The Art of Manliness - #382： The Secrets of Greater Endurance

00:00:00.000 brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast how long can a

00:00:19.040 human run without stopping what's the most weight a human can deadlift will someone ever run a four

00:00:23.680 minute mile in less than three minutes and 30 seconds or will someone ever run a marathon in

00:00:27.720 less than two hours my guest explores these questions in his latest book and along the way

00:00:31.540 uncovers insights to all the factors that go into pushing the limits of human athletic performance

00:00:36.060 his name is alex hutchinson and he's the author of the book endure mind body and the curiously elastic

00:00:41.020 limits of human performance today on the show alex and i discuss the history of the science of human

00:00:45.240 performance and the three competing theories about how to measure and improve it alex first explains

00:00:49.340 the interplay between physiology and psychology when it comes to humans pushing themselves we then

00:00:54.060 spend the rest of the conversation discussing various factors that have influence on our

00:00:58.240 performance including pain thirst muscle strength diet and mental fatigue alex then shares insights

00:01:03.640 in the latest research and how you can manipulate these factors to run faster and longer and lift

00:01:07.560 heavier after the show's over check out the show notes at aom.is slash endure

00:01:11.940 alex hutchinson welcome to the show thanks a lot brad i i'm glad to be here so you got a book out

00:01:34.400 called endure mind body in the curiously elastic limits of human performance and it is about how

00:01:41.000 we're able to push ourselves to do these amazing physical feats and we'll talk about some of the

00:01:45.560 the ones you highlight in the book but before we do that can you tell us a bit about your background

00:01:49.500 and how it inspired you to research the science of human performance and endurance

00:01:53.340 yeah so these days i call myself a a science journalist or sometimes if i'm being really specific i'm a

00:01:59.840 a science of endurance journalist but that all started probably 20 years ago i was a competitive

00:02:05.760 track and field athlete i ran for the canadian national team for a number of years and there was

00:02:12.100 this sort of ongoing mystery of was i really approaching my limits and there was this one night

00:02:17.400 where i ran i'd been trying to break four minutes for 1500 meters which is a sort of decent high school

00:02:23.220 time for for a number of years uh for like four years i've been stuck just over that barrier

00:02:28.140 and one day i was running a race where the timekeeper was calling out the splits that were

00:02:33.200 wrong and he he tricked me basically accidentally into thinking i was running super fast and i ran a

00:02:39.640 nine second personal best which totally changed the trajectory of my running career and basically

00:02:44.240 since that moment and nothing had changed in my physical training so there was this this moment where

00:02:48.900 uh a mental change created a total difference in my apparent physical endurance so i've been sort of

00:02:55.680 wondering about that for a long time and when i became a journalist about 10 years later i started

00:02:59.620 to dig into the the research about the science of endurance trying to understand what what it was

00:03:04.860 that sets limits and and that's kind of that's the long and winding answer but it was a long and

00:03:09.160 winding road that that sort of got me to this point so and as we'll see in this conversation is that

00:03:14.100 it's we really don't know we have some ideas but some of it it's it's confounding so let's talk

00:03:20.160 about sort of the overall give like a big picture view you talk about in the book there's three

00:03:25.200 competing theories that determines the limits of human endurance the first is a physical limit and

00:03:31.660 that is primarily vo2 max now i'm sure our listeners have heard that that acronym thrown around a lot so

00:03:38.480 what exactly is vo2 max and why have physiologists thought that that's the thing that determines how long

00:03:45.880 you can run or push yourself physically yeah so if you two max so that the science definition is that

00:03:52.280 it's it's the maximum amount of oxygen that you can breathe in from the air use your heart to to pump to

00:03:59.760 the muscles extract from the from your blood and use it to to help fuel aerobic exercise so it's this

00:04:07.640 maximum aerobic quantity i mean and it goes back about a century almost a century now to to when we

00:04:15.060 were first scientists were first figuring out how muscles actually work and and there was this

00:04:19.960 dawning realization that oh you know if you if you take an individual muscle fiber it's basically we

00:04:25.420 can understand it's just like a machine and we can understand what the rules that govern this machine

00:04:29.200 are are and so there was this hope that we could extrapolate that up to the human body and think of the

00:04:37.020 body literally the guy who invented vo2 max wrote these articles for scientific american american saying

00:04:41.800 the human body is a machine and we can calculate its limits so vo2 max definitely no one ever thought

00:04:49.420 the vo2 max was the only factor dictating endurance but they thought it was a big factor that tells you

00:04:54.740 so at a certain point the harder i run the more oxygen i i need right and the harder i start to breathe

00:05:00.480 but at a certain point you just can't breathe any harder and you can't bring any more oxygen in

00:05:04.840 and the idea was that that's what determines the limits of your endurance that you reach this

00:05:11.280 this maximum or this plateau in oxygen and so that that turned out to be a really influential

00:05:17.380 idea philosophically for most of the 20th century right so i mean when did people start figuring out

00:05:23.480 well vo2 max really isn't the the determining factor of you know human performance well some of the

00:05:32.440 first skepticism was in the in the late 70s and early 80s and i you know i there's a scientist

00:05:37.380 named tim noakes in south africa who's been both tremendously influential and tremendously controversial

00:05:42.300 about a number of topics and you know i visited him uh six or seven years ago and i asked him like

00:05:48.300 when did you first start having doubts about vo2 max and he said well we had just started our lab in

00:05:52.840 the early 80s and he was testing a lot of elite athletes and he he so he brought in two very good

00:05:58.820 athletes one of whom was a sub four minute miler of one of the best milers that south africa had ever

00:06:03.700 produced and the other was a woman who had won a very famous ultra marathon in south africa which is

00:06:10.680 you know i think it's 55 miles long or something like like that a totally different race so she

00:06:15.860 she was a very slow miler but a good long distance runner and he was a very good miler and he tested them

00:06:21.440 both in the same day and they both had exactly the same vo2 max and he thought well if this test can't

00:06:26.720 tell the difference between this like six foot two sprinting almost you know middle distance runner

00:06:31.460 and this tiny petite ultra runner then obviously there's something we're not understanding here and

00:06:36.380 so i would say in the last 30 years there's been doubts and in the last 20 years there's been

00:06:43.680 controversy and in the last 10 years people have kind of moved away and from the idea that vo2 max

00:06:50.780 it's almost the pendulum sometimes swings too far and now people are like oh vo2 max is meaningless

00:06:54.880 and that's not true vo2 max has meaning it's just not the the sort of sometimes one way of

00:07:00.220 thinking it is thinking of it is if i have a bucket and i want to know how much water can fit in that

00:07:05.760 bucket we we understand geometry well enough to know that if i know how tall the bucket is and how

00:07:10.360 wide it is i know exactly how much water it will hold and it doesn't matter how hard the bucket tries

00:07:15.440 it can't hold more water than that and we now understand so we there was the hope that vo2 max would 0.94

00:07:20.740 would would would allow us to calculate the sort of capacity of the of human endurance in the same

00:07:26.300 way and now we understand that we're not buckets we're more like balloons you can you can kind of

00:07:31.480 squeeze more air or more water into the balloon and the balloon's capacity isn't infinite you can't

00:07:37.740 you can't fit the whole world in the balloon but it's also very hard to define a limit of how much air

00:07:42.960 you can squeeze into a balloon at some point it's going to pop but you don't really know when in

00:07:46.740 advance okay so speaking of tim noakes that leads us to the next theories of what allows it to push

00:07:53.180 ourself and these are more psychological and tim noakes he's the guy that developed it's the central

00:07:58.120 governor theory what is that yeah so so he's and this is probably when you think of alternatives to

00:08:04.920 the human machine view of endurance the most famous one is this central governor theory which was

00:08:09.480 proposed by noakes in the in the late 1990s and basically what he argues is that the brain is

00:08:15.880 protecting you in some way we had there are physical limits but if you reach those physical

00:08:20.140 limits you would die because your heart wouldn't be getting enough oxygen if you know if you were

00:08:25.400 really limited by a lack of oxygen your heart would would stop pumping and you would die that's maybe

00:08:29.920 a little bit hyperbolic but the point is he argues that we never quite reach our limits and that's

00:08:34.760 because the brain is looking out for you in all sorts of different ways it's monitoring your

00:08:38.640 temperature it's monitoring you know your brain oxygen levels and it's it's just and and if it

00:08:45.400 detects that things are getting a little too crazy it automatically sort of throttles down the signals

00:08:51.140 that are going from your brain to your muscles so you're still trying just as hard but you're not

00:08:54.820 getting as much force out of your muscles and that's to make sure you know you never quite hit those

00:08:58.760 limits and that that theory has been really influential but also controversial because the obvious

00:09:04.900 question is okay let's let's let's let's find a brain scanner and let's see the central governor but

00:09:09.240 it it's not that simple there isn't a part of the brain called the central governor so so that that

00:09:14.860 theory has has been been attacked or debated a lot in the in the last few years well there's no like

00:09:20.880 single part of they they have ideas that parts of the brain that might play a role in this central

00:09:26.300 governor absolutely and and you know the sort of interesting thing is the more advanced these studies get

00:09:32.720 the more brain areas get implicated so there's some really interesting studies looking at for instance

00:09:37.400 the insular cortex which is responsible for monitoring signals from within the body so it's a logical

00:09:42.820 place for uh you know for this function to to to be located but it there's all sorts of other parts

00:09:51.140 of the brain that are involved with you know assessing future risk or monitoring the outside environment

00:09:57.040 and so you know i've been following this area of research really closely and maybe five years ago if you'd

00:10:02.100 asked me i would have said oh it's pretty cool they're really they're really zeroing in on the

00:10:06.100 insular cortex and it's links to the to the motor cortex which is what sends the signals out to your

00:10:11.200 muscles and i think that's where it's going to be but you know as as time has gone on more studies come

00:10:17.900 out it's like okay but you also have to include the prefrontal cortex and you also have to include

00:10:22.600 the anterior cingulate cortex which you know assesses your perception of effort and all of a sudden it's like

00:10:28.520 well hang on we've now listed all regions of the brain so is there a is there a central governor or

00:10:34.960 is this just is this a behavior that describes how our brains work to make sure that we don't

00:10:41.380 push ourselves absolutely to our limits and you know one of the one of the sort of vivid images

00:10:46.120 that noakes uses he when he gives talks he'll put up a slide of just after the finish of the 1996

00:10:52.380 olympic marathon which is when a south african runner won it so he likes that picture but the guy who came 1.00

00:10:57.360 second was i think from south korea and maybe just three seconds behind and the two of them are

00:11:01.040 jogging around the track you know waving with their flags and and he says well look what do you notice

00:11:06.140 about the guy in second place he's he's not dead and you think you think about that if you're if

00:11:11.480 you're finishing a marathon you're three seconds from being immortal as the olympic champion of course

00:11:15.860 you're going to be trying as hard as you can this guy didn't leave anything in reserve at least he

00:11:19.480 didn't try not to but obviously he still had enough reserve his heart was still working and his

00:11:23.920 muscles were still working because he crossed the line and he kept jogging well so if there's a

00:11:27.400 central governor there and there's a reserve i mean it's accessible right so does noakes think you can

00:11:33.540 override the central governor like through training or you just are you hamstrung by that no matter what

00:11:39.420 you do yeah so there's no doubt that that reserve is negotiable and it's accessible to different

00:11:46.340 degrees by different people it's hard to like you know when i asked him so what do you do how do you

00:11:52.480 how do you how do you get to this reserve one of his answers was you know what i think

00:11:58.420 the great coaches of the world they're already they always work on the brain so he described he was

00:12:05.180 before he became a sort of running guru he was actually a very accomplished collegiate rower in

00:12:09.660 south africa and he he he said one of his turning points was this workout that he did as a college

00:12:15.600 rower they would usually do six times 500 meter pull or something like that as hard as they could

00:12:22.260 and once they finished it one day and the coach said okay go back and do another one and they were

00:12:26.260 like what we can't do another one we just went as hard as we could he said and the coach said no no

00:12:30.160 no you have another one in you so go back and do another one and they did another one in fact they

00:12:34.680 did four more i think until they had done 10 and it was one of those watershed moments of all of them

00:12:40.100 realizing oh yeah we had pushed as hard as we could but it turns out there was still a reserve there

00:12:46.100 and so there's that you know maybe that's a little wishy-washy but noakes noakes would argue that

00:12:51.020 good coaches help athletes learn what they're capable of and learn how to access that reserve

00:12:55.940 and i think the process of regular training also teaches us that naturally you know you when you

00:13:03.480 first start an you know an activity like running and you get all out of breath and your legs are

00:13:09.500 burning and you think man i went as hard as i could but gradually you learn that those signals

00:13:13.100 aren't really that signal doesn't mean you're about to die it means that it's just a warning

00:13:17.340 that you can't continue indefinitely you can start to push that those limits back a little bit

00:13:21.100 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

00:13:27.160 asking the question are there shortcuts to that process can we learn to access those reserves

00:13:31.380 without the hard work and the answer to that is maybe but the i think the most reliable way is still

00:13:37.000 go through that long process while you're training your body you're also training your mind and if

00:13:41.140 you're conscious of that you can make sure to bring out those lessons and help be aware of the ways

00:13:45.140 that sometimes we hold ourselves back or we trick ourselves into thinking that we've reached a limit

00:13:49.320 when it's really not okay so we've talked about the first theory vo2 max which is the body is basically

00:13:54.600 a machine and you can figure out those limits and push into those limits the second theory is

00:13:59.660 psychological it's the central governor theory developed by noakes there's a third theory also

00:14:04.580 psychological this one is developed by an italian guy called mark named marcoa

00:14:09.400 markora markora yeah tell us about his theory how how it's different from the central governor

00:14:14.780 theory yeah so this this is samuel markora and he his basic claim is that the central governor is

00:14:22.520 a super complicated idea that relies on all these subconscious control mechanisms and you know it

00:14:29.180 relies on your brain knowing in advance how far you're gonna go or what the temperature is going

00:14:33.880 to be and he says look it must it's simpler than that there's not all these subconscious

00:14:37.440 mechanisms we we go until it feels too hard relative to our level of motivation for a given

00:14:44.280 task and when it's harder than we want to we either slow down or stop and that you know that sounds sort

00:14:49.800 of obvious it's like that's not a scientific theory that's you know like grade two you know

00:14:54.620 pseudo psychology but but it's actually a lot deeper than that than it might appear at first glance

00:14:59.680 because what he's saying is that you know vo2 max lactate you know oxygen consumption glycogen stores

00:15:06.900 all that stuff just feeds into something more important which is your sense of effort how hard

00:15:11.740 does it feel and how hard it feels when when it reaches when you reaches a maximum when when you're

00:15:17.640 pushing as hard as you're willing to push or hard as you're able to push then you either have to slow

00:15:22.040 down or stop and and the reason that's actually what what grabbed me about this theory or what what

00:15:27.100 what struck me as remarkable is that he said look here's a prediction based on this theory if it's true

00:15:32.320 that your sense of effort is the final arbiter as to how long how far you can push then we should be

00:15:37.500 able to change your endurance just by working on the mind without affecting the body so i i first saw

00:15:44.060 him at a conference about seven years ago and he said and he was giving a talk and as an aside when

00:15:48.760 he was explaining his theory he said look i should be able to sit people down in a computer for you know

00:15:55.000 a few months have them do some computer tasks that work on specific mental traits like response

00:16:00.620 inhibition which is the the the thing that you work on in the marshmallow test or the thing you test

00:16:05.340 with the the marshmallow test and if i improve your response inhibition i should be able to improve

00:16:10.860 your marathon time without doing any physical training and i thought that sounds just that sounds

00:16:16.820 crazy if you're willing to make a crazy statement like that you should test it and and that's what he's

00:16:21.500 done with some remarkable results and so i've come around to the idea that marcora's theory

00:16:26.980 actually has some very interesting implications that so far seem to be supported by some of his

00:16:33.380 experiments he did another experiment with subliminal messages he he was he had cyclists doing a ride

00:16:38.140 to exhaustion and he flashed up images 16 milliseconds at a time so the cyclists weren't even aware that

00:16:43.960 there were images but he flashed up smiling faces and frowning faces and when when it was a smiling

00:16:49.140 face the cyclists were able to push longer before they reached exhaustion in in his explanation is that

00:16:54.660 the smile you know we sort of we see a smile it puts us at ease and the sense of ease kind of bleeds

00:17:00.280 into our sense that things are okay and not as hard as we we might think of them and so our sense of

00:17:04.700 effort is a little bit lower and we're able to keep pushing so i don't know what the final answer

00:17:09.620 or the right answer is but i i find marcora's theoretical work and also the predictions that he's

00:17:16.060 able to make based on this very seemingly very simple theory to be really interesting so this the

00:17:20.980 marcora thing you there's a i'm familiar somewhat familiar with it with weight training i sometimes

00:17:25.960 do what's called rpe training basically you know the my coach assigns me a program and he says it

00:17:32.040 should be an rpe eight which means like rate of perceived effort right so it should feel like an

00:17:37.540 eight which means that i could do maybe two more reps but what's interesting about rpe is that it

00:17:42.680 changes on a day-to-day basis like you said like some days it just like a weight maybe like 400 pounds

00:17:48.600 feels like an eight then another day it could feel like a nine and nothing's really changed but it's

00:17:54.680 i don't know it's just it's crazy how effort really does like how hard something feels determines whether

00:18:00.380 i can get a weight up or not well that's exactly it and so marcora would say rpe is what counts and and

00:18:07.300 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

00:18:13.780 potential explanations it could be you didn't sleep well it could be that you're stressed about

00:18:17.380 a very exciting interview with alex hutchinson or it could be you know like there's all sorts

00:18:22.100 of possibilities that could be tweaking your uh your sense of perceived effort but the point is

00:18:27.920 if you're if you're trying to figure out what your limits are that rpe is is what matters like if you

00:18:33.920 you can calculate we could go and measure your muscles and you know do physiological tests but

00:18:38.660 ultimately that the determinant of whether you're going to be able to do eight reps or ten reps this weight

00:18:43.100 is how you feel and so marcora's point is that's not a defect in the system that's not like a problem

00:18:48.520 that's actually a sign that rpe or perceived effort is exactly what ultimately determines our limits

00:18:56.360 but he would also argue you can ignore that perceived effort right just like you'd say just you know how

00:19:03.080 bad do you want it would be like the question like if it feels really hard if you just really really

00:19:07.420 want to accomplish this thing if you want to do a four minute mile or whatever if you want it bad

00:19:11.760 enough you can overcome that feeling perceived effort and actually push beyond a bit right

00:19:17.140 up to a point yeah so in marcora's model there's actually two there's the sort of yin and the yang

00:19:22.600 there's effort is is you know as it climbs you're you're more likely to quit motivation is what determines

00:19:29.460 the stealing so let's say you're thinking of effort on a one to ten scale you know if if i go out

00:19:34.820 you know i i went out it was pretty uh this morning and i did a workout with a friend a running

00:19:39.880 workout it was snowy and slushy and uh you know it was not the the greatest day and so

00:19:46.600 the level i was willing to get to was maybe an eight out of ten i wasn't willing to go 10 out of

00:19:53.140 10 on this crappy slushy day when it's not a super important workout and there's cars that are trying

00:19:57.480 to run me over and so on if this was the olympics this morning i would have pushed to 9.999999 out of

00:20:04.600 10 or maybe 10 out of 10 so most of us in most situations are not really reaching 10 out of 10

00:20:10.280 so in that sense the how bad do you want it is how high are you willing to go on this rating scale

00:20:15.140 but once you're you know there's a point at which ratings your your effort reaches a maximum and in

00:20:21.360 you know in scientific studies that's they they pay volunteers in scientific studies not because

00:20:27.200 they're they're you know they they're out of the goodness of their heart they want to make sure

00:20:30.960 that people are maximally motivated so that when they're taking these tests they're willing to go

00:20:34.700 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

00:20:39.920 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

00:20:45.900 reach we do reach limits eventually so what's interesting about marcora's theory is that the

00:20:50.260 psychological can has this influence on the physical right and what i thought was interesting that

00:20:56.220 research you highlight is how even mental fatigue right if you just had a rough day at work you you

00:21:03.440 know stressful stress day with the kids or whatever that can actually diminish physical performance even

00:21:09.140 though like you didn't really exert yourself physically the fact that you had to endure this

00:21:13.220 mental fatigue that's going to hamper your ability to perform your run or your workout whatever it is

00:21:18.860 yeah and that's that's to me that was again one of the really most fascinating results that got me

00:21:23.200 interested in in his work because it's on the one hand it's like yeah you know if if i'm doing like

00:21:29.660 complicated mental arithmetic or stressful negotiations or something all day and then i go and do a workout

00:21:35.220 definitely like i'm going to notice a decrement in my performance but if you if you say okay so why is

00:21:42.280 that how do i explain that in the context of sort of textbook physiology it's not obvious because if i've

00:21:47.940 been sitting at my desk all day you know you think i'd be raring to go and ready to and i used to

00:21:53.000 notice this like i would i would meet friends to do a workout at you know five o'clock and if i had

00:21:58.040 a story to you if i was on deadline till like 4 45 i would always have a terrible workout even though

00:22:03.600 my my job is like the least physically demanding job in history so it's it's obvious in a in an

00:22:10.360 intuitive sense but it's it's not hard it's not easy to explain scientifically and and so what

00:22:15.200 marcora would say is that yeah you know your muscles haven't changed at all all that's happened is

00:22:19.900 that because you're mentally fatigued everything feels a little harder you know it's one point

00:22:24.820 harder on the sort of perceived effort scale and that's exactly what he found and he did a study

00:22:28.980 where it's like you know the people either had to do this computer task where you're sitting at a

00:22:34.240 screen and tapping buttons depending on which letters flash on the screen it's not hard but you

00:22:38.180 have to focus and so it takes your attention versus just watching a documentary about trains or

00:22:43.220 something like that and then they had to cycle to exhaustion at a at a given pace and right from

00:22:49.160 the very start so it's not just something that shows up at the point where they quit right from

00:22:53.160 the as soon as they started pedaling they had to say okay how hard is this and the people who

00:22:57.040 were mentally tired immediately they were rating it as sort of five out of ten rather than four out of

00:23:02.200 ten then halfway through the test they're at like seven out of ten rather than six out of ten

00:23:06.860 and then everyone quits when they reach 10 or you know 9.5 or whatever depending you know

00:23:12.200 roughly 10 it's just that the people who started at a higher rating of perceived exertion

00:23:18.340 uh they're reaching that that they're hitting 10 earlier because not because their muscles are more

00:23:25.880 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 0.75

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 0.90

00:24:19.800 when science gets kind of polarized like this ultimately you know it's i think it's worth remembering 0.97

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 0.90

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 1.00

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 1.00

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 0.92

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 0.94

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 check out our podcast archives we almost have over 400 episodes there in the archives it's artofmanliness.com

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00:56:55.260 manly

00:56:55.940 manly

The Art of Manliness - February 22, 2018

#382： The Secrets of Greater Endurance

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