60-yr-old CEO, scientist, 11x Ironman, RAAM winner, elite masters runner, author of The Toughness Myth (real-world, evidence-based mental toughness strategies)
Ft. Collins, Colorado
Joined April 2014
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- Following1.6K
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Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Across 23 studies, heat training reduced core temperature and heart rate more, raised sweat rate more and improved hot-weather performance more than identical temperate training.
pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/4263…
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Peres Jepchirchir has won the Olympic, World Champs, Boston, NYC, and London marathons. An insane record...
She just tested positive for EPO.
She essentially stole at least $1.5 million in prize money alone in her career. Much more in appearance and sponsorship.
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Regular Long Runs and Higher Training Volumes Are Associated with Better Running Economy Durability in Performance Matched Well-Trained Male Runners
ovid.com/jnls/acsm-msse/abst…
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Marathon runners who go out conservatively and speed up tend to beat those who bank time early. A review of pacing physiology found negative splits improve glycogen sparing, thermoregulation, and cardiovascular drift versus a fast start.
pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/article…
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Are you carb-loading wrong? In the latest ep of Exercise Science, @mackinprof & @gibalam ask @louisemaryburke to walk through the latest science on carb-loading for marathons.
Learn more:
realexercisescience.com/p/ca…
#exercisephysiology #sportsnutrition
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Creatine supplementation speeds up the recovery process from post-workout fatigue, seemingly by affecting the secondary muscle damage effect.
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Physical activity may help protect the aging brain for nearly a decade.
Older adults with a higher VO₂ peak had larger cortical brain volumes and better memory years after a 5-year exercise intervention, regardless of whether they had been assigned to high-intensity, moderate-intensity training, or standard physical activity guidelines.
The group following the guidelines also experienced the least hippocampal volume loss, even four years after the intervention ended. High-intensity training was not superior for preserving hippocampal volume in this study, which I found genuinely surprising.
This does not mean HIIT harms the brain. Entering older age with strong cardiorespiratory fitness, and continuing to stay active, may matter more for long-term brain health than following any one specific training intensity/exercise prescription.
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Consuming carbohydrates before an intense bout of endurance running reduces the post-exercise muscle damage and inflammation responses, likely thereby reducing fatigue and allowing faster recovery after exercise.
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Arnold Schwarzenegger's no complaining rule:
“No complaining about a situation unless you're prepared to do something to make it better. If you see a problem and you don't come to the table with a potential solution, I don't want to hear your whining about how bad it is. It couldn't be that bad if it hasn't motivated you to try to fix it.”
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
"Carbohydrates aren’t a shield against chronic under-fueling. But if you can’t restore a deficit immediately, the type of calories you preserve probably matter."
In today's newsletter.
physiologicallyspeaking.com/…
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Higher aerobic fitness is associated with a lower Alzheimer's risk.
Moderately fit and fit adults had a 46% and 48% lower risk of developing Alzheimer’s, respectively, and every 1 mL/kg/min higher VO₂ peak was associated with a 4% lower risk.
Remaining above 80% of the sex-specific average VO₂ peak (25.1 for men and 20.9 for women) was associated with a substantially lower risk.
*Among adults aged 70-77
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Listen to World champion Josh Kerr:
“I don’t do crazy workouts or crazy mileage. I just don’t miss days.
Consistency is my biggest weapon.
I’ll break any athlete down with how consistent I’m going to be training wise and just getting the work done.”
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Supplements like sodium bicarbonate, beta-alanine, beetroot juice, and caffeine can boost endurance by ~1-3%. What about their impact on adaptation? Read the blog: mssa.app/efg
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
The reason anyone gets insanely rich is almost always because of the stock market. It certainly how @elonmusk did.
And the reason they get rich from the stock market, is because 150m Americans decided they wanted to own shares of stocks directly, or through their retirement plans, or through other approaches as a way of building their net worth and trying to create a better life for themselves.
One Hundred Fifty Million Americans. About 60% of adults.
Effectively believing that @elonmusk and many billionaires could make them wealthier and help them achieve a better life.
If you want @elonmusk , and most billionaires to no longer be that rich, convince those 150m to sell their stocks, funds, ETFs whatever.
Of course you would wipe out the net-worth of most of those people, and everyone else’s savings, as the markets crashed and brought down the economy and created the worst depression we have ever seen.
Alternatively
There are ways to improve healthcare access and eventually make it available to all.
To start -
If you want @elonmusk and all billionaires to improve healthcare for everyone , ask them to stop doing business with the enormous healthcare conglomerates and to work directly with transparently priced care providers.
It’s the behemoth HC conglomerates that make HC so bad for so many. (Check my timeline for more detail)
Removing them would push the cost of healthcare down for everyone. Their corporate decisions impact our healthcare cost and availability.
Of course if they do that, not only would our HC costs go down , and the quality of care for their employees and the entire country go up
But
They would see their corporate cash flow increase dramatically and we would have more millionaires, billionaires and maybe even another trillionaire when that cash flow moved from the big health care conglomerates to their bottom line, so would the net worth of the 150 million American adults that own public stocks
Capitalism is better than socialism because 150m Americans can influence exactly what happens in this country.
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Strength training for 90-120 minutes per week is associated with up to a 30% lower risk of death from all causes, CVD, cancer, and neurologic disease.
That seems to be the upper limit - no additional benefit was observed above 120 minutes of strength training per week.
These benefits were independent of total aerobic activity, but combining strength training with ~5-15 hours of moderate-to-vigorous-intensity aerobic activity reduced all-cause mortality risk by 45%!
Clear message here is: "do both."
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Rest doesn't protect the arthritic knee... activity nourishes it and has been proven to result in significant pain relief. And... high-intensity running shows the greatest pain relief. Not intuitive at all...
Don't rest your arthritic knee; you're not protecting anything, and you're throwing your general health under the bus.
If you don't tolerate any load... well-- then it might be time to talk to your surgeon.
🤖 Made with AI
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Conclusion
The message is the same as before. Carbohydrates win, and fat is not an efficient fuel for high-performance exercise. Yes, you can run a long way at a slow pace on a high-fat diet. For the 0.00001% of people whose entire sporting goal is to finish a 200 km ultramarathon at 5 km/h, the LCHF approach can technically work. For the rest of endurance sport, where pace at threshold determines outcomes and where the difference between fuels shows up in seconds per kilometre, the answer has not changed in a hundred years. Carbohydrate oxidation produces more ATP per litre of oxygen consumed. More ATP per litre of oxygen means more power at the same VO2. More power at the same VO2 means you finish ahead of the keto guy. Noakes can rewrite the historical literature, exclude inconvenient elite-athlete data, and lean on a 10 g/h carbohydrate dose that itself proves his own original LCHF claim wrong, but the stoichiometry does not negotiate.
Carbs win.
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
Why WADA bans things:
Performance Enhancement: There is medical or scientific evidence that the substance or method can improve or has the potential to improve athletic performance. This is <5% of the substances on the list
Health Risk: The substance or method poses an actual or potential risk to the athlete’s health and well-being.
Violation of the Spirit of Sport: The use of the substance goes against the fundamental ethics and values of athletic competition. This is MOST of the substances on the list
Brad Cooper, PhD retweeted
After 50, your hippocampus shrinks by 1 to 2% per year.
A 12-month aerobic exercise trial in older adults reversed that. The exercise group gained 2% in hippocampal volume. The stretching controls lost 1.4%. That 3.4-percentage-point gap reverses roughly one to two years of typical age-related decline. Spatial memory improved, and the gains correlated with hippocampal volume changes.
That trial, run by Kirk Erickson's team at Pittsburgh and published in PNAS in 2011, remains one of the strongest single pieces of cognitive-aging intervention evidence we have in healthy older adults. It hasn't been overturned. It's been extended and validated in larger meta-analyses since.
A paper published this month in the Journals of Gerontology adds the mechanism we can't directly measure in humans. The team took 18-month-old mice (roughly equivalent to a person in their 50s or 60s, depending on the conversion table), induced neuroinflammation, and gave them eight weeks of moderate aerobic exercise. Hippocampal mitochondrial homeostasis recovered. Inflammation, oxidative stress, and apoptosis all fell. Memory impairment reversed.
Mouse to human translation isn't automatic. We can't measure mitochondrial dynamics in living human hippocampus, because no one is biopsying living human brain. The mechanism is inferred in humans, not proven. But the human imaging outcomes are real, replicated, and unambiguous.
This is what gets lost in cognitive aging marketing.
Brain health products line shelves. Nootropics, mushroom blends, lion's mane, NAD precursors, methylene blue. Every one is sold with mechanism claims (often plausible) and weak or absent cognitive outcome data. The single intervention with replicated structural brain outcomes in healthy older adults is exercise. It's free, requires no bottle, and takes 150 minutes a week.
Sleep is the other real competitor. The cognitive evidence for sleep quality is solid, and the structural brain effects of chronic poor sleep are well documented. Treat sleep and exercise as the two foundations, not as alternatives.
What the data actually supports:
150 minutes of moderate aerobic exercise per week, split into 3 to 4 sessions of 30 to 45 minutes. Moderate means you can hold a conversation but not sing. Heart rate around 60 to 70 percent of your maximum. Brisk walking on an incline, light jogging, cycling at a sustainable pace, swimming, rowing. The Erickson protocol used progressive walking, ramping up duration over the first weeks until participants were sustaining roughly 40-minute sessions at moderate intensity.
Vigorous exercise produces similar benefits in roughly half the time, though the evidence base is smaller in older adults specifically.
Resistance training has growing evidence for cognitive aging. The SMART trial in Sydney showed it slowed brain atrophy in adults with mild cognitive impairment. It's worth doing for several reasons, including independent mobility, bone density, and fall prevention. But the cognitive-specific evidence stack is thinner than for aerobic exercise.
What the data does not support:
That compounds or cognitive training apps substitute for exercise. Nothing in those categories has reached the structural brain outcomes Erickson demonstrated.
That casual walking counts as the trial dose. The intervention used elevated heart rate, sustained for 30 or more minutes, multiple sessions per week. Walking your dog around the block is good for you. It's not what was tested.
The bottom line:
If you're over 50 and not currently doing 150 minutes a week of moderate aerobic exercise, this is the single highest-confidence intervention with replicated structural brain outcomes for the second half of life. Sleep is the other foundation. Everything else, every compound and app and stack, sits below those two on the evidence ladder.
Start with 10 minutes of brisk walking three times this week. Build to 30 minutes. Get to 150 minutes a week by month two. That's the kind of progression that produced 2% hippocampal growth in 12 months.
Li et al., J Gerontol A, 2026
Erickson et al., PNAS, 2011
Colcombe et al., J Gerontol A, 2003
Northey et al., Br J Sports Med, 2018
Suo et al., Mol Psychiatry, 2016
