Murph Challange and Fasting Michael Kummer: Hey guys, it's Mike
Kummer here. And in today's video, I want to talk to you about something stupid that I did recently,
and that is I completed the Murph Challenge, a pretty demanding CrossFit workout at the tail
end of a 48-hour fast. But before we get started, make sure you subscribe to this channel and you
click on the little alert button, so you get notified when I publish more videos like this.
Well, those of you who don't know what Murph is. Let me tell you what the workout
consists of, so the workout consists of a one-mile run followed by a hundred pull-ups 200 push-ups
300 squats, and then another mile run. And you do all of that with a 20-pound weight vest. Usually,
that workout takes anywhere from, I want to say 40 to 60 minutes or so, and it's really demanding.
It's even demanding if you don't wear the weight vest, and it's also demanding if you partition
up the pull-ups, pushups, and squats. So what many people do is instead of doing 100 pull-ups
in a row, they do five pull-ups, 10 pushups, 15 squats, and repeat the whole cycle for 20 rounds.
And the advantage of breaking that up is that you give your muscles a little bit of a rest.
So you give a triceps a rest after the pull-ups you give your legs a rest et cetera. Now I've,
that's how I did Murph in the past. But this year I decided I want to do it unpartitioned.
So 100 pull-ups in a row, before I would move on to the 200 pushups and then to the 300 squats and
then also decided to do it with a weighted vest. So with a 20 pound vest and that's because I just
got the vest for, I think for Christmas, from my wife. And so this was the very first time for me
doing it unpartitioned, doing it with a wait vest. And then I decided,
and stupidly that I should do that at the end of it, 48-hour fast. And the reason why I decided to
do this was because I wanted to experience how our ancestors must have felt when they
didn't find any food for a couple of days. And then heads to fight a saber tooth tiger
or a mammoth or whatever, you know, so finally they get to eat. Obviously it's not the same,
you know, I'm sure it's more stressful and more intense to fight a wild animal than doing,
you know, a Murph challenge, but still it's the best that I could do.
And so that's the reason why I did it. It was pretty brutal. And so let's
look at some of the footage that I recorded leading up to Murph, you know, how many ketone
levels were. How my blood sugar was and then how the workout went and how I felt and what happens
to some of these biometrics throughout the workout. It's pretty interesting. Now,
one of the things that happen during prolonged fasts is that your body's metabolism changes
and switches from burning glucose as its primary source of fuel to burning ketones.
And so I've noticed relatively early on that my body would switch into full ketosis. I had,
I think it's one of the measurements throughout the 48-hour fast. I measured almost 48. That's
using my breath, ketone meters. I was in full ketosis at that point. I also noticed
looking at my continuous glucose monitoring. That my glucose levels were relatively low
in the low to mid-sixties for the whole two days, I was relatively low in blood sugar.
I didn't feel hypoglycemic or anything. So I was doing fine, but my blood sugar was
relatively low. So what I expected to happen during the workout was that. Glycogen stores.
My body's glycogen stores, the reserves glucose, and deliver it in a muscle tissue
would be relatively low and depleted. And that I would probably hit a wall relatively
early on. Once my remaining glycogen stores would be depleted. I was basically running,
would be running on fumes at that point. So let's look at some of the footage leading up to it.
And then we switched to the workout and see how that went. Hey guys,
so it's 11:30 on a Thursday now and I just cooked my last meal before the Murph Challenge.
So it's 11:30, right now in the morning. And I picked eggs with bacon and cheese and avocado as
my last meal. And then on Saturday, I'm going to do the Murph Challenge with 11 or at 9:30.
So I'm probably going to end the around, I don't know, 10:30 ish or so. And so I'll break my fast
and at 11, and that will push me to 48 hours, so I'm going to end my fast with the Morph Challenge.
It's going to be fun. And this is my last week. I'm going to try to take out lunch break It's
been exactly 24 hours since I ate yesterday lunch. And I worked out this morning I felt pretty weak,
starting to work out, but then as my body started releasing like glucagon, you know, to have some
glucose for fuel, I started feeling really good. So hopefully I won't miss this glycogen tomorrow
for the Murph. But I think overnight my body's gonna do a good job of converting some of the
damaged proteins and damaged cells into glucose and a process called nuclear gluconeogenesis.
It's actually amazing how the body can make glucose from
non-carbohydrate sources. And so hopefully by tomorrow, my glycogen stores are going to be
refilled at least. So I help. Okay. Because if not, Murph's going to be
a bitch. It probably will be. But yeah, that's a quick one. At the 24-hour mark, right at 7:00 PM.
Now the night before, or the evening before the Murph Challenge tomorrow, and think I've been
getting a little hungry and not too bad, but I'm not feeling super energetic, not surprisingly,
just did a ketone test, I'm like it's 34 ACEs or so. So I bought three point something mmol per
liter. So I'm in full deep ketosis unsurprisingly because my body needs, you know, get energy from
somewhere and it's ketones at this point. And we'll see how tomorrow goes. Good
morning. It's about 6:00 AM. I just got up. I'm going to measure my ketone numbers next. See
what they are doing and when we'll get ready for Murph. So let's see, where are ketones levels?
29 ACEs. Pretty good. My blood sugar has been the low sixties or redlining. Okay.
I'm running well on ketones, something really hypoglycemic or anything. So, yeah.
Yeah, that's
fine. Go past the Preston Ridge flight, go to the Preston Ridge office. Come back.
So as you could see the run went relatively well, I tried to re-keep
my mouth close to breathe, breathe through my nose only. And my heart
didn't go up that far. You know, it all, I was overall feeling, not bad. I was feeling
relatively good with a heart rate, I think it topped out like in the low 170s or so.
I still felt pretty good. And then I started the pull-ups.
so I had planned on doing sets of fives for the pull-ups and I couldn't sustain that,
actually I had to take a little longer breaks than I wanted, but that was because I could
feel the energy draining out of my body. I had to. They were not very difficult per se,
but I could tell that I had to put in much more effort than I had anticipated and the
energy that I used up for those pull-ups I would be then missing for my pushups, let's look at
it. Push-ups
were absolutely brutal. I had to plan doing sets of five or worst case scenario sets of
three. I couldn't do either. I had to go to sets of two, and even those got really,
really spicy. Then there were some pushups where the second one, I barely could, you know,
snake myself up, get into a proper position. It was incredibly difficult. And yeah, I had
to take a long break several seconds between. Those sets of two. And in some cases I'm like,
you know what, let's take a little bit of a shorter break. And I could tell
whenever I did that, the second pushup was almost impossible. I was in absolute muscle fatigue.
I was done. I had nothing left in me other than, you know, just waiting it out to kind of,
you know, get the triceps and the chest recharged and then doing that a two. And that would be
completely empty. Again. Wait a little bit to do another two. It took me forever, I mean,
it was literally. Yeah. Hundred rounds. My knees were hurting already. That one,
at some point I got a mat. I could at least kneel on, on something soft because my
knees were starting to hurt. It was absolutely miserable. So I was so glad when I was finally
done with the pushups. And then I thought, okay, to squats, they not, they can't be that difficult.
So let's crank out, you know, sets of 30 or 40. And see how it goes.
Boy, was I in for a surprise? Seriously? I did a 10 or 15 and I would feel light-headed I'm like,
holy moly, I'm going to die here. So I kept doing, I think it was sets of 30 or so, or sets of 10. I
don't, I don't recall. And I kept chipping away, but you know, for 300 reps. It's going to take
forever. And so at some point I thought, you know what, let's try a set of 30 or 40 and 50.
And I kept doing that and I realized I wouldn't feel any worse after 30, 40, or 50, then it would
feel after 10 or 15. So I kept on finally cranking up the rep count and made larger
sets. And I should've done it in retrospect from the beginning. I think next, if I do the next. I'm
going to start with larger sets to begin with. So it's not going to take me forever and it's
not going to feel any worse at that point. And then we had the final run. Come on, Mike.
The final run was absolutely brutal. Again, not from a heart rate perspective. My heart wasn't
really high. But I just felt like if I give 5% more, I'm gonna throw up. And, you know,
I finished at mine and I came in at 64 or whatever minutes. And that was, that was pretty brutal.
All right. That was Murph 37 on the ketones, my blood sugar spiked only to the 94.
I was absolutely empty. I had no blood sugar left. I hit a water really already doing the pushups,
had to do two sets of twos. Squats like sets of 10 in the beginning. And then I crank it up to
thirties and forties that run that last one was absolutely brutal. Came in at 64, 27. I believe
I was absolutely done. That was the worst workout I've ever done,
not cardiovascular. And in my heart, it didn't go up very far, but it was just muscle fatigue from,
from, from those two absolutely empty. So can it be. During a fast or after a two day fast. Yes.
Is it a great idea? Absolutely not. Unless you want to prove what you can do and want to feel
out how your body reacts and actually it wasn't time and it was bad, but it could have been worse.
So the first thing I did once I had completed the Murph Challenge, I drank a honey water, basically
water with sorry, honey, raw honey with lukewarm water, just to get some like glucose back into
my body. And I did that. I ate two bananas and looking at my blood sugar. It barely spiked, so it
must've soaked all of that up in, in, in no time. It was pretty impressive to see how my body
reacted to that sugar loads by not spiking at all. It was pretty fun. And someone asked
me that at the end, you going to do this again? And I said, probably yes, because I think there
are ways on how can I hone how I can improve. I want to do, you know, larger sets of squats.
I want to train my tricep. So it doesn't fatigue that quickly. So I want to try.
To do the same thing again, but completed in less than an hour. It took me, I think 64,
almost 65 minutes last time. So I think I'm going to do this again. One of the thing
that I have learned is that it can be done, but there are certainly limits of what you can do.
In fact, looking at my recovery score on WHOOP, it took me about 10 days to fully recover. This was
a, a huge stressor on my body. And fasting is a stress. High intensity workouts are a
stressor. Mind you that's the day before Murph, I also worked out, you know, fast that already.
So I had really two workouts and one very intense one within a 48-hour fasting window.
So it literally sucked the life out of my body and it took a while to recover. So if you want
to try this at home, if when I would do this too, and see how your body reacts, just make sure, you
offer your body, plenty of time to recover and plenty of time to recover. It's very important.
Otherwise, you're going to get into an over-training and instead can leads to
injury and, and, and fatigue, et cetera. And, and you don't want that. So it was a
fun experiment. I'll probably do it again. But then again, I also want to see what I can do,
you know, without being fasted that you know, what I can do in Murph. So maybe next year I'm
going to do it without being in a fasted state, and then I'll do it again fasted.
It was definitely fun when it wasn't funny, it was actually horrible, but he was kind of a good
experience to find out, see what my body can do it almost forty years of age. And it turns out
I can do more than what I thought. So with that said, I hope you like this video, hope you find
it entertaining and you got something out of it. If you did give it a thumbs up if you didn't
like it, leave me, let me know in the comments, what I could have done better. Until next time.