Warrior Fitness Q & A: Is Ketosis Ok for Endurance Athletes and What About Vitamins?

Chris Albert 00:00:00 (link to this point)

This is Chris Albert, and I'm here to remind you of one thing. Someday, you're going to die. Now that's not some morbid statement or scary idea. It's solid fact. Your time here on this earth is limited.

You need to be reminded of this as much as possible for one simple reason, to live your best life while you can. This is the Warrior Soul Podcast.

What's going on, ladies and gentlemen? Welcome to another edition of Warrior Soul Q and A. Now, we have three types of episodes we do here on the Warrior Soul Podcast. Every Monday we post an interview, alright, and this is an interview with somebody, some sort of expert that knows something or has written about something or has helped others with something, a piece of information, you know, a little tidbit that could help you guys to make your lives better. And this past week, we published an episode with mister Stephen Mansfield.

You guys should definitely check that out. He is the author of Mansfield's Book of Manly Men, and he came on to talk about how veterans can move into their civilian lives by finding new missions and finding a new band of brothers. And that's something he talks about in Mansfield's book of manly men, something so important for all of us is to have a band of brothers, to have people in our lives who are going to challenge us, who are going to work to make us better, and who are going to be there for us when we fall down and we fail. And then this past Friday, the episode before that, we did a Warrior Notes podcast, on Fridays that's what we do, we talk about, we have an in-depth discussion about a specific subject. This past Friday we talked about overcoming failure, that's one of the most important things you could know, One of the most important things you could know because inevitably in this life, you are going after something that is worth going after, at some point you're gonna fail at something.

At some point you're gonna break down. And you know, the difference between those who are successful and those who just give up and fucking move off and don't pursue their goals is that those who are successful are able to come back from failures and they're able to come back stronger because every time a failure happens, they learn lessons from it. And you have to get to learn to love to fail because every time you fail there's a lesson in it for you. So today we're doing Q and A, and this is going be a particularly fitness oriented Q and A, but I want to tell you guys, listen, we're always looking for great questions up here. I know that there's some of you out there who are struggling with something, some sort of thing that you need some insight on, and you know what, I don't know everything in the world, I don't, but I can at least help you by putting you in touch with the resources that you need.

So if you've got a question that you want answered here on the Warrior Soul Podcast, just send it to us over at info@warriorsoulapparel.com or you can get on to our private Facebook group and this is where a lot of us hang out, right, and when you join the private Facebook group, the Warrior Soul Fitness Academy, this group is dedicated to helping you to live your best life through fitness and we put out some of our best information about health, about fitness, about nutrition up there and when you sign up, you get a free fourteen day workout, you get a testosterone optimization guide and you get in touch with a community of like minded individuals, other veterans, other everyday people who might never have served, but who are working to be the best versions of themselves. And those are the type of people you want to be around. Those are the people you wanna be around because they're gonna challenge you, they're gonna push you to be your best and you don't wanna be around a bunch of naysayers or a bunch of yes men who are just saying, hey dude, you're doing great.

You want to be around people who are going to push you to become better and that's what this podcast is about. So today I got a couple of questions up there and like I said, these are about fitness and the first one was this. It's from, his name's Abracadabra Ali. Abracadabra Ali, that's a pretty cool name. Can an endurance athlete thrive on a keto type diet?

Now, yes, they absolutely can, and for those of you who've been following me for a while, you know that I practice a ketogenic diet. And I have to say that I caught a lot of flack for it, and I talk a lot about ketosis, I talk a lot about the ketogenic diet, I've caught a lot of flack from it, from the veteran community. And it's particularly guys who think that doing ketogenic diet, doing a lot of hard, difficult shit is impossible. And here's what I can tell you from my experience, and I'll get into the science part of this, but I think it's important that you know a little bit about my experience with the keto diet, because you know, I served in the infantry when I was in the Marine Corps, and I have to say that one of my biggest problems as an infantryman in my, you know, late teens, early twenties, was that I got a lot of freaking energy lapses. Right?

So what does that mean? There were times when I had so little energy, I could hardly stay awake. And you know, you privates, p f c's, you lance corporals, you know what I'm talking about, because you're up on watch, you're not getting a whole lot of sleep, and you know, you're trying to get through your day, you know, it could be, it could be part of your time, a lot of your time when you're out in the field is actually just sitting around. You're trying to stay awake, stay awake through hip pocket classes, you're trying to stay awake through training, you're trying to get through everything, and then you know, you just feel like you got lead weights attached to the tops of your eyes. So whenever you get into classroom time or anything like that, you feel like falling asleep.

A lot of times even when you're doing ranges and stuff like that, you're sitting around and then you gotta go do the range. There's a lot of times where where my legs just felt like they were loaded with bricks. And I gotta say that, you know, today, it's twenty years later, I'm about to be 40 next year, and I'm able to get through a lot more shit. Granted, I'm not going out in the field right now. Granted, you know, in some ways my life is a lot easier, but I do a lot of physical shit.

I'm running, I'm lifting weights, I'm going to jiu-jitsu three times a week, and sometimes I'm doing all three in the same day, along with doing all the work that I gotta get done. So the ketogenic diet has helped me in numerous ways. It's helped me, of course, with my ulcerative colitis. I have an autoimmune disease called ulcerative colitis that almost wrecked my life, almost wrecked my career as trainer, almost killed me a couple of times. And the ketogenic diet definitely helped me out with that.

But the biggest thing of all, is it helps me with my mental energy, right? Because, you know, the worst thing that happens, I think to people is that, you know, they go, they eat something in the middle of the day, their brains start shutting down. The reason why that happens is because you get a massive insulin spike, and then when you get a massive insulin spike, all that sugar that you send in your bloodstream, insulin comes in and it shuttles that stuff out, right? And so immediately after you get that spike, you get a drop in blood sugar and it gets really hard to keep your brain in check when it's just running on glucose. With ketosis, you're simply running on ketones, right, you're simply adapting your body into fat adaptation, that means that your body's burning ketones rather than glucose and ketones run a lot steadier, right.

Ketones are fatty acids that are derived from the fats that you eat and they're produced by the liver, right, so beta hydroxybutyrate and it takes a lot longer period of time to oxidize fat, right, so it takes nine hours to oxidize fat, so a lot of times one of the big benefits of ketosis, one of the real reasons why it helped us in our evolution as human beings is that it allowed us to move around for long periods of time, to go long distances, just using our own fat stores for fuel. Right? Not having to eat anything because you know, for for thousands of years in in human history, we had to starve in order to survive. Right? We had to move in order to find food when there was none.

We had to have the energy to defend ourselves in those time periods and the mental acuity to fend off attackers, to think, right? And so that's why we have the ability to go into ketosis. So that's the big thing, right? I want you guys to understand this, the reason why I talk about it is because it's helped me so much. And to be honest with you, I wish I were in ketosis, I wish I were doing a keto diet back when I was a young marine.

I think I would have been a lot better marine. I think I would have been a lot better at my job. I think that I wouldn't have had a lot of the health problems that I have now. I think that I wouldn't have gone through a lot of the bouts of depression that I'd gone through, right? Because, simply because, I mean, the keto diet literally has done so much for my brain.

But here's the other aspect of this, again, I promise you I'll answer the question. There's a lot of fucking assholes talking about the ketogenic diet right now. And what I mean, when I'm saying fucking assholes, I'm talking about people who should have no business talking to you about nutrition. No business talking about anything because these people literally have had no nutrition training whatsoever except for the fact that they took a couple of fucking packets of Pruvit and then they signed up for the Pruvit MLM program and now, all of sudden, they're keto experts. Right?

That's not the way it works, ladies and gentlemen. This is the thing, there's real people out there who could benefit from this diet, and there's real people out there who could benefit from ketosis, from being in ketosis, being in the state of ketosis. But we have all these MLM freaking marketing companies, supplement companies trying to get everybody and their mother to take these ketones, and what pisses me off about this is because ketosis could actually help people, right? But a lot of people are doing the ketogenic diet not because they're trying to increase their performance, they're doing the ketogenic diet because they want to lose weight. And if you are fueling yourself with beta hydroxybutyrate, exogenous beta hydroxybutyrate, and I say this as somebody who is currently developing a new beta hydroxybutyrate supplement, if you're telling them to take beta hydroxybutyrate in order to burn fat, you're not only saying some really dumb shit, you're basically sabotaging their progress.

Because what you're doing for them is you're telling them to put lots of easily accessible energy into their bloodstreams. That's not gonna help them to mobilize their own fat stores for fuel. That's one of the reasons why we created the start keto right free course that you could take. If you guys are interested in taking it, it's up at www.startketoright.com. You can do that.

There there there's a lot of information there. Absolutely free. Just put in your email address, you get the free course. So if you guys are interested in that. Now, onto this question.

Is the ketogenic diet viable for performance, for endurance athletes? And this is actually one of the first ways in which the ketogenic diet was applied to nutrition for athletes. Sorry, I'm getting a drink here. And you know, one of the first people to start to apply it was a guy named Phil Maffetone, and Phil Maffetone, I mean he was a chiropractor, he didn't have a nutritional background, but he studied a lot about nutrition. One thing he noticed about athletes, triathletes in particular, was that they were getting a lot of chronic injuries.

They were getting tons and tons of chronic injuries. And so he was noticing like things going on with their feet, their bones, and a lot of the athletes he was working with, they had these swollen, swollen joints. And there was a period back in the 90s with triathletes where they were all dropping like flies, right? They were all dropping like flies from heart attacks. People's hearts were literally exploding in their chests, right?

And one of the things that was going on back then was that the endurance magazines, all they were promoting were these really, really high carb diets, really high carb like I'm talking whole wheat bread, peanut butter, you know, loading up on pasta and things like that, and carbo loading before a race. And so, you know, again, what was happening was all that stuff, all those extra carbs, all that extra sugar that they were getting, that was creating inflammation in their bodies. Inflammation is one of the primary causes of heart disease. It's also one of the big reasons why you get more likely to become injured because particularly with endurance athletics, you're doing a lot of repetitive motion there, so the chance for overuse injury is very great, right? And so if you're not taking care of your inflammatory levels, your joints are gonna get screwed up, you have a greater chance of injury, but in addition to that, all that repetitive stress to your cardiovascular system, that inflammation can build up and that could actually cause heart disease.

And so Phil started creating what's called the Maffetone Method and basically he started loading up his athletes fats and the results were astounding, mean a lot of his athletes, they started getting records, started breaking records that hadn't been broken in years. He took athletes who were absolutely broken down, they thought they were at the end of their careers, and they came back and they started winning races. So, this is something that they actually talk about in a book, it's called Natural Born Heroes. You guys should definitely check that out. It was written by the same guy who wrote Born to Run.

But is what Natural Born Heroes was about, was about how the ancient Greeks were able to do so many crazy feats of strength and so many crazy feats of endurance and they talk about the Maffetone method in there. Great book, I highly recommend the audio book if you guys get a chance to check it out. So there's actually been a lot of scientific study that's actually gone into ketosis for endurance athletes. Now there's butt a ton of studies out there, but one of the biggest studies and I think most important studies that talks about this is a study called the Metabolic Characteristics of Keto Adapted Ultra Endurance Runners And I actually wrote about this and I'll include both that article and the article I wrote about it for Testosterone Nation in the show notes for this episode. But one of the things that they looked at and the reason why this was such an important study was because it's one of the only studies where they actually did a double not a double blind placebo controlled study, but a double study with control variables in it with live human subjects and what they did was they took two groups of ultra endurance runners and triathletes, Half of them consumed a high carbohydrate diet for six months prior to the test, the other half consumed a ketogenic diet, low carb ketogenic diet for six months prior to the test.

And they brought them in and they did two or three different types of trials. There was a VO2 max test, now this is a test where you put a breathing mask on and through electronic calorimetry, they start to determine, you know, your VO2 max and then your max oxidation rates for fats and sugars, right? So there were some interesting things that happened there. Now, the low carb athletes, they had a much higher v o two max in general than the high carb athletes. Right?

Now, but what was really interesting there was because up until this point, everybody thought that you couldn't use a high fat ketogenic diet if you wanted to do intense exercise. But what they found with the VO2 max test was that the low carb athletes were actually oxidizing fats at much higher rates than the high carb athletes. They were oxidizing fats upwards of 72% of their v o two max, I think. And so the this test basically showed that it was b s that you couldn't do high intense exercise if you were on a low carb diet. Right?

These guys were doing it really high intense exercise and they were still oxidizing fat. Right? They didn't have to switch over to glucose. The other funny thing that they found and they they the next trial was a three hour run, and they did muscle biopsies on these athletes. What they found though was that the low carb athletes had just as much glycogen in their systems, or more glycogen in their systems before, during and after the three hour run.

So what does that tell us? It tells us that if you are fat adapted, you are actually much more efficient at burning glycogen than than if you are carb carb adapted, if you're still burning sugar, because you're not using it as much. You're you're you're literally most of the time using your fat stores and then very little amount of the time you're burning glycogen and and it's myth out there that athletes who are low carb athletes don't have glycogen. They actually have it built up in their livers. And you get it because regardless of how much, you know, protein or carbohydrate you eat, you still go through gluconeogenesis.

Your body is going to create glucose to fuel the liver because that's your emergency your emergency energy supply. So these guys actually still had a good amount of glycogen built up. But you know, one of the things I covered in the article I wrote about this was that, and this goes back to my tirade before about those people who are talking about the ketogenic diet who have no idea about what they're talking about. And this is because a lot of these people are recommending that even if you're an athlete, you have to stay under 50 grams of carbs a day. Now this is true during the adaptation phase, but if you actually look at Volek's study, the average carbohydrate intake for the low carb athletes was 82 grams of carbohydrates a day.

If you actually take the time, go beyond the abstract, you actually read the study, they were consuming an average of 82 grams of carbs a day, and most people out there who are quote unquote ketosis experts, they're gonna sit there and tell you that athletes couldn't do that and remain in ketosis. But if you actually look at the scientific studies, yeah, they were able to do that. They were also consuming an average of, I think it was one gram of protein per pound of body weight per day, which is also higher amounts of protein than a lot of these quote unquote keto experts would tell you. They were consuming a lot of fat, but my recommendations for you guys, if you are looking to utilize the ketogenic diet to increase your athletic performance, to help you with endurance races, is number one, don't just jump into ketosis or think you're going to jump into a ketogenic diet a few weeks before a race and then all of a sudden you're going do the race a few weeks later and you're going to be fine. It takes your body a good amount of time to adapt.

The longer you adapt, the longer you allow your body to adapt to burning ketones for fuel, the better it's gonna get at it. Right, I hear about people, oh it's three weeks before a race, I'm going to put myself into ketosis right now, and that's just not something I would do if you've got an athletic event coming up. You should be doing this in your off season, you should be going through the keto adaptation phase and then keeping yourself on a good low carb, high fat diet and staying on there for a little bit before you decide to compete with it, alright. You know, the other aspect of this is that I would say, you know, beware of the shortcuts that are out there, because a lot of these ketone companies, and I'm friends with some of them, and I think that exogenous ketones could be one of the best things ever to happen in nutrition, which is why I'm working on a ketone product right now. But here's the thing guys, if you keep making yourself dependent on these exogenous ketones and using them all the time, you're not gonna give your body the chance to adapt into ketosis.

I would be using these products as performance enhancers on hard workout days or on race day. I wouldn't be using them as something that you're going to be dependent on for a long period of time and that's because of a few different reasons. Number one, they're really expensive. Number two, it's because if you're going to do ketosis, you want to be burning your own fat stores for fuel. That's where you're going to get a lot of the benefits from.

That's where you're going to be able to have the energy regardless of how much you ate that day because you'll be utilizing your own fat stores for fuel. Alright, so that covers the ketogenic question. The next question I got was from somebody who was a good friend of mine, Yani Pop, and he basically asked, you know, what kind of vitamins do I need? And first things first guys, I gotta say that this is kinda like, it's a cryptic question, right? And when I mean cryptic question, it means I don't have all the information I need about an individual person to make recommendations about specific vitamins and nutrients and minerals on a podcast that's meant for thousands of people, right?

There's thousands of people out there listening to this, so if you're gonna send a question in, make sure you phrase it in a way that applies to everybody. So what am I gonna do here? I'm gonna talk about vitamins that you're probably deficient in, that you should be taking, and nutrients that I think everybody should be getting into their body. Alright, so what does this come down to? And again, if you can tell from my discussion about ketosis, I'm not a big fan of over supplementation.

We got to figure out what our body needs. We got to make that determination and we should be sticking with those things that the body needs that we can't get. Right? So what do we need that we can't get for food that we already know that all human beings need to get into their systems? So the first one, and this is a big one, it's vitamin D, and this goes for a big part of the population.

Know, when possible, you want to get vitamin D from getting out in the sun. But the reality is that a lot of us don't get out in the sun enough, right? We're sitting in offices all day long, we're sitting in front of a computer screen, we're not getting outside, we're not able to get naked, we're not able to expose a lot of our skin to the sun. So there's a huge swath of population here in America and abroad that are vitamin D deficient. So that means we need to supplement with vitamin D.

So when we supplement with vitamin D, the recommendations if you are deficient, the general recommendation is to get about thirty five IU per pound of body weight, okay? And again, D is extremely important, it's anti inflammatory, some people consider it to be a hormone, okay? The other part of this with vitamin D is something that a lot of people don't tell you about, a lot of nutrition experts don't tell you about, but that is that when you supplement with vitamin D, it can leach calcium into your blood waste, your blood vessels. Now, that's a bad thing if it's leaching calcium into your blood vessels. Why is that a bad thing?

Because calcium can cause hardening of your arteries and your blood vessels. And remember what I said about inflammation, one of the problems with inflammation is that it draws calcium into the bloodstream and it creates hardening in the blood vessels and the arteries. So if you are taking lots of vitamin D, you put yourself in danger of this. So what are you supposed to do? You need vitamin D, but you're worried about getting your blood vessels hardened.

Well, what you can do is you can take vitamin K2. So if you're supplementing with vitamin D, you want to make sure you're taking vitamin K2 along with it. Vitamin K2 can keep that calcification from happening. Okay, and that's one thing I look for if I'm taking like a multivitamin or, you know, a supplement that has vitamin D in it, I look for K2, if it doesn't have it in there, it's poor formulation. Alright, so the next thing you want to make sure of is, are you getting your essential fatty acids, okay.

And so that means that omega-3s, it's really important, right. So our brain is up to about a third of our dry weight of our brains is fatty acids and or is fat, right, up to a third of the dry weight of our brain is fat and much of that is omega three fatty acids, specifically EPA and DHA, alright. So you want to make sure that you're getting omega threes. Now normally we try to get this from food, in our history we would try to get it from fatty fish. We would get it from eating sea life, right, whether that's fish or algae or things like that.

And you know, people, they've actually done evolutionary studies where they're starting to think that we evolved living near the ocean. We didn't venture much inland throughout our history, our early history, until our recent history, we started venturing inland to try to find more stuff, to find more food. But they think that in our early history we stuck pretty close to the ocean and that's because our brains are so dependent on omega three fatty acids. And it's really important that you're doing this. If you're a veteran out there, I've done podcasts on this with Doctor.

Michael Lewis, the author of When Brains Collide, he was a former army doctor, he's pulled people out of comas with omega-three fatty acids and he talks about the importance of omega threes if you've ever had a traumatic brain injury, you should be taking a large dose of omega threes and definitely check his book out when when brains collide. If you've ever had a TBI, if you're a veteran out there suffering from a TBI right now, getting a large dose of omega three into your system on a daily basis could potentially change your life. It could potentially help you to restart hormones, it could potentially help you rebuild your brain. So definitely check that book out, but we definitely want to make sure you're supplementing with omega three if we're not getting that fatty fish in, right? So, but one of the things you need to be careful of here, well there's a few things you need to be careful of, some people try to supplement flax oil, but the problem with flax oil is that the EPA and the DHA in there are not bioavailable, right, they are not bioavailable.

So they have to go through an extra step in your body to become bioavailable so you lose a lot of it. But if you take a triglyceride form fish oil or if you take an EPA, DHA, algae oil, an oil that comes from algae for those of you who might be vegans out there, those can be very absorbable. So you want to make sure that you're getting one of these two in there. As far as how much, it's really going to depend. I take about five thousand milligrams a day, right, because I haven't had traumatic brain injury but I want to protect my brain.

People who are fighters, people who've been knocked out, things like that, you might want to take a lot higher than that. But again, I'll leave you to, I'm not a doctor, I'll leave you to Doctor. Michael Lewis's book, When Brains Collide. You should definitely check that out, check that out, our interview with him here on the Warrior Soul podcast. Really, really awesome episode.

So those are three supplements we went through so far that you should probably be taking. Vitamin D, Vitamin K2 and then Omega-3s. Now, the rest is kind of variable, right? The rest is kind of variable. Definitely, if you're on a ketogenic diet or if you're doing intermittent fasting, you want to make sure you're getting minerals in, right?

Because you lose a lot of minerals because you get dehydrated on a ketogenic diet. So an easy way to get that is by taking Himalayan pink salt, right, and that's another thing I would have done back in the day when, you know, if I wish I knew better was I would have added a pinch of Himalayan salt to all the water I drank. Right? I would have kept it with me in the field. I would have stuck it in my my pack and then I would have added a pinch to every camel pack I drank.

Right? Because that loss of minerals that really creates brain dehydration that can cause things that keep you from thinking properly, right? So I would be consuming a little bit of Himalayan pink salt every day. I add a pinch to every liter of water I drink right now. And then, yeah, again, everything else is going to be situation dependent.

It's all going to be situation dependent. If you're deficient in thyroid hormone, for example, you probably want to consider selenium. If you are deficient in testosterone, you might want to consider zinc. You know, there's a lot of these different things that I could get into right now, but I don't have time. But if you have questions about specific deficiencies, send them along over here and we can answer them in future episodes.

So with that guys, that's all I've got for today. If you've got questions, please send them our way. And I just want to make a note here about our amazing sponsors. F bomb nutrition, they make awesome delicious packets of fats, Really awesome, delicious packets of fats. They my favorite are the macadamia nut butters.

Really, really great stuff. They taste like crunched up macadamia nut butter cookie. Mix them up with chocolate, mix them up with sea salt, mix them up with pecan butter, and they're absolutely delicious and you can carry them around with you wherever you go. If you're interested in getting yourself some f bombs, our listeners get 20% off when they use the code Warrior Soul at checkout at www.dropanfbomb.com. Besides that guys, I just wanna say, you know, if you're getting help by this podcast, if you enjoy the information we put out here, please share these episodes out there.

Know, it it really really helps us to spread word about the show and we want to provide you with the absolute best information we can. We also wanna make sure people are listening to it. And if you could, you if you could pay us the highest compliment you can give us, and again, this is something absolutely free. You if you can head over to iTunes and write us a review. Leave us a five star review.

Let us know how we helped you out. Let us know, what you'd like us to do in the future. Really helps us to spread word about the show. Really helps us get more veterans into the movement and more more everyday people into the movement. Right?

We're all about making America great again by making ourselves great again. I think that's the whole idea of this show. And with that, guys, I'll be looking forward to talking to you on Friday with another episode of Warrior Notes, and talk to you guys soon. Get out there and live your best lives while you can.