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110 - Creatine, Concussions & Contact Sports w/ Dr Mike T Nelson
137 Plays15 days ago
Dr. Mike T. Nelson [@drmiketnelson] is a PhD exercise physiologist, metabolic flexibility expert, and one of the most applied performance scientists in the game. He's been researching and using creatine since 1995 — and today he's helping coaches and parents cut through three decades of myth, fear, and bad marketing.
Dr. Mike's Complete Creatine Manual: creatine.miketnelson.com
In this episode, Tex and Dr. Mike break down everything contact sport coaches need to know about creatine — what it actually is, why the steroid myth refuses to die, real dosing protocols, hydration in extreme heat, and the emerging research on creatine as a prophylactic for brain health in contact sports. They also get into caffeine and energy drinks, coaching leverage, exogenous ketones post-concussion, and why vision training may be the most underutilized concussion prevention tool in athletics.
If you coach football, lacrosse, wrestling, or hockey — this is a conversation you'll want your athletes and their parents to hear.
25% OFF Throne Creatine: https://www.thorne.com/u/captains
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Transcript
Parental Concerns vs. High School Football Risks
00:00:00
Speaker
Parents are like, oh, Junior wants to take creatine. Okay, so explain to him what it is. ah Oh, I don't know, I'm really, really worried about this. I'm like, what does he do? Oh, he's a senior playing high school football. Okay, when did he start playing football? Oh, like fourth grade.
00:00:16
Speaker
Okay, so you're worried about something that has more safety data than anything we've ever studied in the supplement industry, maybe except for caffeine.
00:00:28
Speaker
i'm Long-term data has been on the market. People have been using it in billions of doses per year over time for three decades. Mm-hmm. then But you're gonna let him run full speed into another human. That's okay.
00:00:43
Speaker
Like we're not so worried about that, but this creatine, that's gotta be bad, right?
Introduction to Dr. Mike T. Nelson and Creatine Expertise
00:00:48
Speaker
If you coach contact sport athletes, football, lacrosse, wrestling, and hockey, this one's for you.
00:00:54
Speaker
And this may sound silly in the performance space, but every year i'm fighting the same battle with parents and players who think creatine is a steroid. It's not. And today I got the science to back that up as Dr. Mike T. Nelson joins me in studio to drop some knowledge.
00:01:09
Speaker
Dr. Mike is a PhD exercise physiologist, metabolic flexibility expert, and one of the most trusted voices in the applied performance space. He's been studying and using creatine since 1995, has peer-reviewed research published, and has worked with everyone from tactical athletes to high school kids just trying to get stronger.
Exploring Creatine: Myths, Dosing, and Brain Health
00:01:29
Speaker
Today we're breaking down what creatine actually is, the myths that won't die, the real dosing protocol, hydration concerns and the Texas heat, and a part that changed how I coach, what the research says about creatine as a prophylactic for brain health in contact sport athletes.
00:01:46
Speaker
Supplements don't build leaders, but they can protect them. With that, let's hand it off to Dr. Mike to help us raise the game. Ready, ready, and break. Action, Dr. Mike, welcome to Dripping Springs, author Triphasic.
00:02:00
Speaker
I'm here in person. I know. Glad we're ah we able to make this happen, and you're driving cross-country, and this is Pit Stop. Yeah, I started in Minnesota. oh God, what today is today? I started in Minnesota Thursday, drove to...
00:02:14
Speaker
Southern Kansas, and then to Weatherford, Texas, and then Weatherford, Texas to Austin last night. Sweet. Then I'll be in Austin, and then I'm leaving tomorrow to South Padre Island, Texas.
00:02:27
Speaker
All right, and that's home base? ah For four weeks. For four weeks, yeah okay. All right, well, I'm glad we got the opportunity to connect in person. We get to see each other a couple times a year. Yeah. Cavs Mastermind. For sure. Which, mean. We missed you in Vegas.
00:02:40
Speaker
How was the Vegas? It was good. Yeah, it was really good. I unfortunately got there a little late because I had, well, I ended up taking my fifth or sixth flight because of the weather. Oh, so yeah.
00:02:52
Speaker
Yeah, that was, ah yeah. i can Minnesota snowstorm. So, yeah. Yeah, a lot of people were were stuck in that. I know there's an equipment trade show that was in San Diego. Oh, okay. And then a lot of the equipment, they're based up there, like Ohio, Iowa.
00:03:10
Speaker
So then they all got jammed up. Oh, yeah. Yeah, all the equipment was there, but the reps. Oh, no. Oh.
Benefits of Creatine for Strength and Adaptation
00:03:18
Speaker
Well, I want to get you out here to talk about creatine, and caffeine.
00:03:24
Speaker
For sure. the The two superpowers. What do you call them? You wrote a blog about it way back. Oh, I can't remember what I call them now. But those two together. Yeah, like, it had some acronym like CCC something or another. Well, it's fitting for this episode of Captains and Coaches CCCC. Yeah. Um...
00:03:43
Speaker
But yeah, i my coach in high school. I work with a lot of athletes. So I aim to encourage creatine, one for training, and two, now more and more research is coming about ah about contact sports yes and creatine. Yeah, yeah. So now I want to default to an expert.
00:04:01
Speaker
So that way, when parents say no, I can have some proof to say, actually, this is going be beneficial. These are not steroids. Yeah. This is beneficial for, yes, performance and...
00:04:13
Speaker
your cognitive health long-term for a contact sport athlete.
The Role of Supplements vs. Core Training Principles
00:04:17
Speaker
So that is the the goal today and trying to get people unscared of creatine, help them understand what it is.
00:04:27
Speaker
So. Yeah, I agree. It's been around. I mean, The first time I started using creatine was in 1995.
00:04:39
Speaker
So that's what almost 30 plus years ago now. And yeah, I've gone off it a little bit, but mostly, you know, yeah on and just kind of following the research ever since then.
00:04:50
Speaker
Yeah. Were you taking the the old droplets? No, this was actually the first version was actually creatine monohydrate. Okay. Which is still by far like the best version. And there's been...
00:05:02
Speaker
multiple attempts because the supplement industry is like, oh, we gotta have the next creatine. Because creatine is one of the sports supplements that actually works really well. Again, effect size, single digit percentages, but you know pretty efficacious.
00:05:16
Speaker
So since then, the supplement industry has been like, oh, we we need liquid form. We need this other form. We need this you know creatine ethyl ester, if you remember that one. What's that one?
00:05:27
Speaker
they had this deal where they would put it in a glass. And when you mix creatine, it's a white substance. And so the glass
Debunking Creatine Myths
00:05:33
Speaker
gets a little you know kind of clouded, right? Because it's in suspension in there as you mix it.
00:05:38
Speaker
And the argument was, oh well, because you can see how cloudy it is, it's not being it's not that bioavailable, it's not really being absorbed. And so they had a version they called creatine ethyl ester.
00:05:49
Speaker
And so it was basically the creatine molecule that was chemically bonded to another component. What that did was it did cause it to disperse better into water. So their marketing was they would mix it in water and they're like, look, cloudy glass, clear glass. So the clear glass has to be much better.
00:06:05
Speaker
And it turns out it wasn't at all. was actually worse. it was more expensive. And then the the godfather of creatine is actually, unfortunately, he's passed away, is Dr. Roger Harris.
00:06:16
Speaker
So he's the one who did all the original creatine research, you know, him and some other people. And he's kind of considered the godfather creatine as a supplement and also beta-alanine. Cool.
00:06:27
Speaker
And so I remember talking to him at a ah conference lunch. I was honored to to meet him and he was just there presenting and i got to chat with him and it sort of started asking about different forms of creatine. And he's like, yeah, it turns out that I guess the original company who did it didn't do any toxicology studies, just put it out on the market.
00:06:45
Speaker
And he said it turned out that it was actually non-toxic. But he said if your body didn't cleave it in the exact mechanism that it did, it would have unfortunately been quite toxic. So there's been various forms they've tried to make better. And so far to date, there's no form that's been superior
Brain Health Benefits in Contact Sports
00:07:01
Speaker
than creatine monohydrate.
00:07:03
Speaker
Some other forms might be equivalent, maybe, but it's just not worth the the extra money. well And there's not much data on the other versions either. Like we've got, the last time I looked, I was doing the PDF on creatine. I want to say 545 pieces of peer-reviewed material on PubMed on creatine monohydrate alone.
00:07:25
Speaker
Yeah, and in your caffeine and creatine blog, you said it's the most researched supplement. Oh, by far. Like, you could argue caffeine might be close, but in terms of citations, like, you know, both of them are the cited more than anything else by far. Like, there's no no comparison, really.
00:07:44
Speaker
So if it's the most researched supplement, what why are we still scared? I have no idea, because it's It's one of those things where I keep thinking every year, like, so the reason I didn't put out like this ebook until recently was, i just thought everyone kind of knew these things, right? Because you spend, you know, like with coaching and stuff, like you realize you're like, oh, well everybody knows such and such. And then you keep track of like the questions you get. And when you interact with clients, you actually do coaching, you realize, oh, nobody actually knows all that. And now,
00:08:15
Speaker
Creatines becoming a little bit more popular you see it in the mainstream media and so anything that becomes popular there's lots of I don't know I guess Things that go associated with it. So the most common one you hear would you still hear is that oh Don't use creatine as a steroid And it it's not even close to a steroid. I could argue vitamin D and cholesterol are steroids based off of their structure.
00:08:39
Speaker
That's probably an accurate statement, although they're not anabolic steroids. Creatine is not even close. It's just a series of amino acids stuck together. So it it doesn't, I mean, chemically, if you take any organic chemistry, like they're they're not even...
00:08:53
Speaker
They're not even close at all, but I don't know how that got started. I tried to figure out where it came from, and I can't trace down where it is, but you still get questions about that, especially at the high school and college level.
00:09:05
Speaker
Oh, you don't want to use that? that's That's a steroid. It's like, no, it's not even remotely close to that. no So now if we're aiming to attack that myth, it's not a steroid. So then what is it? why Why should a teenage athlete aim to start taking this?
00:09:24
Speaker
Yeah, so if we put like the ethics aside, you could make an argument, which I do kind of agree with, that from a supplement standpoint, do you want the mindset of the most efficacious things are you know things that are supplements and things like that?
00:09:42
Speaker
Because if you look at the data, even with like caffeine and creatine, which are efficacious, you're still talking like single digit percentages for most of the studies, right? Compared to like, if you actually fix your sleep, fix your lifting and fix your nutrition, like those are massive things. Those are way bigger than any single digit effect.
00:10:00
Speaker
So you could
Effective Creatine Loading and Minor Weight Gain
00:10:02
Speaker
make an argument that you don't want people to be focusing on the minors or have that mindset of, you know, oh, what's this next minor component? You want them to be like, hey, let's look at your training. Let's look at your recovery. Let's look at those things that we know are the big rocks that are gonna move it.
00:10:18
Speaker
Outside of that, like creatine itself is efficacious. The early studies showed that you can basically lift a little bit of a heavier weight, but the big thing is you can do a few more reps with a heavy weight. um The reason for that is if you go all the way back to bioenergetics, we use something called ATP, so adenosine triphosphate.
00:10:42
Speaker
And all we simply do is we take one of the high energy phosphate groups off of it and we get energy. So, but then we're left with ADP. So instead of triphosphate, it's a diphosphate.
00:10:53
Speaker
And the body has this cool process that it goes through to basically stick the phosphate group back on. So creatine in essence helps with that process. So you can get back to the high energy state of ATP faster.
00:11:07
Speaker
And what you see is your one RM, so your one rep max may go up a little bit. Studies on that are are a little bit more mixed. I'd say caffeine's probably better for that, but the amount of reps you can do with a heavy load.
00:11:20
Speaker
So if you're doing NFL combine, right? 225 for a max number of reps, maybe you can get 12. Maybe with creatine you could get 13 or 14, right? It's not a massive effect. You're not gonna get 26 reps all of a sudden. yeah But if you compound that effect, like okay, each time I'm training I get a few more reps at a heavier load or heavy load,
00:11:44
Speaker
you get more progressive overload over time and so you're going to get more strength you're going to get better adaptations yeah and so that's kind of the main mechanism of how it works for the most part yeah and we're if we're consistently training if we're in the weight room two to four times a week correct i mean that's a healthy dose of high school yeah training for football you're training for lacrosse the different uh contact sports that lifting is a part of the culture Then we're taking creatine and those few reps each session or each week, they add up over four years. Oh, 100%, for sure. That's a lot of my motivation is we're going to take this because I'm helping you see this delayed gratification for this one small investment of this tasteless powder.
00:12:29
Speaker
Don't do the crap one, just do the mono. Yeah, and so I have something I call coaching leverage, which is the physiologic response times a client's ability to change.
00:12:40
Speaker
good right So if we look at something like protein, you know, protein is beneficial. You can use a supplement. You can get it from obviously real food, of course. But when you work with clients, like what I find is most people can eat more protein. It takes a little bit of education, takes a little bit of time, but in terms of their ability to do it, especially if body composition is their goal, they're like, oh, you mean I eat more of something and lose weight? Oh, this is cool compared to sleep, especially at the high school and college level. I only work with handful of high school people anymore.
00:13:09
Speaker
But it's I would rather put my head through a brick wall at this point, right? Because at the end of the day, i could make tons so tons of studies on sleep and how efficacious it is and how it's beneficial for motor recruitment and motor learning and skill acquisition and recovery and hypertrophy.
00:13:26
Speaker
But... the end of the day, if juniors only sleep in five hours a night, like you could do the highest quality sleep for five hours, but you're probably gonna need more. yeah So you're left with, okay, the end of the day when you're playing, I'm so out of the loop, is it Nintendo is still a thing now? Or sure whatever video game, right? Or whatever the thing is at night.
00:13:45
Speaker
Ah, Bobby, just go to bed two hours earlier. It's like, ah, screw you. Like, what do you know anything about? Right, like you're the client's ability to do those things are very difficult. yeah So you're coaching leverage because of that psychological aspect ends up to be real low.
00:14:00
Speaker
The benefit of supplements is that the psychological aspect is pretty easy. So if you look at creatine, yep, we've got data to show that it does help physiology. Again, is it massive? But no, it does help.
00:14:13
Speaker
And then the client's ability to do it is, you know, an average dose is five grams per day. you just do once per day, take it whenever you want. So the action to do that, to incorporate into their schedule and their lifestyle is actually a pretty easy ask.
00:14:26
Speaker
And I think that is one of the benefits of supplements is there's, you know, pill fatigue and you get confusion and, oh, do i have to remember to bring it? And there are things associated with it. But in general, the action to do it is pretty simple. Yeah. Have you tested any of the creatine gummies?
00:14:44
Speaker
ah see Yes. These are getting more and more popular. Yeah. It might be useful, but even if it's a legit brand, you have to look at the dosing because like the the minimum effective dose is probably around five grams per day. like Yes, if you look at the literature, it's per body weight and what you're trying to do and a bunch of other factors. But across the board, like if you hit like three to five grams per day, for the most part, you're gonna be pretty good.
00:15:11
Speaker
There has been some other testing data on a lot of the gummies and the amount of creatine in them is almost zero in some cases. So I would call me basically. Yeah. So I would, if it were me, like I would call a company and be like, Hey, how much is in here per dose or per gummy or whatever?
00:15:30
Speaker
You could ask for something called the COA, which is certificate of analysis. Okay. And that basically says, hey, we did test it. So we did final testing. We had the gummies were all made. We QC'd, we quality controlled all the ingredients coming in.
00:15:45
Speaker
And then we actually have the final product. And then we did do some testing of the final product to make sure if we say it's two grams of creatine monohydrate are in there, two grams of creatine monohydrate are are actually in there.
00:15:58
Speaker
um Now, again, you can go further down that rabbit hole and be like, You know, could they to what's called dry labbing? Could they just completely make up the COAs and stuff like that? Yes. So you'd have to do your,
00:16:11
Speaker
If you really want to go for it on the rabbit hole, do your due diligence of the actual lab, where's the serial number, where's the traceability, all that kind of stuff. But most companies who are on the up and up for the most part are actually pretty happy to show you the testing or at least talk to you about it because it's expensive and it takes more time and it takes more money.
00:16:29
Speaker
And they get pissed off at companies that are just like putting crap in a container for a fraction of the price and just making more money. yeah So it does kind of make everybody look bad. um In general, most of the bigger brands are gonna be relatively reputable if they sell in other products just because they have more to lose.
00:16:47
Speaker
If it's a brand new company and the only thing they make is like creatine gummies and we've never heard of them before, ge that makes me a little like they don't have a lot to lose like and there's Unfortunately horror stories of companies especially more so in the past. It's gotten a lot better Who created a product and sold it and it wasn't efficacious and then they filed bankruptcy and disappeared just probably some island in the Bahamas and yeah Man so alright what I'm hearing is you're better off just the powder and eating gummy bears and then just
00:17:20
Speaker
Yeah, yeah, it it is convenient and there are more i do know of some more bigger brands that are having what appears to be reputable versions of them coming out or are out in some cases.
00:17:33
Speaker
But yeah, it's just that Yeah, the whole gummy thing is I get it like it's it's easier. It's more convenient It can be good, but right now I'd be like yeah to do a little bit more due diligence. they' There isn't much fake creatine monohydrate on the market just because the costs of the raws are so cheap.
00:17:54
Speaker
Now again, that's actually gone up quite a bit this past year or so, but it's not it's not at the point for someone to fake it to make a lot of money that would be worth the time and the effort.
00:18:09
Speaker
yeah right If it was very expensive and very hard to get, you know just pure economics are like, oh wow, like you know the odds of a bunch of fake stuff showing up are a lot higher because there's unfortunately more negative incentive for someone to try to cheat the system.
00:18:25
Speaker
Time out. Observation, new coaches getting into the field are really smart and intelligent when it comes to programming or understanding practice plans and their sport and really bad at people.
00:18:38
Speaker
They have high IQ and low EQ. I spent the past 14 years traveling the world teaching people how to teach people lifting weights, understanding sport, but most importantly, connecting with people.
00:18:52
Speaker
I've taken all those lessons from all over the world and put them into a new course, Why They're Not Listening, Coaching Today's Athlete. If you want the first lesson free, head to the website, listen.captainsandcoaches.com.
00:19:06
Speaker
to learn more. And now, back to the show. Ready, ready, and break. I imagine a lot of protein companies are are cutting corners like that, too. Yeah, there was a whole protein spiking thing because they're only looking at protein for nitrogen content.
00:19:22
Speaker
And because creatine used to be much cheaper, some companies are actually putting creatine in the protein powder because creatine on a just simple nitrogen test will register as nitrogen.
00:19:34
Speaker
Because basically amino acids is what it's made up of. um So it passes the nitrogen test, but I'm like, okay, but you're not just really disclosing that 100% on the label. You're not saying, oh, each gram of scoop protein has five grams of creatine. You're just putting it in there as basically a nitrogen group.
00:19:54
Speaker
um Which I think is just very weasley. Yeah. um And even with protein powders, like you can go down the path of, you know, calling them, asking for the actual amino acid breakdown of all of them.
00:20:05
Speaker
What do they do on their testing? You know, things of that nature. um Yeah. And I will say that mass market stores that sell big, massive tubs of creatine from weird brands,
00:20:20
Speaker
I know what a lot of the raws cost in the industry and there's no way they're losing money on it. right Because if I look at the label and I'm like, even if you have a massive volume, I have a pretty good idea of what your total cost just to do the raw material is.
00:20:35
Speaker
like You're not losing money. So like what what what this this is already suspicious. Again, there might be some okay brands there, but if it's really cheap, buyer beware.
00:20:49
Speaker
Lesson learned. Yeah. And unfortunately, protein has gotten a lot more expensive as of late. Yeah. the Funny, just going through the grocery store and there was this 16-year-old wearing like a high school wrestling t-shirt and is with his mom trying to convince her to buy him protein so he could bigger.
00:21:09
Speaker
And then he was picking all like the... the the you know, the energy drink labeled ones. Oh, yeah. the You know, I forget what it is. i think it was Ghost or something. And trying to get the ones that are really, like, sweet and appealing. And I'm like, and she's like, I don't trust this. So I interjected and said, maybe I can help you out. So then walked him through the different protein and gave my recommendations for what was there at the grocery store. Yeah, yeah.
00:21:36
Speaker
But just kind of a funny, ah funny interaction, like, Mom was weary of this, and then young man wanted this. And then I showed her my shopping cart. It's funny you say supplements. It was just filled with freaking meat, bison, chicken, yeah all this, and gave him like a seven-minute quick nutrition life lecture.
00:21:58
Speaker
And yeah, so that that was that was fun and helped that I was... just flexing while showing this park full of of real food. But yeah, it was just funny.
00:22:11
Speaker
So any any more myths and fears that you've seen just, I guess, marketed out there or people that are refusing to take creatine? Because my biggest one is just parents think it is a steroid. So I'm glad we... Yeah, so that's usually the... I'm sure you've had these conversations ad nauseum too, and we'll get into this, is that Parents are like, oh, Junior wants to take creatine. Okay, so explain to him what it is. ah Oh, I don't know, I'm really, really worried about this. I'm like, what does he do? Oh, he's a senior playing high school football. Okay, when did he start playing football? Oh, like fourth grade.
00:22:48
Speaker
Okay, so you're worried about something that has more safety data than anything we've ever studied in the supplement industry, maybe except for caffeine.
00:22:59
Speaker
umm Long-term data has been on the market. People have been using it in billions of doses per year over time for three decades. Mm-hmm. Then, but you're gonna let them run full speed into another human. That's okay.
00:23:14
Speaker
Like we're not so worried about that, but this this creatine, that's that's gotta be bad, right? but's ah the And then they usually get mad at me and yeah. That's okay. Yeah.
00:23:25
Speaker
But usually the other thing is there is some weight gain with creatine, especially if you're doing the loading phase. So the earlier studies would show that like, So if you want to saturate your levels of creatine, the creatine is stored in the muscle.
00:23:41
Speaker
So the timing of how you take it probably doesn't matter a whole lot. um And to me, it's still fascinating. Like if you go all the way back to the early studies and if somebody came to me and said, yeah, we're going to do this, this creatine supplement, it's going stored in the muscle and that we can actually get more creatine into the muscle than what you already probably have.
00:24:02
Speaker
I would have been like, no, that sounds stupid. Like, what it makes you think you can like just put more of it in there? That doesn't make sense. And it turns out that that was 100% correct. Like, you can actually saturate or basically stuff more creatine into the muscle. That's why you get higher level performance.
00:24:19
Speaker
So early studies used 20 grams per day for a week. as opposed to five grams per day. They did show with the 20 grams per day that you would get to a higher level of creatine faster.
00:24:31
Speaker
But if you just do five grams per day over 30 days, the difference between loading for five to seven days versus 30 days, there's no difference. So if you are in a big hurry and you've got some time and money and you want to saturate your levels of creatine really fast, you can do 20 grams per day for a muscle perspective.
00:24:50
Speaker
I usually tell people it's if you're not in that big of a hurry, it probably doesn't matter a whole lot. Just take five grams per day. you know if you're a really large mammal, yeah, could probably take you know eight or 10 or something like that.
00:25:01
Speaker
But just do that over 30 days. At the end of those 30 days, you're gonna be pretty well saturated. you know And there's some arguments that You know, at that point, it may be as little as like two or three grams a day to hold that level.
00:25:14
Speaker
um Which is kind of why you see dosing all over the map. Because every time I mentioned five grams, someone's like, oh, well this guy here said, you know, Scott Forbes said, oh, he's only like a minimum of, you know, two or three grams or whatever. And I'm like, well, yeah, that definitely can be true. If you're smaller mammal, you have less muscle mass.
00:25:31
Speaker
If you're already saturated on your levels of creatine, like the amount of turnover, if you're not doing really heavy exercise all the time, like, yeah, you might be able to get by on like, you know a couple of grams or whatever.
00:25:44
Speaker
yeah so And the whole sports industry world is so small. It's like, yeah, I just saw Scott last weekend. We hung out at the bar for total, you know, at the conference or whatever, you know. So it's nice that I get to talk to the people but doing all the actual research of of what's going on.
00:25:59
Speaker
yeah But related to that terms of weight gain, like, Maybe a couple pounds. It's not massive. Most of it is fluid that's stored in the muscle. It's not fat. It does appear to be variable. Like some people will have more fluid gain than other people. um But again, it's a there's a few pounds. It's nothing really dramatic. It's kind of, I'd say I don't really worry too much about it. That seems to be more of a concern with female athletes.
00:26:25
Speaker
And that's why the whole creatine hydrochloride was marketed to women athletes because, oh, you'll have less weight gain from it, which there's no data to support that.
00:26:37
Speaker
Very interesting. Is there a difference between men and women taking creatine? or Oh, good question. I don't know that there's any difference. Like there – if you do it – as a loading phase and you do it per body weight and body comp is similar, there isn't any difference.
00:26:57
Speaker
I don't know of anything at a muscle level that says, Hey, if we look at muscle in female versus males, is there anything different that would make us think that the mechanics of how creatine works are different?
00:27:08
Speaker
I haven't seen any data to to show that that's true. Like more often than not, like muscle between gender appears to be very, very similar actually.
00:27:19
Speaker
Cool. um what How about hydration? That's often another conversation that people are worried it's going to dehydrate you. Or in the the throes of August preseason training for football players, creatine and freaking 100 degree Texas weather.
00:27:37
Speaker
Most of the data would say that it probably helps with hydration more than hurts it. Now, again, anytime you add something to it, people are like, oh my God, I got a cramp. It was a creatine.
00:27:50
Speaker
And you could get into the whole thing about are cramps even dehydration or not. So, kind of, but my analogy would be, if you're that dehydrated, why did only your right calf cramp?
00:28:02
Speaker
Right, if it's a systemic thing you're telling me is going on, why would you you not like have like just this mass seizure? Why is only one local area? So again, it is related to hydration. It's more, I think, of a local muscle type thing going on too, which can be made worse if you're you know definitely dehydrated. Can that make you more prone to cramping? Absolutely.
00:28:21
Speaker
But that's not the the only issue with it. So creatine, because it's actually pulling water into the muscle, it probably actually helps with hydration. There was some early studies that looked at it, and I think, oh, don't quote me on this, but I want to say, um didn't Charlie Francis have something about creatine that he didn't like using it in sprinters because of...
00:28:44
Speaker
Hydration risks an increase of hamstring strains or something like that potential I should know this. Yeah, I would have made that up. So someone out there, please correct me And again on an individual athlete basis are there gonna be some weird shit that happens?
00:28:59
Speaker
I'm sure there is Right, but in terms of just general recommendations, it's not anything to really worry about Cool, and I mean they They need to be drinking enough water anyway. like that Yeah. The biggest thing is like have some electrolytes, have enough water. They do that. Like you're probably going to be fine.
00:29:19
Speaker
If anything, have more sodium, not less. Like a sodium is the main electrolyte you lose in sweat. And there are people who are heavy, what they call heavy salt sweaters that do tend to lose more sodium than other people. So there is a little bit of variability in that.
00:29:34
Speaker
I believe that. the I think I was one of those guys. Yeah. If your black shirt looks white after a practice, like you're probably losing a lot of sodium. Yeah. yeah And we used to call it lecture sweat.
00:29:47
Speaker
We're leading presentations and seminars. And then our our shirts after... Time out. I get two a half. This one's all about training. I'm talking about my old bull strength conditioning program that I have available on Train Heroic. This is Training with Wisdom. It's the program that I am following. I understand who you are. You don't have a lot of time.
00:30:10
Speaker
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00:30:28
Speaker
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00:30:41
Speaker
Come check us out for a seven-day free trial in the Old Bull program, a link in the show notes, or you're watching on YouTube, just click right here. All right, and now back to the show.
00:30:51
Speaker
Ready, ready, and break. So now focusing on performance, we talked about the reps, but I'd also like to take this into the direction of the contact sport. e So what is the research saying about creatine and the brain for contact sport athletes?
00:31:08
Speaker
It's probably beneficial. Now the hard part with that is because people are like, oh, you've been talking about this for years and i need the randomized control study, double blind placebo crossover, blah, blah, blah.
00:31:22
Speaker
And I'm like, you're never gonna get it in humans. right So if we look at, for example, contact injury to the head, right? You could have a concussion, new worst case, you could have a traumatic brain injury.
00:31:35
Speaker
They did a study in mice, this is the first study I saw that um if you're an animal lover, you may not like it, but they gave one group of mice creatine, the other group they did not, and they had this little device that would thwack them on the head and basically give them a concussion or a TBI.
00:31:51
Speaker
And then they sacrificed the mice at the end of the study. It was mice or rats. I can't remember. And then they looked at, you know, differences and performance and a bunch of other stuff. What they found was that if you took creatine prophylactically, it did help kind of mitigate some of the effects. Now, again, it didn't mitigate all of them.
00:32:10
Speaker
um And that's a really nice study design. You've got all your factors controlled. But if you extrapolate that into humans, you're never gonna have a study that's going to be ethical where, hey, you're in the group that gets whacked in the head. We're going to give you a mild concussion.
00:32:26
Speaker
Oh, you don't get whacked in the head. And we're going compare the two, right? Like ah your IRB would never approve that. And rightfully, they they should not. So the hard part about humans is that we don't have super nice trial designs if that is the metric we're trying to do as an outcome.
00:32:44
Speaker
Now we do have some other data showing different changes neurologically. We have some data that you can look at people who self-report using creatine versus people who don't in contact sports. We do see that creatine does tend to be a little bit beneficial there.
00:33:04
Speaker
Again, a lot of the direct data just isn't quite there in humans, but the animal data is pretty good. The thing that makes it a little bit tricky though is that animals, especially mice, probably accumulate creatine in their brain more than humans.
00:33:21
Speaker
And it's really hard in humans to determine what levels of creatine they have in their brains. We can't do direct biopsies. We can't, a muscle you can you know take a pencil like Bergstrom needle and whack it into your leg and pull out a chunk of tissue and look at it under our microscope. Like we can't really and do that for the brain.
00:33:41
Speaker
So we're left with, excuse me, non-invasive means. em MRS is probably the best. So like a super high powered magnet. And what we see is that brain levels of creatine are variable. It does look like they can be increased.
00:33:58
Speaker
They can probably be increased with a supplement. Like, but what dosage? Probably 10 to 20 grams is probably higher than what it is to saturate muscle We don't know exactly how long you would need to take that dose either um
Creatine and Hydration: A Focus on Athletes' Needs
00:34:14
Speaker
so that's kind of the where it gets a little bit tricky because the exact Mechanics and uptake are a little bit different. So Dr. Eric Rothson has done a lot of Rothson has done a lot of work in that area too But my argument to people is and I've used creatine on contact sport athletes for
00:34:33
Speaker
ever. And my argument was, especially once I read the mouse study, which was eight or nine years ago now, is okay, we don't really know what the entire upside is.
00:34:44
Speaker
but We have plenty of data showing there isn't really a negative downside. We've got a ton of safety data, it's not super expensive. thell Dosing probably varies, but even up to 20 grams per day, like there's not really many, air quote, side effects with that.
00:34:58
Speaker
So for athletes, especially if they were, you know, like MMA or they've, you know, they've got a big single event coming up or football, hockey. Okay. You're off season. Eh, not so worried about it, but coming up to preseason. So I would start six, eight weeks out, you know, just start, you know, taking it at that point, leave them taking that through the course of the the whole season.
00:35:22
Speaker
You can get fancy and maybe Do a little bit more before games or something like that. don't have any data to show it's beneficial, but my argument to him was like, hey, wait it's gonna help your performance, gonna help you repeat explosive performance, which is gonna help your game anyway. And a air quote side effect is it might prophylactically be beneficial if you happen to get whacked in the head.
00:35:43
Speaker
So I don't know of any reason really not to take it we don't have to worry about hydration. It's safe, you can get products that are tested. You don't have to worry about popping for some weird drugs or anything like that. You can get and NSF, you know, tested supplements and everything. So to me, there's not many downsides. And surprisingly, even five years ago, that was like new, like no one was really doing it. It's it's a little bit more popular now, but I'm sure you still probably talk to a fair amount of athletes who are like, oh yeah, I've never even thought of that.
00:36:16
Speaker
Yeah, which to me is like, you do consult calls and you help with different sports and stuff. And I, i don't know, maybe it's my own worries of like, oh my God, these athletes are going be doing all this stuff. I'm gonna get in there and I'm maybe like, nothing's useful.
00:36:29
Speaker
And then most of the time it's kind of sort of basic stuff that it becomes like super useful. Yeah. More often than not. Yeah. words simple reminders or reinforcing. For sure. What they already know. Or things they may know, but they're not doing. Yeah.
00:36:43
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. The, yeah, and is there anything out there that it speeds up concussion recovery? Maybe. Maybe not protect, but speeds up recovery? We don't know.
00:36:56
Speaker
and the argument there is that potentially by actually increasing ATP, that you might be able to increase recovery. I would say the data on that is like, it's, it's, it's,
00:37:12
Speaker
Super hard to determine. Part of that is what metric are you looking at as recovery? Are you measuring eye movements? are you Because even like TBI concussion research is it all across the map, right? Because two athletes could suffer the same sort of physical insult, but have completely different symptoms, right? Because different parts of the area might be damaged, how their brain is specifically wired is a little bit different. Like, yes, there's a lot of, you know, generalities, you know, Broca's areas, primarily speech and stuff like that. So there's a lot of
00:37:48
Speaker
generality is one person to the next, but how that individual is wired up is going to be a little bit different. And you can't really even detect a lot of the stuff on MRI. you know So a lot of the stuff, the people I work with are doing a lot of what's called like functional neurology.
00:38:03
Speaker
So they'll go in and they'll look at eye movements in particular ways such as gaze stability or how your eyes are moving and across and vestibular stuff. Because lot people have a concussion are like very light sensitive, yeah like their eyes are not coordinating with their head, they feel dizzy, their equilibrium is off.
00:38:23
Speaker
So those areas that work in those integration centers are just kind of screwed up. So they can go look and be like, oh okay, because of this, BNG testing, your saccades are off this direction.
00:38:36
Speaker
It's probably this part of the brain that's primarily controlling that. And so, okay, what else does that part of the brain actually control? Oh, it does this other thing. Oh, cool. So if we train you in this other area that you can do, do we see some transfer over to eye movement?
00:38:50
Speaker
And a lot of times you do. So there's different training and specific protocol you can do. The hard part is it ends up being a very one-off individual thing, which makes it really hard to do the standard randomized control trial type stuff with it because it's like an individual type up program, which makes it hard.
00:39:13
Speaker
So going all the way back to looking at the changes with supplements, it's it's hard because like what... output are you actually really looking at? And one of the best stats of that was, I think it was Joe Clark when he worked with the University of Cincinnati, he did a lot of vision training.
00:39:28
Speaker
And so his argument, which I agree with is, if you can accurately see what's going on, a lot of this is subconscious, that at the last minute, if you can move just slightly enough so to reduce the impact of it, that your risk of concussion might be dramatically less.
00:39:47
Speaker
And so he did a lot of vision training. I don't know the whole story, but they basically kind of got rid of him for a year and said, ah, poo-poo, you're weirdo. This is weird. amount of concussions they had went up dramatically.
00:39:58
Speaker
but So they're like, uh-oh, so come back here again. and then the amount of concussions went down ah again. love it. Yeah. So I would argue that if you're gonna do anything to reduce concussions, yes, there might be some stuff like creatine as a prophylactic might be helpful, but I would do some type of vision training. and Obviously, you wanna consult with someone who knows how to do that, because there's a lot of very horrible vision training that's being done. I would do that even over neck training and everything else. I would do them in conjunction, right?
00:40:28
Speaker
Because most people think, oh, well, if my neck's a little bit stronger, will that help? Yes, but you're better off with just that that very slight movement at the end to decrease that impact is probably where your biggest return is gonna be.
00:40:41
Speaker
Yeah, so I do think the future is more vision type training in those contact sports. Yeah, I need to look into that. Yeah, and some good tools. It's super interesting. Yeah, yeah, so look up Joe Clark stuff like in my opinion like he's Our other buddy, Dr. Dylan Seeley, has done a lot of stuff with with that too. He's great.
00:40:59
Speaker
Yeah. So shout out to those guys. For sure. Yeah, I'm going to sit down with Dylan. in May oh cool I love Dylan told my son yeah it'll be a good time his father-in-law speaking at summer strong so oh oh that's cool yeah nice and his father-in-law is for the audience Eric Serrano yes dr. Serrano he is awesome we we had dinner at his home oh when we were visiting for the Arnold oh nice so that was awesome just sit down with his whole family
00:41:32
Speaker
yeah Yeah, that's where I met Dylan. so its Oh, cool. Okay. um Yes. All right. Well, funny concussion story that I recall from high school. Because in college, we had like computer testing.
00:41:43
Speaker
So you get a baseline, and then you go in. If you have a big hit or something, then you go back and test. And that that was the extent of it. In high school, we didn't have any of that. And one of my teammates, he definitely had a concussion.
00:41:57
Speaker
So he's down, knocked on the ground. And the trainer runs up to him. And... asked him to count backwards from 100 by 7. And he he says, get me a calculator. yeah a Coach picks him up, says, that's good enough for me. Puts him back in the game. Oh, no. And then he starts looking at the wrong sideline for the play calls.
00:42:18
Speaker
And like, all right, you're out. You're out. But just hilarious just being being in that that small huddle and just coach grabbing him. It's good enough for me. Yeah. Get me a calculator. Oh, man. And that's the hardest part too, as you know, like you're, some people can handle like one concussion okay, surprising. Like, I mean, look at in NFL, college, high school, like you see some people take some pretty big hits and how they get up and still function is mind blowing to me.
00:42:45
Speaker
But you take a big hit, you you get concussed, whether testing we use to determine that. The biggest risk is,
00:42:57
Speaker
if you're not all the way healed, a much smaller impact, like one that doesn't even look like it would register, can cause huge amounts of issues. And so that's my biggest fear is that I think some people are being put back too soon.
00:43:16
Speaker
And i mean, you can look at like the NFL, you can look at Tua, you can look at other people who've had, they seem to, like, oh he's just concussion prone. I'm like, yeah, because I think he wasn't fully healed when they put him back. And again, it's not necessarily always the team's fault because a player wants to play, they get rewarded for playing, they like doing it. you know So sometimes you have to have someone just to hold them back you know from it. So i don't I'm not trying to place blame on anyone in particular.
00:43:43
Speaker
But we've got very clear data showing that that second impact, even though it's very minor, can do a huge amount of of damage at that point. And so that's where I get really worried about and you see this like I work with some athletes it's either like I've had one concussion and we did some stuff it was good or I've had multiple high school and college athletes where I'm like yeah you've ever had a concussion oh yeah like how many like this one kid was eight eight you're the sophomore in freaking college what the hell wow you know and again I see kind of the the worst of the worst all the time but I'm like oh my god like I
00:44:23
Speaker
In almost all those cases, like I think they got put back in too soon. And one other thing that may help too is exogenous ketones. So that that was going to my next question. yeah So now we get a ah brain injury, atp ATP demand goes up, ATP supply goes down. yep So now what I am very clear with my team is no Gatorade. If if you got a head injury, a big hit,
00:44:50
Speaker
Gatorade's off the table. yep Can you help explain why no sugar drinks and why ketone, like a five hour energy shot of ketones is a better option? Yeah, so it turns out that the biggest issue, you're 100% right, is when you you take a big hit to the head, like we other areas can be damaged via you know different mechanisms, all that kind of stuff. But the two big things that happen are, one, the body's ability to use carbohydrates for fuel just gets completely screwed. It just goes almost, not entirely offline, but it it goes bonkers. It just can't.
00:45:24
Speaker
create the energy, but because you're it's damaged, you actually have an increased energy demand from that actual tissue. And then you actually have an increased amount of like neuroinflammation. And in really bad cases, you can have what's called the blood brain barrier that normally keeps like this big fancy filter to keep some stuff actually out of your brain on purpose.
00:45:45
Speaker
that can actually get damaged and start to open up. And so now you've got all these things coming into the brain that are normally should be kept out, and then the neuroinflammation gets even higher, and that causes more issues.
00:45:58
Speaker
And it turns out that ketones can be used as an energy source, even in ah a sort of concussed brain. So the backup fuels are lactate and ketones.
00:46:10
Speaker
So George Brooks's lab has done some really interesting stuff with IV infusions of lactate for concussion and TBI. There's more and more accumulating research now on actual ketones themselves.
00:46:21
Speaker
So you can take ketones in a supplemental form. So there's two basically supplemental forms right now is what's called the ketone salt. So the original one was dealt by Patrick Arnold. I still have some in fridge.
00:46:33
Speaker
It's just the main ketone, which is beta-hydroxybutyrate. And it's just basically a salt bonded to sodium. Okay. And the issue is it the amount of sodium is just through the roof. And if you dump that much sodium into your gut, it gets really pissed off as I found out.
00:46:51
Speaker
So you end up on the toilet quite a bit doing the Wilford Brimley two-step for a while. It's not good for your performance. So then they figured out, oh wait a minute, well what if we take the salt and we split it out over four ions?
00:47:03
Speaker
So we use like so a sodium, potassium, magnesium, and I'm blanking on the other one right now. I'll think of it. okay So they do what's called a quad salt. And so that splits it out so you don't have as much of a GI issue.
00:47:18
Speaker
The downside is if you measure blood levels, you can probably only get to one 1.5 millimolar of the actual ketone in your blood. So then they thought, oh, so this is from Dom D'Agostino's research for military using rebreathers.
00:47:34
Speaker
So military, so special forces, you're really not that cold you know sneaky if they see bubbles coming, right? So they use what's called a rebreather. The benefit of that is you don't have to have this huge tank, but you can end up with a condition called oxygen toxicity.
00:47:50
Speaker
And so they're trying to figure out like, you know, what can we do to kind of work around this? It doesn't happen all the time, but it's a risk. And they realize that, wait a minute, when people are on a ketogenic diet, I think it was animals they did originally, they the risk of oxygen toxicity was really low.
00:48:04
Speaker
Like, well, we can't have all the people on a ketogenic diet. That's probably not the best for the rest of their performance and everything else. So Dom was looking at, can we give them some type of supplement to basically put them in a very high level of ketosis by using a supplement?
00:48:19
Speaker
What they found is you can do that by using something called a ketone ester. So you take... The BHB molecule, which is the main ketone, there's there's two other ones, but BHB is the main one that's used, beta-hydroxybutyrate.
00:48:32
Speaker
And then you bond it to some other type of substance, right, using this this special bond. And your body takes it in, and it cleaves it off, and you can get high levels of blood ketones.
00:48:44
Speaker
So some of the early testing I did with it, we had people...
00:48:48
Speaker
4.5, 4 millimolar, like within 20 minutes. So really high levels, really fast. So if they're gonna go to a mission, okay, you can take the supplement, you get high levels of ketones, they'll stay for a period of time, and now you're kind of covered over that period of time, you don't have to do any sort of special diet.
00:49:04
Speaker
So it turns out that those exogenous ketones now tend to use like post concussion because now you can elevate levels of ketones. They do cross a blood brain barrier and that the body can then use those exogenous ketones for fuel even when the carbohydrate system is all kind of mucked up.
00:49:23
Speaker
Now again, is there direct Research on this, not really. So I did a whole product for the Kerrig Institute where they do a lot of clinical functional neurology.
00:49:34
Speaker
So I'm an associate professor there. And so I did this program on teaching all their you know functional neurology docs how to do this. And I'm, you know, you like do a product you're like oh this is going to be amazing. All these people are going to be like, um we're going to get so much data of them like testing it before and after and case studies and not a whole lot.
00:49:54
Speaker
It is because like it's just so outside of the things that they're normally doing. like They're looking at you know this type of eye movement and this type of thing and that type of thing. And we can spin you in this you know thing and dump you upside down. And it's just out kind of outside of their their wheelhouse. There's some anecdotal stuff. There's some stuff I've done, we'll say consulting with people in the NFL, post-concussion, that type of thing.
00:50:20
Speaker
i'm Who knows? like They did return to play relatively soon. They were cleared by, in one case, I can't see who the athlete was. um Everybody would know his name, but a buddy mine was his functional neurologist who you know I know did pretty in-depth testing and you know cleared him in short order. again Is that because of the ketones we gave him? I have no idea is because it's so hard to you know see what the baseline was. yeah But you know he did make a rapid improvement in about half of the normal time.
00:50:48
Speaker
And again, and you look at what's the upside, what's the downside. Other than cost, and a lot of them taste absolutely horrendously bad, there's not much of a ah downside. And I do do some consulting for Tecton, Ketone Esters. So they do have a product that actually tastes pretty good.
00:51:06
Speaker
Most of the ketone esters, the first time I got one was eight years ago now maybe? A guy new in the supplement industry is like, hey, I'll send you something. I'm like, well, what is it? He's like, I can't tell you, but it's not hormonal. It's what they call grass safe, generally regarded as safe.
00:51:22
Speaker
He's like, it's ungodly expensive. So whatever you do, like don't don't throw it up. It tastes bad. I'm like, oh, okay, sure. And I kept this thing in a FedEx envelope in a bottle about this big.
00:51:34
Speaker
He went to Home Depot and bought like this little Good Grips like measuring cup for measuring glue or something and put it in there. And he's like, yeah, just take like a quarter of the bottle. And I'm looking at it and it's clear there's no COA, there's no return address. At the time, I talked to this guy off and on for like seven years, but I had not met him in person yet.
00:51:56
Speaker
And I'm going, i really want to do this? Like, what am I doing? And so I tried it over my kitchen sink and there was no smell to it. It was Horrible like I've never had jet fuel, but it it was so astringent like the second and you drink it You're like did I just poison myself like it didn't taste bad. It was like I Think I might have done something really stupid. Did you throw up? I tried not to because he said like that vial was something like five grand or something Yeah, so I didn't it turns out it was basically a ah ketone ester and there there are
00:52:33
Speaker
So we get into it, there are different types of ketone esters. Most of them are BHB bonded to some other molecule, but there's a precursor called 1,3-butanediol. So 1,3-butanediol goes to the liver and gets converted into ketones, BHB, and then actually goes through a diol alcohol pathway.
00:52:51
Speaker
And it's weird because like at a low dose, you're like, I don't know, maybe there's a little cognitive benefit. At like a little bit of a higher dose, it it literally feels like you spend time at the bar. it feels like a weird alcohol kind of sensation. So the reason I mentioned that is that people are looking at products.
00:53:11
Speaker
So for example, the current HVMN product is 1,3-butanediol. So in higher amounts, like I don't personally, and maybe it's because i have a disclosure with you know Tecton in terms of ketone esters,
00:53:23
Speaker
I don't know how that's gonna help your performance. Like if you wanna go out and have a good time and use it as an alcohol alternative, maybe. But, so there are different types of ketone esters in the market too.
00:53:35
Speaker
That one's marketed as a ketone ester, but it's kind of more of a precursor and I'm just not a fan of it overall. There's only two studies and they didn't really show any increase in performance.
00:53:47
Speaker
Way more important than you ever wanted to know about that. So what I do personally is, and it's not medical advice, but for kiteboarding, I carry ketone esters with me all the time. So something really bad happens, I get dropped 25 feet out of the sky,
00:54:02
Speaker
I'm gonna me personally I'm gonna put myself in a state of ketosis pretty high and I'm probably gonna transition to a ketogenic diet and In addition to calling my neurologist to see what I need to do next cool. Well, if they don't take a supplement we can at least tell them hey Watch the the sugar drinks Yeah, so back to your point like i I wouldn't consume anything that has a high amount of carbohydrates So I made this pitch years ago to like John Briarty and a bunch of people in the industry. I'm like I'm watching NFL games and getting people seeing getting concussed all the time. Like, why don't they have one thing that's like, hey, if you're playing, like, here's your carbohydrates. And then, oh, you might have a concussion. Like, here's ketone esters or at least have some ketone esters on for, like, running backs or people you know are taking multiple hits per game.
00:54:52
Speaker
You know, like, does your quarterback really need it? Eh, they still take hits. But, you know, mean, you can go through and look and see which people are just getting blasted, like, every game. To me, like, there's not much of a downside. Yes, you could even have them with some carbohydrates.
00:55:06
Speaker
So with athletes I would consult with, I would tell them, you know, load carbohydrates beforehand so your your glycogen stores are saturated. Again, it's up to you. It's not medical advice. But if you do use a ketone ester, you can use it during the game and be at a higher level of ketones.
00:55:23
Speaker
Most people report that they feel a little bit better, like their energy level feels more sustained. There is some data, Brandon Egan's done some stuff with higher levels of cognition under fatigue.
00:55:35
Speaker
And if you think about what's going on in the progression of a game, if you can be more cognitively with it at the end of the game when you're more fatigued, like that to me is like a pretty good benefit.
00:55:45
Speaker
yeah And research on that is still kind of split, but anecdotally, most people seem to almost prefer it a lot of times. Yeah. And with a lot of high schoolers, the placebo is real. Oh, for sure, yeah.
00:55:58
Speaker
They're going to believe you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we may have donated a bunch of ketones to some high school football players, actually. All right. Yeah, yeah. That's good. Time out. Tex here, at Train Heroic headquarters, meeting with the team to talk about the coaching experience that I'm able to provide for my athletes. So if you're a coach and want to put your program out there, on an app that athletes actually enjoy using, Train Heroic's for you. I've been using it since 2014, delivering literally over tens of thousands of workouts to athletes, and Train Heroic allows me to provide the unique coaching experience that I want to. Uploading video, providing coaching feedback, directions, and building a community, that's why I love Train Heroic. And if you want to take your athletes where they can't take themselves, that they want to go, head to trainheroic.com slash captains. and check out how you can deliver programming to them and now back to the show ready ready and for ready
00:56:58
Speaker
do want to wind it down a big battle i i do daily is energy drinks yeah yeah there's no way this stuff can be good so like Let's understand caffeine's benefit for performance, but then pull out caffeine and just look at the energy drinks and all the other crap in there that they're using maybe for that one ounce of performance improvement.
00:57:24
Speaker
yeah Yeah, so I've actually published research that's peer reviewed and published on Monster Energy Drink. I didn't get any funding from Monster. I just picked that as a thing to use.
00:57:35
Speaker
So what we showed is we didn't really look at safety. and we did look at HRV changes, heart rate during exercise, performance. In short, we saw heart rate went up a little bit. you know At a high enough dose, it did help performance. But again, that could be the caffeine amount.
00:57:51
Speaker
We did try to standardize it for caffeine dose. The increase in performance we did see does kind of match the caffeine literature. Again, it's always gonna be a little bit different. Surprisingly, HRV didn't change much. So I kind of thought HRV was going to just go super sympathetic, but it didn't.
00:58:07
Speaker
Again, that could be dose related. If you look at most of the studies on it, you know most of the studies would say that the safety profile is probably pretty good. Now the caveat, what I've seen in actual practice though is especially younger athletes are using high amounts of an energy drink, usually in place of things we know that are helpful. So it's like, oh, what's your pregame ritual? Oh, I have like, you know, one of the big monsters.
00:58:34
Speaker
Oh, how does that go for you? I feel amazing the first half and then I suck. I'm like, okay, so you just had a huge amount of potentially simple carbohydrates. You didn't eat breakfast for Christ's sake.
00:58:47
Speaker
you know You're not hydrated. You didn't have any water or electrolytes. you know So a lot of times what i what I do personally now, because if I tell them not to do it they're not going listen to me.
00:58:58
Speaker
So usually what I do is, okay, let's let's have you have one liter of ah fluid with one packet of element, have that in the morning when you get up. Your goal is to finish drinking it within two hours of once you're awake.
00:59:11
Speaker
Your game is let's say noon, right, for simple math. And then, okay, great, good at that, great. Okay, let's actually have breakfast. Here's what a good breakfast looks like or a decent meal the night before. Oh, okay, and then have you know some snacks before the game or whatever. Oh, okay.
00:59:27
Speaker
oh wow, like i I feel better like the third and fourth quarter now. And then I'm like, oh, could you do like you know just one monster instead of one and a half? right And then basically just pull them back. And most of the time they're like, oh, okay, oh, I do feel better now. oh okay.
00:59:44
Speaker
And I've had better luck doing that approach because if I tell them, like, it's just like ripping their teddy bear away on day one. yeah Like, it just doesn't go well. No. You know, and and as a coach, it's hard because, like, you can see that it's not going well for them, right? I mean, you can see most of the time their performance just...
01:00:04
Speaker
They feel they need more. And they feel they need more, but it's like, okay, now you're just, it's like putting lighter fuel on a fire. Like, do you get a bigger fire? Yes, but at what what cost? Like, you're you're trying to do something hyperacute. And we even know with caffeine, like, there's and what they call an ergolytic effect.
01:00:22
Speaker
If you go too high in caffeine, your performance actually starts to go down. If anyone has taken too much caffeine, you'll realize this. And the other part with stimulants, especially caffeine, is that you tend to get worse at fine motor skills.
01:00:38
Speaker
So gross motor skills can be enhanced to a certain point, which is why you see just such a wide range of dosing. So it's also very similar to like the Rousell scale.
01:00:50
Speaker
Like if you watch powerlifters, you see a lot of powerlifters get kind of amped up, but they're kind of doing a more of a gross motor skill. Like you don't see that with Olympic weightlifters. Like you don't see nearly the amount of stimulant intake with like Olympic weightlifters, right? Maybe the super advanced ones, maybe.
01:01:06
Speaker
But anything where you start to have like a loss of fine motor skills. And so that's something like I look for. And then I don't have any data on this, but it seems like, I think decision making gets affected a little bit too. Again, I can't point to any direct data on that. There's some data showing certain aspects of reflex and things get enhanced with caffeine, but I don't know if that's just, a you just don't have any fuel on board, so your brain is just trying to figure it out and making poor decisions. But like fine motor skills and stuff, you definitely,
01:01:42
Speaker
There's kind of the like the happy medium, right? Where, yeah you get a little bit of a bump, but you don't want to go too far up. And then you get into the whole psychological aspect of, and you know athletes tend to be very superstitious to begin with.
01:01:56
Speaker
you know In a perfect world, that anything that they, it's like, yes, do I want them to have a routine? Yes. Do I want them to have consistency? Yes. But at some point, I actually want to kind of screw with them and make sure they can still perform, right? Because can you do it on no energy drink? Can you be fine?
01:02:15
Speaker
Right. Could you do it out a little bit less sleep? Not that we're going to tell you to sleep three hours and play a big game, you know, but doing these little things in the background so that when they get there and something happens, because something will always happen when you play enough games.
01:02:27
Speaker
Oh, I don't have my favorite socks or I don't have this or I didn't eat my banana before the game or whatever. You know, like you just know that, OK, I'll be fine. I can I can just still go play and it's all going to be OK. Yeah. Yeah.
Building Leaders: Habits Over Supplements
01:02:39
Speaker
Call that calculated coaching. Yes. I do that with certain. ah things like intentionally call, make a bad call or put yeah somebody at a disadvantage. Yes. or Put them in stressful situations to see how they respond and then try to shape that behavior.
01:02:55
Speaker
Yep. So I can see how they react when things don't go their way. Are they going to talk back to me? They're going probably talk back to a ref. So then, yeah, I can certainly find fun ways to do that with different stuff. Now I'm just giving them a hard time for their caffeine. Yeah. Call it contraband because an NCAA band, you can't have caffeine as a, like a stimulant. Oh, you can? So then, yeah, they're Red Bulls and... Oh, okay.
01:03:23
Speaker
So now it's just letting them know that this... Yeah, give them a hard time that way. yeah but And I know NCAA, for a while, you can have high amounts of protein. all i lose track of all the lists of stuff that goes on with them. Yeah, that that one was fascinating. yeah Coaching at the college level, because you had to order yeah certain foods that were in...
01:03:44
Speaker
protein fat ratios or something. So then anything we provided through the weight room to the kids, it had to be a specific ratio. Yeah. I mean, muscle milk even made one specifically for that by changing the ratios. Yeah.
01:03:57
Speaker
I'm like, but you're giving them more fat than what and not enough. for Well, what are you, they just did something to get around the the rule. but Yeah. Anyway. yeah thats That reminds me, that's another thing I want to talk to Dylan about the fat in whey protein and then the connection the low-fat protein that's connected to to colon cancer. I don't know if you've seen anything.
01:04:19
Speaker
no he was telling me something about that. I'll save that yeah yeah for Dr. Dillon. Yeah, and there's old-school stuff. like You talk to old-time lifters like before... like the 1950s, like they all were like, they would use some protein, but they always used it with a high amount of fat, usually like cream or butter or full fat steaks and things like that. So I always think that's kind of interesting too.
01:04:44
Speaker
Yeah, they had it figured out. I mean, they look great. Yeah, and this is before any PEDs too. They just weren't invented. Yeah. Well, cool, man. I feel we're in a better place with materials to then present to parents to allow their kids to take creatine.
01:05:01
Speaker
And then, i mean, yeah, a lot of the the myths tackled. I know dosing was always a big one. So glad we covered that. And I mean, it it all boils back down to behavior Supplements don't build leaders. Habits do.
01:05:15
Speaker
yeah So that that's a big part of this podcast as well. so yeah Awesome, man. Thank you so much. oh yeah actually said We got the time to hang out. yeah And triphasic training too.
01:05:26
Speaker
I'll link that up in the show notes. And you also have a creatine. Yep, I have a PDF on creatine. have a link up for it yet, but we'll put up by the time this will will'll aim it we'll get a link. aim to sync that up. Yeah, yeah. and then I'll put that in the show notes. Yeah, so I went over what is the effect on cognitive, bone, muscle, recovery.
01:05:43
Speaker
i tried to make it less than 50 pages. It's got quotes from creatine researchers like Dr. Darren Kandall, Dr. Scott Forbes, Dr. Eric Rawson. So it's got their little quotes and stuff in there too. And it's all based on the the published research. Sweet. So ill I'll link that up. But if for listeners...
01:06:01
Speaker
Website, newsletter, where should they go? Yeah, so best place is a website, which is miketennelson.com. You can just hit a little button that says join newsletter. That's where probably 90% of my content goes out.
01:06:12
Speaker
So i definitely hop on the newsletter. And then we've got the podcast, so Flex Diet Podcast. And then a little bit of stuff on Instagram, which is just Dr. Mike T. Nelson. Easy day. Yeah, yeah.
01:06:23
Speaker
Awesome. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you for tuning in. Appreciate it. Good to see you.