GUEST SERIES | Dr. Andy Galpin: Maximize Recovery to Achieve Fitness & Performance Goals
03:05:05 Share

Welcome to the huberman lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and am a professor of neurobiology and optometry gy at stanford school of medicine. Today's episode is is the fifth in a six episode series on fitness, exercise and performance. And today's epo de is all about recovery, that is, how to maximize your recovery, to achieve your fitness and exercise and performance schools, and how to avoid over training doctor and the alpin. Great to be back today.

We're discussing recovery, and i'm very sad to have this discussion because as we know, despite the fact that different types of exercise can be used to trigger different types of adaptation, such as increased long distance and dance and arabic capacity strength hypothetic eta, the workouts themselves are not actually when the progress occurs, when the adaptation occurs. And this, to me, is extremely interesting, because IT parallels what we see with so called neuroplasticity, which is the nervous systems ability to change in response to experience. We sit down to learn something.

We experience something. And that is the trigger for a rewiring of the nervous system. But the actual rewiring occurs away from the experience or the learning.

So to in fitness and in exercise, recovery is where the real results actually emerge, where we get Better. So I love you to explain what recovery really is and the different types of recovery, certainly different ways to enhances recovery. And i'd also love for you to explain whether not there ways that people can become Better at recovering. Because if indeed recovery is when progress emerges, when we get Better, well, then anything that supports our recovery and gets us Better at recovering ought to increase our rate in our degree.

progress? absolutely. You nail IT in the description. What people really want is some sort of change, whether you were talking athletes or general population, this changes, uh, some sort of improvement.

And muscle function reduction and body fat higher functioning metabolite m whatever the cases. And the only way that happens is we talk about the equation of stress causes adaptation. But as you alluded to, the piece in middle is only if you can recover from IT.

And so the game we're playing here is we all agree we want more adaptation. That means we need to bring more stress in the system, but we then have to ensure that our recovery outpaces the stress input or else will no adaptation of current effect. What happens is you will actually be a negative spot and start going backwards.

And so what I would love to do is, is talk about how we've handled this. And i've had a decent amount of experience here. I was fortunate enough to do my masters degree in the laboratory of a gentleman named andy re, who was an nsc, a lifetime achievement award winner.

And he studied, in large part, recovery over training, overuse, overload in a lot of areas. In addition, i've been fortunate ough to work with individuals from high functioning ceos and executives who have little time for recovery, high job stress to athletes. In the think of the example of pitches in major ac baseball who have to recover in a matter of four days that they can pitch again at maximum velocity.

So I would love to outline some of the tools and tactics strategies that we use for all these individuals. Give you some foundation stuff and I would love to maybe actually cover some things that most people have never heard of, some stuff you may not have access to, some technologies that we use, some biomarkers um and then even whole bunch of things that are keeping with the same of your show here, cost free or or extremely low costs. So all those strategies um what i'd also like to do is cover nutrition supplementation and fuelling and hydration and things, but that's probably gonna have to be saved for an additional conversation that will do in the next episode.

yes. So we will absolutely hold a conversation about nutrition and supplementation where you can educate us about all the top gun to our stuff all the way down to the the fine details. I do have a question about recovery and is one that I think most people are familiar with themselves, which is so ness.

We think of IT as a muscle sourness, but I was trained early on in my scientific career to always questioned seemingly obvious. So couple of questions about sourness. First of all, what does so is really reflect is IT really muscle sourness.

IT feels like it's in the muscles, but what other organ systems in tissues and sell types does IT involve? And then i'm particularly interested in this concept or this experience that many of us, including myself, had, which is delayed onset muscle soreness. Why would I be that when we are less in shape, or when we perform a movement that is extremely novel to us, the source seems to arrive after a reasonable delay of maybe in a day.

Now we find the next day, but than forty eight hours later, we are exceedingly sore. And as we get more fitter, more familiar with the movement, the sona seems to arrive earlier. So I realized I just asked you about three questions or more.

First, well, what is muscle sourness at a cellular level, which sells which organ systems and so forth? What does that mean if we are sore is something I know will get into a little bit later? And why the delayed onset muscle is?

It's actually one question. So it's totally fine. You answer all, you answer all three because I would actually answer your number three, which will answer number two, which will actually answer number one.

I'd love to tell you that I set IT up a that way intentionally, but i'm just happy to hear that where I was unable to be concise, you are able to be concise ous.

We are still learning a lot about this area. It's actually really difficult to perform these studies anytime you ask a question about something like pain or so, as you're immediately talking about perception. And there is obviously a physical component to that, and there is also perception.

And so tee zing, those things out is extraordinary arly chAllenging. That said, there has been a lot of work in this area. In fact, probably you may have a show already out on pain or maybe once coming down the road.

We did an episode on pain a while ago, but it's definitely time to revisit that literature. I also have some amazing colleagues at stanford who work on pain, both from the cellular and molecular side, but also from the psychological side, about how our understanding of pain and what we believe about pain shapes the experience of pain and pain relief.

Amazing that that stuff is incredible to be important. And i'm i'm glad we flagged that and maybe we just call that good for now. They can come back later for another one years shows.

So that being said, why does that happen? Uh, twenty eight to forty eight hours after you exercise. Well, that actually should give you some clues into what's happening.

So the traditional dogma of delayed onset muscle sas is what this is called, is that IT is a result of quoting microtiter s in the muscle. And so you can start to think, I chAllenge the muscle. There are some small tears in there, and i'm feeling the result to that.

Well, in fact, that certainly does happen, and that can happen. That is not what's explaining your muscle sand. And in fact, you can be quite sore from exercise and have no measurable amount of muscle damage.

And so much like anything else, we are in this idea of pain. It's not a one to one explanation. There are multiple factors that are probably causing your perception of pain.

Muscle damage can be one of them. IT is not the only one. That is probably, in my opinion, though, this is yet to be shown definitively, probably not even the leading cause of that.

And so what's actually happening, well, the reason is taking you twenty, forty, forty eight hours is is you can actually a find various papers, uh, literary views dating back in the number of years, now the over decade, that show these wonderful curves of an flaming a an immune response. And and we don't need to necessarily go through the entire physiology now. But effectively what's happening is those things have a little bit of time delay.

And so some of those steps happen immediately, like right when the exercises there and then some of them were are delayed six to twenty four to forty eight hours um if you know a little bit about this uh physiologies, you have a combination of neutral fields and microphones and a bunch of things happening and this is a time sequence. So what happens is by the time we get to this twenty eight to forty our window now, the muscle saw is kicks, which wait a minute, if I this was a result of my muscles being torn and that happened immediately, wouldn't that pain start immediately? Will answer is that would.

And so that is your first clue that, that's not responsible for when we look at that immune response and we see that is actually peak twenty, forty, forty hours later. And then that's the same time the pain kicked in, that's calling you with the problem. So we have this immune response happening and inflation, tion and all the sun.

We start getting fluid accumulation. And now there are what are called noc setters. And you're probably very obviously are vary from me with these and these your pain or sectors. What's actually interesting, as we don't necessarily know a lot of information about how many painting recept tors are in muscle, they're not really in the bill. In fact, this is why I can perform my muscle BIOS and they don't .

really hurt in the bell of the muscle react.

We do have pressure sensors though. And so if you change the volume of the tissue, you will respond that very, very quickly. So by enhancing swelling in the actual muscle, that is immediately putting pressure on those pressure receptors, if you will, that's a signal. So what's probably happened here and I I just hate to give you another bone, but a lot of delayed on some muscle sonus is probably just a neural feedback loop rather than .

exactly muscle damage. Makes a lot sense. There's a lot of interactions between the types of neurons that control touch sensation and pain sensation in each sensation. In fact, a lot of people kind of collapse each in pain peno. You know that something is painful.

Any itches is is a familiar thing for people mosquito bites in such um and of course there is the classic gate theory of pain which people will be familiar with. And then i'll explain why i'm explaining this, which is if you you something hurts, you know you bonk your near, you stop your toe. We tend to grab that body part and trying to rub IT.

And that rubbing is not a coincidental thing IT activates a set of touch answers that that respond to kind of broad doll touch um and that actively inhibits through the release of an inhibitory or transmitter. The fibers that control the pain signal. So anytime we we rub t you know like a charly horse, our leg or we or we stub our toe and we know we wins and then we grab the home, we got like eez ing a little bit.

That's actually deactivating were partially inactivating the the pain mechanism. So the idea that a swelling response would then trigger a neural response, that they then would recruit the pain receptor response. Here are using broad bd brush strokes here to explain. This makes very good sense to me now. And only now that you've explained how this process works.

I can actually even add more to that. So if you remember how muscles work, so we have to have some sort of signal from the nervous system that has to actually go in and tell the muscle to contract. We will remember there are a few episodes ago we covered and the physiology here of what's called the motoring unit, kay.

But what I did explain to are called muscle spindle. And we have talked about proper reception in uh, an episode before well, but we never tie this picture together. So let me walk you through that really quickly and it's going to tie this loop and an a nice but so what happens is um this motor unit is is coming in from most called an alpha motor unit and that's going to be innovating your muscle fibers and that's going to tell the muscle fibers to contract.

Those are typically spread out throughout the um all all sides of the muscle in interior exterior liver. On the outside though, there is another type of muscle called a muscle spinal. Now these are non contract out, so they don't have that act in a Mason, and they don't produce force.

They are responsive. They are proper accept tive. So what that means is they sense stretch.

This is why, for example, if you were to stretching hand string and stretch, any muscle group isn't really matter or muscle. Its innate response is to fire back, to close that distance. And this is what keeps you from safe.

If you're leaning to the right, you can imagine that the example we give us, if you're you're you're standing on one foot and you start swing to the right, let's say you're standing on your right foot and this makes us easier for folks and you start swing to the right like you're going to fall on your right ear will hit the ground, the inside of your right cafe muscle will start being stretched. The outside will start being compressed, right? So they stretch on the inside of the right cafe.

Muscle will sense that stretch and they will respond by contracting that pulls you back to the middle and stop you from falling. That's proper reception. And muscle spinal and stretch and tell you to contract the way that they work is is through gamma motor neurons.

And so these are sensory things. What's happening is unlike when you tell your muscle that contract, that goes alpha to the muscle contract, these muscle spinal work such that IT is, oh, i've been stretched, send signals back to some central point, typically in the spinal court. And we don't actually want to go over up the brain.

We've got a time delay. This is why these are subconscious autonomic right is so matic, so that gamma is going to go back to the central location and then come back to the alpha motor neurons until contract. So you have those wonderful mechanism of sensing stretch going back. Well, one theory that spent put forward regarding muscle damage is that the pressure is actually being applied to those nerve endings of the muscle spenders, and that's actually responsible for the pain signal that's going back and coming up to your brain and you're registering that is pain rather than IT is actually in the the contract value units.

So the muscle fibers, that's a very intriguing idea because IT would suggest that stretching muscles in order to alleviate series might be the exact incorrect thing to do. Yeah now not saying that for for certain, i'm just building off the mechanistic logic that we've laid out here. Yeah really that you've laid out here.

There is the more effective principal based on exactly that, which is this is why not generally wide low level movement is effective at reducing cute sas because that's .

low level contraction of the muscle.

And you're going to stretch and get tissue out and you can get fluid out.

Wow, you're really .

pumping IT out of the the cell. yes.

And in our previous episode where we were talking about programming or keep using the wee. But let's be fair here where you were educating us, including me in the audience, about different structures for programing, exercise for specific adaptations. That said, other month, weak year scales. That said, we had a brief discussion about the fact that if one trains legs very hard with resistance training, some heavy squatting or dead lifting IT or and there's some sourness that often times doing some lighter cardio or um some low impact work the next day or or any number of different things that involve um not high intensity uh contractions in the muscles, but they do require contractions of the muscles that they can alleviate or ness more quickly than if one word is simply lie around and you watching .

at flicks or something yeah that's exactly right the um to go back just little bit as well. The if that's really the case um the question is like where is this inflammatory signal coming from? And while there is much to be learned there, there is a little bit of information right now suggest it's potentially coming from free radical released from the metal contra again, that may or may not hold up as more research comes, i'm not sure.

But if you remember back to our uh, conversation on endurance. So we talked about the electron transport chain in a road look metabolic regardless of whether you're not you getting energy from cytology is or carbo hydrates. Remember, they have to be finished through a robot meta lisp.

So even if you're lifting weights and you're using cards for your fuel, you have got to finish that metabolism by running IT into the modern country and performing oxide to metabolize as a result of that that electron transport chain runs. So theoretically, if free radical, which is um which are hyper reactive oxygen species, basically there are oxyde molecules that are missing electrons so that they rack to a lot of things. There are the opposite of anti oxidation, by the way, is oxide are goes with the exact protons so they can baLance the charge.

If those leak out, that and of itself is going to be a massive inflammatory signal. And that's probably what signals the cause of these neutral fields and macrophage es and kicks off this entire caste again. I I believe we need more research there. I need to look into IT maybe is more definitive than I that I know um but that's probably what's happening potentially what's happening rather that causes that cascade in signal also um what you have is this combination of, well, if that's the case, why am I not getting tremendous mental muscle damage when I do more a robot based exercise?

Well, because you don't have the mechanical tension pulling on the fibers that's actually causing damage to the cell wall that allows these free radical to escape the my contra and the soul also, that's the best we can postulate at this moment as to why those things are happening and then why. Again, low level exercise tends to enhances h even things like percussion. Um so using either instruments that put a low level of vibration in your leg or like romantic boots, so you massage all these things are generally probably helping because they're moving that stuff out a demand more specifically. So pressure comes off of those nerves, dings in the muscle spindles and allows you to stop perceiving that signal of pain despite the fact that you didn't actually regenerate tissue. And all yet .

fascinating. And I think that beautifully frames were were headed next, which is to talk about all the different modes of recovery and how to accelerate them, and perhaps even how to combine different forms of recovery in order to become Better at recovering and in doing so, make faster progress of fitness. Before we begin, i'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and researchers at stanford.

IT is also separate from doctor andy gilpin teaching and researchers at cost stay for luton. IT is, however, part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, we'd like to thank sponsors of today's podcast.

Our first sponsor is momentous, momentous. Make supplements of the absolute highest quality. The huberman lab podcast is proud to be partnering with momentous for several important reasons.

First of all, as I mentioned, their supplements are of extremely high quality. Second of all, their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations. If you're going to develop a supplementation protocol, you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations. With single ingredient formulations, you can devise the most logical and effective and cost effective supplementation regiment for your goals. In addition, moment's supplement ship internationally.

And this is, of course, important because we realized that many of the human and podcast listeners outside the united states, if you would like to try the various supplements mentioned on the huberman podcast, in particular, supplements for hormonal health, for sleep optimization, for focus, as well as a number of other things, including exercise recovery, you can go to live, momentous, built, O U S. So that live momentous dota flash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by element.

Element is an electorate drink that contains the exact ratios of the electorate. Sodium monism in plastic to optimize seller functioning for mental and physical performance, most people realize that hydration is key. We need to interest enough fluid in order to feel our best and perform our best. But what most people do not realize is that the proper function ing of our cells and nerve cells, neurons and particular, requires that sodium magazine and potash be present in the correct ratios. Now, of course, people with a hypertension and hypertension need to be careful about their sodium intake.

But what a lot of people don't realize is that if you drink caffe in, if you exercise in particular, if you're falling a very clean diet, that is not a lot of processed food, which of course, is a good thing, chances are you're not getting enough sodium, potash and magnetism to optimize mental and physical performance. Element contains a science back ratio of one thousand milligrams. That's one gram of sodium, two hundred milligrams of peasant and sixty milligrams of magnetic sim and no sugar.

If you'd like to try element, you can go to drink element. That's element t dot com slash huberman to get a free element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drink element lm nt doc com slash huberman to claim a free sample pack.

Today's episode is also brought to us by eight sleep asleep make smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I've been using an eight sleep mattress cover for about the last eight months. And IT has completely transformed my sleeping, sleeping about the same amount, but i'm sleeping far deeper.

And i'm now getting the proper ratios also, so called a rapid I movement or rem sleep and slow wave sleep, and waking up feeling far more recovered mentally and physically. The underlying mechanism for all that is very straight forward. I've talked many times before on this podcast and elsewhere about the critical relationship between sleep and body temperature. That is, in order to fall asleep at night, your body needs to drop by about one to three degrees in terms of core body temperature, and waking up involves a one to three degree increase in core body temperature.

With eight matches covers, you can adjust the temperate of your sleeping environment to be one temperature at the start of the night, a different temperature of the middle the night, and a different temperature as you approach morning, each of which can place you into the optimal stages of sleep and have you waking up feeling more refreshed than ever. If you'd like to try eight sleep, you can go to eight sleep dm slash huberman and check out their pod, recover and save one hundred and fifty dollars at check out. X currently ships in the U.

S. A, canada, united kingdom, select countries in the E. U. And australia. Again, that's easily dotcom slash huberman en to save one hundred and fifty dollars at check out. So to kick off this discussion about recovery and with the understanding that recovery is when the specific adaptations exercise actually occur, I love for you to share with us what happens or needs to happen during recovery in order for us to get Better, add anything enduring strength that's at a but also how specific types of exercise stimulus and specific types of adaptations that we trigger. So running a bit further, lifting a bit more weight, slowing the cadences of a given movement eeta, how those specific types of trigger for adaptation relate to the specific or maybe similar types of recovery that are required for us to make progress.

And one of our previous episodes, we were talking about how the harvard fatigue b really identified this idea of homeostatic, or at least sort of championed for and that's important because and all levels, physiology wants to return to homeostasis.

So what happens in terms of adaptation is you chAllenged IT to a level that I realized if IT does not make a change, IT will not be able to get back to the same level of the that's fundamentally was happening. That is recovery, that process, taking an insult, being temporary, reduced and functionality causing a change. So that now we come back and get what we often call us for performance super compensation.

All that really is doing now is bringing you to a new level of homeostasis effectively. IT is understanding, if that same insult comes again, I need to be able to make sure that that doesn't cause the same level of disruption. And so we raise the bar whether this is enhancing our ability to take the same level of mechanical tension on the muscle and not result in micro damage, whether this is being able to take the same reduction energy and not have that compromise of sleep or anything that's really fundamentally changing. So we can have a new level of homeostasis because it's presuming it's predicting that, that same insult is going to come again down the road.

I want to clarify for people that when doctor gobin says insult, well, he may actually insult me. Insult is the nerd speak terminology for some sort of damage inflicted to a tissue e system. So um he's speaking about the insult to the muscle, insult to the neuromuscular connection created by adding more rate to the bar, running a further distance, running a bit faster or or peddling faster that creates a micro o insult and insult. And now because everyone is familiar with psychological and verbal insults, you'll never forget that biological concept.

It's important we tag another thing here, which is called hormesis, one of my favor phenomenon. And IT effectively means this, that there is a dosage or toxic response to almost everything. And if you think about this in the context of such drugs, what this means is if I gave you ten milligrams of something, that IT would be OK, but if I give you ti IT would be a problem.

Eventually, if I go up and give you enough, this thing turns toxic. This is the case of everything from syn IDE, uh, where you can actually be in small. Those just in nature, in fact, is in many of the fruits that you eat.

But IT said a dosage that IT doesn't matter if a dosage is higher, though, that actually can cause problems. And if IT is high enough, if you can actually kill you. And the back end of that, though, is because you introduced this micro insult as you framed IT for me perfectly, your body will adapt to IT.

And that's really was happening with exercise adaptations. IT is a hormone tic stressor. And why that's important is if you look at the immediate responses to exercise, you see an extremely large increase in information, you see oxidative thread, you see a whole cade of a topic like all these problems could on happened.

It's like what's actually quite funny here is um as a part of my P H D, the academic portion, I had to go through the medical side of the school and so I was my psychology class was in medical so i'm the only non medical doctor in that class. My P H D some I leave my lab, I walk campus and I take physiology glass of these folks. And I died the whole time internally, because every time we would cover a new area, IT was basically the the exact same value or number in a medical settings is like, oh my god s they're going to die.

And in performance setting is like, this persons in fantastic shape is I I never still uses me to the stay obviously because it's just simple things like total blood volume, right? You cover like, okay, if you have a patient command their blood volume to six leaders, immediate get him on a diode dc of some sword because I can have a heart attack. But perfect up right.

Immediate, think that six years, years that that person superfit, because that is actually a positive adaptation of training is one of the most important, if not the most important adaptation to enterance training is enhances total blood volume. So you just store more blood in your body when you're more fit than you are less fit. So I mean, go on all all these things. Sodium concentrations per assia concentrations are like you look at these things on paper and you don't know that persons about to die because they are sixty five years old at a shape, or of that person's going to break water .

out of the marathon. This brings up a very important tangent, which is, for instance, if you going take a blood test and you are somebody who exercises very intensely, uh, with resistance training, your blood creatinine levels can be way out of range and if your physician doesn't know that you're doing certain forms of exercise, might say, well, there is a lot of muscle tissue damage occurring in your body yeah as you mentioned before, your total blood volume is is dangerously high when in fact you are far healthier and need much fitter than the person who as numbers would be arranged.

That said, obviously are um limits to these to these statements whereby you would want to be cautious and take action to eliminate a very elevated blood draining level or something of that sort. But the point you bringing up this is also one about the field of medicine, which is that many not all but many physicians don't take into consideration uh, the outside activities that people are doing. And so he becomes that kind of plug in play type type way of looking .

at blood charts. Yeah, we've done many thousand athletes bd chemistry. And if we don't use first, well, we never look at disease stuff as now we do. We take people that are healthy and try to optimize performance. And blood chemistry is one of the best tools. If you really understand what you're doing there, you can get some incredibly powerful information on a blood chemistry that actually released to work going to talk to today uh, in terms of measuring, uh, everything from acute to onic, hydration to city deprivation can identified and blood chemistry to optimization uh, improvements in nutrition supplementation, there's just a lot you get there.

Um if people interested, I feel that I would I point them to gentleman name and garner just an absolute joke or not, the wizard and blood chemistry for high performance, but you can get a ton of information from that if you understand the difference between exactly what you talked about looking for signals of increased risk of cardiovascular events twenty five years down the road verses is this the optimal value for high performance and athlete, which is what our our database in all of our software and shot does. This is only looking for those things. So i'm going to talk about some of the bio markers to look for a little bit later salla very south and blood stuff. But well, maybe say that rather conversation for down their own.

Tell me about different time scales of recovery.

sure. This is actually where was trying to answer your question for. And then I got myself way off track. But the reason I brought up the hermetic thing is if you understand that some things in the acute, say, twenty four to forty years period look terrible, it's actually fine, right? So this is a stimulate that's causing adaptation.

So the reason I brought up the medical uh exchange there is because, uh, you if you looked at the flaming ory markers and and then you mention some of them, you would see that they are highest to cute within seconds to minutes to hours after exercise. However, that's exactly the simula needed to bring them down chronically. okay.

And so chronically, meaning maybe in that moment they are elevated and then maybe they're coming down twenty four hours later and forty hours. However, if you were to compare your resting levels, say that monday before you worked out to arresting level, that monday, the week following, the week following that, what you would probably see is your baseline information goes down. And so we ve got to be really careful what we talking immediately post exercise.

Man, these markers are terrible. Maybe my recovery scores awful. That's not necessarily a bad thing because we're like looking to do is to not only change what's happening today, but we're trying to cause adaptation that may take us weeks or months to actually access. I love that you're .

highlighting this principle because one of the more obvious ones to me, now that you've said this is heart rate. Absolutely, my heart rate goes very, very hydrating exercise. And I do that fairly consistently. Even tell me consistently, my resting heart rate will actually be quite a bit lower.

That's a fantastic example. really. What you're getting out here is this concept where I think it's important to difference between adaptation and optimization. Now we hear that word and I use IT and no scientists hated, but it's a good communication to the optimization. If you're optimizing for the current moment, you're almost surely compromising the late adaptation, right?

If if how to say do the thing right now that makes you feel the absolute in the world and you are like, great. You took a nap and you need a dona. awesome.

You feel amazing. But you know, yes, causing long term issues, the same can be set on the back end. If you're never choosing things that make you Better right now, you're never actually going to see any option.

So what we're really doing, what this recovery conversation is playing this game of balancing immediate gratification with the lake gratification, and how do we identify how much to do? Now this is not, how do I use a value or a marker? Whether this is how tired I feel today, how sorry I am today, where is a score on an APP, or, uh, a tracking metric, well, this is a blood marker.

anything? And understand if that's what I need to cause the adaptations I want, a week, a month, three months from now, in the case of some of our other athletes, is even up to four years, right? We're trying to cause adaptations that will get us where we want to get in the olympics or world champions PS or wall up where we're going to be.

So that's the framework we have to think about recovery. We maybe falsely think about IT, is I need to maximized my recovery today, and you could do something like taking anti climate. Well, this is a supplementation or a drug, or maybe this is ice.

Oh, cool. That's great. That will enhance your recovery in this moment. We'll make you feel Better today, probably tomorrow. But what we know is that blocks the signal adaptation. So you're not going to get the same results, you know, for six, eight weeks or now. So when we talk about recovery, we have to understand what tool am I using and why.

And in order to do that, we have to understand what am I training for and what am I trying to maximize um if I am in middle of a season with an athlete and we are competing tomorrow, I am going to heads towards acute recovery because I have to actuate that performance right now. If I am starting the off season, i'm not hedging towards recovery. I'm actually hedging towards adaptation.

So we're not going to deploy any of these, especially things like, uh, there's evidence that accommodation invitation c, invitation e will blunt hypertrophy adaptations because they are anti inflammatory, the anti oxidant right? Other and other studies have shown maybe they don't have a in habitable effect, but they may may not. Point is consent.

You want to be careful of what you're trying to optimize for, and you have to have that forethought. That alone is gonna dictate your decision making with weather or not. Again, you get in the eyes, uh, you do that now, we will cover some tools, i'm like, massacres that are pretty fine to use. You don't have to worry about those blocking long term medication, but others you are going to .

want to be very careful about. So this principal that you've laid out for us, which is that there's a set of events that are curing exercise that trigger the adaptation and that sets in motion a number of adaptations that occur during ing recovery, but then give us the exact opposite response to what the trigger was. So go back to the heart rate example.

Um heart rate is close to maximum maximum. You do that enough times within a short you know a week or so or two weeks and your resting heart rate goes down. As I recall a few episodes ago, you said that your maximum heart rate doesn't really change that much.

That correct? Yes, okay. But your resting heart rate can go down quite a bit. yeah.

Is that a general theme? Meaning, do we have a more less set upper limit or ceiling for things like inflaming markers for heart rate, maybe even things like stress? And what we do when we deliberately trigger stress or a dramatic increase in heart rate or dramatic increase in inflammatory markers is that we are lowering the floor but that the ceiling remains the same.

It's very dependent upon the market. So in the case of maximum heart rate, IT will not change with the exception of one thing, which is age. Age brings up down.

Training will not change IT up in most circumstances. If you look at something like an a flam gal response, I suppose theoretically, ally, there is a ceiling, the one not aware of IT. I can tell you right now, looking at blood markers that things like create in kindness.

So remember the conversation about meta lem, and well, that we use fossil creating as one of our primary fuel sources for explosive exercise. Well, if we're using forceful creating um this creating kindly, remember, kinds are enzymes that that functioned to break things down for the most part. So creating kinds is the enzi you used to break down creating when you do that a lot, then that creating kindness gets out of muscle and keeps into the blood.

My old global is actually another fantastic marker. By the way, mile global is, if you think about hemoglobin, being in blood is the molecule that Carries auction around when it's in the muscle tissue. And it's mile globe.

And mile, meaning muscle, and the same globulin thing. So there's a bunch of markers you can look at muscle breakdown. And one of things that you can see is a creating kindest level that's elevated after say, um one boat of exercise and you might IT IT might be up in five or six bold.

Um i've actually seen this number in offence of line in the nfl be something like five hundred plus fold. So even within just one categories, that that that number can get extraordinary nearly high. And if you know this is actually one is important point here if you're paying attention to any mechanistic research you're use, you're using that to inform your decision making.

You have to be extraordinary arly careful of magnus de. And what I mean by that is if I were to be running a western lot looking at a signal protein um animal, so the this activation of this protein turn on one hundred biogenesis, and I saw that whatever intervention we gave IT was an nutrition thing or a drug or exercise, and I saw that that signal protein increased by twenty percent. I would basically asking that to be totally physiologically irrelevant because in order for that to be important, IT totally depends the market you're looking at.

But some markers I might need to see four, five, six hundred full increase before. I know that, that will actually be enough to be what we call physiological relevant. Others, if they're up one or two percent, that is relevant.

And so you really want to be careful when you either reading papers or looking at social media stuff. If people are just talking about this marker increase this much IT may not matter IT may be totally irrelevant physiologically. And so you have to that is also what you wonder like how to help the all these people.

Well, that's how they can trick you a little bit intentionally. You're not could be just they're trying with their best, but they don't really understand that really enough. And so that's an important point to pay attention you.

So to answer your question again, full in IT would be hard to determine if there is truly a maximum level. Some things don't want to move like blood bh IT doesn't really want to have the range that you're going to move from is you know like six point and eighty seven point four. And if you get up to like seven point nine, like you're probably a big, big, big trouble. All the things in can go up five hundred, five thousand fold. And so the markers will really determine that answer.

Well, at some point in the future, i'd love to continue this discussion around the topic of stress specifically um and maybe we will get into that little bit later today when we get into the use of deliberate cold exposure because that certainly has effects related directly the temperature on the tissue, but it's certainly has mental effects in terms of raising one's level.

Perceived pain is fun.

So some people love IT, and some people love IT for the feeling they get during IT deliberate called exposure. Some people only like IT for the feeling that they get after IT. Not unlike exercise, I love to train.

I love exercise, but I know many people who they low the exercise, but they love the feeling afterward. So this will be a thing that we will come back to. Thank you for indulging my interest in that at semi tangent, I think it's a relevant tangent. If there is such a thing, we cannot return us to the different time scales here and modes of recovery because I think are headed is how to get Better at recovery.

Yep, let's talk about the tools. Let's talk about what the measure identify for all four of these distinct levels. So level one is we call overload.

And just very quickly, what that means is I didn't work out today. The sign and symptom of overload is your fatigue. Acute performance is down. So I worked out hard right now if I were to go to try to do a maximum effort, I would be reduced in my ability.

The recovery period for a cute overload is minutes to days, right? That's generally we call a cute overall, and that's what we're looking for, right? So we system should theoretically ally see that hormel dresser come back and response come back, bigger, Better, more efficient than such a, if you were to continue training in that state, like most of us do and say, I did to work out today, I had a little bit acute overload going to work out again tomorrow, more cute overload going to work out the next day, little more acute te overload, even if you took a day in between, its that doesn't matter, right? You just continue these acute belts of insult, then you're going to be pushing into the absolute golden target, which is what we call functional overreaching.

So you have overreached what you can currently do. And IT results in a functional outcome. And what we mean functional here is performance is enhanced.

And again, performance being whatever you dem IT to be, your stronger, you enhance muscle size. Your military has improved. You, whatever the thing is, is not just a physical performance. Think right. Amazing recovery time for functional overreaching is typically a few days to maybe even a week or so.

And so typically what we see happen is prior to a competition, individuals will do what we call IT tapirs, which is reduced training volume for some short of here the time. And the reason they do that is to, again, actualize is the race. We here is here, the adaptations.

And so you worked hard for six weeks, and you therefore ally the workout you did three, four, five, six weeks ago. Once you allow the system to recover, will be actualized, which means your performance will be enhanced here. So functional overreaching is the golden target OK.

If you were to be at the point of functional over reaching. And you continue to train. So IT intensified, whether this is through intensity, this through volume or really, as you said earlier, you had something holding back your recovery.

IT doesn't really matter, right? It's sort of two sides at the same point. Then you would move in what we call non functional overreaching.

So you've overreached again. But now IT is non functional as thing you did not see a positive benefit once recovery allowed. This typically means you have weeks.

IT takes weeks to come back from and you basically just get back to baseline. And this is where a lot of folks are who end up in this vicious cycle. And so you're like, man, i'm not getting the results I want.

I'm going to train harder. I'm not getting results that you want. I'm going to train harder and harder. But because you recovery isn't improved, you just end up in the same spots, then you train more and you end up the same way and you end up then just you're blowing up, quitting and you're knocking or you want.

If you were to continue past that point, you may actually be in what we actually call over training. And that typically is uh considered to be overtrained if IT takes months to recover from. So most people think they are overtrained are really not you're just probably non functionally overreached.

And again, classic distinction is if you took three or four days, often you fall Better. You weren't probably, quote, quote, over training. You will probably just in this area of non functional reaching, you need a little bit of a backup.

If you and this has been the case, i've had to happen with jimnez h and a cheerleader and smaller things where they take a month off, and we're barely seeing them start to come back to the baseline numbers in any number of areas, move desire to train, testosterone, courters, all ratios, ball markers in a number of areas, physical performance, vertical jump pie, like all these things, they just start to get back to basic. So over true, over training is actually quite rare. Nonfunctional over reaching is much more common, and IT is a shorter time for me.

So when we talk about recovery, those are the four pieces that were really thinking about. And so if you are concerned about all i'm super sore, how do I get less sore? How do I either not be a sore next time I do the same workout or i'm super sorer now? How do I recover? Those are playing in that first category of overload.

And we can certainly talk about how to figure that out, but the quick answer is you gotto go back to our previous episodes and just pay attention to the volume intensity recommendations. If you're getting significantly uh, more damage or fatigue in a workout, you probably have increased your volume too too quickly or something else is drag your stress bucket down. But generally this is a problem of training.

Um you either didn't warm up sufficiently, your fueling strategy is off, which will talk about in the next episode or you violated one of our principles of increasing intensity volume so too quickly um if it's past that and you're get into the stage where just like i'm feeling beat up all the time, my energy is going down. I just not feeling like i'm recovered. Now we're in this overreaching state so that the story had kind of tell her always is A A few years ago I was working and um my wife and tshe was in the garage training and i'm doing something like SHE comes stumbling and he has a look on her eyes. They're like giant her eyes les or giant she's suck warbling.

She's like, I have up I was like, what you mean you like after up and use to like I read the program wrong and she's like to ming, what do you do? What like you supposed be doing? Ten sets of three every minute on the minute, and he did three at to ten every minute on the minute.

And he was absolutely right. He couldn't move for a few hours afterwards and then for days SHE. Just like you have to handle the kids like I can't get out, but I can so that was a assist example of all right? Like we don't need to fix recovery here, you're just a dummy and you did the train wait too hard, too long like this is not we don't have a problem here.

So if it's A A situation like that is generally you just the program was way off. If it's constantly happening, what you just like, man, like for whatever reason every once a while and getting really sore or having a really bad performance in these workouts, then we need to go to our other stress bucket, take a look at our alathea LOL stacie and get figured out what's happening there. So those are the easy ways to flag acute overload problems.

I like to a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a vitamin, mineral, probiotic and adapted and drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking ethos that Greens daily since two thousand and twelve.

So i'm delighted that the response, or of this podd cast reason I started taking athletic Greens, and the reason I still take athletic Greens once or twice a day, is that IT helps me, me all of my foundation. Tional nutritional needs, that is, IT covers my vitamins, my minerals, and the probiotics are especially important to me. Athol Greens also contains adapter genes, which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work or just general life.

If you like to try athletic Greens, you can go to athletic Greens dock com slash huberman to claim a special offer. They will give you five free travel packs, and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin d 3k two again。 If you like to try athletic Greens, go to athletic Greens stock com slash huberman to claim the special offer. I'm happy that you pointed out the distinction between functional, over reaching, over training and being overtrained. One common mistake that people make him think about biology generally, is that they think in terms of nouns and adjective.

and not verbs.

amaze. Biology is a collection of processing or processes, depending on who you are and where you live in, who you trained with. Being overtrained is a state that, in many ways, is an additive error overtrained.

I'm overtrained like saying, you know, i'm an american. I know checkless of in whatever IT happens to be right. And in many ways, people do start to associate an identity, at least transient identity. And they started making all sorts of decisions that sounds like about what's worth of verbs.

They will and will not engage, whether I think if we look at things as processes and we assign verbs to them, then we can say, okay, i'm functionally overreaching or i'm truly over training, which just a matter of degrees, right, right? Or under training for that matter. I'm not i'm reaching, but i'm not functionally reaching.

It's just it's just performance. And you know, just as with the nervous system won't change unless you give me a reason to this is a reason why if you can perform something perfectly or speak a language privately, there's there's no revering of the nervous system. This myth that we've all been told that every experience requires your nova system, it's different now than IT was two seconds to a that's that's a ridiculous, illogical statement. We know that's not true. If your ervy system can perform something, IT has no reason to change and IT want the same way.

This is why you have to progressive the overload. You have to learn something new or chAllenge your muse do something new. It's same thing.

So in the example that you gave, uh, with your wife doing this work out, that turned out to be far more strange ous SHE had functionally overreach. In some sense he might have been over training or heading in the direction of over training, but the mistake would be to assume that he was overtrained right as I kind of it's almost becomes a bit of a state or a character assignment um as opposed to a verb.

In any case, there's no perfect way describe we're doing about nouns and additives and we're also talking about verbs, but I think the verbs are really anchor down in processes and things that we do, actions that we can take. And so if I may, i'd like you just highlight this, this idea of shifting one thinking towards verb actions, rather than labels on the state that we happen to be in or the person that we happen to be, right? Sometimes that even does IT become kind of character logical, the way that people describe IT. And, uh so I have to believe that there is something called over training that over training is real, in other words, but that we don't ever really know if we're overtrained.

You know .

there's no no it's not like a red flag you know shoots up out of your shoulder and say I am over trained you know it's um so in doing so, I hope that we can start thinking about some of the verbs, the actions that we can all take in order to ensure that we stimulate progressive overload one way another and at the same time that we don't fall into these bins of character assignment where suddenly we decide that we need to do x like take a month off or something like that because I am beginning to realize um from our discussion that that's exactly the wrong way to go.

Those are fantastic points. I want want to make sure IT is clear that there is no clinical diagnoses for over training. There are no standards. There's no test or a blood panel you can pull that would actually identify you in that state. So you're your distinction here, Andrew, of these are verbs and rather than none is is so wonderful because that is exactly the case.

The only way we could really come retroactively diagnose one with over training as if again, we had you did weeks a recovery and you only got back to baseline. So we can't do IT in the moment. I can't take a single test.

Um there's no subjective marker. Anything as you are over training IT is simply you are probably over training and we need to reverse that quickly or in the case of the step before you are probably funny, functionally overreaching. And if you continue to do this, you will probably enter into this stage, uh, where this is you're over training and we need to come back. So that's an important thing to let people know is there's no one thing we can actually point to that says you are here. You are not a known, this is a verb.

So what are some tools that we can use to enhance our recovery?

Yes, let's start off with that. A cute overload face. So in other words, I just did to work out and i'm feeling awful, or I just did, one, two days is gone on. Super soul.

How do I get rid of that right now? Well, there's a couple of things you can do immediately after your workout and then others that may be more actionable a day later or two days later and will discover. Handful them will do some nutrition and addiction and implementation in the next episode.

I'm going to cover everything else, not in a category right now. So a couple of things. Number one, ah you can actually start kick start the recovery process at the end of your current training session.

And I guess I should say this way, I strongly suggest you start this recovery process immediately after the workout. You mentioned earlier about this idea of you gotta a get a really high peek of stress to cause adaptation, but I actually didn't explain that correctly. Because what has to happen as you need that extremely high peak, but you think you have to be met with an extremely sharp recovery back down.

And so, you know, you ve talked about this before and some of your neuroplasticity stuff in in terms of what has to happen that causes the insult. And then you immediately need to be able to recover to make sure that that causes changes in the same thing happens here. So we need a really sharp and high and filamentary response.

And then if you do not meet IT with an immediate recovery period, the signal won't be there to maximized your results. So what's that mean? You can actually do a couple of things.

Number one is actually listening the slow pace music. There is evidence to suggest fast pace music may a slow down in your recovery. And slow pace would actually hand IT.

So if you just change from, you know, your maximum, get you up in a going music during the workout to a slower, lower cats, that will help you kick start the idea. Have a similar note. You can also use, we call down regulation breathing. You can do them in conjunction, or one or the other, whichever is up to you.

So my personal favorite method here is somewhere between three to ten minutes of finishing your training session, laying down, uh, i'd like to be in a position you could certainly do the lowest position, but I think ying in your back is generally more effective. Person al preference are no science. Um I like the eyes being covered, getting into this dark, quiet sort of area and then just breathing through your nose.

In a structured patents, there's a lot of different things you can try. An easy example is just box breathing, so and you can imagine box having four squares. So what you're going to do is inhale for summer between three to eight seconds. And whatever number you choose, you keep that same temple.

And so let's say you choose to do a five second in hill that's going to take you up vertically and then horizontal tally for your box is a five second hold and then a five second next hail and then a five second hole. And you just need to repeat that for the time domain. I typically honestly don't use a timer.

You will actually notice a lot of people will like fall asleep or get really close to falling asleep. And this period you can do a triangle version of that where you do an inhale, hold x hail and then go right back in your in hail or I but there's a bunch of different tricks you can try here. You need to play around and see you and actually works best for you.

Um ten minutes is probably Better. But if you can just at least give me three that work. If you really, really resistant, you can actually do that just in the shower. And so if you're going to find your work, I get in the shower again, disclosure ize in the shower, give me three minutes of focused relaxation, breathing, and that will accelerate through a recovery process.

I love IT, and I particularly love IT because my laboratory works on stress and respiring a breathing and the interactions between the two. And I just mention a result that was just accepted for publication, so should be out by ten thirty. Thank you. Uh, this is the beautiful work of, uh, not me directly, although he took place in my labor as we know it's the student to post heavy lifting of doctor bomb on in lab a phenomenal researcher that shows that a short period of five minutes of box breathing of exactly the type that you described or cyclic sign so two inhales followed by an extended excel alonger empty ideally that inhales are done with the nose.

The exalts are done h through the mouth, although IT could all be done through the nose um or the mouth for that matter, but probably nose nose for inhale, mouth for excel or uh in in health through the nose and and health through the nose. Sick like sign as we refer to done for five months, both of those produce very significant decreases. And resting heart rate the over time will increase things like hard rate variability and so on and so forth. Um so provided that there are extended x sales, that seems like the coming response and the reduction in overall stress occurs. The only thing that really senses in the other direction would be something like cyclic I per ventilation. You ve that um and interestingly, uh when we had people just do five minutes of meditation which during which of course they are breathing, but they're just allowing their breathing to progress however IT happens to be in that moment um or moments across the five minutes uh there were reductions in the same sorts of markers of stress that I describe but not as significant as breathing so I love the blocks breathing tool post workout um and there's some other other alternative there too I just mentioned but I think people greatly underestimate the potency of breathing for shifting one's nervous system function away from a stress or if one wants tored more alerting stress.

I actually have a couple questions for you on that. I think the audience would appreciate this. A how long were those boxes? Does that just uses .

like the great question. So we use the carbon dioxide tolerance test in order for people to determine how long the different sides of the box should be a new cover. Carbon oxy previous episode, now we can provide a link to that clip um in the shower note captions. But as you point out, to involve a long extended excel to lungs empty, and of course people could sit with lungs empty, but uh, they have to accurately faithful fully, as we say, report how long IT took them to empty their long. We use that as as engaged.

Typically if IT takes, if people go to long as empty in twenty seconds or less, I believe I have to go back to the paper and look but I believe that the um duration for each of the sides of the boxes as were somewhere between two and three seconds, if they had a uh C O two discard time of anywhere from uh twenty seconds up to about forty forty five seconds because decides to the box where I believe between four and six seconds. And then for people longer than who could discard their air over a period of a minute um or more, we use a uh box duration that is in hell hold x hal holds duration of somewhere between I believe IT was um seven or maybe he was eight and as long as eleven or twelve seconds you're kind of free divertisements you can really do this um who are really well trained for this sort of thing. The I don't call me exactly on those numbers, but that that was approximate .

those line up exactly with what we've done. So I believe it's it's going to be close within seconds of non important distinction is going to be close to know. So that's great. And that was that took them what six weeks.

So this study was done over the period of a month and then when they were swapped into a new pattern of breathing condition or meditation condition, and this was all done in in the natural world, as we say, they were wearing woop bands that we we're getting hard rate, Harry, very beauty, sleep data, subjective data about mood at at also a lot of measures. But this was more than one hundred subjects out in the wild of life.

And we tried as best we could attract life stress events and exercise and things like that, that was harder to control outside the laboratory. Really, all those results speak to exactly what you're describing here, which is deliberate aspiration that involves controlled holds. And x sales really has a dramatic and very immediate impact on reducing our levels of stress.

That's wonderful. I'm not surprised at all with your findings. And what's really interesting about that is you mentioned how the exhalation portion is primarily responsible for the downtown regulation.

And that actually goes back to our previous endless conversation, which is that in general, at rest, at non althias de increases in seo two, or the primary driver for ventilation. And so what that generally means is inhales are associated with an uptake and sympathetic state, and x hales are associated with the uptake of paris of the estate. This is generally why folks will do things like x hail and finish that x hae right before they perform a very high precision neology ical task.

So if you're going to say aim m at a target and sue, you're going to excel fully and then almost always execute that movement at the end of X, L, because that's when you in your highest Price, sympathetic state and lowest drive revenues. I have to say i'm not surprised at all you guys found that there is actually other data that point to individuals, particular after turns training, that can get back down to baseline high rate is going to be correlated with who gets the most actual result of the training. Said that if you take a bound of individuals and put them through in in dance training program, and if you measure how quickly they can get back down to baseline after each workout, in general, those folks sitter Better at that are going to see greater improvements in performance at the end of your, say, four, six or eight week training block.

And so there's a little bit of causation and correlation there that we have to untie. But I think it's enough to say, hey, if you invest these three in your case years, said he was five minutes, it's only going to enhance recovery. You have a likelihood of increasing your results from your training. And now we also have additional benefits like being able to transition more properly into our next task, going to work, going to see family, whatever the thing is. And it's it's a nice close to I ask you to be in a high sympathetic state body and I asked you to perform and be another stress I gave you recovery and now ready to transition in our next thing so that we don't take that exercise energy, if you will, into our next a task, which mayor may not want me in a sympathetic drive state. So if somebody .

is sore following a workout, either locally sore in a muscle, group of group of muscles, be in the legs or chester torso, or maybe the whole body. So as IT sometimes is the case, what are some tools that they can implement in order to accelerate the. I want to call moving out of that sourness, but it's really as we know, the alleviation of the sourness through a bunch of different processes, what are the most effective tools to push back on that series and dissipated?

Yeah, absolutely. First of all, it's not like kate. This is the truly important thing that we still hear people talk about is know your store twenty four hours later, you're got to do this thing to get the last date out there as we talked about the metabolism, uh conversation and episode that that is not the cause.

Fatigue is certainly not the cause of sorters. So not an action will tip there. But just a pet peeve of mine. When I hear people say that I stated so we can maybe in that conversation um trade gies tools here's what you can do. You can actually wear compression here that will help a little bit.

There's A A decent amount of evidence suggesting if you just want you put some title fitting close on leisure wear or compression GIF, you IT that can actually prevent a little bit of sorters from occurring. So if you're in the case of porn asia, and he realized, you just done way, wait, wait too much, you went, hung out with your bell hunting friending. You trained way too hard and you realized, all my goodness, i'm going to be very sore here you can immediately put on compression. Girl, where are that really for as long as as possible?

What are some examples of compression? Girl, i've seen people on the plane with those high, high socks.

Yes, I mean, anything that you wear compression gear for what you do for exercise? So whether these are just, you know, compression pants and leggings, the tight fitting leggings, whether this is a long sleeve shirt that's like a rh guard you would wear in judge to or surfing or something like that as long as it's tight fitting IT doesn't have to be much more than that you can wear yeah I suppose you could get the socks would be great but we'd journal just tell our athletes they would put on a long sleep compression shirts that they would wear for they are training and a long .

compression leggings that be fine can people apply these compression um garb after training and still get some of the positive effects?

Yeah I have not seen any evidence to suggest that would block adaptation. That may be the case. I am not aware of those studies if that happens. But um I certainly know that the information suggests IT enhance a little bit of most of recovery.

but ideally one knows if they are about to do a workout that could trigger a lot of sourness. Yeah and then where's compression gear of some sort to offset that? And if so, does that have to be local to the muscle groups that you're working on? The reason I asked about the socks is my understand the socks, the compression socks people on the plane is that it's going to shift the patterns of blood flow and lower legs, but all over the body. Yeah.

you're probably gonna want to focus on on the actual exercising tissue though. Actually that really a good question. I don't know the answer of what or not.

Your upper body work out only war, lower body compression gear, if that what I actually help. That's a great question that may have been done, I don't know, but I don't know the answer to that in general. We just tell people like we're we're the whole thing as much you can.

Um I actually not concerned that you wearing at during your workout, uh IT is something you could put on afterwards or even where there is a little bit of compression either day. Um we've actually did a really fun study. Uh, I collaborated with bill cramer, whose uh, sports scientists of the year word is the bill cramer award, if that gives you an education out of the university to connect cate as well as with lee Brown so two lifetime achievement awards.

wires. And we we put people on a plane in stores connected and flew them to cow safe letton. So across country flight, and some of them got to wear compression here during the flight and others did not and then they landed in california, did a training about put them back on the plane, went back to stores.

And I invited another training about when they got back there. There was a lot of data that came out of that paper. But one of things that was clear is the compression group was effective at handling some of the blood related regulation and other issues associated with uh, long flights and particular athletes forming.

So that's actually a sneaky little insider trick that i'll use a lot with. People perfect without this are travelling is just where that compression gear on the plane. So you talked about that and that sort of wrong that study to mind that as another effectives strategy.

So compression year in general as well as particularly on a plane, basically the tighter or you can get IT, the Better without obviously making your hands purple and being uncomfortable and things like that. So IT doesn't to be overly tight. Uh, anything will work and and probably help. So i'm also doing that personally anytime i'm taking a fight like that as much as I can, I just to feel a little Better when I get there.

So what are some other methods that we can use to alleviate acute sas?

Well, if we continue on the same theme, which is saying, okay, we use some sort of pressure manipulation to enhances recovery. If compression is one strategy, you can also use things like um compression boots or garments and these are nominated devices that will pump uh air outside. You can press back where there's any number of devices that will do this.

You can also use the physical hand. So this would be massage and body work really working as best we can tell on the same mechanisms, which you're effectively moving fluid in and out of the tissue as well as potentially enhancing blood flow. Uh, increase in capitalization and which is going to only get new trends s in and waste products out so you can kind of pick and juice based upon your budget, h preferences, availability, timing, things like that.

So those are all effective strategies outside of that really is the next largest category, which is now thermal. And uh and so far in this discussion, we've mentioned cold water emerging and I talked about the hyper tri section, how you would not want to do that immediately post exercise, which would be getting into cold water or nice bad if you're trying to grow muscle mass. Having said that, there is good evidence showing that cold water merge specifically is effective at reducing muscle sourness.

So IT is a fair consideration and is a classic example of how there are no free passes and physiology. Nothing is always good or always bad. It's always about what are you willing to give up. And first is what you willing to get. And the case of like cold water immersion, you maybe thinking, yeah, I might want some of hypertrophic adaptations, but if you're in that phase of training where you're actually trying to push more towards optimization in that moment rather than long term adaptation, then an ice math might be a great choice.

In the addition, if you fall into the scenario like a did and you realize like i'm just so unbelievable store, this might cost me three or four or five or six days of training IT might be worth that for you to accelerate that recovery, proceed by a couple of days so that you don't miss so much training. So it's just it's an hour. M is an equation.

What am I looking for get if i'm in season or trying to compete or if I have just done way, way, way too much exercise and I am really in significant pain, you would probably be willing to give up some small percentage of eventual moss growth after single session to get out of pain. So um all of the cold strategies, cold water merge is clearly the best approach rather than cold air or some other tactic. So a cold showers is probably not enough here.

You really do. You want to be either in moderately cold, this is maybe forty to fifty degree water for probably north of fifteen minutes, or you can be in sub forty for as little as maybe five minutes to get some of the factor. And there's been a number of studies, some sort of summarising a bunch of that kind of one rather than going .

through the point by point, the numbers you just throughout assuming or um uh very height seem seem really called to me. I uncomfortable ly called .

absolutely.

So I always recommend that people ease into IT as a protocol overall that they not immediately go to thirty five degree cold water if they have never done that before.

Um that said, once people are comfortable being uncomfortable because I always answer to the question, how cold should IT be? Exactly would you agree that it's should be very, very cold, so much so that you really, really want to get out, but that you are able to stay and safely? Whatever that value .

happens to be, you absolutely need to be safe. Having said that, we have actually in our X P T retreats put dozens, not hundreds of people at this point um immediate this sub thirty five great water, their first time ever and done in a three minutes multiple rounds uh in a session so they can handle. But you don't need to go that crazy if you don't want, you can have to play a game, right?

You you want to be really, really cold for a short on of time, or you want to be like kind of cold for a longer of time. Really the only mistake you could make is doing something like, you know, sixty five degree of water, which for the most people is not very comfortable and doing, you know, five or ten minutes not be the problem, not can be effective. So if you're like, man, thirty five is is absolutely crazy and you wanted to fifty five degree water and there's literature in that area, but it's going to say you need to probably be there somewhere almost really north of ten minutes and some of the to show you need to be there like well north of twenty to thirty minutes.

So for my money, I would rather go really, really cold and get IT done in five minutes. But um personal preference on this one you can also make a little bit round yourself. There is not nearly as much evidence, but there is some on contrast stuff.

So uh this is when you go cold, hot sort back and for there are no really good rules in terms of how much should you go, how many rounds, how long and cold, how long and hot. The hub and a couple of studies. But in obviously, those studies use numbers, but that doesn't mean those have been testing to see what are optimal.

Which is a very big different. So um you can really just kind of play that by field. What is good for recovery? You just have to be careful because you're are going to put more blood flow in the area.

And so you may walk out, there was some additional swelling, which is going going to put greater pressure on there. So you have to kind of play with the eyes personally, really like hot h for a recovery. I will feel maybe not great in that moment, but the next day I tend to feel really, really good.

In addition, if I wake up the next morning and i'm really, really hurting and and i'm super stiff, a hot bath will will help that um a quite a bit so you can play with some of those protocols. Again, you don't have to do yes, there is outs in no requirement to do so. IT is just an option if you're interested yet.

The studies of doctors anos berg, sure yeah, are not directly aimed at alleviating sodas or recovery there. More about increasing thermal capacity by a storage of Brown at opposed tissue, not the blower fat, but the stuff around the clover als and around the heart that help you generate body heat at rest and metabolism and so on.

And the numbers there that um she's come up with again have not been tested against all the possible derivations, just like with breathing, we did five minute sessions but who knows maybe a minute would have been equally effective. We just there are constraints on these source of studies, but the values that she's come up with, which seem to be good thresholds for making sure that in adaptation responses triggered by heaven, cold is IT, ends up being fifty seven minutes per week total of uncomfortable but safe heat in that kasana. And that can be all in one session, or breaking IT up into a couple of sessions on the same day or different days, and then eleven minutes per week of cold, either in one single session or multiple session.

Again, one could do more. One could break that up over, you know, multiple days, or do IT all in one day, or do IT all in one, you know, an hour in the sun. And the elements s in the colder rice first, although that seems a little bit extreme, especially for the uninitiated, but those are the numbers that have been studied. But as you point out, there are not a lot of really thoro studies examining different cold protocols according to temperature by time requirements. So there is a bit of subjective fuel require to establish a routine.

And I would actually say this is another time to reemphasize something we talked about at the beginning of our conversation, which is that pain itself is not a defined outcome. H, it's heavily influenced by your perception. And so if you don't feel like they work for you, they won't work.

If you feel like they work fantastic, they do. So it's a chAllenging field to get really objective data on. So there's always going to be a little bit .

of um subjective .

nature to some of these things. I can tell you I like totally we've used hatt cal contrast for a long time that leads some love IT some don't care for and everything in between. So it's one of those things were I never Mandate IT, of course I can Mandate anything for anyone to work with, but I never, you know, like here, you're interested.

great. You struggling this area. You want to try this, you did.

And you like that. great. You're struggling in this area.

You try that. You didn't love IT. Okay, fine. Not what we'll find other thoughts as we we will get into. There's a lot of ways to enhances recovery.

This is only one, and that hasn't even really come down to stopping the problem in the first place where we're just treating symptoms, which is first line of defense. But you really need to go back and fight out why it's happening to begin with as a solution. Um these are different and acute symptom e management tactics. One final .

point about deliberate cold exposure. I think the worth mentioning is one of the reasons the shower is effective, but not nearly as effective as cold water emersion or emerge and ice up to the neck is simply because of the reason you stayed before, which is that more showers are not going to get that cold. And I can get down, you know, into the sub forties.

Also, cold showers haven't really been studied that much. They have, but not nearly as much as emersion. And people always ask why. I just think about the chAllenges of studying cold water h exposure in the shower, where you can really control for how much of the body is covered with, not the head stays under different size, bodies is set up where as when people come into a aborted or they can get into a cold water.

And we know where the neck is, we know where the chain is, and we can make sure that people's arms and legs are underneath. But with cold, our sure you can make everyone face away or toward the shower, but it's really tRicky. And um for all the variations that they were described, that said, I would you agree that if one wants to use deliberate cold, the exposure that cold showers is Better than nothing and cold emersion in circulating cold water or ice bath is Better than a single shower yeah what .

i'd actually say if you're looking for a recovery for muscle sas, I would say cold shower is probably doing very little because you're not going to be able to get enough cold water onto any muscle besides basically your head. Um so maybe you could try a cold bath, uh, and so you at least get some surface area coverage yeah, if you want to use cold shower for all the other awesome reasons, the cold shower that's totally great.

But if you're trying to use that to recover your low back and glue from being sore from training in a good way, it's probably not going to do much that the emerge be there. You actually also hit sneaky other point, which is if you can't cat your water super cold, just make the water move. So if you have jets and stuff, you can turn on name.

Please try this and feel like OK. I can do a forty degree bath, awesome. Try sixty when the water is moving, right?

Because you break up the thermal layer Normally, you have a little thin layer water.

you're heating up.

you break that it's a whole new world, absolutely. So being very still in the cold water is actually the weaker way to o that you can make your face stoic, but make your body circulate some water around you as long as we're on this. Maybe just one more point about heat.

Ah i've certainly use sona wet sona dry sona as stem sama sona. Excuse me, ju es can work pretty well. Yeah um males, if you are looking to conceive in the sixty days following a so p baling sona or um hot to do, I do realized that IT that both those approaches do severely limit the number of motors perm substantially.

So for the people that are not trying to conceive, don't think that this works reliably enough that you could use as a form of contract action. But but for people that are trying to can leave IT really is detrimental to sperm health, right? And so for that reason, some people bring an ice back and put in on the growing or near the groin when they go in.

But um which is hard to do in a hot tub than osama. So here we're getting into the fine points um or crude points, if you will, unintended. But but the idea is that we won't want anyone to approach he his techniques and compromise the other life goals.

I certainly not allowed anywhere near these things when we were at that stage of life all or to say, but x nine and me hang and I would layer so no, for those reasons she's like you not going and you're .

not going one of stuff and right he he and sperm a relationship but it's not one that's positive for i'd like to take a brief break to access ledge, a sponsor inside tracker. Inside tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood DNA to help you Better understand your body and help you reach your health goals.

I ve long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long term health and well being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test. One issue with a lot of blood test in DNA test out there, however, is that you get information back about various levels of lipid ds and hormones metaphoric at sea, but you don't know what to do with that information. Inside tracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy.

They have a personalized platform that let you see what your specific numbers are, of course. But then also, what sorts of behavioral do and do es, what sorts of nutritional changes, what sort of of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you? If you'd like to try inside tracker, you can visit inside tracker dcom slash huberman to get twenty percent off.

Any of inside track kers plans. Again, that's inside tracker docs slash huberman to get twenty percent off. Are there ways to combine the various types of stimulus that you described for inducing recovery? You talk about breathing base tools um which while they could adjust and indeed do adjust oxygen and caring oxide ray IOS and eta. I'm guessing the major effect of those on recovery is going to be neural. It's going to be deliberate coming of the nervous system, more sympathetic based mentioned and then you talk about some movement based and touch based approaches um which will movement certainly will circulate blood but also will generate contractions of the muscles right which may be if indeed against sell speculation, if indeed some of the sort nesses due to excessive stretch or swelling at the stretch ends of the of the muscles that would make sense so movement in touch and then thermal, are there ways to combine these um that are more effective or maybe even sync?

Yeah I suppose you get throw on uh some compression government put on a neumatic compression device in sydney a while. You don't regulate your breath like that. What would we find?

Quite honest though, you probably don't need to maximize all of them. We were joking. You can probably go for a light swim while regulating your breathing and cold water.

And you get the compression from the cold water and and you'd be in a good spot. So you can certainly do that. The realities ties.

I generally look for some physical approach, and then some a holistic approach of the breath works basically. So I want breath and then something else. If you'd knock those two things out, you're a good spot.

So that could be breath while you're in thermal stress. So just controlling and doing on regular up, you have to also remember ice. Is this trusted? Now i'll actually show you some data here in a second about how that actually can and hands um systemic recovery.

Although IT won't happen in the in the eu minutes, in fact it's gona take at least thirty sixty minutes and then you will eventually see a rebound effect. But acutely is going to make you actually more sympathetic, which is going to the direction if he can do the opposite or I can actually drive you up. So it's a little bit dependent upon how you respond, what time a day um and how you're using.

So in general, I guess um combining them is if you need to um depending on what you have was available. So perhaps you don't have a sona, but you can take a hot bath, great. Maybe you have some percussion device, some tool and you can use that, but you don't have A A song.

amazing. I don't have ice about. They think so I think rather than thinking about an optimal combination of them, I would say to use a couple of the tactics based on what you have and what is easily available in your situation.

I love for you to teach us about some of the methods for a longer form recovery as IT relates to overreaching and overtraining.

Sure you want to think about those in a couple of phases face. One is to try to prevent that from happening in the first place. Uh, in terms of training load, you're going to just go back to our previous episodes where we talk give you specific instructions for how much to increase your volume and intensity per week.

Ata, another thing you can do that is do some monitoring and i'll i'll go over some different tools, some cost free ones as well as some higher tech, logical demanding ones to monitor, to see it's actually happening. And then the third approach here is, what if this is all ready occurred? A, I figured out i'm stock.

How do I get back out of that hole? So I would like to just sort a tackle this one by one in order and and talk about what's happening, what tools you can use and why are gone to work, right? So anytime we're talking about a fatigue management here, most people are aware these terms because if you have any sort of technology ah, you're probably getting some sort of reading this score or recovery score or strain depending on which APP or watch or tech you have, you have a little bit of an acute change.

If you're in the sport performance world, you might be looking at things again like load or a GPS tracking and monitoring. And really, all of IT is doing the same thing. It's trying to either one predict a problem is going to happen in the future and then placing restrictions upon you so that you don't run that situation.

The other thing is possibly doing is identifying a drop in physiology or performance and then saying we need to get you out of this whole. That's really what's happening. And so when we think of the first one, just imagine A A scenario like a biology limitation, uh, pitch count in baseball.

And what has happened there is, is individuals, no fields have looked and said, hey, what we noticed is people who throw, say, more than one hundred pitches in a game. Tennis are losing effectiveness and increased injury ate. Therefore, we're predicting the next time you go to play, if you cross that thresh hold, we started an increased risk of negative consequences.

So therefore, we're going to cap your, in this case, pitching volume at that hundred pitches per game or whatever the case. Same thing running is sea seta. So you could simply do that.

And there's actually really cool data coming out now on sport performance stuff, looking at things like I am using GPS track kers and trying to identify even position by position specific a recommendations for how much distance you should cover in a practice in a training session um so that you can say, hey, these positions don't cross this threshold. These positions don't cross this threshold. Basketball and tennis and and all kinds of things like that.

That's not probably extremely applicable to many of the listeners right now. But IT is still conveying the idea that if we understand where we break, then we can stop ourselves from getting there in the first place. The functional example, uh, here is just thinking about basic things like where do I start my training program and then how do I progressed IT.

And we've already covered those numbers. In either case, though, you want to have three markers that you're paying attention to if you're concerned you're getting into over reaching phase, are potentially gonna ad over training or you want to get out of three unique things. Number one, we're gona look for some sort of performance magic, right? So this could be your times are going, yeah your squad numbers, your power is going down, any of these things.

So it's got to be an actual performance. Number two, some sort of physiology. And so I want to see something happening with resting heart rate.

Some bio marker is moving hard. Variability of some other measure that is not influenced by you. And the beauty of using biological markers are if we can track like performance.

And I said, okay, here's our performance tests. Every day you come in, you're going to do a vertical jump. And if one day you come in all that your vertical jump is super law, I might think, oh, man, maybe we're starting to over reach.

You also could be feeling lazy that day and just not a jump very high and purpose you you didn't want to work out. The beauty of bio markers are you don't get to manipulate them like that. They don't care.

There's a downside to IT, which is maybe there gest interrex markers, right? And so i'm not telling you biological markers Better than performance markers. What i'm saying as you want to look at both, right? In fact, you want to look at a third category as well, which is some sort of symptom logy.

And so am I I am I having a symptom of original? Am I seeing a performance circuit? And am I seeing a biological marker as well?

If you see all three of these popping up, you have reason to believe you've reached some over reaching. Now what you have not identified yet is if that is functional over reaching, non functional, overreaching or true over training. And remember, you shouldn't be feeling great after every training session you're trying to cause adaptation.

And until you back off maybe even weeks or months later to actualize the adaptation and get that super compensation and performance increase, you're gonna to invest a little bit. So you're going to go in the whole any sport performance go is gonna at numbers throughout the year and say, ah yeah when we first start training and preparation for the season, we are going to see a drop in performance that day, that week. That's part of the plan, right? That's this stress you're trying to accumulate.

You want to see all three those markers. You just want to pay attention to a couple of things. How long are they a day? Three days, seven days, fifteen days? It's such a if you're seeing a performance drop in a day and I am far away from from performance, uh, so the day that I want to pick for, i'm not going to do anything different.

If I see two days in drop performance, i'm not word. If I see more than probably in in my opinion, five days in a row of document, then I might start paying attention if you're in seasonal or close to competition er whatever that thing means, you and you see more than a couple of days in world of dropping, then you might actually want to take some some steps to mitigate that. So IT really is important to understand again, what are we trying to do or we're trying to cause adaptation or trying to go's annotation.

And I have a very specific example of all this we can run through here in a sec and of course, the tools to to pull you ads phases, but that's that's fundamentally what we're trying to do here. Um I would encourage again, don't be too reactive, responsive to any one measure. Cover a whole bunch of one minute second, but you can get last in in different things because they all have proven coins. And so I know it's simple to just look at one score and your watch and make your decisions because of that, or check your APP, but you really want to be careful of doing that. You're gonna probably lead yourself in the wrong direction more often than you're gonna yourself.

I'm curious as to why when we overreach too much or too often where we are overtraining, that performance is diminished. Because on the face of IT, it's kind of obvious you're ever reaching. You're overtraining.

So performance is diminished, but that's completely circular. And you hear about things like a juno fatigue and a jono burnout. Well, IT turns out a general burnt out doesn't mean really exist. There is such a thing as a general insufficiency syndrome by course you these phrase like burn out a dream or burn out over training um they're thrown around and you know as much as a words like gas lighting and obsessive compulsive, you know are without any real clinical definition or there are clinical definitions, but people aren't obeying them when they use the language. I do want to acknowledge, however, what is absolutely true, which is that over reaching too much too often over training, these can degrade performance. But mechanistically speaking, what's going on because I think if once we understand what's going on mechanistically and I think um we can all look at tools, whether not is breathing, movement, compression, thermal, psychological, motivational, etta and have a much clear sense as to what's going to work best and what likely won't work.

I love this question so much because as I mentioned at the beginning, I I was fortunate to spend my some of my graduate work in andy fries lab at the university of memphis. And we did a lot in this area. And so we in fact, this is how I learned how to do essays and run western blots and measure signings, proteins and things like this. So this stuff is the year dear to my heart. He also did a bunch of really wild studies, and he had done some before I got there.

So i'm gona combine kind of any fries entire career and and just highlight so the big pictures of what he found, that he was very interested in exercise, particularly strength training, and trying to figure out this entire question right, which is like, why is is actually happening when I work out too much, when I live too much, that all the said I can't sleep? What's happening? Like why is my energy now? Why is my mood, my motivation reduced if I school too much? And so we did a whole series of studies across this career, and again, to ort of highlights of the sea, some of these themes that ran through them.

So the first one that jumps out to its reliance career, into this really Austin protocol, where he had people squad, one hundred percent of their back squat max, every day for two weeks. So you come into the gem in, and I think this first one was on a machine and you did a one rup max, and then you came back in every single day for two weeks. So these are what we would generally call a kind of that that sort to moderate range over reaching and by definition, some of them in that actually being true over training because IT would take the individuals sometimes two to up to eight weeks to return back to their winter up max, I think of these protocols.

Um so some of them were non functional, over reaching or some combination of that. Well, along with that, he took uh a lot of blood samples as well as muscle biopsies to try to look at what's happening. And ological ally um neurologically muscle physiology wise to pay attention was happen.

So a couple of things that jump out there um one of his initial studies actually I think the very first one he did when they ran that first h squad every day protocol, what they found is kind column levels change change quite significant um and depending on kind of what you wanted to pay attention to there, whether IT was een ephor nor up and ephor um or even uh some other markers, they basically increased by summer between two to three four. And so a little bit of understanding of sleep physiology, if a general land is extremely high and our friend, you're going to have a hard time sleeping. So that alone was first indication.

And this is like, wait a minute, somethings actually happening here. That's just beyond muscle sas. There's some sort of systemic fatigue happening. And as you repeat, len point is not the adrenal gLance becoming fatigue that sort of a bit tongue chick pyne tix IT is course all this regulation and general stress syndrome um but it's really can be noted in in blood in terms of epinephrine uh nor a penetrant.

Another study he had done of a similar round was over the course of seven half days, people came in at fifteen training sessions. So it's really cool. These are these really short about, so just ridiculous training.

And they said, okay, like sometimes happening with with a penetrant and or pennant, something's happening with the stop rone. What's IT looked like inside the cells. And now muscle biases came on board, and they started looking at things like map kines.

What are these signal proteins that are tend to be associated with an animal like response? Say, regulate muscle protein senses, and they do many other things but that's like A A big factor of them um they looked at various energies and look a corner corner t tors and they wanted to say, like what maybe receptor density or endorse sensitivity is changing and in fact, surprise, surprise, that's exactly what they found. So they found both energon and local code receptor concentrations were reduced.

And so you can start to see a picture farming, which is like mm, very similar to the instant type two diabetes story, where you, you, you really put yourself in a very high stress situation. So presumably epa on etra testosterone releases are extremely high in response to that to try to reach back to some level of homeostasis, you start down regulating the receptors for them. And so it's like the signal can only get so high if you're going to keep that gas on, we're going to pull back the throttle on the receptor so that the total signal says the same.

If that makes a little bit sense, well, that becomes obviously problematic. Um so then like you finally follow up study here that is important. Notice they did another protocol which was really, really cool and they said the first ones weren't enough.

So how about this? We're going to come in every day for two weeks, and we're going to do ten sets of a one remains every day. So they were coming in and they would do ten one rep.

Maxes every day for two weeks and what really all about that study, if they didn't complete any other repetitions they had repeated until they had ten successful one, right? Maxes on a given day. Absolutely brutal, brutal protocol.

I wasn't there at the time. Um they had finished that right before I got on cam, but I was actually able to be around when they were doing some of the final analysis. There are the tissue um what they want to look at this particular atr study was based at erga receptors, which are those recept tors.

What they are going to be up an effort to be binding poor. So again, a similar story here. And perhaps are we losing overall sensitivity because of this extreme sympathetic stimulation? And I actually thinking about what would have been pretty cool if they had another group that did IT and did some down regulation breathing post to see if I can imitate some of the problems.

But of course, this was twenty plus years ago, or something like that. So couple things that happened is the one rep. Maxes dropped by a think around like eight kilos by the end of the two weeks, if I remember right, like the group average was something in the air od of one hundred and fifty one kilo.

So these are pretty well trained individuals. And IT went from rather, I think actually I was about one hundred and sixty kilos. S and yd dropped to, like honor and fifty two kilos, something close to that. What was more is significant though, was their power dropped by thirty five percent, which is really, really interesting because if if you pay engine to declines in physical performance over time and I mean that like through aging, what you'll see is people can hold on the muscle mass pretty well.

Um IT will go down to buy about you know one percent or so after the age of forty, however strange will go down at like two to four percent and then power by eight to ten percent. And if you look at actually world records across strange sports by age, you'll see that they will decline by age, but not that much. However, if you look at speed sports by age, they fall off the planet.

So it's very chAllenging to preserve fast through time, whether this is fatigue or because of, uh, age. That's really important because that'll then tell you, hey, a little bit of kerry in the coal mine is not necessarily your strength, but your speed. And so a lot of different techniques that we use to measure performance. Remember that our try out right symptom logy physiology performance, you're generally Better looking at speed based performance tests rather than strength based performance tests to get an earlier indication of potential. Uh over reaching all over training.

So anyways back to the the individual study there um in that same group but can we have the same problem where IT took some of them two to eight weeks to come back? So what they had to do is I came from with the exact time frame I probably should have thought through this, but they they had to come back something like every week, every couple of days, even after the study finished, until they got back to their baseline one remakes. And some of them may took them up to eight weeks before they finally got back.

So they probably were in a classic, a over training state at that place, which is was done in as little as two weeks. And this is also another point that people always asked, like how I, how long as I take? Is this something that has to happen all the course of months? Or or like if I to go to to two days or this intense training camp for two or three weeks, could I actually cause our training? And the answer is, if IT is actually truly enough volume and enough intensity, you probably can do some significant damage in as little as two weeks about IT and happen.

And often, most likely, you you're probably going to be reaching a state of non functional over reaching, but you may actually be able to put yourself in the position where I might take three or four weeks or more to get back to baseline after A A truth, the intense. And again, think about this protocol. It's like totally unrealistic for the most part, ten sets of one of a one rup max squad every day for two straight weeks.

Some some folks, if you're extremely highly trained weight later, you might do something like that when you're very close to say, world championships. But outside of that release specific scenario, it's a totally absurd training protocol. But that was the point, right? We were trying to ensure uh, ensure that over training was mad or close.

It's similar when we've done. We've actually, I think, three studies in the center of our performance on dom's muscle sourness in and all those cases, you do just like ridiculous like extension protocols because you're trying to ensure you cause super on next. If you don't, then you have nothing to study. So um absurd training calls protocols, but but that's the point.

So none's um as results showing off the beta adeno tric receptors um were doing regulated by something like thirty seven percent um what's IT probably even more significant though was the sensitivity in those receptors uh was reduced by like two and half fold and so it's like OK wait a minute, we're becoming desensitize this time. We and we're also actually now starting to reduce our total concentration. Similar was just actually interesting was a very a sneaky smart thing to do as they looked at not turn al urn area and everyone and guess what that was also up by like fifty percent .

to thirteen one five, five zero, five zero. yeah.

And so now you're seeing this time and where it's like. I'm seeing response at the tissue level. I'm seeing a response probably, although they didn't actually look at a patch italian like that. I'm seeing a dream al and other ecological problems. And then i'm also seeing this increase in concentration have been up and up and what i'm supposed to be sleeping and surprise, surprise, i'm having a hard time sleeping symbology.

That's a very interesting finding about nocturnal epiphone. And after, of course, is a journal in its released from the adjourns. No surprise there, but also from this brain area called local cruise on the brain, and the brain tends to be called up an offer in the body, a gentle, just to complicate everyone's understanding, but that no one platter did not come from us.

So don't blame us. The point is that rapid eyes movement sleets are called rem sleep is more abundant than the second half the night. We know that the dreams associated with rapid I movement sleep are more emotionally laden, and that those dreams and those emotional states are actually important for discarding the emotional load of previous day's experiences.

It's access sort of A A natural trauma therapy, if you will, because in the Normal healthy state, those dreams are associated with the inability to release at an after at night. So for me, what you just described, the first, the first time ever heard of IT, but IT ties together something really quite clear from the sleep news science literature, which is that when people are stressed, they tend to get less rapid I movement sleep. That rapid I movement sleep Normally is associated with low levels who have an effort. So whether not its causes or not isn't clear, but sort of doesn't matter for sake of this discussion but what i'm wondering and I suppose one good test for but maybe observed is whether not people who are over in over training too much, over reaching too much because of this elevated ocn al beneath and diminish dream sleep, whether not their emotional state is also um disrupted because one thing we know for sure is if you want to disrupt boy's emotional state you d deprive them move sleep and Robin, I move sleep in particular the one copia to that is for those of you out there that i've heard that rabid di move deprivation, deliberate rapid movements. Deprivation is a treatment for depression that is true, but it's coupled with a next night enhanced rapid I move and sleep so one of the major takeaway from all of this that i'm realizing is that, no surprise, daytime activities impact nighttime underground function, impact quality of sleep, impact daytime activities.

Yeah actually there's there's so many fun things I wanted do here now um this is actually why measuring I movement is a very fantastic tool for understanding total stressed load and you can actually differentiate different types of stress or caffeine news versus alcohol use vers sleep deprivation by actually measuring I movements. That's actually what we do in our absolute rest sleep companies.

In addition to getting a uh full P S D sleep city done in your bedroom, you're going to get tracking assessment which are going to be able to figure out why you're getting there. So um none's yeah if you actually look at the classic science and symptoms of over training or overtraining syndrome, it's going to be everything from performance documents like we talked about. Um resting heart rate is going to increase.

You're going to see things like hv drop by generally twenty or so percent um that would be a very large a disruption in hrb um decrease body weight and then all the stuff and you just talked about so motivation and hearings, appetite, mood um all of this stuff are are classically known associations with with our train and that's further exact reasons to talk about sleep disturbances and disruptions um wanting to train motivation, all of this stuff uh goes part and parcel with non functional over reaching and or over training. Um you can actually tie this back in a little bit to some other biomarkers. And this is this is great because this stuff we look for, this is the physiology stuff we look for.

Um you've probably talked about A S H P G before um which is a sex or more binding global. So this is the protein that that of flow nearby does gona bind up sex for month, in particular tests room. So what happens with um over training is you can actually take this series like week by week, and you can actually see this number rise.

And so if you see this like say, you're using A A service like inside tracker and you're getting your your blood measure every so often and you see this numbers start checking up, this is actually associated with that because what's actually happening is binding up your free to astro. And that is leading back to the circle we're talking about. And you can actually see the same thing happen with calorie restriction, just not even of calories, but in this particular case because that actually happens in both scenario.

You know what's not issue simply of being under calorie? Uh, it's clearly an issue of the training load being too high. So just give another little tool there is um I can get the link for IT.

There's A A website that was created by which journal and but i'll get IT to you. You can link IT up where you can actually go in and plug in a number of values, blood chemistry. So if you got your blood work done and you can plug in your pre number and your post number, so say you've got IT done and then maybe ten weeks later, you're got to done again.

And you're wondering and you notice him, my free test from down or my pg is up. Is that actually a meaningful number? And you IT will actually tell you whether not the change preto post is physiologically meaningful or not. Artist within the air margin of the measure. Um and you can actually change like right on the website, you can change your confidence.

It's really, really cool if you know if you just have you your own blood you wanted know like ah I had to any level this year and now is now here over there is is a totally free resource created gona p review all stuff and i'll give the link to that. So that's a pretty cool um measure. In addition to that, like probably one of them more powerful and easy metrics uh biologically is to take your course on D A T, A ratio.

So this is known to be associated with a lot of things. Um you want to be really carefully. You don't want this number to be too high or too low. Something like zero point zero nine IT is about call to D H A D.

to course.

all ratio A, D, A, G A to course all.

And love to tell you, I said IT backwards on purpose just to make sure everyone understood. But I got .

a yeah I mean, this ratio has been associated with so many things. Um you have to do, you do have to be careful with association, right not being causation, but everything from risk infections, the meta lic health and and like other disease states as well as more what we're talking about, which is hey, I am I get in sort of course audis regulation, which is what a lot of folks would call. No, again, I in fatigue.

No, that's not really good happening. But if a general and uh epi or off into stores, one and cordials going to be along the right. And so you can also look at things like testosterone cord ratios.

So there's a lot of things you can clean here to give you some insights and where you're going. If that if that ratio is too high, that's gonna associated with meta lic syndrome and a bunch of other stuff. If it's too low, that's going to be associated with a lot of cogent problems like um aggression and mood and and a bunch of things like that. So again, you want to keep IT right around that zero points, zero nine ratio and and most of time actually in some blood chemistry, your stuff you'll get to you've got a report of that or you can calculate .

pretty quickly. I'm sure we'll get into this in the episode that comes next on nutrition and supplementation. What about compounds that lower court is all such as, uh, uganda? I can see now based on the logic you're spelling out that during phases of a lot of intense overreaching or frequent overreaching, given that those compounds can indeed lower cortisol. Fun word to say um two words but the first one more fun .

to say rod .

ola rodia rodeo a ro dial a rosea folks and ash under i've been. Trying radio a recently um and mainly as a buffer to output. Um IT does seem to have some good data attached to the related to lowering once perceived threshold of how hard they're working.

So in other words, you can work harder um and not feel as if you're working really hard, which allows you to do more work that sort of the subjective description of how work. But you told me that IT can blunt cordial and I H ganda we know blunt coras all both of these things, of course can do other things. But are these um compounds that you sometimes will incorporate into A A training region? Uh.

I would have been using radio for probably six or more years, like pretty consistently and not perfect. But uh, using IT with the individual work with you do need to be a little bit careful. I wouldn't say that a blunt corzo IT probably more probably describes as course of modulator uh, what he means sort if it's too high or too low, it'll help kind of keep IT with enormous range.

Um there's also there a is important to note there have been a handful of days at two of I know specifically I showed that uh radios is going to hand strength gains. However, you may reduce moscow and dirt. So um we need more human data, honest stuff.

And they may turn out that not a concern may also turn out to be concerned. So nothing is nothing is perfect and free. There's no supplement that is a panache. And I have used again really in a lot of situations um because they think you can have to pay change the court as all is, is you have it's supposed to be modulated throughout the day. It's not supposed to be with this Normal.

Now in fact, if you look at Normative values is typically uh described in uh micrograms, produce leader and depending on literally what company used to draw your blood, if you're getting up to the blood, depending on what which method they used to analyze, that the moment of values are like, Frankly, embarrassingly ly all over the place. They're mostly going to be like five to twenty five as a cott Normal of value. But that's outrageous.

We also know those numbers very massively by age, by sex um and throughout the day. And so if you only are taking a single point, this assume doing a fasted blood, rob, which is what most folks do, is really only gona tell you a lot about what's happening in that moment. We need to know.

Well, like maybe let's say my cortile was if i'm a, say, thirty eight year old woman and my seven I am cortisol was fifteen milligrams per decelea. Er that's pretty good. But if it's fifteen milgram predecessor at three P M, oh boy, i'm i'm in probably having submission.

Es, right? So there's a chain throughout the day and you need to be able the plot, that kers. So you can actually pretty standard practice that we do is we look at courses all throughout the day going to take multiple markers because I don't want to to see your baseline cortisol.

I want to see this curve throughout the day. That's going to tell me a ton about um again, as you're sleeping caused by this regulation um is that your training is is something else. So I would like take a single baseline blood marker of cortisol.

With a lot of afghanistan, we would typically measured at least three times throughout the day. So something like sixty nine, I am twelve to three, and something like closer to the evening, often times we do much more. What do you like? Seven pots, or something like that throughout the day depending on situation.

So you want to be careful of that um distance were here. You can also course in um through aliva and now the sort of person cons to that because the pool of doing IT in your blood is is much more stable. Um saliva is extremely responsive to whatever happened these seconds before you took that test.

The upside of IT though, is you can do a bunch of real world life experiments. So for example, we will do sometimes if we want to see how an individual is responding to a given stressor, let's take IT, right? Let's take take the spending with two. We're going to take IT and we're going to go do this work out or this cold exposure where we're going to do take at the we know that is responsive to what just happened, but at the point um so you can actually there is sort of process conn. So you will use the appropriate measures for the appropriate question you trying .

to answer in a couple of points and reflections about quarters. All my first um laboratory duty as an undergraduate was in a actually in a bio psychology lab at the time they didn't have the field of neuroscience says it's now called IT was called bio psychology or biology or chemistry all collapsed into now called neuroscience which is only some years ago but my job was to collect court as all samples which means I was collecting spit which means I was collecting slag in the advantage of saliva based courts, free court is all the active form dimensions reflective of what happened in the seconds or minutes.

Um just prior, a couple of things about the regular cortical pattern across the day because I realized that well would be wonderful for everybody to get their cortical measured in detail multiple times and blood and saliva and so on. Some people just won't do that for whatever reason or can do that. Yes, the basic contour of a healthy pattern of cortisol circular is uh to have highest levels of cortisol in the morning um is actually part of the mechanism that associate waking you up, viewing bright light ideally from sunlight.

But other forms of bright light, light early in the day actually can lead to a fifty percent five zero percent increase in that bike, which is a good thing. People, vo H T S A, related to enhance mood and alertness. Immune system functions that, when I think IT can be useful for people, understand, is that many things will Spike quarters all throughout the day, stress, cold water, exercise.

But the ideas that IT comes down to baseline or near baseline rather quickly. One of the worst situations, as you pointed out, is when the highest level, of course, l is consistently shifted to the afternoon period. In fact, that's a um pretty reliable signature of certain forms of depression.

This is worked by um my college, gave its bio and for psychiatry and the the great bob supose rubber suppose of y severs don't get authors and behave that that and fame. Lots lots of popular books there. I think that if people are trying to regulate their court as all, and they're just and they just understand that basic control, that the baseline should be that, you know, rise pretty quickly after one rises in the morning.

So easy, remember, rise, rise, rise out of bed and rise cores, all with light, bright light, with exercise, with casting, these things will all increase course all. And then across the day, it's Normal for coral to Spike. But then to use some of the downregulates methods that you described, in particular the breathing methods and exercise itself is the case may be, but then to really pay attention to how much psychological and physical stress is occurring in the six hours or so or eight hours prior to sleep. Does that seem like good to a broad control of how to have a healthy pattern of court, at least because you actually want the court, is all to reduce implementation and initiate title pate in the recovery.

you will not see any progress from exercise training without a large Spike. In course, al IT is critically important. When we think of phrases like corzo, inflation, tion, stress.

This is not bad. Physical ology is not personified right there that things don't like h you in the body, right? That is all is not good and bad.

They just are um the more you try to suppress critism, the more you suppress adaptation. What you want is exactly what you large Spikes met with large quick recovery and you want to do that throughout the day with that home metic gesture. This is so going back to oh, uganda and radio issue. Um I think we would be very short sighted for people to do that as this is a profile active. You if you blunt cortile, you're going to cause you know suppressing.

especially early in the day, totally taking us should go on to before going to train as is counterparty yeah.

we do not just this is not a baseline part of our foundational package. If you go look at the ethic foundations, are the athi resilience protos up put together, you're not going to see these things in there for that specific reason. Any form of cortisol regulation needs to be done strategically.

If you are excessively high, we're bringing you back down the Normal values at the right time. And great if you're Normal, though, then taking you down, lord, than that is actually problematic. The same thing is actually true SE, since we're here for oxide stress, foreign formation anti oxidant is we mentioned, I think earlier about taking vitamin inviting post exercise of actually blunt and at least has the potential to do so.

Same thing, right? If you're modulating this response just because and you have not done so because of uh actually biological testing that indicated you needed to do such, then you actually maybe making things worse. And so um we we see this constantly with people who take a number of supplements and substances for sleep, and then they wake up the next morning groggy and your your cordial suppressed.

Okay great. So then they take something for stimulation and then the rest of the day they are trying to reduce and then is nasty cycle. I said of just getting out of the way and letting cord's all do it's supposed to do um and then making sure again you're teaching IT so exactly a cultural response.

You can culture your own body to go down in the later part the day and go up in the earlier part of the day. I mean, you want to make sure that you are driving that train with intent. And so again, generate, if you don't need that, you shouldn't do IT, right?

If you don't need to lower courts all, you shouldn't walk around doing IT, you're just going to suppress the state even far. And this is what's this is needed for anibal, a response. So you're not going to grow a muscle.

Of course, all is not Spike. It's it's going going to compromise IT rather. So you want to be intentional with these practices, uh, especially in the form of of supplementation, be very, very intentional.

I've heard IT said that carbo hydrates, in particular starting carbo hydrates inhibit court at all. And this could be through the trip, define no acids related pathway that ratchet up to. So tora release probably some other things to I think the idea that cover hydra just stimulate tone and is a little .

bit P K going up and immediately turning on there.

Ah right. So I think we've all experiences this. We're stressed, we're stressed. We doesn't necessary even have to be highly processed. You fat I know fatty carbo hydrates like potato chips, potato chips s and debt these kinds of IT can also be uh borrow ario milo pasta um which here i'm not trying to demonize um cover hydes I I do in just cover hydrate minimum or non process carbohydrates most of the time, but not all the time.

And they have a fairly potent a effect on on lowering stress and perceived stress and even quality of sleep, which is not to say that somebody has to load up on them like crazy unless the guidon is really depleted. Talked a lot about this in the indian episode. I touch more in the nutrition supplementation epo de but um in thinking about the relationship between carbon hydrates in court is all and what we've just been talking about terms of court as all as being vitally important for the adaptation trigger or trigger ing. Adaptation is probably a Better way to put IT but that IT can blunt court is all taken post training or um maybe in the evening before sleep. What are some of the basic ways that one can think about and maybe use carbon hydrate in specific ways in order to let's take control court is all rather than uh quash court .

is all uh you actually have alluded to a number of times times so we often ten times will give people a lot of carbon hydrates at night um for some of these reasons um you're going to feel fantastic. A lot of people that helps you sleep um both get to sleep and safe sleep. So quality you talked about specifically remember think about at this way, court is all at its core, is an energy signal molecule.

IT says we are in the need for energy great um appan preference. The same way you you'll start seeing, for example, could all will liberate free fighting assets, put him in the blood's stream, get you prepared to do something? The problem is, if it's continually elevated throughout the day with down regulation, we start running into issues, right?

So again, this is the differentiation between all my cords. So slightly elevator all day versus I had a really big, big Spike after a training, I had a really big Spike after breath protocol such and I went back down. So that being said, if you then in just carbo hy rates, you are ten IT is quick to see the same.

Or we have new strength, we have energy against specifically carbon hydrate. Therefore, course, all can sort of go back down. We don't need to deliberating free file assets and preparing the info fuel.

So you can help yourself go to sleep. For many, as you point out, many mechanisms actually why carbohydrates will help you sleep at night. And for some, not all people, but some, that would be one of the relationships at house with course.

L great. I look forward to hearing more about how the various micro dries and micro nutrient and so called adaptive gans, this very mysterious group of yeah ah compound another word adaptations through around so much um but as long as we're talking about adaptation, I think ah that'll be fair play for the uh discussion in the next episode about nutrition and supplementation.

In my laboratory, when we study stress, we use a number of different markers, subjective reports of how stress people feel, heart rate, morning heart rate, heart rate variability, court is all, free core is all, and on and on. What are some of the other markers of stress as IT relates to exercise adaptations in recovery? Because once again, I think were seeing a lot of parallels between the study of psychological stress and the study of physical stress. As IT relates to exercise.

adaptation remembers in terms of physiology, stress is stress. This is why we have this cool term of alathea low or other cases such that IT really doesn't matter which system you test for IT will reflect overall stress. You mentioned several of them.

We've got done talking about some biomarkers. H R V. And Harry are another great example. Because what you're trying to do is this, when we were talking about the muscle sorters thing we were really getting, that was A A marker of how do I fix the overuse in that particular muscle. Now we've really transition into global markers of overuse.

And why these are problematic or important to pay attention to, rather, is, again, these are the indicators that needed just work they must allow too hard. But you have actually done something where you have compromised all of your physiology to a level where you've influence a circulating cattle omy or something like going to influence multiple markers now like you're sleep in your mood, in your behavior. So that's why these things are problematic.

That said, you could look at resting heart rate. Not a bad thing to do. However, that does have multiple downsides. One thing we do know is arresting heart rate will elevate with excessive stress sloat.

This actually doesn't matter if IT is physical stress or psychological stress or accommodation, so you will see that number drift up over time. Here's the downside though. It's not tremendous y sensitive to smaller stressors.

Uh, in other words, if you were to do something like alcohol is a very good example, you will see your resty heart at elevate with alcohol use and access of tobacco use and psychological stress. However, if you do something smaller, like a hard training sessions, resting heart is is not sensitive enough to pick that up. You will actually probably stay the same.

So for those reasons, we don't actually use resting hearts rate that much. We will take IT, but it's not our primary indicator that means that hv is a Better use. So just where the quickly for those are not from mayor are your heart rate.

Let's say, for example, you you're resting Harris sixty beats per minute. That means every second beating IT doesn't actually happen on a consistent rhythm such that they would beat on second one, beat on second two, beat on second three. Eec, the rate is more variable.

So a Michael, beat, beat, beat, beat, be, be. There's a variation in the heart rate. And at the end of the sixty seconds in this enable, you would have still complete sixty beats.

They just aren't on the exact same patter. Well, one thing that's actually quite interesting is the amount of variation in your heart rate is actually associated with your overall sympathetic or persons. But that takes such that a large variation.

So an erythia c pattern is generally more representative of being more arrested, recovered and being more more sympathetic. You'll notice during times of extremely high stress, and you will be very remic, be, be, be, be, be. And so this is a little bit of of a confusing idea, but a high H R V is there indicated of a lot of variation, meaning you're pretty recovered.

A low H R V, meaning there's a lot of variation, means you're probably pretty stressed in is is uh related to her rate but in my opinion is a significantly Better marker. Oh that now one thing you want to pay attention to if you do this ah a couple of things. There are some accuracy issues with many other devices.

Basically everybody at this one probably has some device that's telling on their hv. What you do not want to do is simply compare your number to somebody else. For a lot of reasons.

Not all these technologies are actually even measuring the same thing. again. Some of them are actually combining with other metrics and calling IT you're overall readiness or your recovery.

So now we what we've actually done is made a couple of assumptions and stack them on a whole host of other assumptions and then gave you you a number and you don't know what that sort of black box score actually even represent. So I would caution one against taking too much information from that if you are actually measuring hv. Even within that, there's a lots of ways to calculate that aren't not important here.

So don't necessarily worry about the score and compared to yourself, but not to others. What you will see is if you use similar devices and techniques, he is hard to find day to here but in general people that are uh overweight um might have a little bit of a of a lower score as an a war score. Um we need more information or not to be clear.

So in large part the best way to use something like hv is to measure under the exact same circumstances every day. So whether are you going to use a this a device uh, on your watch or your phone or your bed or anything else, or you're gna buy a special a jery on or its fine, just take that measure at the same time. Um mostly this means first thing in the morning.

So you wake up, you go to back and you come back down. Take your measure, something like that. You don't a way sometimes you take up before food and after, look your phone, like all these other things that can influence stress. So so take and and usually take somewhere between second and seven minutes to record so you want to pay that. Now one of things you'll notice is there is a natural change in your hv that this happens.

And so what you can really want to pay attention to is, I guess, entering the question of, well, how much of a change in hrb has to happen before I should care, and it's hard to answer, right? So let's to say your H. R.

V was a hundred. I just made that number. What if you wake up tomorrow? W's ninety nine?

What that mean? I don't know. If you wake up tomorrow when it's twenty, that's probably a bad thing. Well, where's that line? It's hard. One thing I would recommend doing is taking your hv for at least eight month before you start using that value to make any changes.

And you recommend taking the first thing in the morning, roughly the storm .

does not have to in the morning but because your day will change on most days when you get into um that's the most stable thing in your life. So I would take IT then, and I would collect IT for at least a day, at least a month, rather maybe even six weeks, and then give yourself basically running average. So what we quite onest ly do is um we will actually track IT for forever.

And then what we always look at is what does look like today relative to the last week on average. And then what does that look like to our historical average? And we always compare those things and you also want to make sure you compare like to like.

So one of the words I generally were not going to worry about today's H. R. Score relative to tomorrow. What I want to look at is today's relative this exact cine day last week, not for others, but for non authors. This is very important to imagine.

Don't worry about the difference between hrb score on monday compared to tuesday, paid in the monday compared to last monday and the monday before that. That's because you typically have the same sort of weekly schedule. And what you don't want to do is, is they look at monday's H R.

V score, which is a reflection of what happens sunday, and compare that to tuesday, which is actually your reflection of what happened monday. You probably didn't do the same stressors on sunday's monday. You not actually compared in the same thing.

But if you have a general weekly schedule, you would likely to compare this monday to last mondays because they're both comparing what happens on the press days or IT. Did that sort of distinction makes sense? absolutely.

I do the same thing with body weight. By the way, if you're trying to track body mass gain or file loss or something, compare like the like. You can look at the daily changes, but you need to pay attention to what that Normal distribution.

So if you kind of do that, you know, monday to monday thing that'll give you a rough area of saying, okay, my Normal weekly variation is, say five, so my average is one hundred, but I will flock away between ninety five to one of five that's my standard deviation is sort of a science dogs would call that um if you start very uh, changing more than five percent outside of your Normal standard deviation, then i'm going to start paying attention a little bit and i'm not actually run a little bit and algorithm on this one. And so here is my thinking process. When I gets A H, V, really any metric, but hv is an example using first step, did I collect good data? And what that I mean, again, that I measured the same way I measure every single day.

Or did I get up and look at my phone first and I realize all crap, I forgot to take my hb. And then I went back over there, so say, I had a fifteen percent derivation from my Normal number. And then I realized, oh yeah, that's right.

I was up super late last night doing whatever. Okay, great. I'm going to consider that bad data.

He didn't go. It's bad day that i'm not doing anything ignorant. Bad day. And you throw out, you don't use IT if you decide for the most policy soon he was a good data. Okay, great.

Then i'm going on on my next question, which is, is IT acute and there was is IT just today right? Or is IT chronic as was this? Is that is this pattern when happening for more than five days or at least three at last forward, something like that, three minimum is what I like on esty. I just look at five or more days. That's a very big distinction, if IT is something that just happened today.

And the next question I am going to asked myself is, and I am that adaptation face and by trying to be in the face where i'm trying to cause an insult to the body that he needs to respond with, if that is the case, i'm just going to ignore IT, right? In fact, it's almost sometimes a good sign. Hey, we are stressing the body and IT is stressed.

What we're doing is working amazing. In fact, if you don't see that I sort like me, maybe we're not enough to push the face, right? So great.

If the answer is no, where in a peaking phase, then we're actually gna use what I call acute state shifters. So this is a whole host of little tricks that I have that can change H R V. Or any recovery metric within seconds.

Again, these are not chronic fixes. This is just, i'm having a bad day today. I feel like crap.

Can I make myself feel Better right now? And so I kind of call these party tricks a lot of the times and there's the thousand of them. We are soon as I going to go and but i'll i'll give you some examples.

Um you can pull out first of all physical movement will do IT you be stunned how just doing some yoga moving around, doing some jumping jacks, starting your workout. I mean you've probably experience this is sick. They are all this point. But um if you ever do any serious lifting over serious meantime, there will be days when which you walk in the gym and you feel awful and somehow that they .

use a lifetime. Pr, yeah that's a strange, strange phenomenon ah experience that more than a few times it's rare, the universes rare, however you feel great you have a horrible work out IT happens yeah um and you can have for any number of different reasons but yeah I think the the former when isn't feeling very good and then somehow a terrific workout does set a kind of a seed of doubt as to how good are subjective assessments really are and which I guess is why we were talking about um objective assessments. You like a Jerry and .

remember if it's a single day here, uh, you can even do hard training people sort of have this idea like, well, if you get up in your recovery scores down, do a lighter day that's problem like probably never making that choice, to be honest, not in this situation. And remember, this is one bad day and we are in a phase of even trying to improve performance right now like we're probably still training hard.

You will again, often see, I felt terrible when I trained to super hard and I totally changed my day around this all can happen to exercises, my first love here. Um absolutely breathing and any sort of up regulation breathing. So we talked a lot about down regulation breathing.

Just do the opposite, right? And so this is one hyperventilation strategies can work um instead of accentuated in the x hail you exerted the in hill or you restrict the excels. This is working on the exact of situation. You can also play little. This is where things like music, motivational quotes um if you're the type that follows people on instagram that motivate you or work of these things, coaching, tactics, these can be things like um finding out are talking about that person's why um you sort shared to something that a montreal you use when you're training hard to keep you go Better.

I want to have to ask you to share that now but some people have this sometimes, right or you may have this conversation with you out, we call this finding out your why, right? So finding out like why you really hear what are we doing here and a lot of time you hear things like it's because I grew up poor and I don't even want to be poor. Okay, great.

This is for my children or like any number of things. And and you can pull that out on these days. You need to be really careful as we call these party tricks, because when you play that card too often IT starts to lose effect, right? And you can only dig to a whole so often before it's sort like the same thing is with music, right? If you every time you go to the way room is blasting death metal at level ten or eventually it's not this no longer motivating right is no longer helpful. So um you wanted deploy these things strategically yeah that .

the phrases comes to mind is signalled the noise, you know the nerve system, especially the dopamine system in the adjournment system, which are part of this larger system category ming system, is that doping appen nor they get up and go focus on external goals, movement associated it's and on and on that that system responds best to high signal relative to noise. So if you are, as you point out, um listen and music every time drinking a ton of caffeine energy during three, work out neutral picks and then you know stacking all those things sometimes refer this is global means stacking informally refer to his glop a means acting. You're doing all those things.

Then you're first of all, then you're wondering why later that afternoon, the next day, you're feeling like you're you're under a cloud of is your category an system crash? But it's also that um you don't certain ly become dependent on IT is just that you start to wonder whether not you have the internal mechanisms and motivation to train without those things. And so one tends to use them more and more and then they have a diminishing effect over time.

The rule that i've been um sort of applying has been I never do two workout in a row or i'm stacking in stimulants, loud music and any kind of sort of hypocrisy inspiration. However, every set in the gym or when I run, I really trying be diligent about form and attention to what i'm doing. The one exception would be the london ation endurance work.

Part of the reason I do that work is to let my mind go into states of drifting, not trying to thinking complete sentences or even close to IT, just let my my brain kind of idle at a low harm. And for that reason, generally listen to something that up more of a story or don't listen anything at all. And just like my thoughts kind of all through.

Anyway, I don't want to take us too far off track, but I think this a of signal, the noise will resonate with the engineers out there. But since most people are likely not engineers, IT is the way that the nervous system works. Evidence by the fact that whatever area of your body right now is in contact with a chair or um any other surface has been in contact with for more than a few seconds, you forget that is in contact with that because there's low signalled the noise at that point.

A similar note. You actually mention stimulants basically there, what they're talking cafe or any other stimulant, any other counters, all modulators are adapted genes. Any these things fall in the category if you're not using them consistently and you're having a rough day and also you throw down two hundred seven grams caffeine and it's going to change real fast .

strong forming senancour .

effect yeah absolutely for these reasons, right? So we mentioned a couple of them, breath work um food, more calories, just eating some food and sometimes we give people like what we call comfortable oos.

So this is just like, hey you you're from georgia and we know you love grits, so we're having grits for breakfast oh my great like this something to change removed acute state shifters um to alter IT the other couple of tricks here are light so if we know that maybe see multiple people strugling that day, maybe we'll put on the lights extra bright will bring us some other things and just get IT more lightly, not even count actually going outside and seeing the sun but perhaps do that. And then other little tricks that i've learned over the years is one particularly thing I love is literally drawn a line, a physical line on the ground. And you look at that line and you say, like i'm going to train today and i'm going to accomplish this effort.

Um i'm not going to walk, pass this line and into that training space until I am ready to give that effort. And that may take a minute or ten or whatever, but it's the physical barrier is very important to saying like i'm not just going to get through IT. I'm going to actually perform the way I want to perform or i'm not going to do IT and i'm not going across this line. And so i'm ready .

to make that happen. I really like that tool. IT also brings to mind the importance of at least thinking about how your relationship with your phone during training um can perhaps help but also impede workout motivation and performance.

In an earlier epo de, you mentioned that if people are using their phone to play music during their workout, that they establish the complete playlist prior to and shin the workout and they're not deviate from that playlist. I supposed to changing IT in the middle because there just too much of a um of an impulse to also check so so media check email check text messages. I mean, the way I think about the phone actually is is a bunch of loom brain areas.

It's got a memory system for you. It's got look up tables for a look up tables. It's got websites to look things up on the internet. It's got photos. I mean, he is so rich with sensory data and it's so closely linked to our own brain architecture.

They already are designed for those to be that way that I always think about IT as bringing in a second person with me, but that person is at my twin that um has severe attention issues. And for those that already have attention issues, just think about this as A A twin that within compound you by tapping on your shoulder y're talking to you all the time, interrupting you h somebody that you like a lot. But that Frankly is um is a little but irritating in that there they're interrupting your ability to really show up and also your ability to show up for them. So I started to think about the phone as an entire individual, and that IT represents me and and certainly are not the Better version of me.

exactly. You actually mentioned something else that will use uh, occasionally, which we will call brain games or puzzles, whether this is across word puzzle or something where you actually lose your thought of self for a second and your brain is engaged in a task that you weren't regretting or even thinking about. These can be stupid little games. IT could be little chAllenges, especially like a group or team setting, like we're going to play one round of dodge ball or we're going to play one round of a tumblers.

So you do encourage this. Yeah, I see. So you would play .

like a thing and sort of warming up the car, get in and went, get going where you get your phone roller, you're dime, what everything is just like everyone line up and we're going to play some rules to see who went right. It's just like whatever, right? Also, you snapped into a new mental shift or literally playing brain games, playing touches on your like any these things can work in this acute setting.

Can I ask your question is not directly related to recovery um pursue but I think it's worth mentioning um or ask him about rather which is the use of mirrors or no mirrors while training um you know the experience of seeing oneself and observing one's form in the area. Post has some utility. You can get some sense of progress that you trigger um here almost specifically referred to a resistance training. I suppose that could be cardio of you're running on a trade Miller pushing a slight or something but um you can see form, um you can get a sense of um what your face looks like when you grim as um but in all seriousness um you are without question a person, not you andy, but um one is in a less interactive mode when looking at themselves in the area so the extra perception, perception of things beyond confines es of our skin, even if it's a picture of us into reception, perception of everything from the skin inward um and so if we're looking at ourselves, we're diverting some allocation of our attention. Let's say there's one hundred. These are arbitrary units and you can they put fifty percent of your attention on the feeling in your body or the muscles, your training um and fifty percent on how IT appears in the mirror or you could be a hundred percent on the mirror, one hundred percent internally, which you best accomplish fly by closing your eyes so obviously their constraint tear certain movements he would't want to close your eyes that that in general, what are your thoughts on mirrors or no mrs. For resistance training specifically.

IT depends on the metric that you find most important and what I mean but this is if you're training for same muscle hyper v, there's emerging evidence that suggests h actually looking at yourself in the mirror and even flexing in between sets um can actually be advantages or can augment muscle gates.

Oh my there's uh support for all the the the mayor flexors absolutely not not making fun of you. I just as is is interesting to be on the observing side of of that. But hey, listen, results of what people are after you.

Having said that, if you're trying in hands a movement learning, then IT may be detrimental. Uh so if you're doing an exercise that is explosive and fast, probably not the best thing to be looking into a mere um if you were to walk into any olympic way lifting uh arena and you'd had any thoughts of using a myr, you would probably run out of the gym very, very quickly.

You can see yourself in time to make a an adjustment with the movement that's happening that fast. And also we will do exactly what you mention, which is IT will remove your ability to understand and feel the movement. And so this is a big component to using technology for exercise at all, is you have to make sure that the end point is you understanding you and your physiology more, not less, when you outsource learning to technology.

In this case, even if the technology is the mirror, you remove your ability to gain and truly understand that learning process. So you need to be very, very careful whether you're using a mirror or whether you're using any number of apps where you can record, say, a movement and then watch IT afterwards. And I will give you a breakdown of your hand was in the right spot or foot was in the right spot. These are all great, but you need didn't take the next step, which to say, I need to be able to feel that position, right?

So in the case of performance, if you can imagine trying to learn a new technique, say, running technique, and you have to be able to watch yourself in the mirror to understand you're stride in a position if you don't take the next step of saying, okay, now I don't know how to look in the mira, and I can feel when i'm getting out of rythm or whatever the cases, then you'll never be able to actually then use that in your race. And so it's very, very important that people again pay attention to what is the dependent variable they actually interested in doing if you're trying to get Better at something the tech is OK as a starting place. IT is cannot be the finishing place.

Thank you for those reflections. I'm curious as to what happens or what one should do if their HIV is reduced for maybe three or four or more days in a row?

absolutely. The next question and i'm going to ask is in in that adaptation face. If so, i'm going to still ignore IT, just like I did if he was a single bad day. But i'm going to start watching IT very carefully.

I may actually now introduce some other tests, so I may use a performance test, uh, you may look at something else, maybe asked questions, maybe have some communication either with myself or somebody else. So i'm going to start paying more attention. But i'm still really not gonna much action until that crosses more than seven days of consistent problems.

Um if IT does do that or or in a peaking phase, then i'm going to go to set of solutions that are truly going to pull me out of the hole rather than just be uh, those acute state shifters. These are more what I call chronic state shifters. Now some of these are actually very similar to the ones we've used before, uh, for example, term stress.

So I can promise you, if your recovery score is in the tax and you walk outside and you jump in your thirty five degree water and you get back out, what's going to happen is your hv score immediately afterwards. I'm i'm talking within seconds is going to be significant compromised right now. Always think about the memory.

Low H R V means high. sympathetic. I promise you, cold water will put you in a high sympathy wever. And we've tested this pretty extensively um looking at H R V zero fifteen, thirty, sixty, ninety although you up to one hundred and eighty minutes post and on average you will see your hrb score continue to rise after that.

And so well you have this immediate sympathetic response, you will immediately then respond about thirty minutes on most people depends on the personal and that score will be improved for several hours afterwards. So um heat can kind of have a similar effect. Um that actually again is that is is sort of an acute fix.

But over time, as we've described earlier, I can also have a little bit chronic effect. Um we can also then get in the areas like sleep. And so now we're going to start playing and expLoring why are are you sleep ing poor as well or was your sleep score fine but your hrb was low?

That's a little bit of different answer if your sleep is getting compromise that they're going to start going into and making sure we're improving our sleep um in terms of like brain stuff instead of maybe playing a game or having music or some of these other tricks that aren't onna really have chronic effect. But you can do things like work on social connection that's actually been shown to improve uh, recovery over time. You can do things like journal or meditation and those have an acute effect as well as a chronic effects.

So again, if if you go journal right now, now you probably feel Better. But also we know that over time that will gradually improve things. So um adaptations and things like that also can have A A chronic effect.

Um so can things like electorates or food or hydrogen if those things were were off. So we're gonna to a whole number of areas, but those are the primary ones outstanding of all that. Of course, IT may be simply a time to go back and we assess our training program.

That's truly the case. So that's we're out. If so, we're probably going to either completely remove training um or drop IT like fifty percent or so until we start rebounding back to baseline. And that's generally the numbers .

we use for many people who are not training for A. Competitive before and maybe aren't pushing themselves really hard. Maybe they consider themselves some of the exercises in order maintain health and the statics and longe evites that and they never really finish any workout, completely exhausted.

They're sleeping okay, they're appetites okay. Can we assume that they are recovering well or maybe they're not creating enough of a adaptation response? So there's no progressive over reaching and so there's really no stimulus for recovery.

What i'm saying here is on the the face of IT, I think is obvious, right? If you don't train harder is nothing to recover from. What i'm really saying is, is the ability to recover itself something that we need to train.

In other words, can we get Better at recovering? And the um analogy here would be something like focus in order to perform work of any kind but certain ly mental work and physical work, we need to be able to focus. The ability of focus is the reflection of a bunch of neural circuits and chemicals and hormones at ra.

But we know roughly what those are and we know that if you are poor at focusing for every small bit of time, that you can focus a little bit longer, even with a matter of seconds, those circuits themselves get Better at focusing and so on and so forth. So in other words, is the recovery system, however, brought neurotransmitter, hormones, neural muscular immune base that can that system or set of systems become Better? Can we get Better at recovering?

Can we meaning can IT become faster and um and more effective? Can we think of the recovery system is kind of a blade that gets sharper by engaging recovery? Because if so, then there's strong reason for people who are not pushing really hard to push at least a little bit harder than is comfortable for them every once in a while to make sure that, that system doesn't start a slide back.

Remember, physiology is listening to everything you do, and IT is always responding. So the analogy that I will meet your analogy with that I use here the bowling ally. So you've probably been bowing before and you've used the bumper and .

right amper lanes. I've gone polling before and i've spent time in the gutter and i've spent time on the pins o so it's fun of me just slide around on their shoes and like all the kids would hang out there and I feel like, do they still have buying allies? I don't even know. He feels like something. May i've gone the way of the two .

thousands I don't care of one okay.

right? What my intent wasn't to ruin your analogy um okay, tell us about bowling. All the bowlers are going to come after me .

with with elevations just so if one word to go .

bowling and they didn't .

want to put their ball on the gutter, yeah, you could put these little bumpers in those lanes and these little phone pads are going to gutter, that if your ball going towards the gutters hit ts, those and bounces off, goes back in the line, right? okay. So in this entire conversation, this is actually true of a lot of the way people approach their fitness and health.

People are very concerned, often times with optimizing meaning. I want to make sure I don't go on the gutter. I don't want to hit the walls. So therefore, i'm going to try to improve the accuracy in which I threw the ball.

So I want to make sure that I am throwing IT down the senator lane more often, and I want to get my this, my standard deviation title and title so that I don't get anywhere close to hitting the wall. However, what they're not realizing is if you do that, the body will start shrinking the size of the lane because what a basic says is, uh, we haven't had a Better touch us in years. We don't need to be this wide.

Let's get smaller and smaller and smaller. So it's not that you actually are having a reduced ability to recover, but you start becoming incredible, sensitive to that. So you choose strategies enhancing recovery are to practice getting closer, throwing up all down the middle or to wide and to widen the ally.

That's exactly what you're referring to and you absolutely should do that. And so what happens if you don't have to be so precise with what you're doing because your ability to handle so many things is right. So if you're off now by four or five inches to the right, no problem because you've just triple the size of your rally, that's exactly what you want to do.

So paying attention to two things. Number one is getting Better at accuracy, maybe staying really tight with your progressions um using nutritious and sleep to optimize your recovery and push your resilience is what we call this. In fact, there's actually a biological way to measure resilience.

We do that all of our folks, this is scientific value. Ted stuff I didn't just make IT up. You can actually measure resilience and there's more and more coming out on this, but that's exactly what determined so how well can you handle and banging things off the stressful.

So when you see a reduction in a ten percent of your H R. V today for you, that may make you feel terrible for me. I might not feel anything because i'm well adapted to large fluctuations, and therefore, i'm OK.

The less unless you do that, the more and more responsive you will be to those slight deviations. So that is exactly the target. That kind of what I looked to.

And I say you got to understand what are we optimizing for? We optimizing for making sure I don't feel any different today. And we optimizing to make sure when I do feel different, I still unable to perform.

Um so this is why you wanted do things like maybe use some cafe in today and feel great. But if I have to use IT every day, all i'm doing is shrinking my sensitivity. There's now if I have to go there without IT, I can't train IT.

All right. Caffeine is the easy example because people understand how that hole is worked. But this is really true of everything else. So yeah, you need to practice this.

And the way to do that is to give yourself more time to continue bring in the stress from nutrition, from training, from breath work. Um you mentioned earlier about focus the exact same thing, right? It's not just about getting Better right now.

It's about training a system and you can clearly train that, right? Um we will often say breath work is a practice that's exactly what we're talking about, right? So you're practicing getting Better at these things.

You're practicing returning your focus. You're practicing recovering and quite literally, physico logically, you can up regulate whether we're talking enzymes, where that we're talking about regulators, these will be up regulated. So the time the next time that that insert comes in, it's not as because not as damaging. So yeah, absolutely, you can and you should strive for that .

throughout all the episodes where we've been talking about exercise, at the core of that is this word adaptations. And I love that you mention that breath work can also create adaptations.

The way i'm visualizing all of this now is that resistance training with weight machines, body, we otherwise cardio asked lar training, running job in sprinting, jumping and on thermal training, exposure to heat, exposure to cold in the dedicated way, and deliberate aspiration OK breathing or breath work as a practice. All of those can be viewed as ways to trigger adaptations. And in the context of recovery, the specific adaptations you're trying to engage are opposite to stress.

In fact, with the exception of perhaps deliberate cold exposure, maybe deliberate heat exposure because if the song is really hot, you can get the dying northin release, which is kind of uncomfortable. But still in both those cases, the rebound from that in others, when you get out, you shower, you go to bed the next morning, you do others going to bliss out feeling, we know why that is. That is the rebound to that uncomfortable situation. So IT seems that doesn't really matter whether or not you're using resistance. You're doing cardio accute training you using thermal approaches or you're using restrained based approaches.

All of these are really ways of both trigger ing adaptations and if applied properly, to actually help you recover from the stress and create the the literal result that you they are trying to achieve for some people that might have been obvious, but I think for many people, including myself, this set of conversations that we've been having a with a series, these episodes, so the first time we've ever thought about exercise in these ways in event is just a reflection. But it's one that at least for me um is tremendously useful because IT has a lot of organization logic to IT which at least appeals to to my brain because the more that things have a logic, the more for me that they become a simplified and the more that the vast ray of tools becomes becomes visible to me. As you said earlier, what is IT? Let me make track.

Get this right. It's concepts are few, methods are many different OK. How would you put around how you stay?

Methods are many.

concepts are few. The directionality .

probably .

IT doesn't. No, let's keep IT right. The methods are many concepts are few. Galban's law in science and allowed naming things after yourself um but you can aim uh things after other people so ah it's galen law because i'm .

definitely the one who created that idea. So absolutely that was extreme and tremendous ark m to sort alter.

right? regardless. Here we go. Gels law, we go.

One thing that in my head right now is we've thrown out a lot of options for folks. And maybe what we can do is try to simplify a little bit. So what I can kind of walk you through is how we, uh, measure recover, if you will, and how often and some tools.

And what I would recommend people do is not use everything I said. You want to pick one or two things per category that are most important to you, that are at your cost, that are at your availability, that are interesting and important, relevant to you, and do that. The reason I kind of want to cover a large number of things was to give the voice options.

But again, I want to emphasize the point is to not measure all of them. In fact, you don't need to. We i've run this before with professional athletes were we've taken blood earn every single day.

We've done performance measures, vertical jumps on a force plate, whole bunch of things every day for years on end. And what I can tell you is there is tremendous for danny and physiology, right? Everything is everything.

So you don't need to do them and don't feel like you're missing out if you aren't doing them. One or two matrix is probably fine. I generally recommend one subjective measure.

This could be as simple as what's your mood, how you feel today? great. In one objective measure, H R, V, A resting heart rate.

Anything else? right? So if you even literally just did that, you'd probably have pretty good insight. Has to actually doing so maybe in fact, i'll go more detail here um maybe will give you a couple of examples of things to measure every day.

Some things that you should measured maybe correctly monthly and then maybe even in some my annually and then you can maybe just pick a couple for me is this categories and have yourself a pretty good monitoring system for what to do. And i'll include some that are um a little bit technology base and then others that are totally costly and require nothing. Okay, start off.

I would recommend taking something like H R V every day or or most days um if you don't have a device like that, you could also use honest the seo to toilet test and we've talked about that a number of times. We probably plenty research to go find that um but that doesn't require anything that typically takes about a minute or so. And you can do that under the same the cum stances in which hv in other words, do at the same time every day have the same stratification stuff.

And that is actually been in our coaching experience. While admittedly there is no appear reviewed research on this yet, just in our experience, this tends to track extremely closely with hv and other metric of recovery. In fact, we actually did do a uh a pilot trial in my lab and uh attract decently well with post state and trade.

So uh, it's a nice metric um not perfect, but you you could take that. So if you wanted, you could do both. But again, remember, you're trying to capture systemic stress.

And so you're really just showing you're measuring one thing two ways so you don't necessarily have to have them. I will do both this because I am super interested in small differences. But globally, they are going to tell you basically the same thing.

So those are two things will be used again, basically daily. Uh, you're around or or close to IT um if you want to go pass out a little bit um you can look you can use an actual a uh a pretty old are commonly used survey called a delta D A L D A. I forget the exact acronym, but IT is a fairly lengthy questionnaire and IT accounts for things like how do you feel today, how did you sleep?

Any stressors going on in life, how you've been eating and this is a fairly comprehensive lengthy survey um that came out. I mean, he is probably been around for thirty years or something is is nothing new and been used extensively. You would not want to do that every day if you wanted to take some subjective measures every day.

We typically stick with, like I said, mood, motivation， something like that. Um you you could perform this all details, so something more like monthly or at the end of each training phase in every couple of months. And probably worth looking at is not going to tell you if you're in a best spot today or tomorrow, but you would pick that up with the h of V R. So to tell ist us, IT would though tell you information, especially if you're working with another individual about major life changes and if anything, I just facilitates that conversation, right?

I noticed you reported x happening um let's let's talk about that and can I help to him? So another kind of sneaky helpful one is is a simply body but like I said, um nonfunctional over reaching and over training are associated with the number of things like energy appetite suppression changes and and and body waiter body composition so you can measure that um monthly or even really quarterly uh depending on what kind of out later individual you're working out or if you're trying to. So if you're not trying to lose waiter, if you're trying to be at maintenance and you'll give you some to so moving past that now actually we're going to move into the realm of things that we call hidden stressors.

So those are all visible stressors. Um so he instance is the most common ones we sort of mentioned, and I would probably do this. Um you well even have to these ones through serum.

So this is blood work court is all like we talked about uh and test stores and of course test test of course on ratio and in the other ones I mentioned, um you can do those quarterly. It's not bad. There are some blood markers that there is really no sense to do them that soon. And there are other markers, I mean in our system or individuals are getting pretty sense of blood work, saliva work, yarn in stool. And there's so there's point of those things you just do not need to measure know every ten weeks or so um in this case course, all as you know, sort of changes rapidly teston stone can change pretty quickly.

Um but if you're really trying to notice a larger trend, certainly a quarter or so is is an appropriate time brain doing at every four or five weeks probably unnecessary so you can save yourself some money and do that um other other stuff you can look at actually more like some my annually in um plasma like glue to mean and glue mean to glue me ratio. And you can may be saved that why you want to look at those for another conversation. But those are important.

And we always look at something from the oxide distress. thanks. So this could be something like T, N, F alpha look and six, something like that. Again, we're looking at that in serum and we're looking at that. You like some my annually and then another sneaky actually one that I love to look at is the neutral field yma size ratio, which gave us some pretty insight.

And then you could look at that like fairly quarter, if that number starts to get really high, certain like more than nine to one, you ve got a pretty good things like that, something nari is going on with the mean system. So we will actually take action much lower than that number. But and that's like a nice kind of seas, like that's a very, very high number.

So those are some things you can use. Um most folks have the ability hopefully take us some basic blood work done, get a basic cause, C B C and C M P um if you have a great physician and you can get insurance to cover that and you just going to ask for A C B C and C M P theyll know what that means. You can google up and the order. You'll get all the information, typically that I just described or close enough, and you'll get some insights, then you can you can just use that free service I mentioned earlier to check to see not the changes are um just a matter of testing quality or actually physiological relevant.

What you just described is an amazingly powerful ray of tools. I'm hoping that you can also mention a few tools that are either lower cost, truly low cost or zero cost that while they may not have the accuracy or um give the complete picture that some of the bio markers and other tools that you mentioned do that they can still provide reasonably reliable metrics that people can use in order to assess their level of recovery.

absolutely. The c to tolerance would be the first one um and you can just take that metric at any time you like. The other ones we've talked about so far are things like your mood. Um we haven't mentioned the beto, but that's another assessment that people also tend to have a pretty good grip on and they know what feels Normal. So when things go out of wait tends to be a pretty good signal that people will recognize.

Yeah one note about that um something that came up in an episode on on hormones with for male and female alth that at some point will air which is that now there's no objective measure for people in terms of libido across the board, meaning people very tremendously um age, life circumstances and on and on. And so this is one of those subjective measures that I think people need to have some sense what their critical baseline really is.

And i'm guessing that the time to assess that might best be when initiating or midway through a relatively low intensity training phase um maybe during the time of year in which all the other factors that can influence libido are not at their maximum. So if you think about your light and dope me and the relationship between those and the test after and studien systems, we know that the beto a just to and to men and women um tends to peak in the summer month. So if that's your baseline that you're comparing to, I don't know that that as reliable as um picking something like the the fall or the spring.

And so anyway, this again is very subjective, but we just encourage people to recognize that there is no standard numbers for this no look up table. There's equivalent of the libido BMI. Lm, I just suspected the acronym that probably is li. Um so I think that is just something to keep in mind as people um do comparisons or subjective comparison is don't pick a comparison to an extreme. Try and pick a comparison to a average, as you know, IT to be that .

actually sort of reminding me, one issue that we have seen a lot lately is people, if they're having lib to issues or just even slightly noticing uh drop, they just assume that then therefore means or test crashing and those things are certainly connected. But that is not necessarily the case. And where that becomes a problem is that people then go ah on things like T R T sea with no true oversight and then all kinds other problems. So make sure that if you're going to take that step that you actually get to stop and measured and you're working with a qualified person to guide you through that process. Don't just assume because you're having low energy or your libido is little IT down IT could be simply training related IT could be sleep related, could be any number of things um so that is like a little bit word of caution there.

Two quick points along the lines of what you just said. One interesting thing that I learned when researching our episode on test aston in astern optimization. This was an episode that we done some time ago but is still available that come format that is that many people actually increase their libido and even their levels of test stone and estrogen as they progressed from their twenty years into their forties.

If they take excEllent care themselves, including the correct exercise adaptations, correct body fat to lean lean muscle ratios. But of course I can go the other way to a lot of people can be training to achieve social low body fats stores that label can suffer. So you know the age of an age related declines in the beto um are not necessarily written into the script of life.

In fact, there are some data points of a really interesting paper I talk about in that episode of uh individuals. This was a study focused on males in their eighties and nineties who maintained total and free test after on as high as. A individuals in their twenties. But then when you look at the lifestyle factors of these people, their eighties and nineties, they were doing a lot to create that that scenario.

The second point is one relate to what you just said um which is very true, which is people generally tend to assume that a drop in libido is relate to a drop in test astro um and then assume that they need to increase their test astros and in some cases that is true but it's also often the case that people who take estrogen or aroma tase blockers that is and i'm inhibitors that prevent the conversion of testosterone origin, experience severe deficits in libel because of estrogen. So trogon blockers are as much an issue here as um low test after then. The final point is also warned that um many people now men and women are um I think need to be aware of, which is that die hydrophoby sor on dh is among the more powerful androgen for um power output, physical power output, but also for libido and dht is strongly inhibited by certain things like tumeric.

So a lot of people who are taking hydas of tuc can experience drops in the beto. So end of who are taking various compounds to prevent hair loss yeah things like fanatic ROI. So there's a whole catalog of things that can reduce libido that are not directly in the test astronomers th way that can be D H E related exertion late. And this I think points to the importance of take a objective measure of your libido, pay attention as actually be aware you don't object but be aware and trying to figure out what factors um uh are involved for you but don't immediately assume that is what's needed is more testosterone and often times the opposite .

is the case yeah you try to put on a of muscle with .

no good luck right? And indeed a lot of athletes and particular no competitive by blige that have that no san rap thin skin. If you get to know some of those people you talk to them, they they can um look like the sort of comic book archetype of what um someone might might want to be. I think that's not with this discussion or these episodes have been about, but often times as they can have a serious slipper .

issues I mentioned earlier. And I will emphasize that once mart, you need to be very when you're taking anti oxidant, anti c filmo ies, uh cortile reducer for all those reasons. I didn't really sort of getting examples, but you just nailed another fantastic reason of IT.

We do not give those things propac's ally. I I strongly discourage people from just walking around taking supplementation of anti accidents um especially powerful ones for no reason if you have done some testing um and you have a good reason to do so. I'm fine or if you're a very specific take training phase or something like that, cool but if you just walking around doing that, you are often times, not always, but you are often times causing problems that then you then try to solve.

Bye, taking more of those anti flaming tories. I feel terrible. Low energy, low a B2Ba ba ba.

I'm too inflamed. It's at a so yeah, anti accidents in the form of food are fantastic. Almost no issue.

There is good evidence actually there. So don't worry about men. I shouldn't eat high anti oxide rich foods. You going to be fine. What we're talking about here is pharmaceuticals and supplementation, where you can take orders of magnus de high dosages very quickly and you could in the presence of food. So that distinction is also very important. The accident rich foods are generally fine, and as consumed in totally absurd concentrations, implementations powers cream drugs, such trees where you can get into a problem. So yeah, you want to be very careful of doing that unless you have a reason we don't do that and less we see a reason to do so in someone's markers yeah.

In urban compounds, despite the fact that the urban can be quite potent modulator of hormones, astro ganda being uh, an example uh two urban compounds that we have talked a lot about on our podcast before and repeatedly, including in that test after on astern optimization uh episode uh tony ali um and fido's a agressive um 通过 ali is now taken by a large number of men and women toner ali and photo gia typically men i'm not sure that there are any good studies about the effects of photo gia in women。

Those are urban compounds that can have poor effects in increasing test astroland and leutze zing hormones. Ah do they work yeah they work to vary degrees in in most everybody not certainly not in everybody um but they do work but they work because they are potent. They have effects.

So the idea that urban compounds are not powerful um is wrong and it's important to remember that that can cut both ways hence my mention of this observation related to tumeric, which is not to say that some people can take to mark and feel perfectly fine, maintain or even an increase in the liberal that sure that can happen is just that for people that are very dht sensitive, this tends to be an issue. So unfortunately for many of these compounds, the only way to find out is really to try them or to just completely avoid them in this site. You don't want to try them is fine too but there really aren't ways to dict who will respond, who won't and who will be hyper responders. And um in that case, it's a bit of it's a little bit of a wild west.

I'm also sort of remembering what the point of this conversation was supposed to be and maybe I ever turn back to that. Um which were some cost for your low cost matrix. Uh that was a very fantastic but none of less a another couple of ones you can do are, uh, grip strength testing.

So if you can buy a fairly cheap hand grip diameter and on any number of places, these are typically able to be purchased for twenty to forty dollars or something like that rent. You can actually just test that every day. I've done that uh, in a number of athletes, a decent but of time.

I admittedly, I don't do anymore. And that's not because I disagree that, but because we just were getting the information already and I was just to be done. But if that's the only option, that is a great one to do.

I mentioned also earlier how I actually like speed test over strength test as an earlier indication of overreaching. And so because of that, I like a vertical jump test. Um if you have access to a force plate that's great, then you can get a more in depth charteris tics of the force velocity curve in acceleration and things like that.

Um used a lot in high performance situations, if not simply looking at you know your performance. And so you can kind of go back to one of our earlier episodes, when I described coLoring my fingertips with highlighters earlier of my life. You can do the same thing and got your garage on every day. Jump up in, touch a that marker and see where your APP i'm. So a system like that could be done.

You can also use tools like uh force transducer and do a standard movement and I can say a vertical jump or a hypolito like that and measure the velocity and just compare that they did have a standard load, right? So you do at every single time with the same load um same some more thing can be done with like A A measure throat um so you have the same ball, you throw the same thing. And in this sort of where you out today, you want to do a little bit warm up but not excessive here you want to to get an idea of where your baseline is and you don't want to influence IT by the verity uh of the warm up every single thing because that alone can change the same stretching uh acute stats stretching directly influence this power production.

So you don't want to go out there and one day to a twenty minute stretch before then the day you can stretch at all because that alone will will cause, uh, deviations in your performance. So try to keep everything you can think of standards and that'll give you a little bit Better data, remembering all of these values, the biomarkers, the performance of, they have Normal variations. You just want to figure out first, informal, what those Normal variations are for you.

So you have your Normal number. You have your standard deviation. When you start getting outside of that standard deviation, you start paying attention.

And so that's kind of we typically call that the gray zone. And so if is in the grey zone, we're fine. We're not adjusted. What if it's outside of that, whatever that is for you recognizing that the grey zone is smaller for some folks and larger for others, but what is Normal for you and your situation, and then you can make your decisions outside of that. When you see numbers that are consistently or more than three to five days in a row or close for the last five days, for the last six, something like that, then you maybe have some cause for action.

But that was an incredible description of the various tools and modes for recovery. And I realized, I jump the gun a bit during our discussion about food and supplements. But I like to think that serves as a nice, a precursor to the next episode, which is going to be all about nutrition and supplementation. If you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast, please subscribe our youtube channel. That's a terrific zero cost way to support us.

In addition, please subscribed to the podcast on spotify and apple and on both spotify and apple, you can leave us up to a five star review if you have questions for us or comments or suggestions about topics you like us to cover or guess you'd like me to include on the huberman la podcast. Please put those in the comments section on youtube. We do read all the comments.

Please also check out the sponsor of mentioned at the beginning and during today's episode. That's the best way to support this podcast. I'd also like to inform you about the huberman podcast free newsletters.

It's called the neutral network newsletter, and each month the neural network news letter is sent out, and IT contains summaries of podcast episodes, specific protocols discussed on the human in the podcast, all in fairly concise format, and all completely zero cost. You can sign up for the neural network news letter by going to huberman lab dot com, go to the menu and click on newsletter. You provide us your email we do not share with anybody, and as I mentioned before, it's completely zero cost.

By going to hub human lab dot com, you can also go into the menu tab and go to newsletter and see some example newsletters from months past. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercises and performance with dr. Andy galpin. And as always, thank you for your interesting.