 The next speaker is someone in all seriousness who has changed my life. There was a book called Body by Science, which I have right here, my personal copy. He's also the owner and operator of Ultimate Exercise, a personal training facility in Seneca, South Carolina. And he recently filmed a show with Tony Robbins called Breakthrough with Tony Robbins, or Anthony Robbins, same thing. More than that though, I've said something about him that I believe to be 100% absolutely true. I've said it on the internet and I've said it, I said it at our convention in Stockholm and I talked about this book. That Doug is one of the wisest men of our time and so under-appreciated and undervalued, it's almost indescribable. With that said, Doug, would you sign my copy of Body by Science? Be happy to. Appreciate it. My honor. Thank you, Doug. Appreciate it. Honor to have you here. Thank you. Thanks. Yep. Guys, thank you. The first thing I wanted to tell all of y'all is how lucky you are. If I could imagine being 21 years old and being able to come to a convention like this and to have had the opportunity to listen to Mark Sisson, to get workout advice from Drew Bay and Bill de Simone, people that you're going to be hearing, if I would have done two things with that. Number one, have the opportunity to have heard it and number two, to have actually listened to it, it would be really amazing how much more quickly and better my life would have progressed. There is so much that I did with my intense interest in working out that even using the cutting edge technology of the day was just leading me down a very wrong pathway. I came out of the whole Arthur Jones and Autoless High Intensity Training Camp which was a definite move in the right direction but it was a fairly high volume of work doing 15, 20 different movements to complete muscular failure and beyond three days a week and I did this religiously all the way through college, med school, residency and adulthood into my late 30s, early 40s and truly through most of that time it felt like hammered dog shit. Okay, I was really tired and I did it all the way through med school and residency. Every other night call, three days a week, I was there, I did it and I felt like crap. If I could have really been able to have been exposed to this and wrapped my brain around the minimal amount necessary to trigger the adaptive response that I was looking for and then get out of the way, the experience of all of that, of college, of med school, of residency, of getting married, of having children, all of that would have been on such a higher plane because I would have been experiencing it in a much more recovered and a better feeling way. Now, you've already heard Mark Sisson speak and he has really been at the spearhead of the primal diet or the Paleolithic diet. I really don't have anything to add in terms of what he's saying. Other than later, I'm gonna flip this over, I'm gonna drag you guys through med school biochemistry and I wanna provide you with an intellectual understanding of why everything that Mark told you is correct. And as a physician, I can tell you 80% of what Mark Sisson told you goes very severely against the grain of standard medical practice, but he's right and I'm gonna show you that he's right, okay? You're also gonna get the opportunity after me to hear Drew Bay talk, I'm gonna let him give you the nuts and bolts of how to work out, okay? What I wanna give you guys is the why. If you can understand the why, you'll be able to embrace the how. And the basic thrust of the talk that I wanna give you today is I want you to do two things. I want you to not over-train and I want you to eat like Mark Sisson told you to, okay? At this point, I wanted to take a little segue and preface everything that I'm gonna tell you guys today in a certain context because when I got here, I actually ended up arriving late because my flight in last night got canceled, I came in in the morning, I got here around 10 o'clock or so and I decided to pop in on one of the dating talks. And it occurred to me that you guys are all here for self-improvement, to improve your life in every facet, to be better physically, to be better mentally, to be better intellectually and to pursue the best woman that you can find. That's what the game's about. But what I wanna tell you is all this drive for self-improvement that we're all about, that we all embrace, I gotta tell you, it's not about us. And we need to understand that very clearly, okay? Everything that we are here to do today is driven by DNA, okay? DNA is a self-replicating hormone. Its only purpose in the world is to make Xerox copies of itself and propagate itself into the future, okay? You, your brain, your body, your mind, your soul, every bit of you is viewed by DNA as a leased vehicle, okay? It is using you as a vehicle to transport itself forward into the future. And all of your behaviors and all of your desires are driven by that, okay? And that comes to bear out in the kind of workout you do and the kind of diet you eat. And I heard all sorts of advice on, you know, how you're going to initially walk up and speak to a woman. But the story of DNA is true for her as well. And one of the things that people are assessing when they're trying to assess the attractiveness of a mate or whether you're gonna even get your foot in the door is your genetic fitness. Her DNA is assessing your DNA. And you've seen it before. You've seen a really buff, handsome guy in the club approach a girl and get the cold shoulder. And you've seen a guy that's not so buff, pretty skinny, doesn't really have great posture or great dress, walks up, hits a home run. You can ask yourself, why is that? Well, it has a lot to do with DNA because the instantaneous assessment that someone is making of you is trying to assess the health of your DNA relative to theirs and the success of propagation into the future. You're being sized up in an instant. And if you wonder why a technique that works so well on one person didn't work on another is because it wasn't the technique. Many, many times it's not the technique, okay? I don't know if you know this. Women will probably confirm this for you. They've made their decision about you before you've ever said a word. And a lot of times they've made it by smell or by sight. Your DNA encodes on it genes for something called a human leukocyte antigen or HLA. And you have a particular combination of HLA genes, human leukocyte antigen genes. And as a consequence of your particular genotype, you have a particular constellation of HLA antibodies. And so does she. And if she has antibodies to your HLA genotype, it doesn't matter what you say or what you do or how smooth you are, it's not gonna fly. Your foot will not even get in the door. And you're gonna beat yourself up over it and there's no need to bother at all. Which I did like one premise of his talk in particular was to lower the expectations and just try a lot because it's a numbers game. Whether you're successful or not has very little to do with your approach and a lot to do with your DNA and her DNA. So make a lot of approaches and don't be afraid of failure. I'm gonna get crass here for a second but Drew knows a guy that invented the Nullis machines and the Med-X machines that I use in my training facility, his name was Arthur Jones. He was a chauvinist pig extraordinaire but he had a great saying and he actually said it to my wife who was very attracted to him. And he was 81 at the time. He said, you know, in my life he says, I've learned to just walk up to women and ask them if they wanna fuck. He says, I've been slapped a lot. He goes, I get fucked a lot too. So roll the dice, gentlemen. If there's one book I could recommend that you read to put your dating efforts in a proper context, it would be a book called The Red Queen and it is written by a scientist named Matt Ridley and it's on the evolutionary biology of sexual behavior. You will learn more about yourself, you will learn more about women and your approach to them by reading that book and learning how birds and bees and chipmunks and squirrels do it and why they do it and what predicates certain behaviors, how you tell the difference between a gold digger and a cuckolder and everything that you can learn about any subject is best viewed in the context of evolutionary biology. And the same is true of exercise. So that's what I'm gonna go into next. First we're gonna talk about not overtraining and then we'll go into my medical support of Mark Sisson's diet. So I wrote this book along with my co-author John Little. It was done over the course of a couple of years and it was done by cell phone and internet. We'd set up an appointment every week and I would talk for two hours, we would plan out what our chapter would be, he'd ask me questions, I'd answer them and then we massaged it into the written word and turned it into a book. The book got picked up by McGraw Hill and one thing I've learned about publishers is publishers are good at two things. One is distribution. That is getting your book into the major bookstores and on Amazon. And the other is cover art. They're not great at marketing, that's all up to you. But when this book came out, it had this subtitle underneath it which said a research-based program for strength training, bodybuilding and complete fitness in 12 minutes a week. And at first I thought, well, that's kind of gimmicky and not exactly what I wanted to come across but on further reflection, I came to realize it's exactly what I want to say and it's exactly what the book says. They interpret it correctly and they interpret it correctly for the general public to get the gist of it by just looking at the cover. So it's research-based. Everything that we say in the book, we don't want anyone to take on faith. We actually want it to be backed up by scientific literature. Now up until probably as recently as five years ago, that would not have been possible because the people that were at the forefront of the high intensity exercise movement were pushing that forefront by their knowledge of basic science. Research is taking theories generated by an understanding of basic science and testing them. But we pushed the realm of basic science and pretty much screamed from the mountaintops about it because of the results that we saw on an empiric basis. It was enough to generate a theorem. And then finally people started picking it up and testing the theorems and enough data accumulated where we could actually produce a book where everything that we said in it could be footnoted and documented with peer-reviewed scientific literature. So that is one thing about the book. The middle portion says it's for strength training, bodybuilding, and complete fitness, which sound like three separate things. And they're not. Because once you truly understand the essence of exercise, you will figure out that strength training and bodybuilding and complete fitness are all one and the same. That the only way that you can get at any metabolic segment of your body or any working organ of your body is by doing mechanical work with muscle. That is the foundation of exercise. Now, some people will do a protocol that's advocated in the book and get completely different results than another because remember, it's not about us. It's about DNA. So applying an identical protocol, the phenotype that you generate with this protocol will be completely different from you than the phenotype that a person with another genetic makeup is going to produce. Good example is Patrick, who put me through a workout this morning. He and I do an almost an identical workout, but the phenotypic expression, stand up Patrick so everyone can see you, the phenotypic expression of that is completely different. He is, he's far leaner, that's for sure. But he's long, lean, sinewy, I'm a little more blocky, carry a higher percentage of body fat, but the thing is when you do proper exercise, whatever your genotype is, if you're doing proper exercise, you will get the best phenotypic expression for you. It may not be what you have in mind for yourself, but I can guarantee you this, is that when someone of the opposite sex is making an assessment of you, the instantaneous thing that's going on on a subconscious level is an assessment of your health and robustness. And when you optimize whatever your best phenotypic expression is, even if you wish you looked like Mark Sisson or Patrick or Phil in the blank, it doesn't matter because what you get is the best you possible, and that's the one that's gonna get your foot in the door for just about everything that you're looking for. So for some people, if you have a certain genetic expression and you're doing this protocol, you're gonna become very, very strong, but you're not gonna generate a lot of muscle mass, you're not gonna be popping out all over the place. Well, there's a reason for that. There's a gene called interleukin-15. You get a copy from each parent. And the type of copy can be termed in either an insertion or a deletion, okay? If you get two insertions of this gene, then you're gonna be one of these guys that's big, muscular, all swole up, but you're not gonna demonstrate as much strength in the gym. If you get a double deletion of this gene, both your parents were negative, so to speak, on this gene, then you're one of these guys that's extraordinarily strong. But doesn't get that big. And there's not a thing you can do about it, but you can be guaranteed of this is whatever way it goes for you is the best way for you because your genome is determined that for you ahead of time. So for some people, the strength training component of it is gonna be bigger. For other people, the bodybuilding component of it is gonna be bigger. But for everyone, the complete fitness is gonna be guaranteed. Because this protocol actually produces something that we term global metabolic conditioning. And when I flip this thing over later to take you through med school biochemistry course, we'll talk a little bit about that. But you will have complete fitness as a result of having done that. Now, extraordinary claims require extraordinary truth and you also have to be prepared to clear your mind of everything else that you've been told about fitness, okay? And most of us have gotten our fitness knowledge through the media or through magazines, okay? You look at the cover of men's fitness today and you go back and look at the cover of men's fitness two years ago and it's the same headlines and the same stories, rehashed over and over and over again and we believe them. And we believe them because of a built in genetic, DNA driven way of thinking that we have. Because one thing that you have to understand in your life and if you can wrap your brain around this in your 20s, it will make all the difference in the rest of your life and you will progress in your life much, much faster. And it's this, our brains are not built for truth. Our brains are built for survival, okay? So many times, rather than seeking actual cause effect relationships, it's more efficacious for us to jump to a conclusion and do so quickly, okay? It is the reason why everyone seeks the investment advice of Warren Buffet is because we think he has superior knowledge when in fact he has superior DNA for investing, okay? But the point is, is our brain is built to jump to conclusions. On a primitive level, we go out for a hunt. As we go out on the hunt, rabbit crosses the trail, we strike out, we don't get anything. Next hunt, we're gonna sacrifice a rabbit before we go out. I mean, it's very simplistic thinking, but I'm gonna give you an example of it that I hear all the time. Is my wife has always been a swimmer, loves to swim and sometimes I'll go hang out at the Olympic pool where she swims and watch the kids watch she does it. And I hear people's conversations and they say, I've taken up swimming because I want the long lean body of a swimmer, okay? Because the assumption is, is the activity has produced the phenotype, or the body type, not that the body type has selected a particular activity. Okay? And if you wanna prove it to yourself, go to a collegiate swim meet and sit through the whole day of qualifying. And what you'll notice is at the beginning of the day, when you're at the one eighth and quarter finals, you'll look up on the starting blocks and you'll see a great variety in body types up there. But as you progress through the day, what you'll see is that the swimmer start to look more and more similar. They start to look more and more like the prototypical swimmer, long, lean, morphinoid, sort of smooth. By the time you get to the finals, it looks almost as if there are a row of clones sitting up on the starting blocks. Because what's happened is competition is simply accelerated evolution. And you have people that have already been pre-selected by their phenotype to do well in that sport. And then through the selective pressure of competition, you've found that ideal body type. But you get some schmuck like me that goes in swims and thinks I'm gonna get the long, lean body of the swimmer, it's not gonna happen. Your phenotype is your phenotype, but we tend to make these mistakes. And those mistakes of observations are called heuristics. Heuristics is our way of thinking that allows us to survive. During hunter-gatherer times when we were out in the wild, we didn't have time to deliberate truth versus not truth. We needed to make quick decisions in life and death circumstances. So we parsed out a more effective way of doing that. And in so doing, we made ourselves easy to exploit. Right now, there are hundreds of thousands of women that are doing yoga because Madonna does yoga. How many of your girlfriends are doing Pilates? There you go. And it's all because you can take this heuristic mistake in thinking and exploit it. And you can make people think that if they do what this person does, then you're gonna have that. I don't know if you guys are even old enough to remember Ty Boe and Billy Banks, yeah. And now it's 90X, get ripped in 90 days. But they take these models and they put them up there as representative of what the protocol has produced. And it's not gonna be true for you, but if you do a proper protocol, you will become the best you that you can be. Now, the other thing that you're gonna run into that you're gonna have to clear your mind of in the process of embracing a new and better way of getting the best body that you can have is the industry's linking of health and fitness and making you think that they're one in the same. And that as fitness rises, health tracks along with it and vice versa. And it's not true, okay? First, when they linked health and fitness, they never defined their terms. So in our book, we are gonna define our terms. So in terms of health, what health is, in my definition, is number one, a lack of disease. As an emergency physician, I see a lot of disease people. I can tell you that is absolutely a prerequisite for being healthy is the absence of disease. And the other, and this is where already at your young age, you guys are at a big disadvantage, the other component of health is an appropriate balance between a catabolic and an anabolic state, okay? A catabolic state is anything that results in tissue breakdown or destruction or turnover. And an anabolic state is anything that results from energy input and construction or building, okay? Now the vast majority of people in our society are suffering from an imbalance of the anabolic state relative to the catabolic state. They are in a continuous process of energy consumption and a continued process of trying to drive growth. And that produces several very unhealthy states we'll talk about, but one is by having a continual input of energy, your DNA makes assessments on how best to propagate itself into the future. If you are very replete with energy, then your DNA's assessment is there is enough bounty or plenty around that we can propagate ourselves into the future effectively by reproduction. So sexual maturation occurs quickly, reproduction occurs quickly. Women reach menarchy in their first menses, nowadays as early as age nine. Whereas 20 or 30 years ago, most women didn't reach menarchy until about age 15. Hence the Keynesian era and all the fertility rituals and most cultures that sent around the 15th birthday. The problem is, is that also results in accelerated disease processes and accelerated aging. Now during the catabolic state, what your DNA looks at it says, we're energy replete, everything's depleted, there's not much energy. The best way that I can propagate myself into the future is not offspring because offspring require more energy and there is not an abundance of energy now. The way I propagate myself into the future is to undergo DNA repair processes. And that balance between the antibiotic and catabolic state is what keeps you healthy. You get out of balance with it, then that's when you start having health problems and your body composition goes to crap. Now, that's a problem for anyone that's going through that process in their life. In terms of this imbalance between an antibiotic state and a catabolic state and the completely wrong foodstuffs that Mark Sisson educated you guys about yesterday, your generation is the first generation that has been poisoned in this way, beginning in utero. This year is the first year that we've had an epidemic of what used to be called adult onset diabetes. We're having an epidemic of type two diabetes in nine month olds because yours was the first generation that really got loaded down with this and we'll talk more about it in the biochem part, but you have been poisoned starting in utero. Most of you guys are about at the age where if I would have had kids at the normal time, any one of y'all could be of age to be my kid. And I can tell you this, all my friends back in the 80s, the first time their kid had a diarrhea poop or any colic, they went to the pediatrician, they changed their formula, they put them on soy formula. Well, I happened to a lot of you guys and that is the hormonal equivalent of putting your baby on birth control pills. It wreaked hormonal havoc on your body and set the stage for you to have problems with your weight, your insulin control, the ability to gain muscle and to respond to exercise. So you guys are already starting from a dugout hole. Now, let's say you get the exercise bug and you really get hooked with it because you're getting positive results. Well, the natural thought with that, particularly in our command and control society where we like to make sure everything's regimented and that we're driving the process and we're in control of it is to do more and more and more. Well, the problem is is that you can get more and more fitness but in the process of doing so, instead of it being too much anabolic, too little catabolic, all of a sudden you flip the table and now you have an excess catabolic state relative to that anabolic state and then you're over-trained and producing a lot of systemic inflammation from that. So your fitness can actually undermine your health and the vast majority of people that follow conventional fitness wisdom end up doing a form of exercise of insufficient intensity to actually stimulate a good adaptive response and as a consequence, try to make up for that by doing a higher volume of work and it's that higher volume of work that creates this catabolic, anabolic imbalance. So let's define fitness. If fitness is what we're after, what the hell is it? Well, Arthur DeVaney, one of the followers of the evolutionary fitness lifestyle that Marxists and champions, coined the term physiologic headroom and I like to think of fitness as that. It is the difference between the most you can do and the least you can do. And most people in our contemporary society, as they age, their physiologic headroom gradually does this and on the day when the most you can do equals the least you can do, that's called dead. And that's the way the vast majority of people in our society are living. You guys started off in the whole in utero. So even though many of you are very young, you're already halfway down this sliding decline of functional ability. What you want and what is easy to accomplish with the appropriate stimulus is to preserve that physiologic headroom, make it as high as possible, gradually progress it over time so it's even higher and keep this high level of physiologic headroom all the way through your entire life until the day you die and it just drops all of a sudden. It's like the old one horse sheath. It's healthy all of its life, pulls the plow forever and then just without warning, heals over, doesn't feel sick, doesn't feel bad, just dies. That's the way to live your life and that's the way to live it over time. Now, discussing the concept of the workout itself, I wanna discuss the underlying biology of it. And what you gotta understand is that it's not a matter of doing a certain amount of work or a certain amount of sets or any sort of recipe that you can follow. Your body does not work that way. Your body responds to signals and the hormonal environment. Okay, anyone with a girlfriend knows that. Hormones rule everything, okay? Signaling rules everything in biology. So what you're wanting to do with your workouts to get the most results from them is to produce the appropriate signal. And that signal is going to act on your body which we'll call an organism. And if that organism has the appropriate resources, it will make an adaptive response. But make no mistake, the signal is a threatful and negative thing. So you have to dose it out appropriately. And what the signal is, is fatigue or weakening. Okay, you think, well, I'm going in the gym to get stronger. Well, in the long term, yes. In the short term, no. What you're really trying to do is produce a momentary fatigue of your musculature that's very weak, that's very significant. If you do that, everything else will track along naturally. But let's say we take you into the gym on any given movement. And at the beginning of that movement, you have 100 units of force capability. You can put out 100 units at maximum effort, okay? Well, I'm not going to pick 100 units as your resistance on whatever piece of equipment we're using because as soon as you started pushing and you fatigue down to 99, you'd be done. And it wouldn't last very long. So if you got 100 units of capability, we'll select a resistance of 70 units. And we will have you very slowly and smoothly lift that weight and lower that weight and lift it and lower it. But what's happening here is if we've selected that resistance appropriately, you're going to be aggressively recruiting muscle, which is organized in little packets called motor units. And you're gonna aggressively recruit them in a particular order that goes from the weakest and smallest to the strongest and biggest. And you're gonna go through that order and if we fatigue you aggressively enough with enough weight, you will sequentially fatigue out those motor units so that you become progressively weaker with every second that you're working out. And what's gonna happen is you will keep going up and down and up and down and somewhere along in here, you'll start to feel really panicky because your body instinctually feels the window between your capability and the resistance selected closing and it produces an intense panic because that intense panic came out of millions of years of evolution where you were wrestling or fighting with a rival or an animal and you were very equally matched. And when that fatigue starts to close the window between the two of you, you know you're about to die. That's encoded into your GNA and you will feel that panic here and you will want to stop. But if you're appropriately motivated and or appropriately instructed, you can keep pushing until you get to the point where your maximal effort is now producing 69 units of force. 69 units of force cannot lift 70 units of weight and you have now reached muscular fatigue or muscular failure. Try as hard as you may to continue any additional movement and it won't go because your force output does not exceed the weight selected. You really want to quit now but if you're appropriately motivated or appropriately instructed, you will continue to try to produce movement for an additional five or 10 seconds which will drive your level of fatigue down even further. So what's happened in this single set of exercise that took 90 seconds is a rate and depth of fatigue that calls to you from your evolutionary past and says you nearly died and you need to adapt to this. So the next time you're ever faced with a struggle like this, you will have some reserves left over. This is a strong stimulus to synthesize new muscle and the metabolic systems that support it. So not just the muscle but the conditioning to support it. So what happens is over the course of several days, you will synthesize that new muscle and you will then become with that much capability. Well, if you go to Patrick's gym or you go have Drew train you, he'll look at your workout card and he'll go, hmm, really? Okay, there we go. And they'll repeat the whole process again. And do that in a sequential step-wise fashion over time. You become stronger and more capable but here's the key. This signal that responded on your body is a negative thing. So once you invoke it, you wanna allow your body the opportunity to synthesize the adaptive response. Let's say you wanna put on a pound of muscle. Doesn't sound like much but go down to your grocery store and pick up a pound of ground round and make the realization that my body has to synthesize that de novo out of the blue. Just out of the nutrients and whatever you have hanging around in your body and you realize that that process is gonna take time. And what we've come to find out, what the big aha was that I wish I had known when I was 21 that I didn't figure out until I was about 40 was that this amount of time is much longer than we originally realized and is typically in the range of five to 10 days averaging around seven. Now, during periods of time, can you get away with it every fourth day? Yeah, but over time, we're looking at a spectrum and you can slide up and down that spectrum but it's much longer than you realized. But the important thing to realize is that if you bring this signal back to the organism before it's completed its adaptive response, you will interfere with that response. You will block it. And that's where everyone makes a mistake. You start to see some results. You get six-sided. You start to do more and you do it more frequently and you end up doing this. And then all of a sudden, the progress that you saw comes to a stall and not understanding the underlying biology of what's going on there. You try to fix it with more effort because that's what our Western culture has indoctrinated us with is that don't force it, get a bigger hammer. So you get a bigger hammer and you keep hammering at it, hammering at it, hammering at it. And despite all the evidence to the contrary, you keep on doing it until you get fed up and discussed and throw your hands up and quit. And then six, nine months later, a year later, you look at the cover of Men's Health and go, I wish I looked like that and you start all over again. Okay. But if you learn number one to apply a stimulus that's meaningful, that's hard, that hard workout will make you have a short workout. If you can stand a workout that lasts longer than 12 or 15 minutes, you're not working hard enough to awaken that ancient message in your DNA that says adapt. It has to be hard enough where 12 to 15 minutes is all you can stand. If you've done that, you've produced a stimulus that's going to produce an adaptive response that takes time. And that's where the 12 minutes once a week comes from. Okay. Now, the particulars of the workout is in the book, but I will capsize it to say in the book, what we've done just to get people started is picked five very big, basic, simple movements. Okay. There's a leg press. There's a pull down movement. There's a chest press movement. There's a rowing movement and an overhead press movement. Big, multiple joint movements that cover all the musculature of your body. And they are movements that don't require a lot of coordination. We're not going to have you do the men's health bowl, Gary, and overhead split squat because we don't want you having all your mental energy focused on balancing and doing this tight rope act. We want all your mental energy focused on producing effort and a level of fatigue that will wake up that ancient signal. That's where the money is. Okay. That's where the good stuff is is to produce that level of fatigue. Okay. And not only that is if you do something that is so skill-based and combine that level of fatigue with a skill-based movement, you're going to get hurt. You're going to be slinging your kettlebell around. You're going to get fatigued and you're going to get sloppy and then you're going to hurt yourself. If you're doing a simplified movement, slow and smoothly, you can get to the deepest level of fatigue and if you're doing it right, guess what? By the time you get down here, you're too weak to hurt yourself because if you're going to hurt yourself, you're going to hurt yourself with force. Force is mass times acceleration. You do it slow and smooth. You eliminate acceleration. By the time you get down here, you're too weak to hurt yourself. So you're getting it done safely too. Okay. But so these five big movements done safely, back to back. It's going to take you 90 seconds to two minutes to reach complete muscular fatigue. Bam, bam, bam, five done in and out. Go home. That's basically the workout but I'm going to let people that are better discussing that, like Drew, give you more details about that but that's the premise of how the workout works. Now, what I want to do is take what you learned from Mark Sisson yesterday and do two things with that. One is I want to provide medical support for everything that he told you. And then I'm going to show you how doing this wraps into that, okay? So, while I try to get this thing flipped over, does anyone have any questions this far or anything they want to ask? Yes, sir. Based on what you just mentioned, so are you opposed to skills-based exercises or workouts? Can you clarify or expand upon that? No, I mean to some extent all exercises are skilled-based but if you're going to be producing this level of fatigue going to muscular failure, I would much rather you do it squatting with a spotter or on a leg press machine that's set up in such a way that you can't drop it on yourself when you get to the level of fatigue that I'm seeking out. Now, can you do a significant level of fatigue with a skilled-based movement? Yeah. And can you do it for a long time without getting hurt? Yeah. No, it's just, I think it goes down and then flips. Oh. This way. So, no, I'm not completely opposed to it but what we did in the book was we wanted to get people going with this with extremely simple movements because our focus is effort and not technique. What we're looking for is that depth of fatigue and we want someone to come right out of the blocks and be able to aspire to that on day one as opposed to spend all their mental energy on trying to coordinate things. That answer? Okay. Yes, sir? Not working. Could you maybe shed a little more light on the anabolic versus catabolic state? Mark mentioned it yesterday and he said basically dispelling the common wisdom that people were thinking that you need to eat every three hours or you're going to enter catabolic state. Right. And that's true from the exercise standpoint. It's also true from the dietary standpoint. And the thing is, is no omnivore nature eats three meals in two snacks a day. I mean, it's ridiculous. If you had to eat that much, you're going to get eaten. You don't have time to hunt, gather, reproduce or do anything else, okay? But what happens and the reason that becomes part of our culture as we'll discuss here is people become metabolically deranged to the extent that they can't tap their energy stores. And as a consequence, when they feel their energy start to wane, they can't tap into their body fat or their glycogen stores because of their hormonal environment. So they need to eat right away. And the way most people that have been eating a grain-based and a high-carbohydrate diet exist, is as soon as their blood sugar drops, they got to eat something to kind of level it out. And that is the conventional wisdom's approach to managing hunger. But it's a losing battle because hunger always wins. But when you eat an appropriate evolutionary-based diet, you'll find yourself, you know, if you eat what March recommended for breakfast, for instance, you just have that. After you've done that for a while, you'll be going along and it'll be 2.30 in the afternoon, you go, I forgot to eat lunch. And you'll find yourself wanting only two meals a day because you're eating in such a way that doesn't drive hunger and you're eating in a way that sets your hormonal environment where you can actually experience satiety. But that'll come out more as we go through this. You'll see what I'm talking about. Yes, sir? My question is you're doing a workout once a week and you're getting an adaptive response to that workout. How often do you have to tweak that workout because eventually you're gonna get used to that workout? Do you just increase the intensity until you're the fatigue or is there a method to change your workout? I mean, there are ways that you can tweak things but you'd be surprised at how far you can go without having to change much at all, okay? You'll learn a lot from Bill de Simone. Muscle and joint function really does not change much over time and the whole concept of variety and the P90X muscle confusion and stuff like that is really not as true as they make it out to be. The real key is to allow the adaptation to occur and then to step up the challenge in terms of the resistance accordingly. Now over time, what you really have to make tweaks for is not something necessarily going on in your body but tweaks in the mechanics of the equipment itself because no equipment's perfect. The strength curve of the equipment doesn't match that of your body perfectly. So there's gonna be a sticking point at different places. I don't know if you've ever done a barbell squat but you know it's much harder when you're coming out of the hole than it is when you're up almost completely standing. So what happens is the weight progresses over time sticking points like a speed bump. Well when you first start, you're pushing a little Ugo over a speed bump but as you get advanced, you're pushing a Mack truck over a speed bump. So you end up having to alternate movements that have a different location of sticking point and things like that. But really truth be told in terms of approaching your body's own phenotypic maximum, it almost doesn't matter. You're slicing things pretty thin at that point. One else? After your workout, when would you recommend for sport training? Like how much rest? Say if you have to train five days a week, six days a week for your certain sport. Can you give me more particulars about your question or a sport per se? I play volleyball and our weightlifting program revolves a lot around squats, deadlifts, and RDLs and usually we'll weightlip around two o'clock for an hour and then have rest and we'll practice for three hours and that's five days a week and we'll lift for three days a week. Because I want to talk to my coaches and my strength training coach about this and I want to ask them. Yeah, you're not going to get very far with that. Yeah, because after we do those squats I can't jump at all and it's very hard to practice for three hours. Yeah. Yeah, I mean if they are indoctrinated to such an extent, you're going to get nowhere with it. And as long as part of your organized sport you're kind of locked into that training paradigm to try to add this on top of it would just be suicide. What I would suggest to you is for yourself is to try to use something that follows this paradigm more during your off season leading up to the beginning of your season when all this starts. And then try to sell it by demonstrating your performance right at the beginning of the season on the conditioning that you did for yourself. Because the folklore and coaching is just abhorrent. I mean you couldn't do it anymore wrong. I mean to be doing squats in Romanian deadlifts and a jumping athlete five and six days a week you might as well put a 40 pound weighted vest on them and have them go out and compete. I mean they're going to be so fatigued, so ragged out. And the thing is doing that kind of training fatigues your fastest twitch motor units which are the ones you need most for that particular sport but they're also the ones that are most fatigued sensitive meaning they fatigue quickly and they recover slowly. So your most productive motor units, the 15% of your muscle that is the most productive for explosive movement and jumping is just out of the equation for the entire season. But how to approach it with your coaches is I got no good answer for you. If I can't do it, I don't think you can. Yes. Oh yeah, yeah. Yeah, and here's the real key with this. Yep. Oh, I'm sorry he went on the mic. He was asking is, kid, when you incorporate this kind of workout at the time that you're initiating a new sport for yourself like martial arts. Have I got that correct? Yes, and the neat thing is that when you're taking on a new sport for martial arts what you're really focusing on even though there's a large exercise component to it and a lot of activity, what you're trying to do there is to hone a skill, to develop a skill set. So you are skill training. This has nothing to do with skill training. This is physical conditioning which the more you separate your physical conditioning from your skill training, the better it will be. And when you do your skill training you wanna make certain that you're doing it in the freshest, most recovered state possible because you want to entrain the neuromotor pathway, sort of a dog trail in the backyard so to speak that is most efficient for all the skills that you're learning. Because if you're going to compete with this you wanna compete when you're fully recovered. So what you need to do is when you're taking on your new sport is to look at it and then back engineer your workout around your sporting activity so you make certain that when you're practicing your skill you've had enough recovery time. And if that means pushing the workout out to every 10th day because you're having so much activity learning your skill that's fine. You're not gonna decompensate. Your body's not gonna build a pound of ground round and allow it to decompensate in 14 days. It will not happen. Now your metabolic conditioning will decompensate over 14 days but if you're doing this other activity that's gonna be taken care of by itself. So the key becomes this is short enough and brief enough where you can build your workout around your life and not your life around your workout. This is really interesting to me and I actually have three small questions. Could you first please repeat the five basic movements? Then I wanted to know how yesterday Mark System was talking about incorporating more play activities and I wanted to know how you thought that might affect that R part of your model if you're playing after you've done this kind of training. And then the last one, does your approach also apply to cardio exercise? Yes. Oh yeah. And we'll hit the cardio thing more when we do this but first the five movements are a leg press, a pull down movement and Bill Desimone will go through the mechanics of those in great detail for you. So you don't have to worry about that. So leg press, a pull down, a chest press movement, a rolling movement, which is in the horizontal plane and an overhead press. So that will kind of cover all the major elements of your body there. Second part of the question was the play. Yeah, that's very easy to incorporate because remember we're trying to separate our physical conditioning, which is a very deliberate engineered triggering of a biologic process from other activities. But the thing you gotta remember is that play is not gonna interfere with the recovery side of the equation too much because if we look at the level of intensity, if we were to draw it on a graph with the x-axis being the edge of this stage and the y-axis going this way, if we were to draw a graph of the intensity of the workout, what we'd see is that the needle would peg, go all the way across the room, out the door and out the front door of the hotel. But play activity, even those that are fairly boisterous and really get you huffin' and puffin' and stuff like that, they're probably in terms of measuring intensity relative to that and they're not gonna go beyond this first row of tables. So it does have some effect on recovery, but I think it is important to incorporate playful physical activity and if you find in your record keeping that the amount of playful physical activity that you want to incorporate is not allowing you to recover by the seventh day, well let's say you're working out every fifth day, it's not working, you're not progressing, but you don't wanna give up the amount of play you're doing, fine, you should work out to the seventh day. If you start showing progress again, then hold it there for a while. And then if all of a sudden you have a workout where it doesn't progress, skip a week, then come back at every seventh day, two or three weeks, skip a week. Or you can go to every tenth day, or you can just mix it up. Or every third workout you can flip a coin, if it's head you work out, if it's tails you don't. Doesn't matter, but allow for that recovery and allow for it in a way where your life and your play and what you wanna do is in the driver's seat and not the workout. Cause in the end that will get you the best result. I have one question. I've actually read the book The Red Queen by Matt Ridley and it's an awesome book. It's very informational and answers a lot of questions that I didn't even know that I had. But my question now is that there are these new systems for working out nutrition and health and things that are based on evolution. And through the history of evolution, our life expectancy was extremely short compared to what we're expecting to live now. So how can we base these systems on life longevity while for thousands of years we weren't living that long? Okay. First is when you look at hunter gather life expectancy, when you look at the anthropological studies about that, you gotta realize that that's actuarial, okay? Over an entire lifespan. And the vast, vast majority of that is accounted for a skewing of the median downward by infant mortality, okay? And this is one of my favorite pet peeves as an emergency physician, is it always just drives me freaking crazy when some granola head wants a nurse midwife to deliver their baby in their living room? And that shit pisses me off because when that baby comes out blue with a cord wrapped around its neck, they're dropping it in my lap on an ambulance, okay? If you have any historical graveyards in the town where you live, go visit it. Because fully one-third the graves there are infant graves. Okay? The vast majority of prehistoric humankind's mortality that made their life expectancy 30 years instead of 72 years has to do with the infant mortality associated with it or simply becoming a saber-toothed tiger shit at some point in your life, okay? We, this is the beautiful thing about technology and capitalism is we can make mistakes and not die, okay? In emergency medicine, I have a very famous saying and I like to say it a lot. Stupidity is not a crime, but it is punishable by death. Nature is a hanging judge and that's where our hunter-gatherer friends bit the dust. It didn't really have anything to do with anabolic, catabolic balance or long-term health benefits because there were older survivors and the fossil evidence of those older survivors based on ligament attachments and bony assessment and bone mineral density was, they were extraordinarily robust, okay? The Hadza tribe that lives in Central Africa is one of the few pure hunter-gatherer tribes that still lives as they originally did and they don't even recognize a child as human until it has survived three lunar cycles just to psychologically protect themselves from the high infant mortality rate which also does two things which sort of skews Mark Sisson in my argument about why evolutionary nutrition is such a boon is that also you have a selection bias is if you're not good genetic material, you're not gonna make it beyond three moons, that's the way it is. So the deck is kind of loaded in their favor just from a genetic predisposition because, you know, as far as someone like me compared to your average hunter-gatherer that did survive, you know, probably to quote Full Metal Jacket, the best part of me ran down the crack of my mama's ass and wound up as a brown stain on the mattress, but. So, yeah, that has a point but it doesn't really specifically apply when you actually parse the numbers out. Any others before we go to med school? How am I doing on time? All right, let me fly. This is med school biochemistry in a nutshell and I'm gonna give it to you and you're gonna understand it. This big square is a cell of your body, okay? Could be a muscle cell, any cell that you wanna call it, okay? And what I've drawn up here is a metabolism in your body. This part of the cell is liquid, it's about 70% water. It's sort of like slime, ectoplasmic. Gool, if you will, that is the liquid interior of the cell and it's called cytosol. Inside the cell is the little powerhouse of the cell called the mitochondria, okay? And metabolism shuttles through there. Your body takes glucose and through an insulin receptor, passes glucose into the interior of the cell. Inside the cell are proteins or enzymes that alter the chemical structure of glucose and in the process of altering its chemical structure, generate energy in the form of phosphates that can be used to drive the machinery of the cell. So it's sort of like generating biodiesel, if you will, okay? So you go through these processes of about 20 steps and at the very end of it, you end up with a waste product called pyruvate. And when animals first were crawling around the slime in the very, very beginning of our evolutionary past, that was the extent of our metabolism. But somewhere along the way, little proto-bacteria and viruses got inside the cell and developed a symbiotic relationship with the cell and basically they ate our waste products and used it for energy. And at that period of evolution, oxygen was starting to become present in our atmosphere and these little proto-bacteria learned how to use oxygen to extract energy from our waste product. So what originally started as a parasite living in our cells, became an organelle and they used pyruvate and they cycle it through something called the Krebs cycle and that ended up producing not four ATP, but 32 ATP. Well, they stopped being parasites and bacteria and actually became organelles inside of our cell which became part of our energy architecture. So when we're making energy, the part that occurs out in the liquid part of the cell is anaerobic metabolism. And the part that incurs inside the mitochondria driven by oxygen is called aerobic metabolism. Now, the weird thing is that even though this produces much less ATP, in terms of cycling this, in terms of turning the churn, this really hauls ass. And this is not so fast. So you can turn the anaerobic cycle really, really quickly and you can make pyruvate faster than your mitochondria can use it. And when that happens, the pyruvate gets activated acted on by an enzyme called lactate dehydrogenase and you end up making lactic acid, which is something you all are all familiar with, okay? But in terms of an aerobic workout to answer your question, the answer is that when you do truly hard work, you are going to cycle this anaerobic process as fast as it can possibly go. And the only way that you can maximally stimulate the aerobic metabolic cycle is by delivering as much substrate as it can handle. So to the extent that you can really ramp this up, you are conditioning this as much as possible. My workouts take about eight minutes once a week. My resting heart rate's about 48 to 50, okay? Because this, here's the other thing, is you go down to Patrick's place where you have Drew Bae put you through a workout. At the end of the workout, you're gonna be laying on the carpet and what you're gonna be doing on that carpet is taking all this pyruvate that you made quicker than the mitochondria could use it and got turned into lactic acid. While you're laying on the carpet, your body takes that lactic acid, brings it back through the central vein of your liver and in the liver cells there, that lactic acid gets converted back to pyruvate, sent in the bloodstream, sent to your mitochondria and shuttled through the aerobic cycle. So while you're laying on the carpet recovering and you're getting your car, you go back to your job, you sit at your laptop, for the next hour and a half, you're getting a superior aerobic workout compared to walking on a treadmill for the same period of time. So you're up-regulating that aerobic metabolic cycle during that recovery period because you actually did it hard enough to matter, okay? So that answers the aerobics question, but you kinda get the idea of how energy moves through this whole process. Now, let's talk about Mark Sisson's diet and how it fits into this whole thing. Now, if we are in a fully anabolic state, if anabolic is out of balance relative to catabolic, then we have plenty of energy coming in here, cycling through the process. And in the process of taking all this and converting it to ATP, a byproduct gets stacked up called citrate. Well, citrate acts as a feedback mechanism to a linchpin enzyme in the whole process called phosphoructokinase. It's not important that you remember that. Just know that it's there because this is like the thermostat at the back of the room. And this is like the cold air coming out of the vents, okay? So when you're in an energy-replete environment, getting lots and lots of carbohydrate, lots and lots of glucose, this comes up here and blocks phosphoructokinase. Well, what happens then? You can't go down. Well, all these enzymes that are doing this work are bidirectional. So what ends up happening is you go backwards because your body doesn't want all this glucose stacking up inside the cell because that glucose binds to proteins. It's called glycation byproducts. And it mucks up the metabolic machinery, just like pouring pancake syrup on the keyboard of your computer wood. Your body doesn't want it, so it wants to protect itself. So it goes backwards up here and then there's an enzyme called glycogen synthase. And you take those glucose molecules and you hook them all together like tinker toys into this big thing and you store them in your liver and you store them in your muscle. But you store about 70 grams of glycogen in your liver and you can store about 200 grams of glycogen in your muscle. And they're in those two different locations for two completely different reasons. The reason it's in your liver is to maintain a stable blood glucose. If y'all are getting hungry because you haven't had your snack, then what's gonna happen is you're gonna release a little bit of glycogen from your liver to maintain a stable blood glucose. And that's important because our major evolutionary DNA-driven process that brought us here today was a big brain. That was the evolutionary gamble that worked because some hominid ancestor actually found the ocean and ate lots of omega-3 fatty acids and got a big brain, okay? But a big brain requires a constant influx of energy. So if it dips a little bit, you tap your liver glycogen, maintain a stable blood glucose so your brain keeps working, okay? Now, the glycogen that's in your muscle is there for a completely different reason. It's there for emergency onsite usage. It's like the coal car on the train. It's right there to be used on spot by the muscle in question. Now, take your DNA, go back on an evolutionary basis, the most likely time that an animal is ever going to get attacked is when it's at the watering hole or when it's feeding. It's guard is down, it's concentrating on an anabolic process. And on a dime, it has to turn its metabolism from anabolic to catabolic. And it does that by cleaving thousands upon thousands of molecules of glycogen into glucose out of the muscle for onsite usage to do this, okay? But that's why they're there. But forget that for right now, we're in a high energy state. So we're gonna do this and we're gonna go backwards and we're gonna jam as much as we can in the muscle and as much as we can in the liver, okay? That's 270 grams. So you go to Starbucks in the morning, you get yourself a nice big bagel and a caramel latte, guess what? You've topped off your gas tank. You stored all the glycogen you can store. And that's assuming that your gas tank was empty, which it wasn't, okay? So what happens then? Well, it can't go this way and now it can't go this way. So what happens is it gets stuck at this level of fructose or phosphofructokinase and through a metabolic process that occurs in this high energy state, fructose gets converted to something called glyceraldehyde-3-phosphate. You take three of those, link them together and you got triglycerides. Triglycerides get mobilized in your body and stored in your body fat, which becomes an ever-expanding reservoir, okay? Well, now that you're doing this, you can only do this at a certain rate. So glucose starts to stack up in the bloodstream. Well, what's your body's response to that? Make more insulin. Well, your body doesn't want insulin to be moving glucose into the cell because it's trying to prevent it from having glycation damage. So what does it do? It decreases your number of insulin receptors on your muscle cells and other cells in your body, except for one place. The insulin receptors on your body fat stay intact. What your body fat is, in addition to being an energy storage depot, is a mechanism of protecting yourself from glycation end products. But it only works up to a certain point. So what ends up happening here is you have developed something called internal starvation. Okay? Energy is inputted. It can't go here. It can't go here. It can only go here. The glucose starts to stack up and your insulin levels get high and your insulin receptors go down everywhere except here. But the problem is if your energy levels start to wane, you can't tap any energy out of your stored body fat because the hormone that does that, hormone-sensitive lipase is sensitive to insulin. Insulin will not allow you to tap body fat. So when you have an elevated serum insulin, you can't mobilize body fat. So what happens is as soon as your energy levels start to wane, you become ravenously hungry because you gotta jack up your energy level short-term, but then it just does this and you can't tap it out of there. And the weirdest thing that I only noticed in the past couple of years is I've looked at hundreds of thousands of CT scans over the years. And I always had it in my head that the morbidly obese were probably pretty well muscled underneath all that because effectively they're lifting weights all the time. But it's not the case. Their muscles are extraordinarily atrophied. Your external oblique muscle that ought to be about as thick as a piece of steak, and these people is paper thin and stretched to the point of bursting. If you look at their spinal erector muscles on the cross section of a CT scan, which basically takes pictures of you like a honey baked ham slices. If you look at it, you look at the extra, I mean you look at the lumbar extensor muscles, what should be about the size of the barrel of a baseball bat is as small as this magic marker because they are having nutrient partitioning that doesn't allow any energy to go anywhere but the body fat. So they can't support any sort of preservation of muscle mass. So they are literally starving inside an encasement of blubber. So, this whole process of metabolic derangement I like to think of as a tub overflowing. And the diet Mark Sisson talked to you about is taking that overflowing tub and turning off the spigot. What I like to offer with the exercise protocol that we talk about in the book is a way to pull the drain plug. Because high intensity exercise does something very special. It mobilizes, remember we talked about the glycogen in the muscle. You have the greatest number of potential insulin receptors on the surface of your muscle cells. But the cool thing is, is if you bring a high intensity exercise stimulus to your body, then what will happen is the glucose that gets cleaved out of the muscle's glycogen is done so by what's called an amplification cascade. And there's a series of about five enzymes. All one right after the other, okay? But the first enzyme when activated goes to the second one and can activate a thousand of those. Each one of the second ones can activate a thousand of the third ones and so on and so on. So what happens is high intensity exercise cleaves massive amounts of glycogen out of the muscle, empties it out and produces a need for insulin sensitivity to be restored on the muscle cell. And when that happens, the glucose in your blood goes down, your serum insulin levels go down, and then all of a sudden this process can go this way instead of this way. And what you'll find is the synergistic effect of the two, of Mark Sisson's diet and this workout are such that your body, it's almost too easy, your body will auto-regulate towards your ideal body composition, which for most males will be 10 to 11% body fat for most females about 18%. For a guy like Patrick, he's probably hovering around 5% just because that's his phenotype. But whatever is best for you, you will auto-regulate towards that. And that's the cool thing is if you do it right, this really is your birthright. This is encoded in your DNA over millions of years and it's only screwed up because of a misapplication of knowledge and technology. One of the biggest of which I wanna close with here and is talk about fructose. Now, carbohydrate and glucose are part of what drove this whole problem that I just spoke to you about. But once you're in this state, that process can be amplified by our modern diet. Okay, if you take table sugar or sucrose, that's just the linkage of a glucose molecule to a fructose molecule. When you eat it, there's a sucrose enzyme in your saliva in your stomach that breaks the two apart. And the free-floating fructose, when you're in this metabolic state where you can't go this way and you can't go this way and can only go this way, gets greatly amplified. Okay, fructose has the unique capability of still getting into the cell. But it doesn't need insulin to do so. It just diffuses straight in, is acted on by PFK, and just goes straight to body fat, okay? Now, when I was a kid, that was bad because everything had sugar in it, but it was easy to identify. Okay, your mom could pick up something and go, oh, that's got a lot of sugar in it, I'm not gonna get that, you know? Or, no, we're not getting honeycombs, we're getting Cheerios, fill in the blank. But in 1981, Archer Daniels Midland came up with a cool invention made out of corn called high-fructose corn syrup. And the problem with it is that food manufacturers that relied on sugar saw an opportunity because you gotta remember the big selling point of high-fructose corn syrup is that it's manufactured. Sugar has to be grown on plantations, mostly in the Caribbean, and it's traded on a commodities market. Futures traders try to predict the future and adjust price accordingly. So when hurricane season, a storm starts to brew out in the Gulf, they all freak out, price goes up. Well, if you're making Coca-Cola in the 1980s, it doesn't matter. People still wanna put 50 cents in the machine and get a Coke. But if your cost for sugar suddenly quadrupled, that's a real problem. Well, along comes ADM with the answer. So all of a sudden, you invent new Coke and then you over-sweeten it. And then everyone hates it. You go back to classic Coke, which is the old recipe, except it's not sucrose, it's high-fructose corn syrup. Makes you go, hmm, I don't know whether that's true or not, but what is true is high-fructose corn syrup is extremely economical to use as a sweetener and all sorts of things. And most people are already living in this state. And the problem with high-fructose corn syrup is it's still a glucose molecule and a fructose molecule linked together. So it's not necessarily any more evil than table sugar and it does come from corn, if that's a good thing. But the real problem is, is that everyone's in this metabolic state and it is everywhere. It's in your coat, it's in your Gatorade, it's in your bread, it's in your pizza sauce, it's in your peanut butter, it's in every damn thing you eat. Wouldn't be such a big deal if we weren't all already in this state. So you're just taking a problem that's like a fire and you're throwing gasoline on it. That is why we have this obesity epidemic that you see in the country. We have a metabolic derangement that for a large segment of the population, you guys included began in utero and it's still going on in places where you can't even find it or detect it. So that's my spiel on the paleo diet and why you should do it. Any questions? Yes? Oh, not me, I said 15 minutes. Oh, okay. Let's do questions then. Yes, sir. Hi, Doug, how are you? Good. Great book, I read it back in last November, I guess, or last October into November. Thank you. And then right after that, I read good calories, bad calories. Since then, I've been very low carb, mostly meat, high fat. It's been great. I just had a couple questions. If you could elaborate, or I guess you haven't mentioned it, but if you could talk a little bit about ketone body metabolism, in particular, I guess, how long it takes to adapt and how long after you've been that way for a while, it takes to kind of revert back if you're on vacation eating crap, for example. And then the other one was about the brain chemistry of carbohydrate addiction because when I was younger, I ate a ton of pasta. It got me really sick, but at the end of the day, I still crave some of those foods, despite knowing that after I eat that stuff, the next morning I feel like crap. Right, I kind of explained that for you. Okay, tell me the first part of the question again. Ketone body metabolism. Okay, ketone bodies are a byproduct of the metabolism of fatty acids and certain fatty acids, doesn't matter, which really. But when you mobilize body fat, or when you ingest fat as a food substance, certain fatty acids, when they go through this process called beta oxidation, which is part of the Krebs cycle, it is the part of the Krebs cycle that uses an energy process that actually ends up generating 96 ATP. Byproduct that gets thrown off of that is ketone. And ketone is acetoacetic acid or acetone, fingernail polish remover, literally, or beta hydroxybutyrate. And they are just a byproduct of that metabolism. The vast majority of it is eliminated through your body, mostly through your breath, which you can smell when you're ketotic and in your urine. Has sort of a fruity, musty odor to it. Ketone is very useful, and it was actually a byproduct of metabolism that we adapted to in our hunter-gatherer past, because ketone is the only fuel other than glucose that your brain can subsist off of and function very well on. As a matter of fact, when you look at neuromotor testing of people that are in ketosis, they actually perform much better on neuromotor testing, tests of coordination and things of that nature, when they are in a ketotic state. And it makes sense, in a hunter-gatherer past, if you were starting to mobilize body fat in producing ketone, it would be to your advantage if you used a fuel that made you sharper and more likely to be successful hunting and gathering. Do you think, which do you think is the default, as opposed to the backup? Because like Dr. Harris on his Palaeonu blog believes that the ketone body metabolism is the default, and glucose metabolism is for survival when you're starving. It's like dire needs. So can you comment on that? Yeah, I kind of agree with that, but the important thing though is to not get confused ketone metabolism with fat metabolism. They're not necessarily the same, and not all the time when you're fat burning, you're going to produce significant amount of ketones. And it takes a very small amount of glucose, a very small amount of glucogenic amino acids to provide enough metabolic bipyte to keep you out of ketosis. Okay, so it takes very little of that. So ketosis isn't necessarily a goal or a marker of being a fat burner. But I do tend to agree with Kurt Harris in that I believe that the default metabolic state in our evolutionary past was being a fat burner, not a car burner. For two reasons, one is just pure availability. And number two is for energy output, 96 versus 36. So it's very natural that we would seek it and that it would be predominant in our diet, and that would be our predominant metabolic default. You know, if we took everyone in this room and we got in a bus and they dumped us out in the wilderness and said, hunt and gather for a week, and then we come back and we did a macronutrient assessment of everything that we brought back, you would find that very little of the caloric content that we were able to get for ourselves would be carbohydrate. Unless we just happened to hit that one two week block at the end of summer, beginning of fall, when apple trees were in fruit or blueberries were blooming or something like that. Short of that, carbohydrate would be the smallest macronutrient amongst everything that we gather. And that's part of how all this problem begins is that we have metabolism that's involved to store energy based on this signal. Is there an abundance of that which is least abundant in my environment? So if there is an abundance of carbohydrate, that which is least abundant in my environment, then that is my signal that is okay to store energy in the form of fat. That's why the whole process is driven by insulin because the whole fitness industry and diet industry has in their head that somehow we evolve this little accountant that's sitting up there going, this many calories in, this many calories out, tally it up and go, okay, now we'll lose weight. No, if it was that complicated, we never would have survived as a species. Not only that, if we burned as many calories as it says on the treadmill, we never would have survived a hunting and gathering trip. At that rate, you wouldn't survive a trip to the grocery store. It's all predicated on signaling and insulin and signaling. So to answer your question, I think we're predominantly, the default position is to be a fat burner, but being in ketosis is not necessarily a marker for that depending on what you're eating. But being in ketosis is not a bad thing. People freak out when they hear ketosis because they think of diabetic ketoacidosis. And what happens there is when you're diabetic, you don't make any insulin. So you're just stacking up a ton of glucose out here that you can't get into the cell. So it's like people in the apartment are calling for pizza over and over and over again. Lots of pizza delivery dudes are coming to the door, but no one can answer the door. So the default then becomes to mobilize body fat, but you have no glucose entering the cell at all, no gluconeogenic amino acids to buffet the production of the byproduct of ketone. You have to so aggressively tap this that you actually develop a ketoacidosis, which is a disease state, which is why people freak out when they are in ketosis or hear ketone. So there's that part of the question. The other was, oh, the carb crave. Yeah, okay. So the problem with the carb crave is that you have kind of beat a metabolic dog trail of this can't go this way, can't go this way, gotta go this way, okay? Well, part of beating this dog trail here is this high energy state produces a lot of an energy byproduct called NADPH. That's not important to know, but it's a high energy phosphate bond material. And that drives metabolic processes that in themselves produce byproducts that interfere with two other hormones that you rely on to tell you when to stop eating, grailin and leptin. Leptin is actually produced by your body fat that tells your brain, look, we got enough body fat, it's time to stop. And grailin is activated largely by fat through a hormone called cholecystokinin, and it gives you the sensation of fullness in your stomach. Well, the byproducts of doing this over and over again affect your grailin and leptin sensitivity so it doesn't work as well in the brain. Leptin is there, it's secreted out by your fat cells because fat should, in a proper metabolic state, have a diminishing marginal utility. It does good to have some stored body fat, but at some point the amount stored, the incremental cost of carrying all that around is greater than the potential energy benefit of having it. It's like gypsies, you can only put so much crap in the wagon when the cost of pulling the wagon exceeds the benefit of what's in the wagon. And that's what leptin's trying to do, but the byproducts of that metabolism don't allow leptin across the blood-brain barrier. It binds to it, prevents it across the blood-brain barrier where it can actually send the message. So you probably have some persistence of that in your own metabolism, because you gotta remember this is like having a dog in your backyard. Once you beat the dog trails, they don't just fade away automatically. Okay. Ooh. Okay, great. So my girlfriend is a cardio bunny. She runs a lot, and I've read the book, and I really think you've done a great job articulating some of the things that I haven't been able to get across properly. Good, thanks, I'm glad. But there's just one other thing. We always talk about muscular adaptation versus cardiovascular adaptation, and I've always tried to explain why muscular is more important, it works more, but I've never been able to get that across, because she's always talking about you need more oxygen uptake and VO2 max. And could you just explain the difference there and what's that about? I will as best I can. You know what I just realized, Anthony is, I apologize. I have a nervous habit of clicking these pins in all my own videos. I'm just always pissed off, because I'm standing there clicking the pin right over the microphone. So I'm gonna put this down so I stop doing that at the very end of this whole talk. So hopefully you're able to edit some of that out. But to answer your question, her question is not even correct. Okay, because it's predicated on several false assumptions that are predicated on other false assumptions. And the biggest false assumption that came out of years of aerobics based research is that somehow this part of metabolism, the oxygen using part of metabolism is somehow uniquely hooked up to the cardiovascular system where the rest of this isn't, okay? But, I'm gonna have to pick up the marker again, but I promise not to click it. But the thing is, you gotta realize is that there's physiologically no way that you can take just this part of the metabolism in your cells and have it hooked up to your heart. Everyone thinks that aerobic equals cardiovascular to the extent that we don't have aerobics rooms anymore, we have cardio theaters. Aerobic and cardio has become interchangeable in people's lexicon. Is this not true? Because there's no way that you can isolate out this portion of metabolism and have it connected to the heart and the blood vessels. What you gotta realize is that the heart and blood vessels support the entirety of metabolism, this whole thing. And the only way that you can get at this entirety of metabolism, or what I like to call global metabolic conditioning, is by doing mechanical work with muscle. And to the extent that you do a higher quality of mechanical work with muscle, the higher the quality of the cardiovascular stimulus is going to be. Okay? Remember what we said, even if we were going to take her assumption that aerobic equals cardio, even if you do this, you can only ramp up cardio maximally if you give it substrate at the fastest rate possible that it can do it. And then afterwards, that gets converted back into substrate and continues to ramp that up. But the bigger issue is that these cardiovascular improvements, the vast, vast majority of them, everyone has it in their head, I do this exercise and something gets better in my heart and blood vessels. And that's true to some extent, but it's way, way overstated. The vast, vast majority of cardiovascular adaptations that you see, my resting heart rate of 48 is not because of something so much that happened in my heart and blood vessels, but rather that is an autonomic, meaning central nervous system automatic. It's an autonomic adjustment to changes that have occurred at the cellular level within the muscle itself. So what you're perceiving is, oh, I got a low resting heart rate and my blood pressure's low and my heart rate's low and all that's good markers for health is not really something that's happened here. It's the fact that all these enzymes that make all this happen and these linchpin enzymes that keep the whole process going and lactate dehydrogenase and pyruvate dehydrogenase, all those enzymes can up-regulate and become more powerful and more efficient. And when that happens, when that's more powerful and more efficient, this has to work less hard and that's borne out through the parameters that we measure, but it's not because of something that specifically happened there. All right, last question? That it? Guys, thanks so much. It's been an honor. Thank you.