From olympians to everyday athletes: mastering strength and endurance with Dr Tony Boutagy

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This week on the podcast Mikki speaks to Dr Tony Boutagy, the renowned strength and conditioning coach. With over three decades of experience, Tony has worked with athletes across more than 30 sports, ranging from national to international levels. In recent years, his focus has shifted more towards physique training, but his expertise spans across hypertrophy, strength programming, periodisation, and the complex interaction between cardio and resistance training.

In this episode, we dive into the science behind effective training methods, explore how to balance strength and endurance, and get Tony's insights on nutrition and the latest trends in fitness, including sex related differences in the real world. Whether you're an athlete, a coach, or simply interested in optimising your training, there's a wealth of knowledge here to help you achieve your goals.

Tony is a strength coach and an exercise physiologist based in Sydney, Australia. His undergraduate degree was in Human Movement (ACU) and he holds a PhD in Exercise and Sports Science from Charles Darwin University in far north Australia.

In his coaching career that has spanned closed to 30 years, he has written over 70,000 training programs, across a wide range of populations, including the general public, athletes, Olympians (2004, 2008, 2012, 2016), special populations and those needing rehabilitation from injuries. 

Tony has been involved in education since 1999, having held various educational positions at several universities in exercise science, physiotherapy, and personal training. His own educational programs for personal trainers, allied health professionals and the general public have been running for since 2002, which have now moved to an online platform since Covid.

Previously Tony has been an Adjunct Associate Lecturer at the University of the Sunshine Coast, a lecturer at the Australian Fitness Network, AIF, the Australian Catholic University (Schools of Exercise Science and Physiotherapy), NetFit New Zealand and New Zealand Weightlifting.

Tony has also been an editorial board member for The University of the Sunshine Coast's Fitness Research department and an editor for the Journal of Fitness Research, a member of the Australian Institute of Fitness Personal Training Advisory Panel and has sat on the expert advisory panel for Fitness Australia. Over the past three decades Tony has written hundreds of health and fitness related articles and was the recipient of the 2004 Australian Fitness Industry’s Author of the Year Award. 

Find Tony here: https://www.tonyboutagy.com/pages/about-tony

IG: https://www.instagram.com/tonyboutagy/?hl=en 

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Creators & Guests

Host

Mikki Williden

What is Mikkipedia?

Mikkipedia is an exploration in all things health, well being, fitness, food and nutrition. I sit down with scientists, doctors, professors, practitioners and people who have a wealth of experience and have a conversation that takes a deep dive into their area of expertise. I love translating science into a language that people understand, so while some of the conversations will be pretty in-depth, you will come away with some practical tips that can be instigated into your everyday life. I hope you enjoy the show!

Transcribed using AI trancription, errors may occur. Contact Mikki for clarification

00:03
Hey everyone, it's Mikki here. You're listening to Mikkipedia, and this week on the podcast, I speak to Dr. Tony Boutagy. Tony and I have been internet friends for years now, and he is a renowned strength and conditioning coach with over three decades of experience. Tony has worked with athletes across more than 30 sports, ranging from national to international levels, and in recent years, his focus has shifted more towards physique training, but his expertise spans

00:33
hypertrophy, strength programming, periodization, and the complex interaction between cardio and resistance training. And in this episode, we dive into the science behind effective training methods, we explore how to balance strength and endurance, and get Tony's insights on nutrition and the latest trends in fitness, including sex-related differences in the real world.

00:56
Whether you're an athlete, a coach, or just interested in optimizing your training, there's a wealth of knowledge here to help you achieve your goals. And I have to say, what I love about Tony is he sings from the same song sheet as some of my other favorite guests, including of course, Brandon DeCruz, Darren Ellis, Cliff Harvey, Eric Helms. So I just love having these conversations with these experts.

01:21
For those people unfamiliar with Tony, he is a strength coach and an exercise physiologist based in Sydney, Australia. And his undergraduate degree was in human movement. And he holds a PhD in exercise and sports science from Charles Darwin University in the far north Australia. In his coaching career that has spanned close to 30 years, he has written over 70,000 training programs across a wide range of populations including the general public, athletes, Olympians,

01:50
special populations and those needing rehabilitation from injuries. Tony has been involved in education since 1999, having held various educational positions at several universities in exercise science, physiotherapy and personal training. His own educational programs for personal trainers, allied health professionals and the general public have been running since 2002, which have now moved to an online platform since of course Covid years.

02:18
Previously, Tony has been an adjunct associate lecturer at the University of Sunshine Coast, a lecturer at Australian Fitness Network, the Australian Catholic University, NetFit New Zealand and New Zealand Weightlifting. Over the past three decades, Tony has written hundreds of health and fitness related articles and was the recipient of the 2004 Australian Fitness Industries Author of the Year award and though that was 20 years ago, he is still absolutely up there.

02:47
with the current information and knowledge. So I really think you're gonna love this interview. I've popped links in the show notes as to where you can find Tony, both on his website and on Instagram, where he freely shares his insight and knowledge and isn't afraid to go against the grain, if you like, with current sort of trends. So give him a follow if you don't already. Now, before we crack on into the interview though, I would just like to remind you that the best way to support

03:16
This podcast is to hit the subscribe button on your favorite podcast listening platform. That increases the visibility of Micopedia and amongst literally thousands of other podcasts out there. So more people get to hear from experts that I have on the show, like Dr. Tony Bortagy. All right, team, enjoy this conversation.

03:39
and I've been aware of your work, and then I came across you on Instagram, and then you were just saying a lot of the same things, which I think in my head, even though I don't have your similar experience, and I just thought you'd be super interested to talk to about all of these things. Well, because I had followed you for so long, I have sent so many clients to you, either directly or to your courses, and I think it's one of these small worlds. I used to work in New Zealand.

04:09
20 or so years ago with Netfit, New Zealand weightlifting, and a whole bunch of New Zealand things that were around two decades ago. And I'm sure we've got a lot of mutual friends and people who pop up on your podcast go, I've met them and it's been great, great to connect. Nice one, Tony. And so give us a little bit of your background. So now you're Australian, right? Although I feel like...

04:35
I hear some South African, but I think I must be wrong about that. I get that a lot. And I think that's because I train South Africans. I was born in Oxford, England, but came to Australia pretty young. My dad was doing postdoc work there. And I arrived in Sydney and have been here essentially ever since. Amazing. So a little bit of geek is in your genes then, if your dad is doing postdoc. Yeah, correct. I think my love of books and reading.

05:02
came from going into his office at a young age and there would be wall to ceiling books and I think that just since then I've been a book collector. Yeah, tell me Tony, have you also always been an athlete? Yeah, I have. Now, athletes I think is a very loose term. I've always been physically active and finishing university I was either going to be a musician because I play guitar and

05:33
I'm either going to go to the conservatorium and study music, or I actually really like health and fitness. So I'm going to start training some people and see if I enjoy that. And this is 1995. And I did a human movement sports science degree and it rolled on from there basically. Yeah. How old are you, Tony? 47. Oh, there you go. Same age, basically. Great age. Yeah. Great age. This is going to be a great year, as they all have been previously and they all will be. Absolutely.

06:02
Yeah. So, okay. So you've got the geek is ingrained and you've sort of always been an active person. Who inspired you early on to be interested in health and fitness? Or was that just something that you sort of developed on your own? All of my group of friends. I grew up in a really interesting, unique situation. I grew up in a strong religious setting where on weekends, we wouldn't go out partying. We would go and ride our bikes around.

06:32
and go swimming and were very physically active and challenge each other. So I didn't have a normal childhood. It was really physically active. And I think just inspiring myself to keep up with my friends who are much more talented and better than I were at writing, at running, at swimming. That is what early inspired me on. And then when I was this junior trainer at the gym, I was working. So I must have been 18, 19.

06:59
there was a biomechanist who trained at the Institute of Sport and he was there finishing a PhD and training clients. And the way he understood movement, because I came from cycling, swimming, running, and I just watched him explain weight training and I thought, wow, this is a whole next level to lifting weights that I do not know about. So I hung around him like a really bad smell, copied all his programs, asked him a million questions.

07:29
being a truly endurance-based athlete and love of only endurance sport to really appreciating the role of muscle. Yeah. And did that translate into your studies as well? Like, what was your PhD on? That's right. So from human movement, sports science, I then gravitated to things that were very weight training oriented. So majored in biomechanics, majored in sports nutrition, muscle physiology. And my PhD supervisor was a track and field expert.

07:58
So in the early 2000s, I'm going to think maybe 2001, 2002, I enrolled in a master's that we rolled straight into a PhD. We just took out a more ambitious project. And he was an expert in strength, speed, power, and was one of these people that could look at predictor lifts. If you could squat X, you should be able to sprint or jump Y. And he, it was one of these encyclopedic knowledge of

08:24
strength training and track and field. You could say, who won what medal at 1972? And you've got the answer. So that really pushed my interest from just purely muscle because I was personal training into the athletic endeavors that involved a quality of strength, speed, power, power, rate of force development, as opposed to just hypertrophy, which I had been working until up until that time.

08:53
your sort of transition from PhD into this professional space. Because I have to say, like, given, you know, your background to this point is not that different from a lot of people in your, who will have a similar qualification, but I feel like you are everywhere. You are a voice of knowledge for so many different people internationally. So how do you get to that point where you're the go-to man? Because this is how I feel.

09:21
This is how I see you, just in the realm of on social media and on Twitter and stuff. And you've got such a wealth of knowledge and your opinion is so valued. So what's been that journey? Well, I've never been asked that and I have actually never viewed it that way. I know where I'm not and I'm not in academia and purely because going through my... I was speaking to Jose Antonio about this literally yesterday in that when I went through my PhD...

09:50
I did not like the other people who grilled me. And I just felt that they were living in this really, I hope this doesn't come across the wrong way, but living in a comfortable office, lecturing their students, but they were so rude and mean when I was doing my thesis. And yeah, you know, that's academia, right? Everyone gets pulled apart when they're doing their thesis, and that makes you stronger. But you know, I'm a nice guy, and I just didn't particularly like

10:19
that backstabbing, we're all in the same department. I think there was a better way of doing it. And I'm sure everyone in academia can relate exactly to that. So I thought, I'm not gonna do this. I'm gonna stay in coaching. I love coaching. I like working with real people. And I had at that time a really nice blend of working with able-bodied and Paralympic athletes. And I would do most of that for free because as everyone who works in most sports know, there's...

10:46
very little money in it, so we'd offer our assistance. And I would learn from that and apply it to the general public who then I would earn my income. But what I really discovered at an early age is that I loved reading and there were so many books, excellent books on the science of endurance training and a little bit on strength training. But I would finish them and think, well, how do I write a program? I would then fly around the world and study with people who were renowned strength coaches.

11:16
whether they were weightlifters or generalists, and work out what they were doing and how they periodized and how they would approach competition and the off-season. And that is how then I learned to write programs because there weren't really good books about this. And then in the early 2000s, I thought I could probably start running courses to teach other trainers. And I was already lecturing at various places about the theory of training.

11:44
with the basics of this is how you do a program. But I was thinking, this is not how you do a program in the real world. And that's basically the foot in both worlds that you speak of, of coaching full-time and educating full-time. And it's a really nice balance. It is. And I'd just like to touch on a couple of things you've said there. And you would have heard me.

12:10
talk about this, I'm sure, because it's rife in the nutrition space as well. Although from a different angle, you talk about your superiors, for want of a better word, grilling you and questioning you in a way that was almost unnecessarily critical, if you like. Equally, when you are only in academia and you are only there to teach and you don't translate that knowledge

12:39
into that real world application, you lose that sense of meaning of what it actually means to be in the real world. And you're in fact talking to a person in front of you, and you're not just focusing on a mean value or what the literature tells you. And I feel like you blend that knowledge really nicely. The same way that I like to apply it as well, because there is research out there, which people will spout.

13:04
This is research and they're very science heavy in a way that almost I don't understand when I'm listening to them. I'm like, I don't even know what you're saying here. But actually, when you go back and you dive into the research, they're talking about it's mechanistic research, it's preclinical research and stuff like that. And this is encountered in both of our fields that basically work together, nutrition and exercise, whether it's resistance or aerobic. We're all speaking in the same world.

13:33
And you can tell when a trainer has gone to do masters or PhD work. And you can see by the nature of their study design that their supervisor drove it all because you step back and go, I know that person. They wouldn't do a training program or a nutrition design like that. They just wouldn't do it. And when we read studies on what does weight training do to preserving muscle and energy deficit in a certain population.

14:03
You'd look at the study and you think, no one's doing that. No one is training like that. And I have a slide in a lecture that I give, which talks about frequency versus splits. And I show everyone, because you look at the conclusion and the conclusion makes sense about frequency and equating volume. And then I said, but here's the study, here's the program that these people did. No one, hopefully no one trains like that in the real world. And this is why I think

14:32
there is a need for academically trained coaches who can access the literature, understand it, know where it fits into the big picture, and then take that and apply it in the general public because there are so many good coaches, but they don't know the research. So they get into group think or ways of what one of my mentors, one of the best coaches on the planet is doing things the same way today that they were doing 15, 20 years ago, because

14:59
It worked back then, so it will work today. And anything outside of that scope, they won't see. And that's another end of the spectrum that is not helpful either. But at the same time, you don't want to just be changing your mind every day that a new study or a new exercise comes out. Yeah, and I think it's that understanding of the body of literature is really important. So whilst we do need to keep an open mind on things related to nutrition and fitness and change our opinion

15:29
body of knowledge, that body of knowledge is almost always more than just one study. And it would have to be a very powerful, huge, I don't know what kind of study could possibly change a person's mind. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that's right. And you would need several that was well-designed across population groups, that if coaches had experienced something over many years, across different genders, different sporting profiles,

15:58
This is where the training variables come in and training theory, generalized theories of training have been around since the 1960s. These have been already articulated and they've been expanded. But if you look at the writings, which I do, I have a library at home that has almost every major strength book dating back to the 1800s. Amazing. And when you look at that over the years, and let's take the Russian literature of the

16:27
There's not a huge difference. Yes, there may be iron special exercises and ways of doing things, but generally it's pretty, you could look at Verkoshansky and you could look at what people are doing today and is pretty similar. Yes, we now understand mechanisms of doing things and why that's happening, but they had often worked it out. And this is an idea that you do need to understand where we have come from and understand that art.

16:54
If something is going to change your mind that's been around for 60 years, it needs to be really comprehensive, well-designed study in the target population. I think this is where you and I have had some discussions where there have been some dissenting out-of-the-box thinking that coaches step back and say, well, hang on, this actually doesn't make sense from both the coaching and what we know about the literature. It seems very fringy, but as with all those social media, if

17:23
If it suits your bias, yeah, the people jump on board and it becomes a very popular thing. Yeah. So Tony, you train both male and female athletes, right? Yeah. And primarily female athletes. Yes. OK. Primarily female. What age groups do you work in? I have trained juniors. In fact, in terms of athletes, I've worked with as young as 18. So schoolboy rugby at the Australian level.

17:52
up to masters athletes and I've worked with masters long distance runners. Yeah, nice one. And then in gin pop, like, what's your sort of age range there if there is such a... Yeah, again, teenagers. Currently, I have several clients in my 70s, several in the 60s, and then everyone in between. I think from social media, a lot of people feel that I just train

18:21
in reality, they're the ones who want me to film them when they're training. Whereas my 60 and 70 year olds are like, you're not filming that. You're not showing that anywhere. So, yeah, it does not represent what most trainers are doing. Well, I would say it's isn't that funny, because actually, if you were to train and if you were to film the 60s or 70 year olds, that would make for very good viral content on social media, wouldn't it?

18:50
Well, I should really consider it, but we also I work with a really great team of people who do things that I can't do. I work with a world expert in Dexa. I have a medical doctor. I use a number of great nutritionists. But the Dexa scans in particular, when you look at the Dexa scan of a 62 female or 68 female or someone in their 70s, and we're seeing their bone mineral density right at the top line off the charts. Amazing.

19:19
These people are lifelong lifters and we're able to collect data because I've got at least five clients I've trained over 25 years. I've collected a lot of data on these people. So it's quite a unique perspective. Yeah, they're all case studies, but this is coaching and it's not academia. And we try and draw inferences from what has worked over many years as opposed to what will work in a 12-week challenge and then no one ever trains again.

19:48
Yeah. Tony, is that publishable, your data, just out of interest? I've got all the data. So it's just, it's one of these things called a 24 hour clock. So inconvenient, isn't it? Only 24 hours in a day, only seven days of the week. So I want to ask you about your insights into training the female athlete, because there is just so much information out there. And you and I have sort of chatted offline briefly about

20:18
some of the messages that are put out there and just their applicability to real life. And you know, I chat to a number of women who are in that perimenopause, postmenopause age group and they are just confused actually about what it is they need to do on a training front. So can you dispel some of the, or add clarity to some of the messages that are out there?

20:45
Because what I'll offer is how I see and try and reconcile the literature with what we know what I've experienced from coaching, but also then speaking to a lot of colleagues who are also coaches who work across the genders. And I've got some really close friends who've worked with exceptionally good world record holding athletes who are female. And

21:13
And when we talk shop, what do you do differently? Have you had to change things? The big picture is that good coaching is individualized and it's individualized in the respect of firstly, what is your goal? What's the timeframe? And then with testing data, what are you not good at? And what do we need to improve? And I can do that very easily because I'm a face-to-face trainer. I'm not working by distance where I'm trying to look at videos and conversations.

21:42
I can have somebody stand on one leg or jump or do an aerobic test or a battery of flexibility movements. I can say, you're tight there, strong there, that left. And from there, we can design programs that go after everything that we see. But over the decades of coaching, and next year will be 30 years, good coaching would have males and females turn up and say, I'm on my period. I'm not feeling great.

22:12
A guy would say, I haven't slept this week because I've had a deal go wrong at work. Or both people say I'm having a fight with my partner and I'm just not feeling great. And good coaching is to auto-regulate training on the fly. It's we're going to swap that out. I'm sore here, we're going to change that. I just don't feel like training today. Great, let's keep the ball rolling and do something else. And over the last several years, there has been a greater push to say women, women, women,

22:41
have different physiologies, they are not men. And there are different, and this always surprises us because we have known this, and yes, women have been underrepresented in the literature. That's beyond dispute. That is being rectified, but a lot of our knowledge does, especially in training studies, come from men for a very simple reason. Up until recently, the majority of sports science students have been men and they're very easy to do.

23:08
And because we didn't know much about the menstrual cycle, the women who were, if they were at the cycle, they had to be excluded because hormones were being tested. Now this is being rectified as you would know and we're collecting a lot more data. But the only reason why we know that there are gender differences in a number of different physical parameters is because they have been tested. And we see differences in muscle fiber type, fatigability, oxygen uptake, lactate transport.

23:37
differences in relative and absolute strength. You name it, on and on, there are gender differences. But when you look at training studies, and this is what I find interesting, you have some people in an eight-week program who barely improve and then other people who improve 300%. So when you look at the individual differences, male and female, everyone is different. That agrees with what I would see in the gym, is that no two people respond the same way. And the role of the coach...

24:07
is to find out what works better. Do you handle more volume? Do you handle more intensity? Do you need less frequency? And where I see a lot of people who read the science but aren't coaching, they sit back and say, there's gender differences, which means females should do this at this time of the cycle because the literature says you're going to be more lax here. And in postmenopause, you'll have these changes in hormones, so you need to do X, Y, and Z. I take a step back and think, would it really make any meaningful difference?

24:36
And that's the key word, like meaningful difference that you will notice outside of you saying, I'm feeling great today. Would you mind if we don't deadlift because my back's a little achy? I just don't see it making a meaningful difference. But I'm also willing to change my mind as we said before, if good data comes out to say that there should really, we've done this side by side and this is superior. Yeah. Okay. So essentially if there are...

25:04
differences we've seen in the literature that may be significant in terms of statistically when they've analyzed the data, that though that might exist, but it may be different on the gym floor, like how clinically, as you said, how meaningful is it? Is it actually going to make an appreciable difference? And if not, then it's the individual variation between different people that is the major, and also that person day to day, it's like how they're feeling that day.

25:33
Absolutely. You take the same individual and over six months, look at their strength or performance outcomes. They wave up and down. And to try and pinpoint that on your phase of the menstrual cycle if you're premenopause or the change in your estrogen and your FSH postmenopause, and that's why you're... I just don't buy that.

26:00
because the individuality of day-to-day variation for everyone is so profound. And it's not my experience. If you talk to any trainer who has worked with the same people across many years and plot their strength changes, it is like this up and down. And it's a scatter. You cannot say, oh, that was when your E2 was really low and that was when you... No, you can't do that. So good coaching is just...

26:29
asking them at the beginning of the session, how are you feeling today? Yeah. Yeah. No, it makes perfect sense. Tony, can you help clarify, I suppose, some of the messaging around what women need to be doing post-menopause? Because obviously you work with a group of athletes and everyone. When I say athlete, I mean active individual. So what's your strategy there because the message of lift heavy and what that is. And I know heavy is relative, but

26:58
you know, could I still lift light? Like, could I still go post menopause, Mickey at 55 or 60, could I go in and do my eight to 12 reps and feel confident that I could still be progressing? Yeah. And I actively work in the real world with people who have gone through menopause and have then worked with them decades afterwards. I love this field. And all I care about is improving a client's

27:26
bone mineral density, muscle mass, metabolic health, and general wellbeing. I don't care about arguments. I don't care about having statements that are catchy and sell books. It's just what is the best method for a female full stop. And the changes that undergo hormonally are no longer there to support bone and muscle in the same way estrogen was premenopause, which means we need to artificially or mechanotransduction,

27:56
push that into the skeletal muscle via a stimulus. But this is what blows me away a little bit because when you read the literature, the changes that undergo a female through the hormonal transition, with or without hormonal help, this new phenotype that will occur, let's call it from 55 onwards, is well-defined and insulin resistance increases and testosterone drops and estrogen.

28:25
becomes non-existent and so forth. So what are we going to do about it? What do we change postmenopause to what we did premenopause? And people have looked, well intentioned people have looked at the literature and say, here are the hormone changes, now you need to train differently. And when I look at coaching, I think, well, that doesn't actually make sense because if you want to preserve fast-rich fibers, both males and females lose fast-rich fibers as we age.

28:54
We know this to be the case in a study that came out this week, a really well-designed study showed that men are probably losing it faster than females are. So now we're teasing this difference up, but let's grant it that it's an even drop. When you lift weights, you're using fast twitch fibers. And Stu Phillips has been on about this now for 15 years. If you fail at eight reps versus 10 reps versus 30 reps, and you fail, you can't do another rep, you've used your fast twitch fibers.

29:24
because the Henneman size principle says it's used on a needs basis. And when you approach effort and task failure, you will use all available fibers. Yes, there are subtle differences between failing at five versus failing at 20 in terms of the motor unit pool. And Bill Crane has done a lot of work in this field. And Mike Roberts is now continuing with that legacy. But from again, from a meaningful difference, Mickey, if you are 60,

29:52
and you do leg press and you fail at 20 versus five, you've used all of your fast twitch muscle fibers. And this is where I put my coaching hat on and say, we're telling postmenopausal women to lift heavy or to do sprint interval training and not to do X, Y, and Z or to do much less of it. I think that's not good coaching. Good coaching would mean that you would progress. Somebody who says, I'm gonna take up weight training, bravo, we need to prepare you.

30:22
We need to prepare your tendons, ligaments, bones, your neuromuscular system to understand how to coordinate safe movement pattern and to handle load. Over many years, you might choose to incorporate strength and power work. And I think that's a good idea. Would I dream to do that under two years of somebody with no training experience? No coach would. Only somebody who's read the literature and said, they need to preserve fast rich fibers. Let's just do max strength work. That is does not.

30:51
give justice to the wide body of literature that we know. Yeah. And Tony, you are, like, you're quite vocal about that, aren't you? Like, I've seen you on social media, you're like, you're just like, hey, this is where it's at with regards to the literature about what we should and shouldn't be doing. It all comes from, ordinarily, I wouldn't. In other words, as a coach most of the time, my social media is as a, hey, here's an interesting study that I thought was cool, so let's put that up.

31:21
Or here's a training method that for many people who don't have access to a thousand bits of equipment and they've got barbells and dumbbells, how can you have planned variation because you can't just swap exercise. You've only got a barbell. So we need different methods. So a lot of the posts are, well, here's a drop set and I've got 15 different ways you can do a drop set. And you can always use the same bit of equipment, but you can do it slightly differently.

31:48
and then have variation because variation is an important part of progressive overload. But my direct messages, every morning I'd wake up and there would be a dozen messages saying, hey, what do you think about this? And I'd look at that and say, well, to me as a coach who reads science, that doesn't make sense. And then my friend's wives would start texting me and say, hey, it's me. I just read this. I'm going to stop zone two training and do sprint interval training. And what do you think?

32:17
And so therefore I started just being a little bit more vocal and hopefully it's just presented for those people who don't know about the debate can look back and say, actually that sounds pretty sensible. You've got to alternate hard and easy days. You've got to prepare the body for heavy lifting. You can incorporate max strength work once you've earned the right to do that. But if you choose to do 10, 20, 30 reps, it's probably easier on your joints. And as long as you work with effort, you will use your fast twitch fibers.

32:48
So, I mean, people think about training for hypertrophy and training for strength. So if I shift to a more general discussion about that, Tony, because I'm super interested in this because as a, my physique has actually changed a little bit in the last three years where I've been focusing more on lifting and lifting in that range of anywhere from sort of probably eight to 15, let's say, and trying to be consistent two to three times a week.

33:18
slightly more if I am injured and not running, which you probably arguably would be at least a third of the time. But is what I need to, and I'm primarily interested in my strength and preserving it for as long as possible, I suppose. Do they always go hand in hand? Like if I'm training for strength, will I also sort of build my muscle as well?

33:45
It depends on how you want to look at strength and what you think is meaningful. It is well understood in the studies that have looked at rep range differences and then measured maximal strength that the closer you work to your maximum ability, which is your 1RM versus say a 15RM, you will get stronger.

34:08
in the one RM for neurological reasons, primarily that the brain understands how to coordinate the agonist and the antagonist to perform that movement under heavy loads. And this is what weightlifting and powerlifting is, is exposing the brain and the nervous system to the exact loading and pattern that you need for that sport. Now my question then as a coach, as a son, as a brother, as a friend is how important

34:35
is your one to five RM as you age. I have aging parents. The ability to carry their own bags and to take the lid off the pickles from the fridge and to put the shopping bags in the car, that's not your one RM. Strength is your ability to produce force. So if your 10 RM goes up or 20 RM goes up, you're getting stronger. I think we're missing the point here. It's not what makes you

35:05
stronger. And any lifting of weights will do that. Should older individuals or postmenopausal females incorporate a variety of rep ranges? And the answer is yes. Because as my earliest mentor would say, what's the best rep range? He would say, it's the one that you're not doing. You need planned variation. But it's this myopic focus that if you are older, you must be doing five sets of

35:34
That's just one of literally hundreds of different set rep schemes that we can use over the training years. Because if you do five sets of five more than once a year, you're leaving performance gains on the table. There are dozens of different methods that we can use. So we miss it. To me, we misunderstand that we're not talking about maximal strength, we're just talking about strength and any way training will do that. Okay. And so this might make you cringe, right? But...

36:03
I have a range of different programs that I sort of dive in and out of depending on how I feel on a given day. And I'm like, well, if I go in the gym, and I already sort of know that I'll be training my lower body once and I'm doing my upper body twice. In fact, I'll do a full body and then I'll do two upper bodies and I'll talk to you about this in a minute. And what I do, like the actual exercises itself and the actual rep range might...

36:31
theory as well, but I'll aim to feel a certain way at the end of it. So I'll be like, okay, well, I'm going to do my back and my shoulders and chest or whatever. But I'm not very, what I don't like, Tony, which is quite unusual because I'm quite regimented in many areas of my life. But in the gym, I hate, I've realized I don't love following a program for eight weeks, it's the same. Yeah. Yeah, I get that. So if you spoke to Tony 15 years ago,

37:02
Everything that we know about this, so in terms of the history of the science of understanding how this happens, first we've got the generalized theories of training, which occurred with Nikolai Osolin in the 1950s and 60s. And then the theories of periodization came out and then it moved to really strength power-oriented with Tzatzioski, Rokoschanski, and the whole history of Russian literature. Then the Americans came on board in the 1980s with Mike Stone, Bill Kramer, and then that's this journey of where we've come.

37:33
A lot of our understanding of program, even the programming fundamentals in 2004 by Kramer and colleagues show that you stick to a program for a period of time so that the body adjusts neurologically and muscly to the program. As time has gone on, there have been more studies that have had muscle centric rather than metrics, power, rate of force development, speed, strength. So we're now just looking at muscle.

38:03
And the ideas that we have a program and we stick to it is coming from the history of that last 60 years of training for a quality, but hypertrophy is not a strength quality. It's an adaptation to resistance training. Yes, you can make a really strong argument and people like Brett Contreras have done this eloquently in that you don't just want to mix it up every time you come and train. You want to get like a hip thrust and...

38:30
and push that, hit a new PR and then move on. So I get that and I don't have a disagreement. But 15 years ago, I had a number of clients who had worked with me again for 10, 15 years and said, I'm getting tired of doing the same thing for four weeks and then changing. So would you mind if we train the same muscles but you just give me something different? Now, at first my inner Tony said, no.

38:57
you have to stick to the program. And it was like I was having a stroke. My brain couldn't comprehend that we would change it up. But I thought, well, why not? Let's test it. Let's do a dexascan. Let's get some strength metrics. And let's do this. So we autoregulated training. And yes, I knew going in that it was lower body or hip dominant or whatever it was, but we kept it very, changed the method, changed the exercises and then dex it. And everyone went up in muscle mass.

39:26
And if there was a body composition, that mass went down. Amazing. And there was enough Dexer to say, well, hang on, maybe it's just challenging muscle, that's the most important thing. And yes, there's only so many good exercises. So there is similarity, but I have a number of clients who never do the same program ever. Wow. And there is only improvement. Yeah. No, that does challenge. Now it's going to be a difficult study to design.

39:56
But you can do that study. So I have sympathy to both. So for most people I design clients, but Miki, if you say to me, give me something. So a client I work with remotely in America, I just sent her 24 different templates and she just picks based on what she wants. I love it. And that is so, it is basically like Russian roulette every time we go into the gym. And I'm like, my training's chaos theory, actually. Chaos theory, yeah. Yeah, I love it. It's like I describe my endurance.

40:26
basis like is that gray zone. I love the gray zone. I love chaos theory. And I'm not the worst athlete in the world either. So, and I guess it doesn't, it could also just come down to your goals as well, because my goal is to be fit and healthy and resilient and independent into my older years. I'm not wanting to be a world champion. And I think probably my goals are very similar to 99% of the people out there.

40:53
If you were saying, I am going to the Olympics and I need a very specific quality of performance, that changed the discussion. If it is, I like exercise and I want bone and I want muscle and I want healthy metabolism and I want to enjoy what I'm doing, great. Let's change our programming structure to better suit your compliance so that you're excited about going to America because you happen to like that one. And

41:18
This is where it's both based very loosely on Bill Kramer's idea and Steve Flack's idea of flexible nonlinear periodization, which all came about from athletes who had fixed periodization schemes, but because of their competition on the weekend and then their training demands on the week, didn't often feel like doing strength and power on Monday because they're so fatigued. So they had a smorgasbord to choose from. You're feeling beat up, then you might do more restorative work.

41:47
Now, what I'm saying to any coach listening, we go, right, we've been doing this for a long time. But there is a very narrow mitered mile peak view in coaching that you have to stick to a program for three to five weeks. Anyone knows muscle, muscle is still adapting way, way much longer than that. So we do that to keep a client interested. So why not do it for a week? And I have enough proof now, decks are proven.

42:15
to have made me change my mind about that. Because again, 15 years ago, I would not have believed it. Yeah, it's so interesting. And I'm keen to hear your thoughts on this. The way you think about fitness and strength hypertrophy is very much aligned with a friend of mine, Darren, who's in the space as well. And he's similarly, he's got his master's in strength and conditioning, and he works with a range of different people. And I've asked him this question, so I'm keen to hear your thoughts on.

42:43
What's the go on rest period between when you can then go into the gym and do something again? You know, like, what's the deal? Can I do squats five days in a row? Can I work legs five days in a row? It always depends on your goal and your personality type and how well you absorb the training. And if your personality type is, I like to train every day.

43:09
And I did one of these programs for a client last week who would prefer a 20-minute session, 20 to 30 minutes, but just wants to train every day. But you cannot unless you think about it. You will overwork the shoulder, in particular in the upper body. Shoulders use in everything. It doesn't matter whether you're doing delts, arms, you're using the shoulders. And you're really using your hips and lumbar spine in everything lower body. So you can't just do it indiscriminately. It does need thought process. But...

43:37
Why not train every day? And it's this idea of recovery. And recovery, time course of recovery is different depending on which system you're looking at. You've got muscular system and fast rich and slow rich recover at different rates. We've got this from the wonderful worker, Wim de Vries in Belgium, which has looked at both strength training and aerobic training and look at the time course recovery between slow and fast rich individuals. And when we look at how often you're training in the week, well, how fit are you? How well do you recover?

44:07
how much training can you absorb and positively adapt to. That is the only way you can answer it, and everyone is different. And ideally, if your brief is to, well, I love training and I want to train as much as possible, then the goal is to get you as fit as possible so you can tolerate training demands. But that process might be a year long to incrementally increase your ability to absorb training volume. And the enemy of absorbing training full stop is intensity.

44:37
And this is where the idea of, well, you want to stop short of failure. You want to leave a rep in the tap when you're doing tanking, when you're doing interval training and so forth. That's where you can get into the weeds of how you can construct that. Yeah, super interesting and sort of a lot and definitely aligned with Darren's approach to train your muscles to optimise for whatever you're optimising to, which for the most part, with when we discuss this, it's in a sort of fat loss context and things like that.

45:07
Tony, I'm keen on your thoughts on any interference with endurance-based training and strength-based training and when, how you program strength-based training for your endurance people, which would be me as well. So it's a bit of a selfish question, actually. It comes back to this phrase, meaningful difference. And most of those in the space who understand the different modes of exercise, they are doing different things.

45:37
from the molecular trigger to start that cascade to increase muscle protein synthesis for contractile proteins or whether the synthesis is for, that trigger is for more mitochondrial proteins. Those pathways are distinct and that led with the pioneering discoveries of Bob Hickson in the 1970s, 80s to say, when you do, and he was a maniac, so it was a power lifting program and a 10,000-meter track program.

46:06
there is a payoff and that payoff isn't strength. It didn't look at hypertrophy initially. It was he didn't. It was a solo study. Now, since that time when molecular science came out, which was after my time as a university, we didn't know anything about this stuff. But when all the molecular data came out, it was, well, one is doing this and that is that. And John Hawley would say do opposites distract. Yeah, they're doing different things. So do you need since sport often, unless it's weightlifting and powerlifting,

46:35
Sport requires strength, speed, power, endurance to varying degrees. So do we do them in the same session? Do we do one morning and night? Do we do them on different days? How do we get around this? And the research, it has been pretty well studied in different athletic population groups. But what is really difficult, and coming back to the sentence, the meaningful difference that you would notice from a practical perspective, Miki, if I gave you...

47:01
a leg dominant workout on Monday and ask you to run 25 kilometers Tuesday, it's not going to happen. So how do we get around this? And if you look at the training programs of world tour cyclists that I've worked with, or Olympic level runners who I've worked with, the training volume is so obscenely low because we cannot interfere from the main sessions. Okay. So the strength based training volume is low. Is that what you're saying? So ridiculously low. Yeah.

47:30
And this is where you have to work with head coach. So when we say, Tony, you've coached, no, I've told the athletes what to do in the weight room. They've got a proper coach who does the coaching and we're the support staff. And you speak with them to say, well, what is their ground reaction forces like if they're a boxer or what is happening to their speed or their power numbers? And we try and move these things around so that there's less interference or we plan the less.

47:59
recovery run the rest day before that next, because I think it's well accepted that improving strength and bringing up antagonistic weak areas for runners, cyclists or whoever it is, will improve longevity and performance in the long term. Again, we get myopic. Will improving strength and power improve cycling? Debatable. Will it help longevity? Undoubtedly. And this is the things that we're considering.

48:26
and the level of experience. So if we're using you as an example, we look across your week and we ask ourselves, do you want upper body musculature? And as an elite runner, that answer is no, not really, except most runners that I've worked with actually benefit from arm strength for their swing. So that aside, we then say, well, generally speaking, we don't want upper body musculature, we want lower body. So where does it fit into the training week? But you might say, I want a little bit of running.

48:54
but I also want healthy upper body bone and muscle mass as I age. So, okay, then we might need to start incorporating more upper body training. Now, upper body can go in the same day that you are running. It's the ground impact forces of running that seem to have this, um, this negative knock on from the resistance training. And that's where I go low volume. And it could be just one or two lower body strength exercises. And then the rest are.

49:23
preventative. We work on ankle and shin and hip and core with maybe two sets and higher reps not to fatigue to raise that neurological awareness of how to recruit those muscles a little bit better. And then we go on feedback. How do you feel? Is your running times allowing for an adaptational period? How are you feeling? Okay, nice one. So what I'm hearing is that my split that I just told you I did earlier,

49:52
three sort of upper body-ish workouts in a lower body might be aligned with what you're just describing because I still want that upper body strength and muscle mass, but I don't necessarily want to waste my legs because I've got a run on Sunday that I want to, you know, a run hike that is going to be, you know, a few hours out. And I want to save myself for that. That's right. And that's where you look at minimum dose. And if you're using weight training

50:22
but to also help running performance, but to also minimize injury. We look at what is not being done for a runner. For an elite runner, we do that in the off season. So we do everything that's not done in running in the off season, then we get rid of it, and then they do their season. For somebody who just loves running and wants to be a good runner, then we actually have to incorporate that in the year and we wouldn't use a more traditional athletic periodization.

50:48
and we would use minimum dose. What's the minimum that you need to improve strength slash muscle mass for the lower body? And I think the other consideration here is this whole concept of low energy. And this is what I think has perhaps confounded some of the early literature is that I just jumped off the bike before we did this call. I used a power meter and a heart rate monitor and I did 600 ish calories. If I now sit in low

51:17
And then after this, I'm going to go and lift weights. If I don't eat until I get back from weights, I have now got an extended period of low energy. And as anyone who understands this field knows that low energy is the enemy of muscle hypertrophy. So I speak to anyone in the muscle world, is that right, we're going to eat regularly. We're going to keep providing that anabolic stimulus to muscle. And this is where I think a lot of endurance athletes who add weight training come undone, is because you expend so much energy

51:44
moving your body, whether it's running, cycling, swimming, that when you come to lift weights, you're in low energy. And I make sure that all athletes understand that some of the negatives you see from adding weight training to aerobic or vice versa for those people, I strongly encourage the muscle world to have more cardio for metabolic benefits. A lot of people just think it's all about weight loss. You get enormous metabolic benefits from a variety of different zones and training. But

52:12
they expend a lot of energy. So unless you're eating that back, you will be in low energy when you're lifting weights and muscle doesn't really like low energy when trying to get bigger. Yeah, nice one. And you know, I've got my program and you'll be familiar with it. I assume but Monday's matter and it's a, you know, it's a fat loss plan. And one of the things I really try and hone in on.

52:35
on the participants, 80% of them are female, are to fuel around their training, which they may not be in the habit of doing. And, you know, from my read of the literature is that, you know, when you are in a sufficient calorie balance and you've timed your training around meals, then, you know, eating in addition to that might not necessarily be a problem. But if you're in a calorie deficit and you're training early...

53:02
people do, which I love because you do it, you're in the habit of doing it. You just need something else in the tank. It's not enough just to get up and train in a fasted state and then go for a long period of time. That's like accelerating that potential for injury, which this might not be an issue if you're maintaining your weight and you've got a healthy calorie balance. Well, that's right. And so there are individual differences, but when looking up...

53:31
broad statements. This was clearly a mistake I've made in my coaching. When the first time restricted eating studies came out in rodents with Sachin Panda, this was about 2012. I remember at one of our major conferences that next year, 2013, I basically did the rookie mistake, stood up and said, this is where it's all at everyone.

53:51
You're going to have eight hours of eating, 16 hours of fasting. And if you wake up and you train in that fasted state and then refrain from eating, then your ketones will go up and autophagy will go up. And we thought that was great. And now we didn't have human data. And I certainly didn't do it on enough people with DEXA to actually look at what's going on. And then we started getting the DEXA stuff coming in and say, we're losing muscle mass here. So that's not good in any way. You look at it, whatever else is going up, if muscle is going down, that is not good.

54:20
So we changed the approach. And this was prior to the wonderful work from Grant Tinsley that's come out looking at then adding resistance training and so forth. But we were able to, this is the beauty where if you have access to dextro and blood testing, you can do this stuff in real time straight away. I should have done that before telling an audience. So that's a problem. So the issue here, and I love, I think it's Sam Impey and James Morton who talk about

54:48
fueling for the demands or fueling for the task. And they use that red light, green light, orange light. I use the same idea is that if you are doing something casual, it's an upper body session, it's Pilates yoga, it's an easy jog walk, you don't need a lot of carbs. You don't need the same energy. But if you're doing an hour of HIIT or a lower body workout, you need to fuel for the demand.

55:16
And so for those people who are serious about their training, then yes, you will need to structure your pre-meal. And that could be the dinner before if you're training first thing in the morning. You have a beautiful muscular and liver system to support that training system before you have breakfast. But as long as you're rolling like that, then I've not seen a problem and I've been using that ever since that paper came out a number of years ago. It works really well. For the general public who's just doing an hour a day.

55:44
upper body, lower body, cardio. I tend to not go into the weeds because you are then telling people to change things each day and most people are creatures of habit. I have found the feedback has been a bit about my pay grade. I don't really care that much. As you said, as long as your weight's stable, then maybe you don't need to go into the weeds that much. Yeah. My other point to those people when they are in that fat loss phase is that...

56:10
want to feel good in your workouts actually. You don't want to struggle and suffer when you're already in this, you're focused on changing your food to improve your body composition. Like you don't get additional gains from doing it in a fasted state. And if anything, it's going to likely reduce your overall metabolic output. You may burn less calories.

56:31
And then you feel crap for the rest of the day. So that's the other thing I thought about. Let's think, what are we trying to do? And I've worked with several world champions in the physique, world who are females, who when we are getting to the pointy end and they're now down at around five kilograms of total body fat. So that's so lean that you can see the pancreas producing insulin now. It is super lean. Now, we always fuel the training session.

57:00
And in that week, we might train for the girls, it's lower body dominant, obviously. They might train glutes Monday, Wednesday, Friday, and the volumes are prodigious because they're really at the pointy end. And we are fueling, wrapping that session with nutrition to get the most out of it. If they turn up on fumes, you're not going to recruit fast-twitch fibers. This is back to the Henneman principle, is that if you want fast-twitch fiber recruitment to hypertrophy.

57:30
then you need to go in in a high energy status. So how do we balance that by having to be weekly in low energy, where that's where we energy cycle? You don't train the same way every day, nor does the same training session have the same goal. So we have that red light, green light system based on what they're doing. Yeah, and to your point, this is where you do get into the weeds, for those people who have clear specific goals, whereas the general population who are just,

57:58
rocking it up to the gym at 6am. So this is related to what you're saying, I think, is that if you are training females and they rock on up fasted, they train all right, they feel all right, the hormones are fine, are you just going to go, that's fine? Absolutely. Because it's the pre-meal which was the dinner before. So if you're... A lot of people train fasted.

58:24
and this idea that women shouldn't train fasted, I think, well, hang on, I've trained fasted females for 30 years. I've never seen an issue in performance, in DEXA scans, in blood work, in CGMs, you name it, I just don't see it. So where is this scare mongering coming from? And then you look at the literature and there are these different peptides or different hormones that change with sensitivity to glucose control when glucose goes down. It's like, right, evolution worked this out long ago.

58:52
You just need enough time to adapt to it. You cannot use a 24-hour study where you exercise somebody in the morning and their glucose levels drop and then measure a peptide and then impute that that's going to do something to your fertility or it's going to do something to your bone. And I think this is a really nice point because in our world, we would use high and low carb approaches depending on the genotype. We've talked about me offline, how I'm not good.

59:18
despite exercising as much as I do, I'm not good at handling carbs, so I go lower carbs. But if we're dealing with someone else who does handle carbs well, you will use a different approach. Now there's data that has come out to show that an acute low carb availability can change bone turnover. But everyone in sports nutrition knows you can't do this acutely. You need long-term adaptation to that style of diet. Otherwise,

59:46
we would see so many women with bone density problems who were on lower carb or ketogenic diets, and we don't see that. And that's why we need scientists to say, well, hang on, there's a problem with that study before you start telling females to never train in the fasted state. Because if that works for you, and then suddenly you're scared into not doing it, and you're force feeding yourself at five in the morning, that doesn't make sense as well. So it really does, I just scratch my head.

01:00:15
that there are people who have got voices and people listen to them, who make claims based on mechanistic studies with no training outcomes and scare women off doing something. We want women to exercise. No barriers to that. They exercise first thing in the morning and they're scared off that and have to slam down a banana because they're scared. That's why we have a liver. That's why we have muscles and that's why we need an adaptational period. Yeah, nice one. And for what it's worth, I've recently been looking at

01:00:45
some stuff online and low carbohydrate availability is often conflated with low energy availability. Yes, correct. And even if you look at studies around low carbohydrate availability, they are quoting or referencing low energy availability studies. So just because something is maybe written in the literature or you see it linked in a blog online does not necessarily mean that it's being...

01:01:13
referenced as is in fact correct. That's right. There is a really long history of low carb research with folks like Jeff Volek and others who have looked at kind of almost every conceivable configuration of a well constructed low carb or ketogenic diet. There is also, and I know these people, super nice people, great researchers.

01:01:40
who are doing acute low carb availability and low energy studies that are then reporting on these acute markers. And it really is scaring many people off, manipulating carbs or manipulating energy availability based on this acute data. And again, I think it takes voices who are in the coaching world who can read science to say, this is why they did this study. And this is the only thing we can take from it. This does not mean you can't try.

01:02:08
X, Y, and Z, because there are great voices. I think Dan Plews is one of the best voices in this field saying, we need an adaptation period. And one week, yes, you're going to see fat oxidation change significantly. Yes, the weight training world is very underrepresented in this, especially the muscle world. Jeff Volek has done great work, but a lot of people really are not aware of his literature at all. No, I know. Yeah, I completely agree. And for what it's worth, and this is an interesting point.

01:02:37
is that some researchers, and James Morton is one of them, are now questioning the low energy availability data that we think we understand. And he really pointed out something that's quite obvious, actually, is that there's so much underreporting that goes on. And in their estimation, once you account for that underreporting, many of the issues that we feel that have been equated to low energy availability,

01:03:04
may not be due to the energy intake, but may instead be due to stress or training stress or life stress and stuff like that. Because I've had this conversation with a friend of mine who's a dietician in this field and she's been practicing for longer than we have. She's like, I just don't see what they're saying out there. Yeah.

01:03:33
at the very top end of the sport. And I think they're really nice ideas where they think, well, let's try and ramp up fat metabolism this way and let's do prolonged water only rides. And I think people like Brad Wiggins and Garrett Thomas, Chris Froome, they all have reported, yeah, we'd go for seven hours on a coffee and these kinds of things. I have been able to collect blood on people who've done these kinds of approaches and they had unmeasurable testosterone.

01:04:02
upon getting back from these rights. That was zero. Zero. So you are hypo go natal. You have shut off your testosterone production by training like this. And I love coaches who think outside the box and let's try stuff. Great. And let's measure some potentially off-target effects, give it enough time to adapt and see is it doing what we want to do based on mechanism. That comes back to mechanism. There's the difference between something acute term with

01:04:30
versus actually its application in the real world. Now tell me Tony, I'm super interested. And I know that we have to wrap it up, but like when you do a test like that and you see this unmeasurable testosterone, are you then in a position to do a test in 12 hours to see, does this shift back up again? Like what's the story? Yeah, we can. We can do it as often as we want. And yeah, it goes back up, but not to the...

01:04:58
The endurance world, who also play around with fasting, I think is a very dangerous combination. They're usually hypogonadal already. And when we measure resting metabolic rate with indirect calorimetry on the same day, in the same hour that we've done a DEXA scan, we are always seeing metabolic adaptation. So when you read studies that metabolic adaptation is an artifact and doesn't happen, it's like, I see it. I see it all the time.

01:05:26
So for those who do a lot of exercise in the fastest state and you measure RMR, the record that I had was 430-something under what the DEXA said it should have been using a Cunningham equation looking at fat-free mass. That's consistent with Kevin Hall's data. Yeah. And then I'm not sure if you... I mean, I'm sure you are aware of

01:05:55
Her premise is, well, there is metabolic adaptation, but you just need a bit of time. You just need a bit of time for that energy availability to come back online and then RMR is corrected. Is that what you see? Nope, absolutely not. And she is the work that I reference in that I think her paper was, this is an artifact. It's not done long enough. So in the world that I live in, where people die for months on end.

01:06:24
That's where we see it and it persists. So we see it persisting later. Now her argument was, well with Kevin Hall, when they retested them, they all tried to diet again to get themselves back into shape, knowing they were gonna be retested. Like, okay, but I work in the physique world where it's not uncommon to subside in massive low energy availability for months on end. And in many of the case studies that have come out, there's a number now of good case studies and Eric Helms has done this stuff.

01:06:54
that yes, this is what happens. And then once they refeed, then it goes back to normal. I've seen both the people who are regular water fastest, and those people who have done a more renegade approach to dieting, that when you RMR them back in a build phase, they're still running low. And we can measure T3 and confirm that. Yeah. So in your experience, Tony, then how long does it take? And this will be that we're going to have to...

01:07:23
potentially, but this conversation, maybe move it to another podcast. I'm super interested. But just very briefly, how long does it take for your physique athletes to move out of that low energy availability state? Yeah. If I have been in control, we have no problems. So no radars symptoms, no loss of menstrual cycle. Also clean, which is something that the vast majority

01:07:48
of females would take Anova or Ostrin, so either anabolic steroid or a selective antigen receptor modulator. It is rife. And now that does different things, but I only work with clean people and they have to promise they clean every blood test and to make sure that that's the case. So you're in natural bodybuilding. I'm only natural. I'm only natural. And some of the physiques that you will see, they've been accused...

01:08:12
of being on drugs because the physics are so good, but we've got 10 years of blood work where you can detect changes. So there's absolutely sure that they're clean. Yeah. Now we've never seen red S because I've always used the fuel according to the task approach. So we go in and out of energy availability, but we've got them down to five and six kilograms of total body fat at competition time. And

01:08:38
How long does it take to get them back up again? Well, we have a step, we use a different approach and I've used different approaches. We just don't know. But yes, T3 runs a little bit low when we get them at competition time. But by typically a month later, everything is back to normal. Interesting, so interesting. And if you're okay with this, Tony, I'd love to get you back on and talk more specifically about Physique and what you do there. Because we do have to.

01:09:06
leave it here, but I just, I find it super fascinating actually. So unsurprisingly, because this is the stuff I love to think about. It's a very fascinating world because everything is devoted to that. Now, athletes, of course, they're devoted, but this is a very, whether for good or for bad, it is a completely black hole of absorption where everything is controlled from sleep to training to nutrition to every macronutrient. They weigh everything.

01:09:35
Yes. And measure our training output. So we have a really good audience. So when you get those people and you dex them and blood test them and even RMR them, you've got a really good audience. 100%. And for what it's worth, the fact, you know, I think physique is, you can learn a lot from physique sport because it's the extreme of the human experience really when it comes to. If only cyclists would understand or endurance athletes is that

01:10:05
We have a group of people who really know how to manipulate body fat. Yeah. They've mastered this. Yeah. Yes. You guys, you've done other things, but you're not good at losing body fat. You're right on fumes for hours and no physique person is doing that. So yes, this is what I find is very siloed. The people don't speak. I love cross-disciplinary work. So I'm reading everything from mechanistic stuff in labs to what endurance athletes do to what the...

01:10:34
the strength, power, muscle, and try and find a common ground that can work depending what the goal is. Nah, awesome, Tony. So can you let people know where they can find you on the socials and on the internet? Sure. Most of the coaching things that I do with a little bit of information on things I find interesting in the science world is on Instagram, and it's my name, Tony Bataji. I have a website, Tony Bataji.

01:11:01
And Twitter, I'm not active. I actually have a fake Twitter account, which I've followed you for years on, and then we realized we actually weren't following each other. So yeah, I'm gonna put Tony Batagia on Twitter as well, but I just put up studies that I think, hey, I just read that this morning, there you go. Nice one, that's what I do too. I love it, Tony. Hey, thank you so much for your time, and we will organize it next episode. Looking forward to it, thanks for having me.

01:11:38
Alrighty, hopefully you enjoyed a lot of what Tony had to share and as I said at the outset, he provides such a wealth of information out there on social media. I learn things from his feed almost every time I go into it. So I highly recommend that you give Tony a follow. Next week on the podcast, I have the honour of speaking to Dr Krista Varaday.

01:12:03
about intermittent fasting and some myths and misconceptions and she is one of the pioneering researchers in this space. Until then though you can catch me over on Instagram, threads and Twitter @mikkiwilliden, Facebook @mikkiwillidenNutrition or head to my website mikkiwilliden.com and book a one on one call with me. All right team you have a great week see you later.