This $10/Year Supplement Is Your Cheat Code To Better Cardio w/ Dr. Andrew Marley (SSOF Ep 183)

Dr. Andrew Marley1:48

And the use of vibration significantly increases not just the oxygen demand, so the VO2 that we're seeing for example level five with vibration at 120 rpm is actually similar to what VO2 max was.

James de Lacey2:37

So you mean, but that would be like oxygen consumption, correct?

Dr. Andrew Marley3:07

The amount of oxygen that you're consuming. And also the time taken to recover is significantly longer, obviously because there's more of a demand. Also the rate at which the muscle is desaturated with oxygen is greater with vibration than without vibration.

What we're also seeing is that with cadence, that will change also the muscles which will be recruited. So the hamstring doesn't get recruited until the higher cadences. We're usually looking at at least 100 to 120 rpm, and obviously with the vibration we get more of a recruitment in the hamstring.

So that seems to be all there is to it. So that will obviously help as we know if people have a hamstring injury you should just be focusing on things like your Nordic curls or your general strength work, you need to be making sure that the athlete is then moving the limb at the velocity it needs to move at the sport.

And I think that is a big reason why we see a lot hamstring strains in things like professional football. That's kind of going off a small tangent here, but that's okay. Often when people come back from a hamstring strain they'll do their stuff in the gym and they'll see that their numbers are the same and then they get re-injured again.

I think that's because often, managers or coaches will wrap their athletes up in cotton wool and don't let them perform max effort sprints. So when they ask them to do that in the game, the hamstring isn't really conditioned to do that activity even though it's strong and not actually able to contract properly.

James de Lacey4:33

Yeah, well they're going off like a NordBoard, peak force number and then that, oh yep, that's all good, asymmetry's better, and it's like, man, that's not even half the demand.

Dr. Andrew Marley4:44

Absolutely. People will look at hamstring there, but that is one aspect of it. But when you look at hamstring strains, they occur from sprinting mechanics, of sprinting movement, sorry, mainly deceleration and change of direction to then re-accelerate.

If the hamstring cannot sufficiently cope with these acute demands, which is sure enough what we can look to help with things like your Nordics or your RDLs, but if it can't then re-accelerate, then what's the point? If we're not conditioning the certain muscles to the demands of the sport, there's no point.

And that's the kind of what we saw with the vibration study, that cadence specifically, cadence is over 100 rpm or what's needed to start to get the hamstring to start to become deoxygenated, in other words, get some kind of metabolic demand in the hamstring. So that's kind of what's interesting about the bike.

James de Lacey5:37

I do, I will come back to that as well.

There's a study a while ago, I reviewed it for Science Sport. Must have been like four or five years ago. I think it was they looked at, it was being on a bike I think it was four times a week. I can't remember the exact length of the study and how much time they spent on it, but essentially doing a lot of bike riding.

And this cohort led to essentially, I think it was short, like basically shorter muscle fascicle and shorter hamstrings, basically saying that if you're doing a lot of bike work, you may want to offset it with something else or maybe you don't want to do as much I guess volume on the bike, especially as a team sport athlete when you've got to run.

So yeah, that's kind of interesting, interesting tip I guess to be for people listening maybe to be aware if you do a lot of like volume on a bike and you in a sport where you need to be I guess lengthened.

Dr. Andrew Marley6:30

Yeah, 100%. You need things to be specific to the sport, but you don't want to go down death by specificity route. So a lot of coaches fall this trap where they're like, unless it's totally sport specific, we're not doing it. I was like, well everything has a place. It depends how you use it.

So for example, we'll go back to a bike for example. If you're coming from a hamstring injury, you might then want to start going off season conditioning making sure they're hitting correct kind of cadences to get us training in the hamstring, and then move that on to kind of more running based stuff later on, which will then mimic the actions a lot more than what to what they're going to be doing in the game. So everything has a place, we just need to be careful about how we use it.

James de Lacey7:16

So what, what the vibration bike, say you have access to one randomly. What's the real world application of using this vibration? You obviously mentioned it's more demanding on I guess faster consumption, more demanding on the muscle. Does that mean that that is something you would replace say normal bike sprints or normal biking with this vibration because of that? How are you seeing it being used?

Dr. Andrew Marley7:37

So we've seen a couple of things with it. One is that even if, I think it was we did it maybe two days a week, I mean three to four minutes of vibration bike increased core temperature by about a degree. So that has applications for acclimation studies where you need to increase core temperature for a long period of time to then get adaptations to exercise in the heat.

But exercise with a bike, it does kind of buckle you for a couple days afterwards I find, you're not really fully recovered. So I would do one or the other for most people. If you're a trained athlete, you could maybe supplement with both, but I can't really say for certain just yet.

In terms of what how you would do it, I wouldn't necessarily say it would be useful for sprints like your typical sprint and interval type stuff with like your load or your Monarch bikes or anything like that. It's still I think it leads into stuff more towards the high intensity interval training type stuff.

So you, for example, your exercises for at least a minute at a time with you, again, depending on the athlete, either one to one or a one to three work to rest ratio. And it it definitely is hard. That's one thing that I will say.

But the next kind of study we're going to be looking at that is we need to then actually properly distinguish if doing it with a vibration where we're matching it for work on a non-vibrating bike makes a difference, because we put some power pedals on the vibrating bike. And what we saw was that the watts required to turn the pedals was a lot higher with the vibration on. So if we then got say one group on a load bike and they did say the same volume of work,

Minute long intervals at 300 watts. And then the other group had to then do one minute long intervals with the vibration matching 300 watts worth of work, what's the difference kind of there? But my initial view is that you can get more of a trained demand with the vibration bike at a lower cadence.

This will then have applications for aging who these people can't necessarily spin the pedals quite as fast, so we could really call it a sprint. So, because of the vibration, there's a lot more mechanical inefficiency, and there's a lot more energy loss. So, if you can recruit more of the muscle, I get more of a training response at a lower cadence, does that have transfer over to aging? Obviously, it has potential transfer over to sport. We don't really know yet. This is just what we've seen at the moment.

James de Lacey10:19

We're throwing some ideas out there. Would you expect maybe a similar response to the blood flow restriction research where you have submaximal with the BFR cuffs or submaximal walk? Even walking and jogging, they see some pretty good improvements and other things with BFR cuffs in those submaximal states.

Dr. Andrew Marley10:19

I would imagine there'd be a similar kind of improvement, but I think the mechanisms would be different. I think that's because of mechanical efficiency, you have to then have much more of a neural component to then drive your muscles to actually push the pedals down. So, I think I'm throwing an idea there is beyond much more of a neural drive rather than the more metabolic differences which we see with the blood flow stuff.

James de Lacey10:19

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It's got my gears thinking now. My academic supervisor back home, he has this cool devices to like for eccentric cycling. And now, what would happen if you put vibration while eccentric cycling? That'd just be crazy.

Dr. Andrew Marley12:20

Oh, that would be disgusting. It would be hard. I don't actually I think that'd be too hard for most people, to be honest. I think if you're super trained, it could be used. But, even what we find with trained cyclists, not all of them could cycle at 120 rpm, level five resistance. A level five is an arbitrary resistance, which is on this bike. It goes up to level five.

With vibration, not all of them could do that for 90 seconds. These were trained road cyclists. So, I think adding an eccentric element, that would be just awful.

James de Lacey12:20

We'll give it a worst try, man. Well, if you super try Trifecta and do something like that, that would be fun. Yeah, that it's an interesting point. And I remember when I had Dr. John Babraj on here, one of your colleagues, and a super Was he one of your supervisors as well?

Dr. Andrew Marley13:11

Yeah, he's one of the supervisors for my PhD, yeah.

James de Lacey13:11

Yeah. So, he was talking about vibration like he's trying to do the whole vibration stuff with you, and he was talking about vibration plates. He was using it to fox gen muscle oxygen desaturation as well. So, are there any other applications around this vibration that maybe you think have potential applications within sport and maybe potential uses? With the vibration bike or vibration in general?

Dr. Andrew Marley13:11

Even just vibration in general. I think with the vibration general stuff, it's usually not done correctly. I don't understand the whole idea around it being that if you're on a vibration plate, you do exercise, you get more muscle recruitment, therefore it's going to lead to strength improvement. That's not necessarily what has been seen. I think you need to be subjected to treatments to prolonged vibration to actually see some kind of an improvement.

I think potentially for sport, I wouldn't use vibration in a traditional S&C sense, e.g., to get somebody stronger. I think just standard weight training, when I say standard weight training, whatever you call that, in other words, on a stable surface, is the way to go. But, I think it has some potential conditioning uses.

So, potentially after you do a sprint, you go to a vibration on a vibration plate, for example. That could then slow down recovery essentially, and then you go to repeat sprints, you're then chronically making people be in an oxygen depleted state, which may You chronically feel like [expletive] Pretty much. That could then have benefits, but I think from a strength point of view, no. From a conditioning point of view, maybe.

James de Lacey14:04

Probably. I mean even if I'm thinking now like if you're looking to do some kind of we'll call it chronic muscle conditioning, even holding push-up positions on it maybe with your hands on it, that's going to get you the desaturation profile.

Dr. Andrew Marley15:13

So, we actually had a student last year. So, she did sprints, and she got people to hold a quarter squat on a vibrated plate in the afterwards to see if that would do anything or if you heard of quarter squat with no vibration. We've still seen that some other things that vibrations can be useful for. And that sense, yeah, I think the key thing there is for me, vibration is more of a conditioning tool rather than a strength tool, which vibration is traditionally used as a strength tool in the past.

It was actually developed for in the '60s for NASA to help athletes with the due gravity stuff. There may be something there, but I think it's definitely more so in the conditioning sense.

James de Lacey15:13

I see in the CrossFit world, they use it as a recovery tool like they call it lymphatic drainage or whatever else. I don't know. I'm just like, "Okay." Not convinced.

Dr. Andrew Marley16:07

I get it. I don't get me wrong. Vibration will get the lymphatic system moving, but I don't think that it will actually help with recovery. I think it'll be the opposite. Because, which is the reason why I think that we saw this increase in core temperature for me doing a an identical vibration bike probably is due to the lymphatic system kicking in. Oh, hello. But, again, this is more of a training adaptation rather than a recovery modality.

James de Lacey16:07

Yeah, especially with the intensity of the vibrations and stuff like that. We've been doing too high with the vibration.

Dr. Andrew Marley16:07

Cuz what we've seen You can't go too high. Well, if you do, then you don't get the same response. So, if you vibrate to say 60 hertz, whatever it is, you don't get as much of a muscle desaturation. In other words, the muscle doesn't use up oxygen as much as if you were to be on 35 hertz. So, there is a sweet spot. It's just like anything else. I think that 35 hertz for just standing, without even talking about vibration on a bike or anything, that kind of range is better for getting the muscle to use up oxygen.

James de Lacey17:04

Interesting. And on that idea of your sweet spots, so your vitamin D research. It's probably one of the more interesting areas of vitamin D, especially cuz it's related to performance. I know we've talked way back we covered some of your previous research on it. Now, you obviously got a new paper, but let's run through the timeline from the beginning of that research to your new paper now. Kind of what happened in those studies, what you looked at, and then the findings as it progressed through.

Dr. Andrew Marley17:51

So, the first study was a dose-response study looking at vitamin D, and we started off with three groups, 50,000 IUs per week, 80,000 IUs per week, or 100,000 IUs per week. And then everyone was a after it was a control. So, then we then saw that there was no benefit to supplementing with more than 50,000 IUs per week in terms of improvements in VO2 max, in terms of improvements in hematocrit and hemoglobin levels, in terms of improvements in leg wingate performance. So, taking more doesn't do anything extra, which is what we've seen a lot of different supplementation studies. There is an upper limit for this.

So, then the question was, right, so if we combine vitamin D with training, what happens? So, we got two groups, one took 50,000 IUs per week. I did weekly because long story short, I wasn't able to get a funding to actually test vitamin D levels. I had to make sure that people were taking the vitamins. So, I could watch them take their supplements once per week. That's why we did it that way to make it easier for everyone.

So, yes, so one group they took 50,000 IUs per week. The other group took five capsules of olive oil, which doesn't really do much for high-intensity exercise. It looks the same as the vitamin D tablets. And then did the identical training, combined lower upper body using cycle ergometers in the lab. We saw that in the vitamin D group, there was improvement in hematocrit and hemoglobin, so potentially a better ability to transport oxygen around the body.

We also saw that the effect sizes were more in line with improving VO2 max and time to exhaustion, wingate power, etc. with vitamin D as opposed to not taking vitamin D. This is probably because vitamin D in itself isn't a vitamin. It's a prohormone. It needs to be activated by the body for that to induce effects.

These effects are multifaceted. They are genomic and non-genomic. The genomic effects we're talking about increases in mitochondrial biogenesis, mitochondrial efficiency. In other words, vitamin D will switch on or switch off various genes in the body. So if you don't have enough vitamin D, you're not switching on as many of these genes in all the various cells, which means you don't get the full benefit.

The non-genomic effects are when vitamin D binds to the membrane vitamin D receptors on cells, which can then influence more rapid changes in things like calcium dynamics, which is probably why some papers have seen that if you take vitamin D, there are improvements in muscle strength.

There was one paper, it was by Wild et al. I can't remember the name off the top of my head fully. But they gave judoka 150,000 IUs of vitamin D, tested them before and then 10 days after the vitamin D supplementation, and the vitamin D significantly improved muscle strength and RFD.

These improvements are too fast to be due to any changes in genomic transcription because you don't see improvements in strength from increased hypertrophy. It takes a long time to do that. And it was thought that it's differences in calcium dynamics which did it, because when vitamin D binds onto vitamin D receptors on the cell membrane, it can then more basically trigger the muscle to more rapidly release calcium into the muscle and re-uptake it again. More calcium in the muscle, more cross bridges formed, more strength and also improved rate of force development.

So it's kind of a multi-faceted approach to how vitamin D could be working. It also kind of acts to mop up reactive oxygen species and things like that, which is probably why it's improving things like hematocrit, because if red blood cells are traveling, reactive oxygen species become all stiff. And when you're exercising it's going through all the tissues and whatnot.

If it's a stiff red blood cell, it'll break, and if it breaks, it needs to get mopped up and recycled. Whereas if you can improve the environment within the body by removing these reactive oxygen species and stuff, the red blood cells can be a bit more supple, means they can go through all the arteries and veins and whatnot to a better extent, thereby prolonging the life of the red blood cells, which we kind of tried to have a look at in the third paper. And also, the actual number of red blood cells which were there.

So, yeah. So that was—so sorry—the final study happened during COVID. I was put on hold for a year. And when I was allowed to go back to do my research, I wasn't allowed into the labs really. I wasn't allowed to do any gas stuff. I wasn't allowed to do a whole bunch of stuff.

And then obviously because I'm coming up to the end of my PhD, I thought, "Right, how am I going to actually get a third study without doing all the things I wanted to do?" So I decided on a really short duration intervention of 2 weeks of sprint interval training, because we've seen in the literature that six sessions is enough to induce positive adaptation. I was able to phrase that as often athletes, combat athletes, will take 2 weeks to get ready for a fight.

It happens all the time. "When are you fighting?" "When? In 2 weeks." "Okay, cool." So it does happen. And I decided to use a hill sprint intervention combined with battle ropes. So still looking at lower and upper body conditioning, because that is important for combat athletes.

Combat athletes are unique in that they need to have a good element of upper body conditioning to compete relatively well in the sport. So they took that alongside either vitamin D or an olive oil placebo. We were then able to repeat the sprint ability. So I had to stay far away from them in the lab while they sprinted on the bike. And I was then able to dust down the lab after, one of those Ghostbusters. So I got one of those sprays. I had to use one of them around the bike and the entire lab and everything.

James de Lacey23:56

Oh my goodness.

Dr. Andrew Marley23:56

It was real with gloves on, PPE covering the whole shebang. Today I had to get the data off the computer. Today I had a look at that kind of thing. I needed to take a finger prick. What's that all about? I was like, "Mad." Goggles, mask on, the whole shebang.

But what we saw with that was that battle ropes were an ineffective conditioning modality for improving repeated sprint ability in the upper body. In fact, it made it a little bit worse using the protocol we did. Now, there isn't really an established battle rope protocol. We used the Tabata method because that's been done before. It seemed like a reasonable place to start. And then hill sprints were useful at improving repeated sprint ability, and that the vitamin D had an additive effect.

So that's essentially the nutshell from that. Also, we assessed isometric contractile hold ability. In other words, holding a wall sit or holding an isometric push-up hold for how long they could do that for. No difference in the olive oil group, significantly improved in the vitamin D group. So that was yeah, that's essentially the nutshell of all three papers.

James de Lacey24:47

Nice. Nice. Funny enough, you mentioned about the PPE. We were flying home during COVID. We had to wear—I think it was on one of the international flights—we had to wear a [expletive] mask, plastic thing down over that covers your face during the flight.

Dr. Andrew Marley24:47

Crazy [expletive]. Awful.

James de Lacey24:47

So coming back to those vitamin D studies, it's so interesting to hear about a supplement that can have such a significant effect. Because when you think supplements and performance, you think, "Okay, creatine," even though the effects are relatively small in the grand scheme of things. And then outside of that, you pretty much have nothing to really give you a strong effect on performance. But vitamin D is—I mean, that's relatively consistent across those three studies.

Dr. Andrew Marley26:03

Yeah. So it's interesting that it does that, but only if you're deficient. If you're not deficient, then taking vitamin D will do nothing for you. Obviously I had combat athletes based in Scotland, and we don't really see the sun, and when we do, we don't actually get any UV radiation between October and about April.

And then we kind of combined that with the fact that combat athletes will tend to be indoors all the time, or when they are outside, they'll have lots of layers of clothing on if they go for runs, etc. They don't get a lot of vitamin D creation from exposure to the sun. And also, they tend to not be eating properly, so they don't get a lot of vitamin D from their diet anyway. So for that group of athletes, it was probably useful.

For beach volleyball players in Texas, probably wouldn't be all that useful for them. It's all about context.

James de Lacey26:50

Yeah. What is deficient in terms of numbers on a blood test?

Dr. Andrew Marley26:50

It depends who you ask.

James de Lacey26:50

Okay. So what what is your opinion?

Dr. Andrew Marley26:50

My opinion is you need to be having vitamin D levels of higher than 75 nanomoles per liter to be considered sufficient. Now, the IOM say that anything over 50 is sufficient. Most people use IOM numbers because they are relatively well established.

But then there's a lot of papers out there now which show that there are beneficial effects of getting vitamin D status up to this 75 nanomoles to about 125 nanomoles per liter to get kind of the maximum benefits.

Now, for most people, 50 would probably be fine for a normal population. But when you're talking about trying to maximize performance, then getting it up to this kind of 75 number is probably the way to go, I would say, just from what I've seen. However, there isn't really a consensus on that.

I think most governments use the guidelines from the IOM, which is if you're 50 nanomoles per liter, they use their cutoffs to define deficiency, insufficiency, and optimal as that. But I don't think that's quite correct. It's also why I don't think the protein recommendations are correct either. When they say that most people will need 0.8 grams per kilogram body mass, I think that is too low as well, especially for an aging population.

Yeah, I think governments especially will err on the side of caution, which is fine. I completely understand that. But if there's more evidence to say that things should be different, then maybe people should be willing to reconsider their position.

James de Lacey28:46

Can you reach that 75 to 125 level for vitamin D just from sun exposure?

Dr. Andrew Marley28:46

Can do. Yeah.

James de Lacey29:05

Would you need a lot?

Dr. Andrew Marley29:05

You're probably looking at about an hour of exposure a day to reach those levels.

James de Lacey29:12

That's quite a lot.

Dr. Andrew Marley29:12

But you need to be careful obviously that you don't burn yourself, because if you burn yourself you get cancer, that defeats the whole purpose in the first place. Which is why I think, to quote Graham Close, he's a big advocate for a food first but not food only approach. Get your vitamins, get your macros, etc., from food sources where possible. But where that isn't practical, then supplementation could be useful.

James de Lacey29:12

Yeah. So vitamin D is cheap enough to—

Dr. Andrew Marley29:12

Yeah. Yeah, that's, you could get a year's supply of vitamin D, vitamin D3—so you get vitamin D3, not vitamin D2. A supply of vitamin D3 for what, five pounds? So that's what, like four bucks? Yeah, I thought it's nothing. It's really easy to go to Amazon to get it. It's dead easy. So I gave 50,000 IUs per week in one go because I had to make sure they were taking it.

And like I said, I take it at 50,000 IUs a week in one go because it's easier for me that way. If you're somebody who likes to have a daily routine, then take your 4,000 IUs per day is perfectly acceptable as well.

James de Lacey30:10

Nice. I did a video on your latest paper recently and it's doing all right. It's got 1.2K views looking at your research now and one of the questions was why not 25,000 IUs?

Dr. Andrew Marley30:10

So there was a paper, oh god I can't remember that paper for the life of me. Oh, it's just escaped me. But it looked at 20,000 IUs compared to 50,000 IUs and it seemed that the 50,000 group was better. Now I'm not saying that what I did was completely infallible. If I had more people in my first paper, I would have loved to have done a lower dose study as well to then see where the key one is there.

But what we see is that if you take a big vitamin D in one go, some of it will probably be turned into an inactive form of vitamin D to then being treated. So you need a higher dose to then get yourself up to that level. Now if you take it daily, that 4,000 IUs is obviously a much lower consumption of vitamin D3 in a week. So 4,000 IUs per day over seven days is a lot lower than 50,000 IUs. But you're then better able to process it. Or that you're then not as much vitamin D becoming this inactive form to then being treated.

Well obviously vitamin D toxicity is a thing but it's very difficult to do. You need to be taking...

James de Lacey31:14

Yeah, I was going to ask, if you go over that 125, is that when you start getting into that territory?

Dr. Andrew Marley31:59

Well I've only really heard of that with people that were taking 10,000 IUs per day for a period of six months. So that's far too much at that point. Yeah, you don't need to do that because then you're taking loads of vitamin D as a drop by taking loads dropping and then you get that effect there. Whereas you take it the 50,000 in one go you're then utilize what you can, get rid of what you can't and then you just take a load and back in that range there.

James de Lacey31:59

What are the symptoms of someone who would have vitamin D toxicity?

Dr. Andrew Marley31:59

It tends to be more of a kidney damage. So again anything, any kind of symptom you associate with kidney damage could be a symptom of vitamin D toxicity.

It is very hard to do. There was one paper I read, somebody accidentally gave elderly people, it was 100,000 IUs of vitamin D3 in one go rather than 10,000 IUs and there was no negative side effects apart from elevated blood calcium level and that which returned to normal relatively quickly. So taking a single high dose is not going to do too much to you in a negative sense.

But if you are chronically taking high dose vitamin D and you're chronically having high levels of calcium in your blood, that calcium is going to go somewhere. Otherwise it's going to start to block up the kidneys. And then start to form more plaque in the kidneys. Your kidneys aren't going to be filtering water as effectively and there are the other symptoms which can come from that.

And the other I think I've done some vitamin D content on your stuff before.

James de Lacey33:43

Maybe it was even on the Christian Orr podcast you're on but people will always ask, okay if I'm taking so much vitamin D, don't I need to take vitamin K2 with it? Is that something that, okay why would someone even want to do that in the first place and is that something that you would recommend or think is needed?

Dr. Andrew Marley33:43

Yeah, you can. You absolutely can. I think it's a good thing to do. By and large, especially if you don't eat enough in your diet which again most people don't do. It's generally a good thing to do. I would always say because it makes sure that the vitamin D is going to where you want it to go. In other words it's not just clogging up your kidneys. Vitamin essentially, people who are wondering if you take vitamin K with vitamin D, it makes the calcium deposit into teeth and bones a lot more.

Instead, whereas you don't take vitamin K, then there's going to be more calcium floating around in the blood. Like I said, vitamin D directly influences calcium and how it is utilized in the body which has led to the strength increases. But you can take it but I wouldn't say it's absolutely essential because vitamin K toxicity is probably more dangerous than vitamin D toxicity. So just be careful of that.

James de Lacey34:43

Okay. But yeah, you see a lot of a lot of vitamin D supplements now kind of D3 plus K2. And they kind of combine them together.

Dr. Andrew Marley35:20

Yeah. Yeah, it's probably because that's the recommendation. If you want to improve bone health, then taking vitamin K with vitamin D is the way to go. But this all stems from the old stuff where people used to think that vitamin D was only useful to prevent people getting rickets. But we now know that vitamin D does a lot more than that. There are vitamin D receptors in basically every nucleated cell in your body. It's started to affect directly affect the transcription of approximately 1,500 genes. When I was doing my PhD it was 1,200 and it's now up to 1,500 genes.

So it does a lot. It's not just to do with bone health. I think that's important thing to understand there. But within that, like I said, food first not food only. You should try to get everything from the diet because vitamin D needs magnesium and zinc to work properly as well.

If you're deficient in magnesium, it will not work. If deficient in zinc, it will not work. You need to make sure everything in your diet is nailed down first and then supplement, especially in Scotland supplement with vitamin D to get to that level so it will actually do its job. If you don't have enough zinc and magnesium in your diet, you can take all the vitamin D you want, it's not going to do anything.

James de Lacey36:10

Interesting. So what would be some dietary foods that people can look to eat to get some vitamin D in but maybe also get some of that zinc and magnesium?

Dr. Andrew Marley36:10

So for vitamin D you get vitamin D2 from mushrooms. So any kind of plant-based source. With vitamin D3, that's mainly from things like your oily fish and your eggs and things like that.

But as for things like for magnesium, you your main ones are your nuts, your dark leafy greens, beans, things like that. As long as you're eating a balanced diet trying to eat your minimum five a day, you'll probably be fine for having enough magnesium in there. You also get some magnesium from milk which is why in all the papers I gave all the vitamin D with...

James de Lacey37:31

Yeah, I saw that.

Dr. Andrew Marley37:31

the Jersey whole fat milk. One, Jersey milk is a really fatty milk. So if there's more fat in you with the vitamin D, it's then going to actually go into your system a lot easier. Two, milk has zinc and magnesium which then may help make it work. The magnesium is required to turn the vitamin D into its active form.

So the CYP enzymes which convert vitamin D into 25D and 125D they need magnesium to work. When vitamin D goes into the tissues to induce its genomic effects that needs to bind to retinoid X receptors which have zinc attached to them. For attaching to do anything. So it's a multi-stage process there.

James de Lacey37:31

Nice. And if I was going to summarize the mechanisms that you went through just for people listening, so I want to come back to that for vitamin D working.

So you're basically looking at improved oxygen delivery. You're looking at improved mitochondrial I guess function and more mitochondria. You're looking at improved calcium sensitivity. As three main mechanisms when getting vitamin D into that nice 75 to 125 range.

Dr. Andrew Marley38:47

Yep. Yeah, they are probably the I would say the three biggest ones. Because vitamin D is also involved in nitric oxide synthesis. So if you have more nitric oxide or you have so nitric oxide is working properly, it's then causing a vasodilatory effect therefore flooding the muscle with more blood. More blood equals more oxygen, more substrate, better clearance. So yeah, I would say that you break down each of those three parts. There are multiple facets to each but yeah, they're probably the three main things.

James de Lacey38:47

Perfect. And you obviously, you did battle ropes in that in that final study. You obviously mentioned that there wasn't as much that came out of that but we're just interested to hear your thoughts on using battle ropes for sprint interval training because typically I guess most people they have air bikes which is kind of full body. And pretty much no one has an arm ergometer because who has a massive arm ergometer machine just sitting in their garage or their gym?

So battle ropes, can battle ropes be a solid substitute for upper body sprint intervals?

Dr. Andrew Marley39:47

For me the jury is out. So I saw that with my protocol, I said my protocol, Tabata created it back in the dawn of time with 1999.

So with the protocol that I used, it didn't do anything. However, I was got people I was peer reviewed just now which looked at six weeks of battle rope training in wheelchair athletes and I improved their distance covered in 12 minute push test. They didn't improve anything else but improved that. Another paper I saw it was Bornath and Canelo. God the year escapes me. They did a six week intervention. But they did a lot more work in each training session with the battle ropes and also they alternated the battle rope exercise after each bout.

So I just did, 20 seconds battle rope and that. What most people still see with that. What the Canelo did that and they also did the big slams as well. So maybe you need to vary the exercise enough so that you get training response.

Because my theory is if you just did normal battle ropes, like your double arm whipping motion, there's a technique element to it. And if you can start to, it's called something like, okay, you get too efficient. Yeah, you'll get efficient with that, you'll start like a surfer, like ride the wave essentially. You're not actually then putting yourself under a lot of metabolic stress, which means you're not going to adapt because the first thing you do, I said battle ropes, you go oh that was hard.

But after people don't do it on the regular or they'll do battle ropes as part of a circuit or at the end of the session where you're already fatigued. Maybe you were to do battle ropes as a standalone, let's say you did three times per week and you just did 20 seconds of alternate whipping movement. I guarantee you by the end of week two you'll find it relatively easy.

So I think what you need to do is you need to alternate the exercise. And you also need to make sure that you're progressing exercise in a kind of a logical way which I think is probably more important for for battle ropes. Like if you do your standard sprint interval on a treadmill or a bike, you do your whatever it is like four sprints of 15 seconds. You tend to be doing that against the same resistance if you're on a Goblet squat or you're on an air bike, you just go as hard as you can.

It's relatively unskilled. You just need to go and you get that kind of cardiovascular response. You start to get, feel the fatigue in the muscle and all that starts to happen.

To get the same kind of cardiovascular response with battle ropes, it's important that you probably stress system for a bit more because I'll say the upper body has a lot of muscle mass than lower body so will not have as much of a a cardiac requirement. And you need to be changing these exercises so that you're actually kind of hitting everything. Because that was another kind of thing that I put the limitations of the last study.

We assessed the sprint ability on an arm ergometer. How much transfer is there from battle ropes and arm ergometer? Well, from what we saw there, nothing. In fact like I said, it made it worse. So yeah, for me the jury is out on it. I'm not saying that it doesn't work. I just said it didn't work over two weeks in the protocol that we used. But I'm also not saying that it is amazing and it should be included in every single combat sport person's S&C arsenal either.

James de Lacey43:30

Have you looked at any of the muscle oxygenation data while using battle ropes?

Dr. Andrew Marley43:30

Not yet because that's quite hard, especially if you think of combat athletes, you think of the lightweights and stuff. They don't tend to have big muscles. And that's kind of, and this is the thing. It's so most of the muscle oxygenation stuff, we look at the legs because the vastus lateralis, vastus medialis, vastus intermedius, they're relatively big muscles, relatively what easy to find, too relatively easy to place.

And I'm trying to place a sensor on somebody's anterior delt. If it's somebody like half of your size, then sure, that'd be easy enough. But you got somebody who weighs 57 kilograms, the placement will be kind of off.

So no, we haven't really done that yet, but I would like to do something like that in the future. But we need to make sure that we're one getting suitably trained participants with lots of muscle mass I can actually place the monitors on with confidence that it's actually reading muscle oxygenation levels at the muscle.

James de Lacey44:24

You should have recruited some powerlifters or bodybuilders or something. There should be a few around.

Dr. Andrew Marley44:49

I know, I know. Cardio kills gains. They'll never do that.

James de Lacey44:54

If if someone was looking to experiment with some battle rope stuff, maybe they had that and wanted to do some upper body, how would you recommend they would do the sprint intervals? Would would they run say the exact same protocol as like a bike sprint say like 10 on 20 off or would you need longer intervals with the battle ropes?

Dr. Andrew Marley44:54

I think you need longer intervals. I I would actually go 30 seconds on for for for most people. So I'd say 30 seconds on depending on the fitness level, either one to one up to one to three work to rest ratio for a minimum of four bouts. That's probably what I would say would be the bare minimum.

And even if you wanted to expand on that, you could do 30 seconds double whip, 30 seconds slams, 30 seconds big circles back to that and then you you could kind of run through that a couple of times. But I do think you need to have a much longer period to actually get the muscle stress that we need. And like I said, which will be helped by changing the exercise so you don't kind of get into a rhythm of just kind of going through it for technique.

James de Lacey45:45

Is there is there a cadence consideration too? Like obviously the the two hand the one everyone does is kind of fast but the slams are relatively slow. As fast as you can. Does that work?

Dr. Andrew Marley46:13

As fast as you can.

James de Lacey46:13

Even though the even though you cannot do the slams as fast as say the I don't know what you call this [expletive].

Dr. Andrew Marley46:18

As fast as you can is what he's using there in the left side.

James de Lacey46:22

But and you can't do the slams as fast as that. So is that going to have a different effect then on potentially what is happening at the muscle and—

Dr. Andrew Marley46:22

Potentially, but as long as intensity is there because intensity is what drives adaptation. You need to be stressing the system in some way, shape or form. As long as your intensity is there, you go as fast you can with good form, then with the slams you're using more of the muscle anyway. Or using more muscles should I say. So you'll still be getting that response there.

As long as you're going as fast as you can because that's the thing, battle ropes will never be used to develop power because to develop power you need to be relatively unfatigued. E.g. you do your cleans, you could do your cluster sets, what whatever it is. Battle ropes are a conditioning thing. So yeah, I think when people try to program them for power, that's entirely wrong. But you probably shouldn't as well.

James de Lacey47:19

As have you used them at all for like a high intensity interval training approach? Like you mentioned earlier like your your kind of over a minute intervals for that kind of response?

Dr. Andrew Marley47:19

No, I've not. I think it lends itself a lot more to kind of sprint style stuff. Because again as you said, how do you control for for cadence? You would probably need to have a heart rate monitor on or something with a screen on which you can see the heart rate. You then need to up or down the work rate, try and fall within a set range for the time period because there's no way to really monitor—

James de Lacey47:58

To quantify like yeah.

Dr. Andrew Marley47:58

Exactly. But it's relatively easy to do for for for cycle stuff which has been done to death in in the literature. People done it to heart rate, they've done it to maximal aerobic power or maximal aerobic speed or whatever it is. I think with battle ropes it's a lot more difficult to do. So I think it does lend itself a little more to the sprint interval stuff where you just say right, go as hard as fast as you can because then what they're doing is largely irrelevant as long as they're meeting that maximal volitional effort.

Because that's what we did with the wheelchair basketball guys. It was maximal volitional effort. There's no point trying to match it to heart rate because you have a spinal cord injury. That could then influence exactly how kind of how many reps you in terms of like kind of function with your arms and stuff. So it's not really practical in that sense. So it's much easier that way.

James de Lacey48:47

You mentioned the wheelchair with the wheelchair basketball guys. What what was the test they improved? Was it time was it time trial? Time to exhaustion?

Dr. Andrew Marley48:59

So it was wheelchair basketball. One group did battle ropes, one group didn't for six weeks and they did they trained twice a week and they did 50 second intervals for six bouts. We looked at 20 meter sprints. So 0, 5, 10, 20 meters splits throughout that. There was a modified T test. We looked at hand grip strength and I did 20 minute push test. So we set out a course, how far can you go in 12 minute push test? How far can you go in 12 minutes around the track?

And the group who did no training, everything was the same but they got better or they got worse because they're still doing the normal wheels for basketball training through all this. The group which did the battle ropes, the only thing which improved was their ability to travel on the track. Which then implies an improved VO2 max, but obviously it was inferential because there's an equation that we used to determine VO2 max to be from distance covered.

And that was about it. It didn't actually help with any of the power metrics. Which is also why I'm saying that battle ropes is a conditioning tool. It's not a tool to develop power. Because even in wheelchair sports who rely entirely on the upper body for locomotion, battle ropes did nothing to improve sprint speed or agility. It did however improve their ability to to go. So that that's actually, so that's under peer review just now. Hopefully that is available soon.

James de Lacey50:00

Nice. Nice. And to to round this one out, what would be nice for I think the listeners, your top recommended supplements for fighters. As many or as little as you want.

Dr. Andrew Marley50:00

Vitamin D, obviously. 4,000 IUs per day for most people, or if you want to do it a weekly dose, 50,000. They said potentially less would be fine, but I go by what I would see in the literature or what I would see which people take large weekly doses.

James de Lacey50:59

50,000 used to be the most common one, the one we would see. But isn't 4,000 IUs a day only 32,000?

Dr. Andrew Marley51:08

I was saying earlier, John, because if you take a large weekly dose, a lot of it will become inactive within a week, which you can't then use of time to do anything. Whereas you take the 4,000, you then utilize more of that per bolus, if that makes sense.

So vitamin D, and I'd take omega-3s. No more than 5 g per day, but about 2 g per day for most people, especially if you don't eat oily fish. Make sure that your EPA to DHA ratio is 3:1 with that, because that is better for cardiac function, and it also seems to—the theory being that that ratio will allow the muscle to function a bit better. If you had a DHA to EPA ratio, that seems to be better for brain function.

So maybe when you're tired, switch that around. Who knows? I have no real evidence to suggest one way or the other for that one, but definitely omega-3.

If you can stomach it, beta-alanine. I cannot stomach it at all. I hate the tingle. Those tingles are killer. I can't. If you can stomach it, then that's fine. But again, the important thing to understand with beta-alanine is that taking it as a pre-workout will do nothing for you. And that's obviously what people do. And that's how the supplement companies get you. You want, "Yeah. It's working."

And that's the—it's high caffeine, so you feel your heart going like that. You feel the tingly, and you think, "I must be ready to work out." It's like, "Well, no, you need to be taking beta-alanine consistently for at least 3 weeks before it'll do anything. Even on days that you're not training."

So I would take beta-alanine. Creatine is what I would love to recommend, but only on fighters who are not actively preparing or thinking about preparing for competition. Because we need to think about the weight, which is a big thing. Obviously with creatine, you can take on an extra about 2 kilos of water weight, give or take, roughly. And that could be a problem.

But the thing with creatine is there's some stuff coming out now—it might be useful to help recover for brain injury.

James de Lacey53:32

But again, the jury is out on that. Mostly animal research, isn't it?

Dr. Andrew Marley53:32

Exactly. They are doing a trial just now somewhere in the States, which is looking at creatine as a potential supplement to reduce risk of brain injury, but again, there is nothing really concrete on that. But we do know is that creatine levels in the brain do fall after a concussion, but correlation does not equal causation, obviously.

I would love to recommend creatine, but it would really depend on where the fighter is and their feeling or what they're planning on doing. If a fighter's come back from injury, so let's say they've had a shoulder injury, you may as well take creatine, and you'll be focusing on power strength development of the lower body while rehabilitating the upper body. And then once you've then got the benefits of the creatine, which will potentially allow you to train a little bit more.

In other words, complete more work in each training set. Then stop the creatine, in theory, you'll still have the benefits from having trained well on the creatine, and then after about 4 weeks, your excess water weight from taking the creatine will drop down again. So creatine is a maybe used with caution. And to be honest, that is really about it.

I did have a question in the chat on your opinion on L-citrulline. I don't—with L-citrulline, I don't think the evidence is not quite there yet, to be honest. I don't think it'll do you any harm, but I don't think it's going to help either. That's just my opinion on it. But like I said, with a lot of these supplements, a lot of the market, a lot of things you'll see on social media, are just that.

James de Lacey55:29

They're just kind of bunk. Now, the citrulline is like a vasodilator, basically. It's like a—it's like the nitric oxide. It's like the new nitric oxide that they like to push.

Dr. Andrew Marley55:42

Yeah. Like I said, it will not hurt, but I'm not sure it'll help either. So I'm not willing to say one way or the other until I see enough concrete evidence that makes me go, "Yeah, this is something that we could take." Oh, we don't know what is optimal L-citrulline levels. How do you define that? We don't know.

James de Lacey56:11

Okay. And just to quickly finish this, on beta-alanine. So obviously, mechanism of beta-alanine, more carnosine. The idea is that you buffer the acidity. But if you go—I mean, if you talk to like Dutch John Barry, acidity is seen as probably a good thing for maintaining force production.

Dr. Andrew Marley56:30

So what is happening? What is happening with beta-alanine? Why is that potentially giving us better short-term endurance?

James de Lacey56:30

In summary, I don't know.

Dr. Andrew Marley56:30

Yeah, I don't know either. That's why I'm asking you. I'm like, this doesn't make sense to me.

James de Lacey56:30

No.

Dr. Andrew Marley56:30

Because I am with John on this one. So it's really funny. So obviously, John was my PhD supervisor, and we both teach at Abertay. He teaches physiology, I teach strength and conditioning. And I'll say something, and then John will in the very next class go, "What he said is a load of rubbish. Load of shite. Not true." The students come back to me and go, "John said this." And I'll go, "Well, fine, but this is my counter argument." So we end up arguing through the students through the course of one academic year.

So the students quite like it because they're basically—everything I say, John hates weight training, obviously. He thinks it's stupid.

James de Lacey57:17

Yep. He's very vocal about that.

Dr. Andrew Marley57:27

But I think weight training is good as long as you don't just do bouldering. Everything has its place, though. But I do agree that this idea of metabolic acidosis causing fatigue, it doesn't quite add up because when you look at a lot of the papers which investigate fatigue, they look at skinned muscle fibers which were treated at temperatures of probably 5° C or they were stored at sub-zero temperatures. Humans don't function like that. Our muscles aren't skinned, and we have a core body temperature of 37° Celsius.

And when you actually have a look at things like the effect of acidity on muscle fibers which are done at higher temperatures, which I think the highest I've seen is 25° Celsius, the effect on acidity and contraction loss wasn't actually there.

So I think that's also important to understand. And even if you look at the position statement for the International Society of Sports Nutrition, the ISSN—them—anyway, they have a really good position statement on beta-alanine. It does review the papers on beta-alanine, but it locks in this idea of carnosine being a muscle buffer. And I'm not convinced that that's actually the answer.

I think carnosine is doing something else. Now, for what that is, I'm not sure, but not really willing to say one way or the other. But I don't think it's muscle buffering because of these other papers which have looked at these skinned muscle fibers and stuff. Something's not quite adding up. I'm not going to say—

James de Lacey59:22

That's why I asked you the question. Because it's not adding up for me, either.

Dr. Andrew Marley59:26

I'm not going to say something is good or something is bad unless I have some evidence. If I know something, I'll just say it. I don't know. But I do think what we have seen is that it does tend to work provided you can stomach the tingles. And this has been seen throughout a bunch of different papers.

I think the evidence is more strongly leading towards beta-alanine working than it not. However, the mechanism behind it I don't know. I really don't know because at least with vitamin D research, it's also linked to health. So with health, there's more money. With more money, there's a lot more money which goes into the mechanics of it. Beta-alanine is very much a sports supplement. And by default, no one wants to fund that. Doesn't have as much—it doesn't have as much clout with it as well.

Even then, even if it was a health benefit, I couldn't see my granny taking beta-alanine. It would—

James de Lacey1:00:17

Tingling her face off on the couch. I was just speaking out. Just saying.

Dr. Andrew Marley1:00:31

Awkward. It'd be kind of funny actually. But you know what I'm saying? It just doesn't make—like I said, the whole idea of muscle growth just doesn't make sense. To me, it doesn't make sense to be honest with you. Maybe some people will disagree with me and that's perfectly fine. I'm not going to get bothered over a difference of opinion.

But no, I think it has something to do with carbohydrate metabolism. Potentially, but I don't know what that is yet. As crazy as it is, it's not—that'll be a second PhD.

James de Lacey1:00:31

Oh god, no more.

Dr. Andrew Marley1:01:07

Oh, I would love to do something actually looking at carbohydrate metabolism with beta-alanine. But again, that would be a whole bunch of money which I do not have at the moment.

James de Lacey1:01:07

No, fair enough. That's a good way to end the pod, Andy. Where can people find and follow you? Keep up with what you're doing. Keep up with the research, etc.

Dr. Andrew Marley1:01:07

So I got a research gate a couple months ago. So that's exciting. So I want you to—I know follow you. I know it's very fancy. So what else? I've got research gate. You can also get me on Instagram or LinkedIn. I'm on those things. Or you can just email me at a.barley@abertay.ac.uk. More than happy to fire you a back and chat nonsense about what I've been doing.

James de Lacey1:01:07

Nice. I'll link that up in the description video if anyone's interested.

But I appreciate you coming on and sharing all the knowledge and research on vitamin D.

Dr. Andrew Marley1:01:51

Oh, it's pleasure to be on. Love it.