#101 Dr. Andy Galpin: The Optimal Diet, Supplement, & Recovery Protocol for Peak Performance

0:00Welcome back to the podcast. Today, we're diving deep into the science of nutrition, supplementation, training, and recovery for peak athletic performance and longevity. And joining me is Dr. Andy Galpin. Dr. Galpin is a professor and director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. He bridges the gap between rigorous laboratory research and practical real-world strategies, coaching elite athletes, Olympians, and everyday fitness enthusiasts alike. His research explores the nuances of how training, nutrition, and targeted supplementation

0:31interact to drive strength, endurance, and optimal recovery. In this wide-ranging conversation, Andy and I unpack several critical topics, including nutrition for performance and longevity. Are these goals fundamentally at odds or can they coexist? We explore strategies for balancing immediate athletic goals with long-term health. Fasted training and time-restricted eating. Who should train fasted? When might skipping breakfast enhance or impair your results? We discuss his latest research on fasting, training timing, and body recomposition.

1:06Carbohydrates, fat, and protein. What truly matters when fueling performance, recovery, or endurance? And what's just noise? We break down macro timing, the reality behind carb loading, and the nuances of protein intake beyond standard guidelines. Supplements that actually move the needle. Andy shares practical insights into creatine, caffeine, beta-alanine, beetroot juice, rhodiola, and other performance enhancers, including optimal dosages, timing strategies, and which supplements might actively hinder your progress. Recovery science made practical.

1:40We dissect the science behind cold water immersion, sauna, compression therapies, and targeted nutritional strategies. Which of these practices boost recovery and which might inadvertently blunt adaptations? We talk about sleep and performance. Andy reveals his top practical interventions to dramatically improve sleep quality tonight. No wearables required. We also tackle common myths, emerging trends, and questions athletes often face from micronutrient needs and electrolyte management to inflammation,

2:11soreness, and overtraining. By the end of this episode, you'll have a clear evidence-based roadmap for optimizing your training, nutrition, supplementation, and recovery, whether your goal is achieving elite performance, improving overall health, or extending longevity. If you're aiming to enhance your VO2 max or build strength, we've compiled a comprehensive training guide that integrates insights from leading experts featured on the Found My Fitness podcast. This resource offers evidence-based protocols to optimize your training outcomes. You can access this free guide right now at howtotrainguide.com.

2:45Once again, that's howtotrainguide.com. If you find value in the rigorous evidence-based content provided on this podcast and want to support our commitment to keeping it ad-free, please consider becoming a Found My Fitness Premium member. Membership grants you exclusive access to the Aliquot, which is our members-only private podcast, monthly live Q&A sessions with me, curated science digest crafted to help you optimize your health and longevity. You can learn more at foundmyfitness.com forward slash premium. Once again, that's

3:19foundmyfitness.com forward slash premium. So without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Dr. Andy Galpin. Hey, everyone. I'm super excited to be sitting across the table from Dr. Andy Galpin, who is the director of the Human Performance Center at Parker University. Andy and I have been corresponding for at least the last 10 years. I'm pretty pumped to have this conversation. He is an expert in muscle physiology, but also has published a wide range of, I would say, exercise physiology

3:53related topics from muscle health to nutrition to recovery. He also coaches athletes, Olympians, MMA fighters, just all around got a lot of experience and the science behind it. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today, Andy. I mean, you and I have talked about, you know, a lot of things via, you know, X and Twitter at the time, I think email as well. So thank you so much for coming on the show. It's just, I can't even explain how much of an honor and a pleasure this is. I've been

4:27telling you for a long time now, how stoked I am about this. And my wife is tired of hearing of it. So I'm finally excited to get here and do it. Well, today, it's kind of interesting, because, you know, you've, you've got this vast publication history in muscle biology, and exercise physiology. But I'm kind of taking you in a direction where you've also published and you have a lot of knowledge regarding nutrition, supplements, recovery. I'm super interested in the role of those in helping people sort of meet their fitness goals. And when it comes to nutrition, I mean, this

5:02is obviously a field that's constantly, you know, there's no agreement ever, whether we're talking about performance or longevity. But, you know, there's a growing number of athletes and people that are like myself, which are, I would say, committed exercisers, that I'm very interested in health, not as much in performance, although I'm becoming a lot more interested in performance these days. But I'm interested in longevity, for sure. I mean, that's my primary interest. And so

5:32there's, there's people kind of trying to figure out what kind of diet they could, you know, what kind of diet they could eat to sort of meet their performance and longevity goals, if that's even possible. Is that something that you've thought about? Yeah, I get the question of performance versus longevity or health and nutrition a lot. And I think, as you've done so well over your career, there are tenets that are going to agree, and then

6:03there's going to be distension. And so I think it's easy as maybe to frame this as what are the flags we can put on both sides of this equation? Known obvious yeses and obvious noes, right? So if you want to live your longest, healthiest life, number one, we're all going to agree on probably five, seven, maybe eight different things. And if you were to look, I'll just do it this way. If I said, okay, great, because we deal with these clients, I deal with high performance athletes, as you mentioned, and we have a lot of our clients that are like you, they're not athletes, never were, do not care, but they're wanting to live their longest, healthiest life. And if I threw their diets in

6:37front of you, I'd be stunned if you could tell me which one was for which person. I don't think you'd have any chance, right? So you'd say, what's that going to look like? We're going to center around protein, right? You've talked about that endlessly. It's going to be high and high quality. We're going to have a lot of variety of foods. We're going to have a lot of variety of colors. Turns out micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals are pretty important, right? Like your entire career. We're going to have some attention paid to fiber. Caloric intake will be managed. We're going to distribute carbohydrates and fat in some way that helps them hit their needs and

7:11goals and personal preferences. We could go down the list. But the easiest way to think about it is how much overlap is there? Almost all. What are the small differences between these performance and longevity goals? Well, depends on what type of performance. So we're talking about a lot of caloric expenditure. Are we talking about a power event? Then yeah, we're going to find some differences. And we can chop that up all day if you want to know like exact numbers and hours. But the reality of it is both of those people, performance, longevity, you have to manage calories one way or the other. You have to do all the other things. It's not that different.

7:45You can make some arguments of maybe you can get away with certain things. If you're not interested in performance, you can do some different things with food timing, food frequency. You can play with some different stuff where you wouldn't want to do that with a high performance athlete. So there's a lot of fun differences with those things. But at the highest level for the average person, if you're eating like a high performance athlete, for the most part, you're also eating for longevity. Only big fundamental difference there might be caloric balance. Yeah. That's the top layer. But other than that, it's pretty similar.

8:17I was kind of thinking that was going to be your answer. I do. I'm very interested in the intermittent fasting, time restricted eating, training fat, training while you're fasted, depending on the type of training, because it's something that I do for certain types of training. You like to train fasted. Well, I like to train fasted if I'm going for a 30-minute run, zone two kind of run. Sure. And the reason I do that is because, I mean, this was years ago, I read a meta-analysis. And

8:49maybe I would love to hear your updates on the literature, because I know that you've been keeping up with it. But there was a meta-analysis looking at people that were training fasted. And if they were doing endurance type of aerobic exercise training, and they trained – they were training – it was like less than 60 minutes. It was like less than an hour, right? Yeah. And this isn't – you know, this is like a zone two kind of below the lactate threshold type of training. Then they had better adaptations in mitochondria, mitochondrial enzymes, you know, obviously like fatty acids being oxidized. So whereas if they trained when they

9:24were fed – again, it was less than an hour – some of those adaptations were blunted somewhat. And for me, it was like, oh, well, I kind of want those adaptations. So I do like to train a little bit fasted. Now, I don't do hour-long runs anymore. That was like a thing of my past for me. I do – my strength training, I do not like to do fasted at all. I have to have like something like a banana. I have to have some glucose or something. So I'd love to get your take on training while fasted.

9:55Yeah. There's a lot of things to think about here. I know that I sent you right before we started here our preprint of our – one of our fasting studies we just got published. So we can go into that if you want. But in general, the biggest way to think about this is, is the magnitude of benefit with the intervention exceeding the magnitude of preference. And what I mean by that is when I coach people this morning, like literally this morning, I'm dealing with putting together a program for the number one quarterback in college football. Right after that, I have to deal with one of our

10:30executives who's a 60-year-old female. Right after that, I'm also dealing with a guy preparing for a 900-mile hike. And so that context is important because as I'm answering questions like this, all of these avatars are in my head. And I'm thinking, what is true for a person one, two, and three? And what is true for the other person who like doesn't exercise at all? And if something's not consistent across those four, then I have to modify and contextualize the answer. So when it comes to training fasted, great. If you are going for an event like you're talking about and you feel

11:02better when you do it, that matters to me in that particular context more than the physiological benefit. Because the physiological benefit is not fake. It's just not huge. So is it more beneficial for your mitochondria? Yes, potentially. But if you look at the amount, it's not that much. Now, if you liked it or didn't care, fine. But if you're like, I hate it, my performance is worse, I don't like it, I don't feel good, then we actually don't do it. And so my first layer answer to all that is number one, what are you actually performing best in? What are your personal preferences? Are you

11:34training in the morning? Are you training the evening? All these other factors that are now again, contextualized, are my true answer. And I hate to be wishwashy on that. But that's the most honest answer, because I deal with a lot of people with different goals and different scenarios. So the science can lead us in one direction. But the actual layering on top of what would I really recommend a human do that in this scenario matters more. So if you look at the research very specifically on fasting exercise, always depends on the type of exercise you mentioned, you were

12:05really careful about saying like, I'm under 60 minutes, right? I'm under 60 minutes, like I know you're, you're aware that that answer will change, right? What am I optimizing for? Am I optimizing for performance? Am I optimizing for feeling better that day? More focused that day? Am I optimizing for the happiness, the personal, like there's so many different reasons why one would exercise, that you have to answer all those questions and figure out, well, what lever am I trying to pull here? What am I trying to get out of it? So do we have people, am I, I'll answer this way. Do we ever take somebody and say, hey, you need to start doing your endurance work in the morning fasted? I can't think of very

12:40many times when we've ever done that. But if somebody shows up with that, well, we don't have any strong reason, we're not going to pull them off of it either. What if someone says, I'm interested in fat adaptation? Yeah. I'm interested in mitochondrial health. And I'm not an endurance athlete. I'm just, you know, these are my recovery days. I do strength training on other days. These are my recovery days, so to speak, right? In a way, then would you still kind of, what would your, what are your thoughts on that? So you mentioned my mito adaptations aren't, it's not, it's a subtle

13:10difference. But what about like policies? Like what about, you know? Yeah. So the way that we would frame this is we need more information on them to determine whether or not that's going to actually matter for them. So if they're saying, okay, I want to enhance fat burning. I want to enhance oxidative capacity. Great. Well, we actually need to look at their capacity for metabolic flexibility. We need to test that. I need to see that number, right? If you're just saying you want more, I'm going to say more from where, like where are you currently at? I don't know. Well, then we don't know if we have anything to actually gain here. So we could do that intervention. And I don't

13:41know if it would do anything for you. If you're already pegged on that, if your mitochondria are already functioning very high, if your ability to utilize fuel independent of food is strong, then we're not going to get anything from that. If you're really weak in that area, then we would get something from it. So our first answer is data, right? We have to run some objective tests. If you don't want to do that or can't do that, you want to give that a try? Sure. Like fine. It's probably not going to hurt much in the short term. So go ahead and do that. So my answer to somebody who asked that question, like I want to optimize mitochondria. Okay, great. Starting off with faster cardio is not the

14:14place we would go, but we might use it eventually. If you can do a whole bunch of stuff and we can do this objectively. Okay. When you go out and train, how do you feel if you don't eat before? Oh, I feel terrible. Okay. Well, that's like an easy litmus test to say, maybe we have some stuff we can do there. There's way more we get into in detail. I wouldn't only ask that question, but that's how we would actually think about that answer. So it could be everything from yes to like, I'm not super worried about it. If they're really, really stoked to do it, I'm probably going to say yes, just for that

14:46fact alone. Like, yeah, let's give it a go. But I don't necessarily think you would have to do that to have healthy mitochondria. If that's another way to answer the question. What about people that are doing strength training, resistance training first thing in the morning, and they don't have a lot of time, they're getting their kids ready for school. And it's like, they want to feel with something. Like what's the best option? Personal preference in terms of feeding or not feeding, the literature would be fairly clear here, I would say our personal experience would match that some people are fine, some people are not. If you want to go just like practical recommendations, a banana and a protein shake,

15:20super easy, a little bit of yogurt, maybe in granola, we have a lot of our athletes that will train in the morning, and that's a really common thing. Some granola yogurt, maybe honey, maybe some berries, small six to eight ounces, right, really small servings, you're talking probably 300 calories, maybe 50 grams of carbohydrate, like in these rough neighborhoods of things, some a little protein 10 to 30 grams, depending on their physical size. Remember, some of our athletes are 115 pounds, some of them are 350 pounds. So like the numbers vary, a small size is

15:52different for those people. So personal preference, but yeah, the recommendations would be things like that. We don't have too many athletes or clients that we'll intentionally ask them to not eat before they train, like we sort of talked about. But the easy, quick, just get out the door stuff, that's what we're going to lean on. Like very simple, easy digesting, small amounts of food, probably not as much as your full breakfast, but those things will tend to work pretty well. Yeah, I don't, I think athletes are less interested in that, and people that are more interested in body

16:24recomposition, they're wanting to lose fat, gain muscle, are more interested in, okay, well, perhaps that kind of person that their liver glycogen takes more hours before it depletes. And then it's like, well, if I then eat before my run, then I didn't fully deplete the liver glycogen. And so they're not going to be perhaps undergoing lipolysis and oxidizing fatty acids for energy. So what about people that are interested in, that are, that are fit and they're, they're not really athletes, but they're

16:59exercisers and they're interested in just sort of fat loss, body recomposition?

17:07The acute timeframe pre mid post exercise for those people probably doesn't matter that much. It really isn't going to have a huge impact. What will matter is the days and weeks, the total caloric expenditure throughout the day. This person, if you're training in the morning, you probably have at least 24 hours to recover, right? Even if you're training hard every single day, most of the time, when we get really specific about nutrient timing, it's because a lot of our clientele are training twice or more a day. That's when timing really is critical. Whether you're talking about timing, timing of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. So when we hear people say things

17:41like, Oh, timing doesn't matter. For the average person, it's not a huge deal. But for some of our people, it really significantly matters. But what you just described is not it's that other person who's like, I'm exercising, let's just even say seven days a week. Probably most people are doing like five. So even in between that, you've got a lot of recovery time. So what you have before the workout doesn't matter a huge amount. Whether you have it immediately post doesn't matter a huge amount. The total in throughout the day, the only caveat is actually what you asked a little bit before.

18:12It's personal preference. I don't feel as well. Okay, great. I'm stomach. Awesome. That's the context. It's not the physiology or the biology that's mattering there. It's now personal preference or objective data that says we're getting less performance out of this. Your recovery is slowing down. What are the cases? So overall, I would say do what feels best for you there. And there's not a significant thing you should be worried about of productivity you're leaving on the table, progress you're leaving on the table, or compromised results from no matter what choice you make there, whether it is fats, the protein, or the carbohydrates.

18:42What about people that are doing time-restricted eating? And, you know, the worry of time-restricted eating would be losing muscle, perhaps if you're not getting in your protein intake or resistance training. What are your thoughts there? You have a new publication now. You've published in this area. How do you feel about people that are doing, let's say, a 16-8 time-restricted eating? Yeah. So we actually ran this study. We started in 2019, and we just published it this week.

19:13That tells you, you know how that goes. COVID killed us. We had a big cohort study going. Our last two groups, I was like literally days away from doing the final biopsies, and we got pulled out of the lab, and I was like begging our people. I'm like, just let me one day go in and biopsy 10 people. No, they wouldn't. So nonetheless, we ran this study, and one of the things we're interested in is, with time-restricted eating 16-8, all the research on that area, for the most part, is caloric restriction. So how does this thing work for fat loss? And that's fine. Grant Tinsley,

19:48I don't know if you know Grant, but he's done a ton of work at Texas Tech, and lots of other groups have done it. You've talked a lot about TREs, 16-8 tons. Okay, great. What I was more interested in is, what's the opposite? What about the person who's trying to gain muscle? If I do 16-8, what's actually happening here? And because of the way that I operate, I don't care about just a molecular mechanism. I don't care just about body composition. I wanted to ask questions about sleep, about personal preference, about digestion, about how hard the diet was, how likely are you to do it, physical performance. Because when you go into the real world, that's how you

20:20make decisions, right? I want to be able to tell people, hey, this 16-8, maybe it is better for body composition, but it's harder to follow, or it makes your sleep worse, or it's better for everything. Whatever combination the answer is going to be, I don't really care, but that's the full context people have when they make dietary decisions. So that's what we did. We took people that were very well-trained, and we did eight weeks of strength training with them in the lab, supervised, all that, already, again, previously well-trained men and women, college age as normal. We did biopsies. We did muscle imaging. We did questionnaires. We did sleep stuff. We did blood.

20:54We did a bunch of different things. And ultimately, what we wanted to see was, okay, we're going to put them all at the same protein load, and we're going to put them in caloric excess. So hypercaloric, not hypocaloric. We know the answer what happens with TRE if you're trying to lose weight. What happens is somebody actively trying to gain muscle. So that's the very unique twist of this. And it was super interesting. The take-home message was it didn't matter a ton. As long as you hit your numbers, the results were basically the same across both groups, right? So standard four or five, six feedings a day versus TRE. Now, we actually doubled down on the question because we actually

21:30made the people train in the TRE group in the morning, and then they had to wait at least an hour before they fueled afterwards. So they trained, fasted. They didn't recover with protein or anything like that immediately afterwards, and they stayed in that state until the afternoon. So even despite of that, it didn't significantly compromise muscle growth or performance or really anything else. We saw some subtle differences. The TRE group actually looked like it didn't gain as much body

22:00fat because you're going to do that when you go hypochloric, right? You're going to, especially if you're well-trained, you want to add muscle, you're going to bring some fat along for the route. I don't know if it was a, enough of a difference. And we, I spent a lot of time in that data set. I don't know if that's a real finding, to be honest, or if that was just a little bit of an artifact. The, the counter to it was as time went on, fatigue got higher in the TRE group. Legs got heavier performance and the legs started to decline. Again, so much so what I suggest TRE is

22:35going to be bad. No, no, but it was like, okay, I think there's something happening here. I think potentially if we were to change the study design a little bit and give them fuel closer, that would have made it not exactly sure. We would have to run a separate study design for that. And so if you torture the data a little bit, you might find some subtle differences between the two groups and they were, you know, statistically significant and effect size and like all those things there. But look, looking at it from a real practitioner perspective, my general take home was it didn't matter a ton. If you're trying to maximize leg strength and maximize leg growth, I probably wouldn't go to

23:1016.8 TRE. But if you have other reasons to do it, you're still going to get gains. They still got stronger. They didn't get as strong. There's some other issues that happened, but either one of them works. But, but do you think again, um, if, if they were a lot, I mean, most people after they're done strength training, they eat within an hour. Like, like I immediately am getting protein in me because I like need, I just, my body wants it. Yeah. So, um, do you think that maybe would negate some of the performance deficits that you found? I think it would, honestly, it was more of a carbohydrate

23:44issue. Carbohydrates. Yeah. I think that was the bigger issue because they were going so long without carbohydrates and they were training so hard. They were, and they were doing the same workout, uh, multiple times per week. I just think over time, uh, we were also progressing them. So they were being tested every time they came in the lab and the training got harder, right? Like traditional progressive overload. I don't think they, I wish we had actually biopsy data for their, um, muscle glycogen levels. But if I had to suspect, I think that that was starting to leak down.

24:18And I just think the legs were getting, we would say just getting heavier over time. Like it just wasn't handling the volume because that's actually what happened too. The volume that the TRE group did started to come down at the end. They just couldn't do as much volume as the other group could do. Okay. At the end of a workout, not like at the end of the eight weeks. Oh, okay. So because we tested them, uh, pre mid and post. When were they working out morning or evening morning? Yep. So they're all working out fast. Fasted. They're doing strength training fasted. Yeah.

24:48So let's, okay. So the bottom line is from your study, which is going to be published soon. Depending on when this comes out, it may already be there. Nice. Okay. Like any, any day. Any day. I'm stunned it actually hasn't happened yet. Congratulations. This is great. This is a great study. I'm, you sent it to me. I can't wait to read it. Um, you can gain muscle on a 16, eight time restricted eating schedule. Um, it sounds like if you're, if you're, if you're doing the training fasted, I mean, there's ways to do 16, eight. You can stop eating earlier and not have to be fasted in the morning, right? Well, so actually like, that's super interesting because when I looked at this, I was like,

25:21man, I think that's just, is the better approach. Yeah. Maybe if they would have done their fasting in the evening afternoon, there's all a bunch of other arguments we could make that that's better anyways. That would be a really cool followup. And I would, I'd be willing to bet they wouldn't have had such a, uh, indirect, indirect markers of fatigue over time. They just didn't have fuel for a really long time. I could also tell you these things behind, and this is like the veil of people that when you run actual studies, you can make comments about things that aren't in the paper.

25:51The people had a really hard time with the carbohydrates. That was the complaint. And so when you had a whole bunch, you remember, cause you're getting, some of these people are at six, 700 grams of carbohydrate a day. And you got to get that in an eight hour window. It was GI was just destroyed. Like it was a lot of people were like, man, my stomach is just blowing up from 600 grams of carbohydrates. Cause you imagine eating 200 grams of carbohydrates. A couple hours later, you got to know the 200, another 200. It was just a lot. Was it so high because you were doing this, this hypercaloric? Because I mean,

26:23most people aren't doing that many carbohydrates unless they're like endurance athletes. Yeah. Well, we had big, we have some big people, right? So if you're a hundred and hundred and ten kilos and you've got to be at a hypochloric and you're at either six grams per kilogram body weight, like those numbers get high fast. So in order to get there, like that stuff got there, even the protein got a little tough as well. So we didn't see, I wish we would have had more subjective questions in those areas, but that would, I would say like, it was just hard for those people to hit their numbers. Most of them got there, but they're just like, whoa, I just wish I

26:58had another hour. Like give me another two hours. Could I get 50 of this grams of this protein a little bit earlier? That'd make my life so much easier. So I just think from a practical perspective, it was harder for them to follow. It was harder for them to hit their numbers waiting the whole day than to start and hit it in a caloric surplus. So if you're not in a caloric surplus, different equation here. If you're in a caloric deficit, different equation here. But for people that are pre-trained, pretty well-trained and they're actively trying to get bigger and stronger, it wouldn't be the first approach I would take. But it's still plausible. Clearly it worked. They

27:33still got benefits from it, but switching the order, I think would be cool. Would you say that if they were, let's say they were in a slight caloric deficit, still getting their protein, meeting their protein needs, would they be still gaining muscle, you think? I don't think it would have gained as much. They would have gained some, right? If you look at like, again, all grand work and a lot of that hypocaloric state stuff, sometimes they gain muscle. It can happen, but can they gain it at the same rate as when you add more calories? I don't think so. And I don't think so because in our particular program, the training program was really aggressive. They were training

28:08hard for really well-trained people. I don't think the recovery would be there. I just don't think it would be there. When did they stop eating and how was their sleep affected? So we let them choose their window. So some of them came in and trained at like seven o'clock in the morning because they want to start their eating window at 10, right? But they're college kids. So most of them trained like 10, 11, 12 o'clock in the morning. And then they would start their eating windows, you know, between one and two o'clock in the afternoon, like something like that. Depends on if they work or whatever they're there. So we let them shift a little bit. The time domains had to be the same,

28:41but when the, like we didn't make them start at noon, like, you know, depending on their life schedule. Sleep didn't really change that much. I wish we would have had some of our newer sleep technology. We could have really objectively looked at it at the time. We just had basic questionnaires, right? So we'll see there. What we did notice is the perceived fatigue and naps increased over time in the TRE group. And so again, a little inclination there of saying, I think fatigue was setting in more. Didn't some of that didn't land statistically significant,

29:15but you start to see sort of multiple things in the same pattern. You go, all right, if we run a follow-up study there, that might be interesting to focus on. Why is it important for people to have carbohydrates before they're doing strength training? You don't have to, if you can get away with it, you're fine. It's not the thing we're super concerned about, depending on where you're at. If you can get through it, if your total caloric intake throughout the day is fine, if your carbohydrate intake throughout the day is fine, and depending on how often your strength training, if you're the kind of typical person who's training the same body part on non-consecutive days,

29:49then carbohydrate pre-exercise is not a big deal. It's totally fine. You can get away with your strength training. It'd be a personal preference again. If you're training though the same muscle group in multiple days or multiple times per day, that's when the carbohydrate timing will matter most. So you can have it before. Generally, people feel better with it. Performance is usually better, but it's not always. Or if you're someone that is on more of a hypocaloric diet, if you're trying to lose fat or perhaps maintain your weight, you're kind of really kind of watching your

30:21calories, then perhaps you're not having a huge total caloric, you know, totally caloric intake per day that you might want to have carbohydrates in that. We will generally, as just a high-level rule, try to get more of our calories around training. Just period. Regardless of what we're doing, regardless of what type of training, regardless of the person, as a first-level thing, that's our preference. We want to either do it pre, mid, post. In your example there, if we're trying to bring calories down, we're going to go somewhere else if we can. It doesn't always work that way. People don't

30:54always like it, but that is our default position is, yeah, we're going to do more calories in and around the training to support it. I want better performance. You perform better, you get better adaptations. That's generally how we look at it. What about people that are more endurance type of athletes? They're out running, you know, 10, 15 or more miles or cycling, biking. What about those individuals? Different equation now, right? So whether you talk about strength training or even

31:24endurance training, but as you said earlier, like you're talking sub 60 minutes at kind of a moderate to low intensity, carbohydrate before training for most people is not going to matter that much. Now you're talking about something different, really high intensity exercise for a prolonged amount and or moderate exercise for a longer amount, right? So we'll define longer by plus 60 minutes. Now you will very often see performance improvements with carbohydrates. That said, we have some of our people, some of our friends, um, a good friend of mine that I will never stop

31:57giving him the business on this one. Cam Haynes, you know, Cam? Oh yeah. Cam's great. The worst performance nutrition you could just possibly dream of, right? Like he will intentionally not eat and drink water and then go run 18 miles, right? And you're just like, what, like, what are we doing here? Right? I've made the argument, like I will PR him in every race he's ever done. If he would just like, let me tell him, he would just follow what I tell him to do, but he refuses. So you can do these things. This is not a matter of it's impossible physiologically, but are you going to get your best out of it? Probably not. Carbohydrates before exercise, probably three or

32:31four hours before exercise, if possible, if you're trying to maximize performance, generally looking at something in the neighborhood of 50 to a hundred grams of carbohydrates, that's a huge plus or minus range there. Three or four hours before we were generally looking at starches, slower digesting, like give it time, not a big spike. Some people we will tinker with 30 minutes before something in the neighborhood of 50, 60 grams of carbohydrates, maybe a little bit more. Some people though kind of deal with a glucose double whammy if you do that. So you got to be careful. What I mean is if you

33:06take a whole bunch of fast responding glucose, right? Things that get in your bloodstream really quickly, right before you start exercising, insulin starts pulling glucose down, muscle starts pulling it as well. And so blood glucose actually dips. This is a, like, I had a banana and honey right before I started my race. And then I got two miles in and I felt like death. Like, oh, okay. You had two mechanisms at the same time that are independent, that are bringing it down. And blood glucose actually dips quite a bit until the liver has a chance to kick in and bring it back to normalize.

33:36So you'll feel that response pretty often. So you got to be really careful with easy digesting carbohydrates right before the event. And depending on how long it's going to last. But those are like rough numbers to start with. In the exercise itself, the numbers you're going to see here somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 grams, up to 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour, which is, like, if you want to maximize performance, you'll see the data will show you like 80 plus,

34:0880 to 100 grams. What kind of carbohydrates are you talking? You don't want that easy stuff, right? No, now you want the fastest possible. Oh, you do want the fastest possible. Because you're in a race, right? You're moving, right? This is when the goos and the packs and things hit in. So you're trying to smash it in there as much as you can. I actually just had a guy named Jordy Sullivan, a dietitian in Australia. He was just on my podcast. And he actually coached a guy named Ned Brockman. And Ned did a thousand mile race on a track. So he ran on a track for a

34:38thousand miles. I think it took him like 11 or 12 days, something like that, to finish. Did he, I mean, how was, where, the sleeping, what was the sleeping like? The sleeping situation. Sleep on the track, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. He would just, like, lay down and crash for a little bit and then get up and just, like, run again. And he just kept going. He, Jordy went through the exact details, exactly what he fed him, the amounts, the concentration. And when you get into things like that, when Michael's

35:08getting ready for this 900 mile hike thing, 60 to 80 to 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour is awesome in the lab. And I put you on a bike and you're in my research facility. Like, those are the numbers that work. But when you cross over into humans, you start getting really tired of goo. Like, don't want to taste sugary drinks anymore. And so when you get past a couple of hours of exercise, then you actually start really paying attention to texture and flavor profile and mouthfeel because that stuff starts to matter. And you can't hit those numbers. They're just

35:39not realistic. So if you're going to try to do something like this, pick your poison in terms of the carbohydrate source. This is the, you know, fast sugars. But if you're going to go for more than a couple of hours, you got to really think carefully about, are you sure you're going to like that taste of that for six hours? Because you probably won't. Oh, it's just incredible. I can't believe people do things like that. What about carbohydrate replenishment after a long endurance type of workout? Do you think that's important to

36:12replenish the glycogen stores? Depends on what you had starting with. So did you feed before or did you not? Right? That is automatically our context. If you fed before, then we don't have to worry about as much directly after. If you're fasted, we've got to worry about more. The other context we have to pay attention to, again, what's our total caloric intake? What's our carbohydrate intake throughout the day? And when are we going to train again? Some of our folks, again, training multiple times per day, we are going to go absolutely out of our way to get 100 grams of carbohydrate post-exercise if it's a

36:43hard training session. It's a rough number. Again, that number scales up and down with physical size and caloric expenditure, things like that. If you're going to get on a plane and drive and you're going to do something else for the next two days, carbohydrate post-exercise, like the amount doesn't matter. It's not a big deal. You're up against a race of replenishment time. If that matters, you want to, again, look for 100-ish grams of carbohydrate pretty close to finishing. And unlike protein, timing matters. The faster you get that carbohydrate in, the faster you will

37:16replenish muscle and liver glycogen. Protein, as you've covered many times, like timing, anabolic window, like not a big deal at all. But carbohydrates are different.

37:26You've got to repeat that performance again soon, faster, more, better. If you've got a lot of time, then your recovery window is plenty, then you're going to be fine. Or even if you're just training for a race, right? If you're training like every day, you're probably going to want to get that replenishment in right away. Well, in that case, actually, that's a great point because it's not only necessarily just about recovering for your next workout, but you actually need to train that system. So one mistake people make when they do endurance events like that is they will forget to mimic the race in training. So then when they get into training, they try to do something, they haven't done it before, and their bodies can freak out. This is

38:01when you get a lot of GI distress, when you get a lot of your tapering, and the week before, all of a sudden, your performance is down, and you're like, what's going on? Well, you're doing something different now than you were doing the last eight weeks. And so, yeah, I would actually strongly encourage you to treat your practice races like your real race. So do your pre-, mid-, post-fueling strategies in preparation for that so that when you show up, your body's like, yep, this is exactly what we do. This is exactly how we handle people for the Super Bowl,

38:31for World Championship events, for the Olympics. You try to make those big events where they're so incredibly important, and there's so much pressure and stress in that you want to make it feel like a normal practice. This is just what we do. So while most of you aren't going to be on that stage, I get it. When you go run that first 5K, like, that's still going to be a really, you're going to be really excited, and it's going to feel like that. Your body is going to know, wow, this is something I care about. Or you go and you finally get to surf that wave that you've been wanting to do, or whatever the thing is, you go on that hunt that you've been wanting to go after.

39:03The thing you can control the most is making your day feel like you've been training. It's a normal process. This is what we do. This is how we warm up. This is the thing we take. The more you can do that, the more consistent a response you're going to have, the more predictable response, and that way you can check out of those things and let your body just do what it's been ingrained to do. So yeah, I would definitely recommend that post-carbohydrate for that individual simply for those purposes. What kind of effect does that have on performance? Is it pretty noticeable? I mean, if you're... Yeah. It is everything from I bonked what happened,

39:34I felt flat, everything went away, what's going on, to now I hit the PR. If you play with these things correctly, you should feel your best on competition day. There's some of our sports that this is not possible because of weight cutting and the other dumb things we have to do. But for the most part, this is the stuff that matters. This is the like, there's nothing worse than when you PR a week after competition. Like there's just nothing worse, right? You're like, all right, PR the week before or the week after. These are little details that make you land

40:04on the right day, in the right time, in that one race, that one event. That's how we help people smash those things. And they don't just go, well, we're just going to train kind of hard and we hope that you show up the day and perform. We want to take all those questions out of it. So yeah, it'll make everything from, again, I tanked, I bombed, I failed out to I had my best performance ever. To kind of go back to the original question about eating for longevity versus performance. Now, we're kind of talking about here. Oh man, we're on question one still. Well, no, I just kind of

40:35wanted to circle back because if we are talking about someone that is racing, right? They're competing, they're trying to PR, they're, you know, all of those things. Then the carbohydrate sources that they're eating aren't going to be what I'm eating. I'm not going to be, I'm certainly not going to be chugging the goo, but like the fast, like during like intra workout, right? While you're, while you're racing, or even perhaps like you were saying right before, you know, eating, eating the,

41:08the quick, like the, the stuff that's going to spike your blood glucose quickly isn't typically stuff that people that are eating for a longevity type of, like my, my carbohydrate sources are typically vegetables, you know, fruits that have a food fiber matrix. Most of the time, I mean, some fruits can hit, hit your, your body a little quicker than others, like grapes, for example, but you know, um, you know, most of the carbohydrate source are more complex carbohydrates. Yeah. So fair point. This is that small sliver difference at the end, right? So again, if we were

41:39to look at your, um, we actually have probably, I don't know, five females right now that we're coaching that are plus around your body size. So we'll make just equivalence to you and those individuals. We take both your diets for you and all those different girls that are in their different sports. They're going to be almost identical, right? So they're going to be heavily focused on vegetables and starches and fruit and all those things. What would that difference be? Well, okay. Some of them post training might do, um, a powdered glucose source. So we might give them

42:13a carbohydrate supplement. Uh, then we might use a Vitargo or something like that, where it's like a scooped carbohydrate where you're probably never having that. You're not having it throughout the day. You're not having it pre and post your workout. You don't need 60 grams of carbohydrate. That's easily. So that would be different, right? But what are they going to have post-workout? I don't know. Watermelon. Like they're going to have things that you're probably eating too. Do we have a little more Liberty with them to add some more grapes? Sure. But you could also probably eat grapes too. You would just take something else like out or move it around or you would have more

42:46protein when you have the grapes or whatever different strategies we do. It's really small. The amount of goos and powders and things like that that we're doing. We're going to eat 95% of their calories as whole real food. You got a little bit of supplements on the end and things like that, but we're not going to spend too much time with low quality foods. Even for those individuals, I want them eating real whole healthy foods. So that is, it's, it's a really small difference, I guess. Uh, so yeah, in some of the situations where for the most part, your diet and their diets would be very identical. So fat often gets overshadowed by protein

43:22and carbohydrates. Yeah. Where does that come into the equation of, you know, meeting your fitness goals, whether you're an endurance athlete or strength training or not necessarily an athlete, just someone who's interested in, in being healthy and exercising and, you know, looking for the longevity aspects of diet and exercise. Yeah. So I would say, I mean, you, you, you positioned it pretty well. Most people will start with protein, lock that thing in, and then you'll play with carbohydrates and fat as a way to adjust overall caloric intake. And

43:55because we know the role of carbohydrates and exercise performance, we will usually go to that second and then fat gets the third consideration. Like, okay, fine. Whatever calories we have left, we have to backfill with fat. And as long as your fat isn't too low and it's too low chronically, then you're not going to really run into too many issues with having insufficient amount of, of intake of fat, dietary fat. That said, this is something I've changed my tune on a lot, right? Like I, I come from the classic exercise physiology, academic background, and all those people are carbohydrates first, carbohydrates second, third, fourth. And

44:30like fat was always shunned. And I don't, I don't think, uh, I don't think I believe that as much anymore. I also, we've experienced a lot, a lot of the people we worked with, they're fine on moderate to low carbohydrate, even high exercisers, non-athletes, but they just, they train a ton. You're talking about guys and girls running 60 miles per week, right? Like, like real high energy expenditures in terms of performance. And they're at a hundred grams of carbohydrate a day. They're not eating ketosis at all. They're not even trying to be, but they just like are fine at 150 grams a

45:01day or 200 grams of carbohydrate a day, right? For 120 to 190 pound, like individuals kind of at that, just as some frame of reference for numbers there. In that case, their, their fat intakes are way higher and they're fine. We're not seeing any performance decrements. They're not having a hard time recovering. Their sleep isn't going down. Like sex hormones are fine. So I actually have just seen enough evidence now, anecdotally and empirically being like, I think actually you're fine. There. I think you're okay. If you're giving yourself, if your endogenous recovery is sufficient, I think you're going to be just fine there. So what we do with carbohydrates and fat for that

45:37person you're describing is we let personal preference drive us a lot, right? We also will change it just so that you can have some dietary changes. Like fat tastes delicious. It's really hard. It's really bland when you don't get to have a lot of fat in your diet. So sometimes we'll bring carbohydrate down for a while and let them have more fat if we need to manage calories. We don't generally see that much for the average person. Like we don't see that many consequences performance wise. So I don't think most people are going to have this huge, like, oh my God,

46:08I'm not recovering anymore. If you're doing a normal amount of exercise, I think you're going to be just fine. Some people think if they're eating a high fat diet, low carb diet, and they're doing endurance type of exercise, they're more heavily biased towards endurance training, that they're going to be more fat adapted. They're going to be more metabolically flexible and their mitochondrial adaptations are going to be superior. I would not support that statement. I would disagree with that. This is a great one. So the

46:44term metabolic flexibility has been hijacked. And the way that it is described now colloquially is not what that phrase ever started to be. And it's not what that is intended to be. It's so crazy because metabolic flexibility has got turned into maximizing fat burning. It's supposed to be metabolic flexibility, which means you have the ability to run the whole gamut. I get it. If you pluck the average person off the street, they're probably less likely to be good at burning fat than they are at carbohydrate. So on aggregate, we probably need to get more people better at burning fat.

47:15I'm with you on that one. But metabolic flexibility is not just maximized fat burning. Those are not the same thing. And that's how people will often describe that. If you go too hard on one side of the other of the equation, you'll see a whole host of adaptations that compromise the ability to do the other things. That's not metabolic flexibility. That is still specialization. You're just specializing the other side of the equation. If that's what you want to do, fine. We're all for it. But we generally like to see people truly flexible on both sides. So if you want to go higher fat in your

47:46performance because you feel better, you like it, great. If you can demonstrate no issues, we're all for it. But if we're doing it for a theoretical idea and you don't actually have information behind that, then like, we're not going to support those ideas. So you want to go higher fat? Great. We have had some people where we've tinkered around with some, some number of people actually we've tinkered around with different things. We try a higher fat diet and they actually do perform better. So we stay with that, right? Like even independent of any metabolic flexibility data we've

48:18got on them. Great. We're going to stay in that. And then we've had others that are the opposite. So these are these really long, long duration endurance folks that are out there and they just don't do well when carbohydrates get low. And so we have to have room for both of those realities. Some people will perform better on a higher fat diet for more fat oxidizing, lower intensity things. And some will just do a lot better on those. And to finish up the point, I'm talking about long duration endurance events that are both fast and slow. So if you look at

48:50to be ridiculous, like, like we were talking about Cam earlier, you look at some Rob, Rob, you know, producer, you, these guys are under two and a half hour marathon times, right? Cam's higher, but you know, Rob's a two and a half hour. He's fat. He's going to be burning. I don't know. I don't have metabolic data on him, but 70 to 80% carbohydrate in the marathon. So that's a long duration endurance event, but that is not a fat burning event. That is a carbohydrate game, right? If you want to run a marathon fast, that is a carbohydrate game. If you want to run a really, really long one and you don't care about speed,

49:24you're still going to burn a boatload of carbohydrates, but now we can afford to go slower with more fat oxidation. And so when we say endurance, there's also like another level of question. It was like, okay, fast endurance or just like endurance for the longterm. So all that goes into our calculus of thinking about how we're going to fuel somebody, how we're going to ask them to recover. Um, to get to the, like to go back a few minutes earlier, Jordy was talking about this with Ned Brockman, like a thousand miles. He's not giving him fat only. He's not on an 80% fat. Like that is his most fat oxidation, oxidation possible thing you could come up with a thousand

49:59dang miles. And he's still relying heavily on carbohydrates to get him through. So I don't know if that actually answers your question, but you can think about like, that's the stuff that we framed against. Well, yeah, it does answer the question. It's basically like, no, you don't have to, you don't have to be eating, eating, eating a higher fat diet isn't necessarily going to make you better at burning fat. Oh no, definitely not. I certainly think that, you know, when it comes down to that metabolic flexibility exercise, again, like when you're, when you're doing a lot

50:29of exercise, you become, you're, you actually are becoming more metabolically flexible through exercise in my opinion than anything else. Actually, I think the one thing that's kind of interesting here that that does get left, the way that we think about metabolic flexibility is more of an innate human skill rather than an exercise performance one, such that I think you all, we all should have the ability to go for six hours and not have any food and still perform cognitively. You shouldn't be hangry and cranky because you missed lunch, right? Like that is now

51:03you're in the kind of like, you're not super resilient, whether this is a metabolic flexibility issue or not. If that's happening consistently with you, I would say we have some room to grow with metabolic health likely, right? You should probably be able to go 24 hours and maintain cognitive function and maintain physical performance. If you've ever, you've done some fasting, like longer fasting stuff, right? You should be able to not eat any calories for 24 hours and still exercise, right? You're not deplete really of very much anything.

51:34If you're the person who is the, like, I can't do anything. I skipped lunch or didn't get the breakfast. Then I think we have some stuff to do, but this is more of like, you have probably are lacking some innate physiological skills that are going to help you in multiple ways. But past that, the metabolic flexibility thing is, again, not often packaged correctly in my opinion. What do you think about, so, you know, I've had Marty Gabala on the podcast talking about high intensity interval training and, you know, how, obviously when you're doing, a lot of people think when you're like doing HIIT that it's like this all, I'm only burning glucose, right? You know,

52:08if I'm doing zone two, I'm only burning fat, only oxidizing fat and using mitochondria and they don't realize there's actually a lot of gray going on. Like, you're doing high intensity interval training types of exercise. You're, yeah, you're, you're, you're, you know, going above the lactate threshold. You're, you're using glucose as fuel, but you're also still using your mitochondria, right? I mean, you're, you're pushing them hard and. There, there, there are many things to say about, uh, poor understanding of metabolism is, is how I'll say that. There is no way to fully metabolize carbohydrate without oxidation.

52:43You just can't, right? Like you can run through and we can do it. And it's probably not the most interesting thing, but you can't get very far anaerobically with even carbohydrate. You have to finish that story aerobically. Does that mean your fuel in the exercise itself is the same as the total net expenditure? No. So in the case of Marty's work and high intensity stuff, yeah. In the actual exercise bout itself, you're going to be well above anaerobic threshold. You're going to be well above an RER of 1.0, right? You're going to get really, really high. In fact,

53:17we have seen many times 1.3s, 1.4s, right? For RERs or RQs. That's mathematically impossible. 1.0 means a hundred percent. So what you're mean is like the, the, the, the carbon dioxide expenditure is so exceeding aerobic or oxidative intake that your numbers get like astronomically high. So yes, but that said those, anything you just burn there, that's sitting either in lactate or in pyruvate or some other intermediate form there, it's going to be finished in the mitochondria

53:49with oxidation. You want to recover faster. And I'm talking about within the minutes to hours, post-exercise, as well as couple of days. Now this is an aerobic capacity issue. That's how you handle these things for our athletes that fight in five, five minute rounds, like in the UFC, or we do 12 rounds in boxing, whatever the case is, there is a huge aerobic component to that huge, despite the fact that they are going as hard as possible. They are pegged heart rate wise and other things, getting them to recover, especially from session to session, the morning workout to the evening

54:22workout, the higher functioning aerobic capacity we have there. And I don't mean VO2 max per se there. I truly mean aerobic capacity. That is a huge component of their ability to recover and to not be completely trash the next day. The ones that are really, really smashed anaerobically, like really high, they can't train as much. We have to back them off more. The volume has to be lower. We have to be really strategic. We run into injuries more frequently. We run into just physiologically running into the ground. Our recovery metrics get lower. The taper has to be longer. We have to just make

54:56adjustments with calories. They can't handle as much the ones that are higher in aerobic fitness. They can handle things more. There's consequences that too. But yeah, that you can pick the highest intensity thing you could possibly do. And there's still like anaerobic and aerobic is not two different things. It's the same gear, right? It's the top side and bottom side of the same gear. There's not different units. They're just, you know, the front side and the backside of it. So they will always complement each other. They're not distinct things. I mean, look at all of Georgia's work

55:27on lactate. Like we know these answers now. This is not a one system. These are not different systems. These are just the different side of the same coin. Right. No, it's true. I mean, it's, but people like to kind of put this, I think Lane explained this in a good way, how people like just put things in bins. Like it's like this bin or this bin. And it's like, well, there's sometimes there's a lot of, there's not bins. They're just kind of just overlap. It's rarely how physiology works. Yeah. Right. We have redundant systems on purpose. I kind of wanted to ask you just because we were

55:58talking about the timing of, we talked about the anabolic window for carbohydrates, how they're really, there truly does seem to be an importance there with respect to at least if you're doing more endurance type of training and you want to be ready for the next day. But protein, you know, Stu Phillips has been on, Luke Levin Loon, you're in agreement. They're really the anabolic window is more of a, it's more of a total daily protein intake. Is that, I mean, I guess, you know, when Lane came on the podcast, he said, maybe there's a little something you can squeeze out

56:29if you're like top level, you know, type of, yeah, power lifter, muscle bodybuilder, whatever. Yeah. And honestly, that comes down though to practicality. It's just simply because I said earlier, it's just really hard to get 400 grams of protein in a day. Right. Hmm. So you just end up having to do protein like all, like, yeah, right. So you're just look at Mike Ormsby's work out of Florida state. He's done all that pre bed carbohydrate stuff or a protein ingestion stuff. So it's like 40 grams of protein 30 minutes before bed. Now in all that stuff, he hasn't shown these huge massive benefits to it. He actually doesn't show

57:02any consequences either. So you don't compromise fat. You don't gain more fat. You don't reduce fat oxidation by having this big bowl of protein right before bed. And so the way he will package that is to say, if you're struggling to hit your total protein numbers, this is just another window to get you there. If your protein numbers are fine though, there's no added benefit here. There's no huge win. And so that just is another example. I think of this point, when it comes to the protein game, probably what Lane was saying, like, if this is just maybe a way for you to smack in 15 more

57:33grams or 20 or 40, then great. But outside of that, there's no magic benefit. Yeah. Luke Van Loon actually did a few studies. I don't know if he collaborated with the person just mentioned, but also on this pre sleep protein loading, where it's like they're giving people protein, a bolus of protein right before bed. And it does increase muscle protein synthesis while they're sleeping. And, you know, again, I think the way he also framed it was you're getting more of your total protein. You're getting more of that, you know, total protein for the day.

58:07But also it seems to make a difference for like elderly people who are just terrible at getting, making, meeting that protein requirement, you know, for whatever reason. I don't know. It's just hard to chew food or their appetite isn't, they don't have, you know, their appetite hormones are kind of dysregulated, whatever the reason. So what I wanted to ask you about, because it was kind of interesting, I saw a study you were a co author on with respect to protein, kind of on that sort of same, you know, token people meeting, it's hard for some people to take

58:39in 1.6 grams per kilogram body weight or more. Yeah, right. Tough. So they're taking protein powders, they're doing the protein powder, it's the easiest thing, right? What are your thoughts on whole foods versus powders? Now you published an interesting study on egg, egg white powder versus the whole egg? Yeah, yeah. But I'd love to like to know your thoughts in general. Yeah, that was actually a pretty cool study. Whole food is always the answer, right? That there's always our default

59:12position. If we ever have to go to supplements, or even supplemental food, like a protein powder or a powdered carbohydrate, that is our second choice. Full stop right there. That particular paper and actually set of studies on that found basically the same thing. So whole egg versus egg white. And it turns out potentially we don't we didn't have mechanisms behind this, but potentially some of the stuff that's in the egg yolk itself was contributing to additional muscle growth, micronutrient wise, vitamin D, right, of course, and like any number of things are in there.

59:43Coke. Absolutely, right? Whether those actually were the case, I don't get we didn't have mechanism on those. It was just sort of like, why do you think this is happening? And even when you match it for calories, seems to be the case. Nonetheless, to back out your question, yeah, it's a whole food answer, right? If we can get there with whole food, and I will say this, we have many of our professional athletes that take almost no supplements. And they definitely don't supplement protein powder. Some of them don't like it doesn't set well with their GI. You don't have to have protein powder ever. I can't think of a compelling reason why outside of practical, you know, easier

1:00:17flavor, taste, whatever. So protein very specifically, whole food, muscle growth, whole food. There are other use cases for other supplements and things that other strategies, but that is our answer. And I think that the that paper you're referring to showed the same thing. Yeah, I was kind of it was, I was a little shocked, to be honest, because, you know, protein was equated, calories were equated. And they were they were training. And it's like, the one the

1:00:48people eating the whole eggs had increases, I guess it was slight in muscle mass was strength also, right? Yeah, but you would anticipate it to be slight. Like how much of a benefit would a couple of egg yolks a day, plausibly give it a healthy person, it shouldn't be much. Had those data come back, and it was more than that, I would have been like, I don't know about that. Yeah, well, it's a little interesting, because you always think about, well, leucine is the major signal for, you know, protein synthesis, muscle protein synthesis. And you would think, well, if it's the leucine and the egg white powder, it should be why? Why is there? Why is

1:01:22there a difference? Right? I mean, Well, again, this is what like, it's actually funny, because when the reviewers came back, it was like, I knew it was gonna happen. Everybody knew. And it was that, right? You're just like, okay, how? And we're like, well, I don't know, we don't have this. And so you just start making, again, as you mentioned, choline, and you start making like, well, plausible this, and then you make plausibly that, and then plausibly that, and like, you're trying to run these Well, there's also some omega-3s in eggs. And you might think, well, the cell membranes, now maybe the transporters are getting more leucine in, who knows? Totally. Who knows, right? But I personally, you know, I don't like protein powders, to be honest. And

1:01:57it's a processed food. I mean, you look at protein powders, and it's like, never just protein. Never. And so I have every reason to be motivated to eat my turkey burger, my homemade turkey burger, you know, versus the protein powder. But I get it. I get like, I have these like pre-made, homemade turkey burgers, you know, they're food prepped, and they're there ready to just microwave. I'm not scared of microwave. So easy for me to do. But there's a lot of people that it's

1:02:28like, they're not going to cook something. If they don't meal prep, then it's the go-to, right? You're going, I don't like protein bars. Same thing, where it's like, it's processed. It's all this stuff, like, you know? So I kind of liked the little extra motivation to say, yeah, go for the whole foods. Go for the whole foods, you know? I have had a love-hate relationship with those things as well. Spent many decades, like, smashing many scoops of protein powder a day, and then probably went a decade or more with,

1:03:00like, almost no protein powder. Now I'm back on it a little bit more for other reasons. Like, they're getting better with some of those things. But if you're asking me what I'd rather do, have a candy bar, or have, like, a piece of whole food, I'm always going to take the whole food, for preference, just flavor preferences. Like, I like eating food more than I like supplements. So we talked a lot about macronutrients. I think there was, you know, I didn't know if there was, going back to the fat, just before we move on to the micronutrients, is there really an optimal

1:03:33fat ratio or timing? I mean, or is it mostly come down to if they perform better, if that's what they want? Or do you think that it's something that's just not as important as carbohydrates? Well, I'll answer this two ways. I'll be short. I actually think it's an interesting question. I don't think people spend a lot of time studying. I'm open to the possibility that there is way more important in different timing scenarios than we think, but that people just have not done that work. So that's an open-ended question that's never been there. The other way I'll say it is,

1:04:06because of that, I guess, yeah. Like, I just don't feel like at this point we have any compelling reason to think that it is a critical thing to pay attention to in terms of timing and stuff relative there. If you just think about plausibly what these different fueling sources are intending to do, it makes sense that fat is probably the thing you could be third concerned about. You have backup stores of it already. It can be mobilized. When you ingest it or you're using your own endogenous

1:04:38fat, it still happens at roughly the same rate, so on and so forth. So with all that, I think that's our answer, but I'm open. I'm open to other things. What about, so you mentioned earlier, you know, that you're mostly concerned if people aren't getting enough fat. And so I'd love for you to explain to people why that is, but also I'm interested in your thoughts about the quality of fat. Are some fats better than others? Do some fats hinder performance? Yeah, this is actually a whole category of questions that are super interesting.

1:05:12We grew up in the same nutritional generation, right? Low fat, low fat, low fat. And then we saw those consequences. Okay. If you are really low fat for a long time, there are like cataclysm of problems that can happen with that, especially if you're combining that on top of hypochlorism, right? Endocrine disruptions, sleep disruptions, probably long-term health disruptions in many areas. Like it's going to be a huge issue. What does low mean? I don't think we have a great definitive number on that, but if it's less than 10% of your calories, again, combined with

1:05:45hypochloric for a long period of time, then you're probably running into all kinds of issues from cell membrane. Like you don't, you don't have the basic building blocks to keep cells together to the other ones, endocrine health, organ health, a ton, transporter health, storage health. Like it has so many roles in our body. So you don't want, you want to stay away from those things. Now past that, in terms of fat quality, boy, how, how inflamed your audience is probably a little

1:06:16bit better, but how, how mad do you want the internet to get mad at these following statements, right? I, the truth is all that matters to me. Yeah. I know what matters to you. You've been clear in your career of how you approach things, but there's, there's just not a lot of compelling evidence that whole fat in itself can be disregarded as always healthy or always bad, right? So animal fat, vegetable fats, seed oils, right? We'll throw it out there.

1:06:51Hmm. When managed under all appropriate situations, we're okay here. Like we're really just okay. You're fine. We're going to handle these things, but you go exaggerating any one of those areas, you're going to run into problems, right? So if you're eating copious amounts of saturated fat and combining that with low physical activity, hyper, hyper calorism, you're going to have problems. Same thing with seed oils, right? You cook them, you process them. You do all those

1:07:21things. You combine them. You're going to run into problems there too. So what does a quality fat mean?

1:07:27I always default back to the same thing. I don't want to eat anything that's processed. I don't care. Animal, plant, you pick it. I'm trying to eat whole food versions of everything. And that is true for my carbohydrates, my proteins, and my fats. So we don't approach the fats that differently. So I don't deal with it that much because rarely are we going out of our way to give people processed foods, processed fats included. So when we're eating, for most of our people, they eat animal sources, right? So we're going to be getting fats from animals in a reasonable

1:08:00amount. We're paying attention to those other factors, vegetables, protein, whole foods. So because of that, animal fat just doesn't come in huge quantities. We don't have the physical space. It comes in a normal amount and we're okay. At the same time, we're not having to be so guarded against seed oils because we're not consuming most foods that come with seed oils. We don't have to worry about that. Right. It's the company. It's the company, right? Like it's like these things are not critically, you know, some people get so like fired up about it.

1:08:30What about olive oil, avocado oil, avocados, nuts? I mean, omega-3 fatty acids, fish, like those are all. If it's in a whole food, we're going to, like we have no issue with it, right? You have to be a little bit careful with exogenous oils just because of, as you're aware, like caloric intake just gets really, really high there. But do we have our people eat nuts? Yeah. Avocados. Yes. Like all of the above. Whole foods are almost always going to be on our list. You just be careful with additives. Like you put something into an oil and low quality in

1:09:06the sunlight, it, you know, fill in the blank there. Same thing with nuts, right? Those can come in low quality as well. So we always try to get those things in the appropriate standards and then we don't have any issues past that. So I don't know how much we've successfully dodged or didn't dodge any landmines on that one. But man, I just don't have a lot of aptitude for the conversation. I mean, we have to spend hours talking about it because there's just so much nuance. That would be a whole other episode. Thank you. Thank you for saying that rather so I didn't have to say it. That's one kind way to put it. But my goodness, people. Yeah, there's a lot of emotions involved in nutrition

1:09:38for sure. That's a great way to put it. There's a lot of emotions involved. Um, so micronutrients, this is an area that as you know, I'm very passionate about and I think it's a good segue into some supplements that I'm interested in talking about. But you know, exercise does increase requirements for several micronutrients. How do you, how do you approach that so that people are more intentional about their diet and trying to get some of those, maybe talk about some of those micronutrients and then how. So micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, phytochemicals, if you're doing your job with nutrition, those

1:10:15things are mostly taken care of, right? If you're eating the variety of the foods, the type of foods that we've been talking about, the big basic stuff, you're in a really good spot. Now, do we need to go on top of those things and supplement particular vitamins, minerals, nutrients? Context dependent here. Magnesium is the one that jumps off, of course, as the one where if our food quality sources were, I don't want to say how they used to be or what we would like them to be, and we had adequate amounts of those in our food, then

1:10:48we would literally just not have to worry about supplements at all. But that's not always the case. So because of that, you can look and you'll see all kinds of numbers about things like magnesium deficiencies, whether that's clinical deficient, subclinical, or just suboptimal, I don't know, some papers 40% of people, some people 60%, like those numbers can get really, really high. When you look at athletes, because of caloric expenditure and because of sweat, and because of how much tissue breakdown that's happening through many, like then the needs are even higher with them. So I would say magnesium as a supplement

1:11:20comes in probably 90% of the people we work with. It's really, really, really common for us to add magnesium as a supplement. We try to add higher magnesium bioavailable foods more. That is our starting place, but we're probably going to add supplements on top of that in addition because you just, it's just hard to get there. You got to be careful with this a little bit though because if you were to look at your magnesium levels in like a classic blood draw, that's a terrible place to look. The magnesium that comes on your blood work that you get is not an

1:11:56indicative of all of what's actually happening in your body. The vast majority of it's going to be stored in bone anyways, and it's super transient. And now there's, there's good information you can get there and there's other ways you can look at it, markers of it. But I always like to flag that because people get really freaked out. They going for blood work for whatever reason, they see that and they're like, oh, I'm super high. I don't need it. Like, no, like that's not a good way to interpret your overall magnesium status. We can talk more about that, but in general, because of those things, we ended up adding magnesium is, is one of our top line micronutrients

1:12:27to pay attention to. So I'll go on for more, but I'll stop on magnesium if you want to talk more about that. Yeah, no, it's, it's, I know you're a fan. Yeah, for sure. Um, I'm glad you mentioned the plasma levels magnesium, which is mostly what's being measured in a standard test. I guess you would get from like a routine physical or something like that. Yeah. You pull it out from your bones and, and, and really, um, it's, it's, it's, it's kind of like this, your bones are this reservoir. And by the time someone reaches older age, like 50% of their magnesium has been taken out of their bones. I mean, it's incredible. And it plays a role in osteoporosis. A huge rule.

1:12:58But people aren't really focused on that as much. Um, yeah. So about if, if half the country isn't, as you mentioned, depends on the paper that you're reading and what, you know, what's being defined as magnesium insufficiency. Most of the time it's looking at what the RDA is. Yeah. So for, for women, it's about 320 milligrams per day for men, about 420 milligrams per day. And so people aren't meeting that requirement. And so they're considered to be getting insufficient magnesium. And so you're talking about half the country, basically. So you've got a one in two chance of whatever athlete that walks into your door, that might be not getting enough.

1:13:31Right. So that's kind of, I think I would say that it's good insurance, but then as you mentioned, you know, these athletes are sweating magnesium, they're breaking down tissue. Um, they're, you know, urinating more. I mean, there's lots of like, it's coming out, it's coming out. And so they can require up to 10 to 20% more than the RDA. And so if they're not even meeting that RDA, um, it makes sense to supplement. Now I've heard you talk about different magnesium supplements, like magnesium citrate being, being one that, um, is often preferred for recovery.

1:14:04You, uh, magnesium source is different. Uh, back when we were kids, you had to be really on top of this, uh, because of ineffective forms of magnesium and because of GI distress, most supplement companies have cleaned that up. So now you can look at, uh, bisglycinate is, is a really common one that is fine. Citrate's fine. Obviously three and eights become more popular now. Um, any of those are generally okay, right? It's the old forms, the oxidates that the different ones like that, that you like really had to be careful of, but you're generally okay there. They've also in large part, uh, dose these things so that GI distress is not huge anymore. So this

1:14:41is actually something we would, we would pay a lot of attention to way back in the day, but for the most part, you're okay. As long as your dosage is, is reasonable. Um, if it is giving you problems, then you can go down a little bit or you can try a different form, but we haven't seen, uh, did huge differences between various forms. Um, they're all basically getting to the same spot. So like most of our people coming in, the closest accuracy you can look at is like, it's not uncommon for us to see people below 250 in terms of their intake. So like you said,

1:15:12320, 400, like, and that's not an athlete. That's, that's the standard person. Athletes can be 20% more. Yeah. So we actually have generally found our non-athlete or our normal people population is generally higher with magnesium intake. Our athletes tend to be lower. Um, that's a little bit of, well, that's a lot of selection bias. Someone's coming into work with me. They're probably pretty health conscious. They're eating more meat, less greens. The athletes are not like always health conscious. So it's a little section bias. Yeah, but like really common. I'm like so much

1:15:44so to be candid, I barely look at it anymore. Cause I'm like, I just know, I assume you're going to be low until you prove, prove otherwise. But yeah, the forms of it. Um, yeah. What kind of dose do you typically, and, and, and have you noticed, um, it affect performance or do you already, are they already supplementing with it? It's, it's not really, no, most, most aren't actually surprising enough. Most are not taking with it. Standard dose juice. If you look at the big high quality brands, 150, 200, something like that in that range, right. That's going to usually take a scoop,

1:16:16a scoop and a half. If it's a powder, three pills, caps, if it's capsule, like something like that. So those would be sort of our starter dosages. We have gone double that plenty of times. Again, context, we deal with many 300 plus pound people. So when we're doubling it, I'm not doubling it for the a hundred and you know, something, nothing pound, uh, individual. So we can get high there. The only real drawback in general, as you know, when you're start tinkering with vitamins, you have a range of like, okay, not a big deal to like really big

1:16:51deal. Phytochemicals, antioxidants, same there. Minerals are different. You got to be careful with rocks, right? Magnesium though is pretty inert. It's okay. You start tinkering with iron. You got to really be paying attention. You start tinkering with other rocks. You got to really understand that magnesium seems to be like pretty okay. Like the worst thing we're going to deal with is GI distress. And as I talked about, like most people are okay now. It's not a big deal. So I'm not super concerned with going a little bit aggressive with magnesium because of that, because we also, um, are asking so much of them in other areas of performance or movement. It's one I'm saying,

1:17:26like, don't worry a ton about the dosage on that one. If you're a little bit high, you want to go a little more aggressive. I'm fine at that. We will see some people respond very well in terms of physical recovery, totally subjective. They feel like their legs are not a sore anymore, or they're not getting as much. I don't know if that's actually happening. Totally. Honestly, I don't know. Um, we will see pretty pronounced improvements in a bunch of sleep metrics though. That seems to be re and that's,

1:17:57that's all very objective. Like our sleep technology is incredibly advanced that we use. It's not just, um, like a consumer wearable. And so we have a ton of metrics we can look at there. And that one seems to be a really clear jumping off point. And it doesn't seem to matter which form we use. That was my next question. Yeah. Doesn't seem surprised. No, I mean, there's been actually probably two or three papers in the last six months on three and eight specifically. We're finally starting to get human trials, um, need more work, but we haven't noticed a big difference between

1:18:27forms. Most people are on three and eight right now, but, uh, not a big deal for us. What about, so omega threes, um, and I do want to talk about, we're going to get into recovery and, and supplements for performance as well. But omega threes is another one. I mean, I personally, as you probably know, think that most people are not getting enough omega three. In fact, if you look at, if you look at data on the omega three index, people are mostly not there in the low range and there's a lot of longevity reasons, you know, cardiovascular health, inflammation,

1:18:58why getting up to a higher omega three index would be ideal. And most people, there's been studies showing that taking around 1.5 to two grams a day will get you there from a 4% omega three index, which is low to an 8% omega three index, which is high. And, um, what, how do you approach omega threes from a performance perspective? Have you seen the data on omega index and professional athletes? No, I think don't quote me here, but you'll make the point. I think that the, uh, the NBA data was like 50% or below five hits star low five. Yeah. It's just like

1:19:34very low, stunningly low, right? Nobody's at 15. Like, it's just like, you just don't get it. Yeah. Right. Um, the numbers might even higher. It's, it's outrageous. So yeah, we, magnesium is a pretty big staple. And unless we have strong contraindication, pretty much everyone's going to be getting omega three as well. Um, I know again, another, like, we'll throw it out there. Yes. I saw the AFib paper. Like everybody's aware of the omega three and heart flutter, heart palpitations.

1:20:06Great. Um, if you are a cardiologist, you can treat that however you'd like. If you're concerned about work with your cardiologist, do whatever you want. But outside of that, there is so much other information, so much benefit, so many rationale reasons, uh, for omega threes that we use it very consistently. We always start food first, blah, blah, blah, all the things. But because of that, uh, a moderate to low dose of omega three, pretty safe place to go. Yeah. On the, on the AFib thing, um, there's, you know, it seems to be at a four gram, super high dose range, four grams,

1:20:40ethyl ester form. Yeah. And also the recent paper that came out, the, it was a correlation paper. It wasn't a randomized control trial. Bill Harris has had publishing a response to that. It was a like terrible statistics and all this stuff done. So anyway, did you see the absolute effect by the way? Um, yeah, it was like extremely low, like ridiculous. Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's not. So I think it was just creating a lot of anxiety, you know, no, no, of course there's people that maybe have a family history or prone, maybe shouldn't be taking five grams of ethyl ester, you know,

1:21:12high vasepa or whatever a day. But, um, man, I got torched for that recently. Really? Yeah. I talk about somewhere people flew off the handle. I'm like, my God, like you have to pay attention past line, the top line. You do. And the absolute effect. It's like, again, it's like one of those things where you're going to have to spend a little bit of time talking about all the nuance to like really convey everything. You can't just do a little like, you know, soundbite. It's just not, people are going to have their emotional response and that's that. There's also like, just the humans are weird. You can't pick a exercise, a supplement, a nutrition thing that we've ever done

1:21:47where somebody of the 7 billion of us won't throw their hand up and go, oh, I did that. And I had this crazy negative response. Right. Like, yeah, yes. Like totally happens. And I believe you. I trust you. I can't explain it. Right. Physiology is wild. There's nuance here. People respond differently. Not to mention that maybe it was something else. I mean, like you never really know, but have you, so I had, um, a young professor on the podcast, Chris McClory, and he's been doing some pretty pioneering and interesting work. He trained with a couple of the, a couple of the

1:22:21big guys. Stu Phillips is one he trained with. Um, but he does work on, on, on high dose omega-3 and disuse atrophy. And he's done a couple of randomized controlled trials showing has to be preloading because it's completely independent of the inflammatory effects, anti-inflammatory effects of omega-3s. Right. Where it, it seems to be, you have to like get these people on omega-3 for at least a month. Right. They're doing like four or five weeks before the trial, before, um, before the trial starts. So they have to be loaded

1:22:54up. That's how long it takes to accumulate in cell membranes. And, um, it's accumulating in their, in their cell membranes and their muscle. And people then have a disuse event. So he'll put a cast or whatever on them and it cuts disuse atrophy like in half. And he's like, you know, trying to figure out what's going on, but it appears to be sensitizing muscle to amino acids. So it's almost like what exercise is doing. So, which is of course, when you're having a disuse event, you're not exercising. And so, um, but anyways, it's

1:23:26something interesting. I kind of wanted to throw out there and get on your radar because it's kind of in your world. And yeah, look, when you, you'll see a cornucopia of things like this, when you take people, I would assume, I don't know his population database in that trial, but I would assume it's fairly inactive, unhealthy people, women, young women. Okay. The only reason I'm saying that is you just seems to see these type of crazy things happen when you go from like somewhat suboptimal to poor health and you just get them back to

1:23:58baseline wild stuff to starts happening like this. Like I have no idea. We could probably get a whiteboard out and start tossing up mechanisms, figure out like what's plausibly happening there, but you could infer this. Okay. A healthier cell membrane probably then can do a bunch of things that it was trying to do, but what wasn't healthy enough to do however we want to determine healthy. And now it can, could it be a reaction response? Could it be all these things? Yeah. Awesome. That is quite different than going from already pretty healthy there. So I would imagine that case. If you take people who are already pretty healthy

1:24:30into the same thing, you wouldn't see as much of a response, but that goes to the point of saying, okay, now, given the fact we know most people are not already pretty healthy. These were healthy women. I think, I think that generally speaking healthy. So we're looking at the effects of omega-3. They weren't high. They don't, they didn't have high levels of omega-3. Right. So that, so the idea is you take someone that's already eating fish, they're supplementing with omega-3, they're exercising, whatever. And you, so you put them in a disuse event, you know, where they're not, not moving a limb for four weeks or whatever and healthy

1:25:05or not, they're going to lose muscle mass. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So it's kind of interesting that. Super interesting. That you, you take something like omega-3s, which are known to affect transporters, receptors, anything embedded in the cell membrane and makes it better. It means make it, makes it functional. So when you have a deficiency of it, like they're not as optimal. So it's kind of, it's kind of interesting because it kind of. Super interesting. Yeah. For me it has, it's not just important for like, elderly people and perhaps a surgery or an event, a disuse event you can plan for, but I think just injury, like in general, like having, having, you know, these omega-3s in

1:25:39our cell membranes built up to that level already would be important. But also what about recovery? Have you looked at omega-3s in recovery at all? Not in my lab ever.

1:25:55Yeah. I don't, I don't think, I don't think I've spent a ton of time outside of the obnoxious, again, going from deficient, super low, just back to a standard number, going from good to high. No, I don't, I don't think I have anything super interesting to say on that stuff. Well, to be determined some other time. I do want to get into some of these performance enhancers and this is kind of, you know, it's a, it's an area that I'm, I'm interested in myself. I, as we were chatting earlier off camera, I had, I had recently had Darren Kando

1:26:27on the podcast and he's done a lot of research in the creatine world. And so I'm kind of curious,