Barbell Shrugged - 42- Top 3 Sleep and Recovery Methods for CrossFit

Episode Date: January 9, 2013

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Hey guys, this is Rich Froning, and you're listening to Barbell Shrugged. For the video version, go to fitter.tv. That's when you say this stuff in the intro of the show, bro. I forgot what I was supposed to say. He said we need something inspiring. Hi, welcome to Chris's... Hi, doing this for real. Three, two, one. I thought we were doing it for real. Oh, you this for real. Three, two, one.

I thought we were doing it for real. Oh, you were supposed to say three, two, one. Three, two, one. Go. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Mike Bledsoe here with Doug Larson and Chris Moore. Hi. If you saw the intro.

We're ready for the show. If you saw the intro, you know that we're going to be talking about recovery today. God, we're so rested and ready and recovered. I got ninja hands. We're going to chop the subject up. But first, I want to mention that you should check out fitter.tv and sign up for the newsletter. And also, you should check out uh faction foods nutrition course doug goes into a lot of detail about how to recover via nutrition on the nutrition side of things during that uh seminar that he does

you'll get lost in detail it'll change everything about your life it'll yep yeah that you'll never see it'll change your life the same way again it will change your life that's what you told that girl today at the gym said should i sign up and michael the same way again. It will change your life. That's what you told that girl today at the gym. She said, should I sign up? And Mike was like, only if you want to change your life. Whatever. She's like, I'll do it. She totally bought it.

What? Thanks, Mark. In that case, it sounds like a good idea. I don't know. I mean, I've gotten much more bold when I talk to people now. Before, I was like, yeah, if you will, you know, a long time ago, you know, if you want to, you know, get in shape or lose some weight, or if you want to like do CrossFit, yeah. But like, you know, after, after running facility for so long, and then you get a lot of people coming in and they're like, you know, you change their lives. They get off

medication. Like they, they are definitely on the road to being dead in the next five years. You know, they're, they're taking these medications and their their blood glucose levels are like skyrocketing all that kind of stuff and then you know you get them training and eating paleo and a year later like they're not taking any of that stuff and they're way thinner and they're we have clients that were close to death oh i have some clients that they they have come to us and they go, thank you. You've saved my life or you saved my friend's life or my wife. Michael Bledsoe. I very specifically. Hero.

Yeah, I very specifically remember one time. Basically. Basically, that's what I was getting at. NSCA, CPT, CrossFit certification, comma, hero. Level two hero. I'm going to start signing off on my emails that way. We could probably corner the market on hero certifications. Hero certification.

Man. Sounds good. I have yet to see a hero certification. I think that might be the way to go. All right. We're, we're effectively off topic. No,

we're not. All right. We're going to talk about, uh, why are we even talking about recovery? And, uh, we feel that is a highly overlooked topic um doug what what do you

think uh why do you think people overlook this topic it's certainly not the first thing people think when they think about joining a gym they think about coming in all the work yeah they think about doing all the work you know they think about lifting the weights and running the miles or you know doing the push-ups or what have you. Rocky montage. That's right. And they don't think about the fact that during the actual training, they're not getting better necessarily. They're breaking themselves down only to build themselves back up when they go and recover outside of the gym. Then they come back bigger and better than they were.

That's it, Doug, the building back up part. That's right. Dose response, as you always say. Yeah, the greatest story I've ever heard or the greatest little quip uh dr mike stone he talked about a bunch of the show he's a mentor to us all was a mentor to me when i was back in research the coolest thing he said was yeah i mean there's no difference it's kind of describing what a strength coach would have fitness professional was he kind of equated it more to being like a pharmacist in that you are prescribing something to a client to get a response. So there's all kinds of things that you think about when you think with that kind of perspective, one being you got to give

the right dose to get the response you want. And you got to get that response that covers things like not giving too much exercise at the beginning, because just like taking a pill, if you start off with a thousand milligrams dose, when a hundred would do the job, you would quickly be in trouble. So it's a good way to think about it. But yeah, I mean, it's not the work that gets you the results you want. It's how well you recover from the work. And if you can't recover from the work, you're not putting at least as much attention on recovery as you are the work part. You're not going to get all the results you could have. I think a lot of people, they, uh, they think, oh, I've got recovery down.

You know what I mean? Like, oh, I rest all the time. I've got no problem sleeping in. It's like the people who say, oh, you know, I've tried to eat a bunch, and I just can't gain the weight. You're not eating as much as you think you are. So I guess rest is probably the same. It's like, dude, I'm not getting the gains I want.

I'm resting all the time. I'm getting like five hours of sleep a night or I'm eating like three times a day or I'm taking all this. Well, to you, it seems like a lot. To everybody looking at that, they wouldn't think it's very much. So change your perspective.

And I think people just, when they first start training, if they're a beginner, all they're worried about is training and they don't worry about – I mean, I don't even think the thought of recovery pops in people's heads. I don't think it's even a concern. Well, the thing you struggle with all the time is that if you're not working,

when you just set all these new goals, it's the first of the year, you've got all these resolutions, lose X of weight, gain X amounts of strength, get all these skills learned, how are you going to do it if you're resting? So you think more is better, and the more part you're thinking about is the work part. Every time you find yourself resting and recovering, you think, well, I'm being lazy.

I should be working or doing something. People come to us all the time. They say, I'm so tired. I think I'm overtraining. It's like, how often are you training? They're like, I don't know, three or four days a week. And we're like, you are not overtraining. As you always say, you're not overtraining.

You're under-recovering. If McGolder can come in and train 13 sessions a week and we're like you are not overtraining you are as you always say you're not overtraining you're under recovering yeah you know if mcgolder can come in and train 13 sessions a week or 15 sessions a week you know two days most days and then a triple on saturdays and and get through it and get stronger and better than you my friend are not overtrained yeah yeah and he gets better every week and his training volume is super high i remember i remember when uh i was in school. Oh, you remember something. I do remember something from school. This girl.

Something about a girl. Yeah. Okay. I like this story so far. She was pretty hot. That's probably why I was listening in the first place. Was it a hot professor? No.

No, no. A student. Lady, you had my curiosity. Now you have my attention. So we're all supposed to present something that we would want to present to, like, if you were being interviewed by the news or something like that. Like, what would you want to tell the average person? And so I want to tell people about squatting or something, right?

Which makes sense. And this girl the most boring newscast ever this girl wants to talk about or maybe the importance of the squat or something like that you know something like something that's novel to most people but you know is going to be helpful she comes up with overtraining and i was just i wanted to like throw stuff at her from the back of the classroom amer America is so overtrained. I'm like, yeah, that's our problem in the United States right now is that people are working out way too much. I was back there going, you are an idiot.

There's nobody at French Riviera Spa overtraining. That's the Globo gym in Memphis. Yeah, people got sensitized to the idea. Well, maybe I'm overtrained. Well, yeah, I mean, obvious points, there's no. And then there's a lot of people who just refuse to even believe in the concept. Guys like our buddy John, John North, who's like, proudly displays the awesome t-shirts and bumper stickers.

Overtraining is a myth. I think he actually says a lot. You're not overtrained, you're under-recovered. I think he's says a lot. You're not overtrained. You're under-recovered. I think he's on the same focus. And he has some strange things going on. We love John. Yeah. But he takes a morning swim.

Even if he has to break the ice in the pool. I don't know where he's doing this. But I saw him saying he was taking a morning swim outside and it was cold i'm like what are you doing like i tweeted at him he's like it's okay yeah it's a daily ritual like it's something i do every day i thought it was in like preparation for the american open or something like that's that's a that's a kind of recovery is making yeah carving out time for something that means a lot to you that makes you feel rejuvenated because i think anything that sort of subjectively reduces your distress is probably a very good thing.

Like if it's sitting in the morning and having a cup of coffee, having 30 minutes to read a book and forget about all the concerns, it's going to settle the mind and help you concentrate on the other things you need to do during the day. One thing you were saying earlier, right before we got started, was that you view stress as a cumulative thing. No matter where the stress is coming from, whether you're just stressed out from being at work or whether you're actually taking on physical stress from training, it all piles on top of each other. So, you know, you could have a low training volume week, but just a stressful, you know,

rest of your life and it could affect your training negatively. Yeah. You got to keep everything, everything checked and balanced in, in your life. So if you're, if you have a goal to compete for competition or train for competition, and yet you're planning to do so at the end of the year and work's getting really busy, boss is asking you to stay a few hours past, uh, past five, that spills over into your training. You get all, you know, tense about that. You rush to the gym. Everybody's already started. You get stressed. You try to catch up. You leave. You don't feel like you had a good training session because you probably didn't. You don't sleep well that night because you're kind of stressed about it and bummed about it because it's important to you. You get up the next day, you go to work, all that pressing project

deadlines and stuff reappear. You get stressed about it. The next training session, boss asks you again to do some work. You go home late. You get backed up on your training. That kind of cycle is really easy to get caught up in, and it's inevitable. It's going to happen. And those times you have to back off the training demand and try to be more efficient in the gym, or else you just won't be able to fit all that in. It's just the reality of it.

And you're talking about stress and cumulative stress. Like, what exactly is going on in the body? I mean, Chris, like, what do you think is happening? Like, is the stress that we're experiencing at work the same stress that we're experiencing in the gym or you're putting your body under stress when you train all these like what's you know what's what's the difference there yeah i mean as far as in the gym these physical stresses are kind of we're more familiar with you know you're you're getting amped up for a set but really

you're so used to that and you find it so pleasurable it's not really distressful i think from the nervous system perspective you're not really getting a big wear and tear there you get a little bit of a ding there when you do for a big heavy like deadlift attempt that's why you can't deadlift so often so heavy it wears down your ability of your nervous system to to come up with the effort for that but yeah there's all the routine stress of the stress in the muscle tissues, hormonal responses to deal with that. Uh, but I think people would really discount the distress that comes from busy work days that make you distracted and unfocused in the gym, but loom over you as you train. Uh, you know, I guess that raises all your physiological

variables, your heart rate all your physiological variables, your heart rate, your blood pressure, everything. It has a physical effect on you, just the same, but it's detracting from your ability to focus on the workout. You go home, that stress is still there. If you don't do a really diligent job of trying to recover from it, it will not go away. It'll mount like credit on your credit card or charges on your credit card.

Each little thing you do that you don't pay off as quick as possible starts mounting mounting mounting appreciate it so it's harder and harder to recover from and one thing i find with a lot of athletes is they um they they compartmentalize what they think about stress so yeah they don't associate physical stress with emotional stress spiritual spiritual stress, mental stress. Like they see that I can be mentally. A lot of athletes think they can be very emotionally stressed and mentally stressed and stressed at home. And then the physical stress they experience in the gym is a completely different thing. And that's really not the case.

You can't compartmentalize them. And so when we get an athlete who, you know. What is that sound? The helicopter. Oh, God. There's a helo outside. This week on Barbell Shrugged, we're sponsored by Black Helicopters.

Black Helicopters. Who does that? Alex Jones? This is now the Alex Jones Show. We have black helicopters outside watching. You're being monitored by government drones. Black helicopters are outside. Drones, dude. No, the drones are quiet. You're being monitored by government drones. Black helicopters are outside. Drones, dude.

The drones are quiet. Oh, yeah, that's right. They're sneaky. We'd already be dead by now. We would be dead. I just thought on the topic, a great little book, Educational Value, I'm adding to the audience. Get yourself a $2 used copy of Hans Selye's Stress of Life book. One of the first books I read.

I think I read it on my own actually in grad school because you know every every strength and conditioning course you'll ever take in school they always reference his curve his stress response like too much stress too much stress oh it's getting a lot of stress so i'm very alarmed oh i'm going over the edge i'm gonna die like kind of let's base everything we do off this curve but they never really go into all the great research he did on that they just say well you have too much and pretty soon it gets to be way too much to recover from and you're dead yeah i've never read that but that that book is really cool it's funny because i reference that myself because it's in every textbook on training and periodization

and all that don't be the guy who references something to sound smart and doesn't read the book well because i do you're not as skillful as i am you can't do it and still sound really smart i will reference the principle but i but i'm not you don't need to read the whole thing because it's you know it's a bunch of like electrocuting the shit out of like rat go nads and seeing what happens but it's really fascinating stuff the guy was just a masochist yeah science and all things in the name of science yeah uh but going back what i was kind of talking about is like athletes tend to want to compartmentalize and they think it's not going to affect them and they've got to recognize it is

cumulative yeah if you have a if you have a bad day at work yeah you just had a kid and you're not sleeping that great you just had a fight with your girlfriend you're going to the gym and you know any one of these things you have to be very diligent in accounting for these have a real measurable repeating effect on how you perform in a gym so we talk about counting for stress that's one check that off the list well pay attention i want to talk about a cortisol a little bit people people talk that's been in infomercials like cortisol the stress hormone and uh belly fat i think yeah that's right people do you know they they it is attributed to belly fat and but it's also a very necessary hormone um and doug i know you were talking about wanting to talk about

uh sleep cycles a little bit in regard to hormones and you tell us exactly how cortisol plays a role in our recovery yeah um so when you wake up in the morning you're gonna have very high cortisol levels and it's gonna kind of taper off throughout the day and up in the morning you're gonna have very high cortisol levels and then it's gonna kind of taper off throughout the day and then throughout the night it's gonna raise back up and then it's gonna taper off throughout the day and that's kind of your the cycle that you you generally get for cortisol um so for the stress all being the same being cumulative i think definitely hormonally um it's it's super cumulative like if you're at work and you're stressed out you're going to have higher adrenaline higher cortisol levels as a result of being stressed out um the the physical stressors

definitely aren't the same obviously you're not going to get a lot of like muscle tissue breakdown you're not going to be sore from being stressed out at work so maybe maybe you could say that that's slightly different but hormonally i think i think stressors kind of build up on top of each other um as far as the the sleep cycles go uh I was looking at sleep cycles earlier today. Everyone knows about REM sleep. They tend to think if I was in a deep sleep, I was in REM sleep, which probably isn't 100% correct. Generally, you go through a couple different cycles when you sleep. You have four non-REM, rapid eye movement type sleeps, sleep stage, excuse me.

The first two, you of just starting to calm down like if someone bumped you you'd wake up you're not really asleep yet you're not really getting any recovery benefit from that that's why you take a power nap it can kind of rejuvenate you but you're not really going to get recovered from any type of like muscular damage right from i understand the first two cycles that that power nap is good for the mind it's like a defrag for the brain but yeah you're not going to to get the hormonal response that you're wanting. That's right. You're not going to get the hormonal response.

You're not going to get any protein synthesis response. You're not going to gain muscle mass, for example, or recover from muscle tissue that's been broken down. It's not until you get into kind of the stage three, stage four deep sleep that you start to get those benefits. And then you kind of – when you're in stage one and stage two, you're sleeping very light. And then the deep sleep is stage three and stage four. And then actually kind of counter to what most people think, REM sleep, you're actually not in a deep sleep anymore necessarily.

You're coming back out of it. And then throughout the night, you go through those five stages on kind of like a 90, maybe 110-minute cycle. And then slowly throughout the night, those stage three and stage four deeper sleep stages shorten. And you stay mostly in the stage one, stage two kind of, excuse me, stage one, stage two and REM sleep, which is the lighter sleep towards the morning. And then hopefully if you've slept enough and you've recovered enough, then you should be in those lighter stages of sleep right before you wake up. You should wake up feeling refreshed and recovered.

And then you've got your $500 escalating light, natural ambient alarm clock that gently eases you out of sleep and gets you on your day. I still want to buy one of those. Like the voice of gentle muses in your ear. Awaken, Mr. Bledsoe. It's time to get your day going.

Actually, I think I'm going to purchase that this month. I'm going to invest in the Hue Light. It works off the iPhone. I thought it was going to be the cool one that had it. I'm going to get it before you. Sorry, dude. When are you getting them? Probably next couple weeks.

You're not going to have it before me, asshole, because I'm buying it next weekend. I'm buying them tomorrow. Well, I'm going to buy them right now. I'm buying them. well i'm gonna buy them right now i'm buying them where's my iphone i'm gonna make that right no so anyways yeah that's something i've been meaning to do is like uh the whole idea of an alarm clock kind of waking up in the middle of whatever sleep cycle or if you got enough sleep or not then you're just gonna wake up wherever you're at and the idea is that you know you're gonna wake up stressed out as opposed to if you wake up on your own due to getting enough sleep being in being spending more time that that graduation you're talking about um the idea is you wake up via light then you'll wake up in the

most ideal time and i will point out and i'll point out let me point out go ahead he's like i was pointing out something i'm gonna point at you. It's great if you can do it. But for all the parents in the audience, this shit is a pipe dream. Because every morning at a certain time, your kid's going to yell and scream. Oh, yeah. Sorry for you. Whatever shit cycle you're in the middle of, you're getting out of it. That's why I'm not going to have kids yet.

So I can still take advantage of my sleep. Bro, I'm thinking about my recovery. I can't have kids. Wife, please. Think about our needs. We have to sleep. People, I'm thinking about my recovery. I can't have kids. Wife, please. Think about our needs. We have to sleep. People who are competitive athletes and have kids, I don't know how they do it.

I need as much sleep as I can get. The idea is that you turn... Say you want to pick a 30-minute period you want to wake up between 6 and 6.30 and set the lights to gradually come on as if it were to mimic the sunrise. And hopefully you would wake up at the right point in your sleep cycle

instead of depending on that. If you're in the middle of sleep, I guess you wouldn't notice. Yeah, the light will wake you up, but when it's good for you, probably. It's sort of the opposite of having right next to your iPhone with the alarm, the most annoying setting

that every morning at 6.45 is going to rip you out of your dreams and immerse you into a cold reality. I try to play music I like. I'm going to wake up to something I enjoy. I'm still like smooth.

I like the alarm clock that you were talking about the other day with somebody where you put it on your counter and then when it goes off, it rolls off your counter and rolls in all different directions. It'll roll under your bed and then when it goes off it it rolls off your counter like it rolls in all different directions like rolling your bed and you gotta chase it down as it's screaming at you it's like one of those balls used to play with that spins around that would be unweighted and that that would be the opposite of what i'm advocating yeah it'll wake you up if that doesn't stress you out i don't know what will. What else do we want to talk about with recovery?

So recovery, it involves hormone production, having healthy cortisol cycles going on, growth hormone, testosterone production. Those are some hormones that are being produced when you're asleep. That's what happens in those deeper sleeps. What I – well, I guess we would no brain freeze i had like a good coaching tip and like man i was gonna totally win i was getting i was i was letting myself being confined by the the template of the board the board telling me what to talk about so

what wait i can recap can i recap so i some questions. So we're thinking about hormones. Yeah. Stress. Yeah. And getting everything back in a good ratio, bro. So we can grow muscles and get everything balanced. And we're going to think of so far of two key things. Do everything and all things possible to get the, all the sleep you need, which I guess

how much sleep is right for you as a whole, a bag of worms. Isn't it Doug? Eight hours is, does not apply to everybody does it not necessarily it really depends on your training volume and and uh how stressed you are at work we talk about stress being cumulative so eight hours is a good place to start but that's easier said than done in a lot of cases and might not be enough in a lot of people's cases so fight for it get to bed early turn the lights off turn the stimulation down don't try to work and be super creative maybe necessarily all the way up until bedtime give yourself some downtime negotiate with your wife's like hey look listen tonight i'll do i'll do like you're in battle

i'll do two loads of laundry i'll cook dinner and make lunch for tomorrow and then you let me sleep and you take care of the kid strategic negotiations that's like a nice way to say just i guess the other big tip is that when these things are happening if you're going through a bad stretch with the kids not sleeping work is busy there's some sort of stress in your life make sure you think okay normally i would do this considering all this shit storm going on in my life i better knock things down 10 i bet you even though it seems like I'm not getting my work in, this workout's too easy, I think you're doing yourself a favor.

Then when the inevitable passage of that storm happens in a week or two and everything settles back down, then you can resume. So I mean, cut the cycle short, build another week on the next one, and be smart about it. Don't stick to some programs because it was set in stone.

Now you think, no matter what happens in my life, no matter what happens, I'm doing this workout. Great. You get points for being a super tough guy, but your training is going to suck still. If you had a bad day at work and you didn't sleep and your dog got hit by a car and today calls for a max effort deadlift, don't do the max effort deadlift.

Bump that back a week. Be smart. Don't be dumb is what we're saying. that is really good advice thank you yeah that'd be a bad day though my girlfriend broke up with me my kid didn't sleep last night and my dog got ran over by a snowmobile oh we've spent a lot of shit bro we spent a lot of time talking about hormones and sleep and rest uh but let's talk about like what exactly uh is is uh recovery nutrition so there's there's two sides of the coin when it comes to recovery um in my opinion uh the first is like sleep in and rest and then the other um is nutrition so uh exactly so we got a couple

things to worry about when we talk about nutrition and And one might be glycogen replenishment, and the other would be building the muscle tissue that you've damaged. And then also I think we were talking about this a little bit earlier too, is nervous system recovery as well. So the nervous system tends to take a big beating. That's the one I think people forget about. They think muscles, sure, and joints. Yeah, I tend people, people forget about. They think muscles. Sure.

And I tend to, I tend to not think about that a whole lot either. And I've experienced it myself where you almost, if you experience it, I mean, I have the camera twice. Does anybody pay attention? Your head's too big. That's mean,

man. That's mean. If your head took up less room, it happens to be true though. I got a big head. Um, so, uh, I lost my train of thought. Debra Hale again. The nervous system.

Yeah, nervous system recovery is something that's easy to forget about. I forget about it a lot, yeah. Because you don't really feel it quite as much. If you have super sore muscles, muscular tissue breakdown is easy to remember because you're sore as shit. Well, it takes me weeks to notice that my nervous system is getting dull yeah i feel like dull to everything like i noticed getting slow yeah getting slow yeah yeah that ties into getting slow yeah my coordination goes down a little bit like i'll bump into the wall like on accident you know i'll be like wow maybe i'm fatigued that's when you know you need to go take a nap yeah

or you miss 10 snatches in a row at 80 of your one rep max yeah you should probably take a break or every third word is is followed with uh yeah well i think you should um do is uh eat food that's what i sound like when i present anything well let's talk about the nutrition side of things a little bit so uh glycogen what is that doug is that sugar that was a hell of an explanation glycogen all right let's talk about glycogen and then okay so we'll talk about glycogen we'll talk about rebuilding muscle as well so uh you want to explain i think doug does an excellent job of explaining glycogen and glycogen replenishment. Sure. Pretty much all glycogen is is just all the carbohydrates that you store.

For now, we'll say just in your muscles. You also store it in your liver, but we're going to focus on muscles today. Anytime you do any type of heavy or fast or high-intensity type movement, you're going to be burning primarily, we'll say, carbohydrates. Anytime you get that burn in your muscles and you produce lactic acid, all lactic acid was produced from burning carbohydrates and so you burned all those carbohydrates you got to replenish those carbohydrates and what those carbohydrates are called when they're stored in your muscles is muscle glycogen so post-workout or during your workout it's okay to have some sugar in a workout drink because you're burning all that that sugar. And so you can just build it back. The rest of your day, if you're just sitting in your office,

you're not really burning a whole lot of muscle glycogen. So crushing Coke or Gatorade all day long is a bad thing because those stores are already full. And if they're already full, then those calories have to go somewhere. And the assumption is that they're going to body fat because they're not going towards glycogen. Pretty much. What types of sugars are best for? Lower back fat.

What are the best sugars for replacing glycogen? For muscle glycogen, we're talking mostly about pure glucose. So Gatorade and table sugar are going to have a little bit of fructose in them. It's not 100% ideal. If you bought pure glucose or Waxy Maze or Maltodextrin, those basically break down into pure glucose. Or if you just ate some type of very starchy vegetable, if you ate potatoes or rice or any of those, anything that's starchy, for the most part, starches break down into pure

glucose and there's no fructose in starches. So if you're going to try to stay 100% paleo and you're going to eat potatoes and rice and things like that, then for the most part, those carbohydrates are going to break down into pure glucose. So post-workout, those really aren't that bad of an option, especially if you're someone who's trying to replenish glycogen as fast as possible, like if you're doing two workouts a day or if you're trying to gain muscle mass. Is there a reason to do Gatorade over Waxy Maze or glucose specifically?

It tastes really good and it's got electrolytes in it. It's got electrolytes. You've bought into the lies. The stuff that plants crave. Brondo is what plants crave. I can't say electrolytes without thinking about that movie. Ever. You've got to watch Idiocracy, people.

Watch Idiocracy and then look up Brondo commercials on YouTube. The Brondo commercials are just great. Good for 20 minutes of entertainment for sure. Yeah. I was going to say another thing. I just got reminded. I did that post last week and part of the research I read was in rats. So yeah,

it's curious how none of these mechanisms we're talking about are independent. Like you getting tired, your diet, the needs for replenishing your glycogen reserves, your needs for sleep. The interesting thing is these things are linked. Like I read this research where you can take rats

and inject some little compound that blocks adenosine receptors, for instance. Adenosine being something that piles up, I guess, when you cleave off a bunch of ATP. And you're the guy that was wanting us to avoid complex terminology at the beginning of the show. Bear with me. So you have this little magical energy molecule in your body

that you cut the end off, you get a little energy released, right? So I guess one of the things that happens when you do that is one component piles up as a byproduct i guess maybe it does it throughout the day like in rats if you if you inject something in their brains that sounds cruel i'm sure it's just like that oh look at this little rat boink inject a syringe full of some shit into its cerebral cortex but if you do that uh again i'm paraphrasing research the scientists did not write this up in a methodology first we take the fucking rat and jam its head with a syringe full of this shit sounds fancier than that but bear with us but if you do that if

you block the reception of those compounds that pile up these rats don't get sleepy but if you let this happen naturally the more metabolic byproducts that produce as they go about their daily lives, the more the need for sleep accumulates because that's that built-in mechanism that the brain is monitoring and putting in checks and balances in. So it's like we talk about sleep, we talk about nutrition, like these things aren't independent silos of things. These are complicated things that are happening in your body sort of naturally and your brain is really, really good at monitoring what's going on in your muscle fiber as you're contracting.

It's not just a separate thing that's happening. It's all fancy. It's pretty cool. Hey, science is cool. Science built that chair yourself. I don't even know how to respond to that. It's all tied together. My brain just exploded.

You just explained the matrix for your muscles. You want to give a quick teaser, and then we'll take a break? Quick teaser. Next, we're going to talk about the top three recovery methods You just explained the matrix for your muscles. You want to give a quick teaser and then we'll take a break. Quick teaser. Uh, next we're going to talk about, uh, the top three recovery methods that we recommend. Well,

I feel teased. Yeah. Um, I wonder what those are. I do want to talk about, and we're also going to talk about, uh, what protein does.

So having protein drinks for a training. Perfect. That sounds titillating. Ooh. Behave like you're not an animal. I can't, I can't not behave like you're not an animal i can't i can't not behave like i'm not an animal hey guys uh welcome back if you didn't notice did you hear that uh that's grace that's a separate coaching tip the barbell shrug dog oh hashtag hashtag grace grace the dog grace the dog wait like the wad yep i named my dog grace the dog i named my dog after 30 cleaning jerks

yes you did and your other dog is named izzy short for is, the WOD for 30 snatches. For dirty snatches. 30 snatches. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Let's get back on track with this podcast. All right. So we're going to talk about, we're going to deliver on what we promised we'd talk about. We're going to talk about, next we're talking about the top three recovery methods.

So, Doug, what is your favorite recovery method? What do we do? What do we do if we want to favorite? What do we, what do we do? What do we, what do we, what do we do if we want to recover? What do we do? Yeah. And what are the top three things?

Let's list these by priority. Like, like if you can only do one or maybe you should put a lot of emphasis on this. So what do you, what do you think is like the top three most important things you should be doing for recovery? What would you do? What do you do? Let him talk.

Let's go next! Next 25 minutes. You've angered the cameraman. Let's figure out how many ways we can ask the same question. So, Doug, if there were only three things, hypothetically. He wants to go home. So, obviously, we've been talking about sleep the whole time. Sleep is tip-top number one. After that, I'm going to break nutrition into two categories.

How much sleep would be ideal? We kind of touched on that earlier. We were saying eight hours, which most people have that in their head as how much sleep you're supposed to get. Give or take, depending on how much recovery you really need, how tired you are, how much you're working at your job, how many training sessions you have per week. I will start off with right around eight hours of sleep, give or take an hour, and then making sure you're getting enough food and enough quality food. If you're not getting a solid three, four, maybe five meals a day of a quality

paleo meal, then that's a good place to start. And then, like I said, I was going to break nutrition up into two different categories. So the third category for me is specifically workout nutrition. Are you getting enough calories either during or post-workout? And if you're getting all paleo meals, then your workout nutrition is probably going to be higher in carbohydrate, like we said right before the break, compared to the rest of your meals, to replenish that glycogen and also to give you a good insulin kick

to promote all the protein that you're getting in that meal. Since insulin stores things in cells, it's going to store protein in your muscle cells and it's going to help you recover. So you would say that the glucose plus the protein would have a synergistic effect? Synergy. Synergy. One of my favorite words. Synergy is my favorite word, and I try to sneak it in everywhere.

Zoom in on this. This is the universal sign of synergy. Glycogen supplementation, glucose, powder, shit that Bledsoe takes. Protein powder, boom. Oh, God. Ooh. that blood so it takes protein powder boom oh god all right so are you agree with that those two those three but yeah what are your top three recovery methods and if it's the same as doug's that's okay that's okay uh well for every workout i sacrifice a chicken i say dear god of recovery let this poor soul represent my desire to appease you please bestow upon me plenty of

workout recovery so it usually works pretty good psychosomatic largely no i i agree with that uh i mean the thing i struggle with is not only focusing on the amount of time you're sleeping but probably going into it to get the most out of that time it's like you know if you have fluorescent lights on in your living room and you're watching reruns of Seinfeld or something, you're all laughing and stimulated, and then you go try to jump into bed at 10 p.m. because you've got to get up at 6.

Man, even if you did fall asleep, you're going to take a while to get into a deep sleep. So make sure you have this built-in relaxation or recovery phase kind of before, you know, chill out a little bit. That way you're ready to sleep when it's time to sleep that might be a good little bonus tip for the audience uh but i'm sure i'm gonna take doug's advice and pay a little more attention to post-workout recovery because i usually don't do that like i'm just going home i'll have i'll eat within the next two hours i usually pretty bad about that kind of thing so i'm gonna take doug's advice he's

my friend he He's smart. Awesome. To sleep one. I was going to say, to sleep is something that's really fascinating for me because I was thinking of this thing today when I was driving

about learning. I'm going to make an actual point. Bear with me. Sometimes it takes a while. I hope you do. No, but I mean, think of it this way as well, the importance of sleep.

Like you go to your gym and you put a lot of importance on focusing on the technique and trying to learn. You know, I'm paying really close attention to Mr. Bledsoe as he's showing me these tips to improve my clean and jerk, for instance. There's lots of other stuff you did in your day. You worked, you took on challenges, you read a book. But the curious thing about learning is none of that really helped you learn until you have processed. You mentioned really quickly about defragging your brain.

What happens when you learn is that you sort of build associations between what you've done in the past to what you've experienced. You strengthen certain positive memories, certain synapses in the brain that make strong associations. Associations that are weak are no longer relevant. You break down. It's all this complicated stuff that goes on and you truly learn. And a lot of that is going to happen while you sleep. Old memories are going to fire. You're going to replay through the day's events with the new memories.

You're going to build associations. All this is going to happen randomly. You're going to get vivid representations of your past, which is another word for dreaming. Whoa. And potential futures. Yeah. So you tie together those relationships, and it's only when you awake.

I want to watch a documentary on dreams. Yeah. It's only when you wake up from that good, well-planned. I know everything there is to know about dreaming. You wake up from that good, well-planned, high-quality sleep. You do it when it's appropriate time for you to get up when you resume the next day then you have to be more specific then you've actually done your learning but it's not until your brain makes sense of everything you've

experienced you've got that so it's really it's really maybe even put more focus on that night sleep than you do on your actual training i think it that's a really good point. Last week, I think it was Friday, I got really angry with myself the next day because I had an amazing training session. I mean, it went really well. I felt like I was moving really well. I was moving fast. I was just – I got done with the training session. I was like, man, I was on point the whole time.

And then I went out and I had a few beers. I stayed up too late. I woke up too early the whole time. And then I went out and I had a few beers. I stayed up too late. I woke up too early the next day. I definitely didn't recover physically. I probably didn't recover mentally like you're talking about right now. And I feel like I probably got 50% effectiveness out of that workout simply because I didn't go and recover optimally. And talking about nervous system a bit too, and that goes into the motor learning and all that kind of stuff.

You know, even if I can cause my muscles to recover quicker, you know, I may not get all, I may not get, you know, learning, improving my snatch, my snatch speed and, and those movement patterns as well as I could have so and that's just as important as anything else yeah you can't do you can't do can't treat these things like they're independent and not connected they're all they all go to with one package deal you are not just a pile of muscle with a brain set on top of it these things are finely tuned to work together yeah but doing one without taking care of the other is not going to give you the comprehensive benefit right if you think that's true, man, you're just wrong.

Good luck not making PRs, sucker. Sorry. On the workout shake front, a lot of people talk about having a post-workout shake. For me personally, I drink most of my shakes during my training, especially if I'm just doing strength work and I'm not Metconning. Some people don't like to have stuff in their stomach when they Metcon. They get all pukey feeling. Pansies.

Which kind of goes away after you're kind of accustomed to Metconning frequently. Why don't you get in shape? So people talk about having a post-workout shake as opposed to like a peri-workout or like a during-workout shake. Really, I view drinking your shake during your training as almost like a post-workout shake because if you train for an hour it's really if you start drinking your shake at the beginning of your training session like those nutrients aren't going to peak in your bloodstream until after about an hour so right about time you're finishing up your workouts right when those

nutrients are going to be peaking which is right when you want them to be to be peaking for max recovery so i i do that just because it seems physically it just seems more appropriate like but if i'm all tired okay well i gotta drink this fucking glass of stuff it's kind of gross it's like okay i gotta chug this down that don't feel so good yeah if i drink it before i don't feel so good so like oh it makes sense i feel really great if i just sip on it the whole time plus i'm like not really getting that thirsty and i kind of sort of settles the stomach nice little routine between heavy sets. It just makes more sense on all levels.

Yeah, and then right towards the end of your workout, when you're supposed to be getting the most fatigued, you actually have some nutrients flowing around your bloodstream, and you still feel okay because you still have a little bit of energy, and you're not totally depleted. That's how I feel about it. That's also how I feel. How do you feel about it?

Somewhat similar. Yes. Every time I do a heavy, I do a heavy wad. I do three wads, the hardest ones I can think of. And then I drank two pints of raw goat milk immediately after my last rep. And then I hurl.

Yeah. While I, while I train, I, I get through about two-thirds of my shake during my training and then i chug the last third afterwards and depending if i had a really high volume session so say i'm doing a lot of crossfit style training then i will after i drink you know i'll finish off the last bit i'll probably consume more while i'm training if the volume is really

high maybe i'll finish the entire shake while I'm training. Afterwards, I make a whole new one and I put that on top of it. I'm drinking two workout shakes, really. The way I know if I'm getting too much of that is if I start getting fat. If I start accumulating some fat mass,

I'm like, okay, I'm probably overdoing the post-workout shake a little bit too much on the carb side of things, especially. Yeah. I'll make one more point. The coolest things I've been fascinated with lately is the different strokes comment Doug touched on. Because really, there's this thing that's a good idea. Getting nutrients when your body needs it. We all agree.

Some research is going to point at certain times being better than others. Sure, fine. But the real thing to focus on is doing it better than not doing it. Just doing it gives you a lot of benefits. And some of these little ancillary benefits, these small things can be timing related. Sure. But the big thing that's equally important to the,

as to the why it works and when you should do it, it's like, what would you prefer? If you're like, man, I can't stand the idea of drinking shakes during, well, drink it after but if it's a nice little reward you look forward to it the whole workout it makes sense to you to do it after or before doesn't affect your workout adversely do it then yeah some people talk about sleeping the brain and memories and preferences and all

that like the big thing i'm focusing on is that a huge training prescription guideline if you can get to this level of detail is to do on some level, what you prefer. If certain things just don't make sense, if you just don't prefer it, an organ, if a workout scheduled a certain time or in a certain way, just is counter to what seems like what makes sense to you.

Do it another way. Yeah. If it matters that you come to the gym and do things the way that's intuitive that makes sense that gets you excited to train because if you are understanding what you're doing what you're consuming if you have a good reason behind how you rest and how you recover if you organize your exercises in a way that makes sense to you and get you excited to do it then you're gonna train really hard and that's gonna be coupled with your good recovery and get really fantastic results your preference can't be coupled with your good recovery and you can get really fantastic results.

Your preference can't be overlooked. You got to focus on that as well. Yeah. And some people, you know, they can't have that meal prior to training, you know, and don't do it. And, uh, but I mean, the best thing I can do is tell people what works for me. And, you know, I, I was given, um, years ago, I mean, I'm pretty much on the same page as Doug and Chris, you know my top my

top three things are you know sleep then then uh just general good nutrition and then you know you have that post-workout nutrition or during workout nutrition um but you know years ago you know we we uh discovered some research that says you know you should drink whey protein and a sugar and we started off taking whey and uh gatorade It's like, okay, that makes sense. And since then, we've been kind of fine-tuning. I'm playing around with different types of carbohydrates. Right now, I'm playing around with – I don't drink whey at all, actually. I'm just taking a high dose of BCAAs, branched-chain amino acids.

I don't like whey either. It makes me feel weird. Well, and the argument was made to me like you should switch to bcaas uh because it can just get in your system faster and kind of what doug was talking about like you know that uh some of those nutrients being present while you're training well if you're drinking bcaas you can drink them even closer and during and and get the benefits from that even sooner so what i've been playing around with lately is I take a – I can only find one, a glucose, just pure glucose supplement, and then I couple that with – Like a powder? Yeah, it's just a powder, and I couple that with some BCAAs,

and I get flavored BCAAs because if you just take straight up BCAAs, you will probably yak. It tastes terrible. It's so gross. I feel like I'm drinking chemicals, you know? Like I'm like, ugh. What straight up BCAAs, you will probably yak. It tastes terrible. It's so gross. I feel like I'm drinking chemicals. What's a BCAA? Branched chain amino acids. The main one you're really looking at,

the main amino acid would be leucine. And then what is this? L-glutamine. Leucine, isoleucine, and valine. Oh. For the branched chains. Yeah, I've got the BCAAs, and then it also has glutamine

in it also okay so mine has the stuff i'm taking actually has four so how do you feel so far with this approach um so i switched to that about a week and a half ago two weeks ago and i actually feel amazing um i i was not consuming as many carbohydrates in my during and post-workout shakes. And I bumped them because I was feeling tired near the end of my workout. So I was like, okay, I'm low energy. I need to put a little more sugar in there. So I'm taking about 40 grams of sugar as pure glucose. And then I'm taking the amino acids.

Now, the BCAAs, I'm actually triple dosing. So most people, when they take BCAAs, they're getting about 10 grams total, if you were to add them all up. And they take them. One little scoop of whatever is provided. And what I used to do is, like, I would take my BCAAs prior to training,

and I would take a single serving. But what I've learned about most supplements is you should probably double or triple the dose. That's a joke. That does not apply across the board. Oh, it sounds good. I'm writing it down. it sounds good triple everything if the doctor gives you drugs you should probably ignore the prescription dose and drink a bunch of grapefruit juice here to uh to close that loop a little bit with the bcaas we mentioned that there

is those three amino acids and that might not mean shit to some of the people listening so so protein is made out of amino acids right and those three amino acids are the most important ones that we find in the majority of the proteins that we would be eating so you're basically kind of whittling down to the to the most important three and those are the ones you're focusing on the primary amino acid is responsible for for keeping the muscles from breaking down it also initiates the muscle to build back up sooner. And that would be loosing. So what I'm doing is I'm triple dusting that.

So I'm getting like 30 grams of protein in just those three amino acids. So it's 30 grams of that powder. Yeah. If you were to do the same thing with whey protein, you might be, and I'm just going to make a really general assumption. I haven't done the math. It might be like 100 grams of protein like to get that same amount of of uh what's your dosage yeah i might be having to take like 100 grams of whey protein or something like that to

get that same amount and i think that's probably and that would as a ballpark figure that would give you the shits that that might be hard to swallow figuratively and literally yeah i mean uh it has to do a lot with speed of digestion, you know. I can either drink 100 grams of whey protein, maybe a lot of those amino acids I don't need. So for that, at that specific time, you need the other ones too. Testicle cam. So I'm taking the BCAAs, triple dosing those um i'm i'm gonna do

that for a while i may i may quadruple dose and see if i get an even better effect so my my workout shake has creatine beta alanine in it the glucose and uh and the bcaas and i'm actually seeing uh i've noticed i've gotten leaner stayed about the same weight maybe maybe lost a pound or two um and i feel during my workouts amazing i get done and i'm like man i feel you should put up links on the show right now ctp inside my hands when you edit links to those products glucose powder no that sounds a lot of work pca click here and then click here for that and then combine them into this which is a shaker bottle i'm talking i'm talking about this right now but i i'd hate to openly promote a product after having 10 days of experience myself who needs more than 10 days

experience for anything it's like not only am have you had the four-hour work week you can master things rapidly and then move on to something else. It's a case study and it's very short term. So we'll be, you know, if in six weeks I'm still feeling fantastic about it, I might start promoting it. Maybe prescribing like the same, you know, okay, I found that it's better to take five times. Or I found out I didn't need to take three times.

Two times is probably a good amount i may play around with two we'll double our population sample yeah that'll work i'll show you the power of our sample we'll see all right so here one time very succinct what exactly do you put in your workout drink workout drink 40 grams of sugar in the form of a glucose supplement uh 30 grams worth of bcaas uh four grams of beta alanine and uh five grams of creatine so that is what goes in my workout shake so when i go to train what i do and water i do add some okay we'll ask you what goes in there and you didn't leave you didn't say water uh water goes in that as well uh i drink that uh training. Right now, most of my training is just weightlifting.

I'm focusing on just that. Not a lot of conditioning going on there. If I was doing more conditioning, I would probably bump the carbs. Would you scale those numbers based on activity, but also body weight? Yes. Would you approximate it? Yeah, you'd have to. I weigh about 175 pounds, and that's what I'm dosing with right now.

I'll let you do the math. Let's say you were a very handsome 275-pound former powerlifter who was interested in maybe trying to shake. How much of those – what would you put in the shake? I would do the same thing, probably increase it by 50%. 50%, all right, because I have a friend who's a former powerlifter who's very handsome and weighs about two hundred and seventy five pounds. So I mean so I got into a lot of detail that so just real quick I drink the

shake I I finished two-thirds of it while I train as soon as I'm done I finished the other third and slam a bar and then about 20 minutes later I pour 36 ounces of raw goats milk and I try to finish that pretty quickly. And that's kind of like my workout, post-workout nutrition. I want to talk about sleep real quick. What I find to be optimal and what some of the research supports and all that kind of stuff and what I've found works for me is being in bed and trying to be asleep between like 9.30 and 10. Trying to get asleep at least by 11. If I don't have to be up at a very specific time, I don't set my alarm clock.

I just kind of wake up when I wake up. It tends to be between 6 and 7 o'clock anyway. I try to get that 8 to 9 hours of sleep find is ideal for me. I then, between 1 and 3 p 3pm. I take another nap if I am loaded down with work and I've got stuff going on. I take a 30 minute power nap. If I have the opportunity, I take and I go to bed around one and I set my alarm clock for, you know o'clock so i'll let myself sleep for two hours but i will not uh i won't sleep after three but i i rarely need the alarm clock what i do is i fall asleep i go through a full sleep cycle between it lasts between 60 and 90 minutes i want to get that

hormonal response so that i get a little extra recovery so i get the extra dose of testosterone growth hormone um and then and then, and then, uh, I go off and train or whatever, you know, ideal scenario. I would sleep eight to 10 hours every night and take a 90 minute nap every day. I don't live in ideal world.

I pretty close to it. Pretty close to it. I'm not taking any naps. I'd say, I'd say three days of the week I can get that 90 minute nap. And if I really make it a priority, um, and I'm,

I'm working on getting more time for me uh so i can do that i do on fridays because you give up so much of yourself now you need to focus on you the older i get the more like that's how i feel yeah the older i get the more selfish i i become with like uh having my time for my own recovery. That's what Ashley tells me. Yeah. My wife agrees with that comment. I guarantee it. Like he is selfish. I'm like, woman, you should try being selfish yourself. Stop doing shit for me.

So what if you're doing all the stuff that we're talking about right now and you still feel under recovered? What then? We'll start with you. Take lots of steroids. There you go. Take a trip to Tijuana. The Hon honest truth on the barbershop buy them take all your liquidate some money from your 401k buy the drugs put them in your anal cavity sneak across the border and then you have plenty of drugs take them yeah whenever someone says they don't do that uh i would say once you assume that you have

enough of something like i oh i'm sleeping plenty but yeah i don't feel rested and i'm eating plenty but i don't have the energy to train let that be a warning sign that your perspective and your assumptions could be totally wrong like maybe talk to a good coach uh you know have some correspondence with us we'd love to talk to you it could be that what you think is enough is nowhere near enough that happens a lot it's just that you in your mind it's a lot you're really working on it but you might not be working on it like you think you're working on it yeah that'd be my first guess yeah if you didn't get a lot of sleep before like if you're one of those guys it's five hours a night and then you're like up to seven and you're like i am crushing sleep if the training is good if you're at a good box with good prescriptions and you or you've got

a good strength coach and you are paying all the attention you possibly can to your diet and you are sleeping the amount you need to sleep with the quality of sleep you need and you are legitimately not recovering you you could, shit, man, you got cancer or something. You could go to a doctor. Take a closer look. Yeah, I find that to be true. Those two things should cover it. I talk to, this happens a lot with women.

I'm like, you know, how much. What'd you say here? I'm treading here. I'm treading my own. Women, they think. Lisa just looked at you like, you better watch it. I've had women tell me, you know, I eat plenty of this or that. Like, I have got it.

And I'm like, all right, fill me out a diet log and send it to me. And I get the dialogue, and it's like, they're eating like 1,200 calories and training like eight times a week. And I'm like, that is not going to cut it, you know. It's just like they're not consuming enough protein or enough high- protein or something like that and that's exactly what it is in their mind you know compared to what they used to eat when they were a vegan this is a lot of protein you know but this is not you know enough getting that objective view you know like you know let's record how much you actually do sleep when did you go to bed this week look at the numbers and tell you what they think yeah be honest and have somebody really look at what you're doing.

I think a lot of times people go, oh, I did really good on Monday. Tuesday was an exception because this thing happened. And Wednesday, well, that other thing happened too, so I made the exception there. And then if someone's really logging everything, and they come to find out they make a lot of exceptions all the time. And so they usually remember the good days. And pretty soon the exception is the norm. It's no longer the exception. It's the time. And so, you know, they usually remember the good days. the exception is the norm. It's no longer the exception.

It's the rule. In a world where exceptions become the rule. No, but yeah, every once in a while I cheat, you know, I cheat like, you know,

Tuesday afternoon and maybe Wednesday morning and Thursday all day and Saturday and Sunday I have whatever I want. That's way more common than the joke would suggest. Super typical. I won't name who this person is,

but she'll be like, she's like, man, why is it that you're lean all the time? And I can't seem to lose this fat. I want to lose. I'm like, well,

how many times do you cheat this week? She's like one time. I'm like, well, what about Tuesday night? Okay. Two times. It was just a bowl of queso

what about come on it was cheese what about wednesday what about wednesday lunch okay that was four times and it's like it's like okay and then it becomes the movie the jerk so yeah yeah then you're in the doghouse that's right whoa whoa who are we talking about we don't we still don't know you gave away too much dog names. You gave away too much, Doug. That's right. Is it time now for... Should we plug? No. We nailed this thing.

No. I've been having a good time. Those two points were smashed to death. Oh, man. We crushed that. Oh, yeah. There's one thing I want to talk about. We were kind of discussing part of the show.

What if you can't do the ideal recovery you know what i mean like what if what if you can't get eight hours what if you have the newborn kid yeah what if you can't what if you have a job where you know if your boss catching you trying to sneak underneath your desk and catch a 20 minute nap you're screwed yeah you know what if you can't do that what if uh you're a poor college student and you can't afford the higher quality food, all that kind of stuff? Well, the interesting thing about those two examples is that you can probably put extra focus on the other thing.

That's true. Like if you can't get enough sleep because your job or your baby won't allow it, then you could probably maybe put more focus on diet, maybe invest in some things that'll help you maybe pay more attention to higher quality intake of foods, more diligence on that end. If you're a college student who has no money can't buy good food well as busy as you think you are you probably got time to sleep in you know class starts at 11 asshole sleep in you know put extra focus on that so i mean that's probably the first decent strategy right when i was in college i was sleeping nine hours a night and taking a nap

every afternoon yeah people go man you don't you don't understand how tough it is to be in college i've got two classes this semester and my dad's making me work like eight hours a week at fucking papa john's uh and like you know it's just really tough like and you're like wow uh as a 30 year old man i realized that in college i was an idiot going to school is not hard i don't give a shit how many papers your professor made you write this semester. I always look back on my life when I was younger. Every point in my life, I'm like, I am working so hard. And then as I get older, I'm like, man, nothing. It's only going to get worse.

When I'm 60, I'm going to be working my ass off. I'm going to get no sleep. But doing what you love. At this rate. At this rate. But you'll be living the dream. That's what they say. So if you can't, if you're not getting the ideal recovery,

say you can only get six hours a night. What are some things that you can change about your training? What would you want to change about your training volume potentially? One thing I've done in the past is when I'm super sore, I'm extra sleepy. Back when I used to do hypertrophy training and I was just wrecked sore everywhere, which still definitely happens. What is hypertrophy training? It means getting real sore just so you can get bigger. Cool. Pretty much.

Lots of this. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, oh. Lots of that. Yeah. It was mostly back squats and RDLs for us. Mostly screaming for me.

Yeah. So if your rec's sore, then you're often super tired. And so if you can make it where you're not quite so sore, then you won't be quite as sleepy. And I've experienced this a couple times where I can do more conditioning, doing the type of conditioning that doesn't make you sore, pushing the prowler, doing the rower, air dining. You can do all your conditioning where you're not getting quite as sore, and then i just don't feel like i need as much recovery because i'm just not

breaking down as much tissue smarter or you could do like uh yeah instead of like 10 sets of 10 back squats you might do a few might reduce your volume into like a box squat where you can sit down nice and easy and then jump up real fast and i would break down some of the wear and tear i think it's a really good point. Trying to reduce the amount of work that causes muscular damage. I personally was thinking more along the lines of just lowering your volume, period. The amount of energy you're going to spend. In that situation, you know you're not going to be recovered. Don't try to mimic.

That might be a way to keep your volume higher. That's the exact same thing though. With a box squat, you're basically by eliminating the deceleration at the bottom, you eliminate how sore you get as a result too. So that's kind of the same thing really. Yeah. But yeah,

that's it. When you know, when there's some kind of program you're trying to follow or somebody's training, you're trying to, to follow it. That's one of the reason why just blindly following a blogs training program may be really bad for you. Cause this may be a group of highly trained weightlifters who aren't doing and you're trying to follow it. That's one of the reasons why just blindly following a blog's training program

may be really bad for you because this may be a group of highly trained weightlifters who aren't doing anything else but just two to three days of training or two to three sessions a day of training. You're a guy with a newborn kid, an eight to five corporate job, and a wife who wants to see and talk to you and engage in you on a human level. When you get home from the gym, you're not going to get up at 5 five o'clock a.m and then on your lunch break and then at 10 o'clock at night trying to do that training it's not going to work you're going to fail horribly and your life will be shit choose the better path train three days a week you know on the day where

you know your wife says yeah take that time for you focus on tuesdays thursdays and then make that one hour you get to train precious and efficient and only the things that count and really plan it out and come into it prepared. And afterwards, get home and get recovered. I mean, you've got to put priority where priority is due. That's something you've done the last couple years. You had to.

You had a kid last year. And, like, one of the things you talk about is selecting exercise selection. You know, you kind of threw out a lot of these, you know, maybe some of this assistance work that was creating a lot of training volume. Yeah, when I'm power lifted, I would do like 40 minutes of assistance work to warm up. Right. Then like two to three main exercises. And then three to four of all these little exercises you think you must have to get better.

And they help. But the reality is, if you're strapped for time, you've got three training sessions a week you can do. My view is, well, if I came in each time and squatted, I pulled a couple times, I pressed once a week because that's all my shoulders allow. Because I can't recover from any more than that. Those are the things that give me the biggest bang for my buck. On a day I don't have time to do push-ups or single leg squats or or something or sit-ups then you won't do it because that's not going to matter what matters is in that hour you get the main thing in on the days you have the luxury of some time and you're feeling great and the kids with the wife and you have all these times to train

you can do some stuff you can do extra sets of back raises and all that and it's going to help you but it's not critical so you know just enjoy it yeah you got to be smart you got to pick pick the biggest bang for the buck that's going to be the barbell in an hour's time yeah nothing wrong coming in just doing five by five on squatting and going home it's way better now look if if have the people listening to the show hello readers viewers how are you i'll be doing good if you came in got a sweat going hit your squats for five by five put every molecule of effort and focus on those five sets and then went home you'd probably get really strong really quick you don't have to do the five sets of arduos after

then the sit-ups in the then the wad your buddy prescribed we do the 45 sets of 20 reps on the kettlebell swings don't worry about all that yeah do the five by five the way it should be done. You will be destroyed in the need of a nap afterwards. Yeah, for conditioning, I like intervals a lot. If you are super pressed for time. If you run a 400-meter sprint at 100% full speed, take a five-minute break, and then do it again, you might only need to run two of them,

and you will get plenty of good work out of that. I agree. You'll be out of there after your warm-up, you'll be out of there in 10 minutes. Strategy, yeah. All right, guys, I think it's about time to wrap things up. Remember to get your rest. So it might be good to start tracking some of these things.

Get your rest, look at your workout nutrition, and just look at your total calories throughout the entire day. Don't forget to go to fitter.tv and sign up for the newsletter. Doug, what do you got to plug? I got two today number one lisa mac right over here taking our photos today yeah lisa she owns l max studios here in town and she actually just got done taking my engagement photos she actually took all y'all's they look all y'all's engagement photos too right well not not me no no i know the photographer take mine but she's taking many great photos and i would rather go back in time and have her do it sure she's very talented

individual uh so she does a great job for so if you're in memphis you need some photos taken lisa mack at l mac studio is a great option what's your website l mac studio you can fly her to where you are too. I mean, hell, she'll go. Yeah, you can fly her out. Lmaxstudio.com if you're here in Memphis and you want some photos taken. And she especially enjoys wedding photos and engagement photos. Is that right? And baby photos.

So if you just had a newborn baby. Here's a link for her website, CTP. Put it right there. Do you do nudes? Click here. No. She does nudes for crossfit males only sign me up that's right uh the other thing is the faction foods nutrition course we talk about

recovery all day that nutrition course goes through you know from knowing nothing about paleo to having like a full-scale paleo plan and knowing exactly what to do a step-by-step eight session course where you learn everything you need to know about how to improve your nutrition so you can recover better get stronger and get better at crossfit chris oh yeah me oh yeah uh yeah go on fitter tv and check out the the simple strength seminar we have now added value we've done the little applied supplement to the simple strength seminar they said it couldn't be done they said it couldn't be done a simple how-to for applying the proven awesomely simple and effective principles of the simple strength seminar

into your training program so i wrote a little little 10-page ebook start to finish how you can apply each one of those main points from that seminar to get a really rock solid dead simple easy to follow training program in place that can start you on the path achieving your goals today if you purchased the simple strength uh product before uh log back in and check it out because it's it's in there now i think doug probably already sent you an email letting you know that that's the case. And most importantly. I sent it out to everybody, but there's still a link on the actual product page if you've purchased Simple Strength where you can click and go check it out.

Give it a read. Apply it. Give us feedback how it's going. If you've got a unique situation, let's give you some coaching advice. Let's help you through your journey towards achieving your strength goals. That's how we did it. We got feedback from someone who bought the product and they said, I wish you had one of these things as part of the product. And we said, okay. And we went and made it.

And we put it on there. It's just that easy. It's just that friggin' easy. That's the best part about having digital products where it's just part of a webpage and you can go add to it anytime. You dream it up, we'll achieve it. And then we'll give it to you. And then the other thing, check out the blog,

thechrismoreblog.com. I drew a fancy banner for you. Oh, it's so fancy. Go look at it. And then there'll be a new, what today is what? January 6th. Tonight there's going to be a new, by the time this appears, you'll have seen it and read it and have digested it and, oh, this is the greatest thing.

But there's a blog post on Rush going up tonight, the greatest band that ever came from Canada. Rush. I'm not joking. This is going to happen. So check out that blog. Reach out to me. Give me some feedback. Hit me up on the tweeters. Whatever your heart desires, I will provide to you with knowledge.

Yeah. In the next few weeks, I did a nutrition seminar yesterday at CrossFit Carriville. We recorded it, and it will be up in the store in a week or two whenever CTP gets around to editing that down.

It will be a bonus to Doug's Faction Foods Nutrition course. So if you buy his at any time, you will have access to mine as well. So I think that's it. Everyone go get some

rest. Drink your post-workout shakes lisa's getting some rest right now we're gonna sign off on this eat some uh eat some good she loves animals get recovered peace out guys