Peter Attia MDPeter’s takeaways on aerobic exercise and VO2 max, insulin resistance, and more (PS 4 sneak peek)
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
25 min read · 5,363 words- 0:00 – 1:18
Intro
- PAPeter Attia
I absolutely think pharmaceutical advertising should be abolished
- SPSpeaker
Today is gonna be another quarterly podcast summary episode. Huge variety of topics. Olav talking about training, performance, VO2 max.
- PAPeter Attia
It's very quick and tempting to just say, "Ah, they must be just using drugs we haven't figured out yet." Another explanation, and the one that I find, uh, more appealing, is that they literally figured out how to double the octane of the fuel.
- SPSpeaker
Ralph looking at insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes.
- PAPeter Attia
For me, the biggest surprise by far — I mean, I had to pick my head up off the table when he said this — was pioglitazone.
- SPSpeaker
Saum looking at healthcare.
- PAPeter Attia
With all that as backdrop, I said, "Saum, I still don't fully understand why the hell we pay 2X per capita what every other country pays."
- SPSpeaker
Trenna looking at autism, ADHD, anxiety.
- PAPeter Attia
She's like, "Look, I'm really not interested in the label. I'm interested in the impairment."
- SPSpeaker
Mike looking at resistance training.
- PAPeter Attia
Everybody needs to know what it feels like to go to failure, and everybody therefore needs to get familiar with what does it feel like when I was one rep before that. [upbeat music] Hey, everyone. Welcome to The Drive Podcast. I'm your host, Peter Attia.
- SPSpeaker
Peter,
- 1:18 – 3:58
Overview of topics to be discussed
- SPSpeaker
thanks for joining us on another AMA on your own podcast. We appreciate you coming by.
- PAPeter Attia
I, I always appreciate being here. Thank you for having me.
- SPSpeaker
Any, anytime. Anytime. So today is gonna be another quarterly podcast summary episode. Lot of words. Basically what it means is we look at past episodes, kinda cover what the main takeaways are, what your favorite insights were, any changes you made based on, like, behavior to yourself, how you work with patients, how you think about things, anything of that nature from those episodes. The other thing to say as a reminder, it's meant as more to, like, augment the episodes, not necessarily as a replacement, and we get a lot of feedback where people will listen to this and then re-listen to some of the original episodes and find a lot of value in it. So today we'll look at Olav talking about training, performance, VO2 max. Ralph looking at insulin resistance, type 2 diabetes, metformin, SGLT2 inhibitors, other drugs. Saum looking at healthcare, trying to understand why healthcare in the US is nearly two times per capita of any other developed nation. Trenna looking at autism, ADHD, anxiety. We have Mike looking at resistance training and kinda diving into everything revolving that. So huge variety of topics, lot of different things that I think people should find interest in, and I think we'll get it started with Olav. So do you kinda wanna start going through your episode with Olav? This was obviously the second time he was back on. Um, a little behind the scenes, we talked beforehand about, hey, let's try and make it a little less technical, 'cause the first one was pretty technical. And I think looking back, you probably made it more technical than the first, so I think that's just by nature how you and Olav are always gonna be. So maybe break down for people what you learned and what your biggest insights were from that.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah. And before we dive into this, uh, at least in as long as we've been doing quarterly podcast summaries, I will say this, this might end up being the, the longest, because, um, just by the nature of coincidence and which podcasts fall into the past quarter, um, this is probably the most voluminous set of notes I've ever taken across a set of podcasts. Uh, in fact, I would say that two of the episodes that we've covered here, uh, the one with Ralph and the one with Saum, uh, were easily kinda three to 4X the volume of notes I normally take. Um, uh, and, you know, i- i- impute from that way you will. Uh, I've done my best to try to synthesize that. Uh, but, but nevertheless, uh, there's just, there's a lot going on in this past quarter. Okay.
- 3:58 – 15:46
Olav Aleksander Bu Pt.2 episode: metrics to track aerobic efficiency and insights about VO2 max, and the ability of increased carbohydrate consumption to boost performance
- PAPeter Attia
You're right. I wanted to make the Olav one at the outset just straight into, um, less technical things, and I could not resist the tractor pull of trying to at least explain some technical things. So we started the discussion by explaining the difference between things like functional threshold power and critical power. Um, again, I hesitate to bring these up now, because I just don't think they're relevant unless you are a cyclist. Um, but if you are interested, I'll just state it. The functional threshold power, or FTP, is the power that you can hold for one hour. That is one way to test it. You literally get on a bike, usually on an Erg, so it's, it's a stationary bike, um, and you ride as hard as you can without blowing up for one hour, and whatever the average power is that you held is your FTP. Much more typically, uh, for example, when I was a cyclist, we would do this in a 20-minute test, and we would, uh, discount it by typically 10%, although Olav suggested only 5%. In my experience, 10% was necessary. Um, there's something called critical power, which is very similar, uh, but rather than it being the power you can hold for an hour, it's the power you can hold for 30 to 40 minutes. I think the more important distinction here is that you can calculate critical power much easier. You can do it from, uh, a set of curves that are derived from three to four individual tests that are much shorter. Why is this relevant? This is relevant because if you want to have other metrics beyond VO2 max for, um, higher-end aerobic efficiency, you might wanna know your FTP or critical power, and critical power is much easier to measure. So these days, um, and this ties into another insight, by the way. These days, I don't spend a lot of time worrying about my FTP. In fact, I don't know what it is, 'cause I haven't done a 20-minute power test since NAM. Don't necessarily think I'm gonna do one anytime soon probably, 'cause I don't wanna see how low it is. Um, but it made me realize maybe I oughta do a critical power test, um just so that I have another benchmark to be tracking. Um, so we talked about a few other things which I'm not going to go into, anaerobic threshold and stuff. We covered a little bit of that in the, uh, in the first podcast. Another very interesting insight that came up for me in this podcast, uh, which was really just a personal insight, so again, I hesitate to spend too much time on it, was talking about the relationship between VO2 max and PVO2 max or VVO2 max. So if you're a cyclist, what does that mean? PVO2 max means what is your power when you are at VO2 max? Again, VO2 max, just to make sure everybody knows what I'm talking about, this is maximum ventilation, meaning maximum oxygen consumption. It's usually sustained for at least a minute when you're doing the test. So what's the highest amount of oxygen in liters per minute that can be consumed for a minute? And this is achieved during a ramp exercise. Uh, again, almost exclusively done on a bike or on a treadmill, stationary bike. Um, and when you hit that VO2 max, if you're on a treadmill, you will note that, hey, there's a velocity, assuming you're running flat. Um, or you might see, oh, actually I'm on a, you know, I'm on a bike and my PVO2 max is the power that I've achieved. Now, some have argued that VVO2 max or PVO2 max are actually more predictive of sport-specific performance than just the number VO2 max. Um, and I think there might be something to that because I shared my numbers with Olav and the truth of it is I have always had a very low P- PVO2 max to VO2 max. Stated another way, I have always had a VO2 max, um, that is higher than many people who are much better cyclists than me. Uh, it wasn't uncommon when I was, uh, training that my VO2 max was 15 points higher than people, um, who had a higher FTP than me, for example. And what Olav suggested there is it speaks to really inefficient, uh, probably over-training aerobically, under-training anaerobically. So there's an inefficiency there and that inefficiency, um, means that I am actually requiring more energy across the board to put out more power. Now, something very interesting that comes from that is there might be an association between people like that and a lesser propensity to gain weight. Um, and it is true that every time I've done a resting metabolic expenditure test or any time, um, I've done the more elaborate stuff, I've actually done the doubly labeled water test in the metabolic chambers, I always seem to have a through-the-roof energy expenditure for my body weight. So I guess for the first time that all kind of came together, which was, wow, on the one hand I have an advantage perhaps in that I have a very high energy expenditure, so relative to somebody else who eats as much as I do, I'm going to be leaner. But the flip side of that is I'm actually quite inefficient at utilizing energy. So again, I found that very, very interesting. One of the other things we talked about was, um, hey, is there anything that a person can do besides the obvious, which is training to boost their VO2 max? Um, he mentioned something about beetroot. Wasn't familiar with this, but beetroot concentrate, he said, is rich in nitrates. Uh, body converts it into nitric oxide and that of course helps with vasodilation, opens up capillary beds. Um, it should be stated then of course that anything that impairs nitric oxide synthase, and there are many things that do from homocysteine to insulin resistance is going to impede it. Um, uh, again, he said at the elite level, this doesn't have much of a difference, uh, but in amateur athletes like the rest of us, uh, it can be about a 5% boost. Uh, the other thing he talked about that I thought was really interesting was, um, and again, this was to me just more gamesmanship than anything else and I can't wait to try it the next time I do a VO2 max test, which by the way is probably going to be this weekend or next. Um, he said as you approach, uh, failure, uh, do a few breath holds and he said that that produces a significant boost in VO2 max. Again, it's just a reactive overconsumption of oxygen. I don't know if that means anything. Um, one of the other things that, um, I asked him about was the use of acetaminophen. Um, again, there are some data that suggest that acetaminophen use, uh, can boost peak, um, uh, endurance performance by 1 to 2%. And so I, I asked Olav, you know, if, if, um, if Christian or Gustav use acetaminophen themselves, uh, during Ironman and, and he said they did not. Uh, and he raised a point that I thought was interesting, which is, um, while acetaminophen or Tylenol can obviously reduce the perception of pain, which has been one of the arguments for why it boosts performance, um, it may impair, uh, uh, the athlete from giving off heat for, from heat dissipation. And so, you know, he just questioned whether or not that, that, that might be a worthwhile trade-off. Of course, for me, that begs, um, the, the, the desire to do an experiment and find out. Uh, another area that we talked about, which again, doesn't appeal to or does, isn't relevant to me in the way I train, but if any of you are listening and you are really high-performance athletes, I think this is arguably, um, probably the single most important takeaway from this podcast is what the upper limits of carbohydrate consumption are while, uh, doing, uh, cardio, um, activity and racing. So, uh, again, if you're a triathlete, if you're a cyclist, if you're, uh, a runner, less, less applicable in running because the races are typically so short, but of course, if you're an ultramarathon runner, that would not be the case. So again, everybody's kind of done this math, right? Which is, uh, okay, if you're, if you're running, uh, if you're, if you're doing an Ironman or something like that, you're probably, depending on your level of fitness, um, expending somewhere between 700 and 1,000 calories, uh, kilocalories per hour. Um, let's, let's even be conservative and say you're really, really just kind of going easy, uh, you know, you'd be at 600 to 700 kcal per hour. Now, we don't have that much stored glycogen, right? You've got maybe 50, 100 and maybe 200 grams of glycogen if you have really big muscles stored, um, which you're gonna run out of pretty quickly. That's gonna supply you for maybe an hour and a half. So thereafter, you have to meet your needs from body fat and intake of carbohydrates. Um, and the conventional thinking has always been that you can only consume about 60 grams of glucose per hour, and 60 grams of glucose, of course, is only about 240 kilocalories. Uh, this has always been one of my main arguments for why being fat-adapted is very important because if you're consuming that 60 of glucose and that's giving you whatever it's giving you, you have to get the balance from fat, and you're only gonna do that if you're heavily fat-adapted. So you get into this cycle. Well, what we've seen unquestionably is, I think, the biggest, um, uh, honestly the biggest innovation in, uh, endurance sports like the Tour de France and Ironman over the past decade is the amount of glucose that these guys are able to consume. Um, he talked about numbers I had never heard before. As some of you may recall, I interviewed Tadej Pogačar recently, the greatest cyclist on the planet. His numbers blew my mind of the type of carbohydrate, um, uh, intake that he was tolerating, 150, 180 grams per hour. Um, [lip smack] Olav said that they're now pushing triathletes at the world-class level to 240 grams per hour. Uh, again, this is unbelievable to me, and what that basically tells you is you can meet all of your glycolytic needs indefinitely through that. Now, again, just as Tadej said, you have to train this system. Um, these are athletes that are required to now consume gels and eat carbohydrates at a 12% mixture. [lip smack] Uh, what does that mean? 12% mixture means 12... Uh, pardon me, 120 grams per liter. 10% mixture is 100 grams per liter, et cetera. Uh, conventional wisdom is that we can't tolerate, meaning our gastrointestinal system cannot tolerate more than a 5% mixture. Um, and I know for me personally, when I used to be doing ultra distance stuff, I had a hard time going above five to 6% myself. Uh, but what Olav, uh, said and what Tadej has also said separately is you can actually train your GI system to double that. Um, and so how these guys are drinking two liters per hour of a 12% mixture, which would be 240 grams, I, I simply can't fathom. Um, but clearly that's what they're doing and, uh... or, or they're doing it in some combination, so they're consuming gels plus water that amounts to that mixture. Um, but I think when you look at the, um, hyperbolic performance of endurance athletes today, it's very quick and tempting to just say, "Oh, they must be just using drugs we haven't figured out yet." Um, yeah, it's also the fact that I, I think a- a- another explanation and the one that I find, uh, more appealing is that, um, they literally figured out how to double the octane of the fuel. I mean, that's effectively what's happening. It's like a car that went from, you know, racing at 70 octane to 140 octane, and I'm not gonna bother explaining what octane is. I'm not even sure if there's a 140, but you know what I'm getting at. So I would say those are probably the most important, um, things. Um,
- 15:46 – 26:25
The best practices for performing a VO2 max test, the differences between VO2 max training and all-out efforts, and the role of energy intake in endurance performance
- PAPeter Attia
I guess the last thing that I would take away from this is, is kind of, uh, I... he offered a great protocol for, um, how to make sure you're giving it your best when you do a VO2 max test. Um, this has already been something that, um, I, I've started implementing a little bit more with our patients and making sure that, for example, if they do a VO2 max test, I'm... I, I've always asked people, like, describe the protocol, and many times I'm not pleased with the protocol. But this was kind of like the, um, the, the kind of, I think, re- really sort of super-duper protocol, right? So, um, you know, uh, you know, you want to, um, do this at the time of day that is, is a normal time that you would be training, so you wanna be well-rested, et cetera. Um, minimize traveling the day before, so we try to tell our patients the same thing. If you're coming into Austin for a VO2 max test, boy, it would be really great if it was just a short flight the day before, and if it's international, please, you know, come in more than a day before if you wanna maximize the test. Um, the warm-up should be basically, um, six minutes very, very easy, six minutes zone two, three minutes at threshold or FTP, two to three times at a 10 to 15-second burst at about what you expect your PVO2 max is. Then a relatively short rest of 10 to 15 minutes, get a drink, and then get on with it. Um, yeah, so I would say that's... those are probably the most important things, uh, Nick, that I took away from this podcast.
- SPSpeaker
So Peter, just a few follow-up questions there. Let's just start with the VO2 max training. So in that protocol, it actually is like a decent warm-up that you're having people do, right? Like, I remember when I've done VO2 max testing, I don't know if I... they even really had me do any type of warm-up. You just kinda went, hit the treadmill, and then started going. So you're having people go through a little bit of a workout before they get going.
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah, and I'll tell you this. I do most of my VO2 max testing outdo- outdoors now. I use that VO2 Master device, which I, I love. It w- I would... So, so I'm gonna leave from my house. I'm gonna ride 10 to 15 minutes to the place where I do my hill repeats, so that's a warm-up in and of itself. And by the way, getting there, there are a couple of short little climbs where I'll do, like, 30 seconds of, you know, relatively high power just to get up over a little h- pitch. I will do two to three full runs of the hill at escalating power before I'm truly going to hit my max. Um, so I'll do, like, a four to five-minute up at a, you know, like, not, like, a p- uh, like, uh, maybe 85% of what my maximum power would be for that climb, come down for the same amount of rest period, go up again at maybe 90% of what my maximum power would be, come back down, and then maybe I would go and give it. Like, the, the third one would be out there. So by the time I've, I've done it, I've really warmed up. And so the other day, I was talking to a patient who did his VO2 max test at a facility, um, it was at a university that he went to do it. It was just, like, a place where you can go and pay to do it, and I was kind of surprised at what his number was. It was lower than I expected given his training, and I, I said, "Tell me about the protocol." And he's like, "Yeah, I just got on the treadmill, and they just started cranking it." And I was like, "And how long after you started on the treadmill did you hit VO2 max?" And he's like, "I don't know, five minutes?" And I was like, "Yeah, that's, that's a garbage protocol. They... You were not warmed up and ready to do that."
- SPSpeaker
And you mentioned you have a VO2 max coming up. Um, when was the last time you tested prior to this?
- PAPeter Attia
In the spring.
- SPSpeaker
So about six-ish months.
- PAPeter Attia
And the, and the reason is, like, because I like doing it outdoors, I d- I have noticed, because I live in Texas, um, how much of a performance hit I take in the summer. Like, it's just, it's a, it's a, it's a noticeable difference in the summer, so I'm like, "Yeah, I just would rather do it in the spring." Uh, fall, winter, spring is when I prefer to test.
- SPSpeaker
And, like, let's say the month leading up to it, so the past month, have you changed your training at all? Are you doing anything in particular for it? No?
- PAPeter Attia
No, not at all. I'm just... This is just a, a data check. It's just, like, you know, I had my blood drawn this week, uh, had my DEXA scan a couple of weeks ago. I'm doing a VO2 max.
- SPSpeaker
In general, so if you haven't changed anything, just as a reminder for people, what does your, like, VO2 max training look like in a typical week? Is that one day a week? Are you doing it multiple?
- PAPeter Attia
Just one day a week. Yeah, it's three days a week of zone two and one day a week of, uh, of, of interval training. But, but interval training at that specific sort of four, five, upper limit eight-minute intervals.
- SPSpeaker
And I always like when we talk VO2 max training, I think back to one of the actually first video podcasts we ever did with Alex Hutchinson, and do you kinda wanna walk people through... I think a lot of times when you think of VO2 max training or Tabata training or, like, going all out, a lot of times people kind of, like, lose sight at how hard that actually is. Like, do you kinda wanna walk through, if you're doing actual intervals, real VO2 max training, like, what that feels like once you're done and-
- PAPeter Attia
Well, VO, VO2 max training hurts less than a true Tabata. I mean, a true Tabata is... A- again, that's where I think people have a hard time understanding what all out means. I mean, technically, I don't think the human body is capable of going all out for more than 10 seconds. So even at the level of a Tabata, which is a 20-second effort followed by a 10-second rest repeated eight times or done eight times, um, even a 20-second, there's just a governor that is, like, self-regulating how hard you go. Um, the reverse Tabata, where you go 10 seconds all out, 20 seconds rest for eight rounds, that's about the closest thing that I think we're capable of doing as a truly all out. Um, and, and you will increase your VO2 max doing that type of an exercise, but not nearly, not nearly as much as if you're doing intervals in the three to eight-minute range. Um, and by definition, if you're doing something for three to eight minutes, you're not going all out. What you're trying to do is go as hard as you can for that distance and for that time. Um, so, you know, it's, it's, it's a different animal. Obviously, I think it hurts more 'cause it's just, you know, it's a lower level of peak pain, but it's spread out over a longer period of time, so the area under the pain curve is greater. Uh, but it's, but it's, it's, it's far from all out, and at any moment in time, the pain is not the same.
- SPSpeaker
And can you remind people, like, let's say you're doing a four-minute interval, you're not starting at four minutes going as hard as you can and then trying to sustain it. Can you walk through kind of how you think about, like, the energy you put out are spread across four minutes?
- PAPeter Attia
Yeah. Well, now technically, the power is constant throughout the four minutes, so I know in my mind what I, how many watts I wanna produce and what I want my average wattage to be over the five minutes. So let's just say I wanna do five minutes at 300 watts. Um, of course, y- you're outdoors, so you don't have complete control. It's always jumping around, but, but I'm really watching the t- the three-second power tracing and the average power to keep it there. Well, after the first minute, I barely know I'm on the bike. Like, it's, it should be really easy after a minute. If you're dying after the first minute, you've set your target too high. Um, um, two minutes in, you know, or two and a half minutes in when I'm halfway done, I still feel pretty g- good. My heart rate is now going to be within about five beats of what its maximum is, um, but I still feel pretty good. It's really at about minute three, three and a half that the pain train starts to leave the station, and that's when it really starts to feel miserable, and that last minute is, is really, really difficult. And, um, again, if you've done this right, when you, when you finish this, you're really going to need that four or five minutes of very, very easy pedaling, uh, to let your heart rate come back down, uh, to, to then repeat it. But again, the goal is not to have killed yourself in that five minutes such that you can't do it again 'cause what I'm trying to do is actually preserve that power across all the intervals.
- SPSpeaker
Last follow up on this is you talked about the consumption and like the increase in performance as a result of like what they're able to consume, um, when they're performing. How much of a difference like do you think that makes, or how can you explain it to like... A lot of laypeople probably aren't thinking about that consumption or their mixture. I know a lot of endurance athletes are, but like how much of a game changer do you think it is to have that increase in what they're able to put in their body during events?
- PAPeter Attia
Well, again, for people like me and probably most people listening to this podcast, it doesn't... this is not something that should be on our radar. Like, I'm-- I don't think there's ever gonna be a day when I'm doing a 10-hour endurance event again. Um, and therefore, I don't really need to worry about it. Like, it's, uh, you know, if I'm exercising for two hours, that's, that's kind of a long time. So again, at two hours, I'm fine with just water, uh, and my, you know... and I'm living off my own glycogen and, you know, whatever. Um, but it's very difficult now to think about people competing at a world-class level in cycling, uh, and, and Ironman, because what Olav and many others have now argued is the problem of peak endurance is effectively an energetic problem. It's basically a question of how much chemical energy in the form of food can you convert into electrical energy via the metabolism of food back into chemical energy in the form of ATP back into mechanical energy. Like, there, there's... it's just, it's just an energy transfer problem, okay? And more energy input means more energy output, right? The more input, the more f- logs you can put into the fire, the hotter the fire burns, the more steam it makes, the faster the wheel turns. That's basically what it comes down to. And what we've seen over the past decade is quite literally a more than doubling of the feedstock that goes into the furnace.
- SPSpeaker
All right. Anything else on Olav before we move on?
- PAPeter Attia
No.
- SPSpeaker
Perfect. So next
- 26:25 – 29:43
Ralph DeFronzo episode: the pathophysiology of insulin resistance and type 2 diabetes—how they impact different organs, flaws in conventional diabetes treatment, and more
- SPSpeaker
is Ralph on insulin resistance, which I think you said was one of the more interesting interviews you've ever done, correct?
- PAPeter Attia
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Episode duration: 29:43
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