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Trail runners can dual fuel with carbs and ketones! (here's why)

Michael Brandt is the Founder-CEO of HVMN, a company that makes exogenous ketones. In this clip from our interview on the Singletrack Podcast, he talks about dual fueling with carbohydrates and exogenous ketones.

Interested in using exogenous ketones to improve your nutritional strategy in training and racing? Use code Singletrack20 at this link (https://hvmn.com/ketone?rfsn=7023148.ebe5d8) to get 20% off your first order from HVMN.

Transcript:

Finn:

So you said something interesting there about being friends with all the carbohydrate products out there.

I want to ask you this question around whether your product interferes with carbon intake because - and I've joked about this on Twitter before - there are people out there who, you know, if you eat anything but carbs, you're dead to them. And there are other people who if eat anything but fat or protein, you're dead to them. So it's almost like the Democrats and the Republicans of Nutritional Twitter.

So I'm curious: do exogenous ketones solve a lot of problems here by allowing runners to eat whatever they want in tandem with this product?

Michael:

It's funny that there's this Holy War around nutrition that that doesn't need to be. What you want is metabolic flexibility. What you want to do, the perfect way to train for a race, what we see from our elite athlete partners is the development of metabolic flexibility.

You develop the ability for your body to be able to run without carbs. I don't care how fit you are at the end of your 50 miler. Your glycogen stores are depleted, and I don't care how many Honey Stingers you've tried to eat, like you're, you cannot eat fast enough, your GI system cannot process enough to be able to supply you with your energy demand for a 50 mile race.

So you, even if you carb loaded and tapered for the whole week prior, you're gonna have run out of glycogen glucose. Your body is going to be having to operate in a low blood sugar context, meaning it needs to be able to tap into its fat and ketone system, so it's advantageous as a runner to develop that.

If we're talking endurance, it's really helpful to do some workouts in a facet state. Again, not your high intensity ones, but your lower intensity wants to train that.

I had dinner with Zach Bitter the other night in Austin. He's super keto, right? His stance is making that fat system hyper efficient, like fats into ketones, super efficient. You get less inflammation when you're using fats and ketones. It's more efficient where you're using less oxygen to turn that into usable energy, so he doesn't wanna touch carbs.

Standard school of thought has been carb loading before the race, but even a lot of the old school coaches, they still push doing fasted runs and developing that flexibility. So there's no way around it. You're gonna, at some point be using both fuel systems. I don't see it as an either or - it really doesn't need to be.

What Ketone-IQ allows you to do is it gives you a bioavailable fuel source that goes through this ketones pathway that is generally untapped except to the extent that your body is making its own ketones from fat.

So it's strictly just additive on top. We call it like dual fueling. You're able to have more ketones. You're just able to get more metabolites through the expressway into your cells than if you were having carbohydrates alone.

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