Episode 384: Andrew Coates on Mid-Life Fitness: Cardio vs. Strength, Fasting Pitfalls, and Ozempic Facts

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Just so much conversation and so much noise around cardio versus strength training.

That's the first part, right?

Don't do cardio, cardio, only do strength training, limit your cardio.

Now it's from doing HIIT training to now doing just basic walking with a weighted vest.

What do you believe is the best form of cardio for middle age?

And do you also believe that we should be still doing cardio even into our 40s, 50s?

Absolutely.

So I try to look at cardio through a lens.

A, especially as we get into our 40s, we should be really looking at this for metabolic health, right?

So cardio-respiratory metabolic health.

It's great for that.

Two, we also look at: do we still have performance goals?

So some people will also want to do recreational or even like high-level sporting stuff.

So the type of conditioning that you choose, I like the word conditioning, is right?

Conditioning would be a little bit more tactical than just general cardio, but cardio is the word that everybody uses.

So you want to take, so basically when you, the word conditioning for you is a synonym for cardio.

I don't think That's okay.

That's probably not fair either.

I guess conditioning is probably more deliberate and is more tactical and it's more specific.

Like, I think of conditioning as if you're an athlete and you're conditioning your body.

Absolutely.

You know what I mean?

Totally.

To a purpose, right?

To a purpose, yeah.

Cardio, I think, is a bit more general, but there's enough overlap that we're playing.

Tomato tomato.

We're playing in Somato.

We're not care Zachary.

Let's just say cardio for the sake of the fact, but the word works.

So we're doing cardio for performance, right?

So a lot of people are still interested in whether they're a recreational marathon runner or they want to participate in their pickleball players, right?

So do you have the cardiovascular stamina to go out and actually do the things you want to do?

So let's look at, here's your motivators for cardiorespiratory health, for conditioning for life.

Then there's fat loss, okay?

You get fitness professionals who say that resistance training or cardio are not very good for fat loss.

And it's like.

I haven't heard resistant training.

Well, there are people who say that too.

And the problem with that message is, I mean, they're sort of, they're grasping at like technically true things that aren't very helpful because you're discouraging people from doing these things.

These effects tend to be overstated.

But if you are lifting weights, the recovery from resistance training increases your metabolic rate as you recover, probably a two-day effect.

We are also burning calories while we're working out.

Cardio will burn more calories per unit at a time.

Strength training will burn calories.

It's better than sitting on the couch.

And then also, the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn at rest.

Now, that effect gets overstated.

It takes a fair bit of muscle to be like me versus you, I burn more calories at rest.

There's a big disparity in our body weight.

Yeah.

And you're also so muscular.

Like that's exactly the truth.

People that, so these are this, this is what you're saying right now is the loops that we all hear all the time, right?

Having more muscle on your body helps you burn more calories at rest.

Okay.

Let's go through that then because it's like, well, how much muscle do you really need to have to actually burn that much more calories versus doing cardio and burning more calories in that particular moment?

So if we're going to take the long view, what you said, we want to build and we want to maintain muscle.

So, people talk about building.

As we get older, we lose muscle mass, especially if we don't have a stimulus on muscle to preserve it.

So, the extreme example is when we shoot astronauts into space, what ends up happening when they come back down after a few months?

They lose muscle mass and they lose bone mineral density.

Why?

There's no gravity.

What does gravity do?

It's stimulus on our body's tissues that preserves muscle and bone.

And then, if we go and go above and beyond that and actually actively lift weights, provide resistance, it strengthens bone and strengthens muscle.

But if we get someone who's very inactive over time, they're not going to maintain muscle mass.

And as they get older, we lose muscle mass again, sarcopenia, age-related muscle loss.

It's actually a big problem when it comes to older adults.

And then we get into risks of, well, if bone mineral density drops, which women are actually more vulnerable to post-menopausal because of hormonal changes, and I'm not getting into the depth of that, I'm not the expert there, but it's a real thing.

Then we're at increased risk of falls.

So if someone also has less muscle, less motor skill, and less, less, and they're more prone to falling, and then they have weaker bones and less cushioning when they fall.

If you suffer a ephemer or a hip fracture, I don't know the percentage, but a substantial number of people literally, like the fall will kill them.

And another substantial amount of those people, because they're immediately sedentary, they're cut off from a lot of their social life, which also is very negative for their mental health.

We see a lot of people die within the first year or their quality of life rapidly declines.

Right.

So long term, that's just one of the major incentives to maintain muscle.

But also for your metabolic health, the more muscle you have, yes.

The effect of a little bit of muscle, so an average person, let's say a woman puts on five, six pounds of muscle.

Okay.

The difference in the calories she burns on a daily basis is actually be kind of small.

But it's not whether we gain more muscle if we stay the same.

It's preventing losing it.

Because as we lose it over time, especially the people get caught in these cycles of yo-yo restrictive dieting, which if someone's just really restrictive and they're not maintaining protein, they're not resistance training, then they can actually lose of the amount of weight they lose, a significant portion of kidney muscle mass.

We're seeing this now with Ozempic.

And Ozempic gets demonized and people are going to have strong emotional reactions to Ozempic, whether they think it's cheating or it's like this wonderful thing that helps people.

Ultimately, Ozempic, if taken in the absence of resistance training, it functions like a fad diet.

I don't want people to like take that out of context.

But what matters here, you have to preserve the muscle mass and you have to create a stimulus that preserves the muscle.

And if someone then goes through repeated cycles of yo-yo dieting where they're losing some muscle and then they can't keep it up anymore and then they start, they don't just go back to maintenance.

They were gaining weight in the first place and then they go and they fall off the rails and they start eating a lot of calories.

Well, they gain the weight back more rapidly.

Their metabolic rate because they've lost muscle mass is now a little bit lower.

So they can go back to the same amount of food and actually gain body fat faster because their metabolism is a little slower.

It's a moving target.

It's not static.

And so you repeat cycles of that.

And if you gradually lose more muscle mass, guess what?

It becomes harder and harder and harder to keep body body fat off.

And over time, if you're inactive, gaining a lot of body fat, your metabolic health risks go way up.

Yeah, well, Ozempic is a very controversial thing for all those reasons, right?

My question is: if someone's taking Ozempic, but they're still working out and doing weight training, what happened?

Do they still lose muscle mass?

So, as I understand it, and I think there are people who are better experts than me at this stuff, but it should be roughly equivalent to the person who diets but is also resistance training.

Because Ozempic fundamentally does one thing.

It blunts appetite.

So you're eating less calories.

So if you equate the person who is dieting, you know, traditionally, reducing calories, they're maintaining protein and they're working out versus the person who takes Ozempic, their hunger signals, the food noise is diminished, an equivalent amount of calories, the resistance training, they should, as I understand it, preserve about the same amount of muscle mass.

Okay, so they function fairly similarly because Ozempic just makes people eat less, lower appetite.

Does it also though, I don't, from what I understand with it, is your body can acclimate to it.

So the more you take it, the less it has the effect.

Like maybe when you first take it, maybe your hunger dissipates a lot.

But as you take it, your hunger is not as, it's not, you kind of gain your appetite back a little bit.

It makes sense.

That's sort of the, that's the limits of idolatry on the topic because I have a couple of medical doctors who are really smart about this stuff and I tend to defer to them.

Yeah.

So for me, that particular piece of info, you know more than me.

Yo, really?

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

So let's not talk about that.

I'll be the expert on that.

So that's what I've actually heard.

I've heard that that is something that happens.

I also heard that people get exceptionally tired on Ozempic and their energy levels diminish, where then that's why they can't do the workouts or the strength training to the same level that they were doing before, even if they were doing it, because they're so tired and they feel like shit.

Which is another thing I was going to say, which is interesting, is I don't think enough people talk about just the that malaise and exhaustion that people are getting from Ozempic.

They talk a lot about Ozempic face.

They talk a lot about obviously not being able to maintain muscle mass.

No one really talks about the other, like most people I know who are on it have the side effect of low energy and exhaustion.

And people would rather, let me just finish this.

And people would rather be lethargic and/or nauseous, or a combination of both, but be thinner versus feeling better, but having a few pounds heavy, being a few pounds heavier.

And to me, this is the problem with the world we live in and society and the amount of pressure or yeah, pressure that we put on each other for looking a certain way.

I think it's really sad.

I have a feeling, I mean, again, I don't know the actual date on this, but I have a feeling if you take someone who...

again, has a lot of food noise, like they're always thinking about food,

their hunger hormone signaling is basically dysregulated through whatever is going on, right?

Genetically or just like years of their lifestyle.

And then you shut off that noise.

They're probably not very good at having a good relationship with eating nutritional food at a regular interval because they're motivated to eat for sustenance.

They're probably like always just thinking about like food.

All of a sudden you turn that off and you no longer have the signal, anywhere near as much signal for appetite.

So they're probably on some level over-restricting the amount of food they eat.

They drop weight rapidly.

And we know as well, like Ozempic Face, if you get someone who diets down a lot, if you see bodybuilding competitors, their faces become very like gaunt because literally the fat in their face starts to drop, right?

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Well, I also think a lot of people who enter the fitness space, and you can probably, your friend who's sitting over there, she can probably respond to this, that a lot of times times, because the people who have a lot of food noise and a lot of like body dysmorphia or image problems, or they have a psychology around food or disordered eating, go into the fitness space because it's a way of controlling it and because they're obsessed about it.

Now, I'm all, by the way, I'm going to speak about myself for a second because when I was, you know, I was hardcore into the health and to fitness.

And I went into it because I was had, I had like an obsession with the fit, with fitness and like looking a certain way and being fit, being really fit, where it's like a vicious cycle that's like

in your, like that's just what happens.

Would you say that happens in your absolutely.

I would say that people that kind of come out of the like eating disorder space or like, you know, poor relationship with food, bodybuilding is super appropriate because it's like a healthy version of extreme control.

Exactly.

It's a healthy version of, so if you can't hear,

have to hear her, it's exactly what I would call it.

It's a healthy version of extreme control when you're putting your career in the place where you can do the thing that you are like, honestly, like psychotic about.

I mean, it's, it's, it's, it's also people who become shrinks, right?

The people who become psychiatrists are usually the ones who are mentally the most fucked up, right?

Like it's kind of like the irony in life.

I find it very interesting.

But then it becomes a situation where you then.

You have to get out of it because it becomes so overconsuming of you who you are.

I'll give you another example of this phenomenon, intermittent fasting.

Oh, right.

By the way, don't get me started on intermittent fasting.

I could not agree with you more.

I think it's just a way of restrictive eating.

Personally.

It can.

I mean, I think.

Yeah, you can say it's an autophagy and all these other things.

It gives people a reason and an excuse to limit

the eating window.

So you're eating less calories.

And the people that I know who are doing it, again, not everybody.

I can never paint everybody with one brush, but I would say a lot of the people that I know are doing this because they have so much food noise and they're trying to lose weight.

And that's the way that they want to lose weight.

It's not for a health reason.

People always say, I want to be healthy.

No, you want to look good.

It's vanity.

Don't confuse the two.

Just be honest with what it is.

It presents as a very socially acceptable way to have an eating disorder.

Now, I will not demonize it unilaterally as bad, but it's

it can be attractive to people who have that disordered eating relationship and may be prone to restriction binge cycles.

And then what we have is we have a daily way of, we've dressed it up in this science-y sounding way to say, oh, it's intermittent fasting.

It does all these things.

When you equate for calorie intake and protein, it has the same effects as any other type of dietary restriction.

There's no magic to it, but it can be a very, very socially acceptable way.

to do some goofy stuff with your food.

That's actually the best way I've ever heard anyone explain it.

It's a socially acceptable way to do goofy things with your food.

And then you can have a lot of experts and believe me, all these fasting experts, and I've had a lot of them on my show talk about, oh no, it changes the body composition and it's about autophagy and your body needs to be,

we feed our bodies too much.

We need to be starving our bodies for a certain amount of time to like let it repair itself.

I've heard all of it in every way, up, down, sideways.

And like everything else, the pendulum always swings one way and then it swings the other way.

It used to be eat five meals a a day because if you eat five small little meals a day, your metabolism will be revving.

You'll keep your, you know what I mean?

Like there'll always be a reason and an excuse why that particular way of eating is the best way of eating.

And then we demonize it and then we bring in the intermittent fasting or we bring in the

ketogenic or we bring in the this and the that.

And then keto is not extreme enough anymore.

So then we get into carnivore dieting.

And then carnivore is not extreme enough.

So then it just becomes like organ meat and sunning your butthole and all these other sort of weird things.

Exactly.

Did you ever hear the one?

Yeah.

Oreg meat's like the big one now.

Like that's what people are doing now.

And by the way, even that guy, what's that whackadoo guy, liver king or whatever, who was like, oh, look at me.

All I do is eat, you know.

meat.

Is that what he did?

Meat and liver.

Organ meat.

Organ meat.

Yeah, of course.

And he's like, look at me.

Look how shredded I am.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You look like that because you're on a, like, you're on like pounds of steroids daily.

I don't want to look like him.

And I don't want to look like you anyway.

This is, this is not nice.

So this will be an ad hominem, but you can smell him through the internet.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Like,

who wants to look like that?

Anyway, I know.

I'll leave it up.

People do.

Well, I think people, like, people will go to any extreme to lose weight.

Like, that, like, to me, this is what it kind of like circles all the way back to, I hate to say it, like the Ozempics of the world, like, who would rather be nauseous and or

exhausted than to, you know, have another five pounds of weight on them.

Like people would rather feel like shit all day than

to look fat.

It's really kind of crazy to me.

And I think it's, it's who's coming in because I look at the person, I've worked with some people who are on it, and the person who is staring down pre-diabetes, who the food.

Totally different.

Yeah.

And that's why.

Yeah.

That's why I think like it's like anything.

It's like nuance, right the person who has has always had food noise for their entire life who is staring down the barrel of the gun of pre-diabetes and diabetes who for whatever reason has just simply been unable to find consistency with you know what we would consider healthy nutritional lifestyle that maybe you and i found easier and we take for granted just how hard it is for them and no it's hard for i believe me i'm i said i put myself in that boat like to me i was obsessed i am still by the way i'm not saying i was I love to eat, it's my favorite pastime on the planet.

I think about food constantly.

I'm always thinking what my next meal is, what I'm going to be eating, how I can eat it.

Like, it's a whole, it's like a whole, it's a whole symphony in my head all the time.

You have a boundary around it, though, don't you?

I have a what?

A boundary, you have a boundary around it, like, because you obviously don't eat unrestrained, whatever you eat.

Well, no, that's my discipline.

So, what I've done is create, what I've done is create a lot of like parameters around what I eat because I I know I have this crazy like love for food.

So I eat very much the same things all the time.

I have a very strict morning routine of what I eat.

I won't allow myself, and you can say whatever you want.

No, you can't like restrict, restrict.

Yeah, I can, because I know my personality.

This whole idea of like, well, eat in moderation.

I don't have it.

I don't have that button in my head where it's like, you know, oh, I can just have four chips.

No, I can't.

I can have, oh, I can just have four almonds.

No, i can't if i even taste a chip it will be i will eat nine bags of chips if i even if i have one almond i'm gonna have nine pounds of almonds that's just my personality type i'm an exceptionally extreme person so why i'm even saying this is like i think a lot none of this is like a one size fits all when people are saying things like oh you know what like you know it's because you are

uh restricting yourself and then that's why you binge no i'm i'm restricting myself because i know my personality is such an extreme where I don't have that like thing in my brain.

That neurotransmitter doesn't

like fuse or work where I can just stop.

Even if I just eat a little bit, I don't have that ability.

So, my thing is, people should have enough self-awareness to know where their triggers are, what they do, and then create parameters.

Like, that's the only way to have success.