Energy Pathways- Fat vs Sugar

I know I shouldn't type so much in one blog, but it is so hard to get these points and philosophies across without justifying them. It's your journey and I want this to be a trusted resource ...
SO please read all the way through and not on your phone while you are driving! Take the time to read and understand it so that you can apply it!
I cannot begin to explain the controversy that rests around fat burning vs. sugar burning. It has caused SO MUCH CONFUSION for EVERYONE!!! Even most trainers are confused about it at this point. So I will revert back to what a mentor of mine and Exercise Physiology Professor told me... Go by the latest research from Tier 1 research journals. DO NOT BELIEVE MAGAZINES!!! they are meant to sell the latest and greatest fads ... Sure there is some truth to some of the articles, but it is marketing at it's finest and written mostly by individuals that do not truly understand the science of the human body and go by what either another article said or what a company says about it own products which can be a little biased.

So I'm sorry to break it down this way again, but it's the easiest way to understand. I will try my best to make Exercise Physiology easy to understand.
First, you have to remember that only God can create energy. Right? Good!
On earth, all it can do is change forms.
In our body, how we fuel ourselves directly impacts what fuel we use for energy in any form...
Here are the FACTS!
We ALL have the same 'Energy systems' or pathways if you will.
First, you have to remember that only God can create energy. Right? Good!
On earth, all it can do is change forms.
As it relates to training, energy 'production' is both time and intensity related (technically it is related to nutrition also, but I'm not going to open that Pandora's box just yet). If you run/sprint as hard as you can, you can only do so for a very short period of time before you collapse, throw up, pass out, etc... On the other hand, walking or slow jogging allows you to go as long as you want (within reason). Why is that? These pathways, like the repetition continuum, do not switch on and off when one is exhausted. They are all always running at the same time, but one is emphasized over the other at certain times and is directly influenced by time and intensity.

So, this is what happens in energy production: 

YEEEAAA about that... right? My exercise phys. professor told us unless we are scientists we don't need to memorize the Kreb Cycle. I agree... look at how big those words are!
How many fat burner commercials explain their products and how they effect us on the cellular level? This diagram is probably top 5 if not the most important process that happens in the body! YOU CANNOT ARGUE WITH THE KREB CYCLE..

So here is a summary of what I believe is true about the anaerobic threshold and 'fat burning' vs. sugar burning!

The term 'Threshold' gives the connotation that it is a specific point, a magical point where your body shifts from aerobic to anaerobic production. But this isn't the case and I will try to explain. First, a little background on Anaerobic Threshold, or as it's also called, Lactate Threshold by some. There are two main avenues the body has to produce energy. One is the aerobic pathway where fat and sugar are broken down into ATPs which fuel the muscles. Then there is the anaerobic system which produces ATP from sugar in the absence of oxygen. Without oxygen, sugar is incompletely burned and lactic acid is left as the end product. This creates an acidic condition in the body that interferes with further exercise. (There is a third energy system, the Creatine Phosphate (CP) system at the upper end of the anaerobic pathway, which produces energy for very short periods but doesn't contribute a lot to overall endurance swimming, running, or cycling compared to the other two.)

Let's not think of your energy systems as having an on/off switch like a light switch. Instead think of them as having a dimmer switch. They are all on but at different levels and increase on a continuum. 

Conventional thinking is that aerobic energy production occurs during low and moderate exercise but when we pass the anaerobic threshold, we switch over to anaerobic energy production. This is not necessarily correct. 
Both aerobic and anaerobic energy production are occurring at all times in the body. 
          -At low intensity activity, aerobic energy production predominates and anaerobic production occurs at a very low level, low enough that the resulting lactic acid is easily removed and processed.      
          -As activity level increases, your aerobic energy production continues but your anaerobic system increases its contribution to energy production. 
          -Your anaerobic system doesn't suddenly kick in once you've reached some discrete threshold. It's on all the time. 
          -As you exercise harder, it's contribution to energy production increases and along with it lactic acid. 
          -As your intensity increases, your production of lactic acid outpaces your body's ability to remove it and you will eventually have to ease off and slow down.
Commonly, the anaerobic threshold is defined as the rate of maximum exertion you can maintain for one hour. Above this pace and you will build up acidity at a rate which will force you to slow down. 

Here is an example:
The rate of maximum effort is dependent on time. You can run faster for 1 minute than you can for 5 minutes, faster for 15 minutes than you can for 30, and faster for 30 minutes than you can for 60. This is because you can operate at and tolerate a higher level of oxygen debt and lactic acid for short periods of time. If you do a 15 minute time trial, you will be doing this at a more anaerobic level than if you do a 30 minute time trial.
If we redefined the anaerobic threshold as the maximum level you can work for 15 minutes instead of one hour, you would have a higher threshold value. At your hardest, fastest efforts, such as in sprints, you will be using your anaerobic system at it's maximum level. You are also using your CP system and you are still depending on the aerobic system as well because you are still bringing oxygen into your body, just not as fast as you need it to continue at that intensity.

SOOOO.... What the heck does all this mean?
Basically, when you walk, you are breathing in oxygen... It is then delivered to your cells and you expel carbon dioxide. So all that oxygen is being delivered to the cells and they have plenty for the amount of energy your are demanding.
When you are breathless, you are breathing in oxygen and most of that oxygen is coming right back out. What happens when you don't have enough oxygen? You do not pass go and you do not collect 200 dollars, you are forced to stop or slow down and recover. You cannot train yourself to be able to hold 'anaerobic intensities' longer than the amount of fuel your body has for them which has been shown to be pretty standard... What you CAN do is train your body to be more metabolically efficient, teaching your body to use the "aerobic" energy system predominantly at higher intensities.
THAT IS WHAT ENDURANCE TRAINING IS ALL ABOUT...STAYING POWERFUL!!!

Remember, you cannot stay powerful without a strong aerobic foundation.

I hope this helps! I will elaborate on how to train the energy systems later on.

Coach Lee

Know Thyself

Finding the problem:

People are GREAT at coming up with solutions. The issue is that we can't always identify the problem! Often times I catch myself thinking I am in better shape than the reality of the situation. So I do certain types of workouts that sometimes end up hurting more than helping. If I don't overwork myself, I will make up my own rules and skip steps... Here is a pictoral example:

So just because you found A solution, it does not mean you have identified the problem!

Anyone ever experience something like that? So I went ahead and made an equation that I believe works!

(Please tell me if you have seen this anywhere so I can give credit if it belongs to someone else)

(Scientific Knowledge - Subjective Feedback) + Practical Application = Desired Adaptation

God gave us science for many reasons. In this case, understanding the human body, what it is capable of and how to maximize performance. Do you even realize the unbelievable machines that we are? Do you know what you are physically capable of? There are so many instances where people achieve 'the next level' of human adaptation. It occurs every year with athletics. How much longer can we continue to break world records? Seriously... Michael Phelps? Is there going to be someone better than that guy?

So to briefly break down this equation:

Scientific Knowledge:

This is not the time to guess. If you go by 'perceived exertion' it is very likely that you will lie to yourself and not necessarily on purpose. It's the path of least resistance. Ever heard of it? We seek it mostly involuntarily to some degree every day of our lives. Instead, it's time to learn a little about what is going on inside of your body.
Knowing yourself requires testing yourself. To make these tests a little more scientific in nature, make them reliable/repeatable and valid! If you do not assess, you do not know where to start and where you can really expect to finish.

I'm a huge fan of assessments! It's what I do for a living. In my experience, most people have tons of great goals. However, they have no clue where they are emotionally, physically or psychologically in relation to their goal or how to actually get there... We tend to live in our athletic past. It's is important to know exactly where you are right now in your life and the circumstances surrounding you presently. Not 10+ years ago!

So when gathering knowledge about yourself, be sure to:

1. Make it valid... Measure same time, distance, heart rate in same conditions every time. Metabolic assessments are the way to go in order to take the guess work out of it!
2. Plan for it... Schedule your assessing throughout your training (usually every 4 wks)
3. Have a time budget... Know how much time you can give each week for it.
4. Have a financial budget... Know costs involved to achieving your goal
5. Find your support system... Coach/Team, Spouse, Friend, etc..We all need someone get over it.
6. RECORD IT!! you can get lost if you don't. And you will be amazed when you review it 10 years down the road I promise.

Subjective Feedback:
So in any world of achievement, there are different types of feedback right? Objective and subjective... The reason I choose to subtract the subjective feedback is simply because you have to listen to your body. As scientific as we can be, there still needs to be that subjective input. As you learn your body more, the feedback becomes more clear. You start to know what muscles are hurting and why. Sometimes a day off is better than "pushing through the pain". When certain parts of your body hurt for certain or uncertain reasons it may be best to break protocol. We can never truly predict with 100% accuracy what an athlete is capable of. This wonderful thing called adrenaline kicks in at some point and can change outcomes from time to time. Also, there is an emotional side to training and racing. Tons of overtraining happens when there is an emotional or psychological stress added to variable training intensities. So please..... Take yourself into account!

Practical Application:
What the heck is practical? I don think we use this too much anymore. Most of the time we (especially adults) over think things to the point where it is no longer simple enough to just go do. Let's take swimming for example... Every adult I take to the water to train has some difficulty understanding the word "relax". I believe Bruce Lee said this "the more relaxed you are, the more force you can produce". What would seem the most simple piece of this whole thing, being able to relax, becomes this analysis paralysis type pattern with the question "how do I relax?" well... Good luck with that.
The other part of practical application is training load. If you are in your first couple years of racing, be careful what you do to yourself. We are gluttons for punishment (remember the definition of endurance) therefore, we instinctively do more than we should sometimes. Mainly because in the endurance world there is always something to improve. So instead of trying to fix everything at the same time, we might want to think in terms of how long am I going to be participating in this game? And how do I build the right kind of foundation for both the level that I am at as well as the level I want to be? It's called Progressive Overload... Look it up.

Desired Adaptation: (just for the record... I don't believe we came from monkeys)
I think 'adaptation' is one of my favorite words. It has such a profound meaning in life and the majority of people don't really understand how to control it. Adaptation occurs whether we want it to or not, and is directly influenced by what we do across all areas of life. It does not discriminate. If you place any stress on the body it will adapt. Good or bad. We can teach ourselves to be very efficient at being inefficient if that makes sense. I often use my first car as an example. I had a jeep wrangler for about 9 yrs. Sadly, I had to trade it in because it was a hot mess and because of how I treated it. Sometimes I would race it off the starting line at red lights and the race lasted about 3.2 seconds. And let me tell you, a 2.5L 4cylinder engine on a jeep does not need to be doing such things. When I decided to trade it in it had about 186,000 miles on it. I figure about 50,000 miles was spent in mud or something like that which means that I put a ton of miles on my engine going nowhere. Too often we do this to our bodies and then expect the engine to last and perform at high levels.
When we place the wrong stress on our body it still adapts and makes it feel normal. I have this thing that I say to ALL my clients, "if it feels stupid, you are probably doing it right." So many of us have postural distortions that NEED to be fixed before we place high stress on those areas of our body. Before we try to set time standards as goals we really need to make a large effort to protect our joints over time. Your body will appreciate much more than putting high volume on it's engine when it's not firing on all cylinders. Besides, we are not the one's getting paid for our desired race outcomes. We have a 'normal' job to go to and a family to take care of right?

Coach Lee

Endurance...defined... a few times

Endurance training is a process.... Think of the word itself.... ENDURANCE. We don't 'play' endurance. We 'build' it! So you have to both respect yourself and trust the process. If you don't, you just won't make it...

So I will line out what I think is easiest to hardest to understand about endurance. As you read through this, think about where your knowledge starts and stops about what endurance actually is from all angles and what it's going to take to build yours. You might already know it all which is great!

So what does it mean? Here are some definitions that I prefer:

Endurance: also called Sufferance, Stamina, Resilience, or Durability

Endurance: the ability to sustain a prolonged stressful effort or activity

Endurance: The capacity of something to last or to withstand wear and tear.

And I especially like this great synonym: Staying Power!

It says: "Continuous Effort - not strength or intelligence - is the key to unlocking our potential"

You can really call it whatever you want (since we live in America and can make up whatever reality we can possibly dream of, call it what we want and then demand others to view it the same way), but the simple fact is that it takes time for everyone. Nothing really frustrates me more than people who 'commit' to something and don't follow through with it. This happens so much when people, for example, enter a marathon or an Ironman event they have not prepared for or don't even have enough time to prepare for. It does so much more damage to the body and causes injury and/or burnout. The 2 major threats to athletics and/or health. If somebody has a heart attack at a marathon, the media says, 'happened while running, therefore running must be bad for us'. Yes it is that skewed but we already knew that right?

Someone once told me that years seem to go by faster as we age because each year becomes a smaller percentage of time we have been alive. My son (who has no real concept of time) thinks that a year takes forever. I on the other hand, feel my life speeding by at a ridiculous pace trying to keep up. And I have heard plenty of people who have been around the block a few times (you know who you are) say " where the crap did the last 20 years go?"

Building Endurance follows a similar pattern.

In the beginning... Those short runs, rides or swims seem LOOONG! It does not hurt in a good way just yet, you can't breathe, and you wonder why you contemplated such a thing... And, just like the young age of a child, you get bored and may be ready to move on to the next thing shortly after you have begun. Some people quit, drop out, don't finish, blah, blah. Call it what you want... I call it WEAK!

Just as we teach children patience and persistence(if there is such a thing), so should we remember those values ourselves when pursuing such enduring events. Stick with it for more than a year or two and you will see what amazing things can happen to your mind and body.What once was hard, is no longer as hard. Place a stimulus and watch the adaptation happen...OWN YOUR BODY!

If you just so happen to persist in this endurance game, this crazy phenomenon called ADAPTATION occurs. You can call it progress! ( I'll get into progression some other time). And years of meaningful and mostly healthy behaviors go by and you wake up one day with too many fricken dryfit t-shirts, hats, socks and water bottles than you know what to do with and you don't want to throw them away since you have such fond and painful memories attached to each. 

Right?

We all build 'endurance' or 'staying power'. But what type of endurance? How powerful can you stay and for how long? It's all measurable nowadays.
I'm pretty sure it takes quite some time to 'BUILD' endurance. Sure, you can go run a marathon in 6-8 months, but go talk to someone who has been "endurance training" for 20+ years. Their perception of a race is a little different. Their cause has either changed or solidified. Their body looks a little different than other's their age. Their lifestyle includes running as a weekly volume. Now go talk to someone who has been doing the same for 1-5 years. you will hear a completely different understanding of endurance.
One of the coolest aspects of the Endurance world is that it does not discriminate. All ages, shapes, sizes and abilities seem to come together to test their endurance against each other. And everyone gets to 'play'!

So what is the objective of endurance training then?

The objective of endurance training is to develop the energy production systems to meet the demands of the event.

(each distance has it's own energy requirements and is specific to each individual)
Some of you may be asking, "what the crap is an energy production system and how can I get me one of those"?
Well guess what.... We all have energy production systems built in and ready to go. I would say that one of the primary causes for failure in the endurance realm is a lack of understanding the Energy Systems of the body and how to train them. If you want me to elaborate on the energy systems I will some other time...

Next is the question... What types of endurance are there?

• Aerobic Endurance
• Anaerobic Endurance
• Strength Endurance
• Speed Endurance

Which type of endurance do you have or lack?

I do have to say that ALL types of endurance must have a SOLID aerobic foundation to fully maximize the situation...

I am not going to break down each one of these right now. Just know that whenever you leave out an entire component to anything, you will not reach your potential! So many of us 'just go run' or 'just go swim or ride'. There are so many different variables in a race to think about and fine tune... If you know me, I'm sure you have heard me say that you should not mindlessly train. ALWAYS be mindful when you exercise. Mainly to have a purpose for what you are doing to yourself that day. It all goes back to that word. SPECIFICITY...Work on what YOU need to work on. If you have are not as good at one of the sports of a triathlon... You should probably spend a little more time doing it. If for no other reason than to be more efficient.

I guess my main point here is to always continue. If you decide to take on endurance. Do so as a lifestyle improvement. Whether it be for better health, weight loss, recreation, accomplishment, to win or whatever hole it fills in your life... Continue... never give up or hold back.... The only way you can be sure not to win is to quit!!!

Coach Lee

When in Rome

'Rome was not built in a day' is such a cliche saying. But it is so relevant in this instant gratification world we live in.

As adults, we fail to take the time necessary to achieve the athletic potential we are capable of which usually results in injury and unmet goals. Just as it took quite a bit of time, effort and motivation to build the magnificent city of Rome, it takes so much motivation, time and effort to build an endurance machine out of the human body.
Just imagine if they tried to build Rome in one or two years...
Would it be possible?
How many shortcuts would have to be taken for that to happen?
And how quickly would it have fallen because of the lack of structural integrity?

Which one do you think has more structural integrity??

(I promise I will get to the point soon)
The simple fact is that you MUST lay the foundation before you build.
Now let's apply this to the body. Your heart... Important? Yes! The most important muscle in the body is the heart. Studies show that an individual who has not "properly" trained for a high volume race, such as a marathon, and decides to race anyway does more damage to the heart than a fricken heart attack.

Makes a lot of sense right? It's kind of like when they tell you not to take a brand new car immediately on a road trip because it may cause damage to the brand new engine. Brand new anything should not be over stressed. It needs to be "broken in" to some degree. So if you are new to fitness or endurance training or whatever, be careful when setting your goals. Know where you are physically before you take on something physical. (yea)

So this is why I like to categorize or compartmentalize, if you will, different levels of athletes. It helps to identify where and how to start building.
I believe we all have an inner athlete of some sort. The important part is knowing what kind of athlete you are. And, don't be offended, knowing your role as such.

So to finally come to my 1st main point. I identify three primary types of athletes. (please tell me if you disagree).
1) The Finisher
2) The Competitor
3) The Elite/Pro
These categories are kind of like a measuring stick. There are levels inside each category and I will elaborate more on each one in later posts. Which category are you in?

One of the most important quotes (to me) is "know thyself". The more you truly know who you are and what your potential is, the more you can bring this little word/concept called SPECIFICITY into your training...and life for that matter.

There are many principles of training, but specificity is at the center. We are not created equal in the endurance world. Each athlete requires specific manipulations to their training plan because of this little thing called life. Without specificity, what separates good from great? Talent or hard work? Both require specificity. The cool thing is that everyone starts with a foundation. How strong is yours?

Before they built one of the most amazing, longest standing cities in the world, they had a flat (maybe hilly) piece of dirt to build a foundation on. So the next time you are in Rome take a look at the ground. That's where the journey begins. Then look up and see what amazing potential someone saw on that piece of land and just imagine how much planning, commitment, time and hard work went into the process.

In conclusion and 2nd main point:
It's your body... You only get one... See the potential.. Make the plan...Build your foundation... Work hard.... And TRUST THE PROCESS!!!

Coach Lee

Intro to my blog

So I've been thinking about creating an endurance blog for a long time now. If any of you are like me, life is going by at an increasingly speedy pace, and time is something that can be limited, taken for granted, and lost to nonsense.
This blog is about endurance training in general. The ins and outs of every level athlete (I will explain my breakdown of an athlete in the next post). It is important to understand how to implement an endurance based lifestyle into a controlled yet chaotic reality. One of the largest threats to the endurance world is burn out. Doing too much...too fast.
I'm passionate about the progress people make in their journey towards endurance excellence. I am a very opinionated and scientifically minded person. I do not always practice what I preach because I firmly believe that no matter how scientific we can be, individual subjectivity is required to make progress toward any endurance related goal. Everyone's journey is different and I hope this blog will help guide each of you through your own journey.
Please ask as many questions as possible. I do believe there are such things as stupid questions. However, if you don't know the answer, you probably shouldn't guess.
Please debate... There is nothing better than a good debate as long as you are respectful of me and other readers

Coach lee