- Oh, good morning, Trainiacs.
That there was the first run back
since we got in from Puerto Rico,
and that was like a real feelgood kinda run.
I don't know what it was, maybe just
being outside, sun in my eyes.
That hasn't happened months, well, actually there was
a lot of sun in my eyes in Puerto Rico,
but just days away from starting to build up
to Challenge Roth and the project with Dan Plews
about becoming more fat adapted,
increasing the fat oxidation levels.
We had a call last night and it's starting.
(energetic electronic music)
(sighs)
Well, officially my legs were not ready to run.
They were feeling good yesterday,
they are sore today after that, wow!
I immediately regretted that.
Alright, so if you missed the last video that we did
with Dan Plews I'll link to it at the end,
but Doctor Dan Plews is a doctor, B, a sports scientist
specifically researching and publishing
dozens of papers, being cited in, I think,
over hundreds of papers about endurance sports
performance research, specifically HIIT training,
HRV training, and, for the purposes of this chat,
low carb high fat endurance training.
He also coaches Terenzo Bozzone,
and he's coached, I think, three pro athletes
to under eight hour Ironman finishes.
Most notably, however, well, actually if you talk to him
he's like, "I find it fairly annoying
"that that's what people care about,"
but he won KONA in 2018, he was the amateur that set
the all-time KONA course record going 8:24
and running a, I think it was the, fifth fastest marathon
of the day in 2:50, that's how we ended up meeting him.
Now, why this is all so interesting to me
is because I started doing research after having Dan
on the podcast and there were studies that show
that the ability to improve your fat oxidation,
basically access fat as fuel in endurance sports,
plays as much as a 50% role in
the variation in your performance.
So I reached out to Dan and he is helping me
become more fat-adapted for Challenge Roth.
There, now you're updated.
So Dan is acting as like a bit of a coach consultant
sort of thing in leading up to Challenge Roth,
and he's already started helping me with some of my dieting.
I've had instant results.
- And have you, how's your eating been?
How've you been doing on that front?
- I went, I think it was seven or eight days,
with eating a little bit earlier and the evening salads
after you suggested that, and that consistently kept
my fasting blood glucose low right away and it held there.
- Well, that's good 'cause it seems
like I knew what I was talkin' about then, aye?
- Yeah, Dan said that I should try having just a salad
for dinner eating a little bit earlier at night.
I have been monitoring my fasting blood glucose
for the last few months, and in the week after
I made nothing but that one change,
fasting blood glucose levels were
lower than they have ever been.
So there's some nuances to going low carb.
It's not just eating less carbs like this.
- So I think now it's time, I think you can still
keep on that a little bit of carb,
but what you need to do is just keep those carbs
to like only in that red, orange,
and green list that I sent you,
the no bread, none of that kinda stuff.
Just keep it, keep it some more
what we like to call the healthy carbs.
- So not all carbs are created equal
despite what a lot of the charlatans out there say
where a calorie is a calorie is a calorie.
That's not actually the case.
I've seen significant differences
in my fasting blood glucose whether
I have rice, or pizza, or sweet potatoes.
So there's actually, if you didn't get this already,
go to triathlontaren.com/theplews
and you'll get a free, basically,
how to start low carb high fat training
that Dan has put together for free for all of you,
and there is a list of the good foods, the great foods
like green, orange, red, like good foods.
Next thing I learned, and this is where Dan
is going to be also training me a little bit
as a consultant on the actual workouts,
is that I learned last night that
it's not just about going low carb.
- And just on the training side,
I was thinking about it a little bit more.
Like, you know, the best way to tackle it because,
like it or not, you know, the food, the diet's one thing
but the training plan's another, you know,
and they're both critical to having a good race at Roth,
so I just wanna make sure that we're ticking all the boxes
and kinda leaving no stone unturned
and actually covering up the training side as well.
It's not that I don't trust that you're gonna give yourself
the best training plan, but I think, you know,
a combination of diet and the plan is important
and like, it'd be quite hard for you to know
how to do them both at the same time, you know,
'cause you've not really done it before.
- So he's gonna help with some of that,
and I think what we're going to be doing
is there are going to be periods where we focus
on including the intense stuff,
even though carbs are a little bit low,
to overcome some of the challenges
of low carb high fat training,
and there will be some particular moments
where I do specific efforts that are fasted
or just on like a fat-based coffee, a butter coffee.
I'm not entirely sure, stay tuned for that.
A bottom line, you have to be careful
with everything that you read on here online.
I've talked about it in the past
and what I was finding is we're starting to go down a path
that low carb high fat training, it's fairly dangerous.
If you don't get it right you will, A,
not get the results, and B, you could potentially
mess up your hormones, there's a lot to it,
and Dan, I like this like me then Dan, then me then Dan,
he actually had like a very classy way
of explaining this with music.
- Just like I've said before, like you can tell people
the notes, the musical notes, but it's the order
in which you put them and the time in between
that makes them music, but what the main name
is that we just wanna show ya, you know,
give 'em some snippets along the journey.
- So now why Dan agreed to all this
is because he thinks that it's important
to document the journey, and we're gonna
be starting with some testing.
I'm gonna go into the lab, and what we're looking to do
is basically duplicate a journey that he took an athlete
called Matt Kerr on between the end of December
and just the end of February where Matt Kerr, get this,
Matt Ker started out as a complete sugar-burner
so much so that basically unless he was going under
135 watts on the bike he was not burning any fat,
and then when they modeled that and said alright,
here's how much fat you're burning,
here's how much sugar you're burning,
even if you take in enough calories
you will run out of fuel around
three hours and 50 minutes to four hours and 20 minutes,
slogging through the end of your races.
Pretty scary if you're doing a eight, nine, 12 hour Ironman.
What they did with Matt was they took him through
a eight week fat adaptation protocol
where in that period of time they improved
his ability to oxidize fat so much so
that when he went and raced eight weeks later
at Ironman New Zealand he was able to,
as they modeled with the same testing,
he was able to hold 270 watts for eight
to nine hours before running out of fuel.
The results were the very first Ironman that he did
and just the third triathlon that he ever did was
nine hours and 21 minutes, finishing 10th overall.
This is his first Ironman race, and here's the really
notable thing, he was sitting at 20th place overall
right up until the last 14 kilometers of the marathon
when because he was still bonk-free,
still oxidizing fat, just clipping along,
his pace dipped slightly but not nearly as much
as all of his competitors, and over the course of those
last 14 kilometers just moved up from 20th to 19th to 18th
to 17th all the way up to 10th place
because he just stayed smooth.
Now, granted, Matt was a very talented athlete.
In his, I think, first half Ironman race
he did a 4:28 at Taupo 70.3,
but it's not just Matt that's doing this,
it's Terenzo Bozzone, it's Jan van Berkel,
it's Dan Plews himself, and if you look at Dan Plews'
performance in KONA he basically even split the marathon.
There was no fade whatsoever.
Every 10K split was 40 minutes on the nose.
So this is seeming very legit,
but you have to do it right which is why I say
go to triathlontaren.com/theplews
and just start wrapping your head around
what the best people in the world do
to make sure that this is safe, properly done,
and you get the most out of it.
On that note, I'm gonna go nurse my legs.
They're really sore.
Go check it out, Trainiacs, triathlontaren.com/theplews.
Thanks to Plews to helping me out.
This is super interesting and I'm looking forward to it,
maybe not the intense efforts that we do
when I'm trying to be keto.
Later, Trainiacs.