Episode 57 Exploring the Science of HRV and Strength Training with Dr. Mike T Nelson

 Dr. Mike T Nelson is a researcher with a PhD in exercise physiology and a master's degree in mechanical engineering, Mike walked us through the intricate details of heart rate variability (HRV). Tapping into his expertise, we discussed its potential in predicting overtraining in athletes and the challenges involved in its accurate measurement. But that's not all! We also ventured into the mysterious world of fasting, exploring its potential benefits and the difficulties of assessing its effects scientifically.

Mike T. Nelson, PhD, MSME, CSCS, CISSN, is a research fanatic who specializes in metabolic flexibility, heart rate variability, and human performance.  He has spent 20 years of his life learning how the human body works.  He has a PhD in Exercise Physiology, and a MS in Mechanical Engineering (biomechanics).  He's an Associate Professor at the Carrick Institute, university instructor at Rocky Mountain University, creator of the Flex Diet Certification & Physiologic Flexibility Cert and a Human Optimization Specialist with the Special Forces Experience.  He also is the Research and Human Performance Science Advisor at Tecton -makers of a unique ketone ester, and performance analysis with Rapid Health.  He has published research in both physiology and engineering peer-reviewed journals.  He's even been called in to share his techniques with top military agencies.  In his free time he enjoys spending time with his wife, lifting odd objects, going to metal concerts, and kiteboarding.  Find out more at www.miketnelson.com

About the Show

We cover all things related to sports science, nutrition, and performance. The Sports Science Dudes represent the opinions of the hosts and guests and are not the official opinions of the International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), the Society for Sports Neuroscience, or Nova Southeastern University. The advice provided on this show should not be construed as medical advice and is purely an educational forum.

Hosted by Jose Antonio PhD

Dr. Antonio is the co-founder and CEO of the International Society of Sports Nutrition and the co-founder of the Society for Sports Neuroscience, www.issn.net. Dr. Antonio has over 120 peer-reviewed publications and 16 books. He is a Professor at Nova Southeastern University, Davie, Florida in the Department of Health and Human Performance.

Twitter: @JoseAntonioPhD

Instagram: the_issn and supphd

Co-host Anthony Ricci EdD

Dr Ricci is an expert on Fight Sports and is currently an Assistant Professor at Nova Southeastern University in Davie Florida in the Department of Health and Human Performance.

Instagram: sportpsy_sci_doc and fightshape_ricci

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome to the Sports Science Dudes. I am your host, dr Jose Antonio, with my co-host, tony Ricci. If you're a first-time listener, hit the subscribe button. Like the show. You can find us on YouTube, rumble, spotify and Apple podcasts. Our special guest today is Dr Mike T Nelson. He has a PhD, cscs and CISSN. He's a research fanatic. I do like that. He specializes in metabolic flexibility, heart rate variability, which we will talk about, as well as human performance. He spent two decades probably more actually.

Speaker 1: 0:35

It seems like you know what I'm saying I feel like we've been doing this for like half a century. It's like forever. So he's been doing it a long time. He's got a PhD in exercise physiology and I didn't realize that she had a master's degree in mechanical engineering, so that's pretty cool. You're currently an associate prof at the Carrick Institute. You're a university instructor at Rocky Mountain University. I actually have a couple of students currently going to Rocky Mountain.

Speaker 1: 1:06

You're the creator of the Flex Diet Certification and Physiologic Flexibility, cert and Human Optimization Specialist with the Special Forces Experience. You're also the research and human performance science advisor at Tecton. They make the ketone ester drink. You've published research in both physiology and engineering peer reviewed journals, which is kind of a cool combo. Not bad, yeah. And he's even been called Mike's even been called into shares techniques with top military agencies. In his free time he enjoys spending time with his wife lifting odd objects, going to metal concerts and the coolest of all, because I am an ocean lover like you he kiteboards, which is you know what's interesting about kiteboarding? I don't, tony, have you really? Have you been feeling the hurricane like winds for the last few days?

Speaker 2: 1:57

No, I'm in the wrong spot. Yeah, Come on out.

Speaker 1: 2:01

Mike, this might be the wind. I'm like, wow, this is like the windiest winter, which is great for kiteboarding. It's very bad for paddleboarding.

Speaker 3: 2:08

We get all over. That's why you have to do both. Then your windy days to kiteboarding and not windy days to go paddleboarding.

Speaker 1: 2:15

You know, because you know that would make sense. I've watched them kiteboard and here's the thing Kiteboarding to me is like you know, it's like learning how to surf or learning how to golf. There's a certain amount of time you have to put into it so that you don't kill yourself out there. And I'm thinking I tried like, for instance, I took golf lessons a long time ago. I'm like you know, it looks like a good way to kill a day. And then I realized, wow, you really have to put a lot of time into this to be somewhat competent. Same with kiteboarding. It's like, wow, do I have that kind of time? I don't know if.

Speaker 2: 2:50

I do, I would just flail.

Speaker 1: 2:52

I would just flail. It's one of those things where God, I wish I'd picked it up, like 10 or 20 years ago or whatever. But yeah, the skill there's a certain skill level that I don't even think. I don't know if you could even explain it to someone who has no idea what it feels like to fly on the water. I mean, maybe you could, I don't know much.

Speaker 3: 3:09

Could you? Yeah, it's like you said. It's complex because for listeners you have a bar with four lines that go up to this like looks like an upside down flying parachute thing and use that to pull you across the water on a hybrid between a wakeboard, surfboardy kind of thing. And then the nice part is, if you do it correctly, you can then send the kite straight up above you and then you can fly through the air for you know so far and land pretty nice. But like, the best I've done so far is 26 feet up for like 150 feet, like six seconds, wow, and there's pros that do way more than that. But it's so fun, like even if you've done any extreme sports or anything like being in the air and just flying around for like three seconds feels like an eternity, it feels like forever.

Speaker 2: 3:58

But that's a lot of fun and that's a good deal above the ocean surface.

Speaker 3: 4:04

Yes, yeah, the first few times even do it, even just doing six feet, the first time you look down and you're like whoa, oh shit.

Speaker 1: 4:17

I know I can only imagine that feels like, because the few times I've paddled in somewhat rough water and the water carries you up Even if you're just a few feet above the water, it's like holy shit, I'm going to crash and my hands get something so well if you come out today, mike, you can probably get what the wind.

Speaker 2: 4:36

I'm looking out the window. You can probably get to the Azores in about three hours.

Speaker 3: 4:40

Yeah, nice.

Speaker 1: 4:43

Oh too much. Hey, mike, you you're a big proponent, or you talk quite a bit about heartbreak variability.

Speaker 1: 4:50

And I think, tony, I don't know if you've used up, if that's a tool you guys use with fighters, you and Corey yeah, I the thing I have before you explain what it is and the importance. I think my Garmin watch attempts to measure it, but I think it's just bullshit on my watch that I'm like this data is not right and I would have to wear some sort of EKG monitor to get true heartbreak variability. So could you comment on that a little bit? You know what it is the importance of it trying to actually measure it while I got my watch on and I'm paddling out wherever yeah, so simply, heartbreak variability.

Speaker 3: 5:26

If we measure the average heart rate during an activity, it gives us some you know useful information. If we then take the variability analysis of it, that gives us, like the next level, in depth info. So when we do that, it tells us the status of our autonomic nervous system. So for the listeners, you've got the parasympathetic side, which was like pushing on the brake of the car heart rate slows down, more rest and relaxation. And then you have the sympathetic side, which is the gas pedal. Push on the gas harder, more stress, but you get higher performance. The car goes faster, your heart rate goes faster. So HRV is actually really accurate, if it's done correctly, to tell you the status of your autonomic nervous system, and we know a whole bunch of things can both acutely and chronically change that. The biggest thing for training is a high level of training. Stress or stressors a day before can show up in your heart rate variability. The nice part about that is it gives you a physiologic measure of yourself or the athlete's stress level. Sometimes they're good at telling you where it is, sometimes they're not. The caveat, as you mentioned, though, is a couple things. One, when do you do the measurement? Because the context is super important. So the downside to a lot of wearables now is they're trying to put HRV and everything and they're measuring it all the time and so if you have a nice cup of coffee or you go up paddle board or you get stressed or all these things will change your heart rate variability and that's not a flaw in the measurement. That's just how it's actually being done. So for most people you're going to do a heart rate variability over the course of a night because that's relatively stable. When I work with athletes, we do it first thing in the morning using a seated position. So that way you're doing it at a one time measurement after the most stable period, which is normally going to be sleep. With that, we usually use a heart rate strap, although there are some finger sensors that can work. If you look at like I have an aurora ring, I also have a Garmin or is actually pretty accurate with what they report for heart rate variability. They've published that data. The downside is it's accumulating over the course of the night. So if you have things that change your sleep or your sleep quality or duration, that can affect your score a little bit.

Speaker 3: 7:37

And then also if you have athletes that have a very low resting heart rate, you can run into something called parasympathetic saturation, which is the fancy term, meaning their parasympathetic tone is so high or their vagal tone is so high you don't see a lot of their other stressors. So if we use like the beach analogy, imagine like you're on the beach and you have these monster waves are just kind of obliterating everything else. So with those athletes, we typically have to have them do a command and measurement first thing in the morning and we put them in a standing position so you put your body in a little bit of stress. Now we can kind of see some of those background stressors. So I have a Garmin too, and they published some stuff. The overnight on Garmin is actually pretty accurate.

Speaker 3: 8:21

Again, all all of them use kind of their own algorithms, so the numbers aren't really a direct one to one comparison. But again, the issue is when are they giving you that data? So, unfortunately, a lot of wearables now, like I mentioned, they're trying to give you more data all the time and again without that context it's not useful, right? So I go to a hard, heavy session and it says, hey, your heart rate variability sucks. I'm like, well, yeah, I want to be sympathetic If I want that output. I, that's what I want at that particular point. If I'm chilling out in the evening, then I want the inverse of that. Again, the context of when the measurement is actually being done is super important.

Speaker 1: 8:56

Mike, what would be so when you're looking at the numbers, what would be the numbers for, quote, a good variability of four, one, a great one. What is that? What are the units on that? What's the value?

Speaker 3: 9:10

Yeah, so if this is a big if, if they give you the actual raw data, you'll see it's measured in milliseconds. So what that is is it's actually how much variability you have from one beat to the next, and this is fine scale variability. You know 20 to 110 milliseconds, so very, very, very tiny In general. The more you have, the more parasympathetic side of the equation you're on, and that's a good thing. Like we have long term data showing that it's related to cardiac mortality and some pathologies and other things like that. If you just get the raw data and it's accurate, you know like 20 to 40 milliseconds I would say is probably average. There's some data showing that you know 20 to 25 may even be average from a general population athletes tend to do better and heart rate variability.

Speaker 3: 10:03

The other issue is that some devices like I use the athlete app a lot that takes that score and it translates a two of one to 100 scale, because like telling you something in milliseconds isn't that super helpful for people. So they'll have. 100 is like close to 100% parasympathetic. A one is like 100% sympathetic you're possibly dead or something bad happened to you and with that they'll give you a little indicator light. They'll say like green, amber or red, and that's to try to tell you the change that you had in terms of should I continue with my training, should I be, you know, pulled back a little bit, or should I take kind of more of a rest day?

Speaker 1: 10:42

Did you explain. I'm sorry, tony, do you have a question?

Speaker 2: 10:45

No, well, just quickly, Mike. So, and maybe, Joe, you're getting it. You know you'll get into this. You talked in about optimal timing, Mike, so you know, is that just during sleep? Is it post-workout recovery of any value? Or what does that really entail when you say optimal, if we could.

Speaker 3: 11:07

Yeah, so most of the research is done with either a sleep measurement, which there really isn't that much data. Until recently Most of the measurement was done with a one-time command and measurement in the morning, like when I did my study in energy drinks. We looked at heart rate variability but at the time we didn't have wearable tech that was good enough to give us that data. So they physically had to come into the lab. They came in the morning, they had either an energy drink or they had a placebo and we would have them rest for a period of time and then we would do the heart rate variability. So a lot of the data going back up until the last couple of years, that was kind of the standard measurement. Now, with wearables you can technically measure HRV at any one point and it will tell you the status of the autonomic nervous system.

Speaker 3: 11:49

The downside is you have to be aware of other things that will change it. So if you did a hard workout, that'll change it. If you drank caffeine, that'll change it. Even drinking a lot of water over a short period of time will alter your heart rate variability. So what I use like post-training if we did like a hard session on the rower or the bike and I wanna see, like, how is that athlete fairing with that training stressor? Like what is their physiologic perception of that? I'll take a one to two minute heart rate recovery because I think that has a little bit more data post-exercise. So that's just how fast you got from a peak, how fast are you coming back down over one to two minutes and that's actually a very good measure of what's called parasympathetic reactivation. So if you're more trained you're in a better state. Basically your heart rate recovery will be faster. So for training sessions I actually use a heart rate recovery more acutely during and post that session.

Speaker 1: 12:47

What are your thoughts on? One, is there a difference between endurance and strength trained athletes? Ie, certainly one of the training effects of chronic endurance training is this crazy braided cardio. They have, I mean, I know a couple of endurance athletes whose resting heart rate is below 40 and even approaching 30. So I guess how much variability is there when you're only beating 30 beats a minute? And then also, is there a difference based on the people who just do power training power training versus endurance training?

Speaker 3: 13:18

Yeah, as a whole, the people who do endurance training will have a much higher HRV, meaning they will be more on the parasympathetic side and, again, resting heart rate is a reflection of that. If my chronic resting heart rate goes down, that means that my HRV in general is gonna be higher. But if you wanna get really far down on the weeds and you look at a lot of athletes, one of the things I'll look at is how correlated is their heart rate variability to their resting heart rate. Most people that should be pretty correlated, meaning that as they see chronic adaptations one of them is a lowering of heart rate their heart rate variability should go up. In a handful of people I've seen that correlation breaks down a little bit and that's telling me there's some other weird stress where they've got going on, like some eye issues, some vestibular issues. They've been knocked out a few times. There's something else going on with that. So usually endurance athletes will fare much better with that. Again, that goes back to knowing that.

Speaker 3: 14:15

For a measurement status, then, if I just have like a, I had an endurance athlete. Their resting heart rate's 37. When they took their HRV measurement lying down first thing in the morning it literally almost never changed. Like they had to go out and do like an all night bender of like five drinks and sleep four hours and their HRV would change. The lot of the emails I get from people are like heart rate variability is dog shit. I have this endurance athlete and it never changed and I'm like when did you measure it? Did you measure it when they're lying down? Did you measure it over sleep? They're like, yeah, you probably have to do a command and measurement standing to kind of get them a little bit more sympathetic. But because it's always measured standing and you're doing a variability analysis, that kind of drops out over time, cause they're more interested in the changes from day to day. So that's like a big kind of thing that people miss when they do the measurements.

Speaker 1: 15:08

Does HRV predict any clinic outcomes?

Speaker 3: 15:13

In some issues. So when I worked in the medical device industry we implanted pacemakers and defibrillators and later on they actually measured heart rate variability all the time. So when they would do something where they would try to resynchronize the right side of the ventricle to the left side so the right side of the heart to the left side for heart failure these are primarily what's called left bundle branch blocks we would see heart rate variability would get much better over time. So in different pathologies like that it can be used diagnostically to see how the therapy they're delivering is going. There's some other data in general showing that if you have better heart rate variability you have a less chance of sudden cardiac death. There's some other data on that.

Speaker 3: 15:54

The hard part again is it's not this nice neat linear curve Cause people email me all the time. They're like hey man, here's my HRV. Is this good? It's like well, you're kind of within the range of good cause. They think if I just like a milliseconds, like, oh man, if I'm 80, and I do all this endurance training, I get to 110, like I'm gonna be so much better.

Speaker 3: 16:16

It's like eh not necessarily You're on the high end of the curve and it kind of flattens out for benefits. Now, if you're 10 and you go to 30, yeah, you're probably gonna see some pretty big, you know pickups from that change.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Tony, do you think there's any value to it? Like because mixed martial arts fighters, the volume of training is so ungodly high. Is there a way to use it as a predictor of whether or not I guess I don't know if the term is overreached or over-trained, or you know, probably, and I think it would have to be with Mike's, you know, taking a look at what Mike's recommendations are regarding the timing.

Speaker 2: 16:56

I mean, it's what we're looking for with those guys. Obviously it's trends, not just HRV, right? Maybe three or four things going in. Whatever's going up that should be down is not good. Whatever's going down that should be up is not good. So I think it may be one of a collective group that has some great value. I would assume in most cases, as Mike said, there's some consistency with a decline in resting heart rate or an increase in recovery capacity and the HRV itself. So I think it has great value, to be honest.

Speaker 2: 17:31

But I think two things are, and that's why we're here today what might be a good measurement tool? And if we're going to measure it in the MMA athlete, particularly during camp Mike, where you have your two or three training sessions per day, so that makes it even hard maybe to potentially get effective measurements post-training, but then again limited to sleep, because this is what I'm learning right now for Mike, dr Mike, here is that there's too much room for variation if I'm doing it all day long in a stressful day where they're going from session to session and maybe gym to gym. So I think it can have a lot of utility. But, as we're seeing here, I think we have to be very strategic is the word I'm getting in when we measure, and even potentially for the duration. Right, mike, is that right?

Speaker 3: 18:17

Yeah, and Joel Javison has used this a lot too with the Marchal Art athletes for many years and used a mega wave and other systems. And yeah, you're correct, like for 90 to 95% of people listening to this podcast, do a commada measurement first thing in the morning, do it after they use the bathroom. Don't drink any water, don't do anything else, just sit down, get into calm state Most people it's gonna be seated like the rare endurance athletes can be standing, do the measurement and then just log it right. And so, like Tony was saying, if you're going into a camp, you then have to take the HRV measurement and put it into the context of what you expect, right? So if you're in the middle of your camp, you're probably gonna see the athletes are a little bit more stressed, right, cause they're doing a whole bunch of shit. But as you get closer to the fight, then you would wanna see that stress level going down so that they're at a more recovered type state. And so that's where I find that it's most useful, especially for athletes, that you tell them it's like, okay, you're gonna run through a brick wall today.

Speaker 3: 19:20

They're like cool, coach, here I go right, you can show them the data, because some of those athletes can do an ungodly amount of work and so you wanna titrate the work so they're getting the right adaptations, but they'll drive themselves in the red like no problem and a lot of times they won't tell you.

Speaker 3: 19:34

They're like oh, coach, I'm fine, I'm fine, right. So having other measurements velocity based stuff, watching their skills, watching, resting heart rate, watching HRV you could like, hey, man, we see these metrics and looks like you're getting close to kind of the max, so let's pull back for a few days. You're not a bad human being, your body is just telling us that you're stressed. And then they kind of do that and like oh yeah, okay, I feel a little bit better. So I like having at least a couple of measures that are not dependent on what they say. And then when I calibrate that to what do they say, what are they feeling? Because, as we all know, that's different for every athlete. So it gives you their perception and then it gives you an actual physiologic measurement of the response of their system to everything that's going on.

Speaker 2: 20:21

Just to quickly. An excellent point, really great point, because the markers might tell you otherwise and, like you said, they're just gonna keep sucking it up and do not be any of that. You're right, great point.

Speaker 1: 20:33

Yes, as you both are well aware, in our industry not just the people who are the experts in it, but the people who exercise, who follow the advice online that it tends to be quite a fetish industry. It's something quote new comes up and is like, oh my God, I gotta do that. You know whether it's following. I remember when the ketogenic diet was such a big thing and now you don't hear much about it. The carnivore diet you're starting to hear more about it, but I'm sure it'll go through its life cycle. Cold water immersion that seems to be the sort of fad of the day Everyone's buying, literally. I can't believe people are buying buckets just to sit in cold water.

Speaker 3: 21:18

And that's you know what.

Speaker 1: 21:19

That's why Tony and I moved to Florida.

Speaker 3: 21:21

We didn't move to cold.

Speaker 1: 21:23

And Mike remember when I was in Minnesota that one time. Oh yeah, the last time you were over there I was like holy crap, I'm freezing my ass off. I guess I can't do this cold stuff. So what are your thoughts on? I mean, there's two things that you know your opinion on just this fattish nature of our industry, and then, specifically, you know using cold to do whatever.

Speaker 3: 21:46

Yeah, I mean, fitness has always been fattish. I think, as Alan Cosgrove once said, there's like the over and under reaction to everything. Right, you can just watch the pendulum swing from. You know. No one had ever heard of cold water immersion four or five years ago, other than some Wim Hof and some crazy instructors. To now, everyone's gotta do cold water. And there's also then the sub fraction of people who are like cold water.

Speaker 2: 22:08

I hate. It's the stupidest thing ever.

Speaker 3: 22:10

Right. So you've got like the pendulum going back both ways. Sauna was kind of that way and it's hard, I think, for consumers, because rarely is everything is, you guys know, black or white. So if you look at cold water immersion, I started doing it like right before COVID, I got a freezer, converted it, filled it full of water. I thought, oh, let's see what this is about, cause the research seemed kind of interesting.

Speaker 3: 22:35

And for recovery, which I would say is in season athletes training relatively hard, again, this could be speed, power, vertical jump. But unfortunately it's a mixed bag on whether it does actually help or not. Like some data says yes, some data says no. But then you're looking at okay, what did they use for protocol? How long did they do it? You know all the. There's so many factors that go into it. We just don't have enough data to even make good meta analyses or just make heads or tails. But most athletes I've worked with they do tend to like cold water immersion and they do tend to like it in season. And I'm generally fine with that because if they feel better and they can perform better the next day or for the next game, cool Like I may give up a little bit of adaptation with it Don't care Like if they can perform again cool, that's awesome Audis season it gets a little bit trickier.

Speaker 3: 23:26

And then if you look at hypertrophy, which again most of the burrows care about and everyone else does too, for good reason there is some data showing that hypertrophy may be blunted from cold water immersion. Now, again, the caveat is if you actually read the studies. The main study which is done from Van Loon's lab looked at 50 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 20 minutes. So most of the studies are at least 10 minutes or longer to see changes for hypertrophy. And so I went through for the physiologic flexibility cert and pulled all the studies, read them all, because in my brand I'm like, okay.

Speaker 3: 24:00

So if I translate this, what does that actually cost in terms of muscle hypertrophy? So if we take like the hypothetical, like highest gain, let's say you can add 12 pounds lean body mass a year, right, that's, you're definitely an outlier, that's definitely the extreme, but it makes simple math to see. You know, it's about a pound per month. If I do cold water immersion in a 50 degrees Fahrenheit and I follow the study exactly and I do 20 minutes and I do it immediately post training. Does that cost me half a pound, like a quarter of an ounce, like three quarters of a pound, Like what is the number in an actual, you know English sort of translation? And of course the answer is I can't tell you.

Speaker 1: 24:40

Well, actually you point to, you actually point to a larger scientific problem, not just with cold water immersion, but really a lot of the studies that look at muscle protein synthesis. These are all acute training. Actually, they're not training studies, they're just acute studies. A lot of them are yes, yeah, and so being able to give pragmatic advice in that, like you give the example of one pound a month for 12 months, well, I know you ain't gonna find anyone doing a 12 month time course study it's just not gonna happen.

Speaker 1: 25:11

What about an eight week study on cold water immersion? I haven't seen that either what about?

Speaker 1: 25:15

a four week and then you get into what's the value of four weeks if someone's been doing it for a year. So there's all these limitations with it, and I take my attitude towards is actually the same with supplements and you know when people say, well, what supplements you know, would you recommend it. And my attitude is, or my philosophy is, if it helps or has a neutral click, use it. You know, if it does nothing, the worst that'll happen as you spend some money. But if it might help, use it now With cold water immersion, as you mentioned, there might be an inhibition of muscle protein synthesis, but that's under those specific circumstances. What would happen if you play with the temperature, play with the duration, and the answer is nobody knows. So nobody knows.

Speaker 1: 26:00

Now I know a lot of people who do it and they basically say, well, I just feel better afterwards and I'm like, okay, well, if you feel better afterwards, I just do it. I mean, I know a lot of the D2 athletes at our university. They do it. It's almost like as a matter of it's almost a habit, a lot of coaches and say, okay, sit in the tub, recover, blah, blah, blah, and maybe it helps, maybe it doesn't. I think a better recovery is maybe just have protein post workout. We know that'll help you recover Versus, you know, sitting in a cold tub.

Speaker 1: 26:31

So I think it's just hard to do. Is it's really hard to do these time course studies? And those are really the ones that have to be done, not these acute. You know, let's sit in a tub for a few hours and then measure, measure, mps. It's like, yeah, that's like you know. I'll take the baseball analogy. That's like looking at the first pitch, wow, that guy can throw. And then, yes, so is that supposed to predict how he throws in the seventh inning? Of course not. So what sucks is, most people will look at the acute stuff and not really ask no one's doing the chronic stuff. The chronic stuff is actually the hard stuff to do.

Speaker 3: 27:09

Yeah, and I think with cold water immersion last count, I could be wrong in this. There's only four chronic studies looking at hypertrophy, and I want to say the longest was eight weeks, and you know some of them did muscle fiber, so they could show difference in muscle fiber diameter. But as you know, joey, because you did that work directly, how do you scale that up to a whole human like? You could statistically show there's a difference, but you can't translate that to what that means. The other one is DEXA, and it was within the limits of DEXA. Again, you pull all the subjects, you can see a difference. If you try to go down to an individual basis, it kind of breaks down, and they did show right directly it does affect muscle protein synthetic response.

Speaker 3: 27:50

The caveat I would add, though, is that most people would say it also affects inflammation, but the studies that I've looked at for that in healthy people not pathologies Inflammation markers don't seem to change, like IL-6 and kind of your classic inflammation markers TNF alpha they don't seem to change much at all. So I'm not convinced. In healthy people it's changing inflammation. Now pathologies that might be different. We just don't have much data there.

Speaker 1: 28:16

Mike, do you think? Do you want those inflammatory markers to change post exercise.

Speaker 3: 28:21

Well, that's the other question, right? So my guess is that you probably want to buy modal response, like after exercise. You probably want them to go up right, you probably want to have some type of inflammation to help the healing process. But then you want to come back down to baseline and then you probably want to hit them again. You don't really want them to be chronically elevated but you don't want to. You look at some of the studies with NSAIDs. You don't want to purposely, you know, blunt them all the time and then that gets even messier. If you look at adult, you know older populations NSAIDs you know Trappy did that study where they were frankly anabolic. So older adults responded different than younger adults.

Speaker 1: 29:00

So yeah, tony, are you at that age where you got to take NSAIDs in the morning, like me?

Speaker 2: 29:06

I don't, I. I mean, I usually have them in the morning instead of my cereal, with a little bit of milk and just a little bit of milk.

Speaker 2: 29:15

I don't use them that much. But the answer to that is I would. I probably should, regarding just mitigating pain, but I don't use them. I do. I've been really up in my mobility work and the joints are feeling pretty good. And, by the way, just to me, one of the best things you can do, completely anecdotal, you want to your body to feel pretty good again. Get it in the water, get gravity off. You do some mobility work in the water, swim a little bit, and that in and of itself, I think is a great method of recovery. But as far as the ibuprofen, I am and I will use that for really bad days, really bad- yeah, you know it's weird, I get into these weird habits.

Speaker 1: 29:55

Like I'll wake up and, like man, I'm really stiff, kind of sore, like back hurts, so I take, I take Advil, I take like three or four pills and then I catch myself repeating that behavior every morning. I'm like crap. I've been doing this straight for like two weeks. Maybe I should back off, yeah, and just deal with the stiffness, the soreness, you know. And let's face it, mike, we all know age always wins. So yes, it's just.

Speaker 2: 30:21

It's just what it is now.

Speaker 1: 30:23

Hey, let's change subjects. I want to talk to you about fasting, because that's another one of those fattish things intermittent fasting time, restricted feeding. I was listening to forget who. There's a guy who's like ubiquitous on social media. I think his name is. He's the guy who worked with Dana White Brecca get back.

Speaker 3: 30:39

Oh.

Speaker 1: 30:39

Brecca yeah it's like he's like when and I'm paraphrasing because I, when I was listening to some like how does he know that? Well, from zero 10 hours, this is what happens with a, with a three day water fast, and then from 10 to 20 hours this happens, and then from 24. I'm like Wait, do we have data that is that precise? Zero to 10, 10 to 20, 20, so fasting it's. It is fattish. It is fattish. We had a card, tony, who'd we have, who talked about I F and chronic clerk restriction, about Texas tech remember, I guess.

Speaker 3: 31:15

Texas that was grant. Yeah, grant tinsley yeah, yeah, good guy is awesome.

Speaker 1: 31:21

From a purely body composition, a body weight standpoint, there doesn't seem to be a difference fasting versus chronic clerk restriction. But tell us what your thoughts on it in terms of is just, it's an additional way to basically restrict calories. Is there any special health benefits to it, etc. Etc.

Speaker 3: 31:40

Yeah. So I originally heard about fasting through Brad Pilon's book Eat, stop Eat. Going back, oh God, probably on a decade, 11 years ago, and back at that point I was like fasting what is this? This is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Like all the muscle is going to fall right off your body. This is the stupidest thing ever, and I never thought it would become popular. And so I read his book and I started looking at all the studies and I was like, oh well, maybe it's not as bad for us as we thought, and so I always viewed it as okay, maybe it's more neutral. And then fast forward many years. There's all these crazy autophagy and this and that and this and that and everything else.

Speaker 1: 32:21

Oh, autophagy, that's another one, but we'll get to that later. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 32:26

Oh, but I did end up using it as an intervention in the flux diet serve because when I started working with clients I realized that, oh, if I took a very progressive manner, so I made a mistake of like, okay, I mean, every couple of hours I'm going to try fasting for 24 hours, and it was a train wreck. And I tried again still a train wreck. But then I realized I'm like, oh, I'm an idiot. It'd be like someone coming to my gym at the time and being like, oh, bro, you've never deadlifted. Cool, let's put 405 on the bar and I'll just yell at you to try harder.

Speaker 1: 32:59

Well, mike, explain how you felt during that initial 24 hours, while you're like, holy shit, this is a dumb idea that I'm doing I felt like crap and I was hungry.

Speaker 3: 33:14

And what I realized also was that for me at the time, eating every couple of hours that was awake to go for 24 hours just like deadlifting 405, if you've never started, it's just too big of a gap. So I said, okay, what if I just go and I skip breakfast, starting on Monday? I skip breakfast just Monday and I just do normal the rest of week. The following Monday, let's say, I skip breakfast and then I don't eat until one in the afternoon. So I took like six day weeks, just taking one day per week and just slowly built out the time that I was fasting. And when I did that I realized like shocker adaptation, I felt pretty good and it wasn't really that hard. And so when I started trying it with clients, I'd also tried very low caloric days, just eat one meal, all this other stuff. But when I did a very progressive manner, most people actually liked fasting. They came back and they said, wow, I actually liked this. And when I was working with them I realized, okay, if I get to 24 hours, or 19 to 24 hours, that's an easy way of literally just chopping out a day's worth of calories from their total caloric load and they could eat more normal quote unquote the rest of the time. So from a compliance standpoint, if it was progressive, I found it was actually super useful. And then when I was looking and researching metabolic flexibility, I was also trying to think I'm like, okay, what else can we do to potentially make someone more sensitive to insulin and get them to try to use more fat as a fuel? And obviously exercise helps, sleep helps. But you know, shocker, if you just don't eat right, your insulin levels go down. That does push your body to use more fat acutely as a fuel source and then obviously you're cutting out a whole amount of calories for that period of time. And there is some interesting studies looking at fasting as a way to increase and to resensitize the body's ability to use fat as a fuel again. If you're relatively metabolically healthy, metabolically flexible, it's pretty easy. Those people don't need a lot of work. There's a study done in people who are borderline obese, type 2 diabetics. It took up to 48 hours of fasting for their insulin levels to kind of come all the way back down again. So I like using it because it's been relatively easy with clients. It's a good way to cut out a whole bunch of calories.

Speaker 3: 35:24

On the health side, I think there may be some implications, helping the body to use fat better as a fuel. Now again, we don't know if that magically translates to you losing a bunch of fat or anything like that. It's just another intervention to do. The downside is the benefits of it generally have been way oversold. Stuff from an earthworm doesn't necessarily scale up to humans. The closer you get to mammals, the more a lot of those studies just don't translate much at all. So I think there might be some health benefits if you're already unhealthy. That's debatable. We don't want to have a whole lot of data there. That's just my guess at this point. But it's also extremely hard to set up a study where you don't have that caloric deficit also. So most of the studies that have looked at that would say currently most of the benefit does come from having that type of caloric deficit when they've compared them to each other.

Speaker 1: 36:25

Tony, when fighters are cutting weight, do they employ basically I'll just eat less throughout the day, or do some of them use time restricted feeding or some sort of fasting technique?

Speaker 2: 36:38

Yeah, I think there was a time where I think they were time restricting unintentionally, just not eating enough, and that was the. You know they did that largely because they were coming into camp with weights at about 18 to 22% above scale. They were less cognizant of maintaining good body composition in the off season, joey. So I think it was unintentional, they had little option but, to you know, wake up in the morning, train and not eat, and that was a behavior with really no intent from a fasting standpoint or the being cognizant of the benefits of fasting. Just that's what they needed to do and that's how they felt about it.

Speaker 2: 37:17

You're restrict calorically. I think we see less of it now and I'm thankful for that, particularly as you get into camps. I think what people tend to forget is can you suck it up? You know, physically, I mean, yeah, you can get to practice. You got some glycogen left over. As Mike said, if you're in good condition, you can pull some fats at various points throughout the course of the training day, but I can't see any benefit in it, benefit when you're trying to process cognitively at very high speeds and that's where the brain, I think, is, you know, really going to need its glucose.

Speaker 3: 37:52

And yeah, can you?

Speaker 2: 37:52

spill enough from the liver at that point maybe to get through one practice. But how are you going to get through two? You know so I'm not a proponent of it in sport, not during camps or not, where there are high cognitive demands and where the motor skill applications are very complicated, like I, don't you know if you're going to go for a long run. I'm not condemning running. I think endurance athletes are incredible. You have to overcome the pain. You have to. There's much you have to overcome, but it's not like doing an aerial on a balance beam and I don't want to do that fast.

Speaker 2: 38:25

The brain has to, probably right, and I I'll let Mike elaborate on this, but the brain needs quite a bit of fuel at a ferocious pace when you have to, particularly with reaction time, response and so forth, right, so yeah, I would.

Speaker 3: 38:38

I would agree with that. I mean you can look at like liver glycogen overnight after a fast will be relatively depleted. Right, you can fast for like two days and muscle glycogen won't really be tapped at all. Again, the assumption is you're not doing a lot of muscular work. Once that starts escalating and you're fasting and you're doing a high output of more glycolytic type work. Yeah, I mean pretty much any athlete in the face of the planet is going to be like yeah, I don't feel so good at the after this.

Speaker 1: 39:12

Now, mike, you had mentioned and I forgot to ask you about this you had mentioned the, you know, fasting versus chronic loric restriction, and a lot of the benefits are just from you're just restricting calories, losing weight, etc, etc. What about the claims of cold water immersion promoting the loss of body fat?

Speaker 3: 39:31

Oh boy. So when I looked at the research on this I my thought pattern was okay, maybe there's something to this right. I mean I did my background was a mechanical engineering, so I suffered through thermal. I did a. My thesis was actually on heat transfer. So stick a monkey in front of a big microwave transmitter and blast the monkey and look at. You know heat transfer effects in the head and stuff. And so you know that cold water does leach. You know heat from the body really fast. We know humans are homeotherms. They have to keep about you know 98.6 temperatures, actually about 97.7. And so when I looked at it I was kind of secretly hoping I'm like man. I hope this works, Because doing cold water immersion sucks when you do it. This is not fun and unfortunately I was very disappointed Again that I think you can get there.

Speaker 3: 40:21

There is an old, so the military spent a lot of money looking at this right, because if soldiers are in you know they go overboard or the how long can they hang out in the water. So this is you look at some very old research like there's a fair amount of research in that area, and what you find is for body comp. I think the one study was they put them in basically a freezer at like 41 degrees. This was air in like a pair of shorts for like an hour and a half or some crazy amount of time, and this is a chronic study and they did see a fair amount of weight loss with that.

Speaker 3: 40:52

They didn't look at body comp, the cold water itself not much in theory, if my back of the envelope calculations are even remotely close to right. You have to be in for quite a long time and you have to be into the point where you're frankly just shivering and cold for a long time after. Again, safety factors. Obviously there's a big risk with that. I'm not recommending anybody do this. I may have tried that a few times in my garage and take a bunch of measurements and it is absolutely horrible. Like to sit in there with your teeth chattering and to be cold for like three to four hours after for some theoretical benefit that I can't point to for many study no.

Speaker 1: 41:35

You guys remember a book called Life Extension by Dirk Pearson, and Sandy Shaw.

Speaker 2: 41:41

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yes.

Speaker 1: 41:42

It was one of. I read this, this book, a long time ago and one of the things they recommended for losing fat, and I remember reading this. I'm like they're insane. They said make your house really cold. Yeah, it's really cold and you'll shiver all day, and shivering is just another way to expend energy, obviously, and you'll lose body fat, you'll lose weight or whatever. I'm thinking who the hell is gonna do that? I mean? In Minnesota you know, you can just open the windows in the winter. Yeah, you'll shiver like all day.

Speaker 2: 42:15

In Florida that would cost you 2,500 a month to keep your. Ac in a level where you shiver all day.

Speaker 1: 42:21

Yeah, imagine AC running, just so you can shiver. I'm like holy crap.

Speaker 2: 42:25

Yeah, you're right 2,500 a month.

Speaker 1: 42:26

Hey, mike, last topic I want to talk to you about rep ranges because when the last half decade or so, the idea that you know, in terms of muscle hypertrophy at least not not strength you know whether it's high volume, low load or high load, low volume or low reps, it sort of doesn't matter how you achieve hypertrophy. You sort of You'll get to the same place. Just we're taking a different road.

Speaker 3: 42:52

Yeah, I agree with that. Brad Schoenfeld has done some of those studies you can go back to. One of the first studies was done by Nick Byrd from Steve Phillips lab, right. So the range is probably as low as 30% of 1RM up to 85% of 1RM. You might even be able to go higher than that. It was just that study. The amount of time they spent lifting to equate volume was a lot and if you talk to people in it I think they might even reported this in the study or I got it from Brad directly is that they had a lot more joint pain. They just didn't feel as good.

Speaker 1: 43:24

Wait, the high rep group or low group.

Speaker 3: 43:26

The high load group.

Speaker 3: 43:28

High load group, like the 85% of the 1RM, and that makes sense, right? You're using to have your loads, you're probably going to have more stress on the joints, so that kind of adds up, especially when you're equating volume across both groups. Again, if you want more strength, you probably have to be a little bit on the heavier load. That's even a little bit more in question from talking to Steve Phillips. They looked at a couple studies where because most of these studies, if it's a chronic study, they have whatever implement they're doing, but the measurements are usually done on an isokinetic machine in order to get all these cool numbers and stuff off it, which I totally get. But that's a different thing that you're measuring than what you were doing in the study in most cases, but not every case.

Speaker 3: 44:11

So Steve was saying that they had a couple studies, that they equated them, so they had them practice isokinetic for like two sessions and then looked at their strength instead of just putting them on the bio decks and running it, and they didn't see nearly as much of a strength gain as what the other studies showed. So maybe it's like this hyper specific learning effect. Maybe just by getting the muscle bigger you do get more strength gains than what we realize. You know. Again, these are probably not elite level athletes we're looking at during the studies either and they're limited over time, course. But it is interesting because I used to be very much of the. If you want to get strong, you have to definitely lift heavier, and I do think that's generally true to specificity. However, there's probably more positive transfer from a lot of stuff, I think, than what we realize. Also, which man trying to sift through all that stuff makes it very hard and takes a lot of studies to put together.

Speaker 2: 45:11

And just a thought too, mike, because we're seeing some research now that is telling us that we don't have to go the compound group or multiple joint group in order to stimulate more. We can isolate each group and potentially get the aggregate would be the same in each targeted area. What are your thoughts on that? From what we're seeing, Probably.

Speaker 3: 45:32

I mean, I agree with most of those studies. Right Again, if you're looking at getting relatively close to failure, most of those studies would show that yeah, you can get probably equivalent hypertrophy. So I do admit, for more general population than I train, I do use more machines now for hypertrophy than I did in the past. The caveat I will give, though, is that those tend to be more intermediate to advanced lifters also, and it's an online environment and I don't trust a lot of them getting close to failure on squat bench deadlift things that are more technical without somebody watching them.

Speaker 3: 46:08

So I think you can make like one of the templates I use a lot is Monday, wednesday, friday maybe squat, bench, deadlift as your main exercise and my goal is more performance with that. When I add more load over time, I want it to be very technically precise and then I'll do more accessory work with machines and crap. If you're going to almost failure or failure on a leg extension, I'm not that worried. Right and so if you want some level of performance and you want some hypertrophy, but you want to air and be a little bit more safe, I've used more of that template a lot now than I did five years ago.

Speaker 1: 46:41

Right, great. Last question and we'll wrap it up, mike, sort of a fun question what supplements would you recommend for someone Basically trains for general fitness? They do some cardio, they do some weights. They're like hey, dr Mike, could you tell me what supplements might help? I eat pretty well most of the time, so what would you recommend?

Speaker 3: 47:00

I would start with the protein supplement more, just out of convenience. Right, if you're hitting all your protein with real food, great, I don't need it. Creatine five grams per day. Monohydrate don't eat anything fancy. Fish oil two to four grams per day, depending on how deficient they are. I have a little blood spot test I use to see where the levels are at the other one that the data is, I'd say, conflicting.

Speaker 3: 47:24

I actually use a high dose multivitamin multimineral supplement. There's some data showing that under high stress conditions it appears to be beneficial. They did some cool studies where they put researchers out after, like some of the earthquakes in New Zealand, some of the floods in North Dakota, and they gave one group placebo and they gave another group the high dose multivitamin because the thought process was this is a high external stressor environment. Let's just look to see what happens. Both those studies granted, they're done by the same research group. I did show that the multivitamin group was better. Again, general population, not necessarily athletes maybe their diet sucks, but I haven't seen much of a downside with that. Their stress tolerance appears to go up a little bit After. That depends on what they're trying to do caffeine once in a while for performance, and then it just gets into hyper specific single digit percentages of what you want to get after that. That's right.

Speaker 1: 48:23

Well, if it helps or has a neutral effect, I say give it a shot. Mike, where can people find out more about you? Are you giving any seminars between now and ISSN? Where can people find you?

Speaker 2: 48:36

Oh yeah, I didn't want to interrupt, mike, but just give us a quick minute on what they learned, because I know you've worked on your certification too. Give me a quick minute on what that cert entails.

Speaker 3: 48:47

Yeah sure, the first cert is the flex diet certification. It's based on nutrition and recovery, everything from sleep to the macronutrients, meat, et cetera. Then how do you take that and learn the theory? Then the big principle is metabolic flexibility, flexible dieting. Then we have very specific action items that they need to do. The second one is the level two. It's a physiologic flexibility cert looking at homeostatic regulators so temperature, hot, cold, exposure, ph, breathing, and then also expanded fuels, everything from ketones to lactate. All the stuff you can find for me is at miketeenelsoncom. I do have some stuff on Instagram once in a while which is just dr yeah, it's dr M-I-K-E-T-N-E-L-S-O-N. Then most information I put out is on the newsletter. If you go to miketeenelsoncom, just scroll down, you can get on the newsletter and most information goes out that way.

Speaker 1: 49:45

Great. I repeat, that is miketeenelsoncom. That is miketeenelsoncom. Dr Mike, I want to thank you for being on the Sports Science Dude. You are an official Sports Science Dude.

Speaker 3: 49:55

Oh nice.

Speaker 2: 49:55

Cool.

Speaker 1: 49:58

We'll send the certification in the mail, oh perfect, yay. Well, thanks and hey, you enjoy the holidays. Have a Merry Christmas, have a great New Year and thank you for being on the show.

Speaker 3: 50:09

Thank you guys very much I appreciate it. We'll see you soon. Thanks again. See you guys soon. Thank you, bye.