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I got the chance to sit down with Ben Bocchicchio, PhD, author of "15 Minutes to Fitness." Dr. Ben has been a pioneer in the field of exercise physiology and obesity research for nearly 50 years. In this interview we talk about strength, health, and things you can do to age successfully. Check out Dr. Ben’s work at www.drbenbo.com and my newsletter at www.unremarkablebrain.com
Enjoy!
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Dr. Mary Newport is the author of the new book, Clearly Keto for Healthy Brain Aging and Alzheimer’s Prevention. She’s one of the groundbreaking researchers on the use of a ketogenic diet and ketone supplements for brain health, and in this episode we chat all about lifestyle changes that you can make now to preserve your cognitive function well into old age.
If, like me, you have someone in your family who suffers from dementia or cognitive impairment, please share this one. It might just change their lives for the better.
You can find all of Dr. Mary’s latest research on www.coconutketones.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
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As a special event for my Substack subscribers, I asked Vinnie Tortorich, author of "Fitness Confidential," to spend some time with us and answer our questions. He generously did so, and what happened next is incredible! We were spontaneously joined by Low-Carb experts Mary Newport, MD, author of "Clearly Keto," Ben Bocchicchio, PhD, author of "Fifteen Minutes to Fitness" and even Jim Abrahams, creator of such Hollywood hits as "Airplane!" and "The Naked Gun," and founder of The Charlie Foundation. It was an amazing time, and I hope you enjoy! For more writing, podcasts, and other fun stuff, sign up for my blog at www.unremarkablebrain.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
Hi gang! One of the most popular of my "Healthy Happy Hour" YouTube series was my chat with Vinnie Tortorich. Vinnie is a celebrity fitness trainer, podcaster, author, filmmaker, and entrepreneur — basically, the guy does it all, and amazingly, he does it all well.
I highly recommend that you check out his book Fitness Confidential, his podcast of the same name, his three movies, Fat: A Documentary, Fat a documentary part 2, and Beyond Impossible. And if that leaves you hungering for high-quality vitamins and snacks, then check out his three companies, purevitaminclub.com, purecoffeeclub.com, and NSNGFoods.com. (I know it sounds like I must be sponsored by the guy, but in fact, I’m not — I’m just a big Vinnie fan.)
Vinnie was the one who first introduced ME to a low-carb way of eating, and I really have him to thank for my book, my blog… all of this. In this interview, we talk about his many years in the fitness game, the origins of his NSNG — no sugars, no grains — lifestyle, what it takes to be the founder of your own company (or two, or three), and lot more. I hope you enjoy!
And don't forget to check out my blog at unremarkablebrain.com, as well as My Unremarkable Brain the book!
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
This week is another of "Big Dave's Small Bites," a quick, focused interview with an expert in the field of health and wellness with takeaways that you can apply in your own life.
I'm once again joined by Dr. Ben Bocchicchio. A recent inductee into the National Fitness Hall of Fame — where he keeps the company of such greats as Charles Atlas and Arnold Scharzenegger — Dr. Ben has PhDs in both exercise physiology and obesity. He’s published over 200 articles, collaborating with medical researchers at places from Johns Hopkins to Arizona State University.
His book, 15 Minutes to Fitness is a very comprehensive, very readable introduction to the low-carb diet and to exercise, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Check it out at www.drbenbo.com
This week, we talk about
- How much exercise to you really need to improve your metabolic health?- Why resistance training is the key to better metabolism.
- How do you know you've reached your personal exercise threshold?
...and much more.
To read more about this topic, check out the accompanying article on my website, www.unremarkablebrain.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
Hey Folks! I got to sit down with Amy Berger, founder of Tuit Nutrition, and author of the books “The Alzheimer’s Antidote: Using a Low-Carb, High-Fat Diet to Fight Alzheimer’s Disease, Memory Loss, and Cognitive Decline,” “The Stall Slayer: Seven Road Blocks to Keto Fat Loss and What to Do About Them,” and co-author of “End Your Carb Confusion,” written with Eric Westman, MD.
She's a voice of reason in the wilderness of conflicting dietary advice, and I love her tagline: "Keto without the crazy."
In our talk we cover a bunch of interesting topics, such as:
Her upbringing and discovering Atkins
100 years of keto
Overview of how low-carb works
Finding your way through the “noise” of online dietary advice
Keeping it simple
Trigger foods and living in the real world
Keto for Alzheimer’s
Keto for epilepsy, mental health and more!
Find Amy’s website, including links to her books, here at www.tuitnutrition.com
And if you haven't yet, subscribe to my newsletter at www.unremarkablebrain.com
Thanks!
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This week, we’ve got another Big Dave’s Small Bites podcast episode: short, easily-digestible mini-interviews with experts in health and fitness. Once again, I chat with Ben Bocchicchio, PhD, an expert in exercise physiology and obesity research, who has literally written the book (along with hundreds of academic papers) on exercise and weight loss.
We all know exercise is important, but what kind should we be doing? Some people swear by HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training); others swear at it. After all, the name conjures images of sweaty sprints, box jumps, and the dreaded burpee.
But Dr. Ben says we’ve got it all wrong. He says going slow, not fast, is the best — and safest — way to up the intensity and maximize our results in the gym, and he’s built his SMaRT (Slow, Maximum Response Training) system to take advantage of that fact. Listen in to learn more about:
- Why slow reps are the way to go
- How to make your workout more efficient so you can get MORE results with LESS time at the gym
- The difference between “training,” “exercise,” and “activity”
Dr. Ben’s book, 15 Minutes to Fitness is a terrific introduction to the low-carb diet and to exercise, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Find it, and lots of other info, at www.drbenbo.com
Please don’t forget to rate, review and recommend this podcast. And check out all the good stuff going on at www.unremarkablebrain.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
Which is more important for weight loss — diet or exercise? Ask ten experts, and you’ll get ten different answers. Recently, I got a chance to catch up with fitness expert Dr. Ben Bocchicchio to find out what he thinks on the matter, and his answer kind of surprised me.
Dr. Ben is a giant in the field of health and fitness. A recent inductee into the National Fitness Hall of Fame — where he keeps the company of such greats as Charles Atlas and Arnold Scharzenegger — Dr. Ben has PhDs in both exercise physiology and obesity. He’s published over 200 articles, collaborating with medical researchers at places from Johns Hopkins to Arizona State University.
His book, 15 Minutes to Fitness is a very comprehensive, very readable introduction to the low-carb diet and to exercise, and I can’t recommend it highly enough. Find it, and lots of other info, at www.drbenbo.com
In this episode:
* The importance — and difficulty — of sticking with an eating plan
* Why controlling carbs is key
* Why calories do count
* The synergistic effect of adding exercise to your diet
Don’t forget to rate, review and recommend this podcast. And check out all the good stuff going on at www.unremarkablebrain.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
Welcome! In this short “intro” episode, I give a brief overview of what The Unremarkable Brain podcast is all about — namely epilepsy and the ketogenic diet, but also food, health, and thriving in general.
In this episode:
* Who is Big Dave Robinson?
* Why “unremarkable?”
* How can we take control of our health?
* and more!
Be sure to check out my book and my website, www.unremarkablebrain.com
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
Hey, gang!
It’s been a busy couple of weeks here in Big Dave’s world. The start of another mid-pandemic school year has kept me pretty busy, but I’m trying hard to stick to my eating and exercise plans — and sometimes I even succeed!
Unfortunately, my tricky brain had its own things going on, and that old stalker Epilepsy caught me off-guard last week.
As I mentioned in my book, I’ve been using a combination of medication and diet to try to control my seizures for the past three years. My doc switched me to a new medication earlier this year, and after this latest seizure, upped the dosage a bit. It’s sort of a trial-and-error process, really. Here’s hoping we’ve finally got it.
getting my keto mojo workin’
Then last weekend was the Low Carb USA conference, which I attended online. There were lots of great talks from the most influential names in the world of low-carb eating, including some of the folks that I’ve interviewed on my Healthy Happy Hour YouTube series, and each did a lengthy Q&A after their talk. It was a great way to recharge my mojo at a time when I really need some motivation.
One of the things that I’ve decided is to really start tracking seriously — I’d become a bit lax over the summer. My collection of gadgets has grown now to include a Freestyle Libre continuous glucose monitor (CGM), an Oura ring to track my sleep, and a Keto Mojo to measure my blood ketones. Now if I can just keep them all straight, I’ll be in business!
I’ll do reviews on each of these in the coming weeks, in case you’re interested in hearing about the life of the so-called quantified self, but let’s start with the CGM.
sweet, sweet blood
Carbohydrates — whether from the crystallized juice of a sugar cane or from the starch inside a potato — are turned into glucose by the digestion and transferred into the bloodstream. When there’s too much of that glucose floating around, it’s turned again into fat and stored in the gut or the butt. As I’ve said before, the whole idea of the low-carb diet is to cut off the supply and keep this from happening.
But how much glucose is too much?
I've always been curious about measurements (for example, how did the "bucket" become a standard unit of chicken?), so I decided to dig into this thing a little further.
According to trusty ol' WebMD, pre-diabetes occurs when fasting blood sugar is measured to be above 100 mg/dL. Diabetes proper starts at 126. But what does that mean, really? As a proud and ignorant American, I don't speak the language of grams and liters, not to mention milligrams or deciliters. (Come on, now, science!)
So I did some scrounging around, and I found newhealthguide.org and this visual of 1 gram of sugar:
100 milligrams is 0.1 grams, or 10% of the amount pictured above.
Ok, so what the heck is a deciliter of blood? Turns out it's about the size of a dixie cup.
...In other words, we’re really not talking about a lot of sugar. Try sweetening a small cup of coffee with 1/40 of a sugar packet, and chances are you'll barely taste a difference.
Now for a little fun with algebra (uh oh!): The average body has around 5 liters of blood — something you likely don't think about unless your name is Dexter. That means if your blood sugar is 100mg/dL, your entire circulatory system, head to toe, is holding only about one teaspoon of glucose!
It really makes you appreciate what a finely-tuned system the body is. The difference between “normal” blood glucose and full-on diabetes isn’t cupfuls or even spoonfuls of sugar. It’s basically a matter of whether your one teaspoon is level, rounded, or heaping.
la dolce vita
My own fasting blood glucose often comes in around 105 — not an emergency, but certainly not ideal. So my doc agreed to write a prescription for a CGM (even as she warned me that my insurance probably wouldn’t cover it).
A trip to the pharmacy, a little puzzling over the directions, and I managed to stick the small plastic disc to the back of my upper arm, where its tiny needle will sip at my blood day and night. An app on my cell phone enables me to check it any time I want just by holding the phone close to the disc.
The result? Information like this:
I can see from this graph, for example, that during my high-intensity SMaRT workout, my body turned some of my fat stores into blood glucose in order to fuel my maxed-out muscles (just as Dr. Ben said it would). I can also tell that I didn’t actually get away with that dark chocolate I snuck just before bed.
It’s a great accountability tool, but as he shared in his Low Carb USA presentation last weekend, Dr. Brian Lenzkes takes it one step further. Not only do his patients check their own CGM data, but that same information syncs remotely to Dr. Brian’s phone, so he gets pinged any time one of his people goes off plan. “I can call them up right away,” he says, “and ask them what’s going on.”
Always kind and understanding, Dr. Brian helps them troubleshoot their diet and lifestyle. “The elephant in the room?” he says, “Stress.” He shared that patients will sometimes see a blood sugar spike of 30 points or more, simply from a stressful meeting or presentation. Other times, stress will drive people to eat something sweet, and that shows up too.
Dr. Lenzkes also uses the CGM as a teaching tool: in his talk, he tells the story of a patient who asked which she should eat for breakfast, oatmeal or cereal. She tried both, and saw right away that cereal caused a much larger glucose spike (188) than oatmeal (143). “The right answer was none of the above,” he says. “The right answer for her was eggs,” which caused her blood sugar to remain flat. She went on to lose 22 lbs just by making that switch.
This combination of high-tech and high-touch is, I think, the future of medicine. Lifestyle diseases like obesity and diabetes respond well to lifestyle treatments like diet and exercise, but only when the patient is able to stay the course. And let’s face it, in our current, sugar-soaked food environment, staying the course is tough! Having a Jimminy Cricket right in your phone can be a powerful tool to keeping things going in the right direction.
If you’re interested in diving deep into low-carb knowledge, it’s still possible to register and access the recordings at lowcarbusa.org. But for a taste of what Dr. Brian is all about, click above for a “Big Dave’s Small Bites” podcast taken from my interview with Dr. Lenzkes.
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to more fun with data soon!
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This week is the third in my trilogy of posts about the great Ben Bocchicchio, PhD. I really like something that he shared at his talk from last year’s Low Carb USA online conference, so I asked him about it during our interview for my YouTube live series.
During the talk, he shared the following graphic:
“In my mind,” he said, “the health spectrum goes from illness on the left side, to absence of disease in the middle, to health on the right side.” Seems simple enough, but dig into it, and the implication of this fuel gauge is that most of our “health care” system is not really about promoting health, per se, it’s about the elimination of disease.
Wait — isn’t that the same thing? Isn’t “health” the opposite of “disease?” (Well, technically maybe “ease” is the opposite of dis-ease, but let’s not get crazy with semantics here). Not so much, says Dr. Ben.
“Most doctors deal with illness,” he says, “and their goal is to get their patients to an absence of disease state, so you no longer have problems, you no longer have bad labs numbers,” even if that requires two and three medications.
Health, however, is a step further: “Health in my mind connotes vibrance, vitality, a high level of function.” It’s an interesting distinction.
my hips don’t lie
I’ve been thinking about Dr. Ben’s graphic lately, as I’ve been trying to shake off my pandemic torpor and get active again.
On one hand, my body has suffered the ravages of sitting all day in front of a Zoom screen: I’ve developed persistent tightness and soreness in my left hip. The pain finally got so bad that I started seeing a physical therapist, and after a few months of twice-weekly sessions and (mostly) daily stretching, it’s gotten so I can sleep, get around, and walk the dog without pain.
In Dr. Ben’s world, I’ve gone from the left to the middle part of the gauge. But to truly get to “health” will take further work — more exercise, more strengthening of the muscles around the joint, more stretching and mobility. I need to go from viable to vital. As I get back into my routine of rowing out on the water and of doing some resistance training, I’ll be trying to move the needle in that direction.
The same is true in the world of food and health. My book tells the story of how I found the ketogenic diet in an attempt to lose weight and improve my health, but how I found along the way that it could also help treat my epilepsy. I did it all backwards — I was fixated on the right side of the gauge, but ended up circling back to left.
When working with clients, Dr. Ben says he’s always striven to get people all the way to health — specifically metabolic health. I asked him to break that down for us a bit. He says that metabolism is all the chemical processes that take place in the creation and use of energy in the body. So metabolic health is when these things are functioning optimally. Diet and exercise together have the ability to influence these processes and pathways, which is why lifestyle, he says, is key to reaching that high level of functioning called health.
For more on these ideas, check out the audio file above, my latest “Small Bites” mini-podcast. And for even more, check out Dr. Ben’s book, 15 Minutes to Fitness: Dr. Ben's SMaRT Plan for Diet and Total Health.
That’s it for this week. Thanks again for joining, and don’t forget to subscribe, share, and all that good stuff!
Note: The ramblings published on this blog re the opinions of the author alone and shared for entertainment purposes only. The author is an English major with no medical or scientific background; thus, his words should never be taken as medical advice. Consult with your doctor or medical professional before undertaking any diet or exercise program.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
Last week, we talked about muscles and I shared some info from my interview with Dr. Ben Bocchicchio , who has spent over 40 years studying muscle fibers, how they work and how to train them. This week, I want to take that out into the real world for the everyday “fathlete” with 15 Minutes to Fitness: Dr. Ben's SMaRT Plan for Diet and Total Health.
At first glance, 15 Minutes looks like any of the other diet books that flood the market every January: an outlandish promise (get fit in 15 minutes? Really??), a flashy cover featuring photos of buff models who have likely never been out of shape in their lives… But citing the case of Book v. Cover, there’s actually more to it than meets the eye. What I really love about this book is that very early on, Dr. Ben’s unique perspective shows up.
what is exercise?
When you think about it, we use the term “exercise” pretty loosely. Dr. Ben points out that we use the word to refer to everything from growing tomatoes to running a triathlon. For a guy who dedicates his life to the research and practice of exercise — in particular, using it as a therapeutic intervention to achieve weight loss and health — it’s important that we put a finer point on it.
For that reason, Dr. Ben starts with making the distinction between “activity” — anything that gets us up and moving, such as hobbies or sports — and “exercise,” which he defines as a targeted intervention that “manipulates your muscle fibers in a specific way for productive weight loss.” In fact, he says, the right kind of captial-E Exercise “positively impacts many other systems in our bodies: cardiovascular, respiratory, endocrine, nervous, skeletal, and so on.”
2b or not 2b?
So what’s Dr. Ben’s prescription to achieve all these benefits? The key to effective exercise is in the muscle fibers worked. In my last post, I shared Dr. Ben’s Famous Muscle Fiber Chart and we talked about the different fibers. In the book, he then goes on to explain that when we exercise our 2B muscle fibers, specifically, all kinds of good things happen:
* Your muscles and bones get stronger
* Your metabolism increases (meaning that you burn more calories all day long)
* Your heart and lungs get more efficient
* Beneficial hormones in your body and brain are stimulated, which keep you looking young and feeling sharp
So how can we be sure to use those 2B fibers? The good news is that it’s not complicated and doesn’t take long. The bad news is that we have to embrace failure.
See, the body doesn’t really want to use the type 2B muscles. They take a lot of energy, and require us to use up our glycogen — a form of sugar that we store in our muscles for a fight-or-flight emergency. The body wants to be efficient, so it will use Type 1 for as long as it can, and only recruit the big guns when absolutely necessary — meaning, when the lower-level fibers can’t handle the load.
success through failure
To experience this for yourself, try doing a wall sit: push your back against the wall and come into a “sitting” position with your knees bent at 90 degrees — like you’re in a straight-backed chair, but minus the actual chair. (Why not try it now? In fact, see if you can hold it while you finish reading this article. I dare you!)
At first, you won’t feel much of anything. The easygoing Type 1 muscles are able to keep you upright just fine. But as seconds tick away, they’ll begin to tire, and your body will ask the Type 2a fibers to help out. Then Type 2ab. Then Type 2b. If you stay there long enough, you’ll feel a burning sensation in your quads, your heart will beat faster, your breath will become labored, and finally, you’ll reach the point where you can hold it no longer. Welcome to muscle failure.
work SMaRTer… but also work harder
Dr. Ben’s SMaRT (Slow, Maximum Response Training) workout, developed over his 40-plus years of experience, and tested in clinical trials at places like Johns Hopkins University, leverages that failure point in each of the major muscle groups in the body.
That may sound like a heavy lift, but it actually only takes 8 exercises, each done for about 30-90 seconds. This is where the “15 Minutes” promise comes in. And because they take a long time to recover, he recommends only doing the workout twice a week. “I’m a bang-for-your-buck kind of guy,” Dr. Ben told me, “hit that failure and get outta Dodge.” In other words, the SMaRT workout represents what they might call in medicine the “minimum effective dose” of exercise — the shortest distance from point A to point 2B.
Sounds simple, right? It is.
Sounds quick? It is.
Sounds easy? It is not.
“Muscle failure” is just as unpleasant as it sounds, and after 15 minutes or so of systematically destroying — er, fatiguing — every major muscle group in the body, I usually wobble away sweaty, red-faced and feeling like a wrung-out dishrag. But on the plus side, I always feel like I’ve done something, and in the two days of recovery, my sore body confirms it.
beginning and re-beginning
When I first found 15 Minutes, it was December of 2019. Rowing season had ended, and I decided to use Dr. Ben’s workout over the winter to try to work on strength and fight off the inevitable holiday weight gain, so I hit the Nautilus machines at the local Y. It was great. I very quickly saw progress in my leg press, leg extension, and rows, and within a few months I was close to using the entire weight stack on several of these machines.
Then March 2020 hit and, well, no more Y. Luckily, Dr. Ben provides three different versions of the workout in his book, so if you don’t have access to a gym, you can use a set of resistance bands or an at-home Total Gym machine. (Remember those Chuck Norris infomercials? Yep, Dr. Ben was the one who trained him. (And if, as popular culture tells us, Chuck Norris is the ultimate badass, then that makes Dr. Ben the badass’s badass, in my book.))
Stuck home in lockdown, I bought myself a set of rubber cables on Amazon for $25 and managed to keep up the routine for another month or two. Unfortunately, my lazier angels got the better of me, and I eventually fell out of the habit. But I’ve recently managed to pick up the bands again and get back to it. (Here’s to re-beginnings, right?)
My assessment? It’s definitely a tough workout, and not always a pleasant one. But on the other hand, it’s over with quickly (15 minutes is a stretch — it usually takes me in the range of twenty, but still not bad) and since it’s so short, and since I do it at home, there’s really no excuse not to squeeze two of these sessions into my week.
For a more detailed look, check out Dr. Ben’s site, where he’s got video tutorials of all three versions of the workout, using actual clients of all ages and fitness levels.
And even though he gives it away for free, the book is still worth a read, in my view, because it’s interesting to know the science behind the program and helpful to understand all the ins and outs. Plus, it includes his “controlled carb” eating plan, which is a great way to get started on a low-carb diet.
As of a few weeks ago, I’m back to rowing on the water with my crew, but I’m going to try to keep the SMaRT workout as part of my weekly routine. I think the combination will be a good balance of “activity” and “exercise.” I’ll keep you posted!
Oh, and for those of you still holding that wall sit, congrats! You may collapse now.
PS: This week I’ll be doing a super-secret BONUS video FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY! Be sure to subscribe using the shiny, red, candy-like button below. All it takes is an email address (even if it’s just your standard fake)!
Note: The ramblings published on this blog are the opinions of the author alone and shared for entertainment purposes only. The author is an English major with no medical or scientific background; thus, his words should never be taken as medical advice. Consult with your doctor or medical professional before undertaking any diet or exercise program.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit unremarkablebrain.substack.com -
Hey, gang! Longtime readers will see something new here: an audio file attached to this post. I’m dipping my toe into the world of podcasting, but combining it with the blogging that I know well. The result of this unholy union is something I’m calling Big Dave’s Small Bites — a short article and a mini-podcast that work together to explore a topic from a few different angles. This week’s post features some more thoughts on the Olympics, combined with some content from my Healthy Happy Hour live series. Feel free to read, listen, or both! Enjoy!
Last week, I was watching my niece compete in the Olympics (did I mention my niece was in the Olympics?) along with some of my family members via Zoom. She represented Team USA in rowing — an event that covers 2000 meters and takes six minutes from start to finish.
“It’s funny,” my cousin said, “during the race, they don’t look like they’re working that hard, but once they cross the finish line, they just collapse of exhaustion!”
It’s true — rowing, when done well, looks effortless, almost mechanistic, in its repetition of precise movements over and over. But paradoxically, it takes a helluva lot of effort to make it look effortless. Success depends on a unique combination of strength, cardiovascular fitness, and the technique to apply both efficiently.
Looking at these rowers, with their chiseled shoulders, arms and legs, and not an ounce of body fat, there’s no doubt that they are world-class athletes through and through. And after the race, I flipped through the other sports coverage and I found it interesting to see the wide variety of events, wide variety of world-class athletes, and wide variety of body types, each well-suited to the work at hand.
It all got me thinking about muscle fibers. In my recent interview with Dr. Ben Boccicchio, we discussed the different types of muscle that are in the body — no, not just thigh-muscle-connects-to-the-shin-muscle type of stuff, but the actual fibers that comprise each and every one of the muscles in your body. This gets a little deep, but here goes…
a muscle is a muscle, right?
What comes to mind when we think about “muscles?” Probably Popeye with a gullet fulla spinach and a bicep swelling to the size of a tank. But the fact is, we all have muscles all over our bodies, and what they looks like, and how they work, depends on how we use them.
Let’s take two ends of the spectrum. First, think of a stocky powerlifter (say, Hidilyn Diaz, who last week became the Philippines’ first-ever Olympic gold medalist). Compare that to a skinny 50k race-walker (which is apparently a thing). Two world-class athletes, two very different bodies, each uniquely adapted to the demands of their sport.
This speaks to the fact that — broadly speaking — power muscles are different from endurance muscles. The thick muscles that create quick bursts of speed and strength, (of the type that’s needed to lift a barbell over your head or sprint 100 meters) are known as fast-twitch muscle fibers. Then there are the long, lean muscles that are able to go for hours and hours at slower speed, (say, in a marathon or triathlon). These are called — you guessed it — slow-twitch muscle fibers.
Another set of terms you might hear when it comes to muscles is aerobic and anaerobic. This refers to how the muscles produce energy. Very simply put, aerobic energy production uses oxygen to create energy. This efficient process is the “default mode” for most activity, be it reading on the couch or walking around the block. Anaerobic production, on the other hand, requires no oxygen; it turns glycogen (sugar) directly into energy. This less-efficient process is sort of like a backup system: the deep reserves that we use in “fight or flight” situations, like lifting a car bumper to save a kid trapped underneath, or sprinting down the aisle at Costco to grab the last rotisserie chicken.
When I spoke with Dr. Ben about it, he used the more scientific terms of Types 1 and 2, with Type 1 being the slowest of the slow-twitch, and Type 2B, the fastest of the fast-twitch.
During our interview, I shared Dr. Ben’s table, which I call, “More Than You Ever Wanted to Know About Muscle Fibers.” As you can see, Type 1 fibers are the most aerobic, and Type 2B are the most anaerobic. (Types 2A and 2A/B are somewhere in between).
It’s probably best if I let him explain in his own words. Click the Play button above to hear Dr. Ben talk us through the chart — not just the science, but how he uses it as a teaching tool, and what it means in real life.
muscle and exercise
Researchers have found that the leg muscles of world-class sprinters are comprised of as much as 75% Type 2 fibers, while marathoners’ muscles can be up to 80% Type 1. This accounts for the obvious physical differences between, say, Usain Bolt and Eliud Kipchoge. Most of us mere mortals, though, have an even 50-50 split.
So what does that mean for our exercise routine? Should we don a leotard and “get physical” with some aerobics? Or break out the kilt and pick up some big rocks at our local Highland Games? Predictably (and frustratingly) enough, the answer is, “it depends” — in this case, on what outcome you’re trying to achieve. The training routine for a powerlifter looks very different from that of a race-walker. According to most studies, a 2000-meter rowing race is around 80% aerobic and about 20% anaerobic, so elite rowers often use a mix of training that mirrors that proportion.
For us normal humans, there are benefits to both kinds of exercise, and our particular goals will determine how we work out. But according to Dr. Ben, there are some unique advantages to taxing our Type 2B muscle fibers, which means that we should make like the Eagles and “take it to the limit” a couple of times per week.
Next time, I’ll get into the idea of training Type 2B fibers, including an overview of Dr. Ben’s SMaRT workout program, which I’ve been using lately and really enjoy. In the meantime, shoot me an email or write a comment below and let me know what you think of this post and this format.
Thanks for reading!
- Big Dave
PS: Don’t forget to check out Dr. Ben’s amazing book, 15 Minutes to Fitness, and his website at www.drbenbo.com
PPS: And while you’re reading stuff, why not look at my book, My Unremarkable Brain, now available wherever books are sold. And don’t forget to leave a review!
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