- [Man] Good morning trainiacs.
We are back.
We have a video to do you and me.
Last week on Instagram
I put up a post comparing where I was roughly
around summer of last year and where I am now.
Little bit of progress that I've made.
I'm not as shredded as I was say in my prime
like two years ago, but it's progress.
I'm happy.
Now in that post,
I said that endurance training lowers your metabolism
and the good people,
the open-minded people that people will want to learn said
that they were intrigued by that,
the other people that find themselves to
be internet scientists said that I am off my rocker
and there is no possible way that
isn't, it's bro science.
This is like saying water's wet.
And all of you said like, how dare you say that water's wet.
It is not wet.
That's bro science.
Yeah. You're about to learn that yes
endurance training can lower metabolism
but there are things that you can do to speed it back
up with your endurance training and your nutrition.
We're going to talk about all of that today.
Oh, lockdown, you've brought out the best in people.
Let's start by stating four facts.
These are factual things that we know.
Number one, there is the concept of homeostasis.
The body does not want to change.
It wants to stay the same.
This is the concept of homeostasis.
Second, matter can't evaporate.
Matter can't turn into nothing,
matter has to turn into something.
So, whatever we drink, whatever we eat, whatever we ingest,
whatever we rub into our body
it has to turn into something.
It doesn't just absolutely go away.
It doesn't evaporate.
This you might hear of on Greg Doucet channel
as the law of thermal dynamics,
that things can't change into non things.
The things have to go somewhere.
Your body has to do something with all these things
that come into our body.
The third thing is that combining
homeostasis with that law of thermodynamics
your metabolism adjusts up and down, it can change
in reaction to that in order to try to stay the same.
If you're trying to gain weight really, really quickly
it's going to end up speeding up
the metabolism to make it harder and harder.
This is why you have the concept of bodybuilders with like
early gains.
That when you first start making changes
you change at a very rapid pace, but it slows down.
(bell dings)
Same thing with when you're trying to lose weight.
When you're trying to lose weight
your metabolism slows down to stop that weight loss
and stay in homeostasis closer to where you started out.
Something that we also know with the metabolism going up
and down in its speed and how many calories
it burns day to day is that it likes to slow down
and make it harder for you to lose weight.
Then it likes to speed up
and make it easier for you to lose weight.
Finally, the fourth thing that we know is
that the more lean muscle tissue you have
the faster your metabolism is.
If you're lighter
if you're leaner, if you're built like a runner
like a lot of triathletes historically have been
your metabolism is going to be a lot slower than
if you are a 300 pound ripped bodybuilder and you have all
of that lean muscle tissue to fuel
every single day.
So now let's look at an example of how all of this works
in actual real life.
There was a study done of the biggest loser contestants,
and what they found is that the vast majority
of biggest loser contestants lose a ton of weight,
and then they end up gaining it back later.
Why did this happen?
And when they lost weight
they would expect that their metabolism slowed
down by about 200 calories per day because,
there is that much less tissue to move around.
But what they found was that their metabolism slowed down
by about 700 calories per day.
It overshot and actually slowed down
a lot more than they would expect.
Why is this, what is the mechanism for this?
The mechanism for this is the metabolism going up and down.
And what was the reason for that up and down?
It was a calorie deficit.
When the body sees that there is a calorie deficit
it wants to slow down the metabolism
to stop your body from losing weight.
And the reason for that is that in periods of famine
which happened weekly, if not every single day
it was much easier to access the fat
stored as fuel on our body
than it was to go and find more food.
This was a safety mechanism.
So in response to that calorie deficit
the body ended up slowing down more
than it needed to, to preserve all of that fat.
What else can create a calorie deficit? Exercise.
If you all of a sudden start ramping up
from no exercise to lots of exercise
your body is going to experience a calorie deficit
because you're burning off more calories in a day.
And, originally your appetite, isn't going to increase
alongside that, or let's say you're already active
and you start building up to a race.
You're going to be increasing
the amount of calories that you burn,
because you're probably going to be exercising more hours
and more intensely.
So again, you're going to be increasing the amount
of calories that you burn every single day.
And it's very, very hard to get that balance, right
where you are taking in just enough to not gain weight
but then also exercise just enough so that you're
in this nice little balance more often than not,
what ends up happening is people have
a maintenance level of calories.
They start exercising more creating a calorie deficit,
lose a little bit of weight and even though you might say,
Hey you know what I did good.
I lost a little bit of weight.
Do that time and time again, it's more and more signals
for your body to end up
slowing the metabolism down more and more.
That's why you see from hours 12 to 17, the majority
of the finishers in an Ironman, they're not ripped,
they're not super lean it's because
most of the athletes out there aren't genetically
gifted enough to have this lean, super ripped physique
while having that balance of eating enough
to not feel ill and not eating so much
that you're gaining tremendous amounts of weight.
What happens is your body slows down the metabolism
to find that same sort of balance
and maybe you've lost 10, 20, 30, 40 pounds.
Yeah. Like great.
But overall, your body has no choice
but to slow down because more often than not,
we are in a calorie deficit
just because of how much we exercise.
It's the fact.
Now some of the astute people out there might be saying,
Hey, but aren't there studies that show
that metabolism is actually sped up by exercise.
Well, first, yes, that is a study that is out there
and that's, what's been shown
but there are a couple of things about this.
One, this is taking absolutely sedentary athletes
and giving them a modest amount
of exercise for a short period of time.
So, it's not taking athletes that are training
for an ultra endurance event, like a triathlon.
Also a lot of the studies out there are just generalizing
exercise as actually increasing your metabolism.
Some does, but other exercise doesn't.
And then I actually started citing studies
and then people were like, you know, Taryn.
I don't believe studies.
So I'm like, okay, I can't win.
So I'm not going to play this game.
You want to learn from this video, great.
If you don't, great, fine, it's not my problem.
But the reason that there are no long-term studies
of years of endurance exercise slowing down metabolism is
because it's almost impossible to design a study
where you control for exercise levels, for calorie intake,
for all of the various demographics that are associated
with aging, with muscle loss, with all of these things
to actually say endurance exercise slows down metabolism.
Anything past about a three month period is almost unheard
of in a study because it's too hard to control for.
My old coach, Dr. Dan Pluse.
He actually did a study that was three months long
and it was known as the longest standing study
on low carbon endurance train that there had ever been.
Three months, that's it.
And it just three months, you're just barely
starting to see the effect of long-term endurance training.
So you're not going to see these studies out there
and we have to infer what's going to happen
by some of the other things that we do know.
One thing that we do know is if you take an athlete
and at the start of a build season, right at say, January
you get them into a lab and test them on a metabolic cart,
and you find out how much calories
they're burning during exercise.
Then, you come back at the end of the season
when they're totally trained.
When they're as efficient as possible, you get the mask
and you find out exactly how much calories they're burning
what's going to happen is you're actually
going to see that during exercise
they're going to burn fewer calories in season.
Why is this happening?
Because the body is adapting.
It wants to be more efficient.
It wants to conserve calories.
So, as you are progressing throughout your training cycle
regardless of your calories in calories out
if you're training well and getting fitter,
you're actually going to burn
fewer calories during exercise
than when you are unfit.
sounds a lot like the body slowing down in that.
So, now how do we combat this?
Number one, strength training. Strength training builds
lean muscle tissue and as we talked about before
if you have more lean muscle tissue
you are going to have a faster metabolism.
So, don't ignore strength training.
Even if you can maintain your muscle tissue
while you're doing endurance training.
And while you're aging, you are going to be able to
incur these calorie deficits a little bit easier.
You're not going to have to keep lowering
and lowering and lowering your calories
to stay as ripped or even not as ripped
just as fitting into clothes as you want to be.
The second thing that you can do to
combat this is hit training.
I really like hit training from the standpoint
of 80, 20 balance polarized training balance
a pyramidical model of balance
all good training plans have the vast majority
of their training at low intensity, and then a small amount
of their training at high-intensity doing that training
at high intensity is what actually makes you faster.
The low intensity is what allows you to work really
fast here and absorb it.
But in addition to that
when you do really maximal effort hit training
there's something called,
post exercise oxygen consumption
because you're in an anaerobic state
during that hit training if you go hard enough,
your body is in an oxygen debt
and it ends up kind of boosting your metabolism
over the next 36 to 48 hours.
So while you don't burn a ton of calories
because these workouts tend to be short during,
you burn more calories after.
It tends to ramp up your metabolism after the workouts done.
The third thing that makes a difference is not
just how much you eat.
It's what you eat.
The different types of food you eat
has a different effect on your metabolism.
There's something called the thermic effect of food
which is how much energy it takes your body
to actually process, digest, work through and
get out all of the food that you eat.
If you're eating a lot of protein, it's going to
take about 25% of the calories that you're ingesting
from that protein to actually digest the protein.
Pretty good.
If you're eating carbohydrates,
it's only about 6 to 8% of the calories
that you need to actually digest it.
However, if those carbohydrates are fiber
it's going to be upwards of around 20%
of the calories that you are going to be eating.
If you're eating a lot of fat
it's as little as about 2 to 3%.
So if you eat a high protein, high fiber, moderate fat diet,
you're going to be actually burning a lot
of the calories that you are actually consuming.
So, you're going to be able to eat more
as a bonus fiber, A. Fills you up,
and B. It is really, really good for your gut bacteria.
And if you have healthy gut bacteria
you are likely going to have lower amounts of cortisol,
lower amounts of body fat, lower cravings.
It's going to fill you up more,
high fiber, high protein is great.
And that's why never such a big fan of just
big time on fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat, fat.
When I was doing the timed carb approach
which I am still doing now, and as a final bonus
the high protein in that hype protein, high fiber
moderate fat diet, it has a muscle sparing effect.
If you have enough protein, it's more likely
that you are going to maintain a lot more muscle fibers.
So your metabolism will be higher
whereas if you restrict protein and you follow the advice
of a lot of pundits out there that say like
nobody's walking into the hospitals with protein deficiency.
Yeah. Well, nobody's walking
into a hospital with sun deficiency either
but there's lots of people walking
in with vitamin D deficient see, same sort of thing.
So there are complications with not getting enough protein.
Getting a good amount of protein is really really critical
for endurance athletes.
Getting a high amount of fiber is very critical for a lot
of endurance athletes because our guts are so compromised
from spending so much time with blood shunted
from our gut and going into our limbs to
power us going, swimming, biking, and running.
So high fiber, high protein, moderate fat,
excellent diet to keep your metabolism nice and high
with all that that said rant is over.
That's it. That is all.
And over the next week or so,
I will be doing a video
on my time to carbohydrate diet
and how I've come to adept that ability to burn fat
to a healthy lifestyle.
So if you aren't already subscribed
hit the subscribe button below. Later, trainee acts.