Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Irene Davis from the University of South Florida who is a top running injuries researcher and the current president of the American College of Sports Medicine. She makes the argument that we were born to run and have evolved to land on the ball of the foot during running and this reduces impact load compared with landing on the heel. Modern running shoes tend to increase the likelihood of landing on one’s heel. She is a fan of minimalist shoes, which...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Dr David Martin. David has a remarkable and varied background starting off as a research scientist at the Australian Institute Sport and then National Sports Science Coordinator at Cycling Australia. He then became Director, Performance Research and Development at the Philadelphia 76ers. He is currently Chief Scientist, Director of Performance at Apeiron Life, San Francisco where he works to improve the healthspan of high net worth individuals. He is also an...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Mark Haykowsky from the University of Alberta, Canada and remarkable heart transplant recipients Dwight Kroening, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada and Elmar Sprink, Cologne, Germany. Dwight was very fit before a heart defect resulted in his heart transplantation (HT) way back in 1986. Elmar was an endurance athlete who suffered a series of cardiac arrests before his HT 12 years ago. They have undertaken Ironman triathlons and more. Both had VO2 maxes in the...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Associate Professor Chris Fry from the University of Kentucky, USA. Joint injury causes muscle weakness and atrophy (reductions in muscle size) due to the the inactivity but also separately due to the injury itself. Substances are released from muscle to help repair the joint/bone. Prehab is important before surgery. There can be residual effects long after joint injury. We also discussed hypertrophy and aging and the importance of having a lot of muscle...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Assistant Professor Kevin Murach who is a rising star from the University of Arkansas, USA. Kevin is an expert on muscle, muscle growth, adaptation to exercise training, “muscle memory”, the regulation of muscle growth and muscle memory and the effect of aging etc. Muscle memory definitely seems real (especially in slow muscle fibers). Looks like epigenetics involved more than changes to muscle fibers nuclei. But more work needs to be done, especially in humans....

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Dr Nicola Guess from Oxford University, England and Professor Jonathan Little from the University of British Columbia, Canada. Nicola is a dietitian researcher with many years of expertise including the importance or otherwise of glucose “spikes” or excursions and the pros and cons of continuous glucose monitor use. Jonathan is an expert on exercise metabolism who is coming onto the podcast for the second time after speaking previously about keto diets and...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Associate Professor from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, USA. Jill is an expert on the brain and exercise. We discussed the effect of acute (one bout) and chronic physical activity/ exercise on cognitive function, brain blood flow (BBF), dementia/Alzheimer’s disease risk and progression etc. A very interesting chat. Twitter: @Barnes_Lab0:00. Introduction and welcome2:01. How Jill got into exercise research4:25. Studying with Hiro O. Tanaka6:00. Researching...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Margie Davenport from the University of Alberta, Canada. She is an expert on exercise and pregnancy. We discussed the effect of pregnancy on the health (including pre-eclampsia and gestational diabetes) and exercise performance of the mother and on the health of the fetus during pregnancy and the offspring after pregnancy. It became very clear that there needs to be more focus on the beneficial effects of exercise before and during pregnancy on both the...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Darren Candow from the University of Regina. Saskatchewan, Canada. He is an expert on creatine (Cr) and the effects of creatine supplementation on resistance exercise and other exercise. He is also examining the role of creatine in bone metabolism and cognitive function.Get greater increases in strength than muscle mass when supplement with Cr during resistance training. Vegetarians/vegans have lower muscle but not lower brain Cr. Need to exercise to get...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Associate Professor Nisha Charkoudian from the US Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, Natick, Massachusetts, USA. She is an expert on the effects of extreme environments on exercise capacity. We talked about dehydration, electrolytes, effects of humid vs dry environments etc. We also discussed the importance of considering sex as a biological variable. This included including both sexes in studies even if underpowered to examine both. We then...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Associate Professor from the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is an expert on the effect of beta2-agonist asthma bronchodilator medications (like Ventolin) on muscle and exercise performance. We talked about what is asthma/exercise induced bronchoconstriction, can you train your lungs?, the increased prevalence of asthma in endurance athletes, can asthma limit aerobic capacity, what are beta2-agonists?, acute and chronic effects of beta2-agonists on muscle...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Luc can Loon from Maastricht University, The Netherlands. He is an expert with a wealth of knowledge on the role of physical activity/exercise and nutrition on muscle adaptation. A lot of his research focuses on protein and protein synthesis. He applies these studies to young healthy individuals, the aged and also has conducted important experiments on people in ICU. He makes it clear that most people, especially athletes, get enough protein in their...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Michael Kjær from the Department of Clinical Medicine, Bispebjerg Hospital, the University of Copenhagen, Denmark. He is an expert on tendons and exercise. We chatted about muscle vs musculotendinous junction vs tendon, what structures get injured and why, tendon injuries: mechanisms, prevention, treatment, acute vs chronic/overuse tendon injuries, best to rest or exercise injured tendons?, whether diet, supplements or medicine can assist recovery from...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Sue Bodine from the Oklahoma Medical ResearchFoundation, Oklahoma, USA. She is an expert on muscle, in particular muscle atrophy with inactivity/aging. We chatted about how with age muscle size is reduced and this is associated with a reduction in muscle fiber size and also a loss of fast muscle fibers. Resistance training (and perhaps intense endurance exercise) can attenuate the rate of muscle atrophy. We discussed how much muscle atrophy is due to age...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Shona Halson from the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia. We chatted about how much sleep athletes need compared with how much sleep they actually get. Night sleep vs naps vs total sleep in athletes vs non athletes. The importance of consistency of sleep. Caffeine, sleep and exercise performance. Is overtraining actually a lot less common than believed? Ice baths may reduce hypertrophy with resistance training but improve team...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Assoc Prof Andre La Gerche a world leading Sports Cardiologist from St Vincent’s Institute of Medical Research, Melbourne, Australia. Acute exercise for long periods at a high intensity can result in abnormal right ventricle function. In addition, years of long, hard exercise training is associated with increased coronary artery calcium (CAC) levels and atrial fibrillation (AF). Despite this, Andre is a huge advocate of exercise across the population and generally...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Wim Derave from the Ghent University in Belgium. We talked about the different muscle fibres/fiber types in humans and his recent evidence that pure Type 2X muscle fibers may not really exist or maybe only in some sedentary individuals. He also made the point that muscle fiber type info is not used enough in sports contexts. He outlined some non invasive ways of estimating your muscle fibre types. Finally we discussed remarkable and important findings...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor José Calbet from the University of Las Palmas de Gran, Canary Islands, Spain. José has a very strong research record and is a global leader in his field. He has done amazing invasive exercise studies in humans to determine the limiting factor(s) to VO2 max. We talked about what is VO2 max, the factors determining VO2 max, the limits to VO2 max, the effects of VO2 max on exercise performance, pseudoanemia, VO2 max in females, VO2 max in masters athletes...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Ylva Hellsten from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. She is an authority on the effect of exercise on blood flow and cardiovascular function. We talked about heart rate before exercise and blood flow and blood pressure during and after exercise. She pointed out that muscle blood flow can increase by 100-fold during exercise! We discussed the effect of physical activity and aging/inactivity and menopause on the cardiovascular system. Also the...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with his great collaborator Professor Erik Richter from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. Erik is an absolute authority and the godfather of the field of glucose metabolism during exercise and how exercise increases insulin sensitivity in muscle. He was the first to show that contraction can increase muscle glucose uptake without insulin but at the same time exercise increases insulin sensitivity. Very relevant for all including people with diabetes. We talked...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Associate Professor Jeremy Loenneke from the University of Mississippi, USA. He is an expert on resistance training and in particular the effect of blood flow restriction (BFR) on muscle hypertrophy and strength. He is finding that you can get similar increases in hypertrophy, and close to similar increases in strength, by conducting low load resistance training with blood flow restriction compared with high load resistance training. Surprisingly, he is also...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor David Wright from the University of British Columbia, Canada. He has undertaken a lot of important work on the effect of exercise on muscle glucose uptake and mitochondria and then has branched out to examine the effect of exercise training on mitochondria in adipose tissue (fat). We discussed his work around that and then talked about an interesting new focus of his work around the metabolic effects of antipsychotics. He is finding that exercise can...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Karyn Esser from the University of Florida, USA. She is an authority on circadian biology. We discuss whether exercise affects muscle circadian clocks and whether muscle clocks affect exercise. What is the best time to exercise and to eat etc. Also the effects of jet lag and shift work and how to best manage these. A very interesting chat. Karyn’s Twitter: @kaesser.0:00. Introduction2:30. How Karyn got into exercise research.4:40. She was “picked up” by...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor David Bishop from Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. He has a broad background in exercise physiology research and has focused for many years on exercise and muscle mitochondria. He finds that low volume, prolonged exercise tends to increase mitochondrial volume more than mitochondrial function while sprint exercise training does the opposite, increasing mitochondrial function more than mitochondrial volume. He hypothesizes that polarized type...