#822 - Dr Andy Galpin - The New Science Of Heart Health, VO2 Max & Sleep Hacking
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Hello, everybody. Welcome back to the show. My guest today is Dr. Andy Galpin. He's a professor of kinesiology, an exercise scientist, and an author. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States, and poor sleep is affecting almost everyone. Andy has some of the best evidence-based strategies for improving both of those while becoming fitter and more resilient.

Expect to learn which metrics matter most for health, the best ways to train your VO2 max, what the most optimal daily routine for peak VO2 max looks like, advanced techniques to enhance your sleep, what happens when you over-optimize life, why breathwork can replace your afternoon nap, how to improve your sleep with nutrition, and much more.

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Talk to me about the metrics that matter most for health, in your opinion. We've got an unlimited amount of data that we can access from wearables and beds and breathwork and CO2 tolerance tests and everything else. What are the ones that you think are most important? Yeah, sure. I think the easiest way to start this is go over a very large picture and then to

stop us from being very general the entire time, which is sometimes a bit boring. I'll let you pick whichever one you want to go hardest into there. So,

When we start looking at things from the perspective of how long you're going to live and how well you're going to live, most people are pretty keen on that idea now. And those things are different. And it's not just about living a long time and you want to live well. So what's that mean? Well, we actually can pull from multiple data sets here in the sense that it's everything from your sense of connection to the world, your sense of purpose.

social belongings, those things are incredibly important. And depending on the papers you pull from, some could argue those are the top predictors of how long. Now, mental health and such is not my expertise. So I will hopefully not spend all of our time on that. But we have to acknowledge those, the way you ask the question, that is a true and honest answer. It is the things that go into making you feel like a sense of purpose and belonging. That's great. Independent of that, in terms of your physical health,

Now we can just really run through the gamut of what does your body have to do to survive and perform well, right? Well, it has to have some functionality of cardiorespiratory fitness. Easy metric we talk about here very often, and people are really keen to this fact now, which makes me smile because for 25 years, I've been screaming this and no one cared. And like the podcast, Stan, the universe took over with it three years ago. And I'm like, well, great. Now it's out there. So VO2 max is a very strong predictor of how long you're going to live.

From that perspective. Other research is going to look at things like physical strength, both your grip strength and your leg strength. Also very, very important. Backing down from that, now you have things like muscle quality, overall muscle size. Of course, you have negative regulators. So what I mean by that, these are things you don't want to have. So as I've been going through this, I realized I've been giving you things that you want to make sure are high.

And you have a whole subset of things you want to stay away from. Obesity. You don't want to have metabolic disease. You don't want to have sleep disorders. You don't want to have that. So I tend to leave that stuff. I always forget to mention that. But yeah, like don't have any of those. And then be fit, be strong, and maintain a sense of proprioception. And so if you look at the research on things like brain aging, what's critically clear is you don't want to lose your sense of smell.

You don't want to lose your sense of vision or your hearing because those are all tied into the global idea of proprioception. And that is a fancy way of saying your body's ability to understand where it is in space. This is translated often into things like balance. Okay. So if you were to look at the research on fall prevention, it's very clear. You do not want to fall and have an accident after the age of 60. That's,

And I don't mean to be a bit dramatic here, but it's quite literally almost a death sentence if you fall and break a hip or something like that after the age of 60. Well, what causes that? Pure accidents. But then outside of that, it is things like loss of balance.

Then once you lose the balance, you have a lack of foot speed or hand speed to get your hand in the right position to brace yourself from a fall. And then if you do do that, it's the lack of eccentric strength to stop yourself from hitting the ground and collapsing and smashing a bone. And so I just sprayed you with a whole bunch of stuff to answer your question, but from

Just the physical side of the equation. Those are generally the things we're looking at in terms of an exercise scientist's perspective. I don't really spend much time in my career, honestly, on medical stuff. I'm not a medical doctor. I've talked to Peter Atiyah or Gabrielle Lyon. If you want to know about APOB, like I don't care about those things at all. I look at the human performance side of the perspective on that question.

Where has this recent pivot to prioritizing VO2 max come from? Is this just that I was a normie and totally didn't know what was going on in the literature? Because it felt to me like up until maybe three years ago, maybe even less, it was all go slow to go fast. It's all zone two. We must accumulate a very, very high amount of aggressive walking per week. What's happened with this VO2 max revolution? Okay, that's a really nice question.

We have known this answer since the late 1980s. There's a very classic, he just passed away actually, actually a scientist named Stephen Blair out of South Carolina. And he published these data in 1989, 1990, 91. We have million people databases on this. I actually remember as a graduate student in 2005,

sitting in a lecture from Jonathan Myers at Stanford, presenting incredibly clear evidence on VO2 max out predicting diabetes, out predicting blood pressure, out predicting cholesterol, out predicting heart disease, out predicting heart surgeries. We've known this stuff for now well over 20 years. Do you mean out predicting all of those things for longevity? For all cause mortality, dying for any reason. You want to call it longevity? Fine. Scientifically, we'd say mortality. All cause mortality. So yes, thank you.

So the point being, as an exercise scientist community, again, we've known this answer for an extremely long time. There was research in 2004 and 1999 in JAMA as well, showing that leg strength in a handful of studies outpredicted even VO2 max in terms of, again, predicting all-cause mortality, clinical prognosis, how long you're going to live, who's going to fare best post-surgery, anyone who randomly shows up to the hospital. If you give them a leg press test or leg extension test, rather,

that will be the most significant predictor without knowing any other information of what's going to look like how serious your problem is going to be right like again this is in jama not in like the journal of dudes who like to lift weights that mike you're telling i started that journal by the way that's good that's our yeah um so okay we've known this for a very long time so your question why did it get so popular well a handful of things i think

We screamed from the rafters about this stuff for forever, and the medical community never cared or didn't listen or whatever the case was. Why they started turning their attention, I think at some point the tsunami of data just starts to overwhelm me. And then when these data started getting published in medical journals, and then really I believe the true key was this, and I'm being quite arrogant here, but I think it is my generation of scientists.

Because you had, when I was a graduate student, everyone who was a scientist in this field was from the 1970s and 1980s generation. This is your steady state, long, slow, cycling, swimming, jogging. That's what they do for exercise. Those are the sports they follow. That's the research we did. And then you had Arnold come along and strength training became this thing. And you have this whole generation of kids from the 1980s.

who liked science, but then also liked lifting weights and started going like, why is there none of this stuff in the science? This stuff was not exercise science. And so we went on to become students. We went on to go to graduate schools. And then we started doing, open up our own laboratories and started doing research on these types of things.

That's a 30-year window, right? It takes a long time. And then those data finally started coming out. And so the last 20 years, you've seen this just enormous increase in strength training and higher intensity stuff. Now, the last couple of years, I think that's just kind of the wave of science, right? Where it takes a long time of like 10 years of data to accumulate people getting awards, becoming big names in the field where they are respectable, coming out of the big labs from the big

and going, oh, okay, I guess there's something here going on. Why that took off in the pop culture, I don't know per se, but I think it probably has to do with the idea of going, hey, one of the biggest barriers to exercise that we're aware of is people's time. They say, I don't have the time for it. And so then when Marty Gabala's research started coming out,

And he started saying, hey, we can get the same cardiovascular benefits in four total minutes of accumulated work throughout a week as four hours. And again, not one study, it's dozens of studies now coming out in different areas and populations that grabbed a lot of media attention. And that's when high intensity interval training really took off media wise. And I think that's what landed us in this position. I think it's probably gone too far in that direction. But nonetheless, if I had to guess, this is why things got to where they are now.

Can you tell me about that study or the protocol that was followed by a sequence of studies, the four minutes thing? Oh, there's been dozens and dozens of them. This is everything from 20 seconds of work and 20 seconds of rest repeated four to 12 times. I'm summarizing a bunch of different papers and protocols. Higher ones up to one minute on, one minute off. Like all the classic, again, what most people would call high intensity interval training. This is

This is actually a good way to get yourself confused on the internet because back in my day, HIIT training, it was H-I-T training. This was an old Mike Mentzer bodybuilding, very, very, very, very slow repetition stuff, right? And then when HIIT came along, the second HIIT, there's an extra I in there. It's high intensity interval training. And so people ever like, we always, I see people all the time fighting about this stuff and always laugh. I'm like, man, you guys don't even know you're not even saying the same thing. Like, this is not, this is two different things of HIIT.

But yeah, tons and tons of protocols. Some of them have longer rest intervals. So for example, one minute as hard as you possibly can recover for four or five minutes. Repeat that four times in a day. These are typically on things like a bike. So you're cycling almost always there. But some of them are shorter rest intervals. And Tabata came on board. Those studies came out over 25 years ago. But again, people just got wind of them a few years ago. So that got big.

But the way I'm saying is I want you people to be really clear here. There is absolutely no magic protocol there. None at all. There's no magic duration. There's no magic respirable, and there's no magic number of times you have to do it because there have been, again, countless studies over a huge range of all those variables, and almost all of them still show benefit with one key. If you truly take those intervals at a max effort, it'll work.

Now, if you're doing 30 on 30 off and you're just kind of going like 80, 85% through that 30 seconds of work, then you're not going to see the same results. So the one key, and Marty would say this too, is if you're trying to get tons of benefits, cardiovascular benefits, especially from a very, very short amount of work, that amount of work has to be, you got to get it done. You can't just be like, well, I went way shorter and I kind of worked a little harder.

Like, nope, you got to do a work one way or the other. You got to do work over time or you got to do the work in real hurt.

What are your favorite protocols that you either suggest to friends, clients, or that you use yourself for improving VO2 max? Rhonda Patrick was on. She extolled the virtues of the Norwegian 4x4. I've been doing that. I thought that was fun, but I'm non-monogamous, man. I'm a whore for this. You give me something that you think is sexier, I'll slip into that negligee and I'll get on it.

Yeah, this is like, I apologize for like rolling my eyes when you said that. Norwegian, sure. That's great. Like Peter and Rhonda talk about, awesome. It's just one group of scientists put one protocol out. There's nothing magical about it. And all the same thing happened with Tabata 20 years ago. Everyone's like, oh, it's Tabata. You have like, okay, fine. If you want to do the Norwegian, that's just excellent. I'll do those things. Honestly, that's the old school run a mile, walk a mile.

That's really all it is for the most part. Right. So it is a similar thing of there's an old protocol called fart lick. Right. And you can do a fart lick thing. That's at least 30 years old, if not longer. There is the sprint the straightaway, walk the corners sort of thing, get a mile of work done.

Those are awesome. You asked which ones I use. I use all of them. I use the ones I just talked about. I will do personally, as well as in my coaching practice with our athletes, as well as with our executive non-athletes. We will use all of these. I will do very commonly, very short max effort, 20 seconds or so with even up to 60 seconds to rest. A lot of recovery. And in those 20 seconds, like you have to get after it. And we're typically going to do somewhere between eight to 12 rounds per

of that work, right? I would, just from a motivation standpoint, I think there's something about the 30 seconds to one minute

sort of mark. Like if I was just doing 20 seconds, I, it's going to be, I'm going to have to motivate myself to get back on the horse so many times, eight rounds, 12 rounds by round seven. I'm like, Oh God, go fuck yourself. I don't want, I don't want to do this again. I have to say from a psychological standpoint, the Norwegian four by four to me is actually quite enjoyable. Uh, reason being that there's fewer rounds. Yes, you've got to hold. And yes, you're actually probably not hitting peak, uh,

as much is to actually ask a question on that. Cause I guess maybe a good few people on the show that listening to the show will have started doing that because of what Rhonda and Peter have been talking about.

What is the upper bound for the work duration in order to improve VO2max beyond which you're no longer hitting the peak that you need to? Presumably, if I said, oh, it's 15 minutes on, 15 minutes off, well, what are we doing here? That can't be the case. Four minutes to me seems like it's probably close to the upper bound of a work interval. No? No, no, much higher, much higher. You can extend that. So let's take a quick step back. What is VO2max?

So essentially what we're looking at is the maximum amount of oxygen you can bring in and utilize. And that has two components, a central and peripheral component. Peripheral meaning it is your lungs and heart. So it is how much air can you bring into your lungs? How much of that can you get from your lungs to your heart? And then you got to pump that out of your heart into your blood. That's the central side of it. The peripheral side of it, you got to get that

to your working tissue. Your ability to extract that oxygen from your blood into your tissue is the AVO2 max side of the equation. So there's arterial venous difference. So it's the difference in oxygen concentration going into your muscle versus out, which tells you how much your muscle's extracted. Okay. A typical way to test VO2 max is on a treadmill or a bike on a metabolic cart. So you have your face hooked up to a machine and we collect every milliliter literally of air you breathe in or out.

Those protocols, those tests take somewhere between eight to 15 minutes to complete. It is hard to get up to your VO2 max in the time shorter than that. Such as to say this law of specificity tells us it's called SED, S-A-I-D, Specific Adaptation to Imposed Demand. What that says is the best way to ever improve the physiological marker is to do exactly the challenge.

So the best way to improve your VO2max is to run a VO2max test or equivalent, period. That's specificity. It's not practical. It's not realistic.

But it is like by the, if we were robots, I'd say that is your number right there. Eight to 12 minutes long of progressively getting harder. Okay. Now, if you're super fit, sometimes that takes longer, 15 to 20. If you're unfit, that can certainly happen much lower. But typically, if you're hitting a peak in much lower than that, it's often not a true VO2 max because you're failing for other reasons.

Like muscular endurance, like your quads blew up, your calves blew up before you could truly get there, whatever the case may be. So I'm not indicating you can't get to a VO2 max in four minutes. You can. And certainly in the data are clear, the Norwegian protocol will absolutely work. Okay. So it's, we have to make sure we're going after the right thing though. Right. And so if we understand eight to 12 minutes is eight to 15 is a very typical one. This is your one mile repeat.

Run a mile. Most people that's going to take eight to 10 minutes and little is four minutes and maybe higher rest. Do it again. Do that every single day. That would be your most specific and direct protocol. That said, when we understand the physiological limitations, the way that I will always teach this is in the place of adaptation is the place of limitation. Whatever limited you in your performance is the thing that will adapt to that training. So if you and I both went out and did the Norwegian protocol,

You and I might adapt differently because what we're failing in those four minutes might be different. You might be failing- Preston Pysh : My lungs might have blown up, but your legs might have blown up. David Gardner : Bingo. I've run, I don't know how many fields of access I've run, but I will always ask people afterwards, "Why'd you stop?" And they're always like, "I'm like, why'd you quit?" And it is either my legs couldn't take another step or it is felt like my heart's going to blow out of my chest.

Something like that. Okay. I'm asking that because now that's leading my coaching decision. What is our limitation? What did we fail? Was this stroke volume? Was this heart rate? Was this position? Was this fatigue? Was this technique breakdown? Maybe this is respiratory muscular failure. Where is actually driving the problem? This is where I'm going to go with my coaching then. And so this could, and our clients will see this all the time. Some of them will get a lot of long duration, lower intensity stuff. Some of them will get the opposite.

Some of them will get a combination of both. Some of them will get like maybe some kettlebell intervals, anaerobic stuff with weights. Some of them will get strictly, you know, rowing, walking, stuff like that, because you can improve the O2 max in all of those cases. If that's the place that's being limited, you see what I'm saying? Like that is my, like, I, I, I'd like to try to give more direct answers, but my honest answer, because I do coach people at this point is,

is we do all of that depending on what their actual specific problem is. If you don't know your problem, my recommendation would be to do some one to twice per week of some lower intensity movement stuff. I do not care what zone you're in at all. We never test, like hardly ever pay attention to that. I'm sorry, I need you. Like, I just don't care about those things. Something low. Okay. Whatever that can be. Something that's going to be

insanely high. And so this is almost always less than two minutes duration. The problem with four minutes is it's very hard for people to really get work done in four minutes. Most people who like yourself, I could, I mean, I know you've been up to the top of the mountain with the rock on your shoulder.

I know you probably have the ability to really get after it for those four minutes, but most people in our experience struggle with those four minutes to do anything besides kind of just coast. So that's not really doing enough work. So the four minute one is a little bit dangerous for me because it's just way too easy for people to kind of just cruise. So the hard stuff, I want it truly hard. Now we're still going to coach people. If you tell me, hey, literally psychologically, I'm not, okay, great. I'm not going to force you to go do a 30 second sprint.

thing because you're like, all right, we'll pick something different for you. Another person is like, I just cannot get myself to work that hard for four straight minutes. Fine. Let's cut it down to 45 seconds and let's repeat it 45 seconds, whatever we're going to have to do. But that's component two, some real true high intensity thing. Component three then is more of that middle ground. Give me four to 15 minutes of continuous work. By the end, we're going to peg and we might do one round of that.

That might be it. Like the whole protocol today, which we've used a lot in our professional athletes and our non-athletes, nice, good, solid warmup, probably a 10 to 15 up to 20 minute, like good warmup. And we're going to do one round. And that might be a one mile max. You're going to run a mile as fast as you can. If you can't run, we'll do something in the equivalent of a six to 15 minute max effort. By the end, that's it. And we're probably shutting it down. Doesn't mean we're doing all three of those in the week.

But over the course of the month, we're going to understand like, where are we getting an A, B, and C? And how does that fit into this person's protocol and plan? That's the most honest answer I can give you of how we actually do it. That's great. That's a nice protocol. For the people who want to integrate VO2 max work into their weekly routine, I'm imagining most people will be on some form of push-pull leg splits and kind of body part split. But maybe they're realizing that...

should pay attention to my heart. And I do sometimes get out of breath doing a set of stairs and I look good, but I probably should do a little bit more fitness stuff. What are just a couple of protocols, Norwegian 4x4 is something that we've spoken about, on versus off with rounds and then frequency per week. What's a couple of common favorites that you might suggest that people try? Can you ask that again? I'm not sure I've

Let's track exactly what you're saying. Like the whole week of all your training. So what would be a couple of different VO2 max optimizing workouts that people could do in terms of the intervals of work and rest? And then what would the frequency per week be? Oh, okay. All right. Let's just maybe sketch out a week. And that'll be like a theoretical week, which would be a little bit easier. Okay, great. So let's just say you're going to start on Monday. And I always like to...

to do the hardest thing training-wise on Mondays. It's just like, get out of the way, right? So maybe Monday is your day where we're going to do that one-mile test. Okay, great. It's a 40-minute workout total because for 20 minutes, you're going to be laying there in agony, right? So we got a lot for 40, but we're going to do a solid 10-minute warmup, very, very good one, and then we're going to run an eight-minute test. You're out of there. It's done. Pick machine. Pick the rower, pick the assault bike, pick the whatever you want to do. If you don't have a mile,

fine set it for eight minutes great let's just do something as hard as we can and this is you're not progressing you're not backing down you're just pegging it for eight minutes right you can kind of use minute one or two to kind of ramp up a little bit but then you're just going to enter death and see how long you can play in death that you'd be happy for somebody to use an assault bike a rower oh yeah yeah a ski erg walk run swim no one's doing a ski erg that's insane but yeah the assault bike or the other row maybe

I almost always do it on an assault bike. It's by far for the top end stuff, it's by far my favorite. I think one of the problems that I encounter a lot of the time is getting my heart rate up sufficiently high without blowing my legs out doing something. And the challenge that I often face

is if I'm doing it on just a static bike, my legs are like, if I tried to do it on a bike, my legs are absolutely smoked. If I tried to do it on a true form, my hamstrings feel like they're going to fall off. I just can't get my heart rate up sufficiently high without feeling, without not feeling that sort of muscular fatigue. And then also that's all, by the way, that's very easy to fix. Okay. That's super easy.

One, you're not warming up appropriately, I promise. And then you're not progressing into it heart rate-wise. You do that, and that problem will go away almost immediately. Okay. Am I right? Five minutes at a moderate pace, that's a warm-up, isn't it? That's not a warm-up. I'm pretty sure that's a warm-up. Not for max effort, it's not. I mean, that's a laboratory. We use that protocol all the time in the lab. Five minutes, a low-level...

aerobic exercise and then you jump in and do a max effort like well why do you think you're think about it this way uh do you think that's the protocol i would use prior to somebody walking into the octagon to fight for a ufc title let's just hop on the bike easy for five minutes no and there's a reason okay i feel seen all right all right uh okay so monday i'm actually glad you brought that up the reason i cut you off on that honestly is because we see that all the time

And I wanted to put that out there. It's like, Hey, that's actually not normal. And the reason why it matters is you're not actually going to get as much out of your training because of that. Right. If you, if I had you do the same thing with weights, you'd look at me like I'm like, I'm the same. I was like, okay, great. Let's just stretch out a little bit. And all of a sudden let's just go throw three 15 on. Let's just do set of 10 on squats. You'd be like,

Like you'd be childish, right? But then when you're going to do that on a salt bike, you're like, yeah, that's normal. That's totally fine. No, no, your legs are going to fall off. It's a, it's a like blatant disregard for the difficulty of cardio work.

It's like a middle finger. It's a middle finger to cardio stuff. It's like, ah, no, this is bums and tums. It'll be fine. It's also because you're one minute in on the bike and you're just like, oh my God, this is terrible. And so you're like, yeah, five minutes was a lot. It was hard. Yeah, it was. Okay, so day one, day one, hardest one. Got our work done. Okay, we're out of there. Tuesday. Now we're going to build back in our lower intensity, easier thing.

All right. So maybe you're going for your hike. You're going to go ruck. You're going to go do whatever you want to do. I will typically personally do like a 30 minute station of three nasal breathing only. What I mean by that is 10 minutes on a bike, 10 minutes on a treadmill, 10 minutes on a rower, something like that. Right. Because I don't want to sit in a row for 30 minutes. I can't I actually can't handle any of those. Something's going to hurt on me afterwards for the most part.

Um, so I'll, I'll do whatever, right. I might jump rope. I might do all kinds of stuff like that with our athletes. We will, we will actually even do shorter. So we'll do oftentimes like five minute things. We'll set up five to seven stations. It might be bench press at 50% of your one or max, right. It might be pushups. It might be an active walking lunge sort of thing, five minutes. And it's going to be nasal only to keep things down. I don't want any muscular endurance. We're not sweating that hard. Um,

but we're moving in a lot of different ways. We'll do Turkish get ups or more athletic movements so that we're not just like lifting weights up and down sort of the whole time. So we try to move and your joints honestly tend to feel better afterwards. You kind of finish that and you have more energy where you can trust that the Monday you finish that you have less energy. You're in the hole today. You're actually feel like, man, I should go to work right now. Like I feel locked in. I feel pretty good. That can be 20 to 40 minutes. It can be longer. If you really think go two hours, I don't really care, but I would say,

Under 20 is just kind of moving. It's not really going to be enough to stimulate what we're looking for here. So we would plug that in. Wednesday is probably where we're going to incorporate. You mentioned lifting, so there's going to be some lifting in there. Whatever we're doing, if you're trying to get stronger, do your strength training stuff. If you're trying to simply improve VO2 max, then we might do some corrective exercises here. By corrective, I mean this could be overhead press. This could be heavy rows. This could be

Big hip thrusts or leg press, whatever we're doing to feel strong, feel joints, whatever that thing is we're trying to do. We're not going to go to max effort here, but we're not just warming up either. We're going to get work done, right? Because we're going to make sure that muscular endurance wise, that's not causing our problems. And so this would look more like.

somewhat of a bodybuilder workout, though it's not single joint. It's not joint isolation stuff. It's typically more compound things. And it's still going to be, we'll call it that eight to 15 rep range of your big things, probably two to three sets with that first set being, um,

you know, six, seven RPE, you know, out of 10, that can set maybe a little bit higher, but you're not going to nine at all. Right. So we're gonna get some work done there. You're gonna leave the gym filling a pump. You're gonna be sweating, but you're not gonna be destroyed either.

And then if you have a few isolation exercises for a lagging body part or a body part you specifically want to emphasize, especially if it's upper body, then trash it. I don't care. Just zero RER. Just get it after. Who cares? Try to push down so you're dead. Go ahead. All good. So that would be probably Wednesday. If you want to also add in additional day two, so you want to do another thing, but this is what I would encourage walking.

So on this day, we should have done a 10 minute, 15 minute walk in the morning, another 10, 15 minute one in the afternoon. Really, really low level stuff. If you can do three in a day, great, but we're going to get stuff in. Okay. Now that leads us to Thursday. So Thursday is probably when we're going to come back and it's going to look closer to Monday or it's going to be our shorter, higher one, but we're not going to go all the way up to that ceiling.

It's very difficult for people to go to max heart rate more than twice per week, the average person. Pro athletes, yeah, every day, right, or close. But most people, especially if you're in a job that is sympathetically driven or any life, I should say, it's not even a job, if there's just a lot of processing sympathetically, it's

you walk out of that thing and you always red line yourself all day and then you red line yourself in the gym, people end up spending a lot of money to unwind that problem because it gets to a bad spot pretty fast. But we're going to work here. And this would be more of like this is the day for Norwegian. This is four fours. You don't have to actually get all the way to the top end here, but you're going to put in good, consistent, hard work. We're going to get there. If you want to do a slightly different protocol,

That's fine. But this could be a, call it 85% day. And so if you want it to do 30 on 30 off, you're moving, but this is not like motivational music playing, like everything in my life counts right now. Rocky music. Like I have to finish. Like you, you can only go into that hole so often. Right. Or it just ends up sliding down. So call this, just call this four by four day. If you want to make life easier and we're good there.

Now into Friday. And by the way, any of these days could have been a pure off day if you wanted, of course, or needed to travel day, whatever the case is. Friday, we're going to go back into Tuesday, right? So now in our longer duration thing, probably picking up the intensity just a little bit on those 30 minutes, still nasal breathing, but like trying to get some real work done. And then Saturday, we're going back into movement. So this is, we're lifting again and we're basic movement. And that leaves a Sunday for Friday.

any additional stuff you want to do. If you want to slide another lift in, you want to slide more recovery stuff in, you want to slide other stuff in. Honest reality is that's a buffer day because probably something happened in those six days where you didn't get your training in. And so now you can kind of slide things back one day and make sure you get six good training days done out of seven. One of the things that you mentioned there was motivation to do this. I would imagine that for a lot of people, one of the biggest

hurdles to doing top-end VO2 max work is fear of the difficulty. It's the trepidation that you have as you walk into the gym knowing if I'm going to do this properly, it's really going to hurt and that means my heart rate's going to be high and that's kind of scary and I get anxious thinking about that and that sucks. From a motivation, sustaining, will to train over time, intra-training

session or intra workout vo2 max motivation what have you come to learn as levers and ways that people can kind of really sink in yeah that's a really great question because you have people that go into one of two big camps on this one camp one is we'll call this crossfit camp which is if i'm not throwing up the end of the workout it didn't count right and it's not it's not i'm not taking a shot at all but these are people that do not have the problem you just described

This is actually the opposite. I feel like I didn't do anything if I don't peg myself all the way to the end every day. That's a problem. And then you have the other group, which is more like you described, which is going, hey, I just worked all these hours. I had this going on. And like now my whole workout. Fuck, no. Like I will work out today. I can get it done, but I can't do that. There's just no way. That happens to me all the time.

have 27 jobs and kid like that. Sometimes I'm just like, Oh God, I have 30 minutes. I can get a workout, but that's not going to happen. And I just know, right. All right, great. So I personally, and the way we often coach is I, this is why I don't like having set workouts on set days of the week. Example I gave you was like, Monday is the hard day. I never do that. I just have the workouts in order and I just do the next one in order regardless. Right. And so if something came up on Monday, I'm like,

And I couldn't train. I'm not doing Tuesday's workout on Tuesday. I'm doing Monday's workout. So there are no Monday workouts. It is just, this is the order we do them in. And I try to get 20 in and 30 days. Sometimes that's seven in a row. Sometimes that's, you know, one, one, sometimes it's 14 days in a row. Cause I got a break and lined up that way. I never take a day off unless I'm forced to, because my schedule forces me to do it often enough. Anyways, it works out. Right. So that's how I ended up doing it. Um,

That said, this gives you the ability to when that flight got delayed and you landed in and the other thing happened, your kid was sick all night and you're like, yes, today is supposed to be that max effort one mile. Not doing it today. I'm just going to slide in that lower intensity one. And there's a game you're going to play here, right? Because if you do that often enough, you end up just picking a 30 minute kind of easy one every day when you didn't have to, right? At the same time, there's also, I'd rather people do that

then choose nothing, right? If the option is, okay, then I don't have time to do that perfect workout at that intensity. And therefore, Dr. Andy said, if I don't do it at all the way up to max, it doesn't do any benefit. So therefore, I'm just not going to do it. That's not the case. Still working at 80% still has benefit. Working at 40% still has benefit over 0%. There is never a case in which exercise is doing nothing. That does not happen. It's not the optimal benefit potentially.

but it's never zero. And so I always want to make people, especially if people that are like struggling, if exercise is new to them, if it's just even not new, but it's not a huge passion, like it is ours. I want, I still want to win. I want to win as many times as we can. And if we see it sliding into that spot where it's like, all right, it's been three weeks. We haven't done anything hard. Then, then it's, it's time to reassess what we're doing. But often is the case, as you know, this, once you get in there and get moving, you're,

You're like, all right, I can do this. And then you end up going and doing the hard thing anyways. But if you never show up in the gym, that answer is going to be zero every time. So I just don't want people not training. It is the primary thing I'm worried about. Yeah, this is one of the, I guess, VO2 max training is the cardio equivalent of one RMs.

And well, like 1RM days, they're scary. And it's the one that you're tempted to miss. So yeah, the hurdle to doing it is embedded in the difficulty. And the difficulty is precisely the signal for the outcome that you're trying to get. So it's this sort of very vicious cycle of the thing that you want to do being the thing that discourages you from doing the thing. So yeah, I mean, I'm speaking to myself here as someone who's trying to improve my cardiovascular fitness after many years of just lifting heavy things.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we're the same here, friend, you know, that's us. I see. One thing I will often describe is think about the month. All right. So I got this from a friend of mine, Kenny Kane, many years ago, actually started one of the first CrossFit gyms, top 10 or something like that. CrossFit, I like for many, many years. And he realized this problem of, Hey, you can't just go red line every single day. So he set up a structure where he says 70% of our training

However many trainings that is, 70% of them are going to be practice. What he means by that is you're still going to work. You're still going to get sweaty. It's going to be hard. But the goal is to get better at something, get better at technique, get better at holding your rib cage when you get tired. You're getting better at something, much like if you were to go to play sports.

and you go to practice every day, you're not thinking you're trying to win that practice. You're intentionally doing a drill where someone's holding your arm behind you, or there's six basketball players against you. You're setting odds against you on purpose. You know you're not going to win, but you're trying to specifically get better at something. 70% of a basketball practice or whatever is practice related, right? Great. That leaves you then 20% or so of the time where we're going to practice competing.

Okay. So we're going to scrimmage. We're going to actually try to get the best score possible. So here, here's our 20 minute test, Chris. Let's see how, can you get the highest amount of mileage? Whatever the thing is, we can be right. We're going to compete. And this is, we're going to pace ourselves. We're not going to go as hard as we can. We're going to try to win, right? We're going to try to beat the person, the leaderboard, whatever the case may be, right? We're going to change our technique and our position. We want to get the highest score on the bench, right? In terms of a weight up there, that's 20%. That leaves us 10% of the time

Well, we're going to touch death, right? We're going to touch this, which means we might do that same 20 minute workout. And I want you sprinting step number one. I know you're going to blow up in three minutes. I know the point is you're going to get a worse score. You will do way better if you pace yourself, but I don't want a good score here. I want this to, I want this to be how, how horrible can you feel? Can you put the rock? I saw your, your Borat cat and I just got back from cam. So I'm using this analogy, but Oh, wow. He made you do the thing.

I begged him. I'm like, come on, dude. We had to reschedule. He's like, oh, we'll just skip it. I'm like, no, no. Like, I will come back up later. We are going up that mountain. Yeah. Right. Like, we're going to put the 70 pound rock on your shoulder and we're going to sprint. And yeah, that means we're going to triple our time. It's going to take us two and a half hours to get up that mountain. But this is today's point, right? That's 10%.

And so mentally, if the athlete and the client knows that, hey, I just need you to get there mentally 10% of the time. Think of the average person working out four times per week, okay? Over the months, that's 16 workouts. 10% means twice. Twice a month, can you give me that? Can you give me that max one mile twice this month? I'm not feeling it this week, not feeling it today. Okay, cool, cool, cool. 70% is still going to be practice. 70% is still going to be, or 20% is still going to be compete. We're going to pace...

Twice though. So between once and twice, I need you to get there. And now we have that like, okay, you have the breathing room, but then we also have a context of going at

I don't know the last time I really went hard. Who knows? Because we have a set schedule. Yeah. That's nice. I like, I was talking to Mike Israetel about fat loss a couple of weeks ago, and he was saying that he treats his step count across the week the same way as he treats his calorie intake across the week. That if he has one day where he only hits 5K, then tomorrow he maybe tries to do 13, and the day after that he tries to do 13, and then he's like, oh, no, we're back. We're back to where we're supposed to be. And yeah, yeah.

I like the idea of not being so dogmatic with a week, which is just an arbitrary measure in any case, but taking a slightly broader window. And then within that, it gives you, it allows you to kind of play around with things a bit more. Yeah. This is actually a really important thing. I know you've had Mike on. I don't even probably know. I feel like I see you guys posting clips from your show three times a week for the last year and a half. So he must've been on your show 20 times. He is my biggest fan.

I believe that. I do believe that. Do you even return his calls or texts anymore? I bet you don't. I haven't spoken to him in months, actually. Not directly. I bet if we looked at your phone, there's probably 300 or 400 unanswered messages from him to you. It's the picture messages that are really concerning. That's really what we should be worried about. Very much understood. The point being, this is one of the things that separates people that are either plateauing

or struggling to get results with training despite working hard. Like, man, I'm really getting after it. I am, whether it's the nutrition side or the training side. Are you just worried about one workout? Are you just worried about one week? And your entire programming thinking is just on a seven-day window. These are the kind of problems you run into, right? We have to step back and look at what's the month look like? What's the two months or three months at minimum? And now if we're playing that kind of a game, if you're playing your step count per month game,

That's way more effective than playing just today. Like now you have to put the work in today to eventually get there at the end of the 30 days, but really taking a big picture back and going, okay, great this week. How did that layer on the last week and the week ahead of that? And then what's this month look like? We actually do it. We program it by quarter. So what's quarter Q1, Q2, Q3 with, with all of our stuff with everybody or in season, off season, post fight, like whatever the case is from the different athletes, um,

And that's really how you don't make missteps like that and how you can make small things that feel like nothing, like one extra 10-minute walk today, all of a sudden make big things or, hey, you know, it's okay to back off right now because we got this or we got this or whatever. This becomes huge for our boxers and fighters because they feel like they have to fight hard every day. And when we can show them, no, this is what we're going to get done in the next 60 days, it's like, oh, okay.

there's a sense of relief there because like, I know we'll get after it when we need to get after it, but I don't have to just randomly take days off. And I feel like death. Who are some of the fighters that you work with that people might know? Can you talk about them? Yeah. I mean, I've worked with plenty of, um, different fighters, boxers, UFC fighters. Um, right now I still currently work a lot with Ryan Ortega. So I've worked with him for many years, Tatiana Suarez, um, for many years, but even Matt Brown recently, who just recently retired, uh,

Matt should be in the Hall of Fame any day, hopefully. I think he has the most wins in UFC history or most fights, most knockouts as well. So those folks, Mike Lee fought for World Championship in boxing. I just actually started working with Jordan Panthen, who's a really high-level boxer. So we've been around a ton of them, lots of wrestlers, a bunch of things. So a whole number of them. Those are the ones that I'm coaching right now. What else is there to say about

about VO2max, any other common assumptions, errors that people make, any unclosed loops that you think that you need to dial in? One thing, part of the reason I push back so hard on the protocol thing is because I really wanted people to not see those as limitations. And what I mean by that is thinking, oh, because I didn't do the 4x4 perfectly, I'm

therefore I can't train or I'm not going to get better. And I've made that before, but I like being, or that point earlier, but I like being very direct in that you have unlimited options with VO2max. It is really equivalent in my opinion to bodybuilding training where I almost call it idiot proof in the sense that the training is hard for sure. And the programming at the highest levels, it's complicated, but at the entry point, midpoint, moderate point, it's,

If there's any part of a protocol you heard on a program that you feel like you can't do, oh, I'd love to do that, but my knee, I'd love to do that, but I can't, I don't have access to it. You're okay. You're totally fine. You can still get whatever needs to be done regardless of the exercise equipment you have, regardless of the time limitations you have, regardless of the weather outside. There are still lots of options at work. So if you get inspired...

By Rhonda doing her awesome stuff or peer or whatever, and you hear the exact protocol and you go, I can't do that. Therefore, it's not going to work. I want to make sure you know that that is not the case. You can modify these things a ton of ways and still get all of the benefits, if not more. What else? Or what?

What do you wish that more people knew about cardiovascular fitness? It seems to me that in part of this VO2 max revolution that we're seeing at the moment, massive proliferation of heart disease, big concerns that people have over protecting their heart over the long term. What do you wish that more people knew about cardiovascular fitness? You would be stunned how little effort it takes to see benefit. Like really quite stunned how little exercise has to happen

for you to see big results, especially if you're in those bottom 20 or 25% of fitness. So if you are really in a bad spot, it takes nothing. As little I'm talking about as 20 seconds. So there's a handful of studies out of Canada that have been done on things like exercise snacks. So these are literally 20 second bursts, one to three times per day,

in office related settings. So imagine you're in your suit and you're tying all that. You get it from your desk, you sprint 20 seconds up a step and you go right back to work. Those have been shown in multiple studies from multiple labs to enhance VO2 max. Now it's not going to do it if you're a highly trained athlete. I'm not saying, oh, don't do any other workouts. All you have to do is this 20 second sprint once. What I'm going all the way down to the bottom is that's how little your stimulus you need for your body to actually pay attention.

Now, the benefits of V2Max to a protocol like that are small. You're talking a few percentage points. But look at the power of that, right? It can certainly maintain where you're at. And so if you are in a situation where whatever, you can't have access, can't afford a gym membership or who... Now, I told Andrew, he remembered about this a couple of years ago. And still to this day, I'll see him in the studio just sprinting around the studio, full get up. That's him running away from his demons. He's not doing V2Max work. Of course, yeah. Yeah.

Or running away from his cell phone or whatever else. So yeah, these things can really, really help. So if you just do the bare minimum, that will matter. And it will matter for about as many physiological variables as one can think.

Sure, your longevity. Sure, your heart disease. Yes, of course. But blood sugar regulation, energy throughout the day. In fact, in the studies I'm mentioning, not only did they look at VO2 max, but they also looked at executive function, decision-making, and word recall. All that improved. So, I mean, you really can enhance your life in whatever metric matters to you. Some people like you and I, to be honest-

Like desk related stuff doesn't do much for me. Like, all right, I'm young. I'm pretty, I'm okay. But man, improving my word recall by 20%. That's, that's fantastic. Make better decisions. I don't have to redo my work. That, that would be nice. There's data on money. People make more money.

Like you, you finance your high. No, for sure. Like you see those with sleep all the time too. I think the number was sleep is actually like in America. Most recent estimate was poor sleep, uh, is causes a $400 billion loss in America alone. On average, people lose something like six working days.

because of slightly, not like massive bad sleep, just slightly worse sleep causes a total throughout the year of about six a month of work a day. We actually have a client. Is that productivity, loss in productivity, errors, car crashes, full works? All of it. Got sick more. Just kind of checked out that 10 minutes early today and went home because I was a little tired today. It was the redid my work faster, all those things. We have a client in my sleep company who is a financial trader.

And he tracks, we have his sleep data tracked for a long time with his financial trades. And it is a very statistically significant correlation. So he keeps re-upping, he keeps repaying because he's like, no matter what I pay you guys, I make more money. Just like sleeping better. We're like, great. Wow. What's your sleep company? It's called Absolute Rest. Okay. Is that sleep coaching? Is that a product? What is it? It's both of it. So at the height, we have two.

things actually. One of them we just released like a month ago. It's a more consumer grade version. But for the first handful of years where it started is this elite program where we come in and we can actually build full sleep labs in people's houses. So you can get a full clinical grade FDA approved sleep study done every single night in your house or take it with you, take it wherever you want.

So we have full, it's all wireless too. You've ever seen people in the sleep clinics that have the wires, all that stuff's gone, needing those things. So we can run all that from your house. But in addition to that, now we've got the highest fidelity understanding of how you sleep. We're not missing data and making assumptions. And because of that, we now want to go, well, why are you sleeping that way? And so we're not just stopping and being like, well, your sleep's shitty. And people are like, great. I got a sleep study done. They told me how that, it didn't help at all. Why are you sleeping that way?

Well, number one, then we're going to start off by looking at your environment. So we have a full environmental scanner that sits next to your bed and is scanning your room at all times for CO2 concentrations, humidity, particulates, volatile organics, dander, mold, pollen, allergens. All those things are being continuously scanned in your room to make sure it's not environmentally related. We're doing blood work specific to sleep-related physiology.

We have a psychological evaluation. One of our co-founders is a Harvard psychiatrist, psychologist of sleep. And then we have any pathology screened, of course. And so we have an understanding of exactly why you're sleeping. It's all positionally done too. So if the problem was on your left side or right side or whatever that thing is happening. So all those data come back to our scientists who are the most published scientists in the world in sleep, folks that handle the astronauts and the space station and all that.

They go over all those data, give you your results back there, and then put you on a several month long coaching program where you get to check in and see. And we fix sleep very successfully because of that. So we have been doing that for a very long time. And then just about a month ago, we released what's called Sleep Lens, which is a fingertip version of our sleep program. And so now we can do this at about a tenth of the price.

And so we can run a full FDA approved equivalent to being in a sleep lab from your fingertip. It's not a wearable, it's not a tracker. You're going to like check your sleep score. We can medically diagnose sleep disorders on this thing. And we can look at hundreds of measures per second, as opposed to like one measure per five minutes.

Wow. So sleep is, you know, between VO2 max, I think it's 11, episode 1109 or 1159 was Matthew Walker on Rogan. And that was the day that I got red pilled about my sleep because I'd been a club. Oh, you had a good sleeper? Uh-oh. Not that I'm not a good sleeper. I was a club promoter for so long and baked into my weekly routine from the age of 18 until the age of...

or 33 when COVID came along, was I was awake until at least three or four in the morning running a nightclub. And the beautiful thing about being a club promoter is that the very final task you have to do is the most cognitively demanding one. So you have to count the till, make sure that all of the money is where you say it is, enter into a spreadsheet so you're looking at a beautiful bright screen for a little while, drive home, put it in the... Or drive to the office, put it in the safe, make sure that everything's okay. And then...

within 20 minutes go right okay brain I know that you just did all that mental arithmetic best of luck getting yourself to sleep and I did that and that was just life that was life for me you know those are the times when we'd be driving we ran events in Manchester which is about two and a half hours from where we were based and um I would do that drive every other week for

Half a decade. And I'd get back at 5 a.m. There was some times where I'd hit rush hour leaving Newcastle going to Manchester at 5 p.m. And then I would hit rush hour getting back home the next day, which felt particularly unfair. But yeah, I...

I think that that was a big turning point for me. I don't think that I'd really considered sleep. It sounds so stupid in retrospect. It makes me sound like a total idiot. But I just hadn't considered how important sleep was for cognition, for performance, for mood, all of this stuff. And I think, yeah, between VO2 max and sleep, that's been probably two of the biggest red pill changes that I've seen in terms of prioritization over the last five years. Yeah, I mean, we coach...

Major League Baseball players. I coach NBA players. I coach Travis Barker, the drummer for Blink-182. I was just with Travis last weekend. So we had a 5K in the morning. So let's see. We were probably there at 7 a.m. getting warmed up and all that stuff. Travis ran 20, just under 22 minutes for a 5K. It's pretty good, right? And then... Better than me. We were...

in uh staples center kia forum whatever uh sofa stadium in front of 70 000 people until i don't know i left at midnight i think something like that and then who knows when he like got home got to sleep and all that right so i'm dealing he's on tour right now he's in salt lake today like okay playing for the 70 000 people be a fucking drummer in front of 70 000 people on stage and then go to bed

Good luck. Right. Like absolutely good luck. And he is a maniac with his health. He's, he's dialed. He runs every day. He's up super early, but it's the same problem. It's like, by the time we get off stage, you get wound down, all that stuff. It's five in the morning. Like who knows what to do? Right. Not because he's out partying, but just because again, I literally am on stage as a rock star until midnight. And they're like, now try to come down and see, you know, okay. So we deal with those problems really routinely. Right.

as well as our executives that are running companies, different time zones, working in all those things. It's like we have to land. And our golfers too would live now. Man, I coach John Rahm and he's in live now. So he's all over the world. Time change. So we deal with this problem a lot. And funny enough, man, that we're having this, I don't know when this show's going to come out, but just yesterday, episode five of my podcast came out all on sleep enhancement.

And so one of the things you will see really consistently is, yeah, I mean, Matthew Walker has done such an amazing job helping people understand that if you don't sleep well, everything in your health goes down. But there's an entirely different side of the equation, which is the performance enhancing ability to go from okay sleep to good sleep. There's a whole bunch of studies that have been done on sleep banking and sleep extension. So these are people that are already sleeping okay, and they go from good to what I call great sleep.

And you see market and massive improvements in everything from reaction time

to three-point and free throw shooting accuracy in division one basketball players, professional tennis players having 20% reduction in cortisol, serving accuracy improving, body composition, VO2 max, cyclists, rugby players. There's lots and lots of data going from I sleep seven, seven and a half hours to I sleep better than that. And it's not just duration, right? I'm just giving a number.

And then look what happens to physiology. There's probably 30 plus studies out of Walter Reed that have been done on looking at things like sleep banking and sleep extension prior to sleep depriments. So you know you're going, this is oftentimes the military, but this is you're going to do training camp. You're going to do some situation in which, say you're going to be traveling internationally in meetings and speaking events and you're going to be doing a seminar, but

Okay, great. We know that because that cognitive function, physical performance is going to go down. But if you can get ahead of sleep before you go, the drop will be attenuated. So you'll have much less of a reduction in your performance when you know the shit's going to hit the fan one way or the other, right? So before season, before going back out on tour, we're taking a ton of advantage of these things in between sessions. So there is a lot you can do. And as much as VO2 Max is cool,

Nothing has a more ubiquitous benefit to every aspect of anything you care about in your body than sleep well. Assume that most of the people listening have been red-pilled on

most of Matthew Walker's stuff that, look, I know that I should be aiming to get eight hours a night. I know that eight hours of sleep is not derived from eight hours in bed because sleep efficiency is a thing that being consistent, cool, dark room, et cetera, et cetera. You've mentioned there's this entire other world of enhancement. What are, what are the big movers there that most people don't know about?

Great. I love the way you say that because I feel like every time sleep comes up, people tune out because they're like, yes, cool, dark, quiet. And that's like all true. Correct. What else can we do? Okay. Well, let's go backwards. Why don't people sleep well to begin with? All right. That's actually causing most of your problem. So we're going to look at this in different parts. Sleep duration is one thing. Honestly, it's the variable we probably pay the least amount of attention to. Really? Yeah. I mean, it's fine, but either people sleep five hours and it's like, hey,

do you want to spend 10 grand? Because I can also just tell you, you have to sleep more. I could do that, but here's a problem. What's more interesting is the, I'm in bed for eight hours, here's the problem starts. You're falling asleep problems. I get up a lot. It is often things that are benign. There are people think benign that are not. Oh, I sleep, I snore a ton. Oh, really? Interesting. That's not normal. It doesn't necessarily mean you have a sleep disorder, but it's

It's very generally likely that something bad is happening. Oh, OK. I wake up two or three times to go pee in the night. Oh, that's not normal either. That should not be happening. That number should be basically zero. Oh, I'm just getting old. Nope. Nope, nope, nope. Those are not answers either. Shouldn't be happening. We see a lot of, oh, I feel terrible all day. Energy is low. Libido is low. Focus is low. Brain fog is low. I think I have COVID-related-- long COVID-- something like that. OK, all possible. Sure.

How's your sleep? Oh, I sleep pretty well. Really? Take a look at it. This happened actually with one of our professional athletes. Used a wearable, we'll say, and had like a 90 plus percent score on the wearable consistently. We run them through stuff, immediately clinically diagnosable sleep disorder. Like this is not a test. What was the sleep disorder that was missed so obviously by the wearable? Well, wearables can't diagnose any sleep disorders.

Of course, but I would have guessed that if you have a disorder, it would show up somehow in some of those markers. No, it won't because the vast majority of cheap consumer wearables are going to be looking at so low resolution that it's an x-ray. So imagine you fell off the mountain today as you're running and your knee is destroyed. You got hella back down and they took you down there. And they're like, oh man, his knee is torn up and we'll take an x-ray. And the doctor comes back and goes, no broken bones, you're fine.

Like, well, okay, but your MCL is torn. ACL is torn. It's kneecaps dislocated. It's an x-ray. It can only look at a few things and it's looking at it at very, very low resolution. Typically wearables are going to take a measurement once every five minutes. So if you had any event that happened, not within that very small time window, it all gets missed. That's something I remember. I had a fuck. Who's elite HRV, Joel Jameson.

Oh, yeah, with Morpheus? Yes. I remember speaking to him, and he was telling me about how HRV, when you do it in those bracket windows like that, if you're laid on your front versus if you're laid on your side, if you're at a particular stage of sleep, and you can kind of do this odd dance routine during sleep that gives a really...

um skewed uh set of data uh which i found particularly interesting all right so i i know that i'm branching off i promise i'll bring you back what are the metrics that you guys when you do your sleep studies are looking at which are being missed what are the things that pick up these sleep disorders okay so you want to think about this this way when most people are this is cool um

When most people think about sleep, right? We're thinking about duration and their sleep score and your wearables. And I could go on, but I think you get the point that those are not a good way. One of the main reasons why is what people tend to be concerned about is how long did I sleep and how much time did I spend in various stages, deep REM, things like that. Throw all that out of the way. It's completely garbage.

Not only from like a technology perspective, but what I simply mean is the construct, the idea of sleep stages is almost nonsensical for everybody. The amount of time you spend in a sleep stage, I'm not going to say is totally irrelevant, but it's way less important than most people think because of a handful of things.

Your brain is going to engineer what we call the archetype. So the architecture of your sleep based upon the demands and what it needs. And so you are not going through the same physical or cognitive demands every single day. Thus, you don't need the same sleep staging every single day. When your brain is doing something with your sleep staging, it's doing it for a reason. And then you're going in there and listening to Andrew Huberman and taking a supplement to hack that sleep stage. And now you're going against what your brain is trying to do.

You're causing problems. The sleep staging is not accurately depicted. They also change the record. It's like they're changed arbitrarily. This is now deep sleep. This is now not deep sleep. So we see people consistently over time, like, oh my God, my deep sleep's gone way down. What do you mean?

Oh, no, no, no. One, an algorithm could have been just changed in the background. It's not like your two years of data is gone and that happens all the time. But I mean, even medically, the medical side of the equation can change their definition of these things and has happened many times. So we don't also even know at all how much sleep staging you should be in for any given sort of purpose. It would be the equivalent of saying you should do this exact type of training every single day the rest of your life.

Why? Well, because that's the average type of training the average person does. Well, that's fucking unhelpful. That's about as unhelpful as it could possibly get. And so that's not going to provide you any insight into what's going on. More importantly than the time you spend, let's just throw all that away. Let's say you could accurately measure your sleep stages. It's not the time you spend in those stages. It's the depth in those stages that matter. I don't know where of any tracker or wearable that can actually measure any of that.

And so if you and I both spent an hour in deep sleep, whatever that means, but your amplitude within that is five times higher than mine, you're going to have much more restorative sleep than I. And this is your classic, my scores are okay. I'm in the right time, but I'm still feeling lethargic. I'm still feeling whatever other thing we're issuing. And we have seen this a ton from TRT clinics. So people that have gone on testosterone and because energy is low,

You fill in the blanks there. It's fine. Not against that at all. When we come back, we're like, why did you think you needed testosterone? When we take a look at your sleep, you're like, if you're tired, the first place we should look is sleep. This is pretty obvious, right? What's energy intake look like? Food, nutrition. And what's sleep look like? That's our mountain, right? We don't need to think we're in some weird spot. And so, again, testosterone is fine. Don't want to take us off track here. That was not the point. But the point is going like, whoa, we have to really pay attention to

how sleep actually works. So when I say like duration, like it is what it is. I am more looking at things like what is the amplitude within these sleep stages? So what's the quality of that? What's the consistency?

of your sleep-wake cycles and rhythms? What is the actual next day feelings? What's your symptomology, right? How's that actually doing? And we're going to measure that cognitively. So I'm not just going to ask you, how do you feel? We're going to measure cognitive speed, processing speed, reaction time, things like that. I was going to say, what are the tests that you do for that? We don't do anything without testing for the most part. We're going to track metrics on, this is technology and performance. This is our game, right? So we're not messing around with it.

And any of that stuff. So we're going to test all of those. We're going to look at things like respiratory rate, right? We're going to look at HRV. And now since we do this as a high variability, I can differentiate and tell you, oh, this was a problem of you're unfit, right? So I can give you that example. Maybe I, okay. I can, we can very easily triangulate and say, all right,

You're resting. I take a look at you and I say, all right, symptomology is there. We're not feeling refreshed. We think something's going on with sleep. All right, awesome. Now we look and you don't have any clinical insomnia, right? We're not having these obvious signs of that. But just because you don't have clinical apnea or whatever, doesn't mean you don't have subclinical. So maybe we see a little bit of subclinical apnea. Okay, well, you're kind of a bigger guy. Body mass tends to go up. That tends to start happening. All right, now why are you having an apnea?

Interesting. Well, apnea could be anatomical. So we're going to actually run a scan of your face and we're going to be able to see, is there any anatomical things going on? It's a navel cavity thing. It could be a tongue-related issue. And so there are tongue, believe it or not, there are tongue-strengthening exercises we can do that'll stop your tongue from flopping back in your neck. A flaccid tongue. I knew I had a flaccid tongue. I mean, I didn't want to say it, but if it never gets used, it... It's pretty obvious, man. It's pretty obvious. Right? Yeah.

So we just need to firm you up a little bit. Turgid, nice turgid tongue. Turgid tongue. It could be as simple as that, right? It could be as simple as position. So maybe all of your happiness are happening when you're laying on your right shoulder. Now all we have to do is teach you to stop laying on your right shoulder and all of a sudden your sleep changes instantaneously. And we've had this, I can't even count how many times things like that have happened. It could also be

things like environmental. So one of the things I've talked about a lot in the past is the fact that when you take a breath in, you inhale oxygen. When you take a breath out, you exhale CO2. Now, in a normal situation, that's fine. As you're sleeping, you're not exhaling very hard. So that breath, if you're watching the video here, is coming just kind of like seeping out of your mouth. That stays right in front of your face and forms what's called a CO2 cloud. And you take your next breath and you rebreathe back instead of that CO2.

Most people, that's not a big deal. However, if you're highly sensitive to CO2 or if the CO2 concentrations in your room start getting really high, why? Because all your doors and windows are shut. Because you have a sleeping partner. Because you have an animal in there as well. Your kid is in there too. More bodies in a room, poor ventilation. When that number crosses 900 parts per million, you will see consistent research showing poor sleep onset,

wakeful events, next day restfulness, next day concentration, next day cognitive function, all when CO2 levels start to rise above 900. So it could be simply that. It has nothing to do with anything else going on besides the fact that you're choking yourself on CO2. CO2 levels rise in your body. That's one of your primary levers that kicks you from autonomic to parasympathetic nervous system.

This is fight or flight to rest and digest. Human taught me about this test that they do where they get people to take a single breath in from some mask that's got a really high concentration of carbon dioxide, and it's able to reliably bring on a panic attack. A single breath is able to reliably. There's been many, many decades of research in psychiatry that uses CO2 to induce panic. That's like one of the most standard models for anxiety and panic disorder research.

is inhaling CO2. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It's been around for a very long time. A lower level version of that when you have poor ventilation and high amounts of CO2 in your room. Yep. Or if none of that's happening and you're simply intolerant to CO2, you're hypersensitive to it, your concentration in your bedroom could be very, very low, but it's still kicking off that entire sympathetic cascade because you're overly triggered to your CO2.

So I can see that because I can see your HRV, I can see your heart rate, and I can see your oxygenation. So I will very quickly be able to be like, this is the problem. To hell with your tongue exercises, to hell with your supplementation and all those other things or whatever. In your particular case, this is simply about you developing better CO2 tolerance. We see this one really routinely. The opposite could be the case.

We see that those things are fine. Heart rate is actually... So the way I can triangulate this is because we can look at HRV, we can look at CO2, and we can look at O2 concentration, and I can look at your VO2 max. Now I can identify, oh, if your resting heart rate's really, really high, but your HRV is also high, that means you're nice and downregulated, and your respiratory rate is low. You're not overbreathing, right? And then I look at your VO2 max, and your VO2 max is shit. I know, oh, okay, you're unfit.

You're just unfit. We have got to get, that's our problem. You're not over breathing. It's not an O2 issue. It's not an environmental, it's not a tongue thing. You're just unfit to a position where you're having any deviation, that small apnea you have, that small amount of apnea you have rather, is causing such a big effect because you don't have any breathing room. The VO2 you need to have just to sleep is just barely below your threshold when you're awake. And so slight deviations cause you to choke immediately.

O2 gets low and now you're having this response or the opposite. And that's the last one I'll give you. But we could be super fit, very low resting heart rate. HRV is high and or respiratory rate is high. You're not downregulated.

You're exhausted. So your sleep onset is really, really short. You're falling asleep immediately, but you wake up often. When you wake up, you have a hard time going back to sleep. And or when you even sleep through the night, you still feel very fatigued the next day. And we look respiratory rates overly high. You're dumping CO2. You're

You're getting rid of it too much. This causes respiratory alkalosis. And I can confirm this by looking at your hydration status because in response to respiratory alkalosis, your kidneys will put you into metabolic acidosis, which means it's very, very hard to retain electrolytes. And all of a sudden, you're waking up and peeing a ton.

but there's not a lot of volume in it. It's not super clear. You're not overly hydrated. We're consistently seeing signs and symptoms of dehydration in your lab work and your blood. And now we know about a being about a boom. This is all simply coming down to the fact that you're overly sympathetically driven. You're over breathing. We correct that sleep problems go away. Wow.

I love the 360 view of all of this. It's very impressive and comprehensive. Okay, getting back into sleep enhancements, not for noobs. Sleep enhancements, not for noobs. Yeah. So this is where it comes down to going, okay, we're sleeping okay. You're falling asleep fine. And you're maybe waking up a couple of times. And we'll just call you asleep, you know, kind of like the way I call your podcast. It's okay. It's not great, but it's just like, it's okay.

right like it's all right if i have to i want to watch it but i'm not going to go out my way right

So what we're looking at there could be duration, could be timing, could be consistently, could be any of those things. And we're just going to go there and polish it all the way up. Right. And so this is making sure we want to change the rhetoric here. This is not about you getting the most sleep. This is not about you having to have a 90 minute routine to get to bed every night. I want to actually develop the most resilient sleepers possible.

That is our goal. We always shy away from optimization. That's like the most anti-science word you could ever develop, but sometimes you just use it. We would rather be resilient. What's that mean? Even when you do have a slightly crummy night or a suboptimal night, we're still performing at the highest level possible the next day. When we don't have our environment, when we're not in the same position, you're not in your house today, you're out traveling, right? I won't tell the world where you are, right? I know the groupies are just

I'll never leave you alone. All of, all of the women of Bozeman, Montana will come with their cows. Now I'm going to be way, I'm going to be back home by the time this comes out. So they can send, they can send all of the cows over to Hilton, wherever the fuck I am in Bozeman at the moment. That's a trick. You guys know that, right? He's still in Bozeman. He just tried to throw you off the track. Uh, he's cagey. Yeah. Uh,

So we want to make you as resilient as possible, right? You're in a different environment, different bedroom. I want to make it such that when you are traveling, when you're on the road, we still get in there and we still have a great night of sleep or pretty good. And what you'll tend to see happen is if you can just keep people out of catastrophe with sleep, you're okay. You don't have to have these perfect nights. What really gets people is those really big dips and you can't come back out of those holes. Recovering that sleep debt is really, really challenging. So we just want to make sure...

It's the same thing we use with our, for example, our baseball players. The key to having a good ERA and winning a Cy Young, every time we've been able to do that with somebody, it's just we avoid them giving up 10 runs in one inning. You just can't have a terrible day. You don't have to throw great every single day, no horrible days. And that's really what we're after is super, super resilient. That baseline starts to come up just a little bit over three, six months. It's a complete game changer. So what we're doing is we're making sure

number one, environment as consistent as possible. And so we will engineer their bedrooms at home such that it is transportable with minimal effort. And the reason that matters is one of the biggest problems people have with sleep on the road is what's called the first night effect. First time in a new environment, whether you travel all the time or not, even if it's an environment you've been in, it's your second home, it's your vacation home, it's your parents' home. A lot of people will struggle with sleep

um the first night in it right it's a whole host of things going on but one of the things you can avoid that is making sure that environment smells and and looks visually and sounds like your house most of those problems go away so what do we do you engineer a particular sound in your house that can be transportable you engineer a particular smell this can be as simple as you take like a little bit of a lavender very subtle lavender scent and put it next to your bed at home

Take that with you on the road. You put that thing down, you make the visual of the same thing. You make the hearing the same thing, whether you're using a very light noise machine, keep the noise machine under 35 decibels, by the way, above that actually starts hurting sleep. So it's very, very quiet.

Now the environment is mimicked on the road and it doesn't matter where you go. You can avoid not all the problems, but you can avoid a lot of them. Pillow sheets is another really common one, right? Take your pillow sheet with you. You can't typically take your full eight sleep and your, you know, all that stuff with you. But if you take your pillow sheet, that stuff can go a long way. And then lastly, keep the same routine.

So if you shower and then do a, B and C, do that exact same thing. Take your same soap with you. Take your same smells as much of that. You can, that is not again, completely unbearable. That will go a very, very long way to that. So just that step alone for our NBA guys that are traveling new cities every three to five days, um,

That stuff makes a big deal. Our corporate people who live on airplanes, same thing. Like you spend actually more of your life on hotels than you do at home. It makes a huge deal. So that's one small example of how we can make them a little bit more resilient and just take that baseline and keep it higher. I love the idea. And I think that you are...

uh out ahead of the trend that i'm starting to see a good bit of pushback we spoke about this for a long time yesterday on this stupidly long hike i did yesterday which was um the perils of over optimization and kind of pushing back against protocol maxing and um you know for

All of the brilliant things that we've been given by health information and the democratization of access to scientific studies and what you should do and what you could do. I think lots of people are made

more sick by trying to be optimal than they would be by just embracing their suboptimal habits. This sort of rumination and, oh my God, I didn't get my... My friend George tells this great story. This was when he was first red-pilled. I think it was Matthew Walker. So he has this elaborate 90-minute wind-down routine before bed, and he's got no lights anywhere in the entire room. And he's had his red light glasses on for ages. And he's been doing his

4-4-8 breathing to downregulate everything and he's brushing his teeth in the dark and then as he's doing that his then girlfriend bursts into the room turns the light on blinds him because he hasn't seen any fucking light for the last 90 minutes blinds him he's seething he's he's raging because he's just spent 90 minutes trying to do this they get into bed she falls asleep straight away and he's laid there staring at the ceiling hating her and that's it just perfectly encapsulates this

fragility that gets built into the system when you rely on a too elaborate of a routine. I have many things to say about this, so I'm not sure how long you want me to go, but I will say just a few things that are short. I wrote a book, my one and only ever book, seven or eight years ago now with Brian McKenzie. And this was the entire premise of that book for the most part. You really want to stay away from optimization. You're going to play a game at all times.

On this side of the equation, you've got optimal. On the other side of the equation, you've got adaptation. If you're playing on one, you're not getting the other one. Sorry. Explain that to me. Yes. If you are optimizing, let's just say it this way. You have that 90-minute routine, okay? And you go through this, and that gets you a perfect night of sleep. Amazing. Every time you do that, you are making yourself less and less resilient to any change in that routine, okay? Now, the girlfriend was the opposite.

The girlfriend, if you said, hey, I need you to have a perfect night of sleep, everything is on the line tomorrow. You're going to get $50 million based on your sleep score. She wouldn't know what to do because she is all in resilient adaptation phase, right? It's just like whatever happens, still be able to get to sleep, but you have no ability understanding what makes you. So it's not one is better than the other one. But if you spend all of your time optimizing, think of this in the perspective of eating sugar.

Okay. Think about this. Another way to say this is immediate versus delayed gratification. Okay. If you're always choosing immediate gratification, if you're always choosing, do the thing that makes me feel the best right now, optimize for today. Okay. You're going to go, all right, I'm going to wake up. I'll have some ice cream. I'm going to turn my phone off. I'm going to play video games. You're going to do the thing that makes you feel the best right now. That is maximizing how you feel and perform in this very moment. You're optimized.

It's immediate gratification. But you know by doing that, you're making life a little bit worse. You do that every single day, you're going to get unhealthy. You're going to get unhealthy. You're not going to get productive. You're going to lose money. You're going to lose your job. So long-term-wise, you're compromising the long-term. You're compromising your adaptability. If you do the opposite, which is you never live in the moment.

You're always worried about tomorrow. You're never having a break for today. You know the problems that are associated with people not being present, not being grateful for what they have, not so on and so forth. So you don't want to always be worried about 50 years from now, and you don't want to always be just worried about this exact day. The same thing happens with optimization and adaptation. If I want you to play the best round of golf in your entire life, we would relax today, we'd get a massage, we'd do some breath work, we would not talk to anybody else, we'd maybe do some light warmup,

And we'd show if that's all you did every day, though, eventually your golf game would get worse and worse and worse because you're never actually practicing and getting better. Okay. So if I wanted you to get up that mountain yesterday on your hike and have a great, the greatest hike of your life, we would have had a completely different strategy the five days before, or we would have gone campaign style and we would have done the opposite. We'd have been like the hell of all of this. We're going to get up that hill with the most difficulty possible.

We're not going to perform at our best, but we're going to see. Now, that challenge is going to cause adaptations because you're stressed more, you're more fatigued, you're more challenged. That's going to push you to grow in height. When we get close to the Olympics, all of our athletes in the Olympics will be optimizing, maximizing recovery. What's it going to take there? Right now, as we're still a few months out,

We're still adapting. I don't care if I'm getting their best scores ever. We're not PRing today. I don't care. We're doing stuff that causes fatigue. Their performance is going down because we're pushing adaptations. We're causing stress in the system intentionally for a longer term adaptation. That's the game you're always playing. So every single choice you make every day, you're causing adaptation.

or you're peaking. Immediate gratification, delayed gratification. You can't always choose both. They're the opposite. How much time you spend on each is not an easy answer, but you have to acknowledge both of those are going on. I love just this idea of optimizing building fragility into the system and adaptability being robust, I think is absolutely bang on. Two things. First one, for the person who...

has access and understands a lot of the ways that they should be optimizing. How do you advise someone to emotionally let go of that fear of control? And then second thing is, I need you to explain how that makes sense to me with regards to sleep, given that there are so many things in sleep that are routinized. All right, great. I'll do those both at the same time.

So are you familiar with the idea of orthosomnia? No. This is a insomnia induced from sleep trackers. Okay. Okay. I just answered both your questions. Here's what's going to happen in some folks, not all, not even most, just some folks. And I can tell this story because he gave me permission to do so. John Rahm.

One of the best golfers in the world. We just went through this. And he was like, man, I went back and listened to your thing. Boom. He's not looking at a sleep tracker anymore. Now he still wears it so I can track, but he doesn't look at it. He doesn't have the app or whatever. He doesn't, he doesn't access it himself. Yeah, that's right. So with our stuff at absolute rest, you don't even like, there's no sleep scores anyways. Like we have high fidelity data, the data matter. They don't care about your score. So yeah,

Here's what can happen. If you're very compulsive and you're worried about optimizing your sleep score and you're going after sleep score, what can start to happen is your physiology and psychology will realize the first thing I'm going to do tomorrow morning is check that score. And there's a lot riding on that score. My happiness, my unhappiness, my sadness, my joy, all this is...

being driven by that score. That will create an anticipatory response. Your brain will start back feeling that thing and you will start having worse sleep the night of. You'll wake up earlier because you're waiting for a big emotional up or down 6 a.m. the next day when that alarm goes off. That can, in the worst case scenarios, then lead to insomnia all night laying around restless. We see this in people trying to work on their sleep before sleep hand. It's 8 o'clock. You go to bed at 10.

And you put the kids down, you shut the laptop up, and now all of a sudden panic sets in. And you're like, fuck.

Okay, two hours from now, I'm going to have to go to sleep. And I know I never get to sleep on time. And I'm trying to really work on it. I'm doing these things. And I just got I hope I fall asleep tonight. I hope I don't let you see where I'm going with this, right? I can keep going in this example. But this is really, really common with people who are struggling with sleep, and they're really trying to work on it. It's almost like you're working too much on it. And now you're creating an anticipatory response. I gave you the anticipatory response and the wake up. But now this can happen prior to going to bed as well.

Both cases are the same thing. You've created a physiological pattern that is now compromising either falling asleep or waking asleep, all based on the result, the score, the metric. This is the anti-Laird Hamilton. This is the fragile. This is you are not resilient. We should be able to have a great night of sleep regardless. When we work with our social forces folks, we have to get sufficient sleep in any situation.

I'm an outdoorsman. Like I love my whole setup, but when I'm out hunting there, like you need to be able to sleep in the tent at a 45 degree angle and sliding off the mountain all damn night. Like I just had to do pretty recently, right? Raining all night, all those things. The goal is to get enough quality sleep in those situations when I don't have the sun is still out and all that stuff's going on. Right. And it's like, you still have to be able to sleep period because you're going to be up in four hours to go chase an elk or whatever you're gonna do. Right.

So all that stuff's going on. So going back to our examples, that's two situations in which anticipatory response is ruined, falling asleep and or staying asleep. So in someone that's having that problem, just like we do with John, actually John did it to himself and then he told me afterwards. But in the other folks that we're coaching, we will often take that score away from them. Many times I'll say, again, can you continue to wear the thing? But actually the nice thing about the old days in Aura is manually on the back end, coaches could go turn that off.

So if I was coaching you, I could go turn off your thing. You don't get to see your score. Yeah. I mean, we've been talking about this a lot. George had a self-imposed bout of insomnia and went through a lot of the lessons I think you're talking about here. He did some CBT for insomnia too. And he found this study where they paid people, two different cohorts. They paid one group to fall asleep quickly. You're nodding. I'm guessing that you know this study quite well. Yeah. Sure. Sure.

shock horror, the group that was paid to fall asleep more quickly fell asleep less quickly than the group that it didn't matter, that was just the control. And yeah, sleep is this very vicious thing

are sort of counterintuitive, the harder you try, the less quickly it comes, at least in the moment. I guess preparatorily, you can do things in advance. But even in that, if you've, oh, this is my first night on my new eight sleep, I really hope that this goes well. And maybe the physiological improvement of being in a temperature controlled mattress helps, but this sort of rumination in the brain and all the rest of it, it's, yeah, it's wild. It's wild, this sort of

vicious feedback loop that you have and uh one of his suggestions one of g's suggestions is to imagine if whoop or or aura um gave you your score for the entire week of sleep at the end of the week um because you don't have this rapid iteration oh i feel great today and you look and you go what

70%? I was only asleep for 6 hours and 15 minutes, but I feel oh, maybe I am going to have a bad day. And you go, well, what the fuck? And then you do sleep well, and if you have a bad score, the only time that it's good is if you have a good night's sleep with a good score. That's it. It's the only time that you ever actually win. So the second half of that Jon Rahm story was, he was like

You know, he was dealing with that. And then he goes, yo, I just left. I don't remember what he went from like Singapore to Houston or something. And he's like, and he doesn't, he's very health conscious. So I don't want to misrepresent how he acts normally. But in this case, he was like, I drank a whole bottle of wine. I changed four time zones. I got home for a couple of hours and I said, my sleep score is 90 something. He's like, this is bullshit. And out of there. So to your point, okay. Some people, these problems can happen because of anticipatory response.

Other people, though, will still see benefits. So I don't want this to come off as all this stuff sucks. It doesn't work because there can be accountability benefits. I have seen this a lot with our athletes. It's like, hey, we need you in bed by midnight or whatever.

Like they know Andy's going to look and they know that she could get a text from me in the morning. They're like, they were going to play that next little game of call of duty, but all right, they go to bed. So accountability really does and can help. Awareness can be a huge benefit. Some people think they're sleeping well, think they're getting, and they're really, really not right. So there can be simply, okay. Um, some ability to go, I'm trying a, B and C different nightly routine, different nutritional protocol, whatever.

How do I know if it's okay? So there can be benefit there. Most people on aggregate do better when they pay attention. So we just do want to recognize some people that will be in these situations like we talked about where it can create a bad physiological pattern or loop. And one of the ways that you can get around this is probably what your friend George did or a version of this. And this is extreme.

It is not our first or second or third or fourth or fifth or even 10th stop on the train, but it is a stop on the train. There's research behind it. And anyone who's dealt with true insomnia personally or has worked with people in this will be very familiar with this. And it can be quite effective. But there is something called sleep restriction training that you can do. So if you're struggling to fall asleep or stay asleep, then...

One of the worst things one can do is ruminate on that. And so I gave the example of the hours before going to sleep, you start already ruminating on the fact that you're not going to fall asleep very quickly. People have talked, Matthew Walker has talked about, if you're going to lay in bed for an hour, get out of bed. Do not set yourself in a pattern up. When you get into bed, you close the lights off, you're exhausted, you feel like you're going to fall asleep immediately, and then you get into bed and you lay there.

Right. This happens for many reasons, but one of them is this is a physiological pattern that's been made. You have to break that pattern. So one way to do that is you do not get into bed at all until you are ready to absolutely fall asleep. And if you're there for more than a few minutes, you get out of bed and you just do not allow yourself to be in that position to get there. With the case of sleep restriction training, what one would do is just one example. You could do this a lot of ways, but one example would be you're going to set the alarm for 5 a.m.

And you're not going to get into bed until midnight, period. And no matter what, you will get up at 5 a.m. And you'll get out of bed. And we're going to do that for an entire week. What's going to happen is- Oh, my God. Yeah. Well, you say that. Remember, you know anybody who's ever dealt with insomnia? Except for George, not really. They're not sleeping five hours on it anyways. Right. So for you and I, it's like, I've had kids. I've had kids.

And I've been a mini hunting thing. So like, sure. I don't want to do it, but this is not the, like, I'm already sleeping eight and a half hours. Why would I go do like, no dummy, of course don't do that. Like this is, I sleep for a few hours a night anyways. So I don't even sleep for five as it is. So great. Okay. And we're going to get up. And those first few nights that week are going to, going to be brutal. And you may lay there for your hour, like you normally do. And so you may get four and a half hours. You might get four, you might get three and a half hours and you're going to get up. Well, what will eventually happen is.

You will start to fall asleep quickly and you will fill in after three, four or five days. You'll fill in those five hours with a perfect sleep, sleep architecture because your physiology will realize we do not have any options. There's no room to get up and pee. It's like down out because it knows five is coming. It will know when five is. It's a forcing function. Yes. Yes, sir. It's forcing it to happen. Right. And then every week you add 15 minutes back. So next week you get into bed at 1145. You know what will happen? You'll fall asleep immediately.

Ooh, we got 15 minutes early. No, you'll still- But that's what the body's going to think. The body's going to think, oh, wow, we've got an additional little bit. We better take advantage of it. Hell yeah. It's going to go, we're so damn tired. Get in immediately, right? It doesn't always work, but it's honestly quite effective. And then you add 15 minutes back and then you keep backfilling until you can get to your seven or seven and a half or wherever your nine and a half, wherever your target number is.

So you can keep running on that for a very long time until it is needed. And it is brutal. You can just do the math there. That's going to be five, six weeks. Thank you for that. And you can't nap throughout the day like you can. That's a bad thing. And so making sure that one often sleep restriction training. But the point I'm bringing up there is that really highlights how patterning.

matters to physiology. And so going through a 90 minute routine like your friend is nice in the sense that it does set up a nice, productive, positive pattern. But you don't want to put yourself in a position where you've optimized so much that you've lost all resilience. And so if you don't have that, you can no longer fall asleep for hours and hours and hours because things are... So what I typically will coach, it's the same with counting calories, right? Like what? That's an abrupt change.

I will categorize people nutritionally as either cooks or bakers. Okay. I'm going to tie this back in a second. What I mean by that is, do you know the difference between cooking and baking? One makes really good donuts. Good answer. Yes. Which one would make the really good donuts? Bake. Obviously you don't cook a donut. Do you? No, you don't. No. Something's gone wrong. Okay. It's detail and precision for the most part, right? If you're baking, okay.

It's not, unless you're a really high level chef, it's not by feel, right? It is a quarter of a teaspoon, an eighth of a tablespoon. Do you say tablespoon or teaspoon? Ah, fuck, it doesn't matter. Just throw one of them in there. Your donut's going to be terrible. It's not going to come up, right? Baking is high precision in specific order at specific measurements. Cooking is the opposite. Cooking is what probably, I don't know you very well, but probably what you and I do. Open the refrigerator, find some meat thing, put it in a pan with some oil,

and some sort of vegetable or starch or something else, and then hit it with some hot sauce and cheese and plate that shit and we're out of here. That's cooking to me and you. It's going to be delicious. Everyone wins. We're happy. Now, if you are a baker and I give you cooking-like instructions or coaching, you're going to have huge anxiety. If I'm like, all right, what do I want to do to get better? Make sure you're downregulated to just get cool and hot and

Cool. No, no, no, no. When should I go to bed? When should I brush my teeth? What type of light? What's the wavelength? Like you want all the protocol, protocol, protocol. If I don't give you that, it's going to give you anxiety. It's going to make your sleep worse. If I don't give you that level of nutrition detail,

If I go, oh, I have some almonds. How many almonds? Like there's an actual example that happened. Nothing in mind. It was like a panic text. It was like, talk, talk, talk. How many? You didn't say how many almonds. You didn't say how many. You said like a small handful, whatever. It was a small handful. And I was like, uh, and she was like, was that eight? I was like, yeah, it was eight. How many did you have? She's like, I had eight. I'm like, oh, thank God it wasn't six. She's like, no, no, it was eight. I was like, whew. This is like an actual story many years ago, right? I'm like, yeah, okay.

She was a baker. Like she needed to know exactly. Other athletes are the opposite. If you're a cook and I give you that level of detail, I need you to weigh and measure every single thing. I need you to have this exact routine by this, this it's stifling. It's overwhelming. It's like, Oh my God, it's too much control. I don't have much freedom there. I feel like I can't do all that stuff. Right. And so we want to match people's general, uh,

personality trait with the type of information and the style. So some of our people are getting really rough concepts, maybe one thing to pay attention to with their sleep stuff, with their nutrition. And other folks are getting very specific timed protocols based on, if I feel like that time protocol is going to send you into a world of negative, I take the details away. If I feel like the loose structure gives you too much freedom and you make bad choices, I take your freedom away.

Right. So, um, Brian Ortega is a great example of that. Like I have to take his freedom away. I have to take everything away. He has to feel like he's in prison again. He's just like, dude, I have to have a, like, those are his words, not mine. It's just like, bro, like it has to be, I can't have any, I want, cause he doesn't want to make choices. He doesn't lack self-discipline at all. He will follow exactly what I say endlessly, but he's like, I don't want to make any choices throughout the day with this stuff. I want to train and only think about fighting. Great. Okay. Um,

Other athletes I coach, like NBA players, I don't have a single NBA player who wants to be coached like that. Not one. They will be like, to hell with it. I'd get middle fingers and fire. It's got to be concepts and one or two things to pay attention to per month. And that's it. I can name other guys, NFL guys. Some are the opposite. Some are whatever. Okay. You get the point. So with sleep, we want to think of the same thing. And what I brought up calories is okay.

I think it's important, regardless of whether you're a cook or a baker, for your sleep, for your training, for your mental health work, for your breath work, for your nutrition. You should start by going through a phase as a baker. You need to weigh and measure all your food for 30 days, at least once. We need to try very specific sleep routine. We need to, I need exact repetitions and video film of your lifting. How much did you get? I need all of it.

Now, I don't have to do it for forever, but you really never know what's working, what's not working. I don't know if you really are calibrated. Do you really know what a spoonful of peanut butter was? That's the common example up there. Same thing. We got to know. How did your sleep feel? Oh, I feel good. No, no. I need more detail. I need to know exactly what's going on on everything. And then from there, once we've got calibrated, now we can back off if you want. I know high-level people.

who still weigh and measure their food. 20 years, and they're not even competing anymore. It's like, okay, great. Some people give me 30 days or 14 days. What's it going to take?

Let me get real data. Let you get real understanding. And now we can back off and go by feel more. But you can't just start by going by feel. Dude, I talk about this all the time. It's such a... I feel like we're best friends. We are now. We are now. As long as Mike is, Rital can come along as well. I'm sure that that'll be fine. No, that's not negotiable. He's out. It's me or him. Now. Right now. It's you. It's you. Sorry. You're not Jewish, are you?

My kids are. All right. They're allowed once every other time. I need to get rid of my dad. You know what? That's fair. I'll do that deal. That's a deal. I say that everybody should go through an obsessive period of productivity, time tracking, time blocking, Pomodoro technique, because it is impossible for you to play with the rules of the game if you haven't first learned the rules of the game. Like, what the fuck are you doing here trying to...

be free-flowing with your pick your fucking discipline of choice. You didn't you don't what are you free-flowing with? That's just not that's just not knowing how to play. You don't know the rules. You don't know the physics of the system. So yeah, I think focus on precision and then for some people they stay in precision. Maybe the people that need a little bit more control and then other people that are a little bit more creative artistic-y right brainy type person. Maybe they sort of they play with it a little bit. Taking it back is

to the enhancements for sleep. I love that idea. I love the idea about recreating the environment as best you can when you're on the road. That's definitely something that I'm going to consider.

One question on that, and then let's get into some stuff that you can do at home. Earplugs. I've become a huge fan of earplugs since moving to America. Main reason being that it just seems to be a really loud country. Even like the wildlife is loud. The birds are at least three times louder than those of the UK. Everything's bigger in Texas, including the volume of the fucking wildlife.

Earplugs versus white noise. Have you got any concerns around earplugs? Obviously, my thinking being that you can replicate the environment pretty precisely in that it's silence. Yes. This is personal preference. So I don't, I'm not aware. We actually have a paper in review right now on sleep environment. And I don't know of any data specifically indicating one is better than the other. The only knocks against white noise

is oftentimes too loud. As I mentioned earlier, 35 decibels is the limit. And you actually see sleep problems when you get above 35. So don't turn your sleep noise machine up too loud. In addition to that, there's a whole host of papers coming out on a new technology called Pink Noise. And that seems to be much more effective. I don't know of any Pink Noise machines that are available commercially yet.

But you want to keep your eye on that as a plausibly better solution than white noise. We have some folks that use earplugs. One of my business partners, Dan Garner, uses them every night at home nonetheless. I will use them a lot hunting.

And in other activities, camping, because you're sleeping next to somebody who snores, things like that. But I don't use them ever at home. So I have no fundamental issue with them as long as they're not causing any pain, you know, things like that. And there's so many different companies making good earplugs at this stage. That's generally fine. There's a pair that I got. I tried...

10 pairs from Amazon and settled on one specifically for sleep. And they've got little rubber fins on them and they're fucking brilliant. And they can just go, there's a pair everywhere in the bag that I try to take on planes, in my toiletries bag, in my house, in my bedside drawer, everywhere. And yeah, if push comes to shove and the neighbors next door are having a party or some, some, something else happens, it's just boom, everything's fine. I honestly don't use them at home because I have two little kids.

Security. Yeah, I understand. I'm relishing in my time where I can be totally like just totally disregard personal safety because it's only me that is the potential culprit as soon as the kids come along. Yeah, it's that was jealousy out of my mouth in case you didn't hear that. That was just what it is. All right, let's get back into advanced or moderate, like purple belt techniques for sleep enhancement in the home.

Okay, great. So past all the top level stuff, quiet, dark, be consistent with your timing is another one. Try to go to bed and wake up around the same time every day, plus or minus 30 minutes is what we say. Realistically, 45 minutes is where you're at. Specifically, try to keep your wake up time really consistent. That's almost always easier. Sometimes it's hard to fall asleep when you're ready to go to sleep, but it's always easy to wake up at the same time because you can engineer that. So start there. Now,

All that stuff out of the way. Other things you want to think about are extending sleep throughout the day. So this could come in one of a couple of forms. A nap. There's a lot of research. Benefits on refreshment, cognitive function, reaction time, physical force production, endurance, sport performance, all are enhanced with sleep.

uh, napping during the day, 20 to 90 minutes is the typical one. And you almost always want to be done with your naps before 4 PM. Just a rough guideline, depending on how, when you train, like having a coffee too late in the day. Bingo. So what happens is throughout the day, you build up sleep pressure. And if that pressure is released too late in the night, you don't have enough time to build it back up. And this is why we're going to struggle with all the sleep. So,

I don't nap ever. I can't stand napping. It doesn't work for me at all. I don't like it. And so I won't ever choose that option. If I need extended duration, I'm either going to bed earlier. That's my preference. My wife, Natasha, prefer to sleep in a little bit later. I cannot stand sleeping. I cannot stand it at all. I'd rather go to bed at 6 p.m. I'm like, I'm not sleeping and it's never going to happen. I will never nap either.

What I can do, though, is this is when a breath work, a down regulation session is highly effective. So if you can't nap, don't want to nap. We actually just dealt with this with we work with a lot of people who run venture capital and things like that. And they're like, yo, we're in Manhattan office. Like, I'm not fucking taking a 20 minute nap like on Wall Street. We're like, no. I'm like, OK, cool.

Can we do stuff that looks like you're at your desk? And so this is if you're watching, you're going to see me do this right now. Right. You can simply be at your desk. Your eyes can be closed or open and you can close your mouth and you can do very structured, very slow breathing. Right. This could look like meditation. This could be not meditation. It could be NSDR or not. NSDR is super easy to do.

progressive relaxation techniques. So if I'm sitting at my desk, my eyes are open, my mouth is closed, and I'm progressively squeezing the tip of my toes and relaxing it. I could have earphones in going through an actual script. I'm going to walk it from my toes to my ankles, to my knees, all the way up and down my head and back down. No one even knows you're not working.

Those things are not the same as sleep, but they are somewhat equivalent. You can get sleep-like responses physiologically from stuff like that, and it can be seven minutes long. 20 is better, but I'll take- What's your favorite NSDR or rejuvenation practices? Is there a YouTube video that you keep coming back to? Is there an app that you like to follow?

So we use, yeah, that's a great question. We use a handful of different ones. So we will use, Andrew's got a few scripts out now that we'll use specifically where he's doing NSDR. Andrew Huberman has those. I will use Sam Harris has an app called Waking Up. We use that a lot. A ton of our people will do that. And you can just go through any number of things there. There's another organization, a company I've been a part of since the very beginning called XPT.

XPT has an app that was founded by Brian McKenzie and Laird Hamilton and Gabby Reese. They have a ton of protocols. Some of the protocols are very yoga-y, sort of that feel. And then some of them are from actual Navy SEALs or people deep in the military. So depending on which type of just voice or cadence or whatever makes you feel more than the thing. And so I will pull that thing out.

pretty consistently and they have a bunch of them they have four minute ones they have 45 minute long ones well those ones are really common i personally don't use any of those very often i will always do my own thing i'm always going to lay down for that for the most part either going to be closed and i'm just going to do basic stuff right so like that's for me that is very much as simple as just regulating in

And back out. And I try, it's kind of my version of transmedial meditation where I'm not actually focusing on my breath per se, but all I'm paying attention to is breathing. And I don't care what the cadence is. I don't actually count because I don't want to be actively engaged in that. I'm just worrying about chilling and chilling. And any thought that comes to my head, I push out. I just want to be neutral. I don't want anything going on. So it's kind of like the opposite of focusing on breath. It's the focus on nothing.

If my mind drifts, it drifts, it's fine. But then we just come right back to, this is your Zen time. If I'm really not able to do that, which is very often, I'm going to do that outside. So what that means is I'm going to walk and I'm not going to have headphones in. I'm not going to listen to podcasts. I'm not going to listen to music. My mouth is going to be closed. I'm probably taking the dogs and we're going to walk

I don't know where I'm going or how long I'm doing. And I'm doing the same thing. Mouth is closed, breathing through my nose, and I'm very much intentionally not working. That little bit of arousal reduction is insanely powerful for me personally. I can't speak to anybody else, but for me, given the fact that I have, I don't think I have any more work than anybody else has to do, but I just have it in so many different areas. I oftentimes feel like I just can't ever get out of it.

And so I just need some time where I can just be like, you're not doing anything. You're not doing research. You're not doing coaching. You're not worrying about your companies. Nothing right now. And that can be seven minutes, six minutes. It can be one lap around the block. But that is- Given that you're also trying to get sleep, you're trying to get your step count in throughout

Throughout the day, you're stacking that on top of it. You're getting a little bit of sunlight. You're locomoting, moving your eyes from left to right. Your ocular focus is being changed as well. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Passive gaze, whatever it's called. All of that stuff is like bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. Hearing is all changing. Totally. Yep. So like neurologically, I don't even count that to my step count stuff. I'm simply doing it as a mental reset. And I'll notice too when I'm...

My restaurant rate starts getting pretty high when I'm working. It's like, what are you doing? Running a marathon or, or writing a paper? Like what's, what's happening? What is it? Email apnea that people get. For sure. Right. Like mouth drops, chins open, like hunch forward and you're just going nuts. And so then I'll try to just go, boom, go out there. You've mentioned a couple of times. I, I,

I had it in my head. I remember I definitely didn't make it up. I definitely heard it from someone that sleep banking basically wasn't a thing. Has this changed? Was there a camp of people that was saying that sleep banking wasn't a thing? Have I totally fucking hallucinated this? I'm actually really glad you brought this up because, man, I have been taught by so many people on the Internet how wrong I am about this one.

This is crazy. So I'm glad that I can teach you my learnings of how internet people can educate scientists on science. So great. This is a bunch of knuckleheads who I don't think have the ability to listen and comprehend what Matthew Walker says. So it's actually very straightforward and there is no argument in change here. It's people that I'm sorry for being a bit sardonic there, but this one is holy Cleto.

I'll give you the backstory. So, um, many years ago when, when Matthew came out with this book, it was great. Like one of the things he talked about is sleep debt and you can't repay sleep debt. And I remember seven or eight years ago, I was speaking, um,

I think for the Seattle Sounders and Stephen Lockley was up there. Stephen's at Harvard. Stephen works for my company now, but this was years ago. He's the one that built all the circadian rhythm stuff for the International Space Station, the light and all that stuff. Excellent series like this. And I talk a little bit about this and he's like, well, yeah, no one has a time machine.

So yes, if you sleep for five hours tonight, you can know ever, ever, ever go back and regain those three hours. Yes, yes, yes, yes. No one's arguing that point at all. It's a basic physics problem. Of course, that's exactly what Matthew was saying. What he was trying to tell you is just because you sleep for five hours a night throughout the week, and then you sleep 20 hours a day on Saturday, and your total amount of hours are the same, that's not equivalent.

And he's 100% correct. Again, I don't know any scientist in this area who would make a cogent argument that that's incorrect. We all agree on this point. I think it was his episode with Joe that this sort of all started, and probably his many other. But he's like, you can't repay sleep debt. You can't repay sleep debt. And that's what he meant. And he's 100% correct. However...

As I mentioned, there are now probably over 50 studies on sleep extension and sleep banking. If you go to any professional sleep society, scientific conference and clinic, you're going to see these things very routinely come up. This is very, very well accepted in the field that you can sleep longer. Think about it this way. Imagine you slept for five hours last night.

I slept for less than that. I guarantee you. I slept for five hours in the loudest fucking campsite in all of Montana. Yes. I can't stand that. You go to Montana and you're thinking like big sky country. How the fuck are you around other people? Oh, this was, this was wildlife. This wasn't, this is the fact that the sun rises at, oh, it starts to get light at about 4am and it's your birds wielding megaphones. But, uh,

i was uh come on i was in the tetons last year hunting elk and the first night before we went to bed uh one of the guys out there was like i just so you know uh we'll have some visitors tonight i was like oh okay and it could have been two three in the morning and just bang bang bang on the tents and there was a moose that was coming through camp every night just smash him and just wrecking everyone yeah god damn it it was fine like

So I have a friend who's been on the show a lot, a guy called Yousef. He has, you may know the name for this medical issue. If he is woken suddenly during the night, he makes a yelp, makes a loud yelping noise. Yeah.

And it's quite common. Apparently, he's the perfect avatar for the person who deals with this. It's a male in his sort of around about 30, in his early 30s, no previous history of psychiatric disorders. And, um,

So this has happened a number of times. It's happened when he went to go and see George in Dubai. And he heard George's first thought when he heard this yelp was, I hope that that girl is okay. That was his first instinct. We went to a bachelor party in the UK a couple of years ago, classic British bachelor party where we're sharing twin rooms of single beds. So I'm like, right, okay, whatever. Like, you know, I'm

I'm in it. We're doing it. And we've been out for dinner and we've had a couple of beers and we went go-karting, whatever the classic sort of stag do thing is. And it's three in the morning. I roll over and rip one of the biggest farts that I've ever ripped. That wakes him up. So what you hear is,

from him into bed next to me which fucking killed me but yeah the number of different sleep maladies that you can have from mooses to birds wielding megaphones to a friend that makes a shrieking noise when he's woken suddenly there's lots of ways that you can be disrupted yeah yeah that's great thankfully the moose never banged on my that trip but no I get it what was our point what were we talking about

You were saying that you'd had limited sleep last night and you're talking about sleep banking. That's what it was. Okay, great. So you and I slept for five hours last night. Just because we didn't get our eight, if that's the number, does not mean we are now going to be in sleep the rest of our lives.

right? So like, tell me how that would work. Like, okay, if you ever miss a minute of sleep, you're therefore going to add that on. So by the time you're what, four years old, you're now in 75,000 hours of sleep. Like, like, how does this work? Of course it gets reset, right? So there's this, yes. If you sleep for five hours tonight and you sleep for more hours tomorrow night, you'll feel better. Like that's yes. So

Again, I don't think it's really difficult to comprehend both of those two things. I think logically, it kind of makes sense. When you think about, I always think about this to do with money, that if I buy that sandwich for five bucks, I will never get that five bucks back ever. And if I eat that sandwich, I will never not be able to have not consumed those calories. Those calories are in me for the rest of time. But I think when you start to, it's like a deterministic view of...

uh health or finances or sleep when you start to think like that it it might be right it might be truthful but functionally it's false but the way that it actually shows up to you is is it's kind of pointless yeah i feel like it's people who have perhaps need to set out a campfire have a glass of whiskey and go wait a minute does that make sense like let's just slow down for a second

Does that make sense? That that debt is just going to accumulate every minute the rest of your life and you can't do it. And which is certainly not what Matthew was saying. So the sleep debt thing is that it is. Yes. Can't go back in time to. Yes, you can't just sleep terrible and sleep more. And those would be equivalent. So four hours, one night, 12 the next. And all of a sudden you're back to even. That's not how it works either.

But it's also not this permanent debt you carry the rest of your life and you'll never recover from. So the idea then with sleep banking and sleep extension is two things. So banking, the way I define it, is getting ahead. So sleeping extra time prior to known sleep debt.

Extension is simply adding more time throughout the day. So these are the studies that have taken people and said, you're already sleeping, again, eight hours. Can we get you to nine and a half for 10? Can we add somewhere between 45 minutes to 90 minutes per night? The research there is as little as three days up to seven or eight weeks. I think the Cherry Ma, who did this classic study I'm referring to now out of Stanford with basketball players, this was in the division on basketball players. And she got them to sleep 90 extra minutes per night for five to seven weeks.

So it can be done. Some of the athletes chose to sleep in. Some chose to go to bed earlier. Some chose to add naps, but you extended sleep. And most of the research will do that. They'll say, however you want, try to ask, you know, up to 90 minutes. Some added 10 minutes, some added two hours, right? So not everyone's going to get 90 extra minutes, but you're going to get some on there. Now, those tend to be optimization strategies.

It is very hard to sleep 10 hours a night without a sleep disorder for forever, right? And it's certainly many can argue it's not necessary. It's definitely not necessary to do that. Most of the research on high-performing, high-energy expenditure athletes...

we'll indicate nine plus hours per night is generally the, what we go after. There is not a perfect correlation between caloric expenditure and sleep needs, but there is some relationship. Jeffrey Dermott has done a ton of stuff in this. He was the sleep scientist for the Atlanta Falcons and team USA and things like that. And he's got good data on this. And again, it's not a perfect relationship between caloric expenditure, but

There is a relationship. People that are in sports or activity levels that burn way more calories will perform better when they generally cross nine plus hours of sleep. If you're fairly sedentary, but you work out pretty hard, you don't probably need nine hours, right? What we're thinking about folks are training twice a day or running a hundred miles per week, some other activities with large, large amounts of caloric expenditure.

So that is extending sleep. The banking one, as I mentioned, I know of, again, of at least 30 studies or more on this where you lead prior to training camp, prior to pre-season trainings, prior to, especially in the military, tons and tons of work in the military where we make sure that we are getting...

a maximum amount of sleep for the week to month prior to known sleep deprivation. And you see those problems that happen when the sleep deprivation comes on, those are attenuated. So I don't know how much more research one needs to say that's a real thing. Your shooting accuracy in terms of firearm shooting, neurological control, mental cognition, decision-making, memory recall,

It just holds on better when you go through those known periods of sleep deprivation. So we have a lot of athletes and a lot of sleep coaches and sleep scientists will have their athletes in the preseason try to bank, right? You get as much sleep as you can so that at least we're not going into our season in sleep debt. So that's the biggest way to think about it.

Dude, so interesting. I did a tour last year and I wish that I'd been red pilled on sleep banking beforehand because I was wrecked for a full month. Is there anything else that we haven't talked about from a purple belt sleep enhancement perspective that are other big movers? Yeah. Nutrition is a really big one. Okay. There's a lot of focus and conversation on supplementation for sleep and that's fine, but nutrition should be paid attention to

Far before that. So the timing and type will have a huge determinant upon the quality of your sleep. And you can run a lot of self-testing on this, right? So here's what I mean. The classic thing we'll say is you generally don't want to have a large meal in the two to three hours prior to going to sleep. That's mostly true, but it's also not always true. And so you can test that. Some people will respond eating before bed much better.

Generally never going to be a big meal. That's going to lead to digestive issues. But blood sugar regulation is a really big key to grogginess, the sleep inertia. So what you feel that next morning when you wake up and you're like, man, I feel like a truck hit me, that kind of thing. A large portion of that is determined by blood glucose.

And so if you're waking up with very low blood glucose, then, hey, like nutrition is our play here. Almost surely, unless we've got a sleep disorder, some guy. So you want to tinker with that. There's lots of different things. I mean, go all the way back. I think I'm pretty sure I don't can't guarantee it, but I'm pretty sure Tim Ferriss wrote about this in for our body.

right? 15 years ago, whatever, right? Having an apple before bed, having some sort of slow releasing glycemic index carbohydrate can really stabilize blood glucose. And he nailed it. He was, he was dead on man. Like those things can be really, really helpful. Uh, last thing I'll say about this is carbohydrates. So one way to really help people sleep at night is a nice amount of carbohydrate in their last feeding. There's a lot of dogma over the years about don't have carbs at night because of fat and like all this other stupid shit. Um,

Uh, and hopefully the door is closed on that because we have, thank you, Mike Ormsby and all the folks have done all the research and that it's like not happening at all as long as calories and all that is equated for. But having a nice bolus of carbohydrate, uh, prior to bed is, is really, really helpful. We recently, uh, not recently, actually it's been a while now, but we had a client a couple of years ago.

who was struggling with a handful of things, sleep, sleep, sleep, was falling asleep fine, shooting awake at 2, 3 in the morning. He's like, boom, this was happening. And the guy's pretty dull, has a lot of resources in the space, couldn't get it figured out. I'm like, all right. So we start taking a look. We pull up his blood work. Clear, clear thing happens here. We look at insulin. Insulin's low. Okay, interesting. Sex hormone binding globulin's way up.

There is a known inverse relationship between those two. Insulin is low, SHBG is going to go up. Because the sex hormone binding globulin is up, testosterone is down. Okay, so free testosterone is down. All right, so it's another classic like in the mid-50s kind of guy or early 50s, high runner, very successful dude financially, and it's like, okay, maybe it's time for me to do testosterone. Fine if you want to choose that, but I know your answer. I know why you're shooting away.

Now what's going on? Okay. We start looking at melatonin and serotonin. We start looking at B vitamin status. We see all these things and we see classic sign of insufficient carbohydrate. Let me guess. And I can tell him you're probably trying to keep it under 150 grams of carbs per day. Yep. A hundred percent. Pretty active dude too. Not insane, but pretty active. I'm like, great. What you need is another 75 grams of carbohydrate at dinner.

It's like, what? All we did was that insulin went back up. Sex hormone, buying lab and went back down. Testosterone went right back up, slept completely through the night, instantaneously, basically always, uh,

And guess what happens to serotonin, melatonin? They go right back in normal. Cortisol curve is perfect, waking up grogginess out of the way. Problem solved by just eating. What would you say to people who maybe like the idea of a little bit of carbs before they go to bed or in that window? What are some of your favorite sources that people can eat for digestion so that they're not in too much discomfort when they get horizontal and timing before bed?

Yep. Timing, tinker with it. If you need three hours, three hours is fine. If two hours is fine, if an hour is fine, whatever it is, start at three and work your way back if you have to. Now, we end up dealing with a lot of people who three hours is not an option because they're training twice a day or again, they're playing a game at night and then it's like, okay, great.

game got over at 10 30 and now you want me to have dinner when and then go to bed when so then i'll have dinner at 11 30 and i guess i'll stay up till 2 30 just because my three it's not gonna happen right so we don't always have that but tinker with start at three work your way back if you'd like you can also then try a very small snack right before bed and by right before bed that could be 45 minutes before bed right whatever it is to you um i will

Eat pretty much like right before bed a lot. And I'm just fine out of it, but not everyone necessarily will. So timing wise, three hours is a fine starting place. Adjust as needed and see what works for you. In terms of amount, almost always, if you're having some sort of starch, rice, potato, whatever sits well with you, quinoa, if beans sit well with you, great. Like what are the natural more starchies? Fruit is fine. Actually, there's a lot of research on kiwis

Kiwis are very effective for helping people fall asleep. So that's another great way to fruit to try. This could be your before bed snack. Kiwi could be a part of your dinner. You could try it that way. So don't, don't be scared about fruits with dinner fruits in the evenings. We will do that. In fact, if we're trying to manage carbohydrates, oftentimes we'll restrict them during the day or in the morning and put more at night, better recovery, better sleep.

feeling better and you'll feel just as fine the next day so those would be the types as well as the timing that i would start people with fuck yeah andy galpin ladies and gentlemen dude i'm a i've been oh yeah absolute headshot today i love it i had 10 things i wanted to talk about and we spoke about vo2 max and sleep for two and a bit hours and i couldn't be happier

uh dude you're great you're really really fantastic i can see why uh rob and uh andrew pushed you to get cracking because i think it's a a much needed rebalancing to um some of the sort of in the weeds uh deep stuff and i i think i think you're fucking great so why can people go they want to keep up to date with all of your things they want to check out your stuff where should they head on the internet

Yeah. Obviously the podcast is the best place perform with Dr. Andy Galpin is the name of that. And like I said, only 10 episodes there. So that's season one. She will to get through it all. And then maybe if those guys can talk me back into season two next year, we'll come back for another round, but that is up and live on all your podcast places and YouTube as well. And then on Twitter and Instagram of Dr. Andy Galpin are the easiest place to find access to podcasts,

I pretty much use those for science communication exclusively. So that's where we'll put out all of our stuff. And you can go from there to find all the links to Absolute Rest and our blood work company, Vitality, and our coaching programs at Rapid. And all those things are pretty easy to find. So we got it all.

Hell yeah. Dude, what a good first little foray into becoming best friends. Yeah, man. Appreciate it. We're going to get, we'll connect afterwards and we'll make sure that sleep is getting truly dialed in to you because I'm not fully convinced you're there. Okay. All right. All right, dude. Thank you so much for today. All right, man. Good to connect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.