This episode I discuss endurance: our ability to perform effort over extended amounts of time. I describe the four kinds of endurance: muscular endurance, long duration (single-set) efforts, and the two kinds of high intensity interval training (HIIT). I discuss efficiency of effort and maximizing quality of effort, and a hydration formula. I review how our heart literally gets stronger when we oxygenate muscles properly. I also discuss motivation for long bouts of work and the visual physiological basis of the "extra gear" we all can leverage for effort. Finally, I review how accelerating as we fatigue can allow us to access untapped energetic resources.

Introduction

welcome to the hubermann lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life i'm andrew huberman and i'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at stanford school of medicine this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at stanford it is however part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme i'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is roca rocco makes sunglasses and eyeglasses and i'm delighted that they're a partner and a sponsor for the podcast as some of you may already know i've spent two decades or more studying the visual system how we see vision is absolutely the most important sense by which humans navigate the world and survive and our eyes as two pieces of our brain do many other important things as well so taking good care of our eyesight is essential founded by two all-american swimmers from stamford roca was born out of an obsession for performance they carefully put science and purpose behind their design choices and they built absolutely terrific products as a result the glasses are amazing i love them because they look great they are super comfortable and the optical clarity is incredible they filter out sunlight in a way that still allows you to see contrast and shadows the way you need to you know for me one of the things that's really irritating is if i have a pair of sunglasses that don't allow me to see all the things i want to see and with roka glasses i get incredible contrast but then i can also relax and be outdoors in bright light and as the amount of light changes with cloud cover and things of that sort my ability to see my surroundings is still really sharp and really clear and that only comes from really understanding how the visual system works and how it adjusts to contrast and adaptation and all these different things they really understand the science and that went into the design of these glasses and as many of you know sunlight and the viewing of light is also very important for setting circadian rhythms so that's also been incorporated into the design and science behind these glasses i do wear readers i don't often wear them during the podcast but i have to wear reading glasses at night so i use their readers and i own a pair of their sunglasses and i'm delighted with them if you'd like to check out roka glasses you can go to roca.com that's roka.com and enter the code huberman to save 20 off your first order that's roka.com enter the code huberman at checkout to get 20 off your first order today's podcast is also brought to you by inside tracker inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and dna to help you better understand your body and reach your health goals i'm a big believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the important things that are vital to our immediate and long-term health can only be detected in a good quality blood test the problem with blood tests is that most blood tests you get a lot of information back about levels that are too high or too low of this thing or the other thing but making sense of that and what to do with that information is very challenging even if you have a really attentive physician oftentimes it's mysterious as to what to do with all this data with inside tracker they make it very easy to understand what all the metabolic factors hormone factors etc mean for you and what to do about those markers so they offer you directives in terms of nutrition supplementation as well as lifestyle factors like exercise sleep etc that can allow you to take control of those numbers and bring them into the ranges that are best for you and your long- term health another feature of inside tracker that's great is their inner age test this test shows you what your biological age and how it compares to your chronological age which i can only imagine most everybody including me are extremely interested in how long am i likely to live how old am i really in terms of my biology if you'd like to try inside tracker you can visit insidetracker.com huberman to get 25 off any of inside tracker's plans use the code huberman at checkout today's episode is also brought to us by athletic greens athletic greens is an all-in-one vitamin mineral probiotic drink i've been using athletic green since 2012 and so i'm delighted that they're sponsoring the podcast with athletic greens you get a ton of factors that are good for you mixed into this one really good tasting drink i like to mix mine with water and a little bit of lemon juice and i drink that once or twice a day typically once early in the day and sometimes also in the afternoon or even evening i'm able to sleep after drinking in the evening just fine the reason i've been using athletic greens for so long that i continue to use athletic greens is that one i feel better when i take it i just do psychologically physically i feel better but also it covers all my bases of the things that i need for my general health sort of a foundational supplement as i like to call it in fact when people ask me what should i take if i were to recommend just one supplement that people take it would be athletic greens with athletic greens you get support for your gut which is important because the gut microbiome is important for the gut brain access for mood metabolism hormones etc there are so many data that support that statement as well there are many factors in athletic greens that support general health metabolism endocrine factors immunity etc so with athletic greens i drink it once or twice a day and i know that i've got all that covered if you'd like to try athletic greens you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman and if you do that you can claim a special offer they'll send you five free travel packs plus a year surpr supply excuse me of vitamin d3 and k2 so you get the 5 free travel packs and a year supply of d3 if you go to athleticgreens.com huberman you can claim that special offer for the last month four episodes to be exact we've been discussing physical performance and skill learning we've talked about how to learn skills faster whether or not those are skills for athletic performance dance music things of that sort we've also talked about how to gain strength and how to lose fat faster by leveraging the nervous system things like shiver and non-shiver non-exercise activity induced thermogenesis we talked about how neurons can actually trigger accelerated fat loss we talked about hypertrophy also called muscle growth and we covered everything from sets and reps protocols how long to stay in a cold ice bath when to get out how to keep shivering we've covered a lot of tools and a lot of science so if you're interested in those things and you even perhaps want to learn a little bit about how we make energy atp from carbohydrates or from fats it's all covered in the previous four episodes this was going to be the time that we moved to a new topic entirely but we are going to do one more episode in this series on physical performance for the simple reason that you asked many questions about something that's vitally important both for physical performance and long-term and short-term health and that's endurance and so today we are going to talk about endurance now if you're a strength athlete or you're not interested in endurance don't depart just yet because it turns out that there are ways to train endurance that are very different than i would have previously imagined if you only think about long runs long swims marathons half marathons 10ks 5ks and that sort of thing puts you to sleep kind of like costello is snoring in the background right now he's not a long distance endurance athlete that's for sure if you're interested in those things or if you are averse to those things i encourage you to continue listening because we are going to talk about a little bit of science and then some specific protocols that really define what endurance is the four types of endurance and ways to train those in concert with the other things that you might be doing like weight training or skill training or yoga and if you are an endurance athlete we are going to cover a lot of tools and science that i'm certain will also help enhance your training and performance in races or even just recreationally the topic of endurance i think has been badly misrepresented frankly online and when you start digging into the science and you start talking to real experts in this area what you discover what i've discovered is that it's an incredibly interesting area because it teaches us so much about how our body and our brain use fuels and how we can control which fuels are used by our body and brain so today we will talk about the four kinds of endurance we will also cover the topic of hydration which might sound incredibly boring like okay just drink more water but it's really interesting because not only is hydration a limiting factor on performance but there is a right way to hydrate and there is a wrong way to hydrate there actually is a formula that i'll teach you to know how much water to be drinking depending on your activity levels and if that sounds like a simple thing like oh just you know tap off water until your urine runs clear that's actually the wrong advice it turns out that if you don't hydrate properly you can see 20 to 30 percent reductions in performance whether or not that strength whether that's increasing hypertrophy whether or not that's running swimming even mental performance so even if you're not an athlete or a recreational athlete at all i encourage you to stay tuned for the part about hydration so we're going to cover as usual a little bit of science and then we're going to dive right into protocols that you can apply if you like and if you deem those correct and safe for you before we dive into all that i want to make an important announcement which is all the episodes of the hubermann lab podcast are now housed on a single website which is hubermanlab.com if you go to hubermannlab.com you can find all the episodes in youtube apple and spotify format with links there the website is also searchable so if you go into the little search function which you'll find very easily and you put in for instance creatine or sleep or ice bath or sauna it will take you to the specific episodes that contain that information and in addition if you go to the website hubermanlab.com you have the opportunity to sign up for what we call the hubermann lab neural network the hubermann lab neural network is a zero cost resource where once a month perhaps more often you'll receive a email newsletter and that newsletter will contain specific protocols announcements attachments of pdfs and things of that sort of protocols tools and science from the podcast we will also make any announcements about live lectures which at some point i'll probably start doing in various cities in the us and probably around the world as well as well as other things that i think would be really useful to you all of course at zero cost so that's hubermanlab.com sign up for the neural network newsletter you can find that in the menu tab or it might pop up when you get there and i hope you will join and as a final announcement if you're not already following us on instagram you can go to huberman lab on instagram and if you do that i often make announcements and release protocols and links to protocols and things there as well i briefly want to touch on something from the previous episode which is that if you are somebody that is trying to increase muscle strength and or size or if you're simply somebody who doesn't want to increase muscle strength and size you just want to maintain the musculature that you have it's vital that you perform at least five sets of resistance training per muscle per week if we don't do that we lose muscle over time and that is one reason among many to have a regular resistance training protocol nobody wants to start resembling a folded over envelope or a melted candle no one wants to have challenges getting up out of a chair or off the ground maintaining musculature is vital not just to our immediate health but to our long-term health trajectory so i just want to emphasize that point if you're curious about the sets the reps how close to failure to go or not go whether or not you should be doing your cardiovascular training before or after your weight training all of that is in the previous episode right down to the details and i like to think made simple for you to understand but i do strongly believe that resistance training whether or not it's with body weight or bands or weights or simply lifting rocks in the yard or logs in the yard is vital for our systemic physiology and our overall health and that includes our brain health and i described the reasons for that and the mechanisms in the previous episode today i'd like to talk about endurance and how to build endurance and how to use endurance for the health of your entire body endurance as the name suggests is our ability to engage in continuous bouts of exercise or continuous movement or continuous effort of any kind and i do believe that our ability to engage in activities that we call endurance training or physical endurance activities do have carryover to mental performance of things that require long-term effort i'll touch on that at the end and why there's reason to believe that there's a biological crossover between those two things i don't think it's simply the case that if you train yourself to be a strength and speed athlete and to do short bouts of exercise that are very intense that you can only do mental work that's of short bouts and very intense but it is clear that cardiovascular exercise exercise where you're getting your heart rate up continuously for a period of time and endurance exercise we will define what that is in a moment is vital for tapping into and enhancing various aspects of our biology in the body and in the brain such that our brain can perform work for longer periods of time focused work learning etc so i want to dive into the topic of endurance and i want to just begin by addressing something that's vital to any kind of effort whether or not it's mental effort or physical effort so as always a little bit of science and we'll get right into protocols so the key thing to understand about energy production in the body meaning your ability to think your ability to talk your ability to walk your ability to run is this thing that we call atp atp and mitochondria which are just little what we call organelles within cells these are little factories that make energy if you will atp is required for anything that requires energy for anything that you do that requires effort and there are different ways to get atp and we have been gifted as a species with the ability to convert lots of things into atp we can convert carbohydrates literally the kinds of carbohydrates you eat a bagel you eat a piece of pizza pizza usually is dough and it has cheese and some other things costello here as we talk about pizza custard loves pizza by the way eating a piece of pizza it gets converted into various things fatty acids from the fats glucose from the bread and those things get converted into atp within cells through things like glycolysis things like lipolysis i talked about this in previous episodes so our muscles and our neurons use different fuel sources to generate atp the ones that are used first for short bouts of intense activity are things like phosphocreatine if you've only heard about creatine as a supplement well phosphocreatine actually exists in our muscles and that's why people take creatine you can load your muscles with more creatine and though and excuse me phosphate creatine is great for short intense bouts of effort so when you're really pushing hard on something physical let's say you see a car on the side of the road and that car is stalled and a person says hey can you help me push my car and you start to push that's gonna be phosphocreatine it's gonna be your main fuel source then you start to tap into things like glucose which is literally just carbohydrate it's just sugar that's in your blood and then if you keep pushing on that car you keep in engaging in a particular effort or you keep studying or you keep listening to this podcast you start to tap into other fuel sources like glycogen from your liver which is just it's like a little pack just like you know you might have packed a sandwich or something for work you have a little pack of glycogen in your liver that you can rely on and you have fat stored in adipose tissue even if you have very very low body fat percentage like you're one of these people as like three percent or five percent body fat really thin skin very little body fat you can extract lipids fatty acids from that body fat it's like a storage pack it is a storage pack for energy that can be converted to atp so without going into any more detail when i say today energy or i say atp just remember that regardless of your diet regardless of your nutritional plan your body has the capacity to use creatine glucose glycogen lipids and if you're ketogenic ketones we'll talk about ketosis in order to generate fuel energy now the other crucial point is that in order to complete that process of taking these fuels and converting them into energy most of the time you need oxygen you need air basically in your system now it's not actual air you need oxygen molecules in your system comes in through your mouth and your nose goes to your lungs and distributes via the bloodstream oxygen is not a fuel but like a fire that has no oxygen you can't actually burn the logs but when you blow a lot of oxygen onto a fire basically onto a logs with a flame there then basically it will take five it will take fire it will burn okay oxygen allows you to burn fuel so today we are going to ask the critical questions what allows us to perform what allows us to continue effort for long periods of time and that effort could be a run it could be a swim it could be studying it could be anything that extends over a long period of time well you're going to need energy and you're going to need oxygen but the way to answer a question like what allows us to endure right endurance what allows us to keep going well we think of things like willpower but what's willpower willpower is neurons it's neurons in our brain we have this thing called the central governor which decides whether or not we should or could continue or whether or not we should stop whether or not we should quit okay so whether or not you're somebody who has a lot of what we would call resilience and endurance or whether or not you're somebody who taps out early and quits early or can't handle frustration that has to do with your fuel utilization in specific neurons so we have to ask the question what is the limiting factor on performance right so instead of saying what allows us to endure we should say what prevents us from enduring what prevents us from moving forward what are the factors that say you know what no more i'm not going to continue this run or you know what i've had a really long hard day or maybe i've had an easy day or i'm feeling lazy i just don't even really feel like getting up and moving so what we're going to talk about today actually gets right down to the heart of motivation and fuel use motivation and fuel allocation and we are going to talk about specific training protocols that you can follow that have carryover between the bodily systems of running swimming etc and the way that your brain works so let's talk about endurance by asking first what are the limiting factors on endurance what stops us because in addressing that and answering that we will understand what allows us to get into effort and to continue effort there are five main categories of things that allow us to engage in effort and they are neurons nerves muscle muscle blood things in our blood our heart and our lungs now i don't want to completely write off things like the immune system and other systems of the body but nerve muscle blood heart and lungs are the five that i want to focus on today because that's where most of the data are as we go forward into this i want to acknowledge dr andy galpin who as with the last episode it's been tremendously helpful and informative in terms of the exercise physiology is a true expert he has a laboratory he's a full professor who does work on muscle biopsy who understands the science but who also works with athletes and works with recreational athletes professional athletes really understands at a variety of levels how all these systems work he's the person i consulted with about today's episode although i did access other literature as well and i'm going to mention a key review for any of you aficionados who really want to get down into the weeds but i encourage you if you want more detail to check out dr andy galpin's youtube page i think he's also on twitter he's definitely on instagram his content is excellent and he really understands i have learned and i really believe that an intellectual is somebody who understands a topic at multiple levels of specificity of detail and can communicate that and andy is a true intellectual of muscle physiology and performance and if you hear the word intellectual and you kind of back up and cringe from that understand that he's also a practitioner so thank you andrew galpin andy galpin for your support in these episodes and we hope to have you as a guest on the podcast soon so nerve muscle blood heart and lungs let's talk about neurons and how they work okay but i want to tell you about an experiment that's going to make it very clear why quitting is a mental thing not a physical thing so why do we quit well an experiment was done a couple years ago and was published in the journal cell cell press journal excellent journal showing that there is a class of neurons in our brain stem in the back of our brain that if they shut off we quit now these neurons release epinephrine epinephrine is adrenaline and any time we are engaged in effort of any kind we are releasing epinephrine any time we're awake really we are releasing epinephrine into our brain in fact this little group of neurons in the back of our brain is called the locus ceruleus if you like is churning out epinephrine all the time but if something stresses us out it turns out more and then it acts as kind of an alertness signal for the whole brain we also of course have adrenaline epinephrine released in our body which makes our body ready for things so think about epinephrine as a readiness signal and when we are engaged in effort this readiness signal is being churned into our brain when we're relaxed and we're falling asleep epinephrine levels are low okay so they did a really interesting experiment where they had subjects engage in bouts of effort of trying to move forward toward a goal but they manipulated the visual environment with these stripes kind of like fences passing on both sides of them and by doing that they could trick subjects into thinking that their effort was either allowing them to move forward right because these rungs on the fence were moving past or that their effort was futile that they were no longer moving forward because they would make the rungs move slowly even though the subjects were making a lot of effort to move forward okay so this is analogous or similar to being on a treadmill and you're trying to walk on this treadmill and you just can't move the conveyor right or you're in virtual reality and you're putting a ton of effort but it seems like you're moving excruciatingly slow i had this experience recently in real life i was doing a swim in the pacific i was trying to go south and i was swimming and i was caught in a current not the kind that pulls you out to ocean and i kept looking to my left and i saw this hotel on the shoreline and then i was swimming and swimming and swimming and swimming and 20 minutes later i looked to my left and the hotel is still exactly where it was before which meant that i wasn't moving it felt futile eventually either the current changed or something change and i eventually swam past the hotel got back on the beach and eventually drove home that's essentially what they did in this experiment but what they found was these neurons that release epinephrine there's another cell type called glia which actually means glue in latin that is paying attention to how much epinephrine is being released and at some point the system reaches a threshold it reaches this threshold and it shuts off the release of more epinephrine it's like i quit that's it no more effort signal if they could extend the time before those glia said ah enough if they could release more adrenaline into the system then subjects would keep going so our desire to continue or put differently our willingness to continue and our desire to quit is mediated by events between our two ears now that doesn't mean that the body's not involved but it means that neurons are critically important so we have two categories of neurons that are important the ones in our head that tell us get up and go out and take that run and the ones that allow us encourage us to continue that run and we have neurons that shut things off that say no more and we of course have the neurons that connect to our muscles and control our muscles but the reason we quit is rarely because our body quits our mind quits now we never want to encourage people to drive themselves to the point of injury that's not going to be good for anybody but it is good to know that it's neural our ability to persist is neural so when people say is it i hear that you know sports or effort or fighting or um it's 90 mental 10 physical you know that that whole discussion about how much is mental how much is physical is absolutely silly it just proves that there's no knowledge of the underlying biology behind that statement it's neither mental nor physical everything is physical everything is neurons your thinking is the responsibility of chemicals and electrical signals in your head so it's not 90 percent mental 10 physical it's not 50 50. it's not 70 30. it's 100 nervous system it's neurons okay so when people say mental or physical understand it's 100 neural and i'd love for the how much of of it is mental and how much is physical to just disappear that that argument means nothing and it's not actionable now what do nerves need in order to continue to fire what do you need in order to get neurons to say i will persist well they need glucose unless you're keto and ketogenic adapted you need carbohydrate is glucose that's what neurons run on and you need electrolytes neurons have what's called a sodium potassium pump blah blah blah they generate electricity we could go into all this i will probably do an entire lecture about the action potential but basically in order to get nerves nerve cells to fire to contract muscle to say i'm going to continue you need sufficient sodium salt because the action potential the actual firing of neurons is driven by sodium entering the cell rushing into the cell and then there's a removal of potassium and then there's a kind of resetting of those levels by something called the sodium potassium pump and the sodium potassium pump and sodium and action potentials even if you don't know anything about that is atp dependent it requires energy so you need energy in order to get neurons to fire and it is ph dependent it depends on the conditions or the environment within the brain being of a certain ph or acidity ph is about how acid or how basic the environment is and we will talk a little bit about ph in simple terms that you can understand so nerves need salt they need potassium and it turns out they need magnesium and you need glucose and carbohydrates in order to power those neurons unless you are running on ketones and to run on ketones you have to make sure that you're fully keto adapted i will talk about adding in ketones on top of carbohydrate at the end of the episode okay so that's how nerves work you need carbohydrate you need sodium potassium and magnesium in order to drive the brain muscle muscle is going to engage and generate energy first by using this phospho-creatine system high bouts of effort really intense effort short-lived seconds to minutes but probably more like seconds this could be this phosphate creatine literally a fuel source in the muscle that you're going to burn just like you would logs on a fire and glycogen which is stored carbohydrate in the muscle that also can be burned just like logs on a fire to generate energy so let me make this crystal clear if you move your wrist towards your shoulder and contract your bicep really hard muscle fibers are burning up their own carbohydrate they're converting that into atp in order to generate that energy okay and ph is important and temperature is important in the episode on supercharge your physical performance i talked all about how by using cooling specifically of the palms or the bottoms of the feet or the cheeks of the face using particular methods you can adjust the temperature of the body and of muscle in a way that allows you to do more work to do more reps to run further to keep going and to persist and that's because if temperature is too low or too high then atp is not going to be available because of this whole thing called the pyruvate kinase pathway and the temperature dependence of pyruvate kinase check out that episode if you want to learn more about that but temperature is important and ph is also important so we got nerve muscle and then there's stuff in our blood that's available as an energy source and in blood we've got glucose so literally blood sugar that's floating around so let's say you have fasted for three days your blood glucose is going to be very low so that's not going to be a great fuel source but you will start to liberate fats from your adipose tissue from your fat fatty acids will start to mobilize into the bloodstream and you can burn those for energy and oxygen in your blood when you inhale you're bringing oxygen into your blood so these are all fuel sources in your neurons in your muscle in your blood in your various tissues that are providing the opportunity to give effort to to induce effort whether or not to run or swim or writing or talking now there are some other factors that are important and those are the heart which is going to move blood so the more that the heart can move blood and oxygen well the more fuel that's going to be available for you to engage in muscular effort and thinking effort so your heart is vitally important to your your muscles ability to work in your brain's ability to work and as i've mentioned oxygen a few times it should be obvious then that the lungs are very important you need to bring oxygen in and distribute it to all these tissues because oxygen is critical for the conversion of carbohydrates and the conversion of fats and we could get into the discussion about whether or not oxygen is important for ketogenic metabolism but you need oxygen there you need to breathe and you need to breathe properly so i just covered what would normally be about four lectures of energy consumption and energy utilization i didn't go into much detail at all but what i want you to imagine is that you've got these different cell types you've got neurons you've got muscle they need to collaborate in order to generate effort or to make the decision to do something or to think hard or to run hard or to run far and then you've got fuel sources both in the neurons in the muscle in your blood and then the heart and lungs are are going to help distribute the oxygen and those fuels and of course you have that little energy pack that we call the liver that will allow you to pull out a little more carbohydrate if you need it for work okay so that's as much as i want to cover about energy consumption because that's a lot but what it tells you is that when you eat and you use food as a fuel source that food can be broken down and you can immediately burn the glucose that's in your bloodstream or you can rely on some of the stored fuel in your liver or you can rely on stored fuel in the muscle so called glycogen and there are a lot of different ways that we can generate atp so when we ask the question what's limiting for performance what is going to allow us to endure to engage in effort and endure long balance of effort or even moderately long balance of effort we need to ask which of those things nerve muscle blood heart and lungs is limiting or put differently we ask what should we be doing with our neurons what should we be doing with our muscles what should we be doing with our blood what should we be doing with our heart and what should we be doing with our lungs that's going to allow us to build endurance for mental and physical work and to be able to go longer further with more intensity that's the real question how can we do more work and the way we do that is with energy and the way to get energy to it is by those five things and so now we're going to talk about how you can actually build different types of endurance and what that does at the level of your blood your heart your muscles and your neurons so we're going to skip back and forth between protocols tools and the underlying science so rather than heavy stack the science at the front end and then just give you all the tools at the end we're going to talk about the protocols the four kinds of endurance and how to achieve them and we are going to talk about the underlying science as we move through that if you would like a lot of detailed science i encourage you to check out a review that we've linked in the show notes and the review is called adaptations to endurance and strength training this is a review article with many excellent citations it's from cold spring harbor perspectives in medicine the cold spring harbor press is an excellent scientific press it's been the last 21 years doing summers at cold spring harbor teaching neuroscience but cold spring harbor is involved in all sorts of themes and topics related to neuroscience and medicine this review by hughes elephant elephant that's the name alphasyn and bar b-a-a-r adaptations to endurance and strength training is rich with citations it can be downloaded as a complete pdf there's no paywall and we will link to it and it gets really deep into all the signaling cascades the genetic changes within muscle with high intensity interval training short term super high intensity training uh weight training so if you're a real nerd for this stuff and you want to get right down into how pgc one alpha p53 and ph 20 change the adaptation features of muscle and gene regulation that is definitely the review for you if you're like most people and you're not really interested in that level of detail no reason to pick up the review unless you just want to check out some of the the figures and pictures but i do want to offer that as a resource it's been a in addition to discussions with dr andy galpin it's been a primary resource for the content of this episode so let's talk about the four kinds of endurance and how to achieve those i do believe that everybody should have some sort of endurance practice regular endurance practice it's clear that it's vital for the functioning of the body and the mind and there are clear longevity benefits there are a lot of reasons why that's true but the main one is that if we have good energy utilization in our musculature and in our blood in our vascular system and in our oxygenating system our lungs the so-called cardiovascular system respiratory system and musculature the body and brain function much better there are so many papers now so much data to support that so i do believe everyone should either try to maintain the muscle that they have provided they've already gone through puberty and development and they should be engaged in regular endurance exercise now for many people they think endurance exercise that means what an hour long run or i got to get on the stairmaster or i have to treadmill for hours on end each week it turns out that's not the case there are four kinds of endurance and you can train specifically for any one of those and you can vary your training so let's talk about those four kinds of endurance these are very interesting and they each have very different protocols that you use in order to build and maximize them and now you'll understand what fuel sources they use in order to build that thing we call endurance so first of all we have muscular endurance muscular endurance is the ability for our muscles to perform work over time and our failure to continue to be able to perform that work is going to be due to muscular fatigue not to cardiovascular fatigue so not because we're breathing too hard or we can't get enough blood to the muscles or because we quit mentally but because the muscles themselves give out okay one good example of this would be if you had to pick up a stone in the yard and that stone is not extremely heavy for you and you needed to do that anywhere from 50 to 100 times and you you're picking it up and putting it down and picking it up and putting it down and picking up and putting it down at some point your muscles will fatigue they will fail to endure muscular endurance is incredibly useful for a variety of physical pursuits and we'll talk about the mental pursuits that it supports as well in terms of physical pursuits the ability for a given muscle to perform repeated work is going to improve your golf swing it's going to improve your tennis swing it's going to improve your posture your ability to dance your ability to repeatedly engage in an activity that requires effort in a way that's very different from the kind of endurance that you will build simply by increasing your cardiovascular fitness your ability to generate kind of easy repetition so let's talk about muscular endurance and what it is muscular endurance is going to be something that you can perform for anywhere from 12 to 25 or even up to 100 repetitions and that's actually how if you like you would train muscular endurance and i'll give this specific protocol in a few moments so a good example is push-ups right if you were to get on the floor and start doing push-ups even if you're somebody who has to do knees down push-ups and you're doing your push-ups eventually you won't be able to do any more push-ups and that's not going to be because you couldn't get enough oxygen into your system or your heart wasn't pumping enough blood it's going to be because the muscles fail that's why so if you want to be able to do more push-ups or even more pull-ups muscular endurance is really what it's about it's actually no coincidence that a lot of military boot camp style training is not done with weights it's done with things like push-ups pull-ups sit-ups and running because what they're really building is muscular endurance the ability to perform work repeatedly over time for a given set of muscles and neurons so what's a good protocol to build muscular endurance let's just give that to you now and explain some of the underlying science as that as it follows so a really good muscular endurance training protocol according to the scientific literature would be three to five sets of anywhere from 12 to 100 repetitions that's a huge range now 12 to 25 repetitions is going to be more reasonable for most people and the rest periods are going to be anywhere from 30 to 180 seconds of rest so anywhere from half a minute to three minutes of rest so this might be five sets of push-ups done getting your maximum push-up so for some people that might be zero and you have to do it knees down for some people it might be ten push-ups for some people might be 25 but you could go all the way up to 100 rest anywhere from 30 to 180 seconds and then do your next set for a total of three to five sets so it doesn't actually sound like a ton of work the other thing you could do is something like a plank a plank position is actually a way to build muscular endurance not strength okay it's i'm sure it could be used to develop strength but it's really about muscular endurance so you would do three to five sets of planks those planks would probably even because you're not doing repetitions it's an isometric hold as we say it's kind of static hold or a wall sit would be another example and you would do that probably for a minute or two minutes take some rest of anywhere from 30 or 60 or 180 seconds and then repeat so things like pushing a sled push-ups isometric planks even pull-ups those will all work and as with other forms of training you would want to do this until you approach failure or actually fail and where you're unable to perform another repetition that would mark the end of a set the one critical feature of building muscular endurance is that it has no major eccentric loading component now i haven't talked much about eccentric and concentric loading but concentric loading is when you are shortening the muscle typically or lifting a weight and eccentric movements are when you are lengthening a muscle typically or lowering a weight so if you do a pull up and you get your chin over the bar or chin up that's the concentric portion of the effort and then as you lower yourself that's the eccentric portion eccentric portion of resistance training of any kind whether or not it's for endurance or for strength is one of the major causes of soreness some people will be more susceptible to of this to this excuse me than others but it does create more damage in muscle fibers muscular endurance and building muscular endurance should not include any movements that include major eccentric loads so if you're going to do push-ups it doesn't mean that you want to drop you know smash your chest into the floor and by the way your chest should touch the ground on every push-up that's a real push-up okay it's not about breaking 90 with the elbows it's about pushing down until your chest touch the floor and straightening out that's a proper push-up and a pull-up is where you pull your chin above the bar neither of those should include a slow eccentric or lowering component if you are using those to train muscular endurance the three to five sets of 12 to 25 and maybe even up to 100 repetitions with 30 to 180 seconds of rest in between that means that jumping also is going to be a very poor tool for building muscular endurance because jumping has a slowing down component as you land so things like plyometrics or agility work where you're moving from side to side and you're decelerating you're slowing yourself down a lot not going to be good for muscular endurance terrific for cardiovascular training and conditioning of other kinds and skill training and agility and all that but if you want to build muscular endurance you want to make your muscles able to do more work for longer it's going to be this three to five sets of 12 to 100 reps 30 to 180 seconds of mainly concentric movement okay not a slow lowering phase or a heavy lowering phase so that might be kettlebell swings and things of that sort isometrics as i mentioned things like plank wall sets will work now what's interesting about this is that it doesn't seem at all like what people normally think of as endurance and yet it's been shown in nice quality peer-reviewed studies several of which are cited in the review i mentioned earlier that muscular endurance can improve our ability to engage in long bouts of what we call long duration low intensity endurance work so this can support long runs it can support long swims and it can build also it can build postural strength and endurance simultaneously and that's mainly accomplished through isometric hold so things like planks are actually quite good for building endurance of the spinal erector muscles that provide posture of the abdominal muscles that are helpful for posture for being upright for the upper neck muscles and things of that sort we these days everyone seems to have text neck everyone's basically staring at their toes all the time it has a default towards their toes so isometric holds can be very good for building muscular endurance you can spot people including yourself perhaps with poor muscular endurance in the postural muscles because anytime they stop moving they have to lean against a wall or their hip will move to one side or they're always lean to one side i am guilty of this too some of you have actually pointed out i like to think out of concern that i often am rubbing my lower back and indeed i have some asymmetries in my postural muscles some of which are probably genetic and some of which are probably just from excessive work or something of that sort that have my right shoulder sit lower than my left and things that sort if i wanted to improve those i could improve those by really focusing on symmetry and isometric symmetry meaning hold my holding my hands at equivalent positions in planks and doing isometric holds for building muscular endurance of the postural muscles but this can also be done with as i mentioned kettlebell swings for the lower back and legs and posterior chains so there are a number of different exercises you could do this with but it should be compound exercises mainly it's rare for people to do this kind of muscular endurance work specifically for things like bicep curls or triceps and there aren't many activities that really rely on isolation of those muscles and repeatedly right it's hard i'm sure there are some out there but it's kind of hard to imagine so you can do this with isometrics you can do this with more standard non-isometric type movements but make sure there isn't a strong eccentric load so now let's talk about the science briefly of why this works well that takes us back to this issue of fuel utilization and what fails so if we were to say okay uh let's say you do a plank uh and you're planking for you know maybe you're able to plank for a minute or two minutes or three minutes at some point you will fail you're not going to fail because the heart gives out you're not going to fail because you can't get enough oxygen because you can breathe while you're doing that you're going to fail because of local muscular failure which means that as you do if you choose to do this protocol of three to five sets etc etc to build muscular endurance mainly what you are going to be building is you're going to be building the ability of your mitochondria to use oxygen to generate energy locally and that it's something called mitochondrial respiration respiration because of the the involvement of oxygen and it's also going to be increasing the extent to which the neurons control the muscles and provide a stimulus for the muscles to contract but this is independent of power and strength okay so even though the the low sets like three to five sets and the fact that you're doing repetitions and you're going to failure even though it seems to resemble power and strength and hypertrophy type training it is distinctly different it's not going to generate strength hypertrophy and power it's going to mainly create this ability to endure to continually contract muscles or repeatedly contract muscles okay continually if you're using isometric holds repeatedly repeatedly excuse me if you're using repetition type exercise where there's a contraction and an extension of the muscle essentially a concentric and an eccentric portion but remember that you want the eccentric portion to be light and relatively fast not so fast that you injure yourself but certainly not deliberately slowed down it was recommended i should say by andy galpin that you not use olympic lifts for this because once you get past 8 or 12 or 25 repetitions especially form on those olympic lifts is key for not getting injured and while some people can perform those sorts of of lifts like you know snatches and deadlifts and cleans and jerks and overhead presses probably not a great idea if the goal is to push the body to points of fatigue because you do open yourself up to injury unless you're very skilled at doing that or you have a really good coach who can help you guide through those lifts so that's one form of endurance which is muscular endurance that's mainly going to rely on neural energy so nerves and muscle and it's not going to rely quite so much on what's available in your blood your heart or your lungs so now let's talk about the other extreme of endurance which is long duration endurance this is the type that people typically think about when they think about endurance you're talking about a long run a long swim a long bike ride well how long will anywhere from 12 minutes to several hours or maybe even an entire day maybe eight or nine hours of hiking or running or biking some people are actually doing those kinds of really long events marathons for instance so anything longer than 12 minutes and this type of work builds on fuel utilization in the muscles it builds on the activity of neurons in the brain that are involved in what we call central pattern generators we talked about this in a previous episode or several previous episodes these are groups of neurons that allow our body to engage in regular rhythmic effort without having to think about the movement too much so running and stepping or swimming if you already know how to swim or pedaling on a bike or walking upstairs and hiking you're not thinking about right left right left it's all carried out by central pattern generators this is going to be at less than 100 percent of your maximum oxygen uptake your vo2 max i'll talk about what vo2 max is but i just want to give a sense of what the protocol is and the underlying science how many sets one long duration effort is one set of 12 minutes or longer so you're not counting repetitions i sure hope that if you're going out on a 30 minute run or even a 15 minute run that you're not counting steps that you're not counting pedal strokes that you're not on the row or counting pulls on the rower i suppose you could but i think that would be pretty dreadful seems like a poor utilization of cognitive brain space you're getting into regular repeated effort and your ability to continue that effort is going to be dependent mainly on the efficiency of the movement on your ability to strike a balance between the the movement itself the generation of the muscular movements that are required and fuel utilization across the different sources of nerve muscle blood heart and lungs so let's ask the question why would you fail on a long run why would you quit well as you set out on that long run assuming you have some glycogen in your liver and in your muscles you're going to use that energy first even if it's very low intensity okay so we're not talking about sprinting we're talking about heading out the door or starting off on a marathon you're starting to assuming you have some conditioning or even if you don't you're going to burn carbohydrate you're going to burn glucose in the bloodstream you're going to burn carbohydrate as those muscles contract those what we call slow twitch muscles they're contracting they start burning up fuel to make atp to continue to contract your mind is going to use more or less energy depending on how much will power how much of a fight you have to get into with yourself in order to generate the effort i really want to underscore this if you're somebody that's thinking maybe i go for the run maybe i don't go for the run i'll do it at two o'clock okay 205 no i only want to go on the half hour or maybe on the main hour and you're going through all that guess what you're burning up useful energy that you could use either for the run for example or for something else when we think about something hard when we ruminate when we per perseverate on on an idea or on a decision we are burning neural energy and neural energy is glucose and epinephrine and all the things we talked about before so willpower in part is the ability to devote resources to things and part of that is making decisions to just either do it or not do it i'm not of the just do it mindset i think there's a right time and a place to train but i also think that it is not good in other words it utilizes excessive resources to churn over decisions excessively and you probably burn as much cognitive energy deciding about whether or not to do a given training or not as you do in the actual training okay so we'll talk more about how this long-duration effort can relate to mental performance but the long-duration effort should be one set 12 minutes or longer it could go for 30 minutes or 60 minutes or an hour we'll talk about programming later in the episode this is going to be less than 100 of your maximum oxygen uptake your heart rate is not going to be through the ceiling or maxed out but it's all about efficiency of movement that's what you're building when you go out for a run that's 30 minutes you are building the capacity to repeat that performance the next time while being more efficient actually burning less fuel and that might seem a little bit counterintuitive but every time you do that run what you're doing is you're building up mitochondrial density it's not so much about mitochondrial oxidation and respiration you're building up mitochondrial density you're actually increasing the amount of atp that you can create for a given bout of effort you're becoming more efficient okay you're burning less fuel overall doing the same thing that's really what these long slow distance or long ballots of effort are really all about now why do this long duration effort why would you want to do it why is it good for you well it does something very important which is that it builds the capillary beds within muscles so let's talk a little bit about vasculature we haven't done this too much yet but if you have seen the episode on supercharging performance we talked about avas these arteriovenous astomosis where blood moves from arteries directly into veins but that's unusual that only takes place in the so-called glabrous skin of the of the palms the face and the bottoms of the feet typically for most all other areas of the body what happens is arteries bring blood to a given tissue like a muscle and veins return that blood back to the heart there are exceptions but in general and in between arteries and veins are these little tiny what are called capillary beds or microcapillaries so these are tiny little avenues like little tiny streams and estuaries between the bigger arteries and veins now those are actually contained within muscle and what's amazing is that you can increase the number of them you can literally build new capillaries you can create new little streams within your muscles and the type of long duration effort that i was talking about before 12 minutes or more of steady effort is very useful for doing that and is very useful in for increasing the mitochondria the energy producing elements of the cells the actual muscle cells and the reason is when blood arrives to muscles it has oxygen the muscles are going to use some of that oxygen and then some of the deoxygenated blood is going to be sent back to the heart and to the lungs now the more capillaries that you build into those muscles the more oxygen available to those muscles i don't want to get too much into the physics of fluid flow but basically it's the difference between taking a hose and sticking it into some dirt um just directly like and turning on the faucet at a given rate uh the spigot rather or having a bunch of little hoses like a sprinkler system that go out and irrigate the whole yard the irrigation is equivalent to this capillary bed system and it's very good at using energy sources within blood so the simple way to think about this is when you go out for a run let's say it's the first run you've done for a while and you go out for 12 or 15 minutes and somewhere right around 20 minutes you're like that's it i just can't continue well when you come back the next time to do that run you've built endurance largely because you've built these capillary beds you've expanded these little streams in which blood can deliver oxygen to the muscles and so it's going to feel relatively straightforward to either go a little bit quicker for the same duration the same distance or to extend that run for another five to ten minutes so this long duration work unlike muscular endurance like planks and everything that we were talking about before is really about building the capillary systems and the mitochondria the energy utilization systems within the muscles themselves and that's very important to understand it's distinctly different than say building the neurons that fire the muscles the neurons are already there they're going to fire those muscles just fine in fact if your life depended on it today you could probably run a marathon you'd probably get injured it would be very psychologically and physically painful i don't recommend you do that unless you're trained for it but if you were to train properly for it if you were to do long duration bouts of effort once or twice a week or three times a week pretty soon it would become easy because you're building these vascular micro beds or microvascular beds as they're called okay so you're able to bring more energy to the muscles and they're able to utilize more energy so that's long duration so we've got muscular endurance and we've got long duration endurance and then there are two kinds in between that in recent years have gotten a lot of attention and excitement but most people are not distinguishing between these two kinds of endurance and that's a shame because in failing to distinguish between the two kinds of what we call high intensity training sometimes called high intensity interval training most people perhaps you are not getting nearly as much physical and mental benefit out of high intensity training as you could so i want to talk about the two kinds of high intensity interval training and what each of them does for your brain and body and what sorts of adaptations they cause because in doing that you can really start to build up specific energy systems in your brain and body in ways that are best serve you for your cognitive work and for other sorts of things like strength and speed or hypertrophy or for running marathons for that matter so there are two kinds of high intensity training for endurance sometimes called high intensity interval training one is anaerobic so-called anaerobic endurance so no oxygen and the other is aerobic endurance both of which qualify as hiit high intensity interval training so let's talk about anaerobic endurance first anaerobic endurance from a protocol perspective is going to be 3 to 12 sets okay and these repetitions and i'll talk about what the repetitions are are going to be performed at whatever speed allows you to complete the work in good safe form okay so it could be fast could be slow as the work continues your repetitions may slow down or it may speed up chances are it's going to slow down so what does this work what do these sets look like remember long slow distance is one set muscular endurance is three to five sets high intensity anaerobic endurance is going to be somewhere between three and 12 sets and it's going to have a ratio of work to rest of anywhere from three to one to one to five okay so what would a three to one ratio set look like well it's going to be 30 seconds of hard pedaling on the bike for instance or running or on the rower these are just examples it could be in the pool swimming it could be any number of things or air squats or you know or weighted squats if you will provided you can manage that 30 seconds on 10 seconds off that's a very brief rest so three to one is just a good example would be 30 seconds on 10 seconds off the opposite extreme on that ratio be one to five so 20 seconds on 100 seconds off so you do the work for 20 seconds then you rest 100 seconds now what's the difference what should you do three to one ratio so 30 seconds on 10 seconds off or should you do one to five 20 seconds on to 100 seconds off well that will depend on whether or not the quality of the movement is important to you so let's just take a look at the three to one ratio so in the three to one ratio if you're going to do 30 seconds of hard pedaling on a bike followed by 10 seconds so maybe one of these what they call assault bikes and then you stop for 10 seconds and then repeat chances are you will be able to do one two three four maybe even as many as 12 sets if you're really in good condition that you'll be able to do all those because pedaling on the bike doesn't require a ton of skill and if you do it incorrectly if your elbow flares out a little bit or something it's very unlikely that you'll get injured unless it's really extreme okay but the same movement done for instance with kettlebells so 30 seconds on 10 seconds off the first set will probably be in good form the second one will be in pretty good form but let's say you're getting to the fifth and sixth set and you're going 30 seconds on 10 seconds off chances are the quality of your repetitions will degrade significantly and you increase the probability that you're going to get injured or that you're going to damage yourself in some way or that you can't complete the movement or that some smaller muscles like your grip muscles might give out okay so the quality of repetitions is going to drop considerably with the three to one approach if you're just doing it for effort and we'll talk about what this builds in your system in a moment that's fine but for most people if quality of form is important so maybe this is uh using weights maybe you're doing squats you're going to do 20 seconds on and 100 seconds of rest maybe it's even a barbell loaded squat maybe you're doing kettlebells maybe you've got some other resistance there that's allowing you to do this what you'll find is that the longer rest even though it's 20 seconds of intense effort followed by a longer rest of about 100 seconds will allow you to perform more quality repetitions safely over time so what does building anaerobic endurance look like and then i'll tell you what it's actually good for in the true practical sense what anaerobic endurance exercise generally looks like is that if you decide to do this for the first week you might do this two or three times a week maybe even just once a week depending on the other things you're doing we'll talk about programming at the end and you would generate just three sets so it might be three sets of 20 seconds of hard effort followed by 100 seconds rest then you repeat 20 seconds of hard effort 100 seconds rest 20 seconds whatever hard 100 seconds rest you might do that twice a week and then each week you're adding one or two sets okay in doing that you will build up what we call anaerobic endurance what is anaerobic endurance well let's ask why we fail anaerobic endurance is going to be taking your system into greater than 100 percent of your vo2 max it's going to be taking your heart rate up very high and it's going to maximize your oxygen utilization systems that is going to have effects that are going to lead to fatigue at some point in the workout and that fatigue will trigger an adaptation so let's ask what adaptation it's triggering well it's triggering both mitochondrial respiration the ability of your mitochondria to generate more energy by using more oxygen because you're bringing so you're maxing out literally you're getting above your vo2 max you're hitting that threshold of how much oxygen you can use in your system one of the adaptations will be that your mitochondria will shift such that they can use more oxygen and you're going to also increase the capillary beds but not as much as you're going to be able to increase the amount of neuron engagement of muscle so normally when we start to hit fatigue when we're exhausted when we're breathing really hard because the systems of the body are linked and we there's a mental component to this as well a kind of motivational component after that third or fourth or sixth set of you know 20 seconds on 100 seconds off or if you're at the other extreme 30 seconds on and 10 seconds off there's going to be a component of you want to stop and by pushing through and repeating another set safely of course what you're doing is you are training the neurons to be able to access more energy literally convert that into atp and for the muscles therefore to access more energy and atp and the adaptation is in the mitochondria's ability to use oxygen and this has tremendous carryover effects for other types of exercise so while i know and appreciate that people are using high intensity interval training of this kind or similar in order to just like burn fat you know do their workouts quote unquote it's very useful for building a capacity to engage in short bouts of effort repeatedly to really lock in i don't want to use the word focus because it's not strictly mental focus but to be able to to generate short bouts of very intense work this can be beneficial in competitive sports or team sports where there's a sprinting component where the field opens up and you need to dribble the ball down the field for instance and shoot on goal or where you're playing tennis and it's a long rally and then all of a sudden somebody really starts you know putting you back on your heels and you have to really make the maximum amount of effort to run to the net and to get the ball across that things of that sort okay there are a variety of places where there's carryover from this type of training but it does support endurance it's about muscle endurance it's about these muscles ability to generate a lot of force in the short term but repeatedly okay so that's the way to conceptualize this and it is different than maximum power even though it feels like maximum effort it is not the same as building power and speed into muscles those are distinctly different protocols so the key elements again are that you're bringing your breathing and your oxygen utilization way up above your max it's not quite hitting failure but you're really pushing the system to the point where you are not ready to do another set and yet you begin another set you're not necessarily psychologically ready i'll talk more about some of the adaptations that this causes in terms of stroke volume in a few minutes when we talk about how it is that work of this sort can increase our heart's ability to deliver blood and oxygen to our lungs and other tissues i'm going to get very specific about how to breathe during these different types of protocols and what's happening at the level of the heart but i want to make sure i touch on the fourth protocol which is high intensity aerobic conditioning so hit has these two forms anaerobic and aerobic and you just heard about anaerobic high-intensity aerobic conditioning also involves about three to twelve sets starting off of course with fewer sets as you're getting into this training and then extending into more sets as one parameter you could expand has again the same ratio of three to one so 30 seconds on 10 seconds off or one to five 20 seconds on 100 seconds off or a very powerful tool for building up aerobic conditioning is a one-to-one ratio a one-to-one ratio is powerful for building on average most of the energy systems involving remember we have these nerve muscle blood heart and lungs a one to a one to one ratio might be you run a mile and however long that takes let's say it takes you six minutes or seven minutes then you rest for an equivalent amount of time then you repeat it and then you rest for an equivalent amount of time so you might run first mile is let's say seven minutes then you rest for seven minutes then you run a mile again and it might take eight minutes and you rest for eight minutes and you continue that for a total of four miles of work for four miles of running work i should say or seven miles of work you can build this up many people find that using this type of training allows them to do things like go run half marathons in marathons even though prior to the race date they've never actually run a half marathon or marathon now that might seem incredible it's like how could it be that running a mile on and then and then resting for running a mile and then resting for an equivalent amount of time running them out resting for equivalent amount of time for seven miles allows you to run continuously for 13 miles or for 26 miles well i'm not discouraging people from ever doing the long duration endurance i think that is very important but it's because it builds up so many of these energy utilization systems it really teaches you to engage excuse me the nerve to muscle firing it improves atp and mitochondrial function in muscle it allows the blood to deliver more oxygen to the muscle and to your brain and i'll explain how that is and it allows your heart to deliver more oxygen overall and it builds a tremendous lung capacity and we will talk about exactly how to breathe and how to build lung capacity both for sake of warming up and for performance so what would this look like and when should you do this um well it's really a question for these workouts of asking how much work can one do in 8 to 12 minutes right and then rest and then repeat how much work can you do for eight to twelve minutes then rest and then repeat and how many times should you do this well this is the sort of thing it's pretty intense and so you would probably only want to do this two maybe three times a week if you're not doing many other things i will talk about how this program can be moved in with other forms of training but i'll just give you a little hint now it's very clear and it's described in the review article referred to and we will link another article as well that concurrent training doing strength training and the endurance training of any of the four cons that i'm describing today can be done you can program those in the same week but you want to get four and ideally six or even better 24 hours between these workouts because it is very hard for instance to do a one-to-one mile repeats like run a mile rest for equivalent time run a mile rest for equivalent time to do that two or three times a week and also do weight training before or do a long run afterwards that would quickly lead to breakdown for most people unless you have very very good energy utilization systems you're a really kind of advanced or elite athlete and or dare i say you're using tools to enhance your performance at the level of blood or hormones and i'm actually going to talk about those at the end and why they work so we have four kinds of endurance muscular endurance we have long duration endurance we have high intensity interval training of two kinds anaerobic and aerobic and this last type the aerobic one works best it seems if you kind of do this one-to-one ratio so how would you use these and what are they actually doing let's talk about the heart and the lungs and oxygen because that's something that we can all benefit from understanding and it will become very clear in that discussion why this type of training is very useful even for non- athletes in order to improve oxygenation and energy utilization of the brain and the heart the brain and the heart are probably the two most important systems that you need to take care of in your life yes your musculature needs to be maintained if you want to build it that's up to you but you should try and maintain your musculature but maintaining or enhancing brain function and cardiovascular function it's absolutely clear our key for health and longevity in the short and long term and the sorts of training i talked about today has been shown again and again and again to be very useful for enhancing the strength of the mind yes i'll talk about that as well as the health of the brain and the body so let's talk about the sorts of adaptations that are happening in your brain and body that are so beneficial in these different forms of training if you are breathing hard and your heart is beating hard so this would be certainly in the high intensity anaerobic and aerobic conditioning because you're getting up near your vo2 max in high intensity aerobic conditioning and you're exceeding your vo2 max in high intensity anaerobic conditioning what's going to happen is as of course your heart beats faster your blood is going to be circulating faster in principle oxygen utilization in muscles is going to go up and over time not long very quickly what will happen when those capillary beds start to expand we talked about that but in addition because of the amount of blood that's being returned to the heart when you engage in these really intense bouts of effort repeatedly the amount of blood being returned to the heart actually causes an eccentric loading of one of the muscular walls of the heart so your heart is muscle it's cardiac muscle we have skeletal muscle attached to our bones and we have cardiac muscle which is our heart when more blood is being returned to the heart because of the additional work that your muscles and nerves are doing it actually has the effect of creating an eccentric loading a kind of pushing of the wall the left i realize i'm not using the strict anatomy here but i don't want to get into all the features of the structural features of the heart but the left ventricle essentially getting slammed back and then having to push back in a kind of eccentric loading of the cardiac muscle and the muscle thickens but not because the heart thickens overall it's actually a strengthening of the cardiac muscle in a way that increases what we call stroke volume meaning as more blood is returned to the heart there's an adaptation where the heart muscle actually gets stronger and therefore can pump more blood per stroke per beat and as it does that it delivers because blood cont contains glucose and oxygen and other things it delivers more fuel to your muscles which allows you to do yet more work per unit time okay so when we hear that oh you know uh so-and-so has a or maybe you have a nice low heart rate that you know maybe you're one of these really extreme folks like 30 or 40 beats per minute although most people are sitting at 50 60 70 80 that's your resting heart rate if you exercise regularly and you do long duration aerobic work your heart rate will start to go down your resting heart rate it will increase the stroke volume of your heart if you do this high intensity type training where your heart is beating very hard so maybe the one-to-one ratio mile run repeats that i described a minute ago so you do that twice a week for three or four and i said it could go all the way up to 12 sets which is a lot i don't recommend people start there pretty soon the stroke volume of your heart will really increase and as a consequence you can deliver more fuel to your muscles and to your brain and you will notice that you can do more work meaning you can do the same work you were doing a few days or weeks ago with relative ease your cognitive functioning will improve this has been shown again and again because there's an increase in vasculature literally capillary beds within the brain the hippocampus areas that support memory but also areas of the brain that support respiration that support focus that support effort this isn't often discussed but the ability to deliver more blood and therefore more glucose remember neurons run on glucose and oxygen to the brain is a big feature of why exercise of the kind i'm describing helps with brain function now weight training does have some positive effects on brain function also when i say weight training i'm really i should be more specific i really am referring to strength and hypertrophy training strengthen hypertrophy training especially if it's of the sort where you get into the burn as we talked about last episode and you start generating lactate as a hormonal signal that can benefit your brain etc it can have positive effects on the brain and frankly there haven't been as many studies of resistance training strength and hypertrophy training on brain function mainly because most of those experiments are done in mice or primates non-human primates i should say and um it's hard to get mice to do resistance training okay it's hard to get humans to do resistance training it's definitely hard to get mice to do resistance training there are ways to do it but it's hard to get them to do say you know three sets of eight on the deadlift and then do some curls and then do some chin ups and this kind of thing okay it's pretty easy to get a mouse to run on a treadmill and you can set the tension on that treadmill to make it so that it's easier or harder for the mouse to turn that wheel so that's one of the reasons however it's very clear and you should now understand intuitively why the kind of standard strength and hypertrophy type workouts are not going to activate the blood oxygenation and the stroke volume increases for the heart that the sorts of training i'm talking about today will it just doesn't have the same positive effects now that isn't to say that if you just weight train that you'll be dumb or that you'll lose your your memory over time you might but it is to say that endurance work in particular the high intensity and long duration work that i've talked about today the two high intensity protocols and the long duration work has been shown again and again and again to have positive effects on brain function not through the addition of new neurons sorry to break break it to you but that's not a major event in the exercised or non- exercised human brain for reasons we can talk about in a future episode but it still has many positive effects through the delivery of things like igf-1 but also just through plane oxygenation of the brain and the way it promotes the development of microvasculature to devel to excuse me to deliver neurons more nutrients if neurons don't get oxygen and glucose they do die unless there's another fuel source like ketones which can replace the glucose if you don't give oxygen to neurons if you don't deliver enough to them you get what's called ischemia you get little microstrokes so the type of exercise i'm talking about today in generating intense heart rate increases provided that's safe for you to do breathing hard that's going to deliver oxygen and blood increased stroke volume of the heart and is going to improve brain function that's been supported by many many quality peer-reviewed studies so that's one form of positive adaptation i also talked about just sort of performance adaptations how doing high intensity aerobic conditioning of the you know mild repeats type training can actually improve your ability to do long bouts of intense work it also seems like it dovetails or is compatible with resistance training that's aimed towards strength and hypertrophy now in full disclosure the data seem to indicate that if people just weight train or train for strength so three reps um rest five minutes three reps of heavy weights etc yeah you'll get much stronger than you would if you're doing things like you know five repetitions up to 12 or 12 to 25 reps and you're you know and you're going out for long jogs there's always going to be a compromise in adaptations unfortunately it does seem like you can do concurrent training as i mentioned before if you allow anywhere from four to six or ideally 24 hours between workouts as i mentioned in the previous episode if you want to know if you are recovered from a workout a great way to do that is to apply the carbon dioxide tolerance test which is four breaths in and out inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale inhale exhale then a big inhale and then a slow controlled exhale if that slow controlled exhale is 60 seconds or longer it means that your parasympathetic your calming nervous system is under your control and it's likely i should say likely that systemically your whole nervous system has recovered from whatever it is that you've been doing and experiencing in life including work and relationships if not you might want to take a rest day dare i say or costello's on is what he's 10 now i think he's on his 12 000th rest day um most people need i should say one to two full rest days per week i know there are people gonna say that's ridiculous and okay maybe you have uh amazing recovery abilities it also depends on training intensity many people benefit from having one or two full rest days per week at least one some people don't need to but if you are not able to extend that exhale on the carbon dioxide tolerance test past 60 seconds or so 45 seconds 60 seconds chances are your so-called sympathetic nervous system your stress system is chronically elevated and you're not really putting the brake on that system enough and that's a subconscious thing there are ways that you can accelerate recovery but i would encourage you to listen to the previous episode it's time stamped for how to assess recovery so how often to program these things will depend on the other things you're doing i think it's perfectly reasonable to do this type of training with other types of training and i'll talk about a variety of combinations of those toward the end of the episode i do want to talk about how to deliver more energy and oxygen these are tools that are extremely useful i believe and that are grounded in physiology the three things i'd like to talk about are how to breathe what to do immediately after training and hydration and i promise i will get back into programming and sort of protocols but i these are vitally important to your ability to perform endurance work in particular and they're grounded in how neurons and blood and oxygen and your heart work together so let's first talk about breathing or respiration we breathe a couple of different ways but let's just remind ourselves why we breathe we breathe to bring oxygen into our system and we breathe to get rid of carbon dioxide and we need both oxygen and carbon dioxide in order to utilize fuel and for our brain and body to work it's not that oxygen is good and carbon dioxide is bad they have to be present in the appropriate ratios so one thing that is very clear is our ability to deliver oxygen to working muscles and to our brain is going to be important for our ability to generate muscular effort especially of the kind of was talking about today but also weight training and other forms of skill based effort etc and our ability to think if you're holding your breath for too long if you're breathing too much if you're what they call over breathing or under breathing if you're shallow breathing if you're mouth breathing these are all things that can really impede mental and physical performance so let's make it really simple and then i promise to do a future episode all about respiration there are two main sources of air for your body and it's air coming in through your nose and air coming in through your mouth in general nasal breathing is better it scrubs the air of bacteria and viruses you have a microbiome in your nose that benefits there are a number of reasons it's also just a more efficient system believe it or not even though it feels like you can gulp more air with your mouth getting good at nasal breathing is useful a gear system of the type that brian mckenzie and colleagues have developed i think is a good way to conceptualize this if you're doing long duration work try and do it all nasal breathing if you have deviated septum it's probably because you don't nasal breathe enough mouth breathing is something that you know many people suffer from it you're more prone to infections it's not as in efficient etc there is a place for mouth breathing however it's usually if you need to do a strong exhale often times you can discard more volume through the mouth unless you're very trained at nasal breathing so if you're doing high intensity training a good way to conceptualize this is to exhale on the max effort and then to inhale on the less intense part so that might be as you're generating the movement you know you in the concentric part of the movement you exhale right just like on a bat swing or something like that or you know fighters and martial artists do this differently depending on how they were trained and the different purposes but the kind of like or the kind of exhaling um during the effort and then inhaling on the portion of the repetition that is not the highest effort portion usually that's the eccentric phase of anything involving weights or rowing and things of that sort so nasal breathing is great but as you increase the intensity of your endurance work you will need to incorporate the mouth so a gear system would look something like first gear would be just nasal breathing or second gear would also be just nasal breathing but with more effort third gear again power speed endurance has a lot more about this you can go to their website i think it's a very intelligent way to conceptualize this um as you go into more max effort then you're going to you know third and fourth and fifth gear and at some point you're not thinking about nose or mouth you're just trying to hang on for dear life and complete the work safely and that means breathe through uh whatever uh orifice uh works for you so that's one aspect nose versus mouth the other aspect is whether or not you're using your ribs the intercostal muscles are these muscles that the bruce lee had these you know remarkable intercostal muscles that allow you to lift the rib cage or the diaphragm which is a skeletal muscle that sits below the lungs just to remind you when you inhale the diaphragm moves down when you exhale the diaphragm moves up okay here's something that most people don't do and would benefit tremendously from and i can say this because andy galpin's lab has done work on this exploring how warming up the intercostals and the nerve to diaphragm pathways before any kind of endurance work or in the first few minutes of endurance work can allow you to breathe more deeply and to deliver more oxygen to the blood and excuse me end to the muscles and to be able to do more work more efficiently so what that involves is sometimes sitting sometimes standing and just really concentrating on two things we always hear about how we should diaphragmatic breathe and that means our belly moves out when we inhale so our our stomach expands but also expanding the intercostals which means actually raising the ribs chest breathing we're all told that you know in yoga class don't breathe with your chest this but actually that is is warming up the intercostal muscles so this is also a great way to generate adrenaline if you do it a little bit intensely so let's say you're feeling un motivated to train i don't particularly like doing endurance training until i'm actually doing it um so i i use and benefit from having a practice where i'll just sit there and for about three minutes i'll just breathe very deeply trying to raise my chest as much as i can for maybe a minute and then expanding my contracting my diaphragm and expanding my stomach outward when i inhale by the end of that you're actually delivering more oxygen to your system um my lab has looked at this in a totally different context andy's lab has looked at it in the context of physical performance so warming up the breathing muscles should make sense given that you now know that muscles and neurons need glucose and they need oxygen in order to function and so that's a great warm-up you can also do this while walking or while getting on the bike and starting to pedal really starting to think about warming up the breathing system and then you can decide if you want to do pure nasal or a combination of nasal and mouth breathing and so on so that's something that we don't often hear about the other one the other tool rather that i've talked about in a previous episode i'll just mention again is some people when they do endurance type work they get a stitch in their side they feel like they've got a side cramp very rarely is it actually a skeletal muscular cramp it's oftentimes it's a referenced pain of the phrenic nerve that innervates the liver so the phrenic nerve is responsible for the movement of the diaphragm it is a very important system but it has a number of what we call collateral so it branches to other organs runs over other organs sometimes when we're breathing shallow and we are in physical motion and we're engaging in physical effort we'll feel that side stitch we think oh i've got a cramp or maybe i'm dehydrated or maybe i need to run with my hands over my head my head excuse me typically you can relieve that side cramp which isn't a cramp at all that side stitch by doing the double inhale exhale really breathing deeply and then sneaking a little bit more air in that's a double kind of firing or what we call volley of action potential sent from the phrenic nerve to the diaphragm which will also activate that collateral that branch literally of the nerve that innervates the liver and then when you exhale you offload a bunch of carbon dioxide but if you repeat that a few times often in fact for me every time but often what will happen is that side stitch will just naturally disappear just means you're not breathing properly your the phrenic nerve is is firing in a way that's kind of aggravating that referenced pain there's nothing kind of voodoo or mysterious about this it just has to do with the way that the different nerves uh travel in the body so as you set out on your run or maybe you're going to do some muscular endurance work or high intensity work warming up the intercostals warming up the diaphragm is is good and there there are exercises there is work that you can do to strengthen the intercostals and to strengthen the diaphragm during bouts of this kind of effort and i would say that one of the ways that you can do that best is by really focusing on getting the maximum diaphragmatic expansion and chest lifting what we're all told now not to do don't you know don't chest breathe belly breathe the intercostals are there for a reason and they are perfectly good at filling your lungs they work best when they collaborate with your diaphragm but when you're starting to fatigue to start to really inhale deeply and try and really expand those to deliver more oxygen to your system while we're talking about delivering more oxygen to your system i want to share with you a useful tool that will now make total sense mechanistically why it works which is often times when we are on a long run or in long duration bouts of effort we will hit the so-called wall right we will bonk i think they used to call it or maybe do they still call it that costello he's asleep we bonk we just we think no we can't continue it's a curious thing as to whether or not that's neural or whether or not it's fuel-based there's certainly going to be a psychological or motivational component but one way that you can reveal this kind of extra gear the capacity to push on is by understanding the way that different muscle fibers use energy differently remember the fast twitch phosphor creatine system and the slow twitch system that relies mainly on lipids and glucose okay well even if you don't remember all that if you've been running steadily for a long time and you're starting to fatigue and you feel like it's time to quit you may have not tapped into an alternative fuel source one thing that you can do is you can actually increase your speed this is also true of work where you're doing repetitions with kettlebells or something you can start to increase your speed so run faster pedal faster row faster swim faster not all out sprint but in doing that you're shifting the muscles and the nerves over towards utilizing a separate fuel source or a distinct fuel source maybe the phosphocreatine system if it's a quick bout of intense acceleration or maybe it's a combination of lipids and carbohydrates in your system that weren't available to you prior now of course if you completely deplete your liver glycogen you completely deplete everything you're only going to be running on stored fuel and fats and and eventually you'll start metabolizing protein muscles themselves but this is a kind of a a unique way to realize that oh you weren't uh you weren't out of energy at all you were just over relying on one fuel source and this is the reason why especially elite athletes are starting to both rely on carbohydrates so they're doing the whole carb depletion then carb loading thing they're loading up their liver and their muscles with plenty of glycogen by eating pastas and rice and stuff before races but they are also ingesting ketones during races during long ballots of effort because ketones can be a quick form of energy there's no reason why you can't use ketones if they are taken exogenous ketones and carbohydrate and in combination remember the body is accustomed to using multiple fuel sources fatty acids carbohydrates all these things it's only in the you know kind of internet age that we think in terms of oh well you're either keto or you're burning sugar or you're you know fat adapted or you're fat fasting or fast fasting or fat fatting costello woke up when i said fat fatting i'm not talking about you costello so the the point is that your body is used to using multiple fuel sources so if you're kind of hitting that wall sometimes accelerating can actually allow you to tap into a new fuel source or combination of fuel sources just based on the way that muscles use fuel so that's another tool the other thing that's really important to think about in terms of endurance type work is hydration and i think hydration is important for all forms of physical work and exercise not just endurance the deal with hydration is that we've been taught about hydration all wrong but let's remember what neurons work on what what do they use in order to fire well they certainly need water right we need water in our system i should say but they remember they use electrolyte sodium and potassium to generate those action potentials to actually get neurons to contract to be able excuse me muscles to contract and for our brain to function and to be able to think typically typically we're going to lose anywhere from one to five pounds of water per hour of exercise and that's going to vary tremendously it's going to vary on weather it's going to vary on intensity probably more like five pounds if it's hot day and you're exercising very intensely so about one to five pounds per hour now you know how much you weigh so if you think about your weight in pounds once you lose about one to four percent of your body weight in water you're going to experience about a 20 to 30 percent reduction in work capacity in your ability to generate effort of any kind strength endurance etc you are also going to experience a significant drop in your ability to think and perform mental operations so hydration is key now many people have been told well if you urinate and your urine is clear well then you're hydrated enough sometimes that's true sometimes that's not true also and this isn't a topic i enjoy um discussing but urine is a biological phenomenon it's actually filtered blood um every once in a while if there's a kid and it's a family friend i'll say did you know that your pee is actually filtered blood and they usually kind of go wide-eyed but then they go oh that's kind of cool like kids have this natural curiosity about blood and pee and stuff that's not contaminated by our preconceived notions of those things being gross because urine being filtered blood can give you some indication as to whether or not you're hydrated enough or not and in order to really assess that it's not going to be sufficient to urinate into another volume of water and assess whether or not your urine is very dark or very light it actually requires urinating into a small volume and saying well is it darker or lighter than before it's not something you really want to do most places um the etiquette of most gyms and environments is not suitable for that but one of the things that you can just do is you can figure well i'm going to lose one to five pounds of water per hour you can show up to exercise reasonably hydrated with electrolytes so potassium sodium and magnesium are really key yes it's true you can die from drinking too much water in particular because it forces you if you drink too much water you'll excrete too many electrolytes and your brain will shut off you'll actually your heart will stop functioning properly so you don't want to over consume water to the extreme either but there are a number of equations that go into figuring out how much water you need based on how intense you're training etc body size etc just remember you burn you lose excuse me about one to five pounds of of water per hour depending on how hot it is and how intensely you're exercising once your body weight drops by one to four percent so you can just figure well if you lose five pounds per hour you exercise for two hours let's say you're about 200 pounds that's about 10 okay well you want to replace that before you very quickly or not you want to replace that all along before you start experiencing this massive 20-30 reduction in work capacity of muscles in the brain a simple formula what i call the galpin equation hereafter referred to as the galpin equation is a formula that gets you close to the exact amount that you would want that dr andy galpin came up with which is your body weight in pounds divided by the number 30 and that is how many ounces you should drink for every 15 minutes of exercise so once again the galloping equation your body weight in pounds divided by 30 that's the amount of of fluid to drink in ounces right every 15 minutes of exercise now if you are sweating a lot you may need more okay if you're already very well hydrated you may need less but that's a good rule of thumb to begin and to start to understand the relationship between hydration and performance there is a phenomenon in which gastric emptying the ability to move stuff out of your gut including water and electrolytes out of your gut and into the bloodstream and for delivery to the tissues of your body for effort is hindered when you get above 70 of your vo2 max in other words when you're doing high intensity training sometimes people experience that ingesting water during intense training is difficult it is something that can be actually trained up it's a matter of learning to kind of relax the your abdominal muscles and there's some other aspects of adaptation that will allow you to drink during higher intensity work as galpin says don't try and ingest fluids when you're working out or competing at higher than 70 of vo2 max if you've never done it before you want to train up this capacity people can learn how to consume fluids during a race or consume fluids during bouts of exercise that are very intense and a lot of people don't want to do that because they don't want to have to stop to urinate etc but given the crucial role of hydration for muscular performance and for brain performance it seems that if you're going to be doing a lot of high intensity interval training of the various kinds we talked about today or high intensity training of any kind that hydration is key and learning or in other words getting your system to adapt to ingesting fluids in the middle of these workouts is something that seems beneficial at least to me in terms of the trade-off between being dehydrated and the somewhat discomfort of maybe drinking some fluids so you sip small amounts of fluid initially and then you're able to take bigger and bigger gulps as time goes on and pretty soon um you're able to drink mid-set or be excuse me not mid-set please don't do that between sets and your workout or while you're still breathing hard after a mile repeat or something of that sort without much disruption or any at all to your performance last episode we talked about how to assess recovery and things that you might want to do to improve recovery how exposure to ice baths and cold showers can reduce inflammation which can be great for recovery but can inhibit some of the adaptations for strength and hypertrophy because inflammation isn't good or bad inflammation isn't like a nice person or a mean person it's both it's a great thing for stimulating adaptations but you don't want it around too long and so we suggested that you not do ice baths within probably six hours of any training where the goal was hyper hypertrophy or strength training there is some evidence that getting yourself into an ice bath or cold shower after endurance training can actually improve the mitochondrial uh aspects of endurance exercise that you can get improvements in mitochondrial density and you can get improvements in mitochondrial respiration by doing that afterwards and that it can facilitate recovery that's still a bit of a controversial area i do think that what i mentioned earlier that waiting at least six hours and probably more like 24 hours between workouts is a good idea that getting at least one full day of rest each week for some people that'll be two i have to say i'm one of these people that after two days of absolutely no exercise i do perform better consistently across all aspects of physical performance and mentally i feel better as well even though i loathe to take those days off unless i'm really exhausted it does seem to help my training some people can train seven days a week and they're fine i think it just is there's a lot of individual variation you want to work on sleep and maximizing sleep for recovery nutrition of course as well i talked about sleep in the first four episodes of the podcast so if you have trouble with sleep definitely check out those episodes it's very clear and a number of sports teams um even some folks that i work with uh and andy galpin and others are starting to incorporate a what's called a parasympathetic down regulation after training of any kind as a way to accelerate recovery and enable you to do more work in other words get back to work out sooner what is parasympathetic down regulation it means finishing your your training and instead of just hopping on the phone or hopping into your car and and um heading off to take five minutes minimum maybe ideally more like 10 or 20 but for sake of time five minutes minimum and doing just some slow pure nasal long exhale devoted breathing we're lying down and just kind of zoning out that it seems can accelerate recovery and allow you to get back into other types of work mental work or physical work more quickly which makes total sense because remember your nervous system and recovery and work is a local phenomenon which muscles were you using you know were you using your your glutes your hams and your and your back or where you're using your shoulders etc but it's also a systemic thing it's also about those neurons and the locus ceruleas that are releasing epinephrine you want to quiet all that down after training you want to really just zone out think costello channel your inner costillo and just mellow out for five to 20 minutes and then move into the rest of your day five minutes should be manageable even if it's just sitting in the car with your eyes closed doing that down regulation breathing i think you'll see big benefits in terms of allowing yourself to come back sooner do more work over time and just perform and feel better generally as well as be able to think about other things besides the just how much the previous workout kind of beat you up a couple more things i think are going to be useful and i do want to just pack these in because we are closing out the month on physical performance and that's about programming and about pacing and the kind of mental aspects of endurance so let's start with pacing and mental aspects of endurance i learned from a friend and colleague here at the podcast that who's very active in triathlon and marathon and other knows a lot about that whole world and the competitive landscape there that pacing and literally physical pacers of a laser on the ground or visualizing or having a pace car or a pace runner in front is actually not allowed in many competitions and if those are present doesn't allow the race times to qualify as legitimate record-holding times and that's very interesting to me because what we know is that the visual system has this capacity to switch back and forth between what we call panoramic vision where we're not really focused on anything things are just flowing past us or our eyes are just kind of zoned out so i can do this right now and you won't be able to tell but i'm looking at the corners of the room i see costillo down there on the floor i see my podcast team here and i can also see the microphone i can see myself in this environment that's panoramic vision whereas if i draw my eyes to one location like right there in the center of the camera it's what's called a virgin's eye movement so i'm contracting my visual window the contraction of the visual window when that's done is the same thing that would happen if i was tracking say a pace car or a pace runner or a laser on the ground the mirror bringing our eyes together to what we call a vergence point has the impact of triggering the activation of neural circuits in the thalamus things like zona and serta if you really want to know what their names are of these brain areas as well as in the brain stem that activate the so-called alertness system things like locus ceruleus whereas panoramic vision tends to bring us into states of relaxation you can actually leverage this during your runs let's say you're out for a long run or you're swimming or you're cycling this is probably easiest to imagine out of the water but you probably do in the water as well if you focus your attention on a landmark that you're going to run to you'll find that it's much easier than if you don't actually have a set milestone or landmark that you're going to run to however if you were to continue that repeatedly just going milestone after milestone after milestone you would feel more mentally fatigued and you would actually be able to generate less work overall one thing that can be useful is focusing on a milestone running to that milestone or biking whatever it is the activity happens to be and then dilating your field of view to relax the system and then continuing again so it's this kind of active contraction or of the visual window and then dilation of the visual window contraction the visual window allows you to generate more effort but there's a cost to doing that because neurons consume energy and now you know how they do that whereas dilation allows you to essentially be more efficient right now pacing is not allowed or having a pace or a visual pacer because it does allow you to access systems in the brain and body that allow you to create more energy more effort and so i find it interesting that i think in a kind of subconscious genius the race officials and the the governing bodies of these of these races have said okay sure having a pacer there or someone in front you can draft off of them there's actually a kind of a aerodynamic effect of having someone in front of you that makes it easier to run in the wake of their of their airstream so to speak same is true in cycling this is why the cycling teams are so good at maneuvering in packs in very specific ways you can go faster with less effort if you're drafting as it's called behind somebody but as well where you place your vision will allow you to generate more effort and so it's interesting that they've taken out this kind of um if you will performance enhancing tool i imagine and i have to imagine it's the appropriate word here that ra good runners good cyclists have the ability to create a kind of pacer in their mind's eye i have to imagine that they're not just completely allowing their attention to drift although they do that when they want to be in highly efficient mode generating effort without having to tax their mental capacity and remember mental capacity is neural energy and consumes glucose energy that they could devote to the functioning of their body but that when needed that they can focus their energy in and actually kind of chase a mental pacer or pick milestones so this is a mental game that you can play as well it's a little bit hard to do in the context of weightlifting in the gym it's more of a moving through space kind of thing but some people do this by counting reps etc i think it's especially suitable for endurance type of exercise especially done outside one of the reasons i hate running on a treadmill is it just feels like it's never ending and i i've never tried one of these peloton things i try and avoid looking at screens as much as i possibly can but if you try this next time you're out for a run or a swim what you'll find is that you have a capacity to engage a system of higher energy output when you focus your eyes on a particular location but you want to use that judiciously because your goal of course is to become efficient at moving through space over time and not taxing your brain and body to the point where you arrive at the end of that unless it's race day just completely tapped out so that's a kind of interesting aspect of running if you're a fan of running which i am and you get the chance to look at any of the documentaries or docu-dramas made about excuse me about steve prefontaine it was clear that he was mostly in a battle with himself but that he was also a highly competitive individual and you'll see this in some of his races i do encourage you to look some of those up on on youtube or see the docudramas they're quite good where he ran that the essentially was 12 laps on a track it's essentially the five it is the 5 000 meter race which essentially three three miles and he essentially tried to sprint the whole thing which is ridiculous actually knowing what you know today you'll realize that steve prefontaine basically was pulling from strength speed power muscular endurance long duration effort high intensity aerobic anaerobic has sort of tried to maximize every fuel system and you'll see that in the the races that he runs but that when runners are nearing the final laps the so-called bell lap of a race they'll often look to one another to see where somebody is obviously to assess their progress and and how close somebody is but when somebody gets passed oftentimes you'll see someone access this mysterious kick this ability to tap into some additional gear that allows them to run forward or faster when they themselves actually thought that they were maxed out so someone could be running for the finish line they're convinced they're going to win they're going max effort or at least they perceive max ever someone passes them and all of a sudden max effort has changed because of that visual target they are able to access higher levels of speed and output and effort and performance they don't always catch up to that person and win but having a target a milestone is a powerful way that we can generate more force and energy in anything and the visual system is the way that we bring those milestones into our brain which then brings about epinephrine which brings about neural firing which allows us to access whatever resources happen to be available to us so i find this fascinating because people often wonder like where does the kick come from where is this kind of gift of an additional gear where is that deeper resource and we often express it and talk about it in kind of psychological terms like heart or willpower or that something kind of got transplanted into us or descended into us and not to remove any of the spiritual aspects of of sport or running or effort of the human uh you know heart but it's very clear that the nervous system when it has a specific visual target can generate the sorts of intense effort that it couldn't otherwise and it sometimes even comes as a surprise to the person generating the effort i promised that i would talk about programming meaning when and how many times a week to do the various workouts related to endurance and how to merge those with other types of exercise that you might be doing for strength or yoga or other things that you might be doing like work and other things unrelated to exercise since that's a vast space with many different parameters and you all have different lives and lifestyles and backgrounds with fitness etc what i'm going to do is i'm going to put three different levels if you will or protocols that one could adopt in a link on the show note so in the caption on youtube if you click on that link you'll be able to see three possible combinations of endurance work strength and hypertrophy work or endurance work flexibility and hypertrophy work that are grounded in many of the major publications that dr andy galpin and colleagues and other people have described including this review that's also linked there on concurrent training and how one can use concurrent training meaning training for endurance training for strength training for hypertrophy training for all these different things without having to train constantly every day twice a day etc so if you are interested in taking the protocols that you learned about in this episode and in previous episodes and combining those we've placed them there for you as a completely zero cost resource please understand they are not holy costello agrees they are not holy there will be variation in terms of what people can tolerate what they have time for but i think they'll serve as a useful guideline in getting started or in continuing with and expanding on existing endurance work strength work hypertrophy work and so forth just really quickly we didn't talk about supplements much today in the previous episodes i talked about the phosphocreatine system and supplementing with creatine talked about beta-alanine for kind of moderate duration work you know really the only things that have been shown to really improve endurance work across the four varieties of endurance work i described today they have essentially two forms one are stimulants so things like caffeine will definitely improve endurance work and power output there's a little bit of evidence that caffeine intake can actually inhibit the function of the creatine system but it's just one study but that's interesting if you want to read that study you can put caffeine into examine.com and it will take you to that study many people get sore after workouts in particular workouts that involve a lot of eccentric loading or workouts that are very novel where they've kind of pushed it instead of moving gradually as i suggest into say high intensity anaerobic endurance work of three sets of 20 seconds on 100 second rest maybe you get overambitious and you do eight sets in which case you're extremely sore certain forms of magnesium in particular magnesium malate m-a-l-a-t-e have been shown to be useful for removing or reducing the amount of delayed onset muscle soreness that form of magnesium is distinctly different than the sorts of magnesium that are good for getting us into sleep things like magnesium 3 and 8 and by glycinate and then there's this whole thing about beet powder and beet juices and things that increase nitric oxide and allow for more vasodilation and therefore delivery of blood to muscle and neurons and other tissues for long bouts of endurance work some people like beet juice and the related compounds that increase arginine and vasodilation some people don't some people don't feel good when they take those some people also don't feel good when they take beta alanine because it can give them this feeling of kind of like um itchy creepy crawlies under the skin kind of the niacin phenomenon the niacin flush some people don't mind that or some people don't experience that so when it comes to supplementation there's a lot of variety but magnesium malate um has been shown to reduce soreness so sometimes that's good cold and hot contrast therapy for soreness things of that sort but in general we focused mainly today on behavioral tools you'll notice that all of the tools are accessible without the need for lots of equipment so i didn't say you need a rower you need a kettlebell though those will work and i hope i was able to illustrate for you that endurance isn't just one thing it's not just the ability to go for long bouts of exercise of different kinds that there's also this mental component because of the way that neurons work and also that there are these different forms of endurance of muscular endurance that where you're going to fail because of the muscles and muscle energy utilization and the nerves that innervate those muscles locally not because of a failure to bring in oxygen or blood whereas long-duration effort it's going to be more about you know being below your vo2 max and your ability to be efficient for long bouts of more than 12 minutes of exercise one set as they say of 12 minutes to maybe several hours i should just mention with long duration type work you know you could even imagine raking in the yard or mowing a lawn depending on how big that lawn is i used to had a job when i was a kid mowing lawns and i'll tell you we didn't have many neighbors with very big lawns but um there are a few of them felt huge because they were really convoluted and if you're pushing that mower and these were the old-fashioned mowers not electric mowers it's work that's also of the sort that we call long-duration endurance work high-intensity training will 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Why Everyone Should Train Endurance

All Episodes Now Searchable at hubermanlab.com & The Neural Network

How To Maintain Muscle

Endurance: It’s Not What You Think, Crossover With Brain Function

Energy; Many Paths To ATP: Creatine, Glucose, Glycogen, Fat; Ketones

The Vital Need For Oxygen: But Why?

What Allows Us To Endure (Anything)?

The 5 Things That Allow Us To Persist/Endure & What Causes Quitting

Why You Quit: It IS All In Your Mind

The “90% Mental” Myth

The Critical Need For Carbohydrates & Electrolytes (& Sometimes Ketones)

Phospho-Creatine, Glycogen, pH, Temperature Is Key

Using Your Blood, Heart, & Lungs To Go Longer, Further, With More Intensity

An Excellent Review on the Science of Training Adaptations (See Caption On YouTube)

The 4 Kinds of Endurance

Muscular Endurance: Powerful for Everyone: Posture, Performance, Resilience

Protocol For Building Muscular Endurance. No Major Eccentric Component

How to Make Muscles More Resilient: Mitochondrial Respiration, Neuronal Firing

Long Duration Endurance: 12minutes or More, One “Set”, Efficiency of Movement

Why Everyone Should Train Long Duration Endurance: Capillaries In Muscle & Brain

Two Distinct Types of High-Intensity Interval Training: Anaerobic & Aerobic

Anaerobic HIIT: 3-12 Sets, Work:Rest Ratio of 3:1 or 1:3; Quality of Repetitions is Key

Maximizing Oxygen Utilization, Heart Rate & Nerve-Muscle Energy Utilization

Aerobic HIIT; 1:1 Work:Rest Ratio, Tapping Into All Energy Utilization Systems

Building A Stronger Heart & Better Brain: Eccentric Loading the Heart: Stroke Volume

Resistance & Weight Training: Useless for the Brain? What Is Good For the Brain?

The Strength-Endurance Tradeoff; How Long to Wait Between Workouts

Breathing During Endurance, Explosive and Weight Training: Nose, Mouth, Gears

Intercostals & Diaphragmatic Breathing: Warming Up Intercostals Is Useful

Increasing Motivation & Adrenaline

Eliminating the “Side Cramp” With Physiological Sighs

Accelerating Through “The Wall”: Accessing Alternative Fuel Sources; Ketone Use

Hydration: Why Hydrate, How To Hydrate, & How Much Fluid To Drink

“The Galpin Equation”; Gastric Emptying Time, Adapting Hydration Mid-Training

Boosting Mitochondrial Density With Cold; Wait 6 Hours Before Cold/Between Training

Accelerating Recovery with 5 Minute Parasympathetic Down-Shift After Training

Leveraging The Visual System During Effort, Milestones; Dilation & Contraction; Pacing

The Physiological Basis of Your “Extra Gear”, Accessing Your “Kick”, Steve Prefontaine

Programming Examples; Concurrent Training

Caffeine, Magnesium Malate to Reduce Soreness, Nitric Oxide, Beta-Alanine

Synthesis; Next Episodes, Zero-Cost Ways to Support, Sponsors, Sources

Thank you to our sponsors: * ROKA - https://www.roka.com - code: huberman * InsideTracker - https://www.insidetracker.com/huberman * Athletic Greens - https://www.athleticgreens.com/huberman

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Website: https://hubermanlab.com Join the Neural Network: https://hubermanlab.com/neural-network

Mechanistic review of training adaptations: * http://perspectivesinmedicine.cshlp.org/content/8/6/a029769.full.pdf

Protocols: https://hubermanlab.com/how-to-build-endurance-in-your-brain-and-body/

Please note that The Huberman Lab Podcast is distinct from Dr. Huberman's teaching and research roles at Stanford University School of Medicine. The information provided in this show is not medical advice, nor should it be taken or applied as a replacement for medical advice. The Huberman Lab Podcast, its employees, guests and affiliates assume no liability for the application of the information discussed.

Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac - https://www.blabacphoto.com