Physiologist Rob Pickels nerds out with Trevor Connor on four recent studies that span a wide range of topics, from the benefits of percussive massagers for strength work to the impact of pregnancy on elite runners. Tune in to find out more.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:05
Hello, and welcome to Fast Talk: your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host, Trevor Connor here with Rob Pickels – and Rob, it’s time for another Nerd Lab, which means that half of our listeners probably just stopped this episode and moved on to the next podcast.
Rob Pickels 00:21
And the other half probably got their notebooks out and are writing everything down.
Trevor Connor 00:25
There we go.
Rob Pickels 00:25
Which half do you like better?
Trevor Connor 00:27
Oh, boy. Are we picking favorites on the show now?
Rob Pickels 00:29
As long as they’re not Canadian.
Trevor Connor 00:31
You had to go – you haven’t done a Canada joke?
Rob Pickels 00:33
I haven’t, and actually one study that I might spring on you later, Trevor, I’ll give you a little teaser that you might not be prepared for this, is actually a Canadian study that Canada did something good. So, I might bring that to the table, if we got time.
Trevor Connor 00:49
Fantastic.
Rob Pickels 00:52
If you’ve been listening to Fast Talk for a while, you know that we’re big supporters of Dr. Stephen Seiler and the polarized training method. We believe in polarized training because the science supporting it is strong. So we’re pleased to announce the release of part two of our new guide to polarized training. Our polarized training pathway now offers five new stories that will guide you to creating your own, custom polarized training approach. Make this the year that you master polarized training and unlock your elite. Learn more at fasttalklabs.com. Where do you want to start?
Trevor Connor 01:30
So we got a few studies here and they’re kind of all over the map, which is gonna make them really interesting. I don’t think we’re gonna get heavy on explaining all the methodology here but really get into what you can take out of these studies. But we got one on strength training, we got one on intervals, we’ve got one on, ready for the term, “Exerkines”.
Rob Pickels 01:50
Exerkines!
Trevor Connor 01:52
And then you got something to spring on me, which I don’t even know what it is. I’m excited.
“Effects of Different High Intensity Interval and Moderate Continuous Training on Aerobic and Anaerobic Performance”
Rob Pickels 01:55
All right, Trevor. Let’s see, I think that if I remember correctly, you were a big fan of this study by Kavar, “Effects of six weeks of different high intensity interval and moderate continuous training on aerobic and anaerobic performance”.
Trevor Connor 02:11
Yeah, I was interested this study and there’s a lot to this study, so I don’t think we’re going to dive into everything. The least of which was, this was actually really focused more on soccer players, tennis players, athletes like that, who have a lot of change in motion. So they were trying to do intervals where you actually do a shuttle run, which is you run to a point, stop, run backwards, go to a point and just keep going back and forth, to see the effects of that change of movement. But what I found really interesting about the study was they were looking at high intensity intervals, and they did a traditional high intensity interval that’s a little longer, so about four minutes in length. And then they did a really short intensity intervals – less than 60 seconds, basically, for the intervals – to see the impact and we’ve had that conversation about, you know, high intensity intervals, do they all basically get you to the same place? Or do they have different impacts? And we certainly had some very high level coaches come on the show and say 30 second intervals, 20 second intervals, one minute intervals, they’re all basically the same. Pick what you find to be fun.
Rob Pickels 03:20
Yeah, you know, you bring up this study, and and one really interesting point for me was the fact that it was a team sports based study and for me to look at how many acronyms I did not understand in this paper – oh, my God, no, it was like M-A-S-S, M-V-T-M-M-something or other, I actually had to convert everything into into cycling terms and so they’re longer – their standard one, I equated very much to a vO2 max effort, like we would sort of define that, right? Kind of about as hard as you can go for that four to six minute period and then the other, the shorter one, I equated that to basically being like a 90% sprint effort where you’re going really hard, maybe you could go a little bit harder, but essentially, for us in the cycling world, it was as if we were doing say 30-30s or maybe a Tabata where you can’t full sprint because the recovery is so short that, you know your performance would would decrease, so yeah, it was really interesting to see that they did these two different high intensity ones in this team sports world. But Trevor, they compared these two to continuous training, right, which I found really interesting because the continuous training they did was essentially 35 minutes of sub threshold running – in a shuttle, 25 meters at a time back and forth, going in this zone two out of a three zone model intensity, and that was the same throughout the entire test period.
Trevor Connor 04:52
They admitted that they had issues with that. They knew it really wasn’t long enough to get any sort of training effects and then just basically said “we were using students, students who were doing this between class, they really only had 35 minutes”. So they admitted that was a weakness of the study, so I didn’t really – the conclusions they drew about the high intensity versus moderate intensity training, I went, “Yeah, let’s, let’s not look at that”. Because even they said, didn’t really test true continuous training.
Rob Pickels 05:24
I’m done now.
Trevor Connor 05:28
Rob just gave me this look while he quietly reach for a coaster to put his coffee on –
Rob Pickels 05:36
And then loudly put the coaster on the table, so…
Trevor Connor 05:39
The whole time not looking at what he’s doing, just looking at me, it’s like, give me this look like, “Did he notice me, did he see me do this right now?”
Rob Pickels 05:47
My dog does this all the time: “does he see me trying to eat this out of the garbage?”
Trevor Connor 05:55
What I think was really interesting about the study was taking these two protocols for training – so a six weeks of training, as we said, the one that was what they called standard high intensity trainings about four minute intervals – again, doing a shutter run so it’s 25 meters, turn, changed directions, 25 meters, change directions, and then a much shorter, harder, you know, pretty close to max intensity interval, where you just did 15 reps and they didn’t give time because they tried to make it individual but it would have been under a minute for each person. And what they found was that the people doing the short intervals saw much greater gains in the test that looked more at your anaerobic capacity.
Rob Pickels 06:43
And that test was a 300 yard shuttle run and this is the most team sports thing in the world to do because one test was based in yards and the other was based in meters. But essentially that 300 yards shuttle run took people about 60 seconds to complete. So I’m like, as a 40 meter hurdler,you know, that was like one lap around the track, you know, in terms of effort, and that’s pretty hard.
Trevor Connor 07:09
Yep. And then the other group, which is that beep test – which as we said, it was kind of an approximation of a vO2 max test and it was interesting, the protocol behind that – but you found the group that did the longer intervals saw much greater gains in the beep test results. So the – basically, they saw more aerobic gains, people doing the short, really high intensity intervals saw greater gains on the anaerobic side.
Rob Pickels 07:37
Yeah, so to put that into perspective, on the beep test, which is the aerobic approximation, the approximation for vO2 Max, that short training group went from 95 to 103 shuttles and the longer group that did, the longer the continuous the four minute efforts, they went from 96 to 108 – so kind of five more shuttles than the other high intensity group. And to put that into perspective, that continuous control group we had mentioned, they went from 95 to about 95 shuttle, so really no change there. Both of these groups are doing 10 additional shuttle repetitions with the high intensity training.
Trevor Connor 08:16
Yep. The other thing I found interesting out of this is when you look at the people doing the long interval work, and the impact on that anaerobic side – so the anaerobic test – they did see improvements, just not as much improvement, but they saw fairly consistent improvement. On the other side, their group doing the very short, the short, very high intensity intervals, when you looked at their improvement on the aerobic test, the beep test, it was quite variable, about half saw improvement, a whole bunch didn’t see improvement, and two actually performed worse.
Rob Pickels 08:52
And I love research that does this because they have graphs that show pre-posts for every single subject. And this is a really important aspect of research that we don’t always talk about. Usually we just talk about group means and one group did better than the other group, therefore, it was a worthwhile treatment. But if 50% of that group did better, and 50% didn’t do better at all, it wasn’t worthwhile for everyone. So it was interesting to look at that and yeah, you’re right on that beep test the longer group, universally – I’m looking at it right now – there was basically two people in that group that didn’t change much and everyone else improved quite a bit.
Trevor Connor 09:32
Yup, so this is actually some confirmation of things I’ve heard some really good coaches talk about. I saw something was similar with Dean Gulledge, I’ve seen this with Neal Henderson, where I can do – my bad, where I opt in with athletes just immediately move into those really high intensity Tabata type intervals, the short, super high intensity and I go “well, it’s going to improve both your aerobic side and your anaerobic side”. Well, as we’re seeing here, that’s true in about half of people, but the other half, maybe not so much, you’re just gonna get that anaerobic capacity improvement, so I have seen coaches that, as they’re moving closer into the season, they’ll first do that more traditional or what they’re calling the standard high intensity here to really hit that aerobic side, and then move into a few weeks of the super high intensity to hit that anaerobic side. And what I’m seeing here is a justification for that, because certainly everybody doing the standard intervals, those four minute intervals, saw improvements on the aerobic side. And everybody saw improvements on the anaerobic side with the short intensity. So most consistent gains is going to be “do the aerobic, then do the super high intensity”.
Rob Pickels 10:47
Yeah, it’s interesting, for me, I’m just thinking about this personally, I typically actually start with the shorter, shorter recovery intervals, because I find them a little bit easier. So when I’m working up towards, you know, a higher continuous consumption of vO2 max with my workouts and trying to push that aerobic capacity, yeah, it is a little bit easier for me to do 30-30s and 20-10s and that’s almost like the half step to get me to these four to eight minute intervals, which for somebody who is a natural sprinters are pretty tough, and no fun to tell you the truth, in my opinion.
Trevor Connor 11:26
Well, I’ve certainly seen that with even a lot of coaches who liked the more traditional approach to training that, in that very early season, they’re gonna give their athletes some of that super high intensity work. And the arguments I’ve heard for that are – this is not the scientific way to put it –
Rob Pickels 11:43
I was gonna say, you haven’t heard a good argument or…?
Trevor Connor 11:45
No, it’s just more – it kind of opens you up, it gives you that ability to tolerate the pain a little more so then when you move into threshold intervals or something a little more aerobic, you can do them a little harder, just because that anaerobic system has been turned around here, reduced little pain.
Rob Pickels 12:03
Yeah, I do think that that is the undermining of a lot of the longer vO2 intervals. You know, and we had a big discussion about this whole concept with with Hunter Allen a few weeks back if people want to listen to that episode, but I know for me motivation, the place I am mentally, my ability to handle that suffering really affects the quality of those intervals that I’m able to do. And there’s just something in my mind that says, “Well, if I just go for 30 seconds, or 20 seconds, or whatever it is, and then I take a break”, sometimes it’s hard to start the next interval, but I can pretty much always finish an interval once I get going.
Trevor Connor 12:38
Okay, so Rob, anything else that we want out of the study?
Rob Pickels 12:42
Yeah, you know, I think it’s interesting. I did look at a couple other pieces of research with this, there was a meta-analysis in 2013 from Jist and I looked at some of Izumi Tabata is work on this – just to see if it was consistent the results that we have here and in some regard, it is – the sprint interval training in this meta-analysis, it increased a robic capacity and healthy untrained individuals and in my opinion, that’s a lot of who these people were, they were students who had maybe had a soccer background, but we’re not talking endurance athletes here –
Trevor Connor 13:15
Those are not high level athletes.
Rob Pickels 13:16
Exactly and then also on the Izumi Tabata side of things – yeah, maybe similar there, they actually saw a little bit of more improvement in vO2 max, but again, I think that that’s maybe because of the Tabata protocol is a shorter work with a very short rest interval, which really limits the workload that people are able to do that at. So maybe kind of the protocol that they’re talking about here to a little bit more of an extreme and actually pulling that workload down. Maybe targeting more of that vO2 level.
Trevor Connor 13:46
Yeah, well, going back to what you said at the very beginning, they even say in this study that the results they saw, particularly on that aerobic side were less than what you’ve seen in other studies, because other studies were continuous.
Rob Pickels 13:58
Yep.
Trevor Connor 13:58
Meaning if you did that four minute interval, you’re on a trainer or you’re running and you’re just kind of going in a straight line, being consistent where when you’re doing the shuttle run, you constantly have to stop and then go again, and then stop and go again.
Rob Pickels 14:11
I will give props to these researchers real quick before we move on because I had – my assumption was that they had these continuous people – in my opinion, they were just setting the continuous people up for failure the whole time. And I was like, “I bet you they had those continuous people just do continuous runs”. And they didn’t, those poor continuous people had to do, as Trevor said earlier, shuttle runs back and forth with in this continuous moment – good lord, that’s an interval workout I don’t want to do.
Trevor Connor 14:23
Yes. I think I did that in high school football.
Rob Pickels 14:40
Oh perfect.
Trevor Connor 14:41
But I’ve tried to block it out of my memory.
Rob Pickels 14:43
Well, in high school football, Trevor, did you do any weightlifting?
Trevor Connor 14:46
Yes, I did.
Rob Pickels 14:47
You did? Did you know that if you used percussive massage treatment on your pec muscles when you were weightlifting, it might have improved your performance?
Trevor Connor 14:59
Good attempt to throw to the next study.
Rob Pickels 15:01
I think that was a great throw, so let’s talk about it
Trevor Connor 15:04
Before we move on –
Rob Pickels 15:05
No!
Trevor Connor 15:05
– just, just because you brought it up, here’s something you probably didn’t know. I was a lineman –
Rob Pickels 15:12
In Canada?
Trevor Connor 15:13
In high school football.
Rob Pickels 15:14
In Canada?
Trevor Connor 15:15
Yeah, it was in Canada, that’s where I went to high school.
Rob Pickels 15:18
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 15:18
We actually didn’t call it high school, but that’s a whole different discussion –
Rob Pickels 15:21
Like secondary school or something?
Trevor Connor 15:23
I went to a college.
Rob Pickels 15:26
Wow. Trevor graduated college at 18. You heard it here first.
Trevor Connor 15:31
No, I started grade five in a college.
Rob Pickels 15:34
Perfect.
Trevor Connor 15:34
So but yes, I was a lineman. Was also 220 pounds – but that’s a whole different story.
Rob Pickels 15:39
Wow, man, you might have been a real lineman at that weight. I’ll let the listeners determine what they think of that.
Trevor Connor 15:45
People bounced off me. It was fun. Now they would roll over me.
Rob Pickels 15:49
And yeah, exactly, and now you bounce off them.
Trevor Connor 15:51
Yeah – and by the way, that’s how I’m gonna die. I still think of myself as 220 pounds. One these days, I’m gonna go into a bar and pick a fight with a guy that’s like *this* size. That wasn’t sciency at all. What’s our next study?
“Acute Effects of Percussive Massage Treatment on Movement Velocity During Resistance Training”
Rob Pickels 16:02
“Acute effects of percussive massage treatment on movement velocity during resistance training”. This came out – when did this come out? 2021. So relatively new, by Garcia Solero and I think this was out of Spain.
Trevor Connor 16:17
I know you’re really excited about this one because you love your percussive massage.
Rob Pickels 16:21
I do and this episode is not sponsored by anyone. But I have pretty much all the percussive massage therapy devices out there, I love them all for their unique qualities. I love them all the same, just like my kids.
Trevor Connor 16:34
There you go. So which is your true favorite? We won’t tell it.
Rob Pickels 16:37
Um, I’m into the Theragun right now, I am. But I do have the Hypervolt as well. My wife uses the Hypervolt more than I do.
Trevor Connor 16:45
Okay.
Rob Pickels 16:45
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 16:46
I’ve got two of the Theraguns.
Rob Pickels 16:47
Nice. So Trevor, this study – I’m going to name it because it’s in this study – they use the Theragun device. But I do want to say that it was not sponsored, they received no outside funding, and they didn’t, they didn’t announce any conflicts of interest – which I like to see. Not that I don’t trust research that’s sponsored by companies because I think that some really good research comes out. But at the same time, something in the back of your mind has a hard time trusting it, whether or not it should. So anyway, I thought that was awesome to see with this.
Trevor Connor 17:16
Yeah. And they had to pick one of the devices, even if they weren’t funded, so…
Rob Pickels 17:20
So let’s give some background info on this – I got to scroll through my notes to actually find where they are – so yeah, they were looking at evaluating percussive massage treatment for improvement during weightlifting and something I found really unique in this is that they were using movement velocity, so –
Trevor Connor 17:38
That was actually probably my favorite part of the study,
Rob Pickels 17:40
I know, right? And this really showed me – we know a lot about endurance training and science – and this was, in some regard, a new concept to me, in some regard not and so I’ll expand on that in a second. Movement velocity, or the purpose of this study, they were essentially timing how long it took for the athletes to complete a benchpress. And –
Trevor Connor 18:05
A single bench press?
Rob Pickels 18:06
Correct, yes, one single repetition – with the thinking being as you lift heavier and heavier, your movement slows down, right, so a one rep max, you’re moving slower than if you lift five pounds. But also throughout the course of a training session, as you do one rep, two reps, three reps, four reps, so on and so forth, as you fatigue, your movement slows down as well. And so they were saying, independent research of this has shown that you can be specific about adaptations, if you stay within a range of movement velocity and if you stop the exercise when your movement velocity slows down beyond a certain point, so instead of doing three sets of 12 repetitions, it would be three sets of repetitions until you slowed down too much.
Trevor Connor 18:55
Yeah, that was actually the biggest thing I took out of it, which I said “that might be the better way to promote adaptations” because for one person 10 reps might be right, for another person 15 reps might be right. So instead of just giving a random number, go until you can’t keep the speed anymore.
Rob Pickels 19:12
And I think it was a really great – and I don’t want to say attempt – I think it was a great execution of being able to put metrics to what’s happening here and we have metrics that surround us in the cycling and the running world, but not so much in weightlifting. So that was very unique to me.
Trevor Connor 19:29
Yeah, so what I loved about this study is it actually gave some really good advice. I found some great results. But if you follow everything in here, you are going to be that guy in the gym that everybody’s going to stare at and give a wide berth because –
Rob Pickels 19:43
Beefcake!
Trevor Connor 19:44
Not even that, it’s just going to be weird. Basically what they had these people do is benchpress until they couldn’t maintain the velocity anymore. They did four sets, and in between each set, they would get on the ground, take out their Theragun, use the Theragun on their chest –
Rob Pickels 20:04
15 seconds per side, I believe,
Trevor Connor 20:06
Yup, and then do their next set and the idea was to see how many reps they could do in each of the four sets with the Theragun. And the results were the group that did not use the Theragun, they saw the number of reps they were doing decline from set to set to set. The Theragun group in all four sets did the same number. So they were able to resist that fatigue with the Theragun.
Rob Pickels 20:31
Yeah, and that fatigue resistance is really important here. So the sets were at 70% of their one rep max, just to give people an idea. And we’re talking a range of 11.4 to 10.3 reps on the percussion gun – and then in the control group, they went from about 11.3 down to 8 reps at the end – so a lot of fatigue there. But the researchers note in this, that the percussive therapy has not been shown to improve jump height, it hasn’t been shown to improve strength necessarily. Nobody in this study was quote unquote “stronger or lift more” – not that they were looking for that – but what it did do was it perhaps decreased the fatigue that people were experiencing, allowing them to do more repetitions, which probably hopefully leads to them getting stronger,
Trevor Connor 21:22
Better adaptation.
Rob Pickels 21:23
Exactly. Bigger load.
Trevor Connor 21:25
So I admit, I found this really fascinating and when I get back into the weight room next year, I’m actually going to try some of this, so…
Rob Pickels 21:32
Next year? You can do this tomorrow!
Trevor Connor 21:35
If I go into the weight room.
Rob Pickels 21:36
Well, you know.
Trevor Connor 21:37
Yes.
Rob Pickels 21:38
Don’t want to be 220 pounds now, do you?
Trevor Connor 21:39
Yeah, that wasn’t….I’ll do the weightroom. (laughs) Less base max.
Rob Pickels 21:45
I have a latte in my mouth that almost exited quickly.
Trevor Connor 21:48
But no, I want to try this. Fortunately, I work out my basement, so not going to get weird looks, but I think when I hit that heavy strength phase, my hypertrophy phase as well, I’ll get to try this “go till decline in velocity” – I think that’s really interesting – and might try a little theragun in between my sets on the more important lifts.
Rob Pickels 22:08
Yeah, Trevor, I actually think that we should look a little bit deeper into this movement velocity side of things, because they’re, they’re talking millisecond differences and I wonder if we’re able to perceive or quantify that without some sort of external equipment. So I want to know more about what equipment they were using. And frankly, I just didn’t have time to dive into the supporting research that really outlined the movement velocity side of things.
Trevor Connor 22:34
Yeah, that would actually be a really interesting thing to dive into – actually, what I found really interesting about this study, and the previous study is, again, as you point out, as cyclists, even runners who are on a treadmill, we have this advantage that we have a lot of metrics, we can control pace – like if you do a vO2 max test on a treadmill or a bike odometer, you can control the power or the pace – and in a vO2 max test, you want to keep ramping it up. So when I read that previous study, and they said, “Well, we use a beep test where you’re going back and forth between these cones and you slowly increase your pace”, I’m like “how do they figure out the pace? How do they keep up with the pace?”. And literally what they were doing was they had a table of each time you go between the cones, here’s how quickly it has to take you, and they they had a device that would beep at the athletes of when they had to hit the next cone. So it was up to the athlete to find the pace and basically they failed at the vO2 max test when they couldn’t get to the next cone –
Rob Pickels 23:36
Correct.
Trevor Connor 23:36
– in time –
Rob Pickels 23:37
Yep.
Trevor Connor 23:38
– but still, the athlete has to control the pace – and it’s the same thing here – you got somebody literally sitting there trying to time their lifts and the pace. It’s much harder in a lot of these other sports to find these metrics that are so easy in cycling or running.
Rob Pickels 23:53
It is and so I’d love to take this to the place that I feel safe. And that’s cycling, right. Trevor, what is the application in your mind? How can a cyclist use this outside of the weight room? Is there any application there?
Trevor Connor 24:06
Two intervals with a Theragun in your jersey pocket?
Rob Pickels 24:09
Yeah, that’s kind of – kind of what I’m thinking…
Trevor Connor 24:11
You were going there? Is that what you’re thinking of doing?
Rob Pickels 24:13
I am kind of going there – is there a way – okay, so backup, backup. Come on a journey with me – everybody close your eyes. If we think about watts, what are watts? Watts are the force multiplied by the speed that you’re applying that force, right? I mean, very simple equation for watts. And if we look through, and I did, I did a little bit of sporting research for this – you know, Rutelli in 1996 and we can link to this paper as well – maximum power degradation in a cyclist doing short intervals is due to both a drop in force and a drop in speed. So if we know that whacking yourself with a percussive massage therapy device helps maintain the speed, is something like this applicable for between-reps or between-sprint interval training – which we were talking about in the previous study and is becoming more and more popular – if you’re sitting on the trainer, you do your 20 second tabata, or whatever you know maybe a Tabata is not hard enough, but do you massage your quads or your butt or your calves whenever you want, whatever slowing you down – bo you massage them between these all out efforts, maintain that sprint power again and again and again and can we turn somebody like you into a sprinter?
Trevor Connor 25:28
Oh, that’s a big asked turning me into a sprinter. Think we’re gonna need more than the theragun to do that.
Rob Pickels 25:35
You need the weightlifting that also goes along with this perhaps.
Trevor Connor 25:38
Weightlifting’s certainly going to help – my answer to you is we often get accused of being nerds, boy, do we deserve that – if we are going to be sitting there out on the trail doing sprints and then pul over to the side of the road and hitting ourselves at the theragun –
Rob Pickels 25:52
Alright, let’s solve this problem. I’m a product guy. Let’s solve this problem. Somebody out there, invent: I want a pair of bib shorts that have percussive massager built into – Trevor almost spit out his tea , we’ve done it to each other at this point – I want bib shorts that have this built-in and immediately upon stopping an interval, I want them to detect that – maybe through EMG, that’d be a great, great way to do it. And then start to massage between intervals and then as soon as you go again, it turns off. It’s a million dollar idea.
Trevor Connor 26:23
So some poor commuter on the trail is going to pass a cyclist –
Rob Pickels 26:27
A buzzing cyclist? (chuckles)
Trevor Connor 26:29
– electrodes attached to their legs and their shorts are doing strange movements that they can’t explain…
Rob Pickels 26:35
There’s like a dance going on – doompa, doompa, doompa – that’d be awesome. Let’s do it.
Trevor Connor 26:41
That is not the conclusion I draw.
Rob Pickels 26:44
No, let’s, let’s shut down Fast Talk and put everything into this idea.
Trevor Connor 26:47
Okay, yeah, that is not a million dollar idea, but let’s try. So no, I mean, I get out of this exactly what they were going for – use this in the weight room – yeah, I mean, if you’re in your basement on a trainer, and you want to try this in between some short high intensity intervals, there might be something to that. I certainly think a track rider who’s doing a hard sprint and then getting down on the grass and resting, they should have that Theragun there or whatever their devices and hit their legs before they do their next sprint.
Rob Pickels 27:18
Yeah, maybe track and field athletes runners as well. This might be a little bit more applicable in between intervals, alittle bit easier there when you’re doing it on the track instead of pulling it out of your jersey pocket on the on the old bike path.
Ryan Kohler 27:29
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“Exerkines in Health, Resilience and Disease”
Trevor Connor 28:07
So what’s the next one?
Rob Pickels 28:09
The next one is – it’s a big one, I don’t even want to list the 22 different authors that are on this – but the title is nice and short.
Trevor Connor 28:17
Lucia was big name in exercise physiology and he is one of the authors.
Rob Pickels 28:21
So this is “Exerkines in Health, Resilience and Disease” – and Trevor, this is, this is your baby, I think, Trevor – I think you might need to explain this to me a little bit. I think I missed the point.
Trevor Connor 28:34
So I love the fact that I pick this one and Rob’s like “why”? He read it and the first thing you said to me after you read it was “why”?
Rob Pickels 28:42
I tried to – I tried to talk Trevor out of doing this research but I – like I say, sometimes – and this is what’s important, right – sometimes research just doesn’t speak to you and it speaks to somebody else. It doesn’t mean it’s not valid and what I want to do, Trevor, is I want to hear your interpretation from this because I do truly think that I missed the point of this research paper.
Trevor Connor 29:04
Well, so, I have an immunology background – so I saw this when I was really excited about it, I just read through the whole thing and they’re bringing up all these cytokines that I’ve spent years studying and their impact and just went “wow, that’s cool”. So to me this was a really fun study. I will say, if you have that immunology background, if you know what the various cytokines are and chemokines are, this is a great study to read – or review, it’s actually not a study – you’re gonna find this really interesting. If you don’t love terms like IL-6 and adioponectin and apelin and all those sorts of terms, then maybe move on to something else. Read some more percussive –
Rob Pickels 29:48
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 29:49
Shorts.
Rob Pickels 29:49
Yeah, this is – this is – this is boring. Oh, poor Wheaton. Yeah.
Trevor Connor 29:55
I was riveted by this – but we’re not going to go into all these different molecules. I’m not going to bore you with this – but the idea and why I think this is really interesting for anybody to listen – this is not a performance study, this is not “you’re going to get faster or better”. This is much more a health study and this term “exerkine” is basically referring to signaling molecules that are upregulated, or impacted by exercise. So it’s not these are molecules that only exist, are created when we exercise – they’re used for other things. So for example, the first one that really sparked this research, they discover that exercise upregulated something called IL-6, that’s a cytokine. IL-6 is a very important cytokine in our immune system and it’s very interesting because it has both inflammatory and anti-inflammatory effects. And they showed that exercise, when you exercise hard, your muscles will upregulate IL-6, so they went, “Wow, exercise, using your muscles, seems to have an impact on the immune system”.
Rob Pickels 30:59
I’m just picturing a researcher in a lab going, “Wow, look at that”.
Trevor Connor 31:04
“Cool.”
Rob Pickels 31:05
And the problem sometimes is that, when you’re doing research on new things, you see the effect, you see the thing that changes, but it’s maybe another step or two removed to understand why that actually matters.
Trevor Connor 31:18
So the big picture of this is, I think, sometimes when we exercise, all we’re focused on is adaptations – so you go, “Okay, I’m gonna go out and do some hard work and that’s going to improve the mitochondria, my muscle cells, that’s going to make my muscles bigger, it’s going to improve my heart”, and you don’t really think beyond there.
Rob Pickels 31:37
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 31:37
And what they are showing with these exerkines – and there’s a large list of them that are impacted by exercise – is they have huge impacts systemically throughout our body and it’s just, it was fascinating going through the list and seeing both the number of molecules that are impacted by exercise and the effects that they have. So they went through cardiovascular health and showed that there are several these exerkines that can really help with the heart’s function. They went through the adipose tissue and showed that these exerkines can promote breakdown of fat and also actually promote something called brown adipose tissue – so short explanation of that, as we have white and brown – white tissue, basically think of it as dead, it doesn’t do anything except store fat. Brown adipose tissue is actually metabolically active, it burns calories. And there’s benefits to having brown adipose tissue. They looked at the liver and gut function – I actually found it really fascinating showing that some of these exerkines can change the gut microbiome in beneficial ways.
Rob Pickels 32:39
And so this is something to point out, when we’re talking about this, we’re seeing an exerkine that is released from a totally different area, your working muscle is secreting these little molecules in these vesicles. And they’re floating throughout your body and they’re landing in your gut, and they’re causing changes elsewhere that are kind of unrelated.
Trevor Connor 32:56
Not just the muscles that’s releasing – so they said in the early research of exerkines, they really focused on exerkines that were released by muscles – but they’re finding that they’re further exerkines that are actually released by other tissues, released by the liver, or at least by the indoctrinate system, that are promoted by exercise and have these benefits. You know, just to continue with the – quickly – with the the overall benefits, and I’m avoiding all the terms, they showed that big improvements in glucose homeostasis – so basically, if you are at risk of diabetes, exercise improves insulin sensitivity. So it can help reverse some of those effects, big impacts on the immune system. We’ve talked about this before and it’s really interesting, you get this kind of duality, where moderate exercise seems to aid the immune system while really heavy exercise seems to blunt the immune system. Likewise, acute exercise is very inflammatory. But chronic exercise, if you’re exercising regularly, every single day, seems to be more anti-inflammatory. So when you are rested, when you’re sitting on the couch, brings inflammation down – which is really good thing.
Rob Pickels 34:03
I think that this is why I – in some regard, struggled with this research -because I think in my mind with my schooling and my background, all of this information is known, right? We know that exercise improves insulin sensitivity, but I guess in the whole scheme of things, that’s like the first step and the last step, and maybe what this research is doing is filling in that middle step of “how is it doing that?” These are the molecules that are doing that.
Trevor Connor 34:31
Yeah, exactly that. We’ve known for a long time exercise improves insulin sensitivity, exercise improves bone health, exercise helps the heart and there’s the studies, you know, you have a group that does exercise, you have a control group that doesn’t, you see these benefits, etc, etc. – that research has been for a while. These exerkines – I mean, this term was only coined in, what, 2016? And it’s basically saying “there are these group of molecules that produce this effect, signaling molecules that produce this effect and we’ve really never studied them as a group so let’s create this group called exerkines and look at the molecules, the signaling molecules, that are impacted by exercise – they are either upregulated or downregulated – and see the various effects they have, see how they produce these results that we know we get from exercise because understanding that is going to allow us to improve how we use exercise for health”, and even bring up at the end, when you have somebody who has mobility issues, who might not be able to exercise, we might be able to use these exerkines to give them some of the benefits of exercise without them being able to exercise.
Rob Pickels 34:53
Yeah, and that’s if – God, do I hate to say this – my mind, when I was reading this, went immediately to “which one of these can be put in a pill” and “which one of these will make me a faster cyclist?” – I’m not going to lie. Yeah.
Trevor Connor 35:51
Yep, can put in a pill, your body’s probably not going to absorb it.
Rob Pickels 35:54
I think that this is interesting, though, right – because Cytomax has lactate in it as an ingredient. (laughs) Trevor’s literally rubbing his face right now.
Trevor Connor 36:07
It wasn’t, um… my favorite drink mix of all time was one that included lactic acid because if you consume lactic acid –
Rob Pickels 36:15
Yeah.
Trevor Connor 36:15
Your body is going to improve its buffering so that when you exercise, the lactic acid isn’t going to impact you – so let’s, let’s address all the various issues with that. For one thing –
Rob Pickels 36:28
We are way off topic now.
Trevor Connor 36:29
I could never pronounce this but we have a type of gut bacteria, the lactobacillus, whatever it is – I could never pronounce it – that are named so because they produce lactic acid. So there’s already a lot of lactic acid in your gut – you do not absorb it, you might convert it to a sugar molecule first and absorb it, but at no point is that lactic acid get into your blood. Lactic acid does not exist in the human body systemically – that is a myth that we continue to seem to perpetuate. So there’s no tolerance to lactic acid needed.
Rob Pickels 37:04
All right, fine, grumpy Trevor, instead of putting these things into a capsule, what if I put them into a syringe?
Trevor Connor 37:10
Well, that’s what you have to do. And –
Rob Pickels 37:12
Don’t do that people. Don’t do that. Don’t.
Trevor Connor 37:15
I liked that they didn’t go down the path of, “well, let’s start injecting all these things into ourselves and make those better performers”, brought up the fact that we – basically, the theme of this is there are huge benefits to exercise to our health –
Rob Pickels 37:29
Yep.
Trevor Connor 37:29
We’re looking at what produces those benefits to health –
Rob Pickels 37:33
Yep.
Trevor Connor 37:33
And if you have somebody who is not able to exercise, the argument here is they can’t be fully healthy – so in them, put in a syringe and injecting it might give them some of the benefits and allow them to live a healthier life, which is impotant.
Rob Pickels 37:48
Yeah. And at the same time, I think that this is talking about the holistic side of things, that exercises is up-regulating, or at least affecting, gosh, I think they have over 50 named –
Trevor Connor 37:59
Yup.
Rob Pickels 37:59
You know, and this is where, you know, we say, “hey, health and nutrients from whole foods is significantly better than buying that pill off the shelf”. If you’re magnesium deficient, sure, you can take a magnesium supplement, but you’re not getting the whole benefit of getting magnesium from green leafy vegetables or other things that are high in it – is that right? I just pulled that out of…um.
Trevor Connor 38:00
That – your what?
Rob Pickels 38:13
I pulled that out of my pantry?
Trevor Connor 38:15
The magnesium?
Rob Pickels 38:16
Yeah, green leafy vegetables, right?
Trevor Connor 38:20
It wasn’t where I was thinking we were gonna go – yes, you have it right.
Rob Pickels 38:29
Okay, perfect.
Trevor Connor 38:30
Good source, magnesium, also good source of calcium.
Rob Pickels 38:32
Yeah!
Trevor Connor 38:33
There you go. So I think the other key message of this study is there are so many of these exerkines, these molecules that we know have health benefits in the body that are elevated or impacted in a positive way by exercise – this is really the evidence that you cannot be healthy, in my opinion, without having physical activity in your life. Your body is designed to have regular physical activity to keep it functioning correctly.
Rob Pickels 39:02
Yeah, if physical activity is affecting so many different things, then it must be integral to what’s going on.
Trevor Connor 39:09
So does that answer your question – are you still like “why”?
Rob Pickels 39:11
No it does – I do, I get the importance and the fact that this is filling in the middle, you know, and I think that, in some regard, a lot of my background is more as a clinical individual that the middle doesn’t matter so much, I just need to know the what and the endpoint – but you being the immunology background, I can understand why a definitely spoke to you. I’m just two steps ahead of you, basically.
Trevor Connor 39:35
Yeah, there we go. Always. You always are. My other favorite part of the study. They brought in PGC-1alpha.
Rob Pickels 39:41
Oh my god, I saw that. I know.
Trevor Connor 39:43
You know I was excited at that point.
Rob Pickels 39:45
I was excited too.
“Impact of Pregnancy in 42 Elite-to-World Class Runners on Training and Performance Outcomes”
Trevor Connor 39:49
All right, Rob, you’re gonna spring one on me.
Rob Pickels 39:52
Yeah, Trevor. I thought this was really an interesting study, especially based off of what we had just talked about with Doctor Stacey Sims – that episode on coaching the female athlete has done really well, we’ve gotten so much great feedback in it – and I was reviewing some research in general and I came across this, that’s actually, I have a published ahead of print. This was accepted for publication on August 5 of this year – so it’s a month old. And its “Impact of pregnancy in 42 elite-to-world class runners on training and performance outcomes”, which is just, frankly, kind of a novel research, you know, that’s been done – there’s certainly been some research into how women in general should perform exercise, because it has benefits across all sorts of different things: gestational diabetes, decreases the risk of preeclampsia, all of these things – but if you look at the WHO, their guidelines, basically just say, “hey, get 150 minutes”, which is about two and a half hours, “of moderate intensity exercise a week, that’s it, just just go for that” and they have no guidance on what happens if you do more, is it safe to do more? Is it beneficial to do more? And frankly, we know that a lot of women are probably doing more than that. Some are definitely doing less, but a lot of probably doing more. So this study – and I do want to say right at the get go – this was, this was a retro-analysis, it’s just an understanding of what these 42 women did. I don’t know that we can draw safety recommendations or anything out of this, I don’t even know that we can draw training information out of this – I’m not saying this is what’s best, it’s just a description of what people did. So they had these 42 women complete a questionnaire of pregnancy in the past – so, obviously, all of them had gone through pregnancy, they had returned to competition and we’re looking at a retrospective thing here. So they broke it up – and I’m just going to describe the study real quick – they broke it up into five periods, they asked about the year prior to being pregnant, they asked about each trimester individually, and then they followed up a year after they were pregnant. I will say one limitation from this, all of the females involved in here were white and they were from Australia, Canada, Ireland, Lithuania, Monaco, the UK, and the US – so I don’t know if that is different if we look at other maybe Asian or African populations, I don’t know, so I don’t know the universal application of this. Anyway, not much to go into on methods on this, tell you the truth, let’s just talk about what they found. About 24% of the women in this study decreased their training load prior to conception to help improve the chances of conception – interesting – their total training definitely decreased from pre-pregnancy into pregnancy and then when we go from pregnancy to post pregnancy, within about 14 weeks, 80% of the training load was back to what the women were doing. So relatively quickly, the women were able to get back to pretty much their highest level of training before that. There really wasn’t a difference in the frequency of training from pre-pregnancy, the women trained about nine times a week – this is running and cross-training, that came down to about six sessions per week throughout and I’m pretty sure it was all running at that point, cross training was kind of cut out once women were in this pregnancy phase – but once they were in the pregnancy phase, all the women continued essentially six sessions per week, so they’re taking one day off of running regardless of the trimester, that didn’t change throughout pregnancy. Volume definitely decreased very quickly – on average, they were running about 114 kilometers before, and that came down to 63 in the first trimester, and then down to 57, and then down to 30 in the third trimester – so big jump from pre-pregnancy into the first trimester, and then kind of relatively flat thereafter. So training volume, you know, stayed relatively consistent in terms of frequency, and then relatively consistent throughout. But what did change a lot was intensity – and this was something that we had talked about with Dr. Sims previously – that intensity basically disappeared, as soon as individuals got pregnant. You know, they were, they were doing two hard runs, and three medium runs per week, that came down to one medium run and no hard runs once individuals got pregnant, and then rebounded again in that postpartum sort of phase. So just like Dr. Sims, was saying, the intensity side of things is definitely potentially hard, especially because nausea and other factors can maybe decrease the caloric intake that women have, which makes it hard to do this high intensity interval. The thing that I found really interesting – so that, that’s sort of done describing changes that they had in training – for me though, what was really interesting was the return to competition after. About 60% of the women had planned to return to elite level competition, at least as good as they were prior and essentially all of them were able to, in fact, there was a 5% – 50% of the women saw a 5% improvement in their IAAF ranking, meaning they were a better overall ranked athlete in the world based on IAAF points after being pregnant – really interesting and I think that that is correlated with a lot of the anecdotes that I’ve heard that people return, if anything, stronger. And, Trevor, I think that what Dr. Sims had mentioned, increased plasma volume, there are some other things that are physiologically are playing into why that is. Now the women did race a lot less after, even though they returned to this elite competition, I guess being a mom’s pretty hard instead of –
Trevor Connor 45:43
I was gonna say – I don’t think that’s physiological, I think that’s “they have a child”.
Rob Pickels 45:47
Exactly.
Trevor Connor 45:48
It’s time.
Rob Pickels 45:49
Yeah, so they went from racing seven times a year to racing three times a year after, which – I hope that that’s a good thing, I hope that’s not an unfortunate thing that they’re missing four of these races, and husbands, you got to get out there and support your wives a little more, if that’s the case, so…
Trevor Connor 46:04
I still remember Chris loved to race cross, and his wife was a cross racertoo so when their daughter was a baby, they would split where fortunately, her race would always be right before his race. So while she was raising, he’d sit there and take care of the daughter and then they would literally have like five minutes between the race to hand off the kid, and then Chris would go and race – so they figured out how to make it work but it does add additional challenges.
Rob Pickels 46:29
Oh, huge challenges. One of the biggest challenges that these women faced in this return to sport, 50% of them – so that was 21 – 50% reported having an injury postpartum. Of that, it was 6 bone stress fractures – no good – 11 musculoskeletal injuries, 2 sciatic and 2 “other” injuries and this was one of the biggest factors in individuals who are able to improve their performance postpartum, essentially, all of them who were able to be stronger after being pregnant did not experience these postpartum injuries, so –
Trevor Connor 47:09
Did they have an explanation or a thought on why that is?
Rob Pickels 47:12
It’s a great question, it was not correlated to any of the metrics that they, that they looked at in here – so it wasn’t the training volume after, it wasn’t the frequency of high intensity, it wasn’t any of that they could draw correlation to – so frankly, I don’t know why, personally.
Trevor Connor 47:29
Just throwing this out there, what would be interesting, and obviouslyalmost impossible to do at this point, would be to look at the nutritional habits, particularly during the pregnancy, as we talked about with Dr. Sims, when a woman is pregnant, priority is always given to the child. So if your diet is not great, and you’re not getting sufficient nutrients, it’s going to go to the child. And that’s actually going to make the mother extremely nutrient deficient, which can have impact on bones, can have impact on muscles. So it’d be interesting to see if there was a difference in the diet between the women that later experience injuries and those who didn’t.
Rob Pickels 48:06
Yeah, and that’s, Trevor, you know, now, now that I’ve explained the study to you, because you didn’t get a chance to read it, I’d love to talk about that next. I think that this is a very formative beginning of research on international competitive women that we could probably extrapolate to women, competitors of all levels, hopefully – my question is, where do we go from here? What do we need to know next, as athletes and coaches, to get worthwhile information to write training or to keep people safe? What’s the next study that should be done?
Trevor Connor 48:40
Well, as you were explaining this, what was really interesting to me, you – first of all, you pointed out, yes, it is completely possible for a woman post pregnancy to return to her former level or better, and actually get there fairly quickly – so that’s an important question that a lot of women have had, where they felt “I get pregnant, that’s the end of my career” and the answer that is “no, it doesn’t have to be”.
Rob Pickels 49:03
And this was, they were looking within a year after pregnancy. So that’s pretty fast.
Trevor Connor 49:08
So that’s an important question but I think the question that isn’t answered is the best way to go through that pregnancy to optimize health – as you said, some ended up injured, some didn’t, so what’s the best nutritional support? But also, I would love to see this – that’d be a tough study to do, I don’t know how you would do it – but my guess is women who continue to exercise through pregnancy probably have a – how would you put this – a more successful pregnancy than those who don’t? If you’re talking about success in terms of the mother’s health, post-pregnancy, and that would be a very interesting study to do, to look at women who don’t exercise during pregnancy, see what sort of impact it has in their body versus those who do and if I’m right about that, that exercising through pregnancy is actually a very good thing, then I think what needs to be figured out is what is optimal? How much exercise? Should you be doing no high intensity or is a little high intensity okay? These are all the things that I think need to be researched and figured out.
Rob Pickels 50:11
Yeah, and I wonder, you would have to do that from a very large study, like a heritage type study, right, that’s just looking at a lot of people over a length of time but I do think that that’s a really interesting way to look at almost a stratification of activity level – or training load, or however we want to quantify it – and also look at the health outcomes, to begin filling in that blank, right, because the WHO basically recommends to female athletes, anything beyond 150 minutes per week, you should really talk to your individual care provider. And I bet you a lot of individual care providers, they don’t have any better information themselves, what are they left to go off of, besides intuition and gut feel, and maybe what they’ve done with their patients before? So filling in that gap can be really, really beneficial.
Trevor Connor 50:59
Yeah, I got the sense Dr. Sims implied this a little bit when we were talking with her but unfortunate, I think a lot of primary care, when they’re making recommendations to women who are pregnant, it’s based on a lot of past beliefs that really have no science behind them and probably a lot of those recommendations are getting outdated.
Rob Pickels 51:17
And I think the easiest thing to do here is to be conservative, right?
Trevor Connor 51:21
Yep.
Rob Pickels 51:21
In the name of the health of the fetus, but as we’re learning, the health of the fetus might actually be improved through this activity –
Trevor Connor 51:29
Right.
Rob Pickels 51:29
And so instead of just being conservative in recommending kind of a minimum level, maybe we do need to figure out exactly what more of an optimal level is.
Trevor Connor 51:39
Right – and that’s what I was getting at. I think, optimizing the level of activity, optimizing nutrition during pregnancy can have such a big impact on the outcome post-pregnancy.
Rob Pickels 51:49
In general, I’m happy to see that this research is coming out now, I’m happy to see all of the traction and information that Dr. Sims has gotten out to the world – but you know, this was a pretty large research group that pulled this together. You know, Dr. Trent Stellingworth I believe, was was one of the authors on here, among others and I hope that we can continue to fill in these gaps because as athletes and coaches, this is hugely important.
Trevor Connor 52:14
Well, good study to spring on me, Rob. It was really interesting. Wanna read that one.
Rob Pickels 52:18
I thought it was – I thought it was a good one, you know, Trevor? Did you have fun on this Nerd lab?
Trevor Connor 52:23
I think I did. Did you?
Rob Pickels 52:24
I think I did too.
Trevor Connor 52:25
Did you get through the exerkines okay?
Rob Pickels 52:26
I got through the exerkines okay. Do you know what’s really funny though, is today is the first relatively cool day in Boulder, Colorado, and I immediately put on, like, jeans and a sweatshirt and I’m over here sweating through it right now because it’s not nearly as cold as I thought it was gonna be.
Trevor Connor 52:40
I had the same thought, I was gonna put a sweater this morning and I’m like, “it’s still sort of summer”.
Rob Pickels 52:45
It is. So you know, Trevor, I think maybe we wrap it up here and I can get out of this little podcast room.
Trevor Connor 52:51
All right. That was another episode of Fast Talk. Subscribe to Fast Talk wherever you prefer to find your favorite podcast. Be sure to leave us a rating and a review. The thoughts and opinions expressed on Fast Talk are those of the individual. As always, we love your feedback. Join the conversation at forum.fasttalklabs.com to discuss each and every episode. Become a member of Fast Talk Laboratories at fasttalklabs.com/join and become a part of our education and coaching community. For Rob Pickels, I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening!
