Barbell Shrugged - Metabolic Flexibility, Insulin Sensitivity, Macros & Ketosis w/ Dr. Mike Nelson

Episode Date: August 24, 2016

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This week on Barbell Shrug, we interview Dr. Mike Nelson. We talk about metabolic flexibility, insulin sensitivity, and the ketogenic diet. Hey, this is Rich Froning. You're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to barbellshrugged.com. That was Kyle's microphone, by the way. Oh, he sweat all over it. Yeah, he was looking at it at one point. He thought it was candy.

Oh, sure, sure. Kyle, uh... I feel like I'm like EDM right now. Are we recording? Yup. Oh, sure, sure. Cal. I feel like I'm like EDM. Are we recording? Yep. Oh, okay. So we got to, you know, want to know what these people, what do they need to know? Everything.

What do you really need to know? Everything. What you really need to know is about to come out right now. The most important things. What's up, guys? Welcome to Barbell Shrug. I'm your host, Mike McGoldrick, here with Alex Macklin. Whoa, hey.

I turned the wrong way. Doug Larson. I'm back. He's back. Welcome back, Doug. Oh, the shit. And as always, CTP behind the camera. And our very special guest today, Dr. Mike Nelson.

We're down here at Paleo FX interviewing some fools. There's a lot of knowledge. We scooped this guy up, listened to a little bit of his panel yesterday. What was your panel on? It was on metabolic flexibility for body composition and performance. Sounds like you made that up. Cool metabolism stuff. Yeah, yeah.

Very cool. So you did a talk on that yesterday. For those of our listeners that have no idea what that is, all the listeners out there. Listeners only, right? Not you guys. Yeah. What's the gist? Not you guys. Yeah. What's the gist?

Tell us about yourself a little bit. I'll do that first. Why should they listen to you? We don't know you. I just met you. You got a cool shirt on? Yeah, I feel like your shirt sums up a lot of things. You're a science-heavy person. If I'm not mistaken, you were in college for like 25 years?

30 years? 18. 18 years. Yeah. I did a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Science and then did a Master's in Mechanical Engineering. Decided I never wanted to go back to school ever again, which lasted like two years. And then we were talking about before the show with Alex, I did about four to five years in a PhD program in biomedical. Decided I did not want to do that.

So I literally dropped out of that, went over to the exercise physiology department, and then that took like another seven years. So you know your degree and you know my degree. He did both. Yeah, right. Right on. And yours.

That's right. And he got a PhD in yours. I know. Why are we on the show? You should be doing the whole thing by yourself. That's why he's wearing a shirt. It's a science. It works, bitches.

It works, bitches. That's awesome. That's actually really funny that that happens to be the case. You did biomedical, I did actual science, and then you did engineering, and you did all three of those exact same things? Mechanical? Pretty much, yeah. Mechanical, yeah.

So it's an interesting combo of having engineering and also physiology at the same time. Because I think, at least I look at physiology quite different from more of a systems level and how everything kind of fits together and not just one little itty-bitty little tiny area that may not play so well with everything else. Yeah, that's the engineering aspect of it. Exactly. Yeah, how it all fits together and what influences each little system.

So, yeah. Yeah, I learned weightlifting from a mechanical engineer. And so all of, like, my background and, like, all my – like, my base, if you will, is very, like, mechanics, physics heavy. Like, when I was learning how to do snatches, like, he was, like, drawing graphs, like, force-time graphs on the board. Like, here's how it works. What I do is, like, push the force- graphs on the board like here's how it works what i do is like push the force time curve to the left yeah so like that that's like how i think about lifting especially weight lifting in particular it's all very heavy on the mechanics physics side and i've seen you you have some andy showed me at one point some of your biomechanics videos that

you've posted online and and like watching those i was like fuck yeah this is like a super connect for me like it's it's it's very academic but it's it's academic in the sense that um that it's it's accurate but then it also you can tell that um the application is is still um it's it's something that athletes actually can can apply to their training which right when i was in school you would learn you would learn mechanics or biomechanics but i would be like you know what this isn't really like am i ever gonna use this i'm not gonna be able to apply what you're saying unless i already know how to apply it then it makes sense but they're not teaching me how to apply and your videos were uh they made a lot of sense for someone who whether you had a background or not they could take the biomechanics you were teaching and apply it

directly to training and i think that's not something that a lot of people can do very well but you do do very well the same thing goes with nutrition like you can teach the concepts and all the yeah things behind it but how do you actually apply it yeah well thank you for that I appreciate that because it's I think having both of those backgrounds you can understand the sort of more hardcore physics type stuff and how it works but at the end of the day I want to try to make it applicable for people because unless you're studying that as a degree you don't really care that much right most people want to go to the gym okay how do i lift more how do i do it safely okay so based on physics you would want to do this then the follow-up question to that is can your tissue handle that or not so you may have

to maybe pull something back a little bit it It may not be super efficient by physics standards, but that's the max your tissue can handle right now. So you kind of have to hang out over there for a little while and then slowly walk to a more efficient form too. Doc, can I ask you, the panel that you spoke on this week was about metabolic flexibility. What brought you here to do that? So you went from these three different degrees.

How did you go from all that knowledge now here to this point and why this topic in particular? Yeah. So how I got into the topic is after I left the PhD program in biomedical, I went to exercise phys. I literally sat down for the first meeting in fall. My advisor walks in. He goes, hey, we got two new projects for you. And they both involve math.

I'm thinking, uh-oh, because I left the PhD program to get away from math. And he looks around the table and he points at me and he goes, they're on metabolic flexibility and heart rate variability. And he goes, you math boy. And he's like pointing at me. He's like, these are your new problems to figure out. What gave it away? Were you wearing the shirt? No, I didn't have the shirt.

But he knew I transferred from engineering. Oh, yeah. So, obviously, if you're engineering, you have to be really good at math. Yeah. I can't add plates together. I'm on the barbell. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, that's how I actually got interested in the topic, and that later became my PhD thesis.

Okay. So, what is metabolic flexibility? Yeah. So, the simple terminology is just to use the right fuel at the right time. So unfortunately, in the fitness world, everyone wants to be extremely polarized, one end or the other. And we had all, oh, high carbohydrates are the best thing ever. And then now it swings the other way of high fat, ketogenic. Oh, that's the best thing ever. And there's distinct benefits to both sides.

So it just depends on what you're actually doing so if we're standing here just doing you know low intensity work you actually want to be using mostly fat but if you guys go to lift and you're lifting heavy weights and doing sprints you actually want the abilities to still use carbohydrates at that point so it's neither one is good nor bad it just depends upon what you're doing so making sure that fuel matches what you're doing and then can you move back and forth between the two can you switch from using fat and then go exercise and then switch to use carbs really well once you're done switch back to using fat so it depends on you would say you're saying it depends on the

energy system that you're primarily using is that that correct? Yeah, that's correct. And that is primarily determined by the intensity of the exercise or what you're doing. So lower intensity, you want to use more fat. Much higher intensity, primarily carbohydrates. Okay. And intensity meaning like load or like how hard you're going? Yeah. How do you measure that?

Yeah, you can rate it in how hard you're going like yeah what is how do you can measure that yeah you can rate it and how hard you're going so rate of perceived exertion in the lab they'll use as a percentage of basically oxygen that you're consuming so if we hook you up to one of those machines you exhale into this tube and it looks like this little thing does all sorts of calculations by how much energy you're using or how much oxygen you're using, that'll tell you how hard the exercise is if you want to formally quantify it. The easiest way for most people listening to do that is just look at your duration. So if you can do a constant activity for hours, it's not high intensity. It can't be. But if you're doing a super high output, like a weightlifting thing,

super high power, but very short period of time time that's going to be a much higher intensity exercise so strength athletes like power lifters weight lifters who are primarily doing like singles doubles triples they would not they would you would say they do more they need more carbohydrates than fat yeah i would say in general that's true um so if you look at the systems real quick, so you have ATP, CP, which is very, very short, up to like 10 seconds. ATP is like the energy. The energy of the cells. Currency, basically. Currency of the cells, right?

So instead of money as we walk around and use, your body uses ATP. That's a good way to put it, yeah. So it's like your body's money system. Right. If you look at stuff that's a little bit longer than that, say like 10 to maybe 60 seconds, 120 seconds, that's primarily carbohydrates at that point. And then you've got a slow kind of shifting down to using fat at very long intensities. So I think of it like if people DJ or anything like that, you've got the little slider switch back and forth. You're kind of adjusting sort of that mix from the record on the left to the record on the right.

And it's never 100% left, never left never 100 right but it's pretty close and you can kind of be in the middle where you can kind of use you know half of each again it just depends on the intensity of where you're at okay and what now how to where does crossfit or like where does the typical crossfit because crossfit can be very like high intensity and also be very low intensity like aerobic training. I would say most of CrossFit, just to make an overgeneralization, is primarily carbohydrate use. It's called glycolysis. Because most of your stuff is not super short duration

unless you're doing a really specific weight training or strength protocol. Doing something like Fran. Yeah. Or going for one rep max snatch or something like that. If you're doing your standard, no kind of and wrap type sets, you're going Doing something like Fran. Yeah. Or going for one-rep max snatch or something like that. Right. But if you're doing your standard, you know, kind of and-rep type sets, you're going for, you know, 20, 30, 40, 60 seconds or more, but you're doing it as hard as you can a lot of times.

So that's primarily using carbohydrates as the main fuel during that activity. Okay. So the flexibility, the ability to go back and forth between the two, is there a way you would know if you're not good at that? Like, how would you assess yourself? Is there like, what's, what's the way that someone could monitor and say like, I'm not very good at when I go out for a long run at burning fat as a fuel source, body burn. I get it. I understand that you're supposed to do that, but how do you know if your body is flexible doing that? Yeah, that's a really good question. Thank you.

Yeah. I worked hard on that question. You thought of that question for like all day. All day. Since this morning. I've been waiting patiently for my turn. I needed the one good question. I'm about to be done.

I'm just kidding. So in the lab, you can definitely measure it. In the real world, what I use as approximate measure is what is your performance on a set lift or a set CrossFit type workout. That'll give you a rough idea of where you should be. And if you were to only use fat, you can't get to those super high intensities. So that gives you a rough marker for that. On the other end, if you're looking at how do you determine how well you're using fat during low-intensity stuff,

I like to actually use a longer period of fasting because it has very low insulin levels, which we'll probably get into, and there's no energy coming in, so your body is primarily using more fat. And how well you feel in a rough, maybe if you want to get fancy, easy aerobic type run. If you find that your performance there just completely tanks when you're fasted, that probably means that you are used to using more carbohydrates at that point. Now you've kind of removed them a little bit from the system. So your performance tends to go down.

Okay. So like a simple example might be wake up out of bed. You haven't eaten since 8 o'clock the night before maybe. And you go out for a run, an easy run. You don't get up and go sprinting. You go out for an easy run and you just kind of monitor how you felt during that. Did you crash 10 minutes in? Did you feel like extremely lethargic? Yeah, that's what I would generally do. It's not a perfect model.

Is that a long enough time to wait in your mind? Do you need more than just the night before? Yeah, if you want to get super fancy, let's get a little bit more into the weeds. Let's do it. Yeah. Let's do it. Let's go there. I love the weeds.

Yeah. So your example, I think, is a good first place for people to start, right? So if they crash during that, they know that something's probably off, right? The catch is that people come back and argue and say, well, you know, your muscle glycogen is still full. Right. The stored carbohydrates in the muscle. So you can still go do something that's moderately high intensity and still be OK. And that's actually true. So if you want to go to the next level, you can do a much longer period of fast with some type of muscular work, some type of exercise there and then see how you feel and perform after that.

So like trying to burn off the glycogen. Yeah. So you're trying to use more of the glycogen so that it can't be used again. So like if you want to do that, you could maybe do some like airdyne sprints for some intervals and burn off all the glycogen. Right. You won't be able to get all of it out, but you're just trying to get most of it down so that you're kind of forcing your body to use more fat. Right. If you look in If you look in the literature, a lot of times they'll call train high, compete low. So what they'll purposely do sometimes is they'll train people under low glycogen or low stored sugar in the muscle to try to get them to use more fat. The catch is that a lot of times their performance may go down a little bit,

and then they'll say, okay, before you do your big competition that's primarily using carbs, that's higher intensity intensity we'll give you all your carbohydrates back so they're trying to promote metabolic flexibility so lower intensity stuff you're using fat higher intensity you're using carbohydrates then and this is for strength athletes or just it's primarily more for aerobic athletes okay but crossfit's kind of in this weird sort of middle area. Right. Because you've got some things that are super high intensity, some that are more moderate, but if you talk to like games athletes, they're having to do this repeatedly all the time.

Yeah. So that's really taxing on your energy systems. Yeah. That example, and I know a lot of endurance athletes that might be listening would be like, this is something that we've done for years, but we experimented with that years ago when we did our marathon. I remember cutting carbs for almost a week and then two days out we carb loaded yeah we basically just did carb loading we sure we weren't doing any metabolic flexibility stuff we weren't training with lower

carbs for any any period of time with with the hopes that when we got carbs back it would be beneficial we just we just we're just playing with kind of a typical carb load where we didn't have many carbs for about three days. And then we had like two or three days of like heavy, heavy, heavy carb loading. Yeah. I don't know if it really did anything for us. I don't know either. I ate a bunch of spaghetti and it was really fun. But it was really fun.

Yeah, yeah. Did it work well for you guys or hard to say? I mean, we'd never run a marathon or eaten anything close to it before. Hard to know. We were just doing it mainly for fun. Like we weren't trying to get a good time during a marathon or anything close to it before. Hard to know. We were just doing it mainly for fun. Like, we weren't trying to get a good time during a marathon or anything like that. God, that was rough, man. Like, mile 18, 19, 20, like, my fucking feet hurt so bad.

That whole thing was more about, like, joint pain and, like, I felt like someone beat my feet with a hammer. Energy-wise, fine. Could have kept going all day. But by, like he said, mile 18, I was learning to run new ways. We were not prepared. Our tissues were not mechanically prepared for that much pounding. So you would have to, if you were to test,

you would kind of have to know where you were to begin with, right, to see if you could, if your performance tanked or not. Yeah, for anything, I always tell athletes, you want to know what your standard performance is. Right. Right. Even almost on a day to day performance. And then if you make some dietary change or sleep change or supplement or

whatever, did that actually go up or down? Okay. Because a lot of athletes aren't very good at determining performance changes and what was the cost of that. Right. So maybe performance went up here a little bit, but three days later was just utterly horrible yeah right so you're talking about this how

to get how to figure out if you are flexible enough we kind of cut you off but okay so they're in this fasted state and then they go for this aerobic the aerobic training or Robic Ron or whatever and they see like did my performance drop then what happens next so that kind of tells you where you're at in that spectrum. So if you see the performance really dropped, then you're probably not really using fat as well as you could. Okay. So then the thought being then, okay, I may try to do some more moderate aerobic training, maybe fasted first thing in the morning. Okay. Right? So I'm going to have lower blood glucose, lower insulin,

try to use a little bit more fat and try to go that route. That's usually my preference. Like I said, you can get into fancy stuff with trying to deplete glycogen or not give carbohydrates after their hard training session the night before, things of that nature. That may help a little bit. But the catch you have to watch out for is the high-intensity work and what the fatigue is from that work also.

Right. Or if you're just getting up and just you're kind of fasted and you just do aerobic run, monitor your heart rate, monitor your speed, and just see if it's better or worse. Over time, you would want to be able to keep that same level of performance by using even a little bit less fuel right so less carbohydrates that means you are using more fat to make up that difference and why would i want to do that like what would be the benefit of of this yeah so if you're a higher level endurance athlete i think the main benefit is that you don't have to

worry about trying to keep carbohydrates coming in all the time. So, Noakes did a study a couple of years ago showing that how well you use fat at rest and how well you use carbohydrates at rest did not necessarily predict who was the best ultimate performer. All the people could upregulate, and they were all pretty high-level trained cyclists, and they all did pretty good. The caveat being that they gave them carbohydrates during the training they gave them carbohydrates before but if you talk to higher level endurance athletes who are just running only on carbohydrates if they miss a station or they start getting their gi hurts or things like that and they can't switch over to

using fat very well they'll bonk or their performance will just just drop off really fast why because they can't switch over to use another fuel right once that fuel is removed their performance drops yeah yeah so like in crossfit if if you were doing a longer metcon maybe maybe this is where that comes into play like your your body's ability to switch over to this fat burning stage yeah and i would say, especially in CrossFit, it's actually during the rest periods and the recovery periods a lot of times. So if you're better, more aerobically fit, right? So if you're out and do a really, really hard session,

and when you're resting, you switch to aerobic metabolism, which in a perfect world would be more fat. If your aerobic level is really, really low, it's going to take you quite a long period of time to get enough of that ATP back to be recovered. If you've got a good aerobic base or higher aerobic level, even though you are doing an anaerobic, primarily weight training sport, you can condense that work into a shorter period of time.

Okay. I was just about to ask how that would play out in a CrossFit competition. It's like a one-day competition that has multiple high intense efforts. Because we've talked about that on another show. Developing the aerobic system is going to help you have better repeatability throughout the day. Yes. But this is more on the burning fat as a fuel store side.

I'm sure it's all intertwined. Could you explain that a little bit? So what that might look like during a day of competition, where you say you have three really tough events and then the time in between them? Yeah. So in that case, I would actually have them use as many carbohydrates as possible. And hopefully by that point, they've developed their aerobic system to a high enough degree that they are able to recover from that to get to that point though they probably have in my opinion do some type of fasted training so that their aerobic system can also use fat as a fuel source and performs at a higher level and then by all means the day of the competition

do everything possible to get as much carbohydrates in to get the recovery to do everything that you need to do but that doesn't mean that your training would always look like that yeah that's i think the little bit of the difference there so what would your training look like if if you were yeah so for that i like to split um anaerobic and aerobic so you have one day that's purely just your weight training type day and then let's say that's maybe monday and And then Tuesday would be more of a low level aerobic base. You're going to go run for a moderate one, two miles, something like that. And then once you know your performance marker for that run, I'll slowly try to decrease the amount of carbohydrates or glycogen before that. And I want to see that performance stay almost the same. I know that if they're not using much glycogen, insulin levels are low,

they have to be using more fat in order to keep that performance the same way. The other part by splitting them out in different days is that you're pulling the organism in two different directions if you do the same day. So there was a study done where they had people come in and they said, all right, let's do some anaerobic training. They did some speed, they did some power and it was in females. And then one group, They said, all right, let's do some anaerobic training. They did some speed. They did some power. And it was in females. And in one group, they said, okay, you're going to get on the treadmill and do about 40% of your VO2 max, I think it was.

So moderate intensity immediately after you just finished that pretty intense speed power type session. They had the two groups go for, I think, six weeks. It was women. I think it was in the European Journal of Applied Physiology, I think, April 2016. And the group that did the moderate intensity aerobic stuff after their weight training saw a lot fewer adaptations. They did not get as strong. They did not get as fast.

Over time. Over time. Okay. Yep. And if they pulled the muscle fibers, the fibers are actually smaller. And you're like thinking, well, wait a minute. They did more work, right? Yeah.

But they did the opposite work. So if you think on a molecular level, I've got this really big fiber, and it's an anaerobic fiber, so it doesn't have to use oxygen. I don't care how big that fiber gets. Nothing has to try to get in or diffuse into it. But if I have a really small aerobic fiber, it needs oxygen in order to run. Oxygen has to passively diffuse into the fiber. So it can't be that big. It has to be smaller. And by having those two adaptations right next to each other, they kind of cancel each other out a little bit.

What's called an interference effect. So I think if you just do your weight training stuff do that on one day try to get the much adaptation out of that as you can for say 24 hours do your aerobic the next day get as much adaptation out of that as you can maybe the next day go back to an anaerobic type day weight training type day again instead of trying to smash both of them right next to each other. And then it's like Caldeas would say, like if you have someone doing an Olympic lifting event, they're not also a triathlete or a marathon runner either, right? You're going to be on one end of those spectrums and you can get somewhere in the middle in terms of a training effect, but I think from a stimulus level. So what you actually do when you enter the gym, just think of what is my main goal for today's session? All right, I want to be bigger and

stronger. Get jacked. Cool, right? Majority of the time. It's not always the goal, Alex. Yeah, that's always the goal. Come on. Even when I'm running, I think that. Get jacked. My calves are getting huge. Yeah, yeah. And then maybe the next day is to get more of an aerobic type day. Maybe I want to try to use a little bit more fat on that day. But I don't think trying to smash both of those into one session, right? Because everybody wants to be better in one day. Everybody wants to do all the shit all day. I want everything today.

Bigger, stronger, aerobic-based, fat loss today. Oh, focus. Some focusing, huh? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is metabolic flexibility only accomplished by training, or can you do it by eating a certain way? Yeah, it's actually a combination, I'd say, ideally of both. Okay.

And we're getting to the point now where nutrition is being a lot more periodized with training. I think a lot of people come in, they spend all this time, they got the Russian super squirrel secret Uber training periodized thing that they've got. Some hidden manual somewhere that was translated from the 1960s. Some name that I can't pronounce. The older it is and the further away from whatever country you're from it comes from, the better it is.

It's just the way it is. That shit works. It's just like if your brother's a doctor. He's not a real doctor. You not gonna listen to him like but if it's like some doctor from like israel you're like oh man it's like the like special guy from like far away yeah so you have those programs and a lot of people spend a lot of time trying to figure it out and then they're just like ah here's my nutrition program and it may be like a really good nutrition program but they don't try to match the two up. Right.

So I think of like in the training, what is the adaptation you're really trying to get that day? What is your end result? Do you want to get bigger, stronger? You know, pick something that's kind of related. Yeah. And then think, okay, what nutrition do I want to kind of match that? Right. So if you're going to go in the gym and do a strength and power session, your primary fuel is carbohydrates.

Right. So then I would think, okay, what controls how much carbohydrates I use in the body? If you were to pin it on one hormone, primarily insulin. Insulin, right. Insulin goes up, your body uses more carbohydrates. So having carbohydrates and protein before that session or even higher on that day pushes insulin up, drives you to use carbohydrates better. And then if you did an aerobic session the next day, if it's low intensity, you want to use more fat. So therefore, you may do that more fasted.

So low level of insulin promotes and pushes the body to use more fat. So you're matching the fuel to the intensity. Where a lot of people just take two programs and shove them together and get okay adaptation, but it's kind of more in the middle. You can maybe hit the mark, but you get lucky, but most likely you probably won't. Yeah, there isn't any thought put in how do the two mechanical and biochemical systems work together?

What is the best way to do that? If you're training. Oh, that's an interesting point. You know, you said that we have all the fancy program design and the workouts and the exercise selection, and we put a lot of thought into it. But when it comes to nutrition, that's an interesting point. You know, you said that, uh, we have all the fancy program design and the workouts and the exercise selection. We put a lot of thought into it, but when it comes to nutrition, everyone's always like nutrition is so important. Like that's the number one thing you gotta do, but we don't really do shit about it. We're like, here's a template. It's like, you're not taking it that serious. You don't take the assessment

that serious. You don't know what's going on internally. So like, why is that? And what are some things that we could do to assess better to learn these things about ourselves, to figure out how our body reacts to different types of training? Yeah. I think the best thing at first is what I do with clients is just make them aware to what they're doing. Right. Because most people, I mean, how many times have the clients come in and you go, Hey,

how's your nutrition? They're like, Oh, that's all right. All right, man. It's okay. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. You know, it's pretty good. What the fuck does that mean?

It doesn't mean anything. Yeah, exactly. And I used to argue with clients all the time and try to get them to admit that their nutrition isn't very good, so therefore we can make a change. And after a while, I realized that they're not purposely trying to lie to me. They just really don't know. They are literally mostly unconscious to what they shove in their cake hole on a day-by-day basis.

They'll tell you that they think they know. And research supports this. Dietary recall is not that accurate. No, not accurate at all. People forget about the fucking three glasses of wine they drank at night or the paleo treats, even that shit. They forget. So I give them a sheet and say, okay, I want you to write down

everything you eat and drink for the next three days going forward. Yeah. And I know they're going to change it. I know they're probably going to lie a little bit. I know it's going to look better than what it was before, but I want them to be aware and conscious of what they're doing now. Yeah.

That's always a good starting point. Like write down, I've even had people like, if they don't want to write it down, take a picture of it. Yes. So, take a picture of your phone. Everybody wants to go to the restaurant, Instagram, that shit. Yeah. You're doing it anyway, so take a picture. Yeah, because I had one guy years ago came in, and we argued back and forth forever about his nutrition.

He's about 40 pounds overweight. And eventually, I just threw my hands up in disgust and said, just fill out these three forms. Because he said, my nutrition's perfect. Just work on my training. Sure. And then back and forth. I'm dialed in, Mike. He's dialed in, man.

He was there. And finally in my haste, I said, just fill out this form. Get out of my office. We'll put it in for a baseline, whatever. Guy comes back in two weeks later, he's got the forms, kind of shoves him across the desk and i'm thinking his dog died or he hit someone on the way in i'm like what like dude what happened he's like awakening it's like oh man dude my nutrition sucks yeah yeah you know because he

didn't realize what he was actually eating it was just more completely unconscious um that's the biggest step by far because if you argue with someone who doesn't know what they're doing, you're just going to pound your head against the wall. Yeah. It's just not going to work. Good point. I want to ask, so, Alex, did you have a question? Well, I was going to go a little bit more, like, into specifics of, okay,

so, like, if you train strength one day and you're eating primarily carbohydrates, like, how much carbohydrates, like, is there a percentage of your diet that should be carbohydrates and fat? And like how is that different? Yeah, so I like to set protein first because protein is generally the same for most people. And the easiest number you can use – You mean the same percentage-wise? Per same, yeah.

Okay, yeah. Like about 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. Lean body mass or regular body? Just total body weight. Okay. Yeah, unless you're severely obese. That'll give you a good number of protein. Yeah, so about 0.7.

It involves a little math, but you can do it for the clients who don't like math. And that's pretty consistent across most populations. Yeah. That helps with recovery, helps with metabolism, everything else. From there, I usually set their fat at 60 to 80 grams just to kind of start. If you start getting super low on fat, you affect hormone production. And it's also just really hard.

Has anyone ever tried to do a no-fat diet? Who are we talking about this prescription for right now? What kind of person is this? Someone who's pretty active, does CrossFit three, four times a week. Trying to see increases in body composition without sacrificing performance. So a lot of people. Yeah, four times a week. Okay. Trying to see increases in body composition without sacrificing performance. So a lot of people. Yeah, a lot of people.

Basically everyone. I know people like that. Yeah. Okay. Sorry. Back to it. I've done low fat. It's really hard.

It's fucking hard because all the food tastes like shit. You're doing a little bit of that right now, right? Oh, yeah. I'm doing it. But, I mean, it's the higher calorie. So, I mean, I'm trying to cut. Yeah. And then carbohydrates will, unfortunately, vary the most.

Right. So, I'll have some before and after their weight training sessions. 20 to 40 grams probably pre and post with, you know, about 20 to 40 grams of protein if you just want to keep it super simple. And then from there, I'll adjust their carbohydrates total up or down dependent upon their performance and dependent upon their body composition. Right. So in the perfect world, you're trying to find that nice little sweet spot

where performance is still staying pretty good and body composition is getting better. Right. Because if you give them way too many calories, performance is awesome. I look like the Michelin man. This sucks. I'm going to fire you. Right.

And if you go the other way, you'll see the performance start really tanking really hard. So it's been too aggressive. Is that something where you get a new client and you give them some type of prescription, if you will, where you're giving them their macros or whatever you want to call it, and then they use it for a week or two. You get the feedback. You make a tweak. And then you kind of like eventually get to, okay, you're good.

Just kind of stick with that. Or is it a constant process of every two weeks you're tweaking every two weeks you're tweaking yeah something so i like to constantly be changing it and thinking what's my goal in mind so if their goal let's say they come in and say okay i want to lose more weight assuming everything else is in line they're probably going to slowly start moving everything down trying to keep their performance as high as possible if they say hey i'm good good, I'm at the body composition, everything that I want, I'll actually start moving their calories slowly up over time because I know the most susceptible will come back in a couple months and go,

ah, you know, I was good, but now I need to get leaner. Yeah, yeah. Or, you know, my performance is suffering a little bit. Or my performance is going down. Right, Right. So if they're at a higher number, that gives you leeway to actually go down from that. So you're trying to work them back up in keeping everything good so that they can come back down from there. Most people just go down, down, down, down, down, run into a plateau and go,

well, maybe 800 calories will help me. They only keep trying to go down all the time. Well, I actually, I've read, and I want to see your thoughts on this, but like, I've read that when people run at a caloric deficit for a long period of time, the body actually adapts to low calories. And so a lot of people who run low calorie, they hit this point where I'm not losing any weight. I'm eating like no food.

Yeah. Yeah. Yes and no. It's generally true, but there's still a floor somewhere. Right. And research has kind of hit debatable on that, that you probably can't go too far under. So one of the best studies of that was the Minnesota starvation study. Oh, that sounds awful.

Yeah. It was conscious. It was a bad time to be in Minnesota. I know. It was a bad time. Yeah. The barren awful. Yeah. It was conscious. It was a bad time to be in Minnesota. I know. It was a bad time. The barren lands. Oh. And the study was interesting because they had people who are objecting to the war,

and they're trying to figure out if all these people were in concentration camps, the food's been deprived, what happens when we bring them back? What do we do with these people in terms of metabolism? And this is decades ago. And so what they did is they had them do the same amount of work. So they had them moving and doing the same amount, and they just severely lowered their calories. And what you generally find is, yep, your metabolic rate did go down some. It didn't go down as much as what people would say because they did the same amount of work all the time.

So if you really cut your calories, the first thing you feel like is not doing anything. So your body will start scaling down that amount of work and movement that you're doing. The other part that people miss in that study is a lot of them went just freaking cuckoo, like bonkers. They became utterly obsessed with food. There was people that had cookbooks in their room, like almost like pornography of food,

that they were so obsessed with food like all the time. I can attest to that. I did a fast once. Yeah. And for three days I didn't eat. And then my wife called me and she's like, where are you? And I was like, I'm at Whole Foods. And she's like, what are you doing there? And I was like, I'm just looking.. She's like, what are you doing there?

And I was like, I'm just looking. And I was in a day. I was just walking around. I was like, I just love it all. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, no, no, that's good. Yeah, so I think people don't appreciate the more psychological effects too. So to answer your question, yep, it will go down.

The key is to try to move as much as you can. So people have like Fitbits and the basis or whatever, just keep track of your step count. You know, you kind of want to keep that relatively constant, um, as your calories kind of go down a little bit then, and that'll help see better progress. Yeah. Um, interesting. So we talked about this application on the performance side, and now we've kind of dove in a little bit on the fat loss side. Um, let's, let's keep talking about that i have some questions there um where does insulin sensitivity come into play here and um the foods the food selection that you have and uh where metabolic flexibility

kind of intertwines with all this yeah that's a really good question and another one it's you got two now you're doing good um i don't know what i just said yeah the takeaway on that with insulin sensitivity i think is very misunderstood uh the reason it's very misunderstood is because you have to look at what measure you're doing in the body to get it so one of the main ones is to do what's called an insulin clamp study meaning that you come in when i was at the university minnesota we did a fair amount of these there you've've got an IV in one arm, IV in the other arm. They push a crap ton of insulin. They push a crap ton of carbohydrates. And they're basically elevating both systems at the same time to see how you can handle super high levels of both,

right? So it's just like pushing both physiologic systems as far as you can, just to see what happens. You can argue that that may not be very physiologic systems as far as you can just to see what happens. You can argue that that may not be very physiologic, may not transfer to some good info, but people forget that if you're using that to look at insulin sensitivity, that's an entire whole body measurement. So you're getting all the systems, the brain, the muscle, the fat, everything. If you do another study that's a little bit more eloquent, David Kelly did this, you'd run it just across the leg. So they're primarily quadriceps and leg, primarily more muscle. So that'll give you more of what your muscle insulin sensitivity level is at.

Let's back up real quick. Yeah, I was going to back up. What is insulin sensitivity? What is that? Yeah, like insulin sensitivity. How do you define that? What does it mean? So it's just telling you how well specific tissue or your whole body uses insulin if we look at a case where that gets severely broken is in like type 2 diabetics

right so type 2 diabetics have a really hard time initially using carbohydrates and your body does not want blood levels of glucose to get super high because glucose if it gets super high it's very toxic. Now, in a healthy person, that won't happen because you will upregulate insulin. Insulin says, hey, oh, my gosh, there's all this glucose hanging around the bloodstream. Get it the hell out of there. Stuff it into muscle in terms of glycogen. Run it through different processes to put it into fat.

I don't give a shit what you do. Just get it the hell out of the bloodstream, right? And what happens in your type two diabetic is that that process starts getting broken, but the body still says, Hey, I still can't have that blood glucose be very high, even though it's starting to creep up. So I'm going to jack up the amount of insulin that's coming out. And that's how people end up becoming insulin dependent over time. They just basically burn out, you know, their pancreas and things that produce that. So basically insulin doesn't work as well? Exactly.

You're putting out more because the tissue itself is less sensitive to it. It's like if someone came to your door and knocked once and you didn't hear them because you're half deaf, they have to knock really, really, really loud, right, to get you to open the door. So the body has to put out a whole bunch more of insulin just to get the same effect because the tissue level is not very sensitive to that amount of insulin. So it's generally healthier people or more athletic people, maybe they're the same categories in a lot of cases, they can push out a smaller amount of insulin to get that same effect to to push carbohydrate into the muscle as one example yep yep the only monkey wrench into that whole thing is if you go and do a super low carbohydrate diet the muscle itself can actually become insulin resistant

because it doesn't make sense it's not really a pathological issue it's not really a disease issue but it's trying to select glucose to go more towards the brain. So if you say, hey, I'm only going to do 40 grams of carbohydrates tomorrow and you do that for a couple of days in a row, the body says, oh my gosh, I need glucose to go to the brain or ketones or something else to run it. Oh my gosh, I don't want the muscle to take any of it. So I'm going to make it very insulin resistant so that it bypasses and goes up to the brain. Got it. And so the logical conclusion of that is

if you have super high fat diets and very low carbohydrates for a long period of time, you become almost too sensitive to carbohydrates and you actually lose the ability to use them to a high degree. So this would be the case in ketogenic diet? Like a ketogenic diet, that's exactly what you see. So some people now think, oh, my God, I heard this metabolic flexibility concept. That sounds kind of cool.

I'm going to go bonkers. I'm doing a ketogenic diet, man. I'm going to do that for months before my CrossFit competition. I'm just going to eat a crap ton of carbohydrates. Woo-hoo. Good idea or bad idea? I get the best of both worlds. It's a horrible idea.

Horrible idea. I find the less you know about something, the easier it is to just swing to one end of the extreme and swing to the other end of the extreme rather than understanding the distinctions and just doing as much as you need. Right, right. And so in the ketogenic case,

you put in a whole bunch of carbohydrates, but your body has a very hard time using it. And you can get that to start to work again, but it's not going to happen in a short period of time. So you've become metabolically inflexible. You've actually done the opposite of what you wanted. You were super good at using fat, but you impaired your carbohydrate use in the process of doing it.

Yeah, if you're a CrossFitter, you've got to be good at both. And you want to do both, not just one. So how do you do that? You have what people might call a refeed day or something where you introduce carbohydrates in periodically to maintain that flexibility. So what I would do in the case of, because I've had some people come to me who said, oh, I did a ketogenic diet, I did CrossFit. I said, oh, how did that go for you?

And they're like, great. I said, for how long? Four to six weeks. I feel horrible now. That's why I found you. They tend to crash pretty fast. Can we talk about what the ketogenic diet is real quick? Yeah.

So a ketogenic diet is a diet that's very, very high in fat, very, very low in carbohydrates, probably 40 or 50 grams of carbohydrates or less. So if people aren't used to counting their macros, that's like half a large bagel. That's nothing. It's like a couple of strawberries and some broccoli. It's like you sniff a date and maybe lick it, and that's like your carbohydrates for one day.

That's about it. You're pretty much eating meat and lean, griefy – Yeah, fat. And maybe even lean, griefy things. Blueberries on a rare occasion, something like that. Moderate to – Probably the best part of your whole day. Yeah, yeah.

It sounds awesome because you're gonna be like well fuck i can eat bacon and eggs like all day long but yeah dude that gets old so you eat bacon eggs and cheese for like half a day and you're like i won't do it anymore well my stepdad is huge in the keto and i tried it and i think i got into it because it makes your breath smell terrible it will yeah because you're just burning off the acetone. And my pee smelled terrible too. It always smells terrible, dude. Not that I'm trying to give a prescription for listeners,

but 40 to 50 grams per day of carbohydrates. Now I think one of the biggest misconceptions is that when you take away that many calories, they're not usually filling it in with something else. So you're saying that you have a set amount of calories based on your activity level, and then if you want to go ketogenic, that's when you would figure out, shoot, shit, for the listeners, a bug just hit me in the face, 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrates,

so you have to fill in the rest of those calories with proteins and fats. Primarily fat. Primarily fat. Protein is relative, compared to what most athletes eat for protein, a ketogenic diet is relatively low in protein. If you have too much protein, your body will basically convert it to glucose.

I was going to ask, why fat then? Why does it have to be fat? Because fat doesn't have an insulin release. So when you have very low amounts of insulin, you produce these other alternate things called ketones. So ketones were primarily used as a starvation mechanism. So you can imagine that if you're fasting for a super long period of time, you don't have any calories coming in,

your body says, oh, my gosh, one, I don't have many stored carbohydrates. I'm not going to last very long. So I'm going to push everything over to use as much fat as possible. But, oh, my God, the brain likes glucose. But the brain can also run on ketones. So during that process, because you're primarily using a lot of fat and your insulin is super low, you start producing more ketones as an alternate fuel to keep you alive and to allow you to survive. Okay. So for certain metabolic diseases, that may be beneficial. There may be some benefits to that. But in terms of performance, you're losing your ability to use carbohydrates.

I was just going to ask, why would you do this? Because it sounds terrible. Well, the thing is a lot of people are like, oh, but my body composition is so much better. My brain function is better. And in some of those cases, that can actually be true depending on what you're doing. But I think what they forget to add into their little equation is what happens to my performance. Yeah. Now, if I can't keep the same level of performance moderately in terms of, let's say, weight training, in terms of just lifting,

I don't know if I really need to keep all this expensive muscle tissue and all this other stuff around. Yeah. And there's debates about how well ketones may preserve muscle, may not, there are different mechanisms. But I think they fail to figure out, one, like you were saying, initially it sounds amazing, right? And then you try it for like two or three days and you're like, I don't want to look at this thing again.

And you have to, there's a lot that goes into it. If you want to do it correctly, you've got to test your ketone, your body's ketone levels to see if you're in that ketogenic zone. You can test them via a urinary test, just little strips. They're not super accurate due to various reasons, but you can also do it through blood, but the little strips, the keto

strips are like three to four bucks each. They get pretty expensive, which is kind of the downside. If your mouth tastes like a spoon, you're probably, because that was me. So I think a lot of it is just people forget to look at what is the total performance cost. And humans in general are horrible at predicting what's going to happen to them in the future.

If you go up to most people and go, hey, dude, you get to eat bacon and eggs every day. Is that going to be awesome? They're like, yeah, man. You'll be able to do that for two months? Oh, yeah. You interview them on day four? I hate you. Go away. awesome they're like yeah man you'll be able to do that for two months oh yeah you interview him on day four i hate you go away you know but they think going into it oh this is going to be the

greatest ever and they kind of fail to look at how they're doing in the process we know with with keto like my stepdad uh i think he still does or he dabbled in he's more of a runner type sure um would that be more for – He's like a four-meter sprinter. Yeah. Well, yeah. He's a four-meter sprinter. You say runner, you automatically assume like distance runner.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But he runs like quite a bit. So would keto be more appropriate for like endurance athletes or – Because we said definitely not crossfitters and strength athletes. I would say possibly, but even then, probably more even ultra-endurance runners. Because people forget that... So if you look at a marathon, right? To me, a marathon is a long freaking way.

But if you're talking about the elite runners... We can confirm. Yeah, you guys can confirm the sideways shuffle and everything else. I wouldn't make it at all. It is so bad. But elite marathon runners are freaking fast, and they're running almost entirely on carbohydrates. And they have to because they're running really freaking fast,

even though they're running a marathon. It's relative. It's five minute miles. Sub six, yeah. Yeah. And that's flying. That's flying. Now, if you talk about someone who's not at that level

and is running primarily for a body composition effect, that's a little bit different question. So I think in the ketogenic case, if you're doing super long, like, ultra-endurance runs, maybe we don't have a lot of data there. Some of the really early data from the 80s was from Steve Finney. Jeff Bullock has done some of that work. They did show that you may be able to hold on

to some pretty good aerobic adaptations. You may get a little bit better in areas, but your speed and power definitely drops off. So you think even if you're a cyclist, like I was a volunteer for the Race Across America once. Start in San Diego, finish in Atlantic City. We had a team of four people. It was just horrible. No, cycling you said? Cycling, yeah. So biking. of four people it was just horrible no cycling you said cycling yeah so biking so one guy was

in the middle of nebraska and he was trying to pass another guy from austria and there's no you can't you know trail anyone you have to be x distance behind and so you can't draft there's no drafting right so you have to ride pretty fast and pass that person and then keep going so that's actually a lot of speed and power yeah in the middle of a seven day what would be classically considered a pure aerobic event um so even in those cases there's still a lot of speed and power that's involved and in that case those guys are pretty sleep deprived at the same time oh they're total sleep deprived they've been because they're alternating shifts all the time. So we had four people, two groups of two.

So they would exchange back and forth for two for about three to four hours. They would attempt to sleep in a bumpy RV that usually gets lost. And then they would try to come back again. So it's extremely stressful. I have a random question. So I might be putting you on the spot, but you've already mentioned a number of studies. And I'm wondering if you have like a favorite study that you can cite right now and just like tell us like what it is. In general or what topic? Just, I mean, in the fitness nutrition world, like do you have like a favorite study that you

think is just fucking super cool that you want to share with the listeners? Yeah, it's actually the one I talked about with the interference effect. So the fact that by doing the lower intensity aerobic stuff after a weight training session, you actually impaired the work that you just did, even though you did more work. Because that's something that's been around for quite a while. But that's one of the very first studies that's looked at lower intensity work after speed and power

and pushed them right next to each other and then went long enough to see what happened so that negated the speed power because they did and they didn't have as good of an adaptation from the speed power because they followed it up with aerobic training directly after their speed exactly yep compared to the group who just walked out of the gym the group who just got up and walked out of the gym did much better in that study what was the what was the time duration between just finishing the speed power work and then the aerobic capacity oh it was like minutes so what what about like what about if you did uh speed power in the morning and then six hours later you did aerobic yeah what what did they

look at that at all they haven't looked at that directly. They've looked at some mechanism stuff. So John Hawley's done that. Coffee is his last name. And from what we see from the mechanistic stuff, I would flip those two. Do the low-intensity aerobic stuff first, primarily fasted, because those molecular adaptations probably last only two to three hours. Speed and power in terms of, like like protein synthesis and that type of thing hormone production 24 48 maybe 72 hours if you really just beat the crap out of yourself um so do that two to three hours after your aerobic session that also allows you to have

more carbohydrates at that point push up your insulin get better at using carbs at that point and allows you enough time to still get that positive adaptation from it. That's a huge point because we always get that question all the time, like, which should I do first? Yeah, and the aerobic system is warmed up for the day too, so going into your next session is going to make things flow a lot better. That looks a lot like my training from the past when I was trying to train for the CrossFit Games,

and a lot of high-level CrossFitters do that now. They wake up, they do a lot of AM fasted work, aerobic stuff, rest a few hours, get some food in, and then they go do the high-intensity stuff later on. Yeah, I would totally agree. I was going to ask, yeah, what about switching the order, but you just said that, so very interesting. Yeah, and if you think about it from the athlete's perspective,

that way is actually easier, and they were going to do the same amount of work anyway. Yeah. Right, so why don't you just set it up? Yeah. Even if we don't have a ton of studies to show that it's extremely positive we know it's not going to be negative it's usually easier for them to do everything that we have so far says that that should bring you a better result yeah i think for off season i don't see it being a problem as you get closer to competition you would want to be more sport specific you might even want to do the strength work first followed followed by aerobic, just to kind of throw you off,

because that's just kind of the name of the sport in CrossFit is you're going to do heavy lifting when you're very tired. You're going to do a lot of weird things that you don't have control over. But off season, I think, yeah, it's a great idea. Yeah, so I would say where they are aerobic first, and then strength and power is more like a eustress model. So stress your body can probably pretty easily recover from.

If you flip them, it's almost more of a distress. It's harder to recover from that. But from the mental side, I think there is definitely a benefit to doing that, right? So changing things that you would normally do. Oh, you didn't have your carbohydrate today. Oh, Joe Bob forgot to bring it to you. Do your session with no carbohydrates. Can you still perform in doing that? Now, you don't want to do that every single day, but you'd want to do it just enough so that if something happens when you get to the event or someone's screwed up or whatever. Damn it, Joe Bob. Yeah, Joe Bob.

Didn't bring my Gatorade. That you can mentally go back to, oh, and I even remind athletes of this. Yeah, I remember we did that one time where we didn't have that during your session. You did pretty good. They're like, oh, oh, yeah, you'll be okay. Oh, okay. Yeah, because they're metabolically flexible. They're metabolically flexible,

and they've mentally done that challenge before and been okay. And they know that being a little hungry feels okay, and you'll live through it. Yeah, yeah. So I think those things to get them more mentally prepared, I think, are very useful. Yeah. The hard part is that you don't want to do that all the time, just once in a while. Yeah. Gotcha.

So kind of to summarize basically is you want to be flexible, metabolically flexible. You don't want to do things that push you, like polarize you in terms of how your body uses carbohydrates or fat. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so I'd say just think about what is the goal of that session, right? So if you're doing a weight training session, what's my fuel? Primarily carbohydrates.

I want to have some carbs before and after, maximize the performance of that session. If I'm doing lower intensity stuff, what's the goal of that session? It's probably not purely performance-based. I would say, can I do well with less carbohydrates, maybe even fasted? Can I get more aerobic adaptation? So that's my goal. That's a great takeaway.

Would MCTs be good in that case instead of carbs? What are MCTs? Medium chain triglycerides. Coconut oil, right? Yeah, so like a C8 would be your best bet. That will increase ketones a little bit. That was a fat that has eight carbons in it. Eight carbons in it.

Like it's a specific type of medium chain triglyceride. Yep, caprylic. Yep. That will increase ketones a little bit. So one thing I've been playing with in some athletes is giving them an exogenous ketone salt on those days. So I'm trying to push that aerobic system as far as I can and see if I get a little bit better adaptation there. What kind of salt?

So you can buy, like, ketone salts now. So instead of doing, like, a ketogenic diet to get your blood ketones high, we can give you a supplement that will push them up within, like, 20 minutes. Got them ketone salts. You don't have to take five days to put yourself in a state of ketosis. People are selling more and more ketones these days. salts. You don't have to take five days to put yourself in a state of ketosis. The benefit of that is that you can have high ketones for an immediate training

session and then go back to using carbohydrates the next day. You don't have to stay in this huge ketogenic state the entire time. Not much data on that. How long for that gets banned by WADA? No more ketone salts.

No more of that. Yeah. The hard part is I don't know how they would trace it, but maybe they could. Maybe. One more question I had for you is how long would it take to get somebody metabolically flexible? Depends on where they start. I mean, most people I work with can do pretty good in like about eight weeks. I mean, if they do structured pretty good.

Consistently follow. Some people may take a little bit longer. You know, if you're like a type two borderline diabetic, yeah, it's going to take you quite a while because you're metabolically inflexible. But a marker of health is actually metabolic flexibility. So you would still want to move in that direction. Just going to take you a lot longer

and you have to be a lot more careful and slower. And this will be following kind of the prescription that you would do. So you would, you would set their protein and then you would give them start off at 60, 80 grams of fat, and then you would play around with their carbohydrates over time. Yep. Yep. Trying to find the sweet spot of, we have enough carbs. A lot of them are pre and post training. We want to keep their performance high and then get them towards what their body composition goal is. So maybe just for, just for just the listeners, like let's say if I'm like 180 pound dude right here, like where would you, like where would I, like how would I start? Yeah. So I initially had people start at around 200 grams of carbohydrates on a training day. So I mean, they're only doing like once a day.

Their off day would be about 120 grams of carbohydrates. I find on their off day or their aerobic day, if you start getting lower than that, they just feel horrible. They don't move around much. Their recovery gets to be extremely impaired too. So you don't want to drive them all the way to like 10 on their off day, but you want them to be a little bit lower. Total calories stay the same though. Total them to be a little bit lower. Yeah. Total calories stay the same though. Total calories are probably a little bit lower on the rest day if their goal is body composition. Yeah. So I'll cut calories from that a little bit.

Usually just those 80 grams of carbohydrates will be the caloric difference. Okay. That's a lot like what I'm doing right now. It's like on training days, depending on my volume, my carbohydrates are much higher. And then on rest days, my on my volume, my carbohydrates are much higher. And then on rest days, my carbohydrates are lower, but the calories are also lower because I'm not doing anything. And because your goals are more body composition. Right. Yeah. So if you're performance-based, you probably don't want to do that. You want to

actually use that off day to not feed more, but you definitely don't want to drop the calories after a day of training. Yeah. I would say if your goal is purely performance you're trying to stay at the same body comp those people don't i don't see as much difference between a training day and an off day so i'll push their carbohydrates a little bit higher yeah hoping that in some cases i can get them to train a whole nother day per week yeah so instead of going maybe four days a week with heavier strength stuff i may be able to get in five days a week, keep the quality of those sessions high. So if I expand that over the course of a year, that's 50 extra sessions for you

to get better at your sport. I see that with a lot of athletes. When they're not training the rest day, they think, I just don't need to eat as much today. But it's not the case if you're chasing performance. You don't want to do that. You feel like you didn't earn it. Guys, it's not the case if you're chasing performance. And it's hard to eat too because you don't want to do that. You feel like you didn't earn it.

Gotcha. Guys, it's been almost an hour. I want to be respectful of your time. Is there anything else you want to add, or can you tell the folks that have been listening where we can find you? Sure. Yeah, just go to my website. It's just MikeTNelson.com.

They can find me there. If they have any questions, just email me at DrMike at MikeTNelson.com. Are you on Instagram or anything or Facebook? I'm on Instagram, drmiketnelson. Twitter, miketnelson. Facebook, I think if they just search miketnelson, they can find me too. And what was the name of your business that you have? It's Extreme Human Performance.

Okay. Very cool. Awesome, Mike. Thanks, guys. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. It was awesome. Thanks, guys.

Thank you very much. That was awesome. Thanks, guys. Thank you.