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
- 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
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
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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
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term health another feature of inside tracker that's great is their
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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
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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 tap into yet other fuel sources and
mechanisms as we learned today so if you are enjoying this podcast and
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