Protein for Ultrarunning with Jose Antonio, PhD | KoopCast Episode #181

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and this episode of the podcast is about protein for ultra runners and is with a true trailblazer and pioneer in nutrition research that is dr jose antonio he has been at the forefront of nutrition protein and supplement research for over 30 years he was the lead author and primary catalyst for how we think about protein in sports today ranging from bodybuilding to strength training power sports and even in endurance applications dr antonio is also the founder of the issn or the international society for sports nutrition and that is an accomplishment that should not go understated the issn is now a key body in sports nutrition research and information the papers that they produce are ones that i constantly lean on and in fact the podcast that i did which reviewed their position statement on nutrition considerations for ultra marathon is today the most downloaded podcast that i have ever produced and i think that that goes to speak to the quality of the research that they produce and put out dr antonio and i discuss

this and the origins of the issn and why that organization is relevant today and ultimately we get to why protein is important for ultra runners and how we should consider it carefully particularly during intensified training volume periods i hope this podcast inspires you to look at your day-to-day nutrition game plan a bit more carefully and perhaps take in some additional protein for recovery when needed now with that as a backdrop i'm getting right out of the way here's my conversation with dr jose antonio first off it's an honor um as i was saying off air um i i love being able to put a virtual face at least to the names that i've seen across uh publications and it's been a just a really joy in actually starting this podcast an unintended consequence starting this podcast that i get to talk to people whose work i have been familiar with not just for a little bit but no offense but for a long time in your case because you have been doing this for a long time true true story yeah yeah oddly enough uh yeah i mean i i tell people you know the original uh introduction to nutrition as an undergrad and um what i like to do and i i might tease you a little bit with this but when i teach class instead of telling them the year i did

something i'll often i'll often quiz my class and i'll say you know what when i was an undergrad in college that was when ronald reagan was president does anyone know when that is and a bunch of 19 year olds are like who's who is that yeah exactly yeah so that must be a long time ago i'm like yeah it actually was a long time ago but since you don't know the years it was roughly in the 1980s when i was an undergrad so but yeah it's um you know i think it's uh i know we'll get into this more but how the issn was formed a lot of it really stemmed from how i started out as an undergrad and then eventually masters and PhD but uh but we'll get into that we'll get into that well we can we can jump into it right now because i think that will help the audience kind of get to know you and your work a little bit better something that i'm very familiar with but pete we take for granted that organizations exist such as the issn and and i say that because i know it's not easy to do at one point something doesn't exist and then at another point in time somebody or some group of people and you are the somebody in this case wills it into existence you made a conscious and deliberate choice and you might have not known how complicated that choice was at the time but you you made a deliberate choice at the time so you know what i'm going to form this organization for whatever purpose that you decided decided to have it be at the time and that's not an easy leap to make it's an organization that i've leaned on their expertise and their opinions and their

position statements and things like that a lot i saw one that just came out from my my great colleague and good friend dr stacy sims and right and and you were at you were literally the tip of that spear that started it so so the audience can get to know you and your work a little bit better like take us through the journey of this like how did the whole thing actually come into being you know it's funny the tip of the spear i like that analogy it reminds me of the movie 300 i don't know if you remember that movie it was uh it was 300 spartans against like a million persians and i swear to god i felt like a spartan when we started this but it's like oh my god no one wants us to do this but here here's sort of the um and interrupt me if you want if you know if some of the details seem to be awry my undergrad degree was in biology because again this is when in the 1980s reagan was president exercise science is kind of was around yeah not really i mean most people who like the sciences either went biology chemistry physics and i'm thinking you know what physics kind of hard maybe too hard for me chemistry oh my god that's hard i can do biology i think i can do biology so i was a bio major uh my father was a physician he's like why don't you be a doctor well the reason i don't want to be a doctor or physician is i don't like being around sick people okay well that kind of makes sense you don't want to be a physician so i was thinking okay i'm going to be a bio major and i love exercise so i'm going to study exercise science because remember this is the 1980s sports nutrition or sports supplements as a field of study was pretty much non-existent yeah right

especially supplements in fact if you said you wanted to do research and supplements back in the 80s they'd look at like look at you like you had three eyeballs like why that's that's not a legitimate field of inquiry so i got a bachelor's degree in biology i went that was at the american university then i got a master's degree in exercise physiology at kent state university where i i learned under peter lemon who did some of the original protein work and this is back in the 80s still and even back in the 80s most people who worked in the allied health care field allied health scientists so you can physicians dieticians even most scientists viewed protein as you'd eat too much it's bad for you and i'm thinking that doesn't make sense it just doesn't make sense so again this is the 1980s i started my PhD in the late 80s finished in the early 90s i got my PhD basically in muscle physiology you're thinking why didn't i get in sports nutrition because at the time sports nutrition was not a legitimate field of inquiry which seems odd like to college students now they're like well that's weird because it seems like every college has a sports nutrition course you're right back in the 80s and 90s they didn't exist so that's what's so weird about this this category so i get my PhD and um the first job i actually had was uh this might jog your memory i was the chief science um i guess the the chief science guy for the weeder publications i wrote for muscle and fitness i wrote

for flex um jeez it's i'm blanking there were so many magazines i had to write for but really for two years i was a professional writer because i like the category of mixing exercise and nutrition these are the original for for people who aren't familiar with this these are the original like gym bro magazines with all due with all due respect to your writing that's the category that they were in yes it is total gym bro and in fact i purposely did this because one i learned that most scientists are really poor in communicating with non-scientists so i i i said to myself i need to learn how to write in a manner that a non-scientist can understand because who cares if all the science is great when no one knows what the hell you're talking about so that was actually a conscious decision i wanted to learn how to write for the consumer and also during this time i actually uh was a um a frequent uh guest and host of a a fitness um radio show in dallas texas a guy named larry north he ran a bunch of gyms there and and i don't know if you know larry i grew up in dallas so i've met him several times so it's funny because i'm thinking okay i i can speak science talk but i need to learn how to speak in a language that non-scientists will understand so literally out of the blue and again this is before the internet i had to call larry up larry doesn't know who the hell i am so i call larry up he's at his gym i'm like hi larry you don't know me i'm a grad student here i know a little bit about exercise hey can i be on your show he's like uh okay sure why don't you just come on this weekend and be a guest i'm like okay cool so again i had never been on radio so i'm like oh this will be fun so i went on there actually

he thought i did a good job so i started being his substitute host when he'd go out of town so this is kind of a long-winded explanation until we get to issn so during this time i'm trying to teach myself how to communicate with non-scientists because i think that's one of the skills that they do not and to this day they still don't teach scientists that they're really poor at communicating with non-scientists um but my interest even after all the schooling my interest was always sports nutrition and supplements because i always had a fascination with um mainly i learned this from my uncle he was a bodybuilder he would take all this stuff and he's like oh yeah this will help me put muscle on this will do that whether or not there were science at the time which there really wasn't i was like wow this is super cool so what was the first supplement that actually had some science behind it this is the early 90s do you remember probably either protein or creatine creatine protein a little bit but when creatine hit the scene in the 90s like huh yeah this is kind of a game changer and throughout the 90s as the data starts to accumulate people are like hmm this creatine stuff there might be something to sports supplements but not so fast so uh one of my colleagues jeff stout he's at the university of central florida now i said hey why don't we give a talk on supplements at the american college of sports medicine this was roughly late 90s early 2000s and he's like sure but i don't think they like supplements which is true they didn't like supplements um so we gave a talk and there was about 300 people in the audience and apparently

there'd never really been a quote supplement talk at acsm so we were the first supplement talk uh the first supplement talk half the audience loved us and half hated and i mean hated us in fact the half that hated us once we were done talking they went up to the microphone and they just started verbally beating the crap out of us and i ain't kidding i'm like whoa what did we say i mean these people it was um i remember this one particular quote from a scientist i forget what school he was at he basically said this and i paraphrase you guys have no business giving a talk to this conference and i'm thinking wow that's that's really open-minded really open-minded um and that's the kind of treatment we always got when it came to supplements and in fact got so bad at the time i was at university of delaware the department i don't know if it's the department chair because again this is a while back said you know what it's probably a good idea that you guys that you don't do any research in supplements i'm thinking wow that's a very non-scientific position to take so i'm like okay this is really crazy why are so many people anti-supplement and then fast forward a good friend of mine doug common he he uh organized the workshop a pre-fancy workshop so this was at the time american diet head egg association i think it was 2003 he organized it and the theme was sports nutrition and so myself and maybe 10 other people gave talks on sports nutrition it was the same 10 people who always talk about sports nutrition because really nobody was willing to and um it was at that conference

that one of my friends and colleagues susan kleiner she's a dietitian up in the northwest west it was at a dinner uh where all of us were there and she said you know what why don't we start our own organization since it's always the same people giving a talk on sports nutrition we're gonna make our own club right well it basically would have been a club because it's like what like all 10 of us i mean keep in mind in the early 2000s hardly anybody hardly anyone did research in sports sports supplements in particular like nobody in fact even to this day you go into 2023 i'd say in the world in the world there might be 50 to 100 scientists who quote do sports supplement or sports nutrition research it's it's still a very niche category um but it's a category that everyone loves so so you know we all thought about it myself susan kleiner uh douglas kalman um rick frider he's at texas a&m um and anthony almata so we met oddly enough at the acsm conference that following i think later that year and we basically said okay man let's start something we'll call it you know i was thinking the american association of whatever nutrition i'm like okay that acronym is a ssn okay that won't work uh we don't like that acronym so we came up with issn international society sports nutrition and basically myself and doug kalman basically we said we'll just do it we'll run the business part of it i'll take the lead doug will be second and we'll figure out how to do it

and then after the meeting i'm like doug so how do you actually do this i mean i never run an academic non-profit never i wouldn't like how do you start this he's like well he's like i don't know let me talk to some people so basically doug talked to some people who organize conferences and he says well these are the logistics of it we're probably going to lose money for a few years i'm like oh okay well we lose money there's only one way to find out if this works so um so before we launched our first conference just remember two key things stuck in my head and this is how we were treated at the uh i tried to join scan which is a subgroup of the american dietetics association now rebranded as the academy of nutrition and dietetics when i tried to join them in the early 2000s and this is despite the fact that i gave a talk at their workshop uh and i donated money i wanted to join why i want to network and they're like no you're not a dietitian you can't join i'm like whoa sure yeah wait so you have to be a dietitian to join an organization just because you want to network they're like yeah you do i'm like okay well that's really parochial and weird um and then american college of sports medicine i was told uh myself and jeff stout at a cocktail function at acsm i was told by the president of acsm the president the top she said uh gentlemen if and i paraphrase gentlemen if you want to have a career don't do research and supplements no and at first when i heard that i was like did you say don't do research i'm kind of talking to myself and later on i i talked to i looked at my friend jeff

stout i said she actually said not to do research i mean coming from a scientist that is well it's bizarre but also quite dogmatic so that's how two organizations treated us who had an interest in sports nutrition and supplements so that's the reason that was sort of the impetus for why we started issn because other organizations that quote talked about nutrition did such a really poor job and and honestly the zeitgeist of the time was very very anti-supplement i mean if you mentioned word supplements like yeah you guys all you do is promote supplements it's just a bunch of meatheads who take pills and and like protein powder and all this other stuff and i'm thinking it's to me i think what's the most insane part is the dogma that we ran into just absolute dogmatic attitude of scientists saying that it's not a legitimate field of inquiry and i'm thinking wait a minute everything should be inquired everything in fact especially yeah to me the most important thing you know people ask me what does it take to be a scientist do you have to be brilliant no you can actually be quite average uh you know but i think a scientist needs to be curious so you got to like like wonder about stuff got to be persistent in fact if you're curious and persistent that's most of it but you got to be skeptical and i'm thinking how could these people not be skeptical in fact they're just saying no doesn't work don't even study it and so you know

i you know when i talk to my friend jeff stout and doug helman i always say well um we lost that battle but we won the war yeah because at the end of the day sports nutrition is a viable category not only as a field of study there are now PhD students doing their dissertation in sports nutrition and supplements yeah and 20 years ago you would have never seen that um and also as as an industry we've introduced or tried to get people in the industry to fund research so that instead of just making goofy ass claims about you know my product increases testosterone by 400 i'm like you know maybe you should do a study on your product to actually see if it does before you just make stuff up you know so um that's sort of the long-winded explanation you know i left out details because there was a lot going on but that's kind of what happened well and here's the irony 20 years later is that specifically with sports supplements and the long-time listeners of my audience will know that i've been like beating on this drum for maybe you know seven out of the last 10 podcasts that needs the most scrutiny in today's day and age we need to scrutinize what is coming across our product shelves and what we see in the grocery store and what we see in the sports uh nutrition stores and things like that in our in our and in our instagram accounts we need to scrutinize those sports supplements more than the stuff that's been studied for however many years because they're so new because it's so unregulated and because there's the potential for both good and harm both those divergent you know pathways within

uh within those sports supplements so it's hard to have that foresight 20 years you know 20 years ago but once again kudos to you for winning the war because i i i can appreciate how starting something like that is not only difficult but is met with intentional deliberate resistance oh yeah a lot of resistance and trying to swim upstream in your own field in your own field of study in your own field of practice is not it is not an easy endeavor so kudos to you and and thank you from the from the community for actually getting it done oh you're welcome you're welcome it's been a fun and crazy ride but yeah in our first conference before we had it i asked you know doug kelman i said do you think anyone will show up and he's like i don't know maybe maybe not and i think i think that's what made it quote easy for us we had this attitude like okay if we if no one shows up okay we won't do it again it's no big deal you know but yeah you have to try yeah exactly try well to date to date as a kind of a reflection of that of that success not that i'm in not that i should be any barometer of anything but to date the most downloaded episode that i have ever produced was on your the issn's position statement on ultramarathon nutrition that was authored by nick tiller who's been become a fast colleague of mine and he and i collaborate on a number of uh number of different things so the i use that as a as as more of a thank you to say that the work actually does reach the people and it does

so in an impactful way as represented by as as uh representation of the downloads would you know lead us all to believe so so so thank you for that awesome awesome i'm glad we're gonna ping off of something though that's a little bit away from the sports supplement side of things and it kind of goes to like the heart of some of your original research that you've also had a tremendous amount of impact on a number of different peoples and that's with protein you yes one of my favorite subjects i know well you alluded to you're a game changer literally in this right because because you started studying protein at a time where in some applications high protein diets were kind of demonized and demonized to the point that we thought that they were deleterious for health not just for sports performance but deleterious for health and you had some of the original very impactful research that said quite the opposite that we can do we can utilize very high protein diets and i want you to get into how high these very high protein diets are and they're in fact not deleterious for health so take the listeners through that journey as well because that was something that also was a dogma that you kind of refuted yeah this what's fascinating about this is sort of like issn i actually had no intention of studying protein or high protein diets that sounds odd because i ended up doing a series of studies but what prompted it was the constant refrain of protein is bad for you protein is bad for your kidneys protein is bad for your bones and i'm thinking no it's not the the evidence for that just isn't there but i kept hearing it every year every year every year i'm thinking what the hell is

going on and even all my colleagues are like yeah we it's really weird this bizarre anti-protein stance which you know people ask well why is there bizarre anti-protein stance well i think it originates from the fact that dietary protein as a supplement originated in bodybuilding i mean it's bodybuilders really that push this and bodybuilders are on the juice so it's like okay these guys are on drugs they're also taking protein it's got to be bad everything's bad we're just marrying it all together yeah we're marrying you know getting drugs protein it's all bad so what's funny is i think this is around 2013 or 14 i'm teaching a class there was one student in my class a pretty large guy always had and you know this he always had his jug of water and i'm like this is it with you guys always drinking what you thirsty in the middle of class and he was always eating too like you eat during class you drink during class i know you're not starving because you're like 240 pounds and so just out of the blue i said how much protein do you eat and this is what i love about male bodybuilders and i found out they're the best subjects when it comes to high protein diets he goes through a rolodex in fact that's a bad analogy who knows what a rolodex is anymore but he goes to a rolodex in his head and he's like oh i consume about 200 something grams of protein i'm like oh that's a lot so i do calculations my head i'm like wow that's over three grams per kilo huh interesting so that basically that incident prompted me i'm like you know what why don't i why don't i do a high protein diet study just have people consume two grams per pound which is a lot i've tried it i've failed it's a lot and just see what happens don't change anything else don't change training don't change

anything else but just consume two grams per pound what did we find nothing body composition didn't change they didn't get fatter they didn't get more muscular nothing changed everyone's like wow that's really weird how do you how can you consume 600 extra calories and nothing happens well we know there's a thermic effect of protein maybe an inhibited appetite and their dietary recalls may not have been accurate okay maybe maybe not so we followed it up because we had we had so many people drop out of that study that we dropped it to three grams per kilo which is still a lot that's a lot yeah i mean people like oh that's easy no that's not easy no but we put everybody these are all trained college students we put everyone on a what i call a traditional bodybuilding uh program you know split routine chest shoulders tries back buys legs you know the whole works high protein diet compared to the control which oddly enough was somewhat high um when you consume a lot of protein coupled with a change in training lean body mass gains are the same okay that's kind of cool teams there's a threshold once you get above it it's not gonna help much however they lost more fat which was the fascinating part of like wow you lose more fat if you just jack your protein now people are like oh well i think i'll do that and the caveat i always say is i don't think you understand how hard it is to consume that much right it's right it's work and people when they started they're like holy crap this is hard i mean it's actually hard yeah um but the common question we got was okay that was a nice two-month study how do you

know it's safe even though we did some we need a we did a comprehensive metabolic panel we found nothing happened like okay two months okay what if we do it for a year i'm like okay well i decided to get the male bodybuilders who consumed the most i'm like hey let's do this for a year like okay we'll do it for a year nothing no change in liver panel the kidney function blood glucose blood lipids nothing and of course i remember talking a friend of mine you're like they're like watch uh get on on facebook i'm sure someone's gonna say one year's not enough what do you know someone on facebook said matt one year that's not very long i'm like oh my god so i actually convinced these guys hey can we follow you up for two years so two years the average intake of these guys was about i think it's about 3.5 grams per kilo that is so very high that is so it is it is people don't realize how high that is and after two years two years no change in liver function no change in blood glucose no change in kidney function no change in blood lipids no change and here's the here's the funny part the guy who consumed the most he was over four grams per kilo um he at times got over five grams per kilo uh he loved protein and there was there was one day he's like he's like hey bro um he's a hey bro that's what he called me yeah yeah he's like check out how much i ate this day and so he he sent me his diet log and he was meticulous i'm like holy crap you ate 1200 grams of protein in one day he's like yeah

yeah yeah and he's the guy's ripped i mean he's kind of a cute uh a funny personal story because i asked him i said you know what is it with you you just love protein and training he's like uh he was from venezuela he's like brother you know i used to be a fat guy he goes i'll be honest i was a fat guy i was over 400 pounds i was fat and i was depressed i opened up a muscle magazine i see these guys they work out all the time and they take protein so he's like well that's just what i'll do i'll work out and take protein that's cool and it sounds silly but that basically is what inspired him and he to this day he's 212 to 220 pounds always ripped always eating a bucket full of protein and i'll tell you this whenever i see him he's always sweating because and you're when you're taking that much protein you are constantly sweating so we did that whole series of studies i think was six we even did one a one-year study in women trained women showing it had no effect on bone bone mineral density and to this day this day i am still reading accounts of protein is bad for your kidneys protein is bad for your bones and i'm thinking what do you got to do with it i mean so maybe you you you might have an idea you know coming as a non-scientist you know sort of taking this all in but why is there there is this constant drumbeat of protein bad protein bad protein bad and here's another thing think about this jason protein is the only macronutrient that you'll see people arguing online about um this is how much you should take and when you hit that limit stop

but they never argue about carbs or fat that way it's only protein once you get in fact i have a colleague once you hit 1.6 grams per kilo that's it anything else is a waste but they never say that about carbs or fat it's always protein limit protein limit protein i'm thinking hey this is just weird to me there's a weird cultural bias against protein maybe you might have an idea well a lot of it in in the endurance well in the endurance realm it's because it replaces something else so in the endurance realm we tend to use we tend to think that carbohydrates are king king right they're the king and queen makers you need to consume as many carbohydrates as possible to try to support your activities and things like that and the protein consumption it kind of like it replaces or interferes with the carbohydrate consumption that's the fear that a lot of endurance athletes have and this is kind of what i want this is one of the things we can skip to this part that i wanted to get to is when we have athletes that are substituting protein for one of the other macronutrients either carbohydrates or fat should that be viewed as a bad thing and what happens in an endurance application when that substitution does actually start to take place because they only have a calorie budget of so many calories right they can only tolerate so many or they're trying to restrict their calories in some way or something like that if that if that protein budget or if that protein budget starts to actually

interfere with the carbohydrate and or the fat intake what actually happens there and is that a bad thing this no this is a great question because um it's funny my wife is actually a national class cyclist and she takes a bucket full of protein a day well over two grams per kilo probably close to three grams per kilo that is a lot for an endurance athlete i'm gonna say that like throughout this podcast that's a lot of protein right it is uh but she recovers really well and here's the okay here's here's where it gets a little tricky because when you say endurance athlete runners cyclists swimmers i do a lot of endurance stuff i do uh stand-up paddling um it gets a little tricky because it almost depends on the athlete now i think a mistake is made when people think if i jack my protein it necessarily is you're substituting it for carbs and fat in fact i would suggest for the endurance athletes you work with keep your carbs and fat the same and just eat more protein because one you're not going to get fatter on it number two you might actually recover better so and this is where and i think one of your questions had to do with you know looking at protein intake as grams per kilo versus like a percentage of diet i am not a fan of you know anything as a percent of diet because what you need to look at is is is grams per kilo because at the end of the day if you're hitting i tell people if you're hitting the grams per kilo let's say you work with a runner a cyclist i would tell them hit one gram per pound or 2.2 grams per kilo and then just backfill the rest of your diet with carbs and fat enough that you can train hard and enough that you

can replenish uh skeletal muscle glycogen now this is where it gets tricky how many of these events are actually limited by skeletal muscle glycogen if you're running a mile no uh a 10k no maybe a half marathon maybe a marathon maybe if you run the okay let's go the extreme maybe if you do the bad water 135 are you really limited by muscle glycogen or are you limited by food intake so it gets really tricky it's like i'm not convinced that in fact you probably read some of the same papers about carb intake in in quote in endurance athletes up to 10 grams per kilo uh eight to 10 grams per kilo i know a lot of endurance athletes in south florida who are who get on the podium regularly none of them are that high in fact i think they'd be lucky if they were five grams per kilo so what happens with competitive athletes doesn't seem to match per se what you read in the literature so even though literature says you know get five to eight grams per kilo or up to 10 grams per kilo i tell endurance athletes focus on protein backfill the rest with carbs and fat because protein will help you recover and then they'll say well you know if i'm in a race i'm like yeah if you're in a race just consume carbs if you're a cyclist teach yourself to consume carbs running is a little different because it's kind of hard to you know consume carbs while you're running it depends on the aid stations and whatnot but for a short race it doesn't matter um so that's it's it's it's kind of tricky it's you know i was working with a friend who who did a stand-up paddle from cuba to florida

she's the only she's the second human to do it um first woman to do it when she said hey uh i'm gonna i'm gonna try to paddle from cuba to florida i'm like wow that's that'll take a long time it took her 27 hours um we talked about training and nutrition but i said nutrition should actually be simple your nutrition is you're gonna paddle a lot and you're gonna teach yourself to eat whatever you can eat so that your brain stays awake while you're paddling because at the end of the day if your brain dies in the middle of the gulf you know obviously you have a crew with a chase boat with you if your brain dies you're done you're gonna quit so the goal is to keep your brain like you know somewhat alert somewhat cogent and if it's pizza if it's pop tarts i don't care what it is that's the goal so i i'm not one of those who sticks to like the you know five to eight grams per kilo of carbs i mean it's it's kind of a nice you know sort of here's sort of the standard we can play around with it but i think the focus should actually be on protein because it will help you recover and at the end of the day if you're not recovering the next workout is just gonna suck well and here's where we can kind of like get into the ranges right so i can remember when i very first started coaching the de facto amount of protein that an endurance athlete should take just very conveniently worked out to one gram per kilogram and that's you know like 20 years ago that's where it was they we would give a range 0.8 to one but every it and it's drifted up across two conditions i've noticed in my coaching career one is time that i've been coaching so every four

or five years when these position statements come out and all the nutritionists and your cohort and things like that meet just the needle starts to move up to 1.2 to 1.6 and then 1.6 to 2 and okay we're starting to recognize that it's you know that it's more important for endurance athletes and not just a not just a macronutrient that bodybuilders need to focus on and things like that the second the second uh instance is where it's creeped up and this is just more from a professional development standpoint as i have migrated from working with what i would call the traditional endurance athletes the marathoners the ironman triathletes and the olympic distance triathletes and things like that into the ultramarathon realm those protein requirements even when we normalize it per unit body weight still still go up as well explain to me why i am seeing that over my over the course of my 20 year coaching career why i'm seeing this drift in protein recommendations going up simply as a function of the time that i've been coaching and the duration of the events that i'm coaching for yeah i think you know it's funny that uh that actually is the evolution of protein intake amongst endurance athletes because i remember when i first you know when i was a graduate student endurance athletes never thought about protein so we're talking you know back in the 1990s now i think what's interesting is it's true bodybuilders tend to be the ones who push protein but i've always even

reminded even the most competitive strength power athletes that nobody beats their body up more than ultra endurance athletes nobody puts their body under more stress than someone who's running a long distance someone who's cycling a long distance i guess i don't know if there's such a thing i've never met a competitive ultra distance swimmer it seems like you might drown or something but um so you know the ultra distance running events like if you're training for the bad water 135 that kind of training just beats the hell out of you now what's interesting is i almost don't worry as much about their protein intake because i think as a matter of caloric intake it will actually be high just because the volume of calories they have to consume just to feel normal is going to be high and a lot of them will actually reach probably one gram per pound just from eating large volumes of food so for them i don't worry as much but the key for them in terms of why protein intakes keep creeping up i think is an issue of recovery because skeletal muscle damage you have to recover remember you have immune system cells that you know if if you do any kind of prolonged endurance stuff you know people say is that good for you well i'm good for you okay it's kind of a trade-off does it depress your immune system yes if you were to race america 26.2 miles will you probably will you get sick afterwards yeah so there's a trade-off here technically it's not you're not doing it for health you're doing it you know for other reasons but it's much better to be someone who runs a marathon than someone who sits on their butt and eats doritos and you know as a bmi of 35 so again

series of trade-offs but the need to recover i think is paramount and i and i think for the longest time endurance athletes have been fooled into thinking recovery is muscle glycogen repletion i'm like yeah that's one thing in fact that's kind of a simple thing replacing muscle glycogen what about your skeletal muscle fibers that are damaged what about your immune system that's depressed you need dietary protein to help recovery in those aspects well also the muscle glycogen repletion is a biochemically much simpler thing than all the other things that you were just talking about that protein does on the muscular side and on the on the immune side as well so and also this sorry sorry also this if you get if you consume an isochloric amount of carbs versus carbs plus protein so let's say it's 1.2 grams per kilo of carbs versus uh you got 0.8 grams per kilo of carbs plus 0.4 grams per kilo protein again so it's isochloric the carbs plus protein actually might help replenish muscle glycogen better than the carbs alone so there's that recovery aspect that it might actually even be better for muscle glycogen in addition to skeletal muscle immune system etc etc well particularly if it facilitates a higher caloric intake and you you don't know this but i'll spring it on you right now my my long time colleague kathy zawatsky who worked in john ivy's lab over at the university of texas did a lot of the original four to one protein or carbohydrate protein uh research so her and i have had many

many conversations over this over the course of years and comparing isocaloric you know strategies to higher protein strategies and things like that and the thing that drives it the most is the calories but then if you can get some mix of carbohydrate and protein in it not only fuels the recovery piece but it tends or it it seems like it also facilitates the adaptive process and this is another aspect that i wanted to get your your take on is should we be thinking about protein in an ergogenic sense in that if you're taking in more protein you're going to get a higher degree of adaptation from the workload that you're actually doing compared to a lower protein situation so you're getting more bang for your buck from the workouts themselves yeah well i think we we have to first define how does an endurance athlete adapt to exercise training per se so there's really two two main things one it's at the level skeletal muscle so you're dealing with um becoming better at oxidizing fat you're you're you're better at increasing the amount of muscle like changes that's stored but also at the central level the level of the cardiac muscle stroke volume is higher cardiac output's higher and things like that so to me the reason that protein is so important for enhancing the adaptive response is in a way it's kind of secondary it's because it's helping you recover it helps it affects the way you train the next day and if

you just kind of repeat the process constantly okay i'm recovered better i train the next day my training might be one percent better i recover better i train the next day maybe my training again is one or two percent better so those those little details there probably don't matter in the short run but over the course of weeks and months i think it's critically important for promoting the adaptive response because regardless of the athletes you work with whether they're endurance or strength power athlete i've always viewed this as if you can recover then we can beat the crap out of you the next day if you don't recover then we got to dial it back which means the adaptive response would be less whether you're a powerlifter just trying to lift heavier weights or whether you're a 10k runner trying to run faster it's always a question of i need to get you to recover in fact if you take a sport that's much more complicated than than powerlifting or distance running take a sport like mixed martial arts i have a lot of colleagues who work with fighters they train a lot because not only if they train their strength power they got to train their cardiovascular capacity they got to train the skill stuff judo jiu-jitsu boxing whatnot for them it's always we got to get you to recover because if you don't recover when you spar the next day you're going to feel like shit and then your workout kind of sucks so it's always how can i get you to recover and i think that's where protein comes in it's it's i always think of it as recovering and this is a short sidebar when people talk about the use of performance enhancing drugs particularly testosterone and the anabolic steroids the derivatives of testosterone people mistakenly call it performance enhancing but it's not it's a recovery it's a training drug it

helps you recover if i can get you to recover better i can train you better and that's and to me that's where protein comes in it's really it's to recover now if you if you're to run a 10k and you are drinking sugar during it versus drinking protein you'll run faster with sugar i know that but that's in the acute sense but in the chronic sense it's a question of recovery and that's why you know antibiotic steroids are great that's why you know protein is great it's it's a recovery issue does this extend does that protein as a recovery issue also extend to the protein that you should be taking in or can take in during the workout itself particularly if that workout is long because ultra runners we have these training sessions that often exceed four hours there's six hours there eight hours we just did a schedule review in our coaching department of people who are training for this 250 mile race called the coca uh cocodona 250 which is uh in arizona about a month ago and um we're reviewing these cycling is running running right i did it last year it took 60 some odd hours just as perspective but the training the training context is is there are many training sessions that exceed four six eight hours in order to prepare for these things and in in some sports nutrition contexts we think we think about ingesting protein during endurance exercise as simply satiety but you

can also view it as helping the recovery process for once you actually stop exercise starting to fuel that piece of it so can we view this ingestion of protein during exercise within that light and like can we give some generalized recommendations for how much that should actually be no you're absolutely right it should serve as a recovery mode in fact um if you're training that long four hours eight hours um 12 hours a day uh for some of these ultra endurance events you have limited time just to eat so with that limited time to eat you have to get that protein even if you have to take a break and drink something you have to get that protein in to help you recover because the volume of exercise you're doing is so great that unless you get that protein in i don't see how one your immune system will recover i don't see how skeletal muscle recover sure you can maybe replenish my muscle glycogen but here's kind of the kicker if you damage skeletal muscle fibers from exercise it actually becomes more difficult for you to replenish muscle glycogen so if you can keep skeletal muscle fibers healthy it's much easier to replenish muscle glycogen so i think it's a great thing um if you're if someone's training that way that they have to teach themselves to consume whether it's food whether it's a liquid shake they have to consume something during that long training session otherwise i don't know how your body would would recover for the next day and what would the recommended bolus be because once again we've got a lot of athletes that are out there they're going to do a training camp and they're going to do six hours one day four hours the next day four hours

next day and over a three-day period and they're thinking about their they're thinking about practicing their race day nutrition and this is what i always have this struggle with athletes that are going through these intensified volume periods where they markedly increase their volume for a short period of time and we want them to practice their race day nutrition which is going to be more carbohydrate skewed right because we want to try to get as much you know carbohydrate into the system as possible but yet it's still a training activity so we want to be able to recover uh we want to be able to be able to recover better and also fuel the adaptive process for you know on the tail end of it once they actually recover once they actually have a time where they can kind of down regulate so when we're thinking about these longer activities fueling it specifically for training what's the like what are some good practices to actually ingest protein during those long during those long activities yeah the way i would look at it is um one i would working with these athletes i would ask how many sit-down meals do you get um if you're training all day that what do you get breakfast and dinner is that yeah yeah that's about it yeah okay so if you have breakfast and dinner and so in between you're doing all this training i would first calculate what the total protein intake should be for that day so let's say let's say you weigh 150 pounds so the goal is 150 grams of protein if you could get you know 50 and 50 on either end so 50 and breakfast 50 for dinner or it could be

40 60 so that takes care of two-thirds your protein intake now during the rest of the day getting 50 grams well i'm about to say shouldn't be hard but it's hard otherwise everyone would do it um getting the extra 50 grams could be divided into smaller doses because obviously you're not going to get 50 grams of protein in one sitting because you'll just you know you'll have to stop and go to the bathroom but if you can break it up into smaller segments um and here's the thing we don't there's no data on this we have data on how much you know the max amount of carbs you might be able to consume per hour but we don't have data on protein so this is one of those things where each person has to play around with the dose and see how much they can tolerate you know at a given sitting you know while they're training and that's what we find with a lot of athletes during these intensified volume periods is because essentially you hit the nail on the head they're skipping a meal and they're replacing that meal with sports nutrition products which are predominantly carbohydrate right gels sports drinks you know the bars and things like that they're predominantly if not exclusively carbohydrate so their total caloric intake goes up during the intensified volume period but yet their proportion of protein goes down because the distribution of those calories is more skewed into the sports nutrition category and i think that that's a like a flaw in the whole programming side of things because you during training in particular you want more you want more proportion of your total

calorie budget to be coming from protein because of the intensified training and because you want to fuel the adaptive and the recovery processes right yeah we typically do the opposite because all we're thinking is oh i got to practice my race day nutrition so i've got to take in three gels an hour you know two gels an hour kind of whatever the the athlete is has kind of got it in their heads and and i i appreciate your perspective on let's just keep it simple two meals and then figure out what that protein count is for the for the meal that's in between that you're skipping and figure out a way to get that in during the course of training yeah and i think this is of course much easier for cyclists than with runners because cyclists they can carry food or whatever they want to consume whereas runners you know i assume when you're doing such long events you have a crew that's following you right oh yeah for the events yeah yeah so they can get so in a way you can you can be super specific as to what you're consuming when you're consuming it which helps i mean but maybe for someone obviously quote the shorter races you know a 26.2 mile foot race and it might be in a way it might be a little bit more difficult because i'm not sure are you allowed to have someone give you specific stuff if you're running a marathon can someone say this concoction is for runner xyz is that allowed yeah for the elites they're allowed to get their special concoction at certain at certain points of the course for a for a marathon for an ultra it's just your crew shows up to the aid station and you can get whatever you want to from them okay okay yeah but i think i think definitely you know keep it simple get your

protein for breakfast and dinner and then you know play around with what you have in between figure out what dose you can consume without getting gi distress i mean because that's how the original studies were done with carbs it's like well how much can i consume yeah how much can i actually oxidize so i don't know how how much you consume you know i tell my wife when she does these super long rides you know just get maybe 60 grams per hour see how you feel maybe more will help but you might get a bellyache but there's only one way to find out play around with it yeah i think this concept of during the intensified training period is just being mindful of how much sports nutrition product you're replacing your normal caloric budget with is a really important one and if anything i'd like for you to opine on this as well during these intensified training periods if you're normally at let's just say you know 1.5 grams per kilogram per day of protein during the intensified training periods if anything you should be above that because of the importance of the regenerative process and all of the muscle breakdown and things like that what would be a reasonable extension of that so we you know you have a normal endurance athlete that's at 1.2 1.5 grams per kilogram per day when they go through these intensified training periods is there a limit to how much they should be increasing that or is there a reasonable amount that they need to increase it by it's funny jason my position is that they should be starting at two grams per kilo so so wipe that out to start out with let's just start at two

i mean that is their baseline it should be two grams per kilo i think that that's reasonable for an ultra marathon athlete by the way yeah yeah yeah so to me well you know 1.2 1.5 i'm like that's in my head i'm like wow that's kind of low especially especially for ultra endurance guys or forget ultra endurance just endurance people i'm like it's kind of low you you're beating the hell out of your body and i know a lot of them don't view it that way they're like hey i i run i'm i don't really get sore i'm like yeah just because you're not just because you're not sore doesn't mean you're not beating hell out of your skeletal muscle fibers you're not you know putting stress on your immune system you you know 1.2 to 1.5 is kind of low so and i know if you talk to i'd say if you talk to 100 people in sports nutrition or dietetics they'll probably be like yeah 1.2 1.5 is good i don't think that's good i think you put it this way is there any harm to going to two grams per kilo or higher and the answer is no from a health standpoint that's not going to harm you from a body composition standpoint it actually might help you from a recovery standpoint it'll definitely help you there's no there's no downside to it and that's the thing but again what's the caveat it's hard to do yeah it's just hard to do well so here's the deal we'll back it into the real numbers the official issm position statement on this is 1.6 to 2.5 grams per day so that that's your you know that's your you know your your publication that you have you know some authorship over and things like that that nick tiller produced but my point that i kind of want to try to drive home is is that during these

intensified volume phases first off just getting that getting that recommended amount of protein in is difficult it can be a little bit of a chore that chore has a bigger magnifying glass on it when you are doing these intensified volume phases because of the sports nutrition products you're taking in and you also should be increasing that that amount of protein per day as well and what i want the listeners to try to appreciate is is about how much do you think they should be increasing whatever their baseline is two grams 2.4 grams 2.5 grams kind of whatever that is what's a reasonable shift so that people can start to like get in their mind okay i'm gonna go and i'm gonna train really hard for three days here are some things that i need to do from a nutrition perspective in order to make the most out of it okay i actually try to keep it quite simple um that's actually a question i get from collegiate athletes who might end up let's say their volume of training is going up for whatever reason but it's only for a short period of time i tell them okay if you're recovering well now uh again we're talking about 18 to 21 year olds so they they're always recovering as long as they're not drinking too much exactly um but i try to keep it simple i'm like okay if if volume is going up or whatever whatever if the demands of training you're going i keep it simple i say can you consume just an additional protein shake let's say it's 40 grams it can be a ready to drink it can be powder just do that and most college kids are like oh yeah i can do that that's simple i don't even play with numbers that

much i actually just say find a shake you like make sure you consume that in addition to your normal diet don't use it to replace something else do it in addition and and and from almost all of them they're like you know what simple advice is advice that's that's doable it's advice that i will comply with and to me compliance and adherence a lot of people don't talk about as much but yeah it is critical because we can you and i can offer the most detailed advice and then someone will look at it like i don't know what the hell you're saying okay what should i do again well so what you're saying is you're taking like a unit approach you're taking like one extra serving 40 to 50 gram serving let's pile that on top of everything else that you're normally doing i think that that's a reasonable approach and to be honest with you like one of the things that um that i personally have changed with a lot of athletes is the the recovery shake right we used to have a four to one ratio or six to one ratio or kind of whatever in order to replace muscle muscle glycogen i've kind of taken the approach just like you know what your muscle glycogen is going to be back to their normal levels in 24 hours anyway let's just make that whole recovery shake or most of it at least protein so let's flip the ratio so instead of four grams of carb to one gram of protein four grams of protein to one gram of carbs because you're going to take care of the carbohydrate side of it anyway no that's actually smart because unless you're doing like two a days or something yeah yeah you will replenish muscle glycogen if you're eating a normal mixed diet mixed meal diet over the course of 24

hours it'll be replaced um and here's the interesting fact that's sort of a quick sidebar um when you read the position stance because i remember when we wrote the protein position stand the difficulty with these position stands is you have 20 people trying to come up with a conclusion we all sort of agree with so we're like okay well i don't really agree with that but you know what i'll let it slide and someone's out no this is great and so you end up with this document that okay we you know i guess it's sort of like if you're a politician it's like give me some of this and i'll give you some of that so there's sort of this compromise it's like okay within the scientific community this seems to be reasonable now with protein i was not the only one that felt this i said even though that's what the data says i actually recommend a lot more than our position stand so you will find people on these position stands who are like you know what we know that's what the literature says however based on my experience working with x number of athletes i think we should do this keeping in mind that most people here's the caveat most people don't even do what we suggest not even close from a protein perspective i can tell you that directly but having worked with athletes when we analyze their diets it's it there's not enough protein in there yeah yeah but and so when people ask me because they've asked me about protein i'm like but you recommend more than that i'm like you're right i do i mean i don't want it to be the jose antonio position stand yeah yeah but what's it gonna so i mean you're kind of in a little bit of a position to influence this right you've been in the

industry for a long time you you've had influence over me i don't do research but you had influence over a lot of people that actually do research what is it going to take to for the jose position stand to become the position stand like what research needs to be done to tease that out further so that when the next position stand comes out it it it kind of shows what is actually going on from an athletic perspective well i think there's a there's a convenience factor or maybe a compliance factor where it's really difficult to get and let's face it most of these studies are done in college students because that's who we have access to it's actually hard to get them to consume higher protein diet over the course of weeks or months it's just hard and so you're not going to see a lot of these kinds of studies and uh i think that's probably the the biggest i guess hurdle um it's easy to get people to go one to 1.5 grams per kilo because i think that's what most people do without even thinking about it but the higher protein intakes i mean it's just difficult it's hard people don't realize you know you have to think about it yeah when they start doing their diet logs they're like wow i'm i need 40 more grams before i go to bed i don't i don't know if i want to do this so it's hard yeah so i mean there's a little bit of like realistic like compliance thing behind it to to to kind of sum that up yeah well i i hope that we've inspired some of our prototypical endurance athletes to consume more protein and then as a lot of the dialogue was centered around training camps and

it's gonna it's this is going to come out in a time of year where a lot of athletes are thinking about these intensified volume periods hope it inspires them particularly during the intensified volume periods to look at their protein uh intakes a little bit more uh cautiously and strategically uh before we let you go you have to tell people where they can find out and engage with more of the issn and more of your work because it is fantastic it's stuff that i lean on a lot whenever there's something that comes out from your organization i i know that i can trust the science and the publications that are that are coming out of there because of the degree of scrutiny that you and your colleagues kind of put on them where can people go and find out more about this yeah thanks um well one i want to plug our conference which is june 15 to 17 it's in fort lauderdale beach at the weston uh this is terrible it sounds like a terrible location you should go the beach is quite pretty um so we'll i'll be there you know i'll be there you know i always say the best place to meet me is at the conference um if you can't meet me at the conference probably the easiest ways to reach me um would be social media on twitter it's jose antonio PhD um also we have an instagram account the it's the issn it's the underscore issn um that might be the probably the easiest way to find me but um yeah just i always tell people keep on lookout for new publications um we're presenting some data um at the issn conference one of them one of them is on protein the others are oddly enough on uh um

i guess stimulants pre-workout type stimulants see how it affects cognition and things like that so my research agenda now we still do protein stuff but we're branching out into what i call sports neuroscience stuff things that affect cognition in the brain and whatnot but um i do want to recommend for your athletes uh for people who have a hard time with protein i had a conversation with a gentleman one of my good friends at the university of arkansas perhaps as a substitute for a whole protein like way they could consume the essential amino acids and i'm sure if you go on amazon.com you could find eaa concoctions so if you get the essential amino acids gram for gram if you did 20 grams of essentials versus 20 grams away 20 grams of essentials will give you much more bang for the buck and it's probably easier to consume because it's it's not quite as thick as most whole protein so i would recommend that if if and i'm sure some of them don't taste good but i think the flavoring is getting better but the essential amino acids might be one way for them to get all the amino acids that are needed for recovery so so i would i would highly recommend that and um again if you know jason if you if you if any you of any of your athletes need any information on sports nutrition you know where to reach me i'm in south florida i'm not sure where are you by the way i'm in colorado we're going to hit you up whenever we bring supplements back on board though you know i had a great conversation with brady homer over at examine.com uh just about the whole supplement arena more than anything else and trying to educate the the listeners just on how that arena how people

play in that arena more than anything else i really want to get to the a lot of what you and your colleagues work uh is on and what use cases are the best for what types of sports supplements when when can they go well and when can they be effective and when do they go awry and it's just a big waste of money and time or be a negative which we're starting to see some of that more and more in the supplement industry where things are promoted that can actually be a net negative either for health and or performance actually you know it's funny you bring that up i had a conversation with a gentleman to talk about the antioxidants if you go back 10 20 years the antioxidants yeah we need to take them take vitamin e take this take that and now we know maybe that's not a good thing because it might inhibit mitochondrial biogenesis and in fact get your antioxidants from food so that was one where i went from hey you should take it like whoa let's rewind it looks like maybe you guys you know unless you want to mess up your mitochondria once again coming from dallas you can appreciate this i was an intern a very a very very remedial intern at that for a very short period of time at the cooper aerobic center uh dallas texas so a lot of that original antioxidant research was was was done by by dr cooper so seeing that full circle of course across the course of my entire the entirety of my career this is when i was a freaking teenager um it's actually been kind of interesting to to actually watch unfold and so so anyway to your to your point i hear what you're saying that there is something that is another thing that has come full circle cool very cool well hey jason it's been a pleasure um

let me know when you upload the show uh you know i'll share it absolutely absolutely thank you for your time again i appreciate it okay thanks buddy bye-bye all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to jose for coming on the podcast today and more importantly thank you jose for the impact that you have had on me other coaches out there athletes and sports nutritionists alike that have all taken some sort of guidance from your work over the years and the work that the iss issn has done for those of you out there that want to learn more about the international society for sports nutrition go ahead and check out the links and show notes there's a wealth of information out there and keep track of what they do and what they come out with there's always new stuff that they are doing and stuff that is valuable for endurance athletes and athletes really of all types if you'd like this podcast please take a moment go into your podcast player of choice and share it with your friends and family there's no better way to show your friends and your training partners that you care about them than to share good information i hope there's good information contained within this podcast that you and your training partners will provide valuable that is it for today folks and as always we will see you out on the trails you