Our Episode

[Music]
welcome to the hubman lab guest Series
where I and an expert guest discuss
science and science-based tools for
everyday
life I’m Andrew huberman and I’m a
professor of neurobiology and
Opthalmology at Stanford School of
Medicine today’s episode is the fifth in
a six episode series on fitness exercise
and performance and today’s episode is
all about recovery that is how to
maximize your recovery to achieve your
fitness and exercise and performance
goals and how to avoid overtraining Dr
Andy Galpin great to be
back today we’re discussing recovery and
I’m very excited to have this discussion
because as we know despite the fact that
different types of exercise can be used
to trigger different types of adaptation
such as increased long distance
endurance Anor robic capacity strength
hypertrophy Etc the workouts themselves
are not actually when the progress
occurs when the adaptation occurs occurs
and this to me is extremely interesting
because it parallels what we see with
so-call neuroplasticity which is the
nervous systems ability to change in
response to experience we sit down to
learn
something we experience something and
that is the trigger for rewiring of the
nervous system but the actual rewiring
occurs away from the experience or the
learning so to in Fitness and in
exercise recovery is where the Real
Results actually emerge where we get
better so I’d love for you to explain
what recovery really is and the
different types of recovery certainly
different ways to enhance recovery and
I’d also love for you to explain whether
or not there are ways that people can
become better at recovering because if
indeed recovery is when progress emerges
when we get better well then anything
that supports our recovery and gets us
better at recovering ought to increase
our rate and our degree of progress
absolutely you nailed it in the
description what people really want is
some sort of change whether we’re
talking athletes or general population
this change is uh some sort of
improvement in muscle function reduction
in body fat higher functioning
metabolism whatever the case is and the
only way that happens is we talk about
the equation of stress causes adaptation
but as you alluded to the piece in the
middle is only if you can recover from
it and so the game we’re playing here is
we all agree we want more adaptation
that means we need to bring more stress
into the system but we then have to
ensure that our recovery
outpaces the stress input or else we no
adaptation will occur in fact what
happens is you will actually be in a
negative spot and start going backwards
and so what I would love to do is is
talk about how we’ve handled this um and
I’ve had a decent amount of experience
here I was fortunate enough to do my
master’s degree in the laboratory of a
gentleman named Andy fry who’s an NCA
lifetime time Achievement Award winner
and he studied in large part recovery
overtraining overuse overload in a lot
of areas in addition I’ve been fortunate
enough to work with individuals from
high functioning CEOs and Executives who
have little time for Recovery High job
stress to to athletes uh in the think of
the example of pitchers in Major League
Baseball who have to recover in a matter
of 4 days so that they can pitch again
at maximum velocity so I would love to
outline some of the tools and tactics
strategies that we use for all these
individuals um give you some
foundational stuff and I would love to
maybe actually cover some things that
most people have never heard of um some
stuff you may not have access to some
technologies that we use some
biomarkers um and then even a whole
bunch of things that are keeping with
the theme of your show here cost free or
extremely low cost so all those
strategies um what i’ would also like to
do is cover nutrition and
supplementation
and fueling and hydration and things but
that’s probably going to have to be
saved for an additional conversation
that we’ll do in the next episode yes so
we will absolutely hold a conversation
about nutrition and supplementation
where you can educate us about all the
top C toour stuff all the way down to
the the uh fine
details I do have a question about
recovery and it’s one that I think most
people are familiar with themselves
which is
soreness we think of it as muscle
soreness but I was trained early on in
my scientific career to always question
the seemingly obvious so couple of
questions about soreness first of all
what does soreness really reflect is it
really muscle soreness it feels like
it’s in the muscles uh but what other
organ systems and tissues and cell types
does it involve and then I’m
particularly interested in this concept
or this experience that many of us
including myself had which is delayed
onset muscle soreness why would it be
that when we are less in shape or when
we perform a movement that is extremely
novel to us the soreness seems to arrive
after a reasonable delay of maybe even a
day you know we’re F the next day with
48 hours later we are exceedingly sore
and as we get more fit or more familiar
with the movement the soreness seems to
arrive earlier so I realized I just
asked you about three questions or more
first of all what is muscle soreness at
a Cellar level which cells which organ
systems and so forth what does it mean
if we are sore is something I know we’ll
get into a little bit later and then why
the delayed onset muscle soreness it’s
actually one question so it’s totally
fine you answered all you asked all
three because I’m going to actually
answer number three which will answer
number two which will actually answer
number one I’d love to tell you that I
set it up uh that way intentionally but
uh I’m just happy to hear that where I
was unable to be concise you are able to
be concise thank you yeah we are still
learning a lot about this area it’s
actually really difficult to perform
these studies anytime you ask a question
about something like pain or soreness
you’re immediately talking about
perception and there is obviously a
physical component to that but there’s
also perception and so teasing those
things out is extraordinarily
challenging that said there has been a
lot of work in this area in fact
probably you may have a show already out
on pain or maybe one’s coming down the
road we did an episode on pain uh while
ago but it’s definitely time to revisit
that literature I also have some amazing
colleagues at Stanford who work on pain
both from the uh cellular and molecular
side but also from the psychological
side about how our um understanding of
pain and what we believe about pain
shapes the experience of pain and Pain
Relief amazing that’s that stuff is
incredibly important and I’m I’m glad we
flagged that and maybe we’ll just call
that good for now they can come back
later for another one of your shows so
that being said why does it happen uh 28
to 48 hours after you exercise well that
actually should give you some Clues into
what’s happening so the traditional
dogma of delayed onset muscle soreness
is what this is called is that it is a
result of quote unquote micro tears in
the muscle and so you can sort of think
I challenged the muscle there was some
small tears in there and I’m feeling the
result of that well in fact that
certainly does happen and it can happen
that is not what’s explaining your
muscle soreness and in fact you can be
quite sore from exercise and have no
measurable amount of muscle damage and
so much like anything else when we’re in
this idea of pain it’s not a
onetoone explanation there are multiple
factors that are probably causing your
perception of pain muscle damage can be
one of them it is not the only one and
it is probably in my opinion though this
is yet to be shown
definitively probably not even the
leading cause of it and so what’s
actually happening well the reason it’s
taking you 24 to 48 hours is is you can
actually uh find various papers uh
literature reviews dating back in a
number of years now over a decade that
show these wonderful curves of an
inflammatory uh and immune response and
and we don’t need to necessarily go
through the entire physiology right now
but effectively what’s happening is
those things have a little bit of a time
delay and so some of those steps happen
immediately like right when the exercise
is there and then some of them are
delayed six to 24 to 48 hours um if you
know a little bit about this uh
physiology it’s you have a combination
of neutrophils and macras and a bunch of
things happening and this has a Time
sequence so what happens is by the time
we get to this 28 to 48 hour
window now the muscle soreness kicks in
which wait a minute if I if this was a
result of my muscles being torn and that
happened
immediately wouldn’t that pain start
immediately well the answer is it would
and so that that is your first clue that
that’s not responsible for it when we
look at that immune response and we see
that that is actually Peak 24 to 48
hours later and then that’s the same
time the pain kicked in that’s cluing
you with the problem so we have this
immune response happening in
inflammation then all of a sudden we
start getting fluid accumulation and now
there are what are called nose receptors
and you’re probably very obviously
you’re very familiar with these and
these are pain receptors what’s actually
interesting is we don’t necessarily know
a lot of information about how many pain
receptors are in muscle they’re not
really in the belly in fact this is why
I can perform my muscle biopsies and
they don’t really hurt you mean in the
belly of the muscle correct yeah we do
have pressure sensors though and so if
you change the volume of the tissue you
will respond to that very very quickly
so by enhancing swelling in the actual
muscle that is immediately putting
pressure on those pressure receptors if
you will that’s the signal so what’s
probably happening here and I just I
just hate to give you another bone but a
lot of delayed on some muscle sorus is
probably just a neural feedback loop
rather than it is actual MUSC damage
yeah makes a lot of sense there’s a lot
of interactions between the um types of
neurons that control touch sensation and
pain sensation and itch sensation in
fact a lot of people um kind of collapse
itch and pain together Pingo you know
that’s something it’s painful and it
itches is is a familiar thing for people
mosquito bites and such um and of course
there’s the uh classic gate theory of
pain which uh people will be familiar
with and then I’ll explain why I’m
explaining this um which is if you you
something hurts you know you Bonk your
knee or you stub your toe we tend to
grab that body part and try and rub it
totally and that rubbing is not a
coincidental thing it activates a set of
uh touch sensors that are that respond
to kind of broad dull touch um and that
actively inhibits through the release of
an inhibitory neurotransmitter the
fibers that control the pain signal so
anytime we we rub a you know like a
charlie horse our leg or we or we stub
our toe and we you know we winse and
then we grab the toe and we kind of like
squeezing in a little bit that’s
actually
deactivating or partially inactivating
the the pain mechanism so the idea that
uh a swelling response would then
trigger a neural response that then then
would recruit the pain receptor response
here I’m using broad broad brush um
Strokes here to explain this um makes
very good sense to me um now and only
now that you’ve explained how this
process works I can actually even add
more to that so if you remember how
muscles work so we have to have some
sort of signal from the nervous system
that has to actually go in and tell the
muscle to contract well remember there a
few episodes ago we covered the
physiology here of what’s called a motor
unit okay well what I didn’t explain to
are called muscle spindles and we have
talked about proprioception in uh an
episode of before as well but we never
tied this picture together so let me
walk you through that really quickly and
it’s going to tie this Loop in into a
nice bow so what happens is um this
motor unit is is coming in from what’s
called an alpha motor unit and that’s
going to be innovating your muscle
fibers and that’s going to tell the
muscle fibers to contract those are
typically spread out throughout the uh
all sides of the muscle in interior
exterior all over on the outside though
there is another type of muscle called a
muscle spindle now these are non
contractile so they don’t have that acon
and myosin and they don’t produce Force
they are responsive they are
proprioceptive so what that means is
they sense stretch and this is why for
example if you were to um stretch a
hamstring stretch any muscle group it
doesn’t really matter or muscle its
innate response is to fire back to close
that distance and this is what keeps you
from say if you’re leaning to the right
um You can imagine that the example we
give is if if you’re standing on one
foot and you start swaying to the right
all right let’s say you’re standing on
your right foot and this make this
easier for folks and you start swaying
to the right like you’re going to fall
on your right ear will hit the ground
the inside of your right calf muscle
will start being stretched the outside
will start being compressed right so the
stretch on the inside of the right calf
muscle will sense that stretch and it
will respond by Contracting that pulls
you back to the middle and stops you
from falling that’s proprioception and
muscle spindles send stretch and tell
you to contract the way that they work
is is through gamma motor neurons and so
these are sensory things so what’s
happening is unlike when you tell your
muscle to contract it goes Alpha to the
muscle contract these muscle spindles
work such that it is oh I’ve been
stretched send signal back to some
Central Point typically in the spinal
cord and we don’t actually want to go
all the way up to the brain we’ve got a
time delay this is why these are
subconscious autonomic right versus
somatic so that gamma is going to go
back to the central location and then
come back through the Alpha motor
neurons until it to contract so you have
this wonderful mechanism of sensing
stretch going back well one Theory
that’s been put forward regarding muscle
damage is that the pressure is actually
being applied to those nerve endings of
the muscle spindles and that’s actually
responsible for the pain signal that’s
going back and coming up to your brain
and you’re registering that as pain
rather than it is actually in the the
contractile units so the muscle fibers
that that’s a very intriguing idea
uh because it would suggest that
stretching muscles in order to alleviate
soreness might be the exact incorrect
thing to do yeah now I’m not saying that
for sure for certain I’m just building
off the mechanistic logic that we’ve
laid out here yeah really that you’ve
laid out here there’s a more effective
principle based on exactly that which is
this is generally why low-level
movement is effective at reducing acute
soreness because that’s lowle
contraction of the muscles antich and
get tissue out and and get fluid
out wow you’re literally pumping it out
of the the cell yes and in our previous
episode where we were talking about
programming or using the wi but let’s be
fair here where you were educating us
including me um and the audience about
different structures for programming
exercise for specific adaptations Etc
the month week year SC scales Etc we had
a brief um discussion about the fact
that if one trains legs very hard with
resistance training you know some heavy
squatting or deadlifting it or and
there’s some soreness that often times
doing some quote unquote lighter cardio
or um some uh low impact work the next
day or or any number of different things
that involve um not
high-intensity uh contractions of the
muscles but that do require contractions
of the muscles that it can alleviate
soreness more quickly than if one were
to Simply lie around and you know watch
Netflix or something yeah that’s exactly
right the um to go back just a little
bit as well the if that’s really the
case um the question is like where is
this inflammatory signal coming from and
while there’s much to be learned there
uh there is a little bit
of information right now that suggests
it’s potentially coming from free
radicals released from the mondra again
that may or may not hold up as more
research comes I’m not sure but but if
you remember back to our uh conversation
on endurance so we talked about the
electron transport chain and aerobic
metabolism and regardless of whether or
not you’re getting energy from
glycolysis or carbohydrates remember
they have to be finished through aerobic
metabolism so even if you’re lifting
weights and you’re using carbs for your
fuel you have got to finish that
metabolism by running it into the
mitochondria and Performing oxidated
metabolism as a result of that that
electron transport chain runs so
theoretically if free radicals which is
um which are hyperreactive oxygen
species basically they’re oxygen
molecules that are missing an electron
so that they react to a lot of things
they’re the opposite of antioxidants by
the way this is you know oxidant
molecules with extra protons so they can
balance the charge if those leak out
that in of itself is going to be a
massive inflammatory signal and that’s
probably what signals the cause of these
neutrophils and macroasia and kicks off
this entire Cascade again I believe we
need more research there I need to look
into it maybe it’s more definitive than
I
that I know um but that’s probably
what’s happening potentially what’s
happening rather that causes that
Cascade in Signal also um what you have
is this combination of well if that’s
the case why am I not getting tremendous
amount of muscle damage when I do more
aerobic based exercise well because you
don’t have the mechanical tension
pulling on the fibers that’s actually
causing damage to the cell wall that
allows these free radicals to escape the
mitochondria and the cell cell wall so
that’s the best we can postulate at this
moment as to why those things are
happening and then why again low-level
exercise tends to enhance uh even things
like percussion um so using either
instruments that put a low level of
vibration into your leg or like
pneumatic boots so you massage all these
things are generally probably helping
because they’re moving that stuff out
Adema most specifically so pressure
comes off of those nerve endings in the
muscle spindles
and allows you to stop receiving that
signal of pain despite the fact that you
didn’t actually regenerate tissue at all
yet fascinating and I think that
beautifully frames where we’re headed
next which is to talk about all the
different modes of recovery and how to
accelerate them and perhaps even how to
combine different forms of recovery in
order to become better at recovering and
in doing so make faster progress with
Fitness before we begin I’d like to
emphasize that this podcast is separate
from my teaching and research roles at
Stanford it is also separate from Dr
Andy galpin’s teaching and research
roles at Cal State Fullerton it is
however part of our desire and effort to
bring zero cost to Consumer information
about science and science related tools
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$150 at checkout so to kick off this
discussion about recovery and with the
understanding that recovery is when the
specific adaptations to exercise
actually occur I’d love for you to share
with us what happens or needs to happen
during recovery in order for us to get
better at anything endurance strength
Etc but also how specific types of
exercise stimuli and specific types of
adaptations that we trigger so running a
bit further lifting a bit more weight
slowing the Cadence of a given movement
Etc how those specific types of triggers
for adaptation relate to the specific or
maybe similar types of recovery that are
required for us to make progress us in
one of our previous episodes we were
talking about how the Harvard fatigue
lab really identified this idea of
homeostasis or at least sort of
championed it for it and that’s
important because in all levels
physiology wants to return to
homeostasis so what happens in terms of
adaptation is you’ve challenged it to a
level that it realizes if it does not
make a change it will not be able to get
back to the same level of homeostasis
that’s fundamentally what’s happening
that is recovery
that process of taking an insult being
temporarily reduced in
functionality causing a change so that
now we come back and get what we often
call in sport performance super
compensation all that really is doing
though is bringing you to a new level of
homeostasis effectively it is
understanding if that same insult comes
again I need to be able to make sure
that that doesn’t cause the same level
of disruption and so we raise the bar
whether this is is enhancing our ability
to take the same level of mechanical
tension on the muscle and not result in
micro damage whether this is being able
to take the same reduction in energy and
not have that
compromise sleep or anything it’s really
fundamentally changing so we can have a
new level of homeostasis because it’s
presuming it’s predicting that that same
insult is going to come again down the
road I want to clarify for people that
when Dr galin says
insult while he may actually insult me
um insult is the nerd speake terminology
for some sort of damage inflicted to a
tissue or system so um he’s speaking
about the insult to the muscle or insult
to the neuromuscular connection created
by adding more weight to the bar um
running a further distance um uh running
a bit fast or or pedaling faster that
creates a micro insult or an insult and
now because everyone is familiar with um
psychological and verbal insults you’ll
never forget that biological concept
it’s important we tag another thing here
which is called hormesis it’s one of my
favorite phenomenon and it effectively
means this that there is a dosage or
toxicity response to almost everything
and if you think about this in the
context of say drugs what this means is
if I gave you 10 milligrams of something
that it would be okay but if I gave you
20 it’d be a problem and eventually if I
go up and give you enough this thing
turns toxic this is a case of everything
from cyanide uh where it can actually be
in small dosages in nature in fact it’s
in many of the fruits that you eat but
it’s at a dosage that it doesn’t matter
if that dosage gets higher though that
actually can cause problems and if it is
high enough it can actually kill you
instantaneously the back end of that
though is because you introduce this
micro insult as you framed it for me
perfectly your body will then adapt to
it and that’s really what’s happening
with exercise adaptation is is it is a
hormetic stressor
and why that’s important is if you look
at the immediate responses to exercise
you see an extremely large increase in
inflammation you see oxidative stress
you see a whole Cascade of autophagy
like all these problems quote unquote
happening it’s that what’s actually
quite funny here is um as a part of my
PhD the academic portion I had to go
through the medical side of the school
and so I was my physiology class was in
med school so I’m the only non-medical
doctor in that class right I’m a PhD
some I leave my lab I walk across campus
and I take physiology class with these
folks and I I died the whole time
internally because every time we would
cover a new area it was basically the
the exact same value or number in a
medical setting is like oh my gosh
they’re going to die and in performance
setting is like this person’s in
fantastic shape it’s I never still
amuses me to this day obviously because
it’s just simple things like total blood
volume right and you cover like okay if
you have a patient come in their blood
volume is six liters you know
immediately get them on a diuretic of
some sort because they’re going to have
a heart attack as blood pressure gets up
right now I’m immediately thinking damn
six liters that that person is super fit
because that is actually a positive
adaptation to training it’s one of the
most important if not the most important
adaptation to endurance training is
enhance total blood volume so you you’ll
store more blood in your body when
you’re more fit than you are less fit so
I mean I could go on all all these
things sodium concentrations potassium
concentrations are like you look at
these things on paper and you don’t know
if that person’s about to die cuz
they’re 65 years old and out of shape or
if that person is going to break a world
record the marathon this brings up a
very important tangent which is uh for
instance if you go and take a blood test
and you are somebody who exercises very
intensely uh with resistance training
your blood creatinine levels can be way
out of range and if your physician
doesn’t know that you’re doing certain
forms of exercise might say wow there’s
a lot of muscle tissue damage occurring
in your body um as you mentioned before
your total blood volume is is
dangerously High when in fact you are
far healthier and indeed much fitter
than the person who numbers would be in
range that said obviously there are um
limits to these to these statements
whereby you would want to be cautious
and take action to amarate a very
elevated um blood creatinine level or
something of that sort but the point
you’re you’re uh bringing up is is also
one about the field of medicine which is
that many not all but many Physicians
don’t take into consideration uh the
outside activities that people are doing
and so it becomes a kind of a plug-
Inplay type um type way of looking at
blood charts we’ve done many thousand
athletes blood chemistry and uh we we
don’t use first of all we never look at
disease stuff that’s not what we do we
take people that are healthy and try to
optimize performance and blood chemistry
is one of the best tools if you really
understand what you’re doing there you
can uh get some incredibly powerful
information out of blood chemistry that
actually relates to what we’re going to
talk to today uh in terms of measuring
uh everything from acute to Chronic
dehydration to sleep deprivation can be
identified in in blood chemistry to
optimization improvements in nutrition
supplementation there’s just a lot you
can get there um even people interested
in that field I would i’ Point them to a
gentleman named Dan Garner who’s just an
absolute Juggernaut and wizard in blood
chemistry for high performance but you
can get a ton of information from that
if you understand the difference between
exactly what you talked about looking
for signals of increased risk of
cardiovascular events 25 years down the
road versus is this the optimal value
for high performance in an athlete which
is what our our database and all of our
software and stuff does is is only
looking for those things so I’m going to
talk about some of the biomarkers to
look for a little bit later um salivary
stuff some blood stuff um but we’ll
maybe save that part of the conversation
for down the road tell me about
different time scales of recovery sure
this is actually where I was trying to
answer your question for and then I got
myself way off track but the reason I
brought up the hormetic thing is if you
understand that some things in the acute
say 24 to 48 hour period look
terrible it’s actually fine right so
this is the stimuli that’s causing
adaptation so the reason I brought up
the medical U exchange there is because
uh you if you looked at inflammatory
markers and then you mentioned some of
them you would see that they are highest
acute within seconds to minutes to hours
after exercise
however that’s exactly the stimuli
needed to bring them down
chronically okay and so chronically
meaning maybe in that moment they are
elevated and then maybe they’re coming
down 24 hours later and 48 Hours however
if you were to compare your resting
level say that Monday before you worked
out so your resting level that Monday
the week following the week following
that what you would probably see is your
Baseline inflammation goes down and so
we got to be really careful are we
talking immediately post exercise man
these markers look terrible maybe my
recovery score is awful Etc that’s not
necessarily a bad thing because what
we’re like looking to do is to not only
change what’s happening today but we’re
trying to cause adaptation that may take
us weeks or months to actually access I
love that you’re highlighting this
principle because one of the more
obvious ones to me now that you’ve said
this is heart rate absolutely my heart
rate goes very very high during exercise
and I do that fairly consistently or
even semic consistently my resting heart
rate will actually be quite a bit lower
that’s a fantastic example really what
you’re getting at here is this concept
where I think it’s important to
differentiate between adaptation and
optimization now we hear that word and I
use it and most scientists hate it but
it’s a good communication tool of
optimization if you’re optimizing for
the current moment you’re almost surely
compromising delayed
adaptation right if
if I were to say do the thing right now
that makes you feel the absolute best in
the world and you’re like great you took
a nap and you ate a dut like awesome you
feel amazing but you know it’s causing
long-term issues the same can be said on
the back end if you’re never choosing
things that make you better right now
you’re never actually going to see any
adaptation so what we’re really doing
with this recovery conversation is
playing this game of balancing immediate
gratification with delayed gratification
and how do we identify how much to do
now versus not how do I use a value or a
marker whether this is how tired I feel
today how sore I am today versus a score
on an app or a a tracking metric whether
this is a blood marker anything and
understand if that’s what I need to
cause the adaptation I want a week a
month three months from now and in the
case of some of our other athletes it’s
even up to four years right we’re trying
to cause adaptations that will get us
where we want to get in the Olympics or
World Championships or World Cup or
wherever we’re going to be so that’s the
framework we have to think about
recovery we we maybe falsely think about
it is I need to maximize my recovery
today and you could do something like
take an
anti-inflammatory whether this is a
supplementation or a drug or maybe this
is
ice oh cool that’s great that will
enhance your recovery in this moment
that’ll make you feel better today
probably tomorrow but what we know is
that blocks the signal for adaptation so
you’re not going to get the same results
you know four six eight weeks from now
so when we talk about recovery we have
to understand what tool am I using and
why and in order to do that we have to
understand what am I training for and
what am I trying to maximize um if I am
in the middle of a season with an
athlete and we are competing tomorrow I
am going to headed towards acute
recovery right because I have to actuate
that performance right now if I am
starting the off season I’m not hedging
towards recovery I’m actually hedging
towards adaptation so we’re not going to
deploy any of these especially things
like uh there’s evidence that a
combination of vitamin C and vitamin E
will blunt hypertrophic adaptations
because they’re anti-inflammatory they
antioxidants right um other other
Studies have shown maybe they don’t have
uh inhibitory effect they may or may not
point is
conceptually you want to be careful of
what you’re trying to optimize for and
you have to have that forethought and
that alone is going to dictate your
decision making with whether or not
again you get in the eyes uh you do
everything now we will cover some tools
like massage that are pretty fine to use
you don’t have to worry about those
blocking long-term adaptation but others
you’re going to want to be very careful
about so this principle that you’ve laid
out for us which is that there’s a set
of events that occur during exercise
that trigger the
adaptation and that sets in motion a
number of adaptations that occur during
recovery that then get us the exact
opposite response to what the trigger
was so I’ll go back to the heart rate
example um heart rate is close to
maximal or maximal you do that enough
times within a short you know a week or
so or two weeks and your resting heart
rate goes down as I recall a few
episodes ago you said that your maximum
heart rate doesn’t really change that
much is that correct yes okay but your
resting heart rate can go down quite a
bit
yep is that a general theme mean meaning
do we have a more or less set upper
limit or ceiling for things like
inflammatory markers for heart rate
maybe even things like stress and what
we do when we deliberately trigger
stress or a dramatic increase in heart
rate or dramatic increase in
inflammatory markers is that we are
lowering the floor but that the ceiling
Remains the
Same it’s very dependent upon the marker
so in the case of maximum heart rate it
will not
change with the exception of one thing
which is age age brings it down training
will not change it up in most
circumstances if you look at something
like an inflammatory response I suppose
theoretically there is a ceiling though
I’m not aware of it um I can tell you
right now looking at blood markers of
things like creatin kise so remember the
conversation about metabolism and that
we use phosphocreatine as one of our
primary fuel sources for explosive
exercise well if we’re using
phosphocreatine
U this creatin kinas now remember kinas
are enzymes that that function to break
things down for the most part so creatin
kinas is the enzyme you Ed to break down
creatine when you do that a lot then
that creatin kise gets out of muscle and
seeps into the blood um myoglobin is
actually another fantastic marker by the
way myoglobin is if you think about
hemoglobin being in blood is the
molecule that carries oxgen around when
it’s in the muscle tissue then it’s my
globin my meaning muscle and it’s the
same globulin thing so there’s a bunch
of markers you can look at muscle
breakdown and one of the things that you
can see is a creatin k level that’s
elevated after say um one bot of
exercise and and you might it might be
up you know five or six fold um I’ve
actually seen this number in offensive
lineman in the NFL be something like 500
plus fold so even within just one
category to the next that that number
can get extraordinarily high and if you
know this is actually one is important
Point here if if you’re paying attention
to any mechanistic research or use
you’re using that to inform your
decision-making you have to be
extraordinarily careful of magnitude and
what I mean by that is if if I were to
to be running a a western blot looking
at a signaling protein um in a muscle
does did this activation of this protein
turn on mitochondrial biogenesis and I
saw that whatever intervention we gave
it whether it was an nutrition thing or
a drug or an exercise and I saw that
that signaling protein increased by 20%
I would basically assume that to be
totally physiologically irrelevant
because in order for that to be
important it totally depends on the
marker you’re looking at but you some
markers I might need to see four five
six hundredfold increase before I know
that that will actually be enough to be
what we call physiologically relevant
others if they’re up one or two% that is
relevant and so you really want to be
careful when you’re either reading
papers or looking at Social Media stuff
if people are just talking about this
marker increase this much it may not
matter it may be totally irrelevant
physiologically and so you have to that
that’s also if you’re wondering like how
the hell are the all these people well
that’s how they can trick you a little
bit and intentionally or not it could be
just they’re trying to their best but
they don’t really understand that area
enough and so um that’s an important
point to pay attention to so to answer
your question again
fully it would be hard to determine if
there is truly a maximum level um some
things don’t want to move like blood pH
it doesn’t really want to move the range
that you’re going to move from is you
know like 6.8 to 7.4 and if you get up
to like 7.9 like you’re probably in big
big big trouble other things again can
go up 500 5,000 fold and so the markers
will really determine that
answer well at some point in the future
I’d love to continue this discussion
around the topic of stress specifically
yeah um and maybe we will get into that
a little bit later today when we um get
into the use of deliberate cold exposure
because that certainly um has effects
related directly to temperature on
tissue but it certainly has mental
effects in terms of raising one’s level
of perceived pain it’s fun also good or
some people love it and some people love
it for the feeling they get during it um
deliberate cold exposure some people
only like it for the feeling that they
get after it not unlike exercise totally
I I love to train I love exercise but I
know many people who uh um they Lo
exercise but they love the feeling
afterward so this will be a theme that
we will come back
to thank you for indulging my interest
in that semi- tangent I think it’s a
relevant tangent if there is such a
thing if you can now return us to the
different time scales yeah and modes of
recovery because I think where we are
headed is how to get better at
recovering yep let’s talk about the
tools let’s talk about what to measure
and identify for all four of these
distinct levels so level one is what we
call overload and just very quickly what
that means is I did a workout
today the sign and symptom of overload
is you’re fatigued per acute performance
is down so I worked out hard right now
if I were to go try to do a maximum
effort I would be reduced in my ability
the recovery period for acute overload
is minutes to days right that’s
generally what we call acute overload
and that’s what we’re looking for right
so we system should theoretically see
that hormetic stressor come back in
response come back bigger better more
efficient Etc if you were to continue
training in that state like most of us
do and say I did a workout today I had a
little bit of a Cute Overload going to
work out again tomorrow a little more
acute overload going to work out the
next day a little more acute overload
even if you took a day in between it’s
that doesn’t matter right you just
continue these acute bouts of insult
then you’re going to be pushing into the
absolute golden Target which is what we
call functional
overreaching so you have
overreached what you can currently do
and and it results in a functional
outcome and what we mean functionally
here is performance is enhanced and
again performance being whatever you
deem it to be you’re
stronger know you’ve enhanced muscle
size your mitochondria has improved
you’ve whatever the thing is it’s not
just a physical performance thing right
amazing recovery time for functional
overreaching is typically a few days to
maybe even a week or so and so typically
what we see happen is prior to a
competition individuals will do what we
call a taper which is a reduced training
volume for some short period of time and
the the reason they do that is to again
actualize is the phrase we use here the
adaptations and so you worked hard for
six weeks and you know theoretically the
workout you did three four five six
weeks ago once you allow the system to
recover will be actualized which means
your performance will be enhanced here
so functional overreaching is the golden
Target okay if you were to be at the
point of functional overreaching and you
continue to train so it intensified
whether this is through intensity this
is through volume or really as you said
earlier you had something holding back
your recovery it doesn’t really matter
right it’s it’s sort of two sides of the
same coin then you would move into what
we call
nonfunctional overreaching so you’ve
overreached again but now it is
nonfunctional as in you did not see a
positive benefit once recovery allowed
this typically means you have weeks it
takes weeks to come back from and you
basically just get back to Baseline and
this is where a lot of folks are who end
up in this vicious cycle and so you’re
like man I’m not getting the results I
want I’m going to train harder I’m not
getting results I want I’m going to
train harder and harder but because
you’ve recovery isn’t improved you just
end up in the same spot so then you
train more and you end up in the same
spot and you end up then just either
blowing up or quitting and you’re not
getting where you want if you were to
continue past that point you may
actually be into what we actually call
overtraining and that typically is uh
considered to be overtrained if it takes
months to recover from so most people
think they’re overtrained are really not
you’re just probably
non-functionally overreached and again
the classic distinction is if you took
three or four days off and you felt
better you weren’t probably quote
unquote overtrained you were probably
just in this area of non-functional
reaching you need a little bit of a back
off if you and this has been the case
I’ve had the app with gymnasts uh and a
cheerleader and some other things where
they take a month off and we’re barely
seeing them start to come back to their
Baseline numbers in any number of areas
mood desire to train testosterone
cortisol ratios bow markers in a number
of areas physical performance vertical
jump height like all these things they
just start to get back to Baseline so
over true overt training is actually
quite rare nonfunctional overreaching is
much more common and uh it is a a
shorter time frame scale so when we talk
about recovery those are the four pieces
that we’re really thinking about and so
if you are concerned about oh I’m super
sore how do I get less sore how do I
either not be a sore next time I do that
same workout or I’m super sore now how
do I recover those are playing in that
first category of overload and we can
certainly talk about how to figure that
out but the quick answer is you got to
go back to our previous episodes and
just pay attention to the volume
intensity recommend commendations if
you’re getting
significantly uh more damage or fatigue
in a workout you probably have increased
your volume too too quickly or something
else is dragging your stress bucket down
but generally this is a problem of
training um you either didn’t warm up
sufficiently your fueling strategy is
off which we’ll talk about in The Next
Episode or You’ violated one of our
principles of increasing intensity and
volume sort of too quickly um if it’s
past that
and you’re getting to a stage where
you’re just like I’m feeling beat up all
the time my energy is going down I’m
just not feeling like I’m recovered now
we’re in this overreaching stage so the
the story I kind of tell here always is
uh a few years ago I was
working and uh my wife Natasha was in
the garage training and I’m doing
something and like she comes stumbling
and she has this look on her eyes and
they’re like giant her eyeballs are
giant she’s just like wobbling she’s
like I effed up
and I was like what do you mean you like
effed up and she’s just like I read the
program wrong and she’s like like what’
you do like she was supposed to be doing
10 sets of three every minute on the
minute and she did three sets of 10
every minute on the minute and she was
absolutely wrecked she couldn’t move for
a few hours afterwards and then for days
she’s just like you have to handle the
kids like I can’t get out of bed I can’t
move so that was like a classic example
of all right like we don’t need to fix
recovery here you’re just a dummy and
you did the training
way too hard too long like this is not
we don’t have a problem here so if it’s
a situation like that it’s generally you
just the program was way off if it’s
constantly happening where you’re just
like man like for whatever reason every
once in a while I’m getting really sore
or having a really bad performance in
these workouts then we need to go to our
other stress bucket take a look at our
alistic load or allostasis and get
figured out what’s happening there um so
those are the the easy ways to flag
acute overload problems
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the special offer I’m happy that you
pointed out the distinction between
functional overreaching overtraining and
being overtrained I think one common
mistake that people make in thinking
about biology generally is that they
think in terms of nouns and adjectives
and not verbs amazing I love that so
much you know biology is a collection of
processes or processes depending on who
you are and where you live and who you
trained
with being
overtrained is a state that in many ways
is an adjective you’re overtrained I’m
overtrained it’s like saying
uh you know I’m an American I’m a you
know Czechoslovakian whatever it happens
to be right and in many ways people do
start to associate with an identity at
least a transient identity and they
start making all sorts of decisions it
sounds like about what sorts of verbs
they will and will not engage in whereas
I think if we look at things as
processes and we assign verbs to them
then we can say okay I’m functionally
overreaching or I’m truly over
trainining which is a matter of degrees
correct right or under trining for that
matter I’m not I’m reaching but I’m not
functionally reaching it’s just it’s
just performance and you know just as
with the nervous system won’t change
unless you give it a reason to this is
the reason why if you can perform
something perfectly or speak a language
perfectly there’s there’s no rewiring of
the nervous system this myth that we’ve
all been told that every experience
rewires your nervous system it’s
different now than it was two seconds
ago that’s that’s a ridiculous illogical
statement we know that’s not true if
your nervous system can perform
something it has no reason to change and
it won’t muscles the same way this is
why you have to progressively overload
you have to learn something new or
challenge your muscle to do something
new it’s same thing so in the example
that you gave uh with your wife doing
this workout that turned out to be far
more strenuous she had functionally
overreached in some sense she might have
been overtraining or heading in the
direction of overtraining but the
mistake would be to assume that she was
overtrained right as a kind of it’s
almost becomes a bit of a a state or a
character
assignment um as opposed to a verb and
in any case there’s no perfect way to
describe this we’re talking about nouns
and adjectives and and we’re also um uh
talking about verbs but I think the
verbs are really anchored down in
processes and things that we do actions
that we can take and so um if I may I’d
like to just highlight this this idea of
Shifting one’s thinking towards verb
actions rather than labels on the state
that we happen to be in or the person
that we happen to be right sometimes it
even does become kind of
characterological in the way that people
describe it and uh so I have to believe
that there is something called
overtraining that overtraining is real
in other words but that we don’t ever
really know if we’re
overtrained you nailed it there’s
there’s no you know it’s not like a red
flag you know shoots up out of your
shoulder it’s like I’m overtrained you
know it’s um so in doing so I hope that
we can start thinking about some of the
verbs the actions that we can take in
order to ensure that we stimulate
Progressive overload one way or another
and at the same time that we don’t fall
into these bins of character assignment
where suddenly we decide that we need to
do X like take a month off or something
like that because I I’m beginning to
realize um from our discussion that
that’s exactly the wrong way to go those
are fantastic points I I want to make
sure it is clear that there is no
clinical diagnosis for overtraining
there are no standards there’s no test
or or a blood panel you can pull that
would actually identify you in that
state so your your distinction Here
Andrew of these are verbs rather than
nouns is is so wonderful because that is
exactly the case uh the only way we
could really come retroactively diagnose
one with overtraining is if again we had
you did weeks of recovery and you only
got back to Baseline so we can’t do it
in the moment I can’t take a single test
um there’s no subjective marker or
anything that says you are overtrained
it is simply you are probably
overtraining and we need to reverse that
quickly or in the case of the step
before you are probably fun
non-functionally overreaching and if you
continue to do this you will probably
enter into a stage uh where this is your
overtraining and we need to come back so
that’s an important thing to let people
know is there’s no one thing we can
actually point to that says you are here
you are not a noun this is a verb so
what are some tools that we can use to
enhance our recovery yep let’s start off
with that a Cute Overload phase so in
other words I just did a workout and I’m
feeling awful or I just did one two days
ago and I’m super sore how do I get rid
of that right now well there’s a couple
of things you can do immediately after
your workout and then others that are
maybe more actionable a day later or two
days later and we’ll just cover handful
of them we’ll do some nutrition and
hydration and supplementation in the
next episode I’m going to cover
everything else not in that category
right now so a couple of things number
one uh you actually start Kickstart that
recovery process at the end of your
current training session and I guess I
should say it this way I strongly
suggest you start this recovery process
immediately after the workout you
mentioned earlier about this idea of you
got to get a really high peak of stress
to cause adaptation but I actually
didn’t explain that correctly because
what has to happen is you need that
extremely high peak but then you have to
be met with an extremely sharp recovery
back down and so you know you’ve talked
about this before in some of your
neuroplasticity stuff and in terms of
what has to happen that caus the insult
and then you immediately need to be able
to recover to make sure that that causes
changes in the brain same thing happens
here so we need a really sharp and high
inflammatory response and then if you do
not meet it with an immediate recovery
period the signal won’t be there to
maximize your results so what’s that
mean you can actually do a couple of
things number one is listening to slow
paced music there’s evidence that
suggest fast-paced music May uh slow
down your recovery and slow pace would
actually enhance it so if you just
change from you know your maximum get
you up and get going music during the
workout to a slower lower Cadence that
will help you Kickstart the idea of a
similar note you can also use what we
call down regulation breathing you could
do them in conjunction or one or the
other whichever is up to you so my
personal favorite method here is is
somewhere between 3 to 10 minutes of
finishing your training session laying
down i’ like to be in that position you
could certainly do it in the Lotus
position but I think laying on your back
is generally more effective personal
preference there no signs uh I like the
eyes being covered getting into this
dark quiet sort of area and then just
breathing through your nose in a
structured Cadence there’s a lot of
different things you can try an easy
example is just box breathing so and you
can imagine box having four squares so
what you’re going to do is inhale for
somewhere between like 3 to 8 seconds
and then whatever number you choose you
keep that same tempo and so let’s say
you chose to do a 5-second
inhale that’s going to take you up
vertically and then horizontally for
your box is a 5-second hold and then a
5-second exhale and then a 5-sec hold
and you just need to repeat that for the
time domain I typically honestly don’t
use a timer you’ll actually notice a lot
of people will like fall asleep or get
really close to falling asleep in this
period you could do a triangle version
of that where you do an inhale hold
exhale and then go right back into your
inhale or there’s a bunch of different
tricks you can try here you need to play
around and see what actually works best
for you 10 minutes is probably better
but if you can just at least give me
three that’ll work if you’re really
really resistant you can actually do
that just in the shower and so if you’re
going to finish your workout get in the
shower again just close your eyes in the
shower give me three minutes of focused
relaxation breathing and that will
accelerate the recovery process I love
it and I particularly love it because my
laboratory works on stress and
respiration AK breathing and the
interactions between the two and I’ll
just mention a result that was just
accepted for publication so should be
out by time this episode SS uh thank you
uh this is the beautiful work of uh not
me directly although it took place in my
lab but as we know it’s the students of
posto really do the heavy lifting of um
Dr maliss U balbon uh in my lab it’s a
phenomenal
researcher that showed that a short
period of 5 minutes of box breathing of
exactly the type that you described or
uh cyclic sign so two inhales followed
by an extended exhale to lungs empty
ideally the inhales are done through the
nose the exhales are done uh through the
mouth although it could all be done
through the nose um or the mouth for
that matter but probably nose nose for
inhale inhale mouth for exhale or um uh
in inhales through the nose and and xhl
through the nose cyclic sing as we refer
to it done for 5 minutes both of those
produce very significant uh decreases in
resting heart
rate the over time will increase things
like heart rate variability and so on
and so forth um so provided that there
are extended exhales it seems like the
calming response and the reduction in
overall stress occurs the only thing
that really sends things in the other
direction would be something like cyclic
hyperventilation I’m sure you’ve
observed that um and interestingly uh
when we had people just do 5 minutes of
u meditation which during which of
course they are breathing but they’re
just allowing their breathing to
progress however it happens to be in
that moment um or moments across the
five minutes uh there were reductions in
the same sorts of markers of stress that
I described but not as significant as
breathing so I love the Box breathing
tool post-workout um and there’s some
other Alternatives there too that I just
mentioned but I think people greatly
underestimate the potency of breathing
for shifting one’s nervous system
function away from stress or if one
wants toward more alertness and stress I
actually have a couple questions for you
on that sure I think the audience would
appreciate this um how long were those
boxes was it just user selected great
question so we use the carbon dioxide
tolerance test amazing in order for
people to determine how long the
different sides of the Box should be and
you cover carbon dioxide tolerance test
in previous episode and we can provide a
link to that clip um in the show note
captions but as you point out it
involves a long extended exhale to lungs
empty um and of course people could sit
with lungs empty but uh they have to
accurately Faithfully as we say report
how long it took them to empty their
lungs we use that as a as a gauge
typically if it takes if people go to
lungs empty in 20 seconds or less I
believe I have to go back to the paper
and look but I believe that the um
duration for each of the sides of the
box boxes as it were was somewhere
between um two and 3 seconds if they had
a uh CO2 discard time of anywhere from
uh 20 seconds up to about 40 45 seconds
we used a the sides of the Box were I
believe um between four and six seconds
and then for people longer than a who
could discard their erir over a period
of a minute um or more we used a uh box
duration that is inhale hold exhale hold
duration of somewhere between I believe
it was um seven or maybe it was eight
and um as long as 11 or 12 seconds you
get your kind of free diver types who
can really do this um who are really
well trained for this sort of thing the
don’t quote me exactly on those numbers
but that that was approximate those line
up exactly with what what we’ve done so
I I believe it’s it’s going to be close
within seconds of non-important
Distinction is it’s going to be close
you know so that’s great and that was uh
it took them what six weeks before they
uh so this study was done over the
period of a month and then when they
were swapped into a new pattern of
breathing um condition or meditation
condition and this was all done in in
the natural world as we say um they were
wearing woot bands that we were getting
heart rate heart rate variability sleep
data subjective data about mood Etc so
there were a lot of measures but this
was um more than 100 subjects out in the
wild of life um and we tried as best we
could to track life stress events and
exercise and things like that that was
harder to control outside the laboratory
really all those results speak to
exactly what you’re describing here
which is that deliberate respiration
that involves controlled holds and
exhales really has a dramatic and very
immediate impact on reducing our levels
of stress that that’s wonderful I’m not
surprised at all uh with your findings
and what’s really interesting about that
is you mentioned how the exhalation
portion is primarily responsible for the
down regulation and that’s actually goes
back to our previous endurance
conversation which is that in general at
rest at non- altitude increases in CO2
are the primary driver for ventilation
and so what that generally means is
inhales are associated with an uptick
and sympathetic State and exhales are
associated with a uptick of
parasympathetic State uh this is
generally why folks will do things like
exhale and finish that exhale right
before they perform a very high
Precision neurological task so if you’re
going to say aim at a Target and shoot
you’re going to Exhale fully and then
almost always execute that movement at
the end of the exhale because that’s
when you’re in your highest
parasympathetic State and lowest drive
for ventilation I have to say I’m not
surprised at all that you guys found
that there’s actually other data that
point to individuals particularly after
endurance training that can get backed
down to Baseline heart rate is going to
be correlated with who gets the most
actual results of the training
said that if you take a bunch of
individuals and put them through an
endurance training program and if you
measure how quickly they can get back
down to Baseline after each workout in
general those folks that are better at
that are going to see greater
improvements in performance at the end
of your say four six or eight week
training block and so there’s a little
bit of causation and correlation there
that we have to untie but I think it’s
enough to say hey if you invest these
three and in your case your your study
was 5 minutes it’s only going to enhance
recovery you have a likelihood of
increasing the results from your
training and now we also have additional
benefits like being able to transition
more appropriately into our next task
going to work going to see family
whatever the thing is and it’s it’s a
nice close to I asked you to be in a
high sympathetic State body and I asked
you to perform and to be under stress I
gave you recovery and now we’re ready to
transition in our next thing so that we
don’t take that exercise energy if you
will into our next task which may or may
not want me in a sympathetic Drive state
so if somebody is sore following a
workout either locally sore in a muscle
group or group of muscles maybe in their
legs or chest or torso or maybe their
whole body is sore as it sometimes is
the case what are some tools that they
can Implement in order to to accelerate
the I want to call it moving out of that
soreness but it’s really uh as we know
the alleviation of the soreness through
a bunch of different processes what are
the most effective tools to push back on
that soreness and dissipate it yeah
absolutely first of all it’s not lactate
that’s is a really important thing that
we still hear people talk about is you
know you’re sore 24 hours later you got
to do this thing to get the lactate out
of there as we talked about in the
metabolism uh conversation and episode
that that is not the cause of fatigue
and it’s certainly not the cause of
soreness so not an actionable tip there
but just a pet peeve of mine when I hear
people say that that I get irritated so
we can maybe in that conversation um
strategies tools here’s what you can do
you can actually wear compression gear
that will help a little bit there’s a
decent amount of evidence suggesting if
you just were to you know put some
tighter fitting clothes on Leisure wear
or compression gear if you have it that
that can actually prevent a little bit
of soreness from occurring so if you’re
in the case of poor Natasha and you
realize you just done way way way too
much or you went and hung out with your
bow hunting friend and you trained way
too hard and you realize oh my goodness
I’m going to be very sore here you can
immediately put on compression gear and
wear that really for as long as possible
what are some examples of compression
gear I’ve seen people on the plane with
those high high socks um I mean anything
that you wear compression gear for what
you do for exercise so whether these are
just uh you know compression panss and
leggings the tight fitting leggings uh
whether this is a long sleeve shirt
that’s like a rashgard you would wear in
you know Jiu-Jitsu or surfing or
something like that as long as it’s
tight fitting it doesn’t have to be much
more than that you can wear I suppose
you could get the socks would be great
but um we generally just tell our
athletes um they would put on long
sleeve compression shirts that they
would wear for their training and then
long compression leggings and that’d be
fine can people apply these compression
um Garb after training and still get
some of the positive effects yeah I have
not seen any evidence to suggest that
that would block adaptation that may be
the case I I am not aware of those
studies if that happens but um I
certainly know that the information
suggests it canh hands a little bit of
Muscle Recovery but ideally one knows if
they are about to do a workout that
could trigger a lot of soreness and then
wears compression gear of some sort to
offset that and if
so does it have to be local to the
muscle groups that you’re working on the
reason I asked about the sock is my
understanding the socks that the
compression socks people wear on the
plane is that it’s going to shift the
patterns of blood flow not just in the
lower legs but all over the body yeah
you’re probably going to want to focus
it on the actual exercising tissue
though actually that’s a really good
question I don’t know the answer of
whether or not you did an upper body
workout only or lower body compression
gear if that would actually help that’s
a great question that may have been done
I don’t know but I don’t know the answer
to that in general we just tell people
like we wear the whole thing as much as
you can um I actually am not concerned
that you’re wearing it during your
workout
it is something you could put on
afterwards or even wear just a little
bit of compression the other day um
we’ve actually did a really fun study uh
I collaborated with um Bill Kramer who’s
uh you know Sports scientist of the Year
award is the bill Kramer award if that
gives you an indication out of uh
University of Connecticut as well as
with Lee Brown so two Lifetime
Achievement Award winners and we we put
people on a a plane in stores
Connecticut and flew them to Cal State
Fullerton so a cross Country flight and
some of them got to wear compression
gear during the flight and others did
not and then they landed in California
did a training bout put them back on the
plane went back to stores and I think
they did another training about when
they got back there there was a lot of
data that came out of that paper but one
of the things that was clear is the
compression group was effective um at
handling some of the blood related
coagulation and other issues associated
with uh long flights and particularly
athletic performance so that’s actually
a sneaky little Insider trick that I’ll
use a lot with people particularly with
athletes that are traveling is just wear
that compression gear on the plane so
you you talked about that and that sort
of rung that study to mind that it’s
another effective strategy so
compression gear in general as well as
particularly on a plane um basically the
tighter you can get it the better
without obviously making your hands
purple and being uncomfortable and
things like that so it doesn’t have to
be overly tight uh anything will work
and probably help so I’m also doing that
personally anytime I’m taking a flight
like that as much as I can just feel a
little better when I get there so what
are some other methods that we can use
to alleviate acute soreness well if we
continue down this same theme which is
saying okay we use some sort of pressure
manipulation to enhance recovery if
compression is one strategy you can also
use things like um compression boots or
garments and these are pneumatic devices
that will you know pump uh air outside
you and compress back and forth there’s
any number of devices that will do this
um you can also use the physical hand so
this would be massage and body work um
they’re all really working as best we
can tell on the same mechanisms uh which
are effectively moving fluid in and out
of the tissue as well as potentially
enhancing blood flow uh increasing
capillarization and which is going to
only get nutrients in and waste products
out so you can kind of pick and choose
based upon your budget uh preferences
availability timing things like that so
those are all effective strategy
outside of that really is the next
largest category which is now thermal
and uh and so far in this discussion
we’ve mentioned cold water immersion and
I talked about in the hypert section how
you would not want to do that
immediately post exercise which would be
getting into cold water or an ice bath
if you’re trying to grow muscle mass
having said that there is good evidence
showing that cold water immersion
specifically is effective at reducing
muscle soreness so so it is a fair
consideration and it’s a classic example
of how there are no free passes in
physiology nothing is always good or
always bad it’s always about what are
you willing to give up and versus what
you’re willing to get and in the case of
like cold water immersion you may be
thinking yeah I might blunt some of the
hypertrophic adaptations but if you’re
in that phase of training where you’re
actually trying to push more towards
optimization in that moment rather than
long-term adaptation then a an ice maath
might be a great choice in addition if
you fall into a scenario like Natasha
did and you realize like I’m just so
unbelievably sore this might cost me
three or four or five or six days of
training it might be worth it for you to
accelerate that recovery process by a
couple of days so that you don’t miss so
much training so it’s it’s just a it’s
an algorithm it’s an equation what am I
looking for again if I’m in season or
trying to compete or if I have just done
way way way too much exercise and I’m
really in significant pain you would
probably be willing to give up some
small percentage of eventual muscle
growth after a single session to get out
of pain so um of the cold strategies
cold water immersion is clearly the best
approach rather than cold air or some
other tactics so a cold shower is
probably not enough here you really do
uh want to be either in moderately cold
this is maybe 40 to 50 degree water uh
for probably north of 15 minutes or you
can be in sub40 for as little as maybe 5
minutes to get some of the effect and
there’s been a number of studies um so
I’m sort of summarizing a bunch of that
kind of into one rather than going
through them Point by point the numbers
you just threw out U which I’m assuming
are um uh Fahrenheit um seem seem really
cold to me right uncomfortably cold
absolutely so I always recommend that
people ease into it as a protocol
overall that they not immediately go to
35 degree uh cold water if they’ve never
done it before uh that said once people
are comfortable being uncomfortable
because I always answer the question how
cold should it be exactly would you
agree that it should be very very cold
so much so that you really really want
to get out but that you’re able to stay
in safely whatever that value happens to
be you absolutely need to be safe having
said that we have actually in our xpt
Retreats put dozens if not hundreds of
people at this point uh immediately into
the sub35 degree water their first time
ever and done you know 3 minutes
multiple rounds uh in a session so they
can handle it but you don’t need to go
that crazy if you don’t want you kind of
have to play a game right do you want to
be really really cold for a short amount
of time or do you want to be like kind
of cold for a longer amount of time I
really the only mistake you can make is
doing something like you know 65 degree
water which for most people is not very
comfortable and doing you know five or
10 minutes it’s just not going to be
effective it’s probably not going to be
effective so if you’re like man 35 is is
absolutely crazy and you want to do 55
degree water and there’s literature in
that area but it’s going to say you need
to probably be there you know somewhere
almost surely north of 10 minutes and
some of it will actually show you need
to be in there like well north of 20 to
30 minutes so for my money I would
rather go really really cold and get it
down in five minutes but um personal
preference on this one you can also make
it a little bit easier on yourself there
is not nearly as much evidence but there
is some on contrast stuff so uh this is
when you go cold hot and sort of back
and forth there are no really good rules
in terms of how much should you go how
many rounds how long and cold how long
and hot again there have been a couple
of studies but and obviously those
studies use numbers but that doesn’t
mean those have been tested to see what
what are optimal which is a very big
difference so um you can really just
kind of play that by
feel hot is good for Recovery you just
have to be careful because you are going
to put more blood flow in the area and
so you you may walk out of there with
some additional acute swelling which is
then going to put greater pressure on
there so you have to kind of play with
that I
personally really like hot uh for
Recovery I will feel maybe not great in
that moment but the next day I tend to
feel really really good in addition if I
wake up the next morning and I’m really
really hurting and and I’m super stiff a
hot bath will will help that um quite a
bit so you can play with some of those
protocols again you don’t have to do ice
there’s absolutely no requirement to do
so it is just an option if you’re
interested yeah the studies of Dr
Susanna soberg um sure yeah are not
directly aimed at alleviating soreness
or recovery they’re more about
increasing thermal capacity by a storage
of uh Brown adapost tissue not the
blubbery fat but the stuff around the
clavicles and around the heart that help
you generate body heat at rest and
metabolism and so on and the numbers
there that um she’s come up with again
have not been tested against all the
possible derivations just like with
breathing we did five minute sessions
but who knows maybe a minute would have
been equally effective we just there are
constraints on these sorts of studies
but the values that she’s come up with
which seem to be good thresholds for
making sure that an adaptation response
is triggered by heat and cold is it ends
up being 57 minutes per week total of
uncomfortable but safe heat in that case
sauna and that can be all in one session
or breaking it up into a couple of
sessions on the same day or or different
days and then 11 minutes per week of
cold either in one single session or
multiple sessions again one could do
more
um one could break that up over you know
multiple days or do it all in one day or
do it all in one you know an hour in the
sauna and then 11 minutes in the cold or
vice versa although that seems a little
bit extreme especially for the
uninitiated but those are the numbers
that have been studied but as you point
out there are not a lot of really
thorough studies examining different
cold protocols according to temperature
by time requirements so there is a bit
of subjective feel required to establish
a routine and I would actually say this
is another time to re-emphasize
something we talked about at the
beginning of our convers
which is that pain itself is not a
defined outcome it’s heavily influenced
by your perception and so if you don’t
feel like they work for you they won’t
work if you feel like they work
fantastic they do so it’s a challenging
field to get really objective data on so
there’s always going to be a little bit
of subjective nature to some of these
things I can tell you anecdotally we’ve
used hot and cold contrasts for a long
time with athletes um some love it some
don’t care for it and everything in
between so it’s one of those things
where I never
mandated of course I can’t mandate
anything for anyone I work with but I’m
never you know like hey are you
interested great you’re struggling in
this area you want to try this you did
and you liked it great you’re struggling
in this area and you tried it you didn’t
love it okay fine I’m not we we’ll find
other routes as we we’ll get into
there’s a lot of ways to enhance
recovery um this is only one and it
hasn’t even really come down to stopping
the problem in the first place we’re not
we’re just treating symptoms which is
first line of defense but you really
need to go back and figure out why it’s
happening to begin with as a solution
these are just different again acute
symptom management
tactics one final point about uh
deliberate cold exposure I think worth
mentioning is one of the reasons the
shower is effective but not nearly as
effective as cold water immersion or
immersion in ice up to the neck is
simply because of the reason you stated
before which is that most showers are
not going to get that cold you’re not
going to get down you know into the sub
40s um
also cold showers haven’t really been
studied that much they have but not
nearly as much as immersion and people
always ask why I just think about the
challenges of studying cold water uh
exposure in the shower where you can’t
really control for how much of the body
is covered whether or not the head stays
under different Siz bodies Etc whereas
when people come into a laboratory they
can get into a cold water tank we know
where the neck is know where the chin is
and we can make sure that people’s arms
and um legs are underneath but with cold
shower sure you can make everyone face
away or toward the shower but it’s
really tricky and um for all the
variations that that were described that
said would you agree that if one wants
to use deliberate cold exposure that
cold shower is better than nothing and
cold immersion in circulating cold water
or ice bath is better than um than cold
shower yeah what I would actually say if
you’re looking for recovery for muscle
soreness I would say cold shower is
probably doing very little U because
you’re not going to be able to get
enough cold water onto any muscle
besides basically your head um so maybe
you could try a cold bath uh and so you
at least get some surface area coverage
but yeah if you want to use cold shower
for all the other awesome reasons cold
shower that’s totally great but if
you’re trying to use that to recover
your low back and glutes from being sore
from training in a good way it’s
probably not going to do much the the
immersion would be there you actually
also hit sneaky other point which is if
you can’t get your water super cold just
make the water move so if you have Jets
and stuff you can turn on and anyone
who’s tried this and you’re like okay I
can do a 40 Dee bath awesome uh try 60
when the water’s moving right because
you break up the thermal layer normally
you have a little thin layer of water
that you’re heating up you break that up
it’s a whole new world yeah absolutely
so being very still in the cold water is
actually the weaker way to go correct
that you can make your face stoic but
make your body circulate some water
around you as long as we’re on this
maybe just one more point about heat uh
I’ve certainly used sauna wet sauna dry
sauna steam sa saunas excuse me jacuzzi
can work pretty well y um uh males if
you are looking to conceive in the 60
days following uh following sauna or um
hot tub do realize that it that both
those approaches do severely limit the
number of motile sperm um substantially
so for people that are not trying to
conceive don’t think that this works
reliably enough that you could use as a
form of contraception yeah but but for
people that are trying to conceive it
really is detrimental to to sperm Health
right and so for that reason some people
bring an ice pack and put it on the
groin or near the groin uh when they go
in but um which is harder to do in a hot
tub than a sauna so here we’re getting
into the fine points um or crude points
if you will pun intended but um but the
idea is that we we wouldn’t want anyone
to approach these techniques and
compromise their other life goals
was not allowed anywhere near these
things when uh we were at that stage of
life I I’ll just say Natasha put an x on
me hanging out with lared so going going
in no for those reasons she’s like
you’re not going in you’re not going
none of the stuff and I just had to wait
right he um heat and sperm have a have a
relationship but it’s not one that’s
positive for the sperm I’d like to take
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to get 20% off are there ways to combine
uh the various types of um stimula that
you described for inducing recovery you
talked about breathing based tools um
which while they could adjust and indeed
do adjust oxygen and carbon dioxide
ratios and Etc I’m guessing the major
effect of those on recovery is going to
be neural it’s going to be deliberate
calming of the nervous system more
sympathetic based uh you mentioned yeah
most definitely and then you talked
about some movement based and touchbased
approaches um which will uh movement cly
certainly will circulate blood but also
will generate contractions of the
muscles yep right which maybe if indeed
again it’s still speculation if indeed
some of the soreness is due to excessive
stretch or swelling at the stretch ends
of the of the muscles that would make
sense so movement and touch and then
thermal are there ways to to combine
these um that are more effective or
maybe even synergistic yeah I suppose
you could throw on uh some compression
garment put on a Pneumatic compression
device and sit in the sauna while you
down regulate your breath like that that
would be fine
quite honestly though you probably don’t
need to maximize all of them we were
joking uh you could probably go for a
light swim while regulating your
breathing in cold water uh you get the
compression from the cold water and and
you’d be in a good spot so you can
certainly do that the reality of it is I
generally look for some physical
approach and then some uh holistic
approach of the breath work basically so
I want breath and then something else if
you knock those two things out you’re in
a good spot so that could be breath
while you’re in thermal stress so just
controlling and doing the UN regulation
stuff you have to also remember ice is a
stressor and I’ll actually show you some
data here in a second about how that
actually can
enhance um systemic recovery although it
won’t happen in the in the acute minutes
in fact it’s going to take at least 30
to 60 minutes and then you’ll eventually
see a rebound effect but acutely it’s
going to make you actually more
sympathetic which is going the other
direction heat can do the opposite
opposite or it can actually drive you up
so it’s a little bit dependent upon how
you respond what time of day um and how
you’re using so in general I guess uh
combining them
is if you need it um depending on what
you have what’s available so perhaps you
don’t have a sauna but you can take a
hot bath great maybe you have some
percussion device some tool and you can
use that but you don’t have u a sauna
amazing don’t have ice bath these things
so I think rather than thinking about an
optimal combination of them I would say
just use a couple of the tactics based
on what you have and what is easily
available um in your situation I’d love
for you to teach us about some of the
methods for longer form recovery as it
relates to overreaching and overtraining
sure you want to think about this in a
couple of phases phase one is to try to
prevent it from happening in the first
place uh in terms of training load
you’re going to just go back to our
previous episodes where we talk give you
specific instructions for how much to
increase your volume and intensity per
week Etc the other thing you can do then
is do some monitoring and I’ll I’ll go
over some different tools some cost-free
ones as well as some some higher
techologically demanding ones uh to
monitor to see if it’s actually
happening and then the third approach
here is what if this is already occurred
I figured out I’m so how do I get back
out of that hole so I would like to just
sort of tackle these one by one in order
and and talk about what’s happening what
tools you can use and why they’re going
to work all right so anytime we’re
talking about
fatigue management here most people are
aware of these terms because if you have
any sort of Technology uh you’re
probably getting some sort of Readiness
score or recovery score or strain
depending on which app or watch or Tech
you have you have a little bit of
vacular change if you’re in the sport
performance world you might be looking
at things again like load or GPS
tracking and monitoring and really all
of it is is doing the same thing it’s
trying to either one
predict a problem is going to happen in
the future and then placing restrictions
upon you so that you don’t run into that
situation the other thing is possibly
doing is identifying a drop in
physiology or performance and then
saying we need to get you out of this
hole that’s really what’s happening and
so when we think of the first one just
imagine uh a scenario like a mileage
limitation uh pitch count in baseball
and what has happened there is is you
know individuals in those fields have
looked and said hey what we notice is
people who throw say more than a 100
pitches in a game tend to start losing
Effectiveness and increased injury rate
therefore we’re predicting the next time
you go to play if you cross that
threshold we start having an increased
risk of negative consequences so
therefore we’re going to cap your in
this case pitching volume at that 100
pitches per game or whatever the case
same thing with running etc etc so you
could just simply do that and there’s
actually really cool data coming out now
on sport performance stuff looking at
things like Imus and GPS trackers and
trying to identify even position by
position specific uh recommendations for
how much distance you should cover in a
practice in a training session um so
that you can say hey these positions
don’t cross this threshold these
positions don’t cross this threshold in
basketball and tennis and and all kinds
of things like that that’s not probably
extremely applicable to many of the
listeners right now but it is still
conveying the idea that that if we
understand where we break then we can
stop ourselves from getting there in the
first place the functional example uh
here is just thinking about basic things
like where do I start my training
program and then how do I progress it
and we’ve already covered those numbers
in either case though you want to have
three markers that you’re paying
attention to if you’re concerned you’re
getting into an overreaching phase or
potentially going to lead to
overtraining or you want to get out it’s
three unique things number one we’re
going to look for some sort of
performance metric right so this could
be um your times are going down your
your squat numbers your your power is
going down any of these things so it’s
got to be an actual performance number
two some sort of physiology and so I
want to see something happening with
resting heart rate some biomarker is
moving uh heart rate variability some
other measure that is not
influenced by you and the beauty of
using biological markers are if we
contrast that to like performance and I
said okay here’s our performance test
every day you come in you’re going to do
a vertical jump and if one day you come
in all a sudden your vertical jump is
super low I might think oh man maybe
we’re starting to
overreach you also could be feeling lazy
that day and just not have jumped very
high on purpose because you didn’t want
to work out the beauty of biomarkers are
you don’t get to manipulate them like
that they don’t care there’s a downside
to it which is maybe they’re just
indirect markers right and so I’m not
telling you biological markers are
better than performance markers what I’m
saying is you want to look at both all
right in fact you want to look at our
third category as
well which is some sort of symptomology
and so am I am I having a symptom of
overreaching am I seeing a performance
decrement and then am I seeing a
biological marker as well if you see all
three of these popping up you have
reason to believe you’ve reached some
overreaching now what you have not
identified yet is if that is functional
overreaching non-functional overreaching
or true overt trining and remember you
shouldn’t be feeling great after every
training session you’re trying to cause
adaptation and until you back off maybe
even weeks or months later to actualize
the adaptation and get that super
compensation and performance increase
you’re going to have to invest a little
bit so you’re going to go in the hole um
any sport performance coach is going to
look at numbers throughout the year and
say yeah yeah when we first start
training and preparation for this the
season we are going to see a drop in
performance that day that week that’s
part of the plan though right that’s the
stress you’re trying to accumulate so
you want to see all three of those
markers you just want to pay attention
to a couple of things how long are they
down for a day three days 7even Days 15
days Etc if you’re seeing a performance
drop in a day and I am far away from
from performance uh so the day that I
want to peek for I’m not going to do
anything different if I see two days in
a row drop performance I’m not worried
if I see more than probably in my
opinion five days in a row of decrement
then I might start paying
attention if you’re in season though or
close to competition or whatever that
thing means to you and you see more than
a couple of days in a row of dropping
then you might actually want to take
some some steps to mitigate that so it
really is important you understand again
what are we trying to do are we trying
to cause adaptation are we trying trying
to cause adaptation and I I have a very
specific example of all this we can run
through uh here in a second and then of
course a bunch of tools to to pull you
out of those phases but that’s that’s
fundamentally what we’re trying to do
here uh I would encourage you again
don’t be too reactive and responsive to
any one measure I’m going to cover a
whole bunch of them in a second but you
can get lost in in different things
because they all have pros and cons and
so I know it’s simple to just look at
one score on your watch and make your
decisions because of that or check your
app but you really want to be careful of
doing that you’re going to probably lead
yourself in the wrong direction more
often than you’re going to help yourself
I’m curious as to why when we overreach
too much or too often or we are
overtraining that performance is
diminished because on the face of it
it’s kind of obvious you’re overreaching
you’re overtraining so performance has
diminished but that’s completely
circular you hear about things like
adrenal fatigue and adrenal burnout well
it turns out adrenal burnout doesn’t
even really exist absolutely not there
is such a thing as adrenal insufficiency
syndrome but course you know these
phrases like burnout adrenal burnout
overtraining um they’re thrown around
you know as much as words like
gaslighting and obsessive compulsive you
know are without any real clinical
definition um or there are clinical
definitions but people aren’t obeying
them when they use the language I do
want to acknowledge however what is
absolutely true which is that over
reaching too much too often overtraining
these can degrade
performance but mechanistically speaking
what’s going on because I think if once
we understand what’s going on
mechanistically then I think um we can
all look at tools whether or not it’s
breathing movement compression thermal
psychological um motivational Etc and
have a much clearer sense as to what’s
going to work best and what likely won’t
work I love this question so much
because as I mentioned at the beginning
I I was fortunate to spend my uh some of
my graduate work in Andy fries Lab at
the University of Memphis and we we did
a lot in this area and so we in fact
this is how I learned how to do assays
and run Western blots and measure
signaling proteins and things like this
so this stuff is near and dear to my
heart we also did a bunch of really wild
studies and he had done some before I
got there so I’m going to combine kind
of Andy his entire career uh and just
highlight some of the big pictures of
what he found there um he was very
interested in exercise particularly
strength training and trying to figure
out this entire question right which is
like why is this actually happening when
I work out too much when I lift too much
that all of a sudden I can’t sleep
what’s happening like why is my energy
down why is my mood my motivation
reduced if I squat too much so we did a
whole series of studies across his
career and again I’ll just sort of
highlight some of the the
some of the themes that ran through them
so the first one that jumps out to mind
is early in his career he did this
really awesome protocol um where he had
people squat 100% of their back squat
Max every day for two weeks so you come
into the gym and and I think this first
one was on a machine and you did a one
rep max and then you came back in every
single day for two weeks so these are
what we would generally call kind of
like that short to moderate range
overreaching and by definition some of
them ended up actually being true over
training because it would take the
individuals sometimes two to up to eight
weeks to return back to their one rep
max at the end of these protocols um so
some of them were non-functional
overreaching or some combination of that
well along with that he took uh a lot of
blood samples as well as muscle biopsies
to try to look at what’s happening
endocrinologically um neurologically
muscle physiology wise to pay attention
What’s happen so a couple of things that
jump out there um one of his initial
studies actually I think the very first
one he did did um when they ran that
first uh squat everyday
protocol what they found was camine
levels changed quite significantly um
and depending on kind of what you wanted
to pay attention to there whether it was
epinephrine or nor epinephrine um or
even uh some other markers they
basically increased by somewhere between
two to three fold and so a little bit of
understanding of sleep physiology if
adrenaline is extremely high epinephrine
you’re going to have a hard time
sleeping so that alone was was first
indication this is like wait a minute
something’s actually happening here
that’s just beyond muscle soreness
there’s some sort of systemic fatigue
happening and as you rightfully pointed
out is not the adrenal glands becoming
fatigued that’s sort of a bit of tongue
and cheek and pedantics it is cortisol
disregulation and general stress
syndrome um but it’s really can be noted
in in blood in terms of epinephrine and
norepinephrine another study he had done
of a similar realm was over the the
course of seven and a half days people
came in and did 15 training sessions so
it was really cool these are these
really short BS of just ridiculous
training and they said okay like
something’s happening with with
epinephrine and norepinephrine something
HP something’s happening with
testosterone what’s it look like inside
the cell so now muscle biopsies came on
board and they started looking at things
like map kinases which are these
signaling proteins that are tend to be
associated with an anabolic response
they upregulate muscle protein synthesis
and they do many other things but that’s
like a big factor of them um they looked
at various androgens and gluc cortic
cord receptors and they wanted to see
like well maybe receptor density or
Andor sensitivity is changing and in
fact surprise surprise that’s exactly
what they found so they found both
Androgen and gluc cortico receptor
concentrations were reduced and so you
can start to see a picture forming which
is like hm very similar to the insulin
type 2 diabetes story where you’ve
you’ve really put yourself in a very
high stress situation so presumably
epinephrine Etc testosterone releases
are extremely high in response to that
to try to reach back to some level of
homeostasis you start downregulating the
receptors for them and so it’s like the
signal can only get so high if you’re
going to keep that gas on we’re going to
pull back the throttle and the receptor
so that the total signal stays the same
if that makes a little bit of sense well
that becomes obviously
problematic um so then like a final
follow-up study here that that is it’s
important to not is they did another
protocol which was really really cool
and they said the first ones weren’t
enough so how about this we’re going to
come in every day for two weeks and
we’re going to do 10 sets of a one rep
max every day so they were coming in and
they would do 10 one rep Maxes every day
for two weeks and what what’s really
cool about that study if they didn’t
complete any of the repetitions they had
to repeat it until they had 10
successful one rep Maxes on that given
day
um absolutely brutal brutal protocol I
wasn’t there at the time um they had
finished that right before I got on
campus but I was actually able to be
around when they were doing some of the
final analyses there of the tissue um
what they want to look at in this
particular study was beta adrenergic
receptors which are those receptors
where that are going to be epine and
such are going to be binding for so
again similar story here um perhaps are
we losing overall sensitivity because of
this extreme sympathetic stimulation now
actually thinking back what would have
been pretty cool is if they had another
group that did it and then did some down
regulation breathing post to see if that
can urate some of the problems but of
course this was 20 plus years ago or
something like that
so um couple of things that happened is
the one rep Maxes dropped by I think
around like8 kilos by the end of the two
weeks uh if I remember right like the
group average was something in the
neighborhood of 151 kilos so these were
pretty well- trained individuals and it
went from rather I think actually it was
about 160 kilos and they dropped to like
150 2 kilos something close to that what
was more significant though was their
power dropped by
35% which is really really interesting
because if if you pay attention
to declines in physical performance over
time and I mean that like through aging
what you’ll see is people can hold on to
muscle mass pretty
well um it will go down by about you
know 1% or so after the age of 40
however strength will go down at like 2
to 4% and then Power by 8 to 10% and if
you look at actually World Records
across strength Sports by age you’ll see
that they will
decline by age but not that much however
if you look at Speed Sports by age they
fall off the planet so it’s very
challenging to preserve fast Through
Time whether this is fatigue or because
of uh age that’s really important
because that’ll then tell you hey a
little bit of a in the coal mine is not
necessarily your strength but your speed
and so a lot of different techniques
that we use to measure performance
remember that’s our Triad right
symptomology physiology and performance
um you’re generally better looking at
speed based performance tests rather
than strength-based performance tests to
get an earlier indication of potential
uh overreaching or overtraining so
anyways back to the the individual study
there um in that same group again we we
had the same problem where it took some
of them 2 to eight weeks to come back so
what they had to do is I can’t remember
the exact time frame I probably should
have thought through this but they they
had to come back something like every
week or every couple of days even after
the study finished until they got back
to their Baseline one rep max and some
of them it took them up to eight weeks
before they finally got back so they
probably were in a classic overtraining
State at that point which is was done in
as little as two weeks and this is also
another point that people always ask
like how uh like how long does it take
is this something that has to happen
over the course of months or or like if
I were to go do two days or this intense
training camp for two or three weeks
could I actually cause over training and
the answer is if it is actually truly
enough volume and enough intensity you
probably can do some significant damage
in as little as two weeks probably
doesn’t happen that often most likely
you you’re probably going to be reaching
a state of nonfunctional overreaching
but you may actually be able to put
yourself in a position where it might
take three or four weeks or more to get
back to Baseline after a truly intense
and again think about this protocol it’s
like totally unrealistic for the most
part 10 sets of one of a one rep max
squat every day for two straight weeks
um some folks if you’re extremely highly
trained weightlifter you might do
something like that when you’re very
close to say World Championships but
outside of that really specific scenario
it’s a totally absurd training protocol
but that was the point right we were
trying to
ensure uh ensure that overtraining was
met or close it’s similar to when we’ve
done we’ve actually done I think three
studies in the center for sport
performance on Dom’s muscle soreness and
in all those cases you do just like
ridiculous leg extension protocols
because you’re just trying to ensure you
cause super soreness if you don’t then
you have nothing to study so um absurd
training Pro protocols but but that’s
the point so nonetheless um as a result
sure enough the beta adrenergic
receptors uh were regulated by something
like
37% um what’s probably even more
significant though was the sensitivity
in those receptors was reduced by like
two and a half fold and so it’s like
okay wait a minute we’re becoming
desensitized to this timei and we’re
also actually now starting to reduce our
total
concentration similar which is actually
an interesting was a very sneaky smart
thing to do is they looked at nocturnal
urinary epinephrine and guess what that
was also up by like
50% 1515 5 Z 5 zero yeah and so now
you’re seeing this tie-in where it’s
like I’m seeing response at the tissue
level I’m seeing a response probably
although they didn’t actually look at a
pituitary anything like that I’m seeing
adrenal and other endocrinological
problems and then I’m also seeing this
increase in concentration of vrine when
I’m supposed to be sleeping and surprise
surprise I’m having a hard time sleeping
um symptomology well that’s uh a very
interesting finding about nocturnal
epinephrine epinephrine of course is
adrenaline it’s released from the
adrenals no surprise there but also from
this brain area called Locus culus in
the brain and the Brain tends to be
called epinephrine in the body
adrenaline just to complicate everyone’s
um understanding but that nclat did not
come from us so don’t blame us the point
is
that rapid eye movement sleep so called
REM
sleep is more abundant in the second
half of the night we know that the
dreams associated with rapid eye
movement sleep are more emotionally
Laden and that those dreams and those
emotional states are actually important
for discarding the emotional load of
previous days experiences it’s a sort of
a uh natural trauma therapy if you will
because in the normal healthy State
those dreams are associated with an
inability to release epinephrine at
night so for me what you just described
first of all it’s the first time I’ve
ever heard of it um uh but it ties
together something really uh quite clear
from the Sleep Neuroscience literature
which is that when people are stressed
they tend to get less rapid eye movement
sleep that rapid eye movement sleep
normally is associated with low levels
of epinephrine so whether or not it’s
causal or not isn’t clear um but sort of
doesn’t matter for sake of this
discussion but what I’m wondering and I
suppose one could test for but maybe
observed is whether or not people who
are over in overtraining too much
overreaching too much because of this
elevated nocturnal epinephrine
diminished REM sleep whether not their
emotional state is also um disrupted
because one thing we know for sure is if
you want to disrupt somebody’s emotional
state you deprive them of sleep and
rapid eye movement sleep in particular
the one caveat to that is for those of
you out there that have heard that rapid
eye movement sleep deprivation
deliberate rapid eye movement sleep
deprivation is a treatment for
depression that is true but it’s coupled
with a next night enhanced rapid eye
movement sleep so one of the major
takeaways from all of this uh that I’m
realizing is that no surprise daytime
activities impact nighttime endocrine
function impact quality of sleep impact
daytime activities yeah actually there’s
there’s so many fun things I want to do
here now um this is actually why
measuring eye movement is a very
fantastic tool for understanding total
stress load and you can actually
differentiate different types of stress
so caffeine use versus alcohol use
versus sleep deprivation by actually
measuring eye movements that’s actually
what we do in our absolute rest sleep
company is in addition to getting a a
full PSD sleep study done in your
bedroom you’re going to get an eye
tracking assessment which we’re going to
be able to figure out why you’re getting
there so um nonetheless yeah if you
actually look at the classic signs and
symptoms of overtraining or overtraining
syndrome it’s going to be everything
from performance decrements like we
talked about um resting heart rate is
going to increase uh you’re going to see
things like HRV drop by generally 20 or
so percent that would be a very large
disruption in HRV um decreased body
weight and then all the stuff Andrew y
just talked about so motivation
adherence appetite mood um all of this
stuff are are classically known
associations with with overtraining and
that’s for the exact reasons you’re
talking about sleep disturbances and
disruptions um wanting to train
motivation all of this stuff uh goes
part and parcel with non-functional
overreaching and or overtraining um you
can actually tie this back in a little
bit more to some other biomarkers and
this is this is great because this is
the stuff we look for this is the the
physiology stuff we look for um you’ve
probably talked about shbg before um
which is the sex hormone binding
globulin so it’s this protein that
that’ll float in your body that’s going
to bind up sex hormones in particular
testosterone so what happens with um
overt training is you can actually take
this serly like week by week and you
will actually see this number rise and
so if you see this like say you’re using
a a a service like inside tracker and
you’re getting your your blood measured
every so often and you see this numers
start ticking up this is actually
associated with that because what’s
actually happening is it’s binding up
all your free testosterone and that’s
just leading back to the circle we’re
talking about and you can actually see
the same thing happen with calorie
restriction U just not eating enough
calories but in this particular case
because it actually happens in both
scenarios you know it’s not an issue
simply of being underc calori it’s
clearly an issue of the training load
being too high so just to give another
little tool there’s uh I can get the
link for it but there’s a a website that
um was created by uh which Journal oh
slipping but I’ll get it to you you can
link it up where you can actually go in
and plug in a number of values from
blood chemistry so if you got your blood
work done and you can plug in your pre
number and your post number so say you
got it done and then maybe 10 weeks
later you got it done again and you’re
wondering and you notice hey my free
testosterone’s down or my shbg is up is
it actually a meaningful number and you
it will actually tell you whether or not
the change prepos is physiologically
Meaningful or not or just within the
error margin of the measure um and you
can actually change like like right
there on the website you can change your
confidence interval so it’s really
really cool if if you know if you just
have your own blood and you want to know
like hey I had any level this year and
now it’s you know here over there it’s
just a totally free resource um created
gone through peer review all that stuff
um and I’ll give the link to that so
that’s a pretty cool um measure in
addition to that like probably one of
the more powerful and easy metrics uh
biologically is to take your cortisol
and dhaa ratio so this is known to be
associated with a lot of things um you
want to be really careful you don’t want
this number to be too high or too low
something like
0.09 is about cortisol to DHEA DHEA to
cortisol ratio yeah DHEA to cortisol I’d
love to tell you I said it backwards on
purpose just to make sure everyone
understood but I got it
backwards yeah I mean this ratio has
been associated with so many things um
you have to do you do have to be careful
with Association right not being
causation but everything from risk of
infections some metabolic health and and
like other disease States as well as
more what we’re talking about which is
hey am I am I am I getting sort of
cortisol this regulation which is what a
lot of folks would call you know again
adrenal fatigue and know that’s not
really what’s happening but if
adrenaline and epinephrine are off and
testosterone cortisol is going to be
along the right and so you can also look
at things like testosterone to cortisol
ratios um so there’s a lot of things you
can glean here to give you some insights
into where you’re going if that um if
that ratio is too high that’s going to
be associated with metabolic syndrome
and a bunch of other stuff if it’s too
low that’s going to be associated with a
lot of cognitive problems like um
aggression and mood and and a bunch of
things like that so again you want to
keep it right around that 0.09 ratio and
and most of the time actually in some
blood chemistry stuff you’ll get a
you’ll get a report of that or you can
calculate it pretty
quickly I’m sure we’ll get into this in
the episode that comes next on uh
nutrition and supplementation
totally what about compounds that lower
cortisol such as ashwagandha um I can
see now based on the L you’re spelling
out that during phases of a lot of
intense overreaching or frequent
overreaching given that those compounds
can indeed lower cortisol rodol rolia
rosacea Rola Rola Rosa um fun word to
say um two words but the first one more
fun to say Rola Roda Rola Rosa riola
Rosa folks and ashwag gandha um I’ve
been
uh trying riola recently um and mainly
as a buffer to uh output um it does seem
to have some good data attached to it
related to lowering uh one’s perceived
threshold of how hard they’re working so
in other words you can work harder um
and not feel as if you’re working really
hard which allows you to do more work
that’s sort of the subjective
description of how it works but you told
me that it um Can blunt cortisol and and
ashonda we know blunts cortisol both of
these things of course can do other
things but are these um compounds that
you sometimes will incorporate into uh a
training regimen uh I I’ve been using
rodea for probably six or more years
like pretty consistently not personally
but uh using it with the individual we
work with you do need to be a little bit
careful uh I wouldn’t say that it blunts
cortisol it is probably more
appropriately described as a cortisol
modulator uh which means sort of if it
gets too high or too low it’ll it’ll
help kind of keep it within normative
range
um there’s also there it is important to
note there have been a handful of
studies two of I know
specifically showed that riola use can
enhance strength gains however it may
reduce muscular
endurance so um we need more human data
on this stuff and it may turn out that’s
not a concern it may also turn out to be
a concern so nothing is nothing is
perfect and free there’s no supplement
that is a Panacea and um
I have used again rodol in a lot of
situations because the other thing you
kind of have to pay attention to the
cortisol is is you have it’s supposed to
be modulated throughout the day it’s not
supposed to be at this normal value in
fact if you look at normative values um
it’s typically uh described in um uh
micrograms per deciliter and depending
on literally what company you used to
draw your blood if you’re getting it
through the blood uh depending on what
which method they use to analyze it the
normative values are like frankly
embarrassingly all over the place um
they’re mostly going to be like 5 to 25
as a quote unquote normative value but
that’s outrageous we also know those
numbers vary massively by age by sex um
and throughout the day and so if you
only are taking a single point let’s
assume you’re doing a fasted blood draw
which is what most folks do it’s really
only going to tell you a lot about
what’s happening in that moment we need
to know well like maybe let’s say my
cortisol was if I’m a say 38-year-old
woman and my 7 A.M cortisol was you know
15 milligram per decer that’s pretty
good but if it’s 15 milligrams per
deciliter at 3 p.m. oh boy I’m I’m
probably having some issues right so
there’s a change throughout the day and
you need to be able to plot that curve
so you can actually well pretty standard
practice that we do is we look at
cortisol throughout the day we’re going
to take multiple markers because I don’t
want to just see your Baseline cortisol
I want to see this curve throughout the
day that’s going to tell me a ton
about U again is your sleep being caused
by this regulation um is it your
training is it something else so I would
like take a single Baseline blood marker
of
cortisol with a lot of grain of salt we
we typically measure it at least three
times throughout the day so something
like 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. 12: to 3 and then
something like closer to the evening
oftentimes we do much more we’ll do like
seven points or something like that
throughout the day depending on the
situation so you want to be careful of
that um just since we’re here you can
also get cortisol in uh through saliva
and now there’s sort of pros and cons to
that because the the pro of doing it in
your blood is it’s it it’s much more
stable um saliva is extremely responsive
to whatever happened these seconds
before you took that test the upside of
it though is you can do a bunch of real
world life experiments so for example we
will do this sometimes if we want to see
how an individual is responding to a
given stressor
let’s take it right let’s take the take
it in the you know spit into a tube
we’re going to take it and then we’re
going to go do this workout or this cold
exposure whatever we’re going to do take
it at thean we know that it’s responsive
to what just happened but that’s the
point um so you can actually there’s
sort of pros and cons so you’ll use the
appropriate measure for the appropriate
uh question you’re trying to answer yeah
a couple of points and Reflections about
cortisol my first uh laboratory Duty as
an undergraduate was in a was actually
in a biopsychology lab at the time they
didn’t have the field of Neuroscience as
it’s now called it was called
biopsychology or psychobiology I didn’t
know that no there was used to be
neurochemistry neurobiology they had all
collapsed into what we now called
Neuroscience which was only some years
ago but my job was to collect cortisol
samples which means I I was collecting
um spit which means I was collecting
saliva and the an advantage of saliva
based cortisol it’s free cortisol it’s
the active form as you mentioned it’s
reflective of what happened in the
seconds or minutes um just prior a
couple of things about the regular
cortisol pattern across the day because
I realized that while it wonderful for
everybody to get their cortisol measured
in detail multiple times and blood and
and saliva and so on some people just
won’t do that uh for whatever reason or
can’t do that yeah and the basic Contour
of a healthy pattern of cortisol
secretion is uh to have highest levels
of cortisol in the morning um is
actually part of the mechanism that’s
associated with waking you up viewing
bright light ideally from sunlight but
other forms of bright light early in the
day actually can lead to a 50% %
increase in that qu cortisol Spike which
is a good thing people here elevated
cortisol oh no this sets in motion a
Cascade of things related to enhanced
mood and alertness immune system
function Etc what I think it can be
useful for people to understand is that
many things will Spike cortisol
throughout the day stress cold water
exercise but the idea is that it comes
down to baseline or near Baseline um
rather quickly one of the worst
situations as you pointed out is when
the highest level of cortisol is
consistently shifted to the afternoon
period in fact that’s a um pretty
reliable signature of certain forms of
depression this is worked by U my
colleague David Spiegel at um Stanford
Psychiatry and the the great Bob spolski
Robert spolski of uh why zebras don’t
get ulcers y behave Etc and fame lots of
lots of popular books there um I think
that if people are trying to regulate
their cortisol and they’re just under
and they just understand that basic
Contour that the Baseline should be uh
you know rise pretty quickly after one
rise in the morning so it’s easy to
remember rise rise um rise out of bed
and Rise cortisol with light um bright
light with exercise um with caffeine
these things will all increase cortisol
and then across the day it’s normal for
cortisol to spike but then to use some
of the down regulation methods that you
described in particular the breathing
methods and exercise itself as the case
may be but then to really pay attention
to how much psychological and physical
stress is occurring in the six hours or
so or eight hours prior to sleep um does
that seem like a a good sort of broad
Contour of how to have a healthy pattern
of cortisol released because you
actually want the cortisol to reduce
inflammation and initiate or participate
in the recovery process you will not see
any
progress from exercise training without
a large spike in cortisol it is
critically important when we think of
phrases like cortisol inflammation
stress this is not bad right physiology
is not personified right there the
things don’t like hate you in the body
right it is all is not good and bad they
just are um the more you try to suppress
cortisol the more you suppress
adaptation what you want is exactly what
you mentioned large spikes meant with
large quick recovery and you want to do
that throughout the day and get that hor
medic stressor this is so to going back
to your ashwagandha and Rola issue um it
I think it would be very shortsighted
for people that do that as this is a
prophylactic okay because you if you
blunt cortisol you’re going to cause
immunosuppression especially early in
the day totally taking on to before
going to train is is counterproductive
yeah we do not just this is not a
baseline part of our foundational
package right if you go look at the um
athlete foundations or the athlete
resilience protocols that put together
you’re not going to see these things in
there for that specific reason um any
form of cortisol regulation needs to be
done strategically if you are
excessively high and we’re bringing you
back down to normative values at the
right time then great if you’re normal
though then taking you down lower than
that is actually problematic that’s the
same thing is actually true since we’re
here for oxidative stress forign
inflammation antioxidant use um we
mentioned I think earlier about taking
vitamin C and vitamin E post exercise
will actually blunt adaptations or at
least has the potential to do so same
thing right if you’re modulating this
response just because and you have not
done so because of actually biological
testing that indicated you needed to do
such then you actually may be making
things worse and so um we we see
constantly with people who take a number
of supplements and substances for sleep
and then they wake up the next morning
groggy and your your cortisol suppressed
okay great so then they take something
for stimulation and then the rest of the
day they’re trying to reduce and then
you’re this nasty cycle instead of just
getting out of the way and letting
cortisol do what it’s supposed to do U
and then making sure again you’re
teaching it so this is actually a
coachable response you can coach your
own body to go down in the later part of
the day and go up in the earlier part of
the day you want to make sure that you
are driving that train with intent and
so again to reiterate if you don’t need
that you shouldn’t do it right if you
don’t need to lower cortisol you
shouldn’t walk around doing it you’re
just going to suppress the state even
far and this is what’s need this is
needed for anabolic responses so you’re
not going to grow muscle if cortisol is
not spiked it’s it’s going to compromise
it rather so you want to be intentional
with these practices uh especially in
the form of of supplementation be very
very
intentional I’ve heard it said that
carbohydrates in particular starchy
carbohydrates definely can inhibit
cortisol definitely and uh this could be
through the uh tryptophan amino acid
related pathway that ratchets up to uh
serotonin release probably some other
things too I mean the idea that
carbohydrates just stimulate serotonin
is is a little bit uh overly simp
cellular mechanisms amk going up and
immediately turning on there yeah right
so um you know I think we’ve all
experienced this uh you know we’re
stressed we’re stressed we uh doesn’t
necessarily even have to be highly
processed you know uh fat assoc you know
fatty carbohydrates um you know like
potato chips and and potato chips and
dip or these kinds of things it can also
be a bowl of rice a bowl of oatmeal a
bowl of pasta um which here I’m not
trying to demonize um carbohydrates I I
do ingest carbohydrates um minimally or
non-processed carbohydrates um most of
the time but not all the time and they
have a a fairly potent uh effect on on
lowering stress and perceived stress and
even quality of sleep which is not to
say that somebody has to load up on them
like crazy unless their glycogen is
really depleted talked a lot about this
in the endurance episode I know we’ll
touch on it more in the nutrition
supplementation episode but um in
thinking about the relationship between
carbohydrates and cortisol and what
we’ve just been talking about terms of
cortisol as being vitally important for
the adaptation Trigger or triggering
adaptation it’s probably a better way to
put it but that it can blunt
cortisol taken post training or um maybe
in the evening before sleep what are
some of the basic ways that one can
think about and maybe use carbohydrates
in specific ways in order to let’s say
control cortisol rather than uh quash
cortisol uh you actually have alluded to
a number of times already so we often
times will give people a lot of
carbohydrates at
night for some of these reasons you’re
going to feel fantastic a lot of people
that helps you sleep um both get to
sleep and stay asleep Sleep Quality you
talked about specifically remember think
about it this way cortisol at its core
is an energy signaling molecule it says
we are in the need for
energy great um epinephrine the same you
you’ll start seeing for example cortisol
will liberate uh free fatty acids put
them in the bloodstream getting you
prepared to do something the problem is
if it’s continually elevated throughout
the day with no down regulation we start
running into issues right so again this
is the differentiation between oh my
cortisol is slightly elevated all day
versus I had a really big big spike
after training I had a really big spike
after breath protocol Etc and then it
went back down so that being said if you
then ingest carbohydrates you are
telling it is quick to see the sign all
we have nutrients we have energy again
specifically carbohydrates therefore
cortisol can sort of go back down we
don’t need to be liberating free fatty
acids and preparing uh the need for fuel
so you can help yourself go to sleep for
many as you pointed out many mechanisms
actually of why carbohydrates will help
you sleep at night for some not all
people but some that would be one of the
relationships it has with cortisol great
I look forward to hearing more about how
the various macronutrients and
micronutrients and so-called adaptogens
this very mysterious group of compounds
you know the word adapt gets thrown
around so much nowadays um but as long
as we’re talking about adaptation I
think uh that’ll be fair play for the uh
discussion in the next episode about
nutrition and supplementation in my
laboratory when we study stress we use a
number of different markers subjective
reports of how stressed people feel uh
heart rate mning heart rate heart rate
variability cortisol free cortisol and
on and on
what are some of the other markers of
stress as it relates to exercise
adaptations and Recovery because once
again I think we’re seeing a lot of
parallels between the study of
psychological stress and the study of
physical stress as it relates to
exercise adaptation
remember in terms of physiology stress
is stress this is why we have this cool
term of alistic load or allostasis so
it’s that it really doesn’t matter which
system you test for it will reflect
overall stress uh you you mentioned
several of them we’ve got done talking
about some
biomarkers HRV and heart rate are
another great example because what
you’re trying to do is this when we were
talking about the muscle soreness thing
what we were really getting at was a
marker of how do I fix the overuse in
that particular muscle now we’ve really
transitioned into Global markers of
overuse and why these are
problematic or important to pay
attention to rather is again these are
the indicators that you didn’t just work
a muscle out too hard but you have
actually done something where you’ve
compromised all of your physiology to a
level where you’ve influenced a
circulating catacol amine or something
that’s going to influence multiple
markers now like your sleep and your
mood and your behavior so that’s why
these things are problematic that said
you could look at resting heart rate not
a bad thing to do however that does have
multiple downsides uh one thing we do
know is your resting heart rate will
Elevate with excessive stress load this
actually doesn’t matter if it is
physical stress or psychological stress
or a combination so you will see that
number drift up over time here’s the
downside though it’s not tremendously
sensitive to smaller stressors uh in
other words if you were to do something
like alcohol is a very good example you
will see your resting heart rate Elevate
with alcohol use um excessive tobacco
use and psychological stress however if
you do something smaller like a hard
training sessions resting heart rate is
not sensitive enough to pick that up it
will actually probably stay the same so
for those reasons we don’t actually use
resting heart rate that much we will
take it but it’s not our primary
indicator that being said HRV is a
better use so just really quickly for
those that are not familiar uh your
heart rate uh let’s say for example you
your resting heart rate is 60 beats per
minute that means every second it’s
beating it doesn’t actually happen on a
consistent Rhythm such that it would
beat on second one beat on second two
beat on second three Etc the rate is
more variable so it might go
beat beat
beat beat beat be there’s a variation in
the heart rate and at the end of that 60
seconds in this example you would have
still completed 60 beats they just
aren’t on the exact same pattern well
one thing that’s actually quite
interesting is the amount of variation
in your heart rate is actually
associated with your overall sympathetic
or parasympathetic State such that a
large variation so an arhythmic pattern
is generally more representative of
being more rested and recovered and
being more parasympathetic and you’ll
notice during times of extremely high
stress uh you will be very rhythmic beat
beat beat beat beat and so this is a
little bit of a of a confusing idea but
a high
HRV is there indicated of a lot of
variation meaning you’re pretty
recovered a low HRV meaning there’s not
a lot of variation means you’re probably
pretty stressed and wire so it’s it’s uh
related to heart rate but in my opinion
it is a significantly better marker of
that now one thing you want to pay
attention to if you do this a couple of
things there are some accuracy issues
with many of the devices basically
everybody at this point probably has
some device uh that’s telling them their
HRV what you do not want to do is simply
compare your number to somebody else for
a lot of reasons not all of these
Technologies are actually even measuring
the same thing um again some of them are
actually combining with other metrics
and calling it your overall Readiness or
your recovery and so now we’ve what
we’ve actually done is made a couple of
assumptions and then stacked them on a
whole host of other assumptions and then
gave you a number and you don’t know
what that sort of black box score
actually even represents so I would
caution one against taking too much uh
information from that if you are
actually measuring HRV even within that
there’s a lots of ways to calculate it
that are not important here
so don’t necessarily worry about the
score compare it to yourself but not to
others what you will see is if you use
similar devices and
techniques it’s hard to find data here
but in general people that are uh
overweight um might have a little bit of
a of a lower score as in a worse score
um we need more information on that to
be clear so in large part the best way
to use something like HRV is to measure
it under the exact same
circumstances every day so whether
you’re going to use um just a device uh
on your watch or your phone or your bed
or anything else or you’re going to buy
a special HRV on it’s fine just take
that measure at the same time um mostly
this means first thing in the morning so
you wake up you go to the bathroom you
come back down take your measure or
something like that you don’t uh wait
sometimes you took it before food then
after or look at your phone like all
these other things that can influence
stress so so take it it usually takes
somewhere between seconds and minutes to
record so you want to pay attention to
that now one of the things you’ll notice
is there is a natural change in your HRV
that just happens and so what you kind
of really want to pay attention to is I
guess answering the question of well how
much of a change in HRV has to happen
before I should care and it’s hard to
answer right so let’s just say your HRV
was 100 I just made that number up what
if you wake up tomorrow it’s 99 what’s
that mean well I don’t know if you wake
up tomorrow when it’s 20 that’s probably
a bad thing well where’s that line it’s
hard one thing I would recommend doing
is taking your HRV for at least a month
before you start using that value to
make any changes and you recommend
taking it first thing in the morning yep
always at roughly the same time
basically under the same circumstances
it doesn’t have to be technically in the
morning but because your day will change
on most days what you get into um that’s
the most stable thing in your life so I
would take it then and I would collect
it for at least a day at least a month
rather maybe even six weeks and then
give yourself basically a running
average so what we quite honestly do is
uh we will actually track it for forever
and then what we always look at is what
does it look like today relative to the
last week on average and then what does
that look like to our historical average
and we always compare those things um
and you also want to make sure you
compare like to like so in other words I
generally I’m not going to worry about
today’s HRV score relative to tomorrow’s
what I want to look at is today’s
relative to this exact same day last
week um not for athletes but for
non-athletes this is very important so
imagine don’t worry about the difference
between hrb score and Monday compared to
Tuesday
pay attention to Monday compared to last
Monday and the Monday before that that’s
because you typically have the same sort
of weekly schedule and what you don’t
want to do is is say look at Monday’s
HRV score which is a reflection of what
happen Sunday and compare that to
Tuesdays which is actually a reflection
of what happened Monday you probably
didn’t do the same stressors on Sunday
as Monday so you’re not actually
comparing the same thing but if you have
a General weekly schedule you’re likely
to compare this Monday’s or to the last
Mondays because they’re both comparing
what happened on the previous days see
did that sort of Distinction make sense
absolutely I do the same thing with body
weight by the way if you’re trying to
track body mass gain or fat loss or
something compare like the like you can
look at the daily changes but you need
to pay attention to what that normal
distribution is so if you kind of do
that you know Monday to Monday thing
that’ll give you a rough area of saying
okay my normal weekly variation is say
five so my average is 100 but I will
fluctuate between 95 to 105 that’s my
standard deviation is sort of a science
dorks would call that um if you start
very uh changing more than 5% outside of
your normal standard deviation then I’m
going to start paying attention a little
bit and I’m going to actually run a
little bit of an algorithm on this one
and so here is my thinking process when
I get HRV really any metric but HRV is
is the example we’re using First Step
did I collect good data and what that I
mean again did I measure it the same way
I measured every single day or did I get
up and look at my phone first and I
realized oh crap I forgot to take my HRV
and then I went back and got there so
say I had a 15% derivation from my
normal number and then I realized oh
yeah that’s right I was up super late
last night doing whatever okay great I’m
going to consider that bad data you
didn’t good if it’s bad data then I’m
not doing anything ignore it’s bad data
and you throw it out you don’t use it if
you decide for the most part let’s
assume it was good data okay great then
I’m going on to my next question which
is is is it acute in other words is it
just today right or is it chronic in
words this is a is this pattern been
happening for more than five days or at
least three out of the last four or
something like that three minimum is
what I like honestly I generally look at
five or more days that’s a very big
distinction if it is something that just
happened today then the next question
I’m going to ask myself is and I in that
adaptation phase am I trying to be in a
phase where I’m trying to cause insult
to the body that it needs to respond
with if that is the case
I’m just going to ignore it right in
fact it’s almost sometimes a good sign
hey we are stressing the body and it is
stressed what we’re doing is working
amazing in fact if you don’t see that
it’s sort of like maybe we’re not doing
enough to push the pace all right so
great if the answer is no we’re in a
peaking phase then we’re actually going
to use what I call acute State shifters
so this is a whole host of little tricks
that I have that can change HRV or any
recovery metric Within
seconds again these are not chronic
fixes this is just I’m having a bad day
today I feel like crap can I make myself
feel better right now and so I kind of
call these parlor tricks a lot of the
times and there’s a thousand of them we
are certainly not going to go over them
but I’ll give you some examples um you
can pull out first of all physical
movement we’ll do it you you’d be
stunned how just doing some yoga moving
around doing some jumping jacks starting
your workout I mean you probably
experienced this it’s sort of cliche in
our world at this point but um if you
ever do any serious lifting over a
serious amount of time there will be
days when which you walk into the gym
and you feel awful and somehow that day
you said a lifetime PR yeah that’s a
strange strange phenomenon yeah I uh I
I’ve experienced that more than a few
times um it’s rare the inverse is rare
however you feel great you have a
horrible workout it happens yeah um and
it can happen for any number of
different reasons but yeah I think the
the former when when isn’t feeling very
good and then somehow it’s a terrific
workout does set a kind of a seed of
Doubt as to how good our subjective
assessments really are and which I guess
is why we were talking about um
objective assessments yep like HRV and
remember if it’s a single day here uh
you can even do hard training uh people
sort of have this idea like well if you
get up and your recovery score is down
do a lighter day
that’s probably like I’m probably never
making that choice to be honest not in
this situation remember this is one bad
day and we are in a phase of even trying
to improve performance right now like
we’re probably still training hard you
will again often see I felt terrible
then I trained super hard and it totally
changed my day around this all can
happen so exercise is my first love here
um absolutely breathing um any sort of
up regulation breathing so we talked a
lot about down regulation breathing just
do the opposite right and so this is
when hyperventilation strategies can
work uh instead of accentuating the
exhale you accentuate the inhale or you
restrict the exhale this is working in
the exact opposite situation you can
also play little this is where things
like music motivational quotes um if
you’re the type that follows people on
Instagram that motivates you or can work
with these things um coaching tactics
these can be things
like um finding out or talking about
that person’s why
um you sort of shared something that a
mantra you use um when you’re training
hard to keep you go better I’m not going
to ask you to share that now but some
people have this sometimes right or you
may have this conversation with your
athlete we call this finding out your
why right so finding out like why are
you really here what are we doing here
and a lot of times you’ll hear things
like it’s because I grew up poor and I
don’t ever want to be poor again okay
great well this is for my children or
like any number of things and you can
pull that out on these days you need to
be really careful this is why I call
these parlor tricks because when you
play that card too often it starts to
lose effect right and you can only dig
to a hole so often before it’s sort of
like a um the same thing is with music
right if you every time you go to the
weight room it’s blasting death metal at
level 10 well eventually it’s not it’s
no longer motivating right it’s no
longer helpful so um you want to deploy
these things strategically yeah the the
phrase that comes to mind is signal to
noise you know the nervous system
especially the dopamine system and the
adrenaline system which are part of this
larger system called the catacol amine
system so that’s dopamine epinephrine
norepinephrine the the get up and go
focus on external goals um movement
Associated it’s and on and on that that
system responds best to high signal
relative to noise so if you’re as you
pointed out um listening to music every
time drinking a ton of caffeine energy
drinks pre-workout New Tropics and then
you know stacking all those things uh
sometimes refer this as dopamine
stacking informally referred to as
dopamine stacking you’re doing all those
things then you first of all then you’re
wondering why later that afternoon or
the next day you’re feeling like you’re
you’re under a cloud well it’s obvious
your your cacing system crashed but it’s
also that um you don’t necessarily
become dependent on it it’s just that
you start to wonder whether or not you
have the internal mechanisms and
motivation to train without those things
and so one tends to use them more and
more and then they have a diminishing
effect over time um the rule that I’ve
been um sort of applying has been I
never do two workouts in a row where I’m
stacking in um stimulants loud music and
any kind of uh sort of high potency
inspiration however every set in the gym
or when I run I really try and be
diligent about form and attention to
what I’m doing the one exception would
be the long duration endurance work part
of the reason I do that work is to let
my mind go into states of drifting uh
not trying to think in complete
sentences or even close to it just let
my my brain kind of idle at at a low hum
uh and for that reason generally listen
to something that’s more of a story or
don’t listen to anything at all and just
let my thoughts kind of spool through
anyway I don’t want to take us too far
off track but I think this um idea of
signal to noise will resonate with the
engineers out there but since most
people are likely not Engineers it is
the way that the nervous system works um
evidenced by the fact that whatever area
of your body right now is in contact
with a chair or um any other surface
that’s been in contact with for more
more than a few seconds you forget that
it’s in contact with it because there’s
low signal to noise at that point a
similar note you actually mentioned
stimulants basically there whether
you’re talking caffeine or any other
stimulant any other cortisol modulators
or adaptogens any of these things fall
in the category if you’re not using them
consistently and you’re having a rough
day and all of a sudden you throw down
200 milligrams of caffeine uh it’s going
to change real fast the equ strong
performance enhancing effect yeah
absolutely and for these reasons right
um so we mentioned a couple of them
breath work
um food more calories just eating some
food uh sometimes we’ll give people like
what we call Comfort Foods so this is
just like hey you’re uh you know you’re
from Georgia and we know you love grits
so we’re having grits for breakfast oh
my great like just something to change
your mood acute State shifters um to
alter it the other couple of Tricks here
are light so if we know that maybe say
multiple people are struggling that day
maybe we’ll put on the lights extra
bright we’ll bring in some extra things
and just get it more light in the area
not that do even count actually going
outside and seeing the Sun but perhaps
we’ll do that um and then other little
tricks that I’ve learned over the years
is one particular thing I love is
literally drawing a line a physical line
in the ground and you look at that line
and you say like I’m going to train
today and I’m going to
accomplish this effort uh I’m not going
to walk past this line and into that
training space until I’m ready to give
that effort and that may take a minute
or 10 or whatever but it it’s the
physical barrier is very important to
saying like I’m not just going to get
through it I’m going to actually perform
the way I want to perform or I’m not
going to do it and I’m not going to
cross this line until I’m ready to make
that happen all right I really like that
tool it also brings to mind the
importance of at least thinking about
how your relationship with your phone
during training um Can perhaps help but
also impede workout motivation and
performance in an earlier episode you
mentioned that if people are using their
phone to play music during their workout
that they establish the complete
playlist prior to initiating the workout
and then not deviate from that playlist
as opposed to changing it in the middle
because there’s just too much of a uh of
an Impulse to also check social media
check email check text messages I mean
the way I think about the phone actually
is it’s a bunch of little um brain areas
it’s got a memory system for you it’s
got lookup tables for lookup tables it’s
got websites to look things up on the
Internet it’s got photos I mean it is so
rich with sensory data and it’s so
closely linked to our own brain
architecture the algorithms are designed
for those to be that way that I always
think about it as bringing in a second
person with me but that person is a my
twin that um has severe attention issues
and for those that already have
attention issues just think about this
as a twin that would then compound You
by tapping on your shoulders talking to
you all the time interrupting you uh
somebody that you like a lot but that
frankly is um is a little bit irritating
in that they’re they’re interrupting
your ability to really show up and also
your ability to show up for them so I
started to think about the phone as um
an entire individual and that it
represents me and and certainly not the
better version of me exactly you
actually mentioned something else that
we use uh occasionally which what we
call Brain Games or puzzles whether this
is a crossword puzzle or something where
you actually
lose your thought of self for a second
and your brain gets engaged in a task
that you weren’t regretting or even
thinking about these can be stupid
little games uh it could be little
challenges especially if you’re in like
a group or a team setting right like
we’re going to play one round of vge
ball or we’re going to play one round of
of Thumb Wars so you do encourage this
yeah I see so you would play like a
thing instead of warming up like all
right get in and everyone get going
we’re going to you know get your foam
roller your D whatever things just like
all right everyone line up and we’re
going to play thumb roll
to see who wins right just like whatever
right and all a sudden you’ve snapped
into a new mental shift um or literally
playing brain games playing Tetris on
your phone like any of these things um
can work in this acute setting C can I
ask you a question it’s not directly
related to recovery uh per se but I
think it’s worth mentioning um or asking
about rather which is the use of mirrors
or no mirrors while training um you know
the experience of seeing oneself and
observing one’s form in the mirror I
suppose has some utility you can get
some sense of progress that you might
trigger um here I’m almost specifically
referring to uh resistance training I
suppose it could be cardio if you’re
running on a treadmill or pushing a sled
or something but um you can see form um
you can get a sense of um what your face
looks like when you Grimace uh but in
all seriousness um you are without
question a person not you Andy but um
one is in a
interceptive mode when looking at
themselves in the mirror so exception
perception of things beyond the confines
of our skin even if it’s a picture of us
interoception perception of everything
from the skin inward um and so if we’re
looking at ourselves we’re diverting
some allocation of our attention let’s
say there’s a hundred these are
arbitrary units and you can think put
50% of your attention on the feeling in
your body or the muscles you’re training
um and 50% on how it appears in the
mirror or it could be 100% on the mirror
100% internally which you best
accomplish probably by closing your eyes
so obviously there are constraints here
certain movements you wouldn’t want to
close your eyes Etc in general what are
your thoughts on mirrors or no mirrors
for resistance training specifically it
depends on the metric that you find most
important and what I mean by this is if
you’re training for say muscle
hypertrophy there’s emerging evidence
that suggests uh actually looking at
yourself in the mirror and even flexing
in between sets um can actually be
advantageous or it can augment muscle
gains oh my there’s uh support for all
the the the uh mirror flexers absolutely
not not making fun of you I just uh it
is is sort of interesting to be on the
observing side of of that but Hey listen
results are what people are after yeah
having said that if you’re trying to
enhance um movement learning then it may
be detrimental so if you’re doing an
exercise that is explosive and fast it’s
probably not the best thing to be
looking into a mirror um if you were to
walk into any Olympic weightlifting
Arena and you had any thoughts of using
a mirror you would probably run out of
the gym very very quickly you can’t see
yourself in time to make an adjustment
with the movement that’s happening that
fast and also we’ll do exactly what you
mentioned which is it will remove your
ability to understand and feel the
movement and so this is a big component
to using technology for exercise at all
is you have to make sure that the end
point is you understanding you and your
physiology more not less when you
Outsource learning to technology in this
case even if the technology is the
mirror you remove your ability to gain
and truly understand that learning
process so you need to be very very
careful whether you’re using a mirror or
whether you’re using any number of apps
where you can record say a movement and
then watch it afterwards and it will
give you a breakdown if your hand was in
the right spot or foot was in the right
spot spot these are all great but you
need to then take the next step which is
to say I need to be able to feel that
position all right so in the case of
performance if you can imagine trying to
learn a new technique say running
technique and you have to be able to
watch yourself in the mirror to
understand your stride in the right
position if you don’t take the next step
of saying okay now I don’t have to look
in the mirror and I can feel when I’m
getting out of rhythm or whatever the
cas is then you’ll never be able to
actually then use that in your race and
so it’s very very important that people
again pay attention to what is the
dependent variable that you’re actually
interested in doing if you’re trying to
get better at something the tech is okay
as a starting place it just cannot be
the finishing place thank you for those
Reflections I’m curious as to what
happens or what one should do if their
HRV is reduced for maybe three or four
or more days in a row absolutely the
next question that I’m going to ask is
and am I in that adaptation phase if so
I’m going to still ignore it just like I
did if it was a single bad day but I’m
going to start watching it very
carefully I may actually now introduce
some other tests so I may use a
performance test uh we may look at
something else maybe ask questions maybe
have some communication either with
myself or somebody else so I’m going to
start paying more attention but I’m
still really not going to take much
action until that crosses more than
seven days of consistent problems um if
it does do that or we’re in a peing
phase then I’m going to go to another
set of solutions that are truly going to
pull me out of the hole rather than just
be uh those acute State shifters these
are more what I call chronic state
shifters now some of these are actually
very similar to the ones we’ve used
before uh for
example thermal stress so I can promise
you if your recovery score is in the
tanks and you walk outside and you jump
in your 35 degree water and you get back
out what’s going to happen is your HRV
score immediately afterwards I’m I’m
talking Within seconds is going to be
significantly compromised right in other
words think about that remember a low
HRV means High sympathetic I promise you
cold water will put you in a high
sympathetic Drive however and we’ve
tested this pretty extensively um
looking at HRV zero 15 30 60 90 all the
way up to 180 minutes post and on
average you will see your HRV score
continue to rise after that and so well
you have this immediate sympathetic
response you will immediately then
respond you know about 30 minutes on
most people depends on the person though
and that score will be improved for
several hours afterwards so um heat can
kind of have a similar effect um that
actually again is a it’s sort of an
acute fix but over time as we’ve
described earlier that can also have a
little bit of a chronic effect um we can
also then get into areas like sleep and
so now we’re going to start playing and
exploring why uh are you sleeping poor
as well or was your sleep score fine but
your HRV was low that’s a little bit of
a different answer if your sleep is
getting compromised then we’re going to
start going into and making sure we’re
improving our sleep um in terms of like
brain stuff instead of maybe playing a
game or having music or some of those
other tricks those aren’t going to
really have a chronic effect but you can
do things like work on social connection
that’s actually been shown to improve
recovery over time you can do things
like journaling or meditation and those
have an acute effect as well as a
chronic effect so again if you go
Journal right now you probably feel
better but also we know that over time
that will gradually improve things so um
adaptogens and things like that also can
have a chronic effect so can things like
electrolytes or food or hydration if
those things were were off so we’re
going to go to a whole number of areas
but those are the primary ones
outstanding of all that of course it may
be simply a time to go back and reassess
our training program that’s truly the
case so uh that’s where we’re at if so
we’re probably going to either
completely remove
training um or drop it to like 50% or so
uh until we start rebounding back to
Baseline and that’s generally the
numbers we
use for many people who are not training
for a competitive Sport and maybe aren’t
pushing themselves really hard you know
maybe uh they’re they consider
themselves somebody who exercises in
order to maintain Health um and
Aesthetics and um longevity Etc uh and
they never really finish any workout
completely
exhausted they’re sleeping okay their
appetite’s okay can we assume that they
are recovering well um or maybe they’re
not creating enough of a
adaptation response like there’s no
Progressive overreaching and so there’s
really no stimulus for Recovery what I’m
saying here is on the the face of it I
think is obvious right if you don’t
train hard there’s nothing to recover
from what I’m really saying is is the
ability to recover itself something that
we need to train in other words can we
get better at recovering and the uh
analogy here would be something like
focus in order to uh perform work of any
kind but certainly mental work and
physical work we need to be able to
focus the ability to focus is the
reflection of a bunch of neural circuits
and chemicals and hormones Etc but we
know roughly what those are and we know
that if you are poor at focusing for
every small bit of time that you can
focus a little bit longer even if it’s a
matter of seconds those circuits
themselves get better at focusing and so
on and so forth so in other words is the
recovery system however Broad
neurotransmitter hormones neural
muscular immune-based Etc can that
system or set of systems become better
can we get better at recovering can we
meaning can it become faster and uh more
effective um can we think of the
recovery system is kind of a blade that
gets sharper by engaging recovery
because if so then there’s strong reason
for people who are not pushing really
hard to push at least a little bit
harder than is comfortable for them
every once in a while to make sure that
system doesn’t start to slide back
remember physiology is listening to
everything you do and it is always
responding so the analogy that I will
meet your analogy with that I use here
is the bowling alley so you’ve probably
been bowling before and you’ve used the
bumper Lanes right the bumper Lanes I’ve
gone bowling before and I’ve spent time
in the gutter and I’ve spent time on the
pins okay um it’s been a while we used
to have a bowling alley in the town
where I went to and um it was fun we
used to slide around on the Sho and like
all the kids would hang out there and I
feel like do they still have bowling
alleys I don’t even know it feels like
something that may have gone the the way
of the the mid 2000s I don’t care if no
one bills anymore you’re not going to
ruin my good analogy okay well well my
intent wasn’t to ruin your analogy um
okay tell us about bowling all the
bowlers are going to come after me with
with um bowling balls or something
you’re going to get blasted with all the
stats on elevations don’t hurt me sorry
cool so if would one were to go bowling
and they didn’t want to put their ball
in the gutter yeah you could put these
little bumpers in those Lanes all right
and these little foam pads that go in
the gutter that if your ball is going
towards the gutter it hits those and
bounces off and goes back in the lane
right okay so in this entire
conversation and this is actually true
of a lot of the way people approach
their fitness and health people are very
concerned often times with optimizing
meaning I want to make sure I don’t go
in the gutter I don’t want to hit the
walls so therefore I’m going to try to
improve the accuracy in which I throw
the ball so I want to make sure that I’m
throwing it down the center of the lane
more often and I want to get my my
standard deviation Tighter and Tighter
so that I don’t get anywhere close to
hitting the
wall however what they’re not realizing
is if you do that the body will start
shrinking the size of the lane because
what it basically says is huh we haven’t
had a ball touch Us in years we don’t
need to be this wide let’s get smaller
and smaller and smaller so it’s not that
you actually
are having a
reduced ability to recover but you start
becoming incredibly sensitive to
that so your two strategies for
enhancing recovery are to practice
getting closer of throwing that ball
down the middle lane or to
widen to widen the alley and that’s
exactly what you’re referring to and you
absolutely should do that and so what
happens is you don’t have to be so
precise with what you’re doing because
your ability to handle so many things
things is widen so if you’re off now by
four or five in to the right no problem
because you’ve just tripled the size of
your alley that’s exactly what you want
to do so paying attention to two things
number one is getting better at accuracy
maybe staying really tight with your
progressions um using nutrition and
sleep to optimize your recovery and push
your resilience is what we call this in
fact there’s actually a biological way
to measure resilience we we do that in
all of our folks um this is
scientifically validated stuff and
didn’t just make it up you can actually
measure resilience and there’s more and
more coming out on this but that’s
exactly what that term me so how well
can you handle and bang things off the
stress so when you see a reduction in
say 10% of your HRV today for you that
may make you feel terrible for me I
might not feel anything because I’m well
adapted to large fluctuations and
therefore I’m okay the less and less you
do that the more and more responsive you
will be to those slight deviations so
that is exactly the Target and that’s
kind of what I allude to when I say you
got to understand what are we optimizing
for we optimizing for making sure I
don’t feel any different today are we
optimizing to make sure when I do feel
different I still am able to perform um
so this is why you want to do things
like maybe use some caffeine today and
feel great but if I have to use it every
day all I’m doing is shrinking my
sensitivity there so now if I have to go
a day without it I can’t train at all
right caffeine is the easy example
because people understand how that whole
system works but this is really true of
everything else so yeah you need to
practice this and the way to do that is
to give yourself more stress to continue
to bring in the stress from nutrition
from training from breath work um you
mentioned earlier about Focus the exact
same thing right it’s not just about
getting better right now it’s about
training a system and you can clearly
train that right um we will often say
breath work is a practice
that’s exactly what we’re talking about
right so you’re practicing getting
better at these things you’re practicing
returning your focus you’re practicing
recovering and quite literally
physiologically you can
upregulate whether we’re talking enzymes
whether we’re talking about Regulators
these will be upregulated so then the
the next time that insult comes in it’s
not as big as it’s not as damaging so
yeah absolutely you can and you should
strive for that throughout all the
episodes where we’ve been talking about
exercise at the core of that is this
word adaptations and I love that you
mentioned that breath work can also
create adaptations the way I’m
visualizing all of this now is
that resistance training with weights
machines body weight
otherwise cardiovascular training
running jogging sprinting jumping and so
on thermal training exposure to heat
exposure to cold in a dedicated way and
deliberate respiration AKA breathing or
breath work as a practice all of those
can be viewed as ways to trigger
adaptations and in the context of
recovery the specific adaptations you’re
trying to engage are opposite to stress
in fact with the exception of perhaps
deliberate cold exposure maybe
deliberate heat exposure because if the
sauna is really hot you can get the
dorphin release which is kind of
uncomfortable but but still in both
those cases the rebound from that in
other words when you get out you shower
you go to bed the next morning you do
have this kind of blist out feeling we
know why that is that is the rebound to
that uncomfortable situation so it seems
it doesn’t really matter whether or not
you’re using resistance you’re doing
cardiovascular training you’re using
thermal approaches or you’re using
respiration based
approaches all of these are really ways
of both triggering adaptations and if
applied properly to actually help you
recover from the stress and create the
the literal result that you’re that
you’re trying to achieve for some people
that might have been obvious but I think
for many people including myself this
set of conversations that we’ve been
having over the series these episodes
It’s really the first time that I’ve
ever thought about exercise in these
ways in any event it’s just a reflection
but it’s one that at least for me um is
tremendously useful because it has a lot
of um Oran organizational logic to it uh
which at least appeals to to my brain
because the more that things have a
logic the more for me that they become
simplified and the more that the vast
array of
tools uh becomes uh becomes visible to
me as you said earlier what is it let me
make sure I get this right it’s um
concepts are few methods are many pretty
close Okay how would you how remind us
how you state it methods are many
concepts are few ah okay either way the
directionality probably matter it
doesn’t matter no let’s keep it right
the the methods are many uh Concepts
there a few um galpin’s law I in science
you’re not allowed to name things after
yourself um but you can name uh things
after other people so uh it’s a galpin’s
law because I’m definitely the one who
created that idea so
absolutely that was extreme and
tremendous sarcasm just so we’re Ultra
clear regardless uh here we go G
galpin’s Law there you go one thing
that’s in my head right now is we’ve
thrown out a lot of options for folks
and maybe what we can do is try to
simplify a little bit so what I can kind
of walk you through is how we uh measure
recovery if you will and how often and
some tools and what I would recommend
people do is not use everything I said
you want to pick one or two things per
category that are most important to you
that are at your cost uh that are at
your availability that are interesting
and important relevant to you and do
that uh the reason I kind of wanted to
cover a a large number of things was was
to give folks options but again I want
to emphasize the point is to not measure
all of them in fact you don’t need to we
um I’ve ran this before with
professional athletes where we’ve taken
blood urine every single day we’ve done
performance measures uh vertical jumps
on a force plate a whole bunch of things
every day for years on end and what I
can tell you is there is tremendous
redundancy in physiology right
Everything is Everything so you don’t
need to do them and don’t feel like
you’re missing out if you aren’t doing
them one or two metrics is probably fine
I generally recommend one subjective
measure this could be as simple as
what’s your mood how do you feel today
great and one objective measure HRV
resting heart rate anything else right
so if you even literally just did that
you’d probably have pretty good insight
as to what you’re doing so maybe in fact
I I’ll go more detail here um maybe I’ll
give you a couple of examples of things
to measure every day some things that
you should measure maybe quarterly
monthly and then maybe even semiannually
and then you can maybe just pick a
couple from each of these categories and
have yourself a pretty good monitoring
system for what to do and I’ll include
some that are um a little bit of
Technology based and then others that
are totally cost free and require
nothing okay to start off I would
recommend taking something like HRV
every day or or most days um if you
don’t have a device like that you could
also use honestly the CO2 tolerance test
and we’ve talked about that a number of
times and we probably have plenty of
resources to go find that uh but that
doesn’t require anything it typically
takes about a minute or so and you can
do that under the same circumstances in
which HRV in other words do it the same
time every day have the same
standardization stuff and that is
actually been in our coaching experience
um while admittedly there is no peer-
reviewed research on this yet um just in
our experience this tends to track
extremely closely with HRV and other
metrics of recovery
in fact we actually did do a uh a pilot
trial in my lab and it uh it tracked
decently well with both state and trade
anxiety so uh it’s a nice metric um not
perfect but you you could take that so
if you wanted you could do both um but
again remember you’re trying to capture
systemic stress and so you’re really
just showing you’re measuring one thing
two ways so you don’t necessarily have
to have them both I will do both just
because like I’m super interested in
small differences but globally they’re
going to tell you basically the same
thing so those are two things we we use
again basically daily year round or or
close to it um if you want to go past
that a little bit um you can look at you
can use an actual a a pretty old
commonly used survey called a daa d l d
I forget the exact acronym but it is a
fairly lengthy questionnaire and it
accounts for things like how do you feel
today how do you sleep um any stressors
going on in your life how you’ve been
eating and it’s this it’s like fairly
comprehensive lengthy survey um that
came out I mean geez it’s probably been
around for 30 years or something it’s
it’s nothing new and been used
extensively uh I you would not want to
do that every day if you wanted to take
some subjective measures every day we
typically stick with like I said mood um
motivation something like that um you
you could perform this do detesto
something more like monthly or at the
end of each training phase you know
every couple of months and probably
worth looking at it’s not going to tell
you if you’re in a bad spot today or
tomorrow but you would pick that up with
the HRV or suit to tolerance test it
would though tell you information
especially if you’re working with
another individual about major life
changes and if anything it just
facilitates that conversation right I
noticed you reported X
happening um let’s let’s talk about that
and can I help Etc so another kind of
sneaky helpful one is is is simply body
fi like I said um non-functional
overreaching and overtraining are
associated with a number of things like
energy um appetite suppression changes
in in in body weight or body composition
so you can measure that um monthly or
even really quarterly uh depending on
what kind of athlete or individual
you’re working at or if you’re trying to
especially if you’re not trying to lose
weight or if you’re trying to be at
maintenance and that’ll give you some
insights as well so moving past that now
actually we’re going to move into the
realm of things that we call Hidden
stressors so those those are all visible
stressors um so hidden stressors the
most common ones we’ve sort of mentioned
U and I would probably do this um well
you’re going have to do these ones
through serum so this is blood work
cortisol like we talked about in
testosterone and then of course
testosterone to cortisol ratio and then
the other ones I mentioned um you can do
those quarterly it’s not bad there are
some blood markers that there’s really
no sense to do them that soon and there
are other markers I mean in our system
our individuals are getting pretty
extensive blood work saliva work urine
and stool and there so there’s plenty of
those things you just do not need to
measure you know every 10 weeks or so uh
in this case you know cortisol as you
know sort of changes rapidly um
testosterone can change pretty quickly
um but if you’re really trying to notice
a large Trend you know certainly
quarterly or so is is an appropriate
time frame um doing it every four or
five weeks is probably unnecessary so
you can save yourself some money and do
that um other stuff you can look at
actually more like semiannually in um
plasma like glutamine and glutamine to
glutamate ratio and you can maybe save
the why you want to look at those for
another conversation but those are
important um we always look at something
from the oxidative stress thing so this
could be something like tnf alpha or
inter Lucan 6 something like that again
we’re looking at that in serum and we’re
looking at that you know like
semiannually and then another sneaky
actually one um that I love to look at
is uh the nutrifil the lymphocytolysis
uh that number starts to get really high
certainly like more than 9 to1 you got a
pretty good Insight that something
gnarly is going on with your immune
system so um we will actually take
action much lower than that number but
that’s like a nice cut off you’ll see is
like that’s a very very high number so
um those are some things you can use uh
most folks have the ability hopefully to
get some basic blood work done get a
basic what’s called a CBC and CMP um if
you have a great physician and you can
get insurance to cover that and you just
go on and ask for a CBC and CMP they’ll
what that means you can Google that and
they’ll order it you’ll get all the
information typically that I just
described or close enough and you’ll get
some insights and then again you can
just use uh that free service I
mentioned earlier to check to see
whether or not the changes are um just a
matter of testing quality or actually
physiologically relevant what you just
described is an amazingly powerful array
of tools I’m hoping that you can also
mention a few tools that are either
lower cost truly low cost or zero cost
that while they may not have the
accuracy or um give the complete picture
that some of the biomarkers and other
tools that you mentioned do that they
can still provide reasonably reliable
metrics that people can use in order to
assess their level of recovery
absolutely the CO2 tolerance test would
be the first one um and you can just
take that metric anytime you’d like the
other ones we’ve talked about so far are
things like your mood uh we haven’t me
mentioned libido but that’s another
assessment that people also tend to have
a pretty good grip on and they know what
feels normal so when things go out of
whack it tends to be a pretty good
signal that people will recognize yeah
and one note about that um so something
that came up in an episode on uh on
hormones both for male and female Health
um that at some point will Air um which
is that you know there’s no objective
measure for people in terms of libido
across the board meaning people people
vary tremendously um age life
circumstances um uh and on and on and so
um this is one of those subjective
measures that I think people need to uh
have some sense of what their quote
unquote Baseline really is and I’m
guessing that the time to assess that
might best be uh when initiating or
Midway through a relatively low
intensity training phase um maybe during
the time of year in which all the other
factors um that can influence libido are
not um at their maximum so if you think
about you know light and dopamine and
the relationship between those and the
testosterone estrogen systems we know
that libido uh testosterone estrogen men
and women um tends to peak in the summer
months so if that’s your Baseline that
you’re comparing to I don’t know that
that’s as reliable as um piing something
like the the fall or the spring um and
so anyway this again is very subjective
but would just encourage people to uh
recognize that there’s no standard
numbers for this no lookup table there’s
no equivalent of the libido BMI LMI um
no dis respect to the acronym that
probably is LMI um so I think that it’s
just something to keep in mind as people
um do comparisons or subjective
comparisons is don’t pick a comparison
to an extreme try and pick a comparison
to a average as you know it to be that
actually sort of reminding me one issue
that we have seen a lot lately is people
if they’re having libido issues or just
even slightly noticing uh drop they just
assume that then therefore means their
testosterone is crashing and those
things are certainly connected but that
is not necessarily the case and where
that becomes a problem is then people
then go uh on things like trt Etc with
no true oversight and then all kinds of
other problems so make sure that if
you’re going to take that step that you
actually get testosterone measured and
you’re working with the quality ified
person to guide you through that process
don’t just assume because you’re having
low energy or your libido is a little
bit down it could be simply training
related it could be sleep related could
be any number of things um so that’s
just like a little bit of a word of
caution there two quick points along the
lines of what you just said one
interesting thing that I learned when
researching our episode on testosterone
and estrogen optimization this was an
episode that we’ve done some time ago
but is still available in our hberman
lab.com all formats Etc is that many
many people actually increase their
libido and even their levels of
testosterone and estrogen as they
progress from their 20s into their 40s
if they take excellent care of
themselves including the correct
exercise adaptations correct body fat to
lean um lean muscle uh ratios but of
course it can go the other way too A lot
of people can be training to achieve
such low body fat stores that libido can
suffer so it it you know the age depend
uh age related declines in libido um are
not necessarily um written into the
script of life in fact there are some
data points from a really interesting
paper I talk about in that um episode of
uh individuals this was a study focused
on males in their 80s and 90s who
maintained total and free testosterone
as high as uh individuals in their 20s
but then when you look at the lifestyle
factors of those people in their 80s and
90s they were doing a lot to create that
that scenario the second point is one
related to what you just said um which
is very true which is people
generally tend to assume that a drop in
libido is related to a drop in
testosterone um and then assume that
they need to increase their testosterone
and in some cases that is true
absolutely but it’s also often the case
that people who take estrogen or
aromatase blockers that is enzyme um
Inhibitors that prevent the conversion
of testosterone to estrogen experience
severe deficits in libido because of
estrogen being too low so estrogen
blockers are as much an issue here as um
low testosterone then the final point is
also one that um many people now men and
women are um I think need to be aware of
which is that dihydrotestosterone DHT is
among the more powerful androgens for um
Power output physical power output but
also for libido and DHT is strongly
inhibited by certain things like
turmeric so a lot of people who are
taking high doses of turmeric uh can
experience drops in libido so there and
um who are taking um uh various
compounds to prevent hair loss y things
like finasteride so there’s a whole
catalog of things that can reduce libido
that are not directly in the
testosterone pathway it can be DHD
related or estrogen related and this I
think points to the importance of yes
take a subjective measure of your libido
pay attention essentially be aware don’t
you know don’t obsess but be be aware
and try and figure out what factors um
are involved for you but don’t
immediately assume that it what’s needed
is more testosterone and often times um
the opposite is the case yeah you yeah
try to put on a lot of muscle with no
estrogen good luck right and and indeed
a lot of um athletes in particular uh
you know competitive bodybuilders that
have that you know Saran Wrap thin skin
if you get to know some of those people
and you talk to them they they can um
look like the sort of comic book
archetype of what um someone might might
want to be I mean that’s not what this
discussion or these episodes have been
about but often times they can have um
serious liido issues I mentioned earlier
and I will emphasize it once more you
need to be very cautious when you’re
taking antioxidants anti-inflammatories
cortisol reducers for all those reasons
right I didn’t really sort of get in
examples but you just nailed another
fantastic reason of it um we do not give
those things
prophylactically I I I strongly
discourage people from just walking
around taking supplementation of antio
oxidant um especially powerful ones for
no reason if you have done some testing
um and you have a good reason to do so
I’m fine or if you’re in a very specific
say training phase or something like
that cool um but if you’re just walking
around doing that you are often times
not always but you’re often times
causing problems that then you then try
to solve by taking more of those
anti-inflammatories I feel terrible low
energy low libido blah blah blah blah
blah I’m too inflamed
Etc so yeah antioxidants in the form of
food are
fantastic almost no issue there is a
good evidence actually there so don’t
worry about man I shouldn’t eat High
antioxidant-rich Foods you’re going to
be fine what we’re talking about here is
Pharmaceuticals and supplementation
where you can take orders of magnitude
higher dosages very quickly than you
could in the presence of food so that
distinction is also very important
antioxidant-rich foods are generally
fine and that’s cons consumed in totally
absurd concentrations supplementations
powders creams drugs Etc is where you
can get into problem so yeah you want to
be very careful of doing that unless you
have a reason we don’t do that unless uh
we we see a reason to do so in someone’s
markers yeah and herbal compounds
despite the fact that their herbal can
be quite potent modulators of of
hormones um ashwagandha being uh an
example uh two herbal compounds that
we’ve talked a lot about on our podcast
before and repeatedly uh including in
that test off
asteron optimization uh episode uh Tonga
ali um and fogia grus um Tonga Ali is
now taken by a large number of men and
women um Tonga Ali and fedoa typically
men I’m not sure that there are any good
studies about the effects of fedia in
women those are herbal compounds that
can have potent effects in increasing
testosterone and glutin ising hormone uh
do they work yeah they work to varying
degrees in in most everybody not
certainly not in everybody um but they
do work but they they work because
they’re potent they have effects so the
idea that herbal compounds are not
powerful um is wrong and it’s important
to remember that that can cut both ways
hence my mention of this uh observation
related to turmeric which is not to say
that some people can’t take turmeric and
feel perfectly fine maintain or even
increase their liido that sure that can
happen it’s just that for people that
are very DHT sensitive this tends to be
an issue so so unfortunately for many of
these compounds the only way to find out
is really to try them or to just
completely avoid them and decide you
don’t want to try them is fine too but
there really aren’t ways to predict who
will respond who won’t and who will be
hyperresponders and um in that case it’s
a bit of a it’s a little bit of a wild
west I’m also sort of remembering what
the point of this conversation was
supposed to be and maybe I’ll I’ll
return back to that which were some cost
free or low cost metrics um that was a
very fun tangent but nonetheless uh
another couple of ones you can do are uh
grip strength testing so if you can buy
a you know fairly cheap handgrip
dynamometer uh on any number of places
these are typically able to be purchased
for 20 to $40 or something like that
range um you can actually just test that
every day I’ve done that uh in a number
of athletes for a decent amount of time
uh admittedly I don’t do it anymore
that’s not because I disagree with it
but because we just we’re getting the
information already and it was just too
redundant but if that’s the only option
it is a great one to do I mentioned Also
earlier how I actually like speed tests
over strength tests as an earlier
indication of overreaching and so
because of that I like a vertical jump
test um if you have access to a force
plate that’s great and then you can get
uh more in-depth characteristics of the
force velocity curve and acceleration
and things like that um used a lot in
high performance situations if not
simply looking at you know your
performance and so you can kind of go
back to one of our earlier episodes when
I described coloring my fingertips with
highlighters earlier in my life you
could do the same thing and go out in
your garage and every day jump up and
touch uh that marker and see where
you’re at um so a system like that could
be done you can also use tools like uh
Force transducer and do a standard
movement against say a vertical jump or
a high Pole or something like that and
measure the velocity and just compare
that dayto day of a standard load right
so you do it every single time with the
same load um same similar thing could be
done with like a a medicine ball throw
um so you have the same ball you throw
the same thing and just sort of where
you’re at today you want to do a little
bit of warmup but not excessive here you
want to kind of get an idea of where
your Baseline is and you don’t want to
influence it by the veracity uh of the
warm up every single day because that
alone can change it same thing with
stretching uh acute static stretching
directly influences power production so
you don’t want to go out there and one
day do a 20- minute stretch before and
then then the other day you didn’t
stretch at all because that alone will
will cause uh deviations in your
performance so try to keep everything
you can think of
standardized and that’ll give you a
little bit better data remembering all
of these values the biom markers the
performance stuff they have normal
variations you just want to figure out
first and foremost what those normal
variations are for you so you have your
normal number
you have your standard deviation when
you start getting outside of that
standard deviation you start paying
attention and so that’s kind of like
what we we typically call that the gray
Zone and so if is in the gry zone we’re
fine we’re not adjusting but if it’s
outside of that whatever that is for you
recognizing that the gry zone is smaller
for some folks and larger for others but
what is normal for you and your
situation and then you can make your
decisions outside of that when you see
numbers that are consistently or more
than 3 to 5 days and in a row or close
four the last 5 days four the last six
something like that then you may have
some cause for Action well that was an
incredible description of the various
tools and modes for recovery and I
realized I jumped the gun a bit during
our discussion about food and
supplements but I like to think that it
serves as a nice uh precursor to the
next episode which is going to be all
about nutrition and supplementation if
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