Episode #175: How Should You Eat Before, During and After Long Workouts?

In this podcast, an interview with Steve Bourne from Hammer. Nutrition plus live bacteria, Alcohol versus sleep clenbuterol, how much protein is enough, inconsistent cramping, getting enough vegetarian fat, water and digestion, too much sleep and back to back marathons.

Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness.com podcast. We provide you with free exercise, nutrition, weight loss, triathlon and wellness advice from the top fitness experts in the nation. So whether you're an Ironman triathlete or you're just trying to shed a few pounds, get ready for non run of the mill cutting edge content from BenGreenfield Fitness.com.

Hey hey everybody. Welcome to the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast. This is Brock and the birthday boy is here.

Hey, I'm 30, I'm older, wiser. Hopefully you can hear that in my voice. This podcast is going to take a very, very serious direction now that I'm 30 and mature and in a brand new age category.

How does that feel?

That's right. For triathlons or marathons or anything that involves age categories, I am now competing in the 30 to 34 year old age group. So there you go.

You become the youngest guy in the age group instead of the oldest guy in the age group.

That's right. So I get older but I also become a baby in my age group. So feels good. So yeah, good week of celebrating and getting ready for Christmas. I hope all the listeners are ready for the holidays. And yeah, if not then you better get an Amazon prime membership really quickly and start ordering stuff.

Just start clicking.

Yep.

Special announcements so there's not a whole lot to go over for today's special announcements. I am going to mention once again that that Weight Training for Triathlon book, the brand new kind of ultimate guide to Weight Training is still available on the Nook on Kindle and in the in the itunes store, also in the Amazon store and and in pretty much any other electronic format that you could view on your e reader. So we will put a link to that in the show notes. And speaking of E reader, I personally just got a Kindle Fire as a matter of fact as a birthday present. Yeah and I'm really digging it. I thought that I would really miss holding a real book in my hands, but I am in love with this thing. So highly recommend that again if you get any extra Amazon gift cards for Christmas that you consider investing in a Kindle Fire. That's a very cool toy. We have one other special announcement that we are going to actually play a special message for, but it is for another triathlon related program that I will be releasing on January 12th. For those of you who are interested, listen to the special message and be sure that you get on the VIP wait list for this.

At first glance, triathletes appear to be a pretty fit group, at least with clothes on. But it's pretty common for triathletes to have tiny arms, a thin and weak neck, a stick like midsection, and a body that's just too skinny. But just imagine if your arms were cut and defined, your chest and shoulders were ripped, your waistline was tapered like a V, your stomach was flat and hard, and your legs were sleek and curvaceous. In other words, what if you had the ultimate triathlon body? Now you can learn how to swim, bike and run fast and look incredibly sexy doing it. Go to tryript.com to start today. That's try ripped.com.

News flashes okay, so if anybody's been following Ben@twitter.com BenGreenfield you're probably familiar familiar with some of these next few stories. But what have you got for us this week?

Well, the fact that and I did mention I have a Kindle fire means that in the morning now I can push the little pulse button on my Kindle and kind of find out what is getting published right when it gets published. And this morning at about 7 o' clock on the New York Times health blog, I noticed this come across that the title of the article is Taste for Salt is Shaped early in Life. And basically it was a study in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition that found essentially the more salt that you give your baby, the more processed foods like crackers and bread and breakfast cereals that you give your baby and your small children that are in early infancy, the more likely that they are going to crave or want higher amounts of salt based foods later on in life. And kind of the takeaway message from this for me was that the more natural foods you can feed your kid, vegetables and fruits and ground up foods that are made with those type of materials but without lots of salt or lots of processing added to them, the more you're setting them up later on in life to not have junk food cravings. So I thought this was a really, really interesting study about taste for salt being shaped early in life.

Yeah, if we didn't need more reasons to feed our a healthy real food diet, this is another good reason to do so.

Absolutely. I agree. Another one, another study came out that stairs are actually faster than the elevator and a lot of us who take the stairs are kind of aware of this Fact, but this actually studied a group of hospital physicians and they found that in most cases to get to any designated floor in a hospital, and I'm going to really assume this was not a 10 plus floor hospital, that it takes about twice as long to take the elevator versus the stairs. On average, it was about 37 and a half seconds longer to get to a designated floor by taking the elevator versus the stairs. And of course, anyone who takes the stairs also gets the exercise benefits of taking the stairs. So again, people who already take the stairs are aware of this. People who take the elevator. To save time, though, you should know that you're really not saving a ton of time. And that may seem like a silly study, but I like to look at information that gives you just one more reason to be as active as possible. And this was certainly one of those, because if you're looking at an eight hour workday, and I do know that nurses and physicians listen to this show, in most cases, taking the stairs is going to do you a favor.

Any exercise you can get from real world circumstances is fantastic too, because that means you don't have to go to the gym. You can just build that into your day rather than parceling pieces of your day out.

Absolutely. And I mean, if you look at things like this from like a human evolution standpoint, and I use evolution in the sense of us actually acting more like our ancestors and our grandfathers and our great grandfathers and grandmothers have acted, really, the presence of modern day gyms that we pop into after a sedentary life during the rest of the day to kick our own butts for 45 minutes or for an hour is a relatively new phenomenon. And it is better from an overall health perspective to be as active as possible during the day and then have brief periods of intense exercise throughout the week. And this is a perfect example of a way to do that. Stay on your feet as much as possible, take the stairs as much as possible. When you have the option to lift things, lift them as much as possible. And again, I'm going to hit on the Kindle again because I've had that thing in my hands for the past 72 hours.

The show is not sponsored by Kindle.

Great free book on there that I actually read this week. I read a lot of books from a project called the Domino Project, which is put out by Seth Godin, who's a really great author whose blog I follow. And one of the books that was put out that is completely free for download on the Kindle was called Flinch and It just talks about things like this, about introducing, you know, kind of non structured exercise into your life. And so it's pretty interesting stuff. Another article about caffeine and physical performance. Really interesting article because this was in the Journal of Caffeine Research. But essentially what the basis of the article is stating is that there's been all these studies that have been done on caffeine and the benefits that it can give you for exercise or for doing a triathlon or running a 5k or lifting weights or whatever. And in each of these studies the people that were studied had abstained from caffeine leading into the study so that they would be sensitive to the effects of the caffeine. And what the article is hypothesizing is that it may be the fact that people are not doing better on caffeine because they're being stimulated by the caffeine as much as they're doing better during the exercise session because they've had some kind of favorable response from having abstained from caffeine leading into the test. Really, really interesting thing to think about. I think there's probably going to be a research study on this coming out very soon that investigates it in detail. But it's interesting to think about in that it could be that all you have to do is abstain from using caffeine for seven to 14 days prior to kind of like an important event that you're doing. And you may not even need to take caffeine after that point because it's possible that just abstaining from caffeine has given you the ergogenic effects that you were looking for. So really interesting kind of flies in the face of logic and what we like to think about caffeine helping performance. But I thought it was a good thought provoking article.

Yeah, that's really cool. I actually read a fellow named Alex Hutchinson keeps a blog called Sweatscience. He looked at that study as well and had some interesting stuff to to say about that. I don't know if you follow Alex.

Yeah, I've read his blog before. It's a good one. He and also another one called Sports Science. I believe it's sportsscience co really good websites. The last thing I wanted to bring up was about nitric oxide because I know there's a lot of folks who spend a lot of money on nitric oxide pre workout to get a better pump to build muscle faster, increase muscle strength, increase muscle mass. Research on nitric oxide goes back and forth but last month in Nutrition and Metabolism Journal there was a study that came out that found that 28 days of weight training while consuming basically a commercially available nitric oxide supplement really favorably influenced muscle strength and muscle mass. And the reason that I bring up this article is because it's another example of a case where you need to be really careful and dig into the research and look at it better. Because if you look at the group that was consuming the nitric oxide, the nitric oxide supplement that they were taking contained it was about 20 to 30 grams of protein. And so these folks were increasing their strength. And the results of the research study were stating that it was due to the nitric oxide. But the group that wasn't taking in the nitric oxide didn't have that adjustment to get all the extra protein that the nitric oxide group was getting. It's very, very likely that it's was just getting a little bit of extra protein for muscle repair that was helping these folks compared to all the expensive nitric oxide that they were consuming. So I like to bring stuff up like this just to, again, warn people whenever you see stuff like this, whether you see a snippet in Men's Health, whether you're actually reading the results of the journal itself in terms of, like, the abstract or the title, whether you've seen it come across a Twitter post, always, always, always question and never accept something at face value, especially when it comes to a supplement that someone is trying to sell you. So just wanted to bring that up and make sure that people are aware of that type of stuff going on.

Never believe the man.

That's right. So, that being said, what do you think? Should we, should we jump into today's Q and A?

We have some fantastic listener questions this week, so, yeah, let's get right into it.

Oh, hey, one more thing before we hop in, folks, after the Q and A. Great interview coming up with Steve Bourne. Steve is a nutritionist. He's really an expert in long distance fueling. Like he rides his bike a thousand miles, that type of long distance. So he's got some really interesting thoughts. And that also means that if our Q and A takes as long as it has been, which has been creeping up on an hour, we could be looking at the second week in a row where we've had a really long podcast or maybe the third or fourth week in a row. So I joined the show. I think it's all Brock's fault.

It's all my fault.

Either way, I have a proposal for the listeners. If you would like us to begin isolating the Q and A episodes from the interviews and releasing about an hour or so long Q and A episode on Wednesdays when the Ben Greenfield Fitness Podcast has always traditionally been released, but then on either a Friday or a Saturday, putting out the interview that I'm doing each week. And we do have some really special interviews planned coming up so that you essentially have basically an hour long Q and A or so and then another 40 to 60 minute interview later on in the week, resulting in two podcasts a week that you can listen to both or you can listen to one if that's something you would be interested in. I'm not really putting into place a formal voting mechanism for this. Instead, if that is something that you do or do not want to see, I want you to go to the show notes for this episode, episode number 170 fivengreenfieldfitness.com and leave your thoughts in the comments. Just click Add a comment and let me know if you want to see the show split up into two kind of more bite sized pieces. All right, so to make sure this thing doesn't go any longer, I'll stop talking now and we'll jump into the Q and A. But again, leave your comment if you want to give feedback on this.

Listener Q and A.

Okay, first listener question is an audio question from Lisa.

Hi, Ben. Lisa calling from Chicago. How do the pharmaceutical companies make live bacteria in their probiotic pills or caplets or tablets stay alive in that format? And oftentimes when I read the label, they're actually alive for over a year according to the expiration date. Can you explain? Thank you.

All right, so what do you think about that, Ben?

It really depends on the probiotic that you get and how it was made in terms of whether or not it's going to kind of stay alive, so to speak, when you get it, when you get something like a probiotic shipped to you. And I think this whole question was formulated based on the interview that we did a few weeks ago with Josh Axe where we talked about this new organic foods company that's kind of shipping organic foods that contain probiotics around the nation. And the probiotics that they're sending out are not shipped refrigerated or cold, they're shipped unrefrigerated. And I looked into this too myself, just to check and see if they were sent on ice or if they weren't sent on ice. And the important thing to realize here is that the process of fermentation, and I'll explain what I mean by that, actually results in Preservation of a probiotic containing compound to the point where if that bottle of probiotic containing whatever hasn't been pasteurized and exposed to really high temperatures, I mean, the type of temperatures that far exceed what it would go under in shipping, like 150 degrees, then it can go for long periods of time at room temperature or unrefrigerated without affecting the quality of the probiotics. So basically what happens is when you ferment something, it helps for those live active cultures to stay alive. Now, if you cure something with vinegar and you pasteurize it, such as you might get from like a bottle of pickles that you'd buy from the grocery store, that is what kills the probiotics. But doing something like fermenting foods at home, which Jessa and I actually do a lot, that helps to preserve foods, it helps to protect foods from spoiling, and it also allows for the thriving of live active cultures in food. So you can take a food, you can take cucumbers, or you can take cabbage, for example. So cucumbers are kind of like the birthplace of pickles. And cabbage is the birthplace of sauerkraut. If you're going to be fermenting, and you can ferment those. If you want to ferment dairy, you also make yogurt by fermenting milk. My wife ferments this raw milk that I mentioned last week each week to make yogurt. So what you do is you use a starter culture, which is typically like a whey or a brine, and that starter culture is typically something that you purchase. I believe that my wife gets ours from Azure Standard, which is a catalog where you can order kind of bulk order health foods. And so, for example, if you're going to make yogurt, you get a little bit of yogurt that you buy from the store, and then you add that to your milk and your starter and essentially you ferment it. And I won't get into the nitty gritties of fermentation, but that's how you would make your own yogurt. We make our own yogurt every week. You can do very, very similar process by basically pickling cucumbers or pickling cabbage and, and getting pickles or sauerkraut. And you're essentially fermenting things out of the refrigerator. And then you put it in the refrigerator when the fermentation is complete. And when you cure a vegetable like that, it can last six months, almost a year, sometimes in the refrigerator. Ultimately, what I'm getting at here is that this fermentation process can allow you to take something and set it out on the counter or put it in a box and ship it. And those probiotics are able to stay alive for a certain period of time, often several days or however long it would take to ship something around the country. So I wouldn't worry too much about ordering a probiotic containing compound like the stuff we were talking about in that show and getting the probiotics damaged. They're heat stable probiotics. So I'll put a link to, to the beyond organic stuff that I'm talking about in the show. Notes. If you don't have access to making yogurt or your own kefir or your own kombucha or you don't have the time to ferment, it's a good option.

Is it important to make sure that you get, when you're starting your culture, when you're buying that stuff from the store to actually add to the stuff you're making at home, Is it important to get the one that actually says active bacterial cultures?

Yeah.

If you get yogurt, for example, that you're going to use as a starter to make your own yogurt, you do want to make sure that it's the stuff that's, that's active cultured yogurt. And the reason that I know that is that I am not the fermenter in our home. I'm not the soaker or the sprouter in our home. My wife does a lot of that. But every time I go to the grocery store, it seems like I get reminded to get the yogurt with the active cultures in it. I've never messed up and not done that. But I know this for a fact because it always gets added to my honeydew list.

It's a very important factor.

That's right.

Cool. Before we move on to the next question, I just want to let everybody know. Sort of a peek behind the scenes or maybe a testament to the lengths that Ben goes to to answer these questions. This question that we just went through was actually queued up for last week's show and like halfway through, well, not even halfway through, like a sentence into answering it, Ben decided to put it aside because there needed to be more research done. So I thought that was really cool as a listener, just to know that you go to those kind of lengths where you actually don't just, you don't ever want to be unprepared for it. So I appreciate that as a listener and I wanted other people to know.

In that case, I had to contact beyond organic and find out exactly whether or not their probiotics were heat stable. Because if they weren't, I wasn't going to to recommend them anymore.

Awesome. Okay, so next question. It's another audio question and it's from Mark.

Hi, Ben, this is Mark from Hoboken with a question for your podcast.

Recently.

I'm 34. Recently, when I drink alcohol, it results in very poor sleep and a feeling of my body being overheated shortly after I go to bed. This is regardless of me drinking plenty of water, both while I'm out and when I get home. It's getting to the point where I can't drink any alcohol at all. If I expect to sleep and be productive, any help would be appreciated.

Okay, so overheating and booze leading to bad sleep. What can you tell us? Ben.

As an alcohol consuming consumer, I understand Mark's conundrum and especially can be frustrating when something like this pops up when you've been able to consume alcohol just fine in the past. Ultimately a lot of things could be leading up to Mark suddenly not being able to tolerate alcohol, and I'll talk about that in a second. But you kind of got to understand what's going on here. Alcohol is broken down in your body by an enzyme. The enzyme is called aldehyde dehydrogenase. You look at, for example, folks of Asian descent, they have a lot lower levels or sometimes an absence of aldehyde dehydrogenase, and they are prone to alcohol poisoning or alcohol sensitivities quite a bit. And you know, Mark is experiencing something kind of similar. Alcohol is probably not being broken down in his body because there's something going on that is deactivating or reducing his ability to make enough enzymes, enough of this aldehyde dehydrogenase, to actually metabolize alcohol into what it gets metabolized into in your body, which is basically acetic acid. And so what this can cause is basically kind of an overproduction of histamine, because histamine shares the same type of enzyme for its metabolism. So you're not getting alcohol broken down. That also, because that alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme is impaired, can lead to a bunch of excess histamine in your system. And so you get a lot of allergy, like symptoms that you might get if you were stung by a bee. Skin flushing and a little bit of heating and often some congestion and maybe some heart palpitations and a lot of issues that are very, very similar to what Mark is experiencing. You can also get kind of flushing red face. You see this in a lot of Chinese and Japanese and Koreans and people of Asian descent, again, because they're deficient in that same enzyme that aldehyde dehydrogenase. So one of the things that you may want to look into is there are certain, and we just got done talking about this, but there are certain probiotics that naturally contain higher levels of aldehyde dehydrogenase. And if you've recently gone through like an antibiotic regimen, or if you have not been eating healthy, or if you have some kind of like yeast or candida or opportunistic kind of bad bacteria or bad fungus infection in your GI tract, you could be really low on your levels of aldehyde dehydrogenase or not allowing them to operate properly. So the first thing that I would do is I would stop drinking alcohol, first of all, until you get this sorted. But I would be looking into your gut health. I would start into a really good probiotic supplementation protocol. I would really drop the amount of sugars and carbs in your diet to make sure that you're not feeding yeast or a fungus in your digestive tract. I would do like a natural antifungal, like an oil of oregano, and basically kind of fix your gut in the hopes that you would be able to produce more of this alcohol dehydrogenase digestive enzyme and allow it to actually function properly. Because histamine is released when you drink alcohol, and because a lot of this type of reaction that you're describing is kind of a histamine based reaction, it could be tempting to take an antihistamine. And it could be something, I guess, to try if you just gotta have your cake and eat it too, and you want to drink alcohol. The only issue is that it can be tough on your liver to be processing both pharmaceutical compounds as well as alcohol at the same time. And antihistamines also have some other kind of unpleasant side effects that may cause the same issues. You can get a little bit of an increased temperature and a fast heartbeat and headaches, and it kind of makes you congested, it makes your mucus a little bit thicker. You can get flushing and redness of the face. So, I mean, antihistamines can cause a lot of the same issues here. So I wouldn't necessarily just try to shut down histamine production by taking that approach, even though it may seem like a tempting or logical thing to do. Last thing I would mention to you, in addition to taking care of your gut health would be there's another kind of natural food based compound that has alcohol dehydrogenase in it, and that's brewer's yeast. Brewer's yeast is used in the making of beer and stuff like that. And you can get brewer's yeast and consume it as a supplement. I believe you can get it in just a powder form. And I personally haven't done this, but you could probably try sprinkling that in a salad or putting it on a smoothie or something of that nature. Not sure quite how good it would taste, but it does have alcohol dehydrogenase in it. So I don't think that's as good a solution as just kind of stopping alcohol, taking care of your gut and then starting back into alcohol after you've given your gut about four to six weeks to rebuild. Good bacteria, kill off some bad bacteria and kind of reboot with the brewer's.

Yeast and the oil of oregano. Would that sort of be at odds with each other? That wouldn't be something you'd do at the same time.

You know, oil of oregano is interesting. It seems that it is selective in its ability to break down cell walls of like bacteria and yeast and fungus. And the reason for that is that somebody I know did an experiment in which they made yogurt and added a bunch of oil of oregano to the yogurt. And the yogurt still fermented and cultured just fine. But then the carvacrol in oil of oregano has been shown to break down bacterial cell wa in laboratory studies. So it's possible that the oil of oregano is simply selective. And that would just be one of those things where nature has things in it that can work as medicinal compounds. Oil of oregano is one of those things and it seems that it is smart in its medicinal abilities.

Well, I hope that answers your question mark. I think I learned a lot right there. Okay, so we've got one more audio question. Loving these audio questions. And this one comes from McKay.

Hello, Ben, this is McKay from Utah. Had a quick question regarding clenbuterol. I'm actually an amateur bodybuilder, so I am interested in gaining muscle and losing fat. That being said, Cleverol is an illegal drug, but it's about as easy to get as a protein shake in the gym. So I was wondering if you have any suggestions or more importantly, alternatives and just your general thoughts on clenbuterol and other fat burning substances like that, like T3 and T4. Thank you very much. My contact information is 801-472-3887. My email address is hlvcapitalmail.com thank you, Ben.

I talked about clenbuterol because I received a similar question not about muscle strength, but about cardiovascular stimulation. I talked about this in podcast number 145. And anytime I mention a podcast where I've talked about something before, you don't have to go back and listen to the whole podcast because all the podcasts are transcribed. So I'll make sure and put a transcription over to podcast number 145 underneath my response to McKay in the show notes. And you can go kind of read a little bit about what I talked about in terms of clenbuterol and endurance exercise or its ability to kind of boost your cardiovascular fitness, because it has been shown to be able to do that. But the issue is that clenbuterol can cause a lot of kind of issues. For example, it can cause heart enlargement. And this has been observed when they've given clonbuterol to exercising rats. I don't think they've directly studied heart enlargement in humans, but clenbuterol supplementation can really, really quickly and dramatically increase the size of the heart of a rat. And that heart expansion can cause some serious cardiovascular issues because it's not due to an increase in the number of cells in your heart muscle, but it's actually due to a change in the collagen fiber integrity in your heart walls. So basically, collagen is a really tough connective tissue that can, if it's kind of infiltrating your heart, stiffen your heart and potentially lead to a decrease in cardiac output. So you're really setting yourself up for kind of short term cardiovascular benefit, but long term damage, irreversible damage to your heart. And those same increases in collagen can also produce cardiac arrhythmias, which is basically an inability of the nerve function of your heart to work properly. You can also see some studies where they've looked again at clenbuterol specifically in exercising rats and found a lot of cardiac cells degeneration. So, you know, clenbuterol is basically something that you'll see athletes taking as a way to kind of pick you up because it mimics noradrenaline and adrenaline, which are these sympathetic nervous system kind of fight or flight reaction type of hormones that your body makes. So you get an increase in body temperature and increasing calorie burn. So that's why some people will take it to burn Fat. And after you get that stimulatory effect kind of kicking in again. McKay kind of asked me about T3 or T4. Well, what can happen is long term, your thyroid gland backs off its own natural production of its heat regulating hormones because clenbuterol is there, kind of doing the job. So then once you stop clenbuterol, you've got the potential for almost like a hypothyroid type of condition. So I know I haven't yet answered McKay's question about whether or not it's useful for muscle building, but at first glance you think that it would be able to do that. And the reason for that is it's basically kind of stimulating the same receptors or similar receptors in the human body that are stimulated with intense exercise. And they're called beta 2 receptors that clenbuterol is supposedly acting on. But initially when folks started taking clenbuterol and they started using clenbuterol for exercise, it was thought that clenbuterol was acting on these exact same kind of muscle building receptors. These are called beta 2 adrenal receptors. And after a while, researchers found that they were actually that clenbuterol was actually working on a completely different muscle cell receptor, not one that was associated with the ability to make a muscle bigger or cause what's called an anabolic effect. And that was even with really, really big doses of clenbuterol. So whereas eating good healthy food and taking in a lot of protein and, you know, doing some creatine and probably another really, really good proven supplement, beta alanine, and then simply giving yourself proper recovery is all going to help with increasing your muscle size. Clenbuterol is not only not going to help, but is also going to set you up for some very serious potential side effects down the road.

Wow, that's. That's pretty much busted as far as I can tell.

There you go. Stay away from it. And that includes like the asthmatic clenbuterol steroidal stuff like spiral pent and stuff like that. Just don't take it unless you have an asthmatic condition and you absolutely need it.

All right, well, the next question, we've got sort of a twofer about protein here. The first one comes from Dylan and Dylan wants to know, he says how much protein should you ingest in one sitting for optimal uptake? I've heard that 30 grams is about all the body can process at one time, but my protein shakes are in the realm of 50 to 60 gram range. I can't imagine the body just holds on to 30 and then pees out the other 30. But if I'm wasting my money and drinking 60 grams of shakes, I'd like to know.

Yeah, I mean, we, we kind of sort of hit on this last week when I said, you know, so you sit down, you eat a huge holiday meal, huge holiday feast. You don't have to be worried that you're going to absorb all of it, and every single ounce of fat that you consume is going to get converted into fat by your body. So you don't have to worry that when you eat a 6,000 calorie Christmas dinner that you're going to gain 2 pounds of fat, because a pound of fat is a little over 3,000 calories. And that's because your body simply has a limit to how much it can absorb. I mean, your gut can only absorb so much carbohydrate and protein in fat before it quits absorbing it and it passes through the small intestine and into your large intestine and into your colon, and you end up peeing a lot and pooing a lot, basically. So when you're looking at something like protein, in most cases, the maximum absorption rate that's been observed in terms of how fast your body can absorb amino acids from protein is about 8 to 10 grams per hour. So if the maximum rate that you can absorb is about 8 to 10 grams per hour, and that's assuming that you've got good digestive health, okay, You've got good levels of proteolytic enzymes, you don't have a lot of the issues that I was kind of discussing earlier, like yeast or fungus or like an imbalance in the good bacteria in your stomach, you're looking at about 8 to 10 grams per hour. Now, the amount of time that it's going to take protein to pass through your stomach and then your small intestine intestine is going to vary. It can be from anywhere from two up to about five hours. Okay? So if we look at the very, very maximum amount of protein that you could absorb, let's say you're maxing out, you're at 10 grams an hour absorption, because your digestive system is just working like a charm. And you're taking a fairly slow transit time because, whether genetically or because of sitting around a lot, guts being sedentary, which can kind of slow that digestive or that rate of time through the digestive tract, you're taking maybe that maximum amount of time, five hours, to have it move through your digestive system. You're going to max out at 50 grams, five hours at 10 grams per hour. Okay. So it's very, very likely that most folks are not going to be in that situation where, where you've got optimum digestive health. You're eating 50 grams of protein and then you're lying down for five hours. So it all kind of slows down and you absorb it all. For those reasons, I think that it's more prudent to kind of take in a little less protein just so you're not wasting your money on your protein and having a bunch of it be non absorbed. I think that 20 to 30 gram portions of protein, that that's more realistic, it's a smarter way to dose and that's the way that I would be doing it. Along with taking digestive enzymes or eating a protein that already has digestive enzymes in it, some of them do. And basically getting your protein that way, like the Mount Capra protein, that stuff has digestive enzymes in it. That's a whey protein that I take and I know that that's helping me break down those proteins more quickly, absorb them a little bit more quickly, but hopefully that kind of gives you some direction in terms of how much protein to eat at any given time.

All right. And yeah, and that leads really nicely into our second question about protein from Brad who says after a recent visit to a sporting store to purchase protein powder, I was told by a staff member that I'm a hard gainer and should consume a 70 to 30 ratio of carbs to protein. While this has allowed me to gain 4kg of weight in the last last two weeks, I'm unsure of whether this is the best option for a hard gainer to get muscle fast. My ultimate goal is to have a big chest, arms and abs. Could you please advise me on a good nutrition plan and gym routine for the standard hard gainer?

Yeah, well, I can't lay out a full on nutrition plan and gym routine, Brad. You can hire me for that if you want, but I will answer your question. Your staff that you talked to at the sporting store was actually kind of barking up the right tree. Because if you are a skinny guy, meaning that you're probably somewhat of a hard gainer, you have a hard time putting on muscle. You need to understand that muscle really like the type of muscle that you want, this big, fast, twitch muscle. It's primarily utilizing what's called your glycolytic energy system, utilizing a lot of carbohydrates as a fuel, storing a lot of carbohydrates as a fuel, as storage glycogen, which can make a muscle seem bigger because you not only get the storage carbohydrate chains, but those also draw a bunch of water into them. And ultimately you're set up in a scenario where if you're eating more carbohydrate, it's only going to make your muscles look bigger, but it's going to give those fast twitch muscles more fuel to contract, to give you more bang for your buck in the gym, and then to kind of grow your muscle fiber and cells so that you get an increase in the actual muscle on your body. So compared to a fast gainer, somebody who's naturally bigger, a higher carbohydrate diet can often result in a little bit more fat gain and a little bit more high fluctuation of blood sugar levels, insulin sensitivity, and a lot of the issues that go along with that high carb diet. Whereas skinny guys with high metabolisms who naturally burn a high amount of carbs for fuel, they sometimes need to step up the carbohydrate intake in order to put on muscle and get big. So if you're skinny and you want to put on muscle, I do recommend that you step up your carb intake a little bit and that you try and time that as closely as possible to your workout so that you do still take into consideration the health effects of eating higher amounts of carbs. But that can be something as simple as having a meal that's higher in carbohydrates, like 400 to 600 calorie based carbohydrate containing meal with like a potato or an oat or quinoa or amaranth or millet or any other kind of healthy carb source. A couple hours before your big weightlifting workout where you're going to try to put on muscle, and then afterwards you don't just have a protein shake, you make sure that you do something like your 30 grams of whey protein in a blender, but you're also dropping a couple bananas and a handful of almonds in there, so you're again adding protein in on that side too. And then apart from those two fueling scenarios, you can mostly focus on good healthy proteins and good healthy fats with little doses of carbs here and there. But that's kind of a good way to present your muscles with the carbs that they need and also take into consideration, you know, the health effects of potentially eating too many carbs.

All right, our next question comes from Charles and he says, hey, Ben and Brock. I have a history of cramping in various types of races and distances. Off road, triathlon, trail running, century ride, marathon, almost always cramping in my hamstrings. I usually drink roughly 500ml of Nuun per hour during the events as well as my nutrition, which is hammer gel and perpetuum. I carry enduro lights as a backup. I don't cramp in every instance, but I'm curious if there's anything or something I was missing, nutritionally or training wise, that might help remedy this problem.

Well, there's multiple things that could cause cramping, so it really depends. I actually talked about this in a Get Fit Guy episode. If you don't know what Get Fit Guy is, I Release about a 5 to 10 minute podcast every week on kind of basic fitness things and emerging trends in fitness. It's over@getfitguy.quickanddirtytips.com in the episode that I did on cramping, I talked about the type of things that can cause cramping and certainly if you're really, really low in minerals and electrolytes because things like calcium and potassium are so crucial to a muscle contraction, a really big imbalance of calcium or sodium or potassium can cause issues when it comes to cramping. But the fact is that that most folks on a typical diet who are not only doing things like drinking noon electrolyte capsules like Charles is and probably are not eating a super duper low sodium diet, they really don't have mineral and electrolyte issues. You can go back and listen to the podcast that I did with Tim Noakes about electrolytes to understand why ultimately it's kind of blown out of proportion the importance of electrolytes. You don't need as many as you think you need. But the other reasons for cramping one can be a lack of fitness. So you're essentially asking your muscle to do something that it hasn't been able to be exposed to in training. This is probably, I think, the most common cause of fitness. And what happens is your muscles protect themselves. You have what's called a Golgi tendon reflex in your muscles and it can cause your muscle to go into a spasm to protect itself from getting torn because it's having to contract harder or more repetitively or to a greater amount of fatigue than you've exposed it to in training. And so the answer to that issue with fatigue is simply to expose your body more to the type of things that it's going to be experiencing when you don't want it to cramp. So if you're planning on running a marathon on pavement, don't do all your running on trails and make sure that you get in a couple of long runs that are close to what your muscles are going to experience during the marathon. If you're doing like, you know, like Brock here is doing, and you're running a half marathon on one day and a marathon on the next day, like he's going to be doing in the goofy marathon, you want to make sure that you get some runs in where you're running on consecutive days for decently long periods of time. So your muscles are used to that kind of. Of doubling up. So lack of fitness can certainly cause cramping. We talked about sodium and calcium and potassium being an issue with one end of the hydration, but of course, water is the issue with the other end of the hydration. And I'd make sure that you are not only getting adequate water, but also being careful with your caffeine, your soda, your intake of anything that's potentially a diuretic or dehydrating or can produce any type of hydration imbalance within your body. So I'd make sure that you're basically attending to the hydration. I know that's a suggestion that is probably pretty common, and there's a reason for it. It does help. Lack of flexibility is another issue. Very, very tight muscles are going to be more likely to cramp. So, I mean, that's something as simple as if you sit at a desk all day without standing up and without walking around and stretching your hip flexors, the muscles on the front of your hips are in a shortened position for a long time. So after a few months of sitting at a desk, that produces inflexible hip flexors that are in this kind of chronically shortened position. And then when you go out and you play a game of tennis or golf or go for a run, your quads start to cramp, because those are your hip flexors. And you can't figure out why, because you're hydrated and you're taking electrolytes. And it's because you sat at your desk for six hours in a row without standing up and getting into a lunge and stretching out your hip flex. So that's another issue is lack of flexibility. So those are some of the things I would look into, into potentially being able to take care of this cramping issue. I hope that helps. But I would look at some of those perspectives and not just the electrolyte and the hydration issue.

Yeah, I think it's really easy. A lot of us go immediately to the electrolyte imbalance anytime we cramp up, just because that's sort of what we've been taught for so long is if you're getting cramps, you need to pound the. Pound the salts.

But yeah.

Next question is from Tony and Tony says, hi Ben, help. I just watched the Fathead movie and as you as you mentioned on the podcast and I thought it was excellent. However, as a lacto ovo pescatarian, how can I implement these ideas that were raised in the movie movie? Avoiding starch and sugar is easy by limiting potatoes and rice. But how do I get the extra fat? Can I do that with fish eggs and dairy and not expose myself to other issues such as heavy metal poisoning from the fish or too many antibiotics from the dairy? Regards, Tony.

Okay, yeah, it's certainly doable to eat a higher fat diet, especially if you're not just a vegetarian, but you're an ovapescalacto vegetarian, which means you can do yogurts and you can do fish and you can do eggs because those are all good sources of healthy fats. So yes, I would certainly be liberally including some good. Cage free, omega 3 enriched eggs in your diet. If you can get them from a local fiber farm, all the better. I would be doing a lot of whole fat dairy sources, whole fat yogurt. If you can get your hands on whole fat raw milk, great kefir, stuff like that. I would be including that in your diet. I would be including fish in your diet that is full of oils and omega 3 fatty acids. You know, cans of sardines that are canned in oil, by the way, sardines, you don't have to worry about heavy metals in those. It's the bigger kind of carnivorous fish like the, the sea bass and stuff like that that you need to be careful of when it comes to, to heavy metals. And if you were to do like a Google search for, I believe it's called like the safe seafood chart or something like that. I mean it's basically a chart that lists all of the, all of the fish that are more prone to having heavy metals and toxins and the ones that are safe and ultimately that'll help you out if you want it. But I can tell you right now that sardines are on the safe list and those are fine. And that's something that I use a lot because canned and some olive oil, that's Another great fat source. And then you've got all your healthy fat sources that are vegetable based avocados and olives and guacamole from the avocados and olive oil and tapenades from the olives, basically a lot of other kind of healthier seed based oils like flaxseed oil or in some cases grapeseed oil, depending on how it's been processed. And then all of your seeds and nuts and nut butters, almond butter and macadamia nuts and Brazil nuts and almonds and walnuts. You could absolutely eat a high fat diet as, as recommended in the movie Fathead, which is a great movie by the way, and not have to worry too much about heavy metal poisoning. And if you're choosing dairy sources that are raw or organic, not having to worry too much about the antibiotics. So not an issue at all. Tony, that's great.

All right, next question comes from Kyle. What is your opinion about avoiding water or other fluid while in intake while I'm talking about chopping things out? Next question is from Kyle and he asks what is your opinion about avoiding water or other fluid intake while eating? I recently read a theory that doing so dilutes your stomach acid, which was claimed to inhibit digestion.

That is false. It's okay to drink water with the meal. And there's this theory out there that when you drink water with the meal, that water can dilute your stomach acid. And when your stomach acid becomes too diluted or insufficiently acidic, then you can't really break down the foods in your stomach the way that you're supposed to be. And that's just bunk. Your stomach acid is at a very, very acidic level that would take way more water than you could comfortably drink in order to dilute it. If you sit down and do the chemistry, it just doesn't work out. And there's a pretty good amount of scientific research in this area too, most of it coming from hospital settings where people measured. The researchers measured stomach acid levels in patients who were drinking water along with a meal either before or after their surgery. And then people who were drinking water fasted. And in any situation, the stomach ph was not significantly altered by water drinking at all, even when the water was consumed after an overnight fast. So it doesn't upset your natural stomach acid levels. If anything, drinking water causes you to gulp down some some air along with the water. So that's something that you may want to be careful of because that can cause some indigestion, some burping, some air in your stomach. I would not be worrying at all about moderate consumption of water that you're not gulping down like a baby at the table as you're eating. It's not an issue at all. And it just drives me nuts that folks say that but don't really look at the chemistry behind it. You just, just, you'd have to drink so much water that it'd be stupid in order to dilute your stomach acid. The issue I'd be focusing on more, you know, looking at, speaking of heavy metals, you know, heavy metals and nitrates and methanes and ethylenes and pesticide residues and all the other stuff that could be in this water that you're drinking. You know, I personally installed a big carbon block water filter in my home, so all the water I drink gets filtered through that carbon filter. And fortunately my Spokane water here is non fluoridated because I'm not a big fan of fluoride either. And those are bigger issues when it comes to water. Not drinking too much water with a meal.

Excellent. Our next question here comes from Dylan. And I have to say, Dylan, I am very envious of you and you'll find out why. When I read the question here, it says, hi Ben, is there such a thing as too much sleep? I'm a very fit and healthy 40 year old male, a competitive age grouper, and I've always thought that my body would wake me up when it's had enough sleep. But I typically sleep 10 hours a night and that is coupled with a 20 minute power nap in the afternoon following my workout and lunch. I've read that many pro athletes swear by sleep and napping. Some schedule naps and call them business meetings as they are much a part of the athlete's training as say cardio workout are. Still, I'm wondering if I'm getting too much sleep. 10 hours a night, typically 10pm to 8am plus a 20 minute nap. Is that why I'm stuck at 15% body fat?

Thanks Dylan. Cow. This guy's gonna put Valium out of business. Yeah, that's a lot of sleep. Unless you're a growing baby or teenager or you're healing up from some serious injury or surgery or something like that. That's a lot of sleep. And don't get me wrong, sleep is great and we've talked about sleep on this show. But yeah, I mean there's research studies that show that when you're sleeping too much there are issues. Like they did a huge study of about 9,000 people and this was in America and they found that People who slept more than nine hours a night had a 50% greater risk of diabetes. And that's probably because you're missing out on two extra hours where you could be normalizing your blood sugar levels, exercising, making yourself more sensitive to insulin, and instead you are sleeping. Another study, and this was a pretty recent study, found that people who slept for about nine or 10 hours every night were 20% more likely to become obese than people who slept about seven to eight hours. And once again, we're looking at your metabolic rate being significantly down regulated when you're asleep, so you're missing out on a bunch of calories that you're burning when you're awake. They found that oversleeping has an effect on certain neurotransmitters in your brain, including serotonin. And because of that, people who slept too much during the evenings could actually have issues with being overly tired or getting headaches during the day, which might be why Dylan is prone to wanting to take a nap during the day, simply because of serotonin imbalance that's caused by his oversleeping during the night. There's a link between heart disease and oversleeping. There was the Nurses Health study that had 72,000 women in it. So this is a big study, and they found that women who slept nine to 11 hours a night were 38% more likely to have coronary heart disease than the women who slept eight hours. And finally, if that's not all enough for you, there's been multiple studies on mortality rate that have found that people who sleep nine or more hours a night have higher death rates than people who sleep seven or eight hours a night. So ultimately, you're going to be doing yourself a favor from a chronic disease and longevity standpoint by starting to maybe set your alarm and focus more on about anywhere between like, seven to a maximum of nine hours of sleep a night. But you're also going to really be able to, to be in a more regular circadian rhythm. You get a lot of excess melatonin when you're in the dark for a long period of time and you have your eyes closed. And so the more melatonin you produce, the longer it's going to take to dissipate, the more drowsy and drained of energy you're going to feel when you wake up, the lower your metabolism is going to be because the lower your cortisol levels are going to be when you wake up in the morning and light hits your eyes. So ultimately, you set yourself up when you sleep too Much to be fat, have diabetes, have heart disease and die early. So I think that there's definitely a point of diminishing returns when it comes to sleep.

It sounds like those are some really scary studies you were just talking about. It makes it sound like sleep is really dangerous. But are those, would you say they're more of a correlation rather than a causation sort of, of sort of study? Like just because you are spending so much more time in bed, you're missing out on things rather than sleep actually being the villain?

Absolutely. Maybe you're spending more time in bed also because you are more prone to depression or you're somebody who is reporting during the study that you're spending that much time in bed, but really you're spending three hours of that watching TV or eating junk food. I mean, there's certainly confounding variables here, but ultimately there's enough signs pointing to sleep potentially or too much sleep potentially being an issue where I really do not see a need again, unless you're growing or recovering from a serious event to be sleeping more than eight hours a night.

Gotcha. Well, I take it back. I don't envy Dylan as much as I did before I asked the question.

Yeah, so yeah, I guess those are all the questions, aren't they?

Well, that's all the questions except being that I'm here right now and I actually, I'm about to embark, as you mentioned earlier in the show, I'm doing back to back marathons in just over two weeks. Like on Saturday I'm running a half marathon. On Sunday I'm running a full marathon. I wanted to sort of take this moment just to pick your brain about the best approach to trying to run those races without sacrificing one or the other. Like, like throwing one of them completely out the window in favor of, of actually like racing the full and, and throwing out the half or, or vice versa. And how you would, how you would approach that like just mentally and I guess also nutritionally or recover wise.

Yeah, I actually think that. I'm glad you brought that up actually, because I think it's a good question. You know, it's kind of, kind of related to what we go over in Steve Bor with Steve Bourne here in a second about long distance fueling and multiple stages and stuff like that. But, but from a pacing perspective, you gotta look at it this way. Let's say you want like the fastest two combined times for a half marathon on the first day and a marathon on the next day. You know that in Order to run fast during a half marathon, you're going to have to go outside of your aerobic levels and you're going to have to go fairly anaerobic. You're going to be kind of above your, your lactate threshold, heart rate, and you're going to be burning a lot of carbohydrates as a fuel and you're going to be using a little bit greater percentage of fast twitch muscle fibers and ultimately doing a little bit more damage to your body. Whereas if you want to go as fast as possible during a marathon, you're still staying aerobic for much of the time of that marathon. Really, it's towards the end of the marathon that you're kind of turning up the heat, so to speak. And up to that point it's more like nutrition and hydration management. If I were going to run a half marathon and a marathon on consecutive days, I would be running the half marathon hard. So I would be going after a more intense pace during the half marathon and bringing myself into the pain cave a little bit more during the half marathon, knowing that I'm going to be using a different energy system on the next day. So that being said, I would make sure that you're really, really fueled up with carbohydrates. Listen to the interview with Steve Bourne that we're about to do. But make sure that you're getting in a good carbohydrate containing meal with enough time for it to empty from your digestive system. Steve Bourne says three hours. I tend to think closer to about two to three hours prior to the start of the half marathon. So I think a perfect scenario for this would be a really clean burning carb, like a couple of sweet potatoes, like a couple of big sweet potatoes. Put a little salt, little honey on them and then go out and run your half marathon and make sure that you are keeping yourself from dipping too much into your carbohydrate or your protein reserves during the half marathon by taking in about every half hour or so. A gel that has amino acids in it, like Gu Roctane would be one example of that. And if you want to take that to an even greater level of not tearing down muscle too much, kind of sparing your protein reserves for the next day's race and not being too sore after the half marathon, I would even consider taking in a good dose of amino acids like an amino acid powder like Bioetics makes, or an amino acid capsule like the master amino pattern amino acid capsule. About 30 minutes prior to the start of the half marathon. So now you've got amino acids on board as well. And then as soon as you finish that half marathon, you're going to prioritize your refueling and your muscle repair and recovery by getting in a good carbohydrate containing meal. I would be doing about again, 400 to 600 calories of carbohydrates, kind of in multiple doses every hour and a half or two up until you're kind of totally refueled after that half marathon and including protein doses with each of those meals. So you're doing a lot of brown rice or quinoa or amaranth or millet or more sweet potatoes, along with some protein containing foods like seeds, nuts, chicken, beef, fish, things of that nature, knowing that most of that is gonna be digested by the next morning. So you don't have to worry about eating meat on the day after the or the day of the half marathon. Before bed, you're kind of half marathon dinner. You have some safe carbohydrates like again, a big sweet potato, little side portion of protein, like some fish or something like that, little bit of dark leafy greens, not too much fiber, like some spinach or some bok choy or Swiss chard or some broccoli or something like that. And then for the marathon, you get up the next morning and you have confidence that you're going to be using a different energy system for the marathon. So you fuel very, very similarly as you did before the half marathon. But then for the marathon, and we've done heart rate zone testing, Brock, So we kind of know your zones. But for the marathon you're keeping yourself in about a high zone 2, low zone 3, very, very steady pace all the way up to the 20 mile mark. And up to that point you're just focusing on nutrition and hydration needs. You're trying to get in about 200 to 250 calories an hour from gels, again are fine. The same type of gels you're using during the half marathon is fine. And just sipping water when you're thirsty. And then when you get to about the 20 mile mark at the marathon, you again start to kind of go into the pain cave similar to what you're doing the day before. But the nice part is that you've now got adrenaline, you know, you're almost done, you've got lots of crowd support. And so you're really relying as much on the emotional component to kind of keep you going in those last, that last 10k or so, as much as you are the physical component. And I mean if I were in your shoes, that's exactly what I would be doing for kind of the ultimate combined time is pushing harder in the half marathon the first day, trusting you're going to be using a different energy system all the way up to the point where emotions are almost ready to take over during the actual marathon and then finishing with a hard final kick in the marathon.

That's awesome. That's actually a lot more aggressive than I thought. I would would like the advice that I'd get from you or that I'd even be able to approach.

Yeah. So that's, that's the way I'd take it. And I think you're crazy either way to do both of them. But. And I'm sure we'll be talking a little bit more between now and then as well. But that's, that's in a nutshell what I do.

Yeah.

So anybody who's considering getting hiring Ben as a coach, this is the kind of stuff you can get from him. It's, it's pretty awesome.

Hey, thanks, Brock. All right, what do you think? Should we go go into the Steve Bourne interview?

Let's bring on Steve.

Featured topic.

Hey folks, Ben Greenfield here and I have a guy on the line who is a fueling expert and he actually works with Hammer Nutrition out of Montana, actually not too far from where I'm at up here in Washington state. His name is Steve Bourne and Steve has a lot of experience specifically with ultra cycling. He has a very impressive ultra cycling racing career and for those of you who aren't familiar with what that is.

That'S the really, really long bike rides like the Race Across America.

Another kind of well known one is, is the Furnace Creek. He's ridden in a lot of different very well known cycling tours and he really is kind of the expert when it comes to supporting yourself during endurance events, but specifically during some of the stuff that we're going to talk about today. Really, really long workouts, multi day tours, the type of fueling logistics that can get really kind of messy and set you up for failure if you don't know what you're doing. So Steve, thanks for coming on the call today.

Ben, thanks for having me, man. It's great to talk with you.

Yeah.

I guess kind of a perfect place to start would be to basically go over. You've done all these long cycling events and if you want to pick one that you've done that you kind of think was the best one to use.

As an example.

When you fuel yourself for these events, what are you doing.

What are you doing before, what are.

You doing after and what are you doing during? Perhaps most importantly and kind of what.

Is the reasoning, and I know this.

Is a really loaded question, what's the reasoning behind why you're doing what you're doing as you go through a big long event like this?

Great question. My preparation, aside from training, but fueling wise actually starts weeks and weeks and weeks before the actual event probably. Well, the last big hurrah that I did in the world of ultra cycling sports was the Double Furnace Creek 508, or as it's commonly known, the Furnace Creek 1016. What I did was I started at the finish line the Thursday afternoon before the race started. I did the course backward with race officials and crew.

And what did doing the course backwards involve? I think it was probably more than like a 40k bike ride.

Oh yeah, that was 508 miles. It was the Furnace Creek 508 route. So I did the 508 miles backwards, stopped at the, got to the starting line hotel in enough time to get a few hours to sleep. And like anything, the clock is still going, it never stops. So. So in ultra distance events one of the key things that you have to figure out is I know I need some sleep, but I don't want to sleep too much so as to give up time on my opponents. But I want to sleep as much as necessary to regain some semblance of my form and to have some time to recuperate. So I did the route backwards, slept for I think it was about three and a half, four hours. And then did the regular furnace creep 508 against all the other 60, 70, 80 competitors, whatever it was, as the second half of the record. And that took a lot of pressure off of me because I wasn't, you know, compelled to win. It was just like finish, finish this thing. And I actually did pretty good at when all was said and done, I don't remember my placing, but I think it was in the top, top 15 or 20. So actually did pretty good. And, and throughout the entire 1016 miles, I didn't even have so much as a flat tire. The fueling was spot on. I mean it was the best experience I had. Sure there were moments of great despair, real incredible peaks. But after I was done, there was a little voice that whispered in my ear that said, if you really want to know what going out on top feels like, you will never get a better opportunity. So that was my last big thing in ultra Cycling sports. But as I started to say to me, one of the most important things that athletes can do, and this applies to anybody, and I am so zealous about this, is after all of your workouts, even fairly short workouts, put some fuel back in your body as soon as possible. That allows your body as it adapts to the stresses that you're putting on it in training. It's as though your body is saying, you know what, if Steve is going to do this kind of workout to me tomorrow, I got to learn how to be better prepared. So the muscle tissue rebuilds stronger and your body's ability to to store glycogen in the muscles increases. So it's super easy to do. All you have to do is train and put some fuel or high quality food back into your system as soon as possible after all your workouts leading up to a race. That, in my opinion, is what true carbal loading is. It's not what you do the week before the race, it's not what you do the night before the race. It's what you do in the first 60 minutes after all of your workouts leading up to the race. The more consistent you are with your training and the more consistent you are with ASAP. Post workout refueling, you can build up a nice 90 minute reservoir of glycogen, which is the first fuel your body's going to use. And that's a distinct advantage over having 90 minutes of the day. This premium fuel is a distinct advantage over someone who either blew it off completely or waited too long. So that's one thing that I always get real zealous about and I over talk about it because it's just really important.

So that folks kind of understand here. You're not seeing that the carbohydrates that you ate, say for dinner after a workout 30 days prior are the same carbohydrates you're gonna be burning as a fuel 30 days down the road. You're just saying that that kinda trains your body how to replace and absorb fuels more quickly.

Right. And to store more of them in thein the muscle cells.

Okay, so you're talking about actually increasing your storage capacity by making sure that you pay attention to taking care of your body after a workout.

Yeah, there's an enzyme called glycogen synthase which I know you've heard about. It's super active in the first 30, 60, 90 minutes after a workout. That enzyme is responsible for taking your carbohydrate intake and it works with protein as well, which is why we recommend a carb plus protein recovery drink. Or if you're using solid food, have some protein with your carbs, but take advantage. While this glycogen synthase is really active, which is in the first 90 minutes, you do that and your body learns how to store more and more carbohydrates in the muscles. And when you come to race day, you can have a nice reservoir of fuel, a real premium, high quality fuel ready to serve you once the race begins. So that's something that I think all athletes would really benefit from all those, because when you're tapering for an event and you start slamming down triple the amount of food, your body's going, well, what do you want me to do with all this extra fuel? The glycogen synthase enzyme is only active in a short window of time after a hard workout when you're tapering and certainly the night before a race, it's on sleep mode. So all that extra food that you're eating is only going, one of two things is going to happen. It's going to come out the other end or it's going to be stored as dead weight body fat. My general rule leading up to a race is while I may change the ratio of how many carbs to protein to fat that I'm eating, I don't really deviate too much from what I've been doing in training. In other words, I, I don't just all of a sudden jack up my water intake or my food intake in the hopes of carbo loading. That's really, really important. That's something that I learned the hard way. I'm guilty of going back to those pasta feeds for thirds, fourths and fifths, mistakenly thinking, hey, I'm carbo loading, when in fact the enzyme that controls glycogen in storage is on sleep mode and the body is going well, really don't know what to do with all this extra food except store it as fat.

So yeah, and I think it's a really fine line for folks, you know, that they understand that that doesn't mean that you need to be eating a high carbohydrate diet day round, but it does mean that you need to make sure that your actual workouts are supported. Exactly post workout. Because I know some people will, will tend to take that to the extreme and start to fuel, you know, with a 70, 80% carbohydrate diet. When I don't, I don't think that's what you were saying that you necessarily do, but you Yourself post workout.

Right, Exactly. You know, in the week prior to a big race, I really don't have a big issue. If someone wants to lightly tweak their ratio of carbs to protein to fat. Just don't go crazy. Don't deviate from what got you there in the first place. You know, your body is going to go. You know, we've been doing great all along in training, and now you're just, you know, throwing a monkey wrench in this whole thing. And, you know, what. What are you doing to me? You know, why. Why are you drinking, you know, three times as much water as you normally do? So I think we tend to overcompensate. And I learned the hard way that that's not how the body responds. Prior to a big race, like any race, but especially a big race like Furnace Creek, I want to make sure I have the maximum amount of glycogen available. Even if it is a finite amount, I'd rather have that there to serve me rather than to have very little on board because it is the first used fuel. And if you can enhance the first part of your race by tapping into your glycogen stores and using them efficiently, it can only benefit the latter part of your race.

Gotcha. So let's say you're. I don't know when you actually kind of, kind of start looking at things differently from maybe a total carb protein fat ratio or like a supplement standpoint or what. But, you know, whether it's seven or 10 or 14 days out or the day before, you know, aside from that morning when you wake up, is there anything special that you're doing in those.

Days leading up to a big, long.

Workout or event like this? Aside from what you've just described?

No, not really. In fact, most of the time I'm resting. You know, the hay's in the barn, so to speak. And it's, you know, it's true with training, if you're not fit the week before the race, there's not a whole lot you can do during that time to get fitter. And the same is true, I believe, with your food fuel intake. I don't increase it dramatically. I don't change the ratios dramatically. I just stay on the same path that got me through my training smoothly and successfully, and I don't deviate too much from that. So my body doesn't go, hey, what are you doing to me? So I really don't change a whole lot. I don't deviate from what got me there in the first place and especially the night before the race. I've seen a lot of people, and again, I'm guilty of this, who will just start shoveling down food like there's no tomorrow and the body's going, well, where do you expect me to store all this? It's not going in the muscles because again, the enzyme that controls glycogen storage is only active during a very short period of time after a workout. After that, it's basically on sleep mode. So my rule with eating the night before the race is eat clean, eat quality carbohydrate sources, avoid the refined sugar, eat some good quality protein sources, whether it's fish or high quality cuts of beef or chicken. Drink water, save the alcohol and the desserts for after the race is over because they'll all taste better. Eat until you're satisfied and call it a night. You're done. There's not much more you can do. In fact, there's nothing more you can do. That's been my mantra. I eat just normally. I don't deviate a whole lot.

Gotcha. And I think that's important for people to realize. You know, youyou touched on this. You'reyou're kind of reducing your levels of physical activity that week anyway, so it's.

Not like you have to eat a.

Whole lot more just because your body is already getting some extra calories due to the fact that you are, as.

You know, as you say, resting.

So, yeah, the hay's in the barn and anything you do at that point is probably not going to positively affect your race, but it can certainly negatively influence your race. So I think that, you know, a lot of athletes tend to overcompensate. We worry an awful lot. So, you know, we tend to overcompensate. And I see this whether it's training or the night before the race, you know, whether it's training or calorie consumption.

Yeah. So the morning of the event, you know, let's assume that we've got something like a morning start going on pre workout. What have you found to be kind of the most important principles that have helped you before a really long workout like this or a really long event like this? As far as what you're doing in the immediate for those last few hours.

Before the actual event starts?

I do not eat anything for three hours prior to the start of any workout or race that lasts in excess of, of two, maybe two and a half hours. The reason for that is because the glycogen that I have stored in my muscles, if I eat too close to the start of the race, say an hour or two. That will influence insulin. It will elevate insulin levels, it will create high activity of insulin, which will cause the body to, I hate the word burn through, but that's a fairly appropriate way of putting it. But it will accelerate the rate at which your body utilizes those finite stores of glycogen that took you weeks and weeks and weeks to accrue. I mean, you know, the maximum typically is about 90 minutes or so of muscle glycogen. But if you eat too soon prior to the start of the race, say one to two hours, you will accelerate the rate at which your body is burning through those glycogen stores. Well, I don't want to do that because I want them to work for me as long as they possibly can. And so in order for insulin and all of its hormonal influences to go back down to baseline, which is exactly where you want them, prior to the start of the race, you need to finish any pre race food consumption about three hours prior. Now, if it's an early morning race start, and I do this with triathletes a lot, I do not want anyone to sacrifice sleep to eat because it's not necessary. Now, this will sound really counterintuitive, but in 12 years of working at Hammer Nutrition and sharing this advice with others, 100% of the people who have applied this in their training, I mean, I'm batting a thousand. 100% of the people who have applied this principle in training say it works like a charm. Even after a full night's sleep and you wake up and your stomach's growling and your brain is going, I'm hungry, feed me. Your muscles are actually going to going, we're good to go. Let's do this thing. Here's the deal. During the night, what has been keeping your metabolism going is the glycogen stored in the liver, not the muscle glycogen. If you go to bed with 90 minutes of glycogen stored in the muscles, that's exactly what you're going to wake up with in the morning. You haven't drained one calorie of that. In essence, even though your stomach may be growling and your brain may be going, hey, I'm on empty, feed me. You're not on empty. Your muscles have the full load of glycogen that you went to bed with. You can literally start an early morning race on an empty stomach. What has been keeping your metabolism going throughout the night is the glycogen stored in the liver. Yes. When you wake up in the morning, its levels will be a little low. So it's a good idea to top off liver glycogen stores. And it only takes a couple 2 to 500 calories to do that. You don't need this thousand calorie mega meal. The goal of the pre race, pre exercise meal is to top off liver glycogen stores. You only need 2 to 500 calories to do that and it's a good idea to do that, but you if only because it will put you in a better mood and a better frame of mind, but you don't want to do that at a time that's going to negatively affect how your body is going to use its muscle glycogen stores. So when it comes to a pre workout, pre race meals, there are three options that athletes have. And this applies for anything over say two, two and a half hours. Anything under that, you don't have to worry about that. But. But to allow your body to utilize its muscle glycogen stores as efficiently as possible, you need to complete a small meal three hours prior to the start. That will allow the food to digest and for insulin and all of its hormonal influences to go back down to baseline. If that is not logistically feasible, and in my opinion, losing sleep is never logistically feasible. Have a little something prior to the start, about five or 10 minutes. This is what I tell people who are doing half or full iron distance races. Have a shot of hammer gel or a sip of your bottle of perpetuum about 5, 8 minutes prior to the start. By the time those calories are ingested, blood sugar levels are elevated, you're well into the swim and you won't have to worry about how your body negatively burns its glycogen stores. Or if you're like me and I don't do triathlons, I just ride a bike. I will just simply get on my bike first thing in the morning and after I feel warmed up, which for me takes about 15, 20 minutes or so depending on the weather, and my stomach is like, okay, we're ready to take on some fuel, then I'll begin the refueling process. And as long as they don't wait too long, as long as I don't wait two hours to start refueling, my body will work perfectly. So all three of those scenarios, finishing a pre race, pre workout meal three hours prior. If you're just jonesing for something prior to the start, have a little something that's super Easy to digest. A serving or two of hammer gel, a swig from your premixed bottle of perpetuum, even a banana. If you know your stomach is going to be able to handle that, have that about five to eight minutes prior to the start of the race. Or just begin the race on an empty stomach and start refueling shortly after you begin. I promise you if you do that, you will see really noticeable results in the quality of your endurance. And again, if it was just me saying this, I would just say this is just coincidental. But in 12 years of working with literally thousands of athletes, every single one of them says it works. So even though it seems completely counterintuitive, I would encourage all athletes, especially all long distance athletes, practice that in your workout. If you've got an early morning workout, just get out of bed, get on the bike and start refueling after you begin your workout. If you've got an early morning workout that involves swimming or whatever and fueling during that exercise, have a little something five, eight minutes prior. But the real key is no calories for three hours prior to the start. And watch how your body performs. It'll blow your doors off.

Yeah, and I think that especially, you know, and you touched on this during those really, really long events where you're fueling, the type of fuel that you use is a little bit different, that this becomes even more important. Essentially, you don't want to be a carbohydrate burning animal during a 508 mile bike ride, right?

Dr. No. You want your body fats to be your fuel of source, which they will be once you hit hour number two, number three and beyond, as long as you don't overstuff yourself with too many calories. When people over supply their bodies with too many calories, in essence the body, at least to me it makes sense. The body says, you know, I had literally tens of thousands of calories that I was going to donate to your fueling needs. But if you're going to try and do it all on your own, I can't help you. You're shutting me down. You're turning the fat burning switch off. To me, proper fueling is not, how many calories can I stuff down my gullet without getting sick? And it's not trying to replace what I've burned with X out with X or near X back in. To me, proper fueling is what is the least amount of calories I need to consume to keep my body doing what I want it to do hour after hour after hour, not what's the most calories I can shovel down my throat. But what's the least amount? Because if anything, if I err on the not enough side, that's a super easy problem to fix. You just consume more calories. However, if you overdo it on the calories, at the very least, your stomach's going to rebel. You might even start cramping as the body is pulling fluids and electrolytes away from the working muscles to aid in the digestive process. So I really encourage athletes to forget about how many calories they're burning. That's an interesting figure to know, but it plays very little in terms of what can my body comfortably accept in return from me. Keep in mind, all of you athletes, that once you hit hour number two and beyond, the thousands, tens of thousands of calories from body fat stores become your body's fuel of choice. And they will satisfy about two thirds of your energy requirements. And that's why you don't need to replace calories out with calories in or even close to that. Maybe about a third of what you're losing, maybe is about the most that your body can comfortably accept from you.

So once we get into you actually out there on the road, Steve, during 500 miles, 1,000 miles on a bike.

What kind of stuff stuff are you eating?

Dr. Well, when I did the double 508, that was the final testing ground for perpetuum. I had been using it in my training. Interestingly, the developer of the product was making hand batches of that for me. And it's a carbohydrate protein, healthy fat food in a liquid form. It's basically a meal in a bottle. And the ratio of carbohydrates to protein is about 7 or 8 to 1. And the reason we recommend that, or we suggest that, is because only about 5 to 15% of your energy requirements are going to be fulfilled from protein. So, yes, in order to prevent your muscle tissue from breaking down completely, to Satisfy the body's 5 to 15% of its energy requirements coming from protein, you do need to add a little protein to your fuel mix, but you don't need a whole lot. So the ratio, we believe should be skewed much more in favor of carbohydrates. Perpetuum was designed with about an 8 to 1 ratio of complex carbohydrates to soy protein with a little small amount of healthy fat called lysolecithen. I can't even pronounce it. Lysolecithen. When you give your body a little Donation of fat. It rewards you by saying, thank you for not starving me of fat. It tends to give your body a cue to let go of the calories from its fat stores a little bit more efficiently. We extrapolated that from dieters way back when. The big dieters craze was eliminate all the fat from your diet. So when people did that, they never lost any fat. Why? Because the body's like, hey, no fat coming in, no fat coming out. It holds onto its stores as a life preserving mechanism. So when you give your body a small donation of fat during prolonged exercise, it not only helps your body feel satisfied on less calories, you don't feel all these hunger pangs. But I believe it also sends a cue to the body to help allow the body fat stores or the calories from body fat stores to be used more efficiently as fuel. That's my primary fuel. I use that at least 2/3 to 3/4 of the time. I was on my bike 75 and a half hours during that time and I could have certainly used that fuel from beginning to end, but I think I would have put a gun to my head if I had done that. But I needed the carbs, I needed the protein, the fat was helpful. So I used that as my primary fuel about, I would say 2/3 to 3/4 of the time. There were times during the middle of the night where it was just like, you know what, this really super concentrated carbs, protein, fat, fuel. I really don't feel like it, especially because I'm going up this 21 mile climb. It's only 3%, but it's working me over pretty good. I need something easy to digest. So I'd switch over to hammer gel. Back then, heat was not available or I might have used that, a carbohydrate only fuel. So I would switch back and forth. I did use some solid food. The product that is now the hammer bar was the solid food that I used on occasion just to satisfy the need to chew. Because again, drinking your fuel gets, you know, your food gets old after a while. And I just wanted to have something solid to chew on. So on occasion I would, I would have a hammer bar. We had a few other things, bananas and melons and things like that that I would eat. But I tried to limit the solid food because even if it's super high quality, it always takes the body more time, fluid and energy to get it through the digestive tract. I learned one year when I was just wolfing down the solid food hour after hour after hour in the middle of the night, I mean, I felt lethargic and even sleepy. It was really hard, especially during those early morning hours to stay awake. Why? Because my body was pulling fluid and blood and electrolytes away from the working muscles, diverting them to the digestive tract just to aid in the digestion and breakdown of that solid food. So my rule with solid food is in a long distance effort and it's going to be different for everyone. I find that I can go 12 hours liquid only easily. I've done longer than that. But everyone's different. It's an acquired skill. But if you're going to use solid food, make wise choices. Think of the computer. Garbage in, garbage out. What you put in your body determines the quality of energy you're going to get out of it. A lot of guys doing RAM will think, well, you know what, I'm burning a gazillion calories out here. And what the heck, food is food. You know, calories are calories. It's not. The quality of the calories that you put in your body always counts and it determines the quality of energy you're going to get out of your body. So rule number one with solid food is make wise choices. Which means low or no refined sugar, low or no saturated fat, because that stuff will take forever to digest. I mean, you're going to feel bloated for a long, long time. I try to keep it especially like in shorter races, 12 hour races, I try to keep it low in fiber or minimal fiber. I think I'll pass on that high fiber brand muffin just because I don't want to have an unscheduled bathroom break during the race. Now, during a really long ultra event, yes, you do need fiber. So there's no problem with that the longer you go. But in general, my rules for solid food are make wise choices. Consume foods that you know are going to be easy to digest and are going to give you high quality energy and use them sparingly, somewhat sparingly, almost as a reward of sorts. Other than that, you could do anything on a liquid fuel like perpetuum. And as I said, I use that as my primary fuel during the double 508. I know a lot of people who have done most of a RAM using a combination of our two long distance fuels, perpetuum and sustained energy, switching off between the two. They use that almost exclusively. And they're perfectly fine because these foods have everything you need in terms of the right ratio of carbs, protein and fat.

Gotcha. And for you, you know, I know this will vary based on people's sizes, but for you, about how many calories.

An hour, you know, during a 1000.

Mile bike ride are you putting away?

Well, I've never been the lightest guy in a bike. In fact, I rolled into the double 508 in the back, best shape of my life. And I still weighed 185 pounds. So I'm a bigger guy. The research has showed us that the human liver can for the average size athlete, I consider that average size athlete about 160, 165 pounds. The research has shown that the liver can effectively convert into energy about 4 to little over 4.6 calories per minute. So you're looking at around 240 to 280 calories. Obviously lighter weight athletes are going to need less than that. I crewed for a woman who did the race across Oregon, took her 35 hours. She never went over 125 calories an hour. She had no energy problems. Again, body fat stores were taking care of two thirds of her energy requirements. She didn't need that many calories. Me on the other hand, I'm a little larger guy. When I did that double 508, I was right around 300 calories an hour. And still people were like, damn, you're going to die out there. You're going to be out there forever. You're probably burning 700800 calories an hour and you're only going to take in 300 on average. You're going to bonk out there. And I'm like, no, I'm not, because I'm carrying. Even though I was lean, for me, I'm still carrying 60, 80,000 calories from body fat stores. So again, our general rule of thumb is for the Average size athlete, 240-280 calories per hour is a good gauge to work within. Sometimes you may want a little more. Oftentimes you will need less. I have found that perpetuum is so concentrated that I actually find I do better with a scoop and a half, which is about 202, 203 calories versus 2 scoops, which is about 270 calories. But on average for me, when I was doing the double 508 and on the bike for 75 hours, when we added everything up, I averaged out to be right around 300 calories an hour. And that's me at 185 pounds.

Gotcha. Okay, cool. When you finish riding on something like a multi day event, like this and you're going to be or you're not.

On your bike anymore.

What kind of foods are you grabbing or supplements are you grabbing to kind of maximize recovery and fuel replenishment as quickly as possible for you to be able to go again soon?

Well, I touched on that at the beginning, Ben, and I think the most important thing is before you get in the shower, get out of the sweaty clothes, get horizontal and rest for a while. I think it's really important to put some high quality carbohydrates and protein back in your body as soon as possible. The sooner the better. The late Ed Burke, who basically wrote the book on recovery, said the sooner you do it, the better. Why? Because the enzyme that controls glycogen storage is just smoking hot within the first 30, 60 minutes after exercise. And then its activity starts petering out. So you might as well strike while the iron is hot. Reload your body, refill the tank with carbs and some protein. The carbs will be needed to restore glycogen levels. The protein will be needed to rebuild the raw materials or to provide the raw materials so that the, the muscle tissue can repair itself. And I also believe that this is a good time for taking in antioxidants to help protect the body and the immune system from all the free radical damage that has occurred from not only energy production, but from all your oxygen intakes. So to me, I use the product Recoverite and I take a variety of Hammer products, products after workout, most of which are antioxidant based.

Gotcha. And that actually that kind of segues nicely into something else that I really wanted to ask you because I know that Hammer Nutrition has so many antioxidants in many of its supplements. But there's been a lot of almost like a vilification of antioxidants in literature recently in terms of suggesting that they may not be beneficial or could be harmful for athletes or individuals to be using.

What's your take on that?

Well, they've been vilified for a long time and there's a couple of studies that come to mind. First of all, you and I could discuss the free radical theory of aging. What free radicals do to the cells and the DNA of the cells to damage them. And it is probably the most embraced theory as to why age related diseases occur. It is the oxidation of the cells, the production of free radicals that literally steal electrons from healthy atoms and eventually destroy the cells, impair the cell's ability to make energy and thus cause a variety of age related diseases. Antioxidants we take as ammunition to help neutralize the negative effects of these free radicals which are missing an electron. They steal a healthy electron. Well, now we have antioxidants that help neutralize the damaging effects by donating their own molecular structure. When you look at a lot of the studies, you have to read between the lines to see how the study was designed, how much of said antioxidant was used, whether it was used alone or in tandem with other nutrients. And a couple of studies come to mind that kind of irk me. I think the first one was the beta carotene study done with all the Finnish smokers, excuse me, they gave them a certain amount of beta carotene and only beta carotene. And guess what? A lot of those people who were smokers and had been for a long time still die from cancer even after beta carotene supplementation. So you know, the moral of the story there is that beta carotene supplementation doesn't prevent someone who's already sick from getting sicker. They, you know, they're meant as a preventative to help guard against age related diseases. But if, you know, when they looked at, at the subjects in this particular study, a lot of them continued their smoking habits and beta carotene was ineffective for that. So it's not a curative, so to speak. The other one that bothered me was the vitamin E1. In fact, the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about this and the headline said vitamins raise death risk. And I thought, well, that's a pretty blanketed statement. So we looked at the research and there's a lot of websites that you can look at that just all you have to do is type in vitamin E study flaws and you will find a lot of very scientific minds that show the flaws in these studies. Well, in this particular study it really wasn't a study. Basically it was a meta analysis, which as you know, is a gathering of a number of studies. In this particular meta analysis, a lot of studies that would have proven positive or provided a positive result were left out of this meta analysis. And so basically in simple terms, they divided groups of people into two categories. Those who died by vitamin E intake and those who died without vitamin E intake or a certain amount of vitamin E. What was interesting was that people who got hit by a car were lumped in with the people that died by vitamin E. So it was a flawed study to begin with. And again, it really wasn't a study, it was a meta analysis or a group of studies designed to show that antioxidants didn't work. The latest one that I've read about suggests that vitamin E is linked to high prostate cancer risk. Well, when you look at the study, they used only vitamin E and they used the synthetic form of it. Now, in my opinion, the body really doesn't care whether the vitamin is synthetic or natural because the molecular structure is the same. The exception is vitamin E. The body absorbs and utilizes vitamin E better than the synthetic form. So the men in this particular study used synthetic vitamin E and those who used that had a higher rate of prostate cancer. But antioxidants work in synergy. And what was interesting was the test subjects who were given vitamin E and selenium, a mineral antioxidant, did not have the same results as the vitamin E only studies. So there's a lot of ways that you can twist these studies. But the volumes of research that we know about antioxidants and how they benefit, protecting the body against a variety of age related diseases, especially when they're used in tandem because they work synergistically. You cannot do an antioxidant or a nutrient study with just one nutrient like you would a drug because they don't work the same. You can twist any study to reveal certain outcomes. And I think that if you take a closer look at a lot of these studies, you'll see some real bad design flaws, amongst other things. I'm going way off on a tangent here, but the volume of knowledge that we have regarding the benefits of antioxidant studies and antioxidants in general far outweigh some of these, what I call scare tactic headlines or scare tactic studies. That's not to say that we shouldn't take these seriously, but they need further examination to make sure that the study was done properly, that the right amounts were used. What went wrong with the study? There's a lot of parameters that need to be done before a conclusion, positive or negative, can be achieved in a lot of studies. I think there's a lot of unanswered questions. And for the general public, these are easily found on the web about these studies. And they don't have sensationalistic newspaper, you know, selling headlines like vitamins will kill you. Yeah, yeah.

Sounds to me like basically kind of.

The.

Short and sweet version of this is that the studies that vilify antioxidants are looking at megadoses of mostly synthetic antioxidants separated from the whole food nature that they would appear in nature.

Right. Supplements, neverand. I don't mean to interrupt, but supplements should never, ever replace the diet. That's why they're called supplements. You just can't throw down a handful of pills and say, hey, I'm good to go. Diet's got to come first. But unfortunately, our diet, even though it is the best way, the only way to get all of the thousands of phytochemical that are indigenous to certain foods, that's the only way to get them even they are lacking in the basic vitamins and minerals, or more appropriately stated, enough of them to ensure optimal health. Diet comes first. But I do believe that there is most definitely a place for an intelligent supplement program that just helps bridge the gap between what our diets should provide us and what they are providing us. And with the exception of a handful of people, really, who among us eats an ideal diet 365 days a year? I know I don't. But that's not to say I don't make the effort to eat quality foods. Raw vegetables, organic produce, limit my intake of junk. But I do take multivitamins and a variety of Hammer antioxidant supplements to help augment to provide that which my diet may not provide. And just as an insurance policy.

Yeah, well, it's great advice, Steve, as well as the other advice that you've given here and you've shared quite a bit. I'm going to put a link for folks over to Hammer Nutrition in the show and of course we will also put a referral code there where you can, you can save money if you order from Hammer Nutrition and also help support the show using that as well. And if you have questions about the things that Steve has talked about today, you have questions about Hammer Nutrition, nutrition supplements, how to fuel during long workouts, anything that kind of goes over the topics that we've covered today. Be sure to leave them as a comment in the show notes for this podcast episode, episode number 175@BenGreenfieldFitness.com and we'll be sure to help you out. So, Steve, thanks so much for your time and for coming on the call today.

Hey, thanks so much for having me, Ben. Have a happy holidays. Merry Christmas to you and and let's get together again soon.

Awesome.

Sounds good.

That's fantastic. I've heard Steve speak a couple of times and I'm always learning new stuff from him.

Yeah, he's a good guy. If you go to triathlons, especially around here in the Pacific Northwest, you might see a big huge truck pull up, it's got Hammer Nutrition on the side of it. Usually Steve driving that truck and passing out Hammer nutrition samples. So again, folks, hammernutrition.com is his website. We'll put a link in the Show Notes discount code for them in the show notes as well. I personally use their Race Caps product and their Hammer REM Caps product. And then the other thing I wanted to mention is if you want us to split up the show again, go to the Show Notes for this episode, episode number 175. Let me know if you'd like to see a Q and A separate from the interviews. And I'm happy to start doing that if that's what you'd like to see. It's kind of like a two a week as closer to like 45 to 60 minute podcasts. And finally, Merry Christmas to everybody. Brock, you do anything special for your Canadian Christmas celebration?

Yeah, it's a little bit of a crazy adventure. I went back to my hometown, so I'm trying to get a lot of stuff done and see a lot of people. But that's the great thing about the season. And yesterday was the first day of Hanukkah, so I guess happy Hanukkah to everybody as well.

Yep, absolutely. So we will be podcasting next week. There will not be a holiday break. We're workaholics here at Ben Greenfield Fitness and you'll get a podcast next week. Don't worry, it'll be your post Christmas holiday gift. So thank you to everybody who has supported the podcast. All of your podcast donations are really appreciated. And again, we've got options over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com where you can go in and donate one time or you can sign up to donate a buck a month or five bucks a month if you want to support all the other freeloaders who just listen in and don't donate. You know who you are. But ultimately this show is a labor of love. But it is expensive to host and produce. So if you donate, it goes a long ways towards keeping us going and it's really appreciated. So there you go. There's me ringing my bell in front of the mall. Go ahead and drop a few coins into the Ben Greenfield Fitness bucket to help us along and I'll shut up now and wish everybody happy holidays. Brock, happy holidays to you.

Thanks, Ben, you too, and your family.

And this is Ben and Brock signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com.

It.