5 Ways to Improve Your Mitochondria

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What are you waiting for? Good night.

On today's episode, how to improve your mitochondrial health and why.

What is it and how do you benefit?

I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. And it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international speaker, to founder of the first and the only exclusively made for menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity, and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve.

Exercise is of course one of the best ways to improve your mitochondrial health, and yet it's not as easy as just exercise. It's not the anything is better than nothing. It's actually getting very specific about what it is that you can do to most give you the biggest return on your investment. Of time and of energy, because both are potentially a more limited commodity as we age. So first, though, let's talk about why you want to know. If you want a deeper conversation, I've also got a couple of resources for you I'll put in the show notes today. There are prior Flipping 50 episodes I'll link to. And if you love to geek out and you love 2-hour-long explanations, you may want to listen to some episodes by Peter Attia and podcasts by Rhonda Patrick, episodes on mitochondrial health. But if you're wanting the Reader's Digest condensed click notes, this is it, broken down simply so a 5-year-old can understand it. Not that you are, and not that you can't handle more, but I think all of us want Give me the easy cheat sheet. Tell me why this is important. Help me connect the dots between what I'm about to do in my workout today and how it's going to get me better results. If that's you, this is the right place. So both Peter Attia and Rhonda Patrick, by the way, they're great resources. They both host longer shows that for the most part, many of you expressed you don't have the time or maybe the patience, but they are a very good deep dive if there's a specific topic you're looking for help with within the health and fitness realm. Counter to some of the bros in science, I also have to say I don't agree with zone 2 training being the best thing for women to improve mitochondria and specifically VO2 max capacity. VO2 max is the measure of oxygen carrying capacity, and we once had it far better than we do now. And we have to work for it to maintain a higher level of VO2 than we otherwise would have, thanks to the effects of aging. And in part, for women, thanks to the effects of menopause, because in so many ways menopause can be a negative impact. By, you know, a woman who's not sleeping, who is suffering from insomnia, is likely to miss more workouts. That's going to harm mitochondrial production, because it's true that simply exercising will improve your mitochondria beyond not exercising at all. But if you are a female, what we need to know is distinctly we burn calories for fuel differently than men do during exercise, and that is we burn a higher percentage of fat for fuel just naturally. Not trying, by comparison to our counterparts. We also recover slightly differently after exercise compared to men. And all of that is just by mere— we're women, that's what happened. So it also makes sense that when you hear people say, and research suggests that historically research tells us, you will improve your mitochondria by doing zone 2 training, the majority of the subjects the research was based on are male. So we kind of have to hold out and put together what do we know about exercise physiology, what do we know about menopause physiology, and kind of a healthy nod to Stacy Sims that this is an important consideration to look at, all right, we don't have enough research with women only, so we need to use our heads and look at this pool of knowledge and this pool of knowledge and put them together and say, together, what do the two of them tell us? And we may have to work that way for longer than we like. So first of all, before we go any further, what is the importance of mitochondria? And I can take you back to the time in probably 1984, sitting in the small classroom with Dr. Wally Hutchinson, who already at that time had very wild and white hair, and he was wonderful. And I remember him telling me that mitochondria is where all ATP is produced, and ATP is required for everything that we do that requires energy. Everything— sleeping, breathing, going upstairs, actually exercising. So if we want to function better, we can generate more ATP in order to do it, and we need those mitochondria to be the powerhouses producing that source of energy that is ATP. So the importance of it is, as we age, it is natural for people to accept that going upstairs makes them more tired than it did 10 or 20 or 40 years ago. People accept the fact that they get out of breath doing things that they didn't used to get out of breath doing. With better mitochondrial production as we age, we don't necessarily have to tolerate quite the downshift that at one point we did think we needed to. Studies that I've been talking about for over a decade now proved that with the right exercise training and focus, a 70-year-old could have the same mitochondria production as a 20-year-old. We can reverse the aging that has occurred. We can get it back. Even if we've suffered mitochondrial decline. So just what are the 5 best ways to increase your mitochondrial production, knowing that you might be a little bit more motivated to have a little bit more energy doing the things you do every day anyway? What are the 5 best ways? So here they are. Number 1, regular physical activity. Now, if you're not having daily regular physical activity, that's number 1. Just get off the couch, start walking a little bit, even if it's 10 more minutes that you're walking and doing a dedicated walk every day, or 10 minutes of dancing around your house and you weren't doing that regularly, that's gonna improve you from where you were. Certainly now if you're going for a 30-minute walk or 45-minute walk on a daily basis, probably you've been improving even more. Once you have that base of support, I wouldn't suggest, okay, well let's keep going, let's add Now let's do an hour and a half. So there's a point where, yes, getting in your steps is important, but you know that those steps are not necessarily best accumulated by go for a walk, go for another walk, go for a longer walk. That's really not the whole basis. The basis of using a step counter is to see how active are you during the day. And for those people who are not active at all because they do a lot of sitting at their work, then the exchange may be you need to go for a walk. Walk because you're otherwise not getting it. For somebody who might be delivering the mail, do they need to go for a walk after work? No. And it's not the best use of their time. If you are already walking significantly, say you're a teacher, you're on your feet all day, might be beneficial for you to go for a 30, 45-minute walk. And yet if that's the only extra thing you're doing, you're probably shooting yourself in the foot. The better thing to do would be exchange some of those additional steps that you're getting. 6,000 and 7,000, we see more. If you're shortchanging yourself on the strength training route is not a good thing. So I want you to look at that first. Now, if you're getting 6,000 or 7,000, at least check that box. You are also strength training at least twice per week. That may be adequate and enough and what you want. In fact, if you're a woman in perimenopause Post-menopause, you may tolerate a third time a week provided you're getting the rest and recovery you need, and these workouts are complementary, not just hard and hard and hard and making you couch compensate. But if you're getting all the things, then yes, you actually may do well adding a few more steps if you have the energy to do it. But you want to check all the other boxes first and make sure, have I got my walking foundation? Have I got strength training? Have I got mobility work in there? Have I got some power? I'm doing some jumping, explosive movement, and/or quick strength training, not just always slow and controlled. And am I doing some agility work, getting some high-intensity interval training? And then come back to more steps might be good. Okay, so really important that you look at, yes, regular physical activity, but hit that base building work. Get the strength training and potentially do HIIT. And if that's feeling like, mm, right now it's a little too much, maybe for the amount of stress that you're already going through or the fatigue that you might already feel, then we take that one back off. The next thing, physical activity plus intermittent fasting actually has seen some benefits in mitochondrial production. And here's how and why. Both physical activity and intermittent fasting are what we call hormetic stressors, meaning like it sounds, we're causing and imposing hormonal stress to occur. And what happens when you put stress on something? Well, in the case of a diamond or coal, something beautiful, right? And something innately beautiful happens within the human body as well. When we put stress on the body in a calculated way, and the body is somewhat prepared for it and resilient and ready to respond, you also will result with something positive happening. Sometimes that is an increase in lean muscle mass. Sometimes it's an increase of bone density. Sometimes it's an increase in your VO2 max, your oxygen carrying capacity. And at the base and root of all of those are improved mitochondrial production. So intermittent fasting is another way to do it. Now you can intermittent fast in so many ways, and the first and the easiest is if you normally eat 3 meals, just eat those 3 meals a little closer together. Start your breakfast half an hour or an hour later, have your dinner half an hour or an hour earlier. You've done by default a change of 1 hour or 2 hours more of that window where you're fasting. And all that's doing is giving your body a little bit of a break and again applying a little hormetic stressor. Now, if you go a little bit longer with that intermittent fasting, it can be beneficial, but it isn't always for everyone. And you really have to know what happens. So for instance, I periodically will test with a continuous blood glucose monitor, and I also will do something called a lumen. So I'm measuring my— through my breath, my exhaled air, I'm measuring what am I burning right now. Is it carbs or is it fat? And for the most of us, the goal with intermittent fasting is the longer I fast, the more I'm in a fat-burning stage. Well, that's not true for everyone, especially for a woman in midlife. We have to look really closely at is this having the desired effect, because if you are, for instance, already stressed because you're a woman in midlife. I mean, you punched that ticket just by being in your 40s and beyond. There's no way of getting around it. You didn't know you wanted to go to the concert, but you have the front row seat. It's there. So if you have that and maybe any other stressors in your life right now— emotional, financial, changing homes, moving state to state, Caregiving. A number of things come up in midlife, do they not? That could, if you also add this extended intermittent fast, be too many stressors coming at you at once. Now, you and I can respond pretty positively to almost any stressor when we're resilient and ready for it, but we can't respond to multiple stressors We've got this bucket, and if something tips the bucket and we're full, we're overloaded, then all hell breaks out. There's no better way to say it. Not the desired effect, but in fact the opposite of desired effects. So through use of Alumin, I would see that when I would go 14, 15, 16 hours, the longer I would go in intermittent fasting,, the more I was coming back to burning carbs. It was backfiring. So if I were at 12 and 13 hours, I was burning more fat for fuel. But the longer I went, the more stressed my body got. Now, that might be because I'm somebody who prefers and enjoys moving more. I need the fuel for the exercise. Not having it puts my body under a certain degree of stress. You know, it's hard to tell. It also could have been that moment in time, and I could go back, look at it again. But I know from just continuous blood glucose monitoring that again, if I go longer, my blood sugar goes up even though I haven't eaten anything. Did you know it doesn't have to be response to food? It's any stressor that can elevate blood sugar. So intermittent fasting or just doing 2 meals a day with a short window can increase your mitochondria. Just want to caution you as a woman in midlife not to take that just blankly and boldly and say, well, this works for everybody. It may or may not work for you. And I've heard many women say intermittent fasting works for me like a dream. I've heard other women say, yeah, when I do that, I actually gain weight. And I feel terrible. So no judgment whether it does or it doesn't work for you, but you may need to experiment in order to know.

Hey, this is Debra Atkinson, and there is one thing you can't do in the gym at your age, and that's get all the protein that you need. You've got to do that in the kitchen. To make it easy for myself, not only to get the protein but the fiber, the fruits and vegetables I want daily, I started drinking a smoothie a day 30 years ago. But when I realized all the junk, the sugar, and the extras that you don't want, that I don't want, hiding in most protein powders, that's when I finally caved in after years of saying I will never, ever, ever sell supplements. Stop skipping, skimping, and sabotaging yourself in the morning after workouts by always being prepared. Look, yep, I agree, real food first, but it's just not convenient to carry a turkey sandwich sometimes. The protein— and don't forget the fiber— they kill cravings and they boost satiety. And you've got to make it easy to do the right thing. You can use code PODCAST for 10% off your first order at Flipping50.com today.

Number 3 is to reduce your stress level. And basically what you're doing here is opening the gate. Your body can't produce mitochondria while it's busy helping you survive. Well, it's in survival mode, fight or flight, because you're under stress. It's not going to do the extra additional things to reverse aging, create mitochondria. It can't do that. So it's got to do the base job. Do you remember back in— for me, I think the first time I ever heard this lesson, or certainly paid attention. That could tell you how much I was talking in high school. But I think in high school or in college, the first time I heard this, I was probably in either a health studies or a psychology course. And it was the hierarchy of needs, right? Maslow's hierarchy of needs, you know, and the base of that is safety and security. So if your body has this sense that you're not safe and secure, and that is our perception of stress is high, Even if it's an imagined threat, if we feel like we're under siege, we have this threat and we have this response. Our brain has suggested release more cortisol and your body is now in this fight or flight. So it's not gonna do the extra, the nice, the reverse your aging. It's over here saying, no, no, no, shut everything down. Batten the hatches, we're protecting. Okay, so reducing your stress level doesn't in itself— oh, now I'm producing mitochondria— but it makes it possible. Next, number 4 is prioritize your sleep. Now this one comes back to reducing your stress. If you're sleep deprived, you are under stress because while you sleep, we reset our hormones, and many of those related to supporting our exercise. As you've heard me say in other podcasts, you know, we have to have the R-optimal of our testosterone and our growth hormone. But we also want to pay attention to the fact that sleep, if we're deprived, puts us under stress. So we are wonky in terms of cortisol if we're not sleeping. And back to our previous mention, reduce stress. So we want to prioritize our sleep. And there's, there's two things tucked into this, right? Prioritize it. I mean, come on guys, go to bed, go to bed. The movie's not that good. The rerun, the replay, it'll be there on Netflix tomorrow at an earlier time. Don't get stuck on that, but prioritize it by going to bed. Don't get started doing something and then staying up late. And prioritize sleep at night by keeping it cool, dark, and quiet. And sometimes, you know, that might require sleeping in another room from your partner, sleeping in another room from your pets if possible. I find, again, you've heard me say this, most women will forego their spouse, but not their dog. So, you know, when an old dog gets old, that is a hard thing. You can't necessarily say, I'm gonna sleep in the other room if they're there and you're watching them for— they need your support. I get it. But that's a tough one. So you want to prioritize your sleep. And there is the, yes, put it as a high priority, but there's also prioritize finding The reasons you aren't now or how to. So there are almost 2 dozen solutions to help step by step by step. Getting up at the same time every day, 365. There's no such thing as sleeping in. There's a regular schedule. Your body needs that clock. There is going to bed then at about the same time because you have a sleep need and you have to meet it every night. There is having a routine the first 2 hours of the day when you get up to set your bedtime better already then. And the last 2 hours at night, having a routine then. There are ways to elevate your core temperature about 90 minutes before bed so that as the temperature falls, it's a cue to our brains that we should go to sleep. So that could be a sauna, that could be a hot shower or bath, could be Epsom salt in that bath, could be lavender and Epsom salt in that bath. So many things in ways that you can prioritize. But if you're asleep, that is when you're regenerating. So we don't cause mitochondrial problems in the first place. Number 5, nutritional supplementation. And I'm going to share a couple of the ones that I do. And these are not your typical vitamin A, magnesium supplements. These are kind of the additional extracurricular supplements. And one of those is Mitopure. That is a brand name, but is— erythritolin A is the derivative in it. Mitopure is the product where it's delivering it. Results are seen in about 2 months of supplementation of about 500 milligrams a day in an increase of mitochondria and an increased energy that you will feel and see. But it is literally the kind of anti-aging support our bodies, we used to produce urothelin A. We produce less of it as we age. You can find it in some natural foods, but you can't find it in the concentrations that you need without eating like truckloads of, say, pomegranates or pomegranate juice. But then what's the counter? Pomegranate juice, lots of sugar, right? So there's a trade-off for doing it. Urothelin A coming in the package of MitoPure, and there are two ways to take MitoPure. There's powder powder. So you could stir it in or drop it into a smoothie if you wanted to. You could stir it into yogurt, whether that's dairy-free yogurt depending on who you are. But it has a little taste, so there's a little berry taste to it, very kind of benign. I mean, it doesn't taste great, it doesn't taste bad, it's just okay. It tastes, um, but an easy way to consume, and you can dump it into your smoothie and then never know it's there.. So you've got different ways to take it. Other supplements like NAD, NAD, or CoQ10, and CoQ10 is something you've probably heard more often in order to supplement energy production, but these ignore the need to clear out poor mitochondria. So we need kind of Pac-Man going through clearing out the bad mitochondria for the inactive. It's like taking out the trash. That's the autophagy analogy to intermittent fasting. The reason intermittent fasting seems to work, or severe caloric, um, decrease tends to work with longevity benefits, is when your system is not busy digesting and having to do all these other things of breaking down food, digesting and putting it everywhere, it's like Oh, the factory is closed. It's like it's the weekend. There's time to go sailing and biking and all the things. Similarly, your body kind of sweeps through and has this autophagy of, you know, the bad cells, the dead cells get eaten up, get swept away, taken care of, so the body actually can function in a better way. And this is somewhat similar to what occurs with poor mitochondria function, the inactive mitochondria, which is what Uricillin A does. So if you simply took CoQ10 or NAD+, it would improve the benefit, potentially the function of mitochondria, but you're not actually making room for it because you're not cleaning up the garbage, you're not taking out the old stuff. Uricillin A does that and helps get rid of it so that your energy production through the other means you're doing it will actually have more efficacy. So it also improves the quality and the quantity of your mitochondria. Greater resistance to fatigue— this is how you're going to feel when you've got it. Then if you have greater resistance to fatigue when you're going for walks, potentially moving more spontaneously during the day because you feel good, you have energy, total energy expenditure increases, and your blood sugar levels improve It's a positive domino effect, right? So everything good begins to happen once you clean up the mess and then start producing more mitochondria. There's more energy. Let's go for a walk. I'm moving more muscle now. I'm creating more muscle now, and I'm spontaneously more active all day. All of that lends right back into more mitochondria production. And part of the reason during aging we reduce mitochondria production is those old cells that need to be cleaned up, but it's also we become less active and therefore we don't have this stimulus for creating more on our own. So one of my favorite supplements you've probably heard me talk about is C60. So C60, or carbon 60, is a molecule that was discovered, I think it's back in 1996, might have been discovered prior to that, but in '96, I believe, it won a Nobel Prize for the— it being a longevity agent. It reduces inflammation from oxidation and free radical damage. Now, we were having oxidation when we exercised when we were 20, but all of our cells were so young that the oxidation didn't matter as much. So even with exercise The more we do quote-unquote cardio, we actually may be accelerating our aging to some extent. We want to do the minimum viable amount of cardio in order to get results without having exposure to oxidation. Those of us, self-included, those of us who love endurance training, we're exposing ourselves to more oxidation when our eyeballs, for instance, are exposed to air, you know, that is causing oxidation. And so much of that and what occurs with aging is oxidation from, from the exposure to more and more oxygen and free radical damage that occurs. There's a degeneration of cartilage, but that too is improved by C60. It boosts immunity, it increases hair growth. And I'm talking about just my hair growing longer, new hair growth within 3 weeks. That was my experience. That is not why I started taking it. It was like a, what, what's going on here? And even my hairdresser noticed that. Libido improvement for women in midlife who might be, say, taking hormones., you may notice that your body's ability to use those hormones goes up. So as you take C60, you may need less of that hormone. While I've been on C60, I have noticed that my need for thyroid decreased, so I didn't need as much as they had been on temporarily. So we came back down. I also believe that it increases the production and the use of the supplemental estrogen that I'm taking now and/or the benefits of my testosterone. So I'm taking some but already create some on my own. Your hormones will function better if you're on it. So it's a longevity agent. It reduces inflammation from oxidation or free radical damage. It supports and enhances the degeneration of cartilage, meaning if you've had a loss of cartilage. So it supports your joint health, boosts your immunity, improves hair growth, libido, hormones will function better. All good things. So in the show notes today, I'll put the links to those supplements. And there's one more that I want to mention, and that was energy bits. So it's spirulina and algae, essentially, or chlorophyll. So taking those in, it's real food, actually. I mean, algae is nothing but real food. There's nothing more in it. And it's from the sea, so it tastes a little salty, tastes a little bit like a snack food if you were to chew on several of the tablets. Can actually be great if you're trying to fast and don't want to take in anything additionally. But that also has been shown to improve mitochondria. So I will put the links to Energybits, to C60, and MitoPure for those of you who want to go to the page and learn more about those products. I do have a link. I earn a small commission on each of those, and I only put things up that I truly use. And believe in myself. But I want to recap for you. So what was that? Those 5 things, 5 ways to improve your mitochondria, meaning your energy level. The results from exercise that you are doing on a daily basis. Regular physical activity, cover all the bases. Intermittent fasting, if it's appropriate for you. Reduce your stress level. Work on your coping skills. We may not be able to eliminate the stressors, but we can balance it by coping skills. Prioritize your sleep. If you're prioritizing and trying, be sure that you're prioritizing really finding out and seeking out somebody who can help you with the means to get to sleep. And then last but not least, consider nutritional supplement, supplementation to help you not only generate and improve your mitochondrial production, but to help clean up the ones that are not working well. We need both pieces going on there. I hope that was helpful. Improving your mitochondria is integral to feeling the energy that you deserve as we age. And the more energetic you feel, the more things you are going to be interested in doing, and the better your brain function. Show notes for today will be at flipping50.com/improveyourmitochondria.

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