Supercharge Your VO2 Max & Protect Your Heart - Dr Andy Galpin

talk to me about the metrics that matter most for health in your opinion we've got an unlimited amount of data that we can access from wearables and beds and and breath work and CO2 tolerance tests and everything else what are the ones that you think are most important yeah sure I think the easiest way to start this is go over a very large picture and then to stop us from being very general the entire time which is sometimes a bit boring I'll let you pick whichever one you want to go hardest into there so when we start looking at things uh from the perspective of how long you're going to live and how well you're going to live most people are pretty keen on that idea now and those things are different and it's not just about living a long time and you want to live well so what's that mean well we actually can pull from multiple data sets here in the sense that it's everything from your sense of connection to the world your sense of purpose uh social belongings those things are incredibly important and depending on the papers you you pull from some could argue those are the top predictors of how long now mental health and such is not my expertise so I I will hopefully not spend all of our time on that but we have to acknowledge those the way you ask a question that is a a true and honest answer it is the things that go into making you feel like a sense of purpose and belonging that's great independent on that in terms of your physical health now we can just really run through the gamut of what is your body have to do to survive and perform well right well it has to have some functionality of cardiorespiratory Fitness easy metric we talk about here very often and people are are really Keen to this fact now which makes me smile because for 25 years I've been screaming this and no one cared and and like the podcast of Stan Universe took over with it three years ago and I'm like well great now it's out there so V2 Max is a a very strong predictor of how long you're going to live from the from that perspective other research is going to look at things like physical strength both your grip strength and your leg strength also very very important backing down from that now you have things like muscle quality overall muscle size of course you have negative Regulators so what I mean by that these are things you don't want to have so as I've been going through this I realiz realized I'm been giving you things that you want to make sure they high you have a whole subset of things you want to stay away from obesity you don't want to have metabolic disease you don't want to have Sleep Disorders you don't want to have that so I tend to leave that stuff I always forget to mention that but yeah like don't have any of those and then be fit be strong and maintain a sense of of proprioception and so if you look at the research on things like brain aging what's critically clear is you don't want to lose your sense of smell you don't want to lose your sense of vision or your hearing because those are all tied into the global idea of prop perception and that is a fancy way of saying your body's ability to understand where it is in space this is translated often into things like balance okay so if you were to to look at the research on fall prevention it's very clear you do not want to fall and have an accident after the age of 60 it's and I don't mean to be bit traumatic here but it's it's quite literally almost a death sentence if you fall and break a hip or something like that after the age of 60 well what causes that pure accidents but then outside of that it is things like loss of balance then once you lose the balance you have a lack of foot speed or hand speed to get your hand in the right position to brace yourself from a fall and then if you do do that it's the lack of Ecentric strength to stop yourself from hitting the ground and collapsing and smashing a bone and so I just sprayed you with a whole bunch of stuff to answer your question but from just the physical side of the equation those are generally the things we're looking at in terms of an exercise scientist's perspective I don't really spend much time in my career honestly on medical stuff I'm not a medical doctor go talk to Peter a or Gabriel L if you want to know about apop for like I don't care about those things at all I look at the human performance side of the perspective on that question where has this recent pivot to prioritizing V2 Max come from is this just that I was a normie and totally didn't know what was going on in the literature CU it felt to me like up until maybe three years ago maybe even less it was all go slow to go fast it's all zone two we must accumulate a very very high amount of aggressive walking per week what's happened with this V2 Max Revolution okay that's a really nice question we have known this answer since the late 1980s there's a very classic he just passed away actually excise scientist named Steven Blair out of South Carolina and he published these data 1989 1990 91 we had million people databases on this I actually remember as a graduate student in 200 five sitting in a lecture from Jonathan Myers at Stanford presenting incredible clear evidence on V2 max out predicting diabetes out predicting blood pressure out predicting cholesterol out predicting heart disease out predicting heart surgeries we we've known this stuff for now well over 20 years do you mean out predicting all of those things for longevity for all cause mortality dying for any reason you want to call it longevity fine scientifically we'd say mortality all cause mortality so yes thank you so the point being as an ex scientist Community again we we've known this answer for an extremely long time there was research in 2004 and 1999 in jamama as well showing that leg strength in a handful of studies out predicted even VO2 max in terms of again predicting all cause mortality clinical prognosis how long you're going to live who's going to Faire best post surgery anyone who randomly shows up to the hospital if you give them a leg press test or leg extension test rather that will be the most significant predictor without knowing any other information of what's going to how how serious the problem's going to be right like again this is in jamama not in like the Journal of dudes who like lift weights that that Mike G tell and I started that journal by the way that's good that's our yeah um so okay we've known this for a very long time so your question why did it get so popular well a handful of things I think we screamed from the rafters about this stuff for for forever and the medical community never cared or didn't listen or whatever the case was why they started turning attention I think at some point the the tsunami of data just starts to overwhelm me and then when these data started getting published in medical journals and then really I believe the true key was this and I'm being quite arrogant here but I think it is my generation of scientists because you had when I was a graduate student everyone who was a scientist in this field was from the 1970s 1980s generation this is your steady state long slow cycling swimming jogging that's what they do for exercise those are the sports they follow that's the research we did and then you had Arnold come along and strength training became this thing and you have this whole generation of kids from the 1980s who liked science but then also like lifting weights and go started going like why is there none of this stuff in the science this stuff was not exercise science and so we went on to become students we went on to go to graduate schools and then we started doing open up our own Laboratories and started doing research on these types of things that that's a 30-year window right takes a long time and then those data finally started coming out and so the last 20 years you've seen this just enormous increase in strength training in higher intensity stuff now the last couple of years I think that's just kind of the wave of science right where it takes a long time of like 10 years of data to accumulate people getting Awards becoming big names in the field where they are respectable coming out of the big Labs from the big and going oh okay like I guess there's there's something here going on why that took off in the pop culture I don't know per se uh but I I think it's probably has to do with the idea of going hey one of the biggest barriers to exercise that we're aware of is people's uh uh time right they say I don't have the time for it and so then when Marty gala's research started coming out and he started saying hey we can get the same cardiovascular benefits in four total minutes of accumulated work throughout a week as four hours and he again not one study it's it's dozens of studies now coming out in different areas and populations that grabbed a lot of media attention and that's when high intensity interval training really took off Media wise and I think that's that's what landed Us in this position I think it's probably gone too far in that direction but nonetheless if I had to guess this is why things got to where they are now can you tell me about that study or the the uh protocol that was followed by a sequence of studies the four minutes thing oh there's there's been dozens and dozens of them you could this is everything from uh 20 seconds of work and 20 seconds of rest repeated you know four to 12 times I'm summarizing a bunch of different papers and protocols uh higher ones up to one minute on one minute off like all all the classic again what me most people would call high-intensity interval training this is this is actually a good way to get yourself confused on the internet because back in my day hit training it was hit training this was an old old Mike mener bodybuilding very very very very slow repetition stuff right and then when hit came along the second hit there's an extra eye in there it's high intensity interval training so people are like we always I see people all the time fighting about this stuff and always laugh I'm like man you guys don't even know you're not even saying the same thing this is not this is two different things I've head but yeah tons and tons of protocols some of them have longer rest intervals so for example one minute as hard as you possibly can recover for four or five minutes repeat that four four times in a day these are typically on things like a bike so you're cycling almost always they there but some of them are shorter rest norals and and tobata came on board me that actually those studies came out over 25 years ago but again people just like got went them a few years ago so that got big but the way I'm saying is I want people to be really clear here there is absolutely no magic protocol there none at all there's no magic duration there's no magic restorable and there's no magic number of times you have to do it because there have been again countless studies over sing huge range of all those variables and almost all of them still show benefit with with one key if you truly take those intervals at a Max effort it'll work right now if you're doing 30 on 30 off and you're just kind of going like 80 85% through that 30 seconds of work then you're not going to see the same results so the one key and Marty would say this too is with if you're trying to to get tons of benefits cardiovascular benefits especially from a very very short amount of work that amount of work has to be like you got to get it done you really really you you can't just be like well I went way shorter and I kind of worked a little harder like nope no you got to do the work one way or the other you got to do the work over time or you got to do work in real hurt what are your favorite protocols that you either suggest to friends clients or that you use yourself um for improving V2 Max Ronda Patrick was on she extoled the virtues of the Norwegian 4x4 I've been doing that uh I thought that was fun but I am I'm I'm non monogamous man I'm a I'm a [ __ ] for this I'll take you give me something that you think sexier I'll slip into that negl and I'll get on it yeah this is uh like I I apologize for like rolling my eyes when you said that uh noran sure that's great like Peter and Rhonda talk about awesome it's just one group of scientists put one protocol out there's nothing magical about it and all the same thing happened with Tata 20 years ago like oh Tata have like okay fine if you want to do the Norwegian that's just excellent um I'll do those things honestly that's the old school run a mile walk a mile that's really all it is for the most part right so um it is a similar thing of there's an old protocol called flick right you can do a fli thing that's at least 30 years old if not longer there is the you know Sprint the straightaway walk the corners sort of thing get a mile of work done those are awesome you ask which ones I use I use all of them I use the ones I just talked about I will do personally as well as in my coaching practice with our athletes as well as with our executive non-athletes we will use all these um I will do very commonly very short Max effort 20 seconds or so with even up to 60 seconds to rest a lot of recovery and in those 20 seconds like you have to get after it and we're ially going to do somewhere between 8 to 12 rounds of that work right I would just from a a motivation standpoint I think there's something about the 30 seconds to 1 minute sort of Mark like if I was just doing 20 seconds I I it's going to be I'm going to have to motivate myself to get back on the horse so many times eight rounds 12 rounds by round seven I'm like go go [ __ ] yourself I don't want I don't want to do this again I have to say from a psychological standpoint the Norwegian 4x4 to me is actually quite enjoyable uh reason being that there's fewer rounds yes you've got a hold and yes you're actually probably not hitting Peak as much um is to actually ask a question on that because I guess maybe a good few people on the show that listening to the show will have started doing that because of what Ronda and Peter have been talking about what is the upper Bound for the work duration in order to improve V2 Max Beyond which you're no longer hitting the peak that you need to that presumably if I said oh it's 15 minutes on 15 minutes off well what are we doing here like that that can't be the case four minutes to me seems like it's probably close to the upper bound of a work interval no no no much higher much higher you you can extend that so if you let's take a quick step back what is V2 Max so in essentially what we're looking at is the maximum amount of oxygen you can bring in and utilize and that has two two components a central and peripheral component peripheral meaning it is your lungs and heart okay so it is how much air can you bring into your lungs how much of that can you get from your lungs to Your Heart Right and then you got to pump that out of your heart into your blood that's that's the the central side of it the peripheral side of it you got to get that to your working tissue your ability to extract that oxygen from your blood into your tissue is the the avo2 max side of the equation so the arterial venus difference so it's the difference in oxygen concentration going into your muscle versus out which tells you how much your muscle extracted okay a typical way to test V2 Max is on a treadmill or a bike on a metabolic cart so you have your face hooked up to a machine and we collect every you know milliliter literally of air you breathe in or out okay those protocols those tests take somewhere between 8 to 15 minutes to complete it is hard to get up to your V2 Max in the time shorter than that such as to say this law of specificity tells us that called said Sid specific adaptation to impose demand what that says is the best way to ever improve a physiological marker is to do exactly the challenge right so the best way to improve your VO2 max is to run a VO2 max test or equivalent period right like that's that's specificity it's not practical it's not realistic but it is like by the if we were robots I'd say that is your number right there 8 to 12 minutes long of progressively getting harder okay now if you're super fit sometimes that takes longer 15 to 20 if you're unfit that can certainly happen much lower but typically if you're hitting a peak and much lower than that it's often not a true V2 Max because you're failing for other reasons like muscular endurance like you your quads blew up your Cals blew up before you could truly get there whatever the case may be so I'm not indicating you can't get to a v to Max in 4 minutes you can and certainly and the data are clear the nowegian protocol will absolutely work work okay so it's we have to make sure we're going after the right thing though right and so if we understand 8 to 12 minutes is a 8 to 15 is a very typical one this is your one mile repeat run a mile most people that's going to take 8 to 10 minutes and little as four minutes maybe higher rest do it again do that every single day that would be your most specific and direct protocol that said when we understand the physiological limitations the way that I will always teach the is the place of adaptation is the place of limitation whatever limited you in your performance is the thing that will adapt to that training so if you and I both went out and did the norian protocol you and I might adapt differently because what we're failing in those four minutes might be different you might be my lungs might have blown up but your your legs might have blown up bingo I always I I don't know how many know know how many the to access I've run but I will always ask people afterwards why' you stop right and I always like I'm like why you quit and it is either my legs boom couldn't take another step or it is felt like my heart's going to blow out of my chest something like that okay I'm asking that because now I'm that's leading my coaching decision like what is our limitation what did we fail was this stroke volume was this heart rate was this position was this fatigue was this technique breakdown maybe this is respiratory muscular failure like where is actually driving the problem this is where I'm going to go with my coaching then and so this could and our clients will see this all the time some of them will get a lot of long duration lower intensity stuff some of them will get the opposite some of them will get a combination of both some of them will get like maybe some kettle bell intervals Anor robic stuff with weights some of them will get strictly you know rowing walking stuff like that because you can improve V toax in all of those cases if that's the place that's being limited you see what I'm saying like that is my like I I I'd like to try to give more direct answers but my honest answer because I do coach people at this point is we do all of that depending on what their actual specific problem is if you don't know your problem my recommendation would be to do some one to twice per week of some lower intensity movement stuff I do not care what zone you're in at all we never test like hardly ever pay attention to that I'm sorry I need you like I just don't care about those things something low okay whatever that could be something that's going to be insanely high and so this is almost always less than two minutes duration the problem with four minutes is it's very hard for people to really get work done in four minutes most people who like you yourself I could I mean I know you've been up to the top of the mountain with the rock on your shoulder like I know you probably have the ability to to really get after it for those four minutes but most people in our experience struggle with those four minutes to do anything besides kind of just Coast m so that's not really doing enough work so the four minute one is a little bit dangerous for me because it's just way too easy for people to kind of just Cruise right so the high hard stuff I want it truly hard now we're still going to coach people if you tell me hey literally psychologically I'm not okay great I'm I'm not going to force you to go to the 30 second thing because you're like all right we'll pick something different for you and another person who's like yo I just cannot get myself to work that hard for four straight minutes fine let's cut it down to 45 seconds and let's do repeat 45 seconds what whatever we're going to have to do right but that's component two some real true high-intensity thing component three then is more of that middle ground give me four to 15 minutes of continuous work by the end we're going to Peg and we might do one round of that like that might be it like the whole protocol today which we've used a lot in our professional athletes and our non-athletes nice good solid warm-up probably a 10 to 15 up to 20 minute like good warmup and we're going to do one round and that might be a one mile Max you're going to run a mile as fast as you can if you can't run we'll we'll do something in the equivalent of an six to 15 minute Max effort by the end that's it and we're probably shutting it down doesn't mean we're doing all three of those in the week but over the course of the month we're going to understand like where are we getting in a b and c and how's that fit into this person's protocol and plan that's that's the most honest answer I can give you of how we actually do it that's great that's a nice protocol uh for the people who want to integrate V2 Max work into their weekly routine I'm imag most people will be on some form of push pull leg split some kind of body part split but maybe they're realizing that I should pay attention to my heart and I do sometimes get out of breath doing up a set of stairs and I look good but you know I probably should do a little bit more Fitness stuff um what are just a couple of protocols Norwegian 4x4 is something that we've spoken about uh on versus off with rounds and then uh frequency per week what's a couple of uh common favorites that you might suggest that people try uh can you ask that again let track and exactly what you're saying like the whole week all train so so what would be a couple of different V2 Max optimizing workouts that people could do in terms of the intervals of work and rest and then what would the frequency per week be oh okay all right let's just maybe sketch out a week if and that'll be like a theoretical week which would be a little bit easier okay great so let's just say you're going to start on Monday and I always like to to do the hardest thing training wise on Mondays just like get out of the way right so maybe Monday is your day where we're going to do that one mile test okay great it's a 40 minute workout total because for 20 minutes you're going to be laying there in agony right that's so we got to out L out for 40 but we're going to do a solid 10 minute warm-up very very good one and then we're going to run an eight minute test you're out of there it's done pick machine pick the rower pick the assault bike pick the whatever you want to do if you don't have a mile fine set it for 8 minutes great let's just do something as hard as we can and this is you're not progressing you're not backing down you're just pegging it for 8 minutes right you can kind of use minute one or two to kind of ramp up a little bit but then you're just going to enter death and see how long you can play in death that you'd be happy for somebody to use an assault bike a rower oh yeah yeah a ski urg walk run swim ski no one's doing a ski o that's insane but yeah the assault bu go the other the row maybe I almost always do it on a assault bike it's it's by far for for the top end stuff it's it's by far my favorite I think uh one of the problems that I encounter uh a lot of the time is getting my heart rate up sufficiently high without blowing my legs out doing something and the challenge that I often face is if I'm doing it on just a static bike my legs are like if I tried to do it on a bik ug my legs are absolutely smoked if I tried to do it on a True Form my hamstrings feel like they're going to fall off uh I just can't get my heart rate up sufficiently high uh without feeling without not feeling that sort of muscular fatigue uh and then also you're that's solvable by the way that's very easy to fix okay te that's super easy one you're not warming up appropriately I promise and then you're not progressing into it heart rate wise you f you do that and that problem will go away almost immediately H okay okay am I right uh five minutes at like a moderate Pace that's a warm-up isn't it that's not a warm-up I'm pretty sure that's a warm-up not for not for Max effort it's not I mean that's a laboratory we use that protocol all the time in the lab like five minutes a low level aerobic exercise and then you jump in and do a Max effort like well why do you think you're think about it this way uh do you think that's the protocol I would use prior to somebody walking into the Octagon to fight for a UFC title let's just hop on the bike EAS you for 5 minutes no of course and there's a reason okay I feel seen all right all right okay so Monday I'm actually glad you brought that up the reason I cut you off on that honestly is because we see that all the time and I wanted to put that out there like hey that's actually not normal trap and the reason why it matters is you're not actually GNA get as much out of your training because of that right if you if if I had you do the same thing with weights You' look at me like I'm like I'm insane I was like okay great let's just stretch out a little bit and all a sudden let's just go throw 315 on let's just do set of 10 on squats you'd be like like you to be childish right but then when you're gonna do that on a salt bike you're like yeah that's normal that's totally fine no no your legs blatant it's a it's a like blatant disregard for the difficulty of cardio work it's like a middle finger it's a middle finger to cardio stuff it's like ah no this is bums and Tums it'll be fine it's also cuz you're one minute in on the bike and you're just just like oh my God this is terrible so you're like yeah five minutes was a lot it was hard yeah it was it was okay so day one day one hardest one got our work done okay we're out of there Tuesday now we're going to build back in our lower intensity easier thing all right so maybe you're going for your hike you're going to go Ruck you're going to go do whatever you want to do um I will typically personally uh do like a 30 minute station of three nasal breathing only what I mean by that is 10 minutes on a bike 10 minutes on a treadmill 10 minutes on a rower something like that right because I don't want to sit in a rower for 30 minutes I can't I actually can't handle any of those something's going to hurt on me afterwards for the most part um so I'll I'll do whatever right I might jump rope I might do all kinds of stuff like that with our athletes we will we will actually even do shorter so we'll do often times like five minute things we'll set up five to seven stations it might be bench press at 50% of your One Max right it might be push it might be an active walking lunge sort of thing 5 minutes and it's going to be nasal only to keep things down I don't want any muscular endurance we're not sweating that hard but we're moving in a lot of different ways we'll do Turkish getups or more athletic movements so that we're not just like lifting weights up and down sort of the whole time so we try to move and your joints honestly tend to feel better afterwards you kind of finish that and you have more energy where you contrast that to Monday you finish that you have less energy you're in the hole today you're actually feel like man I should go to work right now like I feel locked in I feel pretty good that can be 20 to 40 minutes could be longer if you really F go two hours I don't really care but I would say under 20 is is just kind of moving it's not really going to be enough to stimulate what we're looking for here so we would plug that in uh Wednesday is probably where we're going to incorporate you mentioned lifting so there's going to be some lifting in there whatever we're doing if you're trying to get stronger do your strength training stuff if you're trying to Simply improve V2 Max then we might do some corrective exercises here and by corrective I mean this could be overhead press this could be Heavy rows this could be big uh hip thrusts or leg press whatever we're doing to feel strong feel joints whatever that thing is we're trying to do we're not going to go to Max effort here but we're not just warming up either we're going to get work done right because we're going to make sure that muscular endurance wise that's not causing our problems and so this would look more more like somewhat of a bodybuilder workout though it's not single joint it's not joint isolation stuff it's typically more compound things and it's still going to be we'll call it that 8 to 15 rep range of your big things probably two to three sets with that first set being you know six seven RP six you know out of 10 second set maybe a little bit higher but you're not going to nine at all right so we're going to get some work done there you're going to leave the gym filling a pump you're going to sweating but you're not going to be destroyed either and then if you have a few isolation exercises for a lagging body port or a body part you specifically want to emphasize especially if it's upper body then like trash it I don't care like you know just zero our zero R just just get it after who cares right try try to push down so you're dead like go ahead right all good so um that would be probably Wednesday if you want to also add in additional day two so you want to do another thing but this is when I would encourage walking so on this day we should have done a 10 minute 15 minute walk in the morning another 10 15 minute one in the afternoon really really low level stuff if you can do three in the day great but we're getting good stuff in okay now that leads us to uh Thursday so Thursday is probably when we're going to come back and it's going to look closer to Monday or it's going to be our shorter Higher One but we're not going to go all the way up to that ceiling it's it's very difficult for people to go to max heart rate more than twice per week the average person pro athletes yeah every day right or close but most people especially if you're in a job that is sympathetically driven or any life I should say it's not even a job if if there's just a lot of processing sympathetically you walk out of that thing you always Redline yourself all day and then you red yourself in the gym um we end up people end up spending a lot of money to unwind that problem because it gets to a bad spot pretty fast so but we're going to work here and and this would be more of like this is the day for Norwegian this is four fours you don't have to actually get all the way to the top end here but you're going to put in good consistent hard work um we're going to get there if you want to do a slightly different protocol that's fine um but this could be a call it 85% day and so if you wanted to do 30 on 30 off you're moving but this is not like motivational music playing like everything in my life counts right now Rocky music like I have to finish like you you can only go into that hole so often right um or just ends up sliding down so uh call this this call this 4x4 day if you want to make life easier and we're good there now into Friday and by the way any of these days could have been a pure off day if if you wanted of course or needed to travel day whatever the case is Friday we're going to go back into Tuesday right so now we're in our longer duration thing probably picking up the intensity just a little bit on those 30 minutes still nasal breathing but trying to get some real work done and then Saturday we're going back into movement so this is we're lifting again and and we're basic movement and that leaves the Sunday for any additional stuff you want to do if you want to slide another lift in you want to slide more recovery stuff in you want to slide other stuff in honest reality is that's a buffer day because probably something happened in those six days where you didn't get your training in and so now you can kind of slide things back one day and make sure you get six good training days done out of seven one of the things that you mentioned there was motivation to do this I would imagine that for a lot of people one of the biggest hurdles to doing topend V2 Max work is fear of the difficulty it's the trepidation that you have as you walk into the gym knowing I if I'm going to do this properly it's really going to hurt and that means my heart rate's going to be high and that's kind of scary and I get anxious thinking about that and that sucks from a motivation sustaining um the will to train over time intra session or intra workout V2 Max motivation what have you come to learn as levers and ways that people can kind of really sink in yeah that's a really great question because you have people that go into one of two big camps on this one Camp one is we'll call this CrossFit Camp which is if I'm not throwing up the end of the workout it didn't count right it's not it's not I'm not taking a shot at all but these are people that do not have the problem you just described this is actually the opposite I feel like I didn't do anything if I don't Peg myself all the way to the end every day that that's a problem and then you have the other group which is more like you described which is going hey I just worked all these hours I had this going on and like now my whole workout [ __ ] like no like I W work out today I can get it done but I can't do that there's just no that happens to me all the time have 27 jobs and kid like sometimes I'm just like oh God I have 30 minutes I can get a workout but that's not going to happen and I just know right all right great so I personally and the way we often coach is I this is why I don't like having set workouts on set days of the week example I gave you was like Monday is the hard day I never do that I just have the workouts in order and I just do the next one in order regardless right and so if something came up on Monday and I couldn't train I'm not doing Tuesday's work on a Tuesday I'm doing Monday's workout so there are no Monday workouts it is just this is the order we do them in and I try to get 20 in in 30 days sometimes that's seven in a row sometimes that's you know one one off sometimes it's 14 days in a row because I got a break and lined up that way I never take a day off unless I'm forced to because my schedule forces me to do it often enough anyways it works out right so that that's how I end up doing it um that said this gives you the ability to when that flight got delayed and you landed in and the other thing happened your kid was sick all night and you're like yes today supposed to be that Max effort one mile not doing it today I'm just going to slide in that lower intensity one and there's a game you're going to play here right because if you do that often enough you end up just a 30 minute kind of easy one every day when you didn't have to right at the same time there's also I I'd rather people do that then choose nothing right if the option is okay then I don't have have time to do that Perfect workout at that intensity and therefore Dr Andy said if I don't do it at all the way up to Max it doesn't do any benefit so therefore I'm just not going to do it that's not the case still working at 80% still has benefit working at 40% still has benefit over 0% there is never a case in which exercise is doing nothing that does not happen it's not the optimal benefit potentially but it's never zero and so I always want to make people especially if that are like struggling if exercise is new to them if it's just even not new but it's not a huge passion Like It Is Ours I want I still want to win I want to win as many times as we can and if we see it sliding into that spot where it's like all right it's been three weeks we haven't done anything hard then then it's it's time to reassess what we're doing but often is the case as you know this once you get in there and get moving you're like all right can do this and then you end up going and doing the hard thing anyways but if you never show up in the gym that answer is going to be zero every time so I just I just don't want people not training is the primary thing I'm worried about yeah this is one of the I guess V2 Max training is the cardio equivalent of on RMS and well like 1 RM days are they're scary and you know it's the one it's the one that you're tempted to miss so yeah the the hurdle to doing it is like embedded in the difficulty and the difficulty isec precisely the signal for the outcome that you're trying to get so it's this sort of very vicious cycle of the thing that you want to do being the thing that discourages you from doing the thing so I yeah I mean you know I'm I'm speaking to myself here as someone who's trying to improve my cardiovascular fitness after uh many years of just lifting heavy things yeah yeah I mean we're the same here friend you know that's us I see you one thing I will often describe is think about the month all right so I got this from a friend of mine Kenny Kane many years ago actually started one of the first CrossFit gems top 10 or something like that CrossFit for many many years and he realized his problem of hey you can't just go Red Line every single day so he set up a structure we says 70% of our training however however many trainings that is 70% of them are going to be practice what he means by that is you're still going to work you're still going to get sweaty it's going to be hard but the goal is to get better at something get better at technique get better at holding your rib cage when you get tired get you're getting better at something much like you if you were to go play sports and you go to practice every day you're not thinking you're trying to win that practice you're you're intentionally doing a drill where someone's holding your arm behind you or there's six basketball players against your you're setting odds against you on purpose you know you're not going to win but you're trying to specifically get better at something 70% of a basketball practice or whatever is practice related right great that leaves you then 20% or so of the time where we're going to practice competing okay so we're going to scrimmage we're going to actually try to get the best score possible so here here's our 20-minute test Chris let's see how you can you get the highest amount of mileage whatever the thing is we can be right we're going to compete and this is we're going to Pace ourself we're not going to go as hard as we can we're going to try to win right we're going to try to beat the person the leaderboard whatever the case may be right we're going to change our technique and our position we want to get the highest score on the bench right in terms of a weight up there that's 20% that leaves us 10% of the time where we're going to touch death right we're going to touch this which means we might do that same 20-minute workout and I want you sprinting step number one I know you're going to blow up in three minutes I know the point is you're going to get a worse score you will do way better if you pace yourself but I I don't want a good score here I want this to I want this to be how how horrible can you feel can you put the rock I I saw your your borack cat and I just got back from cam so I'm using this analogy but oh wow he made you do the thing PO he I begged him I'm like come on dude we had to reschedule he's like oh we'll just skip I'm like no no like I will come back up later we are going up that mountain yeah yeah right like we're gonna put the 70 pound Mount rock on your shoulder and we're going to Sprint and yeah that means we're going to Triple our time it's gonna take us two and a half hours to get up that mountain but this is today's point right that's 10% and so mentally if the athlete and the client knows that hey I just need you to get there mentally 10% of the time think of the average person working out four times per week okay over the months that's 16 workouts 10% means twice twice a month can you give me that can you give me that Max one mile twice this month I'm not feeling it this week not feeling it today this okay cool cool cool 70% is still going to be practice 70 70% still going to be or 20% still going to be compete we're going to pay twice though somewhere between once and twice I need you to get there and now we have that like okay you have the breathing room but then we also have a context of going at I don't know the last time I really went who knows because we have a set schedule yeah that's nice I like uh I was talking to Mike isrel about fat loss a couple of weeks ago and he was saying that he treats his step count across the week the same way as he treats his calorie intake across the week that if he has one day where he only hits 5K then tomorrow he maybe tries to do 13 and the day after that he tries to do 13 and then he's like oh no we're back we're back to where we're supposed to be and um yeah I like the idea of not being so dogmatic with a week which is just an arbitrary measure in any case but taking a slightly broader window and then within that it gives you it allows you to kind of play around with things a bit more yeah this is actually a really important thing I know you've had Mike on uh I don't even probably know I feel like I see you guys post in clips from your show three times a week for the last year and a half so he must have been on your show 20 times he is he is um my biggest fan uh I believe that I do believe that yeah and he do you even return his calls or texts anymore I bet you don't never I haven't I haven't spoken to him in months actually not directly yeah I bet if we looked at your phone there's probably three or 400 unanswered messages from him to you it's the picture messages that are really concerning that's really what we should be worried about but very it uh the point being this is the one of the things that separates people that are either plateauing or struggling to get results with training despite working hard like man I'm really getting after it I am whether it's the nutrition side or the training side are you just worried about one workout or are you just worried about one week and your entire programming thinking is just on a s-day window these are the kind of problems you R into right we have to step back and look at what's the month look like what's the two months or three months at minimum and now if we're playing that kind of a game if you're playing your step count per month game that's way more effective than playing just today now you have to put the work in today to eventually get there at the end of the 30 days but really taking a big picture back and going okay great this week how did that layer on to last week and the week ahead of that and then what's this month look like we actually do it we program it by quarter so what's quarter q1 Q2 Q3 with with all of our stuff with everybody or inseason offseason postf fight like whatever the case is for the different athletes and that's that's really how you don't make misst UPS like that and how you can make small things that feel like nothing like one extra 10-minute walk today all of a sudden make big things or hey you know it's okay to back off right now because we got this or we got this whatever um this becomes huge for our boxers and Fighters because it's just like they feel like they have to fight hard every day and when we can show them no this is what we're going to get done in the next 60 days it's like oh their sense of relief there because like I know we'll get after it we need to get after it but I don't have to just randomly take days off when I feel like death who are some of the fighters that you work with that people might know can you talk about them yeah I mean I've worked with plenty of um different Fighters boxers UFC fighters um right now I still currently work a lot with Brian Ortega so I've worked with him for many years Tatiana Suarez um for for many years but even Matt Brown recently who just recently retired uh Matt should be in the Hall of Fame any day hopefully my Advocate I think he has the most wins in UFC history or most fights most knockouts as well so those folks uh Mike Lee fought for World Championship in boxing I I just actually started working with Jordan panon who really high level boxer so we've been around a ton of them lots of wrestlers uh a bunch of things so a whole number of them those are the ones that like I'm coaching right now what else is there to say about V2 Max any other common assumptions errors that people make any unclosed Loops that you think that you need to uh dial in one thing part of the reason I pushed back so hard on the the protocol thing is because I really wanted people to not see those as limitations and what I mean by that is to thinking oh because I didn't do the 4x4 perfectly therefore I can't train or I'm not going to get better and I've made that before but I like being or that point earlier but I like being very direct in that you have unlimited options with V2 Max it is really equivalent in my opinion to bodybuilding training where I I almost call it idiot proof in the sense that the training is hard for sure and the programming at the highest levels gets complicated but at the entry point midpoint moderate point if there's any part of a protocol you heard on a program that you feel like you can't do oh I'd love to do that but I might knee I'd love to do that but I can't I don't have access to you're okay you're totally fine you can still get whatever it needs to be done regardless of the exercise equipment you have regardless of the time limitations you have regardless of the weather outside there are still lots of options that work so if you get inspired by Rhonda doing her awesome stuff or peer or whatever and you hear the exact protocol and you go I can't do that therefore it's not going to work I I want to make sure you know that that is not the case you can modify these things a ton of ways and still get all of the benefits if not more what else or what what do you wish that more people knew about cardiovascular fitness it seems to me that with in part of this V2 Max Revolution that we're seeing at the moment massive proliferation of heart disease big concerns that people have over protecting their heart over the long term what do you wish that more people knew about cardiovascular fitness you would be stunned how little effort it takes to see benefit like really quite stunned how little exercise has to happen for you to see big results especially if you are in those bottom 20 or 25% of Fitness so if you are really in a bad spot it takes nothing as little I'm talking about as 20 seconds so there's a handful of studies out of Canada that have been done on things like exercise snacks so these are literally 20 second bursts one to three times per day in office related settings so imagine you are in your suit and you're tie and all that you get it from your desk you sprint 20 seconds up a step and you go right back to work those have been shown in multiple studies from multiple labs to enhance V2 Max now it's not going to do it if you're a highly trained athlete I'm not saying oh don't do any other workouts all you have to do is this 20 second Sprint once what I'm what I'm going all the way down to the bottom is That's how little your stimulus you need for your body to actually pay attention now the benefits in VI toax to a protocol like that are small you're talking a few percentage points but look at the power of that right it can certainly maintain where you're at and so if you are in a situation where whatever you can't have access can't afford a gym membership or who now I told Andrew he remember about this a couple years ago and still this day like I'll see him in the studio just like sprinting on the studio like full get up that's him running away from his demons he's not doing V2 Max work of course yeah running away from his cell phone or whatever else yeah uh so yeah I these things can really really help so you if you uh if if you just do the bare minimum that will matter and it will matter for about as many physiological variables as one can think sure your longevity your heart disease yes of course but blood sugar regulation energy throughout the day in fact in the studies I'm mentioning not only they look at V2 Max but they also looked at executive function decision- making and word recall all that improved so I mean you really can enhance your life in whatever metric matters to you some people like you and I to be honest like death related stuff doesn't do much for me like all right I'm young I'm pretty I'm okay but man improving my word call by 20% that's that's fantastic make better decisions I don't have to redo my work that that would be nice uh there's data on money people make more money like you finances are high no for sure like you see this with sleep all the time too I think the number with sleep is actually like in America most recent estimate was poor sleep uh is causes a $400 billion do loss in America alone on average people lose something like six working days because of slightly not not like massive bad sleep just slightly worse sleep causes a total throughout the year of about six equivalent working day we is that productivity loss in productivity errors car crashes full works all of it got sick more yeah just you know kind of checked out that 10 minutes early today and went home because I was a little tired today it was that redid my work faster all those things we have a client in my uh in my sleep company who he's a financial Trader and he he tracks we have his sleep data track for a long time with his financial trades and it is a very statistically significant correlation so he keeps he keeps reupping he keeps repaying because he's like no matter what I pay you guys I make more money just like sleeping better we're like great so wow what's your what's your sleep company it's called absolute rest okay um is that sleep coaching is that a product what is it it's both of it so at the high we have two things actually one of them we just released like a month ago it's a more consumer grade version but for the first handful of years where it started is this Elite program where we come in and we can actually build full sleep labs in people's houses so you can get a full clinical grade FDA approv sleep study done every single night in your house or what take it with you take it wherever you want so we have full it's all Wireless too like you've ever seen people in the sleep conics that have the wires like all over like all that stuff's gone you don't need any of those things so we can run all that from your house but we in addition to that now we've got the highest Fidelity understanding of how you sleep right we're not missing data and making assumptions and because of that we now want to go why are you sleeping that way and so we're not just stopping and being like well your sleep's shitty and people are like great I got a sleep study done they told me how that like that didn't help at all why are you sleeping that way well number one then we're going to start off by looking at your environment so we have a full environmental scanner that sits next to your bed and it's scanning your room at all times for CO2 concentrations uh humidity uh particulates volatile Organics dander mold pollen allergens all those things are being continuously scanned in your room to make sure it's not environmentally related we're doing blood work specific to sleep related physiology uh we have uh psychological evaluation one of our co-founders is a Harvard Psychiatry psychologist of sleep um and then we have any pathology screened of course and so we have have an understanding of exactly why you're sleeping that it's all positionally done too so if the problem was on your left side or right side or whatever the thing is happening so all those data come back to our scientists who are the most uh published scientists in the world in sleep folks that handle the astronauts and the space station and all that they go over all those data give you your results back there and then put you on a a several month-long coaching program where you could check in and and see and we fix sleep very successfully because of that so we have been doing that for a very long time and then just about a month ago we released what's called Sleep lens which is a finger tip version of of our sleep program and so now we can do this at about a tenth of the price and so we can run a full FDA approved equivalent to being in a sleep lab from your fingertip it's not a wearable it's not a Tracker you're not going to like check your sleep score you we can medically diagnos Sleep Disorders on this thing and we can look at hundreds of measures per second as opposed to like one measure per five minutes wow so sleep is you know between VO2 max uh I think it's 11 episode 11:09 or 1159 was uh Matthew Walker on Rogan and that was the day that I got redpilled about my sleep because I'd been a oh oh you're not a good sleeper uh oh not that I'm not a good sleeper I was I was a club promoter for so long and baked into my weekly routine from the age of 18 until the age of 32 or 33 when Co came along was I was awake until at least 300 or 4 in the morning running a nightclub and the beautiful thing about being a club promoter is that the very final task you have to do is the most cognitively demanding one so you have to count the till make sure that all the money is where you say it is enter into a spreadsheet so you're looking at a beautiful bright screen for a little while drive home put it in the or drive to the office put it in the safe make sure that everything's okay and then within 20 minutes it's go right okay brain I know that you just did all that mental arithmetic best of luck getting yourself to sleep and I did that and that was just life that was life for me you know those other times when we'd be driving we ran events in Manchester which is about two and a half hours from where we were based and um I would do that drive every other week for half a decade uh and I'd get back at I get back at 5:00 a.m. there was times where I'd hit Rush Hour leaving Newcastle going to Manchester at 500 p.m. and then I would hit Rush Hour getting back home uh the next day which felt particularly unfair but yeah I um I think that that was a big turning point for me I don't think that I'd really considered sleep it sounds so stupid in retrospect it makes me sound like a total idiot but I just hadn't considered how important sleep was for cognition for performance for mood all of this stuff and um I think yeah between V2 Max and sleep that's been probably two of the biggest red pill changes that I've seen in terms of prioritization over the last five yeah I mean we Coach B major league baseball players I coach NBA players I Coach Travis Barker the drummer for Blink 182 I was just with Travis last weekend so we had a 5K in the morning so uh let's see we were probably there 7 a. getting warmed up and all that stuff Travis ran uh 20 just under 22 minutes for 5K it's pretty good right and then better than me we were in uh Staple Center or kia form whatever uh sofa stadium in front of 70,000 people until I don't know I left at midnight I think something like that and then who knows when he like got home and got to sleep and all that right so I'm dealing he's on tour right now he's in Salt Lake today like okay play in front of 70,000 people be a [ __ ] drummer in front of 70,000 people on stage and then go to bed good luck right like absolutely good luck and he is a maniac with his is Health he's he's dialed he runs every day he's up super early but it's the same problem it's like by the time we get off stage get wound down all that stuff it's 5 in the morning like who knows you do right not because he's out partying but just because again I literally am on stage as a rock star until midnight and I like now try to come down and see you know okay so we deal with those problems really routinely as well as our our Executives that are running companies different time zones working in you know all those things it's like we have to land golfers too with Liv now man I coached John ROM and and he's in Liv now so he's all over the world time change all right so we we deal with this problem a lot and funny enough man we're having this I don't know when this Show's gonna come out but just yesterday episode five of my podcast came out all on sleep enhancement and so one of the things you will see really consistently is yeah I mean Matthew Walker has done such an amazing job helping people understand that if you don't sleep well everything in your health goes down but there's an entirely different side of the equation which is the performance enhancing ability to go from okay sleep to good sleep there's a whole bunch of studies that have been done on sleep Banking and sleep extension so these are people that are already sleeping okay and they go from good to what I call great sleep and you see market and massive improvements in everything from reaction time uh to three point and free throw shooting accuracy in division one basketball players professional tennis players having 20% reduction in cortisol serving accuracy improving body composition V2 Max uh cyclists rugby players like there's there's lots and lots of data going from I sleep seven seven and a half hours to I sleep better than that and it's not just duration right I'm just giving a number and then look what happens to physiology there's probably 30 plus studies out of Walter Reed that have been done on looking at things like sleep Banking and sleep extension prior to sleep de depr so you know you're going uh this is oftentimes the military but this is you're going to do training camp you're going to do some situation in which uh say you're going to be traveling internationally in meetings and speaking events and you're GNA doing a seminar okay great we know that because that cognitive function physical performance is going to go down but if you can get ahead of sleep before you go the drop will be attenuated so you'll have much less of a reduction in your performance when you know the shit's going to hit the fan one way or the other right so before season before going back out on tour we're taking a ton of advantage of these things uh in between session so there is a lot you can do and as much as V2 ax is cool nothing has a more ubiquitous benefit to every aspect of anything you care about in your body then sleep will assume that most of the people listening have been red pilled on most of Matthew Walker's stuff that yeah look I I know that I should be aiming to get 8 hours a night I know that 8 hours of sleep is not derived from 8 hours in bed because sleep efficiency is a thing that being consistent cool dark room etc etc you mentioned there's this entire other world of enhancement what are what are the big movers there that most people don't know about great I love the way you say that because I feel like every time sleep comes up people tune out because they're like yes cool dark quiet and that's like all true correct what else can we do okay well let's go backwards why don't people sleep well to begin with all right that that's actually causing most of your problem so we're going to look at this in different parts sleep duration is one thing honestly it's the variable we probably pay the least amount of attention to really yeah it's fine but like either people sleep you know five hours and it's like hey do you do you want to spend 10 grand because I can also just tell you go like you have to sleep more like I can do that but here's a problem what's more interesting is the like I'm in bed for eight hours uh here's the problem starts right you're falling asleep problems I I get up a lot um it is often things that are benign or people think benign that are not oh I sleep I snore a ton oh really interesting that's not normal doesn't necessarily mean you have a sleep disorder but it's very generally likely that something bad is happening oh okay I wake up two or three times to go peed in the night oh that's not normal either like should not be happening that that number should be basically zero right that that is oh I'm just getting old nope nope nope nope those are not answers either shouldn't be happening we see a lot of oh I feel terrible all day Energy's low libido is low focus is low brain fog's low I think I have covid related long Co something like okay all all possible Right sure how's your sleep Oly pretty well really take a look at it uh this happened actually with one of our professional athletes used a wearable we'll say and had like a 90 plus percent score on the wearable consistently we run them through stuff immediately clinically diagnosable sleep disorder like this is not is not a t the what was the sleep disorder that was missed so obviously by the wearable well wearables can't diagnose any sleep disorders of course but I I would I would have I would have guessed that if you have a disorder it would show up somehow in some of those markers no it won't because the vast majority of cheap consumer wearables are going to be looking at so low resolution that any it's an x-ray so imagine you fell off the mountain today as you're running and your knee is destroyed you got hella back down and they took you down there and they're like oh man his knee is torn up and we'll take an x-ray then the doctor comes back and goes no broken bones you're fine like well okay but your mcl's torn acl's horn it's kneecaps islocated it's an x-ray it can only look at a few things and it's looking at it at very very low resolution typically wearables are going to take a measurement once every five minutes so if you had any event that happened not within that very small time window it all gets missed that's something I remember I had a [ __ ] who's Elite HRV Joel Jameson oh yeah with Morpheus yes um I remember speaking to him and he was telling me about how HRV uh when you do it in those bracket Windows like that uh if you're laid on your front versus if you're laid on your side if you're at a particular stage of sleep and you can kind of do this odd dance routine during sleep that gives a really um skewed set of data uh which I I found particularly interesting all right so I I I know that I'm branching off but I I promise I'll bring you back what are the Met tricks that you guys when you do your sleep studies are looking at which are being missed what are the things that pick up these Sleep Disorders okay so you want to think about this this way when most people are this is cool having fun um when most people think about sleep right we're thinking about duration and then sleep score and your wearables and I could go on but I think you get the point that those are not a good way one of the main reasons why is what people tend to be concerned about is how long that I sleep and how much time that I spend in various stages deep REM things like that throw all that out of the way it's completely garbage not only from like a technology perspective but what I simply mean is the construct the idea of sleep stages is almost nonsensical for everybody the amount of time you spend in a sleep stage I'm not going to say is totally irrelevant but it's way less important than most people think because of a handful of things your brain is going to engineer what we call the archetype so the how the the architecture of your sleep based upon the demands and what it needs and so you are not going through the same physical or cognitive demands every single day thus you don't need the same sleep staging every single day when your brain is doing something with your sleep staging it's doing it for a reason and then you're going in there and listening to Andrew hman and taking a supplement to hack that sleep stage and now you're going against what your brain is trying to do you're causing problems the Sleep staging is not accurately depicted they also change the record like they change arbitrarily uh this is now deep sleep this is now not deep sleep so so we see people consistently over time like oh my God my deep sleep's gone way down what what do you mean oh no no no one an algorithm could have been just changed in the background now like your two years of data is gone and that happens all the time but I mean even medically the medical side of the equation can change their definition of these things and has happened many times so we don't also even know at all how much sleep staging you should be in for any given sort of purpose it would be the equivalent of saying you should do this exact type of training every single day the rest of your life why well because that's the average type of training the average person does well that's [ __ ] unhelpful that's about as unhelpful as it could possibly get and so that that's not going to provide you any insight into what's going on more importantly than the time you spend let's just throw all that out way let's say you could accurately measure your sleep stages it's not the time you spend in those stages it's the depth in those stages that matter I not aware of any tractor or wearable that can actually measure any of that and so if you and I both spent an hour in deep Sleep whatever that means but your amplitude within that is five times higher than mine you're going to have much more restorative sleep than I and this is your classic my scores are okay I'm in the right time but I'm still feeling lethargic I'm still feeling whatever other issue and and we see have seen this a ton from trt clinics so people that have gone on testosterone because energy is low you know you fill in the blanks there it's fine like not against that at all but when we come back we're like why did you think you you needed testosterone when we take a look at your sleep we like if you're tired the first place we should look is sleep like this is pretty obvious right like what's energy intake look like food nutrition and what sleep look like those are the that's our mountain right we don't need to think we're in some weird spot and so again testosterone fine that's don't want to take us off track here that was not the point but the point is going like Whoa We have to really pay attention to how sleep actually works so when I say like duration like it is what it is I am more looking at things like what is the amplitude Within These sleep stages so what's the quality of that what's the consistency of your sleep awake cycles and rhythms what is the actual um next day feelings what's your symptomology right how's it actually doing and we're going to measure that cognitively so I'm not just going to like ask you how do you feel we're going to measure cognitive speed processing speed reaction time things like that what I was going to say what are the tests that you do for that yeah we have we we have we don't do anything without testing for the most part like we're we're going to track metrics on this is this is technology and performance this is our game right so we're not messing around with and any of that stuff so we're going to test all those um we're going to look at things like respiratory rate right we're going to look at HRV and now since we do this in such high variability I can differentiate and tell you oh this was a problem of you're unfit right so I I can I'll give you that example maybe I okay I can we can very easily triangulate and say all right you're resting I take a look at you and I say all right um symptomology is there we're not feeling refreshed we think something's going on with sleep all right awesome now we look and you don't have any clinical insomnia right we're not having these obvious signs are there but just because you don't have clinical apnea or whatever doesn't mean you don't have sub clinical so maybe we see a little bit of subclinical apnea okay well you're kind of a bigger guy body mass tends to go up that tends to start happening all right now why are you having that apnea interesting well apne could be done for could be anatomical so we're going to actually run a scan of your face and we're going to be able to see is there any anatomical things going on it's a naval cavity thing it could be a tongue Rel issue and so there a tongue believe it or not there tongue strengthening exercises we can do that'll stop your tongue from flopping back in your neck F flaccid tongue I knew I had a flaccid tongue I mean I didn't want to say it but yeah if it never gets used it it's pretty obvious man it's pretty obvious right so we just need to firm you up a little bit you know tuid nice turgid tongue turgid tongue it could be a simple as that right it could be simple as position so maybe the all of your apneas are happening when you're like L on your right shoulder now all we have to do is teach you to stop laying on your right shoulder and all of a sudden your sleep changes instantaneously and we've had this I I can't even count how many times things like that have happened it could also be uh things like environmental so one of the things I've talked about a lot in the past is the fact that when you take a breath in you inhale oxygen when you take a breath out you exhale CO2 okay now in a normal situation that's fine as you're sleeping you're not exhaling very hard so that breath if you're watching the video here is coming just kind of like seeping out of your mouth that stays right in front of your face and forms what's called a CO2 cloud and you take your neck breath and you rebreathe back in some of that CO2 most people that's not a big deal however if you're highly sensitive to CO2 or if the CO2 concentrations in your room start getting really high why because all your doors and windows are shut because you have a sleeping partner because you have an animal in there as well your kid is in there too more bodies in a room poor ventilation when that number crosses 900 parts per million you will see consistent research showing poor sleep onset wakeful events next day restfulness next day concentration next day cognitive function all when CO2 levels start to rise above 900 so it could be simply that it has nothing to do with anything else going on besides the fact that you're choking yourself on co2 CO2 levels rise in your body that's one of your primary levers that kicks you from autonomic to parasympathetic nervous system this is fight or flight to rest and dig human taught me about uh this test that they do where they get people to take a single breath in from some mask that's got a really high concentration of carbon dioxide and it's able to reliably bring on a panic attack a single breath is able to reliably there's been many many decades of research in Psychiatry that uses CO2 to induce Panic that that's like one of the most standard models for anxiety and panic disorder research is inhaling CO2 wow yeah it's been around for a very long time a lower level version of that when you have poor ventilation and high amounts of CO2 in your in your room yep or if none of that's happening and you're simply intolerant to CO2 you're hyper sensitive to it your concentration in your bedroom could be very very low but it's still kicking off that entire sympathetic Cascade because you're overly triggered to your CO2 right so I can see that because I can see your HRV I can see your heart rate and I can see your oxygenation so I will very quickly be able to be like this is the problem to hell with your tongue exercises to hell with your supplementation and all those other things whatever in your particular case this is simply about you developing better CO2 tolerance we see this one really routinely the opposite could be the other the case we see that those things are fine heart rate is actually so the way I can triangulate this is because we can look at HRV we can look at CO2 and we can look at O2 concentration and I can look at your V2 Max now I can identify oh if you resting heart rate is really really high but your HRV is also high that means you're nice and down regulated and your respiratory rate is low you're not over breathing right and then I look at your VO2 max and your VO2 max is [ __ ] and know oh okay you're unfit you're just unfit we have got to get that's our problem you're not over breathing it's not an O2 issue it's not environmental it's on a tongue thing you're just unfit to a position where you're having any deviation that smile Apnea you have that small amount of apne have rather is causing such a big effect because you don't have any Breathing Room the V2 you need to have just to sleep is just barely below your threshold when you're awake and so slight deviations cause you to choke O2 gets low and now you're having this response or the opposite and that's the last one I'll give you but we could be super fit very low resting heart rate HRV is high and or respiratory rate is high you're not downregulated you're exhausted so your sleep onset is really really short you're falling asleep immediately but you wake up often when you wake up you have a hard time going back to sleep and or when you even sleep through the night you still feel very fatigued the next day and we look respiratory rates overly high you're dumping CO2 you're getting rid of it too much this causes respiratory alkalosis and I can confirm this by looking at your hydration status because in responds to respiratory alkalosis your kidneys will put you into metabolic acidosis which means that very very hard to retain electrolytes and all of a sudden you're waking up and peeing a ton often but there's not a lot of volume in it it's not super clear you're not overly hydrated we're consistently seeing signs and symptoms of dehydration in your lab work in your blood and now we know bada bing bada boom this is all simply coming down the fact that you're overly sympathetically driven you're over breathing we correct that sleep problems go away wow dude this I love the 360 view of all of this it's very very impr Rive and comprehensive okay getting back into sleep enhancements not for noobs sleep enhancements not for noobs yeah so this is where it comes down to going okay we're sleeping okay you're falling asleep fine and you're maybe waking up a couple of times and we'll just we'll just call your sleep you know kind of like the way I call your podcast it's okay it's not great but it's just like it's okay right like it's all right if I have to I want to watch it but not go out right so what we're looking at there could be duration could be timing could be consistency could be any of those things and we're just going to go there and polish it all the way up right and so this is making sure we want to change the rhetoric here this is not about you getting the most sleep this is not about you um having to have a 90minut routine to get to bed every night I want to actually develop the most resilient sleepers possible that is our goal we always shy away from optimization that's like the most anti-science word you could ever develop but like sometimes you just use it we would rather be resilient what's that mean even when you do have a slightly crummy night or a suboptimal night we're still performing at the highest level possible the next day when we don't have our environment when we're not in the same position you're not in your house today you're out traveling right I won't tell the world where you are um right I know the groupies so just we'll never leave you alone all of all of the women of Boseman mon will come with their cows now I'm going to be wait I'm going to be back home by the time this comes out so they can send they can send all of the cows over to Hilton wherever the [ __ ] I am in Boseman at the moment that's a trick you guys know that right he's still in Boseman he just Tred to throw you off the track Ki yeah uh so we want to make you as resilient as possible right you're in a different environment different bedroom I want to make it such that when you are traveling when you're on the road we still get in there and we still have a great night of sleep or or pretty good and what you'll tend to see happen is if you can just keep people out of catastrophe with sleep you're okay you don't have to have these perfect nights what really gets people is those really big dips and you can't come back out of those holes recovering that sleep debt is really really challenging so we just want to make sure it's the same thing we use with with our for example our baseball players the key to having a good RA and winning a sa young every time we've been able to do that with somebody it's just we avoid them giving up 10 runs in one inning you you just can't have a terrible day you don't have to throw great every single day no horrible days and that's really what we're after is super super resilient that Baseline starts to come up just a little bit over three six months it's a complete Game Cher so what we're doing is we're making sure number one environment as as as consistent as possible and so we will engineer their bedrooms at home such that it is transportable with minimal effort and the reason that matters is one of the biggest problems people have with sleep on the road is What's called the first night effect first time in a new environment whether you travel all the time or not even if it's an environment you've been in it's your second home it's your vacation home it's your parents home a lot of people will struggle with sleep um the first night in there right it's a whole host of things going on but one of the things you can avoid that is making sure that environment smells and and looks visually and sounds like your house no most of those problems go away so what do we do you engineer a particular sound in your house that can be transportable you engineer a particular smell this can be as simple as you take like a little bit of a lavender very subtle lavender scent and put it next to your bed at home take that with you on the road you put that thing down you make the the visual the same thing you make the the hearing the same thing whether you're using a very light noise machine keep the noise machine under 35 DB by the way above that actually starts hurting sleep so it's very very quiet now the environment is mimicked on the road and it doesn't matter where you go you can avoid not all the problems but you can avoid a lot of them uh pillow sheets is another really common one right take your pillow sheet with you you can't typically take your full eight sleep and your you know all that stuff with you but if you take your pillow sheet that stuff can go a long way and then lastly keep the same routine so if you shower and then do a b and c do that exact same thing take your same soap with you take your same smells as much of that you can that is not again completely unbearable that will go away very very long way to that so just that stuff alone for our NBA guys that are traveling new cities every three to five days that stuff makes a big deal um our corporate people who live on airplanes same thing like you spend actually more of your life on hotels than you do at home it makes a huge deal that's one small example of how we can make them a little bit more resilient and just take that Baseline and keep it higher I I love the uh idea and I think that you are uh out ahead of the trend that I'm starting to see uh a good bit of push back we spoke about this for a long time yesterday on this stupidly long hike I did yesterday which was um The Perils of over optimization and kind of pushing back against prot protocol maxing and um you know for all of the brilliant things that we've been given by health information and the democratization of accessors scientific studies and what you should do and what you could do uh I think lots of people are made more sick by trying to be optimal than they would be by just embracing their suboptimal uh habits this sort of rumination and oh my God I didn't get my my friend George tells this great story this was when he was first red pilled I think it was Matthew Walker so he has this elaborate 90-minute wind down routine before bed and he's got no lights anywhere in the entire room and he's had his red light glasses on for ages and you know he's been doing his 448 breathing to down regulate everything and he's brushing his teeth in the dark and then as he's doing that his then girlfriend bursts into the room turns the light on blinds him because he hasn't seen any [ __ ] light for the last 90 minutes blinds him he's seething he's he's raging because he's just spent 90 minutes trying to do this they get into bed she falls asleep straight away and he's laid there staring at the ceiling hating her and that's it's just perfect ly encapsulates this fragility that gets built into the system when you rely on too elaborate of a routine I have many things to say about this so I'm not sure how long you want me to go but I will say just a few things that are short I wrote a book my one and only ever book seven or eight years ago now with Brian McKenzie and this was the entire premise of that book for the most part you really want to stay away from optimization you're going to play a game at all times on this side of the equation you've got optimal on the other side of the equation you've got adaptation if you're playing on one you're knocked in the other one explain that to me yes if you are optimizing let's just say it this way you have that 90-minute routine okay and you go through this and that gets you a perfect night of sleep amazing every time you do that you are making yourself less and less resilient to any change in that routine okay now the girlfriend was the opposite the girlfriend if you said hey I need you to have a perfect night of sleep everything is on the line tomorrow you're going to get $50 million based on your sleep score she wouldn't know what to do because she is all in resilient adaptation phase right it it's just like whatever happens still be able to get to sleep but you have no ability understanding what makes you so it's not one is better than the other one but if you spend all of your time optimizing think of this in the perspective of eating sugar okay okay um think about this another way to say this is immediate versus delayed gratification okay if you're always choosing immediate gratification if you're always choosing do the thing that makes me feel the best right now optimize for today okay you're going to go all right I'm GNA wake up I'll have some ice cream I'm G to turn my phone off I'm G play video games you're going to do the thing that makes you feel the best right now that is maximizing how you feel and perform in this very moment you're optimized it's immediate gratification but you know by doing that you're making life a little bit worse right you're you do that every single day you're going to get unhealthy you're going to get unhealthy you're not going to get productive you're going to lose money you're going to lose your job so long-term wise you're compromising the long term you're compromising your adaptability okay if you do the opposite which is you never live in the moment you're always worried about tomorrow you're never having a break for today you know the problems that are associated with people not being present not being you grateful for what they have not so on and so forth okay so you don't want to always be worried about 50 years from now and you don't want to always be just worried about this exact day the same thing happens with optimization and adaptation if I want you to play the best round of golf in your entire life we would relax today we get a massage we do some breath work we would not talk to anybody else we maybe do some light warmup and we chill if that's all you did every day though eventually your golf game will get worse and worse and worse because you're never actually practicing and getting better okay so if I wanted you to get up that mountain yesterday on your hike and have a great the greatest hike of your life we would have had a completely different strategy the five days before or we would have gone campaign style and we' have done the opposite we' have been like the hell with all this we're going to get up that hill with the most uh difficulty possible we're not going to perform at our best but we're going to see now that challenge is going to cause adaptations because you're stressed more you're more fatigued you're more challenged that's going to push you to when we get close to the Olympics all of our athletes in the Olympics will be optimizing maximizing recovery what's it going to take there right now as we're still a few months out we're still adapting I don't care if I'm getting their best scores ever we're not pring today I don't care we're doing stuff that causes fatigue their performance is going down because we're pushing adaptations we're causing stress in the system intentionally for a long longer term adaptation that's the game you're always playing so every single choice you make every day you're causing adaptation or you're peing okay immediate gratification delay gratification you can't always choose both or the opposite how much time you spend on each is not an easy answer but you have to acknowledge both of those are going on I love the just this idea of uh optimizing building fragility into the system and adaptability being robust I I I think is absolutely bang on two things first one for the person who has access and understands a lot of the ways that they should be should be optimizing how do you advise someone to emotionally let go of that fear of control and then second thing is I need you to explain how that makes sense to me with regards to sleep that there are so many things in sleep that are are routinized oh great I'll do those both at the same time no are you familiar with the idea of orthosomnia no this is a insomnia induced from sleep trackers okay okay I just answered both your questions here's what's going to happen in some folks not all not even most just some folks and I can tell this story because he gave me permission to do so John ROM one of the best golfers in the world we just went through this and he was like man I went back and listened to your thing boom he's not looking at a sleep tracker anymore now he still wears it so I can track but he doesn't look at his he doesn't have the app or whatever he doesn't he doesn't access it himself yeah that's right so with our stuff at Absolute rest you don't even like there no sleep scores anyways like we have high fidelity data the data Mattern they don't care about your score so here's what can happen if you're very compulsive and you're worried about optimizing your sleep score and you're going after your sleep score what can start to happen is your physiology and psychology will realize the first thing I'm going to do tomorrow morning is check that score and there's a lot writing on that score my happiness my unhappiness my sadness my joy all this is being driven by that score that will create an anticipatory response your brain will start back feeling that thing and you will start having worse sleep the night of you'll wake up earlier because you're waiting for a big emotional up or down 6:00 a.m. the next day when that alarm goes off okay that can in the worst case scenarios then lead to insomnia all night laying around Restless we see this in people trying to work on their sleep before sleep hand you it's 8:00 you go to bed at 10: and you put the kids down you shut the laptop up and now all of a sudden Panic sets in you're like [ __ ] okay two hours from now I'm going to have to get right to sleep and I know I never get to sleep on time and I'm trying to really work on it and I'm doing these things and I'm just God I hope I fall asleep tonight I hope I don't let you see where I'm going at this right I can keep going in this example but this is really really common who with people who are struggling with sleep and they're really trying to work on it it's almost like you're working too much on it and now you're creating an anticipatory response I gave you the anticipatory response and the wakeup but now this can happen prior to going to bed as well both cases are the same thing you've created a physiological pattern that is now compromising either falling asleep or Waking asleep all based on the result the score the metric okay this is the anti-air Hamilton right this is the fragile this is you are not resilient we should be able to have a great night of sleep regardless when we work with our special forces folks we have to be get sufficient sleep in any situation I'm an Outdoorsman like I love my whole setup but when I'm out hunting they're like you need to be able to sleep in the tent at a 45 degree angle sliding off the mountain all damn night like I just had to do pretty recently right raining all night all those things the goal is to get enough quality sleep in those situations when I don't have the sun is still out all that stuff's going on right and it's like you still have to be able to sleep period because you're going to be up in four hours to go chase an elk or whatever you're gonna do right so all that stuff's going on so going back to our examples that's two situations which anticipatory responses ruined falling asleep and or staying asleep so in someone that's having that problem just like when we do with John and actually John did it to himself and then he told me afterwards but in the other folks that we're coaching we will often take that score away from them many times I'll say again can you continue to to wear the thing but um actually one the nice thing about the old days in Aura is manually on the back end coaches could go turn that off so if I was coaching you I could go turn off your thing you would only get to see your score yeah I mean we've been talking about this a lot George had a a self-imposed bout of insomnia and went through a lot of the lessons I think you're talking about here he did some CBT uh for insomnia 2 and he found this study where they paid people two two different cohorts they'd paid one group to fall asleep quickly you're nodding I'm guessing that you know this study quite well yeah shock shock horror the group that was paid to fall asleep more quickly fell asleep less quickly than the group that it it didn't matter that was just the control and um yeah there it sleep is this very vicious uh sort of counterintuitive the harder you try the less quickly it comes at least in the moment I guess you preparator you can do things in advance but even in that if you've oh this is my first my my new AG sleep I really hope that this goes well and maybe the physiological Improvement of being in a temperature controlled mattress helps but this sort of rumination in the brain and all the rest of it it's um yeah it's wild it's wild this sort of vicious feedback loop that you have and uh one of his suggestions one of G's suggestions is to imagine if whoop or or Aura um gave you your score for the entire week of sleep at the end of the week um because you don't have this rapid iteration oh I I feel great today and you look and you go what 70% I was only asleep for six 6 hours and 15 minutes but I feel oh maybe I am going to have a bad day and you go what the [ __ ] and then you do sleep well and if you have a bad score the only time that it's good is if you have a good night sleep with a good score that's it that's the only time that you ever actually win so the second half that Don ROM story was he was like you know he was deal with that and then he goes yo I just left I don't remember what he went from like Singapore to Houston or something he's like and he he doesn't he's very healthc conscious so I don't want to misrepresent how he acts normally but in this case he was like I drank a whole bottle of wine I changed four time zones I got home sto for a couple of hours and it said my sleep score was 90 something he's like this is [ __ ] get out of there uh so to Point okay some people these problems can happen because of anticipatory response other people though will still see benefits so I don't want this to come off as all this stuff sucks it doesn't work because there can be accountability benefits you know I I have this seen this a lot with our athletes it's like hey we need you in bed by midnight or whatever like they know Andy's going to look and they know they're G get a text for me in the morning they're like um they were going to play that next little game of Call of Duty but all right they go to bed so accountability really does and can help awareness can be a huge benefit some people think they're sleeping well think they're getting and they're really really not right so there can be simply okay um some ability to go I'm trying a b and c different nightly routine different nutritional produ whatever how do I know if it's okay so there can be benefit there most people on agregate do better when they pay attention so we just do want to recognize some people though will be in the situations like we talked about where it can create a a a bad physiological pattern or Loop and one of the ways that you can get around this is probably what your friend George did or a version of this and this is Extreme it is not our first or second or third or fourth or fifth or even 10th stop on the train but it is a stop on the train there's research behind it and anyone who's dealt with true insomnia personally or or has worked with people in this will be very familiar with this and it can be quite effective but there is something called Sleep Restriction Training that you can do so if you're struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep then one of the worst things one can do is ruminate on that and so I gave you the example of the hours before going to sleep you start already ruminating on the fact that you're not going to fall asleep very quickly people have talked Matthew Walker has talked about if you're going to lay in bed for an hour get out of bed right do not set yourself in a pattern up when you get into bed you close the lights off you're exhausted you feel like you're going to fall asleep immediately and then you get into bed and you lay there right this happens for many reasons but one of them is a this isn't it's this is a physiological pattern that's been that's been made you have to break that pattern so one way to do that is you do not get into bed at all until you are ready to absolutely fall asleep and if you're there for more than a few minutes you get out of it and you just do not allow yourself to be in that position to get there with the case of sleep Restriction Training what one would do is just one example you could do this a lot of ways but one example would be you're going to set the alarm for 5:00 a.m. and you're not going to get into bed until midnight period and no matter what you will get up at 5:00 a.m. and you'll get out of bed and we're going to do that for an entire week what's gonna happen is God yeah well you say that remember you ever you ever you know anybody who's ever dealt with insomnia uh except for George not not really they're not sleeping five hours and night anyways right so for you and I it's like you I've had kids I've and I've been in many hunting so like sure I don't want to do it but this is not the like I'm already sleeping eight and a half hours why would I go do like no dummy of course don't do that like this is I sleep for a few hours a night anyways so I don't even sleep for five as it is so great okay and we're going to get up and those first few nights that week are going going to be brutal and you may lay there for your hour like you normally do and so you may get four and a half hours you might get four you might get three and a half hours and you're going to get up well what will eventually happen is you will start to fall asleep quickly and you will fill in after three four five days you'll fill in those five hours with a perfect sleep sleep architecture because your physiology will realize we do not have any options there's no room to get up and pee it's like down out because it knows five is coming it will know when function yes yes sir it's forcing it to happen right and then every week you add 15 minutes back so next week you get into bed at 11:45 you know what will happen you'll fall asleep immediately oh we got 15 minutes early no you'll still but the that's what the body's GNA think the body's gonna think oh wow we've got we've got an additional little bit we better take advantage of it hell yeah it's gonna go we're so damn tired get in like immediately right doesn't always work but it's it's honestly quite effective and then you add 15 minutes back and then you keep back filling until you get to your seven or seven and a half or wherever your you know 9 and a half wherever your target number is so you can keep running on that for a very long time until is needed and it is brutal you can just do the math there that's going to be five six weeks and you can't nap throughout the day like you can't that's a bad thing and so um making sure one option sleep restrict training but the point I'm bringing up there is that really highlights how patterning matters to physiology and so going through a 90-minute routine like your friend is nice in the sense that it does set up a nice productive positive pattern but you don't want to put yourself in a position where you've optimized so much that you've lost all resilience and so if you don't have that you can no longer fall asleep for hours and hours and hours because things there so well I typically will Coach it's the same with counting calories right like what that's an Abrupt change I will categorize people nutritionally as either cooks or Bakers okay I'm going to tie this back there in a second what I mean by that is do you know the difference between cooking and baking one makes really good Donuts good answer yes which one would make the really good Donuts bake obviously you don't cck a donnut do you well you don't no something's gone wrong okay it's detail and precision for most part right if you're baking it's not unless you're a really highle Chef it's not by feel right it is a quarter of a teaspoon an eighth of a tablespoon do you say tablespoon or teaspoon ah [ __ ] it doesn't matter just throw one of them in there like your Donut's going to be terrible it's not going to come up right baking is high Precision in specific order at specific measurements cooking is the opposite cooking is what probably I don't know you very well but probably what you and I do open the refrigerator find some meat thing put it in a pan with some oil had some sort of vegetable or starch or something else and then hit it with some hot sauce and cheese and plate that [ __ ] and we're out of here right like that's cooking to me and you right it's gonna be delicious everyone wins we're happy right now if you are a baker and I give you cooking like instructions or coaching you're going to have huge anxiety right if I'm like all right what do I want to do to get bed I make sure down regulated just get cool and hot and cool no no no no when should I go to bed when should I brush my teeth what type of light what's the wavelength like you want all the protocol protocol okay if I don't give you that it's going to give you anxiety going to make your sleep worse if I don't give you that level of nutrition detail if I go oh have some almonds how many almonds like there's an actual example that I that happened nothing mind like you it was like a panic text it was like Doc do doc how many you didn't say how many almonds you didn't say how many you said like a a small handful whatever what's a small handful and I was like uh and she was like was that eight I was like yeah it was eight how many did you have she's like I had eight I'm like oh thank God it wasn't six she's like no no it was eight I was like I literally this like an an actual story many years ago right I'm like yeah okay she was a baker like she needed to know exactly other athletes are the opposite if you're a cook and I give you that level of detail I need you to weigh and measure every single thing I need you to have this exact routine by this this it's stifling it's overwhelming it's like oh my God it's too much control I don't have much Freedom there I feel like I can't do all that stuff right and so we want to match people's General uh personality trait with the type of information and the style so some of our people are getting really rough Concepts maybe one thing to pay attention to with their sleep stuff with their nutrition and other folks are getting very specific timed protocols based on if I feel like that timed protocol is going to send you into a world of negative I take the details away if I feel like the loose structure that gives you too much freedom and you make bad choices I take your freedom away right so uh Bri AR is a great example of that like I have to take his freedom away I have to take everything away he has to feel like he's in prison again he's just like dude I have to have a like those are his words not mine just like bro like it has to be I can't have any I I want because he doesn't want to make choices he doesn't lack self-discipline at all he will follow exactly what I say endlessly but he's like I don't want to make any choices throughout the day with this stuff I want to train and only think about fighting great okay um other athletes I coach like NBA players I don't have a single NBA player who wants to be coached like that not one like they will be like the hell like I'd get middle fingers and it fired right like it's just like it's got to be Concepts and one or two things to pay attention to per month and that's it right um I can name other guys NFL guys some are the opposite some are you know whatever okay you get the point so with sleep we want to think of the same thing right and what I brought up calories is okay I think it's important regardless whether you're a cook or a baker for your sleep for your training for your mental health work for your breath work for your nutrition you should start by going through a phase as a baker you need to weigh and measure all your food for 30 days at least once we need to try very specific sleep routine we need to I need exact repetitions and video film of your lifting how much did you get what I need all of it now I don't have to do it for forever but you really never know what's working what's not working I don't know if you really are calibrated do you really know what a spoonful of peanut butter was right that's the that's the common example up there um same thing we got to know how did your sleep feel I feel good no no no I I need more detail I need to know exactly what's going on on everything and then from there once we've got calibrated now we can back off if you want I know High people who still weigh and measure their food 20 years and they're not even competing anymore it's like okay great some people give me 30 days or 14 days what's it going to take let me get real data let you get real understanding and now we can back off and go by feel more but you can't just start by going by feel dude I talk about this all the time I I it's such a uh I feel like we're best friends we are now we are now as long as as long as Mike is Rell can come along as well I'm sure that that'll be fine no that's not negotiable he's out it's me or him there now right now Co it's you it's you sorry you're not Jewish are you no my kids are right oh God they they they're allowed once every other time I need to get rid of my you know what that's fair I'll do that too that's a deal uh I say that everybody should go through an obsessive period of uh P of productivity um time tracking time blocking pomodora technique because it is impossible for you to play with the rules of the game if you you haven't first learned the rules of the game like what the [ __ ] are you doing here trying to be free flowing with your pick your [ __ ] discipline of choice you didn't you don't what are you free flowing with that's just not that's just not knowing how to play you don't know the rules you don't know the physics of the system so yeah I I think focus on precision and then for some people they stay in Precision maybe the people that need a little bit more control and then other people that are a little bit more creative artisti right brainy type person maybe they they sort of they play with it a little bit uh taking it back to the enhancements for sleep I love that idea I love the idea about uh recreating the environment as best you can when you're on the road that's definitely something that I'm going to consider uh one question on that and then let's get into some stuff that you can do at home uh earplugs I've become a huge fan of earplugs since moving to America main reason being that it just seems to be a really loud country even like the wildlife is loud the birds are at least three times louder than those of the UK everything's bigger in Texas including the volume of the [ __ ] Wildlife um earplugs versus white noise have you got any concerns around earplugs obviously my thinking being that you can replicate the environment pretty precisely in that it's silence yes uh this is personal preference so I don't I'm not aware we actually have a paper in review right now on sleep environment and I don't know if any data specifically indicating one is better than the other the only knocks against white noise is often times it's too loud as I mentioned earlier 35 DB is the limit and you actually see sleep problems when you get above 35 so don't turn your sleep not noise machine up too loud uh in addition to that there's a whole host of papers coming out on a new technology called pink noise and that seems to be much more effective I don't know of any pink noise machines are available commercially yet but you want to keep your eye on that as a as a plausibly better solution than white noise we have some folks that use earplugs um one of my business partners Dan Garner uses them every night at home nonetheless I will use them a lot hunting and in other activities camping because you're sleeping next to somebody who snores things like that um but I don't use them ever at home so I have no fundamental issue with them as long as they're not causing any pain you know things like that there's so many different companies making good earplugs at this days that's yeah there's some uh there's a pair a pair that I got I I tried 10 pairs from Amazon uh and settled on uh ones that are specifically for sleep and they've got little rubber fins on them and they're [ __ ] brilliant and they can just go they there's a pair everywhere in the bag that I try to take on planes in my toiletries bag in my house in my bedside dra everywhere and yeah if push comes to shove and the neighbors next door are having a party or some some something else happens it's just boom everything's I honestly don't use them at home because I have two little kids security yeah I understand I'm I'm relishing in my time where I can be totally like just totally disregard personal safety because it's only me that is the the potential culprit as soon as the kids come along yeah it's it's that was jealousy out of my mouth in case you didn't hear that that was jealousy what it is all right let's get back into advanced or moderate like purple belt techniques for Sleep enhancement in the home okay great so past all the top level stuff quiet dark be consistent with your timing is another one try to go to bed and wake up around the same time every day plus or minus 30 minutes is what we say realistically 45 minutes is is where you at specifically try to keep your wakeup time really consistent that's almost always easier sometimes it's hard to fall asleep when you're not ready to go to sleep but it's always easy to wake up at the same time because you can you can engineer that so start there now all that stuff out of the way other things you want to think about are extending sleep throughout the day so this could come in one of a couple of forms a nap there's a lot of research benefits on refreshment cognitive function Reaction Time physical Force production endurance sport performance all are enhanced with um uh napping during the day 20 20 to 90 minutes is the typical one and you almost always want to be done with your naps before 4 p.m. just a rough guideline depending on kind of when you train like having a coffee too late in the day bingo so what happens is throughout the day you build up sleep pressure and if that pressure is released too late in the night you don't have enough time to build it back up and this is why we're going to struggle and fall asleep so uh I don't nap ever I can't stand napping it doesn't work for me at all I don't like it and so I won't ever choose that option if I need extended duration I'm either going to bed earlier that's my preference um my wife Natasha prefer to sleep in a little bit later I cannot stand sleeping in I cannot stand it at all I'd rather go to bed at 6 p.m like like I'm not sleeping and it's never going to happen I will never nap either what I can do though is this is when a uh breath work a down regulation session is highly effective so if you can't nap don't want to nap um actually I just dealt with this with um work with a lot of people who run venture capital and run things like that and they're like yo we're in Manhattan office like I am not I'm I'm not [ __ ] taking a 20 minute nap like on Wall Street like no I'm like okay cool can we do stuff that looks like you're at your desk so this is if you're watching you're going to see me do this right now right you can simply be at your desk your eyes can be closed or open and you can close your mouth and you can do very structured very slow breathing right this could look like medit this could be not meditation it could be nsdr or not nsdr is super easy to do Progressive relaxation techniques so if I'm sitting at my desk my eyes are open my mouth is closed and I'm progressively squeezing the tip of my toes and relaxing it I could have earphones in going through an actual script I'm going to walk it from my toes to my ankles to my knees all the way up and down my head and back down no one even knows you're not working those things are not the same as sleep but they are somewhat equivalent you can get sleep like responses physiologically from stuff like that and it can be 7 minutes long 20 is better but I'll take what's your favorite what's your favorite um nsdr or Rejuvenation practices is there a YouTube video that you keep coming back to is there an app that you like to follow um so we use yeah that's a great question we use a handful of different ones so we will use Andrew's got a few scripts out now uh that that we'll use specifically where he's doing nsdr Andrew hberman those um I will use Sam Harris has an app called waking up we use that a lot a ton of our people will do that and you can just go through any number of things there there's another organization a company I've been a part of since the very beginning called xpt xpt has an app that was founded by Brian McKenzie and lar Hamilton and gab Gabby ree they have a ton of protocols some of the protocols are very yoga e sort of you know that feel and some of them are from actual Navy SEALS or people deep in the military so depending on which type of just voice or Cadence or whatever makes you feel more than the thing and so I will pull that thing out pretty consistently and they have a bunch of them they have four minute ones they have 45 minute long ones wow those ones are really common I personally don't use any of those very often I will always do my own thing I'm always going to lay down for that for the most part eyes are going to be closed and I'm just going to to do basic breath stuff right so like that's for me that is very much as simple as just regulating in and back out and I try it's it's kind of my version of Transcendental Meditation I'm not actually focusing on my breath per se but all I'm paying attention to is breathing and I don't care what the Cadence is I don't actually count because I don't want to be actively engaged in that I'm just worrying about chilling and chilling and any thought that comes in my head I push out I just want to be neutral I don't want anything going on so it's kind of like the opposite of focusing on breath it's the the focus on nothing if my mind drifts it drifts it's fine but then we just come right back to this is your this is your Zen time if I'm really not able to do that which is very often I'm going to do that outside so what I'm that means is I'm going to walk and I'm not going to have headphones in I'm not going to listen to podcasts I'm not going to listen to music my mouth is going to be closed I'll probably taking the dogs and we're going to walk I don't know where I'm going or how long I'm doing and I'm doing the same thing mouth is closed breing through my nose and I am very much intentionally not working that that little bit of Rouser reduction is insanely powerful for me personally I can't speak to anybody else but for me given the fact that I have I don't think I have any more work than anybody else has to do but I just have it in so many different areas I like oftentimes feel like I just can't ever get out of it and so I just need some time where I can just be like you're not doing anything you're not doing research you're not doing coaching you're not worrying about your companies nothing right now and that can be seven minutes six minutes can be one lap around the block but that is given that you're you're also trying to get sleep you're trying to get your step count in throughout the day you're stacking that on top of it you're getting a little bit of sunlight you're locomoting you're moving your eyes from left to right you're um ocul focus is being changed as well yeah yeah yeah yeah passive gaze whatever it's called um all of that stuff it's like being all changing totally yep so like neurologically I don't even count that to my step down stuff I'm simply doing it as a mental reset and and try like I'll notice too when I'm my my Rory rate starts getting pretty high when I'm working it's like what are you doing running a marathon or or writing a paper like What's happen what is it email apnea that people get for sure right like mouth drops chins open like hunch forward and you're just going nuts and so then in turn I'll try to just go boom go out there you've mentioned a couple of times I I had it in my head I'm remember I definitely didn't make it up I definitely heard it from someone that sleep banking basically wasn't a thing has this changed was there a camp of people that was saying that sleep banking wasn't a thing have I totally [ __ ] hallucinated this I'm actually really glad you brought this up because man I have been taught by so many people on the internet how wrong I am about this one this is crazy so I'm glad that I can teach you my learnings of how internet people can educate a scientist on science so um great this is a bunch of Knuckleheads who I don't think have the ability to listen and comprehend what Matthew Walker says so it's actually very straightforward and there is no argument in change here it's people that I'm I'm sorry for being a bit sardonic there but this one is holy cleto I'll give you the backstory so um many years ago when when Matthew came out with this book it was great like one of the things he talked about is sleep debt and you can't repay sleep debt and I remember God seven or eight years ago I was speaking um I think for the SE Sounders and Steven lley was up there Steven's at a Harvard Steven works for my company now but this was years ago though uh he's the one that build up built all the uh circadian rhythm stuff for the International Space Station the light and all that stuff Excell scientist and I talk a little him about this and he was like well yeah no one has a time machine so yes if you sleep for five hours tonight you can no ever ever ever go back and regain those three hours yes yes yes no one's arguing that point at all there's a basic physics problem of course that's exactly what Matthew was saying what what he was trying to tell you is just because you sleep for 5 hours a night throughout the week and then you sleep 20 hours a a day on Saturday and your total amount of hours are the same that's not that's not equivalent and he's 100% correct again I don't know any scientist in this area who would make a cogent argument that that's incorrect we all agree on this point he he he I think he was on I think it was his episode with Joe that this sort of all started and probably his many other but he's like you can't repay sleep debt you can't repay sleep debt and that's what he meant and he's 100% correct however as I mentioned uh there are now know probably over 50 studies on sleep extension and sleep banking if you go to any professional sleep Society uh scientific conference and Clinic like you're going to see these things very routinely come up this is very very well accepted in the field that you can sleep longer think about it this way imagine you slept for five hours last night I slept for less than that I guarantee you I slept for i' slept for five hours in the the loudest [ __ ] Campsite in all of Montana yes I can't stand that you go to Montana and you're thinking like Big Sky country how the [ __ ] are you around other people oh this was this was Wildlife this wasn't this is the fact that the sun rises at oh it starts to get lighted about 4:00 a.m. and it's your BD Birds wielding megaphones that uh I was uh come I was in the Tetons last year hunting elk and the first night before we went to bed one of the guys out there was like hey just so you know uh we'll have some visitors tonight I was like oh okay and could have been 2 three in the morning and just bang bang bang on the tents and there was a moose that was coming through Camp every night just smashing just wrecking everyone godamn it is fine uh so I have a I have a friend uh who's been on the show a lot the guy called Yousef he has you you will may know the name for this medical uh issue if he is woken suddenly during the night he makes a Yelp makes a loud yelping noise um and it's it's quite common apparently he's the perfect avatar for the person who deals with this it's a a male uh in his sort of around about 30 in his early 30s um no previous history of psychiatric disorders and um so this has happened a number of times it's happened when he went to go and see George in Dubai and he heard George George's first thought when he heard this Yelp was I hope that that girl is okay that was his first first instinct we went to a bachelor party in uh the UK a couple of years ago classic British bachelor party where we're sharing twin rooms of single beds so I'm like right okay whatever like you know I'm I'm in it I'm we're doing it uh and we've been out for dinner and we've had a couple of beers and we went go-kart whatever the classic sort of stago thing is and uh it's 3: in the morning I roll over and rip one of the biggest farts that I've ever ripped that wakes him up so what you hear is from him in bed next to me which [ __ ] killed me uh but yeah uh the number of different sleep maladies that you can have from mooses to birds wielding megaphones to a friend that makes a shrieking noise when he's woken suddenly uh there's lots of ways he can be disrupted yeah yeah that that's that's great uh thankfully the Moose never banged on my that trip but no I get it um what was our Point what were we talking about uh you would saying that you'd had you'd had limited sleep last night and you were talking about sleep banking that's what it was okay great so you you you and I slept for five hours last night just because we didn't get our our eight if that's the number does not mean we are now going to be in sleep that the rest of our lives right so like tell me how that would work like okay if you ever miss a minute of sleep you're therefore going to add that on so by the time you're what four years old you're now in 75,000 hours of sleep like like how does this work of course it gets reset right so there's yes if you sleep for five hours tonight and you sleep for more hours tomorrow night you'll feel better like that's yes so again I don't I don't think it's really difficult to comprehend both of those two things I think logically logically it kind of makes sense when you think about I always think about this to do with money that if I buy that sandwich for five bucks I will never get that five bucks back ever and if I eat that sandwich I will never not be able to have not consumed those calories those calories are in me for the rest of time but I think when you start to it's like a deterministic view of uh health or finances or sleep when you start to think like that it it might be right it might be truthful but functionally it's false that the way that it actually shows up to you is is is kind of pointless yeah I feel like it's people who H perhaps need to sit at a campfire have a glass of whiskey and go wait a minute does that make sense like let's just slow down for a second does that make sense that that debt is just going to accumulate every minute the rest of your life and you can't do it and which is certainly not what Matthew was was saying happen so the Sleep de thing is that it is yes can't go back in time two yes you can't just sleep terrible and sleep more and those will be equivalent so four hours one night 12 the next and all of a sudden you're back to even that's not how it works either but it's also not this permanent debt you carry the rest of your life and you'll never recover from so the idea then with sleep Banking and sleep extension is two things so so banking the way I Define it is getting ahead right so sleeping extra time prior to known sleep debt extension is just simply going adding more time throughout the day so this is these are the studies that have taken people and said you're already sleeping again eight hours can we get you to n9ine and a half for 10 and we add somewhere between 45 minutes to 90 minutes per night the research there as little as 3 days up to seven or eight weeks I think the Cherry ma who did this classic study referring to now out of Stanford with basketball players this was NB division one basketball players and she got them to sleep 90 extra minutes per night for five to seven weeks so like it it can be done some of the athletes chose to sleep in some chose to go to bed earlier some chose to add naps but you extended sleep and most of the research will do that they'll say however you want try to add you know up to 90 minutes some added 10 minutes some added two hours right so not everyone 's going to get 90 extra minutes but you're going to get some on there now those tend to be optimization strategies it is very hard to sleep 10 hours a night without a sleep disorder for forever right and it's so certainly many could argue it's not necessary it's definitely not necessary to do that most of the research on high performing high energy expenditure athletes will indicate 9 plus hours per night is generally the what go after um there is not a perfect correlation between caloric expenditure and sleep needs but there is some relationship Jeffrey dermer's done a ton of stuff in this he was the Sleep scientist for the Atlanta Falcons and um Team USA and things like that and and he's got a good data on this and again it's not a perfect relationship between caloric expenditure but there is a relationship people that are in sports or activity levels that burn way more calories will perform better when they generally cross 9 plus hours of sleep if you're fairly sedentary but you work out pretty hard you don't probably need nine hours right we're thinking about folks that are training twice a day or running 100 miles per week some other activities with large large um amounts of clor manager so that is extending sleep the banking one as I mentioned um I know again of at least 30 studies or more on this where you uh lead prior to training camp prior to preseason trainings prior to especially in the military tons and tons of work in the military where we make sure that we are getting a maximum amount of sleep for the week to month prior to known sleep deprivation and you see those problems that happen when the sleep deprivation comes on those are attenuated so I just don't I don't know how much more research one needs to say like that's a real thing you're shooting accuracy in terms of firearm shooting neurological control um mental cognition decision- making m recall it just holds on better when you go through those known periods of sleep deprivation so we have a lot of athletes and a lot of sleep coaches and sleep scientists will have their athletes in the preseason try to bang right you get as much sleep as you can so that at least we're not going into our season and sleep de yeah that's the biggest way to think about it dude so interesting I did a tour last year and I wish that I'd been red pilled on sleep banking beforehand because I was wrecked for a a a full month is there anything else that we haven't talked about from a purple belt sleep enhancement perspective that are other big movers yeah nutrition is a really big one okay there's a lot of focus and conversation on supplementation for sleep and that's fine but nutrition should be paid attention to far before that so the timing and type will have a huge determine upon the quality of your sleep and you can run a lot of self testing on this right so here's what I mean the classic thing we'll say is you generally don't want to have a large meal in the two to three hours prior to going to sleep that's mostly true but it's also not always true and so you can test that let some people will respond eating before bed much better generally never going to be a big meal right that that's going to lead to digestive issues but um blood sugar regulation is a really big key to grogginess the Sleep inertia so what you feel that next morning when you wake up and you're like man I'm like I feel like a truck hit me that kind of thing a large portion of that is determined by blood glucose and so if you're waking up with very low blood glucose um then hey like nutrition is our play here almost surely unless we got a sleep disorder some kind so you want to Tinker with that there's lots of different things I mean go all the way back I think I'm pretty sure I don't can't guarantee it but I'm pretty sure Tim Ferris wrote about this in 4-Hour Body right 15 years ago or whatever right having an apple before bed having some sort of slow relasing glycemic index carbohydrate can really stabilized blos and he nailed it he was he was dead on man like those things can be really really helpful uh last thing I'll say about this is carbohydrates so one way to really help people sleep at night is a nice amount of carbohydrate in their last feeding there's a lot of Dogma over the years about don't have carbs at night because of fat and like all this other stupid [ __ ] uh and hopefully the door is closed on that because we have thank you Mike Ormsby and all the folks who' have done all the research in that it's like not happening at all as long as calories and all that is equated for but having a a nice bolus of carbohydrate uh prior to bed is is really really helpful we recently uh not recently actually it's been a while now but we had a client a couple years ago who was struggling uh with a handful of things sleep sleep sleep was falling asleep fine shooting awake at 2:3 in the morning right just like boom could this was happening and the guy's pretty D has a lot of resources in the space couldn't get to figure it out like all right so we start taking a look we pull up his blood work clear clear thing happens here we look at insulin insulin's low okay interesting sex hormone binding globulins way up there is a known inverse relationship between those two insulin's low shbg is going to go up because sex hormone binding globulin is up testosterone's down okay so free testosterone is down all right so it's another classic like in mid-50s kind of guy or early 50s um high runner very successful dude financially and it's like okay maybe it's time for me to do testosterone fine if you want to choose that but I know your answer I know why you're shooting a wick that what's going on okay we start looking at melatonin and serotonin we start looking at B vitamin status we see all these things and we see classic sign of insufficient carbohydrate let me guess and I can tell him you're probably trying to keep it under 50 grams of carbs per day yep 100% pretty active Dude too not insane but pretty active I'm like great what you need is another 75 grams of carbohydrate at dinner like what all we did was that insulin went back up sex hormone Bing globin went back down testosterone went right back up slept completely through the night instantaneously basically always and guess what happens to serotonin melatonin they go right back in normal cortisol curve is perfect waking up grinus out of the way W problem solved by just what would you what would you say to people who um maybe like the idea of a little bit of carbs before they go to bed or or in that window um what are some of your favorite sources that people can eat for for digestion so they're not in too much discomfort when they get horizontal and um timing before bed yep timing Tinker with it if if you need three hours three hours fine if two hours is fine if an hour is fine whatever it is start at 3 and work your way back if you have to now we end up dealing with a lot of people who 3 hours is not an option because they're training twice a day or again they're playing a game at night and then it's like okay great game got over at 10:30 and now you want me to have dinner when and then go to bed when so then I'll have dinner at 11:30 and I guess I'll stay up till 2:30 just because my three it's not gonna happen right so we don't always have that but Tinker with start at three work your way back if you'd like you can also then try a very small snack right before bed and byy right before bed that could be 45 minutes before bed right whatever it is to you um I will eat pretty much like right before bed a lot and I'm just fine out of it but not everyone necessarily will so timing wise three hours is a fine starting Place adjust as needed and see what works for you in terms of amount almost always if you're having some sort of starch rice potato whatever sits well with you quinoa if beans sit well with you great like what what are the natural more starchies um fruit is fine there's a actually there's a lot of research on kiwis kiwis are very effective for helping people fall asleep so um that's another great way to to fruit to try this could be your before bed snack kiwi could be a part of your dinner you could try it that way so uh don't wor don't be scared about fruits uh with dinner fruits in the evenings we will do that in fact if we're trying to manage carbohydrates oftentimes we'll restrict them during the day or in the morning and put more at night better recovery better sleep feeling better and you'll feel just as fine the next day so those would be this the types as well as the timing that I would starve people with [ __ ] yeah Andy Galpin ladies and gentlemen dude I'm a I've been oh yeah absolute headshot today I love it I had 10 things I wanted to talk about and we spoke about V2 Max and sleep for two and a bit hours and I couldn't be happier uh dude you're great you're really really fantastic I can see why uh Rob and uh Andrew pushed you to get cracking because I think it's a a a much needed rebalancing to um some of the sort of in the weeds uh deep stuff and I I think I think you're [ __ ] great so where can people go they want to keep up to date with all of your things they want to check out your stuff where should they head on the internet yeah uh obviously the podcast is the best place perform with Dr Annie is the name of that and like I said only 10 episodes there so that's season one you'll be able to get through it all and then maybe if those guys can talking back into season two next year we'll come back for another round but that is up and live on all your podcast places and YouTube as well and then on Twitter and Instagram of Dr Andy Galpin are the the easiest place to find uh access to that um I pretty much use those for science communication exclusively so that's where we'll put out all of our stuff and you can go from there to find all the links to Absolute rest and our blood work company vitality and our coaching programs are rapid and all those things are pretty easy to find so so we got it all hell yeah dude what a good first little foray into becoming best friends yeah man appreciate it we're going to get uh we'll connect afterwards here we'll make sure that sleep is getting truly dialed into to you because I'm not fully convinced you're there okay all right all right dude thank you so much for day all right man good to connect if you enjoyed that episode you will love a selection of the best clips from the podcast over the last couple of months and it's available right here go on give him a watch