Live Like a Girl with Dr. Mindy Pelz - Carbs or Keto, Which is best for exercise? - With guest Zach Bitter

Episode Date: November 30, 2020

// R E A D Y • S E T • R E S E T This episode is all about ultramarathons, the best diet for your fitness level, and biohacks to improve your performance.   Zach Bitter is an endurance athlete and coach. He helps people achieve their endurance goals, from beginners to advanced. Whether you are just getting started or looking to build on your past experience, Zach is here to help. Zach graduated from the University of Wisconsin - Stevens Point, where he studied education and competed in cross country and track and field. As an educator, he learned how to work with people at the individual level. In this podcast, we cover: Your nutrition will depend on your fitness goals  Ways to biohacks your performance How to recover from a brutal workout using protein  Ways to prevent injuries using biohacks and nutrition  About the one-hundred-mile distance ultramarathon  Why a training plan can be detrimental  How Zach prepares for his marathons  // E P I S O D E   S P O N S O R S  Interested in our upcoming Reset Experience 2021? Join us here today! Get a free Whoop band and 30 days for free when you use our link here! Be sure to join our Resetter team when you join with code: COMM-9189B8 // R E S O U R C E S   M E N T I O N E D Podcast with Drew Manning Zach Bitter Human Performance Outliers Podcast Zach's Instagram Zach's Twitter Zach's Facebook Zach's LinkedIn Zach's YouTube   // F O L L O W Instagram | @dr.mindypelz & @theresetterpodcast Facebook | /drmindypelz & /theresetterpodcast Youtube | /drmindypelz   Please note the following medical disclaimer: By listening to this podcast you understand that this video is for educational purposes only. It is not intended to substitute for professional medical advice and should not be relied on as health or personal advice. Always seek the guidance of your doctor with any questions you may have regarding your health or medical condition.  

The information discussed in this episode is intended as general information only. It is not intended for one-on-one medical advice, and you should always consult your healthcare practitioner before making any changes. And if you like the content discussed in this episode, please go leave a review so that others can benefit from it as well. I am a woman on a mission that is dedicated to teaching you just how powerful your body was built to be. I like to do that by bringing you the latest science, the greatest thought leaders, and applicable steps that help you tap into your own internal healing power. The purpose of this podcast is to give you the power back and help you believe in yourself again. My name is Dr. Mindy Pels, and I want to

thank you for spending part of your day with me. Welcome to the Resetter podcast. This is Jessica, sidekick and co-host with Dr. Mindy, and this is episode 48, and we are here with an incredible guest today, Zach Bitter. For those of you that are fitness enthusiasts, you are going to love today's episode. Zach is an endurance athlete and a coach who has broken two world records. In August of 2019, he captured the 100 mile world record finishing 100 miles in 11 hours and 19 minutes. And in today's podcast, we are going to, of course, discuss how incredible it is to break two world records and how the heck you decide you want to do a hundred mile race. But we're also going to discuss the best diet for your fitness level, biohacking to improve performance, how to recover well,

ways to train for your fitness goals. We've had so many questions from you guys over the years on training and fitness and how you do nutrition differently for it and what you should be eating. Should you be carb loading? Should you go keto? Which is why we're excited to bring Zach on so that we get answer many of those questions. And if you're new to our podcast, welcome. Don't let the fact that we are discussing ultramarathons and a hundred mile race deter you from listening, as Dr. Middy and myself are not training for a hundred mile run, nor are we ultramarathoners. But lots of great wisdom in this episode in this episode in regards to exercise and nutrition in general. So welcome. If you're listening to this on Apple or Spotify, make sure to click the subscribe buttons.

you automatically get notified of new episodes. And if you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review so that others can see the benefit of those episodes as well. Let me kind of give you just a little bit of a background of just our podcast and our community. So we are a group of people that I've got close to 300,000 across all our platforms that one of the things we do is we fast together. So we do once a week or once a month, we do a five-day fast of all different. types. And we do it as a group once a month. And so one of the big questions that has come up is around

fasting and exercise, high carb and exercise, low carb and exercise. And so these are things that we have continually talked about. And one of the reasons I want to bring you on is to talk about nutrition and just sports performance in general. But when Drew told me that what he was doing with that 100-mileer, my first thought honestly was like, oh my God, that's going to kill your body. Like, why are you doing that? And when we dove deeper into it, he said, oh, you've got to talk to Zach Bitters because Zach Bitter's, he helped me through the whole nutritional piece of this. So hence the reason we are here right now chatting with you

because I really want to hear more of your mindset and how you approach this like extreme long-distance type activities and how you look at it from a nutritional aspect and how do you do it from an injury prevention aspect. And we haven't done a lot on my podcast around different types of exercise and how to tap in to accelerating human performance through just different strategies around hit training, strength training, endurance training. This is what I want to dive into. Yeah, I know those are all great topics. I think we can get into the weeds a bit with some of them and kind of chat about what I've done and what I've helped other folks do within kind of the context of kind of the low carb type of a strategy. And I guess like generally speaking when just to kind of go to like endurance training in general, like I like to kind of frame things in a way that is going to be like kind of like relate the goals no matter what. And the one thing that I find really interesting with some of the ultramarathon type stuff,

especially since it just is longer efforts out there, is like the goal for basically anybody, regardless what their diet is going to be on race day, is to defend muscle glycogen. So you can get to events that are really long, in which case muscle glycogen almost becomes a bit less of a factor, especially if you're really good at burning fat. You know, most folks who are training specifically for a race that's that long probably will be relatively good at burning fat regardless of their diet just because, you know, you're running long distances. A lot of people even on moderate to high carbohydrate diets are sometimes doing longer runs without a lot of fuel before and during and things like that just to kind of train their body

that way. But ultimately, you're trying to get yourself in a position to where at the end of the event, you have intact enough glycogen stores that you feel strong and you can finish strong. Okay. So there's like traditionally with endurance, it's been kind of moderate to high carb has been the message. And I think some of that is relative just to some of the more standard, more studied distances that tend to be in what we can talk about after if you want, kind of these gray area intensities that just make things a little more complicated or a little less natural, I guess, to the human experiment more or less. And either way, like when you just try to extrapolate that forward an ultramarathon where we know a lot less about from a strict kind of research standpoint, you find a situation

where a lot of times people are battling this need essentially, if they're following moderate to high-cover high-hydrate diet to defend that muscle glycary by eating a lot of that sort of stuff during the race itself. During it, yeah. And you just get a wide range of experiences with that. I mean, I've worked with folks who, like, if they have, like, 20 to 25 grams of, like, some sports engineered product, like, that's, like, the peak at what they can tolerate anymore and they're going to start, like, having digestive issues and just really struggling.

And then there's folks who can seemingly do 60, 90 grams. an hour and just clip right along and then everything in between. So if you're going to follow a moderate to high-carbohy diet, you certainly need to be getting probably at least 50, but probably closer to 70 grams of carbohydrate per hour in these longer single-day endurance events. Now, in order to defend muscle glycogen appropriately, within that context, a lot of times we see, like, I believe the most recent position paper was like 60% digestive issues or some sort of digestive situation. So if you choose that route, if you fall into the norm, you're basically a coin flip chance of having a day where you don't feel like you're miserable from a digestive standpoint to know everything from like mild stomach

discomfort to stopping every like half mile in puking or, you know, you have to use the bathroom multiple times at the end of the race and things like that. So that's kind of like the traditional approach with it. Then you get folks like myself, other folks in the sport too, like Jeff Brownie, Mike McKnight, Jason Schlarb to a degree, starting to experiment of different ways to defend muscle glycogen. And one way to do that is to increase your fat oxidation rate to the degree where your body's just not tapping into as much of that muscle glycogen from those lower intensity efforts. So like a lot of times with like a hundred mile race, personally I'm looking at what you'd call like you just underneath your aerobic threshold.

So I'm certainly burning a blend of fats and carbohydrates during that at that intensity, almost regardless of my diet, but I can really, really bring down the number from carbohydrates by manipulating my diet and things like that. So I'm defending my muscle glycogen via increasing my fat metabolization. So it's sparing some of that glycogen stuff. So I'm just going to deplete less of it at a similar intensity as someone's following a moderate to high carbohydrate diet. So where it gets a little nuanced, I think, is like a lot of times I think people want to think all carbs or no carbs. And really there's, I think, a lot of middle. ground with that in the context of performance specifically where I don't necessarily want to

fat adapt myself to the point where I am like I kind of like spin it on its head and now all law son can't tolerate any carbohydrate sources during the race because even even in a pretty fat adapted state which I would consider myself in I think my last that peak fat oxidation rate was a 1.56 grams per minute which for folks are interested that's about 50% higher than the the high range of a lot of the studies done before what we saw in the faster study in 2014. So, like, I can definitely defend a lot more muscle glycogen with just my day-to-day diet. But when I start putting intensities up to what I can, like, optimally train myself to if I put in, like, a really, really good training block, I'm still going to be dipping

into my muscle glycogen to a small degree. But a small degree over the course of an entire day or 12 hours is going to be enough to deplete it. So I still need to defend that with small. small amounts of carbohydrate during the day, if my goal is peak performance, it's just much lower. So for me, like the highest I usually take my carbohydrate intake during a race would be maybe like 40 grams per hour, which is going to be underneath even the lowest range of what they would recommend you to do if you're following a moderate to high carbohydrate diet. And then, like, I've kind of got this dual defense system put up essentially where I have improved fat oxidation rates, but I also have small amounts of exogenous carbohydrates coming in,

both serving me to defend that muscle glycogen. So since I've lowered my carbohydrate requirement during the race itself, I also lower that risk of any type of digestive issue. Interesting. Yeah. So I think like for me personally, I've done, gosh, I think I've lost count, but I think I've probably been some of the neighbor about 70 ultramarathons now. And the majority of them I've done in the context of a high, fat, low carb diet. And I've had stomach issues before. I mean, it's almost unavoidable to never have a stomach issue unless I guess you maybe don't eat anything, but then you're kind of compromising your up-end potential a little bit when some of these longer full-day type events.

You know, for me, it's like, you know, I'll have stomach issue every once in a while, but it's way below like the 50 to 60 percent. It's maybe at most one out of every 10 times or something like that at worst. And it's usually not something that completely derails my day. It's like, all right, I lost a little bit of time where I would have made you build a run, say, 15, 20 minutes faster for that 100 mile race versus what I ended up running had I not had to stop and address some of that sort of stuff. But that's kind of the name of the game, I guess, is muscle glycogen defense. And how you do it is a little more dependent on the individual and kind of

what works for you. And then there's just so many other variables you can tie into that too, where, you know, I work with folks who just follow kind of standard traditional dietary stuff. And then they get into training and they switch their diet. And for them, it's just a lot easier for them to stick to a high fat, low carb diet. And no, they may, they may lose 15 to 20 pounds, which is going to be a huge performance benefit in a sport where you're trying to move your body all day long. As long as you don't go, like, too extreme with that and end up compromising what you'd call your power weight ratio, where now you're starting to lose power along with the weight and it's coming out to be a negative return on performance. People, you have to try really hard to

get down to that in a lot of cases. So most people aren't fighting, fighting that battle, thankfully, but it is worth saying that because there are folks out there who do and find themselves, you know, losing too much weight and then they lose performance on that into the spectrum too. Yeah, and what we see in our resetters is we've got a lot of like, you know, 50-year-old athletes that maybe are running a half marathon or they just want to stay in amazing shape. And they're still trying to get their mind like wrapped around not doing high carb to like carb load before like a Spartan race or something like that. And we get them into to teach them the ketogenic

diet. We teach them variations of fasting in ketosis. And what is hard for people to wrap their head around is the fact that fat may be as good of a fuel source for athletic performance as a carbohydrate is. So would you agree? I mean, that's what I hear you saying is that, yeah, you've got to keep the carb down, keep the fat up, and you're going to have more access to not depleting your glycogen stores. Is that how I'm interpreting what you're saying? Yeah, I think like this is where a lot of the context kind of kind of weaves in to a degree. So if you take like that person, you describe someone in kind of their around age 50 and they have like multiple life focuses, like they want to be healthy, they want to be happy, they want to enjoy

their activities. They want, you know, they want everything to click, but, you know, they're not trying to make the Olympics. They're not trying to win the race, that sort of thing. That person, I think, like, their dietary structure is going to, they're going to have a lot of options, and they're probably best off working with what works for them in terms of kind of getting there from a, from just like a, from their typical nutrition plans. So what can they stick to? What can they make sustainable? When, when we look at just kind of the metabolization of fats, versus carbohydrates. The advantage that fats have is it's super stable. So like, you know, even someone who's at the very front of the race, very lean, couldn't afford to lose an ounce,

has enough body fat on them to power them through like a really long race. They're not going to like deplete that source. What they could deplete is the muscle glycogen. So like with a fat's advantage is it's basically unexhaustible. The disadvantage of burning sugar, burning carbohydrates, is that it's an exhaustible source. So the advantage of a carbohydrate over a fat is it's going to metabolize a little quicker and it's going to require less oxygen to do so. So if you get into these like kind of areas where, let's say you're like an elite marathon runner and you're trying to run like a low two-hour marathon,

that person is going to maybe need to like lean on carbohydrate a little more heavily because the cost of burning fat is a higher oxygen expense. But the interesting thing in where I think people a lot of times get hungry, hung up on is like we're looking at like elite marathons running low two hour marathons versus the average person running a marathon who's going to probably run it around four out. When you're looking at kind of like what is going to be the best like diet for someone, there's like kind of almost multiple contexts within everything. So first context is like, well, what what is the population we're looking at? So we're looking at like front of the pack elite marathoners. We're looking at kind of

middle of the pack folks focused on, you know, careers, family, life, health. all this other stuff versus running like it like eating every last second out maybe at the expense of their own health and longevity and for folks and then we're looking also at just like what is the relative intensity of the event itself too so if you are someone who is going to spend say four to five hours finishing a marathon the relative intensity of a marathon for them is going to be lower than for someone running it in two hours so then also we're looking at almost a different we're looking at a different like fuel or like even a different system of training almost or system of racing intensity at that point. So I think that's where people oftentimes get confused because, you know, a lot of times

I think we see like people who are kind of just your everyday marathon runners wondering why they're doing quite well on a on a low carb, high fat diet and they don't necessarily see the guys in the very front or the women the very front of the sport like doing that same thing. Because For them, it was like a game changer. They may have lost weight. They may feel more energy, may have more consistent energy. They may sleep better. All these things that you see anecdotally people report when they have a dietary shift

that happens to work for them. So I think when you're looking at it from that lens at the individual level, it just makes things a lot more clear and a lot easier to kind of make a little bit of, make tweaks here and there to kind of put a person in their best position to be successful given their contexts they have because there's just tons of variables that that don't cross over when you go from like a professional runner to someone who's running for health, fitness, fund and all that other stuff, you know, right down to kind of how they even structure their day, much less what they're eating. Yeah, it's like when people ask us, oh, which fast should I do? We have eight different fast.

I'm like, well, it depends on what you're trying to do. And that's what I, and that was, that's interesting because I, I hadn't really thought about the fact that if you're running, running the same distance, the nutrition is going to change depending upon what you want to accomplish within that distance. Do you want to go fast or do you want to just slow and steady? Is that what I'm hearing you say? Yeah, exactly. And to give you a bit of an example of that, even if you took me specifically, so now we're making it a little easier to look because we're not comparing two different individuals or comparing one individual. If I do like a hundred mile around a very flat track or something like that, you know, I've run, you know, typically like

my best performance is 11 hours, 19 minutes. My better performance is usually just under 12 hours, somewhere in that neighborhood. For someone else who's out there who's like more near the middle of the pack, it might take them 24 hours to do that event. So for them, they're doing a 24 hour, whereas I'm doing essentially a 12 hour, even though we're maybe going the same distance.

Now, if you take me and just say, okay, Zach, now instead of you just running for 100 miles in that time frame, just see how far you can run in 24 hours. Now I'm more comparable to that person who's running 100 miles and 24 hours, even if I go almost twice as far as them. But then when you look at my dietary difference between those, you'll see a shift. So for that 100-mile, that's under 12 hours, I'm going to keep a little more carbohydrate around in my training and during my race itself. Now I move up to 24 hours where I bring that intensity down even further because I'm going to be out there twice as long. I need to kind of scale back on how fast I go.

now I open up a much bigger window to even leverage what you probably can see like a classic ketogenic diet or even getting close to kind of a no-carb type of diet. And I think that's where it's really interesting when you get that intensity low enough where you can defend muscle glycogen just fine without even consuming any carbohydrate. Yeah, interesting. Okay. So let's take, let's go back to the 50-year-old person who like, because the other thing that I think is so interesting right now is We have people somewhere, you know, between 45 and 60 that are really wanting to push themselves to these extreme levels. And I think people between all the different ways we can track our heart rate and heart rate variability and calories and all that, that we've gotten like this whole new culture of people that want to biohack their performance. And there's a lot of different ways we can do that.

So what I have found, and just for myself and within our group, is that the first step for the average person is you're going to need to move away from this thinking of carb loading or any kind of performance. Let's use a marathon as an example. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would even maybe go a step further and say that, like, I think the way that we see carb loading in modern times has been so skewed away from what it was originally intended that it's like no long. or even serving the individual who's on a moderate of a high-carbohydide diet because really like the idea of a carb load is so that you start the race with completely full carbohydrate stores, glycogen stores, topped off. Now, you can, like if you actually taper for a race where you're like kind of reducing the volume in tense day of your training, you probably don't have to change your eating

habits at all for your glycogen stores to restock themselves in that time frame. So you're actually restocking them by removing the stimulus that would deplete them versus adding more into it. So now what we've done nowadays is people still taper. They don't train right up to race day usually like in the same way they would when they're kind of peaking and doing their hardest weeks in the training cycle. They're scaling back. So then by the time they get to carb load, they already have like completely topped off muscle

glycogen that they don't need to go and eat like a whole other meal of a thousand calories of like pasta and all that stuff to top that off. just going to potentially ruin the race the next day by introducing a huge volume of food that they're not used to eating at that frequency, at that timing and stuff like that. And that's probably part of the reason why we see a lot of these digestive issues in some of these longer efforts or even the shorter ones. It's silly to call a marathon shorter, but relative to 100 miles, like, technically it's for the rest of us, it's a long one.

Yeah. Yeah. So I think like even within like the general community who's following a more like standard diet or a moderate high carbohydrate diet, they could probably benefit from relearning what a natural carbolode looks like. But then you get the population that you refer to. For them, it's less of an issue altogether

because they're just not leaning as heavily on that to begin with. Would they benefit from being in ketosis going into a race or a longer workout? Do ketones help in athletic performance? That's a good question. I'm not sure about the actual metabolization of the ketone. What we know is that, like, there is going to be probably a sweet spot for, like, your fat oxidation rates.

So, like, there's going to be, you want to, like, what they would call it is kind of like a metabolic flexibility part where you are able to burn high enough amounts of fat that you don't, you're not too dependent on carbohydrates. But then depending on the intensity of the event, you may not want to be so far into ketosis that, like, you've all of a sudden now found yourself in a position where, you know, you're any type of exogenous carbohydrate source is going to be unusable to you. So it's kind of like removing that tool from the table. Unless you're in a position where like removing that tool from the table is a non-issue for you because you've decided I feel way better following a strict

ketogenic diet. I feel really good. My ketone bodies are super high. I sleep better. I recover better. My training's more consistent. I don't get injured as much. If you find yourself in that position, then, then you know, you may say, okay, I'm going to sacrifice that tool of an exogenous carbohydrate because so many other things have improved when I take that out it as a whole. But I would guess, I would venture to believe it most people, like, assuming they don't get some sort of like digestive issue from it, if they're doing like a marathon and they're trying to eke out like every last second, a little bit of carbohydrate could probably go a long way for somebody who's, even someone like myself or someone who's even further pushed towards

like a strict keogenic diet on a day-to-day basis. could still maybe get a little bit of a benefit from that. I think where we may see some research come out the next couple of years that I think will be really interesting is essentially just the timing of all of this. So like one of the mistakes that I've made in the past, some of the folks I've worked with have made in the past is you get to like the beginning of a race, like right before you start or the morning of your breakfast. You have a little bit of carbohydrate just as you're thinking, okay, I've got enough fat reserve.

I don't really need to eat a lot of that in order to fuel the race. It's already there. I mean, I have a little bit of carbohydrate just to make sure my blood, glycogen stores are topped off going in. And when you do that, what you can do is you can kind of trigger a scenario where your body's going to push a little more towards dipping into those muscle glycogen stores earlier on versus leveraging that overnight fast and avoiding the carbohydrate for breakfast before the race and waiting until you're, say, like, 45 to 60 minutes into the event to start bringing in any if you are going to.

Because at that point, at that point you've kind of gotten that point where you're burning you're really turning through fat at a high rate. So an introduction of a small amount of carbohydrate. And I mean, I've worked with folks who it's really small. It's like five to ten grams or something like that. And like, you know, they can see a little bit of a, a bit of a kind of a metabolic flexibility or a dual fuel substrate interplay there. But again, you know, that's going to be dependent on kind of what your goals are too. So, you know, there's folks out there. Like I think the first one I was supposed my mind is Charles Washington, who he's a, he, he, he, he, he, he probably fixed your demographic perfectly. I think he, I think Charles is probably right around 50,

maybe in his upper 40s or somewhere around there. And, you know, he runs, he follows a zero-carb diet, runs all sorts of marathons. He doesn't, he doesn't eat or drink during the marathon. And yeah, he's, he's an interesting guy. And he's improved his times relative to what he's done historically and things like that. So I think he's just a good example of, like, you know, when we think of, like, working with the, at the individual level, you've got to consider guys like him and folks like him who, for whatever reason, the original template just wasn't going to work for him. And so it's just bringing the context in, I think, is always important. So one of the things that we do a lot and preach a lot is going in and out of different states,

different diets. So like feast famine cycling is what we call it, where you're stimulating autophagy and then you're coming over here and stimulating mTOR to build muscle. So when I hear you say that you want to maintain your glycogen, levels when you're in especially these longer races. And then I come over to like the theories of hit training. And I look at something like, I don't know if you're familiar with the Carol bike, that is like all about like depleting your oxygen stores.

So is there something, is there a way we can combine those two theories? Like if you go and deplete your oxygen stores and then the next day you turn around and you build them back up, is that going to help you in sports performance if you're going in and out of those states? Yeah, and essentially, like, even a moderate high-carbohydrate marathon runner

is going to kind of almost do that by default, where you're going to drive your muscle glycogen down to where it gets really low. What you do by that is you leverage your body to, or you encourage your body, I guess, to start burning higher rates of fat because of that absence of glycogen there. So when I talk about muscle glycogen defense,

it's more specific to race day because that's where like performance kind of becomes the driver there. Whereas on the day-to-day basis, you know, most folks probably aren't walking around with topped off muscle glycogen in most cases unless they have like a rest day and they eat a bunch of carbohydrate or something like that than they maybe do. Or if they are working out at a very low intensity and allowing that to kind of take place over time. So I think, yeah, I think that there's there's some benefits to doing that. I think there's like you're going to. you're going to encourage your body to burn more fat in the presence of low muscle glycogen. It's just that's maybe not something you'd want to do on a day where you're focusing primarily on performance because you're removing kind of a faster acting fuel source. Muscle glycogen just in general, it doesn't require carbohydrate to resynthesize.

You can do that through fats and proteins. It's just going to be a little bit of a longer, more multi-step process. So this is where I think it gets really interesting because historically, like if I get in a big training block where my volume and intensity is really high. So, you know, I might be doing 15, 20 hours of training and having like speed workouts or some heavier weight training sessions multiple times a week. In that scenario, if I go no carbohydrate, I will run my glycogen store down because I'm just not going to build up fast enough with just fats and proteins. So that's when we're in my training where I might come up off of a strict ketogenic diet and

reintroduce a little more carbohydrate. And for your listeners context, that's usually at the highest point in my training, maybe 20% of my dietary intake, and then like 60% would probably be a fat, about 20% would be about protein as like an example. And that's going to be enough for me based on my higher fat oxidation rates to kind of stay on top of that enough to execute those workouts. At least that's how it's played out in the field for me. Whereas if I decided to go and pick that most intense work, what I do, so maybe I'm going to go to the track and do 12 by 400 meters, which can be a pretty brutal workout.

I can go into that workout following a strict ketogenic diet. diet, say 50 grams or lower and run as good of a workout there as I ever have, as long as I gave myself a few days where I'm not taxing myself at an intense level and giving myself time to kind of build up those muscle ligation stores through like gluconeogenesis and other pathways. So sometimes it's the, again, we go back to context again, right? So like if I wanted to do that workout, say three times in one week or do that workout in the morning and then do a heavy weight training session in the afternoon and then the next morning get up and do another workout, that would be a scenario where I may not be able to lean on like

gluca neogenesis to keep my muscle glycogen in stock. So some well-time strategic carbohydrate at a relatively low level compared to what you're going to see in most scenarios is maybe advisable from a performance standpoint. But again, structuring those type of workouts are based, I would actually say are ill-advised for someone who's just focusing on health and stuff like that and not thinking about trying to like, you know, maximize their potential performance and that type of stuff. I think when you're starting to block workouts like that, you're trying to peep for a specific event versus, you know, just being healthy, enjoying life, staying fit, and all that sort of stuff. Yeah, we have had, I'm curious

what you think on protein cycling and if you've done any research on it, because what we've seen again, just across so many different people, is that when they go into these fasted states, and then they come out of it, out of a fasted state, and they do protein cycling. I had seen some research showing that every two hours if you, or every three hours if you have 20 grams of protein, that throughout a day, that that's the best way to stimulate mTOR and to improve muscle growth is what it was. And that the next day, if they do a protein cycling day after several days of depletion, the next day when they go to lift weight, so they go to work out,

We have a lot of Spartan racers when they go in Spartan race. Their performance is like at a whole other level. Now, those aren't 100-mile ultramarathons, but what do you think of that as protein cycling and going in and out of these states of deprivation and then building back up? Oh, interesting. So are you saying like, for like one day you would do like a fairly frequent protein feed

and then the following days you would step away from that and maybe do like omat or something like that. Yeah, exactly. Okay. Yeah, so I think from how I understand it, I'd be interesting to see, I don't know a whole lot about kind of the cycling side of it. What I understand, though,

in terms of just like protein requirements as a whole, step one, the big mover is going to be making sure you get enough high quality protein, so bioavailable protein. So for me personally, like I focus on the highest bioavailable protein sources, which tend to be like animal product protein sources, dairy sources and things like that. So getting enough of that, which is going to be somewhat individual to the person's size and their activity level, and that's going to be the big mover for muscle recovery and that

sort of thing. Then a step further, it's going to give you, it's going to potentially be a benefit, but it's going to be a much smaller step than that first one where you're getting just enough protein in. And that would be like what you described where like every few hours, you're taking, say, 20 to 30 grams of protein. you stimulate that protein muscle synthesis. So if you had a really brutal workout,

you're trying to recover from it, it's my understanding that one of the best ways to optimize that with protein would be to kind of have that 20 to 30 grams of protein every like three or four hours on schedule so that you're tapping that muscle protein synthesis on more frequent intervals versus hitting it once with that OMAD style.

I don't know anything about what it would be. be like in the like I don't know how much of a carryover fact I guess it is after that first day of doing it. I do know like I don't think it's a huge a huge advantage in terms of uh doing the frequent protein versus like an omat or a two a day type of thing. But it in most people it's going to be a small advantage. So I think once you use you the way I work with folks, I say first let's focus on making sure you have a dietary pattern that's sustainable to you where you're getting enough protein in. Once we're there, then we can take that next step forward and start trying to space it out at the optimal time that you're

going to need to, and then pair that up with the workout days where it's going to be most beneficial. So, like, mostly around, like, peak training phases where you're really putting your body through a lot more kind of stress and breakdown. But I'd have to look into that. It's interesting. I haven't known. I do remember, I think it was, I'm familiar with the mind pump guys. We've got a pretty big podcast out in San Jose, and they were talking, this is years ago, so I'm not sure if they're still, it changed their view on this. not in recent years, but I know they had talked about protein cycling in the past where, like, you know, some of the research at the time was pointing to, like, you can do like some protein

sparing days and it actually can leverage a benefit from that. But I'd have to dig into that stuff a little more. Yeah, I'll send you the study because it was really interesting because the number one complaint we get from people when they're fasting is muscle breakdown. So I started, and my feeling always was it's temporary. Of course it's breaking down when you're in a fasted state. Your body's in a state of gluconeogenesis. There will be some breakdown that happens, but it's what you do afterwards

that will determine how you come out of it. And then I started diving into protein. And I'm like, okay, well, let's look at protein. How about we have somebody go into these atophagy states where you're keeping protein under 20 grams. And then we put you into a state of mTOR. and I started off giving people just like 150 grams of protein in a day and they could do it omad style.

And then I saw an article that said you can stimulate mTOR more efficiently if you are doing protein every couple hours. Well, the minute we shifted people over that, we really saw, and it was primarily performance, we saw muscle growth because a lot of women that are 50, they don't want to lose a lot of muscle. And we really started to see people. regain their muscle again. So I'll send you the article and I'd be curious what your thoughts are on it. Yeah, it'd be interesting to see. I know it seems to be kind of a bit of a debate in terms of kind

of protein in general right now. But a lot of the, I've been fortunate to talk to guys like Stuart Phillips, Professor Jose Antonio, some of the, Professor Don Lehman, some of these guys who were kind of at the forefront of protein metabolism and that sort of stuff. And the way they described, I believe it was Don Lehman talks about your protein usage with even your skeleton and your bone and things like that. Whereas a lot of times I think people don't necessarily associate protein consumption with bone health and bone density and that sort of thing. And it very much is. So, you know, even when you get into the world that I am where it's like long business endurance running often times, people are like, they're fearful probably illogically about getting too bulky

because it's like you don't want to be carrying around more than you have to if you're running a long ways and that sort of thing. But in reality, if you're doing the type of training required for those type of events, you're not going to get bulky off of eating, you know, enough and even overconsuming protein. If anything, you're probably going to lean out because it's just going to be a higher thermogenic effect from protein sources. It's likely going to be more satiating for most people. So, you know, I think it's time to bust the myth for, especially for I think women that, you know, protein should be scary because it's going to make you look big and strong like a power or something like that. Yeah. No, I'll send you the article because the research day because it was

really like fascinating and then to go to our resetters and try this and we saw people building muscles really cool. What are your thoughts on injuries? Because when I think like 100 miles, I'm like, all I can think is I'm going to have some massive injuries. And this was my question to Drew when he told me what you guys did and he did ice baths every after he went through one loop each time. how can we use nutrition or how can we use biohacking? What can we do? It doesn't matter if we're running 100 miles or we want to do a Spartan race. How do we prevent injuries, especially as we're aging?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I think the big movers here are going to be, like, in the training itself, working from where you're at. And this is more difficult nowadays to it, like social media and stuff because you have access to seeing what everyone else is up to, which can be incredibly motivating. I know sometimes if I know I should be ready for a workout and I need to get out there and I'm just being lazy,

you know, I can like go on social media, go on the internet, I can see someone, maybe even my next competitor, like just really training hard and I'll say, okay, now I'm getting out there and going to go after it. So you can use that as an advantage because you have to be careful because you have to always be working from where you're at.

I like to call it kind of micro-stressing. Our goal is to do like a micro-stress, so it's going to be enough to get your body to make a physiological change to get stronger and more resilient. And then you can go on micro-stress again, which might be a little bit more than time before because you've adapted.

And if you just keep doing that consistently over time, you eventually get to where you want to be from a training volume and training intensity standpoint. I think a lot of injuries and stuff are just due to people maybe getting overzealous early on because they're excited. They've got this new training plan. They've got this goal I want to be here at this time frame,

and then they just get out the gate a little too fast. The other piece of the puzzle I think is definitely nutrition, and we kind of touched on that a little bit with protein, I think. I think everything from bone issues to, you know, like ill, like poor recovery times and things are oftentimes, you know, could be associated with the underconsum consumption of protein, long side training too hard and all that stuff. So having that figured out and then having like just a dietary pattern that works for you. So, you know, if that happens to be something in the low carb, high fat category, then I think

that's great. And it's definitely something that is a good tool for you. it works. And there hasn't been any research that I'm aware of from a recovery standpoint on a ketogenic diet versus a moderate high carbohydrate diet. Other than like there's a ton of anecdotes around myself included about when we moved from a high moderate high carbohydrate diet to a low carb, high fat diet, there seems to be like less soreness and less stiffness, less like like immobility, I guess is maybe the way to say it. The weird thing, you know,

if you run these 100-mileers, it's like you get like inflamed and sore and it's hard to even bend your knees, much less do anything with them. Whereas like from my experience and some of the other folks who have stuck with it, they tend to, you know, after a big effort like that,

feel like they have less of that, that soreness, less of that immobility and that sort of stuff. So if that turns out... I can see that. Yeah, and if that turns out to be the case, then you could make the argument, I suppose that, like that improvement in recovery.

is going to allow you to train more, which the training more could maybe offset some of the potential deficits from leaning heavier on fat than carbohydrates from a timing standpoint or a speed of metabolization standpoint. Again, that's probably going to be dependent on the intensity and what their goals are from health and fitness to peak performance and all that stuff and unique to the individual. But the other big one, I think, too, is sleep. So, you know, for me personally, when I was on a moderate to high carbohydrate diet, and then I introduced ultramarathon training on top of it, my sleep started to get really bad.

I'd wake up multiple times a night. And then when I left everything else the same in training but switched to a low-carb-high-fat approach, my sleep went back to where it had been historically before it went bad. So for me, that was a big game changer, personally just because I need to be able to sleep well and recover if I want to keep doing what I'm doing to make it sustainable. For sure.

Yeah. How often are you in ketosis? Do you try to stay in ketosis all the time? Are you pretty much on the ketogenic diet always? The way I kind of break it down is I'm basically always on a low carbohydrate diet where fat and protein are going to be substantially higher than carbohydrates. Kind of like I mentioned earlier, there's parts of the training where I might flex up to around 20%, a couple days a year maybe if it's just like a really big block of training.

I know I'm going to run a calorie deficit just to the volume of training. I might flex up to like 30% for a few days. But that's about the highest it gets. And that's like in peak training. So that's in the context of like, say, 20 hours of training per week. And even when I've done, I did a really cool end of one experiment back in 2018 when I was training for 100 miler. And I was testing my blood ketone levels about three times a day, two to three, periodically spread out. And I was doing it during my highest carbohydrate consumption within my program, which is going to be that kind of 20% rarely, but sometimes up to

30% and I was still in ketosis the majority of the time. I think I did. I tested for, I remember, I had to go back and look at my nose. I think it was like somewhere between two to three weeks. And within that two to three times, I dipped below 0.5 millimeters only like two or three times. But most of the time I was up between like one and two point O blood ketone levels. And some of those days I even had like 200 to 250 grams of carbohydrate. You know, context of everything with that too. some of those days I was also burning three times my resting metabolic rate. Yeah, I was going to say you're metabolically fit is what I hear in that statement. Well, and what it comes down to too, it's like for me, if I want to stay in ketosis and I'm going to

work at my desk all day and not work out at all, I probably do need to be down near 50 grams, somewhere in that neighborhood. But when you add in that 30 miles of running and some mobility and a little bit of strength work, all of a sudden now I basically accelerated that 24-hour period to be more like 48, 72 hours worth of energy demand in a sedentary state. So, you know, the way Dr. Jeff Ballick explained it to me was like someone like myself may need to look at 150 grams of carbohydrate the same way, someone who's, you know, a little more sedentary, maybe going to the gym a few times a week, but mostly working at a desk would look at like 30 to 50 grams of carbohydrate, just lifestyle variances and things

like that. So I do have faces in the year, though, where I do go pretty strict, like 50 grams or less, And that's typically like off-season time or early on in training where I'm focusing on just kind of gradually building lower intensity base and stuff. So there's just less energy demand and less intense stuff in the plan. Yeah. Do you ever look at Carb Manager? We use that to track macros. And one of the docs in my office is on the U.S. national rugby team. And so she's been tracking on the keto diet for macros. and there's a place in that actual app that you can put in your exercise,

and it will adjust your macros according to your energy output. Have you ever heard of that? No, I've heard of some similar stuff like that, though, but it is interesting, like, some of these, like, app tools that you can get now. I mean, even, like, continuous glucose monitors and stuff like that, where you can really figure out, like, you can answer some questions where I think that frustrated people where it's like, well, why can that person eat a banana and not seem to have it affect a negative about when I eat it.

I get like this like 10 minute burst of energy followed by like I need to take a nap type of a response. So some of these like that type of stuff I think is cool. And if you can build out over time and really recognize how certain exercises and workouts affect you and what your needs are within them, I think that's the sweet spot in individual programming. Yeah, absolutely. What are your thoughts on exercise variation?

Do you feel like like you're running these hundred months? Milers, do you think if you want to achieve something really great with your athletic performance, you need to also add in some sprinting, maybe some yoga? Is that powerful or not necessary? That's one of the biggest, I think, misconception sometimes within the sport of ultra marathon or in the sport of endurance in general is that it's always long and slow. You know, there's phases of my training where I'm doing basically all-out sprints for 30 to 60 seconds. And there's phases of my training where my main focus is, what I would call a short interval like VO2 max type of a training session where I'm going about as hard as I can for about three minutes and then I'm taking about a three minute easy

recovery jog and then I'm going to do that again and I might stack, you know, five, six reps like that in there. So it's very intense relative to what I'm going to be doing on race day. So the way I like to call is it's a period I schedule me and I'm going to be focusing on different things during different periods of the training plan. I'm always working towards the most specific stuff I'm going to use on race day. So if that happens to be a 100 mile race where the intensity is much lower than say like a 5 kilometer race, I'm just going to be doing some of those short, fast, harder sessions earlier in the training plan.

And then as I move closer to the race, I'm going to start reducing the intensity and raising the volume and just really working on the mechanics and the specificity that I'll use on the day of the race. So that's kind of how I look at it from like, you know, the full scale. But I think there's a huge value in that stuff from just durability. think of just like the intensity I race at is a type of mechanic that is just conducive to getting hurt. It's very one-dimensional. It's very overuse.

It's like, you know, if you just do that every day all day, you're going to develop imbalances. You're going to have things that come about that are going to negatively impact your longevity and health, in my opinion. And a lot of them come to like a lot of hip, ankle issues, sometimes knee issues, tightness in those areas. So like mobility and strength, speed work, I think help balance. that stuff out quite a bit. So I always keep those in some capacity in my training. Yeah, you know my, so this was 30 years ago, a little over 30 years ago, I played on a tennis scholarship at the University of Kansas. And this is when Serena Williams was just sort of coming out. And it was like my last year playing tennis and everybody was so shocked because she was doing

all these box jumps and weightlifting. And like she was the first person to bring cross training to our sport. Now, a totally different sport than 100. miles but it was so fascinating because then everything started to shift at that point everybody started doing different going in and out of different training mechanisms so and it makes perfect sense to me for injury prevention to not do the same thing over and over and over again right yeah and that carries over into the weight room too you reminded me that when you said box jumps because I think sometimes like another classic mistake endurance athletes will do is by the time they get around to getting into the gym they're going over and they're picking up the five to ten pound dumbbells and doing high repetition

stuff similar to what they're doing running. They're essentially doubling down on what they were already doing. So like the real move I think for endurance athletes is actually to focus on heavier weights, lower reps in most cases, but you know working within the context of where you're at because it is a supplementary activity from what you're trying to do. So making sure like, you know, heavy's relative. Heavy for me is going to be different than someone who is, you know, world-class deadlifters. Right, right. For me, I like operating within rep ranges of three to ten,

depending on where I'm at in the season, focusing on some of those core lifts, like squats, dead lifts, box jumps, kettlebell, swings, that sort of stuff as a way to kind of keep myself durable, keep like the posterior chain nice and strong. So I don't become too dominant and balanced on other areas of my body that are going to be kind of pushed that way from running as much as I do. Yeah, it makes sense.

Do you think women and men need to train differently? To a degree, I think there's a lot of crossover in terms of just like what systems of training are going to benefit you more versus others. And I think that would carry over pretty consistently. But the timing of it, there's probably going to be the biggest difference. The big one is, you know, women are working in, or figuring in, you know, their hormone cycles and things like that. It's going to be different than men.

So if you're familiar with Dr. Stacey Sims, she has actually done some pretty cool work on the timing of workouts for women versus men with endurance sport. She's brought to light a lot of the, I guess, the misconceptions we've maybe had as to, like, her big thing is women are not small men. So it's like there's a time to do intensity stuff and there's maybe a time to do other types of training when you're working in the context of your cycle. If you're a woman, then obviously as men, we don't have to worry about that. So it can be maybe a little, I guess maybe the way to put it we can get away with more from a timing standpoint. So that's the interesting stuff. And I think if anything, what she's done with that is just put a little bit of an incentive on the glaring, the glaring kind of weakness in the research probably for women's specific athletes.

I think a lot of these studies we lean on are oftentimes not only focused on just elite athletes versus average athletes, but male athletes too in like probably the relatively long young, like 18 to 30 year old demographics. So it's like, you know, what about our women, what about our women and men who are middle age and that sort of stuff? It's like, I think there's a lot of growth in those areas, but in the research field and where the nuances and the differences may be. Yeah, we need a lot more studies separating them out. I don't know if you saw there was a study that came out this week and it was kind of a sensational headline that said intermittent fasting is not a tool for weight loss. And when I dove into the study, it was like 116 obese individuals and there were men and women from the age. of like 18 to 50. And I'm like, okay, this is not fair to look at how fasting relates to an 18-year-old man compared to a 45-year-old menopausal woman. We need to start to look at the times of life and

the sex is based off of just hormonal changes alone. The 50-year-old man's not going to have necessarily as much testosterone per se as the 18-year-old man. So I do think these nuances are important when we're trying to biohack using nutrition and exercise and things like that, we need to be a little more careful at how we are interpreting the information. With some of that stuff too, because I've seen some stuff like bone density in that sort of some of the studies too. And I always feel like maybe the message just needs to be like, you know, like if you feel like you range differently from the study results, like there are relatively accessible things you can do to know.

You can go get a Dexas scan and see for yourself if you really need to know, am I losing bone density or gaining bone density? Am I creating muscle loss in areas I don't want to versus other areas and things like that too? So I know not everyone has that so they maybe have to lean on some of that stuff sometimes. But yeah, I'm big about like working at the individual level versus the group level with this sort of stuff because it just seems like it's, I don't envy the researchers and the, in the scientists in the community of nutrition because it is complex and there is only so much we know and have to base stuff off of. So it's like it's hard to get a message that's good. Well,

there is no message. That's probably going to be universal. So when do we separate the individual from the group, I guess is maybe the big question with a lot of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. It's fascinating. Now you have a really cool podcast. I went and started listening to some of them. I've been you've had some really neat guests on. One of my takeaways, when I was like looking at your podcast and what you're doing in the world, I was thinking, why has it become this 100-mile or has become like the new fad is the way I see it? Like people are craving to go to these longer distances. Have I just not been aware of this trend or do you think that it's more popular than ever? Yeah, no, it's really interesting. I think like the 100-mile distance itself, I think,

I think is maybe a little more popular as like this big kind of like holy grail of ultra marathon in like North America. Partly because like there's ultra marathoning has gone through like several like kind of growth and retracted periods over like the last, I mean essentially last 100 plus years. So the most recent kind of growth phase kind of it got popularized with like a couple of books and some documentaries and things that really highlighted. And the 100 mile event was like kind of like front and center for that. So as like more people entered the sport, I think they entered it with this mindset of like 100 miles is the end goal. That's the one I want to really, you know, find my way to work towards, get there and execute. And specifically, there's a race called the Western

States 100 out in California that has gotten really popular. And it's like if you try to get in as a first year entry, you have a lot of 2% chance of getting into the lottery. It's, it's crazy. So yeah, I think there's some of that. But there's been just like a draw, I think, kind of like to the trails. It's the ultramarathons in general too. And you go over to Europe and there's just a lot more of an emphasis on running a specific route versus a specific distance. So they've got like these really like kind of famous like routes and they sometimes they come out to be like an odd distance like 106 miles or something like that. And they're more interested in kind of that versus you're hitting an arbitrary number, I guess. But when you get on the road and that sort of stuff,

which is a little bit of a slower growing side of the sport, the trails have definitely grown faster. In this last kind of phase of ultra running, you get a little more kind of like distance specific, like 100 kilometers, 50 mile, 100 mile, and then you get the timed events, like how far can you run in 12 hours, how far can you run in 24 hours? And those go on forever. You get up to like six day, 10 day and all sorts of craziness. Yeah. Do you think the human body's meant to continually run that far? I mean, it can. Can and should is probably the way to look at it, right? I think I think humans that in general are pretty mechanically designed to cover long distances at a very slow rate, you know, just by evident by our sweat. Like, you know, we've got assets to us that other

mammals don't in terms of being able to cool and run in a variety of different climates, like, successfully. So I think it's like we're definitely like set up as if that were like something that we are going to, we were needing to be able to do maybe back before we had all the resources we do today. but there's always like there's always probably a margin of diminishing return with that too and i think with running where it gets kind of interesting is when you get into like these paces that are between like a really slow effort and a really really fast effort so like paces between like all out sprinting and anything from like a brisk walk to a really easy jog is where i think we start have playing some weird physiological games maybe with our body but then i think a lot of it's going to be like dosage and

context too. So, you know, folks who start slow and kind of build himself up gradually can probably make it a more healthy lifestyle and say somebody who decides to jump in wholesale right out the gate and then does a little too much too soon and finds themselves in compromising their health in the process. I ran a marathon once and that was the first thought I had when I got done. Now, of course, I didn't train properly and this is like 25 years ago. And I was like, I got done and I'm like, I'm pretty sure the human body wasn't supposed to go, you know, 26.2 miles, let alone 100. But I've been in awe watching this trend of, you know, people doing these 100-mileers. And it's so fascinating listening to Utah and through an eye kind of unwound what he had done for training.

And I thought, God, yeah, no, that makes sense. Like if you get your body in the right, if you set it up right, it can do this. And, you know, we see people in Africa that are running hundreds of miles bare for. foot. And, you know, there, so it, body can do it. It wasn't meant to do it. I haven't quite figured that, figured that piece out yet. Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting. I actually think, like, marathon training, if you look at like a really good marathon training plan, that I find to be almost more maybe detrimental or more foreign to like what we're used to than even like maybe, I mean, 100 miles is a long way to run. Like, I think humans traveled long distance like that

likely over multiple days and at a lot slower rate with no huge incentive to like destroy themselves in the process. But like marathon running kind of fits right into that gray area that I was talking about before where you're like you're not going slow enough to make it very sustainable but you're not going fast enough to get like the strength benefits from it I guess. So you find yourself kind of trying to maximize your potential in this pacing strategy that's not really necessarily useful from like I guess an evolutionary standpoint or from a, just like a human species standpoint. And that's where I get curious about just maybe

what are the long-term ramifications from that and everything else. Does the pacing change in 100 miles? I mean, you can. Like, usually, like, this is maybe something that's still relatively debated is that, like, is it better to what they call like a negative split where you run like slightly faster as you get closer to the finish line versus a positive split where you kind of go out faster and then running you're running slower near the end

or like an even split where you just try to run very consistent the whole way. Historically, I've had my better races probably running pretty even split. But there's other folks out there that they really love going out a little faster than what they know they can sustain because they're feeling a little more mentally and physically fresh at that point. And then they're essentially like bagging some time for the end. But you're playing with fire a little bit going that way. I think it's probably a lot safer back to negative or even split.

versus try to positive split a race like that. Interesting. Interesting. Have you heard of the term intermittent living? No, I don't think so. Yeah, so this is a new term that's sort of bubbling up. And it's basically that as humans, we're programmed for comfort right now. We can wake up in the morning.

We can get to the refrigerator. We could eat all day if we want it. We could go to our thermostat in our house and make sure our temperature is exactly what we need. We can get, we can manipulate light so that when it's dark out, we can always turn on light. So there's, in this sense of comfort and manipulation, our mitochondria are not forced to grow and to adapt. And so intermittent living is taking these things that move us into discomfort and create like a hormetic effect where it forces those mitochondria to start to have to work more efficiently. It's almost like our mitochondria are lazy.

and it's everything from fasting to the ketogenic diet to cold plunges to interviewed a guy who believes in intermittent hypoxia where you go into states of holding your breath. And then of course we have the cold showers. And then there's light that people believe in circadian rhythm where you should only turn on light once light is outside. So I'm thinking about the 100 miler and I'm like, well, it would be a force, a way of forcing the body. into a different type of adaptation. Yeah, I mean, I think that's, you probably just highlighted what's so incredible

about the human body in general. It's almost like, you try to outsmart it and it just outsmarts you sometimes. And I think it's like, it knows, like, I need to adapt to what's coming at me, but if you don't bring something to it, it's not going to adapt to that. It's actually going to probably deprogram.

It's like, I don't need that. Why would I keep it around? I think you see that a lot in strength training too. It's like you can take you a long time to build up that strength and then like you you step away from it a while whether it's an injury or just stopping for whatever reason and it seems to go away really quick because your body soon forgets and says says no we don't need it you're not trying it so so i think that that is like exposing your body to a variety of different stimulus i think is probably going to make you

a more well more well-rounded durable person in a whole yeah and if you're probably doing a hundred miles it might be time to try 200 miles then Yeah, that's actually the, there's a few 200-mile races or 200-plus mile races in the U.S. now. So it is, you know, you saturate that like, well, the funny thing with where I think ultramarathony maybe differs a little bit from like the standard endurance distances is, you know, people who become like really big fanatics of like a marathon, they're always targeting that same distance. So for them, it's like, how do I take that next couple of minutes off? What do I do differently to hit that new benchmark? And that's their draw to come back to improve their pace. Whereas with ultra-marathoning, I think there's probably just as much incentive in like, all right, I just did a 50K for the first time. Now I want to do an 80K or a 50 mile. Now I want to do 100 kilometers. Now I want to do 100-mile. And you get enough people in it that get to that 100-mile benchmark. And some of them are going to still be like have an appetite to see what's next. And then then you get the 200-mileers in the multi-day stuff. So it is kind of an interesting like draw to the sport, I suppose.

What happens to your mindset? Do you get to a point where your mind tells you, I can't go anymore? This is like, do you have mindset tricks you use? Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's definitely like probably one of the biggest hurdles to get over with these longer events is that mental side of things because early on in the race, any like seeds it out that creep and you can pretty easily kind of push to the side. But then as you get further into the race, though they tend to be more frequent.

Like you start thinking of you start drifting towards negative thoughts. a lot easier. And you might get past one, but the next one might come up a lot quicker, whereas in the beginning, you might push down that first negative thought at like mile 10 and you don't get another one until mile 25, whereas like the mile 70, you might have a seeded out creep in and then, you know, a mile later have another one creep in and stuff like that. So it just gets a little more fatiguing to keep like, you know, pushing that back and trying to focus on staying positive and staying in the present. So, you know, there's a lot of tricks that I've done too just in training where like when I do my long runs in training

oftentimes I'm just pretending like I'm at that point in the race so if it's like a 30 mile long run I pretend I'm at 70 miles and 100 mile and I'm just visualizing like how I would go through that and you do that like six seven eight times in the kind of final phase of your training by the time you get to that point in the race itself you feel like you've done it enough that it's not so foreign to you that you're trying to pull from pull from experiences from the last 100 Milo, which may have been like half a year to a year or longer before. So there is a lot of that stuff. And the more of them you do, the more tricks you kind of pick up that work for you

in ways you can kind of recognize like when things are heading the wrong way mentally and course correct a little better. That's, I think, kind of the fun part about being in the sport as long as I have now where you kind of, you've gotten up those experiences that you can kind of lean on. And so now if I have a good race now, I think about like, oh yeah, I actually use what what I learned in that race that went terrible for me in this race. I don't know if I would have had a bit of a race had that not happened. So you start to appreciate even some of the less desired days that you've had earlier in your career.

Yeah. And what about music? Do you listen to music at all? Yeah, I'll do like a little bit. Sometimes it depends. Like some races are like sanctioned and they don't allow it. So then you're just left with your own thoughts. Others are a little more like open with that sort of stuff.

So I'll usually use it interchangeably. so I don't what I find is if I try listening to music like an entire long race like that by the time I get to like the hard part of the race I'm just no longer inspired by any of the music so I try to like I bring it in as needed so if I'm feeling really good I try to turn it off and if I feel like I need a distraction then I'll flip it on for a little bit. What do you listen to? Probably a variety of different stuff for the most part but like I'll do quite a bit of just like kind of classic rock for the most part. something with a little bit of energy behind it. Right. Yeah, something with a good beat. That's awesome. Awesome. Well, let's finish up with this.

I have five specific questions for you just off of your own personal life. The first one is what's your favorite recovery strategy? So like you've done a big, yeah, you've done a big race next day. What's your favorite strategy to recover? Yeah. So one thing I try to do if I can help it is give myself enough flexibility in those next few days to sleep whenever I can. So sometimes the hard part is you run these 100 mile races

and your hormones are so whacked out, adrenaline, all this other stuff. So if you might not even sleep well that next night, you might be pretty restless. So then if I feel like tired and feel like I can take a nap in the middle of the day, that's like a great way to speed up that recovery if you can afford the time to be able to do that.

So if I can help it, I try to give myself a little flexibility to be able to as soon as I feel like taking a nap, just lay down and do that. So I'll stay away from maybe caffeine during some of those days if I, for the most part, just so I don't, you know, try to push through that opportunity. This is the time of my recovery where I'll drop the carbs down to next to nothing. And sometimes I'll go zero carb during these those last few days after a big race. Other things I'm trying to think about is just kind of catching up on hydration,

electrolytes, that sort of stuff. If I'm able to, I'll start doing some very light movements like easy walking, some stretch, some stretching, some mobility type stuff. Nothing that would induce any type of training stimulus, but stuff that's just going to kind of get blood flowed to the legs, that sort of stuff. I'll do like absum salt baths and things like that. Yeah, they're great.

Loosome things up a little bit, and chances are like the magnesium isn't going to be welcomed after a long race like that. So those are some of the big ones, I think. What about ice baths? You had Drew doing ice baths. Yeah, so the ice baths for Drew were more of an intra-race hack Because for him, what happened was he had to actually like kind of switch his event last minute with all the COVID stuff that happened.

He was originally to do it in this like really scenic area along the coast. You know, for that, the weather would have been perfect. He would have probably had to worry about overheating things like that. But when that kind of got derailed with COVID, he had to pick us like a, I think it was a five mile loop near where he was living, which offered a lot hotter temperatures. So he would do a loop and he would jump in that ice bath just to bring his core temperature down. because what we've kind of learned is from cooling, you can cool yourself a lot better from topical cooling than you can from just like drinking cold beverages

and stuff like that. So if you can, most people aren't going to have access to a like an ice tub like Drew did. So they're going to like dump ice water in their head. They might put like ice bandanas around their neck and things like that. But Drew had that set up so that he could just jump in after each lap, bring his core tent back down and head back out and avoid the overheating as much as possible. But for ice pads in general,

I think this is an interesting topic for athletes because what you're doing a lot of times with ice baths is you're delaying the inflammation. You're delaying that swelling that's going to move in after a big workout. So I think there's a time in place for ice baths in the context of workouts. So one would be like you just did a big workout, but you have another one soon after.

And you want to kind of like push back that stiffness and that inflammation that you might get from that first workout so you can go and execute that next one. But when you get to that, a point in your training where the primary focus becomes recovery, that's where you may want to step away from the ice baths for a little bit so that you can actually let that inflammation, because it's not chronic inflammation. It's actually just, it's needed. Prepative. Yeah, exactly. So you don't necessarily want to like shut that down with the ice baths

too frequently when you're focusing primarily on recovery. So I'll stay away from them for the most part right after a race. But if, for example, I'm doing like a back-to-back long run, it's a pretty popular workout with ultra marathon runners where typically it's done on the weekend you'll do like you know for me a big one i did last year is 30 miles on saturday and 30 miles again on sunday so in that context after that 30 miler on saturday i might take the ice bath so that i'm pushing off that that stiffness a little bit for the until i do that 30 mile around sunday then i'm going to have a couple days where i'd let them catch up so then i maybe step away from it a while and focus maybe more like the absin salt bath stretching mobility and that sort of stuff

Awesome. Okay, what's your favorite pre-race meal? Pre-race meal, I'll typically do like the night before. I'll bring a little bit of carbohydrate back the night before since I'm not going to have any like the morning of for the most part. So I'll still do like traditional stuff that I do a lot, like a steak, but then I might have like a potato with it or something like that. I try not to get too crazy with fiber just on the night before a race just because it's especially undigestable fiber. There's this potential extra bathroom break that I don't really want in the middle of a performance and that sort of stuff. So I stay away from some of the non-starchy vegetables that would maybe have in my day-to-day stuff like some broccoli, spinach or something like that. But yeah, a lot of pretty basic at that point is meat and potatoes, I guess.

Yeah, yeah, I love it. I love it. Okay, what's your favorite gadget? I just got, I've been using an aura ring and I just got a whoop band. And I know that the more you trick out your gadget. Sometimes it really helps increase your motivation. What's your favorite gadget for working out? Yeah, I've been kind of similar to you.

I've got a watch right now. It's called a Coros Apex that does a lot of the activity tracking as well as the GPS function. So like if I do a run, it'll tell me like where my heart rate was at all the points, where my pacing was, elevation gain and loss. I can really tease out like where my effort was at given the context of the environment and all that stuff. And then it tracks like the sleep and all that stuff too. So you can definitely geek out, see a lot of stuff that are interesting. It's like, oh, well, I did that and then my sleep quality went down or I did this and my sleep

quality went up. And if you can see trends within that for yourself, you can really learn a lot about your own programming and things like that. But I'm actually going to be doing, hopefully starting on Monday, I'm going to do a little end of one experiment with a continuous glucose monitor. So if you ask me in a month, I might have a new gadget that I'm interested in. Oh, those are fun. I wore one once.

They're really, really fun. So what, okay, if you could, I know you do a lot of like nutritional coaching for athletes. If you could take any professional athlete right now and coach them nutritionally or just coach them in general to better performance, who would you, who would you want to work with? It would definitely, I would definitely be somebody who, uh, has struggled with a kind of a conventional approach because that's where I find it interesting. I think like folks who kind of take like the standard approach and have success with it, great for them.

But like I'm not as interested from the curiosity standpoint. I'm kind of curious in the person who's like, well, they did everything right according to the research and things like that. But it's not working for them for whatever reason and try to tease that out. And that's where I have a lot of phone with my own coaching clients too, is figuring out their own fueling plan and stuff like that, especially on race day where I think there's some ranges there. But gosh, if I had to pick, I don't know if anyone really sticks. out that's kind of fixed that parameter at the moment. I'm sure there's plenty of them, but... The one that the one I want to get the message of the ketogenic lifestyle too is

is Serena Williams because she keeps, she keeps conking at like during that second. She comes out strong, wins the first set, conks in the second set, and then the third is like a crapshoot on the bigger matches. And I keep thinking, I wonder if she's doing the ketogenic diet. Like it almost looks like her fuel source is depleted. Now, that's a different, it's not an endurance race, it's a start stop, but still nutrition is powerful. You know, that's actually a good point. I think, like, the interesting sports are like tennis or like mixed martial arts and some of these like types of wrestling, some of these ones where it's like you might be, you're not, you're, you're, you're kind of in between like very explosive and like long and slow. Like someone like Serena, she has to be incredibly explosive for every one of those, every one of the rat or the bat bally.

saying that right for tennis. Bollies, yep, yep, you got it. I'm not as incompetent with tennis as I thought, I guess. So some of the follies, but then she's also got to last, like, what, some of these matches are multiple hours long. Oh, yeah. So it's like, it's that perfect blend. I think that's where it gets really interesting with that because she also has to probably

focus on Blake a gin defense, but she has to do it in a slightly different context than me because I'm going to be trying to stay pretty even pace, where she's going to be Fast stop, fast stop. So, like, it would be interesting to see, first of all, I think what she's currently doing and then where there would maybe be some areas to possibly address. Yeah. Yeah, no, I've thought about it a lot every time I watch her. Okay, last question.

So if you had, like, one message for the world that you wish everybody could understand, maybe it's about ultramarathoning, maybe it's just about life in general. What would that message be? Yeah, it's a good question. I think, like, because what I a lot of times see is, is folks do a great job of picking, like, okay, this is where I want to be. This is my kind of end goal, which I think is great. But once you kind of have that, I think what people oftentimes miss is this opportunity to pick small wins along that path. So like if I'm training for a hundred

miler in four months, that's a great long-term goal. But if I want to really have that be a great experience for me, I need to be picking things that I can count as wins or check marks on the daily basis on the weekly basis on a monthly basis. So even if I get to that race and not have a great day, I can look back on the experience. Like, wow, I learned a lot because I learned that when I do this, this happens. You know, if I'm able to like motivate myself to, you know, do this and check that off, it accelerates my motivation for the next thing in line. And I think, yeah, when people don't put those mini goals in there, then sometimes they,

they start their interest starts to wane as they get into like the thick of the schedule as that end goal isn't quite close enough to motivate them anymore. Yeah, I love that. I love that. I think that's good for everybody on every level. So we're always looking at the end results. So this was awesome, Zach. I really appreciate you letting me pick your brain. We just nutrition and working out keeps coming up in our community. And Drew was like you were the guy that we needed to pick the mind of. So thank you so much for letting us do this. How do people find you? Yeah, yeah. First, thanks for having me on. It's been a blast chatting. It's always fun to hear. hear about what you're doing, people you're working with and what's working for them and that sort of stuff. Yeah, so the best place to kind of find everything I'm up to is on my website at Zachbitter.com. Then you can see like all my social media links, consultations, contact me for coaching and things like that. But from a social media standpoint, I'm most active on

Instagram, which is just at Zach Bitter. Awesome. And your podcast looks amazing. Like I said, I started going through it and I already checked a couple that I can't wait to dive in and listen to deeper. So, oh, cool. This was great. Yeah, and your audience may be interested. I'm going to be recording a podcast with Dr. Dominic Agostino in a couple of weeks. So it's Human Performance Outliers podcast if folks are interested in checking out any of those episodes. Awesome.

I would love to hear that interview and we'll share it to everybody when it comes out. So that's awesome. That's good to know. Cool. Thank you so much. Great. Uh-huh, Zach. Have a beautiful day.

Take care. Okay. So I feel like I got my protein question answered. And I don't know if you caught it. I mean, what's so fun about these guys is that they're taking something incredibly athletic and making it when you look at how they hack their ability to perform for 100 miles or like what Drew was doing. And they're taking like science and mixing it with like this.

desire to go long distances. Yes. There's something really cool about that. Like he's total nerd on one level and this extreme athlete on another level. Yeah. Do you pick up on that? Yeah. I also like too how much he's like it's such an individual thing too, right?

Like looking at, you know, what your age is or what your hormones are or, you know, how well you're sleeping. Like there's so many little tiny differences. And he just seems to be very into like analyzing. all those differences in order to hack a better performance. Yeah. Which is a lot of work. A lot of work.

But it's also the common thread through many of our guests, which is that there's no one right way. You got to look at what you're trying to do. Like I thought that was interesting what he said about the marathon. Well, are you trying to go fast through the marathon? Or are you just trying to do the marathon? Right. And those two people need different nutrition strategies.

Right. So that, and that shows up. I mean, this is what we preach is like. there's eight different fasts that we talk about. How do you know which one to do? Well, it depends on what you're trying to do with your health. And we have gotten so customized to the one-size-fits-all. And I love how all these experts are unraveling that for us.

Agreed. Yeah. And I like, too, how we talked about the start to finish of whatever your goal is. So if your goal is to do a marathon, like people get so hyped up on doing the marathon, then they like kill themselves because they haven't properly, like, slowly let themselves in. And so all those little details of slowly building yourself up until you get to whatever you're trying to achieve. Like that all is part of the process and takes commitment and it's very individualized. Yeah.

I thought that was, I go back to how I trained for my marathon 25, 30 years ago. It was horrible. What'd you do? I was working my ass off. So I was working 60 hours a week and I would go with a friend and train in the morning before work. I didn't do any nutrition. we did three runs a week, and then on the weekend, we had a long run, and we just would up the long run over time.

We weren't weightlifting. We didn't know about nutrition. That's what we did. And as work got more stressful, that we had this training program, so we kept having to get the longer runs, whether we were ready for it or not. So I think the longest run I had done going into it was like 17 miles, and it was painful and horrible. And then two weeks later, I did 26. So I was nowhere near ready for 26, but I made myself do it anyways, which could be why I didn't enjoy it.

Well, and if you think about it, if you're working that much and doing those runs, your poor adrenals were probably dying. And you probably weren't sleeping very well. Your hormones were probably out of whack. Yeah. No, like I said, it's like, I almost, hearing him talk, I was almost like,

I'm just slightly, slightly, slightly intrigued to try it again, but I don't know. This is like, you know, 25, 30 years later, I may be a little different body. I was going to ask you, the competitor in you, are you wanting to try it? Nothing makes me want to do 100 miles. Nothing. There is no part of, your husband would go do 100 miles. Does he want to do 100 miles? Absolutely. Yeah. He's probably dying. Oh, yeah. He was so excited when, because, you know, he's been on Joe Rogan before. And so he was like, oh, my. gosh, I'm like, well, what would you want me to ask him? Yeah, right.

We should have asked him ahead of the time. He's like, I'm so dumbfounded. I don't even, I can't even think of a question. Oh my gosh. That's so funny. But the protein question is one that I just have been analyzing. So I love that he was like, yeah, I could see where that could work. And I was like, yeah, because it makes sense to me that we would want to go into depletion

and then go into growth. That's how the human body was made. So why not use that to our advantage? And I just, in all my research, stumbled upon this incredible study. It was a human study showing every three hours, 20 grams of protein, would stimulate muscle growth, mTOR. I thought, okay, what if we put that with fasting now? And then we just saw such great results.

So I can't wait to send him the article. Yeah. I'm kind of curious to see what he thinks of it. What do you think, too? I thought his input on ice baths and like what your purpose is with the ice baths. I thought that was interesting. Like that took ice baths to a whole new thinking level of like how you stacked your workouts and what you're trying to do and achieve.

I thought that was interesting. And the concept, I've heard this before, that the concept that acute inflammation, short periods of inflammation is actually helpful. And you don't want to kill that. So you want because it's reparative. But it's the chronic inflammation that's the problem and is killing us. Right. Well, and so many people have chronic information. Right.

And you don't even know it actually. Right. Yeah. So that was really interesting as well. And I think, I hope you guys heard this. He, I just get so much pushback from athletes that, especially the Spartan racers. And people who want to, then the long distance runners are like, no, no, I have to carbload. The carblood, yeah.

Which is why I want to ask him, like, do you, I don't, I didn't, I didn't. You hear him say he carblobs ever. Yeah. He said occasionally like a little bit. And he said like 45 minutes into his run, he might have like five, five grams or something. But he leans on fat. But he leans on fat, yeah. Yeah.

So he does like a fat bomb. And he'll do. He said like low carb the night before potato and steak, but not like a bowl of spaghetti. Right. And then wake up and have a muffin or a smoothie, have a smoothie or a bowl of a fruit before you go. Right. So yeah, absolutely. Which is what we're all taught to do throughout. I remember like having big team dinners for sports, like spaghetti and garlic bread and like, right? For volleyball. And this is for basketball. I don't think we did it much for volleyball.

But we probably did actually now that I think about it. But yeah, I'm like, oh my gosh, so backwards. I could have been such a better player. Right. I know. Well, that's, I mean, I always say like my undergraduate degree was in exercise physiology. And we learned to none of this. Like this wasn't, the ketogenic diet wasn't even on anybody's radar. Everybody was in awe of Serena Williams and were like, oh my gosh, what is she doing box jumps for on a, she's a tennis player. Like, and I don't know if you know, I meant to ask him this.

Do you know that the guy, I wish I could remember his name, he just won the U.S. Open golf. And he, I only know him because my son follows him. And so we were watching. He was ranked number 15 in the golf world. and I guess last year at the U.S. Open, he did horribly. And so he decided, I'm never going to suck that way again. And so over the last year, he went to the gym and he started building muscle.

And the guy, they have like a picture of him in one year's time. He has so much muscle. He is so huge. And he just won the U.S. Open. And he says it's because he cross-drained and he worked out. And as my son pointed out, he's like, golfing will never be the same now. Like, everybody's going to now follow that same kind of regime. And it's not going to be a sport where you don't cross train to that degree.

Golfing's so interesting because it's like I can understand the tennis, the volleyball, the basketball, football, like all the sports. But golf is so interesting to me because you just have to swing. Yeah. But I mean, I don't. But I think it's the power. behind the swing. And I'm sure golfers, if you're listening, you're probably dying. You're probably like, no, no. I have no idea what I'm talking about. According to my son, and I don't know all the terminology, but the way he could drive the ball, he can drive it longer, further than anybody.

So, yeah, because of the new muscle mass. But it's the same thing for it. And this is what I really wanted to bring to everybody is like, just because he's talking about 100 miles doesn't mean we can't take those same principles and maximize our nutrition and use them with the fasting and ketogenic diet and diet variation. It's so cool. I just love how all this knowledge is teaching us how to hack into our own bodies. And it doesn't like a cold plunge doesn't cost you any money. Fasting and then protein cycling isn't going to necessarily cost you more money. You're not talking like $1,000 gadgets. You're talking about here's the way the body was designed. do these things and you're going to notice your performance will be better.

Right. Simple switches. Simple switches. Yeah. It's so cool. So anyways, okay, this Dr. Stacey Sims, we got to get her on. Yeah, I already wrote her name down. Okay. Yeah.

I want to know what she has to say about women and hormones because I almost did ask him. I saw on Instagram that he, his wife runs with him. I couldn't tell, right? I couldn't tell how old he was. How old do you think he is? It's in his late 40s. Yeah. That's what I'm wondering.

Because I want to know how his wife does. The one thing that I've noticed going through menopause is when my estrogen is down, I can feel how dry my skin is and my joints feel dry. And they feel like they're more prone to injury because estrogen is a lubricant. And I'm like, I don't know if I would want to time 100 miles around my estrogen production for sure. Can you imagine if that's what they had to do with women racist? I know. It would be a little bit... Okay, the majority of the people competing, when is the one?

Can you map your cycle out for us and we'll plan the race? You got to show us the Clue app before we let do it. So, but I want to hear what this woman has to say because it's just like fasting. We have to tie it around our hormones. Well, what about our workouts? Right. Yeah, no. You know, in yoga, they do that actually come to think of it. In yoga, they say, you know, you're supposed to do more of a yin-style yoga when you're on your cycle.

Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, and you're not supposed to go upside down. You're not supposed to do any inversions when you're on your cycle because you're reversing blood flow. Oh, fascinating. I did not know any of that. Yep. Although it doesn't always, you're not always like wanting to go upside down when you're on your cycle. Like, let's think about how you're feeling.

Right. But that is interesting that there's some methods to it. But if you think about it, like there's so many things that we're learning now around fasting and keto and eating according to our cycle. So there should be exercise that gets varied along our cycle. So that's why I'm really curious to pick this woman's brain. Okay. But that was interesting. Okay, guys, let us know if you try.

This is my task that I have for you. If you try the protein cycling technique where you fast during the week, you can do some autophagy fasting like Monday through Friday, I'm sorry, Monday through Thursday, protein cycle on Friday, do a tough workout on Saturday, protein cycle on Sunday, go back to autophagy Monday through Thursday. That has been the formula we're seeing work for building muscle. I did a few videos on YouTube on it, so all you got to do is type in protein cycling and you'll see it on my channel.

So hope it helps. You put the whole foods in, you take all empty foods out, you put organic food in, and you shake bad toxins out. You know, your microbiome shouts. That's what it's all about. You put fast cycling in fast types out. You download Car Manager where your food is all grafted out. That's what it's all about.

That's what resetting is all...