 Hey everybody, Dr. O here, welcome to chapter 14, fitness, physical activity, nutrients and body adaptations. We're going to cover quite a bit of neat stuff here. We're going to start to really put together everything we've learned, you know, now that we've covered the macro nutrients, the micronutrients, we've covered water. Now we're going to put it together and look at how things like physical activity and sleep relate to it and then we're going to look at different times of our lives, different periods of our lives, different periods of development and our needs. But this is a very important chapter. So I like the title, physical activity, which we're going to talk about, both structured exercise and physical activity here and the different types. The nutrients that we know, we obviously need nutrients to be healthy, but if you are going to be physically active, that does change your nutrient needs. And then body adaptations, I really like that, you know, I teach anatomy and physiology as well. Yes, you need nutrition, right? If you are going to build muscle or improve cardiovascular fitness or lose fat, nutrition is going to play a critically important role. But your body only adapts to what you force it to adapt to, right? So we'll look at the adaptations that come with strength training and endurance training and these types of things. So you need, like for example, if you want strong bones, you don't just need calcium. You need calcium plus weight bearing activities to tell your body to build more bone. If you're losing weight and you want to make sure you're losing fat and not losing muscle, then you have to send a muscle-building signal. You have to send a signal to your body that it needs to preserve muscle because the muscle is needed, right? So if you're on a diet and not strength training, your body will look at muscle like it's an expendable fuel source. If you are strength training while in a calorie deficit, your body will use less lean tissue as a fuel source because it realizes it has other needs. So make sure you always think about that part of it, too. What kind of stimulus am I sending or what am I telling my body to do and that's what you're going to force it to adapt to. All right. Pretty cool stuff, I think. Okay. So the icebreaker, I don't know what's wrong with this picture, but while some students are also athletes, many are not. While not necessarily on a team, many of us can still benefit from knowing about how to fuel our bodies based on our levels of physical activities. What are some of the vitamins, minerals, and energy systems you use when working out and why? All right, so let's go back to the point about knowing how to fuel your body based on levels of physical activity. We are not all athletes, we are not all on teams, but we all have different levels of physical activity and we also have different goals. So we've talked about this throughout the semester, but it's to review the things we've already covered. If you're going to be physically active, then you're going to be damaging and rebuilding your body more than someone that's not. So you know your protein needs are going to be higher because you need protein to build and rebuild tissue. And then once you meet your protein needs, and you get all your vitamins and minerals and all these types of things, once you meet your basic needs, then you need to fuel your body and fuels primarily going to come from carbohydrates or fat. And the ratio of carbs to fat that you consume should really be based on your genetics and your needs and how well you feel at different mixtures of carbs and fat. But your level of physical activity will play a role. If you're very active and you're an endurance athlete and you're constantly on the move, then your body is probably going to want a higher percentage of carbohydrates as fuel. If you're more sedentary or you do things like long hikes or long walks or shorter bouts of exercise, then your body might do just fine relying on fat as a fuel source. We talked about that before. Fat is a better fuel source as far as the amount of energy you can extract from it. But it's a slower burning fuel source. So really, how quickly you need fuel will determine how you should fuel your body. And then other factors as well. But with my training, if I'm trying to improve my strength, it doesn't seem to really matter if I eat more carbs or more fat. But if I'm doing a lot of volume with strength training because I'm trying to put on muscle, what's called hypertrophy, then I need to fuel with carbohydrates or I start to run out of energy. And then if you run out of energy, then your training isn't as good, which means the stimulus to send your body isn't as good. So that's why you have to know yourself, know your body, and then know what your goals are. And really, you need to try different things. Because generally, I do really well with less carbohydrates than a typical person in my situation. But it doesn't mean that I still need to ramp them up and ramp them down accordingly. So you just have to know. I know people that consume twice as many carbs, people that are smaller than me, that consume twice as many carbs as I do to fuel their activity. And then some people can be even on ketogenic diets and do the things that I do. So everyone is different. So you just have to play with these things, find the mixture of foods and the types of foods that make you feel the best, especially when it comes to fueling your activities. I've said this before, but don't eat the foods you like. Eat the foods that like you. Eat the foods that fuel you the way you need them to be fueled. All right. Also, just hard to look at this broken image. So let's just move on. But also, another really important thing is knowing what your goals are and what your primary focus is. So like myself, I've lost a lot of weight. Now I'm in a phase where I'm trying to build muscle. So my goals have changed and my diet has changed accordingly. And so has exercise. So let's say that if fat loss is your primary goal, weight loss, which you should always be trying to preserve muscle, so fat loss, if fat loss is your primary goal, then I would say that your diet is the primary tool. And your exercise should complement your diet. Your training should complement your diet. So basically, while you're trying to lose fat, get the diet dialed in, use the exercise to, yes, burn a few more calories and keep you more physically active, but mainly use exercise to send a stimulus to your body to preserve lean tissue. If your exercise or your training is your primary goal, like if you're trying to build muscle instead of losing fat, then to me, the training is the priority and your diet should complement your training. So that's just kind of how I like to look at it. Your diet is key. If you're trying to lose fat, exercise is very important but secondary. And then if you have a performance goal, whether it's trying to get better at running or build muscle or whatever, then the training is the key to send the body the appropriate signal. And then you consume the diet, still very important, but the diet is designed to support the training, not the other way around. That's kind of how I look at it, just kind of breaking the ice there. OK. Learning objectives describe the health benefits of being physically fit and explain how to develop the components of fitness. So we'll look at exercise again versus just general physical activity levels. Identify the factors that influence fuel use during physical activity and the types of activities that depend on glucose or fat, respectively. So we've already hit that a little bit, but we'll come back. List which vitamins and mineral supplements, if any, athletes may need a why. So what might an athlete need more of than a typical person? Identify the factors that influence an athlete's fluid needs, sorry, and describe the differences between water and sports drinks. We've covered that in an earlier chapter, but we'll hit it again here. Discuss an appropriate daily eating pattern for athletes and list one example of a recommended pre-game and recovery meal. So again, how much you eat in a 24-hour period is still going to be the key. But if you are an athlete or you are training, then how you fuel your body before training, possibly during training and after training, is really more important than the rest of the day. I mean, the 24-hour window is still the most important, but I think that these are really important opportunities for fueling and for recovery that people should use. I don't believe in this magical 30-minute anabolic window or anything like that, but I do believe that pre-training, enduring training, post-training are critical periods to make sure you prime yourself for the training and for recovering from it, and really for recovering for the next training session. So if somebody asks me, what should my diet look like post-training, my first question is when's the next time you're going to train? If it's several days, then it doesn't matter at all. If it's later today, it's going to be critically important. All right, so fitness. What are the benefits of being physically fit? Then this list would be much longer than this, but these are some key ones. And we'll talk about being fit and having an appropriate level of physical fitness and appropriate level of activity versus overdoing it because you'll see that overtraining would impact these things negatively. So restful sleep, people that are physically fit, sleep better, less risk of sleep apnea, generally you just sleep better after having some hard physical activity during the day. Nutritional health, I think there is a huge link there. I think that when I'm training, I am way more likely to eat well. The last thing I want to do is ruin a good training session with a poor diet. So, and I think it's the other way around too, people that eat well start to feel better and maybe you're more likely to get physically active. So it's a chicken or the egg type thing, but I think the two are related. If you feel good, then you want to continue to feel good. Like I know that's been a major thing for me. Just eating for pleasure. I enjoy all the food I eat. The food I eat is all good, but I wouldn't say that that's not a flavor explosion every time I eat, but that's not who I eat. Right, I used to eat that. I used to eat like that. I used to eat for psychological and emotional reasons. I used to eat for lots of negative reasons and I overdid it and I gained a lot of weight. Now I eat to fuel my performance. I eat because I know that if I don't eat a certain way, then I'll be more sore tomorrow when I wake up and my training tomorrow won't be as good, you know, these kind of things. So I do think that the two are related. Improve body composition. Even if you don't lose any weight on the scale, the more physically active you become, you will lose fat, especially visceral fat or in most importantly, visceral fat because it's the most dangerous kind. You will also improve bone density and lean tissue and muscle mass. Improve bone density is the next one. Remember, your body will not build bone it doesn't need. You can have three times as much calcium as you need every day and your body won't turn into bone unless it gets a stimulus to do so. Bone is expensive, metabolically. Bone is heavy, right? So your body doesn't want to carry it unless it needs to. That's why perfectly, physically fit astronauts lose bone density in space. The moment your body senses it doesn't need bone, it will get rid of it. So it's the stimulus from fitness is the key there. Resistance to colds and other infectious diseases, just improved immunity. Low risk of cardiovascular disease. Low risk of type two diabetes. Of course, if your ticker's gonna be in good shape, your blood vessels will be in better shape. Your muscle is the best glucose sink that you have in your body. So if you put on a few pounds of lean mash, mass, it'll absolutely make it easier to control your blood glucose, even if you're eating poorly. Stronger self-image and not only hopefully liking how you look better, which to me should be a very secondary thing, but liking how you feel, liking how you perform, right? I'm 44 years old now and I feel better about myself than I have in my entire life because I know what I'm capable of and I know what I'm capable of becoming, right? And my training sessions and eating well to fuel that are what drive that. Long life and quality of life. So yes, people that are physically fit will live longer, but you can say, oh, you live four years longer, you spend all four years in the gym, whatever number, depending on the study you look at, right? But the quality of life is the key, right? So are you gonna be, you know, there are 85-year-olds that are log in miles every day and feel great, their mind and their body are working well and there are 60-year-olds that are basically bedridden, right? So the quality of life to me is the key difference. Will you be able to, are you gonna be able to perform your activities in daily living? Are you gonna be able to live by yourself? Are you gonna be able to do what you want to do when you get older? To me, that's what I'm really looking for. I'm looking for having the energy and the capability and the ability to be the grandfather that I want to be in the future more than eek in a couple more years of existence out, especially if you're sick and you have diseases and all these kind of things. To me, the quality of life is much more important than quantity. Lower incidents and severity of depression and anxiety, that's for physical and psychological and mental and emotional reasons. All these things are true. You don't wanna overdo it. I look at these types of things. Extreme activity, extreme training is actually, it can be hard on the cardiovascular system, can hurt your immune system, people that run marathons are more likely to get sick after they run marathons, things like that. Physical fitness and training can lead to body dysmorphia images or image issues and all these types of things too. So it's like everything else, it's dose dependent. And that's why we'll look at the different types of training here coming up but I actually like to, well actually right here, be some of them, but I like to look at it the same way we did meal planning back in, what was it, chapter two where we talk about a good diet is adequate, balanced, varied, moderate, right? All these types of things. I feel the same way when it comes to physical activity. So adequate physical, so using the same terminology, an adequate diet or adequate physical activity is making sure you're meeting your needs. You're reaching the minimums that the government recommends and these kinds of things. So meeting some sort of minimum standard of physical activity. Moderate means you're not overdoing it. So running a few miles a week is one thing, running 150 miles a week is a whole another thing. So too much of a good thing, too much exercise can be bad. So somewhere between adequate and moderate you have this balance. So are you pushing your body hard enough but not pushing it too hard? What you wanna do, it's called stress, recovery, adaptation. You wanna stress your body enough so that you can recover and adapt to it. If you stress your body too much, your body is only recovering and not adapting and improving and that's not good. And if you stress it even more than that, you can't even recover from it and that's when people just grind themselves into the dirt. So you want it to be adequate and moderate which somewhere in the middle we have balanced and then varied. You don't wanna just do one thing. You've got power lifters that get really good at power lifting but get winded when they walk to the restroom. So we'll look at the components of physical activity and making sure that you're doing all of these things. Or you have people that only focus on flexibility and they don't focus on strength and building muscle, these types of things. So variety is good when it comes to fitness. So what we say adequate, moderate, balanced, varied and then calorie control doesn't fit in here or those types of things. But another really big one then would be sustainability which I add to the meal planning thing but you need to find types of physical activity that you enjoy doing and will do for the rest of your life. A 10 minute walk every day that you will do every day for the next 10 years will have a huge impact compared to, you wanna start doing high intensity interval training and you know it's better for you and you know you should do it but you dread doing it and you only do it for a couple of days at a time and then you get hurt or you quit doing it. The best exercise program in the world that you won't do isn't gonna help you at all. So consistently good, always beats occasionally great. All right, so physical activity intensity compared. So what kind of intensity, basically the more intense an activity is the less time you need to do it to meet the physical fitness guidelines. So light intensity, little to no increase in breathing end or heart rate, perceived exertion on a zero to 10 scale less than five, the talk test you're able to sing, energy expenditure less than three and a half kilocalories or calories per minute in the walking pace of less than three miles per hour. So right before I did this video I just took a eight minute walk, I just do a loop around the block when it's nice out and I'm getting my mind right before I record or teach. So that would have been, definitely would have been light. I was singing in my head but I wouldn't sing out loud but I could have. So moderate intensity, some increase in breathing end or heart rate, perceived exertion of five or six on a zero to 10 scale you're able to have a conversation. So if two people are walking, you know a little faster clip but they're still having a conversation with each other that's moderate intensity. So energy expenditure of 3.5 to seven kilocalories per minute and walking pace of three to four and a half miles per hour. Vigorous activity, you see a large increase in breathing and or heart rate, perceived exertion on a scale of zero to 10 would be seven or eight. Conversation is difficult or broken. So you know we've reached this kind of vigorous level when you can say a few words, if someone asks you a question, you will respond with a couple of words maybe have to catch your breath in the middle of the sentence, that's vigorous activity. So more than seven calories per minute, a walking pace of more than four and a half miles per hour. So if you caught me after doing a set of squats of 10 or 12 repetitions, I would not be able to hold a conversation with you for a while. If you asked me a question, I would give you the shortest one or two word answer that I could. All right, then we have back to activity intensity looking at the fuel system. So we'll come back to this more later but let's start at the bottom. So moderate activity, so activity duration that you can do for more than 20 minutes is aerobic. So your body is gonna burn ATP or it always burns ATP but the ATP is gonna come primarily from fat. So if you're on like a nice slow hike, most of the calories you're burning are coming from fat. Remember, fat's a really good fuel source but it's a slow fuel source. But with this kind of activity, you don't need a huge increase in energy per minute so your body can still just keep relying on burning fat for fuel. When you get to high intensity, things that you can only do for two to 20 minutes, still aerobic but now we're gonna have to start to use more carbs so you're gonna be burning carbohydrates from glycolysis in the TCA cycle. And so you'll be using your liver glycogen stores, you'll be using muscle glycogen, you'll be using blood glucose or you have to start making carbohydrates. All right, that'd be like things like cycling, swimming and running that you can do for long periods of time. Still aerobic though so both the bottom two use oxygen, the key is just are you burning fat or carbs for fuel and you're never burning one or the other. You're always burning both. We're talking about which one are you burning primarily. All right, so very high intensity activity. Think about like high intensity interval training or something. You can do these things for 20 seconds to two minutes. Now we're in the lactic acid system. So we're gonna get ATP from carbs but it's gonna be anaerobic glycolysis. And remember if you don't have oxygen, glycolysis turns glucose into peruvate but then peruvate becomes lactate. We covered that back before. So this would be 400 meter running, 100 meter swims, gymnastic routines, those kind of things. And then extreme things you can only do for a few seconds, five to 10 seconds. That's gonna be the phosphogen system or the ATP creatine phosphate system. So it's the fuels that you already have available. You don't have time to make any new fuel. So it's gonna be the ATP that's stored in your body and then creatine phosphate. So 100 meter sprints, shop puts, golf or baseball bat swings, tennis or volleyball serves. So just super short duration, super high intensity. Your body has maybe two or three seconds of ATP stored up in it. What creatine phosphate is, this is why people take creatine monohydrate to try to help saturate the creatine phosphate system. So creatine phosphate is stored energy and it has a phosphate. Remember when ATP is spent, it loses its energy and becomes ADP. Creatine phosphate comes along and said, hey, I can give you my energy, I can donate you my energy and donate you my phosphate. Turning ADP back into ATP. So this system recycles ATP. So we only have two or three seconds of ATP stored in our body but we can get 10 or 15 seconds of fuel out of this system, the phosphogen system, because the combination of ATP and creatine phosphate. All right, I gotta check this real quick. All right, so I got to know what time to go to the airport to get my steps on. Okay, physical activity guidelines. So we talked about this variety being important. So cardio respiratory fitness, so things that primarily make your heart and lungs stronger, strength training, which makes your muscles and bones stronger and flexibility which allows you to move better through space, right? Things that I think about a combination of stretching but also like mobility and movement and all these are important because if you're strong and flexible and mobile or you're less likely to fall. And as you get older, that's basically like if you're over the age of 70 or even younger maybe, your priority needs to be not falling down because it's one of the leading causes of death people over the age of 75. I believe it's the fifth leading cause of death over people the age of 75. And if it doesn't kill you, it will cause serious problems. I think back to my grandfather, right? When he was in his 70s and early 80s, people would have guessed he was 10 years younger than he was. He had a fall, broke his shoulder, put him in the nursing home for a short period of time. He started to kind of wither away, got out, fell again, broke his hip in the nursing home, in and out of my uncle's home because he couldn't care for himself anymore. And the last couple of years were really rough. It was those falls that limited his mobility and limited his ability to take care of himself and to stay active that just caused this massive deterioration. I know it's not something I want to deal with when I get older. All right, so let's go. So cardio respiratory fitness, aerobic activity that uses large muscle groups and can be maintained continuously. This should be done five to seven days per week at a moderate level of intensity, at least 30 minutes per day. So five to seven days per week, 30 minutes per day. Examples would be, I won't read them all, you know how to read, but running, skating, rowing, power walking, these types of things. Water aerobics are a great one. And then as the, just so you know, as the intensity goes up, the duration can go down. So you see that at the bottom, if you prefer more vigorous aerobic activity than a minimum of only 20 minutes per day, three days per week is recommended. So the more intense something is, the less time you need to do it to get the appreciable benefit and the less often you should do it. And that's just because it's harder on your body, right? Vigorous things are harder on your body, meaning you need more time to recover. So taking a walk five to seven days per week, more intense things, less periods, less duration and less often. All right. And then we, so speaking of adaptation, you also want to remember in the background, this idea of the fit principle that it's called progressive overload. Basically you need to continue to keep adapting. If you take a two mile walk every day, it might be really hard when you first start, but at some points it gets so easy that it's not even taxing your body anymore. There's nothing for your body to adapt to. So the fit principle says that you need to constantly be pushing your body so it will continue to adapt and you do so by increasing frequency, intensity or time. So how often you do something, how intense it is or how long you do it. So if you're two mile walk becomes really easy and you're doing it three days a week, then jump up to five days a week or make it a three mile walk or walk faster, some of those kind of things. All right. Strength training, resistance activity that is performed at a controlled speed and through a full range of motion. So this can be body weight or strength training using weights. I mean, at some point, body weight will kind of lose its effectiveness as you get stronger and stronger and adding weight is a good idea. Frequency, two to three non-consecutive days per week, non-consecutive because your body has to recover. It only takes a few minutes to recover from a walk if any time. It takes 24, 48, 72 hours to recover from a bout of strength training. So if you did a bunch of strength training today, then depending on, you know, if you're a novice, if you're new to it, it will take that full 72 hours to recover potentially. If you've been training for years, it might only take 24 hours, but still it does, it takes time to recover. And remember, it's not called the stress adaptation cycle. It's called the stress recovery adaptation cycle. You don't get stronger in the gym. You get stronger when you're recovering from what you did in the gym. I'm hopefully getting stronger today because of what I did yesterday in the gym. If I'm recovering properly and recovering enough that I can adapt, that's the key to remember. Art intensity, enough to enhance muscle strength and improve body composition. So you should be, you know, if you're doing pushups, you should be getting better at them and then able to do more of them. And then maybe you'll add weight, right? These kinds of things. Duration, two to four sets of eight to 12 repetitions involving each major muscle group. That would certainly be enough if you are a novice. The volume will need to go up as you get stronger as you become an intermediate or advanced at strength training. Frequency needs to go up or intensity or time duration. Okay, pullups, pushups, situps, weightlifting pilates. They fall into that category. Flexibility, so stretching activities that use the major muscle groups, two to seven days per week. Enough to feel tightness or slight discomfort. Again, I think stretching is great. Stretching and mobility work is great. Most research now says that you shouldn't be doing it before your other types of exercise. You should kind of have dedicated mobility sessions. You would certainly, you want to warm up before training, but stretching too intensely for too long actually weakens performance and increases injury risk. That's something that people used to not believe, but now we know it's true. All right, two to four repetitions of 15 to 30 seconds per muscle group, things like yoga. Yeah, so you see a combination of these things. Maybe you take, even if it's something like I recommend taking a 10 minute walk after every meal. So you're taking, let's say three 10 minute walks a day, every once in a while you're gonna get on the bike and do things a little bit more vigorous, a little more intense. Strength training a couple days per week. Flexibility as part of your recovery process from those other types of exercise. I love it, that's a great program. And it meets those planning things we talked about earlier. Adequate, moderate, balanced and varied. So get after it. Reflection number one, you can pause if you want to answer these questions. All right, during or immediately after physical activity, muscles release myokines. These signals change, these signals changes in skeletal muscle and adipose tissue, that's pretty cool. So that means that being physically active will help your muscles be healthier, help your muscles use fuel better, hopefully help your muscles grow that you're looking for, but also it impacts adipose tissue. They're like, there are stem cells for example, that can become bone or they can become fat. When you're physically active, these kind of signals tell your body to turn those stem cells into new bone. When you're not physically active, different signals or an absence of these signals tell those stem cells that they can go ahead and become fat. So it literally changes what you're made of. To gain health benefits, a minimum of 10 minutes per day of aerobic activity is recommended. Longer time and greater intensity bring greater health benefits. So start with that 10 minute walk after supper, you'll see it and then increase it from there. When I first started, I was just, I was doing, I was taking walks, 10 minute walks, became 20 minute walks, became 30 minute walks. Then I started adding strength training using just basic resistance bands, pretty straightforward stuff. You know, now I'm lifting much heavier weights. I'm training for several hours more than I used to and I continue to reap benefits because of it. These guidelines help adults improve their body composition, strength and flexibility. So your body composition is basically what percent of you is fat, what percent of you is not fat or what's called fat free mass. So even if you don't see changes on the scale, people, this happens all the time. People go, they start training and they wondering, wondering why they're, the scale's not moving, they're not losing weight, but their pants sizes change or their clothes fit better or their body, because their body composition is changing. Muscle's more dense than fat. So if you lose a pound of muscle and gain a pound of, or if you, sorry, lose a pound of fat, gain a pound of muscle, you will actually be a little bit larger, but you'll be much healthier. All right, myokines are signaling proteins. Physical activity beyond the activities of daily living provide health benefits and a dose response relationship. So that's an important point. Physical activity beyond activities of daily living. And that's because if your body adapts, right? So if you do the same thing every day, at some point the adaptation becomes so high or so great that it's no longer pushing your body. It's not stressing your body anymore. My dad for years and years was a letter carrier, was a mailman. So he walked hours a day. And I'm sure when he first started, his body would ache and he saw some benefit of it. But then for most of his career, that just became part of his activities of daily living. So if he wanted to really stress his heart, he needed to do more than that. He had to go do some extra or something. He couldn't just rely on his activities of daily living because that became his body's baseline. And then a dose response relationship up to a point. I like that. So like physical activity. So studies have shown that walking up to 16,000 steps a day will offer decreased risk of death. After that, the benefit of going from, so if you're walking 4,000 steps a day and you go to 16,000 steps a day, huge increases in health and decreased risk of death. If you go from 16,000 steps a day to 26,000 steps a day, you no longer see that, right? It's the benefit tapers off. All right, even 16,000 steps, you could say that 10, 12,000 steps a day is where you get the most bang for your buck. And then as you climb above that, you still get benefit, but not as much. Developing fitness. The body adapts to physical activity, responding to physical activity overload by building structures to support the activity. Stress, recovery, adaptation. When protein synthesis is greater than degradation, a person can gain muscle in a condition called hypertrophy. So if you're training and eating in a way where your body will synthesize more proteins that are broken down, then your muscles will get bigger. But you can get stronger without muscles getting bigger, but generally bigger muscles are easier to get stronger. Atrophy occurs when protein degradation is greater than synthesis. So I saw a study recently, took 70-year-olds and they trained them for a year and they actually were able to see hypertrophy. Their muscles got bigger and they gained lean tissue. But sadly, just a few weeks of inactivity and they lost a lot of that benefit. When you're young, it's easier to put on muscle and maintain muscle. When you're older, you're really just trying to fight that loss at some point. But it's a fight that you should fight. All right, strategies to build fitness and prevent injuries. Be active all week. This is why, if you ask, when you should do both, but if you ask me, should I ramp my physical activity up every day of every week? Or should I do 30 minutes of real hard exercise three times a week? I would just say to be more active throughout the day. You get a lot of health benefits there, but you should do both. But working out for 30 minutes a day doesn't, and then sitting on the couch the rest of the time is not gonna get you where you wanna get as far as being truly fit. So find ways to be more physically active. Increase your non-exercise activity as much as you increase your activity. That's why I know what's exercise as soon as you plan it and it's purposeful and all that, but I look at the two separately. So I have my training sessions and then just throughout the day, I try to find ways to be active. I take short walks, I walk to a colleague instead of emailing them, little things like that. I volunteer to go to the store, get some steps in. So just park farther away. All these things, they sound cliche, but they absolutely work. Be active all week. Use proper equipment in a tire so not only, so things keep yourself safe, basically. You can't improve your physical fitness if you're constantly being injured. So make sure that you're using the proper equipment. You're using it correctly. You're dressed correctly so you don't injure yourself and those kind of things. Use proper form, so form and technique, whether or not they keep you safe, it also makes it more efficient, which means that you'll be better at what you're doing. If you run with better mechanics, I think you're less likely to get injured, but you're also more likely to be good at running. And if you get good at running and efficient at running and you can run farther and faster for longer and you're not hurt, then you're more likely to keep doing it and that goes back to that sustainability piece. Include a warm-up and cool-down activities. So, again, long bouts of stretching don't appear to be the key thing to do, but get your muscles and joints warmed up, like prior to strength training, I do some real basic warm-up stuff, get the heart beating, and I do a little bit of mobility work, but then I also, before I lift anything heavy, I lift lots of things light. I do bodyweight exercises and just use the bar to get started, those kind of things. And then cool-down activities are really good too to prepare the muscles for the recovery ahead. Challenge your strength and endurance a few times a week. A challenge being a keyword. It's called progressive overload. If you don't continue to challenge your body, it will adapt to a point and then stop adapting. Pay attention to your body signals. This is like, so maybe if you need a deload week or you need just, if my muscles are sore and I go in to work out, I work out in the garage primarily. And after my warm-up, if my muscles, if they're less sore or not sore at all anymore, then I know I'm good to go. If things are hurting or if joints are hurting when I do things, then I need to be smart about that. You need to know when to take it easy, just as much as you need to know when to push hard. Include at least one day of rest per week. So this would be, again, I don't think you have to rest from taking walks, but the more vigorous activities are, the more rest you need. So like I lift, I lift weights five days a week, so I have two days where I'm completely resting from lifting anyways. On those days, I do recovery work, mobility work, take walks, et cetera, or just do nothing occasionally. Yeah, I guess I don't think you need to take, the more intense something is, the more rest you would need. I was just gonna say, like if you're taking those walks after dinner, I don't think you need to recover from them. For most people. All right, cardio respiratory endurance. Aerobic workouts improve heart and lung function. They enhance oxygen delivery by increasing cardiac output. Cardiac output is how much blood your heart can pump per minute. So it is your stroke volume, which is how much blood your heart can move per beat, per pump, times your heart rate. So the reason this is why if you work your heart, your heart gets better at being taxed, then at rest becomes real easy. So you see that people that run do endurance activities, they have slower heart rate, more efficient breathing, improved circulation, and lower blood pressure. Think about the heart rate thing though. If you're a trained athlete, then your stroke volume is really high. Your heart has become a really efficient pump because you've trained it to be so. So if you can move 30 liters of blood per minute while doing super intense activity, then resting on the couch is easy. So if your cardiac output gets really high, and your stroke volume gets really high, then your heart rate can be really low. So this is why when you exercise, your resting heart rate generally will get lower. Think about how easy it is to sit on the couch. If you're a sprinter or you're a marathon runner, think about how easy it is for your heart to sit on the couch. And that's why you see this, that's why endurance training makes your heart and lungs function better. To a point. All right, what is cardiorespiratory endurance? How does it work with the body to improve muscle endurance and flexibility? So cardiorespiratory, I don't understand exactly what this is saying here, but cardiorespiratory endurance allows joints that doesn't allow that. Aerobic training, so there's a typo there, I guess. Aerobic training enhances capacity for the delivery of oxygen and removal of waste. So if you have cardiorespiratory endurance, then you can do things that make you stronger and more flexible. Like I mentioned earlier, if your cardiovascular health is so low that you're not capable of lifting weights in the rep ranges of eight or 10 or 12 reps, then it's limiting what you can do. So the better your heart and lungs function, the harder you can train in other areas. Exercise promotes a body composition that includes lean muscle mass, increases and reduces excess fat, well increases muscle, there's some typos here, big ones, that'd be increases muscles and reduces excess fat and supports the ongoing activity of heart, lungs and blood. Muscle endurance allows us to work harder and longer without fatigue, that's the key I was getting to. Flexibility allows our joints to move through a range of motion, bend and recover. All right, so we covered cardiovascular fitness, muscle, strength and endurance. Resistance training, the purpose of resistance training is basically to put tension on a muscle and to damage them and the recovery processes how they get stronger. Build muscle mass, develop and maintain muscle strength, muscle power and muscle endurance. So muscle strength and how much weight can you lift. Power is like explosive strength and then endurance would be strength for a long period of time. Benefits for the prevention of chronic diseases. I mean, just, I talked about how muscle mass is a glucose sink so it'll keep your blood sugar from getting too high, lots of other things as well. Maximize and maintain bone mass, improve posture and reduce risk of back injury, all great things. I mean, like 85% of Americans will have a serious bout of low back injury at some point in their life. Strength versus power versus endurance, we just talked about that. So back to, I was gonna say here, so yes, building muscle mass super important and I talked about that, the stimulus that you need to send to the body. So when you basically, you need to stress your muscles, put tension on your muscles and you need to kind of wear them out and do some damage. So when you lift weights, you lift a weight that's really hard and really heavy on the body and your body says, we need, I know muscles are metabolically expensive but we have to build more muscle, we have to build more strength in case this jerk asks us to do that again, right? That's stress, recover, adapt, stress, recovery, adaptation. So a balanced fitness program, we covered this already, level of intensity varies, address is all aspects of fitness. So let's look at level of intensity when it comes to resistance training. If you're gonna lift really, really heavy weights, you don't lift them very often, right? Are you, you lift maybe less often or let's say you do, you're doing three sets of five repetitions or three repetitions. Well, so you lift, when you lift higher weights, you do less reps. When you lift lower weights, you do them for more repetitions. So you're trying to, you're focusing on different attributes there but the intensity is for how hard you're pushing and or maybe how close you get to failure, that can be about the same but you just gotta keep that in mind. You cannot always lift the heaviest weight possible. At some point, you know, you will break and that's why, you know, most good exercise training programs, let's talk about that for a second. First of all, exercise versus training. I like to look at it where exercise is what you're doing for today. Training, there's an end goal in mind. So when you're training, what you're doing today in the gym is leading to some goal in the future. That's kind of how I look at the difference but I'm gonna start with what I was gonna say there but this idea of, you know, while you're exercising or a good training program, you will have times where you're high intensity, maybe moderate intensity, maybe low intensity. You'll have things called deload weeks where you're purposely dropping the volume and intensity to help your body recover, et cetera, et cetera. All right, energy systems and fuels to support activity. Now we're getting into some of the metabolic stuff that we've covered quite a bit of before. And I mentioned this, we've already seen this chart once so I've already mentioned this. The Phosphogen system is the creatine phosphate system where your body uses that two or three seconds of ATP and then creatine phosphate can recycle ATP so you can get 10 or 15 seconds worth of fuel out of it. The lactic acid system is during anaerobic glycolysis. So if you don't have enough oxygen, glucose becomes pyruvate, becomes lactate and that's this system here. The formation of lactate is designed to keep glycolysis running or else anaerobic metabolism would kill you. The aerobic system, you burn a combination of fats and glucose depending on intensity, low intensity, moderate intensity, you burn primarily fat, high intensity, you burn primarily carbs. That would be so aerobic glycolysis would be glucose to pyruvate to acetyl CoA and then fatty acid oxidation or beta oxidation of fat also leads to acetyl CoA and both of those enter the Krebs citric acid cycle or the TCA cycle and that's where you get a bunch of energy but you need oxygen to do it. All right, glycogen used during physical activity you can see this image on the side. If you have a high carb diet, your maximum endurance time is higher because that means your glycogen stores will be full. Glycogen stores about 2,000 calories depends on size, depends on training, lots of factors. If you're on a ketogenic or low carb diet your body will be storing a lot less glycogen but you also won't be using as much glycogen so it won't matter unless you're doing maximum endurance type activities. So glycogen stores about 2,000 calories like I said enough for about 20 miles of running. When glycogen is depleted your muscles will fatigue. So maximizing muscle glycogen is very important for an endurance athlete. The amount of stored glycogen depends on your diet, higher carb diets, more glycogen stores, absolutely. High intensity activities will use more glycogen as well. So that's why athletes generally want to make sure they have more stored carbohydrates, sedentary people, fat does the work you need. You've got a ton of energy stored as fat you just can't access it quickly enough during intense activity. Lactate, covered this already, product of anaerobic glycolysis accumulates during high intensity activities basically anytime that you can't maintain enough oxygen when you've reached your VO2 max or the maximum oxygen that your body can use this usually means you can't hold a conversation. So if you can't hold a comfortable conversation you're probably dipping into lactate production. When accumulation rate exceeds the rate of clearing activity can only be sustained for one to three minutes. So really good endurance athletes like tour de France cyclists besides the drugs and stuff they take. They have unbelievable lactate clearance. They produce lactate quickly but they also clear it away quickly so they can keep pushing and pushing and pushing when me and you would have failed a long time ago. So lactate clearance is one of the key things that makes someone like Lance Armstrong for example that made him so much better than even his competition. He was probably cheating, they were cheating too though and he was still way better than them. So how quickly he could clear lactate was a huge thing. So lactate and fatigue, lactate quickly leaves the muscles, travels to the blood and then it's converted back into glucose. Remember that's called the core recycle. We covered that in our metabolism chapter. Duration of activity also affects glycogen use. Initially your body uses glycogen for fuel with sustained aerobic activity more fat and less glucose is used because you know glucose is limited and you wanna preserve it for the brain and red blood cells and things like that. So your body will use fat whenever possible unless your blood sugar is high. But it will, so the longer you go though your body will have to start to rely more on fat which it can because fat is a great fuel source but slow but if you're doing long activities your body has time to ramp up fat usage. Once you're out of glucose, you remember muscle glycogen can only be used by those muscles. Liver glycogen can be used to increase blood glucose. Once you're out of glucose you better start making it if you're not eating it. Gluconeogenesis is a process of turning non-carbohydrates into carbs, primarily protein, amino acids and glycerol from fats. Two to three hours of strenuous activity will deplete storage then you have to continue to do this. Continued exertion becomes almost impossible. At some point they call it bonking. At some point you are out of fuel. That's why you manage your fuel and you train and maybe if you get like intra-workout carbohydrates you do whatever you can to keep your fuel levels elevated. Once you're out of fuel, you're out of fuel. All right, training effects, glycogen use. Trained athletes use glucose and glycogen more slowly just because they get better at this, right? They get better at burning fat to preserve glucose. So glucose after activity, this would be again the big thing here is when's the next time you're gonna train. If you're gonna train later today then post-workout carbs critically important. If you're gonna train in three days your glycogen stores will be refilled from normal diets. It really doesn't matter what you eat at that point. So, but if you're looking for glucose after activity eat a high carb diet regularly just you have plenty of glucose available. Consume glucose during prolonged exercise. We call those intra-workout carbohydrates. So that'd be like your carb based sports drinks like data rates. Carb carbohydrate rich foods after activity increases insulin sensitivity and increases glycogen stores. So that's all true. I mean so how quickly and effectively this occurs again depends on when's the next time you're gonna train but if you're ever gonna have an insulin spike I think a good time to do it is after training to because not only does insulin help replenish your glycogen stores but it also helps get amino acids into your cells so you can rebuild proteins. So carb recommendations for athletes it just again depends but however many calories you're consuming general recommendations are 40 to 65% of your calories should come from carbs and I would say that you want to put as many of them at least especially the quickly digesting carbs you want them before and after training. All right fat used during physical activity. Fat intake recommendations for athletes is the same as the general population 20 to 35% of energy from fat. Now it's usually gonna be on the lower end because you only have so many calories to work with and an athlete should be eating more protein and will probably be eating more carbs. So athletes are generally gonna be closer to the 20% range whereas Joe and Jane Schmo like the rest of us could be fine at those higher levels. So 20 to 35% of energy from fat, less than 10% from saturated fat same recommendations as the rest of us. Fat can fuel hours of activity and not run out. Spot reducing is not a thing. Remember your body will take fat from wherever it has the enzymes needed to break down fat the quickest. So that's why when you do lose weight people typically lose weight in certain places whether it's the place they want or not. So maybe you have the let's say that when you start losing fat you notice you lose it from your butt first. Well that's because that's the easiest place for your body to get it because that's why it's getting it from there. Let's say you're trying to lose it from your belly. Well sadly for a lot of people belly fat will be the last fat to go so you have to get even leaner if you wanna reach those spots and that's genetically determined and there really isn't anything that I've ever seen that can help you choose where body fat comes from. All right factors affecting fat use, duration and intensity of activity. We've talked about that several times now and the type of training. So if you lift heavy weights for a few seconds at a time and you walk you can be fine on a low carb diet. If you run miles and miles and miles you're going to need more carbohydrates. I always say that if you run marathons you need to eat carbohydrates. If you eat a lot of carbohydrates you should run marathons. All right protein use during physical activity and between times athletes use more protein as fuel so 10% of total fuel during activity and rest your body needs to make glucose and one of the ways it does so is from protein. So that's one of several reasons why athletes should be on higher protein diets. Not only do you need use protein as fuel more than the typical person but you need protein to build muscle which is made out of protein and to repair muscle. So your protein needs are much higher. That 0.8 grams per kilogram of body weight that is the RDA for a sedentary adult that is not what an athlete needs. Ideal protein intake for athletes is now seen to be 1.6 and 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight which take your kilograms divided by 2.2. So 2.2 grams per kilogram is the same thing as saying one gram per pound. So somewhere between, somewhere around one gram per pound or slightly less of body weight would be what your protein needs would be if you're physically active. What about that? Oh, okay so I always say it should be your goal weight because if you're trying to lose 50 pounds if you're 250 pounds and you want to weigh 200 pounds you don't need 250 grams of protein. You need enough protein to support your lean mass not your lean plus fat free mass. So if your goal weight is 200 then you could shoot for 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram based on the 200 pound weight, not your current weight. But if you're already lean then just use your body weight that's perfectly fine. All right, so diet, adequate energy and carbon take. Carbs are protein sparing so if you have glucose you won't need to make glucose and you won't need to use protein to do so so a higher carb diet will spare protein. Intensity and duration increase higher protein needs just talked about why. Make sure you meet your carbohydrate needs, supplements are not necessary. So protein shakes and all that are great but they're not necessary unless you can't get enough protein. So I like to use a protein shake is kind of like to catch things at the end of the day. If I haven't met my protein needs then I have a protein shake but you can, even an athlete that needs a lot of calories should be able to meet their protein needs from their foods. Oh also just one last thing going back to that. I always like to say any meal that doesn't have adequate protein is kind of like a wasted meal. I know you replenish your glycogen stores and all of that but if you're gonna be consuming calories you may as well have the building blocks you need there to put them to good use. If you eat a bunch of calories with a bunch of protein then your body can build lean tissue. If you eat a bunch of calories but you don't have a lot of protein on board your body will still build tissue but it can't build the tissue that needs protein so it'll build fat, right? So you should definitely be spacing your protein throughout the day and making sure that there's protein should be the priority of almost every meal or really every meal. You can pause this and answer these questions. Protein is not a major fuel for physical activity. Remember we need more carbs and fat or fuel sources. Protein's a building block that can be used for fuel. In the hours following activity protein synthesis accelerates so that's why you need good protein. Consuming high quality protein enhances this action. So personally, I believe in, you know, getting however many carbs you eat you should front and back load them around your training. Even somebody on a low carb diet should still be trying to get 15 or 20 grams of carbs pre-workout or something like that but let's say you eat hundreds of carbs, doesn't matter but after training the several meals after training should be really have plenty of protein to make sure you can maximize protein synthesis. So on my training days I eat more carbs, less fat and more protein. On non-training days I still eat a good amount of protein but less than on a training day and then I eat less carbs and more fat. That's just how it works for me. All right, insulin prevents muscle breakdown. So we talked about how carbs and insulin spare protein. Aerobic activities like running stimulate the synthesis of mitochondria to facilitate efficient aerobic metabolism. So it's called mitochondrial biogenesis. You will actually, so exercise forces your cells to build more mitochondria which is great. This is why when you exercise, you get better at exercising. Your body, you become more fit. Insulin also stimulates muscle protein synthesis. These adaptations occur through signals into DNA to produce the needed proteins. So that's why we talked about carbs can be good for building muscle. I don't know if they're essential because they can't be because there are people that are on ketogenic diets that build muscle but I don't know if they're building the maximum amount they could which is why as someone that's even a fan of lower carb diets for the typical person, I still think that carbs support training in ways that fat does not. All right, vitamins and minerals to support activity. We've covered a lot of this. Do you take vitamin in our mineral supplements? Why are we not? If you do, what do you take and what do you hope the benefit might be? That's a question for you to answer but I would say that like I've said before, supplements are just that. They should supplement a healthy diet. They will never replace a healthy diet. If you take them, so even people I've mentioned before, I'll say it here in one place though, even people that eat really healthy diets have some nutrients they may struggle to find and the big ones to me are, so I'm not talking about someone that's a vegan or on some sort of restrictive diet at all, just a typical person eating a good healthy whole food diet. I still would always check to make sure you're getting enough potassium, getting enough magnesium and getting enough iodine. Those are the first three I look for if I'm looking for someone being deficient in nutrients even though they eat healthy. So use a tracking app, use chronometer, use those tools and look for those problems. If you have them, then supplement. As far as like the nutritional supplements though that have been clinically proven to be urgent agates, like to enhance performance, list is very low. You can go to their entire stores that sell supplements but clinic, the ones that I would stand behind clinically proven to be effective. Creatine monohydrate been studied repeatedly, repeatedly, repeatedly. I think that non-athletes should take it just as much as athletes. I really like that one again, not medical advice is telling you what I believe. So creatine monohydrate, caffeine, caffeine does at the right dose, caffeine is a performance enhancing compound. Whey protein, so protein shakes to make sure you're getting your protein needs. I think that those are all good. And then the omega-3 fats, the fish oils have been shown to enhance recovery a little bit and these kind of things. That's kind of a distant forth but as far as if you're asking me like, oh, I'm in a multi-vitamin to make sure you're not deficient in anything. Those are, I mean anything above and beyond that, you're either looking for, you're completely wasting your money or there are things that have very minimum benefits, maybe they'll help you 1%, 2%, 3%, which if you're trying to optimize things, that might be enough for you to say, hey, that's worth 20 bucks a month or 40 bucks a month. But for a typical person, most things just don't offer much good return on investment. I'm sure there are other ones, but those are the key ones. All right, many of the vitamins and minerals assisting in releasing energy from fuels and in transporting oxygen, which is why you need them and if you're physically active, you need more of them. But remember, if you're physically active, you're also eating more. So as long as you're eating nutrient-dense foods, you are already getting more of them. This knowledge has led many people to believe, mistakenly, that vitamin and mineral supplements offer physically active people, both health benefits and athletic advantages. Sorry, my phone's going off. Okay. All right, so again, you need more but you're already eating more so your base should still be covered. Take a supplement if you wanna fill in any cracks, absolutely, but high doses of vitamins are not gonna offer advantages very often and they may actually do the opposite. Like one area is like antioxidants, right? Taking a bunch of vitamin C and vitamin E, these kind of things has been shown to decrease muscle soreness, which sounds great. But remember, it is stress, recovery, adaptation. If you do things like that to decrease the amount of stress your body goes through with training, you may be impacting the recovery process and the adaptation process. So it could be limiting the benefit of the activity. So this would be things like cold plunges, high dose antioxidants. There's lots of things like that that have been shown to make you less sore, which sounds great. But honestly, you get less sore just because you get used to training. It's called the repeated bout effect. So don't rob your gains, don't rob your progress by worrying about little things like that. I'm not saying that no pain, no gain, nothing like that, but I'm just saying, it sounds great on the surface when you say supplementing vitamin C decreases muscle soreness. But if it decreases it in a way that also decreases the adaptation, then it's not as good as it sounds, is it? All right, dietary supplements, vitamin and mineral deficiencies, impede performance. Of course, yeah, you need nutrients to metabolize fuel, et cetera. Athletes consuming little food, for example, to make weight may benefit from a multivitamin mineral supplement. That's a really great point. If you're on a diet, you're now eating less food, but you're still being physically active, that's when you may not be getting enough nutrition from your diet. So a great, great idea there. Supplements won't improve the performance of well-nourished athletes. If you're already eating nutrient-dense foods, those nutrients should already be on board. Vitamins and minerals tend to function as small parts of larger units, so it may take hours or days for vitamins and minerals to be assembled into their working larger units. Therefore, taking a supplement prior to competing will not improve performance. Don't think that taking a multivitamin is gonna help you today. If anything, it might just give you a stomach ache, so I never would recommend adding things pre-training or pre-performance without having tested how your body's going to impact it. When I was younger, I was trying to lose weight. I'd take a multivitamin on an empty stomach. Probably every two or three workouts, I would have to stop to throw up, and it was because of the supplement in my stomach. All right, vitamin E, prolonged. Did we actually just talk about this? Prolonged for prolonged high-intensity activity. So that increases free radical production, and free radicals may be beneficial. That's what we're talking about here. So vitamin E, the benefits of supplementation, research shows mixed results, because yes, it might help with muscle soreness, but it may interfere with the adaptations we're talking about here. So that's what I would be leery of. We've covered where to find vitamin E earlier, but it's mainly found in vegetable oil and nuts and seeds, those kind of things. Iron deficiency prevalent among active young women. So if you're physically active and growing, your iron needs are gonna be higher. If you're menstruating on top of it, your iron needs are gonna be even higher. Vegetarian athletes are not consuming heme iron, so they'll have less bioavailable iron in their food. So that can lead to iron deficiency anemia, which obviously impairs performance. We need oxygen to perform. Sports anemia is an adaptive temporary response that affects hemoglobin levels, but it's not a true anemia. So recommendations for athletes, active teens have higher iron needs. So if your iron needs do go up with physical activity, but if you're not menstruating, then they're still not very high. Fluids and electrolytes to support activity. We could be out a whole section on this. This is just review again as well. Water loss versus both sweat and breathing. So if you're exercising, you're gonna be losing water faster. You're breathing faster and sweating more. So an athlete or someone that's out in a hot human environment has to worry a lot more about regulating hydration and temperature. Dehydration leads to fatigue, a loss of 2% of body weight reduces muscle capacity to work. So you don't wanna get very dehydrated. That's why you don't wanna get dehydrated at all. So make sure you're properly hydrated, but the key is to be properly hydrated when you start, hydrate as you go, and then hydrate when you end. What I recommend is weighing yourself before and after training and drink two to four cups of water for every pound that you've lost during training. Hyperthermia, so if you are dehydrated, your body cannot regulate temperature very well. So you'll reach a point where you can be sweating. So this is why humidity impacts things, sweating without evaporation. So it's like 27 times harder to cool off in a human environment than just a hot environment. And that's because normally you sweat, the sweat evaporates off your body into the environment and that's what cools you off. If it's humid, you sweat, the sweat pours off of you. The environment, there's already so much water in the air around you that it's not being taken up. So sweat is just you're losing water in electrolytes, but it's not cooling you off the same way. All right, and then hypothermia would be your temperature falling too low. Hydration, you hydrate before activity, drink extra fluid in the days before an event. It's not just the morning before an event. You wanna be very, very hydrated. Remember that hydration though means not just water. Hydration means to make sure you have proper water and electrolytes. Rehydrate during and after activity. I just gave you my rules there, two to four cups of water for every pound lost. Fluids for everyday active people just plain cool water, but if you're an athlete or if you're sweating a lot, then fluid plus electrolytes and then if you're an endurance athlete, carbs fluid electrolytes. All right, so I mentioned this before, but personally I add some electrolyte products to a drink or two a day. If I'm really sweating, I work out in the garage. So if it's really hot and humid out there, I will add some extra electrolytes as well, but making sure you don't need to get electrolytes from your beverages. You can drink water and then get electrolytes from your food, but you gotta make sure you're getting them somewhere. So I kinda hedged my bets there. All right, electrolyte losses and replacement. Losses occur with sweat. Higher losses and untrained persons, very true. When you first start exercising, you'll sweat more and you'll lose more things in your sweat like electrolytes. Well-trained athletes will lose less sodium, for example, but you can lose up to 3,000 milligrams of sodium per hour when you're sweating. So you have to accommodate these losses somewhere. Replacement, you can use regular foods, like I just said, or you can use electrolyte replacements. Salt tablets, again, it's kinda like fiber supplements. You're supposed to get minerals with your fiber. If you only get fiber supplements, then you're getting, then you're maybe detracting from the minerals from your diet. Same thing here, salt without more water can actually make dehydration worse, which is why you shouldn't drink salt water all the time, but make sure you're getting your electrolytes somewhere. Hyponate triamine, we've covered this already as well. The loss of sodium and excessive fluid consumption. So overhydration hurts more athletes than dehydration, interestingly enough, because if you're sweating, you're losing water and electrolytes. If you're only drinking water, you're only replacing water. And so you have a loss of sodium consuming a lot of liquids. It actually deludes the sodium in your body, and that's what hyponatremia is. And it can even be fatal. I have a friend that almost died from this marathon, a training for a marathon on an old country road, and she had developed this hyponatremia, or hyponatremic encephalopathy. So only drinking water, losing sweat or losing water and electrolytes causes a dangerous drop in sodium potentially. So make sure you're getting your electrolytes, replacing your losses. So if you're taking a walk on a cool day, you're not losing really any electrolytes, so don't worry about replacing them. If you're training for hours in a hot human environment, that's a whole different story. Sports drinks. Hydration is critical for optimal performance. Water is the best choice for most people. We've already said why. Sports drinks, I mean, I like electrolyte supplements in my water, because I want water and electrolytes. If you need more carbs than a sports drinks, the way to go, it's water. It's got glucose and fructose and these kinds of things. Sodium and other electrolytes. So they're, and since they taste good, you'll drink more, so they'll keep you hydrated. So those are the benefits. The downside is lots of sugar and lots of calories. If you need them, that's fine. If you're a training athlete, but if you're just drinking Gatorade all day thinking it's super healthy, it's basically soda with some little bit of electrolytes added. Enhanced water, just all those things out there. Again, just be mindful of the sugar intake and are you training hard enough to really need intra-workout carbohydrates? If you are, then use these things. If not, water with occasional electrolytes or making sure you've got plenty of electrolytes in your diet is fine. Poor beverage choices, alcohol and caffeine. So alcohol is metabolizing the liver, not muscle, so it isn't fuel for muscles. It's not rich in carbohydrates, it's rich in alcohol. So there are calories there, but your body just uses them differently. Can out-compete, that should say, with food sources for some B vitamins. Slows reaction time, reduces strength, power, endurance, hinders accuracy, balance and coordination. Alcohol is not a performance-enhancing drug. Now caffeine is, right, but it is, you know, it is, like I said, it can hinder performance and potentially be dangerous if you use an excess. So, you know, do you need three scoops of your pre-workout? Probably not a great idea, but, you know, a good, a moderate dose of caffeine can be performance-enhancing drug, but too much of it can actually damage performance. Diets for physically active people. I mean, we've kind of, we've talked about these kind of things, all the extra things that they need. Water, way before and after activity, term of replenishment, we covered that. I like that two to four cups rule for every pound you lose. Nutrient density, because you are gonna need more nutrients, but since you're consuming more calories, as long as the food you're eating is healthy, you should be getting all those needs met. But some people have a hard time. If you're trying to gain muscle, or you hear these stories about athletes needing five, six, 10,000 calories a day, sometimes you do need empty calories, right? There are people, if you're trying to gain muscle, for example, and you're eating, you're just dying, eating 4,000 calories of chicken breast and broccoli and oatmeal and rice, sometimes people have to add things, like pop tarts and things that are just really energy dense to meet their calorie needs from training. It's, you know, again, optimal performance and optimal health are probably not the same thing. It's just, that's just reality. Carbs, so we talked about this plenty, but maybe a pre-game meal. Timing is really important, like when should you have your pre-game meal? Certainly not too close to training, but not too soon either. Protein intake, we've covered all that. Here's some, you can read these, some examples of nutrient-dense snacks, whatever fits into your diet and your, meet your needs, but these are all things that you see, you know, generally going to have a little bit of proteins and fiber, all the good stuff. Meals before and after competition. So pre-game meals should be one to four hours before competition. I generally say one to three, but one to four is good. Make sure you're hydrated. Foods that are easy to digest. This would be when you'd want carb, you know, foods that are high in carbs, but maybe not high in fiber. Carbs that can be more easily digested. So you don't want food that's just sitting in your stomach like a brick. So this would be, you know, just consider that. Recovery meals, high carb to replenish glycogen, helps maintain muscle glycogen stores and increases muscle protein synthesis because of an increase in insulin. So that's why most people would do well with those post-workout carbohydrates. But nothing magical about this anabolic window. If you're meeting your needs, protein for sure, not protein, but nothing wrong with it, right? Have a protein shake, have a post-workout chocolate milk or carb protein drink, whatever you want. If it helps you meet your macro targets and your calorie targets, then there's nothing wrong with it. So don't avoid consuming food in the post-workout window. But that whole 30 minute anabolic window thing is just not true. All right, we did it. Now the lesson is over. What did we learn? Describe the health benefits of being physically fit and explain how to develop the components of fitness. We hit that good. Identify the factors that influence fuel use during physical activity and the types of activity that depend on glucose or fat. Did that. List which vitamins and mineral supplements if any athletes may need and why. Good combo about that. Identify the factors that influence an athlete's fluid needs and describe the differences between water and sports drinks and when they're needed. Discuss an appropriate daily eating pattern or diet for athletes and list one example of a recommended pre-game and recovery meal. Again, just, I mentioned chocolate milk. Chocolate milk has a pretty good ratio of carbs to protein. So some people say that's like the perfect thing to have in the post-workout window before getting to your actual first meal. And then we talked about some examples of rapidly absorbing carbs. Really it's all about you. Don't do new things, right? Try incorporate your diet, try new diets. When you're training, see how it impacts you. See how caffeine impacts you. This, that, the other thing. Don't do those things for the first time on game day because you want to know how it'll impact you. All right, great chapter. I hope this helps. Have a wonderful day. Be blessed.