Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 00:00

Have you ever been confused about training? Should you do cardio? Should you do strength training? But cardio blunts or strength training gains. Listen, this is just one example of the information that spreads and confuses people. Dr. Alyssa Olnick is a PhD that focuses on exercise metabolism and sex differences, she did her postdoc in menopause and metabolism. Also, she’s personally run 17 ultra marathons while maintaining competitive weightlifting. All right, so this girl’s on a mission to help women train more efficiently and with less confusion, she’s going to show us the science behind what is true when it comes to the differences between men and women in training, and even more importantly, what do we do with it? Do people call you Dr. Olynyk?

Alyssa Olenick 01:03

Usually I don’t. I think they either get you called Dr. Alyssa Lennox or like just Alyssa or Doc or Doc Lis. Yeah, usually people default to doc list because my handle, so any of them, any of them work though.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:14

As long as they’re not swear words I’m in, that’s

Alyssa Olenick 01:16

kind of like honestly, as long as someone’s like, ‘call me that bitch, then I’m like fine, I’m honestly fine with it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:21

You had me at hello. Yeah, one of the things that I didn’t want to do in this episode, talking about fitness, is in the landscape of social media and YouTube, it’s all about debunking things, and quite frankly, as you and I were chatting previously, when you’re in the world of debunking, it detracts from the science, and then what to do.

Alyssa Olenick 01:41

Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:42

you have been training for a very long time on in a variety of sport and just training modalities, endurance, ultra endurance, which is crazy. My husband just ran his first 50.

Alyssa Olenick 01:55

Yeah, that’s amazing.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:56

Actually, he did the Boston and then Big Sur

Alyssa Olenick 01:58

right back to back.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 01:59

Yeah, and I totally caught him on tape vomiting. If you wanted, if anyone wants to listen, there’s definitely footage

Alyssa Olenick 02:05

of me out there, probably doing the same somewhere, so it’s hard.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 02:09

But really, what I wanted to double down on is this hybrid model of training, and I know that you do it both personally and have studied it.

Alyssa Olenick 02:17

Yeah, yeah, so I kind of have this non-official saying of hybrid as health. I’m sure everybody knows by now that resistance training is very important, especially if you’re coming from your audience, right? Muscle protein, all the things. And then cardiovascular training, I think, kind of was like really big, and then it kind of got downplayed for the overplay of resistance training, but I think with the

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 02:39

overplay of resistance. well, the

Alyssa Olenick 02:41

overcorrection of the lack of resistance training, I would say, and it’s funny because I become known as, like, this cardio girl, but I am a true and true little meathead, honestly, at the end of the day, and I actually really got started into fitness with resistance training, but I loved endurance and cardiovascular training because I was an athlete growing up, and what I realized when I, you know, started to get into my master’s and my PhD, and when you look at the exercise guidelines and all this data and literature, is like the best health benefits come from a fitness training program that encompasses both in some capacity, and so from a both training perspective, most athletes are following a concurrent training model, they’re doing some degree of resistance training and cardiovascular training in different varying percentages, depending on what their goal is, or whatever they’re trying to achieve, but when, then we look at also like the prescription for health, we see a combination of resistance training and cardiovascular training. So, I mean, hybrid has been really trendy. I think you know that’s gotten really popular in the last few years. It was not a thing when I started to like be in the hybrid space. My friend jokingly called me the queen of hybrid training, because I was kind of like adapting it and talking about it and doing it before now. It’s like everybody’s doing it. And

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 03:44

how would you define hybrid training? Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 03:45

so I was gonna say I use hybrid training kind of as my Trojan horse of getting people to do cardiovascular resistance training, but it’s really just concurrent training. And so most people, hybrid training is trendy, so if people want to use the term hybrid training because they, it makes them feel good about the exercise they’re doing, absolutely do it, but hybrid training, more so in the literal sense, is taking two or more modes of fitness and trying to maximize your fitness and capacity in those at the same time. Where in the science it’s more often referred to as concurrent training, it’s not actually called hybrid training in any of the research done on it. It’s called concurrent training, and that is essentially the inclusion of resistance training and some form of endurance, or cardiovascular training, and the same day, week, or training cycle that a person, or most likely in most studies, it’s athletes are doing. So, concurrent training model is a little more broad, of like it can kind of adjust to goals, seasons, you know, the person or athlete at hand, where hybrid training is more so like you’re truly trying to be as endurance sleep, endurance fit as you can be, while also being as fit as you can in strength, but there’s also other ways you can find it. It doesn’t just have to be classic cardio or running and lifting, it can be multiple sports at the same time. There’s a lot of variations in it, because it’s just kind of made up at the end of the day, but essentially it is just. A more modern fitness term for what is concurrent training, coming from the scientific literature,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 05:03

would it be something like the following: a newbie to training is lifting three days a week and then doing five days a week of cardio. Yeah, would that be considered concurrent training? Yeah, yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 05:14

that would be considered concurrent training. Yep,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 05:16

when you talk about the hybrid athlete, would that, because as I think, as we sit here and we chat, you and I have been into fitness for a really long time. Yes, but the reality is, if someone is coming to listen to this podcast, they are probably interested in fitness, or maybe they’ve been doing it for a long time, but overall people are not training. Yeah, and as someone is sitting here thinking, okay, well, if I’m a beginner, how do I think about the foundational science, and yeah, and then apply that to real life,

Alyssa Olenick 05:52

yeah. So that’s where I kind of like to give the disclaimer about hybrid being like kind of intense, and if it feels off-putting to beginners, I’m like, you don’t have to identify as a hybrid athlete, it’s just a model of fitness that I, it’s a more friendly term than concurrent training. You say concurrent training, no one’s stopping their scroll, right? They don’t care, but if you’re an absolute beginner, I have a stance in my fitness philosophy that I love beginners, and I want to get to them before everyone else gets to them and gives them all the things that distracts them. And usually what I tell you, I love that, right, because

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:18

people are very distractible with,

Alyssa Olenick 06:19

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 06:20

various types of, and I

Alyssa Olenick 06:21

always, in my programs, have included beginner programs, because I’m like, I want you to come in and you have the fastest pathway to success, rather than like trying this and trying that and doing all these things, but with the beginner, everything’s new, everything’s overwhelming, and being less fit makes it harder, like, I think people don’t give enough credit to the beginners that it’s really hard, it’s a lot easier for me to go for a run, I feel a lot better than I did, you know, when I was starting out, or at the beginning of my fitness, or same thing for people starting in the gym, right? Like, there is that resistance that you feel both physiologically, but also mentally, like, there’s a lot of things you’re trying to correct for in your life. So, I usually tell beginners, don’t worry about doing it all, right? You can start with a cardio program, and this is a training program, but, like, what will you start with, and what will get you in the gym, and what will get you moving? For some people, the intimidation of lifting feels really scary. I’m like, okay, can we get you and start doing some cardio, and then you can look at the weight room and see what’s going on, and feel comfortable in the gym, and build that habit, and then merge to that. For some people, I say, hey, if you have no strength, no baseline capacity, no muscle, you’re gonna be okay if you don’t do cardio for the first, I don’t know, month or two, while you build that skills and that foundation. I think there’s this idea that, well, if you haven’t been doing it well, now you need to do it perfectly tomorrow, or it doesn’t count. And I don’t have that philosophy. I think beginners should start where they’re willing, what feels the most realistic, most accessible, but then have a plan long term to start integrating the two together, because we know that muscle, obviously, anyone listening to this podcast knows muscle is really, really important for health. We want strength, we want power, we want bone density, we want capacity, but also we know that parameters of cardiovascular fitness are heavily tied to long term health outcomes. So, how do we get you to do both in a way that’s realistic for you, but also the beginner, you don’t have to think about, like, well, what’s that high-end, even recreational athlete doing? You might never need to be there to improve your health or fitness, but how can we get you to model those things in a scalable way that’s realistic for you, and you can do, but then also knowing that you always have the option to scale up. I think a lot of beginners are like, “Oh, I’ll never do that thing, and then 123, years down the road, they’re like, “I want to try the high rocks. I want to try the half marathon. I want to do the power lifting meat. Yeah, these are

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 08:23

all considered well. Would those be considered hybrid type athletes? Maybe that the cross.. yeah. What is it called? The hybrid,

Alyssa Olenick 08:35

the high rocks. The high

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 08:36

rocks, that’s right.

Alyssa Olenick 08:37

Yeah, high rocks are.. I mean, they get a lot of slack for not being truly hybrid, because they are very heavily endurance focused. It’s a very endurance heavy race. I mean, it’s a running race, if you ask me. But most people training for that usually are doing some sort of resistance training, because you need a baseline of strength to push that sled, or to do a bunch of lunges, right? But then you do need the endurance training on top of it. But I mean, I love, in general, though, if anyone, once they get past that beginner stage, where they’re very intimidated by everything. I love saying, like, set an athletic goal. You don’t have to compete in something, but you can. I think the high rocks, you know, the CrossFit, the power local powerlifting meet, the local race, whatever that is, that could be a really great goal to make it fun, social, supportive. But you can always set goals like that without

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 09:16

timeline.

Alyssa Olenick 09:17

Um, I don’t have a specific timeline for anyone with how fast to train for anything like that. I would say, you know, that first six months in the gym of training for any specific goal, give yourself grace in that time period of maybe first 12 weeks to six months of like getting used to the training, the routine adapting, but it’s never too soon to set a fitness goal. And honestly, I think a lot of people might find it more rewarding because if you set the goal of, like, hey, I want to deadlift my body weight, right, that’s a great objective to work towards, than just, like, I just want to change my body, or I want to xyz, which can be sometimes not as fast of a process as we want it to be, or as quickly rewarding, and it gives you something to work towards, and it gives your training meaning, and then it, I feel like, for especially for a lot of women, it kind of. Of you have to train hard enough to get to that goal, rather than so doing some of those things that spin your wheel, and just kind of, I don’t say waste your time, because all movement is valuable, but aren’t valuable in the sense of moving you closer to like an objective strength or fitness, but also it,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 10:13

yes, all movement is valuable, but we know from aging data that if you are heavily reliant only on cardiovascular activity, your muscle fibers change. Yeah, you cannot maintain those type two muscle fibers, and yeah, as a geriatrician, we would see those individuals that all they did was walk. Yes, yes, walking is important, but is not going to maintain strength and those bigger muscle fibers. Yeah, and that’s a big

Alyssa Olenick 10:39

reason why I like people setting objective kind of athletic goals, even if they’re not going to compete, because then it kind of forces you to train with an adequate enough stimulus, that stimulus you have to have a hard enough stimulus to reach the goal, but then it can add an enjoyment factor to it, which is a big obstacle for a lot of people, but yeah, I, I’m very big on you have to have a stress or stimulus greater than what your body’s baseline is at, and I think that a lot of people conflate movement with exercise with training. That’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 11:04

a really good point. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 11:05

like, there’s a spectrum of movement to exercise to training, and I think that, you know, and this gets really hard because everyone’s like, “Well, everything’s good, don’t shame people for what they’re doing. I’m like, “Yeah, all movement is good, and it’s going to be net productive for any health measure. Just moving around more is a net positive thing, but if we want specific adaptations to muscle, bone, cardiovascular system adaptations, you do need enough of a stressor and a stimulus to drive that adaptation to actually get those benefits, and that reminds me of something that I hear a lot, and it’s this idea of the interference effect, I’m

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 11:36

gonna read something that I pulled out, and the interference effect, which is the idea that if you’re doing cardiovascular activity, that it’s going to interfere with your muscle gains if you’re doing them right within the same time period, and this has really been something that we get questions on a lot. The interference effect, which I would say has been the boogeyman of concurrent training. Yes, since there was an original study, Hickson in 1980 found that combining endurance and strength blunted strength gain in men. How should we think about that? And is that true?

Alyssa Olenick 12:17

So I will give people the quick answer they want to hear, for most people, the endurance of their, or I’m sorry, the interference effect is not really a big deal. Really high-end specified athletes or people with high training volumes, that’s where that starts to become more important.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 12:34

Do we know that to be true, though?

Alyssa Olenick 12:36

I think from like an applicable training standpoint, most people, if they’re so detrained that they’re gonna start to get fitter with almost anything that you give them over time, and I, you know, there’s there’s been some like review papers that have discussed this theoretically, and my viewpoint on it is that you know you can get fit at both for a while, but eventually there is going to be that degree of specificity that you’re going to need to branch out, or you’re going to probably have, you’re going to hit a ceiling, right, of like what you can truly achieve long term if

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:03

you are pushing for an extreme capacity, right. Yes,

Alyssa Olenick 13:07

and that’s where hybrid training is different than specified training, right. Like a hybrid athlete with someone who’s trying to maximize both, but they’re always going to be sacrificing some degree of their strength or some degree of their endurance, versus the pure endurance, the guys that just ran sub two one hour marathons, they’re probably strength training to support that, but their endurance actually know how

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:26

much Kipchoge weighs.

Alyssa Olenick 13:28

Oh my gosh, just probably less than me, like maybe 60 kilos, 140 pounds.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:35

He weighs, I think it was like 115

Alyssa Olenick 13:37

Okay, yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:38

He, for you guys listening, yeah, we were really big into the marathon in this house, and he was like 115 okay, that’s even

Alyssa Olenick 13:48

lighter than I was thinking, yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 13:50

and I might be wrong, yeah, but it was much lighter, and I think he’s what is he, six, probably close, so tall, very tall, and I guess what I’m saying is that it’s not this weed outcome. I mean, people are built to probably run a certain way, and I don’t know how much resistance training he is. Yeah, most

Alyssa Olenick 14:13

elite athletes are to do some degree, probably to support, at least, because we do have data that suggests that resistance training reduces injury risk or improves running economy, but like at that extreme end of sport, you are rewarded by efficiency, size, also weight, all of those things. There’s a little bit of nuance there. People take that and they go, why, if I lost a bunch of weight, I’d be a better runner. I’m like, no, they’re also training incredibly high volumes, but then all the way to the other side, you have the super elite strength athletes, the strong man, the powerlifting, the Olympic weightlifters, they’re probably maybe doing enough cardio to support general baseline health

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 14:47

within that, within that session, or you mean no, in general, in a training

Alyssa Olenick 14:53

cycle, or even a year, but they’re probably not doing a ton, right, so there’s always going to be those extremes of specificity and. You want to be an elite runner, you want to be an elite weightlifter. I’m not going to tell you that you should train for a marathon or a powerlifting meet on top of that. That’s where the hybrid training kind of falls, in the middle of that spectrum of like those are people who are trying to maximize both. But to the original point of the interference effect, there’s always a compromise, right, of what you are. You’re not going to be the fastest marathoner you’d ever be, or be the strongest lifter, but you’re trying to be the strongest at both that you can be simultaneously, right. And we’re seeing now a lot of people are getting very strong and very fit at the same time. You can have both of those characterized characteristics developed. What we see in some of the studies is that I think when people think of the interference effect, they think, okay, well, it’s 100% blunted that if you do both, or you do both in the same program, or in the same workout session, or too close to each other, it’s 100% blunted, and it’s not that, it’s that it’s probably the magnitude of the effect that you would get from that session might be a little bit less, but you are still adapting or getting benefit from it, but that’s why I think the

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 15:58

magnitude of the effect, I just want to pause you there, because it, this makes me think about women in training, and there’s a lot of discussion about the differences between men and women. Yeah, I believe that you and I are both on the same foundational belief that it’s about it’s not that the men and women are different, clearly they’re different, but it is the interpersonal individuality.

Alyssa Olenick 16:22

Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:22

that really probably trumps everything. Now that being said, are there different fiber types that would be predominant in men versus women? Maybe, like, maybe, but the percentage,

Alyssa Olenick 16:34

yeah, is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:34

so minuscule that it, what might be 2% or less,

Alyssa Olenick 16:39

yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:39

And this is, this just goes back to the, the, the statement that strength could be blunted,

Alyssa Olenick 16:46

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 16:47

if you’re doing too much cardiovascular activity, or there’s this interference effect, but when we say strength is blunted, is it a point 2%

Alyssa Olenick 16:55

Yeah, and I would have to try to give a, I wish I remember the actual datas from these, these studies that I’m referring to,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 17:02

which ones are they? We can pull them up.

Alyssa Olenick 17:04

I would have to, I would have to give you guys the citations. I’m sorry, I don’t have them off the top of my head. I have them pulled up in a presentation that I gave last year, but we see this magnitude of blunting. It’s greater with running than cycling or like non nervous system stressing type activities, because there’s, you know, let me back up a second and talk more about the interference effect to give more context for people. So, the interference effect from those original studies essentially they looked at this cellular pathway. So, lifting and cardiovascular training have two different cellular pathways, and these cascades are like almost like someone’s knocking a door, ringing a doorbell, the messenger is going to someone else, it’s sending a signal, it’s telling someone to do this,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 17:42

like my house.

Alyssa Olenick 17:42

Yes, exactly. And so the resistance training pathway is turned on by mechanical tension, that tension, that pulling, that stress, that strain on that pathway, and it essentially results in muscle protein synthesis, or you have also neuromuscular adaptations to strength training. When you start lifting heavier, your neurons are better at contracting more fibers. Those fibers get more powerful, they can produce more force. All of these things are adaptations unique to resistance training. Then you have endurance training, and this cascade is essentially turned on by energy deficits in your cell. Essentially, you start doing activity, there’s turnover of glucose, ATP. All of our energy systems fuel and sense that deficit, and that deficit in energy inside of our cells turns on a different pathway, and it turns on some of these things called PGC one alpha, which is really important for simulation of mitochondrial biogenesis, and all these other positive adaptations of aerobic training, but it also turns on something called AMPK, and AMPK essentially is like the neighbor kid messenger that goes and then locks the door to the house you can’t get in to the resistance training house, essentially. If you want to play on the kids and house craziness, and essentially that when AMPK is really up-regulated, there’s kind of this like blocking of that protein synthesis pathway. Now, which

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 18:58

would be mTOR, yeah, which

Alyssa Olenick 18:59

would be mTOR. Now is the degree of what’s that happening 100% every time it happens. No, I think that that’s you can think of it almost like, like muscle stimulus soup, like there’s so many other things that are also happening, but there is a down regulation, because you have to think muscle is a pathway where your body is taking, you know, proteins and building, and it’s, it’s anabolic, you’re trying to build tissue, where endurance training, by nature, is catabolic in the sense of it’s breaking down fats, carbs, hopefully not proteins, but sometimes for energy metabolism, because in the moment it’s trying just to supply, supply the output, they’re kind of antagonist in that sense with each other, so when I say that it is blunted and or different activities can interfere, and that’s one way that it can interfere. I’m a little bit more of the take that most of the issue for most people comes down to central nervous system fatigue. So, there’s carryover of fatigue from an endurance training session that then, when you go to the gym, you’re not able to lift as heavy or as high of percent of what your one rep max or your power. Output is lower, so therefore the net productivity of that session might be slightly lower because you aren’t able to push as hard. So I want to

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 20:08

pause you there, because I think it’s really important.

Alyssa Olenick 20:10

Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 20:12

what I’m hearing you say is that the intensity of the endurance activity over time affects the nervous system, which all training affects the nervous system, but some training definitely seems to have nervous system impact that is bigger than others. Yes, we agree. For example, like yoga might have a lower impact on central nervous system fatigue, something like a sprint or a max effort, or running to the point where your heart rate is up, and you maybe get to the place where you quote bonk, there’s a stressor.

Alyssa Olenick 20:50

Yeah, so, and that’s what we see. That’s why I was trying to get just not point

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 20:53

physical, no. So, this is where I think people listening,

Alyssa Olenick 20:57

yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 20:57

would love to understand more, and I just want to clarify, because you said it so eloquently, I want them to understand the importance of what you’re saying.

Alyssa Olenick 21:06

Yeah, so it’s that you’re when you’re trying to do concurrent training, hybrid training, combined modes in a week, you’re competing for resources within your body now between two different things in a training program, and one of those is that fatigue from one session to the next, right? We also see physical

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 21:20

or mental fatigue,

Alyssa Olenick 21:21

usually it’s physiological, so you have like less ability to contract your muscles as powerfully, things like that. You might have mental fatigue as well, that can come with some of that CNS fatigue. I know that if I was to run before I lift, my brain state is not there to go all out maximally during that training session, versus if I separate them and do them around, so there is some fatigue there, so you can have carryover both ways, right? People also, if you do a really heavy leg day, and then you go to do your, your speed work or your high intensity intervals, you might not be able to push those as hard because you have that carry over both ways, right? But it does appear that modes of training like running tend to be a little bit more demanding on the central nervous system, versus if you were to bike right, that might be a little less fatiguing or demanding on that nervous system, so you might see less of a magnitude of that blunting we were talking about earlier, because there’s less of that potential carryover interference that isn’t necessarily cellular as it is, you’re you can’t train those things at 100% back to back, so to speak,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 22:21

can I ask you, Kashya question? Yeah, absolute curiosity. How does one know? And I’ve thought about this a lot, because I’ve studied amino acids and the amino acid fatigue. There’s this idea that there is the utilization of these fuel systems change, but there would be.. there’s almost no way for us to be able to differentiate. Okay, so is this tryptophan, you know, serotonin ratio actually being depleted, or are we looking at some kind of muscular fatigue? How does someone tell? Because, yeah, you would think that someone would be able to tell if it’s a muscular fatigue problem. How from a scientific perspective?

Alyssa Olenick 23:03

Yeah, so one of the ways that I liked, in a more practical way, so people can understand, is that for me, I think that one of the easiest ways to tell that potentially your endurance training is starting to interfere with your lifting is that your bar speed, or your weight speed, starts to go down at regular weights or intensity, so like if I’m peaking for a race and I’m at the end of a training cycle, I will notice that, like, the same weight might move slower, it might be a little bit harder. I don’t have that snap or that pop to my lifting, so that’s really strength and conditioning, like, bro, like, you can get little things that test your bar speed, and you could, like, literally quantify how fast you’re moving that, that’s one way that I see that, also, like the same weight or the same output might be an effort level higher than it normally is, or you might have to drop weight to do the same perceived level of effort, so you’re kind of having to adjust to that because you’re not able to produce the same amount of work or force in your training session, those are a little bit more objective, so people can say, “Hey, like, that is happening to me, and that’s not necessarily always a bad thing, right? Like, when I’m peaking and training for a race, I just expect that that’s going to happen. It’s not inherently bad. The fact that I’m still lifting and training and showing up during that is probably more important as a net stimulus for still, you know, supporting muscle power, all of that stuff. But I think that that’s it’s a really easy way for people to see. Similarly, on the opposite side, if you do a really heavy full body or strength day or leg day, and then you try to do your hardest, fastest interval workout the next day, you might feel some of that carryover fatigue. And so, just speaking to your point a little bit about metabolically, one of the things that I think is the biggest issue for most people when it comes to like interference or competition of these resources is nutrition, right, making sure that you’re eating enough to fuel these systems, especially carbohydrate, especially if you’re adding in endurance to resistance training. It’s a very carbohydrate-heavy, demanding type of activity, and I think for your audience who’s very concerned with protein and muscle turnover. Carbs are protein sparing. Also, your body isn’t going to want to pull from carbs to fuel anything, or recover from, or break down muscle tissue if they have enough of that, right? So, it’s a big piece in recovery there. And I think when I say that, people think we’ll overeat carbs. Well, no, carbs are necessary based off your activity level, like the more you’re doing, the more carbohydrates you’re going to need. So, there is that competition of resources, and then also assuming like protein is staying same or slightly going up, depending on what you’re doing, and that’s kind of maintained throughout that, so I think that there’s a lot of like lifestyle factors that we can do to minimize that, then having to like have biopsies and see what’s going on in our cells, and for most people, you know, I usually, this is like not to be dismissive, people like you’re not fit enough to worry about that, right? Like, you will still gain fitness and still improve for a very long time before most of these things start to become a question of do I need to pick, do I need to prioritize, or the approach that I like to take is seasons, right, seasons of emphasis and focus that allow you to spread those resources and more in favor of one mode versus the other, so you can raise that floor of fitness up together without giving up the other one entirely.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 26:04

I like the idea of raising the floor of fitness for the nutrition aspect. I think it’s a very important conversation. We’ve also had Zach Bitter on the podcast news. Zach, yeah, again we had Lisa Smith Bachchan on both ultra endurance runners, and one of the things that they said to your point is that they focus on having enough calories, and then if they’re having 5000 calories, then if they have, I don’t know, 40% of that is carbohydrates or more, and 20% of protein that they hit their protein. Yeah, target. How do you think in terms of fuel use? And just to kind of lay this out for people, healthy muscle at rest burns primarily fatty acids. If you are unhealthy, if your muscle tissue is what is a good word, compromised, then you force it to burn glucose. If you are sedentary and you are overeating carbohydrates, you are in a position while you are sedentary, you are forced to burn glucose. This is not ideal.

Alyssa Olenick 27:11

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But as you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 27:12

train what in a healthy muscle, the more and longer that you’re training, the more carbohydrates that you would utilize.

Alyssa Olenick 27:20

Yeah, so energy metabolism in exercise and our muscles works on a spectrum of intensity or duration, right? So, for most people listening to this, you’re probably not going to do so much endurance that it starts to kind of cross over, but you might be, so we can get to there. Yeah, I mean, we’ve got, yeah, get it all, just for

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 27:39

perspective, this podcast, which, what I think is so amazing, is that we have the general population who are really interested, and we also have a lot of scientists.

Alyssa Olenick 27:47

Yeah, that’s true. That

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 27:49

listen to this, and then we have a mix of athletes and also military.

Alyssa Olenick 27:54

Yeah, that’s true. And they are going very long. So the

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 27:56

what I love to do is I always love to explain for the layperson, then the athlete, then the scientist.

Alyssa Olenick 28:02

Yeah, I can absolutely do that. So, when we think about metabolism in our muscle or our bodies during exercise, essentially it works on a spectrum of intensity and time. So, at rest in a healthy muscle, healthy individual, you are, you know, using a lot more fat for fuel, you’re oxidizing a lot of fat, it’s, you know, your body has a ton of oxygen available, and you need oxygen to metabolize fat, and that point is important, so we can explain later how fitness interacts with this, but then as exercise intensity goes up, both fat and carbohydrate will kind of go up. I know you just did your whole podcast with Tommy Wood, and you talked about fat max a little bit, and some of that stuff, and so your fat oxidation and carboxidation will both go up, but at one point, they will. There’s this whole thing called a crossover effect, and essentially your body gets to a point where it can’t keep up with doing both, or there is this like cellular interference between carbs and fats that different signals for your body will be like, “Hey, okay, we can’t keep up with fat oxidation right now, it’s too energy costly, it’s too.. we don’t have enough oxygen, we’re moving too hard. There’s too much lactate. Whatever the signal is going on, what

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 29:03

happens?

Alyssa Olenick 29:03

And then you’ll switch to predominantly carbohydrate oxidation, because carbs are really easy to break down. You can break them down both anaerobically without oxygen and aerobically with oxygen. Also, there is a lot of lactate production that starts to happen as you get more and more intense, which allows your body to keep doing carbohydrate metabolism to a point until you can’t do it anymore, so the more intense you get, the more you will go to essentially 100% carbohydrate oxidation, and that’s just when we think about the sheer relationship between intensity and that. So, if you were to do a classic VO two max test in a lab, you would go for eight to 12 minutes running progressively harder or biking progressively harder until you couldn’t go anymore, and you would see this metabolism shift across this, but it will also shift with duration. So, if you were to go do like a long run or a long bike or long endurance rock, whatever it is, for the people listening here, for that, you will predominantly, if you’re doing a really long duration activity, you’re going to be using a lot of fat oxidation, that’s a favorable add. Tation, because you’re usually not able to sustain a high intensity for long periods of time. You can usually only sustain high intensity for very short periods of time, but metabolism doesn’t work in silos, where you’re only burning carbs or you’re only burning fat. Your body can dynamically shift between them, or oscillate to kind of what it needs to supply it, or what’s available in the bloodstream, so what you’re taking in, if you’re eating during activity. So, you will use a lot of fat during that activity, assuming it’s like slow to moderate intensity, where fat oxidation still can kind of happen at a large amount, but gradually over time you’ll start to duplicate your glycogen levels and your muscle cells, you’ll start to kind of shift towards, you know, depending on if you’re taking a nutrition or not, you’ll shift to preferentially using a little bit more glucose as you go, or having to rely more on fat oxidation, because you don’t have enough glucose available, but then usually you’ll start to slow down, or bonk, or kind of hit that wall. So, these things are kind of dynamically happening in our bodies. But the reason I brought up the oxygen thing earlier is that this differs person to person, right? This ability to oxidize fat for a long period of time during exercise, or when that crossover happens, or something that people might hear of the lactate threshold. A lot of these are just indirect physiological markers of talking about what’s metabolically happening in the muscle, and what we can do. And can I ask

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 31:13

you a question? Yeah, before we continue, is this a training adaptation, or is there a genetic component to how someone utilizes fuel,

Alyssa Olenick 31:22

yeah. So, a good example of somebody like we just talked about, the elite marathoners, right? Those guys probably preferentially are born with a ton of type one muscle fibers, so they’re gonna be more predominantly, probably off the get-go, predisposed to mitochondria, fat oxidation, all of those things, but they’re probably not gonna go and become like an elite power lifter, right, with really powerful type two muscle fibers. So, there is that genetic component of what’s the muscle fibers that you were born with, right? What are you pre-like disposed to adapt to and respond to? So, there is a little bit of that, right? Not all of us are going to become world-class athletes in whatever modality that we want to do, right? Yeah, I wish, I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 31:59

really wish.

Alyssa Olenick 32:00

So, there is that little bit of that underlying genetics, but I really like to, in the genetics conversation, acknowledge for people that, like, everybody will adapt to the stressor of exercise, like even if you’re not going to be, your ceiling is genetically determined, but your ability to adapt at all isn’t something where it’s like, well, nope, you just, you just don’t adapt to anything, you might need slightly bigger stressor or more than somebody else, like there’s hard gainers in lifting versus people who might not be as cardiovascularly gifted off the get-go, but with enough training you can adapt. It’s just that ceiling, like we’re not all going to get a VO two max of 90, right? Like, we’re all going to hit that at some point, and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 32:34

the fuel utilization, yes, is the fuel utilization, because there’s a lot of discussion in the space that men and women utilize fuels differently. Again, I’m sure that you’ve heard that. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 32:48

we can talk about that. So, let me first go back to my point of that adaptation to fetalization, that is trainable in everybody, right? Everybody to the same

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 32:57

extent,

Alyssa Olenick 32:58

give or take, right? Obviously, some people are going to be able to become, because you’re going to have a higher v2 max, you’re going to have a higher ceiling of that, and all those things, like the amount of energy per minute those guys in those marathons are burning is astronomical from what their bodies can keep up with. Right, not everyone’s going to be able to do that, but everybody can shift their ability to burn or oxidize or use more fat during activity, and so that crossover point of which, when those two cross over, or for many people they’re lactate thresholds, or we’ve talked, you know, a lot of people hear about zones, which are just indirect measures of like physiological points.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 33:32

We had Martin Gabala on there, he’s like,

Alyssa Olenick 33:33

yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 33:34

zone is different for everybody, yes,

Alyssa Olenick 33:36

no, exactly. And so you, with training, all of those thresholds can shift, and your ability to oxidize fat will remain for longer during physical activity, and that is a positive adaptation, because for athletes that preserves your depletion of glucose and glycogen and your body, which is a good thing, but also it’s a marker of that underlying adaptation that is both more capillaries being able to deliver more blood and more oxygen to your mitochondria and your tissue, but also what most people care about is that you either have more or more efficient or a rust mitochondria that are able to use the oxygen, because your aerobic fitness and your metabolism, they’re all interlinked, are dependent on your ability to deliver oxygen and your ability to use that oxygen when it gets to the muscle cell and mitochondria are what, using that for energy production, so that is a trainable characteristic. Sedentary people, both men and women, who do endurance or cardiovascular training and get those adaptations at the muscular level, there’s of course heart and capillarity and vasculars. We no one cares about that. Everyone cares about the mitochondria, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 34:39

No, we just care about muscle.

Alyssa Olenick 34:40

Yes, and inside the muscle, but you could think of the mitochondria as the little engines in the muscle, like my whole, you know, to put a positive, my whole approach to hybrid training is like build the car with the lifting and then build the engine with the cardio, like that’s the way I think about it. So, the more you have of these mitochondria, the better you are at being a fat burner or fat oxidizer, and that is positive. Adaptation for metabolic health,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 35:02

totally,

Alyssa Olenick 35:02

and aerobic cardiovascular output. Right, so, like, I know you guys talked about in that last podcast, metabolic flexibility. That was my whole dissertation topic, actually, was metabolic flexibility, and it’s essentially like, can you switch between carbs and fats when it’s necessary? Right, burning carbs isn’t inherently a bad thing, it’s just about, are you burning them when you could be using fat or at the wrong time at rest, right? Like that’s not a positive adaptation, but the more you train, the more you’re able to increase your fat oxidation at higher intensities, so you can sustain a faster pace, a faster power output, a faster speed, and still be using fat oxidation, which is good, because then you’re not depleting or relying on carbohydrate. Those elite runners, I know we keep coming back to them, the point of which they can metabolize fat still, or their lactate threshold is so close to their VO two max, right? It’s crazy how close that is compared to us regular people, right. But we can still shift that forward with training, and we see that. But then when we talk about the men and women conversation, you know, there is the underlying narrative that women have more type one fibers, and they’re better fat burner, so therefore they’re always better at this, and that also isn’t entirely true. Because training status also matters for women, it’s not like I think it’s like, you know, pushes this narrative that a sedentary woman is somehow metabolically healthier or better than a male counterpart just because she has estrogen, and that’s not entirely true.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:19

I’ve never even heard that.

Alyssa Olenick 36:21

I feel like that’s like the almost the narrative that gets pushed is like, well, you’re a woman, so you’re better at burning fat, and so you have more type one muscle fiber, so it’s metabolically more favorable. But there’s still a training

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:30

if someone is sedatory, that’s a disease state. Yeah, and to your point, which I think is of interest to this community, and also the scientists in this community, if Brett Good Pasture would ever come on this podcast. Yeah, excited him left and

Alyssa Olenick 36:43

right up and down on my dissertation. Yeah, a huge

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 36:46

fan. Yeah, the where fat is stored within the muscle as it relates to the mitochondria, it’s the athlete’s paradox. Yeah, and what you’re saying, what you were talking about, which I think is so valuable, is that the fat location within the muscle is close if you are training and you become well trained, then the fuel source of fat is close to the mitochondria within the muscle, because it

Alyssa Olenick 37:10

wants to be able to readily pull it out. Yep, exactly right,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 37:13

and that serves individuals even if they are not training. So, if someone is well trained and then they are just living a life, they are more healthy,

Alyssa Olenick 37:22

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 37:23

than someone who is sedentary, where there is fat infiltration, not necessarily close to the mitochondria, it is within tissue, it’s within connector, it’s it distorts the muscle, yeah, so

Alyssa Olenick 37:35

some of the earlier studies in metabolic flexibility were actually done in individuals with elevated weight status and or sedentary, they also like looked at their actual muscle physiology and the two things that they do that biopsy or tracer studies, one of the, yeah, tracer studies or biopsy, and essentially the two things that they found that improve this like metabolic flexibility within the muscle, which essentially just is a fancy way that your body can use fat when it’s necessary, switch between the two, and there’s not this like interference of carb and fat, like it’s almost like a, you can think of it like a red light was out, and carbs and fats are all stuck, and they don’t know who to go where. Being metabolically flexible is having like a really good crossing guard and signaling to these things, hey, we need to bring fat into the cell, hey, we need to clear out this glucose, this needs to be oxidized, things like that. But when they individuals lost body fat, they also lose it in their, in their muscle cells, and or improve fitness status. Yes, and that was directly tied to that fat oxidation at the muscular level, to the point that you were making there. So, yeah, and to go back to the female conversation, you know, there are estrogen receptors in muscle cells, which do interact with, you know, the fat oxidation pathways and all this stuff, so there is a elevated fat oxidation in women during lower to moderate intensity exercise, like, so I think, like, below 70% VO two max, but once you get kind of above 70 or so, it starts to become a lot more intense. Obviously, everyone’s thresholds are going to be different, so there could be anywhere between 40 to 6040, to 70, someone can kind of cross over to that, but if you had like fitness matched males and females, you might see a female is oxidizing fat a little bit longer or a little bit more, but then once you reach that crossover point, everybody’s using carbohydrates. I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 39:13

also have to pause you to be fair, and I think that you agree, you and I are a lot on this, is there’s a lot of potential for information that we don’t know.

Alyssa Olenick 39:24

Yeah, oh yeah, absolutely. When

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 39:26

it comes to women and exercise, and just women in general, it’s not very clear. We haven’t been studying them to the level that, because they’re complicated, right? Yeah, the changes and fluctuations and hormone it creates and complicates things, and you know there are estrogen receptors on muscle, but to the extent at which that plays a role, I don’t think that it’s – we don’t have enough bodies of literature,

Alyssa Olenick 39:56

no,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 39:56

in human,

Alyssa Olenick 39:58

no, and it’s mostly mass model. Exactly, it’s mostly mouse model, but to the point is that’s like what people are hearing, that there’s estrogen receptors, they’re like they’re associated, and that’s estrogen, they’re increasing mitochondria, all this stuff, and whether that’s true or not, you know, one of my underlying theories I’d actually love to see test in the literature is the interaction between women who undergo exercise training and that interaction at the muscular level versus like sedentary to see if that’s like a switch, you know, I mean, like, is exercise needed for those interactions? I don’t know which

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:24

interactions,

Alyssa Olenick 40:25

for, you know, a lot of these positive adaptations we attribute to female sex. Is it, is it, you know, just female sex at baseline, or is it female sex plus the exposure to exercise training that increases that fat oxidation, or some of your

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:38

studies, um, when I was at the University of Illinois, and Don Lehman did some of the first studies on postmenopausal women,

Alyssa Olenick 40:48

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:48

and also women just in general with diet and exercise, meaning it was calorie controlled isocaloric, we fed them,

Alyssa Olenick 40:57

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 40:57

and then there were the exercise inputs without hormones, right, postmenopausal, and it was really the resistance training, which was the biggest driver. Yeah, and obviously the isocaloric diets with higher protein, yeah, those people did better. Yeah, everything got better. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 41:17

and because we’ve seen that in some of the metabolism exercise science studies, like, you’ll have sedentary groups of women versus trained, and the trained women always have greater fat oxidation. It’s across the board. It’s not just, yeah, so you might see some of that, but honestly, that’s where you know a lot of people, okay? If there are these baseline general physiological differences, I mean, there are, they are

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 41:38

no,

Alyssa Olenick 41:39

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 41:39

I mean, women have more estrogen? At some point, they lose it. It probably plays a role to what extent. I’m not sure. And that’s

Alyssa Olenick 41:47

where I think the question comes from. Okay, a lot of people say, well, there’s these differences, and I’m like, okay, but what does that mean for training application? Does that change? Because when we also expose women to traditional training of strength or aerobic training, we see similar adaptations relative, obviously, there’s some absolute differences that we see compared to men and women. So, maybe we are oxidizing a little bit more fat, a little bit more.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 42:08

Are we talking about anything that’s statistically significant? I

Alyssa Olenick 42:12

think that so many people blow out a proportion fat oxidation, it’s like grams,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 42:18

and that is, yeah, this is all context for people, because there’s a lot that we don’t know, but what we do know is that a good, solid training program is a good, solid training, that’s that,

Alyssa Olenick 42:27

and that’s kind of my whole thing, is like, okay, yeah, I mean, I did my whole dissertation on having women do HIIT, right, like across the menstrual cycle, and what we found that was that aerobic fitness status mattered more than birth control use or menstrual cycle phase when it came to fat oxidation in both phases of the menstrual cycle, right, but the women who were more fit, they oxidized more fat across the entire HIIT protocol, but we’re talking like maybe 1510, grams of fat during what did that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 42:52

translate over to in terms of, do you translate that over in terms of calories, how could someone put that into context that is thing is hearing that, yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 43:01

I mean, say 1010 grams of fat, say it’s that, just absolutely, that I have to go back and do the real math, that’s like 90 calories, right, of fat, but that doesn’t mean that the caloric differences, the other group just might have been using more glucose or more glycogen, right, they might still be burning,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 43:18

so it’s even less than one would imagine, yeah, it’s not meaningful from,

Alyssa Olenick 43:21

and I think that’s where people conflate fat oxidation with fat burning, right? You’re utilizing fat as a fuel source, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s a net removal of, like, fat from your, you know, your adipose tissue that you, you want to shrink, so to speak, right? Because your body’s dynamic, it’s going in and out of these states across the day, it’s not just like your exercise training session isn’t always net additive to that, either there’s compensation, all of these things. So, yeah, I think that the real question, when it comes to these underlying differences that we see in women, is like, yeah, they might have a little bit of that, and that might be good for ultra long endurance, where we might not deplete glycogen as fast, because it’s so slow, low intensity, but that’s also conflated by the fact that all of that is also a training adaptation, right, so people who.. there’s just so much of a Venn diagram overlap, you know. There’s these baseline differences that we do objectively see between men and women. And

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 44:09

what are those?

Alyssa Olenick 44:09

Like, women typically have more type one muscle fibers, but the difference is like 4951 It’s not like 6040 or anything crazy like that.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 44:18

Type one muscle fibers.. Do you want to.. yeah, highlight that for people. Yeah, so type one muscle

Alyssa Olenick 44:22

fibers tend to have more mitochondria in them. They’re more oxidative, they are faster to fatigue, but they can endure longer. They’re in the endurance muscle fiber, where type two muscle fibers are more of your, your strength muscle fibers, your power output muscle fibers, your, you know, your ability to produce force, and men have slightly more of that, they also just have thicker, denser type two muscle fibers, genetically like that, they’re just because of puberty, right, like they, they get that bigger,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 44:48

stronger, they’re the bulk, yeah, and

Alyssa Olenick 44:50

so a lot of our baseline differences between men and women typically really do come from that heavy influence of testosterone, that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 44:56

actually I hadn’t thought about this before, but if you were to, and I’m not working. Anyone doing, yeah, but you do see female bodybuilders that then take testosterone, and they’re able to bring their physique up to what I would consider would be very masculine type, it’s a masculinization, and their size is not that much different,

Alyssa Olenick 45:15

no, because we have, you know, these meta analyzes that when you look at men and women from baseline, if you control for body size or lean body mass, women gain muscle to the same degree as men. We just gain the absolute amount is less because we don’t have the ability to put on that much tissue. They

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 45:30

1. You, so I’ve thought about this a lot. Yeah, and I feel like it’s a really difficult conversation in the way that just trying to think about it. For example, I will look at my husband, who is just this massive human, and he’s running marathons. He looks at a weight, and he can put on muscle. I mean, probably less now, because he’s so well trained. Yeah, but for me and you, I think that even if our training was perfect, it just seems as if it might take us a little bit longer.

Alyssa Olenick 46:01

Yeah, I think about some of the bigger gaps for women, there might be some of those differences in physiology, because the, you know, the testosterone is just making, because it’s so physiologically greater, right, versus like even, yeah, it

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 46:12

would be because I hear that people can, or men and women can put relatively the same amount of muscle mass on, but scientifically it doesn’t make sense in the way that they just don’t have as much. I think the big difference, though,

Alyssa Olenick 46:25

too, is we also have to consider, like, the social factor. Like, I actually look at a weight and put on a ton of muscle, but I have been lifting since I was 1415, years old, right? So I got a way bigger head start than a lot of women. Like, I, if I had $1 for every time a woman asked me, “How do I get legs like yours? and I’m like, my dad’s genetics, and I’ve been lifting since I was 15, right? Like, I asked me that, yeah, I know, I’m like, I’m like at just the perfect combination of that, but you know, I do have that bonus that I’m probably more predisposed to be a strength athlete than an endurance athlete, and everything that I do, but I started lifting when I was 15, I think about the women who don’t start lifting until they’re in their 30s, 40s, they have also the, you know, the lack of the testosterone, and then potentially, you know, perimenopause is just a storm of other influences all at once, but they also don’t have that training age, right, that that long-term accumulation of that stress or that muscle that was built, especially since so much bone density and muscle is being built in your teens to your 20s, and then kind of starts to slowly decay in your 30s on, if you don’t keep training it. I think that that also adds an added effect for a lot of women who are maybe starting later in life, that is genuinely harder. So, I think it’s a mix of a few different things, because the studies, they’re controlled, but also most of the studies that are being done on college students, right? Right, because that’s the people that they’re able to get into the studies, they’re not necessarily doing those trials on women that are 3545 50, and comparing that necessarily. It’s just a bunch of college age populations.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 47:50

And I interrupted you, and I’m really glad that we are talking about this, because you studied women, that was your interest. What do we know the differences between men and women, when it comes to training muscle, what can you say confidently that we know versus what is still outstanding for questions?

Alyssa Olenick 48:10

Yeah, so one women don’t need different training programs than men. Strength training works because strength training is a stress and a strain on your muscle and your body. We adapt similarly. I like to say that we’re a different sex, but we’re not a different species, right? Like, we still respond to a lot of similar things. There is some data coming out, potentially, that we might fatigue a little less quickly, so we might be able to do more reps, more sets, a little bit more volume in the gym. Is it because we’re

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 48:35

lifting less weight?

Alyssa Olenick 48:36

There could be that. I think in these studies they’re controlled. I think that they think it’s the underlying effect of potentially estrogen being favorable for that, but I also think that that’s a good point. A lot of studies on women is that women are under trained going into them, maybe compared to their male counterparts. We also see that too, in like low energy availability studies, like how many of those women were in low energy availability before they even entered the study, right? We also, it’s really hard to control for all those baseline differences, but objectively, regardless of the fact that men have more testosterone and they have a higher baseline muscle bone, all of that stuff going into the game. Maybe they played sports growing up and you didn’t. The road to get to the results that you’re looking for isn’t there isn’t like a sex-specific protocol that that gets there, other than potentially like if you can push a little harder or handle a little more, then like, and recover from it, then go for it, then do it. Absolutely, like, there’s no rule saying that you can’t. I just don’t think we have the data right now that suggests that there’s a different protocol between sexes that say, okay, well, this person should do this and this person should do that. At least in the data that we have right now, do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:38

we know confidently the impact estrogen has on muscle,

Alyssa Olenick 49:44

so it’s not as clear cut right now. The story that everyone wants to think that estrogen equals muscle, because when we look at the data from, also,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:52

that makes no sense.

Alyssa Olenick 49:52

Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:54

just from,

Alyssa Olenick 49:55

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 49:56

someone who’s been reading the literature for a really long time, that makes no sense. That’s

Alyssa Olenick 49:59

and. Feel like that’s the narrative that’s being pushed to women, is like, well, you have estrogen premenopausal, so you have muscle, and then it goes away, and then you don’t have muscle, like that’s like the narrative that’s being, at least from what I’m seeing, not

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:09

primary role is to drive anabolic,

Alyssa Olenick 50:12

yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 50:12

adaptation, and

Alyssa Olenick 50:13

then we see that when you look at the data of the perimenopause to menopause transition, estrogen doesn’t seem to be the main contributor to the muscle loss, there is, it’s tricky, because there’s overlap with aging and other things that can influence that, and I think it’s really hard for a lot of women to unpack the fact that, like, age and menopause happen at the same time, and so many of those things concurrently happen, it’s really hard to test that, you can’t, you really can’t, you can, you can do, you know, these suppression studies, but they’re still not perfectly gonna capture age versus menopause, so there’s this overlap here, but if estrogen had such a stimulus on that, or was so robust, then we would see that when you add back estrogen, that all that muscle loss was completely regained, or there was this significant meaningful boost in it. Really, what we see is this main driver in stimulus, even for menopausal women, is the resistance training, even more like, not that protein isn’t important, but in the studies where the human isolate high versus low protein, it’s the resistance training is the stimulus, not the estrogen, not

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:11

that’s absolutely true. And yeah, Don Lehman and I talk about this all the time, that protein is so important for many things, it’s non-negotiable, right? Yeah, I mean, you need more of it as you age, but protein alone isn’t it’s

Alyssa Olenick 51:24

not doing it on its own,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 51:24

it’s not going to do it on its own. There’s a very, as you age, it’s helpful, but the protective component seems to become a bit devalued if you are sedentary. So, without a shadow of a doubt, yeah, resistance training is the primary, and then you know we focus a lot on protein, because you have to eat, so if you’re going to eat, you got to get that piece right, but yeah, people don’t understand that you can’t just eat a whole bunch of protein and then build muscle and even protect it, I mean it’s your best defense, yeah, you

Alyssa Olenick 52:00

have to, you have to have that resistance training stimulus. You have to maintain it, and I think the thing that potentially, to your point, of women under loading, like they really struggle with, is I think a lot of women, at least from what I’ve seen, is they’re afraid to load heavy enough, or they’ve never experienced what that feels like, so they don’t have anything. So, like, I grew up an athlete, right? I’ve been lifting since I was 15,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 52:18

primary

Alyssa Olenick 52:19

sport. I played lacrosse and did cross country, but I was exposed at a very early age of what my max effort felt like, what hard felt like. You know what I mean. If women don’t have that context, they might not think, okay, well, I should be lifting to like a 789 out of 10 in the gym, whatever, but that might actually be like a 456 right? Because to them that does feel perceptually really hard, but they’ve never given that relatively, so then maybe they’re not getting as much of the stress and the stimulus that they actually need, and then they’re frustrated because they’re like, “Well, I’m not gaining muscle, I’m not getting the body composition goals I want, I’m not getting results, but the stress wasn’t great enough to drive that. But I also then wonder, how do we get more women to understand what, like, truly hard enough feels like so that you can have those adaptations that you are looking for from resistance training, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:05

Yeah, well, they can come train with me or you. It’s, it’s always a good time. What about the menstrual cycle fluctuations in terms of the hormonal environment,

Alyssa Olenick 53:22

yeah, is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 53:22

there, and I remember when I was in my 20s, I mean, it definitely was much, and I always trained, but there were definitely moments and days where it felt whether it was energy, and again, it can be, yeah, a ton of variables, but would you say that does the change in hormones affect the caloric intake to a meaningful degree, or the training to a meaningful degree?

Alyssa Olenick 53:50

Yeah, I think that the influence of the menstrual cycle on performance or intake ends up being, and this is not, you know, this is really hard for people to understand. The data right now really doesn’t show this, like hormones change equals like muscle, like performance or output, or whatever that looks like. We just don’t really see that consistently in the data, but what we do see is that the hormone fluctuations can change perceptually how you feel. So, to the eating standpoint, there might be an acute increase in energy expenditure in the luteal phase, it’s like two to 12% is the range, that’s something like two

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 54:25

to 12. Let’s think about what that would be, like 50

Alyssa Olenick 54:27

to like 200 calories a day, like, so it’s not a ton, right? It’s not like go eat a ton more, and also, like, it’s also there’s some studies that show no effect, so it’s not like this big conclusive thing, it’s a, it might be increased. We do see that women habitually eat more in the luteal phase and less in the follicular phase, the early half the menstrual cycle, whether that’s because estrogen has a different effect on hunger and satiety versus the luteal phase, affects digestion, slower motility, things like that, or energy expenditure, there’s other things that potentially could be going at play there, but then when we think about all. So the changes in those hormones really, what happens is in that specifically late luteal phase into early menstrual cycle phase, where we do have studies that show, hey, there might be something going on here, decreased in performance. There’s a few studies, they are smaller, but I really love them because they control for hormones and all these perceptual metrics, and when they try to find a relationship between the change in the hormones and the performance, they don’t, but then they look at perception of pain, motivation, you know, all of those things that drive you to want to push hard in the gym. Those are impacted by hormones, and there is that steep drop off of progesterone and estrogen into that menstrual cycle. And for some women, they’re more sensitive to that, so that’s like PMS, PMDD, like that can drive that, but you might do the same training session in the gym, and your late luteal phase, and the same weight, say it’s 100 pounds. If in your follicular phase it feels like an effort of seven out of 10, well, now it might feel like a nine out of 10. And it might not be that your muscles can’t move that weight, you might just, your effort levels, the motivation, all of those things might be impacting that. And then that’s compounded by women with increased menstrual cycle symptoms that report it report also more increases of impact on their performance. Right, so there’s multiple factors going at play here. There’s little things here and there across the cycle that might be more real and true, like for example, there might be changes like thermoregulation in the luteal phase, so meaning

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 56:20

you would get warmer, you would get

Alyssa Olenick 56:22

warmer, and you couldn’t cool down as quickly. You might sweat more salt and lose, have more sodium loss, because you might increase your sweat rate. So, for women that are doing like endurance performance, that might be something where, like, you might want to dial in your hydration or your sodium electrolyte strategy for, like, an endurance event, if you were in that. So, I think a lot of the times when we say that there’s, like, not one concrete menstrual cycle program that means that there’s none of these things are happening, but it’s not this, like, oh, we changed all these things every single week, or to every hormone profile. It’s you’re kind of adjusting to fluctuations, and also the individual variation is really big. There’s some really cool studies coming out of these out of Europe, that’s called the Findora Project.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 56:57

What is it,

Alyssa Olenick 56:58

Findora, F E N D U R A, and they’re testing a lot of female athletes, and where’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:03

that out of

Alyssa Olenick 57:04

somewhere in Europe? I saw at the female athlete conference that’s hosted by Dr. Katie Ackerman, their group presented to.. they have, like, you can look up their website, and they have all of their papers coming out of these projects. They’re really exciting, and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:15

Copenhagen.. I think it

Alyssa Olenick 57:16

might.. it’s somewhere like that. There’s so much more sports performance research in Europe, there’s a lot more funding for it. US only cares about disease. Europe will, in Australia, fund a little bit more performance stuff, but it’s they, they’ve been doing these studies where, and some of them, they track these female athletes for two cycles, and they’ll see, like, where the performance changes is different cycle to cycle, right? So it’s not that you’re just I’m different from you, or you’re different from me, or she’s different from her. It’s also, you could be different month

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 57:45

one, totally to

Alyssa Olenick 57:46

month two. So I’m really big on like the toolset of like learning to adapt and listen to and just to your body, because women do, like you said, you perceive it. I was a female athlete calling my mom, crying, because I’m like, I don’t want to have to do suicides with cramps. This feels horrific. I feel I’m, I feel horrible, and that’s very, very, very real. And I want to

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 58:05

say, so I’m actually working on my third book.

Alyssa Olenick 58:07

Yes. Okay. Amazing. It is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 58:08

about strong women. Okay, yeah. And you know, as I’m sitting here looking at just the scope out there, menopause people are, you know, it seems very defeatist, and then also, you know, they talk about estrogen in the brain, and, and all of these hormone fluctuations, just like you and I are talking about, yeah. And then I couldn’t help but think that if our mentality was trained up,

Alyssa Olenick 58:36

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 58:36

that if our mentality was trained up, well, you might have cramps, and it might be terrible, but you still execute.

Alyssa Olenick 58:45

Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 58:46

and I don’t want to downplay this, and I had hyper-emassis graviton for, yeah, you had really run pregnancies, right? It was,

Alyssa Olenick 58:51

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 58:51

and my husband was active duty, so I was alone in New York City in a 600 square foot apartment, throwing up in nauseous, traveling from downtown to uptown alone, yeah, and I still trained, and you know, and my whole point of saying is that, yeah, a guy’s not going to go through that, and then at the end of the day I was having all kinds of hormonal fluctuations, but there’s the biology, the physiology, and then there is the mentality, and I think that if we go through our life like you did when you started young, yeah, train up the mentality of, yeah, it’s hard,

Alyssa Olenick 59:34

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 59:35

and then you,

Alyssa Olenick 59:36

and I think a lot of women, again to my point from earlier, like if you weren’t exposed to that just because you weren’t a lifelong athlete like me, or doing the things that you did, like you can still develop and train that right? Like, I have a lot of cognitive skills for doing the hard things, because I did the hard things to do it right. Like, I just finished the worst ultra that I’ve ever finished in my entire life. I death marched the whole thing in, and I, any, and a lot of people. Would have just quit, and I was like, well, I can still finish it. I wanted to quit. I said it out loud many times, but I didn’t actually do it. It was terrible, but it’s so funny. Even three weeks later, I’m like, I’m really glad I finished that, because now I know what I can do when it gets hard, or when I want to quit, or when I don’t want to do it. And I think that so many of the messages that go towards women, and this is probably like, the if there’s a hill I’m going to die on my platform, is I’m not going to talk to you like you’re stupid, and I’m also not going to talk to you like you’re broken, and so many people are fragile, or it’s doom and gloom, or nothing can be fixed, and things might change and shift, and that’s real, right? But I really do agree that so many of the narratives talk to women like they’re incapable of handling any difficulties or resistance, and we’re so capable in everything that we do, right? Like a lot of women are doing similar things to, like, what you were doing, being pregnant, you know, still pushing yourself, you’re doing these things in other areas of your life, and think about how you can do that in training and show up for yourself and still do those hard things, but also, yeah, especially when you think about the narratives around pregnancy, the menstrual cycle, menopause, like, we just keep telling women, you’re weak, you’re fragile, you can’t do it, you’re incapable, everything downhill. Yeah, I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:01:06

have hormone changes, and maybe you’re hungry for an extra 50 to 100 calories, or 200 but all of that, there has to be a separation of here’s the emotional component to it, here’s the science, here’s what we know, and here’s what actually your choices, yeah, your own agency, and yeah, that’s one of the reasons I was really excited to chat with you about it, because as I was listening to your interviews and reading some of the things that you write, that that really came across, and yes, estrogen does play a role, and you were talking about progesterone, and maybe in the luteal phase, when your progesterone is high, you might be, I don’t know, yeah, more risk adverse or want to train less, or do any of these other things, but regardless, we still have to show up,

Alyssa Olenick 1:01:55

yeah, and I think a lot of people, I think they look for that reprieve and messaging that kind of gives them the permission slip to do less, and I really always like to remind women, I’m like, if you are having such a terrible day that you don’t want to train, you don’t have to train on day 28 of your cycle, but how can we proactively rearrange your week shift where you feel good, you know what I mean, like maximize on when you can get it and get it done, rather than just writing it off as, like, well, I’m broken, let’s move on,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:02:18

when you talk about nutrition and the hybrid athlete, coming back to the hybrid athlete. So, up to this point, we’ve kind of outlined the idea of concurrent training, which, honestly, is what everyone should be doing.

Alyssa Olenick 1:02:32

It really is. That’s why I’m trojan horsing everyone into hell, yeah, tricky, tricking everyone into hell,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:02:38

you know, the and also, even our exercise guidelines have both cardiovascular activity and resistance training. Yeah, I think that those are probably abysmally low, which is 150 minutes, two days a week of resistance training. I’m happy that we start there, but that’s not where we wanted to probably end up. Well, I

Alyssa Olenick 1:02:58

don’t think a lot of people realize that that’s just the first big jump in health impacts being decreased, but it keeps going when you keep doing more, like I think that that gets left. What do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:07

you mean?

Alyssa Olenick 1:03:07

So, especially cardiovascular, the resistance training guideline just got rewritten, and we could talk about those in a second, because I’m very thrilled with the updates to that. But when we think about the aerobic training guidelines, that minimum of 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous can be interchangeable, two to one, blah blah blah, all of that confusing doesn’t actually make sense to any one jargon, because, like, to the point of you keep asking me for specific examples, you tell everyone a moderate intensity is this many met minutes, my mom doesn’t know what a met minute

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:35

is, I don’t even know what a metment

Alyssa Olenick 1:03:36

I know, because I’ve tested not metabolic carts, I couldn’t tell you how to calculate how gardening equates to met minutes, right? Like, it just some

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:03:42

real vigorous weeding, yeah?

Alyssa Olenick 1:03:44

Right, like that’s what that’s what they try to do. And I get, I get that it’s coming from metabolic data, but there’s no good application for the lay person from that. So, anyway, that 150 minutes of moderate to 75 vigorous is when you start to see the first meaningful decrease in risk of death, mortality, whatever word you want to use, that sounds really aggressive, or just like disease risk, like onset of chronic diseases. All these things may attract people long term. 150

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:07

minutes,

Alyssa Olenick 1:04:08

yeah, or 75 minutes of the vigorous. But when you scale that up to 300 minutes of moderate, or 150 minutes of vigorous, which can be kind of hard to get to that with the vigorous activity, kind of the more you do, the more you kind of have to start parsing it out, and we can talk about that too. You still see another jump and decrease in those risk factors, and it kind of keeps going.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:27

Do we know that to be true, or is that epi data? It’s

Alyssa Olenick 1:04:29

all epi data. Yeah, so but I offends

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:04:32

your husband. There’s.. he didn’t want to do epi

Alyssa Olenick 1:04:34

data if it makes you feel any better. He wanted to be a physiologist. He wanted to be performance physiology. The army shows where he went. Yeah, so it is epi data. You’re just looking at these big data sets and, like, finding these associations of outcomes, which is a big reason for me. Is like, I’m really big. That’s again coming back to my objective athletic goals. Is because, like, I don’t really care necessarily, like, how much you’re doing is good. The more you do, the more you move, the better you’re probably going to have net health benefits, but I care about how are we object. Moving a parameter of fitness forward, right? Can you do more work

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:05:04

fitness or parameter of health outcome?

Alyssa Olenick 1:05:06

So I’m big on that. If you improve your fitness, for most people, right, obviously there’s the caveat that athletes sometimes aren’t the healthiest to get to where they need to be. I say

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:05:15

that the better the athlete, the worse their health. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:05:17

but for most regular people, if you’re improving a measure of fitness, you’re probably indirectly improving a measure of health, because the physiological adaptations that are required for you to be comforter are all the things that positively influence health. So, I think a lot of people obsess about, like, hand grip and VO two, because those are always, like, really heavily related, because they’re easy to test, right? But if you can improve your 5k time or how much you can bike for 30 minutes or whatever it is that you’re trying to do, and you can either go for longer, further, or cover more distance or more power output a set amount of time. I think those are a lot more easier objectives for a person to know that they actually got fitter and better, because in order to improve that, you had to improve your fat oxidation, improve your mitochondria, develop more muscle fibers. Maybe you have more powerful type two muscle fibers, right? To deadlift your body weight, or two times your body weight, you have to have those adaptations that positively impact you downstream. Of course, you can take it too far, right, and become unhealthy, but most regular people are not doing enough of that, yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:06:22

Or so, what were the past resistance training guidelines, and what are they now? Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:06:26

so the past resistance training guidelines, they were just very vague. It was two days a week of full body resistance training, and then they kind of just stopped there, right? Cardio got the spotlight, and I think a lot of that is because historically exercise physiology has been very endurance, and also the

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:06:40

ACSM, who wrote, who writes the, the exercise guidelines to, is it the American College of, yeah, so

Alyssa Olenick 1:06:46

who has their own ACSM? Also, is that’s the, that’s who just released this updated position stand coming from it, and I loved it, because one, it did set the, it’s still saying at least two days a week, like at least, like we really want at least two days a week again, if you’re a true beginner, and you’re only gonna start with one, start with the one, but like, make the roadmap to build, and it also does a great job of like speaking to that beginner, of like everything works when you start, start with whatever you can do, whether that’s body weight, resistance bands, you know what I mean, like whatever you are willing to do, it’s better than nothing, but I love that it started to parse out strength, hypertrophy, and power, and defining those more clearly, and talking about, like, how you actually achieve those versus just saying go lift your whole body twice a week in 60 minutes. Do you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:29

remember what they are? I could probably pull them up too.

Alyssa Olenick 1:07:31

Oh, I don’t remember exactly everything off the top of my head, because there’s so many different parameters, but really, like, if we’re gonna break it into those three buckets of strength, power, and hypertrophy, which I’m a big fan of programs, including a little bit. That’s interesting, though. Yeah, it’s

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:46

interesting that they, and they break it down into strength, hypertrophy, and like

Alyssa Olenick 1:07:50

the what this literature suggests is like best for developing those. Again, they keep coming back to the fundamental thing that like doing something is better than nothing. I talked about that. We

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:07:59

guys know, yes, but we want to cast, we want

Alyssa Olenick 1:08:02

to do a little bit more. Yeah, I know there’s always the,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:08:04

they want to do more,

Alyssa Olenick 1:08:05

they want to do more. So, when we think about strength, I know strength is obviously specific to what you’re trying to do, right? Like, you can get stronger at reps of 10, you can stronger at reps of 15, but we’re thinking about, like, the true characteristic of strength of, like, text testing your maximal capacity of your muscle, we’re usually thinking of that, like greater than 80, maybe greater than 90% of your one rep max effort, so it’s more of your traditional 135 rep ranges, and that’s a mix of both a trainable adaptation, but also a skill, because strength has to be practiced to be, you know, performed, so strength isn’t just an adaptation of the muscle, like we talked about earlier, it’s also like your neuromuscular, your neurons’ ability to contract and recruit more muscle fibers, and or produce more force output, and it’s trained by practicing that, right? Like, you kind of have to practice it to do it, so that’s strength training. And there’s a lot of benefits to strength training, you get a lot of muscle fiber recruitment, you’re, you’re getting, you want strength, strength is really important. We lose strength as we age, um, and you know that’s it’s a kind of independent characteristic, sometimes of muscle size alone. There is a pretty good relationship between having more muscle and being stronger, but strength can also be trained independently to some degree on its own, and it’s important to train, but that intimidates a lot of people. So, you can do it at like more moderate rep ranges, or lifting heavy relative to like what you’re willing to do. You don’t all have to do one rep max power lifting type Olympic weightlifting efforts to benefit from that, and then we have hypertrophy, which you know historically hypertrophy got sold as you had to do like eight to 12 reps, and that’s the hypertrophy range. Hypertrophy has a pretty big breadth and depth, it’s more so tied to volume, how much you’re actually doing, so for example,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:09:40

how many reps in sets or total

Alyssa Olenick 1:09:43

sets you’re doing across a week of training and things like that, but the nice thing about that is like the threshold of when you start to see benefits from hypertrophy starts as little as like two to four sets a week. When

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:09:53

you say benefits, how are you defining benefits?

Alyssa Olenick 1:09:56

So people in studies who gain muscle from doing a training program, so they start. To gain muscle tissue,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:10:01

so you do gain strength before you gain tissue.

Alyssa Olenick 1:10:05

Yes, because the newbie gains will come through first, so you’ll get those strength adaptations first, and that’s why you get really strong the first, like, six weeks of lifting, or whatever it is. But, yeah, I mean, we have this, like, a minimum effective dose of, like, you can kind of get slowest two to four. I love to see people closer into like six to eight, maybe six to 10, for a lot of benefit. We have some interesting studies in post-menopausal women that like a little bit more volume actually gives them a little bit more benefit, but the difference was like six to eight sets. It wasn’t like crazy, it wasn’t like six to 20, it was like doing two more sets was like enough to give them like a slightly greater magnitude of benefit, so

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:10:41

from the outcome of putting on muscle, yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:10:43

putting on muscle, and stuff like that, so or strength of muscle, and so sometimes doing a little bit more, you know, you need that for hypertrophy, but you can get hypertrophy across a wide variety of rep ranges, you can go all the way up to 30, as long as you get close enough to the effort level that you need, and you can go all the way down to strength. What’s hard, though, is like once you kind of get above 15 to 20, or you get below five, it’s kind of hard to either do enough volume when it’s below five, or to what we talked about earlier, like perception of effort. It’s really hard to go really close to muscular failure, or close to that fatigue point with that many reps. So, if you are starting out at home, or you don’t have a ton of equipment, you can do 2025 30 reps to still get some hypertrophy, but you just really do have to make sure you’re taking it to an effort of like seven eight or nine out of 10, or really close to like, hey, if I did one to four reps more, I couldn’t do any more. That’s what’s most important for hypertrophy, is that proximity to essentially failure. It doesn’t have to be 100% failure, but it does need to be like essentially

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:11:43

strength, isn’t there a strength hypertrophy continuum?

Alyssa Olenick 1:11:46

Yes, so that’s kind of what we’re talking about here. And now it’s kind of like the continuum has kind of been reclassified as they all overlap, so strength hypertrophy and endurance all overlap, but when you get to more reps, it’s going to be slightly more favoring endurance, you get to lower reps and slightly favoring strength, hypertrophy can be achieved across all of these.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:12:04

So, this is the 2026 ACSM position stand on resistance training. So, it was published April 2026 Stu, you’re welcome to show anytime. It represents a significant update to the 2009 position stand, and takes a notably more flexible, which it did sound like individual approach compared to prior guidelines. Here is the key shift in individualization over rigid prescription criteria. I’m not sure if I agree with that. It says that only 30% of American adults perform any muscle strengthening activities, 30%

Alyssa Olenick 1:12:41

and that’s also like self-reported, and stuff that’s like not really true formal lifting gets like factored into that, so it’s probably actually lower. I

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:12:52

know,

Alyssa Olenick 1:12:52

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:12:53

it’s terrible.

Alyssa Olenick 1:12:53

I know

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:12:54

we’re changing that. We’re trying to know that November is National Muscle Health Month.

Alyssa Olenick 1:12:59

I didn’t know that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:12:59

we created National Muscle, really, we did.

Alyssa Olenick 1:13:01

That’s amazing. And we’re

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:13:02

gonna work on initiatives, so hopefully you will, yeah, be involved in that. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:13:05

I would love to be. That’s, that’s actually amazing. National

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:13:08

Muscle Health Month,

Alyssa Olenick 1:13:09

I love that

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:13:10

60% or more perform none. Okay, so prior ECSM guidelines were estimated to potentially require 20 plus hours a week of training to I do not, that’s not there’s no way that’s true. 20 plus hours a week,

Alyssa Olenick 1:13:25

that does not seem correct.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:13:26

No, no, making them impractical for most adults. Okay, minimal dose of resistance training can produce, and this is how they defined it, produce substantial strength, hypertrophy, and functional gains. Here it is: two to three sessions a week, eight to 10 exercises, one to four sets. Okay, so it’s lifting a little bit heavy. Oh, and here it says eight to 20 reps, or 40 to 70 of one rep max. No one knows they’re one rep max, two or three minutes of rest. Okay, basically it said two days a week prior. This now says two to three days a week, gives you eight to 10 exercises, which is a good amount. The load greater than 80% one rep max to maximize strength gains. Okay, sets multiple sets frequency higher load multi set training three times per week was highest ranked for strength. This is interesting. Two times per week was highest ranked for hypertrophy.

Alyssa Olenick 1:14:27

That’s interesting, but I wonder if that’s just by default of the studies being

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:14:31

done. Okay, they said that you can use an elastic band, home weight resistance training, body weight training. So all in all, what it does is it gives a more, it seems as if it’s a little bit more specific, but also saying that there’s a broader range of things that you can do.

Alyssa Olenick 1:14:53

Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:14:54

and they also emphasize periodization, which is making that less important, and the way I understand periodization. Is the the actual training program is that is that a good way to think about it? Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:15:04

it’s kind of like alternating between cycles of different focus across time. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:15:10

it also says that this aligns with the American Heart Association of 30 to 60 minutes a week. That doesn’t seem like enough. I

Alyssa Olenick 1:15:22

think that I think like people can get a lot done with two full body days a week if they are done intensely enough. It’s kind of like the same cardio conversation, right? Like you just had in that last podcast, is like if you’re going through the motions, it’s probably not enough, but I think if you can do two days that are like really meaningfully, or three days that are like full body, and they’re actually taking them to strength or pushing hard, but I think that’s the gap, right, for a lot of people, is they, they don’t take those days super hard.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:15:50

This is, it’s really important to, I think, that we can all agree that if we were going to pick a perfect amount, that it’s probably two to three days, and let’s say in my ideal world, and I covered this in the Forever Strong playbook, which I’m going to give you one if you do not have one. I don’t have one. Okay, yeah, I apologize that I don’t have one. That’s okay, but three days a week, yeah, we have to shoot. If we don’t shoot for something, we fall for everything.

Alyssa Olenick 1:16:18

Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:16:19

I like this. Now I want to ask the reverse question. We can all agree that it’s – we’re going to say three days a week, and do you care when we think about the outcome again? It’s challenging. I think exercise training muscle health conversation from the physical aspect is so much more complicated than what I do as a physician, and in nutritional sciences it’s much more complicated. Because my question to you would be, do we think about body parts? Do we think about functional patterns? If I squat and I have hamstring tear, or I have hip dysplasia, I’m not using my glutes the way that I should be. Yeah, so the stimulus required for me, I might not be getting enough of what I need, and I know that that’s a little complicated when we think about each individual. Yeah, but how from a health, not performance, outside of performance, from a prevention aspect for your mom, yeah, how do you think about exercises and patterns and movements?

Alyssa Olenick 1:17:26

Yeah, so I would love, first of all, Mom, if you’re watching this, I would love a world of my mom resistance trained. I would love so much for her to watch. She doesn’t resistance train.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:35

Oh, mom, I’ve

Alyssa Olenick 1:17:35

tried. My dad does, though. My dad tried 65 and he’s still out there crushing it, but I know I’m trying so, so hard on that. So, if she was to start tomorrow,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:17:43

which she will,

Alyssa Olenick 1:17:44

yes, hopefully I got her doing some more walking up hills, some more, a little bit more intensity. But yeah, we’re working on the resistance training. But if I was to start her from scratch tomorrow, right, or people starting from zero, I love getting, you know, you hear this all of the time when you tell beginners this, but then it doesn’t actually mean anything when you say push, pull, hinge, squat. What does that mean to anybody? So, realistically, you want to do something where you are doing a squatting pattern, bending at the knees, whether that’s a leg press, a lunge, a step up, a box squat, a regular squat. Like, there’s.. it can be from a health perspective. If you don’t put performance goal, it doesn’t matter what mode you’re doing, but you want something that is going to load your quads and your glutes within this parameter, and obviously a lot of people like with squatting, they will say, I have knee problems, I have hip problems, things like that. You can adjust range of motion, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:18:33

you agree, because I, yeah, you know, as I think about this, when we say that you should squat, what is a good squat for a woman?

Alyssa Olenick 1:18:40

I mean, I would love to see a world where every woman is squatting at least their body weight, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:18:44

But, but think about this, but that’s those numbers are so..

Alyssa Olenick 1:18:47

there’s there’s no scientific data that says like this is the minimum of what you should achieve. This is a problem. Yes, we don’t know. We all of it is arbitrary power lifting or bodybuilding building. Got people classifying people by like their by just like what’s on average, but we don’t know if there’s like, so,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:19:02

and that’s why I asked you about the squat. Do we know that? I mean, we could say that we want leg strength for walking, getting off up off the floor. We know that it’s, you know, for women, this is one of the largest places where they hold more of their muscle mass, is actually their leg suffer insulin sensitivity. Again, my question is, do you, is there a reason that you think about that, like why?

Alyssa Olenick 1:19:27

So, the one reason I really think about squatting, and then hinging, which we can get to, is more like picking something off of the floor, bending of the hips, is because those specifically, especially in women, load the hips and spine, which is where we see a lot of bone mineral density loss, so for me, for women, I always really emphasize, and that’s why, like, if women are gonna go to the gym and they’re just gonna overemphasize, like, days and booty days, at, I don’t care, because that’s what’s probably the most important thing, anyway, right? Like, I’m fine with that, like, you get your hip thrust on, you do, you girl, right, because to your point, there’s a lot of lower body women have more lower body muscle than they do upper body muscle. Are gaps in strength and muscle, they are slightly smaller than to men’s. We think about sex differences. Upper bodies are great. I think it’s like women’s.. I just looked this up yesterday. I think it’s like 60% of what men have in the lower body, and then upper body is like, I don’t know, something a lot smaller, like 30 or 40% or something like.. but it’s a good gap.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:20:18

It is not based on training, because people will say, well, you know, men and women are relatively the same strength. Have you heard that they have the same relative strength?

Alyssa Olenick 1:20:30

Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:20:30

I mean, do they? If we’re talking about now mass and men have more mass,

Alyssa Olenick 1:20:39

yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:20:39

and that doesn’t, I mean, yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:20:40

so there seems to be a bigger gap in disparity in the upper body strength between men and women than lower body strength, but also then in the studies that’s true, like women gain just as much muscle as men, like they’ll actually gain more relative upper body strength, but I also just think that’s because women typically are under training before you go into those studies, so they’re gaining more because they don’t have that same training baseline going into it, but when I think about training in general for women, like, yes, I want women to train upper body, back, chest, shoulders, like it’s important to train her whole body, I think it’s important, but like, if a woman ever bench pressed in her entire life, she’s probably gonna be fine, but if she’s not loading her hips and spine, I’m more worried about her, that would be

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:15

one spine work, yeah, and

Alyssa Olenick 1:21:16

I, and one, there’s more muscle in the lower body, but two, we start to see more of that bone mineral density loss, like if you go and get a dexa for bone density to test to see what you’re, you’re at, they’re gonna do a hip and spine dexa, they’re gonna look at the greater trochanter and your hip there, and then your, your lower vertebrae, because that’s where more of that density loss, that doesn’t mean you can’t have density loss across your body, athletic populations of women get stress fractures all over, like it’s bone density is important beyond just those locations. Why

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:21:42

you want the hip hinge, the squat. Yeah, because I want to

Alyssa Olenick 1:21:45

lower, I want to load your lower body. I want you to load either on your back or pulling up off the floor or picking up or something where you’re pressing against, like I want you to load that lower body for that reason, because I know we haven’t talked about bone a lot, but bone responds to intensity and load, right. So you need that stress and strain on it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:22:04

Responds to intensity and load. Give me an example.

Alyssa Olenick 1:22:08

So the two things that bone responds to very well is resistance training or power plyometric training, because it’s it’s putting a lot of force into the bone, and then in that stress signal of that force being put in the bone or the muscle pulling against it is what signals it to make more bone cells. People think bone is static, but it’s actually very plastic. It keeps kind of regenerating itself or building or breaking down itself over time, and so that sends the signals to it. So, something like walking isn’t enough to put that much load and impact into the boat.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:22:38

I went on my friend’s podcast, very dear friend. Yeah, and I said walking is not enough, and people wait,

Alyssa Olenick 1:22:47

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:22:48

doc, they were so offended.

Alyssa Olenick 1:22:50

I actually know, because I was sent it like a million times,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:22:53

but that is, they’re wrong, it’s not enough.

Alyssa Olenick 1:22:56

And my biggest thing is back to our whole conversation earlier,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:23:00

I, I’m hearing you say,

Alyssa Olenick 1:23:02

and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:23:03

walking, it’s not enough

Alyssa Olenick 1:23:04

for bone, it’s not enough for muscle growth, and my biggest thing is like, when we think about improving cardiovascular fitness, if walking is enough to get you your heart rate elevated, raising it,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:23:13

now you’re making accommodations for, we’re not, we’re not doing that, guys, everybody knows it’s not enough.

Alyssa Olenick 1:23:19

Well, what I’m saying is that if that is enough of a physiological stressor, that that is putting you into those upper thresholds, that’s a sign that you need to gain more fitness, right? Like, that’s kind of like a.. it can be for some people really starting out, but that’s a sign that over time walking should become a baseline, not

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:23:34

a should not, not just the

Alyssa Olenick 1:23:36

physiological stressor for that exercise adaptation, right? So, yeah, swimming, also swimming and biking, too. That’s offloading. That I feel like a lot of elderly populations get prescribed that, but that’s not really bone loading. So, we want to make sure we’re having something that is like loading that bone specifically, especially women have higher rates of bone loss than males. They’re more at risk for osteoporosis, and also there appears to be more of a rapid loss of bone right around the menopause transition, because did you know

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:03

estrogen is important,

Alyssa Olenick 1:24:04

and that’s one of those things where estrogen is directly associated with that, so that’s a big reason for like women specifically, or people starting out, and that’s like, not like men don’t benefit from that too, like loading your lower body is good for everybody,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:15

hinge, and again, because as we think about how we choose, because now the ecsm, it’s it’s a little loose in terms of there’s so much choice.

Alyssa Olenick 1:24:24

Yes,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:24

hinge, you like, and what’s an example of a hinge? So,

Alyssa Olenick 1:24:27

hinge is a deadlift, and again, that can be elevated, that can be something done with a machine that is a deadlift, like it doesn’t have to be that, it could be a hip thrust, it can be a good morning, and you know what, we

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:24:39

will schedule this differently, and also we’ll go through that. Yeah, we should go through that for people. Yeah, yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:24:46

because I don’t think they know what those people say squat and hinge or push and pull, and no one knows what that means, right? And then you know, I do like let’s train our upper bodies, because you’re gonna have to pick things up, you’re gonna have to push things overhead, yeah, like you’re gonna have to be strong. Body, and so that would be pushing away from your chest, so that’s a push up, a bench press, a dumbbell chest press. A

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:25:06

push up is important. It

Alyssa Olenick 1:25:08

could be, it could be a great, it could be elevated right if you need to start to work your way down. I think it’s a great skill to obtain, but something that’s pushing you, you away or weight away from you would be an upper body push. And then you also have upper body pushes overhead, so shoulder presses, barbell overhead press, any sort of pressing overhead, and then you can have pulling towards you, so you have your row, your lat pull down, your pull up, anything that’s pulling that weight towards your body. So, similarly, it’s like very similar, upper body, you can either push or pull weight away from you, and upper body, you can push or pull weight away from you, and if you were to have a workout program with just four exercises in it, like three days a week, you could do one of each of those and have like a very complete program three days a week that’s hit most of those things in the guidelines, or those minimums, trained, loaded enough, heavy enough, that you’ll see a lot of adaptations and gains. It’s a really simple way to approach it, and you can mix in things like power, plyometrics, jumping, or if you afterwards. I like that.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:04

I want to touch on this plyometric component for bones specifically, or maybe not. Do you think that everyone should be doing some kind of plyometric?

Alyssa Olenick 1:26:13

I, so I have this thing that I’m calling the women’s training triad, actually, right now, and the base is strength and power, and the top is aerobic training, so like you want to have this strong foundation and base of like muscular health, and how do you defend this power? So I classify power into things that are either specifically power training, and I’ll define that in a second, plyometrics, jumping, hopping, skipping, something where you are moving weight or your body rapidly.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:26:38

Oh, I like this jumping hop. Okay, yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:26:40

so I kind of bucket them all in together, because I’m sure you’ve heard, like, the new term is power pinion, and we start to lose power. Have you not heard of this? Okay, so we start to lose power faster than we lose strength as we age, and I think a lot of people have always over focused on, like, the classic bodybuilder pro program for hypertrophy, or a lot of the strength stuff, but we lose power as we age, and that’s like your ability to catch yourself when you fall, or get up out of a chair quickly, or react to something, we

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:02

lose strength, and we start to

Alyssa Olenick 1:27:04

lose it more rapidly. We’re starting to see more data that’s showing that, and it’s a question. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:08

do you think that that’s because people are not training power?

Alyssa Olenick 1:27:12

I think it’s a mix of people are not training in general, and they’re not training power. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:16

because

Alyssa Olenick 1:27:17

well, no one trains unless you’re an athlete and you’re 20, I don’t do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:19

it exactly. Yeah, we do get a denervation of muscle and the neural connection,

Alyssa Olenick 1:27:28

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:29

but people don’t train power,

Alyssa Olenick 1:27:31

just like they don’t, you know, there’s all these people who talk about, like, we don’t really sprint or move fast or train power, like all that stuff seems super reserved for athletes and people in their youth, but we will get adapt and keep doing those as they age, they’re actually really important, right.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:27:43

Power pin is the new power

Alyssa Olenick 1:27:44

pinions, the new sarcopenia. Yeah, but I think it’s important because power is, if we’re talking about athletes, that’s really great for improving your running performance, reducing injury risk, all those things, having stronger, denser bones, which are really important for people who have endurance-based goals. If you’re a strength athlete, being able to move weight quickly or have more power is going to benefit you, because that’s a characteristic of muscle that you want for the sport, or whatever you’re doing, but also when we’re thinking about general population individuals, one, we don’t want power loss as we age, especially with fall risks being higher in women and fragility being higher, but also when we look at the studies that look at bone health, we also see that it’s usually strengthening combined, combined with some sort of jumping or landing based training to put that loaded impact on the bones, and it’s not to say that strength training has no benefit without that, it does, but usually see them combined, or even like really like simple things like pogo hops, like sets of 10 across a year, improves bone density in post and perimenopausal women, so even little bits of impact, so I like, I kind of group. I have

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:45

a question. Running, if you’re okay,

Alyssa Olenick 1:28:47

running isn’t enough, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:48

you, you would,

Alyssa Olenick 1:28:49

there’s a lot of loaded impact, which is why I can, and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:28:51

it’s unilateral, isn’t it?

Alyssa Olenick 1:28:52

Yes, and it is more than walking or swimming or biking, so it’s like a spectrum, right? So, but running still isn’t like it’s it, there is a lot of load and impact on your bones and your body impact into that is really significant, but it’s just still not as great as like true jump landing, you know what I mean, versus there’s a little bit more elasticity and support, and that’s what’s kind of on the spectrum, so running is closer to this than walking is, or swimming, or biking, but it’s not quite, so if someone was to go from full sedentary to running, they probably would get a little bit of benefit here, but they wouldn’t maximize that benefit across it. And for a lot of people, the reason I group these together is because it can be intimidating. You’ve never done it. A lot of women struggle with, like, pelvic floor stuff, or people might have knee injuries, so I’m not gonna tell everyone they have to go do depth jumps to height, because that might not be realistic, or that might not be the starting point for them, but I put these together because you can also move weight quickly, so that’s kind of a little bit more into the guidelines that they talked about. Power, there is like 60 to 70% of your one rep max, but you’re doing it quickly, more rapidly. Give me an

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:29:52

example, because that’s my favorite form of cardio. Yeah, is doing kettlebell swings.

Alyssa Olenick 1:29:57

Yeah, it would be like kettlebell swings, maybe dumbbell throw. Stores, maybe like you take a squat and instead of doing it for heavy load, you’re doing it as quickly as you can. That

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:30:07

is part as cardio, or is that I

Alyssa Olenick 1:30:10

still count that as I don’t count anything really that’s like doesn’t have a cardiovascular component as cardio. There’s some overlap with that kind of thing, but I kind of still bucket them out because those pathways we talked about earlier, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:30:19

I couldn’t, yeah, so there’s a little bit of overlap, yeah. If you’re like, if I call you and I say, Alyssa, I’m doing cardio, and it’s gonna be 50, I don’t know, 50 kettlebell swings, and then I’m gonna do 50 broad jumps, and then I’m gonna do, you’re not counting that as my cardio,

Alyssa Olenick 1:30:40

not in the traditional sense, because what happens is the your heart rate will go up because it’s very central demanding and there’s a lot of muscular intensity, it’s hard, so there’s going to be an overlap in some of that, like your cardiovascular system is contributing to that exercise, you

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:30:54

don’t want me to be doing, but you’re not

Alyssa Olenick 1:30:55

stimulating those pathways of adaptation, and even the VO two max contribution of that is it’s artificially, like a lot, your heart rate will be artificially higher than the actual VO two max contribution of that exercise, so it’s not that it can’t have a card, people get really mad, that’s where my come for me. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:10

Martin would probably disagree with you,

Alyssa Olenick 1:31:12

really. I think there’s an overlap there, but I think when we think about like true, true aerobic stuff, I usually like if you do something like that, because I do stuff like that too. I love throwing in like a bike or ski or a row in it, so there’s still that like traditional because you can’t get as much power output like aerobically, I guess, or even anaerobically from something like a kettlebell swing as you would if you went on a row and did a max one minute effort, so to speak, so I think that I like when we, I’m not against those things, I do them, but I think that I usually like to say, like, let’s throw in some sort of component of, like, classic cardio. You like it for

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:45

power, because we’re talking, yes, but I like it for

Alyssa Olenick 1:31:48

power.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:31:49

How often do people need to do some kind of power in an ideal world? Yeah, or someone who is, or has been training, for example, me, because now I start jumping. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:32:00

you could start with like one day a week, or even spacing it off, say you lift three days a week, you could put it a little bit in each one of those programs, or some people do like a whole day dedicated to that, but you want to start out with less and build, especially if you’re doing like jumping or landing or plyometrics in that more formal sense, you want to start with like just like 50, but the goal is

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:19

50 hops in a day every day, I think that that,

Alyssa Olenick 1:32:23

and then you can build, or you can build in like, so you might start with like pogo hops, like really simple double leg hopping, if you haven’t done a lot of this before, because this is also a lot of stress on a

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:32

pogo,

Alyssa Olenick 1:32:33

no, not a pogo stick, they’re called, they’re just like little hops, very, very gentle jump

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:37

rope,

Alyssa Olenick 1:32:38

that could be a great example of that too, just

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:40

tried that recently. I almost totally wiped out.

Alyssa Olenick 1:32:42

Yeah, it’s.. it’s hard. So, that’s just.. you can start with really low-level plyometrics, but then if you want to keep gaining skill, you can start going from like double leg hops to single leg hops or alternating

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:32:52

effective dose to there’s the maintaining the power that you have, and then there’s improving it.

Alyssa Olenick 1:32:59

Yeah, so the the suggested hops, or landings, or whatever you want to call it, in like traditional power plyometric, like jumping type literature, is somewhere around like 50 to 100 hops a day, but you can build that up, but again, it takes that, that building of it, yes, like, but even these, there’s like, though, some of the stories I mentioned earlier that are doing like just a couple sets of pogo hops, and they’re like menopausal women across a week, I think that’s awesome. They were doing like I maybe like maybe at the end like 100 hops a day a few times a week, and it’s nothing aggressive, it’s nothing crazy kind of thing. I don’t think we have a minimum for like if you’re doing like speed rep back squats, I don’t think there’s like a threshold minimum we have established for that for that kind of thing, but yeah, you just want to make sure, because for a lot of people, you can get injured if you just like go straight to doing what I do, and if you start doing like lateral hops to box jumps, that might be a little aggressive, but you can start with this, and we still see these improvements with this seam of it, and then you can obviously keep going and keep progressing from there. The thing is that I don’t think we have, we have these trials in older adults, where they have them do strength or power training, and they do see these improvements, but there’s sometimes so much of a disconnect between, like, performance literature and health literature that we don’t have this, like, well, if you get to moderate level plyometrics, you actually have xyz health benefits from it. It’s kind of right now you can just think of it as a spectrum.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:34:17

Okay, we talked about the strength, the power. What else you said? There was the triad.

Alyssa Olenick 1:34:23

Yeah, so I call that like, and really I call it the women’s training triad, because that’s just like I’ve now just kind of been talking a lot more to women, but it’s really just like performance for health, longevity, fitness, and essentially it’s just a foundation of strength training, so strength, hypertrophy, gaining muscle, being strong, getting those training sessions, but then also having that power, that moving fast quickly type that I kind of group those together on that foundation, because your strength and power can complement each other. They don’t have to necessarily be thought as different. I think when I tell people they should do stuff like power-based training, they’re like, when am I going to fit that on top of everything else? I’m like, put it in your workout between your warm-up and your main sets. They, and like, just include it into your training day. It doesn’t have to be its own separate thing. And then good programmed cardiovascular training, and when I say that, I mean that you’re

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:08

smiling. Yeah, I

Alyssa Olenick 1:35:09

just, so many people just either do an adequate cardiovascular training, where it’s not stressful enough, they’re going for a passive leisurely walk, their heart rate’s barely getting up, there’s no really stress or strain on their body, or women just do this thing where they just like drink from the fire hose of every group fitness class under the sun, or they do a lot of like modern intensity all of the time unintentional training, and all that stuff is junk

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:33

training. You mean

Alyssa Olenick 1:35:34

kind of, yeah, like it’s not, it’s not that there’s zero benefit for health from doing that, but it’s usually not specific enough to get like any meaningful adaptations past that like baseline phase of gaining adaptation from just doing it right, used to do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:35:47

that. Yeah, that was me. It was just kind of low level, but you know in retrospect it probably was improving my VO two max at some point, but maybe not specific. Yeah, how much? Because that was one of my questions. The reverse question is the minimum effective dose for someone, the cardiovascular aspect for someone whose primary goal is strength.

Alyssa Olenick 1:36:08

Yeah, so I think the minimum effective dose is getting to at least the exercise guidelines, right? And then from there you can do more. That’s where we can kind of tie in those conversations too, of like intensity versus mode, because if your main goal is strength and hypertrophy, and you just want to do enough cardio to not die early, do it on a bike, do it on a rower, you don’t need to run unless you want to run and you enjoy running, but also the intensity will, like we talked about earlier, influence some of that interference, so zone two gets a lot of hype, good or bad, right, wrong, and different. City

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:36:41

will,

Alyssa Olenick 1:36:42

so if you do a really, really intense cardio session, it’s probably going to have that carryover effect that we talked about earlier on that strength session. So, if you’re going to do a really intense cardio session, pairing it away on a day where you don’t care that it’s interfered by your training session from the gym the day before, because you care more about that strength, or it’s after, or it’s separated by a rest day, but that’s where, like, kind of some of that conversation around zone two is helpful too, because zone two is like less fatiguing, if you want it to do more volume and you’re not wanting to interfere with strength, you can do more of that zone two, because it’s less totally fatiguing, and kind of get more volume in there, but I’m a big fan of, like, I think everyone should do at least one day a week of higher intensity training, whether that’s HIIT training, sprint interval training, threshold training, whatever it is, like something that’s pushing you above that zone four to zone five plus. I think one day a week, and for many people just starting out, like, you can, like, a lot of studies take sedentary people and put them on bikes and have them do hit. It’s not like you can’t do it, but if that feels too intimidating, you could start with lower to moderate intensity activity and build up to that with time.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:37:48

Yeah. No, I, but I just

Alyssa Olenick 1:37:49

want to start sprinting right on the road flat. Yeah, but we want to hear about

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:37:52

what is in an ideal world.

Alyssa Olenick 1:37:54

Yeah, we

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:37:54

all recognize that it takes time to build up, but the end goal is you want to see everyone doing some type of high intensity interval every week. Yes, is it a.. is there a length of time?

Alyssa Olenick 1:38:06

Is I think it scales with fitness of it. You can start, and it also depend on the duration of the interval, but I think, like in most classic high intensity or sprint interval sessions, in anywhere between 15 to 30 minutes, you can get a lot.. you can get a lot.. what’s the rest time and warm up built in, like, if you from warm up, doing your interval session, rest in between, because if you’re doing, like, uh, four by four, right, like that’s going to take a lot longer than maybe, like, a woman and on women and off sprint for 10 rounds, type thing, like that’s a 20 minute work, about

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:38:33

80% VR two max, you’re not talking about 90 plus hitting red line,

Alyssa Olenick 1:38:38

yeah, so in very, very classic sprint stuff. Yeah, you can like that. 1020, seconds in redlining. I, I like sprint interval training. I like hit interval training. They’re kind of like sister and brother, right? So, you can do either or of those. I just think that I would love to see a lot of people doing something that’s more intense. You could also oscillate between these, right? Like, there’s different benefits to like doing different intensities and training around different thresholds and moving them forward, but like, if you’re above that essentially lactate threshold, do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:39:06

we care about that? Why do people care about a lactate threshold for a normie? Yeah, me,

Alyssa Olenick 1:39:10

so from a normie, the reason you care about your lactate threshold more than anything is not because you care about your next marathon performance, it’s because that’s my,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:39:18

the one that will never happen. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:39:19

exactly, like I care about it, because it’s allowing me to run faster at a higher power output with less physiological fatigue. For you, it’s just an underlying reflection of those adaptations that we talked about earlier, because if you’re able to have more mitochondria, they’re more capable, you’re able to clear more lactate, you’re relying more on oxidative metabolism, you’re having less of that interference at the cellular level, that’s blunting fat oxidation, and with time that will shift up, but do with that,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:39:46

everyone should be able to know what their lactate threshold. No, you don’t need to know

Alyssa Olenick 1:39:49

how to, you absolutely don’t need to know what it is, but that’s why, but we want to train. The reason I say lactate threshold is, we want to train above it, because there is more of a bigger physiological stressor, I think. Last podcast just talked about this, coming from that high intensity of sprint interval training. There’s more of that cellular deficit that we talked about. Energy is greater, it’s faster, it’s sending faster signals to your body than like a really long slow zone two sessions gonna have. So people who aren’t training a lot of cardio, you know, the exercise guidelines of like 150 versus 75 it’s basically the more intense you do it, the less you have to do. So, if you, I say, at least one, because I’d love to see everyone do at least one day per week. You could probably do one or two. I don’t think people need, I think, 456, days of, because the more days of the high intensity you do, the less quality it’s going to be. You’re not going to be able to sustain that output every single day, but you could do like a more classic hit day, and then a more classic sprint day, you could do those circuit interval type workouts that are mixed. Yeah, like you could do that as part of that. Yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:40:46

Saturdays are high intensity, we do a little bit heavier weights, but Saturdays are high intensity, and then typically we do some kind of sprint interval a few times, depending on how my nervous system is, and when I say that, that sounds so just arbitrary, yeah, like I was traveling, yeah, no, I totally

Alyssa Olenick 1:41:04

get it, yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:41:05

but today was, you know, it’s a maxed out effort, but it’s 250 meters, it’s nothing crazy, and it’s a, it’s a thrown in there for, yeah, but this reminds me of something that I did want to touch up, because I know we’re running short on time, nutrition for the hybrid, the hybrid athlete, and I am cautiously saying athlete, because again, there are these buckets where we say, okay, well, you’re a lay person, a regular person, which I would consider myself in that, and then there’s athletes, yeah, but I would say for overall wellness, there are certain risks that I think are real for women, and it says hybrid athletes here, you know, the team and I were talking about this, who the relative energy deficiency in sports. So, reds, what have you seen with chronic low energy availability and just muscle and hormone function, bone metabolism. Are there early warning signs that someone

Alyssa Olenick 1:42:05

is, yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:42:06

in this energy deficit?

Alyssa Olenick 1:42:07

Yeah, and I think that so many women that are pretty active will not identify as athletes, so they don’t think that they’re highly active, and they don’t realize that even taking like the jumps from, like, oh, I’m doing the minimum to doing like the 150 to 300 minutes. If you increase that demand on your body and you don’t match it with enough physiological resources, it might not prioritize hormonal health. So, this isn’t just a conversation for.. I mean, I train eight to 12 hours a week. This is not just a conversation on me. It’s yet

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:42:34

to you,

Alyssa Olenick 1:42:34

no? But, like, that’s like people think, well, listen, like, you’re crazy, you’re extreme. This matters for you, right? But even a woman doing three to five or building up to that, like training for their first half marathon, marathon, they’ve never been exposed to the higher volume of endurance, they often don’t match that increase with that, and so do

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:42:53

you think that it is in our practice we work with a lot of people that are very physically active and strong medical, and one of the things that we see is that when they jump up their training, it’s not that they’re actually hungrier, they get to a point where they’re actually less hungry.

Alyssa Olenick 1:43:08

Yeah, yeah. So, there is.. it’s interesting because you start like, because the more you train, or the more it’s intense. Sometimes you get that suppression of hunger and satiety. I also think it’s a mix of, like, women are so conditioned to, like, be afraid of eating more carbohydrate or calories, or they just have never been in a position where they needed it to fuel, so they’re just kind of eating their normal diet and not realizing they need to scale it up to the activity that they’re doing, you know. Again, a lot of people, they’ll be like, “When I talk about the importance of carbs or increasing carbs or inter-workout carbs, they’re like, “Well, what about metabolic disease? I’m like, “But I’m not talking about eating past your body’s capacity for that. I’m talking about matching your body’s need for that, and so what happens in women is that when you have these energy deficits, so that’s like chronically across time, you have these big deficits of energy that mix match between your activity level and what your body needs for physiological function, it will start to basically like down regulate and or deprioritize hormonal function, because it’s a costly, and it’s like it doesn’t want to make a baby if there’s an environment that has scarce resources, so that’s where more of the, you know, we talk about the cycle training, like a bigger risk for female health is the down regulation of the menstrual cycle, like that is a, you know, you want to talk about increased stress in the body and cortisol and inflammation and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:44:20

pregnant, that’s one of the things that we, yeah, have them make sure that they’re eating breakfast,

Alyssa Olenick 1:44:25

yeah, because there is, it’s still early data, but there’s data that suggests, like, within day deficits can also be eliminated stressful, or carbohydrate availability deficits can be come stressful because they’re not feeling that activity, so for women, they, I think, they wait until they miss their period, and that’s that’s not the first warning sign, that is the red flag, that is like the alarms going off. There is a spectrum of steps that your menstrual cycle dysfunction starts to take, and I think a lot of women, they’ve never tracked their cycle, they’re not aware of their phases, they don’t know where they’re at. Cycle

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:44:53

when you are talking to your community, what are.. is there something that is a really early warning sign,

Alyssa Olenick 1:44:59

1. Most women aren’t testing ovulation until they try to have a baby, but if you’re missing ovulatory cycles frequency, that’s a sign. What you might start to notice instead, because you might not be tracking ovulation, so you might not know is that your luteal phase, your luteal phase is pretty standard in how long it is. It’s usually like about 1314 days after you ovulate to your next period. If you start to notice that that’s shorter, or you start to suddenly have a lot lighter cycles, or shorter cycles than normal, because your progesterone isn’t being elevated, so you’re not building up that lining, like those might don’t just wait until you’re missing your period entirely. If the duration of your cycle starts to really shift, or even like phase to phase, like obviously we talked about earlier, that you can change month to month, but like if you start to see these acute little differences in your cycle, you might be having menstrual cycle dysfunction, luteal phase deficiency, and ovulation, all these fancy terms, long before your body’s not ovulating, you have luteal phase deficiency, and all now you actually have amenorrhea, like that is, which that is the final step, and that’s so I think that for so many women, they don’t, you know, not everyone, but a lot of women don’t even know what phase of their cycle they’re in, or when they’re getting it, and there’s period surprises them, so you know, the first thing would be to have like some sort of cycle awareness of just knowing where you’re at, what’s normal for you, but then paying attention to like when those things start to change a lot, if they get really long or really short in cycle length that’s abnormal to you, or outside that normal range of, like, you know, if it starts, you start to get a 20 day cycle, and you should get a 28 day cycle, that’s a good sign, like, hey, maybe something under the hood isn’t going on, or you start skipping cycles, or all those little things underneath that is worth paying attention to, rather than just waiting until you don’t have your period for three months, and the reason this is such a big deal, to your point, to the bone, is like when girls and women go into low energy availability, the bone loss is incredibly significant. It’s fast, it’s very fast. And even so, in order to regain your cycle, you typically have to gain more weight than you lost to get there. You have to go past that, which can be really scary for a lot of highly active women, but even up to 12 months after weight is restored and cycles restored, the bone density loss isn’t fully restored, and so it’s like you really don’t want to dig yourself, especially like we think about nowadays all of the narratives to girls in their 20s when bone density is peaking, to like not resist in this train, just do like yoga and pilates, hawker walks, and like under eat, and then it’s like this perfect storm of like, okay, well, no, like that’s like that’s the opposite of what we want to be doing during this time, and it’s really, I mean, it’s a huge risk in endurance, girls, girls who are doing endurance sport, and then it’s also a risk to just like sedentary women who aren’t doing the typical things that you should be doing to prevent or promote bone density and loss across time. So, what

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:47:39

about I have two more questions before we wrap up. What about protein requirements for the can for the concurrent training athlete, and I’m going to be very specific here. Those that are doing more endurance, so they’re doing endurance and they are doing strength. Where is the evidence for protein with endurance training, because I think that this is a misrepresented topic. Yeah,

Alyssa Olenick 1:48:07

a lot of people think that endurance athletes don’t need as much protein because they’re not building and promoting muscle growth, and they’re not lifting, but you actually need potentially higher protein, and I think a lot of that is because your body doesn’t want to, like, really use protein for energy metabolism, but it can, and it will, and if you are in very large carbohydrate deficits or energy deficits, whether that’s intra workout or from training chronically, How

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:48:29

do you use your fuel source as you’re thinking about your own nutrition? How do you think about your grams per kg? And then do you use brown chain amino acids or essential amino acids into a workout,

Alyssa Olenick 1:48:43

so I don’t do.. I mean, I did.. I did do EAA a few years ago. I was.. my long story short, my PhD just gave me every gut health issue that you could possibly have from the stress, and so I was having a hard time with eating in the mornings and training. So that one period in time in my life, I did take essential amino acids during that, just so I had some amino acids available. Right now, I really just prioritize getting in protein in at my breakfast before I go out for my long runs, or across the week I’m getting enough during the day. How

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:49:12

much protein do you typically ingest in a day?

Alyssa Olenick 1:49:15

Um, I haven’t tracked in a few weeks, but when I was tracking, I was probably getting between 120 and 140 grams per day, and I’m about 141 pounds, so that’s about right. Yeah, so I, I try to hit somewhere in that range. I don’t go over because I’d rather take that for carbohydrate – it’s not really necessary. I’d rather use that energy for carbohydrate. What about

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:49:33

your carbs?

Alyssa Olenick 1:49:35

So I, when I’m in peak ultra marathon training, I’ll go up to like 456 100 grams of carbs a day, especially on long run days, where you’re taking in a ton during it. My day to day, right now, where I’m doing a little bit more normal training, is probably in the three hundreds to 400 range. I probably don’t, I’ve.. it’s really hard to eat enough carbohydrate, like it’s really hard. Yeah, I would rather eat the avocado and the. Not butters than the carbohydrates sometimes, but yeah, for me I’m probably in the three hundreds when I’m just doing a normal training and it ramps up. Do you take it in?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:07

I’m very curious about where the data is for all these endurance types, because we’ve been reading a lot, because, as you know, our household is very interested in, yeah, your husband, he’s

Alyssa Olenick 1:50:17

drinking the Kool-Aid.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:19

Yes, I mean, I don’t know how it is for you, but when my husband is into something, he’s just like, oh

Alyssa Olenick 1:50:24

yeah,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:25

he’s into it. Yep, you would think he’s always.. it’s been

Alyssa Olenick 1:50:29

his thing his whole life, forever.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:50:30

We’ve been playing around with the use of essential amino acids and carbohydrates, because he does use the gels to help with just to be able to keep going and not lose too much muscle.

Alyssa Olenick 1:50:42

Yeah, so I think that one to add on to, we talked about earlier, I always bring like a protein shake with me, so as soon as I finish my long run, I drink that, so I immediately have protein. I know that, like, post-workout timing, like, quote unquote, doesn’t matter as much, as much as getting it in the whole day, but if I’m going out for a 345, hour run, I’m trying to get amino acids in my body right away, typically the good you want to get some carbs in with that to restore that, but in your workout I do, I’m really big on carbohydrate feeding for endurance activities, so I get between 60 and 90 grams of carbs per hour on my long runs, and

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:51:15

how fast, how do you think about your heart rate, or how do you dose that out?

Alyssa Olenick 1:51:22

So, for me, I really just kind of build up to it over time, and then I find that the more intense it is, the less I can handle, versus the slower I’m going, the more I can do. But if I’m doing like a carbohydrates, yeah, but if I’m doing a trail run, that’s like zone one, mostly like very easy long training run, I can tell that I don’t need 90 grams of carbs in that training session to fuel it, kind of thing, but for me, I think about too, not just hitting that carbs to fuel my session, but hitting those carbs, so that my body isn’t using protein from my muscles or my body as an energy source. Also, it helps with recovery, like if you think about concurrent training and hybrid training, you know, if you eat enough intra-workout nutrition and daily nutrition after a long run, you’re gonna feel a lot better when you show up to the gym Monday than if you eat 30 grams of carbs per hour, didn’t hit your protein for the day, and then try to show up for that same resistance training session on Monday. So that’s the way I think about it. I would love to eat a little bit. This is actually a lesson that I learned in my last ultra, there wasn’t.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:52:21

How long is an ultra 100

Alyssa Olenick 1:52:23

plus? An ultra is anything 32 miles or 50 kilometers and longer.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:52:29

Oh yeah, an ultra is it’s only 32 miles.

Alyssa Olenick 1:52:33

Yeah, it starts the 50k distance. Yeah, yeah, I know it’s crazy. It starts the 50k distance. So I just ran on ultra marathon that it was supposed to be 100k but ended up being like 69 miles, and the reason it was so bad for me is that I didn’t have enough food, food, like I had done the perfect gels and the electrolytes, but I didn’t have enough real food in my system, in my stomach. Part of that was I was assuming to rely on aid stations more, and the aid stations didn’t have quite what I needed, and that’s feedback I gave. I’m friends with the RD, and he took it for next year, but what ended up happening is that I just kind of finished that thing totally depleted, and I needed more of that. You know what we see in Ultra Endurance is that there you need a little bit of protein, you want some protein, you want, and it’s nothing crazy. It’s like something like 1015, grams an hour, it’s nothing crazy that you need to get in. I do struggle with GI issues with running, so for me I have to be really careful about like the sources of protein, more so fat, like proteins kind of easy to get in and digest form, but

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:53:23

use this is exactly why we use the essential amino acids, exactly right. And it’s

Alyssa Olenick 1:53:27

really something I should do. A lot of gels, historically in the past, used to have them in there, but that was because of the way that essential amino acids interact with the brain and fatigue, and talked about kind of thing. Yeah, I have thought about that more. I got away from it the last few years, but yeah, I thought about that. I was like, I, it would be great, because honestly, like that, I’m not, I’m not so much worried about like muscle loss when it comes to my training, because I’m still resistance training during it,

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:53:52

potentially recovering. But in

Alyssa Olenick 1:53:53

an event like that, especially now that it’s like kind of popular to over race, like ultra endurance and marathon races, that’s one thing I don’t do. Like, I know, like, we talk about muscle loss and preserving muscle. I take seasons intentionally where I really just lift a lot. I’m still always running or doing endurance training, but also I can handle a lot more without that appearance on my body, because I have a.. I’ve raised the floor, but I take time to actually like build back up. What’s crazy is, when I was on my PhD, I would do duxes and VO two maxes all of the time, just because I was always participating in my studies and being a lab rat, and I could watch my bone density oscillate with my training cycles, and I always had really high bone density, but I take periods of time off, but I think about, like, I finished that race so depleted, that energy deficit that I was in, I spent that whole next week just eating as much as I could to recover, because that probably was a greater nest negative influence on my musculature than the peaking block, where I was running 10 hours a week and lifting on top of it. You know what I mean, like that’s probably more of where that big stress and strain comes from. So I do try, like, right now I’m ramping back up, lifting, I’m doing a lot more, like I’m gonna go into an intentional season of at least rebuilding that back, and that’s like my big thing with hybrid. Training, as I call it, the seasons approach, but it’s how athletes train. You’re not just doing 100% endurance training all the time, like you need to spend time developing strength and hypertrophy, and especially if you’re someone who lacks that, and you’ve never built that, you really should take a period of time actually like scaling back the endurance, so you can create that recovery space to ramp up and build, and that’s really important message for women who’ve neglected strength training their whole life, or endurance athletes who have never really strength trained, they just have always done endurance training, you know, it’s really hard and scary, but like taking a time where you step back and you really intentionally drive up that, I mean, spend a year really lifting, right, and you love that, like I love that, really, yeah, I tell it to women too, all the time. I like, love that advice. Spend a year, I call it like, spend a year, like, not like chronically yo-yo dieting and flipping between workout programs. Just spend a year eating and lifting, and it will change so much in your life for you. But you have to just give it time, right? Because it’s really muscle is really slow to adapt. But I really like that year of all in. It would be great if muscle

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:55:58

was as easy as fat. Yeah, yeah, it just really, some reason it’s not,

Alyssa Olenick 1:56:03

yeah, so that’s kind of like to round up my whole philosophy there on all of that. Hopefully that touches on all those last little bits that are cliffhanging for people, because at the end of the day, I know we talked about endurance training a lot and some strength training, like I need people to always walk away from conversations with me knowing that I’m very pro lifting, I am very pro lifting.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon 1:56:22

Well, doc, list. This has been wonderful, and I think it really creates a very great perspective for people, because we oftentimes have one person that is focused on strength and one person that is focused on endurance, but you’re really this perfect intersection of both, and what I love is that you do it. Yeah, it’s one thing to talk about it, and then it’s another to do it, and you’ve experimented with all of these things, and I am excited for your book and all things to come. So, thank you very much. Yeah, thank you, thank

Alyssa Olenick 1:56:56

you.

1:56:56

Bye.