Jay Feldman 0:04
Welcome to episode 82 of the energy balance podcast, where we teach you how to live without constant hunger and cravings, fatigue, brain fog, poor sleep and other low energy symptoms by maximizing your cellular energy. I'm Jay Feldman. I'm a health coach and independent health researcher, and joining me again today is my good friend Mike Fave. Mike and I have been studying health and nutrition together for a long time now, and Mike also draws on his experiences from working within the healthcare industry. Today's episode is part three, the final part of our fitness versus Health Series, where we'll be discussing how we can maximize fitness and athletic performance from the bioenergetic view. And more specifically, today, we'll be discussing supplements to maximize fitness and athletic performance, why exercise and physical fitness are generally beneficial as long as they're kept in the right balance, the minimum effective dose for muscle growth, strength and endurance, how stress and sleep affect our capacity to handle Exercise and Nutritional strategies to mitigate the harmful effects from high levels of exercise while also maximizing performance. This series has been inspired by a couple of listener questions. If you have any questions that you'd like us to answer on a future episode. You can send those in to Jay at Jay Feldman wellness.com or feel free to leave those in the comments if you're watching on YouTube to check out the show notes for today's episode, you can head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/podcast where you can take a look at the studies and links to articles and anything else that we reference throughout today's episode, and if you are dealing with any low energy symptoms, whether that is fatigue or joint pain, chronic cravings or hunger, maybe it's weight gain that you've been trying to get off by increasing your exercise. Maybe it's digestive symptoms or brain fog or poor sleep or hormonal imbalances, or any other low energy symptom or chronic health issue. Then head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy where you can sign up for a free energy balance mini course, where I'll explain how these different symptoms and conditions are really caused by lack of energy, and I'll also walk you through the main things that you want to do from a diet and lifestyle perspective, to maximize your cellular energy and resolve these symptoms and conditions. So to sign up for that free energy balance mini course, head over to Jay Feldman, wellness.com/energy, and with that, let's get started.

So we were talking about how there are certain things that prevent, that help that our bodies use to help cope with excess energy demands, where they become more efficient to reduce those energy demands, and how that can be something that's helpful. Again, this is kind of a point for exercise. I did want to mention also something we were talking about earlier was just this idea of trade off in terms of the expensive tissue hypothesis and kind of this suggestion that it's either muscle or brain sort of thing. And I do want to make just a clarification, it's not quite that simple. And of course, there is a threshold where that would happen. I think that threshold is probably and not just muscle, but just athletic performance as a whole. I think that threshold is relatively high depending on where you're at metabolically, of course, and so again, we it's more of those situations where it's very hard to quantify, and you have to kind of use those, a lot of those qualitative measures and other variables, but I think you can still have a decent amount of muscle mass and not have that be coming at the cost of other things, if you're very metabolically efficient and functional and eating maybe those 4000 plus calories a day, depending on the amount of activity you're doing, of course, and body size and all of that. But So I did want to make that clarification. And again, kind of the last piece here, in terms of the just finding that balance with exercise. I think the other point that we were kind of getting at is that in most cases where somebody is doing endurance training, and they're doing it in a competitive way, that tends to go past that balance that threshold, and tends to go toward a point where the stress and energy demands do outweigh the specific benefits. Of course, it doesn't have to be that way. It all just depends on what somebody's doing individually and typically in non endurance type training. That doesn't happen quite as much. But of course, as we were talking about as well, when you are competitive, especially at very high levels, it is most likely going to come at a cost there. So yeah, just wanted to make a couple clarifications. Didn't want to make it sound like we were just fully trashing exercise or gaining. Or anything like that, just wanting to recognize the balance that has to be had there, and why we have to have a balance there.

Mike 5:08
Yeah, I mean it I don't, I don't think either of us are net, are anti exercise, especially because both of us have a history of exercising. I think it's just the it. The premise is the amount of exercise, like, how much is the other thing too, is how much is necessary for the effect? I think minimum effective dose is something that's important to consider, because at there's and even in the research, even bodybuilders. I think Jeff nepard had a series discussing training volume, where he had discussed, like, thresholds. I think it wound up being like, 10 sets per body part per week was like the minimum effective threshold to induce a stimulatory response for muscle growth. But after a certain number of sets, and I think there was a little bit of controversy towards the back, like subsequently following this, but after a certain number of sets, it actually became detrimental. So there's, it's not about like. It's not about not doing exercise or doing exercise. It's not a black and white argument. It's where is that amount of exercise appropriate for what your ultimate goals are, if and then is there some type of crossover between the exercise for a certain goal, and while also being able to maintain health. Like, can you balance those two? And I think you can in a lot of circumstances, but obviously in certain situations, like, if you're going to do some type of professional athletics, there's a quite a possibility that you may move, you may basically take down a little bit of health, at least for that period of time while that is going, that exercise is taking place, and then you'll hear a lot of professional athletes and athletes discussing now the importance of recovering during those periods, during that period of time where life becomes focused around exercise, and it's like your workouts are essentially, at that point, become your Job, and everything in your life has to be managed, to manage the like the work, the stress from the workout. And I think Paula Quinn was one of the first people when I was a lot younger that I heard discussing this, where he was talking about not just how many exercise per per set, or how many reps per set, how many exercise per body part, how many body parts per workout, how many workouts per week? But also, what are you doing to manage your your exercise? What are you doing to manage your stress in other areas of your life so that you can effectively recover from the exercise? And I think what's his name, Stan efforting also discusses this as well, and he has some type of quote that's kind of crazy. He's, I think it's, if you're worried about your creatine, but you're only sleeping five hours per night, you're, you're an effing idiot. I think that's his quote be, and it's, and it's important, because it's you're, essentially you're, and we talked about this, I think in horn the hormetic episodes, which was a great prelude to this discussion, was that you have kind of like an allostatic load, or a total bucket of stress that you can manage and exercise is technically a stressor, and while it does have specific effects that we that we can enjoy and that that are beneficial for our bodies overall. And we met, I think we'll get into some of those a little bit. We already discussed some of those. What, what you have to keep in mind is that you're still adding some stress into that bucket, into your total bucket. So depending on the amount of stress you add, you need to minimize stress in other areas in order to effectively recover from that stress and and, more importantly, to progress in your exercise, because it'll become a self defeating cycle, which is what we want people to avoid if they're over exercising and not recovering. You essentially, just at that point, you start to see the graph that you have put up earlier, Jay, where the body starts to lower its actual energy expenditure on other areas to allow for exercise to continue to be maintained. So it becomes, it becomes the stress overtakes the specific effects, and then our, our, our argument at that point is, it becomes, it becomes a problematic, it becomes not a good thing to do. So it's about managing that. So it and I guess this may lead into, and maybe I'm jumping ahead, but like managing your sleep, etc, diet, other external stressors that you have going on in your life. If it's work, whatever it is, it becomes about managing those. Yeah, I'll leave it at that, because I don't want to go too far ahead.

Jay Feldman 9:36
Yeah, there's a you were talking about minimum effective dose. And you mentioned that study, or, or, I don't know what Jeff was..

Mike 9:45
It was a study from Jeff was discussing a study from thing was either like Brad Schoenfeld or someone, or someone like that, who was trying to, they were trying to determine what was the minimum effective dose for exercise, like the number of sets per. Body part per week that would stimulate muscle growth for I think the vast majority of people.

Jay Feldman 10:07
Yeah, and that's helpful, but I wanted to point out so that might be the case for muscle growth, but as far as strength and muscular endurance, the minimum effective dose seems to be much lower. So I'm going to share a quick quote from a study. It's a study titled evidence based resistance training recommendations, and they state, we recommend that appreciably, the same muscular strength and endurance adaptations can be attained by performing a single set of eight to 12 repetitions to momentary muscular failure at a repetition duration that maintains muscular tension throughout the entire range of entire range of motion for most muscle groups once or twice each week. So to just to clarify that they're saying one set of eight to 12 repetitions to muscular failure once or twice a week per muscle group is effectively the minimum effective dose for muscular strength and endurance adaptations. So again, the amount for hypertrophy seems to be a little bit higher, but for someone who's not as concerned about building muscle, that minimum effective dose is likely a lot lower, if you're looking to resistance training in this way, yeah.

Mike 11:14
Oh It also depends on if, if the study was using like ranked beginners, or already pre, pre, already, like trained athletes and this gets to your point earlier, that as you increase over as you progressively consistently work out or exercise over time, you become more effective and efficient in whatever you're doing whatever exercise. And I think this is important to recognize here, the principle of specificity. If you are a bodybuilder and you are getting big, your body will get good at working out whatever you are doing over time. It won't make you good at endurance running. It won't make you a great baseball pitcher. It'll make you a good bodybuilder. You adapt, you adapt in the direction for what you're training, and over time, your body becomes more efficient with that. So it may take a higher stimulus over time to get the same response, and that higher stimulus may be less stressful on the body overall. So that's something that you were specifically discussing earlier.

Jay Feldman 12:11
Yeah, and just for reference that that study was a review. It was actually something that was opposing the ACSM guidelines, saying that they were kind of suggesting too hive of training levels, and it did involve looking at studies that involved both trained and untrained athletes.

Mike 12:26
So the ACSM guidelines were the 10 sets ones.

Jay Feldman 12:29
I don't know. I don't know what the ACSM guidelines were exactly. I don't know if that's where that.

Mike 12:36
I don't think that was an ACS guy. I think that was a specific, like, one specific study by that those particular researchers, there's like, a certain number of exercise physiologists, researchers in the bodybuilding sphere that are well known that I think a lot of these guys pull their research from, like, there's, there's like, a few researchers. Specifically think Brad Schoenfeld is one. There's a there's like a couple, there's a couple others.

Jay Feldman 13:00
Yeah, yeah. Again, I just want to clarify, the 10 sets might be the minimum effective dose for hypertrophy, just not for strength and muscular endurance. Yeah, it does. I will say that that 10 sets does sound high. Again, there's so many confounding variables to consider with this, with these studies, as far as how much is recovery emphasized, and what exactly does the training look like, where, I think I bet, if we were working with someone and had them on a, you know, with a good lifestyle, sleep, nutrition, whatever else, I bet they could build muscle on on less. But, of course, I haven't. I haven't seen this study that you're referencing.

Mike 13:39
It depends on the like, 10 sets of leg extensions for quads is not going to be super stressful, but 10 sets of squats, well, that may put a tax on the system. Yeah, there's a lot of different factors involved.

Jay Feldman 13:54
Yeah, yeah, beyond just the types of exercise as well, of course, that's going to be a huge factor as well. And so yeah, maybe, yeah, I don't know. We'd have to look at that study, but if they were doing leg extensions as their their quad exercise, then yeah, that would be questionable. And as you're getting at, maybe much fewer sets of squats or lunges, which don't only involve the quads, of course, involve the glutes, hamstrings, calves, whatever could be way more efficient. And you know, because you're targeting multiple muscle groups, you're also doing a movement that's actually relevant to how we actually move, or at least more relevant depending on which one you're doing, and you can do fewer sets, because it creates better, better muscular response. But I don't know what they were looking at in those studies. So Rob, just trying to get juicy, good point.

Mike 14:39
We don't need to be functional.

Jay Feldman 14:44
I wanted to move on to one other factor that we had alluded to earlier that I just wanted to add a little bit more substance to, which was the idea that there are certain limitations to our overall energetic capacity and. And this is why, you know, they were talking about it in terms of the expensive tissue hypothesis, where they were saying, if there's a constant amount of energy available, you can only give so much to any organ, and if one organ is taking more, it's going to come at the cost of others. And we were saying, Yes, that's true, but of course, there are a lot of ways you could increase that energy availability, but there are also limits on that system and so and that's going to depend on a lot of factors. Of course, it's going to depend on the species, right? Of course, we're probably talking about us humans, but a gorilla that has to rely more on fermentation doesn't have as much of a small intestinal absorptive capacity would be limited because of that. And obviously our energetic capacity seems to be beyond that, but there's still limits to it, and I'm sure there can be future versions of our cells that are have greater capacities there, but so a couple of our limitations. I mean, just to mention a few. One is going to be our gut and digestion, where there's only so much food that we can digest in a day, and that's going to vary between the type of food, but even if it's the most easily digestible food, the most elemental types of foods, there's still going to be limitations as far as how much we can digest, break down and absorb, and so that would be a limiting factor, and that's something that I know I experienced. I think we talked about this when we were discussing our stories, where, when we were kind of in our refeeding stage, and I know my both of our requirements energetically, were extremely high, if I know that if I didn't start eating early enough, and I didn't eat consistently enough, my digestion was limiting in terms of how much I could get in and I would be In a deficit that I would feel because I literally could not eat enough to make up for how much I needed. I was eating five to 6000 calories a day. And if I instead of eating every two and a half hours, I waited four hours, I couldn't get enough food in later, because I'd be limited by my digestion, I would start to feel too full, and that would be also limiting. You know that itself has its limits, and we experienced that through stress hormones or or just through a slight dampening metabolism or something. So that's something that I've experienced play out directly. And the same thing would happen also based on food choices, if I was choosing foods that didn't digest well enough, and let's say it was like a lot of starch. And this isn't, I mean, this is something that we did during part of the time, but let's say I wanted to eat a bunch of bread or something the that would fill me up too much and digest too slow, and cause some bloating, whatever else, to the point where there's no way I could get in the same amount of calories that I needed to function optimally. And that would be depressing, because I wouldn't be able to meet a high enough capacity. So yeah, just kind of some real life experience where some of these limitations came into play. And another interesting one here too, is is that our digestive system size and function doesn't change that much. It doesn't vary that much with overall body size. And so for somebody who has a larger body size, and this especially comes into play when we're talking about musculature, for example, if you have a huge amount of muscle mass, it's not like your digestive system has grown its capacities with that. And so that's going to be one of the limiting factors. You can only digest and absorb so much food, yet you have so much more mass to fuel. And so that's why, or at least part of the reason, the digestion being limiting capacity, as far as why you do start to have a trade off when you reach those points and then a couple or, yeah, I mean, a couple others to consider. Of course, there's always going to be limits to just the metabolic capacity of our mitochondria and and how those actually function. I don't think we near those limits, I think that we're probably much more limited by something like digestion, or the next thing I'll get at, which is nutrient availability in an easily digestible form. But there are going to be some capacities there. In the same way that you look at, if you look at organisms that don't have mitochondria, they're way limited in their energetic capacities. And that's why mitochondria, why we, you could say, evolved with them, was because they offered such a huge benefit as terms of increasing energy and complexity and structure. But I'm sure that there could be an organelle more efficient than mitochondria just doesn't exist yet, or that we know of, right, or that we know of at least, and and that that could increase that capacity. But for now, we could be limited in some capacities by our mitochondria. The last one I would I would say again, which I kind of mentioned was, is our food availability, food availability, or nutrient availability. And even just considering how hard it can be to get ripe fruit throughout the year, which I think is a huge mainstay, a huge requirement as far as energetic capacity goes, due to the easily digestible nutrients and carbohydrates that are in there. Again, same thing with good quality meat or dairy or anything beyond there, those there are certainly limitations there to the availability of the. At really high quality food, and that's going to limit our capacity. Of course, sunlight is going to do the same, especially live at northern latitude or something. And now we can try to offset those things using vitamin D lamps and whatnot, but not that that fully mimics the sun or heat. Of course, we can turn turn up our thermostat and things like that. But there's what I'm getting. Of course, there are certain things we can do to offset these. Offset these capacities in the same way that we can bottle oranges from Mexico and ship them up to the states, bottle orange juice, juice from oranges from Mexico and ship them up to the states, and that can provide that really great nutrition that's not immediately available there. So we're doing all these things to help, almost give us the opportunity to revert back to how we were maybe 100 years ago, definitely more than that as well. But there are still certain limitations, just by our food supply and whatnot, in addition to just our own physiology. So those are just a few things to consider just when we're talking about where those limitations come from and why we couldn't officially produce, efficiently, produce the equivalent of, let's say, 20,000 calories a day of food energy. It's just probably something that's not in the cards for us, at least in as present humans and in the present world we live in.

Mike 21:13
Yeah. And on the mitochondrial piece, specifically, I actually wrote an essay about this for nursing school. It wasn't received. Well, I think I failed the essay.

Jay Feldman 21:26
We did talk about this one, yeah.

Mike 21:29
But essentially, the what they found, what the research is showing, is that the it, like the separation between a prokaryote and the eukaryot, was the development of the or, I guess, multicellular versus singular single cell was the development of the mitochondria. The developing mitochondria allowed the cells to differentiate further and become more complex and increase their structure. So after just being like a single celled bacteria just kind of floating around, and maybe they were the bacteria will work with another bacteria kind of loosely, but once the mitochondria got put inside the cell, the cell now had the ability or to produce enough energy to be able to, number one, further differentiate organelles. So nucleus, endoplasmic reticulum, etc, etc, etc, ribosomes, whatever it is, and then also the cells were then able to work together to form multicellular organisms. So as the mitochondria itself was a massive, massive step forward, and they're saying in the paper that they were discussing the Mito, the adaptation or the development of a mitochondria, wasn't a linear process. It was like once that happened, there was an explosion afterwards, of life forms and development because of the extreme advantage that the mitochondria produced. So and you essentially, that's where we now. We have all of these different life forms, including us. It was like a key element, at least in this theory. So it's like, it's the mitochondria was extremely important adaptation. And then the next step in kind of, the next thought process around this was the formation of multicellular organisms allowed, especially at our level, allowed for the differentiation of multiple cells and tissues to have different functions, but to be also able to regulate an internal environment. So on a single celled organism, that single cell can maintain whatever happens and it's in its unique space, like in existence, the space that occupies it can regulate just that space. It maintains that internal environment for that very small space. The next level of that, when you have a multicellular organism, particularly at our level we have we are in, do we have an increased space that we are able to occupy? And then from for multiple cells, and then those cells, with their specialization and whatnot, can maintain the systems at certain extreme conditions. So you're starting to see that we can, mean all the cells can with everything that they have going on, the different hormones, the different mediators and whatnot, are all bathing themselves and maintaining themselves in a certain state and solution. So for example, in the blood sodium, potassium chloride, magnesium, cholesterol, are all maintained in very specific levels, and they adjust on specific processes. That's a massive adaptation. So basically, the cell is having it creating environments for itself that are optimal for itself. They've the and all the cells are working together to do this. That would be like the next step. There would be like, your, I don't know, a snake or a mouse or whatever. And then when you get to us, it's they can also manipulate the environment, right? Like a mouse makes a nest for its babies, it goes underground to keep itself warm during the winter, et cetera. But with humans, as you were discussing Jay, we can manipulate our environment at a whole nother level, where not only we. Have to dig underground to build a shelter. We build a house. We can temperature regulate it. We can change the humidity. We can change our access to glucose into all different types of foods. By shipping oranges. It has to form orange juice up from Mexico to here. We can change our exposure to UV light. We can regulate all these different types of factors, so having that mitochondria there and developing the multicellular organism and the differentiation of structures, and then furthermore, to develop society, has allowed us to manipulate the environment at large. So and the next continuing along the evolutionary path is essentially being able to manipulate and optimize our environment at large. It will you all of us working together in a cooperative fashion, a collaborative fashion, rather than a competitive fashion, to be able to continually manipulate the environment, to optimize it for ourselves, and push our own evolution in in a particular positive, not, not Malthusian direction. And so it's like I wanted to highlight this. It's slightly tangential, but I think it's related, because streaming more energy, and going back to Dr Pete's hypothesis of energy and structure being related at interrelated at every level, but streaming more energy through this system is key to optimizing our functions and optimizing things going forward, not only in this moment in time, but in perpetual moments of time. So it's a so when you're going into diet with if, since we if we establish that the mitochondria currently aren't necessarily our limiting factors, it's more of our ability to get food than optimizing diet and avoiding energetic deficits would be one of the most important things to optimize here. So it would make sense to move towards food choices that are easily digested and absorbed for us based on our digestive anatomy and physiology, so that we can continue to run at these higher levels of function and all kind of like a long trail leading into it. But I think it exemplifies the importance of particularly having enough quality food and energy dense and nutrient dense food that doesn't cause microbial issues inside the intestine. And I think the reason, I think the reason that the gut is always such a situated aspect in most people's disorders is because the gut is kind of one of the biggest limiting factors for a lot of people, getting quality and adequate food in and being able to digest it and assimilate it into your tissues and then use it for energy is going to be one of the biggest most important aspects, besides actually maintaining your energy expenditure externally, which includes those different stressors that You have imposed on you throughout your life. So the equation overall, in this grand picture that I just painted is really limiting the excessive expenditures and stressors that you have on your life, so that you're able to take in food, adequately, digested, stimulated appropriately, so that you can produce creatively, et cetera, whatever it is, and optimize all these different functions. That's the perspective that we're coming from as which is directly antithetical to the perspective of, let's eat less, exercise more, let's starve ourselves, let's intermittently fast. Let's do all these things to stress ourselves and waste our energy that we have available to us. And let's make it not only let's, let's waste the energy that we have available to us. Let's focus on foods that we can hardly digest so we have less energy coming in. Because having too much energy is the problem, which is false. It's the whole perspective is skewed. It's not because people aren't getting obese because they have too much energy on board. People are getting obese because they're inflamed and they're eating crap diets and they're under a large amount of stress, and if you look at them, they have a lack of energy and exactly a lack of cellular energy.

Jay Feldman 28:46
Yeah. I'll link back to episodes where we discussed that. I wanted to touch on a couple things real quick. Just that, I think one of the large reasons why our gut and digestion are so limiting, as you mentioned, is because of our modern food and what we've done to our modern food supply and and as you mentioned, you kind of gave a nice little sneak peek of of some of the thoughts in terms of evolution that we'll be discussing in a series, hopefully not in The too distant future. And that also, I think, explains, or Yeah, illustrates why we feel so strongly about what we are being told by industry and medicine, conventional medicine and things, and how that directly opposes and interferes with the direction of our evolution toward greater structure and complexity. But that is, of course, as you're kind of getting at a larger topic, and yeah, one that we will dive into. But circling back to how this all relates to fitness and athletic performance and exercise the. Yeah, you know, again, the frame is helpful, because what we've gotten to is that there's a balance here. There's a balance to strike where you don't want to have excessive energy demands. There are benefits to these things. However, there are that that that threshold, or that per that kind of Goldilocks zone, is going to vary based on the individual. It's also going to vary based on nutrition and sleep and everything, as you mentioned, and for people who especially want for whatever reason. And as we talked about, there can be a ton of them, whether it's social or competitive or whatever it is, there are various reasons why somebody might want to still be participating in, you know, not necessarily excessive, but high levels of of exercise. And there are things that we can do to help to mitigate that. And that was something that was asked in in the question by Lindsay, was, what can be done to essentially and paraphrase for paraphrasing, but what can be done to mitigate any of those potential negatives? And so, yeah, I want to talk through how we can what we can do to mitigate these things in terms of nutrition and supplements. Of course, you mentioned sleep, things like that, in a way that will lead to maximal performance, and for somebody who has that goal, and then also that will minimize stress and minimize the energy demands, to minimize the negative health effects. And the first piece here, just to start off in the nutrition, and this is something that we've talked through a lot, but the amount of food that we're taking in is a huge, huge factor that's going to help to minimize the stress and help us increase our energy availability, so that with increased energy demands, we don't have to dip into stress as much and we can recover much quicker. And so we're talking about eating more. There are certain levels of protein that we'll need, but generally they're way lower than people think. And this also includes people who are high level athletes, where the assumption is that if you're more trained, you need more protein, but actually the body becomes more efficient at using that protein. And so it tends to be the opposite of that, where you actually don't need as much. And so we've talked before about the range of point six to point eight grams per pound of body weight of protein as being a goal. And I think that that's the best goal. I think that the most common mistake here is going beyond that and having increased protein beyond that, where you're not really getting benefits, and that's coming at the cost, at the very least, digestively, of the amount of carbs and fats that you can get in which you need in order to produce energy in the first place. So if you're overeating protein, that's going to come at the cost of carbs and fat, because you only have so much digestive capacity, and also you end up converting into liver, and that's going to increase the production of ammonia, and it's also much less efficient than just taking extra carbs. So I'd say keeping the protein down if you're above that range, and I guess keeping it up if you're below that range, but trying to stick to that point six to point eight grams per pound of body weight would be best there. And then the most important piece here, or I guess the next part of that, the other side of that coin, is increasing the amount of carbs and fat that you're taking in in order to help increase your energy availability and decrease the stress and and decrease the amount of stress in the first place, and also help to recover from recover from it. Of course, carbs are needed for the immediate high intensity exercise. They're also needed for the recovery. And fat is also needed for the muscles at rest, and for somebody who has higher muscle mass, I find that normally those are the people that do best with a slightly higher fat intake. So we've talked about a range of maybe 25 to 40% of calories from fat, and I generally find that the people that are leaner, more active and have more muscle mass do better at the higher end of that range. They might also have higher needs for steroid hormones. So that could be part of it as well. But I think a huge part of it is because of the need to fuel both during activity and then also fuel the muscles at rest. And so getting enough carbs and fat and getting enough calories in as a whole is going to be huge, and really trying to maximize that as much as possible. You know, assuming that you're using these things efficiently, assuming that you're following the general guidelines that we've discussed that help you use the food that you're taking in to produce energy, eating as much as you can of the easily digestible foods is going to be the best way to maximize performance and minimize stress. And as I was saying, focusing on getting both enough carbs and fat in and and keeping the protein in the range that I mentioned, I think is going to be the most important thing that you can do in this regard.

Mike 34:28
Yeah, I agree 100% there. And I think the types of foods that you choose is going to be quite important as well. And we kind of pray gave a preludal or foreshadowing of the ones that we would mention, but it's usually going to be your animal products to your protein. The other thing I want to I want to stipulate on protein for people who are over the age of, I think like 5560 or 65 somewhere in that range, having a higher amount of protein can actually be more beneficial. And studies basically show that. And I think it's because they there's, there's an increased protein breakdown with older age. And you tend to see. People develop sarcopenia, which is muscle loss. That's a feature of aging. It's related to elevate cortisol, etc, and then also they have, like, less of an anabolic response. So for some people in that older age group, going up to even one gram per pound may be helpful. So that's something to just keep in mind.

Jay Feldman 35:17
you here, but just a counterpoint, I would say, if the problem is cortisol, stress and aging, and the shift toward whether it's andropause or menopause, where you have more stress hormones and lower reproductive hormones, doing the things to help oppose that might reduce the protein need also, as opposed to, you know, and reduce this sarcopenia without increasing protein intake. And so I, I would also just offer the counterpoint, that maybe just getting enough carbs and fat in and doing all the things to optimize your metabolism might prevent that effect without increasing protein. But obviously, if that's not the case, then, you know, someone's experienced these things, experiencing these things, and finding that's not the case, then yeah, maybe consider bumping protein.

Mike 35:56
Yeah, and it's not even that much more. It'd be one gram per pound. So that's not, that's only that's a marginal amount more from the point eight grams per pound, if you were going to be there and then you'd still have, you could still take in because the thing to keep, the thing, from my perspective, keep in mind, is, so say you have somebody who's 150 pounds, and they're at point eight grams per pound, that's 120 grams. If they're 150 pounds, and they go to a hunt one gram per pound, that's 150 grams. So it's only 30 grams extra, which is about 120 extra calories, which is marginal increase in total number of calories for that protein, I don't think it would take away from the amount of carbs and fat to eat on a regular basis, especially if that extra protein was being made up through collagen, just taking in some extra collagen hydrolysate, which would be increasing glycine overall. And for that older population, meeting a glycine requirement on a regular basis becomes more important, because I think the glycine need becomes higher, whereas in younger people you I guess up to 2535 or so, it would be helpful to have collagen, be helpful to have the extra glycine, but it may not be as necessary or as as required in the as in the older population. But then even with that, it's still about, I would say, getting the carbs and fats up and again, from the from the quality sources. So animal protein sources, that's your eggs, that your beef, that your lean, white meats, if you want to have them, seafood, collagen, hydrolysate dairy, if you tolerate it, in whichever forms that you tolerate it. And then for carbs, largely coming from easily digested starches, if you do well with starches, potatoes, yams, right? White rice, plantains, bananas. And then from fruits, which would be, you know, any fruit that you tolerate, 100% juices and then fat sources be mostly monounsaturated, saturated butter, beef tallow, chocolate macadamia oil, macadamia nuts, coconut oil, beef fat. I don't know, am I missing anymore?

Jay Feldman 38:00
I think that was those. Most of them we just for reference to, we talked through these sorts of things in episodes two through five of the podcast, talking through, really, where we want to get most of our food from, and I think a little bit in Episode Six and seven as well. Or maybe, yeah, maybe two through six, and a little bit in seven as far as macronutrients and things. But yeah, so we've talked through these things ad nauseam. I want to go through all the individual foods, unless there's something specific. There was something specific you wanted to mention there.

Mike 38:25
No, I think that it's, I think the dietary piece is a this was continues to stay about the same. I had, like, I haven't found it. Could it adjust in the future, like, marginally in different areas, sure, but I haven't found that it's been relatively the same the one the other thing, I think it's important with all the dietary pieces to make sure that you're eating foods that you specifically tolerate, not foods that we or Dr Pete or XYZ guru or whoever it is says is like the ideal food. If you're eating something and doesn't you're not tolerating it. Well then, you know, don't, don't continue to eat it, just because the theory and, you know, maybe in the future, you may tolerate it. Maybe now there's some reason that you're not tolerating it, but, you know, go on how you feel. Go on, on what's going on with you. Yeah, that's what I think, that that's, that's a really important piece that I think is often missed, regardless of what I say, you know, I could I think pineapple juice and pomegranate juice are the best in the world, but I have clients who don't do well with juice, so don't drink juice while you're not tolerating it.

Jay Feldman 39:30
Yeah, yeah. Great point. Yeah. Really. Great point. There are a couple other things I would mention in terms of mitigating the stress. So one that you mentioned briefly was sleep. And I'll refer back to our sleep episodes, because I think if someone, especially if someone's struggling with sleep, I'll check those out. And we talked through kind of what is optimal there as well. And we talked about how much of an impact that has on health and physiology and and body composition. We talked about. The study where getting I think it was looking at five or six hours compared to eight hours, and had a dramatic effect on fat loss and and muscle mass and things. So I would take a look back at those episodes. But definitely want to reiterate here that getting enough sleep, I would say eight plus hours a night if you're especially if you're favoring athletic performance and high levels of fitness and really expending a lot of energy in that regard, I would really make sure to get eight or more hours, maybe in the eight to 10 hour range. As you mentioned earlier, that quote, I don't remember who you said it was from, but Zen efforting, yeah, as far as how much you know, just kind of getting it.

Mike 40:42
If you're getting, if you're if you're, like, taking all your creatine on time, but you're getting like five hours of sleep, you're an effing idiot. I think if the quote is something like that.

Jay Feldman 40:53
Got right, and it just is a good way to illustrate the point of just how much sleep matters compared to all these, these other other not the things that we're describing, but something like the amount of creatine you're taking, which we'll talk about creatine a second. I do think it can be a helpful supplement for performance, minimizing stress and on from there. But some these foundational factors like eating enough and getting enough sleep, certainly matter more than the exact dose of your creatine or whether you even take creatine.

Mike 41:20
Yeah. And I think, I think the most important point to hammer down are the foundational factors. Because I think most people aren't even hitting the foundational factors. They want to go straight into minutia with supplements and this, but like, blood flow, restriction, training and whatever it is, like these, like, more niche, like, Oh, this is interesting, but I think the basics are always the most important. And I think even I think for both of us, that's where we tend to find the most benefit for our clients is literally just getting the basics down. But the third point I would put in is stress, and this is something directly applicable to myself, where it's like, I don't sleep eight hours or more every night, although I'm very close to doing it, because I know how important it is with like, all the work that I'm doing, the amount of hours in the hospital and working 1415, hour shifts, things like that, but I think that managing your stress overall is something that becomes really important. So even though I'm sleeping that about the eight hours every night, and I'm still getting all my meals in every single day. My ability to work out has been severely decreased compared to what it was because I'm under significantly more external stressors from work. So work is impairing my ability to get to the gym effectively. And a lot of people there's this mentality of like, oh, you're just you're too soft. You need to just push through. You need to just do it. It's like, yeah, you could do that, and you could burn out, you know, be my guest. But there's like it. There's when you become more aware of yourself, you get to, you get a sense of what you know, why are your reserves are physically and what you're capable of. And you have to, you know, be careful of those limits. And so there's gonna, if you're gonna work 80 hours a week, you cannot expect to put in seven days a week of working out without consequences. Can you can it be done? Sure, is it worth it? That's for you to determine. But that's, I think it's very important to recognize external stressors you're and I think this is no name of professional athletes, if you're look at, you know, you look at a professional athlete who goes through a divorce, is his performance going to be as good? That's my I would say that it's more likely that his performance is not going to be as good if he's going through a divorce versus if he was happily married. And I don't have any research studies to Pro to support that, but I would, you know, just practical experience and life experience in general, I would say, would indicate that that would be the case. External stressors, whether work, whether family, interpersonal, etc, are do add to that, allostatic load directly. And there's research to support emotional stress, increase in cortisol and whatnot. So it's very important to manage sleep, diet and then external stressors, and have those things locked down appropriately if you want to perform and function and exercise that depending on what level you want to function at, you know, if somebody, if you're working your nine to five and you can, you know you're you, it's not too stressful for you. I'm sure you I'm sure you could still get in an X number of workouts a week, but you're not going to be doing two a day workouts to become Mr Olympia if you're doing your nine to five that would that might be a little bit difficult. Is it possible? Sure? What are the costs? Well, that's for you to determine if they're if they're worth that. And the one thing I want to mention about sleep, very briefly too, is that a lot of times, a lot of people want some supplements stacked for sleep. And I think a lot of the times it's not a supplement deficiency that is causing people sleep problems. I think a lot of times it's actually something either not eating enough, or, more specifically, eating something that's irritating the gut is one of the biggest things that I see in. Preparing people's sleep. So it's about more taking out the things that are causing the problem, necessary. Or it can be about as much it can be about taking out things that are causing the problem as much as it is about adding certain things in.

Jay Feldman 45:14
Yeah, yeah. And we we discussed those nuances in those in that sleep series. So, or for people, back to that in terms of somebody who does check those foundational boxes, stress, sleep, nutrition, and they're, you know, really focused on athletic performance, there is a place for supplements that I think can certainly help in the same way you were talking about our capacity to manipulate our environment, considering our current complexity and what that's allowed for, one of those things is supplements, and it is a way that we can help to reduce stress and maximize, or at least increase our energy availability, energy production. And so there's a handful that I would look to that could be potentially helpful for somebody who is again in this situation. One that you mentioned already is creatine, which is shown to have benefits in terms of performance, especially in very intense short term activity, but it can still have benefits that are outside of just that direct performance effect, that can potentially be greater in terms of its effects on the gut andor protective effects, general anti inflammatory effects, And those could be more impactful as opposed to its direct ability to increase our energetic capacity, for, you know, our zero to 32nd or what is it, zero to 15 second or something reserves, so through the that's through the phosphor creatine system. So it has some benefits there, but I would say there's greater benefits outside of that that would make it useful in terms of in terms of performance.

Mike 46:45
Yeah, I definitely think creatine is one. I think, besides the general supplements that we that we tend to cover, which I think all have a beneficial effect, I think that hormones can be very helpful for athletic performance, just hands down. There's no question about that. I mean...

Jay Feldman 47:02
That's why they're not allowed. That's why they're not allowed. And someone who's, who's, you know, competing under certain regulating bodies, because they're so helpful for for that. And you pointed out earlier how, I think you were talking about this, how their real benefits come from the recovery, not from, not from any other piece of it. It's their ability to reduce the stress and improve our resilience to it. Well,

Mike 47:23
yeah, if you're taking and it, the thing is, it's not even that you have to go, like, load up on trend alone, or, of course, or some synthetic hormone analog, even using things like the HEA, pregnant alone, thyroid, Vitamin D, Vitamin K, can be extremely helpful for modulating the stress pathways on top of eating at it, like making sure you're getting all of your vitamins and minerals and making sure that you're eating enough macros and calories, etc, you have every you had the whole picture together, but then adding in exogenous hormone, and I'm not even if you weren't taking heroic doses of hormones, Depending on what your specific goal was even using just to shift the balance, to keep you in an anabolic state, with modulating all of these things and then throwing in, like, if you did, like lower dose, like low, low dose of test or something like that, to modulate a ratio like those things. I think there's a reason that they're banned, and it's because those things work, and they work really well, and that's why, for bodybuilders, the if you if you want to look a certain way as a bodybuilder, those hormones help if you want to be a top tier sprinter, having those hormones on board allows you to train more with less stress and maintain an anabolic profile. Now, I'm not saying everybody should hop on hormones, but I'm saying that for a lot of these circumstances, there's hands down that there's hormones and drugs, I think, like, what is it? Meldonium? What is it? What is the drug? I forget what it's called. It's like a carbonic anhydrase inhibitor. I'm forgetting what it's called, whatever it is.

Jay Feldman 49:04
Its the main one, the the one that's used for altitude sickness,

Mike 49:10
Yes, and a lot of professional athletes use it for endurance, endurance sports, like in tennis, There's that famous tennis star who got caught using it.

Jay Feldman 49:25
Oh, man, we've talked about it before. Why Acetazolamide?

Mike 49:30
Acetazolamide, exactly, having some beneficial effects for performance and then for biking, like using EPOE in alpha, which is a helps you synthesize more red blood cells so it can increase your endurance, like all of these things, or even training at altitude, for MMA fighters, which has become a thing, all of these things have, like, pretty potent, beneficial, known effects, all of these different compounds. Now, are there side effects to some of them? 100% Sent. There's going to be side effects and downsides. But for somebody who, like besides the basics, then like your more specific supplements, which could be, you know what we talked about, creatine, your amino acid supplementation using protein powders, getting all your vitamins and minerals on board, maybe some specific herbs, you know, I don't know how, like, how amazing the different herbs are, like your Tribulus, your tongue, cattle, e your substanti, like they, they can have some beneficial effects. I think that the higher tier stuff for for higher level is going to be running some of these, those other compounds, to a large extent. And that's what you're seeing in most professional sports, I think, is people running these different compounds. So I'm just curious, if my curiosity around it, and I haven't really experimented with it, because a lot of a lot of the stuff is unaccessible to large extent. But if you were running, like bioidentical stuff at low levels, just to keep yourself in an anabolic profile without shutting down your whole system, using pregnant alone, DHEA thyroid on top of running like lower dose transdermal test or something like that, would you get that better outcome without a lot of the negative side effects, which would include like infertility or aromatization or excess prolactin or etc, and allow it will allow you to train at higher levels and minimize the that and the the catabolic response of the excess glucocorticoids, etc,

Jay Feldman 51:32
Exactly. Yeah. So what you're basically getting at is more of those precursor hormones in moderate doses. You know, even just the standard doses for DHEA. I mean, standard doses and pills are 2550, 100 milligrams, and a lot of times people, especially who are working in or bodybuilding or trying to build more muscle, to use hundreds of milligrams. It goes far into that aromatization zone, as you were talking about. We're really we want to keep it at 15 milligrams or less. So, yeah, using some of those precursors, as you mentioned, pregnenolone, DHEA and progesterone as well. Progesterone not being a precursor to the androgens, but for women, definitely something that would help to mitigate stress, although small months of pregnalone or DHEA, well, small amounts of DHA would still be fine. For most women, pregnenolone would be fine. Either way. It's not particularly androgenic the and, as you said, thyroid hormone, which is kind of even more precursor, it helps to produce pregnanol in the first place, also generally anti stress. Again, assuming that that box is checked, where you're taking in enough fuel, because you have to consider that with all these hormones, they will, in a structured, cohesive way, increase the amount of energy demand where it's again, increasing a it's kind of directing it toward increased structure and helping to oppose stress. But that does come with higher energy costs, and that's that's why our bodies turn those hormones down when we don't have enough energy available, maybe because of excess exercise, or because we're not taking enough food, or some combination of those things. So when we're taking these hormones, we need to make sure. Really want to make sure that we're eating and providing enough of an energy supply and fuel supply and a usable fuel supply. And then, as you were pointing out, of course, once you start moving beyond those precursors, maybe small amounts of testosterone, small amounts of DH DHT, there's a place for those, but high doses of those things, or a lot of the synthetic analogs of various androgens, I would, I would really shy away from, there's, as you were saying, tons of side effects. And you see, you see those side effects in people like, you know, in bodybuilders, for example, where there's a ton of health issues that not only comes from the things that they're using, but also, I think that's another example, or a clear example, where the amount of muscle mass and training is going way far beyond that healthy range. But the same thing would go for the hormone use there.

Mike 53:56
So Well, yeah, because they couldn't get to that level without the compounds that they're running.

Jay Feldman 54:01
Yeah, exactly, exactly you mentioned training at altitude. And some people use those masks and things and so one thing I would so I would actually shy away from that side of things where, in general, at least my understanding.

Mike 54:16
What was living at, I think it was living at altitude and then training at the like at a lower level, I think that's what the MMA fighters were doing.

Jay Feldman 54:26
Right So, and that's what I mean a lot of endurance athletes have been doing. And so the reason for that is because when you're training at altitude, or training with the mask, or something like that, like those, those restrictive masks that are supposed to mimic altitude, it limits your performance too much. And so that comes at a cost to the actual benefits that you would get in terms of performance improvements. And so you what you'd actually want to do is if you could mimic altitude, where you live, and then train at non altitude, so you can do better in your training. And you mentioned a set as a. Mind as a way that is basically mimicking altitude by increasing carbon dioxide. Baking soda would do the same thing. I wouldn't just go on and set his old mind, just for, you know, just because, but you were...

Mike 55:10
I was giving ideas, yeah, of right mechanisms, of why things like that.

Jay Feldman 55:16
Exactly, yeah and so baking soda is something that I think would be much safer as far as increasing CO two levels. Of course, there's a ton of other things that go into that, and we did a whole series talking about CO two and also some things to help increase it. So I'll link back to those. But as you were saying, it just kind of shines light on that mechanism and how important it is in terms of performance and minimizing stress. And they see that as well with climate, like with acclimat acclimatization to altitude, and the effects on exercise and how you have an increased lactate threshold and things basically meaning that you can do the same amount of exercise and not produce as much lactate, which is a sign of less stress. In talking about reducing stress, keeping inflammation down. Aspirin would be something that I think could be helpful in in moderate amounts, or depending on on how much it's needed, coffee and caffeine would be, you know, have a lot of ergogenic benefits in terms of performance, also through great mechanisms, as opposed to some other stimulants. Again, assuming that is balanced out with with the right nutrition and everything. But that would be a pretty great one. Of course, we did a an episode, or at least a part of an episode, discussing coffee and the various other benefits that it has. So I'll link back to those definitely be something I would be something I'd consider. And then a couple of others B vitamins, which, again, are helpful for increasing our energetic capacity, extremely important for energy production, and have a ton of other benefits as well. We talk about them in virtually every series every condition, because they are very clearly apparent in all of them. Again, b1 and b3 being some of the most prominent, but some of those other B vitamins being really helpful as well. And you talked earlier about glycine and collagen and gelatin in terms of getting protein from those sources, which I think is a great idea and would be especially important when you're doing things that could be increasing the breakdown or degradation of your own collagenous tissues, you know, joints and bones and things like that.

Mike 57:23
So building them up from exercise which stimulates that, right?

Jay Feldman 57:27
Yeah, but either side of that, yeah, in either case, increased requirements are probably likely. And there's a ton of other benefits too. As you said, the glycine that's in there, both for aging, but also for liver health and and on and on, just general anti inflammatory effects. So that would be another one I would look to as would look to as far as helping to mitigate some of the negatives from from a lot of exercise.

Mike 57:51
Yeah, yeah. I agree with all those and I think I was going to mention whey protein too, is something that could be helpful for putting on muscle and things like that.

Jay Feldman 58:00
if someone's struggling to get enough protein in, yeah, I tend to prefer getting it from the whole food sources, because of the other nutrition that comes with it. But if somebody is like..

Mike 58:09
Well, I think I could, I think it's easy, like, the way, like you making away protein shake with juice, and then having, you know, you could throw an avocado. You can have some academia nuts on the side, whatever it is, it's stay you like. So what I find with a lot of clients is they have, they can do three meals fine, but sometimes getting the fourth meal in can be a little bit more difficult. Or getting more meals in just to increase calories, if you're trying to bulk up or gain weight, can be a little bit more difficult. And so having like a whey protein shake, or having some type of shake available makes life a lot easier, where you can hit your protein, you can hit your carbs, and you can hit your fats, and it only takes about 1015, minutes to make and then maybe, like, 10 minutes to drink. So it's that's something that could is an easy way to get extra calories in, like, a very digestible form, um, overall. So I think that the and it's usually not just whey, it's like a combination of whey and collagen together, the collagen hydraulic state within, like, juice with a whole bunch of different fruits. And then for the fat source, it could be like avocado, it could be the macadamia nuts. It could be cocoa. It could be like chocolate with the shake. It could be, there's a whole bunch of different options. Um, so, or could be like, it could be like, coconut oil for somebody if they were going to, like, work out in the next hour, so they can have the shake, and you have the rapidly digesting protein, carbs and fats from the coconut oil. Coconut Oil for the fats, so that you wouldn't be like, too full if you were going to work out, whatever it was those, those are all easily digestible beneficial options.

Jay Feldman 59:43
Yep, yeah, yep. And if that's something that somebody needs, I think that's a perfect way to or find way to meet that need. I haven't found, yeah, found many of my clients to need that. But you know, I think, as you're saying, everyone's in a different situation. Shouldn't, especially if you're trying to get really quick, easily digestible foods in that could be a good option. You mentioned the fat soluble vitamins before. I think those are particularly important to highlight again for I mean, again, they affect every area of our life or of our health, but especially going to help with steroid hormone production, which, of course, is going to be huge factor when we're discussing this whole side of things. And they've got a ton of other benefits as well in terms of improving mitochondrial respiration, reducing stress and on from there. So those would be ones that I would also throw in the mix or consider, you know, if you're not getting enough dietary.

Mike 1:00:41
I remember what I was gonna I was gonna say so specifically for weight loss stuff, a big stack back in the day that now people can't do because ephedrine became illegal, was ECA stack, which was ephedrine, caffeine and aspirin. I think you could easily mimic those effects by running thyroid and maybe some DHEA, which I think Danny Roddy just posted a whole bunch of stuff on telegram about DHEA, increasing thermogenesis. So you could run, like thyroid, DHEA, aspirin and caffeine together, and that could have some possible beneficial extra weight loss. And I also would recommend making sure that you're eating enough. But all of those would have like the combination of all those together would have thermogenic properties and also could be increasing, could be increasing fat burning to some extent or health, and increasing metabolism in general, because both caffeine and thyroid and DHEA have an effect where they can increase. They all increase thermogenesis, but they also can increase, I think, not necessarily like pulses, but like all oxidation of all substrates, in general. So that would include glucose, that would include fatty acids, kind of does, like the multitude of things, and then aspirin, also, on the hazardous slight, has some uncoupling effects as well, which would increase thermogenesis. So you'd be like, pushing, you'd be pushing your foot on the gas pedal, to some extent, with that combination,

Jay Feldman 1:02:10
Yeah, an outdoor high dose niacinamide in that mix as well. Another one that has very similar effects to all those things, yeah, not again, not that we want to necessarily be forcing thermogenesis or uncoupling, it much rather be at least, I think all of those things can do that, but the thing that they do that's more important is encourage substrate to be oxidized, as you said, through respiration. And that, I think, accounts for more of those benefits. And when you use really high doses in vitro, or, you know, in certain individualized tissues, they you'll see kind of that that situation. I mean, you can have the uncoupling, as we talked about in the hermesis series. You can have that as a result of oxidizing more substrate and producing enough ATP and suddenly uncouple and get rid of extra substrate and produce more energy. You can also have that coming out of stress mechanisms. But normally, when you're seeing that from those sorts of substances, it's just a demand for supply problem due to the nature of the study so..

Mike 1:03:06
Well, I wouldn't recommend excessively high doses. I think that that would be a bad idea. You probably wouldn't feel very good. But for anybody, if you like, get all your basics down right. And you know you have you have this. Your the foundation is in place, and you want to kick up fat loss to a little bit. I think that that's something that could be helpful. And also for specifically for fat loss is avoiding foods that are problematic, problematic for you specifically, I think those are a lot of people I have, if they have, like, an allergy certain food and they're eating it over time, they get digestive issues, etc, that can put on weight gain, even just in the form of water weight so.

Jay Feldman 1:03:47
Yeah, of course, the dosage for these things is going to like, high dose is going to vary based on the individual. For for one person, one to three micrograms of t3 is going to be too high of a dose. They're just not able to handle that depending on where they're at, whereas for somebody else, maybe it's 100 micrograms. So it all, it's all relative to what kind of as you're saying, These things will step on the gas pedal. So it's, what is your what are you able to handle? Exactly? Yeah, the Oh, the other piece I was gonna say, You were mentioning mimicking the effects of that stack, the ECA stack. And I just wanted to clarify, we don't actually want to mimic the effects of ephedrine. We don't want, though, that's

Mike 1:04:28
I think that is the fat loss effect, not the hypothetic effect.

Jay Feldman 1:04:32
Yeah, I know just, just for people listening, ephedrine is basically, it's adrenergic it's increasing adrenaline. Basically is adrenaline. And so it's that's not a mechanism that we want to be encouraging. You were just talking about the fat loss effects, which you can achieve in much healthier ways without encouraging stress in the ways that we just discussed.

Mike 1:04:51
Yeah, the thyroid and the DHEA and the aspirin and even the caffeine as well will all in and, as you kind of mentioned, will all increase by. Uh, oxidation, oxidation of substrate. So it's that they all work through. They all have other beneficial mechanisms as well, especially the in my experience, my preference would be like thyroid, DHA and aspirin. And I use thyroid and aspirin on a regular basis, not for weight loss, just for general health, just to help with stress, just to help with working in the hospital. Now it is important that I supply myself with adequate food. So that is, that is something that I've used regular DHEA is I prefer pregnant alone personally, but I think the effects are a little bit different. And then call, as I've mentioned before, coffee. And I don't do well, but I do use green tea on a regular basis, and I've been tolerating that just fine, so I guess I kind of run that stack almost on a daily basis. The with the hospital, when I take aspirin, maybe like three times a week.

Jay Feldman 1:05:55
Yeah, the hospital is your sport.

Mike 1:05:57
Yeah, the hospital is my sport. Yeah. So the aspirin, the green tea and the thyroid I use on a regular basis, and I'll use pregnant alone. I don't really use the DHEA, and I have good effects that feel great using them. If I come home from work and I take not the green tea, but like an aspirin and a little thyroid, I live immediately feel better, even if I worked 14 hours like it, there's like an immediate like relief in my body, like my legs will be tired. They'll stop hurting. They'll stop being like a little sore from walking around all day long, not sitting for like 14 hours or laying down 14 hours. So there's definitely a beneficial, general health effects from those even outside of the fat loss piece. And I've never, for me, I haven't had to use anything for fat loss like that so...

Jay Feldman 1:06:40
Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so just to kind of conclude here, unless you have anything else to add for supplements, oh, that's it. Okay, so yeah, just to conclude here, I think a lot of what we came to is, is sorting out that balance, and depending on where you're at, then adjusting with maybe some of these things nutritionally or supplement wise, as needed. Of course, a huge part of what we discussed, as well as kind of shedding the societal notions of what we need to look like, necessarily like do we need to look like the bodybuilder? How lean we have to be, how much exercise we have to do this idea that more is better, that endurance exercises is necessarily ideal, and especially huge amounts of it, and yeah, kind of having a more cohesive and nuanced understanding of What exercise is really doing and and that interaction with energy and energy balance, and using that to kind of find that sweet spot for any individual and finding what works best for them. And then, along with this too, there's a lot of freedom, and if we've discussed this before, but there's a lot of freedom that comes from this, where you don't have to just go to the gym and run on the treadmill or run on the elliptical or lift weights. If you don't want to do any of those things, you could do a class. You can find a different sport. You can hike with your dog. You can find it. You know, we talked a lot about martial arts, something that people tend to enjoy a lot. You can play a sport, if I didn't just mention that, and and so there's a lot of room for those things in, you know, outside of the general structure, the general regimented exercise that we have to go at five in the morning to the gym for an hour and a half every day in order to be healthy sort of thing. And yeah, and I think it leaves a lot more room for joy and social interaction, which are some of the huge benefits that we get from movement in the first place, and it also gives us room for challenge and learning new skills and new techniques. And there's so much to gain from movement that have nothing to do with just increasing your energy demands as much as possible. So I hope, yeah. I mean, that's kind of I think that there a lot of freedom that comes with that. And I will say also that sometimes when someone has exercised so intensely for so long, and they realize that freedom, they want to move from exercise away from exercise for a little bit. And I think that's okay too, to take a break, take a rest from constant intense exercise, especially when it's come at the cost of your health. So and I think that even if you do want to do that, if it's coming at the cost of your health, maybe reducing it or taking a break from it, and then coming back down the line to wherever that balance is for you, tends to be a good approach there. But I think we've kind of both landed on the situation where find activities you enjoy in ways that you enjoy. Still think it's very important to move on a regular basis. Talked about the negatives of being sedentary, talked about the benefits of even intense exercise that dips into the stress. And, you know, again, just emphasizing the recovery and emphasizing that balance.

Mike 1:09:52
I laughed when you said the five o'clock in the morning, because I was driving to the hospital yesterday for work, and it was like it was 27 degrees here, and it was like it was, this was like 630 we were driving, and there's two people just jogging down the road, and it's like it is 27 degrees at 630 in the morning. That is, that is like the ultimate torture, like, I couldn't imagine anything more personally, personally, anything more torturous than waking up, like, in the end, going to run, waking up super early and then going to run in the freezing cold I feel like that would I was just, I literally mentioned something to my fiance. I was like, I don't know that's crazy. I like. She was like, Yeah, I would never do that.

Jay Feldman 1:10:34
And that's late for some people. You know, a lot of people are out at 435 o'clock, something like that. Yeah, they're morning running, yeah? Which, again, some people enjoy it, I'm sure, yeah, yeah. And if you do, that's fine, as long as it's in the balance that we kind of already described extensively.

Mike 1:10:49
Yeah, I just was thinking, for my perspectives, like, I don't even want to get up at at six o'clock to go to work. I couldn't imagine getting up and be like, I'm gonna go run. Yeah?

Jay Feldman 1:10:59
That would not be my choice either? Yeah. All right, so before we wrap up this episode and this series, there are a few points that I'd like to add in. And so the first being that we've talked, especially in this episode, a lot about the importance of proper fueling and recovery and making sure that we are capable of handling the exercise that we are experiencing or that we're performing. And I just wanted to mention that this is something that can really make a pretty major difference. It's something that I know I experienced myself in terms of my own fitness and athletic performance, where, when I was not doing things to support myself metabolically, I wasn't eating enough carbohydrates or enough calories or eating the right types of foods. I there was a major difference compared to later on, when I switched those things up and started supporting myself properly and supporting my thyroid activity and all of that. And there were massive differences in terms of my physical energy, my desire for exertion, my strength, my explosiveness. And I think it's an important point to acknowledge, because our bodies are no longer when, when they don't when they have adequate energy available. They're no longer forced to be in a state where they're trying to conserve energy in that when we're exercising, of course, we are using and exerting ourselves and using energy, and that's directly at odds with a body's desire to conserve energy, if it is in that sort of state. So shifting out of that state can make such a huge difference, not only in terms of your recovery, but also in terms of your performance, and even just your your mood, your desire to exercise, the way that you move. It can really, yeah, just make a huge difference. I just wanted to add that in as a personal anecdote, that it's really something I noticed pretty dramatically, where before I just whatever I was doing athletically, whether it was a sport or lifting at the gym, I would always do what was minimally required to complete the task that I was trying to accomplish in a way that would require the least amount of energy, as opposed to after. I felt like I had a desire to be explosive, to use extra amounts of energy, because it was there and my body wasn't trying to conserve it so dramatically. So that was the first point. The next point I wanted to make is that the type of movement, or the type of exercise, the type of training that we choose does make a difference in various ways and so because of that, I think that we want there is something to be said for choosing certain modes of training over others in terms of our health. And so I would generally recommend choosing types of training that respect the way that our bodies naturally move and respect our gait cycle and there's a few reasons for this. One is that it tends to prevent or reduce injury and leads to improvements in performance, but also, more specifically, from an energetic perspective, this leads to this essentially leads to the most efficient type of movement that then creates the lowest energy demand and therefore the least amount of stress for the same type of movement. And I think it was in part two, where I was discussing this in terms of running economy, where, if somebody is a runner and they run over time, their body becomes more efficient at doing so, and so there's less of an energetic demand and if we're moving more efficiently so that, you know, in a way that does respect the way that our bodies are supposed to move, and we're training in a way that encourages that. That's going to do the same thing. It's going to accomplish that same goal of reducing the amount of stress that we experience from the physiological need for energy, you know, on the energetic level. So as far as learning more about how to train in this way, I'd recommend checking out Functional Patterns. I don't have any direct affiliation with them, but I've found from my own experience that to be particularly beneficial. And then the last thing that I wanted to bring up here is just I wanted to further clarify the reason that we were discussing some of the studies in part one showing that there are increased calcium artery scores or overtraining symptoms from pretty moderate amounts of activity, surprisingly moderate amounts of activity and I think we made it rather clear that we weren't saying that that means that this level of activity is inherently harmful, but rather that just pointing out that such moderate levels, pretty mild levels of activity can be harmful if we aren't effectively addressing the other side of the equation, meaning recovery and fueling properly and general metabolic status. So what that does not mean is that these levels of exercise inherently need to be avoided or are inherently harmful. But instead, what it does mean is that we need to be aware that really any amount of exercise, even very moderate amounts can be harmful depending on the circumstances, so we need to make sure that we're supplying our bodies with what they need, so that way we can get the benefits of exercise without those sorts of harmful effects at whatever level it is that we've determined is the ideal amount of exercise for us. So with that, if you did enjoy this series, please please leave a like or comment if you're watching on YouTube and if you're listening elsewhere, please leave a review or five star rating on iTunes. All of those things really do a lot to help support the podcast and are very much appreciated. This series was inspired by a couple of listener questions. If you have any questions that you'd like us to answer on a future episode, you can send those in to Jay at Jay Feldman wellness.com that's j, A, y at Jay Feldman wellness.com or feel free to leave those in the comments on the YouTube video and to check out the show notes for today's episode, you can head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/podcast where I'll link to the studies and articles and anything else that we referenced throughout Today's episode, and if you're dealing with any low energy symptoms, maybe you've been trying to find the proper balance with the amount of exercise you've done in the past, or amount of exercise you're doing currently. And wondering if those are contributing to these symptoms, maybe wanting to focus a little bit more on supporting your body so that you can handle the right amount of exercise. Maybe this is because you're experiencing chronic cravings or hunger or low energy or joint pain, or you're having trouble losing weight, or you're gaining weight, or maybe you're dealing with other low energy symptoms like gut dysfunction or brain fog or poor sleep or hormonal imbalances or any other chronic health issues. Then head over to Jay Feldman wellness.com/energy, where you can sign up for a free energy balance mini course, where I'll explain how these different symptoms and conditions are really caused by lack of energy, and I'll also walk you through the main things that you can do from a diet and lifestyle perspective to maximize your cellular energy and resolve these symptoms and conditions. So to sign up for that free energy balance mini course, head over to Jay Feldman, wellness.com/energy, and with that, I'll see you in the next episode.