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Nutrition For The Aging Athlete
2.8k Plays4 years ago
Scott Johnston talks with high performance dietitian Rebecca Dent on a variety nutrition-related topics for aging athletes. In this episode they cover: why not all calories are created equal; Non Exercise Active Thermogenesis “NEAT”; understanding calorie impact; the boundaries and conditions involved in fasted training; appropriate nutrient timing; the role of diet and nutrition in injury prevention; psychology of maintaining fitness as we age.
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Transcript
Introduction to Uphill Athlete Resources
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome to the Uphill Athlete Podcast. These programs are just one of several free services we provide to disseminate information about training for mountain sports. If you like what you hear and want more, please check out our website, uphillathlete.com, where you'll find many articles and our extensive video library on all aspects of training for and accomplishing a variety of mountain goals.
Engage with Experts: Forum and Email
00:00:24
Speaker
You'll also find our forum, where you can ask questions of our experts and the community at large.
00:00:30
Speaker
Our email is coach at uphillathlete.com and we'd love to hear from you.
Meet the Hosts: Scott Johnston and Rebecca Dent
00:00:37
Speaker
Welcome to another episode of Uphill Athlete Podcast. I'm your host and co-founder of Uphill Athlete, Scott Johnston.
00:00:45
Speaker
And today we have our first repeat guest with Rebecca Dent, who is the uphill athlete's staff dietician. Rebecca is the person to whom we refer all of the athletes that have questions about nutrition and diet. And she makes plans for them, consults with them on the phone. Rebecca is based in Chamonix, which is a pretty idyllic place to be living.
Nutrition for Aging Mountain Athletes
00:01:14
Speaker
And today we're going to dive into nutrition for the aging mountain athlete. I think that we'll hit on a number of topics that will be interesting for folks. And if we have any references or links, they'll be posted in the show notes below. Otherwise, let me get started with Rebecca. Rebecca, welcome. Thanks a lot for joining me again.
00:01:43
Speaker
Thanks for having me back, Scott. I'm looking forward to our conversation around this topic today. Well, it should be. I think we hit on a lot of things that resonated with folks in our first talk, but we certainly still see a great deal of demand and interest on the part of
00:02:04
Speaker
folks, let's say 45, 50 and over who are wanting to continue fairly high level pursuits in the mountains and extend their career essentially. And I think that we both know that
00:02:20
Speaker
along with other supportive elements like strength and aerobic capacity and technical skills, nutrition provides a really important support for those. And so I think this will be something that people can take to the bank with them actually, and you'll figure out how to make this stuff work best for you.
Rebecca Dent's Experience and Collaboration
00:02:44
Speaker
But I want to turn this over mostly to you first and I want to hear some more about your background for folks who didn't tune in the first time. Let's have people, don't you give us your credentials and your background, your experience.
00:02:58
Speaker
Yeah, sure. I'll try and keep it brief. I've been a dietitian for nearly 20 years and worked in sport both with the recreational and elite Olympic athlete for nearly 15 years. I'm currently, as you mentioned, based out in the Chamonix Valley. I moved out here
00:03:15
Speaker
So I have three years ago as my husband's a mountain guide and he was training so we removed that and then so 20 years ago I qualified as a dietician and I set out initially working within the NHS where I kind of
00:03:30
Speaker
gained and was experienced in weight management, so helping people who were obese lose weight and also supporting those that were going through surgery to lose weight. But I had the real passion for sports since a young age and I knew I wanted to be a sports dietician since the age of 15, so I spent a couple of years gaining some clinical practice in the NHS.
00:03:50
Speaker
had got a masters in sports, nutrition at Loughborough Uni and then set out, started my career in elite sport at the Scottish Institute of Sport where I worked with Olympic athletes towards the Vancouver Olympics in 2020, which was a real big goal and dream of mine. So once I
00:04:10
Speaker
tick that box I kind of really had the passion and the drive to work within the outdoor and adventure industry so I kind of volunteered to work with the GB climbing team back then around 2011 and completed my IOC sports nutrition diploma at the same time and then kind of started out on this journey working with endurance and ultra endurance and mountaineering athletes which is kind of
00:04:36
Speaker
brought me to this day where I currently specialise working with endurance and adventure-based athletes here in Chamonix and obviously supporting uphill athletes with their training plans towards their mountaineering goals. And I've just signed myself up for a PhD with Lausanne University looking more into the nutritional influences of that adaptation. So quite a big list of kind of experiences, but yeah, it's been a fantastic journey.
00:05:04
Speaker
And remind people, remind me too, although I think I know this story pretty well, how we got together, how you came in contact with Steve and myself.
00:05:14
Speaker
Well, I was obviously new up Steven or his mounting nearing and benches and achievements. And I just so happened I was following Steve House on Twitter. And that's when I saw kind of a palatholy evolve and start out and then obviously bought the training for the new alpinism book and really just saw it as an opportunity that I just wanted to connect and potentially partner so that I could support
00:05:43
Speaker
your upper athletes and I just emailed Steve and said hey can I work with you and he emailed me back and said yes which was again amazing and I still am really excited to be part of the staff to this day.
00:05:56
Speaker
And we actually had a face-to-face meeting. Oh, yes, we did. Yeah, no, we did. Well, back before the COVID day. It was about three years ago, wasn't it? I attended one of them. I think more. I think it might be four years ago. It was in the September. The mountain storm. Yeah.
00:06:14
Speaker
Steve and I were in the Chamonix Valley doing a workshop for mountain athletes and you came to that and we met there and I think we hit it off quite well and it's been non-stop ever since. Yeah it has, it's been fantastic actually, it's been fantastic to kind of be part of the evolution of uphill athletes and just supporting the uphill athletes as the team has grown so it's fantastic.
00:06:40
Speaker
Well, you've been a key part of that. Thank you. Thank you. So let's dive into some of these subjects.
Importance of Nutrition for Aging Athletes
00:06:47
Speaker
And so what are maybe one of the, one of the first or most important lessons we can go down a list here of things that we could talk about, but what's sort of a big, a really big important lesson that you've taken from your, your experience now working with, with especially older athletes?
00:07:07
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. Just as a kind of a backstory really, I turned 41 this year. So this topic is now of even more interest to me to try and apply all of the principles that we'll talk about today. And when I moved to Chamonix three years ago, as I said, I thought I was fit before we moved here. I'd been training for and completed in a 50 kilometer ultra race, which is about 30 miles in the UK. And then I started out ski touring and I hit the skin track in Le Zouche, which
00:07:37
Speaker
many people might know is quite steep can get quite steep and icy but it's a challenging track and but again I thought I was fit and then at that time when I first moved you know there were people in their 50s and 60s both women and men passing me and I thought this was amazing it was both inspiring but also it motivated me you know to really want to help to support what we class as the aging athlete and really help people
00:08:00
Speaker
get the most out of their physical activity goals and also health with age. So yeah, one of the biggest, I guess, the biggest kind of
00:08:12
Speaker
notes, reasons to kind of... Well, looking back... Oh, sorry, Scott, I'm kind of waffling on. Sorry, I lost my title of thought. Yeah, so one of the first goals I would say about nutrition and the aging athlete is relating to the podcast that you and Steve did on the aging athlete, and that was to never stop.
00:08:33
Speaker
So it's trying to always continue to be physically active and continue to build muscle mass with age. So that's one of the key things. And I think, as you highlighted in the start of this podcast, that actually nutrition is one of the key supporting mechanisms that will help us kind of mitigate that inevitable decline that we all experience, both in muscle mass and our physiology with aging.
00:09:02
Speaker
And I certainly am well beyond that age where I can live a lifestyle like I did 30 plus years ago or more where I could pretty much eat and drink anything I wanted at any time and still get up off the couch and go do
00:09:21
Speaker
you know, extremely demanding things. And now I'm a little more fragile than that. And I think that that can be a challenge for especially lifelong athletes. I think it's a challenge for all older athletes, but lifelong athletes have this. I mean, I certainly do. And when I talk to other older folks like myself that are still very active,
00:09:43
Speaker
we have in our brain this feeling of our 25-year-old self. And it's a struggle to connect the physical limitations that we are currently dealing with due to our advanced age with that mental picture of what we used to be able to do.
00:10:04
Speaker
And I think it can be really tough for folks to go, oh, well, you know, I just I can't just eat a bowl of ice cream every day after dinner and and still maintain, you know, my my body weight the way I want it to be. Or I can't drink, you know, six beers every night or that sort of thing. And I think that that's a really good point that you've brought up is, you know, while we have to be
00:10:31
Speaker
This goes into that, one of Steve's and my catch phrases that we use often is that proper training, first it has to be consistent, second it has to be progressive, and third there has to be some modulation from hard to easy in it. But especially this continuity thing.
00:10:54
Speaker
you need to maintain a steady routine. And I think doing so with diet is a great way to do it because you have... We've talked about this before, Rebecca, but I think diet is a support
00:11:14
Speaker
mechanism to maintain health. I think certainly there are maybe some small dietary hacks that a person could do that might improve performance. But in general, the performance improvements are going to come from the proper training methods. And those proper training methods demand good health and good health demands good nutrition. And so I see diet lying at the bottom of this pyramid of fitness.
00:11:43
Speaker
And it's just tricky or trickier. And I think this is something you and I want to talk about is how do we navigate that as we get older? And again, part of it is in my case. And I think, like I said, many others is realizing, you know, I'm not 25 years old anymore. And all those things I used to do when I was 25.
00:12:05
Speaker
are probably never going to happen again. The best I can hope for is to kind of slow the decline and maintain my health and fitness as long as I can. And what are the tools that I can use that will allow me to do that?
00:12:20
Speaker
Yeah absolutely and nutrition is one of them and as you've mentioned that we can't get away with just eating what we like or not eating a good quality diet to support what we're doing to want to achieve the best that we can in terms of our full fitness ability with aging. I'm seeing more and more kind of
00:12:40
Speaker
uphill athletes coming through who are in their 50s, 60s looking for nutrition to support so that they can optimize those training gains that they're now putting in place to try and get fitter and get stronger with aging. And there's some really good, neat, easy to implement nutrition strategies that
00:13:01
Speaker
I will be sharing today that we can implement to help again offset that loss of muscle mass with aging but also we can still make training and fitness games with aging. It's obviously relative to our age that we're at but actually we can still get fitter and stronger but it's that consistency of training
00:13:24
Speaker
strength training and also consistency of good nutrition and again with all the athletes that come through to me I say give it a couple of weeks one to two weeks and you'll start to see those improvements in potentially body composition and also strength gains recovery better improve recovery which then means
00:13:44
Speaker
better quality of effort of training going into the next session and all of those small changes that you make over time will be adding up to those longer term gains that you're looking for.
00:13:56
Speaker
What sort of physiological changes take place as we age? Can you kind of run down a list of those and talk about maybe we don't have to go into right now what we can do to offset those. If you want to save that for later, we can deal with each one of those individually. But I think just instead of speaking about a general physiological decline, what are some of the specifics that do decline that we are going to notice as we age?
00:14:24
Speaker
Yeah so in sure in the terms of aging there is like this involuntary loss in muscle mass referred to as what many of us now hear is called sarcopenia which in Greek means for loss of flesh and this starts to happen around the age of 40, 45 onwards and the process speeds up around 65, 70 and beyond so
00:14:50
Speaker
It's thought that a person may lose around three to eight percent per decade of muscle mass. And again, as I mentioned, this decline increases kind of from 65 to 70. But that will vary between individuals. You might have a 25-year-old who sat on the sofa playing video games at home that's not very active, not building much muscle and not very aerobically fit. And compare that to a recent client of mine last year who was
00:15:17
Speaker
62 years of age and competed in the Kona triathlon in October 2019 and did it in under 12 hours. Who's going to have the greater body composition? Yeah, it's incredible. Which one of those two will have the greater body composition of muscle mass and the higher BO2 max? So even though we have that age-related muscle mass loss, it can be relative to whether you're someone who is
00:15:42
Speaker
a master athlete compared to someone who's much younger and doesn't do any training at all. So that's one of the first major changes is that involuntary loss in muscle mass which... Certainly one that we were going to notice that one. Yeah, no, absolutely. Both in our performance, our lack of strength, but also you'll notice that your muscle mass isn't what it was once before.
00:16:10
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And as you've said, comes with that muscle mass loss comes an associated production in strength and our physical performance. And primarily the muscle fiber type that we're losing is the type two muscle fiber, which is the one that causes the ability for strength and high intensity sports.
00:16:38
Speaker
Yes, exactly. That's certainly something I see with older athletes that I work with, and certainly myself, because I've been doing this kind of stuff since I was a kid, is what I really see as changing in me is my power. You know, whether it's pulling, and I especially notice it in trying to pull hard moves rock climbing.
00:17:03
Speaker
The power just isn't there, or is it as accessible? And I have to spend a lot more time training for power, whether it's doing hill sprints outdoors, or doing hard climbing in a gym, bouldering, boulder problems, and canvassing, and that sort of thing.
00:17:21
Speaker
But I really have noticed that that's one of the, and I think that's exactly related to what we're talking about here, is certainly the loss of those faster twitch fibers that are responsible for those powerful movements.
00:17:35
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And again, by adding in some good nutrition and making sure primarily first there's enough protein going into your diet and throughout the day that I'll come on to in terms of recommendations, we can actually, again, just make sure that we're maximising whatever muscle mass we have left to work on and to build.
00:17:59
Speaker
What we've also seen in the age related muscle mass loss is that muscle becomes less responsive to that anabolic stimuli. So like you were saying, the climbing power and strength, so from resistance training, those high intensity trainings. But also the muscle protein synthesis also becomes less responsive to protein intake. So as we age, we do need to have greater intakes of protein again, which I'll come on to.
00:18:26
Speaker
That's fascinating. I had no idea. It's good for me because I'm a carnivore. But I do think that is quite interesting.
00:18:40
Speaker
You and I both know that oftentimes when protein amounts are given, there can be a difference between protein amount daily intake for an athlete versus a sedentary person. But I had no idea that it might actually even increase for the old folks like myself. That's quite helpful to know.
00:18:59
Speaker
I'll give you some numbers and some portion size of proteins that we can that everybody can start to use and so yeah just the other kind of physiological effects that happen with aging is that you know we also experience reduced bone mass we have weakened cartilage because of the loss in muscle mass we have an increase in insulin
00:19:17
Speaker
resistance and there's also a natural increase in inflammation as we age. So again I'll talk through how they are related to nutrition, how putting in good nutrition strategies can kind of mitigate some of those losses. With aging and with that subsequent increase in insulin resistance and loss of muscle mass, you hear people say or they have that middle age spread or they've gained weight or they now carry
00:19:46
Speaker
weight around the middle and that is again relative to how much activity and training someone does but does tend to happen if we don't remain active and do strength training and are vigilant with our diet. Yeah, all those are painfully familiar I'm afraid. So the
00:20:12
Speaker
The loss of, something I've noticed and I think is, and I've read a little bit about trying to understand it more, is some loss in elasticity of some of the connective tissue, it seems. You know, I'm not as, when I run, I'm, you know, I feel more, I used to be quite a good runner when I was younger. It could run some quite fast times. And now I feel more like a plotter. And I just feel like some of it is, I just don't, my legs don't feel as springy as they once
00:20:42
Speaker
did. Does that have probably something to do with that? You were talking about the cartilage and tendons and ligaments becoming less supple. Do you think that might be related in some way? Yeah, it will all be connected in terms of muscle mass and the weakened cartilage and just how
00:21:02
Speaker
mechanically and metabolically and biochemically we start to decline as we age. So that will all be, it's all interlinked together in terms of physical activity, disuse, being inactive as well as those natural losses that are happening over time. So what about
00:21:28
Speaker
One of the things I've noticed, again, myself and with others who are older, I think it comes from when you were talking about the middle age spread, beginning to put on fat
Impact of Aging on Metabolism and Nutrition
00:21:39
Speaker
in places you didn't used to have fat, is that my resting heart rate is not as low as it used to be, even though I'm still quite active.
00:21:53
Speaker
And again, I can't eat like I did when I was 25. So I'm guessing that my basal metabolic rate has slowed down substantially. Is that probably a good guess?
00:22:03
Speaker
Yeah we've seen again there's a mixed amount of research in the sense of if again you look at our general lifestyles as we age we get busier we have families we might have more responsibilities we might become more sedentary just out of breaking out of a habit of a routine of training you know life gets in the way sometimes so you have kind of a mix of both that loss of muscle mass which potentially influences our metabolic rate and it slows down as well as kind of
00:22:32
Speaker
the changes in our endocrine hormones that will affect our metabolic rate, but ultimately the two come together. So again, by being active and maintaining that muscle mass, we can support our metabolic rate, but there is still a natural decline in metabolism. So it's trying to again offset that natural decline in how much energy that we just burn on a day-to-day basis, just at rest.
00:23:00
Speaker
And it almost seems like those two things, the decline in loss of muscle mass and general overall fitness and lower basal metabolic rate are linked because if you don't have the capacity, I mean, the one thing, some people just won't have the time, as you pointed out earlier, you know, with jobs and family and other responsibilities in life, we usually have less leisure time than we did when we were younger.
00:23:27
Speaker
But we also have less energy to go out and do those big days back to back and be super active. That's one of the things I notice is that I just don't seem to be able to handle the volume and intensity of training that I once did that probably gave me the fitness to have a really low resting heart rate and probably a much higher basal metabolic rate, kind of the background resting metabolism.
00:23:55
Speaker
And so, you know, it's probably a little bit hard to decide, you know, whether the chicken or the egg came first here, which one is called. And because I think they're so closely linked, but it is certainly a phenomenon that I'm familiar with, and I think other aging athletes are too.
00:24:12
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And that makes, I think, nutrition even more critical because without that base of support of good nutrition and the health that comes with it, it's going to be even harder to maintain a high level of work from day to day or week to week, that sort of thing.
00:24:33
Speaker
Yeah, and that's, again, when an upper athlete comes to me and they sign up for a training plan, the first thing that I will look through is kind of most often the upper athletes will come through and want to improve body composition, lower body fat, lose weight. And I will look at kind of their training volume for that day and also their activity levels for that day. So are they sat at a desk? Are we not moving as much?
00:25:03
Speaker
What's our movement looking like through the day? Are we commuting to work during COVID? A lot more of us are working from home, so our general activity levels day to day are going to be lower, which then ultimately will affect our energy expenditure, which then ultimately impacts the amount of food we then
00:25:21
Speaker
can or need to eat to maintain body weight. So that's the first thing I'll kind of look at is where are the extras coming in, looking at nutrition intake and really trying to make sure it's good quality, other extra snacks creeping in that are not needed, or what's the portion size of the foods. And again, we'll come on to alcohol intake as well and that influence on
00:25:44
Speaker
energy intake so it's trying to match up our now activity levels as we are aging with our nutrition intake so there's often a discrepancy between as we age we slow down but actually we don't adjust our nutrition intake we're still eating what we used to although we're not as active and then with that mismatch comes kind of increasing body fat.
00:26:11
Speaker
Let's touch on the alcohol issue because I think that's going to be of interest to not just the aging athlete, but also other folks listening to this.
Alcohol's Effect on Recovery and Training
00:26:20
Speaker
What's your understanding of how does alcohol fit into one's overall nutrition plan?
00:26:27
Speaker
Yeah, so it's not necessarily something I would regard as healthy. Unfortunately, there are some studies around suggesting maybe a glass of wine or a low alcohol beer can potentially be beneficial for health. But actually, I've never really recommended anybody to drink a glass of wine. On one of my nutrition plans, it's always the
00:26:47
Speaker
opposite. Alcohol, as we know, contains empty calories. There's no nutritional value to alcohol. We tend to drink it for pleasure. We like the taste of it. Beers are becoming more trendy. We like the taste of different types of wine from all over the world. And it's often a social occasion. And potentially, again, through COVID, people may have been drinking more at home. And certainly, we see in the aging population
00:27:15
Speaker
higher intakes of alcohol. With that more alcohol becomes more energy which then doesn't help us achieve our nutrition goals when we're trying to train and train. Well the effects of alcohol itself if we're drinking more than two glasses in one evening are going to have a detrimental effect on our training and recovery.
00:27:36
Speaker
for the next day. So if you're drinking more than two glasses of alcohol in the evening, it's potentially dampening down your muscle protein recovery. So we've seen in studies that alcohol can suppress muscle protein synthesis and also the effects of alcohol. It dehydrates us. It doesn't make us sleep very well. It has an impact on our muscle glycogen levels again, or affecting our ability to get up the next day and put in training session.
00:28:06
Speaker
So explain to me, and I'm thinking some of our listeners would be curious about this, when you say empty calories, what does that mean? I mean, isn't a calorie a calorie?
00:28:19
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. So empty calories is referred to wine. Depending on how large you have that glass of wine is, can be about 200 calories. There's 200 calories that aren't really serving you any purpose. They're not benefiting your health. It's not supporting your training and your recovery. So in that sense, 200 calories from
00:28:39
Speaker
alcohol as opposed to 200 calories from say a good meal of say a salmon steak with some vegetables is more nutritious and better for you in terms of recovering your training and your health as opposed to 200 calories that are coming from a glass of wine.
00:28:58
Speaker
Okay, great. Yeah, so there's certainly no micronutrients probably. Maybe in wine there's some micronutrients, I don't know, but I would assume in a glass of vodka there's probably not many micronutrients, just the alcohol itself. Okay.
Role of NEAT in Aging
00:29:15
Speaker
So there's a concept that I'm not, haven't been familiar with, but you've enlightened me, that you call NEAT, N-E-A-T. Could you explain that to the audience?
00:29:29
Speaker
Yeah, so that was kind of what we were kind of talking about earlier in the sense of our activity is lower. So as we age, we tend to move less, whether it's because we don't have as much energy anymore to go out and do as much volume in training or as long a duration of training.
00:29:49
Speaker
for that day and also life gets in the way, we become busy or we generally just tend to slow down. So the importance of non-exercise active thermogenesis, so that is basically the non-planned activity that you do during the day. So again, one of the key things I'll speak to uphill athletes about is
00:30:09
Speaker
Do you work? Are you retired? What does your activity levels look like during the day between training sessions? I'm working with the training sessions through the week tend to be for around 45 minutes to
00:30:25
Speaker
an hour and a half and then you'll have your longer sessions at the weekend that can be anything from two hours to four hours, depending on obviously the objective and what you're training towards. And what I'm finding is potentially that people are training for a small amount of time in the day, whether it's a 45 minute an hour strength muscular endurance session or whether it's an hour's low intensity aerobic run, then we're sedentary for the rest of the day, we're not moving.
00:30:54
Speaker
we tend to be either sat at desks or we're homebound at the moment because of Covid or generally we've just slowed down and we're not as active and as busy. So then what happens is that that need so the non-planned activity reduces our overall energy expenditure. So again it reduces our calorie intake which is then potentially
00:31:15
Speaker
not what we're compensating for so incomes may be a glass of wine, incomes those extra calories coming from portion sizes we haven't adjusted for or extra snacks that we might not need although we think we're on a training schedule we're still not active for the rest of that day.
00:31:33
Speaker
Well, you definitely, I'm in that category, I'm afraid. So then I think, well, all of us are, maybe now with the COVID situation, many, many people find themselves in that situation where it's not as easy to get out and be moving as much as you'd like. And I know for me with the pandemic,
00:31:55
Speaker
uptick in the uphill athlete business. I'm spending a lot more time buying the computer or in front of the computer, I should say, than I would like and that I used to. So I have to factor that in for sure. And I don't think I've done a particular job as could be done. I might need to get on with the telephone with you and have you build me a nutrition plan. My pleasure. But it's that kind of neat, that activity during the day that will keep
00:32:23
Speaker
giving you that, giving the aging, I feel any of us who are aging that muscle stimulus up and down stairs and people who don't have stairs that maybe have bungalows or an apartment blocks on the ground floor. It's trying to find those movements that are still functional as we age that muscle mass loss translate to loss in both strength but also functional properties so balance proprioception
00:32:50
Speaker
all of those things that are really important for all of us to maintain with aging. So it's really important that both energy expenditure and burning those calories to also keep moving generally throughout the day to again keep putting in that muscle stimulus in addition in above what we think is our training session for that day.
00:33:14
Speaker
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense, I think. It really resonates with me that the idea that 45 minutes of low intensity training isn't a lot of activity in calorie wise. It's not a great deal of activity. I mean, it is benefiting you in terms of, especially for people that are aerobically deficient, which we know many of the people that come to us are, it is moving the needle in the aerobic development category.
00:33:40
Speaker
but it's still not a great caloric expenditure. And I think if you feel like you've had a major training session and then you should reward yourself with some high calorie snack afterwards, that might be completely, from a nutrition standpoint, might be quite defeating to do it that way.
00:34:00
Speaker
Yeah, and that is trying to change that mindset. Absolutely, that training will be sending you in a direction of progression and consistency over time is certainly going to get you better. It's really beneficial, but it's understanding actually the impact, the calorie impact on your day off. That session isn't going to be high, which then doesn't give us an excuse to eat what we like after.
00:34:24
Speaker
Can we touch, let's go back for a moment if you don't mind and touch on fasted training. That was what we spent the bulk of our time in our first episode with you discussing. And if people are interested in learning more about fasted training, I think that would be a great, it's a great resource I hope for them. And they should go check that.
00:34:47
Speaker
podcast out, but how would you say, or are there any changes or adjustments that might be wanted to be made for the aging athlete with regards to fasted training, or should we just use the same sorts of caveats and warnings and controls that we put out there in the first podcast about fasted training?
00:35:15
Speaker
I, in my experience, I, I've worked with, um, aging athletes who are into their sixties. Um, there's a popular, um, a world record breaking ultra runner, William Sitchel, who's Scottish, who was one of the kind of first ultra distance athletes that I work with. And he's 66 and he still does fasted training and, um, and he kind of continues to do that. He's has a very good diet and he also does the strength training. So, and I've also seen, um, really another athlete
00:35:44
Speaker
come to me who's in his 60s and has always been inadvertently been doing his morning runs before breakfast. And he still does his morning runs before breakfast. And he was just doing that because it was easier. And I've not seen any detrimental effects. I would potentially caution against people who start out doing the past sessions when they're kind of at the point where we classes and aging athletes are maybe into 50s and 60s.
00:36:13
Speaker
you know, deciding to all of a sudden do the fasted sessions and maybe start slowly and gently. But from the athletes that I've worked with and the master athletes I've worked with who've come from a background of having always done this type of sessions, they still respond really well and they are really very well, extremely fat-adaptated. I'm not sure if that's been your experience, Scott.
00:36:34
Speaker
It is, exactly, so I'm glad to hear that I'm not alone in that. I want to emphasize one thing before I talk about my own experience, although it's just anecdotal, like these things you've mentioned, and that is that when we spoke the first time about FASTA training, we did put boundaries and parameters on it, and we strongly recommended
00:36:59
Speaker
that a person gradually introduced this into their training. They don't just jump in to the deep end of the pool immediately and try to go out there and run six hours in the mountains without having eaten anything for 16 hours or something. And so we were trying to make it, I think we were trying to explain the benefits of, certainly that was our intent, to explain the benefits of
00:37:28
Speaker
what can happen when a person utilizes facet training in an intelligent manner with these sort of boundaries and conditions and say, okay, these are the kinds of things we've seen anecdotally. And I've been using this training on myself and others for 30 years. And so I have a lot of anecdotal evidence to support some of the things we talk about
00:37:54
Speaker
But, and we've learned some valuable lessons. I mean, you know, as we pointed out last time we talked, you know, for some people an hour or once a week of fasted low intensity exercise might be stretching it even. It might be a really tough load for them.
00:38:11
Speaker
And on the other hand, you and I both have experience working with very high level, very well fat adapted athletes that can literally go out for three or four hour run in a fasted state and come back and not even be very hungry.
00:38:27
Speaker
So I think it's really important for people to understand that this is not like most training recommendations that they would find from us. It's not a one size fits all. There definitely are benefits. And I think they, in my experience, they run the full spectrum of age. I haven't seen any diminution in the effect with older athletes.
00:38:51
Speaker
And I certainly have maintained that in my life for decades now of doing several fasted low intensity sessions in a week. I kind of stumbled into it the same way you were talking about this.
00:39:09
Speaker
ultra runner who just it's convenient to go out in the morning before it's kind of hard to run very much on a full stomach. And so that's how I stumbled into this was, oh, it's easier to just go out and run on an empty stomach. And then I would notice that as long as the energy demands were not super high, I was capable of handling a fairly high volume of that low intensity type work without
00:39:35
Speaker
any drop-off in performance or massive cravings and hunger afterwards. And so I'm relieved to hear that you've seen that exact same thing. And so I would, again, with all the cautions that we put forth in our first recorded podcast about this, my experience would be that there's really no
00:40:01
Speaker
no reason that somebody in that older athlete age group couldn't benefit similarly to a young person.
00:40:10
Speaker
No, absolutely. And I guess it would be, it's just, as I would say, you know, it's just reflecting back on your own training and feelings of fatigue and recovery. Again, when an up-path comes to me, I ask them about recovery and how well recovered do you feel after each training session. And it's just reflecting back on that. And if you're adding in fasted training sessions, then recover well and just take a note of your recovery.
00:40:37
Speaker
through each day and through the week and just respond to those changes of perceived effort and perceived feelings of fatigue. I think that we uphill athletes like to have some hard data and some numbers and metrics that we can use to track athletes' improvement in fitness and that sort of thing.
00:41:00
Speaker
But we definitely, and I think this might have been misconstrued by people in the past, we're also very big believers in the subjective feelings. How does it feel? Like you just pointed out. Are you recovering? Do you feel the kind of energy levels you think you should have the next morning if you did a big, fasted workout the day before?
Recovery and Overtraining Prevention
00:41:20
Speaker
If not, you're not recovering well from that and either you didn't need enough after or you went a little too long or too fast and that sort of thing, then it's delayed your recovery. Because as we mentioned again in that first podcast about fasted training, there's almost always going to be some kind of a trade-off of fat adaptation versus recovery.
00:41:43
Speaker
I mean, if you wanted to take it to an extreme, you would go and do this three-hour run, and then you might not even eat for several hours afterwards, and that's going to trigger a big adaptation to fat utilization by your body, but it's also going to have a very dramatic effect on your ability to recover and do a similar training session again soon, the next day even.
00:42:06
Speaker
And so I think that it's important to understand there's almost always going to be some kind of trade off if you if you do a fasted workout, you need to expect that it might take you longer to recover from that. And all the more important to have good nutrition between these fasted workouts. And so we.
00:42:26
Speaker
We want to emphasize that while data, heart rate, GPS data, how far you ran, how fast you ran, how much vertical you did, those are all very handy metrics for us. And they really help, especially in remote coaching, they help us look at what the athlete did.
00:42:44
Speaker
But one of the key things we are looking for in the athletes that we coach is how do they feel? What were their subjective feelings? Their perceived exertion? Were they, you know, legs heavy and tired? And so it's important to combine both that hard data, objective data, and the subjective.
00:43:02
Speaker
And I think what you were just saying about, you know, how did you feel the next day? And tuning into your body and not being, let's say, a slave to the training plan so that it's, you know, oh, boy, I'm really tired today. My legs are really heavy probably because you didn't refuel well after that last workout. But a plan says I'm supposed to go out and do hill sprints or intervals for something today.
00:43:28
Speaker
knowing that being aware of how your body's handling the training and being tuned in to what the little subtle signals that our bodies often give us that we ignore can make a difference between success and failure when it comes to how the plan works for you, how your training is actually benefiting you, or in some cases, is your training just making you tired but not making you fit?
00:43:54
Speaker
And so I think that, again, I'm just trying to emphasize that numbers are one thing, but the subjective feeling is very, very important.
00:44:04
Speaker
Yeah absolutely and on that recovery actually and just to kind of move and just to do to go back to protein intakes if I can actually on whilst you were talking about fatigue and recovery and taking note of that again when I have athletes come to me I'm asking them about recovery but also then the one thing that I then go and do is look at protein intakes and how much protein that they're having
00:44:28
Speaker
and both for each meal and throughout the day. And what's common is that we all fall short of protein at breakfast, we don't tend to eat enough. And then it's the timing of protein that's spread throughout the day where actually by improving that and making sure there's enough each meal, then actually that can have a really big influence on both our recovery from training and our energy levels.
00:44:50
Speaker
and our muscle mass gains from that strength session. So as I said earlier, what happens in the aging process is that the muscle has a blunted response to muscle protein synthesis with protein intake.
Protein Needs for Aging Athletes
00:45:06
Speaker
So that simply means that we need to eat a bit more protein as we age to get the
00:45:10
Speaker
the same stimulus response as we were when we maybe have been 25. So the recommendations are, so for the general population in the US and in the UK, they recommend about 0.8 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day. But actually for upper athletes, I would suggest
00:45:30
Speaker
1.4 grams per day and the recommendations in the literature is also suggesting that for master athletes or people who are still competing on a regular basis and training regularly with aging then we need around 1.6 to 2 grams of protein per kilogram of body mass per day and what that looks like is a
00:45:52
Speaker
60 kilogram female who's competing in training on a regular basis will need around 85 to 95 grams of protein per day and a 70 kilogram male athlete competing on a regular basis will need around 100 to 110 grams of protein per day and it's about splitting that daily protein intake
00:46:14
Speaker
per meal so looking at around 0.4 grams of protein per kilogram of body weight per day so for that same female it's about 25 grams of protein per day and for the male it's 30 grams of protein per day but what that looks like in food sources is that around a four ounce steak
00:46:34
Speaker
A four ounce steak is about 25 to 30 grams of protein and a four ounce chicken breast is about 20 to 25 grams of protein. So it's your standard portions of fish and chicken.
00:46:49
Speaker
steaks that we tend to give you enough protein per meal but what actually we need to focus on is both timing so having that portion spread between four to five meals per day but also looking at breakfast time and making sure there's a minimum of 20 grams of protein going in at breakfast because often we'll just have toast and jam or cereal with milk or
00:47:13
Speaker
potentially nothing at all. So yeah it's looking at your daily protein intakes where you can add more so that you're meeting your requirements to make sure that you're optimizing your ability to build muscle mass with aging. I have two questions for you with regard to that and but I'm going to be one question and one comment. The first is a comment that
00:47:37
Speaker
Well, since we're just off of the subject of fasted training, I think we want to be clear that fasted training doesn't mean you're reducing your caloric intake from a day-to-day basis. You still need to take in those calories and the numbers of grams of carbohydrates and protein and fat.
00:47:57
Speaker
you're just shifting the time scale. And that can be a challenge for folks because if you're doing this fasted training and you're out for your morning run, it can put a crimp in your style or crimp in your timetable in terms of when do you eat, if you've got to get to work.
00:48:14
Speaker
And so I think people will have to be a little more creative when it comes to making sure they're getting enough calories. When we're talking about fasted training, we are not talking about necessarily, there might be some weight loss benefits of losing some fat that come with this, but we're definitely not talking about a weight loss program here where we're trying to reduce calories for people. And so I think that would be one distinction. Would you agree with that?
00:48:38
Speaker
Yeah, no, absolutely. It's about making sure that the calories are going in to support the recovery so that actually you're refuelling and recovering well from that fasted training. And it's encouraging people to understand that actually fat adaptation is not fat loss. They're two different processes and two different dietary methods. And fat adaptation is simply getting your body to use more fat as a fuel source to where fat loss is helping
00:49:08
Speaker
someone to lose body fat and body weight. So yeah, they are two totally different things. And again, as I mentioned about the protein intakes, because it's about that's when it can be a challenge or we need to really pay particular attention to our nutrition intake to make sure that both protein, the carbohydrate and the fats are going in as food and good quality food to meet your calorie requirements to support all of your training processes.
00:49:37
Speaker
So what would happen if a person ate too much protein in a day? Let's say they want to make sure they're getting enough. So they're going to tend to, or they're going to try to err on the too much side. Is there a downside to that? Is there a problem with that for folks?
00:49:57
Speaker
We've seen in the research that there's no kind of detrimental effects to health in consuming higher quantities of protein through the day, unless we're someone with pre-existing kidney problems or diabetes. That's potentially when you'd be cautious of people
00:50:14
Speaker
who with higher protein intakes. But if we just try to eat more protein, protein is one of the most satiating foods that we can eat. So it would probably fill us up quicker than the quantity that we could manage to eat. So we'd probably have a natural off button anyway, which is why the diets like the Atkins diet and the keto diet most often produce weight loss results is because they contain a high proportion of protein.
00:50:39
Speaker
within that and often that's what is filling us up and keeping us feeling fuller for longer so people can potentially try to eat more protein but the challenge comes is that actually it'll come at a detriment of the other good nutrients that we need to get into support training and aging.
00:50:55
Speaker
And it would be a challenge to eat that much. But there's no detrimental health effects. Yeah. I'm glad to hear that. Thank you. I'm relieved. So let's move on to injuries because
Nutrition for Injury Recovery and Prevention
00:51:13
Speaker
That's something that comes with the territory when you get older. If you're in this age group and you're still trying to maintain a very active lifestyle, training for climbing, running, skiing, whatever it is, you're more likely, I think, my experience, to either
00:51:32
Speaker
induce some kind of an injury or you're dealing with an injury that you've kind of been pestered by for decades. Maybe you had a ski accident 30 years ago and had knee surgery.
00:51:48
Speaker
and you managed to get by quite well and continue to ski and run and do all these things in your 30s and 40s. And now all of a sudden in your mid or late 50s, you're thinking, boy, that knee is still, that knee is giving me all kinds of problems now. And it hasn't bothered me for decades. So injuries, I think, just come either collectively or they are incumbent with the aging situation
00:52:17
Speaker
So how can diet or nutrition play a role in helping us with either preventing or just managing them?
00:52:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, that's a great question. Again, it depends on the injury, whether it's kind of a joint, whether it's cartilage, whether it's a previous fracture, whether it's a strain, whether it's just pain, aches from previous injuries that haven't fully recovered or surgery. So it depends on the injury and the length of the injuries being sustained and whether it's just something long-term you're having to deal with.
00:52:51
Speaker
In terms of the nutrition it's looking at again making sure that we're eating to meet our energy requirements or if we are carrying the extra weight then potentially losing some body fat so we're within a healthy weight to take some strain and pressure off that injury site would be helpful.
00:53:08
Speaker
The other important aspect would be making sure there's proteins going in through the day to help that injured site, if it's a cartilage and knee injury, previous surgeries. Again, just to support both the muscle mass around that site of injury to support the structure and the function of that joint. So again, making sure there's enough protein.
00:53:31
Speaker
supplements that can help would be potentially um vitamin d3 possibly calcium depending on if you're eating enough calcium dairy foods in the diet more people are turning to vegan and vegetarianism so again it's making sure that is with age i've mentioned that biomass decreases so supporting that both with vitamin d3 supplementation because again as we age our ability to absorb um
00:53:56
Speaker
D2 in the skin to convert to the functional D3 that we need is reduced with aging. So whether it's having a supportive D3, potentially calcium supplement in there for our bones and bone health, and also looking at omega 3s for anti-inflammatory properties. We've got collagen support potentially supporting our cartilage and ligaments.
00:54:21
Speaker
There's also glucosamine, which is potentially beneficial for knee joints and knee pain. And again, these are kind of ones to try one at a time. Don't try and throw everything at the injury. Try and be a bit strategic with your approach, eyeing out your day-to-day. It's really important that we get plenty of fruit and vegetables in on a daily basis. It's a really...
00:54:43
Speaker
People find a tired message, I think, eating your five plus portions of fruit and veg today. But as we age, and as I'd mentioned, there's a natural increase in inflammation. And then when you're training on top of that and potentially have an injury or niggle, then these fruit and vegetables are high in anti-inflammatory
00:55:00
Speaker
property so it's making sure you're getting plenty of fruit and veg in daily, green leafy veg particularly and your berries because they're really high in antioxidants. So again that can help with the anti-inflammatory process of an injury as well as the anti-inflammatory the inflammatory process with aging and recovery from training.
00:55:19
Speaker
And then you've got, yeah, so the collagen. And then the other ones would be potentially creatine, which could be helpful for rebuilding muscle mass after an injury, particularly as we age. We've seen that a low dose supplement of creatine can help both with lean mass and muscle mass gains and strength. So the function of the muscle with the aging process. So all of these things can help combat both injuries and the aging process. But again, it's been strategic.
00:55:49
Speaker
with them and when and where we put them into our diet.
00:55:54
Speaker
That's great advice. Thank you for that. I want to clarify something. I realized when we first started this and I said that I'm a carnivore, I'm not a carnivore. And because I thought I'm going to hear about this from people. I mean, I don't have anything against carnivores. I know there are, I even know some who perform quite well on that kind of a diet. But no, I'm more in the, I guess what it would call the paleo diet type of a diet in Atkins type diet. So I just want to let people know I'd eat lots of vegetables and fruit.
00:56:25
Speaker
But then the other thing is that
00:56:30
Speaker
People will often ask me about introducing some new thing into their lifestyle, whether it's a training intervention, meaning, you know, I'm going to try this type of training. We've already talked about fasted training would qualify as one of these, what are termed training interventions. And I would categorize supplements in the same way.
00:56:55
Speaker
in that it can be fairly, I think it's quite illuminating and it can be fairly simple for a person to do an experiment on themselves. So yeah, try low dose of creatine for a few couple of weeks and see if it helps you recover faster, see if you feel stronger from that. Likewise with some of these other things and
00:57:17
Speaker
I think it's easier to do that. What you were just suggesting, do one change at a time so then you can recognize the cause and effect. But I think it's often easier to do that is, OK, go out and try those hill sprints for a few weeks and see what happens. Or go try some fasted training for a few weeks and see how it works for you. Easier to
00:57:40
Speaker
We, you and I, and a lot of the coaches, all the coaches that work with us, we have a great deal of anecdotal experience with this, but there's no better way to prove whether it works for you or doesn't work for you than to actually give it a try. Just do it in an intelligent way and don't go changing too many variables at one time or you won't have any idea. Was it the vitamin D3 that you increased or was it, you know,
00:58:07
Speaker
the creatine or the protein powder you were taking or something else. I encourage people to do little experiments like that on themselves from time to time just so that they understand how their body responds to this stuff.
Testing Dietary Changes Effectively
00:58:24
Speaker
Yeah, and I would agree and I would encourage people to do that. All of the supplements I suggested are backed by good sound evidence with no side effects unless you already have pre-existing medical conditions, then obviously consult your GP or a qualified nutritionist or dietician first before you embark on any of these supplements and doses. But the other thing I would encourage, as you were saying, Scott,
00:58:50
Speaker
I night the day to day, first look at your protein intakes, make sure there's enough protein in each meal. Are you getting your five portions of fruit in bed today? Are you recovering? Are you putting in your training consistently over time? Make these small kind of pick the low hanging fruit changes to really make sure that your day to day training and nutrition is consistent and solid. And then you can start to experiment with the different training modalities or with the nutrition sufferance because you know everything else is consistent and stable.
00:59:18
Speaker
and you know how you feel and how you're responding to those changes and that good solid base and then put in you know the creatine or the omega-3 or the glucose I mean those different supplements have different durations of time to act and wash out but you can still certainly try them and people generally tend to say to me I've tried this or I added in more
00:59:40
Speaker
protein after my recovery and I feel like I've got more energy or I'm not feeling as tired after that session. So there's certainly lots of benefits to testing these different nutrition strategies out.
00:59:53
Speaker
Yeah, I would 100% agree with that. And I'm glad you're on the same page as me. I don't feel like Lone Ranger out here saying stuff like that. And not having anybody else in my camp, I kind of feel more comfortable when other people have a similar anecdotal evidence like I've seen.
01:00:13
Speaker
When it comes to things like these adjustments that you're making, I want to reemphasize or jump on your bandwagon with you about the fact that
01:00:28
Speaker
Most people don't necessarily need to be fine tuning and tweaking how much vitamin D3 they're taking. Not that that's a bad thing to take as a supplement, but
01:00:45
Speaker
If you're looking to maximize your performance, the first and most important thing you need to do is the basic stuff. Like you were saying, getting enough protein. Are you getting enough sleep? Cutting out the alcohol.
01:00:59
Speaker
doing an appropriate training volume and an appropriate training intensity, doing the strength work, doing these on a consistent basis will get you 95 or 98% of the way there. Having worked, as both of us have, with Olympic athletes, I can say with quite, in my experience, with a very strong opinion about this, and that is that
01:01:27
Speaker
Those people have all of those bases covered before they start looking at whether it's using some sort of simulated altitude or taking creatine, doing some of these other things that I would consider. Maybe those are going to make a couple of tenths of percent performance improvements for them.
01:01:50
Speaker
But they've got all the basic stuff already very well covered. So they have to be looking for some, the low hanging fruit has already been picked for those athletes. And for them, trying to find a couple of percent performance increase can mean the difference between winning in second or third place in a race. And so I think it's quite appropriate at the elite level for people to be wanting to experiment with and try
01:02:20
Speaker
little tweaks like this to their nutrition and training plans. But I think it can also be a mistake to look at, let's say, what an Olympian is doing and saying, oh, they're taking this supplement or they're using this type of running shoe or whatever it is and think, oh, that must be what makes them as successful as they are. And no, no, that's not what makes them successful. It's the 15 years of hard work
01:02:47
Speaker
that they've put in to get to this point that allows them to say that, oh, if I were to change this to this other type of running shoe, I might see, you know, two seconds per mile improvement in my pace because that two seconds per mile is going to be a huge, you know, that's going to, an easy, or that's something that's going to be very hard for them to get through fitness because they're already so highly fit. And so I want to just put that out there that
01:03:14
Speaker
I, we do get folks coming to us from time to time that are not doing the basics at all. They don't have the basis covered. They haven't been putting in the time for years and years, but they want to jump right to these kind of sexy silver bullet type fixes and think that, well, I'm just going to go ketogenic diet and that's going to make me, and I'm going to be a Killian Jornet overnight if I do that.
01:03:36
Speaker
And I think that can be, it's alluring because it sounds rather simple and it's a lot easier to take a pill or buy a pair of shoes than it is to go out there and put in the 20 hours a week of training that would need it to get you to that fitness level. Would you agree with that?
01:03:54
Speaker
Yeah I wholeheartedly agree and I would up my percentage of the people that come through that aren't necessarily doing those but I would as you would refer as to the basics and I would say 80 to 90 percent of the uphill athletes I see are not doing the basics and doing them well and
01:04:11
Speaker
by simply making those changes, there are gains there, easy gains to be made that are really going to potentially transform your
Focusing on Basics Before Performance Tweaks
01:04:20
Speaker
training. And if you are at that top end where you are wanting to have those seconds shaved off or make a difference between podium position first and third, then yeah, that's when, as you quite rightly said, we'll look at the nitty gritty and the minute details, but actually for the majority of us,
01:04:40
Speaker
We just need to be doing the basics and do them well consistently over time. And I had a conversation just this winter, actually, with the British ski team coach. We have a fairly good downhills slalom and downhill skier, a male athlete, despite our lack of snow in the UK. And I simply said to him, I said, what are your secrets to nutrition? What are you doing in the sense of helping him achieve his goals and his performance? And he just said back, you know,
01:05:06
Speaker
the one thing that we do is we do the basics and we do them well was his answer his instant answer in terms of his nutrition and so whatever level we're at that's where we need to start and then once you're there you then can go on to make these additional tweaks that yeah might you know mean that you do see a game a small game but you see another game but then that's when you can go on to that when you're doing the basics more often and consistently
01:05:34
Speaker
Great. I'm glad we're on the same page with that. I think that's a message that needs to be.
01:05:39
Speaker
driven home in the general public's mind, or the general athlete's mind, is that just because Iliad Kipchoge runs in these shoes or eats a traditional Kenyan diet, those are not the keys to his success. And following, jumping into, I'm gonna buy those shoes or I'm gonna eat, I can't remember what the name of that,
01:06:07
Speaker
sort of tuber or root vegetable that is really popular in Kenya. But I've heard people say, well, that must be why Gilead Kichogi can run under two hours for a marathon. Well, and that's highly doubtful, but that's what's making him run under two hours. And I can certainly say that with all the athletes, all the Olympic athletes and the high level athletes that I've worked with, you know, including World Championship podium finishers and
01:06:34
Speaker
none of them have used extraordinarily challenging or difficult dietary tweaks. They just do all the basic things you've been talking about and eat a healthy, clean diet and get plenty of protein and that supports their training and the training is what's going to allow them to perform as well as they do.
01:06:59
Speaker
Well, I think I've beat that horse enough. Maybe we can move on.
Mindset and Ambition in Aging Athletes
01:07:05
Speaker
So let's, I know we should probably start thinking about wrapping this up before too long, but let's, I want to hear about the mentality aspect of this, the mindset, the psychology, and how that can relate to things like illness and maintaining high levels of fitness as we age.
01:07:27
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, again, I'm more and more in my practice, both in my business here and working with uphill athlete. I'm having, it's exciting when an ageing athlete contacts me and they're telling me these big adventures that they want to go on. And for example, I had a
01:07:47
Speaker
an aging, I say an aging athlete, a 60 year old who'd always run and been active all his life and diagnosed Parkinson's age was 60 and wanted wants to run the length of the UK. I've got other athletes who were in their 50s and 60s still wanting to push the grades climbing they want to you know do
01:08:04
Speaker
eight A's and a recent client of mine who for his 60th year wants to do a sub three hour marathon and they're kind of looking for that goal and that determination and they really have a mental focus and drive to keep pushing the goal, pushing the boundaries and seeing what they're capable of. An uphill athlete who I'm currently working with who
01:08:30
Speaker
is 57. He came to me looking for nutrition support because of poor recovery and wasn't making the strength gains that he felt he should have embarked recently on a new strength training plan. I think Scott you worked with him
01:08:46
Speaker
He was trying to, out of curiosity, see how well he could get on or how far he could do with pull-ups, was setting out to kind of, just out of curiosity, see how well he could do with pull-ups and see where his strength would take him because, again, he hadn't enlisted on any consistent strength.
01:09:05
Speaker
training and we know that physical activity and training and support our mental health and cognition with aging so being curious having that mental focus being physically active and throwing in the good nutrition so proteins important for brain health good fruit and amount of fruit and vegetables be the anti-inflammatories your omega-3s for brain health
01:09:25
Speaker
Couple that all together and again we can continue achieving our goals whatever they may be as we age. So I think being curious and having that mental mindset of another stopping and continuing is going to set us in a good start for everyone who hits the aging process at some point.
01:09:47
Speaker
With regards to illness, would you recommend, I mean, maybe this is applicable to all ages, but immune system supports of some type in terms of supplementation, what's your feelings on that?
Supporting Immune Function in Aging
01:10:05
Speaker
Yeah and again immunity and immune dysfunction again as we age is something that we see we're just not able as able to fight infection as we were when we were younger which is what we're seeing in COVID you know the elderly population people over the 70 are kind of being deemed at risk again for that simple matter that as we age our immune system
01:10:26
Speaker
is compromised and doesn't function as well. And for immunity and supplements, again, I would go with fruit and veg, antioxidants, anti-inflammatory foods and nuts and seeds. Our immune system is made up of protein and fat. So it's important to make sure that you're getting these good quality foods from protein and good your mono and poly and saturated fats with aging.
01:10:51
Speaker
Supplements, I'm just trying to think the turmeric potentially again as an anti-inflammatory but not necessary immunity. Vitamin D has been linked strongly to immune status and again I'd encourage people who are spending quite a bit of time indoors, we live in
01:11:08
Speaker
maybe in the northern hemisphere, maybe in the UK where there's not much sunshine and to get your vitamin D3 levels checked and then supplement accordingly. And that has strong evidence linked to immunity. Again, as I said, Amiga 3's linked to immunity and kind of your food first approach in terms of plenty of fruit and vegetables.
01:11:30
Speaker
Right. Okay. Well, so again, you're confirming some of my preconceived notions, so I'm glad. Well, can we wrap this up with you giving us some general, I mean, you have all through this given us general recommendations with some kind of practical strategies that people can implement for themselves.
Tracking Nutrition for Health and Training
01:11:54
Speaker
Yeah, sure. So if you're someone that's kind of training regularly and experience really wants to find out if you are someone that needs to make changes in your diet, take a food diary and keep a food diet to two to three days. Have a look at what you're already doing. See what's already there and see what you're doing well and see where you might need to start adding in in nutrients or foods like are you getting a protein at your breakfast? Are you recovering with enough protein? And again, with
01:12:23
Speaker
the aging athlete if you're...
01:12:26
Speaker
training on a regular basis, you might benefit from a pre-bed protein intake, whether that comes from a protein supplement, whether it's whey protein or a plant-based one, whether it's simply a pot of Greek yogurt before you go to bed, that can all help with recovery. So look at where you can make easy changes and you first need to understand what you're doing or what you're not doing before you can then add in the basics that you're not doing and add in these simple nutrition strategies that again are going to make some
01:12:55
Speaker
are going to be really beneficial for you so keep a food diary, check breakfast are you eating enough protein at breakfast are you eating your five plus portions of fruit and veg one portion is 80 grams which is about three ounces and so are you having that are you eating plenty of
01:13:11
Speaker
green leafy veg daily and berries you're having a serving of green leafy veg and berries daily and then once you've kind of ironed that out look at your intake around your training are you recovering are you eating enough carbohydrate or do you need to reduce your alcohol intake so just start to look at what you're doing and make those small changes over time.
01:13:34
Speaker
Those sound like they shouldn't be that hard to implement, do they? It seems like that's pretty simple stuff for most of us to start dialing in, especially before we go too deeply down the rabbit hole of getting crazy with...
01:13:54
Speaker
trying to make tiny little tweaks. So I've got some great advice. Thank you very much. Anything else that we haven't covered yet that you would like to bring up?
01:14:06
Speaker
The only thing I'd like to say in summary is that when I worked in the NHS, I would see a lot of outpatients and people coming in and they just were, they'd seem to accept that they were old and we were going to get sick. As you get old, we get sick and it's happened to me. This has happened to me. I've just got old and I've got sick and I've got pain and I've got arthritis.
01:14:26
Speaker
You know, some of these things we, you know, genetics will lend themselves, unfortunately, that we will pick up some ill health potentially, but we can really take control of it and we don't have to get old and sick. We can get older and stronger and fitter and really live a longer, healthier life. So just by implementing some of these key strategies that we've talked through in this podcast, whether it's training, definitely strength training, nervous stopping and putting in all the good nutrition
01:14:56
Speaker
practices. I can't encourage people enough how far that will go in supporting both training, your mountaineering objectives and also sustaining our long term health.
01:15:10
Speaker
Great. Thank you. That was perfect. I think that is exactly a great message to end on. I want to encourage folks that are interested in getting in contact with Rebecca to look on our website. You can read about her under our Coaches tab. There will be a section that gives more on her bio there.
01:15:31
Speaker
And if you're interested in a telephone consultation with Rebecca, you can go into our shop or the store on our website and sign up for a nutrition consult with Rebecca. We have a regular phone consult product, and we also have a Rebecca phone consult product. So be sure you sign up for the right one. And if you're interested in going straight to a nutrition plan with Rebecca, if you go to the coaching tab,
01:16:00
Speaker
on our website and scroll down that page a little ways, you will find a place where you can sign up for a nutrition plan with Rebecca. Well, thanks so much, Rebecca, for joining me today. It's been great to talk to you again, and I've certainly learned a bunch. And perhaps we'll do this again sometime soon. Great. Thanks, Scott. Thanks for having me. Yeah. And all of the listeners, thanks for tuning in and will join us next time for our next podcast.
01:16:32
Speaker
Thanks for joining us today. For more information about what we do, please go to our website uphillathlete.com.