Limitations of Research and Individual Variation

100 and when you look at the research they're very it's very one-dimensional there's you can only control a certain number of variables per per experiment so when you look at somebody who's okay we're considering the type of conditioning they're doing the training age male versus female the genetic background we look at the nutrition we look at there's a lot of stuff we're looking at you're not going to find a large scale study that puts in every single variable it would be ungodly expensive and who would you get to run it and fund it and all this stuff so you look at you look at bits and pieces try to infer how they're going to fit together, then you try stuff in the field. Did it work? Did it not? Did it work for everybody? Where do you find that it's not working? Now let's look back at the chemistry. Why is it not working? Oh, I forgot about this thing right here. So there's just so many things that you have to put in. So you have to have, you know, if you look at true evidence-based research, you're looking at, or practice, you're looking at the research and then you're experimenting and you're drawing your conclusions on what's going on, right? Yeah. I saw this quite kind of vividly recently. I was talking to dr james morton who has been head of nutrition at team sky he's oversaw i think five of their tour de france titles and uh one of the big thing he impresses so he's an like a professor in exercise metabolism obviously super in tune with biochemistry but on a practical side he's like a lot of the stuff we would see in research or typical parameters we would have for say cycling and nutrition for sports just he found just didn't apply to some of these top guys in the world like they were physically capable of doing things that shouldn't happen right so then to try and fathom well how is this happening why is one rider able to go for six hours on zero carbohydrate and be perfectly fine another need to have a high carbohydrate feeding an hour and a half into that cycle like these are differences they're seeing in these guys it's like well to understand that you can't go and look at references from particular research or even to some degree some of the textbook parameters you would see. Instead, he had to think, well, what's going on? And then you would come back to biochemically what's going on and then try and piece it apart and trial and error and all this other type of stuff we've just discussed. And so this is how people are navigating elite level of sports. So this is not kind of in any way theoretical right Yeah Yeah you know one time Dr Bob Rakowski said something to me that I thought was brilliant he goes you an n of one he goes you look at the research you try it it may work for you may not what if you outside of the deviation you know you if you look at a bell curve it might help 70 of the people and 15 it does nothing for 15 it's horrendous for so the only way we know is by understanding the base level foundational information how the body works then let's look at the research let's try it why do i feel like it didn't work is there something i could have done better. And then a lot of the traps that trainers, young trainers will get into is they love reading abstracts and they infer their information from an abstract and they go, look, this says this, but you didn't actually pull the 50 page research paper off and read through the whole thing. I saw one the other day on beta alanine and beta alanine doesn't work unless you load it for three or four weeks. And the study was they took beta alanine, then they cycled, does nothing. So you read the abstract and you go, see, I told you beta alanine didn't do anything. Well, no shit, because you got to load it over time, right? Or, you know, if you look at some of the research, was the protocol even done well? There was a modified GVT out, and they said, well, GVT is no better than our standard programming. When I pulled the paper, it wasn't the parameters of GVT. Like, the loading parameters were wrong. It wasn't done long enough. The exercise selection was wrong. There's no way we would ever write a protocol like that. so are we actually researching what we're looking for so if you're not actually researching what it says then you can't tell if what you actually do when you do the real protocol is you are you going to get the same results no absolutely not yeah and that's the whole thing like research is super important can inform a lot of our decisions but just bearing in mind essentially what it's doing there it's framing for most people this is probably the best starting point or this is the closest to the bullseye we can get but from there you may need to change a whole host of things or maybe nothing so with diet you could you could say for any one person a certain type of diet could be a terrible idea or a good thing right even down to fiber intakes in certain cases you may have someone that needs to go on a low fiber diet for a while you may need someone who just isn't going to do well on grains but in general you can still make the case that higher fiber diets and whole grains are probably decent for human health, right? But it's not the same thing as saying you as an individual need to eat these things. And I think that gets lost sometimes in the noise. Yeah. And what people need to realize is every, it just like every exercise protocol works until it doesn't, every nutritional protocol works until it doesn't. So let's say, okay, let's say I have somebody on a modified low carb diet. So maybe they're eating, you know, high protein, moderate fat, 25% of their calories from carbohydrates. That's going to work for a while. What happens when I add three more hours of weight training a week, they're probably going to need more carbohydrates, you know, as their work volume goes up, depending on what the modality is, they're probably going to have to shift some macros. And a lot of this stuff can be, you can use metrics to see if something's working or not. Like you can look at, you know, fasting blood sugar, postprandial blood sugar. That's easy. People can do that at home. You can look at heart rate, heart variability, and blood pressure, right? If I put somebody on a hypercaloric diet with a lot of carbs because they want to grow. Cool. How do I know when to stop that? Well, if your blood pressure starts to go up, if you start putting on more fat than muscle, if you start holding on the water, if your waking heart rate goes up and you're fasting in postprandial blood sugar, it's all wacky. You've probably maximized the hypertrophic response of that unless your response is to get fat and to get metabolic syndrome. So now maybe it's time for a mini cut, but this stuff is all quantifiable and you can do this at home easily with just hardly any tech at all. I mean, what a time to be alive when you can get tons of metrics at home, and you can even, in most countries, order labs off the internet, as long as you know how to read them. It's interesting, and I think we had kind of touched on the other night about low-carbohydrate diets and similar anecdotal experiences of working with people who had been on a low-carbohydrate diet, and it worked excellently for a number of months, maybe longer. And at a certain point, When things start to change and different variables by increasing their carbohydrate content in the diet, they then see better results. And that kind of is just one of those examples that you talk about of over time as variables change, whether that's their training workload, whether that's actually just their biomarkers, their overall health, the requirements for that change. And that kind of nicely filters back to our discussion of like, once you understand from first principles what's going on, then you can make those changes instead of thinking, well, which diet is best? And, oh, this type of person goes on this type of diet and that's it. Or this is the one type of dieting strategy. Instead, now it's much more fluid and dynamic over time. And so for even one individual, there's no one best diet. It's just what's the best diet for this particular moment or this particular phase going forward.