Primal Endurance: How To Escape Chronic Cardio & Carbohydrate Dependency & Become A Fat Burning Beast.

Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. Welcome to today's podcast episode with Mark Sisson, the guy who roams around California on a paddleboard doing feats of primal endurance in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

If I'm training at a low level of aerobic output and a low heart rate, I almost, de facto, I'm getting most of my energy during that training session from fat, and that's what I'm trying to do. And the only way to create the metabolic machinery is to reconfigure diet so you don't have as much glucose coming in, and your body is forced to rely on fat at that pace that most people train, which we call in that chronic cardio zone, that black hole. They're still burning so much glycogen during every training session that the body has a tendency to want to go home and replenish that glycogen.

He's an expert in human performance and nutrition, voted America's top personal trainer and one of the globe's most influential people in health and fitness. His show provides you with everything you need to optimize physical and mental performance. He is Ben Greenfield.

Power, speed, mobility, balance, whatever it is for you, that's the natural movement. Get out there. When you look at all the studies done, studies that have shown the greatest efficacy.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield, and my guest today is pretty much the de facto leader of the entire primal and Paleo lifestyle movement. You have no doubt heard of him before. His name is Mark Sisson, and the reason that I have him on the show today is because he just wrote a fantastic book that I'm holding in my hands right now. It's called Primal Escape. Chronic Cardio and Carbohydrate Dependency Become a Fat Burning Beast. It's even got a really nice photo of Mark, I believe Mark in the photo on the COVID Are you running up a sand dune? Is that what that is?

Yeah, that's that great sand dune off of PCH between Malibu and Oxnard. You probably ridden your bike past it.

I think I have seen this very sand dune. So, yeah, it looks great. The only thing that's missing is, like most photos I see of you. There's a slack line, a Frisbee, and you have your shirt off. And none of those that was coming. None of those are the case.

I knew that was coming, man.

This photo. So you decided not to go tits out on your book cover, huh?

Just one time.

All right, well, it's a good book anyways. So for those of you listening in, this book goes into all sorts of things about how to go faster, how to lose excess body fat, reduce stress. It's kind of like a lot of the advice that you might read over on Mark's website, marksdailyapple.com, but he really delves into especially the components of building endurance. Right. So if you're a triathlete or a cyclist or an obstacle racer or anybody who needs to go for extended periods of time, this is really quite a perfect read for you. So, Mark, thanks for coming on the show, man.

Oh, it's my pleasure. Thanks for having me.

So usually I save this type of question for the end of the podcast when I ask people what a day of eating or what a day of training or something like that looks for them. But I really like the way that you've set up your lifestyle. I think you've pretty much got it nailed. And hearing about how your perfect day actually goes, I think could be an inspiration to a lot of people. So before we jump into the biochemistry and ketogenesis and mitochondrial density and sustained power training and all the crazy science, can you just go into what a typical day looks like for you? Like a perfect day?

Yeah. So first of all, qualifiers here, are we talking about a work day or are we talking about the perfect day of all time? You know what I mean?

Let's talk about a work day.

Yeah. Okay, good. I was hoping that. Because otherwise we might get way, way out of left field.

Otherwise it'd be like unicorns and rainbows and porn stars and who knows what else.

All right, so you already described my perfect day, so never mind. Backing up from that perfect work day. I get up around 6:30, I have a big cup of coffee with some cream in it. I don't put butter in it. I just like to just like the taste of coffee with a little bit of cream and a dabble of sugar, you know, so. So sue me. And then I do. I read the paper. I read two papers, LA Times and Wall Street Journal. I do that. I do all the puzzles in the Times. It's part of my mental morning exercise and it's very meditative for me. Then on a perfect day, I check the weather. I'd probably go down the beach and get on my paddle board and maybe do an hour and a half, two hour paddle, hang out with the dolphins, catch a couple of waves. A lot of times that's probably, that's done Alone. I don't, I don't like to, I don't mind paddling with other people, but I'm okay paddling alone. Get a great workout doing that. Until you've done stand up paddling, you don't appreciate what an awesome full body workout it is.

That's right. I got to get you up here, by the way, to do a cold thermogenesis shiver. Stand up paddling in the Spokane river in April or October.

I can imagine. Because I know in the river there's a tendency. I mean, I'll go two hours in the ocean out here and step on calf height, you know, get by my feet, wet up to my calves, paddle for two hours and step off and never get wet. And I know in the river you dunk quite a bit, right?

So yeah, you dunk and it's just.

Cold, but yeah, and then you get back up and then you got the wind and the, and the cold water on you. Yeah. So yeah, let's do that someday. Meantime, about back to my day, then I'll head down to the office. I have a awesome team of employees whom I manage. Each one has specific. So we might have an hour meeting, hour and a half meeting about plans for the coming days, weeks and months. Might answer a few emails, might work on a blog post idea. Have my first meal of the day at around 12:30 or 1. Typically it's some sort of a large salad, heretofore referred to as Mark's big salad.

Big ass salad. I like it. So you've done all this stuff all morning and your first meal is not really taking place until lunch, aside from that copious amount of sugar that you put in your morning coffee.

Correct. So yeah, I work out, fasted and I don't eat after my workout for quite a while, usually an hour or two. And I find I maintain great energy doing that. Clarity of thought, you know, stay free from the mundane colds and flu. So it really works well for me.

All right, I promise I won't derail your perfect day too much and we'll get back to it. But is there anything biochemical that goes on when you, when you skip a meal like that after workout that's actually good? Aside from just the ability to be Spartanesque?

Yeah. I mean, interesting as we go through this, what you and I both do, which is coach people on how to live an awesome life, that coaching is just basically presenting a series of options to our clients or to our readers or to our followers. Those options, they're choices, they're not necessarily good or bad. They're not necessarily the right answer or the wrong answer. They're just choices. And so one of the choices that we confront after a workout is if I just depleted a bunch of glycogen, do I want to take advantage of that 45 minute to one hour window of opportunity where the body tends to want to replenish glycogen at a very high rate, in which case I will choose to take in a post workout meal that is a 4 to 1 ratio of carbs to protein and maximize that. And that's kind of the, the hack that the endurance community embraced for 40 years. And that works. And the reason you might choose to do that is because you're planning on going out and doing it again tomorrow. That's the reason to expeditiously restore glycogen. Now, the other alternative, the other choice and other choice might be to take advantage of the hgh, the growth hormone and testosterone pulse that happens as a result of a strenuous workout. Now, not so much after a paddle, but certainly after a heavy lifting session, leg day, sprint session, or interval session. And in that case, you want the body to benefit from that pulse of growth hormone and testosterone, because that's what sort of helps your body repair itself to the point that it's even stronger than before you went on that workout binge. Right now the two concepts are kind of mutually exclusive. In other words, if you take the carbohydrate replenishment, the glycogen replenishment route, you raise insulin enough that it blunts the testosterone and growth hormone response. So on the one hand, you're accentuating the replenishment of glycogen so that you can do it again tomorrow. On the other hand, you're blunting the sort of, the aspects of that workout that might enhance your performance better over a long haul.

Yeah.

So they're just choices that you make. And one of the choices that I, one of the, one of the litmus tests I use is I don't want to necessarily work out hard every day for the sake of working out hard every day. So I don't feel the need to replenish glycogen and go glycolytic every single day. In fact, it's counterproductive to what I want to do, and we talk about that a lot in the book. So I elect to maximize my fat burning through the rest of the day, knowing full well that my glycogen stores will, will fill themselves up, albeit a little bit more slowly. But they'll still replenish themselves over time. And if it takes two days or even three days, that's fine because I hadn't planned on going hard for another two or three days. Yeah. Does that make sense, doctor?

It makes perfect sense. Andand I'm really glad you brought that up about testosterone and growth hormone, first of all, because a lot of people really don't realize that you do get an upregulation of those when you, when you, when you are a little bit fasted after workout. But then the other thing is, and I don't know if you've seen this research about ad libitum fueling, but it's actually as little as 8 hours eating ad libitum before your glycogen stores fill up again. So, yeah, unless you're gonna work out again, you know, later on that afternoon or something like that, it's kind of a moot point toto hit that magical window and go and suck down youryour maltodextrin whey protein blend, so.

Exactly. And by the way, I was one of the guys that sort of launched that concept 30 years ago. I created a product called carbo concentrate, which was intended to quickly replenish your glycogen stores. And then years later, I developed a product for Beachbody that was fully intended to allow you to do one day and then come back and do it hard again the next day. So there's, there's a method to those madnesses. But that's not my life these days.

Yeah. Plus you may burn in hell now for giving a bunch of athletes diabetes from carbohydrate concentrates.

Exactly. I mean, it's, you know, I wouldn't.

I wouldn't readily admit that little tongue in cheek there.

But some, some amount of truth to that. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. So anyways, your perfect day. You've got your paddle board and then your, your fast, your big ass salad.

My big ass salad, which has a lot of vegetables, colorful vegetables on it. And I recently. Here's the shameless plug. I recently introduced a line of food products called Primal Kitchen. And my two salad dressings that just came out about a month ago. Greek vinaigrette, which has oregano oil in it as a primary flavoring agent, and honey mustard vinaigrette. So I'll use one of those on the salad, and then I'll have maybe a lamb burger. And I'll use my new Chipotle lime mayonnaise, which is the only mayonnaise made with avocado oil and flavored with chipotle and lime, so it's spicy. And that gets me not only probably my favorite meat, which is lamb, but my favorite healthy fat, which is avocado and some of my favorite flavorings. So that's like my ideal lunch. Then it's back to work, and I'll hit my desk, and then I start to write. I might work on a blog post or finish a blog post that's in process or contact my researchers, because I have researchers now. I. I don't do this in a vacuum and all alone. I have a lot of research staff now. So we'll gather together the necessary components for whatever upcoming post is due.

And Mark, how do you write in terms of like. Like your workstation? What are you one of those guys who sits on the floor? Are you constantly altering position or you're a treadmill workstation guy or what do you do?

No, no. So I have a focal upright desk. Greatest. I think the single greatest piece of furniture ever invented.

I just. We just did an interview with their CEO about Martin. Yeah, yeah.

Martin's a great guy. So I have the upright desk. I have the sitting station, which is basically a tractor seat with a leaning post. So even when I'm not fully standing, which I do much of the time, when I lean into it, I've still got 90, you know, a 90% open hip as opposed to sitting in a chair. So I literally never sit in a chair to write anything. I'm always writing either standing up or easily leaning into the post, which is part of the design of the focal upright furniture. And then how I write mentally is most of the time that I'm on the board. Paddling is when I'm crafting the next blog post or I'm thinking about some idea that hadn't been researched yet and some new point of view on that. So a lot of my creative time starts with either the workout. Either it's like I say, a paddle session or a hike in the mountains or something like that. Very important to me in terms of my creativity to have those amounts of loan time.

Yeah, absolutely. The only time that sucks is if your exercise of choice is swimming, in which case you have nothing to write down or record with. And I found that to be the one frustrating element of swimming is your mind goes nuts and someone needs to invent a waterproof pen and pad for swimmers.

Oh, yeah. And then you have the greatest idea in the world, in the history of the world while you're swimming, and then you get back and you can't remember it you go, how the hell can I not remember that that was the greatest idea in the history of the world.

Or you think about remembering it the whole time and lose track of lapse and form and everything else.

Always my biggest issue with swimming. How many times did I say 15?

Exactly.

So anyway, yeah, so then afternoon is a work session. Typically when the sun is out and that's most of the time in Southern California I take a break maybe around two, I go into my unheated pool and take a cold plunge, a dip. Now in the summertime it's ooh, it's 72 degrees. But in the, you know, in the winter it gets down to the mid-40s so it's rather brisk. I will then air dry in the sun for maybe 10 or 15, 20 minutes and I get a real, it's almost drug like euphoria. Not that I would know, but it's what I perceive to be a drug like euphoria for you, the way you.

Would imagine it to be what I.

Would imagine it to be, how I've, how I've seen it explained. But it's another like nice little part of my day that adds some excitement, some, a hormetic experience recharges the battery, gets me some vitamin D and allows me once again to sort of, to get back to thinking, you know, I have a slack line in the backyard. I might take a few minutes on the slack line just to work on some movement, finish, you know, go back to the desk, finish up writing, maybe do some emails, maybe do some research. You know the, the best and worst things about the Internet are the, the rabbit holes that the scientific research can take you down in terms of links to this and links to that and oh my God, there's so much, yeah, so much information here and you know, how much of it is real and how much of is, do I have to sift through to get to the, to the reality around for a snack, afternoon snack, I might have a handful of macadamia nuts which I really like and then usually wrap it up around 6:30 or 7 and then I have dinner and dinner is often a nice piece of grass fed steak or some kind of fish and grill vegetables. It used to be a glass of wine. I've stopped drinking wine for the most part, although I've discovered some new paleo wines that are, that have changed my perspective once again. Maybe finish off with a piece of chocolate and then you know, unlike a lot of people who are living this sort of hunter gatherer, full on, all in full primal experience I watch a little tv. I think there's some pretty cool things on TV these days. So my wife and I might chill in front of the set for an hour or two.

Nice.

I might finish up by reading a little bit. And then almost our nightly ritual right now is back to the pool. We have a pool outside. We have a Jacuzzi outside. So around 10 or 10:30, I'll take a dip into the pool, walk straight in the pool. And like recently, it's California, so it does get chilly a little bit in the wintertime. The pool's down to 49 right now, and the air temperature was in the low 50s, high 40s with the wind chill the other night. And I walk out in the pool and, you know, stay in for as long as I can, which sometimes is at that, at that temperature is probably a minute and a half max, two minutes. And then I get in the Jacuzzi and hang out with my wife for 20 minutes. Download the day's activities. It's a great kind of quiet time under the stars. We turn off all the lights in the house, all the lights around us, so it's completely pitch black and the stars are up. So it's very primal and awesome. And then we go to bed and. And my perfect day does finish with some nookie too. So, you know, that's. That's my. That's my perfect day. Ben. Dude.

Sounds like a pretty perfect day. And what a lot of people may not realize is that probably stands in stark contrast to the way that you were living your life, like, you know, however many years ago. What are you. They're 38, 39 years old now, so maybe, maybe a decade ago.

Yeah.

You were a professional triathlete. You're a professional triathlete. Can you, can you describe your days as a professional triathlete in terms of just basically give us an idea of where you were at in the triathlon world for people who don't realize that you were actually involved in that world pretty intensively.

Right. So I was a pro before you made any money being a pro. So, yeah, you had to have a job. And that made it really tough. I was a contractor in those days, so I'd get up in the morning, I would hit the pool at 5:30 or 6:00am, come home, you know, do a master's program, come home, work as a contractor doing heavy labor for eight hours, get home around 4, 4:30, run 20 miles or ride 60, come home at night, you know, after that, have a couple of beers and basically go to Bed early, never went out. I didn't have a family, didn't have a, didn't have a, you know, didn't have a wife or children. Didn't really, couldn't keep a girlfriend on that schedule because Saturdays and Sundays were all about all day long training. So get up Saturday morning, do a brick, which was, you know, the original brick, as I defined it, was 100 mile ride followed by a 10 mile run. That was on Saturday. So Sunday you just kind of slept all day. And it was really, it was, it was a tough, tough life.

Yeah.

And basically eat, sleep and train is what it was. And then of course, if you, if you were true pro back in the 90s, you, that was all you did because you trained even harder. But I used my work as a contractor, my actual physical labor. I was monkeying up and down ladders all day. So there was an element, there was a component of training to that that did benefit me when I got to races.

Right, right. And that kind of leads into the first question I want to ask you, because you know me, I like to get into the nitty gritty science and you certainly do in the book. So you were a professional endurance athlete. And one of the things you talk about is how endurance athletes can actually get fat from training for things like triathlons or marathons. What's the actual mechanism behind that? How's that happening?

Yeah, so at the very, very elite level, you don't see that because first of all, those, those people are self selected genetically, they're already genetic freaks to be able to handle a huge workload and not get injured. They're already genetically selected with high VO2 max potential so they can go hard, so they can burn and have historically burned a lot of carbohydrates and not have the excess carbs that they take in, put on body fat. When I was a marathoner back in the 70s, which is my first real sport, running 100 miles a week, I weighed 30 pounds less than I weigh now and I ate, you know, a thousand grams of carbs a day and couldn't, you know, couldn't put any weight on. So there is that elite level now. You drop down to the age group level into the citizen level, where you see people lining up at the start of some triathlons and you wonder, God, you're training, you know, you're riding 120, 170 miles a week, you're running 20 to 40 miles a week, you're in the pool swimming, how do you still have 12 extra or 15 extra pounds of flab on your belly, or how do you still have the big thighs? Or how do you. How does that happen? Well, it happens because people are training. They're basically practicing to hurt. Okay? That's, that's what training seems to have come down to over the past several decades. They're training at a pace that's high enough that it hurts and that they are feeling like they're mentally preparing for a challenge. So they're practicing competing or riding the bike or running at whatever pace it is, at what amounts to close to race pace. But at that pace that most people train, which we call in that chronic cardio zone, that black hole, they're still burning so much glycogen during every training session that the body has a tendency to want to go home and replenish that glycogen by consuming craploads of carbohydrates. That's that ad libitum, post workout eating cycle. And over time, if you're not one of the elites and if you don't have the. If you can't get away with it because of your genetic luck, you tend to overeat carbs. And you do it because you think carbohydrate loading is the way to train. And if I'm going to train every day, then I got to replenish my carbs, just like we talked about in the opening of the show. And it's this vicious cycle of taking in a high carb. And a lot of times these are very sugary drinks that wreak havoc on your insulin system and other hormones. And you tend to over consume the carbs, which then creates an excess of insulin, which is basically a fat storage hormone, among other things. And so you store fat in the fat cells. And because you're taking in so many carbs and you haven't learned how to burn fat effectively yet, you haven't become efficient at burning fat. You still rely so much on the carbs that you tend to gain weight over time as opposed to drop the weight. The only way to drop that weight is to become good at burning fat. And the only way to become good at burning fat is to create the metabolic machinery to want to take fat out of storage and burn it. And the only way to create the metabolic machinery is to reconfigure your diet so you don't have as much glucose coming in and your body is forced to rely on fat. And that's the essence of the dietary strategy that we talk about in the Primal Endurance book.

Interesting. So it's not necessarily the fact that endurance training makes you fat, but it's the actual zone at which you train, the intensity at which you train, which exhausts your glycogen levels and stimulates your appetite so that when you finish you actually have a desire to eat more carbohydrates. And that could all be dependent on the heart rate zone at which you choose to go out and run or bike or swim.

Exactly. And that gets us into the, the main point of the first part of the book, which is, which is to take a look at the training you've been doing. And we almost say it jokingly, but that there's tremendous amount of truth in that you get faster by training slower. And how that works is when we, I talked about you, you know, initially so many athletes when they're embarking on a training strategy for to do a triathlon, they're practicing hurting, you know, they're, they're, they're sort of almost redlining themselves. They're in a zone between 70 to 85% of their heart rate max for hours at a time because that's what they think they're going to be in, in a race or maybe even slightly higher. And so they're practicing to hurt and they're not learning how to burn fat. If they're not learning how to burn fat and they're still chewing up their carbs, they're no more efficient through all the training they're doing. The only way you become efficient as an athlete is to extract more energy from fat at a higher and higher and higher rate of output at a faster and faster pace.

Right? And you're not talking about biomechanical efficiency, you're talking about like biochemical efficiency.

Correct, biochemical efficiency. I mean ultimately, you know, we run out of fuel in these races, right? And a lot of times we run out of. If you've, if you've read the, you know all and I know you have, you know all of the biochemistry from the 70s, 80s and 90s which had to do with carbohydrate and glycogen management, they would always tell you once your glycogen stores are gone, once your muscles have been depleted of glycogen, you hit the wall, you bonk, the race is over. Well, your muscles only hold 500 grams total of glycogen in a well trained athlete. And of that only about 350 of those grams are actually available in the race because the body wants to hold on to the remaining 150 for survival purposes. So you run through the glycogen pretty quickly and, and that's where Gatorade came on the scene in the 60s. That's where all the gels and goo packs, that's where I came on the scene with the carbo concentrate. That's where all these, these mechanisms by which you could take in more carbohydrate during a race and have it be relatively easily digestible so it could get from your gut into your bloodstream quickly. That was all designed to stave off that moment at which your glycogen was depleted. It was to provide exogenous glucose so you didn't have to tap into your stored glucose and deplete it and then hit the wall.

Right.

So all that stuff was sort of predicated on that, on that ability to manage glycogen, but it had nothing to do with your efficiency, which, which meant if I could reconfigure how much energy I get from different fuels and save glycogen and spare glycogen throughout the entire race, then I'm going to finish better than my competitor. And when you realize that the body, even on a low body fat guy, you've got enough fat stored to go 400 miles. So it's not about, you know, you're always going to have enough body fat, but if you could learn how to access that body fat and do so and burn it efficiently in a way that, you know, maybe the first time you, you start out and because we talk about the heart rates, we talk about, you know, 180 minus your age being a good metric for a maximum heart rate for your aerobic training. And a lot of people say, dude, I've never run that slower, I've never trained that slow. You know, I'm, I'm, I'm 62 now. So, you know, my theoretical max heart rate for, for high end training is 118, not for high end training. For aerobic training is, is 118. Well, that's pretty slow until I've, I've done it enough that I'm, I'm actually going faster and faster at that same heart rate because I'm becoming more and more efficient at burning fat. If I exceed that heart rate, I'm no longer really getting most of my energy from fat. I'm, I'm back into getting it from carbohydrate and I'm negating all of the gains that I got otherwise. So if I'm training at a low level of aerobic output and a low heart rate, I almost de facto I'm getting most of my energy during that training session from fat and that's what I'm trying to do. So I'm trying to become more and more efficient at burning fat at higher and higher speeds.

Now, do you have to exercise? Because this is one of the things that I get asked about a lot and I'm curious to hear your opinion on it. When you are training for endurance and you've made the decision to do the majority of your training at that low intensity heart rate like the aerobic or the maffetone or the Lydiard heart rate, whatever you want to call it, that heart rate that isn't up in that kind of like black hole training zone that you described, do you not have to exercise for very long periods of time in that zone to build any appreciable amount of endurance?

Yeah. So that is, that's one of the artifacts of that. Now how, what does that look like? Because when you say training, I could say, you know, when I do a hike with my dog for an hour and a half, I'm getting a training effect that applies directly to my desire to compete in a triathlon or marathon.

Yeah.

When I'm paddling for two hours at a heart rate of 110 to 118 beats a minute for two hours, I get a direct training effect throughout my body that is improving my efficiency. So, and then clearly if I'm actually doing, if I'm, if I'm going to be competing in one of these events, I certainly want to spend some time doing the actual activity. So I'm, there's going to be some running in there, but it doesn't have to be, or some cycling, but it doesn't have to be, you know, even five days a week. It can be two or three days a week. We say make your, you know, your, your long workouts longer and slower and make your short workouts shorter and harder is basically the kind of mantra here. So, so yeah, you there is that. But I'm, I'm one of my, my part time COO right now. He's, he, he's been following me for a long time. He's a lifetime cyclist, loves cycling. He's 55 years old. He just on a whim, he said, well I better read your book, Mark, because I'm working with you. And he started doing it with his cycling group. And he goes, it's unbelievable. He said, now I got all the guys in my bike group are doing what I'm doing and that's, we're going out for four or five hours on a Saturday, whereas we used to do a hard hammer two hour ride. We're doing four or five hours. But we're, we're coming back not beat up and having had a great time and knowing that we're killing it because we're actually seeing the improvements. And it's not like these guys are doing it every day. They're doing their one long ride a week and a couple of catch up rides, you know, or one long ride on the weekends and then a catch up ride or two during the week and then whatever else they do, whether it's, whether it's again, hiking, spending time with, you know, easy swimming, playing a game of easy soccer with the kids, whatever, all these things do contribute to your overall fitness.

Yeah. And tell me what you think about this, Mark, because this is something that, that I try to practice in my own life because I have limited amounts of time to exercise. But I also don't want to do that black hole style training to prepare me for these events. I'm going, you know, I've got a 60 hour event next week. And so for me, I try to hack my environment. What I mean by that is I just stay on my feet all day long. Right. So I use the walking treadmill workstation and I use a standing mat and I'll stop about every hour and do some body weight squats and some jumping jacks. And my theory is that I'm simulating what I would normally be simulating if I were going out and doing like the Kenyan marathon or approach of just like a two hour super duper easy run each day. Do you think that process of hacking your environment is at all effective or is there just not enough sports specificity environment involved?

No, no, no, there's it's totally, it's totally. I mean, you know, every employee at my office has a stand up desk and a tread desk, a treadmill. They're allowed to, you know, they asked for it and I provided it. So some of my employees put in eight miles of easy walking during the day. Just as you said, just walking around during the day instead of sitting has, you know, some neurophysiological biomechanical impact on the body that, that, that prepares you for the 60 hour event coming up. You know the Kung Bushmen who famously are on the videos tracking the kudzu, you know, in, in Africa, they're not training every day. Their life prepares them for this.

Yeah.

So they, the fact they go out on a hunt once, you know, Once every seven or eight days. They're, that's all they need to do. Combined with their regular daily routine which is orchestrated to improve their fitness just of necessity because they don't have chairs to sit in and they don't have, you know, sofas to do that. You know, they're not sitting at a desk doing work, they're either standing or squatting, you know, all day long or moving. Yeah, all that stuff prepares you for, for that event. And you know, your, your 60 hour event coming up. You not. What is it a running event or a combination or.

It's one of, it's one of Joe Disena's crazy harebrained ideas. Death race.

Yeah. Yeah, but I mean, you know how to do all the activities. Yeah, right. You, it's not like you need to practice doing the activities. You just need to have a body that's physiologically prepared to do that. And how you do that is by look, unless you're going to go to win it, which I don't, I don't suppose that you are, but maybe you are. But if, you know, if you're, if you're a pro doing it, you're going to train hard, then we can talk about the other tweaks. But if you're just going to go to have a good time to do well to. And one of the metrics I use is if I can kick the ass of 80% of the people who are training harder than me, thinking this is their big goal for the year, then my style is not only more effective but more fun. I'm enjoying life more while they're agonizing over the missed workout or they're taking a nap in the middle of the day because they overtrained the day before. Whatever. I don't want to live my life that way. The reason for Primal Endurance, the book itself was for the last 10 or 15 years, I've sort of taken back, you know, I've said I've reevaluated my career as an endurance athlete. Said, well, you know that endurance training isn't really that healthy for you. It's not that good. It's really not a longevity strategy for a lot of people. But if you want to do it, if, and you know, I would not take back any of my years of racing. I derived a lot from it. So if you want to do it, let me show you how to do it in a way that is, that is going to build you up and make you stronger and have you living longer as opposed to the old way of training which was tearing you down, shortening your career, possibly putting you at risk for degenerative diseases because of the diet and the way you chose to live. So this is the technology of just the last five or ten years that has come into play that we're instituting in this book that allows you to take on a training strategy that does improve endurance, that does give you more of an enjoyment of life, that takes less time, that involves less struggling and suffering, that involves a much better cleaner diet, that also tastes better for most people. So all of the elements come together to give you everything that you want. It's like it's all possible.

Yeah, I want to talk about diet and ketones here in a minute. Oh, and by the way, I am going to win this event, so how dare you come on my own show and insult me. Of course I'll win.

My bad.

Anyways, though, I want to talk about, about strength training. You actually introduce a very unique style of strength training. I found this personally just because I've done so much study on nutrition and aerobic training myself, but found this particular section of your book to be fascinating in which you talk about something called maximum sustained power training, which is a form of strength training I actually am not too familiar with myself. So can you go into what that is and how it works? Maximum sustained power training, sure.

So when we're talking about competing in endurance contests, we have the ability to extract energy from the muscle cells and so that they will fire in a way that keeps us going. But we can't overlook the fact that we need to maintain power, whether it's the legs that are driving the pedals to put you up over the six mile climb at a, you know, 12 to 14% grade, or whether it's just a flat, flat out, all out marathon. There's power involved and the muscles have to generate power based on some prior experience. So what happens with most runners and a lot of cyclists is over the years all you do is you spin the pedals or you run the miles. And even if you're doing hills, you're not generating a lot of force, you're not generating a lot of power, you're just doing like, we would say it's like doing 10,000 repetitions of 6 pounds or something, or 10,000 repetitions of whatever. So it's a high rep, low weight activity, but you still haven't built any power. Now what happens at the end of a lot of races is the reason you lose or that your time starts, your speed starts to slow. Down is you lose power. And when you lose power, you lose form. And when you lose form, your breathing screws up and, and literally the wheels fall off. So the big challenge for a lot of endurance athletes is how do I sustain power throughout my event? How do I keep, how am I able to go up the first hill on a bike, race the first of three hills at 100% of my power, and then go up the second hill at 100% of my power and go up the third hill at maybe 95% of my power versus the old days when I do 100% on the first hill, 80% on the second hill, and then I paperboy up the last hill, you know, at 60%. Well, all of this stuff, you have to train the fibers, the muscle fibers, deeper and deeper and deeper. And you do that in the gym with very specific work. It could be deadlifts, it could be weighted squats, it could be, you know, a number of other sports, specific activities. And the idea of maximum sustained power came from my friend Jacques Devore. Now, Jacques and I have known each other for about 30 years and he's, he's a very smart trainer. He trains Olympic athletes now he trains elites and pros at his gym in West LA using this maximum sustained power concept. And he's been, he's had a tremendous amount of success at it. And like the first real success we had with was with Dave Zabriskie, the cyclist who at the tail end of his career got kind of tagged for having been involved in the doping movement. So he had to serve a suspension of six months. And as a result of that suspension, he basically came to us and said, let's, you know, how can I, knowing that now everybody is going to have to compete clean? How do I get my 34 year old, 33, 34 year old body in the shape it needs to be to be competitive on the circuit? And so we started working with him and he got tremendous results now.

Interesting. So he got tremendous results and he was incorporating a lot of these things you talk about in the book. Ketosis and low level aerobic training combined with high intensity interval training and this maximum sustained power training stuff that you're explaining.

Absolutely. He was all in. He was all in with his stuff. Okay. And the unfortunate what happens in cycling is there are things called crashes that take you out of the race. But he went into the season out climbing. His partner, Christian Vandevele, who was actually a climber, it never out climbed him. In the decade that they'd been training together, he was you know, his Met, he was holding 6 watts per kg for long periods of time, which is sort of the metric that a lot of the, the cyclists use as an absolute measure of power. So he was, he was ready to have his best season ever. And then just before the time trial, which was his event in the Tour to Tour de California, he crashed. So we lost the season. So that is what it is. But the point is, Jacques came into this years ago as he was getting older. He said, well, I, he was a, he was, he'd always been a big fan of weightlifting for, for endurance athletes, but he found that he was getting injured because he was trying to do the heavy stuff. And he found, he knew that doing multiple repetitions of the lightweight just wasn't, wasn't increasing his power at all. So he developed this method in which you would, you would find your, your one rep max on any of these exercises. Again, a deadlift, a squat, you know, some, some weighted jumps, whatever it's going to be. You'd find your one rep max and then you dial that back to 80% and then you'd start doing a couple of reps. So you do a couple of reps, wait a little bit until you felt recovered enough to do a couple more reps, wait a little bit until you felt good enough to do a couple more reps, and, and you'd start doing this. And you know, he found that over the first couple of sessions, you might be able to do this for a couple of minutes and then have to stop. But with Zabriskie, he found that at some point over the course of training him that, that Dave could do 80% of his max on a squat twice every 10 seconds for eight minutes. And that's true sustained power. Now, that power is one component of a large synergistic collection of different elements that comprise a race. Right? You have to have the fuel partitioning dialed in to be able to, to fuel these, the kind of speed, but you also have to have the sustained power to be able to maintain that power over time and not lose form.

And he didn't have any issues doing something like this. Maximum sustained power training, even doing like ketosis and a low carbohydrate approach.

So he didn't, Dave didn't do as much ketosis as some people, you know, we would have some people do. So Dave was on the low carb strategy and he, he got good at burning fat for sure. But Dave didn't spend a lot of time in the ketosis phase. That's something we Talk about in the book, you don't have to go all in with ketosis to derive these benefits. Ketosis just becomes one other component that allows you to access or tap into another level of brain function that allows you to sustain power and keep going. We could talk about Tim Noakes, the central governor theory of the brain, which suggests that after all the talk all the years about the fact that it may be that when your legs run out of glycogen, that's when you hit the wall. No, postulated that that's not true at all. It's when your brain runs out of glucose that it kicks into this survival mechanism that tells you to pull over the side of the road, slow down and take a nap. So that Nox's central governor of theory of the brain said that if you, if you can't fuel the brain, then you can't fuel the body, regardless of how good you are at burning fat or regardless how good you are at these other things. So with ketosis, when you become good at burning fat and you become good at accessing the stored body fat and you build a metabolic machinery, you increase the mitochondria, for instance, to burn fats more effectively, right? You also start to become keto adapted and you start to become better at using the ketones that are a byproduct of this fat metabolism. And one of the cool things about ketones is that the brain loves ketones for fuel. So if you can unburden the brain of having to get a regular supply of glucose all during the race and maybe drop the glucose requirement way down and then fulfill that requirement with ketones that you're producing as a result of your being good at burning fat, then the brain is able to fuel itself enough to say, I'm doing fine, I don't need to pull over the side of the road. I don't care that there's only 150 grams of glycogen left over in the muscles because we're burning fat, we're burning ketones, Life is wonderful. Let's keep this pace.

Yeah, yeah. That's what I experienced when I did a. I did two Ironman triathlons during about a year of very strict ketosis. And that was one of the biggest things that I found was, you know, five, six hours with almost no. No fuel and my concentration and focus would actually increase as things progress and not decrease. So, yeah, it's super duper useful stuff. Now, one quick thing before we leave maximum sustained power training, and I want to ask you a few More things about ketones. So the idea behind it is you basically choose a series of exercises and you're doing a certain percentage of your one rep max and you're simply lifting that weight without decreasing the weight at all until your power goes out the window and you can't move that particular weight anymore. And then sets over and you go home.

There you go. It's a beautiful thing and it's so finite. It's like the old method. Well, one of the old methods of lifting in the gym was you do a little warm up set and then you maybe do three sets of whatever. But if you're doing them the way the workout calls for, you have to strip the weights off a little bit to, to where you're doing three sets of say 120 and then you're doing, then you're doing three sets of 110 and then you're doing three sets of 90 to finish because you can't sustain the power of the original set of 10 that you did at 100 and you know, at 120. So the maximum sustained power. One of the caveats is, yeah, once you can't do one more good clean rep with, with excellent form without breaking down, that's the end of the workout. You've done all the work that you need to do to create, to upregulate the gene expression in the body, to adapt, to allow you to do it even better the next time you do it. It's such a finite and perfect metric for. And over time you look at, well, I did, you know, I did. Again, looking at this one thing I did, you know, two reps every 10 seconds for two minutes and then I did it for two and a half minutes and I did it for three. And over time, you see the improvement. It's right there, that's clearly sustained power. There's no, you know, there's, there's no arguing what that is or isn't. And it's so, it's so perfect in, in essence and how it applies to your ability to drive the pedals, you know, in a hard gear or how it applies to your ability to sustain, you know, six, six, 20 miles in a marathon or whatever it is you're looking at doing even. And it even works with swimming as well. There are certain, you know, lat poles and things you can do with swimming.

It reminds me a lot of the recent squat battle. I don't know if you saw it on YouTube. They had a squat battle between a power lifter, a strongman athlete, and one of the guys was a cyclist and the cyclist actually did pretty well. He was like a track cyclist, a guy who was pretty ripped. But it was actually quite entertaining to see how long these guys could go at a certain percentage of their 1 RM. But basically I could go in my gym here, load up the, load up the bar for a back squat, go at say 200 pounds and just basically do sets of three, for example, until I can no longer execute a good set of three. And then that's it. I don't, I don't decrease weight on a strip weight. It just sets over, walk out of the gym.

And it's. By the way, it's not only three. You start out with three and then when it gets down to two, you do it two, and then when it gets down to one, you do it one.

Until you can't, until you can't decrease reps, just not weight.

Bingo.

It reminds me a lot of the. Have you seen these ARX trainers, the efficient exercise machines?

Yep.

Yeah, very, very much like that, except a little bit less electronic version of that. It probably doesn't require a $10,000 efficient exercise.

Yeah. The other thing with the efficient exercise, I love, you know, I love those guys like Keith, you know, Keith's a great friend, but, you know, you do have to warm up on those and you do have to be very careful on those. That's, that's really, I don't know, it's. You just have to know how to use that. This is, this is somewhat different from that. They're probably trying to achieve the same thing. But we're talking for, again, we're literally being able to sustain the power over a significant amount of time. Eventually it becomes minutes versus, you know, a brief, you know, two minute session.

On a. Yeah, yeah, on a piece.

Of equipment that's loading you up basically, you know, working against your own willingness to work against it.

Right now, speaking of stressing the body out that way, one of the things you mention in the book is that athletes who are in a state of ketosis or following like a lower carbohydrate intake exercise protocol tend to recover faster from training. How is that, how does that actually happen? I think a lot of people would think that recovery would be delayed because you're not refilling glycogen stores as quickly as possible or something like that.

Right. Well, it's, you know, when you, when you exercise at length, you get delayed onset muscle soreness, which is the one metric of recovery. Certainly the ability to repeat the performance again over time. Is another metric of recovery. And when you're burning carbohydrate, purely carbohydrate within the mitochondria and in the cytosol, it's a, it's a messier undertaking than fats and ketones. So there is more oxidative damage, there are more oxidative fallout, shall we say free radical fallout from being a sugar burner than being a fat and ketone burner. And it's the free radical damage that ultimately wreaks havoc on the athlete's body. Whether it's, you know, when a free radical is created, it's a molecule that then goes around scavenging, it's missing electrons, so it wants to go steal an electron from something else. And sometimes it's, it's the cell wall of an otherwise, you know, structurally integritous cell wall, or maybe it's from an organelle or something. But this free radical damage takes place at a larger degree when you are revving at a high rate and burning sugar versus burning fats and ketones. Now the body produces its own endogenous antioxidant system to mop up or sop up some of that damage. That would be the glutathione and superoxide dismutase and catalase. But in a lot of cases you don't have enough. If you've been working that hard that long and putting that amount of glucose through the system and it's creating, it's like an old burning furnace and creating a lot of smoke and debris, the body has to work hard to clean it up. And if it doesn't, if it doesn't clean it up, it manifests itself in soreness, in scarring, in sometimes damaged DNA. I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of things that, that can go wrong here. So the idea is if you can, if you can craft a clean burning engine by creating more mitochondria, this is what we call mitochondrial biogenesis is literally your body's response to, to being good at burning fat is to say, well, if we're going to burn fat most of the time, let's build more of these fat burning machinery. Yeah, that's the mitochondria. And ironically, not ironically, but coincidentally, the mitochondria have their own DNA unique to any other organelle in the body. The mitochondria have what we call mitochondrial DNA that goes back to, who knows, a billion years ago or more. And that mitochondrial DNA that also gets the signal, the epigenetic signal that it has to become more effective at what it does. So you not only have more. More mitochondria, you have more effective mitochondria, which then make the throughput of fat so much easier. The. The. The substrate material doesn't get backed up at the front door and then, you know, put through in. In a. In a hurried fashion that can't keep up with the cleanup crew on the backside.

Yeah, just takes a long time to build. I think a lot of people look for that to happen, you know, within two weeks or three weeks. But I found it took a good year and a half to really, truly get to the point where you could go for long periods of time and feel like you recover faster. And I know a big part of that. I don't know. Have you ever done genetic testing, Mark, like 23andMe?

Yeah.

Yeah. Like, one of the things that you get back from that is your endogenous antioxidant production, which I didn't realize this until a couple years ago when I started to dive into the science of DNA testing, but some people actually produce more endogenous antioxidants, and they can mop up that damage more quickly, and so they might be able to handle consecutive days of something like ketogenic endurance training. Whereas some people actually produce fewer endogenous antioxidants and need to do a hard workout and then take 72 hours or longer to actually recover. So it's highly variable, too?

Yeah, no, I did DNA fit, and so I got more of a fitness.

Prism or filter that looked at my DNAFit lets you. They'll take your 23me results and you can import them into DNA. That's actually what I wound up doing. So, yeah. A couple other questions for you, Mark. You recently had a podcast with Joe Rogan. It was a great show. I think that anybody who wants to go in and listen to more of the talk about ketosis definitely go and listen to that show as well. I'll link to it in the show notes. But I listened to that in preparation for this interview. So I didn't ask you all the same questions, Mark. And one thing that you did mention was that you don't actually use this method that I've recommended before on other podcasts called heart rate variability training or HRV training to monitor your recovery or your nervous system. And you had a very interesting reason why. Then I'm curious and would love to hear you expound on. Can you talk about why you don't rely upon HRV personally?

Sure. I mean, I like the Concept of hrv. I write about it in the book. I've been wanting to use it for a long time, but I kept getting sort of weird readings on any of the software that I, that I was using.

And what do you mean weird?

Well, I'd have great results, like intervals that were like, you know, 0.8, 0.9, 1.2, 0.8, 1.2, 0. 8, 1.2. So my intervals were so sporadic that I literally went to see a cardiologist.

Which would normally be a good, which.

Would normally be so. Yeah, so HRV looks at the interval and wants there to be great variability from one interval to the next. Well, you know, I've been writing about how the type of training I did my whole life was, was counterproductive, was counter at least to my intent to live a long, healthy life. Yeah, I raced fast and I, and I got some good results and you know, I was effective as an athlete, but as a, as a living, breathing human being, it kind of tore me apart. And I've been writing about that for years. And then it's just finally, recently kind of bit me in the ass a little bit. I have premature ventricular contractions. So one of the epidemics that occurs among my generation of endurance athletes is what we call afib. There's a lot of athletes that I know who are my age, who've trained for 30 or 40 years, who have atrial fibrillation. The heart just beats quickly as a result of the innervation being screwed up partly because of a thick ventricle.

Like an athlete's heart.

Like an athlete's heart. So in the case of, in my case, the premature ventricular contractions are probably caused by a few cells that are scarred over the years as a result of my, probably a combination of my training hard, like maxing my heart rate out every day for 40 years and, or some, maybe, maybe a virus. So I have a couple of cells that skip a beat. They cause the ventricle to skip a beat. So it's not life threatening. Seen a couple of cardiologists about it. It was just annoying because on every skipped beat, the ventricle overfills because it's not, you know, squeezing the blood out, it just overfills. So then the catch up beat is this, this great burst of blood manifests itself as a pounding in my chest. It was affecting my sleep. And it would happen every time I got my heart rate above say 90 or 95 beats. It would happen like every other beat would be skipped and What.

What test did you get to diagnose that?

Well, I got an ekg. I got a resting EKG for starters. Then I had. I've had several treadmill stress EKGs.

Okay.

And then I had all the other stuff to just make sure that there was nothing pathogenic in my heart.

Like a. Like an echo cardiogram.

Yeah. And all that stuff. So everything. Everything in a blood test, everything turned out fine. It's just that this is a. And I've seen a couple of specialists who say, you know, we're seeing this and. And it's something that we can. You can either take. I actually take a calcium channel blocker for it. And it's. Now it's fine. It's like, you know, it doesn't. I couldn't go more than 10 minutes without a skip beat four months ago, five months ago. Now I go four days without a skip beat. And that includes if I'm doing some intensity training. So it's all good, but with regard. And by the way. So maybe I'll get back on trying the hrv. But it all was prompted by the fact that. And in fact, I called one of the top HRV people in the country and I told her about my situation, and she sort of chuckled and she said, yeah, PVCs are one of the. Are one of the few things that cause HRV to not be reliable at all.

Yeah, PVCs, probably. Because I know most athletes, from what I understand, because I've done EKGs and actually have a chapter in my book about heart testing and heart issues in athletes. From what I understand, most endurance athletes, because of that athlete's heart, they actually get PVCs once they get up to about 90% of intensity. Almost everybody has electrical abnormalities now.

Right. But you'll see, as you'll see it, it's, you know, it'll be one. One every 10 beats or one every 20 beats or.

Right. But not at rest. Or not. Or not. Not at easier. So it sounds like you were actually having them at rest too, huh?

Well, I was having. At rest and then I was. And I would have. By the way, I would have them at rest if I got, you know, a call from a lawyer or if I got some stressful, you know, stressful news or something that just, you know, didn't sit well with me. So that would. Or. And alcohol, one glass of wine would put me into what they call ectopy.

Interesting.

And when I talk about my being an ectopy, it was every. It was literally every other or every third beat with regularity like it wasn't just like once in a while for an hour. It would be every other or every third beat.

Why do you think alcohol did that?

Well, because these are, these are stressors that. So alcohol is a stressor.

You know, I, I would have thought.

That, like, I had to stop so I, I switched my coffee around to, to decaf from caffeinated coffee for that reason. Huh.

Yeah. I would have thought alcohol would kind of relax you a little bit, but that's. That's really interesting. Yeah, it would be. It would be intriguing to actually see what it would look like to just wear a heart rate variability or heart rate monitor around all day long and take a look at, at the specific things that might cause a dip in HRV or a change in those values. Because from what I understand, and I had a podcast with, with Rhonda from Sweet Beats Heart rate variability Monitoring about this. Apparently that's when I spoke with. Yeah, when you monitor your HRV, apparently it can detect some of those PVCs or can at least give you clues that they might.

Well, that's what happened. That's. That's how I got the clue. I actually got the clue because I couldn't get my. I couldn't get a chest strap. I got three. I got a Polar, I got a Nike. I couldn't get a chest strap to even give me a reading. Wow. I was like, what's going on here? I get on my Versaclimber, I couldn't. I couldn't get a reading at all. And it was because I guess the algorithm in the watch couldn't figure out what the actual rate was because if every third beat is skipped, you know, it's going. It's going beat, beat, beat, beat, beat, beat. It doesn't know how to. It doesn't know how to put a readout on that.

Maybe you're just heartless, Mark.

Well, that too, yeah.

Well, it's super interesting. I mean, you delve into all this stuff in your book. You actually have a really good chapter on heart rate variability in there too. There, There are literally, I think in the first opening pages of the book, there's 115 different takeaways, just many takeaways, just from the first few pages of the book. And so it really was a great read. I enjoyed it. I was nodding my head yes throughout the whole thing. And so if you are listening in and you're curious about my own opinion of this book on endurance, because I actually disagree with much of the endurance training philosophies that are out there. I'm on the same page, pun intended, as Mark when it comes to the stuff he's got in this book. So the show notes, you can get them@bengreenfieldfitness.com PrimalEndurance that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Primal Endurance. And I'll put links to Mark's book, to the primal mayo we talked about, the focal upright desk, his recent podcast with Joe Rogan, DNA fit, genetic testing, everything we talked about. So you can find it all at the show notes@bengreenfieldfitness.com PrimalEndurance and Mark, I want to thank you for coming on the show and sharing some of this stuff with us.

Always a pleasure, Ben.

All right, well, I will let you get back to your perfect day of hookers and crack and beer and wine. Paleo wine.

Paleo wine.

And thanks for your time, man.

Thank you.

All right, folks, this is Ben Greenfield and Mark Sisson, author of the new book Primal Endurance, signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have a healthy week. Hey, it's Ben Greenfield. I hope you're not sick of my voice yet, because I have one last thing to tell you. I have a special survey that you can go check out if you would like to. It's actually a very important listener survey, and the responses to that survey helped make this show the very best that it can be. So the survey takes approximately three minutes of your time. Yes, three minutes of your life you are never going to get back. However, you'll get the instant gratification that comes with knowing you help support this show and also the satisfaction of knowing that you can tell me how you really feel about the show and help me get to know you better. So you can do it now. It's super simple. The URL is super simple. All you do is you go to podcast1.com that's podcast O n E. Like you spell out the word one podcast1.com and that's it. Just go take the survey. Super simple. Boom. Done. All right, now I'll go.

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Sa. Sam.