Episode 456: Gut Health | Dr. Marc Bubbs

Dr. Marc Bubbs is a Performance Nutritionist, author, speaker and consultant for a portfolio of professional and Olympic athletes and Fortune 100 companies.

Dr. Bubbs previously came on the show for episodes 113 & 275.

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Episode Transcript:

I'm joined by none other than world class sports nutritionist doctor Mark. Bubbs, Mark, welcome back to the show Zach. Great to connect, but it's been a minute. Yeah, I know I was looking back on the catalog just to remind myself of when you were on here last and you were one of the earlier guests to the podcast with episode 113 and then 275. So, it's been a little bit, but I'm excited to kind of catch back up and let someone, maybe the new listeners know who you are for the first time. Yeah, it's definitely amazing how quick time goes by, but, yeah, performance nutritionist, clinical nutritionist. So I spent the last 20 years helping the general population, you know, executives leveling up their health and of course, spending, you know, all that time as well working in pro sports. So consulting with teams, consulting with athletes and and really trying to help people raise their game. Yeah. And you were out at the Olympics this last year. Yeah. The Olympics in Paris last year was pretty cool out there with Team Canada. We'd just come off a bronze medal at the World Cup in the World Championships for basketball, which was great. And it's a buzz being in the Olympics, you know, being in the village, having some athletes in the individual sports like track and field and obviously with basketball, it's, you know, if you're into sport and into. Into performance, it's definitely Mecca. I work in many different sports. So whether it's ice hockey, American football, basketball, consult with individual sports and fight sports, track and field, you know, from, from marathon to, to some of the sprint disciplines. So it's nice. Keeps me on my toes. Lots of different problems to solve. And, you know, it's great to work with people who are really dedicated and ready to make, you know, make the changes to, to level up. Yeah. Well, it'll be great to maybe dive into some of the stuff that you've been focusing on with some of the highest performers in the world, and also share what that maybe means to the average person out there focusing on health and fitness and things like that. I know I'm really excited to have a three part series with you here that we're going to cover some interesting topics that I think a lot of people are thinking about, including things like gut health, just recovery in general. And then maybe I'll skew a little more towards the endurance folks here, but just sustain energy levels for longer type duration stuff. I think those three topics will be quite a bit of fun to jump into and unpack some of the things people should be thinking about. Yeah, it's going to be a fun series. We've got a lot of great things to talk about. It's going to be a nice conversation, and I almost want to throw it back to you, because I've had in team sports a lot of different occasions where acute GI issues have caused performance problems. You know, I can think back to that. To an Olympic qualifier. I mean, this is going back maybe ten plus years and semi-finals night before the finals. We got guys in Mexico City. Unfortunately, a few of them decided to go out to eat and all of a sudden, you know, catch a gut bug and, you know, aren't able to perform at the same level the next day. So we see it in team sports. Obviously endurance training is really intense on the gut. So, you know, curious about your career, any experiences on the GI side? Yeah, yeah definitely. And it's an interesting topic in ultrarunning too because they actually have some research on the frequency of it where they've looked at single day ultramarathons, and it's somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% of participants are going to experience some form of GI distress. And then of that 50%, about half will be severe. So, you know, when you're looking at it through that lens, like almost 1 in 4 people out there are going to find themselves on the side of the trail or the track or the road or in the porta potty, dealing with some sort of severe digestive issue while they're trying to get themselves to the finish line, which obviously means like it's going to slow your progress. And it's not only miserable to be in that state, but it kind of hampers the goal. And I always look at that as if it's a non fitness related issue. So I always hate when something unrelated to all the work you put on in training actually compromises your finishing time to some degree. I like to think that the training should reflect that, but when you get the variables of nutrition and gut health in there, it's just part of the game. And, you know, for me, the one that stands out the most was, I've made it kind of one of my focuses over my career just to try to optimize how fast I'm able to run these controlled 100 milers. And, to date, my best effort was in 2019, where I ran 11 hours and 19 minutes. However, I was in a position quite earlier than that in 2014 where I think I was probably as fit, maybe more fit, who knows? So I was actually up in Alaska on an indoor track that was a timed event that actually went as long as six days, but I was targeting a fast hundred miler within it. So I had traveled up to up to Alaska to get myself ready to kind of perform on, on that sort of a stage. But I actually did have a pretty bad gut issue that I'm pretty sure stemmed from the restaurant the night before I had. Like the reason I suspect that it wasn't something where I went out in the race and I kind of progressively started to lose my stomach, which is what you typically see in ultrarunning. It was something where like, I was out there in the first ten miles and I already started recognizing, like, I'm not tolerating the stuff I'm taking in. And I switched to like basically all liquids at one point. But that didn't fix it entirely. I ended up pulling off the track and using the bathroom. I think I kind of like 17 times over the course of that race. So, after I finished, I gutted it out. I think back to that. I was like, I don't know how much I would have gutted that out. Nowadays versus when I was younger and a little more kind of like in the spirit of getting there at all costs type of mentality. But, I looked at just like the stoppage breaks and then just realistically, how much you could maybe phase into, just like the interruption of going and getting in the zone and then getting pulled out of that due to digestive issues. But, my math had me being a lot closer to the world record than I ended up being with 1208. So that's one I always think back on. Had I avoided that restaurant and that burger I ate the night prior, maybe I would have had a different trajectory in terms of how my racing went along the way. But we learned from those things too. So who knows, maybe. Maybe that taught me some things that I was able to carry forward and optimize in the future, too. Yeah, it's always tough when it happens on race day, isn't it? I mean, obviously you've got experience, but when people are starting out or getting through their amateur career, all of a sudden you get into the race stage, just like you said, you've done all your training, you put in the hard work, you mapped out the fueling strategy. And now that combination of nerves, which can have a huge impact on the gut. And if you're traveling to an event like, you know, all of a sudden you get to eat at a restaurant you're not used to, and that throws you a little curveball. So I think making those changes on the fly is definitely a skill, isn't it? I mean, it's and it's crazy to think that you could have smashed that record even with all those, all those pit stops. Yeah, yeah. I don't envy the custodian for that facility by any means. After that event. Yeah. I mean, you did mention something that I find interesting too, because it is like a topic I'll have with my coaching clients. And I think about myself too, is, you know, you have like, we try to replicate things in training as best we can to prepare for competition. You know, ultrarunning is a little unique, where you're oftentimes exploring quite a bit longer than you're able to really realistically replicate in training outside of doing training races. But you do have that uniqueness of being at an event, and the things you're going to do that are going to generate different things like nerves and that sort of stuff, and how that maybe impacts your digestion is is there anything that you do with just like athletes as they're getting closer to competition, or is it something you can work on with, smaller events to kind of prepare yourself to be ready for that variance in terms of how your body is going to maybe respond to digestion when you're at a big event like the Olympics or something like that. It's a really interesting one, because of the visceral hypersensitivity of the brain's connection to the gut, which it's hard to simulate unless you're at that big event. Right. And so for me, this is where training and groups, training with different groups, putting yourself in positions where you're uncomfortable helps because if everything's mapped out and comfortable and planned, that's great. Obviously we know an endurance sport like consistency is king. Those who show up the most end up having, you know, being able to train the most, adapting best, recovering best, and ultimately performing best. But how do you get into those positions to stress yourself a little bit more? And this is where, you know, there's no clear cut answer. But things like breathwork, you know, which I'm sure you know, you've done in the past, is great. You know, there's lots of different modalities on that side. Even things like cold water exposure for some can be beneficial. But just being in that mode where you can get a sense of that feeling that your body is going to have, which as you know, when you harness it, it's amazing because you can kind of run faster or jump higher or, or play better than you ever have. But it's that fine line. It's that knife's edge, isn't it? Of trying to harness that rather than letting it get the best for you. And the challenge, obviously, in endurance is the fact that you then have to fuel continuously on top of that. Whereas in a team sport, you're only fueling a certain amount throughout so you don't get the same level of potential GI distress. Yeah. What you said is really interesting because I, when I, when I work with coaching clients and they, they pick their goal race. You know I'm usually working with ultramarathon runners not all the time but a good chunk of them are. And a lot of them are trying to work towards doing maybe a hundred mile race or something like that. So one thing we talk about usually early in the process is like, well, where can we phase in events that are going to be helpful in terms of navigating those variances that are different from an event versus training, but also not necessarily step on the future training, things like that. So this is where like sometimes I'll just say, hey, well, let's just find some local or relatively local like five K or 10- K or something like that, where I can easily turn a short or long interval session into an event like that, and we can actually practice everything that you would do outside of the actual race itself to prepare for those variables, because it doesn't have to be 100 miles for you to have that same kind of sensation of, oh, I've got an event tomorrow. I have to go to bed at a certain time. I have to eat specifically, I have to do this before and then navigating all the things that kind of come in outside of the actual running itself and give them kind of wraps at something that we can feed into the training program, that's not going to, you know, compromise their future training by having them run like a hundred mile race in the middle of their. Yeah, yeah. I mean, anything that adds the extra bit of pressure. So whether it's a friendly bet with the coach or something like that is a nice way to just get them a little bit outside that comfort zone. Because as you know better than anybody else, if that prolonged exercise really takes a toll on the gut, right? We're getting a lot of major decreases in blood flow to the gut, which isn't, you know, causing a significant amount of damage. I think one of the studies had it like almost 90% of participants had blood in the stool after, you know, after an ultramarathon race. So we certainly want to be thinking about what we can be doing outside of that. I mean, race day is race day. You know, one of them, Doctor. Daniel, please. I used to always say I treat my body like a used car on race day. Right. We got to get everything in. We got to push ourselves. We got to go, go, go. Right. The goal is to win the podium. But outside of that, if we know that endurance, prolonged training, intense training is going to take us to only that, then what can we do around that? And I think, you know, obviously nutrition is a big focus for you. And I think that's where it is a great place to start to be able to support the gut in the build up to those events and certainly after them. Yeah. And that sort of brings up a topic that I think is getting more attention now because we've seen a lot of these. I think it mostly kind of rose out of a cycling where essentially you're able to tolerate a little more nutrition in that world. So you're seeing some of these like really, really high fueling strategies of upwards of 150g of carbohydrate per hour. And, you know, which is great. Yeah, I know this is great. I can't even imagine trying to get 150g of carbohydrates during or during an ultramarathon. But, to those who are able to do it, more power to them, I guess. But my thought with that always is like we are all familiar that I've done these things of like how your digestion feels at the worst points during these events, when we're kind of hitting them with a lot of these sort of sports products and supplements and things like that, to the degree that we do on race day. And there's like there's some application in terms of practicing that in training. So like with ultra marathoners, a lot of times it's okay. We're going to do your long runs. Let's practice a fueling strategy you're going to be doing on race day. So I do wonder about just what are we doing in terms of potential damage in order to try to glean some benefit on race day, to be able to tolerate those high numbers, because I think if I'm right, the evidence suggests that you can train your gut to a degree where maybe someone's not able to get x number of grams carbohydrate per hour, but then they start practicing it and training. And now all of a sudden on race day, they are able to get a little bit more than they had previously. But that seems to me like maybe a short term like approach in terms of what they're doing and could maybe change over the course of someone's career, even as if they're constantly practicing that in training to be able to do that. Are there anything like in terms of like the in the world of like supplements and just, maybe even types of food too, that you tend to kind of put on a list of like, hey, these are maybe things you want to be mindful of not doing too much of, or staying away from when you're getting close to a competition, or even in general. Context is always key, and so it depends on the individual. So if it's more of an elite racer that I think even a little bit of simple carbohydrate immediately before the race, caffeine timing depending on the individual timed well can be great just to get the CNS up and really get them, you know, feeling great at that. The starting line, I think for the general person, is just having more of a. This is just another day type situation. I think a lot of the clients in the general population that I see, and when I give talks for things like marathons, they almost overthink it. They start putting in too much. Like now they're adding in all sorts of fuels or adding in all sorts of caffeine. And then there's the nerves that are going. So now all of a sudden the gut's responding in a way that it didn't respond to. And those practice sessions and it tends to really throw things off. And so again, on that side of things with the general population, try to keep it as simple as I can. And then we add bits and pieces. And then of course with the more elite then, then that's when we can lean into more of the, you know, the pre-race. And just as you alluded to before, it's during the race of really nailing down what types of carbohydrates they can tolerate, whether it's liquids, gels, some combination of and how high can we push it without them feeling adverse gut symptoms or, you know, it being too much and then experiencing some type of rebound hypoglycemia where towards the end of the race they're really struggling. I did have one other question I wanted to ask you about because you mentioned his work with caffeine. Is there a digestive component to that where if someone's obviously you don't want to overdo caffeine, but is that something that someone? I think when people think of caffeine and overdoing it, they think of jitters, maybe anxiety and things like that. But when we get into the world of forcing that state, is there a digestive hurdle someone could create themselves by overdoing caffeine during a competition, as well as just the other side effects you might get from doing that? The biggest one I see is at the start of the race, because again, you're getting the nerves, which are a good thing, right? You're getting that nervousness, that nervous energy. You're trying to channel that to be positive so that it gives you a lift and you feel light and ready to race, ready to play. The challenge again, is that visceral hypersensitivity will make the gut more likely to want to clear itself. And this is normal, right. You see. NBA players NHL players before a game. Right. The bathroom is a busy place. People are people who are, you know, getting ready to feel light. And so if you then add caffeine on top of that, especially in the form of a drink, because certain individuals will definitely when they have a coffee, right, stimulates voiding. So they're going to want to go to the bathroom. So all of a sudden if you start stacking on the pre-game or pre-event jitters with, you know, a drink of caffeine that can all of a sudden really throw things off when you're not in a stadium or a locker room where, you know, the bathroom is just around the corner, you're at an event and. You know, it can be challenging to figure out where the toilets are in some of these events. So that's one that I would, you know, if it's a new client, we would work around different strategies. Gum can be a really good way of doing that. Typically through the race I would see less of that if they've tried it previously. Start of the race. Gums are a nice strategy, and just trying to keep it as little as you can just because. And this is where experience comes in. You know, as you know, because you're going to have the jitters when you've done multiple events, but in a way that's, dampen down and that you can control and harness versus that first time you're doing it. It can be a lot the, the energy, even just the, the people in the crowd, all that type of stuff. So, you know, that first time people definitely need to play it safe. Yeah, absolutely. And it is one of those things where, like, my mind always goes to endurance events and the potential issues with that. And I don't always think about that when I'm watching an NBA basketball game or something like that. But those guys and gals have to deal with that too. And yeah, you imagine, and to some degree, maybe even more nerve inducing because they're at a stadium in front of thousands of people and maybe on national television. So if they have a bathroom issue, they'll be on ESPN the next morning for all the wrong reasons. Well, well, there was a golfer who went to the Masters, which is quite an obviously renowned tournament, a bit like Wimbledon, where they meant to follow the rules. And he was a young guy. He had to go to the bathroom and went to the bathroom in a famous creek in the back nine. That was not that was very frowned upon. but you're right. I mean, in the Premiership, in professional soccer, halftime is a great time to use the caffeinated gums. And again, with gum, getting the buccal, the oral uptake of caffeine. So it's much quicker. Right. 10 to 15 minutes you're going to get that effect versus having, you know when you take a, you know, a cup of coffee, it can be up to 60 minutes for it to reach peak peak volume in the blood. So that can be a nice acute strategy. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah. The timing is sometimes the big one there with a lot of that stuff is when do you take it and how much of it. So it's always interesting to kind of see the different vehicles and how they, how they kind of change that timeline to some degree. Yeah. Timing. Timing is everything. Right. So it's certainly planning things out, which endurance athletes do really well. Much better than team sport athletes, right? Having things mapped out. Planned out. but that said, the veterans in team sport, those are the ones that have a routine and they stick to their routine. They're always willing to try things, but they'll always be tried in practice sessions. And then if it's something that works, you know, they'll put it in and keep it in the rotation. But having that consistency is massive for being able to perform when and when the pressure's on. What do we know about different potential supplements or things that people can do to maybe help create a better gut biome? Have we gotten any kind of evidence to where it's like, okay, this is probably generally a good protocol for people to do if they're interested in gut integrity and gut health. It's a fascinating area. And that idea of a, you know, the athlete gut microbiome, these signatures that we tend to get out of the different groups and phyla of bacteria in the gut of, of active individuals or healthy individuals versus, you know, unfortunately, they the overweight, hypertensive, type two diabetic, that's again, a different type of, of signature. And so. Just conditioning is one of the missed things. So it's great from an endurance standpoint. Just having a level of aerobic conditioning is a great way to improve gut function, because when we look at some of the best, you know, the healthiest guts at this point tend to be the most diverse guts. So when we talk about gut diversity, having a better aerobic base is a great way to build out gut diversity. And we see this in athletes, even in athletes who do not have the best diet. Right. Like younger athletes who have a very, you know, let's say, fast food type diet, right. Just that impact of exercise. It's such a powerful signal in the gut. You know, from there, in terms of gut diversity, when we look at someone's diet, we're building things out. We always want to think of fiber. So getting enough fiber in, whether it's from the complex carbs that you're getting in fruits, veggies, you know, these are really key. And again, the older the athlete, they tend to be adding more real food, whole foods in as they go, which is fantastic. The younger athletes are the ones that typically need a little bit more help, but I think one of the areas that gets unnoticed is the impact of prebiotics, because prebiotics are a great way of increasing gut diversity. And again, if you just think of a lot of the fruits and vegetables that you're taking in, a lot of the complex carbohydrates, you know, things like your brown rice or your oats, you're going to be getting an impact there. But for endurance athletes, with that increased stress in the body, the increased demand on the gut, it's certainly one that you can think about in terms of supplementation. So we've got lots of different strains of probiotics, and they can become quite specific for the condition you're dealing with the individual. Whereas when we're focusing more on prebiotics we're actually just helping that individual build up more diversity in the gut, which is again, at this point, one of the hallmarks for a healthy gut. And it seems to translate to even a healthy individual when we look at that association. Yeah, that's really interesting. I guess I hadn't thought that exercise alone had that big of an impact on gut health. Can you maybe describe to us a little bit about how that process actually works? It's definitely one that, you know, years ago when I realized this really blew me away as well. I was actually working in a clinic. This is going back 15, 20 years in Toronto. We're seeing a lot of patients with really complex health conditions, a lot of them gut related. And as part of the facility, there is also a training component. So I would be actually training the clients, you know, helping them get better, conditioning better, aerobically fit stronger. And we were seeing in those clients much better outcomes in improving, you know, the gut conditions in those in those populations and those in those clients. And when you look at the research, it's really interesting because athletes tend to have better microbial diversity, right? They tend to have better gut diversity than the general population. And this is even in younger athletes. So this is regardless of the diet that they're consuming. And so just conditioning aerobically sets the terrain in the gut to be able to promote more of those beneficial keystone bacteria. And it does help to keep more of the renegade, you know, quote unquote, bad bacteria at bay. And so I think that's often on the clinical side, a missed area where we can actually rather than just providing more and more supplements for clients who are struggling with GI conditions, getting them moving more, whether that's just walking more, walking, jog, you know, better conditioning. And then, you know, on the athlete's side, it's a big win. But we certainly need to, especially with the younger athletes, find ways of then, you know, gradually over time starting to build out a bit more variety in the diet so we can help them with the food inputs being beneficial as well. Awesome. So step one of good gut health is just getting out and moving around. Yeah. Real. It's a real novel right? Movement is good for you. Yeah, that's all really interesting stuff. And I think it makes total sense. I, I always wonder about just if we get into like, certain populations too, I'd be curious what you see with some of the professional athletes you work with that have like, really high energy demands. Because I know for me, like when I'm in off season, it's like I'll eat all sorts of different, vegetables and fiber rich foods and things like that, because I'm just not asking my body to get out and perform. But when I'm in, like my big training blocks, it's like I might have a training session first thing in the morning that's a couple hours long, and then like another session in the afternoon in the strength strength room and then maybe another run in the afternoon. So there's like these very small windows of time, but I'm asking my body to get up and move again. So things like broccoli or like, fiber heavy types of foods just are difficult to justify digestibility. so I always wonder about that. It's like from a supplementation standpoint, if it's better during certain phases of the year when it's a little harder to try to get as much fiber in as you would otherwise. Because in order to meet my energy demands, I'm tending to actually skew maybe a little more to low volume, lower fiber foods just to get the calories without the bulk, I guess, is the way to say it. Yeah, those low residue diets, those low fiber diets, you see them in fight sport when athletes are peaking to try to make way in. Because obviously you weigh less if you're consuming less of these heavier foods. And to your point, if you're in an intense training block and you're an endurance athlete, you just have to put so much fuel in the system that if we're putting in all these high fiber foods that are really dense, it fills you up too quickly, which is difficult for the general population sometimes to wrap their heads around because it's almost the opposite story. Right? We're telling everybody. Eat lots of fiber. I want you to feel full. So when you're sitting at your desk, you're able to go from breakfast or lunch or lunch and dinner feeling, you know, keeping your blood sugar stable, having good energy. And so this idea of reducing that to just put more energy and more calories in is always a tricky one for the, you know, for the average, for the typical, person. But absolutely, when you're getting into these situations and you see it in sports like American football and rugby as well, when athletes really need to consume a lot of calories, the fiber intake is going to go down. And that's by design. And this is a great example of when you can then add something into the into the individual's regime, things that can be added into their shakes, things that can be added into, you know, juices, foods or drinks that they're already consuming that are going to take the edge off the fact that, you know, they're moving towards the tip of the spear in terms of performance. And I like to often think of it, you know, as a triangle. We've got, you know, health and one side body composition and performance and all the ends of that triangle. And as you move towards one side of the triangle, you're sacrificing to some degree the other aspects. Right. And so as you push towards performance, we start to sacrifice health. Right. And. But the interesting thing is, if we can maintain that because we've got the data to show that, you know, international elite competitors get sick less often than national level competitors and endurance sports who get sick less often than regional, you know, athletes at that level. And so this notion of just being resilient enough to be able to show up every day, to keep competing so that you can train and recover and adapt if you're getting extra 3 or 4 sessions in a month compared to your competition, I mean, that's going to make a big difference. And I think the big thing on that sort of immune front becomes just the symptoms are predictive of poor performance as well. So you don't have to have a full blown, you know, cold or flu. Just feeling that scratchy throat feeling run down. Those pro-inflammatory cytokines are going to be elevated. And that's you know that's enough to start dampening things. There's another thing I was going to ask you about too, just in terms of supplementation is glutamine, because that's something where I've seen over the last maybe five years or so, more interest being paid towards. Just like I think it's mostly advertised as just the integrity of your gut lining. So I kind of go in two different directions with that. One is just like the application of glutamine in your daily nutrition to have a healthier, stronger digestive system for the rigors that are going to be asked of it during competition. But then I wonder too, is like, is there any value in having glutamine in the products that you would actually be using in competition too? So like if I'm running a marathon or an ultra marathon, taking in my carbohydrate source, having glutamine along with that. Is there any like kind of acute application for it too, or is it more just like you want this in your diet frequent enough to build the structures to tolerate glutamine is interesting because we used to think it had a big immune benefit overall, and a lot of that research was originally done in IV glutamine. And if you're, you know, like a burn victim and in a hospital setting, you do get benefit. But over the last five, ten years, we've realized the benefit is much more on the gut side, right? It's a conditionally essential amino acid, which means when you're under stress or the body is under stress, glutamine, which is not normally essential, becomes essential because it's used for so many different things. And the gut is obviously a major player in the situation, because everything that's coming in from the outside world is coming in through the mouth, right? It's the guts that open from your mouth to your backside. And so we're being exposed to all these various things. And glutamine is a fuel for your parasites. Right. It's fuel for those gut cells. And so if we go back to that idea that as you increase training intensity or you increase training volume, so more prolonged training, you basically get a dose dependent increase in these pro-inflammatory molecule cytokines. So you're getting all this damage happening in the gut which the gut then needs to repair. And you know, it certainly can do so with the building blocks, but that glutamine is a key fuel for those gut cells to keep them happy and to maintain that integrity in the gut. So for endurance athletes, it's massive. And I think sometimes it can be the one that people start with. And then they kind of maybe forget or, you know, it goes by the wayside a little bit. But that's definitely one to keep up, especially if you're not getting enough total protein in the diet, which it's great these days that proteins are the macro, the most popular macro. You know like everyone has their every macros have their moment in the sun here. but it certainly is a really key for endurance athletes when they're pushing those distances. Yeah, yeah. It is there because I know the one tricky thing I think about the supplement world and to some degree, I mean, it's kind of fun. I mean, you go online and you see like typically see the polarizing extends sides of any kind of topic and you get the, you know, get like the bio hackers who are taking 150 supplements a day, and then you get the people who say, like, you don't need any supplements, just eat real food. And I'm like, okay, well, the answer is probably somewhere in between these two extremes. And where I think a lot of times supplement companies will leverage that is they'll add a product that has an application to it, but there's really no real consistency within their actual dosage that they're putting in that product versus what the research actually suggests. The amount would be needed to show the positive benefits of. So like with glutamine, is there like there like a general recommendation for that in terms of like I should be getting like say like five grams of glutamine per day or something like that. Yeah. I mean, you hit the nail on the head with that in terms of. It gets tricky in the supplement space because oftentimes people are adding bells and whistles just because people recognize a certain new trendy herb or whatnot. And so they want to put that in the label. Or we go with just more ingredients, like a bigger amount, let's say, of B vitamins compared to the competition. When you know, in training, more isn't better. Right. Like, I, I don't need to tell you. I mean, although ultra obviously there's a lot more, but when you're mapping out a plan, you've got an amount that you're going to do. And if you're adding too much, then that's not just a bad thing, but a very bad thing. And it's strange and nutrition and particularly in supplementation that we tend to get to these super physiological doses. Right. Not just the amount that you get from food, but these very high amounts. And that's when ideally we should have a reason for that. Right. Rather than just taking that in all the time. And so this can get tricky on labels because again, for things like B vitamins, you know, 100% of RGA, heck, if you want to go up to even 200%, that's great. But when you start getting to 10,000% of a water soluble vitamin, I mean, you know, this is when the doctors are right. You've just got an expensive pea at that point. Yeah. Fluorescent green pea exactly as it relates to glutamine. You know, three grams is a nice modest daily dose. You can double that up to 5 or 6 if you're getting into more, you know, intense periods. If your total protein intake in the day is where it needs to be, then you know at least 1.6g/kg. If you're really pushing in an endurance space, maybe up towards 1.8g per kilo. But as you alluded to and we talked about before, with fiber, protein can sometimes be a bit tricky because it makes you too full. Then we struggle to get in the rest of the calories and the carbohydrates to help with the training. So that becomes a bit of the art of the practice of figuring out, you know, where is that inflection point for the individual? But yeah, when it comes to glutamine, I'd say three grams is a nice dose to start and then, you know, pushing that up towards 5 or 6 and intense periods is a good way to go. Awesome. Yeah, it's always good to know that because I think, well, and there's also just the context of like how much of whatever product you're consuming are you going to take to. Because I know for some things it's like if it's something I'm having once per day, then I probably need all of it versus something I could be doing on like a heavy training day, like five, six, seven times. And it's like, maybe I don't want the daily dose in each one of those. Same logic with caffeine, I suppose. Yeah, and it gets tricky when you're trying to. Yeah. Just as you mentioned, when you're trying to add more of a certain thing, if the multivitamin is not built out in a certain way, all of a sudden you're starting to get really crazy high doses of one particular nutrient when what you're after is more B vitamins. So yeah, certainly, countertops full of supplements is definitely something I've seen a lot between athletes and the general public. And. Nutrition is a funny space because you can talk about any one nutrient and make it, you know, and it sounds great. It does a lot of great things. So we want more of it in the diet. But it's just like, again, it's just like on the training side of things. So trying to map out what do people really need for foundational nutrition to cover all their bases, especially for the high performers? And then from there, we can start to individualize and personalize via the diet and then, you know, buy any additional supplements because I'm not sure for you, but I definitely see when it matters most. This is maybe more so in team sport because endurance sport, you guys are more compliant as a general rule than a lot of the team sport athletes. But when it starts to matter most at the end of the season, you know we're in the NBA playoffs, NHL playoffs. Now, this is when some athletes can get pill fatigue and it's hard to get things in, which is frustrating because this is the time when it really matters, right? This is the time when you know, through a whole season, cortisol levels are highest. Recovery is going to be more challenging. We have got compressed schedules, so there's more games in a shorter amount of time. So yeah, lots and lots to think about. Yeah. And then you mix in like a travel schedule on top of it and it's like, yeah, if you have like a dozen different things you need to be doing throughout the course of the day, it's like easy to forget, forget that or literally forget it and not bring it or forget about it because you get kind of stuck in the, the travel schedule versus your normal routine. I know, I know, for me, it's like when I'm the most consistent, it's usually when I'm at home and I have all the structures in place where it's like, okay, I follow this kind of more or less scaffolding of an approach and then traveling as that level of complexity to it. So now I've gotten better. Okay. I've kind of got protocols that I know will loosely be usable when I'm traveling. I just kind of have those kind of locked and loaded for from heading on the road for one reason or the other, but it is an interesting kind of dynamic you get. And, when I think of just like Major League Baseball players or NBA basketball players who are, you know, out there traveling, I guess in the NBA, they're if they're not in the playoffs, they're on the road 4440 games and baseball's almost double that. So baseball's crazy hockey probably too. Yeah. So yeah, it makes sense. To your point, I'm in my practice. I'm always trying to automate as best I can. Right. You've got a lot of people in your performance circle: the coach, the nutritionist, the therapist, a lot of different people. And so how do we help people to streamline things, like to make it just easy and natural and something that they do every day. And I think there's a nice transference there to the rest of us in the general population. Right. I've got three young kids at home. You're busy. You're traveling. It's not always easy to fit everything in and to always go back to the to do list, to have to look at, you know, what you're trying to do. And so, you know, the more you can automate and just make it a habit and part of your daily pattern, whether it's on the fueling side or the supplement side, it's not only does it have a bigger impact, but it's much less mental load. Like, I'm sure you have the clients where it's like, gosh, the to do list. It's getting massive. Of all the things, it almost becomes more stressful than even having to achieve all those things. Right? Yeah, yeah. There's the anticipation of it. Sometimes the hardest part is looking okay. Yeah. What am I going to do about this? How am I going to finish it all? So I, I always like to look at that as like it's sort of good practice mentally to steering your brain in the right direction on race day because the, the race day equivalent of that for ultramarathon is you start the race and your mind wants to go to, I got to get to a hundred miles. I got to get to a hundred miles. It's like, well, wait a second, you're on mile one right now. Let's just get to that next aid station or that next checkpoint and worry about what needs to be done to do that effectively. Before we start worrying about the next ten steps that are required. And it's hard to do that at times. I mean, you catch your brain kind of drifting off into like, how am I going to feel further down, how am I going to feel? And you always have to kind of draw it back. And it's kind of the same practice when you get that sort of day-to -day life stuff, where the to-do lists get pretty long and you start asking yourself, well, how am I going to fit all this in? And eventually you got to just step, step away and say, okay, well, what needs to get done? First? I'm just going to focus on that and worry about that first and the rest of the stuff I can get to. And when I finish this one, that needs to be done first anyway. Yeah, I was going to ask her for you in terms of your career. You shared this in the previous story, but I'm wondering if there's other, other examples of just having to adjust like that on the fly because it's not going the way you think, or you can feel your mind getting out in front of you. Yeah, yeah, I've had a few of them. I mean, I would say it happens in every race, like there's no race. Like I go in knowing it's going to happen. So I sort of shifted my mindset towards this is going to present itself, and it's likely going to present itself when I'm in a weakened state mentally. So I need to be aware that that's going to happen. So when it does, it's just a little more intuitive to catch it and redirect. so like there's there's some that stand out more than others where, like I was doing the San Diego 100 mile a few years ago, and this was maybe one of the earliest times that it happened where I, I got into the race with some expectations and things were going well, but I was like 30 minutes behind the leader. So it was like getting difficult to be, like, to recognize. All right. I'm doing what I need to be doing. I can't be worried about that person up there because, I mean, either they're going to crush it and there's nothing I could have done about it, and I was just going to do myself more damage trying to chase someone who is going to run a faster time than I was able to, or they're making mistakes. And if I keep doing what I'm doing, I'll eventually catch up to them. And I sort of had a spot in there where, you know, it was a little more difficult to make that, make that mental shift. But then I remember distinctly getting into an aid station where my crew was, and they were just like, you're doing great. They got me everything I needed. And I headed out, and I like at that point, I kind of shifted my mindset to like, okay, stop worrying about what he's doing up front. Keep doing what you need to be doing. Check these one aid station at a time. And I kind of went through that process, and I eventually caught up and passed him through the last aid station on the course and ended up winning by a few minutes. And had I gotten too far ahead of myself at like 50 miles and thought, like, I got to close this 30 minute gap in the next ten miles, I probably would have ended up blowing up and having a bad finish myself. So. That was the first one that kind of taught me about just really the mindset of these races, and I started applying that and training a lot more specifically after that, where instead of just going out and doing like a long run for the sake of doing a long run to physically prepare, I would start putting myself in these mental spots and kind of doing dress rehearsals. So if it was like a 30 mile run, I would just envision myself during a certain stage of the race and thinking like, how do I want to actually be thinking about this section of the course and just working my mind through that as I go through that training, that training run, and over the course of a training plan that might be like the first, third, the middle third, the last third, whatever happens to be, and you're just acquiring all these different kind of mental dress rehearsals. So then when I got to, the race where I ran my fastest 100 mile, I sort of had that framework in place of like, it felt like I had done it a bunch of times, even though I was in uncharted charted territory for myself in terms of, you know, how fast I could go in 100 miler, but, you know, you're still navigating that. I remember at like mile 40 in that particular race, despite all that kind of dress rehearsal mental work, I started asking myself, you know, maybe it's not. I had run a couple splits that were a little slower than I wanted. I was like, you know, maybe today's not the day. Maybe I should just accept good versus great and kind of behave accordingly. But my mind quickly caught that and it was like, okay, let's just go get back on track for a couple of miles. And then if I'm going to make any sort of plan adjustments, I'll do it there. It's like I'm not going to do any more or less damage in the next two miles. So in those two miles, I kind of got back on track and it actually felt better. So then I was like, well, if it feels better doing what I'm supposed to be doing, I might as well keep doing what I'm supposed to be doing. And that's yeah, that's sort of just like fed into kind of getting back on track there. And then I started recognizing the different sorts of steps along the way from there to the finish of what I wanted to focus on and where those benchmarks would be. And that was like a real eye opener for me, too, in terms of really applying that kind of holy versus just in bits and pieces over, over races, that where it kind of happened. You had happened to get lucky and your mind went that direction versus a more negative one. It's like the Bill Belichick quote, more games are lost than one. That's amazing that you can. And it's I mean, in individual sport it's hard enough. And I sometimes forget obviously, that the amount of time you have in an ultramarathon, that mental aspect. Because even in golf or tennis, between shots, between serves, there's those little moments where athletes can have those negative thoughts or those things creep up which impact things. But. Yeah. For you. I mean, on those runs, there's so much time. So to be able to reframe that like that and use those kind of catch yourself in those moments and almost view yourself as the third person is pretty powerful because I imagine it can be a lonely place out there in the ultramarathon when it's, the body's feeling tired and the mind is feeling tired. How do you coach up some of your athletes on that side? Yeah, that's one of the harder things. And it gets easier the more experience they get. Like, one of the things I like to tell clients is like, once we can get an event completed, whether it's great, good or bad, we have sort of the well, at least we have some structure to build off of then. So then it's like they've kind of gotten this experience of the experience I really like people to get is like they are in the race. Generally they're feeling good in the beginning, but they're going to hit a low point and then they're going to come out of that low point. And if it's a 100 mile, they're probably gonna go through a series of those. So it sort of becomes this thing of just recognizing that lows aren't a linear trajectory downward, they're often just a moment in time. So the more I think you can start to connect that sensation to things that you're doing more frequently and can practice the better. So it's like teaching them to recognize, like in a short interval session, you're doing ten short reps. Chances are, at 2 or 3, you're going to start questioning whether you can get to ten. But then you just pull yourself back and you're like, all right, I'm going to focus on four before I start focusing on ten. And then you kind of take them one step at a time, and then by the time you get to ten, you're like, okay, well, why did I ever think I wasn't going to be able to do ten? So it's like an opportunity with a relatively unspecific intensity or workout that we're doing, maybe earlier in the training plan. That gives them an opportunity to start practicing that early. Or then if we're kind of closer to the race, they're doing their longer training sessions, then they're going to experience them a little more specifically where, you know, I send them out for a longer run on some cumulative fatigue over the week. They're going to still go through transition phases of feeling good and feeling not so good, and using that as like reminders of like, well, if you're not feeling so good, know that if you're doing the right things, you're going to come out of that. It might just be an opportunity to check in. It's like, am I staying on top of fuel? Am I staying on top of hydration? You know, am I taking care of myself and doing the things I need to do to promote feeling better rather than worse? And then they start making those connections to where it's like, oh, when I hit my fueling and hydration or I tie my caffeine properly, I generally have a little bit of a smoother track versus a really high and really low track. I was going to say it's interesting you mentioned that because that idea of things getting linearly worse. It's obviously a very different context, but when people are sitting at their desks mid-afternoon and the blood sugar levels are dropping and they're starting to feel tired. It is a funny thing, isn't it? We sort of lose the level of doom of like, is this going to keep going? I feel so exhausted, so tired. And we immediately reach for, you know, the sugary thing or the caffeine drink. But just like in your example with the ultramarathon, you just sit with it for a little bit or you have some water and ten minutes, all of a sudden you're coming out the other side of it. So I like that parallel there of people having to just endure a little bit of discomfort and sitting with it and seeing how long it takes, because it's human bodies. Pretty amazing, right? The physiology is going to get to work itself out if you give it enough time. Yeah, yeah. One thing I'll always tell my coaching clients too, is it's gonna be a roller coaster. But how big those dips and rises are are going to be dependent on your pacing, your fueling and your hydration. So if you're pacing well, you're hitting your fueling and hydration targets and all the things that kind of go along with that, like electrolytes and things like that, then that roller coaster track is going to. It's going to have its ups and downs, but it's going to be very, very flat relative to what it could be. But ultimately, a lot of people are going into uncharted territory if they're doing it for the first time, or even if they're not. Even if you're someone like myself who's been doing this for over a decade, there's only so many 100 milers I can and have done, certainly at a high level. And it can be tough to find those reference points from an event itself. So finding the spots in training where you can kind of put your head in the space and practice navigating is always, I think, a big win. If we pivot here real quickly. I know we're talking about inflammation. You've just had a recent injury to your Achilles. That's a similar mindset of things feeling like they're getting worse or having to make these short, acute goals to kind of get through things. Is that something that you've learned in that period? Yeah, absolutely. And I would say this is probably a relative strength of mine is like when I have something that goes wrong, whether it be like I have a bad race or an injury in training or a bad workout. I don't typically sit there and like to focus on that. I really move off of it really quickly and look at like, what are the inputs I need to do based on this? And I'm not sure why that is. I think at some point I just got comfortable with the reality that there are no time machines that I can hop into and go back and change it. So even if I did something that was a boneheaded move and I found myself in a less than ideal situation, yeah, yeah, I'm sort of like the reality is, what do I have to do now? Because whatever I would have done had I done that right is no longer on the table. So I've sort of removed my mind from even thinking, because I think where people struggle with this is they tend to think like, what if I would have done it right and they start doing these imagination tricks in their head of just like, how much better it could be? I assume golfers have a similar, like dynamic in their head where it's like you have a bad shot and it's like you could beat yourself up for the next nine holes over that bad shot. Or you could decide, like, hey, I made that shot already. Nothing I can do about it. And, you know, you know, start making good shots going forward if I want to find the best path forward from here. Absolutely. That ruminating is something that, you know, very acutely can help you come back stronger, but in actual competition is a really tough thing. Like you mentioned, after an injury, if you keep dwelling on the problem and, you know, a friend of mine I grew up with Sean Foley, who was Tiger Woods former golf coach, and, you know, he would say about these great players just like yourself, having a mindset of like, once some of these things have happened, they just turn the page. Whereas the rest of us who are average golfers just keep thinking of that giant slice you hit four holes ago and hoping it's not going to come back, whereas you know the best of the best are able to just completely shut that out and just lock in to what's coming up. And. It's one of those easier said than done, but I always find it fascinating. Again, if we bring this all the way back to the gut the more you ruminate or the more you have, you know, symptoms of anxiety or experiencing anxiety that completely changes the gut bacteria. Right. We see reductions in some of the keystone bacteria like lactobacilli and bifida. So again, all these loops start to intersect of, you know, what you're eating and the sleep and getting the right training plan. And all these things start to contribute to even leveling up the mental performance skills that you might incorporate to be able to prevent some of that, you know, rumination and negative selftalk. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting when you start thinking of all the different feed ins, too, because, I mean, some people maybe this wouldn't be the path forward, but I like to think like when I'm making decisions about why I'm doing what I'm doing, I think of like, well, what what are the what am I impacting here? And if I like the same thing with food too. It's like if I eat this, is this going to be something positive, something negative? But the more information I have to steer me towards doing it or not doing it for me, the better I get at making the right choice. So like if I'm sitting there and I'm thinking like, oh, I could behave like this, but I'm not just impacting the people around me or myself in that moment. I'm also impacting my gut biome. Now, I maybe, maybe consciously have one more reason not to do the negative behavior. Well, it's one of those amazing things again. We see the high performers, the really good at the front end. Being very analytical and taking their time through a decision. But once the decision has been made of how they're going to execute something, it goes into the automatic bucket, right? There's no more of this second guessing and all the rest of it. They just move forward with that, you know, until it's another time for reflection. Whether it's the end of the week, end of a month, end of a training block. But that's a big one for folks as well of just constantly trying to be the assessor rather than just the person executing. You know, especially when you're coaching people, you know, execute the task, evaluate yourself on that process, the outcome part. You know, leave that up to the coach, leave that up to, you know, it's going to be a result of the process. So that's always one that I find challenging as well. And again, you see the best high performers are just able to really once those decisions get made, they just move forward with it with confidence. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting stuff. And yeah, I mean before we, we kind of move on and transition towards the next episodes with recovery and sustained success or sustained energy, I should say. Is there anything else we should let the listeners know about with gut health that we haven't already talked about? Yeah, I think. Consistency is the best predictor of success when it comes to endurance. It takes a toll on the gut. So having a plan of what you're going to do food wise. So in terms of your nutrition, definitely make sure that's on point. Working with a coach so that your training plan is on point. Because if it's, you know, too much intensity or too much volume or not mapped out well, and that's going to have an adverse effect on the gut. And then, you know, in terms of supplementation, having supplements like the prebiotics, like the polyphenols, like the glutamine, as well as the other things you need for health in terms of a complete multivitamin, etc.. Having those in your regime is really key. You know what I call the big rocks, right? Those are the big rocks that you need to really be able to perform your best. All right, Mark, before we let you go, I did want to ask you about some of the work you've been doing with Pro Bio, some in a product that I've been using, I think since last year in November, when you kind of reached out and filled me in a little bit about kind of what you guys had going on over there. We're excited about it, and I appreciate you, test driving it for us. We've taken us a couple of years to get it up to where we wanted to. To build it out. Pretty complex. Supplement in terms of covering all your foundational nutrition. So you can think of all the bottles of pills on your countertop. You know, you're getting 16 pills with a payload in a scoop. So it's been fun. You know, we've been living an elite and pro sport in the last nine months. So already in 30 plus locker rooms, 200 plus athletes. And so we love testing it with different groups. Team sport male female you know endurance. So it's been really cool. And we appreciate you test driving it for us. And the feedback so far has been great. And you know if your listeners or viewers want to test drive themselves what some of the best athletes in the world are using, they can use the code endurance and save 20% off. Awesome. Well thanks Mark. It's been fun to catch up on episode one. I'm looking forward to the next two from this series. Yeah, it should be great. Zach, I really appreciate it. Thanks for tuning into this episode of the Human Performance Outliers podcast with Zach Bitter.