#1 Reason You’re Still Storing Fat & Exhausted (No Matter How Healthy You Eat) | Alan Couzens

1. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee0:00

   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?

2. ACAlan Couzens0:20

   Yeah. I, I think, uh, a lot of the issues that, that we have from a health perspective in, in modern life are, are metabolic in nature. Um, 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. Um, and, and now we- we're not doing that. Um, and I... And the, the nature of exercise when, when we're in the middle of movement, it, it's a very stabilizing sort of activity for our body. So if, if we've just eaten and we go for a walk, it, it stabilizes our, our blood glucose. If we, 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, we've run into from a health perspective are just related to that, are related to the fact that our body's 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, uh, you know, a lot of the health, um, measures that I, I kind of encourage people to, to undertake are related to teaching their body to generate energy from fat. And in working with athletes, obviously that becomes even more of a factor because the glycogen that they have within their body, we w- we want to devote that to, to the training, not to walking to the mailbox and back sort of thing. So, uh, you know, I think from both perspectives, the health perspective and the fueling a lot of training perspective, having the ability to burn fat is, is really important.

3. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee2:25

   Yeah. Thanks, Alan. I think one of the things that is gonna be really fun to tease out today is the similarities between the populations you normally deal with, you know, endurance athletes who are coming to you for elite coaching to maybe compete in a world championship or, you know, 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, 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 this 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 fat. Is that correct? And if so, what is the implication of that for those individuals?

4. ACAlan Couzens3:50

   Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Uh, i- in a, in an earlier life, I spent a lot of my time metabolically testing various levels of, of athletes, recreational athletes, people who had just sort of, you know, moved on from, from very sedentary lives, and that was exactly what we saw. At, at very low efforts, at, at resting efforts, these people are, are burning a lot of carbohydrate as sort of their default fuel, and that becomes problematic because when you burn carbohydrate, you want carbohydrate. The body starts craving carbohydrate. So you, you get into these energy swings of, you know, my glucose is dropping. Glucose is the only thing that I'm really, um, 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, a lot of the, 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, um, a lot of those issues aren't, aren't psychological. They're not issues of weakness. They're issues of a dysfunctional metabolism. And, and that's something that when you do change that, when you, when you do the right sort of exercise and you, 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, the nearest snack. Everything becomes a lot easier once you start to get the metabolic aspect in, uh, in check.

5. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee5:32

   Yeah, I think that's a great point. I'm sure many people who listen to this podcast will sometimes hear about intermittent fasting or time restricted eating or trying to reduce how much they snack, and they'll go, "Yeah, but it's, but it's really difficult. You know, I, I need a snack every two hours. I cannot go for three hours without food." 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 usingfat 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 fat.

6. ACAlan Couzens6:30

   Yeah. I, I, I have a, a bit of a different perspective, I guess, on, 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, uh, their, their first training zone will sort of start at a, 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, 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. Uh, f- from my perspective, it all counts because all, all of the low-intensity movement below what we traditionally think of as training is, is where all of the good stuff happens from a metabolic perspective. So going back to what we were talking about with, with the fat oxidation, people typically when, when they start trying to improve that aspect, they need to be exercising and moving at a very low intensity in order to, to keep it within that fat burning range. So the, the first zone for everybody is just that I'm, I'm up, I'm not on the couch anymore, and I, and I'm moving. And you know, that, that's what I call zone zero. That's your baseline zone where you've got some good metabolic things happening. Um, moving up from that to, 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 stroke volume of the heart. We start to see increases in maximal fat oxidation. We start to see a lot of the, all those positive changes that are really important for endurance athletes. So, so that's zone zero, the metabolic stuff. Zone one, we start to get into the cardiovascular stuff. And then the, the zones above that start to become much more sport specific. So for an Ironman athlete, zone two is where most Ironman athletes will be doing most of their, 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, then moving up from that, you know, zone four, five is sort of that half marathon and, and shorter, uh, 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.

7. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee9:17

   Yeah. That's super interesting. I, I wanna 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 wanna 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 rate's going up. Your intensity, your effort is going up. Is that a useful way for people to think about it, would you say?

8. ACAlan Couzens10:02

   Yeah. Yeah. You know what? And I think, I think it's useful too to think about the fact that, that you're driving your... If we're gonna use the gears analogy, you're driving your body through your whole day, you know? So a lot of people, um, they, 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 exercise is only after a walk in the gym and start doing my structured workout. But every time that you're moving is some gradation of, 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, at that level, these are guys with VO₂ 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.

9. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee11:09

   Yeah. I wanna 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've 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 their, their 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... I, I was looking through a lot of your tweets today and reading all your Substack 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, that, you know, then it matters. So that's myth one. And the, and the second myth, which I think speaks to what I just said, is that you have to 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.

10. ACAlan Couzens13:01

    Yeah. It's just movement, you know? It re- it really is. It's, it's just movement, and I think a lot of, a lot of people really underestimate the benefits of just movement. And, you know, e- even, even things like walking, you know, when, 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, th- this is something that I think, uh, it, it... you really have to experience it in order to believe it. Um, you know, and, and, and a lot of folks, they, they really have to sort of, uh, you know, take that leap of faith and throw the, the heart over the bar first in order to, to get to the point that they really buy into that. But when, when you start to increase this low-volume activity through your day and you, you start to record it on your training peaks, you know, you start to say, "Th- this is actually training. This going, going for a walk for an hour is actually doing something beneficial." Um, when you start tracking that, you see improvement consistently for athletes and, you know, obviously the, the higher the level of athlete, the, uh, the, 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.

11. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee14:26

    So would you say, Alan, if, if there's someone who's listening to this who loves to do a parkrun on a Saturday morning, that which is a, you know, the, 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 parkrun on a Saturday morning. Are you saying that if they wanted to improve their 5K time at their parkrun, and let's say they, 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?

12. ACAlan Couzens15:11

    Without question. Um, there, there's one, uh, one athlete that comes to mind who just recently went under three hours for, for the marathon, and they were doing more than half of their training as walking. So th- this is a person who, you know, is, is running seven-minute miles for, for, for the marathon in, in a competitive event, and most of their training is, was at 15 minutes per mile, was just walking. So, you know, I, I think the, the level of, of breakthrough that, that you can get just by increasing the amount of movement within your day is something that, uh, is really, really underestimated for even very high-level athletes and certainly for, you know, your, your local, local parkrunner who, uh, you know, is, is the weekend warrior who just sort of, you know, doesn't have a lot of time for, for structured training sessions within their week. If they can increase that incidental, um, portion of activity within their day, they're going to notice significant improvements, not only in their performance at the parkrun, but just in terms of their overall health as well.

13. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee16:28

    Why is it that walking at low intensities can improve your ability to run a parkrun? 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've been following your work 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?

14. ACAlan Couzens17:27

    Yeah. The, the biggest thing that separates very, very high-level athletes from untrained people is the size of their heart. So the, the amount of oxygen that they can deliver per beat to the working muscles for, for an elite level athlete, it's, it's about twice what it is for an untrained person. And, and we see that in things like resting heart rate. So, you know, my top pro athlete type guys have resting heart rates of about 30 beats per minute.

15. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee18:01

    Wow.

16. ACAlan Couzens18:01

    Sort of low, low 30s. And you take a typical untrained person, and their resting heart rate is in the 60s, maybe 70s. You know, may- maybe, 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 needsIn, in 30 beats compared to what your untrained person is gonna take tw- twice as many beats. So o- obviously there, there's a big difference in terms of the, the structure of their heart and the size of, size of their heart. Um, and the good news is that even at low intensities, our heart reaches its, its maximal filling at, at fairly low, low sort of levels of effort. Uh, you know, and certainly for, for your typical sort of deconditioned 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 that 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, we start to see these people who might have started with resting heart rates in the 60s, all of a sudden they're in the 50s, and then they're in the 40s. And, and this is all coming from relatively low levels of, of, of exercise.

17. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee19:54

    Yeah. It, 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 '70s, 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 filling of your heart at those low intensities. 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?

18. ACAlan Couzens21:02

    Yeah. And, 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, that we see and what, what I've seen, you know, growing up, uh, a- as a swim coach and, and as a swimmer myself. Y- you see these, these certain types of athlete who do a lot of zone three, zone four, you know, that hard aerobic training, and, 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- I've seen swimmers do things like, you know, they'll, they'll do a, an hour-long training set with their heart rate at 180 the whole time.

19. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee21:50

    Wow.

20. ACAlan Couzens21:50

    And, 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, you've got this very small engine that's revving very, very hard for very long periods of time. And, and from a health perspective, that's, that's not a good thing because it, 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, get perfusion and get a, a lot of blood in between beats. So we get this, this heart that's starved of oxygen for very long periods of time. And, you know, from a health perspective, that's just, just not a, not a good thing. So, you know, I think it's really important that we keep those things in balance. And any, 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, with our, with our periphery.

21. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee22:52

    Yeah. There, there's so many things, Alan, 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 wanna 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 marathons 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, it, it... Saying that you both do marathons is, it's, 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?

22. ACAlan Couzens24:53

    Yeah, I do. Uh, I, I think, uh, that there's some really good, good research on, uh, on the difference in, in the nervous system response at, at different levels of intensity. And, uh, this is something that Stephen Seiler, uh, did, did a really interesting paper on, where he looked at changes in heart rate variability after training sessions below that first threshold. So, so, you know, some of these zone zero, zone one sort of walking or very easy activity, uh, activity sessions versus what most people think of as, as exercise, those zone two through zone five, you know, uh, with, with the pain, with the, with the supposed gain, uh, s- sessions. And, 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 fight or flight dominant, so the, the sympathetic nervous system really gets cranking. There's a, there's a lot of... It's, it's perceived by the body as a whole as a, as a high-stress situation, whereas the low activity, lo- 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, 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 re- really, really hard, and you keep that fight or flight system activated and, and it's, you know, over time you, you reach the point where you've just really worn 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 ha- hard versus someone who, when they work out, they, they listen to the body and they're like, "Oh, I can't. 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, 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, uh, kind of nature.

23. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee27:47

    Yeah. I, I love that, Alan, and I guess it, it really speaks to this idea that you can't really separate the inputs to your nervous system, you know, throughout your daily life. So, you know, we might think of our work life as our work life and, you know, work's busy and it's stressful and... But, hey, hey, when I finish work, now I'm 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, okay, work is really stressful. Let... 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 accountants 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, in inverted commas, 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 year and work's 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.

24. ACAlan Couzens29:24

    Absolutely. And, 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, 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, a, uh, 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, if this person, you know, they take their heart rate variability every morning and they notice that I'm in, I'm in a really bad spot right now. You know, I've, 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's 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

25. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee30:44

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26. ACAlan Couzens32:38

    Yeah, I, I think a, 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 were 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 f- primarily with fat. So we, 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, 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, that a lot of people are dealing with, um, 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 too.

27. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee34:10

    Mm-hmm.

28. ACAlan Couzens34:10

    You know, when, when we have that fight or flight response, our, 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, 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 of this evolutionary wiring where stress generally meant you need quick energy in order to get away from something and, you know, i- in or- 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, to hit that other pillar that you talk about, which is stress management-

29. RCDr. Rangan Chatterjee34:55

    Mm

30. ACAlan Couzens34:56

    ... 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, we have to deal with.

Episode duration: 1:52:55