All cyclists, once they pass 40, feel something change. They're still fit, they can still ride for hours, they can still suffer, but the snap starts to go. The kick out of the corner, the jump on the climb. We treat it as sort of inevitable, and we tell ourselves that's age, that's what happens. But when I asked Dr. Andy Galpin if the power is gone forever, he gave me an emphatic, resounding no. Not even close. So, this conversation, this is the hidden science of getting faster after 40. And it might have less to do with riding more, and more to do with training the parts of you the bike has been quietly neglecting. It's a big one, folks. Dr. Andy Galpin, welcome to the Roadman podcast. It's a pleasure to be here, man. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited. Andy, there's a listener listening to this podcast now. He's the same as me, he's the wrong side of 40. He's done literally zero strength training work for the last decade because he loves riding bikes, mountain bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes. What's the timeline for this guy who he listens to this podcast, he's motivated by this conversation which we're about to have, and he's like, "I need to claw back this fast-twitch capacity which is just atrophied for me." Is the window closed for this dude, or is it just going to take him a little bit longer to get it back? The window is not even remotely closed. Uh in fact, we have enough evidence at this point from animal model research to comparative physiology to like literally in other animals. And in humans, we have longitudinal research, we have experimental research on this. And so, when you have that kind of a well-rounded data set, you can start to make pretty firm conclusions. So, I can say it confidently that something like that power or fast-twitch ability, it is we really don't see an ability uh any place in time where that goes away in terms of you can't increase it. That plasticity just doesn't stop it. Of course, is mitigated by numerous factors and that the volume in which probably most of these people you're referring to are putting in on the bikes is going to slow that that change, that rise, but physiologically there's nothing there that says you can't make progress. So, kind of the second part of your question was about that mitigation part and that's real, right? If you're putting in a couple hundred kilometers a week on a bike, which is not even that inside of an amount. That that's going to just take away recovery reserves, which is fine because that's your primary passion, that's your primary goal, all into that. So, one in that place wouldn't expect to see changes in something like muscle growth or strength in 2 weeks. Now, you might see some pretty fast changes if you practice, but that's a skill development issue, right? You're just figuring out a skill more. Um so, you can really do it. The timeline is just going to be a reflection basically inverse to the amount of volume you're putting in on your bike and it's really conceptually as simple as that. There are some other factors that play into it like your sleep and like your overall caloric balance. If you're in a a very minimal state for that or negative caloric balance or low energy availability is how we would technically refer to that, then you just don't have the recovery capacity to make progress and so really it's a very basic math equation. Uh so, you have a number of levers you can play there and that's, you know, some stuff we can talk about, but the point I'll wrap up by saying is physiologically there's no rationale to think you can't make progress there. Comes now down to programming choices. Okay, so talk to me about that programming. What's the relationship between somebody that's on the bike? So, quite a common distribution of intensity on the bikes coming from like Steven Seiler's research, 80/20 distribution, 80% easy below LT1, 20% slightly harder above LT 2. If somebody's on the bike and their total training time is 10 to 12 hours a week and 100% of that is distributed on the bike at the moment, how would you factor that into the timeline? How does that like Right. inhibit your progression as opposed to somebody who's 6 hours a week or 4 hours a week on the bike? We need to now, since you asked such a really nice question, that detail gives me the ability to give a detailed answer, right? Uh so, you gave me the constraints there. Now we have to ask ask this question of how much do we care about power versus muscle growth versus strength? And then how are we defining that power? So, if we're looking at something like FTP, that's a different thing than if you're saying I want my vertical jump to go up. Right. So, why that matters is specificity becomes the key to your answer. If you're saying my primary I'm just going to assume in this case this person's primary goal is to make this translate onto the bike. So, they want to improve their power and fast group so that they're better on the bike. Great. If you were to give me a different answer, like I want to I'm worried about longevity or something I've heard uh you know, jumping height or broad jump is important, then your actually rate of increase there will be fast because it's a novel skill. It's something you haven't done. The first time you do it, you're going to jump yeah, 12 cm in the air. You're not going to get any movement. And the next time you'll jump 20 and the next time you'll jump 30 because you're at such a such a low skill level with that.
You're highly reasonably trained and so that the mind muscle connection is strong, but you just never asked it to do that task. So, in those particular people, if you're trying a new exercise more broadly, then your rate of increase will be really quick. Again, within weeks uh you'll notice a substantial difference. If you're then trying to transfer it on the bike, something like a wattage move, uh that's going to be much slower because you're already really defined in that movement pattern. We are very used to that system and now you just got to train true anatomical and or metabolic changes rather than acute neuromuscular activation stuff. That's going to be a primary difference. So that timeline will be long because that 10 to 12 hours will ingrain a different movement pattern at a different tempo which is a different neuromuscular synchronization strategy. And remember when you're on the bike in that scenario because you're going to be putting in hours you're actually at its core maximizing efficiency. You're trying to create the most amount of power possible with the least amount of muscle fibers turned on as you can. That's That's the name of the game, right? And now you're asking it to do the opposite. Which is give me the maximum possible possible capacity. So it's conflicting neurological signal. Which means that transition will be slow and then you actually have to build intracellular components that allow energy creation quickly which you just never done. And again those are not acute things that have to happen. You have to build machinery there. Um so in a specific scenario like a like motor skill much longer adaptation timeline. In an unlike or novel very quick. I think the constraint we gave it that people that are in the gym care about performance is an accurate constraint. But now that I'm on the wrong side of 40, I've actually spent a lot of time pondering this that the idea of upstream versus downstream consequences. So if we aim for a target of performance, I'm not necessarily sure that health flows downstream from performance. That if we try instead after 40 to optimize for health I still think you get a degree of performance albeit slightly compromised that naturally flows downhill from that. Yeah, we could be probably pedantic here. I'm a performance guy. So, my argument is always the inverse of yours, which is if you target performance, you are going to almost always target health. The opposite isn't always true. So, if you're targeting health, you're not necessarily always performing at your best. Where we are going to agree here is when I say performance, if you're literally trying to maximize performance in a very specific endeavor, especially one that requires such volume that you're talking about, there's probably a point there, well, there's obviously a point where you cross that. This is no longer aiding health. And now there's a path here where we're potentially putting in so much volume in a position where back injuries creep in or other things like that because we're in such a very fixed position for a very long time. But, cycling has this weird power. So, unlike any sport or pursuit I've ever done, cycling has this weird power when you start training 10 hours a week and then it just whispers at you. It's like, "Bro, leave your wife. You could You could train 15 hours a week. You don't need that bitch." And it's like you leave the wife, it's like, "You could quit that job. You could totally live in your car. You could get 25 hours a week." It just becomes this monster that just keeps wanting to roll. So, I think so many of us, me included, we need to just pump the brakes on this and say, "Okay, I'm finally willing to hold my hands up and say the pro dream is over. I'm not going to make it. Now I need to try and be a little bit more prepared for Armageddon. Like for when, you know, those Boston Dynamic robots kick the door down, I want to at least put up a spirited fight there. Yeah. So, what you're looking at now is saying you've pressed the button as hard as possible on one attribute and now the interest, rather than hyper specificity, is more resilience, robustness, um more well-roundedness. And we You don't want to lose touch entirely of that core module, but we we do want to expand the breadth a little bit. I think what I'm saying is if you were to do that, then we can make a pretty cogent argument that that is the most health-promoting thing you could possibly do. Is just look at this and say, "Okay, often times, as an example, high-level cyclists will have a number of physical deficiencies." As anyone would if they're hyper-specializing. It's not a knock on cycling at all. But I mentioned kind of quickly and offhandedly the low back being a particular concern there. But then you start thinking of the position that you're in. Um, so hip flexors start to become a particular issue. Obviously, muscle mass uh, becomes an issue. You probably have enough muscle to be healthy unless you've really really pulled the calories and you've lost a ton of weight down there. Um, but you you actually end up having a little bit more consistent overreaching concerns. So, a lot of metabolic health, thyroid, endocrine stuff start to creep in. Uh, we often times, this is funny, like people actually don't talk about it, but a lot of cyclists have borderline if not legitimate um, eating disorders. Uh, because the demand to be the standard and light is nearly possible, right? It's like, what's the It is getting better. Like, I think there's been a lot of good research in the last few years. Dr. Sam Hill and Beat David Dorn headed up in Hexis around the benefits of fueling.
And it's insane now if you're fueling and using any of these new performance apps. Like, I just came in from a 4-hour ride trying to put away 280 g of carbohydrates post-ride. Woo, your jaw gets sore, like Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure. Um, I mean, a Welcome Mortons, right? Like, they've done such a great job of reinventing this space. And then, look what we saw happen this weekend. Yeah, this weekend was wild, wasn't it? Like, how you run a sub 2-hour marathon and not win the race? It's it's pandemonium, right? Like you're looking at now 70 What do we call it? 75 years since Bannister. Right? And and loads of dudes were right at the doorstep before 4 minutes when he crossed that thing, and then he crossed it, and then what what is it? 7 weeks later, 10 guys did it or you know, like something like that. And now we're at that spot with the marathon. I'm I'm not as familiar with numbers in cycling. Uh so I I I don't have that touch points there, but yeah, I mean, this is a combination, of course, of shoe technology and fueling and other things like that. So, I mean, we're kind of going off the track of the question, but yeah, we we can get there. Um the well-roundedness thing though is you you're you got we have to potentially start looking at things like why I defaulted the first two answers is like low back issues because if health is a little bit more in your ecosystem now cognitively it's probably I'm not as concerned with things like lack of muscle mass. You'll have that, it'll come back as soon as you pull back the mileage or the or the kilometers, you'll probably will actually add a little bit of muscle just to like I'm more concerned with the systemic things like is your relationship with food healthy, as I mentioned. Can you actually move your hips in a fashion a non-cyclist needs to move them in for the next 65 years plus. Those are issues. Um your speed and your power will come back with minimal a lot of stuff. It's it's honestly generally higher than the general pop anyways because even if you've done long slow cycling, I don't care if you're at zone two or one for 8 hours a week a week, you're still pushing a pedal where most people are pushing nothing. So, you're you're generally fine there. Physiologically, you're in a good spot. So, it really comes down to do we do we reduce any damage because of this chronic load? Um and then another one that could becomes really big is a lot of high-level cyclists uh have developed really poor sleep habits to get around and stuff. So, that's the stuff that as you enter in this, you know, sphere of of health that I would come back and say, "Okay, can we get those things polished up a little bit better?" Which still leaves a ton of space for you to cycle and ride for forever. Um but we just can't have gaping holes in the system where you in the past, like right now, you can probably get away with coming in and smashing 200 g of carbohydrates. You can't do that forever. And if the cycling pulls back, we have to get that. So, we have to walk back some of those those capacities to make you feel like you're in a pretty good health spot. And you And you probably are. Um so, I think you're you're probably pretty close. It's now just a little bit of changing. From data I've seen, I've heard you speaking about muscle composition fibers, lots of slow-twitch versus fast-twitch. From data I've seen, cyclists particularly skew quite heavily towards slower-twitch muscle fibers. Is there long-tail assumption if I have a distribution that's more on the slow-twitch side versus fast-twitch side on health or longevity outcomes? So, we have a lot of research now on what we call lifelong exercisers. So, these are by almost by definition people that have 30-plus years of roughly consistent exercise. And we have historically had this on endurance athletes for a long time. If you go and actually go back to back in 1954, in that 1953 to 56 range, you have the DNA double helix being identified, you have American College of Sports Medicine being formed, you had um uh Everest Edmund Hillary and I forget the Sherpa's name. All this starts happening, right? Why I'm mentioning this is this explodes what was previously done about three decades before in the Harvard Fatigue Lab. So, you have Harvard Fatigue Lab, then you have this mid-50s boom, and then about two decades like a like a two decades later again, you've got this eruption of what we'll now traditionally call exercise science exercise physiology. Why this matters is the students from the mid-1950s era were the students being taught from the people from the Harvard Fatigue Lab. And so, this has a direct translation into creating the field of exercise physiology. Almost all of them were endurance athletes. So, the first really generation to two of exercise scientists, exercise physiologists, sports nutritional scientists were all steady-state endurance and cyclists, swimmers, and runners. So, what you see is the the his history of our entire field is in these people. They started doing this stuff in the 1960s, became doctors and scientists and physicians in the 1970s, and then the bull of research started coming out. So, what was the research on? Endurance athletes. Like Frank Shorter was going to lab, Prefontaine was going to lab. Like we had this massive eruption of the marathon in the states and and globally. We had our Scandinavian influence coming in as this is like really the leaders of sports science coming from that stuff. It was all focused on this crowd. And so, then you have the marathon boom, it returns to the Olympics.
Uh women are now starting to enter it. This created so many people in the 1960s and 70s exercising. Well, if they're alive today, most of them haven't stopped yet. So, in the 1990s and the 2000s, we had people who've been running, cycling, swimming for 20, 30, 40-plus years. Strength training didn't have that boom until about two to three decades later. Arnold came in with Pumping Iron, Nebraska football. It started happening much, much, much later, and it wasn't until the early 1990s where we had our generation. So, it was my predecessors and then my generation of scientists really in you know, 2010 issue area, 2000-2010, who primarily got in the field with a passion of this side of the equation. But, because of that, we don't have 50, 60, 70, 80, 90-year-olds who have strength trained their whole life. We have pockets of that. But, we have a huge pockets of people that have done on the on the endurance side. So, we actually did a study in in Sweden where we looked at cross-country skiers who had on average about 50-plus consecutive years of competing in the skiing. So, these people were world champions, Olympic medalists in 1940s and '50s. We did this study in 2000 10, and they were still competing. Um so, some of them were over 60-plus years of competition records. Um if you're from that area, the the pardon my pronunciation, but the Vasaloppet, which is kind of like their premier um race over there. Again, these people had documented you know, 52 entries into it, 47 entries, like that kind of thing. So, we biopsied them, we VO2 maxed them, we did all the stuff on them, and they were all over the age of 80, some of them in the '90s. And we compared them to age-matched people here um in the Midwest in America that were all living at home. And so, we didn't want to take people out of a nursing home or anything like that, a care center. And some of the things that stood out uh I mean, which I have to go through the data on that, um but uh the obvious ones were obvious. Cardiovascular health was massively better in the endurance exercisers. Um you're talking about I think the average VO2 max was 36, 37 milliliters per kilogram per minute. Um you know, for 88-year-old, that's that's pretty darn good. Uh we had a 92-year-old who was uh I can't remember, 36, 37 as well, something in that ballpark. And our age-matched controls were 20, 21, 22. Um line of independence in men is something in the stratosphere of of 18 milliliter per kilogram per minute. So, they were living at home but they were just, you know, just above that threshold. But these people have never structurally never exercised structured in their entire life, the the controls, of course. When we did the power testing, performance testing, when we did biopsy and looked at fiber type and we did um force profiles and stuff like that, the endurance exercises were not any better shape than the other people. We have also done a study on twins in my lab. And now these this was a pair of monozygous twins. So, this means the DNA is exactly the same. So, we could control for was this genetic or was it actually lifestyle induced? And this particular set of twins had 30 almost 35 years of differing physical activity. One was a pure endurance guy, like a little bit of lifting but it's kind of like I go to the gym, do some bicep curls and things like that, but um we have again 30 plus years of training logs, triathlons, marathons, half marathons, the whole kit and caboodle, all over the endurance. His twin brother had not exercised since they were 18. Almost identical story. Both groups of like of, you know, continuous exercises, the old ones as well as the middle-aged folks here, you're talking 90, 95% slow twitch fibers. When we look at muscle quality, muscle power, muscle strength, the same if not worse than controls. I didn't do this study, but uh another group of scientists more recently published a paper on lifelong strength trainers. And so, this was the first set of things that started come out because now we are 2026. And so, these people have started lifting in 1985, 1990, like we we start to have some long-term data on you think of that? And it turned out basically what you'd predict. Much better preserving fast twitch muscle fibers. But cardiovascular health, blood lipid panels, blood pressure, they're not nearly as good. Now, you could conclude a couple of things from this. One would be Hey, all this endurance training is somehow negative or is it's not helping you preserve your fast twitch fibers. And I can make an argument why you want to preserve them at age. But I also in the same breath have to say they're also 80, 90 years old and they're aging insanely well. So, like I can't make a super strong argument that those older endurance athletes are unhealthy. I mean, that's they very much are. The vast majority of us in the field would look at all the data combined and say, "Hey, look, you're probably in the best spot raging if you do a combination of both." Um but it's it's unclear to us at this point. And this is Sorry, this is pretty nuanced. It's unclear if you are incredibly fit and by fit I mean a broad not just VO2 max but a broader definition of fit and you are heavily slow twitch based, it's unclear how bad that actually is. It's very clear though if you don't have fast twitch fibers and it's not because of a lot of endurance training, it's because of sedentary activity or inactivity, then that is extremely bad. And so this is a classic example of science isn't always simple and straightforward.
We have to be able to pull things apart and with things like okay, great. If you're not active and you lose your fast twitch fibers over time, you know, as you age, which happens, that has a massive reduction in your power and strength and that has a huge increase in your likelihood of falling and that has the data for increase in all cause mortality and bunch of other things. But if you've lost your fast twitch fibers because of a lifetime of endurance training, I I don't I don't know if that's actually that big of a deal. I I think you're probably okay. If I had my druthers, I'd probably say if you peppered in a little bit of lifting along the way, you might get the best of all worlds here. Um but what I don't want to do ever is to discourage people from doing a lot of exercise for many, many years. That ha- that we can't lose the plot there. Like that is by far the bigger win. So how do you think the lifetime endurance athletes how do their habits how do they insulate them from the downsides of losing the fast twitch muscle fibers? Or do we know the answer to that? We don't know all the answers, but but part of it is neuromuscular. So as I mentioned earlier, you're still pressing the pedal. You're you're you are used to telling your your brain, your spinal cord, your nervous system or you're used to telling muscles to do stuff. This is critical. Um I actually don't know if you ran a bunch of reaction time stuff on lifelong endurance athletes, I don't think that they would necessarily be that much worse with reaction time than a lifelong lifter, and they'd probably be better than a lifetime sedentary person. So you're buffering yourself against that. Uh you also start to look at things like intracellular quality. Mitochondrial content is very high. The ability to be metabolically healthy is often times extraordinarily high. Those things matter a lot. Uh your ability to bring in utilize fuel and recover from that without that causing a bunch of cellular damage is really sharp and strong. That has to matter. So I think those would be the places where we would say you're you're still you're still doing the core thing that a human needs to do. Which is push adaptation, right? You're you're you're causing stress, you're causing things to move, and that globally is is a bigger deal than this the specificity and precision of those things. So, I think that's about as far as we can go with that at this point. Um but that that seems to be pretty clear. Because you also have to keep in mind when we say things like slow twitch or fast twitch, we're using somewhat broad categorizations. Slow twitch fibers can still be fast, and fast twitch fibers can still have a lower mitochondria, and be really fatigue resistant. It's just kind of averages of averages. And one thing that we've seen really consistently is fast twitch fibers, like I said, can be develop much more power. They can be big. Um they can have loads of phosphocreatine. And fast twitch fibers can have loads of mitochondria, and be super fit. So, biology finds a way. Yeah, given enough demand. Um so, I think that's probably the stuff you'd see happening in these people. I think an interesting part of that is I had a conversation with Professor Stephen Seiler, and I was asking about long-term outcomes for athletes of this And he said the the the common golden threads that unites people that have good long-term outcomes, and you know, we could deliberate on the meaning of good, but it's consistency. If you're consistent over a long period of time, years, decades, you're going to have good outcomes. I was asking what's the number one thing that breaks consistency, and he said it's intensity. So, when you train too much, you break down, you get sick. You train too hard, you break down, you get sick, you get injured. That breaks your consistency. So, in a way, you can think about it like your floor is more important than your ceiling. Just that staying consistent. But I was thinking about that conversation as you were speaking there, and I was like I was wondering about the behavioral elements to what you're saying as well. Because we could spend the next 10 minutes working out this protocol for the optimum human, exactly how much endurance versus how much strength training you need. But if somebody's unwilling to comply with that because they don't enjoy it, because they can't get that behavioral change to get themselves into the gym three three days a week, is that similar to what Seiler identified in that it now breaks the consistency loop? And consistency is actually what gives us the good outcome. If you tune into the cycling media, you'll hear a lot about carbon bikes. But the truth is not all carbon is created equal. And that's really what Parlee is about. Basically, instead of mass producing frames as quickly as possible, they're taking sheets of high-end carbon and laying them up by hand, piece by piece, with really precise control over how everything is orientated. It's a slower, more labor-intensive process, and that's exactly the point. Most brands don't do it this way because it takes way too much time. It takes too much skill, and it's just more expensive. But Parlee have always leaned into that. Parlee frames are made in small batches by experienced builders in the US and Portugal, with a big focus on how the bike actually feels to ride, not just how it looks on paper. Yes, these bikes do sit at more of a premium price point. But once you understand how much work goes into each frame, it starts to make a lot of sense.
So, when you ride a Parlee, you're not just getting a carbon bike. You're getting something that's been built by a level of precision and attention to detail that most brands don't aim for anymore. If you're curious, you can check them out at parlee.com the full range there. I've been riding my Parlee bike for the last couple of months, and I'm blown away by the ride and the experience and even people's reaction to it. It's a true work of art. I actually don't think I would fully agree with the intensity piece there. I would definitely agree with the injury part of it. Um but we could potentially come back to that. I would also push back pretty hard on the concept that you could even if you had all the resources in the world develop an optimal routine split between them because I just don't think if if functionally matters. There's not that physiology is a a a blunter signal than that. And I I think you could come up with if you had the the largest artificial intelligence phone in the world, I think you could come up with thousands of different setups that come with the equal outcomes. Like there's just this is not a such a thing as one particular way you have to train your hand or your brain. We're we're way better at adapting to broad stimuli than than people give it credit for. Um so that those would be my reaction to it. No one could make a a realistic argument that behavioral modification isn't the top goal. And in fact, if you look at the commercialization side of exercise and fitness and health, that's the golden ticket. If somebody can figure out behavior modification, it's a trillion-dollar company. And everyone knows it and that's what everyone spends their money on. If you look at any app or any physical product, they are trying to engage and figure out that how do I get the customer base activated and and more engaged and retain more? That's that's their secret to keep the customers more. That's that's the golden ticket. So not only are you right on that, you're like you're so right that is actually well-known as the biggest way to make the most money by far. Um cuz it'll lead to staying around the most and it'll lead to actually better outcomes. And and funny enough, as much as we like to give commercialization, you know, a punch in the mouth here and there, um when things work more, people do them better. So companies are generally actually incentivized for things to work. There's of course business models of the opposite. But by and large, more companies are like the product needs to work more to get more results and that's how we'll actually keep uh our customers more. Um so many of them are incentivized at least in some large part to to work. And behavior modification is the key driving factor for nutrition, exercise, meditation, mindfulness, like you you name it that you're after here and that will be uh the core there. So, I think probably with my message here today as well as as much as I can I I hate to dissuade. I don't want to push anybody away from positive habits because of that. If you're finding some success, you're doing good things, I'd rather stay with that. And we can not uh well, what I say all the time is don't use information to kill motivation. If somebody's motivated to move and go, like let's not burn that and at some point we want to go you okay, well, there's a little better ways to do it. There's a little bit better ways to do it and and that is true. We can get there. But if that comes at the cost of them going [ __ ] it, like I'm just so confused, I'm out, then we have all lost. And that's that's we can't afford to play that game um because the research on health is so clear. By far, the biggest response you'll ever get is going from zero to one. And so, if we're pushing people from one to zero, any amount that you've taken people to go from nine to 10 pales in comparison to what hurt our our race our species, rather, when we went from one to zero. We we can't allow that to happen. So, we you know, if you want to phrase this as like the floor going up in terms of your own personal self, like just don't have big gaps and holes, cool. If you want to look at this from the floor of our of our species, same way the way like we we we can't make zero. So, don't get hurt. Don't put information out there that dissuades people and makes them so overwhelmed that they have to quit or want to quit uh and keep keep plugging along in that ration. So, that's how I would typically approach that kind of, you know, floor versus ceiling thing. Um I spent most of my professional career on the other side of the equation, right? Which is like we try to take the world's highest performers and and get them at the the tip-top. That's what I do all day. But from a public messaging perspective, I also want to be sensitive to that other side as well to make sure I think that's why G GLP-1s like Ozempic, Moderna, or is it Moderna? I don't even remember. Ozempic uh definitely. Uh I think they were an interesting societal experiment because from friends that take these, and look, there's brilliant use cases on the fringe, people morbidly obese and it's getting them back moving again. But an observation I had on it was friends that took it they got the outcome, but to use a cycling analogy, I almost wonder if you can just stand on the podium without the work it takes to get to the podium, is standing on the podium now valuable?
Like, is what they're actually looking for the type of person that goes to the gym rather than the six-pack? And you don't get that that be you know, that internal change you're looking for. You get the external signal of lost weight, the scales has gone down, but that internal change is I'm the sort of person who can make a plan and follow through on a three, four days a week. You don't get that. And so many of them I've seen had I think they had secretly hoped they'd become that person. It's a great question. We've we've we're going to have a combination of both, right? So you can I I can make cases obviously we're dealing with this a lot right now. Um We have some of our best, highest executing, highest performer executive CEOs, uh musicians, artists, actors, all that stuff. And even our athletes, of course. Now, with our professional athletes, we're very limited in what we can do outside twice. I We're we're very limited. With other ones we can do whatever. It's not a big part of my playbook, candidly. Uh but many people come into us already doing it or work with somebody else. Okay, fine. [snorts] So I've seen all sides of this equation. We've seen exactly what you're referring to. Uh where this is obviously a shortcut. Um Are they going to get all the way there? Maybe, maybe not. And then we we've seen the ones that are really dialed, they're doing all this stuff, and now they're using this for Uh if I'm in this caloric deficit, I'm going to do all these things. Can I do it though and just not suffer as much? Like, okay, great. So, we're using it for appetite suppressant? Sure. Like, I'm I don't see huge downside there. Or um can I add muscle faster? Can we get leaner faster? Um and they're they're doing everything. Like, their whole life is their training recovery. We've seen that we've seen the opposite end of that spectrum as well. And so, from like a global health perspective, there's plenty of people even in my internal family where I'm like, yeah, you should definitely take those. Because you're 150 lbs overweight. And I like I'll worry about lifestyle stuff later, but you're 50 years old. And you are not going to make it 5 more years. So, I I can see all ends of the spectrum where obviously I'm a lifestyle guy. I'm a set the right systems guy. Uh I never got into anabolics or PEDs. Um not against them, but like for me, it's it's you're kind of like shortcutting the answer. So, that that's where I land. Like, at mentally, I'm like in cognitively, I'm more interested in being in like, let's figure out the system rather than that stuff. But, at the same time, we've seen people use them depending on what we're talking about, appropriately, fairly, safely. Uh and then others who were like, okay, you are probably going to lose 50 lbs, and then you're probably going to go right back to it unless you're on these forever cuz you're not doing all the other things. So, complicated conversation and um people are complicated. So, you're going to see all ends of that spectrum, for sure. Sam Altman was on Cleo Abram's uh podcast yesterday. I'm not sure if you had a chance to listen to it, but she was asking him to speculate about the future. Um one of the areas he was talking about, he thinks by around ChatGPT 7, so in 4 to 5 years, he's very hopeful that he'll be able to run experiments first, that you'll come along, you say, "Hey, I have this type of cancer." And you can come along and say, "Okay, cool. Now, run these five experiments and tell you what you found." Thanks for the results. Now, run these two experiments and tell me what you found. Okay, now go and synthesize this molecule and tell me the outcome of this. When you think about that, let's park if that's a a likely scenario and assume for this theoretical exercise that is where the world's moving. How do you see that intersecting with your field of expertise? What does it look like for health outcomes and performance outcomes? It's already here for us. We already We can already do that. Um so there's a whole space called digital twins, and it's been around for a very long time. It started in NASA and in the engineering space. So, you'll see people when they're manufacturing homes and buildings, and uh processes like that, they'll use a digital twin. In the early 2000s, we started pushing for digital twins with cancer oncology. And looking Sorry, just explain digital twins to us for someone who's not familiar. I'll get there, for sure. Um it it started moving with like some of the more medical fields, and then the last decade or so, we started getting into things like the heart. And at this point, uh it's actually already used in many surgical centers. The brain is pretty much done. Uh and then most of the organs are are are getting pretty close, liver, kidney, things like that. The more difficult challenge are things like systems. So, digital twins are all over the place right now. And the vast majority of what you see when you see digital twin is complete garbage. So, right now, for example, I'm looking at you. This is a digital twin of you. Your camera is looking at you, making a representation, sending a feed over. That's all a digital twin is. It's a digitization of something real. And so, if I took your blood pressure, I could call you a digital twin. Okay, correct. And so, a lot of chicanery is happening in in the health and human physiology because it's become such an AI hot topic.
It's like, "Well, we got a digital twin of you." And then you go, "Look, what are you doing?" You're like, "Okay, like you took my height and weight." Like, What the hell? That's your digital twin? 99 plus percent of the stuff we've seen is that. It's a real garbage and maybe they put a graphic on it and do some weird stuff. You'd like, "This is nonsense. This is nothing here." That said, um there's a number of large grants that have come through lately where they're trying to complete the digital twin of the immune system in 5 years. There have been a number of studies that have looked at multi-processing systems like, "If we take blood samples from you, if we look at your HRV, and your muscle mass, your BMI, ask you some questionnaires, can I filter that into a model, and then predict something like your blood glucose response to an oral glucose tolerance test? Can we look at your microbiome, and and the answer is yes." So, if we feed enough models uh data to a a model, we can predict any number an enormous number of things. And in fact, if you were to just pop in digital twin health or something like that into PubMed or any research engine, you're going to see an onslaught of papers. And you're going to see them all in the last couple of years. This is very clearly where where health care is going. So, it's not a it's not the same thing. This has been the the primary target of federal funding for over a decade here. And those are in uh various layers of success at this point. As I mentioned, it's you can already do this for surgery. Uh we can do this with total muscle. So, right now we have a system where you can run a full body MRI, and we can create a digital twin in three dimensions of 140 muscles on your body. And so instead of saying like this is a DEXA scan, this is how much muscle you have, I can look at the specific volume of your semimembranosus on your right side versus your semimembranosus on your left side. And I can look at scar tissue, I can look at another critical component is called fat infiltration. So it's not the fat in your body composition or your visceral fat around your organs. It's the fat inside the muscle bellies themselves. And this is critical because it tells us about muscle quality and that often times lets us see previous injuries. So we can see things like that pretty routinely. Um we we do that in in all of our athletes and all of our non-athletes because we can see that fidelity. That is a 3D model that we can use and take and spend and and do whatever we want with that, but we can recreate a digital twin of your musculoskeletal with extremely high fidelity. And it can be run on any MRI machine around the world for the most part. So it's not like a special MRI we have to have, right? This is just um a software sequence we can run. So I can keep going on this and this we can do this from a blood chemistry perspective. So when we have enough blood markers, um at my company Vitality, we can create pretty unique molecular signatures of people. And again, this is how we handle all of our people. Um it's it's not just like so something like by the way, if you contrast this to something like an HRV or a heart rate, those are great, but those are non-specific markers, right? So we can know like you're overreached or you're under stress or or over stressed, but I don't know where. I don't know why. Well, now we can get higher level precision to say, oh, this is actually coming from the liver. This is coming from um this is inflammation from excess or from training induced inflammation or this is actually inflammation from potential safety source. Like we can differentiate that in blood now. And this is commercially available now? Yeah, 100%. Anyone can go buy this. Uh Vitality is that company. That's all. Um and if you have blood work, you can submit it to the engine and have it all do all that stuff for you. If you're trying to hit 60 g of carbohydrates per hour, this makes it a lot lot easier. Fueling used to be the bit that I'd overthink the most. Mixing different things, trying to track carbs, and after a couple of hours, everything just felt way way too sweet. This is the new 4 Endurance 2:1 fueling line. I've been using it recently, and it's probably the simplest setup I've come across since I started cycling. Every serving is 30 g of carbohydrates, so it's basically one gel and one bottle, and you're at 60 g of carbs per hour. There's no real thinking needed while you're riding. I'll just sip the drink steadily, and I'll take a gel when I need it. Same ratio across everything. So, it all just fits together really nicely. The other thing I noticed straight away is how light it is. It's not overly sweet, so on longer sessions, it's just easier to keep taking on without getting that heavy sickly feeling. And price-wise, it's actually insanely cheap. 79 cents for a gel and 30 cents for a drink serving, both giving you 30 g of carbohydrates, which is pretty hard to beat anywhere on the market. It's a brand new line, gels and drinks for now, with more coming. And it slotted straight into my training without much thought. If you're looking for a simpler way to fuel your sessions, go to 4endurance.com and check out the 2:1 line from 4 Endurance. I'll link that in the show notes below, too. But, we started out the conversation talking about the crazy feats.
And this was incredibly helpful because baseball is not a sport like running where he doesn't always necessarily control his outcome, right? Even if you have your best stuff the hitter is a factor, right? But what this allowed us to do is to say hey look, you're not going to have your best physiology today. So you need to actually go in and study the hitters more before the game. Make better choices. You have to be more strategic. Right? Not like that not like you wouldn't do that stuff if you're going to throw well, but you have to win in other ways today. And so that gave him huge leverage and that also let us see things as they started to creep up to say, hey look, we're going in the wrong direction 2 weeks in a row our numbers are down, something's happening. Like we we could intervene quickly and in pro sports that keeps you from having those bottom. And like you mentioned earlier um we actually have an like a a large number of major league baseball pitchers right now and I had a conversation just last week with one of our very young ones very very bright star 22 years old and exactly what I was explaining to him is you don't win the Cy Young because you throw a no-hitter or a perfect game. You win it because you never have a bad game where you blow up and give a bunch of runs. It's the This is very similar to where Do you Do you know what Kitman Labs is? No. So, Kitman Labs works with a lot of Premier League teams. So, they think they're just starting to move into the NFL. They're actually an Irish company. So, they started out in rugby over here. They put hundreds of cameras around the training pitch and they'll take Say they move with the football. Say you're looking at Cristiano Ronaldo. So, these hundreds of cameras, they'll build a profile of Ronaldo's stride length, time to acceleration to X pace, jumping, thousands of variables. Now, they look for deviations from that baseline in real time during the game. So, they'll say to the coach, "Hey, if you take Ronaldo off now, you're statistically more likely to get another two, three games out of him in a season. But if you tag that now into the economics of product modern sport, how much extra cash is it worth to get 400 extra minutes out of Ronaldo per season? It's insane. Yeah. Yeah. No, we we we do a lot of that motion capture as well. Um so, we have a [snorts] number of systems where we can do that with what's called wireless mocap. Um so, we used our our markerless rider. You used to have to put all these like fancy markers on everyone's joint to be able to get that fidelity. Now, we can get it in real time. So, we can get kinetics and kinematics. And for example, you can see Um we've done this um I know friends of mine did this at the San Antonio Spurs training facility. Um so, you can see someone like Maybe someone's having a bad day shooting. And you can immediately see, "Oh, your elbow is 3° lower than typical today." Um and [snorts] we do that in pitching right now. Like we will see this in bullpens and stuff. And we get data from the game and we can immediately just go in and be like, "Oh, this is what's happening. Like your elbow's coming up." Oh, great. So, we have that instantaneous feedback because that camera-based system stuff allows us to not again just look at it from a visual perspective, but we're getting joint angles, we're getting forces, we're getting acceleration, we're getting uh what do we call it? Kinetics and kinematics. Um half that equation's okay, half that equation's not right good, but at least we can see what's happening in basically real time. Um so there's a layer there's levels of um ability on that to lower ones. But yeah, all that stuff is is very real. Um we can do all that stuff now and that's again most of that's been around for a long time. [snorts] Bringing Down the House is a really interesting book from MIT students who figured out how to beast the game Blackjack and to make massive amounts of cash. I feel like you'd be an interesting guy to take an odd sports bet here or there. I'd be like, "Well, Andy, what what what way we seeing this game going at the weekend?" Yeah. What are the Yeah. Stay away from that. Andy, it's been a absolute pleasure. Uh we found out we had an Irish connection as well. You spent some time in Galway, so it's a always a pleasure to chat with a fellow Irish. I love it. It's such a I I love the physical place and the culture. I love it. Like the people are great. I I just I don't have enough praise I could possibly put on the island over there. It's great. It's a lovely place. If you've never been, you should go. Couldn't recommend it more. We're going to get you over soon for a bike ride. Sounds good. [gasps] Cheers, pal.