Train Like A Pro: Exercise Scientist Andy Galpin On Fitness Fundamentals, The 9 Adaptations, & Why Your Training Isn't Working

Andy Galpin is a PhD in exercise bioenergetics, professor at Parker University, and elite performance coach to professional and Olympic athletes. This conversation explores his framework of nine fitness adaptations and why many people plateau in what could be called the "gray zone"—working hard enough to feel exhausted but not specifically enough to trigger adaptation. We discuss how movement quality often matters more than intensity, the difference between functional overreaching and overtraining, and what's actually limiting your progress. Also, Andy coaches me through rebuilding movement patterns after spinal fusion surgery. Andy translates complex exercise science into practical training wisdom. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: On: High-performance shoes & apparel crafted for comfort and style👉🏼https://www.on.com/richroll WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Roka: Unlock 20% OFF your order with code RICHROLL👉🏼https://www. ROKA.com/RICHROLL Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com Momentous: High-caliber human performance products for sleep, focus, longevity, and more. For listeners of the show, Momentous is offering up to 35% off your first order👉🏼https://www.livemomentous.com/richroll Calm: Get 40% off a Calm Premium subscription👉🏼https://www.calm.com/richroll Seed: Use code RICHROLL25 for 25% OFF your first order👉🏼https://www.seed.com/RichRoll25 Pique: Get up to 20% OFF plus a FREE rechargeable frother and glass beaker with your first subscription👉🏼https://www.piquelife.com/richroll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 0:44Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  Spend the money to hire one coach and really just do their whole program for eight weeks. It's like, well, I did it for three weeks, kind of, but then I added my own stuff on here. None of that. One coach, and give them that time. Sticking to a program that has been intelligently designed for you, based on really just a few factors. It's not that much. A few things. Monitoring, progressing, how are we feeling? Checking in on subjective, just how do you feel today? How's stuff looking? How's the volume? How's the intensity progressing? Like, just really basic stuff. The vast majority of people are not doing that. If you have done that, or have been doing that, maybe now we can go to other steps. But when we hear these things come up so many times, we're like, you have just not stuck to a program for 10 weeks. You haven't done it.

• 1:51Speaker 01

  You just have to be consistent with an intelligently designed program. And so you can save all your money on all the trackers and the wearables and everything else, and hire one person, and see how it works out.

• 2:12Rich Roll?

  Hey everybody, welcome to the podcast. My name is Rich Roll. This is the podcast that I have been hosting for almost 13 years, one month shy, I think, if memory serves me, because the first episode was published at the end of 2012. Maybe you already knew this, but I'm also a guy who writes books, most notably Finding Ultra, which is sort of this addiction recovery/middle-aged life transformation/athletic memoir, as also maybe you know. And I'm an ultra-endurance athlete. This is a passion that has been placed on hiatus recently due to undergoing spinal fusion

• 2:55Rich Roll?

  surgery back in early May, which, as you might imagine, has done a little bit of damage to my fitness due to this sort of forced state of being sedentary. But I'm nearing the six-month anniversary of my surgery, which is significant because, fingers crossed, assuming that my scans, which I'm getting next week, indicate that everything is healing on schedule, means that I will be getting the green light to start doing a few more things fitness-related, which I really can't wait for, because right now, I would say I'm the least fit that I've been in like 20 years. All of which is fine, it's part of the bargain for getting better, this period of time that

• 3:39Rich Roll?

  in many ways has benefited me, not just in terms of repairing my back, but as this exploration of stillness and presence. But let's just say I'm kind of ready to get back into doing things, something, anything that involves breaking a sweat. And by doing things, I mean doing them right. Rebooting my entire relationship with my physical body in order to rebuild it properly from the ground up, really, to create the best foundation that I possibly can for strength, endurance, resilience. So that I can return to and enjoy movement and exercise for this next chapter

• 4:21Rich Roll?

  of my life and really thereafter, as long as I possibly can. All of which is a very meandering preamble for why I'm so excited for today's episode. Because when it comes to everything fitness, there is no source I trust more than Dr. Andy Galpin, who amidst all the confusing online debates about the complexities of fitness and nutrition, how to train, he is really the welcome voice of experienced, evidence-based expertise that we need. A PhD in human bioenergetics, Dr. Galpin is a professor of kinesiology at Parker University,

• 5:02Rich Roll?

  where he's also the executive director of the Human Performance Center, where he studies and works with professional Olympic and world champion athletes across a wide diversity of disciplines. Today, Dr. Galpin provides a comprehensive overview of fitness and its importance, and dispels common misconceptions, including some of which I have long held, to help us better understand fitness beyond simple catchphrases like VO2 max. From strength and endurance training strategies to setting and achieving goals, today we cover stress and recovery, consistency and intensity, fat adaptation, mental fortitude, what to do when you've hit a fitness plateau, the role that exercise plays in longevity and

• 5:47Rich Roll?

  health, and many other topics. I think you're going to find what Andy shares extremely instructive, so make sure to take notes. But obviously, there's only so much detail that we could cover in a single conversation. And my goal really was just to cover enough to provide you with some essential basics and takeaways, but also to leave you hungry for more. And more you will find, much more in fact, in Andy's incredibly educational podcast series called Perform, which I urge you to check out after you complete listening to this one. And now, let's get into it. This is me and Dr. Andy Galpin. Enjoy.

• 6:31Rich Roll?

  Andy, it's great to have you here, man. I'm so excited to talk to you. This is a question I think we all think we know the answer to. What is fitness?

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Wow. I've done hundreds, if not several thousand podcasts at this point, and I don't know if I've ever been asked that.

• 6:49Rich Roll?

  I mean, how are we supposed to talk about this if we don't have a functioning definition? And I know you have one. So let's like state our terms at the outset here.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Okay, I'll try to be as non-Andy Galpin as I can be here.

• 7:02Rich Roll?

  I'm here for you to be the full Andy Galpin.

• 7:04Speaker 01

  Okay. So very technically scientifically, we generally exchange the word fitness for VO2 max. So if you see in a research paper, the word fitness was tested or fitness improved, they're almost specifically referring to VO2 max. They're shortening cardio respiratory or cardiovascular fitness. You can almost exchange those two. If you were to write, if I was to insert that word fitness improved or whatnot in one of my papers, and I defined fitness as strength, I would be smashed on that. I'd get pushed back immediately. Now, that said, I'm not even arguing that that's correct, or that's the best, but that is, that is the generally accepted way that you can interchange.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  I wouldn't use it that way in my practice. I wouldn't coach people like that. I don't communicate like that. Because a more interesting framework is to actually step back and think where most people have heard the word fitness originally goes back a very long time, which is something more closely aligned with survival of the fittest. That did not refer to VO2 max. That did not say the person or species or organism that has the highest VO2 max is going to survive the longest. It had nothing to do with that. It was simply which is the most fit for the current environment. This could be nothing to do with physical characteristics. Which one is most fit to survive based on the demands placed upon it in the area environment that they're in? And so just constraining that even a little bit more.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  And keeping it biological, this could mean anything from your ability to fight off cancer, your mental health, to your bone quality. This could be anything that says, how well are you going to survive in the current state and demands that you're being placed upon. So when I think of it, I generally am going to hedge towards actually number two, unless I'm in a scientific discussion, then I'll always use that term fitness appropriately because that's the only way to effectively communicate.

• 8:56Rich Roll?

  From canvassing your work, my sense of this definition is if we locate it in the, in the kind of, you know, exercise world in which we, you know, commonly associate this word, it's a reflection of your resilience to adapt to progressive stress, or maybe just even take the word progressive out and put stress.

• 9:20Speaker 01

  We'd probably choose a different term for that. Generally, fitness is more hedged towards expression than adaptability or resilience. And so what I mean by that is, we would say something like, your fitness is your ability to express a power output, a performance output, like to do something where your ability to handle an insult would be more probably explained as resilience or adaptability or plasticity, or something like that. Such as to say, for example, two days ago, I summited Mount St. Helens, which is not incredibly impressive. I think it's 8,500 feet or something like that. But we went, I don't know, 4,000 feet elevation, gain over five miles, something like that. There was five of us, two of us

• 10:04Speaker 01

  woke up the next day fine, and three of us woke up so insanely sore, we can't move. Our VO2 maxes did not correlate at all with the person who's sore versus the person who's not sore. And so right there, there's a distinction of saying, okay, fitness is one thing, VO2 max, ability to express power or strength. The ability, though, to handle novel insults, to handle change, to respond, to adapt quickly, is a different way. If you wanted to find fitness as that, okay, but you're kind of talking about two separate important distinctions.

• 10:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I understand that. I understand that. I guess narrowing it a little bit, though, and to use your word expression, it is the expression of your, if we use it just as like in the, let's just use sports or whatever, it's an expression of your mind and your body's adaptation to exercise and do stress over time.

• 10:55Speaker 01

  It's an expression of capacity. Like, what's your capacity to engage in this particular type of output, which has a whole host of genetic influences and then certainly lifestyle and exercise and backgrounds. It's a combination of all those. In fact, we don't need to keep lingering on it if you want, but VO2 max, very specifically, if you look across the totality of the research, you're going to find something like a 50% genetic and 50% lifestyle explanatory. So just baked into that, it is a combination of what you're saying. It is the expression of what you've done for training, the expression of your ability, it's the expression of genetic limb lengths and everything else that go into that. So it is a combination of both those, but it is not explained entirely by one or the other.

• 11:40Rich Roll?

  To me, when I look at the landscape of fitness and people pursuing fitness goals, there seems to be two things that are occurring. One is people don't, they lack the education and information to approach their goal appropriately. Like, they're just barreling along based upon some kind of half-baked plan, or their friend told them to do this or that, and they're just bouncing around, right? So it's a very kind of unfocused approach. And then, at the same time, we're in this world right now where we're inundated with data points because of wearables and, you know, all kinds of, you know, people on social media telling you what you shouldn't, shouldn't eat and do, et cetera, that can be disorienting as much

• 12:21Rich Roll?

  as it is informative, right? And so we get caught up in, in these 0.01% factors, these minutia, and we blow them up into things that are much more meaningful than they actually are, while we're kind of overlooking the basic things like, hey, if you want to do this, like, you're actually not, your workouts, workouts aren't really, you know, sort of set up to progress you towards that goal.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  Okay, so my number one advice for this, ditch all of that stuff and spend the money to hire one coach. If it's a, let's just keep using example of a race goal or an endurance goal. Just hire one coach who's done that. And really just do their whole program for eight weeks, or 12, or whatever the thing is. You nailed it when you opened that up. It's like, well, I did it for three weeks, kind of. Then I added my own stuff on here and then I'll say, and you're like, no, no, no, no, no. None of that. One coach and give her that 10 weeks to prove that she can do it, or give them that time. It's probably going to work. Someone who's done it a lot, someone who has been there and coached 10s, thousands, hundreds

• 13:28Speaker 01

  of people. Sticking to a program that has been intelligently designed for you, based on really just a few factors. It's not that much. A few things. Monitoring, progressing, how are we feeling? Checking in on subjective, just how do you feel today? How's stuff looking? How's the volume? How's the intensity progressing? Like just really basic stuff. The vast majority of people are not doing that. If you have done that or have been doing that, maybe now we can go to other steps. But you couldn't be more right there. When we hear these things come up, so many times we're like, you have just not stuck to a program for 10 weeks. You haven't done it. You had all these work trips pop up, or you got sick. It's nothing else. Like you just have to be consistent with an intelligently designed program.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  And so you can save all your money on all the trackers and the wearables and everything else. And hire one person and see how it works out.

• 14:20Rich Roll?

  I've never been able to achieve a real, kind of like athletic goal for myself without a coach.

• 14:25Speaker 01

  I pay somebody. Like I have, Tim DeFrancesco has been programming me for years, my strength and conditioning. I can certainly do it all by myself and I pay him and I'll never stop paying him to program everything for me.

• 14:38Rich Roll?

  How important do you think it is to have a goal? Just to focus what it is that you're going to be doing with the limited time that the average person has? Because I think most people, and probably most people watching this or listening to this. They don't have a goal. They just like, they want to lose a little bit of weight. They want to get a little swole. They want to feel fit and good in their body. They want the mental health benefits of, of, you know, what it feels like when you're active. But that translates into like, I go to the gym three times a week and I kind of do what I want. And yeah, I work the different muscle groups and I know, you know, I sort of know like this many sets and this many reps and, you know, I alternate that with cardio on the treadmill and, and I try to eat well and I call it a day.

• 15:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm. You're probably going to get that result. You're probably going to get like, you did a little bit of work and you kind of ate pretty well and you, and you're probably going to get kind of results. That that's how that's going to work. I'm hesitant to say yes on goals because when people hear that and they go, I was roll. I'm not going to get a piece of paper out and write a goal down. Like, I'm not going to do that. I know what I want. I know I want my back pain to go away. And I want to lose these few pounds. Okay. So it's not the fact that you need to be like, great, I'm going to compete on this day. Or I'm going to try to get this new record on bench or this new body weight here. The research has been clear for decades. That is going to be more effective. In fact, if you look at the research on periodization strategies.

• 16:05Speaker 01

  So this is a fancy way of saying, like, how do you set your volume up to progress over weeks? Like, like really in the weeds, strength and conditioning nerd speak. It's really clear. Almost every form of periodization that's ever been tested works about equally as well. And they all exceed no form of periodization. Having a plan always beats not having a plan, even if the plan itself isn't necessarily demonstrably better than another plan. And so you can phrase that and think about that in the form of an actual goal. Write a number down on a piece of paper that you want to get to in terms of the outcome. Or you can think of this simply as, I'm going to have a constructed plan. To me, I'm more interested in that part, like have a plan if that needs to be attached to a,

• 16:50Speaker 01

  I'm doing this plan so that I'll be held accountable to that outcome, tremendous. I don't set specific goals like that personally, but I have a new plan every six to eight weeks. And at the end of those, I have a long conversation with my coach. We go over everything and then we adjust. And I do that based on seasons or things I have coming up like hiking the mountain or it's winter and I want to do these things more. I like these activities more in the winter. Where I live, it's very rainy. So I'm going to do way more indoor activity stuff in the summer. I want to be out with the kids. We're going to switch there. So it is more based on that. It is based on the things going on. So they're not like, I didn't write a time down.

• 17:33Speaker 01

  I want to get up St. Helens in this time, whatever. But it's like, hey, I want to do that and then not be on the couch for a month afterwards. I want to do that and not tear an Achilles. Okay, great. So we just have these.

• 17:42Rich Roll?

  Which is a goal, which is, it's just a different kind of goal.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  It is a, for sure a goal. It's just not the way people think of when they hear those, they think, oh, goal, I have to write down a max I want to do. No, no, no, no, no. It's just a purpose, a target. And then you have a plan constructed around that.

• 17:59Rich Roll?

  There are different kinds of fitness, what you call adaptations, nine of them, right? So when we talk about fitness, it's not like one unifying thing. It's something we express in all these different ways. And maybe you can kind of go over those generally because in terms of creating a plan or setting a goal, you have to know which of the adaptations you're trying to, you know, kind of improve upon or optimize. Because some of them work in tandem with each other, but some of them are kind of countervailing forces.

• 18:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the, the system is always start off number one, like this is classic strength and conditioning theory stuff, but I'll, I'll break this stuff down a little more of a condensed form because we don't have a whole semester, right?

• 18:43Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Well, we could, but like, you know, for today.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  Number one is what we would call a needs analysis. This is just understanding what you need to get done. This could look like you just walking in saying, "I want to lose 10 pounds." Or you could run through a bunch of tests and exams and whatever. I don't really care about that point right now. The point is you have to understand where you're going. No coach in the world can give you a tremendous program if they don't know what you want out of it. Within that, it actually, and I'm hoping people are sticking with me in this because this second part is probably more important than all the other things I'm about to say. One thing I will emphasize over and over again. Pay attention to what I call the defender of those goals, or that goal is.

• 19:33Speaker 01

  It's not the goal per se. Here's what I mean. You want to set a new PR and a 5K. Great. People then say, "My goal is to run this thing in 17 minutes." That's not the goal. That's goal, fine, but what's the defender? "I gotta run more." No, it's not the defender. Why aren't you running it in 17 minutes right now? Are you getting injured too often when you pick up the running volume? Are you too slow? So you have the fitness, the endurance, sorry, but you aren't fast, physically fast enough? Or maybe you're fast enough, but you, it's a technique and a timing or a strategy or tactical. Like, there's a thousand reasons why you couldn't be hitting that goal. And so your training philosophy and your approach is entirely dependent upon solving

• 20:16Speaker 01

  that defender, not just the 17-minute goal. So for example, if I said, "Hey, Rich, you have a 5K program I could buy from you." And you said, "Yeah, sure." That's just then assuming we all have the same limitation to hit that 17-minute 5K or whatever, right? And for a third of the people, you're going to nail it with that program. Because they'll have the same limitation that you wrote that program for. And then a third of the people, it'll be way too much, and a third it'll be way too low because they're average. And so it is, yes, it is great. Have the goal. I don't really care if that was objectively measured, or you just came out the gates and said, "This is a number I want to hit." But where the magic is really going to happen with the successful aiming of the targets

• 20:59Speaker 01

  at those nine, is figuring out why are you being limited from that? And so just to give two real practical examples. Let's say the person that is not hitting 17 minutes is like, "You know, I do pretty good when I hit this much mileage per week." Okay, great. And the person goes, oh, I can't because every time I get past this mileage, I start breaking down. Their programs are totally different. One, person one is like, okay, great. We seem to be fine there, but now we need to go work on your flat out max velo, running speed. You are starting fast enough, right? Look at the people who run the fastest distance, whatever race you want. They're really fast. Marathoners are elite sprinters compared to the average runner, right? Elite sprinters.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  You cannot be slow and run a two hour marathon. You can't be slow and run a two and a half hour marathon. You have to be able to run fast. You get the point, right? So it may be like a speed program where you're like, what in the heck? And then you look and this isn't four by four and this isn't like, no, no, no, no. This is solving your problem. Or the opposite. It's not a speed issue. This is a fact that you don't have the tissue tolerance to run 60 miles a week or whatever we think needs you at. And so you keep breaking down. So this is a volume building tolerance related training program. And we may not peak you and get your best time ever for this particular race. But we're going to be able to get to the type of training we need next race, next year over. And so you're going to stop being broken down.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  Those programs wouldn't even look remotely close. They wouldn't be the same training days per week, the same types of exercise, the amount of lifting they're doing versus, they'd be wildly different. The equipment they're using could be off the reservation in terms of not looking. But they're both still targeting the same exact quote unquote goal. That makes sense?

• 22:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, we think about adaptations to exercise induced stress as the lever for increasing our fitness. But as you always say, like, stress is stress, right? Like, there isn't just like the workout. You have to think about all the other stressors that are impacting your ability to absorb that exercise induced stress, translate it into the, you know, preferred adaptation that you're aiming for. And how all the confounding variables of your life like play into your ability to execute that workout and your ability to, you know, repair yourself in the period in between the next workout.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  I think the framework that we will use the most here is Stress is stress, right? And so adaptation, positive, negative, the body is not personified in those terms. It is just simply responding to stress. And also, stress can be lack of stress. This could be atrophy. This could be, I've stopped doing things. You'll become hyper-efficient. That's not a bad thing. It's not, we will call it a maladaptation, because we're not wanting more body fat, or we're not wanting more insulin resistance, or whatnot. But the body's just doing the response to that.

• 23:54Rich Roll?

  There is an adaptation. We label it as positive or negative, but it is always adapting to whatever stress it has to endure.

• 24:01Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. And so if we're looking at this saying, how do I maximize my recovery? Or how do I get more adaptation for the same work? Or wherever you're landing on that part of the equation. The starting place we always have is we want to remove nonspecific constraints. What's that mean? Okay, imagine the old stress bucket analogy, which everybody uses, right? So you've got a bucket, it can only be filled so much. Once that bucket becomes overflown, then you can keep pouring stuff in it, but you're getting marginal returns because you're overfilling, right? People have probably heard these analogies. It's not perfect, but we'll just stay here for now. What we want to do is say, alright, we know more stress equals more adaptation. But if I can only, let's say I have a gallon

• 24:45Speaker 01

  bucket, and I'm already loaded three quarters with nonspecific stressors, I only can pour in a quarter of stress onto that to get a quarter of an adaptation on the back end. If I can reduce those nonspecifics down, then allows more specific stress to come in, more adaptation in the area I want. What do these things look like? This could be junk miles. This could be lack of sleep that takes things out of my recovery capacity. Could be a whole host of endogenous factors, micronutrient insufficiencies, psychological stress. These things are preloading the stress bucket. And I could walk you through some physiological examples of exactly what this could be. But what they're doing is they're not allowing

• 25:27Speaker 01

  then you to either pile on more stress, think of this as like more training, more adaptation, or you don't have the recovery capacity to handle, manage, adapt, and overcome those stressors to get that positive adaptation. And so you have nonspecific stress piling on that overall, what's called allostatic load, or allostasis, gets too high in a nonspecific. This is people spinning their wheels. And this is when we say things like, Well, my training logs are the same, are pretty close to what they've been. Uh, my sleep hasn't gone way down, my HRV hasn't gone way down, I'm not like crazy sore or anything like that, but I'm just not progressing anymore. These are super classic scenarios and we see that we go, okay, great. But what you don't see is these nonspecific stressors preloading that bucket.

• 26:08Speaker 01

  Once we get those constraints out of the way, we call those performance anchors. We don't really have to do much after that a lot of times. We don't have to get to the second step, which is accelerators. People want to jump right to accelerators when we will almost always look and say, before we, we do any of that, we have to get the anchors gone or managed or, you know, somewhat reduced. And then you can, you'll just simply be able to train more or your training will enhance, you'll have enhanced recovery capacity, or however you want to look at that part of the equation. But that is like conceptually and philosophically, almost always our approach. There are some times when we truly can and need and are ready to go just purely at the accelerator side, but for the most part, we handle anchors and then we get out of the

• 26:51Speaker 01

  way and let people's physiology do what it wants naturally, because as much as we do know about physiology, the vast majority, we don't. And so we don't want to play too many, uh, fingers on the piano stick, the keys there, because let's just let that person's body do what it wants to do and then kind of watch from the outside.

• 27:09Rich Roll?

  So what I hear you saying is basically, we need to really understand the full map, uh, you know, where we're playing our game here. It's not enough to say, you know, I'm running the Boston Marathon on this date and I have this many weeks and here's what I have to do to be ready, or I want to deadlift X by this date and just being focused on what the workout is and, yeah, nutrition and sleep. There's all these other things that go unnoticed and some of these, we have some acuity to kind of naturally perceive, we know we're off or whatever, and we know something's not quite right, but you know, a lot of them aren't like they're just there and short of finding a way to measure them and identify them, they will just go unnoticed and therefore,

• 27:53Rich Roll?

  you know, become these, these anchors that are kind of chronic and persistent because we're not really seeing the map.

• 28:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, we break them up into visible and hidden stressors, right? So visible ones are exactly what you just laid out. You know it, feel it, see it, you're aware of it, you're doing the idiot stressor stuff, like you're. Drinking a bottle of wine before bed every night. Like you're doing these things where okay.

• 28:16Rich Roll?

  You know, it's like you know, you know what's up. Yeah.

• 28:20Speaker 01

  But the visible ones are the challenging ones, right? Where you have a subclinical sleep disorder and don't realize it. You have something going on in your environment or your water, like some. We could go on and on about these things, but and those do become challenging. You don't have to go there. Not everybody has some pathogen in their water that like these tend to grab people's minds and freak them out. So I don't like putting too much emphasis on that because the vast majority of people, it is really just visible stuff. It, you're not as good in your diet as you think that you are, your, you know, your training program that you just made up for yourself on chat GPT. Maybe not, maybe it's not very good. Actually, like most of the time our problems are with those two to three really basic stuff.

• 29:04Speaker 01

  But there have been plenty of cases when there is something in the hidden side that has really unlocked somebody who's been stuck for a while. Um, or spun their wheels. So it can be all those things.

• 29:14Rich Roll?

  Hmm. A secondary goal in this conversation is, is to hopefully put to rest some prevalent misconceptions out there that are, that are driven by a, a desire, you know, to, to be reductive about certain pillars and aspects of fitness. One of those being VO2 max, which you're, you kind of just elaborated on already. But before we get into more specifics, what is your sense of the, the sort of biggest or, or top level misconception that people have? When they think about fitness and their own personal relationship with fitness?

• 29:46Speaker 01

  Oh geez, we could go so many directions with that one. I'd say kind of right up the gates, just things hitting my brain when you say that. Some common missteps in the space are being too worried about individual specific protocols.

• 30:03Speaker 01

  Right, so there's an optimal repetition range, or an optimal rest interval, or an optional volume, and those things can sometimes exist on the individual person. So we're gonna find out your response is better at a certain volume, and mine is different at a certain volume to say of running or cycling distance, or so on. But the fact that we can just go out and say, "Oh, you should do three by five," or "You should do four on four," like, those are just, honestly, almost random examples. And I'm happy to share with you why that is the case.

• 30:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I'm completely on your page. As an athlete who kind of grew up as a swimmer, and later as an endurance athlete, every day, it was just intervals, and those intervals were infinite in their form and shape, and intensity and duration, and volume, right? So when I hear, as much as I love Rhonda Patrick, like, when she talks about the Norwegian method, it does feel reductive. And I think there are people out there like Steve Magnus, who are like, "Listen, you know, this is a template for an idea. There's a concept baked into this that is valuable, but it's important to understand that there is a million derivatives of this that are equally important to explore. And in the training of an athlete for performance, you're gonna have to play within that. You're gonna have to individuate it. You're gonna

• 31:18Rich Roll?

  have to vary it." And that sort of gets lost in the social media discourse around...

• 31:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's hard, honestly. Like, so I'm one part scientist. I still run a lab. We're actively engaged in research. I coach a ton of people myself, personally. And I'm also a public communicator. And so when you get asked these questions, in one sense, my reality of it is, when you ask me, and you haven't, but let's say you asked me about a specific protocol for fat loss, or VO2 gain, my brain goes, "Okay, this morning, before we started talking, I worked with one of the best number one pitchers in Major League Baseball. We also worked with somebody that is probably spending at most three to five days in any individual country. And I've worked with 18-year-old female athletes, all these this morning." And so when I try to answer training protocol questions, my

• 32:06Speaker 01

  brain is going, "Who the heck am I even talking about?" So then I tend to be very long-winded in my answers, and I tend to be very general.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  That's great scientifically, and that's great from a coaching perspective, because those are true, honest answers. The hard part about that from a science communication standpoint, though, is the person listening home goes, "Great, home dude talked a lot, but I don't know what he's even, like, I don't know what to do. Can you give me one example?"

• 32:30Rich Roll?

  Well, that's the problem with truth and nuance.

• 32:32Speaker 01

  It's so hard.

• 32:32Rich Roll?

  Right? It's like, come on, just tell me it's a grip strength, or it's this, or it's that. Because we want our minds to like hang on to something. And there are, there are pillars and principles here. But, you know, in the real world, it's like for whom, you know, for what and when, right? It's always going to be individual specific.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 32:51Rich Roll?

  So, once you kind of are looking at it from a top level down and trying to extract generalities that are applicable to everybody, you know, it quickly comes with an infinite number of caveats.

• 33:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, because anytime I give an answer, I can probably think back within a week and go, "Yep, I violated that answer myself this week. I did the total opposite, I did something different."

• 33:10Rich Roll?

  And all of these considerations have to be taken in the context of, you know, holistically, in the context of that person's lifestyle.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, and a million other things.

• 33:25Rich Roll?

  In many ways, it also relates to people's relationship with how long it takes to, you know, actually, you know, do what's necessary to be the person who can run a 5K at that time. And they want it to happen quickly. So, in the case of the person who's like, "I'm not a vol-, I don't respond well to volume, you know, anytime I'm on a volume program, I get injured." It's not the volume, it's your progression towards the volume.

• 33:48Speaker 01

  Hundred percent.

• 33:49Rich Roll?

  It's just too accelerated. Like, your, your body can't absorb and adapt to that form of exercise-induced stress within that constrained time period. That, I love that idea of like, how come you can't do it right now? You know, that's a really interesting way to like, look at it and frame it. Like, what are the, what are the reasons? What, is it your aerobic capacity? Is it, is it your top end speed? Is it, is it a time constraint? You know, all of these things that, that play into it that are then going to inform the path to achieving that.

• 34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:20Rich Roll?

  And the timeframe in which it's reasonable to expect that it could be achieved.

• 34:23Speaker 01

  So then that's actually the second step, is you set timeframe. After that, right? We know our target.

• 34:29Rich Roll?

  It's the typical STEM thing, right? Or SMART acronym of like, it has to be time bound.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, SMART for those listening is generally realistic, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. That's like the acronym for setting goals. I'm not like as concerned about that. I don't use that framework. But this would more realistically look like, I would say, okay, great. That's the number you want to hit. It's our estimation. This is going to take 50 weeks. Okay. What? Yeah. Because you've got-

• 35:00Rich Roll?

  The turkey trot is like next month.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Sure.

• 35:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:03Speaker 01

  Fine. Then what we have to realize is, okay, I mean, this happens all the time. The athletes that I work with, sometimes we get short notice. Like, and our UFC fighters, right? We got six weeks. Okay, we don't have a, fine. Something pops up, you want to run a race, you want to do some, okay. But now what we have to realize is we're going to run a fine ledge of injury. You accept those terms? Great, I'm in, I'm here for it, we're going to do it. Like, our special forces and military, like, we don't get, we have to be like, okay, great. Well, now we're going to do something different then. We have to double down on recovery capacity stuff. Because we know you're not going to get there. So we have to go do stuff that we wouldn't ask other person to do. Because you're just too close to your personal ledge. We have to work harder in other areas.

• 35:48Speaker 01

  We have to get more data. We have to get more specific and more precise.

• 35:53Speaker 01

  We have to do extra stuff.

• 35:54Rich Roll?

  Because basically, if you have a restricted period of time, the only way to maximize what your gains within that limited amount of time is to shorten the window

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 36:06Rich Roll?

  in which your body repairs itself in between sessions so that you can train more and train harder and still absorb those.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yep. Or we have to make a philosophical decision that we will ditch volume or ditch intensity or whatever. And we're going to not be as say, prepared for the race as possible. But we're going to do everything to peak. Now that's going to be, if you peak for competition, it's great, but at the same time, adaptation is against that. So adaptation optimization are two different ends of the spectrum. And so we might go, look, we're going to peak for this thing. And that means we're going to sabotage the next 10 weeks. We're going to sabotage like later development, but we're going after this right now. Cool. Again, I'm here for it. Let's do it. You tell me the constraints, but that's the target. So to kind of go back to the original question, it is finding what those defenders are. And then that allows you to decide which of these

• 36:57Speaker 01

  nine adaptations you're really truly going after. And so to lay those nine out really quickly, the number one thing right at the top is what we call skill. And this is simply defined as moving how you want to move and not how you don't want to move. This could be technique. This could be flexibility. It could be balance. It could be anything there where you have control, kinesthetic control of your body to make it move however you want, and then avoiding ways that you don't want it to move. That is the ground foundation, right? So that person that keeps breaking down in this example, may have nothing to do with their volume or recovery capacity, or or homocysteine concentration, just simply

• 37:40Speaker 01

  be like, oh, your your mechanics are bad. It's not a volume issue. You just, mechanics are bad. Oh, great. We're done at this point, right? We just got to correct how you move. Or a million other things, right? For the non-athlete person, this is the chronic pain thing. Okay, this is, I'm losing mobility over time. This is, I fall too much. Okay, great. Could be anything else. It's simply controlling your body.

• 38:05Rich Roll?

  The example that pops into my mind is the super fit, like Ironman athlete that doesn't really know how to swim. You know, because they didn't learn when they were a kid. And so they go to the pool and they're so focused on getting their training in and their their technique is so atrocious. It's like, it's not even worth it. It's like, you need to just stop what you're doing. If you took six months and just worked on form, like, because they're fighting the water and they're making it work against them. Like, conditioning really isn't the limiter there. The limiter is like their lack of feel for the water and understanding what is required in order to efficiently move through it.

• 38:42Speaker 01

  This is true, by the way, of every human movement example you could think of.

• 38:47Rich Roll?

  Right, it's just exacerbated in water because the resistance is.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  Well, I just mean in general efficiency. So if you want to get faster or you want better endurance, the better you're moving, both of those go up. Alright, so somebody who's in the gym like wants maximum power, maximum strength, or the person that wants to go improve their, their ultra marathon. So you pick the other ends of the spectrum here. So a major league baseball player wanting to increase max velo on a throw, one effort as hard as they can to somebody run 200 miles. If your first stop and your destination is not maximizing mechanical efficiency, you have skipped way past the biggest payout you can. Because not only you're going to go faster, but you're going to reduce breakdown and wear and tear.

• 39:31Speaker 01

  So I can throw at max velo more often because it's not the wear and tear and I'll actually throw faster. If you dance around with any of these coaches that are these world caliber sprint coaches, or velocity, or throws coaches, you're going to start hearing terms like smooth and timing and sequencing and rhythm. And you're like, rhythm? To like throw a javelin? What the heck are you talking about? You'll see endurance world will tend to use efficiency more, right? Because you want to be there where, so the language is a little bit different between max power, speed and there, but you want to be efficient in the water. You want to be efficient in your transition on your bike. You want to be efficient in your stride. Why? Less wear and tear and more output per, per energy input.

• 40:15Speaker 01

  If you're sub 90%, we don't need to go any further. We have the number one rated college quarterback right now. Speed thing, like it's efficiency. Like he's already super fast. But this is one of his only things that isn't like a 99 on a Madden rating scale. And so we're like, we're working on just efficiency and rhythm and timing. He's just like, what is going on? Like, guess what? He's getting faster. Like, we just have to get him smooth and we have to get a smooth rhythm there, right?

• 40:44Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah. I had Stu McMillan in here who was talking at length about that. And you can obviously understand it in the context of, you know, the 100 meters where, you know, just, you know, these races are won and lost on the absolute tiniest of margins possible. But then if you think about an ultra marathon or like a tiny tweak that just gives them just a slight improvement in efficiency and then you play that out over 100 miles, like that's just a gigantic advantage or gain that you're going to be able to experience. But it's just like, it's not fun to work on that stuff. And also, you can't do it alone. Like, you need, you know, you need somebody else to be giving, you need to be in a feedback loop with someone who can like, help you with that.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  And if you're not the, I'm trying to set a PR or a record here. I don't need that last 5%. I get it with efficiency. Just don't be the bottom 50th percentile. So as long as you're moving like reasonably well, the average person can get away with that. And where we can say, okay, fine, we can move on to other parts of your training program. But if you are below average with how you move, there's really no point in moving past that. Because injury, short and long term, just gets too high. The shoulder just starts nagging you, the low back, the neck. And we're not actually getting progress. And now we're talking endurance, we're talking about muscle growth. I mean, you pick the

• 42:06Speaker 01

  thing, the adaptation we can get into, that's going to be a truism. You have to at least be like above average with how well you move. And if that's enough for you, fine, we can stop there. But below that, basically, a person in our program would be pretty much stalled at that point where we're like, you have to move better. With whatever we're asking you to do, whatever movement it is, above average is kind of like our minimum threshold for that.

• 42:31Rich Roll?

  And how you get somebody to move better, obviously, is going to depend upon their specific sport and all that kind of stuff, right? I mean, I think there's also, like, it just in running, it's like, oh, well, just everyone, like, we all know how to run and everyone's just out running. We're all, you know, we're born to run. And some people look like gazelles when they do it. And some people look like, you know, clunky, I don't know, like... Subarus out there, you know, mulling along and there's just not really much to do about that. And I suppose that, you know, it's going to be difficult to, you know, get the average 45 year old dad to run with the form that Killian Journey does. But, uh, but the point is that there's a lot of, you know, room in between there, you know, it's like, or the basketball

• 43:13Rich Roll?

  player, like you're not, you're not going to end up looking like Michael Jordan, but I'm sure there's, there's plenty that can be done to improve upon whatever it is you're doing and you're doing it just because that's the way you've always done it and no one told you otherwise.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, minimal viable here, right? Like if you and I went and ran, let's say we're both at 80% of our best technical running skill right now, but your 80% is a lot higher than mine. Cause I don't have to run as well as you have to run, because I don't ever run the kind of, I don't know how much you're running these days, but you get the point, right?

• 43:42Rich Roll?

  I've had back surgery. I'm not running at all, buddy. Yeah, I got questions for you about that, but anyway, keep going.

• 43:47Speaker 01

  Well, you go back five years or 10 years, whatever. Point being, if you're a runner, then the, what I would call minimal viable running movement skill is higher than someone who goes, oh, I want to be able to run, but I'm gonna run less than three miles a week. Oh, okay, great. So we can go, you know, you're, you're at a six out of 10, but you're only going to run a couple of times a week and we're doing some sprints or whatever, and we're just doing it for fitness and fun. Great. We're not going to ask you to get to like 80, 90%, just like sacrifice everything else. So you're running as great as possible. We don't have to do that. But if you're a three to 10, like we're not going to play pickleball. Like we're just not going to go do it because you're too low. But if you're going to maximize in that individual goal or run a huge

• 44:31Speaker 01

  distance, or it's a big part of your training, then we're going to ask for that technical capacity to be a little bit higher than the next person, because they're just a little bit lower. You don't have to have Olympic weightlifter squatting technique for us to be like, okay, you can squat. Oh, you're gonna squat twice a week, once a week? Fine. So that gradient changes based on demand and what we're asking your body to do. And it changes based on you and your body. Your squat won't look like mine. My run, my, my, my gait won't look like yours. So it's not that we're all trying to get everybody to look the same at all. We're just trying to get you all kind of above six out of 10 on an imaginary. Non-specific scale here, just like the rough eye test of going, nothing catastrophic

• 45:13Speaker 01

  there. Okay, pretty good. Good there. You want to double down? You want to do a lot of hard, intense, high effort in that area? Now let's get a little bit better. If not, great. We're good there. We'll move on to something else.

• 45:26Rich Roll?

  What you're saying is if there's a hierarchy in all of these adaptations, we're on one of nine right now.

• 45:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:34Rich Roll?

  That really at the top of this pyramid is, is efficiency and technique. Like before you can kind of go on to the next thing, like this has to be sorted out because everything is downstream of this.

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right. Right? Even the adaptation we're going to try to chase later gets changed when we move fast, when we get tired, when we go heavy. And so we have to manage, in fact, like our progression through these things is, can you show me you can do the movement that you want? Whether that's walking, I don't really care. Do it unloaded, which means you can hold on to a bar while you're squatting, or you can be in a pool. Like we can do this where your body weight itself is less than normal. Great. Check. Now we're going to move you on to say, can you do it with your body weight? Check. Great. Now can you do it with some load? Check. Now can you do it with some speed? Check. And we're not going to continue to progress through our types of exercise or

• 46:27Speaker 01

  our training program if we have a fail here, right? So, so maybe your squat technique looks great, but as soon as we put a little bit of load on you, it breaks down. Well, then we're not going to put you on a loaded, it doesn't make any sense. We put endurance almost always at the end. And because of that, it's almost what you said earlier about the endurance person, like we're not going to stack a whole bunch of volume on top of poor movement. I don't want to stack load on top of it either, but show me that you can get tired. Show me you can let, we have, there's more to this one. I'm giving you the, like the shorter version. Show me we can do this in a unilateral with one limb. Show me you can do it eccentric and concentric. There's all these layers. And then once we

• 47:10Speaker 01

  do that, and we've passed that with some threshold, now we can stack print training programs and volumes and intensities and things on it. But if we're seeing these huge breakdowns, we're not getting to the next level of these, these nine.

• 47:23Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 47:24Speaker 01

  Very often. And if we are, I'm not saying like literally never. It's just like, we're not going to dose them at a very high load. It's going to be very, very low and intentional and judicious before we really start letting you fly.

• 47:36Rich Roll?

  Through that lens, in thinking about endurance, it's not so much like how long or far can you sustain an effort? It's how long or far you can sustain that effort without a breakdown in your technique and efficiency. Because like lots of people can like stumble across, you know, the, the finish line of some ridiculously long race, but the people who do well are the people who are able to maintain that form, that technique and propel themselves forward efficiently without a breakdown in that. Because once that breakdown happens, like the whole house of cards kind of like, you know, collapses on top of itself.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  I changed this probably 10 years ago. I remember I was, you know, Brian McKenzie?

• 48:18Rich Roll?

  I do.

• 48:18Speaker 01

  So I was at Brian's house and he was talking about that exact thing. And I was like, oh, that's really interesting. His endurance programming was all based, failure was defined as technical breakdown, right? Not volume, not time, not anything else. It was that when you break down technically, like that's your number.

• 48:34Rich Roll?

  There's no point in continuing to run further or whatever at that point.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  And then like two days later, I was in Colorado with Lauren Landau, strength conditioning coach. Tremendous guy. He was with the Broncos for a long time. Now he's at Notre Dame. And he said the exact same thing, but not from the endurance perspective. And he was going through different drills he was doing. And I was like, how am I not doing this? Like immediately was like, oh, this is the most ridiculous thing ever. And so we've pretty much used that almost exclusively since then is we will always define, not always, most of the time we define fatigue or endurance or failure as that point of diminished technical breakdown, right? You're gonna like, your posture will break and like you'll come back.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  But when we see whatever we're defining as, as a major technical breakdown, then that's the limit. And so in fact, I got a text on the way here. One of our guys is preparing for a fight in China. And he told me last night he had a PR in our endurance work, and this is an aerodynamic piece that we do for rounds. And those rounds are cut off with technical breakdowns. So this is a posture. When he's leaning forward and the, the head starts flopping back and forth and his elbows start flying up. That's when we like cut him and he doesn't know this, by the way, like he's like, he just gets arbitrarily told he's done. He has no idea why, right? We can't because he'll just hijack the system and he won't listen to this.

• 49:59Rich Roll?

  What are you doing? Why are you?

• 50:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. He's like, no, we're done. He's just like, okay. But we got an extra round out of our stuff last night, which is now the third week in a row. We've added around and I'm like, great. So what this showing me is he's holding position better at the same or higher levels of fatigue intuitively. He's subconsciously holding this and then when he gets really tired, he breaks phenomenal. And then we see that in his actual skill training. So that yeah, that's a very big part of our stuff, especially when we are pushing close to competitions where volume and intensity are high, calories are low, stress is high. You're just like, you're asking for a recipe there and you're looking for any excuse to dial something in. And that for for him, for some of our other athletes, it's honestly not as big of a deal.

• 50:45Rich Roll?

  But the really practical application of this for the everyday person is next time you're in the gym and you're thinking, I'm going to go to failure on this lift. Failure isn't, you know, when you can no longer get the bar all the way up by doing whatever you have to do, you know, moving your body around to do it. It's as soon as you can't hold perfect form, then you're done. Right? And I think the other gem within that is that the most important thing in advancing your fitness goals is consistency. Like you talk about this consistency over intensity and everybody loves to, you know, talk about their, their, their monster workout or their massive lift or their incredibly

• 51:24Rich Roll?

  long, you know, weekend run or whatever. And that's all fine, but it's only as important as, you know, as the rest of your program and how it fits into that. Right? So quality, like volume being limited by the extent to which you can express it with quality.

• 51:44Speaker 01

  A hundred percent.

• 51:45Rich Roll?

  And my rule is always. If I'm being consistent, like less is always more because you're, you're not just training for the day, you're training for the week and the month and, and the idea is to be able to get up and do it again the next day and the next day and the next day. And the minute you start, you know, kind of inappropriately stepping over the line and doing a little bit too much because you feel good that day, like just because you feel good that day and you want to go for it, doesn't mean that you should if you have a greater goal that you're working towards because that can come at a cost that's going to undermine your ability to express yourself physically the day after when that was the day when you really were supposed to, you know, do that other kind of workout to advance that.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  With our athletes and our non-athletes, because by numbers, I coach more non-athletes, general population people than professional athletes. With all of them, we have very specific, you can set this up however you want, but red days, days that you're going to like go after, right? And it doesn't always work like that, especially for non-athletes. It's like I'm running a company and I've got a family, like this thing, okay, great. But we will have that plotted for the month and ideally at least for the quarter as well. And so when we get to a spot where that person goes, I'm feeling great today, I want to go after it. Well, we know what's coming up next week and we know what came up came the week before. And so we can look at it and go, yeah, if you want, go ahead. Or we

• 53:12Speaker 01

  can go, no chance. Why? Because either we did a ton last week, or we got a whole huge set coming up next week or next month or whatever. And so we're trying to really make an intelligent decision about like when to fly and when to not go. All that is orchestrated, whether this is just on subjective, high, you know, hard day, medium day, light day, or we have direct measures with a bunch of physiological variables and other stuff. We have a combination of super high technology and no budget, no technology sort of people. So you have some plan there. Now, if you don't have any of that, a number that we will just randomly throw out is the average person who has a real job and a real life can hit that red zone two to four times a month.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  That seems to like be a really good landing spot. And to be really clear, red zone isn't like a hard workout. The red zone is the, you're not sure if you're alive anymore, right? Like you touched death on the wall and we're going to come back from that. You can train really hard, a lot, right? Especially if, you know, other, your house is in order and other places and your recovery is good. You can train pretty hard, but that true, like I went, you know, all the way to the edge there.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  Twice to four times a month, depending on what that means and other variables is about as much as you can handle. That ends up being something like 10% of your training. Five to 10% of the time is where we're going to really have like a truly red day. Depends on if you're training twice per week, four days per week, or you know, whatever. Somewhere in the 60% range is going to be work capacity. 60 to 70% of your workouts, right? So these are hard workouts. These might even feel like a, like a max, your heart rate might get to a max at some point. Or back down. But this could be a combination of like technical work or intervals or strength or lots of things like that. But the vast majority of your time is going to be there. And then that leaves

• 55:13Speaker 01

  another 10 or 20 or so percent of time where it should be truly technical stuff. It could be recovery. It could be just putting in some volume. It could be practice and improving skill. Super rough numbers, that's generally how we, we like, and we'll hedge those numbers differently depending on the athlete and the sport and the time of year and their age and all those things. But just to give people like something to grasp on, because I know when I hear comments like that, I'm like, we can tell them like never to work out hard. That's dumb. Of course you're going to do that, right?

• 55:44Speaker 01

  But you have to also think about that and be like, okay. You had a long day at work, heavy stress going on there. You know, factor in a bunch of other stuff and then you took a whole truckload of stimulants. I'm sure you feel great.

• 55:56Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  But you're going to pay this one way or the other. Now, if it's a couple of times a month, you're fine. Some people that might be more, some people that might be less. But most of our time should be spent in that, like we're building capacity. We are working hard. We're maybe getting a little bit sore, but we're not doing that like I threw up in the trash can at the end of the workout. Sort of thing. If you're 18 or 25.

• 56:19Rich Roll?

  You can, you can get away with that stuff.

• 56:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. When you're 40, you're 33.

• 56:24Rich Roll?

  Think twice, my man.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, let's be intelligent about when we really do that.

• 56:28Rich Roll?

  Whether or not you have a goal or not, a workout should have an intention, a purpose. You should know why it is that you're doing what you're doing and, and what it's intended to accomplish. And in order to know that, you have to know which adaptations you're, you're going for. And you know, you mentioned technique and efficiency, but there, you know, there's strength, there's speed, you know, hypertrophy, there's endurance. There, there's a lot of them. We don't need to like itemize all of these things, but just being clear on like, how is this workout moving me, you know, in the direction I want to go in with respect to this adaptation? And I think what I see, and I'm curious what you think about this. With most people, average people could be really fit.

• 57:11Rich Roll?

  They love working out. And like I said, you know, they, they're like, this is my routine. I go to the gym, I do this stuff. I, you know, I go, I have 45 minutes to run, you know, three or four times a week. And so I just go out and I just like run and I go kind of like as hard as I can sustain that effort for 45 minutes. And I, and I think most people's experience with this is that they improve quickly. Because if you, when you're just starting, you see those gains and, and that, you know, creates adherence, you know, which is what you talk about. You get more emotionally invested in, in doing this.

• 57:43Rich Roll?

  But it's not long before they plateau. Uh, and we can talk about plateaus with elite, you know, performance athletes, but I think with respect to the average, average person, uh, I think there's an epidemic of people plateauing out there because they're not really intentional about what they're doing. And for the most part, they're just kind of going in the middle every day. Like they don't have that red zone workout where they're flat out, or those moments are rare. And they're not doing the, you know, zone two work. So they're not really developing their aerobic capacity. They're not really, you know, developing their anaerobic capacity. They're in this sort of gray, uh, middle zone phase of training where you get fit, but like pretty quickly, like it ends there.

• 58:29Rich Roll?

  And then you could see them like 10 years later and they're still kind of like in the same place and wondering why they're not having any kind of breakthrough.

• 58:36Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, there's a couple of things to unpack, one being. We never want to discourage exercise or physical activity. Not to say that you did that. But I bring that up because when we had these kinds of conversations, I'll get a lot of feedback that is like, I'm doing my best out here and then you're telling me I'm doing anything wrong.

• 58:52Rich Roll?

  Right. Yeah, I get that. And maybe it's just for the mental, you know, benefits of like, I feel good in my body and like, that's great. Like, yes, please, thank you. Cause like, I don't want to be discouraging anybody from doing what they actually enjoy doing that is movement oriented.

• 59:05Speaker 01

  Okay. So we're on the same page. Let's move on past that. Um, yeah, the, I did an entire episode on, um, on my show on plateaus, peaks and plateaus in overtraining. The very first stop on this train is you're probably not plateauing. You probably just don't have a training program. And if you do have a training program, you're actually probably not tracking and measuring enough, or really anything. So what I mean is like, oh, I did my training program. I, here's my runs and I went and did my runs. I did my miles. Great. What heart rate were you at? What was your time on those? Like, I don't know, somewhere between like 30 and 40 minutes? Okay, that 30 or like, that's not the same thing.

• 59:48Speaker 01

  And so it ends up happening as you're right. Like, sometimes you go a little bit faster, sometimes a little bit slower, but it all kind of ends up being this muddle muck of the same kind of thing with not enough specificity to drive variation or to drive adaptation. Right? And so there wasn't enough stimuli to go fast, to make your body really get faster. It wasn't enough stimuli to really produce efficiency. So it didn't get more efficient. It just burned calories and had all the other awesome benefits, but it didn't drive you in direction. All right. So then another classic analogy I'll use is the example of me saying, awesome. Um, let's go get some food, Rich. And I'm sure if we just got a car, started driving in circles, we would find some food eventually. All right. But a faster way is tell me the address, we GPS it, like, and

• 1:00:32Speaker 01

  we get directly there. So you can just like run around and get to a destination, but you're not there. Your body will work best when it says, "You're giving me this exact challenge." It's called the SAID principle, S-A-I-D, specific adaptation to imposed demand. The exact demand will give the exact adaptation. And so when you don't have an exact demand, you tend to just get these like, your body will affect it, and I'm personifying, but your body will be like, "All right, we're not sure if we're supposed to get faster, or more powerful, or increase blood flow. So we're just gonna kind of like wait until we really see what we're being asked to do. Nothing really that stressful? All right, we're not gonna modify. Hold pace. We can handle this stress." And it just holds pace.

• 1:01:18Speaker 01

  So if you don't have a consistent program, it kind of goes back to the first half an hour or whatever we were talking about, like the problems with non-specific thing. And then the second part I brought up is if you don't have some kind of monitoring of at least time, or some other variable, then you can't dial up adaptation, because you can't dial up different changes. And it will not take more than eight to 12 weeks for the average person's body to become really adapted to that stressor, and then it's just gonna hold pace, right? And so we have to then progress with volume, or intensity, or there's lots of ways, exercise variation, range of motion, environmental factors, tons of ways we can progress that doesn't have to mean harder. That's another thing we get a lot of feedback on.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  Like, when we say progression, I'm not saying the workout has to be harder, but there has to be some intentional variation. And then last thing to say about that is, variation is not randomization. So if it's the person we described about earlier, or it's the opposite, where I'm doing tons of different things, that's called random, right? Random gets you no place other than calories and fun other stuff. But in terms of specific adaptation, because it's not enough stimuli in one individual direction. So we want intentional variation, but not just randomization, right? Not to like, "Show up and I do, what's my workout?" Well, whatever machine is open in the gym. Well, like, awesome, super stoked you're lifting, but like, we have better ways to go about variation.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  So that is gonna handle the vast majority of people with that like stuck in the same level problem. And if it's not that, then there's other things we can get to, but that's gonna take care of most things.

• 1:03:02Rich Roll?

  We think of discipline in the fitness context of like get up to go hard, you know, it's like all about like hustle and hardness. But discipline is really having the gumption to like hold back when you feel good and you want to press because you know you're delaying gratification because you have this bigger goal or you know having the discipline to you know not watch Netflix and go to bed early or when you're on that group run to not get caught up in your ego and like you know today I'm supposed to like keep it here and like it doesn't matter if I'm in the back or whatever like that's what I'm doing like you have to humble yourself I think so that's the flip side of discipline that I think it's lost in this conversation and and that's

• 1:03:45Rich Roll?

  what's required if you want to pursue your fitness intentionally.

• 1:03:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have a plan if you can and stick to it and so to the people who are the like I got 45 minutes three days a week person just like I'm just trying to not be dead like I'm not into this fitness stuff that much and I don't really want to write programs and what fine there are plenty of people who sell $10 programs or $30 or like these are super affordable things now I still at this point wouldn't recommend just like throwing stuff into chat GPT because there's just plenty of services and coaching programs that are really well established coaches who can give you a really affordable training program buy one and follow it you don't have to think about anything you show up do the

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  workout and you're done at least you have some some experience buying those training program if you're the opposite probably maybe more like you and I were like actually want to know all these fine you can get really expensive training programs so you can have solutions that match whatever your interest or means are for these but if you're wanting progress and you're not getting it and you're not doing one of those two things we don't have to look much further than that and I think you're going to solve most people's problems.

• 1:05:04Rich Roll?

  Many of these fitness adaptations work in conjunction with each other and sometimes in parallel. And no matter what your fitness goal is, there's on some level, like you have to be kind of advancing all of these adaptations somewhat. Like if you're going to be in ultra marathon, or you still need to pay attention to your strength, like you can't just like, you know, I've learned this the hard way. And if you want to be a strength athlete, you're going to have to have some endurance, you know, work in there in order to optimize that primary, you know, adaptation pillar. But sometimes these things work across purposes with each other. And I'm thinking about the explosion of the hybrid athlete, you know, the person who wants to crush it at high rocks, but also wants to run Leadville, you know?

• 1:05:49Rich Roll?

  And so they're, they're like, super jacked, but like, they're going to go run 100 miles. There's something really cool about like, the challenge of like, how you make those two things like work with each other. But you're really chasing goals, like opposing goals at the same time. Like, do you counsel athletes who are trying to do this? Like, how do you get your head around, like, putting that person on a, on a program that's going to work? I mean, basically, if that's the guy you want to be, you're just, you're really just sacrificing your capacity for greatness in either of them, right? Like, unless you pick one.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Most likely. Yeah. Now, I like how you said that, where you're sacrificing capacity for greatness. Not good.

• 1:06:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you can still do these things.

• 1:06:31Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 1:06:32Rich Roll?

  And perhaps that's just the goal. But if you really like, want to be on the podium at the high rocks world championships, then maybe, you know, you need to put the Leadville goal aside for a couple of years and then shift your focus and work towards that, you know?

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I teach the physiology of these crossover concepts in our, our online courses. So you can, we can walk you through it. Like, we can walk you through the, everything from lymphatic system to endocrine to neural and like, which ones crossover and all that can be mapped out pretty easily. But on the highest level,

• 1:07:04Speaker 01

  Remember physiology is not a person. Physiology doesn't know you're training for speed or endurance, right? It simply knows stress demand. And it only has so many resources and it can only do so many things in so many directions. Like really classic examples here. If you were to maximize the size of your individual muscle fibers. This is an area that I specialized in for a long time scientifically. Great. Well, if we maximize that size, at the same time, we start to compromise what's called lattice spacing. So it's the distance between the actin and the myosin. These are the contractile fibers, filaments that work within your muscle fibers, right? So if we get that thing really large, we might actually start compromising the ability of it to maximize

• 1:07:48Speaker 01

  speed of contraction. Or we start putting the distance between the mitochondria too far apart, which may compromise some sort of metabolic capacity, right? Even within the metabolic side, if we start ramping up enzymes that are needed for utilization of fat as a fuel, we are going to down-regulate the ones that are used in carbohydrate and the opposite. And so in the middle, much of it's going to crossover. It's at the extremes where you stop seeing crossover and then you start going past that and you actually start seeing detriment to that. And so there's actually was a paper that came out just recently by a group I'm familiar with on that mitochondrial piece, which is the lore for all these years has been,

• 1:08:32Speaker 01

  hey, strength training doesn't enhance mitochondrial capacity, but endurance training does. And for the most part, that doesn't seem to be the case. It seems to be the case of like a misunderstanding of this combination of mitochondrial size, mitochondrial density within the tissue. And you have to be able to account for muscle size to understand what the actual adaptation is. So you can't just like blame the whole thing on mitochondria or not, because these are really complicated physiological milieus that have to work in tandem. Outside of just the cell itself. So all that junk to say, there's clear crossover, right? Like the, the example I will give all the time is, all right, so you're going

• 1:09:14Speaker 01

  to tell me that you did a deadlift and your central nervous system is shot, but then you ran 40 miles and it's not? Like, like, tell me, tell me that like, speed and power is neurologically fatiguing, but running 40 miles isn't. Like, that's insanity talking, but like, that's what you would see in a strength and power. These are CNS demanding, but like endurance work isn't. It's like, oh, really? Sure. Like swim 15 miles and tell me your CNS is totally fine. It is nonsense. And so if you notice, I played the game on both sides. There, right? I'm a strength guy. But you get the point, right? There's, there's been these, this miseducation of like, what strength training does and doesn't do, and the consequences. And there's been the same on the other side of the equation. And the

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  reality of it is, like, once we actually start looking at this stuff from properly designed, like, scientific platforms, that's not how it's working. I could give you a million more examples of these things that we were told, like, that does happen or doesn't happen with endurance or strength. But the more we get this, like, that stuff is starting to crumble pretty, pretty heavily.

• 1:10:18Rich Roll?

  From a very basic perspective, is it possible to improve strength and endurance within a single training cycle?

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:10:29Rich Roll?

  And if one was to want to do that, how do you apportion it? Like, I'm just thinking for myself, like, to be honest, like, I don't even know, like, if I'm going to go and do some strength work, should I do it before I go out for my ride, or my run, or my swim, or afterwards? And how many times? And conversely, for the person who's, who's really more of the strength person who's getting into endurance, like, what would that look like? And I know I'm asking, like, the most base, you have to like,

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 1:10:58Rich Roll?

  The most basic way to respond to that.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  No, no, it's actually really good, because we have done this a bunch. We have helped tons of people who have never been athletes do their first 5K to ultra, and everyone between, and the opposite, right? Lifelong strength athlete doing their first high rocks during their first 5K, then the opposite, right? Like, I've been a runner my whole life, and now I'm lifting weights for the first time. So this is actually a really good question for a much reason. So I answered that quickly. Yes, you can do that. The proportion at which we do the strength versus the endurance work is directly related to your background. It's the foundation we've already spent time talking about. If you are really weak, you're going to spend more time on strength. You will be more limited by your physical strength. Let's say leg strength.

• 1:11:44Speaker 01

  If you're just like, okay, strong enough, then we might just do a little bit of strength just to kind of keep you where you're at. If you're super strong, we might ditch it. We might ditch the whole thing for six weeks or eight weeks or other cases. So it is right back to define your limit. Or why are you not succeeding? If you're not succeeding in that endurance event because you're super weak, strong enough, super strong, that's our answer. That is exactly, or the opposite, right? And so it's just like, oh, yeah, we just don't have the energetic capacity. We don't have blood volume. Oh, don't have enough blood volume. That's a different answer than my breathing mechanics are off. Interesting. That's a different answer than we just don't think we have O2 delivery into tissue.

• 1:12:27Speaker 01

  Those are different answers for all quote unquote endurance problems. And we might look at your strength in this case and go, it's not great, but it's like good enough. That's not causing these problems we're seeing over here. Or maybe they are, but there's just only so much training you have in your schedule or physiology or capacity. So we're just going to ditch it for now. Like this happens every training program we ever write. We NFL players just reported last week or so. All of them were on different off-season training programs. They're on different training camp programs. This is exact reason, like what is their limitation? And in training camp, we can't do much. Like they're, they're playing football a lot.

• 1:13:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Speaker 01

  And so we're going to add like one thing to their, their program. Go, okay, you just, we're going to have to maximize this. Or even in their off-season training program, to be honest, like sometimes it's like one thing we can do differently because there's just so much already going on in their physiological demand. So it is being really strategic that is based on that principle of like health. What's your biggest leading indicator? And then we decide. Maybe that is you are terrible. Maybe you are so insanely weak and we're so far behind. You've never lifted. You don't know how to move. Well, you get super sore there. We got to race in seven weeks. We're just going to ditch it entirely. Why? Because it's actually so far behind that is we need to start.

• 1:13:55Rich Roll?

  It would just, it's yeah, within, uh, within that limited timeframe, it's too disruptive.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  Too disruptive. It costs us way too much. Yeah. So we're just not going to work on it. And that, that is a, that is just a strategic decision. We make client by client by person. So yeah, you can do them both. Um, the, the other case, like the most realistic case, you can do a little bit of both, right? You can do it and you can start to see improvements in these opposite of the spectrums, um, based on novelty alone, right? So maybe you're doing a different style of lifting you've ever done before. You can see some big jumps and improvements in that specific area. So maybe it's something like velocity based training, or maybe it's a different movement pattern, or it's a, um, a more power driven type of lifting, or a, a more reaction time type of lifting. And we can see this and go, oh, great. You thought lifting

• 1:14:45Speaker 01

  weights and you thought like three sets of eight on a, you know, on a barbell. That's, there's so many other ways we can lift and get you stronger that have nothing, that would look nothing like that. And so maybe we stay away from that entirely. We do some other stuff. You get really strong, really fast, and it took almost nothing away from our, our volume or our endurance needs. And so that's how we snuck that in kind of like the back door. And so it's part of this is like miseducation too, of like what strength training is. It's like, it's not just dumbbells and barbells for set to five to 10. That's a very, very high level overview, kind of like rough idea. But that's like, kind of like saying there's, you know, cars and trucks. That's the only automobiles in the street. Well, okay, kind of, but like it gets a lot more complicated than that.

• 1:15:29Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I get that. I like that though. You know, I think, I think this is, this is sort of something that is pretty common. Like we find our fitness tribe, you know, and we kind of slide into it. And we all like to do the things that we're good at and strong at, and we don't really want to work on our weaknesses. You know, it's like, who wants to do that? And really that becomes the, the anchor, right? Like that's the limiting factor here. And until you're, you're willing to kind of look at it wide eyed and, and address it, it will continue to hold you back. But it's just more fun to do the thing you're already good at.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, acknowledge it and just decide if that comes up, we live, we die. Like, fine. Like, we just, that's gonna tank us, right? So like, in the sporting example, we'll do this all the time. Like, I remember we had a guy, a major baseball player, and he had a particular guy he was playing against, and the guy was hitting like 400 in his career on him, which is like outrageous, right? Couldn't get this guy out. Tried a bunch of stuff, tried to bring up the weaknesses, whatever. Couldn't get him out. And it's just like, okay, fine. This guy hits this particular pitch the worst against me. And the next time I face him, I'm going to only throw that pitch.

• 1:16:37Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:16:38Speaker 01

  Like, that's it. That's all I'm gonna do. And he threw like 17 straight pitches.

• 1:16:41Rich Roll?

  Well, it's a pretty good solution.

• 1:16:42Speaker 01

  It's like, he's like, wouldn't, and it was like laughable. One at bat was like nine pitches in a bat. It's like the same pitch, nine, he's just like, I'm not throwing him anything. Besides that one, I'm just going to cannibalize everything else. Because I know, like, my best chance to survive is just this one thing.

• 1:16:57Rich Roll?

  The only weakness that I can exploit is this one pitch that I have.

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 1:17:01Rich Roll?

  And if this guy is, that's still a blind spot with this guy, then that's his only way in to, you know, getting the best of him.

• 1:17:08Speaker 01

  He had to go back and develop an entire new pitch that next offseason. Like, just for that guy.

• 1:17:11Rich Roll?

  Just for that.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  Because he's just like, this guy.

• 1:17:13Rich Roll?

  That's a win in and of itself for him.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  No, it was great, right? It's just like, we're not gonna try to shore up these other pitches. When it's like, he didn't hit the slider well. We're just gonna throw a slider.

• 1:17:24Rich Roll?

  In terms of thinking about recovery and understanding that, you know, this is really the critical thing that is gonna translate, you know, what you endured during your workout into becoming fitter and a better athlete. And trying to identify what are the biggest levers to pay attention to here? Can we talk a minute about how to make sense of all the, the sort of data point inputs that we're now, you know, kind of that are available to us now? Because on the one hand, it's super cool. Like, we, you know, we're wearing these trackers, and we can see our sleep stages, and we get scored on them. And we have a sense of how we're recovering

• 1:18:06Rich Roll?

  based upon HRV and our resting heart rate and our respiratory rate. And all of these things are super interesting, but...

• 1:18:15Rich Roll?

  But I think it's important to try to understand like how to contextualize them, how to interpret all of this data, what's really important and what matters in terms of like implementing changes or adjustments to improve your recovery.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:18:32Rich Roll?

  I mean, this is a huge, this is like a semester alone. I know that, but like, you know.

• 1:18:37Speaker 01

  So many years ago, Brian and actually and I wrote a book on fitness technologies. And we laid out an argument and infrastructure there that I think has held up pretty well to this day. The technologies totally changed in 10 years, but doesn't matter. Highest level, any technologies and for the record, these include the ones that my companies make. So I have a very financial conflict of interest specifically in sleep and in blood work, right? I do these things. That said, highest level, we should be using things that are advancing us and things that are neutral up to you and things that are negative

• 1:19:20Speaker 01

  should be gone. Sleep, you brought up, very easy one. There is something called orthosomnia. So this is sleep tracker induced clinical sleep disorders.

• 1:19:30Rich Roll?

  Because you just become neurotic about your sleep score.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  It is exactly what you think, right? And a sleep score on a commercially available tracker is at best, okay, at worst horribly off. You mentioned sleep stages. We still don't have a commercially available tracker that gives you any reliable or realistically close to accurate sleep stage. I could go on for many, many minutes about why like that's a problem, but something like that says, okay, great. If you're going to use a sleep tracker, commercially available sleep tracker, fine. What can you pull from it? Well, you can pull some general awareness. What time are you really going to bed? Oh, I go to bed about 10. Nah, more like 11:45. We get clients all the time.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  They are not even lying to us. They're honestly think that they go to bed at X number and they're off by not minutes, like hours. Calibration, awareness, right? You thought you were eating 3,000 calories a day. It's really more like 4,500 once you started tracking it. Oh, shoot, I just, I wasn't aware what an ounce of peanut butter really looked like. I thought I was, like you fill in all the blanks here. I thought I was doing a pretty good job and in zone whatever my heart rate, but then you measure it, you're way off. So, most people, if you've never measured these things, you don't have any idea what time you fell asleep. You don't have any idea what calories look like or what your HRV is. You were, okay.

• 1:20:57Rich Roll?

  Or what your training zones are.

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  No idea.

• 1:20:59Rich Roll?

  You're thinking you're doing this, you're way outside that zone and, and then you're confused when you're not like, you know, progressing.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? So, they're really good for that type of stuff. They're good for calibration and awareness. They're good for behavior. A lot of people will say, when I wear my tracker, I make better decisions. Doesn't matter if the tracker is accurate. Great, I'm in, I'm totally here for it. If you look at the clinical trials, actually, on specific things like obesity, you'll see a bunch of positive results. You also see some negative results, such that people, when they wear trackers, will gain more body fat. What's the difference between the two groups? Tough to say, but some common things that happen in the groups that are kinda close to their goal, trackers tend to help.

• 1:21:47Speaker 01

  And so, let's say we're just using something simple, rudimentary, like steps per day. And we say, all right, we want everyone at 10,000 steps per day. Not saying that's a good number, but you know, we'll just move past that for now. And you enroll in the study and you're at 7,500. And then you like really pay attention, you, you move more throughout the day and you get to 9,500. Like, damn, I can do this. It's the person who did that in their first days at 2,500 that ends up gaining more weight, sometimes, because they're discouraged because the goal is so far from reality. They're like, I walked all damn day.

• 1:22:24Speaker 01

  And I'm at 3,000 steps. To hell with this. I've tried to get healthy and it's just too hard for me, my body. And then you just, you know, you fill in the logic train from there and they just ditch everything and they actually get worse habits because it's so discouraging. It's not always the case. And again, there's lots of randomized control trials on this stuff now, but you'll, you'll see those things pop up. Most of the times trackers and things for the general public are good for getting people to be more accountable. They're good for going, I know my coach is going to look at this tomorrow. Ah, like, ah, I don't want to do this.

• 1:23:00Rich Roll?

  Built in accountability.

• 1:23:01Speaker 01

  Accountability. All those things are phenomenal. That said, there have been trackers and wearables for roughly 15 years now on like a consumer level. And do you notice our, our population getting healthier?

• 1:23:16Rich Roll?

  I mean, it doesn't seem that way.

• 1:23:18Speaker 01

  Doesn't seem that way.

• 1:23:19Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:20Speaker 01

  It's not, right? So one could say, is it really working? Okay, we'll leave that aside. What are the downsides? The downsides, I gave you the one example, like anytime anyone gets obsessed about numbers, especially if they're non-validated, which most consumer wearables and trackers. Now, when you get into the areas of like Polar and Garmin, you get good, right? You have companies built to track heart rate. They get good at tracking heart rate. The problem is when you get a company built to be an Instagram platform that then tells you your training zone.

• 1:23:50Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that's problematic. Yeah, of course, of course.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  That's not, that's not.

• 1:23:56Rich Roll?

  I mean, if you have, if you have a Garmin and you have a chest strap heart rate monitor, like it's pretty accurate. And, and obviously there's like some products out there are better than others. But at the higher end of these, even if there's a calibration problem or an accuracy problem, they, they tend to be consistent.

• 1:24:13Speaker 01

  They're reliable.

• 1:24:14Rich Roll?

  And so you have, you have these sort of baselines and, and what you're paying attention to is the variability within that.

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? So that's the last piece, reliability is, is good monitoring over time. Those are all good. The downside is when we start getting into decisions based on the kind of information that those machines are not good at. Not, the sleep, again, my bias right in front of you here, is a really big one, right? The way that I'll say this as arrogantly as possible is like, we work with three, four, 500 million dollar athletes. Like, do you think we're going to put a $300 wearable on them to test their sleep? Something as critical as sleep.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  You know the answer.

• 1:24:54Rich Roll?

  You're gonna hook them up to a million wires and put them in that room with glass and observe them all night.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  No, no, no, we do that whole thing in our house.

• 1:25:02Rich Roll?

  Just ask them how they feel. Oh, you do? Okay.

• 1:25:04Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:25:05Rich Roll?

  But you run the experiment, like the top level sleep science.

• 1:25:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:25:09Rich Roll?

  Like setup.

• 1:25:10Speaker 01

  Exactly. So that is all available to anybody now. It's not even that expensive. So we can run full clinical grade medical sleep studies from people in their bedroom every night. It's not even that expensive. If we need to know just what time you're going to bed, I don't need to do that. I can put an Apple Watch and it's gonna tell me roughly like what time you went to bed and what time you woke up. But if I wanna start making decisions about supplements or lifestyle changes or medications based on sleep staging, I'm not doing it based on a $200, $400 wearable. That was not meant for that. There are far better technologies. So it's not about my company, my sleep company, or any of those.

• 1:25:55Speaker 01

  It is about using the right tool for the right job. And so when you get to levels of detail where you're making like decisions about chemicals that are gonna go in your body at high concentrations, in the example of medications or supplements, or changing a mattress, or anything else, like there's better technology. Alright, so we are going to run those studies on people. We're gonna have a full-time environmental analysis going on in their bedroom. We're measuring blood and urine, like we're doing all these things, we're gonna say, oh, this is exactly what's going on. Staging is almost irrelevant, right? There's so many other things that matter. And then what we always do is we build normal homeostatic ranges for people and their physiology.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  And we will reverse engineer, in the case of sleep, sleep based on what actually produces the highest cognitive capacity the following days, not an arbitrary cutoff of minutes. Right? And so. Just one example there, I could give you those with any technology. But if you really care about something like that, if you're struggling with it, or just want to maximize, in this case, sleep, great, go to absolute rest. Way better version. If you don't care about that at all, and you just want to be roughly calibrated, fine. You know, pick the watch and totally fine, right? It'd be the same thing of saying, you know, are you, are you loading your data up into a polar, your heart rate data or something?

• 1:27:22Speaker 01

  Well, for the average person that just wants to kind of know, like, what's my resting heart rate? All right, I probably don't need a $700 Garmin. Fine, fine. But if you want to use that to train, let's get the right technology for the right job. So I could keep going with technology, but like, that's philosophically how I generally think people should handle these things.

• 1:27:40Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, there's no bottom to the, you know, the depth of the pool that you can jump into with this stuff. You know what I mean? Like, you can get super obsessed with graphs and, you know, training peaks and all these, all these, there's so much technology out there. But I guess what I'm asking is for, you know, I'm not talking about the elite person who's just got all this shit like dialed and has someone like you on their team. But the average person who does care, they've got a wearable, they're starting to learn about HRV and resting heart rate and all these, these sorts of things. And, and there is something interesting, like setting aside like, like absolute accuracy on these things to just see fluctuations day to day. And to notice that while we always know when we've had a good night of sleep, like, you know,

• 1:28:23Rich Roll?

  it's like, there's a lot of perceived, you know, kind of perception that I think is important that gets overlooked with the data. But there are some things that are less intuitive, like sometimes I'll have a great night of sleep and I feel ready to go. And like weirdly, like my HRV is much lower than I would have expected, or my respiratory rate is like wonky. And I'm like, oh, that's weird or interesting. And trying to understand like how to interpret that and then how to

• 1:28:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:48Rich Roll?

  adapt our behavior around those things.

• 1:28:51Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah. So that's really good. There's a handful of reasons that can explain exactly what you're talking about. That happens pretty normally, pretty commonly. Everything from algorithm changes on the backend of the technology, right? Those companies will upgrade their, update their algorithms and then your data will jump all over the place. Step number one is that. Step number two with wearables, simple things like if they got twisted on your wrist or finger, you'll get those jumps in numbers. So step number one in this train is always, did you get the real data? You may not even sincerely know that per se. Like, I feel great. I didn't wake up at all last night. I didn't even wake up to pee. But yeah, my sleep score is way down. All right. Almost always then one of two things happened.

• 1:29:35Speaker 01

  You had some sort of overnight push from the company, or it moved on your hand somewhere. Great. Some of the ones are better and some are worse at being robust against a change like slit on your wrist or your finger. But not all of them are. There. Okay, let's assume you got good data and we didn't have like a connection issue or something like that. Now past that is day to day changes are almost always useless. And so we would strongly discourage people, especially from low-grade commercial trackers, from making a decision about what they're going to do today based on one day of information, whether this is resting heart rate, respiratory rate, sleep stages, sleep time, HRV.

• 1:30:18Speaker 01

  Very rarely should you adjust your plan based on that day's numbers. I know those companies will sometimes give you like a Like a recommendation? Yeah, and generally bless their hearts, they're doing the best they can because people like want to do, but but I almost always would say throw that all out. Don't pay attention to that. Follow your plan. With something like those measures, HRV is a little bit different than heart rate and respiratory rate. Those are actually all three telling you very overlapped but different things. But something like resting heart rate, if this thing moves substantially, you're probably sick. Right? If resting heart rate is way up past your norm, either you had a really psychologically stressful thing happen, probably not physiologically stressful, probably psychologically stressful.

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  You're you're elevated, right? Emotionally and or you're sick. Then check your body temperature. If your body temperature is up and your heart rate is up, this is how they had their pre-diagnosis of COVID stuff on wearables. Boom. Two days later, you're sick, right? If your resting heart rate is way up and your HRV is down. Then now we're looking at physiological or psychological stressor. These sync up, right? Those should happen in tandem. But resting heart rate is a lagger. It'll hang tight for a long time. HRV is a much more sensitive measure for short-term psychological or physiological stress. So most likely, your resting heart rate will not move, but your HRV will dip.

• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  So we're already like, you see, we're triaging like what's real and what's not real from these different things. If respiratory rate moves, something happened. Could be sick, could be psychological, physical, but that is going to be a really fast change. And if that thing moves up more than two and a half or so breaths per minute, that's a substantially different number. If your respiratory rate or if your HRV changes by 10%, it doesn't mean anything, like nothing. And so if your resting heart rate is up by five or seven beats per minute, that is very substantial. And so you have to understand what is the normal standard deviation of these individual measures? And when should you care? And so for the most part,

• 1:32:33Speaker 01

  if we're wearing something like that, and I see resting heart rate is up by more than five beats, and temperature is up, and respiratory rate's up more than two and a half to three, almost surely you're sick. And so we might actually, in that case, tone stuff down because we know, hey, you need a lot of rest today. You feel fine, but you're about to be sick. Or for women, this is exactly how we can dial in menstrual cycle. Like, we know what part of your phase you're in if that matters for our training, right? So I should have clarified all those things when I say like, it only goes up here. Well, that's for the male, because we're pretty consistent with those things. So that said, HRV is a fast indicator mover.

• 1:33:14Speaker 01

  But it's also nonspecific. So it's resting heart rate for that matter. So it doesn't know, maybe you were just watching Netflix and you watched some show that was not good for your down regulation, or a thousand other things could be there. But just because that thing is off by 20% even, I might not care at all for you. Some of our people will have deviations of 5% or less in HRV, regardless of huge life stressors. And some will have 25 to 30% variations when almost nothing happened. And so you have to understand, and it's not always true, but for the record, generally, the healthier people are, the less that their HRV changes in response to different things, right?

• 1:33:57Speaker 01

  So they're very resilient against, at a plane flight, lack of sleep, whatever, and their HRV will move by 5%. Not always the case, but a lot of times, the folks that are worse off, you know, they were up an extra 45 minutes and their HRV is all over the place.

• 1:34:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's bouncing all over the place.

• 1:34:15Speaker 01

  So summarize all that.

• 1:34:17Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I mean, I think that's, I think that's helpful. I appreciate like not, not having like knee jerk reactions to these, you know, individual data points within the context of a day to like overly, you know, alter whatever it was you were gonna do. But looking for trends, and also I think in the context of just, you know, talking about recovery in general, what also needs to be considered is, is the phase of training that you're in. Like, we want to go into these periods of, of, you know, functional overload for a reason, where we're like pushing ourselves beyond our body's ability to truly recover in between our workouts, because that's how you get these hyper adaptations

• 1:35:02Rich Roll?

  that result in the real kind of like performance leaps and gains. So, you know, talk a little bit about that.

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, boy, that's even more fun. So we said earlier, adaptation is a byproduct of direct stress. Specific adaptation to impose demand. I can't create adaptation without front-loading stress.

• 1:35:22Speaker 01

  If we are putting stress in the body and then we're seeing biometrics that indicate stress, that's a win. That's not a negative. In fact, it is a hugely positive thing. Like right now, we've got a couple of folks getting ready for UFC fights that are peak camp. Their metrics are not good.

• 1:35:41Rich Roll?

  Right, because you want to crush them for a while. You can't bounce back stronger unless you beat them up enough.

• 1:35:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we were, yeah, I mean.

• 1:35:49Rich Roll?

  Within reason.

• 1:35:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. Where our football players are a little different spot. Our NBA guys are in a completely different spot right now because.

• 1:35:58Rich Roll?

  You have to perform every week. It's a different approach to trying to unleash top performance. Like if you have to do it consistently every other, you know, every weekend or a couple times a week, that's different from the person who's like, I have the Olympics in four years and that's all I care about.

• 1:36:13Speaker 01

  And that's, it's all different for our race car drivers. It's different for our executives and our leaders and our government officials. Like it is 100%. Like what are we trying to do in this? And when we say phase, we're generally talking like a four to eight week chunk, right? So we're looking at this and saying, okay, how did your HRV look this month? What we like to do is we stack like months on top of like months generally, right? So how did January look to last January? Why? Because most people are doing the same thing in January that they did last January, closer than what they did in August to January, right? Depending on that. So yeah, we were taking those things and we're looking at it not the day to day, but at minimum, kind of like five day rolling average, sometimes seven day rolling average. And then we're looking at that week to week variation. I'll

• 1:36:58Speaker 01

  give you really the example. We just ran, we just had a client that just started, had five years of previous data on, I think a whoop tracker. Okay, great. We had a bunch of this stuff. Well, we ran that stuff. We actually had about 60 blood draws to go off of. So fantastic. We were able to take all those data and look back and figure out immediately two big things that were happening in this person's life that they had no idea that were happening the same time every single year. One of them was the practice of Ramadan. And so we were able to see exactly what happened during and for the two months post Ramadan.

• 1:37:36Speaker 01

  Not aware at all. And we were like, oh, did you, so next Ramadan, we have an, we have a strategy going into Ramadan and we have this. So we do not expect your body, because part of Ramadan, if you're not familiar with it, it's an intentional sacrifice.

• 1:37:50Rich Roll?

  It would seem like kind of obvious, like you're, you're not eating. So there's going to be a consequence to that.

• 1:37:55Speaker 01

  Well, the point is a consequence, right? Like that's one of the things you do it is, it's a little bit of a show of self sacrifice. So you're trying to push your physiology to the right. Great. So we're going to have different expectations of a bunch of different variables going in, during and out. We're not trying to protect that much of it. What we're trying to protect is month two and three post. Actually, because like we, we want known expected stressor. That's like part of the self sacrifice that comes with Ramadan. Great. And now we have these other things, but now we have to perform year round. And so we can see, we've seen this stuff in other clients too, with like seasonal variations. We've predicted all kinds of stuff from, from previous data and we can look and see, yeah. Great. So now when you get to this quarter, we've had this once in the past too.

• 1:38:40Speaker 01

  Do you realize quarter four is always your hardest quarter? And they're like, oh, no, no, no, no. And they like, I'm like, no, no, no. Here's the clear data.

• 1:38:48Rich Roll?

  You can see it.

• 1:38:49Speaker 01

  And it's like, oh, man. So we need to have a different strategy for quarter four. Even though you feel like it's your lightest for your business or whatever. This is, maybe it's a byproduct of lagging response. Cause Q3, whatever the case is, but like, we can see this stuff now and we have different expectations for when, in this particular case, training load is going to go down. It's like, we're not going to work as hard physically. Why? Cause I know you're not going to respond. You're going to dig yourself into a bigger hole. Because of external stressors that are happening in there. And so we need to have a different approach, but we can push it like crazy in quarter two. Training, physical training. It's like, okay, so it's a little bit of a different set when we can look back at this from a bigger perspective rather than like the day to day

• 1:39:32Speaker 01

  thing. So whether it's our athletes or our non-athletes, we have these general things of saying, when is overload good? When is it not good? Do we even realize when it's happening in this allostatic fashion? And then now we have to make the conscious choice of saying, we're good with overload here. I'm good with you being pushed really hard this quarter, and I'm good with all your numbers going down. Because that's what allows all of our numbers to go up the following month or following quarter, or whatever the case is. So again, these are things we have access to when we have like big data sets on people. But you don't need to have any of that to think about stuff like this, right? You can just zoom back and think, if I'm getting tired right now, if I'm more fatigued

• 1:40:14Speaker 01

  and more irritable, or man, my brain's not working as well. Well, are you in a hiviest training phase? That's probably a little bit like, that's okay. Don't back off. This is what your coach is trying to do. And those are unfortunately like just some of the consequences that come with really high energy output. The question then is, once you back off, once you complete the plan, did you get that super compensation? If so, then we nailed it.

• 1:40:40Rich Roll?

  What you're saying essentially is, your training program, whether you're a professional or an amateur, has to work within the context of your life. And there's going to be all these other stressors, and your program should account for those, right? And there are going to be these periods of, you know, extreme output, just by dint of the way your life is organized, right? And, and sometimes these are gonna, you know, get in the way of your fitness goals. But there are also intentional periods where we want that functional overload for a reason. And that kind of opens up a broader conversation around periodization that I'm not sure we have time to do today. But the thing you want to avoid is the

• 1:41:23Rich Roll?

  The non-functional version of that, which is where problems start to happen.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we will lay this out on a little bit of a spectrum where if we were going to go train right now, tomorrow, we would wake up probably a little bit slower, a little bit more fatigued than we are today. That's overreached, right? We overloaded, rather. I gave a stress. That's great. So if I overload, and I keep overloading, and I keep overloading, and I keep overloading, and then I recover, then I had some function to that training. So we call that functional overreaching. So you overloaded to a point where like you overreached a little bit, and you went into a hole. Maybe your numbers got lower. Maybe your times got worse. Fatigue got higher. But you backed off for a couple of days, maybe

• 1:42:13Speaker 01

  a couple of weeks, most likely a couple of days, then you came back and you felt great. You've even performed better now. That's the goal, right? That's what the holy grail that coaches are after, right? You're gonna get, you know, two, three weeks out, depending on the sport, ah, things might get a little bit worse for a second, but then once we back off and we taper, we get this super compensation. If you've ever taken like two or three days off from a training program, and you came back and you felt great, you were not overtrained, right? You were not even necessarily non-functional overreached. You were probably doing exactly the overload that we were, that you should be going after. If you're at that phase, though, and you keep training hard, or you train harder, or your recovery capacity is limited, and you don't sleep as well, or whatever the case,

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  you keep cutting calories to get lighter, or whatever, and you go past that point, now we're into what's called non-functional overreaching. You take a week or two off, and you kind of come back to baseline, that's a good indication that you were non-functional overreached. So you were pushing, but it didn't actually produce any positive results. If you go past that, now you get into true overtraining syndrome, which takes weeks or months to come back from. Very, very few people have experienced true overtraining.

• 1:43:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's a lot of people who are misinterpreting that and think that they're overtrained.

• 1:43:36Speaker 01

  If you've taken a couple of days off and you feel better, you are not overtrained. And anyone who's been overtrained is gonna be like, "Thank you, because I took a year off and still felt terrible." That is a struggle. So the overtraining thing is a guess at this point. The, what are the classic signs and symptoms of non-functional versus functional? Overreaching and overtraining? They're very same. They're very similar. A lot of the stuff, it could be lack of sleep, lack of appetite, could be weight gain, could be weight loss, could be sexual desire goes down, could be more injuries, could be like, you don't even know.

• 1:44:11Rich Roll?

  I mean, isn't overtraining just extended chronic, uh, non-functional overreach?

• 1:44:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's fatigue.

• 1:44:18Rich Roll?

  And so the hole just gets deeper and deeper and deeper.

• 1:44:21Speaker 01

  Deeper and deeper. And so the physiological distinction there is you've probably created some real physiological damage. That's not just fatigue anymore, right? So if you're non-functionally overreached, your system is tired. If you have overtrained, you've probably damaged something. Doesn't mean it's irreversible, but you've done some real damage where it takes, again, typically months to restore normal adrenal function, normal hormonal function, normal energetic demands, normal mitochondrial health. Like you've gone way past that point and created a little bit of damage. Um, we're actually working on a project with, um, Adam Phillips Larson is running this at a KI,

• 1:45:03Speaker 01

  where he actually has developed some metrics where we can look at pre-predictive mitochondrial dysfunction way prior to non-functional overreaching via blood markers.

• 1:45:13Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:45:14Speaker 01

  And so what that means is like-

• 1:45:16Rich Roll?

  You can see when you're getting close to that edge.

• 1:45:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we can see it ahead at times. So we can actually take the blood and then predict this will net result down the line of positive, neutral, or negative mitochondrial adaptations.

• 1:45:27Rich Roll?

  That's huge.

• 1:45:28Speaker 01

  It's not, we're not ready.

• 1:45:28Rich Roll?

  Cause it's all about like, where is that edge? You know, you're always dancing around the edge and you kind of have to go over it to realize where it is. But if you know in advance, then you don't have to, you know, suffer the consequence of stepping over it.

• 1:45:40Speaker 01

  It's just a really hard thing. We can look, I mean, most people are going to use things like HRV, they're going to use autonomic nervous system measures.

• 1:45:48Speaker 01

  But actually, how closely that ties to direct physiology is a really hard problem. So unfortunately, like, we don't have numbers in terms of distance or volume, or I can't say HRV will tell you that, or resting heart rate. Like, there's no one metric that will define where you're at there. So it's just a little bit of a challenge to figure out. But a good coach will be able to dial this in for you over time.

• 1:46:12Rich Roll?

  In thinking about some of the misconceptions or myths out there, I think it would be instructive to talk a little bit about fat adaptation, because I think people don't quite understand what's happening here. And I'd like to just test my experience with this and see if it measures up with, you know, how you, how you think about it and what the science says. In my experience as an endurance athlete, obviously, when you're going very long distances,

• 1:46:42Rich Roll?

  efficiency and technique is important, but efficiency with your energy system is a different kind of efficiency. That's what you're trying to really develop. And the way you do that is by developing your body's ability to burn fat as fuel, like, you're go all day. Like, what is the highest level of power that you can sustain over time without tipping into the aerobic, the anaerobic side of things, right? And, and my experience has been that this is really a function of how you're training. And I think there's people who are thinking too much about the nutrition side of it and what they're eating. Am I wrong about that? Or how do you think about that?

• 1:47:25Rich Roll?

  I'm, I'm not saying that, like, what you're eating isn't impactful in this, in this regard. But to me, it's just, it's really just about, like, putting in the work.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay, so.

• 1:47:37Rich Roll?

  Is that, I get a sense you're gonna, you're gonna push back on that.

• 1:47:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, a lot.

• 1:47:41Rich Roll?

  Good.

• 1:47:42Speaker 01

  In different areas. You're not entirely wrong. The impact of like a pre-exercise meal is greatly exaggerated to, I think, kind of one of the points you're really getting at here. There's just so much language and so much conversations about things like this impacting fat burning and oxidative capacity.

• 1:48:00Rich Roll?

  Like eat fat to burn fat, basically. It's like, actually, just go out and ride your bike for seven hours in zone two.

• 1:48:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Right. So, a number of things to think about here. Number one is the fact that you're kind of dancing around a topic that a lot of people will call metabolic flexibility, which is to say you want the ability to burn carbohydrates when optimal and fats when optimal. That term has been hijacked severely recently. That does not mean maximizing fat burning. Doesn't mean maximizing carbohydrate burning. It literally means what I just said, using the best of both worlds. This gets confused because when people hear endurance, they tend to use the marathon example, because we have a lot of data. Marathons are really classic exercise physiology stuff. But the energetics, the metabolic efficiency versus

• 1:48:47Speaker 01

  the mechanical efficiency is kind of how you set this question up, really. It's not even close with a marathon versus an ultra. Like, they're as different as a marathon is to a sprint. As different. Why? What are the metabolic utilization proportions of a high level marathoner? Eighty percent carbohydrate. You heard that right. Like, you're going to be using well over seventy percent carbohydrate to run a marathon if you're fast. You're not doing that if you're running sixty-five plus miles. It's not even in the same stratosphere, right? You're not, the pace is completely different. So that, number one, like trips people up, because you're like, oh, you don't need to use, like, either way, you cut this wrong both ways, right? The pro-carbohydrate crowds are like, no, you don't have to do

• 1:49:31Speaker 01

  that. Look at the data for marathoners, they're burning, they're still burning exclusive carbohydrates, or the fat-burning people are like, no, marathons, like, you gotta burn the most fat possible. It's like, nope. If you are ultra-efficient at burning fat in a marathon, you will be very slow. You can't run fast enough.

• 1:49:46Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you have to run much faster in a marathon. It's not really, I mean, it's an endurance event, but it's not really an aerobic engine event.

• 1:49:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's like.

• 1:49:56Rich Roll?

  There is a lot of speed and anaerobic.

• 1:50:00Speaker 01

  You have to run a four minute mile.

• 1:50:01Rich Roll?

  Energy output, yeah.

• 1:50:02Speaker 01

  You have to run a four minute mile.

• 1:50:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's insane. I know. But that's different than like the Moab 250 or something like that.

• 1:50:09Speaker 01

  Not even close.

• 1:50:09Rich Roll?

  Although there is like, there's some really cool stuff going on in that world because it's like, it's so new, you know, like pushing how far, you know, people can run. And I think we're just at the beginning of like, trying to discover like, you know, how to perform in that, in that environment. There's a lot of growth and learning available there, but there, there are people like, there's this guy, David Roach. And like, he's, he's like training like a competitive eater. Like it's, for him, it's like, he's doing all his, he has 15 years of endurance base building. Like he's got a massive endurance base. So to your point of adaptations, it's like, what do I need to, for his first 100 mile, or he'd never run a 100 mile race, even though he's been a runner forever.

• 1:50:52Rich Roll?

  He's like, I don't need more endurance. I need speed. Like, nobody's running these things fast. I'm going to do all my work at threshold and I'm going to train my body to consume more grams of carbohydrate per hour than any human ever has before. And because that's going to be the thing that's going to be the differentiator here. And, and, you know, in his first 100 mile race, he won, I think he broke the course record. Like, and so it's like a lot of attention's being paid to this guy. And, um, and so I think that just speaks to, not that other people aren't doing that. Tour de France riders are experimenting with caloric intake and all this sort of thing. And, and then there's bicarb and all these other, uh, you know, things that are different variables that get introduced to this. But it highlights the point that like, we think of, oh, this is an aerobic event.

• 1:51:37Rich Roll?

  This is an anaerobic event. And it's like, we're always using these systems, you know? It's like, we think of these things as binaries and they're really not.

• 1:51:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we've got a guy right now, Ross Edgley.

• 1:51:47Rich Roll?

  I know Ross very well. I didn't know you were working with him.

• 1:51:50Speaker 01

  So he's swimming around the entire country right now.

• 1:51:55Rich Roll?

  I have so many questions, but go ahead.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  Uh, I think that's going to be a thousand miles total.

• 1:51:59Rich Roll?

  He's had, like, there's been weird stuff with the tides and the surf and all that. Like he's gotten off the boat and on land a couple of times, right? But I think he's, he's back out there now. He's like halfway.

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  Yep. Yeah. He's going around Iceland. That's right. So there's been a bunch of storms come in. And all that that he's had to hop off. I also had a guy named Jordy Sullivan on my show who did Ned Brockman's thousand mile run. So in that he walks through the entire like what they gave them per minute for all the macronutrients.

• 1:52:28Rich Roll?

  Oh, he was like Ned's guy, nutrition guy?

• 1:52:31Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:52:31Rich Roll?

  Super interesting.

• 1:52:32Speaker 01

  He laid that whole thing out, exactly what they ate, when they ate it, timing wise and what they took and all that. It was so interesting to see what Ned did for the thousand. So thousand mile swim, thousand mile run. I've had my, I didn't, I wasn't involved in that at all. Just Jordy told me all this stuff. And then about a year ago, I had this conversation with Cam and I was like, dude, we gotta do something before, uh, Cam Haynes, sorry. Cause he will just go out and run.

• 1:52:58Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:52:59Speaker 01

  He does nothing. Like he just goes out and runs. And then he just did, uh,

• 1:53:03Rich Roll?

  I mean, Goggins is like that, too.

• 1:53:05Speaker 01

  Nuts.

• 1:53:06Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  Right? So Cam did the, before his book came out, he did, um, what's that? What is that? Two fifty? Coconut, coconut?

• 1:53:12Rich Roll?

  Oh, I know what you're talking about. Like he, he did it like the day that his book came out, like on his publishing date.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:53:18Rich Roll?

  I believe. Yeah. It was like a 200 mile run or something like 200, 200 mile race or something.

• 1:53:22Speaker 01

  Does nothing, right? Uh, preparation, like training wise he does, but like nutrition wise, like you know, some, no strategy. So you have like Ned out here who's got a guy, was everything measured and monitored and like tracked. And then you just have Cam who goes out at 55 years old, grabs whatever's at the aid station, smashes it down and, and just goes, right? Point of saying, take a look at all three of these guys. Guy in his early twenties and Ned, guy in his fifties and then Ross, who is five foot two, 220 pounds of pure muscle, right?

• 1:53:55Rich Roll?

  Yeah. Five foot two in height and width.

• 1:53:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. Right. He's a bowling ball. All right. What's the common denominator among all three of them? Different training styles, different nutrition. Number one, they all have the tissue tolerance. You cannot run anything past, for most people, 10 miles?

• 1:54:15Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:54:16Speaker 01

  The tissue will break down first. If you're a runner, your toes are gonna go black, you're gonna get blisters. If you're a cyclist, like your knee, your blowback, like, number one, success in these things has nothing to do with energetics at all. It has, is your body physically capable of handling that volume? With Rossi was his shoulder, right? So he had to go through a whole bunch of stuff with his shoulder. Prior to this setback, the original thing he was gonna do is different, but had to get that done. Cam can just handle, because he's been doing this for 40-plus years. So when I say like he does nothing to show up to it, he has 40 years of tolerance in his joints that says like, we'll handle that. It still annihilates him, but you get it, right? Ned is totally different, but still is a runner by background.

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  So nothing gets past running fast, running slow in these events. The number one breaker is DNFs. Right? That's the number one thing that stops these shows. Just couldn't hit the finish line, right? So past that, now you get to play a game however you want, fueling-wise. Because the second thing that'll break you is going to be fuel. So what do you want to do? You want to get more calories in per bite? That's gonna be fat. You want to get in though more fast-moving fuel? That's gonna be carbohydrate. The downside, though, of getting in a load of calories via carbohydrate is your gut. GI upset, as well as, and anyone that's done these things, you'll just know, you're so tired of goo. And packs and candies, like you can't get in 60 to 80 grams of carbohydrate per hour

• 1:55:47Speaker 01

  in the same form. You just get, in fact, a lot of DNFs happen because people just can't eat anymore. Right? They're just stomach nauseous, okay. So with Ned, it was like a revolving strategy of different tactile feels of food. And tastes and things like that. With Ross is a little bit different, okay, but the gut is trainable. Right? So the gut can be trained. You can greatly increase your amount of carbohydrate ingestion per hour by practicing it. You can stay away from GI distress. You can play with different forms, and some people will handle manufactured food things better. Whether these are resistant starches, and some people just will not handle it on race day. Where fats come in the equation is like, okay, great, I can double my caloric intake. Over a marathon?

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  That doesn't matter, really. Over something past that? The calories at some point will really start to matter. But a lot of, a lot of fat utilization means that you're gonna go slow. And so you get to play this game of like, how do I balance the physiology, quote unquote, the bioenergetics, my stomach, plus actually just like the practical application of like getting this stuff in over 20 hours, or 40, or 70, or whatever the thing is. I mean, if you look at what like Nick Baer has done for their stuff, like you have totally different strategies to get there. So we, I think it's very clear at this point, we don't know what's

• 1:57:14Speaker 01

  gonna maximize these things. Like, we've got a lot of literature on marathon below. 1970s, people started, in fact, at the lab I came out of, started doing, had Frank Shorter and had those guys in the lab in the 70s. But stuff past marathon distance?

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  We don't know a ton.

• 1:57:31Rich Roll?

  Yeah, it's the Wild West. I mean, listen, the GI distress thing is, is huge. It's still like the number one thing that like, you know, capsizes like people, you know, doing the Kona Ironman. I think like heat plays into it, hydration, and all, you know, like electrolyte balance and all these other things. But like gut distress becomes, you know, is like this huge limiter and people spend years trying to figure it out. And then when it counts the most, still, you know, have an episode or something that, that results in a, you know, a cratered performance. But when you talk about, like Ross Edgley, like this guy's a freak of nature. Like, I just don't understand anything about like how, how it works with him, you know, he's just

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  Neither do I.

• 1:58:12Rich Roll?

  eaten cakes and like, you know, all kinds of crazy stuff. And he just has the, the most insane physique. It doesn't make any sense

• 1:58:20Speaker 01

  Nothing.

• 1:58:21Rich Roll?

  that he has that physique as an endurance athlete. Like, like I've said to him many times, like, you know that you would be a better swimmer if you just like stopped lifting weights, you know, and, and took five years. And, I mean, look at people who excel at the Olympics in the 1500 meters, or like open water swimming. Like, there is a body type, you know? And your body type is actually the exact opposite of that.

• 1:58:43Speaker 01

  Literally.

• 1:58:43Rich Roll?

  You know what I mean? It's like, how does it even work? Like, like when you have, when you, when you're carrying that much muscle mass to like move your shoulder every time, like, how much energy does it take to like just move your, your arm in front of you? Like.

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, to have the bicep size that Ross has.

• 1:59:01Rich Roll?

  I know. It's, it's, it's comical, actually, but like.

• 1:59:04Speaker 01

  He put on.

• 1:59:05Rich Roll?

  He's the one who's right, who's swimming around Iceland. No one else is. You know what I mean?

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  He did 500 miles up Yukon.

• 1:59:11Rich Roll?

  I had him on the show right after he did that. And, and one of my friends that I've known forever was one of his coaches, like on the boat for that experience. And so he, I had, I heard all the stories. Like, yeah, it was wild.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, he's great. It's just like, if, if you were to ask me right now, here's a picture of this dude. Is it physiologically possible for him to do any, like the four things he's done? I'd be like, nope. No chance. No chance, right?

• 1:59:36Rich Roll?

  So like, everything goes out the window.

• 1:59:38Speaker 01

  Totally. And he's, he's, I think he gained 10 kilos prior to the Yukon one. I can't remember exactly, but like, not lean at all. Like the exact opposite of any swimmer you've ever seen. I don't know how technically good he is.

• 1:59:52Rich Roll?

  I mean, for these open water adventures though, like, yeah, like all the guy, all the people that would swim the English Channel, like they get really, they need the blubber. You have to be like, yeah, you have to, you have to like, it, it keeps you warm. I mean, he's in freezing cold water. It's wild.

• 2:00:06Speaker 01

  That's part of it too, right? Like super cold. So he manages, he just must be efficient in the water. And he, his body just handles and he handles, cause he has to get back in that water and keep moving in that water for months, not days or weeks. It's going to take him months to swim around that.

• 2:00:25Rich Roll?

  The mental fortitude to do that is off the charts.

• 2:00:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. And he'll do the whole thing with both of his cheeks, like touching his ears, cause he'll be smiling so much.

• 2:00:34Rich Roll?

  I know. It's crazy.

• 2:00:35Speaker 01

  He's the wildest, right?

• 2:00:37Rich Roll?

  And he's like this teddy bear, you know? He's like, he has this very sweet disposition.

• 2:00:41Speaker 01

  He's sweet. So we, we've actually, um.

• 2:00:45Speaker 01

  I said earlier, like, we don't know scientifically what's happening a lot of these things because it's really hard to collect data on this stuff. But we just did one with way more toned down, but really cool with Michael Easter. I don't know if you know Michael.

• 2:00:58Rich Roll?

  I do.

• 2:00:58Speaker 01

  But he just did a, a really long hike. And we collected a bunch of blood and urine and stool and stuff before, after, and then 45 days post. So I was just working on those data this morning, actually. So that's, that wasn't like a race, but I think it, it was not, I think it was 900 miles that he did.

• 2:01:17Rich Roll?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:01:18Speaker 01

  I, I could be off there.

• 2:01:19Rich Roll?

  Like a ruck with the, he was rucking or just, or just walking?

• 2:01:22Speaker 01

  He walked.

• 2:01:23Rich Roll?

  Did he have the weight vest?

• 2:01:24Speaker 01

  He took all this stuff with him. So I'm not exactly sure, uh, right now, what exactly the poundage of his tent and his food and sort of all that stuff was. But it took him, God, six weeks or something like that. Again, I'm sorry for messing all these numbers up, but you get to just, it was just a really long thing he did. And we're like, what's going to happen? So we took a bunch of metrics. So, um, again, I was working on those data this morning, but hopefully pretty soon we'll have that stuff out and we're gonna, we'll put it out there of like, hey, this is what happened because the world like just doesn't know what happens if, in his case, it's just walking. But I think he averages a marathon a day or a plus. So you're like, what happens when you do that? And then he's sleeping outside.

• 2:02:06Speaker 01

  He's like just sleeping in his sleeping bag and eating whatever he can there. And so I do know what he ate and how he handled all that portion of it, uh, of it. So something like, I love this stuff. Anyone that's doing these things, like, hit me up.

• 2:02:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:18Speaker 01

  Cause I want to do with, I tried to get Cam, I'm like, dude, Cam, let's get Courtney, let's do something.

• 2:02:22Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:02:23Speaker 01

  Cause she's just another one who's just, like, she's insane.

• 2:02:27Rich Roll?

  Well, she just, she, you know, performs at the highest level and seems to train intuitively, you know? And I don't know if that's changed since the last time I've spoken to her, but, um, she very much is about feel. She's not caught up in like looking at a bunch of metrics. And I think maybe she has a coach now, but for a long time she would just go out and like, here's what I feel like doing today. And, and, you know, on some level, like she's a freak of nature, but also like this sport is so young that, um, I often wonder like, what happens when the Olympic gold medalist at the 10,000 meters decides like, they want to, they want to go right to Western states, not like in the sunset of their career, but like when they are still like, you know, at the age where they can perform at

• 2:03:10Rich Roll?

  the highest level and to see what happens. Cause I think, you know, there's a lot of, because it's so new and, and there really, you know, has never been any money in it. It hasn't attracted that kind of athlete to, you know, get off like the world circuit, track and field circuit and like enter into that, you know, what happens when the world's best runners decide like, this is where we want to go?

• 2:03:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, that's actually really interesting. If you look at the, the classic dogma of, I'm not very versed in swimming and cycling, so I'll just keep using running numbers, but the classic like predictors of marathon success, right? There's the, the three that'll jump out always. It's VO2 max, mechanical efficiency or running efficiency and lactate threshold, right? Physiologically, those are the three things. And so you've seen these combinations of like pre Fontaine and shorter, like they'll win differently. Some of them are just 95 VO2 maxes, some of them are 75s, but they're more efficient and lactate threshold, right? So when you go to ultras, that's not the case though. What percentage of an ultra's success is being predicted by VO2? Well, you're probably not going to finish an ultra

• 2:04:18Speaker 01

  or even close with a low VO2 max. Your VO2 max is not going to be 40.

• 2:04:24Rich Roll?

  You need it to be decent, but you don't need it to be a top, in the top tier.

• 2:04:27Speaker 01

  I would imagine it's no, it's like very low on the poll of prediction, right? If anything, it might, it has to come up statistically significant, but it's probably going to explain single digit percent of variance, right? So then what is it? It's not going to be lactate threshold, maybe, I don't know. Efficiency probably super high. But then like, what other variables there that's explaining success?

• 2:04:49Rich Roll?

  Well, there's no, there's no metric to calibrate mental resilience, you know? And so in these cases, it's, you know, the mind that goes before the body. Like it's the mind that's shutting everything down. And, and there are some people that are, have that thing where, you know, they can mute out whatever their body's trying to tell them and, and keep going.

• 2:05:07Speaker 01

  But there's got to be something. From a bioenergetic perspective, that'll give you some physiological insight, right?

• 2:05:16Rich Roll?

  Yeah, that you can glean some insight into. Yeah, I mean, it would be really interesting to look into that. Like, have you ever, have you heard of the 3,000 Mile Self-Transcendence Run? You heard about this?

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:05:28Rich Roll?

  So there's this, there's this race every year.

• 2:05:30Speaker 01

  This is a great name, by the way.

• 2:05:31Rich Roll?

  There's, there's this race every year in Queens, New York, and it's an outgrowth of, there was like a, uh, um, like a guru called Sri Shinmoyi. And he's sort of like this, he, he, he's sort of this figure in New York City running. Like, he was, he was, he was sort of a transcendental thinker and has all these followers or whatever. And, and it was very much about like asceticism and self-actualization through like, through running, the discomfort of it as a means of like purification or whatever. Anyway, he was a figure like in the, I think in the seventies or eighties. But this race, it was originally organized by his organization, I suppose, and it's, it still goes on.

• 2:06:15Rich Roll?

  And basically, there's a city block in Queens, the most, you know, random, like nondescript, like normal block in the middle of Queens. And I think it's a one and a half mile loop. If I'm not mistaken, it might be longer. I might be getting the facts wrong. But basically, a group of people start at dawn and then at dusk, they cut it off. I think it's like, you know, I don't know, like 8:00 AM to, or 6:00 AM to 6:00 PM or something like that. Like for like, you know, like a certain part of the day, you just go around this thing. And, uh, and then you, you go to sleep that night and like the first person who gets to 3,000 miles wins.

• 2:06:54Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:06:55Rich Roll?

  And there's a documentary about it, but the point, I bring it up because, so it goes on for like weeks and weeks and weeks.

• 2:07:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:01Rich Roll?

  And if you're like in New York City around that time, you can just go and watch. There's no one there. There's no fanfare. Like, nobody cares about this race. But it's insane what's happening. And I bring it up because if you look at the competitors and the ones that are winning, like there are people that do it every year and there's like, you know, a couple of people that like have excelled at this race. And they just don't, you wouldn't even think they were athletes. I think one of the guys is like a Finnish mailman or something like that. And his, you know, he's just walking all day delivering the mail at home. And so it defies like the, whatever you kind of imagine, like,

• 2:07:36Rich Roll?

  Like an elite performer in that world would look like, they look very much like just everyday people.

• 2:07:42Speaker 01

  How long does it take them roughly?

• 2:07:44Rich Roll?

  I mean, it's gotta be weeks. I'm reluctant to say, I'd have to look it up, but like, yeah, I mean, a long time.

• 2:07:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:07:48Rich Roll?

  Basically, they're running the distance of America.

• 2:07:51Speaker 01

  I think it took Ned 11 or 12 days, 13 days, something like that.

• 2:07:55Rich Roll?

  To do his thousand mile thing. Yeah, he was doing it on a track and he was sleeping, you know, a little bit every night, but it was all self-contained on that, on that track.

• 2:08:04Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:08:04Rich Roll?

  And he was doing it by himself.

• 2:08:06Speaker 01

  Running for 12 hours a day, the same mile loop.

• 2:08:09Rich Roll?

  But there's not enough people doing this to have like a data set where you can really like extract, you know, something meaningful. Like, are these people all weird outliers or, you know, what, what, what's the shared commonality here that is doing?

• 2:08:22Speaker 01

  I mean, I'm hoping like, maybe it's, maybe it is true. Maybe they are all just elite fat utilization folks. Like, maybe that, that is the whole key. Like, I don't think that's the case, but maybe it's the opposite. I mean, I have no idea what is, what is this magical combination? Mental fortitude stuff aside, all true, but like, geez, there's got to be something physiologically, even just amongst the people that finish. Right? So they all presumably to finish have to have some sort of freak ability mentally. But like, what, what is among them that separates the, the Courtney's from the everyone else's, right? The people that just keep smashing records.

• 2:09:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know. I don't know. Well, I'm, I'm, I'm signing you up to find out, Andy.

• 2:09:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, sounds like a fun experiment, man.

• 2:09:09Rich Roll?

  But on, on the subject of, you know, we were kind of talking about fat adaptation and, and maybe that's a good way to segue into

• 2:09:18Rich Roll?

  some misconceptions around exercise, fitness and like weight loss. Like a lot of people, it's like, I want, I exercise because I want to lose weight. I can't, I just want to lose my gut or whatever. Like, how do you frame weight loss or weight management in the context of, of fitness?

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a really good question.

• 2:09:38Speaker 01

  We can tie this up a bunch of different ways. One would, the starting place is if you look at exercise from a longevity or a body fat perspective, it doesn't play the role that most people think it does. Which is not to say that it is not doing anything or we shouldn't do it, but it is not the biggest explainer of body composition. Nutrition is going to win that game by a landslide. I had Herman Ponser on, who's done a lot of work in this adaptive thermogenesis area, right? So out of his lab in Duke. He makes a pretty compelling case, as others have done as well, that exercise will burn calories for sure,

• 2:10:20Speaker 01

  but if your only benefit or only thought of exercising is to burn calories for the sake of fat loss, most people are going to struggle with that goal because it's not going to burn the caloric numbers that you probably think it does. Your tracker, your wearable, the number on the machine almost always exaggerates the caloric expenditure by sometimes 20 to 30%. So you're probably not burning the calories, number one, that you think. Number two, on the back end of that, a lot of times this, what can happen is your body will down-regulate energy output to match the energy output you use with exercise. That keeps your balance at the same number. The way that it can do that is a bunch of different ways.

• 2:11:03Speaker 01

  But one of them is it will reduce what's called NEAT. And so this is the amount of calories you burn not keeping your organs and tissue alive, not during exercise, but it's this non-exercise caloric expenditure. This is twitching. This is fidgeting. This is getting up and, you know, kind of pacing back. Like it's all these things that people don't think is a big deal. Well, it turns out that NEAT can be anywhere between like 5 and 20% of the total calories you expend throughout the day. And so just to give a fake number, but to make it easier for people to conceptualize this, let's say you burned 500 calories in your workout. Well, your body might reduce your spontaneous physical activity that day by 500 calories. And so now you're back at like a neutral.

• 2:11:48Speaker 01

  So then what do you do? You're like, I'm not losing weight. I'll burn 600. And then your body-

• 2:11:51Rich Roll?

  Then your body will compensate by like less fidgeting and moving around.

• 2:11:56Speaker 01

  And a bunch of other stuff, right? Hello, this is an adaptive thermogenesis. It's not that simple, but- Roughly, this is the idea. And so really, this gets then manipulated into like, oh, I told you calories in, calories out don't matter. You're like, okay, that's not at all what that says. That simply says, we're not paying attention to that equation appropriately by just looking at the number you burn on the treadmill from your run.

• 2:12:21Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:12:22Speaker 01

  So, that said, if you look at the data on people who are successful at weight loss, and who are more likely to keep that weight loss off in the long term, which is what we really want, right? I don't want to just lose weight in six weeks. I want to lose weight in six weeks and for it to be gone for forever. Exercise is a very strong correlate to long-term successful weight maintenance. And so is to say, it's not the thing that is going to burn the calories that's going to help pull the body fat off you, but it is contributing a lot to keeping you at that body composition as time and years go on. It does a whole bunch of things. This doesn't even count the myriad of health benefits outside of just calories and body

• 2:13:07Speaker 01

  composition that come with exercise. And so when people talk about Herman and other people's work like this, it gets lumped in a lot with like, see, I told you, exercise is overrated, or you don't need to do it. And like, that is not the message at all. The message, though, is fair to say, if your only strategy to lose body fat is to go run more, that's probably not the most scientifically established method to do it. Calories from food is the win by far. So when we build fat loss programs, it's going to have an exercise component and a nutrition component.

• 2:13:42Rich Roll?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:13:43Speaker 01

  But if you had to pick one, and all you cared about was losing body fat, that's an easy choice. That will always be nutrition. So that is like the framework we have to start with. From like a misconception and this understanding of what can happen in that area, we want to use exercise to build lean muscle, to build mitochondrial and cellular health, to build connective tissue, to enhance the nervous system, to work on endocrine health and the immune system, and cognitive function, and brain health, and bone health, on and on and on. Those allow you to then sustain exercise for a long time, to be alive, to be more vigorous. Quality of life and fall reduction and balance.

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all of these things are really positively associated with exercise in correlation and causation. But if you want to lose the number on the scale, nutrition's got to be at the forefront of that.

• 2:14:40Rich Roll?

  Weight management being a byproduct of fitness and exercise, but shouldn't necessarily be the goal for complicated reasons.

• 2:14:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:52Rich Roll?

  And you know, it's, there's the adage of like, you can't, you can't out-train a bad diet. Like if you, you know, if you're just like, well, I'm, I do all this exercise so I can like, you know, splurge and do these other things, like that's, that's not the best way to think about it. Like you're just, you still have to be really careful about what you're putting in your body and how much.

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, that's going to be the centerpiece, right? So we, not only body management issues, but recovery, training again, how do you feel the next day? Were you sluggish? Did you not want to do anything? Were you more irritable?

• 2:15:23Rich Roll?

  That gets into a whole conversation about like fasting and training too.

• 2:15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:29Rich Roll?

  Which I have a lot of opinions about.

• 2:15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we, we just published a fasting study a few weeks ago. So yeah, I mean, this is, these are all variables in the equation, right? But the, the thing is, that, that is going to be the place, for fat loss specifically, nutrition is going to be the play there.

• 2:15:44Rich Roll?

  I think the thing that happens though, is when you are really connected to your, your fitness, you then like feel better and you sleep and, and you sleep better because you're like, you know, you're just like, you're depleted at the end of the day and your sleep tends to be deeper. And when, I don't know about you, but when I sleep well and I get up, like I'm, I don't have all the cravings to eat the lousy foods that I, when I'm tired and I'm like, you know, like I find myself reaching for all these, you know, foods that aren't good for me, that when I'm really well rested, like just isn't an issue.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  That's not an anecdote.

• 2:16:19Rich Roll?

  So this, this becomes like a self-perpetuating thing.

• 2:16:21Speaker 01

  Oh, that's a very real, very well-established scientific field that you just described. There is a really, in fact, there's been really interesting studies where people have gone into metabolic awards, put people on identical isocaloric diets, same macronutrients, same calories, and simply restricted sleep in groups, and you will see pronounced changes in body composition, even when you put them in these short-term six to eight week things and you're only regulating sleep. Now, you put that in a real world living scenario. Very clear connections between suboptimal or even chronically restricted sleep and things like ghrelin and leptin.

• 2:17:02Speaker 01

  These are the hormones that control your feeling of fullness or your hunger. Those things will get altered in the short and long term. There's also a very clear connection between carbohydrate consumption and desire for carbohydrate post a acute or single bad night of sleep. That also extends to chronic sleep. When we see stuff to rate deprivation, I'm not even meaning like sub four hours. We're just talking to folks that are sub seven, right? Really, sub six is like a really pretty hard line. Now, obviously carbohydrates are great for us, but what that means is they're not switching out fats and proteins for carbohydrates. They're simply going for higher food density. And also be clear, it's not necessarily just carbohydrates.

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  It's more dense, energy dense foods that they go for. If this needs to sound like treats to you, fine, that's not really what it is, but you're gonna go for foods that have a lot more calories per bite. That's not a rich thing. That is a been shown as most humans are gonna have that response on a poor night of sleep. What that does to go, to complete our circle here, is we actually know those things will directly impair the next night of sleep. And so we see this cycle of bad sleep leads to obesity, obesity leads to bad sleep. That is exactly what happens. That's not like a, and we could go over why obesity directly impacts sleep in a bunch of ways people don't realize.

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  But yeah, it's a really, really tough thing to be in to where yeah, you're gonna continue to do that. Not only then you stack on secondary and tertiary problems like when you're tired, you're probably not, like, you're probably not as likely to go work out. You're not going to be physically active. You're more likely to relax. You're more likely to watch TV. Like you have all these things which then derive caloric expenditure not even further. And we're back in the same sort of loop. If you take that time to actually sleep and recovery, you can get out of the loop, but you're not going to do that. You're going to work, get your job done. You're going to take more stimulants. So we get into this stimulant and we have to take sleep things to, and you, well.

• 2:19:09Rich Roll?

  Right. You're just, yeah, you're just, you're in that spiral. I'm in a low grade version of that right now because I had, I had spinal fusion surgery about three months ago.

• 2:19:19Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:19:20Rich Roll?

  L5 S1 fusion. Went in from the front, went in from the back, like, you know, like kind of a major ordeal. In fact, only two days ago, I had a, I had an appointment with my surgeon two days ago, and he told me for the first time that I could take the brace off. So I've been wearing a back brace. Like I'm in early recovery from this. And it's been extremely challenging for me, you know, because I, I thought like, oh, well, like at least at like six weeks, I'll like kind of feel normal, you know? It's like, and I'm not allowed to do anything but walk really. And he's only now going to refer me to, to PT. So I haven't done any of that.

• 2:19:54Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 2:19:55Rich Roll?

  I mean, I had chronic grade two ischemic spondylolysis, like incredible nerve pain. Like I've been hampered by this for years and, and it's, it's really gotten in the way of like, not only my ability to like, do the things I love, but just quality of life. And so I waited way too long to have this procedure and I'm glad that I did it. So my relationship with like movement and fitness that was already, you know, becoming like significantly impaired, but now I'm like, I can't do anything. It's like, and so I don't feel like myself and, and because I'm not exerting myself, I don't sleep as well. And so then I, and then I crave like the, the greasy foods and all that kind of stuff. And so just observing that, like knowing that, okay, well, I'm in like, this is, this

• 2:20:38Rich Roll?

  is interesting, you know, like how am I, I've never been in this situation before and like, how am I making decisions and, and what is my attitude towards this? Like, am I resentful? Am I approaching it like this is an opportunity and a new beginning? All of which is to say that, you know, I'm empathetic to somebody who's in kind of like a cycle that they feel like they can't break out of and, and, you know, mine has an endpoint, hopefully. But layered on top of this is the fact that like, I'm 58, you know, and so it's like, okay, it's been three months. I mean, like, stuff starts to sag, putting on a little weight, you know, like here, I'm like supposed to be as well fit as pot, you know, like, sure. It's like, yeah, not looking super great right now, you know, and also contending with the fact

• 2:21:22Rich Roll?

  that when the gates open up a little bit and I am able to resume a program, how am I doing this consciously? Like, I think I have this incredible opportunity to just restart everything, like 100% from the beginning, relearn how to walk, like my posture, like how I walk and my posture, I'm already on that. But then I have this opportunity to like, if I had to start all over again with everything, like, what would that look like? And what would I do? And how does, you know, the fact that I'm like inching up to 60 play into that, knowing that it's more difficult to build muscle, it's more difficult to retain muscle mass, like, all of these things become like an added challenge on, on top of it. And so it's kind

• 2:22:06Rich Roll?

  of a cool adventure. It's like, oh, I get to like reframe the whole thing and, and decide a new, like, what kind of athlete I want to be and, and what my relationship with, my relationship with all of these activities that I love is going to look like.

• 2:22:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's awesome. Um, what's the next mountain marker you have?

• 2:22:25Rich Roll?

  My next appointment is six months. And that's really, at six months is when like, the fusion is set in enough where people start to really be able to do stuff. And it really depends upon the surgeon. Like, my surgeon's very conservative. Like, I know other surgeons who perform the surgery who are like, you could be on an exercise bike now or doing certain things. And, and my guy's like, I really don't want you doing that. And I realized, like, as much as I would love to be, you know, in a pool with a kickboard kicking or something like that, really like, the risk is too high, like, because the last thing I want is to disrupt a fusion. So it's like, okay, I'm gonna take his advice. But now I'm gonna start some PT and we'll see what that looks like. I'm sure it's gonna be super mild.

• 2:23:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So you'll, you'll hopefully at the six month mark. Be a little bit clear to do something.

• 2:23:13Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:13Speaker 01

  Which you don't know yet, or?

• 2:23:15Rich Roll?

  The fusion really, it takes like a year, basically, for it to be like, okay, it's totally locked. But it's six months, from what I understand, it's, it's safe to start, you know, lifting some weights, not too heavy, like getting back in the gym a little bit, like everything is, you know, comes with, you know, cautionary.

• 2:23:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:23:32Rich Roll?

  Tales, but.

• 2:23:33Speaker 01

  But you get to rebuild movement patterns.

• 2:23:35Rich Roll?

  Yeah, so, so, so if you were my coach, like, what would be taught, I gotta let you go, we're, we gotta end this soon, but like, what would be your, your kind of like topline pieces of advice?

• 2:23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, we would spend, I would say, I don't know, making a number up, but probably a month of just moving your body, everything from your toes to your fingertips. And I really mean that because you have to actually learn a new sling pattern. So what I mean by that is, is like, your right shoulder, the back of your right shoulder to the back of your left heel, have connection. And that connection point runs through the low back. That whole circumstance is different now. And so the way that you produce any movement, whether you're reaching for a pen on your desk, or typing, or standing, is a little bit off. And so now we have to re-understand like what that looks like. I don't know if it's gonna be substantially different, maybe the same.

• 2:24:29Speaker 01

  But we're gonna go into, like, this would be really classic crawling stuff, to sit through things, to multiple step movements that are in multiple planes. I probably wouldn't be worried at all about any sort of numbers and volume. It is gonna be movement, like, how many different movement planes can be in? And can you start to feel different positions? And then we have to learn, like, what is, what is that gonna look like? What's that not gonna look like? But we're gonna want joints through all ranges of motion, and we're gonna want them in sequence. Those are like the two biggest things that we would go after. Without question is, hips, for sure, have been stuck in a restricted position, right? You're not doing anything. So we're gonna open up all that stuff, but we want that with every joint, including your neck,

• 2:25:14Speaker 01

  including your toes, through all ranges of motion. We'll put on load and fatigue, whatever. But then we really wanna start playing with sequencing. Like, how does it go when we go from a lateral lunge to a reverse pivot, step up and reach?

• 2:25:30Speaker 01

  What was that looking like? I don't know how to do that. Can we crawl? Can we lateral roll? Can we eventually tumble? Can we do different things like that? What does it look like when we do some rudimentary plyometrics, right? Some just stew of stuff, just like pop right there in a stance? What happens when we load through the heel? Like, can we really actually drive vertical load, axial loading through your low back intentionally? Where do we find an aggravation point so we know like where to stay away from and things like that? So it would really be all that stuff for a month, actually, now that I'm saying it, probably three months.

• 2:26:03Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:03Speaker 01

  Would be a huge focus. And then we could put some volume, some endurance, low level zone one stuff on it, probably on an incline, some other different ways like that. But like, that would be the thing is like, let's really get those two phases I mentioned dialed down. And everything else, like, we got plenty of time to put muscle back on.

• 2:26:22Rich Roll?

  It brings us all the way back to the beginning of the conversation with like efficiency and technique. But this is like, you need technique for life, you know? Like, how are you holding your body just as a human being?

• 2:26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:26:33Rich Roll?

  And how does it move and how does it not move? And yeah, like, these are things like, you know, you just don't even think about.

• 2:26:40Speaker 01

  Man, you mentioned, like, this is an opportunity, right? I can't tell you how many people from 30 to 60 years old that we've coached. And if you look at them straight in the face and go, "If I can maximize your muscle in the next year, or I can make you have no pain for 50 years." They all would say, "No pain for 50 years," right? But none of them will take that action.

• 2:27:05Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:06Speaker 01

  None of them will do it. What do I mean? If I say, "Wait, great. What if we didn't..." I lift weight, like, I'm a strength training guy. "What if we didn't lift a single weight for a year? And what if you had the worst body composition of your life for that year? But we use that year to step back. And we rebuilt all this stuff. We got all that pain out of your system."

• 2:27:28Speaker 01

  What do you think this is going to look like 50 years from now? 30, 20, 5 years from now? Are you going to really be concerned about the year that you didn't max your bench? Are you going to be so stoked? You have not had all this joint pain for 40 years? I know what you're going to pick 40 years from now. I know what you're saying right now, but like, will you actually commit to it? And it's really hard for people to do. But when you can do that and go, okay, wait a minute. I'm 36 years old. Oh, my God. Yeah, we're going to lose some strength. We're going to lose some endurance. Your numbers are going to go down. We're going to correct all this stuff and we're going to set you up on a 60-year platform for great health.

• 2:28:11Speaker 01

  Those are the exciting conversations we get to have. And they typically end up being like, yeah, just get me to the race in six weeks.

• 2:28:18Rich Roll?

  Yeah, yeah, because that's the human condition, right? And that's, that's the choice that I would make. And but now I've been forced, you know, to make another choice. And that's why it is a cool opportunity because like it's that idea again of like a different kind of discipline. Like, you know, I want to, as soon as I'm, I get the green light, I would just want to go back and do all the things I was doing before and just hit it, you know? And it's like, do you have the discipline to like, listen to what Andy is saying? And actually take advantage of it, which is going to require ridiculous amount of patience and will just be annoying and frustrating like 99% of the time.

• 2:28:53Speaker 01

  For sure. It's terrible. It's the least fun exercise of your whole life.

• 2:28:58Rich Roll?

  Well, time will tell. Time will tell. I got to like 5% of what I wanted to talk to you about in the outline. So I don't know if I can induce you or convince you to come back here, but this was amazing. And there's a million other things that we could talk about. But you really are one of the, if not the like, leading voice out there when it comes to the science of fitness. And I really, I really appreciate what you're doing. It is a public service.

• 2:29:25Speaker 01

  Man, I really appreciate it. I don't really get many chances to. To be on some of the OGs. Uh, no, not many people have been around this space longer than you have. So when, when Rob told me, I was like, yeah, yeah, super excited. So it was awesome to be here. I'll come back anytime, man. This is great.

• 2:29:42Rich Roll?

  I appreciate it. If you want to learn, uh, more about Andy, he has his perform podcast, uh, which you should check out, which is just a vault of insane wisdom. Uh, you also did that limited series with Andrew. I think there's like six episodes on Huberman Lab where you guys go deep on a variety of subject matters. Um, so if there's anything that we talked about today where you're like, hold on, like, why did you move on? I wanted to know more about that. It's like all in there somewhere. I promise you. Yeah. Uh, and maybe the best way to kind of end this or, or take us out, Andy, is if you could just, you know, share a little bit about like, why all this is important? Like, why should we care about fitness? Like, why does it, why does it matter? Why is it

• 2:30:24Rich Roll?

  important that we stop and, and really kind of consider our fitness in a, in a deeper way than maybe we're used to?

• 2:30:31Speaker 01

  You know, the scientific answer to this would be to walk you through the research on longevity,

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  uh, wellness span, quality of life, health span, all that. Uh, you've probably heard that before. If not, just guess. It, it matters in terms of how well you're going to live, how long you're going to live. But I'm not going to answer it that way. I think for, for you, the way that I would say this would be, as far as we know, you get one ride in this vessel of a human body. And if anything, I think you just owe it to that, to say, you have the capacity to do something and you should explore that and you should play that and you should live in that and you should thank it. Right? You have the ability to run hundreds of miles, apparently, or swim a thousand

• 2:31:24Speaker 01

  miles. And we would have not thought that was physically possible. You have the ability to feel better. You have the ability to be a leader or role model for your children in your physical expression. And there's so many other ways we can do this with mental health and great ethics and being a good person and being nice. But with just your physical fitness, you have the control of as much of your body that you have control of. And we're all broken in different ways and have limitations and strength, but you still have some control there. So I think it is the number one reason I would say why we should care about our fitness is you have a responsibility, in my opinion, to your own physiology that says,

• 2:32:07Speaker 01

  we're here, ready to rock. Give us a chance to play.

• 2:32:11Rich Roll?

  Beautiful, man. Thank you. Appreciate you. Thanks for coming today, man.

• 2:32:17Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:32:20Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is of course, awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the help of our amazing sponsors who

• 2:33:03Rich Roll?

  keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors. And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books, and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae, with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake.

• 2:33:35Rich Roll?

  Content management by Shana Savoy. Copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music was created all the way back in 2012 by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support. See you back here soon. Peace. Plants. Namaste.