FIND YOUR PEAK
Can a vegan diet truly keep pace with a grisly training plan? Hugo and Ross Turner have the answer. The identical twins – and intrepid explorers – have been working with researchers to separate the effects of diet and genetics. Here are their findings
Hugo and Ross – or is that Ross and Hugo? – have earned the nickname “the Adventure Guinea Pigs”. In 2015, the twins scaled Europe’s highest peak, Mount Elbrus in the Caucasus, in order to compare traditional mountaineering gear with modern equipment (which proved to be mostly marketing). They’ve been to Greenland, where a replica of Sir Ernest Shackleton’s
1914 expedition kit uniformly managed to outperform the contemporary equivalent, from the Sunspel jumper and Crockett & Jones boots to a wooden sled.
Most recently, they embarked on a three-month trial pitting a vegan diet against a typical omnivorous one, with their respective body compositions monitored by Boditrax scans at Virgin Active and their biomarkers and microbiome tested by King’s College London’s department of twin research. At the same time, they were training to kite-ski the Hardangervidda plateau in Norway (a trip that has since been waylaid), itself in preparation for kite-skiing 2,500km across Greenland via “the pole of inaccessibility”: the furthest inland point.
MH: This isn’t the first time you’ve compared diets, is it? Ross: At the end of last year, we did a test of high-fat versus high-carb, again with King’s College London. I was on a high-fat diet and I shredded. I lost about 3kg of fat; Hugs [Hugo] was on a high-carb diet and he put on 3kg.
Hugo: Ross has always been slightly heavier, so, we met each other in the middle. At the end, we were 85kg each.
Ross: But I was also much, much leaner.
MH: How fun – or not – were those diets to follow?
Ross: I did miss carbs. I really did miss them. But as soon as I had them, I felt bloated straight away.
MH: So what are the main takeaways from the meat-versus-veg trial?
Ross: My cholesterol has stayed the same – about 6.5mmol/L – and Hugo [on the vegan diet] is down to 4.9.
Hugo: I was at about 5.9mmol/L at the start, so it’s dropped rather drastically.
Ross: As well as your libido.
Hugo: Yeah, my libido went out the window. And the diversity of my gut bacteria decreased, too. But my energy was better. I didn’t get that sugar drop. I couldn’t have most chocolate or biscuits... I was pretty much just on nuts and fruit.
Ross: We had Mindful Chef delivering our food, so we had exactly the same calories going in – give or take 50kcal across the day.
Hugo: Getting vegan meals with the right ingredients was really easy at home. But of course, as soon as you want to go over to a friend’s house, or out on a date…
MH: Maybe that’s why you lost your libido. But how did going vegan affect your training?
Hugo: We were going to the gym five or six times a week and my energy levels were much higher: I didn’t have a single session where I thought, “I don’t have any energy.”
Ross: I was the opposite. I was very hungry at 10pm or 11pm. I had those big spikes of energy and then I’d crash. But then the results [of our training] have been very different – I put on weight, and Hugo has lost it.
Hugo: I’ve shredded this time. I lost 4kg of fat in the first two or three weeks.
Ross: We wore continuous glucose monitors. They go on the back of your triceps and connect to your phone. I was spiking, going down, having that sugar low – or meat low – and Hugo was far more satiated.
MH: What kind of training were you doing?
Hugo: It’s endurance-focused, so high-rep, low-weight, rather than trying to build up mass. On our expeditions, we really don’t want to be carrying any extra weight.
Ross: One of the ways we measure how fit we’re getting is with a submaximal test: what resistance you’re on when you get to a certain heart rate on a Wattbike. It’s simple but quite effective if you want to find out what your fitness level is.
MH: And less unpleasant than a VO2 max test.
Ross: I don’t mind the VO2 max. It’s quite fun. An effective way we’ve found [to track] our endurance training is to count the “total” mass lifted. We’ve gone from about three tonnes – which sounds epic – to 10 or 11 tonnes in an hour. If you add the weight up, it becomes really motivating.
MH: “How much do you bench?” “A tonne…”
Ross: It is, though – if you lift 100kg, 10 times, that’s a tonne. If you’ve lost weight and you’ve doubled your lifting capacity, you’re getting “expedition fit”.
Hugo: Half of it is looking after your body. What’s the chassis like? Is it healthy? We’ve got rusty chassis in the sense that we’ve always got painful backs, tight hamstrings and quads. So, it’s using a good proportion of a gym session – 15-20 minutes before or after, or sometimes a whole hour on rest days – on stretching, rolling and the core.
Ross: And the other 10% is mindset. I’ve been to the gym over the past few months and gone, “I really can’t be bothered.” That’s the point at which you become expedition “mind fit”. Even if you do very little, but you still last the full hour, you’re training your mind not to give up. It’s easy not to flex that mental muscle.