How To Transform Your Metabolic Health & The Surprising Benefits of Walking with Alan Couzens #617

So many people see a lack of nutritional discipline where they really struggle with eating the right thing and sticking to diet as a mental weakness, but really it's a muscle weakness. You have this body that is not trained to burn fat as its primary energy source and is always looking for sugar. So even though you have all this fat stored that you could potentially be using for energy, your muscle just doesn't know what to do with it. So I think that's such an important thing to realise that it's not a mental weakness, it's a muscle weakness. Hey guys, how are you doing? I hope you're having a good week so far. My name is Dr. Rongan Chatterjee and this is my podcast, Feel Better, Live More. When it comes to improving our health and fitness, most of us have absorbed the same message, work harder, push more, sweat more, basically that no pain means no gain. But what if that story is not only wrong, what if that story is actually holding you back? Well this week I sat down with elite endurance coach Alan Cousins to completely reframe how we think about movement, fitness and fat loss. Alan is both an exorcised physiologist and a performance coach and has spent the past three decades working with a wide range of endurance athletes at all ends of the performance spectrum from off the couch fitness athletes to the very best athletes in all of endurance sports. Now I first came across Alan a few years ago when I started following him on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. His content is simply sublime and over the past few years Alan has really helped me to understand the critical importance of low intensity movement, the health, performance and longevity. He also shares his incredible wisdom and insights on his substack, the science of maximal athletic development which I would highly recommend if you want to go deeper into the topics we discuss in this week's episode. In our conversation we discuss why the ability to burn fat at low intensities is one of the most important markers of true metabolic health, why so many people feel they need to eat every two to three hours and why that's usually not a willpower problem but a metabolic problem and how very easy movement, what Alan calls zone zero and zone one can transform your health, energy, mood and even your performance often more than the hard workouts you think you should be doing. We also talk about the need to balance out the stresses of modern life with activities like walking and yoga, the importance of building a big aerobic engine, how best to think about intensity, strength training, VO2 max and muscle mass and why it's never too late to start increasing how much you move and experiencing the incredible benefits. Alan is someone who I have a huge amount of respect for. Not only is he extremely knowledgeable and up to date with the later science, he's also someone who has a huge amount of real world experience helping people to improve their athletic performance and their health. My hope is that this episode serves as a powerful reminder that the human body simply does not work as well as it could without adequate amount of movement and that it inspires you to bring more easy movement into your life in a way that supports your health for many decades to come. I wanted to start off Alan by talking to you about something I've often heard you say, a big part of becoming a healthy human as well as a good long-term athlete is to develop the ability to use fat in order to fuel your low intensity efforts and your day-to-day living. What does that mean for someone who's never come across that concept before? Yeah, I think a lot of the issues that we have from a health perspective in modern life are metabolic in nature. So we as humans have this long-term evolutionary time span where we were moving a lot through our days and we were expending a lot of energy and now we're not doing that. The nature of exercise when we're in the middle of movement, it's a very stabilizing activity for our body. So if we've just eaten and we go for a walk, it stabilizes our blood glucose. If we sit at our desk, we don't get that sort of moderating effect. So I think a lot of the problems that we've run into from a health perspective are just related to that. Are related to the fact that our body is constantly under this metabolic stress. And one of the things that we can do to improve that and to give the body a lot less stress is to teach it to generate energy when we're resting from fat so that it's not constantly having to go through these cycles of, I've got all of this blood glucose circulating, what am I going to do with it? So a lot of the health measures that I kind of encourage people to undertake are related to teaching their body to generate energy from fat. And working with athletes, obviously, that becomes even more of a factor because the glycogen that they have within their body, we want to devote that to the training, not to walk into the mailbox and back sort of thing. So I think from both perspectives, the health perspective and the fueling a lot of training perspective, having the ability to burn fat is really important. Yeah, thanks, Helen. I think one of the things that is going to be really fun to tease out today is the similarities between the populations you normally deal with, endurance athletes who are coming to you for elite coaching to maybe compete in a world championship or super focused and dedicated amateurs who on their weekends and evenings want to do really incredible things with their bodies. But as I've immersed myself in your work for maybe three or four years now, it's really clear to me that the underpinnings of exercise physiology that you talk about absolutely also apply to the regular man or woman on the streets who just wants to be healthy. And so this idea that we want to burn fat as fuel, I guess, implied within that is a idea that many people these days are not in good metabolic health and therefore for these low intensity activities, as you say, walking to the mailbox or sitting on your sofa watching television, they're actually tapping into burning carbs instead of burning fats. Is that correct? And if so, what is the implication of that for those individuals? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. In an earlier life, I spent a lot of my time metabolically testing various levels of athletes, recreational athletes, people who were just sort of moved on from very sedentary lives. And that was exactly what we saw at very low efforts, at resting efforts. These people are burning a lot of carbohydrates, sort of their default fuel. And that becomes problematic because when you burn carbohydrate, you want carbohydrate. The body starts craving carbohydrates. So you get into these energy swings of, you know, my glucose is dropping. Glucose is the only thing that I'm really, really good at burning. So I need to go to the vending machine and get some glucose right now. You know, so I think a lot of the issues of people feeling as though they don't have good control of their nutrition and good control of their weight, a lot of those issues aren't psychological. They're not issues of weakness. They're issues of dysfunctional metabolism. And that's something that when you do change that, when you do the right sort of exercise and you eat the right sort of nutrition to change that, all of a sudden you find it's a lot easier to do those things that you want to do, to not go to the vending machine and grab the nearest snack. Everything becomes a lot easier once you start to get the metabolic aspect in check. Yeah, I think that's a great point. I'm sure many people who listen to this podcast will sometimes hear about intimate and fasting or time restricted eating or trying to reduce how much they snack. And they'll go, yeah, but it's really difficult. You know, I need a snack every two hours. I cannot go for three hours without foods. And of course, there can be many reasons for that. But I think at the heart of it is just as you've said, they're not in good metabolic health. They're not using fat as their fuel for their activities of daily living. They're tapping into carbs, so they're constantly running out of carbs and needing to fix them. Is this one of the reasons you're so keen for people to look at the zones in which they train? Perhaps we can talk about those zones and how using those zones might potentially help people get better at burning fats. Yeah, I have a bit of a different perspective, I guess, on training zones. And one of the ways that I like to view training zones is more as movement zones. So if you talk with a lot of endurance coaches, their first training zone will sort of start at a good aerobic effort. And, you know, below that, if we're talking about things like walking and we're talking about things like yoga and those low intensity activities, they sort of don't count, you know, in terms of training time. And for a lot of athletes, that's sort of how they see it. If, until their heart rate reaches a certain number, it doesn't count. From my perspective, it all counts because all of the low intensity movement below what we traditionally think of as training is where all of the good stuff happens from a metabolic perspective. So going back to what we were talking about with the fat oxidation, people typically, when they start trying to improve that aspect, they need to be exercising and moving at a very low intensity in order to keep it within that fat burning range. So the first zone for everybody is just that I'm up, I'm not on the couch anymore, and I'm moving. And, you know, that's what I call zone zero. That's your baseline zone, where you've got some good metabolic things happening. Moving up from that to zone one, which is where I encourage a lot of my athletes to spend the majority of their training time. That's when we start to have some of the cardiovascular benefits. So we start to see increases in the stroke volume of the heart. We start to see increases in maximal fat oxidation. We start to see a lot of the positive changes that are really important for endurance athletes. So zone zero, the metabolic stuff, zone one, we start getting to the cardiovascular stuff. And then the zones above that start to become much more sport specific. So for an Ironman athlete, zone two is where most Ironman athletes, we do most of their race. For a marathoner, zone three is sort of that next step up where they'll be doing their race. And then they're moving up from that, you know, zone four, five is sort of that half marathon and shorter training, training zone. But but all of those higher zones, your ability to do work in those zones is contingent on you having built that metabolic and cardiovascular base. Yeah, that's super interesting. I want to go into these zones in detail. Is one way to think about these zones, Alan, to think about them as gears, you're sort of very used to talking to endurance athletes and competitive athletes. And I want to make sure throughout this conversation that someone who's not interested in that can still glean your insights and still apply them because I think they're just as relevant. I really do. And so you're basically talking about going through the gears, aren't you? As you go up, you know, zone one, zone two, zone three, your heart rates going up, your intensity, your effort is going up. Is that a useful way for people to think about it, would you say? Yeah, yeah, you know, and I think I think it's useful to to think about the fact that that you're driving your if we're going to use the gears analogy, you're driving your body through your whole day, you know, so a lot of people, they sort of think of going back to, you know, having that that threshold of if it if it's below this level of intensity, it doesn't count. They think that exercises only after I walk in the gym and start doing my structured workout. But every time that you're moving is some gradation of exercise. So I think I think we do a real disservice to folks to think about, you know, we have to hit this magic intensity before good stuff starts to happen. And even for my pro athletes, I will program walks during their day. I'll program recovery walks, you know, and even at that level, these are guys with via two max values of 70 and 80 mils per kilo. You know, they're very, very fit people. Even for them, there is this metabolic benefit to just going out and going for a walk. Yeah, I want to talk about that because you have shared on multiple occasions on your Twitter and now your X accounts and on your substack, which is just fantastic and just full of such high quality information that I think would benefit anyone. I think that you share so many case studies of athletes who have in many ways since working with you trained less in terms of intensity, but they just massively increased zone zero and zone one. So very, very low intensity movement, but they've done lots and lots of it. And they're reporting that they're 5K, you know, Saturday morning time is faster, that when they're competing in their triathlon, it's faster, even though they're not specifically training at that intensity that they need for their race. So there were two myths, I think I was looking through a lot of your tweets today and reading all your sub-sac articles and really trying to get my head around what I wanted to talk to you about. And there's two big myths you often talk about. One is this no pain, no gain idea. Right. So we have this particularly in the Western world that it only matters when we feel it and we're out of breath at the end of it, that, you know, then it matters. So that's myth one. And then the second myth, which I think speaks of what I just said is that you have the train at a certain intensity to improve your performance at that intensity. And I guess one of the really reassuring messages from you, which I think is very achievable for people is to do loads and loads of zone zero and zone one training, which is frankly not that difficult. Yeah, it's just movement. You know, it really is. It's just movement. And I think a lot of people really underestimate the benefits of just movement. And, you know, even things like walking, you know, when we start to increase the volume of walking in an athlete's day and we don't change anything else with their training, their performance level goes up consistently. So, you know, this is something that I think you really have to experience it in order to believe it, you know, and a lot of folks, they really have to sort of, you know, take that leap of faith and throw the heart over the bar first in order to get to the point that they really buy into that. But when you start to increase this low volume activity through your day and you start to record it on your training peaks, you know, you start to say, this is actually training, this going for a walk for an hour is actually doing something beneficial. When you start tracking that, you see improvement consistently for athletes. And, you know, obviously the higher the level of athlete, the less benefit compared to somebody who's just getting up off the couch. But for all athletes, there is benefit in increasing the amount of low intensity movement within your day. So, would you say, Alan, if there's someone who's listening to this, who loves to do a park run on a Saturday morning, which is a, you know, the community 5K runs or walks that go on all over the world. And I know many of my listeners do like to do their local park run on a Saturday morning. Are you saying that if they wanted to improve their 5K time at their park run, and let's say they run a 5K on a Saturday and maybe they run twice during the week. So maybe they run three times a week. But let's say that's all they do. Are you saying that if they could, on top of that, walk for one hour a day, that that would improve their 5K times over a period of time? Without question. There's one athlete that comes to mind who just recently went under three hours for the marathon. And they were doing more than half of their training as walking. So this is a person who, you know, is running seven minute miles for the marathon in a competitive event. And most of their training was at 15 minutes per mile, was just walking. So, you know, I think the level of breakthrough that you can get just by increasing the amount of movement within your day is something that is really, really underestimated for even very high level athletes. And certainly for, you know, your local park runner who, you know, is the weekend warrior who just sort of, you know, doesn't have a lot of time for structured training sessions within their week. If they can increase that incidental portion of activity within their day, they're going to notice significant improvements, not only in their performance at the park run, but just in terms of their overall health as well. Why is it that walking at low intensities can improve your ability to run a park run? Because, you know, going back to that gear system or that zone system, you were saying before that you're encouraging people to do a lot of zone zero and zone one, right? So stuff that's easy to recover from that's not that taxing on the body yet still has a huge benefit because I think the perception with most people is that if they were wanting to run a faster 5k, they need to practice running fast more and more so that they're training that speed. Now, I'm following you for years, so I get it, but for the person who doesn't understand it, how would you describe what is going on in the body for that sort of low intensity training to help them perform in a high intensity event? The biggest thing that separates very, very high level athletes from untrained people is the size of their heart. So the amount of oxygen that they can deliver per beat to the working muscles for an elite level athlete, it's about twice what it is for an untrained person. And we see that in things like resting heart rates. So my top pro athlete type guys have resting heart rates of about 30 beats per minute, sort of low 30s. And you take a typical untrained person and they're resting heart rate is in the 60s, maybe 70s, maybe more than that. So what that says is that these elite athletes are able to push out just as much oxygen to supply resting energy needs in 30 beats compared to what your untrained person is going to take twice as many beats. So obviously there's a big difference in terms of the structure of their heart and the size of their heart. And the good news is that even at low intensities, our heart reaches its maximal feeling at fairly low, low sort of levels of effort. You know, and certainly for, for your typical sort of decondition person, even walking at, you know, not even a brisk pace, even just a walk, are going to be getting very, very close to the maximal stroke volume that they can reach. And what this means is every time that the heart fills up with its maximal stroke volume, it stretches a little bit. And all of these little stretches build up over time and lead to this, this cardiac remodeling, we call it, which really is just about growing the heart and making it larger. So even, even at very, very low levels of intensity, there's a stimulus there to make the heart just a little bit larger with every beat that it takes. And over time, over years, as these beats start to accrue, we start to see improvement there. And we start to see these people who might have started with resting heart rates in the sixties, all of a sudden they're in the fifties and then they're in the forties. And, and this is all coming from relatively low levels of exercise. Yeah, it's absolutely incredible. I think there's something about culture. I don't know if it was always like this hundreds of years ago or not, but certainly since I've been around, which is, you know, when I was born in the late seventies, I kind of feel that I have very much been surrounded by this idea of no pain, no gain, you know, exercise or movement has to be hard. It has to feel hard. You have to feel as though you've worked afterwards. And of course, there may be certain benefits from that, which we can get into later on. But I guess one of your key messages to people pro athlete or not is that even the low intensity movement matters. And what you said there about, you know, you get that maximum feeling of your heart at those low intensity. So if you want that adaptation, which I think we all do, that's a very good adaptation in your heart. What, for example, happens if you go to medium intensity or high intensity, does it not have the same effects on the heart when you do that? Yeah. And, you know, this is something that I think is really important from a health perspective for a lot of athletes, because this is something that we see and what I've seen, you know, growing up as a swim coach and as a swimmer myself, you see these certain types of athlete who do a lot of zone three, zone four, you know, that hard aerobic training. And over time, they develop the ability to train at these levels of intensity where their heart rate is very, very high for very long periods of time. You know, I've seen swimmers do things like, you know, they'll do an hour long training set with their heart rate at 180 the whole time. Wow. And so they have this massive gap between what their muscles can do and what their heart can do. And the more you train that gap, the more you widen it. So you've got this very small engine that's revving very, very hard for very long periods of time. And from a health perspective, that's not a good thing because it affects things like the amount of blood flow that we're able to get to the heart. You know, it has to relax in order to get perfusion and get a lot of blood in between. So we get this heart that's starved of oxygen for very long periods of time. And, you know, from a health perspective, that's just not a good thing. So, you know, I think it's really important that we keep those things in balance. And any time that we spend really working on the peripheral side, on the muscles, we also spend working on the central side and making sure that our engine is growing with our periphery. Yeah, there's so many things, Arlan, for me that have come up there. Firstly, when you're talking about swimmers, you know, who can literally have a heart rate at 180 for a prolonged period of time. I mean, that is a high heart rate. Of course, in the context of racing or swimming, it might make sense. But there has been this sort of idea for a while that there's a sweet spot with exercise, that you want to be moving and exercising quite a bit and you get benefits with your longevity and your health. But over a certain point, it starts to have diminishing returns and people would question then, you know, is marathon training good for you? You know, is running marathon good for you or is it too much? And whenever I would see that research, I would always think, well, hold on a minute. Does it not depend on how you're running that marathon? If you're not trained and you're running that marathon and you're really, really pushing your body and in all your training, you're really, really pushing your body. Well, maybe that's a huge stress on your body. And if you do that for a number of years, I can see how that could be problematic. At the same time, if you only compete once a year, if most of your training is low intensity and, you know, your body's recovering from that, then I think, well, saying that you both do marathons is it's not really comparable because one person is doing it in a way that they might be revving their engine continuously. So your car would wear out if you did that. Where and the other person would be doing it where they're, you know, they're gently looking after their car and their engine whilst they're doing the same thing. So do you think that's one of the reasons why the research on exercise might be a little bit confusing when people say that too much might be problematic? Do you think it's because it's too much of the high intensity stuff that causes the problems? Today's episode is sponsored by Heights. As I get older, I realize that staying healthy isn't just about living longer. 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And each batch is independently tested for quality and safety. That's how they guarantee what's in your scoop and what's not. And the best thing, of course, is that all this goodness comes in one convenient, tasty daily serving. For listeners of my podcast and for a limited time only, get 10 free travel packs plus a free welcome kit, including Shaker, Canister and Scoop, when you sign up for a monthly subscription at drinkag1.com forward slash live more. Yeah, I do. I think that there's some really good, good research on the difference in the nervous system response at different levels of intensity. And this is something that Steven Seiler did a really interesting paper on, where he looked at changes in heart rate variability after training sessions below that first threshold. So, you know, some of these zone zero, zone one, sort of walking or very easy activity, activity sessions versus what most people think of as exercise, those zone two through zone five, you know, with the plan with the with the supposed gain sessions. And he found a significant, almost sort of binary difference between what happens to the nervous system with the low intensity versus the high intensity. And the high intensity activities are very vital flight dominant so that the sympathetic nervous system really gets cranking. There's a lot of it's perceived by the body as a whole as a high stress situation. Whereas the low activity, low intensity activities, the parasympathetic, the rest and digest relaxation nervous system of the body actually gets activated and becomes dominant. So I think when we talk about is, is are we doing too much? Really, the question is how much of the high stress, fight or flight stuff are we are we including within our life, you know, and, and we're not just talking about exercise here, right? You know, stress is stress. So if you have a really stressful job, your fight or flight system is already very active during the day. And then at the end of the day, you go to the gym and you work out really, really hard and you keep that fight or flight system activated. And it's, you know, over time you you reach the point where you just really want out the ability of the body to deal with stress. So I think there's a there's a huge difference in what you're saying between someone who has this mentality of whenever I work out, I have to work out hard. Versus someone who when they work out, they listen to the body and they're like, oh, I'm already in a high stress situation. What kind of activity do I need to do right now to balance that out? And if you take on that perspective, I think you'll find that the body actually does well with quite a lot of activity. So long as it is of that that parasympathetic rest, rest and repair kind of nature. Yeah, I love that, Alan. And I guess it really speaks to this idea that you can't really separate the inputs to your nervous system throughout your daily life. So, you know, we might think of our work life as our work life and, you know, works busy and it's stressful. And but hey, hey, when I finished work, now in my exercise life and in my exercise life, I like to push it hard in the gym. Actually, it sounds like a more helpful way to look at it would be, OK, work is really stressful. I don't know. Let's say you're an accountant and it's coming up to the end of the tax year. Right. So that for from what I know of the accounts, it's who I know. That's a very busy time of year. So it could be for that individual that, oh, at this part of the year for these two months when I'm staying at the office late, I'm working harder than I want to. But that's just the nature of the job. Maybe my inadvertent commerce exercise during these two months should be lots of walking, lots of yoga, lots of low stress movement to help me switch off my sympathetic nervous system. Whereas maybe six months away from that, when they have maybe a dip in the air and works quite light and easy to manage. Maybe that's the time of year when they can be pushing things and doing the intensity and that, you know, it's a it's a different way of looking at your training, isn't it? It's looking at your training as a way of helping your life instead of harming it. Absolutely. And there's been some really good research on exactly that. So if we look at things like heart rate variability, which is a really good marker of whether you're in this fight or flight state versus this this rest and recovery state, when heart rate variability is already low, so, you know, maybe you've got a lot of stress going on in your life and you're just not in a not in a good spot from a kind of fight or flight nervous system perspective, you don't adapt as well to hard training. So exactly what you're talking about, if this person, you know, they take their heart rate variability every morning and they notice that I'm in a really bad spot right now. You know, I've just I'm in that sort of dip where life is really hectic and I'm not recovering like I usually recover. It makes a lot of sense then to back off anything that might be, you know, zone two and above that high intensity stuff because the body is just not going to respond to that during those times and save that stuff for when you're back to a good spot with with your nervous system and your nervous system saying, Hey, I don't have all of this other stress that I have to deal with. I'm ready to deal with some training stress right now. Yeah. I want to go back to metabolic health for a moment, Alan. First of all, I'd love you to, you know, tell me or define it from your perspective. How do you see the term metabolic health? Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with how you're fueling different different intensities. So our body is really designed to be able to fuel all of our low intensity activities primarily through fat. And when when we start to lose that ability is when we start to have some real health problems. Because when we start to lose that ability, we get into some of the things that we're talking about before with our blood sugar, you know, fluctuating all over the place and our body having to deal with that sort of stress. So I think I think that's that's step number one, develop the ability to fuel your low intensity activity. And basically all of your day to day movement should be fueled primarily primarily with fat. So we shouldn't have these situations where through the day we're feeling our blood glucose rising and falling all over the place and feeling the need to hit the vending machine. That's that's step number one, you know, and I think whether your goal is health or performance, that's the first thing that we should be doing is trying to get to the point that we have nice, stable metabolism through the day. We don't have these huge excursions that a lot of people are dealing with in their everyday life. And and a lot of that, again, you know, all of this is sort of tied together because a lot of this is sort of stress related to you know, when when we have that fight or flight response, our body releases a lot of sugar because it's like we've got this massive stress that we have to deal with. And your body doesn't know whether the stress is your boss yelling at you or you have you have to run away from a lion that's that's going to eat you sort of thing. You know, our body isn't isn't really good. We have all this evolutionary wiring where stress generally meant you need quick energy in order to get away from something. And, you know, in order to sort of balance that, not only do we have to do the right things from a nutrition perspective and from an exercise perspective, we also have to hit that other pillar that you talk about, which is stress management and relaxation and, you know, not not falling into those patterns where we always have this lion in the background that's chasing us that that, you know, we have to deal with. If someone has stumbled across this conversation, Alan, and they're not an athlete, they certainly don't consider themselves an athlete, but they want to get healthier and they're carrying excess fat on their body. And one of the things they want to do is to lose some of that fat, which of course is a very, very common goal these days for many people all over the world. If one of your goals is to burn fat and to lose fat off your body, is this zone zero and zone one training, which then improves your body's ability to fuel its activities from fat going to be helpful? Yeah, I think the most important thing and something that's overlooked all of the time is that if you want to burn fat from your body, you need to be able to burn fat within your muscles. And so many people see a lack of a lack of discipline, nutritional discipline, you know, where they really struggle with with eating the right thing and sticking to diet as a mental weakness. But really, it's a muscle weakness. It's you have this body that is not trained to burn fat as as its primary energy source and is always looking for glucose is always looking for sugar. So even though you have all this this fat stored that you could potentially be using for energy, your muscle just doesn't know what to do with it. It's not trained in order to to generate energy using that fat. And so you have this this disconnect between, you know, you have all this this wonderful energy stored within your body that's just waiting to be burned, but you haven't taught your muscle how to how to burn it. So I think I think that's that's such an important important thing to realize that it's not it's not a weakness. It's not a it's not a, you know, a laziness, a lack of a lack of effort on so many people's parts. And, you know, so many people really struggle with sticking with with good nutrition. It's not a mental weakness. It's a muscle weakness. And the more that you can teach your muscle to burn fat, the easier you're going to find it to use what you already have on board. And the quicker you're going to find those body composition changes taking place. Yeah, that's a really interesting way to think about it. And I love that you're you're sort of helping people understand that it's not necessarily you being weak in your mind. It's that you've not trained your muscle appropriately so it can utilize fat for those things. And because a lot of people who are struggling to lose weight will tell you that I went to the gym. I've pushed it really hard in the gym and I try not to snack, but I just I get so hungry every two and a half hours that I just need to eat something. But as you say, there's a certain irony there, isn't there? There is an excess of fat literally on your body. If your body was able to fuel your life from fat and not glucose or carbs, you would be slowly, you know, bit by bit burning off. And as you say, getting those changes in body composition. But the reason you're struggling and they're often going to the gym and pushing it really hard, which I'm guessing is requiring more burning of carbs, burning of sugar as opposed to the training of the burning of fat. Right. So it's really sad actually because people are trying so hard to lose weight, but are perhaps being stuck in this burning sugar cycle. So I guess, Alan, if someone came to you and said, listen, I think I'm not able to burn fat at low intensities, can you please help me? What would you ask them to do? Yeah, I think there's three key components. And the first one that I'll hit is something that we've kind of already talked about. And that is you're going to find it really hard to keep a stable metabolism if you have a lot of stress in your life. So, you know, it's not an intuitive sort of thing to look to you when you're looking to lose fat, but really learning some stress management techniques and doing things. I'm a huge fan of yoga. You know, I do yoga pretty much every day that I'm around. And, you know, when you start doing things like that and having these mental resets during the day where you can really dial down the stress, it has a significant impact on your metabolism. So that would be the first thing that I would say to people, we really need to do what we can to have these anchor points during the day where you completely reset from a stress perspective. And, you know, getting control of your breathing is really important. Just I encourage people every hour, just take five deep breaths. That's all you've got to do every hour on the hour. Set an alarm at your desk and just take five deep breaths. And simple things like that can really have a significant impact on whether your body is moving into that fight or flight mode or whether it stays in that rest and repair mode. So that's number one, taking care of the stress. Number two is exercise and movement. So what you do for exercise and as you said, you know, how hard you push yourself is going to have a significant impact on what you burn. So if someone is really struggling with weight loss, first thing I would say is just forget about anything hard. Just forget about all of the hard stuff. All of your exercise at the moment is going to be easy. So we're just going to do things like very easy walks. You know, we're going to find the nearest park with the most trees and the most beautiful nature that's just going to keep you in that parasympathetic state. And you're going to go for a 40 minute walk every day through the park. And that is your exercise. So everything is going to be low intensity. We're not going to spike the blood sugar. We're going to keep everything in that zone zero, zone one. And then the final thing, and you know, what most people consider is the first thing, is the nutrition. And when you do both of those things, you're going to find that it's a lot easier then to have a diet that is more protein, lean meat, vegetable, fruit, healthy focus, because you won't be having those same cravings that you were having before. So, you know, making the diet focused on real foods and relatively low carb, you know, not crazy, but relatively low carb, which tends to happen when we just eat good nutrition and real food. Yeah, I love the way you put the Allen. I've not really heard fat loss being tackled quite like that before. I love the fact that you started off with stress rather than other things. You know, most people would start off with nutrition. And of course, look, there's many ways to do these things, right? But I really like the way that you frame that. And it made me think of CGMs, you know, continuous glucose monitors. So I personally have found CGMs not all the time, but now and again, to be one of the most useful tools I've seen since I qualified as a doctor to help people understand how their nutrition, their stress, their sleep, their movement affects their blood sugar. And you can't really unknow what you've learnt. Even if you just wear it once for two weeks and then take the learnings and apply them, I still think you'll get a huge amount of value. And one of the things I've learnt from using CGMs now and again is that different forms of exercise do different things to your blood sugar. If I go for a walk, even if I want to hike on a gentle hill, my blood sugar is completely flat and stable. But if I do a Saturday morning 5K where I'm pushing it a little bit, my sugar starts to go up. And it's really, I find it really exciting because I'm learning about my body and how different things I do make a difference. I then know that on high stress days, sometimes you see your sugar going up, even though your nutrition was exactly the same as the day before, or sleep deprivation makes your sugar go up. And I think, I love what you said right at the start of this conversation on this idea that basically our ancestors would have been exceptionally good at fueling from fat. A, food wouldn't have been around all the time, but B, their lifestyles would have lots of low intensity movements, would have ensured that they could meet their needs every day mostly from fat. I think that's a pretty reasonable assumption to make. And what's also really interesting when we think about that is a lot of these populations, these long living populations around the world, they're not training their sprints or training fast 5Ks, they're just walking a ton, often on hilly terrain, but they're moving. They're constantly firing up zone zero and zone one, so they're getting good at using fat for fuel. And I guess because many people these days are not in good metabolic health, I think the stats in America are that it's over 90% of people have some degree of metabolic dysfunction that the UK star I found a couple of months ago suggested it was maybe 60, 65% of the UK population have some element of metabolic dysfunction. So we're looking at populations now that are really struggling with making fuel efficiently in our bodies. And I think the primary thing that we need to help people do is as you say, get them better at burning fat. Yeah, you bring up a really good point with the CGMs. And I found like you, I found it really insightful to wear a CGM for a period of time. And one of the things that I noticed that was really kind of surprising to me was that the patterns that I saw within my glucose had a lot more to do with what I was doing and the stress that I was under rather than what I was eating. And I think that's one of the best uses of CGMs is they really tell you what sort of state your body is in and whether you're in that sort of fight or flight sugar burning state where your blood glucose obviously, you know, kind of goes along with that. And, you know, your body makes available a lot of glucose to burn or whether you're in this calm sort of steady parasympathetic state. And when you when you start to get control of that and you start to have more stability within your glucose profile, it becomes a lot easier than to burn fat. Because if you've got your blood sugar elevated, all of the fat burning of your body is pretty much shut off. So when you're doing your 5K at a full on effort, you're burning very, very little fat. And the same thing if you're sitting in your boss's office and he's yelling at you and you see that your glucose is spiked up because of the stress, you're burning very, very little fat. So really getting control of your metabolism in that sense and getting some stability there is absolutely key to going back to our hunter-gatherers, you know, our ancestors who sure when the lawn was chasing them, they had this big glucose spike. But then for most of the day, they were sitting around the campfire and, you know, they were in that very, very stable parasympathetic state. So I think the more that we can get back to that sort of profile, the healthier we're going to be. If someone, Alan, is not so good at burning fat, and their body is reliant on carbs and sugar, so regular eating in order to fuel, is it going to be difficult for them to go, let's say, for that one hour walk? You know, if they're so bad in terms of their metabolism, how do you help them rebuild that? And is it possible to rebuild in most people? The hardest part, honestly, is mental. You know, and again, going back to our sort of no pain, no gain attitude, most people are going to struggle to exercise easy enough in order to make metabolic inroads. And, you know, this is something that one thing that I like to do when I'm working with sort of just off the couch athletes is I'll get the lactate tester out and I'll measure their lactate, you know, during a very, very easy sort of walk. And I'll see, you know, their lactate is at 2 millimoles per liter or something, which is a fairly elevated sort of level. And I'll tell them, you know, at 2 millimoles per liter, your typical world champion triathlete is doing a really hard session at that point. You know, that's the sort of session that they would be at the track doing, you know, 1000 meter repeats at a pretty good effort. And you're doing this walk and the intensity that you're doing right now, is it a comparable intensity to what the world champion would be doing for a very hard session? So it starts to bring in this sort of framework of if they want to do the sort of intensity that the world champion will be doing for 80% of their workouts, which is a, you know, around about a millimole per liter lactate, it's a very, very easy level of intensity. They have to go crazy easy, just beyond beyond even what their mind can comprehend at that point in order to work out at a similar level of intensity. So that becomes then just, okay, we're going to dial this back, we're just going to amble through, you know, over the course of the next hour, we're just going to walk through this park and we're going to take a chat. And then at the end of it, we're going to test your blood lactate and see where it is. And, you know, then maybe it's sort of 1.5 at the end of the end of that hour of ambling through the park, just talking. And it starts to bring in this perspective of just how easy easy has to be. And so the goal would be for that individual that they would start there, they would just, you know, have these one hour ambles, they might sit down every 15 minutes if they need to, but they would just keep doing that day after day, week after week, month after month, and little by little, their fat burning capacity will start to improve and increase. Exactly. And, you know, as I said, the hardest part is mental because our culture, our society just isn't set up to encourage that. You know, you think, oh, I've got an hour or I've got 30 minutes in which to work out during my day and the rest of my day is very busy. I have to make the absolute most of that. And when you, when people think about making the absolute most of that, they think I have to move fast and I have to exercise hard and I have to feel as though I'm putting out this effort when in reality that's working against these metabolic changes that we want to make. Okay. I have a theoretical question for you, Alan. Let's say someone says to you, I'm not interested in being an athlete, right? I don't want to compete at 5Ks or in triathlons, but around my family life and around my job, I want to do what I can to stay well as I get older. And I can give you one hour a day. Right now, I recognize you might have said one hour's not enough, right? But we'll come to optimal and what you would ideally recommend shortly in this conversation. But if they could give you one hour a day, so that's seven hours a week, what would you say would be their best bang for buck? Today's episode is sponsored by Peloton. Now, we all know that moving our bodies more is good for us. But despite that knowledge, many of us find it hard to actually implement. And that's where the new Peloton Cross Training Bike Plus, powered by Peloton IQ, can really help. It's built for fitness breakthroughs with real-time insights and endless ways to move. And you can go from cycling on the bike plus to strength training off it with one smooth spin of the swivel screen, which offers endless ways to train for a well-rounded routine. While you lift, Peloton IQ counts reps, corrects your form, and suggests new weights, so you're always making progress towards your goals. And Peloton's movement track and camera provides real-time feedback so that you can train safer, lift smarter, and make every move count more. With over 15 types of workouts, expert instructors to keep you motivated, and a personalized plan tailored to your goals, the Cross Training Bike Plus takes the guesswork out of working out. So that you can move freely and let Peloton handle the rest. Let yourself ride, lift, stretch, move, and go. Explore the new Peloton Cross Training Bike Plus at onepeloton.co.uk. That's O-N-E-P-E-L-O-T-O-N.co.uk. And please note, Peloton All Access Membership is required to access all Peloton content and applicable features on your Peloton hardware. The best bang for buck and the thing that I do when I'm time crunched, if I have a busy week of work, or I'm on a training camp with athletes, you know, where I'm not getting the time that I usually get to exercise, the things that I prioritize are walking in nature and yoga. So those are the two things that I think are my non-negotiables in terms of being a healthy human. I need to get out in nature and just walk easy every day, and I need to do some yoga. And it might just be, you know, 15 minutes of working through various sort of yin poses and just to calm my nervous system at the end of the day. But those are the two things that I think have the greatest bang for your buck. And, you know, going back to what we were talking about with stress, when an athlete, when a person, when any human is time crunched and they're very, very busy, they're probably spending a lot of their day in this sympathetic nervous system dominant, this fight or flight sort of mode. So there is huge benefit to just taking some time to switch, to switch out of that mode, to switch into that rest repair recovery mode. And from a health perspective, that's going to give them a whole lot more than trying to make, make huge fitness gains with a really hard training session at that time. Because as we said, when you're dealing with all of these other stresses, you don't adapt to those hard training sessions. So, so yeah, that, that's what I would prioritize. Anything that's going to switch me out of this high stress mode into this parasympathetic dominant rest relaxation. And the other thing that that's going to do, you're going to sleep a lot better, you're going to, you're going to have a much, much better recovery state for when you're not busy, when you're not at work, you're, you're, you're going to find that your whole energy is a lot better if you're able to just, just break out of that high stress cycle. Yeah, I love that. That's, that's very helpful advice. And it's quite counterintuitive. And just to be clear, not only are you on top of all the science, you have measured this sort of stuff in people for decades now with your athletes, you want them to test at what intensity does their lactate start to rise? So first of all, can you say what lactate is? How does it sit on top of those zones that you mentioned before or those gears? And then from there, I want to really understand you love your athletes to test, but do you think there are benefits for Joe public to also test their lactate as well? Or do you think that's overkill? Yeah, so tying in with, with a lot of what, what we've talked about, um, lactate is, is fundamentally a product of sugar burning. So when, when we're in this sugar burning, sugar burning mode of glycolysis, one of the things that happens within our body is when we generate energy from that sugar, we produce this thing called pyruvate. And if, if we're very aerobically fit and we have a lot of mitochondria, this, this pyruvate can then be, uh, can be used as a fuel and can, can, can generate energy aerobically like that. Uh, when, when we don't have that, this pyruvate becomes lactate. So, so, you know, when you see elevated levels of lactate in the blood, you're basically seeing that this person is burning sugar right now and they don't have enough aerobic fitness to use all of the lactate that's being produced. So it's starting to spill over into the blood. So that, that gives you some really important information from a metabolic perspective, you know, right, right from the get go. High lactate, high sugar burning is, is a good way of thinking about it. Um, and then in terms of testing, lactate goes along with a lot of the other type of testing that we've talked about. Um, so when you see elevated levels of blood glucose, because you're sugar burning, you'll also typically see high levels of lactate. So it's not just that you're doing a hard 5k training effort, um, that, that right, that results in an elevated lactate. If you're stressed out, if I'm, if I'm, you know, if I have a, a, uh, an argument with, with a significant other and then I go downstairs and jump on the bike and I test my lactate, it's, it's also going to be elevated, you know, won't be, it won't be a normal resting level for me. So, uh, so I think, I think lactate is, you know, beyond kind of the elite athlete. And obviously we use it to set training zones and things like that. It is a really good marker of what's happening for, for your metabolism. Yeah. Is it fair to say that as I'm, because there's a, there'll be a lot of people who are listening, who perhaps have never come across lactate before or training zones. So going back to what we said earlier, you know, as your intensity goes up, you get different adaptations in the body and different things have been asked of your body at the lower gears, zone zero, uh, zone one, you're burning fat almost exclusively. And as you get more and more intense, you're feeling it more, your heart rate goes up, you start to burn sugar more and your lactate starts to rise as well. Yep. Absolutely. So the, the, the sugar burning starts when, when the lactate starts to, you know, if we, if we plot a curve of intensity and we start at just a walk and then we move to a jog and then we move to a fast run and then we move to like a, a five K kind of, you know, really hard effort, we'll see that the lactate curves sort of rises exponentially through, through those exercise intensities. And exactly what you're saying is happening. So when we, we move to the job, we start to burn a little bit more sugar, but we're fit enough and there's enough mitochondria and enough aerobic fitness within the muscle to use most of the lactate being produced. But then over time, we, you know, as we're increasing the intensity, we start generating more, more sugar. We start, you know, really utilizing a lot of glycolysis to, to, to generate the energy that we need for that. And as that sugar burning increases, we produce more lactate and eventually it's more than what our mitochondria can process. So it starts spilling out into the blood and we see it exponentially rise as the effort goes on, you know, and one of the, one of the key, I guess, guiding training principles for all the athletes that I work with is we want to do a whole lot of work where we're not in that sugar burning mode. So what that means from a lactate perspective is the lactate is at the lowest level that you can possibly get it to. And going back to our walk through the park example, you know, of the, the person we really need to just amble through the park in order to get that lactate to the lowest possible level that we can get it to so that we know that you're burning fat, we know that you're really improving that aspect of your metabolism. Yeah, it's really interesting, Alan, that staying in that zone, that low intensity zone where you're burning fat has got huge performance benefits. So the athletes coming to you who want performance, they're going to get enhanced performance from doing that. But me through my medical lens, I'm thinking, yeah, but it ain't just performance because you're going to improve your mitochondrial function, mitochondrial efficiency, the number of mitochondria, which of course are a central part of health. So if you spend a lot of time in that fat burning zone at low intensities, you're going to improve your metabolic health and improve metabolic health not only makes you feel good in terms of your energy and your vitality, it also reduces your risk of pretty much every single chronic disease that we have, whether that be heart attacks, strokes, dementia, all those things and many forms of cancer, I should say also, the risk of getting them is reduced when you have excellent metabolic health. So I think this low intensity movement that our ancestors did a lot of that you do with your athletes that we're talking about today have benefits for performance and for our health. Absolutely. I think one of the great errors in thinking is that when you reach a certain level of performance, you need to make the trade of, okay, this might not be the best thing for my health, but I'm a serious athlete now and I need to sacrifice that health to some degree. But that's just not the case. The things that are going to be the most beneficial for your long term performances as an athlete are exactly the same things that are going to be the most beneficial for your long term health as a human. Where does intensity then come in to the way you think? Because there must be a role for intensity for health and performance, but are you of the opinion that that comes in later once you've built a foundation in your life of regular amounts of low intensity movement? Absolutely. Yeah. I think the way that intensity comes in is if you're preparing the body for a specific type of effort. So if I'm preparing to run a 5K and I wanted to do it under 20 minutes, then my muscles need to have the ability to work at this 4 minute per K effort. And if I'm only ever training at 7 minutes per K, then obviously I'm not using those muscle fibers in order to do that. So I need a certain amount of training and a certain amount of time spent where I'm recruiting those muscle fibers that I'm going to use when I do my 20 minute 5K. But if we have this really strong foundation of when I'm going through the day, doing my regular activities, when I'm doing my very easy training, I'm fueling it almost exclusively through fat, then I have this glycogen that I can use just for this specific training. So by building this base of where I'm not using sugar and I'm not using glycogen for things that it's not really designed for, I get this pull that I can draw on when I start to do the specific work for a specific event that excites me that I really want to prepare for. And this is really the essence of periodization. You build this foundation of work capacity where you're teaching your body to use fat so that it's not waste the energy doing things that it doesn't need to be doing so that when you move to this specific preparation, you have this energy reserve that you can draw from and really make the most of it. Yeah, so your focus is basically saying let's get the low intensity foundation in first, find a way to get that into your life. Once you've been doing that for a period of time, then let's think about other things like intensity or I guess even strength, but if we were to go back to that fictional chap who said, I don't want to be an athlete, but I want to be well and I want good levels of longevity and they were giving you one hour a day. You were saying walking and yoga, these very low stress activities, which of course are going to do multiple things. They're going to improve your fat burning, improve your metabolic health, and they're going to help you balance the stress from your life. What if they then said, okay, Alan, I've been doing that for two months, feeling great, sleeping better. I can give you two extra hours across the entire week for something else to do with fitness and movement. What would you tell them to do in those extra two hours on top of the seven hours of movement they've already got from walking and yoga? I think beyond that sort of ability to de-stress and to mitigate some of the stresses of everyday life, one of the things that becomes problematic as we age is the loss of muscle mass. If you don't do anything that's not hard, but has some resistance to it, then you lose muscle. I think if I had that extra couple of hours, the next thing that I would add on top of that is just some very basic, very easy in most people's sense of strength training. Just sort of circuit training is something that I'm a big fan of. Relatively low loads, but just keeping them moving over the period of 30 minutes, 45 minutes, moving whole whole body muscle, high muscle mass activities under some level of load. Just basic movements. I do a lot of goblet squats, doing things like single leg, Romanian deadlifts, things that involve your whole body really work on balance, recruit enough muscle mass to keep that as we get older. I think there's a big push at the moment for more and more muscle mass. It seems like we're in this phase of the health and wellness kind of continuum where everyone's all about getting bigger and bigger and bigger and carrying as much muscle mass as we can into our 60s and 70s. I don't think that's necessary. I think the aim really is to maintain the muscle mass of a normal, young, healthy human as we get older. I was going to come to that actually, Alan, because I've also been thinking about this obsession we have these days with muscle. I've spoken to many guests over the years who have said on this podcast that muscle mass is important as you get older. It is, particularly because after the age of 30, I think we can lose three to five percent every decade unless we do something about it. Of course, it's important. Again, like we said before, it's in the detail. Yes, strength and muscle mass is important, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you need to be massive. For anyone who might be confused, Alan, in terms of how they should look at strength or muscle mass, which they've heard about before, how do you make sense of it for them? I think you really want muscle that you can fuel aerobically. This ties in with a lot of what we've been talking about. When you get people who are very well, they have a lot of strength, a lot of muscle mass, and they have a bias of these fast twitch muscle fibres. We've got different types of muscle fibres within our muscle. We've got slow twitch fibres, which have a tendency to be very aerobic. You have a lot of the good stuff within them. You have a lot of mitochondria. A lot of capillaries that can deliver oxygen to them that they're designed to be able to fuel things aerobically. Then you have these fast twitch fibres that don't have as much of that good stuff. They don't have as much mitochondria per unit. They don't have the blood flow that the slow twitch fibres have. When we start to bias our training towards those fast twitch fibres by doing traditional strength training, we detract from our aerobic abilities. Going along with what we said about, we want this body that's very good at producing energy from fat and from oxygen. We want this aerobically fueled organism. If we start to develop the sugar burning side of things with these fast twitch fibres that love generating lactate, that love using sugar as their primary primary energy source, we're really detracting from a lot of the health metrics that we're going for. So something that I look for is if you're adding muscle mass, I want it to be aerobic muscle mass. So I want your VO2 max to go up with the muscle mass. If I'm seeing an athlete's muscle mass go up and their VO2 max go down, then that's telling me that that muscle is not aerobic muscle. It's not the sort of muscle that we really want. So, okay, VO2 max, it's a new term. Can you first of all explain what is VO2 max? And then I'd love you to explain what are those scenarios whereby somebody would increase their muscle mass alongside their VO2 max going down? Because it'd be interesting to know what is it people are doing that could lead to that outcome? So, yeah, if you start off there with what is VO2 max, I think it'll be helpful for people to understand. So VO2 max is basically your whole body's oxygen uptake per unit of time. So if we're very aerobically fit, one of the things that we have is we have a lot of mitochondria. We have a lot of oxygen being delivered to the muscles. So per unit of time, our muscles are using all of that oxygen that's being delivered at a very high rate. So when we see elite level endurance athletes, we see this VO2 max number, which is basically oxygen uptake per unit of time at a super high level. So it's a consistent thing with very, very good endurance athletes to have a high VO2 max. And beyond elite endurance athletes, it also happens to be one of the most important and most consistent variables that are tied to living for a very long time. So if you have a very high VO2 max for your age, your chances of dying over the next 10, 20 years is very low compared to someone who has a very, very low VO2 max for their age. So it's a very important indicator of health and fitness as well. And when we do a lot of strength work that is not challenging the aerobic system, as most traditional strength work where you're doing sort of, you'll do six to 10 reps and then you'll sit on the bench and you'll rest for three minutes. There's not a whole lot of oxygen demand there because the body can use what it has to generate energy anaerobically, and then it has plenty of time to recover. When you do that kind of activity, you get bigger muscles, but you don't get oxidative muscles. You don't get muscles with a lot of this mitochondria and capillary kind of innovation that you would get if you were doing more aerobic activities. That's really interesting. Okay, so I want to make sure people don't go away from this conversation confused, right? So if someone has heard before that it's really important to put on muscle mass, once you hit 30, once you get into your 40s, you must be doing something regularly to counteract the natural tendency for muscle mass to go down. And there are a variety of ways in which they can do that. They may have heard people say, get a heavy weight, lift it five times, stop, wait two, three minutes, do it again. And these things will give certain adaptations, of course, and you will grow bigger muscles by doing that. Do you think there's a potential downside then for people's health of training like that? Or do you think that can have value as long as we're not doing too much of it? Yeah, I think about strength training in the way that I think about endurance training, to be honest with you. So, you know, just like when you're doing endurance training, you have the bulk of your work is very low intensity, and then you have this specific preparation for, you know, your 5k or whatever event you might be preparing for, your strength training, in my opinion, should be similar. So, the majority of the work should be relatively low intensity, should be sort of circuit training. And then you might have a little bit that is devoted to some of these higher efforts. And really what we're going for in the higher efforts is not so much an increase in the size of those fast-twitch fibres. We're just doing enough to keep them around from a neural perspective. So, we're keeping that ability to recruit these fibres and keeping the strength that we already have so that these fibres don't think that they're not needed anymore and start to atrophy. So, I think just a little bit there is really important just to keep your fast-twitch fibres around. But we don't need to go to that level where we need to become bodybuilder, hypertrophy monsters that, you know, I don't think that's beneficial for health. Yeah, I love the way you think there. It's a nice way to think about your aerobic training. A lot of time, low intensity, a little bit of high intensity. Once you've built that aerobic base, I know you mentioned Stephen Sardar before. He came on the podcast about 18 months ago. We had a lovely chat about all these kind of zones and why he recommends an 80-20 approach, 80%, low intensity, 20%. You know, at different intensities, higher. And I know you share very similar perspectives on many levels, but I haven't really heard that approach applied to strength before as well. And it does make a lot of sense to me. And if I think about how I like to train my strength, it is exactly as you say. I don't particularly go and do these 30-minute sessions. I just regularly have heavy things lying around my house and my garden. And throughout the day at various times, I would just go, I'll pick up a sandbag, you know, put it on my shoulder, walk to the end of the garden, throw it up in the air, pick it up again, walk back, throw it up. I maybe do that 10 times. And then I'll get on with my work. Or, you know, I'll pick up a kettlebell, on my way to making a cup of tea. And I'll do 20 kettlebell swings, put the kettle on, get the tea to brew, and then do another 20 kettlebell swings while I'm waiting. And then get my tea and I'll go back to work. So I kind of think I tend to do that. Maybe what I could improve, perhaps, is, you know, where's the 20% of really, really heavy stuff? Maybe I've let that slip over the past few months. Also, with respect to VO2 Max, I've had Peter Ateer on a couple of times on the podcast over the past few years. And Peter, of course, talks a lot about VO2 Max being one of the most important predictors for our longevity. And he talks about, well, he references a scientific paper in his book where, you know, your VO2 Max starts to gradually go down. I think it starts to fall quite sharply, 40s and 50s. I think I can't quite remember the graph. In your experience, from what you've seen, when does fitness and things like VO2 Max start to fall off? I.e. the point I'm trying to get to, Alan, is, is there an age at which you think, listen, if you haven't paid attention to your fitness, you might have got away with it in your 20s and your 30s. But there's a point in life where you simply can't get away with it anymore. You have to start doing something. Have you found like an age range where you've seen that with your athletes at all? Yeah, I mean, the, you know, if we look at sort of, you know, master's record performances, it's, it's fairly easy to see exactly what you're talking about. If we look at sort of, you know, 10k or marathon performances for 30 year olds, 35 year olds, 40 year olds, they're all still fairly good. And then when we start to get towards 50, they start to drop off. And, you know, I can tell you from my experience, these 50 year olds are still, still training a lot. You know, there's still, there's still 50 year olds at the top of endurance sport who are still training just, just like, you know, professional athletes do. So it's, it's not a training, a training issue. It's an aging issue. So I think that's something that is not thought of enough when we see these 30 year old health and fitness influencers who are in great shape and they are only doing their, you know, three or four hours a week or whatever they're doing. It's easy for us as, you know, 50 whatever year old people to say, well, that looks great. You know, they're only training four hours a week. They're doing these high intensity sessions and the, their VO2 max is high. And, you know, that I should, I should do that. I want that VO2 max. But the reality is, our VO2 max is going to decline significantly with age beyond the age of 40. So if, if we want to maintain the VO2 max of a young person when we're in our 40s, 50s, 60s, we're going to need to train more. And I think that's, you know, that that's a uncomfortable truth for a lot of people. But it's something that, that I'll sort of look at in terms of planning for my retirement and planning my 80 years in life. I plan on spending a lot of my time moving. I plan on increasing the amount of exercise that I'm doing versus right now. And, you know, that's something that I think if we were, were to sort of go into exercise with that perspective, that our objective really is sustainability and something that we can build on and not actually decrease through the years, it would change what, what we do. It would change what our exercise looks like. Yeah. I would say one of the things I try and do every day is do at least one hour of walking. I, like you have realized that, hey, as I'm getting older, I need to move more, not less. And I'm very lucky because I do have a lot of autonomy over my time now in a way that I didn't have early one in my career. When opportunities come in and there's, you know, things that I could do, I'm also now thinking about it through the lens of yes, but if I do that, if that gets in the way of my ability to move, I'm not sure it's worth the trade, right? And I definitely, I would give you a lot of credit for that because I think your tweets over the years have really helped frame that in my brain and go, yeah, well, hold on a minute. How do you define success? Right? In fact, Alan, I was going to ask you how, you know, you said you were in your 50s. I'm too polite to ask you how old you are, right? So in your 50s, at this stage in your life, how do you define success? I think as you reach, you know, the sort of age that I'm at now, you start to think about what you want your 60s and 70s to look like. And one of the pitches I've always had in my head, and you know, I've spent, I've spent a bit of time in Arizona at the Grand Canyon. It's one of my favorite places to go and just to hike around. And when I see the bus loads of older people coming through, looking at the Grand Canyon through their bus windows, you know, there are people in their 70s, and I'm sure that some of them are thinking, I wish I had come here back when I was in my 30s and 40s, I would love to get down there and, you know, touch the ground and experience, experience hiking through the canyon. I never want to be at that point. I never want to be on that bus, unable to get out and walk, walk down, hike down into the canyon. So that's sort of my guiding principle, I guess. I always, as long as I'm on this earth, I want to be functional. And I think, you know, no matter how much money you have, no matter how much success you have, you know, from a business perspective, if you're at the point where you're limited in what you can do physically, then there's something that's really important that's missing from your life. And, you know, I'm trying to, obviously, I'm not at that point yet, I'm still able to do all of these things. And I want to keep that for as long as I possibly can. Yeah, it's really interesting, Alan. My son is currently 15, and, you know, we've been talking about what he might do for his A-levels in the next two years, which are the sort of, you know, here in the UK, at least, they're the exams you do in the final two years of school, if you choose to say it's school beyond the age of 16. And I was having a chat with him the other day, and he was talking about what some of his mates were saying, well, about what jobs they want to do. And, you know, one of them says, well, I want to be a charter counselor, you know, I've heard they make quite a lot of money. And whatever, it was just interesting to hear what he was saying. And one of the things I said to him, I said, it's all interesting here, what your mates are saying. But when you're thinking about that, what job you want to do, A, I was saying, think about what you love, right? Think about what is it you're going to really enjoy doing. And if you don't know now, that's completely fine. We can figure that out, or you can figure that out over the next five, 10, 15 years, right? You don't have to make that decision now. But I also said to him, have a think about what is the cost of doing that job. And we went through this thought experiment about if being a charter accountant pays x thousand pounds a year, and that's what that individual wants to earn. Is it still worth it if they're working every weekend, and they're working late every evening, and they can't take any time off? Is it still worth it? Or might it be better to earn 10,000 pounds a year less and have your weekends free and your evenings free? And what it was, the reason I'm so passionate about this is because I know you tweet about this quite a lot about how to look at your life. I just want to put the idea into him that I didn't have at that age, which is all of these choices, they have a cost. There is a consequence. If you choose a job that you love, but that doesn't allow you to move, and I get loads of people are in that position, and there's nothing they can do about it. I do accept that. But I do think it's quite interesting if we were to bring up a generation thinking about, well, what kinds of jobs could I do that would pay me enough, but also give me enough time to move? Do you know what I mean? Yeah, it's, you know, as a coach, and you know, a coach who's worked with a lot of adult athletes who have all different types of jobs, it's frustrating when there's certain cultures and certain jobs that really are built around not having control of your schedule and almost voluntarily surrendering that. It's like, if you want to do this job, you need to be aware that we own you. We own your time, essentially, you know, and whether it's a company that you're working for is owning your time, or whether you're in a startup, and you know, you just kind of realize that the business is everything when you're getting started, and you're not going to have your own sort of, you know, you're not going to have the luxury of then I'm going to say, well, I'm not doing this today, but I've got to go for a three hour hike instead. You know, I think a lot of that is really cultural, and you need to be careful if you value your health, you need to be really careful on what culture you're going to take up and what culture you're going to adopt as the norm, because there's big differences, right? I mean, you have on that side, some people who have very little control of their schedule, and then I've worked with others who have prioritized their health and fitness from the beginning, and have carved out these niches where that's really important, and they're going to make sure that they always have time to do what they need to do from a health and fitness perspective. And I think a lot of people, they kind of get stuck in these these routes, you know, where you say, yes, I'm going to do this, yes, I'm moving up to this promotion. This promotion is going to require X amount more hours per week, you know, and you're just so easy to get really stuck in a particular path, and not to be conscious of, or, you know, health and fitness was something that was really important to me back, you know, five years ago, and now all of a sudden, it's just been kind of pushed out, you know, and it can be really insidious. And I think it's something that, as you said, it's important to be mindful of. It's really where common that, but it doesn't, it doesn't apply to everyone. It was really interesting, I don't know, maybe 10, 15 years ago, one of my mates from primary school, who's a teacher, you know, he's been a teacher for a while, and he was, I think he's the assistant head, no, the assistant is at the head in his department, basically, not of the school in his department. And we, this is back when I used to play squash with him. I think he said once that, oh, mate, I've been offered head of the department, but I'm not going to take it because, yeah, it's a, it's a little bit of extra money, but the amount of stress that job comes with, I don't think it's a good trade. I wouldn't be able to do my sports at the weekend and all the other things he enjoys doing. And it really, it really stuck in my ear when he said that because I wasn't brought up to think like that. I think like that now, but I didn't think like that back then. So there are people out there, maybe like you, maybe like my friends who actually do see life in this kind of more holistic way and go, yeah, at what cost do I do the thing that everyone around me tells me I should be doing, the better job, the promotion? Well, maybe I'm okay just to make, you know, he was like, well, I ain't enough. Like, I don't really need anymore. I'd rather be able to do my fun stuff at the weekends. And that's exactly what you're talking about, isn't it? Yeah, exactly. You know, and I think I came from Australia and I think Australia is a very sort of tradition oriented sort of country. You know, it has these sort of working class values. And, and, you know, I know that growing up, the path was, you know, as you're going through school, you identify what job you want, and then you apply to that job and you, you get in with a company and you sort of work your way through that company. And I didn't really have this exposure to there being different, different options. And it really wasn't until I moved to the US that I saw these people doing things differently, you know, starting businesses and just, just taking these non-traditional approaches. And I think I'm really fortunate that I got exposed to that because if I, if I didn't, it just wouldn't have, it wouldn't have been a possibility. It wouldn't have been in my mindset that, you know, maybe there are these alternative routes that I can take that still pay me enough, but I get, get control of my time and I get to, to make sure that I still have some agency over my health and fitness. We were talking about VO2 Max before and you were saying even in well-trained athletes, as you get older, that VO2 Max will start to decline. So I guess the follow-up question is if we want to protect our VO2 Max as we get older and potentially increase it, is there anything we can do or do we have to accept this as inevitable decline? Yeah, I think it depends where we're coming from. You know, if you're, if you're, Elliot Kipchurgi who you've had on your podcast, then I think some, some decline in VO2 Max is kind of inevitable when you're coming from that, from that level, but for most of us, because you've reached your genetic potential through all your training, so it is going to decline. Absolutely, yeah. And then, you know, for most of us though, I think my kind of my standard or what I aim to maintain through my life is I want to keep a young person's, a normal fit, healthy young person's VO2 Max for as many years as I possibly can. And that's about 50 mils per kilo for a, for a, for a young male. So that's, that's the standard I have in my head of I want to do enough training to hold on to this VO2 Max of 50 mils per kilo for as long as I can. And you know, in, in my fifties, that's a, that's a decent amount of active, you know, I train two hours a day basically. But, but I know that in order to do that in my sixties and seventies, we're starting to get up to pretty elite levels of fitness for, for those guys. So, you know, I'm certainly playing the long game here and I'm pacing with that, with that in mind that I don't necessarily need to be a world champion at 50, but I, I want to be of that sort of fitness when I get into my seventies. I love that. And thinking about this idea of playing the long game, one of the other themes that often comes out in your writing and your tweets is this idea that fitness is a long-term game. And again, that goes against other things in modern culture, you know, we've already mentioned no pain, no gain, right? It's got to feel hard. But there's also this idea that we can cram stuff in. Oh, you know what? I'm just going to sign up for that half marathon in 12 weeks and do the plan, train hard for 12 weeks and then don't train for three months afterwards. Cause you know, I got the medal, I did the race. And one of these key ideas that I get from, from you, Alan, is that you can't really afford to take that much time off. I.e. You are a big fan of consistency, not just for a period of weeks or months. You're a fan of consistency over years. And you sort of share a lot of the time that actually if you can stay consistent week after week, month after month, year after year, you are going to get incredible fitness adaptations. But unfortunately, most people can't maintain that consistency. Can you speak to that a little bit, please? Yeah, I think, I think it's a very, very human thing to, to not be very good at pacing over a long timeframe. So, you know, I've done, done several Ironman races myself and they all go the same, right? When, when you, when you start off, you, you do your swim, you do your bike and people are just zipping by you for the first third of the race because, you know, they, they, they have this in their head that I'm going to be able to maintain this effort, effort all the way through. And 95% of them you then see later on in the day, they were in fact not able to maintain that effort all the way through. So I think that's, that's just a very, very human thing to, to always overestimate what we can maintain over the long term. So, you know, I think these people, when they sign up for their half marathon in 12 weeks, they're not thinking that this is going to completely burn me out and I'm going to be wrecked and not doing anything for the next three years. I'm sure at the time it's like, this, this is the, the starting point for my fitness journey from, from here on out, but they go too hard. They, they, you know, adopt that no pain, no gain mindset. And then by the time they're done with the half marathon, they're like, oh, I got to take, take a breather, you know, maybe they're, maybe they've got some injuries that they're dealing with. Maybe it's just the case of, oh, that was, that was a lot when it comes to, you know, keeping up with my schedule. So I don't think that, that people necessarily intend to be flashes in the pan, but they just, they tend to overestimate what they're going to be able to accomplish over the long term. And, you know, I think that the good news is that we don't need to do these mammoth feats in order to, to get fitter than what we are right now. All we've got to do is beat our long-term average and just keep continuing to beat our long-term average for the smallest of, of little bits. And when we, when we look at that and we look at it objectively and we say, well, how much training have you actually done over the past year? All we've got to do is just do a little bit above that, you know, and just, just keep doing a little bit above that year after year. It becomes a lot more attainable for folks. It's interesting. You mentioned Kip Chogy, who's been on this podcast twice, and I'm very, very fortunate, lucky to have had two long form sit down conversations with arguably the greatest marathon runner of all time. And there's so many things that I've learned from him. Hey, how humble he is, the fact that he still cleans the toilets in the training camp, just like everyone else now, even as this world champion and Olympic gold medalist, he's, he's very, very humble. He's very, very wise. But one of the things I never forgot from our first conversation was that he said that he never ever sits on a niggle. As soon as he feels something, when he's out training, he'll, he'll, he'll often stop. He'll go and see his team. The physio will have a look and it kind of speaks to what we've just been talking about. Injury as we get older is something that takes us out of the game, right? If we push it too hard for too long, as many of us do, we get injured and then we can't train for two months and we can't play the sport we want to. And I think maybe you get away with that in your 20s. You don't get away with it in your 40s or your 50s or it very quickly adds up those injuries, right? So whilst we want to move as we get older, we don't want to be getting injured. And I think, yes, Kipchogi is genetically gifted for sure. He trains very well. He's got a wonderful psychology and approach to life. And I think just very basically, he tends to his body. He won't let a niggle turn into an injury. Now, sure, he's older, he's getting injured, whatever. But in the kind of prime of his career, I think he would go like seven, eight years and almost never miss a training session because he stayed on top of things, which is very inspiring. And we might think that, that this only applies to the world's best. But I don't think it does. Yeah, it's funny. In working with, you know, people who are just starting out and just off the couch, but they're excited and they're really committed to the training program. I think sometimes when we compare their mindset to elite athletes that I've worked with, they're actually over committed. They're resolved to do the plan no matter what. And, you know, going along with what we talked about of laying stresses on top of variable, unpredictable stresses, a lot, that's really common for a lot of amateur athletes. They are just determined to do the training plan. It doesn't matter what they feel with their body. It doesn't matter if they're tired. It doesn't matter if they're sore. It doesn't matter if their ankle's feeling a little bit sketchy. They're going to do the session. And the elites and certainly the best of the elites are very, very good and very, very confident at reading their body and being like, okay, I've got this long-term plan, but today's a little funky. Today, you know, I have to make an audible here and they really have no problem with making that audible. And I think that that is a huge element of their success because the athletes who don't want to do that do exactly what you're talking about. They have these periods of inconsistency where they're just constantly going from one injury. They have a period where they're not able to train properly. They lose fitness and they move on to their next injury and it's just up and down, up and down. Whereas somebody like Kipchogi who has the confidence to make these calls, he's had a tremendously long sort of longevity in the sport. Yeah. One of the other things I feel has really connected with me from your writings, Alan, is this idea about carbohydrate intake. And we probably don't have time to go deep into nutrition today, but broadly speaking, one of the things that I've really liked about your approach is that you, again, please correct me if I've sort of misinterpreted this or it's not quite worded the way in which you would word it, but it's almost thinking about my carbohydrate intake relative to my movement. So for example, if I'm having a sedentary day, my carb intake will be lower. And if I have managed to go for a 90 minute hike, then I proportionately have to maybe increase my carbohydrate intake a little bit because I moved more. For me, I found that very, very helpful. And I've actually seen how that tracks with my blood sugar on my CGM, like on those days where I move. On a sedentary day, if I'm having that same volume of carbs, I can see my sugar go up. If I move for 90 minutes and then I maybe eat a little bit more, I'm talking about whole food carbs, not processed carbs. I feel that my blood sugar stays relatively stable. So is this something you've seen with a lot of your clients that we can think about raising our carbohydrate intake relative to the amount of movement we're doing? Yeah, I think a guiding principle here is that you should eat what you're burning and ultimately you will burn what you're eating. So it's a two-sided equation there. So folks, going back to what we were talking about with the objective being we want to fuel all of our resting and low intensity movement needs through fat. If you take in carbohydrate, your body is going to preferentially burn that carbohydrate. So you're never going to teach your body to burn fat if you're always giving it this steady stream of carbohydrate during your resting days and during your low intensity activity days. So I think that's the first thing to realise. You will end up burning what you eat and your body is lazy in the sense that it will burn the easiest things first. So if you're constantly giving it doughnuts and lollies and those sorts of things, you're always going to end up burning those things first. Does that mean, Alan, that you are a fan of, let's say in the morning, a one-hour fasted walk? So before you have your breakfast, if you're able to go for a walk without eating anything, does that help teach your body to burn fat more than if you have a bowl of corn flakes and then go for a walk? Yeah, that's exactly what I do. So my first walk of the day will be walking the dog and I will not eat breakfast until I get done with the dog walk and depending on how stubborn she's feeling for that day, that could be a very long walk. It could be an hour long walk. So I'll get up, do, get ready, take the dog out and I won't eat until I get back from that. And just that simple ability to not have to eat as soon as you get up, I think it's a really positive sign in terms of someone's metabolic health. And I'm really not hungry. Sometimes it'll be two hours, three hours before I eat and I'm really not hungry. I don't feel the sort of blood sugar swings during the morning and really through most of the data, I'm not noticing those sort of swings that I always had when I was younger and overeating carbohydrate. But Alan, if we are only in zone one, so therefore mostly burning fat, let's say we've gone for a relaxed walk for an hour in nature, does that even need factoring into our nutrition in the sense that we do, all of us have a lot of fat on our bodies, whether we're overweight or not, we have got stores of fat on our bodies. And so if you go for one hour walk where you're only in zone one and you're not tapping into sugar burning and you're burning fats, you don't really need to replace carbs from that walk or do you? Certainly less than what most people do. I think most people are overeating in terms of what they're burning. And in the beginning, it can be very challenging because even in that walk, as we were saying, people who are just getting up off the couch and just getting moving, are burning carbohydrates just at rest. So it can be a little bit challenging, going straight from that to I'm going to fuel everything with fat. So I think you need to be a little bit kind to yourself when you're just getting started. But certainly after someone builds up the ability to exercise at a level where they're burning the fats almost exclusively to fuel the effort, then you really don't need carbohydrate for those very low efforts. But usually what happens is at that point, people are like, oh, I'm getting fitter. So I want to start doing a little bit higher intensity efforts too. So then the carbohydrate comes in to fuel those higher intensity efforts. But yeah, it's a very positive sign when you can go for an hour walk, a two hour walk, a three hour hike, and you're doing it all at a very low intensity and you're really not feeling any sort of highs and lows in terms of the blood sugar. It's a very sustainable effort. Yeah, and very freeing. You're not dependent on having all that food with you because you know actually I'm fully capable within my body to fuel this with what it's got on board, which is very, very liberating. And then I could talk to you for hours. I just love everything that you put out there. I think it's so helpful. I honestly don't know if I'd still be on Twitter at all, if you didn't exist. I know you stopped posting for a few months. And I know you don't do as much as you used to do on there, but I really think your voice is a much needed voice in the world. And I love it. It's had a huge impact on me. If people want to, you know, get into the Alan Cousins world and read more about what you do and join your community, where would you direct them? Yeah, so I am still somewhat active on Twitter. I'm trying to work on my addiction, but I'm still there. So that would be the first place. I do have a forum for a community forum. It's $5 a month for anyone who's sort of looking to get a little bit of feedback on their own journey. And you can find that on my Twitter. It's madcrew.com, sorry, forum.madcrew.app. And apart from that, if anyone's looking for help with their journey, I do consultations and things like that as well. So please feel free to DM me or email me or whatever. Yeah, and your sub stack is brilliant, where you have released chapter after chapter off your book. I don't know if that book's ever going to be published in paper, but it's all there in your sub stack. I would highly recommend that people are interested in this kind of material. You're writing a super clear super on points. There's lots of graphs. You make it really easy to understand. So I would definitely direct people there as well. Alan, thank you so much for making time to come on the show today. My final question to you is, I know you are used to dealing with elite athletes, but if someone has come across this conversation today and they've recognized that, you know what, maybe they're in their late 40s and they've realized that, you know what, I've really not taken my fitness seriously. Maybe there were factors outside their control. Maybe they were in relationship difficulties, elderly parents to look after, challenging children, busy job, whatever it might be, but something today connected with them on a deep level, where they thought, you know what, I want to start getting into fitness now. Maybe they're 50 years old and they've never done it before and they say to you, Alan, is it too late? What would you say to them? Absolutely not. You know, I think if we look at, I've certainly had the ability and the good fortune to work with some very high level older athletes, you know, people who have won their Ironman age group in the Ironman World Championships and those sorts of people, and so many of them have started at that exact age. So, you know, I think for a lot of folks, it's almost a benefit because people who've gone through and have really trained hard in their 20s and 30s, oftentimes they can almost be a little bit burned out and can be, maybe they had sort of a bad experience with training for endurance sports, so it can be a hard thing for them to recover from, but for those people who are just starting fresh in their 40s and 50s, there's still a lot of years left and, you know, as I said, we're playing a very long game here and we want to be progressing through each of those years, so it's definitely not too late. Yeah, Alan, I really appreciate you making the time. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you, Ron. I know it was my pleasure. I really hope you enjoyed that conversation. Do think about one thing that you can take away and apply into your own life and also have a think about one thing from this conversation that you can teach to somebody else. Remember, when you teach someone, it not only helps them, it also helps you learn and retain the information. Now, before you go, just wanted to let you know about Friday 5. It's my free weekly email containing five simple ideas to improve your health and happiness. In that email, I share exclusive insights that I do not share anywhere else, including health advice, how to manage your time better, interesting articles or videos that I'd be consuming, and quotes that have caused me to stop and reflect. And I have to say, in a world of endless emails, it really is delightful that many of you tell me it is one of the only weekly emails that you actively look forward to receiving. 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