 So why is keto bad for athletes? Well, first off, it's not. So if you just look this one up and you're like, why is it bad for athletes? It's just a misunderstanding or understanding of how keto really works. So the reality is this, is being in ketosis is a superior way for the human body to function. Doesn't mean as an athlete that you should always be in ketosis. We have to understand what keto is before you decide if it's good or bad for anybody. The human body has literally been in ketosis for all of our existence, majority of the time. So for an athlete not to spend time in ketosis, that's a big mistake. But for an athlete to be in ketosis all the time, that may also be a big mistake. And I want to explain why. So first off, hey, my name is Dustin Schaefer. I've been in the human performance space for over 20 years. I've been fortunate to work with the top researchers, coaches, doctors, globally, human performance coaches. And I've got to learn from the best of the best. But I also have my own personal experience. As a former recombinant college athlete, I'm huge into fitness, I'm huge into performance. My whole focus is around performance. And it's not just high level athletes, it's everybody perform better. But the one thing that's been really cool over the last five years is that I've been kind of leaned on globally from the top soccer players, Olympic athletes to basketball players, football players, you name it globally, have kind of leaned cyclists, runners, marathon runners and endurance athletes have leaned on me because they want ketones, but they don't know how to do it. How do you get into ketosis and then maintain the high level performance? Well, I'm gonna paint a little picture for you all so you can kind of understand where you could fit in this as an athlete, as whatever athlete that you might think you are or you are, I'm gonna kind of paint a picture. Science right now is showing and proving that majority of endurance athletes, so an endurance athlete is somebody that extended amount of time, typically where they're maintaining a heart rate, let's say about 50%, 55%, some would go a little higher than that for a sustainable amount of time, even 40% for some of your long, long runners. So you're maintaining a heart rate up to, let's say you maintain your heart rate right here, not at a max heart rate, but you're maintaining a heart rate for a sustained, a longer time. What is sustained amount of time? That can be literally over five minutes. It doesn't have to be super long, but most endurance athletes are going for 30 minutes, 40 minutes, an hour, two hours, some 16 hours. True story, 16 hour endurance athletes, it's crazy out there, right? Well, that person, think of it as, they're gonna run more efficiently on fat. Fat in your body will ultimately produce ketones. Now we can drink ketones too, which we'll talk about in a second, but think of it this way, it's like a diesel truck driving across America. A diesel truck basically is a huge, low truck, they don't drive fast, it's not about performance, it's about long, steady, consistent, right? Well, ketosis is a great way to do that. It's very efficient, utilize less oxygen, you get this really efficiency of the cell. Biggest reason why, and a lot of people miss this, is ketones are a cleaner fuel source. So there's less byproduct and waste product. Also, if you're in ketosis, typically you're not loading with a bunch of glucose and carbs, so you're not heavy on the GI tract, which now distracts the muscle system when you're over consuming food, but it takes time. So so many endurance athletes are trying to figure out how to go keto, and we're talking about the diet for right now, I will talk about drinking ketones, because that is another factor that you can play around with, but, and you're going into the diet, it takes, I always encourage my endurance athletes, keto works, if you get, if you understand it, you get your body there as an endurance athlete, you can perform at a higher level, longer, better, and it doesn't mean you have to eliminate all your carbs because you are using them, but you want to maintain a level of ketosis that is very efficient. To do that, you want to start on your off season. You don't want to do this in season, you want to start on your off season, give yourself six months to figure out how the diet's gonna formulate for you, and it's a process. It's a higher fat, moderate protein, low carb diet, and the cool thing is you can do longer runs with less food. So you might go on and do a three hour run, your fastest run might be fasted, and that's crazy before this, before keto, like that didn't happen, right? Your longest fastest run might be a fasting, because now your GI tract doesn't have to worry about anything else, but burning ketones from your fat source, that's it. It's just, it's a burning efficient fuel source. You might do a little fat snack before to help the system out a little bit, but you don't have to go super aggressive, but remember, six months to master that. So if you start doing keto mid season or partly through your training, you're probably gonna screw it up, and you're probably gonna have bad runs. You're probably gonna be dehydrated. You might not hydrate effectively. There's all these other reasons why it might not work. That's not bad for athletes, it just means that you didn't go about it from an intelligent perspective, not to say you're dumb, you got excited and you just decided to go do it, and no, as a coach, you gotta take people through a process. You're changing the way that you're doing everything from a nutritional perspective, doesn't make it wrong, just means you need to figure it out. Statistically, you're better off as an endurance athlete going keto for long-term results. Now here's the catch 22. Anerobic athletes, sprint athletes. Athletes that have short bursts where their heart rate goes up high, where they're going and tapping into ATP really fast. Now, keto does increase ATP production, but here's the challenge is you want some glucose present. So this is where it gets obstacle. This is where it gets really challenging, and why the ketogenic diet is not really the best for anaerobic athletes, in general, is because sometimes you want a little boost of glucose. Now, you can formulate it in the right way and pull it all off, I promise you, but you gotta be really, really aware of how you do this, because if you're gonna go out and be like, let's say you're a 200 meter sprinter and you're gonna run really, really hard, I'm gonna want a little bit of fast-acting fuel in your system. I look at glucose that I use to drive snowmobiles, so it's ether. You pop it in the carburetor and it goes, whee, really fast, but then it just dies off. Well, that's great for 200 meters. Like, that's awesome. I want that extra boost for 200 meters, because after that, I'm just gonna sit down. I'm gonna rest. I don't need the energy then, but if you don't have glucose available in the system, then your body doesn't have, it's not readily available, right? You can find it, but it's not as easy. So, ketones are great though, because ketones are still gonna help with oxygen efficiency, it's gonna help with ATP production, and more importantly, helps with recovery, but with anaerobic athletes, we can time it. From a dietary perspective, what we do with athletes that wanna go keto is off-season, we might do more keto, we might train them that way, but prior to, if they're really keto and they're doing a ketogenic diet, during training, we might tease in some glucose, and now it's just, you have to learn. You have to learn the balance of how much you can get away with, and literally, you can train, maybe you're doing anaerobic training, or you're a powerlifter, or maybe you're a strongman competitor, whatever it is, we add glucose prior to your workout, we gotta figure out how much, what source, that's a process, it's gonna take time, and you're like, I felt strong and powerful, but then an hour or two hours after your workout, you're back into a low carb lifestyle, keeping your weight down, your energy efficiency up, your sleeping isn't better, your recovering faster, and so there's a process in there that you can figure out and you can do. Now, it's gonna take a lot of time, so let's bring in the third component. So over the last few years, we've been doing this, and this is what I coach most people on, is how do you drink ketones? So, we have drinkable ketones, it's the only one in the world that I will recommend, it's the only one in the world I will personally drink, because it's the only bio-identical ketone supplement I can prove exactly how it's gonna work and how you're gonna, from an energy efficiency, and so if you're an endurance athlete, what we do is we just introduce that into your body, we might not adjust your car as much, maybe just reduce them by 30% or 20%, not go full keto, and you might see an even better improvements in your endurance running, you might still decide to go in the ketogenic diet and use that in conjunction, so you don't have to be perfect, so it's gonna fill the gaps, instead of being perfect and have a bad day, you just have to be close and you always have a good day. Anerobic athletes is even better, because anaerobic athletes, we're like, hey, listen, let's use your glucose strategically, but we can be a little higher, a little low, and it's not gonna really make a big difference for us, and we can use this as a performance tool, but more importantly, as a recovery tool. So the coolest thing, if I would have had this back in the day, I don't know, I don't know how far I would have went, but I tell you what, life would have been way better, way more easy, I would have stayed lean, I would have stayed stronger and I would have recovered way faster, so utilizing this tool is a great combo. So when somebody says why athletes shouldn't do keto, they don't understand it. Ketones are efficient fuel source, they have a higher amount of energy, poor caloric, poor gram of higher amount of calories per gram of ketones, they're very efficient. They help with signaling of the cells, they help with cognition and focus, that's great for every athlete, right? They help with oxygenalization, recovery and ATP production, to think that that's not an athletic thing that an athlete shouldn't use, it's just an ignorant statement. The reason why they don't think it's good for athletes is they don't understand how an athlete can do it and still perform, right? And that's gonna take time, you need to find a coach that understands that, you need to find the right, and there's not many out there because this is a pretty new conversation, but I promise you this, the research is clear that if you can elevate your ketone levels while you're performing, even if you're using glucose strategically at times, right? More importantly, just use that with the strategic glucose, you will perform better than you ever can imagine and you're gonna see a lot of breaking records over the next four or five years because of this concept. So, y'all, athletes should have ketones in them. The question is when, where and how. That's the question you should ask yourself. So, hey, to learn more, hey, subscribe to my channel, hit me, PM me. Let me know. I'm here to help you and support you getting there and we'll take care of you as an athlete. I want you to perform at the highest level possible, y'all. Thanks.