The New Science of Athletic Performance That Is Revolutionizing Sports
Peak has four pillars: the foundation the fuel, the recovery and the supercharge.
It takes a long time to be elite. It’s planned, periodized, and purposeful.
Scientometrics is the science of science and studies the evolution of scientific knowledge.
The expert-generalist is a term coined by Orit Gadiesh, chairman of Bain & Company, to describe someone who has the ability and curiosity to master and collect expertise in many different disciplines, industries, skills, capabilities, and topics.
Learning across multiple fields gives you an information advantage, because most people focus solely on their own fields. This multiple-field learning style is referred to as learning transfer.
Spain, France, and Italy spend a paltry 20.3, 14.2, and 13.4 percent of households income respectively on processed foods. In US and UK they spend more than 50 percent.
Foundation
Sleep and Circadian Rhythms
Sleep is universal. All living organisms on the planet sleep.
The average adult today gets approximately 6.5 hours of sleep per night. Approximately 30 percent of the population survive on less than 6 hours of sleep.
There are four key domains to maximize performance: physical abilities (speed, strength, and the like); technical skills (such as dribbling and lifting technique); tactical skills (during the game or competition), and psychological mettle (mindset, drive, and so on). The lack of sleep can sabotage all four.
REM sleep enhances our emotional intelligence. Humans dedicate 20 to 25 percent of sleep time to REM sleep, compared to only 9 percent in other primates.
It is not only sleep time that matters, quality is also important.
To achieve the state of deep sleep, small structure within your brain called thalamus acts as a sensory blocker.
Alcohol consumption influences your liver to work hard to process it, which raises your body temperature, hindering your sleep quality.
Melatonin levels rise when you are tired and sleepy. During the night they gradually decrease.
Traveling east to west is generally easier for your circadian system to acclimatize to compared to traveling west to east. Your brain is capable of recalibrating approximately 1 hour for every day in your new environment.
The ideal sleep environment should feel like you’re sleeping in a cave: dark, quiet and comfortable.
20-30 minutes nap around 1 or 2 pm. would be the best.
The Athlete Microbiome
Your gut contains more than 100 trillion microorganisms collectively called microbiota, which includes bacteria, viruses, and fungi consisting of over 160 different species and 9 million genes.
Our gut microbiota perform an incredible array of essential functions like: our metabolism, breaking down and assimilating food, neutralizing drugs and carcinogens, and synthesizing vitamins (choline, folate, and vitamin K), as well as short-chain fatty acids, and secondary bile acids.
Researchers found massively different glucose responses to exactly the same meals between individuals.
The Hadza hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania are thought to most closely resemble our early ancestors. Our gut microbiota changed a lot. Experts believe the major factors reshaping our intestinal ecosystem are lack of exposure to soil and dirt, lack of fermented foods, the explosion of sugar and processed food consumption and our chronic overuse of antibiotics for medical conditions and in our livestock. Tim Spector joined Hadza and only after 3 days of him eating their food, his gut diversity increased by 20 percent.
Our microbiome and our mitochondria converse via cellular signaling.
A leaky gut leads to an inflamed microenvironment in the digestive system, creating an open vacuum for blooms of pathogenic renegade bacteria like E. coli, Klebsiella, and Proteus.
Training produces a positive hermetic stress via increased reactive oxygen species (ROS), stimulation of mitochondrial biogenesis, and fatty acid oxidation.
It appears that intense bouts of prolonged exercise can significantly damage the gut.
Acellular carbs found in packaged and processed food trigger an inflammatory response, altering gut microbiota signaling, and leading to increased visceral body fat, impaired leptin and insulin signaling, and potentially adding to the chronic inflammatory load.
One of the most overlooked stressors on your gut microbiome is travel.
The way to build a diverse gut microbiota is to eat a diverse diet. Next, ensure adequate intake of prebiotics and fiber. The standard American diet contains a paltry 15 g of fiber per day, recommendations is 25 to 30 g, our ancestors eat between 80 and 150 g.
With probiotics look for multi-strain formulas containing L. rhamnosus, L. fermentum, L casei and/or Bifidobacterium.
Restrictive diets perform much better than high-fiber, high-prebiotics diets for improving a dysbiotic gut.
Gut microbiome expert Miguel Toribio Mateas highlights the many routes of communication between the gut and brain, such as vagus nerve, the immune system, short-chain fatty acids (SCFA) and tryptophan.
If your gut testing revealed renegade H. plyori infection, talk to your doctor or practitioner about using Saccharomyces boulardii, a beneficial yeast, to eradicate the harmful overgrowth.
Blood Sugars and Longevity
Processed food is now the norm. The definition of ultra-processed food is formulations made mostly or entirely from substances derived from foods and additives.
Blood glucose control is a keystone in maintaining human health. Poor blood glucose control plays a fundamental role in the development of modern chronic diseases.
The fasting glucose levels between 80-94 mg/dl were associated with the lowest mortality, regardless of age and sex.
Willpower is finite; the processed-food environment is seemingly infinite. People are consuming less sugar, but they are still getting fatter.
Many athletes wake up with fasting glucose levels above the 100 mg/dl (5.5 mmol/L) threshold. The standard for health is defined as a fasting glucose of less than 6.1 mmol/L.
High blood glucose levels are typically the result of insufficient insulin production and/or increased insulin resistance by the tissues.
The most common medication used by type 2 diabetics to control blood sugar levels is metformin. It helps to lower glucose level by activating AMPK (AMP – activated protein kinase) an enzyme inside your cells that triggers energy utilization.
Aging is the single most important factor for predicting worsening of blood glucose.
It appears there is a large degree of variability between what is “healthy” for me and what is “healthy” for you.
Fitness is defined as “the ability to perform a specific exercise task”, whereas health is defined as “your state of well-being, where physiological systems work in harmony”.
HIIT sessions. The experts believe greater muscle recruitment and faster rate of muscle glycogen depletion might be the key factors triggering superior glucose response.
Training has a massive influence on blood glucose levels, so does stress, sleep and inflammation that is tied to resting glucose levels.
The Nrf2 pathway appears to play an important role as a master regulator of more than 200 protective genes that shield your cells against toxins and harmful agents.
Fuel
Physique Nutrition
Does an elevated body fat percentage directly impact athletic performance?
In strength- and power-based sports, size and strength are massive contributors to athletic success, often at the expense of being lean.
A calorie, as defined in nutrition, is the measure of the amount of energy required to raise the temperature of 1 kg of water by 1 degree Celsius.
Stephen Guyenet wrote in his The Hungry Brain that our brains are biologically driven to seek out high-calorie foods in order to favor weight gain, reproduction, and survival.
RMR is your resting metabolic rate (RMR) and is the amount of calories required to keep you alive. When you lose your weight, your metabolic rate will also drop.
For elite endurance athletes, RNR accounts only for 38-47 percent of total daily EE (energy expenditure).
Nonexercised activity thermogenesis (NEAT) is the scientific term for all the calories your burn getting up and going about your day.
It costs your body more to metabolize certain foods over others, which is called the thermic effect of food (TEF). Protein has far and away the biggest TEF, costing your body 25-30 percent of its calories to process compared to a paltry 6-8 percent for carbs and 2-3 percent for fat.
Stress is essential for growth.
Muscle fiber recruitment follows Hennemans’s size principles, which states the capacity of a muscle to produce force is directly related to its size. Training adaptations specific to hypertrophy are driven by three main factors: muscle tension, metabolic stress, and muscle damage. Your muscle adaptation is influenced by positive energy balance and your net protein balance over time. Strength-based athletes should get a minimum of 1.6 g/kg/day of protein. The general recommendations for carb intake is 4-7 g/kg/day.
Creatine is head and shoulders above other supplements when it come to hypertrophy and athletic support.
When you try to lose weight, general recommendations are for a caloric reduction of 55 kcal/pound/day. One key reason to lose weight slowly and steadily is to minimize the loss of lean muscle mass. Make sure you get around 2.3 to 3.1 g/kg/day of fat-free mass of protein. And reduce fat intake from 40 to 20 %.
When urine osmolality is between 250-700 mOsmol/kg the athlete is assumed to be hydrated.
If you’re trying to get leaner, obtaining objective data via a body composition assessment can be highly valuable. The most commonly used tools are dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DEXA), Bod Pod, skinfold calipers and bioelectrical impedance (BIA).
Endurance Nutrition
Carbohydrates are the key fuel for exercise. By the 1960s, muscle glycogen’s role as a key influencer during exercise was identified, and in the 1980s the first ever studies emerged that concluded that carbs consumed during exercise improved performance.
James Morton PhD, sport nutritionist for Team SKY provided some cutting-edge molecular biology techniques that have kicked off a new era of “nutrient-gene” insights.
Training Low is defined as when an athlete trains with low-carb availability during or after exercise, or trains with low muscle glycogen or low liver glycogen.
Your gut limits the absorption of carbs, and this effect is independent of body size. Back in 2004, sport scientists paired fructose together with glucose during training, and oxidation rates of carbohydrates jumped from 1 g/min to 1.26 g/min.
Sport scientists investigating Ironman found that women took 1 g and man took 1.1 g/kg/hour of carbs.
Intense training, if not properly periodized and planned, could be a recovery roadblock for endurance athletes.
If you are a professional endurance athlete earning a living from your sport, a low-carb or keto strategy might not be wort the effort.
How long does it take to adapt to a low-carb approach? For recreational athletes, a full four weeks.
The IOC announced that only six supplements made their list for performance benefit.
- Caffeine. The CYP1A2 gene could predict performance outcome.
- Beets. The purple power. Spinach, arugula, beetroots, and celery contain about 250 mg of dietary nitrates per 100 g of fresh weight.
- Sodium Bicarbonate. Athletes will take 300 mg/kg bodyweight of bicarbonate dissolved in water 1-2 hour before exercise.
- Vitamin D.
- Nicotinamide Riboside (NR).
- Antioxidants.
Team Sport Nutrition
The nutrition demands of team sports are very different from the demands of physique and endurance sports.
Pro soccer players competing in the English Premier League consume more than 200 g of protein per day.
If you are a recreational high-level athlete, it might take you 6-12 months to build the skill of sprinting.
The shorter, faster players covering more kilometers burned fewer calories (3.359 kcal) compared to the forward grinding it out in the trenches (3.800 kcal). It takes a lot of energy to take a hit, to fight off a block, and to battle through physical contact.
When athletes consume too many simple sugars too far away from training or competition, the high-glycemic carbs spike blood glucose and insulin levels leading to inhibition of pancreatic beta-cell function along with the surge of catecholamines that fuel performance.
The type of fuel you consume, the timing and the total amount are all crucial to athlete performance.
Caffein levels peak in the bloodstream 45-60 minutes post-consumption.
For every 1 Celsius an athlete’s body temperature drops, peak power output drops by 3 percent.
For every molecule of glycogen you lose, you lose three molecules of water. This can lead to dramatic weight loss and more pro-inflammatory and catabolic milieu in the body.
If you are thinking about training adaption, omega-3 fats play a key role in reducing pro-inflammatory eicosanoids, cytokines and reactive oxygen species.
Vitamin D, Calcium and Iron are important and highly depleted in athletes. Not to mention Zinc, Magnesium and others.
Recovery
Periodized recovery
A good working definition of recovery is that allows athletes to train at their highest level possible and compete to the best of their ability.
The more you train, the greater your likelihood of sleep disturbances. The more you train, the greater your potential risk of cold and flu.
The sport science term for the right dose of overload is called functional overreaching (FOR).
The two most common biomarkers used for muscle breakdown are creatin kinase (CK) and lactate dehydrogenase (LDH).
C-reactive protein (CRP-hs) is biomarker for systemic inflammation.
Hormones are often touted as key biomarkers that can be used to accurately predict how well an athlete is coping with stress, training, and competition. The classic hormone biomarkers for athletes are cortisol and testosterone.
Lachlan Penfold is talking about Recovery Pyramid. The base of the pyramid is the foundation for successful recovery – nutrition, sleep, and stress management. Next up is the training plan. Then monitoring. This is followed by therapeutic treatment. The very top are recovery modalities, things like ice baths, compression garments.
Energy balance plays the biggest role in the recovery process. The biggest lever putting the brakes on the catabolic process is calories.
Omega-3 supplements has been found to improve feelings of muscle soreness and oxidative stress. Aim for 1.600 mg of combines EPA and DHA daily for men and 1.100 mg for women.
Exercise is a major source of oxidative stress, kicking up free radical damage in the body.
Some supplements you can use are creatine, curcumin, gelatin and collagen.
Athlete Immunity
Your body will always prioritize survival over performance.
Training hard and pushing yourself to the limits takes its toll on the immune system.
The most common illnesses are URTI – upper respiratory tract infection, then we have exercise induced dehydration and GI disturbances.
If you’re an endurance athlete, immunity should be a top priority when you think about recovery.
People who experience poor sleep quality are at 4-5 times greater risk of catching a cold. Chronic sleep problems (characterized by at least 12 nights of 50 percent sleep loss) can significantly increase pro-inflammatory markers (CRP and IL-6).
Timming is key when fueling with carbs. Do it 10-15 minutes before play, not 60-75 minutes.
Glutamine is one of the most prevalent free-form amino acids in the body. But its value as a supplement is questionable.
Athlete Monitoring and Recovery Strategies
The monitoring of training load has evolved massively in the past three decades.
Dr. Fergus Connely is saying that there is no such thing as full recovery after training: there is simply adaptation to training.
A training plan is a road map from a starting point to a goal, but rarely does it progress linearly from start to finish. Highly skilled professionals with years of experience asking the right questions can provide incredible insights.
Rating of perceived exertion (RPE) is a subjective way of assessing an athlete’s internal load. The RPE scale was originally developed in 1970s by Gunnar Borg. The scale was from 6-20.
You can change an athlete’s training load by changing the training frequency, intensity, time, or type (this is the FITT principle).
Tim Noakes the central governor theory states that the brain acts as the principle governor of physical output.
A more tech-driven assessment strategy is heart rate variability (HRV). Your autonomic nervous system (AND) is made up of two branches, the “fight or flight” sympathetic and the “rest and digest” parasympathetic. The fighter you are the higher your HRV. HRV is roughly telling you the internal cost of performing the training session.
Some additional training helpers: ice baths, cryotherapy and compression garments.
Don’t quit. Suffer now and live the rest of your life as a champion.
Supercharge
Brain Health and Concussions
The medical term for a concussion is mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI), and it affects an estimated 1.7 million people across America.
It is not simply the initial trauma of the hit or fall that causes the problem, but the activation of a cascade of secondary reaction. Recovery takes between 10 and 14 days.
In sport there is a big need for pain management strategies.
Binge drinking is actually seen at higher rates in athletes compared to the general population.
Opioids most definitely reduce pain, but unfortunately do very little to reduce patient suffering. Researchers are now able to better understand how the brain and nervous system work together. They are able to distinguish between pain intensity and pain suffering and how different regions of the brain mediate these two distinct effects.
Sacrificing the size of our gut for the size of our brain and eating a diet rich in the long-chain omega-3 DHA appear to have been primary driving factors in the development of the sophisticated human brain.
A calorie-restricted diet could potentially help create better brain resiliency” to injury. There is a growing body of research that suggests the benefits of ketogenic diets in Alzheimer’s and dementia patients.
Ideally, most of your cooking should be done at low to moderate temperatures using healthy MUFA fats (monosaturated fats), including extra-virgin olive oil, avocado oil, macadamia oil, and walnut oil.
Ketones are 25 percent more efficient than glucose as a fuel source in the brain.
Your brain is 60 percent fat. One-third of this amount is made up of the long chain omega-3 fat DHA.
Mental-emotional health is an important pillar of the new science around peak performance.
Emotions and Mindset
Your emotional brain responds to events more quickly than your thinking brain.
Dr. Sullivan is saying that an emotion is a complex psychophysiological response that has three components: a subjective experience, a neurophysiological response.
The only reason you have pressure is because you have a change. Pressure is a privilege.
Sport is emotional. If you struggle to deal with negative emotions, you’ll struggle to succeed at the highest level. The emotional center of your brain is called the limbic system.
Your brain doesn’t work alone in creating and expressing emotions: your heart and gut are intricately linked.
It’s easy to be confident when you’re performing at your best. The research shows the problem with confidence is that it’s either delusional or contingent. Delusional confidence is thinking you’re better than you actually are. If it is contingent on something, it means that your sense of self-assurance is dependent on something in particular.
Mindfulness is the ability to place your full attention on what is happening in the present. Today, our collective absence of attention is almost expected.
While the amygdala is fully developed at birth, the prefrontal cortex isn’t fully developed until your mid-20s.
If you can somehow be a ruthless killer on the playing field, yet be an open-minded, humble and respectful person off it, then you’ll have found an elite-level winning formula.
Leadership and Great Coaching
What is wise reasoning. It means thinking of the broader context rather than just the immediate issue. The central aspect of wise reasoning include intellectual humility, recognition that the world is constantly changing, and the ability to take different contexts into account (besides your own).
The sheep all come together to form a herd, seemingly in order to protect the collective group from the predator. The center position is farthest from the predator, every sheep is actually trying to get to the middle. The sheep are herding for selfish reasons; they’re trying to survive.
The dickhead rule used by management to maintain a healthy team dynamic. Made famous by the Boston Red Sox in the lead-up to their 2004 World Series championship. You need at least four high-character players for every difficult personality on the team to avoid souring the culture.
When you’re trying to solve a complex problem and uncover an innovative solution, looking outside your sport or industry is a wise decision.
Showing vulnerability and authenticity helps accelerate the trust-building process.
Inspiration and motivation don’t make great leaders; they don’t pay the bills. Discipline does. Discipline helps you build habits, and habits are where the difference is made.
Does it really take 21 days to form a habit? Automaticity typically reaches its peak around 66 days, which means it takes just over two months to build a habit.
The Peak
The evolution of high performance is where several paradigms meet. The overlapping areas of health, nutrition, training, recovery, and mental performance is where the leading experts are looking for the next big breakthrough in athlete performance.
