Dr. Andy Galpin: The Optimal Diet, Supplement, & Recovery Protocol for Peak Performance

I'd love to get your take on training while fasted. You should be able to not eat any calories for 24 hours and still exercise. You don't have to have protein powder ever. This is a a great one. So, the term metabolic flexibility has been hijacked. It's great because it is not a stimulant. So, you can take it in the evenings and it doesn't compromise sleep at all. CO2 levels rise above 900 parts per million. This will significantly and dramatically affect everything from sleep onset, sleep quality, next day perceived fatigue, next day arithmetic ability. How mad do you want the internet to get at these following statements? Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be sitting across the table from Dr. Andy Galpin, who is the director of the human performance center at Parker University. Andy and I have been corresponding for at least the last 10 years. I'm I'm pretty pumped to have this conversation. He is an expert in in muscle physiology but also has published a wide range of I would say exercise physiology related topics from you know muscle health to nutrition to recovery. He also coaches athletes, Olympians, MMA fighters just all around got a lot of experience and the science behind it. So I'm really excited to have this conversation with you today Andy. I mean, you and I have talked about, you know, a lot of things via, you know, X and Twitter at the time, I think email as well. So, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's just I can't even explain how much of an honor and a pleasure this is. Uh, I' I've been telling you for a long time now how stoked I am about this and my wife is tired of hearing of it, so I'm finally excited to get here and do it. Well, um, today it's kind of interesting because, you know, you've you've got this vast publication history in muscle biology and exercise physiology, but I'm kind of taking you in a direction where you've also published and you have a lot of knowledge regarding nutrition, supplements, recovery. I'm super interested in the role of those in helping people sort of meet their fitness goals. And um when it comes to nutrition, I mean this is obviously a field that's constantly, you know, there's no agreement ever whether we're talking about performance or longevity. Sure. Um but you know there's a growing number of athletes and people that are like myself which are I would say committed exercisers that I'm very interested in health. um not as much in performance, although I'm becoming a lot more interested in performance these days, but I'm interested in longevity for sure. I mean, that's my primary interest. And so, there's there's people kind of trying to figure out what kind of diet they could, you know, they what kind of diet they could eat to sort of meet their performance and longevity goals, if that's even possible. Is that something that you've thought about? Yeah, I get the question of performance versus longevity or health with nutrition a lot. And I think as you've done so well over your career, there are tenants that are going to agree and then there's going to be distension. And so I think it's easiest maybe to frame this as what are the flags we can put on both sides of this equation. Known obvious yeses and obvious nos, right? So if you want to live your longest, healthiest life, number one, we're all going to agree on probably five, seven, maybe eight different things. And if you were to look, I'll just do it this way. If I said, "Okay, great." Cuz we deal with these clients. I deal with high performance athletes as you mentioned. And we have a lot of our clients that are like you. They're not athletes. Never were. Do not care. But they are wanting them to live their longest, healthiest life. And if I threw their diets in front of you, I'd be stunned if you could tell me which one was for which person. I don't think you'd have any chance. Right? So you'd say, "What's that going to look like?" We're going to center around protein. Right? You've talked about that endlessly. It's going to be high and high quality. We're going to have a lot of variety of foods. We're going to have a lot of variety of colors. Turns out micronutrients, vitamins, and minerals are pretty important, right? Like your entire career. We're going to have uh some attention paid to fiber. Caloric intake will be managed. We're going to distribute carbohydrates and fat in some way that helps them hit their needs and goals and personal preferences. We could go down the list, but the easiest way to think about it is how much overlap is there? almost all. What are the small differences between these performance and longevity goals? Well, depends on what type of performance. So, we're talking about a lot of caloric expenditure. Are we talking about a power event? What do we then? Yeah, we're going to find some differences and we can chop that up all day if you want to know like exact numbers and hours. But the reality of it is both of those people, performance, longevity, you have to manage calories one way or the other. You have to do all the other things. It's not that different. uh you can make some arguments of maybe you can get away with certain things if you're not interested in performance. You can do some different things with food timing, food frequency, you can play with some different stuff where you wouldn't want to do that with a high performance athlete. So there's there's a lot of fun differences with those things. But at the highest level for the average person, if you're eating like a high performance athlete for the most part, you're also eating for longevity. Only big fundamental difference there might be caloric balance. Yeah, that that's the top layer, but other than that, it's pretty similar. I was kind of thinking that was going to be your answer. I I do I'm very interested in the intermittent fasting, timerestricted eating, training, fat, training while you're fasted, depending on the type of training, cuz um it's it's something that I do for certain types of training. So, you like to train fasted? Well, I like to train fasted if I'm going for a 30 minute run. Yep. Zone 2 kind of run. Sure. And um the reason I do that is because I mean this was years ago. I read a metaanalysis and maybe you I would love to hear your updates on the literature because I know that you've you've been keeping up with it. But there was there was a meta analysis looking at people that were training fasted and if they were doing endurance type of aerobic exercise training and they trained they were training it was like less than 60 minutes. It was like less than an hour, right? Yeah. And um this isn't you know this is like a a zone two kind of below the l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l l lactate threshold type of training then um they had better adaptations in mitochondria mitochondrial enzymes you know obviously like fatty acids being oxidized so um whereas if they trained what they when they were fed again it was less than an hour some of those adaptations were blunted somewhat y and um for me it was like oh well I kind of want those adaptations so I do like to train a little bit faster I don't do hourlong runs anymore. That was like a thing of my past for me. Um I do I do um my my strength training. I do not like to do fasted at all. Um I have to have like something like a banana. I have to have some glucose or something. So I'd love to get your take on training while fasted. Yeah, there's a lot of things to think about here. Um I know that uh I sent you right before we started here our preprint of our one of our fasting studies we just got published. So we can go into that if you want. But in general, the biggest way to think about this is is the magnitude of benefit with the intervention exceeding the magnitude of preference. And what I mean by that is when I coach people this morning, like literally this morning, I'm dealing with uh putting together a program for the number one quarterback in college football. Right after that, I have to deal with one of our executives who's 60-year-old female. Right. Right after that, I'm also dealing with a guy preparing for a 900 mile hike. And so that context is important because as I'm answering questions like this, all of these avatars are in my head and I'm thinking what is true for person one, two, and three, and what is true for the other person who like doesn't exercise at all. And if something's not consistent across those four, then I have to modify and contextualize the answer. So when it comes to training fasted, great. If you are going for an event like you're talking about and you feel better when you do it, that matters to me in that particular context more than the physiological benefit because the physiological benefit is not fake. It's just not huge. So, is it more beneficial for your mitochondria? Yes, potentially. But if you look at the amount, it's not that much. Now, if you liked it or didn't care, fine. But if you're like, I hate it. My performance is worse. I don't like it. I don't feel good. then we actually don't do it. And so my first layer answer to all that is number one, what are you actually performing best in? What are you what are your personal preferences? Are you training in the morning? Are you training in the evening? All these other factors that are now again contextualized are my true answer. And I hate to be wishwashy on that, but that's the most honest answer because I deal with a lot of people with different goals and different scenarios. So the science can lead us in one direction but the actual layering on top of what would I really recommend a human do that in this this scenario matters more. So if you look at the research very specifically on fasting exercise always depends on the type of exercise you mentioned you were really careful about saying like I'm under 60 minutes right I'm under 60 minutes like I know you're you're aware that that answer will change right what am I optimizing for am I optimizing for performance am I optimizing for feeling better that day more focused that day am I optimizing for the happiness the personal like there's so many different reasons why one would exercise that you have to answer all those questions and figure out well what lever am I trying to pull here. What am I trying to get out of it? So, do we have people am I I'll answer this way. Do we ever take somebody and say, "Hey, you need to start doing your endurance work in the morning fasted." I can't think of very many times when we've ever done that. But if somebody shows up with that, well, we don't have any strong reason we're not going to pull them off of it either. What if someone says, "I I'm interested in fat adaptation." Yeah. I'm interested in mitochondrial health and I'm not an endurance athlete. I'm just, you know, these are my recovery days. I do strength training on other days. These are my recovery days, so to speak, right? Um, in a way, then would you still kind of what would your what are your thoughts on that? So, you mentioned MI adaptations aren't it's not it's a subtle difference, but what about lipolysis? Like what about you know? Yeah. So, the way that we would frame this is we need more information on them to determine whether or not that's going to actually matter for them. So, if they're saying, "Okay, I want to enhance fat burning. I want to enhance oxidative capacity. Great. Well, we actually need to look at their capacity for metabolic flexibility. We need to test that. I need to see that number, right? If you're just saying you want more, I'm going to say more from where. Like, where are you currently at? I don't know. Well, then we don't know if we have anything to actually gain here. So, we could do that intervention and I don't know if it would do anything for you. If you're already pegged on that, if your mitochondria are already functioning very high, if your ability to to utilize fuel independent of food is strong, then we're not going to get anything from that. If you're really weak in that area, then we would get something from it. So our first answer is data, right? We have to run some objective test. If you don't want to do that or can't do that, you want to give that a try. Sure. Like fine. It's probably not going to hurt much in the short term. So go ahead and do that. So my answer to somebody who asked that question like I want to optimize mitochondria. Okay, great. Starting off with fasted cardio is not the place we would go, but we we might use it eventually. Um, if you can do a whole bunch of stuff, uh, and we could do this objectively. Okay. When you go out and train, how do you feel if you don't eat before? Oh, I feel terrible. Okay. Well, that's like an easy litmus test to say maybe we have some stuff we can do there. There's way more we could get into in detail. I wouldn't only ask that question, but that's how we would actually think about that answer. So, uh, it could be everything from yes to like I'm not super worried about it. If they're really, really stoked to do it, I'm probably going to say yes just for that fact alone. like, yeah, let's give it a go. Um, but I don't necessarily think you would have to do that to have healthy mitochondria if that's another way to answer the question. What about uh people that are doing strength training, resistance training first thing in the morning and they don't have a lot of time. They're getting their kids ready for school and it's like they they want to fuel with something like what's what what's the best option? Personal preference in terms of feeding or not feeding. The literature would be fairly clear here. I would say our personal experience would match that. Some people are fine, some people are not. Uh if you want to go just like practical recommendations, a banana and a protein shake, super easy. Uh a little bit of yogurt maybe in granola. We have a lot of our athletes that uh will train in the morning. That's a really common thing. Some granola, yogurt, maybe honey, maybe some berries. Small 6 to 8 ounces, right? Like really small servings. You're talking probably 300 calories, maybe 50 grams of carbohydrate. in in these like rough neighborhoods of things. Some a little protein, 10 to 30 grams depending on their physical size. Remember, some of our athletes are 115 pounds, some of them are 350 pounds. So, like the numbers vary, a small size is is different for those people. So, um personal preference, but yeah, the recommendations would be things like that. We don't have too many athletes or clients that uh will intentionally ask them to not eat before they train like we sort of talked about. But the easy, quick, just get out the door stuff, that's what we're going to lean on. Like very simple, easy digesting, small amounts of food, probably not as much as your full breakfast. Uh, but those things will tend to work pretty well. Yeah. I don't I think athletes are less interested in in that. And people that are more interested in body recomposition, they're wanting to lose fat, gain muscle, um, are more interested in Okay. Well, perhaps they're that that kind of person that their liver glycogen takes more hours before it depletes. Yeah. Yeah. And then it's like, well, if I then eat before my run, then I'm I didn't fully deplete the liver glycogen and so they're not going to be perhaps undergoing lipolysis and oxidizing fatty acids for for energy. So, um, what about what about people that are interested in that are that are fit and they're they're not really athletes, but they're exercisers and they're interested in just sort of fat loss, body recomposition. The acute time frame pre- midpost exercise for those people probably doesn't matter that much. It really isn't going to have a huge impact. What will matter is the days and weeks, the total caloric expenditure throughout the day. This person, if you're training in the morning, you probably have at least 24 hours to recover, right? Even if you're training hard every single day, most of the time when we get really specific about nutrient timing, it's because a lot of our clientele are training twice or more a day. That's when timing really is critical. Whether you're talking about timing, timing of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. So when we hear people say things like, "Oh, timing doesn't matter." For the average person, it's not a huge deal. But for some of our people, it really significantly matters. But what you just described is not. It's that other person who's like, I'm exercising, let's just even say, seven days a week. Probably most people are doing like five. So even in between that, you've got a lot of recovery time. So what you have before the workout doesn't matter a huge amount. uh whether you have it immediately post doesn't matter a huge amount. The total in throughout the day the only caveat is actually what you asked a little bit before it's personal preference. I don't feel as well. Okay, great. I'm stomach. Awesome. Then that's the context. It's not the physiology or the biology that's mattering there. It's now personal preference or objective data that says we're getting less performance out of this. Is your recovery slowing down? Whatever the case is. Um, overall I would say do what feels best for you there. And there's not a significant thing you should be worried about of productivity you're leaving on the table, progress you're leaving on the table, or compromised results from no matter what choice you make there, whether it is fats, the protein, or the carbohydrates. What about people that are doing timerestricted eating? And you know, the the the worry of time restricted eating would be losing muscle. Yeah, perhaps if you're not getting in your your protein intake or resistance training, what what is what are your thoughts there? What you you have a new publication now you've published in this area. How how do you feel about people that are doing let's say a 168 timerestricted eating? Yeah, so we actually ran this study uh we started in 2019 and we just published it this week. If that tells you, you know how that goes. Co killed us. We were we had a a big cohort study going. our last two groups. I was like literally days away from doing the final biopsies and we got pulled out of the lab and I was like begging our people. I'm like just let let me one day go in and biopsy 10 people. No, they wouldn't. So, nonetheless, um we ran this study and one of the things we're interested in is with timerestricted eating 168 all the research on that area for the most part is caloric restriction. So, how does this thing work for fat loss? And that's fine. Grant Tinsley. I don't know if you know Grant, but he's done a ton of work at Texas Tech and lots of other groups have done it. You've talked a lot about TR 168 ton. Okay, great. What I was more interested is what's the opposite? What about the person who's trying to gain muscle? If I do 168, what's actually happening here? And because of the way that I operate, I don't care about just a molecular mechanism. I don't care just about body composition. I wanted to ask questions about sleep, about personal preference, about digestion, about how hard the diet was, how likely are you to do it. Physical performance because when you go into the real world, that's how you make decisions, right? I want to be able to tell people, hey, this 168, maybe it is better for body composition, but it's harder to follow or it makes your sleep worse or it's better for everything. Like whatever combination the answer is going to be, I don't really care. But that's the full context people have when they make dietary decisions. So that's what we did. We took people that were very well trained and we did eight weeks of strength training with them in the lab, supervised all that already. Again, previously well trained men and women, college age as normal. We did biopsies, we did muscle imaging, uh we did questionnaires, we did sleep stuff, we did blood, we did a bunch of different things. And ultimately what we wanted to see was okay, we're going to put them all at the same protein load and we're going to put them in caloric excess. So hypercchloric, not hypocchloric. We know the answer. what happens with TR if you're trying to lose weight. What happens in somebody actively trying to gain muscle? So that's the very unique twist of it and it was super interesting. The take-home message was it didn't matter a ton. As long as you hit your numbers, the results were basically the same across both groups, right? So standard four, five, six feedings a day versus TR. Now, we actually like doubled down on the question because we actually made the people train in the TR group in the morning and then they had to wait at least an hour before they fueled afterwards. So, they trained fasted, they didn't recover with protein or anything like that immediately afterwards and they stayed in that state until, you know, the afternoon. So, even in despite of that, it didn't significantly compromise muscle growth or performance or really anything else. We saw some subtle differences. The TR group actually looked like it didn't gain as much body fat because you're going to do that when you go hypocchloric, right? You're going to especially if you're well trained, you want to add muscle, you're going to bring some fat along for the route. I don't know if it was a enough of a difference and we I spent a lot of time in that data set. I don't know if that's a real finding to be honest or if that was just a little bit of an artifact. The the counter to it was as time went on fatigue got higher in the TR group. Legs got heavier performance and the legs started to decline again. So much so would I suggest TR is going to be bad? No. No. But it was like, okay, I think there's something happening here. I think potentially if we were to change the study design a little bit and give them fuel closer, that would have made it not exactly sure. we would have to run a separate study design for that. And so if you torture the data a little bit, you might find some subtle differences between the two groups and they were, you know, statistically significant and effect size and like all those things there. But looking at it from a real practitioner perspective, my general takehome was it didn't matter a ton. If you're trying to maximize leg strength and maximize leg growth, I probably wouldn't go to 168 TR. But if you have other reasons to do it, you're still going to get gains. You're still they still got stronger. they didn't get as strong. There's some other issues that happen, but either one of them works. But but do you think again um if if they were allow I mean most people after they're done strength training they eat within an hour like like I immediately I'm getting protein in me because I like need I just my body wants it. Yeah. So um do you think that maybe would negate some of the performance deficits that you found? I think it would honestly was more of a carbohydrate issue. carbohydrates. Yeah, I think that was the bigger issue because they were going so long without carbohydrates and they were training so hard. They were and they were doing the same workout multiple times per week. I just think over time uh we were also progressing them. So they were being tested every time they came in the lab and the training got harder, right? Like traditional progressive overload. I don't think they I wish we had actually biopsy data for their um muscle glycogen levels, but if I had to suspect, I think that that was starting to leak down. And I I just think the legs were getting we would say just getting heavier over time. Like it just wasn't handling the volume because that's actually what happened too. The volume that the TR group did started to come down at the end. They just couldn't do as much volume as the other group could do. Okay. At the end of a workout, not like at the end of No, at the end of the eight weeks. Okay. So, cuz we tested them uh premid and post. When were they working out? Morning or evening? Morning. Yep. So, they're all working out fasted. Fasted. They're doing strength training fasted. Yeah. So, let's Okay. So, the bottom line is from your study, which is going to be published soon. Depending on when this comes out, it may already be there. Like any any day, I'm stunned. It actually has congratulations. This is great. This is a great study. I You sent it to me. I can't wait to read it. Um, you can gain muscle on a 168 timerestricted eating schedule. Um, it it sounds like if you're if you're if you're doing the training fasted, I mean, there's ways to do 168, you can stop eating earlier and not have to be fasted in the morning, right? Well, so actually, like that's super interesting because when I looked at this, I was like, man, I think that's just is the better approach. Yeah. Maybe if they would have done their fasting in the evening afternoon, there's a bunch of other arguments we could make that that's better. Anyways, that would be a really cool follow-up. I would I'd be willing to bet they wouldn't have had such a indirect indirect markers of fatigue over time. They just didn't have fuel for a really long time. I could also tell you these things behind and this is like the veil of people that when you run actual studies you can make comments about things that aren't in the paper. The people had a really hard time with the carbohydrates. That was the complaint. And so when you had a whole bunch remember because you're getting some of these people are at six 700 grams of carbohydrate a day and you got to get that in an 8 hour window. It was GI was just destroyed. Like it was a lot of people were like man stomach is just blowing up from 600 gram of carbohydrates because you imagine eating 200 grams of carbohydrates. Couple hours later you got another 200 another 200. It was just a lot. Was it so high because you were doing this this hyper caloric because I mean most people aren't doing that many carbohydrates unless they're like endurance athletes. Yeah, we had big we have some big people, right? So if you'reund 110 kilos and you got to be at a hypo and you're at e you know six grams per per kilogram of body weight like those numbers get high fast. So in order to get there like that stuff got there. Even the protein got a little tough as well. So, we didn't see I wish we would have had more subjective questions in those areas, but that what I would say like it was just hard for those people to hit their numbers. Most of them got there, but they're just like, "Woo, I just wish I had another hour. Like, give me another two hours. Could I get 50 of this grams of this protein a little bit earlier? That' make my life so much easier." So, I just think from a practical perspective, it was harder for them to follow. It was harder for them to hit their numbers waiting the whole day than to start and hit it in a caloric surplus. So, if you're not in a caloric surplus, different equation here. If you're in a caloric deficit, different equation here. But for people that are pre-trained, pretty well trained and they're actively trying to get bigger and stronger, it wouldn't be the first approach I would take. Um, but it's still plausible. Clearly, it worked. They still got benefits from it. But switching the order, I think would be cool. Would would you would you say that if they were let's say they were in a slight caloric deficit still getting their protein meeting their protein needs would they be still gaining muscle you think I don't think it would have gained as much they would have gained some right if you look at um like again all grand work and a lot of that hypocchloric state stuffs they gain muscle it can happen but can they gain at the same rate as when you add more calories I don't think so and I don't think so because in our particular program the training program was really aggressive they were training hard for really well trained people. I don't think the recovery would be there. I just don't think it would be there. When did they stop eating and how was their sleep affected? So, we let them choose their window. So, some of them came in and trained at like 7:00 in the morning because they want to start their eating window at 10:00, right? But they're college kids, so most of them trained like 10, 11, 12:00 in the morning. And then they would start their eating windows, you know, between 1 and 2 o'clock in the afternoon, like something like that. depends on if they work or whatever there. So, we let them shift a little bit. The the time domains had to be the same, but when the like we didn't make them start at noon, like you know, depending on their life schedule. Sleep didn't really change that much. I wish we would have had some of our newer sleep technology. We could have really objectively looked at it at the time. We just had basic questionnaires, right? So, we we'll see there. Um what we did notice is the perceived fatigue fatigue and naps increased over time in the TR group. And so again a little inclination there of saying I think fatigue was setting in more didn't some of that didn't land statistically significant but you start to see sort of multiple things in the same pattern. You go all right if we ran a follow-up study there that might be interesting to focus on. Why is it important for people to have carbohydrates before they're doing strength training? You don't have to. If you can get away with it, you're fine. It's not the thing we're super concerned about depending on where you're at. If you can get through it, if the your total caloric intake throughout the day is fine, if your carbohydrate intake throughout the day is fine, and depending on how often you're strength training, if you're the kind of typical person who's training the same body part on non-consecutive days, then carbohydrate pre-ex exercise is not a big deal. It it's totally fine. You can get away with your strength training. It'd be a personal preference. Again, if you're training though the same muscle group in multiple days or multiple times per day, that's when the carbohydrate timing will matter most. So, you can have it before. Um, generally people feel better with it. Performance is usually better, but it's not always. or or if you're someone that is on on more of a hypoc caloric diet, if you're trying to lose fat or perhaps maintain your weight, you're kind of really kind of watching your calories, then then perhaps you're not having a huge total caloric, you know, total totally caloric um intake per day that you might want to have carbohydrates in that. We will generally as just a highle rule try to get more of our calories around training just period regardless of what we're doing regardless of what type of training regardless of the person as a as a first level thing that's our preference we want to either do it premid post in your example there if we're trying to bring calories down we're going to go somewhere else if we can doesn't always work that way people don't always like it but that is that is our default position is yeah we're going to do more calories in and around the training to support it I want better performance, you perform better, you get better adaptations. That's generally how we look at it. What about people that are are more endurance type of athletes? They're they're out running, you know, 10, 15 or more miles or bike, cycling, biking. What about those individuals for different equation now, right? So whether you talk about strength training or even endurance training, but as you said earlier, like you're talking sub 60 minutes at kind of a moderate to low intensity, carbohydrate before training for most people is not going to matter that much. Now you're talking about something different. Really highintensity exercise for a prolonged amount and or moderate exercise for a longer amount, right? So we'll define longer by plus 60 minutes. Now you will very often see performance improvements with carbohydrates. That said, we have some of our people, some of our friends, um, a good friend of mine that I will never stop giving him the business on this one, Cam Haynes. You know, Cam. Oh, yeah. Cam's great. The worst performance nutrition you could just possibly dream of, right? Like, he will intentionally not eat and drink water and then go run 18 miles, right? And you're just like, what? Like, what are we doing here? Right? I've made the argument like I will PR him at every race he's ever done if he would just like let me tell him, he would just follow what I tell him to do, but he refuses. So you can do these things. This is not a matter of it's impossible physiologically, but are you going to get your best out of it? Probably not. Carbohydrates before exercise, probably three or four hours before exercise if possible. If you're trying to maximize performance, generally looking at something in the neighborhood of 50 to 100 grams of carbohydrates, that's a huge plus or minus range there. 3 or four hours before we were generally looking at starches, slower digesting, like give it time, not a big spike. Some people we will tinker with 30 minutes before something in the neighborhood of 50 60 grams of carbohydrates, maybe a little bit more. Some people though kind of deal with a glucose double whammy if you do that. So you got to be careful. Um what what I mean is if you take a whole bunch of uh fast responding glucose, right? Things that get into your bloodstream really quickly right before you start exercising, gluc in insulin starts pulling glucose down, muscle starts pulling it as well. And so blood glucose actually dips. This is a like I had a banana and honey right before I started my race and then I got two miles in and I felt like death. Like oh okay, you had two mechanisms at the same time that are independent that are bringing it down and blood glucose actually dips quite a bit until the liver has a chance to kick in and and bring it back to normalize. So you you'll feel that response pretty often. So, you got to be really careful with um easy digesting carbohydrates right before the event and depending on how long it's going to uh last. Um but those are like rough numbers to start with. In the exercise itself, the numbers you're going to see here somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 grams up to 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour, which is like if you want to maximize performance, you'll see the data will show you like 80 plus 80 to 100 grams. carbohydrates. We're talking you don't want that easy stuff, right? No. Now you want the fast as possible. Oh, you do want the application. You're in a race. Like you're moving, right? This is when the gooze and the packs and things it in. So, you're trying to smash it in there as much as you can. Um I actually just had a guy named uh Jordi Sullivan, a dietitian in Australia. Uh he was just on my podcast and he he actually coached a guy named Ned Brockman and Ned did a thousand mile race on a track. So he ran on a track for a thousand miles. I think it took him like 11 or 12 days, something like that to finish. Did he I mean, how was where the sleeping what was the sleeping like sleeping situation? Sleep on the track right there. Yeah. He would just like lay down and crash for a little bit and then he'd get up and just like run again and he just kept going. He Jordy went through the exact details, exactly what he fed him, the amounts, the type, the concentration. And when you get into things like that, when Michael's getting ready for this 900 mile hike thing, 60 to 80 to 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour is awesome in the lab. And I put you on a bike and you're in my research facility, like those are the numbers that work. But when you cross over into humans, you start getting really tired of goo. You like don't want to taste sugary drinks anymore. And so when you get past a couple of hours of exercise, then you actually start really paying attention to texture and flavor profile and mouth feel because that stuff starts to matter and you can't hit those numbers. They're just not realistic. So if you're going to try to do something like this, pick your poison in terms of the carbohydrate source. This is the, you know, fast sugars. But if you're going to go for more than a couple of hours, you got to really think carefully about are you sure you're going to like that taste of that for six hours? Because you probably won't. Oh, it's it's just incredible. I can't believe people do things like that. Um, what about carbohydrate replenishment after a long endurance type of workout? Um, do you think that's important to to replenish the glycogen stores? And depends on depends on what you had starting with. So, did you feed before or did you not? Right. That'll that is automatically our context. If you fed before, then we don't have to worry about as much directly after. If you're fasted, we've got to worry about more. The other context we have to pay attention to again what's our total caloric intake what's our our carbohydrate intake throughout the day and when are we going to train again some of our folks again training multiple times per day we we are going to go absolutely out of our way to get 100 grams of carbohydrate post exercise if it's a hard training session it's rough number like that again that number scales up and down with physical size and caloric expenditure things like that if you're going to get on a plane and drive and you're going to do something else for the next two carbohydrate post exercise, like the amount doesn't matter. It's not a big deal. Um, you're up against a race of replenishment time. If that matters, you want to again look for 100ish grams of carbohydrate pretty close to finishing. And unlike protein, timing matters. The faster you get that carbohydrate in the the faster you will replenish muscle and liver glycogen. Protein, as you've covered many times, like timing, anabolic window, like not a big deal at all. But carbohydrates are different. You got to repeat that performance again soon. Faster, more, better. If you got a lot of time, then your recovery window is plenty. Then you're going to be fine. Or even if you're just training for a race, right? If you're training like every day, you're probably going to want to get that replenishment in right away. Well, in that case, actually, that's a great point because it's not only necessarily just about recovering for your next workout, but you actually need to train that system. So one pe one mistake people make when they do endurance events like that is they will forget to mimic the race in training. So then when they get into training they try to do something they haven't done it before and their body can freak out. This is when you get a lot of GI distress when you get a lot of you're tapering and you know the week before all of a sudden your performance is down and you're like what's going on? Well you're doing something different now than you were doing the last eight weeks. And so yeah I would actually strongly encourage you to treat your practice races like your real race. So do your pre-mid post fueling strategies in preparation for that. So then when you show up, your body's like, "Yep, this is exactly what we do. This is exactly how we handle people for the Super Bowl, for world championship events, for the Olympics. You try to make those big events where they're so incredibly important and there's so much pressure and stress and that you want to make it feel like a normal practice. This is just what we do. So while most of you aren't going to be on that stage, I get it. when you go run that first 5K, like that's still going to be a really you're going to be really excited and it's going to feel like that. Your body is going to know, wow, this is something I care about. Or you go and you finally get to surf that wave that you've been wanting to do or whatever the thing is. You go on that that hunt that you've been wanting to go after. The thing you can control the most is making your day feel like you've been training. It's a normal process. This is what we do. This is how we warm up. This is the thing we take. The more you can do that, the more consistent a response you're going to have, the more predictable response. And that way you can check out of those things and let your body just do what it's been ingrained to do. So yeah, would definitely recommend that postc carbohydrate for that individual simply for those purposes. What kind of effect does that have on performance? Is it pretty noticeable? I mean, if you're Yeah, it is. It is everything from I bonked. What happened? I felt flat. What? Like everything went away. What's going on? To now I hit the PR. Like if you play with these things correctly, you should feel your best on competition day. There's some of our sports that it's just not possible because of weight cutting and other dumb things we have to do. But for the most part, this is the stuff that matters. This is the like there's nothing worse than when you PR a week after competition. Like there's just nothing worse, right? You're like, "All right, PR the week before or the week after." These are little details that make you land on the right day in the right time in that one race, that one event. That's how we help people smash those things and they don't just go, "Well, we're just going to train kind of hard and we hope that you show up today and perform." Um, we want to take all those questions out of it. So, yeah, it'll make everything from again, I tanked, I bombed, I I failed out to I had my best performance ever. Um, to kind of go back to the original question about eating for longevity versus performance. Now, we're kind we're kind of talking about here. Oh, man. We're on question one still. Well, no. I just kind of want to I wanted to circle back because if we are talking about someone that is racing, right? They're they're competing. They're trying to PR. They're, you know, all of those things, then the carbohydrate sources that they're eating aren't going to be what I'm eating. I'm not gonna be I'm certainly not going to be chugging the goo, but like the the fast like during like intra workout like while you're while you're racing or even perhaps like you were saying right before, you know, eating eating the the quick like the the stuff that's going to spike your blood glucose quickly isn't typically stuff that people that are eating for a longevity type of like my my carbohydrate sources are typically vegetables, you know, fruits that have a food fiber matrix. most of the time. I mean, some fruits can hit hit your your body a little quicker than others, like grapes for example, but you know, um, you know, most of the carbohydrate source are more complex carbohydrates. Yeah. So, fair point. This is that small sliver difference at the end, right? So, again, if we look at your um, we actually have probably I don't know five females right now that we're coaching that are plus around your body size. So, we'll make just equivalents to you and those individuals. We take both your diets for you and all those different girls that are in their different sports. They're going to be almost identical, right? So, they're going to be heavily focused on vegetables and starches and fruit and all those things. What would that difference be? Well, okay, some of them post training might do um a powdered glucose source. So, we might give them a carbohydrate supplement. uh that we might use a vitargo or something like that where it's like a scooped carbohydrate where you're probably never having that. You're not having it throughout the day. You're not having it pre and post your workout. You don't need 60 grams of carbohydrate that's easily d. So that would be different, right? But what are they going to have post-workout? I don't know, watermelon. Like they're going to have things that you're probably eating too. Do we have a little more liberty with them to add some more grapes? Sure. But you could also probably eat grapes, too. you would just take something else like out or move it around or you would have more protein when you have the grapes or whatever different strategies we do. It's really small the amount of goos and powders and things like that that we're doing. We're going to eat 95% of their calories as whole real food. You got a little bit of supplements on the end and things like that, but we're not going to spend too much time with lowquality foods. Even for those individuals, I want them eating real whole healthy foods. So, that is it's it's a really small difference, I guess. Uh so yeah, in some of those situations, but for the most part, your diet and their diets would be very identical. So fat often gets overshadowed by protein and carbohydrates. Yeah. Where does that come into the equation of, you know, meeting your fitness goals, whether you're an endurance athlete or strength training or not necessarily an athlete, just someone who's interested in in being healthy and exercising and, you know, looking for the longevity aspects of of diet and exercise. Yeah. So, I would say I mean, you you position it pretty well. Most people will start with protein, lock that thing in, and then you'll play with carbohydrates and fat as a way to adjust overall caloric intake. And because we know the role of carbohydrates and exercise performance, we will usually go to that second. And then fat gets the third consideration. Like, okay, fine, whatever calories we have left, we back fill with fat. And as long as your fat isn't too low and it's too low chronically, then you're not going to really run into too many issues with having insufficient amount of of intake of fat, dietary fat. That said, this is something I've changed my tune on a lot, right? Like I I come from the classic exercise physiology academic background, and all those people are carbohydrates first, carbohydrates second, third, fourth, and you like fat was always shunned. And I don't I don't think uh I don't think I believe that as much anymore. I also we've experienced a lot a lot of the people we've worked with, they're fine on moderate to low carbohydrate, even high exercisers, non-athletes, but they just they train a ton. You're talking about guys and girls running 60 miles per week, right? Like like real high energy expenditures in terms of performance and they're at 100 grams of carbohydrate a day. They're not in ketosis at all. They're not even trying to be, but they just like are fine at 150 grams a day or 200 grams of carbohydrate a day, right? For 120 to 190 pound like individuals kind of at that just as some frame of reference for numbers there. In that case, their fat intakes are way higher and they they're fine. We're not seeing any performance decrements. They're not having a hard time recovering. Their sleep isn't going down. Like sex hormones are fine. So, I actually have just seen enough evidence now anecdotally and empirically being like, I think actually you're fine there. I I think you're okay if you're giving yourself if your indogenous recovery is sufficient. I think you're going to be just fine there. So, what we do with carbohydrates and fat for that person you're describing is we let personal preference drive us a lot, right? We also will change it just so that you can have some dietary changes. Like fat tastes delicious. It's really hard. It gets really bland when you don't get to have a lot of fat in your diet. So sometimes we'll bring carbohydrate down for a while and let them have more fat if we need to manage calories. We don't generally see that much for the average person. Like we don't see that many consequences performance-wise. So I don't think most people um are going to have this huge like oh my god I'm I'm not recovering anymore. If you're doing a normal amount of exercise, I think you're going to be just fine. Some people think if they're eating a highfat diet, low carb diet, and they're doing endurance type of exercise, more more they're more heavily biased towards endurance training, y that they're going to be more fat adapted, they're going to be more metabolically flexible, and their mitochondrial adaptations are going to be superior. I would not support that statement. I would disagree with that. This is a a great one. So the term metabolic flexibility has been hijacked and the way that it is described now colloally is not what that phrase ever started to be and it's not what that is intended to be. It's so crazy because metabolic flexibility has got turned into maximizing fat burning. It's supposed to be metabolic flexibility which means you have the ability to run the whole gamut. I get it. If you pluck the average person off the street, they're probably less likely to be good at burning fat than they are carbohydrate. So on aggregate, we probably need to get more people better at burning fat. I'm I'm with you on that one. But metabolic flexibility is not just maximize fat burning. Those are not the same thing. That and that's how people will often describe that. If you go too hard on one side of the other of the equation, you'll see a whole host of adaptations that compromise the ability to do the other things. That's not metabolic flexibility. That is still specialization. You're just specializing in the other side of the equation. If that's what you want to do, fine. You know, we're all for it. But we generally like to see people truly flexible on both sides. So if you want to go higher fat in your performance because you feel better, you like it, great. If you can demonstrate no issues, we're all for it. But if we're doing it for a theoretical idea and you don't actually have information behind that, then like we're not going to support those ideas. So you want to go higher fat, great. Um, we have had some people where we've tinkered around with some some number of people actually we've tinkered around with different things. We try a higher fat diet and they actually do perform better. So, we stay with that, right? Like even independent of any metabolic flexibility data we've got of them. Great. We're going to stay in that. And then we've had others that are the opposite. So, these are these really long long duration endurance folks that are out there and they just don't do well when carbohydrates get low. And so, we have to have room for both of those realities. Some people will perform better on a higher fat diet for more fat oxidizing lower intensity things and some will just do a lot better um on those. And to finish up the point, I'm talking about long duration endurance events that are both fast and slow. So if you look at uh to be ridiculous like like we were talking about Cam earlier, you look at some of Rob Rob you know producer these guys are under two and a half hour marathon times right Cam's higher but you know Rob is a 2 and a half hour he's fast he's going to be burning I don't know I don't have metabolic data on him but 70 to 80% carbohydrate in the marathon so that's a a long duration endurance event but that is not a fat burning event that is a carbohydrate gain right if you want to run a marathon fast that is a carbohydrate game. If you want to run a really, really long one and you don't care about speed, you're still going to burn a boatload of carbohydrates, but now we can afford to go slower with more fat oxidation. And so when we say endurance, there's also like another level of question is like, okay, fast endurance or just like endurance for the long term. So all that goes into our calculus of thinking about how we're going to fuel somebody, how we're going to ask them to recover. Um, to get to the like to go back a few minutes earlier, Jordy was talking about this with Ned Brockman, like 1,000 miles. He's not giving him fat only. He's not on an 80% fat. Like, that is his most fat oxidation oxidation possible thing you could come up with, thousand dang miles, and he's still relying heavily on carbohydrates to get him through. So, I don't know if that actually answers your question, but you can think about like that's the stuff that we frame it against. Well, yeah, it does answer the question. It's basically like, no, you don't have to. You don't have to you don't have to be eating eating eating a higher fat diet isn't necessarily going to make you better at burning fat. Um Oh, no. Definitely not. I certainly think that, you know, when it comes down to that metabolic flexibility, exercise again, like when you're when you're doing a lot of exercise, you you become you're you actually are becoming metabol more metabolically flexible through exercise in in my opinion. Absolutely. than anything else. Actually, I think the one thing that's kind of interesting here that that does get left The way that we think about metabolic flexibility is more of an innate human skill rather than an exercise performance one such that I think you all we all should have the ability to go for 6 hours and not have any food and still perform cognitively. You shouldn't be hangry and cranky because you missed lunch, right? Like that is now you're in the kind of like you're not super resilient whether this is a metabolic flexibility issue or not. If that's happening consistently with you, I would say we have some room to grow with metabolic health likely, right? You should probably be able to go 24 hours and maintain cognitive function and maintain physical performance. If you've ever you've done some fasting, like longer fasting stuff, right? You should be able to not eat any calories for 24 hours and still exercise, right? You're not deplete really of of very much anything. If you're the person who is the like, I I can't do anything. I skipped lunch or didn't get deep breath, then I think we we have some stuff to do. But this is more of like you have probably are lacking some innate physiological skills that are going to help you in multiple ways. But past that, uh the metabolic flexibility thing is again not often packaged correctly in my opinion. What do you think about so you know I've had Marty Kabala on the podcast talking about highintensity interval training and you know how obviously when you're doing a lot of people think when you're like doing hit that it's like this all I'm only burning glucose or you know if I'm doing zone 2 I'm only burning fat I'm only oxidizing fat and using mitochondria and they don't realize there's actually a lot of gray going on like you're doing highintensity interval training types of exercise you're yeah you're you're you know going above the lactate threshold you're you're using glucose as fuel But you're also still using your mitochondria, right? I mean, yeah, you're pushing them hard. And there there are many things to say about uh poor understanding of metabolism is is how I'll say that. There is no way to fully metabolize carbohydrate without oxidation. You just can't, right? Like you can run through and we can do it. It's probably not the most interesting thing, but you can't get very far anorobically with even carbohydrate. You have to finish that story aerobically. Does that mean your fuel in the exercise itself is the same as the total net expenditure? No. So in the case of Marty's work and higher intensity stuff, yeah, in the actual exercise bout itself, you're going to be well above anorobic threshold. You're going to be well above an RE of 1.0, right? You're going to get really really in fact we have seen many times 1.3s, 1.4s, fours right for re or rqs that's mathematically impossible 1.0 means 100%. So what you're mean is like the the the the carbon dioxide expenditure is so exceeding aerobic or oxidative intake that your numbers get like astronomically high. So yes, but that said those anything you just burn there that's sitting either in lactate or in pyuvate or some other intermediate form there it's going to be finished in the mitochondria with oxidation you want to recover faster and I'm talking about within the minutes to hours post exercise as well as couple of days now this is an aerobic capacity issue that's how you handle these things uh for our athletes that fight in five five minute rounds like in the UFC or we do 12 rounds in boxing, whatever the case is, there is a huge aerobic component to that. Huge. Despite the fact that they are going as hard as possible, they are pegged heart rate wise and other things. Getting them to recover, especially from session to session, the morning workout to the evening workout, the higher functioning aerobic capacity we have there, and I don't mean V2 max per se there. I truly mean aerobic capacity. That is a huge component of their ability to recover and to not be completely trash the next day. The ones that are really really smashed anorobically, like really high, they can't train as much. We have to back them off more. The volume has to be lower. We have to be really strategic. We run into injuries more frequently. We run into just physiologically running into the ground. Our recovery metrics get lower. Um the taper has to be longer. We have to just make adjustments with calories. They can't handle as much. The ones that are higher in aerobic fitness, they can handle things more. There's consequence of that, too. Yeah, the you can pick the highest intensity thing you could possibly do and there's still um like anorobic and aerobic is not two different things. It's the same gear, right? It's just the top side and bottom side of the same gear. There's not different units. They're just, you know, the front side and the back side of it. So, they will always complement each other. They're not distinct things. Um I mean, and look at all of Georgia's work on lactate. Like we we know these answers now. This is not a one system. These are not different systems. These are just the different side of the same coin, right? No, it's it's true. I mean, it's it's but people like to kind of put this I I think Lane explained this in a in a good good way how people like just put things in bins. Like it's like this bin or this bin and it's like well there's sometimes there's a lot of there's not bins, they're just kind of just overlap. That's rarely how physiology works. Yeah. Right. We have redundant systems on purpose. I I kind of wanted to ask you just because we were talking about the timing of um we talked about the anabolic window for carbohydrates, how there really there truly does seem to be an importance there with respect to at least if you're doing more endurance type of training and you want to be ready for the next day. But protein, you know, Stu Phillips has been on Luc Vanlon, you're in agreement there really the anabolic window is more uh of it's more of the total daily protein intake is that I mean I guess you know when Lane came on the podcast he said maybe there's a little something you can squeeze out if you're like top level yeah you know type yeah powerlter muscle bodybuilder whatever yeah and honestly that comes down though to practicality it's just simply because I said earlier it's just really hard to get 400 grams of protein in a day. So just you just end up having to do protein like all like Yeah. Right. So you're just Look at Mike Ormsby's work out of Florida State. He's done all that pre bed carbohydrate stuff or uh protein ingestion stuff. So it's like 40 grams of protein 30 minutes before bed. Now in all that stuff, he hasn't shown these huge massive benefits to it. He actually doesn't show any consequences either. So you don't uh compromise fat, you don't gain more fat, you don't reduce fat oxidation by having this big bullet of protein right before bed. And so the way he will package that is to say if you're struggling to hit your total protein numbers, this is just another window to get you there. If your protein numbers are fine though, there's no added benefit here. There's no huge win. And so that just is another example I think of this point when it comes to the protein game. probably what Lane was saying, like if this is just maybe a way for you to to smack in 15 more grams or 20 or 40, then great. But outside of that, there's no magic benefit. Yeah. Um Luke Fanlon actually did a few studies. I don't know if he collaborated with um the person just mentioned, but also on this pre like pre-le protein loading where it it's like they're giving people protein, a bolus of protein right before bed, and it it does increase muscle protein synthesis while they're sleeping. And it, you know, again, I think the way he also framed it was you're you're getting more of your total protein. You're you're getting more of that, you know, total protein for the day, but also it seems to make a difference for like elderly people who are just terrible at getting making meeting that protein requirement, you know, for whatever reason. I don't know, it's just hard to chew chew food or their appetite isn't they don't have, you know, their appetite hormones are kind of disregulated, whatever the reason. So, um, what I wanted to ask you about cuz it was kind of interesting. I saw a study you were a co-author on with respect to protein. Kind of on that sort of same, you know, token, people meeting, it's it's hard for some people to take in 1.6 g per kilogram body weight or more. Yeah. Right. Tough. Um, so they're taking protein powders. They're they're doing the protein powder. It's the easiest thing, right? What are your thoughts on whole foods versus powders? Now, you published an interesting study on egg p egg white powder versus the whole egg. Yeah. Yeah. But I' I'd love to like to know your thoughts in general. Yeah, that was um actually a pretty cool study. Whole food is always the answer, right? That is always our default position. If we ever have to go to supplements or even supplemental food like a protein powder or a powdered carbohydrate, that is our second choice. Full stop right there. That particular uh paper and actually set of studies on that found basically the same thing. So whole egg versus egg white. And it turns out potentially we don't we didn't have mechanisms behind this but potentially some of the stuff that's in the egg yolk itself was contributing to additional muscle growth micronutrient wise vitamin D right of course and like any number of things are in there absolutely right whether those actually were the case I don't get we didn't have mechanism on those it was just sort of like why do you think this is happening even when you match it for calories seems to be the case nonetheless to back out your question yeah it's a whole food answer right if we can get there with whole food and I will say this we have many of our professional athletes that take almost no supplements and they definitely don't supplement protein powder. Some of them don't like it. Doesn't sit well with their GI. You don't have to have protein powder ever. I I can't think of a compelling reason why outside of practical, you know, easier flavor, taste, whatever. So, protein very specifically whole food muscle growth whole food. There are other use cases for other supplements and things that you know other strategies but that is our answer and I think that the that paper you're referring to showed the same thing. Yeah, I was kind of it was I was a little shocked to be honest because you know protein was equated, calories were equated and they were they were training and it's like the the one the the people eating the the whole eggs had increases I guess it was slight in in muscle mass wasn't strength strength also right? Yeah. But you would anticipate it to be slight. Like how much of a benefit would a couple of egg yolks a day plausibly give a a healthy person? It shouldn't be much. Had those data come back and it was more than that, I would have been like, I don't know about that. Yeah. Well, it's a little interesting because you always think about, well, lucine is the major signal for, you know, protein synthesis, muscle protein synthesis. And you would think, well, if it's the lucine and the egg white powder, it should be why why is there why is there a difference, right? I mean, well, again, this is what like it's actually funny because when the reviewers came back, it was like we I knew it was going to happen. Everybody knew and it was that, right? You're just like, okay, how we're like, well, I don't know. We don't have this. And so, you just start making as you mentioned choline and you start making like, well, plausible this and then you make plausibly that and then plausibly that. And like you're trying to run Well, there's also some omega-3s in eggs and you might think, well, the cell membranes now maybe the transporters are getting more lucine in. Who knows? Totally. Who knows, right? But I personally, you know, I I don't like protein powders to be honest. And it's a processed food. I mean, you look at protein powders and it's like never just protein. Never. And so I have every reason to be motivated to eat my turkey burger, my homemade turkey burger. Yeah. You know, versus the protein powder. But I get it. I get like I have these like pre-made homemade turkey turkey burgers, you know, they're they're food food prepped and they're there ready to just microwave. I'm not scared to microwave. So easy for me to do, but there's a lot of people that it's like they're not going to cook some if they don't meal prep. Totally. Then it's it's the go-to, right? You're going I don't like protein bars. Same same thing where it's like it's processed. It's all it's all the stuff like you know. So, I I kind of liked the um little extra motivation to say, "Yeah, go for the whole foods. Go for the whole foods." You know, I have had a a lovehate relationship with those things as well. Spent many decades like smashing many scoops of protein powder a day and then probably went a decade or more with like almost no protein powder. Now, I'm back on it a little bit more for for other reasons. Like, they're getting better with some of those things. But if you're asking me what I'd rather do, have a candy bar or have like a piece of whole food, I'm always going to take the whole food for preference, just flavor preferences. Like, I like eating food more than I like supplements. Before we continue, I just want to mention something important. If you're finding these episodes valuable, please consider subscribing to the channel and clicking the notification bell. It's the only way to ensure you'll be notified when a new episode goes live. Many people assume they'll be alerted automatically, but unless the bell is clicked, they won't be. Now, back to the episode. So, we've talked a lot about uh macronutrients. I think there was I, you know, I didn't know if there was going back to the fat just before we move on to the micronutrients. Is there is there really an optimal fat ratio or timing? I mean, or is it mostly come down to if they perform better, if they if that's what they want, or do you think that it's something that's just not as important as well? I'll answer this two ways. I'll be short. I actually think it's an interesting question. I don't think people spend a lot of time studying. I'm open to the possibility that there it's way more important in different timing scenarios than we think, but that people just have not done that work. So, that's an open-ended question that's never been there. The other way I'll say it is because of that I guess yeah like I just don't feel like at this point we have any compelling reason to think that it is a a critical thing to pay attention to in terms of timing and stuff relative there. If you just think about plausibly what these different fueling sources are intending to do. It makes sense that fat is probably the thing you should be third concerned about. you have backup stores of it already. It can be mobilized when you ingest it or you're using your endogenous fat. It still happens at roughly the same rate. So on and so forth. So with all that, I think that's our answer, but I'm open I'm open to other things. What about So you mentioned earlier, you know, that you're mostly concerned if people aren't getting enough fat. Yeah. And so I'd love to you for you to explain to people why that is, but also I'm interested in your thoughts about the quality of fat. Are some fats better than others? Do some fats hinder performance? Yeah, this is actually a whole category of questions that are super interesting. We grew up in the same nutritional generation, right? Low fat, low fat, low fat. And then we saw those consequences. Okay, if you are really low fat for a long time, there are like cataclysm of problems that can happen with that, especially if you're combining that on top of hypocchlorism, right? Endocrine disruptions, sleep disruptions, probably long-term health disruptions in many areas. Like, it's going to be a huge issue. What does low mean? I don't think we have a great definitive number on that, but if it's less than 10% of your calories, again, combined with hypocchloric for a long period of time, then you're probably running into all kinds of issues from cell membrane, like you don't you don't have the basic building blocks to keep cells together to the other ones, endocrine health, organ health, uh a ton transporter health, storage health, like it has so many roles in our body. So, you don't want you want to stay away from those things. Now, past that, terms of fat quality, um, boy, how how inflamed your audience is probably uh a little bit better, but how how mad do you want the internet to get mad uh at these following statements, right? I the truth is all that matters to me. So, I know what matters to you. you you've been clear in your career of, you know, how you approach things, but there's there's just not a lot of compelling evidence that whole fat in itself can be disregarded as always healthy or always bad. Right? So, animal fat, vegetable fats, seed oils, right? We'll throw it out there. Hm. when managed under all appropriate situations, we're okay here. Like, we're really just okay. You're fine. We're going to handle these things. But you go exaggerating any one of those areas, you're going to run into problems, right? So, if you're eating copious amounts of saturated fat and combining that with low physical activity, hyper hypercorism, you're going to have problems. Same thing with seed oils, right? You cook them, you process them, you do all those things. You combine, you're going to run into problems there, too. So, what does a quality fat mean? I always default back to the same thing. I don't want to eat anything that's processed. I don't care animal, plant, you pick it. I'm trying to eat whole food versions of everything. And that is true for my carbohydrates, my proteins, and my fats. So, we don't approach the fats that differently. Um, so I don't deal with it that much because rarely are we going out of our way to give people processed foods, processed fats included. So when we're eating for most of our people, they eat animal animal sources, right? So we're going to be getting fats from animals in a reasonable amount. We're paying attention to those other factors, vegetables, protein, uh, whole foods. So because of that, animal fat just doesn't come in huge quantities. We don't have the physical space. It comes in a normal amount and we're okay. At the same time, we're not having to be so guarded against seed oils because we're not consuming most foods that come with seed oils. We don't have to worry about that, right? It's the company. It's the company, right? Like it's like these things are not critically I know some people get so like fired up about it. And what about uh olive oil? Great. Avocado oil, avocados, nuts. I mean, omega-3, fatty acids, fish, like those are all if it's if it's in a whole food, we're going to like we have no issue with it, right? You have to be a little bit careful with exogenous oils just because of as you're aware like chloric intake just gets really really high there. But do we have our people eat nuts? Yeah. Avocados? Yes. Like all the above. Whole foods are almost always going to be on our list. You just be careful with additives. you put something in an oil and low quality in the sunlight it, you know, fill in the blank there. Same thing with nuts, right? Those can come in low quality as well. So, we always try to get those things uh in the appropriate standards and then we we don't have any issues past that. So, um I don't know how much we've successfully dodged or didn't dodge any landmines on that one, but um man, I just don't have a lot of aptitude for I mean, we we'd have to spend hours talking about it because there's so much nuance. That would be a whole other whole other episode. Thank you for saying that rather so I didn't have to say it. That's one kind way to put it, but my goodness people. Yeah, there's there's a lot of emotions involved in nutrition for sure. That's a great way to put it. There's a lot of emotions involved. Um, so micronutrients, this is an area that, as you know, I'm very passionate about and I think it's a good segue into um some supplements that I'm interested in talking about, but you know, exercise does increase requirements for several micronutrients. How do you how do you approach that so that people are more intentional about their diet and trying to get some of those maybe talk about some of those micronutrients and then yeah and how so micronutrients vitamins minerals phyitochemicals if you're doing your job with nutrition those things are mostly taken care of if you're eating the variety of the foods the type of foods that we've been talking about the the big basic stuff you're in a really good spot now do we need to go on top of those things and supplement particular vitamins, minerals, nutrients. Context dependent here. Magnesium is the one that jumps off of course as the one where if our food quality sources were I don't want to say how they used to be or what we would like them to be and we had adequate amounts of those in our food then we would literally just not have to worry about supplements at all. But that's not always the case. So because of that you can look and you'll see all kinds of numbers about things like magne magnesium deficiencies whether that's clinical deficient subclinical or just suboptimal I don't know some some papers 40% of people some people 60% like those numbers can get really really high when you look at athletes because of caloric expenditure and because of sweat and because of how much tissue breakdown that's happening through many like then the needs are even higher with them so I would say magnesium as a supplement comes in probably 90% of the people we work with. It's really really really common for us to add uh magnesium as a supplement. We try to add higher magnesium bioavailable foods more. That is our starting place, but we're probably going to add supplements on top of that in addition because you just it's just hard to get there. You got to be careful with this a little bit though because if you were to look at your magnesium levels in like a classic blood draw, that's a terrible place to look. The magnesium that comes on your blood work that you get is not an indicative of all of what's actually happening in your body. The vast majority of it's going to be stored in bone anyways and it's super transient. And now there's there's good information you can get there and there's other ways you can look at it, markers of it. But I always like to flag that because people get really freaked out. they going for a blood work for whatever reason, they see that and they're like, "Oh, I'm super high. I don't need it." Like, "No, like that's not a good way to interpret your overall magnesium status." We can talk more about that, but in general, because of those things, we end up adding magnesium as is one of our topline micronutrients to pay attention to. So, I'll go on for more, but I'll stop on magnesium if you want to talk more about that. Yeah. No, it's it's I know you're a fan. Yeah, for sure. Um, I'm glad you mentioned the plasma levels, magnesium, which is mostly what's being measured in a standard test, I guess, you would get from like a routine physical or something like that. Yeah. You pull it out from your bones and and and really um it's it's it's it's kind of like this. Your bones are this reservoir and by the time someone reaches older age, like 50% of their magnesium has been taken out of their bones. I mean, it's incredible and it plays a role in osteoporosis, a huge role, but people aren't really focused on that as much. Um, yeah. Yeah. So about if if half the country isn't as you mentioned depends on the paper that you're reading and what you know what's being defined as magnesium insufficiency. Most of the time it's looking at what the RDA is. So for women it's about 320 milligrams per day. For men about 420 milligs per day and so people aren't meeting that requirement and so they're considered to be getting insufficient magnesium. And so you're talking about half the country basically. So you've got a one in two chance of whatever athlete that walks into your door, they might be not getting enough, right? So that's kind of I I would say that it's good insurance, but then as you mentioned, you these athletes are sweating magnesium. They're breaking down tissue. Um they're, you know, urinating more. I mean, there's lots of like it's coming out. It's coming out. And so they can require up to 10 to 20% more than the RDA. And so if they're not even meeting that RDA, um it makes sense to supplement. Now, I've heard you talk about different magnesium supplements like mag magnesium citrate being being one that um is often preferred for recovery. You uh magnesium source is different. Back when we were kids, you had to be really on top of this uh because of ineffective forms of magnesium and because of GI distress. Most supplement companies have cleaned that up. So now you can look at bislycinate is is a really common one that is fine. and citrate's fine. Obviously 3 and8's become more popular now. Any of those are generally okay, right? It's the old forms, the oxidase, the different ones like that that you like really had to be careful of, but you're generally okay there. They've also in large part dosed these things so that GI distress is not huge anymore. So, this is actually something we would we would pay a lot of attention to way back in the day, but for the most part, you're okay as long as your dosage is is reasonable. Um if it is giving you problems then you can go down a little bit or you can try a different form but we haven't seen uh the huge differences between various forms um they're all basically getting to the same spot. So like most of our people coming in the closest accuracy you can look at is like it's not uncommon for us to see people below 250 in terms of their intake. So like you said 320 400 like and that's not an athlete that's that's the standard person. And athletes can be 20% more. Yeah. So we actually have generally found our non-athlete, our our normal people population is generally higher with magnesium intake. Our athletes tend to be lower. Um that's a little bit of well that's a lot of selection bias. Someone's coming in to work with me, they're probably pretty health consscious. They're eating more meat, less greens. The athletes are not like always health conscious. So it's little section bice. Yeah. But like really common. I'm like so much so to be candid I barely look at it anymore cuz I'm like I just know I assume you're going to be low until you prove prove otherwise. But yeah, the forms of it um yeah what kind of dose do you typically and and and have you noticed um it affect performance or do you already are they already supplementing with it? It's it's not really No, most most aren't actually surprising enough most are not taking with it. standard dose juice if you look at the big high quality brands 150 200 something like that in that range right that's going to usually take a scoop a scoop and a half if it's a powder three pills caps if it's capsule like something like that so those would be sort of our starter dosages we have gone double that plenty of times again context we deal with many 300 plus pound people so when we're doubling it I'm not doubling it for theund you know something nothing pound uh individuals So we can get high there. The only real drawback in general, as you know, when you start tinkering with vitamins, you have a range of like, okay, not a big deal, to like really big deal. Phyitochemicals, antioxidants, same thing. Minerals are different. You got to be careful with rocks, right? Magnesium, though, is pretty inert. It's okay. You start tinkering with iron, you got to really be paying attention. You start tinkering with other rocks, you got to really understand. But magnesium seems to be like pretty okay. Like the worst thing we're going to deal with is GI distress. And as I talked about like most people are okay now. It's not a big deal. So I'm not super concerned with going a little bit aggressive with magnesium because of that because we also um are asking so much of them in in other areas of performance or movement. It's one I'm saying like don't worry a ton about the dosage on that one. If you're a little bit high, you want to go a little more aggressive. I'm fine with that. We will see some people be respond very well in terms of physical recovery. Totally subjective. They feel like their legs are not as sore anymore or they're not getting it as much. I don't know if that's actually happening. Totally. Honestly, I don't know. Um, we will see pretty pronounced improvements in a bunch of sleep metrics though. That seems to be re and that that's all very objective. Like our sleep technology is incredibly advanced that we use. It's not just um like a consumer wearable. And so we have a ton of metrics we can look at there. And that one seems to be a really clear jumping off point. And it doesn't seem to matter which form we use. That was my next question. Yeah. Yeah. Doesn't seem surprised. No, I mean there's been actually probably two or three papers in the last 6 months on 3 and8 specifically. We're finally starting to get human trials um need more work, but we haven't noticed a big difference between forms. Most people are on three and eight right now, but uh not a big deal for us. What about So omega-3s? Um and I do want to talk about we're going to get into recovery and and supplements for performance as well, but omega-3s is another one. I mean, I personally, as you probably know, think that most people are not getting enough omega-3. In fact, if you look at if you look at data on the omega-3 index, people are mostly not. They're in the low range. And there's a lot of longevity reasons, you know, cardiovascular health, inflammation, why getting up to a higher omega-3 index would be ideal. And most people, there's been studies showing like taking around 1.5 to two grams a day will get you there from a 4% omega-3 index, which is low, to an 8% omega-3 index, which is high. And um what h how do you approach omega-3s from a performance perspective? Have you seen the data on omega index and professional athletes? No. I think, don't quote me here, but you'll make the point. I think that the uh the NBA data was like 50% or below five. It's stow. Yeah, it's just like very low. Stunningly low, right? Nobody is at 15. Like, it's just like you just don't get it, right? The numbers might even be higher. It's it's outrageous. So, yeah, we magnesium is a pretty big staple. And unless we have strong contraindication, pretty much everyone's going to be getting omega-3 as well. Uh I know again another like we'll throw it out there. Yes, I saw the AIB paper like everybody's aware of the omega-3 and heart flutter, heart palpitations. Great. Um if you are a cardiologist, you can treat that however you'd like. If you're concerned about work with your cardiologist, do whatever you want. But outside of that, there is so much other information, so much benefit, so many rationale reasons uh for omega-3s that we use it very consistently. We always start food first, blah blah blah, all the things. But because of that, uh a moderate to low dose of omega-3, pretty safe place to go. Yeah. On the on the aphib thing, um there's, you know, it seems to be at a 4 gram super high dose range. Four grams ethyltor form. Yeah. And also the recent paper that came out the it was a correlation paper. It wasn't a randomized control trial. Bill Harris has had publishing a response to that. It was a like terrible statistics and all this stuff done. So anyways, did you see the absolute effect by the way? Um yeah, it was like extremely low. It's ridiculous. Yeah, it's it's it's not so I think it was just creating a lot of anxiety, you know. No, now of course there's people that maybe have a family history or prone maybe shouldn't be taking five grams of ethylster you know high vipa or whatever a day but um man I got torched for that recently. Yeah I talked about somewhere people flew off the handle like my god like you have to pay attention past line the top line you do look at the absolute effect it's like again it's like one of those things where you're going to have to spend a little bit of time talking about all the nuance to like really convey everything. You can't just do a little like, you know, sound bite. It's just not. People are gonna have their emotional response and and that's that. There's also like just look, humans are weird. You can't pick a exercise, a supplement, a nutrition thing that we've ever done where somebody of the seven billion of us won't throw their hand up and go, "Oh, I did that and I had this crazy negative response." Right? Like, yeah. Yes. Like, totally happens. And I believe you. I trust you. I can't explain it. Right. Physiology is wild. There's nuance here. People respond differently. Not to mention that maybe it was something else. I mean, like, you never really know, but totally. Have you So, I had um a young professor on the podcast, Chris Mcllory, and he's been doing some pretty pioneering and interesting work. He trained with a couple of the couple of the the big guys. Steu Phillips is one he trained with. Um, but he does work on on on highdose omega-3 and disuse atrophy. And he's done a couple of randomized control trials showing has to be preloading because it's completely independent of the inflammatory effects, anti-inflammatory effects of omega-3s, right? Where it it seems to be you have to like get these people on omega-3 for at least a month, right? They're doing like four or five weeks before the tri before um before the trial starts. So, they have to be loaded up. That's how long it takes to accumulate in cell membranes. and um it's accumulating in their in their cell membranes in their muscle and people then have a disuse event. So he'll put a cast or whatever on them and it cuts disuse atrophy like in half and he's like you know trying to figure out what's going on but it appears to be sensitizing muscle to amino acids. So it's almost like what exercise is doing. Yeah. Yeah. So, which is of course when you're having a disuse event, you're not exercising. And so, um, but anyways, it's something interesting I kind of wanted to throw out there and get on your radar because it's kind of in your world. And yeah, look, when you you'll see a cornucopia of things like this when you take people, I would assume I don't know his population database in that trial, but I would assume it's fairly inactive, unhealthy people, women, young women. Okay. The only reason I'm saying that is you just seems to see these type of crazy things happen when you go from like somewhat suboptimal to poor health and you just get them back to baseline. Wild stuff just starts happening like this. Like I have no idea. We could probably get a whiteboard out and start tossing up mechanisms, figure out like what's plausibly happening there. But you could infer is okay a healthier cell membrane probably then can do a bunch of things that it was trying to do but what wasn't healthy enough to do however we want to determine healthy and now it can it be a reactionary response could be all these things yeah awesome that is quite different than going from already pretty healthy there so I would imagine that case if you take people who are already pretty healthy and did the same thing you wouldn't see as much of a response but that goes to the point of saying okay Now, given the fact we know most people are not already pretty healthy. These were healthy women. I I think I think that generally speaking healthy. So, we're looking at the effects of omega-3. They weren't high. They don't they didn't have high levels of omega-3, right? So, that So, the idea is you take someone that's already Yeah. Yeah. eating fish. They're supplementing with omega-3. They're exercising, whatever, and you So, you put them in a disused event, you know, where they're not not moving a limb for four weeks or whatever. and um healthy or not, they're going to lose muscle mass. Oh, yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So, it's kind of interesting that super interesting that you you take something like omega-3s which are known to affect transporters, receptors, anything embedded in the cell membrane and makes it better. You means make it makes it functional. So, when you have a deficiency of it, like they're not as optimal. So, it's kind of it's kind of interesting because it kind of interesting. Yeah. For me, it has it's not just important for like elderly people and perhaps a surgery or an event a disuse event. you can plan for. But I think just injury like in general like having having you know these omega-3s in our cell membranes built up to that level already would be important. But also um what about recovery? Have you looked at omega-3s in recovery at all? Not in my lab ever. Um, yeah. I don't I don't think I don't think I've spent a ton of time outside of the obnoxious again, going from deficient, super low, just back to a standard number, going from good to high. Uh, no, I don't I don't think I have anything super interesting to say on that stuff. Well, to be determined some other time. Um, I I do want to get into some of these performance enhancers. And this is kind of, you know, it's a it's an area that I'm I'm interested in myself. I, as we were chatting earlier off camera, I had I had recently had Derek Darren Kando on the podcast and he's done a lot of research in the creatine world and so I'm kind of curious. I I take creatine now. Um, but I wanted to ask you about, you know, the top sort of performance-enhancing supplements and then we can kind of get into some of those like just kind of what what your thoughts. I'm sure creatine is at the top of the list. Yeah, of course. Right. Like how how's that not going to be on the top of of everyone's one? Um the way that we would think about supplements in general is number one remove remove reduce try to eliminate any any physiological insufficiency whether that is coming because of caloric restriction. So we have dealt with a lot of people whether this is again as our athletes or non-athletes where chloric restriction is a thing and I'm saying that because that's why supplements tend to be helpful. I would prefer you to get all your stuff from food. But when food is limited for a bunch of different reasons, now we can use supplements to backfill vitamins, nutrients, minerals, and a bunch of other stuff. That is our topline performance enhancement. When your physiology is in a healthier spot, it will perform better. So, we can get into betalanine and other things for sure, but that's really important for me to state because that is where we have actually seen by far the most enhancements in performance and recovery and sleep and cognitive function. You name it. It's by just making sure we call them performance anchors. That you don't have any anchor behind you. Nothing's just like dragging your physiology down. We get that thing solved, get it up back to normal, and then for the most part, I want to step away. Like I want to let your physiology just run how it wants to run. But if we have big holes, we plug them first. Whether you want to pick your metric is again recovery, muscle growth, testosterone levels, like pick your thing that's going to get your brain most excited. That's where we see the most impact. like by a landslide. If your house is cleaned up there, now we can get into creatine, beta alanines, um you can get into fatigue blockers, you can get into stimulants, you can do a whole bunch of things like that. Um adaptogens, there's a whole host of things we could cover there, but that part of the equation is where you will most all of you will most likely see your biggest benefits, right? So, so pretty much the things we've been talking about, you want to make sure you're optimizing your diet, making sure you're getting your micronutrients, your magnesium, vitamin D, I'm sure. Yeah, we we do this actually quite differently. Um, we spend a lot of time on a bunch of biomarkers. So, we take a ton of blood, a ton of urine, stool, and saliva, and we get really precise with vitamin, mineral, nutrient recommendations. like wait we it's hard to get into that on a podcast without like exact examples but that's where we get so yeah we can start off with general recommendations but being precise to physiology uh we're able to paint pretty good molecular portraits of people and figure out what's happening with them over time and then get really specific with recommendations past that then is when we get into like our direct performance enhancements so like that's how we handle that equation yeah some people are really into to measuring and trying to to you know quantify I their deficiencies and their sufficiencies and see where what's best. But not everyone just not everyone's going to do that, right? So, some people you kind of put them in that in that bucket of, okay, yep, 50% of the country is not getting enough magnesium. Most people not getting, you know, omega-3s and the vitamin D again, you know, more than half the country's not getting enough because we're spending all our time indoors. And so, you kind of you kind of go for the the biggest ones that you're like probably going to help, right? Yep. Um, it's always better to measure things though, right? Especially with like things like vitamin D where you can measure it. It's a simple test and most doctors will do it. Yep. And like vitamin D is a good example of it's also one where I feel pretty good with you just taking vitamin D without a test. I ain't tripping if you're just like, "Hey, I want to take vitamin D." Like, all right, I'm I'm probably cool. Like, what's the worst that's going to happen? Not much. Very limited downside. Strong likelihood you're low. Even if you're not low, very little harm here. So, there's most of the things we've talked about. You don't need any test at all to go do some things. I'm going to say, hey, like we want to see actual markers on this before we start tinkering with that. We said like minerals in particular, be really careful of you have big downsides in them. But yes, most people the big stuff we're going to put you in a better spot and that's what to pay attention to. So the minerals that are are are sort of not as risky would be the magnesium. Now, iron, you said iron is something that probably more focused on with male, sorry, females that are um menrating, right? Premenopausal females. Yep. A lot of them can become low in iron and and reds like red's a really common thing to pay attention to. Um so, this is a concern you have with relative energy deficiency, right? So if you're not only combining being female as well as a lot of caloric expenditure and calories are moderate to low, then we have all kinds of problems we have to pay attention to there. So there's just a whole bunch of other factors that that go into that. Um iron gets really complicated really fast. So I mean we can come back to that one on a different day. And but don't and don't you also like as an athlete you kind of like you're you're losing your you know tear down like red blood cells are are being torn down and so you're probably losing even more iron. No. Okay. So there is a uh a thing that we will talk about for for many decades now called heel strike homalysis. This is exactly what it sounds like. If you run a lot and your feet smash the ground, when your blood is going past the bottom of your foot, just normal blood moving through your body, and that blood is between your foot and the ground, and then you smash it, you will smash your red blood cells. We see this in our combat athletes, right? So, you have physical things hitting your body, you will physically smash those red blood cells. You will smash that iron. And so, yeah, it's not just menration. It's not just breaking down of tissue. You will actually physically smash your own red blood cells. So it is a huge concern for not just females but young old like it's a whole thing. Iron is like it's also insanely related to sleep quality. So you will see numbers go all over the board when you are having spleenic contractions at night because you're having mild sleep apnea or other disturbances. So the numbers that you're paying attention to there um they really throw people for a loop when their blood work. So you got to be really careful and pay attention to that. And as I said that's not an innocuous supplement. You can't just smash it and just be like, I'll just take some more. Not a good idea at all. So, so you definitely want to measure your iron, your feritin, like what are the main things? A bunch of ones. Yeah. I would say that there's probably at least seven markers that we would pay attention to before we're really truly understanding what's happening with your overall iron status. everything from hematocrit to hemoglobin um feritin of course but then you have even like red blood cell magnesium concentrations and maybe probably closer to 10 actually I would pay attention to mean corpuscular volume there's a bunch of different things that we would look at so yeah we we'll come back to that one just cuz I'm I'm stopping myself from going this is going to be a 40minut like part right now okay because it's it the reason why I don't want to do right now is you can't get your toes deep in without just making more confusion than not. Yeah. Got it. It's one of Okay. Well, you mentioned stimulants, um, cognitive enhancers, and that's something I'm I'm interested in. Um, starting with, of course, caffeine. I mean, that's probably one of the most widely used stimulants globally. And I'm I'm sort of there's I've come across a few studies where caffeine if used before exercise seemed to enhance fat burning like pretty significant you know and now this is not and someone that's already an athlete and doing long amounts of endurance exercise is not going to make a difference but someone like myself I'm I'm running like a 30 minute doing 30-minut run or I'm doing a 20-minut hit um I don't know this might make a little bit more of a meaningful difference to me. Uh, I wouldn't I I would be skeptical on that one. Caffeine works. No question about it. It will it works as an erogenic benefit. You will perform oftentimes better. Boom. That's it. So, there you go. Right. Like if you burn more calories, train harder, went faster. Yeah. Now, will it have a lipolytic effect? Yeah. You take it right now, you will see free fatty acids go up in your blood. That will happen. You don't do anything with it, they will be restored and placed right back in their position. So if you look at the research on even fat burners, you're not going to really significantly aid in fat loss, right? Stimulants, caffeine, combinations of them, they are an acute effect. If they are used then to train better, more frequently, more motivation, work harder, great. Sometimes they have an appetite suppressant effect as well. But that's how they're getting to any substantive fat loss rather than the actual mechanism itself. Absolutely. Yeah. So, it's it's essentially just you're working harder kind of like with creatine, right? You're you're more more volume training, performing better, and so um what whatever the reason, motivation, um what what about the dose of the caffeine? Does that Yeah, I mean, typical doses you're going to look at something like most is 150 to 400 milligrams on those things. We way back in the day, people were tinkering with like 10 grams per kilogram, milligrams per kilogram. So, you're getting really high dosages and you're like you're in these trials and you're just sitting there and you're like your head is going to explode. Like these numbers are outrageous. Four to five is like more of a standard one now, which is going to equate to that, you know, like two, 300, 400 total milligrams depending on your body size. you start crossing past like 500 milligrams of caffeine and like you might have an existential event. Like you're going to be like, "What is happening?" And I just remember sitting there with other students and stuff just being like, I just want this to be over with. You just do not feel good at those high dosages at all. Yeah. So, the downsides would be at a higher dose depending depending on the person. Some people are pretty sensitive, but how can someone know if they're it's actually affecting their performance? Like I mean okay so that's actually there's there's a lot of conflicting research as well on adaptation. So there used to be this idea that you want to desensitize yourself to caffeine. So even if you're a normal habitual caffeine user let's just say an average dose of caffeine in a say a coffee or an espresso is 200 milligrams right? Like whatever tea is less and you get the idea. So if say you do two of those a day and you're like a 3 to 400 milligram per day user, you would come off of it entirely for a day or 5 days or something like that and then you would reintroduce it and you would have this like super response. You will feel that. But the question was is that actually then doing anything for performance. People would do this in like the powerlifting and weightlifting worlds and even in the endurance world for a long time. But there's more recent data that suggests it probably doesn't matter. There doesn't seem to be a correlation. Well, it doesn't seem to be a 100% crossover between your perception, your personal stimulation of it, and the performance benefits. Those seem to be disentangled quite a bit. So, even if you're normally at 400 milligrams a day and then you take your normal 400 milligram dose and you don't feel anything different, you might still have those performance benefits. You don't have to feel like you're, you know, like super stimulated uh to get that thing. So, that those data have changed over the years, right? It's gone back and forth. and said like it has to be novel or now it's looks like doesn't really matter that much. So that game of like do you want to reensitize or desensitize yourself I leave it up to people whatever you want to do generally we don't worry about it but it seems to be the performance benefit there so how would you know if your performance is getting better we just have to have some objective marker of performance like are you lifting are you running like what are you doing are you are you either going more um we'll back up the two ways we would typically do this in the lab is like a time trial right or maximum performance like so you you can play the So you can say, "We're going to lock this in at 30 minutes and say, how much work can you get done in 30 minutes? Oh, you got more work done this time than you did without the caffeine." Or the opposite, we're going to run a 5K and does your time get better? Like those are the kind of like the two ways to pay attention to it. And you'll generally see benefit in both of those scenarios. What about um what about music as a performance enhancer? Yep. You'll see that like pretty consistently. You'll see that actually even with muscle growth. So intentional playing of of music generally will give you a small benefit in muscle growth. Mechanism there being obvious like probably are happier, you're probably training more, probably training harder. Um the type of music doesn't seem to matter that much. Seems to be pretty independent. What do you want like you want death metal? Cool. You want to play jazz? Cool. Really, it doesn't seem to matter that much. It doesn't have to be the only thing you'll kind of see here is tempo. Generally higher tempo better. like you don't want to be down slow. I don't know like what those beats would be actually. But anyways, faster or higher tempo stuff would would uh generally be what you're looking at. We actually ran a study in my lab years ago where we had professional drummers come in. Uh this is totally unrelated, but we ran a bunch of metabolic equivalents like we have put them on a metabolic cart and looked at V2 max during drumming of a bunch of different like songs and things like that and looked at caloric expenditure. But yeah, nonetheless, you're a music pretty good idea for most people. So, I've heard you talk a little bit about um you and Andrew Huberman talk about Rodeiola Rosa. Yeah. And I've been sort of interested in this um as a you know, fatigue reducer, cognitive enhancer. I'm kind of interested how does it work? How does it compare to caffeine? You know, dose, all those things. Yeah, rodeiola's been around for a long time. I've probably been using it, I don't know, at least a decade or more. It was always hard to get and you were like scared of where you're going to get it from kind of thing. You don't really know. Now we have enough data on it. There's quality providers, NSF certified places and such. Um, more research is coming out muscle endurance in terms of like how many repetitions can you do of a of an event, you know, 30 reps versus 35 reps, like that kind of muscular endurance. And then we're seeing benefits otherwise. Andrew talks a lot about uh like he feels cognitive stuff from it. I don't really personally there but to each their own. How is it working? Nobody knows. We don't really have outside of like stuff in yeast and I think there's some fruitfly data. There's not a lot of mechanism here. I could guess I could spout out. Is it an adaptogen? What is is it a polyphenol? What is it with both? Right. Right? So you have both of those effects, but the only little bit of mechanism data is maybe cortisol, right? Maybe something HPA access, maybe dopamine, maybe serotonin, like something's happening here. What you will generally see is if you look at markers like heart rate variability. What will often happen with rodeiola is the same dose of highintensity exercise when you use rodeiola will not drive HRV as much. That's why we say it's like an adaptogen. That's why it mitigates the stress response. I have not seen any evidence that rodeiola would do something like improve baseline resting HRV over time. So it's not like a recovery agent, but it seems to make harder higher intensity exposure things not as damaging if that without compromising performance. Right. Okay. So it's not it's not compromising adaptations. Correct. In fact, the some data like have indicated that but most of the research suggests actual performance enhancements from it. We're just now with the cortisol and stuff, we're speculating because at some point if you actually block cortisol response, then you actually inhibit stimuli, right? Which you don't want. So our hands are up in the air. Like I haven't seen anybody really do a lot of human trials and figuring out definitive mechanisms. It's hard to get funding for these sort of things that that too. But yeah, what um what dose do you need to get the performance enhancement? Is it like dependent on your body weight always? Right. But most products are going to be something like I think 150 or so is like a reasonable starting point. I haven't really seen like we've tinkered with really high ones. Um there's some some papers I think have done like 800 milligrams like way up there all at once like one dose. Yeah. Yeah. Um I'm not going to lie to you and say we haven't tried that too. Does it make does it have a caffeine effect or is it like totally different? No. So you don't feel liked? No. Yeah. No. Great question. It's not a um yeah, not not a stimulant like that. We actually haven't seen any like changes in sleep or anything like that. I would always take it in the morning personally if I'm going to use it at all and we generally recommend in the morning just in case. But no, not a stimulant in that that sake at all. It's it's generally again the way to think about it is you take it if I were to put you in a placebo control right now and gave it to you, you wouldn't know. I don't I don't think you would feel like if if I gave you beta alanine or if I gave you caffeine or you you'd be like whoa you like you know there but we could blind you to rodeiola almost surely and you wouldn't know it. And and what about in terms of like you take you say take it in the morning just to be safe but like if you're wanting a performance enhancement you can take it at night no problem. So it's like it's like something that's in your system for a certain amount of time. It doesn't have to be like right before you work out. Yeah. We will use it chronically. Okay. Yeah. But again we're speculating here because we we don't know where we have mechanism. we understand at least roughly how a a beta alanine or sodium bicarbonate are working or caffeine. I I don't actually know. So I I should back up. I I don't know the answer to your question. We are not super worried about it that you have it right before your workout, but I guess it's plausible that we should, but we're not. Yeah. Today we don't. Okay. Well, 150 milligrams. Um I guess I'm going to try that out and see. I I kind of want a little performance enhancement in my especially my strength training my my my CrossFit stuff. Yeah. Uh I think that is a pretty good place where you would likely to see some benefit there. That would be a good place to try. Okay. Um you me you mentioned the beta alanine. I want to get to that in a minute. But um before because we're kind of talking about performance enhancement, there's this whole category of these blood flow enhancers. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah. And there's like so the beetroot juice, beetroot extract, and then there's the citruline arginine. Yeah. Um, so I'd heard of the beetroot juice and and you know the these nitric oxide boosters, but the the citrine and arginine are something that I haven't really I mean arginine I know about for for blood pressure, but not for this performance enhancement. And so I'm wondering um endurance type of exercise or high rep type of exercise. I mean, is this something that actually can make a difference in someone that's already well trained? Is it like not well-trained people? How much? Talk about what it's doing. Sure. There's actually a lot of research, right? Andy Jones uh has done so much stuff here. Um he's done a ton of work on it and there's a lot like you're talking about a solid decade or more in lots of populations, lots of different stuff. So, it is really well studied. It's funny you bring it up because it it gets no love. Like people don't talk about it that much despite it's not a small amount of research here. If you want to especially stack up like rodeiola to be like you have a mountain to go on with beetroo juice and you have a pebble like on rodeiola. We like it. We use it a lot. We use I've used a ton of different forms over the years. It's great because it is not a stimulant. So you can take it in the evenings and it doesn't compromise sleep at all. We will all use it a lot for our individuals who are either exercising at night or training multiple times per day and their stimulants come in the morning but they still have high fatigue and so they want to use it in the evening. So that is our our common use case. You see it a lot in the endurance world particularly the steadystate endurance world. So cycling, swimming, running, things like that. Um you're talking about nitric oxide. This is a basil dilator. You're going to open up blood flow. You will feel it. If I were to put you in that blind test right now and I gave you any of those forms you mentioned, you will be like, "Whoa, something just happened." There's no blinding to those studies. But it sounds like if it's increasing blood flow, it should make your cog you make you cognitively more sharp as well. It will. Yeah. You you'll I don't like Now we're talking beetroot juice or we're talking citrine arginine. You're going to you're going to have a same answer for basically all the above. There there will be noticeable effects. There are differences between all three of those. If you were to take literally beetroot juice and concentrate it into like a 3 ounce shot, you could see the same stuff here. Most of the time with like citrine and arginine though, you're getting really high concentrations. I don't know typical dosage of those off the top of my head to be honest. Um, but what you're going to normally see there is a very pronounced stimulant effect. Like it's not going to be caffeine, but you're going to be like, whoop, especially citrine. Like you're going to see that right now. Um, you will see if you go to the gym and you take any of those forms, particularly like the arginines have fallen out of favor, like they're not as popular anymore for a host of reasons. Um, but even the beetroot stuff, like you will see a pump, a physical pump, like you will see I was reading about that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's not a that's not fake at all. What What's better, beetroot juice or beetroot extract? I mean, I typically go for the low sugar. Yep. Which would be the extract. Yep. But um does it matter? Um does it matter? We use extract more. You could make a compelling argument though that juice is better. You could do that. So it kind of depends on multiple parts of that equation. We use the powder though for a bunch of different reasons. A lot of them are practical. A lot of them are travel related. Right? You you don't want to take a whole bunch of juice with you on your airplane and you're flying all around to different places and you're just like, "All right, I can take the powdered supplement. It lasts longer." shelf stable. Um, if we're talking about like antioxidant, polyphenol properties, well, we know we're losing them the powder. Like, we're probably losing some of that relative to the juice. Okay. But then we're going to back fill that with whole foods and other things there. So, um, lots of research on both of those. I would say a lot of people would say would prefer juice. I would is I think is a fair thing to say, but u I'm not fully against powders. Well, if you're going for the powder, um, what kind of dose can you do you have to take it? How how soon before exercise? Can you take it chronically? Is it going to stop working? Can I start taking it before my podcast? I mean, like, how does this work? You you can if you put a scoop in there right now, you would uh you would know that you did it. There's no question. So, you can take it um you're talking about I don't know five minutes to take effect. Like, it happens fast, like really like like caffeine. Like, you're going to have a pretty acute effect of it. And it will last I think you can think of it like caffeine. It will last probably 3 hoursish. Some people are going to metabolize it faster, some people are slower. So, it is not a it's not a shortlasting thing. It'll be there for quite some time. Um, so if you're going to use it for performance benefits, whether it's in the podcast room or in the wait room or dealing with the assembly at your kids school or whatever thing you got to get through, uh, yeah, right before would be the time to go about it. um we will sometimes use it hours before exercise when we have uh high fatigue, high like motivation issues, right? So like you start having these associations like uh let's say for example we have somebody training at like 4:00 in the afternoon and at 2:00 this is when we start having problems with like am I going to train today? Am I not or whatever. All right, let's give them a little hit right there. And we don't want to go to caffeine. We don't want to go to other stimulants like that. So, we'll simply use it as like an afternoon pickme up, if you will, for even on a non-ex exercising day if if we're trying, especially if we're trying to get caffeine out of somebody's equation or or lower it in the amount in the afternoon. So, we use it then is just simply like a okay, motivation's back up. I'm feeling good again and I'm ready to go. You'll feel it. Can you use it with caffeine? In other words, like Okay, so this What are the downsides? Do I mean it affects blood pressure presumably, right? I think I remember reading studies about that years ago. at least beetroot didn't this is nitric oxide right so this is your primary health concern is going to be anything related to blood pressure right so you handle those equations our downside GI like GI distress is going to 100% be there um with with beetroot or with citrine all the above particularly the beetroot though right the juice there if you eat beets and you forget and then you go to the bathroom like so like That's the part of you're like, "Oh, like you can freak people can freak out and they forget that they took it or they don't know why." So, you you can have things like that, but as long as they're not GI issues, um very minimal concerns outside of if you have again medical conditions that you got to pay attention. Do you have a preference to citrine versus beetroot? We uh beetroot. Why? Yeah. Generally, we're going to be there. The issues we issues is a strong word. The slight things we've had to consider with citrine is power. like it's just too powerful for some people. They're just way like whoa like this is too much for me. I don't like it. Um I don't feel it. So you can titrate those dosages down. Um the other again issue is the wrong word. Issu is too strong. But the other like little bit of like uh we've had is why can't I just get this out of close to something closer to whole food? Okay. So if that is your preference, then we can go back up a little bit to be or beet root juice. Um but that's not a strong argument. Yeah. What about just baking some beads? Would you get a similar effect or would it not be concentrated enough? Uh, probably like 15 years ago, I had a friend who, you know, actually you met before who did this and he would blend beets like in a blender in a smoothie or something or like you could call it a smoothie, but he would like juice it and blend it and he would do a combination. It was probably like eight to 10 whole beets he would consume pre-workout and he did it about three times, I think. And two of the three times he just threw up everywhere and then he's just like red blood. You can It's a dosage issue though. Like right will you get a small benefit? Um I can't like I've never personally felt like a blood flow benefit from eating a bunch of beets personally. Some people say that they do. Um but you wouldn't get the dosage. That's why they're juiced. That's why they're concentrated. Now you said arginine's fallen out of favor. Why? Why is that? Okay. So like you're probably pretty aware of nitric oxide metabolism. You can't just consume nitric oxide nitrite nitrate like immediately like you're toast, right? So then the argument is oh can we go back up the chain like can we go up to arginine? Can we go back up the thing? So the first stop on that train was arginine. Uh and then the issue you're going to fall out there which is almost always the case with supplementation was bioavailability. Like how can we just get enough of it? And that one just seemed to fail. uh well just it seemed to get better once we started going there. And then there's other concerns uh cold sores and things like that started popping up that people were like not super stoked about and so citrine seems to be the better approach that right now that's the short version. Okay, got it. Yeah, the the arginine is used for viral replication and I thought that was kind of an interesting I mean I've I've never tried but um I was reading a little bit about the cold sore thing and I was like I guess if someone has herpes, cold sores or whatever that might that might flare them up or something. But um I'm going to try the beetroot. It's totally worth it. I experimented with it like 10 years ago for blood pressure and um I was giving it to my mom but I just I couldn't at the time I was you know more low carb and I couldn't find a quality source. I'm sure now it's probably there's like great sources of it but um yeah so now I think I'm going to I'm going to I'm going to go back circle back and try try it out again. I love how you experiment on your mom. That's great. I I I'm I mean I'm, you know, try to do what you can do. Yeah, I'm I'm judicial. I don't I don't do all the crazy stuff, but um told you I told you she's doing CrossFit now, which is like amazing. CrossFit for seniors. It's fantastic. I love it. It's definitely a tone down from what I'm doing, but yeah, you're getting Yeah. And confident, too. For sure. Um and I'm also interested in all this stuff to, you know, I'm I'm going to kind of play around a little bit. You mentioned the beta alanine and um I don't know if sodium bicarbonate is in there, but beta alanine I'm sort of interested in. I've never really heard of it until I heard you talk about it. I didn't know anything about the fatigue buffers, what what it's doing. So, how does it work? Tell tell us a little bit about it. It's been around for a really long time. Really simple strategy with this one. So, enzymes work in a certain pH range, right? If you come too acidic inside of a muscle, we have a hard time running any metabolic process. Aerobic, anorobic, strength, it doesn't really matter, right? Contracting muscle power. We start running into acidic environment, we start running into problems. So, Andrew then a whole cascade of supplements designed to buffer fatigue, which is a way to say like, let's keep you within that acidic range. Now, you can do this by starting off more alkaline or you can just do this by putting intermediaries in there that say like we're just going to keep you within that certain range so you don't get too high. Beta alanine was a great stop on that because we're looking at intracellular carnosine. That's what we're trying to do, right? So he's like saying, "Hey, this is our limiting factor. Beta alanine being the amino acid, the limiting factor. So if we can give you more of that, you can build up more carnosine. Then we can buffer more effectively." And it works. There's a good amount of research on it. It works for the things that you would anticipate it working for. Doesn't do much for maximal strength. Doesn't do much for speed or power. Doesn't do a lot for long duration endurance. Um though again you can see some positive benefits there. Where it mostly works are things of really high intensity and by that I mean um cardiovascular intensity right so high intensity strength training again I just said not super relevant because you're doing two reps acidic pro is not the problem there. So beta alanine is something that you would take chronically. you will feel an acute effect um at certainly at somewhat of a higher dose, but you need three to five weeks for this to build up intracellular before it makes a difference. And so much like caffeine or creatine rather, unlike caffeine, this takes a while for you to dose it. Um so you can you can do a bunch of things to mitigate that. Um, but you will see a a pretty classic like CrossFit would be a great example. Like you couldn't basically couldn't engineer a supplement better for acute or or for for CrossFit performance um outside of beta alanine. And as I mentioned, it's been around a really long time. It's just an amino acid. It's not a stimulant. It won't affect energy. You you could take it right now and again like you wouldn't notice. You wouldn't be like, "Oh, I'm fired up and ready to go." You wouldn't feel anything different. Um, but you would just feel the burn is not as bad uh as you're training. What What would be the optimal dose? Um, man, I'm blanking on dosage right now to be honest with you. Okay. Um, so we can look that up, but I I did read that there's some kind of tingling effect. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So, can you can you mitigate that by Yeah, back in the day, uh, we would say like this is an dump, but that doesn't seem to be the case. There there's actually a couple papers that came out. It seems to be something to do with sensory input. So there there's some sort of sensory receptors that are being clicked on and tingled and it kind of feels like a fire. It feels like you're itching, feels like you rolled around in grass a bunch, right? Uh don't tell anybody this. We would we would give people beta alanine a bunch like our friends as a joke and they're like not paying attention. So you like put some like we were younger and so you're like sitting there doing work or whatever and all a sudden you just like start itching everywhere. You're like what the We would do this a bunch. I did this to my wife one time actually and she was like like what is going on? She's like something's Yeah. But that's like a higher dose, right? Not even like a moderate dose. You'll feel that at really. Can you just can you It'll desensitize super fast. It'll So it's really like not something you're going to continue feeling once you you can also just back dosage down like you just go down a tiny bit and you'll find that level of like okay I feel fine. And as soon as you start training it typically goes away. So 30 45 minutes before or so you take it. You'll start feeling those like itchy kind of crawly feels a little bit soon generally as soon as you start training it goes away. Um if that's still bothering you just lower the dosage. What we'll do a lot of the times because it's not an acute stimulant is we'll just split the dosage up throughout the day. Half in the morning half a night. Couple grams in the morning, couple grams at night. Like that that is a general place that we'll go. Um so like if the four grams is like killing you or you don't like it or three is better then again split them up throughout the day and they won't have any effect. So we will do that. Um you will develop a little bit of a um a tolerance to that though. So this is one of the cases where you we actually want to build that dose over time. So when we get within like eight weeks of competition we will start strategically increasing that dosage to get that as high as we possibly can. Uh where other things we don't have to worry about dosage going up. What should you is it like a cycling kind of thing where you cycle it? You don't have to cycle it because there's no feedback loop here. It's just an amino acid. Okay. So there's no um like creatine like there's no you're not shutting down any indogenous process by doing it. But we will tend to to bring it away just for if we don't have a particular purpose with supplements, we don't take them. It's like for that purpose alone. We're like okay great. We finished, we competed, we did something, we're pulling it back down. So for the people who are not in competitive sports, we will tend to just use it when we have a bigger priority or we're training really hard and so we use it in six to 10 weeks and then if you want to like come off of it, but you don't have to cycle it. We have some people that are on it permanently and they just don't come off of it. I haven't seen anything to suggest that you need to pull it away if you don't want and it's pretty safe. You said it's been been well studied and super well studied. Um, I haven't seen outside of the acute tingling, I can't say I've seen any like side effects that have been documented that are a problem. So again, it's amino acids like pretty pretty straightforward. So anything else? We didn't talk about the creatine dose. I mean, yep. I mean, typically I mean, like I said, Darren Kando just was on the podcast and talked about typically for muscle like five grams, but uh reasons to go up for cognitive. Yeah. I mean, Darren's published so much in this in this world. Um, we don't use the five gram number at all for the most part. As I've said a couple times now, it's because we deal with humans that are literally triple the size of each other. 0.1 gram per kilogram body weight is what I think he said. Exactly. Right. Which translates to a lot of people as like 3 to five grams, right? Um, where we probably spend more of our time is like 7 and 1 half to 12 and a half grams most of the time. Um, we'll go as low as three. No problem there. Like I'll go five. No issue there. You want to use five as a starting place? Awesome. Titrate up from there. Really no downside of going higher. So we will like go quite a bit higher quite often. Darren's actually done some stuff at 20 grams a day. Yeah. For years. So, as long as you're not getting nausea is like the number one thing we get is like I got nauseous. Okay, great. So, if you're not getting that and we we run that train pretty high pretty often or people get GI distress, some people get that. I don't. Yeah. Yeah. Um any other supplements? Well, you mentioned um uh quickly I think it's probably worth sodium bicarbonate. Yeah. Okay. Same idea, different mechanism, but same idea as betalanine. So, sod sodium bicarbonate, you're making yourself more alkaline, right? That's all you're doing. So if you want if you don't like beta alanine or don't want to use it or something like that, you can go the sodium bicarbonate route that is like you can get that at the cheapest price possible. Baking soda, right? You can literally do that. We have done that many many many times. Just take baking soda and put in water and drink it. way again many many years ago it's a little bit off color but um when we would have to run these studies with sodium bicarbonate we would have to do it really close to the toilet because this will have a very pronounced acute GI effect on you and so like there was many times of wheeling over carts when you have like a an IV in somebody or something you're like get them over to the toilet not a good situation so because of that most people have modified the delivery mechanisms of sodium bicarbonate, but it does work pretty well. If you're concerned about that, you're like, "That is the least appealing thing I've ever heard in a podcast in my life." You can just use creams. Um, Momentus makes PR lotion. That's exactly what PR lotion is. It's just a sodium bicarbonate cream. So, this is local. So, if you're using your arms today, you can put it on your arms. It has nothing. You don't have to put it through your GI track at all. You can put it on your quad or whatever you're doing. Um so that is the best workaround for that improves your your highintensity performance. Yeah. Sodium you're also you're putting sodium directly intracellular as well as it'll get into um it'll get into blood flow. But does this doesn't have to this doesn't take weeks like beta alanine. It's an acute effect. Yep. So you rub it on right before you take it right before 30 to 60 minutes before training would be uh what you're looking for. or takes some time to get in and get into tissue. But yeah, this is an acute effect. And this is definitely something I would generally only use on training days where beta alanine you could take and probably should take on non-training days because it takes a while for that to storage to come up. Creatine, same thing. If you're going to use a sodium bicarbonate or equivalent, this is only like a pre-workout strategy. Um I want to I want to get into you know recovery and um some other things but torine have you ever yep messed around with torine comes to my mind I I' I've come across the literature also my late mentor Bruce Ames called it a longevity vitamin so you know he was he's taking a gram a day and and this was for longevity reasons and there's a lot of evidence for longevity but I remember when I was looking into it it was I was find coming across some performance and stuff. It seemed a little mixed, but I was kind of curious. We don't use it. No. Okay. It's it's it it's it's good for mitochondrial health, but again, more longevity, I think, than than performance-wise. The closest you'll see is this will come in a lot of uh pre-workout cocktails. Yeah. What do you think of those? Um, okay. I prefer people having the least amount of artificial ingredients as possible. That's our default position, right? If you want to use a stimulant, we'd rather you use coffee, tea, so on and so forth, right? If you're going to use a pre-workout combination, the major downsides are we can't control dosage of indiv individual ingredients. For most of our people, that's a problem. For me as a scientist, I hate it. Like, I want to know what we're dosing. We're going to run experiments. We're going to try things out. And if we have a pre-made cocktail, I don't have any influence on what we're tinkering with. So, when something I hate it, I like precision. I like detail. I don't like the fact that we have a whole bunch of things coming in that we don't know. I don't actually know what's in there. I don't know that they're dosed at that level. Like, we don't have there's all these variables that we don't like. I'm also not ultra concerned that if somebody really wants to have a fill-in- thelank drink before they train and that makes them train harder and better, all right, like we can live with that. Like, I can handle that. If that's your one thing we're dealing with, um, but if it's up to me, we're not going to use them. You'll never see me program one of them ever. If someone already has it and they're gonna like fight against it, okay, I might I might let that slide, but it's never going to come out of my mouth. Yeah. I don't like them because it's like it might have a one or two compounds that I'm interested in, but then it has a whole host of things that I don't want. It's like I can never find something that doesn't have something I don't want. Yeah. Um, speaking of which, supplements that we don't want to take. Um, I mean, I don't know if there's ones that actually inhibit performance, but I'm interested in the ones that are blunting adaptations. Yeah. Right. Maybe we can talk a little bit about Well, are there are there ones that are actually that you don't want to take for performance as well? Caffeine. If you go too high on caffeine, you'll actually see performance decrements like endurance performance decrements way high. Like that stuff, like I said earlier, 8 to 10 grams per kilogram. You'll start to see performance come down. Yeah. That's way insane. I mean I mean you have to be taking some kind of powder or something. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd be drinking. Okay. So So high dose caffeine would be something that's going to impair performance. Of course you could like some people live at that level so they'll be fine there. But yeah, that's one of them. I think what you're probably referring to is things like copious and excessive amounts of supplemental antioxidants. Yeah. Right. Antioxidants, anti-inflammatories. Absolutely. um the lab I was in as a graduate student did some of that original work on acetaphene and things like that. So I was around for a lot of those those programs and then stuff came out on specifically things like vitamin C combined with vitamin E. Um vitamin C in general vitamin E we want to default to food. If we can get it from there we do. That's where we're looking for all of our of our nutrients. Clear evidence in my opinion at this point that antioxidant consumption from food has no detrimental effect on exercise adaptation. Eat your blueberries to your heart's content. Right? Eat the cherries. Eat whatever you want. Never seen evidence to suggest that will blunt performance. There is some evidence to suggest though when you take those as a supplement. Very again the couple of studies were vitamin C, vitamin E. But are they always combined? Have you seen a vitamin C by itself blunting like in what dose? if you have. That's a great question. I know. I don't I've definitely I've seen a lot of com comb vitamin E is a very powerful anti brains. Yeah. So, I'm always, you know, it's it's something I'm very interested in because there there's definitely a good amount of evidence that taking vitamin C in the dose range above 250 milligrams a day can help prevent some upper respiratory tract infections, particularly in high volume training endurance athletes. Yeah, we use vitamin C very judiciously. Not to get us back there, but you start actually looking at iron. What it does when you co-ingest iron with vitamin C. If you're going to go after iron, you probably should bring vitamin C along. You want to bring in collagen, probably should bring in vitamin C. Super lower dosage, like 50 migs, right? Like way down. You want to actually start doing anything to prevent someone getting sick when they're on a when they're traveling. Again, especially when they're traveling in a 6 to 8 week hyperchloric state and they're going to be on a plane and then they're meeting greeting and their fans. They're okay. We're going to go certainly going to go for any kind of immune support that we can have. I I'm not I do not hesitate to go to a gram of vitamin C. Right. Right. You can go way up there for 3 days, 5 days, 7 days, 2 weeks, whatever the case is. Not super concerned about that. We're not going to live at that level. Um like 500 milligrams of vitamin C is a very reasonable dose. Like what about So do you think the timing of it like would you let's say someone works out in the morning Yeah. and they take their vitamin C like with dinner. What's a what's actually what do you think a half life is on 500 milligrams of caffeine caffeine vitamin C? Um it's not very long. No, it's going to be pretty transient. It's like a couple hours, right, in the plasma. Um I bring up because I don't know the answer to it's a really good question, right? I don't know. I'm just I'm I'm what I'm interested in is okay. So you know a lot about adaptations in terms of muscle adaptations. There's the cardiovascular adaptations. There's neural adaptations, right, that are happening in respon that are as a consequence to the inflammation and the oxidation that we are causing from exercise that are important in those adaptations. And so what you're wanting you're not wanting to blunt those those antio I mean sorry those um oxidants and inflammatory signals that you're making. So um here here's the case I'm trying to make. I don't think people should be supplementing with anything above the RDA for vitamin E, alpha tcopherol in general. It's just you don't need, you know, 400 IUs of of alpha tcopherol. Um, but all these studies that are coupling vitamin C with the vitamin E, it's like, hm, well, are we seeing this because the vitamin E was there? I think I there was like one maybe one study I recall um I have a topic page on vitamin C and I think it's on that topic page and it was maybe 500 mill maybe it was a gram I don't know but um I don't I just again it's like I I it's it's good to know because for for one I like to take highdose vitamin C when I've been exposed or when my son's been exposed it helps me and so it'd be nice to know for athletes as well it's like okay can I take that you know high dose vitamin at a certain time. I don't even remember the last time we recommended vitamin E to anybody. So, we rarely we rarely dose it for all those reasons. I'm also was the reason I asked you that halfife question was I was thinking the same thing. I don't know. I don't know anybody that's actually run any even light trial on timing of vitamin C for exercise adaptations. So, I don't know. I don't know if you took it later in the day and you train took it 12 hours a week. I don't know that it would have a different effect. It may it could could um to answer your question, here's how we handle vitamin C. We're not just giving it to people besid like a standard like magnesium or omega-3. We will use it judiciously in different things. But I'm also I'm not worried about it. If you ask me what am I concerned more about the small amount of adaptation that I miss versus not being sick, right? That that's an easy exchange for me categorically. Here's how we think about it. Again, athlete or non-athlete, doesn't actually matter. There are times when we're trying to induce adaptation. When we're doing that, we're we're going to want want to let those stress things happen. And then there's times when we're trying to peak. We call this optimization versus peaking. If I'm peaking, I don't care about adaptation. I'm trying to maximize performance in the short term. In that case, we are going way up on antioxidants. We're going way up on vitamin C. Don't want to get sick. Want you to feel great. We want you to perform at your best right now. If that compromises some adaptation, fine. I don't care because we're trying to get the max performance right now. If we're concerned about long-term optimization, I can't emphasize this enough. Even in people who are not competing, this is still a thing you should play with throughout the year. You should have phases of optimization. You should have phases of adaptation. You should be pushing this boundary. If not, you're going to kind of run medium all the time. And so, that's how we will I will have no problem putting it there. If we have some reason to think somebody is in a really high oxidative state because of really poor nutrition, environmental exposures, any number of other things, then we might just kind of prophylactically give them vitamin C probably at 500 milligrams. I wouldn't be I'm not worried about that. I'm not super concerned. The other thing to pay attention to here is when we say adaptation uh attenuation, it's not blocking. It doesn't mean you're getting zero. It's you're getting 5% less, 10% less, like some amount that matters. But it's not zero. It's not like absolutely zero. Oh, I did nothing. Like, no, it just means you got 90% of where we thought we could have got potentially. Yeah, it would matter if it's every day. Maybe you're getting 5% less over 20 years, but you know, the way I So, if I remember correctly, and you know, people can go to my vitam vitamin C topic page on my website and and see there's like we have a graph. um it your your plasma levels peak and then I it goes pretty close back to baseline I would I want to say after like 3 hours or so. So I take if I'm taking it I'm taking mine at night and I'm you know all night I'm sleeping and so it's like when I work out in the morning my my level should be normal by then. But that's that's kind of the way I approach it. um anti-inflammatories, you know, what do you how do you feel about people taking things like NSAIDs for, you know, pain or as an anti-inflammatory if they're working out too hard because that also blunts adaptations, right? I mean, yes. Yeah, it can. It's the same like you're running a calculus, right? Like what are we trying what are we worried about? Um should you take them every day? Probably not for many reasons. Not a not a good approach. Um, my wife actually just started a new training phase a couple of days ago. So, she added uh a a new a couple of new exercises she hadn't been doing. And she tends to do this. Just went way too heavy. So much pain. She has not been able to move for two days. Like bad, right? She's just like can't move without really really substantial amount. I I couldn't make my heart happier. Like I love hearing her in physical pain. just makes my joy there cuz she's not like hurt, you know? She's just like, "Oh my god, the kids are just terrorizing her. Just like wanting to play with mom and she's just like everything hurts on my body." Yeah. We're like, she's using a lot of inset threat. Like there's no there's no win here. There's no positive benefit. There's no adaptation we're missing with you being in extraordinary amounts of pain, right? In those particular cases when you overshoot it or whatever happens, yeah, like use them. No problem. If that's what you're using just to get through through your training, then then our training program is probably poor or something else in our in our physiological process is depleting our recovery bucket and we need to we need to go fix that problem. So if it it is something we have to use. The exceptions there are are our athletes of course like football is really hard sport and if you got to take it to get through a football week cuz that's your job then like that's what we're going to do. And there's some other things there, but for the most people, um, yeah, we're not using them very often, right? Um, listen. I like the look on your face, by the way, when I said, "My wife is in so much pain. It brings my heart joy." You was like smiling at me at all. Well, I'm just wondering what she's did what she did to be in that much pain that day. Nothing crazy. Just like um she normally does a bunch of her training at home and then she was actually happened to be at a gym where it had some of her equipment and she was able to be like to load stuff more and she was like just too happy at the moment. was like, "Yeah." So, she's uh doing some deadlifts, um some RDL's. I think she did some more overhead pressing, some lat pull downs, like like not crazy stuff. I love being sore, too. I mean, I love waking up the next day. And it's great. Oh, it's it's the best. It's the best recovery. Recovery. Um let's start with some supplements for recovery, but we're going to go get into recovery um as well. I hear a lot about people have been asking me a lot about tart tart cherry juice. Yeah. Which when they're asking me about that, I was like, "Oh, you mean for sleep?" You know, because I'm so used to like people taking Tarte cherry juice for sleep. Um, and but apparently it's being promoted for reducing delayed onset muscle soreness recovery. So, uh, can you talk a little bit about Yeah, there's data there. That's not There's data there to support muscle soreness, muscle damage. Um, could I could I make a strong argument that you wouldn't get the same thing if you just had a really high similar food source? I think you could actually. I don't think there's anything magic to that. I'm not surprised, right? If you think about what's in dark, rich colored fruits, polyphenols, right? Like we we know that that's there. Um, it's the same thing we make when people talk about like blueberries for cognitive performance. Yeah. It's also the same probably in strawberries and probably in raspberry. Like it's it's not like magic to the cherry or the blueberry. I don't think it is a super high concentration of polyphenols in a bunch of different areas. That's probably doing most of the work here. Um but yeah, you will see that there. Um we we tinkered with it for a few years. We don't use it very much honestly. Is it does it you know like I said I want to get into recovery and typically you know when I have delayed onset muscle soreness or doms I go for a run and I'm good. Yeah. Like I mean it hurts when I start running and then as I'm going throughout the run I start to feel better and then the next day I'm much better. Yep. Um so you know I'm I'm just wondering you know is tart cherry cherry juice something you think I should try experimenting with? I mean is it probably not. Probably not. Okay. you're not getting that sore that often. Then who's who's the kind of target person that may benefit from tart cherry juice or your blueberry polyphenol supplement or your polyphenol booster supplement, whatever, fill in the blank. What dose? Yeah, again, we don't use it very often. Um, so I'm probably not the person to make the case for people wanting to go out and try it. It's cool. Um, it's fine. Again, the research is there. I've seen it. It's compelling. You also mentioned sleep. That's another compelling reason. So, if you're getting if you're wanting to use kind of a double combo and you like you like it for sleep, um, where this is most popular is in like the bodybuilding communities for those exact reasons. So, I can take it a ton at night, it'll help me sleep and I'll be a little bit less sore. I'm kind of getting a double win. Is that because the melatonin in it that sleep or combination of plausible? Probably all the above, right? Um, and again, that research is actually there. you you'll see it. And I have seen a lot of people who will anecdotally say, "Yeah, it helped my sleep a ton." But again, I probably haven't recommended it in five years or more. Like we kind of did it a bunch and Okay, great. Yeah. I just I've had multiple people asking me about it and so finally I was like, "Okay, what is this?" Yeah. Yeah. Like what there's got to When you start to have multiple people asking, you start to look into it and see like, "Okay, we generally don't honestly favor recovery supplements that much. That's just like probably the bigger answer here is like supplements for recovery is not that great. It's not as good as other things that we're going to hopefully discuss in a minute. What what about glutamine? Yeah, you you can do that. So, we will use glutamine conditional amino acid, right? So, in our populations when amino acid need is really high and again you're combining it with caloric reduction and you don't have that much room to go like I just can't give you more food or I can't give you more chicken breast. I can't give more turkey or elk or whatever we're doing. Okay, fine. So, we have some argument for the conditional actually coming into practice with those people. Then you have the kind of area of glutamine with gut health stuff. And then we actually see that a little bit transfer over to even brain health and you specifically like postconussion protocols. That whole line then starts to come together and you go, okay, for our population there's one, two, and three likelihood of all that stuff. Okay, pretty reasonable. add on top of that safety profile. No no real downsides here. We're not worried about any other effects of it. Uh yeah, we use that quite a bit actually. That's that that's so I have a few thoughts on glutamine. Um one that's interesting TBI because y glutamine is it's like a it gets converted into you know it gets used by mitochondria as well as a source of energy. Totally. Um, and in fact, I did a lot of research in graduate school with glutamine and te-c cells and activated tea cells. And this is kind of where I got into this. I'm I now take glutamine for immune reasons. Yeah. And I got I don't know if you've seen any of the literature on long endurance athletes, you know, taking glutamine. Yes. Um, I imagine you're taking mult are you taking it two times a day? Are you splitting up your dose? I'm not. Sometime if I if there's an exposure, I'll take it three times a day. Like so if my son all of a sudden starts sneezing, I'm like, "Okay, you're just scooping." But um so glutamine is it's used by by activated tea cells and and it it just dawned on me. I like done all this research. I'm like, you can take glucose out of a cell culture as long as there's glutamine there, those cells are fine. They are fine. Um because they consume glutamine as an energy source. Um it's used it's used as you know alpha ketoglutarate. So basically it gets converted into that. Um but I started taking it and this is total anecds how often I was getting sick. I was like I was wondering if I had cancer. I'm like what is wrong with me? Um and then I started to glutamine and I don't ever get sick anymore. Really? I'm serious. I'm serious. Now, I'm sure if the flu came up or something like I'd probably get it. That doesn't count, though. But upper respiratory tract infections, like if I get a little bit of anything, it's a tiny bit of a runny nose for like a couple of days. And like I haven't I haven't been sick in months, and that's really unusual as a parent, as you know. Oh my god. So, um that's why I take it. I take it not for recovery reasons, but for I take it prophylactically every day. Now, gut health. 5 g 10 g. I So, like I said, so I right now I take five grams a day. No, 5.6. 6. It's almost 6 g. It's about 6 g a day. If there's if I have any inkling, suspicion that it's coming. 25 g. I'm I'm Yeah, I'm like 20 grams. I'm like up up. And um the only downside for me is I can get a little gas when I start going my dose. I think you were talking about no no downsides. I would say the only downside is if someone has cancer, they have Yeah. Yeah. colon cancer or liver cancer or something like that. Cancer cells like glutamine. I was talking about tea cells, but cancer cells can thrive with glutamine. It's a it's an energy source. Totally. And people don't realize that. And so I was thinking about the TBI thing that I'm totally you know going on off a you know tangent here, but I'm wondering if the TBI thing if there's an energy component to it. Oh no, there absolutely is. There's huge I covered this um I did a whole we we published a paper a few months ago myself uh Tommy Wood and Federica K who works with me at uh Parker now as my research scientist published a a review on preventative as well as post brain injury concussion all the supplementation dosage timing all that stuff as well as whole food equivalents and that whole paper is open access so you can go through that whole thing but yeah this came out as a pretty clear one when you start than poking around into the gut health literature as well. You start going, "Okay, the immune stuff you just brought up, this is such a clear connection between this entire chain from being sick to the brain health to the energy." You pay attention to how it's working, what it's doing. You're like, "Okay, this is one of those times where it lines up and you go, "Oh, yeah, now I get it." Like, this is why it's having such cross benefit, right? Absolutely makes sense. In the gut, too, it's like it's being converted to energy. Your gut your gut cells are using alpha ketoglutarate. I mean, it it's so interesting. I think there's just there's so much to be discovered with glutamine. Yeah. Um that I hope people are going to, you know, research that more. But we do almost always 10 grams twice a day, morning and night. Like that's a pretty thing, especially if we have any inclination or direct evidence of actual gut issues. That's a common one. If we want to drop it then back down to 10 grams total a day, like we will do that, but we will generally live at at least 10 grams a day. That said, um I'm going to I'm going to do this. I'm going to do your protocol because I'm not it and if every day if I ever get sick again, I'm having a lawyer send a a letter to you. I'm I'm bl I'm everybody. I gave it to my son as well and he's not getting sick like nearly as much. It's it's it's it's real. So, I was thinking it was place I was like, "Oh, it could be placebo." Because, you know, honestly, if it was placebo, I don't care. If it works, it works. But my son doesn't know of course that I'm giving him glutamine. What are you giving him? Three grams. I'm No, I'm I'm giving him full five. Almost five. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like it it's been a pretty night and day difference in terms of the effects on the immune immune system. I mean, I'm saying immune system. I don't know that it's actually I'm just saying it doesn't matter. Yeah. Bringing illness into our house, not getting a cold. This season has been unbelievable. And it's it's funny because this season has been the worst for all of my friends. Like everyone's been sick. Crushed. Yeah. Everyone's been sick. We haven't. My wife probably has had one cold in a decade. Like it doesn't matter. You could soak her in a bath of 16 cold viruses, she will get nothing. I'm so envious of those people. Nothing. My my daughter is like okay, but she gets a lot. My son and I just You bring it home, it's over. Like it's a wrap. I'm so done. And I get so mad because I'm like I know all these things. I do this whatever. this is my job and I can't but I've never tried this at this level. So try it. Um I'm so like I'm fired up. I I put it in my coffee um or you know my tea and it does you can the coffee if you put like monk fruit or stevia you won't taste it but it does have a taste as you probably know. You probably remember it. I'm a straight shooter. We put it I just put it actually like in that much water and just right down it and we just dose it with all the rest. It's like put creatine put it all in there. deal with six ounces of the light and just get it out. Now, what's it supposed to do for muscle recovery? Well, if it has that conditional effect, if it has any immune effect, it's going to have the same there. So, you'll see muscle soreness as the primary outcome to pay attention to there. Like, is it doing anything anabolically um in cexium maybe or like some other situations cyclopenic, but for normal people? No. Why we do it is the other stuff for the most part like all the good health. I just wonder how much of the glutamine, you know, cuz I remember gosh, it's been so long. I did some of these like substrate labeling studies and it was like, you know, a lot of it's getting converted into glutamate and alpha ketoglutarate and being used as energy. Yep. So, it's it's it's fascinating. You you kind of wonder how much of the glutamine that you're taking in is going as an amino acid versus the energy source. So, um that's a great question. So, you're not really big on recovery supplements. I got two more to ask you about. one and we can kind of lump them lump them together as well. But the hydrayzeed collagen powder for joints and tendons and this is where I get into you know it's high in arginine. It's actually really high in arginine. I take it mostly for skin because I've been pretty convinced by the skin data but I was you know what are your thoughts on on I've changed my tune on this one. I was not compelled by this evidence for a long time. I was also not compelled that as long as your protein intake whole food is high or higher than is you know like higher than basic numbers no compelling evidence I don't care about skin so I'm like whatever I've changed a little bit I more and more research has come out and it looks like there's something actually happening here where this gets sticky is the still the argument of organ specific conversion all right So if you are consuming it, how do we actually know the you're consuming collagen and that's getting into collagen? Well, the argument would be if it's all being broken down into its individual constituents and it doesn't matter. And then there's some talk of like well there are these special kind of conditional ones where it gets crossed through as these combination of amino acids. So therefore it's going to be more targeting collagen. We'll wait and see if that holds true or not. I'm not entirely um convinced of that either. But that said, when you go to the end of the story, it does seem to be doing stuff for connective tissue and ligaments. This the study that convinced me of that very question that you were asking was actually a while published a while ago, over a decade ago, and it was an animal study where hydrayzeed collagen powder was radial lababeled and intact pep peptides were making their ways to the tendons. And I was like, okay, I mean, yeah, it's a rodent, but are we really going to say that, you know, an intact peptide's going to make its way to the tendons? I mean, maybe maybe it's not going to happen in a human, but it it seems encouraging and and I would say um I think it's a scenario where we we probably don't have the answers yet. Like we don't have all the answers. It may be something else. It may maybe it's that, maybe it's not that, but something's happening here. And so now we will of very often recommend it prophylactically. Even if you're not injured, certainly if you have any soft tissue injury history or you're compelled to that um 30 to 60 minutes pre-ex exercise seems to be the time. So timing dosage does seem to matter with collagen. I mentioned earlier co-ongest co-ingested with like 50 milligrams of vitamin C. Yeah. Um seems to be the thing. This is all Keith Bar's work like many other people, but he's the one who's who's pushed this for many many years now scientifically. Um, so he he gets credit for a lot of this work. And again, I was I was on the other side of the fence like I don't buy it. I don't buy it. I don't buy it. Like, okay, it's got a very different amino acid profile than than protein, though. I mean, proline and hydroxyproline. Yeah. I mean, it's Well, this was the this was the argument against it for many years. Like this muscle. Yeah. But like for connective tissue and now pairs potentially it mattered, right? So yep, we'll do it. Um, as you've heard me say many times now, I also like to run like well what ifs? Like what's the downside? There doesn't seem to be really any downside here. So cost money, sure. Physiologically, we're not blocking adaptations. We're not shuttling something else out. We're not doing, you know, long-term damage. We're not shutting off a pathway. Okay. worst we spent some money. All right, most of the people I'm around, they'll they'll take that exchange. Then you start adding with something like collagen, hair, skin, other potential benefits like, okay, I'm getting potential benefits in multiple areas. There is some human research on this. It might work. Very little downside. Yes, it's it's pretty cost intensive relative to protein powder. And if that's your barrier, fine. I get it. No problem. But for the most part, it's not that expensive. Reasonable. There's enough competition now that that that there's prices quality brands that you can find. Um what are your what are your thoughts on glucosamine um condondroitin for tendon joint? We don't use it much. No. No. Um honestly, I would have to dive back into that database. I haven't looked in many years. Kind of mixed evidence as far as I last saw. And sometimes I'll like if I have an issue it's like okay let's try to throw it let's throw it in the bucket. I don't see a big downside just in case. I give it to my dogs that makes you feel any better. That's the only thing we give them. They're old. Um but yeah, we don't use there's just I think there's more compelling ways to go about it. If we're having consistent injury issues, um we're doing other things. That's not going to be our first, second, or third line of defense at all. Yeah. Okay. Well, we'll hopefully get into some of that because I want to get into recovery. Um this is a this is an area where it's very important as of course you know but I don't know that a lot of people focus on recovery although it's becoming I think more increasing it's more awareness is I think being generated now but um I was thinking maybe you could kind of just start by walking people through the physiological process of what's going on during recovery. Why is it so important? How are you defining recovery? How are you labeling? I guess you know you're talking about the shifts in inflammation and immune immune immune response and the cellular repair all the things that are happening in response to the workload that you've applied and the inflammation that you've generated and the you know oxidation that you've generated. Okay. The reason I asked that is because we answer this differently depending on how people are thinking of recovery. When we think about this in terms like a muscle soreness, are we thinking about this in terms of a my energy's low the next day? Are we thinking about this in terms of I felt fine but my actual performance was just a little bit lower? Those are three different types of recovery. Are we thinking about this more chronically? Um, man, I've just been going down for several weeks and several months. Like depending on how we frame this, my answer would completely different. So, is there one or more of those that you would want to focus on? I I think I'm thinking more about adaptations that are occurring to improve muscle mass and strength and your cardiorespiratory fitness for example. Yeah. Okay. So, in that particular case, you've laid out the basic framework for us a second ago, right? In terms of the three big processes that happen there, it is not the case typically where you're actually tearing tissue down in the case of strength training and muscle. We hear that all the time like you break the muscle down, you have these micro tears that would then have those cascades you're mentioning. That actually doesn't happen as much as people think. Um most of the time muscle tissue is fine. We're certainly not tearing down a lot of tissue in our cardiovascular system. This is more of a signaling issue than it is a damage issue. And we know that because you can induce those same adaptations if you cut those first parts of the equation out. So I can give you things that simply ramp up adaptation that don't require damage at all. I do not have to have inflammation to to induce adaptation. That is the primary signal though. Same token if I give you inflammatory agent without any tissue damage at all I can get similar adaptation. Right? So we can cause physiological responses with an inflammatory marker that comes in rather than an actual tissue damage. So those things are independent of itself. It's not there. But you laid out the basic cascade, some sort of inflammatory immune response there, some sort of tissue edema, swelling, and then some sort of back cascade. Why supplements, why different tools, why different recovery protocols work and why they matter is because they can target any aspect of that, the front side or the backside, the insult coming in or the adaptive response. And you can play a game any part of that area. we will use different solutions based on why we think that the thing happened in the first place. So like that is our overall framework of how we set up like recovery in this context. Okay. So then let's let's take a step forward and talk a little bit about what you were asking me and and that would be like how can a person an athlete sort of know if they what can they what could metrics can they look at to help signal if they are if they're helping if they're if they're normally sort of recovering from their training versus not. So then muscle soreness, the injury like what what sort of metrics? First most important metric is how are you feeling? And I'm saying this because if you look at actually the data and we've done this across millions of data points, like literally millions of heart rate variability data points and things like that, subjective perception, how you feel today, will stack up as tight as almost any other biological metric we can pick. It's really, really important. If you're feeling good, if you're making progress and you don't feel terrible, then I I'm not worried about your recovery at all. Like we're done equation. So when you ask me what should people measure? Most of the time the answer is nothing. Don't worry about it. You making progress? Yeah. You in a lot of pain and suffering? No. Good. We're done. Like you want to do metrics behind that. Sometimes it makes things worse. Like you sometimes we're we're looking at data and it's not the right way to go about it and and that can cause problems. We end up pulling technologies away from people a lot. We pull sleep trackers away from people a lot. We do those things. So, I'm bringing that up because that is the metric you should care about. Progress and pain. We're good on both of those. We're done. Like, this is the only recovery equation we're happening. If we're running into issues with one of those two things, now we'll have a conversation. Okay. So, let's say you have muscle soreness again. We're back. We're back to the muscle soreness. Easy. No problem. Muscles are sore. Step number one, input. What's your training program look like? I told you the story earlier, wife getting super sore. That was there's not a supplement there that we can do to fix her. That was a training program error. In her case, it was it was not actually she uses Brett Contrarus's program. Okay. Not Brett's fault. That was her dumb dumb fault. Like that she did a training boooo as she calls them. And okay, great. That's not as something we have to go fix. I was just like, "All right, like don't do that again or suffer. Let's just just throw that one out. Let's go to the backside. Let's assume your training program is good and just for the sake of speedy conversation here, let's assume sleep and nutrition and mental health and all that is is okay, right? Because that is all going to be part of our real equation. Let's go to the end of it. What do you do? You got super sore. How do you fix it? Um supplements again would not be our route. If you need to take pain relievers because you're there, fine. What's going to be more effective? Now you're actually starting to talk about things like blood movement. Mhm. Um, you actually mentioned earlier you like to move. A low level of physical activity on in terms of magnitude of effect is almost always going to be your biggest impact. Can you get something? Can you get out and move a little bit? Um, thermal stress is another big favorite of mine. Sauna, great. I like direct contact though. So, if we can get in warm water, I prefer that. So, this is jacuzzi, bath, things like that. If you want to go to and we've run a couple of actually dom studies, two of them using normate boots, right? And compression boots, air boots, like things that go there. That is fine as well. We've done a uh muscle stimulation stuff. So uh muscle stem units and things like that. You you'll find data that supports all of those things. If you want to sledgehammer things and use a combination, we will do that, too. We will say, "Okay, great. We're going to bath today. We're going to do normate boots. We're going to do hyper ice stuff. We're going to do compression stuff. You can do all of these things. They probably are working on similar mechanisms, but again, no downside. And if you're in that much pain and suffering, use them all. Like, really try to use everything because what you're basically doing is you're doing low-level physical activity for many, many, many hours of the day. Um, we'll use Firefly, that little tiny device you can put on the front of your leg. It's a little strip. Makes your toe bing bing kind of up down move. You can do it for hours a day. So you can put that thing on, you're on a plane, you're working, your toe and your or your foot is flexing at a high frequency, right? B throughout the day. That's been shown a bunch of times to be super effective for recovery. So there's tons of little tools we can do, but all of it is basically doing the same thing. It's low-level blood flow for a long period of time. So, pick your tool, pick your poison, you want free, you want expensive, you want combinations, I can give them all to you, but it's all again basically on the same. So, the the level of blood flow and you're saying for the long a long period of time. So, I what I'm doing is a short I'm doing, you know, 30 minute run. Um, is what what's going on here? Is it delivering just oxygen and nutrients and inflammatory, you know, things are going to the right tissues like or what's the mechanism there? All the above, right? All the above. I would have bet too after you do your run, you're probably a little more physically active because you're not as sore. So, you're probably going to be walking a little bit more. You're going to be getting up. You're going to be doing things more through active throughout the day. So, your 30-minute run is still going to net on aggregate get a lot more blood flow. Yeah. More blood flow in, more nutrients in, more waste products out, all the above. You also have indirect signaling. you uh a lot of pain to go back a little bit a lot of like muscle soreness pain is neurological right so you have pressure likely happening on the nerve endings in that specific area so you can get some of that fluid out of there you have less pressure you have less pl pain pain receptors you also have desensitization that's happening right so you're moving in sodium potassium pumps at like on the cell membrane that's moving stuff back and forth right we're seeing adaptation there so it's going to be a combination of all that I don't know if I've ever seen any particular set of papers that say like this is the exact molecule signaling property that that is like explaining all of muscle soreness. So the best answer we could say would be all of those things are likely contributing on some level. Um at the end of the day most of the time exercise induced muscle soreness is a cellular pressure issue and so the more that you can get that out there you have to get the inflammatory signal out of there because that's going to keep putting you back into tissue swelling. So, get the the the the fluid out and then stop the signal that says stop putting more tissue in or fluid in there. Uh and then eventually you're going to get yourself back to normal. What do you do if someone's feeling a soreness that isn't necessarily going away? It's kind of sticking around. It's not like a really bad injury kind of thing, but it's enough to affect their performance. Um, it's enough that it's like there's something going on now. This like compression thing. I I've kind of been experimenting around with it. Voodoo floss. The voodoo floss. So, I guess it's blood blood flow restriction. Yeah. And you wrap it around something like for me, I've got like this forearm thing. It's like the tiny tendons or something. And it really is when I'm pulling. Yeah. You You're probably actually looking more of a fascial issue than you are blood flow. That's what blue the voodoo floss stuff is going to do. So you're pinning and twisting and moving. So you're it's connective tissue glide and slide. So your connective tissue is supposed to glide actually. So people don't like actually realize this very often, but you should be able to pinch your skin and pull it away from your tissue. That's not just fat there. If you are pinned down constantly, that's a connective tissue fascial issue. And so what you're doing with that is you're rubbing it both horizontally and vertically. When we typically think about like massage, it is a vertical compression, right? I'm pushing down on the tissue. I'm down on the tissue. Well, you'll see often times more benefit is actually horizontal movement and pulling away. This is um if you ever seen like cupping, people do that. You're pulling skin away from fascia rather than smashing fascia back into it when it's kind of knotted down already. So, any relief you're getting there is not probably for the blood flow. It's the fact that you're pinning that fascia and then you're moving the tissue around the fascia and getting that kink. if you will to let go. So completely different mechanism of action there. That is acute and chronic but mostly that is an acute issue. Um if if you're dealing with things like um like runners will get a lot of like side leg pain, TFL pain, IT band, a lot of times same issue there, right? So like you're getting more glide and slide that fascia can move appropriately and that's where the pain signal is going. People don't realize that there's a load of nerve endings in fascia. there's a ton. So, if that stuff gets irritated and aggravated, that's going to be pain and that's probably not a muscle issue. You you might not necessarily be able to tell. You can't a lot of people can't tell their fascia versus their muscle, but more likely than not, it's connected to fascia issue and and what is the best way to for fascia? Is it is it something like a voodoo floss? You can I conceptually you just want to move it. So, if voodoo floss does it for you, awesome. If you want to roll out on a lacrosse ball, cool. If you want manual massage, great. Cupping, infinite ways to do it. But what you want to do again is not just compress. The only thing traditional like a foam roller or um any other selfmile fascial release. Generally, people are smashing down. What we want to think is actually pulling away. So pulling the fascia away from your body rather than smashing it into the muscle and then rotating it, moving it horizontally, gliding up and down versus just smashing together. So the the compression thing that you were talking about with the boots. Yeah. So that's working through blood flow restriction and then how's that working? Um so there's a whole host of companies that make this. Normatch um is is the one that's been on the market for a long time. They actually recently got acquired by Hyper Ice, right? But these are boots that you can sit in. They make them for the upper body, too. But um you can sit in them and imagine a pair of pants and the pair of pants inflates with air all the way around it. And so it goes on and inflates. Entire leg gets crushed and then it deflates and it gets crushed and deflates. And so it squeezes back and forth and back and forth. So you get a little bit of hypoxia, a little bit of blood flow, little bit of hypoxia, a little bit of blood flow. And it can do it for 20 or 40 or 60 minutes or however long you want. It's basically simulated exercise. It's a little bit of blood, little bit, little bit back. So blood flow, yes. Um, you will actually see really compelling evidence on water immersion. Yeah. Not only cold water. I simply mean water. Oh, really? Yeah. Well, heat, I would say for sure because you're also increasing blood flow, right? But it's the orthostatic pressure that comes with being in fluid that will do the same thing. This is many again one of the many reasons why I'm like like sauna is not the only answer here. It's great for a thousand things, but the water itself is playing a little bit of a magic role. And we know this because there have been trials where we've actually controlled for temperature and you still get those benefits of just being in that in in that fluid environment. So if you can do that, you can gravity changes in the equation, things can move in and out of tissue, and there's actually pressure that comes from being in the water. It's a lowle pressure that smashes up against your tissue. Now if you want to change temperature and you get some of those other benefits that's great too but the water itself is fantastic way. So I would strongly also recommend people getting into water if they can. Let's talk about that. Let's get into Okay. So for recovery you hear I mean you you you know probably know I'm super into the deliberate heat exposure through also jacuzzi and sauna. Yeah. Um there's cold water immersion. I'd love to talk about how so with with the heat exposure and jacuzzi sauna. It sounds like jacuzzi might be might be the uh winner with respect to um my favorite the water orthostatic part of the water as well and helping with blood flow. Yep. And also the was does it help with the fascial tissue as well or probably not? Yeah. Yeah. There's there's um I mean there has been you know some evidence on on sauna improving blood pressure but there's a lot of literature out there on on hot baths and he's doing it totally I mean it's probably a lot more robust in in a way as well. Yeah. I mean you have the pressure issue we talked about and then we have all the other heat related mechanisms that you've talked about for many many years now that that happen too. So you combine those two it's it's a big win and and it's not really like you don't have to worry about the timing as much around exercise. In fact, you can get him in a hot jacuzzi or a hot sauna right after you lift weights. In fact, there's some evidence that it's beneficial, right? It's like supportive. Yeah. Yeah. We do it a lot. We we do it a lot post exercise. Do you um do both endurance and weight training? Both. Yep. The only thing you got to be careful with is um if you did something that you really went over the edge with in terms of training. If you get into a sauna, sometimes it feels like it delays recovery a little bit because it actually kind of feels like it exacerbates the training. Like you've continued to train, particularly if you've gone really hard. Like if we've had a our folks have um played like a 5 hour round of golf in Georgia in August, probably not hoping in the sauna afterwards, right? Because like fatigue is high, fluids are already low, so on and so forth. We're not going to add that on. And in that particular case, we're like walking away. So when you you got to think through this stuff a little bit more when you're saying, "All right, we are actually are pretty fatigued. Let's not add to that bucket." But like a normal exercise session, yeah, hop in a sauna jacuzzi afterwards. Like we're all we're all game for it. Totally. Here. What do you um there's a couple of things I want to talk about with the sauna. One, what do you think about some of the I would still say preliminary at this point literature on using deliberate heat exposure as a way to improve endurance like adaptations and yeah, improve performance even. So here's how we will frame it. It's not a substitute for exercise, of course, but it's better than sitting on the couch for most things. So, training is first. If on top of past that or we have an injury or fill in the blank there, then we can use sauna to keep maintenance, to keep pace, to keep some cardiovascular adaptation going. So, if we're pulling training down, like often times we actually have to pull high-intensity exercise down from people. If you're dosing high intensity stuff, like truly high intensity endurance work too often, that can put people in really bad spots. So, what we can do sometimes is pull them off of that and insert sauna and they still can kind of feel like a little bit of I worked really hard. And some people need that, not for physical reasons, but for other rational. So, we'll use it in those particular cases. or we're de loing or we're doing any number of other things where we can't get as much exercise as we want or we're bringing it down. So, we use it in that particular context. If we then take it um into an individual athlete and we're trying to use it for specifically performance benefits, gains, I would only be okay doing that if training volume is pretty low, right? Because anything that takes away from training in an athlete that there has to be a really big payout because specificity wins. So if that means we're doing less miles on the road, well some people can afford less miles. Sometimes that's a good thing, but we got to be really careful of maintaining always training specificity. That's in that context. That's how we'll handle that thing. So it would be really time dependent and and whatever else is going on in our life. Have you seen some of the data? Um there's only really one human study that I've seen lots of animal studies looking at local heat. So on humans it was the local heat applied and how it prevented disuse atrophy by like 40%. And then there of course scores tons and tons of animal studies. In fact I was talking about the animal studies before the human data came out and I got a lot of push back for that. But I do think it's again in that sense where you can use it on the days where you're you're you're not training as much to help with not only the cardiovascular adaptations that you mentioned, but also helping prevent disuse atrophy, right? You know, so yeah, like I love heat. Feels good, of course. Feels way better than cold. We rarely have a hard time convincing people to do stuff that involves the heat. It's like, okay, put a hot pad on your leg. Like, all right, I'm in for that one. Um, High Price makes a bunch of stuff. I don't have any connection to them at all, but uh they just make a bunch of little easy things to put on your legs and your arms that get hot really fast. Super easy to use. So, we will do those things again quite a bit. Um whether or not they're making a benefit in our high performance athletics, I don't know. But if they're like that felt good, that's a win. Plausibly helping. Cool. Yeah. Well, it sounds like even for recovery, it might I mean that's a benefit if it's increasing the blood flow and Yep. and helping with delayed onset muscle soreness and things like that. Yep. Um, cold water immersion on the other hand, I mean, this is something it's it's funny because it's really um it's become popular in as a recovery tool and um I don't I don't there's a lot of people that I've spoken to, you know, friends that didn't know it could blunt adaptations, particularly, you know, muscle hypertrophy. Yeah. And they're like, what? you know, like I'm getting into it after I lift weights. You finally convinced me to do it. Now you're telling me I'm screwing myself up. Your fault. Let's talk about that. Yeah. Muscle soreness. It seems pretty clear based upon the data that is available that cold water immersion is more effective than something like cryotherapy, right? Or cold shower. Um, there has been some papers that showed crowotherapy itself did help with muscle soreness, but if you stack them again against the the cold water immersion, the water wins. So, we really never use crowotherapy. Um, if you're going to use something like a cold shower, then there's there's other reasons for it. I don't think I would be I wouldn't put my money on cold showers doing much for muscle soreness, right? Again, many other reasons why one could do it, but that would not be the primary goal if we're using it for that. So, right out the gates, now it does work and and many studies have been done and I would say our anecdotal experience, my personal experience, our coaching experiences would would support that. Generally, people are going to be a little bit less sore when they go in it. Do we do it immediately postworkout for people trying to grow muscle? No. many in studies now and I feel like every couple of weeks another one comes out and I'm like good good gracious we know already like we know already stop doing this like stop doing that work we know it not a good idea the the questions that come up then next usually are okay so how long post exercise do I have to wait and no one knows that's the study they need to do no one yes like stop doing the basic one we know that answer there's like seven studies at least now that have done it we get it I don't know right the if you look at our time course stuff we've on um like gene expression that happens within seconds or signaling happens within seconds and is ramped up for minutes to hours post exercise depending on the marker and like that. Gene expression typically peaks 3 to four to six hours again depending on the one you're looking at for muscle anabolism. Muscle protein synthesis you're at 48 hours. Okay. No. So, like I don't know cuz people always ask like what if I lift in the morning and ice at night? I I I don't know. It's probably better than lifting and immediately getting into your ice bath. But probably is it is it four to six hours because of the the That's where that number comes from. By the way, it's like all the time course research on gene expression. You're also talking about like four or five genes that were in that study. So it's not like exact like complete mapping of the entire anabolic genetic response. It's like a few of the markers. Some of them were at four, but they weren't all. Some of them peaked at an hour, some peaked like seven hours later. So like the 4hour window thing is like a it's not exactly what people think it is. So nobody has any idea. Like I have no idea at all. I again I'll tell you how we typically handle it. But yeah, we don't know. Yeah. Let's let's talk about how you typically handle it. Also, you know, I would you you mentioned when you're talking about adaptations, the different different things that are happening. There's the inflammatory response, you know, there's the um hormonal responses that are happening. There's a lot of things that are happening, right? And so those things have different time courses. We're talking about muscle protein synthesis, right? You're you're talking about it's elevated for 48 hours after exercise. Um, and I know I had Luke Van Loon on, you know, not long ago, and he's done at least one study, I think two, looking at cold water immersion and muscle protein synthesis, and he was saying, yeah, I mean, you know, because it c the cold water immersion causes vasoc constriction. So, not only are you not getting, you know, the inflammatory mediators to where they need to be and all that signaling, you know, molecules and things like that, amino acids are not going to muscle either as readily. And so, um, he was saying, you know, might want to, you know, wait 24 hours. Like basically, I'm like, so that sounds like a recovery day, but some people are training every day. Yeah, some people are training every day. I mean, y I don't know if they should be training seven days, you know, maybe six days. I don't know. Um, but a I guess a recovery day can be your endurance aerobic day because I don't know if that's really been shown that it's blunting any adaptations. In fact, there's been some performance enhancements, right? Yep. Have you looked into that literature? Yes. Yeah. Not a ton to go off of there, but yeah, like one Quinn can do that. The quick answer there is you're looking at mitochondrial benefits like which is okay. Like then there's some plausible thing there. We don't use cold water immersion a ton. I used to use it more. Mhm. We do it when we do it when we do it rather. It's for other reasons. If somebody really overcooks it and they're super sore, great. Okay. The other reasons we use it are generally not performance-based. Okay. Um, we're not using it for longevity or lifespan, anything like that. We tend to use it for things like stress inoculation, for nervous system resilience, for breathing mechanics. That's the rationale we typically go to cold water. That said, we have pulled cold water away from people a lot. Because it there can be serious neurological not neur serious nervous system problems that come with cold water immersion. There can be sleep issues that come with cold water immersion for some people. So in those people we we tend to like back it off because it's a stressor. It's a very big stressor. And if your your allatic load is already over the brim, some people cold is great. Some people it is pushing past and making things worse. So we'll wind it back. That said, I love it. I have a I have multiple at my house. I've been doing it for a very long time. I had a deep freezer in the back of my house for many many many years that I use. So, um it but it's not for everybody. It's not the danger though. It's not going to like block all your adaptations. Um but it's not probably not something you you have to be doing every day to live a great life either. Yeah. So, lots to say about that. So, mostly mostly people can use it for their muscle soreness. Yep. And other reasons presumably. Yeah. I mean, a lot of people use it for, like you said, the the neurological benefits. I mean, it's something that I if if if I use it, I don't I don't use cold water immersion unless it's summer. To be honest, I know all about the science. My husband uses it. Well, right now he's like, we had to get a new pump, which we got, but then he had to clean it and all this, but he typically uses it every night. Um, he uses it at night. He uses it at night, which is funny because a lot of people use it when they wake up in the morning. Yep. for like that like wake up response and you feel like the norepinephrine, you know, you're feeling focused and um he uses at night because it helps him sleep which you know I guess the coldness I of maybe uh a bunch of reasons that you would explain that like in so we we've actually plotted this. We did a bunch of stuff uh probably four or five years ago. We didn't publish it, just we we were tinkering around with stuff and we started looking at HRV. Uh we brought it up just in case people aren't aware. It's a marker of overall recovery. Like we'll kind of keep it at that for now. And when you go into the ice, whether this is anywhere between 30 to 50° for a minute to 5 minutes, you're generally going to get out of that ice and you will see sympathetic drive. Fight or flight is elevated like pretty consistently. That said, we plotted this every 15 minutes for up to three hours post, and you just continually see a rise in parasympathetic drive for up to three hours post. So, I don't know when he's using it, but I would be I would I would be willing to strongly bet he is far more downregulated going to bed when he does the ice for that exact reason. You got to time it appropriately because again when you get in the ice and immediately somewhere between 15 to 30 minutes post ice exposure you'll be more sympathetically driven but after that for several hours in most of the people they were far more and I'm talking about like 20 to 50% reductions elevations rather in HRV meaning more parasitic for many hours and we stopped actually collecting the data at three hours so I don't even know how long that that thing lasts but I'm not surprised Um, yeah, we have a non small amount of people who like to do it in the evening as well. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah, he does it. I mean, it's at least an hour. Yeah. Then I'm not surprised at all that he likes it, you know. But yeah. Does he shower then before he goes to bed? Does he get hot again or does he um Yeah, sometimes he does shower, but it's like a really quick Yeah. Like not I don't know that he gets hot. He's actually he's cold in bed, so doesn't really make him hot. There you go. There you go. But he does he does hot tub before getting in the cold. Oh, he likes to get hot first and get in the cold. They get hot and then get in the cold. I hate I do the opposite. I go straight cold. I'm like I hate going hot. Oh, I don't hate it, but like I'm like, "All right, just get cold. Just like do the cold and get over it." But a lot of people like it that way. I I I don't really prefer I don't like doing hot to cold. I get blood pressure changes that are like orthostatic too much. Yeah. For me, I'm just like I have to wait a little bit before especially if I'm like hot tub into the cold. I have to I I've had like some scary times where I'm like like just I didn't like it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Understood. Um Okay. So, you were talking a little bit about um HRV and that's and you talk about heart rate variability and I wanted to talk about we we were talk chatting a little bit about this before before we got on camera and um for for measuring something that people can like you know maybe on their wearable device y measure a marker of recovery. Now you said subjective how you feel wins. Y okay. Um, and that seems to be the case with almost everything like like how hard are you going? Do you feel like how what's your heart rate going up to? Or do you feel like your perceived exertions? Oh, your perceived exertion is going to win, right? Yeah. Um, so Ben Lavine was on the podcast and he was actually arguing that heart rate variability is extremely variable in terms of the way it's it's measured. And you know, he he just sees tons of variability, like plus or minus 25% constantly depending on like the variety of factors, the time of day, their breathing, just everything like that. Um, and he likes to look at resting heart rate, like first thing when you wake up in the morning, what's your resting heart rate as a good marker of recovery? And if your resting heart rate's higher than it should be, then it's kind of like, okay, maybe you're you're getting into this over non-functional overreaching, which I want to talk about overtraining. Yeah. Um, but nice use by the way. Good dig. Thank you. That's good. uh but HRV so do you think there's you know if if if there's some way people can kind of follow this consistent measurement protocol same time of day same posture same controlled breathing or something that they do like a controlled breathing thing before they measure it something that's giving them yeah you know consistency yeah the big ones in this particular area um these are all respiratory related what you just described there's lots of ways we measure readiness um performance, fatigue, like depending on which spectrum you're in here, we people will call these different things. Load management. There are performance-based ones. There's the these ones you've all mentioned are in the the respiratory physiology side. So, that's great. We'll just stick right there. Now, HRV is one of them. Resting heart rate's another. More commonly though that we use are respiratory rate. And then you can look at something like CO2 tolerance. Let's just disregard those for now. We'll focus on respiratory rate or we'll focus on Yeah. on uh HRV and heart rate. Resting heart rate is a good sign if conditions are stable. If your resting heart rate becomes elevated at probably more than 3 to five beats per minute for more than a couple of days, that is a good sign something is happening. In this case, not a good thing. Right? So, it's starting to become elevated as you said earlier generally indicates you're getting overcooked, right? too much training or alastic load, total stress, like something not enough recovery or something, not enough recovery, calories, something's going on there. The issue with that is resting heart rate is incredibly unsensitive. It takes weeks for that to happen. You're well into that problem. And when you start seeing changes in resting heart rate, you are so far down that road that you've like, we should have saw this weeks ago. Even first thing in the morning resting heart rate, you're talking about 100%. Yeah. You will not see a change in first thing resting heart rate for a very long time into problems. The reason why people like HRV more is because it is far more stable. It is also like resting heart rate non-specific. So you don't know what's happening. But that variability that you're mentioning that Ben talked about earlier, that's also the benefit once you establish somebody's standard deviation. What do they normally fluctuate? Right. Some people are going to be really neurologically or nervous system going to be super stable. Some people's nervous system is really unstable. That itself is a marker. How wide you range on your daily HRV is incredibly telling to what's going on in your system. Because of that, that sensitivity, I can see things happening really quickly. Now, some of the common mistakes with HRV are looking at the flat score, right? You know, if I said right now, like, Ronald, what's your resting heart rate? And if I said your resting heart rate's 100 beats per minute, you know that's bad. If I said right now your HV is 100, you have no idea if that means anything. Actually, I I wouldn't know. I'd have to be like, okay, well, what device was that on? What conditions? Like, I still don't know. So, the benefit of something like a heart rate is it's clearer and defined for the most part, good and bad. HRV is not. It's really a moving target. So, it's more sensitive, but it tells us information. The variability, like I said, tells us a lot. In addition to that, once I establish your normal standard deviation, when you start exceeding one, especially two standard deviations for more than a couple of days, something is happening. And I will tell you right now, you will see that way before you start seeing changes in resting heart rate that that problem is going to occur way before. You don't want to overreact to a single day as I mentioned. So you wake up, your HRV and your devices, we'll pick a number 70 normally. Some people will stay within 70 to 75 to 65. So their standard deviation would be like five milliseconds. Some people's normal standard deviation is 20. How do they how do they establish their normal standard deviation? 30 days. 30 days. Measure for 30 days. Try to keep things stable. Take the average, right? Most of your tracker devices and stuff will like give you these numbers. Anyways, if you're more than outside that standard deviation for one day, eh, whatever. Don't really care. Right? If it is three plus days, I typically am looking for five plus days. Five plus days of a continual pattern in one direction or the other. Something is happening. Now, it's non-specific. So, there will be a lot of noise in the system. But again, I think this is like this is a feature, not a not a a perk, not a not a downside because we're going to see like, okay, did you change something in your food and your sleep and your environment? You know, fill in the blanks. Everything can tinker in there. We um we we will use HRV a decent amount. Some people though as I said earlier they get so obsessed with those numbers we take it away and go hey just how you feeling today right because of those exact problems Ben has mentioned that like there will be a ton of variability people can't get this past I literally was dealing with um a client he's like we'll just say sold a company early in life he's in his 40s and just has way too much money right this is how he is he surfs it's what he does everything that we measure on him is fantastic he's been in the program for probably a year and a half so He's super dialed and everything and he just can't get this HRV score out of his brain. Like he can't get it cuz he's just like it's down. It's down. It's down. It's not down. Right for him. This is a normal number. And also, by the way, these technology companies, if you're using that stuff, they change algorithms constantly. So like your scores can there. So those are all the reasons if you're like paying attention to commercial HRV stuff, Ben is right. You should be super skeptical. Don't over interpret those things. If you see something like resting heart rate change, that means something. There's no accident there. That wasn't because you had a bad night of sleep. And if you're consistently seeing an elevation of heart rate, one day difference in HRV could be nothing. It could be completely irrelevant to what you're doing, but that doesn't mean necessarily that that it's a bad marker. When you're using it appropriately, there's a ton of information we can glean out of that. Um specifically again where we find most of the value is even things like BOF feedback training right where we can develop more um resilience within a uh your nervous system and you can objectively see that and so we can use a whole bunch of different tools where we can give people and we can say things like okay can you calm yourself down? Can you? Oh yes I can. Great. Well, then show me in your physiology and you can see them looking at HRV data and going, "Oh, it's not moving." Oh, great. This is why we want you to go do A, B, and C. Or they can a bunch of different ways you can do it. So, that's a lot of value in HRV independent of just my single one ultimate recovery marker. In my opinion, respiratory rate is even better there. When you see changes in respiratory rate, this will happen way before changes in resting heart rate. And this itself will influence both resting heart rate and HRV. If you start breathing more, something is happening. Um there's actually a really interesting paper Laura Bloomfield did a couple of papers where she compar she measured all these things resting heart rate sleep HRV um and looked at stress and one of the things she found in her second actually did two studies and the second one found that you'll see something like um your likelihood of experiencing moderate high stress one beat per minute increase in resting heart rate gave like a 1 to 2% increase in risk but a one breath per minute change in resting heart rate was a 20 to 30% increase in likelihood of experiencing moderate stress which is a way of saying that's that stuff will flag way before resting heart rate resting heart rate didn't do anything didn't tell them anything about it but HRV and specifically respiratory rate shot way up you can see acute stress if I look at someone's data in the morning and your normal respiratory rate is say 12 breaths per minute overnight and you're at 14 I'm like whoa something's going on if you're 14 for two days in a row, boom, you're going to get sick the next day or you're already sick or some like, "Hey, is going on Ron? Are you okay?" Like, "What's going on?" Like, "No, my god." Like, something's happening. And so, for me, when we're coaching people like we're coaching them, I I don't want to wait 6 weeks to start seeing problems happen. I need to go like, "Hey, this happened right now. What the heck is h what's going on?" And for our opinion, HRV and respiratory rate will jump off the charts way before resting heart rate. How accurate are respiratory rate devices? like that are measuring this per rate. Um, depends on the device you're using. Uh, if you start going out to the wrist and the hand, we start losing accuracy, right? If you're actually using a chest strap, we're getting better. When we really care about it, like in our in our actually like sleep testing stuff, we're going to have a device directly on your chest. We're measuring not only respiratory rate, but we're measuring the amplitude of change in your chest. We're measuring the direct movement of it. Outside of that though, respiratory rate's pretty easy to measure. But I mean, if something's if someone's doing this at home, are they going to be wearing a strap like while they're sleeping? You can or you can wear your wearable, your watch, you lose accuracy if you wear your watch. Um, for respiratory rate, it's okay. For HRV, we start to lose accuracy, but respiratory rate is actually pretty easy to pick up from a tracker. So, you'd be okay there. HRV gets tricky. and and and the respiratory rate. So you're talking you're mentioning the studies how stress would I mean is it's very sensitive to stress. Y and that's not just like psychological stress that's just exercise. It's any type of stress on the body. Nutritional stress, environmental stress. Um again you'll see uh if you remember a few years ago well years ago we all remember co there was a bunch of different devices that came out where uh NFL in the NBA actually I think they did it with aura they were have these like precoid flags and we had a bunch of professional athletes and I I'll like I'll give some credit here. It was pretty good and what I'm saying is we would get an alert. We're like boom. It's like somebody has CO. We're like what? No signs, no symptoms. And then days later, temperature go up or something. Boom. Well, it's it's combination. Respiratory rate body temperature and a handful of other things. And they had this like fancy algorithm. They just opened it up like publicly last year. My friend actually Ashley Mason's the one that's um she was involved with all that studies with it. It was fantastic. Yeah. Like I tell you like I didn't look at the data. I didn't read the papers, but for our athletes like it was pretty much spot on. Like damn. You like have a data prepared. They're like, "Okay, great. You're going to get CO tomorrow." Like, we just knew it was happening. So th those things can be pretty sensitive. Even again, that's a wearable on their finger. They were able to get good enough with their data to figure out you're going to get sick the next day. So, it can be yes. Stress, it can be nutrition, it can be actual like bacterial, viral infection, environmental exposure, um, allergens, tons of things like that can flag that make people breathe more. Now, would this change in respiratory rate indicate someone is transitioning from like functional overreaching to non-functional reaching? Maybe you can explain what that is. Yeah. And then we can talk a little bit about like if that is a good indicator, what the best indicators are of that. Yeah. Besides I mean I the way you feel as well. I don't know where that comes into being able to determine that. Yeah. Okay. Great. In order for you to create adaptation, we have to put in stress. That's how the body moves, maneuvers itself. The more stress, the more adaptation. At some point though, too much stress overwhelms the system and we start having negative adaptations. We start going backwards. We stop making progress and eventually actually things get worse. You get hurt, you get injured, so on and so forth. At the end of that station, that is overtraining. True physiological overtraining is very rare. It tends to take weeks, if not months, to recover from. This is not you're not overtrained if you're like, "Oh, I had to take Saturday off. I feel way better today." That's not overtrained. Overtrained is I couldn't exercise for two months and then I finally started feeling better. So, it's really uncommon. It does happen. Uncommon. Before that, you get into what's called nonfunctional overreaching. So, you're overreaching. You're you're pushing your body past where it should do. And you did it so much that when you actually recovered, you didn't get any positive adaptations. It was not functional. It didn't produce a benefit. So if you were to go this in the spectrum right now, if you and I to go train, we got done, we would go lift, our acute performance would be worse because we're tired. Okay, great. But then we rest and we come back tomorrow, next day our performance is better. If we keep doing that though, we keep training and we don't give ourselves enough time to recover, we'll eventually go down in performance, down in performance, and then if we take some time to recover, we should have this super compensation. That would be a situation in which we overreached but it was functional because it produced a benefit, produced performance enhancement, more mitochondria, more muscle, you know, fill in the blank for whatever you want. So, we have functional overreaching. That's what we're after. It was functional. We have non-functional. You kept going. You either trained too much, you underreovered or both, and then you had to take weeks off, typically days off or weeks off, and you got back to baseline. And then overreaching is past that. That's the found that that's what we're really getting at. We want to spend as much time in functional overreaching as we can. And when we back off, we have again ideally a super compensation. You know, we got the adaptation we're looking for. If you really get into overtraining, it's hard to define because there's no marker of it. We actually have this really cool um uh Philip Larson in his lab in um Carolina Institute has published a bunch of really cool papers. There's a handful of very specific mitochondrial markers that they've identified that they can actually see overtraining happening before any other signal of them. There's like six or eight different metabolites they've got um that they published. It's really interesting stuff. I actually think they're on to something pretty smart there. But because of that, like this is one of the exercise science problems. Like what are the signs of of true overtraining? I don't know, you're tired, you're hungry, um maybe you're sleeping more, maybe you're sleeping less, maybe you're not hungry. It's like it's kind of like everything. There's no this. is just like, well, we saw people that were overtrained and then some of them had less energy, some of them had more. So, it's all over the board, right? There's no class like there's there's this classic literature on things like testosterone to cortisol ratio and um cortisol DHA ratios and there's lots of other little markers, but there's no one specific biioarker or performance marker or subjective marker or sleep marker that is like the definitive yes, you're diagnosed with overtraining like that doesn't exist. So, it's a combination of all these things um that we're looking at to try to determine whether or not somebody's in that spot or whether they're functionally overreached or non-functionally overreached. So, it's a pretty messy situation to be totally honest with you. So, we don't exactly know what we're doing. All that then saying, all right, how does somebody know? I don't know. Take a day off. Do you feel better? Yeah, I feel way better. Okay, probably functionally overreached or nonfunctionally overreached. That's good. Good position to be in. took a week off, still feel terrible. Okay, now we might need to deploy some more aggressive solutions because you may have actually pushed way past that limit. So that's that is really the best way to think about um overall overtraining. What happens to someone's hormones like testosterone for example when they're in nonfunctional overtraining and then so generally what's going to happen along that entire cascade in all that you're going to be less anabolic. Sorry. Nonfunctional overreaching. Yeah. Yeah. I got you. It's so you're going to be okay. So you're going to So you're going to start off and things get worse. Testosterone will go down if you stay there if you're not getting back into the functional overreaching. Yeah. Like so let's just say we start we're not working out. We haven't trained in in a month and then we we pick it up again. You and I we get after it. We're going. The first couple of weeks we might see a reduction in basil testosterone. We've overloaded the system a little bit. the things might get worse, right? Your physical performance might get worse. Fatigue is setting in. This is a stressor. This is actually good. This is why you wouldn't want to come in and give yourself an anti-inflammatory. We wouldn't want to come and give yourself like you're actually trying to induce adaptation here. And so when you see markers that look like they're bad, this is just a signal that says you're overloaded right now. Resting heart rate might go up. HRV goes down. That's okay. This is the off season for our athletes. We expect these things to happen at the beginning of the offseason when we just start training again normal. If we continue past that or sorry, hold up. If you though were to stop and you were to start recovering more, then you'll see testosterone come right back up potentially. Well, most likely not go back any higher, but it'll come right back up and performance will go higher. So like a an acute and I'm defining acute as like a couple of days or a couple of weeks of something like testosterone going down early in a training phase. It's very normal. It might stay the same, but it might come down a little bit. And if it does come down a little bit, I'm not stopping training. I'm not backing off unless we're seeing signs of like extreme fatigue or pain or whatever. But that little bit of like short-term what looks like a negative thing is not. It's a normal physiological response. If we were to keep going though, we didn't bring you out of that and then we got into something like non-functional overreaching, then the testosterone is still going to be down or potentially lower. But then you'll start seeing the things of now my performance has been down. It's been down for three weeks. It been down for 5 weeks. It's not coming back up. Okay. Sleep issues, hunger issues, other me like motivation issues. You continue to go and you get it in true overtraining. Now almost surely anabolic hormones are down. The few studies directly on actual overtraining suggested that something like a testosterone recovery might take a while. It can really struggle to come back. Typically when somebody's like a little bit overreached, even if their testosterone is down, a couple of days off comes back up. Like it flies right back up. It's not really a compromised endological system there. It's just an acute fatigue. What about in women? Is it same obviously testosterone total amount is lower, right? But same exact curve basically. Okay. So most people probably aren't I mean there's athletes that that might be you know consistently in nonfunctional overreaching especially if they're Yeah. they keep that vicious cycle of they're trying to train more to get better and they don't recover or they don't allow for enough recovery. I'd say we've seen it more in non-athletes than athletes. Oh really? Yeah. Way more. Because an athlete is generally pretty in tuned and they're like I don't want to do this or whatever, right? Like you'll get feedback from them. It's oftentimes the hard charging CEOs. This is the like I'm burning the bridge. I'm I'm on oftentimes a lot of stimulants or other things. Um I'm running a company. I'm doing this. I'm traveling a bunch. And then oh yeah, I do all I do is high-intensity exercise training. And then because of that, I'm on a lot of stimulants like I said. And then oh yeah, then my sleep's not great. It's inconsistent. and I'm in different time zones. I don't see my kid. It's that whole thing that goes woo. Alistatic load just gets through the roof and there's no payback. That's the people we've seen more in the non-functional overreaching and then they wonder why they're plateaued. Yeah. They're not getting anywhere. I I only like there's a few times while I get like I'm like, "Okay, I got to just not work out today cuz I just I wake up and I feel tired." Yep. Um h how much do do you when you're on training days when you're working out hard do you require more sleep? H that's actually we okay I'm I'm laughing here because that makes intuitive sense right and we have a number we work with um I have a company absolute rest and we have the most famous you would know the name sleep scientists in the world right the most published ones I've asked that question so many times nobody has a direct answer it makes sense right I burn more calories today I should sleep more there's no compelling scientific ific evidence to suggest that caloric expenditure is directly tied to minutes of sleep needed. That said, like Jeffrey Durmer has been doing this for 30 years. He's like there is like he just he's saying I'm telling you clinically that happens. So I'm like very much laughing when you say that because I'm like man I know what the science says on that but my experience is different. And Jeff is like no the higher output sports need more sleep. High volume people need more sleep. people that are like professional athletes but they don't have a lot of caloric expenditure don't seem to meet as much need as much sleep. I defer to Jeff on this one. I'm like I I think he's actually right. I I think the same. So it's very funny question. Um but is that like true on a dayto-day basis? I don't think so. I don't think just because you train really hard today you have to have more sleep tomorrow. I think on average over weeks it might probably line up. But that's the best we can answer because you know then the opposite is true, right? If you're not getting enough sleep, oh yeah, then it's going to affect your performance. It's going to affect your adaptations. I mean, everything, right? So, there is nothing we can do to enhance performance more than sleep. So, if there's no supplement, there's nothing that's even close, right? So, sleep is like the best. I mean, and it's part of the recovery, right? Again, recovery is so important for performance. When you ask about recover earlier, that's our first step. How does how does a person know if they are really getting enough sleep because it as you mentioned all these sleep trackers and this and that and I got you know I I'm clearly very biased here like this is what my company does at a very high level right so I have a a vested interest in a different answer here than probably most but we spent a lot of time um I've been fortunate to work with many of the highest paid athletes in the world where we had unlimited funds to do anything and we know at the same time sleep is so critically important but the best thing we could do is send them like a sleep clinic or a consumer wearable and it was like killing me. I'm like how is there not better sleep solutions than these? That's why we went and built absolute rest. How do we know if it's enough? We do it differently. We actually have a bunch of direct measures of follow-up cognitive and physical performance. So we determine high quality sleep as a function of how are you actually performing. So that is a different answer for everybody. It can be a time domain. It can be there's actually a um one of the markers we use is actually called sleep quality index. It's FDA approved. Tons of of of evidence behind it. That metric alone is an okay single number if you want to use it. But that has a lot of validation behind it. We start there. But like I said, sometimes it is a numbers game. It is the total amount of hours past that. It's way more interesting stuff than sleepstaging. Sleep staging is is like not a good way at all to think about sleep quality. More interesting are things like fragmentation, sleep stability, um sleep range. The the amount of time you spend in those arbitrary sleep stages varies wildly by cognitive demand. Your body is not asked to do the same things on every day. So, it's not going to have the same same sleep architecture every day. So the way that we define high quality sleep completely different. Um what we are working on right now actually is direct testing of next day cognitive function. That's how we backfill sleep quality and sleep timing. And so we want to actually develop methodologies in which we're like we'll actually test a whole bunch of different cognitive functions and we can determine what is actually effective for you based on your actual functionality rather than an arbitrary like set of numbers. If that is like, what the hell is he talking about? Back all the way up and just say, how do you define good quality sleep for you? How is your daytime function? That is your thing. Are you fatigued? Are you sleepy throughout the day? Everyone's going to be somewhat sleepy, particularly in the afternoon, right? But are is it detrimental to your performance? How are you performing cognitively? How are you performing physically? Right? And then how much strain are you under? If you're happy with all those things, then then I would say you have good sleep quality. We don't have we don't have to get any piece of technology past that. If you're failing or like s slightly suboptimal in one of those areas, then we might have to do some tinkering, might I have to do some follow-up. But if you're like, I wake up, I'm a little bit tired in the morning, but like that's normal. Yeah, like I have a coffee and then I feel fine. A little bit tired in the afternoon, but I I train, I feel good. You probably sleep pretty good. That's a pretty good marker. If it's not that, let's talk. But other than that, you don't need to go out and get yourself tested. That's kind of how I feel. I feel like all those things like how you feel. I used to do all the sleep tracking and you know, or ring and I I do have an eight sleep bed which tracks my sleep as well. And the only time I use it, I mean, I use the cool and all that, but the only time I look at my data um is if I'm like I go out with friends and I'm out like I'm like I just I know I got like, you know, six hours sleep or something. I just I'm just like curious, you know, or I feel it like the next day, too. Yeah. Um then then it's like I'm that's when I use it. But, you know, it measures my resting heart rate, too. I'll look at that. Sure. It's not as not as probably as good as wearing the Aura ring, but um yeah, I think that there's a lot of benefit in calibration, in awareness, and accountability, right? Right? So, I actually don't even care which tracker you use or the accuracy because for those three things, it's great. Here's examples. Some people have no idea how they're sleeping. It's like, "Oh, yeah. I sleep six hours a night. I sleep five hours a night." And you look and you're like, you sleep eight hours a night. They you have no idea what good So, a tracker, accurate or not, um it's good for accountability. When people know they're being watched, they make better decisions, right? Um it's good for awareness. So, pick your poison. Uh, I have a multiple eight sleeps actually at my house. They're great. I love them. Awesome. Use that. Use or use whatever you want to do. If you're actually trying to get into the nitty-gritty of sleep details, then like you need to take an appropriate look at an appropriate set of technologies, not not those ones. But if you don't care about that, there's tons of benefits from people just like getting somewhat aware and being held kind of accountable. People generally make better decisions, especially again the folks that we work with where they know we're going to look. They know someone's going to be like, "What did you do?" And they're like, they have to answer that question. They just tend to make slightly better decisions. What are some of the highest impact behaviors like adjustments to improve overall sleep quality? I mean, I I I heard you talking about hydration in Yep. for hours and um learned a lot because I talk about everything. Yeah. I learned a lot. But what I really what I realized, you know, I like to drink hot tea, especially in the winter time, like in the evening. Yep. Herbal tea. And it is just detrimental to my sleep because I'll have to wake up and pee once or twice if it's like twice is like the worst. But um I've been convinced that I have to like starve myself of water before I go to bed like hours like you know like in the 3 hours before bed it's it's water fasting like little little bits of water and then I can make it through the night without getting up once and it's amazing. So I'd love to know I mean there's a lot of sleep hygiene and of course you can talk about that but like some of the high impact behaviors maybe things that people don't realize. Yeah, you know all the big stuff. I'll skip past it. Okay, you got it all cold, dark, you know, blah blah blah. Past that. Hydration is one of them. My expectation is for people to wake up at most once per night. I would like to get you to zero. It's not always realistic. Past once per night. Now, we have something to fix for most people. If you're causing the damage by drinking too much water at night, then let's stop that. Uh, I drink tea pretty much right before bed, uh, at night generally, I'm okay with it. If it's not, then then back it off. And if that means you have to go back to three hours, then that's what you got to have the tea at 4:00 in the afternoon, I guess. I don't know. Have it back there. Okay, no problem there. Um, other stuff that people generally don't think about, couple things. Fatigue and falling asleep at night does not necessarily equate to downregulation. So, we have something called the windown index. We have a whole bunch of metrics we can look at. This is very common for the person who wakes up at 2 or 3 in the morning and either that happens all the time or when they wake up at 2 or 3 in the morning, they can't get back to sleep. Really strongly tied to lack of wind down index. And so what does that mean? Just like with your kid, you probably have a 60 to 90 minute routine that that person goes through and you don't even realize it. But that is really critically important to getting you to land in the right spot. your routine is probably 15 minutes, right? Not yours, but you know what I mean. And so having a more appropriate game plan of what that is, it doesn't mean you have to avoid light. Doesn't mean you have to avoid TV. Doesn't mean you have to sleep with your phone in a different room. You can do all those things. You don't have to. We have tremendous high resilient sleepers that do all those things, but it is about a consistent routine. Number one, just try to do the same thing as often as you possibly can. We'll work out switching out behaviors a little bit later. That's another one. Uh, ventilation in the room is critically important. People don't pay attention to this. One of the biggest reasons people wake up through during the night is because they can't breathe through their nose. One of the biggest reasons you can't breathe through their nose is dander, pollen, allergens, something like that. Start to block it up. Whether that's completely blocked or not, but then you open up and you start mouth breathing. Mouth breathing then means your tongue is a bigger issue as well as your mouth can get dehydrated or get uh u dry rather and you have a little bit of a dry mouth and you need to have a drink of water at night. These things can happen. This will wake people up a ton. Um, you want to make sure that you have proper ventilation in your room. One of the things that also happens in this is CO2. CO2 levels rise above 900 bars per million. This will significantly and dramatically affect everything from sleep onset, sleep quality, next day perceived fatigue, next day arithmetic ability. CO2 getting too high in a room can happen because your doors and windows are all closed. If you have multiple bodies, you and your partner, your dog is in there, all of you are now kicking out CO2 into the room, right? You're exhaling. If that room is small, and again, lack of ventilation, that number starts to rise. If you are particularly sensitive to CO2 as well, which many people are, then that kicks off that entire cascade. You get pushed way more into sympathetic drive. And again, the biggest issue is you will see a subjective and objective massive change in fatigue and energy and cognitive function the next day. People rarely think and talk about CO2 concentrations in your room. This is a classic case of like I do all the things. I listen to Matt Walker. Like I do all of it and I still suck at sleep. When you start thinking about what's going on in your physical environment, okay, so a CO2 monitor, I have one. So getting a CO2 monitor, what's the number? 900 parts per million. 900. So, you don't want to be above that. Yep. You will see typically um 1,200,300 in people like really consistently. That's not that bad. Most of the problems happen at like 2,000, 2500, 3,000. So, if you're freaking out, you're like, "Oh my god, Annie said 900 and I'm at 1,000." Okay, don't worry about it. Well, so what do you do to improve your air flow? I mean, just open a window. Okay, you have tons of combinations of things you can do here on both ends of the spectrum. Number one, you can actually just become more resilient to CO2. So, if you work on your CO2 tolerance, this will help. Especially if you're CO2 intolerant. Outside of that, lower the amount in the room. If you can open up windows at night, that's great. If you can have less bodies in your room, that's great. Those two things are generally not very much of an option for people. Awesome. Can you get high ventilation in that room before you go to bed? Have your doors and windows open. Get that number down. Um, when I used to live here in LA, we our house was probably, I don't know, 2 2400 f feet, multiple level, and we're in LA, so our doors and windows are closed cuz air quality is just, it is what it is here. It would not be uncommon for us to just by the time it's like 7:00 at night have 2200 parts per million. Like, you're like, "Oh my gosh, it's up there." And it would take us hours to open up windows and just like let the CO2 clear in the house. Right? you're talking about four humans, two dogs, and even in a pretty big place, that fills up pretty fast. So, can you start that process earlier as earlier in the day, can you again open up windows in the house? If not, at least open up your your sleeping space so that air flow can get in and out of that. If you need to turn a physical fan on to do that, that's another option. And it will drop pretty fast by doing that. Okay. Um, what about people's nose that are closing up? I mean, you know, if you have a lot of pollen, let's say you have pet dander. I mean, do you do you have to get these allergen pillowcases? Like, how do you how do you stop your nose from closing up? Oh, okay. So, a bunch of different things there as well. Um, one, same exact answer. Try to get as much of that cleared out of there as possible before the nighttime starts. Right now, you'll particularly see this with people who are like, "My nose is fine throughout the day and I just wake up at night. It only happens at night. Only happens in my bedroom when you lay down or something." Part of that's gravity. Part of that's physically gravity, right? Like you're laying up here, you're standing up here, right? And you go backwards and then it's going to sit there. Like part of is that. So number one, do all the things I just talked about cleaning the air out of there. If you want to get a air filter and then specifically put it in or above or around your bedroom, that is a great option. Um so you can go there as the next step. Third step is you can just use Fllonese. You can use a a very simple nasal dilator, right? Right. So whether this is actually like a nose strip that you can put on, you use a bunch of different companies for this or an actual like uh uh injection, right? Like again like a fluise and you can squirt it in your nose before bed, dilate your nose, you can stop having problems that way. So those are three or four different things you can try. Um we've used and we use all those things pretty consistently and they're all pretty beneficial and they work pretty well. There's there's some amount of just like like morning gunk you'll have. That's normal. That's okay. But if this is consistently waking up with dry mouth and nose completely clog clogged, then then I would do all those steps past that then you got to really start thinking about special pillow cases and and and different solutions like that. But those are more expensive. The rest of the stuff I mentioned is, you know, cheaper. So if you were if you were going to let's say have the three like highest impact behavior changes to improve sleep. Yeah. I'd say like have a consistent approach timing system whatever you want to routine number one. And I want to be really clear. I know I'm I'm running out but that doesn't mean like 45 minutes of breath work and meditation. Like that's not the routine. The routine can just simply be I do the dishes and then I brush my teeth and then I check my like that is fine for the routine. It doesn't have to be this big like 90 minute my phone's gone and like that's not what I'm referring to. Just do the same thing as much as you can in the same order in the same routine. Number two, make sure that your physical environment past temperature, past sound, past light, like you're you're taking a caution that if you don't have a CO2 sensor or an environmental scanner, we like we send that out to everybody so they always have those. Just open up the ventilation anyways. So, you can do those steps regardless of the testing. So, that'd be my second biggest one. Um, another one that I would maybe say pop off that's that's abnormal. Um, yeah, honestly like the wind down index is is pretty popular. So, making sure just because you're fatigued and you know you're going to fall asleep quickly that you're still doing something to make sure that your uh parasympathetic system is actually turned on. That's a little bit different, right? So, we always say like like turn on the off switch we want to do. So, do whatever that takes for you to do it. Um, some people that's reading, other people that's not like for me like reading doesn't do it for me. um breath work will not do it for me. I actually have to have something that physically triggers my brain of like gives me permission to let go for the day. That means I'm doing something that is so unproductive. Uh I'm probably like reading some blog that four other people read about what the Seattle Seahawks did with their 12 string wide receiver. like like something that is like clearly not workrelated for me. That is what I feel like is a waste of time. That is just a trigger for me to go, yeah, it's your time. You don't have to be productive. You don't have to answer anybody. Like all the input, everybody wants something from you all day. Your space. So, I'm doing that. I'm watching something non like inspiring or motivational on TV. Whatever the case is, right? Like that's hunting videos for me. That's like outdoor stuff. I'm like watching cool things like that. It makes me super happy and I check out. That doesn't work for for Natasha. Like doesn't work for at all. Whatever it is that cues you that your day is over, your you give your brain permission to be done for the day. That's it. So that would be my three like big areas that people can try. I love it. It's funny. That's um I do those things and I didn't realize the routine was it really is when I break my routine, I have a hard time falling asleep. Yeah. And and and my routine is like a simple thing, you know, where it's like, you know, I I I brush my teeth, I wash my face, and then I read the non like completely nonwork-related thing as well. It's got to be like like I never get on Instagram. I don't get on social media. Like I can't it's too work. It's work for me, right? It's hard. So yeah, it's got to be like completely separate from work. What do you like and relaxing music? Um it depends. Like books or articles? No, the So, I do like I I haven't been reading books at night in a while. Now I I read them during the day just because the light component. Y um but no, I I'll I'll just read like new stuff or on your phone. On my phone. Yeah. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. Um it often times will be um I will read like some cool science stuff, but it's not necessarily like health. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, I don't feel like it's, you know, my work. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Technology or whatever other fun stuff. Relaxing music. We play I like to hear some relaxing music. That also helps like Yeah. Yeah. But um no, this has been super awesome, Andy. I I really appreciate you coming out. And let's let's talk about you've got this podcast, Perform. You talk all about I mean it's it's you and also other guests you have on that are experts. Yeah, the um it's seasonal. So, we did uh 10 episodes the first season and then we took I don't know five or six months off and then uh season two was out. Now, no guest season one, just me uh going nuts and then we brought in some guests this season and uh we're actually going to finish up filming tomorrow. We'll be done for the season. We'll take a little break. Then another set will come out later in the fall. So, I can't do the I don't know how you all do it like the the consistent podcast. It's a poof. It takes my soul in a good way. Um, yeah, super fun. Appreciate you bringing that up. It's um, you know, like perform is is name game. Like we want to help people perform at their best, whatever that means to them, like however that means to them. So yeah, I enjoy enjoy it, love it, and yeah, thanks for bringing it up. Yeah, you've got a couple other things you mentioned uh throughout the podcast too that you're Yeah. Um, obviously we're building that human performance center in Dallas, which is really awesome. I can't wait to share with people some of the technology that we built inside that thing. Um, it doesn't exist anywhere else in the world. It's like super exciting. The ability for us to conduct research out of there to do studies that I've wanted to do for decades, you know, it's like, well, that's just not feasible anymore. Um, the the team down there at Parker has removed those barriers. They're like, make it world class. And we're making it world class. We're doing a study right now. Actually, they were actively recruiting for maybe maybe I can um pitch that if if that's cool with you. We're uh my my grad student, she came with me from California and Federica, they're running a study where we're looking at sleep across the menstrual cycle. Stunning enough, this there's not a lot of research on this. And the the stuff that's been done is questionnaires and maybe like a PSG like two days here, two days there, two days at the end of the cycle or something. So there's still a bunch of unresolved questions about what actually happens to sleep quality throughout the menstrual cycle. And so we're actively recruiting. So if you are female and you are interested in this, I would like love to have you involved in our study. You can be anywhere. You don't have to be in Dallas. So it's open. We're recruiting work. We're doing an open protocol. You get a bunch of stuff with it. Um but we're going to run full clinical grade FDA approved sleep analysis every night throughout the entire cycle. Um, so we'll do cycle mapping, we'll do blood, we'll do urine, we do a bunch of cognitive stuff. And so we're really going to see like is sleep changing in people with a normal menstrual cycle across the window. What age range? 18 to 35. So younger, healthier, you know, all that stuff. We really wanted to do it. Actually, Matt was trying to get us to do us in in menopause stuff, and I was like, I want to, but I got to answer one question like at a time rather than two at a time. So, it's just cool stuff like that that we can do because of some of the the technology we have. Um, but yeah, we're actively recruiting. That's our first like big study out of there. And then we got a bunch of other ones. But yeah, the performance center should be open uh next year hopefully. That's exciting. And people come down, check it out. It'll be open to the public, too. Yeah, I'm heading to Dallas in April. Sure. I'll be back again, but um yeah, I'll I'll drop you a line when I when I head back there. Yeah, let us know. I'm super excited about that. Um, yeah. And grad students too, if you want to come to grad school, uh, we have an online program. So, you can get a masters in strength and performance with me that's fully virtual or you can come in person and then work in our lab. We're we're we have a lot of projects. So, welcome all the bodies. So, bring it. Every time I say that, people are like, "Oh my god, your inbox." I'm like, "I don't care. Bring them all." That's awesome. That's awesome. Well, next time I'd love to uh We talked a lot about nutrition and supplements and recovery. I'd love to get into strength training and protocols and uh resistance training, strength training, hypertrophy training. Yeah. You know, I got to tell you something before you you leave and get out of here. I'm so proud of you. The fact that you post those strength training videos and I know what happens in the comments section to that. Like it's everything for me not just be like like hammering everybody on there. But it is really hard for people to post stuff like that when you know you're get you're and you know it's going to happen. Um but you're very courageous in putting that stuff up there. I think it helps a lot of women. I think it's dope as I think it's the coolest thing. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. No, I mean I'm uh you know starting out and I think I think it's great and want to encourage other women too. So yeah, love it. Awesome. Thank you so much, Andy. Been a real pleasure having you on. Appreciate it. Can't wait uh can't wait to chat again and this has been so long coming. A big thank you to Dr. Andy Galpin for coming on the podcast and thank you for listening. If you found this episode valuable, please support Found My Fitness by subscribing to our YouTube channel. You can leave a comment and feedback and these insights really can directly shape our future content. Additionally, please subscribe on Apple Podcast or Spotify, wherever you like to listen to your content to make sure you never miss an episode. If you'd like to leave a fivestar review, that would also be very appreciated. For more frequent science-driven updates, please follow me on Instagram at foundmyfitness. Thank you so much and talk to you soon.