Low Energy Availability and Weight Management in Ultrarunning | Koopcast Episode 40

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 as always i'm your host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we have jose areta who is a lecturer in sports nutrition and metabolism at the school of sport and exercise sciences at liverpool john moore's university jose's primary interest is in the area of training nutrient interactions in humans which basically means how the food stuffs that you eat have an effect on your body when you are actually training and racing we had this enlightening conversation about this concept of low energy availability in athletes and we go over this case study of an athlete that he worked with personally that was having issues with low energy availability and was able to correct those over the course of a few years with some deliberate calorie increases we also talk about how athletes can safely manage their weight and train effectively at the same time which is quite a hard balance to strike if i don't say

so myself and working with a lot of athletes that are in in that exact same situation so let's get right into it here's my conversation with jose areta what's the research field been like recently because i know that you know a lot of the universities come february or march they completely shut down you know they let all the students out they kind of hodgepodge the remainder of their classes and graduation and things like that but it and it seems like like the at least i i get this i'm kind of getting this sense um just from keeping track of the research that's been coming out from february until now you know the middle of june yeah that the backlog is starting to wind down like there was this backlog of research that you know that was getting you know going through the peer review process and going through the publishing process and it just seems like now it's just starting to wind down and everybody that wants to produce additional research is just kind of like yeah we can do like meta analyses or we can go reanalyze old data uh but it just seems like we're starting to enter that phase because the opportunity to actually perform original research because the subject availability is so helter skelter it's just hard to get a pool pool people what's your sense on it uh so the thing is that you know

there's i think the lag time is going to be a lot more than just a couple of months because it really something that people don't really realize is that it really takes years from the moment you sort of start you know collecting data to the moment you actually publish that data and the funny thing is that you know you read a scientific article in like i don't know it depends how much detail you read it in but you can read it in let's say half an hour you know maybe there's research that took like years to to to to get to the to the to print and so you know the fact that we're going through this uh sort of research halt you know at the moment um and it's been known since like what three months now or so um i think we're gonna start to see that maybe in a year time it really depends on the field of work and the the things depend what stage in your career you're at but you know you have like a lot of studies in the in the pipeline that you know some of them you got all the data but you haven't had time to analyze it or to write it down write that down and so on so i think a lot of people have uh sort of a backlog of of research that you are still gonna see coming out what you don't see is like um laboratory-based studies but we you know some of the studies that we are currently doing are uh i don't know maybe survey based or some things that we can um do remotely like you know provided

that you know some of the work that i do is with uh um road cyclists and we can collect a lot of data remotely as well with power meters and you know foot logs and and so on so we can we can still do some things but you know it's not the maybe the full-on physiological adaptation type of analysis that some of us uh do so maybe what you would see is maybe a shift and in the the work that some people are doing uh but i don't i don't think it's gonna stop completely but yeah as you say eventually if this went on for like a year you would see a lot of reviews coming out and meta-analysis and so on yeah did you have any uh the research that you're involved with just have to stop like anything that had like an intervention and like in the middle of the intervention you can't get the subjects back into the lab or anything like that correct yeah uh so basically i was i have a PhD student with which we were about to to start a data collection in the lab um and yeah no we just just couldn't start basically and i consider myself lucky because if we had started then we would have had to stop halfway through which is worse because you already invested resources and time and so on so we were we were just about to start when all this happened but uh yeah but yeah that's the case like everything came you know shut down basically yeah we we have a consumer facing physiology lab here it's not done it's not utilized for research purposes or anything like that it just

now booted back up i mean here in the end end of june where we've started to bring athletes back in for standard like lactate threshold vo2 max testing and and and stuff like that and surprisingly um the the response that we've gotten from the the athletes because we can kind of we can kind of like outlay the protocol and the safety measures that uh that we're using they haven't felt you know unsafe at all i mean they felt you know very safe like coming in getting you know i mean we're collecting gases and you know pricking you know taking uh blood pinpricks and that's the extent of the you know that's the extent of the the surveys or the the assays that we're doing yeah um so yeah here you know we still haven't defined yet when we are gonna go back to the lab and they're still we're still trying to define a word name it when i say we is like the country really like the you know from from top to bottom there has to be a very clear um outline of what we can and cannot do in in the lab in terms of like what the government and you know public health england says to us that we can or cannot do i was present at an online meeting with members of the sort of directed by the physiological society which is an important society that sort of brings together you know physiologists from several countries around the world and it's a uk based and trying to say like okay what can we do and not do in in the lab at the moment and

there was not really a clear outline but you know it seems that the population that we work with mainly there are like young fit uh um participants the risks of them getting covid or getting any negative consequences are extremely low um you know this seems to be a something that affects mainly um elderly you know unfit or like with some sort of like metabolic uh complications so um we hope you know that at least that is going to give us some some support to start to do research sometime soon but we have to we have to make sure that any sort of um interventions that um decrease any any source of uh risk are putting in place yeah strange times strange times um well i hope i hope your research can kind of get back on track because i've always found it fascinating over the years i mean any any research having to do with metabolism and in particular substrate metabolism which uh which you're involved in a lot is it's one of those things that in the endurance space and it's irrespective of whether we're talking about runners cyclists triathletes or in the case of our audience here ultra runners it's always something that gets a keen interest and i think that that interest and you've seen this over the course of your career professionally it seems to get ratcheted up year after year after year because of this like

polarization almost of dietary strategies and dietary manipulations that we're starting to see amongst endurance athletes specifically so i hope that we can continue to see contributions from the from the research side continue to trickle in over the course of the next three years yeah totally i think you know i think it's been quite prominent since like the uh early um 20th century really like the the the contribution of you know substrate use is such an important factor to um sort of performance and you know how people feel really when they they exercise it was like as early as like 1920s you know the the the research of august crog that you was already showing that um you know the use of fat or carbohydrates really had a huge effect on how people were feeling when they were exercising and the um the effect of like carbohydrates for for how much more efficient uh muscle contraction was in terms of like the use of um oxygen and how much energy you generate per liter of oxygen and i think you see 100 years later you know people are becoming to realize uh how how important that uh that is more and more when i say people it's not the researchers but it's more like general population but there as you say there's huge polarization and and this whole idea of like low carb high fat training you know is uh

picking up in terms of like interest in the by a lot of um athletes uh but you know there's still a lot of research to be done to show if there's actually uh enhanced or impaired performance yeah it takes a while i think that's the take-home message with a lot of that research is that you mentioned some of the stuff starts in the 20s and it takes a while for it to actually take root into practice because you can never take a singular study in and of itself and draw a whole lot of conclusions or actually like practical outcomes from it and i think you realize that because you do a lot of work with athletes individually in a coaching capacity too correct yes um so uh basically you know what is the translation of what we do in the lab to what happens in the field is some of the things that i think we do quite well at liverpool john morse and um our you know the the way that we work is basically from from molecule to to to performance kind of thing you know we basically try to nail the work that we do at a sort of physiological molecular level and see how that potentially translates into performance gains but you know we are aware that uh what we have very well controlled in a laboratory setting is not exactly what's happening in a more much more like what wild environment uh in uh when when we go out on the field and try to see what how we can improve the the performance of an athlete that

is a multifactorial really the the the performance outcome right so let's let's start to circle back into like you like firmly where where you're one of the pieces of your wheelhouse because i don't want to pigeonhole you into one specific piece but one of the one of the pieces of your wheelhouse is carbohydrate utilization carbohydrate oxygen oxidation and specifically low energy availability and this has started to um perk the interest of a lot of endurance athletes over the course of the last uh few years and i think um a big facilitator of that has been this transition from the female athlete triad to this this term that's a little bit more it's a comprehensive um uh to to essentially describe the same thing which is reds or red s um but this concept of low energy availability has really become a highlight within endurance athletes simply because it's hard to get a fix on it's really hard to determine if an athlete is under a condition where they're operating with low energy availability and the consequences are so can can be so staggering so why don't we first just kind of set the table in terms of what do we actually mean with low energy availability and then start to dribble into what are the potential like negative outcomes of an athlete having to consistently train in that state yep that's uh i think it's fair to

to go back to the basics um sometimes you know uh but for for your audience or for everyone really i think for for some researchers as well i think for us it's always good to go back to the basis and try to you know think what uh where this is coming from and what actually low energy availability is uh so to give a little bit of a historical recap um the the research on low energy availability sort of started in the in the early uh 90s um and the origin of like trying to look at what energy availability was and what uh low energy availability represented comes from observations on the field that um females uh female athletes in in in particular had this condition where um um disorder eating and low bone mineral density and uh uh men's menstrual dysfunctions happened together which gave gave rise to the the concept of the female athlete triad as you mentioned before it was not clear though what why this uh was happening in in in female female athletes it was actually the the stress of exercise the fact that they were doing a lot of um you know physical activity or if it was the fact that they had like a decreased um sort of uh uh energy from from the the diet that was actually um having an effect but you know a series of research in the um 90s and 2000s were able to sort of tease down that you know regardless of the the stress of um

exercise the amount of energy available from that from the diet was actually what's gone was having a negative effect on um markers of bone metabolism so um you know short studies running the in the labs and to seem to identify that it's actually not the stress of exercise but the energy that is available from the dietary energy that is available that actually um has an effect so i think it's fair i think we can actually define what uh is energy availability as you know as a concept but also numerically you can define and what energy availability is so how do we come up with this number um energy availability is um the energy from the dietary intake so in in calories let's say uh from that we um subtract the energy we expand it during exercise also in calories and then we normalize it to the fat-free mass so we say the energy availability is x amount of calories per kilo of fat-free mass per day that's normally how we refer to it and then you can you know achieve different levels of energy availability so this energy why it's called energy availability because it's like energy available for metabolic processes

so it's the energy that your body has available after you use during exercise to maintain your normal physiology so a value of about 45 kilocalories per kilo of fat-free mass per day approximately is what's gonna sort of maintain your body weight through time in a normal state and maintain your normal physiological function yeah so you would expect that someone that is in a sort of healthy state would would see around 40 to 45 kilocalories per kilo of lean body mass per day so if you drop under that then it's when you begin to see like the consequences of uh low energy availability yeah um which initially you know in a person that is in a normal state which will uh drop weight right uh but that doesn't mean that um if you are in low energy availability you're always gonna drop weight and this is some any area that needs to uh to to see some some uh you know distinctions in terms of uh maybe you know if you stay for a long period of time in low energy availability um it might be that you stop dropping weight because you undergo what is called like metabolic adaptation yeah so there is a series of um endocrine sort of your hormones

uh adapt to this uh new state uh or respond to this new state uh and then you do this this then prolonged over time uh so this early endocrine or hormonal responses then this will result in sort of uh physiological um dysregulations um and i think what what a lot of what a lot of athletes don't realize is the sheer amount of calories that that represents we threw out this number that i don't want to kind of gloss over and we might have to get the calculators out to to to make these numbers real for a person listening yeah that you know that that in order to avoid low energy availability you need about 45 kilocalories per kilogram of fat-free mass and fat-free mass being different than total body mass but if you just do the quick calculations on somebody who is 60 kilograms and let's just say they have a body fat percentage of 20 so that's going to give you i'm doing the math right here that's going to give you a fat-free mass of 48 kilograms and you multiply that by 45 kcals per kilogram that's automatically 2100 calories right there and that's a pretty small person yeah and what what a lot of athletes when i've presented this to athletes the first thing that they're going to say is like that's that's a lot

of calories right there just to sustain just to sustain normal metabolic function at that point yeah and the sheer the sheer quantity of calories i think is the one of the things that athletes look at and when you translate that to their actual diet what they actually need to eat date like day to day that's when it that's when it becomes something from that the athlete's point of view that becomes hard to like wrap their head around that they actually need to eat that much yes yeah no i i completely agree with you uh i think this is uh something well first that we uh luckily we don't have people going with a calculator next to what they eat uh next to what they eat uh doing it all the time because uh there's a degree of uh disorder eating or eating disorders that we don't want to inflict uh in in people so um that's that's one one thing the other thing is that a lot of these values come from um laboratory-based studies yeah uh some of which you know or the majority of which use liquid diet so we have to be very very careful in like how we extrapolate uh some of these values to like the real world yeah yep so you might have heard and probably a lot of people is aware of of these uh thresholds that we have for energy availability so some people say like oh if you are like you know under 30 kilocalories or per kilo of

fat-free mass then that's low energy availability and yes there is support in the literature and saying that okay when you drop under this energy availability value then you see markers of bone metabolism for example being affected but um you know these are studies that lasted for like five days in like um people who were previously uh sedentary and they are put to exercise you know for five days every day at a continuous level of low energy availability so yeah i think fair enough in that study that value has this this effect uh but then it's it we have to be careful of what we extrapolate uh to what's happening in uh in athletes on on the field uh so it might be that you know on um with a you know with a different diet athletes uh in in a specific circumstances like you might not actually need 45 kilocalories per kilo of fat-free mass and it also we have to see what other physical activity you are doing outside the formal exercise so it's it's hard to come up with it with an exact number as much as we want to make um you know nutrition and exact science and i do my best on the everyday work that i do to try to make it as as precise as as possible uh we are aware also that um you know life can be a lot more complicated than just a

a few numbers because what we can quantify it's uh quite small versus what we cannot really quantify yeah in many times athletes can actually perform for periods of time sometimes short periods of time sometimes long periods of time with this chronic low energy availability state going on but what we found is that when you when we go through sometimes what are dramatic steps to restore that energy availability and sometimes that takes many months and maybe even up to 18 months or maybe even two years we can still see improvements in performance and you just happened to author a really interesting uh case study that went out uh and i believe this was one of the athletes that you're working with correct yes yes we've been working with these athletes uh for uh for quite a few years uh now so i'm i'm gonna give you a bit of overview of the study um and then we can talk about also what things we expect to see when you know when someone is under sort of low energy availability um so when we started working with uh with these athletes a while ago i was not uh really aware of what these uh i i knew a little bit about the female athlete triads and and i i knew a little bit it was quite quite new to this whole field um but you know i started working with her and we saw that there was no

she she didn't have like a her menstrual function was not um really what you expect to see in a female and normal uh uh female sedentary human or egg female that has like the her regular menstrual cycle um and we didn't have any any other concerns in terms of like how she was feeling or how she was performing because early on we realized that her numbers could have led to like her being a really really good athlete so we started working together towards like okay let's try to make you the best athlete you can be good athlete cyclist correct like national level type of cycle sorry yeah yes yes but back in the day i mean she progressed from being like a um club level uh um athlete to like you're not but solid national level athlete so this is one of uh australia's uh top uh time trial lists uh and i cannot really say much more just to you know keep uh make sure that you know head identity remains uh um um anonymous um so uh yes very good athlete um basically we started say uh recording okay let's let's let's keep track of your uh of your menses let's start recording your body weight and uh you know all her training is or is uh recorded on on training peaks because we have all the power meter data and

and so on so uh at the start it was more me being uh you know concerned about tracking uh some sort of basic uh body uh um um how do you say like anthropometric parameters basically body weight and training and you know physiological status uh from her m menses you know and it was like sometimes it's hard when you're working with athletes uh female athletes at least maybe in being a male coach because you don't really you feel like it's a bit invasive to ask about you know their their um uh their menstrual cycle and so on maybe this is just male putter because we're not used to asking these things to to females i think sometimes depends on what athletes you're dealing with but uh for some people it's easier to to disclose this information anyway i was careful of like not you know not pushing too much but i think we have to sort of normalize this sort of conversation with athletes and saying like hey do you have a normal menstrual cycle like yes and no and it's just kind of like an honest direct conversation about it so you you have this athlete you started working with this athlete and you're you're simply trying to record parameter data weight performance types of data body fat percentage at the time did you know that she was eminent reek um yes uh at at one point uh there was i can't remember when when this

conversation came up and i was like do you have a normal uh menstrual cycle and she and she goes like well actually uh not and i was like oh this is interesting and this is like okay let's and i said like oh have you had this conversation with your with your medical doctor and she goes like yes and we had like some screening but they couldn't you know they said like everything was fine like my hormonal profile was fine and i was like okay let's let's keep an eye on it and let's let's keep tracking it and see what happens and i basically was seeing some seasonal fluctuations on body weight that i thought they were normal and sometimes there were you know fluctuations of a of a couple of kilos and i was like okay i'm it seems that you know the body weight kind of goes up but then this uh menstrual cycle doesn't really go back to normal um and this is over a period of a few years um up until one point that there was a change uh in the in the athletes uh lifestyle for a series of reasons um that we saw an um quite you know sudden increase in in body weight over over a bit of a few months uh that it uh tied in with like a couple of life events as i was saying before for for the athlete and over this this period of these few years uh her menstrual cycle kind of resumed but it was uh what we call oligomenorrhea so it's like not not a um um regular measurement menses uh so menses are

supposed to be between you know um 20 few days and 30 something days you know this is what it's called like okay this is if if an athlete like has like a somewhat regular menstrual cycle you can say like they're a human array you know if it's like 26 to 35 days approximately then but you know what we saw is like sometimes it was like two months without and then then you had like a little bit of menstrual bleeding and so on but you know after this episode uh of uh a sudden increase in in body weight of about five kilos about like 10 percent of increase in in body weight of of the athletes um a few months uh later uh there was this uh you know the athlete reported this like heavier uh bleeding um and which was kind of surprising it's just like well it's you know this this bleeding like knocked me off like this day like it started and it was like quite quite intense and and it was just a report report from from the athlete and after that the um the um the period became uh regular like very very regular actually and for me that was what was really really surprising was like wow this is like um the fact that also there was such a delay between you know the the and the actual increase in body weight and the actual uh resumption of regular menses for me there was there was like wow like

has anyone like reported that before because and this athlete i must say that throughout these periods she kept training really hard right right yeah so there was no no withdrawal of like training if anything she had actually uh trained more yeah and this is basically what we're seeing in in the in the field uh is sort of supporting the idea that is what was being shown in this sort of shorter lab based studies that um you know it's not really the stress of exercise or the energy drain from exercise but the balance between uh you know the amount of um energy intake and the energy expenditure really so here i must say that you know yes this study uh has methodological limitations obviously because as i said before uh you know when you're on the on the field uh things are a lot harder to control uh we are not running a study right it's like basically we're making observations we're trying to systematically collect data and do observations based on that there's no assessment of energy availability so really we don't have an idea of what the actual energy availability was but provided that there was an increase in body weight and we had a and also assessment of body composition through dexa it's undeniable that it's been a period of like increased uh energy availability or surplus energy availability

yeah in that enter in that body weight increase i don't want to gloss over that either that's rather dramatic especially for an athlete of that caliber to go through that much of a body weight gain irrespective of the time frame yeah i mean it's not like just daily fluctuation of a pound or two i mean you're talking 10 percent yes and so this for this particular athlete you're translating about like five kilos yeah for an athlete this size you can say well that that's that's uh that's quite a lot yeah um the important thing here is that you know uh we i think we have to move the focus from body weight to performance when you're working with a performance athlete um i think a lot of people would feel or most athletes would feel rather depressed if they were like focused on their body weight and soar and increase because they would equate that with probably like a lack uh being being leading to a lesser perfect status you know there's this idea of like uh less body weight equates perfection and that i think that's why a lot of people are like chasing like lower body weight um i think you know the focus has to be moved away from that to what's actually the the actual performance of uh the in the athlete and after i think that i just want to break in really quick because i want to make this point clear even after the body weight gain and regaining

her regular menses she still could perform based on all the performance and testing and power meter data that you had at the same level yes certainly not worse yes so here we have to uh make you know i i don't want to advocate for low body weight uh in by by any means the thing is that we need we need we need proper data to be able to to support this uh i think like low body weight uh very low body weight um it's not really sustainable through prolonged period of time um so for this um what what we do with these athletes we look at their what's called like mean maximal power so how much power they can generate um this is mechanical power they can generate uh on their power meter through on on specific time durations yeah uh we can report this on absolute values or relative to their body weight yeah so these these two values are important for for uh um for for cycling performance so the relative power output is very important for going up a mountain quick uh and the absolute power is going to propel you on the flat surfaces quicker yeah um so what we see is that when she was the lightest uh her five minute mean maximal power which is sort of you can relate that to vo2 max really to the vo2 max value

uh was the highest yeah so you would expect that you know if it was to climb a mountain maybe she could have climbed it like the quickest for that period of time by no means i'm advocating that someone has to be in low body weight for a long period of time uh what we saw though that you know is that when she uh when she put on body weight like the majority of the parameters relative to the to the to the body weight remained about the same and uh the relative the absolute power outputs uh seem to consistently keep going up right throughout this period so uh what i think is most important for me is that and i mean this we we cannot say there's causation here we cannot say that uh because she put on body weight then she can perform better yeah what i think is is important is that uh at least from working as a as a coach you know for an athlete you say like oh it's actually this athlete is is feeling a lot better you know he's he's training a lot he's feeling good um and then we can begin to uh think about you know what are all the physiological parameters that are related to you know having lower higher energy availability um so from things that we know are maybe less scientific uh if you if you if you want um to call them something um in relation to observations that i had as

as a coach was that you know the athlete was feeling a lot better um yeah whether that is because this um there have been changes in in in these athletes life and you know they they could um feel better to to the for their training or it's because um it's because of the energy availability itself i really don't know uh and her performance uh on you know cycling cycling is is can be a bit of a funny animal in terms of performance because it's not uh a lot of the things depend on dynamics of races on how you place yourself in the peloton it's not it's not let's call us pure if you want to call it something as um it's like a 10k running race or something like that yes exactly yeah maybe you know the only thing that you can uh equate uh the sort of uh 10k running races is to like a time trial on cycling you know this is like a bit more objective but um it's it's it's cycling is very very stochastic and a lot of things come down to positioning in the peloton and and so on but um you know road cycling wise her performance was the best uh during this period like her performances had been like very very solid uh so i think uh again having like a holistic approach let's say uh to to her training i think it's important to to keep in mind that sort of keeping a healthy balance uh in terms of you know how

you relate to food and how you know how you deal with your body weight and with your training um i think what is important is not not to focus on body weight solely and i think that's that's a an error that a lot of athletes uh fall into when they go like oh yeah this parameter is is important for performance and we know it's important for performance um but i think um it's it's easy to for it to take over in a um coach and athletes psyche as is the uh sort of uh area of focus for performance well i can i can tell you over the last two decades having worked with you know high level endurance athletes of all different sports that that mindset of being overly focused on body weight is starting to change it is starting to become more of a uh multi-factorial or holistic mindset around performance because we know performance is you know it's always a multi-factorial thing you can never pin it down to vo2 max or five minute you know maximal steady state power or body weight or any one metric there's always you know 20 or 30 or 40 different metrics that are going into ultimately what determines performance one one of the things i want to i want to kind of encapsulate this whole experience really really quickly here because i think it's a fascinating one um but one of the things that struck me the most with this case study was the time frame because it's a long period of time that you're studying just one athlete that you

have good data on the entire time and just to paint the picture for the listeners out there this athlete that you're working with for several years for for three years she had no menstrual cycle at all that you're working with her yeah yeah she gained the weight she gained 10 of her body mass which is once again that's not trivial that's significant but then for a period of time and this is what i'm a little bit unclear on right now for a period of time she had irregular menses yeah and then ever since then uh ever i mean since she resumed her menses her normal menstrual cycle uh for the period reported on the actual uh paper and then she maintained a regular menstrual cycle what was the period of irregularity though the irregular or the irregular menses like how long was it uh the period of irregular menses was about uh three years uh up until it it resumed like uh being uh regular in this what i call like what it it came up as sort of a heavier bleeding yeah you know that was based on the report of the of the athlete a couple of months uh after the this weight gain what i call a weight gain episode so so which the picture that i'm trying to paint is is three years of no menses weight gain which is which we would we could correlate with an increase in calorie intake relative to calorie

output a regular menses for three another three years no okay so so set the time frame for me again because i'm a little confused on it uh i think if i open up because i don't i don't remember all these numbers on top of my head and i'm testing your memory too my memory gets tested a lot so don't i don't feel too bad for you uh so basically uh when i started working with the athlete this uh athlete already had like uh what was i'm in a rake right yeah the body weight was low then for a period of about three years uh there was um the sort of this menstrual cycle resume but was irregular so we went from i'm in a rake to uh oligom in a rake so for three years for three years it was irregular that's that's what i wanted to get across yes yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah and then after this sort of weight gain episode this is when like regularity resumed after a period of of a few months yeah got it uh it's not normally what you would what you would see it's not like a light switch that goes on and off um so for me that was what it was uh impressive from you know what working with her was like wow this is like the fact that it it came back so strong and so regular for me that that was uh um quite quite impressive yeah um but yeah uh i think you know also you know seeing like small uh small fluctuations in in body weight uh

and you know they're not seeing a difference in um in resumption of menses is important and also the other thing that we don't know whether you need to put on uh you know back so many calories before you see a resumption of uh of normal menses i know there's ongoing research at the moment uh where you know they're trying to to see if a different type of intervention of of increasing like carbohydrate availability and so on in a more sort of nuanced way can actually uh produce a resumption of uh of of menses in in female athletes uh so there's a excellent work done by mary jane de zuza and penn state university in the us um and her her work in this in these regards is absolutely brilliant and i think we will soon be seeing from her uh work on that and i know um around europe there's a interest in in this in this work as well and seeing like whether you know basically you can refuel an athlete or how much you need to refuel a female athlete to see a resumption of regular menstrual cycle the thing is that you know between having no menstrual cycle and having a fully functional reproductive systems there's a lot of things in between as well so you can have a menstrual bleeding but still what have like a what we call like an ovulatory menstrual uh bleeding so basically you

have no ovulation so you can you still have a bleeding but it's not you're not like females still not fertile um so and there's um behind uh or like under the hood let's say the hormonal profile of this um sort of discontinuum is is quite different and this is something that i wanted to to say before is what's the actual effect of low low energy availability yeah yeah so energy availability uh or low energy availability whatever that is whatever we we decide to um um to to to to say it is in terms of thresholds on or values or and so on uh what actually triggers or what the let's say what the short term experimental studies in the lab and what they show is that it's basically a huge stressor in terms of what it does to your endocrine system you know so you can see um or so sorry not your endocrine system but your sort of your hormonal profile yeah um most of the research has been done on females but we see you know a decrease for example in leptin and so people get more hungry uh leptin has a um you know a central effect on your center on your central nervous system that seems to uh trigger a cascade of uh other down regulations so uh you see you know um lutein isin

hormone which is an important hormone uh for the for the reproductive axis both in males and females the the frequency of the pulse is is affected you have an effect on uh thyroid thyroid function as well you know the the hormone t3 which is like a master regulator of um of um um sort of the the rate of metabolic uh or the energy expenditure like this this is a very important hormone like gets down regulated uh you know it's like consistently in the studies in low energy availability there's a decrease in insulin you know bone metabolism gets affected and that's why people tend to get like weaker bones that are in in chronic low energy availability we've also shown like skeletal muscle protein synthesis is reduced uh so you know and there's probably a lot of other effects that we don't really uh know but you know the the effects are quite wise well it's it's wide is the best way to put it right i mean you just went through this whole thing all these hormones your bones things like that menstrual cycle gets you know becomes irregular or non-existent and i think the the like the summary of it is everything is foobard to put it colloquially when you go through these chronic periods of low energy availability it's such a it's such a wrecker on all of these physiological systems and like the confounding thing that i see as a coach though

is that even though we can see all of these things in a laboratory setting and we know they we know they're deleterious we know absolutely know that those things are deleterious to the athlete's performance the athlete can still do it like there are some athletes out there that can still perform at olympic level caliber while operating underneath the state and i think that that's from from an elite athlete perspective and there are very few people that are listening to this that are the most elite of the elite most the most of the normal blokes with all due respect that are better listening to the that are listening to this podcast are in a little bit of a different situation but i think this like conundrum of seeing the most elite of the elite win medals and win races and things like that and having the practitioners that are working with them the coaches and nutritionists and things like that know that they're in this chronic state of low energy availability just presents this could like it just presents this weird conundrum to present to a normal person yeah so um you know i i think um it's it's important to consider like different you know what the evidence shows and what sort of theoretical um models we have to interpret this uh so you mentioned the triads before we have this this uh which is a model to try to explain you know what we're observing with in in people and athletes we have the red s as well which is the relative energy

deficiency in sport syndrome uh which is originally sort of ties in with the triad but it's trying to um expand the this idea towards the use on on males as well so there's a new uh also like male athlete triad and that is so extends the female athlete triad to to males so these are like models to explain what might potentially happen uh as a combination of uh observations on the field to athletes that we think they might have been exposed to chronic low energy availability yeah and as you say like well there are some people that are performing at their highest level even they are you know they've been at in low energy availability yeah or it seems because what first we have to acknowledge that we don't know we assume uh because a lot of these things are you know a lot of um we have like indirect markers as well that yeah that's actually is the case um that's important to to to note um first again i don't i don't advocate to uh uh for prolonged periods of low energy availability but we don't really know uh exactly what the performance effects per se of low energy availability are yeah so we know that it is likely to weaken bones yeah for example in a long long term or affects like reproductive function and so on but the effect on

skeletal muscle besides like decreasing myofibrillary protein synthesis we don't really know what it is is and yeah in some aspects it might have a positive effect and by no means i'm saying that well we have to you know oh yeah no low energy availability is a good thing or anything like that um but you know we have to be a bit nuanced also because we have to acknowledge that weight management is part of the sport yeah so if we cannot we can i think it shouldn't be a focused but it shouldn't be ignored yeah let's let's try to ignore let's try to drill into that a little bit deeper because a lot of the day-to-day normal ultra runner athletes is always an oxymoronic statement but the the average ultra running athlete out there is they are going to try to strike a balance between losing a little bit of weight to optimize their performance and still day-to-day make sure that they're covering all of their training bases and i want to explore this in two two different areas the first one is the weight loss side of things and try to come up with like a practical framework that athletes can use and the second one is this kind of some of these more advanced interventions that athletes are starting to use to up up regulate fat oxidation so training with low carbohydrate availability whether it's a back-to-back day or overnight fast or even during the training session hitting a critically low point

with uh with their carbohydrate availability which could seem in opposition to all this dialogue that we just had that is low energy availability is deleterious because anytime you're training with low carbohydrate availability you could be in this area of low energy availability as well so i want to explore both of those in more of a more really practical uh from more of a practical perspective because it is a it is a balancing act right we do have to we do have to manage weight and performance and training kind of all at the same time and they all can have different substrate goals for lack of a better word depending upon what the goal of the session or what the goal of the athlete is so for for the athletes that are out there are normal ultra runners that are trying to finish their first hundred miler or they're trying to finish you know 100 miler within 24 hours or something like that and they know they want to reduce their body weight not by a dramatic amount but by a moderate amount let's say like five pounds five percent or something like that like some something that's not 40 pounds yeah what are the practical things that they can go through to achieve to achieve a body weight loss that's in that range that at the same time will strike the balance to where they can keep their day-to-day running up and they're not running into any of these deleterious effects with bone mineral density or anything else that we've mentioned yeah cool so um i think we we can we can you know um agree in sort of

some practical advice uh whether you know some of these uh practical advice is gonna what what degree of let's say hormonal or bone marker uh dysregulation is is gonna have i don't have an answer for that uh we can you know have some approaches uh with which you can potentially try to manage weight a bit better uh but to what degree uh you are gonna see uh a negative effect or not um i don't really have the the support or it's yeah it's hard it's hard to generalize it yeah one one of one one thing that i think is important or two things that i think is very important to start with is like having this idea of like a perpetual low body weight uh and you know striving for perpetual low body weight is not a good idea right so that's that's that's what i would start with uh that's that's the the one thing you know um perpetual being like months like you're always at your rate race quote unquote race weight for three four five six months yeah maybe sort of short periods of time and i think there's gonna be huge variation between between athletes um i think we have to be aware you know that it seems that females are more likely to experience uh stress fractures than uh than males are so they might be on some of the evidence supports idea that males are are more resilient to this like low energy

availability or energy deficit than females are um so with with with females you have this red flag which is the lack of or loss of a menstrual cycle that you don't have with with uh with men um it doesn't happen always and it doesn't happen at uh it's not that you know you will have to see a loss of um menstrual cycle but this this this is important to to keep in mind so you basically gotta keep your eyes open for um red flags yeah and that is a big red flag if someone doesn't have a a menstrual cycle yeah so that that is to to start you know thinking of what is a good idea to do and what is not a good idea so chronic low body weight is not a good idea you're ruling that out chronic low body weight that's the thing to avoid we can start there yes yes uh i think that's that's the first thing the second thing is like well uh really try to consider where in your in your performance um you know objectives if that's gonna give you the edge that you actually need in terms of how you balance that out between you know how hard you can train and the and the and the performance benefit that you're gonna get i'm so glad that you mentioned that because a lot of times when athletes are looking at weight at weight loss they're looking at it as independent of the

actual performance and yeah if you have an and as as coaches we can go through these mathematical calculations in a fairly you know rudimentary and simplistic fashion and say okay if we have an athlete that if they want to lose you know x percent of their body weight that's going to be worth two three four percent of their performance if they can still physiologically gain aspects of their performance that supersede that weight loss i don't even look at it to be honest with you i'm like listen let's just train let's just train maintain because you've got more to gain just from the training than you do the weight loss and if you end up losing a little bit of weight just because of the training because the training is so hard sometimes that's hard to keep up with in and of itself then that i i would always rather take the physiological improvement or the physiological based performance improvements over the weight loss based performance improvements because the weight loss based performance improvements have such a it's such a trickier balance because of the negative aspects yeah um yeah and you know it's i think it's i think it's a stressor on its on its own uh 100 try to to you know inflict this uh energy deficit so i think it's a you can consider it a stressor over overlaid of on the to the to the stress of the actual training yep yeah so if you think it that way then you begin to be a bit more careful about like where

you put it uh in terms of um even though you know as we were saying before energy availability has an independent effect uh or which was been shown to be independent of the actual effect of training um you know the the fact that you have to inflict uh some degree of energy deficit on someone can be a stressor on its own yeah uh so you know um i think you know having this having said these two uh things as first steps and trying to think about you know what whether weight management is an idea or or or or not as a third point maybe you can say okay let's see whether if it's something that would work uh if it is realistic for your body weight or body composition yeah uh one of one of the things you know cyclists have this thing is just like um how many um bicycles is the amount of bicycles that you should have you know they have a cyclist lab and it's like n plus one whatever amount of bikes you have that's how many bicycles yeah it's shoes for trail runners for sure okay and if you ask them you know what's your ideal body weight is it's like oh probably a couple of kilos less yeah exactly it is now no matter what your body weight is so people get so fixated on what their body weight uh anyway so it's how you really gotta consider whether it's realistic uh for for you to drop you know how many kilos you wanna you wanna you wanna drop um and i think this is one of the things that

you just basically gotta you know do a bit of trial and error and being having a really um sort of um balanced approach and i think the the the key word here is balanced and i think that's one of the things that uh most people uh forget about and they just want like black black or white you know or can i kind of drop like five kilos and just like oh you can maybe drop a few kilos but from from from from what you know it's just like it's very easy to drop like three four kilos like in a few days but you're just gonna lose all your muscle glycogen right and that's it you're just losing water um so what what is the where is this weight coming from you know if you have if you go to the start line with low muscle glycogen i don't wanna i you're not gonna have the best performance it doesn't matter how low intensity is your uh um your ultra marathon you're you're still gonna need that muscle glycogen to perform well yeah so you gotta be very very careful on like whether you know you you you really focus on your on your body weight so having said all these things i think we can think of trying to basically withdraw a few calories uh per day and periodize your carbohydrate availability around the intensity and duration of your sessions yeah i think uh the low intensity uh long sessions uh you're probably gonna be fine with uh completing them with you know little to no carbohydrates because

it's easy to fuel them with uh um whatever fat you have um a fat capacity of burning fat you you have whereas when you're gonna do your intervals you gotta ensure that you're gonna have a high carbohydrate uh availability for those sessions yeah so by doing so you can ensure that you know you can slot in and complete the high uh quality sessions which are key even for someone who does like a lot of my literaries aiming to do like a race that lasts for hours i'm sure that if you coach people you you you would have like it depends on the time of the year and so on but you have like two or three uh interval sessions per week uh for sure um and for these sessions you you want to make sure that you have high carbohydrate availability um basically what again what you need what you want to achieve is a period of you know maybe a couple of months or a few weeks where you withdraw a little bit of energy and track you know changes in body weight without being like overly obsessed you know without trying without you you have to be very careful if it's an athlete that is prone to be like you know too uh focused on their body weight and that sort of triggers some sort of eating behavior or disorder eating um so i think it's gonna it requires a lot of tact i don't think there's a there's a a magic uh sort of um

you know approach to it that is like oh you just follow this recipe and it's fine i think it i think um the other thing that we know is that it's very very hard to you know it's easy to drop weight but it's very hard to to keep it off yeah yeah yeah the thing is like we we as a species and i think mammal species in general are equipped with this drive you know to to to to bounce back to whatever state we have so you can drop weight for a little while but eventually you're you're gonna get hungry you know your metabolism is gonna respond in such a way that you're gonna use less energy throughout the day and you're gonna get hungry and you're gonna eat more yeah so keep that in mind you just i think the the the healthy approach if any is like maybe drop some weight uh if needed be for your performance uh for for the key races and then maybe go back to to something that you you feel is more sustainable over the long term i i love the way that you presented the n minus one proposition because we see that a lot particularly in elite athletes but it trickles down to the everyday athletes as well normally when i'm working with an athlete and let's like get rid of all the caveats right that we that we that we mentioned earlier and we decide that listen okay let's try to get your body weight down to whatever number it is let's just say it's 160 pounds i'll then go back and say let's just get

to 165 and leave the last five pounds on the table it's not material to your performance in this long endurance event and i don't want to roll the dice on trying to balance this you know razor thin edge of having the lowest body weight possible and at the same time trying to train at the high level so let's just leave that off the table let's leave the last five pounds off the table the last three percent off the table kind of whatever whatever that ends up being and then i take almost like a like a two-phased approach i use a lot of block style training so we'll have months of very intensified training where the training intensity is very high and then months where the training intensity is very low so normally what i'll try to do is try to pair up the most weight loss or the most the biggest calorie deficit and they're not big calorie deficits not to say that they're you know big every day but i try to pair the most weight loss up with the lowest intensity and the periods where they have high intensity don't even try to lose any weight at all because the work is more important than the weight loss and so it ends up being this periodized nutrition approach that also court that also correlates with the periodized kind of kind of weight loss approach but the way i get at it is i just leave the last usually like five percent on the table with an athlete and don't even worry about it because it's just too like all the measurement

errors and like trying to get like all of those things like exactly right like there's there might be like 30 athletes on the planet across all endurance sports where that's material where that's material to the outcome of the event that they're training for so and i'm not working with any of those 30 athletes for everybody else just leave it on the table like it's just like and worry about other things just training get better and don't you know obsess about you know the last the last little part yeah i i must say that you know as as much as i try to um dodge your questions my best with my best knowledge and experience i think it's an extremely uh tricky sort of um topic to deal with and it's that's why it's very hard to give like sort of uh blanket uh recommendations i think it really requires uh um very balanced approach as you were saying there's uh there's really uh priorities in the sort of the training um that you know this is not really a top priority it is important don't get me wrong it is important at one point uh for the higher level athletes but um i think uh the the focus shouldn't really be there and i think that's why it's important to understand what the negative effects and all foods are yeah 100 and there can be big negative ones as we talked about earlier um let's

pivot let's pivot a little bit to these uh some of these low carbohydrate availability strategies which i've always viewed as is is kind of like oxymoronic that we actually try to to to chase these down because we spend so much time making sure that we have adequate fuel resources for the work required we want to make sure that the work is maximized the workload is maximized the power output is maximized the pace is is maximized and things like that especially for the high intensity sessions yet we've got this kind of divergent approach where we can say well listen if we're compromising our fuel availability in certain areas we can amplify the the the the training response that is a result of the training session itself and i've talked about this on a few kind of a few previous podcasts and what what i would do rather than kind of like rehash all of those here direct the listeners back to those previous podcasts where we talked about some of the low uh low carbohydrate availability strategies that endurance athletes can use but since i've got you on the horn uh with us today jose what i want to talk more about is just the like the kind of the metabolic reality of trying to undertake any of those and how low is too low and trying since you also split the field as a

practitioner that actually that actually works with athletes how can they try to find that balance of utilizing some of these low fuel availability sessions to upregulate their fat metabolism and at the same time not run afoul of compromising the training either the training intensity that they can achieve or running into like an injury situation because of chronic low availability or overstress yeah um so i think it's important to differentiate on like nutrition for performance from nutrition for adaptation so i think the aim of um training is to generate a level of stress that eventually is gonna make you better for when you really have to perform and i think you know with that in in mind uh then you decide when to put the fuel that you need for whatever aim you have so for racing you want to make sure that you have the highest amount of carbohydrate available as you can because we know that performance wise is this is what is going to lead to to better performance you're for an ultra endurance runner um there's a in general there's a clear relationship between um the the carbohydrate intake and the capacity to to perform over long distances um that's one thing and the other thing in terms of how can you actually

sort of withdraw the use of carbohydrates in your training there's a whole lot of different strategies in which you can do this uh it can range from uh training fasted in the morning for example um where you know you can do like a low intensity session for like as many hours as you can maintain basically it's not really gonna it's gonna require some training for you to be able to uh maintain your intensity of training fasted but eventually your body is gonna adapt for to train fasted um you can also train for example twice a day so you do once one hard session first um in in the morning and then you withdraw you know the the the ingestion of carbohydrates and you have another session in the afternoon of lower intensity um the other option is what we call like sleeping low so basically you have a hard session in the evening and then you have little carbohydrates but you which doesn't mean you have none but you can have some uh when i have when i say none or some it's like one gram per kilo uh of of body weight after so you still have some but you know importantly you put in some protein because it's gonna um aid sort of the recovery process and then you train again in the in the morning a low intensity session uh or would you throw some higher intensity sort of accelerations or like little intervals or so on so there's all uh different

um strategies that you can use um as long as you can hit sort of the around the intensities that you were aiming for that session and again this is this is a balancing act you know what uh what you consider as important if it's your weekly volume or if it's your whatever marker of training stress you use if you use if you use like a training stress score or or whatever you use you just gotta balance balance that out uh where where you draw the line it depends on the athlete and the coach uh what it seems though is that for when you train with low carbohydrate availability uh you get uh the same or higher uh adaptation with less training yeah so you make your training a bit more uh efficient let's say and what here i'm talking you know purely from a from a muscle-centric perspective the other thing that you have to consider as well is that when you train you're not just training your muscles uh and i think we have to bring the brain into the picture as well i think you know physiology is uh or the physiology that we do because we focus on tissues and so on um we have a very sort of brain less model of uh training and i think you know if you can bring in mind that the fact that you're training with uh low carbohydrate availability and that's

going to make the training harder it feels harder right um whether you are able to if if that has an effect on people being able to to withstand more pain when they actually have to perform well really i don't know but it might be an effect that actually has a positive effect because you're training you're training your mind as well to to um um to cope with that uh honestly and and here i'm i'm you know what i'm saying is a bit beyond what we have as evidence in this whole idea of training with low muscle glycogen but for me it's undeniable in terms of like something that we should consider when considering these strategies and i think it's also important to like couch these strategies because we are let's face it we're talking about endurance athletes and if a pinch is something a pinch of something is good a pound of it is better in the athlete's mind that the strategies that we're talking about as the name implies are low carbohydrate availability strategies not no carbohydrate availability strategies correct yeah and that's an important part because when you get to the no part that's where that teeter-totter starts to get out of balance yes uh sometimes i i uh i i have to remind myself that i'm you know talking to a late audience and sometimes i thought we fall like uh as you know scientists researchers and so on talking a bit abstract ways and sometimes it's hard to

um explain what is low what is no carbohydrate and and so on but um yes uh some carbohydrates not the same as none and as we might recommend some of these we also i mean i i i i recommend uh in in many cases a very sort of um how do you say like uh contrasting uh approach to you how you would um have carbohydrates in your training some sessions are without and some sessions are with a lot you know right of carbohydrates so it's not that i'm advocating for for a constant so what you what you try to uh improve is like um what is this idea of like metabolic flexibility you know that you can switch uh in the use of of fuels well as as necessary for your training and and performance uh so basically one of the things that you have to consider as well is that if you're going to have a hard long session you have to train to be able to eat what you what you what you what you train um and also you have to train your gut to be able to um digest those carbohydrates that you are probably going to have during your race um i think a lot of runners and a lot of athletes in general don't don't train their eating and some of the work that i've done with with some athletes is try to

train them to be able to to to eat more not less yeah because if you're going to have someone on a sort of an event that which performance lasts for like eight hours nine hours or or whatever then you just you you you want to make sure that they are able to to have their the the carbohydrates they need for their performance for us as many as many hours as they're going to compete and if if the if they got is the rate limiting step no matter how good those 90 grams per hour would have been that they are not going unable to have that so you have to train for that as well from a from a practical perspective here's how i've always approached it and i'd like to hear how you've done it like with athletes the highest quality sessions i make very little if any compromise on the fueling strategy so they're going to go out and they're going to do like four by eight minute tempo repeats or a set of you know high intensity like vo2 max types of intervals and things like that like i want the athlete well fed feeding during the session if they need to there's no consideration for compromising on the fueling or even the the the fluid and the electrolyte uh side of things for the longer runs and this is really important in an ultra marathon setting they're the longer runs the four five six seven eight hour runs and things like that are kind of like the bread and butter of an ultra runners schedule because not only does that prepare them cardiovascularly but also from a musculoskeletal

standpoint that prepares the athlete and then also as you mentioned from a gut training standpoint that's where you get all of your the proof is in the pudding strategies uh on your nutritional plan to see if they are actually going to work during race day because the stress of the run is so high on those runs because they're so long and they're so hard and it's a proof point for the nutrition strategy that you're ultimately going to use during the ultra marathon i don't really make any compromises on the fuel there it's like full race strategy which is really not that high in an ultra marathon situation as compared to like a four hour road race or something like that or even an ironman triathlon where they're like a super steady you know rate the whole time but anyway the long hard ones i don't kind of make this low training this low training availability strategy i don't i don't really throw it into consideration but it's for like the shorter endurance runs like the two hour endurance runs or the two and a half hour endurance runs and things like that that if there is any manipulation and that's always an individual question those are the ones that i that if if if the answer to that question is yes yeah we want to manipulate those things those are like the first candidates because the athlete can complete the session with very little compromise with lower carbohydrate availability and they're not impacting the work that they're not actually impacting the work that they're doing that's where i start from and i honestly like to have it run into a lot of situations where i've had

to really deviate away from that because i've always viewed the work as more like you're going to get more benefit from having higher quality work than you are from manipulating the fuel and getting lower quality work and then having some sort of you know bounce from the low the low carbohydrate availability so from a practical perspective that's always the i've always kind of cherry-picked the sessions that are in some cases like the least meaningful to make to to to to make to make those additional manipulations yeah i think that's a sensible approach um i think you know we have to you know while you were talking i'm just thinking okay what you know just we always have to go back to whatever evidence we have to that one intervention is better than yeah another one and when we think about this whole carbohydrate periodization and and so on like well there are you know there is good evidence to show that well it actually changes the way your skeletal muscles uh respond um to to actual training and so on um but we are yet to see like a very clear uh performance benefit right yeah so there's the thing is it's very very hard to to put to test the performance and the effect of these interventions uh on on on performance because they require a lot of control and they require you know a lot of a lot of

work this whole idea of carbohydrate and periodization whether it's better than high carbohydrate or low carbohydrate and probably um the best um studies on these when i'm testing performance is like the the what they are called the supernova studies by louis berg which are i think one of the first few studies who are like you know doing like longer term interventions where they see um and changes in substrate use with like different like low carbohydrate high fat interventions and um you know different types of uh like training in the different groups and so on they're like probably so so far the best studies on on trying to to assess whether there is a performance benefit and the way they test performance as well has like ecological uh uh validity uh so it's very much like they they run the studies as if they were proper like phrases okay and we're talking like race walking here where these studies have done been done and these don't really show a more beneficial effect of a carbohydrate period periodization compared to a regular high carbohydrate diet yeah so uh whether it's the way we're testing performance or the duration of the test or so on we really have to you know try to this is this you know the the science of it is it's a bit difficult in a way because it's hard to control yeah and what you're what you're alluding to is is how transient those adaptations are

because we know we can take on these low carbohydrate availability interventions and we can study the effects immediately after those interventions in the lab and yeah a lot of times the results of those are kind of like it's you know excuse my french but it's kind of like a no shit you know type of type of result yeah you don't have you're restricting carbohydrates so they're going to upregulate their fat metabolism but how long that sticks around for how transient those those metabolic adaptations are and how they then manifest into performance adaptations that's kind of like the gap that i think we're currently missing and what and and because we're missing that gap what the the result of that is is on the practitioner side on the coaching side we're making logical extensions of the research to provide counsel to athletes on what they should actually be doing that's really what we're doing we're trying to interpret it interpret what the research says in a box and say okay from a practical perspective here's how we're going to implement that and that's where we start to see these like uh practitioner based like nuances in the advice that's given out from one coach to another for you know what one athlete does versus another athlete does yeah yeah don't get me wrong i'm not disregarding the importance of these sort of studies and you know this uh whole idea of uh um you know potentially what how good carbohydrate manipulation might might be for for adaptation i think uh it's it's

it's based on sound science and you know there's there's a lot of research on it i've contributed myself to it uh i still have like ongoing work on this on this area and i think it's great and very exciting but my point is that we have to be sort of um you know approach it with with uh care in terms of like the recommendations we give and how these are might or not be backed up uh by uh evidence um that's i think that's that's the take-home message so um if i was to say something in terms of all what you should be doing what you should not be doing in terms of like carbohydrate uh um periodization and so on is that you know at least ensure that for the hard long sessions you have the fuel you need um and for for the rest of the sessions um it depends on you know how you as a as a as an athlete can can cope with it but you know the fact that you're like training with low carbohydrate is not necessarily gonna be uh good all the time i think that's a brilliant place to leave it pick the pick the pick your big battles make sure that you're fueled for those and then if there's an advanced intervention consider trickling it in in a little bit of a lower stakes situation yeah uh jose before we break first off i really appreciate your time thanks for joining us

all the way from the uk um where can people learn a little bit more about you and some of the research that you do once you get back to doing more research i guess yeah no we have a few things in the pipeline and i uh try to share all the relevant information that i found about you know energy availability and energy balance and my main topics of research through twitter uh so i think that's probably the the the the best way that i try to sort of share whatever expertise um i have on on whatever topics i work uh in so my twitter handle is at j l areta so i'm gonna spell that j for jose l for um it's lisandro is my second name is l for louis and then areta a-r-e-t-a um so at j l areta um that's my um um twitter account so yeah just follow me there and i'm sharing as much information as i can what's going to be the next thing to come out of uh your lab or do you even know yet um well what's gonna come next that's always up to their and uh editors and reviewers that is a battle that we constantly have as a as researchers you know this is like uh sometimes you think you're going at full speed until you get to the traffic lights and sometimes that's uh uh so uh well have like a few um a few studies from uh from my postdoc that i hope they're gonna be coming out soon uh one

of the ones that i more so i did before being here in in liverpool john moore's that was uh in the norwegian school of spot sciences in oslo and doing a postdoctoral research and one of the last studies that i did there was on you know whether manipulating energy availability acutely and by by a means of changing the amount of fat you have in your recovery meals uh if that has an effect on the early adaptation so that way we hope that's gonna be published uh sometime soon it's been a long windy road for that research but uh we hope it's gonna come out soon at one point i think it's a it's a really nice uh study um and we have you know ongoing work with uh professional um cyclists that we hope we can publish sometime soon we have it we have a few things in the pipeline yeah awesome well i can't wait for it to come out thanks again for your time and yeah thank you for the invitation it was great to chat absolutely this was brilliant and there you have it thanks to jose for coming on the podcast today really appreciate his insight into this area of low energy availability also appreciate all the listeners out there each and every last one of you if you are so inclined go ahead and scroll on over to apple podcasts and give this podcast a rating or a review helps the podcast out a tremendous amount or

you can just hit me up on social media and let me know what you thought of this podcast appreciate the heck out of each and every last one of you we will see you next time and see you out on the trails video