Overtraining Markers with Brent Ruby | Koopcast Episode 96

trail and ultra runners what is going on what's happening welcome to another episode of the KoopCast as always i'm your humble host coach Jason Koop and on this episode of the podcast we have a really fun one for you but one that is also very practical i have on the podcast today and i've still got this crazy grin on my face because i just cut off the horn with him it is brent ruby from the university of montana brent is an exercise physiologist and he also studies really interesting situations like wildland firefighters and he has this very unique piece of equipment in a mobile physiology lab that was crafted out of an old airstream trailer and he's been able to take it around the country into really obscure places and also ultra marathons such as the badwater 135 and the western states 100 we spent a lot of time during the course of this podcast talking specifically about this one study that they did on cyclists where they rode in excess of 3 000 kilometers about five hours a day for 21 days looking searching for markers of overtraining and you guys will be surprised at what they actually found brent is really practical and he is also very down to earth which i appreciate very much in this age of scientific nuance he tells it like it is and he

boils it down to the very simple things that athletes can take home i think you guys will appreciate that over the course of this podcast there's also a personal connection here one of our coaches john fitzgerald had brent as a professor in college and we spend a little bit of time at the very beginning of this podcast talking about that personal connection so here we go i can get right out of the way here's my conversation with brent ruby oh before we get into it i john fitzgerald wanted me to tell you hi oh that's awesome he was such a great student that's so cool to see him doing stuff yeah i remember back in the day when he was an undergrad he was like struggling to figure out what am i gonna do what do i want to major in and yeah the rest is history well i'll tell you what he's found his calling as a coach because he's fantastic he was the the first uh alternating coach specifically that we that we hired and he obviously has that background but he's also done triathlon and things like that really well yeah yeah and just does a fantastic job doing everything that you want to coach to do including kind of like alchemizing the science and the social and psychological side of coaching he's very very good at that that's awesome yeah so you did your job yeah well i remember it was he was he was kind of struggling with it was a stretch for him to come out to montana yeah or school because i yeah if i remember right

he came from like the east coast or something yeah boston boy you know yeah yeah massachusetts kid so yeah but yeah he's he's he's he's done well for himself i he coaches my wife actually oh really yeah that's how much trust that's how much trust i have that's great oh man highest compliment man cool well like i said again thanks um yeah i want to kind of start out with you were y'all were ahead of the hashtag van life curve when you came up with this airstream that eventually became a mobile lab and i you know i was trying to search my memory banks because that's not in incredibly like that's not the only one that exists red bull's got one there are a number of other different outfits that have some type of mobile lab setup but when you told me that you guys started in 2007 is that correct uh when did we buy it yeah i think we bought it in 07 yeah okay that i mean at the time that's a really novel concept so like what initially gave you the impetus well first let's go ahead and like describe the lab and like what the genesis of it was the mobile lab or the lab in general no the mobile the mobile lab okay well back in the back in the late 1900s i always like to say um when we when we when i first came to the university

in the mid 90s uh i started working with fire crews and when you work with fire crews you have to travel with them and and or get to camps um to access them and back in that day we were we just had tents and a rental car and it was a real shoestring budget situation and then we graduated to some bigger tents um but that's still in bad weather and cold and everything else was just difficult and so we had planned i had i just received a grant from the air force and in that i was like i want to make a mobile lab setup and originally we were going to get one of the uh international harvester um crew carriers crew buggies or what they call crummies in the west that hot shots used to transport like 12 people we were going to get one of those really expensive to outfit and um i had convinced my wife joe that i should be able to buy a old airstream trailer off of ebay she gave me a budget i stuck to that budget and bought a 1964 airstream had it hauled out to my house and this was in 2006 and so i had it hauled out to my house and uh that was the first year that i did the um

kona race in hawaii and uh i was getting ready for that race and the guy called me i was on a bike ride actually and the guy called me and says hey um i've just pulled up to your house with the old airstream it hauls really good and so i and stopped my came back from a bike ride quickly to see it and it was in disarray so i got i was in the process of gutting that and working on that and that's when i thought you know what instead of a crew carrier we should get an airstream trailer and and build it however we want to build it uh like the nasa group had done when the apollo astronauts came back and so that was my vision so i called airstream and said hey i want to build a mobile lab can you guys help me and they're like no we don't want any part of this yeah we don't want to play with you uh so they said you have to buy one from a distributor and then whatever you can do whatever and so that's what we did so we having that old one and starting to gut it gave me the motivation to do that for our our lab so we we modified it slightly but we it's basically a stock airstream trailer that we we built a few different things in place so we could handle samples or we could do whatever but it's you can live out of it you can travel with it and collect data in it store samples take take samples

and so it's it's it's been really awesome over the years yeah i'm reminded of uh the listeners will remember a podcast that do with roger crom out of the university of colorado and he made this really interesting comment when we were talking about their steep treadmill he's like you know we we do things that are not off the shelf you know we buy you know aluminum and we're using skateboard grip tape and things that you know you're not going to find in a commercial setting in order to do the research that we want to do because you know we're trying to pioneer things in the in the very literal sense and in this this airstream this mobile lab is is definitely one of those so for for the help out the uninformed listeners that have never been in a physiology lab before what is actually in the airstream what are all the equipment and what are the capabilities that you've got in there oh well it's i mean you could the nice thing about it is it's kind of like our our home base lab at the university is we can make it whatever we want to depending on the situation and so we outfitted the back the tongue side which has two twin beds um we outfitted that by raising one of the beds so we had more storage underneath it so we could easily get um all the muscle samples that were necessary during one of our first big field trials with it with the with the cyclists the giro over training study and so and then we outfitted the bathroom what is typically the bathroom we put centrifuge in there

we put storage facilities for like liquid nitrogen doers to hold the samples and to keep them um to keep them cold and then the basic rest of it is just a really important place for the uh um automatic espresso maker very important and then and then just basically computer uh data analysis stuff so it's not like it's outfitted with cycle ergometers or treadmills or things like that we can take all that stuff but we don't deploy those in that space we build uh we have auxiliary tents that we can put up and um mobile power systems to be able to to power those and we've done that on in a variety of locations we actually bought a different airstream a shorter one for a project series on top of mount evans in colorado which is like almost well it's 14 and the nice thing about mount evans is you could drive up there it's not super fun holland and airstream but we we did it over and over um it was like back in 2012 i believe uh for a project we were helping some folks at cu uh med center in denver on but that that trailer had to be shorter to get around some of the switch packs but the fundamental advantage is you've got this mobile asset that you can take out in the

field and collect samples from and store those samples yeah in a lot of different environments you mentioned mount evans we're going to talk about the cycling study that you did where you took people you know i can't remember what the two endpoints were but over you know 3 000 kilometers and and that's like it's kind of a rarity in sports science where you're either limited to collecting those samples in the lab or at least in one location you post up somewhere for a week or something like that and you're having people do things out they might be doing things out in the field but you're collecting samples from a from kind of a fixed location right yeah and we've done that a lot at races well the it's huge those races are almost all point-to-point races like badwater or western states um kona of course is we didn't take the trailer over there but uh we've we've we've hold up in the medical tent at ironman uh a few times to get samples but and that's that's pretty simple place to collect it but yeah out in the sticks of montana where you're trying to collect muscle samples from wildland firefighters when there is no electricity and no lights having that trailer is a godsend because we have heat and we have and it's all solar powered all of the trailers are solar powered so we don't need we've never once never once turned on a generator for any of those field studies so as a

as a fellow van lifer and somebody who did some modifications to my van i have to ask how much battery power do you have it's it's not that impressive i mean we have a few different like goal zero systems that we can take along with it but it's not like a tesla battery bank of power um because most of the time with the exception of um like some of the cycle ergometers it's pretty low low voltage uh low amp type stuff and surprisingly the damn coffee machine sometimes well it will not work with the goal zero system and so that is you have to have land power uh to be able to power that silly coffee maker well if that's your limiting factor you're doing okay all right so you mentioned this a little bit and i want to spend just one more second kind of setting this up for the listeners give you you mentioned a couple of different locations to where you've taken this in the endurance space give us an idea scope of where it's all been because it's been in a lot of really impressive like high profile places that the listeners will readily uh recognize yeah we uh the first time we took it out was on this big cycling study that went from missoula to colorado and back walled in colorado and back in that same year we also took it to um the western states 100 and we had

it at the at i mean you walked right out the door of the trailer and there was the start of the race so we had it on a big parking pad right by the start of the race which was awesome to get uh last minute samples for the groups that that left on that early morning we also had it at badwater basin at the start of badwater and we had it at the finish um up on um up on top of uh or at the portal whitney portal which was nice because there's a lot of freaking bears up there but uh and then we've where else we've had it on loads of fires in montana um and just recently we took it to a 24-hour race um the 24-hour mountain bike race in bend and we had it parked right there on the course which was outstanding uh because we could we could we weren't collecting any really any high profile samples but we needed nude weights and we needed um urine samples for this energy expenditure study we did on on that at that race so yeah it's just i mean when you walk into it you i mean airstreams in general are pretty cool trailers and when you walk into it you wouldn't really outside of some of the maybe the artwork in there or some of the little things that give it away as a

research facility it just looks like a regular airstream trailer but it's been in a lot of special places and we've claimed i called airstream uh after when was it i don't know if it was after one of the fire studies or after one of the after this year i think it was after one of the fire studies i call airstream trailer and i go hey i want to claim i think i have two world records with your with this airstream trailer and they're like oh really you're calling again and pulling up your customer your customer profile and they're like this dude this guy yeah they should take advantage they should market uh based on the things we've done with airstream because we've been a good customer but uh i have three of them i have my own and then we have two at the lab which are awesome but i said i want to claim that we have two world records we have the world record for the most muscle biopsies taken in an airstream trailer and we have the uh that's a cumulative total and then we also have i also have the day record the single day record of most most biopsies taken in the trailer which is 20 we'll uh we'll send that one day we'll send we'll send that off to guinness i'm sure airstream they're looking at your three sales they're like yeah this is a pretty good customer but they've got more units to sell all right so one of the more interesting studies that we've talked about a couple times uh already in in this intro is the cycling study that you did and i think that this is a fascinating one to learn about a lot of these complex issues dealing with

overtraining and this this comes in it seems like it's kind of fallen out of the new cycle to be honest with you so maybe this is like this like pushes it back in but every 18 months or so there's some there's some new cycle that happens about athletes that are over trained and typically they'll pull from the cycling world they'll pull from the triathlon world they'll pull from the running world and in in trail ultra marathon uh running we see a lot as well just because it's a high volume uh type of sport you had this really unique opportunity so the site the cyclists like day by day in a very over trained type of setup and one of the one of the one of the classic ones that i've actually seen where the cyclists went from missoula to boulder those are the two endpoints correct walden colorado okay to golden just just over the just over the border in walden uh just north of like the steamboat area okay so 3200k 170k a day and to relay that to the listeners that's about they're probably about a five or six hour day on the bike each day yeah about six hours at least so six hours a day for 21 days i think there are two rest days in there right yep so a lot of training yeah a lot of training a lot of training is kind of what i'm getting to why don't you why don't you further describe that study and what were your primary aims and then we'll kind of take the conclusion separately because i think that's a fascinating thing to start to bat around for the listeners to try

to understand when when we we wanted to do an overtraining study uh and so we were struggling with different methodologies and that's right around the time when we uh went to pick up the airstream trailer so we picked up the airstream outside of eugene oregon and then hightailed it to the coast and camped for about four nights on the coast near um near cannon beach and i was with uh my whole lab team which there were three others dustin slivka who actually is the primary author of those papers and then john cuddy and walter hales um that was our lab team for when we first started the research center and when we first got that airstream trailer so we we we went to the coast solely to uh plan plot and plan the methodology for that study and we were bantering around should it be primarily lab-based should it be a combination of lab-based with some field rides we we knew all the while that they were going to be riding outside we didn't want to do 100 mile rides on rollers or on a well there was no smart trainer back then um we had either rollers but the um at that time the power meter opportunities on bikes were just becoming a reality and so we we worked with power tap

um to outfit all the bikes with with with those power meters which was fantastic because essentially we were like wow this turns a regular sweet road bike into an ergometer yeah and we can monitor everything during their training or during these training rides so that's how it that's how it developed the concept of that was to design an overtraining uh type scenario where we ramped up their training volume by about 400 percent and in doing so we thought oh my goodness we're going to see all kinds of signs and symptoms of of bitchiness and overtraining and grumpiness and we saw some of that but it was surprising how uh the classic markers of overtraining that have been reported in the literature we just couldn't see those uh repeatedly and what we were really adamant about was adding in uh performance trials so every third day they would start their day with a good breakfast a warm-up and then what we called the hour of power and we just designated a course that didn't have a hard end point it had a hard start and then the end point was flexible depending on how far they went but the goal was to go as fast and as hard as they could for that hour and the power meters did the

trick so we had a time trial every third day and the thing about overtraining is um if it it doesn't matter what the marker is if the quintessential measure of performance doesn't change then it's it's not a thing and it's like athletes or triathletes are famous for wanting to talk about oh i feel like i'm overtraining i feel like this i feel like that it's like you know what probably not a thing are you complaining no doubt about it do i want to hear it no uh one of the first times we went to one of the first times we went to hawaii for a study at iron man uh we got there late in the afternoon went straight to the beach and we're watching the sunset and this uh a couple of uh locals colorful locals older colorful locals were there and they're like what are you guys doing here i'm like oh we're doing a study with iron man they thought they started laughing and they said which i've never forgot they said what does iron man use for birth control and i'm like i have no idea what is that and they go their personality having done several of those races i can tease them yeah there you go because there's nothing more that they like talking about then oh i'm overtrained or oh i need to here's my my dialed nutrition for my recovery it's like okay they just like talking about it more than they like eating it um and so

i guess the point is they can talk about it all they want but when we took these guys out of their normal day-to-day atmosphere or environment and put them on the road we could not reduce their performance regardless of just hammering hammering hammering and i think a lot of that was just the concept and it's alluded to in that paper that taking people out of removing some of their auxiliary stressors the other things that bring them down during the day um helps the physical training just flow to the top as being the primary driver of of what they do and how they respond i've seen that a lot with like high school athletes my wife coaches high school cross country and she's always telling me about this struggle and that struggle and i'm like you know what you can train them perfectly for the hour and a half you have them but when they make dumb ass decisions in the other 23 hours they don't eat right and they don't get enough sleep and they get stressed out about relationships and school and whatever the benefits of the training start to slip away and so the overtraining concepts i think a lot of those are driven by the auxiliary stressors that bombard these athletes either professional age groupers or otherwise um and keeping those at bay could really uh be the secret

well and you have a perfect test case for that in this study that we were just talking about all that just blew my mind i want to kind of back up a little bit so that the listeners can kind of understand the research protocol from a kind of a fundamental level because one of the really elegant things about this particular study and why it kind of resonated with me is that you took athletes that were at a relatively they were trained athletes but they're training relatively normally between eight and ten hours a week and you said you increased their training volume by 400 percent so that's going from eight to ten hours a week to 35 to 40 hours per week you did that that's not a trivial increase i think everybody out there is saying okay like like i can kind of conceptualize that in my own training i'm training nine hours a week i multiply that by four that's then 36 hours a week i know what that would intend like they can they can like that's that's people have gone through that right yeah from a trail ultra running perspective normally when that happens it's like okay i'm going to go do a big training weekend and right that that increase primarily happens over the course of a couple or a few days during the week but you guys took that to the next level so not only was it a acute training load increase in terms of the amount of time that they were doing in a particular day but you extended it over the course of three weeks to which your statement of we were sure we were going to screw them we were we were sure they were going to be fried kind of by the end of this but at the end

of the day their performances were generally better towards the end than it was than they were at the beginning indicating that there was some type of adaptation adaptations occurring throughout that market increase in training yep absolutely absolutely and i i i'm still no i'm still friends with a lot of these characters um and they have harassed me over the years saying when can we do that again when are we going to do that again and i go none of our lives all of our lives are more complicated now that that would make it very hard and i don't think any of us could tolerate that level anymore because most of them are i mean like me a little bit older now not in their mid-20s so let's talk about the caveats right the first cat because i don't want anybody out there to go oh man i'm gonna go train 40 hours a week now because you know because coop and brett said that that was what that was what was okay we don't want anybody to take that away from this but i do think that the caveats are worth mentioning first off is is something that you mentioned is that they were able to remove all of the other stressors that kind of revolve around their lives they've got you know boyfriend and girlfriends and they've got to deal with you know college kids so they got to deal with their parents or whatever college kids get stressed out about not not all but a lot of those got removed from their lives and they were then able

to replace that type of stress with physical stress right with with kind of training stress the second caveat that i think is in there are is just their age you know they were all college kids right so between you know what ages were the average age was 24 so most of them had had graduated okay and had moved on from that but we're still racing quite a bit they just didn't have like full-time full-time full-time jobs right to leave they were they were flexible yeah exactly i guess what i'm saying is is their age right their chronological age has a lot has a lot to uh has a lot to do with that um we see the former caveat a lot in our training camps and i've pointed this out on the podcast several times before where we can bring you know we have a classic uh training camp uh that i run out of my house uh during memorial day every year and people will typically triple is is the number that we see they triple their volume and they actually kind of do it quite easily and one of the reasons they can do it quite easily is because they're in this like isolated environment and we encourage them to shut their phones off as much as they can and they kind of eat sleep run and things like that now the sustainability part of this is i think the fascinating part the 21 kind of the 21 days and i i i'm really happy that

you mentioned one key element of this study is that you guys were primarily looking at the performance as the ultimate indicator because we can always track biomarkers eight ways from sunday but the thing that always matters the most is the performance which is always an amalgamation of all of these different things that are going on biochemically psychologically you know there's there's just a whole host of things how do you like how do you explain that how do you explain this fourfold increase in training load over three weeks and these and there were still some adaptation or some sort of performance increase that happened at the end at the end of the day is this just are we under representing what we can actually do or what that's a great question i i i don't think we were in the long run i don't think we were overly surprised i thought we'd see some differential and that's why we tried to tease out there's only so much you can do with 10 subjects which is not a great sample size but for something like this it's about all we could handle what are you going to do yeah yeah and uh somebody would criticize i like the reviewers for those papers ridiculous one reviewer said oh we think you should have done this study in the lab it would have been a lot more controlled and i'm like see ya i don't i don't need that kind of comment and you're missing they're missing the point 100 either that or they're just pissed off they didn't think of it first but um the

like exactly like you said there's a tendency to get overly obsessed with biomarkers in the blood and the saliva and the muscle uh it all becomes a complex version of alphabet soup in the end and if it if it can't be linked to a definitive change maintenance decrease or increase in performance then all you have is alphabet soup and it in the end with this a lot of those biomarkers instead of being markers of overtraining we just sort of interpreted them as markers of a training stress that is occurring like simply an increase in heart rate it's like well that seems like it should happen when you when you go from zero to 300 watts it's predictable that a lot of these markers are going to go up and how you interpret them is a function of what is what are you trying to demonstrate at the end of the at the end of the study or at the end of the day and that is performance and performance is infinitely more complex than trying to describe changes in muscle substrate use or changes in some of the genetic mitochondrial markers um those are abstract performance is not what is your average power output for an hour and it takes a lot more to get up to that sort of full throttle level of exercise

intensity than than simply knowing oh i've laid the foundation for better fat oxidation in the muscle therefore i'll be able to throw down some higher watts no it's a there's a tremendous amount of motivation that's necessary to be able to tolerate the level of high level of discomfort that's associated with an hour time trial yeah that and that's another thing that i think is worth pointing out or the performance indicators that you were using was a one hour all-out time trial of which you said there's no finish line right it's they're done whenever the hour's done yeah that's not an easy ask no because it's self-paced right they don't have people yelling at them like you do in the lab like that is it that is not an easy thing to ask somebody to do when they're fresh yeah and here you've got somebody after you know a couple of weeks two and a half weeks of of of cycling a lot five or six hours a day you're asking them to go an hour as hard as they can for the third time yeah like it becomes one of those things like okay even even that if you ask somebody to do three one hour time trials with normal training in between sometimes they lose motivation for that last one hour time trial you know so it's a so so your your comment is really well taken that there's this like alphabet soup of things that go into performance but performance is the ultimate indicator yeah i was trying to count how many uh time trials they did one two three four five seven

they had to throw down seven different times and every three days yeah they would every three days they would do that and they they would complain a little bit about it most of them were like okay time to go they get pumped for it and uh one of the things if they would complain not that they did very much but i would say just think of it this way and i always tell athletes this that a time trial like that on the track or on a bike or whatever is brutal it's like that that like steaming blood taste in your throat that just feels like everything is raw and then tolerating that for an hour and the discomfort throughout the whole body that doesn't go away no matter how no matter how fit they are i said but it's i always love telling athletes it's a you're gonna feel like shit during these time trials but man is it it's a whole lot uh more tolerable to feel like shit when you're going faster here here's here's kind of what i take away from this from a coaching perspective and i want i want to see what you actually think about it is that i don't i when i look at something like this i have less hesitation of designing intensified training blocks for athletes and i don't mean 21 days of five hours a day i mean like four or five days at four or five hours a day which is reasonable for

most normal people to kind of set that time aside even when the increase is three to fourfold i don't have as much hesitancy around that prescription but i make sure that all of the other stressors is otherwise specified that are revolving around their life are minimized in the immediate before during after of those intensified blocks that's what i take away from is i just don't have as much hesitancy with those increases but because i keep seeing studies not only like this i mean this was published in 2012 right um not only studies like this but subsequent studies of where they where you can see all of these dramatic increases in acute training load and and you would look at and go oh that's dumb like you should only increase your training load 10 per week or whatever the stupid formula is but the athletes are fine at the end of the day and sometimes they perform even better when they shouldn't yep absolutely i think that is the perfect formula is to pave the way for like these epic sort of training camps that are short-lived like three days five days if you've got the time and not only is it imperative that you remove try to remove all the stresses i mean the most stressful thing these guys had to do for themselves was set up their own tents and halfway through they started to complain that you guys it would be really great if you could set up your tents or set up our tents

for us i'm like come on we're giving you everything you need full support on the bike all day long with a rolling food support and shag wagon for mechanicals if you had it everything else but um yeah when you it's i think it's it's amazing how uh how tolerant people can or what levels of training they can tolerate if you take away those other stressors absolutely and the only thing that starts to then uh the only thing that creeps into that formula is the potential for some overuse type injuries um which some of these guys it it became a little bit nagging at times but they were they were able to manage it um appropriately through the whole thing just some achilles slight achilles tendonitis we had one crash um one bad crash that required some a couple guys go to the er for some stitches but yeah it it is so if i was going to design training camps that would be the most important thing to remove those stressors as much as you can and you know we see this phenomenon where athletes get better underneath extreme stress in a few different situations i mean i the listeners will know i just got off a really big project uh on the pc where an athlete was setting a fastest time on the pct which

is 51 days and he got better after a couple of weeks which is you know you wouldn't like of course you're doing 51 miles a day you'd expect a gradual deterioration in capabilities but having run out there with him for a lot of those days i could definitely tell there were patches where he was better and yeah true there was patches where he was worse but there are definitely patches where he was better and you wouldn't you wouldn't expect that but a lot of other through hikers that are trying to do this you know somewhere between 45 and 55 days or something like that have that phenomenon of where they where they feel better after a couple of weeks which is kind of the time frame of this study right after a couple of weeks of intense of intensified training and it kind of defies this prototypical overload recovery and then adaptation model that we um uh that we learn and i i learned as a student as well um and like i said i think it's just a fascinating thing that athletes can apply to their normal day-to-day training that they don't have to be as afraid of these big volume jumps as a lot of people are because we see that they're sustainable and as long as you can stave off injury and illness yeah and and remove all of the stresses as otherwise specified those types of what would what would appear to be absurd training increases are actually quite you know quite reasonable yeah but totally agree totally agree it's we also can't underestimate the power of motivation like

what motivates an athlete to even want to get out of bed early and in the morning and go for a cold bike ride or whatever and that to me is if we can figure out how to tap into that and leverage that it's that's a secret weapon i mean i always used to take it as i was reaching a good point in my training where once i would finish a training session the first thing that i would the first thing that would pop into my mind is cool i get to do this again tomorrow what is that training sessions what is that going to look like and i start that was always my signal that i'd kind of arrived at this being a um a sustainable training load task sequence of training sessions towards a goal um and if i didn't have that then i knew that i wasn't going to get the most out of the the training sessions or the that block of whatever macro cycle it was i was working through but i usually take advantage of that with my athletes when they give me the feedback like hey i'm looking forward tomorrow it's like okay let's go let's start to let's start to pour it on like absolutely a killer uh if you could especially when athletes tell you that unsolicited yeah then you know that is the perfect formula as as many times

as i talk to physiologists they always come back the physiologists always come back to the psychology it's hilarious like you're probably don't know how to measure it it's like it's we've tried so many times to measure like cognitive impact or we've tried to measure vigilance and firefighters feeding them one thing versus another and the best we could do in this study was that profile of mood states yeah um and yeah it's a tough there is no tool for it it's not like a cyclorgometer test or a or a muscle sample with an objective marker yeah it's really interesting i had uh uh yame mie uh who created kind of the framework for ultramarathon performance that a lot of physiologists are using right now it's a physiological model and at the end of this whole discussion he was like yeah probably all just comes down to psychology i think i'm just like okay we just spent an hour talking about how all these different physiological inputs and impact performance he's like yeah just however if you want to do it you're going to do it if not you're probably not so okay let's let's pivot we're having fun so we're going to pivot to something that's some more fun and i know you'll have you can be completely you know as unabashed and uninhibited as you want to on feedback on this because i know i know it's kind of a triggering or or at the time certainly it was a true concept you know where i'm going with this cheeseburgers for recovery and you know explain the study and then i want i want the

listeners to appreciate the feedback that you got first and then we'll kind of go to the takeaways right so explain the cheeseburgers for recovery study uh yeah well the world of sport nutrition is riddled with complexities um and it's almost as if the the the group as a whole i have nothing against them i i mean i dabble in it myself a lot of the research we do is sport nutrition oriented but unfortunately it's it's it's almost like the take-home messages are kept in a hidden box and they're secret and the only way athletes or coaches can take advantages of of them is if they if they listen to or fall prey to the marketing of a lot of these different products and i was i've always been frustrated by that i've always been frustrated at how inaccessible science is to the people that are paying the bills and with the work that we've done with fire crews and all that my goal has always to try to make the science more accessible and make the take-home message truly applicable and sport nutrition is sort of famous for not accommodating that and so i don't know what triggered it but a paper or two uh that i had read where they where it was like you have these fine-tuned

dials and it's almost like athletes are expected to run around with a scale and a graduated cylinder just to make sure they're eating and drinking enough in terms of grams per kilogram body weight or mils per kilogram per hour and it becomes overwhelming and impossible to interpret and so i've just thought enough is enough let's do a study where we um pick foods from the mcdonald's menu and we partner those against commonplace sports supplements which are readily marketed as the gold standard for muscle recovery and so that's what we did we walked across the street from the university every morning when we would do a trial and we would pick up menu items from the breakfast menu that we picked out uh doing a deep not really a deep dive a shallow dive on the nutrient intake or the nutritional uh content of the different foods and back then there was a it was perfectly timed because the first feeding which happened right after the exercise happened during the window of the breakfast menu so we've had items from the breakfast menu how convenient the second window which happened two hours later is a four-hour recovery window the second feeding happened at the when the breakfast menu was no longer available at that point so we've moved towards hamburger and french fries but again this was uh simple items from the mcdonald's menu not like whoppers or sorry big macs or uh anything like that queer pounders they were the

small hamburger small fries and everything else so it's not surprising that when you take macro nutrients and compare them to the same macro nutrient profile if it's delivered in gel form or semi-solid liquid or otherwise in food bars and and things with flashy marketing campaigns on the side of them it's it shouldn't be surprising that you would would not see a difference but the rationale for using menu items from the mcdonald's menu is that is about as far on the other end of the spectrum than what is perceived as sort of healthy performance foods and i remember one reporter i think it was from npr or something he's like well i just i'm just uncomfortable it feels like you're advocating mcdonald's i'm like i'm not the if if if you read that from the study then you're not reading the the take-home message appropriately and he said well wouldn't it have been better if you would have just gone to like whole foods and picked healthy uh healthy food options would that provide the same message and i thought no and it wouldn't and he said how come and i said because if i did that we wouldn't be having this discussion it's not nearly as fun but yeah so but but the setup is is you had athletes do an exhaustive bout of work yeah and after one trial they consumed a classic sports nutrition product recovery shake

things like that yeah and then another trial you had them consume the isocaloric and macronutrient equivalent in mcdonald's items you compared the recovery markers between those two and there was no difference right the and the recovery markers were um muscle glycogen resynthesis so what we we've done so many of these studies and we've accumulated almost 200 subjects over the years in these recovery models and we've modified the diet we've given them um things like menu items from mcdonald's we've modified the environment at which the muscle or the whole body is recovering in and we've always used the exact same protocol the same technique for sampling the muscle the same analytical techniques for analyzing the muscle and the same uh methodology for depleting the muscle of that glycogen which is a cyclorgometer a really aggressive 90 minute interval series so we can we can make the muscle glycogen disappear very predictably and then you feed them two different times in that four-hour window and at the end of that four hours you take the muscle sample but most importantly and we haven't done this in all these studies but we did in the mcdonald's based the mcdonald's menu item study um i hesitate to call that the mcdonald's study because it makes it sound like mcdonald's it was not they had no nothing to do with the

funding it was self-funded by uh some of the extra monies that we had uh laying around so but we did a performance time trial which is a 20k 20k time trial full throttle as hard as you can go and uh if you're doing really well that is about 30 minutes or more a little bit less than 30 minutes maybe um and so we didn't see any differences in performance across those two trials and all of these studies are repeated measures so the subjects are randomized as to which trial they get first and usually it's also counterbalanced so half of them get the fast food recovery foods first on trial one and then two weeks later a week later they do the other trial and switch and vice versa um but yeah very tightly controlled um laboratory-based studies and i think the take-home message from that is is as long as the macros and the total calories are balanced it kind of doesn't matter like i hate to say that because like you know like yeah you want people to eat healthy foods right first off right let's get that out of the way yeah but when you're measuring the markers of recovery glycogen resynthesis and things like that just hit the macros and have in total calories matter the most it actually reminds me of an older study uh that ended up becoming a product and this was at a john ivy's lab and the reason i know

the inside detail to this is because the graduate student who did is actually one of my coaching colleagues and uh she compared a carbohydrate beverage to a carbohydrate plus protein beverage and they found that the carbohydrate plus protein beverage had greater uh rates of glycogen resynthesis than just carbohydrate alone but the issue with her with her study was that it wasn't isocaloric so literally they were comparing to they were comparing two different drinks they were comparing this carbohydrate drink and then the carbohydrate drink with with protein added to it added yeah but a whole product got launched because of that it was called endurax r4 you probably remember that in the early 2000s and they were you know hawking this this single study that you know was the proof of that that this was a superior recovery product to which even the people involved in the study were like wait a minute like you can't extrapolate that much out from this one from this one single thing you know so yeah yeah so that once again it kind of comes back to the macros and the total calories matter the most yeah and then you can like if you want to get into all the nuance you're you're splitting the hair pretty fine at that point absolutely yeah you to try to to try to require athletes to have to calculate everything to the gram is unnecessary unless you're chasing a gold medal then yeah at that point you need to like be willing to split some hairs because the difference between the podiums positions are

finite um but the the other thing about all of those recovery studies that really is uh glaring is not only does it the food as long as you get the macros in it doesn't have to be complicated that's the bottom line with that the other thing is all of those studies are done in under lab conditions where it's air conditioned it's comfortable recovery environment and most athletes most operators occupational military or otherwise aren't they don't have the luxury of recovering their whole person or their skeletal muscle in those optimal environments they're at altitude they're in the cold they're in the heat and how does that affect the rate of recovery in the in the skeletal muscle and with all of those studies which we've done every combination cold muscle hot muscle cold body hot body high altitude uh we've done all those combinations and the thing and we've changed obviously the the feeding windows we've changed the type of feeding all that stuff you can slice up the feeding as much as you want but at the end of the day what's most important is that the muscle recovers in a more optimal environment my dogs are barking that's totally fine the the listeners will hear my dog as well i was trying to actually determine was it yours or mine repeat that last part though because that's the important part yeah the the environment that the muscle and the body recovers in is more influential

to at the at the end of the day to to performance and to putting down more glycogen for the next training session and so on the environment is more influential than dialing in the food or macronutrients as precisely as you can so but you can't sell that you can't market that and so that's where it that's the dilemma so here's i mean instead of athletes focusing on the exact ingredients that are in their protein shake or whatever after their workout that's important but even more important they should focus on okay what am i going to be doing while i'm consuming that yeah am i hurtling down the road at 80 miles an hour dodging through traffic adding additional you know stress hormones into this you know cocktail of things that's going on or should i just sit in the park and enjoy myself and breathe deeply for you know a few minutes like what are the like that part of it is going to be more important the environmental piece of it as opposed to the nutrition piece yeah the one thing we haven't evaluated is if you add stress to that sort of cognitive stress we haven't we haven't done that element but at least in terms of the ambient conditions the most optimal would be keep the muscle warm if it's the most often it's the legs so keep the legs warm keep the whole body in a comfortable environment that's sort of air

conditioned so you're not going to compromise nutrient delivery because you've got more blood flow running to the skin because it's hot out that's kind of the ultimate combination so get a cool environment put your sweatpants on yep that's right i dig that the other thing that doesn't work is the the the the um the pants that are have become popular that are pneumatic compression don't get me started don't get me started don't we'll leave if i'm gonna want to if i'm gonna have a massage i'd rather have a person do it than a robot any old day and so the the uh or the the squeezy pants that we call them but those do not influence glycogen recovery one bit yeah um and they don't influence lactate removal and any of that stuff we did that study as well but based on the research that you're doing because a lot of athletes have this like okay should i get in a cold bath should i get in a warm bath should i do this should i do that like afterwards to try to facilitate recovery i mean the cold plunges are all that's another thing that's the rage now right i mean they they sell that just to your point right i mean i can go right now and i could take my pick of five different you know like specific cold plunge apparatus that i can buy for a couple thousand bucks and i can put it's just a trash can with ice that's what we used to use football practice right but what you're advocating for is something really simple right keep the muscles warm put your sweat pants on and stay in air conditioned environment that's likely going to facilitate recovery the best at least uh muscle recovery from a from a glycogen perspective perspective if you if you're an older

athlete and the connective tissue is not what it used to be and the ice bath has some therapeutic capacity along those lines then yeah it's not like a little bit of that is going to send you down a down a path of inability to recover for the next training session the next day there are other aspects of recovery that as you age or as your um competitive um window changes that like for me as a 50 some year old if i'm training hard i'm not too concerned about putting glycogen back into the tank i can do that pretty easily i'm concerned with how do i support the connected tissue appropriately so i can get up and do this again tomorrow it's very different um but yeah brilliant brilliant okay we're gonna leave it at that i i can't tell you how much i appreciated this conversation it was just as fun as john pitched it to me he said you're gonna keep it real and i appreciate that uh with my guests i want to give you one last opportunity to plug this really cool book that you mentioned in some email exchanges that we have i think that's a really neat thing why don't you tell listeners about that and i'll put a link to it in the show notes every time somebody asks me about that i i i get a little chill and then i also get a little bit um sometimes a little bit emotional about it but i've been chasing wildland firefighters for like 25 years

going back to when i first started at the university here and i've seen lots of those firefighters uh start their career and retire within that window of time that i've worked with them um as a research subject and and as a friend and everything else and i have lots of really good friends within that within those agencies and we've done every kind of study i could dream up with these fire crews and these are hot shot crews sort of the elite uh wildland fire community folks and one thing that has struck me repeatedly when we when i talk to them and when i visit them or go to their home bases to give them a little blurb about the latest research and this and that um is the stress that they have associated with the job is not linked really to how hard the job is physically the stress that they have to manage is how do i do this job and how do i come home to my now new family and little kids are involved now i mean i've known so many firefighters that started out as these young bucks that wildland fire was badass and i love it and then they met somebody and they really liked that person and now they have a little kid and now they have a puppy and now whatever and so i just struggled with that and when covid hit and we

couldn't do in-person research very easily i had planned to write this children's book uh and so i just was like okay now i have no excuse so i hunkered down in my little backyard cabin every morning and i would work on it and uh eventually finished it about a i mean that writing the story took me a while but uh working with the artists and everything else and it's just been i think to myself and i think oh my gosh i have all these papers that i get to hand off to wildland fire crews about how to keep the job how to make the job better how do they train better and whatever at the end of the whole career maybe my best contribution to the fire community would be a children's book oh man because it it i think i mean right reading to a kid is unbelievable in terms of how you the storytelling that develops out of it and the creativity that develops out of it and it's it becomes i want it to be a conduit for these the hard charger firefighters to be able to share their world of work with their kids their nieces nephews grandkids whatever and they're not like the ultimate in communicators and so this hopefully will be a conduit to let that happen a little bit better that is a massively optimistic goal but it's been really well received within the fire community and i can't tell

you how many of my colleagues thought you are crazy why in the world would you want to spend time writing a children's book and i'm like well don't knock it until you try it because it was incredibly rewarding uh great experience so that's just really cool what a great what a great contribution to add to all of the academic contributions that you've had i can tell you personally using those academic contributions in my day-to-day work life i'm incredibly appreciative of those if the firefighters are even one-tenth as appreciative of as me and my coaching colleagues of what people like you uh have been able to do then that is an immense contribution that you should be really proud of well that is an i thank you for that that's a incredibly generous compliment but it's it helps when the job is fun it helps to have colleagues that are in a university that's supportive of my creative whimsical ways um but yeah it's it's been a great not a non-bumpy ride that's for sure it's it's been really fun to be able to see a lot of these uh projects through where at the beginning of the of my career a lot of times there was a uh there was considerable doubt from the world of peer review uh that this was a thing or that this

would work and so i've had such awesome colleagues that have believed in me and some of them don't believe in me but that pushes me in a different direction so it's yes it's been a fun process well keep doing what you're doing keep that airstream out there in the field because it keeps producing good data and right on keep using it as coaches i once again i really appreciate your time we'll put links to everything up on the show notes brent thank you again oh my absolute pleasure all right folks there you have it there you go much thanks to brent for that conversation i'm still laughing too much about that was really fun i hope everybody goes out and checks the show notes i'm going to have links to all the research that uh that we talked about but once again if you guys come away with some practical things that you can implement in your day-to-day training tomorrow which is keep your recovery simple and make sure you've got enough macronutrients and you can do intensified training loads if you remove a lot of the other training stresses around you then this podcast has definitely served its purpose thanks again to brent for coming on the show today and keeping it real i appreciate all the listeners out there once again this podcast has no sponsors there are no advertisements i take this on as an expense every single week and i absolutely love doing it you can help the podcast out by sharing it with a friend just forward it over to somebody send somebody a text tell them to check it out or you can leave a rating or review on apple podcast that helps out the

podcast tremendously appreciate the heck out of each and every one of you and as always we will see you out on the trails you