(light music)
-: Now we're gonna move into the systemic stimulations
and adaptations, which we've already hinted to a little bit
in the last unit.
Here we look at local and systemic.
The main picture that you need to understand
is that especially when we're looking at metabolic stress
is that you have to look at how that is being affected
not just within the cells
but then how having that metabolic stress within those cells
is essentially affecting the system as a whole,
both in the metabolites that it's releasing
and the nutrients that they're just requiring
from the rest of the body.
So we have to look at this total systemic effect
that the local training is having on our body.
As we move into systemic,
one big portion is gonna be lactic acid recycling.
When we drew that up before
like when we're talking about systemic energy metabolism,
we looked at how the liver can basically take its glucose
and donate it to the muscle as needed.
The muscle, as it's burning through glucose,
if it's doing so at high rate,
it will release lactic acid.
That lactic acid goes to the liver.
The liver can recycle that back into glucose,
which it can send back to the muscle,
but that cost energy at the liver.
So the liver has got two jobs
that it's doing when we're doing high-output work.
One is it's donating its glucose.
The other is it's making glucose
by recycling the lactic acid, which cost it energy.
It's getting up its resources,
and it's getting up its energy
in these extreme metabolic training conditions.
The thing that's gonna affect that
is gonna be the density of the work,
so the work-to-rest ratio.
Obviously if I am expending a lot of energy
and resting very little,
I'm gonna be burning through a lot of glucose,
which means I am gonna be demanding more glucose
from the body, not just the glycogen that I have,
and then the amount of tissue
that I happen to be working with.
It's a much bigger load for the liver to support the glucose
the the quadriceps are burning through
than it is the middle delts.
When you're training larger muscle groups
or multiple muscle groups,
that's gonna be much more of a demand
in terms of how much lactic acid I'm recycling
if I am pushing out lactic acid from all of that tissue
versus just the small amount of tissue.
So it's the amount of tissue being worked
and the density at which that tissue is being worked.
It's ultimately gonna affect how much recycling is needed.
That stimulus there is what is going to kick us over
into that growth hormone response.
But what we need to be considered of is should we do that
regardless of yay, we can get growth hormone.
But is liver glycogen itself already low?
'Cause if liver glycogen itself is already low,
what does that mean?
That means that now stress hormones
are gonna have to go up higher.
It might actually have to break down protein
to support that blood glucose as well.
It might have to do the gluconeogenesis.
Does my liver have just low energy?
I will have a systemic tolerance to lactic acid.
That will basically be off of how well my liver
can actually recycle that.
Anybody that's still nauseous from the metabolic workout.
If you've vomited during a metabolic workout,
if you ran sprints and sports or whatnot,
it's likely not that you ate too soon.
It's possible.
It's likely not that you drank too much water,
although it's still possible.
What really happens is when the liver
is taking in all those lactic acid,
but it just simply, either from a nutritional
or from an energy status perspective 'cause remember,
your liver had mitochondria and everything else.
They make energy the same way your muscles do.
If that's impaired,
they're gonna be able to recycle less of that lactic acid
'cause it takes energy to do it.
For livers, that metabolism is poor.
If a liver has a poor nutrient stat.
If it's missing cofactors, that's poor.
That lactic acid still has to be disposed of somewhere.
What it'll do is it'll push it down the bile duct,
and it will go into your GI tract.
When you dump a bunch of that
into your GI tract, guess what?
You don't feel so good.
Your GI tract really doesn't want that stuff
sitting around in there,
so what's the easiest way to get rid of it?
Door number one, so just blargh, and there you go.
There is your excess lactic acid that did not get recycled.
That's the most energy-inefficient way to use glucose,
if you will.
But that should never be the goal of workout, right?
The fat loss method is not get rid of calories
by vomiting them out.
What we really want to do
is actually improve the liver's energy production
so that it could tolerate that.
Whether or not lactic acid training
is trainable for an individual
will really be dependent
on the health and the nutritional status of their liver,
not just the muscles,
so we have to take the systemic trainability into context
with what we're going to try and do locally
because somebody could handle a lactic-based workout
for biceps and triceps,
but they can't handle for legs.
But maybe they might be able to handle
if I do biceps and hamstrings together
and triceps and quads together,
but they can't handle it
if I do quads and hamstrings together
because that's so much tissue.
The last bullet point out here
on what's going to really be affecting this
is that blood sugar vacuum effect,
so that's how much sugar, how much glucose
is being sucked out of the blood.
That's everything on the previous slide,
the density and the amount of tissue
that you're working with.
That's the context of what I was just talking about.
Could you potentially make this trainable
as long as you limited the amount of tissue
that you were doing in a single workout.
There might be a trainability factor for them
as long as you divide the body up appropriately
and do the appropriate amount of volume of work
and the appropriate degree of lactic intensity,
then they could get some local benefits here
while not exceeding the tolerance of the liver,
making this then a trainable stimulus for that tissue.
But if you program it badly
and you have too much tissue on one end
and not enough on the other
that then it's too much.
It may exceed the liver.
In that case then, you're actually going to be stressing,
essentially going to be creating a lot of oxidative stress
and inflammation on the liver.
What that's gonna do is it's gonna decrease your recovery,
making you need to take more days.
So if you continue on that training mechanism,
the next day, your liver is actually going to be
in a worse place than it was.
Even though you've changed the muscle groups,
your performance will suffer.
Even though those muscles are fresh,
systemically you will be under-recovered
and not perform like you should.
If we look at the benefits of this
because there is a lot of benefits as well.
We talked about the growth hormone,
which is our nutrient partitioning hormone,
which is extremely anti-catabolic.
It's very catabolic to fat, anti-catabolic to muscle.
It's really good at improving our ability
to conserve glucose.
We're running off of body fat.
It's important for getting good quality sleep.
Growth hormone has a lot of benefits,
but we need to be in a healthy enough state
to be able to tax the liver,
to be able to focus on a growth hormone-based stimulus.
We're gonna need enhanced recovery.
We talked about this a little bit in local.
We get improved tolerance to higher frequency from systemic,
much like you do with oxidative.
So oxidative is gonna affect your tolerance frequency
in a muscular level
'cause you're gonna have improved energy production
at the muscle tissue itself
like localized where you're training.
When we get systemic adaptations
because now the liver's mitochondria got trained,
that means that it's now going to get less stressed
from the demand from your muscles.
So now when your muscles ask it to recycle lactic acid,
or they ask it for glucose, it's less of a stress
because it's better producing energy,
so I can recover fast between training sessions
'cause at rest, my stress hormones will be lower.
That because the stress hormone is lower,
we get that increased threshold of the ANS,
the autonomic nervous system.
If that can be switched over,
if that can go from sympathetic dominant during training
to parasympathetic dominant,
I'm in that rest and digest recovery state
faster than obviously then I can recover faster
and I can get to training again sooner
regardless of body part.
Increased metabolic threshold
for the stress hormone that is for the spikes.
When we talk about cortisol spikes
and catecholamine spikes,
they were all to get the liver to do something
like do the gluconeogenesis or do the ketogenesis
or let's get that glycogen breaking down glucose
into the blood.
So when the liver has better energy metabolism,
it will respond better to those stress hormones.
Ultimately likely they lead to less of them needing to be
or the spikes needing to be less elevated
in response to a given stress.
If I don't need to make as much cortisol
and as much catecholamines to respond to stress,
that also means I don't need
to supercompensate with insulin.
There's less of a chance of that blood sugar
climbing higher than it was supposed to
and therefore I'm less likely
getting into that insulin cortisol seesaw.
This can be achieved in a more muscular depleted state
than local training.
So you can train systemic benefits
without taking muscles to complete fatigue.
You can get muscles to create some lactic acid,
but not take them to complete exhaustion.
Instead of using a few muscles to tax the system,
you can use more muscles to less of a degree of fatigue
to tax the body systemically.
That opens up your library to be able to train this
without necessarily taxing the muscles to the same degree
or with the same stimuli.
That would be like the context
of superseding multiple body parts in a circuit
and quote like what you would probably consider
hypertrophy range where it's like
you're making some lactic acid,
but you're not taxing the lactic capacity.
You're like working in a lactic power range
and then you're doing dense work
but dense work between different muscle groups
instead of dense work between the same muscle groups.
The thing that's getting consistently stressed
on all of those sets is we're sending lactic acids
to the liver, to the liver, to the liver,
but just from different places.
So we're taxing the liver
more than we are the individual tissues.
That's one thing to keep in mind is like we can do this,
we can get these benefits
without necessarily having to stress a muscle
to fatigue, which would be important
if we're trying to limit the amount of oxidative stress
within those individual muscles,
but we still wanted the benefits of, say, growth hormone
or this like improved recovery aspect here.
All right.
If we look at more of the adaptations.
We talked about the liver energy production,
so that's gonna be mostly from mitochondria biogenesis
as well as just efficiency.
So the citric acid cycle, it'd be like on transport chain.
Those are all made up of proteins and enzymes.
So one of the adaptations we get
from taxing this metabolically
is we will make more of those proteins
within the mitochondria
as well as increasing those mitochondria themselves.
We get increased tolerance to lactic acid
and oxidative stress at the liver.
What that's gonna do is it's gonna allow me
to have a more vicious hypertrophy workout
for lower body without being the thing that limits me.
Like if you have been a hypertrophy leg workout
for quads or whatever,
and you're trying to do oxidative stress
or something like that for your hypertrophy mechanism,
and the thing that keeps you from going
is like oh you get nauseous
or you're not recovering between sets
or something like that, this is going to help
because now your systemic fatigue
won't be getting in the way
of you taking that muscle to fatigue
especially if repeated over sets.
It's gonna improve our cardiovascular conditioning
'cause we're going through this.
With this whole process
of getting the lactic acid to the blood
and the circulating cortisol,
and that all requires us to increase respiration
and increase cardiovascular output.
In that context there,
we're gonna see an elevated heart rate
during this style of training
that is consistent throughout there,
not just peaks, ups and downs
because we're constantly focusing on getting blood
to the liver and getting blood back to the muscles,
and moving that lactic acid and glucose around.
We'll get increased systemic lactic acid threshold.
We'll increase the threshold for that,
which then makes this harder to achieve
but by increasing that threshold,
it also makes it so that now if we wanted to focus
more on a muscular lactic,
we want to focus more on taxing the individual tissues,
again the systemic ability would not be an issue.
So now we get into that context.
That person that couldn't train lactic quads
and hamstrings together because with that much tissue,
it was just too much for their system.
As their system gets better,
they can train more tissue within a single workout
in a metabolic fashion without the limiting factor
being their systemic ability to deal with that lactic acid.
Now they can actually push those muscles
to the appropriate degree of fatigue that they're going for
for that particular training stimulus.
If I were going to choose one or the other,
why would I choose systemic or local?
A couple different reasons.
One could be actually what does a person need in their diet.
For some reason or another,
whether it's digestion or insulin sensitivity or whatnot
that okay, we need to restrict carbohydrates in their diet.
Now in the context of looking at how the mitochondria
uses the glucose.
If we can't burn through a lot of glucose
of an individual muscle,
well then we need to make sure that we can get what we need
out of multiple muscles instead
to accomplish the lactic acid stimulus
because no individual muscle
is gonna have a significant amount of glycogen
to be able to burn over into glucose.
Obviously I'm not gonna be getting a lot from the liver
if I haven't been eating much carbohydrates.
Its liver glycogen isn't gonna be very high either.
I'm not gonna be getting a lot of juice from digestive
'cause they're not there.
So the compromise is to dip into multiple muscle groups,
or dip into their glycogen a little bit
and not overly tax them
'cause remember, what happens if we overly tax something
and from a glucose-dependent mechanism
when it doesn't have a lot of glycogen,
it's gonna become more oxidative
and stress hormones are gonna have to go up higher
in order to try and get glucose to that particular tissue.
So doing systemic versus the local
may be a way of getting some metabolic training in
for that particular person,
getting some systemic adaptations.
But in a person who can't,
does not have as many carbohydrates in their diet,
this would be the better option
between local versus systemic.
If they have inflammation or dysbiosis
and that sort of thing,
so now we're talking about gut issues,
one of the issues you have when you do local stimulus,
either a lactic or especially oxidative,
what you'll notice is you get a lot of blood flow.
We get a huge pump to that particular area.
When we do that, we're also taking blood away from the gut,
which can be an issue if we have dysbiosis in the gut
'cause when you start to pull blood flow away from the gut,
certain bad bacteria, fungi, and stuff
can become more aggressive
in fighting for nutrients and things like that,
start to try and burrow through the gut lining
to find food and resources.
One of the things that you might avoid
is training that you would consider
with like high pump training
and people that have chronic gut issues
because they're partitioning
too much blood flow away from the GI tract,
which can be stressful to the GI tract.
The other thing is that they have,
somebody got chronic inflammation,
then we don't want to individually tax those cells.
So by distributing the load amongst multiple muscles,
then we would reduce the inflammation there.
Now if somebody, we suspected, had inflammation,
and it was residing in the liver,
or they had an energy issue residing in the liver,
well then this would not be a good option.
But if they had been abusing their muscle tissue,
and so, their muscle tissue is inflamed
because of bad training or whatever it may be,
then this would be a better option versus the local,
with one exception, which i'll get into on the next slide.
A few other ones.
Poor execution.
Because they don't have to take any individual muscle
to a failure, that means I can spend more time
in a position where a person can execute easier
'cause as you get closer to failure,
it becomes harder to execute,
becomes hard to control the exercise.
If they have a low tolerance to volume like per muscle,
well then obviously here we're spreading out the work
among multiple muscles,
so this would be a more trainable stimulus for them.
If they have a low tolerance to metabolic stress
but it's trainable.
Let's say I have somebody,
and my goal actually is to make them more tolerant
to metabolic stress, first thing I have to figure out
is if I do stimulate it right now, will they adapt to it,
meaning that is their nutrition good enough,
have they been getting good quality micronutrients,
how are their stress levels,
are they able to have glucose.
If that's the case and they haven't been already pushing
this button, then I might do this
simply because my goal is to improve their metabolic,
my goal is a systemic adaptation over the local.
If I'm trying to focus more on the nervous system
and trying to get that ANS to calm down,
improving systemic function
is probably more important than local function,
but I don't want to say that's always true
because when you look at an individual,
it's going to be whichever one of those
is the weakest link of the chain.
Remember, if the cells are not good,
they're not healthy from an energy perspective,
they're gonna tax the system,
but if the system is not very good either,
then you're gonna have higher levels
of stress hormones as well.
You can look at if we make an improvement
in one or the other,
which one will likely have a bigger impact,
which one will likely help the other one out the most.
That might be where you go.
Fat adapting the liver.
Getting the liver simply just to be better metabolizing fat,
which is always good.
When we look at people that have bad sleep
and stuff like that, a lot of times,
they have poor blood sugar regulation at night.
In addition to all of the things
that we can do for mitochondrial health perspective,
if they're ready to train it
like once a week corrected their nutrition,
then actually doing something to get the liver better
at making energy and utilizing more fat at night
will improve its glucose conservation
and its ability to support the brain at night
and therefore give me better quality sleep.
And then lastly out here,
if our main focus is to try and use growth hormone
as a fat loss tool,
well then obviously we want to choose something
that is getting a systemic stimulus.
That does not mean that we couldn't use
something that's also getting local and systemic.
So you could, in that context,
do something that challenges both
because trust me, if you do a local lactic stimulus,
and you do it for large muscle groups,
it is going to likely hit you systemically
unless you are very conditioned
to the point where you need to train
like three or four different muscle groups
consecutively to stress your system.
We have to be very conditioned for that.
And there are those people
that either are just genetically very,
get it in their energy system pathways
or are very conditioned from their training
where in order to actually tax them systemically,
you need to do multiple muscle group,
giant sets and stuff like that.
That's on the extreme end.
Are we going to choose local or systemic?
One thing that I may consider
is is my goal, my long-term goal
more focused around hypertrophy.
What I'm trying to do is increase the performance
of my hypertrophy workout, my ability to tolerate volume.
In that case, actually improving glucose metabolism
locally at the muscle tissue might be ideal.
Also getting more glycogen in there
like being able to store more glycogen
not only helps performance.
But remember when we were talking about that AMPK
and mTOR thing,
we'll get deeper into that
when you go into hypertrophy training
but having good glycogen levels
helps us switch over to those anabolic pathways.
So anything I can do to improve my ability
to get glucose and to synthesize glycogen
is also ultimately going to help me
run those anabolic pathways.
If I don't have enough cardiovascular conditioning
to actually do a systemic thing like it's so poor
that literally doing a local training method
is actually going to tax me cardiovascularly,
well then I obviously need to do
to the level that I could perform at.
If I do well with carbohydrates,
then obviously that opens this up.
But the other option.
I said there was gonna be an exception
to the information thing.
Or needs carbs to stimulate metabolism.
Sometimes we'll get people,
and in order to actually improve energy
because they're so poor at utilizing fat,
and this happens a lot of times
in the chronic oxidative stress
or just poor mitochondrial dysfunction
is that they're so poor at using fat
is that once we get them glucose
or a different source of fuel.
So you have two options
when people are so poor at using fat.
You can either force them down the road
of trying to use ketones
or you can get them using glucose.
Obviously if we're going to do a metabolic training system,
we need to focus on glucose
'cause ketones are not gonna cut it.
But in this context, doing this type of training
like focusing on AMPK but not focusing on oxidative stress,
we can get the body to start putting some nutrients
back into those lean tissues, back into those muscles.
We can start getting some glucose transport in there,
and slowly start improving that fat metabolism
by stimulating AMP and AMPK.
But if you jump over to the oxidative method
or if you overdo it on volume,
then you're gonna have the opposite effect.
That's one of those things
where you're doing this type of training
is really good at improving insulin sensitivity
and glucose uptake.
So if you got somebody that is the skinny fat or something,
this type of the training system
may be very important because you're trying to get them
to actually start partitioning nutrients
back to the lean tissues.
That can be valuable just as long as you don't overdo it,
so oxidative would not be an option there.
If they have poor alkalinity but they have enough,
it's good enough to tolerate some lactic work,
well then they could do local
but likely they can't do something
that's gonna overload them systemically
because it's gonna take them too long to recover from that.
It's gonna be too taxing to their acid-alkaline balance.
When we look at that, the thing is,
is that what really suffers
when you start going outside with that,
or when you start taxing the body from an acidity
and an oxidative state and point on a systemic level,
we really see sleep quality goes just completely out.
So you'll see trouble falling asleep, staying asleep,
and obviously waking up with poor energy
if you're not staying asleep.
That last one out here,
I guess this is actually where I meant
to say that previous point
is to counteract inflammatory glucose intolerance.
So if the tissue is inflamed,
(clears throat)
it's essentially trying to not listen to insulin.
Insulin knocks on the door
and it's like no, no glucose is coming in here.
If we stimulate AMPK from within the inside,
then we can let glucose in without needing insulin.
That is very important here.
If we had oxidative stress,
then we're only gonna make the cell
even more glucose-resistant
because now I have inflammation and oxidative stress,
which is actually gonna raise more inflammation,
but the oxidative stress, on its own,
is also going to inhibit glucose getting into that cell.
So if we're trying to partition nutrients into the cell
doing something that focuses on lactic acid, AMPK,
not oxidative stress can be a way
of getting glucose into cells
that otherwise wouldn't be getting them
because they've been exposed to too much inflammation
or oxidative stress or some combination of both.