Homeostasis is a term you hear a lot on this show and there’s a good reason. Homeostasis is arguably the driving principle of our physiology. In fact, it’s almost impossible to explain how anything happens in our bodies without an understanding of this fundamental concept.
Considering its importance, the definition of homeostasis is simply the processes by which our bodies maintain a constant internal environment in the face of a frequently changing external environment. For example, our bodies are able to maintain a fairly constant internal temperature around 97 degrees Fahrenheit whether it’s 90 degrees outside or 10 degrees. But that’s just one homeostatic balance. We have thousands.
In this summary episode we dive into homeostasis and why it’s so important. But we also explain why training can be seen as just a stressor on homeostasis and how all of our training adaptations are just an effort by the body to better maintain homeostasis. Put another way, without homeostasis, training wouldn’t make a difference.
We also talk about why we need to “bend” homeostasis, but why we absolutely don’t want to break it. Finally, we go beyond training and talk about why health and homeostasis are intimately linked. In fact, one way to define disease is simply as a breakdown in homeostasis.
As with all summary episodes, we pull in clips from past guests. You’ll hear from top researchers and coaches including Dr. Kate Kresge, Dr. Stephen Seiler, Dr. Robert Kenefick, Dr. Brendan Egan, Dr. Iñigo San Millán, Neal Henderson, Julie Ann Davey, Dr. Paul Laursen, and Dr. Asker Jeukendrup.
So, get ready to find your balance, and let’s make you fast!
Episode Transcript
Chris Case 00:00
Hey, everyone. This is Chris with Trevor, and this is fast talk, your source for the science of endurance performance. So Chris,
Trevor Connor 00:11
yes, sir, back to doing the line I am
Chris Case 00:14
because you can’t remember it. So somebody’s gotta remember it, fair.
Trevor Connor 00:18
But there’s something more important here. This is not your first episode back, nope, but you’ve been the host of the last three so I think we can say you’re back on the show.
Chris Case 00:28
I am. I am. Welcome back. Thank you very much. Good to be here. And I think this is a, you know, a fitting one to return on in the grand scope of fast talk as a podcast. We’ve loved these summary episodes. And this is a topic that we’re going to talk about that we’ve mentioned hundreds of times on the show, and now we finally get to talk about it in depth. Now what’s the topic, homeostasis? I
Trevor Connor 00:52
am looking forward to this. I always enjoyed the summary episodes. Were your idea. I always really enjoyed doing them. It’s a lot of fun to just let’s look back, see what we’ve been talking about, and bring in some of those clips. And we are bringing in clips from episodes you were part of. We’re going pretty far back. Nice, very good. So today, our topic, as you said, is homeostasis. Why this is important to our physiology, why this is central to how we adapt? There’s a reason we mention this all the time. So we really want to give an understanding of exactly what this is, why it’s so important to our bodies. We’ll explain training adaptations in the context of this whole idea of homeostasis, but we’re going to take it a step further and talk about health. Our overall health, homeostasis is central to that as well. So I’ve been excited about this one. I love the idea of homeostasis.
Chris Case 01:44
Yeah. I mean, if there’s anything out there in training science that will make you faster, in a way, it’s understanding this fundamental concept, because it relates to so many aspects of training. So let’s make you fast. All right, Trevor, are you ready to define this thing in a sentence or two, just to set the stage for everybody?
Trevor Connor 02:05
Absolutely. So the first thing I did, I’m trying to use these new AI features. I went to chat GPT and asked it, what is the definition of homeostasis? Okay, very, very interesting. AI definition homeostasis is the ability of an organism to maintain a stable internal environment even when external conditions change. It’s a self regulating process that allows the body to adapt and survive in a changing environment. It’s actually a pretty good definition, but let’s simplify this a little bit. It’s basically our bodies want to remain very stable. They want to remain very consistent. And that’s hard, because we are in an environment that is constantly challenging that So the classic example is temperature. We want to maintain a constant body temperature, but you go outside on hot days, go outside and very cold days, your body has to figure that out. But temperature isn’t the only one. There are 1000s of what we call homeostatic balances in our body that our bodies are constantly trying to measure and keep in a pretty tight, narrow range. So other ones osmotic pressure of our body fluids, we try to maintain a very constant blood pH, and we all know what it feels like when it starts getting a little more acidic. You’d actually be surprised how little the acidity in our blood changes before our bodies say, stop this. This is too much oxygen saturation or blood. We try to maintain that as well. And I could just keep going with all these various things that we are always trying to maintain in a very, very tight range, despite all the challenges that the external environment throws at us. So
Chris Case 03:47
homeostasis is essentially the conditions under which we’re working optimally, and our body wants to keep that intact. It’s challenged, whether that’s temperatures or fluid regulation, or all these things, our bodies are kind of not being bombarded, but they’re being challenged in a way, and our body has systems and processes to manage those challenges and keep us in a place where we’re still operating under somewhat optimal conditions. And
Trevor Connor 04:20
important to understand, if you get a little bit out of homeostasis, you don’t function as well. If you get a lot out of homeostasis, that’s where you are in danger. You are going to the hospital. This can kill you. So I think this is a good point. Let’s pull in our first clip. This is actually not from fast talk. I’m pulling a clip out of fast talk, FEM. This is episode 117 where they had Dr Jamie Whitfield describe how the body maintains glucose homeostasis. And I love this one because a a lot of people don’t realize that is one of our homeostatic balances. We try to maintain a certain blood sugar level, and you’ve heard the terms for what happens when we get out of. Homeostasis there, there’s hypoglycemia and hyperglycemia, as you’re
Chris Case 05:03
also hangry being hangry. Oh, you’re that all the time. So
Trevor Connor 05:08
let’s hear from Dr Jamie Whitfield. Now,
Julie Young 05:11
can you help us understand the body’s remarkable ability to maintain that glucose homeostasis?
Dr. Jamie Whitfield 05:17
Yeah. So, I mean, it’s an entire field unto itself in research, there’s some people that have made their entire research career just studying single transporters that are involved in glucose transport. So there’s an incredible amount of complexity and nuance when we think about blood glucose control, and it’s actually pretty impressive. So I mean, again, I mentioned earlier, but you’ve got about four to five grams of glucose circulating in your blood at one time. If you think about what that actually is, compared to what you would put and say, a coffee as an example, it’s not that much, but your body is remarkably good at maintaining that level. You know, there’s studies being shown that even cycling at a relatively low intensity for four to five hours, your blood glucose level doesn’t significantly change into what would be sort of classically deemed hypoglycemia, so that sort of red zone, if you will. So your body’s very, very good at it. There’s a lot of redundancies and backups in place. So your body also has the ability to create new glucose from non carbohydrate sources. So this is a process called gluconeogenesis. So your body can actually take fats, proteins, amino acids and different things, and through a process, convert those into glucose. So even if you’re not actively feeding or fueling, your body has the ability to produce new glucose innately and in order to maintain blood glucose control from a muscle perspective, because that’s sort of what my background and interest is. In terms of blood glucose controls, you’ve got two different pathways to take up glucose across the muscle and ultimately use that as as a fuel source. First, that is insulin dependent. So again, this is typically what’s defective or non operational in type one and type two diabetics. And so there’s a separate signal in cascade, so different activation pathways that are activated in response to insulin. And then you also have contraction stimulated glucose uptake. And critically, those two things have some overlap, but are separate. So you know, even a type one diabetic who isn’t capable of producing insulin contraction mediated glucose uptake, so exercise mediated glucose uptake is still functional. So there’s redundancies, but they are separate pathways.
Chris Case 07:40
Well, let’s now talk about, you mentioned the range of, say, body temperature, or some of these other homeostatic balances. There’s a small range. But what does that mean? What’s the flexibility that we’re talking about here? And how does homeostasis become challenged?
Trevor Connor 07:56
So our body is not very flexible in terms of allowing us to move out of homeostatic balance, as we were just saying, but it is remarkably flexible in its ability to deal with changes in the environment. So I think this is where we need to use a really important term here, which is a stressor. So whenever the external environment challenges homeostasis, that is called a stressor on homeostasis. So again, let’s talk about thermal regulation. You want to maintain a certain body temperature. If you walk outside and it’s negative 20 degrees, that’s a big stressor on that particular homeostatic balance. So we’re incredibly flexible in our ability to deal with a wide range of stressors, and those stressors can be quite extreme at times where the body’s not flexible. Is in maintaining that internal environment. It tries to, as I said, in the face of extreme stressors, tries to still maintain a very tight balance. Core temperature just doesn’t like it changing that much, and I think this is a good place. Let’s dive into that one a little bit. We have Dr Robert Kenefick from Episode 221 where he talks about all the complexities of maintaining thermal regulation under these different stressors. So you
Dr. Robert Kenefick 09:17
can be generating heat as you exercise, and you can be in a hot environment, but either way, we have to maintain a temperature homeostasis. Obviously, you know Fahrenheit. Most people know 9897 598, Mark. What people typically understand in Fahrenheit as the temperature set point, if we want to call it that, that we need to maintain homeostasis. And we can go up a little bit, go down a little bit, and then there’s actual physiological adjustments or adaptations that help us reset or establish homeostasis to bring that temperature back down to the set point. So if we look at the scenario where we’re gaining heat and when we’re exercising, and so the byproducts of exercise involve co. Two. So you’re breathing out CO two. And we all know that water, so metabolic water, is released when you exercise, and that water goes right back into your body tissues or into circulation, and then heat is the other aspect. And so while you’re exercising and generating this heat, that heat is causing heat gain. So you’re gaining heat, your core temperature is actually beginning to increase, and you can also be gaining heat from the environment, so your skin temperature will be rising. And these two inputs go into your brain, to your hypothalamus and give signals that you need to thermoregulate to get our body core temperature back to that homeostatic set point, 30 7c 9798 Fahrenheit. So there are particular adjustments, physiological adjustments that happen. First thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to need to take the heat and bring it to a place where it can thermo regulate, or you can dump that heat. So when you’re looking at a scenario, let’s say you’re cycling, or you’re running and generating that heat from those muscles that are doing that activity, that heat has to go somewhere, and one of the main places it’s going to go is into your your blood volume. So a portion of your blood, as we know, is made up of water. Water is an incredible heat sink. That means that you can put a lot of heat into water, and everybody knows this boiling water, you’re putting that heat into that water on the pan, causing that temperature to rise. And that’s what’s happening in your body. You’re taking that heat from your exercising muscles, putting into the liquid portion of your blood. And now what we need to do is move that heat and bring it out to the periphery of your body. So you’ll notice, most people become flushed when they exercise, and that’s because the blood vessels that at the periphery are beginning to open up. So we have what we call peripheral vaso dilation. And lots of times you’ll see people, especially in the upper extremity, around their face or their chest or their shoulders, will become very red. That’s a reflection of this peripheral vasodilation. The next thing that’s going to happen is you’re going to sweat. So the sweat glands are going to be initiated and fluid, and that fluids coming out of your bloodline, again, is going to go on the surface of your skin, and the heat from your skin is going to cause the evaporation of that sweat. And when the sweat evaporates, it carries heat away from it. So that is how human beings summer regulate. And it seems like the simple answer is thermo regulation, but then when you explain it all out, you can see there’s a lot of complexities, and there’s a lot of adaptations, adjustments that can happen. And like with most things in physiology, you know, you’re doing one thing as an adaptation, because you need to thermo regulate, but there are going to be some downstream consequences of thermo regulation.
Chris Case 12:41
Okay, so we’ve defined homeostasis in a way. We’ve explained how it works in the body for some of these various balances that are taking place. What does it have to do with training? Trevor, this
Trevor Connor 12:53
is why I love talking about homeostasis, and this is why it keeps coming up on the show at the end of the day. All training that we do, the way to think of it is it is a stressor on homeostasis. So we just talked about some of the homeostatic balances that the body tries to maintain. Training actually stresses us. Training does stress core temperature. It stresses our glucose balance. It stresses a whole bunch of different homeostatic balances in our body. Yeah, a lot of things. When you are training, you are basically taking your body out of homeostasis. And all an adaptation is, is your body saying, I don’t like getting out of homeostasis. You just threw something at me that took me too far out of that homeostatic balance, so I’m going to get back into homeostatic balance, but I’m also going to make changes to the body so that I can better handle this in the future, so that next time you throw this sort of stressor at me, I don’t get out of homeostatic balance the way I just did, right? That is when you are thinking about training, when you are thinking about adaptation, that is it at its core. So I think this is a good place to hear from Dr Robert Kenefick again, because he gives, actually a pretty good definition of how adaptation is all about homeostasis.
Dr. Robert Kenefick 14:14
The reason I like physiology is I like I like to think about adaptations and the simple fact that we adapt, adapt to adapt to training adaptive environment, and we could adapt to pathologies as well. So you know, we’re always trying to maintain some kind of homeostasis, and the adaptations be part of that. And what is exciting? It’s always been exciting for me, when you do that for yourself, when you start tracking things over days, and then a few weeks and even months, you can start to see these adaptations happening for yourself. And it’s pretty exciting to see when you’re looking at data, particularly when it’s your own data, and seeing you know these physiological concepts that you’ve read about, maybe you’ve heard about in a podcast or talked about with friends or in a magazine, and then actually see it happen for you, and you can explain it. And I’ve always found for myself, personally, that is so cool to be able to see that. Yeah, and when I’ve been able to work with people and point that out, you know, something they found exciting too, because the app, when you talk about these ideas colonization, or these other types of adaptations like heart rate or even for sweating, you know, they very, very abstract. But when you were actually experienced it for yourself, seeing it happen, it’s really exciting. And then you own it
Trevor Connor 15:22
all right. So before we continue any further, we also have another really good clip of a friend of the show, Dr Steven Seiler, also kind of talking about adaptation being this stressor on homeostasis that your body responds to. But this clip takes it a little further, let’s
Chris Case 15:40
hear from the master now,
Dr. Stephen Seiler 15:43
whether it’s a rat or a human or a horse, if we go way back to the our beloved general adaptation syndrome, which is kind of that was hanselia, the idea of the alarm stage, the resistance stage and the exhaustion Stage. You know, in training, we’re doing alarm and resistance, bouncing back and forth all the time, titrating those trying to push, you know, and the body, every kind of adaptation The body has, whether it’s being able to handle alcohol better or being able to handle heat better, or altitude or training, they all have the same stages. And what hon showed in his early rat studies, he started with 100 rats. He put them in a cold room, the stress they had to deal with was colder than they were used to, and it stressed them, but they adapted. So they first had this alarm stage, and then they had this resistance stage where their bodies handled they lived in the cold, but he would take different rats out at different times, and he was able to show that there was also even the rats that got well adapted. If they kept being stressed long enough they fell apart. Their bodies eventually failed them because of that chronic stress, so then they fell into this exhaustion stage. So you know, we have the capacity to deal with stress for a long time, but all organisms have a limitation on how long we can handle that repetitive stress, and then you can exhaust the athlete or the organism, and one of the best ways to do it is with a monotone stress load. So I guess you know, if I was going to ever try to make that connection between overreaching, over training, and training intensity distribution, all those things we tend to talk about, I think the common denominator is the ability of the athlete and the coach to create the appropriate variation, you know, in that intensity profile.
Chris Case 17:50
One question that comes to my mind, because we’ve spoken about this onto the podcast so many times before, is this idea that there’s training stress and there’s life stress, and they all kind of fall into a bucket, and you have to balance these things, and you have to take into consideration life stress that you might be going through, versus training stress, all that sort of stuff. We’ve really talked about how stressors in training challenge homeostasis, which leads to adaptations. What about the flip side of that? Well, what about life stress? How does that come into play when we’re talking about homeostasis?
Trevor Connor 18:24
So first, all of these things, when you’re talking about a stressor, all these things are a challenge to homeostasis. They are a challenge to some homeostatic balance in your body. And when you’re talking about training stresses, you’re usually stressing multiple dozens of homeostatic balances where they’re the same. They get you out of homeostasis. They can cause fatigue. They can cause your body to not function as well, and your body has to adjust to that. Your body has to then figure out how to get you back into balance, undo any damage that’s been done. The difference when you’re talking about life stresses versus training stresses is training stresses will produce adaptations that are going to make you fitter in whatever sport you’re training for. Yeah, the life stresses, you might actually get adaptations out of those. You might become better at dealing like if you’re constantly taking exams, you’ll notice eventually you get less stressed about the exam. So there’s going to be adaptations there as well. They’re just not adaptations that are going to make you better, fitter in your sport.
Chris Case 19:27
Could be cognitive adaptations that will help you in some way. But I hear what you’re saying, right?
Trevor Connor 19:33
Yeah, but this is important, because if you’re really focused on your sport, your body only has so many resources to deal with all these stresses to produce adaptations. So you want to reduce other stresses, so that your body can just focus on the adaptations of the stresses you want the way to think about it, yeah, so I think one other clip that we want to throw in here. This was a very recent episode, episode 339, with. Out to Brendan Egan. We were talking to him about the physiology of how our bodies adapt, really going into what are the processes inside the body? So we were just talking about you produce a stress. It takes you out of homeostasis. Your body doesn’t like that. So then it produces an adaptation. What I loved about this episode that we did with him. It’s the how do you go from that you’re out of homeostasis to now you have an adaptation? Complex, complex. It is very complex, and I think it’s worth throwing in this clip, please. There’s no exam at the end of this. You don’t need to take notes. But this is Dr Egan basically explaining how complex it is how much is evolved when you stress homeostasis to when you have an adaptation, all of what goes on in the body. So let’s hear from him. Now,
Dr. Brendan Egan 20:50
it’s useful to think of it, I think, in the context of the different headings that we’ve used, but also to think about it in the context of time during and post exercise. So the onset of exercise is that stimulus and that perturbation. And so, as you explained earlier on in the intro, it was this idea that the perturbation to homeostasis activates a variety of signals. Perturbations are things like changes in the ANP to ATP ratio, which is caused by a turnover of ATP. You’ve got changes in calcium concentrations by virtue of the way that muscle contraction manifests. Changes in that NAD to NADH ratio that you mentioned a few minutes ago, changes in partial pressures of oxygen in the muscle, mechanical tension caused by the actual contractile function of the muscle. And they’re all intracellular, as we call it. They’re all part of the signal within the muscle, external to the muscle, there are, of course, changes in catecholamines and hormones that occur at the onset of exercise. So we’ve got changes in circulating factors as well. But we classified that kind of cluster that I mentioned there as signals, and there has to be then something that moves the signal on further in the cell. So during exercise or soon into post exercise recovery. There’s a number of sensors or signal transducers. Effectively, these are proteins then that are activated or repressed, but generally we often focus on think they’re activated in response to these different signals that have been induced by this perturbation homeostasis. So it’s probably useful to name some of these directly, just so people can kind of orientate themselves, but if one of the molecules you mentioned was AMPK, and as the name suggests, you know the NPK activated protein kinase, one of the main activators is a change in the amp to ATP ratio. So as we get greater ATP turnover, as the intensity of exercise increases, or the duration of exercise is prolonged that is a signal to this sensor molecule, the NPK, which then is also a signal transducer, because that has its effect, like I mentioned earlier, of being a kinase that acts upon other downstream targets. Now I mentioned post translational modifications earlier, and one pro post translational modification is phosphorylation, and as I said earlier, NPK is a kinase, which means that it phosphorylates target proteins. So there are a number of downstream effector molecules, as we call them, that are oftentimes transcription factors, like PGC one. Well, okay, I have to correct myself. PGC one is a co activator. It’s not necessarily a direct transcription factor Bucha, that’s getting into the weeds a bit, but PGC one is one of those targets of AMPK, and you’ve alluded to this, and it’s mentioned in lots of places that you’ve kind of got the AMPK, PGC one axis is often talked about as a means to describe the pathway towards mitochondrial biogenesis. So once you’ve now got down towards these effector proteins, usually transcriptional regulators. It’s the change in their activity that is then leading to changes in mRNA expression, or transcriptional processes. So that’s where we are now talking about, that amplification, or that increase, transient increase in an mRNA that’s again, somewhere down the line, is likely to result in a change in protein again, assuming that the protein synthesis machinery is also switched on and is able to translate that mRNA into a protein. So the early points that I mentioned there about the onset of exercise, that perturbation, some of those sensors being activated during exercise. It’s in that post exercise period that there is the change in the mRNA expression. And then again, varies from individual protein to individual protein, but sometime in hours after exercise is when we begin to see those changes in protein for again, depending on when the timing of that muscle biopsy has taken place. And again, as you mentioned earlier, it’s the thinking is that you repeatedly do these exercise sessions. You repeatedly activate these pathways. You repeatedly then get these changes in protein content or function, and that ultimately is, what are the events that underpin the long term adaptive change to exercise?
Chris Case 24:49
Okay, so Trevor, Dr Egan just gave the very complex, very detailed, very specific scientific explanation. I know you have an analogy, perhaps. Yes. Bring us back up to a big picture view of homeostasis. You have this analogy about the house and the storm. Tell us about it.
Trevor Connor 25:07
Yeah. And we actually did another summary episode where we talked about this analogy. And it’s an analogy I love to give, but fundamentally, this analogy is about exactly that, adding a stressor, getting the body out of homeostasis, and then producing an adaptation. And so in this analogy, I think of your body as a house, and what you’re trying to do when you’re training is build a bigger, stronger, better house. And the way to think of it is the repair person is lazy. They’re not going to just go out and say, You know what? I’m going to add an addition onto the house because I feel like it, they’ll never do that. They’ll add an addition, put on a better roof when there’s a need. So here’s how you create the need. That’s with training. Training is not when you’re doing the work on the house. Training, in this analogy, is a storm that comes in and damages the house. So that’s the getting it out of homeostasis, getting your body out of balance where it’s actually not functioning as well. So really important concept, when you’re done training, when you’ve done a big training block, you’re weaker at the end of it. But the idea is, then the repair person comes out and looks at all the damage and goes, well, I don’t like this. I’m lazy. I don’t want to have to keep repairing damage like this. So I’m going to build back a bigger, stronger house, since I have to do the work anyway, so that if a storm like this comes in, the house can handle it. So the really important concept here is you have to do adequate damage. So you have to stress homeostasis enough to have the repair person come out and say, I need to build back bigger, better, stronger. You’ve heard the term super compensation. This is the idea of super compensation. So the flip side of that is, if you just do a little training, just rip a couple roof panels off, then the repair person is going to come out and go, Yeah, I’m lazy. I’m just going to tack on a couple more roof panels, and you’re going to end up with the same house. You want to get an adaptation, you really got to rip the roof off.
Chris Case 27:02
Well, in some ways, that’s a great lead in to the next concept we want to talk about I hear, which is this idea of fatigue and fitness. Yes,
Trevor Connor 27:10
so I remember a long time ago, in my exercise physiology classes, the question was raised, what is fatigue? What causes fatigue? And we really being inexperienced, there’s students learning all this. We thought, well, of course, there’s one thing that causes fatigue, and what you learn very quickly is no even though feeling tired is tired, there are many, many different causes of fatigue. And what it comes down to is fatigue is when one of those homeostatic balances gets too far out of balance, your body is basically going to say, I can’t have you take this any further, because then you’re going to start getting into danger. It’s a warning sign. It is a warning sign. So your body basically says, I’m going to send a signal to your brain to tell your brain stop. And we’ve seen this. So they’ve done studies on core temperature, where they are measuring an athlete’s core temperature, and you see, at a very consistent core temperature, the athlete goes, I can’t go anymore. Likewise, drop in pH. We’ve all had that feeling. You go and do a sprint, you feel that burn. The burn makes you stop. That’s a drop in pH in your blood. Like I said, it actually doesn’t drop that far. Your body’s going to shut you down pretty quick. Same thing we just heard about maintaining blood glucose levels. If your glucose levels and your glycogen levels start to drop, that causes fatigue. If you’re in the middle of a time trial, and you deplete your glycogen, you don’t have sufficient glucose in your blood, you’re going to slow way down. That’s what we call a bonk, right? And we can keep going through these, but every single experience of fatigue is essentially our body getting out of homeostasis. The same can’t maintain this anymore. Stop.
Chris Case 28:49
Yeah. This brings up so many questions that we shouldn’t and won’t get into. But it’s kind of like, well, there is this line. It’s created by the body. How do I cross beyond that. You know, I can hear people out there thinking, ooh, it’s an arbitrary point, and I can go beyond it. And we have discussed this before on other episodes. We won’t today, I just want to recognize that I understand that urge to be like, okay, so it’s yes, I can go beyond that.
Trevor Connor 29:17
There is a go beyond that, but there’s where your body gives a warning, and then there’s where your body is just gonna stop.
Chris Case 29:24
Absolutely, I’m not suggesting that everybody should be always doing that and trying to trick themselves into Breaking Through Barriers. I just know that there’s that inclination sometimes
Trevor Connor 29:35
physiology will always win. There are a lot of mental techniques to push through, and there was a great study where they showed that really elite athletes could go beyond that core temperature that most people stop at, that they could actually go a little higher, a little harder when they’re in a competitive situation, but there’s still limit for them. There is a point where they’re actually going to start doing damage and the body is going to shut down. Yeah, and that is just simple physiology. Technology. But you know, that leads to another great clip here, which is what you see in elite athletes. Is a incredible ability to maintain homeostasis. And so this is a clip from Dr new go sa Milan from episode 109 where he talks about their ability to maintain homeostasis with oxidative stress, something that will shut an amateur athlete down very quickly. When I was doing my research for that article a couple years ago, my thought was, well, of course, if a pro is doing a five hour ride at 280 watts, that’s a huge metabolic flux, that’s a powerful ride, is going to take time to recover where the amateur is riding a pretty low wattage, it’s probably going to be easier. I almost feel like, based on our conversation, based on the research we talked about, it’s almost, as you said, the pros have such an amazing ability to handle the Ross, to recover. It sounds like it’s almost the opposite, that the Pro can go out and do that five hour ride at 280 Watts and do it the next day where the amateur, even though they’re they’re riding at 190 180 Watts might actually mean more time to recover. Yeah,
Dr. Inigo San Millan 31:11
you’re right. And this is another thing that I I was also shocked when I was doing Ross back in the days I would do before a maximal physiological test, and after, as well as even in some stages, I do at the beginner stage and at the end, and I would assume, right, that at the end of the maximal physiological testing, at the end of the stage, they will have much higher rust in the blood, right? But actually they had about the same or even a little bit lower. So that was like, Why in the world could be this, and it is very possible that also their anti action machinery, it overreacts, or because it’s prepared and therefore neutralizes the excess of rust and free radicals, right? So therefore that’s what they might be able to recover very well for the next day. Because this is another, again, as I mentioned earlier, is another Jason part of things of training, which is not about power output or about oxygen or about fighting carbohydrates, is more about, how do you deal with the byproducts, if you will, right, or the rust, the free radicals, and how do you improve the anti accident capacity? Because we know too that the Ross they are necessary to elicit stimulus at the cellular level, and they’re absolutely necessary. And we know that from science, if you suppress Ros, you’re not going to have right adaptation. There are a few papers showing that already, and this is what you need to train your body, and the body has to adapt to that stress and has to produce or enhance the antioxidant capacity. One of the things that lady, back in the days we know with, for example, with Garmin, the advantage that we had, and this is like 2009 most of the team was living in Girona, so I had a person, a coach there in Girona, leaving the whole time, and the riders, once a week, they would just go before training, or on the way to train, they would just go to the headquarters of the team or the machine was there. It’s a few small drops of blood where you can see the free radicals. And we would never supplement with any anti action whatsoever. We would just look at the free radical count. And if the free radicals were normal, they wouldn’t supplement at all. Right, when the free radicals were high, which usually was when the writer had been training more than what he could assimilate, or after, like, maybe a big race, that’s more like, Okay, we could supplement a little bit with antioxidants, but we really want it. And up until this day, obviously, even in the Tour de France, we don’t supplement riders with antioxidants, and we monitor for free radicals. When the free radicals, they just go up, okay? That’s when we we see that, okay, they have lost the adaptation to deal with this super physiological effort, which is the tulip front, and therefore they produce a lot more free radicals or rust then they became neutralized. So that’s what I think it’s indicated to supplement with antioxidants.
Trevor Connor 34:12
So I do want to point out one really important thing from that clip from Dr Sam Malan. He talked about oxidative stress. Well, that is another homeostatic balance, and it’s literally called oxidative stress. It is a stressor, and we’ve shown that you need that stressor to adapt. But there’s a double edged sword here, that elite athletes are really good at keeping oxidative stress down, so they lose that stimulus for adaptation, and this is one of the biggest challenges that elite athletes face is actually be able to stress homeostasis enough.
Chris Case 34:45
I think we’ve kind of skirted around this concept that by naming it, we haven’t named it, homeostasis is being challenged. It leads to fatigue. Yet, as we build an ability to maintain homeostasis at a high. Level, we’ve become more fit,
Trevor Connor 35:02
correct, absolutely, to the point that I would say, if you ask me for a definition of what is fitness in my old days, when I was doing my first exercise physiology classes, I thought it was, well, it’s a higher VO, two Max, or it’s this, it’s stronger muscles. What I would actually say is, fitness is your ability to maintain homeostasis at a higher level. And so let me explain what I mean by that. Sure, you can have an amateur and a pro on bikes both going at the same intensity, same wattage, but what you’ll see is the pro is maintaining all their homeostatic balances. Where you’re going to see in that amateur core temperature is going up quickly. Lot of lactate and hydrogen ions are being released in the blood. So their lactate is getting out of balance. They’re starting to get more acidic. That’s getting out of balance. They’re having problems getting fuel to the working muscles. So their their glucose balance is going down, or availability is going down, what you’re seeing is very quickly they are losing homeostatic balance. And so the Pro, well, at that particular intensity, might be able to go hours the amateur, they’re out of homeostatic balance and gone into fatigue within minutes to right, you know, very short period of time. Sometimes it’s minutes. Yes, right? And I think just to make that point, here’s from the same episode with Dr Sam Milan. Here’s him saying exactly the same thing.
Dr. Inigo San Millan 36:31
Elite athlete is extremely good at oxidizing carbohydrates and even fatty acids at these intensities, whereas the amateur athlete at those intensities of 300 watts, they’re not oxidizing fire at all, and everything is glycolytic, and therefore they produce a lot of lactate. So for those people that the same metabolic state, it would be more 180 watts, for example. As we keep referring to the 180 watts for example, right? That’s what they would be at the same metabolic level. But if you want to go from 180 watts to 300 watts, you’re going to have to mobilize a lot more energy, or you’re going to have to produce, I mean, to oxidize a lot more pyruvate or energy, and you’re going to produce a lot more lactate, but you need to oxidize that lactate. And this is the capacity and everything happens in the mitochondria, and this is why these DC lead acids have an amazing mitochondrial function, which can oxidize the pyruvate, and they can oxidize also the fatty acids, and also produces, they produce largest amount of lactate as a result of pyruvate oxidation. But they oxidize lactate very well within the mitochondria, mainly as well as in adjustment mitochondria, and also as well too trifle fibers.
Chris Case 37:43
So there’s one more concept here that relates to the idea of fatigue and homeostasis that I think we need to define with these terms, and that is over training, which is essentially being in a fatigued state for such a long time that there’s radical changes that are taking place in the
Trevor Connor 38:00
body. So fatigue is when your body gets out of homeostatic balance, but it’s acute, and if you stop training and go and rest for a little bit, you’re going to get back into homeostatic balance. I couldn’t find it, but I remember reading it was either in a textbook or a study where they literally defined over training as getting out of homeostatic balance and not be able to get back into balance after a rest period. Yes. So overtraining is when you are keeping yourself out of balance for an extended period of time, where, as you said, at some point, your body just can’t function as well. So let’s go back to Dr Seiler here. This is from episode 127 where he gives a very similar definition of overtraining.
Dr. Stephen Seiler 38:48
To be honest, when I was kind of trying to find my legs as a sports scientist and decide what I wanted to do, that’s when this over training research was really at its, kind of its peak. I said, Well, you don’t, I don’t really want to study how you do it wrong. I would kind of like to figure out how to do it right. If this is the wrong thing to do, then what’s the right thing to do? What’s correct training look like? And that was really, in a way, my motivation for kind of going down that pathway that I have, which has been more on these issues of trying to optimize the training process and all this intensity distribution and so forth. But what’s interesting about it is it ends up going full circle, because after 20 years of doing this, when I look at trying to understand correct training, it is about that fine tuned balance between signal and stress, which, you know, years ago, that’s what over training the literature was talking about, is over training is fundamentally a failure to get the balance between training and recovery, or training and stress, or signal and stress. You know, you can choose your metaphors to get that. Right? So it’s the backside of all the research, all those things we talk about with intensity distribution and volume progression and all of that, they are intimately related. In my mind, it’s kind of approaching the problem from different directions. And the problem with understanding over training and overreaching is you really can’t diagnose it until it’s already happened. You see, yep, that was a train wreck. Well, it’s a little late, you know,
Chris Case 40:27
just to put a finer point on this, because I know that first of all, the terms over training, overreaching, all these things, there’s significant but subtle differences between these terms. Also, there’s functional and non functional overreaching. So there’s one type, if you will, that is quite beneficial if you know what you’re doing, and then other type that is not so beneficial. So let’s just understand, or give the audience the understanding of how they know or don’t you need to do this over training thing to adapt in some way, sometimes. Yeah, this is
Trevor Connor 41:03
a really important idea to understand that, in essence, when you are training, you are kind of playing with fire. You heard my analogy. Training is a storm, and you want to adapt. You got to rip the roof off. What we’re talking about is you have to get the body out of homeostatic balance, which the body doesn’t like, and adaptation is just the body saying, I didn’t like that. I don’t want you to do that to me again, so I’m going to build you back stronger, but remember that you’re doing damage. You have to essentially be overreaching a little bit to produce that adaptive signal. So we talked in the past about functional overreaching. That’s something that athletes play with of let’s really push it. Let’s get the body pretty far out of homeostatic balance, and then let it super compensate. But it is playing with fire. You are always doing damage in order to get stronger, and you have to be aware of that, and you have to be respectful of that, because if you just are always doing that, eventually you’re going to move into that over train state, and your body is going to get into an unhealthy place. It’s
Chris Case 42:10
storm after storm after storm. And not only do you damage the roof, you knock the whole house down. You need to
Trevor Connor 42:18
know how much of a storm to hit with, yeah, and you need to understand the recovery side too, because that’s when your body gets back into balance. And I think this is a good place to throw in a clip from Neil Henderson from episode 127 where he talks about this idea of overreach being a stress on homeostasis.
Neal Henderson 42:38
So kind of a difference between an overreaching and over training is with a reasonable rest and recovery. With that overreaching, you’re going to see an improvement. With over training, with rest and recovery, there is no improvement, and you’re only going to see decreased performance. So when we apply when we’re training, we actually get worse. That’s part of the things. We have to disturb homeostasis. We have to stress our bodies, we initially get worse. It’s when you recover that there’s adaptation and improvement. That’s what an overreaching or an overload achieves. Over training is such that you’ve done so much work that when you rest and recover, you do not get any better. And so that’s kind of the big differentiator, as I see things in that realm. So
Trevor Connor 43:18
in that sense, there is a benefit to overreaching. As a matter of fact, it sounds like you’re saying it’s almost a necessity. Yeah,
Neal Henderson 43:24
it’s a component of things. Now, you don’t have to have, you know, overreaching consistently, always, all the time, but you have to have some level of that to improve. You know, it’s just part of the nature of the beast.
Chris Case 43:37
So we’ve just talked about what it means to be out of balance, out of homeostatic balance, in a sense, in a chronic way, and how that can lead to very negative repercussions. I’m just curious if there’s a way to sort of measure or pinpoint if you will homeostasis within your body for all these various variables, so that you can have a sense of how much you’re going over homeostasis or getting out of homeostasis, I should say how much you’re actually challenging it. Is there such a thing, or is this an art form?
Trevor Connor 44:11
Yes and no, yeah. There are some metrics. So for example, most training software has the Performance Management chart. Everybody focuses on the CTL, but there’s the ATL and the TSB as well, and they really try to get at how much stress are you throwing at the body, and where’s your body at? Have you gotten back into balance or not? So TSB is literally about balance, sure. Training, stress, balance, TSB. So that’s trying to get at this idea, but it’s a metric. It’s calculations, and everybody’s an individual. Certainly, there’s blood tests that you can do, if you have the resources right that can look at some of these metrics and say, hey, those are still out of balance. What’s going on? But the end of the day, it’s mostly feel. You have to learn, how far can I push myself? And how much rest do I need when I do push myself and everybody’s very different,
Chris Case 45:04
and I would assume working with a coach would help with this process. However, a coach doesn’t know how you feel, so it then comes down to communication between you and the coach, and how you’re feeling on a given day, and how fatigued you might feel, and how stressed you might feel, and all of those things, you
Trevor Connor 45:18
have to communicate a lot. And it really gets down to knowing yourself. You know, very early in my coaching career, I had two athletes very similar level. I put them both through an overreach training camp. One came out of it with the best fitness of his life. The other one came out of it over trained. So a lot of variables. It is an art form.
Jared Berg 45:40
Some sports nutritionists say the gut is a gateway to good health. I might add that the gut is a gateway to high performance. I’m Jared Berg, and I’m a registered dietitian and endurance sports exercise physiologist. I’ve partnered with fast talk labs to help athletes like you improve their sports nutrition. See how you can perform better with a personalized nutrition plan. Learn more at fast talk labs.com Just look for athlete services.
Trevor Connor 46:06
So we’ve been talking about breaking homeostasis as kind of the fundamental idea behind training adaptations. But I want to take this a step further, because we did talk about over training where homeostasis just gets broken for too long, essentially, and that leads to negative consequences. I’m going to take that a step further and define disease, chronic disease, as simply a failure in homeostasis in our bodies.
Chris Case 46:30
So Trevor, if it’s a failure of homeostasis, why don’t we see these chronic diseases develop right away?
Trevor Connor 46:38
This goes back to the flexibility. This goes back to homeostasis, having a remarkable ability to take often extreme stressors and deal with them. And what you see with some of these stressors that ultimately lead to chronic disease is our body can get us back into a tolerable, homeostatic balance. It’s just not optimal. The body isn’t functioning the way it would ideally like to function, but it can keep you in balance for a while. So your perception of all this is, I’m fine, I can handle all this. So classic example of this would be an alcoholic. Alcohol is a big stressor to homeostasis. If you’ve never had alcohol before and you drink it, you’re going to be in a strange place, but you can, over time, build a tolerance to it. And once you built that tolerance, that’s homeostasis. Big saying, I’m learning how to deal with the stressor. And so you can say, well, I have no problems. I can drink alcohol. That’s an adaptation, yeah, just fine. But if you’re drinking too much alcohol over time, over years, you start developing cirrhosis of the liver, you start developing other health conditions, and that’s just a classic example, if you’re putting this stressor on homeostasis, that homeostasis learns how to deal with, but it’s not optimal, and it’s later on that finally homeostasis starts breaking. And you see that with a lot of chronic diseases, and obviously one of the biggest stressors is diet. I think this is a really good example of all this. We had a recent episode with Dr Julianne Davy where she talked about the microbiome, which is also trying to stay in balance, and what happens when the homeostasis of the microbiome isn’t there, and how that can lead to a whole bunch of symptoms and ultimately, conditions that you would even expect. So let’s hear from her now.
Julie Ann Davey 48:25
So you probably have heard that our gut is kind of connected to everything, every system in the body, every organ, and you’ve also probably heard the statement that all disease begins in the gut. And so that’s kind of through research over the years. That’s kind of really what we’re finding out, that everything, sort of at a foundational level, or at a root level, kind of comes back to the gut. So it is really important to look at the gut microbiome to kind of understand what’s going on underneath the surface. And that can really give us a lot of answers. But this microbiome, as we were mentioning, is again composed of trillions of organisms. These are things like bacteria, viruses, fungi, parasites, and it’s extremely important to have a diverse mix, so to speak, of organisms in the gut that leads to health and wellness. And when we don’t have a good balance, that leads to something that’s often referred to as dysbiosis, and that can lead to a host of chronic conditions. I don’t think they’re always a negative thing. It’s really just all about balance. So I’ll give you kind of an example. I work with patients day in and day out on their gut health on I do a lot of comprehensive stool testing, and often we’ll have a stool test that we’re looking at together, I’m looking at with a patient, and let’s say we’re looking at their commensals, which are their good bacteria, and they’re overgrown, and, you know, their levels are high. And so they’ll ask me, Well, isn’t that a good thing? You know, these levels of good bacteria, they’re high. That must be a positive thing. And so I’m always explaining actually, that’s that’s not the case we want. This really, you know, good, healthy balance. We don’t want them to be too low and we don’t want them to be overgrown. So that’s kind of one example of what you’re referring to. But then also, there are certain bacteria that we call opportunistic bacteria. Now these are in everyone’s system. You know, they’re in our bodies, but again, we want to keep them sort of at lower levels, and when there is an opportunity that is right for them to get overgrown, maybe it’s let’s say someone doesn’t have enough stomach acid, and their stomach acid is low, and that allows for these bacteria and other microbes to get overgrown, then that’s not a healthy thing. But they’re there. They’re part of the ecosystem. They’re part of the balance. So it doesn’t mean that just because we have, you know, some that would be considered pathogenic, that is normal and healthy, that’s not a bad thing, as long as they stay in the right balance.
Chris Case 50:53
It seems like many of the diseases we talk about are a loss of homeostatic balance, and they have to do with diet, with the foods we eat, chronic bad diets have massive repercussions. Can you tell us more about that? Trevor, yeah, that
Trevor Connor 51:06
is one of those big stressors where our body can really learn how to deal with foods that aren’t optimal for our body and maintain some sort of homeostatic balance, but eventually it leads the consequences, because we are not in an optimal balance. And I think this is a great place. This is from Episode 272, with Dr Paul Larson, where he talked about the unhealthy athlete and really dives into that. Ultimately, diet is going to have an impact on us. So let’s hear from him. Now.
Dr Paul Laursen 51:34
This is a top 20 swimmer in the world that I’m working with right now, distant swimmer. So this is just how good you can get on crap ultimately, like, I mean, I’ll just read you some of the diet plan stuff that we’re that we’re getting. So he starts. He wakes up in the morning. He has a carbo drink for breakfast. Don’t know what that is, but then he goes and he does his training. He finishes his training with a protein bar and a pack of Doritos. Then he for lunch. He has 500 grams of pasta with tomato sauce. Rob would like that one for a snack. He has half a chocolate bar, then goes to carbo drink for primer for his next training session, finishes that has a protein bar. And for dinner, this is one, one of the days he has KFC, large Maxi popcorn and a chicken combo. And then on to the next day. And again, it just repeats, right? And then we go McDonald’s, 24 nuggets and large fries and like, it’s a complete this is how a top 20 swimmer in the world is actually performing. And when I even bring up the topic of some of the stuff that we’re speaking about today, there is very much an alarm that goes off in this individual’s mind to even start to contemplate about eating whole dense foods, because there’s an addiction problem in here with this. What I’ve just said right, that he needs that sort of dopamine hit constantly around his training. That’s how he he exists. So this can be a very, very tough ask for me and the dietitian that are working with him, no agreed,
Trevor Connor 53:02
and that, I think is a good transition to you, wrote a paper that I quite enjoyed that was just titled, athletes fit but unhealthy, raising this fact that, you know, we think of top performing athletes. Oh, they’re such healthy people, but if they’re not eating, well, are they truly healthy? And
Dr Paul Laursen 53:19
no, they’re not. You can only imagine, right? Won’t say too much more, but it’s like, he’s obviously been doing this for a long time. The processes in his body are not not optimal. You’re not going to be recovering well, and the CI will come back to get him and but it is. It’s just amazing that you can be completely, very unhealthy on the inside, but looking like, you know, the athletes that, you know, we look up to and we idolize and bronzed and muscular and all that sort of stuff. But there can still be some, you know, a lot of various high inflammatory processes that are going on inside the body that aren’t optimal. It’s amazing what the body can do. It’s all stress at the end of the day, but the diet that I just listed off is a very stressful diet that exercise and the training that’s that’s getting done, that’s stress, but the diet is adding stress, and it’s not doing the a good job in the recovery sort of phase to heal and rebuild. It’s just Yeah. It’s not an optimal process,
Rob Pickels 54:17
yeah. And so to discuss the difference performance and kind of being an athlete, right? That’s the ability to do a specific task and to do it well, to run a mile as fast as you possibly can. But health is different from that, right? Health is the optimal function of the internal systems in our body. Health is being free of disease. Health is longevity, and sometimes those two things are potentially at odds with each other, and I think that as individuals, we need to be able to have a holistic view and not necessarily give up one for the other. But ultimately, how do we maximize both health and performance? Because we’re all athletes.
Dr Paul Laursen 54:59
Yeah. Exactly. It is kind of a holism sort of thing. It’s all systems in balance. That’s what it’s sort of all about. I also reflect on a classic example, I’ll just sort of say you can get away with this for a certain period of time and again. Our messaging with the high carbs, through, you know, the Gatorades and those sorts of things. I was here as well. I did this too. Not that bad, but there was elements of my diet in my early 20s, as an Ironman triathlete, doing the same sort of sort of stuff. And my belief was that I could kind of get away with that. What winds up happening. And again, I know this intuitively from my own health, and I know this also, we can look at the Prins data as well. But over time, even the athletes, you can outrun a bad diet, you start to develop these chronically high levels of blood glucose, so much so that in the Prins data, there’s 30% three out of the 10 athletes were pre diabetic in terms of their their blood glucose levels. So they’re sitting at in the, I think it was, you know, around 115 120 grams per deciliter in terms of the blood glucose levels. So they’re, they’re sitting elevated high like that. So it’s not the exercise is no longer holding, you know, you you guys in the Asperger podcast, you guys spoke about how exercise can control a little bit of that because of the insulin independent marker and ways of actually getting sugar into the cells. But over time, you will start to develop this hyperglycemia, and then you get a hyperinsulinemia and a various different cascade of health implications. So over time, it will kind of catch up with you.
Trevor Connor 56:50
So we have been talking a lot lately on the show about the impact of simple sugars on our diet. They are performance enhancing, but you can have a lot of negative impacts because, again, sugar our bodies are not designed to handle a large amount of sugar. It does affect our homeostatic balance, particularly if you’re consuming it off the bike. So let’s hear now from Dr Oscar, you can group who does address a bit of this, that there is such a thing as consuming too much sugar. In even his opinion,
Asker Jeukendrup 57:19
this is a really important point. I think if you go through all those studies, the vast majority, like I would say almost all of them are using sort of excessive sugar intake, and depends maybe a little bit on what you call excessive but it’s usually in those studies. There are very few of those studies where subjects were in energy balance, or people with energy balance, or it’s the epidemiology studies, where, just over time, people people are tracked, but they’re also gaining weight. If you filtered on energy balance studies, you may get slightly different results. But I think the overall point, I think here is really important as overwhelming evidence that if you consume too much sugar, it’s going to have all sorts of negative effects. And whether that is a direct effect of the sugar or it’s an effect of the increased energy balance and then maybe increased weight, which then has all sorts of negative effects. From a public health point of view, it’s almost like, it’s almost not important. It’s it’s like you’re consuming too much sugar, so you need to, you need to reduce it. But that evidence is strong.
Chris Case 58:33
All right, let’s talk about sort of the flip side of this, if we never stress ourselves, if we were never stressing homeostasis or never challenging it is that also going to lead to negative consequences. Bad consequences, bad outcomes. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 58:47
you know, I talked before about understanding your playing a little bit with fire when you are trying to take the body out of homeostasis. But I do think I also need to pull that back a little bit and say that homeostasis in our body is designed to handle stresses, and it’s actually not good for our health if we have no stresses on homeostasis either. There is a theory in the medical world called the hygiene hypothesis that’s one of the potential explanations for autoimmune disease. I actually don’t personally agree with that, but it’s a really interesting hypothesis that says that our immune system is used to a certain amount of stress on it, and when we are too hygienic, when we are not stressing the immune system, the immune system stops functioning as well, and that can actually also lead to disease states. And I think there is some truth to that idea that if we are not stressing homeostasis, which basically means, if we’re just sitting on the couch and watching TV and never challenging ourselves, right? That also actually leads to poor health. There is an optimal point, and I think this is really where I want to finish things up. Of health and performance are both about this balance in stressing homeostasis. Letting it repair and adapt. That’s the recovery side. But if you want to be healthy, if you want to be fit, you need to actually be stressing homeostasis. And the art is finding how much do I stress it, how frequently do I stress it, and how often do I leave it alone to allow it to hit that higher level, to adjust to what I just threw at it. That is really what health and performance comes down to. And I think this is a good place to finish out with a great clip from Dr Kate Kresge, where she talks about something you see in athletes all the time, where they get out of homeostatic balance so they’re not performing as well. Their body is not working optimally, and they get frustrated with their lack of performance, and they immediately go to the mental side and say, What’s wrong with me? I need to be tougher. I need to be stronger, and try to force themselves through it when they need to be looking at this from a homeostatic perspective and just saying, I’m out of balance. So let’s see her talk about that. Now,
Dr. Kate Kresge 1:00:55
you know, if you’re an endurance athlete, and you’ve been able to have pretty good mental performance throughout most of your career, and you’re suffering right now. Always look at your body. I see it again and again. With you guys, you’re a tough bunch, the temptation is to go to your psychology and is to go to your mental toughness and to go to your grit and just sort of, there’s almost this phenomenon where a lot of the athletes I see have been gaslighting themselves for a really long time. This was like something about willpower or their mental tools that they just like weren’t doing well enough, and what they missed was looking at their body and looking for a possible root cause, contributor to their depression, fatigue, distractibility. And oftentimes, when we find it and correct it, they pop back right back up to where they normally were. And they lost a lot of time, and spend a lot of time beating themselves up for something that was just physiological. And so I just want to urge you, like, if you’re in that camp, you haven’t done the testing, you haven’t seen a provider who can help you just assess your whole body health and find any root causes, please do that as a first step. And I think you’ll be really pleasantly surprised at what you find and how you feel when you correct what you find.
Trevor Connor 1:02:01
Well, Chris, nice to do an episode with you again. Same,
Chris Case 1:02:03
come back. Same. Thank you. Good to talk about a big subject. Bring in a lot of clips from a lot of great experts from around the world, from the archives of fast talk all the way back to, well, not double digits. I don’t think we hit any in the double digits, but a good swath of the library we touched upon today, so it’s very nice to be back. Thank you.
Trevor Connor 1:02:23
And with that, we do have a question for the forum. I was trying to think of a good one. My question to all of you, I have basically just said homeostasis is the fundamental principle of our physiology, of our health, of our ability to adapt and perform. Please share with us your thoughts. Do you agree? Do you disagree? What are some examples that you have one way or the other? So go to our forums and please answer that question. That was another episode of fast talk. The thoughts and opinions expressed in fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast, be sure to leave us a radiant review. As always, we love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs, join the conversation@forms.fasttalklabs.com or learn from our experts@fasttalklabs.com for DR, Jamie Whitfield, dr, Kate Kresge. Dr, Steven Seiler. Dr, Robert Kenefick. Dr, Brandon Egan. Dr, negosam, Milan Neil Henderson. Dr, Julie Ann Davy. Dr, Paul Larson. Dr, asker, you can drop and Chris case, I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
