#144 - Phil Maffetone: Optimizing health and performance through maximal aerobic function

The Peter Attia Drive

Peter Attia, MD

Health & Fitness, Medicine, Fitness

4.7 • 7.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 January 2021

⏱️ 82 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Phil Maffetone is an author, health practitioner, and coach with decades of experience helping everyone from amateurs to world-class athletes optimize their health and performance. In this episode, Phil explains the importance of developing the aerobic system, defines maximum aerobic function (MAF), and explains how to determine your MAF heart rate. He then demonstrates how to integrate that into a training protocol which is designed to help people move faster at a sub maximum heart rate and increase fat utilization as the primary source of fuel—emphasizing the importance of nutrition on one's capacity to oxidize fat. Phil also extracts training insights from the amazing feats of world-class marathoners, explores the impact of a low-carb diet on one’s capacity for high intensity exercise and anaerobic performance, and explains the downstream effects of being “overfat.”

We discuss:

Phil’s background in running, and training insights from a six-day race (2:30);
The difference between being “fit” and being “healthy” (11:00);
Defining the aerobic and anaerobic systems, and why VO2 max doesn’t predict performance (18:15);
Defining maximum aerobic function (MAF), determining your MAF heart rate with Phil’s 180 Formula, and why a strong aerobic system is crucial to health and performance (24:00);
Using the MAF test to track and improve your aerobic fitness (37:30);
How increasing your sub-max pace at a given heart rate can increase your maximum pace (40:00);
The impact of nutrition on one’s ability to use fat as fuel while exercising (43:00);
Phil’s nutritional approach with patients, the concept of “carbohydrate intolerance” (51:45);
Assessing the impact of a low-carb diet on high intensity exercise and anaerobic performance (58:00);
Extracting insights from world-class marathoners (1:04:45);
How being “overfat” affects health and performance, and ways to decrease excess body fat (1:13:30); and
More.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey everyone, welcome to the Drive Podcast.
0:13.0	I'm your host, Peter Atia.
0:14.8	This podcast, my website, and my weekly newsletter, I'll focus on the goal of translating
0:18.7	the science of longevity into something accessible for everyone.
0:22.4	Our goal is to provide the best content in health and wellness, full stop, and we've assembled
0:27.0	a great team of analysts to make this happen.
0:29.4	If you enjoy this podcast, we've created a membership program that brings you far more
0:33.2	in depth content if you want to take your knowledge of this space to the next level.
0:37.3	At the end of this episode, I'll explain what those benefits are, or if you want to learn
0:41.0	more now, head over to peteratiamd.com forward slash subscribe.
0:46.3	Now without further delay, here's today's episode.
0:49.0	I guess this week is Phil Maffton.
0:53.4	Phil is an author, a coach, health practitioner.
0:57.2	Where as many hats, and many of you will probably recognize him as he's written a number of
1:01.3	books, the 80s, 90s, and today, basically covering a number of aspects of exercise,
1:08.1	sports, medicine, biofeedback, nutrition.
1:10.3	I first probably came across Phil's work when I was in college, and I was interested in
1:14.8	aerobic training, trying to improve my cycling performance at the time, and became pretty
1:19.4	interested in the way he was advocating for a very low intensity relative to what I was
1:24.4	doing approach, which of course today in hindsight seems to be quite the logical thing to do.
1:29.9	Phil's background is in biology, he has a doctorate in chiropractic, and he also is also
1:35.0	history in Chinese medicine and kinesiology.
	...

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