Dr. Andy Galpin's Secrets to Strength Training, Sleep Hacks, & Recovery Tools Part 2
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If I hooked you up to CO2 and made you breathe CO2, I can induce a panic attack. This is the Pursuit of Wellness podcast, and I'm your host, Mari Llewellyn. Do you hear the word toned a lot? Yeah. It drives me crazy. Yeah, I mean...

We've been in this field for 25 years academically. That one comes with the territory. What do you say to someone who's like, I want to be toned? What does that mean? Yeah. What do you want? What do you not want? Don't tell me the word. Tell me what you specifically want to see and don't want to see. Well, they want like abs and they want some muscle. So they want muscle. Great. So then we say that. You and I know that you don't know what that means. Right. Like-

It doesn't mean anything. Of course it means nothing. It means nothing. It's like a marketing word. Of course. But what do you... Okay, so what do you think of the Pilates princess movement? Do you know what that means? I could not have less of an idea what that means. Okay, Pilates princesses are girls who only do Pilates. Oh, okay. What do you think of that? Well, I mean, the answer is pretty predictable there. Pilates has been around a long time. I'm not familiar with this princess concept, but I mean...

That's fantastic. Yeah. We will use Pilates inspired things often. There is a lot of great stuff in the global Pilates movement thing. I would say the same thing though, if you said you were going to do only and fill in any other fitness.

term, company, approach, I would say you're going to have limitations, always. Pilates has limitations. That doesn't mean there's not some goodness in there, but if that's your only jam, we're clearly going to leave a ton on the table. It's also the least, not Pilates itself, but what you just described to me, is the least scientific and the least precision coaching you could possibly do. I mean, imagine you came into me and you said, great,

I want to be coached. And I would say, okay, do you want a program that like, I don't even know anything about you. And like everyone in this whole room does the same thing. Or would you like me to give you a specific program based on exactly what you want? Most people are going to take option B. Yeah. Right. So why would you think you're going to get a great outcome if you literally by definition know that everyone else in the whole world is doing the same thing? Oh, cause it's, what's the issue here? Is it like, well, I can't afford a person like, okay, that's not, that's not an answer.

First, we want a personalized program, right? So I wouldn't advocate anybody going on the, a general program like that, that I would say the same thing about sleep. I would say the same thing about nutrition. Don't come in and tell me you're going to do

Fill in the blank. Mediterranean. I don't care. Nothing against those broaches. It's saying, why would we take a system like that and be withheld to the limitations of that system? Almost like pigeonholing yourself. Totally. You're intentionally pigeonholing yourself, right? It makes no sense whatsoever when we can say, okay, great. What are you trying to get done? What's the goal?

And then is this the best approach for you? It may be. Clearly, there's a lot of benefit there depending on what stage you're in. And there's lots of arguments for the systems. But like going in and saying like, I'm only going to this. I'm like, great. If you want to leave gains on the table, be my guest. So are you generally recommending people strength train? Of course. Have you heard of muscle mommies? Oh my God.

I have not. This is something I love doing when men come on the show. I have to bring up all the phrases. I'm loving, I'm learning so much from you. Yeah, you could like name programs like the muscle mommy program. Like Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is a muscle mommy. You know, that's a perfect example. Okay, she's definitely both of those things. Yep, yep. Very much a mommy and very much a muscle. But it could also apply to someone who doesn't have kids. They're just like super muscular. Okay, so is...

Is that like a group on Facebook or are we talking like this is just a colloquial expression? If I saw a girl walk past with like delts and glutes, I'd be like muscle mommy. Okay. Yeah. I am. I'm gonna be real honest with you.

I'm very down with the muscle mommy movement. You didn't have me with the Pilates princesses, but you got me with the muscle mommies. I agree. I think that's the vibe. And I think girls are starting to catch on that it looks really good. Yeah. But also you're healthier when you have more muscle mass. Yep. I think the confusion for a lot of girls is the amount of weight that's needed to

because I think with Pilates, they feel this, I don't know if you've ever done it, but you feel this like crazy isolated pain in one area. So they're like, oh, it's, this is growing my muscle. In the early nineties, mid nineties, all the way up through like the early two thousands, we still very much dealt with

strength training, these anaerobic things were a male, right? Yeah. No matter how much we fought that battle, there was a couple of problems there. Number one, there was not a lot, female sports were still not accessible media-wise, right? It wasn't actually until recently where female sports had really any TV time coverage, stuff like that.

But even if you go back to history, women didn't even start running the marathon, start doing other activities like this until decades after men did, right? And then the participation numbers were tiny. This was growing scientifically, but you had a whole generation of females from that 1990s

who were like, well, I'm kind of getting into strength training. I'm kind of getting into these things. I'm getting into sports. But there wasn't social media. There wasn't media out there. Well, these people turned into MDs and strength coaches and scientists. And now they're 30 and 35 and 40 and 45. And they're the Gabrielle Lyons, right? And now these, because, but these are girls that got inspired in the 80s and 90s to do these things.

It's now coming to the forefront, which is great because we've been arguing this. And when you asked that question earlier about toning, I'm like, oh my God, like,

For 25 years, we've been fighting. Fighting the toning war. Sure. And it never worked because it was dudes like me telling girls like you that don't worry, you're not going to get bulky. Yeah. Which is not effective at all. We needed, honestly, those female scientists and stuff to start coming forward and being the face of those movements. That's largely happened. And so the muscle mommies is probably a reflection of the last five to seven years of folks like that and Abby Smith Ryan and all these other folks coming from these different communities

And saying, I've been lifting my whole life. Look at me. And you're like, oh, shit. Yeah. Huh. You don't look like what I thought I was going to look like. If you do want to look big and jacked and bulk, I don't care as a female. Like, again, you define what is good or bad. I don't care at all. And I don't think Gabrielle would care at all what people say, right?

So you tell me what you do and don't want to look like, and we can program to that. It just had, it took a while for us to come from the female voice. You throw on top of that such mounting colossal amounts of peer reviewed, high quality scientific evidence for things that touch female privacy.

pain points. And then you started getting belief in buy-in. And so I think we're probably right at the beginning of that climb because yeah, you will definitely see more there. And men have been saying this for a very long time, but some men don't like muscular women. A lot of men do. So you, I think, this is certainly how I'll raise my daughter and how my wife is and how she'll raise her. It's like you, look, however the fuck you want, there will be some man who cares about you if you care about that. But you don't have to worry about

playing sports because you're too worried that like boys won't like you yeah um that will happen of course but i mean you sure hope like every amount of education we can instill in them it's like that should never be a reality that you have to deal with if you want to be strong and get all the health benefits of that we can do that in a way that doesn't make you look how you don't want if you care or even better yet hopefully you don't even care hopefully you just look how you ever want to look that makes you happy and healthy and and we can

Hopefully by the time my daughter is at that age that these things don't matter as much.

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Everyone wants to live a long, healthy life, of course. People are aware generally of lifespan and wellness span at this point, right? But then there's a new awesome term that we call strength span. And so what this effectively says is your wellness span is going to be dictated in large part by your strength span. Because as soon as you start losing strength at age, then nothing else will function. Really easy example here.

Most people are familiar by now with the importance of things like VO2 max, cardiovascular fitness as you age. This is the entire crux of the wellness span versus lifespan argument. That said, if we were to go outside right now and walk from the bottom of the stairs all the way up here, right? And I cut your leg strength down by 80%. You wouldn't make it up here. Your cardiovascular system would be going nuts. You would be at max heart rate and it would have nothing to do with your VO2 max.

It's the fact that your legs are super weak. Your legs and your hands are the things that make you move throughout the world. And so I call them, they are your interface with the world. So we know that if you have a strong interface, you're more likely to do any activity that you choose to see fit. More importantly, probably, is you won't opt out.

of them. Easy examples like, oh, I'm not going to take that trip. I'm not going to go to the grandkids. I'm not going to do whatever else as I'm aging. Why? Because I know I have to carry my luggage throughout the airport. It's going to be a huge pain in the butt. I'm not strong enough to put it in the overhead bin. All the steps, like, I don't want to do that activity. Why? There's research now that'll suggest one of the biggest driving factors of social withdrawal as you age is sense of burden. When people feel like they're a burden,

They don't want to do anything. Yeah. Because you've been this healthy, functioning, autonomous being for six decades, seven decades, eight decades. And now everyone is honking at you. You know, you're holding up the whole line. The entire thing's going to wait. And you feel really bad about that. And so, you know, you can't do anything about that. And so you're like, I'm just not going to take that trip. I'm not going to go to that outing or whatever that thing is.

That becomes a problem. It becomes a problem because it, as I mentioned, leads directly to social isolation. Yeah. Which is a massive driver of long-term joy, connection, purpose. So all the physical attributes, sure, we can directly tie those to mortality. We can also draw joy and sense of connection and purpose. When you lose a sense of purpose, and in fact, you have a sense of burden, mortality is right off the reservation. We've actually seen, we actually published a paper last year

And we found that specifically leg strength predicted 5% of cognitive function through aging. And we have both correlation and causal data behind that.

And so it's examples of movement. It's examples of physical activity. You're not strong. You're not going to be physically active. Sense of purpose, isolate. So it ties into everything all the way up to directly brain functional purposes. There's excellent research on strength training and white matter atrophy in your brain. So your physical brain, not your mental health, your actual physical brain is going to stay around much longer when you strength train. And again, there are direct causal links.

At this point, we can make the same argument for grip strength. In fact, one paper found, I know that this is a very large study. They looked at grip strength and low grip strength predicted 30% of dementia and Alzheimer's. And so you pick the poison you want to go after, brain health, mental health, physical, you're going to find just, again, mountains of evidence to suggest strength training, the act of it itself, as well as just being strong.

is going to be holding toe to how long and how well you live. So you just can't make an argument that you can get away with being weak

And living a long time. So I keep thinking about my granny. She lives in England and she doesn't necessarily strength train, but she, so she's almost 90 swims every day. Great. Walked miles and miles. Like my whole childhood, just like hiking all the time. She walks into town. She does her own groceries. She's very active. She travels. And I just keep thinking about her. Cause she still has this like very full social life and,

and swims and she's almost 90 years old and she's all there, like super, super all there, hair down to here. It's kind of amazing. Your grandma, in that particular case, doesn't have to necessarily go to the gym and lift weights, but is clearly getting some of that stuff done. Now I'd argue, let's get her to the gym. Like, let's get her to lift some weights. We've done plenty of training studies on 80 plus year olds.

Really? Can they just start though when they're that age or do you think it's like too much of a mental thing? Not at all. Wow. Again, there have been many studies that have been done, many randomized control trials on 80 plus year olds that are not currently strength training. And what you'll actually see is very, very, very low rates of dropout. Those people never leave the studies and they very rarely get hurt.

Wow. It's incredibly safe activity if done appropriately. In fact, one thing that anyone who's done research in this area will tell you, if you do

Any kind of study with college age individuals, like you better expect like a 20 to 30% dropout rate. If you do them in older adults, you better expect a 0% dropout rate and you better expect them to be 25 minutes early to every single training session. Cause like they're there on time. They're always super happy. They love, and then the college kids are always late and excuses and whatever. So from a practical, like executing a study perspective, um,

Most of the time, people that do work with older adults are like, oh man, these are so nice. Because you know they're going to be there on time. They're going to do everything. They're going to knock it out. So it's a very, very safe activity. And it doesn't take incredibly advanced programs. You can be very simple, put them on machines, really long progression window, and a ton of benefit comes from that. How about supplementing for women who are weightlifting? Because I do think there's a lot of fear around weightlifting.

let's say creatine or some of the more performance supplements? I think maybe the problem is differentiating these things, these items, these approaches as performance-based. This has generally caused the issue when, I used to do this a long time ago, but if I said things like strength, and I said, is that performance or is that health, right? 10 years ago in my class, everyone would have said, right, that's strength is performance, right? It's different now. Now when I throw that same slide up, the kids already know that's a bowl thing, right? Mm-hmm.

If I said anaerobic, same thing, right? Still to this day, if I said high intensity, for years, that's always going to go in that same bucket. If you talk about exercise program, if you talk about supplementation, it's the same connotation, right? So if you say creating for years, early 90s, mid 90s, late 90s, this is a performance-based thing. But now you have so much evidence that

On the other side of the equation, most up and coming students now are being like, oh, this is a health thing, right? So you're talking about research on creatine specifically. Sure, muscle growth, muscle strength. There's 30 years of research on that. That's very well established. It's been tested in every population you can imagine. Young, old, male, female, disease populations, on disease, special populations, young,

all kinds of things like that, different dosages. And you're seeing very high safety profiles and very high effectiveness, right? So the small issues you see with creatine, some people get kind of like nauseous or something like that from a little bit, but it's pretty uncommon. Then you have like random anecdotal reports of weird things, but like that happens with physiology, but on aggregate, it's an incredibly safe supplement to take. Benefits are in muscle and performance, sure.

There's a little bit of research actually. Darren Kandow did a two-year study on postmenopausal women using this typical dosage for creatine that people say is like five grams per day. He did 20 grams per day in postmenopausal women. And they found some mild benefits in bone mineral density. So not all the areas that they scanned improved. Some of them did. I think like hips area-ish did, but legs didn't or some variation. So some plausible benefit. It also highlights the fact that

Post-menopausal women took 4X the normal dosages for two years and had no issues, right? No adverse events, basically. No kidney problems, no issues. And so we're like, okay, maybe some mild benefits of bone mineral health, which is really hard to deal with, especially post-menopause, a huge deal for women. We didn't even bring that up as a benefit of strength training, right?

And now you're either going to add some potential bone mineral density, or you're going to maybe at least negate it from losing and from going away. And then there's research on things like mood, brain health. There's some research, recent stuff on cognitive function, on long-term brain development, mental health. It's a little bit of anti. So you have so many benefits in so many areas with a high safety profile that's been tested in multiple populations and countless labs for decades that

it starts to become a really hard argument that that's a performance. It's just a life supplement. It's a really high, and especially when you think about what it actually directly does. Yeah. Past that, you can get into any supplement you want. And like on the surface, you might have this mythology that it is a performance supplement. In reality, it is. The biggest bang for your bucks are going to be the things that remove the most amount of performance anchors. So what is needed specifically based on your physiology? What are the limitations in your diet?

Okay, can we then solve maybe some holes there with supplementation? Getting any supplement from whole food first is always a landslide of a win. But if you have to use them, we'd recommend either sticking to the basics like that, and I could certainly add more to that list,

Or if you're going to add more, make sure that they are very specific to your physiology, very specific to your blood work, very specific to some limitation you're having based on a choice you've made with your exercise or something else. Because outside of that, then you start, you can potentially run into issues. But the kind of high profile, high safety, high benefit ones are there. So performance versus health, like it's not really that different, to be honest. I think women think creatine is going to bloat them. It can a little bit. Yeah.

I'd say that if you give any person any supplement, some people will come back and say, this hurt my stomach. I mean, you could give them a placebo and some of that would happen. So is it possible that some women might feel like watery or bloated from creatine? Yeah. But also like, again, we could give you any food and that could happen. So if you're saying like on aggregate, is it a moderate risk?

No. And do you see that reported a lot in literature? No. Have I given like hundreds of create hundreds of women creatine? Yeah. Have we had a huge problem with it? Not at all. Okay. Have we ever had some women come back? Sure. We've had some men come back and say that too. We've given people chicken and they've come back and said it may blow. Like, so it's not any different than like almost any other substance. So

I'm saying that because I'm very sensitive. When somebody comes to me and says, I started doing A, B, and C, and then this happened, my general default is I believe them. I'm not like, oh, yeah, whatever. It's like, keep taking it. And it's like, oh, my stomach is cramping. Like, nah. Like, weird stuff happens. Yeah. But...

It's pretty rare for us to hear that complaint. Do you have specific recommendations for exercise for women who are pregnant or postpartum? Okay, this is a great, great question. That's not my expertise. Of course, you know, we went through this when my wife was pregnant both times.

There's a lot, what I can say is there's a lot of really cool research coming out right now in this area. So the whole menopause and pregnancy stuff is getting more work. Hopefully that makes people happy. Yeah. People are pissed. Yeah. And actually just like a week ago, they announced another $500 million of funding for research in those areas. Wow.

So hopefully more of that stuff comes. We're actually in the middle, we're trying to raise funds right now for a sleep study through the menstrual cycle. Wow. Project we're working on, which is stunning enough, but-

There's no, like very little data on sleep throughout the menstrual cycle. Wild. Totally stunning, right? Because I have some nights I feel like I am not sleeping and it's completely random. Like my routine is the exact same and I think it's hormonal. We're going to see. Yeah, we're going to see. Yeah, yeah. So we're like, we're acting, my students though right now is like, we're finishing up study design on that project right now. Oh, one of your students doing it? Oh yeah, yeah. Oh wow. That's amazing. No, it's going to be her master's thesis. Oh.

We're doing lots of stuff because it's a really interesting question because now we have the technology to do that. The aura. We will most likely use aura simply because we can get a handful of things like temperature. Okay. And a lot of women actually track their cycle with an aura anyways. Yeah. So if those folks in the study, we can go back and see a lot of their historical data, which would be super effective. So we'll probably use that, but we won't use it for any of the sleep data. You'll have them sleep in a lab? No. Okay. We actually can run full...

clinical grade, FDA approved, highest fidelity technology possible sleep on people from their homes. That's probably the best, right? Because they're getting the actual sleep sort of environment. And we do that without any wires. Wow. So you people, you never have to go to a sleep clinic ever again. So these technologies exist for a very low price.

where you can get a very small thing that you can put on at night and you can get, it's actually way more advanced technology than is in a sleep clinic. And instead of checking kind of like a sleep score in the morning or something, you can get a very legitimate sleep study done in your room. So I'm biased overtly. This is technology I built. Are you selling it? Yeah. Really? Yeah, it's called Absolute Rest. Oh, okay. Anyone can go buy it. What does it look like? It's a little...

thing you can put on your fingertip or your ring. It's not you like, it's not a wearable though. You're not going to wake up and check a recovery score in the morning on it. All those data actually go back directly to our sleep physicians, sleep scientists, gets analyzed and then sent back. And then you get actively coached through that program. So it's not a daily sort of tracker. It's like, it's serious. Yeah. Yeah. Very legit.

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You can just think of it as like instead of going to a sleep clinic and getting that done for one night, why not have that same level of accuracy done every single night for five or seven or 20 days or whatever you want? Do you think HRV is kind of BS? No, not at all. Okay, guess what mine is. On your Oura ring. I would say for a, I'd say your average 40.

200. Are you really? Yep. Yeah. Okay. So you can tell a lot from that actually. Is that genetic though? Because everyone's like, how do I, I mean, yes, I have a pretty, like I'm in bed 830. Like I do have a good routine, but I feel like it has to be genetic, right? Let's just say you checked it with a different technology. So we don't have to make this about aura. Because again, like we're going to use them. We send them to all of our clients. There's a lot of benefit from them. But the reality of it is,

That's not what you asked about is HRV. Yeah. What we talked about is HRV from an aura. Yeah. Those are different things. Yeah. Because the reality of it is an aura is going to take a measurement once every five minutes. Okay. Okay. Our technology is going to take 150 measures per second the entire night. Why that functionally matters.

Your HRV score is going to be dependent upon what's happening every five minutes. Okay. What happens during the other time in that space? That's really going to tell you what's going on with your sleep. What's really going on with your HRV, your oxygenation, blood pulse, things like that. So this is not a very accurate measure on that. How they decide to get that aggregate number, and they report to you 200 milliseconds,

This is super technical, but the reality of it is there's a lot of different ways to run that equation and they're not all going to give you the same number. So if you want HRV, there are much better ways to measure HRV directly. If we really care about that, we're going to use our system. Of course, that's the highest in the past or in addition, we'll use systems like a Morpheus. Okay. It's a strap that's specifically built directly for HRV. It is a much more effective and direct tool. So HRV is very real.

Um, do we make a ton of decisions for people based on their HRV from their aura or Garmin or Apple watch or whoop? No, not at all. Because those issues are pretty large. That said, if yours is routinely 200, um, we could actually probably infer a couple of things about you, which are effective and beneficial. So we will see that a lot. Actually, most of the time we deal with people who are in too much sympathetic drive.

So to rewind just a touch, HRV is heart rate variability. Yeah. This is a global measure of where your autonomic nervous system balance is. So I'm going to violate my own self-hurt here, but just to try to make it kind of quick for people to understand. You have your autonomic nervous system. You can put this into two places. One place is sympathetic drive. This is fight or flight. Sorry, this is fight. So sympathetic, parasympathetic is downregulation, rest and digest, right? Yeah.

It's a bad way to explain those systems, but we'll just stick with that for now. Most people will attach to that. All right, great. Your heart rate, let's say your heart rate is 60 beats per minute. You would assume then your heart is beating every second on the second, like a metronome, 60 beats in 60 seconds every second. Reality is your heart doesn't do that. There's a variability. So it might go one second, one second, 1.1 second, 0.9 seconds. On aggregate, you'll get 60 done in 60 minutes.

Now that difference, you won't even feel, right? Because it's actually smaller than that. So it's imperceptible.

The tighter you are to that metronome, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, every second on the second has a no variability. That is a low variability. That's a low HRV score. That is sympathetic drive. Like fight or flight? Flight, like focused, alert. Like right now, I guarantee you both of our HRVs are pretty low. Okay, because we're focused. We're on, we're dialed, we're focused, we're here. Epinephrine, our adrenaline is a little bit high. Our blood flow is a little bit high. Cortisol is up, blood glucose is going. Heart rate's a little bit higher than normal because we're like on, right? Lights and all that stuff.

We are, right? You're on, you're dialed. Yeah, I'm here. I think so. Of course you are, right? If we leave this thing 20 minutes later, we'll probably go the opposite direction as a compensatory response, right? You'll have more availability in your heart rate. You'll be more down-regulated. That's why you do up-regulating activities so you can get that compensatory down-regulation, right? So we'll come back on the back side.

So somebody that has a low HRV is oftentimes stuck in and drive pretty high. Somebody that has a higher HRV like yours is the opposite. Now here's where it gets fun. It is definitely genetically driven. We've already discussed that is probably not the best technology to measure it, but let's just say it was a great measure. As you age, it generally starts to come down. Okay. As you become less healthy, it generally starts to come down.

I mean, body composition, things like that, right? Certainly psychological stress, total physiological stress are going to pull those things down. I'd say 95% of the time, if we have HRV issues, it's that end of the equation. People with really low HRVs, an equivalent number on an aura-based thing, if you're 40, if you're 30, if you're 20, like those are very actionable things. Let's say that it's a little bit inaccurate, who cares? If you're 20, that's still very, very low.

So even if that number is off by 30 or 40, you're still sub fit. Like it's a pretty low score. There may be some genetic component there. There clearly is, but I can then look at other metrics, a handful of other things and say, okay, this is actually a real thing that's happening. Okay. That said probably five or 10% of the time we do see the opposite problem, which is you, which is really high parasympathetic drive.

Could be normal for you, but then we would ask a lot of follow-up questions, right? And we see this, when we see this, we see actually sometimes a suppressed respiratory rate. So do you know what your respiratory rate is on your aura? No, I can check though. Yeah, let's check that. What's the number I'm looking for? Respiratory rate. It'll be right there on those scores. It'll be expressed in breaths per minute. Then we're going to look at things like how's your energy?

How's your motivation throughout the day? Like, are you lethargic? Are you low? Are you can't get out of bed? Can't get motivated. Can't get to the gym type of stuff. If not, then I'm not going to worry about that HRV score. Right. I'm going to be like, cool. I can't find it. Yeah. I'll find it in five seconds. So a lot of people get caught up in things like the amount of time that they spend in sleep stages. Yeah.

disregard that entirely for normal wearables. You care more about the full time. No, no. Full time is fine. That's great. But what we're really looking at is the amount of amplitude you're spending in each stage. That's going to be telling. So if you're in deep sleep for 40 minutes, but you're in a really high amplitude, then it's probably totally sufficient. If you're in deep for two hours and the amplitude is low, if there's more of these disturbances within that, then that's when you're going to see problems. Oh, respiratory rate. Okay. Okay.

So yours is 15.6. Okay. That's high. I'm breathing a lot. You're over breathing. Oh. Most definitely, right? Now, generally you'll see respiratory rate and HRV sync up. Okay. So generally low HRV, high respiratory rate. You have the opposite problem, right? Yeah. So your respiratory rate's high, you're over breathing. That's caused by a number of things and can lead to a number of bad things. We definitely want to bring that down. Okay.

Could be cause we can get in that. But going back to your HRV, do you have problems with low energy? No. Do you have problems with like struggling to get motivated to go do stuff? No. Then I might not care that much. Okay. Right. So if we hear the opposite answer though, we say, all right, really high HRV, you're really downregulated.

Let me ask you one more question. Do you do any kind of breath work? Not really. Okay, fine. What about, do you need like a sauna or cold? Yes. Okay, what do you do? I'm probably in the sauna like once or twice a week and then I always cold plunge with it. Okay, great. Do you feel more energy or less energy afterwards? More. Okay, fine. If you see somebody who does

Do you do any meditation? Yeah. Okay. When you finish meditating, more energy or less energy? More. All right. Then we have no issue with your HRV. I thought it was a good thing to have a high HRV. Probably not that high. Oh, mine's too high. That's what we were trying to figure out, right? Yeah. Generally, women are higher than men. Because when you said parasympathetic and sympathetic, I...

I think from my perception, I run very anxious. Like I'm constantly... This is good because we're teasing things out. You said a bunch of different things that you actually sort of think are the same thing, but they're not. Okay. And this is really helpful. So HRV is associated with, again, where we're at in those stages, but that's not necessarily the same thing as anxious. Okay. Okay.

It is associated. There's a very strong scientific association between anxiety and HRV scores. Same thing with depression. Same thing with cardiovascular health. There's lots of research showing long-term risk of cardiovascular health, mental health, anxiety, handful of things with HRV. So oftentimes you will see those associated. Low HRV and...

running hot, anxiety, so on. Yours is the opposite. So you do generally want a higher HRV. That means you're in more down regulation than forced. And we talked earlier, most people are stuck in too much sympathetic drive. 10, 5% of the people have an issue with low energy, depression, lethargy, when their HRV gets too high. Okay. Okay.

And so for a woman, how old are you? 30. Okay. Young, healthy, lean woman, your HRV is probably generally going to be higher than most. 100 plus would be a pretty normal number. Maybe a little higher. If you're 120, 140, 150, I wouldn't worry about it. If you are 120, 140, 150, 170, 200...

And we were having any issues with low energy, with depression, with like, I do meditation and I feel worse. I do downregulation breath work and I feel worse. I do sauna stuff, I feel worse. Then we might think you're actually stuck in parasympathetic drive too much. And you are overly downregulated. Okay. You don't have low energy. You are literally just stuck in low energy mode.

You don't need any more down regulation. This is, these folks will breathwork themselves to death and feel terrible and keep feeling terrible. Can't get to the gym. Workouts exhaust them. They're stuck in sympathetic drive. They need up regulation. They don't need any more down regulation. But we ran a bunch of things on you. And this is exactly how we coach, by the way. So for you, I don't care what the data generally say. What I'm looking at you is running through our list of stuff that we know about you and going, okay, I don't care about it. Yeah.

I'm not going to make a coaching decision based on that metric. That was screwy. That's really high. I've seen it before, but uncommon. But we don't see any other compounding symptomology. The rest of your physiological markers aren't aggregating with it. So then I'm going to chalk it up to something we'll watch, and I'm not super, super worried about it. Could be a technology issue. Could be a unique physiology issue.

I'm not doing it right. So you can't, this is the same thing. If you get into blood work, the same thing you get into any other metric, you don't want to coach the marker itself. You have to contextualize it appropriately. So I'd be like, yeah, actually I'm not worried about it. Now we did poke a little around in there though. When we saw your respiratory rate. Yeah. That will tell me everything about anxiety. Okay. What's going on there? Told you they're close, but not the same thing. So now when I see the fact you're over breathing and you're saying like, I run hot, I'm more prone to this or that.

I can confirm that because you're over-breathing. Those are going to be much tighter linked than other stuff. So some metrics we're going to see pull out in HRV, but this one is saying, okay, you're over-breathing. Why? Does that sound like somebody who's relaxed? Of course, I'm exaggerating. But you get the point, right? Yeah. So you have the symptomology and then we see it in the physiology as well.

Now, 15.6 is not crazy, but you get into the 15, 16 respiratory rate, breath per minute, you're right on the borderline of dyspnea, of pain, of cardiovascular events. You get into like literally there's literature on 16 breaths per minute is now going to be much higher associated with cardiovascular events. Oh, wow. In older folks, right? You're not old. I'm not worried of you having a heart attack. Don't worry.

But you clearly say like, oh, this is an over-breathing pathology or you're getting close. I'm not a medical doctor. I don't care about medical thresholds. So just because you didn't hit a medical threshold for hyperventilation, it's still clearly suboptimal. So like I'm going to coach you out of that because we can reduce those things. So we're then going to run backwards and say like, let's chicken and egg here.

Because you can give yourself anxiety right now. And people have been doing this in psychology research for 40 years. If I hooked you up to CO2 and made you breathe CO2, I can induce a panic attack. I can cause that to happen, right? So the question is,

Is a little bit of anxiety you have, first of all, is it detrimental? Sometimes. Okay. But sometimes not. Sometimes anxiety makes you get off your ass. Yeah. That's probably the reason I'm here right now, honestly. No, there's no question, right? So what we will always do is say like, wait a minute, cortisol, anxiety, like, no, no, no. Is it serving a purpose? I'm not going to coach you out of something if it's actually good for you. Yeah. If you're like, no, this little bit of anxiety, like makes me more focused.

I don't know. I'm in for that all day. You're going to be more productive. I don't want to deaden you into like, oh, I'm already super zen, but she never gets anything done. You're like, well, that's tremendous. Like, we don't want that. I know people like that. Yeah. Of course. Right. So we're going to first make sure, like, do you care? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So.

All right. Like I'm mostly there for good, but maybe 15, 20% of the time, I feel like I have a little bit too much that I wish I could bring that down. Yeah. I don't know. I made that up. No, I would say that's accurate. So you're right on the, on the head. You want to be super productive, but you want to have a little more control of it. My ultimate goal is to just make sure your hands are on the steering wheel. I'm not going to tell you turn right or turn left, speed up, slow down. I want you to control that.

I want to give you the tool and say, Mario, you want to go faster, but you know how to do it. Or if you want to slow this train down, you know how to do it. You can decide what you do with it, right? We call this read and regulate.

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So number one, I'm going to make sure you're reading your own physiology. Do you know what's happening? Now, women generally are better, not always, but generally better than men at this. They're much more in tune with what's going on in their physiology on average. So your read state is generally better.

then can you have the second part, which is regulate. So once you recognize and feel what's happening, do you have the skills to bring it down, up or down? Again, it's not always like a down, down, down, down, down, down, down. Sometimes it is like, no, get your ass in gear. Like I need to be able to go up a notch here. So what we want to do is look at that and say, is it the fact that you're over-breathing by nature?

That's then inducing more of the anxiety or causing you to go from here to like, I don't want to be anxious anymore. I got the thing done because that happens. That was the CO2. So I brought that up. If I can cause that, if you were over breathing to connect this dot, if you're like, what the hell has this got to do with CO2? When you take a breath in, you're breathing in oxygen. When you take a breath out, you're exhaling CO2. That difference between O2 and CO2, that carbon, that C, is a byproduct of all metabolism.

Whether you're using fats or carbs or anything else for fuel, you're going to release three things, ATP, water, and carbon. That carbon is going to attach to the oxygen. Breathe in oxygen, that oxygen is floating in my system. It's going to go into some muscle that just ran a bunch of metabolism. It'll attach to a carbon. Carbon then goes in my blood, goes out of my blood into my lungs. I breathe out the CO2.

The amount of oxygen in your system is not regulating your desire to breathe. It's regulating your metabolic processes. Your CO2 is what drives respiratory rate. It's also what drives and regulates your pH.

Okay. This is going to sound funny, but this will tell us everything about being in metabolic acidosis. Like what the hell is that? Yeah. What is that? So anyone that talks about those things of, of changing your pH and your body, like we don't need to go down the route of any fancy supplement or special water because your body will regulate your pH very, very, very tightly as long as you're not screwing it up. Okay. Right. It will put it in the exact spot it wants to be in because it will just manipulate CO2. CO2 will change your pH instantaneously. So,

If you are over breathing, like you are, you are going like, I'm exaggerating, right? Which means you're exhaling way too much. Yeah. Which means you're dumping CO2. Okay. So what's happening to your CO2 levels in your blood? It's lowering. Going down. Yeah. This is called hypocapnia. Okay. Okay. In going down, we are now putting ourself in a state of low acidity. Okay. Acid levels are getting very low. It's called alkalosis. So you have acid and alkaline or acid and basic, right? Okay.

So this is what we call respiratory alkalosis. Okay. I use my respiration to put myself into a low CO2 state. If you do this at home right now, if you just go, do like 10 breaths, you will feel different right now. Mm-hmm.

You'll feel tingling or maybe hot. You'll start sweating. Keep going for 30 seconds and you will feel like your eyes get all weird. That's how quickly CO2 can change your physiology. So when I say if I pump you through a bunch of CO2 right now, you can immediately go into a panic attack or anxiety like some other thing because CO2 gets really high. There are baroreceptors in your brainstem that are going like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. CO2 is getting super high. If it feels like it's getting high, it's going to tell you to bring it back down, right? Mm-hmm.

If it's low, it's going to have you go, don't exhale, let it build back up. It's trying to regulate pH. So if you're over breathing, it is continually being low. Your respiration, your breathing rate is no longer matching your energy demands. Okay. You're dumping more CO2 than you need. That puts you in a respiratory alkalosis. In response to that, your kidneys will put you into metabolic acidosis.

Because it needs to balance the entire system. So now we're seeing acid regulation. We can test this a bunch of different ways, the CO2. We can do this in a CO2 tolerance test that takes seconds to do. We can do this in blood. We're confirming this a bunch of different ways. We'll see this in hydration status. We'll see this in mental clarity. We'll see this in anxiety. We'll see this in breath. We'll see this in a ton of different areas, right? Because physiology is physiology. So again, we won't treat one marker. We're always going to confirm where it's going.

So by doing that, now imagine this, you are over breathing. That's happening. Does that sound like, again, relaxed or stressed physiology? Stressed. Boom. What happens in response? Cortisol is going to be released. Cortisol is going to be released. What's going to happen to blood glucose? Goes up. Goes up. Yeah. Stressed response. It's fight or flight. Okay. Okay. I'm putting you in that state of saying, be prepared. Now I want you to do that.

And now go fall asleep. Super challenging to do, right? Yeah. It's not going to happen. So if you're constantly over breathing, you are constantly being set in a state of be ready for fight or flight. Yeah. Okay. Now, oftentimes folks like this, again, will fall asleep pretty quickly because they're very tired throughout the day because they burned energy all day because they were anxious.

Yeah, I feel like I fall asleep relatively quickly. Yeah, you did. Your latency was okay. Yeah. On there. Yeah. Sometimes folks like this, they'll like have a hard time staying asleep. If they wake up, they'll never get back to sleep. But the reality of it is that's doing it. So was it the initial over-breathing that then causes or exacerbates a little bit of that anxiety that you're feeling? Or is it the opposite? Because if I put you in anxiety right now, psychologically,

If nothing was going on and we had those cameras rolling on you, we would see two things happen. Your mouth would open and you would immediately start breathing through your mouth more and your ventilation rate would go up. So breathing can induce anxiety or anxiety can induce the over-breathing. We would have to figure out what is actually driving that, break that cycle, and then the

let the respiratory rate catch back up to where supply meets demand. And now your state will be in a much more controlled environment, right? Yeah. So to kind of wrap all that up again, I don't want to take that away from you. That's a gift. I just want you to have control and recognize me like, oh man, I have a lot of anxiety or whatever the case is. I feel myself. That's read. I read it. I saw it. Now I don't want this anymore.

How do I back myself back out of that? That's ultimately all I care about. So if you feel that, and then you feel like, no, like I'm on right now, like I don't want you to back out. Yeah. Maybe double down, maybe go harder, right? This is your exercising. This is you're trying to get stuff done. You're in a hard call. You make tough decisions, whatever the case is, right? You're kind of getting sleepy and tired, but you got to get this work done. Like, let's go, Marley. Let's figure it out. Like all these things, right? So it's those two sides of the equation. The reason this can happen a lot of times for folks like you is

It's hard to take threat detection away when it's been around there for a long time. Yeah. So hard chargers, people that have been through trauma, people that have just been in high stress environments, high stress jobs, sometimes parenting can do these things where you probably need to be a little more sympathetic drive because you're making flight decisions or you're making like hard. Okay. Once that threat is gone,

the kids grow up a little bit the injury goes away you stop drinking you exit and sold the company now you got all the money and you're relaxing well if you don't actually relearn that down regulation that pattern will persist totally it happens if i'm on vacation like regardless of course right yeah so now we just need you you clearly are reading those signals we just need to teach you how to throttle it down when you want to throttle it down watch that respiratory rate come down

You'll be more present, more energy throughout the day and be able to focus more. Wow. That was really helpful. I had no idea that I was breathing too fast. It's like a little bit of a therapy session, but for physiology. Now I'm like overly aware of how quickly I'm breathing. And then we probably just made it worse. Yeah. Now I'm hyper fixating. I'm like, slow down. Okay. Well, easy. Just breathe through your nose more. I feel like I do breathe through my nose. I don't use mouth tape or anything. Yeah. I mean, you don't necessarily have to, if you don't know

If you're doing it right, you can try. My husband has the full setup, like no strip, mouth tape, eye mask. He's out. So that is one passive way to go about it. But the reality is we probably just need to give you actual direct tools to use to bring that stuff down. It can be breathwork related if you want. I've done breathwork before. Why does it make you cry?

Okay. It doesn't make me cry, so don't accuse me of that. It does or doesn't? No. Oh, okay. But it makes that happen to a lot of folks. Yeah. Physiology and psychology are tied together. Yeah. I told you, you start messing with oxygen and CO2, you will see things, feel things immediately psychologically. Wild. It can go the opposite direction too, because they're directly tied. Again, if I came in and said, oh my God, your entire family just died right now.

your heart rate would go up. Yeah. There's nothing to do with energy demand, right? And if the opposite happened, I just said, hey, congratulations, you just got $100 million. Like, all right, go for a little bit and then you'd be...

Pretty zoned out. If I did the opposite and put you on a physical stressor, your psychological state would go. You're literally, your eyes would dilate or they would focus, right? Things change if I'm like, man, we're sprinting. If you mess with physiology, you're going to mess with psychology. Like, why does it make some people cry? Because you're directly, those are the chemical signals to your brain that say switch psychological states. So we can, one of the reasons we'll use ice a lot is because we can induce a physiological change

terror response. And then we can work on the mental response to that. So we can work on a lot of, I'll just, this is a horrible phrase, but we'll call them psychological things without having to put you in a sick lot, psychologically dangerous spot. And so it is simply understanding that relationship and saying, what if I put the stressor in a, in the physical side?

We stay away from that targeted, triggered area. We'll put the stress on the physical side, whether it's exercise or breath holds or thermal stress. And now we can work on stress management, stress regulation, stress treatment. We can widen the resilience of the psychological response, but it's too touchy over there. Let the clinical psychologists and therapists and psychiatrists do that stuff, which we're not skilled at, me, right? But we can do it in this area. Yeah. Yeah.

That's why you will always see that response. So we have seen many, many people have that response or similar. Other folks don't like I don't, but plenty do that. So those are physiology and psychology. Like we always joke. My friend Brian says all the time, like psychology is just misunderstood physiology. Yes. Like apologies to all you psychologists out

I'll just, but you get what I'm saying. I see that. I mean, I've been through my fair share of mental health issues and like exercise and food completely changed my life. Okay. So like, why, why, why do people have such a strong, why is there such excellent research on the positive mental health benefits of physical exercise? It's this is exactly what I'm talking. Like you'll see this manifested in a lot of different ways, but you really are just saying the same thing. When you are physically exercising, your metabolic rate is going up.

which means you're producing more carbon. That carbon dioxide concentration is going up. If you're over-breathing all day and that has continually been suppressed and now you elevate it with exercise, what happens? You're actually back to normal. So why are we surprised when we see a different psychological state in response to those things? We see this routinely. This is also people who struggle to skip an exercise session.

That was me for so long. Of course. Yeah. Why? Because you didn't feel normal until your metabolic rate actually started matching your respiratory rate. And then you felt normal and good and calm and focused, right? Yeah. Of course. And then you're like, I don't ever want to not feel that. That's the only way you feel normal or praise it however you want every day. Yeah. So you are addicted to that feeling because that's actually normal state. Yeah.

And now you just need to then, you've learned to kind of deal past that a little bit. But if you were to bring your breath rate down at its current state, you would feel that constantly. So as much as we love exercise, when we see things like that, it is making sure, okay, all right, like we've seen this story before. It's a compensation mechanism if you want to think about it that way. So-

Yeah, we can get back to it. That's why breathwork can make you feel those ways is because those systems are not that different. It's still chemistry, right? You play with chemistry, you're going to see a psychological response. I mean, I have a million more questions for you, but I think I have to wrap it here because otherwise we're going to be here for hours. Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Where can everyone find you online? And where can they get the sleep thing? Or where can I get the sleep thing? Oh, sure.

Uh, the sleep thing can be found at absolute rest. Okay. Dot com. That is open for, we've been sold out for a very long time. Oh, okay. So our big program is, is a little bit limited, but the smaller program is 100% open. We just actually opened up pretty recently. So you would use my data to, to help with the study? Yeah. So what would actually happen is you would be sent a very small device. Mm-hmm.

And you can hook it up and get going and you can do that for as long or as little as you want. And your data will go back to very high quality science, scientists and sleep scientists and folks in that. All that will be analyzed, interpreted for you. You'll be told what's happening at a really high level. So it's not only like, do you have apnea or not? Folks that have been to a sleep clinic,

Like, oh, they told me I only have mild apnea or whatever. It is far more than that. So at the highest thing, it is environmental analysis. So the quick rub in this is any sleep testing is at best going to tell you how you're sleeping. How many hours did you get? Did you wake up? Great. But they don't generally solve problems because they don't tell you why you're sleeping that way.

So what we do is say, okay, great, we'll do the sleep test. That's fine. We'll get all that. But then we're going to run the environmental scanner. So at that night you're sleeping, you're going to have a full scan of CO2, dander, pollen, allergens, light, sound, temperature, mold, like whatever is in the case, right? So you're sleeping this way. Was it because of something in your environment? Yeah.

Got it. Fun fact, we just talked about CO2. What do you think happens when CO2 gets really high in your bedroom? Breathe really fast. You breathe it right back in, right? Right, yeah. And then what happens to your sleep? Can't fall asleep, can't stay asleep. So you can do whatever meditation and things you want. You can do all that. But if there's a super high amount of CO2 in your bedroom, you're going to have sleep issues. Got it. This has nothing to do with whether you have apnea or insomnia or anything like that, right?

So it is environmental. Is it psychological? So there's a whole psychological aspect of the analysis. Is it blood related? And so there'll be a whole that we have actually the world's first very extensive sleep panel of blood chemistry tests. So is it something in your physiology, micronutrient wise, endocrinologic, like something like that that's actually inducing it? Or is it behavioral? Right. So again, is it, are you doing the idiot stuff of, you know,

lots of bright lights right before bed and like all that stuff most people have heard about we're like don't do that yeah but it's generally not that simple so is it positionally based so is it only happening on your right shoulder or your left shoulder like there's all these levels of details that people can get done for generally you know 10 of the cost of a sleep study yeah so it's very very affordable so that is open and people can do that at their leisure where can they watch your content

Or find out more about what you know. Yeah, the easiest place is Instagram and Twitter. I'm still calling it Twitter. I don't care. Twitter the rest of my life. Yeah. No matter what. And then, of course, you're welcome to check out the podcast, which just finished season one. Wow. Congrats. Yep. So I can't hang with you folks. I can't do the weekly thing. No, I can barely do it. So I don't blame you. Yeah, it is just 10 episodes.

Go knock it all out. And then, uh, name of the podcast. It's called perform with Dr. Andy Galpin. Love it. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Yeah. My pleasure. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider patient relationship. As always talk to your doctor or health team.