Podcast Transcription: The Truth About Metabolism, Fat Loss & Strength Training for Longevity with Dr. Mike T. Nelson

Ted Ryce: Mike T. Nelson, really excited to have you back on the show. It's been a while. We had some technical difficulties in the past, but, yeah, really looking forward to catching up with you. You've got a flex, diet certification that you're doing right now. And you also coauthored a new book called triphasic training too. 

Really excited to dive into all of that. So thank you for being here. Yeah. so much for having me on. I really appreciate it. Good to see you again. Yeah. And, the first thing I want to dive into is, the triphasic training too. Triphasic training one when it came out, Caldeets, he brought up or let's say repopularized because isometrics were popular in the past. 

He repopularized going through periods of using isometrics. And can you talk about what triphasic training two is, why the updated version and how it's different and we'll go from there. Yeah.  

Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. Yeah. So the idea of triphasic training is. all movements have three phases, right? So if you think of simply a squat, you're going to unwrap the bar and you're going to go down initially. 

So the down portion is a fancy word we call eccentric. And then at the bottom, you'll have a very slight pause. Some global gym goers don't have much of a pause and it looks bad, but there is some type of pause. If you look close enough, you'll see it. So that is the isometric phase, where there is momentarily no movement. 

And then you have the reverse phase. You're going to have what's called the concentric phase. You're going to get the bar back to where you started again. And so what he realized was that all movements have These three phases, I'll try phasic and for, he initially did it for his high level athletes, but then later found even lower level athletes, even a lot of other populations got better results. 

If you split up the three phases over your training. So like a really simple one, let's say you want to improve your squad, right? So your first week one and week two. You would do the eccentric phase where you would try to emphasize the lowering of the squat. So you may take four to six seconds to lower it all the way down. 

You may use a pretty heavy load, stop for a split second and come back up. And then week three and four, so the next two weeks, you would emphasize that isometric you're talking about. So not go all the way down to the bottom and just, hang out on your calves and your hamstrings. You would go all the way to the bottom and come up about an inch, maybe two inches or less so that you're actively trying to hold that position, just up from the bottom, which is way harder than it looks or that you would imagine. 

So for me, that's like by far my weakest area for sure. And then the final weeks, the last two weeks, then you would just work on the concentric, trying to come up from the bottom as fast as you can. And then you would go back and, retest your squad, whether it's a 1 rep max, 5 rep max, whatever, it doesn't matter. 

And what he found was that doing just some type of emphasis where you emphasize each of the three components on their own, that the results were dramatically, better. And so that was the genesis of the, triphasic. Now, what he found was, since he's working with athletes that have to also perform on the field, is that transferred much better to the field. 

So when he initially put athletes on these, the time was 50, 000 force plates that measure how much force you're putting into the ground on, say, a squad. You would look at it and it would look like this kind of weird shaped you, like the athletes who are not as good. They could maybe move the same amount, absolute load, say three 65. 

But it would be a very kind of slow eccentric, somewhat of a stop and a slow concentric. The athletes who are really good could violently go down really fast, stop for a split second, and then come up really fast. So their shape looked more like a V instead of this distorted U. And he realized that the eccentric lowering phase was probably one of the rate limiters. 

And so that's how he started playing with longer periods of eccentric. Later realized, oh yeah, the isometric might be a limiter also. So he found that athletes could move the same load much faster, which translated into much better performance on the field. So if you think about how you have to stop and change directions, that changing of direction, that's a real violent, eccentric component. 

And so you're training that also. So that was back. Ooh. I think he started looking at that stuff like the early two thousands, I think. I wanna say the first book was published 12 years ago. and I had the luxury, I did my biomedical PhD work at the University of Minnesota, then later did my PhD in exercise visit at Minnesota. 

And so I did my PhD in exercise fizz, like Cal's area was literally, I don't know, 30 seconds from where I was at. so I go over and harass him on breaks and stuff like that. And he get bored sometimes and wander over to the lab. yeah, so that's how it all started.  

Ted Ryce: Very cool. And this triphasic training to book, why write a second edition? 

What's different about what he initially discovered and now, and also how did you, coauthored the book? So what was, how did you add to it to make it even better? Yeah.  

Mike T. Nelson: so the second one, which I have the pre print copy here, exciting. literally just came out the other day and it's actually not even an update to the first one. 

It's taking those same principles and saying, okay, if you like those principles, we have the official title, cause I have to read it cause it changed so many times. 14 high performance methods to unlock elite athletic development. So it's all, it's 14 brand new methods. There's actually more in there than that, but I thought 14 sounded good. 

And I didn't want to say 47 new methods and put a name on every little single thing. But the goal was, okay, so if you buy into those methods. What are the extension of all of those methods? And then also, more importantly, and maybe more relevant for your audience too, is how do you support the training of those methods? 

Because one of the keys to it is the training stress that is applied during the triphasic model is pretty high. So what do you, what kind of shape do you have to be in, so to speak, to handle that level of training? So in the book, there's literally how to think almost like 80 pages on aerobic training, like cardiovascular training and like a hardcore strength book, because what he realized and I realized the same thing, just after he did and we compared notes, is that your aerobic system, so your cardio strength, your VO two max, whatever words you want to use associated with it. 

That's probably going to be limiting to how much exercise and how much stress you can handle as a physical organism. Now, that may be stress in the boardroom, that may be stress from running a business, that may be lack of sleep, whatever. But the higher your VO2 max, your aerobic metabolism, the more you are just generally resilient to stress. 

So he realized to do higher stress methods with his athletes. He actually had to back up and make sure their aerobic system could handle it first before he could add more stress to them. So we've got, I don't know, all different types of aerobic systems from like contralateral training to old school aerobic stuff. 

And none of it's just go run, right? Because you have a, a 280 pound natural hammer thrower, go run five miles is going to be horrible advice, right? So how do you do it with, some of those limitations? Which works well because, a lot of people can't run, don't want to run, they're not able to, etc. 

Should you be able to, at some point, to do some sprints, I think it's definitely a good, diagnostic, movement. And then the second component is, we took and said, okay, how do, the biggest thing that I think I helped with is, a lot of it is all his methods, like I added some of the aerobic stuff and some of the science stuff, and there's, I think we ended up with, 155 references or something, which took way too much of my life. 

The thing I added was I've known Cal for probably 17 years now. And he, the stuff he comes up with, I don't see anyone else coming up with stuff that's similar. And he just thinks completely different, but he's also practical. Like his job depends upon getting results for his college and professional athletes. 

So he has to be very practical at the same time, but they've all evolved over the last about 10 years. It's not like he. did some, ayahuasca journey and woke up with 40 different ideas and had the whole thing mapped out for the next 10 years of his life. It was an iterative process of, hey, we tried this. 

That didn't work. We tried this. Let's go to this direction. And he talks about creating problems. He didn't even know he had problems that he had then had to solve, right? high stress applied to athletes. Oh, crap. I need to get the stress level here, but oops, we just, we can't do that. What do we have to do before that? 

Oops. We have to go do some aerobic training. so for me, the hardest part was how do you organize all this? Because I'm very, engineering background, very linear. And I think most people think in more of a linear fashion. So how do you take this amorphous mix of all these different methods and put it in a linear fashion? 

So we came up with just starting with a workout. So you're going to do your turn on phase. So it's turned on train transfer. So turn on is going to be your warmup. What kind of warmup do you do? How do you get ready? What are some integration drills you would do? What are the different training methods then for the second part? 

The third method then is if you're an elite athlete, how does that transfer to the field? What are things you can do to increase your ability to perform on the field? Not just necessarily in the weight room. So that was the biggest thing of. Just getting it in some linear format and to have it be understandable to people who haven't hung out with Cal for 17 years of their life. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, one of the criticisms I have of his first book, it was really hard for me to understand, even though I, for everyone to understand, myself included, and I was there. What are you saying here, man? Oh, yeah. So yeah, it was hard to understand it, which made it hard to implement, but, yeah, thanks. 

that's amazing. And do you know, Brad Thorpe, the ISO fit guy? Oh yeah. I don't  

Mike T. Nelson: know him, but I followed his stuff like back in the day.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. He's, I have him on the show like once a year just to keep promoting isometrics because sure. Although he's a bit, let's say a bit of a zealot, Oh yeah. I can't get on board with no, I'm just going to do isometric training. 

Maybe if I'm old and beat up and there's, nothing else, I can't make any sort of dynamic exercise work for me. Okay. But. there's, fun in doing certain types of exercise, which I would argue is important to consistency and, getting the max enjoyment out of life. But why bring it up is because this is such an underappreciated part of training. 

And as you said, there's always an isometric component, whether you're doing a back squat and you think, yeah, I'm working my legs. No, your, erector spinae, your back muscles. Or working isometrically. So you don't topple over, you're doing a bicep curl again, holding your posture. You're already training isometric exercise or training, certain muscles isometrically, you're just probably not doing it intentionally or optimally. 

And so what I really like about the triphasic approach is Hey, let's intentionally train this and even better that, he's seen real world results with his athletes. One thing I would say though. A lot of the talk that you just, you know, this great explanation that you just gave, how would you link it to a person who isn't an elite athlete? 

I'm not an elite athlete as much as I'd, like to believe, in my jujitsu practice, but, how do you link the two together?  

Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. And it's. It's a good question because like I've, I sent out a note to my email list, which is not, I work with some high level athletes, but most of my people are actual other, trainers. 

Most people looking for some level of performance, trying to gain muscle, trying to lose fat. They're probably at an intermediate to maybe somewhat advanced level, but. I've got a bunch of weird, cases of people that are actually very detrained for various other reasons too. So I have a real wide spectrum. 

And my argument was that, yes, this is geared to higher level athletes. Yes. These methods are. Pretty stressful and are probably more advanced than what you'll see. but one, you can take the cardiovascular section and anybody can do that. Like you can, drop that into literally anybody's program. 

You just have to scale it down to where they're at. And it's very easy because most of them are scaled on heart rate. So if you start to do one of the programs from it and your heart rate, just woo, like red lines. And your goal is to be in the aerobic area. Okay, now you know for sure you definitely have to, just make it easier, do less, do more rest, etc. 

So the aerobic stuff, I think, is pretty easy to drop into most programs. on the string side, it's a little bit harder, but I think the ideas can transfer. So one of the ideas there is like the supermax method, which again, we're not expecting people to do these super heavy isometrics at 120 percent of the 1RM or anything like that. 

But! If that concept is valid, which I would think that it is. And let's say maybe you just want to downhill ski without pain. Maybe your knees could handle some bodyweight isometrics in a lunge position for a period of time. And that sounds pretty easy, but if you've done it, which I know you have, after a few seconds even, it's way harder than it looks. 

And, myself, too, people that are more on the business side who, you know, a lot of them, it's yeah, I run a business. I'm super busy, but I just want to downhill ski with my friends on weekends and not be in pain and keep up to them. So don't kick my ass. Do this exercise. I guarantee your knees will feel better. 

And as soon as they do it, I'm like, Oh, does this kind of feel like what you would feel like at the end of a hard day of skiing? Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Could you see how this could improve your skiing or snowboarding? Oh yeah. Yeah. Okay. Same idea. You're just, you're not using 120 percent of one or M on a yoke bar. 

You're just doing body weight at a bottom or top position. So I think a lot of the same concepts can, transfer across. And then in the warm up section, we talk about using RPR, Reflexive Performance Reset. We give you the top three things to do for that. That'll literally help everybody. in my biased opinion, I sound like some crazy RPR person, but I've been taught for it for many years, learned it from Doug Heel, learned it from Cal and Chris. 

so I think that's super useful for everyone, because the biggest issues we see is The hip not being able to cycle all the way back into extension, if you watch people in an airport or a mall, their hips do this side to side thing, and they're not really generating force behind them, compared to watching, high level, sprinter is a really good example. 

Most people would have access to. And then there's something he has called the goat drill. Which the first time he showed this to me, I was literally convinced, okay, he's absolutely completely lost his mind. Now, this is the, I said that about RPR to you and that turned out to be useful, but what it is a warmup drill. 

But it's to integrate your senses better into where your body is at. So if you think about again, if we go to the extreme high level and we back down from there, like I'm a big Vikings fan, so watching Justin Jefferson. catch a ball with one hand falling out of bounds, like bringing the ball in and keeping the speed inbounds. 

the stuff elite level athletes do is just bonkers, but that's a high level coordination of where their limbs are in space, what they're seeing with their eyes, what their balance is saying. And a lot of people would do better if their coordination of those systems was even just a little bit better. 

they want to be recreational pickle ball or just have less pain or whatever. So the goat trail is working to coordinate all of those things. And the simplest level, you've got two kind of hula hoops on the ground and you're running a figure eight pattern between them, but you're looking at one target, the target doesn't move. 

So your head and eyes are always fixated on the same target. So your lower body is in moving around your head. And then you're passing a ball around your waist. And if you want to take it up a level, you would add a cognitive component, what's called dual tasking. You would start maybe at 99 and count backwards by threes or sevens. 

You would do a cognitive task as you're doing all of this. And you look at, and that's a simple version. He has like super advanced versions are crazy. And the first time I even saw that simple version, I'm like, what are you doing? This is like insane. This looks like the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my life. 

And then you try it and then you realize, Oh, and then you think about what's actually going on. You're like, Oh, and for some people, it might just be okay. Initially, let's just run a figure eight pattern. Can you figure out where to put your feet in your hands and everything in there? Cool. Can we do that now and fix your head in one spot? 

Okay, great. Can we do that now? Can we add a motion to your hands at the same time? So again, I think some of those principles can be used and scaled to other people who are obviously not going to be competing in high level athletics.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah, I love that. And it brings up something that I think gets left out in, let's say the narrative about health and fitness and specifically exercise for non athletes. 

It's Hey, listen, it's nice to go sit in the gym and do your leg extensions and your machine chest press. And there's nothing wrong with that. Yeah. We now know compared to what we used to think back in the day. There's not as much difference with hypertrophy and strength development, but no, there's this nervous system component, there's balance, there's the integration of systems that you're mentioning. 

So very cool. I love that. I can't wait to get this book. So that kind of ties it in together. And if you're listening right now, this is the type of thing that I would even say this. Mike, it's we're not elite athletes, but we should aspire based on our time restraints, our time constraints and our movement limitations. 

We should try to keep a high level of, let's say readiness because you want to avoid falling or you want to travel the world and go to Lisbon, Portugal, where. There's hills and these funky tiles that you have to step on and right. So just making sure you have enough in reserve so that you can do whatever it is that you want to do. 

Chase after your grandchildren. Very important. Yeah. And  

Mike T. Nelson: I would just add a component to that. I think. I'm a big fan of everyone should have some form of recreation. I don't even care what it is. Like I do a lot of kiteboarding, learn to surf, learn to snowboard and learn to ski cross country ski help play pickleball for all I care. 

tennis, like just put your body in this, what I call a semi predictable fashion, right? So if I'm kiteboarding, yeah, I know what the wind is, but the wind's always changing. The waves are changing. My position is changing on the board. If you're playing pickleball, like you don't know exactly where the ball's going to come. 

Like you have an idea. It's probably not going to continue to launch it out of the, the area all the time, but your body has to react unconsciously in those positions. And then when you go back and train, you have a way of also evaluating your training. Are you do you feel like your skill is getting a little bit better or, not? 

And like you said, that also transfers to all the things people want. I want to play with my kids. I want to go on a hike. I don't want to be. Limited. I don't want to fall and break my hip. so I think it does translate to a lot of those other things. And I think in general, in the health and fitness space, it's, I feel like we're still stuck in that seventies mentality of don't do things that matter, bro. 

Or muscle and how lean you are. It's yeah, that's cool. if you want to be a competitive bodybuilder or whatever, that's all you're graded on. Cool. go, bonkers. However, most people, I think what kind of want, yeah, more muscle, one better body comp, but I don't think they want to do it at the degradation of their movement. 

And I've definitely screwed myself over big time by chasing those two things only, and just letting my movement degrade to absolute crap. And that did not end well. What do you mean? What happened? Basically because some of the stuff I have, so when I was four and a half, I had an open heart surgery, I had an atrial septal defect. 

And so that was repaired when I was four and a half. So it was 1978. So only three places in the U S that, did those types of repairs. My heart was the size of someone who was 18 because the blood is mixing from the top chamber becomes very inefficient. They really couldn't do much of any movement per se. 

It didn't really make any sense to me until later in life, you realize. Oh, yeah, a lot of those movement patterns and just aerobic base and the things you would develop as a kid. I just didn't do much because I couldn't move around a lot. And then I also had a strabismus, or what's called amblyopia in your eye. 

So my eyes would not, initially as a kid, would not track together. So I would see in double vision a lot. And their solution then was to patch, the eye to make the lazy eye work better. My eyes then tracked normal and they're like, Hey, you're good. Didn't realize until about 20 years later doing some vision training courses that, Oh, I see in monovision and I've seen in monovision my whole life. 

I don't see in binocular. So death perception, it wasn't anything I really had. And I just thought it was normal. I'm like, ah, some kids suck athletically. They get hit in the face with balls and, it doesn't work. So shocker, I had a lot of very bad scoliosis because your body is going to literally form around the image that your brain thinks you're seeing the world. 

So if you're seeing the world at like this twisted kind of rotated view, your brain doesn't like that. So it'll literally throw your body under the bus to try to create something that's more, stable. And adding a lot of heavy bilateral exercises, even when I started to have pain and just was told, and this is my own fault, ah, you're just a pussy. 

Just suck it up. that's part of the process. If you want to get stronger, just squat bench and dad, that's the only thing you need to do. And yeah, it just ended up with a lot of chronic pain. And I remember it got so bad. I remember taking an Epsom salt bath after some training and asked the guy who was running that. 

I said. I'm wondering about this direction. I picked this, I'm not going to be an elite level athlete. I'm definitely not going to be an elite level power lifter. All I'm getting is more pain and not even progress. And he's maybe you should fire your coach and try something different. 

I was like, Oh,  

Ted Ryce: what a  

Mike T. Nelson: novel idea. but again, that was all my fault because I knew my movement was degrading, but I just didn't place any priority on it whatsoever. And you see this in most clients, like I can guarantee is as a quality of their movement degrades. At some point they are gonna have more pain. 

Like they may be able to compensate, they may be able to get rid of it for a while. but that will happen. And again, that doesn't mean they need to also be hyper worried about every movement. And if they, take a slight inhale wrong in a squat, they're gonna, destroy themselves. Like you're, much more resilient than that. 

but just paying attention to it. The simplest thing I do with clients is. When you wake up in the morning, how much pain do you have? One to ten. And is that muscle pain or joint pain? And if your joint pain is escalating, we're gonna have a conversation about where is your limit. Some people, their limit's really high, they don't care. 

It's a six. For me, mine is so low now, it's like a one or a two. if I wake up multiple days in a row with joint pain, I'm gonna, within a few days, I'm gonna drastically do something different, cause I just, that's my cutoff personally. And everyone has their own personal cutoff.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah, I would love to. We should have a separate conversation. 

I feel I want to get to the flex diet certification. What metabolic flexibility is maybe even a refresher on what metabolism is for those people who, have a broke quote unquote broken metabolism or slow metabolism. But man, that's such a, that's something I do as well, but I'd love to hear more about your approach to it. 

If I wake up and I'm feeling jacked up, meaning I'm at, let's say joint pain of six or seven. I don't do things like before. And for me that it was jujitsu, it's no, but go to jujitsu because it's good for, lift weights, go to jujitsu because it's good for your muscles, give your brain, And it's all true, but you start to realize that there's a great meme that shows your muscles, it's like a personification of your muscles and your joints and the muscle is saying Hey guys, I'm going to get big and strong to your connective tissue. 

And the connective tissue is all cussing and flicking off the muscle. Because the thing is, these two parts of your body are very connected, but. The issue is, as you accumulate joint damage, let's say from inflammation or overuse or whatever, it becomes the limiting factor for getting and staying in shape. 

So you can't just keep training and have your, as you said, your joint pain continue to escalate. You will get to a point where you have to stop, which instead of changing direction, a lot of people, what they do, at least the ones I've talked to, they stopped training. Yeah. I just stopped entirely. They stopped entirely. 

It's the worst thing because now you have this injured joint that needs more support from the muscles. And now, the muscles are weak or less condition. Yeah. And so you need to have strategies. That, that can help you feel better and recover from, the, from feeling beat up. Yeah. 

Do you have anything else you can add there?  

Mike T. Nelson: The only thing I would add is it's all trade offs. so if you're, if you really, love jujitsu, so I really love kiteboarding. And I know that if I screw up a bunch of jumps and get dropped out of the sky from 15 to 20 feet, one, I probably should not try to land some of those. 

I've been trying to land stuff that's too hot. that's not good. But if I wake up the next day And that session overall was still fun, and I have a lot of knee pain, which I've definitely had in the past. I'm okay with it now. Now, I'm going to probably try to change it. I'm going to try to get better with the kite. 

I'm trying not, probably going to be as aggressive. I'm probably going to pull back a little bit. I'm going to try to land most of my jumps. And even last year, I took a whole year of just having the whole two hour session a week of just hammering the shit out of my quads in the gym because I realized my quads relative to my hamstrings and glutes were incredibly weak. 

So what does it mean shock absorber when you're coming down? It's primarily the quads again, it's your whole leg, it's your whole system. But relatively speaking, my quads were incredibly weak. So I did a lot of, single leg work. I did a lot of single leg presses, belt squats, trying to go all the way down to sit on your heels, like hack squat, narrow, like as deep as you can go lighter weight and a year later, it's Oh, I didn't have near the amount of knee pain either, but again, those are all active trade offs that. 

If I have that amount of pain lifting, I'm probably going to change something immediately because the trade off there is not worth it for me. And I feel like I have more options and more places to go. So again, it's not like you said, it's not a good or bad. It's just, let's just be aware of it. And let's be grown adults. 

And let's take responsibility for the things we did do ourselves. And if that trade off is worth it to you, cool. who am I to say, but I think most of the time that's not. An active, conscious conversation. It's just something like, Oh, this always happens to me. Or, that's just the price I have to pay or, and all that stuff. 

I think it's just a bunch of bullshit.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. And I just want to follow up with one thing that you said that I thought was really important. The way I look at training in the gym, and I'm sure you're On the same page with this. It's that's not my, that's not where I go to push my body to the limit. 

That's where I go to prepare my body to push it to the limit. I'm not in there, trying to demonstrate strength. I'm trying to build it for jujitsu because jujitsu is way more just like kiteboarding and landing those. It's just way more than anything that you'll ever experience. So one of the things that I think is important, if you're listening right now, don't look at the gym as a place to beat your, to beat yourself up. 

It's to build yourself up for whatever you do. And if you're not doing anything, then maybe like you said earlier, Mike, get a hobby to train for, even if it's pickleball. Yeah.  

Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. And the last part of that is what is your priority of training and recreation and what risks are you willing to pay? 

So for me, like my name one is just kiteboarding. Second is probably grip training. For me, grip training is pretty safe. It has a built in limiter. You're either going to make the lift or you're not. So it's, pretty safe. You can push pretty hard and still be safe with kiteboarding. 

I've Accepted that if I get injured and I'm hoping I'm not, I, people may watch it and look like it's crazy, but I feel like I'm actually hyper conservative compared to a lot of my friends. I've accepted the fact that if I get injured, that I'm okay with it. I don't want it to happen. I'm going to be pissed off for quite a while. 

But if I get injured in the gym of something that I did, I'm going to be even more pissed off because to me, that's, it's not my number one priority. And it's a much more controlled environment. Like the weights are not moving around, trying to hit me and shit. same with Jiu Jitsu. Like you can only control what you can. 

You can't control what the other crazy person you're doing against. Shit's just going to happen at some point. Yeah. You're going to try to mitigate it. You're going to try to train. You're trying to be in shape, have discussions beforehand. What's the goal, the role, all that stuff. But shit might happen and that's okay to me and those kind of more uncontrolled environments if that's what you enjoy and if that's what you want to do. 

So again, back to what are your priorities and what is the risk reward that each person is willing to pay for it.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah, said. listen, let's change directions here. Let's talk about metabolic flexibility. Let's start with. What, should people listening right now who think they might have a slow metabolism? 

Cause that's something I still hear from people in their forties and fifties and sixties. So can you talk about that? And then we can get into what metabolic flexibility is.  

Mike T. Nelson: So the biggest thing you'll hear, I hear this mostly from guys. I still hear it a lot from women too. Oh, bro. My metabolism just slows down so much as I age. 

ah, I used to eat everything and do everything when I was in my twenties and now I'm, these are people I'm 50. Like these are people like, Oh, I just turned 40 and my life is just a disaster. I can't lose weight. and then you tell them that. the research says that unless you're, start getting over 60, and that's even debatable, your metabolism really doesn't slow down much with age. 

Now, the big caveat to that is, as long as you have been as active as you were when you were younger. this implies you're doing your exercise, you're lifting weights, you're doing some cardio, you're doing your neat, you're doing your walking. And most people are, Not doing those things. So if you look at the research, it is a pretty linear response, meaning that still holds pretty well with age up to around 60, 65, but you then talk to them, you're like, oh, I work 10 hours a day, we've got two kids. 

I was a busy executive or whatever their job is. I got to drive a half hour to work and drive back home. And so you realize that because of modern life and responsibilities and everything, they're just not running around on campus exercising once a day and having to walk 12, 000 steps just by accident to get to class. 

So on the flip side, then it's okay, let's build in some strength training. Let's add some strength. Let's do some cognitive stuff there. Let's make sure you hold on to as much muscle as possible. Let's do some cardiovascular stuff. Let's make sure you're actually walking. you can literally get walking steps off of everything now, so it's easy to get and, 95 percent of the time just doing those things and, making sure your nutrition is not a floating trash bin fire, like shocker, have some micro nutrition, like green things in your diet that are not skittles, protein, kind of basic stuff, vast majority of the time, everything starts to turn around. 

The last one, obviously, would be sleep. there's a bunch of studies showing sleep is related to metabolism pretty big time. But once you have those down, which again, does take effort, is a long term thing. You're not going to snap your fingers and have everything fixed overnight, like work with a professional. 

It's, it does take time. Most of the time, all their metabolism issues go away. are there outliers to that? Yes, but everybody thinks they're the outlier. That's what's funny. after that, people are like, oh, my thyroid's low. It's that can happen. But even then, maybe 10 to 15 percent off your metabolic rate, according to literature. 

So is it a factor? Yes. Is it, 50%? Nope. and people also think that they're resting metabolic rate. So if you come into a lab or you come into my house, because I have a freaking metabolic heart, because I'm a weirdo. And you just lay down, they put this little mask over you, measures all the air that comes in and out, and that's a pretty good marker of what they call indirect calorimetry, of what your metabolic rate is. 

You're just hanging out, you're literally not doing anything, you're just resting. Most people are convinced that theirs is like 800 calories or something, just obscenely low. And it's, I've measured a whole bunch of people. It's probably not. I even looked at the literature on anorexics, because I'm like, this sounds horrible, but what is a population that we know is probably drastically under eating to the effect that it's a disease and they have serious health issues? 

Oh, anorexic population. And if you look at their resting metabolic rate, scaling it to body weight, it's lower, but it's not that shockingly low. in the literature, you're going to be hard pressed to find someone under 800, 900 calories a day. it does scale with body size, so if you're a very small individual, yes, some of those people could potentially get down that low. 

I got dudes that are 200 pounds are telling me, bro, my resting metabolic rates, like 900. I guarantee by looking at you, it's not 900, unless you're on death's door or something drastically wrong has happened, like it's not. And we measure them. It's low end, maybe 1200, 1500. So that's usually not it. 

The other caveat I would add is that. I think there's still too much emphasis on the actual numbers. People think that, oh, if I just had a faster metabolism, it would solve all my issues. But they forget that the biggest thing that controls the rate of your metabolism is actually neat. It's called non exercise activity thermogenesis. 

Like how much you walk around, how much your twitch, how much you move in terms of controllable factors. That's probably the biggest one. And in most people, unless you're doing a ton of exercise, it's actually higher than formal exercise. Now, again, marathon runners, triathletes, professional athletes, the other, their need isn't going to be higher than that. 

But for most people, and you ask them, what's your step count? Oh, it's 5, 000 a day. Cool. Like over time, if we can just get you to 10, 000, 12, 000, I guarantee that'll make a massive difference related to it. So yeah, that's my little soapbox speech.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. Yeah. so important. So important. 

So you can, I think the big takeaway is look, if you really believe this. And, go get it tested. Yeah. Go get it tested and, get some data to back up what you're saying. And you'll most likely find, or at least 99 percent of the time, you're going to find that, there's nothing wrong with your metabolism at all, other than the things that you mentioned, Mike. 

Is that you don't move around and if you haven't been strength training, you've been losing muscle. That's one thing I think people don't understand. I've heard people in the past tell me, Hey, my weight hasn't changed, but I'm a lot fatter. It's do you lift weights? Okay. So your body composition changed. 

You lost muscle gain fat, but the scale didn't really register the change because of. The muscle loss and the fat gain were, let's say more equal. So really important. And then the other thing is. this, idea that we can burn a lot of calories from our exercise, that was something that blew my mind back, a few years back when we started looking into how much is actually getting burned via, that hard workout, because what we'll think. 

Mike, and you know this, Oh, it was so hardcore. That 20 minute hit session was so hardcore. I must've been like 2000 calories or whatever. It's no, not really. No. It really more is more about how much time you spend moving versus, certainly the intensity of movement matters. And then there's the afterburn effect. 

It really is more of like, how much do you move throughout the day, regardless of whether you're lifting weights, going running, or just walking, or like you said, just twitching, which, funny to think about, but it's more about that. So once you start to realize, Hey, this is more about getting in some movement, however I can, and all those seemingly ridiculous. 

Ideas like, Hey, take the stairs instead of the elevator. It really does. When you start doing that, man, it's so much easier to stay lean. So much easier.  

Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, all those things add up. And the other second part to your question about metabolic flexibility is the second component that I think is underrated is how healthy is your metabolism from what fuels you're using at the right time, which I think is also underappreciated. 

So as you become. Less metabolically flexible, and I'll explain what that is. Your body will shift away from using fat under lower to moderate level exercise. The metabolic flexibility has three components. How well can your body use carbohydrates, which is good for high intensity exercise. How well can your body use fat as a fuel, which is good for just hanging out, having conversations like this, low level, moderate, intensity, exercise, walking, and then how fast can you switch back and forth between those two? 

So I think people get too hung up on the number, the amount of calories that they burn and yes, that's super important. Yes. Calories in calories out. All that stuff still works. Physics has not been violated. Entropy is real. A second law of thermodynamics. So I had to suffer through all that shit when I was in college. 

but if you're looking at the health of the system and the capacity to make change, I would argue that also what fuel you're using, the right fuel at the right time is also, very important. Beneficial as a marker of metabolic health. So someone who is more metabolically flexible is more healthy. 

Someone who's metabolically inflexible. We know that's leading to different metabolic diseases like type two diabetes, et cetera.  

Ted Ryce: So, part of this has to do with their insulin resistance as well.  

Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. Insulin resistance will be a huge. Monkey wrench to all of that. So you can think of insulin as your body's kind of fuel selector switch. 

So insulin has been pretty much demonized a lot. So higher levels of insulin acutely, again, this isn't a healthy individual will push your body to use more carbohydrates. So if I do, if I have two pop tarts for breakfast, my insulin levels are going to go up and that is a good thing because that's a signal to your body to say, Hey, we've got a bunch of blood glucose coming in. 

We need to get it the hell out of the bloodstream, store it somewhere, put it in muscle, maybe convert it to fat, which does happen, but not at a real high rate, just get it out of here. so insulin levels will go up and your body will actually start oxidizing or burning more of those carbohydrates. 

So when insulin levels are low, the body will preferentially use more fat as a fuel, but You're doing fasted exercise. It is true that as a percentage of the fuel being used, fat will be more used as a fuel source when insulin levels are low. Again, that's a whole different debate about how much does that add up long term is a whole probably hour podcast just on that. 

But my bias is if you're doing low to moderate intensity exercise, you want the body's ability to use fat as a fuel anyway. That's a healthier alternative. You don't need to use a high energy fuel source such as carbohydrates for that. So you want to make sure you've got those three components in place. 

And then you're correct that as you become more resistant to insulin at the muscle level, Your body's solution is to then put out more and more insulin. So if you look at the progression towards a diabetic state, as more and more insulin is floating around, which you can check on a blood test, you can look at a 24 hour marker like c peptide, you do find that those people tend to get shifted away from using fat as a fuel. 

The body is going, Oh, my God, we've got all this insulin floating around. Let's just stay on this carbohydrate. The end of the spectrum to try to deal with the things that are going on.  

Ted Ryce: And right. So looking at we, we run biomarkers, we run C peptide fasting insulin in, all the, fasting glucose and hemoglobin A1C. 

Yep. Like perfect. So what are. So you'll see that on the C peptide. So you're looking for insulin resistance. How do you, how would you train someone to become more metabolically flexible? And what would that show up as if you ran a panel?  

Mike T. Nelson: Yep. So the hallmarks of I'm looking at blood work on it for someone who's probably not metabolically flexible, and I don't have anything, let's say. 

You just give me, dude bro's blood work and say, Hey, does this person have metabolic issues? what are your top things you're looking at? Definitely looking at fasting glucose, A1C as you mentioned, roughly three month marker of blood glucose. Fasting insulin, yes. I'm just looking at a rough range. 

It'll vary a lot minute to minute. But I'm just looking at is it low or is it high or is it just like astronomically off the chart. C peptide, it's a better 24 hour marker of insulin. And then I'm also going to look at triglycerides. because if you have a high levels of triglycerides, that's literally an indication that you have fat that is building up in the bloodstream because you can't get it the hell out of there. 

and that is also a consequence of glucose metabolism not working so well, your fat metabolism, you get squished from both ends of the spectrum. So if those are the things, those are like the, primary things, there's other things you can look at, but those would be the primary things I'd look at. 

you can get fancier after that and look at, like glycomark, which is a marker of ischemic variability, oral glucose tolerance tests, et cetera. But on a basic blood panel, those are the ones I'd look at. If those are goofy, obviously the first thing I'm going to look at is make sure you're not in a caloric surplus. 

Like we're probably going to put you in a caloric deficit of some degree, because that's just going to fix all sorts of shit, like magically. But specifically, I want you to do more exercise that's going to target higher end carbohydrate metabolism. So lifting weights and maybe a couple intervals, just once or twice a week. 

And then I'm going to try to target the fat metabolism in. We're going to bump up your step count and probably have you do, shocker, some fasted cardio, which I'm sure I'll get lots of hate mail for. Zone two is popular now. If you want to do his own to watch Netflix, cool. Like you're probably going to need to do some work on both ends of that spectrum. 

Of course, assuming the rest of your life, your stress and your sleep and all that stuff is, semi manageable.  

Ted Ryce: Yeah. so the way to bring that blood sugar dysregulation is to. Calorie deficit, high intensity exercise, lifting weights, potentially some HIIT training, real HIIT training, not the body weight thing you got off YouTube. 

Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. If you're going to do HIIT training, my bias is use a bike or use a rower because you're automatically going to get output on it. And most people like biomechanically can go pretty hard on those implements. if you're a sprinter, yeah, you can go hard spring. If you're an elite level swimmer, you can probably swim pretty hard. 

Most people's mechanics on those things are not all that great. Same with cross country skiing and versa climber. Those are some other ones to do. I love the rower cause it's full body and you always get an output. And so the key with doing intervals is. I don't want to see interval 1 and then see like a 40 percent drop off to interval 2. 

at best, maybe 5 10 percent drop off and I probably don't even want that much. Because most people go by how hard it felt, and I can give you all sorts of heinous shit that'll make you feel bad, like you want to feel bad, do 30, 30, like 30 seconds on as hard as you can on a rower, 30 seconds rest, and then go again, like you're going to hate your life, right? 

But most people will see a massive drop off between interval one and two or three on that. And so they're training an output that's lower. And what you were saying about Just how we think of metabolism, we think of burning calories. I try to train all my clients to think of exercise and even cardiovascular stuff is I want to see your output. 

I want to see what you can physically do. Because if you can physically do more over time, one, we know you got the adaptations we want. And two, you're automatically going to be burning more calories. I can give you all sorts of stuff that'll burn a bunch of calories and there's a time and a place to do that. 

But if you are not getting the adaptations we want from it, you're Your only solution is just to do more of that thing, and that's not going to end well. And literally the rest of your life is probably not going to get any better. And you're going to be pissed at me and fire me, right? But if we show that, Hey, you got stronger, you added more muscle. 

Hey, you're able to do more volume, able to do more density. Oh, wow. Last time in the roar, you can only hit, 30 seconds. You're averaged 230 Watts. Great. Six weeks later, you can average 245 Watts now. Awesome. Like we have concrete proof that you're actually getting better and your output is better. 

Therefore, all the things downstream that we want, we can 100 percent agree you are getting those adaptations. Now, they will be a little bit different from one person to the next, like muscle hypertrophy. Some people just get bigger a lot faster than other people, but for you as an individual, we can be pretty darn sure that you are getting the maximum amount or close to it from your physiology at that point. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, it's spring up. Such a good point. So Mike, a question is, you're looking at the output, let's say on a rower or bike, and you see you do 30 thirties, and so that 30, that first 32nd interval, you're going hard. But then let's say there's a, like you mentioned, a 40% drop off. So this isn't just about what your heart rate is doing, it's about what the output is. 

Yep. What happens, let's say your heart rate is still high, but the output drops. What does that mean? Does that mean you're not going to have adaptations? You're not burning as many calories. What is the effect? Because probably the majority of people listening right now who've tried interval training, that's what's happened to them. 

They tried to Tabata or the 30, 30 or. So can you explain that a little bit more?  

Mike T. Nelson: Yeah. What'll happen is they'll make progress for about two to three weeks and they'll hit a wall and they'll hate their life because they're literally accumulating more fatigue. That's not increasing, say cardiovascular output and the solution to that. 

And it's literally because they're not able to do the output. I know it sounds like Like rhetorical, like the, the snake chasing his tail or whatever. So the solution then is, okay, let's, rig the system so that you can get that output. So I'm going to get rid of your 30 second rest period. 

yeah, go balls out for 30 seconds. Let's say you hit 300 Watts average. Awesome. I'm going to have you rest as long as you want. Like you may rest two, three, four minutes. But now I want to see, can you hit within 5 percent of that 300 Watts again? can you get even within 10 percent of that? Cool. 

You did awesome. Rest as long as you want again. Cool. Can we do a third interval? Can we do a fourth interval? And I may push people until they just, even with complete rest, they can't do any more intervals. Great. We'll stay at that volume for a while. Now, then we can go back in the next phase and let's say, okay, you were taking an average of four minutes rest. 

Cool. Can you hold that output and hold that drop off? Could you do that in a resting three minutes and 30 seconds or three minutes and 50 seconds? Can we now make that more dense, but we're not sacrificing output to do that. So if people just think about it, it's like weight training, right? Yeah, you can do all sorts of heinous drop sets and there's a time and a place to add those things. 

I still use them with clients all the time, but I'm very judicious with what I do. And I still want to see over time, are they moving more load? Are they doing a better density? Are they getting stronger? Like wherever they, even if they're curling soup cans, I don't care where they start because I know that they're getting the adaptation from it. 

Their body has to respond. It's already gotten stronger. they're probably going to add some muscle, et cetera.  

Ted Ryce: Mike, I know you have a, another interview coming up, so I want to be mindful of your time, but this is such a great conversation. If you want to learn more about Dr. Mike T. Nelson, you want to go to Dr. 

Mike T. Nelson on Instagram. You can find him there, but if you really want to get the next level, you really should check out his flex diet certification. It's a certification course on metabolic flexibility. What Mike was just talking about and they go over so many things they go over, training and exercise protein fat as fuel, a deeper dive into what Mike was just talking about and you can find that at flex diet. 

com Mike, we've got to do this more often, man.  

Mike T. Nelson: Yeah, thank you so much. I really appreciate it. And, yeah, we'll have to chat again, maybe about injury stuff. And then, that just ends up with the fizz flux, which is all. High intensity interval training, cold, heat, all the other kind of sexy. That's well, when I started, it wasn't sexy, but now it's sexy stuff. 

Ted Ryce: Yeah, absolutely. Hey man, thanks again. And let's be in touch soon. I want to do this. I want to do this again soon. I really want to get your take on, the interval training and injuries in particular. Oh, sure. Thanks so much. We'll do it. Thanks buddy.