Mitch Bernier Pn2, FMS, USATF (2025)

05/11/2025

Fat and LPL - Lipoprotein Lipase.

LPL is the enzyme that decides where your fat goes (and how you burn it).

Lipoprotein Lipase (LPL) sits on your blood vessel walls like a metabolic gatekeeper. When fat (in the form of triglycerides) floats by in your bloodstream, LPL breaks it apart into free fatty acids.

Then it decides:
➡️ send them into muscle for fuel
or
➡️ park them into fat tissue for storage.

Your activity level and it seems like the amount of this enzyme you have on your muscle or active tissues, plays a role in keeping fat loss.

Exercise Flips the Switch

When you move, muscle-based LPL activity skyrockets. Your body starts vacuuming fat from the bloodstream to use as energy. When you sit all day, adipose-based LPL takes over and the fat gets stored instead of burned.

This is why NEAT behavior is so powerful.

Nutrition & Hormones Steer the Flow

Insulin (after meals) reduces LPL in muscle and boosts it in fat tissue which equals more storage.

Fasting or endurance training does the opposite. Meaning more LPL in muscle equals more oxidation or muscle usage.

Protein and omega-3s help support healthy LPL balance and historically American lack Omega-3 in their diet.

End note: I write these for you, the AUDIENCE, to understand how powerful movement and training is and that you can drastically change your life one training session at a time.

02/11/2025

Race Day.

I had a great test out today. I had a pace that I wanted to hold and was just 2 seconds off pace. When you are within 6 seconds of your pace, you are pacing well.

The bridge itself was tough. Ascending and trying to hold pace, in my case 7:30 min/mil or better, it a battle. Economy goes out the window as your body needs to recruit more fibers to climb. This in turn adds more metabolites into the tissue, effecting pH, increasing heart rate and fuel (CHO) consumption at a faster rate.

It makes me think, "can I hold this pace over the bridge for the next two mile?" And "am I going to cramp up and have to walk because I am burning through too much fuel?".

It turns out that I was fine. Other than two 20 second stops for hydration, I held pace.

But I want it to feel easier. I want to have reserves for the last kick......

I want more.....

28/10/2025

Fat: Too Much, Reduces Lung Function.

The amount of fat on your body does more than cover muscle. It crowds your lungs. This large cohort study found that when fat goes up — lung function goes down.

In ~5,011 middle-aged adults (avg 54 yrs), over ~8 years, increases in fat mass index (FMI) and waist-to-hip ratio (WHR) were linked with steeper declines in both forced vital capacity (FVC) and forced expiratory volume.

🫁 FVC (Forced Vital Capacity)

Think of this as how much total air you can exhale after taking your biggest breath in.
It measures lung size and expansion ability.

💨 FEV₁ (Forced Expiratory Volume in 1 Second)

This is how much of that air you can push out in the first second.
It reflects how strong and open your airways are.

It seems that the amount of fat on your body affects your breathing, literally making moving harder.

Why It Matters for Fat Loss & Health:

Lung function isn’t just about breathing harder — it affects oxygen delivery, recovery, performance, and longevity.

If central fat increases, it may mechanically restrict the chest and lungs, increase inflammation, and reduce pulmonary capacity.

For someone chasing fat-loss for performance: losing overall body fat and tightening up central adiposity = better respiratory durability for running, cycling & and every day.

27/10/2025

Fatloss: Myth.

Have you ever heard: ‘Every pound you lose is 75 % fat and 25 % muscle’?

Yeah… science says that rule doesn’t hold up.

For decades, textbooks and trainers repeated the ‘one-fourth fat-free mass rule.’ It claimed that for every 4 lb you lose, 3 lb is fat, and 1 lb is muscle.

The problem? That ratio changes constantly depending on your size, diet, training, and time. Reminder that a bug portion of keeping fat off is how much lean mass you have and how much tissue activity you have at rest.

Early in weight loss, you lose more water + glycogen, not pure fat. It is very deceiving.

As the deficit continues, fat loss accelerates while lean loss slows. Especially with resistance training + protein.

The 3 : 1 ratio only fits some short-term studies. When looking across long-term interventions, it’s all over the map (anywhere from 1 : 1 to 10 : 1 fat : lean).

Overall, YOU WANT TO KEEP YOUR LEAN MASS. It's your furnace, and the bigger the furnace, the easier it is to keep your fat loss.

Here’s the formula:
What Protects Lean Mass

• Protein ≥ 1.6 g/kg/day
• Strength training 2–3× per week
• Adequate sleep & recovery
• Gradual calorie deficit (0.5–1 % body weight/week)

Hope this helps ✌️.

20/10/2025

Fat: Metabolism.

This great infographic explains the relationship between intensity and the enzymes that are built in the .

Exercise promotes fat loss by increasing the number and activity of enzymes involved in fat metabolism, such as those regulating the breakdown of stored fat and the burning of fatty acids for energy.

While high-intensity exercise initially relies on carbohydrates, overall fat loss is achieved through both a higher capacity for fat burning in trained muscles and by influencing fat redistribution. Enzyme activity can also be influenced by factors like cellular energy status, which increases during exercise, and hormonal signals.

How Exercise Affects Fat-Burning Enzymes:
• Regulation of fat breakdown (lipolysis): Exercise triggers signals like a surge in calcium (Ca2+) and the release of epinephrine, which activate enzymes and processes to break down fat stored in muscles (IMTG) and release fatty acids.

• Enzymes in mitochondria: Exercise increases the number of mitochondria, the powerhouses of the cell, and activates enzymes within the mitochondria that are crucial for burning fat to produce energy.

• Fatty acid transport and oxidation: During exercise, the body works to move fatty acids from the bloodstream into the mitochondria for burning. This process is regulated by enzymes like carnitine palmitoyltransferase 1 (CPT1), which can be inhibited by high-intensity exercise.

• Cellular energy regulation: During exercise, the energy status of the cell changes, leading to the activation of enzymes like AMPK, which helps regulate fat metabolism

Be patient: Significant fat loss requires consistency. Exercise improves body composition by increasing muscle and reducing fat and also improves your overall health

16/10/2025

Max Health & Performance.

Your VOamax he ultimate measure of how
efficiently, your body uses oxygen - and it's
built, not born.

VO₂max predicts longevity better than almost any other health metric — even cholesterol or blood pressure.

Higher VO₂max = better cardiac output, capillary density, and mitochondrial function.

Why You Should Care!!
Every step, pedal stroke, or breath that improves oxygen delivery reduces your risk of heart disease and early mortality.

Breakdown: Simple Science

SV (Stroke Volume): How much blood the heart pumps each beat.
→ Trained runners can eject 2–3x more blood per beat than untrained individuals.

HR (Heart Rate): How fast the heart beats to meet demand.
→ Efficiency isn’t about max HR — it’s about how low HR can stay for a given speed.

(a–vO₂ diff): The muscle’s ability to extract oxygen.
→ The more mitochondria and capillaries you build, the more O₂ those muscles can use.

Performance takeaway:
Endurance training improves both sides of the equation — heart delivery and muscle extraction.

Why You Should Care!!!
Running performance isn’t about pushing harder, it’s about using oxygen smarter.

The more you know.....

i

10/10/2025

Fat => How It Moves Through Our System.

Fat becomes usable energy only when oxidized and trained mitochondria make this process faster and more efficient. My hope is to continue to push the understanding that program design can be focused on building the enzymes that support this process....for fat loss, health, and performance.

Mobilization: Think of this as “unlocking” stored energy under hormonal command

During endurance exercise, epinephrine and glucagon trigger lipolysis. These hormones activate PKA, which phosphorylates HSL and perilipin, releasing fatty acids (FA) from stored triglycerides (TG).

ATGL → HSL → MGL works in sequence to break down TG → DAG → MAG → free fatty acids (FFA).

Those FFAs exit the adipocyte bound to albumin and flow into the bloodstream’s as a fat taxi.

Transport: From Storage Into Muscle.

Exercise increases lipoprotein lipase (LPL) on blood vessel walls in muscle.

LPL breaks down triglycerides from chylomicrons (CM) and VLDL, releasing FFAs for muscle uptake.

Simultaneously, this process boosts HDL-C, a metabolic benefit of endurance training. Your doctor really likes this process.

Oxidation: Inside The Muscle, Inisde The Mitochondria.

Inside the mitochondria:

CPT1 → CACT → CPT2 shuttle long-chain fatty acids inward.

β-oxidation breaks them into acetyl-CoA, which enters the TCA cycle to produce ATP — your true performance currency.

Intramuscular fat (IMTG) also contributes locally via HSL activity.

You don't have to be efficient with all these processes for fat loss, but those that are seem to do a better job keeping fatloss long term.

07/10/2025

Fat Loss & Support Items

Another amazing study from Kevin Hall. There was a lot discussed here, but I just want to highlight some items for you, The AUDIENCE:

• Hall uses mathematical modeling of energy balance and body composition dynamics to simulate how different interventions approach plateaus.

• The paper compares calorie restriction,
GLP-1 agonists (e.g., semaglutide), tirzepatide, and gastric bypass surgery to see how each delays or shifts the plateau via different parameters.

• One key parameter in Hal's model is persistent intervention magnitude or how strong and sustained the shift away from baseline equilibrium is. Surgery showed >4x magnitude compared
to calorie restriction.

• Another parameter. the feedback control
circuit between weight loss and appetite. Many interventions (GLP-1,surgery) blunt or weaken this appetite feedback loop, helping prolong weight loss before plateau.

• In typical diet restrictions, plateau is often
reached in 6-12 months because the
body's appetite feedback is still strong.

• Interventions like surgery and GLP-1 drugs
show an extended period of weight loss
before plateau because they modify
appetite control more profoundly than diet
alone.

• However, all interventions eventually
plateau and the system returns to a new
steady state.

Beyond just diet & drugs, you must adjust energy expenditure, strengthen behavior, and maintain metabolic adaptation.

02/10/2025

Fat Loss & Sleep Issues.

Can you believe how much your sleeping pattern is connected to your ability to lose fat?

I continue to love my career because I get to bring YOU the audience research to help you get to your goals, both short-term (like looking good) and long -term (out living the people you went to high school with).

If you haven't nailed a consistent sleep pattern or/and aren't getting enough sleep (duration) and are struggling on fat loss, there is data that can tell you why.

Research shows that disturbed sleep
(quantity OR quality) leads to:

• Increased cravings for carbs & fats.

• Hormonal chaos (ghrelin up, leptin down).

• Lower metabolic efficiency.

Key Points from the Study

1. Sleep loss = more calories.
Poor sleep makes people snack more, especially high-carb and high-fat foods.

2. Hormonal dysregulation. Sleep deprivation disrupts the neuroendocrine appetite system (enzymes like ghrelin & leptin), which pushes people to eat more while slowing metabolic
efficiency.

3. Bi-directional relationship. Poor sleep makes fat loss harder, and carrying more weight can also negatively affect sleep quality.

4. Long-term maintenance. Without good sleep, even people who lose weight struggle to keep it off.

i

01/10/2025

Push Ups To Extend Your Life.

I am currently trying to find a female version of this, but I wanted to talk about this great research.

In this paper above, the researchers followed up on a 10-year study of firefighters and found that those who could perform between 11 & 40 push-ups had a big reduction in cardiovascular events.

Here is why I think this is super valuable for YOU, The audience:
• Push-Ups are free, fast, and "functional."
• It seems that Strength is more than performance. It's cardiovascular protection.
• This would be protection against hypertension, metabolic syndrome, stroke, and other cardiovascular events.

Those who could do 40 push-ups were in the lowest risk category.

Today, I did 160 push-ups in my home workout.

So.......

How many push-ups can up do?

24/09/2025

Fatloss & Your Training Options.

I continue to put out content that I hope helps us with the weight management that we all seek, whether for performance or lasting health. Bringing it back to the research, move more, and you might get the body of your dreams.

In the study above, cited more than 900 times, it looked at exercise interventions for an aging population. I like this study because it's really hard to get older persons to behavior change, so if there is a study that shows this in an older population, it should work well with younger (that's my two cents).

The intervention had three groups, all with nutritional guidance, 1. Aerobic training, 2. Resistance training, 3. Aerobic and resistance training.

Who do you think had the best weight loss results? You guessed it group 3.

Group 3 had the highest expenditure throughout the week and retained more lean mass as they weightlossed. Reminder that your lean mass is your furnace and that you want the biggest furnace possible as you head into the nack half of life.

So..... are you doing you Zone 2 & resistance training 2x weekly?

13/09/2025

Fat Loss & Walking >>>

Conclusions
10,000 steps·day, with approximately 3,500 steps·day performed as BOUT-MVPA (moderate-to-vigorous physical activity), is associated with enhanced weight loss in a behavioral intervention.

I like this study because it talks about walking as "a behavioral intervention." If you have never walked 10k steps per day, it is harder than you think, but the data says it may be key for long-term fat loss. The usual 150 min/week (~7k steps) isn’t enough for lasting results.

In this study People who average ~10,000 steps per day with at least 3,500 of those steps at a moderate-to-vigorous pace and in bouts of 10+ minutes lose more weight and keep it off for 18 months than those who simply hit “150 minutes a week” of activity.

Think about it, 18 month long term change just by adding walking to your current routine.

Time is key.
The first six months set the trajectory.
Build the 10k-step habit now, before the window for easy metabolic adaptation closes.

Your next walk isn’t just steps > it’s momentum that compounds for years of better weight control and metabolic health.

Monday	09:00 - 17:00
Tuesday	09:00 - 17:00
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Sunday	09:00 - 17:00

Mitch Bernier Pn2, FMS, USATF

05/11/2025

02/11/2025

28/10/2025

27/10/2025

20/10/2025

16/10/2025

10/10/2025

07/10/2025

02/10/2025

01/10/2025

24/09/2025

13/09/2025

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