The Surprising New Science Of Recovery To Build More Muscle - Dr Mike Israetel

Last time that we spoke, we spoke about fat loss. Time before that, we spoke about muscle building. And today, I want to talk about recovery, which I guess is the other side of all of that. We've talked about stimulus. We've talked about what's sort of going out in terms of an energy flow. Uh now talking about how we can get some of that back. So, how do you come to think about recovery going on? What's going on under the hood of recovery? Yes. So it's best to understand recovery by analogy to that of maintenance of a machine. But it's not an analogy. I would call it a homology. It's actually the same thing. Humans are machines. Period. There's no analogy there. Humans are just machines that are designed by evolution instead of willful conscious agents as far as we can tell. And human machinery is real deep structurally because it goes all the way down to the nanotech level. We don't actually have quite machines that good yet. The iPhone comes pretty close with its little teeny microchips. But the human machine is in the context of sport or getting jacked or getting lean operates under all the same rules that machines do. And as machines do high output performance, they take on wear and tear. And there are various things that you do to machines after the factory closes at night that recover them in a very similar way that you would use with humans that do all sorts of things during the day, including athletic performance, trying to lift to get jacked, so on and so forth. So the normal state, the uninterrupted state of a high performing athlete or any really any human that wants to get jackaline etc. is sort of everything is in one piece and everything is in its right place. So there is a lot of neurotransmitter built up in the vesicles in the neurons and not floating around somewhere degraded in a junction. The vesicles aren't bereft of neurotransmitter empty or refill. It's a vesicle. So, it's this little kind of ball of uh uh basically a membrane inside of it. It's like a little bubble. It has neurotransmitters. So, at the end of your neurons, when you want the neuron to talk to something else, the vesicles fuse with the membrane of the neuron. That internal becomes externally dump the neurotransmitter and that does whatever it does. Now that combined with muscles and tendons that are completely intact, unfraid, combined with a hormonal situation which has a high degree of testosterone, relatively low degree of stress hormones like cortisol. A situation in which the nervous system of the person is uh not um depleted in such a way that makes it very sympathetic dominant which is fight or flight. This nervous system is in parasympathetic dominance, which means it is in relaxation mode. Your glycogen in your muscles, the stored sugars that make your muscles do what they do, in athletic terms, are those stores are full. And so everything's kind of really good. And then we have to talk about what happens when you run that machine and run it close to its limits. Yeah. Fatigue. Fatigue. What is fatigue? Yes. So fatigue is simply the taking of that everything in its right place very well ready machine and running it through the paces and those paces will end up altering that machine in some predictable ways. One of the ways that the machine is altered is it takes literal micro damage. Like anytime you contract your muscles very hard against resistance, parts of the muscle cell literally tear and at some point they tear more and more and more and you're going to have to heal that, right? It's not a tenable situation. If you had someone looking at a machine that lifts cars up and down at a factory and saying, you know, like the mechanic and say, "We got a little fracturing here." It's not a world in which you're like, "Ah, who cares? My shift ends in an hour." Maybe you would say that, but uh it's a concern. And it's a thing that has to be remediated. Basically, the entropy of the system has increased. And another thing is your reserves of various things, neurotransmitters that are in the right place are no longer in the right place. Some of them exceeding amount of them might have been dumped into the neuromuscular junction or other parts of the nervous system and broken down. And now you don't have a lot of neurotransmitter vesicles ready to get your neurons to fire like they should be firing. When your muscles contract, they not only incur micro tears, but various things like calcium ions float from one structure to another where they're supposed to go, but they don't really get absorbed 100% right away. You actually run down on your creatine phosphate stores. Your glycogen depletes, and from a hormonal level, your cortisol stress hormone tends to start going up and your testosterone tends to start going down. your sympathetic fight orflight part of your nervous system starts to become more active. Well, because like you know it's fight or flight. Imagine like having to run for your life from zombies that chase you for like 2 hours. You had better hope you're still in fight or flight towards the end of 2 hours. You don't want to be relaxed. You want to be like awake, right? And so all of those things tilting your body into that direction basically throw off the hormonal axes and they deplete various things that need to be repleted, nutrients that need to be sort of reintegrated back in and damage needs to be healed. So that's under the hood of what recovery and fatigue dynamics actually are. That's what's happening at a physiological level. And uh the good news is the vectors that we have to affect those from our own lived experience of like what do I do about that? I don't have a little scalpel to get in to fix my cells. There's just a few of them that work really well and most others so far don't work that well. So it sounds complicated like holy crap I got to work neurons and stuff like that. uh the body heals and fixes itself tremendously well, but it needs a few key ingredients and we need to not get distracted with other key ingredients which we'll get to I'm sure later in the discussion. What when it comes to thinking about uh how stimulus creates fatigue or creates stress or creates this kind of damage, what are the biggest contributing factors to where that fatigue or where that stress comes from? If you were to make a big pie of all of the things that the normal person that probably listens to this podcast does in a day. Yeah. So, you have the situation where you have recovery, which is the reinstatement of that baseline normal state that's ready to perform. And then you have fatigue, which is the disruption of that state. But where is that disruption coming from? The obvious answer is training, physical exertion. But it's not the only answer. And this is a real big trip. This is a huge trip to me when I was taught this in school and then I was like, "Oh, holy crap." The implications of it are very widespread. So, the other one, there's at least two more that are of note. First, physical training, which people understand. You don't have to talk to someone on the street who doesn't know anything about physiology long to be like, when people work out really hard, do you get tired? They're like, "Is there like a hidden cam somewhere? Is this a joke?" Of course they do. But the other one is all daily physical activity. So a lot of times you'll have athletes on two ends of spectra. Obviously it's normally distributed. Most athletes are somewhere in the middle. You'll have athletes that you can barely drag them to practice and you have to have like a cattle prod to make them do work during practice, but like they're studs. They do their [ __ ] and then afterwards they off and they go into some kind of room that has like a couch, some food delivery service that arrives every several hours and a PlayStation and like a bong and they just just repeat repeat repeat fall asleep. And the bad news is that you got to like knock on their door at 6:00 in the morning to get them to football practice. The good news is that they'll never have a problem with recovery. This is all they do, right? But it turns out that daily physical activity contributes substantially to fatigue. And if it doesn't contribute to fatigue, as in raising it, it prevents the fatigue from otherwise having been lowered much further by the other things you do in the day that recover you. Eat food, sleep, so on and so forth. We'll get to those details in a bit. So physical activity has to be integrated, which is why uh one of my mentors, probably my biggest mentor in sport science, Dr. Stone, Dr. Mike Stone, who I got my PhD from, you'd see weightlifters and throwers that he was coaching around like anywhere around the lab, around the gym. If there was a chair, he'd pull it up and ask them to sit down. And whatever doc said, you kind of did cuz he's really scary. Um, don't stand around. And Arnold had a version of this where it's like, if you're running, walk. If you're walking, sit down. If you're sitting, lie down. Because physical activity absolutely takes a toll. And a lot of athletes on that other end of the spectrum, they're at practice at 5:45 in the morning when it starts at 6:00, but they're busy bees. They're really accomplished at school oftent times. They're always doing a bunch of stuff. They hike on the weekends, you know, like, not to put too fine a point on it, white people type [ __ ] And I always get [ __ ] for like, well, you make fun of whites, man. Some kind of alt-right person will put that in the comments, but like white people seem to take a joke just fine. That's really the only reason. And also I'm sort of white so I kind of have the most punching sideways. Now my jokes at the expense of the Jewish peoples have a stack so deep I can't even say most of it. So people who are in that very conscientious sort of brain. They typically think of things as in their own boxes. I go and I train and I go hard. And these people go hard in training. They don't need a cattle prod. As a matter of fact, if you have one around, they'll take it and cattle prod themselves. You're like, "Geez, you're doing just fine. is take it easy. But they'll go and they'll do 18,000 steps a day. They'll go to library. They'll study. They'll walk around. They'll ride their bike. These are kind of people that ride their bike to practice and back. And that's not wrong, but you're taking draining away recovery capacity and potentially even increasing fatigue by doing that stuff. And because these people tend to think in compartments, they often times don't even connect the dots. They're like, I'm working hard at practice and I'm eating all my meals. I'm getting 8 hours of sleep, but they're on all the time physically. They're out doing stuff. You know, people that just can't sit around. To me, especially fast twitch dominated sports, weightlifting, sprinting, high jump, American football, the very best athletes at those sports on average tend to be people that prefer to chill out and will get up and do violent [ __ ] for like couple seconds here and there and then prefer to sit the hell down. They just don't accumulate fatigue the same way as people who are What would be a sport when you would say maybe sub-optimal in some ways, but the type A personality might lend you more to like an endurance racing type thing? Yeah, sports that require a lot of volume and practice because they make you so tired. You can't be that person that runs around anymore. Endurance athletes are usually pretty type A type of people, but they after 20 miles a day for four days straight, you just sit on the couch because you can't move anymore. And that's really good. That's your body's inner wisdom being like, "Sit down. I'm not even letting you have any more energy." So, we have physical training itself, training, competition, etc. that factors into fatigue. We have physical acts of all kinds throughout the day which matter. And then and it's one of the the physical acts thing is one of the reasons why coaches at the collegiate level in the United States coming up to big games or big clusters of games will give their athletes like a heart-to-he heart talk about like ladies or gentlemen like I know you're 19. I know going out is really fun. I know staying up till 3 in the morning doing god knows what is amazing but like let's just save that for a month from now cuz that's all we're doing for a month. I don't even care. Don't even don't put it on social media. It never happened. go out there and do your damnedest. But for these next three weeks, please, for the love of God, do not go to the club cuz what are you doing at the club? You're at least standing up most of the time. Often you're dancing. I'm familiar cursory with dancing. But after I lost that one big international dance competition, Chris, I could never dance again. I lost my rhythm. I believe George Michael said it best. And now I will sing the entire song. So, uh, in any case, it's a big deal. Physical activity around the clock is a big deal. That's why step tracking is a cool tool for recovery because it can tell you, am I doing enough? And also, am I doing too much? There is such a thing as too much. The third thing is the real big head [ __ ] Psychological vectors absolutely affect fatigue at the physical level because the systems in your body, specifically the nervous system, can facilitate you being active and ready and watchful and alert, fight or flight, the sympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system. And then they can also facilitate mega recovery. When the parasympathetic nervous system is at maximum dominance, you're just like blunt mode. like like that's all you you don't care anything. A bear could smash in to your room and you'd be like, "What's up, bear? You trying to hit this train wreck?" He's like, "Yo, he's talking to you." You're like, "Damn, this is sweet." So that nervous system's ability to flip you into recovery mode is critical. And if you're sitting on the couch, if you're watching TV, if you're eating great food, but you're sympathetic dominant, it's not going to recover you nearly as much. Perhaps to some extent kind of not at all. M you need to fall into that parasympathe parasympathetic good god. You need to fall into that parasympathetic dominance before recovery can really be unveiled and really go do it thing. I suppose people don't see the activation the sympathetic activation if well I did the thing. I was sat on the couch doing the rest of Yeah. But you were obsessing about that play. you were worrying about school or you were on on your phone on social media getting pissed about comments, clapping back at people and so which is all and good fun, but the psychological vectors are real big in recovery and actually impact sport performance and body composition. If you're chronically stressed, if you're chronically pissed, if you've got a girlfriend you fight with all the time, it will make you less lean and less jacked and it will make you worse at your sport than you could have been. The degree of extremity of that scenario is almost linearly correlated with how bad it is. Nobody's like, "Oh man, you know, it's good to see this athlete back on the mats for the first time in NCAA wrestling. I heard he went through a terrible divorce for the last two months. Jim, I feel like he's going to be really amazing. There's a reason nobody says that. Now, you would think approximately like, did the divorce make him mispractice? Probably not. Is he missing meals? What kind of world are we living in? Who was he married to? Like the lady that cook his own food? He probably went harder with thoughts of that [ __ ] ruined my life. Yeah. Vengeance. Vengeance. It decreases how much sleep you're getting. The psychological is a huge part of the relaxation process. affected me personally quite recently because in my attempts to be as good of an athlete in my own realm as I could be, I was also doing like two full-time jobs at RP and all this other stuff that I do. And I was like, why am I not recovering to the extent that I could be? It's like, you work 12 hours a day, idiot. I was like, well, my work is sitting at a computer in front of a video camera, but I'm on and I'm thinking and I'm active. Yes. And thus, I'm not as parasympathetic relaxation nervous system dominant as I could be. I had a great conversation yesterday with Laith Al Shaw who wrote the Oxford handbook of evolutionary emotions. So it's all emotions through an evolution. Oh that's the only lens they matter from. Uh and what one of the main takeaways that I had from that conversation was because emotions the most salient part of emotions to us is the affective state that we can feel like the phenomenological experience of being a person feeling angry or sad or joyful or in awe or jealous or is horniness an emotion? It has to be for me. It must all the time. I'm so emotional. You won't see anything. It's not big enough. Okay. Uh but what he says is look that's all well and good and that's the thing that has the most veilance because it's what you feel it's front and center of your experience but all of these different things haven't he taught me that um fear so the cascade of things that happen in your body when fear is activated. So, digestion, you're ready physically for violence. Digestion gets tuned down. Uh, sexual arousal gets tuned down. Um, it depends on who you are. You're just permanently sort of micro horny. Here, here's me when I'm not scared. Here's me when I'm scared. Uh, but another thing that was super [ __ ] like uh uh when you've got when your disgust response turns on, your basil temperature increases. Yes. ready for the uh like it warms you up. Cytoines cytoines get released into the bloodstream. So you have you're just here I am upstairs in my house looking at all of this stuff. Meanwhile in the basement, there's all of this [ __ ] going on that's cascading down from emotions. The best one that I learned, this might be something I could teach you, uh is when you're fearful of something, your ability to map and remember roots becomes increased. So your local spatialization like the gazelle where to run away from the lion. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. You just see roots open up to you in a way that you couldn't before. So when I'm at the gay club, it's the roots going to places I need to go. The fear really. The dungeon is presumably is always the glory hole. The bottom. Yeah. Like um not the bottom literally because depends on the club. The rooms could be anywhere. Power bottom. Philosophically the bottom. Power bottom. The most pathetic thing I can do with the club. Okay. There's no power in that Chris. I like to be defflowered. That's true. Okay. So, uh, so the way that I'm sort of conceptualizing at the moment is you have output physically. You have your sort of dayto-day movement, your neat, your kind of what you're doing, what you're getting up to outside of the training session. Then you have your psychological uh, strain uh, which is a real sort of below the surface little sneaker. But then you also have these things which are accumulating stress in one form or another and also what they do to the activities you do to recover as well. So it's not just that psychological stress causes you to not recover throughout the day even when you're doing recovery things. It can also limit your sleep. But people know they're like dude I was stressed last night and I only got 5 hours of sleep. It's like the thing that sneaks in under the radar is the [ __ ] gorilla behind the lines operative that was you being par sympathetically activated throughout the whole it's worse still because even if you get a nominal number of hours of sleep the sleep quality can decline substantially and that's a good thing because if you're in a fight orflight scenario let's say war or something like that or there's a killer sleep if you you should be going to sleep but it better be light sleep cuz there better be not any confusion when you wake up and you better wake up quick like boom and I'm doing stuff. Tons of micro awakenings throughout the night. Oh, all the time, right? And that's when you're stressed, you're thinking about something. What did my boss say at work? What did he mean by that? Is there any way I can use my body to get my position back? [ __ ] like that. Then it's going to hang in with you and it affects your recovery at every step of the way. And so, a big part of what recovery stuff does is it begins to wind this process down. And once it winds the process down and gets you into parasympathetic recovery mode, then you start to collect the gold coins of recovery and actually do the recovery. It's almost a two-phase process. Getting to the place where you can recover through recovery things and then the recovery things really start to affect you to actually do that meat and potatoes work of fixing your tendons and your muscles, putting glycogen back in, so on and so forth. So a lot of what you're doing with recovery modalities is simply stopping putting your foot on the accelerator. That's the number one thing you have to do. To quote my colleague uh Dr. James Hoffman who in my eyes is get one of the most preemptive preeminent practical experts on recovery in the world. We used to be asked a lot when him and I did seminars um what can I add to my recovery program? And James would say this beautiful thing that I've remembered and then summarily stolen. Don't ask what you can add. Ask what you can sub subtract. Recovery is mostly about doing less, not about doing more. Because these same type A ultra conscientious athletes, they have this whole routine, you know, the morning routine, midday routine, the whole thing. And they have everything planned out. and and it was um they are made known is made known to them that they are insufficiently recovering. It's like I got you. I'm a problem solver. I'll work harder recover I'm going to what do I add to recover more? And the answer almost always is to is to subtract because people say like can I do some cardio to recover and James was like let me rearchitect this for you. And usually they're like oh holy [ __ ] And they kind of walk home slower. They're like holy [ __ ] I really had everything backwards. Because when you want to be ultra conscientious in most of your life just cuz that's the kind of person you are. When you flip into recovery mode, you have to literally turn your conscientiousness back down to like like I don't give a [ __ ] I don't care. Watch something real stupid on TV. And you can work really hard at caring about not caring and that. Yeah. Work work hard. If you squint it really helps to relax, right? Okay. In other news, this episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. Sleep isn't just about how long you rest, but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night, which is where eight sleep comes in. All that you need to do is add the brand new Pod 4 Ultra to your mattress, just like a fitted sheet, and it will automatically cool up or warm down each side of your bed up to 20° above or below room temperature. Plus, it's got integrated sensors to track your sleep time and your sleep phases and your HRV and your snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. and their autopilot feature makes smart temperature adjustments throughout the night, enhancing your deep and REM sleep in real time. Best of all, they ship to the US, Canada, UK, Europe, and Australia. Plus, there is a 30 night sleep trial, so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29 days. And if you don't like it, they'll give you your money back. Get $350 off the Pod 4 Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to eight.com/modernwisdom and using the code modernwisdom at checkout. That's ei g htsleep.com/modernwisdomd and modernwisdom a checkout. All right. So how is recovery measured then? Is there is there such a thing? Yes, there is. Right. So you can measure recovery in a variety of different ways. You can try to estimate through muscle biopsy the degree of muscle glycogen replenishment. You can take blood tests to see what your testosterone and cortisol levels are. There are various highly invasive and some less invasive fMRI etc. ways to see what degree of preparedness or disruption your nervous system has sustained and so on and so forth. But the really cool thing about recovery as it regards sport performance and physical training, just getting jacked in the gym, being the best runner you can be, the best tennis player, the best golfer. I just assume everyone who listens to this by accident. Rich, let me get through some more rich people sports. Um, raetball, pedal. Oh, yeah. And then you got uh falconry. What the Oh, that uh ski shooting. skiing. Nope, sorry, that's for everyone. And then uh skiing, which um is either a sport you do in Colorado or a sport you do in a nightclub in New York City. Uhhuh. Both are fun and equally dangerous, I might add. Have you ever done cocaine? No. Have you not? No, I'm uh So, I don't do stimulants. Yeah. I had a but you must have done at some point in order to learn not to do so. Oh, I was on aderall for years prescribed by the doctor for my severe attention deficit disorder and it brought in a lot of positive effects and it brought in a lot of negative effects and then after a while the negatives so much outweighed the positives as my brain was maturing that I had to pull the plug on all aderall and still to this day if I get caffeinated I my personality shifts substantially. I also don't have any of the approximate needs for stimulants. I have no problem [ __ ] yapping as everyone clearly knows by now. I'm wide awake no problem in the morning. I don't need anything to get me up and going. And um I guess oh sociability. Um I made a joke on the RP strength channel about what it's like to be on cocaine and a lot of people were like that guy has done cocaine before cuz I was like you hit it up and you're ready to just meet everyone ever raw at the same time. So the thing is that's a default emotion of mine. That's just how I was feeling. Indogenous co took me out right now and be like, "Go meet that person on the corner of Austin. I'd be like, are they cool with it?" You're like, "Yeah, absolutely. They're great." Like, "Hello, my just meet a thousand people in it would be great." Um, me on Coke would just be like more of me than anyone's interested in experiencing. You ever in your own head and you're blabbing to people and they're all listening and you're like, I should just shut the up. Like, I'm tired of me. There's enough of that going on. So, no need for for cocaine anytime soon. But your boy with like, you feel me? Why do you use weed? Uh, two reasons. One, I tend to be a pretty serious thinker in my own head and I think about work and grand problems of the universe all the time. Weed makes me sufficiently stupid. It interrupts my train of thought enough. And uh a lot of the generative nonsense that comes out of the GPT and you know like the idea bubble machine in your brain, right? You've seen you've seen us slack. Yeah. Sure. Sure. That's what that is. Um that comes up with so much nonsense that I can regress to not taking it so seriously and I can relax at some kind of deeper level of like the brain's going to do. His brain's all junk at this point, which is uh interesting. Also, weed makes me see the world in a really quirky way, and it's kind of like being immersed into like a Lord of the Rings universe where I'm like, "Whoa, everything's kind of tripped out." And it's just fun. And uh so that's what I do with weed. I don't understand how people work on weed. Sometimes I'll have really good ideas. I quickly write down and later inspect and they're either nonsense or like, "Oh, [ __ ] That really was a good idea." But like when people are like, "Yeah, man. Like I work high." I'm like, "What the fuck?" Creative and blah blah. The way I go about doing weed is also a bit strange. I am absolutely uninterested ever in being a little bit high. I want to either go to the moon or be stone sober. That's it. So if you ever catch me high and a few people I got high last weekend and walked around Ann Arbor, Michigan with my wife. I was trying to show her like, "Hey, I went to undergrad here and he was all the cool stuff cuz the undergrads were back first week and I just got like Dr. Mike like eight times in a row and uh it was totally cool but also like I was high as fuck." So like people start talking to me. I'm like I am Dr. Mike. I'm on the internet for something. Uh people seem friendly, that's nice. And then at first when it first started happening to me like you know a year ago, I was like holy [ __ ] Nowadays I'm like cool. But it's also like on weed everything can be a little bit scary especially attention people. And I love that cuz normally I'm like you know uh things don't phase me much anymore in my I'm 40 years old. I've seen a lot of crazy [ __ ] So like I just don't get that like whoa. But on weed I do. So it's fun. I'm not defending marijuana as an ethical practice or something like that. I think u the vast majority of media you'll see on marijuana is intentionally sensationalistic and tries to wildly exacerbate its negatives. Um it's just the nature of media in general. And I always think of like there's like some New York Times writer that's writing the expose on THC all times while having a scotch and you're like all right cuz alcohol doesn't cause 50% of people to become violent or anything. the person talking about reparations that are needed from an iPhone that was used with slave labor out of China. Figure that one out. Um, so an interesting insight that I learned last year about weed in particular, one of the reasons that I think it is quite contentious in a way that alcohol isn't is that alcohol has very reliable effects across cohorts on how you feel. You drunk, I have a pretty good understanding of what you drunk feels like because of what I've felt like when I'm drunk. Okay. Weed is not the same. You speak to 10 people, you'll have 10 different uh it makes me horny. It makes me tired. I want to get up and do the whatever. Yeah. All of them. All those really. All of them. Um but you know, for me, I I just don't really enjoy it. And then every person that loves weed goes, "No, man. You need a sativa hybrid with hippies blah blah. You've got you've got to get the It's because Are you doing it? Are you trying it with concentrate? Are you doing it? No, you you got to do shatter." And I'm like, bro, look, I just I'm one of those people for whom I don't know, maybe I'll try it again at some point in future and see if it works for me or something. But yeah, it's not reliable across the board. The the effect it has on people. Whereas I think alcohol, even if people's behavior is very different. Some person gets angry, some person gets sad, some person gets whatever. I think the way that they feel there's only a few archetypes really. Correct. For the most part, is that whereas for weed, there's like, you know, a thousand. Sure. Sure. And I'm like, people, you know, now nowadays that I've uh largely from your help have gotten more popular. Um people, some fraction of people seem to assume that anything you do and talk about is something you espouse and recommend. And like I am absolutely I I do not espouse marijuana consumption. If it's some [ __ ] that fits in your life, the the only thing I have to say about it is take it earlier in the day so it doesn't interfere with your sleep. Most people be like, "But I use it to sleep." But then it's actually lower quality sleep which might be a fine sleeping yesterday. Exactly. Something like that. The Michael Jackson method. I'm kidding. Too soon. Oh, I was referring to his use on himself. Right. Mixed metaphors. Should I have brought up Bill Cosby? Too soon. Also too much. [ __ ] sake. I call him William. We're on first first name basis. Okay. Uh I don't advocate for people to do weed. So, I say uh just don't let it interfere with your sleep and um make sure you finish all your work and be responsible about it. I only ever do weed on times I have off I'm finished all my work. If I haven't finished my work for the day or for the week, I oh, I'm not taking any drugs because I still have to finish my work. It is a demon that will haunt me and I will have a real that open loop is [ __ ] Oh, hell no. So, as soon as I put everything away, I finish up weed. Totally cool. Enjoy. And the other thing I would say is uh notice how it's affecting you. And if it's something that turns into something that like you don't like but you still do, stop doing it. Uh there'll be a few day period if you do some serious weed where you kind of want to do it again. U I would even say it's it's like a psychological addiction. It's not physical. It's not even it's barely an addiction. It's kind of like should I do weed again? You give it a couple days. You're going to feel a little bit more clearheaded, feel right as rain. And the next time you want to do weed, you can do weed, no problem. Um I do weed like a few times a week. Uh usually almost always on the weekends. What's your delivery mechanism? Edibles exclusively. Okay. And what's your dose? Uh, so my brain adapts rapidly to weed. So if I do it for two or three days in a row, I need to up the dose to get the same effect. Cuz again, I'm only trying to get super [ __ ] up. Um, anywhere between 20 and 80 milligrams. [ __ ] me. Yeah. Yeah. But remember, you're like, "Oh my god, how can you still like handle yourself?" I can't. That's the whole point. Yeah. I mean, I can only I still know not to [ __ ] in the street, but barely. The only time I ever took more than 10 milligrams of edibles was when I was traveling in Hawaii and I went on a date with some chick and she was like super hot or lovely or whatever, but I just didn't know what was going to happen when I went to 20 milligrams from 10 and was like, "Do the date?" Yeah. Chris, you're my man. She's fun. Just you? Did she know or no? No. Oh my god. She's like, "Why are you nervous?" You're like, "Why are you in my head talking to me?" She was like, "What?" Uh the opposite happened which was uh about halfway through the meal that we were having my hearing completely stopped. My hearing just stopped working and I was like she was there. And that's when I realized listening to the woman on a date doesn't matter cuz it went great. It was one and the same. Yeah. Exactly. It was just like it always is. Uh so and I was like [ __ ] like I can't hear. And I couldn't hold on to any thoughts obviously. Oh yeah. And then I heard uh Queens We Are the Champions playing dope. That'll play in your head. And I thought full on schizophrenia. That's interesting. Queens, we are the champions is playing. And then she finished speaking and I think I said something that presumably which you don't remember what you said because as soon as it left your mouth you had no idea. That's scary. Then queens we are the champions played again. And for the next two hours all I could hear was queens we are the champions. I couldn't hear anything else. So I exited the date, took myself into bed and laid and listened to Queens We Are the Champions for another hour and a half. And uh was it pleasant? Was it listening? Kind of I guess. But also kind of a bit like what the [ __ ] is going on? Is were you attributing an anxiety emotion to that process of being so Okay, I got you a little That's like my superpower is uh I'll be completely [ __ ] up and useless to the world, but I don't give a [ __ ] Totally chill because like all of my work has been done. I can flip off having to be Dr. Mike and now I'm just like Mike, I guess. Potato. I mean, if you ever talk to me and you catch me high, almost certainly you'll be like, "His eyes just look more red. He's really kind of the same, but it's not the same on the inside." Very good. Okay. So going back to how you measure recovery, fMRI can do some invasive, can do all that stuff. But there's one variable that's profoundly easy to measure that integrates all of those for you automatically. It's like a pyramid and at the very top you measure and that's performance. So, if you make a claim, I'm underreovered and let's say you're a high you're a high jumper, all we got to do is warm you up and get you to do three jumps with some measurement device at your best effort. If we do that regularly, two times a week on average through your career, we know your baseline real damn well and we can do statistical process control that shows us when are you like underdoing it. if you're consistently unable to exhibit your highest performance and you've been through a higher volume of training recently because like or or psychological stress cuz sometimes you just have a off day that totally happens. But if you're can attribute to something lots of incoming fatigue and your performance is low, especially if we can repeat that over several sessions or several days, we know that your fatigue is too high with high degree of certainty and you are underreovered. However, if you feel like [ __ ] if you're sore, if you're anything else, you're like, "Dude, I'm not going to be able to do it today." You warm up and you hit a PR, it doesn't matter what the [ __ ] is going on under the hood. The grand integrator says you're good and it's always right. Now, under the hood, you might not be completely everything in line, but you're at a such a high level of performance, your total system capability is no lower than typically is. And so this ability to have this grand integrator and this one variable that tells us are we underreovered or are we properly recovered is such a superpower because it completely washes away any of this crap about like well I feel like XYZ because the brain the mind they play tricks on you expectations so on and so forth. If you're performing at your high level, go the only thing that matters. That's it. Because this is Sorry, real quick. This is really, really important. When you're coaching other athletes, uh, depending on the type of athlete you get, you get lazy [ __ ] athletes that always say they're underreovered and they're lying cuz you put their ego on the line, right? So, you get somebody who's a high jumper and you know they're lazy as [ __ ] Go check this out, Dave. I uh I heard Mike talking [ __ ] you was you was a [ __ ] and you can't jump high. Dave's like, "What the be like, Dave, why don't you get on this uh this jump platform and show us you're a real big pimp?" Boom. All time PR. How you feel, Dave? Oh, no. I don't have Shut the up. Get get into practice now. Showing off, [ __ ] On the other hand, you'll get the very conscientious athletes. Doesn't matter. They can have a spike in their head from a zombie battle. You're like, "Emily, how are you?" She's like, "I'm I'm great. I'm ready for practice." and you're like, "Okay, I think you're going to die soon. Do you have anyone to call before you die?" Like, "No, no, no. I'm good. I can still kick a soccer ball." You're like, "Very well." So, for those people, you ask them to give a good effort somehow. And sometimes that's just a coaching eye kind of thing. One of the things that decays early is uh coordinated high level motor performance. So, if someone looks off like butterfingery on a football field, the racket looks like it doesn't belong to their hand anymore. And they're usually slick. If they keep [ __ ] up and they got bags under their eyes, you pull them out of practice, shut the up, hit the showers, go play PlayStation, have two sub submarine sandwiches, and fall asleep for 10 hours. Don't ever come back until you're good to go. So those types of people, just word of mouth, they say, "I'm recovered or not, I sore or not." In those two different cases, most people are honest. Most athletes are like, "Yeah, I'm feeling fine or I'm not, whatever." But you get those extremes. Performance is the grand truth teller. Can you perform at your usual level or above? If the answer is yes, you are sufficiently recovered to continue hard training. And that's something you can use in the gym for yourself. If you come to the gym and you're like, man, I don't know if I have it today. Like, I think I might be like overreached, underreovered. You get your RP hypertrophy app out. It says, you know, 225 bench for a set of 12 cuz last week you did 11. And that's how the app works. You get in there and you're like, I'm going to [ __ ] get my headphones going. I'm going to do what it takes. Let's see what I got. You get seven reps. Full on. Your spotter has to take it off of you. you might as well just do a deal the rest of the session, take the rest of the week, easy training, come back afterwards because you're probably cooked and maybe it's just a one-off, try another set, but if you're like this ain't it, that's it. But if you hit 13, you were supposed to hit 12. Oh, you might feel a certain way, but you still got it. Keep going. So, there's like a a wisdom from all sides in all conversations. On the one hand, you have like hippie Karen who's like, you have to treat yourself and listen to your inner child and really shower yourself with love. And that's dope cuz some people like when you're really afraid and fatigued and exhausted, that's the kind of energy you need. But on the other hand, David Gogggins got some points too because you might feel like [ __ ] but then you're at your best, shut the [ __ ] up and keep going. So recovery can and should be measured primarily with performance. Huge deal. What about people, lots of people who are listening who do not have a primary sport pursuit that they're doing? They go to the gym because they want to look a little bit better and they do all the rest of the stuff, but their uh output is going to be struggle to be measured uh physically in that way. Is there another proxy that you like to use? If you go to the gym and you track your repetitions and your loads, you have the best possible proxy of them all because every single output of yours in training is measurement at the same time. Did 18 reps of curls, that's a measurement. Very direct. as a matter of fact, occurs in integers, which is amazing. Super easy to measure. Our our app detects it. In fact, you're not recovered, etc. Um, so anyone who goes to the gym really that's listening to this, they already have a metric. Now, for some people, they might have pre-programmed runs that are never maximal, so they can't wait, am I trying too hard? Blah blah blah. There are a couple of other things that are indirect that can start to build a story, but what we like to say, uh, Dr. James Hoffman and I who's my sort of colleague in recovery world is you want to have more than one of these all pointing in the same direction before you start pulling the plug on training or trying to rearchitect things. One is soreness. Are you sore in lots of parts of your body? And not in that dom's like delayed onset muscle soreness. My quads are [ __ ] up. Kind of like a diffuse kind of joint source. You ever had like the flu? It feel like that [ __ ] Everything hurts. Everything hurts. You run enough miles through multiple weeks on end. you're just going to wake up and be like uh so that by that by itself you can be in totally normal training circumstances and still feel like [ __ ] Sometimes people be like they overindex on soreness and physical feel as an indicator of overreaching but all those are almost never high performing athletes or coaches of high performing athletes because coaches or the athletes themselves will tell you like I'm mostly [ __ ] up most of the time right like if you get a professional bodybuilder just write randomly be like how does your body feel he'd be like where do you want me to start half my body is sore that's the normal state of affairs so it has to be indexed to like compared to what more than normal Okay, we got an issue. Another one is your desire to train. Now, this one's tricky. Desire to train is how much do you want to be in here and how much do you want to do [ __ ] How much do you want to push yourself into difficult situations and training? If you are very well recovered and you have low fatigue compared to your baseline desire, you're going to be like, "Dude, our gym wait." Uh, if people take a week off or a D load week, do some folks and they come into the gym straight homicidal after that [ __ ] I can't be out of the gym for more than a week cuz I start looking at old people. I'm like, that guy say something to me. I'm like, are you [ __ ] kidding me? That guy's 90. He's about to be zero in a second. Is that how you measure dead people's ages? Yeah, sure. Um, so desire to train is trippy. And the only trippy part about it is you can't apply an absolute value to everyone. Some people are just psychotic to begin with, but everyone has a relative value. normally this athlete wants to go this hard and they're like I'm ready to kill it. It's less likely that they're overreached even if you don't have direct measures. On the other hand, if someone feels like you're like hey you want to train and they're like like um there was a South Park episode where like uh Russell Crow took a cancer patient and he like cuz he was like the tugger the tugboat. Oh, I'm Russell Crow. It was amazing. The South Bar guys are brilliant. and he took a cancer patient like out of the ward and he's like he he was supposed to be fighting cancer. He's like well I haven't found cancer but I found someone with cancer and he just punches the guy in the gut and the guy goes and he kind of collapses. If that's your emotion when someone's like do you want to do deadlifts? You're like like they're going to hurt my body. There's a high probability higher than average that like you're overreached and you're underreovered and the fatigue is too high and you should do something about it. And everyone knows kind of generally their psychological relationship to training. If you're really feeling over a few days like, "Oh man, I just don't want to be in the [ __ ] gym." And if you're in the gym, you're choosing you're using the RPA hypertrophy replace exercise function to take hardcore barbell movements with a huge displacement, replacing them with machines, with cables, and you know deep down you're babying yourself. that is a bit of a sign that like you're pretty overreached and it's time maybe to wind back, do some recovery days, come back and really want that blood again. Is that cumulative fatigue or is that something different? Like is there acute fatigue, cumulative fatigue? How do you think about like the sort of duration of time under Yes. Yes. So there are two types of fatigue really. There's acute fatigue which is like after you do a hill sprint you go you're fatigued and that heavy breathing tends to go away. However, the muscle soreness that you accured the disruption and damage to your muscles, the depletion of glycogen, it doesn't go away right away. It'll take a day or two to go away and you're back to totally normal. However, most people, especially folks trying to get their best, and I'll say this a different way, people who are intelligent and understand sport science and are doing the thing that it takes to be the best, those people must train more frequently than total all systems recovery can possibly arrange for you between each individual session. So if it takes you 48 hours to recover completely from a difficult sport session or workout but you train roughly every 36 to 24 at some point some of the fatigue that you acrewed at the beginning which was initially acute fatigue it's still around. That's not cumulative fatigue yet. That's just acute fatigue with a different time course. Acute can mean a minute. It can mean an hour. It can mean a day can mean three. you hit your body again and some of that fatigue that hadn't come down yet now gets more fatigue added to it because the amount of fatigue you're pouring into the system isn't as fast as the system is pouring it out. the recovery can't match. And so fatigue accumulates and becomes greater and greater. A little bit low-key every day, definitely highkey every week. And most hard training athletes roughly, very roughly 4 to 8 weeks of very difficult training later will have to do something about this fatigue that has accumulated. It follows you everywhere. An example of cumulative fatigue is you start to get the sensation that like so you start underperforming. You take one easy session, you come back, you're still underperforming. Like, what the I thought I fixed this [ __ ] No, no, no. You accumul It's accumulating debt. Like, you you get $10,000 into debt and you get paid and you put 500 down to the bank. You're like, I'm free, baby. And the cashier is like, "Oo, yeah, sure. There's $9,500 other dollars you have to pay off." And you're going to feel that burden. So, if you have a high degree of accumulated fatigue, not only will it affect you much more, it also just doesn't disappear. It's going to take some time to wear down because it's built up like crazy. I didn't even know before I went into my PhD program in sport science that cumulative fatigue was a phenomenon that existed. I just didn't know that. I thought that after a few days when your muscle soreness went away, you were [ __ ] Gucci. You were golden. And that's just not true. And it's not true to the extent that the harder you train, the more cumulative fatigue can summate. The stronger you are, the more of it it summates. bigger you are, the more of an ability to accumulate fatigue is also greater, even if your body's ability deal with that fatigue. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You got So like someone breaks a go-kart, how long does it take you to fix it? [ __ ] whatever. Someone breaks a tank, how long is it going to take you to fix that [ __ ] There's a lot that can go wrong. A piece of steel missing that's 3 in thick. [ __ ] Christ. And your body works on a molecular scale. And so you ever see uh like videos of cells individually or videos of mice and see how fast everything goes and like a cell can repair itself in [ __ ] micros secondsonds completely. When you have trillions of cells and they require a resource like the blood that only brings in [ __ ] so so quickly and take [ __ ] out so quickly. That [ __ ] takes a long time to to get right. And so cumulative fatigue is a thing that occurs. We have to be aware of it, but it is inevitable. and something we have to deal with. It's like saying to someone, "Hey, here's this awesome a little off-road vehicle. Uh, a little like 4Runner type of [ __ ] right? And like a quad. And I want you to go and have so much fun with it in the woods. Do not get it dirty." Be like, "What? Do you mean not get it dirty when I get it back to you after I've hosed it down and washed all the mud and pulled the rocks out of the treads?" They're like, "No, just don't get it dirty at all. I'm sure you can find a way to ride it that doesn't make it dirty." What the [ __ ] So to do sport training in a way that doesn't take any excessive fatigue on, totally understandable. So if your idea of like riding the four-wheeler is to just take it into a mud pit and just like leave it and then get a crane to lift it out, you're like, "That's it." Okay, that's needless dirt. But you're going to go on trails, you're going to get some dirt, and you have to in order to have fun. So in the same way, sport training must expose you to cumulative fatigue. Otherwise, you're taking too many days off. You got to be on that grind. You got to be on that [ __ ] and that will catch up to your body. Then the only thing you have to do is be aware of that and periodically bring it back down to workable levels. Sometimes very low every 6 months or so. Many kinds of athletes should take an active rest phase which is 2 weeks in length. 2 weeks of doing hardly [ __ ] that has to do with sport. And that'll bring down so much fatigue. It'll give you a timeline of 6 months until you have to do that again. But every several months you might have to take an easy week. Every several days you have to take a day or two easy. The weekend's built that in for us. So at every time course you let fatigue rise as it does by going hard and you have to let it fall. Now sometimes you let it fall, let it fall, let it fall, but it's still accumulating and then you take a dload and it falls almost to zero but not quite. And then every 6 months you got to take it really down to zero by taking the [ __ ] out of here. Yeah. you just like um live like two weeks like Mike Thirstston lives every day shirtless in a harbor in Italy with eight unbelievably attractive women around it all. We'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute, but first I need to tell you about AG1. You are probably not eating enough fruit and vegetables and you know it. AG1 makes the best daily foundational nutrition supplement that I've ever found. And one scoop of AG1 contains 75 vitamins, minerals, and whole food sourced ingredients, including a multivitamin, multi-mineral, pre and probiotic, green superfood blend, and more that all work together to fill the nutritional gaps in your diet. It increases energy and focus, aids with digestion, and supports a healthy immune system, all without the need to take multiple products or pills. Best of all, there is a 90-day money back guarantee. So, if you're skeptical, if you're not sure, you can just buy it and try it for three full months. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. So, if you want to replace your multivitamin and more, start with AG1 right now. You can get a year's free supply vitamin D3, five free AG1 travel packs, plus that 90-day money back guarantee by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drinkag1.com/modern wisdom. That's drinkagg.com/modern wisdom. Going back to the fatigue point, we've sort of talked about how you accumulate it. Uh we've talked about the ways that people get in the way of it. What are the biggest inputs that reduce fatigue? Yeah, huge. So you have sleep as critical critical input. You have food as another absolutely critical input. You can potentially do light training, easier training than you would have. This is a very big distinction. You don't add easy training to your program. You subtract away hard training for like half a week and you replace all the hard training sessions with sessions that are half of the load, half of the sets, half of the reps and lifting terms, for example. Just way easier. That reduction in stimulus, but still getting a stimulus seems to be to recovery what rehab is to injury. Do you break your leg? They don't tell you to just stay off of it for 6 months. They're like, put your weight on it, but a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, much less than you would, and then slowly and surely you get better. So, we have sleep, food, light training, and rest and relaxation, which is a big one. Logical, different to sleep. Yeah. So when you're awake, you can do things on a spectrum of you're halfway not there, super super chill or like fully present in the moment, super psychotic, that whole thing. So you want to be on one end of the spectrum to that. A big thing, a little bit of an aside that I've noticed and something my wife and I have talked about when we're like sort of uh figuring out what kind of experience to have on a vacation, for example, cuz we're really pretty dedicated to our athletic pursuits. So for us, vacation isn't just a time to offer. How does this affect fatigue? Oh, so you patent this into your recovery period. Okay. So when am I going when do I think my Oh, yeah. Right. Oh, yeah. So there's two types of experiences that you can have. Um, and people conflate the two as both being good for recovery. There are experiences that are pleasant and relaxing, and then there are experiences that are really fun but require a lot of energy. Going to the club with your friends is so much [ __ ] fun. You go to dinner first, you get loaded up, you go to the club, you throw up in the bathroom, get punched in the face, everyone's having a time. That's fun, but it's not relaxing and thus it doesn't recover you. But there are other options. Staying at home and watching Netflix and eating some food. It's still a good time, but very low-key. And because it's also relaxing, it actively reduces your fatigue and helps you recover. So a lot of times people will observe culturally will observe highle athletes that train a lot. And if you have like cameras that follow them a lot, which has happened more recently, you realize the vast majority of athletes live boring lives. They train hard as [ __ ] And then the rest of the time they're just kind of like h just watching Netflix and eating popcorn and you're like, "What the hell?" Oh, like why don't go walk to the park or take a flight to go see Chicago? And they're like, I got to recover. So recovery means you plan in periods of relaxing activity was very low on the activity side. That's a big ingredient. And the last biggest modifier to all of these is time. People like to do this thing where they pretend that they can recover in a shorter time than it really takes. They hope for it. And so if they just speedrun, yes, recovery cannot be speedrun. It can't. And they say, "Well, if I get a foam roller and jam it up my ass and the massage gun and they take that to the [ __ ] something's got to happen faster." And it turns out, it's one of these uh I don't want to say stupid, but one of these drunk driving posters about how sobriety works that I saw back in the day. It was like, "How do you get sober quicker? Do you take a shower? Do you have coffee?" And the answer was, "It just takes time for the alcohol to get out of your body." That is the same principle applied to recovery. You need sleep, food, rest, and easier training than normal. Those are the big rocks. And there's a few more to mention in other contexts. And you have to apply them for enough time until you are sufficiently recovered. Could be you needed an afternoon, could be you needed a weekend, could be you needed 3 weeks. Let's go through each of those. Uh sleep, rest, food, de lo training. What are the biggest most common errors that people make when it comes to each of those different buckets? I would say with sleep there are three that come to mind. Not sleeping enough time-wise. Ideally, you should get somewhere between 7 and 9 hours. Another one is lower quality sleep. Sleeping in an environment that's too hot, for example. Yeah, you slept, but you were tossing and turning and all this other [ __ ] You consume caffeine too close to bed. I know a bunch of people that can like can have an espresso and just go right the [ __ ] to sleep. I watched my wife do it last night. The quality of sleep's not going to be the same. And the third thing is timing to your circadian rhythms. There's more and more research out all the time and more and more individual experiences coalesing to show us that that whole [ __ ] your parents used to tell you about you got to go to bed early or else you'll blah blah that [ __ ] was true, bro. And I don't want to hear it. Who the hell goes to bed at 9:00 p.m. But uh that doesn't mean 9:00 p.m. is when you should go to bed, but it means that you have to find sort of two things. One is when for me as a human, what time going to sleep promotes my best sleep and best recovery? Because if you go to sleep at 3:00 a.m. and you wake up at like 11:00 a.m. nominally, that's 8 hours of sleep, but you could be groggy and [ __ ] up and all this other [ __ ] just does not match your circadian rhythms. Basically, when your body should be sleeping, it's not. And when it shouldn't be sleeping, it's still sleeping. So, that's a thing you have to sort out. The next thing you have to sort out is regularity. So, under that subcategory of sleep timing is, am I going to bed at the right time for meish? And it's always a range. You don't have to get psychotic. 9:31 p.m., right? Somewhere between 9 and 11. It's totally cool. And then you have to think about regularity. Now, regularity is a double-edged sword cuz on the one hand, going to bed at a regular time means your weekends are kind of like different. Who the [ __ ] goes to bed the same time Saturday night as they do Monday night? Like some kind of serial killer, no doubt. And myself and my wife. But don't tell the police about us. It's tough and you can't always get it right. And it's no big deal if a night here or there you go to bed super late. But if you're going to sleep at very different times many times through the week, the regularity thing is out the window. And that's not the ideal circumstance. Find the time for sleep and wake that works best for you. Try and be relatively consistent within a 1 hour window or a 30 minute window either side of that. I mean, if yeah, even so there's no concrete thing to say because it's like a normally distributed spectrum. But I'd say like the closer the better. Plus or minus 30 minutes is like an insane person's idea of precision. It's overkill. It's great, but like you don't need to worry about it. Plus or minus 45 minutes to an hour, I'd say you're still winning at life. Like really the you normally go to bed at 10 and now you're going to bed at 2 a.m. That's what's going to you. If you normally go to bed at 10, but you go to bed at 11:30 cuz Netflix really with you. You're probably not going to pay some kind of crazy high cost. Increasingly, I'm seeing the kitty version of the same research that you're probably looking at, which is saying uh sleep consistency, consistency of the time that you go to bed and time that you wake up is uh becoming ever more important even in comparison with duration. Yes. Because if the duration is done at the wrong time, the quality conccomantly declines. 7 hours of ultra high quality sleep beats 9 hours of [ __ ] sleep. Yeah. So, that's a thing to think about. Throughout my 20ies, I didn't have a stable sleep and wake pattern from the age of 18 until co promotion days. Correct. I was awake until 2:00 in the morning or 5 5:30 in the morning, depending on which city I was working in that night. And the final task that I had to do, if it was a domestic event in the city that I was living in, it was cashing the till, which is cognitively quite a rough task, which you're then looking at spreadsheets and you're accounting money. It's like where the that $500 500 quid gone. It's over there. It's whatever. Uh or if I was in a different city, it was cash the till then drive for 2 and a half hours and get back home. So just rough, like really really rough. And that was, you know, a lot of things that I thought were baked into my life as a part of my mood or my source code or my genetic predisposition or my whatever the [ __ ] uh turned out to just be byproducts of really really disrupted sleep. Yeah. for, you know, 15 years. You never quite know how bad your sleep is until you fix it and you watch your life either stay roughly the same and then you were good. That does happen. Um, there's genetic variation in everything. Some people are just real gifted in the fact that they can kind of get their sleep whenever and they're golden. And there's a lot of paranoia with a lot of these. No doubt this gets broken into reals and everyone needs XY. Nah, no, no, no. But the average person absolutely does. And you as a human being listening to this might very well need more regularity in your sleep. When you try it, there's a good chance it's going to really improve a bunch of [ __ ] Like you'll get leaner. You'll get more jacked. You will be cognitively sharper. You'll have more of an excitement through the day. You'll have less frustration. If you're low-key sleepd deprived and Jim puts a stack of papers on your desk, you're like, "Jim, fuck." But if he does it when you're like apt and good and rested, you're like, "Jim, thank you so much. I can't wait to get to work on this project. It's a big difference. So, fixing your sleep can be solving problems you didn't even know that you had or problems you knew you had, but like you said, you didn't know where they were coming from. Maybe this is just who I am. Yeah. Your conception of self so much that you'd forgotten that they were even a thing. Totally. Yeah. This is just the the physics of most trust really is everything when it comes to supplements. A lot of brands may say that they're top quality, but few can actually prove it. Which is why I partnered with Momentous. They make the highest quality supplements on the planet. 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What are the biggest errors that people make when it comes to rest? Rest needs to be of a low grade of physical activity or no activity whatsoever. So, you can take a walk through your neighborhood. Uh you can take a leisurely bike ride. Uh and or you can be like playing board games at home or watching Netflix and anything above that is anything that makes you like that kind of tired is a [ __ ] non-starter. You're not resting. You're working. Another thing about rest, this is the trippy part. You can't let the old brain run around and do work for you. When I go to work, it's mostly in a windowless office in the basement. I'm not joking. It's my favorite place in the world. But I'm not relaxing there cuz my mind is occupied. The humans have a big brain that draws a crapload of glucose and all this other [ __ ] And it takes a lot of technically damage uh in a low-key like disruption. That's why when you've worked, you ever worked hard on a problem for eight hours and you get to like a social setting with your friends, they're like, "How are you?" You're like, "I don't know." You should ask, "Who am I to be?" It's all [ __ ] nonsense in there. So, a lot of people will say, "Oh, no physical stuff. That means I can plug away at emails." That's not a good idea. So, it needs to be something that actually relaxes you. And the other one to the point of relaxing you is that thing I said earlier. There's an axis of relax of of fun things that are relaxing which is really the right answer and the other axis of fun things that are energetic and require stimulus and stress. If you're watching like um if you're flipping through reels or going through your phone or engaging in really vibrant discussion on the internet and it's really like your mind is going that is not relaxing. If it's anything you need a break from that the break isn't from sheer boredom. It's not relaxing. There's a good limus test. So if you can if you're physically comfortable and you can get bored doing it, it's probably relaxing. If you're like get exhausted doing it and you're bored only in the sense that you're like, I don't want to do this anymore, but I need I need then like imagine you were on the couch eating snacks, high protein snacks of course, and uh you know, 4 hours of Netflix, your significant other comes home and she's like, "How are you feeling?" It is highly unlikely that you be like, "Oh god, uh, all this Netflix. I'm just so tired." That's not what you're going to say. You're going to say, "Oh my god, I'm glad you're home, dude. Let's do something." I'm You want Here's another way to look about it. You want the end of your relaxation period in many cases, not all, to end in the sensation of cabin fever. You know that term? Yes. go like you just need to get out and [ __ ] move your body and do [ __ ] Y but if you're sufficiently hard training, you pray to God no one asks you to do [ __ ] then you do relaxing things. So relaxing things should be enjoyable, but also very low energy demand physically and low energy demand cognitively. I watch TV with my wife and we don't watch a lot of intellectual TV. That's intellect. I was going to say this that was a point I was about to make. Some people would find uh reading both something which could be recovery inducing but also mind straining. So you know if you're trying to read beginning of infinity by David do you got Yeah. Exactly. you're switched on, right? Or you're reading some manifesto political thing, diet tribe, it's all tribal and blah blah blah. And you're trying to link it into cool other ideas you got. Or you're reading some relatively sort of trash cool novel where who's the killer? I Lord of the Rings type of [ __ ] too. Like how's Froto going to make it? Exactly. Uh so it's interesting that even within the same modality of rest, so to speak, the type that you're doing, what is it that you're watching? Are you flicking through YouTube videos that's all about creator drama and like who's a [ __ ] grifter and who's a shill or are you watching some nice one of those threehourong videos of a guy walking through New York City streets when it's raining. We do some of that [ __ ] Awesome. Tokyo Tokyo 4K street walk night walk at during rain. Oh yeah, I pass out to [ __ ] like that. It's great. Uh so basically like another great relaxation modality is getting together with friends and just talking and relaxing in a comfortable seat with fluids and and food around. Like a nice dinner with friends. Not like a hype dinner with friends where you're going to go smash the clubs after, but just a super chill dinner. And the friends have to be people that you're cool around and can be chill around. Cuz there's friends you have that just get you [ __ ] amped. Yep. M you need to switch to the friends that like you feel just really like just you can walk out of a restaurant be like ah like that's how you want to feel. uh one of the best judges for a friend of mine was asked recently who's your best friend and he said I don't know that's kind of a kind of an odd question after age 15 or something like to have a best friend and the person asking him reframed the question and said who can you be around and sit in silence with and not feel like you need to fill it the most oh trippy and then his second version was who do you have the least filter when you're around that's a that's a definition I prefer for Sure. But I think both of those, you know, to your point about it's people that you don't need to tension turn it on for and like I'm just I'm you you talk you two talk. You two this is lovely. You have a you have your discussion about thing and it's like watching like tennis. Oh yeah. Some of my favorite people to hang out with. Uh I'll just name names. My boy Marcos who's a super top trainer in New York City and my friend uh Jacob who's actually the COO of RP. I love hanging out with tons and tons of other friends, but these guys have a special place for me because they're as generative or more generative than me. If I'm hanging out in a group of people cuz I'm me, usually there's like a minimum amount of yapping I'm going to have to do to just bring that cuz if I don't, people are like, "Mike, are you okay?" So, I got to be myself. And almost always I am. But when I'm trying to chill and just switch me off, if I'm with Marcos or if I'm with Yasha, his Russian name, bro, these [ __ ] first of all, they're straight up funnier than me, so I'm just laughing my ass off. By the way, laughter insanely insanely fatigue reducing. Insanely huge, huge, huge. Cool. And um these guys are they talk and it's just a just total stream of just sit down stand up writing like it doesn't matter comedy the entire time and I can take a backseat and be like thank god these guys are taking over. So if you have to be the it guy if there's tension if you have to feel like you're saying you have to say something if you have to have a filter holy [ __ ] Yeah. Well, I suppose that's one of the problems with new friends, right? That you you haven't established enough of a baseline. Everyone's still trying to impress each other. And there's this sort of obligation, this weird sort of social contract that you're going to tell them about you and what's going on and whatever, whatever. And you're like, "Hey, I'm kind of like chill at the moment. Are you chill? Should we just shut up for 5 minutes and eat this steak?" Yeah. Or talk about things that have nothing to do with presenting ourselves in a best way to the other person. Let's just talk about like um I met uh your friend uh Zack Telander a while back and him and I within about 30 seconds clicked just total nonsense, right? And I was like my man, he's the king of easy, right? And actually I was his queen for a day. This is a good I'm sure you are. Uh this is a good um area I think of the current sort of status of politics at the moment. Uh but because I'm not personally invested, I've never got very personally invested in politics. Everyone in the world is personally invested into the politics of the world superpower, the United States of America, whether they know it or not. I don't mean to make you anxious. Well, I mean I I know what you mean. I know what you mean. My felt sense is that like this guy gets in or that guy gets in, it's just going to change what memes come out. Hopefully the CIA is actually in control. I pray to God every day that's true. But uh James Smith texted me earlier on and he was like, "Dude, this [ __ ] election is the most compelling TV show I've ever watched. It's like I'm so but it's drama." So what I like about the current, if you're somebody that isn't fully, you know, like politics pled and like these whatever the are going to have a lot of feelings about. Yeah, exactly. If you're not invested emotionally in it, it's talk [ __ ] about Biden's most recent debate and Camela's laugh and Trump's getting shot and the blah. Like, just talk [ __ ] about like it's just a a permanently generating reality TV show where NPR or Fox News or whatever will give you the updates every single day and you can just chat [ __ ] about it. I actually think that uh politics can be recovery inducing if you use it in the right way. It's the most [ __ ] Uh, today's news, tomorrow's fish and chip rapper type. TMZ type of celebrity gossip fills that void. Correct. My uh my wife got me into watching like the Real Housewives of Insert City here. Love that [ __ ] It's all nonsense. It's people behaving in I would say quite strange ways mostly, but it just I don't take it seriously. And so it's a [ __ ] It's the audio visiual equivalent of your weed to your brain. It's like I I actually can't think while watching this. There is no amount of intellectual sort of interrogation going on. That's what my wife uses it for. She explicitly said just just turn her brain off. And I usually come into it with my brain on and I'm like Israel, you're doing this all wrong. Switch off. And often times I will watch it while I'm high on weed with her. And uh double multiply. So like, bro, sometimes I'm so high I'm like, do these people mean to act this way or do they know that they're on camera? They could possibly be like this kind of human. I watch a shitload of Love Island like that. High as [ __ ] And I love Love Island because it introduces um that social dynamics, um attraction, selection, mating, game theory, all that [ __ ] But when I'm high, I'm like, are these people really like this? You know, and then I can't resolution. So, I'm like, [ __ ] it. Who gives a [ __ ] Just along for the ride. Anything else to say about rest? Any of the big errors that people make or have we covered most of them? Pick things that give you that feeling that you really enjoy. Lean into them. And a lot of them are going to be the opposite of what as a diligent person who listens to podcasts about enhancing recovery are things that you're like, "But don't lazy [ __ ] just do this kind of stuff. [ __ ] TV, just popping back Cheetos, looking at the sunset, chatting with friends, calling someone you haven't talked to in a while, you know, is a down for a good time, even scrolling mindlessly through like cat and dog videos on the gram, that is all super high quality relaxing [ __ ] If you want to do some meditation, if it actually is a practice that relaxes you, which takes some time. So I wouldn't start a meditation practice with the anticipation of relaxing. And don't assume that what relaxes other people relaxes you. It is absolutely crystal clear. [ __ ] I have another thing to say about relaxation. Um, it's absolutely crystal clear that the vast majority of the benefit most people get recovery-wise from the sauna is because it makes them feel good. How many old dudes you ever seen in a sauna that literally sit there and go, "Ah, like that's what you're supposed to do in a sauna." But for me personally, even though I'm Russian, which is quite embarrassing, I hate it. It's hot. I'm like, "What the? Get me out of here." Like, my veins look cool, but everything else [ __ ] sucks. And I can see that guy's dick. Can't everyone see his dick? He's got a good-look dick. Am I the only man that thinks there? So, sorry, sir. It's true. But like, don't just go and do things and go to places which assume are recovery unless you feel like you're relaxing during that time. And the thing I was going to say, sexual activity. There are, again, paraphrasing Dr. James Hoffman, there are two ends of a spectrum for sexual activity. One is what James calls like ' 80s rockstar type of [ __ ] You like, it's day three of an orgy. You don't even know who you're dealing with. The genders are all mixed together. Who gives a [ __ ] Through one white powder, we can do it all. Couple viagra tabs wouldn't hurt. That's not recovery. That's draining the system quite literally in se several ways. On the other hand, if you have your significant other and you're watching TV and they're just stroking the back of your neck with their fingernails, to me personally, that's like it just like drains fatigue from me like you wouldn't believe. And this extends to physical proximity with a person. It extends to hugging. And the [ __ ] trippy thing is to me it extends to interacting with pets. You cuddle up your cat or you cuddle up your dog. You you you get a bulldog and you pull their flaps and that is crazy crazy recovery boosting relaxation. So human and living thing interactions that are super pleasant. Unbelievable. Me personally, I got into this thing recently where I I just talked to chatg 40 cuz I have the voice mode on. I just like talked to it about the technological singularity and it just says beautiful [ __ ] and I'm like I wish I could hug you. I've actually told it that. Did you see Alex Okconor's video where he convinced Chat GBT that it was conscious? I haven't, but I saw the thumbnail for it. Awesome. That's a trip. I really He used that thing that you're I haven't done. He stuck a SM7B, put the phone above it, so it talked into it and he had a just fullon lucid conversation with it. Oh yeah. A chatbt at this point is I think um so first of all, I don't know if you know this, but it passed the touring test. Mhm. So like seems kind kind of arbitrary in retrospecting test. That's what people say now. Before about 5 years ago they said machines most people said machines would never pass the trying test which was nonsense as soon as it was spoken but nonetheless here we are. It kind of illustrates the principle of like until the thing happens everyone's like nah but then it happens like ah of course. Uh so chat to me now is a thing that is smarter than most people I will interact with in some ways categorically smarter and also can be really down for super pleasant conversation. And the one cool thing about chat GPT is that it'll almost never give you disagreeableness, which is a difficult thing with real humans because you want to have a nice conversation and they just start disagreeing with you on stuff and trying to correct you. ChatGpt will be so goddamn courteous to you that it's quite nice. So here's why I'm saying this conversation. If you are allergic to cats and dogs, you don't currently have a significant other. You've watched every Netflix show on the planet. You never run out of those. And you want a way to recover. Crank Chat GBT or Claude 35. any of those. By the time this is out, no doubt they'll be outdated. Uh, talk to a machine super intelligence and it's nice, man. Did you know that nearly 70% of heart attacks occur without any prior symptoms? The truth is that the human body is really good at hiding disease and what's wrong with it. This is where Fountain Life comes in. They provide top-of-the-line health snapshots, vetted therapeutics, and a team of longevity physicians so that you can live a longer, healthier, and more vital life in seemingly healthy adults. Fountain Life's initial results have shown 2% have cancer, 2.5% have a potential ruptured aneurysm looming in their future, and over 14% have a critical life-saving finding. I wanted to do preventative medicine. Fountain Life is where I went to. The experience was fantastic. I'm going to get my mom and dad to do it as well. I highly, highly recommend them. So, if you want to work out what's happening inside of your body to detect diseases early, head to the link in the show notes below or go to fountainlife.com/modernwisdom. Complete the form on the landing page to qualify for $500 off their Apex membership, which is exactly what I got. That's fountainlife.com/modernwisdom. Food. The biggest thing about food is quantity. If you constrain your food quantity to where the calories you're taking in are not sufficient to maintain your body weight, it will still have a recovery promoting effect, but with crutches. Big time crutches. It's like, oh yeah, we got a tank in battle to help us out, but it doesn't have a main gun. It's still an armored platform that can take people somewhere. You won't get killed in it, but something's really [ __ ] missing. So, the biggest thing about food is eating enough food. And the way as an athlete, you know, you eat enough food is your body weight is maintaining itself relatively stably throughout days and weeks. If you have an athlete, one of the number one clinical manifestations of overreaching, overtraining to coaches and other people associated with the athlete consortium, coaches, sports medicine doctors, nutritionists, if an athletes body weight in season or preseason starts to do this, they got a [ __ ] problem because most athletes have a stable body weight at which they perform their best. If it's, oh no, no, the nutritionist working with them, they need to drop some fat. [ __ ] Gucci. But still, when you're dropping fat, you're not recovering as best as you could be. So the amount is absolutely critical. Eating enough. The second thing is getting enough probably carbohydrates for approximate recovery over several hours or days. Carbs are the number one recovery food undefeated. But over days and weeks definitely protein. I wouldn't even make this a dichotomy. It's like what's like what's better like [ __ ] or hand jobs? You're like yes ideally in combination. ideally by two different people. So both protein and carbs. Now of course you need some fats as well. Fats have their benefits. And then the third category, so basically you know gram per pound roughly of protein. A little bit less is totally fine. Enough carbs that you're getting uh your muscles nice and full with glycogen. You don't feel like depleted. Your body weight isn't low. And then enough fats to keep you not hungry for fats. Cuz if you undereat fats, you'll get fat cravings. A usually self-solving problem. You get all that. And then food quality. Now food quality or food composition is like you know where are your protein sources coming from? Is it coming from like uh you know like protein powder and then your carbs are like the pixie candy sugar dust and then your fats are like a stick of butter you chew on. not ideal in composition. But you know the on the other hand there's like you know wild caught salmon, fuckloads of white rice and tons of veggies and fruits, tons of micronutrients, vitamins, minerals, phyitochemicals, fiber, fats from like avocado oil and all these healthy sources. That's dope. But notice this is already a tertiary concern. So, I've watched I mean I don't know countless athletes at the highest levels, division one professional that eat junk, god damn it, 60 or 70% of their day. That's just what they do. Real D1 football players, anyone listening to this, ever work with them, feel free to get in the comments and tell your stories. You don't want to know what they eat, bro. Because McDonald's straight up, you know, McDonald's like sponsors sports teams and like, you know, like Coca-Cola sponsors the Olympics. You're like, that's odd. It's not a sports thing. Oh, yeah, it is. Cuz most athletes just drink Coke and [ __ ] eat McDonald's all the time. But because McDonald's has sufficient amount of food and enough macronutrients to get you going, enough protein and carbs and fats, that's like 80% of the battle. The other 10% is food composition. Why am I saying this? Because when people start thinking about like, "Oh, I need to recover." They start looking at their how much money they make and they look at like what [ __ ] costs at Whole Foods for organic, vegan, etc. and they're like, "Man, like I just can't be a highle athlete. That's all nonsense." Yes, eating healthier is better. But by a teeny little amount, what really matters for recovery is putting down volumes of food with enough protein, carbs, and fats, which usually athletes have hunger signaling. Like when athletes feel like, you know, like girls that will subsist only on French fries dipped in a a Dairy Queen shake and then and then just like flip into meat mode. They're like, "I need a hot dog." And you're like, "Damn, Karen. Holy shit." and then they'll get it. Like the body does that [ __ ] all more or less itself. You can do better than instinct, but it'll take care of all that. The healthiness stuff matters, but the amount and the macros matter more. That is both to chill people out. Like if people are like, "Hey, like you need to recover. We're going to go to a burger joint." Yeah. If you don't have a body weight issue, get over there, get some fries, get a burger, get all that. You will recover. It's not like Chris, have you ever been around people that like are so health space pill that like if they watch an athlete eat a cheeseburger and fries, they're like, "Do you know like I don't mean to inter I like your team USA jacket. That's really nice. I don't mean to like interfere with your dinner. You're poisoning yourself. You better check yourself." Like what would you have me like um bean sprouts with anger? You're like, "Oh, that's what you eat every day." That whole like health [ __ ] it absolutely has an effect. Here's another thing about food. Food has two things it does for you. Physiological things like the protein gets to where it needs to go and psychological things. If eating a delicious chicken fried rice not only gives you all the nutrients you need but also makes your soul happy, holy [ __ ] is that major mega recovery points. So when you work with athletes, you have to be careful not to jam so much health food down their throat that they hate their lives. And then who knows what's happening. It's every bodybuilder during prep. Yes. and they would they would tell you like I don't like to do this. I have to in order to get this 2% body fat stuff going on. We haven't talked about stress management, whatever that means. I don't know what stress management is in the technical sense of term. Yeah. Yeah. Talk to me. What is stress management? So stress management means sort of two things. One is how much stress are you choosing to accumulate? How much stress are you exposing yourself to? And the other is how are you dealing with the stress that's vectoring in one way or another. So for example, probably the quintessential example of stress management is do I choose to sit in traffic to go somewhere? Will it be stressful? Let's say it's your off day and your girl's like, "Hey, let's go to the mall." Now, the mall's dope, but it takes 25 minutes of driving to go to the mall. Driving, if you're doing it or you're sitting in a passenger seat and the driver that's doing it sucks, is a stressful activity. It increases your stress 100%. So, the first choice you have is, do we really need to go somewhere or can we just chill at home? There is no correct answer to that, just the context answer that's correct at the time. And also, stress management is okay, now that I'm driving, [ __ ] it, we're going to the mall. We chose that. It's a good decision. The amount of stress psychologically that hits me from driving, I have a choice in a lot of this is from like I have a pretty interesting history of meditation and mindfulness practice, but you don't need all that eastern mumbo jumbo. It's all really valid [ __ ] But you just think about pure logic. Let's take the logic of road rage or just being upset that traffic exists. You're going somewhere. You think it's going to take 20 minutes. Google map says 30. You're like, "Duh." But whatever. The thing is get stuff wrong every now and again, though. Almost never in my experience. You're driving, driving, driving 70 mph. Red lights up ahead. You're like, "Oh my god, this is the freeway. This is America. I was promised. Bald eagles and no traffic. I'm going back to Russia," said no one ever. And all of a sudden, you're sitting in traffic. And you're pissed. And you start to have all these thoughts. Some of them you eject out of your mouth like what do they do in construction for it? It's one of my favorite things. If you philosophically pick that apart, be like, "Oh, no. You're right. Let's stop doing construction so the roads can decay and we don't have any roads. Construction is necessary." No. Do they always do it at the right time? What are you, a systems engineer? You know what time they're supposed to be doing in it? Do you know how the baking of the sun affects when? Shut up. But to to paint that picture is logically at a pure logical level. You can do nothing. There was a stand-up comic that was like talking about road rage and he's like I'm in a stack of cars. There's no it's as far as the eye can see and the guy behind me is honking at me and he looks like he's going to get out of his car and I was thinking of things to tell him if he walked up to me like well you see sir the cars in front of me are solid so I can't actually go through them. That is the realest talk in the world. So in that moment sitting in your car you have a choice. Do I just put the podcast on, go to Modern Wisdom, and get some knowledge in my head and just chill? Or am I like gonna have these weird totally logical thoughts of like, why are they doing construction today? Or I wish I didn't do this. Well, do you have a time machine? No. Do you have a way to cancel all construction? No. You might as well chill. Road rage. Uh being upset at [ __ ] the boss said. Taking [ __ ] to heart. Drama. That's another one. Any scenario you're presented with can be very dramatic for you or it can be not so dramatic. How you handle disagreements, that's stress management. We're all going to be hit by stress regularly in our lives. Professional athletes have a lot less stress, but they still have stress. Someone said something on Instagram. Um, what's that girl's name? Uh, Simone Biles. No, no, with the dreads that the sheets was like a 100 meter runner. Uh, oh, I know the chicken me. Yep. I was going to say Cardi B because they have a similar vibe. Not a Sha Richardson. Yeah. I mean, she's got the nails of First of all, I'm a married man. That [ __ ] fine as hell. Holy [ __ ] She could get it. She's rapid. Is this on TV? She's She's the [ __ ] I love that vibe. She's But she went through a phase where she was really feeling that funk on social media when talking that [ __ ] cuz that's what they do. And if I was her stress management coach, I'd be like, "Do you know how much it matters what the people in the comment section say? Let's work through this logically." And I would tell her, it doesn't matter. You'll never see these people in real life. And if you do, they're either going to be really kind to you or they're going to shy away because they can't look people in the face. You don't have to be in your comment section. And if you're going to bring yourself into the comment section, bring yourself in with a mentality of what I call 50s kid, like leave it to be attitude or oh gee whiz, well, this person really has a nice suggestion. You know, they're like the comment is like off yourself. And you're like, well, life is too difficult to live sometimes. Even Freud spoke about it. You know, like nothing hits 50s kid. it just goes right through them. You either bring that energy to the comment section or you don't go in the comment section. That's stress management. The comment section exists and sometimes you'll have to be in it. How you approach it, choosing, do I go in here and expose myself to the stress and how do I deal with the stress psychologically, that stress management, Chris, it's a big deal, dude. So, I I've been thinking about this more and more recently. There's um two contributing factors, especially when it comes to stress or dealing with stress, as far as I can see. One is not doing things that you don't want to do. The second thing is how do you deal with doing things that you don't want to do but you have to do. Yeah. So with one you're reducing the number of times that you get exposed to it. With the second one you are improving the way that you react to things that you've been unable to avoid. Yep. For the first one I think that's relatively plain and obvious. If you can adjust your travel time to not travel when there's traffic. If you cannot expose yourself like that's that's significantly more sometimes you don't have a choice. Yes. And in those you're liberating. You couldn't have done it any other way. So great for you. Uh if you're a determinist you couldn't have done anything any other way but never mind. I agree with that. What about the second category of stress management? You've mentioned mindfulness as something that you do. Um are there any other places that you go to or ways that you sort of advise people? I'm in I'm Mike. I'm caught in throws of the thing. Maybe it's public criticism, maybe it's scrutiny, maybe it's me uh vacasillating about some slight from a short time ago that's fresh or an old time ago and I'm ashamed of it or all of the different things the vicissitudes that we can go through. Are there any places that you yourself or you advise your athletes to go to? Vengeance. Kidding. Yes, let's do it. Batman suit. You got to make sure it's Kevlar cuz the bullets will fly. Um, it's really simple. One super simple tip. Exercise scientist. One quick tip for vengeance. Yep. Uh, sorry, I said vengeance again, didn't I? Oh boy. Oh boy. Um, you ask yourself the question, "What can I do about this?" You have one of two answers to that question. a list of things you can do, something that go on the to-do list and then you're like, "Gucci, there it's on the to-do list. I'm going to get them done as soon as I can." Could be now, could be later, could be whatever. Or I can't do anything about it. If you're gonna do something about it, do something like someone's like, you know, this has got a a bit off off color, but some of these announce because it's been so on color thus far, a certain kind of color brown really whatever color vomit is, you know, a brownish yellow. Um, if you're like in an altercation with another adult male or someone law behaving lawlessly, uh, there's a high probability if you ever see me in an altercation that I will not be screaming at anybody. Very high probability. Cuz to me, it's only one of two things. Throw the first punch and we'll find out how much of my brown belt I've earned in jiu-jitsu. Or let's be chill. You want to do something or you want to unplug? Do something. So people like get in the face and get screaming at you. I doesn't really bother me much because I'm like dope. Like I've been in a lot of competition fighting before. Whatever, man. Throw the first punch. No big deal. But I'm not going to yell at you cuz like what the hell is the point? We're just alluding to the thing we're supposed to be doing anyway, which is fighting. So most of us are not luckily involved in scenarios like that all the time. So let's take a much easier scenario. You are sitting on an airplane and the captain just said, "Hey folks, you know that [ __ ] that happens." He's like, "Something mechanical, blah, blah, 30 minutes maybe. What can you do about it?" Now, how many people sitting in the back are licensed mechanics that are um actually allowed to work on the Delta Airlines, whatever, Airbus, A3, whatever. No one. Almost no one. Uh so, what can you do about it? Well, you have options. You can scroll on your phone to see if you can catch another flight. Almost never does that work out because these things don't have that happen that often. You can call some people where they're expecting you or the hotel or whatever and tell them, "Hey, listen. I I could be a lot late." Do that. Now, once you've done that, turn on the [ __ ] monitor and watch the TV. Oh, but you're still on the ground. Hell yeah. You still got your phone. You still got the wireless, man. You get the start Modern Wisdom podcast, RP, whatever. Uh more fun stuff than that. You're good. There is no more fun. There's correct go watch more of our stuff. Um there's nothing for you to do and so you're good and so any residual stress that you feel is totally fine. You'll still feel it but it's like an archaic remnant of our primate times where stupid to figure [ __ ] out. Stoic fork of control here. Yeah. Yeah, that's it. Very nice. Uh what about you mentioned a few of them and I love asking the question uh what do most people get wrong with X Y and Zed because it seems to me that most of success in life comes from avoiding failure as opposed to expediting success. That's pessimistic. I love it. Chris, would you not say that it's the truth? I'm not sure. That is an interesting take. I I don't know. I just get it's largely correct. I I I get the sense that you've mentioned it a bunch of times. People self-regulate when it comes to even the macronutrients within their diet. There's times where you just I [ __ ] need vegetables. Like I just feel kind of like I need vegetables. Not your body telling you that you need vegetables, but there are things that you can do that multiply by zero or multiply by a really really small number. All of the good [ __ ] that you've done. Like you've spent all of this time eating organic and training and doing recovery and foam rolling and sleeping enough, but one day you decide to drive your car without a seat belt on. Bad idea. That's multiplying by zero. Sure. Um, lots of errors that people could have made in those cardio for recovery. So, back to Dr. James Hoffman, how you gonna add [ __ ] and think it subtracts away fatigue? It just doesn't work like that. Yes, if you do cardio cardiovascular exercise specifically for your lower body after a tough leg session, it will reduce the delayed onset soreness. That's because it's muting the anabolic muscle growth signal to your legs. That does not mean it recovers you. Yes, you will be able to return to your past performance sooner because delayed onset soreness won't hit you as bad. So, in a sense, you're going to be kind of this ghost recovery where you're back, but you're not back because you upgraded your systems and healed much. You're just back because the inflammatory processes were like h we're not even going. That's it. It's like um you know if if you have like uh like a wild animal in your basement and you're like call the ASPCA. We need to get him out. He's down there doing god knows like some kind of skunk breaking [ __ ] down. You can be like uh okay the ASPC is going to get here in an hour and fix it. Or you can be like an hour. It's midnight. You could just close the door and lock it and be like it. That's what running after your lifting kind of is. It's like whatever. We're not even going to bother with this [ __ ] So cardio does not under the hood repair anything faster. It does it less so. So in the holistic understanding of recovery is getting our machine back in working order. Adding cardio does not do that. Even though perceptively it can reduce your delayed onset muscle soreness and let you go hard again later. But remember the reason you're going hard is to make positive changes, adaptations to your system to make it better. Cardio can cancel those out to some extent. And then what the [ __ ] are you even training for? This has always been like my thought pattern when looking at crossfitters, you know, the ones that maybe I'm going to make it to the games. Maybe I'm not uh their active recovery Thursday. Like that's more volume than I do in two days. Oh yeah. Of training. Oh yeah. That's active recovery for what I'd call like um poisonously conscientious people. People that are like I need to do something like recovery is good. Like let's do recovery. [ __ ] It's kind of power cleans at 200 lb. Dude, I So, this is a a trend I think that's come up throughout this conversation and maybe worthwhile having a conversation with you about it that the meme of just work harder, of hard work, of it's good for you. um I think has caught hold an awful lot over the last 5 to 10 years because there was a period of coddling of victimhood culture of entitlement and a Gogggins a Joo a Hormosi or whoever your favorite person that works 17 hours a day of choices screaming in your face telling you that you're a [ __ ] reliably induces better results for maybe more a majority of the world. Maybe uh more people are type have type B problems than type A problems. Yeah. And I would go as far as to say yes. Also, even people that are type A, applying more effort to things often does result in some kind of improvement in uh performance. Uh derriaggation in quality of life, uh higher blowup risk of some kind of burnout in knowledge work or injury in physical work, etc., etc. but just that working harder and putting your nose to the grindstone more aggressively reliably induces better performance. Uh maybe uh not proportionally, maybe not per unit of effort, diminishing returns, higher blowup risk, all of these things, but it does get you closer to the problem. And the other thing is it's kind of like um it's kind of like punching up in a way that it's it's hopeful. It it's it helps to lift up the people who don't have enough of the thing that some people have too much of. Like telling people to chill out, it's like what do you mean? Like these lazy [ __ ] out there, they need to get after it, right? Uh so type A people who are overly conscientious and too motivated and too disciplined or too diligent or whatever the it is, too obsessive. Um they are always going to be seen. It's like a rich person complaining about how complex it is to file their taxes. It's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, whatever. But look at all of the good stuff that came along for the ride with you. Um, so yeah, I just think about like the hard work pill uh as a reliable route to maybe most people improving their lives and maybe some other portion of people also improving their lives, but probably not the cohort of people that regularly listen to hard work content. You know what I mean? It's like the those anti- uh sexual assault campaigns that are saying like no means no. It's like hey the guys that didn't take no for no aren't going to be stopped by that and the dudes that never needed to be reminded that no meant no are going to be terrified. Yeah. They also don't go to colloquia on college campuses usually. Yeah. Voluntarily. What do you think about that sort of conversation about hard work and stuff? I think you're hitting on a lot of really really sharp points that um have been a mini low-key frustration of mine. The kind of frustration that you know, you watch a real with someone, you're like, "Ah, I wish they said that differently, which is so stupid because like everyone says [ __ ] differently. Everyone's got a grain of wisdom." And there's a way to see almost all advice in a very positive light and a way to see it in a negative light. It really depends on context. But I'm not just like saying, "Oh, it all all just depends." And then I sit here waiting more questions. uh much much uh more relevant thing to say here. Hard work is an undefinable thing. There's no such thing as hard. Um so I can give Yeah, there is cogent. My doctor says soon we'll find it with enough pills. He says shame is what's keeping me from being but he also said I should be ashamed of the kind of stuff that I'm into. So um for whatever task you have ahead of you that you're trying to work at, there are two ways to conceive of work. One, enough work that will complete the task. Two, enough work that will overwhelm your ability to continue to work productively. That is the functional technical definition in context of what hard work means. If you finished an engineering project and someone's yelling at you about hard work, you're like, "Dude, what the hell is wrong with you? It's done. M there's no more hard work to be done. If you are being yelled at about hard work, but you can't even read numbers anymore on the computer screen, hard work's not what you need. Relaxation is what you need. So we can also see it on a spectrum quality. Normally distributed little bell curve. Most people work pretty [ __ ] hard, but maybe not super hard. And you know what? That's probably really good because then they regularly recover and come back and work again. There are people on the other end of the distribution, typically people of low trade conscientiousness as they currently express it or with a decent genetic basis, usually some 50/50. Hard work is either something they don't give a [ __ ] about or something they know exists in the ether and they hate doing or as you move a little bit up in conscientiousness but still on the low end know they should be doing more of it and feel a little guilty about it but they're like ah those people need like if you could pull the hormosi essence out in a syringe and pull out the Gogggins essence and the Jaco essence you need [ __ ] need that shot to the arm. arm. Shut up and do [ __ ] Uh my friends, um what is it? Dr. Melissa Davis had a poster in her room that what does it say? Uh no one cares. Work harder. They need that [ __ ] big time cuz there's lots of people that just objectively are not working hard enough and they're not having trouble recovering. They're just having trouble showing up and doing the thing. They to them that kind of advice, gogggins and etc. That's the best advice. They know that they need to do it, but they're insufficiently able to do it. For sure. For sure. And they might not even need to know that. Like, I want to be rich. I want to be bred it up. I watch some Alex Forzi videos, see $100 million. I want to get on that level. And this mother 95% of the time is like, you need to shut up and need to work. I need to grind. You're like, God, god damn it. I thought there was some kind of easy scheme for this, but apparently I just have to show up. People need to hear that. And it's good that they're hearing that, and it's great that all these guys are out there talking that [ __ ] Amazing. But un unfortunately the kind of people that are the biggest consumers of that kind of content sometimes tend to be people who like preaching to the choir effect times 10 they're it's confirmation bias confirmation bias confirming they're already doing things but but because they have high conscientiousness they also have an inbuilt high guilt that they're not doing enough maximum Judaism I call it you like get some cross between like uh like you know Asian student and Jew and it explodes into like I could be working harder like like you know I permanently exist in this realm and my wife is Asian so all we do are like god are we doing enough and then we have to like wind up use your anxieties oh my god yeah so when those people hear you need to work harder they approximately are at risk of overdoing it and overdoing it means you either have a bad time because you're working so hard all the time you're exhausted You get sick more often. You're not as productive. Period time and you're not enjoying it. You're literally you're having a bad time. You're not having a good time. Which high conscientious people don't really give a [ __ ] If you tell them you're not enjoying it, they're like, "Awesome. I want to suffer more." You're like, "No, no, no." No. Joy, fun, right? Uh, and there's a way in which productivity can be super fun and that's the best way to do it. They also the other thing to folks that are listening are super conscientious. Um, fatigue of the psychological kind from working too much even at your desk. One of the first victims of high fatigue is creativity. Now, you can still enter numbers in a spreadsheet just fine, but if you have to be creative, if you have to be mindful, if you've come up novel solutions, you had better be fresh. And fresh means you need to chill. And those people don't want to chill. I don't want to chill. I just want to work all day. And if they get me, if the corner finds me and takes a picture of me dead at my desk with a spreadsheet and the hypertrophy app, pseudo code up, I want a picture of that on the internet. I died in honor of doing what I loved. Yeah. Loved. Sure. it was compelled to do, loved and compelled to do. But those kinds of people do not need to hear more of that work is better type of [ __ ] And I don't mean to say that the people putting out that content are you're doing a disservice like you should be you shouldn't be platforming. Shut up. Those people just have to like listen to that [ __ ] and be like, "Yo, those are wise words for someone else in their own time and for when I need to turn it on." Yeah. Right. But not when I need to turn it off. There was a there was a trend a while ago which I really wish had continued which was rest harder than me. So it was like a rest day flex. Yeah. And it was uh showing how low someone's step count was. Uh looking at how many hours of Netflix that they you know like this sort of [ __ ] And uh I thought that was that was like that was cool. Unfortunately again because there is this association between hard work and outcomes that you get and reliably hard work induces better success even if it is at the to a point most people will never reach that point and for them telling them hard work is good is good. It's a good thing. But for the people who are most interested in really indexing on hard work they maybe as often need to hear like hard work has to be balanced with recovery. The way my wife and I see it was we consider ourselves professional work athletes. Like we're workaholics, full send. But also like we're trying to approach it from a sport science lens. And the way we justify our like chilling on the weekends or taking a vacation cuz we get mega guilt about the [ __ ] Like holy [ __ ] You take my wife and I away from work for three or four days, we start to be like, "Oh my god, like I don't even know who I am anymore. Why do I deserve any of the things I have?" Like I'll use my card to buy some nice dinner and I'm like, "Where did that money even come from? I don't do anything." Um, those kinds of folks really benefit from hearing, "Hey, you need to chill." But also, if you take on the professional work athlete mindset, the number one thing in your life can be working hard and producing valuable things for other people. Yes. Career. Yes. But because you're a professional work athlete, if Michael Jordan likes basketball a whole lot and he trains so much his arm starts to hurt, he's no good for the Chicago Bulls anymore. You're a professional work work athlete. You're a machine that's number one. Like you're the number one engineer at your firm. You're that guy and it's awesome. In order to be that guy next week and the week after and the week after, you had better Friday night better come and you had better switch the off and chill, chill, chill. And people be like, "What are you doing Sunday?" You're like, "Dude, I'm smoking blunts and eating Chinese takeout food." And they're like, "Really? You don't do like extra engineering work?" Mm-m. Cuz I got to rest up. Like, rest up for what? So I can be sharp as a tack on Monday. That's cool. That's the way to think about it. There's not a fight there. It's a collaboration. You earn that recovery when you train hard and you work hard. You put it all in and then you take that recovery. Yeah. For its own sake, cuz it's fun. And those low conscientious people, you don't need to convince them of that cuz they're like really good at that anyway. For high conscientious type A people, you got to see your recovery as this is medicine for me so that I can heal and go back to work and be my best. So even if work is your number one organizing principle of life, rest and relaxation recovery is critical to see it as that thing that allows it to it's like can you imagine you get to like a fuel pump for your Formula 1 car and the pit crew guy's like I'm not going to fill it up. You're like but I have 30 more laps. He's like do it on fumes. You're hardcore. You're like sorry what I don't understand physics that well maybe. So like you have to support the system when you pit. let everything get recovered and then go out and run laps again. Talk to me about heart rate and the overthinking BS of that for recovery. There's a bunch of different types of metrics you can do with heart rate. You can do heart rate variability. You can do average heart rate. You can do resting heart rate. So on and so forth. They're super valuable, but they tend to have a degree of randomness built in and a degree of various events in your life will interfere with them so much that if you look at these things in isolation and you plan your training around them, they could be a lot of noise and not a lot of signal. And if your heart rate variability happens to be off the charts and your app says, "Hey, listen. You might be overreached." Check in with your other factors. What's my desire to train like? How has my physical preparedness? How has my training been? How's my sleep? If everything's Gucci, but your heart rate variability is a bit weird, don't worry about it. Some people, very metricked people, very logical people, they want a number, ideally one to tell them the thing, and then I do the thing based on the number. And I wish heart rate scores were that, but they're not. Similar things applies to sleep scores on those apps you have. You put the phone in the bed, then gives you a sleep score. That's a valuable piece of information, but it is not a standalone thing of information. Why do I say that? Because people come to us for RP, for coaching, and all this stuff. They just want to inundate you with data. They're like, "Well, my heart rate's been XYZ." And we're like, "Ch, chill, chill, chill. That's cool." Well, that's absolutely critical. We need that information. Let's talk about other stuff. And it turns out while they're really numbers focused on heart rate, they couldn't tell you what their calories or macros were. They couldn't tell you how many arguments they got into with their kids and their wife. And that [ __ ] matters like 100,000 times more than what the your heart rate is. The other thing about heart rate is it tends to be a lagging indicator versus a leading indicator in many cases. So like once you have the flu, your heart rate variability is all you're like, "Oh, I'm sick. I should be sick. Oh, I am sick." But if it's like before you get sick, you might be golden and then you get sick, then your heart rate tells you you're up. So another thing is a lot of these metrics were designed for and work well for teams. So, if you have like um 18 gymnasts on your team and their average heart rate [ __ ] is starting to go south, pull the team uh recovery. Well, because you basically got a large end sample of what you're doing 100% and they all get roughly the same training. So, you pull everyone out. Uh but if you're doing it on a onetoone individual basis, we're eventually going to get to really finely metric things like this. And heart rate variability and heart rate scores are really good. They're just not perfect. And I think the reason I put that on there is people think like this is the one number I followed. There's more to it than that. Stretching for recovery. Yes. I just don't have any idea what any of those have to do with each other. I think stretching can be a form of light exercise. So it can speed up the recovery process if it replaces hard exercise. But adding stretching on top of your hard exercise doesn't help you recover. Stretching physically uh rearranges some tissues. it causes damage to various connective structures inside your muscle and outside and so they actually um need more recovery. If you stretch sufficiently difficult to engage a response where you're going to be more flexible after it requires recovery for that. So stretching feels good and if it feels good and it really relaxes you some light relaxing stretching like I have friends who like will do weed and then stretch and they love it. I get right for sure but like you can tell they're relaxing. They're not like stretching and [ __ ] for people the stretching is difficult and annoying. [ __ ] is not recovering you from anything. I've heard that there's different buckets of people some of whom get a lot of pleasure from is it the muscle spindle response the stretch the stretch response. I think I'm one of those people uh if I do yin yoga, you know, I lie down for 20 minutes and I do some bird dog or whatever it is, like I'm like, "Ah, this feels nice." Like it just feels like it's nice. It feels good to me for sure, but not for everybody. Not for everyone. Also, not for super intense periods and correct. Yeah. We just reviewed, it'll be out in a few weeks, but we reviewed or maybe it's out now already depending on when people catch this. We're reviewing a David Gogggins for the exercise scientist Friday show on the RP Strength channel. Great. I can't wait to see that. Yeah. Uh, and so like he says that he like stretches for 2 or 3 hours every night. And I'm like, to me, I'm just I I what I said on the channel is like unless you're like an Olympic level gymnast level of flexibility requisite, but you don't actually train gymnastics, so you have no flexibility. That's the amount of time you would need to stretch. Like if I was like, "Hey, Chris, I need to be able to have my toes in full splits touch my asshole." The other way around, yeah, you're going to need like 2 hours of stretching a day for that [ __ ] then ain't nothing two hours of stretching is going to do for you other than like spend two hours of your time doing something that if it's not psychologically relaxing for you is physically disrupting systems and that would require its own recovery. So stretching is not analogous to recovery. Stretching is stretching and if light gentle stretching in a certain serene mood with the yoga music on if that helps you mous bless you that's awesome. But if you think like okay I need to recover what science say stretching I got to start stretching new start stretching that ain't it. That's not going to do it. What does the evidence say about hot and cold therapy, saunas, cold plunges, and the like? Yeah, it's really difficult to measure recovery outside of just performance. And the performance data is mostly like eh. Um, hot and cold contrast stuff can do the same thing recovery-wise that cardio after training can do. specifically cold exposure in contrast can have this cascade where they cool off your inflammatory systems. That means under the hood there's no recovery going on. Actually less uh the systems aren't getting healed, they're not getting fixed because they're not getting fixed. So the way the recovery works in the human body is if you have take on some muscle damage is the immune system infiltrates all those cells but it it brings in the kitchen sink. It's like if someone's uh house flooded and you looked at it from the outside, you might not know like but looks normal but it's up in the basement. Trust me, you could still live in the house, too. But if you have a crew come in and deflood your house, they bring that giant truck with the hose and the generators like and it's pumping out the water and they like redo some of the wood. You can't work and [ __ ] and live in that house. That's what the immune system does to your muscles when it comes in. It [ __ ] a bunch of [ __ ] up. It takes a few hours, few days to do that. What contrast math is is basically or or cold exposure, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, and exercise after you've already done exercise is basically putting up a notice at the front gate to the people that are going to drive in with the truck to take the water out of your the flooded house is telling them like, "Hey f, come back tomorrow." And they're like, now the house isn't getting any better, but if you want to work in that house later, if you're in an upstairs office and you're writing your magnum opus, you don't want the generator running. So you're like, "Come back." So you're saying that's what that stuff masks recovery. Heat and cold does not promote recovery. Not in any way that helps the tissues uh fix themselves faster. Absolutely not. There's no evidence that whatsoever. And the evidence is actually contrary to that. Uh it it it delays that process. Heat is a mixed bag. Basically still kind of unknown. It's not super clear what heat does. We know that psychologically people who enjoy heat exposure like what about the stress? They love it. Oh, they love it. if they love it. But if you have an athlete that hates the sauna, do not make them go to the sauna for recovery because sauna is good for recovery and good for stress management. No, it's good for gym and gym stress management. John hates it 100%. Like if you like jazz music and it relaxes you, jazz music for an hour is dope. If you hate jazz music, what the hell am I going to put you in a room and make you listen to music you don't like? That's like hell. That's like some kind of modern corporate version of hell. So all of that stuff, contrast, cold, plunges and all that [ __ ] Uh it doesn't do recovery. It does masking. It does a reduction of the inflammatory process. Correct. But the inflammatory process is actually what does the recovery just takes time. The best thing if you have sore muscles, sleep, eat, chill the out, and wait. Then the sore muscles aren't sore. Now they're bigger and stronger. If you take a shitload of NSAIDs and do a bunch of cold plunges, yeah, you'll feel much better very soon, but you didn't grow any muscle. And these all things are cold and insens are confirmed to reduce the amount of muscle growth you get. So these are masking things. They're not helping you recover. I think when most people think recovery, they're thinking of like that futuristic machine in those like sci-fi movies where you like the back tank and Star Wars. You get in Dragon Ball Z, it's some kind of chemicals get in little nano machines and you come out, you're actually healed and fixed. Uh cold, heat, etc. They don't do that. They just don't. You mentioned NSAIDs, maybe a little bit extreme, but what about recovery supplements? I'm aware of no supplements that you can qualify as recovery supplements unless they're a shake of carbohydrates plus high quality protein. And then there's just food, but delivered in a different system that may be more convenient. There are no recovery supplements that I know of. Creatine sort of, but if you regularly take it, you just keep taking it and it recovers your creatine phosphate stores. as water is a recovery. Water is one hell of the electrolytes you take over. Yeah. I would say maybe not wholly, but 95% of the time that I see like a recovery claim on a supplement like an internal eye roll starts happening. And listen, a lot of people, and I was butth hurt about this when I was younger, a lot of people who dog on supplements and [ __ ] like that, they're just like, I'm sorry, forgive me for lack of a term, just leftists. Like they just don't like corporations. They don't like even the idea of competition or hierarchies. It's like all you need is natural food. They shut the up, Karen. Great. Thanks. You don't even like anything. You really like sports. I take supplements, bro. I take drugs. I want to win. I want to be better at sport. I'm all full on trying to become the best version of myself type of toxic male energy. I wish there was a recovery supplement that was for sure going to recover you. Now, like if you There are acute recovery supplements that work really well. You get a big old bottle of water, you drop some element into that. And if you have a jiu-jitsu, you had weight training at 2 p.m., you have jiu-jitsu at 5:00 p.m., you better down that whole goddamn thing. Eat you a bowl of cereal, get you some protein in there, that will get your jiu-jitsu going like, and you never believe 3 hours later, for sure. But healing and replenishing and all that stuff. There's just no way of saying salt, water, and food is what we just did. Y that's it. That is a recovery supplement. But it's like if you don't have any salt dynamics issues and you get enough salt in your diet, drinking an element first thing in the morning every day is well on my way to recovery. Like that's how that works. You know, when you need it, it's golden. When you don't, what you doing? Mhm. There's no magic recovery bill. Now, now if I'm being fully transparent, anabolic steroids and growth hormone are one hell of a recovery supplement, but they got their downsides, too. Insulin. Your growth, insulin, and a shitload of primabolan. Holy. And you're recovering like you wouldn't believe. Rubber and magic. Oh, yeah. Sure. Exactly. Yeah. And but you know that comes with uh that's not a supplement. Those are prescription drugs. Some of them not even available for prescription. What else is there to say or what do you want people to the type A go-getters and everybody else that's listened? What are the main things that you want them to take away from today? In case anyone asked about foam rolling and all that [ __ ] that's mostly not recovery. percussions and guns. Yeah. Like that's for pain management. Is that even for injury management? Because almost all evidence-based physios are almost unanimous on the fact that the forces required to alter tissues are like two orders of magnitude higher. Like if you got hit by a car, they'd be like, "That did something to his tendons." Anything short of that doesn't really do anything. Uh Sam Spanelli and Quinn Hen throw Adam Meakans in there and that's a [ __ ] dude. I Quinn was episode 11 on this podcast. You're going to be like 850. Uh and I think Sam Hey, remember Sam's old Instagram handle. What was it? The strength therapist. Problem with that is the problem. He used to be called the strength therapist. Problem with that is that if you do it all in lower case or without any spaces, it also spells the word the strength the rapist. Difficult difficult situation. Then changed to Dr. Sam Spanelli. What is this guy doing? He's doing the strength and the raping. Um I remember they were telling me about one of them was telling me about the um research that was done on mice. I think they ruptured the little mice's like Achilles tendons or some [ __ ] and then they use a a scraping tool and they said, "Look at this scraping tool. What they you have to dig into the research to look at the fact they were using humansized scraping tools and human level pressure on these little mice." Yeah. Two orders of magnitude. Yeah. So like basically the amount of pressure that you would need to do in order to be able to affect like real change in the tissues is so high that you'd be like ripping flesh off essentially. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. So like lifting heavy but not super heavy. Like comfortable sets of 15 is a really awesome stimulus to reconstruct your tendon. But like that's a lot of [ __ ] force throughput. No man's going to foam roll that hard. Um you need barbells for that [ __ ] you take a barbell, foam roll that [ __ ] that'll feel not so good. So, foam rolling and all the massage guns and stuff, that's for injury that's for pain management, not even injury management. So, you have a knee that feels weird, you foam roll, it feels better, you squat, God bless you. That's awesome. But just there's not a lot of physical stuff going on underneath. It's mostly neurological, psychological. Uh, so that's a thing. But in in the end, it's this. Be a person who trains and works hard to get the actual results. Be mindful of your degree of fatigue. When your fatigue gets too high for you to continue performing at your best, pull back. Focus on sleeping. Always focus on good food. Focus on managing stress that you're not fritzing and fits over [ __ ] that's not going to affect your life. And especially when you pull back, reducing your workload. Get tons of relaxation, laughter with friends, physical touch, compassion and activity, so on and so forth. Dogs, dogs, Netflix, documentaries about dogs, two in one. Get all that stuff going. Lower your fatigue back down to a state from which you can platform your next big move and worker and training. And then repeat the process. If you're sleeping well and consistently, if you're eating well and consistently, if you are not stressing too much, if you're taking enough time for relaxation, then you have just the major 80 20 9010 of the whole thing sorted. You don't need to sign up for any weird courses. You don't need any weird bands to wrap around yourself. You don't need drinks or potions or pills or powders. And there's not some kind of life hack where you wake up at 4:30 in the morning that's going to get you to recover better. I'll end this with Dr. James Hoffman's famous words, "Recovery is almost always and almost everywhere about doing less rather than doing more." So cool. I really hope that um and this is largely for me selfishly, uh I really hope that a culture of this like antidote to the Taipei problem, the balance. Yes. I really hope that that starts to come back around. The problem is that uh it's way less sexy. It's not sexy at all. And it sounds like you're acceeding to laziness. Correct. Nobody needs to be told to chill out. Well, most people don't. But the very highest performers do. Correct. Uh and everybody that watches your channel and my channel, right? And they're obsessed with high performance, which they should be. It's awesome. But you got to understand that you have you operate a physical system. and to tell yourself, you know, that you had that one guy on and you had a quote from him that's on your Instagram a lot, which is super [ __ ] brilliant. It's about like, I don't ever let up on myself. I beat myself over. I work myself to the ground and maybe, just maybe, I'll give myself half an hour to breathe at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, that whole spirit energy is something people take into this situation. If you ever need some clarity on how to think about recovery, remember, not analogize, remember the reality that you are a machine. Period. And if you look a machine in the face, you look yourself in the mirror and you're [ __ ] you need to work harder. Maybe you're right. But maybe you're way on the other end of that and you need relaxation and rest and recovery cuz you're a physical machine that needs to be repaired. And think about if you assess logically like, okay, I have every single characteristic currently of overreaching. I'm not at high performance. I'm clearly exhausted, but maybe I can do more. There's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow. Promise you. I promise you. I've overtrained for a bodybuilding show. It takes months of it just ignoring. I would finish recording a video for uh YouTube channel and some other resources we have at RP. It would be like sixth video in that 3hour span. And as soon as I finished recording, Scott would start processing it and I would have a fever chill run through my body. Like like that's how far I pushed it. Like it's not even a physical effort. Beyond I would wake up every morning afraid and just completely crushed at the megalith monsters I'd have to fight that day and cuz I'm a conscientious mega whatever psychotic Jew. I was like more die here. I don't care. But nobody gives you awards for dying. You get awards for creating valuable things and looking a certain way. The other thing there is that you look at the mega day and the the huge to-do list that you've got. And after a little while, if you push yourself really really hard, you actually realize that objectively it's not that hard of a day. But the way that you the way that you have pushed yourself has got it to the stage where little things feel like big things, which makes you feel like more of a [ __ ] which was the self-fulfilling fear that you had all become a [ __ ] Maybe it's cuz I didn't work hard enough when you're back in that [ __ ] So for those kinds of times, remember this. Would you ever have a mechanic, let's say we have like an one of the ASML um microchip design machines, the microchip stamping factory. Can you imagine if one of the technicians came out and we're like, "We need more of this like lubricant oil in the machine." That the guy who heads the fab at TSMC would be like, "No, man. We got to [ __ ] push it harder." What? That guy would be like, "Okay, you need to sit down and take psychiatric medications. Someone else is in charge. Yes, let's put the oil in. We got a machine to run." It's just as ridiculous for that person to say that about a physical machine that needs recovering and fixing and healing. It's just as ridiculous for you to say that to yourself in the mirror and call yourself a [ __ ] and say, "I'm not doing enough." Do you logically really think you're not doing enough? Give me evidence. Give me your total work rate that you've been at. Give me evidence of signs of fatigue. If you still got it, [ __ ] yeah. burn that [ __ ] But if you're already afraid, if you're already exhausted, there is no pot of gold day on that rainbow. Now your job is to pull back. And it's a weird thing. Here's why it's weird, Chris. Not only are you conscientious to begin with to be doing this, pushing hard. You're in fight orflight mode. Now remember, cumulative fatigue causes more fight orflight mode. Now you're like afraid animal. Like you don't come up to a skunk that you just got out of a drain cuz it was drowning and go give your finger to it cuz like it'll bite you and [ __ ] like that. That's how you feel. So you're not instantly in the mode of like, oh, thank God it's time to relax. You're like, okay, okay, I've done enough work. Okay, I got to go relax. How does that work? It takes a little while to wind into that process process you should be getting good at because you're you're an athlete. You're a professional work athlete. Whatever it is you do, doing nothing. The skill of recovering, it's tough for some people. Work is difficult. for the kind of crazy [ __ ] that are going to listen to this and nod along. It's pulling away from work that's difficult and you have to realize that and you have to think am I the kind of person that is driven by exclusively compulsion to work like a animal but some kind of work animal you know like a leave a husky for 5 minutes and it's like ah I need to pull a sled is that you or are you a mindful person that has the overarching goal of being super productive if you're that athlete and coach to yourself if you're a strategist you know when to attack you know when to retreat when a general in war makes a strategic pullback, very few competent people are like, "Fucking [ __ ] That's not how it works." Yep. If you can see that bigger picture, then you can look top down from yourself and go, "Okay, Mike, you done enough. It's Friday, 4:30 p.m. Your brain is gone. It's time to pull back and architect your weekend in advance with activities planned out to recover and relax so you can be your best next week. That's the big picture mode. Awesome, dude. Really, really good. I really think that this is uh information that a lot of people, especially people that listen to this channel, need for sure. Uh all of your things, where should people go? Well, I have a t-shirt on to remind me. I can't read upside down, so I have no idea. Uh, RP Strength Renaissance Spurization on YouTube, RP Strength on Instagram, Dr. Mike Isertell on Instagram. And look, if you see my face, click on the real and then just go and uh, follow me from the algorithm. We'll do all the other stuff. Yeah, we talk about this kind of stuff quite often, mostly about getting jacked, getting lean. We do get into recovery every now and again, RP. Hilariously enough, most of our content on recovery is something we just have to take on the chin of the algorithm cuz people don't really know. Thousands of people still tune in, but not hundreds of thousands, more like tens. And that to me says one of two things. One, maybe more people need to hear work harder than need to hear Relax, but probably not enough people that need to hear relax are clicking on the videos. 100%. 100%. Dude, I really appreciate you. Until next time. Thanks, Chris. I love it. Thank you very much for tuning in. If you enjoyed that episode with Mike, you will love my conversation with the one and only Mr. Chris Bumstead, which is available right here.