👋 Hey. Welcome to issue #53 of The Everyday Athlete Newsletter.
Yew! The newsletter turns 1 today 🎉
As always, thank you for your time and attention every Friday. I promise to keep doing my best to make it worthwhile for you each week. Good things to come.
Anyway here are my 3 favourite ideas, learns and resources to help you improve your performance this week (4 min read):
🏎 Healthy mitochondria: upgrade your engine
Year 9 science taught us that mitochondria are the powerhouse of our cells.
They're like these little factories that take in food and turn it into energy. This energy is a molecule called "ATP". And it's the fuel that our bodies need to move, breathe and function.
Lots of strong and healthy mitochondria give us more energy to handle stressors like cold, heat, altitude, poison, radiation. Having healthy mitochondria is like having a Ferrari engine.
The opposite – unhealthy mitochondria – is a likely cause of cardiovascular and neurodegenerative diseases, cancer, diabetes, obesity, and aging. It’s like having my old Chinese-built $1200 piece of shit moped (good for a breakdown every 2 months) as your engine.
See, (kinda like how an engine blows smoke) when mitochondria turn our food into energy they leak molecules called free radicals. These little fuckers then fly around the body damaging our healthy cells.
Anti-oxidants help neutralise free radicals. But even a bucket of blueberries won’t protect us from free radical damage (i.e. oxidative stress).
What we’re after is more, healthier and stronger mitochondria – they produce less free radicals and (like anti-oxidants) help neutralise them.
"I am convinced that it is impossible to be healthy without also having healthy mitochondria." – Dr Peter Attia
Righto, things that help build more, stronger, healthier mitochondria:
- 🚬 Avoiding smoking, drinking, eating crap, overeating, pollution, overtraining
- 💤 Sleep
- 🌡 Sauna and ice
- 🏃 Steady-state endurance training (zone 2) – specifically the mitochondria in our type 2, slow twitch muscle fibres
- 🏋 Power training (short, all-out effort with lots of rest) – specifically in our type 1, fast twitch muscle fibres (big dive into this next week)
Note: There's other stuff that's been proven to help our mitochondria. But they come with a cost. For example, fasting (at the risk of losing muscle), caloric restriction (at the risk of being unenjoyable/unsustainable) and high-intensity interval training (at the risk of lactate build up – soreness, low energy, higher free radical release and hormonal imbalances).
So the 5 dot points above are the most bang for your buck. More on the specific power training we can do for our mitochondrial health next week.
💬 Aussie actor and author Frederick Alexander on habits
"People do not decide their futures, they decide their habits and their habits decide their futures."
Choose well.
🏃 Finish the stress response
Our stress response looks something like this:
- 👀 We sense a threat
- 🏃 We have a fight/flight/freeze response
- 😌 Threat over, we’re safe
If that was a million years ago on the Serengeti, we’d either be fighting a predator, running from it or getting eaten by it.
See, the stress response is physical. Our brain releases chemicals like adrenaline and cortisol. Our heart rate, blood pressure, breath rate increase. Our liver pumps us with energy, converting glycogen to glucose. Other systems like our digestive system and reproduction shut down.
That's how it was designed – to keep us alive.
This same response is now triggered by emails, traffic and social media comments. But with no physical outlet, these chemicals and energy just sit in our bodies.
“It’s not like you actually take fight or flight and use that surge of cranked-up energy and awareness in you. Most get cranked up and hold onto it. The body experiences a degree of toxicity just trying to absorb and process it.
You have to let it go. Otherwise, you keep yourself in that state and the system keeps producing chemical reactions to deal with it - inefficient and toxic. It’s not designed to do that.” – Laird Hamilton
So when we do get stressed in an everyday situation, we have to finish the stress response.
My favourite way is to mimic our ancestors... go find a tiger and fight it.
Ha, nah – it's to move.
Run. Walk. Exercise snack. Dance.
(Down-regulation breathing works too)
Release it.
(Our stress response can still be a useful tool. But only if it’s short-lived. Sport, interviews, presentations, and genuine emergencies are good examples where it can be helpful. But we still have to finish the stress response. Sport does this naturally. Most other situations don’t.)
So if you get cranked up, get moving after.
That's it!
Have a great weekend 🤙
Matt
P.s.
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