Inside Exercise

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...

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 b...

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 focu...

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: @k...

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, incre...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Russell Hepple from the University of Florida, USA. He is an expert on muscle mitochondria. We tend to think of the mitochondria as the powerhouse of the cell. As Russ clearly explains there is a lot more going on than only this. It is very important that the inner mitochondrial membrane remains impermeable. However, there are situations such as aging, ischem...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Dr Orla O’Sullivan from the Teagasc Food Research Centre, from Ireland. She is a research expert effect of diet and exercise on the gut microbiome (the types of cells in the gut microbiome based on the DNA measurements). She has looked at the gut microbiota in rugby players, cricketers, ironman and other sports. She emphasized the importance of having a diverse gut mic...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Mike Tipton from University of Portsmouth, England. He is an absolute authority on exercise in extreme environments. We talked initially about his important work examining the causes and prevention of drowning in cold water. Autonomic conflict and triathlon mass starts. We then discussed exercise in the cold and cold adaptations and cross adaptation between c...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Dr Edward Chambers from Imperial College London who is an expert on the gut microbiota, exercise and metabolism. He has shown that some fibre can be fermented to short chain fatty acids (SCFA) by gut microbiota which can influence skeletal muscle metabolism. In addition, these SCFA can affect appetite. He has also shown that exercise and/or carbohydrate ingestion reduc...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Benjamin Miller from the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) who is an expert on muscle proteostasis /plasticity in response to exercise and aging. He has evidence that muscle atrophy with aging may be due more to increased protein breakdown than reduced protein synthesis. He also has found that the top diabetes drug metformin can impair some of the b...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Dr Carlos Henríquez-Olguín from The University of Copenhagen, Denmark. Carlos is an up and coming rising star exercise metabolism researcher. He discusses the challenges of doing mechanistic exercise research in Chile and how he ended up moving to the University of Copenhagen. Language challenges etc. He has been doing really ground breaking research on reactive oxygen...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Emeritus Professor Michael Gleeson from Loughborough University, England. He is the biggest global name with many decades of research examining the effects of exercise and diet on the immune system. Exercise is beneficial for the immune system unless it is undertaken at a very high /elite level. A very interesting chat. Twitter: @profmikegleeson 0:00. Introduction/Mich...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Dr Paul Cohen from Translational Research Institute for Metabolism and Diabetes, AdventHealth Orlando, Florida, USA. He has a very strong track record of research examining muscle mitochondria in health and disease and in particular the effects of exercise in attenuating the reductions in mitochondrial function with age. A very interesting chat. Twitter: @CoenPM 0:00....

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Lars Nybo from the University of Copenhagen. He is an expert on the effects of environmental conditions on exercise. Here he discussed factors effecting cycling performance and then focused on circumstances where one needs to be careful applying findings from the lab to the real world. A very interesting chat. Twitter: @Nyborger Nybo 0:00. Introduction 2:20....

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Brad Schoenfeld from Lehman College, The City University of New York, the Bronx, New York. He has a very strong track record on research examining how to maximize muscle hypertrophy and also important protein synthesis and strength studies. He also applies his knowledge being a former personal trainer and a successful competitive natural body builder. We disc...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Wendy Kohrt from the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. She has an extremely strong track record of research on how exercise affects bone. She has changed her thinking of late after finding that acute exercise actually has a catabolic effect on bone even though overall, it can have beneficial effects. This is dependent on the actual exercise/spor...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Mark Tarnopolsky from McMaster University in Canada. Mark has done pioneering studies in many areas including sex differences and exercise, HITT training and creatine supplementation. Today we focus on his remarkable work with muscle myopathies. Exercise can be beneficial in all muscle myopathies in regards to function and/or healthspan and/or lifespan. The t...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Emeritus Professor David “Doc” Costill who is an absolute legend of exercise physiology and human performance. He was Founder and Director of the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University in Muncie, Indiana, USA. He made the lab one of the top labs in the world and has a remarkable track record. He supervised the who’s who of exercise physiology research in...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Dr Mark Burnley from the Loughborough University in England. He is an expert on critical power (cycling) and critical speed (running). We compared and contrasted the speed duration relationship across the animal kingdom. Mark is an absolute wealth of knowledge on exercise intensity domains and critical power etc and comparative exercise physiology. Critical power is es...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Stephen Seiler from the University of Agder in Norway. He is American who started his career in USA before moving to Norway almost 30 years ago. He points out that most exercise training research is based around university semesters with mainly untrained to trained transitions which is very different to what athletes do. Stephen coined the term polarized trai...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Pope Moseley from Arizona State University in the United States. Pope has a lung and critical care background. We spoke about his early heat shock protein work with Carl Gisolfi, a giant of research on exercise and the gut. Also heat, heat shock proteins, gut leak and heat stroke, exercise training and gut leak, heat shock proteins and autophagy, “Heat shock...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Kristian Thorborg from the University of Copenhagen in Denmark who also has s position at Lund University in Sweden. We spoke about the role of the placebo effect, sports injury prevention and especially the role of eccentric exercise, plyometrics, whether stretching reduces sports injuries, prehabilitation, exercise to avoid surgery, rehabilitation, is ice u...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Scott Trappe, Director of the Human performance laboratory at Ball State University, Indiana, USA. We spoke about the influence that Scott’s supervisor, the great David “Doc” Costill, has had on exercise physiology (long time Ball State HPL Director before Scott). We then discussed the negative effects of space on the human body and whether exercise can minim...

Dr Glenn McConell chats with Professor Juleen Zierath who has had a remarkable background with current senior roles at both the Karolinska Institute in Sweden and the University of Copenhagen in Denmark. She was also previously the Chair of the Nobel Committee. We discuss the effects of circadian rhythms on: muscle insulin sensitivity, metabolic responses to exercise in T2D vs controls, exercise p...

Dr Glenn McConell chats for a second time with Associate Professor Andrew Coggan from Indiana University, Purdue University, Indianapolis (IUPUI), USA. Andy was an elite time trial cyclist who has a very impressive research track record. He also wrote the first book on training and racing using power (training levels). As was the case last week with Michael Joyner, Andy makes the case that differe...