Wu Tsai Human Performance, Episode 2

The second Wu Tsai episode moves into recovery, and into one of the more surprising lines of work from Dr Panda's laboratory. The finding that exercise can go badly wrong when nutrition does not keep up with it.

Exercise is reliably good for body and mind, yet some people who train heavily end up with worse health rather than better. His group's work on this showed that exercising with insufficient nutrition compromises the function of nearly every organ examined and inverts the circadian clocks in most regions of the brain, an effect large enough to reframe under fuelling as a timing problem as well as an energy one. It gives a mechanistic account of something coaches have long observed without being able to measure.

That leads into what better biomarkers of healthy versus unhealthy training might look like, and what optimum nutrition for performance and recovery would involve. The most useful episode here for anyone working with athletes at high training loads.