Optimized Fat Metabolism for Ultrarunning with Jeff Browning⎮KoopCast Episode 10

happy 2020 trail runners welcome to the next decade this is the first recording of this decade of the KoopCast and i really thought that to kick the decade off in style i would do a podcast on one of the most requested topics that i get on social media twitter and instagram and that is can you become a better ultra runner through fat adaptation or optimized fat metabolism and i thought no who else but to talk about this then my good friend jeff browning uh who is a proponent of this style of nutrition he's been doing it for the last few years and he's found a lot of success with it there's absolutely no doubt about that at the ripe young age of 48 jeff is absolutely crushing it out on the trails he had a tremendous 2019 and has had a lot of success over the last few years and he attributes much of that success to this new diet process that um that he's really undertaken where he limits the amount of carbohydrates that that he takes in to around 30 or so or even less and because of that is able to tap into more of his fat reserves and utilize fat as a source of energy

i do not share the same opinions as jeff and we have gone back and forth on social media about this and that comes definitely kind of comes out in the podcast but despite all that jeff and i we really like each other as people we see each other at races we hang out we have a lot of mutual respect for one another both just personally and also professionally as as coaches and so i thought who better to bring on the podcast than than jeff and so we did we we hooked it around we kicked around this topic of optimized fat metabolism and we did so in a way that is really practitioner to practitioner based or coach to coach base we tried not to get too involved in batting around different research studies and this study said this and this meta-analysis did that because all too often those types of conversations they just get too much in the weeds in addition to that to really have those conversations you have to have two really true domain experts that do nothing but research science for for a living so we tried to keep it at a very high practical level that all i didn't athletes can can readily identify from and and just to get to think about is this a correct strategy that you want to utilize or not and i think the proof is kind of gonna ultimately lie in the pudding with athletes year after year after year who undertake these types of strategies or stick with the traditional higher carbohydrates uh types of strategies so you guys have a listen i had a lot of fun with this conversation it's a long one

it's about two and a half hours buckle in get your long run ready because yeah this is the longest KoopCast to date we definitely set a record on this one uh we had fun with it you guys without any further ado here's my conversation about optimized fat metabolism with jeff browning endurance athletics in general or is a creative endeavor right oh man well ultra running specifically is a creative endeavor you know i mean we you you've you've been running ultra marathons for long enough to realize that from a training perspective a lot of the the the history behind ultra marathon training particularly like in the 90s and the early 2000s is just winging it yeah totally you know i heard it was winging it when i got into it yeah you know in 2001 yeah and it was you would talk to somebody oh hey what'd you do to train for western states and then you talk to another another person you say okay what'd you do to train for hard rock and then somehow the person on the other end of it that was trying to figure it out had this like magic alchemy where they would come up with their own like training protocol based on all of these like little anecdotal reports that they would get and this is way before you know we had twitter and strava and things like that is back in the ultra listserv days where a lot of this information was disseminated i got a lot of my information the early days from run 100s.com yeah exactly yeah like because he had so many links to like

training blogs you know like people had like done right write-ups on stuff but but but in a lot of ways that style in ultra running of getting information related to training and diet and nutrition still kind of hangs around and the totally and the reason it hangs around is just because in the research it's not studied as much because it's a hard thing to study and the population of people who do this just isn't that big so getting like actual research subjects is quite challenging so there's still like this remnants even today in 2020 right we're in the first month of 2020 now there's still these remnants of having to piece together what are what are in in large part anecdotes to come up with valid training strategies yeah absolutely yeah i think and also it's just it's the style of training we're doing right we're in the mountains like you can't put that in the lab yeah totally i'm sorry but you're never going to be able to put that fully in a lab that that scenario where you got humidity and altitude and you know wildlife and and rockfall and you know whatever you know there's a muddy conditions snow it depends you could go run one trail you know 100 times in one year and you would get 100 different conditions well and that was one of the frustrating things about when i started transitioning coaching trail and ultra runners from coaching road runners triathletes and cyclists is we had this and you know this is a cyclist right we had this like really you know really pure way of measuring intensity which is

the power meter on a bike and the equivalent to that in the road running world would be pace and we could take that and we could make a lot of sense out of the training data itself is the athlete getting better worse or the same but you move that onto the trails and it just gets really it gets super fuzzy like it's hard to do like we try to have it's really hard to do it's intuitive almost yeah right and a lot of communication back and forth with the athlete and hopefully they're being honest with you well yeah so that that actually i actually think that trail and ultra running coaches they they have to accentuate the art of coaching more than the science because the data that they're getting is just fuzzier that's the best way i totally agree with that that's such a good point and i haven't heard that stated in that fat in that way before but that is so true well a little bit of this we can kind of transition into how you got into optimize fat metabolism because the parallels are really similar where you were trying to solve a problem for you right your own n of one and there was not just like an ultra running there's not a lot of information out there at the time and you took what you had you took the kind of the tools at your disposal and you said here here here's how i'm going to solve this really specific problem that i that i have and so it's a little bit of a lead-in why don't you just like take us through that story specifically of how this started intriguing you and how you started getting into optimize fat metabolism yeah more i mean it wasn't a a conscious

choice originally it was more like i was forced into this pathway because i was having some after a couple of trips to south america and raced at ultra fjord in 2015 and um i had some gi issues with like some can i went to a naturopath and basically it was kind of diagnosed as um uh candida overgrowth in my gi track right i was having some major like breakouts rashes itches itching on my inside my gut like on the inside i got an alien you know on the inside and it was not fun i had like seven major flare-ups in 2015 and i was just not and i was getting to the point where like post-race i had i remember telling my wife she likes to tell this story because i remember saying i don't know how much longer i can do these hundred things because they are just they are killing me like i mean just like i was swollen i had major inflammation um you know and it just wasn't like i just didn't look good man for like a week or two afterwards and um i was pretty beat up and and just that whole candida issue i was desperate i mean i got to that i got to that like low low like where you're just like in the lowest in an ultra you're just like i think i should just quit you know um but i just i being the geeky like reader that i am i i just wouldn't accept that you know that i don't know whether it's that ultra spirit where you're just

like you've been taught to like push through it figure it out right so or you quit right you either push through it and figure it out or you quit yeah right so i i basically spent about probably 30 hours eight to midnight every night for a week after i was done traffic design during the week and i just started researching anti-candida diets and i started coming across forums and blogs about paleo primal blueprint um those kind of diets and said you need to starve the starve the sugar right it feeds on sugar yeast you know candida is yeast it feeds on sugar i broke it down to the simplest terms like you would with a with an athlete and you go okay all right i need to starve this thing of sugar and then i got hold of i i came across vespa's website i knew nothing about him i never used the product at that time you know i am sponsored by him now so full disclosure but i i came across he had peter had a bunch of really really good information on of m on just optimizing fat metabolism kind of this ancestral background and that's where i really started digging into it and then i called zach bitter because he was a friend and i said dude what do i do like i'm having this issue and i want to try to do this and i knew he did it and and he just gave me some tips and mainly for like long runs like what do i eat on long runs you know now that i'm trying to starve this thing of sugar and he kind of gave me some ideas um but at the end of the day peter and and peter defty at vespa and and zach

bitter really helped me kind of they kind of slingshot gave me a slingshot push into like kind of what what ofm was and how to kind of how kind of use it and then i just started like i was all in once i kind of realized there might be a performance benefit to it right from a recovery perspective and from maybe even like maybe even like a running perspective even and we were still at that time we were still like didn't really know much right we've learned a lot about fat science in five years right four years i've been doing it right there's a lot more people doing a lot of people tinkering a lot of people making mistakes having success i would agree yeah like we're all over the place right we're throwing darts on a dartboard and and that's what's kind of cool it's kind of emerging still right we don't fully understand it and so that's where i kind of came to it from like i just needed to fix something but you and then i saw the performance and i got a hold of that okay so that's kind of what i wanted to get out of the whole storyline is that initially you were looking at this to solve a medical condition exactly and there are a lot of people out there and i'll actually include myself in that cohort of people who try to solve some bizarre medical condition with a low carbohydrate high fat type of diet the transition for you from trying to solve that medical condition to hey i'm still an elite ultra runner it might actually help my performance that's what i really want

to focus on and and and dive a little bit more into so why don't we start out by summarizing the key advantages as you see it for that style of nutrition program and why don't we just back up a little bit you can give us like an umbrella statement of of optimized fat metabolism and then transition that statement into what are the key advantages as you see them well okay i want to throw a caveat out there that it's not a keto protocol you're not a keto athlete of m is not a keto at you're not a keto so i don't i want to make sure that everyone understands that up front we are not like we are not carbohydrates fully have a place in training and in and in recovery and there's a place for it so what it does i i guess the best way to put it in an umbrella statement is um one you're you're the simplest is you're trying to push your crossover point right from when you right you're you're when you're in your low aerobic zones you're burning cart you're burning fat primarily fat and as you get more intense and more intense that crossover you get to a point where you're burning carbohydrate you start to cross over and burn mainly carbohydrates that 50 50 once you get 50 50 fat 50 carbohydrate that's your crossover point so what we're trying to do with ofm what we're seeing is with athletes

i've coached and some of the people in the testing that we're starting to see right we're still looking at small data sets right like we said it's an emerging science so what we're seeing is crossover points get pushed which is that's what i'm interested in is that crossover point right because in in ultra running especially in endurance sports it's about running at the highest aerobic capacity you can for the longest period of time without going too far now you can surge into more intense zones but you still have to come back and recover right like you look at like say western states right you have to like you have to push hard if you're in the top 10 running for the top 10 there's all these surges in the last 50k like tons of surges and moves to be in that zone and so that's what i'm interested in is that crossover point and pushing that out and i think that's what the what i'm seeing right now in my own experiences and what i've seen in the testing we've done is that it really pushes crossover point shifts it pretty majorly so like you know what we see in the science right now is if we look in the in the past right we kind of generally can agree i'm sure you'll agree with this that 50 to 65 percent of vo2 max is where most athletes are going to hit their crossover point that's a that's a pretty accurate statement trained athletes will will push it yes further to the right thank you for and that's perfect and that's that's been well demonstrated across a lot of endurance athletes that as you just

endurance train you push this crossover point which is the point at which you are burning equal amounts of carbohydrate and fat to fuel your exercise you push that to a higher and higher absolute and relative intensity training alone does that to a large extent and i think where you're coming at it from is that the ofm side of it pushes it even further it pushes even further and what we're doing is using everyday lifestyle diet to push that number okay so that's context number one your crossover point is at a higher relative and absolute intensity yeah which is very beneficial for ultra running especially okay right the other the other side benefits of ofm that i see that are really really big for me that i noticed initially was recovery so less oxidative stress right so to the metabolic system and i think part of that's probably because and this is just a quick like when you burn right for every for every unit of oxygen you can so so let's say you're burning mainly glucose for your or carbohydrate for your fuel source right that that ratio is approximately a one-to-one ratio of every unit of oxygen you consume you're you're have about a equal unit of co2 right product coming out is that correct that you agree with that right one-to-one ratio yep so what we're seeing in like fat is if you're burning primarily

fat as your fuel source then it's a one to 0.75 ratio right unit one unit of oxygen to 0.75 of co2 so the theory now this isn't we don't have science we don't have any like hardcore studies to really prove this yet but the theory is that we're doing less oxidative stress because we're not kicking out as much co2 okay we're gonna we're gonna come back and talk about that because there's a lot of exercise testing that revolves around the respiratory exchange ratio which you were just mentioning which is which is i want to get into that because i think that's an interesting one because there is a there is a cost to burning fat yeah okay so we're gonna we're gonna come back and talk about that but the second point that we're trying to bring to light is is that there's some sort of recovery enhancement enhancement from optimized fat metabolism and your your theory is and this is where it gets really muddy is that recovery enhancement has to do with the amount of carbon dioxide that is produced as a as a byproduct of this is a theory theory okay because we're gonna we're gonna talk about that theory a little bit but let's keep let's keep going so you've got the crossover points better yeah you're burning more fat at a higher intensity your recovery is better keep going i don't know how many bullet points you want to go through let's try to keep them less than 10 yeah let's let's keep let's keep it uh let me give you let's see what's another good one pick one more we'll talk well those three we could fill the rest of the other is gi stress i think for ultra running

specifically let's get into specific i think it's kind of cool to tie it into real world right like what athletes are experiencing and this is what i am i'm sure you're dealing with it too with your your athletes i'm dealing with my athletes i have people come to me that just you know they're having major gi stress and ultras and that is a this one's a huge one because if you can burn on board fat if you can teach your body to burn at a deeper rate per minute of on board fat you're gonna have to consume less carbohydrate during the event that's the most important piece okay i would say because that's so real world yep totally totally agree gi distress is a huge issue with ultra runners i mean you look at all the survey data they're all it's all coming up to the number one or number two issue that uh ultra runners and in particular 100 mile races or 100 mile runners uh experience during uh during their particular race so i completely agree that if we can solve the gi issue it would be a huge advantage to all ultra runners and that's where i say this this ofm protocol is a tool for people that are experiencing that that's just they could try all kinds of things i'm not saying it's the only way but i'm saying it is a way to help solve that issue okay so let's keep it at three because otherwise we'll we'll have a seven hour podcast and people will turn it turn off after the second hour talk for seven hours too so well we can have part two and part three and part four but we're gonna we're gonna keep the three main advantages as improving the crossover point

improving some aspect of recovery that's related to carbon dioxide production and then alleviating the gastrointestinal distress those in theory are going to be the that's going to be our framework to talk about the advantages of of of ofm we're going to come back to those let's get kind of kind of down to brass tacks of how you do it and then you can probably bleed that into a little bit of how you have your athletes do this as well yeah it's all kind of one thing because i did the same thing i do my athlete the way i do with my athletes so i'll just talk about kind of a quick kind of overview if that if that works of like how you would approach doing it yep um i think the biggest thing is and this is where the where we got to this like when i made the disclaimer no i'm not a keto athlete um i don't feel that i don't like being put in a box i i feel that the keto community does themselves a disservice because they're just so incredibly vocal whenever anything comes out that they just turn everybody off it's a weird well this is what happens with any fad diet right we have we have we have vegetarians and vegans we have keto we have carnivore now like we have everybody and everybody gets in this box and say this is the only way i like uh tony horton from p90x beat body right the famous kind of online workouts like one of his my favorite quotes from him

was i'm a flexitarian you know like you get more data and you find out new things and you try it and it might work for you and so you might incorporate that little piece into your lifestyle so like that's the way i am i'm i'm constantly tinkering and and so let's get let's stick to ofm though okay um number one is you have to do a keto reset phase so the keto people are gonna love me right here let's say wait a minute you just said you were a keto person but all of a sudden you're getting into it as a tool okay it's as a tool it's like anything you might use vegetarianism as a tool you might use carnivore as a tool you might use keto as a tool that's what i have to put out there that it's these fad diets are the only reason that they work in my opinion is that because it's from our ancestral eating days when we ate seasonally right when we ate seasonally we we sometimes were forced to only eat vegetables sometimes we were forced to only eat meat and fat right and sometimes we eat a mixture of the two right so we're more keto so like there's a combo of like throughout our history as humans on this planet that we've eaten weight like specific macros depending on what was available to us and i think that's what we're really taking this these different diets and using them as a tool i like to look at them as like i like to tell my athletes it's like a crescent wrench okay a crescent wrench is a great tool for like loosening a pipe right a pipe fitting but it's a horrible tool for hammering in

a nail so right that's a hilarious analogy when you're gonna get that tool out of your toolbox and use it and there are those times you're gonna store it in your toolbox you might not use it for six months okay we're gonna we'll we'll talk about the validity of the tool a little bit but suffice to say i'm not in complete agreement with you that the reason that all of these diets work has to do with some sort of ancestral lineage i think hold on hold on i gave you your piece you can give me my piece i think the real reason why and the data actually illuminates this quite well the real reason why all of these diets quote unquote work is they're all just a different variation of caloric restriction that's all it is and it induces a negative energy balance people lose weight and people see the health benefits from losing weight now that broadens the scope of people outside the athletic population but when we're talking about the fad diets which apply to everybody not just the athletes yeah totally that's why all that's why the zone diet worked and the south beach diet worked and the ornish diet worked and you know whatever else you can kind of throw out there okay let's let's i can agree with you on that piece i think there's some there's some validity there's a validity that point for sure okay let's get absolutely let's keep going down brass tacks so keto reset is your first part of it let's get get into that a little bit like and it's not long term it's it's a month it what you have to do is

you have to like restrict carbohydrate enough so you can start making this ship shift to tap into a deeper rate of fat it's it's making your body start to say i've got to start producing ketones i need to start learning to burn fat at a higher rate that's what you're teaching your body to do in that first and it's only what we know is like from like all the all the research that dr volick and dr finney have done which are probably the two most published on fat metabolism stuff right um those two guys like one thing we can agree on with their research is that they it takes about really three weeks to really open that pathway up to burn on board fat at a high rate by restricting carbohydrate so that's that's that's phase one okay before you go on what's the like we think we got to calibrate the amount of carbohydrate that you're inducing for each of these just because i think people kind of get lost in the vocabulary of keto low high they really don't know what it is so what what's the carbohydrate level during the keto reset phase the kind of the traditional around 50 grams okay that's all that's all that's all i think that's that's the correct context so 50 grams two gels worth of carbohydrates right just to just to make the equivalent in everybody's head maybe it's two and a half bananas or something like that if we want to think about a real food product but that's the total amount of carbohydrate that you're eating throughout an entire day during the simplest way to look at it is two meals with vegetables only and meat yeah meat and fat for everything else right

so i told you i was going to do this before this podcast so for breakfast i really did have eggs and butter yeah buddy i knew you were going to i wanted to get in the spirit of things jeff but but but i have to admit to you i feel bad i cheated and i put like four cups of spinach and like maybe three quarters of cups three quarters of a cup of salsa on top and i probably got like 25 or 28 grams of carbs out of that so i've already kind of like blown my day since i'm like halfway through it let me tell you this the keto reset is a hard it's hard that's why i wanted to bring it up yeah you you have what i have i have to like prepare my athletes kind of mentally for that four weeks it's like it's like you're gonna feel low especially the first two weeks you're gonna back off on long runs to like two hours you know like it's gonna be it's like no intensity it's bad it's best for the off season right low intensity low volume overall for the whole like what they look at compared to say the rest of the year and and that's ideal right i did it during a high intensity of training for hurt 100 but i was desperate um and it was in a desperate phase of my life and you probably wouldn't do that again would you no i wouldn't i would take it during the off season and enjoy and like just really embrace it but but i would say that like that that's the first phase that one's that one's more like learning

to like what it is to eat keto like so then after four weeks you know how to do it right so if you need to use it and after that i i want to make sure this is very clear after that four weeks you don't we don't do keto very often it's like maybe one day maybe a reset if you went to hall the holidays and ate a bunch of food and you gained four pounds and you're like come back from the holidays going oh my god i drank too much i ate too much i need to do a reset and then you might do a week reset right or a two-week reset or a three-day week reset but you're not going to go back to four weeks unless you completely fell off the wagon and went high carb for a long period of time again but your body has made that shift and once it's made that shift it knows that metabolic set so it goes okay i know that and i i just need some carbohydrate restriction to get me to reset again okay okay step one is the keto reset for four weeks yep okay that's step one okay step two is what we call it kind of the uh that let me kind of give you like a i would say like what we call it it's it's about six weeks what i call the adaptation phase an adaptation phase is like okay we're still relatively still restricting carbohydrates a little bit to what to what what so that at this point we shift to more like we're still restricting to about no more than maybe uh 150 grams a day okay but we're starting

to use them and you're gonna let this is your favorite term jason is strategic carbohydrates god but okay let me let me explain that though because people throw that around a lot and i want to i want to understand i want to put it in context okay we've restricted for four weeks right so now you felt now you're starting to have by the end of four weeks you're usually having stable energy you're producing ketones now your fat metabolism is kicked up your your body knows how to burn on board fat but we do still have about eight it takes about eight to 12 weeks to really really get fat adapted so it's a it's a patient game right you got to be patient with it and so then we continue to restrict carbohydrates but then we start thinking about it in the context of effort and volume so a rest day would be more lower carb day like be more keto day like 50 60 grams of carbohydrates now this isn't a hard fast you don't have to stick to that oh my god did i have 50 grams of carbs this is where i start to talk talk to people don't get carb phobic you don't want to get carb phobic because after four weeks of restricting you start you're like reading labels and you start getting a little like mental about it and you don't want to stay there you you at this point you're saying okay i know how to intuitively eat you know keto but i'm not keto i'm gonna start bringing in carbohydrates and that's when i say okay now we start bringing in fruit sweet potatoes red potatoes kind of like what we that that neutrovore

paleo primal blueprint food list right we're sticking still to that food list because those carbohydrates have fiber in them those carbohydrates are don't jack your blood sugar up a ton especially if you have them with some fat like if you're having potato with some butter you know you're not going to jack your insulin up we're so we're still trying to keep insulin stable that's the key here if you keep insulin stable you can tap into onboard fat but still but still i know you're not trying to get people carb phobic that's still really low carbohydrate absolutely 100 to 100 grams of carbohydrate is going to be for somebody who has a 3 000 calorie diet that's going to be 20 maybe less of their total nutrient intake total amount of calories is going to come from carbohydrates yeah that's still a really low amount but during this time we start taking training back up at the same time so i have them start timing carbohydrate usage around those especially when glucose uptake is good like post-workout so they come after the workout and they're like that's when you burn glycogen you've like you tapped into and you need to replenish right for bone health for for uh your glycogen stores so that's when you'd be like okay i'm gonna have yogurt and berries and you know some raw honey or you know you're adding or maple syrup or into there to sweeten it you know so you're having like a decent amount and it's nutrient rich too right you're using fruit you're using potatoes you're using um yogurt you know so you you're not eating junk food right you're

nutrient rich food but the equivalent is and i think this is important for people to understand who don't understand ofm is that if you're looking at a diet that contains 100 grams of carbohydrate from a real perspective that's about a cup of rice and two bananas 100 grams of carbohydrate right so it's still the the picture that i'm trying to paint is in the keto phase it's 50 grams right a banana and a half or two bananas or something like that in your adaptation phase that you're calling it the total amount of carbohydrate could be expressed as a cup of rice and a couple of bananas just so people can kind of like internalize 100 grams and i would say even i'm having people take them up to about 100 to 150 grams on big day so on a long run day they'd be up high but see i'm that's why i'm saying strategic because you're using it on the timing it on the day that you have big workouts so intensity strength you'd have more carbohydrates on long run day you'd have more carbohydrates and even i would even say starting to tinker with timing before too so hey i got speed work today and strength well i want you to have some handful of berries before two hours before that workout right or something like that so you're timing them around the workouts before and after if that makes sense so that then you have some on board and it gets that carbohydrate is what gives us the pop right that gives us the intense that we can handle intensity and it gives us recovery focus for topping glycogen back off okay so that's that's kind of that that's a six-week phase right so at the end of four weeks and six

weeks we're 10 weeks in got it right okay and then after that what we say is ongoing phase is in the phase three is intuitive and and that's that intuitive phase is really starting to say okay i'm individualizing for me personally and my lifestyle so i say okay well i feel better when my carbs are 150 200 grams a day but i might restrict strategically here and there right and then around like an easy day or rest day or i might even intermittent fast one day a week for a lot for like a a maintenance easy run you know i i say i would say people need to be careful with too much fasting if they're training but what so what are the parameters around the intuitive phase because you've got these two you've got these two setups right this keto reset and the adaptation phase where first it's almost like a carbohydrate washout is how you could view that from the from the keto it's easier to burn fat instead of carbohydrates and the second one you're introducing a little bit more you're going for 50 grams to 150 grams a day of carbohydrate and this third phase is is intuitive what are the parameters around that other than you you customize it for each individual because what i want to eventually relate these two is just some endurance the endurance consensus that's currently out there in terms of macronutrient it's going to be low carb compared to the endurance and that's what

and that's what and that's kind of what i want to present to compare and contrast so in the intuitive phase what are like take me through a typical diet or what are you typically doing with those athletes uh so most people are well i let me give you what my normal day looks like sure that's probably easier usually i work out most days like during the week my maintenance stuff is during my weekly stuff is at lunch so i have like about a noon workout window noon to two workout window so that workout window i'm gonna i usually what i most days i'm eating most of my carbohydrates a majority of them in about an eight hour window so i'm i'm eating still so i'm not restricting calories but i am restricting carbohydrates to an eight hour window after the workout okay so so i'm like i'm carb fasting oh so i've had my meal the night before then i'm fasting all night the next morning going to till that workout i've only had usually eggs you know maybe some heavy whipping cream in my coffee um and maybe some meat if i have leftovers or something i might make it with my eggs and and then i'm like so i do have calories in the morning and then i have noon workout and then immediately i'm getting food in me and that's when i'm gonna have start having carbs like right after that workout i'm having carbs i'm gonna like top off glycogen so i'm ready for my next workout right so i burned glycogen but what i found is at the beginning of this so

over the time things change so in the early the first six months i had to add a little if i was going to go do an intensity workout say in that midweek workout i'd have to add a few berries or something to give me some pop right i needed that pop you know so i needed some carbohydrates before the workout but now i found i don't need it but i get i get the fact that you're restricting carbohydrates until about the noon time frame totally get it at the end of the day and i'm trying to simplify this just in the in the effort of time at the end of the day what is your macronutrient competition composition going to be you it's it's usually somewhere in the 60 to 70 percent fat um or sometimes even 50 percent fat but the protein and fat are going to be the most take the most of my macros so i'm i'm i'm really i really concentrate on good sources of protein from red meat chicken but full fat skin on the chicken you know catch the drippings dip the dip the all the meat in the drippings you know full fat hamburger you know full or uh ribeyes roast t-bones stuff like that um i'm doing organ meat like liver um mixing it all up i'm constantly trying to keep fish i'm trying to keep like a variety of meat sources but but kind of prioritizing fattier stuff so a lot of a lot of animal protein but if you work the math on that you're gonna end up around

60 maybe 65 percent fat yeah probably 20 percent protein i hope you're at 20 percent protein just to keep your protein requirements absolutely and i and that's one thing we prioritize in this is like after we go into that second phase and into the third intuitive phase is that we start prioritizing protein intake per day like how much do you weigh you should probably be hitting about 80 percent of what your body weight is in grams of protein a day especially if you're over age 40 i love that ratio anyway we'll we'll get we'll get too weeded in that with all the bodybuilder stuff but um um uh so so anyway let's keep painting this picture though so we're gonna just assume and i'm trying to paint the picture for the audience here that the macronutrient composition at the end of the day for you is about 65 percent fat about 20 percent protein which leaves about 15 percent carbohydrate so based on a based on a 3 000 calorie diet that's 450 grams of carbohydrates so if we look at the whole arc of this the whole arc of your plan are there any more phases of the plan or is it a three-point plan it's kind of three-point plan okay okay so the whole arc of the plan you go from rough roughly i know there's individualization here and there but roughly 50 grams of carbs carbs a day to 150 grams of carbs a day to 450 grams of carbs a day over the course of 12 weeks yeah but i would say that you're not

you can't put it on a daily basis because it depends on what you're doing that day okay if you average all seven days of the week out i'm never at 450 grams of carbohydrates a day okay so it's even less than that so it's got to be less than 15 more than usually 200 at the most okay so what i'm replacing in intensity i'm replacing it with protein so the the macro that i increase when i'm in higher training volume would be protein because it's insulin stable and you can convert it's not as efficient as process as carbohydrate but i will i'll convert through gluconeogenesis i'm going to convert some of that to glucose to right to top off some glycogen yeah with extra protein yeah so i'm i'm prioritizing protein in this scenario when i'm in training okay i missed the reason you're confused with that is i actually misstated the the math on that it's 400 in the final phase for you it's 450 calories worth of carbohydrates not 450 grams yeah what would that be in grams so we got a ballpark for that so 125 110 yeah okay that that's okay yeah okay so you're going you're going that threw me for a loop there because you said 450 grams yeah no i don't ever have that yeah sometimes in four years sometimes when i do the math in my head it's it ends up it ends up bad but anyway so the arc that i wanted to paint is that you're going from a very very low carbohydrate diet to a slightly higher which is

still low carbohydrate diet it's still low still low right 100 grams a day to maybe a little over 100 grams a day yeah yeah so like on a long run like a long run around a long run or bigger bigger volume blocks or even a weekly volume blocks you might be high you might be 100 to 100 for for low carb you you'd be 100 100 to 180 grams a day of carbohydrate that's that could be like you know that'd be five six servings of fruit okay and so you take you take this pattern which you used you as the blueprint for this pattern and you use that for your athletes so yeah the people that want to do ofm that's kind of the protocol and then after that we're tinkering to based on how that individual so some people are like say six four you know 180 like they're gonna have they're gonna have a bigger caloric need during the day than say uh someone who's my height five nine 140 but i get the caloric need but you change their ratios based on their size uh some will find that they do better on a little more carbohydrate and some will find that they do better on lower carbohydrate it just depends on the individual and the it's hard to put it into like oh this person's in this camp and this it's so in we have individual metabolisms right some of us right so that this one's this is a tricky one to nail down that's why it's kind of almost like you know a dartboard there's a target in the middle but we're we might be hitting the outer zone right like it's just it's hard to put yeah but here so here's the

thing that i've always here's one of one of the contentions i've always had with this strategy and you're and you're kind of playing into this all already with all due respect is i completely concur with you that nutrition and metabolism is individual there's going to be some individuals and we're not going to get into the weeds with this but there are going to be some individuals that adapt really well to this diet or that diet they can thrive on a carnivorous diet they can thrive on a vegan diet and kind of everywhere in between but you've taken your blueprint the jeff browning optimized fat metabolism blueprint and you're applying it to these other individuals which is the opposite of individualization well no we're using it as a we're using it as a guideline because if to keep fat burning but the guy the guideline is based off of you though that's my point like does this protocol the guidelines based off of how how you can still meander back into ketosis here and there based on what because because if we're staying in ketosis part of the time then we know that we can burn fat at a high rate so the idea here is to keep fat metabolism optimized okay we're we're burning at a higher rate than if i go back to eating a high rate of carbohydrates then i'm my it's going to down regulate and this is what the studies show at goo as soon as i have gels a big amount at one time at one time right but that's not how i use it real

life but when i use it in one setting then all of a sudden i have an insulin response as soon as i have an insulin response the body says store fat and sell and quit burning fat it quits tapping into it wants to quit tapping into fat it's not an on-off switch it's a gray zone but but you can't you can't get around the fact that you're basing this three-point blueprint off of you well not off just me right it's off zach bitter two people off of what two people keep naming them jeff you can keep going well here's another person that does it but doesn't doesn't really he follows it but doesn't follow it in a like strict ofm sense but jason slarb's another one right okay you got three right keep going and so anyway i'm using this as a cheek i'm not saying it's it's not a majority of people we are outliers that that are that are like we said it's an emerging what we understand about fat science is still emerging and and that's my point here is that we're you can call us whatever you want we can call outliers and call us pioneers we can call us like pioneers oh man that's that's that's as cocky as all right fair enough because that's not my style outliers is pretty cocky too but well no no i just mean that we're trying stuff that that that the consensus doesn't necessarily agree okay okay we can we can agree on that because if you do go to the consensus and there has been scientific consensus

reported on this from the international journal sports nutrition when they have experts a panel of experts that spend their whole careers looking at nutrition and they did this specifically with ultra marathon but i would say looking at nutrition in a specific paradigm well when they're looking at nutrition across ultra running and they once again they do it as a profession and their orientation is they want athletes to perform the best that's that's sports dietitians and registered dietitians and sports scientists that's their only orientation we want to get athletes to perform at their best their consensus comes out to be that in dirt that ultra marathon athletes will perform better off of a 60 carbohydrate diet and we can move the individual needle around a 50 or 65 or 70 but that is on the like it's quite literally the opposite side of the fence of the scenario that you painted which is 30 which is 30 and below and so when i when i see that and i don't have i don't have issues when practitioners are are not going with a scientific consensus when they're in opposition to a scientific consensus but but they better have solid rationale behind it and when i see the rationale be here's my blueprint i'm going to i'm going to translate this blueprint to other people in the

nutrition area knowing that that's so individual that's when i think that the that the rationale starts to break down a little bit yeah i mean i'm not that i'm not just it's just not me zach bitter and slarb like right i've you know the people i've coached on this over the last you know few years have it's been people have stuck to it because they've found a benefit in it right so for them personally you know and a lot of the people that i see really have benefit with this is people over the age of 35 right they're they're heavier than they used to be they've lost 35 40 pounds now they have tons of energy they all of a sudden don't have to they don't have gi stress in a race they don't have to take as many calories in a race as they used to they could you know they they recover really fast i think that's probably the biggest one on this it's just a lack of inflammation um even up to i i've had an athlete at the age of 62 who's a long-time ultra runner have a very similar so yeah like i don't have like you know the international uh you know uh sports nutrition folks are not like gonna back me on this one right but they leave the door open and i mean in your credit and the and the and and for the for everybody who's trying an ofm diet or a low carb diet every time one of these comes out and this has been i've probably seen four rounds of this in my coaching career there's always a little bit of the door that's kind of opened and the look the way that they couch the little bit of the door

being opened is but it warrants further investigation that's the phrasing that any of these consensus statements will use and so you do have that you do have that to to like lean on and i agree i think both of us agree that we do need more research in this area no and i think one of the things that if we look at the research in the past that it's been flawed because what we understood was like we they they changed the diet for seven to 14 days or three weeks and what we understand is at three weeks you're barely you're just opening that pathway right so that's why i think like the probably the gold standard study right now for fat is the faster study yeah but wait hold on why so i agree with you on that statement why is your keto washout period four weeks well because it's really if you look at the way we do it it's really the 10 weeks but not the keto part of it initially because it's low volume but but here's here this is something that we haven't got into and i want to make sure that this comes across clear yeah is if we look at keto diet most people will agree like 50 grams or less a day so you can get you in ketosis right that's the point is ketosis means that you're converting fatty acids to blood ketones so you can burn them for glucose basically the body can burn them for glucose that's the simple way or simple explanation right so that's what we're doing that first four weeks we're taking intensity back we're taking volume back so we can get you adapted and in ketosis once you're in ketosis then we start bringing back the carbohydrates strategically around

effort and volume but what you'll find is ketosis is different for an athlete than it is for a sedentary person or someone who's doing 20 or 30 minutes worth of x light aerobic exercise every day like we're talking about ultra runners here right so this is for ultra running the way i approach it so we're bringing in more carbohydrates around that effort and volume but they'll still going to be in ketosis so that that 150 150 200 grams what we're finding in really healthy metabolism you could probably even go up to 300 250 300 grams a day and some athletes that may still would they might knock them out of ketosis for 24 to 30 48 hours but as soon as they got back to their normal diet the day after the run like the day when they're not really training that hard and they took their carbohydrates back a little bit because of that day's intensity and volume then all of a sudden they're back in ketosis and they're burning fat at a high rate again okay that's fair enough i mean you're looking at the whole arc is kind of what you're saying and not the strict stereotypical ketogenic arc which is 12 weeks of 50 grams or less that's when you start to produce more blood ketones and if you you know somehow ruin it by going up to 75 or god forbid 100 grams of carbohydrates a day you've then kicked your body out of ketosis you're still looking at the whole art i get it i get it i think that's a that's a valid kind of rational argument that we're not going to get too much into the weeds too yeah okay so you mentioned you mentioned these these benefits right we can talk about the consensus statements and things like that i don't i don't think that that's that worthwhile of a discussion

i do want to talk about the practical benefits and we mentioned three of them earlier one of them is the metabolic crossover point the other one is enhanced recovery and the last one is gi distress which i agree if we can improve any or all of those using whatever training strategy the athlete's going to be better off you would agree with that right absolutely okay any any three of those okay just yeah just one of the three okay so let's do this i'll offer up what is mine and probably a common criticism across each of those points as it relates to a low carbohydrate diet and you can tell me why that's wrong i'll give you the last i'll give you the last word on each of them oh okay is that fair fair fair enough let's see what let's see let's see okay so first off the metabolic crossover point yep so we've known for probably a hundred years that you can influence the metabolic crossover point and just to to re-familiarize everybody who's not uh intimately involved in the vocabulary the metabolic crossover point refers to the exercise intensity at which you are burning an equal amount of fat and an equal amount of carbohydrate and it typically occurs about you mentioned 50 to 65 percent of vo2 max i'll use on the individual i'll use 65 percent just to make it easy and that's what we see in endurance populations so 65 percent of vo2 max that's a

normal endurance run you go out you go and run you're running about 65 percent of your vo2 max you're burning about 50 percent carbohydrates 50 percent fat as long as you're not fat adapted you're eating up i want i want to say a normal diet but it's not normal because 50 percent of the people on this call it would be like maybe average if we averaged ours anyway so we've done we've known for a long time that you can influence the metabolic crossover point via a myriad of ways you can influence it with training that's probably the biggest one we see this in the lab all the time you just train crossover point gets better you can influence it with diet acutely and chronically and you see this in your testing as well that once you start to induce or once you start to ingest exogenous carbohydrate your oxidation of that carbohydrate then goes up so that crossover point where we see this 50 50 split between carbohydrates and fat is is uh is can be manipulated by simply the foodstuffs that you're taking in at that time and that has a big effect on the amount of of carbohydrate versus fat that you're actually burning in a real environment right what you consume what you actually consume and so my contention is that the vast majority of the improvements that you get specifically having to do

with the metabolic crossover point happen with years and years of training those adaptations take a long long time to actually sink in and can be manipulated to a great extent with just the calories that you're taking in at the time and there's no situation there's no ultra marathon situation that exists where you where you cannot rely or where you you always will have to rely on some amount of exogenous carbohydrate and that's going to influence your burn rate of carbohydrates and fats to a much greater extent in that real time in that race type of scenario than all of the nutritional training that you've done before because the physical training does so much and because it's manipulated by what you're actually taking in at the time so that that paints the argument for carbohydrate crossovers manipulated via other ways to a great a much greater extent other ways and you're using this dietary manipulation to influence which you can always get in a lab you can always get that manipulation in a lab but once you take it out in the real world it starts to fall apart so this is where at the beginning of our oh go ahead go no no so what's the no no it's okay so what what's the what's wrong tell me what's wrong with that argument nothing i agree with all of it but i do disagree that you can use your diet to influence

it at a higher you can push that crossover point more with diet that's the only really the part of the argument that i'm bringing to it is that because what i've seen is my crossover point really get pushed and so like like i'm i'm getting way and and we will be seen even in the faster study is that we saw like the crossover points in the fat group in the fat adapted group being really high like 75 of vo2 max mine's at 80 some percent of vo2 max is my crossover yeah but jeff let me give you some context on this because we have over i think like 1500 data sets in our lab that's not that uncommon to push it up to 80 for with a normally trained endurance athlete and i and i and if you look at the stats which i actually have right here if you look at the stats it is uncommon but when we're talking about really high level athletes which you're one of them yes i actually i have access to a lot of other high level athletes that's not that uncommon maybe maybe a smidge maybe you can look at and go hey you know like the highest athletes might be at 82 percent or 80 percent or something like that but it's not such a huge outlier that i would look at that i would look at your results when i see your and you were very gracious at sharing some of these uh sharing some of this lab data from me that you did at goo which we're going to get into it a little bit when i look at it through that lens through

my lens of experience i don't see this huge magnified fat burning outlier okay so what i see what what i'm seeing as far as with just n equals my athletes that's really my data set right fair enough okay so um i'm seeing not only like yeah we want to push the crossover point but it also it there's a trickle down effect to burning a higher percentage of fat during exercise right to be able to shift that crossover point because what you're doing is you're getting you're getting less less inflammation we go back to that one to 0.75 ratio that we talked about earlier we're going to talk about that more in depth for point number two but keep going yeah i mean i think that that's where i see this thing shine is that i'm seeing athletes one they can maintain body weight with eating this way one because once you get over and a lot of my that's different than the crossover point you're making you're starting to you're starting to make a body weight argument here which is different than the and i'll concede as a method of caloric restriction you can use a low carb diet to restrict calories now we can argue again on another podcast on what the best way to restrict calories are that's a completely different completely different topic but we're talking about

the influence that it has on metabolic crossover and i agree with you that you can get the manipulation in the lab you're right the faster study the faster study demonstrated that and for those for those uh for the listeners that are not familiar with the faster study what they did is they took a cohort of elite ultramarathon athletes and put them on a ketogenic diet and and essentially compare their pre-ketogenic performance not performance but their pre-ketogenic steady state metabolism to their post-ketogenic steady state metabolism and in this case the steady state was 64 percent of vo2 max am i getting that right jeff 64 percent uh yes i think that's what it was so it's normal endurance pace we've talked about 65 percent of vo2 max and what they found was is that in the ketogenic state all of their fat metabolizing things were upregulated they were upregulating their fat metabolism yeah to which the general the and i'll just paint the criticism on that uh study with a very broad brush is kind of a no shit type of outcome when you don't have any carbohydrates available and you're gonna burn fat period that always happens now the the total amount of fat oxidation or the or the high the the rate of fat oxidation you could say is surprising but not the fact that they're actually oxidizing more fat it's the extent to which

okay yeah that's good that's a fair fair portrait of that study because that study gets thrown around in the low carb community like the friggin bible yeah it's true good point okay let's leave the crossover point right and i i think i think the this the consensus that we can come out with is you can manipulate that a lot of different ways you totally can and and you are you are using the dietary manipulation as an enhancement to the manipulations that can be made via training yeah okay simple simple we'll leave it there in the interest of time okay the next one the recovery one and this this well i was thinking about this this morning uh when i was walking my dog and i'm like uh this is gonna get super weeded because we really don't and the reason we're gonna get super we don't really understand it right we said theories that's why i say that's why i make sure i throw out there it's a theory right we don't know for sure what what why there we're seeing this like better but mine was night and day as far as my athletes are experiencing it too that i coach yeah and and i i'm not going to discount that i whenever athletes improve their performance through whatever mechanism i think as a practitioner we have to look at that and go okay maybe there's something there but what i will always go to is what are the plausible mechanisms of that actually happening and you mentioned your theory which is which i'm gonna just one yeah there might be multiples i don't

know you're right there might be multiples but the two that get thrown out thrown out there are this this thing with metabolism right somehow you're you're metabolizing different substrates and because of that difference in metabolism there is some sort of pickup in the amount of recovery that's going on and the other one has to do very uh kind of very specifically with the oxidative stress and somehow burning more fat that's the key to the theory on my end is that what at least in our camp that's kind of the theory is that we're just doing less oxidative stress over the long haul so meaning over say 100 miler right if you're burning more a higher rate of fat per minute right for your aerobic needs then you're gonna do less oxidative stress that's the basics yeah but so here's here's my contention with that is you're basing that on the on on the carbon dioxide that's produced somehow the carbon dioxide produces is is is deleterious to an athlete right and you mentioned i want you to elaborate on this a little bit just kind of based on your research so you mentioned something earlier that for every liter of oxygen that you consume when you're metabolizing a carbohydrate for energy that's going to produce a liter of carbon dioxide yeah for every liter of of of oxygen that you consume when you metabolize a fat into energy that's going to produce 0.7 liters of carbon dioxide

that's based off of chemistry so you go and you do the chemical equation for atp and you look carbohydrate compared to fat you're left over with those ratios one to one on the carbohydrate side one to 0.7 on the fat side and so this has been brought up in the low carb community kind of ad nauseam that because there's less carbohydrate or there's less carbon dioxide produced when you're metabolizing fat that says that it's it's a cleaner source of fuel am i synopsizing that correctly i think that's been thrown around quite a bit okay so in the real world yeah how does that actually work and so the term the term that we use in physiology for this is the respiratory exchange ratio which all it is is it's a proxy to get at how much carbohydrate versus fat that you're used that you're that you're burning in a laboratory type of setting so we look at we look at the we look at how much carbon dioxide is getting kicked out by the athlete we know how much oxygen they're taking in because they've got a mask on we can measure all that stuff we can figure out that ratio and then calculate that's a key word we're calculating not measuring we calculate the percentage of fat versus carbohydrate that they're uh that they're doing so in the real world jeff what like what does that look like when you're on the treadmill doing your graded exercise test we mean what are the what are the numbers yeah yeah just just run us through this respiratory exchange ratio we mentioned it was 0.7 when you're burning pure fat and one when you're

burning pure carbohydrate i mean i think that probably would need to get into the i can't tell you off the top of my head i'd have to look at like what we're like the goo study yeah so we're talking about yeah just so let me give you a quick just a quick run of show so these this 0.7 and one ratio that you mentioned is based off of chemistry that's all it's based off of just chemistry yeah well that's what i'm saying it's just a theory i don't know whether that's exactly what we're getting i don't know if that's what's causing the better recovery you know like all i know is i can experience i experience better recovery my athletes experience better recovery but my contention with that is that in the real world you're not really expelling that much more carbon dioxide in either setting and i'm going to walk through that math really quickly i'm not even going to get into carbon dioxide is bad for the body and there's more free radicals produced and things like that i just want to talk about the math but it's still it's still if you look at those two numbers compared side by side right one it's 0.7 is a lot less than one agree agree totally agree but that's not the real world so to paint the picture here you if i'm sitting here i just consume my eggs and spinach and salsa breakfast i'm sitting here i probably have a respiratory exchange ratio of about 0.8 maybe 0.75 and so what that indicates is i'm burning primarily fats and some carbohydrate because it's above 0.7 remember if i was at 0.7 that's 0.7 liters divided

by one if i was at 0.7 it'd be pure fat if i was at one it would be pure carbohydrates so i'm sitting here i'm gonna i'm burning about 0.75 maybe 0.8 if i get you know really into the conversation right we put somebody on a treadmill and as the exercise intensity increases that ratio is going to go up yeah it's gonna go up and up and up and even actually gets over one which is indicative of contributions from i'm gonna use a word i don't like anaerobic energy sources yeah that's the typical run of show yeah so what i'm trying to get at is is when you become a fat adapted athlete at a specific intensity what does your respiratory exchange ratio go to and from like what's the difference and this is i don't think we know that data well i mean you can look at your data right from the goo study because you had one trial where you were fed carbohydrate and you had one trial where you're fasted paper in front of you i'd have to find the page just ballpark it is it is it one tenth or two tenths i think i was going i don't know i'm not sure i think tenth or two tenths i don't know let's just say let's just say it's a tenth which would be a lot that'd be like going from 0.8 to 0.9 but so we're talking about respiratory uh okay hold on hold on

hold on we're just doing so we're doing like data out there just no but we're doing simple math we're doing simple math so if you and what you're doing literally is as you said you're kicking out less carbon dioxide yep so if you have if you're kicking out one tenth of a liter per minute less carbon dioxide what does that mean in the real world for a real person well i mean one tenth would be let's put it in like a hundred miles terms no no let's just do just a normal run just a normal run one tenth of a because that's the difference we just explained that one tenth of a liter less carbon dioxide per minute over over a 60 minute run is going to be about 15 liters of carbon dioxide that more or less you mean less or more depending upon what side of the venture on that one okay okay i'm following you now okay you're following you're following me now so in that in that 60 minute run that your normal athlete is done they've they have produced 15 less liters of carbon dioxide yeah in this fat in this kind of in this fat adapted state right that's less than two and a half percent of all of the carbon of all of the carbon dioxide that you're going to produce in a day and that does not even account for the for the reduction in running economy

which we're going to talk about in a second that goes on when you're burning more fat so because of the reduction in running economy you have to be at a higher oxygen uptake for any single level in the goose study which you see in the goose study and so that two and a half percent is even less it's probably closer to one percent and my point with this carbon dioxide and this is i'm just getting i'm just trying to tear apart the carbon dioxide theory i'm not saying that there's another good theory out there but my point with this carbon dioxide theory like okay we're going to burn more fat and the reason we want to burn more fat is because you can recover better and the reason that you recover better is because there's less carbon dioxide produced that doesn't hold any water based on the math okay then then maybe that's not the theory i don't know so what is the plausible theory i'll say i don't know yeah but all i know is that my athletes and myself see a huge i mean okay i'll give you just a an example on my own this is just my own n equals one when i first did it right i had 2200s to compare what my post recovery looked like when i raced yeah and that's that's a pretty decent data set for you right 2200s of like a high carb athlete my wife used to just be hated hundreds because i looked so hammered i was i was swollen really really bad inflammation knees ankles cankles you know like bags under my eyes kind of a little

even like um what i'd say brain fog for a week after the race and i just chalked it up to that's you know and but when i did this i had a good buddy of mine george who works at patagonia as an ultra runner and uh jesse haynes and kira henniger right we're all at hurt 100 help crew for me and one they made a comment as soon as i showed up my body type had changed um just how much i how much like leaner and all that kind of stuff i was but the other was when i showed up to um they knew what my post hundred looked like they both all of them had crewed for me before so they had this reference point my wife had a reference point i had a reference point um and after the race i was i was taking photos of my ankles my knees um and just telling my wife oh my god it's like it's been you know a 40 or 24 hours since the race and i'm doing air squats like my quads are hardly sore like i'm not i just feel i mean i didn't have the inflammation i normally did i like bounced back super quick and and to the enough of a of a difference in body composition as far as like what i look like afterwards that jesse was like and both jesse and george did the shift they were like dude i'm doing whatever you just did i'm doing it and so jesse's another one that does it right so there's another name um to throw into it zach and

yeah we're up to five all men all men all men by the way yeah and and that's something we should we need to talk about i want to talk about women too yep we'll get it yep because it's different yep um and so i guess the biggest thing and and then with my athletes too we just i've seen this like and it's been consistent across the board since that shift because i've been doing it for four years now a little over four years right so i've done what i've done 39 hundreds now so what is that nine eight seventeen hundreds so almost half and half i've done seventeen hundreds since i made the shift but you've got i think what you're getting at is you've got a lot of personal and also professional experience with your athletes yeah that indicates that something is going on from a recovery and i don't know what it is man but all i know is they're like i'll give you whatever it is it's working i'll i'll give you that and i think that's a i think that that is an accurate statement of the state of affairs in terms of your recovery being enhanced on a low carb diet is we don't know the mechanisms very well no there's there's some anecdotal evidence to point that that that is actually the case and i'll offer you up my final opinion on this and you can tell me if if you want to debunk it on it my yeah absolutely my theory is i'd love to hear your theory is your your nutrient quality independent of the macronutrients so independent of the carbohydrate fat and protein composition of the diet is just better because

you're because you're concentrating on good food you're concentrating on good foods and that trickles down to the recovery not it's not not the macronutrient composition or the restriction of carbohydrate that is that's facilitating the enhanced recovery it's the overall quality of the diet well i would say that the athletes that i am coaching that is a good point because they are like really cleaning up like because this makes you clean up like because you're totally green foods well i mean and you once again you can go back and look at if you go back and look at the obesity research which there's a lot of research in this area and they look at diet adherence and how that impacts weight loss that's the that's the only thing that makes a difference is just the adherence piece if you're consciously focused on eating high quality foods independent of the macronutrient composition so the percentage of carbohydrates fats and protein they're going to lose more weight they're probably going to perform better they're going to recover quicker things like that one side thing that i that just just my own stuff i like to tinker after hundreds because i do like at least four a year and so i like to tinker with what the week after the race like what i eat and so like sometimes i'll let myself go and be like man i'm gonna have a i'm gonna have like a gluten-free pizza right and i'm gonna have like i'm gonna have all these like foods that i normally would like kind of restrict a little bit or like only have a very special occasions you know and save it for those times and i'll kind of just eat whatever and the one thing that i found is when i do go to that gluten-free pizza i'm freaking

inflamed like i'm swollen but if i go as soon as i tighten it up if i tighten it back up and restrict my carbohydrates down and then like up my protein and fats all of a sudden that inflammation goes down i drop the water i like don't have the inflammation and i recover faster so the times i play and even tinkering from day to day even from what i ate and then i go oh my god i got swollen and then i'll like tighten it up and all that it'll flush all that like swelling out but still it's the same thing right it's we don't know the mechanism this is just what i've seen so i don't know what it is but there's something there but but suffice it to say this carbon dioxide theory is nonsense because just mathematically it does it does it's a very trivial amount so we've got to not look we've got to like throw that away okay i like that okay i'm cool with that okay let's go on to the third let's go on to the third thing gi distress so it makes all the sense in the world that you're if you're consuming less exogenous sources of fuel so less gels that you're taking in less pizza at the aid stations less you know whatever else that you're taking in pizza at the aid station well hey man i was in turdichance i had a lot of pizza but that's that kind of race by the way i wanted to say good job thanks dude i want to do that race that i'm intrigued it's so rad it's like everything about it even the awesome pizza that you get to eat around everywhere so you can dude if you do that race

eat eat some freaking pizza jeff come on i will eat some pizza okay good all right i'll i'm gonna put that on instagram i love it a big old pizza i love it i love it tour anyway um so it suffice to say that if you're consuming less exogenous fuel wherever that fuel is coming from during an ultra marathon you're going to have less gi distress total volume of food total amount of calories you have to process and things like that yeah now i would say that by consume by being able to consume more your performance will be greater and that's accentuated the shorter and the shorter the duration is because the cost the oxygen cost of consuming carbohydrate and then using that carbohydrate is less than the oxygen cost of using your endogenous mainly endogenous sources of fat okay and so i i look i just look at the principle of solving gi distress not through reducing the amount of stuff that the person has to take in but by increasing the amount that they can tolerate because of that proposition because if you can tolerate more you're going to be able to exercise at a higher intensity for longer and you can't dispute that if you can take in more exogenous fuel you can exercise at a higher intensity for longer

so that's the orientation so for gi distress i'm just telling you how i'm coming at my orientation which is the opposite of how you're because you're coming at gi uh distress from reducing the intake i'm coming at gi distress from from being able to tolerate a higher intake but with a cost right because this is where the recovery piece comes in there's something about the increased in consumption of carbohydrate during exercise that there's some correlation there because when we can back it off there's better recovery so because we still use carbohydrate during a race right i still use it during a race i just use a lot less than because i had trained myself to use a lot in in my carbohydrate days for 15 years like at the end of like when i'm there at the end i was i was taking i could handle 60 70 gels during a race yeah but but i guess what i'm trying to say is is on an optimized fat diet you're in like part of the part of the inherent strategy is you have to rely on less exogenous sources of fuel because you're not training that aspect but you are that's where the strategic carbohydrate use because we're we're still keeping your body using it during exercise during long runs your iv dripping carbohydrate like simple carbohydrates during long runs you're still using it so you're still that that what we're what it's really we're look we're shooting for is a dual or what we call flex fuel dual fuel source right we can

burn high fat fat at a high rate because we're manipulating everyday diet but then we can also burn carbohydrate efficiently too we can use both that's the one thing like it becomes like a rocket fuel like that's that's the difference i see from my carbohydrate days of 15 years of racing at that and where i'd be like i've got to have them or i'm gonna bonk whereas now i i they're they're like i'm dripping them the whole time because i can keep that i can pop i can surge i can like throw down at a high level but i'm still because i'm iv dripping them the whole time i'm never consuming a ton in one setting like i'm not never like overloading my system too much unless my heart rate's going to creep up so this is where the strategic for example i'm i'm iv dripping you know i'm i'm sponsored by goo disclaimer there so i use goo products but i'll also i'll all but i just want to give you an example of my fueling yeah right i'm iv dripping grew rock tank non-caffeinated goo rock tank grape like during the race like that's a drip about 125 calories between every aid station right i probably hit about 200 calories an hour is what i'm hitting i'm 5 940 i'm hitting about 200 calories an hour and carbohydrate okay so maybe 150 early on 100 to 150 but at once i'm over three or four hours in i'm like at about a 200 because i'm i'm racing right so i'm at a pretty high output right especially later especially something like western states right like like this year's western states i i mean we threw down the last

60k like i ran five i ran the fastest split on strava from four still to the finish and regan got second and kyle petrari got third so eighth ninth and tenth place we all ran the fastest splits ever on strava that's only for people who've been in the race no one's going to run that that split because it has the river crossing right but but the point is that we we were at a high output right at the end of 100 right so the point here is you're using it strategically so if i know a hill climbs coming up i'm going to pop a whole gel and i'm going to ride that high up that climb but then when i'm back to my aerobic zones i'm burning fat still at a decently high rate and this is this goes back to our early conversation that about like what we want to test at goo like in real world real world conditions right is being able to bring in like how how does this what does this look like at two or three hours into a race versus like a 70 minute treadmill test yeah and that's that's gonna that i think that's gonna be fascinating but suffice it to say on this gi distress there's two different strategies that you can take you can either try to burn more fat so that you're taking in less fuel and in your case that's 200 calories or you can train the gut such that you can take in more carbs to take in more fuel and i guess what i guess what i'm saying is is the side of the the side of the fence that i typically steer people towards is to train your gut because there's a performance benefit for being able to for being able

to tolerate more exogenous carbohydrates because we know that burning fat particularly at high intensities has a cost to it and that cost is and that cost is running economy yeah there is a cost on paper but in real world scenario meaning how my perceived effort is lower yeah but from a training perspective though okay let's get let's actually let's go to this is a good place to transition to the goo studies because i think there's a couple of pieces of this that will uh bring this to light so you went into goo energy labs in berkeley california they have an exercise physiology uh set up their metabolic testing and it's it's in a consumer setting it's a it's it's a neat setup because you can do whatever you want to do it's not like a university setting where they have to you know adhere to a certain protocol and they have to get it approved and you've got to have you know 15 people and it's got to be homogenous group and things like that they can bring they can bring you in jeff and they can poke and prod and do whatever they want to you to do and do it however we decide yeah and so the strength of it is the strength of having a setup like that is you can do whatever you want the weakness is is it's like isolated to okay it's just this person under just these conditions that we that we actually studied but needless to say i i i found it interesting not fascinating but interesting uh in terms of what you guys were actually able to do and produce so why don't you run through

very quickly the the research protocol as a whole and then the five different setups that you had and then we're going to focus on like two of them that are probably more applicable yeah well okay so we had one i went back up a week before i went relative relatively low carb so for the week before the the test so that meant we wanted to see like kind of you know if i what i'd normally do before a race is about 12 to five days out from the race i'd go more of like a keto slash carnivore phase during that phase to really get my fat burning kicked up a little bit like to re-enhance it a little bit right and then bring carbs back in the five days before the race okay before like 100 so like so that we wanted to kind of we wanted to mirror doing a little bit of carbohydrate restriction right before the event so we could get a baseline of where i burn fat when i'm in that phase so as soon as i showed up we did a fasted we did we did um a full inside tracker blood work okay um and then we did uh a fasted test so the first let's back up just a little bit though because you did the same test protocol across five different conditions yes let's go over the just go over the testing protocol first and then we'll get into the five different conditions no that's fine i think but a lot of people don't understand what an what a graded exercise test can actually look like so let's go over how that graded exercise test worked first and then the different iterations

of it that okay so they have this is kind of cool for ultra running because they have one of those uh uh uh one of those treadmills that goes like to 40 percent yeah it's a wood way right yeah uh no i think it's uh i think it was uh nordic track okay like the incline trainer okay cool is what we're on so okay so what we do is um uh we do a 20 minute or 15 minute warm-up put you on a treadmill put the oxygen mask on and everything like that super easy pace they don't even put the mask on yet just 20 minute warm-up or 15 minute warm-up then we put the mask which you know is going to breed carbohydrate and fat right what i'm when i'm burning what my fuel sources are so we're putting the mask on it's a little backpack so they it's like a little tiny and it's bluetooth so bluetooth to a laptop that's sitting next to me on a desk with where the where roxanne was standing right so she's a scientist at goo so she she's we take another four minutes to get to make put it at one percent and like let me warm up make sure everything's reading so it continues my warm-up to basically 19 minutes so this is just getting used to the mask for four minutes making sure everything's reading are they getting data all this kind of stuff oh i should back up at the beginning they took all my baseline stuff um blood glucose ketones and lactate you got your finger pricked a lot yeah i got pricked a lot dude we had to move to my ear after a while

so yeah it was brutal so and switch sides because we did five tests in two and a half days were your fingers all bruised and purple afterwards not too bad recovery dude good one good one okay so let's keep going through the protocol so you warm up you got the mask on yep and so the the test starts so every four minutes they take a they they do uh okay so every four minutes we bump up the grade so we put it at five minute or a 12 minute miles five miles an hour okay and that's consistent through the whole test we don't increase speed we just increase uh um great percentage grade right so we the test initially starts at three percent for four minutes and then we go six nine twelve fifteen eighteen twenty one to it's basically in the in the in the fasted test which is the first day was fasted only a black cup of coffee no food for 14 hours since the night before they wanted to see my baseline of where i could hand where i could go what my numbers look like and where i maxed out at basically where i tap out like when i tap out of the treadmill and i tapped out at three minutes into the 21 percent okay so then every four minutes they took my lactate every other one they took ketones and blood glucose so every so every eight minutes so it's a it's a let me i'm gonna simplify it a little bit it's a graded exercise test yep you

have a warm-up period yep you start out at 12 minute miles and you increase the grade three percent every four minutes until you get to a 21 percent grade yeah so it's three three percent grade at a at a 12 minute mile for four minutes six percent grade at a 12 minute mile for four minutes nine percent grade at a 12 minute mile for four minutes so on and so forth and the whole time you're taking measurements i've got a mask on you got a mask on and you're and all that mask is doing is it is it's measuring the amount of air that you're taking in and the amount of carbon dioxide that you're blowing out and since you know the composition of the air around you you can do all the equations to see how much oxygen you're utilizing and how much co2 you're kicking out like we're talking about earlier but the point is is you're doing all these and the exercise intensity is increasing and so yeah so that's what i want that's why i want people to understand that haven't done a graded exercise test how do you feel during each one of those stages so it's like super chill and three six nine percent because i was i mean at the time it was last winter and i was i'm pretty well trained at the time so like running uphill was not that hard for me so like i felt pretty good until i got into the teens and it gets a little harder and starting to get starting to get hard you know in the 12 15 you start getting into 18 you're you're trying not to fall off the back of the treadmill yep okay and 21 is all out that's like i'm kicking at the end of an 800 meter race like i'm when's the last time you did

an 800 meter race i high school i was a high school 800 meter runner um um yeah the pain cave the last 300 meters um so like just that last four minutes is like everything you can do to hold form breathe get it oxygen like not fall off the back of the treadmill not stumble like you're literally doing it until you you either have to quit and like straddle the treadmill and you're just like you know or or you try to finish the session so it's it's designed so the end of it is theoretically your max yeah theoretically and this is this is slightly different than a standardized vo2 max test where because it wasn't an official vo2 max test but we did get vo2 max numbers yeah and i want to i want to draw that distinction because in a typical vo2 max test you run the test until literally the subject jumps off of the treadmill and straddles the treadmill they are taking it to as far as they can go sometimes they actually do fall off the back of the treadmill and i have to catch them when i when i'm the when i when i'm the one running the test and i've done that several times before but this is this is not designed to be a specific vo2 max test it's designed just to get you close so that you're running close to your really close and but more more more so to run you through the range of intensities that's the real big point yeah and that's why we established the fasted baseline test because that's what we go to

where we could have gone to 24 right but i had i tapped out at 21 at three minutes in okay like i was like i can't go any farther perfect so that's that established like we're going to 21 in every test okay so you did this test and to throw out a really bad nutrition pun you had five different flavors of this test there were five different nutrition interventions that you used across the same test on different days yeah test of the morning and and also a side note we we even kept this is like goo wanted me to do this we kept the exact same food i ate the exact same food for that three days good test protocol lunch exact same macros same amounts yep like same amount of coffee every day so it was very consistent so you're going through this test this ramp protocol increases three percent every four minutes until jeff pukes or falls off the back of the treadmill or the test i've had that happen too that's a story for another day it is gross um so you've got this test you've got the standardized test and you've got five different flavors of it why don't you explain each one of the trials very quickly because we're going to talk a little bit more in depth about the reason i we did we tested all these because i'm sponsored by all three products i'm goo's my primary nutrition sponsor and and then i also am sponsored by hvmn ketone esters and vespa so um so we wanted to we wanted to kind of i came there kind of with all of it with me just in case like to see we wanted to see what each of my because i use all three during a hundred we wanted to see what that fueling each

one did individually so not in real world example where i'd be mixing them but individually so the first one was fasted like we said the second one was in the afternoon the first day so i got about a six hour rest at five and a half six hour rest and did the test all over again we did carbohydrates and the carbohydrates carbohydrates were specifically what i think that's goo so it was goo roctane a full serving so 250 calories in a 20 ounce bottle i sipped on before the rich before the before we even started which i'd never do so not real world but we wanted to see what it did to my fat right did it down regulate my fat burning right did it push my fat way low like what was it doing to me when i had a good amount right so we had it before and i think i took one gel in the middle if i remember right you you have the yeah i found that really odd so you took the mask off you took the gel and then you put the mask back on yeah okay all right and and so right before like right in about i don't remember maybe nine or ten nine or twelve percent somewhere in there we i popped a gel before i got into the intense zones so i you know throw down at in the higher zones like when you're when that's ramping up so the second half the test is really hard so and i want to i want to clarify something for just one second because the research protocol was actually half a serving of roctane drink okay good i'm glad you i'm glad you're you're looking at it i'm talking yeah no no it's okay it's okay i i can't i can't look and talk at the same time so half a serving is 125

calories in the two hours before 125 calories to start and then at one gel right yep and then you're having one gel i think it was in the middle in the middle of the protocol i think timing is inconsequential but i think the amount because that's i think that's more of the reason i wanted to bring that out is that's a little bit more of a real world situation for a non-ofm type of athlete where yes they take in some carbohydrate before before a race and then totally sip on it on the way to the start line yeah and then 20 30 minutes into the race they take a gel i think that's a that's a relatively applicable situation for a lot of athletes so keep going so we got these two trials first the fasted one and the carbohydrate one hydrate one was day one day two was the morning test was ketone esters only which they don't recommend as a disclaimer it knocks your blood sugar low like hypoglycemic low right so but because i'm a high fat fat adapted athlete my body my body my body's used to being you know can have my blood sugar pretty low and it's not bonk so they were okay with us doing ketones by themselves like we we we said okay i think you can handle this but if you look you look at my my my blood sugar was low before the start they have the aed on standby yeah what's that the aed on standby for you so i think i got down to 57 blood sugar yeah yeah before the race or before the uh test and it's a it's a product called hvmn in north america did they say hvmn or is it human they've doing it both ways i'm not sure

i think originally they thought human would be really like catchy but everyone calls it hvmn so that's what so i just call it hvmn yeah that's what i call it so it's a key it's a ketone ester drink it's commercially available it's one of i think two ketone ester drinks that you can get commercially right now to paint the the picture for the athletes it's it's not it's starting to become more recognized as a source of uh of fueling or as a nutritional strategy i'll put it that way as a nutritional strategy and a lot of that was here's your second terrible nutrition pun a lot of that has been fueled by some of the use that the tour de france riders were using and every team has bought is using it except the french team well it's there's another story there but i've so anyway it's a it's a it's a nutritional intervention for those of you that are not familiar with what a ketone ester is we're not going to talk about that trial it's an exogenous ketone basically but it really push you were seeing it push a bump your ketones your blood ketones pretty high like a point you know or so yep okay so that was trial number three ketone number three and then in the afternoon session we did the way they recommend it is ketones and carbs together um but you you have the paper in front of me i can't remember exactly did we drink carbs before or we just i don't remember how exactly we did it uh yeah so the ketone plus ketone plus carbs is one serving ketone ester one hour before

plus half a serving of roctane 30 minutes before and then one gel at the third stage yep there you go so you're doing ketone esters plus carbohydrate before and then carbohydrate during which is a little more like the way you're supposed to use that product yeah is that is that fair actually because i know you use this at western states is that fairly analogous to how you were using it western states yeah i yeah i take i took uh ketone esters at three times so 30 55 80 that's like a hundred dollar intervention right because they're like 30 a serving they're like 30 some dollars a serving dude it's a hundred dollar intervention oh god yeah they'll get that price went down yeah okay okay i i wanted to paint that picture because once again i think that that that's actually a real world scenario for the use of ketone esters okay so that that was the next trial and then the and then the last day the last morning the third day we just did a morning test before i flew out um that was uh fasted with only vespa 30 minutes before yep okay so another product done just completely in isolation which is how i would use that product i only would take vespa 30 minutes before a hundred and my first carbohydrates wouldn't come in for an hour until after running an hour okay so that would be realistic for you for one hour of a hundred mile run yep and then i would start dripping carbohydrate okay all

right and this is where it comes back to where we want to use this meta this metabolic cart right the backpack in a real world setting at altitude on a trail where i do a circuit of climbing for three hours and keep testing at every lap yeah they've tried to do that type of study at western states before with the portable uh metabolic carts and once you enter it's tricky because once you introduce three or four of them and you got 10 or 15 subjects you just end up losing a lot of data it's it's not it they're they're don't get me wrong they're reliable but it's just when you're swapping them in and out and you got different people and it's in the real world or there's dust and you know the environment like we all compete in um it's just way more complicated okay so let's get back to it we're only going to focus on a couple of those trials because yep discussing all five of them is another five podcasts totally dude which we can do there's enough demand for it i don't mind doing it but but let's take what are jeff browning's takeaways from this what are my takeaways it's you it's you doing the test so what are your takeaways from it because you're going to use this test as an athlete and as a coach in some form or fashion take the information from it and say this is what i this is what i'm going to use it for um well i think some of the things that i really got away from it was that um all pro all the products kind of do what they say they're supposed to do yeah that's a really good one

that i mean that's that was the big takeaway it was like i wanted to know i'm using all three of these products are they doing what they say they'll do and they actually do there was no like you know you know i was able to i was able to have pop in the in the carbohydrate test i was able to have pop in the ketone and carb test right um you know like i i felt really strong in those these are the two tests we want to talk about ketones and carbs together right and then ketones and carbs by themselves and and i felt really good but if you look at the carb test right it really really down regulated my fat burning like my fat burning like tanked and it's the orientation i mean the orientation is like your i just love this from a sociology perspective your orientation on this is your fat regulation was down regulated another orientation could be your carbohydrate metabolism was up regulated yes and vice versa in the other trials and this is where the flex fuel idea and this is where the real world scenario for me is really intriguing is because i i would keep get my fat burning really really kicked up in the beginning of the race and then i'd start trickling carbohydrates in a very small amounts never overwhelming myself so i would not getting an insulin response i'm not getting a blood sugar spike like i did during taking 125 calories of goo before before i started the test right that way it isn't a real world scenario for me personally

what so what is the real like what's the trickle in mine's mine's literally 125 calories per hour like so sipping uh-huh so it's very small every sip's probably one or two grams of carbohydrates but once you once you're saying earlier you were targeting more closer to 200 calories an hour i am i'm getting 125 calories from goo roctane right and then i might have a little bit of fruit at the aid station table like a third of a banana or a little bit of juice from an orange wedge a couple of orange wedges um and then i might take a strategic gel every once in a while like you know i'm i'll pop like i might eat in early miles i'll eat like half a gel so i don't get as much and then i'll wait five or ten minutes and eat the rest of the gel just to not have that insulin spike so i'm still trickling in the carbohydrate right that's what i'm thinking is sorry oh go ahead go ahead well one of the thinkings behind that is just to give you a side there's a reason for it um is that what we see a lot is like if you have about five grams of carbohydrates it raises your blood sugar right in most people so somewhere in ballpark let's just ballpark we're throwing a ballpark out there right this isn't hard science but but it's a ballpark so like five grams of carbohydrates it's going to give you a blood sugar spike which means your insulin's got to kick out your pancreas got to kick out insulin to get your blood sugar back down okay to get you back to the teaspoon of glucose in your bloodstream okay to homeostasis so that's about what we so what we're looking at is

sipping carbohydrate instead of taking a whole gel at one time unless your heart rate's going to creep up right where you can have good glucose uptake and really pop have that pop so like for me if i'm coming into a big climb at western states i'm going to pop a gel at the base of the climb it's strategic because i know my heart rate's going to creep up on that climb or if i'm going to pass someone in the second half and i'm coming up on a guy who's i got a pass and i'm going to have to surge for 15 20 minutes then i'm going to pop a whole gel yeah that that nibble nibble sip sip recommendation is the that's the that's the for everyone yeah that's the colloquial way to to describe it and there's a lot of you know i i think that that's a completely reasonable way to go about it what i was trying to say earlier is that's why i like the chewable products more than the gel products is because you're not limited to 100 calorie shot of something all at once and you can meter it out and especially for smaller athletes absolutely not that that let me let me qualify that because some some physiologists still yell at me on twitter if i don't but body size body body size doesn't so body the your body's ability to absorb carbohydrate is relatively independent of body size and that's a lot of people don't realize that that's actually that that's actually the case they think trying to use their common sense that a 200 pound person can absorb carbohydrates more quickly than a

100 pound person but what they see when they actually study this is it's relatively independent of that status and probably has more to do with their actual nutrition program and how much they and how much they've practiced it but the my point with that is is that a lot of people just because for whatever other reason not body size they just can't handle 100 calories or 25 grams of carbohydrates all at once or it's or it kind of adversely affects them so anyway that's just more of an aside yeah yeah totally and that's another side note of what you just said about their nutrition is that's one other thing i took away from this is what i eat and what the nutrition i have affects what my fueling is what i'm going to burn and i always put that in the no shit category like if you consume carbohydrates you're going to burn carbohydrates if you don't consume fat you're going to burn fat yeah i think the key here out of all this is to realize that like this still isn't just because that we did this test it doesn't it just says shows what my body does with each fueling source individually but it doesn't show it as a synergy of when you use it in a race like i would so that's what i'm most intrigued about is to find out what like am i still burning at a super high rate of fat right during the race or during a race while i'm dripping carbohydrates yeah so it's a take home messages we could we could like we can kind of yeah we can kind of move this along is the the the products are working as they stated are going to work if you take in something you're going to burn whatever that is that you took and if you don't take in anything you're going to burn fat because you

don't have any carbohydrate on board absolutely absolutely okay but i i think the real jeff browning take home uh take home message from this is just what you said what does this mean in the real world when you start combining all of this stuff into a real race situation how does that actually after you're after you're depleted after you're depleted you've been running for four hours you know you've gone through robinson flat you've you know done this done that what does that mean at that and we might not ever have crystal clear answers to that but we can start to kind of inch them forward yeah yeah absolutely yeah and i think the other thing that i thought um a side note that was interesting out of this is how much and i don't want to get in the weeds because this is a separate this could be a separate podcast but the the fifth test on vespo was very interesting to me just because it really kicked fat burning up over two grams a minute yeah and that's off the charts yeah that's high i actually look back at our at our data to see if i could find any and i could find some athletes that were like at 1.6 or 1.8 and once again these are not fat adapted athletes these are just endurance athletes uh but i would i would agree with you that two grams a minute is high now you might make the comparison to the yeah it was two grams a minute you might make make the comparison to the to to the now famous faster study but the conditions are different i want to i want to couch the the the conversation with the the conditions in the in the faster study what they are exercising at a sub maximal level

in your case we weren't taking an intense test it wasn't an intense test in your case at the goo lab where you're seeing 2.2 grams of fat per 2.2 grams of fat being metabolized per minute that is not in a steady state condition that's an incremental ramp test which is wildly different yeah and which was really an some interesting data that came out of that i think that that was really eye-opening for me personally as an athlete using three different products going whoa this one is really interesting product to me like what the heck i think so i think when i go back and i listen to this podcast i'm gonna have this list of like five different ones to take up next because we've been to that like five times okay i would be like we're gonna move this on so the the interesting part of that it's your podcast where are we going hey man well i think we both want to talk about who are not candidates for this okay good so you you're the practitioner in this area right like you have people come to you and say jeff i want to be a fat burning machine do they actually say that uh i probably had a couple say that okay most people you know most people just say you know i'm interested in this like fat adaptation thing or of m like and okay and saying you know i'm i'm interested in exploring it you know that's when i hear the celebrity influencers say that i just want to puke but that's just me so but you have people come to you and say hey listen i want to i want to i want to become i want to do this i want to learn more about of m and at some way you're i appreciate

what you do as a practitioner at some way you got to look at that situation go okay this is right for this person or no this isn't right for that person and we have to do that all the time as coaches with interventions well i yeah and one of the first ones is not great for is something with an eating disorder because they immediately like they get so caught up in the numbers and like where we talked about being like carb phobic and all those kind of things that it just gives them something else to fuel that problem yep yep and so i agree with you because then they're not going to eat enough because one of the things i see early on when you're trying to do that when we talk about phase one is people don't shift enough eating enough fat and protein they just restrict calories big time and then they they feel like crap and and so one is like it this this isn't like you're just restricting calories big time and you don't want to do that because you're exercising yeah so so like that's that's number one um um most people like a lot of the big candidates for me personally and this is where i i get a lot of like um satisfaction and coaching these people it's very rewarding is people who come to me that are like 35 40 45 50 and they come to me and go you know they're middle the back of the packers they're having major gi stress they're having you know they've gained 35 40 pounds in their when they're older and they like or they can't quite get down to their the race weight they used to get down to when they're younger and and they're just like they're struggling with like body weight they're

struggling with with uh gi stress those are my main people that come to me like those are candidates like i've had tons of success stories where it's like oh they lost 40 pounds you know or and and i would say that a majority of the guys people come to me are men so i want to throw that out there because women i know women don't get the full representation here and when it comes to bad adaptation and of m it's different they need more carbohydrate than a man does they easily go into ketosis easier or faster and so they're better natural fat burners than than guys in the most just because of i think because of childbirth and when you're nursing you go into ketosis mostly and so their bodies know how to shift there and guys if they've been eating a high carb diet their whole life don't necessarily but women if especially if they've had kids their body's going to know that condition and they need more carbohydrates to regulate hormones to make sure that that they're healthy i i agree with you that women are probably not the best not probably they are not the best candidates to undergo something like this and in particular the three-step process that you use but have you have you ever actually had any women that go through this oh yeah okay i've had multiple women and i've had it so one of the things that i would say is that the ones i've had that are successful at it are really good at using carbohydrate like we talked about so they don't go as low as guys and then they go a little higher so they still are relatively low carb overall right compared to the

like what we're talking about the normal population we're still but they're more like their maintenance diet during training is 100 to 250 uh 250 uh calories of carbohydrates a day okay right so so people with eating disorders sorry grams sorry 100 grams to 250 we've been going back and forth sorry yeah that's fine we're one for one on that switch which is fair which is fair um okay so you've got two categories people with eating disorders totally agree with you not candidates for this women you definitely need to do it differently if you are thinking about doing it i think they're just more susceptible to having a relative energy deficit in something in a and there are warning signs for them too and if they're feeling lethargic all the time and really chronically tired if they're especially if they're having inconsistent um periods and stuff like that they need to be like they really need to be focused on like is everything regulating correctly do i feel good you know 100 100 yeah okay so who else wouldn't be a like who else would you say we need to do something different with you i mean i i thought about this last night a lot because you gave me that question before and i just there's no i mean i think there's a lot of people are willing to try it i don't think it's i don't think there's any really bad candidates necessarily i think the key is like not getting chronically keto chronically chronically caught up in like being carb phobic like the key is like shifting at some point to like after that four weeks is like getting in that zone of like what

i call what i tell everyone if i'm telling someone just on the street and then i explain to them real quick i'm like well basically we move to like a primal blueprint diet so go read the book primal blueprint and you'll get it it's like you know it's it's relatively low carb but it's very nutrient dense and it's prioritizing nutrient dense foods and nutrient dense kind of uh carbohydrates like fruits potatoes right staying away from anti-nutrient type foods like grain-based foods or limiting them um because they have anti-nutrients in like phytic acid and lectins but it seems like you're getting in yeah yeah yeah and you've you've actually alluded to this concept a couple of times just in the last five minutes that at times it does go awry and what i'm trying to what i'm seeming to get from you is that it goes awry when people take it to more of an extreme extreme exactly this is what this is where like the the chronic camps you know chronic keto chronic carnivore right like you need to ebb and flow and use all of them to your advantage right there's times to be a little higher carb there's times to be you know low carb there there's time to be zero carb you know like just here and there i like to look at it as like a meal based like sometimes i have a carnivore meal sometimes i have a keto meal sometimes i have a full carb meal only like i was about to say is there a time where

you're 100 carbs i i mean in meals yes yeah like post workout like if i go do an intent like today if if we get done with this podcast in time i'm supposed to go to mountain project and do a really intense 50 minute strength workout after that i'm gonna have all carbs like after that workout but like 20 or 30 grams yeah i mean that's not a lot that's a banana because i'll have a full piece of fruit that's 25 about 25 grams of carbohydrates then i'll have yogurt that's going to be another 25 grams so probably 50 to 70 grams of carbohydrates in one setting right after that workout okay all right cool if that makes sense is that yeah yeah yeah yeah right we're timing it or when when uptake is good that's when you can utilize it and your body's gonna say hey thank you i need to top off glycogen boom done yeah and i i agree with you that the zealots in the nutrition space do whatever strategy that they're purporting a disservice whether it's the carnivore zealots or the low carb zealots or the keto zealots or the vegan zealots or absolutely even the high carb zealots like you need to you need to modify your nutrition intake based on a number of different parameters the intensity being one of them lifestyle being another one your goals and things like that it's when you get to this diet is the best for everybody for whatever now i would say if you're trying to i would say there is a caveat

you can go you're gonna have to go a little chronically lower carb if you're managing a metabolic issue right so if you already have something going on if you have a healthy metabolism you can handle a decent amount of carbs but if you're dealing with something like i've had people that have been dealing with like skin rashes or like kind of candida type issues where they break out when they have too many carbs and their rash breaks out but when they back off on carbs it goes away and goes into remission right i've had people who have rheumatoid arthritis that have had good luck with like a keto or a low carb diet and putting that like those symptoms go away when they're but if they go if they stray too far or have too many carbs in one setting the symptoms come back yeah that's a that's a big rabbit hole to go down though like all the difference i just wanted to throw it out there that there is a category that people can kind of explore that diet to help manage those issues i've seen really good success rates in that stuff you know in those kind of things like type 2 diabetes even my my father is type 2 diabetic and i saw really good numbers for one week we just put him on a just as an experiment he's my own dad i can do whatever i want i want with him and he's in a wheelchair he's had a heart attack a stroke he can he's used he's lost use of the right side he's on all kinds of medication he's in long-term care now you know so but but i when he before he went into long-term care i i came home for a week to help them like get get hand right after half after the stroke and he was just super lethargic he takes his blood sugar like three

times a day you know and like he has to monitor it he goes to kidney dialysis three times a week they take his weight his everything you know take all his numbers and what i saw was improvement stabilization and improvement the entire week i was there for seven days he can to his credit he continued it for about another month and he lost a ton of weight he like his blood sugar was completely back to normal on on that kind of like a paleo diet not like primal blueprint i didn't take him super low carb i didn't go keto i didn't i was scared to do keto like i didn't want to take him super low because he's type two but i did take him to like more of like 100 grams a day yeah and he was he timed it you know like like it was it was beautiful one day his blood sugar tanked a little too much you know down the 70s he was kind of looking like i was off doing stuff in a room and i can't i i kind of forgot about him for a while and like when it came back in and was like he was kind of like dozing off i'm like dad you hungry i was like i think so i gave him a half an orange and his blood sugar was back up to 95 and and he was fine yeah but and he's back talking and and that's awesome that's awesome it was cool like just n equals one experiment on my own dad who who is very metabolically compromised yep yeah and you see i mean a lot of the to to kind of wrap this up in a nice little bow a lot of the a lot of the low carb performance based rationales come from diabetes research overweight research metabolic syndrome syndrome research and things like that and that's not

indifferent from the way a lot of other performance things come into the fold within sport where it's very specialized medical intervention and we're we're looking at that medical intervention saying okay how can we take a shade of this or a flavor of this or a slice of this and apply it to endurance athletes to strength athletes to team athletes so that they can they can perform better that run of show has been going on ad nauseum for for years and this is a great example of that i think that's what we talked about bullock and finney studies earlier they started out studying low carb diets and how it helped like with metabolic syndromes and like as a therapeutic benefit and then eventually said wow well i started tinkering with it with athletes and then they saw benefits there and they just follow the data so i think that's it's an interesting time man i that's for sure like we're in this time where we don't like you said we don't have all the data we we have theories and we have we have concepts and right but we see people benefiting from it and people really doing well on it sometimes and some people failing on it you know there's there's goods and bads and i think at the end of the day it's you know if people are willing to kind of give it a try i think most people are a fairly good candidate if they're willing to take the time you have to learn though you have to take the time to read you have to take the time to study a little bit it's not an easy path i don't ever think we're going to you know we talk about the five athletes we've mentioned um that's going to be it man it's

the team of five we're the we're the uh anyway wait a minute hold on hold on why so why does this happen this is a sociology thing but so when somebody like yourself or zach zach we'll use zach because he's a great example right now currently he goes and he breaks the 100 mile world record yeah phenomenal for performance phenomenal hands down great performance anybody can look at it and go yep that's that's great he is lauded in around the world all different types of press athletes oh there's this you know fat adapted runner that broke the 100 mile world record and blah blah and that becomes a point of conversation amongst everybody when jim walmsley breaks the the course record at western states nobody said oh he was fueled on carbohydrates right it's true so i think that that sometimes like the anomalies you know what i think as a fat adapted athlete yeah yeah what could he do fat adapted of course you think like that like no gi stress no like dude like i would love to know like you know someone like kipchoge you know or something like that like well i'll tell you kipchoge 100 would be worse 100 for the event that he does for the event that he does if he's if he is metabolizing more fat for a two-hour marathon or two-hour marathon type of intensity he's going to get

worse because the oxygen cost is greater because the oxygen period period that's the end of story there and that's that's not even research that's just human metabolism you're about eight percent less economical using fat as a fuel source versus carbohydrate meaning you're using eight percent more oxygen utilizing fat as a fuel source versus carbohydrate and at that intensity oxygen is at a premium okay i got a question what what what what percent of vo2 max is he at in that over 90 because over 90 yeah so he yeah he has to have carbohydrate but if he could if he could shift that fat burning to say like where he is like burning mostly say 85 percent fat at 82 percent of his vo2 max or 85 percent of his vo2 max there might be enough shift where when he was using strategic dripping carbohydrates during the race that he might be able to like push it even higher like harder so i i'm not saying but i'm saying like for you to say i guarantee as we know things can come to light down the road that could like flip that on its head i'll i'll i'll stick by that i'll stick by the guarantee all right i'll i'll 100 percent i'll 100 sure you are of yourself well no it's not that it's just that the metabolism doesn't work out i mean i mean even like you know we talk about the vespa number that i had like 2.2 grams a minute five years ago we would have said that's not i've got guys and you know people like professors

and physiology labs at usu going we we don't even we've never seen these number shifts in our athletes when we're testing like cross-country runners and track runners but that's not the same as marathon performance marathon marathon performance oxygen is at a premium yes and when oxygen is especially at that level at that at that level four hour marathon or different story but two hour marathon where oxygen is as a premium the strategy has to be what are the fuel sources that are going to take the least amount of oxygen and that fuel source is carbohydrate right yeah i agree with you there i think i think i could i can i'll concede that point okay well but i always i'm like i said flexitarian like i'm not i just don't i'd like to see some of these athletes who are high carb athletes that are really at the top of their game right now i'd like to see what i could do with them if i could if they would do that adaptation a little bit and just see if they if they lost their performance right but there's a cohort for that there's a cohort for that jeff they did that in the supernova study out of louise burke's lab at the australian institute for sport where they took elite level racewalkers and this is this is this is analogous this is this has this is somewhat analogous to ultra marathon running because the intensity is actually pretty close they took elite ultra they took elite racewalkers and put them all on a low carb diet and measured their performance which is what matters at the

olympic level gold silver bronze but didn't one of the guys one of the racewalkers did like had amazing performance after he brought carbohydrates back right but they but what they found was is it impaired exercise economy which is a no-dust statement anytime you increase fat oxidation you're going to impair exercise economy and that was detrimental to their performance so not only but not only not only was their performance reduced but their training adaptations were reduced as well but i would argue that they didn't get back to they they didn't do they didn't get to ofm protocol they did they did it in two different ways they did they did low carb keto and then they did high carb right and then they're then they all felt better well of course the carbohydrates all your high end so it's all your high end performance no it was a low carb verse group versus a high carb group and they measured the performance i was listening to a podcast where they were breaking that one down and and you can correct me if i'm wrong but one of the athletes had like a great a great performance when he brought some carbohydrates back right after the the low carb phase which is indicative of like all of a sudden he brought back the carbs to give him the pop but he still was burning fat at a high rate right it doesn't just shut fat burning off so he was burning fat at a higher rate like we're talking about like i my full my theory is during a race that i'm still burning at a without being able to take the metabolic cart with me during western states or something i'm not you know that's why i want to

do this outside test we talked about but that he did that phase and then he brought back strategic carbs right before the event and he felt great and he and he i think he might even pete ard but but the point here is that there's there's there's something in the middle there it's not just keto camp it's not just carb camp of m is the combination of the two so you have flex fuel so you're still burning fat at a higher rate but i don't want to be 100 fat burner i just want to be a high fat burner but still my body knows how to use carbohydrates really really efficiently too well you can you can bring up the one the one person and i i'm not going to profess that i didn't look at the actually i did look at the individual data i can't remember how much of an outlier that one person was but but of course they didn't perform well on the low carb well i don't know i mean once again these are olympic level race walkers and you could actually from a performance perspective you can actually take issue with that study because you're messing with their careers at that point totally right when you're doing a nutritional intervention that compromises the the career of an elite level uh athlete at that level they're getting paid yeah and so but but anyway so even the fact that you would consider a study like that that had those those performance detriment i think is uh i think is incredible but what that points out that whole dialogue points out is there's still an individual nature to it absolutely that's incredibly difficult to weed out with one thing really is a takeaway from this podcast

is it's not it's not a one-size-fits-all and it's also not something you can just kind of go a b c done right like correct i'm still learning i've been doing it four years i'm still tinkering i've taken my carbs higher i've taken them lower i've taken them chronic low for a while i've taken them chronic higher for a while like in and out both ways like really ebbed and flowed and i'm still tinkering like it's been four years right but the takeaway here is that you there isn't just a a recipe i agree with that follow exactly 100 i agree with that all right you gotta go work out man we're over two hours into this you get the record for the longest podcast to date of our my like data set of 12 right now so i would expect no less from you jeff am i lucky 13 uh i can't would the order the the release date is different than the record date and i always get them jumbled up in my mind but it's going to be like 12 or 11 or something like that if you want lucky 13 i can i can hold back the production if you really want that i don't care dude i really don't care you get the last word though i really appreciate i really appreciate you coming on jeff first and foremost no i mean i think that i just want to thank you for having me on man i i mean you and i like i love following you on twitter man i love your i love your blog posts i follow them i read them um we have a lot in common more than we probably have you know not in common um and uh from a just

i just really appreciate you in our space and being a thought leader in this and pushing it and and being willing to call people on stuff and i mean we need that kind of rapport but you do it in a in a respectful manner you and i've always we've had a lot of little twitter conversations um and and we've always had it's always respectful and i appreciate that about you and um and i appreciate that you're doing this podcast it's pretty sweet dude all right we'll leave it at that man because the feeling is 100 mutual we might not see eye to eye or our plates might not be eye to eye um oh i got one last thing okay you do have the distinction of being one of the few people to ever pace bronco billy um yeah i mean i think you're only in a handful less than it less than a handful wow that's an honor what year was that i mean i'm 3900s i've only had a pacer i think four or five times um and you're one of them in hard rock 07 yeah that was a long time ago hurting dude yeah that was fun man well the and the the feeling is the the feeling is mutual because that is one of the experience that kind of propelled my interest in ultra running i was really new to the game somehow yeah so i'd only done i think 150 miler before that i'd never been out on the hard rock course and somehow or another a mutual friend of ours garrett grobbins convinced you to take on this newbie pacer to go over virginia's pass of all places on the hard rock course when i had no

business like being of any source of advice inspiration or anything on the hard rock course my first time out on the hard rock course yeah yeah dude me too we went over virginia's we we were virgin virgin virginia's pass oh my god yeah well we could do we could do a whole nother podcast on our hard rock experiences that's another thing all the time in american basin oh dude i thought i was gonna die yeah well yeah that was scary all right man we're gonna let you go go hit the weight room tell those guys i said hi out there i miss them i should make a trip out there sometime if i do we'll get synced up for dinner or something like that sound good let's do it all right cool man thanks coo yep thanks jeff appreciate it yep giddy up okay trail runners what did you think did you make it through that whole episode if you did thank you very much we set a record for the KoopCast in the short history of this podcast two and a half hours i did not really expect that to go that long but you know sometimes you just gotta let it keep keep it going people i really appreciate jeff coming on the podcast he certainly didn't have to but he really did uh kind of accept the invitation with uh open arms knowing that he was going to get you know a reasonable level of of intellectual criticism kind of come back at some of his arguments and i think i provided some of that uh maybe at times you thought that you know we we just kind of rambled on too long you can tell me what you think you can hit me up on social media at

Jason Koop is twitter and at Jason Koop on instagram i appreciate you guys listening if you can bear with me for just a couple more minutes i do have a couple of hot takes related to this particular podcast first off i'd be remiss to mention that in any nutrition scenario if you're getting sold a nutrition program based on a lot of the buzzword bingo that goes around just run the opposite way if this diet is paleo or primal or cleansing or ancestral or any of these things that are really not related to anything relevant it's just marketing run away it's not worth your time look look for something better to design your nutrition to design your nutrition program around honestly this thing this uh some of the stuff in the news in the nutrition space has really gone on way too far and way too long the second thing that i'll mention is uh it's a little bit of an extension of something that we mentioned in the podcast there is a scientific consensus on this and the international society of sports nutrition their position stand on nutritional considerations for single stage ultra marathon training and racing states that ultra runners would be best served to have 60 of their calories come from carbohydrate 15 from protein and 25 from fat to support their day-to-day training activities and this is this consensus statement is made up of a group of individuals not just one or two or three but many individuals who spend their entire lives they're actually actual

nutrition experts and jeff and i we're not nutrition experts we we have to play in the space because we're both coaches but the people that come up with these types of consensus of consensus statements are in fact domain experts and when you have a strategy that flies in the face of all of those experts coming together and to create one type of consensus around this one area which is macronutrient composition you better have a pretty darn good reason at why your strategy flies in the face of that and to be honest with you i don't think a lot of these low-carb strategies have a good rationale behind them in order to fly in the face of what the scientific consensus is yes there are always stories of athletes that have had success on this diet or that diet or another diet but when you really break down why those things are happening the mechanisms quite frankly fall apart and my personal opinion on this is it all really just comes down to different variations of caloric restriction low-carb diet is just a way to restrict the total amount of calories via one macronutrient carbohydrate in this uh in this case and many athletes they just lose weight and they see a performance benefit because of that and while there might be other things going on that's one of the main ones and i'm not saying that this is a good way a low carbohydrate diet is a good way to lose weight but as a way to lose weight is a way to restrict

calories sure go ahead and go for it if that's if that's if that's kind of what floats your boat and you can support training who am i to disagree with that uh it's a whole nother podcast as to whether that's the best way to restrict calories and drop a few pounds but we will save that for another time and we have gone on long enough really appreciate you guys listening like i said it was a long one hopefully you guys had a long run queued up for the day um if you could spare a moment go give this podcast a rating on itunes it really helps us out a lot really appreciate the feedback that i've gotten so far on this podcast and as always you guys we will see you out on the trails you