Mitochondrial Health and Metabolic Flexibility

so much stuff that you kind of mentioned and there are a few things that i want to go back to and dig into um you mentioned about you sort of briefly just mentioned about the impacts of you know about um aerobic training on our mitochondria and this is something that we're hearing a lot more about lately is you know mitochondria being you know powerful for the cell and being so important for for health and fitness do you want to just touch on that a little bit because i know that was something that we spoke about a lot in the course and the impact of a good training regime on our mitochondria and how that can benefit our health yeah so i mean this is where you're making the majority energy right through the mitochondria so if i have someone who is chronically stressed out over time if if their metabolic flexibility is very low we get to a point where the mitochondria is not working as effectively as it should. We're not oxidizing things as effectively as we should. Once you stop oxidizing things effectively, and if you think about that word oxidizing, what element on the periodic table do you need to oxidize things? You need oxygen. So that in and of itself should be a case of, hey, maybe I do want to do some aerobics because that's the one thing that gets more oxygen into my body and allows me to oxidize better. The better my mitochondria work and the more mitochondria I have up to a point the more energy I can make faster and the more endurance I have as well as the more food I can eat because I can churn through that much better and then when you think about the majority of your fighters that you that you're in contact with how do they eat yeah it's yeah it varies but some of them not great some of them but often they're you know probably in a calorie deficit more often than not I think oh and they're in a massive calorie deficit. I know guys, I know guys that compete at the, at the top levels that they're lucky to eat 1200 to 1800 calories a day. And it just blows my mind because I remember getting ready for my first tournament. I was eating five to 6,000 calories a day because I was dropping weight too quickly. And so then I looked at my competition coach and I'm going, how are you surviving on 1800 calories a day? And then I realized, cause I trained, I was training him at the time as well well no wonder you're getting gassed out no wonder you have all these injuries that won't heal you're not feeding yourself enough enough to uh make the stuff heal so the first thing is if we work on that mitochondria sorry the dog just walked in if if we're working on the mitochondria initially we're going to have a lot more energy to perform and keep that performance higher over time because that really the key First you have to perform but then you have to keep that performance high over five minutes Or what if you in a super fight and it a 20 submission fight What happens if it gets past 10 minutes and you don't have the ability to manage the next 10 minutes? You're pretty screwed. So what we like to do is work on that aerobic base first, get the mitochondria functioning much better initially. then we can then to me you've now deserved to do the higher level stuff now if you want to do hit training and you want to do all that that's great you can do all that but you can't a lot of people will start with the intense stuff before they've laid the foundation of the easy stuff first right so it's not and it sounds uh it sounds counterintuitive to take a step back and able to go forward. But, you know, there's also the saying in judo, slow and smooth, smooth is fast. Sometimes you have to slow things down, right, before you can make them fast. And the same thing with weight training as well. Why do we teach people to go with slow tempo weight training initially? It's to get very good at the exercise before you speed the exercise up. And so the same thing goes with the conditioning too. I need to lay down the machinery that's going to allow me to have the endurance and the recovery capacity to uh to perform at a high level which means that in a lot of cases i want to make sure that that anaerobic and aerobic side of my metabolism is balanced out okay so um you'll see a lot of the fighters are very anaerobically conditioned they're just not very aerobically conditioned right so we're we always i mean we've been told by men's health and and whoever else maybe across i don't know for a long time that like kind of HIIT training will be enough and that will get us our aerobic gains or you can get better aerobic kind of gains from HIIT training than steady state and but I think now we're starting to kind of dispel that myth is that right or maybe I've got that wrong no I mean it will one thing is we have to define what we're talking about with HIIT training right so again we've we've split this into two different categories you have you have researchers that will look at at high intensity interval training as a as a factor of how high you can keep your heart rate for a certain amount of time. But then you'll have another side of the researchers that dictate hit as power output. And I tend to look at it as more power output. How high can I have my power output? How long can I maintain that power? For me, that's going to be more important when we're talking about sports is that I can maintain power and repeat that power over and over and over across however many minutes I have to compete at. So things like intervals and things like that. what's that so things like a lactic intervals lactic power intervals things like this yeah I'm like even things like like a lactic intervals to me if if it's a like that with complete rest I don't see a lot of usability for that in combat sports there's no there's nothing you're really going to do that's gonna last ten seconds that you need to recover from right you're probably you're probably looking more towards building an aerobic base and building enough glycolytic base so that you can maintain a high level of power and endurance by using both fat and carbohydrate equally at the same time. Okay. So, but just to go back to the question, you're saying that we need to lay that foundation with like lifts, essentially low intensity, you know, steady state cardio. Could it be done with interval training or is it really that we need to focus on that low intensity stuff? Actually, yeah, that was one of the questions you had, like, what's the usability of lists? I mean, there's a reason why over the last however many hundred years that we've been having combat sports that people do road work. Like why do boxers do road work? Why do if you go to Thailand, and you go and you do Muay Thai, you're going to be running a lot. Okay, and there's a good reason for that they understand the value of that. Now I do think that that can be taken to an extreme, like we're not trying to create marathon but being able to go out and do a 5k and maybe a couple of 5k intervals and perform that really at a high level is probably going to be beneficial for you but again whenever we talk about cardio there's two things people think about they either think about weight loss or they think about running a marathon they think about like the two most extreme things you can think of I'm thinking about adaptation right I'm thinking about recovery I'm I'm thinking about better sleep I'm thinking about the ability to eat more food the ability to maintain power output for a long time that's the stuff I'm thinking about and it doesn't take a long time to build that aerobic base depending on where you start right if you start in your VO2 max if you put somebody in a concept 2 and they're at a 24 yeah it's gonna take them a while to get that up but for most people I see massive improvements in just six to eight weeks of dead

VO2 max training if you just get that out of the way the drop off from that is very very low you just get that out of the way and then kind of put that on maintenance and you can you can maintain a lot of that you know just doing easy flow rolls and things like that if you go and you know go in on a you know open mat and just find somebody who wants to do easy flow rolling for 20 or 30 minutes very easy to maintain that cardiovascular adaptation and then then you can focus on other things like if you want to throw in you know more hit type training that's good too now the secondary thing with this is when we look at hit training we have to we have to dictate what we're looking for you're looking for global cardiovascular respiratory adaptations or you're looking at localized localized conditioning right so global conditioning is vo2 max localized is do I have enough enzymes and then do I have the machinery in my peripheral system to then take you know take advantage of that extra oxygen like doing things like rowing and running and the airdyne and the skier and that type of thing will build a lot of good global conditioning if i'm going to turn that into localized conditioning which i should when i move it into a more specific phase now since you've done joel jameson's things this is where we're looking at things like hris and hicts and things like that to then build the machinery localized in my limbs to then be able to take advantage of that and be able to oxidize better now that I can get that oxygen in. So if you think about the first thing is you have to get the oxygen into the body, then you have to get the machinery and the peripheral system to be able to utilize that oxygen as well. So if I can't get the oxygen in, it doesn't matter how good I am locally, I still have to support that with my lungs and with my heart, with my vascular system. So it makes sense go ahead and take care of that first then get really specific on you know heavy sled pushes and pulls and strongman type work and then working more on that really high intensity interval training side of it now that i can take advantage of epoch because i can get oxygen in now yeah i suppose if again taking that to the next level if you can do that with specific movements that spp stuff in like your drilling or you know specific mma or jiu-jitsu related movements going to be kind of even more you know efficient and you know preparing you for the task at hand yeah i mean if you go like like just imagine you know if you go to a if you don't go to a fight specific class where you're getting ready for a tournament you're going to do things like shark tank like you're going to be in there you're going to you're going to be going hard balls to the wall if you have a good level of aerobic foundation it's not going to be as hard for you as if you you didn't, right? So it's only going to be a benefit, right? And you see that, right? You go to a competition class, and you can see the guys who, it's their first class, and they don't know what to expect, and then they quickly realize this isn't a normal class, and you're basically rolling hard, like you're basically fighting for your life for 60 to 90 minutes, and they find out really quickly after 10 to 15 minutes of this, holy shit, I need to get in shape. It's the stress tester. I know my heart rate always goes up. If the coach says, well, it's Shark Tank today, you're like, fuck. I wish I could have that pizza for lunch.