Barry Murray is a Consultant Nutritionist & Lecturer.
He has previously worked with BMC Pro Cycling Team & advised some of the top riders in the world.
We speak on a range of topics including fat loss, fuelling, improving immunity and myths which are holding you back.
A fascinating chat with a man who strives to uncover the truth.
Show Notes:
The Bi-Carb Cream I talk about is here
www.roadmanresources.com
Support this podcast:
www.patreon.com/anthony_walsh
Barry's Twitter Handle is @ON4Sport
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You can still have your bowl of porridge or your pizza and or your ice cream or your favorite fruit, right? I still eat a lot of those things now, but I Do it. I'll give it a kind of a value. I do it at a kind of a 15 to 20% amount of my daily diet, okay, because I know that from 10 years experience now that your body can still have carbohydrates if you eat first of all a lower amount, not zero. Like you said, people are binary about things. You don't need to be low carb does not mean zero carb. That was always one of my kind of phrases, you know. The big question is this. How do we use cycling as a tool to improve our health, our happiness, and our lung chavages? That is the question. This podcast will give you the answers. My I'm going to Amazon to be Welsh and welcome to the Roadman Podcast. Hello you beautiful roadman. It's Wednesday and that can only mean one thing. We're back for the long form Roadman podcast. Oh, I do love Wednesdays. I like the short form, but you know what? My heart, my passion, my soul, it's in this long form. It's where we started and I love Ramblin. I love my soapbox and I've no better soapbox than this Wednesday long-form podcast. So, thank you for joining me again. I've got a really special treat today for listeners. I have Barry Murray as a guest. Barry might not be a name you're familiar with. But after the show, it's definitely someone I can see you digging a little bit deeper and trying to find out some more about Barry. Barry's credentials are, I can list them for errors, papers he submitted. what he's most known for in recent years is being the nutritionist for a BMC pro cycling team. He went on to work individually at World Tour Reuters of note, including Steve Cummins. Steve spoke about him on a recent podcast and about how transformative Barry's approach to food and fueling was in his career. So I was really lucky to catch up with Barry today. We spoke about everything from what to eat on the boy, myths that are being told to us around how much carbohydrate we actually need. And then we got onto deeper topics about how we can heal the body through ancestral living practices. And we even finished up the podcast chatting about COVID and the health implications and ways you can make your immune system bullet proof. So it is worth listening all the way through until the end of this podcast. I really enjoyed this chat when we think about what this podcast is that pursuit of health, happiness and longevity. Barry in his teachings and his in his lifestyle really embodies those principles, health, happiness, longevity. So it was a pleasure to chat with him today. Before we jump in and I introduce Barry Morley, let me first remind you to head on over to patreon at patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore waltch. Your contributions on Patreon are what make this podcast possible. They are what pay for the hosting costs, what cover the costs of the equipment. They are what makes this possible. They are the fuel for this fire. So please, if you're listening to the podcast and you can afford to buy me a coffee, if you can afford to buy me a beer and just say, you know what, thanks very much. It might seem like a small trivial amount for you, like a point of beer. Who even notices a point of beer? But for me, it's two things. It's validation that I'm going the right direction with the podcast and it's also getting closer to that break even figure on this podcast being a really sustainable long term venture. So I'm going to leave the link in the show notes for us. Thank you for listening to my rambling and now the moment you came for let's jump in and chat with Barry Murray. Barry Murray, welcome to the roadmap podcast. Hey, Anto yet. I was a one coaching so a roadmap now. Yeah, it's good to be back in a different form. For listeners, myself and Barry used to work together quite closely a number of years ago. Barry upsticks from living close enough to the capital. And now you're down in, is it Dingell now, Barry? Near Dingell. So Tom Green country, it's Amascaux. So for anyone who's not an Irish listener, kind of explain where you are now. Yeah, so we're actually three years now living in the south-west of Ireland. on a peninsula and yeah well as you know was living in Wicklow now a proper the area is known as the Kingdom and it is pretty much a Kingdom with you know big mountains right on the Atlantic Ocean and so yeah it's cool place to live it's like living in Churassic Park yeah basically or you know some people say It's kind of New Zealand's kind of tight landscape or Donnie Goss or anyone who's been up there, but yeah beautiful parts of country three years in there and now we're no longer just a You know crazy ultra runner and nutrition guy who Did things on his own Since we've moved down Got married and have a little son now. So things are a little bit. Don't I don't run around as much as I used to Congratulations. Yeah, yeah, yeah, cheers I think it's fair since I've known you to say that you're somebody who's always tried to seek the truth and from what I know about you, without an agenda most of the time, would that be a fair synopsis of your work? I mean, all I ever wanted to do, I was always interested, when I was like a teenager, instead of going and getting a pack of chris and a bar of chocolate, I did an apple, right? I was always just interested. I would always just like trying to eat kind of healthy, right? So then long story short, I did chemistry first in UCD as my first degree and at the time the pharmaceutical company was from a suitable area was big. So for five years I worked as a chemist in a pharmaceutical company. I did lots of different things like technical support and formulation and kind of like a chemical engineer. Anyway long story short in my late 20s I moved over to England to go to Loughborough and did a Masters in Sports & Nutrition there. And then I became kind of started working for myself independently just as a kind of a casual consultant and and all I never took any offers from sports and nutrition companies saying they were selling protein shakes or you know energy drinks or anything like that and all I ever wanted do, because of my chemistry backgrounds, all I wanted to do was dig deep into how nutrition worked, how food works and how it affects health and performance. Two things I was always interested in, it wasn't just how fast I could go on a bike or how fast I could run, I was always interested equally, if not more so, in how I could keep myself healthy. And I did that without funding from anyone or without getting employed by any company or even any institute or anything like that.
And all I did was dig deep into all the biochemistry books related to nutrition because I knew it was more than just calories and grams of this and grams of that. And that's what based on how I formed my own knowledge and my own advice and recommendations came from not essentially not listening to any other influencers or any other voices other than what the textbook and what the papers and what the theory was saying. I love this idea that there is an objective truth that we can at some point, if we dig deep enough, we can remove agendas and actually get to the core of what is true and what is false. And I suppose when you were going through your nutrition studies, the dogma would have been slammed down your throat as carbs is the fuel necessary for endurance sport. So how do you go from, because you would have entered that in early 2000, late 90s, early 2000s through college? So college I was, yeah, I finished around 99, 2000s and then I went work in the pharmaceutical and then I went back to do my masters around 2008. So how do you come on that journey from them forcing down that dog medist prevailed for you know, nearly sent sports on, it was invented of as carbs as the dominant field source. Carbs are kicking all this stuff to start the question. Where does that journey start? Well, interestingly, like that's what I was taught in life where I'm doing my masters. And I was following it at the time. I remember doing a half-marathon and carb loading before it. And so I was following it and believing in it. It was when I finished. Here's what I would say. I have learned more since I finished in academia than I did when I was in academia. And what I did was what I explained, I just dug deeper and deeper into all the physiology and the mechanisms behind your metabolism. So it was in 2010, I read a paper, Sheet Bar was the author's name. still remembers. And it actually was a really good paper showing how if you actually don't eat before you train, because I was always getting up and having a lot of power at the time, right? And the paper was very clear but in very deep kind of biochemistry terms of how the switches for fap burning actually turn on. And it was kind of, that's always kind of things like when I start reading something that has no agenda or has no bias and isn't coming from Lucas 8 Sport or isn't coming from the Gatorade Sports Science Institute. It was when you try to be in strip things down to the bare bones of chemistry, right? And when you read it and you go, that actually makes complete sense to me. Why are you doing this? So I, from that kind of, it was around 2010, I started looking more and more, like I said, into the kind of deep biochemistry of it. And it made the theory of it made complete sense. And then I started practicing it. And that was the key. I was doing it in real life. I wasn't just reading it on the corner from a study or a paper. But yeah, it's all that I had there that I firmly believe. I finished Law School in 2011. And the years since finishing Law School and the years during Law School and Masters and Undergrads. I've learned so much more since leaving and it's nearly the worst thing people do is get a qualification because when they get a qualification some fat, loud hands you a piece of paper and says, okay there you go now you know something but you know your industry, my industry, every industry, it changes so fast whether it's finance, marketing or health and nutrition, you need to be a lifelong students and that's one of the things I'm always ordering people on the podcast to keep learning, keep questioning, keep growing. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, like textbooks and academic textbooks take a long time to change, right? So, even in the space, not just, you know, months, but even over years, you're still going to be reading something that is 10 years at a date, you know? And so that's where kind of my from from 2010 right up until now, but particularly from 2010 to 2015, over that kind of five year period, I read so much and discovered so much that went against what the academic textbook told me. I just could not go back to following the academic recommendations because did you face a lot of resistance? Yes, I mean I started working in 2013 for BNC and I moved over to Italy and I became friends with Stephen Cummings who we actually have Steve Collins on the podcast a while ago he was asking for you. Oh right cool cool yeah no great guy and we still occasionally keep in touch but um he was writing for Team Sky when we first start. I kind of, he kind of hired me as a consultant when he was with Team Sky and I got to know him then and then he got me, he put a good word in for me with BMC and then I got a job with BMC and moved over to the same town. He was living in. But anyway, I was doing the stuff, generally, at that time I was still learning but we were doing a lot of like kind of lower car of days and a lot of fast to training with him and it was really working well and not very many other cyclists were really hopped on to it. And when I went working with BMC and they went and just started off my own website and my own consultancy. Yes, a lot of resistance at the start at that time. And I mean, there's no problem with people honestly debating if they can show me their evidence and they can support and it's they can support it. I have no problem with that, but at the time, I was doing two things that were confirming for me without any doubt that this was valid. I was digging deep into the science of it, and I was doing it with top-level professional cyclists like Steve Cummings. You can't disabuse and that something doesn't work if you're doing it in both in theory and both in practice. But you know what I love? Because I don't have your professional in that niche-down area. So it's your life. You can go down that rabbit hole to the end degree. For me, when I'm looking at top-level stuff, I can read one study on Hoi-Fash and I can read one study on Hoi-Karp. And it's difficult to know how much merit to attribute to each of them and they seem very contradictory. But then it's such a powerful tool I have. It's observation. I can go on a control one. I can go on a control order and I can see how I feel. Like, I don't need to read 10 studies about damages to knee injury by hitting yourself at a hammer. I can hit myself at a hammer and go fuck, I'm not doing that again.
That horse. And that was my experience with it. I know I spoke to you, but I didn't get a chance to go down the rabbit hole myself for many years. But when I adopted a lot of this stuff, I felt fucking amazing. Yeah. That's what I now say to people. And it is what I said to people at the time. And when I went with BMC, I was saying that to a lot of the writers. But it was more the English-speaking writers that were Taylor Finney and those guys like that were on the team at the time. And they had heard of things like Paleo. You know, Paleo isn't low carb, but Paleo is kind of get off the rice and pasta and and start eating, you know, veg and fish and meats, you know, it was a better way of eating and they were onto that at the time. And like you said, all I was then saying to people was try it and see if it works. Now here's where it went wrong Anthony is, so people had heard, okay, yeah, I kind of get you that if I get up in the morning and I don't have a big ball of porridge, it actually might make my fat burning engine work better. So people then were going out on a Sunday for their tree hour ride and doing it straight off the bat and killing themselves right there after an hour or two they were going to the shop and getting the kind of coke and the Mars part right. Because even though like you said doing something and observation and observing something is for yourself is the way to do it. There are then our right ways and wrong ways to try and try something out for the first time. wrong way of trying out a low carb or, you know, training fasted is to do it, you know, heavy-handedly in the deep end. You know, you don't go out for your three-hour ride with just a cup of coffee if you've never done it before. You know, so this was where this is how over the last few years you have kind of a divide. You have some people like yourself and maybe me and lots of others who are really like, yeah, look, you don't need that much carbs to perform and you actually feel better and it improves your health and it's better for long-term health with like regarding diabetes etc and boost your endurance. Then there's a lot of people saying, look carbs do work and I need them to give me energy, right? What I will say is one of the main reasons why people still rely on carbs is they haven't given their bodies enough time or progression from eating 70 or 60% carbohydrate diet, they haven't given their body what I think is about six months of a gradual reduction and gradually doing one hour fast, it's moving up to an hour and a half, 90 minutes, moving up to two hours, moving up to three hours. That is why it hasn't, why does it divide into me and why some people still are strongly against it. And I can totally sympathize with that. In 2013, I was riding for a Stellus pro-cycling in the US and I hadn't met you or chatted to you at this point. I knew all of your work at that point, you've been working with like Ryan Cher, looking some prominent artists. So I'd heard about you and I went down quite on my own rabbit hole on it. I remember trying a fasted ride on a recovery session. So a one-hour ride, like, you know, 150 watts, barely turning the legs over. And I remember being just dizzy, panicked, and it's the first time I'd ever gone without breakfast and my life, I think. And I actually felt claustrophobic nearly. And I was about 25 minutes from home, and I had these thoughts gone, am I actually going to make it home? And now I'll habitually get up and I'll just go out riding on a Saturday morning. And I actually don't even think about breakfast. I'll have a black coffee at the coffee shop before we go. And I might ride for four hours and come home. But I still don't have a crazy hunger about me because it's such, such low level endurance training. Yeah. Well, there you go. So like that, you know, that's where people started. You know, that's where the challenge and where people would debate me at the time was. Oh sure, I can't function without my bullet of courage and without my past and without my career. I was like, you know, you can't drop them straight away and expect everything to work perfectly. I mean, there are, it's a big mechanism when you look into what's called flat oxidation or and it's actually, it's a big system and there's a lot of parts that need to get working and different for each person as to how effectively and efficiently those parts work, right? But what I will say is for everybody it takes a certain amount of time and even that amount of time differs from some people. Like I think it kind of took me maybe one to two years as some people are three to six months. So you know what I mean? So there's so much variability with it all and it's the key thing is why it hasn't gone say mainstream so to speak. Now it has become hell of a lot of popular over the last few years. The reason why nothing like that gets the kind of green light is because nowadays we want to touch, we want one button stuff, we want to click something and make it work. We want to take a shot of ketones and become a fapper. We don't want to do six months of proper eating healthy, reducing your carbohydrates gradually and you know we don't want to do the long long-term stuff we want to do quick stuff. Well look this is the exact problem we have with cycling coach and like I had a client yesterday and I reviewed his threshold test and he started off at about 250 watts in his threshold test at about 120 kilograms. Now he's under 100 kilograms and he's on 360 watts for his threshold test. I was telling somebody about this yesterday like oh my god that's like magic. It's not magic. It's consistency. It's he employed himself for six months, not like two weeks and then said, you know, this isn't working for me. It's six months, not missing any sessions. It's six months, not going for drinks after work, not getting a takeaway on the weekend. It's six months of consistent good habits. Doo doo doo doo, roadman, it's roadman intermission time. I hope you're enjoying the podcast and my musings with Barry so far, it's definitely a fascinating chart, even to listen back on. The intermission is the time in the podcast where we all just chill out, we go and we stick the kettle on, we take a collective little exhalation and we head on over to patreon.com forward slash Anthony underscore waltch and we make a small little donation for the help of this podcast.
You're definitely getting some tips out of this podcast that are changing your life. Show someone that love back our way over on patreon.com. Let's get back to Barry. Yeah, that's the way to, that's the way at fast, let's call it, you know, what I'd be known for, at least I've been known for something over the last few years is fast adaptation. Okay, you could be known for worse things, Barry. Yeah, you could be around for worse. Adaptation is something that has a timeframe associated with it. And if you want to be calm, very good at burning fat, you need to give your body time to adapt to it. Just like if you want to improve your functional threshold, you need to do it on a consistent gradual basis. You know what I think is a big problem with it, having watched a lot of our alkaline go through your system, it's the binary fashion people trade in. It's either a goal with this fat adapted system or a knot. What that results in, I see, is a period of real hardcore, you know, today I'm going to sacrifice them off the biscuits, I'm off the beer, I'm off the wine, hardcore, hardcore, until they crack and then they go fuck it and they go full on default and back to their, you know, eating frosties for breakfast and special kite for lunch. Yeah, and that brings me on to a crucial kind of point about the whole thing. Over the years, and now I will admit, probably kind of around, you know, the first couple of years when I was getting into it, I was part of that binary kind of attitude where I went full gas on the, never touching a piece of bread. I mean, I literally like, wasn't, I used to love eating apples. I stopped eating apples because I knew the carbohydrate content of apples, right? I stopped eating certain types of eggs because I knew a carrot has got more carbs than broccoli did, right? That led me down a deep hole and it led me a deep hole into extremity of any situation is going to cause harm, right? And what I realized is to become fat adapted, first of all, this is going to lead us down down loads of different tangents. It's not just about what we eat. You can do various other things that would help your metabolism switch the fat burning, right, which we can go into in a while. And I started going, okay, it actually just, it doesn't really, it's not 100% related to whether I have a bit of sourdough toast with my eggs or not, right? At the time I taught it did, but as I delve deeper and learned more, Where I am now, I realize that you can, and this is the beauty of it, you can still have your bowl of porridge or your pizza and or your ice cream or your favorite fruit, right? I still eat a lot of those things now, but I'll give it a kind of a value. I do it at a kind of a 15 to 20% amount of my daily diet. Diet okay because I know that from 10 years experience now That your body can still have carbohydrates if you eat first of all a lower amount not zero like you said people are Binary about things you don't need to be low carb does not mean zero carb that was always one of my kind of phrases You know so you can be lowish which is 20% of a 3000 calorie diet is still you know a I had decent enough proportion of carbohydrates, right? The next thing that comes with that is when you eat them, okay? So there's good times and bad times to allow your body to have carbohydrates. And if you live like that, then you kind of go, I'm actually not really depriving myself of those kind of nice things that I like, a bit of pizza here, some sourdough toast here or, you know- Because what happened to me is very similar to your experience there. I went to the extreme with it. And because I knew the system and I said, okay, lean meats, avocados, nuts, these things are good. But I get cross-ons pizzas, these things are bad. When you start labeling stuff good and bad, you bring in a morality around food. You say, oh, I had three or four bad foods today. That means I had a bad day. I had four bad days. That means I had a bad week. I know you're down on yourself and you're starting to pull mental health into food when really, they don't need to be interest-wined. But I move to just like you're saying, making better choices and labeling them sort of instead of something that's good and bad, labeling something that's pro fat adoption or anti fat adoption. It's just changelander label on it too, high nutrition density food, low nutrition density food. I'm trying to just make good choices seven times out of 10. I got to baguette for breakfast this morning with my egg. I'm I'm not gonna beat myself up about it, but I just won't nail a pizza for lunch and then a pasta for dinner. Yeah, exactly. So like I said before, it's about, first of all, quantifying by going, okay, I'm not gonna be on, I wanna keep it lowish and else. So that means that bit of that bit if I get in the morning, as long as I'm not having a big, like you said, a pizza and I bought a pasta later on, my overall daily carbohydrate intake is gonna be fairly low, you know? So, there needs to be a method then it's not about just like, this is good for me and this is good for fellow adaptation and this is bad. Then it's about the method of the way, the method you use to use. As in, classic thing is, I know that intermittent fasting probably does as much, if not more, forming in terms of fat adapting, then eating low carb. Like I would, I'd nearly go. This is, this is hard. I changed over the last year, I've changed my career a little bit, so I went from 10 years working on my own as a nutrition, performance nutritionist, right? And now I work in the Institute of Technology in Trale. I've left my nutrition business on the side. I might dip back into it and do talks here and there, but I just needed to kind of jump ship for a while because like everything in life, too much of a good thing can be bad. And I just reached a stage where I had enough and anyway, long story short, not working as a performance nutritionist anymore. But what was the point of it? It's got to be a lifelong passion to yours. So like I assume since you've parked the nutrition, or not parked, but less focus on it. that same principle of trying to get to the bottom of what the objective true is, how do we optimize performance? I assume you're still trying to learn that, apply it to yourself and now apply it to your kid as he starts to grow.
Like, has this question? Robert Haus with sleep, with environmental toxins, immunity. Yes. So, here's where I go. What it has, I said to you, I'll take the gloves off for this podcast, right? So, I don't think food is that high on the priority list for your fat adaptation or for your health, right? And here's what I will say. If you regularly intermittent fast, that's going to do two massive things. One, it's going to turn on the fat burning engine much more. And I mean, skipping breakfast one or two days a week is gonna give your, it's gonna switch on the machinery, like I mentioned earlier, that will help your body burn more fast. Even if at lunchtime you have a sandwich and then even you have a bowl of chips, right? That's 16 hours. Just to clarify for people, listen, are you talking about a 16-hour fast window and an eight-air fade window? Yeah, I mean, it's, again, it doesn't have to be anal like that, but if you simply give your body between 14 and 16 hours of not eating fast. That will switch on the flapping engine quite well. The other thing that we'll switch on is a word called autophagy. And autophagy means cellular kind of cleanse. And that's been known to boost, like one of the good things you can do for immunity is actually fast, okay, because up basically, it actually switches on your immune cells more, okay? So, and the other thing, it does is it cleanses kind of debris and the breakdown that's already in your cell. So by doing simply not eating, right, instead of an addition, it's a subtraction. And you can actually burn more fat and keep yourself healthier by not eating a couple of times. We'd be great. Like I talk a little bit into cellular autophagy and some of the stuff on it, it's baffling how it's not more mainstream, like the ability to kill a pre-cancerous cells. Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think it's a two to three day fast has actually shown to be anti-cancer genetic basically, right? So why, Anthony, this can go into other areas, why is it not bigger? Because it doesn't cost anything, and it doesn't cost anything, it's not profitable. And that is unfortunately how a lot of health recommendations and even policies and everything else in this world is obviously comes back to the money, you know. And if Barry Murray says to you that you can be healthier and you can be more fat adapted if you just don't eat for a while, what does that give? What money does that make anyone, you know? You used the words in the phrase, which I thought was now is their addition and subtraction. of addition and subtraction. And I think that's the thing, every single thing people want to do, it's an addition. And when you start peeling back and going, well, what do I need? And can I be happier or less? And applying that to diet, can I be healthier or less? Yeah, I mean, that's where I read a book called Anti-Fragile about five years ago by Nicholas, sorry, Naseem Talib, most people, I love people, probably heard of it. And he had a big chapter into a color, the power of subtraction. So I started applying that into nutrition and it kind of makes sense. It's kind of like what I knew when intermittent fastened it, I knew what not eating before training did. And I knew that if I put, you know, this vitamin C and vitamin E, antioxidants straight into me after training, it actually belongs to the adaptation. So again, And then you actually can gain more in life if you actually start subtracting things and not adding them. What's speaking to that in the industry that hasn't very many commercial incentives for us. Have you read the book by James Nestor, Brieud? No, it's a title is? Brieud. So it's all about breath work and how it's the lost art. Oh, okay, Brieud. So he thinks for health, your pillars of nutrition, training and breath work. And breath work he argues that is a completely lost art, but it's the he talks about the power it has the ability to heal autoimmune diseases, even conditions like scoliosis, skin conditions like eczema, all through simple breath work. It's very much an adaptation of Wim Hof's breeding myth. Yes. So yeah, I think the intermittent fasting is what I went into after kind of looking at everything related to food And then then I came across again. It was about I don't know five or six years ago. Maybe more I came across Wim Hof And it tied it he ties in his breathing as you know with cold What's called cold termogenesis or colds? therapy, okay, and then I went down that angle of things where I was kind of going okay and And cold actually helps with fat burning also and actually boosts your immune system as well. And so I know about the breath work, but I never, it was one thing I never just took time to actually practice myself. But there's loads of breaths. I forget, I've told my head, have you heard of a guy called Brian McKenzie? No. Okay, yeah. So he was one of the kind of cross fit endurance big guys kind of over in the States and he has got his own similar kind of breath work kind of effort and all that kind of stuff. But yeah it's very simple control and carbon dioxide expenditure and that kind of stuff. But again, Wim Hof has actually got pretty good studies behind a lot of the stuff that he's done as well. He had actually a group I think it was from Holland, the Netherlands, a group of researchers kind of doing studies on his codes, his codes, thermogenesis and things like that. I first came across this. I was reading about a NASA physicist and his name was Ray Cronice. He's a desk jockey. I'm not sure if you noticed, or he's a desk jockey and he was looking to lose weight, but his business, everything is about energy. And so he looked at his weight loss as a calories in, calories out. And it wasn't working for him, and he wasn't losing the weight or getting the results he wants. So he started looking around and then he heard the story about Phelps and how Phelps has eaten 12,000 calories a day or something crazy. And he looked at it and gone, well, he's training what six, seven hours maximum a day. And the calorie expenditure he can expect for about six, seven hours is nowhere near 12,000. So it's like even if he's doing six, seven hours of race pace drills every single day, seven days a week, which is not plausible and no coach, whatever suggests that he's still not getting near the 12,000. So he's like there must be another element here there must be it can't be just calories in calories out. And the one he came to was what he did his industry was built around was thermal, thermal dynamics. And it's a term of dynamics that the heist generates. Termogenesis. Termogenesis, yeah, sorry. And so his studies focused entirely on heist and the ability to borrow calories to avoid immersion in cold.
And that's kind of when I went down that rabbit hole and went down Wim Van Haff or Wim Haff. And I always seem to add in a van, like Rude Van Nistelroydere, what I'm talking about Wim Haff. But Wim Hofstoff is phenomenal. Yeah, it is. And now unfortunately, again, this is where, it's not just about doing one thing. People then get very into just going, right, I do two eyes bad today and I do my breeding and it's all sorted then. What I found is there's certainly merit in all of these things, whether you really get into your breathing, whether you start doing the cold, therapy stuff, whether you get into fat adaptation and intermittent fast. There's merit in all of them, but none of them work in isolation. Everything has to be done. This is where next part of my job, actually, my career, let's call it, it went from purely focusing on nutrition, I set up then a Patreon account called the Connected Athletes. That was just kind of three or four years ago. What I was trying to show people there was... Was this Wets from the Tofte? Yeah, so I came friends with, after BMC, I started working in the individuals with just pro-riders and Spain Tofte's team, the Australian team at the time. I got in touch with them and they got me over for some of their training camps and they wanted a guy said to me, you'd really get on with Spain tough. So while I was over there and Dora, remember I just randomly kind of contacted them and said, when I come over and chat to you and just stay over for, I was on my way back to Barcelona. Yeah, it went over and messes up. Two of us basically sing from the same, M-Sheet, he's actually a burning guy and completely understands everything related to all these things of fat adapting and intermittent fasting and using the code. I couldn't believe that somebody at that level and that kind of experience, he's 13, 14 years experience in the Pro Peloton, he couldn't believe that he was actually using it again, using it all in real life, you know. So the two of us started recording podcasts for this Patreon site that I had called The Connected Athlete, and what I was trying to show people is not about, it's about how you connect all the dots. And the more you're able to link, you know, how you live in everyday life, how you sleep, you know, how you limit your time in front of the blue light in the evening and you know, how you can get outdoors and get some cold exposure. And actually, if you actually try and connect all those things and do it in a kind of a hit, a bit you away, not just on a Saturday. Again, some people just pick things and do them once a month and go out. It didn't really work for me. But this is kind of the new sense. I know we haven't spoken as much as we used to speak on the phone. So quite often, the last couple of years we haven't spoken as much, but really my focus since, I suppose when we stopped hanging out as much when you moved down to Chile, was around the time I was taking a step back from Saikland. And since then I signed back up with a body of mine to try and qualify for the Paralympics in Tokyo on the tandem with him. And I had to come back and look at every aspect of my trend and it's, you know what, I've taken two years out of sport, I've not lived that lane, I need to look at everything. I hate that holistic or 360 view, but it really was what I had to do. So I had to come in and look at the body. So training, strength training, nutrition. But then I had to look at balance, because if you've ever had a domestic with a missus that morning, you're not training, you're not optimizing your performance that day. So there's obviously a stress component. And then I had to look at being, like I had to look at stuff like meditation, culture, the lighter, be true photo, bio modulation, grounding, stuff like this. And so I kind of came up with this slogan where I have like body balance being equals performance. And that's very much the way I try the coach athletes now. And that sort of multi-dimensional, tree pillar approach to their coach. And it's given the performance gains, but it's actually changing them as people. It's given them almost as corny as it sounds, like in awakening in other areas of their life. Yes, absolutely. And what the sad thing is, is how few people actually understand that and how even fewer people are actually willing to do it, because the problem is out to me with all of these things, just like properly fat adapting, it takes time and it takes effort on the individual themselves, you know? So for instance, one of the key things that myself was saying, or I was talking about was, really, when you look deep down into what really makes you tick, actually a lot of it all comes back to sleep, you know? You could be eating wild organic salmon, you know, cooked in coconut oil and organic veg every day. But if you're a sleeper, screwed, the bad sleep will override all the goodness of like nutrition and your training almost, you know. So then you start looking into sleep and you start realizing, well, like, we need to get off the laptop and the iPad at nighttime at least an hour before I sleep. The blue-light blocking glasses, like I use a company or a optics I think they're called. Like it's just, it seems to start getting dark. Did you want to explain the hormonal reasons why we're doing that in serotonin production and melatonin production? Yeah, so what they show is blue-light blocks the production of melatonin and melatonin is your sleep hormone basically and it initiates the deep sleep. So if you're getting that blue light before you go to bed, you're not gonna get the metatone released that's gonna help you get into that deep sleep. So you're killing your sleep if you've got your WhatsApp or your Twitter on and you're looking at it in bed, I mean, Jesus. Whatever about wearing blue blockers while you're watching TV or your laptop at eight o'clock or nine o'clock. And if you're in bed at 11 o'clock, open up your phone, you're completely zapping, you're mapping your men at home and productive. And you know what happens to them, are you like, what's the thing, if you're looking at your phone in bed that noise the next morning when you wake up, what do you do, you pull your phone out and you look at it and you're opening up a whole different kind of warms because I have this saying with my athletes and I say, you know, win the morning, win the day. And it's, you know, the day draws up a lot of unpredictable stuff for us. But what we can control, it's our morning. We can start building positive momentum morning straight away by having a morning ritual.
If you pull up your phone straight away and you see a message from an Irish customer, a boss, all of a sudden your stress hormone is kicked up, your infoid or floyce and your reactor for the rest of the day. It's such a terrible way to start the day. Yes, so almost like looking at your phone first thing in the morning is almost as bad as looking at it before you go to bed. So again, it's like if people want to really know know how your body works, you need to understand the endocrine system and hormone release. Like you said, one of the things that you need to really control is the cortisol response. You don't want to jack that up first thing in the morning because it's already high. Looking at a phone and a screen and dealing with a work message at half seven in the morning is going to do exactly that. There's so many rituals in the morning that you can do that are just going to help you. And one of the again simple things doesn't cost any money is trying to get, I mean there are, I know a few guys that actually have apps on their phone for when it shuts down, say on airplane mode and when it actually opens up again and they give themselves half an hour, 45 minutes in the morning. But you know what I'm saying is I don't speak on a phone, certainly across here. I turned off all my notifications. Like someone said to me once my phone rang and I went to answer and he just said, you know what, you know it's your phone. It's not their phone. They don't get to decide when you chat with them. Yeah, so yeah, it's a simple thing. I've done that as well. I mean, look, all I get is the phone rings or a text message or a WhatsApp message are the only three things that I'll actually see the rest. I don't see anything. So, So yeah, it's very simple. You know, even at that, like, because we exchange WhatsApp messages, like, if I send you a WhatsApp message, I don't need or expect a reply from you instantly, but people feel a need to reply to you. It's like, yeah, I mean, you know, we're arranging this chat. I'm like, Hey Barry, you want to do a podcast? Like, I don't need an answer, like within 15 seconds. Like, no. Yeah, I unfortunately, what I discovered over the last few years, like the more connected, I mean, it sounds very hippy, right? And for years, I was the most anti-hippie guy you could ever meet. Like, I was all into just like, you know, I would like to be one of these guys going, you know, hoeing trees for her and going around barefoot. I, and what I freaking realized was, is a lot of this stuff that you would call hippyish actually has a flippin' science to it. Like, you know, actually going around barefoot, which is what Spain tuft the most experienced professional cyclist. He was 42 when he was riding and I think he rode his last Grand Tour and he was 42 years late. And he would get up in the morning and like purposefully go out even when he was during the three weeks of Grand Tour to go out and find a patch of grass outside the hotel and frickin sit down and do some stretches and yoga moves because he knew that connecting with the Earth is actually going to have an anti-inflammatory effect, you know? And all this stuff I taught was just baloney, but when you actually look deep down into it, there's there's there's solid science behind it. And we're starting to see that trickle effect, like you see the English cricketers last year and they're doing walks before the game and they're bare-feet across the pitch to manage their springing rooms. Okay, yeah, class. I mean, again, Like all of those things, you don't need a degree in science to realize actually that actually does make me feel good, you know? I mean, and the game once you do them, but the key is it's back to that word consistency. You know, I remember we were trying to introduce myself and saying we were working with one or two other guys, young guys ourselves and even some of the guys on his team. they wanted to know exactly how long they should go out for in the morning and you know and how many days a week they should do it whereas myself and Spain are like we don't even think about it we just do it as a make it you know it's just habitual to us so it can't be these kind of things can't be just done every Thursday for half an hour they're not training sessions you know What's a wrap-up? Oh, that is a nice bowberry, isn't it? All this stuff, it's a diet. Your message, essentially, it's getting away from processed stuff. It's getting away from fucking baguettes and pizzas and back to stuff you can kill, stuff you can pull out of the ground, stuff you can pick off a tray. It's the same with sleep. We're trying to get away from man-made stuff like phones and lights. We're trying to get back move and connect and we're called, connect them with light. This isn't new stuff. We've been doing this for hundreds of thousands of years. trying to get it. Like, we're trying to teach people how to breathe again for folks like, you know, instinctively out of stuff. It's trying to get back to ancestral living. Yeah. And for like the modern world is developed now to try and produce things for us to make us function better. Okay. So it's an addition world, right? And what I have found is the more things you try to add, the more you inhibit the natural workings of your body. Okay? So it's another hippie-ish phrase, but the closer to nature you are in terms of your daily, you know, schedule your daily activity, the closer to nature that your food is, the better you're going to be. I mean, it's so simple, but we are so removed now from all of those things because, like we said, we wake up with a phone beside us, we eat something that hasn't come from the ground or hasn't been plucked off the tree. And we stay indoors most of the day, we get back on our phones and our iPads in the evening. And we're sitting at Trickel into Saiklin now as well, though, it's like clients message amigo and like, oh, you know, their preparer is a win a bike race. And they're like, oh, can I just do Zwift today? No, fuck off, you can't do this with, like get out in the rain. Like, at some point, it's a primal sport. It's lads pushing each other to go as hard as you can, as fast as you can. There's fucking potholes, there's rain, there's crashes, there's hardship. That's what our sport is about. Can I sit in fucking doors with the fan on watching Netflix on Zwift? Like, no, you can't. Yeah, that whole area really worries me, especially over the lockdown where we actually, you know, if you were a cyclist, you couldn't really do much, but luckily as a runner, I go out in any conditions.
But what I've noticed over the last, certainly over the last couple of years is cyclists and even runners becoming more and more reliant on their swift or their treadmill. And what that is doing to you is making you softer. Okay, no, there doesn't need to be any more description of it. and the softer you become, the more fragile you become and the weaker that you're going to become. If you are outside in, like you said, wind rain, cold, west, that is helping your body adapt to make you stronger and anti-fragile or not as fragile, okay? So, we're developing, we're actually like, we're turning off all of our triggers that actually make the human body, you know, adapt to being a stronger and more resilient body. If you're sitting inside in your garage with your fan on, just because it's a bit rainy and a bit cold outside. you know, your long-term health and your performance is going to suffer. Like a lot of it's like callus in the mind. It's like getting used to that hardship. And you know, as much as anyone, I love the science of coaching and you know, you need to try and hard and then interspersed periods of recovery to grow. But the soft fuckers have taken this idea of we need to recover. And instead of making it their 5% or their 10%, they've made it their 90%. And they're like, oh, I need to recover. It's like you've not to recover from you haven't done any hard work It's gone to a complete snowflake points where it's just becoming hard to push people because they're obsessed with recovery Yeah You know I you know I run there myself mainly and I have very Rarely have like I don't do the I very rarely have recovery days or recovery weeks and I'm trying in usually five or six days a week and I'm doing a mountain running in all different forms of tempo and interval type stuff. Like people, cyclists like their recovery days of 90 minutes down to the cafe for their croissants and coffee. Or like you said today, it's 90 minutes on the swift with the heat on or whatever. So yeah, I don't know what we're like, I worry about the future of our resilience and our toughness to be honest with you, if we're doing all that now. Barry, we could end up chatting for six hours. Let's chat about, finish it off with immunity to currents, all of us have been dealing in some form with the impacts of COVID. How can we stretch? I'm trying to get at the link between cycling and Munis E. Covid and how what your take is on that this whole period of Gondro. Yeah, well, look, hopefully most people know that if you're fit and healthy and under the age of 65, you have as much probability of dying from Covid as you have from getting knocked off your bike in a road traffic accident or car accident. right? So they are the actual statistics. So to keep yourself immune though is absolutely key and unfortunately what's happened over the last few months in the media is they actually have forgotten the word, the two words, the immune system, right? All you hear is, you know, all these avoidance measures and all the, and then this, you know, wake for the magic cure of the vaccine, when the actual cure is to strengthen your immune system and the most sophisticated system you have to fight infection is your immune system. It's very sophisticated. So, look, most people who are of any general knowledge are going to know from the nutrition perspective, it's everything about eating. I like just using the term that you mentioned is nutrients, dense foods. You don't need to go down to what gives me more vitamin C or where do I get my zinc from? The more nutrient dense your foods are, the better, full stop. I will say that fat adaptation in itself is going to actually make you healthier because it's going to improve your insulin sensitivity and fat adaptation alone is actually going to boost your immune system. Eating in a way that's letting your body to fall adapt, eating nutrient dense foods are probably the main nutrition areas. Now what I have found back to what I was discussing earlier is your immune system has probably boosted more by doing things like intermittent fasting and getting a bit of cold exposure. So like definitely over the lockdown I was telling all my family and friends I was like look one day a week just intermittent fast because the guaranteed the effects of autophagy are going to straighten your immune system and kill off any virus better than any vitamin C tablets or anything like that. So I would massively advocate intermittent fasting as you're probably number one in new booster. Cold? Yeah, I'm not mad about cold anymore, but I do think it is another tool in the box to boost your immunity. Not everybody, look, I live near the sea, I have no problem all year round getting in and out of the sea. Some people are near lakes and rivers. I mean, if you can do that, great. And then back to what we said about sleep. I mean, if you want to improve your growth hormone release, your cortisol response during the day, again, immune system is built on how good your sleep is. So, like, there's some really key things there for people to work on that are not necessarily related, that are not that hard to do. It's like, you know, try and skip a breakfast or if it suits you to skip a dinner once a week, great. Try and have a cold shower or get in for a dip and it certainly if you live near the ocean or a lake. And definitely work on, everybody needs to look, I'm still working on my sleep now. When you have a baby sleep goes out the window, there's so much tinkering as an individual. You can do with your sleep, regarding what you do before you go to bed, how dark your room is, the temperature of your room, and your mindset, your breathing, the relaxation stuff you do before sleeping. There's a heap of stuff that individually affect people in different ways. Matt Walker, why we sleep is a very interesting book if you have a chance to read it. Yes, heard about that one. I mean, there's no sleep stuff now. You don't have to go far and find kind of, you know, the recommendations on improving sleep. Again, I'd say the big one would be, is get off your phone and get some blue light, blackened glasses that cost about 50 in quillip. They're literally the cheapest way to get sleep. I've even been mucking around with a chilly part. I'm not sure if you've heard of them. Mmm. Very interesting. Are they the matrices that you can split? Certainly if you're a share, if you have a partner and you can go half of it. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's been tough back in about a few years ago, he got one of them for himself. So a simple cheap way to open the windows. There you go.
I'm not sure. What's the stats about the brain sleep's better, a couple of degrees cooler than the rest of the body? Yes. Yes. I mean, your bedroom, if you surprise what the best temperature for the bedroom is, It's actually, I think it's like 15 degrees, you know, versus a lot of people probably have a little around 20 degrees, you know. Yeah. It's, there's very simple and, you know, like trying to get this clatter home to clients all the time, it's not always spending money is the problem. It's just been a little bit smarter. It's just question a little bit more. And as you pointed out in this podcast, it's often not addition. It's subtraction that gets us closer to our goal. Yeah, subtraction and also, like, you know, if you're anyone who is really into it, you can read deep into it to kind of convince yourself and the other way of convincing yourself is actually what you're doing it. And one other way to avoid going down the wrong path is what I've learned over the last few months is don't listen to what's in the media because the way the public can be manipulated is absolutely incredible, true mainstream media and true social media these days. So if you want to not go down the wrong path, you know, we don't have a TV in our house anyway, but you know, if you're watching the six o'clock news and listening to the radio and reading the Irish Times every day, chances are that you're being given information that's not fully true, you know. an Oscar Wilde quote, noise to finish on, it was whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it's time to pause and reflect. Yeah, absolutely, that's a classic one. And I had another one there, if something is common, it is usually wrong. Barry, thank you very much for your time. If someone wants to keep following you, I know you're not a man for social media these days, but what's the way to read? Here's what I was saying, the The only thing I found Facebook bit too toxic these days, so I deactivated my accounts and actually feel much better for it. I haven't got a website anymore because well, I just didn't renew it and I wanted to give myself a break. I just kept Twitter. I found Twitter to be one area where you could first of all choose who you follow and follow headlines and news and information. And yeah, you don't get as many trolls as you do on Facebook and stuff. So, Barry Murray, if you look me up or Optimum Nutrition for Sports, which is one of my previous company was called, you'll find me on Twitter and I'm quite active these days, Anthony, because we're trying to speak up for science in regards to COVID-19 and I'm trying to find, like I try to deep dive deep into what's the best way for us to eat without any bias or any agenda, but trying to dive deep into what this coronavirus COVID-19 actually is and what is the science behind the restrictions and the recommendations coming to us. And it's pretty be startling when you actually look into it as to the amount of misinformation and the amount of what we call anti-science that is regarding this situation at the moment. And it has gone way more deeper, like I was always quite concerned about, you know, people saying that, you know, you should eat those carbs to make yourself healthy and perform I found that I found that annoying I find that frustrating and I was worried because of how wrong it was for there I'm way more worried about what's being given to us now in terms of Well, you would hope that we cause and reflect after you know the COVID hysteria is died down and we View this stuff to a clearer lens and say okay was the lockdown right was this measure proportionate? And you know what I find with science a lot of time, are a lot of scientific articles I've read. They're a carpenter, he sees every solution as the hammer. And scientists often will look at a very narrow view and say, okay, this is the right or wrong, health answer. But they don't often look at what the politician has been asked to do, and I've no love her politicians. But what they are been asked to do, It's a different problem set. There have been asked to judge it through an economic lens, a scientific lens, a public health lens, a private health lens, a balancing of resources lens. And I think both those deserve open, honest public discussion when all this is over. Yeah, I mean, some, you know, I can be quite black and white, two better things. Some people have said to me what you've just said, time will tell. and I really hope it does for what I've done it. Like here's what I will say. I knew back in 2012 how fat oxidation worked. I didn't have to wait until Professor Tim Noakes and all the others started coming out with it over recent years. And similar to where COVID is now, if you look into the data and the statistics the actual real science, a lot of it is indisputable in terms of, you know, there's a lot of things that you can't actually question as being wrong and it's being told to us that it's the right thing to do. So there are certain things I agree that need longer discussions and like you said, a broader kind of framework as to how you make kind of recommendations and decisions. there are some things that are just indisputable and I just hope more and more people start you know becoming aware of it you know. Yeah I suppose the severe restrictions and lockdown came in for the biggest criticism for a lot of people but the inverse argument that that would be it's difficult to put the genie back in the bottle you know you only need to get it wrong once and we see like we had like the Brazilian president I'm not sure how much have been following the case over there. It's both Sarmos' name, but he was basically spouting a lot of the anti-lockdown rhetoric that we've heard. Some quarters over here, only the elderly at risk. It's just another flu. The economy must come forced, very much to Trump's style. But their economy has imploded. There are over 3 million cases now, and I think their testing rate is so low. They're only doing something like 10 to 15,000 tests per million people and they're up over 100,000 deaths and now the economy is exploded because they didn't shut down cafes, they didn't shut down schools and now they have no choice but to shut them down and they're not a 10 million unemployed. So it's almost a societal collapse there. So I don't know, I can just be thankful it didn't happen to us in Ireland, but I don't know, I haven't looked into and was the health fair or do we even have a criteria for Georgian deferness of a lockdown? Well, Anthony, I mean, all you need to start looking at in terms of let's, you know, it's hard to go into different countries.
I could tell you a bit, Sweden and how they didn't lock down their schools or their cafes or their bars or their economy. And, you know, they are still less their death rate per capita is less than the UK, Spain, Belgium and Italy and they haven't got, you know, if you look at what's cost in Ireland, if you're a man who's into your sums like you work at what the pandemic, the pandemic unemployment payments is cost in the economy, you look at what businesses are having to now close, you then look into hospital stuff with cancer screenings and heart disease screenings and stuff being missed. It's massive. The collateral damage that's going to be that is currently being done to Ireland is massive in compared to what the lockdown was supposed to save. My undergrad's economics, so in economics we'd call it an externality, it's the own one to own foreseen, side effect of an action. So, you know, and that's all the stuff you were listing there. Like it's the secondary, and tertiary, unemployment, or even, you know, people that aren't going to the hospital with a heart condition and doing a haul from a heart condition because they're scared to go because they don't want to be affected by COVID. You know, all those things, it's going to be some job measuring at all. Yes, what I'm saying is, and this is a massive discussion area at the moment, what I'm saying is there is a lot of information already available, but it's not coming out from the mainstream media because I don't know why, but obviously the mainstream media and the government want obviously to tell you a certain thing. just like the food pyramid, that was recommended for years. You have to go elsewhere to find out what the truth was. That's the same situation we're in now. But that's models I think across our whole internet ecosystem at the moment and debates that are raging around censorship. Because you have censorship on one end, but another word for censorship is protecting vulnerable users. And that debate between protecting vulnerable users, like we'll all have stuff we will, you know, at least the vast majority of rational people will agree that child pornography has no place on a platform like Twitter. I think we'll all agree that. But then on the other end of that, we have censorship around some ideas which are pretty extreme around COVID, around politics, around radical on either the left or the right. And it's that those gray areas that are really starting to cause debate as what has no place on the internet in that bucket with child pornography, what else has no place there? You know, does racism, I would argue, has no place there? You know, we can agree on a, we can disagree in a lot of things and we can still be friends. But if we disagree on racism, I'm probably not not going to be your friend. There is topics like that that I think normal right-minded citizens believe have no place on the internet and those opinions don't deserve to have a platform. I think that's the real debate we're going to have over the next few years as to what we put into that bucket and who decides what goes into that bucket. Yeah, I mean, we were just talking about carbs and skipping breakfast there. We've coming to a whole other area now. Here's what I'll just leave you with, Anthony, is I'm interested primarily on health and performance and how you make it work is naturally in the world. COVID-19 is going to affect all our health and performance and all the masking people is to be aware of the information that's coming to you and seek information elsewhere that is going to allow you to make your decision because if you just get it from one channel, then your decision is not going to be correct. Folks, I'm going to link up Barry's Twitter account in the show notes. Barry, thanks for chatting today and I'm sure you'll be hearing from our listeners in your Twitter DM's I mentioned over the next few weeks. It will end anytime. It's all good, shall we? Chateau. Well, I really enjoyed that podcast with Barry Murray. I'm sure you took some, you know, that stuff about Bulletproof and your immunity at the end is definitely very tangible because I know a lot of people have panicked and there's so much information out there and I haven't had time to see if through a lot of them. I'm sure you're in the same boat. There's definitely some tangible things we can go away and do like fast and cold therapy to bore proof immunity that was kind of my takeaway from the podcast really enjoyed chatting with you guys this week I enjoy channel Barry I hope you got a lot about it just a reminder about this roadman resources that I'm putting together it's over on roadmanresources.com I'll put the link in the show notes and description the idea with roadmanresources.com is who can go to the boy job and trust what they're actually saying. Like just a 16 year old that's never soykeled behind the counter. Like we can't trust him. So I wanted to build roadman resources as a library of a library of the wisdom. All libraries are libraries are wisdom. A library of collection of all the best stuff I've used through my cycling career. So it's everything for the best horrors, the craze, the potions. This week I've been talking a lot about I'm human, it's one of the products I've added in there, I added in there this week. That's why I'm so proud of my crazy internet skills sticking Ampeumen into my resources section. And what Ampeumen does, it inhibits the production of lactate acid to boy curp grain. You can rub it on your legs. This is not an Ampeumen ad, although it sounds like one and if Ampeumen is listening, maybe I will take a little bit of freak swag off you. Who knows? Anthony, you're losing the run yourself. Jumping over to RobemanResources.com. That's where you can buy your Amk human boy carb cream. It's legit, have a look through all the other stuff I have listed on there and if you're enjoying it, please send it around to the club mates and say oh you don't know what indoor trainer to get, well man resources got you hooked up. Guys I'm Ramblin but what I am gonna do is wish you a good day and I'm gonna chat to you again tomorrow. Thanks for listening.
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