Episode 458: Recovery Optimization | 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. He is also the co-founder of ProBio Nutrition. Part one of this series is episode 456 where we cover gut health.
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Episode Transcript:
Dr. Bubbs, welcome back.
I appreciate you having me back. I really enjoyed the first episode and recovery's a great topic. We had a lot to talk about
today. Yeah, we do. It seems like it's a nice transition theme into another important topic that makes up one, one of what I call, like one of the building blocks of success is, I know like a lot of times when we talk about athletes or we talk about training and fitness and all these things, it's okay, what workout do I do?
How hard should I go? And you see all that mentality and the way I always describe it to my coaching clients is that real progress is made. On the recovery side of things, it might feel harder to do the work, but if you don't get the recovery, the work doesn't amount the way it would with proper recovery.
So it becomes a pillar of progress and success. So I'm really excited to dive into some of the specifics around recovery with you.
Yeah, and it's massive for endurance training. 'cause endurance Ultra Marathon, you guys are always pushing right up against that edge in terms of overreaching over training, really getting those.
All those marginal gains at the tip of the spear. So I'm curious for you, Zach, in terms of recovery, over the years, I imagine your routine, your regimes changed quite a bit now.
Yeah. It, my, my training in general kind of shifts a fair bit over the course of the year where a lot of the time I'm training probably a lot closer to what someone would maybe imagine an endurance athlete would be training like with speed work development, a more traditional long run and some strength work and things like that.
And it's really not until the end stages of the program where I start deviating from that sort of a design into what people maybe imagine an ultra marathoner would be doing, which is. Going, going out on the weekends and running for hours on end and then getting up and doing it again the next day and that sort of thing.
The recovery thing though is, like you said, it is a balance because endurance is a sport of cumulative fatigue and that's where a lot of your progress is made. So there is this sort of give and take in terms of finding out like, alright, did my body or is my body receptive for another stimulus, or do I need complete rest?
And trying to figure out where you're at with that. And I think where a lot of people sometimes make a mistake is when they pair it with what they see other people doing versus what their body's telling them. And your body's going to tell you at some point if you're doing too much. So for me, like with recovery, there's some of the basic stuff, like I've got a mobility routine that I tend to do that just helps with some of the spots on me specifically that tend to need a little more attention to make sure that they're kinda heading back.
In kind of the more grand scheme of things or more translatable to everybody else's. The thing I focus on the most with recovery is just good sleep and good nutrition. I think those are the foundational components to it, and if you can get those right, then bringing in the other things are gonna be helpful.
Whether that be like soft tissue work. Visiting the physical therapist, which I've been doing a little bit more recently with an achilles that has been giving me some trouble. Some of it is a little bit of whack-a-mole where it's one buildup. It's not something, there's no concerns in a certain area, and the other ones there are, and you maybe spend a little more time in the physical therapist office than you would in other builds and things like that.
But yeah, sleep. Nutrition. Those are the two big ones. Mobility I find to be another good one to keep things moving in the right direction for me. I'll do some hot, cold contrast therapy as well as a way to relax and help me transition from one training session to the next.
And the other piece to it is just like recognizing when I've loaded my body with enough where it's okay, now I need to change the routine slightly and reduce, or I'll call it like a D load week. And usually it's every, maybe two or three weeks where I'll just reduce volume, reduce intensity and the training and give myself a little bit of a catch up period so that I am getting ahead of what could potentially become an injury or fatigue and things like that.
I look for other things too that just tend to signify not enough recovery. Things like, okay, my sleeping patterns are getting interrupted in a way that's not normal. Or maybe I'm a little more irritable than I normally would be. Things are bothering me a little more than that. I would normally just let it roll off my shoulder.
Stuff like that. Yeah, so those are some things that I tend to just look for trends in and, but if they're going well, then the nice thing about being an older athlete is I have been through it a lot, so I tend to know usually a lot of the lines to not cross and stay behind.
It's nice when the training age is higher, you have that wisdom to be able to know when the good pain versus the bad pain. And, I love the movement. Mobility, get some blood flow to the area. It's a bit like putting a little grease in the joints, things move a little bit better.
And then, the contrast is great to bring blood flow. So that's, I think those are really nice staples, aren't they, especially. They're great for younger athletes, but as you get older, it just makes all the difference in the world. And I love the line that you used there about ready for another stimulus.
I think that's, oftentimes you probably see these clients, even athletes sometimes don't tend to think that way. And I think to your point, this is where the sleep and the nutrition are massive because they're the things that allow you to be ready for that, that next stimulus.
And one of the, I guess you could probably put this in the art side of training philosophy, is you get like different individuals that tend to respond to stimuluses differently too.
Where for me, I can typically load in quite a bit of low intensity volume and. It takes a lot of that to really break me down to a point where, okay, I need to like back off of it. But the speed work development stuff is where if I get a little too fancy or a little too aggressive with it, that's where things usually start to pop up on me and I've gotta be maybe a little more mindful to float a little bit on the lower end of total volume on that side and give myself a little longer of a ramp up if I want to get in a certain amount of work over a given period of time.
And I, I've got friends. Other folks in the sports that are the opposite, where it's like I, you can throw interval sessions at them left and right, but then when you ramp their volume up a little too much, that's when things start breaking down on them and they feel like they need additional recovery.
Finding that right spacing between certain sessions is another piece of the puzzle too, is not always just, I get this much recovery after this training and that training and, there's variance there
even. It is interesting when you're at the coalface and coaching of those archetypes, those trends, the art of coaching, as you say, that present themselves to certain types of builds or clients, tolerate volume better or you mentioned other types of clients.
We gotta be mindful of more. We get into that speed work of where we are in those volumes. It's great that we have so much more in the evidence base over the last 10, 20 years, but. The coach's eye is still so key in this whole process.
Yeah. Yeah. At the end of the day, it's all about just adding the stimulus that's gonna make the improvement versus doing something that's either gonna maintain or regress.
And I really like Steve Magnus' take on this. He is a coach to pro athletes and an author and former elite athlete himself, who's really become a pretty big spokesperson on the coaching side of endurance sport, where he'll talk about what is your global fitness picture as an endurance athlete.
Endurance athlete, is there a spot that kind of stands out as being weaker than the others? And a lot of times, like in terms of becoming a better just overall runner, which I always look at as like the foundation of what I wanna do, regardless of what. The event I'm gonna train for is like step one is to become a good runner or be a good runner.
And then from there you get specific. So when I'm in that phase of training too, it's like I look at it through that same lens. It's like where am I sitting on the global fitness spectrum for a runner? And if it's something where it's alright, my my. My strengths right now are at my aerobic threshold and my lactate threshold, but my VO two max is maybe a little, or my, I should say, my velocity at VO two max is a little weaker compared to where it should be.
Maybe I'm gonna put a little more stimulus and more attention towards that training input for a period of time and try to encourage my body to make adaptations within that area. And then it becomes a little bit of a back and forth as things either balance out or weaknesses become strengths and vice versa.
On that note, when you think
about nutrition, you think about sleep, obviously being key, nutrition's another pillar. When I'm working with athletes and teams there's four big buckets that we're always thinking of when it comes to recovering nutrition. The total energy is massive, right?
That's the one that we sometimes get lost in. I can't see the forest or the trees there. If we don't have enough total energy, then recovery's really difficult to be able to maximize. Total carbohydrate intakes. Another key one, protein intake, and of course micronutrition. So I'm curious about you.
Depending on what stage you're in training, how do you layer that onto your approach?
Yeah. I have a little bit of a different approach than a lot of endurance athletes. I skew a little lower carbohydrate, but I don't follow a strict ketogenic diet. I. I will periodize it to the degree where if I'm doing things that have a little bit of a higher intensity component to it or a speed work development phase, I'm gonna be bringing my carbohydrates up a little bit relative to what I would be doing if I'm just in a base or foundational building phase.
Or the other way to maybe look at it too is just total energy intake. I'll hit a phase of training where my week might look really weird, where I'm doing like a huge bulk of my training in two or three days as I'm trying to consolidate volume into a shorter period of time to prepare for the rigors of running a hundred miles in one push.
Then I have these massive energy demanding days that are, sometimes north of 6,000 calories and things like that. And the big one there, it's alright, if I'm gonna get up and do that. On one day and then duty and the next day, it's like being on top of it.
That first day is really important 'cause that's setting you up a lot of times for that second day. Or the difference could be like feeling good on the second day outside of maybe the warmup and then versus feeling like flat, low energy irritable during the second one because you were just massively deficient in your energy needs on the first one.
Yeah. In terms of structuring it, I'm looking at it first and foremost. It's making sure I'm getting enough and, from there it becomes what's the, what's the fuel for the job? So if I'm doing short intervals or long intervals that are on the moderate to high intensity side of things, then I'm just gonna.
Consolidate more of my carbohydrate intake around those activities. Whereas if I'm on a rest day or something like that I might be focusing more on fats and proteins as I have the primary macronutrients in my diet. The other thing is like the micronutrients too, where sometimes it's maybe a little easier when the training's high on that side 'cause you're just eating such a high volume of food that you're gonna get some more along.
Exactly. But since I do skew higher fat than most endurance athletes, I do have to pay attention to what micronutrients would I be getting had I followed a moderate to high carbohydrate diet that are gonna come along with those specific types of foods versus what you're gonna get in most of the fat sources out there.
I guess similar to maybe what you would see if you had a plant-based athlete or something like that where they're restricting on some food group and then all of a sudden you have to be considerate of what micronutrients are typically rich in those products that I might be lacking or what's the bioavailability difference between these things and how do I navigate that and make sure I'm on top of things?
And that's where it maybe gets a little complicated when you have a lifestyle like mine where it's not necessarily the same thing every day can be quite polarizing even in a single week. Yeah. I think at the end of the day.
There's lots of different strategies to get there, so it's great when you have a philosophy or how you feel like your body responds and you can repeat that and really start to get into the nuances of it because then, just as you mentioned, you can start rounding out where to put more energy, where to put more carbohydrate, particularly around exercise.
And you did, I think you touched on this before. We always think of recovery when it comes to nutrition. We're gonna eat a recovery meal. That recovery meal is actually preparation for the next day as well. And of course we can manipulate that by having less carbohydrate and more of a trained low strategy where we're depleting glycogen or we can be carving up to be able to really recover from an intense session or in preparation from an intense session.
So I think that's where, and I'd be curious to hear your thoughts with your coaching clients. That's where there tends to still be a lot of opportunity. People who are getting more elite don't realize how much sometimes they can push around the sessions. Or even post in preparation for, let's say a big day, the following day.
Yeah, and I think there's a lot to consider with that too. 'cause like you, you also have that scenario where say I'm gonna do like a four hour long run or something like that. If I'm not fueling during that run or fueling very little before because I'm getting up early in the morning to do it.
You, you can find yourself like. Most of the way through the morning and having this massive caloric deficit that's just gonna be very difficult to cover over the next however many hours. So you have an abbreviated time to refuel and an exaggeratedly large energy outside of the equation.
So for those types of training sessions and things like that, I find it to be just a little more valuable to say, okay, let's try to accomplish a couple things here. One. I'm gonna be fueling during the race itself. So it makes sense to practice that during training and it makes even more sense to practice that during a training session that's specific to what I'm gonna be doing on race day.
So then rather than going out and doing a four hour long run on very little fuel or no fuel, in some cases, I'm usually, when I'm getting my long runs to that duration, starting to practice my interface fueling strategy, which is gonna give me a little bit of an energy input during the training session itself.
And then. Following that, it's just what you mentioned, it's like getting in something pretty quickly after where it's like not waiting an hour or two to eat after that training session, focusing on getting in protein, getting in some combination of carbohydrate and fats right after that session so that I'm starting that recovery process and making sure that I'm not, digging a hole for the following session and slowing recovery essentially.
Yeah, it's interesting 'cause if you look across the population, breakfast is the meal of the day that we tend to consume the least amount of protein, right? Compared to lunch and dinner. And leucine, as you mentioned, is the key one for triggering.
The mTOR pathway, which is the signaling pathway that kicks up muscle protein synthesis to help us build, grow. And so if you think of a typical breakfast, like if you have a couple of eggs for breakfast, which you know, clients will often do, that's 12 grams of protein, that's about 1.2 grams of leucine.
So leucine is an essential amino acid that's a key player in stimulating muscle protein synthesis, and we're trying to get to at least two, 2.5 grams of leucine to be able to maximize this effect. And so people fall short. A good rule of thumb for WHE protein, it's about a gram of leucine for every 10 grams away.
And so if you're a bigger athlete, we could be talking, getting up to about three grams of leucine to hit that threshold. And the one that probably goes under notice that you probably see this is when you start getting into 50, 60-year-old clients, seventies. We do become more anabolic resistant and so they need more protein, which is a little paradoxical.
'cause oftentimes appetite will go down, and as you get to late fifties, sixties. So for me, that's definitely a big one. I've used amino acids in different supplements over the years to help augment that. It's one of the reasons why when we built out the probe blend, we put an extra gram of leucine in to be able to help people hit that threshold.
Because if you think of even the plant-based folks who are having a plant-based shake, that's even less leucine, right? That's why typically we need to supplement with 30 or 40 grams of plant-based protein just to get that leucine up. So it's a convenient way to help people get there because, some people just won't eat four eggs for breakfast in the morning, even though, Hey I don't mind.
I could knock it back pretty happily and easily. But depending on your day, depending on the workout it's, it could be a challenge.
Yeah, that is an interesting part too, and it, when you get to like total protein intake for a single meal I often see recommendations just floating around saying try to get like 30 grams of protein.
Is that mostly because that's typically what's gonna be required to hit the leucine target, or is it something where like someone could in theory, do less than that if they optimized leucine with a supplement or something like that? You could do less
if you had additional losses. I think the big thing with the individuals is zooming back out again to context.
What are the goals? Is this person trying to lose weight and improve body composition? Are they a recreational runner? Are they more on the elite end? Are they a professional athlete? Because that'll drive things in the sense that the more elite somebody is, we just talked about total energy being so key.
To fuel the training and also to recover. And if you're having really big boluses of protein, above that threshold, we know it's really satiating macronutrient, which is great. But the paradox for the general population is like, of course we want them to feel full so they can get between meals.
But for the athletes no, we're trying to get more in, we're trying to get as much energy in between some of these sessions to be able to replenish everything that was spent. So that's one where you might. In certain situations, if someone's having 50 grams of protein or 40 grams of protein, they might potentially do well with 30 and being able to ratchet up other macronutrients, that's more so for me and lunches and dinners, when people are more used to bigger boluses.
I find on average, even with Elite and Olympic marathoners, the breakfast meal is still the one where. Culturally getting up, having a tee and going for a run, a marathon run. If you're East African, Kenyan, some of these elite runners is something they always do. So it's a new pattern and I like some, I find it interesting sometimes the connection there to the general public who we always think athletes are completely different.
And certainly they are from a physical performance standpoint, but a lot of the things that. Somebody in the general coaching client might struggle with. It's actually something that the elites could struggle with as well.
I know I find that if I'm getting a little lax on just like my nutrition in the sense there, I'm just like eating the foods that I normally have.
Kind of like a pretty standard when I'm at home cooking myself and stuff like that, of foods that that I'm gonna rotate through. But, sometimes for whatever reason, you decide to lean into one group more than another. And I find if I. Do that and I'm getting a little too much protein, kinda some of those higher numbers, like maybe after my run I have something that has 50 grams of protein in it.
I find I'm a little more lethargic after that because it's probably harder to digest that much protein. And then I notice I feel like it's a little harder to focus and move on to the next task versus when I'm getting enough protein, but maybe spreading it out a little bit.
Be better over the course of the day. Are you seeing that like with your athletes doing multiple training sessions in a day? I was gonna say, I
I mean we know the thermic effect of food and proteins have the highest thermic effect, so it's costing the most calories. So it's literally, it does take more work to break down and that's a net benefit again, the general population for helping us with body composition.
'cause we're burning more calories just by digesting. But to your point, when we get more elite and we were just chatting before the session here of the number of sessions you've got in a day. Even when you're, as you're ramping up and it's okay, we can't have, we can't have Zach feeling too tired and sluggish for too long, so we've gotta adjust some of those intakes.
So I think that's definitely one that, getting a feel for how the athlete's energy levels are. Sometimes it's not a bad thing if it leads into an afternoon nap, right? Perfect. Athlete's a little bit more tired, whether it's from higher protein, some people have higher carbohydrates in that meal. Great, let's go for a nap.
Get that 45 minutes in or an hour, whatever it might be. But if it's not timed right and it's before another session, then we've gotta figure out the right approach. The nice thing is that as you increase protein intake you increase micronutrition, which is a big win. But again, still for me, when I'm working with athletes and clients in general, I'm always looking at the top of the day and the end of the day.
These tend to be the two main areas where things go wrong the most, and getting that breakfast right, or that start of the day, even at the highest level, there's typically still areas of opportunity to get some big wins there.
One thing that I find interesting about recovery is it really is your hedge against your hedge against injury, which is gonna be one of the bigger limiters because if you get injured now all of a sudden you're gonna have a hard time being consistent because your body's just not gonna let you do what you need to do to be consistent.
If we look at that through the lens of proper. Programming to the degree where you're not overdoing things so that over a longer period of time you can actually do more by doing less in the moment. That's step one in a lot of cases, but like we were talking about earlier too, it is a bit of a fine line and as you get further along, you get to these kinds of pressure points where you're peaking for a race.
So you're gonna try to stress the body. So you're gonna try to ask for a little more than you're used to giving and you can make a mistake and find yourself injured or hurt and needing to navigate that. The way I look at that is since we're already playing on thin ice, sometimes on the training side of things, especially as we're peaking for a goal event, that just in my opinion means making sure other areas that could lead to injury or lead to problems in recovery need to be dialed in that much more because you can't afford to have multiple things go wrong and expect it to not end badly for you with an injury or something like that.
What are we looking nutrition wise when it comes to, or just recovery in general, I should say, when it comes to injury prevention and that sort of thing? Yeah, for me, I
I mean, once we've covered the macros and we shift over to the micros, there's some real big areas of opportunity again to get some big wins.
The challenge with some of this is people have heard about it before, so they think, oh, I'm already doing that, or, that's fine. So things like vitamin D are massive, right? Vitamin D. 80 to 90% of our stores come from the sun, right? So depending on the time of year, depending on where we live, levels would be lower.
It's actually much more like a steroid hormone, right? Vitamin D has its own receptor and it's impacting thousands of genes. So it is unlike other vitamins and minerals, and we've got some great data on how it impacts things like immunity and injury. You just alluded to the fact that for endurance athletes, you gotta show up every day, you gotta train.
And if you can't do that, if you're not available, right? The old saying the best ability is availability, right? So if you're not available to train, this is a problem. And with vitamin D, the lower your vitamin D levels, the greater your risk of infection. On top of that, the lower your vitamin D levels, the greater number of sick days you'll have with symptoms.
We know now in the research, and this goes back to, even when I wrote my book Peak, so going back to 20 16, 20 17, we know that just upper respiratory symptoms alone can impact performance. And then on top of that, we know that as vitamin D levels are low, you're gonna experience more severe symptoms.
So it's not a good look if you're an endurance athlete. More days, more symptoms, and more severe symptoms. And so this is when you know, doing due diligence, getting yourself tested because. Unlike other micronutrients, we've got some great data on benchmarks and targets to hit. When it comes to things like when it comes to things like the impacts on immunity, so with vitamin DI mean, if you, when we look at the research, 36 nanograms per mil, right?
If you do a blood test, 25 oh HD, a normal range for vitamin D would be greater than 20. That's considered adequate. We talk about athletes and high performance, we're seeing more and more coming down the pipeline in terms of the research where at higher levels, good things are happening. So for example, in terms of immune function, right?
When we get above 36 nanograms per mil, we start to see significant improvements in some of those metrics, right? Less, less illness, less severity of symptoms, less sick days. And this pushes right up until we get to vote. This is an international unit. It's a hundred nano moles per liter, which is 40 nanograms per mil.
So those are some levels, particularly in the winter months, that we want to be able to maintain. Oftentimes we just think we're there because we're taking a vitamin D supplement, or we think we're there because the athlete plays an outdoor sport or the runners outside a lot, so they think I must be getting lots of sun.
But there's a number of different factors. Geographical position that you are cloud cover, whether you're wearing long sleeve clothing, amount of melanin in the skin, so how dark your complexion is. All these factors come into play to determine where your levels are at. And so it's surprising that as people become more elite, I'm still surprised at how that's a number that we're guessing at a little too often.
Which is not ideal. So there's lots more data coming out. Kinda highlighting the fact that if we look at the regular metrics in terms of ranges, saying if you're above 20, you're considered adequate. Again, if you're less than, some less than 36 with some of the other data on, let's say military, military personnel, right? Lower Vitamin D predicts poor performance than those individuals. And we even get some data outta the NFL showing increased muscle strains. And so individuals ethnicity impacts where baseline levels can be. So that's one factor to consider. But when we look at the data, we still see two thirds of athletes either insufficient, so not meeting that, that level that we're looking for or deficient in vitamin D.
And for runners, this extends, we talk about injury risk, stress fractures. They did some really interesting work in the NCAA, I think it was 800 athletes, and they broke 'em into two groups. And in one subset they kept their levels above that 40 nanogram per mil over the winter, right? So again, regular range says 20.
We're increasing that level up to this 40 nanogram per mil for athletes to see the impact on the immune front. Because we know in terms of immunity, vitamin D has a big impact on your innate immune system, right? This is your first line of defense, right? The macrophages, monocytes, these things that are gonna help to keep the bugs away, as well as vitamin D playing a key role in calcium metabolism, which, we can come back to here in a minute.
So one group stays above the 40, the other group is just a placebo, right? There's no supplementation. And at the end of that winter period. The group that stayed above that 40 nanogram per mil had a 12% reduced risk of fractures. That's, so that's pretty significant. So we're seeing these rules in terms of how it impacts mitochondrial function, satellite cells, and the muscle as well.
So the muscle stem cells require vitamin D. So lots of different factors here. This is where. There aren't so many micronutrients and nutrition that we can actually measure and know that there's a target to get to. And when we get to that target, we'll actually see a really significant impact. And Vitamin D is one of those micronutrients, and it's still today.
It's one where athletes might get tested once, they might get tested twice a year, but. We're not doing it frequently enough. It's in a lot of cases to be able to maintain those levels and to start to personalize the dose to make sure that athletes stay above at least that 36 nanogram per mil mark.
Yeah. Yeah, that is interesting too when you have like just shifts in climate, whether it be where you live or for example, like we moved from Phoenix to Austin and we get sun here in Austin, but we got a lot more sun in Phoenix. So I always wonder about the variance in nutritional needs from one of those climates to the next. I'm gonna get sun pretty much every day, even in the winter.
Phoenix. Whereas in Austin here, there could be a couple weeks where I get very little comparatively. Yeah.
And thankfully your injury re recovery's going well, but if we even flip to surgeries, if your vitamin D status is lower pre-surgery, it predicts a poor outcome. And so this is one where even within professional athletes, sometimes they'll have surgeries, things like acls and wanna do some consulting.
We'll ask. The staff or the athlete, what their level was pre-operation and they won't have a test result, right? They didn't test it. And this is where it gets interesting. 'cause what you do afterwards, after the surgery is not nearly as important as your pre-surgery levels maintaining that at least 36 nanogram per mil.
So again, for you, thankfully, the recovery's going well, but if you had to do a procedure or an ACL injury, we see rates really on the rise in, N-F-L-N-B-A. It's another key one to be mindful of.
Yeah, that is interesting. Do they know or think they know what the cause of the increased injury rates are with some of those sports?
Is that just because the athletes are getting bigger and stronger and more explosive maybe that they're putting more stress? Or is that possibly a nutrient deficiency thing that we're seeing that wasn't there prior? I
I mean, it's the million dollar question really, because we've never had more science and more knowledge about the whole space.
Lots of different theories. Early specialization is certainly one where in basketball, if you start hooping at 9, 10, 11 and that's all you do, then all of a sudden you've accumulated a lot of miles by the time you're even in your early twenties, mid twenties, right? So I think that notion of being able to change sports and play different sports, and when we look at, some of the best, Roger Federer and Tennis, Wayne Gretzky.
Interestingly, their parents would say they weren't the ones that told their kid to just play that sport. It was eventually, they played all sports and eventually they, it was Federer who decided, okay, I just wanna play tennis now at whatever it was, 14, 15. But that's certainly one, obviously they are, which is much more powerful these days.
And I think nutrition we're seeing better sleep habits with athletes, which is great. I think there's still. More room to benefit on the micronutrition and nutrition front as well, for sure.
Yeah. Yeah. Is there anything that, that you're, you got me thinking with the sleeping stuff too, and I think of these athletes that travel a lot for their sport.
Is there micronutrients that are more beneficial for them to be, like, timing properly or even just getting more of in general when they're in a phase of the year where they're having to bounce from city to city versus having that consistent routine in their hometown?
Yeah, I think. One, if we just even wrap up on the vitamin D story would be in terms of the dose, to be able to maintain that level above that 36 that I mentioned, which again, when you test teams in pro sport, you know over half the team is typically lower than that 36.
If we look at all the data we need approximately 1,700. IU of vitamin DA day. For me, I round that up to 2000 IU a day. If you can get that in daily, you're gonna put yourself in a really good spot to be able to maintain those levels above 36 and in the winter months, ideally above 40. So that's the first order.
And I think ensuring that you're getting that in, if you're low, you gotta get that in with a meal. Absolutely. The fat's gonna really help the uptake. The nice part for those who are already getting towards the higher end is the. The delta or the amount that you shift starts to reduce the higher you get.
So there's almost like a safety valve built in there, which is great. So that's the first one for me because it's impacting inflammation, it's impacting immunity, it's impacting things like bone. So if your vitamin D goes down calcium absorption goes down. And so that's when we see those fracture risks and whatnot.
And whether it's the English premiership, N-B-A-N-F-L. Insufficiency or deficiency again across, almost two thirds of the league. So definitely get that one hammered home. When you talk about travel and what else athletes can be doing, I think, getting in, I. A multivitamin is a good insurance policy.
The problem is most people forget to take it or don't take it. Or if you work for a sports team, it's probably shoved between the seats somewhere on the plane. Or if you ask the equipment guy, it's still in the player's shorts and that's why his shorts turned orange in the wash. So getting the consistency in the compliance.
That is such a huge part of it. And I think on the professional side, the plane is a great time, right? You got a captured audience. The players are there. So one of the reasons why we built the probe blend was to be able to provide a better experience for taking in some of these foundational supplements, right?
So we can provide guys a drink and get these things in rather than having to give them 6, 8, 10 pills to do the job. The other side of things, I think for the rest of us in the general population. Getting that in is huge. I think this is where polyphenols also play a big role, right?
These are these groups of compounds found in plants, right? Fruits, vegetables, spices, herbs, things like wine, dark chocolate, some of the nice stuff. And then, coffee, green tea. And polyphenols play a really big role in, in. As antioxidants, right? So cleaning up all that oxidative damage. If you think of exercise, if you're driving your car, the exhaust that gives out the tailpipe, that's happening in the body.
And we need to quench that and put that out. And this is where a lot of the research now revolves around juices and. Whether it's cherry juice, pomegranate juice, black current juice, these high polyphenol juices are really nice strategies because you tend to bring on board the carbohydrate that you're after for, say, post-training.
You're rehydrating along the way, and then of course, you're bringing on board these polyphenols, which are playing a really nice role in reducing muscle soreness and reducing inflammation. You would probably be a really good person to ask around muscle soreness. 'cause that's obviously a big limiter to people being able to show up and train consistently.
So what's that like for you in terms of muscle soreness? Because I know, I think you use some black currents in your regime.
Yeah, I do. I'll use tart cherry extract and black currents. So those, I started using consistently this year as I moved into a phase of the opportunity for the most risk, I'll put it that way for me, is when I'm in a speeder development phase, and I'm also trying to maintain a relatively high amount of lower body work.
So I might have a day where I do short intervals, say targeting my velocity at VO two max with a total of 15 minutes of work or something like that. And then later that day, I might go into the gym and do lower body work. So if there's a day where I'm gonna have a higher risk of waking up the next day or in the next 40 hours and get that kind of delayed onset muscle soreness, that's the time running some of that sort of stuff alongside all the other stuff we talked about is just gonna be something I'm gonna be a little bit more interested in doing. And, I have noticed this year that I've been less sore after heavier days like that to the degree where I almost notice, like if I overreach, it's more of like a.
Essential nervous system fatigue that I notice as being a holdup, as it, as opposed to alright, I feel ally had that experience this year, which has been nice. Obviously you still need to manage workload so that you're not driving the essential nervous system and on the ground too often.
And with your coaching clients
who are more on the novice to intermediate side. Would you say it becomes more of a, this, more of the muscular fatigue with that group versus as they get more advanced, becomes more central? Or is it really depending on the training block and whatnot?
Yeah, I would say the way to maybe the people that are like.
More elite or they've been doing it longer, or they've gotten to a point where they have just a really large training load tolerance. It tends to be that it's just harder for us to push them hard enough to get to that point because we're already so far along the training load side of things.
There's just less room between. Them completely giving up because it's insane for sure. Versus like someone, for sure, someone who's new and excited and they're, they have a very low training load input. They're, it's kinda like your eyes are bigger than your stomach type of thing. But with training where it's I wanna do all these cool things, but your body's not quite ready for it yet.
So that's the biggest risk with that cohort. With the elites, it tends to be more like what stimulus are we adding that you haven't done in a while? 'cause you've been specializing in this. So a lot of times that could be the weight room. For ultra runners, a lot of times that can be the speed work development stuff where they might be coming to me for the first time and be like, oh, I really haven't done a speed work development phase in quite a while, but they've been doing a hundred plus mile training weeks.
It's okay, we, I give them one interval session, I'm gonna probably program on the lower end. And tell 'em to be a little more in tune with some of these other inputs that are gonna help with some of that soreness so that they're transitioning into that phase a little bit better since it's something they haven't been used to.
Yeah, it is
fascinating. What. People can tolerate and the differences in what people can tolerate within the same type of training.
Yeah. Yeah, I'll always, I'll never forget the first time like that connected the dots with specialization was, I had been, I think it was maybe like my second or third season of running cross country in college and I came home during the winter and went cross country skiing with my dad for an hour.
And I'm like, I've been running like. Almost a hundred mile weeks for like months on. There's no way this one hour cross country skiing session is gonna be any problem. The next day I woke up and had all these stabilizer muscles that were sore and I was just like, okay, I guess yeah, I'm not playing basketball, baseball, and soccer and things where I would probably engage those on a regular enough basis where you can just jump into a different sport and expect it not to hit you a little bit harder if you're not used to it.
You definitely get that with the more kind of. The folks that are really specialized or have adapted to the sport where they're just doing so much training to get ready for whatever event they're doing. There's just not a lot of space for that extra stuff, but that extra stuff, I think and this is actually a little bit of a pivot, but like when I'm, when I've got a client in off season.
I don't want them doing nothing in the off season. I want them to have a mental, physical break from the rigors of our peak phase. But if it's, that's a great opportunity to do a different activity. So you're still making your body move, you're still staying in shape and things like that, but you're maybe totally relaxing your mind from their active running.
But you're also keeping a little bit of that, that benefits from having variety in your training versus being too specialized. Especially for a
a lot of those postural muscles, like you mentioned. We do corrective exercise in the gym. We do it for a minute, a couple minutes, maybe more, but if you get on a surfboard and paddle for 10, 15, 20 minutes, just prone, all those extensors getting lit up, all the support muscles around the shoulder, like you're gonna get, you're building a new skill, but you're also getting a tremendous amount of work in a real blind spot.
Definitely over the years I've become a bigger and bigger fan of trying to get clients to do, like you say, in the off season, different activities that really compliment what they love to do because you tend to find they can lean into it a little bit more and, stick to it and get better gains.
Obviously, for those who love the gym, it's not the end of the world. They get in there. But for a lot of folks if you could find those activities, it's definitely a big win.
Yeah, no doubt. Yeah. Is there anything like that? Goes with the timing side of things or is that more of a, just being consistent with it, where if you're getting those things in on a regular basis, and maybe this is actually a question for the vitamin D too.
Is there a timing aspect to that in terms of it working better or worse?
Yeah, with polyphenols, again, there's two things to think about. Your daily total, so the amount that you're getting in your diet, and if you're someone who has more of a processed food diet, it's something you wanna be thinking about.
Almost half of all the polyphenols we get do come from coffee and tea. So if you're not a big coffee or tea drinker, all of a sudden you're putting a lot more pressure on yourself, on the rest of your diet, on your fruits and your vegetables and everything else. I think a big one is, we often talk about dietary patterns versus specific nutrients when we're looking to improve health outcomes and even things like recovery and green drinks have obviously become more and more popular over the years.
There are some good ones out there. I think the challenge with them when it comes to recovery, 'cause this is a question I'll get asked by athletes in the in pro sport now and endurance athletes as well. We don't have a lot of good data on recovery. And the impacts on these cytokines, like the TNF alphas, like the IL six, the only one that does, and this is going back to 20 12, 20 13 a group formulated the blend called Spectra.
And they actually, tested the blend, validated the blend, and this was in healthy individuals, randomized control trial. And we did see reductions in things like these cytokine markers, TNF, alphas, IL, sixes. If you're going to go down that road of being able to provide some support with supplementation, using blends that actually have some evidence behind them is certainly the place to start.
The drinks that we talked about, like the. Cherry juice, pomegranate juice, black, current juice, those are great to be timed. After the session. And again, the nice thing with food or having a food-based approach is we do have research that shows if you get into these super physiological doses, like these really high doses of antioxidants, you can blunt some of that stimulus that you just worked your butt off to create in the training session.
So we don't want to have that, but when it's coming from food or you're using a supplement that has as a food-based dose at it, then those are great wins because again, it's just stacking on your day. And, you must see this in your clients as well when you have, they have a busy life.
Kids at home, they're running around. There's days where we clients fall short and sometimes well short. And so having a backup, having something there to be able to ensure that they're getting everything they need is definitely a big win.
Yeah, and that is actually a good point too, in terms of the dosing on the proper end of it.
'cause sometimes we think about getting enough or not having enough. But then with a lot of supplements out there, they're just throwing some insane amount in there because it's like I, I imagine anyway, it's this wow factor of we have, 10,000 of whatever it happens to be. Maybe 10,000 is actually worse than 2000.
I know. It's definitely the
A better approach, which is frustrating, 20 years into this, it's 'cause in training, no one would say, you know what, if six sets was good, I think I'll do 24 sets in the gym. But when it comes to nutrition, it's always what if I'm gonna take 10,000 milligrams of vitamin C?
And it's if we did maybe two to 400 and repeated that through the day, we'll actually get a much better effect than the single bolus. So it's tough. It's a, there's some education in there, but it's, the cool part with endurance is it's got the sames. The same effects of when people are consistent with it, they can really start to see the benefit.
Which is huge, especially when you're training hard. Life's busy at home and you wanna see, you want to, you're training up for an event and you want to be able to show up feeling your best and be able to perform. It's massive. 'cause especially for endurance events, if you're training 3, 4, 6 months a year to build up to an event, there's nothing worse than.
Feeling tired or run down. Or sick before, before the event.
Yeah, no doubt. No doubt. I always look at that as like you don't want, you don't want a non fitness related thing to impact your performance on race day. Whether that be like we were talking about in episode one with digestion going wrong during a race, or, being behind on your nutrition and then feeling flat going into your.
Training or your race where you spent months training for it. So yeah, I mean if there's a way to maybe wrap things up, I think it would probably be consistent. Like consistency in your training is gonna trump having these hero sessions, consistency in your nutrition, targeting the right things at the right times are gonna be what ends up giving you your tools from that side of things.
And then consistency with sleep. These are the things that all blend together when done that kind of result in what we're looking for on event day or race day. That's it.
Consistency predicts outcome. So build a routine, repeat it, do it so often, you don't even have to think about it.
And then you can be confident, whether it's your training plan, your nutrition, that when it's time to perform or when it's that training day, you can show up and give it your best. You see it all the time with your clients, with yourself, and I see it all the time, in athletes, in, in pro sport, Olympic sport and with my executive clients, it's, it's one of those simple but not easy. When you say it to people, it's oh, that's okay. Easy. No worries. No, it takes some thinking. There's always hurdles, there's always roadblocks, but it's working through them. That's the key part. And really trying to, yeah, automate things to be able to build that consistency in which, I'm preaching to the choir here with yourself.
But I'm sure it's something that, a message that you're giving your clients all the time as well.
All right, mark. There's a lot to digest here. Is there anything that you'd wanna just leave the listeners with that kind of sums it all up? Yeah. I think a good rule of
thumb for listeners is, number one, total energy, right?
Make sure you get enough calories in to be able to support recovery, and also set you up for training the next day. Number two would be protein intake. Make sure you get enough throughout the day, and specifically in that breakfast period, we know that's the one where we tend to get the least amount of protein.
And number three is micronutrition. Make sure you're getting the vitamin D, the polyphenols, and for me, working with clients, chasing 'em with pill packs. So for the last 15 years, that's why I built the probe blend. So if you want to. Test drive the pro blend to be able to cover those needs.
We got a special code for the listeners here, Zach, they can head over to pro bio nutrition.com and use the promo code Endurance and Save 20%.
Dr. Bubbs, thanks a bunch for joining me again and chatting a little bit about recovery. Looking forward to round three. Amazing. Appreciate the time, Zach, and looking
forward to the next one.