#382： The Secrets of Greater Endurance
Episode Stats
Summary
In the latest episode of the Art of Manliness podcast, my guest explores these questions in his latest book, and, along the way, uncovers insights to all the factors that go into pushing the limits of human athletic performance.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast how long can a
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human run without stopping what's the most weight a human can deadlift will someone ever run a four
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minute mile in less than three minutes and 30 seconds or will someone ever run a marathon in
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less than two hours my guest explores these questions in his latest book and along the way
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uncovers insights to all the factors that go into pushing the limits of human athletic performance
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his name is alex hutchinson and he's the author of the book endure mind body and the curiously elastic
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limits of human performance today on the show alex and i discuss the history of the science of human
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performance and the three competing theories about how to measure and improve it alex first explains
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the interplay between physiology and psychology when it comes to humans pushing themselves we then
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spend the rest of the conversation discussing various factors that have influence on our
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performance including pain thirst muscle strength diet and mental fatigue alex then shares insights
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in the latest research and how you can manipulate these factors to run faster and longer and lift
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heavier after the show's over check out the show notes at aom.is slash endure
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alex hutchinson welcome to the show thanks a lot brad i i'm glad to be here so you got a book out
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called endure mind body in the curiously elastic limits of human performance and it is about how
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we're able to push ourselves to do these amazing physical feats and we'll talk about some of the
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the ones you highlight in the book but before we do that can you tell us a bit about your background
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and how it inspired you to research the science of human performance and endurance
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yeah so these days i call myself a a science journalist or sometimes if i'm being really specific i'm a
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a science of endurance journalist but that all started probably 20 years ago i was a competitive
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track and field athlete i ran for the canadian national team for a number of years and there was
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this sort of ongoing mystery of was i really approaching my limits and there was this one night
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where i ran i'd been trying to break four minutes for 1500 meters which is a sort of decent high school
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time for for a number of years uh for like four years i've been stuck just over that barrier
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and one day i was running a race where the timekeeper was calling out the splits that were
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wrong and he he tricked me basically accidentally into thinking i was running super fast and i ran a
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nine second personal best which totally changed the trajectory of my running career and basically
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since that moment and nothing had changed in my physical training so there was this this moment where
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uh a mental change created a total difference in my apparent physical endurance so i've been sort of
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wondering about that for a long time and when i became a journalist about 10 years later i started
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to dig into the the research about the science of endurance trying to understand what what it was
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that sets limits and and that's kind of that's the long and winding answer but it was a long and
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winding road that that sort of got me to this point so and as we'll see in this conversation is that
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it's we really don't know we have some ideas but some of it it's it's confounding so let's talk
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about sort of the overall give like a big picture view you talk about in the book there's three
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competing theories that determines the limits of human endurance the first is a physical limit and
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that is primarily vo2 max now i'm sure our listeners have heard that that acronym thrown around a lot so
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what exactly is vo2 max and why have physiologists thought that that's the thing that determines how long
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you can run or push yourself physically yeah so if you two max so that the science definition is that
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it's it's the maximum amount of oxygen that you can breathe in from the air use your heart to to pump to
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the muscles extract from the from your blood and use it to to help fuel aerobic exercise so it's this
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maximum aerobic quantity i mean and it goes back about a century almost a century now to to when we
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were first scientists were first figuring out how muscles actually work and and there was this
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dawning realization that oh you know if you if you take an individual muscle fiber it's basically we
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can understand it's just like a machine and we can understand what the rules that govern this machine
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are are and so there was this hope that we could extrapolate that up to the human body and think of the
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body literally the guy who invented vo2 max wrote these articles for scientific american american saying
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the human body is a machine and we can calculate its limits so vo2 max definitely no one ever thought
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the vo2 max was the only factor dictating endurance but they thought it was a big factor that tells you
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so at a certain point the harder i run the more oxygen i i need right and the harder i start to breathe
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but at a certain point you just can't breathe any harder and you can't bring any more oxygen in
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and the idea was that that's what determines the limits of your endurance that you reach this
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this maximum or this plateau in oxygen and so that that turned out to be a really influential
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idea philosophically for most of the 20th century right so i mean when did people start figuring out
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well vo2 max really isn't the the determining factor of you know human performance well some of the
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first skepticism was in the in the late 70s and early 80s and i you know i there's a scientist
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named tim noakes in south africa who's been both tremendously influential and tremendously controversial
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about a number of topics and you know i visited him uh six or seven years ago and i asked him like
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when did you first start having doubts about vo2 max and he said well we had just started our lab in
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the early 80s and he was testing a lot of elite athletes and he he so he brought in two very good
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athletes one of whom was a sub four minute miler of one of the best milers that south africa had ever
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produced and the other was a woman who had won a very famous ultra marathon in south africa which is
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you know i think it's 55 miles long or something like like that a totally different race so she
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she was a very slow miler but a good long distance runner and he was a very good miler and he tested them
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both in the same day and they both had exactly the same vo2 max and he thought well if this test can't
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tell the difference between this like six foot two sprinting almost you know middle distance runner
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and this tiny petite ultra runner then obviously there's something we're not understanding here and
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so i would say in the last 30 years there's been doubts and in the last 20 years there's been
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controversy and in the last 10 years people have kind of moved away and from the idea that vo2 max
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it's almost the pendulum sometimes swings too far and now people are like oh vo2 max is meaningless
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and that's not true vo2 max has meaning it's just not the the sort of sometimes one way of
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thinking it is thinking of it is if i have a bucket and i want to know how much water can fit in that
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bucket we we understand geometry well enough to know that if i know how tall the bucket is and how
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wide it is i know exactly how much water it will hold and it doesn't matter how hard the bucket tries
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it can't hold more water than that and we now understand so we there was the hope that vo2 max would
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would would would allow us to calculate the sort of capacity of the of human endurance in the same
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way and now we understand that we're not buckets we're more like balloons you can you can kind of
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squeeze more air or more water into the balloon and the balloon's capacity isn't infinite you can't
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you can't fit the whole world in the balloon but it's also very hard to define a limit of how much air
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you can squeeze into a balloon at some point it's going to pop but you don't really know when in
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advance okay so speaking of tim noakes that leads us to the next theories of what allows it to push
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ourself and these are more psychological and tim noakes he's the guy that developed it's the central
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governor theory what is that yeah so so he's and this is probably when you think of alternatives to
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the human machine view of endurance the most famous one is this central governor theory which was
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proposed by noakes in the in the late 1990s and basically what he argues is that the brain is
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protecting you in some way we had there are physical limits but if you reach those physical
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limits you would die because your heart wouldn't be getting enough oxygen if you know if you were
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really limited by a lack of oxygen your heart would would stop pumping and you would die that's maybe
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a little bit hyperbolic but the point is he argues that we never quite reach our limits and that's
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because the brain is looking out for you in all sorts of different ways it's monitoring your
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temperature it's monitoring you know your brain oxygen levels and it's it's just and and if it
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detects that things are getting a little too crazy it automatically sort of throttles down the signals
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that are going from your brain to your muscles so you're still trying just as hard but you're not
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getting as much force out of your muscles and that's to make sure you know you never quite hit those
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limits and that that theory has been really influential but also controversial because the obvious
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question is okay let's let's let's let's find a brain scanner and let's see the central governor but
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it it's not that simple there isn't a part of the brain called the central governor so so that that
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theory has has been been attacked or debated a lot in the in the last few years well there's no like
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single part of they they have ideas that parts of the brain that might play a role in this central
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governor absolutely and and you know the sort of interesting thing is the more advanced these studies get
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the more brain areas get implicated so there's some really interesting studies looking at for instance
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the insular cortex which is responsible for monitoring signals from within the body so it's a logical
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place for uh you know for this function to to to be located but it there's all sorts of other parts
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of the brain that are involved with you know assessing future risk or monitoring the outside environment
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and so you know i've been following this area of research really closely and maybe five years ago if you'd
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asked me i would have said oh it's pretty cool they're really they're really zeroing in on the
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insular cortex and it's links to the to the motor cortex which is what sends the signals out to your
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muscles and i think that's where it's going to be but you know as as time has gone on more studies come
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out it's like okay but you also have to include the prefrontal cortex and you also have to include
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the anterior cingulate cortex which you know assesses your perception of effort and all of a sudden it's like
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well hang on we've now listed all regions of the brain so is there a is there a central governor or
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is this just is this a behavior that describes how our brains work to make sure that we don't
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push ourselves absolutely to our limits and you know one of the one of the sort of vivid images
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that noakes uses he when he gives talks he'll put up a slide of just after the finish of the 1996
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olympic marathon which is when a south african runner won it so he likes that picture but the guy who came
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second was i think from south korea and maybe just three seconds behind and the two of them are
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jogging around the track you know waving with their flags and and he says well look what do you notice
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about the guy in second place he's he's not dead and you think you think about that if you're if
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you're finishing a marathon you're three seconds from being immortal as the olympic champion of course
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you're going to be trying as hard as you can this guy didn't leave anything in reserve at least he
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didn't try not to but obviously he still had enough reserve his heart was still working and his
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muscles were still working because he crossed the line and he kept jogging well so if there's a
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central governor there and there's a reserve i mean it's accessible right so does noakes think you can
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override the central governor like through training or you just are you hamstrung by that no matter what
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you do yeah so there's no doubt that that reserve is negotiable and it's accessible to different
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degrees by different people it's hard to like you know when i asked him so what do you do how do you
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how do you how do you get to this reserve one of his answers was you know what i think
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the great coaches of the world they're already they always work on the brain so he described he was
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before he became a sort of running guru he was actually a very accomplished collegiate rower in
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south africa and he he he said one of his turning points was this workout that he did as a college
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rower they would usually do six times 500 meter pull or something like that as hard as they could
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and once they finished it one day and the coach said okay go back and do another one and they were
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like what we can't do another one we just went as hard as we could he said and the coach said no no
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no you have another one in you so go back and do another one and they did another one in fact they
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did four more i think until they had done 10 and it was one of those watershed moments of all of them
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realizing oh yeah we had pushed as hard as we could but it turns out there was still a reserve there
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and so there's that you know maybe that's a little wishy-washy but noakes noakes would argue that
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good coaches help athletes learn what they're capable of and learn how to access that reserve
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and i think the process of regular training also teaches us that naturally you know you when you
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first start an you know an activity like running and you get all out of breath and your legs are
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burning and you think man i went as hard as i could but gradually you learn that those signals
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aren't really that signal doesn't mean you're about to die it means that it's just a warning
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that you can't continue indefinitely you can start to push that those limits back a little bit
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gradually and i don't you know part of my book the last part of my book is as you know is is kind of
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asking the question are there shortcuts to that process can we learn to access those reserves
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without the hard work and the answer to that is maybe but the i think the most reliable way is still
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go through that long process while you're training your body you're also training your mind and if
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you're conscious of that you can make sure to bring out those lessons and help be aware of the ways
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that sometimes we hold ourselves back or we trick ourselves into thinking that we've reached a limit
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when it's really not okay so we've talked about the first theory vo2 max which is the body is basically
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a machine and you can figure out those limits and push into those limits the second theory is
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psychological it's the central governor theory developed by noakes there's a third theory also
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psychological this one is developed by an italian guy called mark named marcoa
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markora markora yeah tell us about his theory how how it's different from the central governor
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theory yeah so this this is samuel markora and he his basic claim is that the central governor is
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a super complicated idea that relies on all these subconscious control mechanisms and you know it
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relies on your brain knowing in advance how far you're gonna go or what the temperature is going
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to be and he says look it must it's simpler than that there's not all these subconscious
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mechanisms we we go until it feels too hard relative to our level of motivation for a given
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task and when it's harder than we want to we either slow down or stop and that you know that sounds sort
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of obvious it's like that's not a scientific theory that's you know like grade two you know
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pseudo psychology but but it's actually a lot deeper than that than it might appear at first glance
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because what he's saying is that you know vo2 max lactate you know oxygen consumption glycogen stores
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all that stuff just feeds into something more important which is your sense of effort how hard
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does it feel and how hard it feels when when it reaches when you reaches a maximum when when you're
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pushing as hard as you're willing to push or hard as you're able to push then you either have to slow
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down or stop and and the reason that's actually what what grabbed me about this theory or what what
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what struck me as remarkable is that he said look here's a prediction based on this theory if it's true
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that your sense of effort is the final arbiter as to how long how far you can push then we should be
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able to change your endurance just by working on the mind without affecting the body so i i first saw
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him at a conference about seven years ago and he said and he was giving a talk and as an aside when
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he was explaining his theory he said look i should be able to sit people down in a computer for you know
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a few months have them do some computer tasks that work on specific mental traits like response
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inhibition which is the the the thing that you work on in the marshmallow test or the thing you test
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with the the marshmallow test and if i improve your response inhibition i should be able to improve
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your marathon time without doing any physical training and i thought that sounds just that sounds
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crazy if you're willing to make a crazy statement like that you should test it and and that's what he's
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done with some remarkable results and so i've come around to the idea that marcora's theory
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actually has some very interesting implications that so far seem to be supported by some of his
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experiments he did another experiment with subliminal messages he he was he had cyclists doing a ride
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to exhaustion and he flashed up images 16 milliseconds at a time so the cyclists weren't even aware that
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there were images but he flashed up smiling faces and frowning faces and when when it was a smiling
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face the cyclists were able to push longer before they reached exhaustion in in his explanation is that
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the smile you know we sort of we see a smile it puts us at ease and the sense of ease kind of bleeds
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into our sense that things are okay and not as hard as we we might think of them and so our sense of
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effort is a little bit lower and we're able to keep pushing so i don't know what the final answer
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or the right answer is but i i find marcora's theoretical work and also the predictions that he's
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able to make based on this very seemingly very simple theory to be really interesting so this the
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marcora thing you there's a i'm familiar somewhat familiar with it with weight training i sometimes
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do what's called rpe training basically you know the my coach assigns me a program and he says it
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should be an rpe eight which means like rate of perceived effort right so it should feel like an
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eight which means that i could do maybe two more reps but what's interesting about rpe is that it
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changes on a day-to-day basis like you said like some days it just like a weight maybe like 400 pounds
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feels like an eight then another day it could feel like a nine and nothing's really changed but it's
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i don't know it's just it's crazy how effort really does like how hard something feels determines whether
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i can get a weight up or not well that's exactly it and so marcora would say rpe is what counts and and
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so you might say why is lifting 400 pounds an eight one day and a nine the next day and there are a lot of
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potential explanations it could be you didn't sleep well it could be that you're stressed about
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a very exciting interview with alex hutchinson or it could be you know like there's all sorts
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of possibilities that could be tweaking your uh your sense of perceived effort but the point is
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if you're if you're trying to figure out what your limits are that rpe is is what matters like if you
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you can calculate we could go and measure your muscles and you know do physiological tests but
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ultimately that the determinant of whether you're going to be able to do eight reps or ten reps this weight
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is how you feel and so marcora's point is that's not a defect in the system that's not like a problem
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that's actually a sign that rpe or perceived effort is exactly what ultimately determines our limits
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but he would also argue you can ignore that perceived effort right just like you'd say just you know how
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bad do you want it would be like the question like if it feels really hard if you just really really
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want to accomplish this thing if you want to do a four minute mile or whatever if you want it bad
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enough you can overcome that feeling perceived effort and actually push beyond a bit right
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up to a point yeah so in marcora's model there's actually two there's the sort of yin and the yang
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there's effort is is you know as it climbs you're you're more likely to quit motivation is what determines
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the stealing so let's say you're thinking of effort on a one to ten scale you know if if i go out
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you know i i went out it was pretty uh this morning and i did a workout with a friend a running
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workout it was snowy and slushy and uh you know it was not the the greatest day and so
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the level i was willing to get to was maybe an eight out of ten i wasn't willing to go 10 out of
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10 on this crappy slushy day when it's not a super important workout and there's cars that are trying
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to run me over and so on if this was the olympics this morning i would have pushed to 9.999999 out of
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10 or maybe 10 out of 10 so most of us in most situations are not really reaching 10 out of 10
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so in that sense the how bad do you want it is how high are you willing to go on this rating scale
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but once you're you know there's a point at which ratings your your effort reaches a maximum and in
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you know in scientific studies that's they they pay volunteers in scientific studies not because
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they're they're you know they they're out of the goodness of their heart they want to make sure
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that people are maximally motivated so that when they're taking these tests they're willing to go
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up to an effort of 10 out of 10 and once you are at an effort of 10 out of 10 there is there's not
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really any further you can push no matter how badly you want it so it's it's only up to a point we do
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reach we do reach limits eventually so what's interesting about marcora's theory is that the
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psychological can has this influence on the physical right and what i thought was interesting that
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research you highlight is how even mental fatigue right if you just had a rough day at work you you
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know stressful stress day with the kids or whatever that can actually diminish physical performance even
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though like you didn't really exert yourself physically the fact that you had to endure this
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mental fatigue that's going to hamper your ability to perform your run or your workout whatever it is
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yeah and that's that's to me that was again one of the really most fascinating results that got me
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interested in in his work because it's on the one hand it's like yeah you know if if i'm doing like
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complicated mental arithmetic or stressful negotiations or something all day and then i go and do a workout
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definitely like i'm going to notice a decrement in my performance but if you if you say okay so why is
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that how do i explain that in the context of sort of textbook physiology it's not obvious because if i've
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been sitting at my desk all day you know you think i'd be raring to go and ready to and i used to
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notice this like i would i would meet friends to do a workout at you know five o'clock and if i had
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a story to you if i was on deadline till like 4 45 i would always have a terrible workout even though
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my my job is like the least physically demanding job in history so it's it's obvious in a in an
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intuitive sense but it's it's not hard it's not easy to explain scientifically and and so what
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marcora would say is that yeah you know your muscles haven't changed at all all that's happened is
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that because you're mentally fatigued everything feels a little harder you know it's one point
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harder on the sort of perceived effort scale and that's exactly what he found and he did a study
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where it's like you know the people either had to do this computer task where you're sitting at a
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screen and tapping buttons depending on which letters flash on the screen it's not hard but you
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have to focus and so it takes your attention versus just watching a documentary about trains or
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something like that and then they had to cycle to exhaustion at a at a given pace and right from
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the very start so it's not just something that shows up at the point where they quit right from
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the as soon as they started pedaling they had to say okay how hard is this and the people who
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were mentally tired immediately they were rating it as sort of five out of ten rather than four out of
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ten then halfway through the test they're at like seven out of ten rather than six out of ten
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and then everyone quits when they reach 10 or you know 9.5 or whatever depending you know
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roughly 10 it's just that the people who started at a higher rating of perceived exertion
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uh they're reaching that that they're hitting 10 earlier because not because their muscles are more
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tired or there's more lactic acid or there's not enough oxygen or anything like that just simply
00:23:30.640
because it feels harder because their brain's a little tired we'll talk a little bit later like
00:23:34.480
what marcora thinks you can do to train you know basically increase your your body or your your
00:23:40.240
i don't know what you want to call it your the motivation your mental capacity to keep going even
00:23:45.900
when you're fatigued but let's talk you title in the book that there's there is this like this
00:23:49.940
ardent strident debate between marcora's camp and noak's camp i mean why why why the acrimony between the
00:23:59.220
two yeah it's it's it's interesting and i i wish it wasn't because i i think both sides or
00:24:04.080
both groups have done really really fascinating research and you know anytime i talk to scientists
00:24:09.100
from from one camp i come away think man these guys are amazing that they must be right then i'll talk
00:24:13.920
the other camp and and it'll be like oh no those guys are full of crap so it's it's difficult when
00:24:19.800
when science gets kind of polarized like this ultimately you know it's i think it's worth remembering
00:24:25.780
that science is a human endeavor uh that's as as one of the one of the scientists i was speaking to
00:24:31.280
the sort of guy in the middle that's what he told me he said you just got to remember it's a human
00:24:34.500
endeavor people have egos and motivation to to advance their own ideas and you know no one takes
00:24:41.880
kindly to be when it's suggested that their ideas are wrong or are not original and so sometimes the
00:24:46.900
debates are as much personal as they are scientific you know and there there are some some actual
00:24:54.360
differences in the two theories in terms of what's proposed and and how it's supposed to work and
00:24:59.060
ultimately experiments are going to decide which theory if any if either of them is the right one
00:25:04.700
my suspicion is that it's going to end up being kind of a mix of both and i think both of them are
00:25:09.940
kind of moving towards each other in terms of uh they both now recognize that effort is really
00:25:15.380
a key a really really important parameter so even the scientists who've been developing nox's ideas
00:25:21.200
they would now argue the way the brain keeps track of you know whether your body is in danger is
00:25:27.080
through sense of effort that sense of effort is is this warning signal that tells you you'd better
00:25:31.280
slow down because we're getting pretty close to 10 out of 10 so yeah it's at the end of the day
00:25:36.980
uh in any field you're never going to have everyone getting along with with everyone else
00:25:41.900
and i guess just the one other thing to mention on this is that it's really hard to challenge
00:25:48.320
established theories like in any in science and in you know in in any field if to be the one who says
00:25:56.780
you know what i think we've been doing this wrong for the last century is really hard and you get a lot
00:26:01.280
of push back and so i think there's something to the fact that the people who've successfully
00:26:06.560
proposed these news new ideas they have to have a certain personality that's willing to push hard and
00:26:10.840
to be abrasive and to to put forward new ideas despite criticism and so as a result when you get
00:26:17.560
two people or two groups who who are both putting forward new ideas that they maybe don't necessarily
00:26:23.160
have the the the temperament to want to cooperate they're they're just naturally inclined to push and to
00:26:28.760
kind of question everything so let's talk about some of the before we get to the mental things that's interesting
00:26:34.680
but what's also i what i thought was very useful for me is the physiological factors that you
00:26:40.160
highlight in the book that contribute to our sense of effort whether something feels hard or not and
00:26:45.940
one interesting one was pain right so if you're doing a hard a long run an ultra marathon mid-distance
00:26:52.240
run or you're a competitive lifter you're going to feel pain when you're training so how does i mean
00:27:00.060
i guess it makes sense when you when something hurts you want to stop but the question is can you
00:27:04.060
train yourself to ignore that pain yeah so so first thing i'd say about pain is that you know if you'd
00:27:10.200
ask me when i was a runner well why you know why do you slow down in the third lap of a mile race
00:27:15.940
i'd say well it hurts it really really really hurts and and you know we sort of naturally think of
00:27:22.160
endurance as a or you know when you're really pushing your limits it's a painful task and one of
00:27:27.940
the things that marcora argues and i think he's he's generally right is that you have to learn to
00:27:33.940
separate the feelings of pain and effort and definitely if you're running a marathon it hurts
00:27:40.460
but is the pain really what holds you back or is it the effort that it feels too hard that you don't
00:27:45.260
go faster not because you're worried about hurting a little more but actually but because you just
00:27:50.180
can't it feels too hard and so he's done some interesting studies where you know so first of all
00:27:57.280
he'll he'll have a subject dip their hand there's a classic pain test called the cold presser test
00:28:02.060
basically it's a measure of how how long you can hold your hand in an ice bucket until the pain gets
00:28:07.000
too much and so he'll have them have people dip their hand in an ice bucket and rate their sense
00:28:11.280
of pain over time until they reach 10 out of 10 and have to pull it out so then they know what maximum
00:28:16.000
pain feels like then he has them do a cycling test to exhaustion and he has them rate both their pain and
00:28:21.860
their effort and what he finds is that the point where they get to the end of the get where they're on
00:28:26.220
the bike and they say okay i can't keep this pace anymore i have to stop i cannot continue
00:28:29.720
at that point they're rating their effort very close to 10 out of 10 but their pain might only
00:28:34.100
be 6 out of 10 now 6 out of 10 hurts but it but it suggests that what limits us usually is not pain
00:28:40.860
it's it's effort so from marcora's perspective pain is pain is kind of it's there and it hurts but it's
00:28:47.320
not that important but there are other lines of evidence that suggest that pain does play some sort
00:28:53.380
role in in our limits and in fact there's a bunch of evidence showing that athletes are
00:28:59.220
better at tolerating pain than non-athletes and that this isn't necessarily something you're born
00:29:04.140
with it's something you can train and there was one there was a recent study out of a university in
00:29:08.620
england where they compared two different cycling training programs one was a sort of steady just ride
00:29:14.640
at a steady pace and the other was a high intensity interval program which is involves enduring a bunch of
00:29:20.680
discomfort a bunch of pain and they designed the programs to be exactly the same in terms of how
00:29:25.640
much physical improvement they they produced so that so both groups improved their vo2 max by exactly
00:29:30.360
the same amount but the high intensity interval group increased their pain tolerance more and also
00:29:35.920
increased their performance more so it's like they both had the same physiological improvement but by
00:29:41.120
by being forced to cope with a painful stimulus they were able to endure a little bit more discomfort
00:29:47.060
during uh during a competition and so one way to think of that is that pain isn't the be-all and
00:29:53.220
end-all you don't quit because it's because it because the pain is just absolutely so excruciating
00:29:58.420
but pain is something that contributes to your sense of effort and so if something is six out of
00:30:03.280
ten on pain it's not limiting you directly but it's also making your effort maybe a point or half a
00:30:08.720
point higher so it's getting you to that that maximum effort a little bit more quickly
00:30:12.840
so when you say pain tolerance it's not that the athlete feels pain less like the pain still feels
00:30:19.860
like a seven he just has trained themselves to ignore that and push through and like again effort
00:30:26.640
becomes the limiting factor yeah that's exactly it so so there's a bunch of studies on athletes and
00:30:31.460
what they all find is let's say let's say you give people electric shocks with progressively increasing
00:30:36.640
intensity on their arm or something and athletes and non-athletes will both say okay that hurts at the
00:30:42.320
same point they'll say like yeah it's the point where that's pain pain threshold the or a pain
00:30:47.920
sensitivity rather they detect pain in the same way it's just that as you keep turning up the the
00:30:53.060
shocks the non-athletes are the first ones to say okay i want to stop now and the athletes will keep
00:30:57.320
going for for in some cases substantially longer and so no one really knows the full answer as to how that
00:31:05.460
happens but the prevailing thinking is that it's not that there's some physiological change that
00:31:10.020
athletes have some sort of magical anti-pain molecule circulating in their body it's just a
00:31:15.560
question of psychological coping mechanism mechanisms athletes because they train in ways
00:31:21.280
that are uncomfortable they're used to on a daily basis dealing with some discomfort and they
00:31:25.880
understand that pain doesn't always doesn't doesn't mean your arm's going to fall off it just means
00:31:31.080
it just hurts it's just it's information for your brain and so they're willing to tolerate that
00:31:35.160
information a little bit longer until it really gets intense and then they say okay yeah like pain
00:31:39.820
still affects them it's just they've they've learned to cope and that's actually one of the most
00:31:44.060
transferable things i think about athletic training uh or and playing sports is that you you learn these
00:31:51.600
psychological coping mechanisms without even being aware of it that allow you to handle discomfort
00:31:57.000
whether it's you know being stuck in an uncomfortable plane seat you know airplane seat for four hours or
00:32:02.680
whether it's you know running the last five miles of a marathon the coping skills i think are really
00:32:07.160
transferable so another factor is physiological factors the muscles themselves and this was i thought the
00:32:13.480
experiments done you know throughout the history of this science was interesting like one of the
00:32:17.780
interesting ones where they just take frog legs and just put electricity through them and just watch
00:32:23.020
them twitch up and down until they'd stop to see you know how long muscle tissue could uh can move
00:32:28.580
so what does the research say about that how long can muscles contract fully before they just they
00:32:36.100
won't move anymore yeah so so so the answer is longer than you will ever be able to to inflict damage
00:32:42.120
on them so yeah again the frog leg experiments that they started in the late 1800s and the classic ones
00:32:47.000
were in the early 1900s and they're zapping frog legs and finding that yeah eventually you get to this
00:32:51.640
point where the legs don't even twitch anymore and it's like oh so that's what fatigue is that's
00:32:55.860
but the problem is the frog legs aren't attached to anything and they later did experiments with
00:33:00.720
what's called decerebrate cats which is basically cats whose brains have been removed and they found
00:33:05.800
the same thing you know you could you could make them twitch until their muscles wouldn't move anymore
00:33:08.880
but in reality we never get to that point because of what we've been talking about the brain is like
00:33:13.940
nah let's we're not going to let you twitch that muscle anymore and so one of the there's a guy named
00:33:18.880
guillaume millet who's uh he's a french researcher he's currently at the university of calgary
00:33:22.640
and he's also an accomplished ultra endurance athlete he you know he was a an ultra runner and
00:33:27.840
a national team cross-country skier and he got interested in this topic about 15 years ago and
00:33:33.300
he started and and there's there's techniques you can use that are sort of similar to this uh
00:33:37.900
zapping the frog's legs you can use them on humans now so you can first of all you can you can ask
00:33:44.300
someone to say let's say you want to test the leg muscles you can say okay contract your leg muscle
00:33:48.460
or push out with your leg muscles as hard as you can so then you know what the maximum voluntary
00:33:52.480
contraction is then you can say okay we're going to apply an electrical jolt to the nerve at the top
00:33:59.000
of your leg and we're going to make your leg twitch just like the frog legs frog's legs and we're going
00:34:03.440
to see how how much how strongly you can twitch that muscle and then we're going to take a magnetic
00:34:09.600
stimulator and apply it to your brain right at the region that where the nerves go down to the to the
00:34:17.340
leg muscle and we're going to make it twitch there so then we're going to be able to find out where is
00:34:20.540
the fatigue is it is it in your brain like from the voluntary desire to twitch is it in the muscle
00:34:25.880
and the muscle not twitch or is it somewhere in the spinal cord because there's there's a lot of sort
00:34:30.820
of potential fatigue mechanisms in the spinal cord where the nerve signal is traveling down and so he
00:34:37.180
said okay well let's he started out with experiments where it's like okay let's put someone on a treadmill
00:34:40.760
for four hours and let's see how much muscle fatigue versus central fatigue which is brain or
00:34:47.060
spinal cord there is let's let's compare by comparing the voluntary maximum with with the
00:34:52.040
with the electrically stimulated maximum and i said okay four hours isn't enough let's try eight hours
00:34:57.240
let's try 12 hours let's try then he went to a race in france or in in europe called the ultra trail
00:35:03.480
mont blanc which is uh it's something like i think the winning time this year was just under 20 hours
00:35:10.780
and it's up and down you climb sort of more than the the height of everest and go back down so it's
00:35:17.160
a really long race and at this point he's still finding yeah the muscles get tired but they don't
00:35:21.920
get totally maxed out so then he said well that's not extreme enough but so there's another trail race
00:35:26.400
called the torre des géants which is it takes about for for the guys they were studying it takes at
00:35:32.780
least you know 80 hours sometimes the winners are 80 80 to 100 hours to run this race and they don't
00:35:37.800
they sleep almost not at all they basically go for you know three or four days straight just running
00:35:42.960
the whole time and the shocking result was that the actual amount of fatigue in the muscles was less
00:35:50.480
after this 80 hour race than it was after the 20 hour race or the 25 hour race and so this was a sort
00:35:58.540
of headline result it's like oh you're less tired if after you run 200 miles through the mountains
00:36:02.980
than then you then when you run 100 miles through the mountains but the the real lesson was that
00:36:08.540
no matter how far you go because your brain is is kind of holding the brakes you never get to that
00:36:17.060
that point like the frog's legs where there's just no more twitch left in your muscle and in fact if you
00:36:21.740
go long enough it's so long that you have to slow down just to get there and so you actually get a
00:36:27.180
little bit of less a little bit less fatigue so the maximum amount of fatigue in your muscles is
00:36:31.120
actually from quite a short duration it might even be from just a couple minutes you can push so hard
00:36:36.160
that you'll get a high level of muscle fatigue but you never reach that point where the muscles
00:36:41.160
can't twitch anymore so you can always keep going you can always keep your legs moving yeah if you
00:36:47.800
yeah try i i'm sure if i was to you know stand at the end of the tell the j on say hey you can you
00:36:52.740
can keep going you can run another mile i might get you know some some negative comments from the
00:36:57.600
people because the legs aren't the limiting factor but other things are are starting to fail and you're
00:37:03.680
probably you know sleep deprived and your brain just wants to stop and your legs are probably sore
00:37:08.820
too but they can still twitch if you uh if you if you're if you're if a lion jumps out from behind
00:37:13.140
the tree you'll discover you can you can still sprint down the down the street so related to muscles is
00:37:18.920
how we fuel the fuel our muscles and this has been a topic of just a lot of controversy and debate
00:37:25.220
the past i'd say 15 years so when i was growing up carb loading was all the rage right like before a
00:37:32.200
football game before a run you know my mom was like here's a big bowl of pasta you got to eat this so
00:37:38.300
you have carbs for running but then you know of course the whole paleo things happened in the past 15
00:37:43.520
years or so and you know saying in endurance runners to pick this up no actually we want go high fat low
00:37:50.040
carb because you know we want to be an aerobic you know using oxygen not glycogen so what does the
00:37:56.740
research actually say about high fat low carb diets and human performance and endurance so the short
00:38:04.480
answer is it doesn't say a whole lot it's you know these are are hard things to study and so a lot of
00:38:11.400
the arguments are are not really uh not really based on scientific research but more on just like
00:38:19.400
i tried this and it worked for me um now i should i should emphasize that you know if a lot of people
00:38:26.620
say i tried this and it worked for me it's something you have to pay attention to and you have to think
00:38:30.300
carefully about maybe there's something here but like you said the carb loading thing which which
00:38:34.920
really emerged in the in the 60s in scandinavia it it sort of became the dominant paradigm and so
00:38:41.480
for a long time people including me would have said there's no way you can do good endurance
00:38:48.680
performance without good carbohydrate levels and so there were some studies in the in the 80s for
00:38:54.760
example a few isolated studies that suggested hey if you if you take the time to adapt to a high fat
00:39:01.040
low carb diet you can actually sustain your endurance pretty well the evidence wasn't super
00:39:06.220
strong or anything like that but there were these studies and they got mostly ignored because
00:39:09.200
the idea was was so entrenched that carbs were the way to go and what's happened over the last i would
00:39:16.300
say five years is there's been an acceptance that that that that that the idea of a low carb high fat
00:39:24.460
diet was dismissed too quickly for endurance performance that and that a lot of the studies that
00:39:29.260
suggested there's that it was actually really bad for you they were too short or there were other
00:39:33.520
flaws in the study so if you switch to a you know a high fat diet for a week and then try and do run
00:39:40.140
a marathon or whatever you're definitely going to have problems because your body hasn't fully adapted
00:39:44.380
so the big question is what happens if you take longer so that your body has really learned to uh
00:39:50.060
to make the best use possible of of your fat stores and so there's there's two questions you can ask one is
00:39:58.000
is it is it is it possible to do this and have reasonable performance and the other is is it
00:40:03.580
better than the current carbohydrate based approach and i would say the big revolution to me
00:40:11.120
has has been the idea that it is possible to go low carb high fat and to have very good endurance
00:40:19.320
performance to to you know run marathons successfully to run ultra marathons successfully
00:40:24.160
uh to do ironman triathlons and so on all the while while consuming virtually no carbohydrates
00:40:29.560
and that's a that's a big surprise and you know it's it's been confirmed in some studies too that
00:40:35.800
there have been some studies at the australian institute of sport that have shown that yeah it
00:40:39.180
is possible to to maintain performance in a relatively meaningful way whether it's better than carbs is
00:40:45.280
is is is where i think the argument has gotten pushed a little farther than the evidence suggests
00:40:50.780
um and there's there's there's definitely a bit of a food fight if you will among scientists for and
00:40:56.620
against this idea debating sort of subtleties of whether the efficiency is increased by a few percent
00:41:01.580
or decreased by a few percent but the bottom line just to simplify it from my perspective is
00:41:06.140
nobody has shown that low carb high fat is better than carbs for most endurance performance
00:41:11.220
there's some evidence that it might be worse where the advantage might be is if you're talking about
00:41:16.340
ultra endurance performance where you know it's one thing to say hey just take in 60 grams of
00:41:21.860
carbohydrate per hour and you will be fine it's another thing to do that for 12 hours it's very hard
00:41:27.260
to keep choking down gels for 12 hours so if you can switch to a fat-based fuel so that you don't have
00:41:35.000
to eat as much during a long competition that may well be an advantage in terms of avoiding stomach upset
00:41:41.720
and things like that and just feeling better so so i'm definitely open to the idea that this low carb
00:41:46.220
high fat approach has some advantages for some people in certain contexts if you look at the
00:41:53.800
olympic marathon or something like that i i would be surprised if you found anyone really in history
00:42:00.260
who's taken that approach so so to me there's a long way to go before anyone can claim that it's it's
00:42:05.720
better for competitive events of say three hours or less yeah as you point out when you're doing
00:42:11.600
a competitive event there's always at that end you have that kick where you have to go really fast
00:42:16.520
right you're doing that sprint and that requires you're probably going to switch from an aerobic to
00:42:21.140
anaerobic and that requires glycogen which requires carbohydrates so if you're doing a 5k probably don't
00:42:28.480
you know the uh high fat low carbs not going to do much for you but if you're doing an ultra marathon
00:42:32.600
definitely try that yeah and and and you know if you're in the tour de france then it's a very very
00:42:38.600
long race but every time there's a a breakaway every time there's a you know a significant hill
00:42:45.180
climb you're having to dig deep and rely on carbohydrates and if you've sort of down regulated
00:42:50.460
your ability to use carbohydrates you're just you're not going to be competitive now it's still
00:42:55.400
debated some people still disagree and say that oh you can still use your carbohydrates you can have
00:42:59.340
your cake and eat it too but that's i think that that remains to be to be proven and the other thing
00:43:04.400
is you know like i guess we can look very narrowly at how does it affect your endurance but you can
00:43:09.020
also look more broadly at how does this fit in with your with your lifestyle and so for some people
00:43:14.860
going low carb high fat is is wonderful and it's really changed their lives and and that's great but
00:43:19.780
you know i wouldn't recommend if someone is just looking for a performance boost to to have this
00:43:25.340
radical overhaul of their lifestyle unless they're looking to do some sort of overhaul for other
00:43:30.140
reasons because it's a it's a big ask to suddenly cut out all carbohydrates for something that may or
00:43:36.360
may not help you in this one small facet of your life right as you point out to a lot of the big
00:43:41.380
marathon runners are from kenya and they pretty much just like eat corn porridge it's their diet
00:43:46.760
yeah they're the definite uh sort of ultimate example of it's like you know if you listen to
00:43:53.060
sort of mainstream sports nutritionist nutritionist these days they're like yeah you need carbohydrates
00:43:58.520
but of course it's got to be complex organic vegetable blah blah you know it's like you got
00:44:04.000
to eat high quality of course we don't recommend sugar and you look at what the kenyan marathoners
00:44:07.820
are eating and they're getting like 20 of their calories from the sugar they pour into their from
00:44:11.560
the simple sugar that they pour into their tea and their uh their porridge now you know their
00:44:16.940
lifestyle is such that they seem to be able to they seem to thrive off that but it's even i would
00:44:22.000
like i don't think i would be able to to eat that much sugar without you know feeling this
00:44:27.480
tremendous sense of guilt which maybe says something about our attitudes towards food in the
00:44:31.700
west or something right so related to food is water hydration and that's another thing like in the past
00:44:39.320
i think 15 years has been this debate like you if you're watching the news one you know one year
00:44:44.720
they're telling you oh you you need to drink eight gallons you know whatever how many gallons a gallon
00:44:49.020
of water a day and then next like no you actually don't need that much water because that's going to
00:44:52.560
kill you so what what's the science say how much water do we really need particularly when we're
00:44:58.580
competing in an endurance event or exercising yeah so i would say the science says you need to drink as
00:45:04.780
as as much as you feel you need to drink and whether it's uh you know but sitting at your desk at the
00:45:10.560
office or or while running a marathon and as you said this debate has gotten really polarized to to to
00:45:16.560
where you know it's almost sort of caricature one side is saying you know you basically have to have an
00:45:22.560
tv hooked up to you at all times or you're going to die and the other side is saying water is terrible
00:45:27.180
you're going to get water poisoning you're going to get hyponatremia which is this condition that can
00:45:31.100
arise if you if you do drink too much water although it's very rare and you know both of these are kind
00:45:35.320
of scare tactics and the truth is somewhere in the middle for the most part in most contexts we really
00:45:40.520
don't need to worry at all about hydration other than being aware that when you're thirsty you should
00:45:45.420
drink that said it's not that hydration is totally irrelevant if you get severely dehydrated
00:45:51.140
you're you are likely to have you know changes in your performance and so you have to be aware and
00:45:56.740
there's some contexts where you have to be more than just aware you have to be planning ahead if
00:46:00.840
you're running a marathon you can't just drink whenever you're thirsty because you can only drink
00:46:04.540
when there's a water station and you you know and if you're running you may not want to drink even
00:46:09.800
though you're thirsty because it's uncomfortable to drink so there's these situations where you do have
00:46:13.980
to kind of be aware but for the most part if you are just simply making an effort to to listen to
00:46:21.100
the signals from your body to to listen to the signals that for you know millions of years of
00:46:25.220
evolution have made sure that we get enough water and if we fall behind on the amount of water we
00:46:30.280
have we'll catch up with it later then you know you'll be okay and I you know one little stat that
00:46:34.800
I like to cite is the first man to run sub 204 for a marathon was Haley Gabriel Selassie in 2008
00:46:42.280
and during that race he lost about 10 percent of his body weight he was I think 128 pounds when he
00:46:48.280
started in something like 120 116 when he finished from dehydration now you know not all of us can do
00:46:54.980
that but but if the if if mild dehydration if two percent dehydration was a problem we wouldn't have
00:47:01.580
these world record setting marathoners losing 10 percent of their weight so so I think the hydration
00:47:06.220
message has been pushed a little harder than it needs to and the performance effects and also the
00:47:13.020
sort of health effects are are not as severe as as you as thought because a lot of the studies are
00:47:18.760
like okay we're gonna give you a diuretic put you in a heat chamber for six hours and then we're gonna
00:47:24.060
test your performance and it's like oh look you you didn't perform as well it's like well that's not a
00:47:28.660
real world situation if I'm in if I'm in my office if I'm hungry or if I'm thirsty I'll drink it's not
00:47:33.160
like I'm being forced not to drink in some of these studies so we've talked about some of the
00:47:37.840
physiological factors that play into rate of you know rate of perceived effort there's a lot more
00:47:43.480
people can take it out of the book but as you've discussed like none of them really like we a lot
00:47:48.200
of people think they matter then they're going to make the difference in their training but
00:47:51.140
you basically the argument you're making is like well they don't actually make that much of a difference
00:47:56.420
and it all comes back to that mentality and that the psychological factors so what can we do
00:48:04.440
to train our brains so that even when things feel hard we keep going or we're able to push yourself
00:48:13.960
even further before things start feeling hard right like that what happened to you right when you're
00:48:18.660
with your run where you thought you're running faster than you really were so it you thought it
00:48:23.400
was easy but it wasn't so how can we do that in our own whatever our activity is whether it's running
00:48:31.080
or weight lifting or whatever it is yeah so let me start with the caveat which is i think the most
00:48:36.020
powerful thing to do is to be aware of these things and you know one of the studies that i found
00:48:40.000
fascinating is investigating the effects of heat on cycling performance and you know they put cyclists
00:48:46.100
in a room where it was you know 100 degrees fahrenheit but in some cases they rigged the thermometer so
00:48:51.740
that it only read like 90 degrees fahrenheit and the cyclists went faster and it's not that heat didn't
00:48:56.860
have an effect it still had some effect but it had much less of effect of an effect so there's always
00:49:01.640
this it's this halfway thing it's not all in your head you can't just pretend that heat doesn't exist
00:49:06.660
but the effects we feel are always greater than or the effect the ultimate effect on our performance
00:49:12.160
is always greater than pure physiology would suggest there's always a mental component and so if you're
00:49:17.060
aware of that i think you can choose to to not to kind of disobey some of the signals to say yeah i feel
00:49:23.640
hot but you know what it doesn't mean i'm dying it just means that i'm being warned that i'm hot
00:49:27.300
so that's the starting point is is be aware that there's more but there's also specific ways you
00:49:34.140
can you can kind of try and strengthen certain kinds of mental muscle and you know i mentioned
00:49:39.820
before the marshmallow test which is this famous thing where they gave four-year-olds they said
00:49:43.900
basically you can have one marshmallow now or you can if you wait you know maybe 15 minutes you can
00:49:48.300
have two marshmallows and then they tracked people who could the longer kids could wait at age four
00:49:53.860
for the marshmallow for an extra marshmallow the better they did in all sorts of you know life
00:49:59.000
outcomes 20 or 30 years later in terms of you know there's studies linking this this sort of response
00:50:04.540
inhibition not just to things like educational attainment and income but also to like crack addiction
00:50:09.900
and stuff like that so response inhibition being able to keep doing something when you don't want to
00:50:16.840
or to avoid doing something that you're not supposed to to suppress your initial urge which
00:50:21.420
in the context of endurance is your initial urge is like this this is hard i should stop or i should
00:50:25.560
slow down if you can suppress that urge you will be able to do better so how can you train response
00:50:31.220
inhibition well there are there are certain computer tasks these these things like something called the
00:50:36.320
stroke task which are designed to measure cognitive traits like response inhibition and so what some
00:50:43.960
some well marcora argued is like okay if you're doing this task which is supposed to measure response
00:50:48.680
inhibition that means you're using your response inhibition and think about physical training if i
00:50:53.580
you know if i want to get faster at or if i want to be able to lift a weight a heavier weight then what
00:50:59.020
i should do is lift weights and make my arm tired and then let it recover and then lift more weights and
00:51:04.060
let it recover and by lifting that weight i'll eventually be able to lift more weight and so he applies the
00:51:08.440
same logic to mental training if you keep doing tasks that tax your response inhibition your response
00:51:14.840
inhibition should ultimately get better and so you should be you should increase your ability
00:51:20.100
to to stick at a task when it's uncomfortable and ultimately be able to sustain ultimately what this
00:51:27.020
will do is kind of reduce your perceived sense of effort because you're getting better at handling
00:51:31.560
mental fatigue and so he's done some studies for over the last three or four years
00:51:35.880
uh they were funded by the british ministry of defense because they they felt like this would
00:51:39.900
be pretty useful for soldiers who are you know in combat for sometimes a couple days at a time
00:51:44.020
and they've had intriguing results it's like so he's found you know if you train people physically
00:51:49.640
and you give half of them this additional brain training on the computer and the people who get the
00:51:55.560
brain training improve their physical performance by a far greater amount than the people who did just the
00:52:00.940
the uh the physical training so there's a kind of proof of principle that you can specifically train
00:52:06.760
the brain with these specific kinds of cognitive tasks now you don't just do go to the crossword
00:52:11.900
puzzle it's a it's a very specifically chosen kind of cognitive task that attacks certain mental traits
00:52:18.160
like response inhibition and i so i tried this out a couple years ago before running a marathon
00:52:23.340
and and you know my you know i wasn't doing a study so i can't really assess whether it worked or not but
00:52:28.520
what i can say is my god those those mental tasks are boring like and they're time consuming so i found
00:52:35.540
it a real challenge so there's there's a maybe gap between saying this is what you can do but it's not
00:52:40.740
necessarily what i would what i would recommend everyone rush out and start doing yeah as you
00:52:45.760
highlight in the books this stuff what he recommends doing marcora is like you have to do these
00:52:49.740
brain drain exercises for an hour and then go train a lot of people don't have an hour of their time
00:52:56.580
plus an hour to train so i guess he's coming up with some ideas of things you can do while you're
00:53:01.320
training to fatigue the brain sort of cut down on the time yeah so he has he has a couple of ideas
00:53:05.940
one thing he said to me is like look from a practical perspective one thing you could do is
00:53:10.140
just embrace the idea of training when you're mental mentally tired sometimes so you know personally
00:53:14.940
i i you know i run most days and i uh and do with some other stuff to lift weights and stuff like
00:53:20.440
that i do it almost always in the morning because that's when i feel fresh and it just feels
00:53:24.040
more pleasant to me that way and he's saying like look it's uh maybe if you do a workout you know
00:53:30.260
after a long day of work or even you know after a night when you haven't slept as well as you'd like
00:53:35.020
that may the the results of the workout may seem worse physically but you're actually training your brain
00:53:42.100
like the mental you know sleep deprivation and mental fatigue learning to push through that is is a
00:53:47.680
mental training exercise so in some ways it's kind of a positive way of framing when you have a
00:53:52.260
crappy workout you're like well i was pretty stressed and tired so my my time in the workout
00:53:57.300
was crappy but i i sure as heck trained my brain today um so so that's a kind of practical approach
00:54:04.220
to keep in mind he's he's been developing an app uh or working with an app developer to create a form
00:54:10.840
of mental training that i as far as i understand it it's sound based rather than like it's an auditory
00:54:15.500
brain training app rather than one with a screen in front of you so it's something you could do
00:54:19.040
you know have it on your phone and be doing it while you're out training and hopefully not be be
00:54:23.360
hit by a car in the process but so he's working on trying to make this available but i think one key
00:54:29.100
and he's done some studies where you do the the brain training task while you're you know sitting
00:54:32.920
on a stationary bike so you're combining the time of physical training and mental training but
00:54:36.660
personally i still have no interest in sitting on a stationary bike for my training i'd rather be
00:54:40.240
outside so you know there's ways that he's trying to make it more accessible and ways that you can kind
00:54:45.460
of work on this indirectly through your mental training but it's still i i think it's still like
00:54:51.800
i guess i want to be cautious about overhyping it because it's it's still like early days yet and
00:54:56.360
it would be good to see other labs reproduce the results because that was the other thing that i
00:55:01.700
took from my own personal experiment with it it's like because you know i'm a busy guy too in some ways
00:55:06.440
and it was not easy for me to find time to do this brain training and it would have felt a lot
00:55:11.080
it was much harder to find time for brain training because of the voice in my head that was saying
00:55:15.900
this is ridiculous like how is this going to help me run a faster marathon so you kind of want to
00:55:21.160
make sure that it's legit and really works before you try and invest a bunch of time in it well
00:55:26.080
there's a lot more we could talk about i mean there's a chapter about zapping your brain that we
00:55:30.720
didn't get to but uh where can people go to find out more about the book and your work so the easiest
00:55:36.100
place to find me is on twitter my handle is sweat science all one word and my website is
00:55:40.720
alexhutchinson.net and both of those places will guide you to you know articles that i write about
00:55:46.160
this topic and and the book and and hopefully you know people will have been working on their
00:55:50.440
mental endurance just by just by listening to me ramble on the on the podcast today
00:55:53.800
well alex hutchinson thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure i really enjoyed it thanks
00:55:58.160
my guest today was alex hutchinson he's the author of the book endure it's available on amazon.com
00:56:03.740
and bookstores everywhere you can find out more information about his work at alexhutchinson.net also check
00:56:08.260
our show notes at aom.is slash endure where you can find links to resources we can delve deeper into
00:56:12.900
this topic well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips
00:56:26.000
and advice make sure to check out the art of manliness at artofmanliness.com while you're there
00:56:29.740
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00:56:35.000
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