Cardio vs Strength Is a Myth and the Science Proves It - Alyssa Olenick

19:45It's greater with running than cycling or, like, non-nervous system stressing type activities. because there's, you know, let me back up a second and talk more about the interference effect to give more context for people. So the interference effect from those original studies, essentially they looked at this cellular pathway. So lifting and cardiovascular training have two different cellular pathways. And these cascades are like almost like someone's knocking a door, ringing a doorbell, the messenger's going to someone else, it's sending a signal, it's telling someone to do this.

20:13Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Like my house. Yes, exactly. And so the resistance training pathway is turned on by mechanical tension, that tension, that pulling, that stress, that strain on that pathway. And it essentially results in muscle protein synthesis, or you have also neuromuscular adaptations to strength training. When you start lifting heavier, your neurons are better at contracting more fibers. Those fibers get more powerful. They can produce more force. All of these things are adaptations unique to resistance training. Then you have endurance training. And this cascade is essentially turned on by energy deficits in your cell.

20:48Essentially, you start doing activity, There's turnover of glucose, ATP. All of our energy systems fuel and sense that deficit. And that deficit in energy inside of our cells turns on a different pathway. And it turns on some of these things called PGC-1-alpha, which is really important for simulation of mitochondrial biogenesis and all these other positive adaptations of aerobic training. But it also turns on something called AMPK. And AMPK essentially is like the neighbor kid messenger that goes and then locks the door to the house so you can't get in to the resistance training house, essentially, if you want to play on the kids and house craziness.

21:21And essentially that when AMPK is really upregulated, there's kind of this like blocking of that protein synthesis pathway.

21:29Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Which would be mTOR. Yeah, which would be mTOR. Now is the degree of what's that happening 100 % every time it happens? No, I think that you can think of it almost like muscle stimulus soup. Like there's so many other things that are also happening. But there is a downregulation because you have to think muscle is a pathway where your body is taking, you know, proteins and building and it's anabolic. You're trying to build tissue. Where endurance training by nature is catabolic in the sense of it's breaking down fats, carbs, hopefully not proteins, but sometimes for energy metabolism because in the moment it's trying just to supply the output.

22:05They're kind of antagonist in that sense with each other. So when I say that it is blunted and or different activities can interference, that's one way that it can interfere. I'm a little bit more of the take that most of the issue for most people comes down to central nervous system fatigue. So there's carryover of fatigue from an endurance training session that then when you go to the gym, you're not able to lift as heavy or as at high of percent of one year one rep max or your power output is slower. So therefore the net productivity of that session might be slightly lower because you aren't able to push as hard.

22:39Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So I want to pause you there because I think it's really important. Yes. What I'm hearing you say is that the intensity of the endurance activity over time affects the nervous system, which all training affects the nervous system. But some training definitely seems to have nervous system impact that is bigger than others. Yes. We agree. For example, yoga might have a lower impact on central nervous system fatigue. Something like a sprint or a max effort or running to the point where your heart rate is up and you maybe get to the place where you, quote, bonk. There's a stressor. Yeah. And that's what we see.

23:23That's why I was trying to get to this point. Which is not physical.

23:25Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No. So this is where I think people listening would love to understand more. And I just want to clarify because you said it so eloquently. I want them to understand the importance of what you're saying. Yeah. So it's that when you're trying to do concurrent training, hybrid training, combined modes in a week, you're competing for resources within your body now between two different things in a training program. And one of those is that fatigue from one session to the next, right? Physical or mental fatigue? Usually it's physiological. So you have like less ability to contract your muscles as powerfully, things like that.

23:58You might have mental fatigue as well. All that can come with some of that CNS fatigue. I know that if I was to run before I lift, my brain state is not there to go all out maximally during that training session versus if I separate them and do them around. So there is some fatigue there. So you can have carryover both ways, right? People also, if you do a really heavy leg day and then you go to do your speed work or your high intensity intervals, you might not be able to push those as hard because you have that carryover both ways, right? But it does appear that modes of training like running tend to be a little bit more demanding on the central nervous system versus if you were to bike, right?

24:33That might be a little less fatiguing or demanding on that nervous system. So you might see less of a magnitude of that blunting we were talking about earlier because there's less of that potential carryover interference that isn't necessarily cellular as it is. You can't train those things at 100 % back to back, so to speak.

24:52Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Are you concerned about what you cook and store your food in? Well, as we learn more about traditional cookware, I'm concerned for myself and my family. Our place is coated with ceramic and or their titanium pro line. They have an entire line. They're one of the sponsors of the show and they have accessories like spatulas and steamers. Their always pan is non-toxic, non-stick. It's made without PFAS, lead or microplastics. It serves 10 functions in one pan. You can strain, saute, fry, boil, and it's oven safe for up to 450 degrees. Their Wonder Oven Pro is another one of my favorite multi-tool appliances.

25:34Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It can air fry, it can bake, it can roast, it can reheat, and they have a special infusion steam feature making things crispy without, you know what I'm talking about, the smell of burning chemicals. We've been doing this rotisserie chicken thing in our family. And this wonder oven preheats 60 % faster than a traditional oven. And more importantly, it's completely free of the forever chemicals. So if you want to upgrade your kitchen, visit fromourplace.com. Use the code Dr. Lion for 10 % off site wide. That's fromourplace.com code Dr. Lion for 10 % off and you can try it risk free for 100 days.

26:16Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Absolute curiosity. How does one know? And I've thought about this a lot because I've studied amino acids and the amino acid fatigue, there's this idea that there is the utilization of these fuel systems change, but there would be, there's almost no way for us to be able to differentiate. okay, so is this tryptophan, you know, serotonin ratio actually being depleted? Or are we looking at some kind of muscular fatigue? How does someone tell? Because you would think that someone would be able to tell if it's a muscular fatigue problem. How from a scientific perspective?

26:59Yeah. So one of the ways that I liked in a more practical way so people can understand is that for me, I think that one of the easiest ways to tell that potentially your endurance training is starting to interfere with your lifting is that your bar speed or your weight speed starts to go down at regular weights or intensity. So like if I'm peaking for a race and I'm at the end of a training cycle, I will notice that like the same weight might move slower. It might be a little bit harder. I don't have that snap or that pop to my lifting. So that's really strength and conditioning, like, bro, like, you can get little things that test your bar speed, and you could, like, literally quantify how fast you're moving that.

27:36That's one way that I see that. Also, like, the same weight or the same output might be an effort level higher than it normally is, or you might have to drop weight to do the same perceived level of effort. So you're kind of having to adjust to that because you're not able to produce the same amount of work or force in your training session. Those are a little bit more objective so people can say, hey, like that is happening to me. And that's not necessarily always a bad thing, right? Like when I'm peaking and training for a race, I just expect that that's going to happen. It's not inherently bad.

28:04The fact that I'm still lifting and training and showing up during that is probably more important as a net stimulus for still, you know, supporting muscle power, all of that stuff. But I think that that's a really easy way for people to see. Similarly, on the opposite side, if you do a really heavy full body or strength day or leg day, and then you try to do your hardest, fastest interval workout the next day, you might feel some of that carryover fatigue. And so speaking to your point a little bit about metabolically, one of the things that I think is the biggest issue for most people when it comes to like interference or competition of these resources is nutrition, right?

28:39Making sure that you're eating enough to fuel these systems, especially carbohydrate, especially if you're adding in endurance to resistance training, It's a very carbohydrate-heavy, demanding type of activity. And I think for your audience who's very concerned with protein and muscle turnover, carbs are protein-sparing. Also, your body isn't going to want to pull from carbs to fuel anything or recover from or break down muscle tissue if they have enough of that, right? So it's a big piece in recovery there. And I think when I say that, people think, well, overeat carbs. Well, no. Carbs are necessary based off your activity level.

29:10Like the more you're doing, the more carbohydrates you're going to need. So there is that competition of resources. And they're also assuming like protein is staying same or slightly going up depending on what you're doing. And that's kind of maintained throughout that. So I think that there's a lot of like lifestyle factors that we can do to minimize that than having to like have biopsies and see what's going on in our cells. And for most people, you know, I usually, this is like not to be dismissive people. I'm like, you're not fit enough to worry about that, right? Like you will still gain fitness and still improve for a very long time before most of these things start to become a question of, do I need to pick?

29:45Do I need to prioritize? Or the approach that I like to take is seasons, right? Seasons of emphasis and focus that allow you to spread those resources more in favor of one mode versus the other. So you can raise that floor of fitness up together without giving up the other one entirely.

30:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I like the idea of raising the floor of fitness. For the nutrition aspect, I think it's a very important conversation. we've also had zach bitter on the podcast yeah yeah again we had lisa smith batchen on both ultra endurance runners and one of the things that they said to your point is that they focus on having enough calories and then if they're having 5 000 calories then if they have i don't know 40 of that is carbohydrates or more and 20 of protein that they hit their protein target. How do you think in terms of fuel use, and just to kind of lay this out for people, healthy muscle at rest burns primarily fatty acids.

30:48Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:If you are unhealthy, if your muscle tissue is, what is a good word, compromised, then you force it to burn glucose. If you are sedentary and you are overeating carbohydrates, you are in a position while you are sedentary, you are forced to burn glucose. This is not ideal. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. But as you train, in a healthy muscle, the more and longer that you're training, the more carbohydrates that you would utilize. Yeah. So energy metabolism in exercise and our muscles works on a spectrum of intensity or duration, right? So for most people listening to this, you're probably not going to do so much endurance that it starts to kind of cross over and switch your favor.

31:30But you might be.

31:31Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So we can get to there. Yeah. I mean, we've got - We can get it all. Just for perspective, this podcast, which what I think is so amazing, is that we have the general population who are really interested. And we also have a lot of scientists. Yeah, that's true. That listen to this. And then we have a mix of athletes and also military. Yeah, that's true. And they are going very long. So what I love to do is I always love to explain for the layperson, then the athlete, then the scientist. Yeah, I can absolutely do that. So when we think about metabolism in our muscle or our bodies during exercise, essentially it works on a spectrum of intensity and time.

32:06So at rest in a healthy muscle, healthy individual, you are using a lot more fat for fuel. You're oxidizing a lot of fat. Your body has a ton of oxygen available and you need oxygen to metabolize fat. And that point is important so we can explain later how fitness interacts with this. But then as exercise intensity goes up, both fat and carbohydrate will kind of go up. I know you just did your whole podcast with Tommy Wood and you talked about Fat Max a little bit and some of that stuff. And so your fat oxidation and carbon oxidation will both go up. But at one point, there's this whole thing called a crossover effect.

32:39And essentially, your body gets to a point where it can't keep up with doing both. Or there is this cellular interference between carbs and fats that different signals for your body will be like, hey, okay, we can't keep up with fat oxidation right now. It's too energy costly. It's too – we don't have enough oxygen. We're moving too hard. there's too much lactate, whatever the signal is going on there. And then what happens? And then you'll switch to predominantly carbohydrate oxidation because carbs are really easy to break down. You can break them down both anaerobically without oxygen and aerobically with oxygen.

33:09Also, there is a lot of lactate production that starts to happen as you get more and more intense, which allows your body to keep doing carbohydrate metabolism to a point until you can't do it anymore. So the more intense you get, the more you will go to essentially 100 % carbohydrate oxidation. And that's just when we think about the sheer relationship between intensity and that. So if you were to do a classic VO2 max test in a lab, you would go for eight to 12 minutes running progressively harder or biking progressively harder until you couldn't go anymore. And you would see this metabolism shift across this, but it will also shift with duration.

33:43So if you were to go do like a long run or a long bike or long endurance rock, whatever it is for the people listening here for that, you will predominantly, if you're doing a really long duration activity, you're going to be using a lot of fat oxidation. That's a favorable adaptation because you're usually not able to sustain a high intensity for long periods of time. You can usually only sustain high intensity for very short periods of time, but metabolism doesn't work in silos where you're only burning carbs or you're only burning fat. Your body can dynamically shift between them or oscillate to kind of what it needs to supply it or what's available in the bloodstream.

34:12So what you're taking in if you're eating during activity. So you will use a lot of fat during that activity, assuming it's like low to moderate intensity where fat oxidation still can kind of happen at a large amount. But gradually over time, you'll start to duplicate your glycogen levels and your muscle cells. You'll start to kind of shift towards, you know, depending on if you're taking a nutrition or not, you'll shift to preferentially using a little bit more glucose as you go or having to rely more on fat oxidation because you don't have enough glucose available. But then usually you'll start to slow down or bonk or kind of hit that wall.

34:45So these things are kind of dynamically happening in our bodies. But the reason I brought up the oxygen thing earlier is that this differs person to person, right? This ability to oxidize fat for a long period of time during exercise or when that crossover happens or something that people might hear of the lactate threshold. A lot of these are just indirect physiological markers of talking about what's metabolically happening in the muscle and what we can do. Can I ask you a question before we continue?

35:11Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Is this a training adaptation or is there a genetic component to how someone utilizes fuel? Yeah. So a good example of somebody, like we just talked about the elite marathoners, right? Those guys probably preferentially are born with a ton of type one muscle fibers. So they're going to be more predominantly probably off the get-go, predisposed to mitochondria, fat oxidation, all of those things, but they're probably not going to go and become like an elite power lifter, right? With really powerful type two muscle fibers. So there is that genetic component of what's the muscle fibers that you were born with, right?

35:44What are you pre like disposed to adapt to and respond to? So there is a little bit of that, right? Not all of us are going to become world-class athletes in whatever modality that we want to do, right? Yeah. I wish, I really wish. So there is that little bit of that underlying genetics, but I really like to, in the genetics conversation, acknowledge for people that like everybody will adapt to the stressor of exercise. Like even if you're not going to be, your ceiling is genetically determined, but your ability to adapt at all isn't something where it's like, well, no, you just don't adapt to anything.

36:13You might need a slightly bigger stressor or more than somebody else. Like there's hard gainers in lifting versus people who might not be as cardiovascularly gifted off the get-go. But with enough training, you can adapt. It's just that ceiling. Like we're not all going to get a VO2 max of 90, right? Like we're all going to hit that at some point.

36:30Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And the fuel utilization. Yes. Is the fuel utilization? Because there's a lot of discussion in this space that men and women utilize fuels differently. Again, I'm sure that you've heard that. Yeah, we can talk about that. So let me first go back to my point of that adaptation to fuelization. That is trainable in everybody, right? For everybody. To the same extent? Give or take, right? Obviously, some people are going to be able to become – because you're going to have a higher V2 max. You're going to have a higher ceiling of that and all those things. Like the amount of energy per minute those guys in this marathon are burning is astronomical for what their bodies can keep up with, right?

37:08Not everyone's going to be able to do that. But everybody can shift their ability to burn or oxidize or use more fat during activity. And so that crossover point of when those two cross over or for many people, their lactate thresholds or we've talked, you know, a lot of people hear about zones, which are just indirect measures of like physiological points.

37:28Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:We had Martin Gabala on there. He's like, yes, zone is different for everybody. Yes, no, exactly. And so you, with training, all of those thresholds can shift and your ability to oxidize fat will remain for longer during physical activity. And that is a positive adaptation because for athletes that preserves your depletion of glucose and glycogen and your body, which is a good thing. But also it's a marker of that underlying adaptation that is both, you know, more capillaries being able to deliver more blood and more oxygen to your mitochondria in your tissue. But also what most people care about is that you either have more or more efficient or more robust mitochondria that are able to use that oxygen because your aerobic fitness and your metabolism, they're all interlinked, are dependent on your ability to deliver oxygen and your ability to use that oxygen when it gets to the muscle cell.

38:19And mitochondria are using that for energy production. So that is a trainable characteristic. Sedentary people, both men and women, who do endurance or cardiovascular training and get those adaptations at the muscular level, There's, of course, heart and capillaries. We don't care about that. No one cares about that. Everyone cares about the mitochondria, right?

38:36Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No, we just care about muscle. Yes, and inside the muscle. But you can think of the mitochondria as the little engines in the muscle. Like my whole, you know, to put a pause in it, my whole approach to hybrid training is like build the car with the lifting and then build the engine with the cardio. Like that's the way I think about it. So the more you have of these mitochondria, the better you are at being a fat burner or fat oxidizer. And that is positive adaptation for metabolic health and aerobic cardiovascular output, right? So like I know you guys talked about in that last podcast metabolic flexibility.

39:04That was my whole dissertation topic actually was metabolic flexibility. And it's essentially like can you switch between carbs and fats when it's necessary, right? Burning carbs isn't inherently a bad thing. It's just about are you burning them when you could be using fat or at the wrong time at rest, right? Like that's not a positive adaptation. But the more you train, the more you're able to increase your fat oxidation at higher intensities. So you can sustain a faster pace, a faster power output, a faster speed, and still be using fat oxidation, which is good because then you're not depleting and relying on carbohydrate.

39:34Those elite runners, I know we keep coming back to them, the point of which they can metabolize fat still or their lactate threshold is so close to their VO2 max, right? It's crazy how close that is compared to us regular people, right? But we can still shift that forward with training, and we see that. But then when we talk about the men and women conversation, there is the underlying narrative that women have more type 1 fibers and they're better fat burners, so therefore they're always better at this. And that also isn't entirely true because training status also matters for women. It's not like, I think it pushes this narrative that a sedentary woman is somehow metabolically healthier or better than a male counterpart just because she has estrogen, and that's not entirely true.

40:15I've never even heard that. I feel like that's like the, almost the narrative that gets pushed is like, well, you're a woman, so you're better at burning fat. And so you have more type 1 muscle fiber. So it's metabolically more favorable. But there's still a training. If someone is sedentary, that's a disease state.

40:28Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah. And to your point, which I think is of interest to this community and also the scientists in this community, if Brett Goodpasture would ever come on this podcast. Yeah. So I did him left and right up and down on my dissertation. By the way, I'm a huge fan. Yeah. Where fat is stored within the muscle as it relates to the mitochondria, it's the athlete's paradox. Yeah. And what you're saying, what you were talking about, which I think is so valuable, is that the fat location within the muscle is close. If you are training and you become well-trained, then the fuel source of fat is close to the mitochondria within the muscle.

41:06Because it wants to be able to readily pull it out. Yep.

41:08Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Exactly right. And that serves individuals even if they are not training. So if someone is well-trained and then they are just living a life, they are more healthy than someone who is sedentary where there is fat infiltration not necessarily close to the mitochondria. It is within tissue. It's within connected. It distorts the muscle quality. So some of the earlier studies in metabolic flexibility were actually done in individuals with elevated weight status and or sedentary. They also looked at their actual muscle physiology. and the two things that - How did they do that? Biopsy or tracer studies.

41:46Yeah, tracer studies or biopsy. And essentially the two things that they found that improve this like metabolic flexibility within the muscle, which essentially just is a fancy way that your body can use fat when it's necessary or switch between the two. And there's not this like interference of carb and fat. Like it's almost like a, you can think of it as like a red light was out and carbs and fats are all stuck and they don't know who to go where. Being metabolically flexible is having like a really good crossing guard and signaling to these things, hey, we need to bring fat into the cell. hey, we need to clear out this glucose, this needs to be oxidized, things like that.

42:13But when individuals lost body fat, they also lose it in their muscle cells and or improve fitness status. And that was directly tied to that fat oxidation at the muscular level to the point that you were making there. So yeah. And to go back to the female conversation, there are estrogen receptors in muscle cells, which do interact with the fat oxidation pathways and all this stuff. So there is a elevated fat oxidation in women during lower to moderate intensity exercise. So I think below 70 % VO2 max. But once you get kind of above 70 or so, it starts to become a lot more intense. Obviously, everyone's thresholds are going to be different.

42:52So there could be anywhere between 40 to 60, 40 to 70. Someone can kind of cross over to that. But if you had fitness match males and females, you might see a female is oxidizing fat a little bit longer or a little bit more. But then once you reach that crossover point, everybody's using carbohydrate.

43:09Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But I also have to pause you. Yeah. To be fair, and I think that you agree, you and I are aligned on this, is there's a lot of potential for information that we don't know. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Women, when it comes to women and exercise and just women in general, it's not very clear. We haven't been studying them to the level that, because they're complicated, Right? The changes in fluctuations in hormone, it creates and complicates things. And, you know, there are estrogen receptors on muscle, but to the extent at which that plays a role, I don't think that it's... We don't have enough bodies of literature in human studies.

43:54Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:No. And it's mostly mass model. Exactly. It's mostly mass model. But to the point is that's like what people are hearing, that there's estrogen receptors, they're associated with estrogen, they're increasing mitochondria, all this stuff. And whether that's true or not, you know, one of my underlying theories I'd actually love to see tested in the literature is the interaction between women who undergo exercise training and that interaction at the muscular level versus like sedentary to see if that's like a switch. You know what I mean? Like is exercise needed for those interactions? I don't know.

44:19For which interactions? For, you know, a lot of these positive adaptations we attribute to female sex. Is it, you know, just female sex at baseline or is it female sex plus the exposure to exercise training that increases that fat oxidation or all of those?

44:33Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I worked on some of those studies when I was at the University of Illinois. And Don Lehman did some of the first studies on postmenopausal women. Yeah. And also women just in general with diet and exercise, meaning it was calorie-controlled, isocaloric. We fed them. Yeah. And then there were the exercise inputs without hormones, right, postmenopausal. And it was really the resistance training. which was the biggest driver. Yeah. And then obviously the isocaloric diets with higher protein. Yeah. Those people did better. Yeah. Everything got better. Yeah. And because we've seen that in some of the metabolism exercise science studies, like you'll have sedentary groups of women versus trained, and the trained women always have greater fat oxidation.

45:22It's across the board. It's not just, yeah. So you might see some of that, but honestly, that's where, you know, a lot of people, okay, if there are these baseline general physiological differences. I mean, there are, right? They are?

45:33Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:There's no – I mean, women have more estrogen. At some point, they lose it. It probably plays a role to what extent, I'm not sure. And that's where I think the question comes from, okay, a lot of people say, well, there's these differences. And I'm like, okay, but what does that mean for training application? Does that change? Probably nothing. Because when we also expose women to traditional training of strength or aerobic training, we see similar adaptations relative. Obviously, there's some absolute differences that we see compared to men and women. And so maybe we are oxidizing a little bit more fat at lower intensities.

46:04Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And when you say a little bit more, are we talking about anything that's statistically significant? I think that so many people blow out a proportion fat oxidation research. So I agree with you. It's like grams. And that is – this is all context for people because there's a lot that we don't know. But what we do know is that a good, solid training program is a good, solid training program. And that's kind of my whole thing is like, okay, yeah. I mean, I did my whole dissertation on having women do HIIT, right, like across the menstrual cycle. And what we found that was that aerobic fitness status mattered more than birth control use or menstrual cycle phase when it came to fat oxidation in both phases of the menstrual cycle, right?

46:39But the women who were more fit, they oxidized more fat across the entire HIIT protocol. But we're talking like maybe 15, 10 grams of fat during the high -

46:48Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And what would that translate over to in terms of – do you translate that over in terms of calories? How could someone put that into context that is hearing that? Yeah, I mean, say 10 grams of fat. Say it's that. Just absolutely don't have to go back and do the real math. That's like 90 calories, right, of fat. But that doesn't mean that the caloric differences, the other group just might have been using more glucose or more glycogen, right? They might still be burning. So it's even less than one would imagine. Yeah, it's not meaningful from – and I think that's where people conflate fat oxidation with fat burning, right?

47:21You're utilizing fat as a fuel source, but that doesn't necessarily mean that that's a net removal of fat from your adipose tissue that you want to shrink, so to speak. Because your body's dynamic. It's going in and out of these states across the day. It's not just like your exercise training session isn't always net additive to that either. There's compensation, all of these things. So, yeah, I think that the real question when it comes to these underlying differences that we see in women is like, yeah, they might have a little bit of that. And that might be good for ultra long endurance where we might not deplete glycogen as fast because it's so slow, low intensity.

47:52But that's also conflated by the fact that all of that is also a training adaptation, right? So people who – there's just so much of a Venn diagram overlap. You know, there's these baseline differences that we do objectively see between men and women. And what are those? Like women typically have more type 1 muscle fibers. But the difference is like 49, 51.

48:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It's not like 60, 40 or anything crazy like that. Type 1 muscle fibers. Do you want to – Yeah. I like that for people. Yeah. So type 1 muscle fibers tend to have more mitochondria in them. They're more oxidative. They are faster to fatigue, but they can endure longer. They're the endurance muscle fiber. Where type 2 muscle fibers are more of your strength muscle fibers, your power output muscle fibers, your ability to produce force. And men have slightly more of that. They also just have thicker, denser type 2 muscle fibers genetically. Like they're just because of puberty, right? They're the bigger, stronger.

48:45Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:They're the bulk. Yeah, and so a lot of our baseline differences between men and women typically really do come from that heavy influence of testosterone that… Actually, I hadn't thought about this before, but if you were to, and I'm not recommending anyone doing this, but you do see female bodybuilders that then take testosterone and they're able to bring their physique up to what I would consider would be very masculine type. It's a masculinization, and their size is not that much different. No, because we have, you know, these meta-analyses that when you look at men and women from baseline, if you control for body size or lean body mass, women gain muscle to the same degree as men.

49:21We just gain the absolute amount is less because we don't have the ability to put on that much tissue.

49:26Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you think that they – so I've thought about this a lot. Yeah. And I feel like it's a really difficult conversation in the way that just trying to think about it. For example, I will look at my husband who is just this massive human and he's running marathons. He looks at a weight and he can put on muscle. I mean, probably less now because he's so well-trained. Yeah. But for me and you, I think that even if our training was perfect, it just seems as if it might take us a little bit longer. Yeah. I think that some of the bigger gaps for women, there might be some of those difference in physiology because the testosterone is just making – Because it's so physiologically greater, right, versus like even within women.

50:07Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But you would agree that it would be – because I hear that people can – or men and women can put relatively the same amount of muscle mass on. But scientifically it doesn't make sense in the way that they just don't have as much testosterone. I think a big difference though too is we also have to consider like the social factor. Like I actually look at a weight and put on a ton of muscle. But I have been lifting since I was 14, 15 years old, right? So I got a way bigger head start than a lot of women. Like, if I had a dollar for every time a woman asked me, how do I get legs like yours? And I'm like, my dad's genetics and I've been lifting since I was 15, right?

50:40No one asked me that. Yeah, I know. I'm like, that's just the perfect combination of that. But, you know, I do have that bonus that I'm probably more predisposed to be a strength athlete than an endurance athlete in everything that I do. But I started lifting when I was 15. I think about the women who don't start lifting until they're in their 30s, 40s. They have also the lack of the testosterone and then potentially perimenopause is just a storm of other influences all at once. But they also don't have that training age, right? That long-term accumulation of that stress or that muscle that was built, especially since so much bone density and muscle is being built in your teens to your 20s and then kind of starts to slowly decay in your 30s on if you don't keep training it.

51:19I think that that also adds an added effect for a lot of women who are maybe starting later in life that is genuinely harder. So I think it's a mix of a few different things. Because the studies, they're controlled, but also most of the studies are being done on college students. Right. Right? Because that's the people that they're able to get into the studies. They're not necessarily doing those trials on women that are 35, 45, 50 and comparing that necessarily. It's just a bunch of college-age populations.

51:46Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And I interrupted you and I'm really glad that we are talking about this because you studied women. That was your interest. Yeah. What do we know the differences between men and women when it comes to training muscle? What can you say confidently that we know versus what is still outstanding for questions? Yeah. So one, women don't need different training programs than men. Strength training works because strength training is a stress and a strain on your muscle and your body. We adapt similarly. I like to say that we're a different sex, but we're not a different species, right? We still respond to a lot of similar things.

52:21There is some data coming out potentially that we might fatigue a little less quickly. So we might be able to do more reps, more sets, a little bit more volume in the gym.

52:30Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Is it because we're lifting less weight? There could be that. I think in these studies, they're controlled. I think that they think it's the underlying effect of potentially estrogen being favorable for that. But I also think that that's a good point in a lot of studies on women is that women are under-trained going into them, maybe compared to their male counterparts. We also see that too in like low energy availability studies. Like how many of those women were in low energy availability before they even entered the study, right? We also, it's really hard to control for all those baseline differences.

52:57But objectively, regardless of the fact that men have more testosterone and they have a higher baseline muscle, bone, all of that stuff going into the game, maybe they played sports growing up and you didn't, the road to get to the results that you're looking for, there isn't like a sex-specific protocol that gets there, other than potentially like if you can push a little harder or handle a little more and recover from it, then go for it. Then do it. Absolutely. There's no rule saying that you can't. I just don't think we have the data right now that suggests that there's a different protocol between sexes that say, okay, well, this person should do this and this person should do that, at least in the data that we have right now.

53:34Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do we know confidently the impact estrogen has on muscle? So it's not as clear cut right now, the story that everyone wants to think that estrogen equals muscle. Because when we look at the data from… Also, that makes no sense. Yeah. Right? Yeah, yeah. I mean, just from someone who's been reading the literature for a really long time, that makes no sense. And I feel like that's the narrative that's been pushed to women. It's like, well, you have estrogen premenopausally, so you have muscle, and then it goes away, and then you don't have muscle. Like, that's like the narrative that's being, at least from what I'm seeing.

54:04Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Estrogen's not primary role is to drive anabolic adaptation. Yes. Adaptation. And then we see that when you look at the data of the perimenopause to menopause transition, estrogen doesn't seem to be the main contributor to the muscle loss. It's tricky because there's overlap with aging and other things that can influence that. I think it's really hard for a lot of women to unpack the fact that age and menopause happen at the same time. And so many of those things concurrently happen. It's really hard to test that. You can do these suppression studies, but they're still not perfectly going to capture age versus, you know, menopause.

54:38So there's this overlap here. But if estrogen had such a stimulus on that or was so robust, then we would see that when you add back estrogen, that all that muscle loss was completely, you know, regained or there was this significant meaningful boost in it. Really what we see is the main driver in stimulus, even for menopausal women, is the resistance training. Even more like, not that protein isn't important, but in the studies where they even

55:02Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:isolate high versus low protein, it's the resistance training is the stimulus, not the estrogen, not... That is absolutely true. And Don Lehman and I talk about this all the time that protein is so important for many things. It's non-negotiable, right? I mean, you need more of it as you age, but protein alone isn't... It's not doing it on its own. It's not going to do it on its own. There's a very, as you age, it's helpful, but the protective component seems to become a bit devalued if you are sedentary. So without a shadow of a doubt, resistance training is the primary. And then, you know, we focus a lot on protein because you have to eat.

55:43Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So if you're going to eat, you got to get that piece right. But I want people to understand that you can't just eat a whole bunch of protein and then build muscle and even protect it. I mean, it's your best defense, but you have to - You have to have that resistance training stimulus. You have to maintain it. And I think the thing that potentially to your point of women underloading, like they really struggle with is I think a lot of women, at least from what I've seen, is they're afraid to load heavy enough or they've never experienced what that feels like. So they don't have anything. So like I grew up an athlete, right?

56:13I've been lifting since I was 15. What was your primary sport? I played lacrosse and did cross country. But I was exposed at a very early age of what my max effort felt like, what hard felt like. You know what I mean? If women don't have that context, they might not think, okay, well, I should be lifting to like a 7, 8, 9, and a 10 in the gym, whatever. But that might actually be like a 4, 5, 6, right? Because to them, that does feel perceptually really hard, but they've never given that relatively. So then maybe they're not getting as much of the stress and the stimulus that they actually need.

56:41And then they're frustrated because they're like, well, I'm not gaining muscle. I'm not getting the body composition goals I want. I'm not getting results. But the stress wasn't great enough to drive that. But I also then, wonder how do we get more women to understand what truly hard enough feels like so that you can have those adaptations that you are looking for from resistance training, right?

57:01Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Most people understand that muscle has to be continuously rebuilt. That's why we train, that's why we recover, and that's why we prioritize protein. Thank you to one of the sponsors of the show, Timeline, powered by MitoPure. What most people don't realize is that the same thing has to happen inside the muscle cell. Just as we remodel muscle through exercise, our cells must continuously remodel their mitochondria to optimize performance. As we age, unfortunately, damaged mitochondria can accumulate and the body's ability to clear them out becomes less efficient. The result isn't just aging, it's declining capacity, less energy, slower recovery, maybe you're moving slower, you're feeling tired, reduced physical resilience, mitochondrial renewal may be one of the most important conversations in muscle health today.

58:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:That's why the science behind Timeline powered by Mitopure is so compelling. Mitopure contains urolithin A, the first nutrient shown in humans to support the body's natural mitochondrial renewal process, restoring what we lose to time. You're already training your muscles. Now support the cellular energy systems that power them. I won't miss a day of training, just like I won't miss a day of MitoPure gummies. At a time when everything feels like it is getting more expensive, Timeline cut the everyday price on MitoPure, which is very amazing. And today, You can get an additional 20 % off the new lower price at timeline.com slash lion.

58:46Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Don't miss it. What about the menstrual cycle fluctuations in terms of the hormonal environment? Yeah. Is there, and I remember when I was in my 20s, I mean, it definitely was much, and I always trained, but there were definitely moments and days where it felt, whether it was energy, and again, it can be a ton of variables, but would you say that does the change in hormones affect the caloric intake to a meaningful degree or the training to a meaningful degree? Yeah. I think that the influence of the menstrual cycle on performance or intake ends up being, And this is not, you know, this is really hard for people to understand.

59:34The data right now really doesn't show this like hormones change equals like muscle, like performance or output or whatever that looks like. We just don't really see that consistently in the data. But what we do see is that the hormone fluctuations can change perceptually how you feel. So to the eating standpoint, there might be an acute increase in energy expenditure in the luteal phase. It's like 2 % to 12 % is the range. So wait, so 2 % to 12%.

1:00:01Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Let's think about what that would be. Like 50 to like 200 calories a day. Like, so it's not a ton, right? It's not like go eat a ton more. And also like, it's also, there's some studies that show no effect. So it's not like this big conclusive thing. It's a, it might be increased. We do see that women habitually eat more in the luteal phase and less in the follicular phase, the early half of the menstrual cycle. Whether that's because estrogen has a different effect on hunger and satiety versus the luteal phase affects digestion, slower motility, things like that, or energy expenditure. there's other things that potentially could be going at play there but then when we think about also the changes in those hormones really what happens is in that specifically late lino phase into early menstrual cycle phase where we do have studies that show hey there might be something going on here decreased in performance there's a few studies they are smaller but i really love them because they control for hormones and all these perceptual metrics and when they try to find a relationship between the change in the hormones and the performance they don't but then And they look at perception of pain, motivation, all of those things that drive you to want to push hard in the gym.

1:01:03Those are impacted by hormones. And there is that steep drop off of progesterone and estrogen into that menstrual cycle. And for some women, they're more sensitive to that. So that's like PMS, PMDD, like that can drive that. But you might do the same training session in the gym in your late luteal phase and the same weight, say it's 100 pounds. If in your follicular phase, it feels like an effort of 7 out of 10, well, now it might feel like a 9 out of 10. And it might not be that your muscles can't move that weight. You might just, your effort levels, the motivation, all of those things might be impacting that.

1:01:34And then that's compounded by women with increased menstrual cycle symptoms that report it, report also more increases of impacts on their performance, right? So there's multiple factors going at play here. There's little things here and there across the cycle that might be more real and true. Like, for example, there might be changes like thermoregulation in the luteal phase. Meaning you would get warmer? You would get warmer and you couldn't cool down as quickly. You might sweat more salt and have more sodium loss because you might increase your sweat rate. So for women that are doing endurance performance, that might be something where you might want to dial in your hydration or your sodium electrolyte strategy for an endurance of it if you were in that.

1:02:12So I think a lot of the times when we say that there's not one concrete menstrual cycle program, that means that none of these things are happening. But it's not this like, oh, we changed all of these things every single week or to every hormone profile. You're kind of adjusting to fluctuations. And also, the individual variation is really big. There's some really cool studies coming out of Europe that's called the Fendora Project. What is it? Fendora, F-E-N-D-U-R-A. And they're testing a lot of female athletes. And where is that out of? Somewhere in Europe. I saw at the female athlete conference that's hosted by Dr.

1:02:43Katie Ackerman, their group representative. You can look up their website, and they have all of their papers coming out of these projects. They're really exciting. Because Copenhagen is incredible. I think it might. It's somewhere like that.

1:02:53Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:There's so much more sports performance research in Europe. There's a lot more funding for it. U.S. only cares about disease. Europe will, in Australia, fund a little bit more performance stuff. But they've been doing these studies where, in some of them, they track these female athletes for two cycles. And they'll see, like, where the performance changes is different cycle to cycle. Right? So it's not that you're just, I'm different from you or you're different from me or she's different from her. Or it's also you could be different month one to month two. So I'm really big on like the tool set of like learning to adapt and listen to and just to your body.

1:03:27Because women do, like you said, you perceive it. I was a female athlete calling my mom crying because I'm like, I don't want to have to do suicides with cramps. This feels horrific. I feel horrible. And that's very, very, very real.

1:03:39Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And I want to say, so I'm actually working on my third book. Yes. Okay, amazing. Which is about strong women. Okay, yeah. And, you know, as I'm sitting here looking at just the scope out there, menopause, people are, you know, it seems very defeatist. And then also, you know, they talk about estrogen in the brain and all of these hormone fluctuations just like you and I are talking about. Yeah. And then I couldn't help but think that if our mentality was trained up. Yeah. That if our mentality was trained up. Well, you might have cramps and it might be terrible, but you still execute. Yeah. And I don't want to downplay.

1:04:22Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Listen, I had hyperemesis gravidome for my pregnancies. Yeah, you had a really rough pregnancy, right? It was. Yeah. And my husband was active duty, so I was alone in New York City in a 600 square foot apartment, throwing up and nauseous, traveling from downtown to uptown alone. Yeah. And I still trained. And, you know, and my whole point of saying is that, yeah, a guy's not going to go through that. And then at the end of the day, I was having all kinds of hormonal fluctuations. But there's the biology, the physiology, and then there is the mentality. And I think that if we go through our life like you did when you started young, you train up the mentality of, yeah, It's hard.

1:05:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah. And then you manage that. And I think a lot of women, again, to my point from earlier, like if you weren't exposed to that just because you weren't a lifelong athlete like me or doing the things that you did, like you can still develop and train that, right? Like I have a lot of cognitive skills for doing the hard things because I did the hard things to do it, right? Like I just finished the worst ultra that I've ever finished in my entire life. I death marched the whole thing in. And a lot of people would have just quit. And I was like, well, I can still finish it. I wanted to quit. I said it out loud many times, but I didn't actually do it.

1:05:42It was terrible. But it's so funny. Even three weeks later, I'm like, I'm really glad I finished that because now I know what I can do when it gets hard or when I want to quit or when I don't want to do it. And I think that so many of the messages that go towards women, and this is probably like the, if there's a hill I'm going to die on my platform is I'm not going to talk to you like you're stupid. And I'm also not going to talk to you like you're broken. And so many people are fragile or it's doom and gloom or nothing can be fixed. And things might change and shift. And that's real, right? But I really do agree that so many of the narratives talk to women like they're incapable of handling any difficulties or resistance.

1:06:16And we're so capable in everything that we do, right? Like a lot of women are doing similar things to like what you were doing, being pregnant, you know, still pushing yourself. You're doing these things in other areas of your life. And think about how you can do that in training and show up for yourself and still do those hard things. But also, yeah, especially when you think about the narratives around pregnancy, the menstrual cycle, menopause. Like we just keep telling women, you're weak, you're fragile, you can't do it, you're incapable, everything's downhill.

1:06:41Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:You might have hormone changes and maybe you're hungry for an extra 50 to 100 calories or 200. But all of that, there has to be a separation of here's the emotional component to it, here's the science, here's what we know, and here's what actually your choice is. Yeah. Your own agency. And that's one of the reasons I was really excited to chat with you about it, because as I was listening to your interviews and reading some of the things that you write, that really came across. And yes, estrogen does play a role. And you were talking about progesterone. And maybe in the luteal phase, when your progesterone is high, you might be, I don't know, more risk adverse or want to train less or do any of these other things.

1:07:29Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:but regardless, we still have to show up. Yeah, and I think a lot of people, I think they look for that reprive and messaging that kind of gives them the permission slip to do less. And I really always like to remind women, like if you are having such a terrible day that you don't want to train, you don't have to train on day 28 of your cycle, but how can we proactively rearrange your week, shift where you feel good? You know what I mean? Like maximize on when you can get it and get it done rather than just writing it off as like, well, I'm broken, let's move on. So when you talk about nutrition and the hybrid athlete, coming back to the hybrid athlete.

1:08:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yes. So up to this point, we've kind of outlined the idea of concurrent training, which honestly is what everyone should be doing. It really is. Because - That's why I say I'm Trojan horsing everyone into health. You are. You are. I appreciate that. I'm just tricking everyone into health. You know, and also even our exercise guidelines have both cardiovascular activity and resistance training. Yeah. I think that those are probably abysmally low, which is 150 minutes, two days a week of resistance training. I'm happy that we start there, but that's not where we want to probably end up. Well, I don't think a lot of people realize that that's just the first big jump in health impacts being decreased, but it keeps going when you keep doing more.

1:08:41Tell me more. What do you mean? So especially cardiovascular. The resistance training guidelines just got rewritten, and we can talk about those in a second because I'm very thrilled with the updates to that. But when we think about the aerobic training guidelines, that minimum of 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous can be interchangeable, two to one, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, that 150 minutes of moderate to 75 vigorous is when you start to see the first meaningful decrease in risk of death, mortality, whatever word you want to use, that sounds really aggressive, or just like disease risk, like onset of chronic diseases, all of these things may track people long term.

1:09:13Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:150 minutes. Yeah. Or 75 minutes of the vigorous. But when you scale that up to 300 minutes of moderate or 150 minutes of vigorous, which can be kind of hard to get to that with the vigorous activity, kind of the more you do, the more you kind of have to start parsing it out. And we can talk about that, too. You still see another jump and decrease in those risk factors. And it kind of keeps going. Do we know that to be true or is that epi data? It's all epi data. Yeah. No offense to your husband. He didn't want to do epi data if it makes you feel any better. He wanted to be a physiologist. He wanted to be performance physiology.

1:09:44The Army shows where he went. Um, yeah, so it is epi data. You're just looking at these big data sets and like finding these associations of outcomes, which is a big reason for me is like, I'm really big. That's again, coming back to my objective athletic goals is because like, I don't really care necessarily like how much you're doing is good. The more you do, the more you move, the better, you're probably going to have net health benefits, but I care about how are we objectively moving a parameter of fitness forward, right? Can you do more work?

1:10:10Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Parameter of fitness or parameter of health outcome? So I'm big on that. If you improve your fitness, for most people, right? Obviously, there's the caveat that athletes sometimes aren't the healthiest to get to where they need to be. I would say that the better the athlete, the worse their health is. Yeah. But for most regular people, if you're improving a measure of fitness, you're probably indirectly improving a measure of health. Because the physiological adaptations that are required for you to become fitter are all the things that positively influence health. So I think a lot of people obsess about like hand grip and VO2 because those are always like really heavily related because they're easy to test, right?

1:10:44But if you can improve your 5K time or how much you can bike for 30 minutes or whatever it is that you're trying to do and you can either go for longer, further, or cover more distance or more power output in a set amount of time, I think those are a lot more easier objectives for a person to know that they actually got fitter and better. because in order to improve that, you had to improve your fat oxidation, improve your mitochondria, develop more muscle fibers. Maybe you have more powerful type two muscle fibers, right? To deadlift your body weight or two times your body weight. You have to have those adaptations that positively impact you downstream.

1:11:19Of course, you can take it too far, right? And become unhealthy, but most regular people are not doing enough of that.

1:11:28Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So what were the past resistance training guidelines and what are they now? Yeah, so the past resistance training guidelines, they were just very vague. It was two days a week of full body resistance training, and then they kind of just stopped there, right? Cardio got the spotlight. And I think a lot of that is because historically exercise physiology has been very endurance-based. And also the ACSM, who writes the exercise guidelines? Is it the American College of Sports Medicine? Yeah, so who has their own? ACSM also is – that's who just released this updated position stand coming from it. And I loved it because one, it did set the, it's still saying at least two days a week, like at least, like we really want at least two days a week.

1:12:06Again, if you're a true beginner and you're only going to start with one, start with the one, but like make the roadmap to build. And it also does a great job of like speaking to that beginner of like everything works when you start, start with whatever you can do, whether that's body weight, resistance bands, you know what I mean? Like whatever you are willing to do, it's better than nothing. But I love that it started to parse out strength, hypertrophy, and power and defining those more clearly and talking about like how you actually achieve those versus just saying go lift your whole body twice a week in 60 minutes do you remember do you remember what they are i could probably pull them up too oh i don't remember exactly everything off the top of my head because there's so many different parameters but really like if we're going to break it into those three buckets of strength power and hypertrophy which i'm a big fan of programs including a little bit

1:12:50Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:that's interesting that's interesting that they and they break it down into strength hypertrophy And like what this literature suggests is like best for developing those. Again, they keep coming back to the fundamental thing that like doing something is better than nothing. We're not talking about that. We talked about that. But we guys know. Yes. People listening to this podcast. We want to do a little bit more. Yeah, I know. There's always the. They want to do more. They want to do more. So when we think about strength, I know strength is obviously specific to what you're trying to do, right?

1:13:17Like you can get stronger at reps of 10. You can get stronger at reps of 15. But when we're thinking about like the true characteristic of strength of like testing your maximal capacity of your muscle, we're usually thinking of that like greater than 80, maybe greater than 90 % of your one rep max effort. So it's more of your traditional one, three, five rep ranges. And that's a mix of both a trainable adaptation, but also a skill because strength has to be practiced to be, you know, performed. So strength isn't just an adaptation of the muscle, like we talked about earlier. It's also like your neuromuscular, your neurons ability to contract and recruit more muscle fibers and or produce more force output.

1:13:52And it's trained by practicing that, right? Like you kind of have to practice it to do it. So that's strength training. And there's a lot of benefits to strength training. You get a lot of muscle fiber recruitment and you're getting, you want strength. Strength's really important. We lose strength as we age. And it's a kind of independent characteristic sometimes of muscle size alone. There is a pretty good relationship between having more muscle and being stronger, but strength can also be trained independently to some degree on its own and it's important to train. But that intimidates a lot of people.

1:14:21So you can do it at like more moderate rep ranges or lifting heavy relative to like what you're willing to do. You don't all have to do one rep max powerlifting type Olympic weightlifting efforts to benefit from that. And then we have hypertrophy, which, you know, historically hypertrophy got sold as you had to do like eight to 12 reps. And that's the hypertrophy range. Hypertrophy has a pretty big breadth and depth. It's more so tied to volume, how much you're actually doing. So for example, how many reps and sets or total sets you're doing across a week of training and things like that. But the nice thing about that is like the threshold of when you start to see benefits from hypertrophy starts as little as like two to four sets a week.

1:14:59Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:When you say benefits, how are you defining benefits? So people in studies who gain muscle from doing a training program. So they start to gain muscle tissue. So you do gain strength before you gain tissue? Yes, because the newbie gains will come through first. So you'll get those strength adaptations first. And that's why you get really strong the first like six weeks of lifting or whatever it is. But yeah, I mean, we have this like a minimum effective dose of like you can kind of get slowest two to four. I'd love to see people closer into like six to eight, maybe six to 10 for a lot of benefit.

1:15:31We have some interesting studies in postmenopausal women that like a little bit more volume actually gives them a little bit more benefit. But the difference was like six to eight sets. It wasn't like crazy. It wasn't like six to 20. It was like doing two more sets was like enough to give them like a slightly greater magnitude of benefit.

1:15:47Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So from the outcome of putting on muscle, yeah, putting on muscle and stuff like that. So, or strength muscle. And so sometimes doing a little bit more, you know, you need that for hypertrophy, but you can get hypertrophy across a wide variety of rep ranges. Um, you can go all the way up to 30, as long as you get close enough to the effort level that you need. And you can go all the way down to strength. What's hard though, is like, once you kind of get above 15 to 20, or you get below five, it's kind of hard to either do enough volume when it's below five or to what we talked about earlier, like perception of effort.

1:16:17It's really hard to go really close to muscular failure or close to that fatigue point with that many reps. So if you are starting out at home or you don't have a ton of equipment, you can do 20, 25, 30 reps to still get some hypertrophy, but you just really do have to make sure you're taking it to an effort of like seven, eight, or nine out of 10, or really close to like, hey, if I did one to four reps more, I couldn't do any more. That's what's most important for hypertrophy is that proximity to essentially failure. It doesn't have to be 100 % failure, but it does need to be like essentially strength.

1:16:49Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Isn't there a strength hypertrophy continuum? Yes. So that's kind of what we're talking about here. And now it's kind of like the continuum has kind of been reclassified as they all overlap. So strength, hypertrophy, and endurance all overlap. But when you get to more reps, it's going to be slightly more favoring endurance. You get to lower reps, it's slightly more favoring strength. Hypertrophy can be achieved across all of these. So this is the 2026 ECSM position stand on resistance training. So it was published April 2026. Stu, you're welcome on the show anytime. It represents a significant update to the 2009 position stand and takes a notably more flexible, which it did sound like, individual approach compared to prior guidelines.

1:17:31Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Here is the key shift. Oh. In individualization over rigid prescription criteria. I'm not sure if I agree with that. It says that only 30 % of American adults perform any muscle strengthening activities. 30%. And that's also like self-reported and stuff that's like not really true formal lifting gets like factored into that. So it's probably actually lower. I know. Yeah. It's terrible. I know. We're changing that. We're trying. Do you know that November is National Muscle Health Month? I didn't know that. We created National Muscle Health Month. Really? We did. That's amazing. And we're going to work on initiatives.

1:18:09Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So hopefully you will be involved in that. Yeah. I would love to be. That's actually amazing. National Muscle Health Month. I love that. 60 % or more performed? None. Okay. So prior ACSM guidelines were estimated to potentially require 20 plus hours a week of training. I do not. That's not. There's no way that's true. 20 plus hours a week. That does not seem correct. No, no, no. Making them impractical for most adults. Okay. Okay, minimal dose of resistance training can produce, and this is how they defined it, produce substantial strength, hypertrophy, and functional gains. Here it is. Two to three sessions a week, eight to 10 exercises, one to four sets.

1:18:52Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Okay, so it's lifting a little bit heavy. Oh, and here it says eight to 20 reps or 40 to 70 of one rep max. No one knows their one rep max, two to three minutes of rest. Okay. um basically it said two days a week prior this now says two to three days a week gives you eight to ten exercises which is a good amount um the load greater than 80 percent one rep max to maximize strength gains okay sets multiple sets frequency higher load multi-set training three times per week was highest ranked for strength. This is interesting. Two times per week was highest ranked for hypertrophy. That's interesting.

1:19:33But I wonder if that's just by default of the

1:19:34Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:studies being done. Okay. They said that you can use an elastic band, home weight resistance training, body weight training. So all in all, what it does is it gives a more, it seems as if it's a little bit more specific, but also saying that there's a broader range of things that you can do. Yes. And they also emphasize periodization, which is making that less important. And the way I understand periodization is the actual training program. Is that a good way to think about it? Yeah. It's kind of like alternating between cycles of different focus across time. Yeah. It also says that this aligns with the American Heart Association of 30 to 60 minutes a week.

1:20:25Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:That doesn't seem like enough. I think that – I think like people can get a lot done with two full body days a week if they're done intensely enough. It's kind of like the same cardio conversation, right? Like you just had in that last podcast is like if you're going through the motions, it's probably not enough. But I think if you can do two days that are like really meaningfully or three days that are like full body and they're actually taking them to strength or pushing hard. But I think that's the gap, right, for a lot of people is they don't take those days super hard. This is – it's really important to – I think that we can all agree that if we were going to pick a perfect amount that it's probably two to three days.

1:21:08Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And let's say in my ideal world, and I covered this in the Forever Strong playbook, which I'm going to give you one if you do not have one. I don't have one. Okay. Yeah. I apologize that I don't have one. We can still be friends. That's okay. But three days a week. Yeah. You have to shoot. If we don't shoot for something, we fall for everything. Yes. I like this. Now, I want to ask the reverse question. We can all agree that we're going to say three days a week. And do you care when we think about the outcome? Again, it's challenging. I think exercise, training, muscle health conversation from the physical aspect is so much more complicated than what I do.

1:21:47Yeah. As a physician and in nutritional sciences, it's much more complicated because my question to you would be, do we think about body parts? Do we think about functional patterns?

1:22:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:if I squat and I have hamstring tear or I have hip dysplasia, I'm not using my glutes the way that I should be. So the stimulus required for me, I might not be getting enough of what I need. And I know that that's a little complicated when we think about each individual, but how from a health, not performance, outside of performance, from a prevention aspect for your mom yeah how do you think about exercises and patterns and movements yeah so i would love first of all mom if you're watching this i would love a world of my mom resistance trained i would love so much for her to do what she won't she doesn't resistance train come on i've tried my dad does though my dad is 65 and he's still out there crushing it but i know i'm trying so so hard on that so if she was to start tomorrow which she will yes hopefully i got her doing some more walking up hills, a little bit more intensity, but yeah, we're working on the resistance training.

1:22:56But if I was to start her from scratch tomorrow, right, or people starting from zero, I love getting, you know, you hear this all the time when you tell beginners this, but then it doesn't actually mean anything. When you say push, pull, hinge, squat, what does that mean to anybody? So realistically, you want to do something where you are doing a squatting pattern, bending at the knees, whether that's a leg press, a lunge, a step up, a box squat, a regular squat. Like there's, It can be, from a health perspective, if you don't have a performance goal, it doesn't matter what mode you're doing. But you want something that is going to load your quads and your glutes within this parameter.

1:23:32And obviously a lot of people like with squatting, they will say, I have knee problems. I have hip problems, things like that. You can adjust range of motion. But you agree because I, you know, as I think about this, when we say that you should squat, what is a good squat for a woman? I mean, I would love to see a world where every woman is squatting at least their body weight. Right, but think about this. Those numbers are so – There's no scientific data that says, like, this is the minimum of what you should achieve. This is a problem. This is arbitrary. We don't know. All of it is arbitrary powerlifting or bodybuilding people, classifying people by, like, their – by just, like, what's on average.

1:24:07But we don't know if there's, like, so –

1:24:08Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And that's why I asked you about the squat. Do we know that – I mean, we could say that we want leg strength for walking, getting off the floor. We know that it's, you know, for women, this is one of the largest places where they hold more of their muscle mass is actually their legs. So for insulin sensitivity. Yeah. But again, my question is, do you – is there a reason that you think about that? Like why? So the one reason I really think about squatting and then hinging, which we can get to is more like picking something off of the floor, bending of the hips, is because those specifically, especially in women, load the hips and spine, which is where we see a lot of bone mineral density loss.

1:24:44So for me, for women, I always really emphasize. And that's why like if women are going to go to the gym and they're just going to overemphasize like days and booty days, I don't care because that's what's probably the most important thing anyway. Like I'm fine with that. Like you get your hip thrust on. You do you, girl. Right? Because to your point, there's a lot of lower body. Women have more lower body muscle than they do upper body muscle. Our gaps in strength and muscle, they are slightly smaller than to men's when you think about sex differences. Upper bodies are more great.

1:25:11Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:That it is not based on training. Because people will say, well, you know, men and women are relatively the same strength. Have you heard that? They have the same relative strength? Yes. I mean, do they? If we're talking about now mass and men have more mass. Yes. Then that doesn't, I mean. Yeah. So there seems to be a bigger gap and disparity in the upper body strength between men and women than lower body strength. But also then in the studies that show like women gain just as much muscle as men, like they'll actually gain more relative upper body strength. But I also just think that's because women typically are under training before you go into those studies.

1:25:47So they're gaining more because they don't have that same training baseline going into it. But when I think about training in general for women, like yes, I want women to train upper body, back, chest, shoulders. Like it's important to train your whole body. I think it's important. But like if a woman ever bench pressed in her entire life, she's probably going to be fine. But if she's not loading her hips and spine, I'm more worried about her. That would be one. Hips and spine work. Yes. And one, there's more muscle in the lower body. But two, we start to see more of that bone mineral density loss.

1:26:14Like if you go and get a DEXA for bone density to test to see what you're at, they're going to do a hip and spine DEXA. They're going to look at the greater trochanter and your hip there and then your lower vertebrae because that's where more of that density loss. That doesn't mean you can't have density loss across your body. Athletic populations of women get stress fractures all over. Like bone density is important beyond just those locations. And that's why you want the hip hinge, the squat. Yeah, because I want to load your lower body. I want you to load either on your back or pulling up off the floor or picking up or something where you're pressing against.

1:26:46Like I want you to load that lower body for that reason because I know we haven't talked about bone a lot, but bone responds to intensity and load, right? So you need that stress and strain on it.

1:26:56Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Bone responds to intensity and load. Give me an example. So the two things that bone responds to very well is resistance training or power plyometric training because it's putting a lot of force into the bone. And then that stress signal of that force being put in the bone or the muscle pulling against it is what signals it to make more bone cells. People think bone is static, but it's actually very plastic. It keeps kind of regenerating itself or building or breaking down itself over time. And so that sends the signals to it. So something like walking isn't enough to put that much load and impact into the bone.

1:27:30Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I went on my friend's podcast, very dear friend. Yeah. And I said, walking is not enough. And people, Doc, they were so offended. I actually know because I was sent it like a million times. But that is, they're wrong. It's not enough. I'm incredibly rigorous about what holds a permanent place in my regular protocol. And thanks to one of the sponsors of this episode, Bond Charge Red Light Face Mask, earned it. Now, let's be honest, between running a practice, recording podcasts, traveling, and raising two children, this is a full-time job. Okay, time is actively trying to age me, I am telling you, but I'd like to keep my skin as healthy as I can for long.

1:28:18Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But I'm not interested in spending a ton of money on trendy nonsense. What caught my attention is the science. Bond Charge uses red light at 630 nanometers and near infrared light at 850 nanometers. These are wavelengths that have been studied for their role in photobiomodulation, a process that supports cellular energy production and healthy skin. What keeps me using it is how easy it is. 10 minutes a day, completely wireless. wireless. You heard me right. I wear it while reading or working at night. And now you will also look like a 1980s sci-fi character while wearing it. But friends, that is a sacrifice I am willing to make for efficiency and effectiveness.

1:29:03Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:If you're looking for a science-backed tool that fits into real life, Bond Charge delivers. Go to bondcharge.com. That's B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com to save 15 % on your Bond Charge red light face mask. Code Dr. Lion for 15 % off. Bondcharge.com. And my biggest thing is back to our whole conversation of earlier, right? And I, if I'm hearing you say walking is not enough. It's not enough for bone. It's not enough for muscle growth. And my biggest thing is like, when we think about improving cardiovascular fitness, if walking is enough to get you, your heart rate elevated enough. Wait a second. Now you're making accommodations for, we're not doing that.

1:29:47Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Guys, everybody knows it's not enough. Well, what I'm saying is that if that is enough of a physiological stressor, that that is putting you into those upper thresholds, that's a sign that you need to gain more fitness, right? Like that's kind of like a – it can be for some people really starting out, but that's a sign that over time walking should become a baseline, not a – Should not be a form of exercise. Not just the physiological stressor for that exercise adaptation, right? So yeah, swimming also. Swimming and biking too, that's offloading. that I feel like a lot of elderly populations get prescribed that, but that's not really bone loading.

1:30:18So we want to make sure we're having something that is like loading that bone specifically, especially women have higher rates of bone loss than males. They're more at risk for osteoporosis. And also there appears to be more of a rapid loss of bone right around the menopause transition.

1:30:33Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Because we do know estrogen is important. And that's one of those things where estrogen is directly associated with that. So that's a big reason for like women specifically are people starting out and it's like not like men don't benefit from that too like loading your lower body is good for everybody hinge and again because as we think about how we choose because now the acsm it's it's a little loose in terms of there's so much choice yes hinge you like and what's an example of a hinge so hinge is a deadlift and again that can be elevated that can be um something done with a machine that is a deadlift like it doesn't have to be that it could be a hip morning and you know what we'll do is we will schedule this differently and also we'll go through that yeah we should go through that for people yeah yeah because i don't think they know what those because people say squat and hinge or push and pull and no one knows what that means right and then you know i i do like let's train our upper bodies because you're gonna have to pick things up you're gonna have to push things overhead yeah like you're gonna have to be strong whole body um and so that would be pushing away from your chest that's a push-up uh bench press a Dumbbell chest press.

1:31:37Do you think a pushup is important? It could be. It could be a great, and it can be elevated, right? If you need to start to work your way down, I think it's a great skill to obtain. But something that's pushing you away or weight away from you would be an upper body push. And then you also have upper body pushes overhead. So shoulder presses, barbell overhead press, any sort of pressing overhead. And then you can have pulling towards you. So you have your row, your lat pull down, your pull up, anything that's pulling that weight towards your body. So similarly, it's like very similar. Upper body, you can either push or pull weight away from you.

1:32:09And upper body, you can push or pull weight away from you. And if you were to have a workout program with just four exercises in it, like three days a week, you could do one of each of those and have like a very complete program three days a week that's going to hit most of those things from the guidelines or those minimums. Trained, loaded enough, heavy enough that you'll see a lot of adaptations and gains. It's a really simple way to approach it. And you can mix in things like power, plyometrics, jumping, core, things like that. I like that. I want to touch on this plyometric component for bones specifically, or maybe not.

1:32:41Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you think that everyone should be doing some kind of plyometric? So I have this thing that I'm calling the women's training triad actually right now, and the base is strength and power, and the top is aerobic training. So you want to have this strong foundation and base of muscular health and fitness. And how do you define power? So I classify power into things that are either specifically power training, and I'll define that in a second, plyometrics, jumping, hopping, skipping, something where you are moving weight or your body rapidly. Oh, I like this. Jumping, hop. Okay. Yeah. So I kind of bucket them all in together because I'm sure you've heard like the new term is power penia and we start to lose power.

1:33:16Have you not heard of this? Okay. So we start to lose power faster than we lose strength as we age. And I think a lot of people have always over focused on like the classic bodybuilder pro program for hypertrophy or a lot of the strength stuff, but we lose power as we age. And that's like your ability to catch yourself when you fall or get up out of a chair quickly or react to something. Before we lose strength.

1:33:33Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And we start to lose it more rapidly. We're starting to see more data that's showing that. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Do you think that that's because people are not training power? I think it's a mix of people are not training in general and they're not training power. Yeah. Because... Well, no one trains, unless you're an athlete and you're 20, you don't do it. Exactly. We do get a denervation of muscle and the neuro connection. yeah but people don't train power just like they don't you know there's all these people who talk about like we don't really sprint or move fast or train power like all that stuff seems to be reserved for athletes and people in their youth but we can adapt and keep doing those as they age they're actually really important right power penia is the new power penia is the new sarcopenia yeah but i i think it's important because power is if we're talking about athletes that's really great for improving your running performance reducing injury risk all those things having stronger denser bones, which are really important for people who have endurance-based goals.

1:34:29If you're a strength athlete, being able to move weight quickly or have more power is going to benefit you because that's a characteristic of muscle that you want for the sport or whatever you're doing. But also when we're thinking about general population individuals, one, we don't want power loss as we age, especially with fall risks being higher in women and fragility being higher. But also when we look at the studies that look at bone health, we also see that it's usually strengthening combined with some sort of jumping or landing based training to put that loaded impact on the bones. And it's not to say that strength training has no benefit without that.

1:35:01It does, but you usually see them combined or even like really like simple things like pogo hops, like sets of 10 across a year improves bone density in perimenopausal women. So even little bits of impact. So I like, I kind of group them all together. I have a question. Running if you're, okay. Running isn't enough. But you would. There's a lot of loaded impact, which is why I can. And it's unilateral, isn't it? Yes. And it is more than walking or swimming or biking. So it's like a spectrum, right? So but running still isn't like it's – there is a lot of load and impact on your bones and your body impact into that is really significant.

1:35:34But it's just still not as great as like true jump landing. You know what I mean? Versus there's a little bit more elasticity and support and that. So it's kind of on the spectrum. So running is closer to this than walking is or swimming or biking. But it's not quite – So if someone was to go from full sedentary to running, they probably would get a little bit of benefit here. But they wouldn't maximize that benefit across it. And for a lot of people, the reason I group these together is because it can be intimidating. You've never done it. A lot of women struggle with pelvic floor stuff or people might have knee injuries.

1:36:07So I'm not going to tell everyone they have to go do depth jumps to height because that might not be realistic or that might not be the starting point for them. But I put these together because you can also move weight quickly. So that's going to a little bit more into the guidelines that they talked about power

1:36:18Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:there is like 60 to 70 percent of your one rep max but you're doing it quickly more rapidly give me an example because that's my favorite form of cardio yeah is doing kettlebell swings yeah it would be like kettlebell swings maybe dumbbell thrusters maybe like you take a squat and instead of doing it for heavy load you're doing it as quickly as you can do you count that as part as cardio or is that i still count that as i don't count anything really that's like doesn't have a cardiovascular component as cardio there's some overlap with that kind of thing but i kind of still bucket them out because those pathways we talked about earlier but i couldn't yeah so there's a little bit of overlap yeah if you're like if i call you and i say alissa i'm doing cardio and it's going to be 50 i don't know 50 kettlebell swings and then i'm going to do 50 broad jumps and then i'm going to do you're not counting that as my cardio not in the traditional sense because what happens is the your heart rate will go up because it's very central demanding and there's a lot of muscular intensity.

1:37:18It's hard. So there's going to be an overlap in some of that, like your cardiovascular system is contributing to that exercise, but you're not stimulating those pathways of adaptation. And even the VO2 max contribution of that is it's artificially like a lot, your heart rate will be artificially higher than the actual VO2 max contribution of that exercise. So it's not that it can't have a cardio. People get really mad. That's where my pitchforks come for me. Yeah. Martin would probably disagree with you. Really? I think there's an overlap there, But I think when we think about like true, true aerobic stuff, I usually like if you're to do something like that, because I do stuff like that too.

1:37:51I love throwing in like a bike or ski or a row in it. So there's still that like traditional, because you can't get as much power output like aerobically, I guess, or even anaerobically from something like a kettlebell swing as you would if you went on a rower and did a max one minute effort, so to speak. So I think that I like when we – I'm not against those things. I do them. But I think that I usually like to say, like, let's throw in some sort of component of, like, classic cardio.

1:38:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But you like this for power because we're talking about – Yes, but I like it for power. Okay. How often do people need to do some kind of power in an ideal world? Yeah. Or someone who is or has been training. For example, me because now I'm going to start jumping. Yeah. You could start with, like, one day a week or even spacing it off. Say you lift three days a week. You could put it a little bit in each one of those programs or some people do like a whole day dedicated to that. But you want to start out with less and build, especially if you're doing like jumping or landing or plyometrics in that more formal sense.

1:38:47You want to start with like just like 50 hops in a day. But the goal is 50 hops in a day, every day. I think that that makes sense. And then you can build or you can build in like – so you might start with like pogo hops, like really simple double leg hopping if you haven't done a lot of this before. Because this is also a lot of stress and strain on – But not a pogo. No, not a pogo stick. They're just like little hops. Very, very gentle. What about jump rope? That could be a great example of that too. I just tried that recently.

1:39:11Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:I almost totally wiped out. Yeah, it's hard. So you can start with really low level biometrics. But then if you want to keep gaining skill, you can start going from like double leg hops to single leg hops. What's the minimum effective dose to there's the maintaining the power that you have and then there's improving it? Yeah. So the suggested hops or landings or whatever you want to call it in like traditional power plyometric like jumping type literature is somewhere around like 50 to 100 hops a day. But you can build that up. But again, it takes that building of it. No, we don't. Yes. But even these – there's like some of the studies I was mentioning earlier that are doing like just a couple sets of pogo hops and they're like menopausal women across a week.

1:39:53I think that's awesome. They were doing like, I maybe like, maybe at the end, like 100 hops a day a few times a week. I think that's awesome. And it's nothing aggressive. It's nothing crazy kind of thing. I don't think we have a minimum for like, if you're doing like speed rep back squats, I don't think there's like a threshold minimum we have established for that kind of thing. But yeah, you just want to make sure, because for a lot of people you can get injured if you just like go straight to doing what I do. And if you start doing like lateral hops to box jumps, that might be a little aggressive.

1:40:21But you can start with this and we still see these improvements with this scene with it. And then you can obviously keep going and keep progressing from there. The thing is that I don't think we have, we have these trials in older adults where they have them do strength or power training and they do see these improvements. But there's sometimes so much of a disconnect between like performance literature and health literature that we don't have this like, well, if you get to moderate level plyometrics, you actually have XYZ health benefits from it. It's kind of right now you can just think of it as a spectrum.

1:40:48Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Okay. We talked about the strength, the power. What else? You said there was the triad. Yeah. So I call that like, and really I call it the women's training triad because that's just like, I've now just kind of been talking a lot more to women, but it's really just like performance for health, longevity, fitness. And essentially it's just a foundation of strength training. So strength, hypertrophy, gaining muscle, being strong, getting those training sessions, but then also having that power, that moving fast, quickly type that I kind of grouped those together on that foundation because your strength and power can complement each other.

1:41:20They don't have to necessarily be thought as different. I think when I tell people they should do stuff like power-based training, they're like, when am I going to fit that in on top of everything else? I'm like, put it in your workout between your warm-up and your main sets. And just include it into your training day. It doesn't have to be its own separate thing. And then good programmed cardiovascular training. And when I say that, I mean that - You're smiling. Yeah. So many people just either do inadequate cardiovascular training where it's not stressful enough. They're going for a passively, usually walk.

1:41:48Their heart rate's barely getting up. There's no really stress or strain on their body. Or women just do this thing where they just like drink from the fire hose of every group fitness class under the sun. Or they do a lot of like moderate intensity all of the time, unintentional training. And all of that stuff is - Junk training, you mean? Kind of, yeah. It's not that there's zero benefit for health from doing that, but it's usually not specific enough to get like any meaningful adaptations past that like baseline phase of gaining adaptation

1:42:16Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:from just doing it right i used to do that yeah that was me it was just kind of low level but you know in retrospect it probably was improving my bo2 max at some point but maybe not specific yeah how much because that was one of my questions the reverse question is the minimum effective dose for someone the cardiovascular aspect for someone whose primary goal is strength yeah so i think the minimum effective dose is getting to at least the exercise guidelines, right? And then from there you can do more. That's where we can kind of tie in those conversations too of like intensity versus mode. Because if your main goal is strength and hypertrophy and you just want to do enough cardio to not die early, do it on a bike, do it on a rower.

1:42:58You don't need to run unless you want to run and you enjoy running. But also the intensity will, like we talked about earlier, influence some of that interference. So zone two gets a lot of hype, good or bad, right, wrong, and different. So if you do a really, really intense cardio session, it's probably going to have that carryover effect that we talked about earlier on that strength session. So if you're going to do a really intense cardio session, paring it away on a day where you don't care that it's interfered by your training session from the gym the day before, because you care more about that strength or it's after, or it's separated by a rest day.

1:43:35But that's where like kind of some of that conversation around zone two is helpful too because zone two is like less fatiguing. If you want it to do more volume and you're not wanting to interfere with strength, you can do more of that zone two because it's less totally fatiguing and kind of get more volume in there. But I'm a big fan of like, I think everyone should do at least one day a week of higher intensity training, whether that's HIIT training, sprint interval training, threshold training, whatever it is, like something that's pushing you above that zone four to zone five plus, I think one day a week, and for many people just starting out, like you can, like a lot of studies take sedentary people and put them on bikes and have them do HIIT.

1:44:11It's not like you can't do it, but if that feels too intimidating, you can start with lower to moderate intensity activity and build up to that with time. But I just want to start sprinting, right, on the road flat.

1:44:21Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Yeah, but we want to hear about what is in an ideal world. We all recognize that it takes time to build up, but the end goal is you want to see everyone doing some type of high intensity interval every week. Yes. Is it a, is there a length of time? I think it scales with fitness of it. You can start and it will also depend on the duration of the interval. But I think like in most classic high intensity or sprint interval sessions in anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes, you can get a lot. That's way too long. You can get a lot with the rest time and warm up build in. Like from warm up, doing your interval session, rest in between.

1:44:55Because if you're doing like a four by four, right? Like that's going to take a lot longer than maybe like a one minute on, one minute off sprint for 10 rounds type thing. Like that's a 20 minute workout.

1:45:04Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So you're about 80 % VO2 max. You're not talking about 90 plus hitting red line. Yeah. So in very, very classic sprint stuff, yeah, you can like that 10, 20 seconds in red lining. I like sprint interval training. I like interval training. They're kind of like sister and brother, right? So you can do either or of those. I just think that I would love to see a lot of people doing something that's more intense. You could also oscillate between these, right? Like there's different benefits to like doing different intensities and training around different thresholds and moving them forward. But like if you're above that essentially lactate threshold.

1:45:36And do we care about that?

1:45:37Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Why do people care about a lactate threshold for a normie? Yeah. So from a normie, the reason you care about your lactate threshold more than anything is not because you care about your next marathon performance is because that's my, the one that will never happen. Yeah, exactly. Like I care about it because it's allowing me to run faster at a higher power output with less physiological fatigue. For you, it's just an underlying reflection of those adaptations that we talked about earlier. Because if you're able to have more mitochondria, they're more capable. You're able to clear more lactate.

1:46:06You're relying more on oxidative metabolism. You're having less of that interference at the cellular level that's blunting fat oxidation. And with time, that will shift up with that.

1:46:15Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But do you believe that everyone should be able to know what their lactate threshold is? No, you don't need to know. You absolutely don't need to know what it is. But the reason I say lactate threshold is we want to train above it. Because there is more of a bigger physiological stressor. I think your last podcast just talked about this coming from that high intensity of sprint interval training. There's more of that cellular deficit that we talked about energy is greater. It's faster. It's sending faster signals to your body than like a really long slow zone two sessions going to have. So people who aren't training a lot of cardio, you know, the exercise guidelines of like 150 versus 75, it's basically the more intense you do it, the less you have to do.

1:46:53So if you – I say at least one because I'd love to see everyone do at least one day per week. You could probably do one or two. I don't think people need – I think four, five, six days because the more days of the high intensity you do, the less quality it's going to be. You're not going to be able to sustain that output every single day. But you could do like a more classic HIIT day and then a more classic sprint day. You could do those circuit interval type workouts that are mixing in. Yeah, like you could do that as part of that. Yeah.

1:47:17Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Saturdays are high intensity. We do a little bit heavier weights, but Saturdays are high intensity. And then typically we do some kind of sprint interval a few times depending on how my nervous system is. And when I say that, that sounds so just arbitrary. Yeah. Like I was traveling. Yeah, no, I totally get it. Yeah. But today was, you know, it's a max out effort, but it's 250 meters. It's nothing crazy. And it's a thrown in there for a couple. But this reminds me of something that I did want to touch up because I know we're running short on time. um nutrition for the hybrid the hybrid athlete and i am cautiously saying athlete because again there are these uh buckets where we say okay well you're a lay person a regular person which i would consider myself in that and then there's athletes yeah but i would say for overall wellness that there are certain risks um that i think are real for women and it says hybrid athletes here, you and the team and I were talking about this, the relative energy deficiency in sports, so reds.

1:48:26Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:What have you seen with chronic low energy availability and just muscle and hormone function, bone metabolism? Are there early warning signs that someone is in this energy deficit? Yeah. And I think that so many women that are pretty active will not identify as athletes. So they don't think that they're highly active and they don't realize that even taking like the jumps from like, oh, I'm doing the minimum to doing like the 150 to 300 minutes. If you increase that demand on your body and you don't match it with enough physiological resources, it might not prioritize hormonal health. So this isn't just a conversation for people.

1:49:00I mean, I train eight to 12 hours a week. This is not just a conversation for me. You don't have kids yet, do you? No. But like, that's like, people think, well, Liz, like you're crazy, you're extreme. This matters for you, right? But even a woman doing three to five or building up to that, Like training for their first half marathon, marathon, they've never been exposed to the higher volume of endurance. They often don't match that increase with that. And so do you think that it is in our practice, we work with a lot of people that are very physically active and strong medical.

1:49:30Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And one of the things that we see is that when they jump up their training, it's not that they're actually hungrier. They get to a point where they're actually less hungry. Yeah. Yeah. So there is, it's interesting because you start like, because the more you train and the more it's intense, sometimes you get that suppression of, of hunger and satiety. I also think it's a mix of like women are so conditioned to like be afraid of eating more carbohydrate or calories, or they just have never been in a position where they needed it to fuel. So they're just kind of eating their normal diet and not realizing they need to scale it up to the activity that they're doing.

1:50:02You know, again, a lot of people, they'll be like, when I talk about the importance of carbs or increasing carbs or inter-workout carbs, they're like, well, what about metabolic disease? I'm like, but I'm not talking about eating past your body's capacity for that. I'm talking about matching your body's need for that. And so what happens in women is that when you have these energy deficits, so that's like chronically across time, you have these big deficits of energy that mix match between your activity level and what your body needs for physiological function. It will start to basically like downregulate and or deprioritize hormonal function because it's a costly and it's like it doesn't want to make a baby if there's an environment that has scarce resources.

1:50:37So that's where more of the, you know, we talk about the cycle training, like a bigger risk for female health is the down regulation of the menstrual cycle. Like that is a, you know, you want to talk about increased stress in the body and cortisol and inflammation and bone risk.

1:50:50Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:For the women that want to get pregnant, that's one of the things that we have them make sure that they're eating breakfast. Yeah, because there is, it's still early data, but there's data that suggests like within day deficits can also be cumulatively stressful. Or carbohydrate availability deficits can become stressful because they're not feeling that activity. So for women, I think they wait until they miss their period. And that's not the first warning sign. That is the red flag. That is like the alarms going off. There is a spectrum of steps that your menstrual cycle dysfunction starts to take.

1:51:20And I think a lot of women, they've never tracked their cycle. They're not aware of their phases. They don't know where they're at.

1:51:23Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you think it's a cycle when you are talking to your community? Is there something that is a really early warning sign? So most women aren't testing ovulation until they try to have a baby. But if you're missing ovulatory cycles frequency, that's a sign. What you might start to notice instead, because you might not be tracking ovulation, so you might not know, is that your luteal phase, your luteal phase is pretty standard in how long it is. It's usually like about 13, 14 days after you ovulate to your next period. If you start to notice that that's shorter, or you start to suddenly have a lot lighter cycles or shorter cycles than normal because your progesterone isn't being elevated, so you're not building up that lining.

1:51:59Like those might, don't just wait until you're missing your period entirely. If the duration of your cycle starts to really shift or even like phase to phase, like obviously we talked about earlier that you can change month to month. But like if you start to see these acute little differences in your cycle, you might be having menstrual cycle dysfunction, luteal phase deficiency, and ovulation, all these fancy terms. Long before your body's not ovulating, you have luteal phase deficiency and now you actually have amenorrhea. Like that is the final step. And that's, so I think that for so many women, they don't, you know, not everyone, but a lot of women don't even know what phase of their cycle they're in or when they're getting it.

1:52:37Others period surprises them. So, you know, the first thing would be to have like some sort of cycle awareness of just knowing where you're at, what's normal for you. But then paying attention to like when those things start to change a lot, if they get really long or really short in cycle length, that's abnormal to you or outside that normal range of like, you know, if it starts, you start to get a 20 day cycle and you still get a 28 day cycle. That's a good sign. Like, hey, maybe something under the hood isn't going on or you start skipping cycles or all those little things underneath. That is worth paying attention to rather than just waiting until you don't have your period for three months.

1:53:08And the reason this is such a big deal, to your point, to the bone, is like when girls and women go into low energy availability, the bone loss is incredibly significant. And it's fast. It's very fast. And even – so in order to regain your cycle, you typically have to gain more weight than you lost to get there. You have to go past that, which can be really scary for a lot of highly active women. But even up to 12 months after weight is restored and cycle is restored, the bone density loss isn't fully restored. And so it's like you really don't want to dig yourself, especially like we think about nowadays, all of the narratives to girls in their 20s when bone density is peaking to like not resistance train, just do like yoga and Pilates, hot girl walks and like under E.

1:53:48And then it's like this perfect storm of like, okay, well, no, like that's like, that's the opposite of what we want to be doing during this time. And it's really, I mean, it's a huge risk in endurance girls, girls who are doing endurance sport. And then it's also a risk to just like sedentary women who aren't doing the typical things that you should be doing to prevent or promote bone density and loss across time.

1:54:09Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:So what about, I have two more questions before we wrap up. What about protein requirements for the concurrent training athlete? And I'm going to be very specific here. Those that are doing more endurance. So they're doing endurance and they are doing strength. Where is the evidence for protein with endurance training? Because I think that this is a misrepresented topic. Yeah. A lot of people think that endurance athletes don't need as much protein because they're not building and promoting muscle growth and they're not lifting, but you actually need potentially higher protein. And I think a lot of that is because your body doesn't want to like really use protein for energy metabolism, but it can and it will.

1:54:52And if you are in very large carbohydrate deficits or energy deficits, whether that's intra-workout or from training chronically.

1:55:00Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How do you use your fuel source as you're thinking about your own nutrition? And how do you think about your grams per kg? And then do you use branched-chain amino acids or essential amino acids into a workout? So I don't do – I mean, I did do EAAs a few years ago. I was – long story short, my PhD just gave me every gut health issue that you could possibly have from the stress. And so I was having a hard time with eating in the mornings and training. So that was one period in time in my life. I did take essential amino acids during that just so I had some amino acids available. Right now, I really just prioritize getting in protein in at my breakfast before I go out for my long runs or across the week I'm getting enough during the day.

1:55:43Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:How much protein do you typically ingest in a day? I haven't tracked in a few weeks, but when I was tracking, I was probably getting between 120 and 140 grams per day. And I'm about 141 pounds. That's about right. Yeah. So I, I try to hit somewhere in that range. Um, I don't go over because I'd rather take that for carbohydrate. It's not really necessary. I'd rather use that energy for carbohydrate. What about your carbs? When I'm in peak ultra marathon training, I'll go up to like. I'm going to take 400, 500, 600 grams of carbs a day, especially on long run days where you're taking in a ton during it.

1:56:15My day-to-day right now where I'm doing a little bit more normal training is probably in the 300s to 400 range. It's really hard to eat enough carbohydrate. It's really hard. I would rather eat the avocado and the nut butters than the carbohydrates sometimes. For me, I'm probably in the 300s when I'm just doing a normal training and it ramps up.

1:56:33Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:Do you take it – I'm very curious about where the data is for all these endurance types because we've been reading a lot because, as you know, our household is very interested in – Yeah. Your husband, he's drinking the Kool-Aid. Yes. I mean, I don't know how it is for you, but when my husband is into something, he's just like – Oh, yeah. He's into it. Yep. You would think he's always – It's been his thing his whole life. Forever. we've been playing around with the use of essential amino acids and carbohydrates because he does use the gels to help with just to be able to keep going and not lose too much muscle.

1:57:10Yeah. So I think that one, to add on to what we talked about earlier, I always bring like a protein shake with me. So as soon as I finish my long run, I drink that. So I immediately have protein. I know that like post-workout timing, like quote unquote, doesn't matter as much, as much as getting it in the whole day. But if I'm going out for a three, four, five hour run, I'm trying to get amino acids in my body right away. Typically the good you want to get some carbs in with that to restore that but intra-workout I do I'm really big on carbohydrate feeding for endurance activity so I get between 60 and 90 grams of carbs per hour on my long runs.

1:57:43Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:And how fast how do you think about your heart rate or how do you dose that out? So for me I I really just kind of build up to it over time. And then I find that the more intense it is, the less I can handle versus the slower I'm going, the more I can do. But if I'm doing like a – The more carbohydrates you can do. Yeah, but if I'm doing a trail run, that's like zone one mostly, like very easy, long training run. I can tell that I don't need 90 grams of carbs in that training session to fuel it kind of thing. But for me, I think about too not just hitting that carbs to fuel my session, but hitting those carbs so that my body isn't using protein from my muscles or my body as an energy source.

1:58:24Um, also it helps with recovery. Like if you think about concurrent training and hybrid training, you know, if you eat enough intro workout nutrition and daily nutrition after a long run, you're going to feel a lot better when you show up to the gym Monday than if you eat 30 grams of carbs per hour, didn't hit your protein for the day and then try to show up that same resistance training session on Monday. So that's the way I think about it. I would love to eat a little bit. This is actually a lesson that I learned in my last ultra. Um, there wasn't

1:58:49Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:a, how long is an ultra a hundred, a hundred plus an ultra is anything 32 miles or 50 kilometers and longer. Oh yeah. An ultra is it's only 32 miles. Yeah. It starts at the 50k distance. Yeah. Yeah. I know. It's crazy. It starts at the 50k distance. So I just ran on ultra marathon that it was supposed to be 100K, but it ended up being like 69 miles. And the reason it was so bad for me is that I didn't have enough food food. Like I had done the perfect gels and the electrolytes, but I didn't have enough real food in my system and my stomach. Part of that was I was assuming to rely on aid stations more and the aid stations didn't have quite what I needed.

1:59:23And that's feedback I gave. I'm friends with the RD and he took it for next year. But what ended up happening is that I just kind of finished that thing totally depleted and I needed more of that. You know, what we see in ultra endurance is that you need a little bit of protein. You want some protein you want and it's nothing crazy it's like something like 10 15 grams an hour it's nothing crazy that you need to get in i do struggle with gi issues with running so for me i have to be really careful about like the sources of protein more so fat like protein's kind of easy to get in

1:59:49Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:undigested in a liquid form but why not use this is exactly why we use the essential amino acids exactly right and it's really something i should do a lot of gels historically in the past used to have them in there but that was because of the way that essential amino acids interact with the brain and fatigue and for delaying that kind of thing. Which is what we talked about, which is what we were kind of talking about. Yeah, I have thought about that more. I got away from it the last few years. Oh, but awesome. Yeah, I thought about that. I was like, it would be great because honestly, like that, I'm not so much worried about like muscle loss when it comes to my training because I'm still in resistance training during it.

2:00:20But in an event like that, especially now that it's like kind of popular to over race like ultra endurance and marathon races, that's one thing I don't do. Like I know like we talk about muscle loss and preserving muscle. I take seasons intentionally where I really just lift a lot. I'm still always running or doing endurance training, but also I can handle a lot more without that interference on my body because I have a, I raised the floor. But I take time to actually like build back up. What's crazy is when I was on my PhD, I would do DEXs and VO2 maxes all the time just because I was always participating in my studies and being a lab rat.

2:00:51And I could watch my bone density oscillate with my training cycles. And I always have really high bone density, but I take periods of time off. But I think about like I finished that race so depleted, that energy deficit that I was in. I spent that whole next week just eating as much as I could to recover because that probably was a greater negative influence on my musculature than the peaking block where I was running 10 hours a week and lifting on top of it. You know what I mean? Like that's probably more of where that big stress and strength comes from. So I do try – like right now I'm ramping back up lifting.

2:01:21I'm doing a lot more – like I'm going to go into an intentional season of at least rebuilding that back. And that's like my big thing with hybrid training is I call it the seasons approach, but it's how athletes train. You're not just doing 100 % endurance training all the time. Like you need to spend time developing strength and hypertrophy. And especially if you're someone who lacks that and you've never built that, you really should take a period of time actually like scaling back the endurance so you can create that recovery space to ramp up and build. And that's a really important message for women who've neglected strength training their whole life or endurance athletes who have never really strength trained.

2:01:54They just have always done endurance training. you know, it's really hard and scary, but like taking a time where you step back and you really intentionally drive up that, I mean, spend a year really lifting, right? I love that. I love that advice. Yeah. I tell it to women too all the time. I love that advice. Spend a year. I call it like spend a year, like not like chronically yo-yo dieting and flipping between workout programs, just spend a year feeding and lifting and it will change so much in your life for you, but you have to just give it time, right? Cause it's really, muscle is really slow to adapt, But I really like that year of all in.

2:02:25Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:It would be great if muscle was as easy as fat. Yeah. Yeah. It just really. For some reason, it's not. Yeah. So that's kind of like to round up my whole philosophy there on all of that. Hopefully that touches on all those last little bits that are cliffhanging for people. Because at the end of the day, I know we talked about endurance training a lot and some strength training. Like I need people to always walk away from conversations with me knowing that I'm very pro lifting. I am very pro lifting. Well, DocList, this has been wonderful. And I think it really creates a very great perspective for people because we oftentimes have one person that is focused on strength and one person that is focused on endurance.

2:03:05Dr. Gabrielle Lyon:But you're really this perfect intersection of both. And what I love is that you do it. Yeah. It's one thing to talk about it and then it's another to do it. And you've experimented with all of these things. and I am excited for your book and all things to come. So thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. Thank you.