00:00
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia and this week on the podcast, I speak to returning guest Dr. Mike T. Nelson about physiological flexibility and the four physiological intervention points. Mike is an OG in the exercise physiology and nutrition space and previously we talked all about metabolic flexibility. This time on the podcast,

00:28
Mike comes back and expands that idea of being flexible and resilient across other domains. So in addition to fuel substrate use and sort of a recap on metabolic flexibility, we talk about temperature regulation, our pH buffer and lactic acid tolerance, and breath work to enhance our ability to deal with stress and become less anti-fragile. For those of you unfamiliar with Mike,

00:57
I'll put a link to our previous podcast that was recorded almost two years ago in November 2023. Dr. Mike T. Nelson is a research-fuelled fitness and nutrition educator. has spent over 20 years of his life learning how the human body works, specifically focusing on how to properly condition it to burn fat and become stronger, more flexible, and healthier, enhancing longevity. Mike is a go-to.

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in the industry for his knowledge and has been called in to share his techniques with top government agencies, universities and colleges, fitness organizations and fanatics. The techniques he's developed and the results Mike gets for his clients have been featured in international magazines, in scientific publications and on websites across the globe. His podcast, Flex Diet Podcast is a wealth of information on all of these topics and more.

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So can find out more about Mike at miketnelson.com. His Flex Diet podcast is on all of your favorite podcast listening platforms. I've got a link to it in the show notes. In addition to the wait list for his Physiologic Flexibility course, which is coming out in a week or so. So this is a perfect opportunity to enhance your understanding and learning from one of the best there is in our industry.

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All of that said, think you're going to really love this conversation. Before you crack on and listen though, I would like to remind you of two things. One, the best way to support this podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform that increases the visibility of Micropedia and it makes literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to hear from guests I have on the show like Dr. Mike. And two, my Mondays Matter Accelerated 2.0 program oh

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is on sale now. We are selling through to the end of Sunday the 12th of October to kickstart this 21 day reset on Monday 13th of October and this is where I coach you for 21 days through implementing those protein-spearing modified fast days which are so effective for you to lose body fat and keep it off.

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This is for anyone who has felt a little bit overwhelmed at the idea of joining an entire plan, but really wants to understand more about how they can effectively implement this fat loss plan into their lifestyle. So this is such low hanging fruit for anyone wanting to get a handle on this fat loss technique and see some real results in a short amount of time. So that is Monday's matter accelerated. I'll pop a link in the show notes as well. For now though, please listen to this interview.

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that I had with Dr. Mike T. Nelson.

03:53
and then I just go off on a tangent, but that's all right. Mike T. Nelson, so great to see you. It looks like you've had a busy summer. All I see is you traveling, concerts, and the rowing machine, actually. Yeah, yeah, I've doing a fair amount of rowing again. And recently, the last seven days, I went to three concerts. Oh, amazing. Yeah, was good. saw Bruce Dickinson's solo stuff one night and then saw

04:22
Apocalyptica with Lindsey Stirling and Hailstorm, which is amazing. And then one of my favorite bands of all time is a band called Demon Hunter, they're a Christian metal band. So I did the VIP, got to meet them, got my picture taken, went to the show and yeah, it was awesome. That is awesome. Nice one. And are you settling in for like a season of work now? Kind of. We're going to be back down in South Padre in a couple of weeks. So we'll be down there.

04:50
you know, for probably about five and half weeks just hanging out, working and doing some kiteboarding. So I try to not do as many podcasts, not do as many meetings, usually just projects like writing work. I've got a lot of writing I need to get done and try to have a little bit more open schedules so that if it's windy, we can go kiteboard and hang out and move stuff around as needed. Yeah, nice one. So

05:16
Last time we spoke on the podcast and something which I hear you, particularly over the last few years, you or actually 10 years, probably longer, we've talked a lot about metabolic flexibility and it's, and I feel like that's actually gained a, like you were one of the OGs talking about metabolic flexibility. and, now it's a term that people are really familiar with and, at least people in sort of my circles. But of course, of late I've heard you talk much more about physiologic.

05:47
And does the idea that, you know, sort of extends beyond metabolic flexibility or is a little bit bigger. So can you chat first about how you came to sort of expand the idea of, yeah, to expand to this metabolic flexibility idea? Yeah, so I started working on metabolic flexibility as part of my PhD dissertation. I started that work in, I want to say 2008.

06:15
I believe. Yeah, I know, it's just wild. ah The term metabolic flexibility was coined by David Kelly in around 2000. And so it was around three, four years after that, I started thinking, I'm like, okay, that's a cool theory. It applies to metabolism. There's a of useful stuff there. But how do we take that concept and we expand it to all of our physiology? So for metabolic flexibility, you've got carbohydrates on one end, fats on the other end.

06:43
And then how well can you transition back and forth? And it's kind of the dynamic nature of transitioning from one thing to the opposite thing I've been kind of infatuated with. So if we look at even biomechanics, right, most of the muscles in the body are arranged in pairs. You have your bicep and your tricep and they do kind of opposite things. You've got your quadriceps and your hamstrings and they do opposite things, et cetera. And a lot of systems in the body are paired systems like

07:12
sort of a push-pull, it's not always that simple. But I started thinking, okay, if someone has, we'll give them a B in basic exercise, know, pretty good nutrition and sleep. Like those are kind of obviously the three pillars of basics you want to start with. And obviously you've got a of great stuff in that area too. But once we're done with that, like how do we know what's next? Like how would we, is there any framework or are there any kind of rules of thumb we can figure out?

07:40
where we should focus our time next, because there's a never-ending list of biohacking, red light to grounding, to hydrogen water, to cold water and sauna. it's a never-ending list of things people could do, which gets a little bit overwhelming. So I thought, okay, so we're on physiologic flexibility, and how do we figure out what system to look at? And so my bias was, what are the systems that the body...

08:06
absolutely 100 % has to hold within a very, very tight range or stuff goes really awry. Because I think if you want better performance, you just need to train your body to survive better. Originally got that concept from Dr. Arkab at Z-Health back in the day. And I came up with the four main pillars, which would be temperature, pH, expanded fuels, and then air, which is just CO2 and O2.

08:33
that all those have very tight ranges of which your body has to operate. However, we can put it in more extreme environments. So temperature 98.6, it's actually probably 97.7, but we can do sauna, we can do cold water immersion, we can put ourselves in these extremes of temperature. Yeah, we're not really trying to change that core value, but we're trying to run some of these like, just more adaptive processes and other benefits.

09:02
from exposing ourselves to methodical way of increasing those extremes on the end. Yeah. And I've read articles that you've written on physiological flexibility and you've talked about it like it's training for chaos, which is almost, which is actually like one of the, like I often joke about that. My strength training is often like chaos training, which, is, know, you don't want to do if you want to actually seriously progress with like, you know, muscle building or whatnot, but.

09:31
In evolutionary terms, how much of this flexibility, and I think about this with metabolic flexibility, but expanded to this term, how much of this do we naturally have? And how much of it is sort of dampened down or suppressed by modern environment, do you think? Yeah, it's a great question. I think inherently we have a high capacity in each one of those areas. Although I would agree that because primarily of our modern environment and modern living,

09:59
We're just not exposed to it at all. Right. So I think that you can't really ever stop adaptation. Then the question is, okay, what is the signal or the stimulus you want to adapt to? So again, like temperature, um, I live in Minnesota and it's hilarious that people in Arizona yell at me. They're like, Oh, how do you survive the cold winters? It's horrible there. I'm like, well, you just run from one air conditioned unit to the next air conditioned unit in Arizona when it's super hot, which

10:28
I understand it's ungodly hot down there. But I think we don't expose ourselves to any temperature range. And over time, we lose that capacity. So the extreme example, think if you've ever been, I remember visiting my grandma, she was over 100 in the nursing home when she was alive. And it's like 800 degrees in there. And we're in a room and I literally would check the temperature is 76 degrees Fahrenheit.

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And she has a sweatshirt on and a blanket and she's like, oh, I'm so cold. You know, because it, she's losing the ability to regulate heat and she can't tolerate very much of an extreme in the environment. And granted, unfortunately towards the end, she was basically stuck in the exact same environment all the time with even little movement or no way to raise, you know, core temperature or anything like that. So I do think a lot of it is the environment of which we're in.

11:23
we've adapted to a very kind of fine range of thermal neutrality. And again, it doesn't mean to be that, you've got to have no heating in your house and sleep with stone pillows and, you know, do all these extreme things. I love air conditioning because Minnesota does get pretty hot in the summer. I love having heat in the winter. It's freaking amazing. But I think you then have to pick some type of stimulation, even on a small amount.

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to compensate for that. And just like exercise, like think of all the benefits we can get from as little as five, 10, 20 minutes of exercise a day, right? More is usually done a little bit better, but you know, the curve tends to drop off. You don't have to exercise eight hours a day to see benefits. So think it's very similar to that. You don't have to live in a sauna. You don't have to buy a cold plunge and be in there four times a day, but you...

12:17
probably do need to apply some of that stimulus at some point throughout your week or throughout your day. So Michael Ester has his book, The Crisis. Yes, love that book. Yeah, yeah. And it's exactly the same concept, Yes. we just, all of us have seen to be sort of within this small range of where we're comfortable, seldom is there an opportunity to put ourselves out there unless we do it purposefully. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. And again, I

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I love all the things with modern life, but I do think you're going to adapt to wherever you're at. And so you probably should think strategically about doing a few of these things. That doesn't need to take any Herculean effort. Most people could take a cold shower or get exposure to cold. If you're in a warm environment, could, shocker, exercise outside, right? You don't have to go to an air conditioned gym all the time. You can go for a walk. You could go for a run, like...

13:15
Where I live, a lot of times I'll take my rover out and stick it in the middle of the street. I'm like, we live on a dead end, so there's not a lot of traffic or anything like that. But there's ways you can get around doing it without having to spend a ton of money or a lot of cases, any extra money. Yeah. So you personally work to become more resilient in the areas that we're going to discuss, Mike? Yeah. So I started playing with these experiments probably going back eight years ago.

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And then, know, stuff that does take a little bit more technology to play with. I got a big freezer right before COVID happened. So at the end of 2019, and stuck in my garage, sealed it with silicone and then use that for my cold plunge. Again, I'm not recommending that. Make sure it's unplugged, make sure you're safe, all that kind of stuff. But I'm like, yeah, if I'm the guy out here saying all this stuff, like I probably should practice it. Again, I didn't know COVID was going to happen, but...

14:12
It kind of gave me about a two year period where I could literally do a cold plunge every day, probably six, seven days a week for like two years in a row. And, you know, I still do it most of the time now and not quite as much as I did then. um But yeah, just to see what happens, because I didn't want to be the person who's saying, hey, look at all this research, look at all this literature. And yeah, I've had clients and we've kind of put it into the training. But I also wanted to personally experience it of what's going on and

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run the experiments of sitting in a cold plunge maybe too long and poking your finger, looking at glucose and all that kind of fun stuff. Yeah, interesting. Because particularly now, there's so much hype around both sauna and cold plunge, probably more hype around cold plunge actually. Yeah. Yeah. And of course, now you're getting a lot of pushback from factions like sports scientists and saying, know, cold plunge isn't a be-all or end-all. But of course, I think you're coming at it from a different perspective actually. And so, Kim, like...

15:10
Is that am I right in thinking that? Yeah, so when I. So when I looked at it, Cold Plunge was very much a very niche thing, like I had seen some of Wim Hof stuff. uh Shout out to Brian McKenzie. He had a few things on it, you know, with working with Laird Hamilton and those guys. XBT had just started. So there was a few crazy people out there doing it, but it wasn't like Main Street. But I never if you would have asked me at that point even six years ago,

15:41
Oh, is cold plunging going to be a mainstream thing? like, what are you crazy? This is stupid. It sucks. Like no one's going to want to do this. This is dumb. There's going to be companies making cold plunges. think like Morosco, think Dr. Tom was like the only guy making one at that point. And now it's like, Oh my God, there's like, I don't know how many different cold plunge companies, people doing it. And if we look at the research on it, my initial thought was I was hoping for these magical body comps.

16:11
effects because I read the Ray Cronis published some stuff years ago about Michael Phelps and that he did these calculations of why he could burn so many calories is because of the temperature of the water. And, you know, to his credit, I guess he had a metabolic heart and was doing a bunch of measurements. And this is maybe 10, 15 years ago, quite a while ago. And so in my head, I was like, okay, how do I test cold plunge? And at some point I need to figure out how to buy a metabolic heart out of my house.

16:41
So now I do have metal ball covered in my house. So shout out to Panoi. I was disappointed though, because the math just doesn't work out. Like in theory, if you can be in water that's just a little bit cold and you can be in there for many, many hours, maybe it doesn't work out perfectly. But I would say in that case, maybe. um But the fact that you're in cold water, you're in there for very limited time.

17:10
You know, if we're talking two, three, four, five minutes, even eight minutes, there is a huge thermal drain, but you just don't accumulate enough calories for it to make any difference. And so I went back and pulled all the literature I could find on body count stuff, you all the way back to some studies published in like 1934, 1968. And there was, I think only two studies I could find. And one of them was literally they put people in their shorts.

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in a freezer that they had made that they monitored. I want to say the air temp was like, could get this wrong, but I want to say it was like 42 degrees and they were in there for hours. And in that case, they did show that, you did burn a fair amount of calories. But if you read the study, people were shivering. They hated it. Every single one of the subjects that you could argue this was done so long ago, IRB was highly questionable and those types of things too. And yeah, so basically

18:07
Body comp, would say, is kind of a bust in terms of massive effects. Because you will even now still see some people's names who rhymes with Brekka that look like, oh, it's the most amazing thing you've ever seen in your life. It rips fat off your body. And no, no. Like the only way that I've seen if you run the calculations with cold water immersion, maybe if you push yourself to the point where you're

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constantly shivering for hours afterwards and you include that in part of the calculation, maybe. But if anyone's done that, which again, I would not recommend people do that, it is absolutely miserable. You can end up with some aftershock effects, you can end up with pressure drops. Again, it's not anything anyone I would recommend do. Let's say I may have done it a few times to see what happens and it is.

19:02
Absolutely miserable for hours. And I think there's a potential to eat back those calories because you're quite hungry. I've seen people argue that point as well. I Eric Trexler, I think, did a good article on it for mass. And he was like, you know what? Yeah, you might burn a few more calories, but you're going to eat a lot more calories just by way of the fact that it makes you hungrier.

19:25
Yeah, and what I've seen with that in the literature is, I would say that's probably a true effect. I love Eric's stuff. He's awesome. Great dude. um In practice, I've noticed the variability of that is super high. Like some people doesn't affect their calorie intake at all. Other people, it's horrible. They're like, oh my God, I'm so hungry. I see the same thing with the high intensity exercise, like high intensity intervals. Most people like an hour or two after won't be hungry. And then some people...

19:54
go back to just normal baseline, even if they put out a really high output, they did true high intensity interval training and other people are just ridiculously hungry. So I do think there's a fair amount of variability there, but I agree 100 % with your point that yeah, in and of itself, you would want something that's gonna burn a ton of calories and in theory, just blunten your appetite for 24 hours. Other than drugs, those things don't really seem to

20:22
So Mike, what are we training then when we're looking at cold and hope? We haven't really talked about the sauna, but what is it that we're actually training for? And what's happening? What are we doing this for? Yeah, I think it's as simple as expanding what I would call like your HDR or human dynamic range. We know, for example, heart rate. The lower your heart rate goes and the higher you can get to a max, the bigger that range is, it's probably a good marker of health.

20:51
We know that same thing with lung volumes, whether you're looking at minute ventilation or whatever markers you're looking for pulmonary measures. We know that faster transitions are also better, right, for both sports performance, both metabolic flexibility, etc. So I think being able to tolerate a higher high and a lower low just expands. You some people have called it like a physiologic headroom that allows you to just be more adaptable. And what's super interesting in the literature is

21:21
that would apply to temperature. But there's only a handful of studies that even looked at this, but there's something called a cross adaptation effect where you train one thing, but you get better at something else. So like in the lifting world, this would be like, I want to get better at deadlifts. Okay. Well, everybody knows a shocker, you should probably deadlift, but I can't deadlift heavy every single day. So there's something else I could do that would transfer to my deadlift. So if you talk to, you know, people who do kettlebells like

21:50
Paul Sotsulian or people like that, they would say, well, do kettlebell swings. Oh, wow. I deadlifted twice a week. I added two days of kettlebell swings and my deadlift went up more than just deadlifting. Cool. So that means the kettlebell swing transferred to your deadlift. Doesn't look like a deadlift, but you saw an increase in your deadlift performance. And so there is some of these cross adaptations of facts that, again, are not real well studied. The main one is tolerance to hypoxic events.

22:20
So hypoxic events are low oxygen. So they did this really cool study in humans like many years ago where they said, okay, one group you get exposure to cold water immersion, the other group you do not. And we're expose both groups to a hypoxic condition. So low oxygen, which for humans is very threatening and they rated like kind of self report of like how threatening they felt it would be. And the group that had cold water immersion before,

22:46
reported that the hypoxic environment wasn't not nearly as bad. And it was a pretty big difference. And there's some background mechanisms that tend to cross over and things like that. So I think there's more of these crossover effects that we'll find that these systems are kind of overlapping in the background. So I do think there's probably a lot of transfer that we just haven't figured out yet. Again, it's anecdotal, but I can say that

23:14
If people have worked on these four areas, like their HRV scores tend to be better, their ability to handle stress in other forms, even psychological stress sometimes, which is self-report, training stress, other stressors seems to be a lot better. And so the thought being that maybe systematically putting yourself under these small amounts of stress is increasing your body's resilience and allowing you to get back to baseline faster via

23:44
some mechanisms that we probably haven't really 100 % figured out yet. Yeah, interesting. We did some sauna work in the lead up to a run that we just did in the Grand Canyon. Oh, cool. Yeah. Yeah. And it was really great. And particularly, Hubster, he's not very tolerant of the heat. And so for him, he really handled the temperature a lot better.

24:08
than he would have otherwise, because we just knew from previous events. I didn't get into the sauna quite so much, but equally when we're both in the sauna, I tend to take longer to heat up and longer to sweat than he does. And is this a known difference, sex difference, Mike, in your experience? I haven't seen it be a sex difference, but I definitely have seen it be an individual difference. um

24:35
Yeah, like some people, you can see this in the literature, right? Some people are what they call heavy sweaters. Some people aren't. Some people lose more sodium. Other people don't. There seems to be a lot of variability with that and it does change, right? So a lot of that might be some genetic stuff. We do know that adaptation does change that. And like you said, if you know you've got some competition or some event that's going be in a hot environment,

24:59
Like even just two weeks of sauna or heat work like makes a huge difference in terms of the acclimation to that stressor for sure. Yeah, interesting. And to your point about the cold exposure and hypoxic environment, can we from that, is that translatable to if you're you're going to, I don't know, climb Mount Kilimanjaro, for example, then actually doing some cold exposure work before you go may help you tolerate the shift in, um

25:29
the same oxygen? My argument would be yes, but I don't know if that's actually been formally studied yet. But my argument would be yes. And as long as it's monitored, it's probably not much of a downside. I mean, you could extrapolate even further and say, well, maybe that would transfer to high intensity exercise. Again, I haven't seen that study that's been done either, but it would be super interesting because I think

25:57
one of the limbers, especially on, you like you're doing a max 2k on the road or something like that is definitely your ability to get oxygen and carbon dioxide out, all that kind of stuff. But I, I do think there is something perceptually there too, because like if you've ever done like a hard aerobic event and you know cardiovascular wise, you're, you feel pretty good. If you haven't done it in a while, there's this weird sort of

26:24
Not dread, but just like it feels like I'm mentally not prepared for this to suck. You know what I mean? Like, I feel like I'm going to wuss out earlier than what I would normally do. Where if I'm acclimated to it, I've been doing them a couple of times a week. I kind of, okay, I know this is going to suck, but I don't know. There's just something that feels like I can't push myself nearly as hard, but it feels like it's more of a, know, Tim Noakes would say like the central governor, you know, more of that type of thing. Yeah.

26:53
Yeah, that makes sense. And have you read into, she hasn't done a lot, she went on Huberman once, Susanna Soberg or something. has protocols for, I think she only did one study. I'm not sure. Do you have thoughts on her saying you only need like 11 minutes of this cold or 20 minutes of sauna? can't actually remember the numbers. how much do we need and does it compare to what she found?

27:22
Or is she just one person of many? As far as I know, she's the only one that's looked at it terms of quantifying sort of a total time. And then the protocols that have been used for sports performance are all across the map. know, like most of them tend to be relatively cold, like 50 degrees or colder. They tend to be long, like five, 10, 15 minutes. So they do tend to be on the longer side.

27:50
So outside of those protocols, which tend to be acute, and again, they're looking at vertical jump performance, or there has been some look at body comp and muscle mass and muscle protein synthesis and that type of thing. I don't know of any other good data, because that's one of the things when I did the course, I was trying to figure out like, how much we recommend for how long and her study is the only one that's tried to kind of put some time recommendations around it.

28:20
People often think about the metabolic benefits, which to your point, they're not necessarily robust, really, but the psychological benefit of going into cold, um I at least notice it. You just sort of feel invigorated, feel rejuvenated. I do think there's research around that improving psychological aspect. Yeah, the dopamine release, the norepinephrine release, granted these were acute studies, this was a novel stimulus.

28:50
Now those studies are pretty robust. Like that's a pretty legit thing. My friend, Dr. Rhonda Patrick's talked a lot about that. And you definitely do feel it. Like you get done and you're like, oh, like I know the rest of my day usually goes a little bit better. I feel like I have a little bit more energy. I tend to drink a little bit less coffee. And then to the psychological side too, the surprising thing for me, especially after doing the COVID times, I thought, okay, like any other adaptation, like

29:20
And you know, I've been doing this most days for at that point, two years. My expectation was it would be pretty easy at the end of the two years, even after one year that, OK, I just go out and get in. No big deal. But even to this day, like five plus years later, that little hesitation, like right before you get in, like never goes away. Like even a couple of weeks ago, I'm standing there going, this is stupid. What am I doing? This is dumb. Like this sucks. I don't want to.

29:50
There's always that hesitation, even done it, you know, how many hundreds of times I would have thought that would have went away or have been very minimal, but it's always there and it feels like you can't ever get it to zero. But I do think that might be the benefit, right? So you're, you know, psychologically saying, okay, yep, this sucks, but I'm still going to do it anyway. You know, like hard exercise still sucks. I know there's some benefit. I'm going to feel better once I'm done.

30:19
It's only a few minutes, it's gonna be okay, I'm in a safe environment, it's gonna be fine. So you still kinda have to talk your way into it. I think Huberman has a term which I actually like called limbic friction. I think of it as like the professor cortex part of the brain and then the lizard limbic system are like arguing with each other. The lizard limbic system's like, no, this is stupid, you're gonna kill us, we could die in here.

30:45
And the professor part is like, no, it's only for a couple of minutes. It'll be okay. Shut up, you pussy. Yeah. I often think, you know, I often say this to myself when I'm like out in a long run or similar, like just about to hit the cold, like sucks, but feelings change. And I'm not always going to feel this way. And I'm going to feel differently in four minutes time. know, like I sort of, bargain myself with myself with all of these sort of like, um, uh,

31:13
things that go through my head with it. Mike, you mentioned that you sort of have moved from daily exposure to cold. We haven't really discussed heat, but just on the whole sort temperature regulation thing. And also, we're not sure of the dose really, but do you have any idea of, know, like if someone were to say, Mike, what's your recommendation with cold and hot exposure? What are you going to say? So with cold, what I came up with is

31:42
I like the use stress model, so EU stress. So stress you can more readily adapt to. I'm very much biased more towards frequency if people can. So the same thing with training, same thing with nutrition, same thing with most things. There is definitely the distress end of the spectrum where it's going to take you, it's going to be much more difficult, but the stressors are also going be a lot higher. So in the cold plunge world, like...

32:09
Joe Rogan is very big fan of the distress method of cold plunge. And you could argue that maybe that's better for him because he's been doing it so long, he has different adaptations. But I think people see his video and think, oh my God, day one, I gotta go to 35 degrees and get out there and get all the ice out of the cold plunge and do five minutes. And it's like, no, you don't need to do that. And you probably don't want to do that. Like you don't need that much of an extreme stimulus to get the adaptation. So in general, I tell people just start where

32:38
It feels cold, but you can stay in initially for 60 seconds. Like for most people, would say 50 degrees Fahrenheit is plenty cold to start. Like some people have had started 60 degrees Fahrenheit. And then what I do is I like people to slowly build up time. When you get in, you know, get your breath, like, you know, calm your breath down, be calm. And then you'll feel like these sort of. It sounds crazy, but you'll feel like these waves of how it gets harder and then easier.

33:05
So the first wave is usually like right after you get in, everything is cold and just kind of get yourself and you get through that. Okay. And now I just kind of get out before that first wave starts coming up, which for a lot of people is like 60 seconds. And then your goal is over time, a limit I use is kind of five minutes. Once you can pretty easily do five minutes at 50 degrees, then you know, drop it to 49, drop it to 48, go back down to 30 seconds, kind of start over.

33:34
kind of my bias because I don't think you need to go super cold. Most people will still even have a gas reflux at 50 degrees, right? So that's one way of your body. I got that from Dr. Tom Seeger, telling your body telling you that it's fucking cold. It's cold in here. You're applying plenty of stimulus. And then, once you get down to, it took me probably two years to slowly walk myself down to

34:04
think the coldest I've ever done is 38, 39, 40 for a couple minutes, you know, two, three minutes. And that's relatively easy to do now, but it's still hard at first. And then related to heat, I know that contrast therapy is all like a big thing and there's some interesting data on it. It might be beneficial, but if someone starts with contrast doing both cold and hot, it is literally impossible to troubleshoot because you don't know

34:33
How cold was the cold? How long were you in the cold? How hot was it hot? How long were you in there? What was the humidity? How long were you in for each one? What did you do? Did you transfer? Did you like run out of the cold plunge and then in the sauna? Did you go directly from the sauna into the cold plunge? Like, so the more you push the extremes, the higher the stress is going to be, right? So the faster your transitions are, you're going to just accumulate more stress. And again, more stress doesn't necessarily mean that it's bad, but it is virtually impossible to figure out. So the only time I will let

35:03
sort of athletes or clients do that is if you do that on a Sunday and you don't have a cold plunger sauna, you go somewhere to do some recovery work. Great. Do the set protocol. We'll monitor your HRV on Monday. If it's showing that it's always better, just do it and we won't worry much about it. But if you have access to them, much like training, like if you want to maximize training, you would maximize strength training and you would do some cardio, but you would not try to maximize cardiovascular stuff.

35:33
at the exact same time and you wouldn't squish both those sessions next to each other if you could. Again, if you want the absolute max of adaptation. So usually I would tell people do cold first or do hot first, get to a pretty good level, get some adaptation going, you know, six, eight weeks or whatever, then add the other modality in on a separate day, bring that up. So I'm going to put cold on kind of maintenance. I'm going to do sauna maybe four or five, six days a week now.

36:01
And then once you get pretty good with that, then you can kind of play with contrast because now you're more adapted to both of them. And now you're working on the transitions back and forth. So just like metabolic flexibility, like you work on carbohydrates for a while first and then work on fats, then work on your transition, like work on cold for a little while, work on hot for a little while. Okay, now play with your transitions. No, that makes so much sense. And people who

36:29
And people will be well familiar with sort of sauna, cold plunge, because they're very much in that sort of public sphere. you're sort of, when I think about another pillar that you talk about, the pH balance and acid tolerance, like this isn't almost ever talked about in the information that I consume. And I'm very interested in the whole sort of metabolic physiology space. you you described lactate and hydrogen ions.

36:59
as the body's acid bath, if you like. Can you just sort of chat about both lactate and hydrogen and what's going on at that buffering level that is relevant to our understanding of how people tolerate stress, I guess? Yeah. So pH, your body has to hold pH very, very tightly. If it goes up a little too much or a little bit too low, you're in an absolute world of hurt.

37:28
So we have all these systems in that will buffer that system, which is okay, great. So how would I put more acid into the system if I wanna test the buffering system, right? Just like if I want a bigger bicep, I probably have to find some way of stressing the bicep, same idea. It turns out that by doing high intensity interval training, you actually literally dump acid into the muscle. So if you look at,

37:54
You know, for the fancy term is glycolysis. We're just running a bunch of carbohydrates through the system. We're using mainly carbohydrates because we need to produce ATP at a very, very fast rate. The side effect of that is a production of what probably doesn't exist, but is air quotes called lactic acid. So everyone's heard lactic acid is this thing that makes your muscle sore and has all these bad things associated with it. And it turns out almost none of that is true. So lactic acid, if it does exist immediately dissociates into lactate,

38:25
and then these little pesky hydrogen ions. So hydrogen ions are literally the definition of an acid. So the hydrogen ions get dumped into the muscle and so does lactate. Lactate gets a sort of bad view because if you've ever done lactate testing, it's usually some type of RAM test, it's some sort of hideous test and they're like, ooh, your lactate was 11 millimolar, you poor bastard, this sucks. But even during that test,

38:51
they're really using lactate as a proxy for hydrogen ions because it's just not that easy to measure pH directly without fancier equipment. And it turns out lactate in and of itself, it's a really high energy fuel that's used by the body. Like the brain loves lactate, a heart loves lactate, your muscles love lactate, especially the slow twitch fibers. The bugger is it's just not produced a lot without concomitant increases in hydrogen ions. And that requires

39:19
to the exercise or similar? Yep. Yep. The only way to get there is by basically running glycolysis really, really hard so that the byproduct is lactate and hydrogen ions. What that allows you to do is it allows you to get to these higher level outputs. But if anyone's ever done that or even just doing, you know, 15, 20 reps of a leg extension on the leg extension machine, you literally feel like your muscle is burning and it's literally because there's acid being dumped into the muscle. But it's not lactate.

39:49
It was not lactate. Yeah. Yeah. And lactate doesn't even hang around very long at all. It doesn't do anything with muscle soreness. um They're not massaging lactate out of your system, all other kind of stuff that still persists. But the body does have buffering system. So the main intramuscular, so inside the muscle system is a molecule called carnosine. So carnosine, you can increase levels of it. So originally, the studies did, ingestion of carnosine itself.

40:18
And they did find, oh, this does help buffer some of the hydrogen ions. And then later they realized the rate limiter on that is an amino acid called beta-alanine. But beta-alanine combines with L-histonine to form intramuscular carnosine. And the rate limiter is beta-alanine. So if we just get beta-alanine as a supplement, probably need to accumulate up to 180 grams over 30 days. So about six grams per day for 30 days.

40:45
that'll increase intramuscular levels of carnosine. And that is a buffer that then allows you to do a little bit more high energy output. Most of research would say between 120 and 240 seconds of continuous output. That's kind of the sweet spot. We do have some other buffering like baking soda can be used, right? So bicarbonate can be used in the blood. So you can ingest that as a supplement. It does have some efficacious effects. The two big side effects are

41:16
It can really mess with your GI system and it can feel like you want to crap yourself during the middle of your exercise, which is not good for performance. Um, and that just what I've noticed is a variability per individual is pretty high. So you kind of have to start low. You probably have to use multiple dosing. It's kind of a pain. Some people really respond well to it. Some people don't in all honesty, I don't use it a ton just because of the variability of it, but

41:44
you know, it is something to consider and there is some pretty uh efficacious data with it. Cause there are some sports supplements now, Mortaine I think have sodium bicarb as part of the formulation. They put it in a gel and so they're trying to get a much slower release. Again, data I've heard from athletes, like some athletes said it was like the greatest thing they ever did.

42:10
There was one study that was published as a poster session at the International Society of Sports Nutrition with that product and did not show any effect. So it's super interesting. I like the concept. People kind of have to play around with it themselves and see what they find, but it does reduce a fair amount of the GI issues. Yeah. Okay. And then with beta-alanine then, do you feel like that's a safer bet? If I had a choice, I always start with beta-alanine because the only

42:39
negative effect is kind of the tingling effect. The beta alanine can interact with something called the DRG, the dorsal root ganglia, and it can just make you feel kind of weird and kind of itchy. There's no real negatives other than that. just doesn't quite feel like you took too much niacin, but it kind of sort of feels like that. Some people like the feeling. I personally just don't like that feeling at all. don't mind it at all. I'm yeah, I'm like, oh,

43:05
This is working on my, cause it's in a pre-energy drink that I sometimes take. Yeah. Yeah. So I've had an idea for years and someone will probably do this. If you talk to like, uh, Roger Harris, rest in peace, like he was a godfather of kind of creatine and beta alanine super, super nice dude. It does not appear to be. Rate limited, meaning in theory, if you could take a high, high dose of beta alanine.

43:33
you might be able to load it in a very short period of time. Now again, I'm not recommending somebody do this, but the itchy sensation just is absolutely horrible for most people. But if you could come up with a compound that maybe blocks the interaction at the DRG or slows it down long enough to allow it to be absorbed to get under that threshold, which might be really tricky. I do think the use of beta alanine would go up dramatically.

44:00
Because the biggest issue I find is, especially if they get itchy, oh crap, like you might be dosing it like four times a day now to get under the itchy sort of threshold. You get like 1.5 grams four times a day and this is the pain in the butt to do. So someone will probably figure out that problem if they do, please remember me and I don't know, me something cool in the mail. That sounds great. Mike, what I would say is like, it's almost your scientific duty to trial.

44:28
just six grams of beta alanine before you go on the rower. that, I mean, that would give you a good indication of whether or not that high dose and you're only itchy for a short amount of time, right? Like surely you can set aside your individual sort of tolerance for it. Yeah, the other issue is you probably have to load six grams a day for 30 days of seeing the fact because it is stored in the muscle. Of course, okay. Yeah, there isn't much of an acute effect, which on one hand,

44:56
Once you're loaded, like you don't need much to, like creating, like you don't need much once you're loaded to stay there. The washout period is pretty long. It's just the bugger of getting to that loaded state to get all of it basically in the muscle. The main reason it's in most pre-workouts is because people want to feel it working. And so that was when the price dropped in beta alinine, that was the main reason it's in a lot of pre-workouts.

45:22
Yeah, okay. And that is me to a T, you know, when I have my energy drink and it's got better, Aline, I'm like, oh yeah, I totally noticed this. And then potentially that does make me work a bit harder, albeit from a placebo effect, because I'm having an energy drink once every couple of weeks. I'm not having one like daily, so I'm not really getting this like um sort of like dosing effect. Yeah. And it's not bad to do it before. Like there's a neural negative to it.

45:48
It's just, one of those things you probably, to see the full effect, you'd have to be pretty what they call saturated on it. Yeah, nice one. So Mike, with regards to sort of pH balance and acid tolerance, how best are you in sort of guiding people as to how to work on this and work this sort of pillar? The best way is what I call like shit training or super high intensity interval training. Oh, that's good. I like it. Yeah.

46:17
So most people who do interval training, I would say have the best intentions and probably do something that's difficult, but I'd say a lot of it's pretty ineffective. if you, so just say, we'll rip on the 30, 30 protocol, right? So get on a rower or a salt bike, do 30 seconds all out and then take 30 seconds rest and then do it for like 10 rounds or something crazy that someone just pulled out of their butt. If you watch most people's power output on that,

46:47
Let's say your first one's at 300 watts. I would bet by round three, I've seen people as low as 200. I've seen them drop off all the way to like 150. So your power output is dropping really hard. You could do that protocol, but you would have to drop your power output a lot to start. So my bias is keep the power output high and then just open your rest period.

47:10
So instead of making a mandatory one-to-one work-to-rest ratio, which is actually very difficult for most people to do, even high level athletes, just go until you feel you're ready or below like a hundred and then go again. And then once you can't keep within five to 10 % of that output, you're done. So, you know, if you dropped a 250 and you can't recover, maybe if you're new, I'll let you go one more round. But if you get like 245 the next round and your goal is 300, you're done.

47:40
You could do more work, but now you're so sub threshold. I think you're just adding more fatigue at a high cost. So my bias is keep the output high. Allow rest periods to be more open. And then once you auto-regulate, once you can't do that, then you're done for that day. And then your goal is to get to maybe 10 or 12 rounds of the open rest period. Great. Now we can go back and start to shorten the rest periods again. And then once we do that, once we get down to 30,

48:09
then we'll maybe up the output to like 320 watts repeat again. So my bias is I like keeping the output high adjusting the other parameters around that because it's that high output that really is one that leads to performance gains and two is where you're actually are producing the most amount of hydrogen ions. Okay and then with that and the rest period is like say I'm doing it on a bike could I light cycle in that rest period like just like

48:38
turn the legs over, is that a complete rest? You can do either one. Like I have some people who will just do light rest. If you're doing a rower, most people I tell them just get off the rower, walk around, do whatever. Like I don't really find it matters that much. Like if they are on a bike and they are doing some easy paddling, just make sure it's easy paddling. I mean, the other way around it is you can go the other extreme and do like blood flow restriction.

49:04
So you're putting on a cough or something like that that's eliminating venous flow, not necessarily arterial flow. So what we're trying to do is allow blood to come in and not allow a lot of it to go out. And what you'll find there is because you're trapping a lot more of the blood, you will accumulate more hydrogen ions and metabolites from doing that. And you can go as low as like 30 % of one around. So you can use really light loads and still get that high

49:33
acid environment. So that would be another way to do it more with a lifting modality. Yeah. And outside of exercise, is there any way that someone can do this or is it literally about training? There are some ways you can get at it with breath, with breathing techniques. So if you look at like, so Wim Hof technique is uh actually a tumor or what I call like a super ventilation method, especially where you're breathing in and out really fast. And so when you're doing that, you're not

50:03
actually hyperoxygenating the tissue, which you can't do without pressure. But what you are doing is you are actually off gassing more CO2. And it is true that higher levels of CO2 via different reactions become carbonic acid, which do dump acid into the bloodstream. So by doing the opposite, by actually off gassing and getting rid of more CO2, especially at rest where you're not building up any extra from exercise, you do temporarily make the blood more alkaline.

50:33
So that part is actually true. Now it doesn't stay for very long again because you can't really tolerate big changes in pH. And by contrast, if you do a lot of breath holding, now because you don't have any airflow coming in or out and metabolism is still running, that will push you more to the acidic side a little bit. Yeah, that's super interesting. And then before we move on, because I definitely want to chat about more about that oxygen CO2.

51:02
very briefly, but how often should someone do the ship training? My opinion is most people, you're really doing high, true high intensity, probably once a week. Like some people can get by twice a week, but with rare exception other than some elite freaks, like yeah, once or twice a week, I think is plenty. Even once a week is plenty for people to start. Yeah. Okay. No, that makes perfect sense.

51:30
So on oxygen and CO2 tolerance, is that why CO2 tolerance matters a lot more maybe than even oxygen delivery? It's just its ability to increase alkaline? Like, is that what you said? Yeah, so if you look at how your body is regulating, so most people are like, oh, we know oxygen is like super important, so we must be regulating oxygen super tightly. And the answer is

52:00
Really, oxygen is kind of the backup system to CO2. And it's the CO2 sensors in the body and the brain stem, these little chemoreceptors all out the body that your brain and body are most sensitive to. So for example, if you just are doing a breath hold, people are like, oh, it's because I'm running out of oxygen. That is happening, but it's actually the buildup of CO2 that is triggering the need to breathe over the dropping amount of oxygen.

52:29
So oxygen is kind of like this backup system. this, I remember the exact stat, but I there's something like eight or 10 % of the people where CO2 is not the main driver. They think that oxygen is kind of the main driver. So there are a few of those people around. But the way you can show this to yourself is at rest, again, if you hyperventilate, where you breathe in and out really, really fast, you're off gassing more CO2. And what that does is that allows you to do a much longer breath hold.

52:57
Right? Because you've gotten rid of more CO2, it's going to take longer for it to build up now, which is allowing you to hold your breath longer. Again, you would never want to do that near water or your face underwater, because you can have what's called shallow water blackouts, where you literally go from feeling fine to just like, like, um, the dead fish that they have to take. Oh, I got, I got a little floppy, like take him out of the pool and

53:24
Obviously they're there in a completely monitored environment doing that. But yeah, there unfortunately have been people who have drowned by doing the hyperventilation technique and doing a breath hold in a pool. They can pass out and then that's it. But as long you're on dry land, make sure you do it lying down because you can fall over, all that kind of stuff. But it is a way to show you that CO2 is the main regulating system within the body and oxygen is kind of the backup system.

53:54
Yeah, interesting. And so from a practical perspective, then, like, how do we take this information and implement it in a way to help improve our physiologic flexibility? Yeah, this is probably the hardest section it took for me to do because the regulation of O2 and CO2 is very tightly held in the body, but it's also very redundant. And there's also different systems responsible and

54:24
There's like a ton of just myths everywhere. So for example, you see people inhaling oxygen to help with athletic performance. All literature I've reviewed on that so far says it's probably not doing anything. If you could pressurize it, then in theory, you might see a benefit. There was a very old study where they took like what it looked like a big iron lung and they stuck a bike in it and they did hyperoxic experiments where they

54:54
they did pressurize oxygen and they had people exercise. Again, very risky, would not recommend people do this on their own, button controlled settings, et cetera. What they did see is that their output in the chamber was actually better. But what was cool is they then tested them in normal oxygen conditions. Again, this was just one acute thing. This was not a training study, no transfer at all. So even though they got a little bit better exercising with oxygen, once you took that pressure oxygen away,

55:23
there was no comfort benefit. um So a lot of the things with altitude training. So the altitude training over the years is actually kind of flipped. So now you would actually train low and sleep high. So the theory is when you train, you want the highest level of oxygen because you want the biggest performance output. Cause everybody knows if you go to altitude, especially if you're not accustomed to it, your performance just tanks. um

55:53
but we want to try to get more red blood cell mass, some of these positive changes in EPO by sleeping high. The data on that is even mixed. Like the amount of randomized controlled trials with altitude changes for performance at sea level, not at altitude, is really mixed and kind of not impressive. The hemologic changes you'll see when you do it

56:19
probably disappear within one to two weeks. So they're very short lived. But again, if you are competing at altitude, then yes, it is a huge advantage to do that type of training. So I even then looked up, I'm like, well, what about all these like sports teams that perform at altitude, like the Denver Broncos in the US, the Utah Jazz. And it does turn out that there is statistics on that showing that they do have a significant home field advantage in theory because of the altitude.

56:49
because everyone else has to come in to play at that altitude. It's not big, it was definitely still in the single digits, but you know, that does add up over time. Does any of the studies, like I wonder about how they created that train low sleep high environment and whether or not any of the, like if they use tents and maybe the tents aren't actually great at creating that sort of hypoxic environment, I don't know.

57:18
I don't know, because I haven't actually looked, but... Yeah, they're mixed. There's only a handful of actual chronic training studies that have even ever looked at it. There's a great review in MedSci, I think like five years ago now that detailed them, and I think there's only like six studies. And one of the issues is, what's your placebo? Right? If you're doing it in the mountain, like you probably know if you're at a lower altitude or a higher altitude, right?

57:45
So the best way to do it would be to stick people in pressurized chambers and not tell them when it's pressurized. Okay, how many labs are going to do that? How many athletes and labs are going to let them run that for weeks on end? Like almost none. So it gets hard in theory, you're like, oh, this is great. And then you start thinking about the mechanics of how to do it and it becomes very difficult. And then obviously athletes have placebo and variability. Like I know some athletes who

58:15
swear that altitude training was like the best thing they ever did and their results got better. I don't know if that's placebo. I don't know if they're a hyper responder. I don't know, but they seem to swear by it and they were better. So great, like kind of run with it. So it's kind of a, it's a mixed bag right now, I would say, if you have to perform or you're at the normal oxic environment, you're at not performing at altitude. Okay. And then, all of that said Mike,

58:44
What am I going to do to help improve my CO2 and O2 tolerance? So what am I going to do? Yeah. So what you end up with is you've got basically four conditions and only two of them really matter. So I could go hyperoxic, right? So I could go high oxygen. I could go low oxygen pressure, or I can just go normal ox that can change the pressure or the concentration amount. I can do the same thing with CO2.

59:14
practice, what it comes down to is the best bang for your buck to probably play with is something called CO2 tolerance. The CO2 tolerance has been around for quite a while. If you talk to hardcore physiologists like Dempsey from Wisconsin, they'd be like, I don't even know what you're saying. Right. And the guy has published like, you know, respiratory stuff and exercise performance and muscle training and all this stuff for frigging decades. So there is no

59:41
100 % agreement on what it actually is. But yet everyone can kind of feel a difference. And so I think the best way to test it is probably the nasal exhale test, which is from Brian McKenzie at Shift-Adap. I believe they did publish on this. I think it is published now. I'd have to go double check. But in essence, what you would do is you would sit quietly, take a few big inhales, exhale, and then you're going to exhale as long as you can through your nose without swallowing or pausing.

01:00:12
And what you get on that test will give you a rough idea of one, your diaphragm's ability to do an eccentric contraction and your CO2 tolerance. If you're really low, like under 15, 20 seconds, you probably need to work on that. And if you're like 30 to 50, I'd say you still probably need to work on it, but it's not, at least in my book, a dead stop. If you're 50 or 60 seconds at above, you're probably fine.

01:00:40
What I've noticed with a lot of people is that sometimes that can be a huge rate limiter that they've just never looked at. The other way to get at it now is like if you're using aura, like aura for respiratory rates, pretty darn accurate. The new whoop is pretty accurate within one breath per minute. Garmin is like really hit or miss, but respiratory rate can be useful.

01:01:03
So just did a talk for the F1 racing teams on respiratory rate and uh HRV and how to use all these metrics and what do they mean. So if your respiratory rate is 17 or higher or even 16 or higher at night, I can guarantee your CO2 tolerance is dog crap. Because what are you doing? So at night you're unloaded, you're not exercising, you are basically off gassing too much CO2 because your respiratory rate's too high.

01:01:31
So that means that little chemo receptor in your brainstem is like the temperature in your house. It likes this little happy medium, but over time we wanna kind of work that down. So for those people, I would definitely have them do some hypoxic work, usually low intensity stuff, go for a walk with a long exhale, try to do things that do mostly nasal breathing, do a longer exhale during your zone two, maybe even zone three stuff. What we're trying to do is get a little bit higher levels of CO2.

01:02:01
And we're trying to accumulate enough time there that that chemoreceptor over time will reset. And what you'll see is that the respiratory rate will start walking itself down. um The good part is once it gets lower, you don't have to keep doing that work a lot. It'll tend to stick there. It tends to hit these kind of, you know, tractor points or whatever math you want to use to associate with it. um So I'd say respiratory rate, nasal exhaled test for CO2 tolerance is

01:02:28
probably by far the biggest low hanging trute in that area. Yeah, that makes sense. And I mean, this is a random question, but you know those nose things people wear? Yeah. Is that to do with this at all not at all? It's supposedly more of an airflow issue. I played around with a bunch of them. The only ones I think that are worth the crap are the newer ones that have little magnets you put on the nose and they actually do pull your nose apart. There's been some anecdotal stuff. I think

01:02:56
Hopefully there's one study published on it. don't have to look. So those might be beneficial. I've used them with a few clients. seem to be beneficial. The breathing strips and all the other stuff, data that's just so mixed. But again, some people swear by them. I'm like, yeah, you're not doing yourself any worse. So bro, if you like it, like you wear them all day. I don't care. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Totally. And Mike, I want to be mindful of your time, but the last one I want to just double check.

01:03:24
with you is that we spoke a lot about metabolic flexibility the last time that you were on Micropedia. Have any of your thoughts changed on how to get there, its importance? I don't think the importance has changed because obviously this is one of the pillars, but any sort of additional thoughts you might have on metabolic flexibility that would be of interest to the listeners? Yeah, I'm in the process of looking at a bunch of literature from my buddy Dr. Andrew Kootenick was just on my podcast.

01:03:53
not out yet, but you probably saw the paper that he did. And one of their big consensus from the paper was that maybe carbohydrates are playing a role to help high intensity exercise, but maybe more from a stabilization of blood glucose than anything else, which is super interesting. And they did a really cool study with some data. They've done two studies looking at that. So I'm in the process of going back through all that data, rereading their study again.

01:04:23
Yeah, because it's super interesting. So it's not to say that carbohydrates don't have a role, but if that's true, maybe their role is a lot less than what we think. And maybe there is an area where we could push fat oxidation up even higher. That could be an argument more for a ketogenic type diet to be used for that again. Yeah. So I would say that's something I'm trying to...

01:04:51
rethink again, I don't know if it would currently, I don't think it's going to change anything drastically, but I think maybe that higher fat oxidation is more useful than we thought. And the other part that makes it interesting is if that's true, we know that exogenous ketones as terms of a supplement do appear to stabilize blood glucose and allow for bigger drops in blood glucose. So if blood glucose stabilization is the main issue,

01:05:21
maybe that would make an argument for exogenous ketones might be more ergogenic than what we've seen play out in the studies. The data on them is, I'd say, very mixed. Right now, I would argue the best data for exogenous ketones is cognitive function or high levels of fatigue. Dr. Brandon Egan's done a lot of that work. Even that data is still a little bit split. Like, what did you use to fatigue him? Like, what cognitive measures are you doing? Full disclosure, I

01:05:48
I do some work for tecton ketone esters, so take that for however you want. But yeah, so I don't know, that's the end of the spectrum and kind of playing around with and looking at stuff more. I don't know if you have any thoughts in that area. Yeah, it's interesting. We use ketones, but the kind of running that we've been doing lately is like hours and hours and hours of running into the night in this one particular case. And our use of ketones has been more of a supplemental sort

01:06:18
energy source, but that attention and focus. I spoke to Brendan Egan on my podcast as well about the use of ketones. And he'd said, know, anecdotally, which he hasn't published on obviously, but a lot of his athletes do actually use them as a performance enhancer as well. And for what it's worth, anytime I've taken ketones for performance placebo or not, I've had a lift in performance. So I'm super interesting in that space for sure. Yeah.

01:06:48
Again, this may be because of my bias, but I do think it's confounded by what type of ester you're using. And I don't think the 1,3-butane-dial is effective for performance. I think it might actually be a negative because it does partially get converted to ketones, which is true, but it also does get converted to an alcohol pathway. So if you've ever taken 1,3-butane-dial just in and of itself, look at a small dose. I'm like, okay, yeah, I think...

01:07:16
This feels good. And if you cross that threshold, it definitely feels to me like I've been at the bar. Like I can guarantee you that my cognitive performance and everything else is going down for sure. Is that the keto IQ? The keto IQ currently is 1,3-butanediol. It was the same formula as Vicha's lab initially. um They didn't pay for the license.

01:07:43
Well, yeah, more for them. I use Audacious Nutrition, actually. Oh, which one is that? I'm not familiar with that. Oh, that's Keto Start, Dom's wife, Dom D'Agostino's wife. Start, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's the one that we've been using. And that's a salt, correct? It is a salt, yeah. And think, in my conversations with Dom, he's sort of talked about...

01:08:07
uh If there is a performance benefit for ketones, it's sort of if you're able to lift the ketones, not that high actually, like it might only be, you know, lifting them up by a millimole rather than what you get with an ester, which is like pushes them quite high. I mean, again, a lot of it is, it's not published sort of, it's more observational, I suppose. Yeah, I don't think we know blood levels, what the ideal level of ketones are. The salts are interesting. You can't get high levels with the salts and I love Dom and his wife. They're both amazing, like super

01:08:37
super awesome people. And I also wonder what the salts are these people just getting more electrolytes, which I know sounds really simple. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because I've seen that happen a lot. I, you know, again, anecdotal, I'd be like, Hey, well, what do you use for electrolytes for lung races? Like, what are you talking about? I'm like, Oh, well, maybe it's just because you're getting a lot of the electrolytes in there, especially if you're using the quad salt, which I think they use. Yeah, so I'd say there's still a lot more

01:09:08
Interesting work to be done for sure. And then last part is, even if we just use a blood marker measurement, that doesn't tell us really anything about rate of appearance and rate of disappearance. So I do think there is an argument to be made that if you're hitting four or five, six millimolar, like super high, to me, I wonder is everything backing up in the bloodstream and not being used? Because if it's being used, I would not expect these astronomical

01:09:37
high amounts of ketones in the blood, I would expect them to be a little bit lower. But again, you'd have to do again, a tracer study to figure out, you know, where everything's going. Yeah, no, I agree. And when we first started playing around with the ketogenic diet, I had a colleague whose wife, her ketones were consistently above five for weeks and weeks when she started. Wow. I know it was crazy. And then they dropped and then she started getting weight loss and started getting benefits from

01:10:05
It was almost like her system was unable to use what was there. then, I don't know, once things changed metabolically for her, she's seen some benefits. I agree, there's so much. It's such an interesting space. And the work of Andrew Kucnick and the Prince Group and stuff is really interesting to watch for sure. Because it does challenge notions of carbohydrate in the sports nutrition literature. that's a highly contentious area.

01:10:36
Oh yeah, yeah. And even to me, like I remember talking to Don, God, years ago when he was doing the contracts with the military and Patrick Arnold was making ketones for him and stuff. My first question was, like, do you can give these to people and they can still use and burn ketones? He's like, yeah, they appear so. And I'm like, to me, it's crazy that Bob, whose butt may look like a couch cushion has never been in a state of ketosis for 47 years of his entire life.

01:11:05
that that pathway is so conserved, you could give him an exogenous ketone and his body would use it for fuel. Like that to me is just fascinating because that's the backup fuel source if there was, you know, starvation or very low energy intakes and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah. No, I know. It's super interesting. So just to sort of finish up being Mike, like

01:11:28
in this area, this whole space of physiologic flexibility, like it makes sense, right? Because not everything, nothing happens in isolation. So you're looking at much more sort of global pictures. are you writing a book? Like, what's the story? Have you written a book that I've ignored? I don't know. I'm behind on writing books. I'm working on one now on a high flux rate with my buddies, Dean and Job. So the theory being for most people, I think m

01:11:55
you do better having more calories come in and more calories go out. Right? If someone is weight neutral on 1200 calories, oh man, what are you going to white knuckle your way to like a thousand calories a day? Like, where are you going to go? But if you're weight neutral at 2500 calories per day, right? Okay. That's a lot easier. Now you have, you can cut a little bit and be in a deficit and you're fine. And our argument is that the best way to get there is just by doing more walking.

01:12:21
Like you do burn a fair amount of calories. It's easy to do. Most people have access to it. Most people don't do it enough, et cetera. Another book I'm working on is a book on metabolic flexibility through human kinetics. So still working on that. I might be working on a book on protein, but that one's kind of third behind that. And so for right now, the physiologic flexibility stuff is in the physiologic flexibility certification, which will open October 13th through the 20th for seven days.

01:12:50
Oh, amazing. Well, this is perfect timing. Perfect timing. Yeah, great stuff, Mike. And of course, you're well from the information you talk about this all the time on social, obviously in your podcast as well. Can you just remind the listeners where I connect with you? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Best place is probably just the newsletter. So probably 90 % of my content goes out to the newsletter. So go to miketnelson.com. There'll be a little button for newsletter. I do have some stuff on Instagram, which is Dr. Mike T. Nelson.

01:13:17
And then the main website is miketnelson.com. Again, if you have any questions or certifications or anything like that, yeah, let us know. Amazing. Thanks Mike so much for your time. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate all the wonderful, really highly intelligent questions. And thank you so much for all your time. I really appreciate it.

01:13:48
Alright team, hopefully you enjoyed that as much as I enjoyed bringing it to you and of course chatting to Mike, such a wealth of information. So again, I have links to how to find him, his FlexDiet podcast and his Physiologic Flexibility course in the show notes. And don't forget to sign up for Monday's Matter Accelerator 2.0 if you are looking for a primer as we head into the season of festivities. Until next week, you can find me over on

01:14:18
Instagram threads and X @mikkiwilliden Facebook @mikkiwillidennutrition or head to my website Mimikkiwilliden.com and book a one-on-one call with me. All right team you have the best week. See you later