The Rich Roll Podcast - Train Like A Pro: Exercise Scientist Andy Galpin On Fitness Fundamentals, The 9 Adaptations, & Why Your Training Isn't Working

Episode Date: October 23, 2025

Andy Galpin is a PhD in exercise bioenergetics, professor at Parker University, and elite performance coach to professional and Olympic athletes. This conversation explores his framework of nine fitness adaptations and why many people plateau in what could be called the "gray zone"—working hard enough to feel exhausted but not specifically enough to trigger adaptation. We discuss how movement quality often matters more than intensity, the difference between functional overreaching and overtraining, and what's actually limiting your progress. Also, Andy coaches me through rebuilding movement patterns after spinal fusion surgery. Andy translates complex exercise science into practical training wisdom. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style👉🏼https://www.on.com/richroll                                                    WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www.ROKA.com/RICHROLL Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com Momentous: High-caliber human performance products for sleep, focus, longevity, and more. For listeners of the show, Momentous is offering up to 35% off your first order👉🏼https://www.livemomentous.com/richroll Calm: Get 40% off a Calm Premium subscription👉🏼https://www.calm.com/richroll     Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRoll25          Pique: Get up to 20% OFF plus a FREE rechargeable frother and glass beaker with your first subscription👉🏼https://www.piquelife.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors   Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange

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One coach, and give them that time. Sticking to a program that has been intelligently designed for you based on really just a few factors. It's not that much. A few things. monitoring progressing how are we feeling checking in on subjective just how do you feel today how's stuff looking how's the volume how's the intensity progressing like just really basic stuff the vast majority people are not doing that if you have done that or have been doing that maybe now we can go to other steps but when we hear these things come up so many times we're like

you have just not stuck to a program for 10 weeks you haven't done it you just have to be consistent with an intelligently designed program and so you You can save all your money on all the trackers and the wearables and everything else and hire one person and see how it works out. Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast. My name is Rich Roll. This is the podcast that I have been hosting for almost 13 years, one month shy. I think. if memory serves me, because the first episode was published at the end of 2012. Maybe you already knew this, but I'm also a guy who writes books, most notably finding ultra, which is sort of this addiction recovery slash middle age life transformation slash athletic memoir, as also maybe you know, and I'm an ultra endurance athlete.

This is a passion that has been placed on hiatus recently due to undergoing spinal fusion surgery back in early May, which, as you might imagine, has done a little bit of damage to my fitness due to this sort of forced state of being sedentary. But I'm nearing the six-month anniversary of my surgery, which is significant because fingers crossed, assuming that my scans, which I'm getting next week, indicate that everything is healing on schedule, means that I will be getting the green light to start doing a few more things fitness-related. which I really can't wait for because right now I would say I'm the least fit that I've been in like 20 years, all of which is fine. It's part of the bargain for getting better, this period

of time that in many ways has benefited me, not just in terms of repairing my back, but as this exploration of stillness and presence. But let's just say I'm kind of ready to get back into doing things, something, anything that involves breaking a sweat. And by doing things, I mean doing them right, rebooting my entire relationship with my physical body in order to rebuild it properly from the ground up, really, to create the best foundation that I possibly can for strength, endurance, resilience, so that I can return to and enjoy movement and exercise for this next chapter of my life and really thereafter as long as I possibly can. All of which is a very meandering preamble for why I'm so excited for today's episode, because when it comes to everything

fitness, there is no source I trust more than Dr. Andy Galpin, who amidst all the confusing online debates about the complexities of fitness and nutrition, how to train, he is really the welcome voice of experienced, evidence-based expertise that we need. A PhD in human bioenergetics, Dr. Galpin is a professor of kinesiology at Parker University, where he's also the executive director of the Human Performance Center, where he studies and works with professional Olympic and world champion athletes across a wide diversity of disciplines. Today, Dr. Galpin provides a comprehensive overview of fitness and its importance and dispels common misconceptions. including some of which I have long held

to help us better understand fitness beyond simple catchphrases like V-O-2 Max. From strength and endurance training strategies to setting and achieving goals, today we cover stress and recovery, consistency and intensity, fat adaptation, mental fortitude,

what to do when you've hit a fitness plateau, the role that exercise plays in longevity and health, and many other topics. I think you're going to find what Andy shares extremely instructive. So make sure to take notes. But obviously there's only so much detail that we could cover in a single conversation. And my goal really was just to cover enough to provide you with some essential basics and takeaways. But also to leave you hungry for more and more you will find much more in fact in Andy's incredibly educational podcast series called Perform, which I urge you to check out.

after you complete listening to this one. And now let's get into it. This is me and Dr. Andy Galpin. Enjoy. Andy, it's great to have you here, man. I'm so excited to talk to you. This is a question I think we all think we know the answer to. What is fitness?

Wow. I've done hundreds, if not several thousand podcasts to this point. And I don't know if I've ever been asked that. I mean, how are we supposed to talk about this if we don't have a functioning definition? And I know you have one. So let's like state our terms at the outset here. Okay, I'll try to be as non-Andi Galpin as I can be here. I'm here for you to be the full Andy Galpin.

Okay. So very technically scientifically, we generally exchange the word fitness for VO2X. So if you see in a research paper the word fitness was tested or fitness improved, they're almost specifically referring to VL2 Max. shortening, cardiorespiratory or cardiovascular fitness, you can almost exchange those two. If you were to write, if I was to insert that word, fitness improved or whatnot in one of my papers, and I defined fitness as strength, I would be smashed on that. I'd be pushed back immediately. Now, that said, I'm not even arguing that that's correct, or that's the best,

but that is the generally accepted way that you can interchange. I wouldn't use it that way in my practice. I wouldn't coach people like that. I don't communicate like that because a more interesting framework is to actually step back and think where most people have heard the word fitness originally goes back a very long time, which is something more closely aligned with survival of the fittest. That did not refer to VO2 max. That did not say the person or species or organism that has the highest VOTU max is going to survive the longest. It had nothing to do with that. It was simply, which is the most fit for the current environment? This could be nothing to do with physical characteristics,

which one is most fit to survive based on the demands placed upon it in the area environment that there are. And so just constraining that even a little bit more and keeping it biological, this could mean anything from your ability to fight off cancer, your mental health to your bone quality. This could be anything that says how well are you going to survive in the current state and demands that you're being placed upon. So when I think of it, I generally am going to hedge towards actually number two, unless I'm in a scientific discussion, then I'll always use that term fitness appropriately because that's the only way to effectively communicate. From canvassing your work, my sense of this definition is if we locate it in the kind of exercise world in which we commonly associate this word, it's a reflection of your resilience to adapt. to progressive stress

or maybe just even take the word progressive out and put stress. We'd probably choose a different term for that. Generally, fitness is more hedge towards expression than adaptability or resilience. And so what I mean by that is, we would say something like your fitness is your ability to express a power output,

a performance output, like to do something where your ability to handle an insult would be more probably explained as resilience or adaptability or plasticity or something like that. Such as to say, for example, two days ago, I summited Mount St. Helens, which is not incredibly impressive.

I think it's 8,500 feet or something like that. But we went, I don't know, 4,000 feet elevation, gain over five miles, something like that. There was five of us, two of us woke up the next day, fine, and three of us woke up so insanely sore, we can't move. Our VO2 max is not correlated at all. with the person who's sore versus the person who's not sore. And so right there, there's a distinction of saying,

okay, fitness is one thing, V-O-2 max, ability to express power or strength. The ability, though, to handle novel insults, to handle change, to respond, to adapt quickly, is a different way. If you wanted to define fitness as that cave, you're kind of talking about two separate important distinctions. Yeah, I understand that.

I understand that. I guess narrowing it a little bit, though, and to use your word expression, it is the expression of your, if we use it just as like in the, let's just use sports or whatever, it's an expression of your mind and your body's adaptation to exercise and do stress over time.

It's an expression of capacity. Like what's your capacity to engage in this particular type of output? Which has a whole host of genetic influences and then certainly lifestyle and exercise and backgrounds. It's a combination of all those. In fact, we don't need to keep lingering on. if you go on but VO2 max very specifically you look across the totality of the research you're going to find something like a 50% genetic and 50% lifestyle explanatory so just baked into that

it is a combination of what you're saying it is the expression of what you've done for training the expression of your ability it's expression of genetic limb lengths and everything else that go into that so it is a combination of both those but it is not explained entirely by one or the other To me, when I look at the landscape of fitness and people pursuing fitness goals, there seems to be two things that are occurring. One is people don't, they lack the education and information to approach their goal appropriately. Like they're just barreling along based upon some kind of half-baked plan or their friend told them to do this or that. They're just bouncing around, right? So it's a very kind of unfocused approach.

And then at the same time, we're in this world right now where we're, inundated with data points because of wearables and, you know, all kinds of, you know, people on social media telling you what you shouldn't, shouldn't eat and do, et cetera, that can be disorienting as much as it is informative, right? And so we get caught up in these 0.01% factors, these minutia, and we blow them up into things that are much more meaningful than they actually are. While we're kind of overlooking the basic things, like, hey, if you want to do this, like, you're actually not, your workouts aren't really, you know, sort of set up to progress you towards that goal. Okay, so my number one advice for this, ditch all of that stuff and spend

the money to hire one coach. If it's a, let's just keep using example of a race goal or a endurance school, just hire one coach who's done that. And really just do their whole program for eight weeks or 12 or whatever the thing is. You nailed it when you opened that up. It's like, well, I did it for three weeks, kind of. Then I added my own stuff on here. And then I'll say, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no, no. None of that.

One coach and give her that 10 weeks to prove that she can do it or give them that time. It's probably going to work. Someone who's done it a lot, someone who has been there and coached tens, thousands, hundreds of people, sticking to a program that has been intelligently designed for you based on really just a few factors. It's not that much. a few things monitoring progressing how are we feeling checking in on subjective just how do you feel today how's stuff looking how's the volume how's the intensity progressing like just really basic stuff the vast majority people are not doing that if you have done that or have been doing that

maybe now we can go to other steps but you're you couldn't be more right there when we hear these things come up so many times we're like you have just not stuck to a program for 10 weeks you you haven't done it. You had all these work trips pop up or you got sick. It's nothing else. Like you just have to be consistent with an intelligently designed program. And so you can save all your money on all the trackers and the wearables and everything else and hire one person and see how it works out.

I've never been able to achieve a real kind of like athletic goal for myself without a coach. I pay somebody. Yeah. Tim DeFrancesco has been programming me for years, my strength conditioning. I can certainly do it all by myself and I pay him and I'll never stop paying him to program everything for me. How important do you think it is

to have a goal just to focus what it is that you're going to be doing with the limited time that the average person has? Because I think most people and probably most people watching this are listening to this

they don't have a goal. They just like they want to lose a little bit of weight. They want to get a little swall. They want to feel fit and good in their body. They want the mental health benefits. of you know what it feels like when you're active but that translates into like I go to the gym three times a week and I kind of do what I want and yeah I work the different muscle groups and I know you know I sort of know like this many sets and this many reps and you know I alternate that with

cardio on the treadmill and I try to eat well and I call it a day. You're probably going to get that result you're probably going to get like you did a little bit of work and you kind of ate pretty well and you're probably going to get kind of results. That's how that's going to work. I'm hesitant to say yes on goals because when people hear that, they go, iris roll. I'm not going to get a piece of paper out and write a goal down. Like, I'm not going to do that.

I know what I want. I know I want my back pain to go away and I want to lose these few pounds. Okay. So it's not the fact that you need to be like, great, I'm going to compete on this day, or I'm going to try to get this new record on bench or this new body weight here. The research has been clear for decades.

that is going to be more effective. In fact, if you look at the research on periodization strategies, so this is a fancy way of saying, like how do you set your volume up to progress over weeks, like really in the weeds strength additioning nerds speak,

it's really clear. Almost every form of periodization that's ever been tested works about equally as well. And they all exceed no form of periodization. Having a plan always beats not having a plan, even if the plan itself isn't necessarily demonstrably better than another plan.

And so you can phrase that and think about that in the form of an actual goal. Write a number down on a piece of paper that you want to get to in terms of the outcome. Or you can think of this as simply as, I'm going to have a constructed plan. To me, I'm more interested in that part. Like have a plan. If that needs to be attached to a, I'm doing this plan, so that I'll be held accountable to that outcome, tremendous. I don't set specific goals like that personally, but I have a new plan every six to eight weeks. And at the end of those, I have a long conversation with my coach. We go over everything,

and then we adjust. And I do that based on seasons or things I have coming up, like hiking the mountain, or it's winter. And I want to do these things more. I like these activities more in the winter. Where I live, it's very rainy. So I'm going to do way more indoor activity stuff In the summer, I want to be out with the kids. We're going to switch there. So it is more based on that. It is based on the things going on. So they're not like, I didn't write a time down.

I want to get up St. Helens in this time, whatever. But it's like, hey, I want to do that and then not be on the couch for a month afterwards. I want to do that and not tear an achilles. Okay, great. Which is a goal. It's just a different kind of goal. It is a, for sure, a goal. It's just not the way people think of when they hear those.

They think, oh, goal, I have to write down a max I want to do. No, no, no, no, no. It's just a purpose. a target, and then you have a plan constructed around that. There are different kinds of fitness, what you call adaptations, nine of them, right? So when we talk about fitness, it's not like one unifying thing. It's something we express in all these different ways. And maybe you can kind of go over those.

Generally, because in terms of creating a plan or setting a goal, you have to know which of the adaptations you're trying to, you know, kind of improve upon. or optimize because some of them work in tandem with each other, but some of them are kind of countervailing forces. Yeah, so the system is always start off, number one. Like this is classic strength and conditioning theory stuff, but I'll break this stuff down a little more of a condensed form because we don't have a whole semester, right? Yeah.

Well, we could, but like, you know, for today. Number one is what we would call it needs analysis. This is just understanding what you need. to get done. This could look like you just walking in saying, I want to lose 10 pounds. Or you could run through a bunch of tests and exams and whatever. I don't really care about that point right now. The point is you have to understand where you're going. No coach in the world can give you a tremendous program if they don't know what you want out of it. Within that, it actually, and I'm hoping people are sticking with me in this because this second part is probably more important

and then all the other things I'm about to say. One thing I will emphasize over and over again, pay attention to what I call the defender of those goals, or that goal is. It's not the goal, per se. Here's what I mean. You want to set a new PR and a 5K. Great.

People then say, my goal is to run this thing in 17 minutes. That's not the goal. That's goal, fine. But what's the defender? I got to run more. no it's not the defender why aren't you running in 17 minutes right now are you getting injured too often when you pick up the running volume are you too slow so you have the fitness the endurance sorry but you aren't fast physically fast enough or maybe you're fast enough but you it's a technique

and a timing or a strategy or tactical like there's a thousand reasons why you couldn't be hitting that goal and so your training philosophy and your approach is entirely dependent upon solving that defender not just the 17 minute goal so for example if I said, hey, Rich, you have a 5K program I could buy from you. And you said, yeah, sure. That's just then assuming we all have the same limitation

to hit that 17-minute 5K or whatever, right? And for a third of the people, you're going to nail it with that program because they'll have the same limitation that you wrote that program for. And that a third of the people, it would be way too much and a third would be way too low

because you're out. And so it is, yes, it is great. Have the goal. I don't really care if that was objectively measured or you just came out the gates and said this is a number I want to hit. But where the magic is really going to happen with the successful aiming of the targets at those nine is figuring out why are you being limited from that? And so just to give two real practical examples, let's say the person that is not hitting 17 minutes is like, you know,

I do pretty good when I hit this much mileage per week. Okay, great. And the person goes, oh, I can't because every time I get past this mileage, I start breaking down, their programs are totally different. One, person one is like, okay, great, we seem to be fine there, but now we need to go work on your flat-out max below running speed. You start fast enough, right?

Look at the people who run the fastest distance, whatever race you want. They're really fast. Marathoners are elite sprinters compared to the average runner, right? Elite sprinters. You cannot be slow and run a two-hour marathon. You can't be slow and run a two-and-a-half-hour marathon.

You have to be able to run fast. You get the point, right? So it may be like a speed program where you're like, what in the heck? And then you look and this isn't four by four and this isn't like, no, no, no, no. This is solving your problem or the opposite. It's not a speed issue. This is a fact that you don't have the tissue tolerance to run 60 miles a week or whatever we think you need you at, and so you keep breaking down.

So this is a volume-building tolerance-related training program, and we may not peak you and get your best time ever for this particular race but we're going to be able to get to the type of training we need next race the next year over and so you're going to stop being broken down those programs wouldn't even look remotely close they wouldn't be the same training days per week

the same types of exercise the amount of lifting they're doing versus they'd be wildly different the equipment they're using could be off the reservation in terms of not looking but they're both still targeting the same exact quote unquote goal that makes sense Yeah. We think about adaptations to exercise-induced stress as the lever for increasing our fitness, but as you always say, like, stress is stress, right? Like, there isn't just, like, the workout. You have to think about all the other stressors that are impacting your ability to absorb that exercise-induced stress, translate it into the, you know, preferred adaptation that you're aiming for, and how all the confounding variables of your life, like, play into your

ability to execute that workout and your ability to repair yourself in the period in between the next workout. I think the framework that we will use the most here is stress is stressed, right? And so adaptation, positive, negative, the body is not personified in those terms. It is just simply responding to stress. And also stress can be lack of stress. This could be atrophy. This could be, I've stopped doing things. You'll become hyper-efficient. That's not a bad thing. It's not we will call it a maladaptation because we're not wanting more body fat or we're not wanting more insulin resistance or whatnot. But the body's just doing the response to that. There is an adaptation. We label it as positive or negative, but it is always adapting to whatever stress it has to endure.

That's exactly right. And so if we're looking at this saying, how do I maximize my recovery, or how do I get more adaptation for the same work or wherever you're landing on that part of the equation. The starting place we always have is we want to remove non-specific constraints. What's that mean? Okay, imagine the old stress bucket analogy, which everybody uses, right? So you've got a bucket, it can only be filled so much. Once that bucket becomes overflown, then you can keep pouring stuff in it, but you're getting marginal returns because you're overfilling, right? People have probably heard these analogies. It's not perfect, but we'll just stay here for now. What we want to do is say, all right, we know more stress equals more adaptation.

But if I can only, let's say I have a gallon bucket and I'm already loaded three quarters with non-specific stressors, I only can pour in a quarter of stress onto that to get a quarter of an adaptation on the back end. If I can reduce those non-specifics down, then allows more specific stress to come in, more adaptation in the area I want. What do these things look like? This could be junk miles. This could be lack of sleep that takes things out of my recovery. capacity. Could be a whole host of endogenous factors, micronutrient insufficiencies, psychological stress. These things are preloading the stress bucket. And I could walk you through some physiological examples of exactly what this could be. But what they're doing is they're not

allowing then you to either pile on more stress. Think of this as like more training, more adaptation, or you don't have the recovery capacity to handle, manage, adapt, and overcome those stressors to get that positive adaptation. And so you have non-specific stress, piling on that overall, it's called allostatic load or allostasis, gets too high in a non-specific. This is people spinning their wheels. And this is when we say things like, well, my training logs are the same, are pretty close to what they've been, my sleep hasn't gone way down, my HRV hasn't gone way down, I'm not like crazy sore or anything like that, but I'm just not progressing anymore.

These are super classic scenarios when we see that, we go, okay, great. But what you don't see is these nonspecific stressors preloading that bucket. Once we get those constraints out of the way, we call those. performance anchors, we don't really have to do much after that a lot of times. We don't have to get to the second step, which is accelerators. People want to jump right to accelerators when we will almost always look and say, before we do any of that, we have to get the anchors gone or managed or, you know, somewhat reduced. And then you can, you'll just simply build a train more. Or your training will enhance, you'll have enhanced recovery capacity or however you

want to look at that part of the equation. But that is like conceptually and philosophically, almost always our approach. There are some times when we truly can and need and are ready to go just purely up the accelerator side

but for the most part we handle the anchors and then we get out of the way and let people's physiology do what it wants naturally because as much as we do know about physiology, the vast majority we don't

and so we don't want to play too many fingers on the piano stick keys there because let's just let that person's body do what it wants to do and then kind of watch from the outside. So what I hear you saying is basically we need to really understand the full map, you know, where we're playing our game here. It's not enough to say, you know, I'm running the Boston Marathon on this date and I have this many weeks and here's what I have to do to be ready or I want to deadlift X by this date and just being focused on what the workout is.

And yeah, nutrition and sleep. There's all these other things that go unnoticed. And some of these we have some acuity to kind of naturally perceive. We know we're off or whatever and we know something's not quite right. But, you know, a lot of them aren't like they're just there. And short of finding a way to measure them and identify them, they will just go unnoticed. And therefore, you know, become these anchors that are kind of chronic and persistent because we're not really seeing the map. Yeah, we break them up into visible and hidden stressors, right?

So visible ones are exactly what you just laid out. You know it, feel it, see it, you're aware of it, you're doing the idiot stressor stuff, like you're drinking a bottle of wine before bed every night. Like you're doing these things where, okay. You know. Yeah, it's like you know. You know what's up. Yeah.

But the visible ones are the challenging ones, right, where you have a subclinical sleep disorder and don't realize it. You have something going on in your environment or your water. We could go on and on about these things. And those do become challenging. You don't have to go there. Not everybody has some pathogen in their water that, like, these tend to grab people's minds and freak them out.

So I don't like putting too much emphasis on that because the vast majority of people, it is really just visible stuff. You're not as good in your diet as you think that you are. You know, your training program that you just made up for yourself on chat, TBT, maybe not, maybe it's not very good, actually. Like, most of the time our problems are with those two, two to three really basic stuff.

But there have been plenty of cases when there is something in the hidden side that has really unlocked somebody who's been stuck for a while or has spun their wheels. So it can be all those things. A secondary goal in this conversation is to hopefully put to rest

some prevalent misconceptions out there that are driven by a desire to be reductive about certain pillars and aspects of fitness. One of those being V-O-2 Max, which you kind of just elaborated on already. But before we get into more specifics, what is your sense of the sort of biggest or top-level misconception that people have when they think about fitness and their own personal relationship

with fitness? Oh, geez, we could go so many directions with that one. I would say kind of right up the gate, just things hit in my brain when you say that. Some common missteps in the space are being too worried about individual-specific protocols. right so there's an optimal repetition range or an optimal rest interval or an optional volume and those things can sometimes exist on the individual person so we're going to find out your response is better at a certain volume and mine is different at a certain volume to say of running or cycling distance or so on but the fact that we can just go out and say oh you should do three by five or you should do four on four like those are just honestly almost random examples and i'm happy to share with you see why that is the case. I'm completely on your page as an athlete who kind of grew up, you know, as a swimmer and later as an endurance athlete, you know, every day it was just intervals, you know, and those

intervals were infinite in their form and shape and intensity and duration and volume, right? So when I hear, as much as I love Rhonda Patrick, like when she talks about the Norwegian method, it does feel reductive. And I think there are people out there like Steve Magnus who are like, listen, you know, This is a template for an idea. There's a concept baked into this that is valuable, but it's important to understand that there is a million derivatives of this that are equally important to explore.

And in the training of an athlete for performance, you're going to have to play within that. You're going to have to individuate it. You're going to have to vary it. And that sort of gets lost in the sort of social media discourse around. Yeah, I mean, it's hard. Honestly, like, so I'm one part scientist. I still run a lab.

We're actively engaged in research. I coach a ton of people myself personally and I'm also a public communicator and so when you get asked these questions on one sense my reality of it is when you ask me and you haven't but let's say you asked me about a specific protocol for fat loss or V2 my brain goes okay this morning

before we started talking I worked with one of the best number one pitchers in Major League Baseball we also worked with somebody that is probably spending at most three to five days in any individual country and I've worked with 18-year-old female athletes, all these this morning. And so when I try to answer training protocol questions, my brain is going, who the heck am I even talking about?

So then I tend to be very long-winded in my answers, and I tend to be very general. That's great scientifically, and that's great from a coaching perspective because those are true, honest answers. The hard part about that from a science communication standpoint, though, is the person listening home goes, great, home dude talked a lot,

but I don't know what he's even, like I don't know what to do. Can you give me one example? Well, that's the problem with truth and nuance. It's so hard. Right? It's like, come on, just tell me it's a grip strength, or it's this or it's that, because we want our minds to like hang on to something. And there are pillars and principles here, but, you know, in the real world,

it's like for whom, you know, for what and when, right? It's always going to be individual specific. So once you kind of are looking at it from a top level down and trying to extract generalities that are applicable to everybody, you know, it quickly comes with an infinite number of caveats. Yeah, because anytime I give an answer, I can probably think back within the week and go, yep, I violated that answer myself.

Right. This week. Yeah. I did the total opposite. It is something different. And all of these considerations have to be taken in the context of, you know, holistically in the context of that person's lifestyle. Yeah.

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So if you have been curious about creatine, but just kind of put off by the Brosecience marketing, this is your entry point. Use code Richroll at livemomentus.com slash richroll for up to 35% off your first order. In many ways, it also relates to people's relationship with how long it takes to, you know, actually, you know, do what's necessary to be the person. who can run a 5K at that time and they want it to happen quickly. So in the case of the person who's like I'm not a vol I don't respond well to volume you know anytime I want a volume program I get injured it's not the

volume it's your progression towards the volume is just too accelerated like your your body can't absorb and adapt to that form of exercise induced stress within that constrained time period that I love that idea of like how come you can't do it right now you know that's a really interesting way to like look at it and frame it like what are the things what are the reasons what is it your aerobic capacity is it is it is it your top end speed is it is it a time constraint you know all of these things that that play into it that are then going to inform the path to achieving that and the time frame in which it's reasonable to expect that it could be achieved so then that's actually the second step is you set

time frame after that right we know our target now we set typical stem thing right or smart smart acronym of like say it's like it has to be time bound yeah smart for those listening is it's generally realistic uh measurable attainable realistic and timely that's like the acronym for setting goals um i'm not like as concerned about that i don't use that framework but this would more realistically look like i would say okay great that's the number you want to hit it's our estimation this is going to take 50 weeks okay what yeah because you got turkey trot is like next month the handy. Sure. Yeah. Fine. Then when we have to realize is, okay, I mean, this happens all the time. The athletes that I work with, sometimes we get short notice. Like our UFC fighters, right? We got six weeks. Okay. We don't have a fine. Something pops up. You want to run a race. You want to do something? Okay. But now what we have to realize is we're going to run a fine ledge of injury. You accept those terms? Great. I'm in. I'm here for it. We're going to do it. Like, our special forces and military, like, we don't get, We have to be like, okay, great.

Well, now we're going to do something different than we have to double down on recovery capacity stuff because we know you're not going to get there. So we have to go do stuff that we wouldn't ask a other person to do because you're just too close to your personal ledge. We have to work harder in other areas. We have to get more data. We have to get more specific and more precise. We have to do extra stuff.

Because basically, if you have a restricted period of time, the only way to maximize what your gains within that, limited amount of time is to shorten the window in which your body repairs itself in between sessions so that you can train more and train harder and still absorb those those or we have to make a philosophical decision that we will ditch volume or ditch intensity or whatever and we're going to not be as say prepared for the race as possible but we're going to do everything to peak now that's going to be if you peak for competition it's great but at the same time adaptation is against that.

So adaptation optimization are two different ends of the spectrum. And so we might go, look, we're going to peak for this thing. And that means we're going to sabotage the next 10 weeks.

And we're going to sabotage later development. But we're going after this right now? Cool. Like, I'm here for it. Let's do it. You tell me the constraints, but that's the target.

So to kind of go back to the original question, it is finding what those defenders are. And then that allows you decide which these nine adaptations you're really, truly going after. And so to lay those nine out really quickly,

the number one thing right up the top is what we call skill. And this is simply defined as moving how you want to move and not how you don't want to move. This could be technique. This could be flexibility. It could be balance. It could be anything there where you have kinesthetic control of your body to make it move however you want

and then avoiding ways that you don't want it to move. That is the ground foundation, right? So that person that keeps breaking down in this example may have nothing to do with their volume or recovery capacity or homocysteine concentration. It just simply be like, oh, your mechanics are bad. It's not a volume issue. You just mechanics are bad.

Oh, great, we're done at this point, right? We just got to correct how you move. Or a million other things, right? For the non-athlete person, this is the chronic pain thing. Okay, this is, I'm losing mobility over time. And this is, I fall too much. Okay, great, it could be anything else. It's simply controlling your body.

The example that pops into my mind is the super fit like Iron Man athlete that doesn't really know how to swim. You know, because they didn't learn when they were a kid. And so they go to the pool and they're so focused on getting their training in. And their technique is so atrocious. It's like, it's not even worth it. It's like you need to just stop what you're doing. If you took six months and just worked on form,

like, because they're fighting the water and they're making it work against them. Like, conditioning really isn't the limiter there. The limiter is like their lack of feel for the water and understanding what is required in order to efficiently move through it. This is true, by the way, of every human movement example you could think of.

Right. It's just exacerbated in water because the resistance is... Well, I just mean in general efficiency. So if you want to get faster or you want better endurance, the better you're moving, both of those go up. So somebody who's in the gym

wants maximum power or maximum strength or the person that wants to go improve their ultra-marathon. So you pick the other ends of the spectrum here. A major league baseball player wanting to increase max velo on a throw. One effort as hard as they can to somebody run on 200 miles.

If your first stop and your destination is not maximizing mechanical efficiency, you have skipped way past the biggest payout you can because not only you're going to go faster but you're going to reduce breakdown and wear and tear so I can throw at max below more often

because it's not the wear and tear and I'll actually throw faster if you dance around with any of these coaches that are these world caliber sprint coaches or velocity or throws coaches you're going to start hearing terms like smooth and timing and sequencing and rhythm and you're like

rhythm to like throw a javelin what the heck are you talking about you'll see endurance world will tend to use efficiency more because you want to be there so the language is a little bit different between max power speed and there but you want to be efficient in your transition

on your bike you want to be efficient in your stride why less wear and tear and more output poor per energy input if you're sub 90% we don't need to go any further

we have the number one rated college quarterback right now speed thing like it's efficiency like he's already super fast but this is one of his only things that isn't like a 99 on a madden rating scale and so we're like we're working on just efficiency and rhythm and time he's like what what is going on like guess what he's getting faster like we just have to get him smooth and we have to get smooth the rhythm yeah yeah i had stew mcmillan in here who was talking at length about about that and you can obviously understand it in the context of

you know the hundred meters where you know just You know, these races are won and lost on the, on the absolute tiniest of margins possible. But then if you think about an ultramarathoner, like a tiny tweak that just gives them just a slight improvement in efficiency. And then you play that out over 100 miles. Like, that's just a gigantic advantage or gain that you're going to be able to experience. But it's just like, it's not fun to work on that stuff. And also, you can't do it alone. Like you need, you know, you need somebody else to be giving, you need to be in a feedback loop with someone who can, like,

help you with that. And if you're not the, I'm trying to set a PR or record here, I don't need that last 5%. I get it with efficiency. Just don't be the bottom 50th percentile. So as long as you're moving like reasonably well, the average person can get away with that

and to where we can say, okay, fine, we can move on to other parts of your training program. But if you are below average with how you move, there's really no point in moving past that. Because injury, short and long term, just gets too high. The shoulders just starts nagging you, the low back, the neck,

and we're not actually getting progress. And now we're talking endurance. We're talking about muscle growth. I mean, you pick the thing, the adaptation we can get into. That's going to be a truism. You have to at least be like above average with how well you move. And if that's enough for you, fine. We can stop there. But below that, basically a person on our program would be pretty much stalled at that point where we're like, you have to move better. With whatever we're asking you to do, whatever movement that is, above average, is kind of like our minimum threshold for that. And how you get somebody to move better, obviously, it's going to depend upon their specific sport and all that kind of stuff, right? I mean, I think there's also, like, it's just in running, it's like, oh, well, just everyone, like, we all know how to run and everyone's just out running.

We're all, you know, we're born to run. And some people look like gazelles when they do it. And some people look like, you know, clunky, I don't know, like Subaru's out there. Right. I'm going along, and there's just not really much to do about that. And I suppose that, you know, it's going to be difficult to, you know, get the average 45-year-old dad to run with the form that Killian Jornay does. But the point is that there's a lot of, you know, room in between there.

You know, it's like, or the basketball player. Like, you're not going to end up looking like Michael Jordan, but I'm sure there's plenty that can be done to improve upon whatever it is you're doing and you're doing. it just because that's the way you've always done it and no one told you otherwise yeah minimum viable here right like if you and i went and ran let's say we're both at 80% of our best technical running skill right now but you're 80%'s a lot higher in mine because i don't have to run as well as you have to run because i don't ever run the kind of i don't know how much you're running these days but you get the point right back surgery i'm not running at all buddy yeah i got questions for you about that but anyway

keep going well you go back five years yeah 10 years whatever point being if you're a runer than the what I would call minimal viable running movement skill is higher than someone who goes, I want to be able to run, but I'm going to run less than three miles a week. Oh, okay, great. So we can go. You know, you're at a six out of ten, but you're only going to run a couple times a week and we're doing some sprints or whatever, and we're just doing it for fitness and fun. Great. We're not going to ask you to get to like 80, 90 percent and just like sacrifice to everything else. So you're running as great as possible. We don't have to do that. But if you're three to ten, you're like, We're not going to play pickleball.

Like, we're just not going to go do it because you're too low. But if you're going to maximize in that individual goal or run a huge distance or it's a big part of your training, then we're going to ask for that technical capacity to be a little bit higher than the next person because they're just a little bit lower. You don't have to have Olympic weightlifter squating technique for us to be like, okay, you can squat.

Oh, you're going to squat twice a week, once a week, fine. So that gradient changes based on demand and what we're asking your body to do. And it changes based on you and your body. Your squat won't look like mine. My run, my, my gate won't look like yours. So it's not that we're all trying to get everybody to look the same at all.

We're just trying to get you all kind of above six out of ten on an imaginary, non-specific scale here. Just like the rough eye test are going, nothing catastrophic there. Okay, pretty good, good there. You want to double down, you want to do a lot of hard, intense, high effort in that area? now let's get a little bit better. If not, great. We're good there. We'll move on to something

else. What you're saying is if there's a hierarchy in all of these adaptations, we're on one of nine right now. That really at the top of this pyramid is efficiency and technique. Like before you can kind of go on to the next thing, like this has to be sorted out because everything is downstream of this. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. Even the adaptation we're going to try to chase later gets changed when we move fast. when we get tired, when we go heavy. And so we have to manage, in fact, like our progression through these things is,

can you show me you can do the movement that you want? Whether that's walking, I don't really care. Do it unloaded, which means you can hold on to a bar while you're squatting, or you can be in a pool. Like, we can do this where your body weight itself is less than normal. Great. Check. Now we're going to move you on to say,

can you do it with your body weight? Check, great. Now can you do it with some low? load, check. Now can you do it with some speed? Check. And we're not going to continue to progress through our types of exercise or our training program if we have a fail here, right? So maybe your squat technique looks great, but as soon as we put a little bit of load on you, it breaks down. Well, then we're not going to put you on it loaded. It doesn't make any sense. We put endurance almost always at the end. And because of that, it's almost what you said earlier

about the endurance person, like we're not going to stack a whole bunch of volume on top of poor movement. I don't want to stack load on top of it either. But show me that you can get tired. Show me you can let. There's more to this when I'm giving you the shorter version. Show me we can do this in a unilateral with one limb. Show me you can do it eccentric and concentric. There's all these layers. And then once we do that and we've passed that with some threshold, now we can stack training programs and volumes and intensities and things on it. But if we're seeing these huge breakdowns, we're not getting to the next level of these nine very often.

And if we are, I'm not saying like literally never. It's just like we're not going to dose them at a very high load. It's going to be very, very low and intentional and judicious before we really start letting you fly. Through that lens in thinking about endurance, it's not so much like how long or far can you sustain an effort. it's how long or far you can sustain that effort without a breakdown in your technique and efficiency.

Because lots of people can like stumble across, you know, the finish line of some ridiculously long race. But the people who do well are the people who are able to maintain that form, that technique and propel themselves forward efficiently without a breakdown in that. Because once that breakdown happens, like the whole house of cards kind of like,

you know, collapses on top of itself. I changed this probably 10 years ago. I remember I was, you know Brian McKenzie? I do. So I was at Brian's house and he was talking about that exact thing. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. His endurance programming was all based, failure was defined as technical breakdown, right? Not volume, not time, not anything else.

It was when you break down technically, like, that's your number. There's no point in continuing to run further or whatever at that point. And then like two days later, I was in Colorado with Lauren Landau. Strengthening Edition and coach. Tremendous guy. he was with the Broncos for a long time now he was at Notre Dame and he said the exact same thing

but not from the endurance perspective and he was going through different drills he was doing and I was like how am I not doing this? Immediately it was like oh this is the most ridiculous thing ever and so we've pretty much used that almost exclusively since then is we will always define not always most of the time we define

fatigue or endurance or failure as that point of diminish technical breakdown. You're going to like your postural break and like you'll come back. But when we see whatever we're defining as a major technical breakdown, then that's the limit. And so, in fact, I got a text on the way here. One of our guys is preparing for a fight in China. And he told me last night he had a PR in our endurance work,

and this is an aerodyne piece that we do for rounds. And those rounds are cut off with technical breakdowns. So this is a posture when he's leaning forward and the head starts flopping back and forth and his elbows start flying up that's when we like cut him and he doesn't know this by the way. Like he just gets arbitrarily totally told he's done.

He has no idea why, right? We can't because he'll just hijack the system and he won't listen to this. What are you doing? Why are you? Yeah, yeah. He's like, no, we're done. He's just like, okay. But we got an extra round out of our stuff last night which is now the third week in a row we've added a round.

And I'm like, great. So what this is showing me is he's holding position better at the same or higher levels of fatigue. Intuitively. He's subconsciously holding this and then when he gets really tired, he breaks. Phenomenal. And then we see that

in his actual skill training. So, yeah, that's a very big part of our stuff, especially when we are pushing close to competitions where volume and intensity are high, calories are low, stress is high. You're just, like, you're asking for a recipe there and you're looking for any excuse to dial something in and that for him

for some of our other athletes it's honestly not as big of a deal but the really practical application of this for the everyday person is next time you're in the gym and you're thinking I'm going to go to failure on this lift failure isn't you know when you can no longer get the bar all the way up by doing whatever you have to do

you know moving your body around to do it it's as soon as you can't hold perfect form then you're done right and I think the other gym within that is that the most important thing in advancing your fitness goals is consistency. Like you talk about this, consistency over intensity. And everybody loves to, you know, talk about their monster workout or their massive lift or they're incredibly long, you know, weekend run or whatever. And that's all fine. But it's only as important as, you know, as the rest

of your program and how it fits into that. Right. So quality, um, like volume being limited by the extent to which you can express it with quality. 100%. And my rule is always, if I'm being consistent, like less is always more. Because you're not just training for the day, you're training for the week and the month. And the idea is to be able to get up and do it again the next day and the next day and the next day. And the minute you start kind of inappropriately stepping over the line and doing a little bit too much because you feel good that day. Just because you feel good that day and you want to go for it doesn't mean that you should if you have a greater goal that you're working towards because that can come at a cost that's going to undermine your ability to express yourself physically the day after when that was the day when you really were supposed to, you know, do that other kind of workout to advance that.

With our athletes and our non-athletes, because by numbers, I coach more non-athletes, general population people than professional athletes. with all of them we have very specific you can set this up however you want but red days days that you're going to like go after it right and it doesn't always work like that especially for non-athletes

it's like I'm running a company and I've got a fam like this thing okay great but we will have that plotted for the month and ideally at least for the quarter as well and so when we get to a spot where that person goes I'm feeling great today I want to go after it well we know what's coming up next week

and we know what came up came the week before and so we can look at it and go yeah if you want go ahead or we can go no chance why because either we did a ton last week or we got a whole huge set coming up next week or next month or whatever and so we're trying to really make an intelligent decision

about when to fly and when to not go all that is is orchestrated whether this is just on subjective high you know hard day medium day light day or we have direct measures with a bunch of physiological variables and other stuff, we have a combination

of super high technology and no technology sort of people. So you have some plan there. Now, if you don't have any of that, a number that we will just randomly throw out is the average person who has a real job and a real life can hit that red zone

two to four times a month. That seems to like be a really good landing spot and to be really clear, red zone isn't like a hard workout. The red zone is the, you're not sure if you're alive anymore, right? Like you touch death on the wall and we're going to come back from that. You can train really hard a lot, right? Especially if, you know, other, your house is in order in other places and your recovery's good.

You can train pretty hard. But that true, like I went, you know, all the way to the edge there. Twice to four times a month, depending on what that means and other variables, is about as much as you can handle. that ends up being something like 10% of your training 5 to 10% of the time is where we're going to really have like a truly red day depends on if you're training twice per week

four days per week or you know whatever somewhere in the 60% range is going to be work capacity 60 to 70% of your workouts right so these are hard workouts these might even feel like a max your heart rate might get to a max at some point or back down but this could be a combination of like technical work or intervals or strength or lots of things like that but the vast majority of

your time is going to be there and then that leaves another 10 or 20 or so percent of time where it should be truly technical stuff it could be recovery it could be just putting in some volume it could be practice and improving skill super rough numbers that's generally how we like and we'll hedge those numbers differently depending on the athlete in the sport and the time of year and their age and all those things. But just to get people like something to grasp them, because I know when I hear comments like that, I'm like, when you can tell me like never to work out hard,

that's dumb. Of course you're going to do that, right? But you have to also think about that and be like, okay, you had a long day at work, heavy stress going on there, you know, factor in a bunch of other stuff, and then you took a whole truckload of stimulants. I'm sure you feel great.

Yeah. But you're going to pay this one way or the other. Now, if it's a couple times a month, you're fine. some people that might be more some people that might be less but most of our time should be spent in that like we're building capacity

we are working hard we're maybe getting a little bit sore but we're not doing that like I threw up in the trash can at the end of the workout sort of thing if you're 18 or 25 you can get away with that stuff

yeah when you're 40 you're 33 think twice my man yeah let's be intelligent about when we really do that whether or not you have a goal or not a workout should have

an intention, a purpose, you should know why it is that you're doing what you're doing and what it's intended to accomplish. And in order to know that, you have to know which adaptations you're going for. And you know, you mentioned technique and efficiency, but there's strength, their speed, you know, hypertrophy, there's endurance. There's a lot of them. We don't need to, like, itemize all of these things, but just being clear on like, how is this workout moving me, you know, in the direction I want to go in with respect to the. this adaptation. And I think what I see, and I'm curious what you think about this, with most people, average people could be really fit. They love working out. And like I said, you know,

they're like, this is my routine. I go to the gym. I do this stuff. I, you know, I go, I have 45 minutes to run, you know, three or four times a week. And so I just go out and I just like run. And I go kind of like as hard as I can sustain that effort for 45 minutes. And I, And I think most people's experience with this is that they improve quickly, because if you, when you're just starting, you see those gains and that, you know, creates adherence, you know, which is what you talk about. You get more emotionally invested in doing this. But it's not long before they plateau.

And we can talk about plateaus with elite, you know, performance athletes, but I think with respect to the average person, I think there's an. epidemic of people plateauing out there because they're not really intentional about what they're doing. And for the most part, they're just kind of going in the middle every day. Like, they don't have that red zone workout where they're flat out or those moments are rare. And they're not doing the, you know, zone two work. So they're not really developing their aerobic capacity. They're not really, you know, developing their anaerobic capacity. They're in this sort of gray middle zone phase of training where you get fit, but like pretty quickly, like, it ends there. And then you could

see them like 10 years later and they're still kind of like in the same place and wondering why they're not having any kind of breakthrough. Yeah, well, there's a couple of things to unpack, one being we never want to discourage exercise or physical activity, not to say that you did that. But I bring that up because when we had these kinds of conversations, I'll get a lot of feedback that it's like, I'm doing my best out here and then you're telling me I'm doing anything wrong. Right. Yeah, yeah, I get that. And maybe it's just for the mental benefits of like I feel good in my body and like, that's great. Like, yes, please thank you because like I don't want to be discouraging anybody from doing what they actually enjoy doing that is movement oriented.

Okay, so we're on the same page. Let's move on past that. Yeah, I did an entire episode on my show on plateaus, peaks and plateaus and over training. The very first stop on this train is you're probably not plateauing. you probably just don't have a training program. And if you do have a training program, you're actually probably not tracking and measuring enough or really anything. So what I mean is, like, oh, I do my training program.

Here's my runs, and I went and did my runs. I did my miles. Great, what heart rate were you at? What was your time on those? Like, I don't know, so I'm between like 30 and 40 minutes. Okay, that 30 or, like, that's not the same thing. And so it ends up happening is you're right. Like, sometimes you get a little bit faster, sometimes a little bit slower,

but it all kind of ends up being this muddle muck of the same kind of thing with not enough specificity to drive variation or to drive adaptation, right? And so there wasn't enough stimuli to go fast to make your body really get faster. It wasn't enough stimuli to really produce efficiency, so it didn't get more efficient. It just burned calories and had all the other awesome benefits, but it didn't drive you in direction. So another classic analogy I'll use, It's the example of me saying, awesome, let's go get some food, Rich.

And I'm sure if we just got a car, started driving in circles, we would find some food eventually, right? But a faster way is tell me the address, we GPS it, like, and we get directly there. So you can just like run around and get to a destination, but you're not there. Your body will work best when it says you're giving me this exact challenge. It's called the said principle, SAID, specific adaptations to imposed demand. the exact demand will give the exact adaptation. And so when you don't have an exact demand, you tend to just get these, like,

your body will affect it, and I'm personifying, but your body will be like, all right, we're not sure if we're supposed to get faster or more powerful or increase blood flow. So we're just going to kind of like wait until we really see what we're being asked to do. Nothing really that stressful? All right, we're not going to modify.

Hold pace. We can handle this stress, and it just holds pace. so if you don't have a consistent program it kind of goes back to the first half an hour or whatever we were talking about like the problems with non-specific thing and then the second part i brought up was if you don't have some kind of monitoring of at least time or some other variable then you can't dial up adaptation because you can't dial up different changes and it will not take more than eight to 12 weeks for the average person's body to become really adapted to that stressor and And then it's just going to hold pace, right? And so we have to then progress with volume or intensity or there's lots of ways, exercise variation, range of motion, environmental factors, tons of ways we can progress that doesn't have to mean harder.

That's another thing we get a lot of feedback. I'm like, when we say progression, I'm not saying the workout has to be harder, but there has to be some intentional variation. And then last thing to say about that is variation is not randomization. So if it's the person we described about earlier or it's the opposite where I'm doing

tons of different things that's called random right random gets you no place other than calories and fun other stuff but in terms of specific adaptation because it's not enough

stimuli in one individual direction so we want intentional variation but not just randomization right not to like show up and I do what's my workout well whatever machine is open in the gym

well like awesome that's super stoked you're lifting but like We have better ways to go about variation. So that is going to handle the vast majority of people with that stuck in the same level problem. If it's not that, then there's other things we can get to,

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We think of discipline in the fitness context of like, get up to go hard, you know. It's like all about like hustle and hardness. But discipline is really having the gumption to like hold. back when you feel good and you want to press because, you know, you're delaying gratification because you have this bigger goal or, you know, having the discipline to, you know, not watch Netflix and go to bed early or when you're on that group run to not get caught up in your ego and like, no, today I'm supposed to like keep it here and like it doesn't matter if I'm in the back or whatever, like that's what I'm doing. Like you have to humble yourself, I think. So that's

the flip side of discipline that I think it's lost in. in this conversation. And that's what's required if you want to pursue your fitness intentionally. Yeah, you have a plan if you can and stick to it. And so to the people who are the like, I got 45 minutes, three days a week person, just like I'm just trying to not be dead.

Like I'm not into this fitness stuff that much and I don't really want to write programs. Fine. There are plenty of people who sell $10 programs or $30. These are super affordable things now. I still at this point wouldn't recommend just like throwing stuff into chat GPT

because there's just plenty of services and coaching programs that are really well-established coaches who can give you a really affordable training program. Buy one and follow it. You don't have to think about anything. You show up, do the workout, and you're done. At least you have some experience

buying those training program. If you're the opposite, probably maybe more like you and I were like actually want to know all these. Fine, you can, get really expensive training programs. So you can have solutions that match whatever your interest or means are for these. But if you're wanting progress and you're not getting it and you're not doing one of those two things, we don't have to look much further than that.

And I think you're going to solve most people's problems. Many of these fitness adaptations work in conjunction with each other and sometimes in parallel. And no matter what your fitness goal is, there's on some level, like you have to be kind of advancing all of these adaptations somewhat. Like if you're going to be an ultramarathon or you still need to pay attention to your strength, like you can't just like, you know,

I've learned this the hard way. And if you want to be a strength athlete, you're going to have to have some endurance, you know, work in there in order to optimize that primary, you know, adaptation pillar. But sometimes these things work across purposes with each other. And I'm thinking about the explosion of the hybrid athlete, you know, the person who wants to crush it at high rocks, but also wants to run Leadville, you know? And so they're, they're like super jacked, but like they're going to go run 100 miles.

There's something really cool about, like, the challenge of, like, how you make those two things, like, work with each other. But you're really chasing goals, like opposing goals at the same time. Like, do you counsel athletes who are trying to do this? Like, how do you get your head around, like, putting that person on a program that's going to work? I mean, basically, if that's the guy you want to be, you're just, you're really just sacrificing your capacity for greatness in either of them, right? Like, unless you pick one. Most likely. Yeah.

Now, I like how you said that where you're sacrificing capacity for greatness, not good. Yeah, you can still do these things. For sure. And perhaps that's just the goal. but if you really like want to be on the podium at the high rocks world championships then maybe you know you need to put the leadville goal aside for a couple of years and then shift your focus and work towards that you know yeah i mean i teach the physiology of these crossover concepts um and our our online courses so you can we can walk you through it like we can walk you through the everything from the lymphatic system to enderkin to neural and like which ones crossover and all that can be mapped out pretty easily but on the the highest level remember physiology is not a person physiology doesn't know you're training for speed or endurance right it simply knows stress demand

and it only has so many resources and it can only do so many things in so many directions like really classic examples here if you were to maximize the size of your individual muscle fibers right this is an area that I specialized in for a long time scientifically great well if we maximize that size at the same time we start to

compromise what's called lattice spacing. So it's the distance between the actin and the myocin. These are the contractile fibers filaments that work within your muscle fibers, right? So if we get that thing really large, we might actually start compromising the ability of it to maximize speed of contraction. Or we start putting the distance

between the mitochondria too far apart, which may compromise some sort of metabolic capacity, right? Even within the metabolic side, if we start ramping up enzymes that are needed for utilization of fat as a fuel, we are going to downregulate the ones that are used in carbohydrate and the opposite. And so in the middle, much it's going to cross over, it's at the extremes where you stop seeing crossover, and then you start going past that,

and you actually start seeing detriment to that. And so there's actually, it was a paper that came out just recently, by a group I'm familiar with, on that mitochondrial piece, which is the lure for all these years has been a strength training doesn't enhance mitochondrial capacity but endurance training does and for the most part that doesn't seem to be the case it seems to be the case of like a misunderstanding

of this combination of mitochondrial size mitochondrial density within the tissue and you have to be able to account for muscle size to understand what the actual adaptation is so you can't just like blame the whole thing on mitochondria or not because these are really complicated physiological milieus that have to work in tandem

outside of just the cell itself. So all that junk to say there's clear crossover, right? Like the example I will give all the time is, all right, so you're going to tell me that you did a deadlift and your central nervous system

is shot, but then you ran 40 miles and it's not? Like tell me, tell me that like speed and power is neurologically fatiguing, but running 40 miles isn't. Like, that's insanity talking, but, like, that's what you would see in a strength and power. These are

CNS demanding, but, like, endurance work isn't. It's like, oh, really? Sure. Like, swim 15 miles and tell me your C&S is totally fine. It's nonsense. So, if you notice, I played the game on both sides. There, right? I'm a strength guy. But you get the point, right? There's been

this miseducation of, like, what strength training does and doesn't do, and the consequences, and there's been the same on the other side of the equation, And the reality of it is, like, once we actually start looking at this stuff from properly designed, like, scientific platforms, that's not how it's working. I can give you a million more examples of these things that we are told, like, does happen or it doesn't happen with endurance or strength. But the more we get this, like, that stuff is starting to crumble pretty heavily. From a very basic perspective, is it possible to improve strength and endurance within a single training cycle?

Yes. And if one was to want to do that, how do you apportion it? Like, I'm just thinking for myself, like, to be honest, like, I don't even know. Like, if I'm going to go and do some strength work, should I do it before I go out for my ride or my run or my swim or afterwards and how many times? And conversely, for the person who's really more of the strength person who's getting into endurance, like, what would that look like? And I know I'm asking, like, the most basic, you have to like, the most basic way. The most basic way to respond to that. No, no, it's actually really good

because we have done this a month. We've helped tons of people who have never been in athletes do their first 5K to ultra and everyone in between and the opposite, right? Lifelong strength athlete doing their first high rocks

during the first 5K then the opposite, right? Like, I've been a runner my whole life and now I've lifting weights for the first time. So this is actually a really good question for a much reason. So I answered that quickly, yes, you can do that. The proportion at which we do

the strength versus the endurance work is directly related to your background. It's the foundation we've already spent time talking about. If you are really weak, you're going to spend more time on strength. You will be more limited by your physical strength, let's say leg strength. If you're just like, okay, strong enough, then we might just do a little bit of strength just to kind of keep you where you're at. If you're super strong, we might ditch it. We might ditch the whole thing for six weeks or eight weeks or whatever cases.

So it is right back to define your limiter. Why are you not succeeding? If you're not succeeding in that endurance event because you're super weak, strong enough, super strong, that's our answer. That is exactly the opposite, right? And so it's like, oh, yeah, we just don't have the energetic capacity. We don't have blood volume.

Oh, don't have enough blood volume. That's a different answer than my breathing mechanics are off. Interesting. That's a different answer than we just don't think we have O2 delivery into tissue. Those are different answers for all quote unquote endurance problems. And we might look at your strength in this case and go, it's not great, but it's like good enough. That's not causing these problems we're seeing over here. Or maybe they are, but there's just only so much training you have in your schedule or physiology or capacity. So we're just going to ditch it for now. Like this

happens every training program we ever write. We, NFL players just reported. last week or so. All of them were on different off-season training programs. They're on different training camp programs. This is exact reason. Like, what is their limitation? And in training camp, we can't do much. Like, they're playing football a lot.

Yeah. And so we're going to add, like, one thing to their program, go, okay, you just, we're going to have to maximize this. Or even in their off-season training program, to be honest, like sometimes it's like one thing we can do differently because there's just so much already going on and their physiological demand. So it is being really strategic

but it's based on that principle of like health, what's your biggest leading indicator? And then we decide maybe that is, you are terrible. Maybe you are so insanely weak and we're so far behind. You've never lifted.

You don't know how to move well. You get super sore there. And we've got to race in seven weeks. We're just going to ditch it entirely. Why? Because it's actually so far behind that is, we need to start It would just, yeah, within, within that limited time frame, it's too disruptive.

Too disruptive. It cost us way too much. Yeah. So we're just not going to work on it. And that is a, that is just a strategic decision we make client by client by person. So yeah, you can do them both. The other case, like the most realistic case, you can do a little bit of both, right? You can do it and you can start to see improvements in these opposite into the spectrums based on novelty alone, right? So maybe you're doing a different style of lifting you've ever done before. You can see some big jumps and improvements in that specific area. So maybe it's something like velocity-based training. Or maybe it's a different movement pattern. Or it's a more power-driven type of lifting or a more reaction time type of lifting.

And we can see this and go, oh, great. You thought lifting weights and you thought like three sets of A on a barbell, there's so many other ways we can lift and get you stronger that would look nothing like that. And so maybe we stay away from that entirely. We do some other stuff. You get really strong, really fast, and it took almost nothing away from our volume

or our endurance needs. And so that's how we snuck that in kind of like the back door. And so it's part of this is like miseducation too of like what strength training is. It's not just dumbbells and barbells for set to five to ten. That's a very, very high level overview, kind of like rough idea. but that's like kind of like saying

there's, you know, cars and trucks. That's the only automobiles in the street. Well, okay, kind of. Like, it gets a lot more complicated than that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get that. I like that, though. You know, I think this is

sort of something that is pretty common. Like, we find our fitness tribe, you know, and we're going to slide into it. And we all like to do the things that we're good at and strong at. And we don't really want to work on our weaknesses. You know, it's like, who wants to do that? and really that becomes the anchor right like that's the limiting factor here and until you're

you're willing to kind of look at it wide-eyed and address it it will continue to hold you back but it's just more fun to do the thing you're already good at yeah acknowledge it and just decide if that comes up we live we die yeah like fine like we just yeah that's gonna tank us right so like in the sporting example we'll do this all the time like i remember we had a guy uh a major baseball player and he had a particular guy he would he was playing against and the guy was sitting like 400 in his career on him

which is like outrageous right couldn't get this guy out tried a bunch of stuff tried to bring up the weaknesses whatever I couldn't get him out and it was just like okay fine this guy hits this particular pitch

the worst against me and the next time I face him I'm going to only throw that pitch right that's all I'm gonna do and he threw like 17 straight well it's pretty good solution it's like it's like

and it was like laughable one of bat was like nine pitches in the bat he's like the same pitch nine he's just like I'm not throwing him anything besides that one. I'm just going to cannibalize everything else because I know my best chance to survive

is just this one thing. The only weakness that I can exploit is this one pitch that I have. That's it. And if this guy is, that's still a blind spot with this guy, then that's his only way in to get in the best of him.

He had to go back and develop an entire new pitch that next off season. Like, just for that guy. Just for that. Because he's just like, that's a win in and of itself for him. No, it's great, right? It's just like, we're not going to try

to shrew up these, other pitches when it's like he didn't hit the slider well we're just going to throw a slider in terms of thinking about recovery and understanding that um you know this is really the critical thing that is going to translate you know what you endured during your workout into becoming fitter and a better athlete um and trying to identify what are the biggest levers to pay attention to here to here can we talk a minute about uh how to make sense of all that the the this sort of data point inputs that we're now, you know, kind of that are available to us now. Because on the one hand, it's super cool.

Like we, you know, we're wearing these trackers and we can see our sleep stages and we get scored on them. And we have a sense of how we're recovering based upon HRV and our resting heart rate and our, in our respiratory rate. And all of these things are super interesting. But I think it's important to try to understand, like, how to contextualize them. how to interpret all of this data. What's really important and what matters in terms of like implementing changes or adjustments to improve your recovery.

Okay. I mean, this is like a semester alone. I know that. But like, you know. So many years ago, Brian and actually and I wrote a book on fitness technologies. And we laid out an argument and infrastructure there that I think has, held up pretty well to this day. The technology has totally changed in 10 years, but it doesn't matter. Highest level, any technologies, and for the record, these include the ones that my

companies make. So I have a very financial conflict of interest, specifically in sleep and in blood work, right? I do these things. That said, highest level, we should be using things that are advancing us and things that are neutral up to you. and things that are negative should be gone. Sleep, you brought up, very easy one. There is something called orthosomnia. So this is sleep tracker-induced clinical sleep disorders. Because you just become neurotic about your sleep score.

It is exactly what you think, right? And a sleep score on a commercially available tracker is at best okay, at worst, horribly off. You mentioned sleep stages. We still don't have a commercially available tracker that gives you any reliable or realistically close accurate sleep stage.

I could go on for many, many minutes about why, like, that's a problem. But something like that says, okay, great. If you're going to use a sleep track, commercially available sleep tracker, fine, what can you pull from it? Well, you can pull some general awareness.

What time are you really going to bed? Oh, I go to bed about 10. Eh, more like 1145. We get clients all the time. they are not even lying to us they're honestly think that they go to bed at X number

and they're off by not minutes like hours calibration awareness right you thought you were eating 3,000 calories a day it's really more like

4,500 once you started tracking it oh shoot I just I wasn't aware what an ounce of peanut but it really looked like I thought I was like you fill in all the blanks here

I thought I was doing a pretty good job in zone whatever my heart rate but then you measure it you're way off so most people if you've never measured these things you don't have any idea what time you fell asleep.

You don't have any idea what calories look like or what your HRV is. Okay. Or what your training zones are. No idea. You're thinking you're doing this, you're way outside that zone, and then you're confused

when you're not like, you know, progressing. Exactly, right? So they're really good for that type of stuff. They're good for calibration and awareness. They're good for behavior. A lot of people will say, when I wear my tracker, I make better decisions. It doesn't matter if the tracker's accurate.

great i'm in totally here for it um if you look at the clinical trials actually on specific things like obesity you'll see a bunch of positive results you'll also see some negative results such that people when they wear trackers will gain more body fat what's the difference between the two groups tough to say but some common things that happen in the groups that are kind of close to their a goal trackers tend to help And so let's say we're just using something simple, rudimentary like steps per day. And we say, all right,

we want everyone at 10,000 steps per day. Not saying that's a good number. We'll just move past that for now. And you enroll in the study and you're at 7,500. And then you like really pay attention. You move more throughout the day and you get to 9,500. Like, damn, I can do this. It's the person who did that in their first day is at 2,500.

That ends up gaining more weight sometimes, because they're discouraged because the goal is so far from reality they're like, I walked all damn day and I'm at 3,000 steps to hell with this. I've tried to get healthy and it's just too hard for me, my body,

and then you just fill in the logic train from there and they just ditch everything and they actually get worse habits because it's so discouraging. It's not always the case and again there's lots of randomized control trials on this stuff now, but you'll see those things pop up. Most of the time, trackers and things for the general public are good for getting people to be more accountable.

They're good for going, I know my coach is going to look at this tomorrow. Like, I don't want to do this. Built in accountability. Accountability. All those things are phenomenal. That said, there have been trackers and wearables for roughly 15 years now on like a consumer level. and do you notice our population getting healthier? I mean, it doesn't seem that way.

Doesn't seem that way. Yeah. It's not, right? So one could say, is it really working? Okay, we'll leave that aside. What are the downsides? The downsides I gave you the one example. Like, any time anyone gets obsessed about numbers,

especially if they're non-validated, which most consumer wearables and tractors. Now, when you get into the areas of like polar and garment, you get good, right? you have companies built to track heart rate. They get good at tracking heart rate. The problem is when you get a company built to be an Instagram platform

that then tells you your training zone. Yeah, that's problematic. That's not. Yeah, of course, of course. That's not a good thing. If you have a garment, you have a chest strap heart rate monitor, like it's pretty accurate.

And obviously there's like some products out there are better than others. But at the higher end of these, even if there's a calibration problem or an accuracy problem, They tend to be consistent, at least. And so you have these sort of baselines and what you're paying attention to

is the variability within that. Exactly, right? So that's the last piece of reliability is good monitoring over time. Those are all good. The downside is when we start getting into decisions based on the kind of information

that those machines are not good at. The sleep, again, my bias, right in front of you here, is a really big one, right? The way that I'll say this as arrogantly as possible is, Like, we work with three, four, five hundred million dollar athletes. Like, do you think we're going to put a $300 wearable on them to test their sleep?

Something is critical to sleep. Like, you know the answer. You're going to hook them up to a million wires and put them in that room with glass and observe them all night. No, no, no, no. We do that whole thing in the house. Just ask them how they feel. Oh, you do? Okay.

No. So we have. But you run the experiment, like the top level sleep science, like set up. Exactly. So that is all available to anybody now. It's not even that expensive. So we can run full clinical grade medical sleep studies from people in their bedroom every night. It's not even that expensive.

If we need to know just what time you're going to bed, I don't need to do that. I can put an Apple Watch and it's going to tell me roughly like what time you went to bed and what time you woke up. But if I want to start making decisions about supplements or lifestyle, changes or medications based on sleep staging, I'm not doing it based on a $200, $400, $400 wearable. That was not meant for that. There are far better technologies. So it's not about my company, my sleep company, or anything else, it is about using the right tool for the right job. And so when you get to levels of detail where you're making, like, decisions about chemicals that are going to go in your body at high concentrations, in the example of medications

or supplements, or changing a mattress or anything else, like there's better technology, right? So we are going to run those studies on people. We're going to have a full-time environmental analysis going on in their bedroom. We're measuring blood and urine. Like, we're doing all these things. We're going to see, oh, this is exactly what's going on. Staging is almost irrelevant, right?

There's so many other things that matter. And then what we always do is we build normal homeostatic ranges. for people in their physiology and we will reverse engineer in the case of sleep sleep based on what actually produces the highest cognitive capacity the following days

not an arbitrary cutoff of minutes right and so just one example there I could give you those with any technology but if you really care about something like that if you're struggling with it or just want to maximize in this case sleep

great go to absolute rest way better version if you don't care about that at all and you just want to be roughly calibrated. Fine. You know, pick the watch and totally fine, right? You'd be the same thing of saying, you know, are you loading your data up into a polar,

your heart rate data or something? Well, for the average person that just wants to kind of know, like, what's my resting heart rate? All right, I probably don't need a $700 garment. Fine, fine. But if you want to use that to train, let's get the right technology for the right job. So I could keep going with technology,

but like that's philosophically how I generally think people should handle these things. Yeah, I mean, there's no bottom to the, you know, the depth of the pool that you can jump into with this stuff, you know what I mean? Like you can get super obsessed with graphs and, you know, training peaks and all these, all these, there's so much technology out there. But I guess what I'm asking is for, you know, I'm not talking about the elite person who's just got all this shit like dialed and has someone like you on their team. But the average person who does care, they've got a wearable, they're starting. to learn about HRV and resting heart rate and all these these sorts of things. And there is something interesting, like setting aside like absolute accuracy on these things to just see fluctuations day to day. And to notice that while we always know when we've had a good night

of sleep, like, you know, it's like there's a lot of perceived, you know, kind of perception that I think is important that gets overlooked with the data. But there are some things that are less intuitive. Like, sometimes I'll have a great night of sleep and I feel ready to go. And like, weirdly, like my HRV is much lower than I would have expected, or my respiratory rate is like wonky. And I'm like, oh, that's weird or interesting. And trying to understand, like, how to interpret that and then how to adapt our behavior around those things. Yeah. So that's really good. There's a handful of reasons that can explain exactly what you're talking about. That happens pretty normally, pretty commonly. Everything from algorithm changes on the back end of

the technology, right? Those companies will update their algorithms and then your data will jump all over the place. Step number one is that. Step number two with wearables, simple things like if they got twisted on your wrist or finger, you'll get those jumps in numbers. So step number one in this train is always, did you get real data? You may not have necessarily know that per se. Like, I feel great. I didn't wake up at all last night. I didn't even wake up to pee. But yet my sleep scores way down. All right. Almost always then one of two things happened. You had some sort of overnight push from the company or it moved on your hand somewhere. Great. Some of the ones are better and some worse at being robust against a change like slid on your wrist or your finger, but not all of them

are. There. Okay, let's assume you got good data and we didn't have like a connection issue or something weird like that. Now past that is day-to-day changes are almost always useless. And so we would strongly discourage people, especially from low-grade commercial trackers, from making a decision about what they're going to do today based on one day of information. Whether this is resting heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep stages, sleep time, HRV. Very rarely should you adjust your plan based on that day's numbers. I know those companies will sometimes give you like a recommendation. Yeah.

And generally, bless their hearts, they're doing the best they can because people want it to do. But I almost always would say throw that all out. Don't pay attention to that. Follow your plan. With something like those measures, HRV is a little bit different than heart rate and respiratory rate. Those are actually all three telling you very overlapped, but different things.

But something like resting heart rate, if this thing moves substantially, you're probably sick, right? If resting heart rate is way up past your norm, either you had a really psychologically stressful thing happen, probably not physiologically stressful, probably psychologically stressful, you're elevated, right, emotionally, and or you're sick. Then check your body temperature. If your body temperature's up and your heart rate's up, this is how they had their pre-diagnosis of COVID stuff on wearables. Boom, two days later, you're sick, right? If you're resting heart rates way up and your HRV is down, then now we're looking at physiological or psychological

stressor. These sync up, right? Those should happen in tandem. But heart rate, resting heart rate is a lagger. It'll hang tight for a long time. HRV is a much more sensitive measure for short-term psychological or physiological stress. So most likely your resting heart rate will not move, but your HRV will dip. So we're already like, you see we're triaging like what's real and what's not real from these different things. If respiratory rate moves, something happened. Could be sick.

could be psychological or physical, but that is going to be a really fast change. And if that thing moves up more than two and a half or so breaths per minute, that's a substantially different number. If your respiratory rate or if your HRV changes by 10%, it doesn't mean anything. Like nothing.

And so if your resting heart rate is up by five or seven beats per minute, that is very substantial. And so you have to understand what is the normal standard deviation of these individual measures and when should you care? And so for the most part,

if we're wearing something like that and I see resting heart rate is up by more than five beats and temperature is up and respiratory rates up more than two and a half to three, almost surely you're sick. And so we might actually, in that case, tone stuff down because we know,

hey, you need a lot of rest today. You feel fine, but you're about to be sick. Or for women, this is exactly how we can dial in menstrual cycle, like we know what part of your phase you're in if that matters for our training right so i should have clarified all those things i say like it only goes up here well that for the mail because we're pretty consistent with those things so that said um hrv is a is a fast indicator mover but it's also nonspecific so it's resting heart rate for that matter so it doesn't know maybe you were

just watching netflix and you watched some show that was not good for your down regulation or a thousand other things could be there. But just because that thing is off by 20% even, I might not care at all for you. Some of our people will have deviations of 5% or less in HRV, regardless of huge life stressors. And some will have 25% to 30% variations when almost nothing happened.

And so you have to understand, and it's not always true, but for the record, generally the healthier people are, the less that their HRV changes. in response to different things, right? So they're very resilient against at a plane flight, lack of sleep, whatever, and their HRV will move by 5%.

Not always the case, but a lot of times the folks that are worse off, you know, they were up an extra 45 minutes, and their HIV is all over the place. Yeah, it's bouncing all over the place. So summarize all that. Yeah, I mean, I think that's helpful. I appreciate, like, not having, like,

knee-jerk reactions to these, you know, individual data points within the context of a day to like overly, you know, alter whatever it was you were going to do. But looking for trends. And also, I think in the context of just, you know, talking about recovery in general, what also needs to be considered is the phase of training that you're in. Like, we want to go into these periods of, you know, functional overload for a reason where we're like pushing ourselves beyond our body's ability to truly recover in between our workouts because that's how you get these hyper adaptations

that result in the real kind of like performance leaps and gains. So, you know, talk a little bit about that. Yeah, I mean, boy, that's even more fun. So we said earlier, adaptation is a byproduct of direct stress, specific adaptation to impose demand. I can't create adaptation without front-loading stress. If we are putting stress in the body and then we're seeing biometrics

that indicate stress, that's a win. That's not a negative. In fact, it is a hugely positive thing. Like right now, we've got a couple of folks getting ready for UFC fights that are peak camp. Their metrics are not good. Right, because you want to crush them for a while.

We're trying to... You can't bounce back stronger unless you beat them up enough. Yeah, and we don't, yeah, I mean... Within reason. Yeah, of course. Where our football players are a little different spot, our NBA guys are in a completely different spot right now

because they're a different phase in year. Exactly. It's a different approach to trying to unleash top performance. Like if you have to do it consistently every other, you know, every weekend or a couple times a week, that's different from the person who's like, I have the Olympics in four years and that's all I care about. And that's, it's all different for our race car drivers,

and it's different for our example. executives and our leaders and our government officials, like it is 100% like what are we trying to do in this. And when we say phase, we're generally talking like a four to eight week chunk, right? So we're looking at this and saying, okay, how did your HRV look this month? What we like to do is we stack like months on top of like months generally, right? So how did January look to last January? Why? Because most people are doing the same thing in January that they did last January closer than what they did in August to January, right? Depending on that. So, yeah, we're taking those things, and we're looking at it not the day-to-day,

but at minimum kind of like five-day rolling average, sometimes seven-day rolling average, and then we're looking at that week-to-week variation. I'll give you really an example. We just ran, we just had a client that just started, had five years of previous data on, I think, whoop tracker. Okay, great. We had a bunch of other stuff. Well, we ran that stuff.

We actually had about 60 blood draws, two, to go off of. So fantastic. We were able to take all those data and look back and figure out immediately two big things that were happening in this person's life that they had no idea that were happening the same time

every single year. One of them was the practice of Ramadan. And so we were able to see exactly what happened during and for the two months post Ramadan. Not aware at all. And we were like, oh, did you... So next Ramadan, we have a strategy

going into Ramadan and we have this. So we do not expect your body because part of Ramadan, if you're not familiar with it, it's an intentional sacrifice. It would seem like kind of obvious. Like you're not eating, so there's going to be a consequence to that. Well, the point is to consequence, right? Like, that's one of the things you do it is,

it's a little bit of a show of self-sacrifice. So you're trying to push your physiology to the wrong. Great. So we're going to have different expectations of a bunch of different variables going in, during, and out. We're not trying to protect that much of it. What we're trying to protect is month two and three post. actually because like we want

no unexpected stressor that's like part of the self-sacrifice that comes with Ramadan great and now we have these other things but now we have to perform year round and so we can see things we've seen this stuff

in other clients too with like seasonal variations we've predicted all kinds of stuff from previous data and we can look and see yeah great so now when you get to this quarter we've had this once in the past too

do you realize quarter four is always your hardest quarter they're like oh no no no no no and they like, I'm like, no, no, no. Here's the clear data. And it's like, oh, man. So we need to have a different strategy for quarter four. Even though you feel like it's your lightest for your business, whatever, this is,

maybe it's a byproduct of lagging response because Q3, whatever the case is. But like, we can see this stuff now, and we have different expectations for when, in this particular case, training load is going to go down. It's like, we're not going to work as hard physically. Why? Because I know you're not going to respond. on, you're going to dig yourself into a bigger hole because of external stressors that are happening in there. And so we need to have a different approach, but we can push it like crazy

and quarter to. Training, physical training. It's like, okay, so it's a little bit of a different set when we can look back at this from a bigger perspective rather than like the day-to-day thing. So whether it's our athletes or our non-athletes, we have these general things of saying, when is overload good? When is it not good? Do we even realize when it's happening in this allostatic fashion. And then now we have to make the conscious choice of saying, we're good with overload here. I'm good with you being pushed really hard this quarter. And I'm good with all your numbers going down because that's what allows all of our numbers to go up the following month or following quarter or whatever the cases. So again, these are things we have access to when we have

like big data sets on people. But you don't need to have any of that to think about stuff like this, right? You can just zoom back and think if I'm getting tired, right now if I'm more fatigued and more irritable or man my brain's not working as well well are you in a heaviest training phase that that's probably a little bit like that's okay don't back off this is what your coach is trying to do and those are unfortunately like just some of the consequences that come with really high energy output the question then is once you back off once you complete the plan did you get that super compensation if so then we nailed it what you're saying essentially is your training program, A, whether you're a professional or an amateur, has to work

within the context of your life, and there's going to be all these other stressors, and your program should account for those, right? And there are going to be these periods of, you know, extreme output just by dint of the way your life is organized, right? And sometimes these are going to, you know, get in the way of your fitness goals. But there are also intentional periods where we want that functional overload for a reason. And that kind of opens up a broader conversation around periodization that I'm not sure we have time to do today. But the thing you want to avoid is the non-functional version of that,

which is where problems start to happen. Yeah. So we will lay this out on a little bit of a spectrum where if we were trying to go train right now, tomorrow we would wake up probably a little bit slower a little bit more fatigue than we are today that's overreached right we overloaded

rather I gave a stress that's great so if I overload and I keep overloading and I keep overloading I keep overloading and then I recover then I had some function to that training so we call that functional overreaching so you overloaded to a point where we're like you overreach a little bit

and you went into a hole maybe your numbers got lower maybe your times got worse fatigue got higher but you backed off for a couple of days maybe a couple of weeks

most likely a couple days then you came back and you felt great you've even performed better now that's the goal right that's what the holy grail that coaches are after right you're gonna get

you know two three weeks out depending on the sport things might get a little bit worse for a second but then once we back off and we taper we get this super compensation if you've ever taken like two or three days off from a training program

and you came back and you felt great you were not overtrained right you're not even necessarily non-functionally overreached you are probably doing exactly the overload that we were that you should be going after if you're at that phase though and you keep training hard or you train harder or your recovery capacity is limited and you don't sleep as well or whatever the case you keep cutting calories to get lighter or whatever and you go past that point Now we're into what's called non-functional overreaching. You take a week or two off and you kind of come back to baseline. That's a good indication that you are non-functional overreached.

So you were pushing, but it didn't actually produce any positive results. If you go past that, now you get into true overtraining syndrome, which takes weeks or months to come back from. Very, very few people have experienced true over-training. Yeah, there's a lot of people who are misinterpreting that and think that they're overtrained. If you've taken a couple days off and you feel better, you are not overtrained. And anyone who's been overtrained is going to be like, thank you. Because I took a year off and still felt terrible. That is a struggle.

So the overtraining thing is a guess at this point. What are the classic signs and symptoms of non-functional versus functional overreaching and overtraining? They're very same. They're very similar. A lot of the stuff, it could be lack of sleep, lack of appetite, could be weight gain, could be weight loss, could be sexual desire goes down, could be more injuries, could be, like, you don't even know. I mean, isn't overtraining just extended chronic, non-functional overreach?

Yeah, it's fatigue. And so the whole just gets deeper and deeper and deeper. And so the physiological distinction there is, you've probably created some real physiological damage. That's not just fatigue anymore, right? So if you're non-functionally overreached, your system is tired. If you have over-trained, you've probably damaged something. It doesn't mean it's irreversible.

But you've done some real damage where it takes, again, typically months to restore normal adrenal function, normal hormonal function, normal energetic demands, normal mitochondrial health. Like you've gone way past that point and created a little bit of damage. We're actually working on a project out of Phillips Larson is running this out of K.I. Where he actually has developed some metrics where we can look at pre-predictive mitochondrial dysfunction way prior to non-functional overreaching,

via blood markers. Oh, wow. And so what that means is like... So you can see when you're getting close to that edge. Yeah, and we can see it ahead at times. So we can actually take the blood and then predict this will net result down the line of positive, neutral,

or negative mitochondrial adaptations. that's huge it's not we're not ready because it's all about like where is that edge you know you're always dancing around the edge and you kind of have to go over it to realize where it is but if you know in advance then you don't have to

you know suffer the consequence of stepping over it it's just a really hard thing we can look I mean most people are going to use things like HRV they're going to lose autonomic nervous system measures but actually how close that ties to direct physiology is a really hard problem so unfortunately like we don't have numbers in terms of distance or volume or I can't say HRV will tell you that or resting heart rate.

Like there's no one metric that will define where you're at there. So it's just a little bit of a challenge to figure out. But a good coach will be able to dial this in for you over time. In thinking about some of the misconceptions or myths out there, I think it would be instructive to talk a little bit about fat adaptation because I think people don't quite understand what's happening here. And I'd like to just test my experience with this and see if it measures up with, you know,

how you think about it and what the science says. In my experience as an endurance athlete, obviously when you're going very long distances, efficiency and technique is important, but efficiency with your energy system is a different kind of efficiency. That's what you're trying to really develop. And the way you do that is by developing your body's

ability to burn fat as fuel, like your go all day? Like, what is the highest level of power that you can sustain over time without tipping into the aerobic, or the anaerobic side of things, right? And my experience has been that this is really a function of how you're training. And I think there's people who are thinking too much about the nutrition side of it and what they're eating. Am I wrong about that or how do you think about that? I'm not saying that like what you're eating isn't impactful in this, in this regard, but to me, it's just, it's really just about like putting in the work. Yeah. Okay. So is that, I get a sense. You're going to,

you're going to push back on that. Yeah. A lot. Good. In different areas. You're not entirely wrong. The impact of like a pre-exercise meal is greatly exaggerated. to, I think, kind of one of the points you're really getting out here. There's just so much language and so much conversations about things like this impacting fat burning

and oxygen capacity. Like, eat fat to burn fat, basically. And it's like, actually just go out and ride your bike for seven hours in zone two. Yeah, yeah. Right. So a number of things to think about here,

number one is the fact that you're kind of dancing around a topic that a lot of people will call metabolic flexibility, which is to say you want the ability to burn carbohydrates when optimal and fats when optimal. that term has been hijacked severely recently that does not mean maximizing fat burning doesn't

mean maximizing carbohydrate burning it literally means what i just said using the best of both worlds this gets confused because that when people hear endurance they tend to use the marathon example because we have a lot of data marathons were really classic exercise physiology stuff but the energetics the the metabolic efficiency versus the mechanical efficiency is kind of how you set this question about, really. It's not even close with a marathon versus an ultra. Like, they're as different as a marathon is to a sprint. As different. Why? What are the metabolic utilization proportions of a high-level marathoner? 80% carbohydrate. You heard that right. Like, you're going to be using well over 70% carbohydrate to run a marathon if you're fast. You're not doing that if you're running

65 plus miles. It's not even in the same stratosphere, right? You're not, The pace is completely different. So that number one, like, trips people up because you're like, oh, you don't need to use, like either way, you cut this wrong both ways, right? The pro-carbohydric cows are like, no, you don't have to do that. Look at the data from marathoners.

They're still burning carbohydrates, or the fat burning people are like, no, marathons, like, you've got to burn the most fat possible. It's like, nope, if you are ultra-efficient at burning fat in a marathon, you will be very slow. You can't run fast enough. Yeah, you have to run much faster in a marathon. It's not really, I mean, it's an endurance event,

but it's not really an aerobic engine event. Yeah, I mean, it's like... There is a lot of speed and anaerobic energy output, yeah. You have a four minute a mile. Yeah, it's insane. I know. But that's different than like the Moab 250 or something like that. Not even close.

Although there is like, there's some really cool stuff going on in that world because it's like, it's so new, you know, like pushing how far. you know people can run um and i think we're just at the beginning of like trying to discover like you know how to perform in that in that environment there's a lot of growth and learning available there but there there are people like there's this guy david roach and like he's he's like training like a competitive eater like it's for him it's like he's doing all his he has 15 years of endurance based building like he's got a massive endurance base so to your point of adaptations it's like what do i need to for his first hundred mile or he'd never run a hundred

mile race, even though it's been a runner forever, he's like, I don't need more endurance. I need speed. Like, nobody's running these things fast. I'm going to do all my work at threshold and I'm going to train my body to consume more grams of carbohydrate per hour than any human ever has before. And because that's going to be the thing that's going to be the differentiator here. And and, you know, in his first 100 mile race, he won. I think he broke the course record. So it's like a lot of attention is being paid to this guy. And so I think that just speaks to, not that other people aren't doing that, Tour de France riders are experimenting with caloric intake and all this sort of thing. And then there's bicarb and all these other things that are different variables

that get introduced to this. But it highlights the point that like we think of, oh, this is an aerobic event. This is an anaerobic event. And it's like we're always using these systems. You know, it's like we think of these things as binaries and they're really not. Yeah. So we've got a guy right now Ross Edgeley. I know Ross very well. I didn't know you were working with him. So he's swimming around the entire country right now. I have so many questions.

But go ahead. I think that's going to be a thousand miles total. He's had like there's been weird stuff with the tides and the surf and all that. Like he's gotten off the boat and on land a couple times. But I think he's back out there now. He's like halfway. Yep. Yeah.

He's going around Iceland. That's right. So there's been a bunch of storms come in and all that that he's had to hop off. I also had a guy named Jordy Sullivan on my show who did Ned Brockman's 1000 mile run and in that he walks through

the entire nutrition like what they gave them per minute for all the macronutrient Oh he was like Ned's guy nutrition guy exactly super interesting he laid that whole thing out

exactly what they ate when they ate it timing wise and what they took and all that it was so interesting to see what Ned did for the thousand so a thousand mile swim thousand mile run

I've had my I wasn't involved in that at all just Jordi told me all this stuff And then about a year ago I had this conversation with Cam And I was like dude we got to do something before Cam Haynes sorry Because he will just go out and run

Right he does nothing Like he just goes out and runs And then he just did I mean Gockins is like that too Nuts Yeah right So Cam did the before his book came out He did what's that what is that 250?

Coconut I think coconut Oh I know what you're talking about about like he did it like the day that his book came out like on his publishing date yeah i believe yeah it was like a 200 mile run or something like 200 mile race or something does nothing right preparation like like training wise he does but like nutrition wise like no something no strategy so you have like ned out here who's got a guy was everything measured and monitored and like tracked and then you just have cam who goes out at 55 years old grabs whatever's at the aid station smashes it down and and just goes right point of saying take

look at all three of these guys. Guy in his early 20s in Ned, guy in his 50s, and then Ross, who is 5 foot 2, 220 pounds of pure muscle, right? Yeah, 5 foot 2 in height and width. Yeah, exactly, right?

He's a bowling ball. All right, what's the common denominator among all three of them? Different training styles, different nutrition. Number one, they all have the tissue tolerance. You cannot run anything past, for most people, 10 miles,

the tissue will break down first. If you're a runner, your toes are going to go black, you're going to get blisters. If you're a cyclist, like your knee, your blowback, like number one,

success in these things has nothing to do with energetics at all it has, is your body physically capable of handling that volume? With Ross, it was a shoulder, right? So we had to go through

a whole bunch of stuff of this shoulder. Prior to this, had set back, the original thing he was going to do is different, but

had to get that done. Cam can just handle because he's been doing this for 40 plus years. So when I say he does nothing to show up to it, he has 40 years of tolerance in his joints

that says like, we'll handle that. It still annihilates him but you get it, right? Net is totally different but still is a runner by background. So nothing gets past

running fast, running slow in these events. The number one breaker is DNFs. Right? That's the number one thing that stops these shows. Just couldn't hit the finish line. Right?

so past that now you get to play a game however you want fueling wise because the second thing that'll break you is going to be fuel so what do you want to do you want to get more calories in per bite that's going to be fat you want to get in though more fast moving fuel that's going to be carbohydrate the downside though of getting in a load of calories via carbohydrate is your gut GI upset as well as you'll anyone that's done these things you'll just know you're so tired of goo and packs and candies. Like, you just, you can't get in 60 to 80 grams of carbohydrate per hour in the same form.

You just get, in fact, a lot of DNFs happen because people just can't eat anymore, right? They're just stomach, nauseous, okay. So with Ned, it was like a revolving strategy of different tactile fields of food and tastes and things like that. With Ross is a little bit different, okay, but the gut is trainable, right?

So the gut can be trained. You can greatly increase your amount carbohydrate ingestion per hour by practicing it. You can stay away from GI distress. You can play with different forms. And some people will handle manufactured food things better, whether these are resistant starches, and some people just will not handle it on race day.

Where fats come in the equation is like, okay, great, I can double my caloric intake over a marathon. That doesn't matter, really. Over something past that, the calories at some point will really start to matter. but a lot of fat utilization means that you're going to go slow and so you get to play this game of like

how do I balance the physiology quote unquote the bioenergetics my stomach plus actually just like the practical application of like getting this stuff in over 20 hours or 40 or 70 or whatever the thing is I mean if you look at what like Nick Bear is done for their stuff like you have totally different strategies to get there.

So I think it's very clear at this point we don't know what's going to maximize these things. Like we've got a lot of literature on marathon below. 1970s people started, in fact, the lab I came out have started doing,

had Frank Shorter and had those guys in the lab in the 70s. But stuff past marathon distance, we don't know a ton. Yeah, it's the Wild West. I mean, listen, the GI distress thing is huge.

It's still like the number one thing that like, you know, capsizes like people, you know, doing the Kona Iron Man. I think like heat plays into it and hydration and all, you know, like electrolyte balance and all these other things. But like gut distress becomes, you know, it's like this huge limiter and people spend years trying to figure it out. And then when it counts the most, still, you know, have an episode or something that results in a, you know, a cratered performance. But when you talk about like Ross Edgeley, like this guy's a freak of nature. Like I just don't understand. anything about like how it works with him.

You know, he's just... Neither do I. Eating cakes and like, you know, all kinds of crazy stuff. And he just has the most insane physique. It doesn't make any sense. Nothing. That he has that physique as an endurance athlete. Like, like, I've said to him many times,

like, you know that you would be a better swimmer if you just like stopped lifting weights, you know, and took five years. And I mean, look at people who excel at the Olympics in the 1500 meters or like open water swimming. Like, there is a body. type, you know? And your body type is actually the exact opposite of that. You know what I mean? It's like, how does it even work? Like, like, when you have, when you're carrying that much muscle

mass to, like, move your shoulder every time, like, how much energy does it take to, like, just move your, your arm in front of you? Like, yeah, I mean, to have the bicep size that Ross has I know. It's, it's comical, actually. But like, he put on, he's the one who's swimming around Iceland. No one else is. He did, what, 500 miles up Yukon? I had him on the show right after he did that. And one of my friends that I've known forever was one of his coaches, like, on the boat for that experience. And so he, I heard all the stories. Like, yeah, it was wild. Yeah, I mean, he's great. It's just like, if you were to ask me right now, here's a picture of this dude, is it physiologically possible for him to do any like the four things he's done? I'd be like, nope. No chance. No chance, right?

So, like, everything goes out the window. Totally. And he's, I think he gained 10 kilos prior to the Yukon one. I can't remember exactly, but, like, not lean at all. Like, the exact opposite of any swimmer you ever say. I don't know how technically good he is. I mean, for these open water adventures, though, like, yeah, like all the guy, all the people that would swim the English channel, like, they get really, they need the blubber.

You have to be like, yeah, you have to, like, it keeps you warm. I mean, he's in freezing cold water. It's wild. part of it too, right? Like super cold. So he manages, he just must be efficient in the water. And his body just handles. And he handles, because he has to get back in that water and keep moving in that water for months. Not days or weeks. It's going to take him months to swim around that day. The mental fortitude to do that is off the charts. Yeah. And he'll do the whole thing with both of his cheeks, like touching his ears because he'll be smiling so much. I know. It's crazy.

He's the wildish, right? And he's like this teddy bear. Yeah, he's like, he has this very sweet disposition. He's sweet. So we've actually, I said earlier, like, we don't know scientifically what's happening a lot of these things because it's really hard to collect data on this stuff.

But we just did one with way more toned down, but really cool, with Michael Easter. I don't know if you know Michael. I do. But he just did a really long hike. And we collected a bunch of blood and urine and stool and stuff before, after, and then

45 days post. So I was just working on those data this morning, actually. So that wasn't like a race, but I think it was not, I think it was 900 miles that he did. Oh, wow. I could be off there. Like a ruck with the, he was rucking or just walking. Did he have the

weight vest? He took all this stuff with him. So I'm not exactly sure right now what exactly the poundage of his tent and his food and sort of all that stuff was. But it took him, got six weeks or something like that again I'm sorry for

messing all these numbers up but you get to just it was just a really long thing he did and we're like what's going to happen so we took a bunch of metrics so again I was working on those days this morning but hopefully pretty soon we'll have that stuff out and we're gonna we'll put it out there like hey this is what happened because

the world like just doesn't know what happens if in his case it's just walking but I think he averages a marathon a day or plus you're like what happens when you do that And then he's sleeping outside. He's, like, just sleeping in his sleeping bag and eating whatever he can there.

And so I do know what he ate and how he handled all that portion of it, of it. So something. Like, I love this stuff. Anyone that's doing these things, like, hit me up. Yeah. Because I want to do it with him. I try to get Cam.

I'm like, dude, Cam, let's get Courtney. Let's do something. Mm-hmm. Because she's just another one who's just, like, she's insane. Well, she just, she, you know, performs at the highest level and seems to train intuitively, you know.

I don't know if that's changed. It's the last time I've spoken to her, but she very much is about feel. She's not caught up in, like, looking at a bunch of metrics. And I think maybe she has a coach now, but for a long time, she would just go out and, like, here's what I feel like doing today. And, and, you know, on some level, like, she's a freak of nature. But also, like, this sport is so young that I often wonder, like, what happens when the Olympic gold medalist at the 10,000 meters decides, like, they want to, they want to go right to Western.

States, not like in the sunset of their career, but like when they are still like, you know, at the age where they can perform at the highest level and to see what happens. Because I think, you know, there's a lot of, because it's so new and there really, you know, has never been any money in it. It hasn't attracted that kind of athlete to, you know, get off like the world circuit, track and field circuit and like enter into that. You know, what happens when the world's best runners decide, like, this is where we want to go. Yeah. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. If you look at the classic dogma of,

I'm not very versed in swimming and cycling, so I'll just keep using running numbers, but the classic like predictors of marathon success, right? There's the three that'll jump out always. It's VO2 max, mechanical efficiency or running efficiency, and lactate threshold, right? Physiologically, those are the three things. And so you've seen these combinations of like pre-fontaine and shorter,

like they'll win differently. Some of them are just 95 V02 maxes. Some of them are 75s, but they're more efficient and likely to Russia, right? So when you go to Ultras, that's not the case, though. What percentage of an ultra success is being predicted by VO2? Well, you're probably not going to finish an ultra

or even close with a low VO2 max. Your VO2 max is not going to be 40. You need it to be decent, but you don't need it to be in the top tier. I would imagine it's no, it's like very low on the pool of prediction, right? If anything, it might, it has to come up statistically significant, but it's probably going to explain single digit percent of variance, right?

So then what is it? It's not going to be like the threshold, maybe, I don't know, efficiency probably super high. But then like what other variable is there that's explaining success? Well, there's no metric to calibrate mental resilience, you know? And so in these cases, it's, you know, the mind that goes before the body. Like, it's the mind that's shutting everything down. And there are some people that are, have that thing where, you know, they can mute out whatever their body's trying to tell them and keep going.

But there's got to be something from a bio-energetic perspective that'll give you some physiological insight, right? Maybe that you can glean some insight into. Yeah, I mean, it would be really interesting to look into that. Like, have you ever, have you heard of the 3,000 miles self-transcendence run? You heard about this? No. So there's this race every year. This is a great name, by the way.

There's this race every year in Queens, New York. And it's an outgrowth of, there was like a, like a guru called Sreishin-Moy. And he's sort of like this, he's sort of this figure in New York City running. Like he was, he was sort of a transcendental thinker and has all these followers or whatever. And it was very much about, like, asceticism and self-action. visualization through like through running the discomfort of it as a means of like purification or whatever anyway he was a figure like in the i think in the 70s or 80s um but this race it was originally organized by his organization i suppose and it's it still goes on and basically

there's a city block in queens the most you know random like nondescript like normal block in the middle of queens and i think it's a one and and a half mile loop, if I'm not mistaken, it might be longer, I might be getting the facts wrong. But basically, a group of people start at dawn, and then at dusk, they cut it off. I think it's like, you know, I don't know, like 8 a.m. or 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. or something like that,

like for like a certain part of the day, you just go around this thing and then you go to sleep that night. And like the first person who gets to 3,000 miles wins. Oh, and there's a documentary about it. But the point, I bring it up because, so it goes on for like weeks and weeks and weeks. And if you're like in New York City around that time, you can just go and watch. There's no one there. There's no fanfare.

Like, nobody cares about this race. But it's insane what's happening. And I bring it up because if you look at the competitors and the ones that are winning, like, there are people that do it every year. And there's like, you know, a couple people that like have excelled at this race. And they just don't, you wouldn't even think they were athletes. I think one of the guys is like a Finnish mailman or something like that. And his, you know, he's just walking all day, delivering the mail at home. And so it defies, like, the, whatever you kind of imagine, like, like an elite performer in that world would look like.

They look very much like just everyday people. How long does it take them, roughly? I mean, it's got to be. I'm reluctant to say, I'd have to look it up. But, like, yeah, I mean, a long time. Yeah. You know, basically they're running the distance of America. I think it took Ned 11 or 12 days, 13 days, something like that.

his thousand mile thing. Yeah, he was doing it on a track and he was sleeping, you know, a little bit every night, but it was all self-contained on that, on that track. And he was doing it by himself. I'm running for 12 hours a day the same mile loop. But there's not enough people doing this to have like a data set where you can really like extract, you know, something meaningful. Like, are these people all weird outliers or, you know, what, what's the shared commonality here that is doing? I mean, I'm hoping. Like, maybe it's, maybe it is true. Maybe they are all just, elite fat utilization folks like maybe that

that is the whole key right I don't think that's the case but maybe it's the opposite I mean I have no idea what is what is this magical combination mental fortitude stuff aside all true but like geez there's got to be something physiologically even just amongst

the people that finish right so they all presumably to finish have to have some sort of freak ability mentally but like what is among them that separates the court needs from the everyone else's right the people that it just keeps smashing records yeah i don't know i don't know well they may not want anybody else to i'm uh i'm i'm signing you up to find out andy yeah sounds like a fun experiment man but on the subject of you know we were kind of talking

about fat adaptation and and maybe that's a good way to segue into um some misconceptions around exercise, fitness, and, like, weight loss. Like, a lot of people, it's, like, I exercise because I want to lose weight. I just want to lose my gut or whatever. Like, how do you frame weight loss or weight management in the context of fitness? Yeah, that's a really good question. We can tie this up a bunch of different ways. One, the starting places, if you look at exercise from a longevity or a body fat perspective,

it doesn't play the role that most people think it does which is not to say that it is not doing anything or you shouldn't do it but it is not the biggest explainer of body composition nutrition is going to win that game by a landslide I had Herman Ponzer on who's done a lot of work in this adaptive thermogenesis area right so out of his lab in Duke he makes a pretty compelling case as others have done as well that exercise will burn calories for sure, but if your only benefit or only thought of exercising is to burn

calories for the sake of fat loss, most people are going to struggle with that goal, because it's not going to burn the caloric numbers that you probably think. It does your tracker, your wearable, the number on the machine almost always exaggerates the caloric expenditure by sometimes 20 to 30 percent. So you're probably not burning the calories number one that you think. Number two, on the back end of that, a lot of times what can happen is your body will downregulate energy output to match the energy output you use with exercise. That keeps your balance at the same number.

The way that it can do that is a bunch of different ways. But one of them is it will reduce what's called neat. And so this is the amount of calories you burn, not keeping your organs and tissue alive, not during exercise, but it's this non-exercise. exercise, caloric expenditure. This is twitching. This is fidgeting. This is getting up and, you know, kind of pacing back. Like, it's all these things that people don't think is a big deal. Well, it turns out that need can be anywhere between like 5 and 20 percent of the total calories you expend throughout

the day. And so just to give a fake number, but to make it easier for people to pay to conceptualize this, let's say you burn 500 calories in your workout. Well, your body might reduce your spontaneous physical activity that day, by 500 calories. And so now you're back at like a neutral. So then what do you do? You're like, I'm not losing weight. I'll burn 600. And then your body...

Then your body will compensate by like less fidgeting and moving around. And a bunch of other stuff, right? Hello, this is an adaptive thermogenesis. It's not that simple, but roughly this is the idea. And so really, this gets then manipulated into like, oh, I told you, calories in, calories all it don't matter. you're like, okay, that's not at all what that says.

That simply says we're not paying attention to that equation appropriately by just looking at the number you burn on the treadmill from your run. So that said, if you look at the data on people who are successful at weight loss and who are more likely to keep that weight loss off in the long term,

which is what we really want. I don't want to just lose weight in six weeks. I want to lose weight in six weeks and for it to be gone for forever. exercise is a very strong correlate to long-term successful weight maintenance. And so it's to say it's not the thing that is going to burn the calories that's going to help pull the body fat off you, but it is contributing a lot to keeping you at that body composition as time and years go on.

It does a whole bunch of things. This doesn't even count the myriad of health benefits outside of just calories and body composition that come with exercise. And so when people talk about Herman and other people's work like this, it gets lumped in a lot with like, see, I told you exercise is overrated or you don't need to do it.

And like, that is not the message at all. The message, though, is fair to say if your only strategy to lose body fat is to go run more, that's probably not the most scientifically established method to do it. Calories from food is the win by far. So when we build fat loss programs, it's going to have an exercise component

and a nutrition component. But if you had to pick one and all you cared about was losing body fat, that's an easy choice. That will always be nutrition. So that is like the framework we have to start with. From like a misconception and misunderstanding

of what can happen in that area, we want to use exercise to build lean muscle, to build mitochondrial and cellular health, to build connective tissue, enhance the nervous system, to work on endocrine health and the immune system and cognitive function and brain health and bone health, on and on and on. Those allow you to then sustain exercise for a long time, to be alive, to be more vigorous. Quality of life and fall reduction

and balance, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all these things are really positively associated with exercise in correlation and causation. But if you want to lose the number on the scale, nutrition has got to be at the forefront of that. Weight management being a byproduct of fitness and exercise, but shouldn't necessarily be the goal for complicated reasons. Yeah. And there's the adage of like you can't out-train a bad diet. Like if you, you know, if you're just like, well, I do all this exercise so I can like,

you know, splurge and do these other things, like, that's not the best way to think about it. Like, you're just, you still have to be really careful about what you're putting in your body and how much. Yeah, I mean, that's going to be the centerpiece, right? So we, you know, the body management issues, but recovery. Training again, how do you feel the next day? Were you sluggish? Did you not want to do anything? Were you more irritable?

That gets into a whole conversation about, like, fasting and training, too. Yeah, yeah. Which I have a lot of opinions about. Yeah, and we just published a fasting study a few weeks ago. So, yeah, I mean, these are all variables in the equation, right? But the thing is that is going to be the place. For fat loss, specifically, nutrition is going to be the play there. I think the thing that happens, though, is when you are really connected to your fitness,

you then, like, feel better and you sleep and you sleep better because you're like, you know, you're just like, you're depleted at the end of the day and your sleep tends to be deeper. And when I don't know about you, but when I. sleep well and I get up, like, I don't have all the cravings to eat the lousy foods that I, when I'm tired and I'm like, you know, like, I find myself reaching for all these, you know, foods that aren't good for me that when I'm really well rested, like, just isn't an issue. That's not an anecdote. So this, this becomes like a self-perpetuating thing. Oh, that's a very real, very well-established scientific field that you just described.

There is a really, in fact, there's been really interesting studies where people have gone into metabolic wards, put people on identical isochloric diets, same macronutrients, same calories, and simply restricted sleep in groups, and you will see pronounced changes in body composition, even when you put them in these short-term 60-8-week things and you're only regulating sleep. Now, you put that in a real-world living scenario, very clear connections between suboptimal or even chronically restricted sleep and things like ghrelin and leptin. These are the hormones that control, your feeling of fullness, or your hunger. Those things will get altered in the short and long term. There's also a very clear connection between carbohydrate consumption and desire

for carbohydrate post a acute or single bad night of sleep. That also extends to chronic sleep. When we cease up to rate deprivation, I'm not even meaning like sub four hours. We're just talking to folks that are sub seven, right? Really sub six is like a really pretty hard line. now obviously carbohydrates are great for us but what that means is they're not switching out fats and proteins for carbohydrates they're simply going for higher food density and also be clear it's not necessarily just carbohydrates it's more energy dense foods that they go for if this needs to sound like treats to you fine that's not really what it is but you're going to go for foods that have a lot more calories per bite that's not a rich thing that is a been shown as most humans are going to have that response on a poor night of sleep. What that does to go, to complete our circle here, is we actually know those things will directly impair the next night of sleep. And so we see this cycle of bad sleep leads to obesity, obesity leads to bad sleep. That is exactly what happens. That's not like a, and we could go over why obesity

directly impact sleep and a bunch of ways people don't realize. But yeah, it's a really, really tough thing to be in to where you're going to continue to do that. Not only then you stack on secondary and tertiary problems like when you're tired, you're probably not as likely to go work out. So you're not going to be physically active.

You're more likely to relax. You're more likely to watch TV. Like you have all these things which then derive caloric expenditure not even further and we're back in the same sort of loop. If you take that time to actually sleep and recovery, you can get out of loop, but you're not going to do that. You're going to work, get your job done. You're going to take more stimulants. So we get into

this stimulant, then we have to take sleep things. And you, well, right. Yeah, you're just, you're in that spiral. I'm in a low grade version of that right now because I had, I had spinal fusion surgery about three months ago. Okay. L5S1 fusion. Went in from the front, went in from the back, like, you know, like kind of a major ordeal. In fact, only two days ago, I had a, I had an appointment with my surgeon two days ago, and he told me for the first time that I could take the brace off, so I've been wearing a back brace.

Like, I'm in early recovery from this, and it's been extremely challenging for me, you know, because I thought like, oh, well, like, at least at like six weeks, I'll, like, kind of feel normal, you know, and I'm not allowed to do anything but walk, really, and he's only now going to refer me to PT, so I haven't done any of that. Wow.

I mean, I had chronic grade two, Isthmik, Spondiola, thesis, like, incredible nerve pain. Like, I've been hampered by this for years, and it's really gotten in the way of, like, not only my ability to, like, do the things I love, but just quality of life, right? And so I waited way too long to have this procedure, and I'm glad that I did it. So my relationship with, like, movement and fitness that was already, you know, becoming, like, significantly impaired. But now I'm like, I can't do anything.

Yeah. And so I don't feel like myself. And because I'm not exerting myself, I don't sleep as well. And so then I crave, like, the, the greasy foods and all that kind of state. And so just observing that, like, knowing that, okay, well, I'm in, like, this is, this is interesting, you know, like, how am I, I've never been in this situation before and, like, how am I making decisions and, and what is my attitude towards this? Like, am I resentful? Am I approaching it like this is an opportunity and a new beginning? all of which is to say that, you know,

I'm empathetic to somebody who's in kind of like a cycle that they feel like they can't break out of and, you know, mine has an endpoint, hopefully. But layered on top of this is the fact that, like, I'm 58, you know? And so it's like, okay, it's been three months. I mean, like stuff starts to sag, putting on a little weight, you know, like here I'm like supposed to be this well-fitness pot, you know, like, it's like, yeah, I'm not looking super great right now, you know?

And also contending with the fact, that when the gates open up a little bit and I am able to resume a program, how am I doing this consciously? Like, I think I have this incredible opportunity to just restart everything. Like, 100% from the beginning, relearn how to walk, like my posture, like how I walk in my posture, I'm already on that. But then I have this opportunity to like, if I had to start all over again with everything, like, what would that look like and what would I do? And, how does the fact that I'm like inching up to 60 play into that knowing that it's more difficult to build muscle, it's more difficult to retain muscle mass, like all of these things become like

an added challenge on top of it. And so it's kind of a cool adventure. It's like, oh, I get to like reframe the whole thing and decide anew like what kind of athlete I want to be and what my relationship with my relationship with all of these activities that I love is going to look like. Yeah, that's That's awesome. What's the next mile marker you have? My next appointment is six months. And that's really, at six months is when like the fusion is set in enough where people start to really be able to do stuff. And it really depends upon the surgeon. Like my surgeon's very conservative. Like I know other surgeons who perform the surgery were like, you could be on an exercise bike now or doing certain things. And my guy's like, I really don't want you doing that. And I realize like as much as I would love to. to be, you know, in a pool with a kickboard kicking or something like that. Really, like, the risk is too high, like, because the last thing I want is to disrupt the fusion. So it's like, okay, I'm going to take his advice.

But now I'm going to start some PT, and we'll see what that looks like. I'm sure it's going to be super mild. Yeah, yeah. So you'll, you'll hopefully at the six-month mark, be a little bit cleared to do something. Yeah. Which you don't know yet. The fusion really, it takes like a year, basically, for it to be like,

okay, it's totally locked, but it's six months from what I understand. It's safe to start, you know, lifting some weights, not too heavy, like getting back in the gym a little bit. Like, everything comes with, you know, cautionary. Yeah.

But you get to rebuild moving patterns. Yeah. So if you were my coach, like what would be taught, I got to let you go. We've got to end this soon. But like what would be your kind of like top line pieces of advice? Yeah, we would spend, I would say, I don't know, I'm making a number up,

but probably a month of just moving your body, everything from your toes to your fingertips. And I really mean that because you have to actually learn a new sling pattern. So what I mean by that is, is like your right shoulder, the back of your right shoulder to the back of your left heel,

have connection. And that connection point runs through the blowback. That whole circumstance is different now. And so the way that you pronounce any movement, whether you're reaching for a pen, your desk or typing or standing is a little bit off and so now we have to re understand like what that looks like i don't know if it's going to be substantially different maybe the same but we're going

to go into like this would be really classic crawling stuff to sit through things to uh multiple step movements that are in multiple planes i probably wouldn't be worried at all about any sort of numbers and volume, it is going to be movement. Like, how many different movement planes can be in? Can you start to feel different positions? And then we have to learn, like, what is, what is that going to look like? What's that not going to look like? But we're going to want joints through all ranges of motion, and we're going to want them

in sequence. Those are, like, the two biggest things that we would go after without question is hips, for sure, have been stuck in a restricted position, right? You're not doing anything. So we're going to open up all that stuff. But we want that with every joint, including your neck, including your toes. through all ranges of motion. We'll put on load and fatigue, whatever,

but then we really want to start playing with sequencing. Like, how does it go when we go from a lateral lunge to a reverse pivot, step up, and reach? What was it looking like? I don't know, I do that. Can we crawl? Can we lateral roll? Can we eventually tumble?

Can we do different things like that? What does it look like when we do some rudimentary pliometrics, right? Some just do stuff, just like pop right there in a stance. what happens when we load through the heel like can we really actually drive vertical load axial loading through your low back intentionally where do we find an aggravation point so we know like where to stay away from

and things like that so it would really be all that stuff for a month actually now that I'm saying it probably three months would be a huge focus and then we could put some volume some endurance low level zone one stuff on it probably on an incline some other different ways like that

but like that would be the thing is like let's really get those two phases I mentioned dialed down and everything else like we got plenty of time to put muscle back on it brings us all the way back to the beginning of the conversation with like efficiency and technique

but this is like you need technique for life you know like how are you holding your body just as a human being and how does it move and how does it not move and yeah like these are things like you know you just don't even think about man you mentioned like this is an opportunity right

I can't tell you how many people from 30 to 60 years old that we've coached and if you look at them straight in the face and go if I can maximize your muscle in the next year or I can make you have no pain for 50 years they all would say no pain for 50 years right but none of them will take that action yeah none of them will do it what I mean

if I say wait great what if we didn't I lift weight like I'm a strength training guy what if we didn't lift a single weight for a year and what if you had the worst body composition of your life for that year but we used that year to step back and we rebuilt all this stuff we got all that pain out of your system what do you think this is going to look like 50 years from now 30 20 5 years from now are you going to really be concerned

about the year that you didn't max your bench are you to be so stoked you have not not had a list joint pain for 40 years. I know what you're going to pick 40 years from now. I know what you're saying right now, but like, will you actually commit to it? And it's really hard for people to do. But when you can do that and go, okay, wait a minute, I'm 36 years old. Oh, my God. Yeah, we're going to lose some strength. We're going to lose some endurance. Your numbers are going to go down. We're going to correct all this stuff, and we're going to set you up on a 60-year platform for great health.

Those are the exciting conversations we get to have. And they typically end up being like, yeah, just give me to the race in six weeks. Yeah. Yeah, because that's the human condition, right? And that's the choice that I would make. But now I've been forced, you know, to make another choice. And that's why it is a cool opportunity because like it's that idea, again, of like a different kind of discipline.

Like, you know, I want to. As soon as I get the green light, I would just want to go back and do all the things I was doing before, just hit it, you know? And it's like, do you have the discipline to like listen to what Andy is saying and actually take advantage of it, which is going to require ridiculous amount of patience and will just be annoying and frustrating, like 99% of the time? For sure. It's terrible. It's the least fun exercise of your whole life. Well, time will tell. Time will tell. I got to like 5% of what I wanted to talk to you about in the outline. So I don't know if I can induce you or convince you to come back here, but this was amazing. And there's a million

other things that we could talk about. But you really are one of the, if not the, like, leading voice out there when it comes to the science of fitness. And I really, I really appreciate what you're doing. It is a public service. Man, I really appreciate it. I don't really get many chances to be on some of the OGs. No, not many people have been around this space longer than you have. So when Rob told me, I was like, yeah, man, it's super excited. So it was awesome to be here. I'll come back anytime, man. This is great.

I appreciate it. If you want to learn more about Andy, he has his perform podcast, which you should check out, which is just a vault of insane wisdom. You also did that limited series with Andrew. I think there's like six episodes on Huberman Lab where you guys go deep on a variety of subject matters. So if there's anything that we talked about today where you're like, hold on, I'm like, why did you move on? I wanted to know more about that.

It's like all in there somewhere, I promise you. Yeah. And maybe the best way to kind of end this or take us out, Andy, is if you could just, you know, share a little bit about, like, why all this is important? Like, why should we care about fitness? Like, why does it matter? Why is it important that we stop and really kind of consider our fitness in a deeper way than maybe we're used to? You know, the scientific answer to this would be to walk you through. the research on longevity, wellness span, quality of life, health span, all that. You've probably

heard that before. If not, just guess. It matters in terms of how well you're going to live, how long you're going to live. But I'm not going to answer it that way. I think for you, the way that I would say this would be, as far as we know, you get one ride in this vessel of a human body and if anything I think you just owe it to that to say you have the capacity to do something and you should explore that and you should play that and you should live in that and you should thank it right you have the ability to run hundreds of miles apparently or swim a thousand miles and we would have not thought that was physically possible you have the ability to feel better. You have the ability to be a leader or role model for your children in your physical

expression. And there's so many other ways we can do this with mental health and great ethics and being a good person and being nice. But with just your physical fitness, you have the control of as much of your body that you have control of. And we're all broken in different ways and have limitations and strength, but you still have some control there. So I think it is the number one reason And I would say why we should care about our fitness is you have a responsibility, in my opinion, to your own physiology that says, we're here, ready to rock, give us a chance to play. Beautiful, man. Thank you. Appreciate you. Thanks for coming today, man.

Thank you. That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources, related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com, where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, voicing change, and the plant power way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and or

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See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste. You know what I'm going to do.