Fasted Cardio and Metabolic Flexibility

well look this is one of those points of contention everybody wants to argue about right and it's just like the high carb low carb thing low carb isn't better than high carb well it depends on your physiology and depends on your preference like i prefer doing mostly keto and low carb most of the time and then and then eating enough carbs to support uh training but my version of keto is a lot different than what you normally see because i developed a net more of an athletic keto type solid dieting with a fasted cardio is it inherently better nobody knows um you know they there's a few pieces of literature that they'll champion it wasn't any better they it's like they're like three week fucking trials or they might be two session trials um in some of them they can look at acute markers of increasing things like people are people are alpha and pgc one alpha they can look at ampk marks they can look at all these markers of oxidation um but But there's not that many long-term studies except in bodybuilding. There's a reason why bodybuilders do it. And it's my train of thought, and Dr. Mike Nelson agrees with me with this, is that there might be some long-term adaptations that we're not looking at and not measuring. We're only measuring the acute variables. But if you do this over time, it might actually increase the rate of fat oxidation. And whether that makes a difference or not, who knows. But, you know, if I can get more fat adapted through not, I don't want to say, I don't, we won't say keto or low carb, we'll say lower carb, like cutting, cutting carbs enough to where you have enough to train, but it's, it's also low enough to where you have to rely on more fat. You get more metabolically flexible, utilize aerobics to get more metabolically flexible. One of the cool things that that does is it preserves muscle glycogen. So then when you eat carbs, you have a higher chance of storing that as muscle glycogen, which you need that for your weight training workouts. So, I do want to be clear on the low-carb thing. I consider low-carb, I like lower with kind of the parentheses around the ER. It's in context of what you're doing. So, if you've got a guy who's doing Tour de France, 400 grams of carbs, that might be low-carb for him. I've seen cyclists that are producing ketones, so they are in light nutritional ketosis, and they're eating 300 or 400 grams of carbs a day because of fucking cycling for three or four hours a day. And they're burning all of that off. Um, I currently eat around 150 grams of carbs a day, and I still produce anywhere from 0.6 to 1.2 ketones every single day. And my blood sugar sits around 3.8 to around 4.7, which is for me, picture perfect. And even after the 10,000 calories Saturday I had, so I had a, I had a 10,000 calorie Saturday over a thousand grams of carbs, a good majority of those carbs coming from port because I drank quite a lot of port on Saturday. Cause I haven't been drinking. So I kind of went crazy. the next the next day I was still producing like 0.9 ketones um my gosh after a thousand grams of carbs and so yeah I'm eating 150 grams of carbs keto's keto you can't have carbs you can't have more than 50 grams of carbs yes you can depends on the context depends on the person um it has to be high fat I eat about 90 to 100 grams of fat a day still producing ketones a lot of it has to do with the car the fat that you select you know choosing more mcts over everything else so most of my fat comes from coconut oil and and then i also do olive oil because the cardiovascular benefits you can't have high protein i ate about 225 to 250 grams of protein a day i'm still i still have plenty i am i in huge a huge amount of ketosis no but if you're producing above say 0.5 0.6 millimoles you're in ketosis you're in light nutritional ketosis guess where a lot of that's coming from when you wake up and you have high fasted ketones that's coming from the breakdown oxidation of fat so it's a beautiful thing it works really well for me i sleep better my heart rate is right now resting hours 48 my endurance goes up my inflammation bloat goes down now that doesn't work for everybody but it works really well for my my genetics but did you finish the cinnamon and toast crunch. I did have a, I've had two massive bowls of chocolate toast crunch. Um, yeah, so I had one on Saturday and I had one the previous Friday for a three, 300, 400 gram, uh, refeed that day too. So um but yeah look with the fasted cardio stuff um what what are the possible benefits Possibly that you train the body to become more fat adapted and oxidized better That's one bit of it. Secondary benefit is it's really fucking easy to just wake up, put on your sneakers, go for a run. It's a lot easier than I don't believe in fasted cardio. So I'm going to wake up and have a big breakfast. Now I have to wait for that to digest. And oh, well, shit, now I got to go to work. And then after work, you're like, well, I need to have dinner. So you're going to have dinner. and as well, fuck, I just ran out of time. I got to go to bed because Luke said prioritize sleep. So now I can't do my cardio. You just get up, get it knocked out, have your coffee, get on the treadmill, knock it out while you're still half asleep. Just get it done. It's certainly not going to hurt anything, right? It's not going to make you lose all your muscle, but it's, it's a convenience. It's easy. Um, are there some long-term adaptations? Possibly. I think that, I think that the, that's still up in the air, but there's a, there's probably a good reason why bodybuilders have done fasted cardio for like 80 fucking years maybe because it works it's amazing how like all the the things that bodybuilders have been saying for the past i don't know 30 years all those studies that have now been done and are coming out it's pretty much the same thing well that's it i mean that's kind of what scientists do right they what's the first thing that what's the first part of the scientific method i observe something happening okay now let's try to figure out if we can if we can figure out what's happening or let's try to falsify it and they're like oh great look the bodybuilders know what they're talking about you know 0.8 grams per kilogram of protein for the RDA and well okay that keeps you from having a disease bodybuilders eating 2.2 that's way too much so then a few years later oh we're realistically for athletes it needs to be 1.2 then a few years later it needs to be 1.4 then 1.6 and the last literature I saw coming out, came out about two years ago, said 1.8. And the author in the paper said, look, bodybuilders have been eating 2.2 grams per kilogram for decades and decades. The ISSN has done some literature saying that they did upwards of 3.3 to 4.4 with no negative issues. So you might as well just eat 2.2 and then you don't have to worry about, is it enough?