Huberman Lab - How To Build Endurance In Your Brain & Body
Episode Date: June 7, 2021This episode I discuss endurance: our ability to perform effort over extended amounts of time. I describe the four kinds of endurance: muscular endurance, long duration (single-set) efforts, and the t...wo kinds of high intensity interval training (HIIT). I discuss efficiency of effort and maximizing quality of effort, and a hydration formula. I review how our heart literally gets stronger when we oxygenate muscles properly. I also discuss motivation for long bouts of work and the visual physiological basis of the "extra gear" we all can leverage for effort. Finally, I review how accelerating as we fatigue can allow us to access untapped energetic resources. For the full show notes and timestamps, visit hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors: AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman Supplements from Momentous https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac Disclaimer
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Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.
This podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.
It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science-related tools to the general public.
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I've done a couple of episodes now on the so-called gut
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function, neuron function, as well as the function of all the cells and all the tissues and organ
systems of the body. If we have sodium, magnesium, and potassium present in the proper ratios,
all of those cells function properly and all our bodily systems can be optimized.
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For the last month, four episodes to be exact.
We've been discussing physical performance
and skill learning.
We've talked about how to learn skills faster,
whether or not those are skills for athletic performance,
dance, music, things of that sort.
We've also talked about how to gain strength
and how to lose fat faster by leveraging the nervous system.
Things like
shiver and non-shiver, non-exercise activity-induced thermogenesis. We talked
about how neurons can actually trigger accelerated fat loss. We talked about
hypertrophy, also called muscle growth, and we covered everything from sets and
reps, protocols, how long to stay in a cold ice bath, when to get out, how to keep shivering.
We've covered a lot of tools and a lot of science.
So if you're interested in those things, and you even perhaps want to learn a little bit
about how we make energy, ATP, from carbohydrates or from fats, it's all covered in the previous
four episodes.
This was going to be the time that we moved to a new topic entirely, but we
are going to do one more episode in this series on physical performance. For the simple reason,
that you asked many questions about something that's vitally important, both for physical
performance and long-term and short-term health, and that's endurance. And so today we are
going to talk about endurance.
Now if you're a strength athlete or you're not interested in endurance, don't depart
just yet because it turns out that there are ways to train endurance that are very different
than I would have previously imagined.
If you only think about long runs, long swims, marathons, half marathons, 10Ks, 5Ks, and
that sort of thing puts you to sleep, kind of like Costello is snoring in the background
right now.
He's not a long distance endurance athlete, that's for sure.
If you're interested in those things or if you are averse to those things, I encourage
you to continue listening because we are going to talk about a little bit of science and then some specific protocols that really define what endurance is, the four types of endurance
and ways to train those in concert with the other things that you might be doing like weight training
or skill training or yoga. And if you are an endurance athlete, we are going to cover a lot of tools and science that I'm certain will also help enhance your training and performance in races or even
just recreationally.
The topic of endurance, I think, has been badly misrepresented, frankly, online.
And when you start digging into the science and you start talking to real experts in this
area, what you discover, what I've discovered, is that it's an incredibly interesting area
because it teaches us so much about how our body and our brain use fuels and how we can
control which fuels are used by our body and brain.
So today we will talk about the four kinds of endurance.
We will also cover the topic of hydration, which might sound incredibly boring, like,
okay, just drink more water.
But it's really interesting because not only is hydration a limiting factor on performance,
but there is a right way to hydrate, and there is a wrong way to hydrate.
There actually is a formula that I'll teach you to know how much water to be drinking,
depending on your activity levels. And if that sounds like a simple thing, like, oh,
just tap off water until your run, your run is clear, that's actually the wrong advice.
It turns out that if you don't hydrate properly, you can see 20 to 30% reductions in performance,
whether or not that strength, whether or not that's increasing hypertrophy,
whether or not that's running, swimming, even mental performance.
So even if you're not an athlete or a recreational athlete at all, I encourage you to stay tuned
for the part about hydration.
So we're going to cover as usual a little bit of science, and then we're going to dive
right into protocols that you can apply if you like and if you deem those correct and
safe for you.
Before we dive into all that, I want to make an important announcement, which is all the episodes of the Huberman Lab podcast
are now housed on a single website, which is HubermanLab.com.
If you go to HubermanLab.com, you can find all the episodes in YouTube, Apple, and Spotify format with links there.
The website is also searchable, so if you go into the little search function, which you'll
find very easily, and you put in, for instance, CREATINE or SLEEP or ISBATH or SANA, it will
take you to the specific episodes that contain that information.
And in addition, if you go to the website, hubraminlab.com, you have the opportunity to sign up for what we call the HubermanLab Neural Network.
The HubermanLab Neural Network is a zero-cost resource where once a month, perhaps more often, you'll receive an email newsletter, and that newsletter will contain specific protocols, announcements, attachments of PDFs, and things of that sort of protocols, tools and science from the podcast.
We will also make any announcements about
live lectures which at some point I'll probably start doing in various cities in the US and probably around the world as well as
Well as other things that I think would be really useful to you all of course at zero cost
So that's hubermanlab.com
Sign up for the neural network newsletter.
You can find that in the menu tab
or it might pop up when you get there.
And I hope you will join.
And as a final announcement,
if you're not already following us on Instagram,
you can go to hubermanlab on Instagram.
And if you do that,
I often make announcements and release protocols
and links to protocols and things there as well.
I briefly wanna touch on something from the previous episode,
which is that if you are somebody that is trying to increase muscle strength and or size,
or if you're simply somebody who doesn't want to increase muscle strength and size,
and you just want to maintain the musculature that you have,
it's vital that you perform at least five sets of resistance training
per muscle per week. If we don't do that, we lose muscle over time, and that is one reason,
among many, to have a regular resistance training protocol. Nobody wants to start resembling a folded
over envelope or a melted candle. No one wants to have challenges getting up out of a chair or off the ground.
Maintaining musculature is vital not just to our immediate health but to our long-term health
trajectory.
So, I just want to emphasize that point.
If you're curious about the sets, the reps, how close to failure to go or not go, whether
or not you should be doing your cardiovascular training
before or after your weight training.
All of that is in the previous episode, right down to the details.
I like to think it made simple for you to understand.
But I do strongly believe that resistance training, whether or not it's with body weight or
bands or weights or simply lifting rocks in the yard or logs in the yard, is vital for
our systemic physiology and our overall health,
and that includes our brain health.
And I describe the reasons for that
and the mechanisms in the previous episode.
Today I'd like to talk about endurance
and how to build endurance and how to use endurance
for the health of your entire body.
Endurance, as the name suggests, is our ability to engage in
continuous bouts of exercise or continuous movement or continuous effort of any kind.
And I do believe that our ability to engage in activities that we call endurance training or physical endurance activities, do have carryover to
mental performance of things that require long term effort.
I'll touch on that at the end and why there's reason to believe that there's a biological
crossover between those two things.
I don't think it's simply the case that if you train yourself to be a strength and speed
athlete and to do short bouts of exercise, they're very intense, that you can only do
mental work of short bouts and very intense.
But it is clear that cardiovascular exercise, exercise where you're getting your heart
rate up continuously for a period of time and endurance exercise, we will define what
that is in a moment is vital
for tapping into and enhancing various aspects of our biology in the body and in the brain
such that our brain can perform work for longer periods of time, focused work, learning, etc.
So, I want to dive into the topic of endurance and I want to just begin by addressing something
that's vital to any kind of effort, whether that's mental effort or physical effort.
So as always, a little bit of science, then we'll get right into protocols.
So the key thing to understand about energy production in the body, meaning your ability
to think, your ability to talk, your ability to walk, your ability to run
is this thing that we call ATP. ATP and mitochondria, which are just little what we call organelles
within cells, these little factories that make energy, if you will. ATP is required for anything
that requires energy, for anything that you do that requires
effort.
And there are different ways to get ATP.
And we have been gifted as a species with the ability to convert lots of things into ATP.
We can convert carbohydrates.
Literally, the kinds of carbohydrates. You eat a bagel, you eat a piece of pizza.
Pizza usually is dough and it has cheese
and some other things.
Costello here, as we talk about,
the costello loves pizza, by the way.
Eating a piece of pizza, it gets converted into various things,
fatty acids from the fats, glucose from the bread,
and those things get converted into ATP within cells, through
things like like calluses, things like lipolysis.
I talked about this in previous episodes.
So our muscles and our neurons use different fuel sources to generate ATP.
The ones that are used first for short bouts of intense activity are things like phosphocreatine.
If you've only heard about creatine as a supplement, well, phosphocreatine actually
exists in our muscles. And that's why people take creatine. You can load your muscles
with more creatine. And though, and, excuse me, phosphocreatine is great for short intense
bouts of effort. So when you're really pushing hard on something physical,
let's say you see a car on the side of the road
and that car is stalled and the person says,
hey, can you help me push my car and you start to push?
That's gonna be phosphocreatine
is gonna be your main fuel source.
Then you start to tap into things like glucose,
which is literally just carbohydrates,
your sugar that's in your blood.
And then if you keep pushing on that car,
you keep engaging in a particular effort or you keep studying or you keep pushing on that car, you keep engaging in a particular effort, or you
keep studying, or you keep listening to this podcast, you start to tap into other fuel
sources like glycogen from your liver, which is just, it's like a little pack, just like,
you know, you might have packed a sandwich or something for work.
You have a little pack of glycogen in your liver that you can rely on.
And you have fat stored in adipose tissue,
even if you have very, very low body fat percentage.
Like you're one of these people has like 3% or 5% body fat,
really thin skin, very little body fat.
You can extract lipids, fatty acids from that body fat.
It's like a storage pack.
It is a storage pack for energy
that can be converted to ATP.
So, without going into any more detail, when I say today, energy, or I say ATP, just remember that
regardless of your diet, regardless of your nutritional plan, your body has the capacity to use
creatine glucose, glycogen, lipids. And if you're ketogenic ketones,
we'll talk about ketosis in order to generate fuel energy.
Now, the other crucial point is that in order
to complete that process of taking these fuels
and converting them into energy, most of the time,
you need oxygen, you need air, basically, in your system.
Now, it's not actual air. You need oxygen molecules in your system, comes in through your mouth,
and your nose goes to your lungs and distributes via the bloodstream. Oxygen is not a fuel,
but like a fire that has no oxygen, you can't actually burn the logs, but when you
blow a lot of oxygen onto a fire, basically onto a logs with a flame there, then basically
it will take fire, it will burn, okay?
Oxygen allows you to burn fuel.
So today we are going to ask the critical questions. What allows us to perform?
What allows us to continue effort for long periods of time? And that effort could be a run,
it could be a swim, it could be studying, it could be anything that extends over a long period of time.
Well, you're going to need energy and you're going to need oxygen. But the way to answer a question,
like, what allows us to endure, right, endurance? What allows us to keep going? Well, we think of
things like willpower, but what's willpower? Willpower is neurons. It's neurons in our brain. We have
this thing called the central governor, which decides whether or not we should or could continue or whether or not we should
Stop whether or not we should quit
Okay, so whether or not you're somebody who has a lot of what we would call resilience and endurance or whether or not you're somebody who
Taps out early and quits early or can't handle frustration that has to do with your fuel utilization and specific neurons
So we have to ask the question what is the limiting factor on performance?
Right?
So instead of saying what allows us to endure,
we should say what prevents us from enduring,
what prevents us from moving forward?
What are the factors that say, you know what?
No more.
I'm not going to continue this run.
Or you know what?
I've had a really long hard day,
or maybe I've had an easy day,
or I'm feeling lazy, I just don't even really feel like getting up and moving.
So what we're going to talk about today actually gets right down to the heart of motivation
and fuel use, motivation and fuel allocation.
And we are going to talk about specific training protocols that you can follow that have carry
over between the bodily systems of running, swimming, etc. and the way that your brain works.
So let's talk about endurance by asking first what are the limiting factors on endurance?
What stops us? Because addressing that and answering that, we will understand what allows us to get into effort and to continue effort. There are five main categories of things
that allow us to engage in effort.
And they are neurons, nerves, muscle, muscle, blood, things
in our blood, our heart, and our lungs.
Now, I don't want to completely write off things like the immune
system and other systems
of the body, but nerve muscle, blood, heart, and lungs are the five that I want to focus
on today because that's where most of the data are. As we go forward into this, I want
to acknowledge Dr. Andy Galpin, who as with the last episode, it's been tremendously helpful
and informative in terms of the exercise physiology.
He is a true expert.
He has a laboratory. He's a full professor who does work on muscle biopsy, who understands the science,
but who also works with athletes and works with recreational athletes, professional athletes,
really understands at a variety of levels how all these systems work.
He's the person I consulted with about today's episode, although I did access other literature as well, and I'm going to
mention a key review for any of you, aficionados who really want to get down into the weeds, but I
encourage you, if you want more detail, to check out Dr. Andy Galpins' YouTube page. I think he's
also on Twitter. He's definitely on Instagram. His content is excellent.
And he really understands, I have learned and I really believe that an intellectual is somebody
who understands a topic at multiple levels of specificity of detail and can communicate that.
And Andy is a true intellectual of muscle physiology and performance. And if you hear the word
intellectual and you kind
of back up and cringe from that, understand that he's also a practitioner. So thank you Andrew Galpin,
Andy Galpin, for your support in these episodes. And we hope to have you as a guest on the podcast
soon. So nerve muscle, blood, heart, and lungs. Let's talk about neurons and how they work.
But I want to tell you about an experiment that's going to make it very clear why quitting
is a mental thing, not a physical thing.
So why do we quit?
Well, an experiment was done a couple years ago and was published in the journal Cell,
Cell Press Journal, excellent journal, showing that there's a class of neurons in our
brain stem and the back of our brain that if they shut off, we quit.
Now these neurons release epinephrine.
Epinephrine is adrenaline.
And anytime we are engaged in effort of any kind, we are releasing epinephrine.
Anytime we're awake, really,
we are releasing epinephrine into our brain.
In fact, this little group of neurons in the back of our brain
is called the locus serulias, if you like,
is churning out epinephrine all the time.
But if something stresses us out, it turns out more.
And then it acts as kind of an alertness signal for the whole brain.
We also, of course, have adrenaline, epinephrine released in our body, which makes our body ready for things.
So think about epinephrine as a readiness signal, and when we are engaged in effort,
this readiness signal is being churned into our brain. When we're relaxed and we're falling asleep, epinephrine levels are low.
Okay, so they did a really interesting experiment where they had subjects engage in bouts of
effort of trying to move forward toward a goal, but they manipulated the visual environment
with these stripes, kind of like fences passing on both sides of them.
And by doing that, they could trick subjects into thinking that their effort was either
allowing them to move forward, right, because these rungs on the fence were moving past,
or that their effort was futile, that they were no longer moving forward because they would
make the rungs move slowly, even though the subjects were making a lot of effort to move
forward.
Okay, so this is analogous or similar to being on a treadmill
and you're trying to walk on this treadmill
and you just can't move the conveyor, right?
Or your in virtual reality and you're putting a ton of effort
but it seems like you're moving excruciatingly slow.
I had this experience recently in real life.
I was doing a swim in the Pacific.
I was trying to go south and I was swimming and I was caught in a current not the kind that pulls
you out to ocean and I kept looking to my left and I saw this hotel on the
shoreline and then I was swimming and swimming and swimming and swimming and
20 minutes later I looked to my left and the hotel is still exactly where it was
before which meant that I wasn't moving.
It felt futile.
Eventually, either the current changed or something changed, and I eventually swam past the
hotel, got back on the beach and eventually drove home.
That's essentially what they did in this experiment, but what they found was these neurons that
release epinephrine. There's another cell type called glia, which
actually means glue in Latin, that is paying attention to how much epinephrine is being
released. And at some point, the system reaches a threshold. It reaches this threshold,
and it shuts off the release of more epinephrine. It's like a I quit. That's it. No more effort signal. If they could extend
the time before those glia said, uh, enough, if they could release more adrenaline into the system,
then subjects would keep going. So our desire to continue or put differently our willingness to continue and our desire to quit is mediated
by events between our two ears.
Now that doesn't mean that the body's not involved, but it means that neurons are critically important.
So we have two categories of neurons that are important.
The ones in our head that tell us to get up and go out and take that run and the ones that
allow us encourage us to continue that run and we have neurons that
shut things off.
It's a no more.
And we of course have the neurons that connect to our muscles and control our muscles.
But the reason we quit is rarely because our body quits, our mind quits.
Now we never want to encourage people to drive themselves to the point of injury.
That's not going to be good for anybody.
But it is good to know that it's neural.
Our ability to persist is neural.
So when people say, is it, I hear that, you know, sports or effort or fighting or it's
90% mental, 10% physical, you know, that, that whole discussion about how much is mental,
how much is physical is absolutely
silly.
It just proves that there's no knowledge of the underlying biology behind that statement.
It's neither mental nor physical.
Everything is physical.
Everything is neurons.
Your thinking is the responsibility of chemicals and electrical signals in your head.
So it's not 90% mental, 10% physical.
It's not 50, 50,
it's not 70, 30, it's 100% nervous system,
it's neurons, okay?
So when people say mental or physical,
understand it's 100% neural.
And I'd love for the how much of it is mental
and how much is physical to just disappear.
That argument means nothing and it's not actionable.
Now, what do nerves need in order to continue to fire?
What do you need in order to get neurons to say, I will persist?
Well, they need glucose.
Unless you're a keto and ketogenic adapted, you need carbohydrate is glucose.
That's what neurons run on.
And you need electrolytes.
Neurons have what's called a sodium potassium pump, blah, blah, blah.
They generate electricity.
We could go into all this.
I will probably do an entire lecture about the action potential.
But basically, in order to get nerves, nerve cells to fire, to contract muscle, to say,
I'm going to continue.
You need sufficient sodium salt because the action potential, the actual firing of neurons
is driven by sodium entering the cell, rushing into the cell.
And then there's a removal of potassium.
And then there's a kind of resetting of those levels by something called the sodium potassium
pump and the sodium potassium pump and sodium and action potentials.
Even if you don't know anything about that is ATP dependent.
It requires energy.
So you need energy in order to get neurons to fire.
And it is pH dependent.
It depends on the conditions or the environment within the brain being of a certain pH or
acidity.
pH is about how acid or how basic the environment is.
And we will talk a little bit about pH in simple terms that you can understand.
So nerves need salt, they need potassium, and it turns out they need magnesium, and you
need glucose and carbohydrates in order to power those neurons unless you are running on
ketones.
And to run on ketones, you have to make sure
that you're fully keto adapted.
I will talk about adding in ketones
on top of carbohydrate at the end of the episode.
Okay, so that's how nerves work.
You need carbohydrate, you need sodium, potassium,
and magnesium in order to drive the brain.
Muscle, muscle is going to engage and generate energy first by using this
phosphocreatine system. High bouts of effort, really intense effort, short-lived
seconds to minutes, but probably more like seconds is going to be this
phosphocreatine. Literally, a fuel source in the muscle that you're going to burn
just like you would logs on a fire. And glycogen, which is stored carbohydrate in
the muscle, that also can be burned, just
like logs on a fire to generate energy. So let me make this crystal clear. If you move
your wrist towards your shoulder and contract your bicep really hard, muscle fibers are burning
up their own carbohydrate. They're converting that into ATP in order to generate that energy.
Okay. And pH is important and temperature is important.
In the episode on supercharge your physical performance, I talked all about how by using
cooling, specifically of the palms or the bottoms of the feet or the cheeks of the face,
using particular methods, you can adjust the temperature of the body and of muscle in a way that allows you to do more work,
to do more reps, to run further, to keep going and to persist.
And that's because if temperature is too low or too high, then ATP is not going to be
available.
Because of this whole thing called the pyruvate kinase pathway and the temperature dependent
to pyruvate kinase. Check out temperature dependence of pyruvate kinase.
Check out that episode if you want to learn more about that, but temperature is important
and pH is also important.
So we got nerve, muscle, and then there's stuff in our blood that's available as an energy
source.
And in blood, we've got glucose, so literally blood sugar that's floating around.
So let's say you have fasted for three days, your blood glucose is going to be very low,
so that's not going to be a great fuel source,
but you will start to liberate fats from your adipose tissue, from your fat. Fatty acids will start to mobilize into the blood stream, and you can burn
those for energy and
Oxygen in your blood. When you inhale, you're bringing oxygen into your blood. So these are all fuel sources in your neurons, in your muscle, in your blood, in your
various tissues that are providing the opportunity to give effort to induce effort, whether or not it's a runner,
swim or writing or talking.
Now there are some other factors that are important and those are the heart which is going to move
blood.
So the more that the heart can move blood and oxygen,
well, the more fuel that's going to be available for you to engage in muscular effort and
thinking effort. So your heart is vitally important to your muscles ability to work and your brain
's ability to work. And as I've mentioned oxygen a few times, it should be obvious then that the
lungs are
very important.
You need to bring oxygen in and distribute it to all these tissues because oxygen is critical
for the conversion of carbohydrates and the conversion of fats.
And we could get into the discussion about whether or not oxygen is important for ketogenic
metabolism, but you need oxygen there.
You need to breathe and you need to breathe properly.
So I just covered what would normally be about four lectures of energy consumption and energy
utilization.
I didn't go into much detail at all.
But what I want you to imagine is that you've got these different cell types.
You've got neurons.
You've got muscle.
They need to collaborate in order to generate effort or to make the decision to do something
or to think hard or to run hard or to run far.
Then you've got fuel sources both in the neurons, in the muscle, in your blood, and then
the heart and lungs are going to help distribute the oxygen and those fuels.
Of course, you have that little energy pack that we call the liver that will allow
you to pull out a little more carbohydrate if you need it for work.
So that's as much as I want to cover about energy consumption because that's a lot.
But what it tells you is that when you eat and you use food as a fuel source, that food
can be broken down and you can immediately burn the glucose
that's in your bloodstream or you can rely on some of the stored fuel in your liver or you can
rely on stored fuel in the muscle, so-called glycogen, and there are a lot of different ways that we
can generate ATP. So when we ask the question, what's limiting for performance? What is going to allow us to endure, to engage in effort and endure
long bouts of effort, or even moderately long bouts of effort? We need to ask which of those
things? Nerve, muscle, blood, heart, and lungs is limiting. Or put differently, we ask,
what should we be doing with our neurons? What should we be doing with our muscles? What should
we be doing with our blood? What should we be doing with our heart? And what should we be doing with our muscles, what should we be doing with our blood, what should we be doing with our heart, and what should we be doing with our lungs that's
going to allow us to build endurance for mental and physical work, and to be able to go
longer, further, with more intensity.
That's the real question.
How can we do more work?
And the way we do that is with energy and the way to get
energy to it is to buy those five things. And so now we're going to talk about how you can actually
build different types of endurance. And what that does at the level of your blood, your heart,
your muscles, and your neurons. So we're going to skip back and forth between protocols, tools,
and the underlying science. So rather than heavy stack the science at the front end
and then just give you all the tools at the end,
we're going to talk about the protocols,
the four kinds of endurance and how to achieve them,
and we are going to talk about the underlying science
as we move through that.
If you would like a lot of detailed science,
I encourage you to check out a review
that we've linked in the show notes.
And the review is called Adaptations to Endurance and Strength Training.
This is a review article with many excellent citations.
It's from Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Medicine.
The Cold Spring Harbor Press is an excellent scientific press.
It's been the last 21 years doing summers at Coldtspring Harbor, teaching neuroscience, but Coltspring Harbor is involved
in all sorts of themes and topics related to neuroscience and medicine.
This review by Hughes-Elefesson, that's the name, Elfesson and Bar-B-A-A-R. Adaptation
through endurance and strength training is rich with citations.
It can be downloaded as a complete PDF. There's no paywall and we will link to it and it gets really deep into all the signaling cascades, the genetic changes within muscle with high intensity interval training short term super high intensity training weight training. So if you're a real nerd for this stuff and you want to get right down into how PGC1 alpha p53 and pH 20
change the
Adaptation features of muscle and gene regulation that is definitely the review for you
If you're like most people and you're not really interested in that level of detail
No reason to pick up the review unless you just want to check out some of the figures and pictures
But I do want to offer that as a resource. It's been in addition to discussions with Dr. Andy Galpin.
It's been a primary resource for the content of this episode.
So let's talk about the four kinds of endurance
and how to achieve those.
I do believe that everybody should have
some sort of endurance practice, regular endurance practice.
It's clear that it's vital for the functioning
of the body and the mind, and there are clear longevity benefits. There are a lot of reasons
why that's true, but the main one is that if we have good energy utilization in our musculature
In our musculature and in our blood, in our vascular system, and in our oxygenating system, our lungs, the so-called cardiovascular system, respiratory system, and musculature, the body
and brain function much better.
There are so many papers now, so much data to support that.
So I do believe everyone should either try to maintain the muscle that they have, provided
they've already gone through puberty and development, and they should be engaged in regular
endurance exercise.
Now for many people, they think endurance exercise, that means what, an hour-long run, or I
got to get on the stairmaster, or I have to tread mill for hours on end each week, and
turns out that's not the case.
There are four kinds of endurance,
and you can train specifically for any one of those,
and you can vary your training.
So let's talk about those four kinds of endurance.
They're very interesting, and they each have
very different protocols that you use
in order to build and maximize them.
And now you'll understand what fuel sources they use in order to build
that thing we call endurance.
So first of all, we have muscular endurance.
Muscular endurance is the ability for our muscles to perform work over time, and our failure
to continue to be able to perform that work is going to be due to muscular fatigue,
not to cardiovascular fatigue.
So not because we're breathing too hard or we can't get enough blood to the muscles or
because we quit mentally, but because the muscles themselves give out.
One good example of this would be if you had to pick up a stone in the yard and
that stone is not extremely heavy for you and you needed to do that anywhere from 50 to
100 times and you were picking it up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down.
At some point your muscles will fatigue.
They will fail to endure. Muscular endurance is incredibly useful for a variety of physical
pursuits. And we'll talk about the mental pursuits that it supports as well. In terms
of physical pursuits, the ability for a given muscle to perform repeated work is going
to improve your golf swing. It's going to improve your golf swing. It's going to improve
your tennis swing. It's going to improve your posture, your ability to dance, your ability
to repeatedly engage in an activity that requires effort. In a way that's very different
from the kind of endurance that you will build simply by increasing your cardiovascular fitness,
your ability to generate kind of easy repetitions.
So let's talk about muscular endurance and what it is.
Muscular endurance is going to be something
that you can perform for anywhere from 12 to 25
or even up to 100 repetitions.
And that's actually how, if you like,
you would train muscular endurance.
And I will give this specific protocol in a few moments.
So, a good example is pushups.
If you were to get on the floor
and start doing pushups,
even if you're somebody who has to do knees down pushups,
and you're doing your pushups,
eventually you won't be able to do any more pushups.
And that's not going to be because you couldn't get enough oxygen into your system or your
heart wasn't pumping enough blood.
It's going to be because the muscles fail.
That's why.
So if you want to be able to do more pushups or even more pull-ups, muscular endurance
is really what it's about.
It's actually no coincidence that a lot of military bootcamp style training
is not done with weights. It's done with things like pushups, pull-ups, sit-ups, and running,
because what they're really building is muscular endurance, the ability to perform work repeatedly
over time for a given set of muscles and neurons. So what's a good protocol to build muscular endurance?
Let's just give that to you now and explain some of the underlying science as it follows. So a really good muscular endurance training protocol, according to the
scientific literature, would be three to five sets of anywhere from 12 to 100 repetitions.
That's a huge range. Now, 12 to 25 repetitions is going to be more reasonable for most people.
And the rest periods are going to be anywhere from 30 to 180 seconds of rest.
So anywhere from half a minute to three minutes of rest.
So this might be five sets of pushups done getting your maximum pushups.
So for some people, that might be zero and you have to do it knees down.
For some people, it might be 10 pushups. For some people, it might be zero and you have to do it knees down For some people it might be 10 push-ups for some people might be 25
But you could go all the way up to 100 rest anywhere from 30 to 180 seconds
And then do your next set for a total of three to five sets
So it doesn't actually sound like a ton of work the other thing you could do is something like a plank a plank position
Is actually a way to build muscular endurance
not strength position is actually a way to build muscular endurance. Not strength, okay?
I'm sure it could be used to develop strength, but it's really about muscular endurance.
So you would do three to five sets of planks.
Those planks would probably, because you're not doing repetitions, it's an isometric hold,
as we say.
It's kind of static hold or a wall sit would be another example.
And you would do that probably for a minute or two minutes,
take some rest of anywhere from 30 or 180 seconds and then repeat. So things like pushing a sled,
push-ups, isometric planks, even pull-ups. Those will all work and as with other forms of training,
you would want to do this until you approach failure
or actually fail and where you're unable
to perform another repetition.
That would mark the end of a set.
The one critical feature of building muscular endurance
is that it has no major eccentric loading component.
Now, I haven't talked much about eccentric
and concentric loading,
but concentric loading is when you are shortening the muscle typically or lifting a weight,
and eccentric movements are when you are lengthening a muscle typically or lowering a weight.
So if you do a pull up and you get your chin over the bar or a chin up, that's the concentric
portion of the effort. And then as you lower yourself, that's the eccentric portion.
Ecentric portion of resistance training of any kind, whether or not it's for endurance
or for strength, is one of the major causes of soreness.
Some people will be more susceptible to this, excuse me, than others, but it does create
more damage in muscle fibers.
Muscular endurance and building muscular endurance
should not include any movements
that include major eccentric loads.
So if you're going to do push-ups,
it doesn't mean that you want to drop,
smash your chest into the floor.
And by the way, your chest should touch the ground
on every push-up.
That's a real push-up, okay?
It's not about breaking 90 with the elbows. It's about pushing down till your chest, touch the ground on every pushup. That's a real pushup, okay? It's not about breaking 90 with the elbows.
It's about pushing down till your chest
touch the floor and straightening out.
That's a proper pushup.
And a pull up is where you pull out your chin
above the bar.
Neither of those should include a slow eccentric
or lowering component.
If you are using those to train muscular endurance,
the three to five sets of 12 to 25
and maybe even up to 100 repetitions
with 30 to 180 seconds of rest in between. That means that jumping also is going to be a very poor
tool for building muscular endurance because jumping has a slowing down component as you land. So
things like plyometrics or agility work where you're moving from side to side and you're
decelerating, you're slowing yourself down a lot, not going to be good for muscular endurance.
Terrific for cardiovascular training and conditioning of other kinds and skill training and agility
and all that.
But if you want to build muscular endurance, you want to make your muscles able to do more
work for longer, it's going to be this three to five sets of 12 to 100 reps, 30 to 180 seconds, of mainly concentric
movement, okay, not a slow lowering phase or a heavy lowering phase. So that might be kettlebell
swings and things of that sort. Isometric, as I mentioned, things like plank and wall sits will work.
Now, what's interesting about this is that it doesn't seem at all like what people normally
think of as endurance.
And yet, it's been shown in nice quality peer reviewed studies, several of which are
cited in the review I mentioned earlier, that muscular endurance can improve our ability to engage in long bouts of what we call long
duration, low intensity endurance work.
So this can support long runs, it can support long swims, and it can build also, it can
build postural strength and endurance simultaneously.
And that's mainly accomplished through isometric holds. So things like planks
are actually quite good for building endurance of the spinal erector muscles that provide posture
of the abdominal muscles that are helpful for posture for being upright, for the upper neck muscles
and things of that sort. These days, everyone seems to have text neck. Everyone's basically staring
at their toes all the time. It has a default towards their toes.
So isometric holds can be very good
for building muscular endurance.
You can spot people, including yourself, perhaps,
with poor muscular endurance in the postural muscles
because anytime they stop moving,
they have to lean against a wall
or their hip will move to one side
or they're always lean to one side.
I am guilty of this too.
Some of you have actually pointed out, I like to think out of concern, that I often
am rubbing my lower back and indeed I have some asymmetries in my postural muscle, some
of which are probably genetic and some of which are probably just from excessive work or
something in that sort that have my right shoulder sit lower than my left and things that
sort.
If I wanted to improve those, I could improve those by really focusing on symmetry and
isometric symmetry, meaning holding my hands at equivalent positions in planks and doing
isometric holds for building muscular endurance of the postural muscles.
But this can also be done with, as I mentioned, kettlebell swings for the lower back and legs
and posterior chain.
So there are a number of different exercises you could do this with, but it should be compound
exercises mainly.
It's rare for people to do this kind of muscular endurance work specifically for things like
bicep curls or triceps.
And there aren't many activities that really rely on isolation of those muscles repeatedly.
I'm sure there are some out there, but it's kind of hard to imagine.
So you can do this with isometrics.
You can do this with more standard non isometric type movements, but make sure there isn't
a strong eccentric load.
So now let's talk about the science briefly of why this works.
Well, that takes us back to this issue of fuel utilization and what fails.
So if we were to say, okay, let's say you do a plank and you're planking for, you know,
maybe you're able to plank for a minute or two minutes or three minutes, at some point
you will fail.
You're not going to fail because the heart gives out.
You're not going to fail because you can't get enough oxygen because you can breathe
while you're doing that.
You're going to fail because of local muscular failure,
which means that as you do, if you choose to do this protocol
of three to five sets, et cetera, et cetera,
to build muscular endurance,
mainly what you are going to be building
is you're going to be building the ability of your mitochondria
to use oxygen to generate energy locally. And that,
it's something called mitochondrial respiration, respiration because of the involvement of oxygen.
And it's also going to be increasing the extent to which the neurons control the muscles and
provide a stimulus for the muscles to contract.
But this is independent of power and strength.
So even though the low sets, like three to five sets, and the fact that you're doing repetitions
and you're going to failure, even though it seems to resemble power and strength and hypertrophy
type training, it is distinctly different.
It's not going to generate strength, hypertrophy, and power. It's going to mainly create this ability to endure, to continually contract muscles or repeatedly
contract muscles. Okay, continually if you're using isometric holds, repeatedly, excuse me,
if you're using repetition type exercise where there's a contraction and an extension of the
muscle, essentially concentric and an eccentric portion,
but remember that you want the eccentric portion
to be light and relatively fast,
not so fast that you injure yourself,
but certainly not deliberately slowed down.
It was recommended, I should say,
by Andy Galpin, that you not use Olympic lifts for this because once you get
past eight or 12 or 25 repetitions, especially form on those Olympic lifts is key for not getting
injured.
And while some people can perform those sorts of lifts like, you know, snatches and deadlifts
and cleans and jerks and overhead presses, probably not a great idea.
If the goal is to push the body to points of fatigue,
because you do open yourself up to injury,
unless you're very skilled at doing that,
or you have a really good coach
who can help you guide through those lifts.
So that's one form of endurance, which is muscular endurance,
mainly going to rely on neural energy,
so nerves and muscle.
And it's not going to rely quite so much on what's available
in your blood, your heart, or your lungs. So now let's talk about the other extreme of
endurance, which is long duration endurance. This is the type that people typically think
about when they think about endurance. You're talking about a long run, a long swim, a long bike ride. Well, how long? Well, anywhere from 12 minutes
to several hours, or maybe even an entire day, maybe eight or nine hours of hiking or running
or biking. Some people are actually doing those kinds of really long events, marathons,
for instance. So anything longer than 12 minutes. And this type of work builds on fuel utilization in the muscles. It builds on
the activity of neurons in the brain that are involved in what we call central pattern generators.
We talked about this in a previous episode or several previous episodes. These are groups of neurons
that allow our body to engage in regular rhythmic effort without having to think about the movement too much.
So running and stepping or swimming if you already know how to swim or pedaling on a bike or walking upstairs and hiking.
You're not thinking about right left right left. It's all carried out by central pattern generators.
This is going to be at less than 100% of your maximum oxygen uptake, your VO2 max.
I'll talk about what VO2 max is, but I just want to give a sense of what the protocol is
and the underlying science.
How many sets?
One.
Long duration effort is one set of 12 minutes or longer.
So, you're not counting repetitions.
I sure hope that if you're going out on a 30 minute run or even a 15 minute run, that
you're not counting steps, that you're not counting pedal strokes, that you're not on the
row or counting pulls on the row or I suppose you could, but I think that would be pretty dreadful.
Seems like a poor utilization of cognitive brain space. You're getting into regular repeated
effort and your ability to continue that effort
is going to be dependent mainly on the efficiency
of the movement, on your ability to strike a balance
between the movement itself, the generation
of the muscular movements that are required,
and fuel utilization across the different sources
of nerve muscle, blood, heart, and lungs.
So let's ask the question,
why would you fail on a long run?
Why would you quit?
Well, as you set out on that long run,
assuming you have some glycogen in your liver
and in your muscles,
you're going to use that energy first,
even if it's very low intensity.
Okay, so we're not talking about sprinting,
we're talking about heading out the door
or starting off on a marathon.
You're assuming you have some conditioning
or even if you don't, you're going to burn carbohydrate.
You're going to burn glucose in the bloodstream.
You're going to burn carbohydrate
as those muscles contract.
Those what we call slow-trich muscles they're contracting.
They start burning up fuel to make ATP to continue to contract.
Your mind is going to use more or less energy depending on how much will power, how
much of a fight you have to get into with yourself in order to generate the effort. I really
want to underscore this. If you're somebody that's thinking, maybe I go for the run, maybe
I don't go for the run, I'll do it at two o'clock, okay, two o' five. No, I only want to go on
the half hour or maybe on the main hour. And you're going through all that. Guess what? You're burning up useful energy that you could use either for the run, for example, or for something else. When we
think about something hard, when we ruminate, when we perseverate on an idea or on a decision,
we are burning neural energy and neural energy is glucose and epinephrine, and all the things
we talked about before.
So willpower, in part, is the ability to devote resources to things.
And part of that is making decisions to just either do it or not do it.
I'm not of the just do it mindset.
I think there's a right time and a place to train, but I also think that it is not good,
in other words, it utilizes excessive resources
to churn over decisions excessively,
and you probably burn as much cognitive energy
deciding about whether or not to do a given training
or not as you do in the actual training.
Okay, so we'll talk more about how this long duration effort
can relate to mental performance, but the
long duration effort should be one set, 12 minutes or longer.
It could go for 30 minutes or 60 minutes or an hour. We'll talk about
programming later in the episode. This is going to be less than 100% of your
maximum oxygen uptake. Your heart rate is not going to be through the
ceiling or maxed out, but it's all about efficiency of movement.
That's what you're building.
When you go out for a run that's 30 minutes, you are building the capacity to repeat that
performance the next time while being more efficient, actually burning less fuel.
And that might seem a little bit counterintuitive, but every time you do that, run, what you're doing is you're building up
mitochondrial density.
It's not so much about mitochondrial oxidation
and respiration.
You're building up mitochondrial density.
You're actually increasing the amount of ATP
that you can create for a given bout of effort.
You're becoming more efficient, okay?
You're burning less fuel overall doing the same thing.
That's really what these long slow distance or long bouts of effort are really all about.
Now why do this long duration effort?
Why would you want to do it?
Why is it good for you?
Well, it does something very important, which is that it builds the capillary beds within
muscles.
So let's talk a little bit about vasculature.
We haven't done this too much yet,
but if you have seen the episode on supercharging performance,
we talked about AVAs, these arteriovanis estimosis,
where blood moves from arteries directly into veins,
but that's unusual.
That only takes place in the so-called
glamorous skin of the palms, the face and the bottoms of the feet.
Typically, for most all other areas of the body,
what happens is arteries bring blood to a given tissue
like a muscle and veins return that blood back to the heart.
There are exceptions, but in general, and in between arteries and veins are these little
tiny, what are called, capillary beds or microcapillaries.
So these are tiny little avenues, like little tiny streams and estuaries between the bigger
arteries and veins.
Now those are actually contained within muscle and what's
amazing is that you can increase the number of them. You can literally build new
capillaries. You can create new little streams within your muscles. And the type of
long duration effort that I was talking about before, 12 minutes or more of
steady effort, is very useful for doing that and is very useful for
increasing the mitochondria, the energy producing elements of the cells, the
actual muscle cells, and the reason is when blood arrives to muscles, it has oxygen.
The muscles are going to use some of that oxygen and then some of the
deoxygenated blood is going to be sent back to the heart and to the lungs.
Now the more capillaries that you build into those muscles, the more oxygen available to
those muscles.
I don't want to get too much into the physics of fluid flow, but basically it's the difference
between taking a hose and sticking it into some dirt just
directly and turning on the faucet at a given rate, the spigot rather, or having a bunch
of little hoses like a sprinkler system that go out and irrigate the whole yard.
The irrigation is equivalent to this capillary bed system.
And it's very good at using energy sources within blood.
So the simple way to think about this is when you go out
for a run, let's say it's the first run you've done for a while and you go out for 12 or 15 minutes
and somewhere right around 20 minutes, like that's it, I just can't continue. Well, when you come back
the next time to do that run, you've built endurance largely because you've built these capillary beds,
you've expanded these little streams in
which blood can deliver oxygen to the muscles. And so it's going to feel relatively straightforward
to either go a little bit quicker for the same duration, the same distance, or to extend
that run for another 5 to 10 minutes. So this long duration work, unlike muscular endurance,
like planks and everything that we were talking about before, is really about building the
capillary systems and the mitochondria, the energy utilization systems within
the muscles themselves. And that's very important to understand. It's distinctly
different than say building the neurons that fire the muscles. The neurons are
already there. They're going to fire those muscles just fine.
In fact, if your life depended on it today, you could probably run a marathon.
You'd probably get injured, it would be very psychologically and physically painful.
I don't recommend you do that unless you're trained for it.
But if you were to train properly for it, if you were to do long duration bouts of effort
once or twice a week or three times a week, pretty soon it would become easy because you're
building these vascular micro beds or micro vascular beds as they're called.
Okay, so you're able to bring more energy to the muscles and they're able to utilize
more energy.
So that's long duration.
So we've got muscular endurance and we've got long duration endurance.
And then there are two kinds in between that in recent years have gotten a lot of attention
and excitement, but most people
are not distinguishing between these two kinds of endurance.
And that's a shame because in failing to distinguish between the two kinds of what we call
high intensity training, sometimes called high intensity interval training, most people,
perhaps you are not getting nearly as much physical and mental benefit out
of high-intensity training as you could.
So I want to talk about the two kinds of high-intensity interval training and what each of them
does for your brain and body and what sorts of adaptations they cause.
Because in doing that, you can really start to build up specific energy systems in your brain and body in ways that are best
serve you for your cognitive work and for other sorts of things like strength and speed
or hypertrophy or for running marathons for that matter.
So there are two kinds of high intensity training for endurance, sometimes called high intensity
interval training. One is anaerobic, so-called anaerobic endurance, so no oxygen, and the other is aerobic endurance,
both of which qualify as HII, high-intensity interval training.
So let's talk about anaerobic endurance first.
Anaerobic endurance, from a protocol perspective perspective is going to be
three to twelve sets. Okay, and these repetitions, and I'll talk about what the repetitions are,
are going to be performed at whatever speed allows you to complete the work in good safe form. Okay, so it could be fast, it could be slow, as the work continues, your repetitions
may slow down or it may speed up. Chances are it's going to slow down. So what does this
work? What do these sets look like? Remember, long slow distance is one set. Muscular endurance
is three to five sets. High intensity anaerobic endurance is going to be somewhere between three and 12 sets. And it's going to have a ratio of work to rest
of anywhere from three to one to one to five.
So what would a three to one ratio set look like?
Well, it's going to be 30 seconds of hard pedaling
on the bike, for instance, or running, or on the roller. These are just examples. It could be in the pool swimming.
It could be any number of things or air squats or, you know,
or weighted squats, if you will, provided. You can manage that 30
seconds on 10 seconds off. That's a very brief rest. So 3 to
1 is just a good example would be 30 seconds on 10 seconds
off. The opposite extreme on that example would be 30 seconds on 10 seconds off.
The opposite extreme on that ratio would be 1 to 5, so 20 seconds on 100 seconds off.
So you do the work for 20 seconds, then you rest 100 seconds.
Now what's the difference?
What should you do 3 to 1 ratio?
So 30 seconds on 10 seconds off, or should you do one to five, 20 seconds on to 100 seconds off?
Well that will depend on
whether or not the quality of the movement is important to you.
So let's just take a look at the three to one ratio. So in the three to one ratio,
if you're going to do 30 seconds of hard pedaling on a bike, followed by 10 seconds,
so maybe one of these what they call assault bikes.
And then you stop for 10 seconds and then repeat.
Chances are you will be able to do one, two, three,
four, maybe even as many as 12 sets,
if you're really in good condition,
that you'll be able to do all those
because pedaling on the bike doesn't require a ton of skill.
And if you do it incorrectly,
if your elbow flares out a little bit or something,
it's very unlikely that you'll get injured
unless it's really extreme.
But the same movement done, for instance,
with kettlebells, so 30 seconds on, 10 seconds off.
The first set will probably be in good form.
The second one will be in pretty good form,
but let's say you're getting to the fifth and sixth set
and you're going 30 seconds on, 10 seconds off.
Chances are the quality of your repetitions will degrade significantly
and you increase the probability that you're going to get injured or that you're going
to damage yourself in some way or that you can't complete the movement or that some smaller
muscles like your grip muscles might give out.
Okay, so the quality of repetitions is going to drop considerably with the 3-to-1 approach.
If you're just doing it for effort and we'll talk about what this builds in your system
in a moment, that's fine.
But for most people, if quality of form is important, so maybe this is using weights, maybe
you're doing squats, so you're going to do 20 seconds on and 100 seconds of rest, maybe
it's even a barbell loaded squat, maybe you're doing kettlebell You're going to do 20 seconds on and 100 seconds of rest. Maybe it's even a barbell loaded squat.
Maybe you're doing kettlebells.
Maybe you've got some other resistance there that's allowing you to do this.
What you'll find is that the longer rest, even though it's 20 seconds of intense effort
followed by a longer rest of about 100 seconds, will allow you to perform more quality repetitions
safely over time. What does building anaerobic endurance look like?
And then I'll tell you what is actually good for
in the true practical sense.
What anaerobic endurance exercise generally looks like
is that if you decide to do this for the first week,
you might do this two or three times a week,
maybe even just once a week,
depending on the other things you're doing,
we'll talk about programming at the end.
And you would generate just three sets.
So it might be three sets of 20 seconds of hard effort
followed by 100 seconds rest.
Then you repeat 20 seconds of hard effort,
100 seconds rest, 20 seconds of effort,
hard 100 seconds rest.
And you might do that twice a week.
And then each week you're adding one or
two sets.
Okay.
In doing that, you will build up what we call anaerobic endurance.
What is anaerobic endurance?
Well, let's ask why we fail.
Anaerobic endurance is going to be taking your system into greater than 100% of your VO
2 max.
It's going to be taking your heart rate up very high,
and it's going to maximize your oxygen utilization systems.
That is going to have effects that are going to lead
to fatigue at some point in the workout,
and that fatigue will trigger an adaptation.
So let's ask what adaptation it's triggering.
Well, it's triggering both mitochondrial respiration, the ability of your mitochondria
to generate more energy by using more oxygen because you're bringing so much, you're
maxing out literally, you're getting above your VO2 max.
You're hitting that threshold of how much oxygen you can use in your system.
One of the adaptations will be that your mitochondria will shift such that they can use more oxygen.
And you're going to also increase the capillary beds, but not as much as you're going to be
able to increase the amount of neuron engagement of muscle.
So normally when we start to hit fatigue, when we're exhausted, when we're breathing really
hard, because the systems of the body are linked and there's a mental component to this as
well, a kind of motivational component.
After that third or fourth or sixth set of 20 seconds on, 100 seconds off, or if you're
at the other extreme 30 seconds on and 10 seconds off, there's going to be a component of you want to stop and by pushing through and repeating another set safely, of course.
What you're doing is you are training the neurons to be able to access more energy, literally,
convert that into ATP and for the muscles, therefore, to access more energy and ATP.
And the adaptation is in the mitochondria's ability
to use oxygen.
And this has tremendous carryover effects
for other types of exercise.
So while I know and appreciate that people are using
high intensity interval training of this kind or similar,
in order to just like burn fat, you know,
do their workouts, quote unquote,
it's very useful for building a capacity
to engage in short bouts of effort repeatedly, to really lock in.
I don't want to use the word focus because it's not strictly mental focus, but to be able
to generate short bouts of very intense work.
This can be beneficial in competitive sports or team sports where there's a sprinting
component where the field opens up and you need to dribble the ball down the field, for This can be beneficial in competitive sports or team sports where there's a sprinting component
where the field opens up and you need to dribble the ball down the field for instance and
shoot on goal.
Or where you're playing tennis and it's a long rally and then all of a sudden somebody
really starts putting you back on your heels and you have to really make the maximum amount
of effort to run to the net and to get the ball across that.
Things of that sort.
Okay.
There are a variety of places where there's carryover from this type of training, but it does support
endurance.
It's about muscle endurance.
It's about these muscles ability to generate a lot of force in the short term, but repeatedly.
Okay, so that's the way to conceptualize this.
And it is different than maximum power, even though it feels like maximum effort, it is
not the same as building power and speed into muscles.
Those are distinctly different protocols.
So the key elements, again, are that you're bringing
your breathing and your oxygen utilization
way up above your max.
It's not quite hitting failure,
but you're really pushing the system to the point
where you are not ready to do
another set and yet you begin another set.
You're not necessarily psychologically ready.
I'll talk more about some of the adaptations that this causes in terms of stroke volume
in a few minutes when we talk about how it is that work of this sort can increase our
heart's ability to deliver blood and oxygen to our lungs and other tissues.
I'm going to get very specific about how to breathe during these different types of protocols
and what's happening at the level of the heart.
But I want to make sure I touch on the fourth protocol, which is high intensity aerobic
conditioning.
So hit has these two forms, anaerobic and aerobic, and you just heard about anaerobic.
High intensity aerobic conditioning also involves about 3 to 12 sets, starting off,
of course, with fewer sets as you're getting into this training and then extending into more sets,
as one parameter you could expand, has again the same ratio of 3 to 1, so 30 seconds on, 10 seconds
off, or 1 to 5, 20 seconds on, 100 seconds off, or a very powerful tool for
building up a robot conditioning is a one to one ratio.
A one to one ratio is powerful for building on average.
Most of the energy systems involving, remember, we had these nerve muscle, blood, heart,
and lungs.
A one to one ratio might be you run a mile,
and however long that takes, let's say it takes you
six minutes or seven minutes,
then you rest for an equivalent amount of time,
then you repeat, and then you rest
for an equivalent amount of time.
So you might run, first mile is, let's say,
seven minutes, then you rest for seven minutes,
then you run a mile again, and it might take eight minutes, and you rest for eight minutes.
And you continue that for a total of four miles of work, for four miles of running work,
I should say, or seven miles of work.
You can build this up.
Many people find that using this type of training allows them to do things like go run
half-marathons and marathons, even though prior to the race date,
they've never actually run a half marathon or marathon. Now that might seem incredible.
It's like how could it be that running a mile on and then and then resting for running a mile
and then resting for an equivalent amount of time, running a mile, resting for equivalent
amount of time for seven miles allows you to run continuously for 13 miles or for 26 miles.
Well, I'm not discouraging people from ever doing the long duration endurance.
I think that is very important.
But it's because it builds up so many of these energy utilization systems.
It really teaches you to engage, excuse me, the nerve to muscle firing. It improves ATP and mitochondrial function in muscle.
It allows the blood to deliver more oxygen to the muscle and to your brain. And I'll explain
how that is. And it allows your heart to deliver more oxygen overall. And it builds a tremendous
lung capacity. And we will talk about exactly how to breathe
and how to build lung capacity,
both for sake of warming up and for performance.
So what would this look like and when should you do this?
Well, it's really a question for these workouts
of asking how much work can one do in eight to 12 minutes, right?
And then rest and then repeat.
How much work can you do for eight to 12 minutes
than rest and then repeat?
And how many times should you do this? Well, this is the sort
of thing. It's pretty intense. And so you would probably only want to do this two, maybe
three times a week if you're not doing many other things. I will talk about how this program
can be moved in with other forms of training, but I'll just give you a little hint now.
It's very clear. And it's in the review article, referred to and we
will link another article as well, that concurrent training, doing strength training and the endurance
training of any of the four cons that I'm describing today can be done. You can program
those in the same week, but you want to get four and ideally six or even better 24 hours between these workouts because it is very hard for
instance to do a one to one mile repeats like what run a mile rest for equivalent time,
run a mile rest for equivalent time to do that two or three times a week and also do weight
training before or do a long run afterwards.
That would quickly lead to breakdown for most people unless you have very, very good energy utilization systems.
You are really kind of advanced or elite athlete and or dare I say you're using tools to
enhance your performance at the level of blood or hormones.
And I'm actually going to talk about those at the end and why they work.
So we have four kinds of endurance, muscular endurance.
We have long duration endurance.
We have high intensity interval training of two kinds, anaerobic and aerobic.
And this last type, the aerobic one works best.
It seems if you kind of do this one-to-one ratio.
So how would you use these and what are they actually doing?
Let's talk about the heart and the lungs and oxygen because that's something that we can
all benefit from understanding.
And it will become very clear in that discussion why
this type of training is very useful even for non-athletes in order to
improve oxygenation and energy utilization of the brain and the heart. The
brain and the heart are probably the two most important systems that you need
to take care of in your life. Yes, your musculature needs to be maintained. If
you want to build it, that's up to you. But you should try and maintain your musculature,
but maintaining or enhancing a brain function
and cardiovascular function,
it's absolutely clear,
our key for health and longevity in the short and long term.
And the sorts of training I talked about today
has been shown again and again and again
to be very useful for enhancing the strength of the mind.
Yes, I'll talk about that, as well as the health
of the brain and the body.
So let's talk about the sorts of adaptations
that are happening in your brain and body
that are so beneficial in these different forms of training.
If you are breathing hard and your heart is beating hard,
so this would be certainly in the high intensity
anaerobic and aerobic conditioning because you're getting
up near your VO2 max in high intensity aerobic conditioning and you're exceeding your VO2
max in high intensity anaerobic conditioning.
What's going to happen is as of course your heart beats faster, your blood is going to
be circulating faster in principle.
Oxygen utilization in muscles is going to go up.
And over time, not long, very quickly, what will happen
when those capillary beds start to expand.
We talked about that.
But in addition, because of the amount of blood
that's being returned to the heart,
when you engage in these really intense bouts of effort
repeatedly, the amount of blood being returned to the heart
actually causes an eccentric loading
of one of the muscular walls of the heart.
So your heart is muscle, it's cardiac muscle.
We have skeletal muscle attached to our bones
and we have cardiac muscle, which is our heart.
When more blood is being returned to the heart because of the additional work that your
muscles and nerves are doing, it actually has the effect of creating an eccentric loading,
a kind of pushing of the wall, the left wall.
I realize I'm not using the strict anatomy here, but I don't want to get into
all the features of the structural features of the heart. But the left ventricle essentially
getting slammed back and then having to push back in a kind of eccentric loading of the cardiac
muscle and the muscle thickens, but not because the heart thickens overall.
It's actually a strengthening of the cardiac muscle in a way that increases what we call
stroke volume.
Meaning, as more blood is returned to the heart, there's an adaptation where the heart muscle
actually gets stronger and therefore can pump more blood per stroke, per beat. And as it does that, it delivers,
because blood contains glucose and oxygen and other things,
it delivers more fuel to your muscles,
which allows you to do yet more work per unit time.
Okay, so when we hear that, oh, you know, so and so has a,
or maybe you have a nice low heart rate,
that you know, maybe you're one of these really extreme folks
like 30 or 40 beats per minute although most people are sitting at 50, 60, 70, 80 that's your
resting heart rate. If you exercise regularly and you do long duration aerobic work your heart rate
will start to go down your resting heart rate. It will increase the stroke volume of your heart.
If you do this high intensity type training, where your heart is beating very hard,
so maybe the one-to-one ratio mile run repeats
that I described a minute ago.
Let's say you do that twice a week for three or four,
and I said it could go all the way up to 12 sets,
which is a lot.
I don't recommend people start there.
Pretty soon, the stroke volume of your heart
will really increase, and as a consequence,
you can deliver more fuel to your muscles and to your brain
And you will notice that you can do more work
Meaning you can do the same work you were doing a few days or weeks ago with relative ease
Your cognitive functioning will improve this has been shown again and again because there's an increase in
Vascular, or literally capillary beds within the, the hippocampus areas that support memory, but also areas of the brain that support
respiration, that support focus, that support effort. This isn't often discussed, but the ability
to deliver more blood and therefore more glucose, remember neurons run on glucose and oxygen
to the brain, is a big feature of why exercise of the kind of
describing helps with brain function. Now weight training does have some positive
effects on brain function. Also, when I say weight training, I'm really I should
be more specific. I really am referring to strength and hypertrophy training.
Straighten hypertrophy training, especially if it's of the sort where you get
into the burn as we talked about last episode,
and you start generating lactate as a hormonal signal
that can benefit your brain, et cetera,
it can have positive effects on the brain.
And frankly, there haven't been as many studies
of resistance training,
strength in hypertrophy training on brain function,
mainly because most of those experiments
are done in mice or primates, non-human primates, I should say,
and it's hard to get mice to do resistance training.
Okay, it's hard to get humans to do resistance training.
It's definitely hard to get mice to do resistance training.
There are ways to do it, but it's hard to get them to do,
say, you know, three sets of eight on the deadlift
and then do some curls and then do some chin-ups
and this kind of thing.
Okay, it's pretty easy to get a mouse to run
on a treadmill and you can set the tension on
that treadmill to make it so that it's easier or harder for the mouse to turn that wheel.
That's one of the reasons.
However, it's very clear and you should now understand intuitively why the standard
strength and hypertrophy type workouts are not going to activate the blood oxygenation
and the stroke volume increases for the heart that the sorts of training I'm talking about
today will it just doesn't have the same positive effects.
Now that isn't to say that if you just weight train that you'll be dumb or that you'll
lose your memory over time, you might, but it is to say that endurance work, in particular,
the high intensity and long duration work that I've talked about today, the two high-intensity
protocols and the long duration work, has been shown again and again and again to have
positive effects on brain function, not through the addition of new neurons, sorry to break
it to you, but that's not a major event in the exercise or non-exercised human brain
for reasons we can talk about in a future episode.
But it still has many positive effects through the delivery of things like IGF1, but also just
through plain oxygenation of the brain and the way it promotes the development of microvascular
to develop to, excuse me, to deliver neurons more nutrients.
If neurons don't get oxygen and glucose, they do die.
Unless there's another fuel source, like ketones,
which can replace the glucose.
If you don't give oxygen to neurons,
if you don't deliver enough to them,
you get what's called ischemia,
you get little microstrokes.
So, the type of exercise I'm talking about today
in generating intense heart rate increases provided that's safe for you to do. Breathing hard,
that's going to deliver oxygen and blood increased stroke volume of the heart and is going to
improve brain function. This has been supported by many, many quality peer reviewed studies.
So that's one form of positive adaptation.
I also talked about just sort of performance adaptations, how doing high-intensity aerobic
conditioning of the, you know, mile repeats type training can actually improve your ability
to do long bouts of intense work.
It also seems like it dovetails or is compatible with resistance training that's aimed towards
strength and hypertrophy.
Now, in full disclosure, the data seem to indicate that if people just wait train or or is compatible with resistance training that's aimed towards strength and hypertrophy.
Now, in full disclosure, the data seem to indicate
that if people just weight train or train for strength,
so three reps, rest five minutes,
three reps of heavy weights, et cetera.
Yeah, you'll get much stronger than you would
if you're doing things like five repetitions up to 12
or 12 to 25 reps and you're going out for long jogs.
There's always going to be a compromise in adaptations, unfortunately. up to 12 or 12 to 25 reps and you're going out for long jogs.
There's always going to be a compromise in adaptations, unfortunately.
It does seem like you can do concurrent training, as I mentioned before, if you allow anywhere
from four to six or ideally 24 hours between workouts.
As I mentioned in the previous episode, if you want to know if you are recovered from a
workout, a great way to do that is to apply the carbon dioxide tolerance test, which is four breaths in and out, inhale, exhale,
inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale, inhale, exhale,
then a big inhale and then a slow controlled exhale.
If that slow controlled exhale is 60 seconds or longer,
it means that your parasympathetic,
your calming nervous system is under your control.
And it's likely, I should say likely,
that systemically, your whole nervous system has recovered from whatever it is that you've been doing and experiencing in likely, I should say likely that systemically your whole nervous system
has recovered from whatever it is that you've been doing and experiencing in life including
work and relationships. If not, you might want to take a rest day, dare I say, or
cost Elisone is what? He's 10 now. I think he's on his 12,000th rest day. Most people need, I should say,
one to two full rest days per week. I know there
are people going to say that's ridiculous. And okay, maybe you have amazing recovery abilities.
Also depends on training intensity. Many people benefit from having one or two full rest
days per week, at least one. Some people don't need to. But if you are not able to extend
that exhale on the carbon dioxide tolerance test past 60
seconds or so, 45 seconds, 60 seconds.
Chances are your so-called sympathetic nervous system.
Your stress system is chronically elevated and you're not really putting the break on
that system enough.
That's a subconscious thing.
There are ways that you can accelerate recovery, but I would encourage you to listen to the
previous episode.
It's timestamped for how to assess recovery.
So how often to program these things
will depend on the other things you're doing.
I think it's perfectly reasonable to do this type of training
with other types of training,
and I'll talk about a variety of combinations
of those toward the end of the episode.
I do want to talk about how to deliver more energy and oxygen.
These are tools that are extremely useful, I believe, and that are grounded in physiology.
The three things I'd like to talk about are how to breathe, what to do immediately after
training, and hydration.
And I promise I will get back into programming and sort of protocols, but I these are vitally
important to your ability to perform endurance work in particular.
And they are grounded in how neurons and blood and oxygen and your heart work together.
So let's first talk about breathing or respiration.
We breathe a couple of different ways, but let's just remind ourselves why we breathe.
We breathe to bring oxygen into our system, and we breathe to get rid of carbon dioxide.
And we need both oxygen and carbon dioxide in order to utilize fuel and for our brain
and body to work.
It's not that oxygen is good and carbon dioxide is bad.
They have to be present in the appropriate ratios.
So one thing that is very clear is our ability to deliver oxygen to working muscles and to
our brain is going to be important for our ability to generate muscular effort, especially
of the kind I was talking about today, but also weight training and other forms of skill
based effort, et cetera, and our ability to think.
If you're holding your breath for too long, if you're breathing too much, if you're what they call over breathing or under breathing, if you're shallow breathing,
if you're mouth breathing, these are all things that can really impede mental and physical
performance. So let's make it really simple. And then I promise to do a future episode
all about respiration. There are two main sources of air for your body and it's air coming
in through your nose and air coming in through your mouth. In general, nasal breathing is better.
It scrubs the air of bacteria and viruses.
You have a microbiome in your nose that benefits.
There are a number of reasons.
It's also just a more efficient system, believe it or not, even though it feels like you can
gulp more air with your mouth.
Getting good at nasal breathing is useful.
A gear system of the type that Brian McKenzie and colleagues have developed, I think, is a
good way to conceptualize this.
If you're doing long duration work, try and do it all nasal breathing.
If you have deviated septum, it's probably because you don't nasal breathe enough.
Mouth breathing is something that many people suffer from.
You're more prone to infections.
It's not as efficient, etc.
There is a place for mouth breathing, however, it's usually if you need to do a strong
exhale, oftentimes you can discard more volume through the mouth unless you're very trained
at nasal breathing.
So if you're doing high intensity training, a good way to conceptualize this is to exhale
on the max effort and then to
inhale on the less intense part. So that might be as you're generating the movement, you
know, you're in the concentric part of the movement, you exhale, right? Just like on a
bat swing or something like that or, you know, fighters and martial artists do this differently,
depending on how they were trained and the different purposes, but the kind of like, or the kind of exhaling during the effort and then inhaling on the
portion of the repetition that is not the highest effort portion.
Usually that's the eccentric phase of anything involving weights or rowing and things of that sort.
So nasal breathing is great, but as you increase the intensity of your endurance work, you will
need to incorporate the mouth.
So a gear system would look something like first gear would be just nasal breathing, or second
gear would also be just nasal breathing, but with more effort.
Third gear, again, power speed endurance has a lot more about this.
You can go to their website.
I think it's a very intelligent way to conceptualize this.
As you go into more max effort, then you're going to, you know, third and
fourth and fifth gear. And at some point, you're not thinking about nose or mouth. You're
just trying to hang on for dear life and complete the work safely. And that means breathe
through whatever orifice works for you. So that's one aspect, nose versus mouth. The other
aspect is whether or not you're using your ribs, the intercostal
muscles are these muscles that the Bruce Lee had these, you know, remarkable intercostal muscles
that allow you to lift the rib cage or the diaphragm, which is a skeletal muscle that sits
below the lungs. Just to remind you, when you inhale, the diaphragm moves down, when you exhale,
the diaphragm moves up. Okay. here's something that most people don't do
and would benefit tremendously from,
and I can say this because Andy Galpin's lab
has done work on this,
exploring how warming up the intercostals
and the nerve to diaphragm pathways
before any kind of endurance work
or in the first few minutes of endurance work
can allow you to breathe more deeply
and to deliver more oxygen to the blood and, excuse me, end to the muscles and to be able
to do more work more efficiently.
So what that involves is sometimes sitting, sometimes standing and just really concentrating
on two things.
We always hear about how we should diaphragmatic breathe and that means our belly moves
out when we inhale.
So our stomach expands, but also expanding the intercostals, which means actually raising the ribs chest breathing.
We're all told that in yoga class, don't breathe with your chest this.
But actually that is is warming up the intercostal muscles.
So this is also a great way to generate adrenaline if you do it a little bit intensely.
So let's say you're feeling unmotivated to train.
I don't particularly like doing endurance training
until I'm actually doing it.
So I use and benefit from having a practice
while I'll just sit there and for about three minutes,
I'll just breathe very deeply,
trying to raise my chest as much as I can
for maybe a minute and then contracting my diaphragm
and expanding my stomach outward when I inhale.
By the end of that, you're actually delivering more oxygen to your system.
My lab has looked at this in a totally different context.
Andy's lab has looked at it in the context of physical performance.
So warming up the breathing muscles should make sense, given that you now know that muscles
and neurons need glucose and they need oxygen in order to function.
And so that's a great warmup.
You can also do this while walking or while getting on the bike and starting to pedal, really
starting to think about warming up the breathing system.
And then you can decide if you want to do pure nasal or combination of nasal and mouth
breathing and so on.
So that's something that we don't often hear about.
The other one, the other tool rather that I talked about in a previous episode, I'll just
mention again, is some people, when they do endurance type work, they get a stitch in their
side.
They feel like they've got a side cramp.
Very rarely is it actually a skeletal muscular cramp.
It's oftentimes, it's a referenced pain of the frenic nerve that innervates the liver.
So the frenic nerve is responsible for the movement of the diaphragm.
It is a very important system, but it has a number of what we call collateral.
So it branches to other organs, runs over other organs.
Sometimes when we're breathing shallow and we are in physical motion and we're
engaging in physical effort, we'll feel that side stitch and we think, oh, I've got a cramp
or maybe I'm dehydrated or maybe I need to run with my hands over my head, my head, excuse
me. Typically, you can relieve that side cramp, which isn't a cramp at all, that side
stitch by doing the double inhale, exhale, really breathing deeply. And then sneaking a little bit more air in, that's a double
kind of firing or what we call volley of action potential, sent from the frenic nerve to
the diaphragm, which will also activate that collateral, that branch, literally of the nerve,
that innervates the liver. And then when you exhale, you offload a bunch of carbon dioxide, but if you repeat that a few times,
often, in fact for me, every time, but often what will happen is that side stitch will just naturally disappear.
It just means you're not breathing properly. The frenic nerve is firing in a way that's kind of aggravating that referenced pain.
There's nothing kind of voodoo or mysterious about this, it just has to do with the way that the different nerves
travel in the body.
So as you set out on your run, or maybe you're going to do some muscular endurance work or high intensity work, warming up the intercostals,
warming up the diaphragm is good.
And there are exercises.
There is work that you can do to strengthen the intercostals and to strengthen
the diaphragm during bouts of this kind of effort. And I would say that one of the ways that you can do to strengthen the intercostals and to strengthen the diaphragm during
bouts of this kind of effort.
And I would say that one of the ways that you can do that best is by really focusing on
getting the maximum diaphragmatic expansion and chest lifting.
What we're all told now, not to do don't, you know, don't chest breathe, belly breathe.
The intercostals are there for a reason and they are perfectly good at filling your lungs.
They work best when they collaborate with your diaphragm, but when you are starting to fatigue,
to start to really inhale deeply and try and really expand those to deliver more oxygen to your system.
While we're talking about delivering more oxygen to your system, I want to share with you a useful
tool that will now make total sense mechanistically why it works, which is oftentimes
when we are on a long run or in long duration bouts of effort, we will hit the so-called
wall, right?
We will bonk, I think they used to call it, or maybe do they still call it that costillum?
He needs to sleep.
We bonk, we just rethink, no, we can't continue.
It's a curious thing as to whether or not that's neural
or whether or not it's fuel-based.
There's certainly gonna be a psychological
or motivational component, but one way that you can reveal
this kind of extra gear or the capacity to push on
is by understanding the way that different muscle fibers
use energy differently.
Remember the fast twitch phosphocryotene system
and the slow twitch system that relies mainly on lipids and glucose. Okay, well even if you don't remember all that,
if you've been running steadily for a long time and you're starting to fatigue and you feel
like it's time to quit, you may have not tapped into an alternative fuel source. One thing that you
can do is you can actually increase your speed. This is also true of work where you're doing
repetitions with kettlebells or something. You can start to increase your speed. This is also true of work where you're doing repetitions with kettlebells
or something. You can start to increase your speed. So run faster, pedal faster, row faster, swim
faster, not all out sprint. But in doing that, you're shifting the muscles and the nerves
over towards utilizing a separate fuel source or a distinct fuel source. Maybe the phosphocretine
system, if it's a quick bout of intense acceleration,
or maybe it's a combination of lipids
and carbohydrates in your system
that weren't available to you prior.
Now, of course, if you completely deplete your liver
glycogen, you completely deplete everything,
you're only gonna be running on stored fuel and fats
and eventually you'll start metabolizing protein,
muscles themselves.
But this is a kind of a unique way to realize that, oh, you weren't out of energy at all,
you were just over relying on one fuel source.
And this is the reason why especially elite athletes are starting to both rely on carbohydrates
so they're doing the whole carb depletion, then carb loading thing, they're loading up
their liver and their muscles with plenty of glycogen by eating pauses and
rice and stuff before races, but they are also ingesting ketones during races, during
long bouts of effort because ketones can be a quick form of energy.
There's no reason why you can't use ketones if they are taken, exogenous ketones, and
carbohydrate ending combination.
Remember, the body is accustomed to using multiple fuel sources, fatty acids, carbohydrates,
all these things.
It's only in the internet age that we think in terms of, oh, well, you're either keto
or you're burning sugar or you're fat adapted or fat fasting or fast fasting or fat
fattening, Gostello woke up when I said fat fatting.
I'm not talking about you, Gostello.
So the point is that your body is used to using multiple fuel sources.
So if you're kind of hitting that wall,
sometimes accelerating can actually allow you to tap into a new fuel source or
combination of fuel sources, just based on the way that muscles use fuel.
So that's another tool.
The other thing that's really important to think about in terms of endurance type work
is hydration.
And I think hydration is important for all forms of physical work and exercise, not just
endurance.
The deal with hydration is that we've been taught about hydration all wrong.
But let's remember what neurons work on.
What are they use in order to fire?
Well, they certainly need water, right?
We need water in our system, I should say, but they remember they use electrolyte
sodium and potassium to generate those action potentials to actually get neurons
to contract, to be able, excuse me, muscles to contract and for our brain to
function and to be able to think. Typically, typically we're going to lose
anywhere from one to five pounds of water per hour
of exercise.
And that's going to vary tremendously.
It's going to vary on weather.
It's going to vary on intensity, probably more like five pounds if it's hot day and you're
exercising very intensely.
So about one to five pounds per hour.
Now you know how much you weigh.
So if you think about your weight in pounds,
once you lose about one to 4% of your body weight in water,
you're going to experience about a 20 to 30% reduction
in work capacity, in your ability to generate effort
of any kind, strength, endurance, etc.
You are also going to experience a significant drop in your ability to think and perform mental operations.
So hydration is key. Now many people have been told, well, if you urinate and your urine is clear,
well then you're hydrated enough. Sometimes that's true, sometimes that's not true.
Also, and this is a topic I enjoy discussing,
but urine is a biological phenomenon.
It's actually filtered blood.
Everyone's a while, and if there's a kid,
and it's a family friend, I'll say,
did you know that your pee is actually filtered blood,
and they usually kind of go wide eyed?
But then they go, oh, that's kind of cool.
Like, kids have this natural curiosity about blood and pee
and stuff that's not contaminated
by our preconceived notions of those things being gross.
Because urine being filtered blood can give you some indication as to whether or not
you're hydrated enough or not.
And in order to really assess that, it's not going to be sufficient to urinate into another
volume of water and assess whether
or not your urine is very dark or very light.
It actually requires urinating into a small volume and saying, well, is it darker or lighter
than before?
It's not something you really want to do most places.
The etiquette of most gyms and environments is not suitable for that.
But one of the things that you can just do is you can figure, well, I'm going to lose one to five pounds of water per hour.
You can show up to exercise reasonably hydrated with electrolytes.
So potassium, sodium and magnesium are really key.
Yes, it's true.
You can die from drinking too much water in particular because it forces you.
If you drink too much water, you'll excrete too many electrolytes and your brain will
shut off.
Actually, your heart will stop functioning properly, so you don't want to over-consume water
to the extreme either.
But there are a number of equations that go into figuring out how much water you need,
based on how intense your training, et cetera, body size, et cetera.
Just remember, you lose, excuse me, about 1 to 5 pounds of water per hour, depending on how hot it is and how intensely you're exercising.
Once your body weight drops by one to four percent, so you can just figure it well.
If you lose five pounds per hour, you exercise for two hours.
Let's say you're about 200 pounds. That's about 10 percent, okay?
Well, you want to replace that before, very quickly, or not, you want to replace that very quickly, or you want to replace that all along, before
you start experiencing this massive 20-30% reduction in work capacity of muscles in the
brain.
A simple formula, what I call the galpin equation, hereafter, referred to as the galpin
equation, is a formula that gets you close to the exact amount that you would want that
Dr. Andy Galpin came up with, which is your body weight in pounds divided by the number 30.
And that is how many ounces you should drink for every 15 minutes of exercise.
So once again, the Galpin equation, your body weight in pounds divided by 30, that's the
amount of fluid to drink in ounces, right?
Every 15 minutes of exercise.
Now, if you are sweating a lot, you may need more, okay?
If you're already very well hydrated, you may need less,
but that's a good rule of thumb to begin
and to start to understand the relationship
between hydration and performance.
There is a phenomenon in which gastric emptying, the ability to move stuff out of your gut,
including water and electrolytes out of your gut and into the bloodstream and for delivery
to the tissues of your body for effort, is hindered when you get above 70% of your VO2
max.
In other words, when you're doing high-intensity training,
sometimes people experience that ingesting water
during intense training is difficult.
It is something that can be actually trained up.
It's a matter of learning to kind of relax
the abdominal muscles.
And there's some other aspects of adaptation
that will allow you to drink during higher intensity work.
As Galpon says, don't try and ingest fluids when you're working out or competing at higher
than 70% of VO2 max if you've never done it before.
You want to train up this capacity.
People can learn how to consume fluids during a race or consume fluids during bouts of exercise
that are very intense.
And a lot of people don't want to do that
because they don't want to have to stop to urinate, et cetera.
But given the crucial role of hydration
for muscular performance and for brain performance,
it seems that if you're going to be doing
a lot of high-intensity interval training
of the various kinds they talked about today
or high-intensity training of any kind,
that hydration is key and learning,
or in other words, getting your system to adapt
to ingesting fluids in the middle of these workouts
is something that seems beneficial, at least to me,
in terms of the trade-off between being dehydrated
and the somewhat discomfort of maybe drinking some fluid.
So you sip small amounts of fluid initially,
and then you're able to take bigger and bigger gulps
as time goes on, and pretty soon, you're able to drink mid-set or be excuse me not mid-set. Please don't
do that between sets and your workout or while you're still breathing hard after a mile
repeat or something that's sort without much disruption or any at all to your performance.
Last episode we talked about how to assess recovery and things that you might want to do
to improve recovery, how exposure
to ice baths and cold showers can reduce inflammation, which can be great for recovery,
but can inhibit some of the adaptations for strength and hypertrophy because inflammation
isn't good or bad.
Inflammation isn't like a nice person or a mean person.
It's both.
It's a great thing for stimulating adaptations, but you don't want it around
too long. And so we suggested that you not do ice baths within probably six hours of
any training where the goal was hypertrophy or strength training. There is some evidence
that getting yourself into an ice bath or cold shower after endurance training can actually
improve the mitochondrial aspects of endurance exercise
that you can get improvements in mitochondrial density and you can get improvements in mitochondrial
respiration by doing that afterwards and that it can facilitate recovery.
That's still a bit of a controversial area.
I do think that what I mentioned earlier that waiting at least six hours and probably more
like 24 hours between workouts is a good idea that getting at least one full day of rest each week for some people that'll be two.
I have to say I'm one of these people that after two days of absolutely no exercise.
I do perform better consistently across all aspects of physical performance and mentally I feel better as well, Even though I load to take those days off,
unless I'm really exhausted,
it does seem to help my training.
Some people can train seven days a week
and they're fine.
I think it just is,
there's a lot of individual variation.
You want to work on sleep and maximizing sleep
for recovery, nutrition of course as well.
I talked about sleep in the first four episodes
of the podcast.
If you have trouble with sleep, definitely check out those episodes.
It's very clear and a number of sports teams, even some folks that I work with, and Andy
Galpin and others are starting to incorporate a what's called a parasympathetic down regulation
after training of any kind as a way to accelerate recovery and enable you to do more work.
In other words, get back to work out sooner.
What is parasympathetic down regulation?
It means finishing your training and instead of just hopping on the phone or hopping into
your car and heading off to take five minutes minimum, maybe ideally more like 10 or 20,
but for sake of time, five minutes minimum and doing just some slow, pure nasal, long exhale devoted
breathing or lying down and just kind of zoning out.
That it seems can accelerate recovery and allow you to get back into other types of work,
mental work or physical work more quickly, which makes total sense because remember your
nervous system and recovery and work is a local phenomenon, which muscles
were you using?
You know, were you using your glutes, your hands and your back, or were using your shoulders,
et cetera, but it's also a systemic thing.
It's also about those neurons in the locus, serulius that are releasing up and effort.
You want to quiet all that down after training.
You want to really just zone out.
Think Costello.
Channel your inner Costello and just mellow out for five
to 20 minutes and then move into the rest of your day. Five minutes should be manageable,
even if it's just sitting in the car with your eyes closed, doing that down regulation
breathing. I think you'll see big benefits in terms of allowing yourself to come back
sooner, do more work over time, and just perform and feel better generally, as well as be
able to think about other things besides
just how much the previous workout kind of beat you up. A couple more things I think are going to be useful,
and I do want to just pack these in because we are closing out the month on physical performance,
and that's about programming and about pacing and the kind of mental aspects of endurance. So let's start with pacing and mental aspects of endurance.
I learned from a friend and colleague here at the podcast that who's very active in triathlon
and marathon and other knows a lot about that whole world and the competitive landscape
there, that pacing and literally physical Pacers of a laser on the ground or visualizing
or having a pace car or a pace runner in front
is actually not allowed in many competitions.
And if those are present, doesn't allow the race times
to qualify as legitimate record holding times.
And that's very interesting to me because what we know is that the visual system
has this capacity to switch back and forth
between what we call panoramic vision
where we're not really focused on anything.
Things are just flowing past us
or our eyes are just kind of zoned out.
So I can do this right now and you won't be able to tell,
but I'm looking at the corners of the room.
I see Costello down there on the floor.
I see my podcast team here.
And I can also see the microphone.
I can see myself in this environment.
That's panoramic vision.
Whereas if I draw my eyes to one location,
like right there in the center of the camera,
it's what's called a virgin's eye movement.
So I'm contracting my visual window.
The contraction of the visual window, when that's done,
is the same thing that would happen if I was tracking, say a a pace car or a pace runner or a laser on the ground.
The mirror bringing our eyes together to what we call a virgins point has the impact
of triggering the activation of neural circuits in the thalamus, things like Zona and Serta,
if you really want to know what their names are, of these brain areas, as well as in the brain
stem that activate the so-called alertness system, things like
locus serulius, whereas panoramic vision tends to bring us into states of relaxation.
You can actually leverage this during your runs.
Let's say you're out for a long run or you're swimming or you're cycling.
This is probably easiest to imagine out of the water, but you could probably do in the
water as well. If you focus your attention on a landmark
that you're going to run to, you'll
find that it's much easier than if you don't actually
have a set milestone or landmark that you're going to run to.
However, if you were to continue that repeatedly,
just going milestone after milestone after milestone,
you would feel more mentally fatigued
and you would actually be able to generate less
work overall.
One thing that can be useful is focusing on a milestone running to that milestone or biking
whatever it is the activity happens to be and then dilating your field of view to relax
the system and then continuing again.
So it's this kind of active contraction or of the visual window and then dilation of the visual window.
Contraction of the visual window allows you to generate more effort
but there's a cost to doing that because neurons consume energy and now you know how they do that.
Whereas dilation allows you to essentially be more efficient, right?
Now pacing is not allowed or having a pace or a visual
pace or because it does allow you to access systems in the brain and body
that allow you to create more energy, more effort.
And so I find it interesting that I think in a kind of subconscious genius,
the race officials and the governing bodies of these races
have said, okay, sure, having a pacer there or someone in front,
you can draft off of them.
There's actually a kind of a aerodynamic effect of having someone in front, you can draft off of them. There's actually a kind of a aerodynamic effect
of having someone in front of you that makes it easier
to run in the wake of their air stream, so to speak.
Same as true in cycling.
This is why the cycling teams are so good at maneuvering
in packs in very specific ways.
You can go faster with less effort
if you're drafting as it's called behind somebody.
But as well, where you place your vision
will allow you to generate more effort. And so it's interesting that somebody, but as well where you place your vision will allow you to generate
more effort.
And so it's interesting that they've taken out this kind of performance enhancing tool.
I imagine, and I have to imagine, it's the appropriate word here, that good runners,
good cyclists have the ability to create a kind of pacer in their mind's eye.
I have to imagine that they're not just completely allowing their attention to drift, although
they do that when they want to be in highly efficient mode, generating effort without having
attacks their mental capacity.
And remember, mental capacity is neural energy and consumes glucose, energy that they could
devote to the functioning of their body.
But that when needed,
that they can focus their energy in and actually kind of chase a mental pacer or pick milestones.
So this is a mental game that you can play as well.
It's a little bit hard to do in the context of weightlifting in the gym.
It's more of a moving through space kind of thing, but some people do this by counting
reps, etc. I think it's especially suitable for endurance type of exercise, especially done outside.
One of the reasons I hate running on a treadmill is it just feels like it's never ending.
And I've never tried one of these peloton things.
I try and avoid looking at screens as much as I possibly can.
But if you try this next time, you're out for a runner.
So, and what you'll find is that you have a capacity to engage a system of higher energy output when
you focus your eyes on a particular location, but you want to use that judiciously because
your goal, of course, is to become efficient at moving through space over time and not taxing
your brain and body to the point where you arrive at the end of that unless it's race day,
just completely tapped out. So that's a kind of interesting aspect of running.
If you're a fan of running, which I am,
and you get the chance to look at any of the documentaries
or docu-dramas made about,
excuse me about Steve Prefontane,
it was clear that he was mostly in a battle with himself,
but that he was also a highly competitive individual.
And you'll see this in some of his races.
I do encourage you to look some of those up on YouTube or see the docu drama.
They're quite good where he ran that the essentially was 12 laps on a track.
It's essentially the five.
It is the 5,000 meter race, which essentially three, three miles.
And he essentially tried to sprint the whole thing, which is ridiculous.
Actually, knowing what you know today, you'll realize that Steve pre-fantane basically
was pulling from strength, speed,
power, muscular endurance, long duration effort, high intensity, aerobic, anaerobic,
is sort of trying to maximize every fuel system.
And you'll see that in the races that he runs, but that when runners are nearing the final
laps, the so-called bell lap of a race, they'll often look to one another to see where
somebody is, obviously, to assess their progress and how close somebody is. But when somebody gets past, oftentimes you'll see someone
access this mysterious kick, this ability to tap into some additional gear that allows them to
run forward or faster when they themselves actually thought that they were maxed out. So someone
can be running for the finish line.
They're convinced they're going to win.
They're going max effort, at least they perceive max effort.
Someone passes them.
And all of a sudden, max effort has changed because of that visual target.
They are able to access higher levels of speed and output and effort and performance.
They don't always catch up to that person and win.
But having a target, a milestone, is a powerful way that we can
generate more force and energy in anything. And the visual system is the way that we bring those
milestones into our brain, which then brings about epinephrine, which brings about neural firing,
which allows us to access whatever resources happen to be available to us. So I find this
whatever resources happen to be available to us. So I find this fascinating because people often wonder
like where does the kick come from?
Where is this kind of gift of an additional gear?
Where is that deeper resource?
And we often express it and talk about it in kind of psychological terms,
like heart or willpower or that something kind of got transplanted into us
or descended into us and not to remove any of the spiritual aspects of sport or running or effort or the human heart, but it's very
clear that the nervous system when it has a specific visual target can generate the
sorts of intense effort that it couldn't otherwise.
And it sometimes even comes as a surprise to the person generating the effort. I promise that I would talk about programming, meaning when and how many times a week to do
the various workouts related to endurance and how to merge those with other types of exercise
that you might be doing for strength or yoga or other things that you might be doing like work
and other things unrelated to exercise. Since that's a vast space with many different parameters
and you all have different lives and lifestyles
and backgrounds with fitness, et cetera,
what I'm going to do is I'm going to put
three different levels, if you will, or protocols
that one could adopt in a link on the show notes
or in the caption on YouTube.
If you click on that link, you'll be able to see
three possible combinations of endurance work, strength and hypertrophy work, or endurance work,
flexibility and hypertrophy work that are grounded in many of the major publications that Dr. Andy
Galpin and colleagues and other people have described, including this review that's also linked
there on concurrent training and
how one can use concurrent training, meaning training for endurance, training for strength,
training for hypertrophy, training for all these different things without having to train
constantly every day, twice a day, etc.
So if you are interested in taking the protocols that you learned about in this episode and
in previous episodes and combining those, we've placed them there for you as a completely zero cost resource.
Please understand they are not holy.
No, cost bill agrees, they are not holy.
There will be variation in terms of what people can tolerate
and what they have time for, but I think they'll serve as a useful guideline
in getting started or in continuing with and expanding on existing
endurance work, strength work, hypertrophy work, and so forth.
Just really quickly, we didn't talk about supplements much today.
In the previous episodes, I talked about the phosphocreatine system
and supplementing with creatine, talked about beta-alene for
moderate duration work.
Really the only things that have been shown to really improve endurance work across the four varieties of
endurance work I described today. They have essentially two forms, one are stimulants,
so things like caffeine will definitely improve endurance work and power output. There's
a little bit of evidence that caffeine intake can actually inhibit the function of the
creatine system, but it's just one study.
But that's interesting.
If you want to read that study, you can put caffeine
into examine.com, and it will take you to that study.
Many people get sore after workouts,
in particular workouts that involve a lot of eccentric loading
or workouts that are very novel where they've kind of pushed it
instead of moving gradually as I
suggest into say high intensity anaerobic endurance work of three sets of 20 seconds on 100 second
rest. Maybe you get over ambitious and you do eight sets in which case you're extremely sore.
Certain forms of magnesium in particular magnesium malate, M-A-L-A-T-E have been shown to be useful for removing or reducing the amount of delayed
onset muscle soreness.
That form of magnesium is distinctly different than the sorts of magnesium that are good
for getting us into sleep, things like magnesium 3 and 8 and by glycinate.
And then there's this whole thing about beet powder and beet juices and things that increase
nitric oxide and allow for more vasodilation and therefore delivery of blood to muscle and neurons and other tissues for long bouts of endurance work
some people like
beet juice and the related compounds that increase arginine and and vasodilation some people don't some people don't feel good
When they take those some people also don't feel good when they take-alene because it can give them this feeling of kind of like
itchy creepy crawlies under the skin,
kind of the niacin phenomenon, the niacin flush.
Some people don't mind that or some people don't experience that.
So when it comes to supplementation,
there's a lot of variety, but magnesium malate
has been shown to reduce soreness.
So sometimes that's good.
Cold and hot contrast therapy for soreness, things of that sort.
But in general, we focused mainly today on behavioral tools.
You'll notice that all of the tools are accessible
without the need for lots of equipment.
So I didn't say you need a rower or you need a kettlebell,
though those will work.
And I hope I was able to illustrate for you
that endurance isn't just one thing.
It's not just the ability to go for long bouts of exercise of different kinds.
That there's also this mental component because of the way that neurons work.
And also that there are these different forms of endurance, of muscular endurance, that
where you're going to fail because of the muscles and muscle energy utilization.
And the nerves that innovate those muscles locally, not because of a failure to bring in oxygen or blood.
Whereas long duration effort, it's going to be more about, you know, being below your
VO2 max and your ability to be efficient for long bouts of more than 12 minutes of exercise.
One set, as I say, of 12 minutes to maybe several hours.
I should just mention with long duration type work, you know, you could even imagine raking in the yard or mowing a lawn, depending on how big that lawn is. I used to have a job
when I was a kid mowing lawns and they I'll tell you, we didn't have many neighbors with
very big lawns, but there are a few of them felt huge because they were really convoluted.
If you're pushing that more and these were the old fashioned mowers, not electric mowers,
it's work. That's also of the sort that we call long duration endurance work. High intensity training will tap into yet other fuel sources and mechanisms as we learn today.
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