Written by Christopher Kelly
Oct. 29, 2015
[0:00:00]
Christopher: Hello and welcome to the Nourish Balance Thrive podcast. My name is Christopher Kelly. Today, I'm joined by Dr. Phil Maffetone. Hi, Phil.
Phil: Christopher, great to be with you.
Christopher: Thank you. Another very exciting episode of the podcast. Phil is someone I've learned an awful lot from over the years both from his books and from Tawnee Prazak's Endurance Planet podcast which I think is where I first discovered you, Phil.
I'm kind of embarrassed actually that I didn't discover you sooner because Phil has been around for 35 years bringing the latest advances in fitness and nutrition to healthcare professionals around the world. He's worked with world class athletes. He has authored more than 20 books which is pretty amazing. So I think of you as one of the pioneers of heart rate monitoring.
I should link to your interview with Robb Wolf which is one of the best I've heard actually. It's really fantastic. You're talking about the old days in heart monitoring stuff. It's so much fun.
Phil: Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. The old days are -- so we're talking 1983. I think Polar came out with the first wireless heart monitor around that time. But I was using a heart monitor before then that was used in the hospital for cardiac patients. It was big and bulky and not easy to use. I had one in my office. I would have athletes go out for a run with it and come back. After a while I was able to help an athlete get a monitor. So some athletes have them. Those days were kind of interesting.
Christopher: That's amazing. So the first book that I read that was really, really helpful for me was The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing which I will link to. The new book is a more up to date version of that. It's The Endurance Handbook: How to Achieve Athletic Potential, Stay Healthy, and Get the Most Out of Your Body. That's quite a mouthful but it's a fantastic book.
Phil: Thanks. It's really a continuation of The Big Book of Endurance Training and Racing. I don't think I have any duplication other than in the appendix I have the 180 formula and maybe the MAF test listed there just for convenience. A lot of what went into The Endurance Handbook is what I wrote about, lectured about, thought about since the big yellow book came out. So it's newer material. There's some overlap of course because we're talking about sports and endurance training, diet, nutrition and so forth, but al lot of that material is new.
Christopher: The one thing I want to know is why is it not you and Tawnee. Tawnee wrote the foreword to the new book. You're not on the front cover of the book. I don't understand it. You need to get a photographer. You need to go over to LA and get a picture of you.
Phil: I've actually never met Tawnee. We're hoping to do that before the end of the year, maybe even get some pictures too.
Christopher: That would be great. It would be really good to see that. Awesome. Okay. So the first topic I wanted to dive into with you is about long slow distance and about the math method. I've recently become just a tiny bit confused maybe by interviewing Joe Friel who has a new book called Fast After 50. I think one of the key messages of the book is that as we age, and I'm sure that most of my audience will be kind of around about my age, the sort of 35+ bracket, that you need to exercise with intensity to prevent the decline of aerobic capacity or VO2 max as it's sometimes called. I'm not sure whether it flies in the face of what you're recommending or not. So maybe we should start by just being really clear about what you do recommend.
Phil: Yeah. I have not read Joe's book unfortunately. It's on my list. I have this long list.
Christopher: I'm sure.
Phil: Getting longer. I think the research has shown that that we can slow the decline of VO2 max with aging through training. Certainly I go along with that. The question is how do we do that without sacrificing health. That's what I'm all about. I want people to improve their muscular strength. I want them to improve their endurance.
[0:05:01]
I don't care about VO2 max so much because it just doesn't mean a whole lot. It doesn't correspond to performance. There are a lot of people with VO2 max levels that are much lower than people that are finishing the Ironman or a marathon minutes behind them or hours behind them. So I'm leery when we use VO2 max as an indicator. I prefer using a sub max indicator which is what the MAF test is, how fast can you run at a sub max heart rate.
And if you can run faster today at a sub max heart rate than you could six months ago, then you're going the right way. However, if you cannot run faster at a sub max heart rate today than six months ago, then you're doing something wrong. You're not progressing from an endurance standpoint.
So I'd like to look at those indications. Muscular strength is very important to maintain. I don't think there's anything magic about age 50. I think this is something that a 20, 30-year-old, 40-year-old and a 50, 60, 70-year-old should be thinking and those that are even older.
We don't want to lose our muscle mass as we age. Some of it will happen regardless of what we do. I think that's okay. I think the body becomes more efficient and doesn't need as much mass. It's not about muscle mass so much as it's about muscle strength which is related to how many muscle fibers can we contract in a given deadlift, for example, or whatever you're measuring. We can increase strength by doing that without bulking up a muscle. So there are two very different things.
We do want increase strength in a lot of endurance athletes because they tend to be weak. It's amazing how much endurance athletes are lacking in power. All you have to do is a standing jump test which -- there's an article on my website about this and it's in the books. A standing jump test will give you a good idea of strength in your lower body. Many endurance athletes cannot jump more than 10, 12, 14 inches which is pretty terrible.
So we need to measure things that are more practical that give us information, and then we need to act on that information because just measuring things doesn't answer any questions, it doesn't solve any problems, it doesn't make you better. We see that today in the digital world where we're measuring everything. We're measuring our footsteps, our sleep movements. There are so many gadgets out there that measure all kinds of things.
The bottom line is who cares if you could measure it. You've got to be able to do something to improve yourself, and then you got to be able to measure that. And there's too little of that being done.
Christopher: I just read your recent article actually, the digital fitness misfit article which I will link to. It's a really good article.
Phil: Thanks.
Christopher: It's very interesting. I was quite surprised by the end of that article where you said that you're going to be building an app.
Phil: Well, we've been working on an app since earlier in the year. The app will do essentially what I did in my office. More than anything else, I ask a lot of questions. I want to know how you sleep. I want to how long you sleep, but I want to know about the quality. I want to know how you work out. I want to know about the quality. I want to know about sometimes insignificant signs and symptoms that are actually very significant because if you put them all together, it gives you a good indication of the functional status of the patient or of the athlete. We can then use that as a launchpad to improve health and fitness in various.
So the app will ask a lot of questions. It'll ask for more detailed information such as your weight and height. We can measure BMI. The different surveys will give you risks of not only chronic disease which many athletes have, but of chronic inflammation, the so-called functional problems, chronic inflammation, carbohydrate intolerance, aerobic deficiency and other things.
[0:10:12]
We've gone through the first beta test. Things were looking really good. We'll have another beta test later this month. That first launch will be soon after that, later in the year.
Christopher: Interesting. It's starting to sound like it could become a study. Is that one of your long term plans?
Phil: Well, it does present itself with an interesting situation where we can gather information from individuals. It is one of the things in the back of my mind. We have so much to add to this app that they're having a hard time keeping up with me. So I think that will be something that happens down the road.
Christopher: Okay. Yeah. Because it's something I thought of as well. I mentioned before we started recording, Dr. Tommy Wood is someone I've been working with closely. He is a research scientist. He said to me "Oh, you know that if you start asking people some standard questions before and after you work with them, then very soon you will have enough data to publish a study."
So that's what I've been doing for the last six months at least is getting people to answer some questions which I pulled out of an NIH project. There's like a whole databank of questions. Some of them are really, really poignant for athletes. I had trouble falling asleep. I had trouble staying asleep. My sleep was refreshing. I'm collecting all these blood chemistry and organic acids and other biomedical test results. At point Tommy can help me publish a study showing everything.
Phil: Without a doubt. Yeah. The thing that's missing in healthcare today is the doctor-patient relationship. They do all these high-tech tests which are not as effective in determining what's wrong with the patient, not nearly as effective, in fact, than asking the patient questions and knowing what the answers mean, of course. That's what I did throughout my career. I wanted to know about the disease-related things but I also wanted to know about functional things like the sleeping issue you bring up.
So I've been working on questionnaires since I was a student actually. Again, the medical literature has a lot of these questions and a lot of these relationships that we see in people that are very important to understand. So research, sure, you can do some very interesting research projects with this.
Christopher: So I wanted to talk to you today about this idea -- I may have stolen this phrase for you -- the idea of clinical coaching. I think it's a really fascinating idea. So normally when you go to the doctor and you say, "I'm tired" then they're going to be trying to rule out disease. They want to make sure that you're not going to die anytime soon under their care. Of course there's a million shades of gray in between the very best version of you and the disease-ridden version of you, but the doctors, they don't typically care much about the shades of gray. They just want to rule things out.
Most of the work that I've been doing with Tommy and Jamie, the two doctors, are looking at test results. So looking at the blood and the urine and the stool and the saliva results with a view to improving sports performance rather than just saving somebody from disease. I know, especially through my own personal experience, that you can get fantastic results tweaking the biochemistry. Is that the type of thing you've been doing for a long time or is this something new to you?
Phil: No. Biochemistry I think was one of my big things. I was talking to somebody yesterday about this 3 foot by 4 foot biochemistry chart I had in my clinic hanging on the wall. It had every conceivable enzyme and coenzyme, everything including all the nutrients that the body needed to get from point A to point B and the cycle to create energy or whatever.
That was always in the forefront of my mind when I was treating the patient. If they answered yes to this question, so it could mean that there's something in the Krebs cycle that we need to pay more attention to. It's really great stuff.
[0:15:07]
You have to be careful because the body has this domino effect. One thing causes another and another and another. Twenty dominoes later if you measure something, if you say, "Oh, this domino fell down. We could measure it. Look at this" -- well, you also have to be aware that that's an end result problem. So you've got to be careful.
The problem with technology in part today is that they're now measuring everything from saliva, which is great. They're now measuring everything in the blood. You can measure all of the fatty acids in the blood which we couldn't do in the '70s and '80s but we evaluated signs and symptoms to get a sense of what fatty acid imbalances existed. Boy, be careful because as good as all these functional tests are, you have to still wade through just like you have to wade through the signs and symptoms of patients and not treat the signs and symptoms. You can't treat an end result biochemical indicator that you might find in a blood or urine or saliva test. But that said, there are some very, very valuable information there.
So I was as much a biochemist as anything else. I never knew how to define my coaching relationship. I was not really a coach. This is a whole topic. For a while I did use the work clinical coach. People kind of looked funny at me when I use that so I kind of gotten away from it. I sometimes use athletic advisor. I also did a lot of hands-on work in terms of helping eliminate muscle imbalance, for example.
The changes that we can get in an athlete from that are very significant but it's so much related to their biochemistry. You can't really do one without the other. So what do call that? There's no category that we fit into. People say, "Oh, you coached Mark Allen. Well, I didn't really coach Mark Allen. I helped Mark Allen coach himself. I rarely wrote schedules for athletes. I wanted them to learn how to be intuitive and understand what their brain wants to do in training and everything else. So I help them do that. I don't know what you call it but it's been an interesting and wonderful ride along the way.
Christopher: Yeah. I know. I think the term clinical coaching is perfect. I can give people a few examples, some of which I've talked about on the podcast before. The urinary organic acids were extremely helpful in identifying a carnitine deficiency which helps me become a better fat burner. Together with Tommy, we've been tweaking some variables with methylated B vitamins that have helped me increase my hemoglobin.
What else we did? Creatine recently. I guess that's not really clinical. We've not really been doing any test to show that I need this. Creatine has been like the magic turbo button for me in cyclo-cross. It's been the most fantastic experience. You get all sorts of other pleasant side effects. You suddenly realize that you're sleeping better and you've got more energy and your focus is better as well as your athletic performance. So I think it's such a cool thing to go after.
Phil: Without a doubt. I think finding something that an athlete needs more of or if they're deficient because there's a standard range of normal, and a lot of things are not standard range as a normal. It's like taking thiamine or magnesium. If we're low in those nutrients and we take them, we're going to benefit from. But if we're not low and we take them, we force them in, we're most likely not going to benefit. As a matter of fact we could aggravate things. In the case of iron, for example, we can overdose in iron quite easily. Again, it's being holistic, looking at the patient from all angles.
The game is primary-secondary. Here are your primary problems. Here are your secondary problems. Okay. We could see. We're going to ignore all your secondary problems and we're going to address your primary problems and then we're going to reevaluate you.
[0:20:14]
So if you have knee pain and the pain is the result of a foot problem, we're not going to treat your knee. We're going to treat your foot. If you're tired and your blood indices are bad, we're not going to keep giving you infusions because your blood is not healthy. We're going to find out what things are more primary, and give you dose whether it's iron or folate or whatever.
So I think playing that game, primary-secondary, let's not treat symptoms, let's treat causes is such an important thing, and it's just not being done today in mainstream medicine, certainly. I've seen the alternative medicine movement come on in the '70s and in the '80s especially. What I saw was very unfortunate which is that alternative medicine went the way of mainstream medicine. They started treating a lot of symptoms. It was very sad to see.
I think you're doing a great job in this and other people are doing very good work in determining what are the primary problems, then measuring that there is an improvement and then remeasuring and not treating symptoms. That's very, very important.
Christopher: Yeah. For sure. Yes. It's so interesting that you should bring that up. Tommy and I did a podcast on iron overload last week. The next day I had six phone calls scheduled. You know how it is when you do a podcast or write articles. They tend to be the same types of people. I work with a lot of males in their kind of late 40s, early 50s. I think that's significant. There's a pattern here, a demographic.
Four of the six phone calls had iron overload as confirmed by Tommy. This was the day after we did the iron overload podcast. It was unbelievable. The really funny thing about all of these guys is they were all eating a very low carbohydrate ketogenic diet. They've noticed maybe the elevation of their fasting insulin. Their fasted blood glucose was becoming out of control. So they've switched to this low carb diet and were feeling much better on it.
That's the thing to do. When your house is on fire, then you need to do something about flames. It seems like or at least a plausible underlying cause of this problem of carbohydrate intolerance is actually the iron overload.
I just think it's really interesting to do these investigations. I know that these people are not being screened routinely. It's down to me to find these problems.
Phil: Right. Not surprisingly a lot of these patients who have, as per blood test, too much iron are not treated. They're neglected. I've seen plenty of people walk into my office with copies of blood test. "Oh, your iron is very high." Yeah. My doctor said it's okay. I should give blood more often." What kind of a comment is that?
Christopher: Yeah. Stop eating spinach.
Phil: Yeah. Stop eating spinach. This is a serious problem. Iron overload can create all kinds of free radical -- iron free radicals are pretty dangerous. We can speed our aging up quite well with an iron overload among other things. So it's not something that should be taken lightly. If a doctor doesn't know what to do, then he or she should refer the patient out. That's not being done which is really sad.
Christopher: So tell me about how the clinical coaching has been then and now. So when you first started out and you were running blood tests or maybe some other types of tests, what we're you doing then versus what you're doing now?
Phil: Good question. I think back in the '70s and '80s we didn't have salivary cortisol, for example, until -- it may have been '94. So we had to rely, and I still do that today, we had to rely on an oral history from the patient. It was interesting. When salivary cortisol did come out, I jumped on that right away. I did a lot of salivary cortisol tests.
[0:25:09]
What I was finding was that by the time I got the test results back I already knew what the results we're going to be. I said, "Wow! This is interesting." This is confirmation which is nice, but it's also something that -- it was an expense on the patient's part because back then insurance didn't cover it. I don't know if it does now or not. I did less of it. I only did it when I had too many questions or I did it down the road when the athlete was doing better but now training volume and training intensity was higher and they were going into a racing season or maybe in the middle of a racing season. I wanted to just make sure that we weren't seeing cortisol drifting up too high.
I think the main difference today is that I have all that experience that I gathered. I could skip over a lot of secondary things much easier not only from a biochemical standpoint but from a neuromuscular standpoint. So if you have back problems and knee pains and your muscles ache at night, I've learned to kind of ignore a lot of that and say, "Well, those are all secondary things most likely. More likely this problem or that problem is what's not allowing your body to correct its own muscle imbalances." And a lot of times that's what it is.
I think one difference between today and way back when was that I wanted to fix the body more back then. I want to do that today but I'm more inclined today to encourage the body to fix itself. The brain can fix itself much better than I can fix an athlete. So I try and encourage that whether it's a nutritional thing, dietary change, mechanical thing, training issue, whatever it is. I want to just gently nudge the body a certain way rather than grab it and pull it over here and fix it. I think you'd get a better outcome and an outcome that tends to last longer and I think you see the primary problems a lot easier too.
Christopher: Right. Yeah. I know. I get that question a lot too. How do I heal my gut? The answer is or the main answer is you stop putting the things into it which are causing the problem in the first place, and your gut, for the most part, just take care of itself.
Phil: How many people can understand that? Come on. How many doctors don't understand that? When you mention it they'll say, "Well, we don't really know that for sure." Come on. It's amazing what's going on out there. Sorry to interrupt.
Christopher: Yeah. I know. It's simple to think about when you think of any other type of injury which is visible. So if I fall off my bike and I got some gravel rash on my leg, and the question is how do I heal this, well, not falling off again for a while is going to be the first thing you'd want to do, right?
Phil: Yeah. Basically we cut our skin, we bleed. Do we have to run to a surgeon to get it patched up? In most cases no, not if it's not a serious issue. The body fixes it. The body heals up. Everything heals up quite well. But if we have things blocking that healing process, then there's a problem. A lot of people say, "What do you do about these symptoms or those symptoms? What do you do about asthma?"
Here's the bottom line. People who are healthy don't have asthma. People who are healthy don't have heart attacks in the middle of a race and die. People who are healthy don't have injuries because our sport is not a contact sport except for if you fall off your bike or get hit in the head during the swim of a race.
So we have to focus on being healthy, that's really the key, because when we get healthy a lot of secondary problems disappear. It's the reason why when we do the two-week test or if you take people off carbohydrates, however you do that, sometimes the most amazing things happen because you've just removed a roadblock and now the body can take care of itself so much better.
[0:30:28]
Christopher: So why don't you tell me about the two-week test since you mentioned it? What is the two-week test?
Phil: The two-week test is a period of two weeks where people have reduced their carbohydrate intake significantly. They've eliminated junk food, number one. Number two, they eliminate all moderate and high glycemic index foods including all fruit and grains and so forth. They keep track of their signs and symptoms. They keep track of their weight and anything else they want to keep track of. If they have high blood pressure, they carefully monitor their blood pressure because in a two-week period a lot of good things can happen, a lot of dramatic changes can take place because what you're doing is you're lowering your insulin levels sometimes quite significantly.
I developed the two-test I think in 1980-ish, somewhere around there. Before that I really struggled with patients because I was trying to get them off refined carbohydrates, get them to eat more fat. Back then fat was really an evil thing, but protein was evil too. So if protein is bad fat is bad, what are you left with? Carbohydrates. I saw athletes who were eating a diet that was 80+% carbohydrates. That's just insane.
Christopher: Yeah. I've done that.
Phil: So I wanted to change it. What I've realized was happening was I was not getting my point across even though I could correlate their signs and symptoms with too much carbohydrate, even though I could explain that junk food is not healthy and they shouldn't eat it. I realized that what I had to do was quickly make them feel better because I wasn't doing that.
Winning them down from 80% or 70% to 60% or 50% was a long tedious process. They didn't notice much of a change right away with some exceptions, but most of them didn't. If we throw them into a two-week period where their carbohydrate intake is much lower and their insulin is going to drop down quite a bit., once they get over that sugar addiction for two or three days, the bad parts of it, they start feeling better.
Initially I did it for 10 days. It was the ten-day test. I thought after seeing some people, they need a little bit more time in some cases so I moved it to two weeks. It gave people a feeling of being healthy quite often for the first time in many years or first time in their lives. Now you have their attention. So that became the two-week test. It's been used quite a bit since then.
Christopher: That's awesome. You've got a really great website now with a ton of fantastic content. Do you still find that lots of people come to you that still need to do that two-week test or are you finding increasingly that people are already fatted up [0:34:03] [Indiscernible] and they know about this carbohydrate restriction trick?
Phil: I still find many people needing and wanting to do the two-week test. I think we were talking before we recorded about the fact that we've been through this in our society for a long time even before I came on the scene in the '70s and '80s. The idea of balancing the diet and getting rid of refined carbohydrates will get some traction and then it would disappear. Are we better off today? Are things really going to change today? I don't know the answer because I've seen it fizzle out.
Like you say, there are people who don't understand about fat burning. There are people who don't understand that eating junk food is not the best thing for them.
[0:35:12]
So yeah, I think people are still looking to take the two-week test possibly more than ever before. I think back in the '80s people looked at it and said, "Wow! Is this safe? I'm going to talk to my doctor about this." Well, sure, you can do that but that's not going to work. I think more people are doing that.
I think a lot of it is because the concept of sugar addiction is becoming more recognized now. Back in the '70s when I mentioned sugar addiction people would really look at me funny and I'd get a lot of flak from other healthcare practitioners about sugar addiction. One doctor said, "You're making fun of drug addiction by using the phrase sugar addiction." I just thought "What do you mean by that?"
The fact is people who are addicted to drugs will get off drugs a lot easier if they addressed their sugar addiction. There is a great example of a primary and secondary pattern that we see. I digress but I think the answer is maybe more people are looking to do the two-week test today because they're addicted to carbohydrates and they're having a hard time getting off. So a two-week plan for them is like going into a detox program where they're going to go through changes and they're going to feel better. That's a very good thing to do.
Christopher: What do you think causes insulin resistance? I say that casually like it's an easy question to answer. It seems like I've seen the voices of people who just seem to think it's just overconsumption of carbohydrate that causes insulin resistance. Particularly in working with Tommy, I'm kind of coming to the conclusion that lots and lots of things cause insulin resistance. Maybe those people that I'm trying to oversimplify a very complex problem. What do you think causes insulin resistance?
Phil: Well. It is a complex problem. It is an individual problem. So you got to look at the person who is insulin resistant and look at what's not working right, what are they eating, what biochemical imbalances do they have, and also look at their stress because stress can play a very significant role as well. Of course someone who's 50 years of age or 60 years of age tends to be more insulin resistant. So there's that aging component. However, I've seen the insulin resistance change dramatically in 50, 60, 70, 80 year olds. Again, in a two-week period you can do that and see measurable results.
When we look at the data from 1980 to 2005 -- I'm thinking of a particular study, I can't remember the paper, where they show that Americans have eaten a lot more calories in that period but those calories for the most part came from carbohydrates, not from fat, yet we've had this massive explosion of diabetes, we've had this massive explosion of obesity, and obesity is just the tip of the iceberg, we've got a massive explosion of overfat athletes. So there's a very important connection there.
When you take people off the junk food and adjust their carbohydrate so it matches their particular needs, so many things get better. They're less insulin resistant. It's a very powerful tool. But you're right, there's more to it than that. Many people are malnourished, bottom line. That's a good word to use.
I did a diet analysis on every new patient, typically a follow up, that I ever saw when I had my clinic. I was astounded that the average athlete would have seven or eight minerals or vitamins that didn't even attain RDA level. You can't be healthy when you eat that way. So that's a big part of it as well.
[0:40:23]
We also have to be aware that this insulin hang up that we have as a society -- we look at insulin as this wonderful thing and that we need it to get energy -- we had to get glucose into the muscles. There are a lot of noninsulin dependent glucose receptors in muscle, and we use in everyday. We use them when we work out. We get glucose into our muscles during exercise but our insulin levels are very, very low.
We were able to take diabetics off insulin. We certainly, in many cases, bring them down to much lower levels. The side effects of insulin are a very serious problem. So the game is to reduce your insulin if you're diabetic, your insulin needs. And you do that by reducing carbohydrates. Yeah. It's a complex situation but it's individual. The carbohydrate issue, if you don't deal with that, you're not going to get anywhere. So you've got to find that level of natural carbohydrate intake that's compatible with that person.
What I found, as an aside, is that as the years go by -- and this has to do with becoming more insulin resistant with age -- people's requirements for carbohydrates gets lower and lower. So I think you have to kind of keep up with that. Your body is always changing. It changes with the seasons. It changes year by year. You've got to keep up with it. If you're someone who was eating a diet that had 50% natural carbohydrates for a while and now you're 40 or 50, there's a good chance your needs are going to be lower than that. If you lower them you're going to feel better, you're going to train better and you're going to perform better.
Christopher: Do you run into many problems with athletes eating a high fat diet undereating? It's something, a trap that I run into myself in the beginning, and I've seen it a lot since. People start switching to this high fat diet. Suddenly they're not hungry anymore. You get guy who's six foot, 180 pounds doing 10 hours a week of training. He's only eating 1,800 calories a day. I'm not a huge fan of counting calories, but that's an [0:42:55] [Indiscernible], and yet he claims that he's not hungry. Do you see that a lot?
Phil: I do. Being not hungry is an incredibly wonderful thing if you're healthy because hunger as a symptom usually means there's a problem somewhere in most situations. If you get up in the morning you don't eat breakfast, five or six hours later you're getting hungry, of course, that's normal. But if you had breakfast at 7:00 and it's now 12:00 and you're thinking about lunch but you're not hungry, that's a very good sign.
What happens is when you -- and I don't like that phrase, fat-adapted. I think humans are, by nature, are fat-adapted. We're fat burning creatures as are many animals, even hummingbirds. That's why they can travel so many miles to migrate at time of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. They've converted so much of that sugar to fat and they've stored it for their long term energy needs. Of course all birds are the same.
I wrote an article about bears hibernating for the winter and how they store so much fat. That's just what happens to human. We eat carbohydrates. Half of that carbohydrate gets converted to fat and goes into storage. At the same time that carbohydrate intake can prevent us from burning fat for energy when we train.
I think what happens is when people cut down their carbohydrates, they start burning more fat for energy which is easily measured. They start losing body fat. Their endurance improves, et cetera, et cetera. They don't get as hungry.
[0:45:08]
What they find if they're left to go natural on this, they find that they don't have to eat as much food. I have seen people reduce their food intake by 20%, 30% and 40%. I'm talking about people who are very active, many of whom are athletes.
So you could say, "Okay. They're burning more fat for energy when they work out so they don't need to eat as much." I go so far with that explanation because at some point you got this energy factor that you've got to consider. We do what calories. So there is calories in calories out which I don't like looking at because it's misleading.
I don't know how to explain how an athlete can reduce their caloric intake by 30% and still perform as well or even better. I will share an explanation with an athlete I had recently. I don't think she'd mind giving her name. Amanda Stevens who I've been working with from January of this year. She was relying on about 400 calories an hour in her Ironman races. As she became a better fat burner -- her first Ironman, her requirements went down to 175 calories an hour. That's a pretty big drop. She performed better.
Her second Ironman, she was down to 145 calories an hour. It's hard to compare race against race, but she performed quite well. She feel she's lower than that today even How you explain this phenomenon of general day to day eating less calories and functioning as well, I'm not quite sure how to do that without sounding biochemically silly other than to say it happens.
I spoke with Tim Noakes recently. I asked him this question. How much less food are you eating since you've been doing this for the last couple of years? He said about 40% less. I've heard that before from people.
So I think if we look at the food load issue and the food load problem, we have to conclude that if we can get by on less food and the quality food remains high or the quality of food is high, we're going to be much better off. We can cite the experiments of longevity and food intake and all that kind of stuff although I think that kind of a weak link in this situation.
The fact is our system is going to be more efficient when we're burning more fat. So if we can take in less food, our gut is going to be happier, our liver is going to be happier, the body is just going to work better. So that has to be a pretty good deal.
Christopher: Yeah. Absolutely. I think it's okay. Joe Friel talks about that in his book as well. There's often a gap between what science has proved and what experienced coaches know. You just have to deal with that. You have to try it for yourself and be your own expert. Don't just go after experts and think they know everything, like be your own expert and figure it out.
Phil: Exactly.
Christopher: There's nothing in the scientific literature to prove what it is that you're seeing. That's okay. It doesn't matter.
Phil: Well, you're not going to prove anything from the scientific literature in terms of a human being, in terms of sports and what we're talking about here at least. You're right. Again, like I said earlier, one of my goals today versus way back when is I want to help the athlete figure things out for themselves which is more of a reason why I don't give schedules because I want you to go out the door thinking you're going to go for a four-hour bike ride and you end up saying, "Hey, I don't feel like I should be going for a four-hour bike ride. I think I'm going to go for a 90-minute run instead." You come back and change your shoes and go for run. That's what our brain is good. Let the brain do that.
[0:50:09]
So if we find problems with an athlete, we make recommendations and they feel better, now they become, what my friend George Sheehan used to say, an experiment of one. We should all be that.
Christopher: Yeah. That's interesting. I hate to ask about my own personal stuff but it's impossible to resist the temptation in this instance. So at the moment I'm racing these cyclo-cross races which are very short. They're 60 minutes. I feel the need to go and do what I do in the race. Every day I want to go out and just do, not a lot. I guess with intensity, the poison is in the dose. So I'll do three or four 90-second intervals of about 5.5 watts per kilo. So that's going pretty hard for me.
I'll do that every day. I feel really good on that. It's not a long ride. The total length of the ride will be about 60 minutes. That's just what my brain wants to do at the moment. Do you think I'm making a mistake in that instance following my --
Phil: No. Not necessarily. I think there's a time and a place for doing hard workouts, and I'll come back to that. In the very beginning of my clinic, I had a lot of runners because in the '70s the running boom was big. There were not a lot of cyclists. I was in the New York City suburbs. The Triathlon World hadn't reached us yet. It had just been launched in Hawaii and started appearing in the West Coast. I didn't see my first triathlete until '79 or '80 I think.
So I had a lot of runners. I was able to gather data from a lot of them. I had a group of 223 runners. I found that if I let them build an aerobic base for three to six months, what we called slow training back then, and then put them into a 5K or a 10k -- I think we used 5K in that big group of 223 -- 76% ran a personal best, and these were seasoned runners. These were people who had run a lot of 5K races before. Actually there were quite a few that ran a personal best the second time out. I didn't gather that data.
If you look at some of the athletes that I worked with like Mike Pigg, I think he went 18 months where he just trained aerobically and he didn't do any hard workout for his races. He had some incredibly great races for a long span just on his aerobic base. I think, number one, for a 60-minute race that you have --
Christopher: Sixty, six-zero.
Phil: Sixty, right. For a 60-minute race your aerobic system is going to be very, very important. As matter of fact the aerobic system is going to provide 95% of the energy for that race. So that means you want to develop your aerobic system. I go along with the idea of periodization, but I think it has to be individualized rather than okay, it's October, it's time to do intervals because a lot of people are not ready to -- maybe they were ready in September.
So I think you've got to build the aerobic system first because it gives you that incredible fat burning energy which you utilize even at high intensities. There's a recent study that came out showing for the first time that high intensity activity had a very important association with fat burning which we always assumed, I was assumed that, but it's never been measured. So that's been measured.
I think we have to look at other things such as those aerobic fibers that we train when we train at a relatively slow pace, help support those power muscles which don't have much circulation. The aerobic muscle fibers have huge circulation. They're well endowed with blood vessels. That's why they're called red muscle fibers because they're well endowed with blood vessels.
[0:55:16]
The white muscle fibers are those power anaerobic fibers which don't have any circulation. So they rely on the red muscle fibers to bring in blood supply and take away chemicals that are produced during racing that you want to take advantage of. So that's going to be very important.
The bottom line is that if you want to do anaerobic training, if you want to do a hard training, you can as long as you don't do what I consider one of the most important things from my perspective which is to sacrifice your health. Then you have to start looking at recovery or you're recovering from that workout, how long does it take you to recover. It takes longer to recover from a hard workout, obviously, than from an easy workout. So you got to build that all into the schedule. It can be done properly. I'm not opposed to that. I do it myself. But it has to be done properly. As soon as you start getting any clue that something's going wrong, it's time to stop.
I often found that two weeks or three weeks, maybe four weeks was about as much time we want to go for anaerobic training, track intervals, bike, whatever sports you're in and whatever specific things you're doing. Mark did two weeks of anaerobic training right before his Ironman races. Some people chose not to do them because all of a sudden they do six months of aerobic training and now they run a PR by a lot. They say, "Wow! This is a lot of fun. I'm not hurt. I'm feeling great. Why do I want to do track workout? Because every time I do it I get injured." And they never go back to it. They use the race as their anaerobic stimulation which I think -- an anaerobic simulation is important to have.
So it depends on the individual. I think in your case look at what's going on, look at how you're feeling, how you're recovering. A very important point for me is are you sacrificing your health. Of course if you're feeling good and all other indications show that you're not, I still want to say, "Are you diminishing your aerobic potential?" So as you do those hard workouts are you now going slower at that same sub max heart rate, that MAF test than you were before? If you are, then you're sacrificing your aerobic system, and that's not a good thing. I don't expect to see any aerobic progress during interval training or anaerobic training but I don't expect to see a decline in the aerobic function. So that's a very, very important thing to look at.
Christopher: I guess this is another question you can't really answer definitively. When you're talking about just working the aerobic system, does that then mean I have to do 25 hours a week of training in order to get that benefit?
Phil: Not necessarily. No. Absolutely not. I've had a lot of pro endurance athletes who trained way under that. In 10 or 12 hours a week you can build your aerobic system in a phenomenal rate. If 10 or 12 hours a week is all you can fit in because you have a full time job where you work a lot of overtime, you have three kids, a house and social obligations, where are you going to fit 25 hours of training? People try and do that as you're well aware. They're rarely successful at it because they have to sacrifice something.
Ten to 12 hours is a lot of training week. We forget that the benefits of exercise that are well known and have been known for many, many years were done by people who were walking for 30 minutes. So it's amazing how many benefits we can get from a 30-minute walk. Of course we're not going to run a better marathon or do an Ironman obviously with a 30-minute walk, but in a relatively smaller amount of time we can train and accomplish quite a bit.
[1:00:09]
Christopher: It's really good to hear you say that because I'm sure you said it before and maybe it's in the books too but you kind of think it's one or the other, right? So if this guy is not for high intensity intervals on a regular basis, then does that mean I have to go back? Because I've done that before. I've pushed on some 30-hour weeks. Yeah. Nobody has time for that, not at 35 or 45 or 55 years old, not at all.
Phil: Right. The definition of overtraining incorporates the idea that you've done too much volume and/or too much intensity. Those are the two aspects of training that can really hurt you. A lot of athletes do both; too much intensity and too much volume.
Christopher: Right. Of course.
Phil: There's an epidemic of that.
Christopher: Let me ask you one last question which is kind of a big one. I know that a lot of people listening will be interested because a lot of people are like me, citizen scientists and budding health coaches. I've had a couple of people on the show that run training courses which teach biochemistry. Those episodes had been popular. I'm sure some of those people doing those courses have got one eye on becoming a practitioner.
There's a question that I wrestle with all the time which is -- okay. So I have two undergraduate degrees already but they're probably not going to qualify me to get on to any master's degree. So let ask you this. Say you were to be stripped of all of your qualifications and your doctorate, and you wanted to go back into doing the same work that you're doing now. Where would you start?
Phil: Good question. I don't know where I would start. I've been disillusioned with every aspect of healthcare. This is true in a lot of fields. Most of what I learned in school, I don't use. Sure. I did human dissection. I actually saw the muscles. I actually saw the bones, saw the heart, saw the brain, cut things open, played around with it. It's very, very valuable to learn that, I did learn a lot of basic biochemistry as a student. But nobody in that academic environment ever gave me the important leap from here's the Krebs cycle and here's a human being that has the Krebs cycle going on all the time. You can manipulate the Krebs cycle by the way and make people feel better. I had to kind of learn that on my own.
Of course back then nutrition as a science didn't exist. As a subject, it didn't exist. It's interesting. The older biochemistry textbooks have all the nutrients in them but the newer ones don't. Of course I haven't bought a brand new one in a while so they may put some in the back.
Where would I go? What would I do? I don't know the answer to that. I was a terrible student also. I always have a bad taste in my mouth when we talk about going to school and what courses, what routes would I recommend. I don't know the answer. I think it really would depend on the person and what you're willing to put up with to get a license to practice, for example. And could you learn on your own lot more in a shorter period of time and then practice without a license? I'm all for that.
When I had my clinic in New York I was so far out of my scope of practice. Nobody ever bothered me. I don't know the answer. I think the important thing is to learn and never stop learning.
Christopher: Right. Of course. So that's what I do now. I love the Khan Academy. It's one of my favorite things. There's a doctor called Bryan Walsh who's been on the podcast who has a training course called Metabolic Fitness Pro. Bryan is a wonderful teacher who loves biochemistry. So I'll just go do that again.
Phil: Yeah. I think there are a lot of us who have been teaching biochem -- I'd do it more for doctors but I think I'm going to be doing it more for other people.
[1:05:04]
We're going to actually have a certification program that we're hoping to launch in the coming months where we can certify people like yourself, certify coaches, certify doctors in the MAF methodology because one of the problems that I've always had --
Once I got established by the mid '80s, I'd say, I starting seeing a lot of people from out of town, especially athletes who would come in and see me. And then of course they'd go back home to the West Coast or to Europe or Australia. I'd want to have someone follow up with them. The problem was "Okay. Who do we recommend?" I built a very small list of practitioners but the list was so small that it was very difficult and very frustrating to do that, and even today. Who can I recommend in such and such a location without the person having to drive seven hours or fly to a location to see somebody? So I think a certification program would help us a lot. We'll be doing that so look for that in the coming months.
Christopher: Yeah. I will. People are going to think that planned this ahead of time now but we really didn't. I honestly didn't know that you had any plans for…
Phil: It was a word from our sponsor.
Christopher: Yeah. This is not an infomercial. That's fantastic. Would that be relevant to my though? Because I never laid my hand on anyone. I think you can still do a lot of good work without ever laying your hands on someone.
Phil: Certainly. You certainly can. As I'm envisioning the certification program, it will be, number one, to include people who are already certified as a coach whether it's a lifestyle coach or endurance coach or strength and conditioning coach, whatever. Number two, it'll be for a practitioner whether it's a nurse, a dietitian, a chiropractor, a medical doctor, osteopath, whatever. So that we don't leave people out, it will be for everyone else who may fall between the cracks or fall in the cracks, however they say it, where you don't have a certification and you don't have a license to practice something but you've been doing it. So that category will exist as well.
Now I can't remember what your question was.
Christopher: Yeah. I was just going to say if I'd be able to do this certification without laying my hands on anyone.
Phil: You would. Like any other certification, it would require a certain amount of education which people would get from seminars and books and podcasts like this one where we can give credit. If you listen to a podcast like this, there's a learning experience there, and you should be given credit for a certification that you're striving to achieve.
I think we want to make it easy but we want to make sure people understand what the MAF approach is all about which often they don't understand. They think it's all about training slow and eating a lot of fat. It's way more than that. I lift weights at times. I do speed workout sometimes. I recommended it at times. The game is when do you do it and when do you stop doing it.
Christopher: Right. And it's all in the book. I should cling to the book. I mean the book goes into like details on methylated B vitamins even. I know some of that was in there. Yeah. It's far more than going slow and eating fat.
Phil: Yeah. It is.
Christopher: Well, this has been fantastic, Phil. Is your clinic, is your practice, is it still open to new clients? Are you seeing that?
Phil: No. I'm no longer in practice. I see a small number of pro athletes. We're trying to deal with that issue. I get a lot of requests. I think when we start putting the certification program together we will also launch what I would call a coaching program via the website which will be as individualized as we could make it because there are just so many people asking for help. I'm too busy to do what I'm doing already.
Christopher: The website is a fantastic resource. I was reading it the other day. There are like hundreds and hundreds of comments on every single article. You must have hired someone to go in and answer all of these questions because it's insane.
[1:10:08]
Phil: Well, earlier this year we formed a company, MAF Fitness. So we have some people. We have a new website. We're developing the app. Like I said, we're looking at the certification program, and a number of other very interesting things going on.
I was sort of leaving my website to its own for a few years because I was busy with my music. I'm a songwriter also and that keeps me quite busy. And then we decided to start this project. And so we redid the website. It launched this summer. That's the new website you see. It's really looking good. We got more interesting things that are going to be popping up there soon.
So people can go there. There are people that will quite possibly answer your questions or comment about your comments under the articles. I was not able to do that before but we have people who have been on the program and know it very well. Sometimes I jump in there as well.
Christopher: That's awesome. That's really great to hear. I'm so excited for the future now. I listened to a couple of podcasts of you and Tawnee. I kind of got the impression that maybe we were going to lose you to the songwriting and that you were going to give up on all endurance stuff. So it's really exciting to hear all those good news.
Phil: Yeah. I woke up one day, 12 years ago, decided to be a songwriter. I had a great lecture circuit that I was doing. I was consulting a lot still. I had left practice but I was doing a lot of other things. I was writing quite a bit. I dropped all of that thinking that "Okay. I'm a songwriter now. I need to go to LA and rub elbows with songwriters so I could learn how to do it" because I didn't know anything about songwriting or playing music.
After a couple of years I was kind of forced back into the health scene and the fitness scene with some musicians who wanted help in getting healthier. I thought "Well, this is pretty neat." Just looking at brain waves and how the brain waves reacted, it kind of got me back into doing what I'm doing now. Of course I hadn't let go of the songwriting. I'm still doing it. It just makes for a busy wonderful day every day which is quite nice.
Christopher: That's awesome. Brilliant. Philmaffetone.com is the website. I will of course link to that in the show notes.
Phil: My music used to be in the website. We've separated it out now. So maffetonemusic.com is the music website. All of my six albums are up there for free downloads for members so people can listen anytime they want.
Christopher: Wow! Fantastic. I didn't know that. Excellent. Well, this has been wonderful, Phil. I have to have you back on once the certification program is more mature and maybe the app is out. We'll have you back on and talk about some of that.
Phil: That would be great. This has been fun.
Christopher: Cool. Well, thank you so much, Phil. I really appreciate your time.
Phil: Thank you, Chris.
Christopher: Cheers.
[1:13:34] End of Audio
© 2013-2024 nourishbalancethrive