Electrolytes, Creatine & Caffeine: What Actually Works? | Ste Winrow | Ep 71

0:00Stephen Winrow. Jake Dearden. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. How's this morning been? What have you been up to? I've been on the bike actually with my son. I went along the canal for an hour with him and then we had to clean the bathrooms, get ready for the holiday on Tuesday. So my wife's had me busy this morning. Beautiful, beautiful. For the people that may not know who you are, obviously I know you as a good friend. I feel like you're the go-to guy in the Northwest, especially for nutrition. Would you just be able to sum yourself up? That's very kind of you. But yeah, so I'm obviously Steve Winrow.

0:42I look after Winrow Performance, which is just a performance, nutrition, coaching, consultancy business. I guess background-wise, many, many moons ago, I started out my sporting journey playing tennis. So I did that for like a decade. I was very lucky in that period to work with some incredible coaches, travel across Europe. I made it to an okay level in terms of being a junior. But ultimately, I just didn't have it mentally. So once I finished playing tennis, I stumbled my way into uni, did an exercise physiology degree. um and then after that was when I kind of went doing the typical gym type of work I was I worked with Zach Cotton down at Strength Factory we did like a 16-week transformation program and I think that was a catalyst for me in terms of change because coming out of uni I didn't really know what to do um but yeah I mean working with him really really changed I know a lot to him for that.

1:44And then I started to do some CrossFit. So I did CrossFit for a few years and again, was never very good at CrossFit, but was lucky enough to be at CrossFit JST at the time with like Steve Fawcett, John Buller, as you know. But again, I was never great at CrossFit, but I did compete and tried to hold my own. And then I'd made a transition over to triathlon while ago now um and it was in that transition where I embarked into my postgraduate studies into performance nutrition um because I was super keen to understand like the ins and outs of physiology and nutrition and things like that for the sport itself and then I had my own kind of experiences with potentially low energy availability which we'll touch on today and kind of took that experience into my coaching and the people that I worked with.

2:39I had a bit of a passion really about trying to get people to avoid entering into that. So I guess that's the background of where I am today. I've obviously got the nutrition business and I'm incredibly looking out of, worked with the people doing their first ever events to aim me at the CrossFit Games this year, winning the CrossFit Games. So it's been an incredible journey. Yeah, no. And what strikes me is how knowledgeable you are in the field. And I don't know, how do you even get that knowledgeable for one? Like, is it just like the obsession with obviously trying to improve yourself? So say when doing triathlon, you know, you want to kind of optimize everything and nutrition is just one of them aspects and you're kind of hyper-focused on that.

3:27Or was it something else? okay how do you get so good at high rocks and running right but i think you are right i think it's a it's a passion type of situation really um when i made that transition triathlon i was obsessed with trying to understand what it took what what was the nutritional requirements and the more you got reading the more you realized wow this is pretty cool i can kind of understand which might sound a bit nerdy um you could argue i'm a bit of a nerd in that sense um um but the theory was great I learned a lot in terms of that but the real learning started to come when I was working with people yeah and do you feel that's what you have the passion for now like obviously like you can do it with yourself and see the progress there but optimizing other people's journey do you feel like that's where you have absolutely yeah yeah because I can only optimize myself so far and I've never made it to the podium of an Ironman for example um but getting people to fulfill their own kind of optimal and maybe their potential.

4:32And that might look different for different people. People's optimal is very like somebody who works full-time, full-time job, parents, that optimal or that potential that they have is not necessarily going to be the same as a full-time athlete that just is training for one goal. So being able to work with those different people is a good thing. Yeah. And nutrition itself, it's one of the things it's not, it is hard work to be consistent with nutrition, but it's out the box kind of thinking really. Like you've got, everyone just thinks, oh, you train hard, you have the stimulus from training hard and then you get better.

5:12but the other things such as nutrition recovery are the things that are kind of for me like free fitness that that's kind of like the free work whereas you you just need your timings correctly you need to you're going to eat anyway but if you eat the correct things rather than the wrong things you're going to gain an advantage and it's kind of like free advantage points i always see um which i find fascinating so i wanted to make this kind of like a nutrition 101 one for athletes whether that's runners, endurance athletes, triathlon or whatever into kind of like high rocksers. So I just wanted to start off with just kind of like explaining calories, macros and what your opinion is on like food quality because I feel like that's kind of like a big subject at the moment yeah that's so obviously when it comes to calories they're simply a unit of energy um the same way as a minute is a unit of time um and obviously we all have the same hours in the day but we all use them very differently and you can probably argue the same in terms of food quality in the sense that we can all eat 2 000 calories but what makes up that 2 000 calories might be very different inter-individually.

6:32So, you know, the calories get a lot of talk around, is a calorie a calorie? Well, the reality is a calorie definitely is a calorie. You can't avoid that. But what makes that calorie up might be different in terms of its micronutrient structure or how energy dense it might be, for example. So if you strip it back to the basics of nutrition, calories into fats is nine. So you've got nine calories per gram. whereas in proteins and carbohydrates you've only got four calories per gram so fat is generally more energy dense. If you think about carbohydrates themselves you might have a carbohydrate that has relatively low nutrient profile so quite high in sugar might be more processed whereas you might have another carbohydrate that is whole grain maybe a fruit or vegetable so they're very different as well.

7:24So this kind of making up of a calorie is is important so food quality does matter um macro we've touched on macronutrients right so you know how many calories are in a macronutrient but you've got to then think about of your total calorie intake what does the macronutrient structure look like within that so if you're using percentages is it 50 carbohydrates 30 protein 20 fat for example Do you normally go off percentages when working out someone's macros? Because I know there's a couple of different ways to do it, whether you go off grams per kg of body weight or whether you do percentages. How would you go about it?

8:07Usually, for the most part, we'll use grams per kilo of body weight to try to advise athletes on what to use. that becomes particularly more important the the high kind of up the food chain the athlete might be in terms of his ability or her ability because if you are going to need say 5 000 calories in a day and you followed a 50 30 20 um structure in terms of percentages then all of them will rise exponentially together um in terms of how much you might need whereas the reality is you probably can get away with a similar amount of protein and fats per day but as your your output goes up and up your carbohydrate need will go up ah interesting so really like when you're manipulating your protein your fats and your carbohydrates normally it's the carbohydrate one that changes the most keeping things simple yeah yeah yeah you would try and maybe just keep your proteins and fats very stable all year round and manipulate your your carbohydrates I mean, yes, to some degree.

9:14Some people might obviously change depending on their personal situation. And obviously when we're talking today, a lot of what I will say is like the general guideline. And obviously there will be individuals out there who may need to have more fats or less protein, for example. So for like a general athlete out there, in terms of should we go grams per kg of body weight for, say, protein? but what would the ideal amount be? Usually I would say some from my practice would be around 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilo of body weight per day. So that if you're an 80 kilo athlete, that could be somewhere around 160 grams, for example, at two grams per kilo.

10:01Obviously, if that individual is maybe going into a phase where they're trying to lose weight, they might increase the amount of protein. um and as well if you are a high output athlete generally like by just sheer volume of food your protein might increase as well um and i don't think there's too much evidence out there the minute to suggest that going up towards three grams per kilo is going to have too much of a negative health effect unless you've got kidney issues of course would it have much positive effect so say you just said that 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kg your body weight is kind of like optimal so you don't want to go under that because you might struggle to recover but going over that are you going to recover better or i don't know i know there's been you know so many studies out there about this um i'm just intrigued what you think i guess it depends who you would speak to in the research world there'll be different camps some camps will say you know you really don't need to go much above 1.6 grams per kilo where there'll be other cancers say look we can go up to three grams per kilo i think it kind of depends on you as an individual and what fits your lifestyle um ideally we wouldn't want to maybe go below like 1.4 as an athlete grams per kilo um but again like going up to three grams per kilo if you're trying to get the most amount of carbohydrates in that amount of protein will eat away how much carbohydrates that you can consume within a certain calorie budget.

11:32So it's just that balancing out between them. And is that because protein's a little bit more satiating or is it just because the amount of... It's just simple maths. Protein is more and more satiating. The macronutrients protein will provide you more society. So it's great for dieting. Yeah. Obviously great for recovery, but don't stress too much. If you're hitting that 1.6 grams per kg of body weight, then you shouldn't really worry. much more about if you're having you shouldn't stress over it yeah it's just the minimum that you should really hit and then anything above that is kind of like a positive but yeah yeah it's about working it out within your own individual kind of calorie structure if you like so for some people having 1.6 gram per kilo allows them to have quite a lot of carbohydrates but that individual might not have the best habits when it comes to carbohydrate intake So if they increase their protein, which they might get from chicken, which is a lean protein source, packed with amino acids and stuff like that.

12:35So that might be better than, say, if the individual is getting an extra 100 grams from Frosties in the middle of the day. So it's that balancing out between. Perfect. But from a mathematical perspective, you are looking at if you have three grams per kilo as an 80 kilo athlete, so that's going to be 240 grams so you're taking away maybe 80 grams worth of carbohydrates that you could be having as an athlete okay then so what about fats i know there's a lot of controversy on how much fat you should be having having but what's kind of like the minimum you should be having every day because are fats good for hormone health absolutely yeah um the funny thing about fats and protein you can't live without them you could live without carbohydrates for an extended period of time be a bit of a miserable life no i mean each to their own but um yeah fats are a very important nutrient they're going to help with like the absorption of fat soluble vitamins a d e k which is particularly important.

13:44Yes, they're involved in testosterone and other sex hormones as well. So they are a very important nutrient. So just on that, say if you have vitamin D, if you don't have any fats within your diet and you're taking vitamin D, normally it's in a fat-soluble like vitamin and that's why it is in that because you can only absorb it through fats. Is that right? It's not that you can only absorb it through fats. it just will help that facilitation of vitamin D into the system. So there's some vitamins that just aren't absorbable without fats? Yes, A, D, E, and K would require fats to aid their absorption into the body.

14:29Okay. Yeah. Sorry, off on a side note there. Yeah, so with the, like you say, to keep hormone levels healthy and stuff like that, what's kind of like the minimum an athlete should be having? So I don't particularly like to bring an athlete below 0.5 grams per kilo on their fat intake. So again, an 80 kilo individual wouldn't really like to bring them below 40. It would generally, it would be down at that level in situations where they are trying to lose weight because we could keep their carbohydrates higher and the proteins at a stable level whilst being in a lower calorie amount. so if we reduce 10 grams of fat we'll be able to reduce 90 calories we reduce 10 grams of carbs it's only 40 calories i find that so interesting especially as like an athlete that's i eat probably 5 000 calories a day even just trace amounts of fat throughout the day probably add up to about 60 grams of fats it's very hard to actually get your fats that low in my opinion when you're eating maybe it's different if you're only consuming 2 000 calories yeah um but uh Yeah, just in like trace amounts through things that you think are just high carbohydrate, they've normally got a little bit of fat in.

15:48Does it matter what kind of fats this should consist of? Yeah, it does. So obviously if I was to give a target of say 80 grams of fats, then I would ideally like you to get that from mono or polyunsaturated type of fats, salmon olive oil things like that nuts seeds i would not i would rather do that than use donuts and pies to get to your fat number okay and donuts and pies are trans fats yeah or saturated fats and then what are animal fats so say for example i'm having a ribeye steak high in fat what kind of fat is that we could have both so it might have a combination of mon monoe and polyunsaturated fats within it.

16:34But obviously there might be a high content of saturated fat, but everything is fine in moderation. Okay. If you're eating a high fat steak twice a day, every day, that might become problematic. But if not, you should be all right in moderation. Okay. Okay, cool. um and then so you you work out your calories from the minimum fats that you have or whatever or your fat target your protein target and then the rest are you just aiming for kind of carbohydrate yeah yeah so it's like for an athlete we're looking to periodize carbohydrate intake so if we can keep fats at a certain level and proteins at a certain level depending on the demand of the day we would then increase or decrease the carbohydrate intake dependent on that demand and we always aiming for say we're not bothered about and we'll move on to kind of like changing body composition and stuff like that later but uh for performance are we aiming for maintenance calories are we aiming for like a surplus are we okay to be in deficit like well what are we kind of aiming for well i guess the the challenge is the body doesn't stay still every day.

17:48I think where some people go wrong is that there's like this line in the sand drawn on Sunday evening and Monday begins and it's all brand new. You know, for a lot of people, they do a lot of the volume on the weekend, a lot of training over the weekend. And to recover from that requires calories. You know, so understanding what a deficit is, what maintenance is and what a surplus is on a day-to-day basis can be pretty challenging for an athlete, particularly at a high volume. If you're doing very similar training each day, it's not going to change all that much. But it can for an athlete. So yes, there'll be periods where you're in a deficit, either intentionally or unintentionally.

18:27There'll be periods where you might be at maintenance and there'll be periods where you potentially need to go above and beyond what you need, which what I've found in working with people is that can be quite a scary concept for people to actually 3001 calories rather than 3000 because there's a fear of weight gain at that point but it sometimes is necessary in order to facilitate recovery adaptation and your subsequent performance i remember you putting on a post uh about i think it the example was like an ultramarathon and you were saying that you might do a 100k ultramarathon on a saturday or a 50k ultramarathon basically a single day event that's a long duration on a saturday and then a sunday people will go back to because they're completely resting they'll go back to eating their resting calories which might be kind of like 1800 whatever the bmr is plus plus a little bit so they might end up eating like 2000 calories or whatever and you the interesting thing that you said was your body's recovering so much that it actually requires more a day after a big event yeah and and people don't really understand that we'd just be able to go into that a little bit more because i think i butchered it there no no it's it's simple really there's there's evidence out there there's research papers that have done on this either in like rugby players graham close and he did a study where they just basically brought the the rugby players in in the days leading up to the match and then they did their so they measured their resting metabolic rate in the lab so they put the mask on, measure the resting metabolic rate, say that's 2000 calories, do the game, bring them back afterwards, measure the resting metabolic rate again.

20:10And they found that on average, like there was about 500 calories more at rest. So ultimately those athletes needed 500 calories extra than what the typical baseline would be in order to facilitate recovery. um there was a paper as well done in uh 100 mile ultra runners so they tracked their intake and looked at their resting metabolic rates and i think the day after the race it was something like 4 000 calories that the their energy need was the day after the event and they were just sat around doing nothing and there was two athletes in that studio not going to butcher it and try and remember it too much but i do remember one of the athletes needing 4 000 calories roughly the day after the event finished when that it might be 2 000 usually that's crazy that's just from your body recovering i've experienced it before like after doing like a huge event like that or even even like a marathon like your heart rate is probably like 10 20 beats higher the next day and i assume that's just because your body's recovering and you're fatigued and it's kind kind of like working harder to just, yeah, get recovered.

21:24Yeah. The analogy I use is just recovery doesn't come for free. It doesn't. You know, it's going to require calories in order to produce the processes required to facilitate recovery in the body because the body's constantly trying to get back to homeostasis. Yeah. And then touching back on carbohydrates, if you was to, obviously you said that you just make up the rest of your calories with carbohydrates but if there was kind of like a gram per kg you'd recommend for someone who's working out this might be someone who's working out one or two times a day but they're doing like medium to high intensity work like but i feel like people don't understand really that like even an easy run is burning a lot of carbohydrates people think oh like i'm in this fat burning zone because my heart rate's quite low but really it's still very taxing and it's not just the high intensity stuff that requires carbohydrates it's also the lower intensity stuff as well um so is there like anything that you'd suggest whether it's grams per hour of exercise or anything like that so as a generic guideline i can always start with with maybe a recreational athlete at least where you would use like a three to one principle so three grams per kilo carbs two grams per kilo protein one gram kilo fats it could be a starting point for some people and then you would try to look at that and and see whether that fit within the calorie structure that they they kind of need so if that was me i'm 80 kilograms so we've got 240 grams of carbohydrates there we've got 160 grams of uh protein and then we've got 80 grams of fat um roughly if we how many calories would that be roughly so what's what's that if you go 260 plus sorry 240 plus 160 is yep uh sorry we're butchering this now aren't we but yeah 160 plus 240 times 400 times four so that's 1600 calories coming from your protein and carbohydrates and then 80 times 9 80 times 9 because there's 9 calories per gram of fat uh that's 720 so it's somewhere around 2300 calories right yeah so that we're not getting any gold points for uh maths today are we no definitely not but um interesting so for a recreational athlete that that that would be roughly around right and is that like kind of like just training once a day yeah so that could be a useful starting point to have with people when they're looking at their diet and then obviously depending on how much training that they're doing or what their energy needs are they would maybe increase or decrease carbohydrates accordingly yeah and would you just say for example we're going from one session to two sessions you just increase the carbohydrates and would you work out how many calories you're burning in that session and add that on you could estimate what the calorie or the expenditure would be during the next session or combined what both sessions would be um i think it's probably useful at this point to go back and try and understand what constitutes overall energy expenditure so when we say resting metabolic rate that's just the amount of calories that you're going to burn lying down doing nothing it's just general processes muscle turnover bone turnover enzymatic reactions that kind of stuff so for your heart to work brain to work that's resting metabolic rate that's the bulk of the calories that a regular person will expend in a day and roughly how how what would this range be that would depend on the on the person yeah body size um there's lots of things that might impact resting metabolic rate age but it could be from kind of like low end if you're a really small person maybe 1 ,200 to like 2 ,500 being like a big rugby player or something yeah yeah potentially like i've had mine done mine was 2 ,099 okay um 84 kilos um i've had other people who've come through with like 16 1700 for the rest of metabolic rate but much smaller um so it is it is an individual thing if if you want to know exactly you would have to get a mat an actual test done put a mask on and say and and the things that kind of like affect this because a lot of people say oh my my basal metabolic rate is super low or my metabolism's low that that's kind of like the i feel like that's the word that people use for for the basal metabolic rate my metabolism's low so if they wanted to increase increase that just how many calories they burn just sitting there how would you how would you go about that i'm not sure that you could probably make any meaningful difference to your metabolism so when people say oh like you need to build more muscle because then if you're a little bit bigger you can burn more calories at rest is that is that is that true or does it not make is it a bit overrated that statement that is true but so at that point what you're doing there is muscle is is an active metabolically active tissue fat is not so if you increase your muscle mass you will indeed raise your metabolic rate because there will be more um calories required to for that active tissue whereas if you increase your fats it's not metabolically active so an increase in body fat will not increase your metabolic rate.

27:02As I was saying before, in terms of changing like your metabolism, yes, increasing muscle can do that. But when people say, oh, I have a slow metabolism or I have a fast metabolism, it's more, it's not really a thing as such. I mean, it may be for some, but in general, it's not. Yeah. I feel like that's a very touchy subject as well. It is. Yeah. Yeah. yeah we'll stop there with that one might get some meat no no no i um when people say oh i can eat everything um i get and they don't put on weight and i can eat as much as i want i don't put on weight i i actually in my head like the first thing i come to is like i'm a bit worried for them because like is their body not digesting the food properly because that can be a thing right it can be a thing where like your body i don't want to say isn't healthy enough but like isn't isn't getting the nutrients out of the food that you're eating and it's just passing through you and for me that's the story like uh and i don't know whether yeah you probably yeah i mean i don't know whether that's a metabolism thing as such um or whether that's an appetite thing like everybody's different yeah um and you are right like i've worked with people who don't ever want to eat and then i've worked with people who are constantly hungry um and both sides of that coin of they have their own worries so one side will be like i'm always hungry am i going to get fat and the other one is i'm always hungry i'm i can't eat enough so there's constant um differences in in in people um i would always rather work with a hungry athlete than a not hungry athlete because it tells me that kind of things are probably firing to some degree um particularly appetite wise and they're much more able to fuel correctly whereas there is quite a lot of people out there who'll finish a training session and they don't want to eat at all and they don't eat because they're not hungry and they think well i'm not hungry so i'll save my calories for later on when i know i'm hungry later on in the evening and you're kind of missing that window whereas a high appetite athlete is going to be give me the food and they'll be eating constantly which is probably preferential but and you mentioned about the absorption of nutrients that could be a potential issue with them.

29:23Generally not, but it can be. Obviously, if you think about protein, you probably lose 20 % to 30 % of the proteins that you consume to the thermic effect of food. So for every 100 calories, you might only derive 80 calories. So if you have a super, super high protein intake, you might think that you're consuming a thousand calories it might be 800 so i mean it's a simplistic way of looking about it um but that is a general thing that you can reduce your absorption of food depending on the macronutrients and stuff yeah that is that is very interesting i'm definitely in the camp of i can't i i can't stop eating and i uh people say oh like people don't never believe me when I say that and then they spend a week with me and they're like fuck me jake you can eat like you are a fat person in disguise yeah and uh yeah no matter how much exercise I do I know I can put on weight if I wanted to if I just let myself like go and and yeah I'm always hungry like I always finish a meal and and this is probably a red flag for you but I I finish a meal and I'm eating a lot I'm eating like five six thousand calories a day but I I'm going to bed and I know that I could go and have another meal.

30:43I know that I could. And you're probably like, oh, well, you should go and have that other meal. But I've done that in the past and I just put on weight. And then, you know, for a fact, like power to weight ratio is super important within sport. And that power to weight ratio, like even if it's just kind of like, like, yes, for one meal, it's okay. But if you're doing that every single night, over a month that adds up and you might end up adding two kg that month of body weight or whatever and and then that can be a negative impact on your performance so it's it's kind of like a fine line i find but yeah always hungry always seem to be hungry um i don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing um never never suffered with any of the issues of stress fractures or anything like that that comes with the low energy availability, you know, Red S or anything like that.

31:38So I don't know. I just feel like I'm, like you say, when people spend a week with me, like, fuck me, you're a fat person in disguise. And do you worry about that? I'm just always starving. I'm always hungry. I could always eat. I finish a meal and I'm like, I could have that again. Every single meal. I think the first things I would be doing though would be saying like, okay, so you say you eat five, 6 ,000 calories a day. so how do you know I've a track normally through my days of eating a day of eating and I'm not gonna lie I've done a couple of day of eating videos and I've I've tracked everything obviously ate everything tracked everything uh there might be some of the days like I'll video them for YouTube and then there might be a couple of things that I've missed just because I picked something up at it and then forgot about it and then uh and then I'll go to bed I'll work out my calories like yes guys i've done like five and a half six thousand calories whatever i'll go to bed and i'll wake up absolutely starving i'm like like whereas like normally i'm not starving i don't wake up starving but like when i'm eating five thousand calories i'm like i'm still hungry yeah like yeah i think the reason it is inherently difficult to track correctly yeah you know human beings are not very good at tracking at all.

32:58The systems that we use are not very accurate either. It's quite hard. You know, we see things like up to 30, 40 % inaccuracy with tracking. Even with dieticians, you're looking at 10, 20 % in some of the research that's done. Is it the back of a food packet can be up to 20 % wrong? Yeah, either way. Correct. Either way. So if you were 100 calories on the label, it could be 80, it could be 120. Right. um and that's in the uk i think in america it's even it's even more i'm not sure in the us is another beast yeah they're just making up numbers so it's you know but this is something that is kind of self-explanatory you don't really think about it because you just expect what's on the label to be what you get but if you go tesco for a meal deal you open up that uh that sandwich or any other supermarket should we say you open up that sandwich it says there's 30 grams of protein in there and it's like three slices of chicken on it you know that's not 30 grams yeah even with the other food that's in there it's probably not 30 grams you get a pack of bagels you always get that little bagel in the in the pack so there might be one that's thicker and one that's thinner well the thinner one just might not be the same calories as the thicker one it's kind of it is difficult to understand exactly what your calorie intake is which is why tracking can be a super useful tool and definitely something that people should use but definitely not to be prisoned with for a long period.

34:23I always like to, like when first starting out, whatever it is, say if I want to improve my body composition and I want to get a little bit leaner, I might track for a couple of days, get used to what I'm eating and then normally I'm eating the same things when I'm in a dieting phase and then I'll go off it. Would you say that's okay to do? Or would you say you've got to track all the time or would you say don't even bother tracking? I think it comes down to the individual. Tracking can be a very stressful thing, but for others it can be something that they need to do for their mind. I know Harry Lightfoot.

35:03Shout out to Harry, great guy. One of the best CrossFit athletes in the country. He weighs everything. It takes travel scales with him everywhere. So whenever we're away with Red Bull, he'll come down to the breakfast buffet and he'll be measuring out his cocoa pops. and don't get me wrong, he can eat, he can eat and he's having a shitload, but he's weighing absolutely everything. It's just in his head. Yeah, and for him that might facilitate his mind and the way that he works and he gets the most out of himself by doing that. Whereas another athlete might find that super stressful and a lot of hard work.

35:38What percentage of athletes that you've kind of like worked with that are like top level have that like nth degree obsession, would you say? Not many. Not many, which is probably surprising because you think like at the top end of the spectrum, people are doing everything they can to get that advantage. So they're weighing everything out to the gram. But like you say, it is stressful, like, and sometimes inaccurate. So it's a waste of times. Well, I think maybe we can be guilty of as non-professional athletes is assuming that because professionals just train and compete that their life is just pretty easy.

36:19like they just wake up, train, cover, train again, go to sleep. But it's pretty tough to train four or five hours a day and then think about what food you've got to have, weigh that food, cook that food. Not a lot of professional athletes do just do that. Like they don't, some of them are coaching alongside that, whatever are other endeavors that they go through, sponsorship commitments. You've got to make an Instagram post. Like there's a lot of things to think about in a day. so to add that extra layer of or you've now got to weigh your chicken breasts in your packet of rice it's can be a lot for them to to take on and i try to get people to utilize it as a tool but move away from it you know if you used harry as an example it's really great to work with people like that because it makes my life a lot easier i understand what's coming coming in to some degree even if it's not necessarily accurate I know what type of food is coming in but for me it would be if I was working with him it would be can we get to a point where he understands if I weigh out 100 grams of Cocoa Pops what does that look like and if you can understand what it looks like when you've done it every day for a year you might not need to weigh it anymore you can look at it and see and you might get somewhere in and around 100 grams each time and it's kind of using and tracking as a tool to be able to really understand food start thinking like if i have a bagel and a jam i've tracked it that many times i know it's somewhere around 300 calories and 80 grams of carbs so if you need that snack you know that's what is in a bagel jam i've never actually looked at it like that yeah it's quite just a great learning tool to actually understand what's in food because otherwise you're kind of like oblivious to what's the difference between frosties and conflicts like apart from the sugar coating like what is the difference in terms of macronutrients is it uh different is it not and you would find that out by tracking and you do that.

38:16So no, that's, I like that. Yeah, yeah. I really like that. Moving on to hydration. I want to touch on big topic. I feel like it's the lowest of hanging fruits in many people's worlds. I feel like people don't drink enough in my opinion. I've been told in the past that I drink too much. I don't know if that's a thing. And that's not alcohol, by the way. that's uh that's just water but uh yeah what's your opinion on hydration where should what should people's protocols be all that jazz so it's something that what i say to people is you can get all of your nutrition right we can work on nutrition and get your timing right the amount of food that you get right the type of food that you're having and then if you just miss that trick on hydration you really you can be capitulating the rest of it hydration the effects of dehydration can impact performance around like two percent worth of dehydration which would be measured as a two percent reduction in body weight so it doesn't take much for it to impact in performance it sounds when i love it when people say this about hydration like you say it doesn't take much like two percent obviously it sounds like a tiny figure but if you're a hundred kg person that's two kilograms of water that you've lost, which is quite big when you actually like measure it out.

39:41Yeah. Because like sweat rates, obviously, which is usually measured in like endurance world, is somewhere could be 300 milliliters an hour to 1.5 liters an hour on average, right? So there's a big variation for people. But when it comes to hydration, you have both your daily need and then you have obviously a rehydration need. Daily need for me, I use mils per kilo again. So 30 to 35 milliliters per kilo of body weight would be a baseline target. So you might already be looking at it thinking, oh my God, I drink way more than that. Yeah, so even for a 100 kg person, that's like three liters, right?

40:26Yeah, yeah. Three to three and a half liters. There's a baseline. so that's if you didn't do anything and if you're 50 kg then oh that's like one and a half to two liters yeah but that's your baseline right then we've got to think about because it's all about fluid balance we have to replace what comes in so if you then go and train and you lose a liter of fluid as a hundred kilo athlete you suddenly now need four and a half liters instead of three to three and a half yeah to be able to rehydrate and that would just be on average one hour of exercise Maybe, depending on the sweat rate that they have.

41:01Now, when it comes to rehydration, we generally say that you need to replace more than what you lose. So maybe 1.2 to 1.5 times what you lose. Ah, right. I didn't realize that. So just because obviously you will be replacing quite a bit of fluid in that time, you may lose some as you bring fluid back in. So you might disturb the balance and the kidneys will excrete more urine. So, yeah, you've got that daily need, 30 to 35 mil. per kilo and then you've got to replace maybe 1.2 times what you lose um obviously it's difficult maybe to measure what you lose but you can do it pretty easy so technically it's not that difficult but you would simply just weigh yourself before a session and weigh yourself after the session if you didn't have anything in between so you didn't have any fluid or anything during or you didn't go to the toilet then the difference between the starting weight and the end weight would be how much fluid you lost for every kilo you lose would be equal to one liter so if you lost one kilo you lost one liter you need to replace 1.2 times that 1.2 liters on top of your daily need and doing that kind of like test you'd suggest probably doing that as a test rather than doing that every session so say for example we're training in the gym down there um on a Tuesday I go and test myself and then I know roughly how much I'm I'm losing obviously it's different on different days with climate um how hydrated you may be beforehand and stuff like that but if we can get kind of like a you know a point where I know that I'm losing a liter per hour of exercise then you can then go off you don't need to weigh yourself before and after every single session because again i know i get in my head then oh i'm not allowed to have anything i'm not allowed to drink anything i'm not allowed to eat anything um within a session because i need to weigh myself and see how much i've actually lost so you would do exactly that you build a battery i guess of of results from varying conditions and various types of sessions so at the start of a trading block in february you know it's winter for the next couple of months It's going to be pretty cold.

43:11So the session in terms of climate would be similar. You could just do, what is it like when I do a conditioning session? What's it like when I just do strength? You might say it's a liter one day and 0.8 liters the next day. You get an understanding then. You don't need to do it after every session. And you don't need to panic too much about not having anything during, because you just need to account for it. So if you was to have a liter of fluid in the session, you would just add that into your calculation. And then the only challenge would be if you went to the toilet, unless you're going to measure out your wee or your poo.

43:47Yeah. Nah. So in terms of kind of like a daily output, I feel like I'm having kind of like eight to 10 liters on a daily basis. Is it a problem to drink too much like the other side? Yeah, can be. So overhydration, if we think about it in like the context of, of maybe during exercise, particularly like if you are over hydrated, you're going to potentially dilute the sodium in your blood. So then you'll just start to pee out, um, the things that you take in because the kidney is very, very tightly controlling that sodium balance in the blood. Um, so there is potential of over drinking being problematic.

44:31Um, but the kidney is pretty good at just flushing out what you don't need. Um, What about if you're just like every day, outside of training, is it okay to drink more? The same principle probably apply in terms of the kidney will regulate pretty tightly. So if you've got a good working kidney, you should be fine. Yeah, really. Hope nobody comes at me from the medical world and tells me differently. And then electrolytes, obviously a big topic. I feel like if I put my tinfoil hat on, I feel like it's the world is crazy because for kind of like 10 years salt has been well 10 years prior salt has been like really really bad we've reduced it in all of our foods whether that's you go into Tesco and the meal deal says reduce sodium on the packet of your ham sandwich and it literally says reduce sodium all the drinks reduce sodium and then along comes electrolytes and they're just selling it at your back.

45:34So the meal deal price has either stayed the same or gone up. They've reduced the salt out of that and then selling it at your back in something else. Like I find it crazy. That's my like tinfoil hat theory that they've reduced salt out. They've taken it out of the diet, said it's bad for you and then they can sell it at your back in sachets. I don't know if that's true or not, but that's... The conspiracy. Yeah. So I think for anybody who does kind of follow me on Instagram, you may, you could say I'm known as maybe an anti-aliener electrolyte guy. And it's not that I'm anti-electrolytes. It's just that the sheer volume of electrolytes that people are consuming nowadays in the guise of health is scary.

46:15Like you say, like salt in food from a health perspective is in the Western world is people pushing for that to be reduced as much as possible because they already consume too much salt. Like here in the UK, the idea is somewhere, I think six grams for salt. We probably on average eight grams so already consuming too much salt the leading cause of death in the world is cardiovascular disease and one of the leading causes of cardiovascular disease is high salt intake and why is that so it's just related to the things like atherosclerosis that can occur from high salt intake um and is this kind of like over years and years and years of high salt intake yeah it's not the only thing that causes it right but it's a heavily contributing factor um and so if we think about electrolytes all they are is salt and we seem to be taking them as if they're this health promoting thing but we already consume too much and nowadays electrolyte companies are indeed you know selling things at like a thousand milligrams of sodium which is a scary amount of sodium for people to be consuming especially when i feel like it's a scary amount when people are taking it every morning just just on waking because that's when they say take your electrolytes and then before or during a gym session which a gym session might just be weights where they're burning 200 calories they're not really sweating that much and they're probably in the uk where it's fucking cold in any gym that you go in so they're not actually sweating at all um yeah they maybe don't need electrolytes so i've had this conversation several times with people about when they take electrolytes in the morning and look it's each to their own if you take something and you feel great who's to say evidence says otherwise like but for a lot of people who are needs they say that they take electrolytes in the morning it's like dramatically improved their focus in the morning got rid of brain fog in the morning and they feel fantastic in the morning.

48:18My question is always, okay, before you took the electrolytes, did you take any water? Did you drink anything in the morning? No. So was it the electrolytes that you now start taking, or is it actually just the fluid that you start to take, and you're actually starting off the day in a better fluid balance? That's the question. Now, if you did have fluid previously, and you've just added electrolytes to that fluid, and it's made a massive difference, then maybe that's great for you. but I would still monitor how much salt is coming in for the rest of the day. So that's kind of the first part when it comes to the morning.

48:52And then I think where we have gone wrong in the messaging for electrolytes is it's not about replacement, it's about balance when it comes to these things. So what I mean by that is some companies may promote, like you've lost X amount of sodium in your sweat, so you need to replace that sodium we have like 40 50 000 milligrams of sodium stored in the body if you're losing a thousand milligrams in your sweat it's dropping the ocean it's not really about the replacement of it it's about the balance so if you think about how things work during exercise so when we sweat that is us losing fluid we're trying to evaporate heat maintain core temperature, right?

49:38So when it comes to what's happening there is the sodium content of the blood has to be tightly regulated. So when we lose fluid, we lose water, we lose water from the blood. Blood is mostly water. So what happens there is when we reduce that amount of water from the blood, it's being sweated out in the sweat, the sodium will then be excreted from the blood to maintain the balance of sodium in the blood, right? So he's trying to maintain the balance, okay? And if you have too much sodium to water, that can be life-threatening. If you have too much water to sodium, it can be life-threatening. So hyponatremia or hypernatremia, right?

50:27So if the body's trying to get rid of the sodium to maintain sodium balance, and you're trying to pummel it back in, it's a bit counterproductive, right? It's not really about being able to replace all of the electrolytes. It's about being able to maintain balance. Now, if you've got a high sweat rate and you're consuming a hell of a lot of fluid to try to maintain your fluid intake and not be too dehydrated, you're running the risk of consuming a lot of fluid and diluting blood sodium. So electrolytes become very, very important. They can be the difference between life and death, right? and this is where I have to be careful with some of the messaging because you've got people like fighters for example where if they watch some of my videos and start thinking electrolytes are just not important they will die when it comes to rehydrating to get after making weight so they can be the difference between life and death it's just that people are using them blindly thinking they need to replace them and under the guise of health when it's not really the case

51:27yeah it's a hard one it's such a one because like you say that there is an importance of it um when it comes to kind of like an athlete when would you recommend electrolytes because like you say they do have a use they do have an importance um is it over a certain number of hours training is it every sweaty session they should be having some form of electrolytes but with water and what should that ratio be? Like say, for example, because you mentioned there that your body's trying to keep a ratio of electrolytes within the blood, that ratio. What ratio should we be drinking electrolytes in? So say, for example, we've got a one liter bottle of water.

52:10How much electrolyte should we have within that liter of bottle? So it'd be very difficult to give an answer to that given the individuality of like sodium in the sweat. things like that um for anybody who wants to nerd out a little bit like alan mccobbin did a review of this on sodium um so it's an open paper you can read it and in there he has like a decision tree it's a fantastic paper it goes through everything in terms of sodium replacement and he's kind of the guy who's pushing research in the electrolyte world because there really isn't all that much like there's a lot of claims made about electrolytes but very little research um but i digress but you're probably looking at if the exercise is maybe over three or four hours if it's in hot conditions and you are replacing more than 70 of your fluid losses then you might look to bring in electrolytes um other than that you probably don't need them and then i don't know if this is true or not but i've realized if i do have a lot of electrolytes in the morning and then I go and do a sweaty session, my sweat tastes a lot saltier.

53:22And I'm just scared people are doing these sweat rate tests where they're doing sweat rates, but they're also, they also get told how many electrolytes they're losing. And some people, it's a gram per hour. I've seen some guys in Texas where it's like two grams of salt per hour that they're sweating out. But does this figure change if you consume a lot of electrolytes before actually doing the test? Yeah. Because if you don't have any electrolytes and you just have water up until the test, you're still going to do this test, but I assume you're not going to sweat out as many electrolytes because your body's clever.

54:01Yeah, so diet can impact a sodium test. So if you put the patch on and check your sodium, how much sodium you lose in your sweat, diet can impact that. And if you do have a significant amount of sodium prior to an event, then yes, it can make you a saltier sweater. So it can make a difference. And does, if you are a saltier sweater, does that give you a better performance advantage or a worse performance advantage? I'm not sure there may be, but from what I know, I don't know of any sort of evidence to say yes or no. Okay. The higher the sweat rate is more preferential than a low sweat rate. So sweat, but that's like actual fluid loss, not how salty or...

54:51Yeah, because it's like evaporative heat. You're trying to maintain cold temperatures. So the more you sweat, the better you're cooling mechanism. Yeah, I found that so mind baffling when I first realized that the fitter you are, the more you sweat, which you'd think would be the complete opposite. You'd think, car that guy's fit why is he sweating so much and you'd think that he'd be sweating less yeah but the fitter someone is the molly sweat which is uh i mean that's one of the primary mechanisms behind heat training right this to increase your ability to sweat yeah because it's your body will try to maintain core temperature during these races and one of those key ways to do that would be evaporative heat through through the skin yeah and then last thing on kind of like electrolytes so cramping.

55:34I think there's two reasons why we cramp. One is because a muscle is weak. And for me, this feeling, I've had this feeling before, and it's where you cramp in a singular muscle. Say for example, you're running and you cramp in your calf. There's a weakness there in my opinion, or there's something wrong. Your body's telling you to stop, but it's probably because you're about to pull your calf or something like that. And then I've had other versions of cramp where I'm say two hours into a marathon, two to three hours into a marathon. And. I start to cramp and then the cramp suddenly goes from my calf to my hamstrings to the other leg.

56:18And I kind of like just seize up. I feel like this is more of like an electrolyte. It might not be electrolyte, but like a fluid imbalance. I feel like this is the serious cramp where like you need to stop or you need to address this and don't carry on. But it's kind of where you get this full body cramp. That's what I'm trying to say. Is that due to an electrolyte imbalance? It could be. But the thing with cramping is that it's multifactorial and it's very difficult to actually figure it out in research. Like imagine going to a lab, you can't necessarily just put someone on a treadmill and go, all right, can you cramp now?

56:56So you can't really measure it. I think that to isolate cramping just to electrolytes, it's very short-sighted. It's probably not just that. And 99 % of the time probably is. Or dehydration, should I say, not just electrolytes. So like you say, that fluid balance could be a cause of cramping. The electrolytes itself could be the cause of cramping. Muscle weakness could be cramping. Low glycogen could be cramping. So you can cramp from just bonking. Yeah. So if you have a low glycogen stores, usually there might be a situation where less calcium is released from sarcoplasmic reticulum, which has to be released during muscle contraction.

57:36If that's impaired, that might cause the cramping. And that's what cramping actually is. It's a problem with muscle contractions. Yeah. It could be neuromuscular. It could be signals coming from the brain to the muscles. That's why like vinegar is used. Ah, yes. Yeah. That is, and that overrides, that kind of like resets the system, right? Yeah. So it's kind of impacting the neuromuscular firing that may cause cramping. So with that, like if you do get that severe cramping where like more than one muscle is cramping at a time i that that's my sign that it's not just a weakness like if you know suddenly everything starts cramping um in my eyes that's like stop like that's your body telling you to stop and if you don't stop you're gonna cause serious damage and sometimes i've like you know you're at the end of the race you try and push through and it just gets worse and worse and then I found like my recovery goes from a couple of days to maybe a week.

58:35Yeah. Where like I'm, I'm, I'm really fucked and I've caused some damage. I like your muscles after a muscle is cramped. Like I, I don't just have DOMS in that muscle. Then I, it feels like it goes on forever. Yeah. It goes on forever. Um, what, why is that? I guess it comes out of the trauma that you've caused within the muscle. Yeah. Yeah. There's an exponential amount more in terms of trauma that's going on in the muscle damage that's being incurred when you're running through that cramping so if you was to if you someone was to come on with that cramp during a marathon what would you say firstly do address it like address it in what way would you would you think or would you just have everything would you throw the kitchen sink at it in the real world you'd probably end up throwing the kitchen sink so you'd hydrate with water and electrolytes yeah and eat something and then you'd probably have some vinegar of some sort.

59:29Oh, wow. It depends what you've got access to, right? But I think the first and foremost, the reality is you have to stop. You're going to have to stop probably if it's bad enough to get the cramp under control. It may be best for some people to just take a minute worth of walk because it's better to walk for the minute than to just constantly be running for 30 seconds and stopping. And yeah, I think it's just a case during an event where you probably would just reach for the electrolytes. I've done it in Ironman plenty of times. You know, running along with thinking I'm the anti-electrolyte guy, but here I am throwing myself up at the electrolytes to try and stop the cramping.

1:00:03But it's so multifactorial. Who knows what could help at that point? Yeah. And then moving on to supplements and what you think help performance. Yeah, I just want to throw a couple out there with you and then you just say whether it's worth it or whether it's not really. This makes me nervous. Yeah. Okay. first one let's start off with easy stuff creatine definitely worth it definitely my question back would be for all athletes i would argue yes yes even for the one because if you look at creatine obviously it can increase your weight through water weight obviously that's stored within the muscles though big thing that people think uh when they have creatine they'll put the scales will go up but it's not fat um it's just water weight but it's actually within the muscles so especially if you're a guy like it's probably going to make you look better because it'll make your muscles look bigger and you'll look a little bit more jacked and for women as well weight is a very touchy subject for an endurance athlete obviously so this is what i struggle with yeah so when you tell somebody to start taking creatine but you might put a kilo of weight on it's a big thing right but I do believe that the benefits of creatine will far outweigh a kilo of weight that you might put on um I think of the benefits in strength power recovery and some endurance athletes might think well I don't need strength I don't need power for running a marathon but you need it in training you need to be able like people will say well you don't need sodium bicarbonate for a marathon or you don't need beta alanine for an hour for a marathon but you don't just run marathon and pace through training.

1:01:49There'll be some sessions where you're doing 400 meter efforts, which are very, very high intensity. And that's where something like that might come in play. And I think that creatine with its benefits, particularly for recovery in an endurance athlete. And when you say about water retention in the muscle, if the muscle cell is more hydrated, the muscle contraction would be more efficient. So there's that benefit to it. You've got in the right doses anyway, you could have benefits to bone, benefits to cognitive function. so there are a lot of reasons to be taking creatine if you can accept the fact that there may be some water retention and you just mitigate it like there's no need to start on the 20 gram dose that people take per day just take three to five grams per day creatine monohydrate job done boom i would say that a little hack that i i did it was when i did that 222 marathon and I was so obsessed with kind of like weight because I felt like I was trying to improve my fitness as much as possible.

1:02:49And I was like, how else can I get faster and faster? And it was drop weight. And it came to the point where I did pull out my creatine probably two weeks before the race. So I had it throughout the training and got the advantages throughout training. And then I stopped it two weeks before because it apparently takes about two weeks to get out your system. yeah um i i then felt so much smoother within the marathon itself um i don't know if that was just placebo or not but uh yeah so i kind of like used it for training and then dropped off but that was just for the marathon i think high rocks i think there's too much power exercises in there whether it's your burpee broad jumps whether it's uh your heavy sled push sled pull like i think um it's worth it within hyrox um yeah it could be yeah it could be everyone's individual you know that could work for somebody you could maybe even argue if you kept the creatine and you might not cramped yeah true you know this but creatine can help with like carbohydrate absorption as well so there's that to to consider uh caffeine caffeine definitely worth it 100 so his primary mechanism of working for caffeine would be that you are essentially dampening the signals of pain so you can work and operate at a higher rpe for the same sort of effort um you know once upon a time caffeine was banned by weather so we know it works um obviously they had to take away that ban because you can't stop an athlete having coffee right but uh it was banned once upon a time and you know you've got to think about it from the perspective that if it is dampening the pain signals then would would you potentially make an athlete push so hard that they could potentially do some damage to themselves?

1:04:38Because your brain's job is to keep you alive. When your brain's shouting at you to stop, it's trying to keep you alive, right? Yeah, it is a fine line. Is there a certain dosage for competition that you would recommend? Because some of the dosages that I've researched, they're quite scary. I think the one that I've looked at or researched is anywhere between three and six grams per kg of body, weight but when i'm looking at that do i want to be taking if i'm let's say 80 85 kg or whatever do i want to be taking 400 milligrams before i start high rocks and it's an evening event um i feel like that's quite high and quite extreme uh would you would you agree or would you say it is high so the benefits of caffeine can be found at like one to two grams per kilo of body weight um but yes the general recommendation would be three to six milligrams per kilo body weight over maybe a six hour period um so you know for example if you was to wake up and have a coffee in the morning that could be roughly 150 milligrams 100 milligrams if you were then going to have another 100 milligrams say the hour before you've got right so it adds up throughout the day yeah so caffeine is a half life yeah so sit around for around about six hours yeah so you generally want to time a dose somewhere in and around 45 to 60 minutes before if you're taking a digestible source of liquid tablet you will get a faster um effect with something like a gum because it works on the receptors in the brain so there's no digestion to it so the impact of say a caffeine gum will be quicker um maybe 10 to 15 minutes so timing becomes important for caffeine so you probably 45 to 60 minutes before would be your quality performance dose going into the race but that 100 to 150 milligrams that you might have from your coffee in the morning still will probably contribute if your race is within that six hour period it's interesting that you say like you know the low doses work i know um from being with the red bull the the minimal effective dose is around 50 milligrams for for a person um and red bull is only slightly above that so everyone thinks red bull has got shit loads of caffeine and it's only actually got 80 milligrams of caffeine in which is the dose that they want so like you don't get the jitters you don't get the anxiety or whatever but like it's not it's still effective if that makes sense yeah and the craziest thing is if you was to have a red bull if you was to have a coffee you drink the red bull and you'd think that you've got so much more energy and i think that's the placebo of the red bull gives you wings the whole branding and marketing behind it and stuff like that rather than a coffee which you do some studies i think a costa if you get a large costa coffee it can have up to 300 milligrams of caffeine in yeah it's difficult to measure because obviously the bean and the roasting can be different to depend on how much caffeine is in there so interesting but that just shows the power of like placebo and we'll move on to that actually but uh next one bicarbonate of soda again i would recommend for vast majority of athletes for competition um and what does it actually do so it essentially buffers the acidic environment in the muscle right simple as that if we're going to keep it simple yep um so in the in the environment if you take it back to school that like when you build up lactic acid, that's super acidic and then bicarbonate is alkaline.

1:08:17Is that right? So lactic acid is very weak. It dissipates quickly and turns into lactate. Yeah. So let's not bore you too much, but like lactate is a fuel, right? Lactate is not a problem. That is your best friend, right? For a lot of cases, because it allows you to keep working at a given intensity, at that high intensity. it but when it starts to accumulate so i you can't use it for energy and it will start to accumulate it will then produce hydrogen ions so hydrogen ions might then we think be the cause of that acidic environment and that burn that you feel yeah so bicarbonate can help buffer that acidic environment if you like right so it allows like you say it allows you a bit more alkaline to to actually continue to exercise by reducing the pH and blocking that reduction in pH.

1:09:12Interesting. Beta-alanine. Again, it's a buffer. So your sodium bicarbonate buffers or increases the alkaline environment outside of the cell. Beta-alanine works inside of the cell. So yes, there could be potentially a benefit of doing both then the difference is that with beta alanine what you're actually trying to do with it is increase the muscle carnosine content and we can't supplement with carnosine because it's broken down during digestion so it never reaches the muscle so we use beta alanine as that precursor to make carnosine so we have to use it in the simulator what you would creatine where you have to load it so it might be three to six grams per day for four to six weeks for example and that will load up the muscle with carnosine and help buffer the incelic environment inside the cell do you think it works yeah good evidence behind it to suggest it works but probably for things that are more like maybe one to four minutes worth of effort and sodium bicarb maybe up to 10 minutes but there is emerging evidence now of it helping in endurance work as well and what we have to remember with say a marathon particularly for like yourself when you're going for these faster times, the terrain doesn't stay the same.

1:10:28It's not like you get on a treadmill and just run at that pace and don't change. There are surges in a race, there are hills in a race that require you to then probably increase your relative intensity, which sorting by cabinet can help with. And what kind of percentage are we talking about? Is it like tiny, tiny percentage differences? Is it a couple of reps? Say, for example, if we just dumbed it down and we were doing a 20 rep max back squat in the gym, would it allow you to do 21 reps or 22 reps? Is it kind of like a tiny thing or is it like a massive thing where it'll help you double the amount of reps you do?

1:11:07Yeah, so it's going to be like relatively low in terms of the overall benefit to it. because, you know, if, if, when we think about supplements, if it works, it's probably banned. Right. Right. Okay. So that's a good rule of thumb. Yeah. I can't remember the exact quote from Ron Moore, but it's like, if it works, it's probably banned. Or if it doesn't work. Yeah. I can't remember the quote. So I'm not going to butcher it. If it doesn't work, they're trying to sell it. Yeah. Basically. Yeah. If, if it works, it's probably banned. Um, so. So all these things are literally like, probably 0.1 percent there are small percentage might not be 0.1 percent but it might be you know two or three percent potentially for example but it depends how you define that two to three percent because like you could say with carb loading it improves things it might improve things by 20 to 30 percent in terms of capacity but it might be a two to three percent improvement in performance like capacity and performance two different things so like b-trailing might be a small benefit to performance in some instances same a bit sodium bicarb but the difference between winning and losing in some instances is less than one percent you know this is this is a thing milliseconds yeah uh next one we've got nitrates okay so yeah again is another tool in the toolbox if you like um probably the benefits of nitrates will be more pronounced the less trained that you blah, right?

1:12:42So the better train you are, your cardiovascular function is better and better and better. So adding in something like a nitrate might not have as much of a benefit, but it may have a benefit, right? Putting it simply, it can be a vasodilator, so it can allow better blood flow. So you're getting more oxygen to the muscle, could reduce the oxygen, cost the best exercise, so you might be able to operate a higher value of your VO2. and potentially it has a better impact on things like type 2 muscle fibers where you might give them a little bit more oxidative capacity. So it has got good evidence behind it.

1:13:21There's also evidence to say it doesn't work at all. So it depends how you go about it. But I just view it as a tool in the toolbox. I think there is potentially no downsides other than your wee maybe turning red. But as long as you practice it and you get on with it, then it might work and there's not probably going to be a downside because usually they come in the form of like a beetroot shot, beetroot shot. The ones that I've seen for nitrates, the main two, beetroot shot and then citrulli malate as well. Would you recommend one over the other if you was competing? For me personally, I would recommend nitrates from a beetroot shot.

1:14:00Okay. Maybe just better evidence behind it. Yeah, perfect. Perfect. fact uh magnesium especially potentially for sleep uh so magnesium is a funny one actually because it's involved in so many things that it's an incredibly marketable supplement right same with electrolytes they're involved in so many things they're incredibly marketable so when you have a supplement company saying certain things about them theoretically they could be right because there's a mechanism behind what they're trying to claim. And with magnesium, it's, whilst it's very ubiquitous across the food groups, i.e. we get it in lots of different foods, when we do testing, a lot of the time you can find that people are deficient in magnesium.

1:14:50But the challenge comes because we usually measure serum magnesium when we're doing testing for magnesium, which is a very poor indicator of actual magnesium status, like less than 1 % of magnesium is stored there. The rest is like bone, room and extracellular parts of the body. So that can probably, it's quite transient, it can come up and down in accordance to how much you sweat, how much you train, how much maybe you've eaten. So yeah, it's a difficult one to measure. and when it comes to sleep it has impacts on certain pathways like neurologically so it does have mechanisms behind it to improve sleep but what i tend to find when i've when i've looked at the research around it which there might be other people who'd be able to say otherwise but from my interpretation a lot of the evidence to say it can help is in kind of patients who are probably suffering from insomnia, which tells me that if you're someone who is healthy and eating a relatively well-balanced diet, it's unlikely that adding a magnesium will help you improve your sleep.

1:16:04Now, what I have to be really careful with is if there is someone out there who does take magnesium and they do sleep better, then if I'm to tell them, oh, by the way, there's no evidence behind magnesium to help you sleep. If that then changes their belief and then suddenly they start sleeping terribly, then I've done a disjustice there. And you talked about placebo. If people take magnesium and they sleep better, don't listen to anything I just said because you're sleeping better. Just be careful how much you take because there are side effects to too much magnesium. We only need around 300 milligrams a day and a lot of supplements are like 300, 400 milligrams a day.

1:16:44That's the only thing to think. yeah no the power placebo is insane um it's actually crazy i think there was a study done people like taking steroids and not taking steroids like a double blind trial with steroids and people that thought they were on steroids but weren't actually got like gains that you'd never ever get naturally just because they thought they were on steroids so they got the gains as if they were on steroids which is crazy that you can actually yeah they did a similar thing with they brought some people in for a sleep study um put them in the lab attached them to all the gear and sent them off to sleep walk them in the morning one group was told you had a great sleep the other group was told you had a terrible sleep and then they put them through cognitive tests and those who were told they had a good sleep did perform better than those who were told they had a bad sleep despite the fact that they both slept the same so it's like that perception of sleep is and the perception of the quality of sleep can be just as important as maybe the actual amount of sleep potentially that's what that suggests shit take your fitness trackers off now and there's been more serious cases of it where uh you know there's been people that have been told they've got a certain amount of months to live and that affects them and they actually end up dying on the actual mark of however many months they've been told yeah because they've got it in the head oh i better stop thinking about yeah no touchy subjects but uh yeah the power of placebo is crazy um is uh oh last one collagen because everyone's buzzing about especially I feel like in the beauty world collagen is the the next big thing and it's been around for a while but um to my understanding collagen is just a form of protein right yeah it's an incomplete protein um so if you're trying to take collagen to hit your protein target that wouldn't be ideal um but obviously from a sporting context people supplement with collagen to probably help with tendon help um the biggest place I see people go wrong with this is because is they buy supplements that are far under dosed.

1:19:01I remember I'm in a conversation with someone and I can't remember the dose exactly, but I remember saying to him, you're going to have to take 20 tablets a day to hit the dose. Yeah, I've seen that. And I've seen like the, at home, I think Emily's got some collagen tablets. I'm like, why have you got collagen in tablet form? So the variant, collagen can be involved in like skin, for example, or tendon, right? And in order to gain a skin benefit will require a much smaller dose than what it would from a tendon. So tendon, we're looking somewhere maybe 15 to 20 grams, right? So that's kind of like half a protein scoop, right?

1:19:35Well, the protein scoop is whey protein. Yeah, it's whey, but to use a scoop, it'd be like half. So usually a lot of these things will either come in a tablet form where it's already dosed or it'll come with a scoop, which will be dosed based on the scoop. 15 to 20 grams, couple that with some vitamin C. so vitamin c you can help the cross-linking and it arrive basically into the into the tendon it facilitates that journey into the tendon itself the idea is that you would increase the amount of circulating collagen to be delivered to the tissue when you're doing your sort of rehab exercise to then improve the integrity of that tendon and maybe maybe hope to increase your recovery to or decrease your recovery time and is there a specific form of collagen that you should have the different ones there are different ones i think there are things like type 2 type uh collagens and which might be like more towards i think it's fish type collagen but i'm not 100 % sure whether there would be a major difference between the forms there's probably evidence behind the various forms to be able to take collagen whether there's a best one is up for debate so i did a bit of research into this back in the day i don't know if this is true but i got told that the collagen collagen is marketed as like let's say collagen and is super expensive but there's a cheap form of it and it's gelatin apparently gelatin is the same as collagen so yeah so but there is that i've seen papers using gelatin which have provided benefit so i went and bought like a big bag of gelatin so gelatin is the thing that makes gummy bears like hard like so sweets and stuff like that so it's in uh that and i tried mixing it and it it just goes solid completely like as soon as you kind of like try and mix it within a protein shake it'll turn solid yeah um i had an absolute nightmare i think i tried having it and it like stuck to my teeth and stuff like that um because obviously it's a binding agent yeah um but apparently it's the same stuff but it's a lot cheaper yeah yeah i think there's places that do them you know they got like health span elite they do a collagen which is quite good and march onto a collagen that's quite good as well so there's options available out there yeah quite simple to get health spanner yeah i've seen them before they're all kind of like uh wider tested and everything like uh yeah so health family is in sports sport yes yeah yeah Yeah.

1:22:10Interesting. Um, let's touch on red S if you don't mind. Um, what is it? Why do people get it? Um, yeah. What, what are the dangers? So red S is relative energy deficiency syndrome. Um, and you, it's a consequence or can be a consequence of low energy availability, right? But it requires a multidisciplinary approach to be able to diagnose REDS. For us, a lot of the time when people say, I'm suffering from REDS, what they're saying is they're suffering from low energy availability. That's not to say that people don't have REDS, right? But one of potentially the things that can contribute to that is low energy availability.

1:23:01Now, it is quite difficult to measure. So there has been questions out there as to whether it actually exists, which for those who have suffered with or currently have reds don't take offense to because i'm well aware that you were suffering with difficult symptoms but the premise behind it is that it's incredibly difficult to measure how do you measure it because as we were talking about before the challenges of understanding how many calories you actually consume the challenges of understanding how many calories you expend so if we don't know how much calories you're consuming or expending and we don't really know what we're looking for in terms of all the different potential tests that we could do.

1:23:42It's hard to measure. That said, I think the bottom line is it exists. So it exists, but there's not like a mark where it's like, if you're above this line, then you've not got red S. Or if you're below this line, you've not got it. It's kind of like not a line in the sand. It's kind of like this thing that has... It requires a lot of people to be able to diagnose someone with reds. Yeah. And it wouldn't be me. I would not be in a position to say to you, you've got reds. I'd be in a position to say to you, I think you might be suffering from low energy availability. Yeah. Right. And if we sit there on the low energy availability side of things, the best way to describe it is comparing it to energy balance.

1:24:22Most people understand what energy balance is. If you eat the same as what you expend, then you will be in energy balance. If you eat more, you'll gain weight. If you eat less, lose weight. Basic principle. I like to explain low energy availability as like looking under the hood of energy balance. So let's say that energy balance is 3 ,000 calories. If you need 1 ,000 calories to recover from the training that you've done, you're left with 2 ,000 calories available. Yeah? If your resting metabolic rate and the calories that you need to walk around and do your day job is 2 ,400 calories, then you're in a 400 calorie deficit in terms of what you have available for your body to do its normal physiological function yeah so the first thing that it will try to do there is make you move less yeah so you'll start taking the car space that's really tight but really close you'll take the lift instead of the stairs you will slouch more you will lie down on the couch i'm sure you've done a long run where you get back and you're lying on the couch and the remote's over there and the sheer thought of getting that remote is another marathon, right?

1:25:29And that's your body down-regulating expenditure because it's trying to preserve energy. But once it's exhausted those avenues, then it might start to think about reducing energy output to other physiological processes. And usually the first thing that might go is like reproductive health. That's where the impact might start because the body doesn't really care about making new life. It's trying to preserve its own, right? So for men, testosterone might fall. For women, progesterone, estrogen might be disrupted. It's much easier to kind of acknowledge in a female because they might miss menstruation.

1:26:07Whereas for a man, it might be not as apparent in the first instances. They might over time feel lack of libido, more fatigue, but it's not as apparent. But generally speaking, that's the kind of things that will go first and you need to try and address them. to bring your calories up basically. And then those kind of like more severe kind of like signs where people can get like stress fractures. So if we think about how, so sex hormones are implicated in bone turnover, right? So if you've got a reduction in testosterone, you might reduce bone turnover. Bone turnover drops, bone density drops.

1:26:49If bone density drops, stress fracture. So that's where it becomes important. Yeah. no it is uh it is super interesting and i think something that people need to kind of like talk about more because like i don't especially like referring back to like when you mentioned like endurance sports like weight does matter and it can get a bit obsessive but for you i'm sure you'd much prefer someone who is eating more and training more rather than trying to be restrictive on everything um yeah i think it's like a stable weight is not always a great indicator that you're in good energy availability right because if what's going on under the hood is because you've got a reduced energy output to those normal physiological processes the body's like kind of tightening up and you might not lose weight you might not gain weight you might be stable but you might be in a state of low energy availability so it's difficult to understand but it's like managing those those flags so would you say for example with weight and with um kind of like peak performance within because i sat here uh the other day with stuart stokes um the the steeplechaser and he spoke about his mom knew he was ready to race when he looked gone in the face so what i got from that is you when you're on race day you might not be at your healthiest and you might have to drop a little bit of weight and improve your power to weight ratio by that but you shouldn't be like that all year round in so like my question to you would be like would is it is it important to kind of go up and down with your weight and have times within your season where you're you're eating a lot more you're in a surplus and then have times where you're more restrictive and then where would you do this within your season as well yeah it's it's i actually um i heard fern cotton of all people i think it was fern cotton say that um nothing in life blooms all year round and it's the same principle for weight if you try to stay at raceway all year around, you'll be in trouble, likely, right?

1:29:07And the reason for that is exactly like you say, there'll be periods where you need to potentially be more tapered towards being at your optimal raceway. And there'll be periods where you probably might need to have maybe more food to facilitate recovery or other processes. So there's different times of the year. Your training is periodized and your nutrition should be periodized with it, right? so it's definitely important to consider the timing of which you might lose weight I think if you're it's probably not the best message to say that when you're gone in the face like I know you're ready to race but we're talking about elite sports there where like you look at any elite performer like if you're at the top of your game in any sport within kind of like endurance athletics, like you're not healthy.

1:30:05Like - It's an interesting one. Training six hours a day probably isn't healthy. It's not, it isn't. No, so this is an interesting one because elite sport and elite athletes have to go to the ends of what they're capable of. And yes, to some degree, potentially it isn't the most healthy thing in the world. And this is what I say to people like in the general population is like, it's not your job to be like that. You don't have to go to that kind of nth degree to get the most out of yourself. That said, I would still always try to promote that you are the healthiest athlete that you can be because it's only, only when you're healthy can you be performing.

1:30:53But I think that it is a, potentially something that we have to manage is that an athlete will be in a state of low energy availability at certain points and we need to try and work around it nutritionally so yes you might end up being at a race where you're right on the edge of being not in the best shape but it's what was required to get the best out of your race your job is to race um but I would never promote that. I always want to be trying to be healthy first. And if you can, for example, if you use the marathon that you were going through, if you could have lost the weight earlier going into the marathon, then that final six weeks before you could have met your energy needs more tightly.

1:31:45You may have still lost weight, but you would have done so through just sheerly not quite being able to keep up with the output and you might have been able to adapt more, recover better and run better. So it's about the timing of it. I wouldn't, ideally we'd like to lose weight somewhere in the middle and then bring it back up slowly. The challenge I have, I've tried that in the past and the challenge I have is I get to a certain body fat percentage and I just risk always wanting to binge eat if I go below that. but I know I, that's where I feel best to race at, if that makes sense. So I've tried dieting like six weeks prior.

1:32:29So sorry, even 12 weeks out from race. So for example, dieting for six weeks and then maintenance calories, but it's, I find it harder hitting than maintenance calories. Even though you're eating more, it's very hard not to go over and not to binge eat and not to put weight back on. and naturally I feel like my body just it just is struggling a little bit more when I've done that in the past before like that's only a certain body fat percentage though and obviously that's going to differ for each person each and every person but I really struggle here with that I don't know if that's just person dependent I think it probably is personal dependent but your body's trying to tell you something sometimes and sometimes you have to listen to it it's wanting more energy and it will always try and give it more energy it's going to tell you jake i need some more food um but that's it's the same for people who go on 12 week body transformations you have to be uncomfortably hungry for a period of time in order to achieve what you want to achieve you wanted to lose a certain amount of weight maybe you did it too quickly and too aggressively and that had some sort of impact don't know um it's just about finding what's optimal like we don't it's hard to understand you know if you're if you think that your 219 attempt is going to be achieved when you hit 77 kilos then how do you know yeah and that's the that's probably the wrong way to look at it as well like you should always be in my my eyes you shouldn't be chasing the weight you should be chasing the times on the track and in training and don't care about the actual weight that you are.

1:34:09I like to think of... But it's very hard to come away from being, especially within the running world. I think high rocks has been one of the best things for that because you can't just get lighter and lighter and lighter to get better. Like you can do that within the running space and it's a very kind of like toxic environment that I've seen. Whereas like within high rocks, you can't just get lighter and lighter because then you're going to be shit on the sleds. and you're not going to be able to push it. And so it's actually promoting a healthier form of living in my eyes because you've got to fuel your body properly.

1:34:43And otherwise you're going to get crushed when you get to them sleds. And it's probably the most positive thing. And I actually probably enjoy training for high rocks more because of that, because I know that I can eat more and I can, not that I don't really restrict it when I'm running, but it's, yeah, it's, I think it is deep down in the back of a lot of people's minds when, when you are in these like endurance sport where weight matters. Yeah. And I think everybody wants to look good. You can't shy away from that. People want to look good. And that's another thing like, yeah. Yeah. You know, it's just the way it is.

1:35:18I think when I'm working with people, I'll try to make them think of it as like, have you qualified to be able to think about weight as your limiting factor? that what i mean by that is like the how are you sleeping enough do you eat enough carbohydrates are you eating enough like if your hydration right are you recovering well you know are you getting like all the are you managing stress like if you're ticking all of these boxes which are your big fruits that you would go for then you might think about losing weight but to try and lose a kilo of weight but then be only eating 2 000 calories and you need two and a half thousand calories or and you've got everything else not yeah if you're 11 5 hours of sleep like you're going for the wrong thing like if you you've got to qualify for for the weight loss journey right that's not to say you would never go for it because like i say there is going to be a benefit from being a power to weight ratio but it's always going to be a case of when is the juice going to being worth the squeeze yeah and then i want to kind of just talk about quickly about uh running whether it's running marathons endurance sports is a certain number of grams per hour of carbohydrates we should be consuming um obviously this is a big topic that that's going around at the moment um and how should that be digested um is there a certain ratio of glucose to fructose i know a lot of people we could have a whole podcast on this i know but and we still probably won't get a direct answer yeah i think we live in a world of like more is better across every realm and the we've gone from recommending 30 grams an hour to 60 grams an hour 90 gram an hour and now we're upwards of 120 plus grams an hour that is being sort of thrown around.

1:37:09And it's difficult to say what the right number is. But what I will say is that when it comes to an evidence base, there is very little, if any evidence, to suggest that there is a performance benefit to going above 90 grams an hour. Okay. That's not to say that there is an evidence out there to say that people can't oxidize more than 90 grams an hour, i.e. they can burn more than that. So that's why people might take 120 grams. I think the difficulty with this is that, well, for an elite level athlete, for example, we know that people are taking more than that and they're performing better and better and better than ever before.

1:37:47So the evidence out there is relatively weak for anything above 90 grams an hour. But the majority of things that are done in terms of papers will just get participants with say a VO2 max of 55, right? The probably just recreational, maybe even university level athletes. How does that relate to you? You're a professional athlete, elite athlete, but probably far fitter than what they are and probably consume far more carbohydrates than they do on a day-to-day basis. So you may well have the ability to oxidize carbohydrates at a much greater rate than them and benefit from that. but when what people fail to maybe think about is that when you consume say 90 grams an hour that doesn't mean that 90 grams just suddenly becomes available to you like i've taken 90 grams and i've got 90 grams in my muscle and i'm ready to go there's a process involved in absorbing that and there's a big difference between being able to tolerate say 120 grams an hour and being able to absorb and use that 120 grams an hour if you are taking on 120 grams but you only absorb 80, right?

1:38:55I.e. it comes out of the stomach, passes the intestinal wall into the blood, into the muscle. If only 80 grams does that, 40 grams is basically sat in the stomach waiting to cause a GI problem. So you might as well just take 80 grams. Make sense? Yeah. So it's a contentious topic because depending on who you speak to will depend on what is recommended. But for the vast majority of people at a recreational level, like 60 to 90 grams, is going to be more than enough because your absolute energy output, you're going to be far less than somebody else. You're running a 220 marathon. If somebody running a 330 marathon, their output is far less than you.

1:39:35Yeah? Because you're running way faster. So the absolute energy requirement is far greater, which means you need more carbohydrates. Yeah. I found the only thing that I mentioned just from personal experience with that is I found, And I feel like I can digest more the hungrier that I am, if that makes sense, which obviously makes sense. But like if my glycogen stores are full, I've carb loaded for the event and say I'm running a marathon. If I take a gel 30 minutes into that race when I'm not really hungry, I'm just taking it. I feel like I'm not digesting it as fast as if I'm in need of it. And I'm two hours into that event and I'm starving and my body's kind of hungry for it.

1:40:20I don't know if your body kind of, I assume it just senses that and digests it faster and realizes, ah, my glycogen, I'm just about to bonk. I need to get these carbohydrates in as fast as possible and digest them faster. The idea for fueling for an endurance event was to have it before you need it. Yeah. Or before you feel like you need it. The point at which you feel like you need it is probably too late. Yeah. So it's, yeah, you go through your car blow, do you have your breakfast? and start fueling straight away. And then if you're someone who struggles with that first gel and start practicing more in training.

1:40:54Yeah. I know there was a book that I read probably like 10 years ago now and it was on a famous ultra marathoner and he used to go to an all-you-can-eat buffet, eat as much as possible and then go for a run to train his digestive system. Yeah. Because obviously running ultramarathons is completely different where you actually, it's probably the only sport where you'd probably avoid gels. I know the top guys might be on gels because it's faster, but the majority of people that are running ultramarathons are just having a sandwich and they're going around the course eating whatever they feel like eating.

1:41:35And that's a mixture of proteins, carbs, and fats, not just carbohydrates. um so no it was just but the intention behind it was that you can train your digestive system as well he's absolutely can yeah yeah you think about the the food competitions you know what used to be on telly on tv well they used to be like man versus food yeah yeah yeah well yeah you trained for it didn't you train your stomach to be able to eat more food yeah and it's the same sort of principle in a way it's gut training for you know to use more carbs so i would recommend everyone doing kind of like a man versus food prep yeah maybe not but you can certainly try um i want to finish with any kind of like nutrition myths that you feel like we've not covered where to begin well can i can i ask one yeah sugar is sugar bad for you or is it good for you what i like to say is there's no good or bad foods they're either appropriate or inappropriate okay yeah this is the first thing we think about sugar no matter at the most implicit level no matter what carbohydrate that you consume they will become sugar yeah so it's like the the process involved in digesting say a whole grain will digest the fibers the micronutrients vitamins all down into glucose, right?

1:42:58Whereas if you give Haribos, you just give in fructose and glucose. You just get rid of the fructose and it's just available as glucose. So with all this digestion that goes on from a whole grain, there is multiple benefits there. You're absorbing nutrients, fibers in the gut. There's a lot of benefits. But obviously there's not really any benefit from just a bag of Haribos. Apart from the energy. Yeah. but let's stay on the haribos a bag of haribos is largely inappropriate for someone who sat at their desk at two o 'clock in the afternoon who isn't training today not appropriate for you if you've just done a two-hour session in the morning and you are going to have to go and do a threshold session on the track in two hours time a bag of haribos might well be in my well be an appropriate snack to have because that sugar is going to be available to you very very quickly in the muscle.

1:43:53And that's the only way you're going to be able to sort of replenish the carbohydrates. If you're having something that's quite a large meal packed with different nutrients, there's a process of digestion or absorption that's going to have to take place, which might take a long time. So by session two, you might not have absorbed those nutrients. So you might not have the carbs available to you to use. You'll have some, but the Haribos might help better, right? Now, it doesn't give everybody the free pass to go and have Haribos. Like I say, it's contextual. right and even at the elite level of sport they're still having very very healthy meals whole grain type meals but they're also having an exponential amount of carbohydrates during their runs or rides or swims whatever they're doing through gels which are glucose and fructose you know does that make sense yeah no for sure and then my other question would be like what's the difference between a teaspoon of white sugar, granulated sugar, and some honey.

1:44:53Because I feel like a lot of people would pick the honey to drizzle over their Greek yogurt. But if you put a teaspoon of sugar to sweeten it up, that would make it unhealthy. The answer is very little. The makeup of sugar is similar to honey. Honey's maybe got a little bit more fructose in there. which to some camps will they'll say well that's even worse um but it's not like it's it's not worth overthinking no no it's the same with everything excess of something will be a problem excessive amount of sugar will be a problem the sugar gets a bad rep because of its implications to things like obesity and diabetes right but our intake of sugar has gone down as a society and obesity went up so it can't be sugar and there is papers done on this or they looked at like the carbohydrate insulin model, you reduce carbs, you still lose the same amount of weight whether you do a low carb diet or a high carb diet.

1:45:58So it's, sugar is a bad rep, but it's not as bad as what people think. Is there any that you think of like myths or fads or controversial topics? Fasting's always one. Okay. Yeah, so fasting does get a lot of press. and you know if you're choosing to fast in order to manage your body weight and your calorie intake then great crack on don't see a problem with that people worry about well i don't eat breakfast and i should eat breakfast um you don't have to eat breakfast breakfast is exactly what it says on the tin it's just a break and a fast so if you have breakfast at 12 or you have it at six doesn't matter it's a break and a fast for an athlete you might matter because if you're training in the morning and you're not eating that's going to be a problem yeah especially for females yeah like even worse females yeah so you know i think we're moving i think what it is with the fasting side of things particularly fasted training is we've been through a world where nutrition was largely just focused on being able to lose weight and manage weight and fasted training allowed you to go for a longer period of time without eating and you were training right and people would say you can burn more fat, for example.

1:47:12So we've moved away from that to being in a much more performance focused world now where if you can get something in, it's going to be, you're going to probably going to have a better session than if you can. And that something could be very simple. It could be a banana and an orange juice or a workout fuel, right? So you wake up, have some sort of carb-based powder drink if you want, or an orange juice with a banana on the way to the track, do the session and we're going to probably get more out of that than you would if you did it fasted but it's about choosing the right foods because if you kind of get up and have a big whole grain type breakfast you might not digest that as well going avocado and eggs on toast that's a popular breakfast at the moment like that's probably not the the most ideal for right before an intense session no and that's again where you know i mean we're moving off the topic of fasting but if as an athlete as an elite athlete they do struggle with this because you guys still see what goes on on social media and most of my job is going around putting fires out on social media that gets died but you know there's a lot of bad press around eating frosties or eating bad foods squares bars things like that when really they are a really useful tool for an elite level athlete who doesn't really have the time in the morning to get that sort of stuff in to get like more maybe nutritious and healthy stuff in before a session.

1:48:37But they will use those tools. And they're exactly that. They're a tool to use. But obviously we would ideally like to get a mix of both convenience foods and whole-based foods as well. But I digress there because when it comes to fasting, there might be other reasons why people do that. That might be an autophagy that people talk about. Autophagy. Yeah, that's only after like 18 to 24 hours I've heard. So the problem is like you can increase that cell recycling by fasting, of course, but you can do the same thing through exercise, probably more. So do you really need to fast or can you just exercise to do that?

1:49:19So the autophagy side of things, I don't really see a reason to fast to do that because you'll go a longer period of time where you might have cell recycling but then when you come to eat, you will eat more in a condensed period of time, which slows it down more. So you're kind of balancing out the same. Really, you probably just get the same out of just typical diet and training. So the autophagy side, maybe not so much. And then the last one I want to kind of like touch on, eating late, like eating before bed. Is it good? Is it bad? You get told you shouldn't eat two hours prior to going to bed.

1:49:57What's your thoughts on that? So it depends where you look really. Nutrition plays a pretty small role in your overall sleep quality. Still plays a small role. Things like tryptophan can help, which is an amino acid. So you can't get that in milk. That can help. Some people say having a high GI meal, like high GI, high glycemic index, food, carbohydrate, maybe three hours before bed can help with sleep. Kiwi has been said to help with sleep, dark chocolate. So there are things that you can have. I think the timing wise, again, this is very individual. So whilst there might be things out there to suggest you shouldn't eat two hours before bed, you might eat an hour before bed and be absolutely fine.

1:50:49You know, for me personally, I eat an hour before I go to sleep because I'm hungry. And I sleep just fine. but for somebody else if you're then having a meal an hour before bed and suddenly your sleep's not very good then you probably want to change the timing of that meal and maybe follow the principle that you would have some sort of tryptophan rich food with some high glycemic index food no it it is it is interesting because i've spoke to quite a few people on that and they kind of say for ultimate recovery you want to be having you know 30 to 40 you want to be having a big protein serving like every three to four hours throughout the day and obviously the only time you don't really get that is through the sleep so you go into this catabolic state where you're not optimally recovering um so i've been advised to have like either a protein shake or uh maybe it might be like a protein yogurt bowl or something like that a high protein serving right before bed yeah and it works for me but i know all the people are like oh no you don't want to do that like that's going to affect your performance that's going to affect your sleep and it's going to ruin everything um like say it's probably person dependent but um what would you say anything about that the kind of like catabolic state of or is that just overthinking it no so the you are the body's always in the state of protein turnover so it's either making new proteins or breaking them down um every time you eat protein or you train you will stimulate the growth of new drug proteins and then in between it will use those proteins to recover or enzymatic processes, things like that.

1:52:26So we see this kind of muscle protein synthesis over the day. And ideally, we want a situation where we're building more protein than we are breaking down so that you're in a net positive balance, right? And that will ensure that you will either grow or maintain muscle mass. And obviously, when you go to bed, you're not going to train and you're not going to sleep for the next six to nine hours, depending on who you are. Not going to eat, yeah. Not going to train, not going to eat. Not going to train, not going to eat. so technically your muscle protein synthesis could keep going down so by having a larger dose before bed that could potentially maintain your muscle protein synthesis higher through the night to maintain that muscle protein synthesis better so that's where it comes to like timing is kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to protein intake so whereby if you i mean we used to think that there was a ceiling to how much protein you could absorb per meal but we've kind of seen now with some pretty good research it was relatively new um where they gave a hundred grams worth of protein and they measured muscle protein synthesis over the next 24 hours and it maintained elevated it was elevated for a longer period so by that we can surmise that a hundred grams can be absorbed and maintain that higher amount for a longer period interesting we'll finish on that 100 grams of protein before bed is that what we're saying no to be fair my yogurt balls i'll put some ingredients on on the on the screen maybe but uh my uh my yogurt ball has about 100 grams and i have that before bed every night so doing something right i feel like we could literally chat forever i do definitely want to get you back on because i feel like there's a lot of other things that we've not covered yeah for sure um but for now thank you pleasure being here thank you very much privilege