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- Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast
where we discuss science
and science-based tools
for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman,
and I'm a professor of
neurobiology and ophthalmology
at Stanford School of Medicine.
This podcast is separate from my teaching
and research roles at Stanford.
It is however, part of
my desire and effort
to bring zero cost to consumer
information about science
and science-related tools
to the general public.
In keeping with that theme,
I'd like to thank the
sponsors of today's podcast.
Our first sponsor is ROKA.
ROKA makes sunglasses and eyeglasses.
And I'm delighted that they're a partner
and a sponsor for the podcast.
As some of you may already
know I've spent two decades
or more studying the visual system,
how we see?
Vision is absolutely
the most important sense
by which humans navigate
the world and survive.
And our eyes as two pieces of our brain
do many other important things as well.
So taking good care of
our eyesight is essential.
Founded by two All-Americans
swimmers from Stanford.
ROKA was born out of an
obsession for performance.
They've carefully put science and purpose
behind their design choices
and they built absolutely
terrific products as a result.
The glasses are amazing.
I love them because they look great.
They are super comfortable
and the optical clarity is incredible.
They filter out sunlight in a way
that still allows you to
see contrast and shadows
the way you need to.
And for me, one of the things
that's really irritating
is if I have a pair of sunglasses
that don't allow me to see
all the things I want to see.
And with ROKA glasses,
I get incredible contrast
but then I can also relax
and be outdoors in bright light.
And as the amount of light
changes with cloud cover
and things of that sort,
my ability to see my surroundings
coz it's still really
sharp and really clear.
And that only comes from
really understanding
how the visual system works,
and how it adjusts to
contrast and adaptation
and all these different things.
They really understand the science
and that went into the
design of these glasses.
And as many of you know,
sunlight and the viewing of light
is also very important for
setting circadian rhythm.
So that's also been incorporated
into the design and science
behind these glasses.
I do wear readers.
I don't often wear them
during the podcast,
but I have to wear
reading glasses at night.
So I use their readers and I
own a pair of their sunglasses.
And I'm delighted with them.
If you'd like to check out ROKA glasses,
you can go to www.roka.com,
that's R-O-K-A.com and
enter the code Huberman
to save 20% off your first order.
That's R-O-K-A.com,
enter the code Huberman
at checkout to get 20% off
your first order.
Today's podcast is also brought
to you by InsideTracker.
InsideTracker is a
personalized nutrition platform
that analyzes data from your blood and DNA
to help you better understand your body
and reach your health goals.
I'm a big believer in getting
regular blood work done
for the simple reason that
many of the important things
that are vital to our
immediate and long-term health
can only be detected in a
good quality blood test.
The problem with blood tests
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you get a lot of information
back about that are too high
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But making sense of that,
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Even if you have a really
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Today's episode is also brought
to us by Athletic Greens.
Athletic Greens is an all-in-one
vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink.
I've been using Athletic
Greens since 2012,
and so I'm delighted that
they're sponsoring the podcast.
With athletic greens,
you get a ton of factors
that are good for you
mixed into this one
really good tasting drink.
I like to mix mine with water
and a little bit of lemon juice,
and I drink that once or twice a day.
Typically, once early in the day,
and sometimes also in the
afternoon or even evening.
I'm able to sleep after drinking
in the evening just fine.
The reason I been using
Athletic Greens for so long
that I continue to use
Athletic Greens is that,
one, I feel better when I take it.
I just do.
Psychologically,
physically, I feel better.
But also it covers all
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that I need for my general health.
It's sort of a foundational
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In fact, when people ask me,
what should I take?
If I were to recommend just one supplement
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So with Athletic Greens, I
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And I know that I've got all that covered.
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For the last month four
episodes to be exact,
we've been discussing physical performance
and skill learning.
We've talked about how
to learn skills faster,
whether or not those are
skills, athletic performance,
dance, music, things of that sort.
We've also talked about
how to gain strength
and how to lose fat faster by
leveraging the nervous system.
Things like shiver and non-shiver,
non-exercise activity
induced thermogenesis.
We talked about how neurons
can actually trigger
accelerated fat loss.
We talked about hypertrophy
also called muscle growth
and we covered everything
from sets and reps protocols,
how long to stay in a cold ice bath?
When to get out?
How to keep shivering?
We've covered a lot of
tools and a lot of science.
So if you're interested in those things
and you even perhaps want
to learn a little bit about
how we make energy ATP from
carbohydrates or from fats,
it's all covered in the
previous four episodes.
This was going to be the time
that we moved to a new topic entirely,
but we are going to do one
more episode in this series
on physical performance.
For the simple reason that
you asked many questions
about something that's vitally important
both for physical
performance and long-term
and short-term health
and that's endurance.
And so today we are going
to talk about endurance.
Now, if you're a strength athlete
or you're not interested in endurance,
don't depart just yet,
because it turns out that there
are ways to train endurance
that are very different
than I would have previously imagined.
If you only think about long runs,
long swims, marathons,
half marathons, 10Ks, 5Ks
and that sort of thing puts you to sleep
kind of like Costello is
snoring in the background
right now.
He's not a long distance
endurance athlete,
that's for sure.
If you're interested in those things
or if you are averse to those things,
I encourage you to continue listening
because we are going to talk
about a little bit of science
and then some specific protocols
that really define what endurance is?
The four types of endurance
and ways to train those in
concert with the other things
that you might be doing
like weight training
or skill training or yoga.
And if you are an endurance athlete,
we are going to cover a
lot of tools and science
that I'm certain will also
help enhance your training
and performance in races
or even just recreationally.
The topic of endurance I think
has been badly misrepresented,
frankly, online.
And when you'd start
digging into the science
and you start talking to
real experts in this area,
what you discover, what
I've discovered is that,
it's an incredibly interesting area
because it teaches us so
much about how our body
and our brain use fuels and
how we can control which fuels
are used by our body and brain?
So today we will talk about
the four kinds of endurance.
We will also cover the topic of hydration
which might sound incredibly boring.
Like, okay, just drink more water.
But it's really interesting
because not only is
hydration a limiting factor
on performance,
but there is a right way to hydrate,
and there is a wrong way to hydrate.
There actually is a formula
that I'll teach you to know
how much water to be drinking
depending on your activity levels.
And if that sounds like a simple thing,
like, oh, just tap off water
until your urine runs clear.
That's actually the wrong advice.
It turns out that if you
don't hydrate properly,
you can see 20 to 30%
reductions in performance,
whether or not that strength,
whether that's increasing hypertrophy,
whether or not that's running, swimming,
even mental performance.
So even if you're not an athlete
or a recreational athlete at all,
I encourage you to stay tuned
for the part about hydration.
So we're going to cover as
usual a little bit of science
and then we're going to
dive right into protocols
that you can apply if you like,
and if you deem those
correct and safe for you.
Before we dive into all that,
I want to make an important announcement,
which has all the episodes
of the Huberman Lab Podcast
are now housed on a single website,
which is www.hubermanlab.com.
If you go to www.hubermanlab.com,
you can find all the episodes in YouTube,
Apple and Spotify format with links there.
The website is also searchable.
So if you go into the
little search function
which you'll find very easily,
and you put in, for
instance, creatine or sleep
or ice bath or sauna,
it will take you to the specific episodes
that contain that information.
And in addition, if you go to the website
www.hubermanlab.com,
you have the opportunity to sign up
for what we call the
Huberman Lab Neural Network.
The Huberman Lab Neural
Network is a zero cost resource
where once a month perhaps more often
you'll receive a email newsletter,
and that newsletter will
contain specific protocols,
announcements, attachments of
PDFs and things of that sort
of protocols, tools and
science from the podcast.
We will also make any
announcements about live lectures
which at some point I'll
probably start doing
in various cities in the US
and probably around the world as well,
as well as other things that I think
would be really useful to you
all of course at zero cost.
So that's www.hubermanlab.com,
sign up for the Neural Network newsletter.
You can find that in the menu tab
or it might pop up when you get there.
And I hope you will join.
And as a final announcement,
if you're not already
following us on Instagram,
you can go to Huberman Lab on Instagram.
And if you do that,
I often make announcements
and release protocols
and links to protocols
and things there as well.
I briefly want to touch on something
from the previous episode which is that,
if you are somebody that is trying
to increase muscle strength and or size,
or if you're simply somebody
who doesn't want to increase
muscle strength and size,
and you just want to maintain
the musculature that you have,
it's vital that you
perform at least five sets
of resistance training
per muscle per week.
If we don't do that, we
lose muscle over time.
And that is one reason among many
to have a regular resistance
training protocol.
Nobody wants to start resembling
a folded over envelope
or a melted candle.
No one wants to have challenges
getting up out of a chair
or off the ground.
Maintaining musculature is vital,
not just to our immediate health,
but to our long-term health trajectory.
So I just want to emphasize that point.
If you're curious about
the sets, the reps,
how close to failure to go or not go?
Whether or not you should be doing
your cardiovascular training
before or after your weight training?
All of that is in the previous episode
right down to the details,
and I like to think made
simple for you to understand.
But I do strongly believe
that resistance training
whether or not it's with body
weight or bands or weights
or simply lifting rocks in
the yard or logs in the yard
is vital for our systemic
physiology and our overall health,
and that includes our brain health.
And I described the reasons
for that and the mechanisms
in the previous episode.
Today, I'd like to talk about endurance
and how to build endurance,
and how to use endurance for
the health of your entire body.
Endurance, as the name suggests
is our ability to engage
in continuous bouts of exercise,
or continuous movement or
continuous effort of any kind.
And I do believe that our
ability to engage in activities
that we call endurance training
or physical endurance activities
do have carry over to
mental performance of things
that require long-term effort.
I'll touch on that at the end
and why there's reason to believe
that there is a biological crossover
between those two things.
I don't think it's simply the case
that if you train
yourself to be a strength
and speed athlete and to
do short bouts of exercise
are very intense,
that you can only do mental work
that's of short bouts and very intense.
But it is clear that
cardiovascular exercise,
exercise where you're
getting your heart rate up
continuously for a period of time,
and endurance exercise we will define
what that is in a moment,
is vital for tapping into
and enhancing various aspects
of our biology in the
body end in the brain
such that our brain can perform work
for longer periods of time,
focused work, learning, et cetera.
So I want to dive into
the topic of endurance
and I want to just begin
by addressing something
that's vital to any kind of effort,
whether that's mental
effort or physical effort.
So as always a little bit of science
and we'll get right into protocols.
So the key thing to understand
about energy production in the body,
meaning your ability to think,
your ability to talk,
your ability to walk,
your ability to run is this
thing that we call ATP.
ATP and mitochondria,
which are just little
what we call organelles within cells.
These little factories that
make energy, if you will.
ATP is required for anything
that requires energy,
for anything that you
do that requires effort.
And there are different ways to get ATP.
And we have been gifted as
a species with the ability
to convert lots of things into ATP.
We can convert carbohydrates,
literally the kinds of
carbohydrates eat a bagel,
you eat a piece of pizza.
Pizza usually is dough, and it has cheese
and some other things.
Costello hears me talking about pizza.
Costello loves pizza, by the way.
Eating a piece of pizza,
it gets converted into various things,
fatty acids from the fats,
glucose from the bread,
and those things get converted
into ATP within cells,
through things like like
glycolysis, things like lipolysis.
I talked about this in previous episodes.
So our muscles and our neurons
use different fuel sources
to generate ATP.
The ones that are used
first for short bouts
of intense activity are
things like phosphocreatine.
If you've only heard about
creatine as a supplement.
Well, phosphocreatine actually
exists on our muscles,
and that's why people take creatine.
You can load your muscles
with more creatine.
And though, and excuse me.
Phosphocreatine is great for
short, intense bouts of effort.
So when you're really pushing
hard on something physical,
let's say you see a car
on the side of the road
and that car is stalled and a person says,
"Hey, can you help me push my car?"
And you start to push.
That's going to be phosphocreatine
is going to be your main fuel source.
Then you start to tap
into things like glucose
which is literally just
carbohydrate is the sugar
that's in your blood.
And then if you keep pushing on that car,
you keep engaging in a particular effort,
or you keep studying or you
keep listening to this podcast,
you start to tap into other
fuel sources like glycogen
from your liver, which is just,
it's like a little pack,
just like you might have packed a sandwich
or something for work.
You have a little pack
of glycogen in your liver
that you can rely on.
And you have fat stored in adipose tissue.
Even if you have very, very
low body fat percentage
like you're one of these people
as like 3% or 5% body fat
really thin skin, very little body fat,
you can extract lipids fatty
acids from that body fat.
It's like a storage pack,
it is a storage pack for energy
that can be converted to ATP.
So without going into any more detail,
when I say today energy or I say ATP,
just remember that
regardless of your diet,
regardless of your nutritional plan,
your body has the
capacity to use creatine,
glucose, glycogen, lipids.
And if you're ketogenic, ketones.
We'll talk about ketosis.
In order to generate fuel, energy.
Now, the other crucial point is that,
in order to complete that
process of taking these fuels
and converting them into energy,
most of the time you need oxygen.
You need air basically in your system.
Now, it's not actual air.
You need oxygen molecules in your system,
comes in through your mouth and your nose,
goes to your lungs and
distributes via the bloodstream.
Oxygen is not a fuel,
but like a fire that has no oxygen
you can't actually burn the logs,
but when you blow a lot
of oxygen onto a fire,
basically, onto logs with a flame there,
then basically it will take fire,
it will burn.
Okay?
Oxygen allows you to burn fuel.
So today we are going to
ask the critical questions.
What allows us to perform?
What allows us to continue
effort for long periods of time?
And that effort could be a run,
it could be a swim,
it could be studying,
it could be anything that extends
over a long period of time.
Well, you're going to need energy
and you're going to need oxygen.
But the way to answer a question
like what allows us to endure, right?
Endurance.
What allows us to keep going?
Well, we think of things like willpower.
But what's willpower?
Willpower is neurons.
It's neurons in our brain.
We have this thing called
the central governor
which decides whether or not
we should or could continue
or whether or not we should stop,
whether or not we should quit.
Okay?
So whether or not you're somebody
who has a lot of what
we would call resilience
and endurance,
or whether or not you're
somebody who taps out early
and quits early or can't
handle frustration,
that has to do with your fuel utilization
and specific neurons.
So we have to ask the question,
what is the limiting
factor on performance?
Right?
So instead of saying,
what allows us to endure?
We should say, what
prevents us from enduring?
What prevents us from moving forward?
What are the factors that say,
you know what?
No more, I'm not going
to continue this run.
Or you know what?
I've had a really long, hard day
or maybe I've had an easy
day or I'm feeling lazy,
I just don't even really feel
like getting up and moving.
So what we're going to talk about today
actually gets right down
to the heart of motivation
and fuel use.
Motivation and fuel allocation.
And we are going to talk about
specific training protocols
that you can follow that have carry over
between the bodily systems of
running swimming, et cetera,
and the way that your brain works.
So let's talk about
endurance by asking first,
what are the limiting
factors on endurance?
What stops us?
Because in addressing
that and answering that,
we will understand what
allows us to get into effort
and to continue effort.
There are five main categories of things
that allow us to engage in effort.
And they are neurons, nerves, muscle,
muscle, blood, things in our blood,
our heart and our lungs.
Now, I don't want to
completely write off things
like the immune system and
other systems of the body,
but nerve muscle, blood, heart and lungs
are the five that I
want to focus on today,
because that's where most of the data are.
As we go forward into this,
I want to acknowledge Dr. Andy Galpin,
who as with the last episode,
has been tremendously
helpful and informative
in terms of the exercise physiology.
He's a true expert.
He has a laboratory,
he's a full professor who
does work on muscle biopsy,
who understands the science,
but who also works with athletes
and works with recreational athletes,
professional athletes really understands
at a variety of levels how
all these systems work?
He's the person I consulted
with about today's episode,
although I did access
other literature as well.
And I'm going to mention a
key review for any of you,
afficionados, who really want
to get down into the weeds.
But I encourage you,
if you want more detail
to check out Dr. Andy
Galpin's YouTube page,
I think he's also on Twitter.
He's definitely on Instagram.
His content is excellent,
and he really understands...
I have learned and I really believe
that an intellectual is somebody
who understands a topic at multiple levels
of specificity of detail
and can communicate that.
And Andy is a true intellectual
of muscle physiology
and performance.
And if you hear the word intellectual
and you kind of back up
and cringe from that,
understand that he's also a practitioner.
So thank you, Andrew Galpin.
Andy Galpin for your
support in these episodes
and we hope to have you as
a guest on the podcast soon.
So nerve muscle, blood, heart and lungs.
Let's talk about neurons
and how they work.
Okay?
But I want to tell you about an experiment
that's going to make it very clear
why quitting is a mental
thing not a physical thing.
So why do we quit?
Well, an experiment was
done a couple years ago
and was published in the journal Cell.
Cell Press journal, excellent journal
showing that there is a class
of neurons in our brain stem,
in the back of our brain that
if they shut off, we quit.
Now, these neurons release epinephrin.
Epinephrin is adrenaline.
And anytime we are engaged
in effort of any kind,
we are releasing epinephrin.
Anytime we're awake really,
we are releasing epinephrin
into our brain.
In fact, this little roup of neurons
in the back of our brain is
called the locus coeruleus
if you like.
It's churning out epinephrin all the time,
but if something stresses us out,
it churns out more and then it acts
as kind of an alertness
signal for the whole brain.
We also of course have
adrenaline epinephrin
released in our body which
makes our body ready for things.
So think about epinephrin
as a readiness signal.
And when we are engaged in effort,
this readiness signal is
being churned into our brain.
When we relax and we're falling asleep,
epinephrin levels are low.
Okay, so they did a really
interesting experiment
where they had subjects
engage in bouts of effort
of trying to move forward toward a goal.
But they manipulated
the visual environment
with the stripes,
kind of like fences passing
on both sides of them.
And by doing that, they
could trick subjects
into thinking that their
effort was either allowing them
to move forward, right?
Because these rungs on the
fence were moving past,
or that their effort was futile
that they were no longer moving forward
because they would make
the runs move slowly
even though the subjects
were making a lot of effort
to move forward.
Okay?
So this is analogous or
similar to being on a treadmill
and you're trying to
walk on this treadmill
and you just can't move
the conveyor, right?
Or you're in virtual reality
and you're putting a ton of effort,
but it seems like you're
moving excruciatingly slow.
I had this experience
recently in real life.
I was doing a swim in the Pacific,
I was trying to go
south and I was swimming
and I was caught in a current,
not the cup that pulls you out to ocean.
And I kept looking to my left,
and I saw this hotel on the shoreline,
and then I was swimming and swimming
and swimming and swimming,
and 20 minutes later I looked
to my left and the hotel
is still exactly where it was before,
which meant that I wasn't moving.
It felt futile.
Eventually, either the current
changed or something changed
and I eventually swam past the hotel,
got back on the beach and
eventually drove home.
That's essentially what
they did in this experiment.
But what they found was these neurons
that release epinephrin,
there's another cell type called glia,
which actually means glue in Latin,
that is paying attention
to how much epinephrin
is being released.
And at some point the
system reaches a threshold.
It reaches this threshold
and it shuts off the
release of more epinephrin.
It's like I quit, that's it,
no more effort signal.
If they could extend the time
before those glia said, ah, enough.
If they could release more
adrenaline into the system,
then subjects would keep going.
So our desire to continue
or put differently,
our willingness to continue
and our desire to quit
is mediated by events
between our two ears.
Now, that doesn't mean that
the body's not involved,
but it means that neurons
are critically important.
So we have two categories of
neurons that are important.
The ones in our head that tell us get up
and go out and take that run.
And the ones that allow us
and encourage us to continue
that run,
and we have neurons that shut things off
and say no more.
And we of course have the neurons
that connect to our muscles
and control our muscles.
But the reason we quit is
rarely because our body quits,
our mind quits.
Now, we never want to encourage people
to drive themselves to
the point of injury,
that's not going to be good for anybody,
but it is good to know that it's neural.
Our ability to persist is neural.
So when people say is it, I hear that,
you know, sports or effort or fighting,
or it's 90% mental, 10% physical.
That whole discussion
about how much is mental,
how much is physical?
Is absolutely silly.
It just proves that there's no knowledge
of the underlying biology
behind that statement.
It's neither mental nor physical.
Everything is physical,
everything is neurons.
Your thinking is the
responsibility of chemicals
and electrical signals in your head.
So it's not 90% mental, 10% physical.
It's not 50/50.
It's not 70/30, it's 100% nervous system.
It's neurons.
Okay?
So when people say mental or physical,
understand it's 100% neural.
And I'd love for the,
how much of it is mental
and how much is physical
to just disappear.
That argument means nothing
and it's not actionable.
Now, what do nerves need in
order to continue to fire?
What do you need in order
to get neurons to say,
I will persist.
Well, they need glucose.
Unless you're on keto
and ketogenic adapted,
you need carbohydrate is glucose.
That's what neurons run on.
And you need electrolytes.
Neurons have what's called
a sodium potassium pump
blah, blah, blah.
They generate electricity.
We could go into all this.
I will probably do an entire lecture
about the action potential,
but basically in order to
get nerve cells to fire,
to contract muscle,
to say, I'm going to continue.
You need sufficient sodium, salt,
because the action potential
the actual firing of neurons
is driven by sodium entering the cell,
rushing into the cell.
And then there's a removal of potassium.
And then there's a kind of
resetting of those levels
by something called the
sodium potassium pump.
And the sodium potassium pump and sodium
and action potentials,
even if you don't know anything
about that is ATP dependent.
It requires energy.
So you need energy in order
to get neurons to fire.
And it is pH dependent.
It depends on the conditions
or the environment within the
brain being of a certain pH
or acidity.
pH is about how acid or how
basic the environment is?
And we will talk a little
bit about pH in simple terms
so you can understand.
So nerves need salt, they need potassium.
And it turns out they need magnesium
and you need glucose and carbohydrates
in order to power those neurons,
unless you are running on ketones.
And to run on ketones,
you have to make sure that
you're fully keto adapted.
I will talk about adding in
ketones on top of carbohydrate
at the end of the episode.
Okay, so that's how nerves work.
You need carbohydrate,
you need sodium, potassium and magnesium
in order to drive the brain.
Muscle.
Muscle is going to engage
in generating energy first
by using this phosphocreatine system.
High bouts of effort
really intense effort,
short-lived seconds to minutes,
but probably more like seconds
is going to be this phosphate
creating literally a fuel source
in the muscle that you're going to burn,
just like you would logs on a fire.
And glycogen which is stored
carbohydrate in the muscle,
that also can be burned
just like logs on a fire
to generate energy.
So let me make this crystal clear.
If you move your wrist
towards your shoulder
and contract your bicep really hard,
muscle fibers are burning
up their own carbohydrate.
They're converting that into ATP
in order to generate that energy.
Okay?
And pH is important and
temperature is important.
In the episode on supercharge
your physical performance,
I talked all about how by
using cooling specifically
of the palms or the bottoms of the feet
or the cheeks of the face
using particular methods,
you can adjust the temperature
of the body and of muscle
in a way that allows you to do more work,
to do more reps, to run further,
to keep going and to persist.
And that's because if temperature
is too low or too high,
then ATP is not going to be available
because of this whole thing
called the pyruvate kinase pathway
and the temperature
dependence of pyruvate kinase.
Check out that episode if you
want to learn more about that.
But temperature is important
and pH is also important.
So we got nerve, muscle,
and then there's stuff in our blood
that's available as an energy source.
And in blood, we got glucose.
So literally blood sugar
that's floating around.
So let's say you have
fasted for three days,
your blood glucose is
going to be very low.
So that's not going to
be a great fuel source,
but you will start to liberate fats
from your adipose tissue from your fat.
Fatty acids will start to
mobilize into the bloodstream
and you can burn those for energy.
And oxygen in your blood when
you inhale, [inhales deeply]
you're bringing oxygen into your blood.
So these are all fuel
sources in your neurons,
in your muscle, in your blood,
in your various tissues that
are providing the opportunity
to induce effort whether
or not it's a run or swim
or writing or talking.
Now, there are some other
factors that are important
and those are the heart
which is going to move blood.
So the more that the heart
can move blood and oxygen,
well, the more fuel that's
going to be available for you
to engage in muscular
effort and thinking effort.
So your heart vitally important
to your muscles ability
to work and your brain's ability to work.
And as I've mentioned, oxygen a few times,
it should be obvious then that
the lungs are very important.
You need to bring oxygen in,
and distribute it to all these tissues,
because oxygen is critical
for the conversion
of carbohydrates and
the conversion of fats.
And we could get into the discussion about
whether or not oxygen is important
for ketogenic metabolism,
but you need oxygen there,
you need to breathe and you
need to breathe properly.
So I just covered what would
normally be about four lectures
of energy consumption
and energy utilization.
I didn't go into much detail at all.
But what I want you to imagine is that,
you've got these different cell types.
You've got neurons, you've got muscle,
they need to collaborate
in order to generate effort
or to make the decision to do something
or to think hard or to
run hard or to run far.
And then you've got fuel
sources both in the neurons,
in the muscle, in your blood,
and then the heart and
lungs are going to help
distribute the oxygen and those fuels.
And of course you have
that little energy pack
that we call the liver that
will allow you to pull out
a little more carbohydrate
if you need it for work.
Okay?
So that's as much as I want to
cover about energy consumption,
because that's a lot.
But what it tells you is that when you eat
and you use food as a fuel source,
that food can be broken down
and you can immediately burn the glucose
that's in your bloodstream,
or you can rely on some of
the stored fuel in your liver,
or you can rely on stored
fuel in the muscle,
so-called glycogen.
And there are a lot of different ways
that we can generate ATP.
So when we ask the question,
what's limiting for performance?
What is going to allow us to endure,
to engage in effort and
endure long bouts of effort
or even moderately long bouts of effort?
We need to ask which of those things,
nerve, muscle, blood, heart
and lungs is limiting?
Or put differently,
we ask, what should we be
doing with our neurons?
What should we be doing with our muscles?
What should we be doing with our blood?
What should we be doing with our heart
and what should we be doing with our lungs
that's going to allow
us to build endurance
for mental and physical work
and to be able to go longer,
further with more intensity?
That's the real question?
How can we do more work?
And the way we do that is with energy,
and the way to get energy to it,
is to buy those five things.
And so now we're going to talk about,
how you can actually build
different types of endurance?
And what that does at
the level of your blood,
your heart, your muscles and your neurons.
So we're going to skip back and
forth between protocols, tools
and the underlying science.
So rather than heavy stack
the science at the front end
and then just give you
all the tools at the end,
we're going to talk about the protocols,
the four kinds of endurance
and how to achieve them?
And we are going to talk
about the underlying science
as we move through that.
If you would like a lot
of detailed science,
I encourage you to check out a review
that we've linked in the show notes.
And the review is called
adaptations to endurance
and strength training.
This is a review article with
many excellent citations.
It's from Cold Spring Harbor
Perspectives in Medicine.
The Cold Spring Harbor Press
is an excellent scientific press.
Spent the last 21 years doing
summers at Cold Spring Harbor
teaching neuroscience,
but Cold Spring Harbor is
involved in all sorts of themes
and topics related to
neuroscience and medicine.
This review by Hughes L.Ellefson.
Ellefson that's the name.
Ellefson and Barr, B-A-A-R.
Adaptations through endurance
and strength training
is rich with citations.
It can be downloaded as a complete PDF.
There's no paywall and we will link to it.
And it gets really deep into
all the signaling cascades,
the genetic changes within muscle
with high intensity interval training,
short-term, super high intensity
training, weight training.
So if you're a real nerd for this stuff
and you want to get right
down into how PGC-1alpha,
P53 and PH20 change the
adaptation features of muscle
and gene regulation,
that is definitely the review for you.
If you're like most people,
and you're not really interested
in that level of detail,
no reason to pick up the review,
unless you just want to check out
some of the figures and pictures.
But I do want to offer that as a resource
it's been in addition to
discussions with Dr. Andy Galpin,
it's been a primary
resource for the content
of this episode.
So let's talk about the
four kinds of endurance
and how to achieve those?
I do believe that everybody
should have some sort
of endurance practice,
regular endurance practice.
It's clear that it's vital for
the functioning of the body
and the mind.
And there are clear longevity benefits.
There are a lot of
reasons why that's true,
but the main one is that if we
have good energy utilization
in our musculature and in our blood,
in our vascular system and
in our oxygenating system,
our lungs, the so-called
cardiovascular system,
respiratory system and musculature.
The body and brain function much better.
There are so many papers now,
so much data to support that.
So I do believe everyone
should either try to maintain
the muscle that they have,
provided they've already
gone through puberty
and development.
And they should be engaged in
regular endurance exercise.
Now, for many people, they
think endurance exercise.
That means what?
A hour long run or I got
to get on the StairMaster
or I have to treadmill for
hours on end each week.
And it turns out that's not the case.
There are four kinds of endurance,
and you can train specifically
for any one of those,
and you can vary your training.
So let's talk about those
four kinds of endurance.
These are very interesting
and they each have very
different protocols
that you use in order to
build and maximize them.
And now you'll understand
what fuel sources they use
in order to build that
thing we call endurance.
So first of all, we
have muscular endurance.
Muscular endurance is the
ability for our muscles
to perform work over time,
and our failure to continue
to be able to perform
that work is going to be
due to muscular fatigue,
not to cardiovascular fatigue.
So not because we're breathing too hard
or we can't get enough
blood to the muscles
or because we quit mentally,
but because the muscles
themselves give out.
Okay?
One good example of this would be,
if you had to pick up a stone in the yard
and that stone is not
extremely heavy for you,
and you needed to do that
anywhere from 50 to a 100 times,
and you were picking it
up and putting it down
and picking it up and putting it down
and picking up and putting it down.
At some point, your muscles will fatigue.
They will fail to endure.
Muscular endurance is incredibly useful
for a variety of physical pursuits.
And we will talk about the mental pursuits
that it supports as well.
In terms of physical pursuits,
the ability for a given muscle
to perform repeated work
is going to improve your golf swing.
It's going to improve your tennis swing.
It's going to improve your posture,
your ability to dance,
your ability to repeatedly
engage in an activity
that requires effort in a
way that's very different
from the kind of endurance
that you will build simply
by increasing your cardiovascular fitness,
your ability to generate
kind of easy repetition.
So let's talk about muscular
endurance and what it is?
Muscular endurance is
going to be something
that you can perform for
anywhere from 12 to 25,
or even up to 100 repetitions.
And that's actually how if you like
you would train muscular endurance.
And I'll give the specific
protocol in a few moments.
So a good example is push-ups, right?
If you were to get on the
floor and start doing push-ups,
even if you're somebody who
has to do knees down push-ups,
and you're doing your push-ups,
eventually you won't be
able to do any more push-ups
and that's not going to be
because you couldn't get enough
oxygen into your system,
or your heart wasn't pumping enough blood.
It's going to be because the muscles fail.
That's why.
So if you want to be
able to do more push-ups
or even more pull-ups.
Muscular endurance is
really what it's about.
It's actually no coincidence
that a lot of military bootcamp
style training is not done with weights,
it's done with things
like push-ups, pull-ups,
sit-ups and running.
Because what they're really
building is muscular endurance.
The ability to perform
work repeatedly over time
for a given set of muscles and neurons.
So what's a good protocol
to build muscular endurance.
Let's just give that to you now
and explain some of the
underlying science as it follows.
So a really good muscular
endurance training protocol
according to the scientific
literature would be,
three to five sets of anywhere
from 12 to 100 repetitions.
That's a huge range.
Now, 12 to 25 repetitions is
going to be more reasonable
for most people.
And the rest periods
are going to be anywhere
from 30 to 180 seconds of rest.
So anywhere from half a minute
to three minutes of rest.
So this might be five sets of push-ups,
done getting your maximum push-ups
although for some people
that might be zero
and you have to do it knees down.
For some people it might be 10 push-ups,
for some people might be 25,
but you could go all the way up to 100.
Rest anywhere from 30 to 180 seconds,
and then do your next set
for a total of three to five sets.
So it doesn't actually
sound like a ton of work.
The other thing you could do
is something like a plank.
A plank position is actually a way
to build muscular endurance, not strength.
Okay?
I'm sure it could be
used to develop strength,
but it's really about muscular endurance.
So you would do three
to five sets of planks.
Those planks would probably even
because you're not doing repetitions,
it's an isometric hold as we say,
as kind of static hold or a wall sit
would be another example.
And you would do that probably
for a minute or two minutes,
take some rest of anywhere
from 30, 60, or 180 seconds,
and then repeat.
So things like pushing a sled, push-ups,
isometric planks, even pull-ups,
those will all work.
And as with others forms of training,
you would want to do this,
until you approach
failure or actually fail
and where you're unable to
perform another repetition
that would mark the end of a set.
The one critical feature of
building muscular endurance
is that it has no major east
centric loading component.
Now, I haven't talked much about eccentric
and concentric loading.
But concentric loading is
when you are shortening
the muscle typically or lifting a weight.
And east centric movements
are when you are lengthening
a muscle typically
or lowering a weight.
So if you do a pull up and
you get your chin over the bar
or a chin up, that's the
concentric portion of the effort,
and then as you lower yourself,
that's the eccentric portion.
Eccentric portion of resistance
training of any kind,
whether or not it's for
endurance or for strength
is one of the major causes of soreness.
Some people will be more
susceptible to this,
excuse me than others,
but it does create more
damage in muscle fibers.
Muscular endurance and
building muscular endurance
should not include any movements
that include major eccentric loads.
So if you're going to do push-ups,
it doesn't mean that you want to drop,
you know, smash your chest into the floor.
And by the way your chest
should touch the ground
on every push-up.
That's a real push-up.
Okay?
It's not about breaking
90 with the elbows,
it's about pushing down until
your chest touch the floor
and straightening out.
That's a proper push-up.
And a pull-up is where you pull
up your chin above the bar.
Neither of those should
include a slow eccentric
or lowering component.
If you are using those to
train muscular endurance
the three to five sets of 12 to 25
and maybe even up to 100 repetitions
with 3,280 seconds of rest in between.
That means that jumping also
is going to be a very poor tool
for building muscular endurance,
because jumping has a slowing
down component as you land.
So things like plyometrics or agility work
where you're moving from side to side,
and you're decelerating,
you're slowing yourself down a lot,
not going to be good
for muscular endurance.
Terrific for cardiovascular training
and conditioning of other
kinds and skill training
and agility and all that.
But if you want to build
muscular endurance,
you want to make your muscles
able to do more work for longer.
It's going to be this three to five sets
of 12 to 100 reps,
30 to 180 seconds of
mainly concentric movement.
Okay?
Not a slow lowering phase
or a heavy lowering phase.
So that might be kettlebell
swings and things of that sort.
Isometrics, as I mentioned,
things like planks
and wall sets will work.
Now, what's interesting
about this is that,
it doesn't seem at all
like what people normally
think of as endurance.
And yet it's been shown in nice, quality
peer-reviewed studies,
several of which are cited in the review
I mentioned earlier,
that muscular endurance
can improve our ability
to engage in long bouts of
what we call long duration,
low-intensity endurance work.
So this can support long runs.
It can support long swims.
And it can build also...
It can build postural strength
and endurance simultaneously
and that's mainly accomplished
through isometrical.
So things like planks
are actually quite good
for building endurance of
the spinal erector muscles
that provide posture of
the abdominal muscles
that are helpful for
posture for being upright
for the upper neck muscles
and things of that sort.
These days everyone
seems to have texts neck.
Everyone is basically staring
at their toes all the time
as a default towards their toes.
So isometric holds can be very good
for building muscular endurance.
You can spot people including yourself,
perhaps with poor muscular
endurance in the postural muscles
because anytime they stop moving,
they have to lean against a wall
or their hip will move to one side,
or they're always leaned to one side.
I am guilty of this too.
Some of you have actually pointed out.
I like to think out of concern
that I often am rubbing my lower back.
And indeed I have some
asymmetries of my postural muscles
some of which are probably genetic
and some of which are probably
just from excessive work
or something of that sort
that have my right shoulder
set lower than my left
and things of that sort.
If I wanted to improve those,
I could improve those by
really focusing on symmetry
and isometric.
Symmetry meaning holding my
hands at equivalent positions
in planks and doing isometric holds
for building muscular endurance
of the postural muscles.
But this can also be done with,
as I mentioned, kettlebell
swings for the lower back
and legs and posterior chain.
So there are a number
of different exercises
you could do this with,
but it should be compound
exercises mainly.
It's rare for people to do
this kind of muscular endurance
work specifically for things
like bicep curls or triceps.
And there aren't many activities
that really rely on
isolation of those muscles
and repeatedly, right?
It's hard...
I'm sure there are some out there,
but it's kind of hard to imagine.
So you can do this with isometrics,
you can do this with more standard
non-isometric type movements,
but make sure there isn't
a strong eccentric load.
So now let's talk about
the science briefly
of why this works?
Well, that takes us back to
this issue of fuel utilization
and what fails?
So if we would say, okay,
let's say you do a plank
and you're planking for,
you know, maybe you're
able to plank for a minute
or two minutes or three minutes.
At some point you will fail.
You're not going to fail
because the heart gives out.
You're not going to fail because
you can't get enough oxygen
because you can breathe
while you're doing that.
You're going to fail because
of local muscular failure.
Which means that as you do,
if you choose to do this
protocol of three to five sets,
et cetera, et cetera, to
build muscular endurance,
mainly what you are going to be building
is you're going to be building the ability
of your mitochondria to use oxygen
to generate energy locally.
And that is something called
mitochondrial respiration.
Respiration because of
the involvement of oxygen.
And it's also going to
be increasing the extent
to which the neurons control the muscles
and provide a stimulus for
the muscles to contract.
But this is independent
of power and strength.
Okay?
So even though the low sets
like three to five sets
and the fact that you're doing repetitions
and you're going to failure,
even though it seems to
resemble power and strength
and hypertrophy type training,
it is distinctly different.
It's not going to generate
strength, hypertrophy and power.
It's going to mainly create
this ability to endure
to continually contract muscles
or repeatedly contract muscles.
Okay?
Continually if you're
using isometric holds,
repeatedly, excuse me,
if you're using repetition type exercise
where there's a contraction
and an extension the muscle
essentially concentric
and an eccentric portion.
But remember that you want the
eccentric portion to be light
and relatively fast,
not so fast that you injure yourself,
but certainly not
deliberately slowed down.
It was recommended, I
should say by Andy Galpin
that you not use Olympic lifts for this,
because once you get past
eight or 12 or 25 repetitions,
especially form on those
Olympic lifts is key
for not getting injured.
And while some people can
perform those sorts of of lifts
likes snatches and deadlifts
and cleans and jerks
and overhead presses,
probably not a great idea if
the goal is to push the body
to points of fatigue,
because you do open yourself up to injury,
unless you're very skilled at doing that,
or you have a really good coach
who can help you guide
through those lifts.
So that's one form of endurance
which is muscular endurance.
And it's mainly going to
rely on neural energy.
So nerves and muscle.
And it's not going to rely quite so much
on what's available in your
blood, your heart or your lungs.
So now let's talk about the
other extreme of endurance
which is long duration endurance.
This is the type that
people typically think about
when they think about endurance.
You're talking about a
long run, a long swim,
a long bike ride.
Well, how long we'll
anywhere from 12 minutes
to several hours or
maybe even an entire day,
maybe eight or nine hours of
hiking or running or biking.
Some people are actually doing those kinds
of really long events
marathons, for instance.
So anything longer than 12 minutes.
And this type of work
builds on fuel utilization
in the muscles,
it builds on the activity
of neurons in the brain
that are involved in what we call
central pattern generators.
We talked about this in a previous episode
or several previous episodes.
These are groups of
neurons that allow our body
to engage in regular rhythmic effort
without having to think
about the movement too much.
So running and stepping or swimming
if you already know how to swim,
or peddling on a bike or
walking upstairs and hiking,
you're not thinking about
right, left, right, left.
It's all carried out by
central pattern generators.
This is going to be at
less than a hundred percent
of your maximum oxygen uptake,
your VO2 max, I'll talk
about what VO2 max is.
But I just want to give a
sense of what the protocol is,
and the underlying science.
How many sets?
One.
Long duration effort is one
set of 12 minutes or longer.
So you're not counting repetitions.
I sure hope that if you're
going out on a 30 minute run
or even a 15 minute run,
that you're not counting steps,
that you're not counting pedal strokes,
that you're not on the rower
counting poles on the rower.
I suppose you could,
but I think that would be pretty dreadful.
Seems like a poor utilization
of cognitive brain space.
You're getting into
regular repeated effort
and your ability to continue that effort
is going to be dependent
mainly on the efficiency
of the movement on your
ability to strike a balance
between the movement itself,
the generation of the muscular
movements that are required,
and fuel utilization across
the different sources
of nerve muscle, blood, heart and lungs.
So let's ask the question.
Why would you fail on a long run?
Why would you quit?
Well, as you set out on that long run,
assuming you have some
glycogen in your liver
and in your muscles, you're
going to use that energy first,
even if it's very low intensity.
I guess we're not talking about sprinting,
we're talking about heading out the door
or starting off on a marathon.
You're starting to assuming
you have some conditioning
or even if you don't,
you're going to burn carbohydrate.
You're going to burn
glucose in the bloodstream,
you're going to burn carbohydrate
as those muscles contract.
Those what we call slow twitch muscles.
They're contracting,
they start burning up fuel to make ATP
to continue to contract.
Your mind is going to
use more or less energy
depending on how much willpower,
how much of a fight you have
to get into with yourself
in order to generate the effort.
I really want to underscore this.
If you're somebody that's thinking,
maybe I go for the run,
maybe I don't go for the run.
I'll do it at two o'clock.
Okay, 2:05.
No, I only want to go on the half hour
or maybe on the main hour.
And you're going through all that.
Guess what?
You're burning up useful energy
that you could use either
for the run, for example,
or for something else.
When we think about something hard,
when we ruminate,
when we perseverate on
an idea or on a decision,
we are burning neural
energy and neural energy
is glucose and epinephrin
and all the things
we talked about before.
So willpower in part is the ability
to devote resources to things
and part of that is making decisions
to just either do it or not do it.
I'm not of the just do it mindset.
I think there's a right
time and a place to train.
But I also think that it is not good.
In other words, it utilizes
excessive resources
to churn over decisions excessively,
and you probably burn
as much cognitive energy
deciding about whether or not
to do a given training or not
as you do in the actual training.
Okay?
So we'll talk more about how
this long duration effort
can relate to mental performance,
but the long duration
effort should be one set,
12 minutes or longer.
It could go for 30 minutes
or 60 minutes or an hour.
We'll talk about programming
later in the episode.
This is going to be less
than a hundred percent
of your maximum oxygen uptake.
Your heart rate is not going
to be through the ceiling
or maxed out.
But it's all about efficiency of movement.
That's what you're building.
When you go out for a
run that's 30 minutes,
you are building the capacity
to repeat that performance.
The next time, while being more efficient
actually burning less fuel.
And that might seem a
little bit counterintuitive,
but every time you do that run,
what you're doing is you're building up
mitochondrial density.
It's not so much about
mitochondrial oxidation
and respiration.
You're building up mitochondrial density.
You're actually increasing
the amount of ATP
that you can create for
a given about of effort.
You're becoming more efficient.
Okay?
You're burning less fuel
overall doing the same thing.
That's really what
these long slow distance
or long bouts of effort
are really all about.
Now, why do this long duration effort?
Why would you want to do it?
Why is it good for you?
Well, it does something very important
which is that it builds the
capillary beds within muscles.
So let's talk a little
bit about vasculature.
We haven't done this too much yet,
but if you have seen the episode
on supercharging performance.
We talked about these AVAs
arteriovenous anastomosis
where blood moves from
arteries directly into veins,
but that's unusual,
that only takes place in
the so-called glabrous skin
of the palms, the face and
the bottoms of the feet.
Typically, for most all
other areas of the body
what happens is,
arteries bring blood to a
given tissue like a muscle,
and veins return that
blood back to the heart.
There are exceptions, but in general.
And in between arteries and
veins are these little tiny
what are called capillary
beds or microcapillaries.
So these are tiny little avenues,
like little tiny streams and estuaries
between the bigger arteries and veins.
Now, those are actually
contained within muscle.
And what's amazing is
that you can increase
the number of them.
You can literally build new capillaries.
You can create new little
streams within your muscles
and the type of long duration effort
that I was talking about
before to 12 minutes or more
of steady effort is very
useful for doing that,
and is very useful for
increasing the mitochondria,
the energy producing
elements of the cells,
the actual muscle cells.
And the reason is when
blood arrives to muscles
it has oxygen.
The muscles are going to
use some of that oxygen.
And then some of the deoxygenated blood
is going to be sent back to
the heart and to the lungs.
Now, the more capillaries that
you build into those muscles,
the more oxygen available
to those muscles.
I don't want to get too much
into the physics of fluid flow.
But basically it's the
difference between taking a hose
and sticking it into some
dirt just directly like
and turning on the faucet at a given rate,
the spigot rather,
or having a bunch of little hoses
like a sprinkler system that go out
and irrigate the whole yard.
The irrigation is equivalent
to this capillary bed system.
And it's very good at using
energy sources within blood.
So the simple way to think about this is,
when you go out for a run,
let's say it's the first
run you've done for a while,
and you out for 12 or 15 minutes
and somewhere right around 20 minutes
you're like, that's it.
I just can't continue.
Well, when you come back the
next time to do that run,
you've built endurance largely
because you've built these capillary beds.
You've expanded these little streams
in which blood can deliver
oxygen to the muscles.
And so it's going to feel
relatively straightforward
to either go a little bit
quicker for the same duration,
the same distance.
Or to extend that run for
another five to 10 minutes.
So this long duration work,
unlike muscular endurance like planks
and everything that we
were talking about before
is really about building
the capillary systems
and the mitochondria,
the energy utilization systems
within the muscles themselves.
And that's very important to understand.
It's distinctly different
than say building the neurons
that fire the muscles.
The neurons are already there,
they're going to fire
those muscles just fine.
In fact, if your life depended on it,
today you could probably run a marathon.
You'd probably get injured,
it would be very psychologically
and physically painful.
I don't recommend you do that
unless you're trained for it.
But if you were to train properly for it,
if you were to do long
duration bouts of effort
once or twice a week or three times a week
pretty soon it would become easy,
because you're building
these vascular micro beds
or microvascular beds as they're called.
Okay?
So you're able to bring
more energy to the muscles
and they're able to utilize more energy.
So that's long duration.
So we've got muscular endurance
and we've got long duration endurance.
And then there are two kinds in between
that in recent years have
gotten a lot of attention
and excitement,
but most people are not distinguishing
between these two kinds of endurance.
And that's a shame because
in failing to distinguish
between the two kinds of what we call
high-intensity training,
sometimes called high
intensity interval training.
Most people, perhaps you,
are not getting nearly as much physical
and mental benefit out of
high intensity training
as you could.
So I want to talk about the two kinds
of high-intensity interval training,
and what each of them does
for your brain and body,
and what sorts of adaptations they cause?
Because in doing that,
you can really start to build
up specific energy systems
in your brain and body in
ways that are best serve you
for your cognitive work.
And for other sorts of things
like strength and speed
or hypertrophy or for running
marathons for that matter.
So there are two kinds of
high intensity training
for endurance.
Sometimes called high-intensity
interval training.
One, is anaerobic, so-called
an aerobic endurance,
so no oxygen.
And the other is aerobic endurance.
Both of which qualify as HIIT,
high intensity interval training.
So let's talk about
anaerobic endurance first.
Anaerobic endurance from
a protocol perspective
is going to be three to 12 sets.
Okay?
And these records and I'll talk about
what the repetitions are,
are going to be performed
at whatever speed allows you
to complete the work in good, safe form.
Okay?
So it could be fast, it could be slow
as the work continues,
your repetitions may slow down,
or it may speed up.
Chances are it's going to slow down.
So what does this work?
What are the sets look like?
Remember long slow distance is one set.
Muscular endurance is three to five sets.
High-intensity anaerobic endurance
is going to be somewhere
between three and 12 sets.
And it's going to have
a ratio of work to rest
of anywhere from three
to one to one to five.
Okay?
So what would a three to
one ratio set look like?
Well, it's going to be 30
seconds of hard pedaling
on the bike, for instance,
or running or on the rower.
These are just examples.
It could be in the pool, swimming.
It could be any number
of things or air squats,
or weighted squats if you will
provided you can manage that.
30 seconds on, 10 seconds off.
That's a very brief rest.
So three to one is just a good example
would be 30 seconds on 10 seconds off.
The opposite extreme on
that ratio be one to five.
So 20 seconds on a hundred seconds off.
So you do the work for 20 seconds
then you rest a hundred seconds.
Now, what's the difference?
What should you do three one ratio?
So 30 seconds on 10 seconds off,
or should you do one to five,
20 seconds on to 100 seconds off?
Well, that will depend on
whether or not the quality
of the movement is important to you.
So let's just take a look
at the three to one ratio.
So in the three to one ratio,
if you're going to do 30
seconds of hard peddling
on a bike followed by 10 seconds.
So maybe one of these what
they call assault bikes,
and then you stop for 10
seconds and then repeat,
chances are you will
be able to do one, two,
three, four, maybe even
as many as 12 sets,
if you're really in good condition
that you'll be able to do all those
because pedaling on the bike
doesn't require a ton of skill.
And if you do it incorrectly,
if your elbow flares out
a little bit or something,
it's very unlikely that you'll get injured
unless it's really extreme.
Okay?
But the same movement done for
instance, with kettlebells.
So 30 seconds on 10 seconds off.
The first set will
probably be in good form.
The second one will be
in pretty good form,
but let's say you're getting
to the fifth and sixth set
and you're going 30
seconds on 10 seconds off
chances are the quality
of your repetitions
will degrade significantly.
And you increase the probability
that you're going to get injured,
or that you're going
to damage in some way,
or that you can't complete the movement
or that some smaller muscles
like your grip muscles
might give out.
Okay?
So the quality of repetitions
is going to drop considerably
with the three to one approach.
If you're just doing it for effort.
And we'll talk about what
this builds in your system
in a moment, that's fine.
But for most people, if
quality of form is important,
so maybe this is using weights,
maybe you're doing squats.
You're going to do 20 seconds
on and 100 seconds of rest.
Maybe it's even a barbell loaded squat,
maybe you're doing kettlebells,
maybe you've got some
other resistance there
that's allowing you to do this.
What you'll find is that the longer rest,
even though it's 20
seconds of intense effort,
followed by a longer rest
of about a hundred seconds
will allow you to perform
more quality repetitions
safely over time.
So what does building
anaerobic endurance look like?
And then I'll tell you what
it's actually good for,
in the true practical sense.
What anaerobic endurance
exercise generally looks like
is that if you decide to
do this for the first week,
you might do this two
or three times a week,
maybe even just once a week,
depending on the other
things you're doing,
we'll talk about programming at the end.
And you would generate just three sets.
So it might be three sets of
20 seconds of hard effort,
followed by 100 seconds rest.
Then you repeat 20 seconds of hard effort,
100 seconds rest, 20 seconds
of effort, 100 seconds rest,
and you might do that twice a week.
And then each week you're
adding one or two sets, okay?
In doing that, you will
build up what we call
anaerobic endurance.
What is anaerobic endurance?
Well, let's ask why we fail?
Anaerobic endurance is going
to be taking your system
into greater than 100% of your VO2 max.
It's going to be taking
your heart rate up very high
and it's going to maximize your
oxygen utilization systems.
That is going to have effects
that are going to lead
to fatigue at some point
in the workout.
And that fatigue will
trigger an adaptation.
So let's ask what
adaptation it's triggering.
Well, it's triggering both
mitochondrial respiration,
the ability of your mitochondria
to generate more energy
by using more oxygen because
you're bringing so...
You're maxing out,
literally you're getting
above your VO2 max.
You're hitting that
threshold of how much oxygen
you can use in your system?
One of the adaptations will
be that your mitochondria
will shift such that
they can use more oxygen.
And you're going to also
increase the capillary beds,
but not as much as you're going to be able
to increase the amount of
neuron engagement of muscle.
So normally when we start to hit fatigue,
when we're exhausted,
when we're breathing really hard
because the systems of the body are linked
and we there's a
component to this as well,
a kind of motivational component.
After that third or
fourth or sixth set of,
you know, 20 seconds on
a hundred seconds off,
or if you're at the other
extreme 30 seconds on,
and 10 seconds off.
There's going to be a
component of you want to stop.
And by pushing through and
repeating another set safely,
of course.
What you're doing is
you're training the neurons
to be able to access
more energy, literally,
convert that into ATP and for the muscles
therefore to access more energy and ATP.
And the adaptation is in
the mitochondria's ability
to use oxygen,
and this has tremendous carry over effects
for other types of exercise.
So while I know and appreciate
that people are using high
intensity interval training
of this kind or similar in
order to just like burn fat,
you know, do their
workouts, quote unquote.
It's very useful for
building a capacity to engage
in short bouts of effort
repeatedly to really lock in.
I don't want to use the word focus
because it's not strictly mental focus,
but to be able to generate
short bouts of very intense work
this can be beneficial
in competitive sports
or team sports where there's
a sprinting component,
where the field opens up
and you need to dribble
the ball down the field, for
instance and shoot on goal.
Or where you're playing tennis,
and it's a long rally.
And then all of a sudden,
somebody really starts,
you know, putting you back on your heels
and you have to really make
the maximum amount of effort
to run to the net and to
get the ball across in that.
Things of that sort.
Okay?
There are a variety of places
where there's carry over
from this type of training,
but it does support endurance.
It's about muscle endurance.
It's about these muscles ability
to generate a lot of force
in the short-term, but repeatedly.
Okay?
So that's the way to conceptualize this.
And it is different than maximum power.
Even though it feels like maximum effort,
it is not the same as building
power and speed into muscles.
Those are distinctly different protocols.
So the key elements again
are that you're bringing your breathing
and your oxygen utilization
way up above your max.
It's not quite hitting failure,
but you're really pushing the system
to the point where you are
not ready to do another set
and yet you begin another set.
You're not necessarily
psychologically ready.
I'll talk more about
some of the adaptations
that this causes in terms of
stroke volume in a few minutes
when we talk about how it
is that work of this sort
can increase our heart's ability
to deliver blood and oxygen
to our lungs and other tissues.
I'm going to get very
specific about how to breathe
during these different types of protocols
and what's happening at
the level of the heart?
But I want to make sure I
touch on the fourth protocol
which is high intensity
aerobic conditioning.
So HIIT has these two forms,
anaerobic and aerobic.
And you just heard about anaerobic.
High-intensity aerobic conditioning
also involves about three to 12 sets.
Starting off of course, with fewer sets
as you're getting into this training
and then extending into more sets
as one parameter you could expand.
Has again the same ratio of three to one.
So 30 seconds on 10 seconds off,
or one to five, 20 seconds
on 100 seconds off,
or a very powerful tool for
building up aerobic conditioning
is a one-to-one ratio.
A one-to-one ratio is powerful
for building on average.
Most of the energy systems involving,
remember we had these nerve
muscle blood, heart and lungs.
A one-to-one ratio
might be you run a mile.
And however long that takes,
let's say it takes you six
minutes or seven minutes,
then you rest for an
equivalent amount of time.
Then you repeat.
And then you rest for an
equivalent amount of time.
So you might run first mile
is let's say seven minutes.
Then you rest for seven minutes.
Then you run a mile again,
and it might take eight minutes
and you rest for eight minutes.
And you continue that for a
total of four miles of work.
Four miles of running work, I should say.
Or seven miles of work.
You can build this up.
Many people find that
using this type of training
allows them to do things
like go run half marathons
and marathons even though
prior to the race date,
they've never actually run
a half marathon or marathon.
Now, that might seem incredible.
It's like how could it be
that running a mile on,
and then resting for running a mile
and then resting for an
equivalent amount of time,
running a mile, resting
for equivalent amount time
for seven miles allows
you to run continuously
for 13 miles or for 26 miles.
Well, I'm not discouraging people
from ever doing the
long duration endurance.
I think that is very important.
But it's because it builds
up so many of these energy
utilization systems.
It really teaches you
to engage, excuse me,
the nerve to muscle firing.
It improves ATP and
mitochondrial function in muscle.
It allows the blood to deliver more oxygen
to the muscle and to your brain.
And I'll explain how that is.
And it allows your heart to
deliver more oxygen overall.
And it builds a tremendous lung capacity.
And we will talk about
exactly how to breathe
and how to build lung capacity.
Both for sake of warming
up and for performance.
So what would this look like?
And when should you do this?
Well, it's really a
question for these workouts
of asking how much work can
one do in eight to 12 minutes,
right?
And then rest, and then repeat.
How much work can you do
for eight to 12 minutes
then rest and then repeat?
And how many times should you do this?
Well, this is the sort of
thing it's pretty intense.
And so you would probably
only want to do this two,
maybe three times a week
if you're not doing many other things.
I will talk about how this program
can be moved in with
other forms of training.
But I'll just give you a little hint now.
It's very clear and it's
described in the review article
are referred to and we will
link another article as well.
That concurrent training,
doing strength training
and the endurance training
of any of the four kinds
that I'm describing today can be done.
You can program those in the same week.
But you want to get four and ideally six
or even better 24 hours
between these workouts.
Because it is very hard, for instance,
to do a one-to-one mile repeats
like run a mile rest for equivalent time,
run a mile rest for equivalent time
to do that two or three times a week,
and also do weight training before
or do a long run afterwards.
That would quickly lead to
break down for most people,
unless you have very, very good
energy utilization systems.
You're really kind of
advanced or elite athlete,
and or dare I say you're using tools
to enhance your performance
at the level of blood
or hormones.
And I'm actually going to
talk about those at the end
and why they work?
So we have four kinds of endurance.
Muscular endurance.
We have long-duration endurance.
We have high intensity
interval training of two kinds,
anaerobic and aerobic.
And this last type, the
aerobic one works best.
It seems if you kind of
do this one-to-one ratio.
So how would you use these and
what are they actually doing?
Let's talk about the heart
and the lungs and oxygen,
because that's something
that we can all benefit
from understanding.
And it will become very
clear in that discussion
why this type of training is very useful
even for non-athletes in
order to improve oxygenation
and energy utilization of
the brain and the heart.
The brain and the heart are probably
the two most important systems
that you need to take
care of in your life.
Yes, your musculature
needs to be maintained.
If you want to build it, that's up to you.
But you should try and
maintain your musculature,
but maintaining or
enhancing a brain function
and cardiovascular function.
It's absolutely clear are
key for health and longevity
in the short and long-term.
And the sorts of training
I talked about today
has been shown again and again and again
to be very useful for enhancing
the strength of the mind.
Yes, I'll talk about that.
As well as the health of
the brain and the body.
So let's talk about the
sorts of adaptations
that are happening in your brain and body
that are so beneficial in these
different forms of training.
If you are breathing hard and
your heart is beating hard.
So this would be certainly
in the high intensity
anaerobic and aerobic conditioning.
'Cause you're getting up near your VO2 max
in high intensity aerobic conditioning,
and you're exceeding your
VO2 max in high intensity
anaerobic conditioning.
What's going to happen is as of course,
your heart beats faster,
your blood is going to be
circulating faster in principle.
Oxygen utilization in
muscles is going to go up
and over time, not long,
very quickly what will happen
when those capillary beds start to expand?
We talked about that.
But in addition, because
of the amount of blood
that's being returned to the heart,
when you engage in these
really intense bouts
of effort repeatedly,
the amount of blood being
returned to the heart
actually causes an east centric loading
of one of the muscular walls of the heart.
So your heart is muscle.
It's cardiac muscle.
We have skeletal muscle
attached to our bones
and we have cardiac
muscle, which is our heart.
When more blood is being
returned to the heart
because of the additional
work that your muscles
and nerves are doing,
it actually has the effect of creating
an east centric loading, a
kind of pushing of the wall,
the left wall.
I realize I'm not using
the strict anatomy here,
but I don't want to get
into all the features
of the structural features of the heart.
But the left ventricle
essentially getting slammed back
and then having to push back
in a kind of east centric
loading of the cardiac muscle
and the muscle thickens,
but not because the
heart thickens overall,
it's actually a strengthening
of the cardiac muscle
in a way that increases
what we call stroke volume.
Meaning as more blood is
returned to the heart.
There's an adaptation
where the heart muscle
actually gets stronger and
therefore can pump more blood
per stroke per beat.
And as it does that, it delivers
because blood contains glucose
and oxygen and other things.
It delivers more fuel to your muscles
which allows you to do yet
more work per unit time.
Okay?
So when we hear that,
oh, you know, so-and-so
has a or maybe you have
a nice low heart rate
that maybe you're one of
these really extreme folks
like 30 or 40 beats per minute,
although most people are
sitting at 50, 60, 70, 80,
that's your resting heart rate.
If you exercise regularly
and you do long duration aerobic work,
your heart rate will start to go down,
your resting heart rate.
It will increase the stroke
volume of your heart.
If you do this high
intensity type training
where your heart is beating very hard.
So maybe the one-to-one
ratio mile run repeats
that I described a minute ago.
Let's say you do that twice
a week for three or four.
And I said, it could go all
the way up to 12 rep sets,
which is a lot.
I don't recommend people start there.
Pretty soon, the stroke
volume of your heart
will really increase.
And as a consequence,
you can deliver more fuel
to your muscles and to your brain,
and you will notice that
you can do more work
meaning you can do the same
work you were doing a few days
or weeks ago with relative ease.
Your cognitive functioning will improve.
This has been shown again and again,
because there's an
increase in vasculature.
Literally, capillary
beds within the brain,
the hippocampus areas that support memory,
but also areas of the brain
that support respiration,
that support focus,
that support effort.
This isn't often discussed,
but the ability to deliver more blood
and therefore more glucose,
remember neurons run on
glucose and oxygen to the brain
is a big feature of why
exercise of the kind
of describing helps with brain function.
Now, weight training does
have some positive effects
on brain function also.
When I say weight training, I'm really...
I should be more specific.
I really am referring to strength
and hypertrophy training.
Strength and hypertrophy training
especially if it's of the sort
where you get into the burn
as we talked about last episode
and you start generating
lactate as a hormonal signal
that can benefit your brain, et cetera.
It can have positive effects on the brain.
And frankly, there haven't
been as many studies
of resistance training strength
and hypertrophy training
on brain function,
mainly because most of those experiments
are done in mice or
primates, non-human primates,
I should say.
And it's hard to get mice
to do resistance training.
Okay?
It's hard to get humans
to do resistance training.
It's definitely hard to get
mice to do resistance training.
There are ways to do it,
but it's hard to get
them to do say, you know,
three sets of eight on the
deadlift and then do some curls
and then do some chin-ups
and this kind of thing.
Okay?
It's pretty easy to get a
mouse to run on a treadmill
and you can set the
tension on that treadmill
to make it so that it's
easier or harder for the mouse
to turn that wheel.
So that's one of the reasons.
However, it's very clear
and you should now understand intuitively
why the kind of standard
strength and hypertrophy
type workouts are not going to activate
the blood oxygenation and
the stroke volume increases
for the heart that the sorts of training
I'm talking about today will.
It just doesn't have the
same positive effects.
Now, that isn't to say that
if you just weight train
that you'll be dumb or that
you'll lose your memory
over time, you might,
but it is to say that endurance work
in particular the high intensity
and long duration work that
I've talked about today.
The two high intensity protocols
and the long duration work has been shown
again and again and again,
to have positive effects
on brain function.
Not through the addition of new neurons,
sorry to break it to you,
but that's not a major
event in the exercised
or non-exercised human brain,
for reasons we can talk
about in a future episode.
But it still has many positive effects
through the delivery of things like IGF-1,
but also just through plain
oxygenation of the brain
and the way it promotes the
development of microvasculature
to develop, to excuse me,
to deliver new neurons more nutrients.
If neurons don't get oxygen
and glucose, they do die.
Unless there's another
fuel source like ketones
which can replace the glucose.
If you don't give oxygen to neurons,
if you don't deliver enough to them,
you get what's called ischemia,
you get little micro strokes.
So the type of exercise
I'm talking about today
in generating intense heart rate increases
provided that safe for you to do.
Breathing hard,
that's going to deliver oxygen in blood,
increase stroke volume of the heart
and is going to improve brain function
has been supported by many, many quality
peer-reviewed studies.
So that's one form of positive adaptation.
I also talked about just sort
of performance adaptations.
How doing high intensity
aerobic conditioning
of the mile repeats type
training can actually
improve your ability to do
long bouts of intense work.
It also seems like it dovetails
or is compatible with resistance training
that's aimed towards
strength and hypertrophy.
Now, in full disclosure
the data seemed to indicate
that if people just weight
train or train for strength,
so three reps, rest five minutes,
three reps of heavyweights, et cetera.
Yeah, you'll get much
stronger than you would
if you're doing things like
five repetitions up to 12,
or 12 to 25 reps and you're
going out for long jogs.
There's always going to be
a compromise in adaptations,
unfortunately
It does seem like you can
do concurrent training
as I mentioned before,
if you allow anywhere
from four to six or ideally
24 hours between workouts.
As I mentioned in the previous episode,
if you want to know if you
are recovered from a workout?
A great way to do that is to apply
the carbon dioxide tolerance test,
which is four breaths in and out,
inhale, exhale, inhale exhale,
inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale,
then a big inhale and then
a slow controlled exhale.
If that slow controlled exhale
is 60 seconds or longer,
it means that your parasympathetic,
your calming nervous system
is under your control.
And it's likely, I should say likely
that systemically your whole
nervous system has recovered
from whatever it is that you've been doing
and experiencing in life
including work in relationships.
If not, you might want to
take a rest day, dare I say.
Or Costello's on is what?
He's 10 now.
I think he's on his 12,000 thrust day.
Most people need I should say,
one to two full rest days per week.
I know there are people going to say
that's ridiculous and okay,
maybe you have amazing recovery abilities,
also depends on training intensity.
Many people benefit from having one or two
full rest days per week.
At least one, some people don't need to.
But if you are not able
to extend that exhale
on the carbon dioxide tolerance
test past 60 seconds or so,
45 seconds, 60 seconds chances are,
your so-called sympathetic nervous system,
your stress system is chronically elevated
and you're not really putting the brake
on that system enough.
And that's a subconscious thing.
There are ways that you
can accelerate recovery,
but I would encourage you to
listen to the previous episode.
It's time-stamped for
how to assess recovery.
So how often to program these things
will depend on the other
things you're doing.
I think it's perfectly reasonable
to do this type of training
with other types of training.
And I'll talk about a variety
of combinations of those
toward the end of the episode.
I do want to talk about
how to deliver more energy
and oxygen.
These are tools that are extremely useful,
I believe and that are
grounded in physiology.
That three things I'd like to talk about,
are how to breathe?
What to do immediately after
training and hydration?
And I promise I will get
back into programming
and sort of protocols,
but these are vitally
important to your ability
to perform endurance work in particular.
And they are grounded
in how neurons and blood
and oxygen and your heart work together.
So let's first talk about
breathing or respiration.
We breathe a couple of different ways,
but let's just remind
ourselves why we breathe?
We breathe to bring
oxygen into our system,
and we breathe to get
rid of carbon dioxide.
And we need both oxygen and carbon dioxide
in order to utilize fuel and
for our brain and body to work.
It's not the oxygen is good
and carbon oxide is bad.
They have to be present
in the appropriate ratios.
So one thing that is
very clear is our ability
to deliver oxygen to working
muscles enter our brain
is going to be important for our ability
to generate muscular effort
especially of a kind of what
I was talking about today,
but also weight training and other forms
of skill-based effort, et cetera.
And our ability to think.
If you're holding your
breath for too long,
if you're breathing too much,
if you're what they call
over-breathing or under breathing,
if you're shallow breathing,
if you're mouth breathing,
these are all things that
can really impede mental
and physical performance.
So let's make it really simple
and then I promise to do a
future episode all about recipes.
There are two main sources
of air for your body
and it's air coming in through your nose
and air coming in through your mouth.
In general nasal breathing is better.
It scrubs the air of bacteria and viruses.
You have a microbiome in
your nose that benefits.
There are a number of reasons,
it's also just a more efficient
system believe it or not,
even though it feels like
you can gulp more air
with your mouth.
Getting good at nasal breathing is useful.
A gear - System of the
type that Brian McKenzie
and colleagues have developed,
I think is a good way
to conceptualize this.
If you're doing long duration work,
try and do it all nasal breathing.
If you have deviated septum,
it's probably cause you
don't nasal breathe enough.
Mouth breathing is something
that many people suffer from.
You are more prone to infections.
It's not as efficient, et cetera.
There is a place for mouth breathing.
However, it's usually, if you
need to do a strong exhale,
oftentimes you can discard
more volume through the mouth,
unless you're very trained
at nasal breathing.
So if you're doing high
intensity training,
a good way to conceptualize
this is to exhale
on the max effort,
and then to inhale on
the less intense part.
So that might be as you're
generating the movement,
you know, you're in the
concentric part of the movement
you exhale, right?
Just like on a bat swing
or something like that,
or fighters and martial artists
do this differently depending
on how they were trained
and their different purposes,
but they kind of like huh or ssh,
they kind of exhaling during the effort
and then inhaling on the
portion of the repetition
that is not the highest effort portion.
Usually that's the eccentric phase
of anything involving or
rowing and things of that sort.
So nasal breathing is great,
but as you increase the
intensity of your endurance work,
you will need to incorporate the mouth.
So a gear system would look something
like first gear would
be just nasal breathing
or second gear would also
be just nasal breathing.
But with more effort, third gear again,
power speed endurance has
a lot more about this.
You can go to their website.
I think it's a very intelligent
way to conceptualize this.
As you go into more max effort,
then you're going to third
and fourth and fifth gear.
And at some point you're not
thinking about nose or mouth.
You're just trying to
hang on for dear life
and complete the work safely.
And that means breathe through
whatever orifice works for you.
So that's one aspect, nose versus mouth.
The other aspect is whether
or not you're using your ribs,
the intercostal muscles are these muscles
that the Bruce Lee had these
remarkable intercostal muscles
that allow you to lift the
rib cage or the diaphragm
which is a skeletal muscle
that sits below the lungs.
Just to remind you, when you inhale,
the diaphragm moves down,
when you exhale, the diaphragm moves up.
Okay?
Here's something that most people don't do
and would benefit tremendously from.
And I can say this
because Andy Galpin's lab
has done work on this
exploring how warming up
the intercostals and the
nerve to diaphragm pathways
before any kind of endurance work
or in the first few
minutes of endurance work
can allow you to breathe more deeply
and to deliver more oxygen to the blood,
[burps] excuse me,
and to the muscles and to
be able to do more work
more efficiently.
So what that involves
is sometimes sitting,
sometimes standing and
just really concentrating
on two things.
We always hear about how we
should diaphragmatic breathe.
And that means that our belly
moves out when we inhale.
So [inhales deeply] our stomach expands,
but also expanding the intercostals
which means actually raising
the ribs, chest breathing.
We're all told that in yoga class
don't breathe with your
chest this, [inhales deeply].
But actually that is warming
up the intercostal muscles.
So this is also a great
way to generate adrenaline
if you do it a little bit intensely.
So let's say you're feeling
unmotivated to train,
I don't particularly like
doing endurance training
until I'm actually doing it.
So I use and benefit
from having a practice
where I'll just sit there
and for about three minutes
I'll just breathe very deeply
trying to raise my chest
as much as I can for maybe a minute,
and then contracting my diaphragm
and expanding my stomach
outward when I inhale.
By the end of that you're
actually delivering more oxygen
to your system.
My lab has looked at this in
a totally different context.
Andy's lab has looked at it in the context
of physical performance.
So warming up the breathing
muscles should make sense,
given that you now know
that muscles and neurons
need glucose and they need
oxygen in order to function.
And so that's a great warmup.
You can also do this while walking
or while getting on the
bike and starting to peddle,
really starting to think about warming up
the breathing system.
And then you can decide if
you want to do pure nasal
or a combination of nasal and
mouth breathing and so on.
So that's something that
we don't often hear about.
The other one.
The other tool, rather that I talked about
in a previous episode,
I'll just mention again,
is some people when they
do endurance type work
they get a stitch in their side.
They feel like they've got a side cramp.
Very rarely is it actually
a skeletal muscular cramp,
it's oftentimes it's a referenced
pain of the phrenic nerve
that innervates the liver.
So the phrenic nerve is responsible
for the movement of the diaphragm.
It is a very important system,
but it has a number of
what we call collateral.
So it branches to other organs.
Runs over other organs.
Sometimes when we're breathing shallow
and we are in physical motion
and we're engaging in physical effort,
we'll feel that side stitch.
And we think, oh, I've got a
cramp or maybe I'm dehydrated
or maybe I need to run
with my hands over my head,
excuse me.
Typically, you can
relieve that side cramp,
which isn't a cramp at all.
That side stitch by doing
the double inhale, exhale,
really breathing deeply. [inhales deeply]
And then sneaking a
little bit more air in.
That's a double kind of firing
or what we call volume of action potential
sent from the phrenic
nerve to the diaphragm,
which will also activate that collateral,
that branch literally of the nerve
that innervates the liver.
And then when you exhale,
you offload a bunch of carbon dioxide,
but if you repeat that a few times often,
in fact, for me every time
but often what'll happen
is that side stitch will
just naturally disappear.
Just means you're not breathing properly.
You're the phrenic
nerve is firing in a way
that's kind of aggravating
that referenced pain.
There's nothing kind of voodoo
or mysterious about this.
It just has to do with the
way that the different nerves
travel in the body.
So as you set out on your run
or maybe you're going to do
some muscular endurance work
or high intensity work,
warming up the intercostals,
warming up the diaphragm is good.
And there are exercises and there is work
that you can do to
strengthen the intercostals
and to strengthen the diaphragm
during bouts of this kind of effort.
And I would say that one of the ways
that you can do that best
is by really focusing
on getting the maximum
diaphragmatic expansion
and chest lifting.
What we're all told now not to do,
you know, don't chest
breathe, belly breathe.
The intercostals are there for a reason
and they are perfectly
good at filling your lungs.
And they work best when they collaborate
with your diaphragm.
But when you are starting to fatigue
to start to really inhale deeply
and try and really expand those to deliver
more oxygen to your system.
While we're talking about
delivering more oxygen
to your system,
I want to share with you a useful tool
that will now make total sense
mechanistically why it works,
which is oftentimes when
we are on a long run
or in long duration bouts of effort.
We will hit the so-called wall, right?
We will bonk.
I think they used to call it,
do they still call it that Costello?
He's asleep.
We bonk.
Where we just we think
no, we can't continue.
It's a curious thing as to
whether or not that's neural
or whether or not it's fuel-based,
there's certainly going
to be a psychological
or motivational component.
But one way that you can
reveal this kind of extra gear,
the capacity to push on is
by understanding the way
that different muscle fibers
use energy differently.
Remember the fast-twitch
phosphocreatine system
and the slow twitch
system that relies mainly
on lipids and glucose.
Okay, well, even if you
don't remember all that,
if you've been running
steadily for a long time
and you're starting to fatigue
and you feel like it's time to quit.
You may have not tapped into
an alternative fuel source.
One thing that you can
do is you can actually
increase your speed.
This is also true of work
where you're doing repetitions
with kettlebells or something.
You can start to increase your speed.
So run faster, pedal faster,
row faster, swim faster
not all out sprint.
But in doing that, you're
shifting the the muscles
and the nerves over towards
utilizing a separate fuel source
or a distinct fuel source.
Maybe the phosphocreatine system
if it's a quick about
of intense acceleration,
or maybe it's a combination
of lipids and carbohydrates
in your system that weren't
available to you prior.
Now, of course, if you completely deplete
your liver glycogen,
you completely deplete everything,
you're only going to be
running on stored fuel and fats
and eventually you'll
start metabolizing protein,
muscles themselves.
But this is a kind of a
unique way to realize that,
oh, you weren't out of energy at all,
you're just over-relying
on one fuel source.
And this is the reason why,
especially elite athletes
are starting to both rely
on carbohydrates.
So they're doing the whole carb depletion
then carb loading thing.
They're loading up their
liver and their muscles
with plenty of glycogen
by eating pastas and rice
and stuff before races.
But they are also ingesting
ketones during races,
during long bouts of effort,
because ketones can be
a quick form of energy.
There's no reason why
you can't use ketones
if they are taking exogenous
ketones and carbohydrate.
And in combination, remember
the body is accustomed
to using multiple fuel sources,
fatty acids, carbohydrates
all these things.
It's only in the, you
know, of internet age
that we think in terms of,
oh, well you're either keto
or you're burning sugar,
or you're fat adapted
or key or fat fasting
or fast fasting or fat fatting.
Costello woke up when I said fat fatting.
I'm not talking about you Costello.
So the point is that your body
is used to using multiple fuel sources.
So if you're kind of hitting that wall,
sometimes accelerating can
actually allow you to tap
into a new fuel source or
combination of fuel sources
just based on the way
that muscles use fuel.
So that's another tool.
The other thing that's really
important to think about
in terms of endurance
type work is hydration.
And I think hydration is
important for all forms
of physical work and
exercise not just endurance.
The deal with hydration
is that we've been taught
about hydration all wrong.
But let's remember what neurons work on?
What do they use in order to fire?
Well, they certainly need water, right?
We need water in our system, I should say.
But remember they use electrolytes,
sodium and potassium to
generate those action potentials
to actually get neurons to contract,
to be able, excuse me, muscles to contract
and for our brain to function
and to be able to think.
Typically, we're going to lose anywhere
from one to five pounds of
water per hour of exercise.
And that's going to vary tremendously,
it's going to vary on weather,
it's going to vary on intensity,
probably more like five pounds,
if it's hot day and you're
exercising very intensely.
So about one to five pounds per hour.
Now, you know how much you weigh.
So if you think about
your weight in pounds,
once you lose about one to 4%
of your body weight in water,
you're going to experience
about a 20 to 30% reduction
in work capacity.
In your ability to generate
effort of any kind,
strength, endurance, et cetera.
You are also going to
experience a significant drop
in your ability to think and
perform mental operations.
So hydration is key.
Now, many people have been told,
well, if you urinate
and your urine is clear,
well, then you're hydrated enough.
Sometimes that's true.
Sometimes that's not true.
Also and this isn't a
topic I enjoyed discussing,
but a urine is a biological phenomenon.
It's actually filtered
blood every once in a while
and if there's a kid and
it's a family friend,
I'll say, "Did you know that your pee
"is actually filtered blood?"
And they usually kind of go wide-eyed.
But then they go, "Oh,
that's kind of cool."
Like kids have this natural curiosity
about blood and pee and stuff.
That's not contaminated by
our preconceived notions
of those things being gross,
because you're in being filtered blood
can give you some indication as to whether
or not you're hydrated enough or not.
And in order to really assess that,
it's not going to be sufficient to urinate
into another volume of water and assess
whether or not your urine
is very dark or very light.
It actually requires
urinating into a small volume
and saying, well, is it
darker or lighter than before?
It's not something you really
want to do most places.
The etiquette of most
gyms and environments
is not suitable for that.
But one of the things that you can just do
is you configure,
well, I'm going to lose one to
five pounds of water per hour.
You can show up to exercise
reasonably hydrated
with electrolytes.
So potassium, sodium and
magnesium are really key.
Yes, it's true, you can die
from drinking too much water
in particular because it forces you,
if you drink too much water,
you excrete too many electrolytes
and your brain will shut off.
You'll actually your heart
will stop functioning properly.
So you don't want to over
consume to the extreme either,
but there are a number of equations
that go into figuring out
how much water you need
based on how intense
your training, et cetera,
body size, et cetera.
Just remember you burn,
you lose, excuse me
about one to five pounds
of water per hour,
depending on how hot it is,
and how intensely you're exercising.
Once your body weight drops by one to 4%.
So you can just figure,
well, if you lose five pounds per hour,
you exercise for two hours.
Let's say you're about 200 pounds,
that's about 10%.
Okay?
Well, you want to replace that
before you very quickly or not.
You want to replace that all along
before you start experiencing
this massive 20 to 30% reduction
in work capacity of muscles
and the brain.
A simple formula.
What I call it, the Galpin equation.
Hereafter, referred to
as the Galpin equation
is a formula that gets you
close to the exact amount
that you would want that Dr.
Andy Galpin came up with,
which is your body weight in pounds
divided by the number 30.
And that is how many
ounces you should drink
for every 15 minutes of exercise.
So once again, the Galpin equation.
Your body weight in pounds divided by 30.
That's the amount of fluid
to drink in ounces, right?
Every 15 minutes of exercise.
Now, if you are sweating a lot,
you may need more.
Okay?
If you're already very well hydrated,
you may need less,
but that's a good rule of thumb to begin
and to start to understand
the relationship
between hydration and performance.
There is a phenomenon in
which gastric emptying,
the ability to move stuff out of your gut,
including water and
electrolytes out of your gut
and into the bloodstream and for delivery
to the tissues of your body for effort
is hindered when you get
above 70% of your VO2 max.
In other words when you're
doing high intensity training
sometimes people experience
that ingesting water
during intense training is difficult.
It is something that can
be actually trained up.
It's a matter of learning to kind of relax
your abdominal muscles.
And there's some other
aspects of adaptation
that will allow you to drink
during higher intensity work.
As Galpin says, don't
try and ingest fluids
when you're working out or competing
at higher than 70% of VO2 max
if you've never done it before.
You want to train up this capacity.
People can learn how to
consume fluids during a race
or consume fluids during bouts of exercise
that are very intense.
And a lot of people don't want to do that,
'cause they don't want to have
to stop to urinate, et cetera.
But given the crucial role of hydration
for muscular performance
and for brain performance,
it seems that if you're
going to be doing a lot
of high intensity interval training
of the various concepts talked about today
or high intensity training of any kind
that hydration is key and learning
or in other words, getting
your system to adapt
to ingesting fluids in the
middle of these workouts
is something that seems beneficial.
At least to me, in terms of the trade off
between being dehydrated
and the somewhat discomfort
of maybe drinking some fluids.
So you sip small amounts
of fluid initially
and then you're able to
take bigger and bigger gulps
as time goes on.
And pretty soon you're able
to drink mid-set or be,
excuse me, not mid-set.
Please don't do that between
sets and your workout
or while you're still breathing
hard after a mile repeat
or something of that sort
without much disruption
or any at all to your performance.
Last episode we talked
about how to assess recovery
and things that you might want
to do to improve recovery,
how exposure to ice baths
and cold showers can reduce inflammation
which can be great for recovery,
but can inhibit some of the adaptations
for strength and hypertrophy.
Because inflammation isn't good or bad.
Inflammation isn't like a
nice person or a mean person.
It's both.
It's a great thing for
stimulating adaptations,
but you don't want it around too long.
And so we suggested that
you not do ice baths
within probably six hours of any training
where the goal was hypertrophy
or strength training.
There is some evidence
that getting yourself
into an ice bath or cold
shower after endurance training
can actually improve the
mitochondrial aspects
of endurance exercise that
you can get improvements
in mitochondrial density,
and you can get improvements
in mitochondrial respiration
by doing that afterwards
and that it can facilitate recovery.
That's still a bit of
a controversial area.
I do think that what I mentioned earlier
that waiting at least six hours
and probably more like
24 hours between workouts
is a good idea.
That getting at least one
full day of rest each week,
for some people that'll be two.
I have to say I'm one of these people
that after two days of
absolutely no exercise,
I do perform better
consistently across all aspects
of physical performance and
mentally I feel better as well
even though I load to take those days off
unless I'm really exhausted
it does seem to help my training.
Some people can train seven
days a week and they're fine.
I think it just is there's a
lot of individual variation.
You want to work on sleep
and maximizing sleep
for recovery nutrition,
of course, as well.
I talked about sleep in
the first four episodes
of the podcast.
If you have trouble with sleep
definitely check out those episodes.
It's very clear and a
number of sports teams
even some folks that I work with,
and Andy Galpin and others
are starting to incorporate
a what's called a
parasympathetic down-regulation
after training of any kind as
a way to accelerate recovery
and enable you to do more work.
In other words, get
back to work out sooner.
What is parasympathetic downregulation?
It means finishing your training
and instead of just hopping on the phone
or hopping into your car
and heading off to take
five minutes minimum,
maybe ideally more like 10 or 20,
but for sake of time five minutes minimum
and doing just some slow pure
nasal long exhale breathing
or lying down and just kind of zoning out.
That it seems can accelerate recovery
and allow you to get back
into other types of work,
mental work or physical work more quickly
which makes total sense because
remember your nervous system
and recovery and work
is a local phenomenon
which muscles were you using.
You know, were you using your glutes,
your hams and your back
or were using your shoulders, et cetera.
But it's also a systemic thing.
It's also about those neurons
in the locus coeruleus that
are releasing epinephrine
and you want to quiet all
that down after training.
You want to really just zone out.
Think Costello, channel
your inner Costello,
and just mellow out for five to 20 minutes
and then move into the rest of your day.
Five minutes should be manageable.
Even if it's just sitting in
the car with your eyes closed
doing that downregulation breathing.
I think you'll see big benefits in terms
of allowing yourself to come back sooner,
do more work over time
and just perform and
feel better generally,
as well as be able to
think about other things
besides the just how
much the previous workout
kind of beat you up.
A couple more things I think
are going to be useful.
And I do want to just pack these in,
'cause we are closing out the
month on physical performance.
And that's about
programming and about pacing
and the kind of mental
aspects of endurance.
So let's start with pacing and
mental aspects of endurance.
I learned from a friend and
colleague here at the podcast
that...
Who's very active in triathlon
and marathon and other...
Knows a lot about that whole world
and the competitive landscape there,
that pacing and literally physical pacers
have a laser on the ground
or visualizing or having a
pace car or a pace runner
in front is actually not
allowed in many competitions.
And if those are present
doesn't allow the race times
to qualify as legitimate
record holding times.
And that's very interesting to me
because what we know is
that the visual system
has this capacity to switch
back and forth between
what we call panoramic vision
where we're not really
focused on anything.
Things are just flowing past us
or our eyes are just kind of zoned out.
So I can do this right now
and you won't be able to tell
but I'm looking at the
corners of the room.
I see Costello down there on the floor.
I see my podcast team here
and I can also see the microphone.
I can see myself in this environment.
That's panoramic vision.
Whereas if I draw my eyes to one location
like right there in the
center of the camera,
it's what's called a
vergence eye movement.
So I'm contracting my visual window.
The contraction of the visual
window when that's done,
is the same thing that would happen
if I was tracking say a
pace car or a pace runner
or a laser on the ground.
The mere bringing our eyes together
to what we call a vergence
point has the impact
of triggering the activation
of neural circuits
in the thalamus.
Things like zona incerta,
if you really want to
know what their names are,
of these brain areas.
As well as in the brainstem that activate
the so-called alertness system,
things like locus coeruleus,
whereas panoramic vision tends to bring us
into states of relaxation.
You can actually leverage
us during your runs.
Let's say you're out for a long run
or you're swimming or you're cycling.
This is probably easiest
to imagine out of the water
before I do in the water as well.
If you focus your attention on a landmark
that you're going to run to,
you'll find that it's much easier
than if you don't actually
have a set milestone
or landmark that you're going to run to.
However, if you were to
continue that repeatedly
just going milestone after
milestone, after milestone,
you would feel more mentally fatigued
and you would actually be able
to degenerate less work overall.
One thing that can be useful
is focusing on a milestone,
running to that milestone or biking
whatever it is the activity happens to be,
and then dilating your field of view
to relax the system and
then continuing again.
So it's this kind of active contraction
or of the visual window and then dilation
of the visual window.
Contraction of the visual
window allows you to generate
more effort but there's
a cost to doing that,
because neurons consume energy.
And now you know how they do that.
Whereas dilation allows you to essentially
be more efficient, right?
Now, pacing is not allowed or
having a pacer, a visual pacer
because it does allow
you to access systems
in the brain and body that
allow you to create more energy,
more effort.
And so I find it interesting
that I think in a kind
of subconscious genius
the race officials and
the governing bodies
of these races have said,
okay, sure, having a pacer
there or someone in front,
you can draft off of them,
there's actually a kind
of a aerodynamic effect
of having someone in front of you
that makes it easier to run in
the wake of their airstream.
So to speak.
Same as true in cycling.
This is why the cycling teams are so good
at maneuvering and packs.
In very specific ways, you
can go faster with less effort
if you're drafting as it's
called behind somebody.
But as well where you place
your vision will allow you
to generate more effort.
And so it's interesting
that they've taken out
this kind of, if you will,
performance enhancing tool.
I imagine and I have to imagine
it's the appropriate word here.
That good runners, good
cyclists have the ability
to create a kind of
pacer in their minds eye.
I have to imagine that they're
not just completely allowing
their attention to drift,
although they do that when they
want to be in highly efficient
mode generating effort
without having to tax
their mental capacity.
And remember mental
capacity is neural energy
and consumes glucose energy
that they could devote
to the functioning of their body.
But that when needed that they
can focus their energy in,
and actually kind of chase a
mental pacer or pick milestone.
So this is a mental game
that you can play as well.
It's a little bit hard to do
in the context of weightlifting
in the gym.
It's more of a moving
through space kind of thing,
but some people do this by
counting reps, et cetera.
I think it's especially
suitable for endurance type
of exercise, especially done outside.
One of the reasons I hate
running on a treadmill
is it just feels like it's never ending.
And I've never tried one
of these Peloton things.
I try and avoid looking at screens
as much as I possibly can.
But if you try this next
time you're out for a run
or a swim.
What you'll find is
that you have a capacity
to engage a system of higher energy output
when you focus your eyes
on a particular location,
but you want to use that judiciously
because your goal of course,
is to become efficient at
moving through space over time
and not taxing your brain
and body to the point
where you arrive at the end of that,
unless it's race day just
completely tapped out.
So that's a kind of
interesting aspect of running.
If you're a fan of running, which I am,
and you get the chance to look
at any of the documentaries
or docu-drama has made
about, [clears throat]
excuse me, about Steve Prefontaine.
It was clear that he was mostly
in a battle with himself,
but that he was also a highly
competitive individual.
And you'll see this in some of his races.
I do encourage you to look
some of those up on YouTube
or see the docudramas.
They're quite good.
Where he ran the...
Essentially was 12 laps on a track.
It's essentially the five.
It is the 5,000 meter race
where essentially three miles.
And he essentially tried
to sprint the whole thing
which is ridiculous.
Actually knowing what you know today
you'll realize that Steve Prefontaine
basically was pulling
from strength, speed,
power, muscular, endurance,
long duration effort, high intensity,
aerobic, anaerobic as he sort of tried
to maximize every fuel system.
And you'll see that in
the races that he runs,
but that when runners are
nearing the final laps,
the so-called bell lap of a race,
they'll often look to one another to see
where somebody is obviously
to assess their progress
and how close somebody is?
But when somebody gets past,
oftentimes you'll see someone
access this mysterious kick,
this ability to tap into
some additional gear
that allows them to run forward or faster
when they themselves actually thought
that they were maxed out.
So someone could be running
for the finish line.
They're convinced they're going to win.
They're going max effort
or at least they perceive max effort.
Someone passes them.
And all of a sudden
max effort has changed,
because of that visual target
they are able to access higher levels
of speed and output and
effort and performance.
They don't always catch
up to that person and win,
but having a target a
milestone is a powerful way
that we can generate more
force and energy in anything.
And the visual system
is the way that we bring
those milestones into our brain,
which then brings about epinephrin,
which brings about neural firing,
which allows us to
access whatever resources
happen to be available to us.
So I find this fascinating
because people often wonder,
like where does the kick come from?
Where is this kind of gift
of an additional gear?
Where is that deeper resource?
And we often express it and talk about it,
in kind of psychological
terms like heart or willpower
or that something kind of
got transplanted into us
or descended into us.
And not to remove any of the
spiritual aspects of sport
or running or effort of
the human, you know, heart.
But it's very clear
that the nervous system
when it has a specific visual target
can generate the sorts of intense effort
that it couldn't otherwise.
And it sometimes even comes as a surprise
to the person generating the effort.
I promised that I would
talk about programming,
meaning when and how many times a week
to do the various workouts
related to endurance
and how to merge those with
other types of exercise
that you might be doing
for strength or yoga
or other things that you
might be doing like work
and other things, unrelated to exercise.
Since that's a vast space
with many different parameters
and you all have different
lives and lifestyles
and backgrounds with fitness, et cetera.
What I'm going to do is I'm going to put
three different levels
if you will or protocols
that one could adopt in
a link on the show notes.
So in the caption on YouTube,
if you click on that link,
you'll be able to see
three possible combinations
of endurance work, strength,
and hypertrophy work
or endurance work, flexibility
and hypertrophy work
that are grounded in many
of the major publications
that Dr. Andy Galpin and
colleagues and other people
have described including this review
that's also linked there
on concurrent training
and how one can use concurrent training,
meaning training for endurance,
training for strength,
training for hypertrophy,
training for all these different things
without having to train
constantly everyday
twice a day, et cetera.
So if you are interested
in taking the protocols
that you learned about in this episode
and in previous episodes
and combining those,
we've placed them there for you
as a completely zero cost resource.
Please understand they are not wholly...
Costello agrees.
They are not wholly.
There will be variation in terms
of what people can tolerate
and what they have time for?
But I think they'll serve
as a useful guideline
in getting started or in
continuing with an expanding
on existing endurance work, strength work,
hypertrophy work and so forth.
Just really quickly.
We didn't talk about
supplements much today.
In the previous episodes I talked about
the phosphocreatine system and
supplementing with creatine,
I talked about beta alanine
for kind of moderate duration work.
You know really the only
things that have been shown
to really improve endurance
work across the four varieties
of endurance work I described today.
They have essentially two forms.
One, are stimulants.
So things like caffeine will definitely
improve endurance work and power output.
There's a little bit of evidence
that caffeine intake can actually inhibit
the function of the creating system,
but it's just one study.
But that's interesting.
If you want to read that study,
you can put caffeine into www.examine.com
and it will take you to that study.
Many people get sore after workouts,
in particular workouts
that involve a lot of eccentric loading
or workouts that are very novel
where they've kind of pushed
it instead of moving gradually
as I suggest into say high
intensity anaerobic endurance
work of three sets of 20
seconds on 100 seconds rest.
Maybe you get over ambitious
and you do eight sets.
In which case you are extremely sore.
Certain forms of magnesium in particular,
magnesium malate, M-A-L-A-T-E.
Have been shown to be useful for removing
or reducing the amount of
delayed onset muscle soreness.
That form of magnesium
is distinctly different
than the sorts of magnesium that are good
for getting us into sleep.
Things like magnesium three
and eight and Bisglycinate.
And then there's this whole
thing about beet powder
and beet juices and things
that increase nitric oxide
and allow for more vasodilation
and therefore delivery
of blood to muscle and
neurons and other tissues
for long bouts of endurance work.
Some people like beet juice
and they related compounds
that increase arginine and vasodilation.
Some people don't.
Some people don't feel
good when they take those.
Some people also don't feel good
when they take beta alanine,
because it can give them this feeling
of kind of like itchy, creepy
crawlies under the skin
kind of the niacin
phenomenon, the niacin flush.
Some people don't mind that,
or some people don't experience that.
So when it comes to supplementation
there's a lot of variety.
But magnesium malate has
been shown to reduce soreness
as sometimes that's good.
Cold and hot contrast therapy for soreness
things of that sort.
But in general, we focused
mainly today on behavioral tools.
You'll notice that all of
the tools are accessible
without the need for lots of equipment.
So I didn't say you need a rower,
or you need a kettlebell
though those will work.
And I hope I was able to
illustrate for you that endurance
isn't just one thing.
It's not just the ability to
go for long bouts of exercise
of different kinds,
that there's also this mental component
because of the way that neurons work.
And also that there are these
different forms of endurance
of muscular endurance,
that where you're going to fail
'cause of the muscles and
muscle energy utilization
and the nerves that innovate
those muscles locally
not because of a failure to
bring in oxygen or blood.
Whereas long duration effort.
It's going to be more about,
you know, being below your VO2 max,
and your ability to be
efficient for long bouts
of more than 12 minutes of exercise.
One set, as they say of 12
minutes to maybe several hours.
I should just mention with
long duration type work.
You know, you could even
imagine raking in the yard
or mowing a lawn depending
on how big that lawn is.
I use to have job when
I was a kid mowing lawns
and I'll tell you,
we didn't have many neighbors
with very big lawns,
but there are a few of them felt huge
'cause they were really convoluted.
And if you're pushing that mower,
and these were the old fashioned mowers
not electric mowers, it's work.
That's also of the sort
that we call long duration
endurance work.
High intensity training we'll tap
into yet other fuel sources and mechanisms
as we learned today.
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who's finally waking up for...
Oh, no, he went back to sleep.
Thank you for your interest in science.
[upbeat music]