Barbell Shrugged - Hibernating bears may be on to something: why better sleep and fasting may improve your health, with Dr. Mike T Nelson — Muscle Maven Radio Episode #26

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hey, everybody. Welcome to Muscle Maven Radio. I'm your host, Ashley Van Houten, and I'm very happy that you are listening to this podcast because that's why I do it. Today's conversation is a really fun one. It's the perfect combination, I think, of fun and educational. We'll call it fun-ducational. I promise I won't make up any more words in this episode, or I promise to try not to. But my guest today is Dr. Mike T. Nelson. He's a coach and a metabolism expert who helps people get healthy and also look good. Two equally important goals. Okay, maybe not equally important, but they're both good.

Starting point is 00:00:42 And I always love chatting with Mike about his research and what's interesting him these days, including his passion for the very dangerous sport, seems to me, kiteboarding. And another thing which came completely out of left field in this conversation, his interest in hibernating bear research, which may actually inspire some human-related research around sleep and fasting. So interesting. And as a Canadian who has endured many long, horrible winters, I can personally get on board with a plan to just sleep through the winter. So we'll see how that goes. But we also talk about differences between good

Starting point is 00:01:18 and bad stress. We talk about what metabolic flexibility really is and why you don't necessarily have to be keto to get there. Hallelujah. We talk about fasting and we talk about factors that can improve your sleep. We get into all of this. So I really hope you enjoy listening as much as I enjoy speaking with Mike because he's the best. Before we start, I have two show sponsors today. And we're both very important in my day-to-day life, keeping me fit and healthy. The first is my friends over at Beekeepers Naturals. They've got their raw enzymatic honey products, including a couple of products that I want to highlight

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Starting point is 00:03:49 I'm speaking, but I'll stop doing that now and just get on with the interview so that you can learn from the smart and awesome Dr. Mike T. Nelson. All right, Dr. Mike, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for being here. Yeah, no problem. Thank you so much for having me on here. I greatly appreciate it. It's always great for on my end to be hosting two podcasts because then the people that I really like to talk to, I can just ask you back again right away, but just come on this podcast instead of the paleo podcast because I've already talked to you on another podcast, but I just want all the opportunities I can to pick your brain. So I'm glad you're willing to do that with me today.

Starting point is 00:04:28 Yeah, anytime. I appreciate it. Thank you. So how's your summer going, by the way? Are you at home now? I know you've been traveling a lot and doing some good kiteboarding. Yeah, it's been good. We just got home two days ago. I was gone for like three and a half weeks. My wife was gone for almost five and a half weeks. We went out to visit her brother in Vancouver, Washington, and then she stayed out there. I went back home for six days and then did a road trip starting in Minnesota to South Dakota to Montana to two weeks in Hood River, Oregon, and then worked our way back home again. Nice.

Starting point is 00:05:05 Yeah. Got to do a lot of good kiteboarding in Hood River. Was there hanging out for the kiteboard for cancer race and got in about, it was like 10 or 11 sessions and hit a PR on the longest distance I've ever gone kiteboarding, which did 50 miles in about over four hours on the Hood River there in the swell and everything. So that was a long day. Yeah, I know very little about kiteboarding. And I know enough to know that that sounds exhausting.

Starting point is 00:05:35 Yeah, it was a long day. I went out an hour before my buddies went out. And then we went all the way upriver and just kind of had a good time or practice doing some jumps and stuff and then long story short another friend of mine lost his board and started going down the river and took a while to find it i finally got it and then he was way down river and i got good practice of trying to carry a board while trying to get back to him and the hard part was i literally had to ride directly downwind which isn't too much of a, but you point the board kind of with the wind, but because you're on waves and swell, you can kind of override the kite if you don't keep it flying too much. And then the kite kind of falls on you. So that was, uh, that was kind of tricky. I guess I need more practice doing that.

Starting point is 00:06:20 Have you, uh, have you ever had any like epic bails or like bad kind of falls while you were doing this oh yeah yeah it's pretty much a guarantee at some point i mean when i was learning in minnesota i got picked up by fisher people i got i self-rescued which means i got uh rolled up in my kite and had a drift all the way across the lake to the other side and hike three miles back to where I started because the wind died. I mean, when I was down there, I've been doing it for, man, since 2005. And I had my small eight meter kite out and I don't know what happened. I just overflew it or I did something screwy and I wrapped a line around it and put a bow tie in it and couldn't get it back up again. So I had to self-rescue and walk in and took about an hour and a half to sort out the lines

Starting point is 00:07:10 because I had to pull the safety on it. And I've been practicing more jumps and freaked out once when I was probably 15 feet up and dropped like a stone and all sorts of fun stuff. All right. So you are actually an adrenaline junkie. Like this sounds, it sounds very fun and cool, but also quite terrifying. Yeah, it's super fun.

Starting point is 00:07:32 I mean, my goal for this trip was to get a couple jumps over 20 feet up in the air, which I did, which was cool. And I mean, it's a pretty amazing feeling. You're up in the air looking down and everything gets real small. And if you do it right, you can fly the kite and you can you know land pretty soft um if you do it wrong you kind of get dropped out of the sky like a sack of potatoes but you get better at leaving the kite kind of above you to try to break your fall and not screw up as hard so usually the

Starting point is 00:08:00 crashes are not quite as epic do you try to something new. And then you feel like a beginner again. And last of all, I tried riding a surfboard just on flat water and oh man, I felt like I'm like, Oh, this is what it's like to learn all over again. Like this kind of sucks. And yeah,

Starting point is 00:08:18 I mean, I guess you could look at it that way, but it's also making your brain work in different ways. Like I remember, I mean, I don't have any experience with this, but I grew up skiing, obviously, because I'm Canadian.

Starting point is 00:08:27 So of course I did. And it was all downhill skiing. And then I remember at some point when I was like in my sort of early teens, it became the cool thing to like snowboard. And I was kind of, I was resistant to it because I'm like, man, I don't want to learn like a whole new thing. And I still stick to skiing and skiing has come back again and is cool. Or at least that's what I'm telling myself. But it's interesting how things can be like, generally speaking on paper, quite similar, similar kind of idea. But they in reality,

Starting point is 00:08:56 they're very, very different sports. And it takes a completely different kind of set of skills to be able to do it and not be on your ass the entire time. Yeah, it's definitely different. And, you know, the past three years off and on, I've been trying to learn how to foil board. So foil board is kind of, I guess it's somewhat popular now. But it's a board, like a surfboard or a kite board or whatever board they even have for windsurfers now. And it's a hydrofoil that's mounted underneath it. So when you start out, I've just kind of gone behind a boat just to learn. You can ride on the surfboard and it feels like someone's kind of pulling you around because the foil is underneath.

Starting point is 00:09:35 You shift your weight back a little bit and then forward again, and the foil will come up and the board will stay out of the water the entire time. The only thing in the water is this hydrofoil underneath. And it's super crazy sensation, very little sensation. And it feels almost kind of like snowboarding in powder because the foil part is underneath the water. So if there's any waves or stuff like that, you're not hitting any of the waves because the board is like not even on the water. But it's super touchy, like the full length mass. So how far the hydrofoil sits in the water is about three feet. And any little small movement is, you know, amplified by a three foot lever.

Starting point is 00:10:16 So it makes it kind of tricky to learn, which I'm still in the process of trying to figure out. But super fun once you get going. Yeah. And again, terrifying. I've only seen this like in YouTube videos and stuff. And it's nuts because you are, yeah, you're literally, it looks like you're, it's like back to the future styles. You're like hovering over a wave.

Starting point is 00:10:37 And didn't they invent it so that people could basically like ride waves that were too crazy to ride normally? Yeah. The rumor is L lauren hamilton was the first guy to to do it yeah i remember seeing his early videos a long time ago and the early prototypes he actually took and mounted uh snowboard boots onto a surfboard and his thought of using the hydrofoil was he's trying to ride these massive waves and at some point you can't really go any faster on a surfboard

Starting point is 00:11:06 because of the friction of the board. He's like, hey, what if we stick a hydrofoil underneath and we drastically drop the friction? We should be able to ride a lot faster. The early setups you saw of him with snowboard boots mounted onto it because it was so touchy to try to get the amount of control. I can't even imagine trying to figure that out i mean back then you know just like early kiteboarding they didn't no one knew what the hell they were doing you know it's just let's try this let's try that let's you know borrow this technology let's throw it on a board and

Starting point is 00:11:37 man even now it's it's tricky to learn and if they figured out a lot of stuff just in the last four or five years and i can't imagine just trying to ride something you built in your garage with no previous experience but i'm glad they did yeah that's why there are people like laird hamilton in the world thank goodness because they're the uh and i've met him i've spent some time with him and he's an amazing human being but yeah you need to be like a little bit crazy that's a compliment yeah like in a great way. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, thank goodness.

Starting point is 00:12:09 All right, so we're already getting way off track, but I want to, basically, this is just a, you know, selfish, I get to grill you and ask you questions about nutrition and training and some of the things that you're working on and some of the things that you're seeing with your clients. And I thought it was really interesting. We were talking offline because I'm saying, you know, being one of the, well, the only woman host on Shrug Collective group of podcasts, I kind of, I sort of take it upon myself to ask questions for the ladies as much as I can. And you said that despite the fact

Starting point is 00:12:39 that you aren't necessarily trying to do this, a large majority of your online clients that you work with tend to be women. I thought that was really interesting. Yeah, it's one of those things that it's been that way for, you know, pretty much the last five years. And even the certification I have a flex diet cert, I would say probably 70% of the people last time I checked that went through it were actually women. Most of them are, you know, trainers and fitness enthusiasts. And I asked a couple of them, I said, well, why is that? I mean, my newsletter, you know, mostly is kind of geared towards guys in terms of our writing style. And the feedback was they're like, well, you don't really write about women's issues per se, but it seemed like you understood the principles. And I was looking for something that was a little bit different, but actually had

Starting point is 00:13:23 a pretty good scientific background. So I thought, hmm, maybe that means there's, I don't know, less scientific stuff with women's writing. I don't know. I don't follow a lot of it, so I can't really say, but I thought that was pretty interesting. Yeah. I mean, I guess we could also say that women are discerning intelligent creatures and they sought you out and found your work because it was science and research backed and intelligently put out there. So that's, we'll just do a little check in the box for women being smart. I appreciate that. Yeah, there you go. But what do you mean exactly by, I'm interested in this, like the way,

Starting point is 00:14:01 like your newsletter and the language that you put out is more and maybe not even super consciously done in this way. But you said it was sort of more geared towards men. How do you mean that exactly? So I imagine if I'm writing to sort of an avatar, right, to write to one person, it's someone who's in, you know, the early 30s to maybe 40s, usually a trainer been around for quite a a while usually i'd say the kind of stereotypical male who's kind of interested in strength a little bit of hypertrophy kind of body comp but also has kind of performance goals too so kind of a mix between the two more experienced definitely not doesn't want to read about oh just do three by 10 in the gym and you'll be great.

Starting point is 00:14:46 You know, trying to figure out what are a little different intricacies that can be done, but also not really disregarding the basics altogether. Because in fitness, as you know, you've got a lot of people who talk about, you know, just the basics. And I think that's great. We definitely need that. And there's definitely a place for that. And I think of, you know, guys like Dan John and people like that, who I love and have just amazing information are really good storytellers. And then you've got kind of the other extreme, which is more of the fringe biohacking people that do God knows what to their water and everything in between. And I guess I'm kind of the hybrid of, you know,

Starting point is 00:15:26 yeah, here's the basics and, you know, here's some stuff that may be interesting and, you know, here's the research, you know, on it. And I try to stay somewhat open-minded to new stuff, but at the same point, you know, look to see, is there any research on it? You know, what are the different things that, that can be useful and i mean even now i just bought a little you know cooler for my mattress pad i've got a red light photobiomodulation unit and stuff i'm playing around with just uh because there's some pretty good research on that but like all things i mean everyone's like well we need the 17 randomized double blind controlled trials and elite athletes. And

Starting point is 00:16:05 that's just never going to happen. You know, that performance research is pretty much probably always going to be limited. So you're kind of stuck in that middle area of, okay, what's the data say? You know, what is kind of a logical extension, you know, of that data? And how do you put that in with, you know, just good, solid, basic principles, so that you're, you know, of that data? And how do you put that in with, you know, just good, solid, basic principles, so that you're, you know, in some ways, you're kind of on the cutting bleeding edge, but you just haven't forgot all of the basics and end up doing just the weirdest stuff known to man with no overload. Yeah, I like that. I like that sweet spot. Because I think I think you're speaking to a lot of us, and probably lot of my listeners too who are not – we're not like complete novices.

Starting point is 00:16:50 We're not like the people who are just kind of coming into this like we don't know what we want. But – and sometimes the further along you are in a fitness journey, sometimes the more you need to be reminded about the basics because it's easy to think, okay, we've got that. And now it's time to move on when all of the best coaches in the world will tell you that the basics are always important and they should always be like the bedrock and the focus of what you're doing. And then when you, you know, it's, it's about knowing when to incorporate some of these fun things. But as you said, the fun, the, these little kind of extra weird biohacky, not quite figured out research wise yet, like that is kind of the fun stuff. So it's great to have that sort of basis of like, look, get your sleep and like, don't eat garbage food, but also like try this chili pad on your bed, like could be cool. Because that's fun. Like

Starting point is 00:17:35 that, that experimentation part is what's really makes kind of the whole health and fitness journey entertaining, I think. Yeah. And that's, you know, one thing I try to do is obviously read the research in that area and, you know, I'll buy expensive testing equipment just to see what happens. You know, I've got a three set up moxie unit to look at blood flow. I just bought a metabolic cart to look at, you know, resting metabolic rate, gas exchange during exercise, stuff like that, because I want to try to quantify it as best I can. You know, if there isn't any research or the research is kind of incomplete, you know, maybe we can substitute a few, you know, and of a few dozen or a couple of people here and there.

Starting point is 00:18:15 It's not peer reviewed. It's not to the same level. It's more anecdotal. But at least it's something, right? At least it's more objective data, whether it's a microwave, HRV, resting heart rate, whatever. So I try to do my best to quantify it as best I can. And then with clients too, looking at what are things that they should quantify and what are things that are probably not worth your time? You know, no one has, you know, an unlimited budget and time to quantify everything in their life. So based on that, you know, what are

Starting point is 00:18:45 kind of the, the big rocks that are useful that, yep, you probably want to take the time and effort to quantify this, but yeah, this, yeah, just to kind of do what feels good. And that's probably going to be good enough. Yeah. Yeah. That makes, it reminds me, I spoke with, I interviewed Dave Asprey at one point for the paleo Magazine podcast, and he was talking about his crazy stack of whatever, 180 supplements that he takes in a day or what have you. And I'm talking to him about it, and he's like, look, I know this isn't for everybody, but I like this stuff. I can afford it.

Starting point is 00:19:18 If I'm going to have the most expensive urine in the world, so be it. That's what I want to do. But in reality, most of us don't want to literally piss away our money so we need to be a little bit more discerning but picking and choosing the areas that we want to kind of play with i think is is the fun part really but but how what's your experience been so far with this uh cooling pad thing in your bed yeah so i got the the new one i'm you know in full disclosure i don't make any money off it. I paid for it with my own money. The early device they had was called a ChiliPad. And it's a pad that runs cool water underneath your mattress. The new one they have out is called an Ooler, O-O-L-E-R. It's basically just like a souped up chili pad. And the cool thing about it, I talked to the owner for quite a while at Paleo FX, and you can program the temperature via your phone and you can set it to change

Starting point is 00:20:12 temperature. So for example, if you look at sleep quality, a lot of people have talked about the effects of light, like Dr. Dan Pardee, people of that. And light is a huge thing, especially AM sunlight to help reset your circadian rhythm and kind of anchor it. The other one that I realized I probably missed that I kind of knew but didn't really understand the impact was temperature. And the bugger with temperature is that, yep, you can make your room cooler, you could use a fan, things of that nature. But most of us are probably not going to turn our air conditioner down cool enough if we live in warm climates to make a difference in terms of the induction. So if you look at going to sleep, we need a core temperature drop as one of the ways you can induce sleep. You kind of get around this a little bit by paradoxically taking a very cold shower or a very hot bath because you

Starting point is 00:21:05 build up kind of this temperature differential once you get out and that can help induce sleep so with this pad the nice part is you can program it at say a low temperature when you go to bed so you crawl into your bed it's at a lower temperature than the room temperature so for example last night i set it to 59 degrees. My wife had hers at 68, so she's a little bit warmer than what I am. And in the morning, I had it warm up to 87 degrees. So it starts warming up in the morning right around the time that I want to wake up. Because if you think about when you have a hard time sleeping,

Starting point is 00:21:42 and I know this happened to me, it probably happened to you with travel. Most of the time you wake up and you're like, this happened to me four days ago when I was in Hood River. Like, man, I'm just sweating because I didn't have air conditioning. It just stayed pretty warm that night. And so if you get really warm during the night, that tends to wake you up. And so this is one way to kind of play around with temperature cycling as a way to induce sleep. And then I have the Our aura ring. And so my thought was, and this is a little bit esoteric, but for probably like two decades now, I've been interested in hibernating bear research. Because I'm like, of course, because I'm like, wouldn't it be cool to be a bear, like, especially you're in a cold climate to be like, yep, wintertime.

Starting point is 00:22:26 I'm going to sleep. Yeah. And I'm going to sleep all winter. And you get to do all that eating before you go. Like you just get to fatten up before you go hibernate. Sounds great. Yeah, eat all the food that I can find. Eat all the berries.

Starting point is 00:22:36 Eat all the fish. And I'm going to get really fat and I'm going to sleep all winter. And then when I wake up, I have lost almost no muscle mass and lost almost entirely fat. And I'm like, how does that happen? Like you don't wake the bears up in their hibernation and see them in there doing pushups and handstands or anything like that. They're literally not really moving that much. So I was always been kind of fascinated about what happens with that. And no one's really entirely sure. But one thing that is interesting is that their core temperature gets very low. Their breathing gets really, really low.

Starting point is 00:23:10 Their heart rate gets super low. So I've been fascinated by what if you could find a way to drop temperature cold enough? Could you kind of get a toper kind of hibernation type scenario in humans now that's extremely out on a limb highly theoretical when i was talking to the guy about this i'm like oh so maybe i can get to the point where i get it cold enough that i wake up shivering then i'll up the temperature just a bit from there i'm like can i get it cool enough where maybe that increases deep sleep, maybe increases REM, maybe increases recovery to try to simulate like a hibernation type scenario, which I know humans aren't really hibernators. So it's a completely different mammal. But we do share, you know, some stuff that kind of crosses over from a nervous system standpoint. One of the ways that bears will regulate their heart rate.

Starting point is 00:24:07 So a buddy of mine was a bear researcher at the University of Minnesota when I was doing my PhD there. And you would think that if you, his job was to wake bears up in hibernation and take measurements. And you would think that, oh, this isn't too bad of a job. I find where the bear sleeps. I go in there, I, you know, trank the bear and take measurements. Ooh, this isn't hard. What you don't realize is that the second you get close to their den, they actually can wake up super fast, right? Because if you think about it, that makes sense, right? You know, otherwise they would be, you know, subject to different predators and things like that. And how they do it is they make this very weird breathing noise where they start breathing super fast. And humans have the same response that we can control heart

Starting point is 00:24:50 rate by our breathing rate. If we start breathing really fast, our heart rate goes up. We start breathing very slow, something called RSA, respiratory sinus arrhythmia, our heart rate will actually start to go down. So it turns out bears can modulate this to a very, very high degree. Humans probably not to the same degree. But so there is some physiology that overlaps. They worked for a cardiac company. So they were trying to figure out, you know, these bears get very, what's called bradycardic, super, super low heart rate, but nothing really happens to them. And hibernation is kind of this weird, the guy who was studying it, his background was in anesthesia.

Starting point is 00:25:27 So are there things that we could do maybe with humans during maybe surgical procedures to induce more of a possible hibernation type status to have less deleterious effects from, you know, anesthetics and things of that nature. So anyway, long story short, I was interested to see if changing temperature and making it cooler, because now I have a way of cooling from underneath, I can leave the same amount of covers on the top. And if that increases sleep quality. Okay, I love where this conversation went. I say I I'm like so into it. If you create another program that's like the hibernating bear diet, I want to be your first test subject. And let me tell you,

Starting point is 00:26:12 like I said, anybody living in like most of Canada and probably the top half of the United States could like get into this because the idea of like eating a lot and then chilling out and just waiting for the winter to be over. I'm so, so on board with that. But I mean, there's also realistically there, there are some other connections here too, because when, with the, like the longevity, um, conversation and people are, we're talking a lot on podcasts like this about like training and eating for longevity versus performance. And it seems to be, and this is simplifying it, but it seems to be, you know, when you're training for performance, it's all about fueling your workouts and recovery and you know

Starting point is 00:26:49 working to intensity and then recovering properly and all this stuff and then when it comes to longevity it's like eat as little as you can get away with work out and stress your body as little as you can get away with meditate take deep breaths like we're kind of doing like a sort of half-assed hibernating bear approach when we're trying to live longer, right? Yeah, I kind of disagree with the standard longevity approach. I mean, if you look at, for example, if you look at caloric restriction, right now, human subjects, there's just not that many. There's a group of people who do what's called self-imposed caloric restriction. I think they're called the cronies. I'm a crazy name.

Starting point is 00:27:28 And if you look at them, they kind of look a lot like large eel-shaped rakes. Not a lot of muscle mass, you know, not a lot of, I'd say, function going on. And they've chosen to, you know, drastically restrict protein, you know, selectively restrict calories by up to 40% to 60%. And if you look at data from chimpanzees and monkeys, it's kind of mixed. As you kind of go up the mammalian food chain, the effect of caloric restriction gets, I would say, not nearly as profound. So if you're a freaking earthworm, man, caloric restriction is freaking amazing. You can dramatically extend your life. If you're a rat or a mouse, you can do pretty good. You start getting up to, you know, humans. I don't know. I don't think this is my gut feeling that it

Starting point is 00:28:18 will pan out as well as what we want. What we do know, we do have research to base on for longevity right now. The top three things are muscle mass or lower body strength. Those are kind of tied together. VO2 max, aerobic capacity, and then grip strength. So we know that those three things from pretty good studies are associated with longevity. So my bias is, you know, because I have clients who are a little bit older, are very interested in performance, but are kind of getting to that point. And I would probably put myself in this bucket too, where I don't want to sacrifice everything just for performance. I want to find that kind of balance where my performance is getting better, but I'm not doing things that are kind of completely unhealthy.

Starting point is 00:29:06 So looking at a protein, so a popular template I'll use with clients is, uh, so everyone talks about how, you know, running mTOR, right? So mammalian target a rapamycin, which is based off of a protein intake, right? So trying to accrue more muscle, everybody seems to be really, really afraid of that now. And, you know, theoretical risks of cancer and a bunch of other stuff. But I think that if we do want to run that, because we know for sure, as you get older, you have a higher risk of sarcopenia, right? So loss of muscle mass with aging. We do know that higher protein diets are helpful with that.

Starting point is 00:29:43 We do know that adults probably need higher amounts of protein to get the same acute effect from that protein. So some very cool research that was done in 20-year-olds compared to 71-year-olds. The 20-year-olds had a pretty robust response to 20 grams of whey protein. And to get that same response in the 71-year-olds, they needed 40 grams of whey protein at the same dose, or I should say at the same time. So we know that as you age, it's kind of called anabolic resistance, you actually need more protein to get the same response. So what I'll do is take, you know, six days a week, kind of hedge my bets. I'll split

Starting point is 00:30:22 between lifting weights and doing some type of cardiovascular training. That'll include some grip training on their weight training days. And then I will have them work up to one day a week, you know, probably a 19 to 24 hour fast. I won't have them use any, you know, amino acids or branched chains or essential amino acids or anything like that on that day. So on that day, I'm kind of hedging my bets a little bit more towards the AMPK, the kind of anti-MTOR, dropping insulin, dropping out a bunch of calories. And if some weird stuff happened, I think having the ability to fast is useful, right? Teaching your body to use fat as a fuel to be more metabolically flexible.

Starting point is 00:31:04 But the other six days, you know, they're going to have probably three to five meals. Most of those are going to be higher in protein, a moderate amount of carbs, which will vary per person, you know, a little bit lower, but not super low fat. And I'm really trying to drive, you know, mTOR performance and all the other markers of longevity that we have pretty good data on. So that's kind of my bias of a hybrid approach that looks at the current data that we have. But, you know, we'll kind of hedge a little bit towards the longevity because I do think that if you're young, you can probably get away running, you know, mTOR all the time. It's probably not going to be a big deal. I do get a

Starting point is 00:31:42 little nervous about, you know, constantly pushing up insulin, constantly putting in more carbs, constantly having high protein 24 seven for decades on end. Yeah, maybe there's a little bit of a risk there. So I'll hedge my bets and do kind of a one day fast to counteract that. Okay, I like I like this because I was always kind of disheartened when I was talking to people about the whole caloric restriction and kind of don't push it too hard and you'll live forever. Cause I'm like, I don't really want to live to be a hundred if I'm going to be like super skinny and tired and sort of miserable the entire time. Like I'd, I'd really rather keep it a little shorter and just kind of feel like robust and energetic the entire time if I can get away with it.

Starting point is 00:32:26 So I want to talk, touch on, you mentioned metabolic flexibility. And I want to talk about that a little bit because it's something that I think is really important for quote unquote, sort of the average person as well as athletes. And it's something that I've read and I've personally experienced that when I've done some experimenting with lower carb and even kind of more specific ketogenic and even carnivore kind of reset sort of approaches. And my background is not necessarily super high carb anyway. Like I'm not really standard American diet styles. I'm more like paleo whole foods approach. So my carbs are generally probably more in line with like,

Starting point is 00:33:05 I don't know, like in the sort of 100 to 150 grams anyway. But when I when I play with and focus on maybe doing like getting into ketosis for a couple days, or just eating carnivore for a week to sort of reset my satiety signals and stuff like that. And when I've done some of this, and then I've played and worked with working up to like a 24 hour fast, and, and I've kind of incorporated these into like my lifestyle, I found that the more I do it, and over time, the easier it becomes. And I'm now at a point where I could spend like an entire week sort of on vacation, kind of eating carbs, or not paying attention to what I'm doing. And then if I want to come back and reset by eating super low carb or do a fast, I can do it relatively easily. And this is not very scientifically backed or studied. It's just kind of my own personal feeling that I feel like I'm metabolically flexible because I feel like I can switch in and out of these things when I want to. And if you told me, Ashley, you can't eat for the next 24 hours, like I'd be fine. You know, I like to eat, but I'd be fine. So my question is, you hear that you kind of have to like do a keto diet for 30 days and like get past the keto flu and eat super low carb and then you're fat adapted and then you can kind of start

Starting point is 00:34:16 working carbs back in or whatever. But is it true that if you, if you do the work and however long it takes to either be in ketosis or burning ketones and you kind of if you can do that for however much time are you then sort of fat adapted and or metabolically flexible after that can you get kicked out of that if you go back to just eating carbs again for like another month like how does that work is it something that your body gets and understands and remembers or not yeah so i would say a lot of people online, I won't use any names, say that metabolic flexibility, this is super cool. We like this topic. And to do that, you have to do a ketogenic type diet because the standard American, you suck

Starting point is 00:35:02 at using fat. So you need to do a ketogenic diet for X amount of time to increase your body's ability to use fat. And then you'll be metabolically flexible. And there's kind of some truth to that, but there's a couple of catches with that. So it is true that if you do a ketogenic type diet, so if we define a ketogenic type diet, you know, Volek will use the 0.5 millimolar ketones in your blood as kind of nutritional ketosis, which is probably a pretty good marker. So you want to do that via a blood test, not a urine. And most people need to be under about 50 grams of carbohydrates. Most people need to be pretty high in fat. There's some debate about how much protein people can get away with.

Starting point is 00:35:46 What I've seen in practice is it's very variable. I've seen people that have to be pretty low protein, and I've seen some people that can get away with higher protein and still be in ketosis. Normally, that latter group has been doing a ketogenic type approach for a longer period of time. So if we do that, so let's say Monday, you say, hey, I'm going to do a ketogenic diet, you drop your carbs to 50 grams per day or less, which is very, very low. If you eat one bagel, you just blew away your carbs for the day. And let's say your diet is on point, we measure your blood ketones, you're day three, and you're at a good level of ketones in your blood, it is true that your body is using

Starting point is 00:36:27 a lot more fat than normal. So what happens is because carbs are very low, it will push insulin down very low. When the insulin is lower, it's kind of like a fuel selector switch. You will upregulate your body's ability to use fat as a fuel. And if you do that really, really hard and you run just tons of fat through the system, a byproduct from the liver is these ketone bodies, right? So commonly beta-hydroxybutyrate, and then there's two other ones, acetone and one other one. But beta-hydroxybutyrate is kind of the main ketone fuel. Technically, it's not really a ketone, but for all practical purposes, it works. The downside of that approach is that a lot of people now are like, oh, wait a minute. Oh, but I'm going to do some high intensity cardio and I'm going to

Starting point is 00:37:18 do kind of cross-FD type, Metcon type stuff. Oh man, when I try to do this on a ketogenic diet, oh boy, my performance doesn't feel very good. Which if you think about it from a biochemistry standpoint, makes sense, right? Your body has been pushed super hard towards the fat end of the spectrum, the carbohydrate end of metabolism you've kind of moved away from. So they're like, oh, I got the solution. I'm going to take in a whole bunch of carbohydrates before I do my high intensity work. Therefore, I will push up my muscle glycogen and liver glycogen. So the stored carbohydrates in the liver and the muscle, and I'm going to do some super high intense work, and this is going to be great. But what they found out was, yeah, didn't really work as well. In terms of

Starting point is 00:38:06 acute power, you'll see at least a single digit drop off in absolute speed and power. Now, for some people, that doesn't matter, right? If you're just a recreational lifter, yeah, probably not a big deal. If you're a higher level athlete, losing, you know, 9% off your peak power, that's a big deal. The reason for that is, so, for example, when we look at some of the ketogenic studies, people will say, oh, we did muscle biopsy, and we found that their carbohydrate stores were actually pretty good. And that's actually true. The part they forgot is that carbohydrate metabolism end of the spectrum got kind of down regulated. The main enzyme that controls that, and there's multiple enzymes, is one called PDH, so pyruvate dehydrogenase.

Starting point is 00:38:52 You kind of just think of it simply as the gatekeeper to glycolysis. So glycolysis is how well you're running that carbohydrate metabolism. Because you've been so high on fat usage, you've moved away from carbohydrate usage, your body just turns down that enzyme. So even when you give back just a massive ton of carbohydrates, it takes a while for that enzyme to start to upregulate again. So you don't see an immediate increase in performance. Now, how long that stays downregulated is highly debatable. I've talked about this with to Dom D'Agostino a fair amount. We don't really know. I mean, I've seen some people were after a couple of weeks, they were fine. Some people, a couple of months. So if you go back to metabolic flexibility, if you go hardcore, like ketogenic type approach, you will lose some of

Starting point is 00:39:43 your carbohydrate metabolism. So now people are like, hey, well, we will lose some of your carbohydrate metabolism. So now people are like, hey, well, we'll solve this issue. We'll do like a cyclic ketogenic diet, which is, you know, you're probably familiar with, you know, Zampano's work like decades ago. They tried that with, I want to say his original template was at seven days and then two days. And then I think it was Mauro Di Pasquale did a five day and a two day, right? So you kind of be ketogenic Monday through Friday, and you have these massive carb ups on Saturday and Sunday. And some people can get away with that. But what we see in research is that, man, you generally don't get back into ketosis until like that Thursday or Friday. And I tried this with clients years ago,

Starting point is 00:40:26 because in my head, I'm thinking, okay, I like metabolic flexibility. I was doing research on it. What's the fastest way I can increase metabolic flexibility? Okay, what are most people missing? Ah, fat metabolism. Okay, so I'll put them on a ketogenic type diet. Ooh, their lifting performance started trending down. Oh, well, I'll take a couple of days in refill, like glycogen stores. And again, it's that PDH enzyme that kind of puts the bugger in that. And most people feel like absolute dog crap, like Monday through Thursday. They just hate their life. They don't feel very good. They feel amazing Saturday because they get to eat everything in sight. By Sunday night, they feel fat and bloated and not very good. And they're back to Monday through Thursday kind of feeling like crap again.

Starting point is 00:41:11 I think you're speaking to probably a very large proportion of people listening who are not even necessarily trying to be keto. They're just like, you're describing my weekend and then my week like every week. Yeah, we get it. And I think it's yeah we get it and i think it's because the transition is too hard so if you go back and like okay what is metabolic flexibility it's how well can you use carbohydrates on kind of the right end of the spectrum which we need for high intensity uh lifting intervals things of that nature and then how well can we use fat on the other end of the spectrum for more resting metabolic rate, lower intensity work. And a ketogenic approach, like I said, I think gets kind of messy because it's too hard of a

Starting point is 00:41:52 transition for most people to pull off. Because when you're going ketogenic, you are kind of downregulating carbohydrate use. So I was looking in the research and this is man probably going back like 10 years ago and i'm like Well, how do we kind of get around this and what I realized was that a longer period of fasting done one day a week Actually doesn't see this down regulation in the pdh enzyme So if we say monday is your fasting day, let's say you've worked up to and can easily do 24 hours. I'll program lower kind of steady state old school cardio that day. We've pushed your insulin levels

Starting point is 00:42:32 down really low, which is a very big metabolic hammer to increase your body's ability to use fat. We're doing kind of some low intensity work kind of as much as I hate the word the fat burning zone, but you're, you know, staying at lower intensity work. But I can come back on Tuesday, let's say you have a very hard Metcon or strength training day, you're going to do Tuesday afternoon. And I've had athletes hit, you know, three 400 grams of carbohydrates that day, and then fine. Why? Because if we look at fasting, that Monday, your liver glycogen levels will actually get pretty low because you were fasted overnight. But muscle glycogen doesn't really go down that much. It may drop a little bit depending on the intensity of the exercise that you did.

Starting point is 00:43:16 But muscular work is a primary thing that uses muscle glycogen. So the glycogen levels in the muscle don't really go down that much. So there's not really this downturn in carbohydrate metabolism. And it's also very short, right? It's only 24 hours. So there's just not much time for that metabolic adaptation. So to me, that my bias is that that's a better approach for people who want an increase in fat metabolism, but also want to keep carbohydrates in for performance. I think you can get most of the benefits you can from a ketogenic type diet. We're excluding pathologies, you know, and other things like that from the discussion just for

Starting point is 00:43:55 general healthy people. And you don't have to do a hardcore ketogenic type approach. And you don't have to worry as much about those transitions and what i find is that in general it's just socially easier also i think people have done a ketogenic diet i think if you're gonna do it probably staying in ketosis for a long period of time initially is going to be the way to go if you've done that quite a while and you're very experienced with it yeah you may get away with you know, more carbs and kind of going in and out. But initially, I find for most people, it's pretty hard because what ends up happening, right, in real life? Oh, bro, I was doing super good on my ketogenic approach for a week.

Starting point is 00:44:37 And then, oh, man, we went to this buffet and, you know, I had all this food. I got kicked out of ketosis for four days. I got back into ketosis for three days. And then we went out with the buddies after the game. And they're constantly in and out all the time. And that just appears to be a very hard transition in and out. Yeah. And I mean, just for sustainability reasons, it's one thing if you're prepping for something specific or if you're doing like a one month plan just to see how it goes. But I mean, anything that and I think a lot of people who think they're in ketosis probably aren't.

Starting point is 00:45:11 They're just eating low carb, which could probably be beneficial for a lot of people anyway. But I mean, it's just it's a very hard thing to maintain. Speaking from my own personal experience, because you have to just be really on top of things. And nobody really wants to do that for their entire life is like is, you know, being on top of their macros every second. It's like, it's a lot of work. Yeah, it's hard. And, you know, I have friends who can do it and do fine. I mean, I've gone to dinners with, you know, Dom and he does fine on it and prefers it because he doesn't have to, you know, eat as much and cognitive performance for him is fine.

Starting point is 00:45:41 And I just eat all of his bread. So it works out good. Yeah, exactly. Perfect, perfect combo. So when so if we're talking about maybe implementing like a 24 hour fast, instead of which I can totally buy into instead of trying to do this keto thing. And again, we're speaking in general terms here, but would it be like a 24 hour fast once a week, you think would probably be like a baseline to try to kind of achieve some of these results? Would some people want to do more? Would some people want to do less? Yeah, what I find is once people have the adaptation to fasting,

Starting point is 00:46:15 a vast majority of people do pretty good on just one day per week. So I initially got this from Brad Pilon's book, Eat Stop Eat, like many, many, many years ago. He's the first guy to really kind of talk about diets and some other very niche cases for other reasons. But kind of going long term, I don't think you need to go much above that. And the caveat I would add, too, is that you probably need a transition period. So the biggest mistake I made going back, man, probably 10 years ago now was I initially heard about fasting. I thought this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life. Right. So I'm like, oh, you got to maximize muscle all the time. I initially heard about fasting. I thought this is the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life, right? Because I'm like, oh, you got to maximize muscle all the time. All your muscles are going to fall off your body, all this stuff. And it's been like a year looking into the research because

Starting point is 00:47:13 I didn't believe any of it. And I'm like, huh, it doesn't look like all the muscles are going to fall off your body. Maybe this is a good thing to increase fat metabolism. What I also found was it generally was easier for people to do. So to have a day where you're fasting for a period of time versus a very low caloric day, the fasting approach for vast majority of clients was much easier, which was quite shocking to me. I was kind of surprised by that. But my biggest mistake was when I did it on myself was, man, I was just eating every couple hours. And I tried to go for 13 hours and ran across the street to a Chinese buffet. And I was there for like two hours. I was just so hungry. And I'm like fasting, the dumbest idea I've ever heard in my life.

Starting point is 00:47:57 You know, talk about self biases. Woke up in a plate of fried rice, didn't know how you got there. Yeah. So I tried a couple more times, same thing. And then I woke up one day and went, oh my God, I'm an idiot. I'm like, I've been trying to go for 24 hours. And historically, when I've been awake, two to three hours is kind of my max. I was that hungry, angry person if we didn't stop and eat and carried food around with them all the time, all that kind of stuff. So I'm like, it was just like if you came to my gym, my garage and had never deadlift in your

Starting point is 00:48:27 life and I put four or five on it and just yell at you to try harder, you know, unless you're Andy Bolton, it's not going to come up off the ground. However, we can just descale it down to wherever you're at. 95 pounds, 135 doesn't the bar. It doesn't matter. We can set it up so that you actually start being successful. And I'm like, oh, I need to do the same thing with fasting. So I set up a thing where, okay, starting Monday, if Monday's your fasting day, just push your breakfast out by two hours, eat the same amount of calories you're normally going to eat. Don't worry about it. Because if you slept eight hours, add two hours, you already did a 10 hour fast that's pretty good for most people so following week let's see if we can do 12 hours so just drop your breakfast eat lunch at your normal time and go on so i would take people

Starting point is 00:49:14 through this approach of just pushing out their fast by two three maybe four hours a week first six to eight weeks or so and only doing that once a week. So if Monday was your fasting day, that's when you would do it. And most people after that could hit, you know, probably a 19 to 24 hour fast pretty easily. I don't recommend that if you're a very, you know, chronically under eating person or, you know, stupid high stress and stuff like that. But you know, if you're generally healthy and your calories are in line, having to be a very neutral kind of ramp in type protocol, I found makes a huge difference. And then what are you doing? You're teaching people how to be successful. Right. Because if they try to do a 24 hour fast and it fails, the same thing I did, like, oh, this is the dumbest idea ever.

Starting point is 00:50:02 You know, right. And then now they have a negative bias towards it. And then you have to kind of work around that, which makes it a lot harder. Yeah, absolutely. So you already mentioned that, generally speaking, for trying to get the results that you want from fasting, that 24 hours is usually plenty, maybe two days on the outset for some people at a time. What do you think though, about some of these like keto or fasting or fasting for longevity folks who do their three, five, seven day water fast? Like, what do you think is actually happening there? Is that is that potentially harmful? Or is it just these guys are fine? Like they're probably not doing any harm, but it's probably not helping either. What do you think about that? Generally, I think it depends on your goal. I mean, I've had friends

Starting point is 00:50:42 who have done it. And then I, I think if you're really trying to hedge your bets towards longevity and you're willing to stay kind of on the hypothetical side, maybe. I mean, you look at kind of Walter Longo's stuff, which again, has only been done in animals so far. There's some human trials that are starting. If you look at places like True North, I've had dinner with a guy, Dr. Allen is a gold hammer, I think, who runs that. And I was talking to him. I'm like, dude, you have so much data. Please publish some of your data because I want to see what the hell is going on.

Starting point is 00:51:16 And they're in the process of publishing some of that right now. I don't agree with all the things that they do there. It's kind of an interesting place, but they have actual humans do it and they've been pretty successful for it. And again, I think if you have, you know, frank pathologies, you have things that are not working well, I think fasting may turn out to be extremely beneficial. If you're a healthy person and you really are trying to drop your risk of cancer, maybe a longer fast, three, seven days, no one knows the exact length, may kind of hedge your bets of, you know, increasing autophagy and trying to clear out precancerous cells. People also forget that one of the easiest way to increase

Starting point is 00:51:55 autophagy is just plain exercise. Exercise will increase autophagy. Autophagy is this fancy word everyone likes to use now that I don't think anybody understands. But I would say right now, those are all pretty hypothetical. Anecdotal from the people I know who have done it, there doesn't appear to be a massive muscle loss. But even DEXA and things like that are 1% to 2% easy body fat percentage error and lean muscle error. So it could just be the error in the machine. You also have to make sure that their glycogen stores are back to normal because glycogen will read as fat-free mass. So if they're different, it'll kind of skew your numbers there. So I think if someone is really trying to push the bleeding edge and willing to try it, I think it may be

Starting point is 00:52:39 useful. Mentally, I think there is something to realizing you can go for longer periods of time without food and be okay. I'm a fan of that from a metabolic flexibility standpoint and just survival. But I would say in terms of hard data, we don't have a lot yet. I think it is really interesting, especially in different cases of pathologies, which again, you'd have to work under your physician's supervision. Because for the case of, say, type 2 diabetics, which again, I'm not recommending that people do this, but a lot of stuff appears to try to reset when you do a long fast, right? Insulin sensitivity will change. Your body will switch to use more fat because insulin gets pushed really low. So one thing people forget about type 2 diabetics is they become very metabolically inflexible.

Starting point is 00:53:30 Everybody thinks of it as kind of a carbohydrate metabolism issue, and they definitely have issues with carbohydrate metabolism. But to counteract that, the body keeps jacking up insulin higher and higher and higher. And when the insulin goes up, it actually pushes you away from using fat as a fuel. So what you find in type two diabetics as the disease advances, they lose the ability to fully use carbs, and they lose the ability to fully use fat also. So getting squished from both ends of the spectrum. So fasting can actually kind of reverse some of that process possibly too. And I mean, you did say too, I think for, again, I'm air quoting over here, but like the average person, so someone who isn't dealing with chronic disease or a specific issue,

Starting point is 00:54:13 but it's just doing this for health benefits or maybe some body composition, that there's sort of diminishing returns after a certain point for most people, because isn't it, this is where I always get overwhelmed when we talk about health and wellness. It's the concept of like inflammation and stress and the fact that stress is good sometimes, and then sometimes it's not, and everything causes stress. And so it's always about how much do you work out? Because working out is good, but if you do it too much, it's stressful. And eating is good, but if you do it too much, it's stressful. And wouldn't that also be the same for fasting? Like for a lot of people, even people who are metabolically flexible and who can do a 24-hour fast, no big deal. Maybe they want to push it

Starting point is 00:54:53 and play and they want to do a five-day fast. Like at some point, isn't that going to be causing some maybe negative stress on the body too? Oh, definitely. I mean, I've done a few longer fasts. I mean, the longest I've ever gone out is just 36 hours, which in comparison is very short. I have had a few clients who, you know, working with their physician decided to do a few longer fasts and we monitored their heart rate variability. And we saw that in general, most of them got pretty stressed and then it kind of changed and flattened out a little bit. I have a client who's actually doing a very medically supervised six day fast right now. So we're measuring her HRV, which I haven't seen yet. So it'll be interesting to see what happens with that. But I like the concept of eustress versus distress. So eustress, E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S, stress your body can generally recover from. My bias is pushing you stress to pretty high levels, right? So

Starting point is 00:55:47 training frequency, I like people to train pretty high frequently, you know, most people every day, if they can do something, the caveat being, I want to see them recover within about 24 hours, so that they can come in and have a good performance and do the same thing the next day. You can alternate, you know, weight training and cardio and get fancy like that. A distress would be a stress that takes your body much longer to recover from. So most athletes, any type of CrossFit, say three-day competition, if you're doing the games that are coming up, very, very distress, right? Very high amount of stress.

Starting point is 00:56:23 It's going to take them quite a while to recover from that, which is fine because they don't have another competition coming up. If you do like a powerlifting meet or Olympic lifting meet, the meet days are generally very distress. And that's okay because they're not that frequent and you can take a lot of time off on the back end. The mistake I see a lot of people make is that most training sessions turn into this distress, crappy rep, low quality type work where they weren't really getting the

Starting point is 00:56:53 performance benefit or providing enough overload in a systematic way, but they're just adding a lot of stress to their body, making it harder to recover from again. So they're kind of getting the two, in my opinion, mixed up. They're a little bit too much on the distress. And fasting for a lot of people, I would imagine if you go into a longer fast, is going to be on the distress side. Now, if you can control a lot of factors in your life and take time to recover from that on the back end, probably going to be okay. But again, it goes back to, you know, what are your goals? What are you trying to do? If you're really trying to push performance, very, very long, fast, probably not going to be the best for that. If you're working

Starting point is 00:57:35 around a pathology through a physician, might be beneficial. Or if you're doing it for health reasons, maybe beneficial. And you can control your recovery from that stress kind of on the back end. Yeah, I like this concept of sort of calculated stress, right? So it's like the kind that can be progressive that your body can overcome and get stronger as a result. It's like the same sort of progressive overload stuff when you're weightlifting in the gym and you kind of go harder so that the next time after you recover properly, you can do that and more. And that, that makes a lot of sense. But I do think just to play devil's advocate, cause I always have to see the cynical side of everything. That's another character, a trait of mine. Um, it's, it takes a certain kind of maturity and self awareness to be able

Starting point is 00:58:23 to do that because so many people who are type A are in the gym and are trying to work hard and everyone thinks that they're the one who can just push it a little bit further, right? Like everybody thinks they're the one who can, I know you got to get eight hours of sleep, but I can get by with six. Or I know you need to take a day off

Starting point is 00:58:39 after a crazy leg day, but like I could probably push it today. So how, I mean, I guess that's why we have coaches like you, right? Because you need uh an objective outsider to be able to kind of help and monitor and guide and tell you like no actually this is how this is going to work you need to take some time off or you need to relax or whatever right yeah that's why i use i'm really big on quantifying performance i do like a lot of cardio stuff on the rower because their performance is automatically quantified use a lot of heart rate variability. So just take a measurement each

Starting point is 00:59:08 morning, which tells me the status of your autonomic nervous system. How much are you sort of parasympathetic versus sympathetic? And then I use the data to explain to clients that, okay, here's what's going on, right? Because when I initially started this years ago, I found that I kind of knew that, okay, you need to, you know, kind of cut back because you're burning the candle a little bit too hard. And they're like, no, I'm fine. I'm the exception to the rule. Everybody thinks they're the outlier. So I kind of reworked all my coaching six years ago to have it be based on data. Okay. Here's your performance in the gym the last week. It's sucked. Right. So you're, that's not my opinion.

Starting point is 00:59:46 Trying harder is not going to solve it. You can try that, but it's not going to work. Right. Or here's your HRV after your crazy leg day you did. And that's fine. If you want to do that once in a while and get nuts, cool. I don't care. But if you do that day in and day out, here's your HRV average showing that you're becoming very sympathetic. So whatever you're doing, your body is telling me this isn't my opinion. This is data from your physiology saying that you've overextended yourself. And if you continue this, bad stuff's going to happen, right? And the cool part is the flip side works just as well. Oh, that's cool.

Starting point is 01:00:21 You cut back a little bit on training. You did some higher quality work. Oh, nice. Your HRV recovered in, you know, 24 or 48 hours. Good. We'll add a little bit more volume. Now we can push more overload. We can add another training day if you really want to train or have an arm day, whatever, right? Because your body is telling me that you can handle that amount of stress. And I'm all for like, you can ask any of my clients who do like an assessment. Like the first week is just hellish because it like, you can ask any of my clients who do like an assessment, like the first week is just hellish, because it's, you know, rep max testing, tons of stuff on the roar, lactate work, steady state work, intense work. It's pretty bad, but it's only one week,

Starting point is 01:00:55 and I want to know where they are looking at data. So I have a really good baseline to go off of at that point, we pull back the volume, and then very slowly and methodically increase it. Yeah, benchmarks are very important. Do you encourage your clients to get trackers like Oura Rings and stuff like that? If they can, the caveat, so the minimum I require for people is some form of HRV and some form of performance metrics. And that can be very basic. If they want to go the next level down, I do like the Oura Ring. I find that it's super useful. The caveat is, as long as that data isn't,

Starting point is 01:01:32 one, making them neurotic, or two, kind of playing into the thinking that they're a fragile flower that's just going to get crushed, right? Right. I try to use it as the opposite direction because it's, okay Yeah. You had five hours of sleep last night, but you had a whole bunch of sleep before that. You could probably

Starting point is 01:01:50 train normal today and I think you'll be just fine. Go to the gym. Oh, yeah, it was a little harder, but everything went good. Perfect. Right. Versus, oh, my God, I only had five hours of sleep. My training's going to suck. I don't want to go to the gym. It's like you've already convinced yourself that it's going to be bad. And the reality is you don't know. You don't know until you test it. So my bias is using the data to increase kind of their anti-fragility, both from a mindset and having them slowly work into stuff that may be distrustful, but showing that, yeah, you probably can do more than you think, as long as you do it in a very kind of systematic way, and not letting them use the data of,

Starting point is 01:02:31 oh, I just can't train anymore, because that's rarely the case. That makes sense. Okay. All right. Well, we're coming almost to the end here. I don't want to keep you too much longer. But I realized that I don't think I've ever actually asked you about your flex diet, like course the program, can you kind of just talk about what it is and what it entails? Yeah, so initially, I didn't want to do a certification. I started off doing a bunch of CEUs for trainers, but I realized most trainers are actually looking for a certification and they want a system that's already done. And so I would talk to different gym owners, like CrossFit gyms and be like, Hey, you got all your programming done. Like programming is much better than it used to be. I'm like, what do you do for nutrition and

Starting point is 01:03:13 recovery? And they always look at you like a two headed space alien, like, ah, I don't know, we do 30 day keto challenge or 30 day paleo challenge or whatever. It was like, no one had like a very rare, did you find like a good system? And most of it was because of people running it had good intentions, but were just massively confused about what to do. And it wasn't really scalable. So I said, okay, so I'm going to do something. And I took what I considered the top kind of eight interventions, you know, stuff like protein, carbohydrates, fat, micronutrition, neat fasting, sleep, and put them then into a video series. So it's based on the concept of flexible dieting and

Starting point is 01:03:54 metabolic flexibility. So each one of the eight interventions, there's one video that's kind of a continuing story of what is metabolic flexibility, what is flexible dieting. So at the end of the eight interventions, you've got a really good idea of the context and the idea of what it is. And then each week, there's a different intervention. So for example, week one is protein. So everything you wanted to know about dietary protein, literally in one hour. And that was the hardest thing for me to do, was to condense everything down into just about a one hour lecture. And then the third one is, okay, here's your five action items. Because what was missing a lot of times was, okay, here's a lot of cool data. Well, what the hell do I do with it? Right? So here's

Starting point is 01:04:36 five different options you have using the intervention, for example, of protein. And here's how you track it. Here's how you monitor it. And so clients go through and do that. And then they can go on to week two and then three and then all the way through eight. And then I just included some expert interviews, you know, so people who are actually in the field, you know, doing the real research, you know, like on protein, like Dr. Jose Antonio, Dr. Stu Phillips, you know, guys like Dr. Dan Party talking about sleep, Eric Helms talking about flexible dieting so people want to go like the next level down and get like the uber in-depth stuff uh they'll be able to get that also that's really cool is it is it mostly directed for coaches or can sort of the

Starting point is 01:05:20 average just nerd who wants to learn about this can Can they kind of pick that up too? Yeah. So right now about 60% of it is trainers and coaches and the rest are just, you know, kind of high end, I would say fitness enthusiasts and what they liked about it. I call them nerds, but sure you can call them fitness enthusiasts. What they liked about it was it gave them kind of a stepwise approach of what to do and it gave them information that, yeah, it's, it's kind of a stepwise approach of what to do. And it gave them information that, yeah, it's kind of at an intermediate level, but we explain all the terms. And obviously, it's all fully referenced. So people want to look at the reference material there. So I was kind of surprised that a lot of people that are very into fitness that they

Starting point is 01:05:59 actually really enjoyed it. And the nice part about having to be online is you can kind of go back and you can review it a couple of times. If it's to be online is you can kind of go back and you can review it a couple of times. You know, if it's all brand new to you, you can go back and review it again, or you can stop and, you know, kind of skip around a little bit. You can kind of do whatever works best for your learning style, as opposed to a classroom that starts on week one. And then by week four, you're like, I don't even know where I'm at. You can't, it's very hard to go back in that type of scenario and just get lost. With online, you can go back and repeat stuff as much as you want.

Starting point is 01:06:31 That's cool. And people can learn more about that or subscribe to it if on your website, right? MikeTNelson.com? Yeah. So MikeTNelson.com, there'll be kind of an opt-in at the top of the page there. Or if they want more specific information, they can just go to FlexDiet.com, F-L-E-X-D-I-E-T.com. And if they're not driving and they've got a cell phone, they can also text the number 44222 and then just type in the word keto ebook. So four, four, two, two, two keto ebook. And then that'll put them on the wait list, the newsletter, and I'll send them a keto ebook. That's basically a flow chart and some info on should I actually do a ketogenic diet or not? Yeah, exactly. Cause that's a question people don't ask. Yeah, people ask a lot about what is the keto diet? What does it look like? How do I do it? Not should I do it? I think more people should ask these questions when they hear about exciting, sexy new plans. Like, it's great. Learn

Starting point is 01:07:36 about it. Cool. Talk to some smart people. But one of those first questions, should I just because I can doesn't mean I should. And I like that you, you, that caveat of don't text while you're driving, because I appreciate that you wholly endorse doing crazy water sports, but do not endorse texting while driving because that is a bad, that's a bad way to get your adrenaline fix, right? Oh yeah. I'm a weirdo where I'll do weird stuff on myself and to myself that I maintain control, but I'm paradoxically the direct opposite when it involves anyone else or even having anyone else in control. I will not get out of the interview behind a boat. Why? Because the

Starting point is 01:08:16 driver gets bored and they're going to try to flip me off. There's nothing I can do to try to circumvent that. But yet I'll go tie myself know, tie myself to 100 feet of line and a 17 meter kite and try to jump 20 feet in the air because if I screw up, then it's just me. Yeah, I can actually relate to that. I appreciate that. And again, bottom line, there's enough fun and exciting ways to potentially, I don't know, have an adventure, but also hurt yourself. You don't need to text and drive.

Starting point is 01:08:43 I like that. Well, Mike, thank you so much for taking the time. I always feel so lucky when I get to just kind of ask you questions and learn so much. And I just get like a sort of a masterclass every time I talk to you. So I really appreciate it. And I hope that you enjoy the rest of your summer and have some more adventures. And don't count out this bear hibernating diet thing yet because i'm gonna think about it a little bit more see what i can come up with and maybe we can chat about it because i really like the idea yeah yeah hit me back with your ideas it'd be very popular with all the canadian and minnesota folks exactly yeah all right thanks so much thank you very much. I really appreciate it.

Starting point is 01:09:30 All right. That's it. Thank you everyone as always for listening. And look, this is not medical advice, but honestly, if you take nothing else from this podcast, it's be more like bears, right? Eat fish, relax in a cave from time to time. Seems to be working out for the bears. I don't know. Make sure maybe there's no bears in the cave that you're relaxing in. Anyway, I'm getting off track. But interestingly enough, I think bears would actually be huge fans of my show sponsors because it's a meat delivery company and a raw honey company. That was a really good segue. I'm proud of that one. Okay.

Starting point is 01:09:58 Don't forget to check the show notes for this episode to get more information on the super high quality grass fed meat company butcher box and the awesome discounts that they're giving you. If you use the code maven, and my favorite healthy honey company beekeepers naturals, the discounts they're giving you if you use the code muscle maven. So go to our show notes, all that information's there. And join me next week for my favorite type of conversation ever. It's basically called well, I'm calling it a lady bro out because I'm talking about some pretty intense gym bro topics around bodybuilding and drugs and training and coming back after an injury, all that stuff with a very successful type A human being.

Starting point is 01:10:40 Her name's Kristen Rowell. She's a professional bodybuilder and a marathon runner. And up until a couple of weeks ago, she launched her own company. But before that, she was a litigation lawyer. So talk about type A. But it's interesting because she's basically doing what most people say you can't do, which is train simultaneously for endurance and basically body composition or muscle building sports. So pretty badass. Very interested in having that conversation with her. So join me next week. And as always, say hi and let me know what you think of the show on Instagram. Reach out to me at The Muscle Maven.

Starting point is 01:11:19 And that's it. Have a great week, everybody.

Barbell Shrugged - Hibernating bears may be on to something: why better sleep and fasting may improve your health, with Dr. Mike T Nelson — Muscle Maven Radio Episode #26

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