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In this episode you’ll hear Mike Tarnapoll on Performance Nutrition, InsideTracker, Keto & More, plus…
- What makes the difference providing energy for your body.
- How InsideTracker can help you perform better.
- Who InsideTracker is for… It’s not for everyone.
- If Keto diets are for CrossFit athletes.
- How performance nutrition can take you to the next level.
- And much, much more.
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The All Around Joe Podcast!
Our guest today
Mike Tarnapoll with InsideTracker.
Partners
InsideTracker – Is a self tracking software to help optimize your athletic performance using blood biomarker technology. You can get started with InsideTracker by clicking here. I recommend the Ultimate Plan
Mikes Background
I am extremely excited to have Mike Tarnapoll on the All Around Joe podcast! Mike received his degree in Nutritional Sciences from Cornell University where he rowed as a Varsity athlete. Mike has spent a lot of time in the Crossfit world, starting out his Crossfit adventure at the well known Rogue box in Columbus, Ohio. Starting his career as a Nutritional Scientist before college as teenage diet tinkerer. Most exciting is the work that Mike is doing with Inside Tracker, a blood testing company that is revolutionizing how we see health and fitness, by taking a pro active approach to health! I warn all of you listening to grab a piece of paper and a pencil, because this podcast is jam packed with information, on how to help personalize, and optimize your personal health & wellness plan, as well as where the future of nutrition is going!
Things we delve in to are:
– Mike’s story of years of tinkering with his diet and how he ultimately started working with Inside Tracker.
– The in’s and outs of a Ketogenic diet, and if it’s right for you. **tons of info here!**
- Blood bio marker work, and why it’s an important aspect to your health & wellness plan. As well as answering in depth questions on what it is, and how it works.
- Dieting, and the different types of diets, how each one will effect you, and why having the foundational knowledge of metabolism will help you sift through the constant change in diet information.
- The background of the Crossfit equipment company we all know and love Rogue. Along with a tie bit of general Crossfit history
- The vision of the future for inside tracker, and where they would like to be in the next ten years as a company. As well as where they are taking health & wellness!
- And much much more!
Show notes
Joe – Joe’s personal story of attempting to “hack” his body for over 15 years, and had little to no results. Inside tracker was the tool that Joe started to implement in his daily life to learn how to optimize his athletic performance through investigating blood work. The data that Joe was able to pull from Inside Tracker has been priceless!
Joe – Mike, Tell us about your self, your history, and how you got to where you are today.
Mike – Mikes path in health and wellness started early. He was introduced to Cross-fit at the age of ten. Started young tinkering with his diet, for aesthetic purposes, but also looking to improve performance in life, cross-fit, and other sports.
**Mikes background story in more detail. Next level diet tinkering 🙂 **
I competed in sectionals in CrossFit in 2010 at 16 years old. At the time my parents had gotten used to the demands that my diet placed on my eating. Always needing to eat “clean” whatever that meant at that time of my life. The night before competing at the sectionals, I spent the entire day cooking chicken breast, vegetables, brown rice, and took it to the sectionals with me. I was pretty serious about health at a young age. From this I was able to have a lot of success in optimizing my athletic performance. Through the years I competed, and by the time I was a senior in high school I had felt like I had gotten to a level where I was a proficient Crossfitter, athlete, and proficient in my dieting. But, my main focus at the time was playing baseball. I was using Crossfit as a method to staying fit to continue my Baseball career so Crossfit was still secondary for me.
I eventually came to the realization that my true passion was fitness, and baseball wasn’t interesting me, like it had once done. So I put Baseball on hold for a little. As I was doing this I continued going to the gym because it was just a part of my lifestyle. Eventually I was spotted on the row machine, and was turned on to the idea of competitive rowing.
Initially, I thought “who would want to do rowing as a sport?” It just didn’t seem fun to me. Quickly, I started to warm up to the idea, and decided to get in to rowing. Eventually I was recruited at Cornell University where I rowed at the Varsity level for 4 years. While I was at Cornell I realized that I had years and years of tinkering with my diet on my own, and that I really wanted to get a formal education on diet. So I got my Major in Nutritional Sciences, and continued on to grad school at Cornell in nutrition which brought me to becoming a registered dietician.
Through everything I learned in my journey through health & wellness, I adopted this view that
***Todays nutrition practices at the basic level, along with the statements and theories are often unreasonably complex convoluted, and conflicting. ***
So I really set out to convey that nutrition doesn’t need to be this difficult for the masses. I happened to find Inside Tracker through a former colleague. I met with the Chief Scientific officer Gil Blander, who had an identical mission in nutrition that I did.
“Our goal was to make nutrition personalized, simplified, and actionable.” – Mike Tarnapoll
This brings me full circle to where i’m at now, overseeing all things Crossfit at Inside tracker.
How old is mike??
Mike – I’m 24.
Joe- You’ve done a lot in the fitness world at such a young age!?
Mike– Explains his connection with crossfire and how it really helped get him to where he’s at today.
Joe – I wish Crossfit was around when I was getting in to fitness in my early days. Im jealous of all these young gunners who are riding the Crossfit wave, and got started at such a young age!
Mike -. Mike got started at Rogue Fitness in Columbus Ohio. Before Rogue was the Rogue it is today they were a small gym with an affiliate, and equipment on the side. They eventually came to the realization that the equipment was going to be the most profitable business model for them. So they sold the affiliate to a couple of guys who had majored in Physical Education. They were looking to do something other than be personal trainers at the local Globo gym. The 2 guys ended up being Graham Holdberg (2010 Crossfit games champion) & Brendan Cowden (highly successful affiliate owner, owns Crossfit Grandview). These are the guys that Mike got in to Crossfit with. Being around these athletes all the time really entrenched him in the lifestyle of Crossfit.
Joe – Before you went to college were you doing much with what the Crossfit affiliates use as a nutrition template, like Zone?
Mike – Say’s he wasn’t. His reasoning is the need to formulate an opinion on a subject through research, and understanding. Mike speaks on taking a look at the human metabolism. Saying when you look at the human metabolism you see that the metabolism is like a map. Everything is pretty interconnected. He narrowed down a system that accounted for the different things that could cause his body to react in certain ways. From these things he was able to build his own perception on what clean healthy eating is. Apples to apples its very similar, with some small differences from what they use in Crossfit, or Zone.
Joe – Was that similar to what you learned when you went through your program at Cornell? Im asking because I’m curious about the changes with time, in a nutritional sciences education.
Mike – Mike explains that the nutrition department at Cornell is very multi faceted. So it catered to the different goals that people have in nutrition. There was a way for him to explore the bio chemical root, how bio chemical pathways function, and what we can do to alter those metabolic pathways. This really gave me an understanding of the foundations of my metabolism and formulated my own opinion on what was good or not good,
**since the diet industry is continually changing. Its hard to know whats right and wrong without that foundational knowledge.**
Joe – Lets delve a little deeper in to Inside Tracker. How do you explain what inside tracker is to someone who’s never heard of it?
Mike– The most basic level is that they are a blood analysis company. Where the bread and butter is, is through the recommendations we give people based on their blood work. Factoring in a complete picture of every persons unique situation. I.E. height, weight, age, diet, etc. Typically were left to our own devices to figure out what is effecting our body’s, why we feel certain ways certain days, what our body needs, etc. But when you add in to those objective assessments you piece together a picture, and have a better understanding of what your body’s doing.
Recommendations company first
Blood testing company second
Joe – Are you guys taking these subjective factors in to play on anti tracker right now?
Mike – Yes. Mike explains that How it works is they have a few different plans, and the plans are only different in the types of bio markers that are tested. The bio markers in each plan is there to hint at a particular goal weather overall health, performance, etc. Once you choose the plan thats right for you, you get the inside tracker profile, this is where we get to learn about you, through diet, supplements, vitamins, etc. All of that info is put in to a PDF lab slip where you take it in to a Quest location, where your blood will be drawn. From you get your results online in about 5 days, where we begin to give you recommendations based on the biomarkers that we looked at, and how they relate to you and your lifestyle.
Joe – Elaborates on the simplicity of the Quest system, how easy it is to get your blood drawn, and how fast you get your results back.
Mike – Compares it to a yearly physical. The total amount of blood taken is less than a 2oz shot glass.
Mike – Talks on systems in place that gets the info from Quest as soon as its processed. Having an in house physician that looks for anything completely out of the ordinary, then we process the info and upload it to your profile.
Joe – Who do you think Inside tracker is for, and not for?
Mike – Explains there is certainly a “Not for”. Anyone looking to manage chronic disease, or illness. **Not a medical company.**
Who is it for? Its for anyone who wants a better understanding of what they should do nutritionally, and physically for a general healthy lifestyle. But, there having issues filtering through the different avenues the health industry puts out as being a valid diet, or new diet, etc. Beyond that is the people who are looking for full optimization, and performance…like you Joe!
Joe – Do you have an idea of where Inside tracker is heading in the future? Like new technology, systems, etc?
Mike – Yes! (Mike excitedly responds) He explains – Personalization is really on the forefront of the health industry, and it’s moving to the healthcare industry as well. The vision of Inside Tracker, is true personalization through different facets of testing parameters. They’ve chosen to look at blood bio markers, but theres also companies looking at genetics, microbiome, etc. What they’re looking to do is start connecting blood bio markers with things like DNA, and microbiome so theres a product that takes a complete look at every aspect of a person.
**Hopefully in the next ten years we can gather the proper research on these different facets so we can start having a healthcare system thats more proactive as opposed to being reactive. **
Joe – I hear people asking me questions about allergies a lot, what are your thoughts on that and how does that effect what you’re doing?
Mike – on, Inside tracker not doing any kind of allergy testing, sensitivity to food testing, to anything along those lines. He says the research behind what those results actually mean in terms of performance and health just isn’t there yet.
The golden rule for finding out if your intolerant to something is the elimination diet. Start taking out certain things from your diet, and track how you feel with or without that certain food.
Joe – I know on inside Tracker one of the fun things they have on there is the recommendations for eating a certain food for X number of days per week. The reason I bring this up is because i’m wondering, if you are able to have one type of inflammatory response at times from certain foods, but controlling it so you necessarily don’t want it all the time?
Mike – Says That’s something you could definitely play around with. Doesn’t know if going that specific would be worth the benefits, compared to making sure you’re spending 80% of your time to making lifestyle and food behavior changes, is much more useful than spending time in food intolerance or sensitivity.
**Mike begins clarifying the differences in food allergies, and food sensitivities, how it’s tested and what it represents. **
Mike – on Food sensitivity & intolerance being a hot topic right now. The guess is that its simple to implement, thats why people like it so much. Theres no one size fits all.
Joe – Are there any blood markers you’ve seen in particular that when adjusted from high to optimal create a larger jump in people performance vs other markers.
Mike – Says yes and elaborates on things like fasting, blood glucose levels, as well as cortisol. When those are high typically people have trouble with continuous energy throughout the day. From a training perspective usually these individuals just competed and wanted to see what their bio markers looked like. From a chronic perspective this could be borderline overtraining, assessed with a lot of different factors as well. Things like testosterone, sex hormone binding globulin, white blood cell count, inflammation all of these give a pretty good window in to what your body is doing in response to you’re training.
Joe – How often do you recommend people are testing, in order to make sure they are regulating these different bio markers to keep them in the desired zone?
Mike – Across the board the gold standard for testing is 4 times a year. Thats sufficient to find baseline change across the board for the markers that could be to low or high for an individual.
But every person is different and it really depends on what there goals are.
Joe – How are we doing with insurance company’s and the best way to get these important things paid for?
Mike – It’s not the answer that Mike or any of us would like to see. But Inside Tracker is considered a proactive treatment not a reactive treatment so it is not covered by our insurance. However, if you have a HSA or FSA account set up with your healthcare, we do qualify as healthcare. But generally it is out of pocket.
** In the end the $589 price tag that I pay a couple times a year to optimize my body, really saves me the extra money I would be spending on insurance if I didn’t know what was going on with my body**
Along with that Inside Tracker offers different plans that are at a better price point for individuals who are just starting to learn more about there biomarkers. These products are still great products and they give you a great amount of usable information. These are great ways to get going, for a better price.
**Getting started and looking inside of your body is important for everyone, not just the athlete. Anyone who wants a healthier lifestyle can gain value from Inside tracker.**
Joe – Is there anything that super exciting to you inside nutrition, health, and fitness that you’re nerding out on?
Mike – Outside of biomarkers Mike really doesn’t think theres anything more new and exciting.
“Continuing to personalize our own health data is what I think is most exciting.”
**Mike goes in much much more detail about what he’s doing, and where he would like to see the future of nutrition moving**
Joe – If someone wants help interpreting their data do they hire you above and beyond, or is that included?
Mike – right now it isn’t included. It would be something that would be referred out. However, He explains he is more than happy talking to people about there results on a phone call if helpful. They are looking to implement a system that will make it easier for clients to reach us. It just isn’t scalable at this moment.
Joe – What is your opinion on the Keto diet? Do you think theres a space for this in Crossfit?
Mike – on seeing endurance athletes getting success putting themselves in a state of ketosis. He explains the differences in Crossfit and endurance athletes and how they could possibly be different and why the same diets, or different diets behave in different ways that produce different results.
Joe – Do you ever get to a point with your clients that you recommend a ketogenic diet?
Mike – As a rule tends to not recommend Keto to his clients unless they’re suffering from epilepsy.
**Mike goes much more in depth on a ketogenic diet, the benefits, and where he thinks it could be valuable.**
Where can we find more info on you mike!?
you can follow me at instagram
**Or E-mail me at – mtarnapoll@insidetracker.com**
Thank you Mike for joining me on the Podcast! Thank you everyone for tuning in!!
Resources and links mentioned in this podcast
– InsideTracker – Get started here
*above could be affiliate links. I get a small commission if you click through them and buy, but they in no way make the products cost anymore. If you decide to use them please let me know so I can thank you. Affiliate Disclosure
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