Ep29 - You Can Ride Longer Without Getting Tired

Tired of getting tired on long rides with your horse? You can actually train your body to use fuel more efficiently, so you have the energy to stay in the saddle longer. In this episode, endurance rider and personal trainer Tamara Baysinger, aka The Sweaty Equestrian, explains how improving our metabolic flexibility in the gym pays dividends in the saddle. Listen to the end for a podcast-only discount code!

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Welcome to Equestrian Fitness for the Long Ride with the Sweaty Equestrian. I'm personal trainer and endurance rider Tamara Basinger, and I'm here to help you ride stronger in a day and longer in your life. Hello from the land of wildfire smoke. I hope my voice doesn't sound too terrible recording for you today. Because here in southwestern Idaho, I'm kind of in the Boise area, we are inundated with smoke that I think is blowing in from wildfires in central or maybe eastern Oregon. And normally when I look at my windows here at home, I can see at least 30 miles. And today I can see about a mile. It's gray, it's dingy, I can smell the smoke, the air quality is terrible, and I can feel it a bit in my throat. So I apologize if I do not sound my best today or if I cough at you a little bit. I will try my best not to. The good news is I missed some days of this smoke because I just spent a week rafting on the lower Salmon River. If you're from this area, I put in around Whitebird and then floated up to Heller Bar, which is kind of near Lewiston. So that's about a 60-mile whitewater trip. And we took a pretty leisurely five, well, five and a half days to float that far and you know, camp along the river and just hang out with family. So that was fun. It's something I've spent my whole life doing, this whitewater rafting. Um, and it takes me completely outside the world of fitness and the sweaty equestrian and horses and all that. But it puts those same kinds of skills into use in a completely different way because rowing a raft in Whitewater obviously takes timing and strength and knowledge and skill and observation. Um, just like anything nuanced, like riding a horse does, uh, but in a completely different way. So, anyway, it was a good break. It was a good chance to use my body in a different way and be outside and in the non-smoky environment, even though now here I am back in the smoke. And I did go out and ride um just lightly this morning. Um, I didn't want my horses breathing really hard in this smoke, but they're out there anyway. So I figured a little walking wasn't gonna make a difference. Um but yeah, I'm hoping this blows out soon. Anyway, um for those of you who are not in smoke and are able to get out there and ride, I wanted to talk today about how you can ride longer without getting tired. What you can do to prepare your body, in other words, to be able to ride longer without getting tired. Now, this is kind of, you could think of this as part two on the subject of metabolic flexibility. Last week in episode 28, we talked about metabolic flexibility and how that means our ability to use fuel appropriately in variable circumstances. And we talked about it last time in the context of life as a whole, the bigger picture, how our body handles fuel when we haven't eaten in a while versus when we just ate, how well the body can store fat and then access it easily for energy so it doesn't just build up our bodies. So that was the context that affects our long-term health, our physical ability, and especially our body composition over the long term. Now, today I want to look at metabolic flexibility from a different perspective. We're going to talk about it in the context of exercise. And yes, I am including riding. So, in other words, we're talking about athletic performance, the athletic performance benefits of metabolic flexibility as opposed to the bigger picture health and body composition benefits of metabolic flexibility. But why should we care? Why are we interested in being metabolically flexible? Why is that a good thing for our riding? Well, the thing is, the more metabolically flexible you are, that is, the more easily you can shift appropriately between your body's different fuel sources, the longer you are going to be able to continue working and supporting your horse well without reaching that point of exhaustion. So here's how this works: when your body is putting forth effort, energy, you use different types of fuel sources from within your body. You can use stored sugar or carbohydrate in the form of glycogen, or you can use fat. Now, both of those sources, glycogen and body fat, are converted into ATP, which is the short way to say idenosine triphosphate, which is the energy currency of the cell. Without ATP, your body ain't doing nothing. It can't. That is the energy that you spend in order to be able to do things. But you make ATP out of either glycogen or fat, or typically some of each, but predominantly one sliding through the scale to predominantly the other. Now, why would this matter? Well, they are very different sources. Glycogen, or that carbohydrate or sugar source, is really quick and easy to access. It's rapidly converted into ATP, and that makes it ideal for high-intensity work where you need to use a lot of ATP quickly and replace it quickly. The problem with glycogen is that it is available in only a limited supply. And when you are out, you are out. You can't really replace it quickly enough to continue working at that highly intense level of effort for very long. So your body also needs to be able to produce ATP from your stored body fat. Now, the advantage to the stored body fat is that even in the leanest among us, we have an essentially boundless, endless supply. You could go forever on body fat, but the tricky part is that it's slower to access. It's slower to convert into ATP. That makes it ideal for low to moderate intensity effort where you don't need to create ATP as quickly to keep going and going. Now, fortunately for us equestrians, in most cases, most of the work that we do in the saddle, most of that kind of exercise is going to be at that low to moderate intensity. So we can typically tap into our fat stores to keep that slow burn going. And that is preferable because the more we are able to rely on our fat for energy, the less we have to tap into that limited supply of glycogen when we do need a quick boost of effort that is at a higher level of intensity. Now, this is a continuum. It's not a light switch that's either off or on. It's more like a dimmer switch. And metabolic flexibility is how well we slide up and down that dimmer or that continuum. If we are metabolically flexible, then we are able to shift easily between the fuel sources, between glycogen or body fat, during exercise. So at lower levels of effort, the body can tap into the fat stores for energy that is steady and virtually unlimited, but it's accessed at a relatively slow pace. And then at higher levels of effort, the body can tap that stored glycogen for a quicker but much more limited source of energy. If you are not metabolically flexible, what happens? Well, if you are not able to slide along the continuum toward burning fat, then glycogen is burned preferentially. It's the only other choice. And if you're burning glycogen preferentially, it's going to run out because it's in limited supply. And if those cells can't easily shift to fat for making ATP to give us the energy that we need, then we are going to run out of glycogen, and that's where we feel that early fatigue. And we also get slow recoveries and intense post-workout cravings. So what if you're listening to this and you're thinking, ugh, I kind of am that guy? I am getting tired too early, earlier than I used to. I'm getting worn out sooner than I think I should. And I just don't have the strength and the energy to keep riding well as long as I want to. Well, the good news is that metabolic flexibility is highly trainable. You can teach your body to get better at accessing your body fat for fuel instead of relying on that limited supply of glycogen that you're going to run out of, and that's when you hit that wall or crash. So, how do you do it? How do you improve your metabolic flexibility, particularly in the sense of being able to access body fat for fuel more easily during exercise and also at increasingly challenging levels of exercise? Because the fitter you get, it's all relative, right? What felt like a four out of ten effort when you weren't very fit is going to be really easy later on. That's going to be a one out of ten effort. And your new four out of ten, well, that's going to be something that would have been an eight or nine out of ten before. It's all relative, and your body gets better and better at continuing to be able to burn body fat at that low to moderate level of effort, but low to moderate means a different thing the fitter you get. So how do you do it? How do you build that capacity to tap into your body fat instead of relying on glycogen? Well, you practice, you train your body to do it, and you train your body by putting it in the position of being right about at the edge of where it would shift from burning body fat at that low to moderate effort into needing to tap into glycogen at a higher level of effort. This is what we call zone two training. It doesn't really matter that it's called that, uh, but some of you are nerds like me and you like to know. Um, so when we when we train in zone two, this is that moderate sustained level of exercise. Depending on how fit you are, this could be something like a fast walk, it might be an easy jog, it might be a moderate run. Maybe it's not running at all, of course. A lot of us aren't that interested in running anymore, thank you. Um, but you could also do this uh in a completely impact-free way, like on a um uh stationary bike or on an elliptical machine. What about on your horse though? Is this something that you can train through riding? Not really, I'm afraid. Um, although there are times when we work at a zone two level while riding, a lot of riding, especially the riding that most people do, is not going to be at a zone two level of effort for a sustained period. Certainly it will be at some times, but often it's going to drop too far below that into too easy of an effort to push your body enough to build this as a skill. So, what I'm talking about is maintaining, say, a four out of ten level of effort for a reasonably sustained period of time. And we'll talk in just a minute about what that means. But first, let's talk about what it looks like. How do you know without being in a lab that you are hitting that sweet spot where you're burning body fat, but you're just below where you would shift to burning glycogen. You're just starting to push that boundary. Well, this is the level of effort where you can talk. You're not breathing so hard that you can't uh just gasp out a word, but you could speak in complete sentences. However, you can only barely speak in complete sentences. Like you can, but you don't necessarily want to. Another way to think about this is imagine that you're on the phone with a friend while you are doing this zone two exercise. You would be able to have a conversation with your friend, but they would definitely know you were exercising. You would be more out of breath than if you were just sitting on the sofa chatting. They would be able to tell. Another way that some people use to describe it is that yes, you can speak, but no, you could not sing. Now, let's get back to how long you want to sustain that effort. Well, typically at least half an hour is a good general guideline. You don't need to start there necessarily. If this is something that is new to you, you are still going to get benefit from doing this for 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes. If you work your way up to say three 30-minute zone two workouts per week, you're going to be in a really good place. You're going to be well ahead of what the vast majority of people do, and you're going to be well ahead of what you are currently doing. Because remember, you've heard me say before: if you keep doing what you have always done, you will keep getting what you have always gotten. Except that isn't even true because you will get less and less and less and less because of the natural decline that comes with age. So that's why we need to intentionally put in this consistent zone two effort if we want to maintain and build our ability to tap body fat for fuel during sustained exercise, like riding, rather than burning our limited supply of glycogen and again running out of energy before we really want to. Now, if that's something that you want help getting started on, I do have a couple of guides out there specifically for building your zone two cardio, like from I haven't done this in a really long time, to I want to get pretty good at this. I have 12 or I'm sorry, 16-week guides. One is called the Sweaty Equestrian's Easiest Ever Guide to Running for Riders. And the other is called the Sweaty Equestrian's Easiest Ever Guide to Rocking for Riders. So for you non-runners, the rocking one is what you would want to look at. Rocking is just walking with a weighted pack. And these guides will walk you through, haha, walking you through a really, really gradual progression. It is the most gentle gradual progression that I am aware of on the market out there to get you from where you are, even if that's like nothing, to getting up to being able to, in the running one, run two and a half miles or four kilometers in a half hour without stopping, or um getting you up to in the rocking one, being able to carry 20% of your body weight on your back for two miles in 40 minutes or less. That is a huge thing to be able to do. And it's again going to train your body how to use fuel more efficiently. It's going to make you more metabolically flexible. So, anyway, if you're interested in that kind of support, the guides are available. They're really inexpensive. You can get them at thesweequestrian.com slash cardio. And tell you what, let's even do a discount code. Use at checkout, use code podcast, and I'll give you 20% off either the rucking guide or the running guide. Um, and you can even get them as a package deal and stack a discount on a discount. So use code podcast to get uh 20% off the running for riders or the rucking for riders or the combination of the two, the bundle. And again, that is at the sweatyequestrian.com slash cardio. Okay, that's it for today. Just a reminder though, that I am collecting questions, listener questions from you for a future listener QA episode. If you would like your question about writer fitness to be included in that episode, you can email it to me. And you have my email address because you're on my newsletter list, right? Um that is at the sweaty equestrian.com/slash newsletter. If you are not on the newsletter list, get on there. Um, I'll email you just once a week, and it's on a different topic than the podcast. So if you're only listening to the podcast, you're only getting half of what I'm putting out there every week. Um, so sign up for the newsletter, and then when you get that, you can just hit reply on any of the newsletters, ask me your question, and I'll get that on my list for a future QA episode. And that will help me help you ride stronger in a day and longer in your life. Want to get more sweaty? Subscribe to my newsletter at the sweatyequestrian dot com slash newsletter. And remember, you have what it takes to be a full athletic partner for your horse. Saddle up strong.