Barbell Shrugged - [Inflammation] The Surprising Link Between Nutrition, Muscle, and Inflammation w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash and Dan Garner Barbell Shrugged #635

Episode Date: March 30, 2022

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged:   What is inflammation why does your body have it How inflammation can improve performance The difference between Good and Bad inflammation Proper ways to reduce inflammation What is Chronic vs. Acute Inflammation   Connect with our guests:   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram   Coach Travis Mash on Instagram   Dan Garner on Instagram   ————————————————   Diesel Dad Mentorship Application: https://bit.ly/DDMentorshipApp   Diesel Dad Training Programs: http://barbellshrugged.com/dieseldad   Please Support Our Sponsors   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   BiOptimizers Probitotics - Save 10% at bioptimizers.com/shrugged   Garage Gym Equipment and Accessories: https://prxperformance.com/discount/BBS5OFF Save 5% using the coupon code “BBS5OFF”

Shrugged family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we are talking about the surprising link between nutrition, muscle, and inflammation. We're going to be digging into what inflammation actually is and why your body naturally has it, how it can improve performance, the difference between good and bad inflammation, proper ways to reduce inflammation, and chronic versus acute inflammation. Dan Garner, the dude smashes. And we're super grateful that we get to have him on the show. Go over all of this fun stuff. These deep, complex conversations that the man just happens to make so easy.

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And how much more rested you feel when you wake up. For an exclusive offer for Barbell Shrug listeners, go to magbreakthrough.com forward slash shrug and use the code shrugged during checkout to save 10% and get free shipping. That's magbreakthrough, M-A-G-B-R-E-A-K-T-H-R-O-U-G-H.com forward slash shrug, magbreakthrough.com forward slash shrug for free shipping and to save 10%. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Warner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Dan Garner back in the house, buddy.

This is so exciting. We're going to talk about inflammation today. I feel like if there's a single word that has been used in more marketing campaigns than anything else in the history of fitness and nutrition, it's the word inflammation, which means there's endless confusion and a whole lot of people that kind of know what they're talking about. And we're going to set the record straight today. So let's kick it off. What is inflammation? All right. Talk about what is inflammation. First off, in terms of marketing campaigns, detox says, hold my beer. It may have been in more marketing campaigns.

That's true. I totally forgot about the detox. Detox is all over the place. But in terms of... Yeah. After you're cleanseded then you worry about your uh your inflammation yeah i usually put stress in that category too anytime i've ever met the doctor he's like oh i don't know could be stress i feel like that's doctor code for i don't really want to look into it and i have no idea what's going on good luck yeah i've got 15 minutes on my calendar for you and we're at minute 14. So stress. Yeah. You should reduce it. Okay, cool. You'll feel something. We'll see. Right.

What is inflammation? Inflammation. Inflammation is basically, I mean, it comes from a hormesis that that's really how we'll explain it because inflammation depending on how deep you want to go it can get real real deep and very very complicated because it's a product of the immune system and we talked about the immune system on last week's podcast and we know how big of a world that is and inflammation is just a part of that world so there's a lot of chemicals going on there's a lot of that world. So there's a lot of chemicals going on. There's a lot of different cytokines. There's a lot of different contexts that could bring up different areas in which inflammation can present itself, whether positive or negative. But I think a good way to

start off is really just with the concept of hormesis. Hormesis is something I'm sure all you guys are totally familiar with. So this would just be review for you. But for anybody unfamiliar in the audience, hormesis is basically a stressor that when in the right dose can be beneficial for physiology. Because for lack of a better phrase, it keeps physiology on its toes. It is a stressor that you can handle. But because you can handle that stressor, you became a stronger individual. So when it comes to inflammation, I like to think about it like a forest fire, because there's two types of inflammation, acute and chronic. And when you think about it like a forest fire, if the four of us were going to go camping, a campfire would be an awesome thing to have because a campfire

provides light, it provides heat, and we can also cook stuff with it. That's great. It only becomes a problem when that campfire turns into a forest fire. Then we've got a whole lot of issues because we've burned down the forest, we're killing the environment, we're creating pollution, we're doing a lot of bad things, right? That's the difference between acute inflammation and chronic inflammation. Acute is actually desirable. It creates a state of hormesis where depending on what the stressor was, you'll get that desired adaptation. But chronic inflammation is what really runs people down. It leads to a lot of different areas of chronic disease and massive implications in terms of being detrimental towards strength, fat loss, weight gain,

all of these things. And beyond this, I also think that there's a new category that I'd like to get into is basically suppressing inflammation too much. Because that acute inflammation, we actually want. The chronic inflammation, we don't. But where people make the mistake is they think any inflammation is chronic inflammation.

And that's a massive mistake. So they take many things to suppress inflammation. And that in turn hurts their total performance, their muscle gain, their fat loss, a lot of these things. So we can absolutely get into that stuff and injury repair too, if you guys want to here. Yeah, I'd love to start off with the health thing. Like anytime I ever see somebody that is carrying excess body fat i really i almost just look at their entire life it's like this is just your your whole life is inflamed you're you're all of the extra anything outside of just your lean body is some chronic inflammatory response that you're just storing all this excess body fat. And that's kind of like step one to getting you healthy. Like just get rid of all the extra crap, which is also why, uh, I feel really good when I tell people, Hey, in the first

like 10 weeks, we're going to, we're going to lose, or in the first like two weeks, we'll lose like right about 10 pounds because I know we can just reduce lose, or in the first like two weeks, we'll lose like right about 10 pounds because I know we can just reduce all the inflammation in their body so much by just getting them eating healthier, cleaner foods, like timing it so their body gets out of that like survival mode state, just getting things moving in the right direction. And all of a sudden, their body just immediately drops 10 pounds in two weeks. And they don't realize you're just playing like the inflammation game. How does body fat really play into all of it? So there's a little bit of science behind this like thought and really like the real life piece where you go, yeah, in two weeks, we'll lose 10 pounds and they do it automatically.

Yeah, for sure. So when it comes to inflammation and health, it's like this weird cycle because a lot of people come to us pro-inflamed because they've gotten overweight by being highly stressed and eating a lot of processed foods. But a way in which a lot of people deal with their stress is through drugs and alcohol and not really exercising much. So like through being lazy, through relying on drugs and alcohol, through eating processed foods, and through having a lot of stress in life, we just simply live in a very pro-inflammatory world. So reversing those things is honestly number one.

Like you could talk about a lot of fancy supplementation, different green tea, catechins, different ways to affect TNF alpha. There's a lot of very cool, fancy things to talk about. But honestly, getting leaner is number one, without a doubt. Optimizing sleep is there. Managing stress is there. And when you go towards managing inflammation, one of the biggest things that you're going to get with respect to fat loss is an improvement in insulin sensitivity. So when somebody comes around and they are highly inflamed, their ability to regulate blood sugar is very poor. And that inability to regulate blood sugar inhibits, not inhibits, but dampens their ability to burn fat effectively because A, the fat cells become harder to mobilize. B, their joints are in

pain because when you're highly inflamed, your joints are in pain and therefore your exercise, the ability to burn calories is decreased just simply due to being in pain. But then also C, your hormones are in the trash as well because things like testosterone are way lower than they otherwise would be. But managing inflammation improves blood sugar control. And we actually talked about that a little bit on the immune system podcast as well. There are certain inflammatory markers that dysregulate blood sugar, but that'll absolutely lead to weight gain as well.

But where people get this like kind of mixed up is there is actually a study done in 2006. And what it found was that people who have slightly low vitamin C status, if you replete vitamin C, you actually get four times the amount of fat loss. It is a study that almost nobody talks about, but I found it fascinating. And the mechanism at play is that vitamin C is actually playing a big role in carnitine synthesis. Carnitine is an amino acid that helps grab fatty acids and bring them to the mitochondria of the muscle cell to be burned. So without carnitine, we don't have a vehicle to bring fatty acids to the muscle cell to be burned. Vitamin C is required to make carnitine. And

since carnitine grabs fatty acids to bring them to the mitochondria, vitamin C is an important part of fat loss. So then people see that and they think, you know, vitamin C is the answer to fat loss. And that's going to be the answer to, I guess, getting an excellent body and improving health. But when you treat one study as God, or you don't look at additional research, because that in a nutshell sounds like the answer. And to go back to the beginning of the podcast, it's very marketable. With that study, the four of us can make a vitamin C product and say that you're going to get four times the amount of fat loss than you otherwise would have got. Clin I can clinically researched.

Yeah. Clinically researched, right? This is demonstrated. We can all put on white lab coats too. We'd be unstoppable. Galvin's got a couple for us. Galvin can send them. Before we get too far, you know, you, you talked about stress, but you know, what about fatigue management? I feel like, you know, there's lots of strategic ways to monitor fatigue as well, which would, you know, obviously fatigue leads to stress. So they're kind of obviously related. So what are your thoughts about that as well? For sure. I mean, fatigue management's key on like, that's kind of in the bucket of

total stress load. Because if you're not incorporating recovery days, active recovery, complete off days, deloads, proper periodization, these are all things that have to be in there because they're going to regulate inflammation too. Because if you don't do that, to go back to the beginning of the podcast, I said there's two types of inflammation, acute and chronic. Well, acute is your weight lifting. That's something that's going to create a positive hormetic response. But if you never take an off week and you don't periodize. It's chronic.

Exactly. That acute inflammation becomes chronic inflammation. And then you end up not getting the results that you were expecting because you're just simply beating yourself into the mud. Shrug family, some very cool news coming out of Walmart. You didn't expect to hear that, I bet. Ageless Male Protein was selected as one of the very few products in the entire performance nutrition category. So the entire shelf with all of the supplements, Ageless Male Protein, the zone, the pump, and the shred were chosen to have rollback pricing to begin the new year. What that means is Walmart pretty much never does sales, but they do these things called rollbacks and they select a very,

very few products in each category. Pretty much the ones that they think are going to absolutely crush in the new year and the hot time. And they chose us, which is super, super cool. So 2200 stores, Walmart nationwide, the Walmart near me, I don't have it. And that's annoying. That means it's a whack Walmart, but the Walmart near you probably hasn't because we're in over half of them. So you can get over, get to the performance nutrition section in the pharmacy, ageistmail, pro T zone, pump and shred. Make sure you get over there. to the performance nutrition section in the pharmacy, Aegis Mail, Pro-T, Zone, Pump, and Shred. Make sure you get over there.

Look for MyFace on the box. Pick up some supplements and get your new year kick-started, right? Friends, I'm so stoked. We have rollback pricing. Whoever knew that that was going to be a thing at Barbell Shrug? I think one thing that coaches mess up is they don't track. So they literally don't – they have no idea. So if you say, you know, Joe so-and-so, you know, he's looking wrecked.

You know, you do his blood work. He's out of health. He's inflamed. And then you're like, well, you know, is his volume high? The dude would be like, I don't know. So I just – my little two cents would be, like, make sure that you track, especially if you're an athlete, any athlete listening, would be like, I don't know. So I just, my little two cents would be like, make sure that you, you know, you track, especially if you're an athlete, any athlete listening, or really anyone, you should track what you're doing.

So if you're going to work out, know what you're doing, because if you feel beat up, you should see, you know, figure out why. That's all I'm saying. For sure. And track your blood work too, because a lot of, if you don't have high C-reactive protein, if you don't have high IL-6, if you don't have high 8-hydroxy 2-deoxyguanosine, then stop taking so many anti-inflammatories. You don't need a million greens drinks a day, a massive amount of vitamin C and E, tons. You don't need these things

if you're not inflamed. And if you're not that inflamed and you're still trying to suppress it, that's when actually you can reduce health benefits. So like we've talked about health and inflammation so far, 400 IU of vitamin E in combination, and it was alpha to cough for all version of vitamin E in combination with one gram of vitamin C suppressed health benefits from exercise. So normally, we always talk about muscle growth and strength and anaerobic aerobic capacity, things like this, but vitamin E and vitamin C were demonstrated to do two things. Number one, increase insulin resistance. So it actually created a state of

insulin resistance post-workout. And number two, it offsets something known as mitohormesis. So I'm kind of glad I talked about hormesis already because the mitochondria are basically your energy powerhouse within the cell. And when you do a conditioning workout or a strength workout, what you're doing is beating up those mitochondria to create a hormetic response. Now, when you took antioxidants, it actually blunted mitohormesis. So the mitochondria no longer adapted to the training. So you had a reduced aerobic and anaerobic adaptations. But even worse from a health perspective, the mitochondria, they didn't have a hormetic response to be able to better deal with something known as reactive oxygen species in the future.

So you are basically taking your own body's ability to deal with inflammation away from you. Because when you drop in an anti-inflammatory, you're doing the work for your body. So your body has no need to adapt. So aerobic, anaerobic, insulin resistance, and your ability for via mitohormesis to fight reactive oxygen species on your own, that was all nullified by vitamin C and vitamin E, something that people pound on a daily basis. What about things like ibuprofen? Every time I hear about ibuprofen, I hear that. I hear a post up today about this. Yeah, ibuprofen is another really big one. So ibuprofen, that's been connected to reducing protein synthesis,

muscle strength, muscle growth, but even preventing the rate at which you repair from injury as well. So a lot of people don't take ibuprofen to deal with muscle soreness. But I'm just like, dude, buck up. Like, what are you doing? It just deal with the muscle soreness. That's a part of the pro inflammatory response. It's all purpose. You're in the gym. You don't need to take ibuprofen post-workout. I mean, at least in my opinion. I agree. Does that blunt hypertrophy to a measurable degree? It blunts hypertrophy and strength and anaerobic and aerobic adaptations.

It does all of those. And it also creates states of endotoxemia. Endotoxemia is something where a bacteria known as lipopolysaccharides, it's in the gut, it will actually leak into circulation in states of endotoxemia. So the endo is basically in us, toxemia is a toxic thing within us going to a place that it shouldn't be. So basically you have a bacteria in the gut now in the bloodstream creating an extremely pro-inflammatory response. Ibuprofen actually accelerates this. So then you end up in this weird cycle where ibuprofen is damaging your gut, which is causing high levels of inflammation.

But since you're highly inflamed, you want to keep taking more ibuprofen. And then you're absolutely trapped in this circle. And that will run you down over time and really wreck your health and your performance as well. So is this breaking down the gut lining? Yes, yes, yes. Yeah, it absolutely is. It's creating something, you know, long story short, called leaky gut. That's what most people know it as. Hurts as leaky gut.

Acetaminophen has been demonstrated to do the same thing. So, ibuprofen and acetaminophen have been demonstrated to blunt, hypertrophic, and strength responses as well. So, I'm no longer taking Sudafed. No. This is things like- What about my seasonal allergies? Well- What about my runny nose? runny nose? What about your gains? I don't know what I'm supposed to do now. Acetaminophen was a part of that, like lumped into the same category there. Yes. Yeah. Acetaminophen and ibuprofen have both been demonstrated to reduce muscle and strength

hybrid as well, which is why I like managing inflammation via other means. And a lot of times it can be managed if you simply do your labs. If you just kind of like, ah, I feel inflamed, ah, my joints hurt, you know, like you don't really know where that inflammation is coming from. Like I said, a mouthful of a word previously called 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine. This is a very reliable urinary marker for inflammation, and it measures DNA damage. And it's been demonstrated to increase in response to resistance training. So it's an awesome, very sensitive marker. You have to order it separately, but I do order it for all my guys, because it's a very sensitive marker for DNA oxidative damage in response to training. And since it's damaging DNA, you ever seen an athlete

who looks like they're weathered, like they've been in bad weather for like the last 10 years, their face looks like leather. That's what DNA oxidative damage looks like. That's what booze looks like. Yeah. Well, yeah, that's a damage in a lot of different areas. But the 8-hydroxy 2-deoxyguanosine will go up in response to DNA oxidative damage. But a very cool thing is a lot of people don't know creatine has an anti-inflammatory effect on that specific marker without interrupting adaptations so that's like one of the most unique things i've ever seen in literature with respect to inflammation is creatine has that anti-inflammatory effect to reduce dna oxidative damage without

impacting adaptations so that's just a cool thing that i think another reason on the long list of reasons why i think pretty much everybody should be on creatine, regardless of what your current goal is. How does eating a bunch of processed foods, soybean oils, omega-6, et cetera, play into all this? So when you're eating a bunch of processed foods, your fat cells are made up of a phospholipid bilayer. So you basically, your cells, every cell in your body is surrounded by fat. And when you have a triglyceride, triglyceride, tri is three fatty acids, glyceride is the backbone. So molecularly speaking, you're putting three fatty acids onto a backbone of glycerol. But these three fatty acids can be any fatty acid. So it could

be all three of them are omega-3, and that's fantastic. Or all three of them could be trans fat, and that'd be really bad. Or it could be two trans fats and one omega-3. It doesn't really matter. A glycerol will attach to any three fatty acids. If you have a high amount of saturated fat or trans fats, for example, this creates a very rigid membrane of the cell. So the cell membrane becomes very hard and that's what creates things such as insulin resistance.

But if you have a cell that's very permeable, say perhaps from monounsaturated fats found in olive oil or omega-3 fats, then permeability is what leads to states of insulin sensitivity. So the fats you take in from your diet and or coming from processed foods, they play a role in inflammation because they literally change the structure at which you're built. You are what you eat in this sense. Your body is going to build you based upon what you put into it because the raw materials you consume are going to go somewhere. And if you eat shit, well, then you'll look like shit. But if you eat good stuff, then your body is going to be built of the good stuff and it's going to have a better health and performance. So that is basically from a structural perspective of how we drive up

inflammation. But the solving that is like the obvious answer of building up what you want to be built up of. You know, like that, I always say that to athletes, like you wouldn't put junk, you wouldn't put regular gas in a high performance car. The same is true for your body. You don't want to put junk food if you want to act like a high performance car. Everything should be dialed in if you care about getting every last ounce of performance and recovery and health out of your life. Yeah. And those two things have to be related, right? We have to be healthy. Then we can use the inflammation and start to chase performance for building bigger muscles, whatever kind of the goal is. But like, how do we, how do we shift inflammation from a health factor into now thinking about

performance? So it's basically the same thing. Because from a health perspective, we learned in this podcast that we do actually want some inflammation that creates the hormesis for the mitochondria, the hormesis for the gut, the hormesis for our ability to fight off inflammatory compounds and reactive oxygen species all by ourself. That's all health-based. But when we're talking about bridging it to performance and recovery, it's the same thing because you want inflammation to be relatively stagnant and you want your training to create a massive signal in the noise.

So everybody listening right now, just imagine a straight line and then a massive line going upwards and then it going all the way back down to baseline. That is really what we want. We want just a normal amount of inflammation throughout the day and then a major spike and then return back down to normal after training so we can create a signal in the noise. That low level, that low level, manageable level of inflammation throughout the day is what's going to drive health. That signal in the noise that we can create from inflammation is what's going to drive our exercise adaptations. And if we suppress the signal, well, then we lose our adaptations.

But if we also have chronically high inflammation, then it's something known as anabolic resistance. Our acute signal gets lost in the noise of chronically high inflammation because your body doesn't know chronic high inflammation from the acute signal response. So when it taught, when it's from the perspective of inflammation, should we do it to be healthy or should we do it to perform? It is the exact same thing. Inflammation is

something that should be managed and not suppressed. It just opened up so many questions. When you say there should be a low level of stress and then one big bump in it, is that a more optimal solution than say smaller? If you were to train, if you were to go do like a super set at 8am, noon, 4 and 6pm. So your training sessions are like broken out throughout the day. Is that less optimal than having one big training session as the only piece of your day because you're going to have those higher jumps? Does that make sense? Yeah, it does make sense. I think that probably metabolically, it would even out to be the same thing, but that would also be very dependent upon the context of

the athlete. If the athlete had time to train twice per day and you could incorporate a routine that fell within their maximum recoverable volume, then I think that that could absolutely be beneficial because you would be creating protein synthesis twice per day rather than just once per day. But in a lot of cases, I think that once per day is just fine. I don't think that, um, I was purely a selfish question because I have, uh, recently like the way that life just works out, I have smaller gaps to train. But those smaller gaps are slightly more frequent. Like I have 20 minutes between a call, I can't really start something new. But I can definitely go squat two and a quarter for a

couple sets of 10 and do some push ups. So filling those gaps with like, some sort of training stimulus works out pretty well with the schedule but i definitely don't have like 60 90 minute blocks that show up uh very frequently to be able to go get like a massive training session in um those imam aesthetics yeah just hit some little little pieces hit some little chunks and stay after it for sure i think i think a large uh determinant if that was going to be successful or not is your ability to actually still initiate hormesis so for example uh i like if i could perform 20 chin-ups in a row and that would create a lot of hormetic response a lot of stress if that was

my 20 rm to do 20 chin-ups in a row but if i did one chin up um you know every 30 minutes it's unlikely to create any form of stress because it's so light volume so i think if you to kind of almost change the question provided you could create a progressive overload in the small pocket of time that you have, then yes, that could be an excellent methodology. But to equate that throughout the entire day, I just don't think it's metabolically demanding enough to create a signal in the noise you need to really disrupt the body. To be clear, you would get some neuromuscular gains. You would get better at the movement, but no hypertrophic gains would take place. Yeah.

What about athletes that, I mean, this is every professional athlete. Like a hockey player spends the whole day on ice, except for they're just out there playing sticks and pucks and shooting at posts and practicing drills even though the intensity is relatively low um but they're they're out there moving they're practicing they're doing doing kind of like the the dumb work throughout the whole day um does that affect any of this because there just is like a higher level of basic movement happening throughout the day? That's higher level relative to us and not them. So somebody who's horrible at dancing is going to burn way more calories and be way more sore from an eight hour

dance class than somebody who's amazing at dancing. The person who's amazing is actually going to look better, be more explosive, have better lines, better coordination, everything. But because they're so neuromuscularly efficient in those movement patterns, they don't generate the same level of inflammation or fatigue from those movement patterns. So an NHL player being on the ice all day long is like me sitting on my computer and reading research all day long. It's a part of our job. It's what we do. It goes back to what Mash said. You become incredibly energy efficient in these patterns. So because you're so efficient, you don't create inflammation like you used to, and something would need to be done in an intense way

to create a signal in the noise. So even if they're on the ice for eight hours a day, it's the one hour where they're- Going hard. They're either in the gym or they're having a hard practice or they're working on systems or whatever it is that- Inducing progressive overload.

Yes. Whatever the goal is. Gotcha. Yeah, you get like guys like you know like ryan who's so good at weightlifting like an 80 clean you know it probably won't do anything as far as like yeah i actually match how do you how do you do that because to be able to get their work while their their volume to a place to actually create change dude a guy like ryan is like just crushing weights to be able to keep him healthy is when he's under that much speed and load every single day is really hard

dude when you get a guy like him who's i've never had anybody that good that like he is is like to the point where we're getting him with dan and andy to uh get their blood work dialed perfectly and so to to find that one little bitty thing that might help and so yeah because we have you should see the training volume that a guy like you know like kim or like harrison morris or kate nye yeah what they have to undergo is for most people understand so makes you so sick. Yeah, I feel like I was relatively strong. And every time back squats started with a number four, and I was like, fuck, this is so heavy. It's such a brutal day to be able to go and lift that.

But those guys are, it's like 500. Every day. Every day. Just to be able to get some sort of gain out of out of the the effort as well strategy so important for coach like me to like you know to give them proper rest you still got you still have to find new times to give them a deload to hopefully you know get the bounce back so yeah how do you actually i know your whole phd's on athlete monitoring how do you manage the rest side of that um so that you're not just i mean it's it's like the dumbest but easiest way to go about it's

like well every day we have to squat 500 now just because that's the number like no definitely not a better way you know like we his program changes on the daily like It is written until the Olympics, but it is a daily. They do a questionnaire when he comes in. We do the sleep. He's got a whoop, so I get real specific on deep and REN and all that. But then we look at overall.

I ask them stress outside of the gym, like on a scale from one to five, five being terrible. I asked them, you know, anxiety, you know, outside of the gym. I want to, you know, we, I program based on what I'm doing to him. And most people don't take into account that, like, especially nowadays, here's, this goes right along with what we're talking about. Like, because kids are on social media, and the blue lights, things are totally different, so the amount of stress that they can take nowadays might be less than when I was there, because I would have gone to bed, you know, and when I did go to bed, even if I went to bed at the same time as them, because, you know, I didn't have a blue light in my eye up until the last second. My efficiency was much better.

Gosh, I just heard last night too, a kid, a 12-year-old, killed himself from bullying. I make that point just to say you've got to track all that. I track what stress are you getting from outside. Then we look at the – every day I look at an RSI score. So they do the jump mat test from 45 centimeters. And, you know, we use velocity, of course. Shout out to Mwear.

But we use – Code MASH. MASH 5. MASH 5. So we use velocity on every single exercise he does. And I really look at the 85% marker because I'm not afraid to go up to 85%, even in a fatigued state. But like when I see the 85% is a good 10% slower than normal,

we'll stop the whole session at that moment and flip the script, no matter what I have written. So, yeah. Yo, if you do a super high volume day and you're sore for like five days how does that affect your inflammation markers for that week and or your ability to recover on other movements etc right so more more acute markers like c-reactive protein and il-6 will be high during that time frame so they'll really come up so if you get you know a lab result back and those come back

high and you just did a brutal squat workout, whatever it is, you don't have to panic and think that you're like in some chronic disease state and that things are horrible because they're likely just high in response to that. Something like creatinine, um, which is reflective of muscle protein breakdown, that'll also be high. So some of these markers, it's important that the, the coach and the athlete know what happened leading up to the lab test in order to actually gain proper inferences from it. But one big thing that's relevant to damage, inflammation, and insulin sensitivity, because we've talked about it quite a bit on this podcast, is that eccentric contractions create a lot of muscular damage.

And muscular damage more than once in the literature has been demonstrated to reduce your rate of glycogen replenishment. And that's why I'm very big on post-workout carbohydrates, um, being your biggest, highest carb meal of the day, regardless of when you train. So I don't care if it's the morning, I don't care if it's your highest carb meal of the day is immediately post-training. And why? Because that's when insulin sensitivity is at its highest. Certain chemical pathways such as glucose transporter 4 are active. You can imagine a muscle cell just like a circle, and then glucose transporter 4 is inside the circle, but then migrates to the lining of the circle in order to open a doorway to allow glucose in so that can be effectively stored in lean tissue as glycogen as opposed to remaining in circulation creating

issues. Glut4 is activated through muscle contraction. So that is activated to get glucose into the cell. Beyond this, our own endogenous glycogen depletion increases insulin sensitivity. The very fact that we burn carbs means that there is an open parking lot for new carbs to go in there to be stored as lean tissue as well. So through GLUT4 translocation and combination with endogenous depletion, we have a massive opportunity to store carbohydrates in the form of lean tissue post-workout. However, what we've seen from muscle damage and eccentric research is that this window slowly decreases after about six hours or so, because that six-hour window, we've got a lot of capability for glycogen replenishment, but as insulin sensitivity goes down, muscle damage and delayed onset muscle soreness begin to go up

as that six hour mark and point reaches that six hour point reaches and then goes onward. And that has been associated with insulin resistance. So when somebody is like, let's put let's say you did a major squat workout today. And then you wake up tomorrow morning and your legs are trashed. You're walking like the tin man. You're like, oh my God, dude, I'm going to have some more carbs today to help with recovery. So in my mind, you missed it because that was yesterday. You missed the boat. Your carbs, you still help, still have them for sure. But your majority of intake should have been within the six hours post-workout because if you feel sore and wrecked right now, your rate of replenishment is dramatically reduced because of the amount of inflammation in that localized area. And you know, doesn't glute for inhibit

insulin because, um, cause insulin like, you know, makes the cells permeable all throughout the body and the muscles need it the most. And so, or am I mistaken? Definitely not my expertise. Yeah. I'm actually unfamiliar with the answer to that question as well. But the only thing I can tell you is that GLUT4 does not require insulin in order to uptake glucose. So that does make mechanistic sense that it doesn't require insulin. So isn't that a rationale for diabetics to do strength training? Yes, that is the rationale. Yeah, that is. So yeah, basically GLUT2 receptors are constantly on because organs need glucose no matter what.

So those are always on. They'll always accept glucose. GLUT4 is more picky, but the largest warehouse for us to store glucose in our body is in our muscles. That's the largest warehouse. So when you activate GLUT4, you dispose of

circulating glucose, which is why type 2 diabetics see huge improvements from doing resistance training. Right. Not on the inflammation front necessarily, but relevant to what you just said. I saw a study a while back. It was showing that as far as glycogen replenishment goes, it showed three different groups. It was post-workout within two hours of training. There was three groups. One of them was, I'm making up numbers here, but say it was 50 grams of carbs in the post-workout shake.

One of them was 50 grams, sorry, 70 grams of carbs in my post-workout shake. So kind of like a low group and a high group of carbs. And then another one was like 40 grams of carbs plus 30 grams of protein. So it was, it was, it was the same amount of calories as the high carb group, but it was a mixture of carbs and protein and the carb protein group had better glycogen replacement, regardless of slightly less carbohydrates than the high carb group. And they did better on glycogen replacement. Do you, in your mind have a, any rationale or mechanism for why that would be the case? Yeah, yeah, dairy protein stimulates insulin. So that would absolutely there would be a higher insulin concentration and half life because dairy

was included. So there's basically two things we kind of we got into it a little bit a few weeks back in our carbohydrate tolerance podcast. But we have the glycemic index and we have the insulin index. The glycemic index is simply a measure of how fast a food takes in order to achieve concentration within the bloodstream. Whereas the insulin index is what foods create an increase in insulin. So for example, beef has as big of an insulin secretion as oatmeal, even though beef contains zero carbohydrates. So you do not need to have carbs in the meal in order to secrete insulin. Wild game, many wild game create major increases in insulin, even though they contain no carbs. And some of the highest peak insulin concentrations you'll ever see are in the dairy world and specifically from whey. So the

very fact that whey carried the insulin punch and then so did the carbohydrates and the carbohydrates were there, that's why that more effective repletion would have taken place. And then since post-workout carbohydrates, they are anti-inflammatory and at some level, is there a difference there as far as the anti-inflammatory effects post some level is is there a difference there as far as the anti-inflammatory effects post-workout of having high carb versus high carb and high protein i think that uh there would be anti-inflammatory to the extent that they reduce cortisol post workout but not anti-inflammatory yeah not not anti-inflammatory to the extent that they would ever impact adaptations so i think that i i think that, what was your question though?

Like anti-inflammatory or sorry, sorry, what was the question? It's just all together actually. I was saying that I know post-workout, there's some anti-inflammatory benefits of having carbohydrates post-workout, mostly with respect to cortisol. I was wondering if that's purely mediated by carbohydrate or since we just talked about having carbs plus protein, had a different effect than just carbs. I was wondering if that might have a different effect

for inflammation also. Gotcha. Whey protein is anti-inflammatory as well. Whey protein has been demonstrated to act as a precursor for glutathione synthesis. So whey protein by itself can help mediate, or I should say manage inflammation through glutathione. And then carbohydrates can help reduce inflammation through reducing cortisol, but neither of which inhibiting adaptations. It's more really, really heavy hitters in the form of say vitamin C, vitamin E e blueberries have been demonstrated to reduce adaptations things like juice concentrates these have been demonstrated to reduce concentration inflammation and adaptations but yeah in terms of whey and carbohydrate never going to impact adaptations really just going to enhance them okay um so you said you said glutathione you said

vitamin c vitamin you said blueberries. I think about, when I think about those four things, I think antioxidant. Like that's where my mind goes. And there's a, there's a strong relationship between antioxidants and inflammation. What, what, what is the relationship there? Antioxidants quench free radicals. Like when, when we talked previously about reactive oxygen species, what antioxidants do, they don't kill inflammation. What they do is neutralize it by molecularly changing it. So that antioxidant will molecularly change a reactive oxygen species to neutralize it.

And that's actually what's been found in a lot of research is, and it's very cool that a lot of fruits and vegetables don't actually contain a lot of antioxidants. What they do is create a hormetic effect on our own ability to produce antioxidants. And that's how we get that antioxidant effect. So that's the relationship that's happening there. And that relationship is very important. I'm never saying that vitamin C, E, fruits, vegetables, none of these things are ever bad for us. I just think for the purpose of maximizing performance and adaptations, they do not belong pre, during, or post-workout. In my world, I would want them to be gone further than 90 minutes post-workout because according to

physiological data, it seems as though the DNA pathways for maximizing things such as mTOR and protein synthesis, those tend to take about 90 minutes to truly see themselves through. Whereas if we had a lot of antioxidants or anti-inflammatories during that time, we would suppress those DNA pathways. So I want people to have all of these healthy things. I just don't want them to have it within 90 minutes post-workout. Can you repeat those things one more time, the 90 minutes post-workout to refrain from? So we do not want to have a lot of fruits, a lot of vegetables, vitamin C or vitamin E in that post-workout window because those are going to reduce our ability to create muscular protein synthesis and the proper hormesis that we were having from exercise. So continue to have those

things, just not 90 minutes post-workout. So every single mom that brings oranges to the soccer game for halftime is doing it wrong. Don't do it. Damn you. So like when you say carbs, in what in what form you know what would be a good carb to take post-workout then white rice white rice white rice is like whatever the bodybuilders have been doing for like the last 80 years just do they do they've done it all already let me throw this one literally go back and watch pumping iron and go do that i'm gonna eat so much sushi charles pulkin have you guys ever heard of the cornflakes diet no i haven't you're like post-workout basically that one one time when i was yeah yeah yeah so you take like

almost like a half a box of cornflakes put them in a blender and you put grape juice and then proteins post-workout to like you know but but you're saying like you know what i mean well grape juice is i mean what it who even knows what's in there is there any you know yeah well i got it i got it i got a theoretical theoretical mechanism maybe grape juice is the strongest concentration of chromium in the diet and chromium is required for glucose disposal. So maybe if that was, if that was a polyquin thing, maybe that's the kind of justification he had.

The only thing I would want to double check up on is the, that amount of fructose taken post-workout. So fructose, it is excellent to, um to enhance uptake of glycogen. And what I mean by that is there's actually awesome research on extracting glucose from the small intestine. And it happens at a rate of about one gram per minute or 60 grams per hour. And that was thought to be 100% truth. It's a sodium-dependent glucose pathway one. And that was what it takes to get

out of the intestine and into our circulation to support recovery. One gram per minute, 60 grams per hour. And then researchers thought, hey, what if we throw some fructose in this thing? And they got it all the way up to 75 grams per hour. And what was found was that fructose, instead of sodium-glucose-dependent transporter one, that fructose, instead of sodium glucose-dependent transporter one, that fructose uses glucose transporter five. So you can take in more carbohydrates at once. And since they take different pathways, you are able to get a faster rate of glycogen replenishment.

So fructose added 15 grams of extra replenishment per hour than glucose alone. But when somebody does cornflakes plus grapefruit juice or grape juice, it's probably exceeding that additional 15 grams, which is what was kind of the whole point. So I'd probably have normal like white rice or something like that, or retardo, you know, pentacarb, these are all good sources, branch cyclic dextrin, and then, then maybe a little grape juice on top of that. So long as it didn't have a high concentration of antioxidants, which a lot of processed juice don't anyway.

Well, a lot of these, you know, a lot of his athletes were, you know, on other things too. So like, yeah, for them might not work for everyone else. So yeah, exactly. So yeah, that, that kind of throws a wrench in most things that i say here especially also if you take insulin post-workout then none of this stuff matters is glute five muscle contraction mediated as well no no it's not that's that's that's a transporter for for fructose mainly for liver glycogen replenishment. My boy knows his chemistry. Yes.

Where can people find you, dude? At Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram. Let's go. Travis Mash! Mashlead.com or at Mashlead Performance on Instagram so people can stop hating on inflammation as a whole.

That's right. You want that campfire. It's good and bad. Doug Larson. Yep. Mine is Graham. Doug Larson. Yeah. Hey, bros.

This is, it took us four shows, but we got there. This thing freaking rolled today. Yeah. I love that. That felt good. Yeah. That was solid. Yeah.

Oh, you posted the first podcast. Oh, good. Yeah, dude. That was solid. Yeah. Oh, you posted the first podcast. Oh, no, no, no. Just getting your PhD worked in here. Oh, yeah, yeah. How you're using all this stuff with your team. Yeah. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We're Barbell Shrugged.

Barbell underscore shrugged. Make sure you get over to Diesel Dad Mentorship where all the busy dads are getting strong, lean, and athletic. And get over to your local Walmart. 2,200 stores nationwide. Ageless Male Pro-T. If you don't see my face on the box, that's because you're in the whack Walmart. You need to go to the cool one right next door

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