The Truth About Overtraining and Recovery with Dr. Phil Maffetone

How do you get an athlete to listen to your message that you're doing too much before it's too late?

in the extreme cases, you have to threaten to not wanna see them anymore. And in some cases, just dismiss them, which ⁓ I've had to do with some very good athletes and it was sad.

I wasn't willing to sacrifice my philosophy

just to keep them on as a potentially great athlete.

Hello and welcome to the Athletes Compass podcast where we navigate training, fitness and health for everyday athletes. We are honored today to talk with a special guest, Dr. Phil Maffetone. Paul has talked about him often on the show. Dr. Maffetone is a renowned figure in endurance sports, celebrated for his holistic approach to health and performance with a background in human biology and chiropractic.

along with certifications in physiotherapy, Chinese medicine and kinesiology. Dr. Maffetone has been a pioneer in integrating various disciplines to optimize athletic performance and overall wellbeing. Dr. Maffetone, we are so grateful you could be with us today. Thank you.

Thanks Paul, it's really great to be with you.

Sure, ⁓ it's a very important concept, but it's even more important to put into practice. And basically, it's that we don't wanna ⁓ push our training to compete better, thinking that we're gonna compete better at the expense of our health. In other words, we don't wanna sacrifice our health to be better athletes. And ⁓ it may seem logical, but ⁓ it's not.

applied because people are ⁓ hearing so much stuff about training and especially the latest thing, the latest hype. And a lot of it's no pain, no gain related. ⁓ Or a lot of it is ⁓ some narrow piece of research that shows that if you ⁓ sprint every day as fast as you could, you're going to get better.

Yeah, that's true. After a week, you might get better if you take a rest day at least. ⁓ But we need to look at the whole picture like you mentioned, Paul. ⁓ We need to look holistically at what's going on, not just right now, but this week, this month, and the rest of our lives, how it's going to influence us.

Thank

the girl in the picture in the fit but unhealthy article. ⁓ I didn't really appreciate health, like performance, ⁓ health over performance concept before actually ⁓ prof started coaching me after I came back from overtraining. ⁓ So how do we

Yes.

as an everyday athletes event and get into this deep hole of overtraining.

I mean, there's a lot of reasons ⁓ why people do what they do. One of them I mentioned, the hype ⁓ socially that we get from the media. So the running magazines, the triathlete magazines, they push this hype about ⁓ more is better, more miles, harder miles. ⁓

you

So it's not just in sports, it's our whole society that has developed this notion that's just outright wrong, that we need to work harder to be better. And ⁓ as Bill Bowerman said, that's garbage. It's the athlete who's most intelligent in that approach that benefits the most. And so...

You know, when I, and this was not foreign to me, although when I first got into practice

started working with athletes, it was so clear because there were the athletes in front of me who were sacrificing their health ⁓ for more fitness. And ⁓ it was hard to even talk to them about it. ⁓

because the concepts, the philosophy they had was so ingrained in them. Even the ones who relied on their training partners to decide what kind of program they were gonna follow, what kind of workout they were gonna have that day, as if their training partners were the experts. And so, I had to really...

emphasize that this was important, often to the point where I said, look, I can't work with you anymore if you're going to keep running yourself into the ground. indeed, I would eventually start dismissing patients, athletes who I started working with, because they couldn't understand, they couldn't

implement those ideas. so I, you know, I didn't want to, I had seen enough athletes who had injuries, for example, they'd come see me and most of those injuries were easy to treat. And the athlete would feel better, then they'd go out and run themselves into the ground more and get the same injury back or maybe a new one.

And so it didn't take long to connect the dots and say, ⁓ you need to think about this differently. And it's really what got me into coaching, because I realized that ⁓ if they had a coach, it was not somebody that was applying this philosophy. And ⁓ so I wanted to intervene and say, OK, I'm going to...

I'm going to help coach you. was in early, even before that, was early on asking athletes, asking people who trained in whatever sport to bring in their diary. And if they didn't have one to start keeping a diary. So I would always look at that. And then I would look at the person and say, well, what I'm seeing in you and what I see in your diary,

just doesn't match. You're not able to do these things. And so therefore, you need to change it. And therefore, I became the coach at that

Hey, I've just got a quick question. Just Marjaana, can you maybe answer your own question a little bit and take yourself back to the mindset that you had maybe ⁓ before you met me and then of course the info that I was giving you was simply the info that Phil taught me. So ⁓ what will you be that younger person?

and less experienced person. What were you thinking?

Okay.

Yeah, so just quick background. I wanted to do my first Ironman. I had one half Ironman under my belt and just moved from Canada to Dubai. I gave myself nine months to train for this Ironman. I mean, I was pretty new to triathlon, especially long distance triathlon.

So I went in, every training session was like I was preparing for ⁓ Olympics. Like I was all in. ⁓ I ⁓ was raised as an athlete and I've carried it with me all my life. So it was a little bit of that, you know, no pain, no gain mentality for months. But I was taking my, like, for example, this is to describe my basic level, 90K bike ride was a long ride for me.

So I had to take myself from pretty low level to a high level quickly, like nine months. It sounds like a long time for everyday athlete, it's for training from Ironman. It's not. Nine months goes fast, right? So I would train, push myself hard and then pick up kids. Sometimes I was so trashed. like, and then after, like when I was walking to the school and get the kids,

Then three kids, they have all kinds of activities, know, supper, you know, get everything done in the house. It was like nonstop. I would not, there were no time to chill. ⁓ If I could squeeze in a nap, that was excellent. And then I would like get up and go get the kids groggy and you know, full on kid stuff afterwards. So it was, there was no rest.

basically. But what I didn't realize that training is not just about muscle, heart, lungs, you know, the stuff that we can all see. Like you can feel muscle soreness, you can feel your muscles getting stronger, you can feel your fitness level getting high or higher, but you don't like recognize and give value to the

tiredness. So I think like looking back, sort of respected that tiredness that I carried, but I totally just ignored it and like tried to will myself through everything. This race is so important to me that I can do this even though I'm tired and exhausted. So I gave no thought on the important part, which is the overall life stress, right?

and how I felt in my body, because I would just will myself through it. ⁓ that I, my biggest mistake was that ignoring the exhaustion.

Yeah, you know, people don't understand that fatigue, muscle fatigue ⁓ with the soreness that ⁓ we see ⁓ is associated with muscle weakness. And with muscle weakness, we have to recover more. With muscle weakness, we have muscle imbalance typically, so our gait becomes irregular. And it's a domino effect that can...

be devastating. But what you say is a common thing, especially ⁓ in ⁓ age group athletes who are working typically a full-time job ⁓ and often have families. And they can't see that big picture. They can only see their training log that they're going to fill out and,

going out and meeting the group for the long ride or whatever. ⁓ And that, you you had to keep reeling people in because they had so much else to do in their life with work and family and social obligations ⁓ that were part of it. And you can't ignore those things.

You know, you, Dr. Maffetone and Paul have both sounded the alarm on this that, you know, this training stress isn't just physical. And I think Marjaana's story really brings this up. How do you get an athlete to listen to your message that you're doing too much before it's too late?

Yeah, early on it was more difficult because nobody knew who I was and so they weren't coming to see me and having to wait a while and ⁓ I was not the expert. I was just, you know, some guy who was going to help fix their knee. ⁓ But I think being firm about it and educating them and talking about the brain and the

the stress hormones and ⁓ sometimes that goes over their head, it gives them a sense that somebody's thinking logically about this. And then in the extreme cases, you have to threaten to not wanna see them anymore. And in some cases, just dismiss them, which ⁓ I've had to do with some very good athletes and it was sad. ⁓

to let them go, but I didn't have any other choice. I wasn't willing to sacrifice my philosophy ⁓ just to keep them on as a potentially great athlete.

I think it's hard to get the buy-in when the message is not ⁓ no pain, no gain. What do you think, Prof? Was it hard to get a buy-in from me? I think I was at the point where I had exhausted every other solution, every other method. I had nowhere to go anymore.

Mm-hmm.

yeah, like it's.

That's right.

I think you're right. think sometimes you have to hit rock bottom before you're willing to crawl out of that and see that... think someone said the definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different response. ⁓ Once you've reached that level, then you've to look elsewhere. ⁓ That's when you actually listen and then you...

⁓ make a plan to do something different and then look at that response to the different thing and then lo and behold, you you've you eventually started to feel the power, right? When your heart rate finally settled and your pace improved at the same heart rate, which is the perfect segue to what we want to talk about next. Like, Phil, can you please describe ⁓ the MAF method in general?

Well, I think the method begins with the philosophy that health and fitness are together and they need to stay balanced. And as we build fitness, we need to build our health to maintain that balance. And then ⁓ what I added to that were some tools that people could use.

on their own, which has always been my philosophy from going back to when I was a student. I don't want to have to give people a cookbook to follow or a diet to follow. I want to give them the tools so they can do that themselves. Essentially, I want to work myself out of a job. And so when they have these tools, they will know that, for example,

what they're doing is working because a good tool like heart rate gives you feedback fairly quick if you're applying everything correctly. So you don't have to wait until your next race or your next two or three races. So those tools included things like the 180 formula.

⁓ the two-week test where people ⁓ get rid of ⁓ junk food and reduce their ⁓ natural carbohydrate intake for a two-week period, monitor their signs and symptoms from before to after that two-week period. Now they could feel ⁓ what it's like for their metabolism to change.

⁓ and see those signs and symptoms, some of them or all of them disappear. ⁓ And other tools that, in many cases, they're biofeedback oriented tools, which was, I used biofeedback in other ways and ⁓ the heart rate relationships, heart rate variability, resting heart rate, all these things are, they're biofeedback tools that,

people, if they have the correct technology, or if they have the technology and use it correctly, they can educate themselves, they can understand better, and they can apply these things with greater confidence. And it only takes one race. When you say to somebody, hey, I know you've been training this way up till now.

and you've done well, but you've burned yourself out several times, you're injured all the time, ⁓ and your health is suffering, ⁓ you could actually race better without injuring, without all the health problems that you've developed, ⁓ and actually train you. And when you say, we'd like to train you at a slow ⁓ pace, a low heart rate,

for four to six months before you do any speed work and then jump into a race to see where you're at. And a high proportion of those people run a personal best if it's like a 10K or a half marathon where you have better ability to compare.

You know, it gets their attention. And so that's an important tool as well.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah, I've just, there's so much to unpack in that statement there, Phil, but just back to the Athletica for a moment, and for Athletica listeners, this is what we've created ultimately. We've created these tools for you. ⁓ So heart rate variability analysis, that's embedded now within the Athletica platform.

So you can actually look at your overall balance of sympathetic ⁓ stress and parasympathetic recovery dominance. We have Phil's 180 formula embedded within every test week ⁓ in every sport across the Athletica platform. And again, a lot of people kind of complain, well, why aren't you using that data to refine my zones and these things? That work is coming.

But for now, just like Phil said, this remains as a tool for you to be able to get insight into your own levels of power or pace relative to that heart rate.

And that will change depending on lifestyle habits and depending on ⁓ training health ultimately. And over to Marjaana next, because Marjaana you had the experience that Phil just described.

you

Yeah, just everything just, you know, felt so much better, better energy, better brain power, everything. But I also did what you just mentioned, the four to six weeks, four to six months of easy training. Remember when we started, Paul? ⁓ So I had already had six months of return from overtraining where I was on a really strict

three times a week, really slow, no intervals. I had just done like once a week interval when we started. I was about to go to my home country, Finland, for Christmas break. I was like, well, what should I do? Paul was like, just sleep. Eat good food, sleep, take it easy, go ski when you want to, but don't stress.

Yeah.

.

how does stress and nervous system tie together? So Dr. Maffetone, if you can explain nervous system.

stress and health and performance.

Yeah,

and you know, the autonomic nervous system, as Paul mentioned, the sympathetic and parasympathetic balance, everything is balanced, plays an obvious role in training and competition ⁓ and recovery, which is a big factor. So we have heart rate variability to monitor that. ⁓

you

Resting heart rate is a nice indicator too, although you have to be careful because with chronic overtraining, the heart rate is abnormally pushed down. And athletes at some point say, gee, my resting heart rate is lower. I guess I'm doing everything right, ⁓ even though they can't get out of bed in the morning. So the autonomic nervous, so it's really a brain thing.

We become great athletes from the brain down. We have to start in the brain, not just in the muscles. And ⁓ the idea, the concept of stress is often misunderstood. People think it's some ⁓ psychological thing. It's an emotional thing. Well, it is, but stress can be physical, stress can be biochemical and metabolic.

I'm to do a thing. It's a motion. going say, well, you can get the foot. It's great. And it's just a foot. It's great. It's going be a high-level catapult. And it's

and stress can be mental and emotional. And

just going to be a mental and emotional thing.

actually the mental part of stress includes education and miseducation can create a lot more stress than obviously education.

includes education and this education can bring out more stress than obviously education.

So Dr. Maffetone, mean, when you talk about this four to six month period of slow pace and low heart rate, I'm just thinking about some of my athletes. would just, that would be, you know, they would go crazy with that. Are you saying that that is, should be something that our everyday athletes should be doing? Or is it just for people who have gotten this over training or overreaching?

It's potentially for everyone, age groupers and professionals, ⁓ especially those who have been over trained, but ⁓ it's really for people who have not developed their aerobic system. And whether you're a basketball player or soccer or ⁓ track and field athlete ⁓ or Ironman athlete, you're ⁓ very dependent and even people who don't compete.

you know, we're all as humans dependent on our aerobic system, which burns higher levels of fat for energy. The aerobic muscles are the so-called slow twitch muscles that have endurance. So the aerobic muscles obviously allow us to train for endurance, but they also support the joints ⁓ all over the body. And they keep us ⁓

you know, they keep the muscles balanced so the joints are more stable during activity. ⁓ so the question is, how is my aerobic system? And if it's not great, ⁓ then you need more pure aerobic training to build that up. Because if you're not purely aerobic training, you're...

aerobic system may not develop as well. So if you do one speed workout a week or one ⁓ fatiguing weight workout a week, or if you have a lot of stress or you have a lot of non-sports obligations in your life, all that interferes. So the pure aerobic base period that ⁓ Arthur Liddiard referred to,

is a valuable thing. ⁓ And again, we want to monitor that. We want to know, A, are you improving? So if you can run faster at the same heart rate, for example, at the same low heart rate, the MAF test, and you can apply that to a bike, to rowing, to anything. ⁓ If you are

getting faster at the same heart rate, you're improving. And so if you're getting faster and faster as you, as the weeks and months go by, ⁓ and you're in endurance sports, why would you want to stop that process? Cause if you start doing, interval training and you start jumping into some races to kind of think, well, I've got to, you know, just kind of race a little bit to get my race thing back.

⁓ Can we go back to MAF method? if you have a new athlete coming to see you, Dr. Maffetone what is the check engine like for you when you're looking at a new athlete? How do you know that aerobic base is something that they need to work on?

A lot of it is taking a good history. And ⁓ first of all, I should say I don't do that anymore. ⁓ But a lot of it is taking a good history. And when I was in practice, I would spend ⁓ typically 90 minutes initially with an athlete. I want to know all about them. Now they've already filled out a whole bunch of forms and typically

⁓ sent them in way back then. We didn't have email, but I got some of the basic information, but I wanted to hear a lot of it from them. I wanted to ⁓ know how they train. Of course, they'll bring their diary and I want to know about their ⁓ competitive performances over time. ⁓ Their coaching connection. Is somebody coaching them? Are they coaching themselves?

Thank

Is it haphazard? ⁓ And then I would ⁓ do a physical exam to measure muscle function, ⁓ thinking maybe ⁓ I'm going to want to do some biofeedback, EMG or EEG biofeedback that may help them physically. But then I would send them to the track or go to the track with them ⁓ with a heart monitor. ⁓

In the beginning, nobody had heart monitors except me, because I had a cardiac monitor that hospitals used, but the wireless monitors hadn't come out yet. ⁓ So it was part of the assessment process. And once I was able to assess them on that high holistic level, ⁓ I can then compare that with their...

level of health and fitness. And if it didn't match, I had to see, well, okay, it's not matching. If we do these things, you'll be okay, starting in a week. And, and as you train more, we can monitor you and you'll be okay by your next race as long as that takes. And so the process really was primarily assessment. That's the

often the missing link in healthcare, especially today where ⁓ practitioners are given an average of eight minutes to talk to their patients.

Wow. Let's talk about ⁓ assessments, Phil, in the context of the MAF method. Now, we get this on Athletica sometimes. You can imagine with, you know, we're trying to really scale this whole concept ⁓ for the world. And a lot of people coming in here doing your MAF method, we see a lot, like as you would have across a career. ⁓ And, you know,

probably just like there's a variation with 220 minus your age for calculation of max heart rate, we have equally this challenge with the MAF method as well. Some will have a very high, you know, they'll be like their heart rate will be super high and they're kind of your key problematic sort of, that the people that are having to walk when they're sort of doing this. Likewise, we have ⁓

very fit, healthy athletes coming in, right? So how do you ⁓ sort of calibrate this ideal level of, know, where someone should sort of start with their heart rate that they want to kind of hold onto for a little bit of time whilst they go through periods of time of testing?

Yeah, it's a good question. ⁓ If you spend that much time assessing someone, ⁓ you're going to find a lot of things that are not quite right. Some of them are going to be more serious and some of them are going to be just ⁓ minor details. But there's a lot of things that are not quite right. The big question is, OK, what do we do now?

We can't address all of those issues. I tried doing that early in my career and it was a disaster. ⁓ But so we have to be a detective and say, okay, ⁓ where do I start? ⁓ What are the primary issues? What are the secondary issues? And we wanna address the primary issues so that that trickles down and

⁓ addresses the body is able to trickle down and address the secondary issues. ⁓ That's the game. ⁓ two of the two of those important primary issues high up, ⁓ three of them, ⁓ one of them is refined carbohydrates as part of the junk food diet. ⁓ Another one is the training intensity. So the heart rate.

and building that aerobic system. And then the other one is stress. The heart rate problem is an example of physical stress. The dietary ⁓ aspect is an example of biochemical metabolic stress. ⁓ But what about those mental emotional stresses that ⁓ can be just as bad? And in many cases, people are so used to them that they don't

realize that it's affecting them or it's a problem or that they're even there. ⁓ And so, you you start here at top and, you know, it's like talking about any of these things. And then sometimes the athlete says, well, wait a minute, I just have a knee problem.

Mm-hmm

That's all they want to focus on. I want to focus on the big picture. They want to focus on their symptom. ⁓ And I, you know, in the beginning, when I started using the heart monitor, I realized how therapeutic it was. And I had a, I had a runner, he was a good runner. think he was ⁓ an age group runner, but he was really, really good ⁓ competitively. And ⁓

I got him training, ⁓ I got him eating better a little bit and we had just started with, I think, ⁓ one visit with ⁓ specific recommendations. he had, ⁓ I think he had a chronic back pain that was often debilitating. ⁓ And I had ⁓ left to go lecture

somewhere. And I got a call from my office that he had called and he was in severe pain. And what can he do?

And he, you know, he was still able to run and the pain was always there and it didn't get any worse. he, you know, and he hadn't, we hadn't really gotten him on the heart monitor yet because the only one I had was the one I had. ⁓ And so ⁓ that was in my office. And I left a message saying, go to my office, get this heart monitor. Here's how you set it up. Just run.

you

according

to your heart rate. And I heard from him when I got back, I got a message when I got back that his back pain had gone away just with two or three runs. ⁓ Which really makes sense because your stress level has come down, you're encouraging the aerobic muscles to work better. They're not gonna fatigue much so you're...

functions of those aerobic muscle fibers, which is support of the low back in particular, ⁓ is going to be noticeably better quite quickly. And so that was an interesting clinical experience for me to see how powerful that can be. ⁓ potentially that was just ⁓ the pattern of back pain he had, but I've seen that before. ⁓

I'll often, you know, eventually ⁓ my practice turned into, ⁓ I'm going to ignore everything except for these primary issues. And so people would come in with hip pain and knee pain and all kinds of problems. And I would just say, look, we're going to ignore these things because they're secondary. We're going to treat the primary things and your body will change quickly.

many cases, in most cases, that was the case.

I

also think MAF is a really useful method in teaching athletes the easy pace. What does it feel to go easy? Because when you start doing the MAF test and if your Arabic engine is not humming happily, you will find yourself walking. And it is really difficult to drop down to walking when you think, this should be easy test. This is easy.

But if you want to keep your heart rate at that target plus minus one or two, at least I allow myself a plus minus one or two and try to keep it in that range, it can be really frustrating to run like that for five miles.

It is, but only because you've come from the no pain, no gain world and you're thinking, gee, this is terrible. I don't want anybody to see me working out. can't train with my friends anymore. And I would tell patients, train at night. Nobody will see you. But the...

Yes.

Thank

Mm-hmm.

The frustration of running slow is a very common thing. And then over time, as they get faster and faster, they start complaining that they have to run too fast. ⁓ You you get down to a six minute pace, which is not unusual ⁓ for an age group athlete. ⁓ If they have the schedule, if their stress levels can be controlled, ⁓

That's not unusual, certainly for a professional that should be easy. And I've seen people coming down to a five minute pace aerobically, which is pretty incredible. they start saying, I can't run this fast every day. ⁓ There's a mental component to that, but there's ⁓ the effort factor. There's all kinds of interesting...

things going on there. However, when that happens, I talk about aerobic intervals, where you train at a lower heart rate for a period of time and then you I like the fart lick workout. So ⁓ you warm up, you get into your zone. Now, if you're running fast ⁓ for two, three miles, and then it's just kind of intense because you're going really fast.

Now you slow down, lower your heart rate, recover for as long as your body wants to recover, and then you pick up the speed again and do that for the entire workout. That's an incredibly wonderful workout.

So for the

We see that on

the bike a lot sooner because the stress level on the bike is different ⁓ and less. So people get to the point on the bike where they're having a hard time getting to their aerobic heart rate because they're going so fast. we have to, at that point, we have to look at the bike set up and their gears and make adjustments as needed. But at some point,

You

It's tough, so doing an aerobic workout, aerobic intervals ⁓ in those situations is very valuable. And likewise for the slow, in the beginning for the slow athletes, sometimes I say, look, do some downhill repeats. And they say, ⁓ you mean uphill repeats? No, downhill repeats. So we want you to run down the hill at your aerobic heart rate, which you'll be running faster with the same heart rate.

you ⁓

And you'll get, you know, if you don't overstride, you'll get a nice turnover effect where on the flats, you're going painfully slow. And if there's an upgrade, you might have to walk.

Mm-hmm.

Nice.

Phil, was just, I've been listening to you and as you go, there's been a new study that's come out in Norway by Ingval Aden. It was published, I think it was published in JAP. It was a great study. They've, and I just actually got back from Norway and the sports school system there is just phenomenal. And kids actually go to school to learn sport and then they get, there's testing and whatnot that goes on and they actually have to.

take part in these research studies too as part of their courses and all these. So they've got this group of cyclists ultimately, they ⁓ basically every single training session, if you can believe it or not, is monitored with gases, right? So they're hooked up to the VO2 max cart. Yeah, it's crazy. But anyways, they take them through a ⁓ series of interval training and they post...

Wow.

assess what they actually sort of saw from the data. And they look at the responders to interval training and the non-responders to interval training. And of course you won't be surprised, but one of the key significant findings was that those that adapted and got better with the interval training, they had a higher volume of MAF work that was under them, zone one training. and it was kind of, was clear as day. It was the only statistical significance in the...

in the two, so they were able to work at a higher percentage of VO2 max. So there was something in this adaptation energy that's brought on by that low intensity training. So, and the message is if you do, if you're just doing HIIT training, you won't necessarily adapt to it. You need to have that MAF training underneath it.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, it's great to see ⁓ those papers because, I mean, that's when we first met, but those kinds of studies, that kind of data that's collected is just invaluable. It's the science part of me that I enjoy so much. The clinical part. ⁓

you

I don't care what the science says, I'm going to do this because I know it's the best thing for the patient. If they're an athlete, I know it's the best thing for them to improve their human performance. And in the very beginning, boy, I was trashed a lot by the, course, the whole athletic community, but the scientists in particular and the clinicians too. ⁓

And something you said that was interesting is that they were measuring gases. ⁓ And of course, in the paper you and I did on maximum aerobic function, ⁓ we showed, ⁓ I can't remember now what graphics we had, but we basically showed that heart rate and fat burning had a very important relationship. ⁓

Totally. Yep.

Yep.

So

for people who can't get into a lab or go to Norway, ⁓ they can just monitor their heart rate. These are more of the tools that we should be looking at. ⁓ The paperwork currently writing, people say, well, how do I know if my brain is improving? Measure your waist. Measure your waist at the umbilicus. And if it's getting smaller, your brain is improving because we've made that.

relationship between excess body fat and poor brain function.

Yeah, don't you talk about that paper, Phil? ⁓ What are the highlights in that one? What's the general thesis?

Gosh, I've lost some brain cells over that paper. And we're still not finished. ⁓ But we're getting there. I always go through this ⁓ not being a scientist or a researcher, being a clinician is you write the paper and then you get the reviewers making comments. And I always take the reviewer comments as ⁓

You

Hahaha!

Nope.

he hates this paper. You know, what am I going to do? He doesn't like it. ⁓ But in the end, the paper turns out better. So I'm always grateful for that. ⁓ we basically address the concept of brain health and differentiate ⁓ or define brain health ⁓ holistically, the full spectrum of brain health.

versus how we tend to think of it now, which is, you if we don't have memory loss or Alzheimer's, then our brain is okay. And then one day we're diagnosed with Alzheimer's, so we go from a healthy brain to an unhealthy brain. And it just doesn't work that way. And we talk about how that end result of an Alzheimer's diagnosis begins 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years earlier, often in childhood.

And there are markers all along the way. ⁓ one of the markers being excess body fat because of its ⁓ significant influence on chronic inflammation, insulin resistance, ⁓ and how it affects the brain, which has its own blood sugar mechanism and use of ketones. Again, so the... ⁓

Okay.

the production of ketones becomes important. And then really the bottom line is that refined carbohydrates, including sugar, that allow you to use more ketones ⁓ in the brain, use more fat burning in the muscles, less reliance on sugar is gonna improve the health of the brain. ⁓ And...

There's so much involved and it's turned into a of a monster of a paper.

No, but I think you've got the general gist there, right? Is that the processed food and sugar is not going to be doing wonders for, you know, arguably one of our most important organs on our body, our brain, and, you know, therefore your mind. ⁓ Now, Marjaana I was looking at some of your correspondence with some of the Athletica users that they get this, they get this issue.

Yeah, yeah.

But speak, Marjaana, to the struggle that they have on a day-to-day kind of basis ⁓ with families and these sorts of things. You know the comment I'm referring to.

How not to eat pasta?

Yeah.

How not to eat birthday cake.

Thank

And there's always somebody's birthday and

people go to the birthday parties because they want to eat cake.

⁓ This is such a good segue because I could almost like, can picture myself reading all of your papers and like just nod head because I've been through them all myself in my experience. And then ⁓ I read this, The Overfat Pandemic, your book, Dr. Amaphatone, and it was...

It's a tough one.

Nice.

Mm-hmm.

such a light bulb moment for me. So all these dots are connecting in my head, overtraining, too much high intensity, ⁓ my body breaking down, constantly injured, something. I even had Bell's Palsy. ⁓ And it takes a long time before the dots start connecting.

candy and lots of sugar and I was eating because I was told, ⁓ as a woman, ⁓ female athlete, you have to like eat extra carbs. But then ⁓ eventually I figured out that this is not the right way to go because my way started to just expand. And I'm a muscular person. So if I look at my BMI, I'm obese, right? Which is

It is not the case. ⁓ I'm pretty fit and healthy now. So I started measuring my belly circumference and that started dropping when I started cutting carbs and processed food especially. Like not just carbs, because know, nice beautiful apple has lots of carbs and ⁓ vegetables have carbs. So I'm not throwing carbs under the bus, but processed foods.

And reading the over fat pandemic was a good reminder why we should just grab our food off the ground. ⁓ But with the family, I have three kids and two teenagers now, and they seem to be able to eat all the carbs they want. And one of our athletes was asking, how do you eat healthier?

he wants to cut processed food like pasta. ⁓ And I said, well, you can still make the pasta sauce and then use like squash spaghetti, like use the vegetable or sweet potato and, you know, dump the pasta sauce over that. So there are ways that even busy family ⁓ moms and dads can, you know, improve their

you

their health by going a little bit more natural diet. And your MAF kitchen recipes are wonderful. My favorite is actually your coffee with egg yolk. This is my morning coffee now. It's egg yolk, half and half. And ⁓ I put cinnamon in there or

you

What is the full ⁓ spice?

Cart- Cartamon?

Cardamom and ⁓ it depends on my mood what spice I put it in there and then a little bit of coconut oil. ⁓ It's so good. I love it. I love my coffee. So thank you for that recipe.

Yeah, that's,

thanks. I have that in them. I use a whole egg and I use some raw unsweetened cacao. And for people who have never tried this, it's the best cappuccino you've ever had. ⁓ But yeah, the problem, you know, when you have a family or if you're social and you're visiting people or having people over for dinner, ⁓

Hmm.

You know, what do you do? It becomes a stress. You lose all your friends. ⁓ You know, what do you do? You I say to people, look, you want to eat the way your ancestors ate for millions of years. And the only reason you have these hangups about the socialization of junk food is because the industry that makes these

You

you

unhealthy foods have been bombarding the world, not just, you know, in the Western world, but the entire world ⁓ for generations about the importance of having these foods, you know, on every level, even the scientific level where they teach still that humans are glucose based animals. And somehow they, they tie that in with the need to eat the

Mm-hmm.

the refined carbohydrates, whether it's pasta or bread or cereal or, ⁓ and so it's, and it's not, you know, in the paper that Paul and I are just finishing, hopefully the relationship with the industry and how ⁓ lobbying has.

changed governments in their recommendations to their people is what got us to a point where 80 % of the world's population is over fat.

Mm-hmm.

This is a very serious problem. know, people talk about the obesity problem and how many people are obese. But as one of our other people showed, ⁓ about 30 % of people who have normal BMIs and normal weight still can have excess body fat.

Uh-huh.

So, you know, the question for ⁓ mothers and, you know, guys who like socializing and ⁓ kids, you know, it's, do you really want to be healthier? Do you want to make health a priority? Do you want to make your brain this amazing part of us that creates all kinds of

Mm-hmm.

wonderful things throughout life and our brain can be can get healthier and healthier throughout life and become the healthiest brain on the day we die. What a concept. But you can't do that if you're eating refined carbohydrates and your body fat is is too high. So you know it's hard to go against the social tide. But ⁓ it's a

much bigger issue than the issues we talked about earlier where you say to a runner, you've got to train slow for a while, ⁓ even though all their friends are training hard.

Yeah, it is. And I would say that it takes time. Like I've seen from my family now that we eat lot healthier, we eat less breads and pasta. Like it's not obvious choice anymore to grab a toast. ⁓ But it will take time. Like if you have a family and you want to make the change, just be patient with it. know, like the kids will pick up.

you

And they will see that you're making changes and you're making those choices that impact you positively. just try, don't give up if it doesn't work in like 20 days, but it will eventually change how they eat too.

Mm-hmm.

Dr. Maffetone, what advice would you give to everyday endurance athletes looking to implement the MAF method into their training routines?

⁓ The two primary things that I mentioned earlier, which apply to ⁓ most people, I've certainly seen athletes who would come in and they're training pretty well and they're eating really well. ⁓ And so we don't have to address those issues ⁓ immediately. ⁓ But for most people, they've got to get off the junk food, which are the refined carbohydrates, including sugars.

And then the first thing they say is, well, you know, what about my energy? What about this? What about during a long ride or during a race? You know, and I talked to them about the fact that as they build their aerobic system, their fat burning goes up and they're going to rely a lot less on carbohydrate supplementation during the race. And many of them in a shorter race, they don't use anything but water.

So that may help. So first, get rid of the unhealthy food. And then second, ⁓ get a heart monitor and using biofeedback, find out the status of your aerobic system. If you're only able to run at a 10 minute pace, for example, and you're training...

830 pace typically every day with your friends. That discrepancy is how ⁓ poorly your aerobic system is functioning.

Dr. Maffetone, thank you so much for joining us today. ⁓

Thank you, this has been fun.

It's a great conversation.

Thank you for listening today to the Athletes Compass podcast. Take a moment now, subscribe, share, and let's keep navigating this endurance adventure together. Improve your training with the science-based training platform, Athletica, and join the conversation here on the Athletica Forum for Dr. Phil Maffetone, Marjaana Rakai, and Dr. Paul Laursen I'm Paul Warloski and this has been the Athletes Compass podcast. Thank you so much for listening.