Women Are Not Small Men with Stacy Sims PhD and Stephanie Howe PhD | KoopCast Episode 33

what's going on trail and ultra runners welcome to another episode of the KoopCast a podcast where we explore all areas of ultra running including training racing nutrition physiology psychology as well as have a little bit of fun banter along the way all in an effort to help you become a better runner as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and in today's episode of the podcast we have none other than the brilliant dr stacy sims for the last 20 years stacy has been relentlessly informing the sports science community that in fact women are not small men and we should not treat them as such and make no doubt about it that this has been no easy task her latest pursuit in this endeavor includes a new online class that is all about women's physiology that both my athletes and our coaches have taken and they cannot say enough good things about it her best-selling book roar has been a roadmap that women coaches and athletes alike have used to tailor exercise programming and nutrition specifically to the female physiology stacy is is also a sought-out lecturer sports scientist as well as a kick-ass endurance athlete in her own right she's also a

personal friend of mine and over the years has enlightened me on how i need to tailor my coaching practice specifically to the needs of women she also has helped me develop heat acclimation protocols that i use for myself and i use for my athletes and i will wholeheartedly admit that the rice ball recipes and training essentials for ultra running were stolen directly from stacy i'm sorry stacy you know i took them from you everybody loves them thank you very much but in this podcast we do a little bit of personal reflection including some of her experiences in the sport of ultra running as well as training and nutrition do's and don'ts for female ultra runners and to make sure i'm just not some dude opining on how women should train i brought on another one of the best in our coach stephanie how to help illuminate this subject even further with her personal and professional experiences as an athlete as well as a coach this is a good one folks let's get right into it my conversation with dr stacy sims and stephanie how all about how women should train for ultra marathon thanks for uh getting on the horn with us stacy um ironically enough i was on the phone with one of my athletes today and uh she said you know you should have you should have stacy sims on your podcast

it's funny that she mentioned that i'm gonna talk to her tonight in just just just a few hours she's like oh my gosh that's gonna be so good oh it's funny i think it's funny like i came out of the gym the other day and this guy was standing in the parking lot and he comes up he's like are you stacy sims and i was like yeah he goes oh i love what you're doing in the lifting community about telling everyone they need to lift heavy and i was like this isn't very random because it's like the gym is in the middle of an industrial area like no one is really there so he's like standing in the parking lot i'm like okay this is a bit weird that's great so when am i gonna get a women or not small men men's cut shirt because i'll rock the shirt you know i will but i need a men's cut shirt because you know i'm you know i'm not you know i i'm pretty outgoing and i'm comfortable with myself but the cut doesn't quite you know it doesn't quite suit my male physique not so flattering no it's not so it's mainly me that doesn't make it flattering so i'm hoping the cut can actually help well i think that ash and sarah have them they do yeah i think so because they brought steve one when they were over here in february okay well i'm gonna have to i'm gonna hang them and say stace says give me a t-shirt i'm gonna have oh i'll gladly pay for it stacy you know that but it did i wore it one time to the gym and um it was good let's just put it that way okay i love it but states if you're okay with it

i want to go back to your crew days first sure you cool with that because i think that's a good introduction because a lot of people are going to be familiar with what you do but let's face it i mean trail and ultra running is a pretty male dominated sport i mean i rail on this year after year after year that the leaders and the trail and ultra running space need to do a better job of getting women into the sport and you know i know that's nothing new to you but if anything the people tuning in to this podcast are going to be a reflection of the trail running community and since they're a reflection of the trail running community they're going to be predominantly men and i dropped out of trail running for that like ultra running for that reason i didn't know that yeah seriously yeah yeah i because when i lived up in um redding i was um do you remember luan parks yeah yeah so i paced here for western state 100 and we did a lot of running and stuff together and i entered quite a few races but then i'd be like wait i have my period there's nowhere to change no one's ever thought about this or like i can't eat this stuff because it hurts my stomach and the men around me are just like you got to do it right so there are a lot of little things that added up to me going not my thing wow see stacy as long as i've known you how long have we known each other now 10 years yeah a long time at least um i've never heard that story oh now you

we'll come back to trail running because we're fixing that shit okay okay it's getting better it is getting better like come come back we'll fix it in europe it's getting worse and the stats actually tease that out like in europe their their their female participation rates it's below 20 it's really really bad oh my god but in the u.s we're we're slow we're slowly we're slowly fixing it so come back to u.s come back to western states we'll you know we'll welcome you with open arms i do have a lot of women that um either take the course or paying me and say hey i'm running 100 miles i'm into ultra running that kind of stuff so there is a a pretty significant pool of the late 40s early 50s set that is gravitated away from your traditional endurance and just jump right into ultra yeah we're still on hockey stick growth like for sure like trail running and ultra running still on hockey stick stick growth right now that's good to hear i've heard a lot of good feedback on your uh on your course we've had i mean you're aware chantelle one of our coaches took it and uh she had a lot of really good feedback for it but i also had one of my athletes uh take it as well who is like right in your demographic i mean she's like she's the she's the she's the prototype and we we probably talk about something from your class like twice a month oh okay so it's been good so let's go back to the origin of it all okay the origin of all this women are not small men from your perspective take us back to the your crew days when you were an

undergraduate my undergraduate days at purdue university that's right um yeah so uh i went to purdue and i didn't want to run because i'd been across crunchy runner so i was like yeah what do i want to do and i met um a friend who's like hey you should try out for crew so went tried out made the team and was really excited about the fact that you could do some endurance stuff you had running um and weight training and stuff so it fit a niche that i hadn't had in a while and really loved it but then as you started getting more and more serious about it and leading up to things like head to the charles and some other key races the lightweight men and the lightweight women as we were called back then um we're doing very similar training sessions and we would train together um dry land training together and the boat was different but most of the time if not all the time the men's lightweight would peak and do really well and the women's would just kind of fall flat and we're like what the hell is going on and then at the same time i was in uh metabolism and x-fiz and was like doing all the experiments wanting to learn more about myself and came up to like some endurance stuff and all my results were different from the men's and so i'd always be like hey what's going on i kept getting the same question well women are anomaly oh you have a menstrual cycle we don't really study women and i was like what are you talking about so the more i dug and tried to get the questions answered the less they're worthy answers so i really started thinking well maybe this is something

that is the reason and rationale why the women aren't responding as well to the training as men and that kind of set my whole mind in the whole like what is going on why don't we have these answers and then i went from undergrad and did an overtraining study for my master's degree looking at overtraining in women and men found differences there um from immune markers to mood states responses that kind of stuff and yeah just kept pushing and pushing but then it's only like the past i guess four three or four years that people are like oh my gosh women are not small men that's that huge like push right with my entire career i've heard nothing but well why do you want to study women we don't know enough about men or women and men are very similar so we don't really need to we can just generalize and you look it's not just sport science and sport nutrition it's all the way down into every biomedical research like they're having to redo most of the chemotherapy research because the only one that's really super effective is breast cancer and men don't outcomes on breast cancer chemotherapy and treatments because they weren't the original population study um so yeah it's it's interesting to see how everything's evolving not just in the sport science field even though i still get a lot of pushback but just the vocalization of women are not small men across the board is is is the pushback now still the same as it was when you first started like shouting this women is

small women are not small men yeah really especially yeah especially in the sports science world like you'll have it's a really interesting because i'll go to conferences and there'll be women presenting and saying well there really are no differences there's there's no phase menstrual cycle phase and i was like if you really look at the research that was done properly there is and if you look at the the depth of the research on strength training there is definitely a rationale for sex differences and menstrual cycle phase training when you get to um like the top into vo2 there are too many confounding variables to tease out menstrual cycle phase training but there are not too many confounding variables to tease out sex differences so when you start looking at research design which i've become an expert in evidently being able to toss out studies saying these are no good because you're comparing men versus women who are on an oral contraceptive pill so you can't really control for that because oc's are are experimental in their own right or they're just doing men and women are grouped in there or they're doing men and women on the low hormone phase which really doesn't tell you much either they'll have a trend for a sex difference but there's not enough for them to say most likely because the n isn't large enough um i got a really large uh email debate with brent ruby about this because he published something and the research design really disseminated down to two women versus eight men and he's like well i'm looking at the field practicality i'm like well you can't do that

until you know the basic science behind it and you need to understand what's happening within a control setting before you put in the practical setting and i can understand his point but for me putting out false information because it's practical isn't right yeah let's back up a little bit because i can i can already tell like between you steph steph say hi for a little bit hi hello i'm just taking it in yeah steph house on the on the horn with us as well we're we're we're gonna have the tendency to dive into the weeds on this pretty quickly here but pull me out yeah no and i don't mind doing that but i think a little bit i think a little bit of like what are the big rocks what are the big differences um between men and women and in particular in an endurance and an ultra endurance setting let's try to like set that table first and then start to drill down into the practical like research application and all of the little you know fine hairs or big hairs that we can start to split apart from there so stacy i'll let you like take it away from there like what are the what are the big big practical like take-home messages so um there are two to three really key things that female endurance athletes need to know the first is we have sex differences in muscle enzyme activity so that means that intensity is an issue for recovery so if you look women can primarily do two really hard days and then they need a day off men can do three to four hard days in a row

and when you're following a training program that isn't specific to women women tend to fall into more of that overreach over training fatigue then the other thing within that same scope is that women have more of a protein for um free fatty acid use so that means that they're more predisposed to being successful in ultra endurance not because of estrogen not because of um their cue angle or their stature but comes down to metabolism of of what's happening in the muscle itself and the fact there's a sex difference where women can use more free fatty acids um so when you're looking at a training scope those two things really need to be considered and we look at the really big rocks on top of that the biggest thing that i deal with and try to help cross the board is breaking the mentality of calories in calories out because women especially um ultra endurance women tend to put on a little bit more body fat than someone who's doing high intensity or shorter distance and it's not for lack of quality nutrition or anything like that it's primarily lack of eating appropriately for what they're doing and getting enough calories in they get into a low energy state and it's it comes into a point where if you're doing ultra running ultra endurance um that you're you're slow anyway just by the nature of the sport you have to for that duration and so you don't really pick up on the early signs of

fatigue from having low energy so if we were to address a little bit of the training scope and then just making sure they're eating enough for daily function as well as the training to get women out of that breakdown state then those are two maybe three two huge wins for women who are endurance athletes because then they will progress and see fitness improving less injury time so less downtime from injury better sleep better body composition better strength um so that would be like the two things that i would have every coach every athlete who is kind of new and playing in the whole women versus men thing to take into consideration and we see this play out a little bit at our training camps which you've been to stacy right and we we have good diversity in our training camps i mean the last one that you went to is is pretty much a 50 50 split right down the middle uh 15 men 15 women and the one of the consistent themes that start that starts to come out of those camps that i think you actually got to see because you came in on either the second till either after the second day or after the last day i can't remember which one it was but one of the consistent themes that we start to see is is that as each day progresses and as the as the athletes get more and more fatigued and just to set this up a little bit further at our training camps we typically can get the athletes there to double or triple their volume

for for a short period of time because they're in an isolated training environment and they're taking care of themselves and they're in a beautiful place and they're getting fed and all this kind of stuff and you know they just want to take advantage of the weekend so it's a big training stress but after the second and third days as everybody starts to get fatigued the gap between the men and the women start to get smaller and smaller and smaller and typically what happens is the women jump up a speed group and the men jump down a speed group and there's probably a whole host of factors like not just physiological factors that go into that actual happening but we've seen that for like before i even knew you i mean i've been doing this stuff for 20 years and we've been seeing that in our in our camp environments for forever and it's been really neat to see just in the last as you mentioned for like four to maybe six years or so some of the underpinnings of why that is actually the case we used to always just like put it on now women are just smarter that which is true they're just smarter they're just pacing themselves better and you know they've got you know some kind of knack of you know managing the stress load and things like that and i think all all of those are absolutely true but there is some additional physiological underpinning to that as well yeah and i um read a lot of articles now where people are talking oh it's estrogen estrogen increases for free fatty acid but it's not like even women who are menopausal or they don't have any estrogen for some particular reason still have that same

advantage and again it comes down to the um muscle metabolism so all this about women shortening the gap once you get more women involved in the sport and taking it as their own sport it'll be very interesting to see how fast that gap closes yeah well that's been theorized for years that there is some point 200 miles 300 miles six days or something like that there's some there's some point where women are going to outperform men and people have tried to deduce that point with math right just looking at the the the the gaps from the 100 meter race all the way to the marathon to ultramarathon distances and things like that and then just extrapolating that math to some far out point and then they've tried to combine that with physiology and some of the things that uh some of the things that you that you just mentioned and i don't know the answer to it i mean i don't know if there is going to be that point or not like way far out there but it's an intriguing thing nonetheless and it's gone in a few cycles right now um at least that i've seen over the years but the key thing that they're not taking into consideration is the training methodology right so up to this point all the women have been following the same kind of things as men primarily the periodization programs right that are not taking into account the urtacognicity of their hormones right so if you're putting in a huge amount of training stress in the

time of your menstrual cycle or you know if you're using oc or something like that when your body is more able to handle that higher load and recover from it and you're pinpointing when we want to do those key workouts and get a better fitness adaptation those strategies haven't been put in play yet so it's when we unlayer everything and we're just looking at you know people are talking about the different shoes and the technology that come on board to make people faster and it's like that no one's looking at the basic training scope so how do we tweak things in training to maximize performance for women if we're looking at when their body can take the load the best adapt to it and then when can we deload when their body needs to be like okay let's get into that because as stephanie will attest to i really like training architecture yeah stephanie is that true yeah no it's a true statement and i think this is a fantastic conversation because not only are women behind men in terms of our introduction to sport especially in the ultra world women are still so far behind in the numbers and all of our models are based on what has been done for males and so this is a really great opportunity for females to close that gap because like you said there's the physiology women are primed to be good longer endurance athletes and we just need to understand how women work to really you know facilitate that yeah so in general training architecture there's several strategies that we're not

going to beat to death right now but some of them are okay you can move from low volume to high volume or high intensity to low intensity you're kind of like cycling in these different periods of volume and intensity and perhaps strength training and specificity and things like that all to meet like some end goal and they have a zillion different names and now that stacy you're involved in the strength training side the strength training people they over contrive periodization like no other group i mean am i am i right absolutely yeah it's it's like an it's like a military launch every time i see some sort of strength training architecture or strength training periodization for any team sports or strength training or bodybuilding or powerlifting or anything like that it just makes it just makes my head explode endurance i'm having i have a PhD student they're trying to um unteach everything she's learning as an essence it's hard it's hard it's very hard um but but we're not going to rehash a lot of that here because we've talked about that in podcasts before but one of the things that i was i was never taught as a coach and i'm i'm trying to learn or unlearn i don't know exactly how i would describe it right now is how to modify that periodization for female athletes because there are differences between male and females but we're both still humans and some things are going to apply some

physiological things are going to apply what are the like the training components the training periodization pieces that should be different for women um if you are looking at hitting that top end so you're looking at the um high intensity stuff right so there are different aspects so you have the the short interval high intensity and then you have more of your vo2 which are your you know five minute kind of things and like i was saying earlier um you can have a block of high intensity and you apply it and i've seen it so many times especially in the cycling world like in cycling camps and stuff you'll start and for the first two to three days the women and the men pretty similar in their intensity and and what they can do and then about day three to four the women are really dropping back um but they're still trying to do that intensity and again it comes down to they need more recovery so it's like two days intensity 36 hours so you do morning morning and then a night um so it's understanding just how you can bring them right up to it and then pull it back um just because of the enzyme differences and and the recovery differences that we have we look over the course of an entire menstrual cycle because we know that the menstrual cycle is short or long and as a female athlete a lot of times you will have a little bit of irregularity the best tool that a coach can have is to have their athlete tracking not to say okay well

everyone in the follicular phase the low hormone phase needs to do xyz it's more understanding the patterning of your athlete so like some women will feel super fantastic around ovulation and you can put in a really hard day and they recover well from it but other women feel really super flat and can't do that hard day for like 36 hours so in the scope of what you're doing you know that you can push really hard and get really good either neuromuscular work done like the heavy loading stuff or that high end stuff or six reps of a relatively moderately to high intense um session when those hormones are relatively low but as soon as estrogen progesterone start coming up and affect everything from metabolism to um amino acid pool neurotransmitter that kind of stuff this is where we need to start going okay well we need a little bit more steady state work not so much high intensity work because of the way that the hormones have affected um even your respiration or your respiratory rate your resting heart rate the switch over from being able to use more carbohydrate to having to use more fatty acids the fact that within the muscle women can oxidize more lysine and not loosing so there's all these different factors that come into play so from a coaching and training standpoint it's let's bring that down and just work on like the sweet spot training not that high intensity not the really low stuff because the really low stuff we want to put a little bit later when we have less ability for

cognition reaction time so we can work on functional movement we can work on foot placement landing mechanics all that kind of stuff in kind of what we call the delude so if we're looking at in an entire scope it's understanding where you can push and be hard and within that hardness you still have to be very careful of two days and a 36 hour recovery to maximize what the female body can do and then getting more into like that steady state not super low not super high because then you're maximizing that performance effect there and then the few days before the period starts this is where you can work on all that functional movement working on a lot of people like oh well i feel really clumsy and i trip and fall during that time we work on that foot placement so that if you end up having a race during that time it's a non-issue stephanie's laughing during this like you've experienced that no no i'm just i yeah no absolutely um and if i could add to just like a practical application of this i think myself as an athlete and as a coach um personally i use an app to track my menstrual cycle and i've done this for years and i think it's such a great tool for me to learn about myself when i'm tired when i'm moody when i feel awful when i'm bloated because you can really use that to your advantage when you're training and i know for me personally when i start to menstruate i usually feel great like that's a really good time to be you know have a good performance and i just think female athletes can learn so much about themselves just simply by tracking their their symptoms and i mean working with a coach and being able to

have that open dialogue is so important and i think more people are becoming comfortable saying the word period and talking about the menstrual cycle which is a barrier we need to break through um but i i just think like more knowledge the more you can use that to your benefit yeah and it's not um like the one thing i do want to point out when we talk about tracking is i have some women who are like i'm tracking so i know i can't do this on this day because i'm right so sorry i swear you can cuss on this podcast it will not be you know novel to the listeners it's fine but what i don't want people to do is use it as an excuse right yeah what i do want people to do is they're aware of the fact that they might feel like shit but then what can they do about it then there's specific like little nutrition interventions you put into play to level that playing field so then it's not an off day because if you go into a race going i usually feel like shit on this day and it's race day that plays with the mind so if you're looking at having that patterning and understanding the days where you feel on fire and other days where you feel not so great you can put things like branched amino acids in for central nervous system fatigue you can add a little bit more salt to your food to moderate some of the risk of hyponatremia if you feel flat in the legs and not on fire then maybe you have to do a longer plyo type workout to get everything firing from a neuromuscular sense so there's small little things you can do to level that so that you don't have an off day but stacy here here's let me try to like synopsize a little bit of like what you just

went through and feel if i'm not giving this justice please push back on it yeah the two big things that that you just went through are first women are just going to need more interspersed rest as compared to men because when they're doing hard workloads yeah and then the second thing is i'm going to try to bring this back to like periodization terminology because the listeners will be somewhat familiar with this is that you're using more of a mixed periodization to take advantage of what's going on in the body naturally versus what we would call a block periodization to take advantage of the concentration of training load on a specific type of physiology right exactly and using the mixed load doesn't mean you're not going to get the training volume it just means that you're going to be able to recover from it and your body's going to absorb that volume a lot better than if you were the traditional high volume and we're going to progress you know every week every two weeks every three weeks and then have a deload yeah because well one of the things that started to emerge especially in endurance sports and particularly in cycling i don't need to tell you this stacy because you've seen it a lot with the men's teams that you've worked with is this block style periodization where they load up on one type of intensity for weeks and weeks and weeks and months and we use this in ultra running a lot as well just because it's so specific to this low intensity thing and what i'm hearing from you is that might

is that pieces of that might be incompatible with women's physiology because you're forcing like a physiological square peg into into uh uh into the round hole yeah exactly and the way that i what if i throw up slides or something like that and explain it is i put up your typical like three weeks on one week off and overlay it over the typical 28 day menstrual cycle that works perfectly right because you have your you're loading during the phases you can and then the deloading and the high hormone but we know that women are not textbook so say a woman has a 40 day cycle then you're putting some of the deload right in the time where her body can still accept that high intensity and then you're putting high intensity right in the point where she should be lowering her intensity and working more on functional movement and then for women who have really short cycles so you know 21 to 25 days it's the follicular phase that lengthens unless they aren't ovulating and that's a whole different conversation so you can really load it up and have a very small deload so understanding the cycle really helps you dial in what kind of periodization model you're going to use um which then works to the women's advantage for the recovery and preventing injury and progressing i think that takes as a coach a lot of communication with the athlete and just thinking of like you know the the number of athletes i work as a coach as well um the number of athletes i work with it's just you

know and everyone you have a little bit different relationship but i think you know that that becomes challenging because you know how do you take this and apply it to each individual person because they're so they're so different um personally i just you know try to be communicative and like understand what you know if we're talking about the menstrual cycle or when you feel good when you not feel good and you know it's kind of still like we don't have like a general template for this of like this is how you train a female athlete so i think a lot of it is like i don't want to say trial and error right now but it's you know we have a lot to learn yeah and it is i mean it sounds really complicated when we're having a conversation about it but um one of the methods that i've found useful for women who don't want to have the conversation or can't is you have that overlay of training groups like we all are free to know the training groups right so they put a little notation day one so you know right or they'll put a notation in on day 14 they'll be like day i feel awful so you're seeing some of the patterning it's not the direct communication but it's not having that face-to-face but it gives you enough information to know so if they're having a short cycle and you're seeing it short because they're day one and then three and a half weeks later day one then you know what you know okay well we have we're working with a short cycle and it gives you more insight to how that athlete is working without having to be really scripted an individual with every athlete and have a huge intake and keep that communication going um but then you have some athletes who are very verbally robust in

their training groups right yes some good novels yes i love that verbally robust it's not a bad thing but you can get a lot of information and dial it in right so yeah um i started working with a and this isn't a plug for them i'm just because i'm impressed with their technology i want to tell you guys about it um wild ai is a new um artificially artificially intelligence driven menstrual cycle app and so they're integrating with a lot of coaches and coaches platforms as well so it takes that onerous off having to have that conversation because the more data that the woman puts in the more it learns about the woman and so it can feed forward that information to the coach and say hey in two days your athlete usually feels this way or does this or feeds back to the athlete in two days you usually feel like fantastic or you don't feel that great so make sure two days before that you're doing xyz or on this day you do that so it's taking a lot of that confusion out because it's just there and i think there's a lot to be said for artificial intelligence to be able to learn just basic information that we tend to forget to kind of talk about 100 so we've got these these few variables that we're changing the first one is the rest the second one is looking at the at the menstrual cycle through the lens of when the athlete is going to be better and worse i think that's the best way

kind of the best way to put it let me try to like summarize some of the pushback that you mentioned earlier because i want to hear you that i want to hear your response to this and i can completely understand where this is coming but a lot of coaches will say well first off we're going to do that anyway we're going to listen to the athlete and when they're doing good and when they're doing poorly and adjust training load and training intensity based off of that regardless of whether they're male or female and then the second part to that is that if you're manipulating the training volume and training intensity to to coincide with what's going on hormonally you're substituting one improvement for another and the one improvement is is taking advantage of that of those hormones and that physiology but the compromise is is there's a better training architecture that can somehow elicit a bigger adaptation and so does that does that teeter-totter right does that compromise actually make sense for an athlete like like quote i'm going to use air quotes here that the listeners can't see does that compromise in the training architecture to take advantage of the physiology is it actually worth it or is it in fact a compromise at all it's not a compromise and i hear the pushback all the time from coaches oh i listen to my athlete but athletes don't tell you a lot like we have been doing in-depth interviews and taking a sociologist and qualitative methodology to look at the physiology

data that we're getting and i'll look at data and i'll be like okay well this person needs a little bit of rest but when you get the interview and overlay it's not rest they're not eating or they're not sleeping or they're not paying attention and so when you're looking just at the data that's coming out and you're not overlaying it even with the menstrual cycle which interrupts those variables um you're not going to have the appropriate conversation to pull the person back and when you start saying okay when we get into like a low energy state that happens with high volume training loads and appetite gets muted and you'll see this progression this complete fall off if you knew where they were in their menstrual cycle and knew how um like low energy availability affected them and you start seeing these perturbations you can pull back a lot earlier but they're not going to be able to tell you what's going on they're just going to say i feel flat i'm tired i feel flat i feel tired but without that extra context within it you can't have the appropriate conversation to be able to dial in pre-athlete and pull them back before they're too far over the ledge of being too tired so what you're saying is is like it enhances the communication and also is it has an anticipatory effect as well where you're where you're being not reactive and instead proactive to what's going going to go on in a couple of days exactly yeah yeah yeah i think that's fair strategy i mean because i once again i've heard that pushback as well and also as a like a coach from a practitioner from a practitioner standpoint i will fully admit and steph is an athlete that i that i coach as well i fully admit that i wrestle with the do i really need to change this that much because of what's going

on like is it really going to make that or should i just you know drive the training hammer home a little bit more and have the athlete you know do whatever they were supposed to do that day yeah and then this is where i'm going to really kind of mess up that conversation is when you start getting to perimenopausal so this is what we've been observing because they're you know it's the forgotten athlete so what we're observing is because you have such irregularity of the hormones you're never really sure when the period's going to come or not what we found is that seven to five days before their period starts there's two days where it's absolute dead fatigue and you can't say it's from lack of sleep or stress all of those things that are going on so they go from this lethargy that's the new normal to like i can't get out of bed i don't know what the hell's going on and then five or seven days later their period starts so being able to be understanding that that's happening there's no like way you can push the training on those days it's just this whole hormonal milieu and change of ratios that is affecting every system in the body trying to relearn a new normal so that's the other complexity that i'm going to pass to you that really happened i gotta get over it is what you're trying to tell me yeah well i mean i mean fortunately i you know and stephanie has this um experience as well we work with athletes across the spectrum so if anything i mean we get a

lot i see a lot of uh uh like national team coaches and things like that with the training center here in colorado springs if anything they get so ingrained with working with a very particular type of athlete that you ask them to move outside of that age group or that particular phenotype that's really good and adapts to anything and can handle any sort of training volume and they're just like i don't i don't know what to do like i don't know i don't know what to do with that athlete and so like we we get it working in the commercial space because we have to work with all those different types of athletes and ultra running has a really diverse group of athletes yep yeah exactly yeah you've seen that before too uh stacy i know you have where you work with like the national team coaches and then for whatever reason you start talking about something that's like outside of their little performance scope and they're brilliant people don't get me wrong like they're really brilliant physiologists and coaches but sometimes when they move outside of that you know olympic spectrum that gold silver they can't make the jump no they can't make the jump you're absolutely right i've seen it time and time again it's absolutely fascinating i know because they're both so focused on you know the top end of the making sure that they're fantastically ready for the olympics or world cup or whatever and when you start saying well you know let's let's break it back a level or is this person experiencing that they're like no not on my watch i was uh i was not to their fault it's just that silence i was talking to one of my colleagues the other day who i won't i won't embarrass um but

you know the fact that the olympics are moving to 2021 you would have thought that they had to like re-engineer the most complicated rocket ship and send it to pluto i'm like you got all your you you realize it's a year like you know how to plan training for one year and they're like no but you don't understand how it's different and it's you know five years and not four years and now we've got to go through all this testing i'm like they're still athletes and they're still training for the same races it's just a year later it's not that much more complicated i know where people here are like sweet that means i have a big break before i have a short hard build up for the olympics exactly oh no it's different anyway um okay let's move on stephanie we're gonna get into your wheelhouse now all right and stacy i would be remiss to to not talk about nutrition with you because i know this is a particular area of expertise and you and i have talked about this a lot over the course of years and the ultra running audience is going to find this fascinating because it it's like its own it's like its own little group you know i mean we have our own little nutrition quirks and things that work and appeals to authority and we do a lot of and i think you can you can relate to this with your research experience because it's a hard it's a hard sport group to do research on we have to do a lot of extrapolation of research that's done on marathoners and cyclists and the two to three to maybe four hour

range i was on the horn earlier with alan mccubbin and he's under undertaking he's out of australia and he's undertaking a hydration study right now that had the runners run on the treadmill for five hours and he's like i can't like like this is this is unheard of you know we're gonna have research subjects run on a treadmill for like five hours you know this is like some like mind-blowing type of thing but in the research world it really is but as ultra runners look at that and we're like meh like you know five hour training yeah i mean we do five hour training runs kind of like every every weekend it's not some big undertaking and so i think i think this like failure of of research to like properly study the sport of ultra running is is really applicable and we do have to make a lot of like educated guesses and extensions of the research just like you've had to make over the course of your career because the research didn't really exist yeah so similar to our previous conversation or like what are the big nuggets from a from a nutrition perspective within ultra running what are the what are the big rocks what are the big nuggets that women need to keep in mind as they're training and preparing for these events so of course the number one thing i'm going to say is women shouldn't do fasted or ketogenic dieting that's across the board like 100 percent all these people are like oh we need free fatty acid we need to increase our our metabolic deficiency and our ability to oxidize or tap

into fat women are already there right and so we know that when women start doing fasted training or the ketogenic diet they their body really starts to get into this downturn there's a few reasons why one is a perturbing zone a key neuropathide that starts the endocrine system and when you don't have enough food you don't have enough carbohydrate in particular this thing is turned down turned off so your whole endocrine system gets blown out of the water so you're resting that volumbrate goes down you put on body fat your menstrual cycle stops and people are like oh well i must i must not be eating right or must not be trained hard enough right so then they start putting in more volume eating less and it just cascades whereas if you take a man in the same situation they'll excel because the sensitivity for turning down this peptin or peptide is completely different in that so they can they can really excel and increase fatty acid oxidation and excel in training and all that kind of stuff in fasted intermittent fasted in ketogenic diets so when i start talking to a bunch of ultra women a lot of them are like oh i have a little bit extra body fat i'd like to lose and so we start looking at what they're doing definitely under eating definitely under protein not enough carbohydrate so when you start addressing let's just initially fuel for each training session and recover really well that tends to stop this breakdown state after exercise and their body gets into more of a relaxed

state and it doesn't take on that whole let's bring the resting metabolic rate down let's perturb the thyroid let's um you know downturn all your metabolic or your endocrine hormones so that's the very first step it's eating in and around your training and then when you're looking at what am i eating in training that depends on time and duration if you're going out for a five hour run you have the ability to eat some real food but when you're looking at a hundred miles and your body is really perturbed and you know that there's some points where you're like i can't eat a thing so you'll know where those down points are so when you're going out for your really long time on the feet type stuff this is where you play around and go okay well i don't want liquid calories because of the fact that it's going to increase the pressure in my gut it's going to cause some systemic dehydration and i'm not going to be able to push through that malese that i have um and we don't want that because once you start having gut perturbations and having to slow down your pace it's really hard to come back from that so we start looking at what are you eating and with the lower intensity aspect of ultra running it's the real food is much better than looking at the engineering of nutrition and we also know that fat and protein and carbohydrate all help each other to digest and get out of the stomach so you get this titration of energy instead of like this one big swoop from using just simple carbohydrate and i mean there's a lot of research that'll show in that five hour range like what to do but when we start looking at

adventure racing which fits into the ultra endurance stuff um nobody's using gels no one's using you know all the liquid calories because it just affects the performance so much so when you're taking an eye into that ultra endurance stuff and looking at what's happening with um fluid shifts just from time on the feet and being awake and the dehydration that's happening with the electrolyte shifts your body needs that real food just to be able to maintain some sense of normalcy um yeah so it's kind of off on the tangent it's like it's a good tangent i'm just like nodding my head just in agreeance with everything you're saying well i've been steph you heard me say this in our coaching ed calls as well but i'll mention this to you stacy i i am a little bit worried that this trend of intermittent fasting low carbohydrate adaptation um ketogenic diets that we see in ultra endurance event not just an ultra running but also an ultra triathlon and things like that that we're gonna as women start to come into the sport they're gonna take that up because they see it prevalent across the entirety of the sport which tends to be made up of men and i the reason that i'm worried about that is because similar to your experience at western states i don't want women to have a bad experience in sport i want women to like come into the sport and if that's a if that's a component of it they come into the sport and they think oh in order to you know be able to finish western

states or whatever i have to have this you know fat metabolism magic going on or anything like that and they have a negative experience either through training in a race because of that that reinforces this problem that we already have yeah and negatives oh sorry oh i was just gonna go ahead i said there's some really good robust research that's been coming out this year well i don't really count 2020 but either there is something out in 2020 um end of 2019 and the beginning of this year that's really showing that women don't do well on these fat adapted diets um louise burke just replicated her race walking one in women and men right so that's one of them there's been some that where they phased women in off a carbohydrate oriented into ketogenic got through the keto flu then looked at muscle activity and performance and it was a complete complete like downturn in performance even though they had adapted fully to the ketogenic diet so there's so many things that are coming out it's like when you look at some of the rationale behind it as well as the original population of the ketogenic and intermittent fasting were clinical populations who need to alleviate quickly or didn't have insulin control or anything like that but when you look at the exercise data exercise does all those things that fasting does and the ketogenic diet does to a greater extent and when you layer them that's when you start having all these problems and people don't separate that and that's part of the whole fitness fitness industry right where you're bombarded with all these myths to make a shit ton

of money and then it gets translated into outside of the gym into kind of real sport and no one's really saying hey wait a second you're exercising you're going to have the autopilot you're going to have the adaptation and then if you really want to benefit your body let's eat real food to support the gut microbiome to get the butyrates going so we have some really good robust healing properties you know so people aren't having those conversations because we're so inundated with all the crap that comes out of the fitness industry that has always been my issue with the meta what i call the metabolic magicians out there that think that some metabolic strategy has some magic adaptation that you know that that happens because of it you just look at exercise and or caloric restriction and it does all the exact same things that intermittent fasting does or low carbohydrate diet does or anything like that just exercise and if you need to lose some weight just normal caloric restriction yeah right and the the appetite hormonal response between a trained individual and an untrained sedentary individual are very different so it's not like applying what the intermittent fasting or low carbohydrate whatever's working to help someone lose weight to just restrict calories that's maybe not going to have the same response in a well-trained athletic population it doesn't have the same response right i always tell people like exercise in itself is a low-carbon fasted state right so you don't need to do it and then if you do want to lose

weight don't do it in around training people like eat for what you were doing and then in the afternoon far away from training that's when you can have a calorie deficit don't put some sauces on skip the salad dressing don't have a couple of snacks before dinner and right away you're having a round of 300 calorie deficit which is enough not to perturb the body to conserve but to lose a little bit of body fat so it's too sensible people don't want to listen i know i know so needless to say women getting into ultra running run away from intermittent fasting and the ketogenic diet as fast as you can yeah exactly yeah well and i want to i want to say too i i'm sure we're gonna maybe get into this but a lot of the women who are runners in the ultra running population are low energy and amenory it's you know and so that's just another reason to avoid this type of eating and i think you know we'd be remiss to not mention this because it's such an important it's such an important health and just i mean it's performance but it's health for these women and yeah um i mean stacy kind of just what you said like these women who are experiencing who you know under eat for the activity that they're doing they may eat like you know 2,000 2,500 calories a day which seems like a lot but for that energy output it's not appropriate and they feel tired they start to feel draggy and so a lot of runners are type a or very perfectionist highly driven and they're just going to dig in harder they're going to try

to manipulate their diet they're going to train more and it's just like this snowball effect of like no if you take a step back you actually eat more your metabolism is going to pick back up you're going to feel better you're going to get your menstrual cycle back and then it's all going to it's all going to come together but it's so hard to break through that barrier with women who are so like just think they need to just like put their head down yeah and just go hard so train a constant battle um i know and i i have worked with a lot of amenary women and successfully just adding like 300 calories a day over it takes time over months six months to a year that can restart the menstrual cycle so it's not like you have to you know reinvent your body but just giving it that extra energy it needs you know to function as a human being um then it can you know be healthy and then performance follows that yeah i've gotten pushed back because i've gone on record saying you know like if you're looking at a baseline of 200 calories or looking at the delta from increasing calorie and decreasing training then you get your period back but there's some um people out there who are like no complete rest and everyone needs 2500 calories and it's like well there's not a lot of people out there who can do complete rest and it's not for the fact well maybe they have a professional contract like i've worked with a few professional athletes who can't not train cannot stop racing because it's in their contract

and then i've also worked with people who are like i'm not running or i'm not cycling just because i love i need to do it because it's my mental release it's my time alone so right sit down with spiral so just understanding yeah like you're saying it's at delta right so you're increasing calorie intake and you're tweaking volume of training so the deficit isn't as huge then yeah you get your cycle back and i don't know an athlete who if you said you just need to rest and just continue to eat well they're gonna be okay with that it's gonna feel awful so i know people tend to eat better when they're active that you may be changing around volume a little bit um reducing training load but some activity i think is super helpful for you know the normalcy of it for the normal people of us right yeah i think we'd be remiss not to also mention that this not only happens to elite athletes because when we talk about reds or is it red s in where you are stacy or is it reds yeah we both you say both so we're talking about relative energy deficiency in sport typically what gets lost in that is is that we're only talking about olympic level athletes because that's where a lot of the kind of the communication gets filtered down from is from the ioc or from the national governing bodies and things like that but the fact of the matter is is that it affects it or it can affect all athletes and i'd like actually absolutely i mean i'd actually like to know from both of your perspectives since you are both in the nutrition

world and you work with a lot of female athletes how common is it outside and first i think we should give a good definition of reds and stacy i'll let you take the lead on that and then and then go into like how prevalent is that in just the normal athletic male or female population well i'll put it this way i i if i could bet money on this i would say 98 of the athletes that show up at kona world championships are either in full low energy availability or reds okay 98 yeah all right i'm gonna get that i'm gonna get that bet going in vegas i'll pull some strings for you and we'll see i'm sure it's gonna start out as like a you know negative 120 uh favorite right out of the bat yeah 98 wow you know we've done some um general population like recreational female athlete research and we know that close to 50 are in low energy availability and that's just general population and part of it is you know the whole push of calories in calories out i don't want to overeat what i just expended or they do an early morning workout and then they don't eat and then they stay in this extended catabolic state so there are many factors but it's very prevalent and when you get up to the upper echelons it's really really super prevalent and no one talks about it yeah like it's the silent quietness and it's endemic in men it's endemic in women and when you filter down it's becoming more um apparent in recreational men as

well so it's more suboptimal low energy availability where they're just on the cusp of being fatigued everything and the blood work looks like it's on the low end of normal but it's too low for them and it's really hard to diagnose and so when you start seeing all the symptomology in both men and women just upping the food a little bit and start to see the difference right when we talk about full relative energy deficiency in sport this is where almost every system of the body is affected so it used to be you know the subset of the female athlete triad where you start having bone issues and metabolic issues and no period but now it extends across the board to gi issues psychological issues immune issues cardiovascular issues give blood work back and the person's all over the show and they're supposed to be an athlete and they're like i don't understand what's going on it's like it's reds it's relative energy deficiency in sport and it's relatively new and we're working on it as well as looking at no one's saying okay well you have gi distress and you also have immune distress well you're probably in reds no one's doing that they're like gi distress let's try to do that so there's still a lot of issues within that that need to be fixed as well but talking about making more more people aware of it is you know another women are not small men 20 year venture by let's hope that it's not that long because it is so prevalent well in ultra running some of this almost happens just as a byproduct of the like the training because the training is so long and you can't keep up with the

caloric demands and you do that day after day i mean i don't want to say it's an inevitability because it makes like the world seem hopeless or the training seem seem hopeless but in a lot of ways especially when you're doing like really high training volumes and ultra runners will go out there they'll you know have 30 hour a week you know training weeks and things like that which that's not indifferent from an elite ironman athlete to have a 30 or 40 hour uh training week but um and i guess my point with that is is we look at this proposition of trying to stay out of an energy deficit and sometimes you just can't avoid it it's just how how good or how adept you are at making sure the hole that you're digging is not too deep and the best thing to do about that again is shut down the breakdown state post-exercise don't go in unfueled don't delay refueling because the longer your body stays in that catabolic state post-exercise the more lea takes hold because we know that you can have a calorie deficit but as long as you're fueling the body when it needs it it doesn't go into the tizzy of down regulating everything so it kind of buys you some time i don't really want people to like stay in an lea state but if the fact of you know increased training load decreased appetite heavy training weeks and you just can't get the food in then really dial in that recovery intake and the and the pre-fueling so that your body doesn't stay in this breakdown state

i think practically for ultra runners like this is an important concept to understand because we're used to such high volume you know and it's like you can do that but then you have to take recovery time and you know we're in the the camp at like 10 miles that's like nothing right so it's like you know understanding that you can sustain that high volume but you have to let your body recover because you will dig that hole and it is much easier in female athletes just because you do have the menstrual cycle as kind of a marker and i think it's an important conversation to have with with athletes is you know are you getting your menstrual cycle and if you're not not ignoring it like it's not okay to just keep training and training um it's something that should be addressed because things are going to happen down the line if you don't yeah and it's not okay to go on an oral contraceptive pill no ask it no which is sending out so many people do oh i am a manorita and the doctor's like oh put you on a pill it's fine you'll get your period no you're not getting your period you're getting withdrawal bleed and it's masking everything that we need to know keep track of yeah yeah okay stacy so since you brought it up we're going to come back to the low energy availability but since you brought it up five percent performance reduction with an oral contraceptive yeah you want to know why yeah go ahead go at it first off true false um it depends on on the level so it's between two and eleven percent okay so the take-home message for that is is if you want an instant performance boost and you're not and you're on an oral

contraceptive just change that easy yeah yeah exactly um and it really comes down to most people think when you're taking an oral contraceptive pill and you have these synthetic hormones that you're taking estrogen and progesterone but you're not there are different molecular structures within these exogenous hormones and it's very critical that these little hydroxyl groups they affect the system differently so when we're looking at that top end performance of co2 all those kinds of things it down regulates your ability to hit that and it has to do with the fact that when you're taking these pills they exert around 500 times the um i guess uh what's the word before uh basic word effect 500 times the effect of um what your natural hormones will do to the cell so you're looking at something that's like really driving a cellular response it's overexciting estrogen receptors the progestin that's in it isn't the same as progesterone so you'll have a difference in the ratios and the way they affect the body so when you're looking at a performance boost and you're saying hey i can't hit that top end i'm not recovering very well it's has a lot to do with these exogenous hormones easy change easy change and yeah okay so we look a lot at the different like i've i work closely with the new zealand women's sevens here because the building that's where they're located and i've had individual conversations and just over the course of three years that i've been working

with them they've all become very dialed in and a lot of them have changed from the oc to a marina um so an iub less stress reactions less stress fractures less muscular injuries better um high intensity training um i guess capacity as well as adaptations so there's been a lot of subtle changes that have really been able to build on the performance that was the other thing i was going to ask you with that is it's not just the pure performance boost that you can get just by switching the type of contraceptive you're using it's also the injury susceptibility that you can uh that you can improve as well and that's potentially big because those are those are those are those are just as big if not bigger performance robbers than anything else out there being out being out injured for four weeks yeah exactly there's no training going on if you're injured right so you're getting that detraining not just recovery um and one of the other things i'll point especially with runners is the stress reactions and stress fractures and if you have low bone density one of the things that physicians will often recommend is going on the pill because supposedly it helps with bone density but it does not the estradiol that's in an oc does not stimulate the bone growth factors that you need if you have an estrogen patch it's different because this is different formulation and it does enhance insulin growth factor one and it does enhance your body's ability to build bone so again i'm just saying that if you're predisposed like there's so many reasons not to be on the pill unless they you

have like endometriosis or pcos or other health conditions that require you or you find benefit from being on the estrogen component of an oc yeah well and we all know how injury-ridden running is i was reading this study for an article that i'm gonna write in the next couple of weeks where they followed 23 runners for two years and they made them the whole basis of the study is they're tracking their acute and chronic workloads and trying to figure out the ratios and what this you know what the step ups mean and things like that but like within the first paragraph of the uh of the abstract of this study said okay we're following these 23 runners after two years 22 of them had a significant injury that caused more than four like four i think it was four training days i mean they had a pretty high threshold for what an injury was but they lost more than four training days so that's everybody yeah that's crazy it's not but it's not it's like that's the norm like it's like everybody that's a crazy norm it's a crazy i know i know why would people sign up for this okay let's come let's steer it back a little bit back onto onto the nutrition side because i want to get your i want to get your take on something specific with uh ultra running and what we were discussing with low energy availability one of the things that makes this so complicated for ultra runners to figure out is the daily difference in caloric requirements that they're going to have

as a product of their training so an athlete can go out on a 60 minute or 45 minute recovery run which should be the appropriate length of a recovery run right about 45 minutes 45 minute recovery run and that's going to cost them four to 600 calories or something like that they can then go out on a six hour training run and that's going to cost them 36 3600 or 4000 calories and the difference between that recovery run day and that long run day and that long run day is so great and the quantity of food that they need to cover that long run day as compared to the recovery run day is so different that's where a lot of athletes screw it up because they literally have to eat sometimes twice as much food from one day to the next and as a coach and stephanie can attest to this like in our coaching group and also like working with athletes i bang my head against the wall trying to like reinforce this with athletes so i'm wondering like how like how how can an athlete wrap their head around trying to get that right that difference in calories yeah we know it's meaningful but a lot of times we a lot of times athletes miss the extent to what they to which they actually need to cover their calories with i think that i think a good just a quick answer for that is telling athletes their body is not a checkbook so not thinking of like day to

day energy intake and like more dynamic so you're probably going to need to make up some more of that on your recovery day so paying attention to your appetite and not saying oh it's a recovery day i don't need to eat as much but knowing you're going to have this big energy expenditure day where it's going to be impossible to catch up so thinking of it more dynamic and like your energy intake over the week needs to match your energy expenditure over the week not necessarily day to day yeah exactly that's what to say when we are working with because cyclists the same thing right you can go out and have a four or five hour ride and spend that but you don't have an appetite and you're not eating enough right so it's like the day after that you're most likely going to still not have an appetite but you need to eat more so we put it as you train hard even recovery days you want to make sure that you're eating and drinking appropriately for each session so you're you're moderating what you're eating and drinking but then on recovery day like even if you're not on the bike or you're not running you need to eat because i've worked with so many athletes who've been told oh recovery day no activity 1100 calories that's all you need it's like no no oh no no no no recovery means food your body needs food to recover so if it's an easy active recovery day you still need to eat bring the calories up because it is it's the dynamics of the week from the day-to-day standpoint stop that breakdown state after exercise and then from a weak state make sure that you don't have more than maybe a 600 calorie deficit across the entire week which people are like how do i figure that out but if you're looking at

okay well this is 600 calorie deficit across the entire week that's more like a weight restriction like weight loss restriction not a huge low energy state so the way that you're looking at it is almost over like a five or a seven day rolling period where you need to balance the energy over those longer periods of time and at the same time the days that are really high caloric output days just focusing on kind of controlling the damage to a certain extent by making sure that before during after the activity you've got just as many calories that you can kind of fathomably stand yeah and quality calories too yeah right wow because you want to take care of our gut that's true that's true absolutely true and we know that's a big issue as well i mean that's one of the things that i learned from you is just how how the food stuffs that um uh that we take in can uh can affect our gut and how big of an issue this is in ultra running and so much so stacy i think i think you realize that i completely plagiarized your uh rice ball recipe i gave you credit for it so it's not technically not plagiarization but i completely plagiarized your rice ball recipe and put it into my book and it is a huge hit like we use it at our camps yeah people love it i still i see people at races that use it and i i i make it a point to try to take as little credit as possible and push all the credit over towards you

so if you get any yeah if you get if you get any feedback on it i've been trying to push it your way for like the last five or six years yeah well i haven't i'm excited about this so i'm not going to say who it is but i have an incoming PhD student from the states he's moving over here with his wife and he's specifically interested in ultra running and ultra endurance and what kind of foods to eat to minimize gut disturbance to help with energy levels so um yeah we're gonna get some real research going in the home of ultra running here in this area so maybe i'll put that in yeah maybe i'll put the rice ball in for this hey i i'll i'll help you fund that research how's that come on over which i will yeah there you go i'll be i'll volunteer to be a subject i'll make it i'll make once you open the country up i'll make a special trip down there just to participate in it but what you can self-quarantine in our guest room there you go what's your hunch though you know we use a lot of sports nutrition products like copious amounts of sports nutrition products i mean i know very successful ultra runners and i've seen them do this they show up to 100 mile race with a case a 48 pack of goo energy dells all one flavor and that's all they'll use for the 100 miles and they're really really successful at it yeah you know other athletes that can maybe stomach two or three gels if that if that so what's the in order to prevent gi distress in an ultra marathon situation

what like what are the like what are the big things that you're going to tell your PhD student to try to like tease out but it's kind of multifaceted first you have your sex differences and gut integrity we also really want to look at the gut microbiome and how that changes leading into a taper week um there's a good article that came out a couple of months ago that was looking at the two weeks before the two days before and what happens during an ultra so getting some idea of the metabolic differences of the gut when it's under stress can inform what you should be eating to help promote that whole um vagus nerve and the gut brain access to kind of help with that gi distress um so yeah there's a lot of different things to look at and it's also okay well what if people are successful on liquid calories like what makes them unique is it a genetic scope is it a gut microbiome scope is it training the gut scope are they translatable and transferable to people who can't do that or would these people who are really successful on liquid calories do a lot better if they put in real food so those are all the kind of questions that are there but it is a three-year PhD so we need to bring it down and answer the most significant question so yeah happy to to take some what do you think is the most significant question that we could try to answer well i don't know whether it's a byproduct of just sports nutrition companies trying to like have more products available or

whether they're starting to see some of like the efficacious nature of having diversity in their sports nutrition lines but we are starting to see it's not just gels right i mean it hasn't been that long where it's been just like just gels i mean we can go back 10 years ago and your choice was like the vanilla gel or the chocolate gel that was it and then drink you know and the drinks were kind of long at the same time but then we started having chewables and then real food products and then package you know package bars and smarter package bars and now we're seeing this the whole movement with things that people can make at home that are rice or potato base that they can that they can kind of take along and baby food yeah baby food right baby food in in sachets right now stephanie you know works for cliff bar they've got some great products cliff pouches before yeah there you go they have a time and place i have the pizza flavored one i just couldn't get my head around that one and you had to be like four to five hours and it had to be hot out and you were just craving salty okay i'll leave it there i remember dakota had some of their um initial batches of that and he came out to my house and did some training he's like here i'll let you have some of this and i we were not four or five hours into the run at that point so it did taste a lot better though i will give him that but so so there is this like real food versus engineered food proposition that athletes need to go through what's your take on that um i think well sitting over here we're one cliff bar is five bucks right so we're looking at no one's

really using that much engineered nutrition because it's too expensive so we're a lot of people here are still on the real food bandwagon which is great and they're finding success with it but then they'll go over and do something in the states and they'll find all the engineered nutrition that's super duper cheap and they'll start using it and then have gut problems so when you're looking at what is it what is about real food that helps again you know if you look at ask her you can do this research and he's like oh you can train the gut for it maybe but i'm always going to come back and say we're not as smart as nature so when you start trying to engineer nutrition to work when the body's under the most extreme stress i'm not sure that that's such a great thing because we don't know the co-factors in food that help the body with that kind of stress um yeah so it'll be interesting and the more we can dig into like what's happening from a cellular and a gut level to be able to inform us on choices i think that's going to help a lot there's a trend now that i'm sure you started to see unfold stacy with these like super caloric drinks that are that try to manipulate the structure or how the carbohydrate is delivered either in like a hydrogel or actually the structure of the carbohydrate and you you like this this is why i'm asking this topic because i'm trying to like push your buttons a little bit on this stacy um but i've always found this is like something it's a it's a proposition where you have a plausible mechanism of action that's going on and then you design a

product around it and just like kind of guess if it works or not yeah so i sat in a um a european seminar with the guy that developed the um mauritius gel like the hydrogel oh the martin gel and by the way you can mention any nutrition product you want to on this i know stephanie is sponsored by cliff but this podcast is not sponsored by anybody so you can do whatever even if it was i'd still yeah it's good whatever all right so keep going yeah so he's at this european conference and he's like i would never design it for the way it was used matter of fact i wish i was never involved because they put it specifically in an elite athletic environment for these guys that were genetically talented to try to run a marathon under two hours and they aren't out there hitting it hard like someone who's running a four-hour marathon so although they're going fast their intestinal integrity isn't as compromised as someone who's out there for longer than two hours so the whole concept is let's try to get enough fuel in them to support them going fast for two hours or less but then it all got pulled over as media and stuff does into the general pop and it's not designed for them and people are having some success and other people are not but they're pushing the whole it came from this you know the sub two hour project and there's a lot of science behind it and the guy's like not science for general pop it's science for these guys who are running sub two hour and so when you

start looking and i get all these questions like it's still a concentrated carbohydrate that's going into the gut that's going to push the pressure up in the small intestines and it's going to cause the same flux of water to come in when you're looking at the super starches and you're looking at the new rendition of the super starch right and you look at some of the research it still is a multidextrin or glucose polymer that invokes the same issues because the body doesn't recognize it as just being a glucose molecule or a fructose molecule it's like what is this thing i don't know let's put water in to decrease the pressure and then we'll figure out what to do with it so there's a lot of marketing hype around it all and it's really frustrating because everyone's like i have this new product i'm like it's the same shit in a different can well the the nutrition we could rant on the nutrition space for forever forever it is completely suspect to this logical fallacy of the appeal to authority where they bring on the elite athletes and some of them it's authentic some of them use the product and they find some sort of benefit from it and they're a great athlete anyway and i'm not discounting that authenticity but the point that you're trying to make that i think is really poignant stacy is that there are only so many elite athletes that you can sell a dollar gel to you have to sell it to the general public and is that an appropriate nutrition product for a four-hour marathoner or a five-hour

marathoner or a 12-hour ironman athlete or something like that just because it's elliot kipchoge's product of choice and it you know it might work for him he broke two-hour marathon there's nothing you know nobody's going to be able to knock that but is it actually translatable to the general public no and the other thing that people don't realize is and this is from behind the scenes i'm sure you've worked with that top end right that are sponsored by something and they'll gap their bottles with something else more they'll use a different product but people don't know that or if they're on a team and they're sponsored by something this is from the cycling set a lot of the pro athletes just use what they've been given and they don't know how much better they would feel if they didn't use it they complain about not feeling wrong um so there is that misstep just because you're an elite athlete and you might be perceived of using something doesn't mean it's even good for the elite athlete so again it's i always say marketing from science which is so unfortunate yeah it really is because then people are like i had i was so dialed in for this race i thought you know my training metrics are great but then i had the port-a-potty stops or i got cramping or i had gi distress and it's like well did you really dial in your nutrition and try it out oh no i just figured i'd do what so-and-so told me to do or i did this on a shorter training session right so they're not really putting the thought process in it because they're overwhelmed with the phone around using a certain product i've i've stacy you probably don't have the scope of this but i've probably had seven or eight nutrition focused podcasts and they all consistently come back to

try your nutrition in training to whatever extent you can replicate the race conditions however close you can get to those race conditions try your training try your nutrition strategy out in training do it relentlessly in training that's the key to everything unfolding it's not a magic product it's not a magic ratio of things it's not a magic super starch you know carbohydrate or anything like that it's literally trying the things out figuring out what works for you in the confines of human physiology let's put that caveat in there yeah in the confines of human physiology but then trying it time and time and time and time again and not letting it till race day to be like oh well i don't i don't know what it's like to take the vanilla gel after seven hours of running like that's a gamble that nobody wants to take yeah who knows well that way when you go into race day too there's the confidence of like i've done this a hundred times i know it works and you take that guesswork out yeah so i've been in the um as having a a trade product in some of these expos and especially at ironman and kona people will come up and be like oh this will work in the week great and they'll use it like the next day in the race i'm like oh i don't want to sell it to you we're not going to sell you that product you can't just change it on the day but feelers so like oh it's the best of the best it's going at the moment i'm going to use it because tomorrow is worlds and there's so many

people who think that way it's like no it's the x factor like it might work for your friend who's used it and told you to come over and try it but that doesn't mean that it's going to work for you so yes as you're saying try it in training as much as you can so that it's not uh an x factor on this day and elite athletes and age group athletes so alike are subject to that error and you know that stacy because you've seen it and i've seen it as well where it's like really like we went we've gone through this for months and you decide to change it at the 11th hour like what were you thinking i know i had the luxury of having a professional that i really respect and really want to do well and there's been a lot of gi distress in the history and finally they were here and i was like put that shit away we're gonna do what i want you to do and let's see how much better it goes and over the course of like three or four weeks changed it all didn't have any kind of issues and i was like see don't default on race day put those gels in my house and do not take them it's like it's like being the mom no no no no no no no maybe that's what we could take away from this plan your race day nutrition out as if your mom is watching you yeah exactly exactly and don't try to hide the chocolate because that's not gonna work there you go all right we're gonna leave it at that

stacy steph i appreciate both of y'all's time yeah thank you this is fun as always yeah yeah it's fun to catch up stace we we need to do this again and then we can really go on some rants now that the audience will be used to and just totally go off the rails and throw f-bombs left and right and it'll be a total hoot you can put your daughter away like early and like put the earmuffs on her and things like that and we'll just that's all right i've been notoriously around her going ah trump's such a fuckwit so she'll be like to my husband mommy said that that trump was a fuckwit he's like what i'm leaving this in by the way i'm not cutting that part out um before we go stacy where could people find more about you and the work that you're doing and get a kick-ass women are not small men t-shirt t-shirt so um i do have a website now uh dr stacy sims.com you can also find me on instant facebook the same and then if you want to follow research perspective you can go to my university page which is um waikato which is the university of waikato in new zealand uh yeah yeah or you could do what my kid does siri find me dr stacy sims and then it comes up with all the things that's so cool all right stacy appreciate everything you you do and i i appreciate all the counsel that you've given me over the years i don't think i've ever said that uh publicly and i know i know you know that but

you've been a big influence on my coaching career and uh uh and certainly a a part of like who i am today is is due to that counsel so you're welcome and i'm glad that people are taking the word so keep doing what you're doing i know it's great finally and there we have it thanks to stacy and thanks to steph for that podcast i could not obviously have done it alone uh stephanie thank you very much for providing your expertise in this podcast thank you to the listeners if you have not already had a chance skip on over to itunes and subscribe to this podcast that is the best way to ensure that all of this content gets fed into your podcasting feed regardless of how you absorb that content in addition to that if you've not had the chance to give this podcast a rating or a review on itunes go on and do so as we mentioned during the podcast there are no sponsors on this podcast so we can talk about any nutrition products that we want to good bad or in different so thank you guys for listening until next time we will see everybody out on the trails you