Iñigo San Millán, Ph.D.: Zone 2 Training and Metabolic Health (Ep. #85 Rebroadcast)

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode.
Welcome to another special episode of the Drive podcast. For this week's episode, we're gonna rebroadcast my conversation with Iñigo San Millán, which was originally aired two years ago in December of 2019 Now, this was one of our most popular episodes and we're as such gonna invite Iñigo back for round two shortly. Now, I gotta be honest with you.
I've always been amazed at how popular this episode was because it was kind of a technical episode. We did not shy away from the nuances of physiology. But one of the things that we talked about in great detail was the importance of zone to training. And many of you have heard me talk about that since. This is really the first episode in which it was discussed on the podcast. So I wanna make sure that folks who haven't had a chance to listen to this, take the time to go back and do it and it's a deep podcast. So I wanna make sure that we don't overload you with another podcast this week. Secondly, I wanna make sure that even the people who have heard it go back and perhaps dig in a little bit more and come back to us with some follow up questions. When I have people back on the show, I love giving the audience a chance to give us their feedback on where they'd like to see the conversation go. So as a brief reminder, Iñigo is an assistant professor at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. His areas of research include exercise, physiology, metabolism, nutrition, sports performance, overtraining, type two diabetes, cancer, and critical care.
He is also the cycling coach for Today Pogacha. And Pogacha, if those of you don't follow cycling, is the guy who's won the Tour de France the last two times. So in 2020, 2021, he's an absolute phenom. And I suspect that we will do a little bit of discussing his training, at least what it is that Iñigo is able to share publicly. Of course, a lot of how these guys train is somewhat secretive. So in this episode that you're going to listen to today, we talk about mitochondria, exercise, metabolic health. We also discuss all the different energy systems and the fuels used during exercise. So we speak about the six training zones. We focus extensively on zone two, why it matters, why lactate is an important fuel source and why measuring lactate provides great insight into mitochondrial function. So without further delay, please enjoy or potentially re-enjoy my conversation with Iñigo San Millán prior to round two.
Iñigo, thank you so much for making time to sit down today in your new office here.

**Iñigo San Millán** (3:13)
Thank you very much, Peter. It's my pleasure and honor that you're here with us at the University of Colorado at the School of Medicine.

**Peter Attia** (3:19)
I emailed my team, I emailed Nick and Bob and a couple of the guys today when I was on the way over here. I was on the plane and I was reviewing my notes and I thought, I am so excited to sit down with you today and Rick tomorrow because we've had so many kind of off the cuff sidebar conversations about mitochondria, mitochondrial function, health, efficiency, et cetera.
And it's sort of like, we never have enough time. It's like 15 minutes here and 12 minutes there and an email here and an email there, but it was in preparing for this, the team helped me really kind of put a lot of my thoughts together. But I think before we kind of get into the really hardcore stuff around mitochondria, which is something that I think anybody who's interested in health at any level, whether it's really at the deep cellular level or just at the level of I want to live as long as I can, as healthy as I can, everybody sort of has a sense that all roads point to the mitochondria. But your path to getting there to me is particularly interesting because it starts with looking at athletes and you yourself, even though you downplay it a lot, you were quite the athlete growing up. So you grew up in Spain and what sports did you play?