Hello and welcome to Fast Talk, your source for the science of endurance performance! I’m your host Trevor Connor here with Fast Talk’s head physiologist Jared Berg.
As endurance athletes, many of us worry about putting on unnecessary muscle mass, which we assume will slow us down on climbs or put extra strain on our joints during runs. Let’s dispel that myth upfront. Engaging in strength training isn’t going to turn you into Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson, unless you do an exorbitant amount of heavy lifting.
Building and maintaining muscle mass offers a range of benefits for endurance athletes, including runners: It enhances overall performance, aids in injury prevention, maintains bone density, and combats sarcopenia – a condition characterized by the progressive loss of muscle mass, strength, and function through aging. Over time, everyone experiences muscle mass loss, which not only leads to decreased performance but also to various health issues.
To delve deeper into the importance of muscle maintenance, we turn to Fast Talk Lab’s head physiologist and registered dietician Jared Berg. Jared will talk with us about the physiology of how training impacts our muscles and the potential consequences of entering a negative energy balance to lose weight – including muscle tissue loss. He will explain why muscle loss doesn’t have to be inevitable.
Jared will also discuss the pivotal role of protein for muscle maintenance. He will identify three critical factors:
- Adequate protein intake, which ensures you consume enough protein to support muscle maintenance and growth.
- Timing of protein intake, to strategically consume protein to maximize its benefits.
- Quality of protein, or choosing high-quality protein sources for optimal muscle health.
Joining Jared, we’ll also hear from Dr. Brendan Egan, a professor at Dublin City University in Ireland and a leading expert on muscle physiology. He’ll provide insight on why we focus on carbohydrates. Additionally, we’ll hear from Dr. Mikki Williden, the host of the Mikkipedia podcast on nutrition, health, and longevity, and the creator of Mondays Matter. She’ll discuss why protein and fat are so important for our health.
References:
- Coffey, V. G., & Hawley, J. A. (2007). The Molecular Bases of Training Adaptation. Sports Medicine, 37(9), 737–763. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.2165/00007256-200737090-00001
- Coffey, V. G., & Hawley, J. A. (2017). Concurrent exercise training: do opposites distract? The Journal of Physiology, 595(9), 2883–2896. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1113/jp272270
- Cronise, R. J., Sinclair, D. A., & Bremer, A. A. (2017). Oxidative Priority, Meal Frequency, and the Energy Economy of Food and Activity: Implications for Longevity, Obesity, and Cardiometabolic Disease. Metabolic Syndrome and Related Disorders, 15(1), 6–17. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1089/met.2016.0108
- Hughes, R. L., & Holscher, H. D. (2021). Fueling Gut Microbes: A Review of the Interaction between Diet, Exercise, and the Gut Microbiota in Athletes. Advances in Nutrition, 12(6), 2190–2215. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1093/advances/nmab077
- Issurin, V. B. (2013). Training Transfer: Scientific Background and Insights for Practical Application. Sports Medicine, 43(8), 675–694. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-013-0049-6
- Rønnestad, B. R., Hansen, J., Hollan, I., & Ellefsen, S. (2015). Strength training improves performance and pedaling characteristics in elite cyclists. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 25(1), e89–e98. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.12257
- Rønnestad, B. R., & Mujika, I. (2014). Optimizing strength training for running and cycling endurance performance: A review. Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports, 24(4), 603–612. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1111/sms.12104
- Schumann, M., Feuerbacher, J. F., Sünkeler, M., Freitag, N., Rønnestad, B. R., Doma, K., & Lundberg, T. R. (2021). Compatibility of Concurrent Aerobic and Strength Training for Skeletal Muscle Size and Function: An Updated Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. Sports Medicine, 1–12. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-021-01587-7
- Schumann, M., & Ronnestad, B. (2019). A Brief Historical Overview on the Science of Concurrent Aerobic and Strength Training. In S. I. P. AG (Ed.), Springer Nature.
Episode Transcript
Trevor Connor 00:00
Trevor, hello and welcome to fast talk, your source for the science of endurance performance. I’m your host. Trevor Connor, here with fast talk’s head physiologist Jared Burke. As endurance athletes, many of us worry about putting on unnecessary muscle mass that might slow us down on climbs or put extra strain on our joints during runs. Let’s dispel that myth up front. Engaging in strength training isn’t going to turn you into the rock unless you commit an exorbitant amount of time to heavy lifting, building and maintaining muscle mass offers a range of benefits for endurance athletes, even runners. It enhances overall performance, AIDS in injury prevention, maintains bone density and combat sarcopenia, the age related loss of muscle mass that comes with time and extended endurance exercise. Over time, everyone experiences muscle mass loss, which leads not only to decreased performance, but also to various health issues. To delve deeper into the importance of muscle maintenance, we turn to fast talk labs, head physiologist and registered dietitian Jared Berg. Jared will talk with us about the physiology of how training impacts our muscles and the potential consequences of entering a negative energy balance to lose weight, including muscle tissue loss. He will explain why muscle loss doesn’t have to be inevitable. Jared will also discuss the pivotal role of protein in her diets for muscle maintenance. He’ll identify three critical factors. First, adequate protein intake, which is ensuring you consume enough protein to support muscle maintenance and growth. Second is timing of protein intake, which is all about strategically timing the protein consumption to maximize its benefits. And finally, the quality of protein, which is about choosing high quality protein sources for optimal muscle health. Joining Jared will also hear from Dr Brendan ingen, a professor at Dublin City University in Ireland and a leading expert on muscle physiology. He’ll provide insights on why we focus on carbohydrates for performance. Additionally, we’ll hear from Dr Mickey Wilden, the host of the Mickey pedia podcast on nutrition, health and longevity, and the creator of Monday’s matter, she’ll discuss why protein and fat are so important for our health. So put down that popcorn. Grab a high quality piece of protein, and let’s make you fast. Well, Jared, welcome back to the show. It’s been a little bit since we’ve had you on been doing great stuff with the services at the company. So tell us how things have been going. Thanks
Jared Berg 02:25
for having me back. Trevor, it’s always good to be on these with you, and have I have a blast with them. So yeah, services are going great. It’s such a awesome ability to be able to work with all kinds of inspiring athletes and individuals doing great things with their sort of events and adventures, and I love to help them along the way, whether it’s working on sort of metabolic testing and helping people figure out and dial in their training zones, or figure out how much substrate, fat, carbohydrates they’re burning in exercise, and also work on sports nutrition programs. So I definitely feel blessed to be in this area of practice. It
Trevor Connor 02:59
is a fun place to be. I call myself a physiologist, but you’re kind of the true physiologist. You’re there in the lab. You’ve got the metabolic cart, you got the lactate testing. You’re bringing people in, collecting a whole lot of data on them and helping them figure out their training based on data that’s otherwise hard to get.
Jared Berg 03:17
Yeah, I’m in the trenches, right? Yep, I like it. I
Trevor Connor 03:21
admire it. I used to do vo two Max testing all the time. I’m not sure I could run a metabolic test anymore. Yeah.
Jared Berg 03:26
I mean, there’s a lot that can go into it, and it’s a lot that comes out of it, which is the exciting, exciting thing is just to to be able to dive in and, you know, help somebody, want somebody who can’t understand sort of why they’re feeling like they’re feeling in a certain type of training, and how, you know why they can’t build up endurance or such. It’s, you know, it’s kind of, it’s kind of fun diving in and depicting or getting at the data and just helping people improve.
Trevor Connor 03:50
Well, the part that scares me now there is this device that you pump air to calibrate the metabolic cart, yes. And you have to do it at different paces, yes. And that final one you have to get first try. It’s really hard. Yeah, getting that one, yeah, good at it. I don’t think I could get past that anymore. It
Jared Berg 04:09
is fun, yeah? So kind of like playing a, sort of a video game, and you get, sort of, you definitely develop a skill, and you can’t be like any like jerks in your movement, and you’re trying to calculate your flow rate, how fast or slow the machine is breathing, if you will. When I
Trevor Connor 04:27
used to teach metabolic carts, the students, I’d have them do that phase, and they do, like, try 30 times. Yes, they visit every single time. And then I’d come in and get in one shot, and you’re like, the superstar, yeah. Now I’m the guy who’d be deck 30 tries to get it done. Yep.
Jared Berg 04:42
That’s the way it is. When I have interns come in and work on that, they’re like, I can’t do it, yep, and it is so hard. Like it, yeah.
Trevor Connor 04:49
So what are we talking about today? I know this is a topic you’re really excited about.
Jared Berg 04:54
I do like this topic, yeah, muscle maintenance and improving muscle. Sort of capacity and function and navigating things like, what are we doing to our muscles when we’re endurance training, or what’s happening to our muscles as we get older? I think it’s just an exciting area. There’s much to think about and a lot to do. So yeah, I’m pumped.
Trevor Connor 05:16
This would be a lot of fun. And you know, you kind of raised this when you talked about this episode, that there’s a lot of endurance athletes who are afraid of putting on muscle mass. I don’t think that’s something they should be overly worried about. You have to do a lot of work to put on a lot of muscle mass, especially when you’re endurance training. Yes, yeah. But you know, for those of us who are getting a little bit older, sarcopenia is something to be concerned about. Maintaining muscle mass is really important. Exactly.
Jared Berg 05:42
It’s unfortunately. I mean, I remember having this discussion with one of my professors when I was out in grad school, and I’m like, you know, we can stop sarcopenia. And she’s like, No, we actually can’t. And I’m like, What do you mean? We can’t? What if you just do all kinds of great strength training and you really work on, you know, eating your pro, you know, your protein, and having it at the right time. You can, you can build muscle, yes, in it more of an acute level, but chronically. When we’re talking about aging, sarcopenia happens. And, I mean, otherwise you would see somebody at, you know, 95 years old, huge and buff, like, you know, the rock, right? That’s just not not happening. So sarcopenia can happen no matter what, but we can slow it down, and we can improve and keep a higher quality muscle through the ages.
Trevor Connor 06:31
That’s fair. So that’s one of the benefits. Give us the One Minute Summary. What are other benefits of maintaining muscle mass, even for endurance athletes,
Jared Berg 06:41
big one performance, right? I mean, we need our muscles. Our muscles are what drive our body, allow our body to move right. We can put out if we have more muscle, and we have more effective muscle and better trained muscle, we can put out more watts on the bike right. We can run faster, swim better, climb mountains. Also injury prevention. When we’re starting to to gain muscle and have increased strength in the muscle belly, it’s going to take some load off of those muscle tendons at the joint, right? And that’s going to improve and decrease our chance to get injuries. I see the last thing that we can quickly talk about is wellness and blood sugar control, improving our lipid profile. We could think of muscles like a metabolic sink, right? They have this ability to to use all the the foods and the substrates that are floating around in our blood and produce intake, produce energy from them, which keeps everything at a healthier level and can improve our health.
Trevor Connor 07:46
So let’s start with the basics. When we’re talking about muscle, there’s animalism and catabolism, correct? Yep, so tell us what we mean by both of those. All right.
Jared Berg 07:56
Well, first, let’s jump in to the catabolic nature of muscles and energy. So catabolic, basically, it just means that we’re taking a complex molecule and breaking it down into simpler ones, right? So we’re taking or taking things like carbohydrates or fats, which are, can be kind of complex and can kind of big molecules. And we’re breaking those down and converting them into at the end, basically ATPs, which is allows us to make energy or to make muscles contract, okay? And then we look at anabolic and that is taking a simple molecule and building complex molecules from it, right? So we’re basically taking things like simple molecules that can be like amino acids and such, and take those amino acids as building blocks and making sort of tissue out of them. Yeah. So
Trevor Connor 08:53
we’re talking about the muscle. The muscle has a lot of protein in it. So really, what we’re talking about with catabolism is taking those proteins and breaking them down into their amino acids.
Jared Berg 09:04
Yep, that’s something that we don’t want to do, right? We don’t want to get our amino acids from our stored proteins. And our stored proteins being what you said, Trevor, are our muscles, right? And so we don’t want that catabolic so we can avoid that catabolic response of breaking down our own muscle or basically eating ourselves to get energy. That’s ideal.
Trevor Connor 09:24
We don’t want that. And so animalism is the opposite. Correct? Yes, exactly, yep. Okay, so let’s dive into the different types of training you can do and the impact they have on catabolic and anabolic processes. And I know one of the beliefs is that endurance training is very catabolic, and there is some logic to this. If you’re going doing a lot of endurance training for hours, you’re using a lot of fuels that you’re breaking down, and sometimes that can even be some of the proteins in your body. So it makes sense that it’d be more catabolic. But what’s your experience with this? What have you seen?
Jared Berg 09:59
My. Experience and understanding right is that it’s catabolic. Endurance training is catabolic, and I’ll go into this a little bit later, but it’s not entirely catabolic. There are some components that can be we can think of as sort of anabolic. But first, let’s talk about endurance training. Really, what we’re doing is we’re ideally using carbohydrates and fats as fuel to get our body to move right and move for long periods of times. However, if long as we are supplying our body with the appropriate energy, we’re going to do just fine, and we’re not going to have to tap into other energy sources like protein to get our bodies to maintain the effort so that, you know, how do we do that? We need to make sure we’re eating enough food before the workout, and we’re eating during right so as the workout gets long, we’re not depleting our energy stores, specifically our carbohydrates, and having to turn protein into carbohydrates for for higher intensity training long into a workout. That’s the sort of that catabolic nature of endurance training, as far as you know, if we were to say, hey, well, what about is there any anabolic Well, there’s, we’re basically never completely aerobic or anaerobic in any activity. There’s always a little bit of each and that anaerobic activity can kind of have a strength component to it. And so it’s kind of why you would see somebody who is who’s say, an avid cyclist or a runner, or, you know, any other type of athlete, they’re going to have more muscle tone and composure than somebody who’s completely sedentary. Yeah. So there is sort of just a much smaller level. There is some there’s just the act of moving muscle and contracting muscle is going to ask your muscles to maintain and possibly build a little. Is it enough to account for the catabolic nature of endurance training? Not necessarily. So it’s like, as we get older and that sort of chronic sort of aging, can you know is underway. We are going to probably slowly lose muscle mass for just endurance training. Yeah,
Trevor Connor 12:06
that is certainly something I’ve seen has been changing in the research, is there’s a ton of research on the concurrent training, if you do strength and endurance together, does one hinder the other? Do they help one another? And it’s gone back and forth in the opinions, if 15 years ago was really the belief that endurance training blocks hypertrophy, it really doesn’t help any sort of building a muscle. What you’re seeing in much more recent researchers are saying it’s just not that simple. So primary driver of hypertrophy is the mTOR, a, k, T path, yes, exactly where the primary driver of endurance is that a m, p, k pathway. But now they’re showing, you know, endurance work actually does trigger that mTOR, a k, T pathway. So you’re not going to turn in Arnold Schwarzenegger doing endurance work, but you’re going to, as you said, See some muscle tone building. See some development. Yeah,
Jared Berg 12:58
anytime you’re asking a muscle to contract, right? You’re initiating a stress response, and then your body is going to want to compensate in some way for that stress response, right? And that’s sort of maybe, maybe where that research is sort of like getting into it.
Trevor Connor 13:12
So what about strength work? Obviously, that hitting the weight room is going to be more of an anabolic type activity,
Jared Berg 13:21
yes, when we talk about building and maintaining muscle, I like to think of it in a sort of terms of hierarchy, right? Where strength training is really at the top of that list. You know, if you don’t move it, you’re gonna lose it, right? And that’s sort of, and that’s what we see. And we can see that in as little as a few weeks, sometimes, you know, depending on what someone’s doing with their diet, and you know how sedentary they are. But then next, you know, I go on that hierarchy, I would just go, you know, into energy balance. And then we have to make sure we have the energy to support the strength training that we’re doing, or the training we’re doing right. And then we need to have make sure you have enough protein. And then it starts to get further down the list. When we have that protein becomes important. And actually, age is sort of dependent on that too. We’ll get into that in a little bit. And then very, very last is quality of protein. But let’s just jump right back up to strength training. Yep, all right, yeah. So I would say strength training, yeah. Again, they feel like it’s one of the most important for building and maintaining and making sure that we have good muscle and if we have good nutrition, strength training has a great impact. It really, you know, asking our body to basically super compensate for a stress that we’re giving it is sort of initiating that, um, build in muscle mass. Simple as
Trevor Connor 14:45
that good. And you mentioned age, yes. How does age affect all this?
Jared Berg 14:52
So age is, I mean, it’s certainly something that we’re still like looking and trying to, trying to understand, what are all the. Different mechanisms at play and why what’s happening is happening, but we do know that we naturally, I would say, in the absence of strength training and good healthy movement, even with fairly good nutrition, we are going to be losing somewhere between, like, a half a pound to a pound of muscle mass. And, you know, I think it’s, I think they’re looking at about, is it every decade? Have you seen that? Or is it every year? Yeah, but it’s been a while since I’ve seen Yeah. So we’re definitely losing, I mean, it might even Yeah, it’s so it’s have to look back into that.
Trevor Connor 15:33
You know, something that’s important to mention there is, we’re talking about people who are fully developed have been doing a lot of training. So if you take somebody who’s 50 or 60 off the couch, yeah, probably has very little muscle tone, they start lifting weights. Yes, they’re gonna put on muscle mass. Yeah,
Jared Berg 15:50
it’s interesting. Yeah. They have more potential to gain muscle as we age, if you’re starting from like, a lower baseline, right, right, where somebody who’s doing a lot of a lot of endurance training, all of their a lot of their energy is going towards, yeah, riding the bike or running and such and not enough can go is gonna go towards building muscle. And so, yeah, that’s certainly an area that I’ve got to think about, that continuum between the two. Yeah, yes.
Trevor Connor 16:16
So before we move on, I do have one last question for you about the impact of strength training on muscle I’ve always been surprised by the research on this, just how little research there’s been until recently, but there’s been a lot of talk about, do you need to do lighter weights more explosively, or do you need to do much heavier weights and just very low reps? What from your experience when you’re talking about strength training and building muscle mass. Do you find to be the most effective? This
Jared Berg 16:43
is definitely an exciting area, and it’s something that we could go on and on about, which is pretty fun, but keeping it simple and short, there’s time for everything you talked about, like lower resistance and more explosive reps. That can be a great type of strength training to do when you’re really nearing competition, right? But now we’re thinking, hey, we’re in sort of January or February. This is the time where we’re sort of, you know, maybe in the deep of the winter, and we have, we’re on the indoor bike, and we’re not putting as much volume we could. This could be a time to spend more time or more volume on strength and a little bit sort of that moderate rep load, where you’re, like, doing sets of, like, sort of between 10 and 18 reps, actually, even even a few sets of those three to five sets, so you get high volume of strength training that can really help you build muscle Mass, right? That’s not maximum strength training. That’s more like hypertrophic or muscle building strength, right? And then as you’re progressing into your part of your season, that’s a time to maybe progress into a max strength phase and that big sort of, you know, base training, and you can increase the resistance, you might do a few less sets, right? But really try to get those muscles stronger before you go into that more speed of movement that you mentioned first. And I
Trevor Connor 18:08
will say so I’ve actually looking right now at the more recent research by Dr ronistad, who’s got a ton with this, yeah, and what he showed is, and I’m bringing this up simply because I know there’s so many endurance athletes out there say, I’ll get in the weight room. I can do very lightweight because I don’t want to put any on any muscle mass. Yes, a unless you’re in there three, four times a week, you’re not going to put on much muscle mass. Don’t worry about that. Yeah, it’s pretty hard. But the other more important thing is, what he showed is, yes, strength training was in performance enhancing for endurance athletes, but it’s with heavier weight, lighter rep, and that very lightweight, more explosive work did not actually improve performance. Yes,
Jared Berg 18:49
it didn’t, huh? It did, yeah, so yeah, I feel like that more explosive is almost like activation, yes. And sort of maybe it can make you feel better before that next session and feel popular before you’re before, like a race, of going to be doing some sprints in a crit or something like I think
Trevor Connor 19:05
it has neurological gains. Yes, that, as you said, make you feel popular. I also think it’s great for injury prevention, because it trains muscle recruitment, yeah, in a controlled setting, too, right, right? Yeah. But in terms of just purely improving your power on the bike, okay? For running, yes. And actually, this Ron and stats study I’m looking at right now, strength, actually, this one’s a cycling there’s another Rana stat study in runners, yeah, where they saw improvements in runners as well. And it was just doing that more max strength type. And they really found the benefits in endurance performance were more from the heavier weight, the heavy so not like heaviest one rep work, but like reps probably so which what you’re talking about with people think of as kind of the hypertrophy type work, yes, yeah, more than I was gonna use a different word, but I couldn’t pronounce it. Yeah,
Jared Berg 19:53
hypertrophic. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, that 10 to 18 is more the hypertrophy. Quick, right? Yeah. And for some of us, yeah, if we’re getting into our our 50s, which sneaks up on us, right, that hypertrophy can be a great way to sort of slow down the muscle loss and potentially reverse it for a little while. And so that’s sort of like, where that becomes important. I think there’s a time for that. And, you know, especially if someone feels like, you know, I need to put on a little muscle before I can really, really tackle the high resistance that a hypertrophy phase is a great first step in a well planned strength progression. I still
Trevor Connor 20:33
find this surprising. About 15 years ago, I was very interested, like, we’ve been weight training for years, yeah, there must be tons of research on, you know, that kind of mid range, 12 reps, 85% of one rep max, versus super heavy, versus much lighter, explosive. And I found this review, you know, at the time, a recent review, so about 15 years old now, looking into the differences of these. And basically, the review said, shockingly, there’s been almost no research on this. It’s all based on belief that has changed. Fortunately, now we’re starting to do that research
Jared Berg 21:07
got, yeah, and I agree. I mean, we’re still kind of getting that, like, we don’t quite understand it, but we’re doing it, yeah, like there’s just starting to come out some, you know, really strength specific work in cycling right now, looking at low cadence, which is trying to cross the bridge between sort of the endurance exercise associated with cycling and strength training. And there’s just, and people have been doing low cadence drills forever, for years, and just trying to thinking that, hey, if I can produce more torque, that’s going to apply to more power. And it does in, you know, when we start that, we add cadence into the equation. So they would just do like, they would call it like, basically sport specific strength training on the bike. And I just, you know, recently saw a study. I’m forgetting the the name of the group, Raphael habits hebises and Paulina hepatis did work at sort of low cadence, high intensity, and they found really good improvements in aerobic capacity across all thresholds, from LT one, VT, LT two, VT two, up to via to max power. So it’s kind of say, Hey, you’re stronger. You can push more torque. That can help drive aerobic performance, too.
Trevor Connor 22:26
So the other thing that I’ve seen, and I think this was also Ron stats work, we’ll put all these references in the show notes, was when you do hypertrophic,
Jared Berg 22:34
hypertrophic Thank you. Word that
Trevor Connor 22:37
you see a strengthening of your slow twitch muscle fibers, which allows you to actually produce more power relying entirely on your slow twitch muscle fibers, which are those fibers that are essentially for purposes of thinking like a 234, hour race, they don’t fatigue, yes. So the more you can use those, the fresher you can stay during a race where once you start pulling in those fast twitch muscle fibers, they’re gonna fatigue,
Jared Berg 23:03
yeah. So it’s almost like you’re building up the maximum tension capacity of your slow twitch fibers. Yep. And therefore, when you’re doing an aerobic activity, you can go to higher levels of that aerobic activity and still have it be at a less percentage of your maximum tension producing capacity, if that are the same percentage, but at a higher power output, yeah. So,
Trevor Connor 23:25
I mean, I remember reading somewhere, I love this, that it’s fast twitch muscle fibers that win the race, and you want to conserve them till the end of the race, so the more you can be spending your time in the race just using those slow twitch muscle fibers and keep the fast twitch fresh, the better you’re gonna perform at the end of the race, and strength training will help with that.
Jared Berg 23:44
And that’s exciting. I mean, to really think about what I’m doing in the gym can actually help improve my slow twitch muscle fibers. I mean, that’s a different thought than most of us we’re ever thinking. We’re all thinking strength training is fast twitch dominant, right? But if there is some potential to improve slow twitch by doing strength based exercise. I think that’s groundbreaking. That’s huge. Yep,
Trevor Connor 24:07
no, it’s great. So I want to shift gears, though, because I know this is what you’re really excited to talk about. Your areas, is nutrition, how to use nutrition to improve performance. And I want to go back to something that you said earlier on that really caught my attention, because when I think about catabolism, I think about breaking down of proteins, and I love that. That’s not what you said. You said catabolism is the breaking down of large molecules into small molecules. Yes, so breaking down fats, breaking down carbohydrates, that’s also catabolic. Yes as a great way to think of it. So yes, endurance work is catabolic, but there’s something really important here, which is, yes, carbohydrates and fats have other roles in our body, but the far and away, the primary role of carbohydrates and fats is as a fuel. Yes, yes. So when you’re doing endurance work, if you’re breaking down. Carbohydrates and fats. There’s no issues with that. Yep, the issue is when you start breaking down proteins, because proteins serve many other functions our body, and arguably, far more important functions than energy, providing energy Exactly. And when you start catabolizing your proteins, you are getting in trouble. That’s where you can start breaking down muscle tissue, things like that. So this is where I’m going to throw it to you. You hinted at this, and I want you to really go into this is, if you’re out doing long workout and you get to the point where you’re catabolizing your protein, your muscle tissue, you’ve probably done something wrong with your nutrition, correct?
Jared Berg 25:37
Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah. We definitely do not want to get to that spot where we are actually trying to use or not trying. We are using protein to really get carbohydrate, because our body, it needs carbohydrates, right? We need to be able to, you know, think, use our brains, and we need to be able to, yeah, move our muscles. And we’re out there doing endurance training, right? You know, the one of the main fuel sources is carbohydrate. And if we’re starting to get low, and we’re starting to, like, become in sort of a, you know, carbohydrate depleted state, our body of natural response is to say, start taking protein from our reserves, which, you know, it could be from our most recent diet, a little bit stored here and there, but a lot, you know, some can come from our muscles, and we’re going to convert that protein into carbohydrates in a process called glyco neogenesis, and basically use that carbohydrate to either generate more movement or use that, yeah, that newly made glycogen or to generate movement in our exercise, and actually to fuel our brain, because carbohydrate, or glucose, is one of the only substrates that can cross the blood brain barrier and allow us to sort of think and not get into a stupor while we’re out there training, which has happened, right? We all have sort of felt that sort of depleted bond state, all right, when we’re in that bond state, we’re actually, you know, in a state where we’re actually breaking down our muscles, right, in addition to trying to use fat as energy.
Trevor Connor 27:17
So what an important thing to point out here, the most abundant amino acid in our body is L glutamine, yes. And so when our body starts relying on protein for fuel, it will start breaking down l glutamine. And l glutamine is the only fuel of our immune system. It’s also the fuel of our digestive tract, yeah. So when you start breaking down and depleting your L glutamine, that’s where you’re more susceptible to getting sick, and you’re also going to find you’re going to start having digestive issues. Yeah, exactly.
Jared Berg 27:47
And then, yeah, it can be kind of hard to sort of catch up. And for doing that chronically, I mean, chronically, be challenging our gut in a way it’s not meant to be challenged. Can, can sort of have long term effects too. The energy balance is almost like a defense mechanism. We’re trying to basically give ourselves a defense against that muscle protein breakdown, and it’s one of the big reasons that we’re seeing such huge improvements in the pro peloton with how well they’re able to recover and perform in subsequent stages, because they are really bringing up their their energy intake from carbohydrate, from fat and protein, and they’re doing it all at well planned times, including before workouts or before races and during during a stage, and then really being precise with how They do it after a stage, and that’s helping keep any muscle loss to a minimum. Let’s
Trevor Connor 28:45
take a minute and hear from Dr Brendan Egan about why carbohydrates can be so important for performance. Yeah,
Dr. Brendan Egan 28:52
I think one of the best described metabolic responses to exercise is the changing in fuel utilization with an increase in intensity. So as we think about different intensity of exercise, and we go from low to moderate to high, what’s very obvious is that there’s an increased reliance on carbohydrates with increase in intensity. So in the context of more sports where you’re either competing at you know, effectively above threshold or doing repeated sprints, anything that we would say is of moderate to high to very high to vigorous. There’s a greater reliance on carbohydrate. And the reality is, we’ve limited stores of carbohydrates within the body. In terms of liver and muscle. We can provide a certain amount in the form of sports drinks and gels and other other sources like that. But ultimately, when that carbohydrate runs out the intensity at which we can perform declines. And so this, you know, could be considered to be fatigue, I suppose, but ultimately it’s going to result in in lower levels of performance than would be ideal if someone has got that fuel in the fuel tank, so to speak. So I think the the emphasis we place on on carbs in sport. It doesn’t have to be for all sports, but it certainly is in the context of sports where they performed at a decent level of intensity and or for, you know, prolonged duration. I’m using very vague terms there because it is a little bit vague to try and generalize, but it makes sense, you know, we need that fuel for those higher intensity efforts, and I think that’s where the, you know, the majority of Focus comes from in this command.
Trevor Connor 30:22
So let’s dive into that a little bit. You mentioned energy balance, yes, so we’re literally just talking about calories here. Energy Balance is when you are consuming as many calories as you are burning. So the problem that a lot of athletes are going to ask about here is, if they want to lose weight, by necessity, they have to go into energy deficit. But as we pointed out, if you aren’t supplying your body with enough carbohydrates and fat, you’re going to start breaking down protein, you’re going to start damaging muscle tissue. So how do you balance this? I want to be in energy deficit to potentially lose some weight, but not be losing a lot of muscle tissue,
Jared Berg 31:01
exactly? That’s, I get that question a lot, and that’s also like, that’s like a project I work on with a lot of my clients, right? I’m trying to lean up. I got a race season, I feel better and I perform better. You know, at the certain weight that I’m targeting. That’s certainly something that I get a lot in in my consults. So you want to distance that calorie deficit as far as you can from the workout really, that’s really the strategy. And so around that workout, you want to be on point. You want to be energized going in. You want to have good energy during right? So when we’re doing these longer workouts, three, four hours, we want to be carved up, definitely getting the carbs on board after that first hour and maintaining all the way through the finish, right? We want to recover with getting at least 50 or 60% of that carbohydrate back in, along with 1015, 20 grams of protein and recovery right after that workout, to minimize any sort of opportunity for not recovering our muscles, right? We want to recover our muscles as best as possible. So we need the energy, and we also need that protein. And then later in the day, after you’ve, you know, sort of compensated and done really well around your training and around your workouts, then you can think about, hey, is there two or 300 calories that I could, you know, cut out? Or, if you did a workout in the late afternoon or early evening, maybe, maybe there’s a little bit at breakfast you can do to bring that deficit a little more, you know, give you a little bigger deficit.
Trevor Connor 32:37
So what I’m hearing I still remember the old days. We saw this at the center, yeah, but in the world tour guys are back then. The was, the Pro was it called back then, wasn’t the world tour. But anyway, they had what were called the coffee rides, which was, you get up in the morning, you have a cup of coffee, then you go out and do a six hour ride. You eat nothing on the ride, you get home, and then you take some sleeping pills to go to sleep so you don’t eat, yeah, oh my god. I’m assuming your feeling is, we don’t do that anymore, and thank God we don’t do that anymore.
Jared Berg 33:10
Exactly. That is old school, and it is, I would say, proven ineffective. I think it’s why we’re seeing such bigger improvements in performance, and you know, faster KOMs and and such, you know, and you know, stages that are being completed at paces that were unimaginable years ago, is because we are not emphasizing this. Hey, Let’s mobilize fat stores. Let’s improve our fat burning to the point where we don’t have to rely on carbohydrates. And that was the that was a thought process where now we’re realizing we can still improve our fats utilization with good, smart training in the presence of good smart carbohydrate and fueling. So
Trevor Connor 33:56
this is a conversation I’ve had with multiple athletes, because I think there’s still a belief, if you’re trying to lose weight, eat less during the workout. Yes, and my experience is they do that. They experience exactly what you’re talking about, which is to start using fuel sources your body doesn’t want to use. So that’s going to harm recovery. That’s going to harm adaptations. And unfortunately, later in the day they’re so hungry because now their body’s in an emergency mode, yeah, they’re going to end up eating all those calories anyway. Yeah? And their body’s going to be in a much worse state, where what I recommend to athletes is don’t be frugal on the ride or the workout. Yeah, fuel, fuel, fuel, fuel. And then later in the day is where you say, as you said, Don’t grab that thing of ice cream if trying to drop a little bit of weight.
Jared Berg 34:43
Exactly. Yeah. You know, I think it really drives in the truth that our bodies are really metabolically flexible, right? If we don’t give the body carbohydrate, it will use fat, right? But that’s not always the. The ideal, it will use fat, but it won’t really have that same potential to produce force. So when we, you know, it’s, it’s kind of like these, there’s, there was a lot of research back in that, in that time frame, you know, wasn’t that long ago. It was like 1015, years ago, where they’re like, Hey, let’s do carb restricted workouts. Let’s do this coffee ride that you’re talking about, and let’s go into a little nap. It’s not eating a carbohydrate. And then let’s do an interval session, right? And then they would see a highly increased sort of fat mobilization, even at high intensities. Or they would do the reverse. They do a high intensity session, not replenish carbohydrates and then see how much fat we could use during endurance activities, and it would just skyrocket. But it, you know, what did that really do? It really just allowed for subpar performances, right? Because then we started adding carbohydrate in, right? We ended up, you know, basically doing more work, climbing hills faster, running faster. So improve performance. And then we would stress the body more. The body would need to super compensate for that stress by, you know, building up muscle capacity, building up the ability to use carbohydrates better and produce more force, and, you know, and still even keep the fat high. And I would always be amazed, like I could say somebody’s like, I’m not a good fat burner. Well, I can make you a good fat burner overnight, yep. And we just do a fast come back in the next day, do a test you’re a better fat burner. So it’s what does it prove to do these car restricted workouts? Just not enough. Yeah.
Trevor Connor 36:35
So what are other things you would do with clients who came to you and said, I need to be an energy deficit. I need to drop some weight, but I don’t want to lose muscle tissue. I don’t want to have all those negative consequences. So what else would you work on them with?
Jared Berg 36:49
I’d say the first thing I would be wanting to work on is making sure that you are maintaining that muscle right, making sure that all the protein needs are met right, and that you’re actually you’re doing the strength training that you need to do to to keep that muscle up, right? Because if you start going into that deficit, and you’re not strength training, and you’re just focusing prioritizing aerobic training, and then you’re in a calorie deficit, you’re going to end up with, yeah, some fat loss, some muscle loss, you’re going to be lighter, but you’re not going to be any better. Very rarely do I ever see somebody get better. And I, you know, we’ve all tried this on our own case studies of one on ourselves and like, Yeah, I’m gonna lose, you know, five or six pounds, and then, you know, I’m gonna be climbing so much better. Lo and behold, we lose those five or six pounds, and it’s like, the exact same time that we got when we had more muscle, and, yeah, we were feeling better, so that would be the main priority, is I would be really focusing on making sure that we’re doing everything we can to maintain our muscle and really the weight is only coming from fat loss. I had this discussion with a client late last week, and it was like, hey, what can we do if I want to try to improve my body composition, which I think is the most important, right? And, you know, I’m sort of like, well, there’s kind of a continuum, right? One way we could increase improve our body composition, have basically lower body fat percentage is actually gain weight, right? If we gain muscle mass, right? And we without gaining fat mass our body, a percentage of body fat will decrease, right? Or we can potentially stay the same weight, right? And even in an energy deficit, we might stay the same weight, but because we’re doing really good strength training, and we’re supporting our muscles with good protein before and after and good carbohydrate during our sessions, and really having good protein around strength training workouts, we might actually stay the same weight in a calorie deficit because we’re doing so well at building muscle mass, right? We might gain an extra pound or two of muscle while we lose a little bit of fat and end up in the end result same way less body fat or we could, which is sort of what people are kind of thinking they want to do, which may not always be the best, but they hey, if I want to actually decrease my body fat percentage, it means I’m going to decrease my weight, but maybe I can just decrease fat and Hold on to muscle in which that’s probably the most challenging of them. But, uh, you so you know, you’re probably going to decrease the fat and a little bit of muscle when you’re in that much of a deficit to make that happen.
Trevor Connor 39:32
So yeah, I will tell you a recommendation I give to athletes, and interest, in your opinion on this is to always lose weight slowly. Yes, so sure, because I find that’s the best way to make sure you’re mostly losing fat tissue, yep, and minimizing the muscle loss. When you lose weight quickly, you’re often taken off both
Jared Berg 39:52
Yeah, and then you’re losing a lot of water too, and just so setting yourself up for like, just Yeah, poor performance, yep. Yeah. For sure.
Trevor Connor 40:00
So something we haven’t talked about, but I think is a really useful tool with this, particularly when you’re dealing with an athlete whose performance is really important and they want to do all this, right? Is how Metabolic testing plays into all this? Yeah,
Jared Berg 40:14
metabolic testing allows me to really dial in someone’s energy needs, right? So I can look at, basically, you know, with having that mask on that you know, that you’re wearing when you’re doing a metabolic test, I can understand how many total calories you’re burning when you’re exercising at different intensities. And then I can understand how many calories are coming from carbohydrates and from fat. So, and that understanding of carbohydrate versus fat metabolism might help with some of that advice I can give an athlete on where they can cut calories out, right? We would know, Hey, as long as we’re replenishing all of the carbohydrates that you’re burning during a workout at the specific intensity that we learned from doing this metabolic test, right? We can feel better about giving you a deficit, right? So you make sure that you’re getting it in all the energy that you need to sort of help with recovery and limit any muscle loss, right? And then some of that deficit comes from that fat that you’re expending and not replacing all those calories that you would have expended from the fat portion of your training. So I
Trevor Connor 41:24
think the last thing we want to talk about here we’ve been mentioning protein, and the importance of protein is just getting into that side of the conversation. So you mentioned before, and I think this was your order of importance, getting adequate protein, the timing of the protein and then the quality of the protein. So let’s dive a little into each of those three, starting with adequate protein.
Jared Berg 41:46
Exactly that is the three. That’s the way I like to think of those three. Is adequate protein comes first. We want to make sure that we’re getting enough protein in our diet, right? And what does that mean? It basically means that for an endurance athlete, we can keep it pretty simple. We can take our body mass, so our weight in kilograms, right? And so say, if we’re a 75 kilogram cyclist, we can double that, and that’s the amount of protein that we need to take in per day. I would say you would be just fine with as little as 1.75 and up to twice your body mass and protein. And that’s a just a great rule of thumb to say, hey, we’re supporting all of our protein needs that we’re trying to compensate for from the stress that we’re putting our bodies through, through strength training, through cycling or through running or whatever sports that we’re that we’re getting ready for, we start to have too little a protein. We end up in this you know, we mean, truthfully, you know, recommended daily allowance is about one gram of protein per kilogram to maybe one even point eight to one, right? That’s just not enough for somebody who is breaking down muscle protein as part of their daily activity, right? And then we’d be at more risk of losing some muscle mass from the endurance training that we really enjoy. Consuming too much can be kind of hard on our kidneys, yes, right? That’s sort of the big thing. And if we consume too much and we’re trying to, like, lose weight, we’re just going to turn that protein into glucose, and then eventually turn that, if we don’t need that glucose, right, we’re going to turn that into fat and store, you know, because we’re not going to, we can’t store glucose on our in our body, you know, past a certain amount, because it’s just a really poor way of storing energy. So we just, you know, going to start its fat. I
Trevor Connor 43:39
was going to ask where you stood in that because I remember back in school, that was one of the more heated debates in the nutrition world, is, what is our protein needs? Yes. And there are some who say anything beyond nitrate balance is bad, so push for much lower protein consumption, even in athletes. Yes. And there are others who say, No, that’s kind of an outdated concept, and particularly when you’re dealing with athletes, you need a lot more protein than what’s been recommended.
Jared Berg 44:08
Yeah, you do. And we just have to think of our bodies. I mean, they’re very again, they’re metabolically flexible, and they’re going to sort of up regulate or down regulate what they need, take what they need and what they don’t, they’re gonna get rid of. So we’re pretty amazing machines, but
Trevor Connor 44:26
you know, something that everybody needs to understand is we do actually have a protein ceiling. Yeah, there is actually a condition called rabbit starvation, where when you consume too much protein, I won’t go into the details, but as real negative consequence on your body that actually basically leads you into a starvation state. People can die of it,
Jared Berg 44:46
huh? Yeah, I haven’t seen that. So it’s called
Trevor Connor 44:48
rabbit starvation because it was discovered by explorers who could only find small animals like rabbits. And so here’s the thing small animals have. Very little fat. Rabbit starvation, rabbit starvation, where large animals have a lot of fat on them, yes, so when you eat large animals, you’re actually getting more fat than you’re getting protein. So it’s not an issue with larger animals, but when they had to survive on small animals like rabbits, they were eating a very high protein diet and would kill them. Interesting. And so explorers knew it as rabbit starvation, and they learned very quickly they had to hunt larger animals. Wow, huh. And so kind of the upper limit. It depends on the person, but generally, you wouldn’t want to be eating more than about 30% of your diet from protein. Got
Jared Berg 45:40
it that’s pretty it opens it up for a nice, balanced diet too. Yep, that really falls well. And, you know, and I look at a lot of sort of athletes and what their their macros are, and then coming through on training peaks and and we’re usually looking somewhere between 15 and 25% right for protein intake, as far as percentage of diet, a lot of it changes based off of total energy needs. When somebody is doing a 5000 calorie day, their carbohydrate needs are going to go up a lot, right? So when your carbohydrate needs go up a lot, your protein ends up being a smaller percentage of your total daily intake, and that might be towards that 15% that same person on a day where they’re just doing some strength training and a light run, right? They might be more at 25% of protein intake because they’re not needing as much carbohydrates to get through their their day of training in life.
Trevor Connor 46:39
Oh, fair enough. Yeah, so let’s talk about timing of protein.
Jared Berg 46:43
So timing of protein, I feel like, is really interesting. And there has been some recent research that discusses and goes over timing of protein based off of of age, right when you’re, um, you know, fortunately, when you’re in your like, 30s, you know, maybe mid 30s and younger, long as you’re getting that goal amount of protein in your day, your body does what it needs with it. It will basically replenish your proteins, your stores, and help you with your muscle health, and then help you build muscle, and you won’t have any sort of any problems maintaining right and so you pretty much can almost do anything. Long as you’re getting the amount of protein that you need to keep your muscle health and right where it needs to be. However, as we start to get into that sort of fifth decade, you know, into our 40s and older, the timing of protein starts to really matter. Basically, what I mean by that timing of protein is we need to make sure that we get enough protein at each meal to reach a certain threshold to basically turn on that muscle biogenesis. And what’s really happening there is when we get enough protein, as long as we’re getting good, balanced protein, we’re getting more into the quality, a little bit later, we can turn on what’s basically we end up with enough leucine in our protein consumption, and that leucine will turn on what you talked about earlier, that M torque, that MT or c1 which is basically like that switch that it charges our body to start building muscle, right? So when we’re younger, the timing doesn’t matter so much, but when we’re when we’re older, we want to make sure we’re getting three meals which kind of falls into our normal eating patterns nicely, three meals with at least 25 to 30 grams of protein in those meals. That’s just with daily timing. We’re not talking about timing around workouts and so yeah, something to definitely think about it, and that’s mostly associated with that leucine threshold and turning on that mTOR switch. So
Trevor Connor 48:46
what about protein after a workout, particularly strength training workout. What’s your feeling about that?
Jared Berg 48:52
You know, my feeling I don’t feel like it’s as necessary as we’re sort of led to believe, right? If you have good protein on your body, say you had lunch at 12, right? And your strength training workouts at two o’clock afternoon workout, right? You’re still digesting that protein during that strength training session. It doesn’t metabolize, you know, that quickly where you’re like now, you don’t have any protein to help you build muscle after that workout, right? So that’s really kind of so you’re really sort of able to capitalize on that sort of good daily protein, those three good meals around strength training, right? So when you’re as far as like having that protein after and I recommend having that protein after a work after a strength session, but that’s more to help you meet your protein needs for the day than it is to say, give you that protein to help you recover from that workout, and carbohydrate becomes just as important, if not more important, after that strength workout, because what we don’t want is your body to be like, Hey, I just blew through all these carbohydrates. Is, I’m going to take the protein that I ate before my meal, right, and take that protein and turn it into carbohydrate to replenish the carbohydrate I depleted, right? So you want to make sure you get that carbohydrate, and that’s probably most important after the strength session, and then get your protein in right? Because that’s going to help you hit that protein goal of years for the day. But I would say, yeah, it’s not as important as, you know, as some like to lead it to believe. I do feel like after high intensity sessions, right? You have a little bit of a window for more protein, sort of absorption after, you know, maybe 20 to 30 minutes after a session. But again, carbohydrate is still more important. Right after you hit those high intensity intervals, those sub threshold blocks, getting in those carbohydrates right after the workout is priority followed, you know, 1015 minutes later by getting in a nice healthy dose of protein. And that healthy dose for me is like 15 to 20 grams at least. So I do remember
Trevor Connor 50:59
seeing research that having a little bit of protein right after a strength workout does help that animalism, but it’s actually doesn’t take much,
Jared Berg 51:09
yeah, just Yeah, just a little bit even, like, chocolate milk kind of thing. It’s like, yeah, they’re saying
Trevor Connor 51:14
it was like six to seven grams. So the one thing that this research I read really threw out is this idea that you have to have this giant protein shake, yes, right after a workout, which a lot of strength athletes do, and they really, actually don’t need it. Yeah,
Jared Berg 51:28
that protein is to help them maybe hit their threshold, but they’re not really doing much with it for a couple hours later in their day. Yep. Yeah. You haven’t
Trevor Connor 51:35
touched on something throughout that I think is really important to emphasize, which is our bodies actually are not very good at converting fat to carbohydrates.
Jared Berg 51:47
Yeah, they don’t, right? Yeah, they don’t. You can’t.
Trevor Connor 51:49
Very, very small, yeah. We need to maintain our blood glucose levels. They can convert protein to glucose. So part of what you’ve been pointing out this whole way along is if you put yourself in a glucose depleted state, your body is going to start catabolizing that protein. That
Jared Berg 52:06
is certainly true. Fat’s role really has the its role is to allow you to spare glucose, right? You can use fat as energy, mostly while you’re at rest or during low intensity endurance training, I would say, yeah, kind of like zone two and below. Yes, you are using fat in zone three and zone four, just not as much. But they fats help you spare that glute, like glucose so you can, you don’t deplete it as fast. So
Trevor Connor 52:33
let’s go into that last one, because I can be very interested in this conversation. We might have slightly different opinions, but quality, yes.
Jared Berg 52:40
So quality of protein, right? When we talk about quality of protein, it’s really, from a definition standpoint, it’s having a protein with the nine essential amino acids. We can just keep it simple like that. So we want to get, yeah, we want to have protein sources, right? And those protein sources need to be comprised of the nine essential amino acids, basically meaning the amino acids that we do not make in our body All right. So we need to get them from other sources, food sources.
Trevor Connor 53:12
I am going to add one thing to that getting them in the right ratios is very important. So something one of my nutrition teachers always said is every protein has every amino acid, all the essential amino acids. It’s just, it’ll be microscopic, yeah, yeah, very small amounts of some. And it’s really about getting it in the right ratios,
Jared Berg 53:32
yes. And that’s sort of why, when I go into quality of protein, I really like variety, yes, variety of proteins we could talk about, like proteins that do have all the nine essential amino acids. Those could include eggs, all the Lean animal proteins, you know, like fish and chicken and beef, dairy, tofu, some of the ancient grains, like quinoa and armrants and buckwheat, those can have all nine amino acids, like Trevor said, though, but they’re good. There are going to be in different ratios. I would say an animal protein is going to have probably more glutamine or even more leucine than a plant based protein, right? But if you eat enough of that plant based protein, you’re probably going to do pretty well at getting enough of the amino acids that you need. This
Trevor Connor 54:22
is why I raised it, because animal proteins tend to be much closer the ratios you need, which makes sense, because their physiology is similar to us. So if you eat an animal protein, you don’t have to worry too much about the ratios. You’re going to get what you need exactly. If you are a vegan, you can get all the amino acids from plant sources. But somebody who really knows how to be a vegan, they know what plant sources they have to mix because, for example, beans do have the complete amino acid profile, but not in the right ratio. So you need to eat beans with other things that are high in the amino acids that beans are low in. That’s
Jared Berg 54:59
actually. Something that was originally thought to be true. However, when we look at amino acids, we actually create an amino acid pool,
Trevor Connor 55:08
which is fair, yeah, yeah. And so it’s like, if you’re getting sufficient, if you’re
Jared Berg 55:13
getting sufficient, if you’re getting enough, if you’re a vegetarian, vegan diet follower, you are going to if you are doing really well at getting the amount of protein that you need, and those proteins have the nine us, you know, have the essential amino acids. As long as you’re getting that good sufficient amount of volume, your body will basically, kind of create this pool and available, you know, basically that you can send a pull, and it does that in your liver, I believe, is where we were doing that, and it’ll take that and use those building blocks to help you build tissue. But
Trevor Connor 55:47
what you see with vegans, particularly new vegans, who don’t know how to do it, right, yes, they aren’t getting sufficient amino acids. Often their diet becomes much lower in protein, exactly. And they don’t, they aren’t even building those pools.
Jared Berg 56:00
And you know, and it’s in beginning that protein is challenging as a vegetarian, vegan individual. And so yeah, it takes some thought process and a little bit of work and some intent to get to that level. And yeah, there may be some extra things you need to do with your diet to make sure that you’re getting, yeah, enough taurine or enough leucine or, you know, yeah, it’s not always as easy, and we’ll see even with age, that we stop making some of the non essential amino acids as much in our body, and then so it almost makes some of these non essentials more, you know, I guess it increases their essentialness in your Diet. I love
Trevor Connor 56:40
that you brought up taurine, because that is actually now getting research in vegans, because taurine, you can almost only get through animal sources. So I recommend to any vegan that they supplement with taurine.
Jared Berg 56:53
Yes, the cool thing about it is the supplementation for vegan is plant based, yep, right, yeah. It’s just hard to find it enough in plants eating normal, normal plant based diet. It’s hard to get enough taurine, but the actual supplement you take can be plant based, so it’s can be pretty, you know, comfortable for a vegan to increase their taurine through supplementation. But
Trevor Connor 57:13
here’s why this is important. Taurine is the only fuel of the neutrophils in our body, which are very important immune cell. So there are now studies showing that vegans have neutropenia, which means they don’t have neutrophils. Taurine is also really important to macular health, yes. And so there’s also research showing now that vegans have vision problems, yeah, if they’re not getting enough taurine in their diet,
Jared Berg 57:36
there’s definitely a lot of things to think about. And we didn’t talk about this one because it’s not an essential but, but creatine, we can get to that a little bit later, is something that we stopped producing as much without on a more vegan vegetarian diet. Because actually creatine, even though it’s a non essential amino acid, it is found in animal foods.
Trevor Connor 57:55
So what else do we need to know about quality definitely back
Jared Berg 57:59
up to that leucine threshold, we want to make sure that in order to really turn on that mTOR signaling, we want to make sure we have leucine at least two to three grams per meal, right? That really helps, especially for us as we’re getting into those, you know, fourth, fifth, decades and beyond, right? So that’s definitely a real driver of muscle biogenesis, making sure we have that leucine. Other than that, I would say we want to avoid. As far as proteins, I would say we talk, you know, we have all these protein powders, right? Do we want to avoid that can be a really helpful tool in someone’s diet that can help with making it easy to eat when we’re on the go and in a busy lifestyle, and trying to make sure we hit those thresholds that can help with getting that big hit of protein after a workout. I would say if we’re going to have the powders, I really love to steer people away from protein powders with artificial sweeteners and zero calorie sweeteners. I feel like those can disrupt the absorption at the gastrointestinal level, right? And then they have other, you know, correlational side effects that we’ve seen. And, you know, even as you know, things like cancer and other conditions. So I really, I really do push avoiding any of those artificial sweeteners and zero calories. And zero calories include, like stevia, Stevie extract, monk fruit extract, all those. I’m not a big fan of that. So what does that do for you? It makes it limited. You’re going to hear this. You’re like, Well, every single thing I look at has these things in them. Well, give you a hint, there’s at least three or four that you can find out there in the in the market. I also like to encourage variety, right? Don’t always have every day that same say, if you’re, if you’re a vegan, vegetarian, plant based protein powder, mix it up a little bit. Have one that has, you know, maybe it’s more rice protein, one with maybe a little bit more pea protein, or hemp seed, or, you know, other other plant based almond protein. There’s all kinds of different ways, right? Because when you start to. Grab something from the same sort of area, from the, you know, protein being grown in the same soil, and condense it all. You can start to raise sort of higher levels of unwanted things like lead and and heavy metals in your proteins. Also
Trevor Connor 1:00:15
really glad to hear that you’re not saying protein powders. This is the healthy way to go. Yeah, convenience, and I get that, but, you know, I Please tell me you’re taking this, but I will always encourage people to eat natural sources of protein way before the powders.
Jared Berg 1:00:30
That is 100% that is sort of what I really advise. And so, I mean, it’s just when you need that shortcut, right? The protein powders can be very useful and helpful. They also can help you, like, I’ll use them in smoothies, because smoothies can be the spot that can drive so many other amazing positive nutrients. So you take a protein powder and that’s like, that’s like, the afterthought, really, yeah, trying to get your protein up there. But that smoothie might, have, you know, be tons of great berries in it, which, have, you know, a lot of polyphenols, which can be really healthy for all kinds of different things, antioxidants and brain and cognitive health. Then you might add a bunch of cacao powder, which can be really good for relaxing blood vessels, and includes increasing blood flow. And so you can create this sort of, like powerful food that has also has the protein needs all in one and can be a great resource for you. Quality of
Trevor Connor 1:01:26
protein is about more than just the amino acid profile. Here’s Dr Mickey Wilden talking about other factors that make protein and fat in our diet so important
Dr. Mikki Willide 1:01:36
100% my mind boggles that we don’t give the same sort of importance to the nutrients which essentially provide all of those other micronutrients that we need. You know, like protein and fat is such a vehicle for those micros, the iron, zinc, the essential fatty acids, the B vitamins. So much so. So yes, we do absolutely overvalue carbohydrates in comparison to protein and fats.
Trevor Connor 1:02:03
So what would be a good way for an athlete to shift their mindset? What should they be thinking about, thinking
Dr. Mikki Willide 1:02:09
about diet, quality? I think because as soon as we start talking about quality, we bring in to the conversation the micronutrients, whereas if all we’re thinking about is quantity, then that’s often missed if we’re just thinking carbs, protein, fats. But as soon as we bring in quality, we’re thinking about these other really important things, and then that will naturally, people will gravitate towards, where do we get these micronutrients, and then protein and fat for the most part.
Trevor Connor 1:02:37
So pulling all this together, making sure you’re getting adequate protein, timing of the protein, quality of the protein. When you’re working with an athlete, how do you make these protein recommendations for them? What do you look at? What sort of data are you looking at? Just take me through the whole conversation that you’d have.
Jared Berg 1:02:56
We’d start off looking at like their demographics, like, what’s their height, what’s their Yeah, what’s their weight and figuring out what their protein needs are. And then we’d be discussing, what is your protein needs and your energy needs based off of what you’re doing in your life. What kind of athlete Are you? How much training are you doing? And then what are your goals? You start off doing that needs assessment, what do you know? What do you need? What are your needs? And then what are your goals? And then we come up with a next is sort of coming up with the intervention, coming up with the plan, right? So we figure out how much how much protein, how we’re going to do it at breakfast, at lunch, at dinner, what we’re going to take in during your training to help you find that optimal diet to support your muscle health. And then also, we’ll even talk about what you’re doing in your training. You know what your strength training looks like, right? And then maybe some changes that we can make there to whether it’s, you know, sort of improve that muscle mass, or use that muscle mass to increase that metabolic sync, that might help you improve your blood glucose control, or your lipid profile, that sort of all goes into like that needs assessment, and then that intervention, and then we come up with a way of monitoring. What does that monitoring look like? What does the outcome look like? Is it losing two or three pounds of weight over the course of, you know, two months, right? And is there an assessment that we want to do, like a body composition test to make sure that that weight is coming from fat and not from muscle, right? Those are, those are sort of how I would work with with an athlete and other metrics that are important is performance. How is, you know, like your performance on a, you know, Max five minute power, and then your FTP, you know, 20 minute, you know, or your 20 minute critical power test, how are those staying, or where are those staying in the course of this sort of other focus that we’re having around nutrition, is your power the same, but your weight down a touch, and that means your watt per kg is up a little bit, right? Those are all kinds of things that we can sort of use to evaluate. So I think
Trevor Connor 1:04:59
the last question. Question I want to hit you with, because you’ve mentioned this before and said we could talk about this later. Yeah, creatine, yes. And so the first question I’m going to throw at you, because I think a lot of people think protein and creatine are the same thing, but they’re not. No,
Jared Berg 1:05:12
they’re not. There can be creatine in protein foods, like I mentioned before, we can eat creatine if we’re eating eggs and animal proteins, right? Linked up creatinine in our diet that way, right? But what creatine is considered a non protein, amino acid, amino acid compound, I mean, it’s sort of we make it from L, arginine, l, methionine and glycine, right? Memory? Yeah, those three proteins help us in our bodies make creatine. So it is probably one of the best researched substrates, or cogenic AIDS, I guess, in sports performance. And that research, I mean, it’s been across all spectrum, spectrums of training and competition, but it’s most prominent and found most beneficial in the strength, yes, areas. Doesn’t mean that it can’t help in certain areas of a endurance athlete, right? But what it’s doing creatine, as you know, mechanistically, it’s basically we have this system in our body to make energy, right? And we out. We all know that we make, we get energy from ATPs, right? But when we spend it, store begin, basically we have enough stored ATPs to get us through a really strong repetition, or short, really short, 510, seconds sprint. When we’re, you know in well,
Trevor Connor 1:06:36
you’re being generous in training seconds, yeah, give it one or two seconds. Yeah.
Jared Berg 1:06:40
It’s just not much. So we don’t store it. We can just expire all those stored ATPs. Well, the creatine phosphate is a way for us to basically load a phosphate back onto that ATP that was turned into an ADP. So adenosine triphosphate was turned into a into adenosine diphosphate, and so that creatine phosphate has a way to shut another phosphate back onto that ADP and turn it into an ATP for another and, you know, an additional like, you know, 1015, seconds of energy, right, which could help us do that next rep or do more load for a rep and strength training, This
Trevor Connor 1:07:18
is true, true, anaerobic work. There is no oxygen involved in any phase here, no
Jared Berg 1:07:25
this is allowing you to do better at repeated sprint efforts. Saying
Trevor Connor 1:07:29
that is there any benefit to consuming creatine for endurance athletes or focusing on creatine
Jared Berg 1:07:37
if strength is the limiter for the endurance athlete, then, yes, right? If that endurance athlete is, you know, 63 years old and is seeing power losses, you know, year after year, and it’s accelerated more in the last, you know, 10 years, right? Creatine could be a potential way to improve, almost, sort of regain some Strength of Youth, right, and build muscle that sort of was lost in I’ve, you know, again, the case study of one. I’ve been endurance athlete my whole life, right? And, you know, and thinking about like, hey, I want to make sure that, you know, I have the right body composition. I have, you know, sort of the right body mass to help me. You know, bike well at all different terrains. You know, I used to do triathlons, and so running was important. So, you know, gaining, you know, 510, 15 pounds of muscle, plus, you know, or some of its water, right, wasn’t of a big interest with me. But now, as you know, an athlete, you know what bad be. Now, in my sixth decade here, at 50 years old, I’m thinking, hey, I want to make sure that I go into the next, you know, my next half of my life here with as much muscle as possible. So I actually started taking creative for the first time in my life about four months ago. And so you notice the difference you’ve now much really, I can’t believe it. Yeah, I’m like, What the heck? I’m not, you know, I’m like, I’ve never had, like, food, something, you know, some sort of food or supplemental intake impact me, or I felt like it did much at all ever, you know, I did feel like it just supports and it just everything combined has given me good health and wellness and performance, right? But the creatine was really interesting to me. I did all, like, the again, case study of one of I did all like, hey, what’s my max? How much can I do? 165 my body weight, under 65 pounds, right? How much, you know, how many times can I lift that for a bench press? And I’m like, Okay, I maxed myself. I, you know, I did three. I think I did two times. The third one, I needed a little help on, right? And then so I started, you know, including, you know, strength training or not. I was always doing strength training, but I started a, you know, getting doing more bench press while I started taking the creatine. And I just did a normal five grams of creatine per day for the three weeks to get up to that level of. Um, you need to be at. And then I just made sure that kept my strength training going. And then I just sort of maintained that five milligrams ongoing, and kept testing myself. And I, you know, like last week, I did 165 pounds 10 times, right, yeah. And I did that for three sets. And then on my fourth one, I dropped to eight, right? So I’m like, that’s a pretty big improvement. From going from maxing out at two four months ago to being at 165 you know, four sets of eight or more, right? And then as far as my weight, I’ve gone up. I’ve put about six or seven pounds of weight on, they say with sort of the dose that I was that I’m taking, in my size, I should expect about five pounds of water rate gain, right? So there’s a pretty good chance that I gained two or three pounds of muscle. And so it’s kind of exciting, like, yeah, just they actually make those gains at a time where they say that you’re supposed to be losing muscle mass and losing weight, right? And so that’s why I think it could really help somebody who’s in that state of they’re just seeing power losses and such on the bike, I feel the same, if not a little bit stronger. My powers up maybe like a few percent. But when you look in Whopper kg, it’s about the same,
Trevor Connor 1:11:15
as you pointed out. You know, they’ve done research on the supplements. They’ve tiered them in terms of whether there’s benefits or not. And that top tier, which is, you know, conclusively, performance enhancing. I think there’s five supplements now that top that, yeah, cruising is one of
Jared Berg 1:11:31
them. Yeah, I was impressed. Yeah. They’re like, something this is how different it felt than, like, the amount I could do. And the same benefits I saw came in doing squats too, yeah, yeah, I saw the same kind of gains of getting up to like, a lot higher like, than I was thinking I would be able to do, all
Trevor Connor 1:11:47
right. Well, Jared, I think we need to wrap this up. There’s actually a whole bunch I wanted to talk to you about it with carbohydrates, but maybe we just save that for a future episode, because I think this was a really interesting episode. We have, you know, we have focused a ton, actually, on carbohydrates in past episodes, but one about muscle mass and protein consumption, we haven’t really focused on that. So I think this was a really good episode, but it’s just about time for our take homes before we get there. I do have a question for our forum, and the question is, do you focus on maintaining muscle mass during the season? And if you do, what are your secrets? So we’ll put that question up in the forums. So just go to fast talk labs.com go into our forum, and you’ll find that as a question, and give us your thoughts, give us your opinion, excited to hear them. And with that, Jared, you’ve done this a few times, so you know the routine we finish out with our take home. So what’s the one message you really want all of our listeners to get from this episode?
Jared Berg 1:12:51
I’m gonna sum it up and all. I’m just gonna say, Hey, do your strength training? Get enough energy. Don’t deplete yourself. Eat enough protein. Eat it at the right time last and not as important, makes you get good quality protein.
Trevor Connor 1:13:06
My take home, I love the complexity of this, because in the early days, certainly when I started out training pretty seriously, it was simple. It was just, you want to lose weight, you go into energy deficit, you don’t eat on your rides, and that’s just how you do it and tough it out. And I think one of the biggest improvements you’ve seen comes from a much broader understanding of the complexity. You know, like you said, you might put yourself in energy deficit, you might be losing weight, but now your body’s catabolizing proteins, and you don’t want that. You’re going to lose performance. It’s going to damage your recovery. So as strange as it sounds, sometimes when you want to lose weight, you need to actually be eating more, eating more on your rides. Then look at other places that you can cut this. It gets really complicated figuring it out. And what you’re seeing in the World Tour teams is this is one of the biggest places where they have seen performance improvements in their athletes, and this is where they are bringing in professional nutritionists to work with those athletes to figure out, how do you keep your weight, where we need it, without going into those catabolic states, without going into those sub optimal places that you don’t want To be so really appreciate your coming in and discussing some of this complexity. This is one of those things where, if you’ve been struggling with these sorts of things, getting a little help because it is complex, can really benefit you as an athlete. So Jared, thanks for being on the show as always. Thanks for having me. That was another episode of fast talk. Thoughts and opinions Express and fast talk are those of the individual subscribe to fast talk wherever prefer to find your favorite podcast, be sure to leave us a rating or review. As always, we’d love your feedback. Tweet us at at fast talk labs, join the conversation at forums dot fast talk labs.com or learn from our experts at fast talk labs.com or Jared Berg. Dr Brendan Egan and Dr Mickey Wilden, I’m Trevor Connor. Thanks for listening. You.
