Primal Endurance Podcast

The Primal Endurance podcast Interval shows are published in between our full-length feature episodes published on Fridays. For the Interval episodes, podcast host Brad Kearns discusses various elements of the Primal Endurance approach, pulling from topics in the book/digital course and adding some candid and fresh insights. The Interval shows will keep you focused and purposeful with all of your workouts and lifestyle decisions.

Once you are fat adapted, you can fine-tune your insulin sensitivity and fat adaptation by engaging in Intermittent Fasting and fasted workouts. When you get depleted and experience true hunger, realize that this offers a powerful opportunity to rewire appetite hormones to escape sugar dependency and become more fat adapted. 

When the prominent hunger hormone ghrelin spikes and you reward yourself with a sweet treat, you hard-wire the connection between pleasure (spikes of dopamine and opioids) and the sugar. If you instead try to fast a bit and/or satisfy your hunger with a high fat food, you can actually alter the neural mediation of food reward. Warning - don’t try this at home unless you are full-on fat adapted and can actually benefit from fasting and fine-tuning without sugar crashing. 

The cellular stress of fasting triggers mitochondrial biogenesis. So does ketogenic eating, because fat and ketones utilize more mitochondria and burn more cleanly than glucose. Fasting and ketogenic eating also boost health with a profound anti-inflammatory effect, and also promoting improved autophagy - cell repair and regeneration. In contrast, overfeeding and routinely eating regular meals to the point of overfeeding can accelerate cell division, which is the essence of accelerated aging. 

The psychological effect of becoming fat adapted/ketogenic can help endurance athletes to not obsess about caloric needs during performance. Enjoy trippy Johnny G anecdotes about long rides on no food in old times.  It can help those struggling with dieting and calorie obsession to become liberated from negative emotional connections to eating, because they are no longer physically dependent upon regular meals. 

Brad Kearns tackles more interesting Q&A from Primal Endurance podcast listeners and book readers. Submit your questions at www.primalblueprint.com/endurance and they will get covered on the air. While the questions relate to the specific needs of the individual, the answers are presented in a manner that applies to a broad audience. Listen and enjoy learning about the challenges and successes of your endurance peers, and come away with plenty of practical tips to help improve your training and competitive results.

The Primal Endurance podcast Interval shows are published in between our full-length feature episodes published on Fridays. For the Interval episodes, podcast host Brad Kearns discusses various elements of the Primal Endurance approach, pulling from topics in the book/digital course and adding some candid and fresh insights. The Interval shows will keep you focused and purposeful with all of your workouts and lifestyle decisions.

More details about the why’s and how’s of transitioning to primal-style eating. Beyond the Paleolithic rationale, sugars and grains are bad for you, period. Even if you are at optimal body fat, there is no justification to ever consume nutrient-devoid refined carbohydrates. 

Dialing in carb intake depends on a variety of variables, especially whether you have excess body fat or not. Females also have some hormonal concerns when quickly reducing carbs, because this dietary transition might be challenging to the genetic hard-wiring toward reproductive fitness. 

Gordo Byrn (Family, Fitness, Finances) epic soundbite “If you need sports nutrition, you’ve maximized your cardio benefits and are possibly risking your health and immune function.” The big secret to going primal is to liberally consume more natural, nutritious fats that provide high satiety and help you become better at burning fat. Make a firm 21-day commitment because sugar and wheat have serious addictive properties.

Host Brad Kearns covers the final four habits, picking up from the part 1 show of the first 3 habits as follows: 

4.         Aerobic Emphasis: Endurance success is primarily dependent on aerobic efficiency. Aerobic base building delivers by far your best return on investment, and is best achieved by strictly limiting heart rate to aerobic max or lower during defined aerobic workouts and training periods. Stay out of the black hole, and don’t venture into high-intensity training blocks before you have a strong base.

5.         Intensity Structure: Intensity can deliver exceptional results for endurance athletes, when a strong base is present, when workouts are brief in duration and really intense, when they are conducted only when you are highly motivated and energized, and during defined periods that are short in duration and always followed by a rest period and preceded by an aerobic period.

6.         Complementary practices: Increased general daily movement, spontaneous, unstructured play sessions, mobility work such as technique drills and dynamic stretching, movement practices like yoga and Pilates, and high-intensity strength training are essential for success, because we live sedentary lives of extreme physical ease. 

7.         Periodization: An annual program always commences with an aerobic base period (minimum eight weeks). With success, high-intensity periods can follow, with a maximum duration of four weeks. Intensity periods are followed by micro periods of rest, followed by aerobic, followed by a return to intensity/ competition. The annual program always ends with an extended rest period or off-season, followed by a new macro aerobic base period to commence a new annual program. 

What does it mean to say "aerobic emphasis?" [00:00:50] 

What does "structured intensity" mean? [00:05:09] 

Complimentary practices are essential to our success.  [00:12:51] 

What is periodization? [00:17:31]

Primal Eating Step 2: Commit to Primal Foods

The Primal Endurance podcast Interval shows are published in between our full-length feature episodes published on Fridays. For the Interval episodes, podcast host Brad Kearns discusses various elements of the Primal Endurance approach, pulling from topics in the book/digital course and adding some candid and fresh insights. The Interval shows will keep you focused and purposeful with all of your workouts and lifestyle decisions.

Make a sincere commitment to ditch offensive, nutrient devoid foods for three weeks and replace this junk with your favorite choices from the primal-approved lineup of meat, fish, fowl, eggs, vegetables, fruits, nuts and seeds—and modern additions like high fat dairy and dark chocolate. 

This effectively results in a higher fat, lower carb diet than the Standard American Diet. Beware the slippery slope that is carb addiction (sugar and wheat have powerful addictive properties akin to opiates)—satisfy yourself with nutrient dense, high fat meals and snacks so you don’t struggle or suffer.

Host Brad Kearns covers a key takeaway from the Primal Endurance book, the list of 7 habits for success in endurance endeavors. In this show, Brad covers the first few habits as follows:

1. Sleep: Sleep comes in at number one. Brad says it's the next frontier of performance breakthroughs in all sports, especially endurance sports. Quick tips: minimize artificial light and digital stimulation after dark; and awaken each morning, without an alarm, refreshed and energized. If you are training more, sleep more. If you can’t honor the aforementioned maxims, stop training until you can. 
   
   2. Stress/Rest Balance: Primal-style endurance training allows you to reach for higher highs (breakthrough workouts) and observe lower lows (more rest, shorter, easier recovery workouts, and staying below aerobic maximum heart rate at the vast majority of workouts). It appeals to your competitive intensity by focusing on peak performance and recovery, instead of focusing on the awed notion of “consistency” in this context. 
   
   3. Intuitive and Personalized: Your training schedule is sensible, intuitive, flexible, and even spontaneous instead of regimented and preordained. Respect your daily life circumstances, motivation levels, stress levels, energy levels, immune function, and moods. This means backing off when tired, but also pursuing breakthrough workouts when you feel great!

Why is sleep so Important? What is so bad about artificial light? How should we "stage" the bedroom? [00:01:00] 

How does one get balance between rest and stress? [00:09:26] 

How can you make your schedule intuitive and personalized? [00:16:21] 

Lights Out:  Sugar, Sleep, and Survival

Primal Eating Step 1: Ditch grains, sugars and refined oils

The Primal Endurance podcast Interval shows are published in between our full-length feature episodes published on Fridays. For the Interval episodes, podcast host Brad Kearns discusses various elements of the Primal Endurance approach, pulling from topics in the book/digital course and adding some candid and fresh insights. The Interval shows will keep you focused and purposeful with all of your workouts and lifestyle decisions.

The first step to going primal is to get rid of the most offensive foods in the Standard American Diet: sugars, grains and refined high polyunsaturated vegetable oils. These foods promote carb dependency, inflammation, and oxidative damage. Besides, they have no nutritional value. Knowing that chronic cardio promotes carb dependency, you must slow down your training pace before you even attempt a dietary transition. 

Realize that besides contributing to overall excess carb intake (grains, even whole grains, convert to glucose upon ingestion), the gluten and other lectins in grains contribute to leaky gut syndrome. The bad oils are particularly insidious—“radiation in a bottle” says Dr. Cate Shanahan. They cause an immediate disruption in healthy cell function and disregulated fat metabolism.

The Primal Endurance podcast Interval shows are published in between our full-length feature episodes published on Fridays. For the Interval episodes, podcast host Brad Kearns discusses various elements of the Primal Endurance approach, pulling from topics in the book/digital course and adding some candid and fresh insights. The Interval shows will keep you focused and purposeful with all of your workouts and lifestyle decisions.

The Primal Endurance podcast Interval shows are published in between our full-length feature episodes published on Fridays. For the Interval episodes, podcast host Brad Kearns discusses various elements of the Primal Endurance approach, pulling from topics in the book/digital course and adding some candid and fresh insights. The Interval shows will keep you focused and purposeful with all of your workouts and lifestyle decisions.

The incredibly simple, sensible, stress-free approach to training detailed by 2016 Olympic bronze medalist (and 2008 Olympic silver medalist) Nick Willis of New Zealand. Nick has had an amazing career as a miler, and at 34 he became the oldest 1500m medalist in Olympic history. Nick decided that in order to extend his career and enjoy a healthy, balanced life, including appreciating family time, furthering his education, and enjoying hobbies like Speedgolf (Nick is a top-10 level Speedgolf pro), he streamlined his training approach to spend less time/fewer miles to stay fresh, and to trade out stuff he didn't enjoy (lengthy gym strength training sessions) for stuff that was more time efficient (a few minutes of sprints and plyos at the end of workouts). Nick only runs once a day and takes a day off each week, but he is one of the fastest milers in history. Take inspiration from Nick's example as he shatters the stereotype of the Olympic runner being an imbalanced cyborg robot training machine.

Brad Kearns tackles more interesting Q&A from Primal Endurance podcast listeners and book readers. Submit your questions at www.primalblueprint.com/endurance and they will get covered on the air. Some recurring themes are coming through with many questioners. In particular, the questioning how "180-age" aerobic maximum heart rate limit applies to real-life goals and the desire to open up the throttle now and then and get race ready. While the questions relate to the specific needs of the individual, the answers are presented in a manner that applies to a broad audience. Listen and enjoy learning about the challenges and successes of your endurance peers, and come away with plenty of practical tips to help improve your training and competitive results.

What is the Primal Endurance audio book? [00:00:55] 

When a person is training for a half marathon on a hilly course should they do any specific hill work? [00:02:50] 

How does one acclimate to race conditions in a climate or time zone other than what we are used to? [00:06:16] 

How does one deal with anxiety when skipping a meal or mental fatigue while they are adapting to the primal lifestyle? [00:12:50] 

What kind of nutrition do I need for a high altitude race when I am really low carb normally? [00:21:10] 

This man experienced major burnout at age 25 and is now embracing primal. He still has long-term carb cravings. What can he do about monitoring the maximum heart rate? [00:25:52] 

When the HRV 56, it this too low. How should we try to increase this? [00:32:39] 

When trying to get into running, it seems to wreck my HRV even though I am training below aerobic. Should I not run? [00:35:13] 

In my recovery from burnout, what should I do in my training to build my fitness back? [00:35:54]