Barbell Shrugged - Science, Strength, and the Gut Biome w/ Dr. Jimmy Bagley, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson — Barbell Shrugged #406
Episode Date: June 26, 2019Dr. Jimmy Bagley is an Assistant Professor of Kinesiology, and Director of the Muscle Physiology Lab, Co-Director of the Exercise Physiology Lab, and Research Director of the Strength and Conditioning... Lab at SF State. Dr. Bagley teaches exercise physiology courses and his research interests include: muscle physiology, advanced cellular imaging techniques, and sport performance enhancement. Dr. Bagley earned a PhD in Human Bioenergetics from the Human Performance Lab at Ball State University, MS in Kinesiology from Cal State University, Fullerton (CSUF), and BS in Kinesiology from Cal Poly (San Luis Obispo). Additionally, he spent one year as a Visiting Scholar in the Biochemistry & Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory at CSUF prior to joining the faculty at SFSU. Dr. Bagley has published over one dozen peer-reviewed scientific articles and book chapters and is an active member of the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), American Physiological Society (APS), and National Strength and Conditioning Association (NSCA). Follow him on Instagram/Twitter: @MusclePhysLab Minute Breakdown: 0-10 – Is virtual reality fitness real? 11-20 – Cell physiology and gut biome 21-30 – Supplementing gut bacteria 31-40 – Metabolic Flexibility 41-50 – Measuring muscle fibers in sedentary and active people 51 -60 – Ideal muscle fiber for CrossFit Dr. Jimmy Bagley on Instagram Please Support Our Sponsors Organifi - Save 20% on green, red, and gold juices at www.organifi.com/shrugged WHOOP - Save $30 on a 12 or 18 month membership using code “SHRUGGED” at www.whoop.com Vuori - The most comfortable, performance clothing line in fitness. Save 25% at www.vuoriclothing.com/shrugged Join the One Ton Challenge Leaderboard, record your PR’s and track your progress. “What is the One Ton Challenge” “How Strong is Strong Enough” “How do I Start the One Ton Challenge” ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-bagley ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals. Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged
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And Dr. Jimmy Bagley is on the show today.
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And let's get into the show.
Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.
I'm Andrew Zv Warner, Doug Larson.
We're at San Francisco State University with Dr. Jimmy Bagley.
We were just fighting with lightsabers.
We did fight with lightsabers.
In the virtual world.
I got my first boxing match.
I don't know who else.
Who was I fighting?
Were you fighting Ugly Joe?
Ugly Joe.
Yeah, make sure you get over to Instagram and check out the video
that we just put up in IGTV or whenever we put it up.
But virtual reality boxing, is that the wave of the future?
Is that how fitness is going now?
I think partly.
Not everybody is going to be there, but it's becoming super accessible.
It's unbelievably realistic.
It's getting even better.
Like when you see the scale in the corner and you try and walk over to the scale.
To weigh in before the fight.
There's literally no scale there yeah it's crazy i mean if people have never tried it i think you have to
try it to believe it yeah those kinds of things really good workout actually too uh-huh i one
round in i was feeling it a little bit yeah i mean shadow boxing moving around like trying to dodge
punches for for five minutes like even though you're not like punching as hard as you can it's
still still a good workout. That was fun.
And for people keeping score at home,
Doug did not knock the guy out in the first round,
but I knocked him out in the second round in the first minute.
Within eight seconds.
Yeah.
I assume he did a little bit of the work, but.
You warmed him up.
You warmed him up.
It's like loosening the jar.
It's like, I loosened it.
Once you hand it to somebody, he's like, I can't get this.
Can you get it?
And they pop it right open.
Right on, man.
Well, what's happening in the lab?
You were mentioning some stuff.
We're talking about the gut biome today.
No, yeah, man.
Thanks, you guys, for coming out.
It's a lot of stuff's going on.
I think our research falls in a couple lines.
One is more basic cell physiology type stuff.
And the other one's applied performance, kind of like with virtual reality, for example.
But the kind of cool stuff we're getting into these days is looking at how the gut microbiome affects everything including muscle health i mean i just saw an article this morning like a new article on gut
microbiome comes out every day about how it affects cancer um pretty insane stuff yeah so
wait more background on you real quick before we get into the details like our our very good friend
andy galpin muscle scientist uh was in graduate school
with you right and so you have a phd and yeah human bioenergetics whatever that means but
it's a fancy word for exercise physiology but yeah bioenergetics so now you're also mostly a
muscle scientist is that correct yeah that's correct so i mean andy i was a couple years
behind him at our phd program and then he got a sweet gig down in Southern California,
and I got a gig up here.
You got him the gig, right?
Yeah, that's the story.
You hear that, Galpin?
I'm sticking to it.
Yeah, Lee Brown gave me a call and said,
what's the deal with this Andy Galpin kid?
And I said, eh, he's kind of a jerk, but I think you'll like him.
Yeah.
He could be stronger.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Smarter.
Probably better looking, but he'll do.
He'll do.
He's like an 8.
He's good.
He's a B-muster. That's perfect. perfect you don't the seven to eight range is perfect like beyond an eight you start to cause trouble things start to happen in the background mostly in the middle of the night no yeah but
yeah i do muscle physiology that's kind of my background isolating single muscle fibers athletes
astronauts aging the whole thing and then since i've been out on my own though we've been branching
out there's so many things to study and i think you know one of the ones one of the things we're Athletes, astronauts, aging, the whole thing. And then since I've been out on my own, we've been branching out.
There's so many things to study.
And I think one of the things we are into is gut microbiome.
I've talked about this too much this week already,
but I just finished watching 10 Hours of One Strange Rock on Netflix.
You work with astronauts?
You keep them strong?
We take their muscle samples and see what happens.
What happens to them up there?
A lot of bad stuff.
Space is bad for you in a lot of ways imagine that no gravity no gravity so obviously you don't have
the resistance on your muscles bones and tendons those deteriorate pretty quickly the good thing
is you can get that strength back though yeah and so finally in the last five or ten years they've
started doing more high intensity interval training which is what you do on earth if you
want to get you know strong and fit and they're finally doing that instead of steady state cardio
yeah yeah i saw the little especially especially their legs like they don't use their legs for which is what you do on Earth if you want to get strong and fit. And they're finally doing that instead of steady-state cardio.
Yeah.
I saw the little deadlift machine. Especially their legs.
Like, they don't use their legs for anything.
No, yeah.
Their arms move them around, and their legs just float behind them like you're scuba diving.
Exactly.
And they call it, they get fathead birdleg syndrome.
So all the blood rushes to your head, and you get fluid shifts and everything.
So they look like aliens.
Fathead birdleg syndrome.
They talked about that because they get super sick the first couple days week plus that
they're up there because all of gravity pulls everything down to excrete and then next thing
you know it doesn't really know where to go yeah and then imagine up there you're fine for a couple
days weeks months but then you come back to earth or mars or the moon or wherever then you got to
move around that's yeah she said one of the ladies said that when you get back when
you when you come back to earth picking your arm up off of like the armrest is the hardest thing
you could ever imagine because you just haven't had to have your brain think about moving your
arm and forever no i can't even imagine that i mean i'd like to go to space but not for six
months or 12 months what yeah yeah even not even the muscle side but like i mean talking about gut health what happens to the nutrition piece up there where they are eating
like what are they eating they're getting it pretty dialed i mean a lot of protein um i know
you know i was talking to this guy they do powdered eggs milk and stuff like that because
you imagine you can't bring a bunch of yeah fresh eggs and stuff like that so it's all kind of mre
style but they're getting better they got a lot of vitamins that and stuff like that. So it's all kind of MRE style, but they're getting better.
They got a lot of vitamins that they have to supplement with.
Do they just recycle a set amount of water?
Yeah, they do recycle water.
They recycle their urine and everything.
I mean, I don't think anything goes to waste up there.
I was going to say, like, transporting a lot of water in space is probably expensive.
I heard at one point it was like $10,000 per pound of payload to go into outer space.
So, like, they're trying to keep the weight to a minimum.
And food is a component.
There's many components, of course.
But they're trying to keep it all down.
Yeah.
And water's heavy.
And think about how much you sweat, right?
So they've got to recycle that water and the air and everything.
And then if you get to Mars or the moon, that's what they're looking for is water so that you don't have to carry it with you.
So they drink the water that they brought.
They pee.
They filter it.
They shower in it. And they drink it and pee. brought they pee they filter it they shower in
it and they drink it and pee it's a tough 30 days up in space yeah i'm sure it tastes fine once it's
filtered no big deal i would do it right on what's going on really no other option so yeah you'll
make it work your options are to go into orbit or just float into the ether or drink your own pee
i'm going with the pee. Yeah, I'm in.
What's going on with the gut health, gut biome these days? What was the company you mentioned that you guys are working with here? Yeah, so we started partnering with this company, Ubiome,
and basically what we do is, so I guess background, what is the gut microbiome? So the gut microbiome
is the genome of all the bacteria and fungus and everything living inside your gut. You've got
trillions of bacteria cells that add up to about five pounds in your gut. So that must be there
for a reason. You don't just have five pounds of bacteria on here for nothing. And I think
historically people have not known what it's all about because it's been so hard to measure this
on a large scale. But this company, Ubiome, does a whole genome test of the bacteria in there.
So they basically take a fecal sample, like they don't take it, but you give it to them. You put it in a little vial. That's the funnest part of this, right? It's collecting the poop. But then
they take that, they isolate all the DNA in there, and then they look and see what that DNA belongs
to. There's thousands of types of bacteria. And so what our lab initially looked at with one of our
past graduate students, Ryan Dirk, who's now our lab manager, a study he published last year was looked at the relationship between the gut microbiome and fitness.
So just kind of a long cross-sectional study looking at 40 people at various fitness levels.
And then we measured their gut microbiome and we looked at two main bacteria types, Firmic McCutie's and bacteria DDS, probably butchering those names.
It's, you know, Latin or Greek or whatever, but we just call it F to B ratio.
So this F to B ratio we found correlated with fitness.
So the higher your VO two max or aerobic fitness,
the higher the percent of F to B. So let's say mine is, you know,
0.9 or whatever.
Somebody that has a VO two max of like 80 or whatever, we'd expect that
to be much higher. So we found this relationship, but we don't know, is it cause or effect,
right? Is the gut microbiome causing you to be fit or is your fitness causing your gut microbiome?
Of the billions of bacteria in your gut, how did you pick those two?
Those are two that are known for things like metabolism and they're actually not a specific bacteria
they're like a phylum that's correct yeah so they're a phylum which is a you know bigger
group of bacteria and then within those there's multiple different types that digest things like
carbohydrates which is super important in your gut or produce things like butyrate which is a
substance we know helps protect the gut lining so this is a problem with aging and extreme exercise.
You heard of leaky gut syndrome?
Yeah, or if you've ever ran a marathon or something,
you might have a leaky gut because your gut bounces and everything like that.
But this butyrate apparently helps protect the lining
so that all these bacteria don't send toxins, endotoxins,
into your bloodstream and cause bad things to happen.
If you're a person who has just taken like a round of antibiotics
and like you're trying to kind of replenish so to speak your your microbiome and you take some type
of probiotic pill or like you're eating yogurt and sauerkraut and fermented foods and whatever else
like especially the supplements though like you said there's thousands of different types of
bacteria trillions of cells like something that's microscopic adds up to five pounds there's a lot
of them and then you take this pill and there's one, maybe five,
maybe 10 different types of bacteria in there.
Maybe they're phylums and they're classes of bacteria,
but like how does, you know,
one to five different strains of bacteria affect the fact that you need
thousands of different types in your gut?
Well, first of all, I think, you know, we don't,
we didn't recruit any subjects that had taken any antibiotics in the last six months because that just decimates the bacteria in your gut.
Super bad for it.
I think that those probiotics help.
I don't know exactly the mechanism of how they increase all the thousands or hundreds of different kinds, whatever you have.
But everybody, all three of us measured our gut microbiome.
I might have 200 types.
You might have 400.
You might have 300.
It's all different.
And we're not at the point where we can say, okay, this is good is good this is bad but we think and we know that diversity is probably good so
yeah like you said take probiotics that's going to help for sure but just eating diverse foods i
know a lot of people get stuck on all right i'm gonna eat chicken and chicken and chicken and
fish and whatever like if you don't have diversity in your food you're probably not gonna have a
diverse microbiome as you guys learn about these two are we going to be able to design probiotics that make you fitter?
That's what we're kind of thinking in the future.
And so the F to B ratio I was talking about.
Dang.
No.
Dang.
Virtual reality and I can just take probiotics and I'm going to be Usain Bolt?
Or you could take Usain Bolt's poop and do a little fecal transplant.
Spend it a little bit?
Yeah, fecal transplant. And that's what people are talking about too.
It's crazy. But so we ended up studying this elite ultra marathon runner. We're doing the
study right now. He's going to be doing the Western States 100 this year, which is a crazy
100 mile race in the mountains here. But we measured his F to B ratio. Most people around
one or so, this guy was seven times higher in his f to b ratio which is
insane and it happened to be the top five bacteria in there three of them were related to um to
carbohydrate metabolism which you'd expect somebody's running 100 miles you're going to
need to digest carbohydrates you know during yeah exercise so um man a hundred mile race and their gut bacteria is mimicking the demand that they need to go that long.
So how are you guys like, what is it?
What is the process, I guess, of like finding these specific bacteria and then realizing like,
oh, that's the one that's associated with VO2 max or carbohydrate metabolism.
Like, I think a lot of this comes from animal studies and cell culture studies.
So we're just in the ground floor of human research. Carbohydrate metabolism. I think a lot of this comes from animal studies and cell culture studies.
We're just in the ground floor of human research.
We don't know barely anything except for there's maybe been a couple studies on exercise training in humans.
We're trying to do another one. Is the gut really the frontier of where a lot of the conversation is headed?
I think so.
I think the gut is the new hot thing.
There's always a new hot thing, but I it i remember 10 years ago was epigenetics and then you know andy galpin and i just published
a paper on epigenetics coming out in a couple months we're allowed to hear about that oh yeah
yeah what are the results of that so basically we we looked at a group of resistance trained men and
and sedentary men and we looked at the basically after exercise a time course of epigenetic changes, which this
is changes to your DNA so that you can express different proteins kind of downstream. And we
found differential responses to the same intensity exercise. So both of these, I don't remember the
exact protocol, but let's say it was like knee extension, 70% of your one RM, the train group
had like a totally different response in the untrained group. So I think it just shows a mechanism of how if you're trained,
you're probably going to train different than if you're untrained.
They showed a different response in which genes were expressed and which weren't.
Yeah.
So what we looked at was DNA methylation.
So the DNA strands inside your nucleus, if they're hypomethylated, like less methylation,
that means that they can be expressed more.
And so we find that after exercise, a lot of genes get hypomethylated, like less methylation, that means that they can be expressed more. And so we find that after exercise, a lot of genes get hypomethylated so that transcription can start happening and start making proteins.
So your gene expression is affecting how fast you're rebuilding muscle tissue?
Is that what you're saying?
Yeah.
Your, I guess, methylation, DNA methylation level will be how fast you're going to produce proteins to do that.
And, I mean, we only looked at a handful of genes,
I think like six or seven, found some differential responses,
but the next step is to do a gene array
where we can look at every gene and figure this out.
And this is where, you know, things are going big data,
microbiome, DNA methylation.
It's a lot of computing power, so that stuff is beyond me.
I need to hire a data scientist to be able to manage all this stuff right like and from a commercial standpoint i'd imagine people
are looking for ways if that's the case to intentionally methylate genes is that hypo
methylate yeah yeah so to remove yeah methyl groups right right okay and uh for specific genes
if you do it on the wrong gene though like you could get cancer or tumor growth or something so
it's worth it if you get jacked totally worth it yeah there's a lot of other people doing things that cause
cancer in the gym oh yeah for sure to grow themselves yeah i'd imagine there's a lot that
you just don't know that you don't know there's unintended consequences to messing with your genome
oh yeah yeah because and we don't know how long that that was right terminology actually yeah
yeah because you're not going to change the actual gene like your dna is not going to change unless you get some crazy viral infection or whatever.
But you're changing how the DNA gets expressed or the rate of expression.
So is this going to be able to, in a way, like change supplementation protocols?
If you're able to do this test, you can start to take specific supplements that are going to feed the exact
thing that you need right i can imagine yeah and i think the supplements would have to be targeted
though that's the hard part is figuring out how to target those uh what else what have you guys
found with comparing regular people regular people to elite athletes like what other studies have you
done where you're comparing elite sprinters or elite hockey players or whatever just to like regular joes like have you guys found how their their muscles are different both um from a like a
hereditary standpoint versus a training standpoint and vice versa this is a great question this is
what we're trying to answer so it's really hard to tell if it's so let's say something like muscle
fiber type which you guys talked talk about sometimes on this show, right? So your muscle fiber type, you've got fast twitch, slow twitch.
Let's say that you have 80% fast twitch.
I don't know if that's because you're training or you were born that way
because everybody can change a little bit,
and you might have a higher ability to change.
So a study that we just did, we looked at the fiber type of identical twins.
Oh, it's a twin study.
You did that with Calvin, right?
Right, yeah.
So this is
kind of a cool story too. Like, uh, the whole thing started where I was talking to some students in
Andy's lab and we were just chit chatting and we're isolating muscle fibers, super nerdy,
super awesome. And the students like, Oh, you know, my dad's an identical twin. This,
I'm like, your dad's an identical twin. That's kind of cool. Like I'm thinking science already.
Like, Oh, what is, uh, what does your dad's brother do? Oh, you know, he's a truck driver. What does your
dad do? Oh, he's an elite endurance athlete. He does Ironman. He's like, yeah, he's like,
let's talk to them. Right. And so we ended up getting these two guys out and ran a huge battery
of tests on them. And one of the things that we looked at, which is the most interesting was the
muscle fiber types. So we'd imagine fiber types between identical twins,
maybe to change 5%, 10%, 20% with 30 years of training.
These guys were 55% difference.
So the trained twin had 55% more slow twitch fibers than the untrained.
Which you could think that's almost counterintuitive.
Like if you are sedentary and you're not trained at all,
you could think that that person would also have a predominance of type one muscle fibers, but that's not always the case.
It's counterintuitive. It is counterintuitive because you'd actually, if you were untrained,
you'd have more of these hybrid fiber types. So the motor neurons going back, you got your brain
sends signals to motor neurons, sends signals to your muscles. If those motor neurons aren't firing,
the muscle fiber doesn't know what to do. Let's say it's a slow fiber. It'll just start to shift to kind of
an intermediate fiber because it's not being used. And it's not like a good thing, like a hybrid car
where you're like, oh, that's awesome. I can go fast or slow. This is like one part of the muscle
fiber is pulling fast. The other part's pulling slow and they're just ripping apart. Yeah. Yeah.
How long do you, does it, I guess, take if, if you have two twins? Is it instantaneous when someone starts working out that these changes start to happen or with like a compounding effect to get to 55%?
Or like how long does it take before your physiology really starts changing?
I think it's, well, it's probably a dose response.
So magnitude of the stimulus, whatever it is, and the duration.
So there's was, our study was 30 years discordant.
So they had been apart for 30 years.
One was training, one wasn't.
Their studies were like 10 years, five years, a lot of those.
And they find, you know, 5%, 10% shifts.
So I just think, I don't know if it's linear.
You probably in the first five or six years shift really a lot.
And then it just goes more from there.
But it's different person to person.
So the next step is we're trying to team up with a couple of other researchers
to actually build a database of identical twins that have different exercise experiences.
So if you're an identical twin out there, call us.
Call us at DrJimmyBagley on Instagram or Twitter and let me know
because that's what we're looking for.
That's awesome.
Getting back to the gut so um if we are able to find specific bacteria
and some of these are better at metabolizing carbohydrates um what is what is kind of the
down range on how we are training people like do we how much of that conversation is owned by the
bacteria in your gut versus like this nature versus nurture thing. Like this is my gut. How much can I really influence it? And then does that really tell the
story of my physical performance and capabilities? Yeah. I think that's another thing. So some people,
again, their gut might be kind of set yet, you know, when you're born, if you have, if you're
born natural birth versus a cesarean section, you get different kinds of bacteria from your mom and stuff.
That sticks with you for life.
People you live with, you have the same bacteria on you as them pretty much.
Kind of weird, but bugs like to jump around.
So I'm thinking that if somebody has the ability to take a supplement or exercise or whatever,
we figured out that can actually probably significantly change their bacteria.
But we don't really know enough yet i mean that company like i said ubiome they're i don't know
what they're at millions why are they interested in this it's another big data thing and i think
it's ultimately to look at therapies for different diseases because like i said so cancer alzheimer's
dementia all these things are related to the gut microbiome. If carbohydrates seem to be, in a way, like the villain of obesity,
if you have a gut filled with the bacteria that's great at digesting carbohydrate,
then you're fine.
Yeah, exactly.
So they actually took an animal study.
Well, load me up.
I like ice cream.
No, that's what I mean.
And there's ones that digest fat, too. I'll just take. No, that's what I mean. And there was one.
I'll just take a shot of that.
Shot of the bacteria and we'll be good to go.
Saturday night.
Well, that's what people are thinking, too.
It may be a suppository or something.
Kind of gross.
But if you can get the bacteria in there. That doesn't sound as fun as what you were talking about.
Yeah.
You were talking about ice cream.
I was talking about ice cream.
But then you can eat as much ice cream.
I just want the ice cream.
As you want.
No, it's like they took studies where they have animals that have no bacteria they're called germ-free mice and then they feed them high fat high sugar diets
no obesity so it's kind of weird and then they have other ones that they have like an obese
type bacteria in there and they get obese another one where they have lean bacteria from a lean
mouse they don't get obese so i think your bacteria can definitely affect how you process
all these foods and you know have we found ones for specifically like protein increasing protease?
That's the big enzyme that digests protein and amino acids.
Have you found specific bacteria for that?
Yeah, there's tons of bacteria that we know what they do.
We just don't know how to get them where they need to go and how much you need and how long it takes.
But like I said, I think, you know, supplement companies for sure in the next 10, 15 years are going to be targeting not just probiotics.
Like you said, you're taking two or three different types of bacteria, but actually
specific bacteria that you can get to your gut. Yeah. I mean, we're in the fitness industry,
so we kind of like automatically direct our attention over to supplements. But as far as I
know, many of the larger DNA sequencing companies and microbiome companies are taking all that data and they're selling it to pharmaceutical companies.
And that's like a big part of the revenue model.
Yeah.
This is probably the dark side of tech is data, basically data hoarding.
And we don't really have control over where our data goes.
So, you know, without getting too dark into all that.
Yeah.
When you do 23andMe or uBiome, you don't necessarily know what's going to happen to your profile in the next 10 years. Yeah. And that's part of the reason it's so cheap to do those tests because they don't need
your money specifically. They just want your data. Yep, exactly. So we want your data too,
but for research, not for... We're the good guys. We're the good guys. We try to be, right? Yeah.
They're good people too. They're trying to just make breakthrough discoveries. Yeah. And like I
said, I think there's a dark side
and a light side to everything,
but hopefully in the grand scheme of things,
all the stuff we find out
is going to save millions of lives.
They're also trying to do it
over thousands and thousands of people.
Everyone thinks that they're by their specific DNA.
It's like, they have mine.
You're like a number in the computer.
Yeah, and it's not like your name is tagged to it.
If you sell it to a pharma company,
they're not going to say,
all right, this is your name.
You're,
you know,
it's going to be de-identified.
Send it to their address.
Yeah.
Um,
well,
if assuming you,
you come back with this gut profile,
um,
I guess in a way,
what,
what do you deem one of them more or less important?
And what is the connectivity between muscle fibers,
gut health
bacteria what's in there um and then maybe training regimens and and volume like what are we learning
about if we're connecting these to the gut to performance how do we use the data create training
programs i think that the main thing that we want to do is if you look at this there's this model of
how gut health really works is stopping this leaky gut syndrome. And that has to do with these bacteria that produce butyrate,
the substance that protects your gut from leaking out bacteria that create endotoxins.
So if we can target, you know, either training regimens, we don't know resistance training,
aerobic combination. We don't know what kind of food specifically will get these butyrate
producers up. But if you can increase those, then that decreases leaky gut.
And then that makes it so, you know, hopefully your brain when you're 80 years old doesn't have a lot of bacteria endotoxins in there that have been eating it up or whatever.
Yeah.
It's not my wheelhouse specifically, but like in the keto world, a lot of people supplement with endogenous ketones, beta-hydroxybutyrate is one of those.
Is that similar to the butyrate you're talking about?
Is that a variation of it? Is it related? Can being in ketosis help what you're talking
about? It is similar, but I don't know if it gets to where it needs to go. That's the problem with
supplements, right? Like I could take an ATP supplement. Is that ATP going to go into my
muscles where it needs to go? You know, that's why I don't have it. So I don't, I don't know
for sure. Um, yeah, I mean, this research is to me, too. I'm a year and a half in.
We just published our first paper on it last year.
So I'm learning something new every day, which is why I'm a professor, so I can learn.
I get paid to learn.
Did we get all the results of the twin study that we started going into?
So fiber type was different.
And then other stuff, like you'd expect, their aerobic capacity, VO2, was 30% different.
Body fat was lower.
Blood profile, lipids, all that was better in endurance training.
So 30 years of endurance.
Those are some of the more intuitive findings.
But another one that also probably is intuitive is that the untrained twin's legs were way stronger.
Had a higher one rep max and knee extension and all that because he was a little heavier probably.
And the other trend is just running and cycling and swimming, which is great cardiovascularly.
Great for your upper body, everything too,
but it might not be great for knee extensions and squats.
1RM strength.
Right.
What was the body fat percentage or weight of the untrained one?
It was under 20, I believe.
Oh, so not even.
No, he wasn't.
I mean, they were in their 50s too.
So they were.
Yeah.
But, I mean, 20 for a 50-year-old is pretty good.
Yeah.
It's pretty fit.
When you think, I love the gut bacteria stuff, but when you think about all of the nutrition stuff that's out there right now,
and I feel like everybody's counting macros and just handing macro plans out to people,
do you roll your eyes at that stuff now, kind of knowing the deeper story?
Like I feel like we can handle a lot of the conversation talking about macros,
but clearly there's a massive leap to let's do some gut bacteria testing and actually find out what's going on inside you.
Yeah, and I, so go count your macros, count your calories,
whatever you want to do for your specific program,
but just know like say you're you
know on a carnivore keto diet and you got high fat high protein as soon as you start eating carbs
you don't have those bacteria living in your gut to digest the carbs so you're not going to handle
carbs so people say oh i'm you know intolerant of carbs yeah because you haven't been eating them
you know it's not like you have to take gluten out for 30 days and watch what happens when you
eat a piece of bread yeah it's your bacteria is crazy it will adapt to the stresses put on it yeah so the cold turkey
approach to nutrition isn't the best way you should ease in and out of changes in diet exactly
like you do in training you don't cold turkey stop and start training programs you ease into it right
there's a beautiful term for that right metabolic flexibility there it is yeah metabolic flexibility so our ability to not only like to to have variants in our diet to be able
to run off all of the fuels um i guess is there anything that you guys are finding in the lab like
on the on the gut bacteria side of you need x amount of this like how are you guys testing
this to to find out what's optimal for people i think right now we're
still in the data collection phase so we need to find strong people fit people see what their gut
bacteria so you guys yeah come on in yeah let's get a sample we need to do it we showed up just
in time right this is kind of the way that you know andy galpin and i go about research too is
there's been so much research on sedentary untrained people so much research on
disease population super important but there's not a lot of high level athlete data and that's
where we're trying to fill that gap because if we know what the gut bacteria is for high level
like ultra endurance runner or olympic lifter maybe that's what your bacteria have you guys
ever compared stuff like that of taking somebody that's an ultra marathoner top 10 in the world or
whatever that is and then looked at somebody that's an olympic weightlifter and their their
job is one second efforts or quarter second efforts it feels like when you're snatching
um and the difference in those two i'm gonna steal that idea we're gonna do it now let's make it
happen well we got one i get my name on it so i'm a scientist? Definitely. Yes. Were you involved in the studies that he did testing the fiber types of national caliber or world-class Olympic weightlifters?
Yep.
That was actually just published last week, too.
Man, we're busy, huh?
Yeah.
We've got a lot going on.
Yeah.
Who's writing all this stuff?
So Andy and I tag team write stuff.
And sometimes we'll have writing retreats.
Like this last spring, we were out at Colorado River.
Just posted up for three days, a little trailer on the river and just wrote got a grant done got papers done that's how you got to get it done i think yeah separate yourself yeah but um no yeah
this weightlifting study uh collected biopsies on over a dozen elite weightlifters and olympic
world class at the worlds in biopsy means you go into someone's leg and you steal their muscle
exactly look at it exactly muscle biopsy take a small sample which is the size of a pea you know
like 100 milligrams or so and then with that we have thousands of fibers we can isolate and look
at their fiber type and you'd imagine the weightlifters had a lot of fast twitch fibers
they had the most as a group ever recorded in the way that we test so over 65 fast twitch fibers and there was actually
a couple women that were over 80 fast twitch fibers which is super rare but no guys um the
guys were in their 60s and 70s so i mean averages across the board men and women were the same but
the highest five fast twitch fiber type we found was in the women yeah i feel like that's semi
counter to it as well like you would you would think that guys have a higher amount of fast-switch fibers.
Guys are just more associated with strength and speed and power.
But the women were the ones that had the highest percentage, you're saying.
Yeah.
And so I think what it shows is that probably training has more to do with your fiber type than your sex.
Well, genetics does too, right?
But if you took us, I think most of the times when people have measured fiber type in sedentary people,
probably sedentary men historically have been more active than sedentary women,
just with work and everything like that.
It's totally changing now.
But so when they did measure sedentary people, they said,
oh, these women have a different fiber type than men or less fast twitch or whatever.
But what they were really seeing was an artifact of their physical activity,
you know, outside whatever.
So there's more that goes into lifting weights than just
having high contractile speed contractile velocity of a muscle there's there's you know
limb lengths and joint angles and on and on technique blah blah but you would think if women
at the same weight in the same weight class if they have a higher percentage of fast twitch
muscle fibers and they're in the same weight class and they're both lean to the guys. They have similar muscle mass and similar limb lengths that the
women would have higher numbers. But I don't think that's the case, right? No, it's not the case.
So why do you think that is if their muscle mass has a higher percentage of fast-twitch fibers?
I think it's a few things. One of them may be the architecture of the way the fibers are arranged.
So if you look, if the fibers are arranged perpendicular or angled that's going to change how the force is transmitted also they may have
you know similar lean or mass size but they may have less um actually smaller muscle fibers we
didn't measure the diameter of the fibers oh you didn't look at cross-sectional area you just
talked about percentage of the number but not the size of the individual fibers right so that's
probably it and then also neural stimulation there's differences between men and women too so i mean if we went through
there's dozens of things we could say make the difference but at least we know now if you pulled
a muscle cell from a man and a woman fiber typed them you wouldn't be able to tell the difference
between a man and a woman yeah regarding the the nervous system we're about to go talk withcience, which we've done a show with in the past. Are you familiar with them at all?
A little bit. Yeah.
But I was wondering, I don't know all the details of how their technology works.
Like it stimulates your brain. You're supposed to develop motor patterns at a faster rate is how I intuitively think about it. But I was wondering, from a force production standpoint,
if they stimulated the nervous system enough to have the recruitment of muscle fibers increase faster than it would with just regular training.
I don't know if it's possible.
Because if you did that, if you were to artificially stimulate muscle, it would be super painful.
Because your nervous system creates an electrical impulse that goes to the muscle. You'd have to artificially
stimulate through the skin and fat or wherever you are stimulating. Or if you're doing it,
you know, at the brain, I don't know how necessarily that works, but you'd have to
give yourself such a big shock that it would hurt super bad. And you'd, you're better off just
maxing out yourself. Yeah. That sounds more fun than being shocked.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, we're going to go figure it out.
Yeah, let me know how it goes.
I bet it'll be awesome.
We're going to go learn how to bench press.
Yeah.
We're going to be the strongest we've ever been.
Yeah.
How are you guys when we just went and there was a class going on in a gym,
what does a study look like for you guys
when you're actually,
what exercises are you choosing?
Because I'm kind of, like, getting into what you're talking about. Like, your ability to move in the gym becomes a massive piece of how strong you are.
How do you guys keep that basically, like, controlled?
Yeah, controlled across people that have different training ages and it's hard how you're able to
really keep that keep that control equalized with people so usually you'll see a lot of studies that
are like three by ten knee extensions at 70 percent on rm and then three by ten squats or sled or
whatever people use these because they're controlled and that's not what normal people will do in the
gym but they also we want to stimulate usually the vastest lateralis or quads
because that's what we're biopsying and looking at.
So we do a lot of these standard ones,
but now you're seeing a lot of more dynamic actual pro.
It's just like you're kind of talking about like snatches and clean and jerks.
If that's really going to be the test,
we're going for Olympic weightlifters that are in the top 1% in the world,
that there's a massive difference in being able to test students
that have only been snatching for six months maybe yeah you just got to scale it so you know a lot of
our studies that are in recreationally trained people we're not going to be doing snatch and
stuff but we might you know get into squats or that's why you have a lot of machines too yeah
yeah what do you got in the back of your mind right now for like dream studies like you really
want to do something but you just haven't able to like to get it approved or just the technology's not there but like you're super
excited about the someday aspect of it man i think well my brain's always crazy i keep telling people
like my ideas aren't like linear ideas where i've got these two or three it's like a spider web and
it just goes all different directions but i think big goals for our lab is to do these big training
studies where we can get dozens and hundreds of people in to do different training protocols and measure the whole gamut of things.
Muscle biopsies to do fiber type and all that gene expression and then also microbiome stuff.
But, you know, in the short term, I guess we do have some studies planned looking at resistance training and aerobic training effects on microbiome.
There's not a lot of data on that in humans, so we're pretty interested in that.
And then doing these more cross-sectional studies on elite athletes.
So you'll see a paper, hopefully Andy and I have been working on it for about eight years now,
where papers take a long time, where we're going to be showing some data of a lot of different types of elite athletes
from MMA fighters to weightlifters
to ultra marathon runners and everything in between and looking at differences.
When you talk about gene expression, does the training program specific,
like the protocol that you're on make a difference in the, like how much of that gene is expressed?
Like if I just came in and just casually lifted it 50, 60%, but it was pretty consistent,
is that going to be the same expression as if I'm on like a really heavy training program
where I'm trying to increase my one RM back squat or deadlift?
Oh yeah, it'll change and it'll depend on what genes you're looking at.
Cause you know, we got 23, whatever thousand genes that do things, but there's hundreds
or a couple thousand that are important in muscle.
So yeah, if you're lifting super heavy, this energy sensor in your cell,
AMPK is going to say, Hey, I'm running out of energy.
And that's going to get ramped up really quick.
Whereas if you're lifting at 50, 60%, then that gene won't get expressed as much.
Can you go over the AMPK?
We were down at Galpin's lab and he kept throwing that around as if everybody
just knows what the hell he's talking about.
We hang out with really smart people like Dr. Irene Tobias.
It's his postdoc that's like a legit biochemist.
We're physiologists that dabble in biochemistry.
So we know a little bit to be dangerous.
She talks very technical in regular conversation.
Yeah, she's legit.
She's as soon as everyone knows the AMP kinase and mTOR and everything else.
Yeah, but they don't.
Just toss it around.
I'm just nodding my head.
Sure, Irene. So AMPk is a protein complex well that's another crazy word so it's just a protein in your every cell you have and it's a sensor of energy so atp is your energy in your cell that goes down
amp goes up its senses amp and then that tells tells your body to start either getting glucose in there or
breaking down fats or whatever to start making more energy. So that's like really all it does.
I mean, it's super important, but it's really important for diabetes and for performance and
all this stuff. So we're looking at AMPK after high intensity interval training in elite crossfitters
right now. And that's a study that we presented some data here and there,
but we're pretty excited looking at men and women
and seeing how over a course of two, three hours,
how does AMPK change inside the muscle
so that we can do things like program your timing of nutrition.
Say you have a certain fiber type and AMPK doesn't get ramped up
until 30, 40 minutes after, maybe you should be eating in that window
or if it gets ramped up right away
eating in that window so what are you learning about crossfitters because there's an interesting
breed of athlete that is you know not ultra marathons but running rowing marathons and
snatching 300 pounds females snatching 200 like they're big strong yeah fit and they're big, strong. Yeah, fit. And they're also able to go run many six-minute miles in a row or, you know, row a marathon.
Like what is their muscle fiber kind of outlook have for the elite level person?
I'd imagine that most of them would have a lot of these type 2A fibers, which are fast twitch,
but they would also express really oxidative enzymes or aerobic enzymes so they probably have a lot of fast twitch fibers that also act like
slow aerobic fibers which is what you want that's what everybody would want so you know and you can
develop those but a lot of people might just be born with them so i think you know as crossfit's
got more and more popular you see the caliber of athlete get better and better and better until
we're at basically Olympic level.
Yeah, because you think about a guy like Matt Frazier that was national champion
or whatever it was in Olympic weightlifting and how long he has to sit on an erg,
just developing the ability to become a long-distance athlete
or those ranges in the middle.
I think it's like a three-year, four-year process for him almost
to be able to get to the point where he can kind of row a row a marathon and be in the top 10 in the world yeah and he's
going to lose some strength and 1rm and stuff but that's not really the goal still but he'll still
be super strong so yeah but you know it depends on the person if you start like that probably a
lot easier to get fit than if you're just like me like average joe how do they compare to i guess are they really
like the the mid-range athlete that you guys have in here like if an ultra marathon's on one end and
you've got olympic weightlifter gold medalist on the other do do the crossfit athletes fill in a
lot of gaps for you on putting putting the story together of how how we can learn about muscle
fibers yeah i think they're like you said right in the middle, good at both.
The only thing comparative that we've looked at is elite MMA fighters,
probably real similar.
You've got to be strong, but you've got to be able to go X amount of rounds
and have that endurance too.
So these are the type of athletes that are probably,
it's probably really fun to be,
but it's also really hard to program for them, right,
because you've got to peak certain components of fitness at certain times.
Yeah.
Yeah.
What other components of muscle do you guys study?
Do you look at like mitochondrial density and capillary density?
Anything that's not just like fiber type specific?
Yeah.
So one of the main things we're looking at now is myonuclear domain.
So all of your muscle cells have thousands of nuclei.
So normal cells have one nucleus
muscles can repair super fast so you need a lot of nuclei with a lot of dna yeah andy shows the
3d you printed um muscle fiber that was multi-nucleated there was like hundreds on it
yeah that was the one that i printed out my first one oh you printed it yeah yeah so we wrote that
paper a while david andy all that credit you see You see that? Galpin stole it. Oh, yeah. He's okay. He'll steal my ideas.
We steal each other's ideas.
But no, yeah.
So we can 3D print a full model, but you can count all the nuclei and everything.
And then, like you said, mitochondrial density, we can actually image.
So mitochondria are like one-tenth or smaller the size of a nuclei.
And there's lots of them.
It's like a matrix inside your muscle fiber.
So we can look at mitochondrial content, density.
We're starting to do this crazy stuff with atomic force microscope.
That's a microscope that pushes a little needle down on top of a cell and
you can tell how stretchy or strong the membranes are.
And that's kind of a forgotten aspect of muscles that you've got these
proteins,
actin and myosin,
which contract if anybody knows sliding filament theory,
but you forget that it's not just pulling tendon to tendon,
it's pulling against the membrane,
and the membranes are what transmit the force
from the next fiber to the next fiber.
So if you have a thicker, stronger membrane,
you're probably going to be better at transmitting force.
How would you influence the fluidity of the membrane
or the toughness of the membrane, like you're saying?
That's not the right terminology, but how do you influence how tough the membrane or like the the the toughness of the membrane like you're saying i don't know that that's not the right terminology but like how do you how do you influence like how
tough the membrane is well you've got proteins that connect to the membrane from your sarcomeres
what generate force and some of them like one common one that people know is dystrophin so
if you heard of muscular dystrophy that basically is a protein membrane that doesn't work so people
with muscular dystrophy have great actinomyosins contracting,
but it's not transmitting force to their tendons
and bones. So that's one thing.
Also, just overall cell health,
you know, cell walls are made of fats, so you've
got to eat fats and lipids and stuff.
You can't just eat only carbs or whatever.
Yeah, it's what you eat.
I've heard about this. I can't just eat only carbs?
Yeah, I try.
That'd be delicious. It goes back to ice this. I can't just eat only carbs. Yeah, I try. It goes back to ice
cream. What were we just doing? How is virtual reality a part of science all of a sudden?
So we live in this place called San Francisco, surrounded by the Silicon Valley. And we were
approached by this guy, really smart, techie guy named Aaron Stanton. He used to work at Apple.
And he came to us and he was like, hey, so I've been playing these virtual reality games and I think I'm exercising,
but my heart rate's up. Am I just scared? He's like, do I just have like...
Am I falling off this cliff for real?
Is it like an autonomic response? And he was on Reddit and people, all the Reddit, you know,
trolls are like, oh, you're just scared. You're not exercising, blah, blah, blah. So he's like,
let's find out. So he Googles San Francisco exercise physiology, finds us. We're the first
ones.
He comes over, and we started doing this study where we had him
and multiple other people playing virtual reality games, boxing games,
archery games, dance games, and then looking at the metabolic cost.
So we hook them up with a mask, measure how much oxygen your muscles use.
We're finding all of them are moderate to high-intensity exercise.
So it is exercise, not just you're scared.
You might be scared too.
So how does that play into just general fitness though?
It's not going to replace the fact that I need to go have strong joints and muscles.
No, I don't think it will replace it yet.
Yeah.
So if we can get those controllers but weight them a little bit heavier, maybe deadlifts, is that possible?
Totally possible.
Yeah, there's another company that just opened called Black Box VR,
and it's a gym that has cable stacks that move around you, and you grab them and use them to exercise.
So that's the next level stuff.
Right now you can shadow box and all that.
You're doing aerobic exercise, but resistance training with vr is the future yeah i feel like as far as exercise goes the the vr
stuff we just did is kind of like the lowest level of exercise it's just quote-unquote burning
calories by moving around a lot it's like moving is better than not moving but like there's no
real full range of motion stuff movement quality isn't really a part of it you're kind of just
you're just accomplishing a task that's in front of you but you're not really learning how to move you're not becoming more skilled as a mover etc
and you're not becoming stronger increasing bone density whatever else but but your heart rate's
getting up and you are sweating and so you're burning some calories and and you're getting
circulation like there's a lot of benefits to it but it's it's limiting if you're like a real
athlete but if you're sedentary you're a gamer it's better than sitting on your couch all day
oh yeah for sure i think like you said it's if you're an elite crossfader trying to compete in the games you're not going
to be doing vr all day but you might warm up with vr right you might spend 5-10 minutes shadowboxing
in vr just to get into it and then do your routine but is there a way that we could implement kind of
movement practice though and like to actually have almost like in like a coach's eye type thing where you're
doing movements or lifting with virtual reality stuff and you're just getting readouts of like
maybe there's a force plate underneath and you're like just getting exactly what's going on bar path
that's just on the side of the wall that doesn't exist no yeah exactly that's what we need because
there's so many motion sensors and there's these things called haptics like haptic gloves that
actually you know have pressure sensors on them and it makes it so imagine you're
wearing these gloves you go down to grab something that's like a bar bar's not there but it feels
like it's there that's kind of the crazy new thing have you seen those tesla suits not related to the
elon's company uh-uh it's like a it's like a full body haptic type of thing where like if you're
if you're outside like the suit will make you feel
cool like you can feel the wind on you because it's a full body thing and it provides some amount
of stimulation where you could be in a virtual world and like if you get gunshot like it might
like make your chest like hot i've totally made that up but like it's like things like that yeah
like there's there's a sensory component to vr now you're not it's not just visual yeah visual
auditory and then the kinesthetic stuff and then pretty soon probably smell have like olfactory thing like you know you're walking
to a bakery or whatever like there's the carbs right yeah virtual bread this is so great yeah
it's way better uh what are you guys using to actually test uh with the with the vr um like
how does that really play into are you guys having people do this for six weeks and then retesting uh like
how your body's using oxygen and just getting in shape like yeah i mean that's a good we haven't
done any training studies with this but we have implemented it into our student fitness center
and they have weekly kind of meetups where people can come in and test it out and play against each
other but we're looking at things like negatives like um people that may feel uncomfortable
motion sickness and stuff which is a potential problem but we're also looking at yeah fitness
level and enjoyability it seems like another main finding is let's say you're working at
you know it should be a 15 on your rpe scale or very hard people are rating that as 13 or 12 or
something so they're always consistently rating the intensity lower than what it should be so that's one thing but again like they're having a good time so they
don't they don't feel like it's that hard because they're enjoying it yeah it's like if you play
basketball or soccer you're having a good time you're actually working pretty hard but another
thing is like you said they might not be aware of their body as much so we need to have that
awareness component because we don't want anybody to get hurt or anything we haven't had that yet
but yeah.
Very cool.
Yeah.
I wish we could stay here for like,
I know,
you guys should move in.
Three more hours.
Yeah.
We got some virtual reality.
We got to go
do some Halo
and learn about
this neuro priming.
Yeah.
Could we use neuro priming
in this virtual reality world?
Do you know this term
that they use?
I've seen,
yeah, I saw a guy that was doing, he was playing the piano with his brain or something like that is that the same thing it's pretty crazy no we'll have to ask him about that no whatever it is
stimulating their neuro cortex or their their motor cortex to increase movement pattern so
i think that there's like a massively cool potential at some point for this virtual reality thing.
I would love to see bar paths.
I would love to see the ability to like analyze form and how you guys can implement that stuff.
I'd imagine those guys want to do more studies like the things that you do with their technology.
So I'll connect with those guys.
I bet you down the line you guys can do some work together.
That'd be awesome.
Yeah, I appreciate it.
Where can people find you in the lab? You find the lab at muscle fizz lab you can find our grad program
at sfsu underscore kin underscore grad and you can find me at dr jimmy bagley nice when what's
the next big study you guys are publishing um so we do have some studies that have been submitted
i'm trying to think the next big one coming out.
Yeah. Look out for that epigenetic study that should be coming out in the next three months.
Yeah. Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. So yeah, it'll be cool. Very cool. By the way, by beside yourself and Andy Galpin, who else is really pushing this
field forward right now? Man, we have a big crew that we're working with. I really like the guys,
the crew down at University of Kentucky.
So Dr. Kevin Murak is down there.
He's actually a postdoc, but he's super legit.
He's working with John McCarthy.
He's into stuff like ribosomal biogenesis.
So you want to get deep into muscle.
Next time we'll talk ribosomes.
That stuff's crazy.
But, yeah, man, yeah, our crew's all over the place. You guys are growing.
Yeah, we're growing.
We're exponentially growing.
Meatheads at Science didn't exist a while ago.
Yeah, just wait.
Now they're everywhere.
To the next generation.
They're infiltrating.
All of our students we're sending off to the world.
When your classroom is the weight room, which we saw this morning,
it's a lot easier to show up to class.
Oh, yeah.
It's a lot easier to care about school.
Yep, we can exercise and biopsy and then look what happened. It's pretty cool. Yeah. There you go. Dude, thank you for coming on the show.
Thank you for clearing up a morning for us. Yeah. It's a little last minute and we were able to
get in here and crank out an hour. I appreciate it guys. Thanks for coming out. For sure. We'll
do it again. Doug Larson. You can find me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. I'm at Anders
Varner because I'm Anders Varner. Get into the Shrug Collective at Shrug Collective,
YouTube, iTunes.
Leave a comment.
We'll see you guys next Wednesday.
That's a wrap, friends.
Hope you learned about the gut health today.
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