Phil Maffetone: Optimizing health and performance through maximal aerobic function

**Peter Attia** (0:11)
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Now, without further delay, here's today's episode. My guest this week is Phil Maffetone. Phil is an author, a coach, health practitioner.
He wears many hats. Many of you will probably recognize him as he's written a number of books, the 80s, 90s and today, basically covering a number of aspects of exercise, sports medicine, biofeedback, nutrition. I first probably came across Phil's work when I was in college, and I was interested in aerobic training, trying to improve my cycling performance at the time, and became pretty interested in the way he was advocating for a very low intensity relative to what I was doing approach, which of course today in hindsight seems to be quite the logical thing to do. Phil's background is in biology. He has a doctorate in chiropractic, and he also has trained in Chinese medicine and kinesiology.
He was in private practice for about two decades, and he's now a consultant along with continuing to write, doing independent research and lecturing. In this episode, we talk about his journey, how he became interested in this, both as an athlete himself, and then ultimately as a coach. We get into what is maximal aerobic function, and this overlaps very closely. In fact, you could argue this is a very similar way to describe zone two, something we speak about in a previous podcast, but coming at it through a sort of different lens and using heart rate as opposed to lactate to measure it. We get into the importance of fuel partitioning in addition to different levels of intensity. We talk a little bit about marathon times and how they've changed over time and what that probably tells us about training. So I hope you'll enjoy this episode, and without further delay, please enjoy my conversation with Phil Maffetone.
All right, Phil, thanks so much for making time so late in your day. You're in, where are you? Are you in Portugal right now?

**Phil Maffetone** (2:40)
I'm in Lisbon, Portugal, and they don't have dinner here till nine or 10 at night, which I usually skip. So it's just past lunch for me.
It's great to be with you. So thanks, Peter, for having me.

**Peter Attia** (2:54)
Well, I've been wanting to speak with you for quite some time, and we've got a lot of listeners who have been excited about getting you on. A lot of questions have come about. We've talked a lot about aerobic efficiency on this podcast, because obviously it's such an important part of delaying the aging process. So even if you take it out of the context of performance, I think today we'll sort of talk about both of these things, sort of performance and health.
But it's obviously something that you've been working on for such a long time. It's been kind of central to the work you've done, but I kind of want to go back and give folks a bit of a sense of how you cut your teeth on this stuff. So you're obviously an avid runner yourself, correct?

**Phil Maffetone** (3:34)
I've been running since, yeah, since high school, I guess, and from track and field in high school and college. And then when I got out and into practice, I thought, you know, this road running stuff looks interesting. I'm starting to see patients.
Let me see what's going on. And I, you know, I jumped into a 5K and it was a complete disaster because I was a track runner. And what do we know about distance? And gradually I progressed to the marathon. I trained for a six day running race on a track because I had been working with some ultra runners, Stu Middleman in particular. And it looked like such an exciting event. I thought this, you know, I'm gonna do this.
Then I can, you know, my bio could read, I've run everything from 200 meters to six days. I thought that was cool. Of course, I was, by that time, I was so busy with treating other athletes that I was just not able to get the time on the training. All the training was on a track because the race was on a track.