Barbell Shrugged - Metabolic Flexibility w/ Dr. Michael T. Nelson, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #774

Episode Date: November 27, 2024

Dr. Michael T. Nelson is a research-fueled nutrition and fitness educator. Dr. Mike spent 18 years of his university life learning how the human body works, specifically focusing on how to properly condition it to burn fat and become stronger, more flexible, and healthier. Dr. Nelson has a Ph.D. in Exercise Physiology, a BA in Natural Science, and an MS in Biomechanics. He is also an adjunct professor and a member of the American College of Sports Medicine. He has been called in to share his techniques with top government agencies, athletes at the top of their game, and now you. The techniques he has developed and the results he has gotten for his clients have been featured in international magazines, in scientific publications, and on websites across the globe. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Links: Work with Dr. Mike Dr. Mike’s Flex Diet Course Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Michael T. Nelson, one of my favorite human beings on this entire planet. Not only has he been my coach past year, but when I first met Mike T. Nelson like many, many, many years ago, I want to say it's like six, seven years ago now, we were at Paleo FX, if any of you fitness nerds remember that fun event in Austin, Texas. That means you've been around for a long time. He was one of the very first people that I interviewed. I think we talked for three straight hours about micronutrients. And I literally could not believe that humans on this planet were that smart that they could

just sit down and recite the optimal levels of every single micronutrient, where to get it, what foods are best for it, how it relates to your physiology, the results you would get if they were at an optimal level. It just blew my mind. And to this day, six, seven years later, still my homie, still my homie, and we get to hang out on Barbell Shrug. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidealthreport.com. That is where you can learn about all the lab, lifestyle, and performance testing, analysis, and program design that we will be doing for you when you enter into Rapid Health Optimization, and you can access all of that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Marvell Shrugged. I'm Inners Warner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Bash,

and a man that has taken me from a slightly above average mile to a six minute and 17 second mile, making me the fittest 41 year old in my house because there's only one the hero to only my children dr michael c nelson welcome to the show this is like show number like 12 or 13 i feel like of you like an enormous not you basically uh you're in the family man it's It's so great. Today, we're going to be digging into metabolic flexibility, which is like, that's like your thing. That's like your big course, right? Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. Flex diet cert. Bingo. Before we dig into kind of the new things you're riffing on, can you give us like a high level understanding of metabolic flexibility for people that have not heard you talk about in the past? Yeah, in the fitness world, as you guys all know, like if you want to write a good book, you just demonize the whole macronutrient group.

Like carbs are bad. You don't need any of those. And then, oh, fat's bad, too. And too much protein, your kidneys will fly out of your back when you're deadlifting or something like that. All these horrible things are going to happen to you. And the reality, obviously, for listeners, that none of those are really true. So metabolic flexibility looks at the two main fuels, which are carbohydrates and fats. So on one end of the spectrum, how well can you use carbohydrates? And then also, how well can you use fats as a fuel? And the third component then is how well can you switch back and forth between those two, depending on what you're actually

doing. This is a very healthy person should be able to do that. So if you're like, you know, Travis, you're going to go squat, front squat a bunch of ungodly amount of weight, you're going to use a high amount of carbohydrates. If we're just hanging out having this conversation here, the preferred fuel would actually be fat because we don't have a lot of intensity going on. The metabolic flexibility is how well you use carbohydrates, how well you use fat, and then how well can you switch back and forth between those two main fuel sources. Did you coin that term, by the way? I know that you're in this space,

but did you actually say that phrase for the first time and turn it into a thing? No, the credit for that actually goes back to David Kelly in 2000. And it's interesting because the previous work would be the crossover method, which Brooks and Mercer, which is 1992. And you can find stuff all the way back to, I think the earliest reference I could find was 1897, was like Montague talking about competitors eating bread before exercise as

a way to optimize performance. So you can find hundreds of years back the concept, but it was Dr. Kelly that first coined the official term metabolic flexibility in 2000. Well, to find out which is better, do you just go by the activity you're about to do, or are some people better constructed for carbs and some better for fats? Yeah, so there's a lot of ways you can look at it. So in the lab, you would run, like, say, a max test using a metabolic cart. So everybody's seeing the little machine you breathe into that, you know, takes all your air and looks at it. And what the machine is doing

is it's looking at the amount of air that goes in and out, but it's also looking at oxygen and CO2. And what that can tell you then is your percentage of fats versus carbohydrates. And what you'll see on every test is if you start out with a slow warm up, most of that fuel will originally be from fat. And then as you get into a higher intensity exercise, at some point, you're using all just carbohydrates towards max. And that's what I was told. And that's what every exercise physiology book will tell you. And if you take enough people and you average it out, that is 100% correct. But as you guys know, there's a lot of variability on an individual level. And that crossover point,

that point where you're burning 50% fat and 50% carbohydrates, that actually can vary quite a bit from one individual to the next. And the cool part is you can move that around by your training. So if you have a harder time using carbohydrates, you can then train to get better at that. If you have a harder time using fat as a fuel, you can train to get better at that too. There's some super cool follow-up studies because the longest time I thought, oh, well, if you're just at low intensity exercise, all the books say you're just burning mostly fat. But then when you look at individuals and you work in the real world, you're like, I don't know, this doesn't seem to add up because

energetically, you could substitute carbohydrates for that. We won't get into the metabolism of that. So when you look at the studies, there's three studies that have been done now. They took average people that are recreationally active, pulled them in off the street, stuck them in a lab, and measured how well they're using fat on low to moderate intensity exercise. Gadecki did this once. Helges did this in 1999. I published some research on this in 2015. And what you find is the variability is like 20 to 93 percent, meaning some of those people are really good at using fat at low intensity exercise. Some of them suck absolutely horribly at doing that. But yet these are generally considered the recreationally healthy individuals so on the

low end of the spectrum how well your body is using fat as a fuel can actually vary quite a bit from one person to the next so is that purely a function of fitness we'll say it's like the embedded as you get in better and better shape relative intensity changes and so at a certain intensity if you're in better shape you'd be more likely to be using fat as fuel because just a lower percentage of your max will say does it go the other way too though you're talking about like that's generally how i think about it but is you said that some people you can train yourself to be better at using carbohydrates how how do you do that that was not what I expected you to say there.

Yeah. So on the low end of the spectrum, you're correct. But what they did is super cool. And we did this in a study I ran. We baselined each person to their VO2 max. So they came into the lab, they did a VO2 max first, and then they said, okay, we're going to put you at 20 to 30% of your VO2 max. So relative intensity of exercise was fixed on an individual basis. Otherwise, you're correct. Someone with a monster VO2 is going to be way different than someone with a low VO2 just because that same work

may be way sub-max for one person and may be close to max for somebody else. So they did baseline it to a percentage of them so that the relative intensity is the same across each individual so it's interesting that that variability still stood out even once they did that on the carbohydrate end of this but the end the two biggest things are primarily going to be, I would say, there's insulin-independent and insulin-mediated mechanisms. So when insulin's around, you've got this thing called the GLUT4 translocation. It goes out to the edge of the cell, and it can take in carbohydrates.

But what people forget is that a lot of that can be mediated in a non-insulin environment, meaning that if you're just walking around pure muscle contraction in and of itself can actually pull glucose directly out of the bloodstream independent of insulin and there's some pretty cool studies done in dogs where they took out their pancreas and did a whole bunch of measurements and you get harder to do some of those studies in humans but just general movement in and of itself is probably number one. Number two, obviously related to muscle mass.

The bigger muscle mass you have, the more sink you have to get rid of fuels is going to be better. Last component I would say is how much higher intensity work you're doing. Because we know that as you scale up to higher intensity work the percentage of carbohydrates you're going to use is going to be more however if you're doing true high intensity work how much work you can do there is limited so you're kind of looking for this sweet spot i would say of moderate higher intensity exercise but not all out let's do 20 second repeats on the bike or the rower and try to kill ourselves in you know two minutes so so a lot of this seems like it would happen organically if you just trained

you know you had a well-constructed training program that was goal-oriented for your sport then all these changes and adaptations would just kind of naturally fall into place to what extent are you almost deviating from training for the sport in a specific way to try to optimize um the nutrient partitioning that you're kind of suggesting here yeah it a lot of it does shockingly look like good training programming which you know a lot of stuff does right that's why it's called good training program um how it's a little bit different, I would say, is some people will probably have some limiter that they may want to address. So if I look at endurance athletes first.

So years ago, I actually saw athletes who were high-level endurance athletes literally did not have a crossover effect, meaning they never got to the point, no matter how low the intensity, where they got got to the point, no matter how low the intensity, where they got below 50% carbohydrate use. Now, if they could keep carbohydrates coming in all the time during longer races, they did pretty good. They actually did really good. But if they missed a station, they had some GI issues, they had some other issues like their race was a complete total disaster you could also argue from a health standpoint probably not the most healthy either on more of the the strength side you can look at some advanced work where they will try to prioritize i would say as a eustress

model we're going to give you enough carbohydrates so that you can perform high intensity work. But they've done a few fascinating studies where they did kind of the approach where they would limit carbohydrates and still have you do high intensity work. And what they're doing is they're trying to get these molecular adaptations that when you pull the nutrient out that you're using, but you're still exercising there, the body goes, oh, crap, we don't have that around. So we're going to ramp up some of the enzymes and all this production of other things there. And what it looks like is just absolutely horrible. You may come in, it is hideous. So what it would look like is you would come into the lab, let's say in the afternoon,

and we're going to do repeated high intensity work of two, four, five minutes, because we're going to try to deplete out as much glycogen as we can, right? Maybe get down to 40%. You can't drive it to zero. And then you're going to leave the lab. You're going to go home and have just like some protein and go to bed. You're going to wake up the next morning. You're going to come back to the lab again. And now we're going to brutalize you again with more high intensity interval stuff. Because after an overnight sleep, your liver glycogen is relatively low, but your muscle glycogen is fine. Under these conditions, we depleted out a lot of that muscle glycogen on day one, did not replete it, we just barely gave you some protein. And so now you're

coming back to the lab on day two and you're doing this high intensity work on a low liver glycogen and a low muscle glycogen. And what you'll see is that it's horrible. Athletes hate it. Your HRV plummets. Your stress goes through the roof. But done in a short controlled period of time, the research studies on this are split like 50-50. You may see some pretty big benefits. Like Marquette was the first one that published this in MedSci in 2016. And they showed increase in 5K times, increase in running efficiency, and better body composition in two weeks done by DEXA,

literally with the same calories in both groups. They just prioritize them in different orders by doing the training this way. Gail did a follow-up study a year later, didn't see any big changes to it. So the studies on that are still split and we're wondering like how far do you have to go or whatever. So what I tell athletes in practice then, if you're kind of getting close to your upper level, your plateau, you're having enough carbohydrates, you're doing good training, all that stuff, you may consider doing like a distress session of prioritizing the adaptation over performance acutely. Run that for a few days to maybe a week or two then go back to giving

carbohydrates before exercise and see if you have an improvement again you would only try this in my opinion if athletes are getting close to a plateau you would definitely only do it off season because for those one or two weeks that you're doing it your performance is gonna absolutely tank and they're gonna hate you because i've tried doing some of this stuff it is like high intensity work by itself is miserable this makes it even more miserable if that was even possible there's gonna be a lot of trust between you and the athlete at that point as well 100 because they think you're insane yeah it's gonna be rough and their performance is gonna go down in the short term it's kind of like like getting a new client and telling them you're going to do this new thing.

And then they want to lose body fat and then their weight goes up three pounds in the first couple of days. And then they go freak out. Yeah. Yeah. It's a very advanced method for sure. And again, the research is still split. It's not like all the research says, oh, this is 100% winner if you do it. There's a lot of unknowns so what i do is i will watch

their hrv and i'll have a design sort of stop point ahead of time like okay it's chronically down like 12 points we're gonna pull the plug and i'm gonna say that's probably enough stress for now so i tell people when you do this like talk to your athletes whether you use rpe or use a certain drop of performance whatever it is have some agreement so that they know that this is very short and very limited because otherwise they think you're just going to torture them for weeks on end and that's not going to end well so i'm assuming you want to do this well away from a comp because you would oh yes yes yeah definitely off season do not do this in season it's a horrible idea to do in season. Yeah. Sounds like it could possibly like take somebody. Yeah.

Yeah. And that's the hard part with a lot of the advanced stuff, right? You're running on the bleeding edge of, if you do just enough, you're probably good. If you do too much, oops,

now you kind of went over that edge. Like you're walking the tight rope, like pretty narrow. Yeah. I mean, that's the way it goes there with all elite. That's the way it goes. Everything though, on that totally, you know, when you're at that end end range it's like you got

to be careful when you try these new things yeah and but some of the things that you try are the thing that actually in high level athletes make a big difference as you guys know um good so yeah but it's a cool concept like the backup to that is you don't have to go that extreme you can do things where you just drop liver glycogen and maybe you do some zone two stuff or some easy aerobic stuff that morning so if i back up from that extreme end that's typically how i'll program client stuff so let's say tuesday thursday is just an easy aerobic development you're going to do that in the morning great i'm going to have you do that fasted because we know insulin lowers are going to be lower. Liver glycogen is going to be lower.

Muscle glycogen is still going to be there if we need it. But we want to prioritize fat as the main fuel to run through the system. It's modern intensity. We don't need carbohydrates to hit that performance. So my bias is I will do that at that point to upregulate the body's use of fat. Then we'll come back maybe Monday, Wednesday, Friday, might have higher amounts of carbohydrates. We're going to prioritize lifting more stuff and we're going to look for performance on that day. So you can kind of periodize it a little bit throughout the week, what I call match macros,

making sure that the macronutrients match the actual training stimulus. I've seen a lot of really good training programs. I've seen a lot of really good nutrition. But you can look at them and it's like, oh my God, these two people never talk to each other. And that can work to a point. But I think having those things like two wheels on a bicycle, like working together, especially if you're trying to get better body composition and performance goals, that makes just a lot more sense. So this seems to be much further on the performance side than the health side.

Of course, there's a massive crossover with those two things in many ways. But for someone who's just trying to be healthy and they're not a professional athlete and trying to hit some specific performance goal other than just in general be stronger and leaner and all the things like to what degree do they need to worry about this specific idea or concept i would argue that they can get by not having to worry about it but i think it's a faster road because we know that metabolic flexibility is actually a good marker for health also at the same time. If we look at a disease state, so a disease state would be someone who's

pretty advanced as a type two diabetic. So in that condition, we all know that they have an issue using carbohydrates on the right end of the spectrum. But as the disease progresses, they actually start losing the ability to downregulate and use fat as a fuel. So one of the main compensation factors the body has is to increase insulin. So we know as type 2 diabetics progress, insulin levels tend to go up higher and higher. When insulin levels are higher, it's harder for the body to downregulate to a low insulin state to use fat as a fuel. So if you imagine carbohydrates on one end and fats on the other end, like a barbell, they're actually getting squished on both ends. They're losing

the ability to use carbohydrates, they're losing the ability to use fat. So if we back up then and say, okay, so someone who just wants to be more healthy and have more performance goals, I actually kind of use the same approach with them just not as aggressive so if they're doing some aerobic stuff i still ideally would have them do it fasted but for some people that may be like they just get up in the morning and do a fasted walk for 30 minutes right it doesn't necessarily have to be you know formal training again a lot of it depends on the constraints of their schedule that type of thing my argument would be that the same things that the higher level athletes are doing if we just scale that down even if like health is kind of the top priority if i can make someone more

metabolically flexible i'm going to be able to make them more healthy and on the flip side if you drop all this into the real world we know that like social things are going to happen like they they're going to go out with friends. They may end up face first in a birthday cake. They're going to end up with these high carbohydrate insults at times. And if their body is better able to handle those high carbohydrates, usually I find that their appetite isn't as dysregulated the next day. Weight gain is usually more maintained. It's much easier for them to get back on schedule the next day. Weight gain is usually more maintained. It's much easier for them to get back on schedule the next day also. What about the nutrition side of this? Are there certain patterns or methods you use when you're implementing these tactics? In terms of

nutrition, like macronutrient type stuff? Yeah. Usually protein will be relatively fixed. It doesn't change much, you know, around 0.7 grams per pound of body weight. And then for healthier people, I usually generally set fat a little bit lower, you know, 70, 80, 90 grams per day. Again, there are some exceptions to that. And then carbohydrates are the main thing that will fluctuate the most. And so initially, I may start someone on just a very simple, what I call just a flat macro approach. I know Dan's talked about this too. Let's just find maintenance. Let's just find

where you're at. Let's just find your total calories. Let's just start pretty simple. We may do that for a couple of weeks. And then after that, once that's kind of plateaued a little bit, now I might go a little bit higher on carbohydrates on lifting days, and a little bit lower on carbohydrates on the cardio days, because you don't really need that much fuel for low to moderate intensity cardio. From a compliance standpoint, I find that most people kind of like this a little bit more, because if they don't have a lot of calories to work with initially while you're kind of working them up they have days that they can have more carbohydrates as opposed to having days that are all this kind of low to moderate level again there's some people

who don't prefer that approach either and then over time if you're really trying to get more extreme for you know body comp type things those deviations between the high carb day and the low carb day might get more extreme. So you may have two, three, 400, 500 grams of carbs one day, and you may have like 120, 200 the next day. Again, the nice part is that all of this is scalable to the person and to where their limits are at also. In general, I don't really have anyone go below 100, 110 grams of carbs total per day. I call that the metabolic no man's land, where you're like around 110 to like, you know, 30. You're not low enough to really be a ketogenic approach. You don't have ketones. And you just feel crappy, you don't have enough energy. And I've lost track of like,

how many clients have come in who are like trying to do weight loss and get healthy and their carbohydrates are like 95 grams a day it's like how do you feel i'm like they're like i feel like crap like how's your performance it's pretty bad all right let me guess you're stuck at a plateau like yep how did you know what they don't tell you is that they usually have very high carbohydrate days on weekends social events things like that so their their totals are a little bit higher but they've been told they just need to have this like super low carb approach and yeah in that area i just find it just doesn't work well at all are you talking about shifting

like so when you have your low carb days you, are you going to then have more fats? And then when you shift to higher carbs, are you going to take through the fats? Are you standardizing the daily macros, or is that waving up and down as well? Daily calories. Yeah. You're saying stabilizing the daily calories but shifting the macro. Yeah, is that what he's talking about? Yeah, so what i'll

do actually is i will actually shift calories by changing carbohydrate amount and i'll generally just leave fat the same okay with the rare circumstances so what happens then is you have days that are probably a little high on calories and days that are are lower and we can so you're just trying to average you know all right so right the average then will come out to be you know are we trying to gain weight are we trying to lose weight are we just trying to average. Yeah. So the average then will come out to be, you know, are we trying to gain weight? Are we trying to lose weight? Are we just trying to maintain? Maintain.

Right. Yeah. And usually from people doing it in a compliance standpoint, there's only one thing that's really changing. Right. So if they know what their higher calorie, you know, carb foods are, they'll have more of those on the days that they're lifting. And they don't really have to worry about changing a whole lot else. So it does make it easier for them to execute also. Yeah. And then how are you, is there a path in which people are even getting more detailed when it comes to workout timing and

nutrition timing around those workouts where they do want to be having most of those carbohydrates around the workout and then as they get further away prioritizing the fat yeah you can i mean i definitely do that if their calories are on the lower side and their goal is still performance and health so if you only have 160 grams of total carbohydrates to work with per day, I'm probably going to bracket most of those before and after your training. If you're at, I got one client that said 450 grams of carbs, like the timing is taking care of it. Like you're already having carbs before and after training by just eating, you know, four meals a day, you're having over 100 grams of carbs at each meal but i do find as calories do go down because calories in calories out is a real thing based on physics that prioritizing more of them around training

and even sometimes before training or intra training when the calories get really low definitely helps because we're trying to do everything we can to preserve that performance even if they're not a performance athlete like that performance is what's driving how much muscle you're going to hold on to how many calories you're going to burn and we want to partition the loss of calories out of the system ideally from fat and not muscle and the biggest mistake i've seen people make is they'll just slash all their calories too hard. And then their training performance just tanks with it. And then they lose a fair amount of muscle and they can't figure out why. And it's just their performance outcome when they're training just dropped a lot. So they

don't have that same stimulus on their body to hold on to as much of that tissue as they did before. And the average person still can tell when they're weak. You know, I mean, so many men that I coach that are, I have several people about my age who are trying to stay fit as they get older. If they're bench press of all things, of course, if it dips, they hate it. They hate it, man. They don't care what happens. Nobody wants to be a, you know what? it man they don't care what happens nobody wants to be up

you know what yeah no i don't want to yeah yeah and i mean even if i have clients who are not competitive like we track all their performance pretty closely because if i see a big drop in it relative to their baseline wherever their baseline is is just fine i know something's off like stress went up compliance went up or something like that or i mean you you know you guys have been around gyms your whole life you walk into a commercial gym how many people even write anything down like there's no way you remembered your third set on monday of bench press you did five reps instead of six like you don't remember any of that and i highly doubt they're on their phone typing in all their stuff in the true coach or coach catalyst or something like that.

They're usually throwing cat memes or God knows whatever else they're doing. Exactly. I remember doing bodybuilding for six weeks when I was in college. And for about five of those weeks, I was like, this is easy. I was getting leaner. Life is good. Enter week six. And my bitch breast vomited.

And I immediately quit. I was like, yeah, this sucks. Follow his lead, guys. I was like, my bitch, I mean. So I just quit. My bitch breast. I didn't care about anything. But all of a sudden, 315 was hard. And I'm like, I quit. I'm like bench press. I didn't care about anything, but all of a sudden, 315 was hard.

And I'm like, I quit. I'm like, no. My ego got hit. So if we can maintain that ego a little bit, it would help someone like me for sure. Oh, yeah. I mean, a lot of people who start off when I work with them, their calories may not be that far off, but they're just so weirdly distributed throughout the day and if you see their performance going down and if you can just move calories around and fix their performance they're like oh my gosh you're such a musician this is amazing like you saved my

press absolutely flying for life now yeah i would have been your client for life absolutely yo with your own clients what what are all the things that you that you track and measure and whatnot on kind of a daily weekly basis uh i know all the stuff we do here at rapid and you help us out on kind of the the sleep tracking side of things and analysis and you've done many other things here with us as well i call you our spliss army and i think you can kind of do it all again which is a huge compliment for the record oh thank you but with your own clients uh what does that look like yeah so i switched to it's a kind of more systematic of you probably about seven or eight years ago um that was right around where you could

get hrv daily on your like smartphone which is great so pretty much everyone will look at hrv it's a good marker of stress. They'll just do the measurement one time in the morning. Again, we've got Aura. We've got other ways of looking at it. You know, they'll have their pros and cons. You just have to know what you're looking for on that. Really big on measuring pretty much all sets, reps, et cetera.

And it's not as hard as it sounds because everyone has their programming in there. You just simply write, you know, what you did for how many reps. Rest periods we look at a little bit but i do it more intuitive like those are allowed to change as long as they can keep performance up and get all their training done there are times we may collapse rest periods a little bit more on that obviously they're doing any cardio what their output on cardio is like bike rower running etc. Most people like some form of nutrition. Like we do have some people that are habit based. So they're maybe just tracking protein or tracking fiber or

things like that. More advanced clients are tracking, you know, all of their macros and different days and times. A fair amount of stuff with sleep. You can use your Garmin, Apple, Aura is much better for sleep. As long as you know what you're looking at for that. I heard Andy talk about this on the show recently, and I was just nodding my head that sleep stages are probably the last thing I'll look at in those things. But things like respiratory rate, what time you went to bed, what time you got up, your heart rate profile during sleep, all those things are super informative on the recovery side. And then for some people, if they are able to do it, we'll look at some basic blood work. Again,

not for health stuff, but just for performance and try to get just a holistic idea of what's going on. They may have some assessments we may redo. That varies. some people will check stuff every four weeks some people maybe every four months most programming is a one to eight week phase and at the end i'm gonna have them do just a series of amraps so they're gonna take the same load they were using and maybe we said eight to twelve rep range with maybe a one rar okay now you're gonna take that same load and just do as many reps as you can with with you know good form and if they hit like five reps more than what they were doing before boom it's like all right that's cool but it also tells me the week before you were nowhere close to a one hour either i've sort of seen that go up over the course of weeks so it's kind of a nice way of

one checking to see if they're in the parameters you expect and two are they actually making performance without having to you know redo one of rams and a whole bunch of stuff that you know high level athletes are not going to do on that and the last thing is just kind of how do they they feel like i think we sometimes get a little bit and i've been guilty of this in the past too, over quantitative of just only collecting numbers and forgetting to ask them like, you know, how do you feel? Like, do you feel like I've had a couple of clients in the past where I look at it on paper and I'm like, I don't know, this seems like a disaster. And then you talk to them and like, bro, how are you doing? They're like, oh, this is amazing. I love this. I feel

so much better. And you know, like they're qualitative, like everything is great. So I'm like, all right, cool. Let's go with that. I'm still going to try to, you know, work on some of these metrics too. But I think just, you know, simply asking clients,

like how are you feeling like about the program in progress, I think is a very underrated, easy thing to do. I think it opens up like conversations as well. You know, i do a subjective questionnaire daily and so and when i start to see performance taper off i can go back

to subjective questionnaire and try to get start to get ideas of when it started what happened possibly and so it just opens up those tough talks you gotta have yeah and that's why i really like the daily hrv because if i see a drop and i don't notice a performance change i can't find anything else in the metrics like their sleep wasn't off i just circle it on the graph and i just literally send an email like hey what's going on because especially online like you don't know like i've had made that a big argument with their spouse i've had people like their pet died you. Stuff I didn't even know that happened. And I'm like, okay, now we can have a conversation about it and see what's going on. Or sometimes you can't find anything. Sometimes

you have to go looking to see what it was. And if that pattern keeps repeating, you're like, okay, something's going on. And then you need to play detective and figure out what it is. But similar to you, it just allows so many more conversations than in the past I would have completely missed until you get, you know, one, two, three, four weeks down the road and all the wheels fell off the car. And now it's like stuck in the ditch and I got to try to fix it and get it back on the road. Yeah. How much value do you put into HRV? And I say that because for me personally, N equals just my life. I feel like that number, especially now that I have an eight sleep mattress and an aura, and those numbers are surprisingly similar on a daily basis.

Nice. Like some of the other companies, i don't think they get it right those two when they're dialed in like as close as they are on a day-to-day basis um and then i add the subjective kind of just like how do i feel when i get out of bed in the morning it's wildly accurate i can almost like um you know if there's if there's a day down in the 50s or something like that, I can totally feel it. And most of the time I'm 70 to 85-ish, something around there. And if I do have one of those days, there's usually some sort of stressor that has been added to life that I just didn't know was going on or didn't know it was as stressful. And the reason I ask is because if

you just, for me personally, when I see those HRV numbers, I pretty much know how well I slept, how well training went on a, like an intensity level the day before, or if there was just something out of the blue that kind of got me that I didn't really think was going on. Is it, is that a metric that you actually put a good deal of value behind? Yeah, I would say over the years, I probably used daily HRV readings for, God, almost a decade now. And at first, I was very wary of it. I had done research on it, published research on HRV as part of my PhD.

But even then, I was still like, I don't know. This wasn't a lot of daily info. But time and time again, if it's done accurately, which is a big gift for some other companies, it's pretty darn useful to the point now where if I see a big drop and I know the reading is done on a valid system and they didn't change the way that they're measuring it. I had one client who all of a sudden I looked at her HRV numbers and I'm like, these got way better, way fast. I said, well, this doesn't match performance or anything else. I said, did you do something different?

Like something's going on. And she's like, well, yeah, you told me to measure them seated all the time. But I found if I laid down, I got a lot better numbers. So I just started doing them laying down. So excluding any weird positional changes. Yeah. It's pretty darn accurate to the point now that if I know that it's a trend and a pattern and they don't know what it was, that tells me there's something unconscious going on.

The weirdest one I ever had was probably five years ago was traveling went to an event was just a just a marketing thing there's only private group of people five people there stayed in airbnb uh didn't really train much other than just two light sessions my hrv just started just tanking like it went off a cliff like hard i couldn't figure it out i'm like, I feel a little bit more tired. It was, you know, whatever. And I get home and it went up by like 15 points overnight. And I'm like, something was going on.

The only thing I could figure out is I was a new Airbnb. It was a guy's basement. And I didn't realize this until I got home. And it smelled very dank and kind of moldy. And so my guess is I think there was some mold or something in that basement that was just tanking my hrv um where i didn't realize it till i i got back so again like if you don't know consciously what's going on i usually now believe that there's something subconscious that's happened. Another one was a training client.

We're looking at all his training performance. Everything is going good. And then he tells me about a big psychological event that happened in his life. And I'm like, yeah, that can definitely tank your HRV. He's like, what? What are you talking about? I'm like, yeah, like that can definitely do it. And he's like, I had no idea.

You know, and he didn't think to mention it because in his brain, he's like i had no idea you know and he didn't think to mention it because in his brain he's like well this isn't related at all um so yeah definitely i think it's very useful i think it's probably still an under utilized tool because at the end of the day you're still the coach or you're the person you still get to decide what to do with it like i'll do a volume-based training program on a red HRV, only because I've done it enough times to know that if I can get some decent movement for 40 minutes, it's going to be better the next day versus not doing it. Now, would I recommend that to a client on day one without knowing their patterns? No. But just because it's showing a poor reading, it doesn't

always necessarily have to dictate exactly what you're doing. You're going to take that information, you're going to decide just like feedback on training, everything else, and then decide, okay, what is the best move here to do this? And you just kind of can run those experiments over and over and figure out for that individual what is going to be best. Yeah. I don't know if you've seen any of this with maybe like long distance athletes. Um, I know that, uh, I've interviewed or worked with interviewed a couple, uh, like pro soccer players and I didn't even know that HRV readings got up into like the one fifties, one sixties. They have some of the highest ever. It's crazy. It's like, it's unreal what happens when you run 20 miles a day and do a bunch of wind sprints and stuff in the middle and just constantly moving.

If you see somebody that is that high, and they're saying like, call it 150 on average, and then it drops to 100. Is that anything to it? You know, that'd be like my numbers dropping from 75 to 50 or something along those lines where the 50 doesn't seem that scary. But if there was a drop in 50 points all of a sudden on a consistent basis, even though having an HRV of 100 is still world class. I know we're talking about a very small piece of the population, but would that be something that created sort of like a question mark, red flags in your brain? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Because HRV, depending on the system and depending upon the person,

will vary a lot. So the first thing I do with new clients is like, we just take their HRV for two weeks. Don't look at it. Don't do anything. Just trust me on this. Just do it for two weeks. I want to see what their baseline is. And then i'm going to go back and try to correlate it to training nutrition and you know they have a little questionnaire they fill out each day like travis was saying and see if there's anything there to give us an idea and i'm really looking for drops from their baseline whether the baseline is 70 100 150 doesn 150, doesn't matter. So if they're hitting 150 and they drop to 100, that's a massive change. And that would tell me that's like a big red flag

of like something's going on. And when you accumulate enough data too, you'll be able to see like, you know, there's seven day trend. Is it kind of trending up, down or neutral? As opposed to, okay, one day it dropped real hard and then they recovered, right? So I look at those as acute versus chronic changes too.

Yeah. I was wondering, just because if it goes from 150 to 100, that's still going to be what everybody else would go, holy crap. You're like triple digits on a daily basis, but it's actually a massive 30 something percent difference in performance. Yeah. So on a health standpoint, they're probably still so high on that scale that all the health perspective and everything there is still going to be there. But that's an indication to their system and to their kind of way of living.

That's a big change, and something's going on with them at that point. Yeah. Going back and kind of thinking about the long distance runner side of things on the metabolic flexibility are you uh specific to that goal of long like you've got three of us on here doug mash and uh myself that are always going to be wondering how we get a little bit stronger and add some muscle but if you have somebody that is interested in at the extreme ultra marathons or marathons, um,

are the energy sources that you're going to be recommending to them going to be different than they would be for the more meathead, uh, Travis mash. Yes. The biggest caveat there is going to be what level of endurance athlete are they right um and because like they're you guys have been around long enough to see all these trends of oh hey endurance athletes you need to be low carb that's the best way to go that's the weirdest one and

then you look at i hear that one i go what right you look at people winning marathons not just finishing a marathon but winning marathons like they're using almost a hundred percent carbohydrate because they're getting at it man he's almost doing this yeah yes yeah kipchoge is not out there just jogging around doing 10 minute miles you know no no no so that's the first question i ask is like okay are you a high level competitor looking to get better? Or like, it's just on your bucket list. You just like, I want to finish a marathon. Cool. That's awesome. Like that's, that's great. Um, if their times are lower, then we've got a lot more room. We can probably use a lot more, more fat. And I will actually

probably push them more that direction because their rate, they don't need to go into carbohydrates as much. And if you can get them to use more fat, it just simplifies tons of stuff out of the equation. You don't need to worry about as much of external carbohydrates. You don't need to worry as much about having them upset their stomach. They miss a few stations or whatever. It just simplifies a lot of things. The cost being with that approach is you're probably not going to win marathons i guarantee you're not going to win a marathon but if your goal was just to complete one that's actually a little bit easier approach i'd argue that's probably a little bit healthier too now as you get out into ultra endurance running and that type of thing it gets even more weird like i

think that you could make an argument for using more ketones and things like that um a guy who is actually working to be the first uh solo crossing event artica fully unsupported he's actually in day nine right now um so i helped him a little bit with some nutrition stuff and so we talked about you know the role of carbohydrates the role of fats the role of ketones because he's got i think it's 155 days and the starting weight of his sled i believe was 410 pounds that he's pulling so that's like the other bonkers end of like the extreme end. Plus it's fricking Antarctica. You got temperature to deal with on top of that.

Yeah. So it's a similar concepts, but again, it depends upon what is the length you're trying to go? How competitive are you? And then from there we can sub select what's going to be the best method for you. Dude. That's freaking me out.

I won't sleep tonight thinking about some dude right now is tracking across antarctica by himself yeah look up i think his handle on instagram is fear vana actually yeah awesome dude yeah just out there with starling just updating people yeah solo like he's the only one one. Does he have any way of reaching? Let's say if things go bad. Does he have a... I'll communicate if it goes bad. He'll be able to communicate it's going bad.

Now getting someone to worry is a whole other thing. I can't give an address right yeah i'm like using the address my i actually i actually met do you know ann bancroft is i think she's one of your minnesota maybe friends um last time i was up at the points retreat uh she spoke there and i you just triggered me thinking about i had to go look up her name again because yeah listening to her talk about living in antarctica uh absolutely wild um and that was like the biggest everybody's asking her about all of her like uh mental toughness to go

and do this big event i was like uh what'd you eat like how did you fuel yourself did you lift weights before you went how did you train like i had so many questions that nobody cared about that were uh we like needed her on here right now like yeah there's no uh there's no grocery store in antarctica to go get your favorite proteins and you just gotta you're eating like mres basically trying to survive as you just hoof it across the man it's crazy and the other other thing too that becomes a huge issue is if you're pulling all your own food and supplies like what is the weight versus the energy you're going to get out of that because you have to pull all of it so that was a big discussion of in general fat is a lot more dense but then you also have to consider like you're moving most of the day like you'll only be able

to sit usually in the evening and maybe the morning for a little while so you've got prep time everything's freaking frozen unless you're trying to keep stuff next to you. So this is the whole logistics of that. And then also people forget, like this happens with ultra marathon people too. I did with a person who helped at the Ram Race once. So four people were, you know, biking and trying to cross, you know,

San Diego to Atlantic City, New Jersey. And you forget that sometimes you have what they call taste fatigue. I remember we're in frigging Nebraska on day three somewhere. I won't say the name of the company we had these prepared gels and stuff from. I showed one of the cyclists the container, and he's like, if you even show me that container again, I'm going to throw you out of the trailer and I'm going to vomit all over you. He's like, I cannot stand that stuff anymore and i'm sitting there going oh my god we've got like three

more days left like what am i gonna do and so i'm like all right man like what do you want he's like fig newtons i'm like fig newtons he's like yes fig newtons i'm like all right so we went to the grocery store we've just the guy lived on like three and a half days of like multiple sleeves of Fig Newtons. Mike Nelson, where can the people find you, man? Best place is the website, which is miketnelson.com. I've got a daily newsletter there. You can go to the little newsletter tab at the top.

That's where probably 90-ish percent of my content goes out. And then do some stuff, random updates on Instagram once in a while which is dr mike t nelson on instagram yeah tell them about your cert since we just talked about metabolic yeah we do have this which is the flex diet certification it was a mashup of metabolic flexibility and flexible dieting and so we cover eight different interventions from exercise, obviously nutrition, macros, sleep, neat, and we put it in a comprehensive system so people can learn about each one. And then we've got a fair amount of researchers on there too. And the nice part is we take all the research and then it's in a complete system. So they'll have the action

items at the end of each one. They'll know exactly what to do with clients that are in front of them. Because a lot of the systems out there, but they didn't really tell you the big picture, the details. And then, okay, what do you exactly do with that information? So we wanted to try to cover all three of those areas. And you can just find it more info probably through the newsletter is the best place. I love it. Coach Travis Bash. Mashlead.com um one

thing i'd like to shout out is my son rock 10 year old wrote his first book and published it on amazon he's a beast dude he is a beast tell me about it it's 101 things to do before you grow up by travis rock mashmash, he put. But yeah, go to Amazon, search for that. Or now it's in the link in my, if you go to any of my social medias, it's in the link in my bio. It's like the top. If he does enough drop downs on Amazon, he'll be a bestseller for his Instagram profile.

No doubt. Dude, help me out, you guys. Yeah, yeah. It's actually a good book. And it's illustrated by my talented wife. So it's, you know, the illustrations are sick from his mama. Putting that in the show notes. It's a little true.

Blow up, man. Yeah, man. Get that man investing his money already. I'm proud of him. He's already writing his second book. It's The Adventures of the Bear. Hell yeah. I'm proud of the kid.

He's a beast. Way smarter than me. There you go. Doug Larson. Now I'm going to smack my boys around. I'm telling them to step their games up. Ten-year-olds out there writing books. Can you believe how much of a letdown my kids are?

Jesus. Sorry, boys. Good. Mike T. Nelson, appreciate you coming on the show, brother. Thanks, guys. It was fun. I don't know what episode this is together. Eight of them, probably probably at this point, like that many,

many shows you always deliver. That's why we keep asking you back. So again, appreciate you being here. Thank you so much. I am Douglas E. Larson on Instagram. Follow me there.

There you go. And I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we are Barbell Shrugged, Barbell underscore shrugged to make sure you get over to rapid health report.com. As we can learn about all the lab lifestyle performance, testing and analysis that we will be doing for you. And you can join us at Rapid Health Optimization. Just get over to rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.