WHOOP Podcast - World-renowned HRV researcher Daniel Plews discusses everything you need to know about performance and training

Episode Date: January 27, 2021

Dr. Daniel Plews has been at the forefront of some of the most groundbreaking heart rate variability research over the last 10-plus years. He sits down with WHOOP VP of Data Science and Research Emily Capodilupo and VP of Performance Kristen Holmes to discuss how you can apply your HRV data to your training. They dive deep on how HRV can guide your training (4:08), why HRV is foundational to the WHOOP recovery metric (6:19), keys to excellent recovery (13:57), avoiding overtraining (14:56), looking at HRV over multiple days instead of one day (16:51), adapting to a training stimulus (20:11), working out based on recovery (25:33), understanding nutrition and eating for your performance goals (33:22), and why fasting and training don't always go hand-in-hand (39:22).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the WOOP podcast. I'm your host Will Ahmed, founder and CEO of WOOP, where we are on a mission to unlock human performance. That's right. We build technology across hardware, software, analytics. That's designed to improve your health. Check out the WOOP membership at WOOP.com, and you can get 15% off if you use the code

Will Ahmed. That's W-I-L-L-A-H-M-E. D. All right, we got an amazing episode, world-class, HRV expert, Dr. Daniel Ploos, HRV, of course, being heart rate variability. This is a deep dive on heart rate variability with an expert. Dr. Ploos has been at the forefront of some of the most groundbreaking HRV research over the last 10-plus years. He sits down with VP of data science and research, Emily Capitaluco and our VP of Performance, Kristen Holmes, the dynamic duo, to discuss how you can apply your HRV data to your training. He's also an expert on nutrition and shares his philosophy

on how to best shape your diet for the outcomes you're looking for. It's amazing. So much of heart rate variability research is core to the foundation of whoop. I mean, it was what I was reading when I was in college that made me say, wow, if we could measure heart rate variability continuously, what kind of a product could we deliver to the market? And Emily and Kristen and Dan touch on that. They also discuss how Dan started researching HRV and why he believes it's one of the best metrics for guiding training, why looking at HRV over multiple days is more important than a one-day snapshot, what steps you need to take to avoid overreaching during your training, how to best eat for your performance goals, and why there's no one blanket diet

everyone should follow. And Dan's three pillars of excellent recovery, nutrition, sleep, and training periodization. This episode is a deep dive on the science of HRV and nutrition. I know you'll find something useful to apply to your life. So without further ado, here are Dan, Emily, and Kristen. Hi, everybody. I'm Emily Capitaluppo, whoops vice president of data science and research. And I'm joined by my podcast other half loop VP of performance science christian holmes hi everyone today we are also joined by an incredibly special guest dr daniel pluse hey thanks for having me on dr flus got his phd from a ut in ockland new zealand where he studied hrv one of our very favorite topics at whoop and he is responsible for an impressive amount of

our understanding about the relationship between hrv and athletic performance and how to use HRV to optimize your training. Beyond HRV, Dan's 54 publications span functional resistance training for Ironman triathlon, plasma acidosis, anaerobic power reserve and cycling time trial performance, HRV and blood glucose for the athletic populations, and ketogenic diets and their impact on athletic performance. It's because of Dan's HRV research that I first learned about his work eight years ago, but his research is actually not the only reason why we're so excited to have him on today's pod. Dan is also an extremely accomplished athlete himself. He's been a competitive endurance athlete since he was nine, and in 2018 set a world record for his age group

at the Ironman World Championship in Kona, Hawaii. He also coaches other athletes, including elite triathletes and the New Zealand national sailing, rowing, and women's kayaking teams. And many of his athletes have won Olympic gold medals. So he's clearly on to something with his coaching and research. Thank you so much for joining us today. We're really grateful. So let's get started at the beginning. So you did your PhD on heart rate variability way before heart rate variability was cool. Can you tell us a little bit about how you got into HRV and how did you decide that of all of the things in the world, that's what you wanted to spend your PhD studying? I first heard about high variability when I was in Singapore. So before I moved to New Zealand, I was based in

Singapore. And over there, I was an exercise physiologist working for the Singapore Sports Council at the time. I'd done my master's by that point. My master's was in running after cycling, basically, looking at the different effects of different types of cycling power outputs. So like, we're looking at the sarcastic nature of cycling on running an economy, moved to Singapore, for which as a sports scientist there. And when I was there, I was fortunate enough to meet Professor Paul Lawson, who was at the time doing a kind of a distance learning with Edith Cowan University of Singaporean students.

And I was running the lab for that distance learning course. So we met, we hit it off, and he was coming over to New Zealand to be the head of physiology for the high performance sport in New Zealand, which is in charge of the Olympic team. And so he was doing a lot of HRV and he says, do you want to come over to New Zealand, work with me at a hard form of support New Zealand and also do a PhD at the time. There's a hot topic at the moment. Everyone's really interested in heart rate variability. So that was kind of my first look into it.

And I started doing some reading about the area. And I don't know if anyone's ever just read about HRV for the first time. I was overwhelmed with confusion, to be honest with you, when it comes to all the time domain analysis and the frequency analysis. And back then, you know, HRVs, I think HIV has come a long way now that it's been simplified, simplified to, for better understanding. That's not simplified for the worse. In my opinion, it's been simplified for the better because it now has better practical application for athletes. So, yeah, so I did lots of reading and that was that, came over to New Zealand. Then we designed a PhD all around hardware availability with the idea

that we wanted highway variability to some way guide and be practically applicable for training. And of course, at the time as well, one of the papers that had just been published was the Kivalenium study that was a highway variability guided training, his very first one that had ever done. So that was also something that was really exciting and kind of wanted to get. Yeah, 2007, right? Yeah, 2007, yeah. Yeah, that's a great paper.

And we should link it in the show notes. because that's actually fairly foundational to our recovery score. Do you want to talk a little bit about what it was that he found? Yeah. So, I mean, there's been, I mean, there's been a number of studies since, but I think he was the first person to pretty much guide training based on heart rate variability. So he had two groups. One group just trained under a normal training program.

And then the other group looked to basically they did high intensity training or hard training when heart rate variability was high, and on days when heart variability was low, they did low intensity training. And that's basically how he guided the training. And from memory, I think he used one or two standard deviations above the norm. Maybe it was one sample, one or two standard deviations above the norm. He would do high intensity training. And if it was less than that, it would do low intensity training.

It's been a while since I've read that one, but I think it was something along those lines. But since then, he's also repeated that study. And there was another study that was done by Visterian as well. He also showed the same thing. Another couple of studies come out this year from the Spanish groups that I was author in one of those papers as well, looking at block periodization versus HIV-guided training. That also had mostly positive results.

And more recently, I was part of a meta-analysis that changed in V-O-2 max using heart-variability guided training versus normal training and the overall meta-analysis which showed also positive results for higher variability guided training. But yeah, small-known, we call it a meta-analysis, but it's quite hard to do a very good meta-analysis when you're talking like, you know, six or eight studies,

so but still, it's definitely promising. Yeah, so the paper that you helped co-author that you just mentioned came out in June, which we should definitely link in the show notes. I actually just read it. I think it's a great paper. You talk about sort of two groups, of athletes, they all happen to be elite cyclists in your case who were following either a

block periodized or an HRV-based training program. Can you define those two different methods for people who aren't familiar? So block periodization basically, it's exactly what it says. It's training in in blocks of time where you're really focusing on a specific adaptation or a specific area of training and then you move on to the next block and then you move on to the next block. Whereas This HRV was more, it was more based on, just like we talked about before, where they're doing the high, it's not really based on anything other than what the HRV is telling you. So high intensity training when the HRV is high and low intensity training when the HIV is low. And the block periodization is kind of quite traditional now. So people will

come up to a race and they'll training blocks up until that race will kind of do a general phase, a specific phase and the competition phase up to the race and then the general phase competition phase, a specific base, and then the competition phase up until the rate. And that's kind of how everything's gone into those kind of small blocks. And block periodization, I think, for folks, just to further simplify, block periodization is quite rigid, right? And, you know, when you're using hearty variability to guide training, that's very fluid, right? It's based on the prescription is, is, of training is based on your recovery level, right? Which is, which is exactly. And it depends which school of camp you sit in really because like the whole area of periodization um in my eyes at

least i believe is a bit of hogwash anyway and it's based on a lot of dogma there's really no evidence to suggest that periodized training is does anything that's more beneficial um and there was a there's a great paper that was written by keely um i think it was in the 2010 2011 and there's title of yeah it's a great paper yeah 21st century dogma or something like that periodized He just pooh-poo's the whole periodization. He puts forward really good cases. And the reason being, and this is where HRB can be so great, is because the adaptation to any kind of training stimulus is different

depending on how you approach or you present yourself at that training session. So even if you're, if you present yourself with low motivation, you present yourself with low sleep, you present yourself with low intent compared to someone who presents themselves with high motivation, high intent, they actually get better adaptation from doing that training session. So that's why having this pre-idea that, okay, this week we're going to focus on this, this week we're going to have a recovery week, this week. And you know, you might not need a recovery week at that time. And likewise, you may need to do a recovery week when you're

actually doing a high-intensity period. So it's just, yeah, I'm not a fan of basic periodization, really. So I think you should, my philosophy is that you, if it's an event, you have certain key determinants of that performance, whether it be anaerobic power, VO2 max, and all those items should be touched at one time. But how much you're touching on those particular items depends on where you are away from the competition. So you might do a little bit of, like, more of your kind of VO2 max work. If you're further away from competition, if you're training for an event that requires a V-O-2 max, whereas when you get closer to the competition, you're probably just doing a little bit more of that, but it doesn't mean you neglect it

really, really early on, and that's kind of the way that I coach and train my athletes. Yeah, Dan, and the results of your paper really back up your dislike for block periodization. Do you want to share what you found? The actual results were reasonably similar, but the real take-home was that the HRV guided training group actually did a little bit less training as well and had slightly better results. But it wasn't actually significant, but depends on where you, I mean, to me, that's a positive result. Yeah. And I think that really speaks to the idea that you were just getting at where like if you show up to training and your body's not really ready for that training,

that, you know, you're not going to get the benefit out of it. So the fact that they got similar results with slightly less training is really interesting and kind of speak to that, you know, train, smarter, not harder. And it's the exact point that, you know, you do, I always like to say when you, when you train, you want to get as much bang for your book as you possibly can. And by doing, being smart, it's a way forward. Emily and I and just generally, we talk a lot about this concept of showing up with capacity, you know, and how that is actually, you know, kind of what you're doing away from training

is actually most predictive, right, of next day capacity. And I think it's probably a little bit different, Dan, in your world and that, you know, you're doing multiple sessions. This is tip of the spear, super and super intense training. And that's obviously going to have quite an impact on heart rate variability. But for folks who are not trying, you know, training for Kona, for example, or an Iron Man, but are just, you know, working out for an hour a day, it's those other 23 hours that are really, really critical in terms of how they deal with them that will be most predictive of next day, HRV, next day capacity. Do you have any insights there on, you know, just for the regular Joe and then also for the Kona type athlete and how to deal with those other 23 hours? Yeah, well, I guess, I mean, it all comes down to recovery, right?

And for me, I always think of recovery as as three main pillars. And the three main pillars for me are nutrition, sleep and training. I'm going to say the word training periodization. But what I mean by training periodization is basically how you, how you, how. where you place different training types. So, for example, if you're doing a high VOTOMAT session, you at least want to leave 48 hours before you would attempt to do that other type of session, whereas if you're doing kind of more of a threshold-based session,

a threshold or kind of a tempo-based session, you can probably leave more like 24 hours. So it's that it's the backing up of training sessions that require high heart rates and therefore high sympathetic stress where the real problem comes in. I actually had a question the other day. Someone asked me, I have like an education community. And one of the questions that came through was, when is hard too hard, too hard? Can I actually go too hard in training? And my response was, well, it's really, it's impossible to go too hard.

The only thing you can go do is go too hard too frequently. So there's that is the, that's the problem when it comes to, to that sort of thing. And so it's, so that's a, so that's the training periodization. So having a good spacing between training and knowing what the right training types is really key. And also, of course, sleep quality, sleep hours and nutrition, I think, is a massive one, you know, sticking away from refined foods, low processed foods, low sugar. I think it has massive implications on recovery as well. But of course, that's the beauty of HIV generally. When you compare it to other training models, you might be familiar with like performance

management chart, the Bousseau model, and there's also the Bannister model. You know, there's There's no, with those models, it's directly thinking that there is a relationship between load and therefore fatigue, where it has no implications of what's going on in other people in your life. So lots of home stress, lots of work stress, all those sorts of things. They also have implications on your HRV. They also have implications on your overall sympathetic stress. And that can therefore affect how you present to that session. And so they're all the things that you have to consider. And that's the beauty of HRV because it captures everything in one go,

which is what I really like. Yeah. So we at Woop, we're obviously huge, huge fans of HRV. It's the foundation of our recovery score. It was one of the very first features that we built. But as someone who both researches HRV and applies it as an athlete and a coach, what would you say are the limitations of HRV-based training and what are this kind of like things to look out for?

Well, I think one of the things, one of the main things, and I've written about this at length in a number of my papers, is the, I don't think in all certainty that a one-day measure is the way forward. I think you need to look at kind of rolling averages is always something that I've been more of a fan of to give a better idea of what's happening and whether I'm going to make a change based on training, you know, because you can definitely have some false positives on some days and vice versa. Like some, you know, for example, there are, you can have some examples, especially people are doing high levels of endurance training where you get really, really high heart rate variability, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they're feeling that great. So there's that to be aware of as well. I've always thought it's not the silver bullet and the question that the one single metric that you should look at, you need a variety of metrics to really know whether you're going to change training or not. And often, and often it's the, it's really, it's providing you with more

certainty in a decision rather than making the decision for you. And that's the way I like to, I like to particularly use HIV and all metrics, to be fair. So, you know, if an athlete presents and I'll see that they've got low HRV, their motivation to train is low, they had a bit of a bad session yesterday. And all those things together would make me make a decision, not just based on one metric on its own. So that's smart. Yeah, very, um, And actually, your research, especially some of those earlier papers between like 2013 and 2015 about the variability and heart rate variability actually being more important than heart rate variability did definitely inform our recovery score. And that's why we have a separate recovery score and

like your daily HRV measure where we're modeling some of those effects and dampening sort of one-off values and focusing more and trend-wise what's going on. At the end of the day, I guess the CV, the CV of the HRV, the day-to-day CV of the HRV, you know, that's another... I just want to explain that, Dan, real quick, for a number two. Okay, so the CV, the day-to-day coefficient variation of the heart rate variability. So basically, how much is your heart rate variability score changing on a day-to-day basis is another score that you can add to your HRV score on that day to help you make a decision? So what I found in, I think it was my first ever publication actually was in Egypt and I think it was 2013 when we looked at the non-functional overreach athlete and we found that in that particular case, the athlete who became non-fluently overreach, they had descending heart rate variability and also descending day-to-day variations in the HRV. So that's what we found in that particular case.

But I know that since then, Andrew Flat has kind of also suggested that when someone goes into a new training stimulus, for example, you typically see more day-to-day variation in the hardware variability, which can also mean that they're quite highly stressed. So to me, it's now looking like it's kind of both sides. You know, too much, too little variation and a lot of variation is almost a bit of a warning sign. So, yeah, so that's the old, the CV, the CV and the HRV, I think that was actually the time. of the paper that we published was the main the main the main crunch of it so Daniel can you kind of talk in practical terms for you know a member who's who's trying to use hearty variability to understand you know how they're adapting to a training stimulus what would be your advice on on how to how to think about the data and you know when to back off when to push um let's say if

they're if they're trying to get bitter so they're really trying you know they're functionally overreaching you know what would be that cadence um that you think would would be kind of ideal for someone to shoot for? So I think first, I always think context before content. So you have to think of the context of the training that that person is doing. So if I speak about specifically an Ironman or an endurance-based athlete, which is the type of athletes that I work with the most, those sorts of athletes, for example, they're doing a lot of low-intensity endurance-based work.

So they're doing a lot of volume during the week, predominantly 70s to 80s to 80% of that is a heart rate lower than their aerobic threshold, so pretty easy. You know, they'll be getting, to speak in root terms, they'll be getting strain scores 20 plus nearly every day pretty much. So with athletes like that, what you typically tend to see is that if everything is going well, and HRV, we're talking like a rolling average on the HRV and we're looking at, say, RMSSD, it will gradually, during a training block, it will gradually increase and go up and up and up. And it will stay elevated to it. a period of time. And that's what I would classify as something that's quite functional and

like functional overreaching. And that was shown, and it's been backed up by a couple of studies as well. So Bellinger backed this up and also Jan Lemuel back this up in one of his studies in triathletes that was published in MSSE, the Medicine, Sport and Science and Exercise Journal. He showed that what happened is that during periods of training in triathletes with low intensity, HIV would go up over time and then it would kind of peak. And then it would kind of peek. And then as they rested and recovered, it would come back down and then they would have a very good performance. But when he tested them at periods when the HIV was very high, they didn't necessarily

perform that well from an absolute performance standpoint. And I also saw that in many of my Olympic rowers and published a paper in sports medicine that showed the same thing. So that's typically what you see. On the other side, if you're doing, if you're an endurance athlete and HRVs continuously going down and you're not getting that gradual increase over a training block. It's definitely a sign that something is wrong, either in your sleep, in your daily stresses, in your training intensive distribution very often, in your work-life balance, all those things. There's something that has

to be investigated and changed to make sure that you're not too sympathetic all the time, because at the end of the day, you can only cope with so much sympathetic stress in the day-to-day day-to-day activity. And it comes down to not only performance, but also health as well. So, Daniel, we have a lot of folks on the platform who are strength and conditioning coaches, who are having to prescribe training across, you know, large groups of people. Do you have any advice or recommendations for those individuals on how to kind of customize, but customize that scale? Because I think that's, I think oftentimes why folks just deferred to block because it's just easier, right, to just have kind of a blanket approach to training and not

really look at how someone is actually the capacity that they show up to training and then, you know, be able to modulate volume and intensity based on that. So what's, what's your kind of recommendation for folks who are training larger groups? Yeah, well, I guess the way you, the way you can do it. And as you know, I've worked with Zwift, right? And some of the things that we had done in Zwift is that we actually tagged every single training with, like a high careerability score. And if I was going to do things on scale, and actually, I do do this in scale because I have an Endure IQ training squad. And within that training squad, every single training type is I like to call them. So what I mean by a training type is a session

with a specific outcome and a specific intensity attached to it. So a VOTMAT session, a speed session, endurance session, 70.3 development session, strength session, all those sorts of sessions. They have a score attached to it. So, for example, endurance sessions, you know, you can have your score in green, orange, or red, whatever. But a VOTOMAT session, you know, if it's red, you don't really want to be doing a VOTOMAT session when it's in red. So if you were going to do things on scale, that's the way I would do things, is that, and then you can pick and choose sessions based on how you're presenting in that day rather than just, yeah, so you know, you've got a whole variety of low-H-RV sessions,

a whole variety of high-H-RV sessions, and they're the ones that you can pick and choose, and that makes it a bit more of a scalable factor. I think we're the only, at Endure IQ at the moment, we're the only people who have really done that. So every session, we have a specific tag based on hardware variability for that reason.

I love that. I mean, we'd be able to do that with the community feature. You know, if you have a coach who has, you know, visibility over their community, you know, you could just help, but just bucket folks basically, you know, based on recovery and, you know, to your point, just have like a laundry list of if you're green, laundry list of workouts. If you're, you know, yellow, laundry list of workouts. And if you're red, yeah, and exactly. And I think that's the future of, you know, the future of, of scalable workouts. And maybe even coaching is this kind of guy based, AI based coaching methods. So I'm a co-founder in a company called Trick, who we're just looking, we're just starting

and we're just going for some, we're looking at beta testers quite soon, but the idea is, is that very thing that I just talked about in the workouts will change in accordance to with how you're presenting in a recovery standpoint, and it changes based on the training types that you're doing. And that's, because for that very reason, the adaptation that you're gaining from every session is very dependent on how you're presenting. And, you know, the whole multiple of things, benefits of training that way. You're not going to be overtrained.

You're going to be more healthy. You're going to get more bang for you book when you're training. So, yeah, so that's the future, I believe, in those kind of scalable workouts. Dan, one of the things that I think is so interesting about your work is that you're your own best test subject. And, you know, I think one of the areas where this is particularly true is in a lot of the research that you've done around diets for athletes. So I know that you are a fan of the high-fat, very low-carb diet. Can you talk about the research that you've done there

and how that differs from the ketogenic diet? Yeah, so I guess I'll deem it the high-fat, healthy-fat low-carb diet, not high-fat, because I prefer to keep the word healthy in there because otherwise... It is better. Just to avoid people going and buying, you know, frying up all the sausages and thinking they're doing a great job, you know. Yeah, so I guess I'll try and talk about my journey.

I mean, I've been doing triathlons since I was nine years old. And I was a national youth champion, national junior champion back in the UK. And, you know, I was always taught that high carb was the way forward. And, you know, carbs are the absolute fuel source of for everything. And fat and fats were to be avoided at all costs. Through my own reading, from my own research, I discovered the, what, when Tim Notes was talking about the low-carb diet, I tried it myself. And I guess for a lot of experimentation, even going into a ketogenic diet, I found that I really

stepped up my performance, particularly when it came to long-distance triathlon, you know, talking about Iron Man. But I only really, but it took me a lot of time to experiment to go quite low to a ketogenic diet to kind of now finding this kind of. what I would describe as more of a low-carb diet, which is where you're kind of, you're titrating in carbs around training a little bit more, but they're also a fraction higher. So rather than being what ketogenic would be described as less than 50 grams per day, you're talking more between 130 to 150 grams per day, but particularly putting those in

and around your training sessions, with the idea is that you're doing everything you can to try and increase your fat oxidation. because particularly for long-distance triathlon where you're talking events that are lasting eight to nine, you know, for some people 12 hours, the preservation of endogenous carbohydrates stores, so internal carbohydrate stores are absolutely critical. So by shifting your fat-out station to burn more fat at a given intensity,

say at 260 watts, you can shift your, the amount of cut, like you may have been at 20% from fat, and you can shift that towards 70% from fat has massive implications on how you preserve those stores. And at the end of the day, that really helps because it stops you from basically writting out of glycogen and from one for the term that's often used is bonking or hitting the wall, which is a massive problem for many people doing long distance triathlon. But also, I personally have found that I hold my weight a lot better as well. I don't have these fluctuations in weight and I'm a lot leaner all year round.

and also I can just take less fuel on. So my stomach's a lot better when I'm doing these long-distance events. So that's kind of how I got into it. And now I've got a course on the matter and so I won Kona following this diet as well. Yeah, so actually, and we can link to your course in the show notes, but one of the things that you actually published on not too long ago was how depending on how elite you are at triathlon that your fueling needs might be different because I know that, you know, some people might listen to what you just said and go like,

oh, that's how Dan won Kona. That's what I should do. But I know that your research maybe suggests that somebody who's maybe taking a lot longer to finish an Ironman, like 11, 12 hours, might want to adopt a different fueling strategy. If you look at, um, so say you take two athletes and you take a 12 hour I'm an athlete and then you take an 8 hour I'm an athlete. So the biggest difference between those two athletes is calories burn in a minute. So the eight hour athlete will be burning way more calories in a minute than the 12 hour hour athlete because they're doing, because they're doing a much higher level. And because of that, you know, you can produce power or energy with fat to a certain point. And, you know, that's probably

going to be maxed out in a race. Even if you're a good fat burner, it's most likely going to be maxed out at like 1.2 to 1.3 grams per minute. And then there's probably going to be maxed out in a race. And then the rest will come from carbohydrates, whereas, so that addition, additional energy, additional power has to therefore come from carbohydrates. So if you now take the lower end athlete, they could probably cover all their energy requirements with pure fat, whereas an elite athlete, they will not be able to cover all their energy requirements, most likely with pure fat. So what we wrote in this paper is it was course, it was called horses, we call it.

horses on the same courses, different horses on the same courses, because everyone does the same course in an Ironman, but the two horses are very, very different, whereas the lower end athlete who's not producing, who doesn't have that much overall calorie requirement, can probably get away with just having more of a fat-based fuel. When you talk about the elites, you will have to have some form of carbohydrate stores taken, no matter how good your fat oxidation is. So even with me, my maximum fat oxidation rate is 1.4 grams per minute, which is, it's pretty high. But I still took 50 grams of carbs per hour when I would do, for the duration of the bike, at least, when I did when I did Kona.

So, yeah, as with all these things and nutrition, even with the low carb diet, I would never say that it's the answer to everyone and it works for every single person. It certainly doesn't. But I think there's definitely, if it's something that you do, decide to do, there are nuances within it that have to be tackled correctly to do it right because many, many people get it very, very wrong. You know, it's just such an interesting topic. You know, I think, you know, when you consider just how critical nutrition is, you know,

when it comes to being able to achieve results, Daniel, when you think about the importance of nutrition, you know, when you stack that with kind of sleep, they're obviously both extremely important. And like, how much do you attribute nutrition to achieving results? Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, I attribute nutrition massively to achieving results. But I also believe is that nutrition has to be specific to the outcome. So, like, what I'm talking about now is an event that requires a high fat oxidation. So, and it's like people often say, oh, high fat diets doesn't work.

It's a load of, it's a load of hot wash. And to me, it's as crazy as saying, oh, bench press didn't improve Ironman performance. It's like, yeah, no, no nonsense. Like, of course it didn't. But, but like, so you talk about people saying, oh, you know, high fat diets, the hope was for 10K, the hope was for a 10K race walker. But it's not, you know, it's not an event that requires you to have a decent fat oxidation because it's not really a key determinant.

So that's where nutrition is really key. So if I was training a bodybuilder, for example, you know, what are they trying to achieve. You're trying to increase more muscle, you know, then therefore high protein, high carbohydrate, you actually want some insulin to actually grow and get bigger and get more muscle. And so there's lots of different things and nuances where I think the diet shifts dependent on the outcome. So, you know, 400 meter sprinter doesn't really need to be on a low carb diet, for example. I do believe that current guidelines for nutrition are too carbohydrate bit dependent, but there's no way that, you know, a 400-meter sprinter needs to be training their

fat oxidation because it's just not a thing. Neither does a cross-fitter, you know, that's not really an important thing either. But it depends on the outcome. Is it a health outcome? Is it a performance outcome? All these different things is dependent on the nutritional strategy that you that you go forward with. Yeah, Dan, I'm so glad that you made this point because I think it's so important. And I think that like there's such a tendency to want to distill everything to sound bites that we lose the fact that, like, your research and sort of your own experience, you're talking about, you know, six plus hour endurance events. And the way that you need to feel for those are specific to what you're trying to do. And so, you know, there isn't really, I mean,

there are foods, I guess, that are just blanket bad. But there isn't, you know, the best diet and a worst diet and, you know, keto versus paleo versus whatever and like these many grams. Like, it's really, it's about like the diet that's matching your goals. And so the way that you're going want to train even within endurance sports right it could change between when you're in season and out of season and really close to a race and so you know this we should stay away from this kind of like oh this is how he won a gold medal or you know kona championship like and therefore it's best like that's only true if you're also trying to race a six hour yeah exactly exactly totally agree and i think um everyone everyone puts themselves in a when

it comes to nutrition specifically, you know, everyone puts themselves in a bit of a camp, right, whereas I'm a local, I'm a vegan, I'm a paleo, and I'm not that way at all. You know, I, I try, I eat in a certain way because I'm trying to maximize my recovery. I'm trying to maximize my fat oxidation that's very critical for the sport that I do. I'm trying to achieve a certain body weight as well. Like for Iron Man, you have to be pretty lean. You have to, I mean, I have to literally shred. To get to my race weight, I will drop a lot of muscle mass because as soon as I start,

don't really focus on something. I actually get a lot heavier and then I strip down and I'm a lot skinnier, but it's not coming from fat. A lot of it comes from muscle as well. So there's lots of different things. So in that particular case, I'll have to look at my protein and not take on quite as much protein. And all these sorts of things are critical. to the outcome. And that's why having an outcome-based nutritional approach is the way forward.

Yeah, I definitely think that's where a lot of folks fall down, you know, particularly individuals who are doing lots of different types of workouts across a week. You know, it's, I think principally your activity requirements should drive your fueling behaviors. You know, to me that makes a lot of sense. If I want to earn fast, I'm going to eat a certain way. If I need to run a long time, I'm going to eat a certain way. You know, if I'm going to be resting instead of on the couch, I'm going to eat a certain way. You know, it's activity requirements drive fueling behavior. And yeah, and I think that's where nutrition science, frankly, it drives me a little crazy

and that there's, you know, this kind of blanket prescription. And the same way that we try to blanket prescribe training, right, like not based on all these contextual factors that really are going to influence whether or not you get the outcome you want. So, yeah, I think it's, sometimes it's, to Emily's point, you know, it's oversimplified are to still down into these sound bites that it's really a little bit more, it's not overly complicated, but it is a little bit more sophisticated than that. And it's worth the time, I think, to really try to unpack it in a way that gets you the results that you want, you know, because you just end up wasting a lot of time and effort by doing it incorrectly or create a lot

of friction that's entirely unnecessary. 100%, Kristen. And one of the, just to give an example, one of the main things that I see particularly with nutrition and people not really understanding what they're doing is when it comes to fasting and you know there's this massive thing now where people are like you know they love like not eating until one o'clock and they're doing these like intermittent fasting windows and they'll try and do that they'll go on a low carb diet and they'll do fasting and then they go oh this this low carb diet is not working for me it doesn't work and I'm like well look at look at how many calories you're eating a day because you're doing fasting you're

doing low carb, which is an appetite suppressor, and you're like 2,000 calories less than your requirement, and you're complaining about you're feeling bad, and you're blaming the lack of carbohydrates. And this is one of the things that, why I felt I had to do the course that we've built is because I just wanted to help people get the right information and do things correctly. And, you know, the, it's that very thing is that, you know, people do fasting, but still train. it's not really designed. Intimates and Fast isn't really designed for people

who are training more than 10, 20 hours a week, right? So, and then you're in all sorts of trouble. Yeah. So, Dan, you actually published some survey data about training fasted, which is... Oh, yeah. Do you want to talk about those results? You're really testing my mind

because I'm like, trying to remember all these studies. Sorry. I've Google stocked you more successfully than you've Google stocked you. Yeah, I should have Google. That's where we know, Dan has a, has a, you know, all his research assistant minions doing all the work. We know what's happening. Yeah, well, he's dead case. It's 20% true.

If you ask me anything about my own PhD work, where I'd definitely be able to give you more concrete answers. But I do read them all and I do contribute. So, here you go. So I do know. So that one, we actually published two papers on the, on the survey. So Jeff Rosschild is my PhD student. And Jeff's doing a great PhD because he's looking at the effects of pre-feeding on training adaptation. So the first part of his PhD was to say, okay, what do athletes think they know about eating before training?

So let's get a general consensus to see what happens. So within that survey, we got nearly like 2,000, 2,000 people replied to that survey. and the main outcome was around fasted training and it was like okay so why do you not do fasted training and the answer was I don't do fasted training because I think it's bad for my training adaptation and then the next question was why do you do fasted training and it was about 50 it was almost 50 50 and the answer was I do fast training because it's good for my training adaptation so it's clearly that people don't they have very little idea of why they do things and what's beneficial and what's not. So you've got these two camps that's like one saying the plastic training is really

bad for the training adaptation, the other one saying it's really good for your training adaptation. So, um, which, which was really good for us because it just went to show that this is the PhD topic well worth pursuing because no one really actually knows the, the answer to those questions. And when it comes to pre-exercise feeding, there's literally been no studies that have been done in, um, in athletes who, in athletes, really, it's been pretty much done on like obese, obese populations and looking at, looking at things like that. So, yeah, so Jeff's doing a great job. And we're doing, I mean, his PhD is something that I find massively exciting.

Awesome. So, yeah, we've already, we've already finding some really cool data on that. Very cool. So what else are you working on? Anything else we're talking about? So I'm pretty busy at the moment. My main focus at the moment is the Americas Cup. So we've got the Americas Cups just around the corner here in New Zealand.

And so it's pretty much crunch time. So that's, that's, that's requiring a lot of, a lot of my focus. Got to make sure the America's Cup doesn't go to America and stays in New Zealand. So, so do we have the, like all the teams are over here now. We're doing some of the racing. There's plenty of going on with that. So that's, that's one of my main, my main focus is building, looking at building a new course for AndroidQ, which will be all around monitoring.

Nice. and also growing the training squad. And then also what I've already mentioned is trick this AI coaching application. So that's really exciting at the moment. And I think it's going to revolutionize the way people train specifically for triathlon. So we're looking just building that up, building the, you know, it's almost ready to the stage where we're going to be getting some beta testers soon. So that's absolutely super exciting.

And then other than that, yeah, working with my students and trying to get a bit more research out there. As soon as when the America's Cup's done, I have been a little bit, I think I'm saying, I've been a little bit less into the research in the last few years, even though I've still published five things, apparently, five publications. But yeah, so I'm going to hopefully get a bit more into that. But with the whole COVID situation, we're just a little. bit hamstrung at the moment with students unfortunately so we've got a lot of people who are wanting to come in and and be students and but they're just just all on the waiting list because as you know new Zealand doesn't have anyone any foreigners or any new students coming in so any anyone that we have are all local and the pool is quite small with a four million population

so oh well yeah yeah not not many people are four point five million want to do a a PhD in sports science. But it's so interesting. Yeah. Well, thank you, Dan, so much for joining us tonight. We really appreciate it. And, you know, if anybody wants to find you or get more information, where can you be found? I'm guessing I'm pretty active on Instagram.

So you can follow me on Instagram. It's at the ploos. And obviously have EndureQ.com website as well. So you can look at it there. have a, I actually have a weekly newsletter. It's called the brewup. So yeah, if you do sign up to that, if you do go in there, sign up to the brewup because, and with the brewup, it's like, we call it the brewup because it's five, being English, I'm quite into my, I'm from Yorkshire. And in Yorkshire, we have Yorkshire tea. And there's five steps to making the perfect

Yorkshire tea. So we call it the brew up. And we give five little tips every week on, generally I'll cover a great podcast that I've listened to, a book that I'm reading, a great work out, some new science and some new tech that I've tried, something like that. So I love that. So be sure to be sure to sign up to that. And there'll be a lot of cool resources in the show notes. Dan, you obviously pointed out a ton of different things that you're working on. And yeah, we'll be sure to link to all that as well for folks. Awesome. Thanks for having me on. And yeah, we'll speak again soon. Thank you. And thank you, Kristen. Oh, yeah, of course. Thank you to Dan for coming on the podcast and sharing all of his research on H-R-V.

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