The Muscle Growth Doctor: Exercise At Night Is A Terrible Idea! Grip Strength = Disease! Andy Galpin

I've never seen a single paper that shows you can't lose weight you can't get stronger all of it can be done but

you paying attention to things that just do not matter Dr Andy gpin one of the most highly respected exercise

physiologists in the field today he is the director of the center for sports performance and he's a coach to many

professional athletes I'm going to talk about how do I lose weight and how do I improve my performance mood sleep but if

you want to live as well as possible for a long time it comes down to a couple of things number one you can't not pay

attention to grip strike and in fact we can actually PR dicts Alzheimer's and Dementia risk via grip strength testing

and then leg strength and do2 Max those things will out predict how long you're going to live more than almost any

metric and I'm saying leg strength because one of the most significant issues that we face during aging it's

our Falls if you look at the risk of dying after a hip break and those are over 60 years old there is a 70% chance

of death of the next 15 years wow what is V2 Max your maximum ability to bring in and utilize oxygen there was actually

a study with 750,000 people and found smoking and diabetes at a 40% increase

risk of dying and V toax is 300% oh what do I need to be doing comes down to a couple of things if you can do this

stuff consistently you're going to be just fine first of all but why' you care

most people will go through challenges at some point in their life this is going to give you the ability to not be in those situations

anymore sorry I need to collect myself a little bit here just just a lot of part of my story that the world doesn't know

um it's absolutely crazy to me that so many of you have decided to watch our show um and so many of you have decided

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episode Dr Andy Galpin if someone's just clicked on this podcast right now and if

you were to speak freely about the things that you care about the most what exactly is it that they would walk walk

away from this conversation with in terms of value that would positively impact their

life I've done hundreds of podcasts and I have never had that question and I've certainly never had it

coming right at the gates so I love it the way I would capture it would be I

want to enhance Human Performance and when I say that I want to make sure that you're not hearing sport performance that means sport to

you fine that's great but I really break that down into three categories people want to look a certain way whatever that

means to you I don't care people want to feel a certain way and people want to perform a certain way you set the ground

rules you want to look this way when you say perform and you think perform that means X to you when you say you want to

feel that means why to you great let's establish all that and then my goal is simply to help you achieve all of those

goals so you want to be bigger and stronger and have more energy throughout the day great you want to think more clearly you want to be a better leader

athlete spouse parent that's great you want to be out of pain you want to have

a certain functionality in a certain all those things are on the table so when I say perform I mean cognitively

physically in whatever area of Department that matters for you all those are on the table we we analyze all

that we break it down and we say okay this is the targets we're going after and then my mission is just to help

anyone I'm working with but really broadly the world get better at that I

don't think I've ever seen any paper that has shown any genetic combination

that shows you can't grow muscle I've never seen a single paper that shows you can't lose weight never seen a single

indication of any physiological marker that says you can't get stronger whatever you're interested in nothing

should stop you from making some progress in some area of your physical health and if you do that you got a

chance why do you care why' you care about human performance and exercise and

cognitive performance where did that come from what was the like first Domino that fell in your

life sorry I need to collect myself a little bit here

um I've been on a lot of podcasts and there's just I've been in the media a

lot and there's just a lot of part of my story that the world doesn't know

um the shortest answer to that question was I grew up with sports being

everywhere right and and I played Sports growing up everyone I knew played Sports growing up and I personally was an

adequate athlete which means I was good but not exceptional but I wasn't terrible

either I was told uh as a teenager and by the people around me and my parents

and my grandparents that you you know you deserve nothing not in the negative way

but in terms of like no one owes you anything in this world if you want to get better at sports you better train you better work harder and in in the

most positive loving like way possible Right my I was very fortunate my parents were incredibly positive and supportive

and there's no negativity there and so it was just as simple as a matter of fact of hey you say you want to win then

why aren't you working hard than everybody else just the way that my parents raised us and the way that my

grandparents and my siblings um there was just a sense of

like

my sorry I'm trying to it's okay give it more genuine answer but um there's only

so most people will go through challenges at some point in their life and

uh I'm no different

I was just very fortunate to where my parents were in a position that my dad was a construction worker my

grandparents were construction workers we grew up in the country my mom did whatever she could to you know keep our

house and things like that and they raised us in a very positive way they always said you're

going to go to college I don't care what you do what you spend your career on whatever but you're just not doing what we did just because they wanted us to

have an easier and better life um so so for me Human Performance was

that hey here's your chance like here's your chance to get out and do something

um this is going to give you the ability to not be in those situations

anymore and I get to do that by being around Sports all the time which is is pretty great so why I

care what is the emotion

Andy sorry I've never been on this road in real public before

um there's a lot of things that people will go through in life that are out of their

control to me this represents stuff that will be within your control and so I give you the chance to

make changes that you can control your strength and your health at least you

got that you tell me where the parameters are here because I want to make sure that you're comfortable but from that I

understand that in your childhood there were things that you you couldn't control and in in what I heard there was

that this was something that you could give you that

control I don't want to overplay my own situation

I had a tremendous childhood had a tremendous life again especially never being around

alcohol or violence and things like that like I had a lot of great breaks and still had loving parents support

positivity there were a number of years you know as a child that were really difficult and just being like man my

parents never did anything like again never violence never alcohol never

negative never hate just okay fine that was really horrible really bad break

what are we going to do we're going to work harder financially difficult yeah for sure

um in other ways but the the thing I appreciate is

like many of the things the biggest one is just like it doesn't matter we're

moving forward like not in terms of like ignoring it we're letting it go but like okay great bad deal here got real bad

luck but we're we're we're pressing on we are going to overcome this

stuff when we start talking about exercise and health and performance and all these

things what have what's been your academic and life experience that has

built the foundation of everything that you know can you give me a little bit of a

walkr yeah so I have an undergraduate degree in what's called exercise science can you iology it's same thing I got a

master's in human movement sciences and then my PhD is in what's called human bioenergetics and what happened

professionally once you graduated from there so as soon as I finished my PhD I started my lab at Cal State Fullerton um

so I work and I'm now one of the directors of What's called the center for sport performance there so within that we've got multiple

Laboratories biome mechanics strength conditioning um motor control motor

learning Etc and they all study the the mission of that Center actually is to

study and disseminate research that enhances Human Performance what is the range of people that you work with that

come to you and say Dr Andy Galpin I need help with this oh oh my gosh so we

have traditionally spent most of my career working with our pro athletes um I've been fortunate to work with Olympic

gold and silver medalists world champions the highest contract in Major League Baseball and golf All Pro that

every position in the NFL etc etc but by far in terms of numbers wise we've worked with more executive clients and

than professional athletes so our coaching program rapid health and performance is like what if we took what

we've been doing for a decade in only these Elite athletes and put a system

together for non-athletes and that's exactly what we've done with that company and it's gone exceptionally well

people that tend to come in for that uh kind of fall into a couple of buckets a lot of times it's kind of like your your

adult athletes if you will so I want to run a marathon I want to do something like that but the overwhelming majority

of people are just going hey I want to just feel better I want to look better and I want to perform better and I want

to minimize my likelihood of missing what I mean by that is you can try a diet you can try a thing and like see

what happens for six weeks and that's very effective but some people have more

money than they have time and some some people have been through the ringer I've been trying for a year two years five

years I haven't slept in a decade what's it going to take I don't want to miss anything and so we do extremely

comprehensive testing uh it takes a very long time to finish all of our testing we can get a volumetric measurement of

each muscle on your body so I can look at the size of each ind1 we can look at your V2 Max we can look at cognitive

performance we're running very in-depth sleep assessments we're looking at environmental factors in your house like

we're running everything possible that we go through with our highle athletes and by doing that we're able to see and

find what we call Performance anchors so these are things that are putting the most constrain on your

physiology and so the analogy I'll say is imagine you want to drive a car faster people's initial inclination is

to hit the gas pedal that's great my inclination is to look at your left foot

which is I want to make sure your foot isn't on a break somewhere so before I you the gas pedal

let's make sure our left foot's off the brick and in this case that is a constraint what are you doing to hold

back your own biology and so we can able to find those things and then because of that we can give them extremely specific

Solutions and our program tends to be so effective because we can go through all

this analysis that allows us to then give them very simple and hypers

specific plans when you talk about that left foot on the break analogy which I

thought was a really nice sort of crystallizing analogy what are the most common um

things that we have our left foot on the break with in terms of are there fundamental things that you see most most often that are kind of getting in

the way of us reaching our Optimal Performance yeah you want to think about these in a couple of buckets we call

these stressors yeah so the way that your body works at all times in fact I think this is one of the traits that

separates human physiology from any other animal we have a better ability to adapt

and respond to our environment that's the single thing your body is trying to do at all times right put pushing and

pulling it's always reading and sensing trying to get to a certain place stressor comes in and it adjusts okay

great that's a good thing we categorize those stressors into two major areas what we call Visible stressors and then

hidden stressors visible stressors are things you're doing that you are visible and aware of so you went and worked out

you felt that great that's a stressor you drank alcohol you felt that you didn't sleep tonight you feel these

things right you can see them you smoke cigarettes like you have all these things you your diet your nutrition so

all those are analyzed from a perspective of there one of the most common ones well the obvious ones youve

probably covered countless times right don't drink alcohol in excess and don't drink um try to have quality water and

sunlight and honestly like the the you know 15-year-old Health like could probably

tell you like what are the five pillars in of health and like that would you would line those things up pretty well

now where things get more interesting in our stuff is the hidden stressors so these are things that are putting equal

or greater stress on your system but you can't see or feel them so this could be

things like a vitamin or mineral insufficiency you no one wakes up and

goes ah man like my vitamin D is low today you know you don't see that you don't feel that right where you know

like man I ate all you could eat pizza last night like I know why I feel this way because of that thing I did last night um if there is a pathogen if there

is an something suppressing your immune system If U endocrine system is not happy with something going on oxidative

stress something like that could be happening um a lot of times these can be falling into sleep as well we've seen a

number of times where people have a um a self- perceived I sleep okay I sleep pretty

decent and then we can actually run real true in depth analysis and we can see hu in fact we've had multiple times where

we've like very likely saved somebody's life because there's self-perceived sleep was pretty good and we were able

to actually see like your your steps away from a heart attack um and effectively put them basically in a hospital within a few weeks and and

we're told many times like you basically saved this guy's life that's happened countless times so there are things that

are going on that are beyond your perception that we can see um whether

it's through some of our molecular biomarkers whether it's again our brain

analysis like a lot of the stuff that we can see um other ones that are common are things like muscle strength muscle

performance people don't realize how telling those can be over your overall physiological Health but you don't

necessarily see them a really easy example is most people um are somewhat aware that grip strength yeah is a

incredibly important predictor of in fact there's a really cool paper it's titled something like grip strength is

an indispensable marker of Aging something like that right which is basically saying like you can't not pay

attention to grip strike and we've actually published a paper last year Tommy wood um from the University of

Washington neuroscientists LED this project and we've got a couple of them going but one of the things things we found there is is we can actually

predict um Alzheimer's and Dementia risk via grip strength testing and strongly we actually have a

project right now that we validated in the UK biobank which is 500,000 people or so we validated it in the American

equivalent which is called n Hanes um we can actually predict muscle quality from four blood markers and we can also

predict the risk of dementia as well from those four basic biomarkers and those are also directly tied to grip

right and so looking at things like that is saying okay you have some potential signs of of either short-term or

long-term physiological stress that's happening and you don't necessarily feel it yet because you're 35 or 45 and you

don't feel super weak but we're seeing these early signs one other example of that and I and I'll caution to say that

there's only been one paper on this so in science that's a way of saying we'll see like okay but just as

one example this paper came out last year and it showed that the asymmetry in your grip strength so the difference in

strength between your right and left hand is actually an early predictor of neurological

Decline and the reason is think about this in order for your muscles to contract they have to be sent a signal

from your central nervous system your brain and brain stem and if you're having significant asymmetries from one

side to the other and by this they meant over 10% so if you have a grip strength of 40 kilos on the right hand 10% of

that would be 4 kilos so if your left hand is 30 kilos that's way more than

10% difference that may be an early sign of of early denervation of that left

side and so neurologically I'm potentially losing ground there so just

things like that are are things were able to detect this is hey we're seeing things that are putting stress on your

system whether you realize that or not so they can be these molecular

biomarkers but they can also be other things that people just either don't have a technology or they don't know how

to or or they're not aware that that can give you tremendous insights into the overall stress as scientifically we call

this allostatic load or allostasis but that's the marker where after ultimately and in the case of grip

strength I find that so fascinating because I was reading about that in your work um a while ago that it could also

be the case that I've just trained one side to totally it could so it's if you've trained one side then you're yeah

then if you've only gone after one side you've done either a sport or you have a lifestyle or an occupation that is really one side dependent it

could be as simple as but for the typical person we tend to yeah be fairly even and asymmetrical sorry symmetrical

with our grip strength yeah remember these are population averages sure right

this is one study it's you know the individual person always uh means less to the individual person than it does to

the population when we were talking about some of these invisible stresses um my partner came back to the house two

days ago and said babe I've just found out from the doctor because she did a bunch of tests and she hadn't been feeling so great but one of the things

we found out was that she was very deficient in vitamin D and it made me wonder how many people are walking

around and you must have seen this in some of the the lab work you've done with a deficiency in things like vitamin

D and what is what is then the symptom of that deficiency so vitamin D is one of the

more common deficiencies you will see you will not see or feel that oh

this is another example of potentially hidden stressor right what could you be experiencing vitamin D is associated

with low bone mineral density low muscle size low muscle strength cognitive

function uh immune function mental health so you could be

experiencing any number of things and vitamin D being low could be contributing to that it's very likely to

be the sole explainer of any individual thing but it could be playing a larg

impact vitamin D is also one of the higher safety profiles and so typically

what I tell people is I don't like when people go after supplements specifically vitamins and minerals you can get away

with vitamins a little bit more minerals be really careful of but vitamin D honestly you can go pretty wild with it

and the chances of you being deficient or even just subclinically low as we'll call that chances are pretty high and

the chances of you running into issues with the vitamin D are also very low so it's one of those ones that mask like

pretty good chance to be effective pretty low risk I'm okay with people

really pushing vitamin D obviously supplements the better answer is the sunlight right yeah but if if you want

to take a supplement and you don't have the don't have money for or availability to get blood testing done and you're not

sure going after a little bit of vitamin D is there are worse things you could do we'll put it that way so I'm okay with

that one are there other deficiencies that you're more concerned about in terms of um vitamins yeah well well I

you should be concerned about vitamin D being low because it is so effective in so many areas that's generally how vitamins and minerals work it's also

very very very common I maybe I I sort of inadvertently blew past that so much because there there are things that we

are going after much more that people are unaware of um when you see vitamin D

on a blood panel and if it is low you can take vitamin D that said you do want

to be really careful if you get blood work done of trying to just move those numbers up and down and I'm going to say

this for a couple of reasons vitamin D is one of those ones that's okay if it's low take vitamin D directly move it up

no problems there that said when you go to interpret blood work you have to

realize most of those values when you're being told that number is high or that number is

low I won't say they're irrelevant but they're misleading at the least and that

to say you've got some blood work done right and it gives you a whole bunch of things back let's say you did a basic thing

like what we'll call a CBC and CMP so a complete blood count and a cardom metabolic panel those are like the most common things you'll get and you'll see

all kinds of stuff in there white blood cell counts and vitamins and and hormones and things like that okay great

and then on the as you look over at the paper on the right side it's going to tell you a reference range that reference range is going to tell you

whether you're high or low right and so on that test you did right um it

probably said you know your vitamin D level is 20 and it should be between 30 and 100 something like that great well

it's that 30 to 100 part where things get squarely because did they take into

account ethnicity okay those numbers differ based on your ethnic background right

what is normal as we said earlier is also not the same as what is common okay and it's definitely not the same as

optimal now remember and I'll try not to say this too many times I don't deal with disease I disee I deal with like

I'm not not in a disease state but I want to get better and optimized and why I'm drawing that distinction is because

on a blood test you're looking for do you clinically flag for an actual

metabolic disease or otherwise okay most of those things are set against that and

so their reference ranges are built off of databases like the UK biobank like

and hannes here who are generally not healthy people and the people that are in those data in fact we actually ran

this and published this last year that in the and haes database in America at least the people that had the muscle

mass had no association between their muscle mass and their exercise history which means these people did not

gain muscle by exercising now some people exercise in these databases but you're talking very very small numbers in addition when they

build reference ranges so they're building it off of populations that are not the healthiest and as you're aware

our our world is not getting healthier mhm so those numbers are moving okay now

when they build a reference range they use typically most companies by the way every company that you get your blood draw from has a different

range so they're not all the same okay so that it's not like they're not nefarious it's not it's just like they

have different databases to pick from many companies will give you a reference range based on their own database okay

so all you're seeing is like what's normal for the people that bought their lab right not population okay and they

use a 95% curve which is to say 95% of people land within this spell curve and so if

you were within that you're normal 2 and a half% at the top 2 and a half% low so

what that could mean is you could be in like the 94th percentile and be told you're in the

reference range easy example is something like blood glucose okay now a normal blood glucose is going to be in

the mid or mid 80s rather 80 85 something like that okay technically

you're not going to flag on most people's databases until you get past like 110 120 130 plus you're actually

diabetes and so you can come and flag for like 108 and technically medically you're not

diabetic yet you're not pre-diabetic yet but there's no world on this Earth where somebody has a fasting blood glucose of

108 and they are healthy or they are optimally healthy we'll say right that is in fact we have strong evidence you

get past 95 you're starting to increase your risk of oxidative stress retinopathy tons of issues happen with a

consistent blood fting blood glucose over 95 and so a great example that would be you would be within the

reference range there you'd be told your normal and then I would look at and be like that's absolutely suboptimal is it

clinically officially diabetic no but I'm telling you right now to have to perform at your absolute best that's not

the range you want to be in I'm going to make it worse for you so the reference ranges are one particular concern the

second one is and the reason I brought this up with vitamin D vitamin D is okay it's low you push it up no problem most

your markers you don't want to do that with though because physiology is responding to physiology which means

something moves something up and then it moves something else down in the way it's the push pull thing so if you don't

know what you're pushing up you might be pulling something else down you're pulling something else down it might be pushing something else up you don't know

what you're doing there so you don't want to treat those markers as Like A and B and C are low I should make them

all go up you need to understand why they're doing that low testosterone is an easy example low testosterone is

often times a symptom of something going on you need to go backwards and figure out why is your testosterone low to

begin with right because if you can do that then then you get out of the way testosterone will go up we've done this

a countless times with people right we've we've doubled testosterone more times than I could even count without

using hormones at all again I'm not against hormone therapy like at all but

you don't always necessarily need it if you can understand well why is your testosterone suppressed as it is if it

truly is sometimes it's not like we you know there are normal ranges for different people but if we can see

something going on where you've got immunosuppress depression or something else happening that's again subclinical

so you're not sick all the time you're not like in a hospital bed it's like oh okay we can see a and C happening those

are known to be associated with you know compromising testosterone clear those things up and then back out of the way

and watch testosterone just take off easy example this one is um my my

colleague Dan Garner he did this one famously he had an athlete or a client

who actually had a a number of markers that are in a blood test so basophil

specifically that are associated with allergic reactions not an allergy test okay but he noticed that this particular

individual was doing everything right but that number was off the chart found that actually was happening is there was

a a tree in this gentleman's neighborhood that was causing him a little bit of a response so he had to

make sure he stayed away from that tree his basil fill number went back to normal and this testosterone rocketed

really absolutely it gets more complicated okay

so take something like albumin albumin's a protein it's the uh it's actually the

protein on egg whites which is great it does a lot of things it's a carrier protein though so it carries um breed

blood cells it carries cortisol through your body it's also what's called an acute phase reactant mean it it will

respond to acute changes in your body albumin is is a really good way to measure hydration most people have no

idea about that right it's because when you get dehydrated a little bit albumin is measured based on concentration so

how much is there relative to how much blood so if you take the total amount of blood down then the concentration of

albumin looks like it goes up right you see what I'm saying so in when you're

dehydrated albumin levels will go up however when you're inflamed it goes the opposite

direction and so if you look on a blood test if you're a little bit dehydrated a little bit inflamed what's albumin going

to look like level dead in the middle yeah this is exactly what happens when people do things like I feel suboptimal

or terrible or just not at my best but my labs look okay nothing's off the

markers that much like I don't I'm not clinically deficient or excessive to something so everything can be within

the reference ranges but given the reference range problem given the association problem and giving other

things that we uh really happen as that multifaceted approach we can absolutely see what's explaining why you're feeling

what you're feeling dead in your blood panels without anything ever being off

your reference range in that particular case if your alumin was up or down and

then you went in and did something specifically to change your alumen you've actually now messed with the entire system when it had nothing to do

with alumen it was just the fact that you needed to drink some more water and lower overall inflammation so I say that

to caution folks of saying like be really careful about especially if you're going to go to minerals and then

absolutely with medications please let a qualified physician or somebody that understands blood work at this level

really make sure that they're helping you um One More Time vitamin D is a good example of something that's okay you

push that one up no problem there for the most part there there are times when it is but the rest of them folks like be

a bit careful there so what are the if I if I stay away from the temptation of the industry that says like drugs and

minerals and supplements are the answer to everything and I come back down to the sort of fundamentals of health and

performance sleep is one of the fundamentals right oh it pro arguably the core yeah so thinking about sleep

then so many of us are suffering with sleep my sleep for whatever reason is

really really good in terms of duration I don't know about quality we can you're

making a face on me I don't know about quality but the duration is great and I speak to so many people I think

increasing numbers that are struggling with sleep for whatever reason if someone comes to your Labs you know and

you realize that there's an issue with sleep a how do you realize there's an issue and what are the first steps you take to help correct that so that they

can get that foundation in place so I want to know exactly how you're sleeping so I know exactly why you're sleeping

that way so then we know exactly what to do about it and this is why frankly our success rates are so high okay what do

we want to do I want to run the most in-depth analysis of your sleep absolutely possible so I have a company called absolute rest and so what we do

is we actually build full functional sleep labs in people's houses and this is all Wireless so we

can run full full clinical grade FDA approved sleep studies in your house you

don't have to go to a hospital you don't have to go to anywhere else right um we're going to run that we're going to run this all wirelessly and we're going

to run uh we're looking at not only depth of sleep um the the the the gold

standard in science is called polysomnography right so it's the like the wires attached to your brain all that stuff actually don't think

polygraphy is the best way there's a better way to do it called cardiopulmonary coupling where we can actually look at your autonomic nervous

system and how that's actually responding so I prefer that method we'll do both we we actually run full PSG and

um cardiopulmonary coupling as well but we're looking at that so we can look at are you do you have brexis like are you

are your jaw clenching at night uh we're looking at you are your leg moving we're doing that also while we're looking at

position so we're having this on your right side on your left side on your back where you at um we can actually do

a whole bunch of other fancy stuff with ocular metrics with eye tracking with facial scanning and like all kinds of

other stuff but we want to most specifically look at how you're sleeping we're looking at then why and so in

terms of why you're sleeping that's in a bunch of different buckets one of the buckets is environmental and so we actually run full-time environmental

scanning of your sleep environment we actually have a little device I take take it with me like everywhere I go so

we have our athletes always checking the environment when they're in hotels and places like that we can always run environmental scans to make sure that um

it's an optimal thing so we're looking for temperature humidity but carbon dioxide dander pollen allergens molds

things like that we can all measure in real time instantaneously on that thing so we want to make sure nothing in the

environment is causing the sleep if we can check off environment then we're looking at behaviors um you've probably

heard a lot about sleep hygiene and you know don't watch exciting TV Thrillers before night don't get on your laptop

and work and answer emails and then fall asleep try to fall asleep five minutes later that's all behavioral stuff right

and I'm happy to talk about as many of those as possible um but that that's the like stuff people have kind of shared

the world a lot right but then those are very true and very real outside of Behavioral then we're looking at

physiological so what are your actual melatonin concentrations how much serotonin are you making dopamine are

there what is it in your blood biochemistry uh precursors what is actually happening so we're taking

salivary markers and blood markers to see what is going on in your physiology that is U potentially causing or as a

result iron concentrations B vitamins like a ton of stuff that are that are needed for proper sleep physiology we're

measuring all of that we also are measuring psychology so we have a very in-depth um way to to evaluate

psychology of sleep so previous trauma and PTSD and associations there's a

funny enough there is a ton of actual Sleep Disorders caused by people's

psychological state of their sleep meaning we have had a lot of success you

know fixing sleep problems because people just have such a negative association with their sleep because they've s slept so poorly for so many

years that they actually start getting anxiety when it starts getting late at night because they just know they're not going to sleep well and so now actually

the the problem is gone but they have have such a problem they get into this is a common one of like I get so tired I

get so tired I can't I fall asleep on the couch and then I get in bed I lay there for hours or the the classic one

we get here is I fall asleep immediately but then two to three hours in the night I wake up and then I'm shot awake okay

great like those are all like pretty clear solu or causes a lot of the times so they have very clear Solutions um

that are not not very often supplements what do you do in those cases cuz I a lot of people that have messaged me

speak to exactly what you've described that yeah so we would go back and actually figure out uh again is this

behavioral so are you doing the no offense the idiot proof stuff like are you drinking are you like doing all

those things so a lot of times it is simple as that a lot of the times you don't need to spend a dollar on any assessment it is really truly do the

stuff people have told you 100 times to stop doing I mean on the psychological Point yeah if it's just an anxiety reaction well I started there for a

reason because that can be causing it okay so it is an actual sleep problem you're happening you're having because

of your behaviors okay now let's say it's not all those things remember

earlier when I said your body's superpower is adapting responding right that's exactly what's happening if you

get into bed and you learn a pattern of continuing to lay there and stay awake

or wake up in certain hours that pattern will be recognized and that pattern will be repeated you have to break that

pattern so how do you do it this is not very common but I'll give you like an

extreme example okay there's a thing called Sleep restrict rtion training okay it's very effective but it is

brutal we don't go to it often one more time but we have gone to it I have used

it it can be successful this is the same for people who wake up after a few hours or struggle to fall asleep so what you

do is let's say um you want to get up at we'll make the math easy here 5 o'clock

in the morning okay great and you typically get in bed at 10: and you lay there and you're kind of up all night and you have all these sleep issues

right and then you wake up at 5: you're exhausted so you have to have Cafe caffeine all day and then you're up from your caffeine so then you have to have

melatonin right I can't tell you how many times we've looked at people's next morning melatonin concentrations and

seeing them 20 30 or 40 times higher than the upper limit on the reference

range value so then what happens when you're walking around with extreme

amounts of melatonin the next day like you're sedated great so how do you break this cycle well one of the ones is you

stop those Habits Like not that much caffeine that late and stop the Melatonin okay I don't like melatonin

like at all very much for almost anything but we're going to set the clock and you're going to wake up at 5

o'clock in the morning I don't care what happens you're waking up at 5: in the morning period and we're not even going

to get into bed until 11:59 so you're going to have five hours

of sleep at most and you know what happens night one you lay there and you don't fall asleep because you're in that

pattern right and you're also staring the clock knowing I have to get up at 5 and you're laying there worrying and

thinking about how you're not sleeping and it is brutal and you're going to have a couple of hours of sleep and you're going to wake up at 5: and you

are going to get up at 5: every single day period no sleeping in a weekends okay you're also going to not get into

bed no matter how tired you are you're not getting into bed until 11:59 you do that for a week what will

happen very quickly is your body will start to realize a new pattern of yo the

second she lets us lay down you better fall asleep and you better not mess around during those 5 hours cuz we're

not getting any naps or not getting anything else right you will start to fall asleep quickly and you will jump

right into deep sleep and you'll you'll go through a a pretty compressed but a proper sleep

architecture every week then you add back 10 to 15 minutes so next week you

go to bed at 11:45 and you know what happens next week when you get into bed at 11:45 you lay around falling trying

to fall asleep no chance right cuz now you've got a week with pretty gnarly

sleep restriction you fall asleep immediately 10 or 15 minutes a week after that and so what you end up doing

is you backfill until you get back up to your eight or eight and a half hours but the pattern you're learning the entire

time is when I go to sleep I fall asleep and I do not wake up until that next

time so you stop the overnight wakings you stop the struggling to fall asleep it takes a couple of months clearly and

it is brutal but it is very very effective how effective from your research we've never had a problem with

somebody and not working really putting it that way now again we don't use it

very often yeah you don't need to yeah you can do a subtler version of those

things um so I want to acknowledge that as an extreme sort of thing and I don't recommend doing it especially if you

have legitimate health concerns like you want to have an MD or walk through that

something like that on you you can do it on a more condensed scale though if you

generally if you're laying there struggling to fall asleep uh almost every sleep scientist is going to tell you you get out of

bed because you don't want to set that pattern of like every night I toss and turn for an hour and a half that's a

problem right and so you want to break out of that pattern one way or the other to not just set up that routine and the

same thing would be this is why it's important to not do things first thing

in the morning that are deleterious to sleep so rolling over waking up and immediately turning the TV on or

immediately looking at social media because your body will anticipate that response it will then start a Cascade

prior to that that kicks you up and starts waking you up earlier and earlier every morning because it knows that

stimulation coming at 6 am. and so instead of you waking up at 600 am with your alarm and then checking your phone

your body starts to wake you up at 5:45 5:30 5:15 because it just knows that thing is coming at 6 and so making sure

that your morning is not jump started um in that direction that it really does

wake up appropriately is really important to those that like wake up super early and they just can't get back to sleep there's obviously a a

well-known might be a myth I don't know that says we should sleep for eight hours a night well anytime you throw out numbers

like that again you're talking on average for most people most of the time uh we certainly have some people that

are high performing at seven maybe seven and a half um we certainly have plenty that need nine 15 need more um there's

actually excellent research on um it's called Sleep extension research when you look at so this I love this this is a

great example of going from like are you talking about risk of long-term health or are you talking about maximizing

performance okay now the research is clear going from like s and a half hours

to 9 hours is probably not needed to minimize your risk of brain health over

there okay like seven out probably fine however if you're trying to maximize your performance it's a different answer

the Sleep extension research will show you that the most classic one share M's

work out of Stanford many years ago now but she took the Stanford basketball team and she had them sleep an

additional 2 hours a night in season right they asked them to sleep for 10 hours a night the end result was I think

like 1.8 hours of additional sleep per night for five to eight weeks in season

okay now there's no control group there's there's lots of potential criticisms I'll acknowledge all that but

it doesn't matter because what we're getting at here you you'll see the bigger point and so she did this in high

level athletes in season right now these also were not chronically sleep deprived

so they didn't go through like three hours of sleeping like that they were sleeping seven hours or whatever and said go from seven to or uh eight hours

go from8 to 10 on average those numbers different for every person but that's what she did and what she saw was a 9%

Improvement in free throw percentage enormous right wow about a 9%

Improvement in three-point shooting percentage Improvement m in Reaction Time reduced sleepiness um improved mood

and a handful of other markers improved in season in division one basketball

players now probably would have gotten better in season anyways right like that tends to happen again no control group

so I don't want to oversell it but I think it's pretty powerful saying hey going from okay sleep to maximizing your

sleep pretty big improvements um in all these tests in some of the tests like the the reaction time test they did

daily for the whole season so it wasn't just like well the one time they did a test they happen to get better that day same thing the free throw and

three-point shooting percentage stuff was done like in a weekly practice and so they measured it you know weekly over

the season in pretty marked improvements that's been repeated in tennis swimming

cycling it's been done in as little as 45 minutes of extra sleep per night for 3 days and we're seeing improvements of

reductions in cortisol by 20% as been shown in rugby players uh reductions in

body fat improvements in V2 Max all this stuff has been shown when you go from this like even seven to 7 and a half

hour range to eight eight plus um there's been there's actually evidence of 30 additional minutes per night uh

reduces likelihood of getting a cold by four times so good to great it's not the same

thing now I run many companies in a lab I have two small children like I I I

know some of you out there like oh my God if I could only sleep for 10 hours like trust me like my wife will murder

me just hearing that but my point is not that my point is to say look what if

what if that work at Stanford was exaggerated okay so instead of improving

3point percentage by 9% it was actually 5% or four like I don't know but who

cares right pretty powerful and look at all the other studies like they're they're all generally in science when

you see multiple studies from different Labs different scientists different groups different

populations and they're all generally pointing towards the same thing the numbers aren't exact and the mechanisms

yeah yeah yeah but that is when you start to get real confidence and with sleep extension that's where I believe

the collective research is it's like there's a lot of studies from a lot of different scientists and a lot of different athletes measuring different

things and you see this 3 to 10% Improvement in most measures when you go

from anywhere between 45 to an additional two hours per night for as little as 3 Days To up to 5 to seven

weeks so uh from a normal person perspective if you can sleep even 30

more minutes it's probably going to matter if you can if you need it if you're person who needs a nap and does

well with napping that can be your additional 30 minutes or 45 minutes or 90 minutes or whatever um so different

people will get this differently I personally hate napping like as as a personal human but we'll use it a lot a

lot of actually in our um like our Executives and CEOs we do a ton of of very concentrated like intentional

napping that's super super effective so whatever it is for you um I personally do better if I just go to bed earlier I

can't sleep in like that that will never happen but if I can definitely go to sleep earlier I can't nap those things

so whatever works for you in your situation and your physiology but it's generally a good idea um I can't make

the argument that you'll live longer by going from 8 hour hour to sleep to 8:30 not at all but I can make a strong

argument that it will make you perform better what about sleep debt you know because there's a lot of misconceptions

that if I sleep for four hours today I just make it up tomorrow by sleeping another four hours and I think I've lived under that illusion for a certain

several years of my life yeah it's an excuse I tell myself I'll just make it up on the weekend the here's the

misconceptions about sleep debt um one of the guys that works for us at Absolute rest Steven lley from

Harvard he he will always laugh about this and you'll say yeah man you can't time travel as in like you can't go

backwards and make the debt up so if you only suff for four hours you'll never get those additional four hours back but

that's not what we're saying with sleep Deb okay you can't do that but you can absolutely go from consistent diminished

sleep to getting back out of that sleep debt so when you think about sleep debt that way you absolutely can do it you

phrased it well though a second ago which is to say it is a huge mistake to think I'll have inconsistent sleep short

sleep and then just sleep more and over the course of seven days as long as the total amount of hours add up to the same

I'm fine and that is is a terrible strategy and I don't think a single sleep scientist in the world would

disagree with me there trust me we interact with as many of these people as you can so one of the things um you

mentioned earlier you said your total sleep duration is good okay great that's only one component of sleep you also

mentioned Sleep Quality that's another really important component I would argue the overwhelming majority of people have

never had an accurate assessment of Sleep Quality but that's another thing right what people also don't realize the

Sleep consistency and in fact a lot of the data will suggest that sleep consistency is more important than Total

Sleep Time meaning you need to be going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time plus or minus 30 minutes is the

goal I'm a human too I will stay up you know later and you know occasionally do

things like that so we'll give our people typically 45 minutes a grace period but as like a your default State

you should be trying to go to bed and waking up plus or minus 20 to 30 minutes

most of your nights um if you can do that you will see many of the benefits

of longer duration by simply getting more consistent the other major component of sleep here is sleep

timing so um the performing at the same time of day the same type of

tasks is as important as sleep duration and Sleep Quality meaning we we take

advantage of this with athletes all the time you can predict winning percentage of NFL games NBA games NHL games and

Major League Baseball games the big four in America over a 30-year span can be predicted by simply looking at who

performed not in their time zone but who performed in the time that was their

normal circadian time what I mean by that is let's say you had a West Coast team whether they

travel to the East Coast or not doesn't matter but if they played on the East Coast at the same time of day that they

normally play on the west coast it doesn't matter that they got on a plane for three hours they they performed at

the same time of day that they normally did they have a competitive Advantage somewhere between two to 4% depending on

the study maybe a little higher over the team that is playing at home in their same building if they're playing at a

different time than they normally play so I'll give you like one example we worked with the univ University of

Washington football team this year on their sleep and so if they play a normal West Coast game at

1:00 um in normal West Coast Football Time 1 p.m. and then we had to go to the east coast which we didn't have to too

often but next year we're going to start having to go there right and we got there and we played a game in Ohio but

we played it at 4 o'clock Ohio time which is still one o'clock our time then we don't have any concerns with jet

lager travel but in fact in that case the Ohio team who typically plays at you

a different time is having to compete way earlier or way later then they're actually at a at a circadian

disadvantage because we're playing at the same local circadian time so it's not the time change that gets people we

do the same thing by the way with with our executive professional clients when especially like negotiations if you're

doing like a team meeting you have to think well that's great but if you're going to like actually have to battle somebody like negotiation or make really hard decision I want you making that

decision on your local schedule and I want your opponent off

schedule don't don't tell anybody who said that you'll have an advantage so you get the East Coast

person to have to have a a a 400 PM or 5:00 p.m West Coast meeting that's 8 or

N9 o'clock their time their their cognitive performance is going to be lower than yours or the inverse so we

make sure we give our people advantages I was thinking about the gym because the time that I go to the gym fluctuates wildly sometimes I go in the morning and

I'm going to be honest because it's what I have to do sometimes I go at midnight terrible idea I know you're gonna say

that Yeah we actually have we encountered this a number of times where we see uh sleep issues we see energy

issues we see struggling to lose body fat issues things like that and they come in and they think they want this

like secret recipe of supplements and you know blood markers and they want all this stuff and I'm like we do it I'm

like yo you got to stop training at night and we start looking at things like their respiratory rate their HRV

other markers of Sleep Quality and it can be as simple as the fact that you are doing too much high intensity stuff

in the evening that has a carryover that carryover can be a couple of hours for some people it could be six hours for

other people and so if you are doing a a training session at 10 p.m. you better expect not to sleep very well that's

going to happen now some people are a little bit more resilient to that and others it's really really really damaging and so we have to pull people

off of exercise a lot at that time or minimum go hey yo for you if you're

going to train at night it needs to be restorative training short duration get a little sweat going don't get your

heart rate up too high don't do anything too neurologically fatiguing and then get out of there we got to do our harder

work in the morning um I'm just Mak it's not always the case but it's more often than not that we have to peel people

back that said again I work with professional athletes we play major league baseball games at 7 o'clock we're

not done till 10 or 11 whether it's like hey they literally can't control it that's their job or you know schedule

wise whatever you you can work around it the world is not perfect but in an ideal scenario you

really want to pay attention to that because that can can seriously affect what are the topics on sleep that most

people just aren't talking about because you're right there's a theit proof stuff we all know about um but but from your

research you must have discovered another set of issues that just don't get the same level of Spotlight and

attention yeah um I mean I could I could go on about this stuff for a long time

we've mentioned the environmental piece of it really important we actually have a a literature review in review right

now that that should be published fairly soon entirely on environmental factors

Rel I've never thought about it before when you start talking about sort of pathogens in the environment I thought Jesus Christ is that I didn't know that

was an issue oh oh yeah yeah CO2 I didn't think that was an issue when I was asleep oh absolutely so think about

it this way when you take a breath in you breathe in oxygen when you take an exhale and you breathe out you're

breathing out CO2 so the difference is O2 and CO2 is the carbon molecule now

your tissue is breaking down car carbon for all the metabolism in fact the way that you produce all of your energy

doesn't matter if you're using carbohydrates or fat remember fat is just a big long chain of carbon that's

what fat molecules are carbohydrates are a carbon that has a water on it it is a

carbon that is been hydrated so the chemical equation for like glucose blood sugar is C6

h126 which means six carbons and six H2O that's all carbohydrates are right

they're big chains of carbon so whether you're using carbohydrates or fat it doesn't matter their the end product of

metabolism is going to be three things water ATP which is the central energy

currency and carbon dioxide great so it doesn't matter what you're using for fuel it doesn't matter what you're using

the fuel for exercise digestion building your immune system thinking it doesn't

matter remember your brain is a massive suck of of energy right uses the majority of your ATP throughout the days

is to power your brain so great doesn't matter what it's coming from or what it's being used more metabolism for any

reason from any Source results in more carbon dioxide buildup you take the carbon dioxide out of your organs and

tissue and you put it in your blood your body is paying attention to carbon dioxide deeply right that's one of the

primary ways in which you regulate your pH your body will regulate PH almost

over almost anything else that it has uh blood sugar pH um blood pressure things

like that are like the tight things that want to mess with ph is arguably the number one thing and the reason is if

you get too alkaline or too acidic enzymes don't work so everything shuts

down so you want to keep your pH will stay very very very tight you could do basically whatever you want you could eat and drink you could do anything you

want and it's going to keep pH like really really tight right it's hard hard hard to change so it's watching that CO2

you take a breath in of O O2 you're pretty much using that to run and regulate cellular

metabolism you're managing O2 by altering respiration and so if you were

to hold your breath right now and you were to 10 seconds 15 seconds 20 seconds

would go on right now I you could actually do this at home I would encourage you to hit pause and do this if you can not while

driving if you don't breathe what's going to happen is you're going to not breathe in oxygen okay fine but really

you're going to start building up CO2 because the way that you do is you build it up in the blood you get it to the pulmonary system and then you exhale and

you get rid of it so you're breathing your respir ation rate is entirely determined by how much O2 or how much

CO2 you want in your system that's what regulates respiration such to say that air hunger you're feeling when you

holding your breath it's not that you're running out of oxygen you have anerobic metabolism you can produce bolt loads of

energy without oxygen you have enough oxygen in your system currently to go extensive amounts of time you're not

running out of oxygen what you're feeling is a buildup of CO2 it's the CO2 that drives your respiration so when you

then breathe out you've exhaled and then you're probably going to go and breathe pretty hard for a few times because what

you're saying is there was too much CO2 build up I need to dump it so I can lower that level okay now

physiologically we call that hypo Capa Capa is is carbon dioxide and hypo is

low if you breathe a bunch hyperventilate you're getting CO2 concentrations very very very low bring

it back if you hold your breath and hypo ventilate you let CO2 concentrations go up CO2 concentrations have a

bidirectional relationship between Psychology and Physiology okay so if CO2 Rises not only

do you feel a physical sensation in your chest you feel a physical panic but you'll feel a psychological change right

it is telling you you need to move into what's called sympathetic drive this is your fight flight or freeze right and

this is great if you think about this from a normal electric perspective we'll get to a more interesting one here a

second if I start moving and start expending energy I start building up CO2 I want my brain to know hey this is

potentially a fight or flight situation doesn't matter if it's that extreme right it's just a gradient be more

focused be more alert be more aroused be more intent your vision literally Narrows right be more focused um I'm on

task I'm like right now I guarantee you our respiratory rates are higher than they need to be um I HRV is a little bit

lower right HRV is heart rate variability that's a measure of where I'm at in the sympathetic parasympathetic drive right I'm more

focused our vision is very narrow right now I got four feet to look at right and

I'm a tune I'm paying attention like all of our senses are really heightened right now when we're done we're probably

going to go the exact opposite direction right our vision is going to open back up I'm not going to be paying things Etc

I'm going to go into parasympathetic parasympathetic is rest digest it is chill it is Z it is depressed it's

lethargic it's all these things right so parasympathetic sympathetic is not good or bad you as a normal human want High

resilience on both sides when you go to bed tonight I want you to feel lethargic I want you to feel no motivation I want

you to feel Zen great I want digestion and things like that right now I I don't

want you to feel super Zen like I want you to be a little bit like May same way right a little bit alert speaking a

little faster than you'd like to be but really focus driven and motivated that's great I don't want you feeling that

though before going to sleep I don't want you feeling lethargic when it's time to wake up I don't want you feel

largic when we got to go to the gym so it's about just making sure we're on when we want to be on and not we want to

be on so your CO2 is going to tell you that so a physical stressor like the

exercise elevates CO2 tells the brain sympathetic drive a psychological stressor does the exact same thing so we

could be not doing anything we're experiencing that right now we're not moving at all for the most part but I

guarantee you our cortisol levels are higher or glucose is being dumped into the blood elevated uh I guarantee you

our strength right now is higher our our speed our power our muscle endurance is higher right now than in the exact same

situation if we were watching TV okay it's like we are primed and ready our nervous system is actually literally

primed you set out neurotransmitters into the system already that are there ready to activate so it's faster okay so

that's awesome that's telling us to to go the direction we want to be in now if

CO2 goes the opposite direction we have the opposite feeling okay so we get

super Zen super chin so what you want to be doing is breathing at a rate to where your supply meets your demand if I'm my

Supply is up a little bit and I have a little more demand then I'm going to breathe a little bit more normal

respiration rate at night should be something like 11 10 breaths per minute okay if you're looking at your overnight

sleep tracker and you're seeing you're breathing 16 17 18 breaths per minute couple of things are probably happening

number one you may have some form of sleep apnea you can't get enough

oxygen so you're ventilating more than you need to be number two you could be in sympathetic drive more than you need

to be okay now that could be happened for a number of different reasons but you're over breathing you shouldn't be

breathing that much because your demand of energy is very very low and so you're dumping

CO2 by doing that your CO2 concentrations get too low this puts you

in a little bit of a state we call respiratory alkalosis your kidneys will often times

not always often though respond by trying to put you into metabolic

acidosis and so there's a lot of research showing that people that are diagnosed with metabolic acidosis it's

actually misdiagnosed in reality it's respiratory alkalosis that caus it's the over

breathing that caused the problem the metabolic acidosis um you'll start

changing how much bicarbonate you recycle electroly light um we see hydration issues with this constantly so if you're an over breather like you're

going to have all kinds of hydration problems all that's going on over there okay so getting back now that we have a

little bit of foundation to what's really happening with CO2 in your room if you are what we call CO2

sensitive and you're intolerant to CO2 so a little bit of CO2 starts building up and your body already kicks you into

a position where it thinks you're way too high it then will tell you to start breathing you'll start over breathing

that whole Cascade I just explained then kicks in so what happens to your hrb gets worse what happens to your

ability to fall asleep gets worse oh I wake up and then I can't get back to sleep you look at your respiratory rate

you you check your CO2 tolerance you're going to know exactly why right now I'm about to finish the

circle if it's not those things and you simply are sitting there let's imagine you and your partner are

in your room um do you guys have any other living things in your room this sleep with you my dog your dog yeah what

size of dog uh not big not not big a foot and a half okay now um without

getting too personal here what does your uh room look like when you guys are asleep how big is the room roughly um

it's about the same size of the space we're in now okay fantastic and is your door shut is it closed always closed

always closed yeah perfect you you couldn't be seeing me up better here so you're at night laying there

breathing in and you're breathing out and you're breathing out CO2 and your lovely little Bulldog is breathing out

CO2 and your partner is breathing out CO2 so what's happening to the CO2 concentration in that room as that door

is closed it's rising right it's going up generally not an issue not a huge

deal but what of you is maybe a little bit CO2 sensitive the amount of CO2 in your room is rising you're rebreathing

that CO2 right back in CO2 is then getting too high that's going to cause your entire system like

we said earlier when when CO2 levels increase this kicks off sympathetic Drive puts you into fight or flight now

all a sudden HRV goes down a little bit resting heart rate goes up a little bit arousa goes up a little bit your body

temperature changes you're not getting into the same sleep stages and we're having either a struggle falling asleep staying asleep Etc in addition to that

um there's a handful of studies now we need way more research here but there's a handful of studies that have taken

people at what's called 900 parts per million so that's the CO2 concentration that's the level right below 9900 parts

per million we have no issue and so normally like I'll check my house um if if our doors are closed and stuff all

day I myself two uh Shephard mix you know rescues um wife two kids ours will

easily get up to 15,00 parts per million now the research on this stuff has done

experiments where they take people up to like 3,000 okay so can I make a strong claim that if you're at 1100 parts per

million it's really going to screw up your sleep well I I I don't think so but now we're playing a game of like

the studies have gone to the extreme and what they will see is a huge reduction of Sleep Quality both subjective and

objective so actually measured on like a a PSG system or similar as well as subjects saying like I did not sleep

well last night next day cognitive function memory reaction time um sleepiness um wakefulness um next day

executive function decision- making at work all this stuff is significantly and when I say significant here I want to

make sure I'm saying not only like research statistically significant but of a magnitude That Matters to your life

right so it's both clinically relevant and statistically significant so we're seeing real reductions in Sleep Quality

in fact there's a thing called something to do with like a building sickness MH um where people like they they have

headaches and they have uh they feel like you know brain fog and all that stuff because they're in large like apartment buildings and the quality of

the air gets so low and by that I specifically referring to CO2 that they feel these issues and once they get Co2

out of the room then this building sickness thing goes away so if you're in that situation and that starts to rise

and it does get up to 22,000 or 2500 which is not that crazy you're absolutely going to see reductions in

Sleep Quality um sleep onset again was is a time it's called latency the time

takes you to fall asleep waking events disturbances and then next day sleepiness wakefulness and cognitive

function will be compromised certainly up to 3,000 to 3500 parts per million um

what happens at 2,000 I don't know like again we need more research like where is the exact line that starts to matter

I do know you get up that high it starts to matter and that number is not crazy

especially for people who close their door yeah I just thinking damn right people who live in apartment buildings

uh or hotels where they can't control people that live in environments where they can't open up their Windows because it's too hot or too cold or rainy or the

air quality is really poor whatever the case is so if that happens a couple steps you can take take one you're not

going to do cuz I don't do it either which is don't have your dog in the room uh I have two dogs and I

sleep right on the end of my bed like not on my bed but on the floor below it so that that's out of the question but

making sure you have a lot of ventilation in your room if you can and you want to use a fan in your room that's fine don't make it too loud if if

you want to download there's all kinds of apps you can download on your phone that allow you to measure the decimals of noise keep it under 35 35 decimal um

same thing by the way if you're using like a white noise machine white noises will actually compromise Sleep Quality they'll make it worse if they're too

loud the other thing to do is if you can get away with having your doors and windows open during times the day where

you can at least let that clear out a little bit and then if you can shut them you know even if you can open up up for half an hour or something like that um

all those steps will help manage CO2 that's just CO2 we haven't even gotten into the other stuff in your environment

so is there any other big ticket sleep items that are unobvious cuz CO2 for me that's a revelation for me yeah sticking

with the environmental theme there are some things you can do for travel okay that are not super well understood one

of them is we've talked a lot about patterning if you can pattern your sleep

environment at home with your sleep environment on the road you're going to have much more success many people are aware of the

first night phenomenon which is the first night you get into a new place you tend to struggle go sleep so the first

in a hotel or other place doesn't matter how comfortable it is cuz the body's on edge Bingo right so how do you take that

away well make the body think it's at home so how can you do that the sound

the smell the temperature all of this is all these sensors are going in your brain If you artificially design your

sleeping environment in your house any way that can be transported with you then you can cut that problem down in

large parts so if there's a particular scent I don't mean like have a a plugin that there but some um like lavender is

very common Lavender is highly associated with Sleep Quality um so a lot of people will do like a little bit of a lavender spray on the bottom of

their bed or in the corner of their room or just something very very subtle that you're not paying attention to um there

are companies that make little lavender sprays right and so then you have that lavender scent at your house again

something that you would barely even be conscious of when you walk in then you take that scent on the road with you

when you get in your hotel room you can spray it around a little bit and now your body will go oh okay we're at home

not going to fix it entirely but these things can you can start stacking little behaviors like that trying to stay in

the same Rhythm do the same thing the the 90 minutes before sleep that you did at home when you're on the road so don't

all of a sudden you know like switch out and shower at a different time or eat at a different time like try to be as consistent with your sleep routine as

possible will be the bigger ticket but then little things like you know having the same setup if if you have a noise

machine machine take that thing with you and try to bring that environment as much as you can but the smell is a very

big one because it's very high reward very low risk and you know pretty easy to take a couple of ounces of a spray or

something with you on the road is sleep equal to recovery because I'm thinking K now I'm really well slept sometimes I

wake up like last night in fact and I'd had eight and a half hours sleep I'd flown in from London landed here in La

my recovery on my whoop band here was 10 12% it was really really low and I was

shocked even though my HRV was quite high it was quite confusing I I spend a lot of time thinking about my HRV I'm

pretty obsessed with it and I spend a little bit less time thinking about my my recovery but my HRV me and my friends Almost are like competitive with it we

all have a little league table me and my girlfriend it's one of the first things we talk about in the morning every morning do these things really really

matter hrb is a very very strong metric it is effectively telling you the

overall balance of your autonomic nervous system and that is very strong there's a lot there's I don't know 50

plus years of research on HIV it's not new it's not like it's very well established it's highly associated with

actually um long long-term cardiovascular risk Strokes hypertension

blood glucose hyper cholesterolemia like lots of things that are associated with with HRV um mental health anxiety

depression tons of stuff we also know uh interventions that are generally Associated to be positive for you

exercise um stress regulation breath work meditation all generally improve

HRV and things that are associated as poor for your health like lack of exercise low quality nutrition alcohol

use are also things that are going to reduce in December about December the

20th or 30th around that time that 10day window my HIV was fantastic and then I

went keto for about four four or five weeks for the entire time I was keto my

HIV was in the bin and then I came out of keto and my HIV was still in the bin and to be honest it's only in the last

three days and we're in February now we're like mid mid-February when my HIV has started to recover and I was like

what the hell happened was it the keto that I did was it I don't know um again a lot to say on that uh depends on how

far you want me to go down this road I'm not surprised um I I would love to see your blood work I could probably

tell you exactly what's happening from that that will explain a lot of what's going on the reason I'm saying that is

we have seen uh many many times situations which people are fatigued HRV

goes down sleep like we see all these issues right and you'll see kind of a interesting combination here and I've

used this example a lot because it's come up so many times where testosterone starts to go a little bit low and you start looking at another thing called

sex hormone binding globulin it's one of the hormones it's a sex hormone binding glob globulin is like a collection of

proteins right so it's a protein that holds on to sex hormones like testosterone so when that gets really

really high the amount of free testosterone goes down that's what free testost how much is not being globbed up

and so you see this combination of like sex hormone binding L globulin gets really high testosterone gets super low and then you start poking around and you

look at insulin and insulin's low and you're like oh okay great and we have we know that there's a known Association

there's an inverse relationship between sex hormone binding globulin and Insulin okay now could be a million

things you don't know anytime like this is one of the the reasons why I love blood chemistry so much because it

allows you to be in little bit of a ATT Ive now you're always working off the human you're always working off

symptoms you don't treat or coach blood markers it's it's a bad way to go about it right but you're looking for Clues

okay so you're looking around you're poking around there and like trust me like you can check the record I've given

this example plenty times so I'm not I'm not just saying this for you it's just going to work you're teaming me up man like you're just lighting me up here so

in this particular case you think okay why is insulin low again could be many many many things you start asking additional questions but what we've seen

a lot is you start poking around looking what carbohydrate intake is like and if carbohydrate intake is insufficient and

lower than what that person needs now that number is different for every person situation all context but if it's

lower than what you need in that particular instance then your insulin can start getting too low as a result of that sex hormone binding globulin goes

up as a result of that testosterone starts going down as a result of that you start feeling the feelings of low

testosterone so the solution in that particular case we give people carbohydrates do you know what it feels

like when they have some carb hydrates back insulin starts going up testosterone starts going up they start

feeling incredible in addition they start sleeping better right so we know there's an association between carbohydrate intake and serotonin

concentrations this is the molecule that helps you fall asleep at night there's also metaanalyses that'll show a pretty

tight correlation between carbohydrate intake and sleep onset and Sleep

Quality that is not at all to say you can't be Ketone and sleep great that is

not at all to say you can't be K in ketosis and have high testosterone absolutely possible I'm not against it

we just see that one often enough to where um this is a good example of it

just didn't work for you in that situation doesn't mean it doesn't work for anybody else or any other situation plenty of times to go after it we

actually just put one of our clients in our coaching program um on a ketogenic diet for like a very specific brain

health reason actually at brain cancer um but nonetheless the other times is

sort of like okay great this not working for you right now why isn't how are you feeling not feeling there how is your

your HRV how is your sleep how's your respiratory rate how's your performance how's your training like I want to know all these things how's your nutrition in

these particular cases it's like all right sometimes as subtle as an additional 50 grams of carbohydrate at

night Wham feel amazing sleep goes up testosterone goes way up body composition doesn't change at all right

you're not going to gain any additional fat as long as you reduce the calories elsewhere right um and you feel great so

we use carbohydrates at night a lot um not not like right before bed but you know in your normal thing high quality

carbohydrates um as long as the total amount of carbohydrates throughout the day are counting for all that so you're

just you're just switching you're saying okay great we're going to pull a little bit from morning or lunch put a little bit more that in the afternoon and

changing the order here if needed and in that particular case um that's why I would love to have seen your blood work

there I don't know that that was happening but that brought me up because you've seen that one so many times now where we're like all right to step back

and watch here without knowing some having this sort of blood markers from me or having any

tests done on me or anyone that's listening now what are the like the first things you would look at if I'm

trying to whoop my friend's ass at HRV in our little HRV League table what are the like fundamentals of HRV are you

sure you want me to tell them you want me to just tell you afterwards yeah cuz I can cut this out and no one needs to hear it so I can just so I can know cuz

this is a big thing it's like a big thing in my family now there's like a family leag table and there's like my best friend's League table then me and

my girlfriend so I'm trying to and I'm losing right now cuz this bloody keto thing that I did

it really honestly my honest answer I hate to do this but it does come back to what is your biggest anchor so we're

going to figure out because this going be different for everybody if let's assume you've eliminated all the what we call 88 practices all that stuff is gone

okay now we start getting to kind of level two like level B level things all right um I would want to see what that

respiratory rate looks like I would want to see what's the Sleep data actually look like that's your starting place no

question um you want to think about it this way okay maybe I'll back up little bit easier when go to solve this problem

I'm using what's called first principles okay so I'm going to very very fundamental things saying what's causing stress and then what's causing stress

relief two sides that equation and I want to see what's going on where's the problem too much in or not handling

enough of what we currently have need thoughts is one of two areas so coming

in was there is there any changes we can make in your total stress that is a non-specific stressor right so things

that are not helping you achieve an adaptation that not

business can we solve those things right relationship wise like great um something in the environment like is

there some other non-specific are there any hidden stressors if I can remove these hidden stressors all of a sudden

the stress bucket just got lowered now Len you're automatically having your HRV and so I'm going hunting right I I'll

take you through the full battery kit and Kaboodle and I will find like what are the non-specific stressors that are in there and we're dialing those things

up okay let's assume you either can't do all that stuff or or you done all that now how do we modify how we handle the

stress the stress resilience is the piece okay great what are we doing for Stress Management um how much time are

you spending decompressing I mean physically and physiologically okay um one of the

things I love is we are in a state right now uh For Better or For Worse I'll just

assume better where we have way more arousal in our daily lives than we've probably had in human history in the

past okay great so how do we how do we address that we need intentional times when we're removing

input a mistake that some folks will make is okay I'm working and then sometimes I listen to music or a podcast

and that's great that's part of your day and then what do you do after work okay I go to the gym okay awesome love you

there what do you listen to oh I listen to more podcasts okay great so arousal Rous arousal all right then what are you

doing when you're done like oh okay great um watch tv okay great like all

what kind of TV all right and you see the you see that the calculus I'm going through what are we doing the time of our day what do you

do if you get done with work early for an hour what are you do in the weekends right I'm not judging but I'm I'm trying

to run the calculus of going like where is our time where we don't have input coming in and so sometimes I'm not I

listen to music and stuff when I train occasionally not against it I I've said

this stuff before and people have been like oh man Andy's like you shouldn't never listen to podcast like no no no no they please listen to

podcast definitely and like And subscribe you know absolutely R can we five star R please please come on now we

got kids to feed dogs to take care of just when is the time when we don't

have sensory input coming in so one of the things we'll do often is saying okay great can we do one to three 10minute

walks with no input nothing in your ears if you want to make it a 45 minute

walk great if you want to do one I don't really care what it is but we need some time where you can I like three a day

because I want to start your day like that mhm de compress get focused you're going to notice I'm sure your brain

works similar to mine we're like if you go 20 seconds he like all of a sudden and

you're getting back and you're gonna fire off 50 emails and texts and like you're you're on right which is great

but you need that time I like doing it lunch same thing you've been on on on on

on on on give yourself 10 minutes if you want to do actual breath work if you want to do actual just closed eyes if

you want to do meditation if you I prefer to just like walk outside personally what whatever it is but you

need some time where we just stop the world it's like torture for me it's horrible right it's so awful for me you

know how you know how much I have to like force myself to do those that part my girlfriend's a breath practitioner so

she finds it so easy of course she she'll wake up in the morning and she'll do like an hour and a half yoga breath

work in front of me never yeah and she doesn't she doesn't she hasn't even gone and got her phone off charging she'll

then walk into the kitchen and drink her water make her little tea with the herbs

thing in it and she'll drift back and she'll go and she sits on the balcony and just sits in the sun me whatever the

opposite of that is is me yeah I know I wake up like the second My Eyes Are Open I'm like I'm like 100% I'm raging to

like get after something or I actually tend to wake up with a huge creative explosion so I don't have just like have

anxiety of like stuff I have to do but I have excitement of like oh I got an idea like this is really cool like I want to

like I want to get raging right and but I don't I'm like I play with my kids and stuff like that right so can you give me

five minutes right can what can you give me in the morning of just down can we do the same thing at some point during the

day and trust me that midday one is like awful for me right cuz the whole time I sit there just going all I'm doing is

wasting time right now but it it is a it is a worthwhile investment because even that amount of

time like to reenter um I don't close my eyes I don't do breath like I don't I don't even try it's just like okay great

I'm gonna literally walk outside like I'm gonna take one lap around my house like I'm doing something to like bring

it back down and then I love it for guys like you and I at night because there

has to be some sort of physiological signal that we're done M I have to have a thing if not I'm like boom kids dinner

playing with them get them to bed and then I'm like everything I can do to not walk back in my office like everything I can

do the wife just has to be like nah so if I can finish that with like fine we're going to do dinner and then we're going to go play outside we're going to

take the dogs for a walk we're going to go on a nature walk or something I have to have something that tells me you're done um the last thing I'll say on this

is there's actually really interesting research that will find a

disassociation between HRV and respiratory rate and Sleep

Quality and the reason I'm saying that is they are all entwined but they are all so different there's actually a

study that came out last year and found for every breath rate per minute so one breath per minute rate increase this was

in college freshman there was a 25% increase in likehood of experiencing moderate to high

stress but it wasn't found in HRV and it wasn't found in any sleep objective or

subjective markers what that's telling you is again those are associated but they are independent variables to

pay attention to and so just because you're like oh I sleep enough and just because and the last one to get to is is

we actually use scientifically validated questionnaires to look at mental health and in every people every person we work

with it's not our expertise that we have somebody in our team that that does that but really we're looking for red flags

if we need to refer out right but we do that because there's just no way you can optimize a human experience with just

total disregard for mental health right but what happens often is we see people

who are fine or just not like major issues in mental health but they can still have an extremely stressed

physiology and so understanding stress when I say stress I do the same thing I associate that with like oh I'm not

stressed I'm not stressed but then when we look at your HRV and we look at all these other markers we're looking at a

bunch of blood markers and other molecular markers we're seeing like well you have a very stressed physiology now

for whatever reason you're handling it fine psychologically or it's not making an impact

whether it is or not or I don't know that's not my area but we can see it physiologically and so coming into your

equation it goes okay we have levers to pull here um you asked a few minutes ago is sleep and Recovery the same thing

they are not they're Associated but this is a good example you could be sleeping fine but if you're not physiologically

recovering enough that can be a separate issue there's a ven diagram here there's an overlap but they are not necessarily

just the same thing and a lot of people you you'll see the same pattern with CO2 tolerance respiratory rate sleep and HRV

they'll be highly Associated but in some people you might have to disang one from

the other one or another one and really pull something apart so that's what we would do for you is to go in to with

this HRV game is to say okay great where's the place we have to go and usually you'll see something poking out

there that says okay here's our opportunity um to go after something and improve and to work on and this is where

we're going to get the most bang for the buck for you does red light play a role because for Christmas she got me two

massive red light um I don't even know what they are they're just like panels

yeah there's a lot of data on H on red light therapy this is actually a good example of something that um that I

missed the boat on like I've changed my tune on this one big time I I didn't think that there was anything here and I

I was wrong about that one there there's a lot of research um what is red light therapy doing I'm in my head I was like

maybe it's mimicking the Sun or something I don't know okay so there's a couple of wavel there's one around like 640 is nanometers and another about 850

nanometers plus or minus here and what what we're looking at here is red light therapy in those wavelengths have an

ability to cross and get into tissue so they can get past your skin lever and they activate a whole series of Cascades

um of things that are that are beneficial for skin Health um we've seen injury um we actually seen changes in

endocrine system hormone balances for them um there's that again it's pretty impressive what it's actually doing

because it can get in and stimulate um it absolutely can mimic there's actually data on uh it potentially improves

Vision when actually like in the eye um work with your your eye doctors on that

one please your opthalmologist and stuff but you can actually see that you'll see this a lot for overall Global recovery

again for muscle soreness and muscle damage um it can actually benefit those as well I have them there there's a

bunch coming out but they actually get hypers specific and like focus it on a certain area of your body that that is

damaged and tissue um we've used them a l a lot with athletes coming back from surgery specifically so one of our

quarterbacks this year had a pretty um gnarly lower body injury at the very

beginning of the season and we were able to get him back in pretty good shape pretty fast and and we used many different things but red light was

certainly one of them I haven't found many people yet where I'm like you definitely have to go get red light it's

one of those things where I'm like oh you got it oh cool like I would do it or like hey you have a $60 million contract

this year on the line well we're doing everything like like bring it all on um that that's kind of where I I stand with

it so it's it's another area that I am paying attention to more and more to see what more things come out but really the

ability for those um those wavelengths to penetrate skin to actually get into tissue is what's causing active change

uh inside your actual physiology I'm someone that works out every day I I got to be honest not all

the workouts are great workouts some of them are pretty terrible workouts because this by the way is the next place I was going with your HRV question

okay another uh thing where we could potentially see some improvements at your HRV is breaking down how you're

training what types of training you're doing and what time of day you're doing them typically lower intensity longer

duration stuff oftentimes increases HRV over time higher intensity stuff can put

people in the hole and what I mean by that is people that have very high demanding jobs and then they couple that

with really high-intensity high sympathetic Drive training well now

we're wondering you're like you're high sympathetic drive all day and then the only break from you had from that you

went higher sympathetic drive and now we wonder why your total drive is pretty

high sympathetic well you know when I think I think about training you always talk about these trade-offs that you're making one of the questions I have is

can I achieve it all at once and being more specific I want to gain muscle mass and

I want to stay superan at the same time and there's a school of thought that says you've got to like load up and then

you've got to cut but I don't want to do that I just want to gain muscle mass but

stay lean MH is that possible yes oh good great yeah couple things to think

about here it depends on your Baseline Fitness and your how lean you are to

start okay now you're pretty lean as it is already and I assume you're

reasonably fit and clearly you work out and stuff like okay great it's going to be a little harder

for you right if you're really really unfit and you're really overweight it's

much easier to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time right so it's going to be challenging for you especially you

got a number three years of training uh that's still kind of like early in your training age right that's a pretty young

training age we got some newbie games that we'll still be able to take advantage of especially you don't have like a specific plan and intention with

your training you to kind of just you you know working out all right great we would be able to have pretty good success with that physiologically it's

possible it's never going to be 100% though there's no way I can put especially without exogenous

testosterone there's just no way I can put 15 pounds of muscle on you and zero fat like that's just not going to happen

could we put on seven or eight pounds of muscle and one pound of fat oh yeah we could do that like that would not be a

crazy thing you would see that pretty consistently in the research and certainly thousands of coaches and

practice like oh yeah like I've seen that countless times and so it's it's kind of like what are the reasonable

expectations there um so what I would do is for you is recommend saying you don't have to go like 40 pounds and like you

know but how much you really want to be at what's that number right we would figure that out maybe run analysis on

you see where you're actually at all right great and then we set reasonable expectations so you want to end up being

you know you want to put on five kilos total okay tremendous you willing to accept you know 5 kilos 4 and a half

kilos of muscle and maybe one of fat oh okay we get reasonable expectations and then what you would want to do there is

train consistently you would want to be in a close to caloric slight Surplus as

possible we have to add calories to gain Mass right but how we're going to do that is 10% Surplus something like that

so if your normal maintenance with all your exercise is 3,000 calories I don't need you to go to 6,000 calories that's

a recipe to put on some muscle but a lot of fat too now we don't know the exact number here there's a lot of studies

going on actually friends of mine Eric Helms in New Zealand has done a handful of studies like this recently trying to

figure out what is that number 5% 10% 20% where is the number in terms of

caloric excess that you want to be on to put the most amount of lean muscle mass and the least amount of fat on because

it's not going to be zero right 10 or so percent which for you would be 10% of

3,000 would be 300 extra calories maybe 15% maybe going to 500 extra calories we're not going to 5,000 calories we're

not making these crazy jumps in your situation there we'd make sure protein is really really high uh at least 2 gam

per kilogram right something like that maybe even higher making sure we have enough extra on there but we're hedging

on if we're going to miss the mark i' rather you miss by 15% too high than 2%

too low there's just no advantage of being down there and then we'll regulate chloric intake in terms of your calories

and fat we would play with those ratios if you wanted a little more fat little less carbs we could do that if you want

to do the empite we could play with that stuff but those would be the standards we'd said does it matter what time I eat

in terms of exercise because I've always heard that you should eat sort of immediately after you do a workout doesn't matter in terms of protein

timing if you're just looking at muscle growth none of the other human factors

which there are many then timing of protein is pretty irrelevant you're fine

timing of carbohydrates does start to matter though specifically for recovery

now that typically happens in athletes that train multiple times a day that said with both of them you have options

again look at the research on intermittent fasting you don't see especially if you look at the the

classic kind of like 168 which is you you know you have a condensed eating window of just six hours a day and the

other 18 you're fasting um that is not any more advantageous for fat loss than

non-fasting there doesn't seem to be any difference at all when you account for calories and protein so if you want to

eat six meals a day great you want to eat one meal a day won't matter for fat loss so that still though tells us

timing of protein it's just not super important for someone like you for

muscle mass gains the only practical challenge is this if we need you at that

two grams of protein per kilo or maybe higher can you get enough food in during

your timing of eating sometimes yeah um you know in our study we had plenty of participants that had

no issue eating all their food and calories in a caloric Surplus in a six- hour window they had no problem others

really struggled and so now we're not talking science or physiology we're talking practical application you in

your own personal life ah my stomach is so full or timing of work or whatever but if that's not the case then I'd be

like great we're going to have no problem so I wouldn't be super concerned with the timing of either of your or any

of your macronutrients um outside of personal preference real world situations things like that if I'm

just a normal guy which I very much am and I'm maybe a busy business person or

I just have a you know job as a manager or something and I'm thinking about the types of training that are going to help

me perform at my best cognitively in my work but then just be healthy over time in my life what is the like blend of

training types and styles and durations that are optimal for me to just be a great average Joe mhm you need a handful

of physiological skills to age super well

okay so if you want to live and live as well as possible for a long time and it comes down to a couple of things you

need to move well what's that mean different definitions but you need to move in a way that is not getting hurt

causing pain great that comes down to movement skill there's some flexibility in there there's some mobility and

there's also just like do you know how to stand up do you know how to walk right so we need to move well so something where you're addressing I

don't need you to be the most talented Sprinter in the world but we just can't have glaring holes can have huge

problems in Mobility flexibility posture range of the motion because we have to stay out of pain so number one biggest

key to successful aging when it comes to exercise is not missing

training we can't miss training for big chunks in time months and years because we're hurt we have to stay active Okay

see what I'm saying yeah so Mobility means that we can be consistent if it does yeah right so um there's no like

strong tie there of like hey the more range of motion your hamstring the less injuries you'll have I'm just talking if

you have some really bad issue where all of a sudden you're 40 years old and

you're in so much back pain you can't walk okay you're that's going to be a problem so don't get hurt step number

one number two is now speed and power and I'm saying that because if you look

at one of the most significant issues that we face during aging it's our Falls

risk you can't fall if you look at the data I don't know what it is off the top of my head but if you look at the risk

of dying after a hip break in those that are over 60 years old it's something

alarming like a 50% chance of death over the next 15 years like it's absurd and you could whatever the number is it

doesn't matter when you look up the real ones you're going to be like wow it's just as bad as as I exemplified there so

you you can't afford to do that why do you fall when you're over 60 well sometimes a dog just walks out in front

of you and okay great but the things that you can control you can't lose your

balance don't like you need to train balance okay great secondly if you lose your balance you need to have the foot

speed and the Hand speed to move your appendices out in front of you to stop that fall from happening right this is a

foot speed this is a hand speed mostly since your legs are the way that you interface with the world most of the

time we always start with our lower body right we can't can't have bad knees can't have bad ankles and we can't lose

foot speed and power let's assume that freak accident happened you had um a

slip and you had the ability to get your foot out in front of you and you're falling right so you're tripping you're falling forward and then you flung your

right foot out in front of you and you planted it to stop yourself from falling so you didn't smash your hip you then

need to have the Ecentric strength to stop yourself from collapsing on that foot so you had the

foot speed to get it out there but did you have enough strength to actually stop yourself from falling physical strength uh is one of

these strongest predictors of mortality of any metric in the entire

world the only one that is sort of close to it is your V2 Max those things will

out predict how long you're going to live more than almost any metric if you look at them stacked up directly against

clinical uh traditional clinical risk factors uh blood pressure um

cardiovascular disease markers coronary artery disease smoking diabetes things like that those are all bad but leg

strength and V2 Max typically will predict survival rate more so than those

other markers there's actually a couple of studies um that come to mind one of them out of Jonathan Myers lab the famous One 750,000 people in the studies

like big studies and over the course of it I think 174,000 people died you know these are

retrospective studies and stuff like that right but what you're looking at is like who stayed alive and who didn't not

like a surrogate marker not some sort of like direct marker right and you will definitely see what's called a hazard

ratio which is to say okay 1.0 is neutral below one is reduced risk of

dying above one is increased risk and you'll look at things um you you'll see smoking and diabetes put you at a HR of

like 1.3 1.4 so 30% in increase Hazard ratio 40% increase like that's not good

and then you start to see the things like V to Max and you start seeing like 4X increases 5x increases like they just

outpace smoking and Diabetes by massive amounts it's not like uh smoking is 30%

and BO2 Max is 40% it's like smoking is 30% and V2 Max is 300% what is V2 Max

for anybody that doesn't know your maximum ability to bring in and utilize oxygen um cardiovascular fitness if you

want to think about it like that when you compare leg strength in those same studies

depending on the studies it's comparable if not higher of a predictor than the

VO2 max can I just think about that when I get older because a lot of people you know I'm 30 years old great question you

can you're welcome to but here's what happens we know that VO2 max will drop

something like 1% per year after the age of around 40 to

45ish right now you can you can amarate or attenuate a lot of that Sor it will

drop automatically yeah with aging okay for sure regardless of what I I mean obviously my work will go against it yes

but if if left alone it kind of drops itself not even if left alone um we actually did a study years ago in

Stockholm Sweden where we took we ran VO2 max tests on cross country skiers

and these people were world champions in the 1940s and 50s and they were still competing in

2010 so they're on year 50 55 60 of continuous training and competing is

really really cool to get these people in there a little like again you're your studs in the 1950s and you're they

haven't stopped competing and we compared them to age matched um individuals in in back here

in in the States now all these people were over 80 some of them were up to 92 years old and we ran their V2 Max test

and there a bunch of fun stuff we' did there but when you look at the V2 Max um our group average was something like 35

38 milliliters per kilogram per minute those people we didn't have their data from the 1940s but if you're going to

win a world championship in cross country skiing you're probably going to be in the 80s or 90s your V to Max so

they were way up there in the 80s or 90s presumably when they were in their 20s and 30s we're down to the

mid-30s you know 50 years later but people their age that don't

train typically on average V2 Max is about 20 so it is way higher with training the

slope in terms of the decrease can really be blunted but it will still go

down you'll never see an 80-year-old who can outrun a 30-year old if they're equivalently like trained and

talented right so it goes down the same thing will happen with muscle strength and muscle size how is this linked to

mortality though what is it about my V2 Max that ends up you know putting me in a grave yeah so here's what happens when

men cross below 18 milliliters per kilogram per minute for women it's about 15 to 16 it's what we call the line of

Independence and what that means is basic tasks of everyday living represent

so much oxygen utilization that you can't do anything as an example if your V2 Max is 15 things like getting dressed

in the morning are about 12 okay uh getting up from the toilet 12 or 13

walking 14 15 you imagine doing a workout where you're at literally at

your maximum heart rate just walking up your stairs you shut down right and so

what happens is it's multifaceted number one cardiovascular your heart is just no longer fit right the amount of blood

pressure and the amount of stress your heart is under all day just surviving um

is is enormous so what do you think happens to your HRV what do you think happens to your sleep what do you think

happens to your glob it's a very stressed physiology it gets worse than that though you tend to stop doing

things so you you socially light you stop being around people you stop having purpose and drive because you can't do

anything mental health can decline because you you don't feel like you're worth anything so selfworth goes really

low because you can't do anything by yourself you can't even make your own breakfast you can't and so you start to just re and so this thing just catapults

so it is a it is a again multifaceted problem you can talk about just the

ability to you can't bring any utiliz oxgen you can't feel your brain you start to deteriorate but then you can go

all the way to the other the Spectrum that I just said of like social isolation because you can't walk you can't be in the world you can't get out

in the sunlight like you you can't physical activity starts to plummet once leg strength leg strength specifically

will tell you how long you'll be physically active once your legs get weak you stop being Physically Active

because everything gets really really down hard so you're like I'm not even going to go for a walk why because I'm

going to be exhausted because my legs are going to be shaking because my legs are so weak so you tend to stop you tend

to sit you tend to not want to move and then all those other problems exist and now what we what we call this is atrophy

leads to atrophy so atrophy is a loss of muscle but now because we're weaker we want to do less things which makes it

worse and worse and we just spiral down so not ever getting into that cycle is critically important so why can't you

wait until you're old first of all trainability is still really high we've

done training studies on people 80 years old you can grow muscle and strength at 80 no question in fact almost as well as

you can when you're in your 20s but if you're starting at a V2 Max of

35 when you're 40 years old how long until you cross below 20

well 1% per year you can run the math there pretty quickly you're going to cross that line of independence by 60 65

and now I guess you can start working out but right really really challenging

alternatively you drive it as high as possible now so when you see that decline over time your buffer is much

higher last point I'll make I'm sure you got a 100 questions there if you run that Gamble and you get to 50 and you

have any little thing go wrong you got to have a hip replacement you got to have something going on and now you're

bedridden for six weeks boom you just fall off the cliff um you get really busy at work you got

to take care of your mom who now need all these things that happen in real life and you can't work out as much

great so the the way that we say this like one of the uh the golfers I work with Donn ROM we were talking about this

a couple weeks ago as well I bring it up and he was like yo look one of the strategies is we always control the

things we can control so there are parts of the golf game that you can't control the weather and what your opponents are

doing and so he always makes sure he gets really good at the things he can physically control I would say the exact

same thing right here if you have the time right now and there's never a good time but you can control it you you can

work out you have the ability then you want to put that as high as possible because when things then come out of

your control and you get hurt or work or all the gyms in the world shut down

like you know all these things that can happen then then you've got some buffer but if you got no buffer you're running

a pretty high risk and you're running a risk of losing your health which means you're not going to be able to do anything reminds me of a conversation I

had at Christmas with a dear relative of mine who to scen set of Christmas we've got three little kids below the age of

six running around which my brother's kids um we've got all the generations there and then we've got the oldest

generation and a member of that generation isn't able to move for many

of the reasons you've described anymore there's not an injury there but just going up the stairs even will make them out of breath and we sat down as a as a

family at Christmas trying to figure out whether this was reversible or not and oh yeah and we all concluded you know

again being Optimist and trying and loving this person very much that in fact it was a part of a downward spiral

and this individual had kind of accepted that it was their fate they said like they had blamed on something that was

unchangeable and I was there on YouTube trying to find videos to prove that you know if you start I'll get you an exercise bike and if you start moving it

can it can change there's extensive evidence to show you're right okay good tons um

again you can look at our any of our work or any other groups of scientists that have done training studies in

untrained 70 year olds uh men women 80 year olds plus there's the reason I'm

saying 80s because of a study that came out last I think it was last year the year before on that strength training in

80 plus year olds that are not currently active huge improvements in strength

muscle growth like you're I can't remember the exact one but you're I think it was like over 15% increase in muscle Sid like numbers that that matter

so yeah you absolutely you could pick your study you would have dozens to pick from that would show work now can you

get that person did do it that's the hard part that's the ultimate hard part A lot of it starting starts with it even

believing it it's possible which most people don't believe it's possible they think once you get to 60 it's kind of an inevitability and there's nothing I can

do to change it yeah absolutely fundamentally not true in fact if you look at the papers that have been done

on the rate of decrease I don't remember the exact numbers right now um but it's stunning

what percentage of physiological decrements are stopped

entirely um like specifically with V2 Max your V2 Max will remain high highly stable the the kind of number we always

play with is 50 at 50 which is at 50 years old I want your V to Max to be at least

50 if you train consistently you'll see tons of people who I remember I said earlier it tends to start dropping

around 45 to 50 you'll see people who do not drop into their 60s from their 20s if they consistently train and that that

is a very real phenomenon so you have a huge control over it the earlier start

the better but if you've already missed that window it's no problem whatsoever

your ability to change like really never stops in response to exercise plasticity

in tissue is extraordinarily high and it responds very well the training and and there's just no reason to think you

can't make huge progress at any age what kind of training for v2 Max I understand leg strength I figure I can kind of

figure out what I need to do there but to improve my V2 Max what do I need to be doing yeah think of a couple of things you need to challenge your heart

to pump consistently over time what that means is if you want to think about that as lower intensity more continuous work

that's great the mode running swimming cycling pushing a sled doing a circuit

joining a group activity class those things don't matter that much in terms of they all work great so something that

continue makes your heart rate elevated for let's just call it 20 minutes minimum somewhere between 20 and 60

minutes so if all you can do is 20 let's start at 20 no problem um what zone should you be in I don't care what heart

rate I don't care elevated great I'll take that as a win win that's all I need

then we need to do something that requires your heart rate to get closer to Max what heart rate what's I don't it

doesn't matter go up high I would Bank on those two things something that is a lower intensity longer duration and then

something that is a higher intensity shorter duration if you want to do something like 30 seconds as hard as you

can and 30 seconds of rest for four to six rounds great no problem there right

if you want to do something that's a little bit different if you want to not even worry about that and again go to a

group activity class go to a spin class go to a kettle bell circuit class great

you want to go to cardio kickboxing all that's gonna fine great that alone will check the boxes off for a lot of people

so when you think about this uh people get like as an exercise scientist people get way too caught up in like the

specific protocol how many reps exactly when you ask a question like how do I improve my VO2

max specificity always matters towards the end but at the highest level it's

like yo just get your heart rate up there's a there's a principle in science we call said Sid specific

adaptation to imposed demand that is to say if your physiology is challenged it

will adapt that's all it has to be if you want your heart to improve just

challenge it that's as complicated as we have to be you do that consistently

ideally you overload a little bit over time it will adapt your V toax will improve and does that also count for

muscles because I've been really Keen to ask you I go to the gym every day and I think I'm not growing my muscles very

well because I'm basically doing the same thing yeah I'm like I know that I should be doing something differently

here we can do better than that what are the fundamental things I need to be thinking about I'm going to go to the gym tomorrow morning now but what do I

what do I need to be thinking about what you've kind of described is playing a game of variation against

specificity okay like everything Pro and cons here it's not much better if you were to go hypers specific you did the

exact same workout every single time you would drive a lot of adaptation because

you're seeing exactly what you're going after at the same time though you've increased our chance of overuse

injury problems because we're we're putting all of our load and stress in the same movement patterns the same joints Etc if you go the other direction

which is like I literally just make up my workouts every single time right chance of overuse of a specific movement

pattern goes down but progress also goes down because there's not enough stimulus in the same

pattern so we need consistency we need to drive a Groove and get better at

something but we don't want to be there so how do we play the game a little bit well we want to have what's called variation we want to have for you some

sort of progressive overload how do we achieve that we can go up and load or

wait okay we can go up in reps per set we can go up in sets we can go up in

number of exercises we can go up on what's called frequency so how many days per week we could do a combination we

could reduce your rest intervals how much time you resting between reps any combinations right but we have to have some strategy we can't do it all and

what we want to think about is 10% which is no more than a 10% increase week to

week okay that'll be enough to where we can progressively overload you but also not really uh make our injury RIS too

high so we would want a a fairly consistent plan for maybe 6 to 8 weeks

or so that we can watch and monitor and going get great what I would recommend you doing is having say 50 workouts all

planned out and you're going to get to the end of 50 whenever you get to the end of 50 we're not doing like you

workout legs Monday you do upper body Wednesday no no here's your workout and this is the order you're going to do

them in and here's the 50 you're going to complete and we're going to write a new program when you're done with 50 but if you can get EX workout one done today

and tomorrow you can get workout number two done great and then it's 3 days before you get to number three fine

number four so instead of thinking about this on like a 7day micro cycle is what we called it no no no we just have this

much work to get done ideally we want to get this 50 done in the next 100 days

okay great whatever you're going to go three four days in a row because you're like hey actually I got a trip going on

I'm not going be able to train those two days so I'm going to train four days in a row well that's not ideal but it's better than skipping 3 days okay great

then you're going to come back and go hey I'm actually home for 10 days I got to stretch I'm going to go three days a day off oh okay great but that's what we

would do as a system somewhere like that where we you know what the end goal is but that allows us to then construct

those 50 days with intentional overload as you know whoop are a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the

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join. woop.com CEO I had a big debate this Christmas

with my girlfriend about creatine so we're in Cape Town in South Africa and I went and bought creatine and I put it on

the table and I was like I'm going to start taking creatine right that's so me not really knowing what it is what it's for that's right and she picked it up

and then looked at the label and gave it back to me and she said crea's not for work women oh and she she felt and I

think a lot of people feel this this is why I wanted to ask you it is she thinks that she thought creatine was for

bodybuilders and I Googled it and Googled it and showed her the Google thing and she was oh amazing and she started taking creatine but I imagine

there's a lot of people out there that think creatine is for people that want to just get stacked great question um

sometimes you you get deep in your own world and you forget you know what the people are really think out of that the world so there's a website and company

called examine.com I have no affiliation with them but is it is an unbiased place you

can go to and you can ask that question for any supplement you can ask about or you can ask about Arginine or

tongat Ali or whatever you want you can also ask it by the adaptation so what are the best supplements for fat loss

for brain function for cardiovascular health and it'll give you answers based on there so it's a really phenomenal

site so when you ask does it work well work for what and work how

much that's the two questions right work for what so in the case of creatine it improves say muscle strength probably

why she had that muscle size okay what's the weight of the evidence lots of studies hundreds and hundreds of studies

men women young old children all kinds of stuff right of astronauts space

flight um bed rest tons and tons of research okay check that box What's the magnitude of effect you're probably

looking at somewhere between a three to 12% okay

that's a pretty good magnitude of effect um for something that has an insanely good risk profile meaning like you can't

cause imbalances with it it's not a hormone um it's not a mineral so it's not causing oxidative stress anywhere

it's like really really robust in there and so when you look at it you go okay

great pretty easy Choice here um I'm not it's not like the hormone

stuff like I said where like you're turning on something it's a fuel source so in fact remember earlier when I said

metabolism you're either using carbohydrates or fat as a fuel actually creatine is the third one it's a faster

one so the sto geometry is one to one so you can break down one molecule of phosphor gives you one molecule

of ATP it's the fastest one but it gives you the lowest energetic output so it's

a fuel and because of this there is extensive research on Performance Based

things this is where it started in fact I remember as a kid when the entire Valco and steroid thing hit baseball in

the early 2000s creatine was like on that list and that's where this entire Association

came because Mark Maguire and Barry Bonds were using all of of course allegedly whatever performance enhancing

drugs they were not using and they were also using things like creatine and so that just kind of got lumped in as like

oh it's a steroid it's like a because it came from that world and most of the

evidence and most of the research was on that fortunately the last 20 years

honestly people have sort of left that with because we know the answer there more interesting stuff is coming

in things like bone health now my friend Darren kando just finished a really great study two-year study on post mopal

women at 20 grams a day typical dosage for is five grams so your typical

bodybuilder at the gym is using five grams a day he put this in post menopausal women 4X the dose and did it

for two years no adverse effects no kidney issues no problems

uh improved some of the bone markers I think in the actual like the femur area

I remember exactly it didn't improve others it's not a miracle it's not a Panacea but it was like hey didn't do

anything bad potential to help bone M density and a in a a population that really needs it from just a simple fuel

it's kind of rather than thinking about it like a mineral or a vitamin or hormone think it more of like protein

powder like it's just it's a it's a nutrient that you get that that fuels it in addition there's been at least two

trials that I can think of at the top of my head that have shown that it may enhance things like mood uh there's a ton of research on

traumatic brain injury long-term physical brain health um because it is such a fast fuel source it's actually a

preferred fuel source in your brain the your asro sites which are kind of like the the central nervous system

cells thrive on Creatine so they absolutely love it so it is it is U um

neurological as well so it'll help the neurological system nervous system um as brain and tons and tons of stuff going

is an antioxidant anti has some like mild antioxidant properties and a bunch of other stuff so um while I understand

a lot of people still here and think about as like the muscle thing that's because that's where it's came from and the dominant research but really I would

encourage people to look at um more of the last 20 years what people that are doing creating research the topics

they're actually studying and it's not muscle growth in young healthy guys there's two most replayed moments

these most replayed moments are basically from the podcast and interviews you've already done the thing that people replayed the most and I I I

was looking at what those moments were because I find it quite interesting and I thought I'd just let you know what they are the first one was um people

overrating burning fat in Anor robic exercise as a method of fat loss and this is really what I want to talk about

is I've definitely grown up my whole life thinking that the way that you burn fat is by running h i mean this is what

most people think right they think you want to burn fat around here the belly fat the best way to do is go for a run

and a lot of people have very little luck with that and end up beating themselves up so to close off on this

conversation I'd like to hear your take on that you need to think about fat

loss in a broader approach than most people give it to which is to say when

you say fat loss let's get specific what we're meaning is we're losing fat and

ideally we're preserving muscle that's what that's what we typically want okay we're also talking

about losing fat so that it stays off as long as possible those are baked into to

that phrase but oftentimes forgotten so the advice I'm going to give you is with those two assumptions in mind you're

trying to keep as much lean Master as you can and you're trying to make this a successful journey and not something you

have to repeat again Time and Time totally right yo-yo dieting in fact one of the

more I probably the highest most cited paper I've ever published was

on yo-yo dieting like a review article on that so you you can go read that people love that paper I was just a

co-author um Jackson wrote that paper so credit goes to Jackson for that um but

making sure you're paying attention to say those parameters in mind how do I lose weight you can look across meta

analyses and review articles and you will see the number one predictor of long-term successful weight loss and by

again weight less I mean fat loss is always adherence it's adherence to your workout

program and it's adherence to your nutrition program so step number one before we worry about any change in diet

we s we start arguing about which method of exercise is best before we start really going way down the line to things

like genetic testing like you're really wasting your time here and a lot of that stuff especially if you're not paying

attention to what's going to make you adhere the longest amount of time in fact if

you just stopped right there that's enough for most people can you put yourself in a position where you're able

to feel abundant with your nutrition approach and notice I'm I'm trying not to say diet here right should be a

nutritional approach you have a balance between living life and flexibility but then also figuring out what triggers you

and maybe you don't have a trigger maybe you can be more flexible maybe you need more stringent like all the things that go into it you got to figure out a

system so you're not people will not be on a diet very long collectively right on average diets don't work quote

unquote for those exact reasons right you got to get to a caloric deficit somehow okay but you got to do that in a

way where you still are happy and sustainable totally right and you still feel energy and you're you're there and

that it's working for you right and that's different for every physiology okay great and you got to me exercise

system the same thing right if you hate running there's no reason you don't have to run a step to lose a ton of weight if

you love running you should run if you hate lifting weight fine I can work with any parameter you give me if all we're

concerned about is preserving lean muscle mass and losing fat over the long term that's really what we have to to

consider the most okay now within that does that mean every training and nutrition program is the same no no no

not at all there are fundamental differences here's the problem to think about if I said hey you're going to do

the same training program the rest of your life you'd probably be like well

but if I told you that with nutrition people are like well yeah of course like there's you know magic diets

that do like no keto great meditranian great high carb great great great you

can do them all they can all work for you some people taking on gluten help some people great great great sure all

of it is possible right we come from very different backgrounds if you look at any of the research for example like

a really interesting point on genetic testing

if you're not taking account genetic background on that genetic testing for things like nutrition Precision

Nutrition is entirely worthless because we see classic markers that are

associated with say more effective um carbohydrate utilization or fat utilization or or body composition and

they might predict a decent percentage of variance in European conasi you apply

those exact same things to West African or east African and those variants go to zero

people forget that part when they start talking genetic testing they have not been validated across all ethnic

backgrounds and the ones that have have shown they range from like 40% variance to zero so like really like you're way way

way ahead of the cart here paying attention to things that just do not matter we got to get you on a system

that works okay great for some people that might be more nutritionally based

all right you can lose and preserve muscle mass really well by just going decently high on protein and then

regulating your calories the example I gave you earlier you want to go more carbs less fat great you want to the opposite like we can play those levers

no problem all right what's your problem though oh I struggle with um car

Cravings okay great oh I struggle with hunger pangs okay great I struggle with okay well then we're going to make those

decisions based on more this more La based on like where is your pain Point what's your problem I struggle with the

okay great I have to now we're personalizing now we're individual izing it based on things that are going to matter orders of magnitude more than

other things that I've just talked about right that stuff will trumpet exercise the same thing maybe you you hate

exercise okay great maybe we can get you to walk a few times a day and we'll get most of our fat loss dur nutrition maybe

the opposite you love training but po man you just struggle to eat whatever or not eat something all right great maybe

we'll play the game more with you know willpower will push the pace on our exercise high intensity fine low

intensity fine weight great cardiio great surfing great like don't zone six

to I don't care all of it can be done okay some of the foundational things that tend to be

consistent for those two things on most people is you need to make sure protein

is adequate hard to maintain muscle mass with lower protein especially if we're

going hypochloric so keep protein High you want to do something revolving

strength training at least once week for the same exact reasons something that makes you burn a lot of

calories long duration high intensity either way that's all you really have to do if you can do that stuff

consistently over time you're going to get there you're going to be just fine um where we see problems are people that

put themselves in a positions of scarcity what you mean by scarcity for anyone that doesn't know that depriving

themselves of the pr you feel like you never get to do the thing you want to do psych this is a psychological thing

right totally which causes the effect which causes the the problem of

consistency inherence over time right so making sure you do that I personally have some go-to standards I like to do

I'll happily share that with you um I tend to like to have a decent balance between kind of our Anor robic strength

training high heart rate stuff and our U more steady state longer duration stuff so if someone's going to be able to work

out three times per week I'm probably doing one thing where we're going long duration call it a hike call it a SW

swim call it a run whatever we can do and then the other two days I'm probably doing combination of lifting and then

probably finishing with some high heart rate thing right so we'll do like a little bit of strength and hypertrophy

muscle growth work and then we'll do a circuit or an air assault bike or some Sprints or like what can we get you into

it's like really really hard if I can get you in an environment where you're working out with some other human I love

that is there any reason why you do the strength first and then absolutely that's a great question if you do

strength training before endurance work your strength training will not compromise your endurance in fact

sometimes it exacerbates it if you do your endurance first you're going to be

more fatigued and you're going to lose strength and so you'll have worse performance in your strength training

what's the most important thing we haven't spoken about you know if there was one more thing you could add of all the things you know that would allow

Jennifer who's a 34y old single mother or Dave who's a black cab driver in

London the average person I think it is exciting what's coming in the world of

human health and I think it's helpful for people to know that stuff because a lot

of the challenges we're facing going to get worse we have things that

are going to be possible pretty soon at kind of the stuff I'm talking about this

idea of precision exercise Precision Nutrition it's not really available to many people

too expensive Etc we're going to cross those barriers pretty soon we are working on a project right

now called the human digital twin so this is a combination of you know a couple of my companies so the Sleep

company absolute rest um our blood work company Vitality blueprint Springbok um

there's another company called axio force that actually has four sensors in your shoe and we can see early changes

potentially in gate so how you're walking which could potentially and

research is needed here but potentially be early signs of Parkinson's development neurological disorders so we'll see this in Gate before we'll see

this in symptoms companies that are involved in this entire thing we can take all those data we're actually doing

this right now uh put them together and make what's called a digital twin this

allows us to make your physiology and so from our perspective of you know Vitality we've got all your blood work

and molecular biomark from absolute rest we've got your sleep we've got your movement patterns we can actually work with another company to

watch you physically move and do other stuff we can take your physiology and upload it then from there we can run

endless simulations of combinations of nutrition and training and supplementation medicine movement

daytime patterns sunlight water all those things and figure out really

quickly how you're going to respond the best for whatever outcome we want it's not ready at all right now but we're

actually again running it right now we'll have our first cohort done probably in the next week or

so we really really soon I don't know how well the model is going to be the first time through it I don't know if

our group's going to be the best at it it doesn't matter but this is clearly going to be something the world is capable of uh as we get better at Being

Human sensors and we can bring those data in we're going to be able to deploy things

like this and say hey yo this is most likely to work for you the digital twin

is already being used for like the heart it's in place we have the digital twin of the the kidneys is is as well the

lungs are coming soon the heart is coming pretty soon there's lots of groups I'm I'm not involved in any of those projects but that's that's coming

on board so the ability to not have to guess anymore and most importantly try I

tried this for six weeks it didn't work I tried this for n that's going to go away really fast great you still have to go do all

the work the technology won't work out for you well

we have some stuff that'll do that too um what's the cost though like when you were saying all of that I go you

know what I mean we spent the entire length of human history with one

maybe arguably two singular goals one of them at the core was stress

reduction that was what we were after right you create communities so you're safer you create homes so you're

environmental and you create agriculture so we food and we all want to reduce the stress thing right didn't called that

but that's what it was and then we got to the year 2000 or so we realized oh

maybe that was the wrong target I saw on your bookshelf at home there's a

book called The Comfort crisis oh yeah and that just flash in front of me as you were saying that yeah shout out

Michael it's a great book um when we have astronauts come back

from the International Space Station um getting people to live on Mars it's a bit of a rocket problem

but it's a bigger physiology problem and the this HDT project ran is

part of the people we're working with is Cody burkart runs human works at

Nasa figuring out that line of going hey you don't want to release