Dr. Duncan French

yes you're absolutely right i mean at low intensities of exercise or just day-to-day living we shouldn't be tapping into our um carbohydrate fuel sources extensively that that's that's for higher intensity work or you know the fight or flight needs of stress you know um if you know athletes or any individual has a you know

a high carbohydrate diet, they're going to start to become predisposed to utilizing that fuel source preferentially.

Now, at low intensity, that can be problematic, certainly for an athlete, because if they preferentially use carbohydrate at lower intensities, when the exercise demand goes to a higher intensity, they've already exhausted their fuel stores.

They can't draw upon fat because the oxidization of that fat is just too slow.

so they're essentially now become fatigued and because they've already utilized the carbohydrate stores so what we try to do yes through diet manipulation and a little bit of exercise manipulation is as you say teach the body or train the body to preferentially use a specific fuel source fat obviously at lower intensities and carbohydrate at high intensities and we look at specifically the crossover point between the two tells a lot in terms of how an athlete is is ultimately um how their metabolism is working

Do I have that more or less right?

Yeah, you said it eloquently.

At the end of the day, you're consciously understanding what the exposure to physical exertion is, and you're flexing your diet accordingly.

better at dealing with heat barring like hyperthermia and death like i mean obviously you heat up the brain too much people will have seizures and die but um you lose neurons but uh what's the right way to acclimate heat yeah so we we normally start with about 15 minutes of exposure now if someone's really lacking acclimation to heat you know you can do that in three five minute efforts do you know what i mean and actually take this hot hot sauna yeah hot sauna take time to step out 200 degrees or something correct yeah yeah 200 fahrenheit yes

And we try to work up to 30 to 40 minutes to 45 minutes in the sauna continuous.

Now, we have to understand what's the advantage of heat acclimation for our athletes.

Ultimately, their ability to sweat and to lose body fluids is going to be advantageous to their weight cut process, their ability to make weight.

It is a technique that some of these guys adopt.

If you don't have high sweat rates, it means you're going to have to sit in the sauna for longer and longer and longer to get the same delta in sweat release.

So the more acclimated you are, the more your body is thermogenically adapted, the more sweat glands you have.

So we start with 15 minutes and then we just try to

add on and add on across the time.

And now for us, we kind of found about 14 sauna exposures starts to really then drive the adaptations that we're looking for.

So it's not a quick fix.

A heat acclimation strategy has to happen long before fight week or long before the fights.