Your Performance Is Dropping? Here's Why | Dr Phil Maffetone

Overtraining is probably the most significant and frequent problem in sports.

Most runners have no idea this is happening to them. You run more, you train harder, you add some intervals, but somehow you're getting slower, not faster.

There's 3 stages of overtraining, but in the first stage, many people don't know they're overtraining and they are. You may initially speed up a little bit, but then you start to slow down. Consistently month after month. That is a big red flag.

You start waking up at 1 AM, 2 AM. You notice during the day your mood dips. You become a bit more irritable with your children. And somehow you tell yourself this is just stress or daily life.

That is often due to the stress hormone cortisol. It starts to rise at 1 AM or 2 AM and wakes you up. That's a classic stress sign. You've got too much stress.

And yet, when runners fix this, everything changes. One runner in our Personal Best program, Brent, he's 59 years old. By training consistent and at a low intensity, but also by really keeping his stress levels under control, he ended up improving his low-intensity running pace by more than 3 minutes per mile. That is 1 minute and 52 seconds per kilometer.

While you're allowing your body to heal, build your aerobic system and change your diet, and you will become a new person. If you just remove stress, you're going to be a better athlete.

In this conversation, Dr. Phil Methotown breaks down the real signs you're overtraining, the hidden stress that is wrecking your body, and the exact steps to recover so you can improve your running and your health. Before we dive in, excited to share that we now offer for a limited time autographed copies of my new book, Running Breakthroughs. Several of you have reached out that you wanted to get an autographed copy.

So yeah, it's going to be available.

I don't know for how long, but they're going to be available over there at my website, florisgierman.com. A lot of positive feedback on the book already. Thank you so much to anyone who has purchased it either as an audiobook, as a printed book, or as an ebook. Runners from all across the world. So it's basically a summary of 10 years of lessons that I've learned from podcasting, from coaching athletes, and from my own running journey, it really is the book that I wish I read earlier on. You can find it either as an autographed copy or as a regular copy at florisgierman.com, or you can also check on Amazon in your country.

So it's available worldwide.

This episode was brought to you by PATH Projects. This is the running clothing company that I'm one of the co-founders of. Two of my favorite pieces are the Graves PX Shell Jacket that just won a Runner's World Gear of the Year Award and the Pyrenees Hooded Shirt. I wear both of these items frequently, not just during the fall and winter runs, but even during the spring and some of the colder summer days as well. You can get 10% off your order of PATH Projects at pathprojects.com/flow. That is pathprojects.com/flow. Hope you enjoy my conversation with Dr. Phil Maffetone.

Well, Dr. Maffetone, welcome back on the Extra Mileage Show. I'm very excited to have you here. It was 10 years ago, more than 10 years ago that you and I recorded our first conversation. That conversation had 237,000 views by now on YouTube, and it is amazing to see how some of that timeless content from back then is still very relevant over here. So first of all, I want to say thank you for round 5 here today to be back on the show.

Well, thank you. It's really great to be with you again. And I'll say ahead of time, congratulations on your new book, which you will no doubt talk about. But yeah, I mean, that's a big event.

You have played an absolute huge role in that. So Running Breakthroughs, it basically— the book just launched, and this is a collection of more than 10 years of lessons, takeaways, and quotes from the podcast and from my own running and from several other runners out there. And if it wasn't for you, I don't think that book would have existed. So first of all, like, massive thank you for the impact that you have made on me over here and on many runners out there. And I would like to start out with the question of what is it that you have seen from breakthroughs in different athletes over the years? Because I know I've personally experienced it. I've seen several other runners like experience significant changes in their running, in their health. But if you can back up a little bit, what would your teachings— what have you seen happen with athletes over time?

Well, I think there, there's a lot of things. There's a lot of ways to answer that because everyone is an individual and everybody has really their own unique world that they live in. And so when they make positive changes in their, Lifestyle, they, they make unique changes in their existence and really very significantly. But obviously in sports, even though everyone focuses on fitness, the health changes in people, I think, have been the most dramatic things. And, and even back when I was a student, my goal was to help people get healthier and get more fit in even athletes who are not competitive athletes. Everyone who exercises, which should be everyone, needs to become more fit because that's a big part of and the balance to health. Health and fitness should be balanced. So that health factor, which for many athletes, they were surprised to see those health changes occur because the focus typically for me when I was helping back in my, I call it my former career, but it's really not my former career, it's my existing career. Back when I was helping people one-on-one, the, the, the, the focus of people, the reason they came to see me was because they want to be a better athlete. They want to run better marathons. They want to run better 10Ks. They want to not be injured, whatever. And, and it's almost like an all-or-none thing. That's a physiological phrase where, you know, muscles either contract or they don't. There's nothing in between. And so my approach is very similar. It's that Here's all the things you need to do as an individual. We've evaluated you, done all these tests. Here's what I find you should do. Here are the top recommendations. And being healthy is one of the offshoots of that. But the benefits from a performance standpoint have been something that really has been significant as well. And that's something that, you know, I sometimes will get an email or a message from somebody from years ago who did this and did that. And, you know, this is how much they've improved. And it's just, you know, you never get tired of hearing that. So, but the performance improvements in people is always a fun thing because that's their priority. So I enjoy seeing that as well.

It's really interesting how people come to you to almost improve their running times and they come out of it being a healthier athlete. And so many of these things are well connected. And interestingly enough, this morning I drove into the office and I knew like I was gonna record this conversation with you today. And it's funny how the universe works sometimes. As I got to the office, I received a text message from one of our runners in our coaching program, the Personal Best Program, and his name is Brent, Brent Cunningham. And he actually shared with me, hey, Floris, I wanted to share all of the progress that I've made with low heart rate training and with the MAF approach. So Brent Cunningham, he's 59 years old. And he sent over all of his different MAF heart rate data and different tests over the, over the last few years. And so in March of 2023, which is almost 3 years ago, he ran his first MAF test. So he went out to a running track at a heart rate of about 130, and he ran an 11:51 minute per mile. So that's a 7:22 minute per K. And then over time, he started improving. So that pace came down further and further.. And so after like a year, it had dropped. And then like, actually, on a monthly basis, it started dropping. Sometimes he plateaued, sometimes he went back a little bit, and then he kept just being consistent and patient with it. And then yesterday he did another test and he ran it in 8:37 minute miles. So that is a 5:21 minute per K. So he shaved off more than 3 minutes per mile. Purely by making some of these different health and fitness changes and nutritional changes that you have talked about. And one of the main ones over here that was the most eye-opening to me was slow down to speed up and being gentle with the body and not always doing more, but also really keeping that stress element in mind. Can you talk to me a little bit more about the stress element? And even how, even on a day-to-day basis, what practical advice do you have to the listeners here to lower their stress levels and how it can potentially impact their running paces?

Yeah, I mean, that's a really key word, stress. And essentially, if you remove stress from the body, it helps bring out our athletic potential. And it, you know, that's a conceptual thing. But understand that if you just remove stress, you're gonna be a better athlete. And the first thing I have to say after that is some details, which is what is stress? Stress can be physical, stress can be biochemical, our metabolism typically is part of that biochemistry, and stress can be mental, emotional, the brain. And we tend to accumulate stress in our lives. And we tend to accumulate it more than we get rid of it. And so the stress builds up over time and that will wreck your athletic potential. It'll wreck your health and your fitness. And so no matter how well you train, Even if you're doing the perfect thing for your body with a high level of stress, things are not gonna work very well. So people need to, and what I did, and I've written about this, but what I did when I was coaching one-on-one, I would have athletes make a list of all their stresses. And it was really pretty simple. They would make 3 columns. Physical stress, biochemical stress, mental-emotional stress. And over the next few days or the next week or two, they would write down things, you know, like shoes that don't fit, sitting too much. Those are typical physical stresses. Biochemical stresses, diet, very important. Exercise, diet, especially caffeine. Too much caffeine, alcohol, too much alcohol, metabolism. That was a, you know, that's the biochemical stress. And then the mental emotional stress. Everything from, you know, education is a mental stress potentially for people because if you're, if you don't know I mean, it's amazing, but I've seen this many times. People are gonna run a marathon and they really can't figure out the times, whether it's miles or kilometers that they see posted or, okay, I've run this far, how far do I have to go? Seems like simple math, but a lot of people can't, you know, they get confused with that's a stress. You know, when you see, very common, you see somebody gets up in the morning on marathon morning and they have their routine, they're going to do their routine and all of a sudden they start thinking, oh, maybe I shouldn't do that. My friend is doing this, maybe I should do that too. And you go on the bus to get to the starting line and all these people are doing other things and you're saying, gee, maybe I should do that too. Classic. It's a classic stress that will ruin your race without a doubt. So, that, you know, that's sort of the summary answer to the stress factor for not just athletes but for everybody.

Let's actually break it down. So, let's look at the running component. Let's go into the nutritional component, which ties directly into a paper that you recently published. And then, let's look at some of the other factors over here as well. Let's start out with the running component and the running stress. Meaning, if we zoom out, the majority of athletes is training at an intensity that is probably higher than their current fitness level. Meaning they run often in that gray zone, not slow enough on the slow days, and sometimes not hard enough or too hard even on the hard days. Can you share high level to someone who is less familiar with low heart rate training, your philosophy about this and what you have noticed in athletes?

Yeah, I like to look at the body and the muscles and the energy systems, which are all tied together as a balance. So look at it as we have an aerobic system in the body, and we have an anaerobic system of the body, and they need to be balanced. And when we're stressed, our anaerobic system tends to get overactive and mess us up. But when we don't train the aerobic system, we lose aerobic function. That aerobic system becomes literally deficient. And that aerobic system is important because it burns fat for energy. And the anaerobic system burns sugar for energy. So we need to burn a balance of sugar and fat as well. And we're, as humans, we're well endowed with a lot of aerobic system muscles, muscle fibers technically, because in the human body, the muscles are mixed aerobic and anaerobically, except in the jaw, which is all anaerobic. But the aerobic muscles are extensive throughout the body. And so we are, by nature, highly aerobic. We are endurance animals. And yet we also have the ability to sprint, even if we're not trained. We have the ability to quickly get out of the way if somebody's heading toward us with a car or we're in the middle of the road and it starts lightning and thundering, you know. But that aerobic system is really the key for the kind of athletes that you and I deal with often, endurance athletes. Even a 5K, even a 1-mile race is requiring so much aerobic function. And of course, a marathon and an ultramarathon, almost exclusively aerobic. And so that aerobic system needs to be balanced and it needs to develop in order to make the athlete a better athlete. And that's something that develops when we exercise at a relaxed state, at a lower heart rate, if we have to measure something like the heart rate. And I started measuring heart rate because I, I was interested in biofeedback. And I wanted to monitor people from a stress standpoint. And heart rate is an easy one. And today we have all these fancy heart rate monitors which will send message into their computers like the message you got. You know, we had to do that manually years ago. And now it's a lot easier and kind of more fun. But that low heart rate training is what is, I call maximum aerobic function, MAF. MAF means you want to find that optimal heart rate to train that aerobic system so it gets better and better. And every time that aerobic system improves, we get more, we get better circulation. Our metabolism improves because we burn more fat, we store less fat. And among the many things that happen, the good things that happen are we get faster at that same heart rate. So your message you got where this guy went 3 minutes faster per mile over a certain period of time. So that 3 minutes faster is he's still training at the same effort, same level of effort, because he's training at the same heart rate, yet he's much more efficient. So now he can run 3 minutes a mile faster. That's astounding. I'm still astounded by these things even after all these years.

The fascinating part for me is that it doesn't only help indeed with your low-intensity running, it also truly helps because if this If Brent is going out and he's going to run a 5K when he is aerobically 12 minutes per mile versus when he's aerobically 9 minutes per mile, it makes a huge difference over there even—

It does.

And that's what your top end is going to be.

Right. I was just going to say that because as you get better aerobically, you get better anaerobically as well. So that aerobic improvement of 3 minutes translates into your race pace. You can now race faster at the same effort, or if you still want to race at a high effort, you could run much faster. Simple as that. And that applies to runners, to cyclists, to swimmers, to basketball players, to golfers. I mean, it's a human issue in that when you improve the aerobic system, Everything works better. Our ranges of motion improve, our injury rates diminish, on and on.

The part that was eye-opening for me was conversation with Dr. Marco Gazzella, one of our mutual friends and fellow podcast guest as well. He brought up the whole lactate shuttle concept of if you're able to have a good developed aerobic system, even when you start doing high-intensity running, the lactate gets out of your muscles much easier. Do you have any additional thoughts to share around that?

Yeah. It's just part of the natural function of the body doing what it's supposed to do. In this case with the lactate, there's some biochemical relationships there, but simply, As we build the aerobic muscles more and more, they are called red muscles because they're well endowed with circulation. And that circulation also helps the anaerobic muscle fiber. And so now we have the aerobic system improving the, the, the circulation around the anaerobic muscle, which is where we're producing this lactate. So it gets out of the system and doesn't interfere. It doesn't slow us down. However, however you wanna look at it.

So there's a variety of different ways to calculate those low-intensity training zones. If you don't have a heart rate monitor, you can simply go out and run at a conversational pace. There's ways that you can slow down by trying nasal breathing on its own. You have developed a 180 minus your age formula. So there's a variety of different ways that you can train at that low intensity. You have the, the resting heart rate and max heart rate. That's all low intensity focused. I wanna briefly just talk about high intensity because there's two challenges that I come across often with recreational runners. One, they don't do their high intensity running hard enough, but I also see the opposite where they push it to an extent that they are well into the zone 5, into the red zone, and they need multiple days to recover afterwards. Please share your thoughts on some guidelines for high-intensity running.

It depends on the individual. What do they want to do? What are their goals? If they're a competitive athlete, whether an age group athlete or a professional, it's really very similar. It's what do you want to do? What are your goals? And what do you enjoy doing? I personally, I love getting on the track and doing interval-type workout. Mostly, I like doing fartlek workouts on the track. But I grew up on the track as a young athlete. I ran, you know, I was a sprinter. So the track always felt good to me. But many, many athletes are not, they don't like the track. They just don't like it. And so I say, well, then stay away from it. What would you like to do? Hill repeats or fartlek? Just go out and, you know, run on your own in a relaxed way. And, you know, for most of the people who I say that to, when we monitor them, we find that they're in the speed part of the Fartlek or the HIIT, whatever you want to call it, they will run about 90% of their max heart rate. And that may only be for 50 meters or 100 meters. And that's okay. So that correlates really well with the laboratory work. And so I generally say, let's, you know, you want to be around 90% of your max heart rate if you want to use heart rate. You could use feeling and it's going to correspond to the 90% really amazingly well. But you want to have fun doing it. So, you know, it's really that simple. But before you do that, You've got to make sure you've built the aerobic system to keep things balanced. If you haven't, you're in trouble because a lot of people start with a poor aerobic system, right? So that guy was running, what was it, 13 minutes?

12 minutes per mile, just a little, yeah.

12 minutes. So his aerobic system was really not very good, way down here, and he kind of took 3 minutes off from that And now he balanced his aerobic and anaerobic system. That's a huge health benefit and a huge fitness benefit. And that's really the key is to keep everything balanced. So before you do that high-intensity work, you want to make sure your aerobic system is well developed. And it could take 3 to 6 months typically to do that.

A few years ago, or it might have been like 8 years ago or 10 years ago even, at some point I shared 18 months of my math data with you. And this was— it started out with low heart rate training around an 8:30 minute per mile. And like, that was on flat, but I was always running at around a 7 minute per mile. And then I felt like I had to slow down quite a bit. For, for some people listening, 8:30 might already feel very fast, but for me at the time, that felt like I had to slow down significantly. But even there, being able to shave off time, time after time, and some months you would hit a plateau, sometimes you go back a little bit, but you just keep making some of the right, like you're patient with it, you trust the process, you add in speed work when it feels right. Even when it came down to speed work, it was often just once or twice a week, kind of as you indicated too, 15 to 30 minutes of high intensity.. And it wasn't overdoing it there. But after 18 months, I was able to shave that down to— at one point, I was on a track running a 6:08 per mile at a heart rate of 150, which when I was 30 was aerobic still for me. And I could not even believe that that was possible. And, like, it wasn't until I actually experienced it myself, like, wow, this is pretty wild how you can run very comfortable at a much faster pace than you did just 18 months ago before that.

Yeah. And, you know, it's interesting because not that many years ago, there were still physiologists who, when I would say that on a podcast or at a conference or something, they would say, "No, no, no, that's not possible. You can't train at that low heart rate and get faster because you get faster when you train fast." But, you know, and I think less and less you're, you're hearing that, but it was, it was a physiological thing that, that people had a hard time with. Physiologists had a hard time with it.

So be— before we move on to the topic of nutrition, one last question about this is to those listening who have tried low heart rate training, but they felt it didn't work for them, or for those who got impatient with it or it felt too slow. What advice do you have to those people who might have tried but they haven't, haven't noticed some of those benefits or pace improvements?

Yeah, the low heart training works for everyone. If it's not working for you, it's because something is blocking that aerobic stimulation, blocking the aerobic system from getting the benefits from training at the low at the low heart rate level. And the most common reason for blocking the aerobic system is the diet. And people who are eating a lot of carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates, including sugar, suppress the aerobic system because it suppresses fat burning. And so now you've suppressed the fuel of the aerobic muscle. How could you build the aerobic muscle and the aerobic system if you've suppressed fat burning? Because that's the fuel. So that's usually the issue. Stress in general will inhibit aerobic function. And so in some people, there are so many other stresses in their life that, you know, that's impairing the process. But, but the diet is the most common, I think. Yeah.

The, the stress is so eye-opening to me as well. And even looking at one of what some of the more elite athletes are doing is they often try to keep their daily stress levels fairly low. They try to keep their life fairly simple so that they can simply handle more training load, that they can recover better because the stress bucket gets either filled with daily stress or training stress. And if you can keep that low, you can literally handle more training load. And, and even when I look at myself, when I look at myself 10 years ago, 12 years ago, I was able to run 85-mile weeks and I was able to recover and feel good. And if I would be running more than 50 miles a week right now, my wheels would simply come off. I wouldn't be able to do what I'm doing with the podcast and with work and with writing a book and the kids and the family.

Yeah. You have so many other things going on. And people don't understand that. They think, well, here's my life and here's my training and racing. And they're, you know, they're different. They're not different. It's all one big thing.

Yeah. So to those listening, indeed, like just taking an inventory of what's going on in your life and being realistic on the day-to-day. Some days you will be able to push it a bit more and some days you have to stand back. And that can be on a daily basis. It can be on a weekly basis. But there's a time and place for certain training cycles and certain training goals there.

Yeah, stress is cumulative. So we accumulate stress, even if a stress comes on and then eventually goes away, that accumulated stress is still there until we recover. And that recovery issue from training and from life, anything in life, is very, very important. And a lot of athletes just don't put— they put in the training time, but they don't put in the recovery time. That's a very common reason why people don't progress.

One of my favorite ways to reduce stress was actually mentioned by you on one of the first podcasts we recorded, which was the 5-minute break, where it was purely intentional. And I do it frequently still. I even did it yesterday after recording a conversation. I sat down in my car. And I just like took some deep breaths, very calm, very controlled, and I just kind of let my mind organize. And within 5 minutes, you literally feel a switch going from higher stress or fight or flight or whatever tension state you might have been in to like, hey, it's all of a sudden like feeling more controlled. It doesn't need to be a half-hour meditation.

It can be— No, it doesn't need to be an hour. You don't have to go to a class. 5 minutes. It's called the 5-minute power break. And it's really, really simple. It's just what you you described. That's all it takes. You can do it anywhere. And, you know, it's like people will say, well, I don't have time for that. And I have to say, can you repeat that so you could hear what you just said? Because if you don't have time for a 5-minute power break to reset your brain and body, You've got, you've got a lot more problems than you think.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Let's talk about Frontiers journal paper. You recently co-authored this. It is titled Refined Carbohydrates and the Overfed Pandemic: Implications for Brain Health and Public Health Policy. Tell us, what are some of the key findings from this paper?

Well, it's a paper that took quite some time to complete, and it took the journal some time to publish. But, and Professor Paul Larson, who you know, is an author as well. And there are a number of very interesting things. One of the things is that about 80% of the people on Earth have an unhealthy brain. And that's kind of a shocking finding. And then another important aspect, and in looking at all the different things that can affect the brain, we talked about the aerobic system. The aerobic system has a huge impact on brain function. And by the way, athletes, for some reason, when you start talking about the brain, they kind of turn off. But the most important part of the body for an athlete is the brain. That's where everything happens. The aerobic system is important for the brain because as you build the aerobic system, the brain gets more circulation, it gets more function on many different levels, mental levels, because the other end of the muscles that we're trying to build up, the aerobic muscle fibers, the other end is in the brain. So everything we do in training impacts the brain. And if we're not training that aerobic system, then we lose out on that on that benefit. So of course, there's a lot of different things, you know, learning another language and reading about things you, you know, you're not familiar with, listening to music that you're not familiar— all these things have a positive impact on the brain. And I looked at all these different things and really said, let's prioritize them because there's a hierarchy in the nervous system, in our nervous system, And we've learned from public health efforts that when all these recommendations are made to the public, people tend not to do them. They tend to get confused. They say, well, I don't know what to do now because they're hit with all these different things that they should do and then they hear other things. And so I thought, well, let's, let's just say What, what could we do if there was only one primary recommendation? And in the end, the primary recommendation, what affects the brain the most, was refined carbohydrates, including sugar. And therefore, the recommendation is to avoid those things if we want a healthy brain.

So to athletes listening, not everyone might be familiar as an athlete with what exactly refined carbohydrates are. So I think what might be very helpful is if you can share like what are the most common consumed refined carbohydrates and what do you suggest as alternatives.

Yeah. And in the paper I get into this because even, even scientists and clinicians are a little confused about carbohydrates, refined carbohydrates. What's— what is whole, whole grain? You know, these are, these are confusing words because the, the companies that make these products have twisted the definitions around and have, you know, trained the public to think one way when they really should be thinking another way. You know, I used to say when people would ask me that question, I would say, if you have to ask, you're probably eating it. So refined carbohydrates are products that begin from the field growing wheat, other grains that grow in nature, and then those grains are picked harvested and processed, intensely processed, so that the end result is this stuff that really is totally different than what grew. It's almost void or void of nutrients that it had in the beginning, and it has an effect on the body that's very harmful. For example, most grain product, most flours in the marketplace today, and I'm talking about all around the world, are refined carbohydrates. And refined carbohydrates, when we eat them, quickly is converted to sugar. So if we have a, you know, a a small bowl of pasta or some bread, it's just like eating a few teaspoons of sugar. It's the same thing. And the trickery is that, you know, companies say this is whole grain. I think in the US, whole grain on the label means 30% of the flour is whole grain. The other 70% is refined. And refined— when you eat refined carbohydrate with the whole grain, you lose the benefits of the whole grain. So it's really, you know, we as a population, we've been duped.

So just like I grew up in Holland, the Netherlands, and I know food standards and regulations are different in Europe than they are here in the US. You just mentioned this example. But if we, for example, even look at bread, there's a variety of different breads. Would you say across the board, like, there's some better breads than other breads? Or would you say avoid all bread? I'm like, I think the more specific we can be here, the more helpful it would be to the listener, because I think the difference between a white bread that you buy in a store here in the US on a shelf versus like a fresh slice of bread from a bakery in Europe, like ingredient-wise, it's already different, but I would love to hear your thoughts.

Well, virtually all flour and flour products, including corn and lentil, whatever, you know, rye, but especially wheat, are refined. In the US, there, I think there may be 1 or 2 companies that make a whole grain, a true whole grain bread out of whole kernels different grains. Most people will not eat it because they're not used to a rough bread. And you see that in Europe. It's more of a rough— But they have, you know, even in Europe, Japan, Australia, all over the world, this refined flour wave has hit Everything and everywhere. And you have to be really careful to avoid refined carbohydrates. It's not easy, but you can do it. The other, the other component of refined carbohydrate is sugar. It comes, you know, there's like 18 different names for sugar now. So you have to study up on that. But sugar is everywhere. It's in packaged foods all over. In restaurants, even the high-end restaurants, you have to ask, is there sugar in this sauce? Is there cornstarch? Is there, you know, tapioca starch? And, you know, you don't make a lot of friends that way, but you will be much healthier.

It is absolutely eye-opening to me once you walk through a supermarket and you take that lens of what you were just talking about, and you realize that 90 to 95% of the items in the store are processed in one way or another. And yeah, and they're called junk food. It depends a little bit on what type of supermarket you walk into. But outside of the produce aisle, there's a lot of processed food out there. And I think a lot of people are not even that familiar with how much processed items items are out there.

Yeah. And, you know, we should not be swayed by a health food store because they have just as much junk food as the other stores. Maybe not just as much, but, but a lot of organic junk food made with white flour, white sugar, even the organic products, organic white flour and organic sugar are prevalent in all of those foods. That, you know, health food stores tend to carry and people think are natural and healthy because they're in a health food store.

So we've talked about what not to eat. Talk to me about what you do see working well, in particular for athletes.

Yeah, that's, that's often the question, you know, when I go through foods that people shouldn't be eating because I know what they're eating because I've I've done a diet analysis on them and I say, you know, you need to avoid this and that and that. And then they say, well, what can I eat? We have a population that doesn't know what to eat. Take away the junk and they say, well, now what do I do? You know, eggs, natural cheese, all real cheese, meats, fish, and all the vegetables except for potatoes and corn and ketchup are, you know, natural foods. And these are the things we should be eating because when we are eating a diet that is high in refined foods, refined carbohydrates in particular, The levels of nutrients have come way down. And when we take those foods out and we put back healthy foods, real foods, we also bring in a lot of nutrients that we were not getting before and now we're getting. And that's really good for our bodies and of course the brain. And so You know, when people say, well, I can't eat eggs all the time. Well, I could make eggs differently every day for years and not repeat. There's so many ways to make all of these foods, meats and fish, poultry, of course, if you want. But, you know, have a variety, but It's not that hard.

So two, two questions that come up. One is earlier you talked about when a product comes from the ground and it gets processed and it's different when it's, it's being changed around before you consume it. Whereas why potatoes or why even rice would not be on that list of things to eat?

What you just kind of indicated. In the case of rice, it's processed a good amount. In the case of potatoes, like other foods, they are genetically modified by agricultural scientists to be much more starchy than the old potatoes that were really small, which had a lot less starch. And so the consumption of foods that people might say, well, you know, a potato is natural. Well, it's been modified. But what about fruits? They're, they're natural. Now we get into, are you as an individual insulin resistant, meaning your muscles don't allow glucose to be taken in for energy? Very well. So you produce more insulin to try and get more glucose into the muscle. That's called insulin resistance. It's a, it's a big step before diabetes. And many people are into the, that insulin resistant state and they just stay that way the rest of their lives. Some of them go into, into diabetes. And the way you could tell if you're insulin resistant, is to measure body fat. If you have excess body fat, you're insulin resistant. Pretty simple. And you can measure your waist at the level of the belly button and your height. Your waist should be less than half your height. That would indicate you're overfat if that's not the case. So if you have excess body fat, it means you're overfat. If you're overfat, you're insulin resistant. If you're insulin resistant, your intake of natural carbohydrates, fruits, for example, honey, needs to be much lower because you don't tolerate those carbohydrates, those natural carbohydrates very well. A lot of those are stored as fat and you've already got too much, so you wanna reduce them and eat more protein and more natural fats.

One thought that comes up when hearing you mention some of the different— like before we started recording, we were talking briefly about like the coffee with fat or with some butter in it or with some coconut oil and some heavy cream as one of the things that you drink. You mentioned eggs earlier. Sometimes the concern gets brought up by different people of high cholesterol. And I know this is an interesting topic of debate, but I would love to hear your thought when someone says like, well, I really have to watch out for my cholesterol with eating this much fat.

What would you respond to that? Yeah, I think that, that all changed years and years ago, many years ago. The idea that eggs contain, the yolks contain cholesterol, and therefore when we eat them, our cholesterol is gonna go up So that was perpetuated by the cereal companies because they didn't want people eating eggs for breakfast. They wanted you to have their cereal for breakfast. And it worked. And for years, doctors were, you know, warning people about eating eggs and measuring cholesterol. And that whole cholesterol thing has changed. The concern should be that our HDL cholesterol is not high enough. And that is the concern. And our triglycerides, in fact, the triglyceride HDL cholesterol needs to be balanced. And that ratio is the most important number. All the other cholesterol stuff you can discard, you know, it just doesn't apply anymore. This is 2025, not 1982. So I eat 6 eggs a day typically. And you know, and you say that— That's a lot of eggs. You say that and people say, "Oh, but not the yolks." And I said, "It's my favorite part." Great healthy fats in there. And if we're healthy, we metabolize all of this properly. You know, eggs have, they are one of the best, almost the only source of choline of any significance in our diet. Choline is very important for the brain. And when people start losing their memory, they look around and all of a sudden they read an article about choline and then they grab supplements to to try and make up for lost time. That's not the way to do it. The way to do it is to get that choline in now, get it into your brain. It also controls stress. So, you know, so the, the, the same is true with saturated fat. That, that whole phobia about saturated fat has gone away, unfortunately. The companies that are selling you unhealthy foods want you to still think that saturated fats are bad because they're selling you products that are made from vegetable oils that they claim are good when in fact they are the bad, the bad fat. So we need to look at the science. We need clinicians to understand how all this works, not be miseducated and misinformed through social media, typically by the companies that are selling unhealthy products. That's, that's, boy, that's a big problem.

There is so much noise out there. And sometimes it's hard with the one side saying one thing. You just hear from different perspectives. You hear a lot of different inputs over there.

What's important is to experiment on your long training and see, number one, what helps. There's a subjective component to that. You know, how do you feel at the end of a 20-mile run, for example, training run? And then there's an objective measure, which is what does your heart rate do over that period of time? And if you get, if you have enough energy from body fat stores and carbohydrate intake, your heart rate is not gonna go up much during the run, and therefore make you slow down. And so you have to, you have to evaluate that component. And also, people don't understand that one of the biggest problems that many endurance athletes have, especially in a longer race, but even at 10K, is gut, gut dysfunction, gut pain, diarrhea, gut pain. You know, this comes primarily from carbohydrate ingestion. I should say too much carbohydrate ingestion. And so if your gut is happy, there's a good chance that you're ingesting enough but not too much carbohydrate.

And once again, a lot of this comes down to experimenting, right? Seeing what works for one athlete and the body might respond a bit different, or you're somewhere else in your fat burning journey where you, you're still working on improving that, that fat burning ability. And yeah, I think trial and error and journaling, you can learn a lot along the way.

It just, yeah, we all do. I mean, I'm still experimenting with myself and, and, you know, helping other people experiment with their, you know, with their exercise or whatever it is that they need help with. And, you know, we don't know, you know, there are food challenges. We want to challenge our body with food. And the carbohydrate thing is really a food challenge. The 2-week test, which I developed, is a food challenge. And the heart rate, you know, the the, the MAF test where we monitor the heart rate every month or two to see if we're getting faster like your friend did, because then we know we're improving. We don't have to guess. We don't have to— well, I must be improving because I'm putting in all these miles.

Yeah, it is so fascinating, this entire journey. One overarching— you mentioned it earlier, the word enjoyment. During the speed work, meaning do what feels right, do what you're drawn into. You enjoy running on a track, you grew up running on a track, and for you that feels enjoyable. Doing intervals feels better for you than probably doing a very detriment-specific schedule. Other people enjoy doing hill sprints. Other people enjoy just running out there, picking up that pace during their daily runs or whatnot. And I think when I look back through all of the different podcast guests that I've interviewed over the years, the word enjoyment was the most consistent across the board of those who have had a long, fulfilling career in running. And even for recreational runners, that enjoyment actually is such a big one over there.

It is. And it still amazes me to see You know, people running along the road when I drive by and they're not having fun. You know they're not having fun. What can we do about this? And I've worked with athletes who were not having fun and I would literally talk them out of running or talk them out of swimming or whatever it was they're doing. And I'd say, well, what else do you like to do? Well, I like to do this, but you know, I don't have a bike. Go buy a bike. You know, there's a lot of ways you can enjoy recreational exercise and find it, and that will be more fulfilling.

Mixing things up, sometimes cross-training could be like— I picked up pickleball a few years ago. I'm having so much fun with pickleball as well. And for— I realized the other day I was— I used a heart rate monitor for the pickleball and it didn't go that high. It was up in the 110s, 120s. But if you do that for 3, 4 hours, like, you're surely getting a workout in as well. So you do. Wonderful. Do you have any— like, we see over time that there's been a lot of people who have experienced joy and benefits and improvements from the MEF method, from, from your way of teaching and the different fundamentals that you've laid out there with low heart rate training, with the nutrition. Is there anything that you feel is sometimes a misconception about this training approach?

Everything we've talked about. First of all, it's not— I didn't make any of this up. I'm just Looking at the human body and saying, well, here's what the human body does. Here's what it should do more of. Here's what it doesn't like. Let's do more of what it likes and our natural potential will come out. That is a, you know, people sometimes get confused about that. They kind of put athletes into a category you know, well, this person is athletic and I'm not, or, you know, we're all athletic. We're all human beings and we have this incredible brain and body that can do the most amazing things. But if we abuse it, we're in trouble. And so an injury, getting injured, unless we fall fall on a trail or, you know, something like that. An injury means we're doing something wrong. An abnormal symptom, fatigue in the afternoon, means we're doing something wrong. If we don't sleep well at night, something is wrong. Find out what it is. And when you balance the body, when health and fitness are balanced, those abnormal signs and symptoms will, will go away.

There's quite a few people who actually overtrain or feel burned out, but they don't—

Overtraining is probably the most, the most significant and frequent problem in sports. The reason is that many people don't know about it. There's 3 stages of overtraining, but in the first stage, many people don't know they're overtraining and they are. And if you're using a heart monitor, what happens in that first stage of overtraining is you may initially speed up a little bit, but then you start to slow down consistently month after month. That is a big red flag that you are heading into overtraining.

What are some other red flags? What are some other— like, I think it might be helpful because I truly see it happen so much and people not realizing. Like, what are some of the symptoms be from like stage 1, 2, 3? And what are some of the things that we can do? Because I think waking up in the middle of the night is very common for people, and it is also one of these potential symptoms of overtraining.

So tell me a little bit more here. It is. And, and that is often due to the stress hormone cortisol, which instead of starting to rise at 5:00 AM or 6:00 AM, it starts to rise at 1:00 AM or 2:00 AM and wakes you up. That's a classic stress sign. You've got too much stress. But those are, you know, those kinds of things are common. But there's also a mental emotional injury in overtraining. People get depressed. Typically anxiety, depression and anxiety are very common early on in overtraining. But I think the, before these symptoms come on, using a heart monitor to monitor yourself, that's an objective form of biofeedback. And it's a really good way to measure progress. And if you're not making progress, you're probably overtraining.

Another one that comes to mind is irritability. Sometimes I catch myself getting more frustrated with my kids, or I'm shorter with my kids. That's one of the other signs. I think another sign is loss of, or less or lower sex drive is one of the other ones.

Both are very, yes, the, you know, the, the The moodiness is associated with blood sugar problems typically, because again, you've got someone who's insulin resistant and they're making too much insulin. So the insulin brings up your sugar in the blood, but then it brings it down too low. You get moody. The hormones are associated with that as well. But the sex drive effect is strictly from hormones, especially when the stress hormone cortisol goes up. The other hormones, the estrogens and testosterone, which men and women have both, they go down. And we have a population now with the master's runners and the older athletes in general who are, you know, in their 50s, 60s, and 70s who are finding when their testosterone is measured that they have very low testosterone. Unfortunately, they're given testosterone, a prescription of testosterone, which is the worst thing you can do because the cause of it is not that you're lacking testosterone. It's that your stress hormone's up here and it's suppressed the testosterone and the estrogen. So you want to reduce the stress, the cortisol will come back, and the hormones will naturally come back up.

The other one is resting heart rate and heart rate variability, which for me, even seeing the resting heart rate, I, I use an Oura Ring. And for me, I, one of the things I do in the morning, I just check what's my resting heart rate. And you could do it manually. You could do it in a variety of different ways. But typically these days, I'm around 38, 37, 38. But if I start seeing it go even 40 already, I can tell something is off. But once I see it go higher than 40, for example, I go to altitude for a few days, it goes up 5 or 6 or 7 beats. And these stressors, even after hard races or anything like that, it's, it's the resting heart rate and the heart rate variability is, I think, another interesting one to see how that actually comes down.

Yeah. Heart rate variability, very, very important to monitor. They're easier to monitor these days than way back when I first started where I had to send an athlete to a cardiologist and They would do an EKG and they would look at, you know, those days are gone. Of course, resting heart rate, just however you monitor your heart rate, use that to measure your first thing in the morning is a good measure of resting heart rate. But during the day, if you lie down for 7, 8, 10 minutes, relax, you'll get to your your resting heart rate. And in overtraining, the resting heart rate starts to rise. That's why the heart rate variability changes. And again, it's an easy thing to check on a regular basis. And if you're a serious competitive athlete or a serious person about your health, these are the things that you should monitor on a regular basis because they can inform you that whatever you're doing, something is not quite right. And again, the goal is to figure out what's wrong and fix it. If you can't figure out what's wrong, do some research. You know, talk to a coach or a clinician who knows about this stuff. Don't assume your doctor knows anything about any of this stuff because it may not be the case. But it's like, you know, it's like hypertension. If you have hypertension, it means there's a problem because hypertension is an abnormal state. Okay, now you have hypertension. What do I do? Take a prescription? That's treating the symptom. You need to find out what's wrong. In the case of hypertension, it's usually that you're insulin resistant. And when we have people do the 2-week test where they reduce their carbohydrates, their blood pressure quickly comes down.

To anyone not familiar with the 2-week test, can you briefly explain it and where people can find out more information about it?

Yeah, I've, I've written a number of articles about it and they're easy to find. But, but the 2-week test I, I devised back in the early '80s I was, I was trying to help people get off sugar and junk food even back then. You know, it was confusing to them. You know, I'm an athlete, so eating junk food is okay. I'll burn it off. No, no, no. It doesn't work that way. And it was really— it was difficult. I almost had to negotiate with people. And I realized that if they could feel how good their body worked without the sugar, without the junk food, that that would make them realize how important it is, it was. So I devised this period of time, 2 weeks, where they got rid of all their refined carbohydrate, all, all the junk food, and including fruit juice. And during the 2-week test, even fruits, because those people who were insulin resistant wouldn't tolerate them, and many others didn't. But a 2-week period without that, they complain for the first few days because they're sugar addicted, and it can take a few days to to kind of get through that. But by the end of 2 weeks, they're often a new person. They may have lost 8, 10 pounds. Their body fat's lower. They're sleeping better. Their energy's better. They're not hungry anymore. And my, my, my favorite case was a young woman who had done well with everything. She had taken a couple of minutes off her MAF test. She lost a lot of body fat. Mood improved significantly. That was a big problem. She was able to get off her medications and so on and so forth. And over the, you know, after about a year, she seemed to sort of hit a plateau in her training. Her MAF test hit a plateau, and we did some more tests, and I talked to her more, and she happened to mention that both her parents were diabetic. And I said, well, you didn't mention that before. It was on your— you know, I said, well, let's do the, let's do the two, because we didn't do the two-week test because she didn't need to. So I said, let's do the two-week test, let's see what happens. She did the two-week test, she took over a minute off her MAF test, and she was even more of an incredibly balanced person. It was just amazing.

So sometimes it's, it's tricky. It really is. And I've done I've personally done these 2-week tests every few years, actually. I think it's eye-opening. Sometimes I forget about it for a while, and even now today, it's a good reminder again of let's actually just check in when we cut out.

It is. But you know what's even— and you hit on something that's very important— is that we change, our body changes, the foods that are around us, they have different names and And the companies are deceptive in their advertising and all that. But the human body changes as we age. And as we age, we have to adjust our training, our racing. We have to adjust stress, you know, controlling stress. And we have to adjust our food intake. And even if, you know, when we're 25 or 30 years of age, we may be less insulin resistant, so we can consume more fruit as one example. When we're 45, that may not be the case. So be aware that what you find works for you right now may change. It may not work for you as well in the, in the coming years because we all age and our, our needs are modified.

One interesting observation that I had when using a blood glucose monitor is that back in the day I was running a lot, but that was all that I was doing and I wasn't spending any, like barely any time in the gym. And then after I turned 40, I was like, all right, let's really start getting a bit more active in the gym. And I did kind of a pre, uh, and post blood sugar level analysis. And it was interesting to see once I developed more body muscle, my blood sugar levels seemed to stabilize a bit more. And I was able, I was able to handle carbs with a different impact on the blood sugar levels than I was without doing much strength training. So I thought that was an eye-opening observation.

Yeah. Muscle, Over 40.

Wow, that's pretty old.

You're calling me old here. It's not so much about muscle, but about strength. They're two different things. We can have a lot of muscle and not be strong. That's what powerlifters do, or that's what bodybuilders do. They build up a lot of big bulk, but they're among the weakest athletes in the world, actually. So building muscle doesn't necessarily make you strong. What makes you strong is the brain's ability to contract those anaerobic muscle fibers to lift a weight. That is strength. And you can have a skinny guy like me who's very strong, because my brain has been trained to contract more muscles during the lifting of whatever. And that's, you know, easy to measure with an ergometer, those grip strength devices. We have a serious epidemic of weakness in the world among athletes and endurance athletes. Endurance runners are among the weakest, you know, because, uh, of the kind of training they do. And when they lift weights, they're doing the traditional weightlifting, which doesn't necessarily get them strong.

Yeah. And it, that's the interesting thing. It's not that I wasn't doing any strength training. I had a conversation with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee from the UK, and he brought up even just doing a few exercises here and there throughout the day when you have a kettlebell laying around, or whether you like making a coffee and doing 10 squats or you do 10 lunges or anything like that. So the simplicity of integrating strength throughout the day, that is an interesting one too.

Yeah. It's easy to do. I have a barbell, you know, that I— whenever I, you know, walk through the house, I will stop and lift this heavy barbell and do typically squats. And but you never want to get sore with lifting weight because that means you're triggering hypertrophy, which makes the muscle bigger, not necessarily stronger. So that, that's a— well, that's a whole nother podcast, I guess. But that's a— that's something very important because when you're lifting weights and you're creating hypertrophy and the muscles get bigger, if you're an endurance athlete, number one, that's a big stress on your body. How long does it take to recover from that? 2 days, sometimes 3 days. And you're not gonna train in that period. You shouldn't, but you do. And number two, you're, you're adding body weight. And if you add a pound or two, may not seem like much, but if you run a marathon with 2 extra pounds, Yeah, it can be significant for sure.

Earlier we talked about overtraining and there were a few different things already mentioned. You mentioned doing some breathwork, 5 or 10 minutes laying down and calming down the nervous system. The other one was adjusting your nutritional intake and being just cautious or like aware of what you put in your body. Were there any— we talked about training intensity, we talked about not overdoing it in training, low-intensity training, high-intensity training. Is there anything else that comes to mind for you? Because in particular, people listening right now, and I think people underestimate how many people are overtrained or burned out. If someone wants to get back into training again or wants to, like, recover from this, what What other advice do you have here? Because it's a serious underestimated, like, situation.

It's a serious problem. And recovery is the key. You have to recover. And for many athletes, for many runners, recovery means building that aerobic system up. And it could take 6 months of aerobic training where you don't exceed that heart rate threshold. That is making you run slow, but at the same time, you're getting faster. Recovery is such an important factor. But a lot of times, you could just ask an athlete, you know, when was the last time you ran a personal best in whatever, 5K, 10K, you know, marathon? And they have to think, let's see, I think it was 1989. No, that, you know, there is something called aging. And when we age, we, you know, that's why they have age categories because we're not as effective when we're 70 compared to when we're 30. But relatively speaking, I should be just as fast in my age group at my age right now compared to when I was 25. And that generally holds true. But, you know, the fun thing is a big aspect of it. People who are overtrained stop having fun typically. And there, you know, there's so many signs and symptoms like we talked about that indicate that, but that recovery factor is the big one. And it takes time. And while you're allowing your body to heal, build your aerobic system and change your diet and you will become a new person. And I've got all kinds of, good case histories about that from professionals and age groupers and whether you're on a team or a solo. I mean, just, it's human performance and you want to let the body perform its best, which take away the roadblocks and it happens.

So well said. One thing I would add is check in with yourself in the morning and ask yourself, how excited are you to go for a run?. And that internal dialogue, pay close attention to that.

Yeah, you use the A word, awareness. You know, when I teach doctors, I often say, you know, some patients are unaware their arm fell off. And until you say, hey, what happened to your arm? Oh, I didn't notice that. You know, we need to be aware of our body, every little inkling, every little sign and symptom we have is meaningful. You don't want to become obsessed, but you want to become aware, hyper-aware of everything. Do you feel better after a workout? You should. Do you feel better after a good night's sleep? You should. Do you feel great, you know, at 4 PM? You should, energy-wise. Really, You know, that awareness is a key thing.

And don't feel bad taking a few days off from training. Don't feel bad taking walk breaks or even switching to walking altogether for a while.

Oh, walking is such an amazing workout. It's more than amazing. But people are thinking, gee, if I don't run, My competition's going to be training and I'll lose that much more. You know, come on. Recovery is, you know, one of the things that happens with recovery is we get stronger while we're recovering. While we're doing nothing, we get stronger.

What a deal. We are already way over our estimated time that we were going to be recording. There's so many topics that I enjoy talking about with you. Where can people find the study that you just published?

Well, if you go to my website, maffetonemusic.com, on the home page you'll see a new brain study. If you click that, you'll be able to read the press release, which kind of overviews the whole study, which is too technical, more technical than I wanted, but that's what they wanted. And then there's a link to the actual study, which is— you'll need a lot of coffee to read that.

It's a long scroll for sure, but I loved going through that, and I'll make sure to link to all of those in the show notes as well. In closing, do you have any closing thoughts that you would like to share? There's a lot of athletes listening, want to become a stronger, healthier, happier athlete. Anything in closing you would like to share with them?

If you're not sure, I mean, you should be sure whether things are working well for you. If you're running your best, if your energy is good, you're not eating, you know, stop what you're doing and ask yourself, just like we've been talking about, ask yourself, you know, am I going to enjoy my run today? Or when you finished a workout, or when you finished a race. Do you want to do it again? Maybe not that day, but, you know, it should be fun. Every workout should be fun. And the individuality component is really important. What your training partner is doing is probably a lot different from what you should be doing. And it's possible that It's something you never want to do, but you're an individual.

Find out what works for you. So well said. Dr. Maffredone, thank you very much.

Really enjoyed this conversation. And thanks, Floris. I did too. I appreciate it.

And again, congratulations on your book. Thank you so much. And I look forward to round 6 again when the time is right, and I'm sure that will be coming up here again soon.

Just let me know.

I'd, I'd be honored. Awesome. All right. Have a good rest of your day. You too.

Bye now. Thanks so much for listening. I can't believe I've been speaking with Dr. Maffetone for more than a decade now, and I still pick up things here and there again. Would love to hear from you.

What was your favorite lesson, takeaway, or quote from this specific conversation?

Also, if you would like to find signed copies and autographed copy of my new book, Running Breakthroughs. You can find out more at florisgierman.com. To learn more about our running coaching program that Brent, who was mentioned in this podcast a few times, is a part of as well, you can check out pbprogram.com. Thanks so much for listening.

Have fun out there on your runs.

Bye now.