Barbell Shrugged - Building the Best Pilots in the World w/ Zachary Carson, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #789

Episode Date: March 12, 2025

Zachary Carson is a highly experienced Aerospace Physiology Officer with a deep understanding of human factors and risk mitigation in high-stakes operational environments. His expertise lies in optimizing human performance within complex aerospace systems. As a subject matter expert, Carson specializes in identifying and addressing the unique challenges faced by operators of advanced Major Weapons Systems. Carson is committed to advancing human performance in aerospace operations and contributing to the safety and success of mission-critical activities. His experience includes simulator training and tactical flying sorties, providing a hands-on understanding of the demands placed on operators in these challenging environments. Carson is dedicated to continuing his development as a subject matter expert, and making meaningful contributions to the field. Work With Us: Arétē by RAPID Health Optimization Links: Zachary Carson on LinkedIn Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram  

Shrug family this week on barbell shrug Zachary Carson from the US Air Force He's an exercise physiologist with one mission in life to create the best pilots in the world Which is super cool and we're actually working on a bunch of stuff with him right now So we can help that mission and he came in today I actually have a very good friend of mine That was a Blue Angel pilot went to Top Gun in the Navy, like total, total badass pilot. And I always used to think about how essentially the locker room of the Blue Angels or the locker room where those guys are getting ready and practicing at Top Gun

is essentially like the highest level sports team. They just don't play sports. They don't play football or hockey or basketball. They fly planes. But it's the exact same thing I mean there's an enormous number of pilots that exist in this world and to be at the level of performance that those pilots specifically the ones that Zack works with in the Air Force you're total savage if you are working with Zack and in today's show we dig through everything that the pilots are doing to prepare their bodies, everything that the Air Force is investing into their pilots, because obviously the hardware side of things,

the actual planes do such enormously cool maneuvers at this point, but how do we keep their bodies and their brains from breaking down with the immense amount of force that is pushed on the body when you have a plane that performs the way it does? And it's a very cool conversation that you're going to be a part of today. As always, friends, make sure you head over to RATLab.com. That is where you can learn more about all the lab testing, analysis, coaching, program design that we do inside Rapid Health Optimization Signature Program, ARETE. And you can access all of that at aretelab.com. Friends, let's get into the show.

Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson. Zachary Carson. I'm going to be super official. You are the exercise physiologist for the best pilots in the world. That's your job. When you wrote me the first message, you said, I want to build the best pilots in the world. I went, me too. That sounds awesome. That's like the best mission statement you could have in your job. Welcome to the show, man. I'd love for, uh, you

kind of open it up here. I'd love to, uh, just hear a little bit of background on yourself and how, uh, how you got to the position to create the best pilots in the world. Yeah. Thank you. Uh, thanks so much for the opportunity to be here. Uh, I'm super pumped, uh, super excited about your show. Obviously I've been a huge fan for several years. So, uh, when I, when I first wrote you, obviously I was just super jazzed up about my current opportunity because I'm at the United States Air Force Weapons School, embedded in the schoolhouse as the aerospace physiologist for, as you mentioned, some of the best pilots, the best air crew, and some of the best operators in the world. So, how did I get here? My journey is a little bit unorthodox compared to some. I graduated high school, had the typical, I don't really know what I want to do mentality. And then I decided to join the Navy. You know, I decided to join the Navy. I thought Special Forces would be a good fit just because you see the videos, you see the movies, you read the books and everything

just sounds awesome. And so I went and did the rescue swimmer thing. I went and joined the Navy. I went through the rescue swimmer schoolhouse. Were you out in San Diego for that? I was. I was out in San Diego. I worked with all those divers. Yeah. So I think... Down in Coronado. Yeah. Down in Coronado. Yep. yep yeah i think my first introduction to barbell shrugged when it was when i was still stationed in san diego stop it yeah i think did i did i train you no i don't believe so uh but i remember a bunch of people down there but just that the crossfit scene was huge out there right so uh i remember kind of getting plugged in and watching some of the podcasts back then on YouTube before podcasting was really even a thing. Right. Um, so

yeah, so I was out there for six years. I got to do that thing. I got to jump out of helicopters, got to fly around, do a whole bunch of stuff with, uh, the special forces community, you know, fast ropes, rappelling, um, picking boats out of the water, dropping boats in the water, a lot of really cool stuff. So I did that for six years, got three deployments in, a whole bunch of hours in that aircraft, been all around the world. And then I decided to get out. I decided to get out of the military for a couple years, decided I wanted to be a professional student. utilize my GI Bill for anybody out there that's like wondering about the military. One of the best, it's not even the best kept secret anymore,

but one of the best things that you can do is go serve your time and then get free education. Right. So I went back to school. I went to Grand Valley State University for their exercise physiology program and crushed that for a couple of years. At that point, met my wife and we kind of hit it off. And I had always wanted to possibly go back into the military, but then there's always that, hey, life changing situations that are going on. But I did end up applying for the Air Force and the Navy. So the Air Force and the Navy are the only two programs in the DoD that have aerospace physiology. I knew I wanted to do physiology. I loved the physiology stuff that I did in the Navy. So helicopter communities, they have to go through like aviation physiology and do the dunker tank. And it's basically just this huge tank that drops you

in the water, spins you around, gets you all disoriented. And then you have to like escape it as if it was a crash. So I've always been interested in that. Love the information that they had because it was all about performance and working out and exercise and diet. Um, so going back to current time, I applied for the Air Force and they accepted me. So I commissioned as an officer into the Aerospace Physiology Program back in 2018. I've been doing that ever since. Since that point in time, I have been at Vance Air Force Base. I've been at Shaw Air Force Base, Elmendorf Air Force Base up in Anchorage, Alaska.

So that was a cool experience and then currently at the the weapons school as the aerospace physiology fellow for the weapons school taking care of all of their squadrons so it's a massive enterprise here and they train the best to be the best and they basically employ me as a human factors expert where I can research, identify, and develop mitigation techniques for human performance issues that they may be experiencing while flying their respective platforms. Super cool. When did, or like, first off, when you say weapons school, that's Top Gun, right? The Navy has Top Gun, and you have weapons school, but they're like the same. You guys do like the dog fighting, everything that Tom Cruise does, right? Yes. But better. Well, you know, better is a strong word, right? I got bros on both sides of the curtain, right? I know guys in the Navy.

I know guys in the Air Force. It's a little bit different. So the Navy also has a weapons school, fully ingrained weapons school. So the weapons school in the Air Force is about six months. Top Gun is a much shorter program. And Top Gun is really just about the tactical employment of the fighter pilot, whereas the weapons school is the tactical and strategic employment and development of not only the fighter pilot, but also the weapons system and how they operate. Now the Navy does that too, but Top Gun is just that specialty program where it's almost exclusively

focused on the fighting fighting the dog fighting aspect like you mentioned right uh so yeah anytime somebody asks like what do you do i'm like well i'm at the weapons school it's kind of like top gun um so we just you know we just don't sing goodness gracious great balls on fire like they do i. No shirtless double high fives on the beach playing volleyball with your bros? No? I mean, there's only desert here, so not a lot of beach. I'm from San Diego. I'm down with a shirtless high five, by the way. I have like a real confession that... Dr. Andy Galpin here.

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You know, when I hop on the Southwest flight and I am headed to wherever the fitness industry has taken me, uh, to go hang out with Doug Larson. And we were going on a little trip together. I get on that plane and I'm like, you know what? This might be the end. I'm on this city bus. That's flying around at 500 miles an hour. You guys are going like mock three, like speeds that I can't even imagine what's going on. Breaking sound barriers. Doing, I mean, like literally the highest performing maneuvers that exist. And I'm over here on a Southwest flight. And I kind of just assume this thing might not make it.

How do you keep people's bodies? Like what is kind of like the physical demand um because it's not really like the southwest flight to uh to baltimore it's it's got to be one of the most physically taxing things taking your brain like hitting the gas and on your car where your head snaps back but it like thousands of miles an hour like what what are what are kind of like the, the physical demands of actually being in the cockpit of something that goes that speed and doing the turns and everything else that is like required to fly like an F-16. Yeah.

So first of all, the aviation community is inherently dangerous, right? No matter how fast you're going. Thanks for, thanks for giving me the confidence to get on the Southwest flight now. Yeah. So, there's a reason that we have these protective mechanisms around us when we go into the aviation environment, right? I like to tell people that the human body is built for standing upright on two feet with all of our senses firing around us at one atmosphere of pressure.

Right. That's what God created us for. He didn't create us to go 800, 800 miles per hour and then to shoot straight up into the sky. Right. Yeah. Actually on that note, like he was,

he was saying commercial flights, they're on five, 600 miles an hour. And then, you know, he was saying thousands, but he's kind of joking. Like,

you don't really go thousands of miles an hour. Like it's not so much the speed as it is the turns and the G forces and all of that, right. That are like the real stressors involved. Yes. Yeah. So that's what I was just going to dive into. So our bread and butter as physiologists is hypoxia. So less oxygen at altitude, right? Air is thinner. We can't breathe as well. So our bread and butter really is hypoxia, but that's not the only threat when we're talking about the aviation environment. As Doug just mentioned, when it comes to fighter pilots, especially the G-forces

is incredibly stressful on the body. We also deal with situational awareness, spatial disorientation, right? So, your vestibular apparatus in there going all kinds of crazy. If you've ever experienced vertigo, those kinds of things we have to teach for. And then noise and vibration can cause a ton of irritation as well and have some stressors on the body. So when it comes to physiology, it's kind of all those things encompassing. And then also as we're focusing on the fighter pilot, really the stresses on the body from the G-forces is really the most important thing that we work on mitigating and strategizing towards success for. Wait, like physiologically, everyone's heard of G-forces. And at some level, they probably realize if the G-forces are too high, then they'll black out.

But that might be as far as it goes for a lot of people. Physiologically, what is actually happening there? Why would you black out? And what other problems that aren't quite as serious are also woven into the mix there? Yeah, so G-forces are, it's not simply just gravity pulling down on you. It's the acceleration of the aircraft over the gravity. And that gives us what we call big G, little z. So G forces can work on our body in a variety of different ways. GZ is going to be

straight up and down through the body. And then you have GY, which is through the chest forward and back, and then GX out to to the sides so what we really focus on when we're talking about jets turning is going to be gz because what it's doing is it's pulling you down into your seat and when you're experiencing that g-force or you're under that load all of your blood is rushing to your lower extremities right yeah we're thinking about blood where does it need to be it needs to be in the nugget up top in the brain right so as soon as we start to have that depletion in blood pressure in the brain we're going to start experiencing what i like to call the red flags of g-induced loss of

consciousness or g-lock which you've probably commonly heard right so as that blood pressure drops and we start to lose that blood up top we start to have visual effects first and foremost because our eyes are essentially tissue extensions of our brain and we start to experience the curtains kind of closing or maybe the peephole effect graying out of the eyes we start to lose that color vision very rapidly. And also, if it gets to a certain point, we can actually lose all visual representation, we can blackout before we lose consciousness, because our ocular pressure is actually slightly above our brain pressure. So that's kind of a bizarre experience that I've never had flying, but some people will experience like a full blackout.

But like I still they'll say I still remember what was happening because we're talking about millimeters of mercury. Your ocular pressure is actually right around 20 millimeters of mercury. So if you exceed less than 20, your brain still might be conscious, but you just don't have any visual representation, which is kind of bizarre to think about. So in a nutshell, what you're doing is you're just losing blood from the head. And we need to actively employ what's called the anti-G straining maneuver, where we employ this method to get the blood back up to our brain so we can continue performing in that environment. Yeah. So the brain being one piece of that, but you were also saying there's like a plane that goes through your chest.

Is there some sort of like cardiac pressure? Yes. That one seems even more terrifying because you can kind of come back from the blackout by going slower, I would imagine. But having like a cardiac event from G-forces sounds way scarier. Yes. So that's pretty rare in general.

I mean, there's a whole bunch of mechanisms that start to take over in your body. So you are correct. Your heart, your lungs, your internal organs, they're all suspended, right? They're all connected by tissues and they're suspended. So there will be some movement of all those organs in your body when you're under G forces, but it just hasn't been shown to have a great effect. Even though when you are under G, you're obviously experiencing a ton of a ton of hormone or a ton of like endocrine dump and what we're talking about is you know that classic flight or fight response so your heart does start pumping a little bit faster your blood pressure goes up a little bit all those things start to

happen as soon as you experience that acceleration physiology and it basically feels like you're sprinting 100 meters when you're pulling seven to nine G's for a couple of seconds. Is that where the fitness component comes into play here? Like how does being healthy and or in good shape influence like how many G's you can take or how you respond and adapt or how are you able to handle these stressors successfully and, you know, at a minimum, stay conscious, but beyond that, be able to perform at your best and actually like accomplish the mission and do the job that you're signed up to do. Yeah. So before I answer that question, I just want to tackle one thing that I mentioned, the AGSM, the anti-G straining maneuver. Let me just break that down for you real quick to tell

you exactly what it is, how we mitigate those risks. And then I'll talk about the fitness component and how that comes into it. So the AGSM is, is three components. It's a lower body strain, essentially where we're trying to tighten all the muscles in the lower body. I like to focus on squeezing the glutes, bracing the gut or the abs, obviously, the core, trying to pull your hamstrings in by like digging your heels into the floor. And then trying to engage your adductors as well, pretending that you have a ball between your knees. So you're basically engaging everything in your lower body that you possibly can to squeeze that blood and force it back to the heart where it can push it back to the brain the second component is everybody driving their car right now just did that you can't help it i was doing a lot you're explaining it that's fair now i'm ready i mean we have to we have to chair

fly all the time when we're teaching this this this uh a specific measure right so we're we're teaching this specific measure, right? So we're always squeezing our butt and trying to breathe and trying to go through the motions. It's kind of difficult to do when you're not under G, right? Because even though you're driving a car or you're sitting in your chair, you're squeezing all those muscles and you can't really feel if you're making a difference or not because we just don't know because we're not under G. So the second component is going to be the breathing component. And that's going to be

a cyclic breathing where we essentially take a prep breath in, and then we hold that air in the back of our throat against the closed glottis. So we kind of hook that air into the back of our throats, take a breath in, hold it. And then we have to breathe every two and a half to three seconds. It's a forceful exhale and a very quick inhale. So it almost sounds like a K sounds like this. Oh, it's like breathing at the top of a squat. That's exactly it. So that's actually how I teach it. Oh, look at that. Meathead language always wins. That's how I teach it to people that know how to work out. I'll say, do you know like when you're squatting and you're wearing a belt? Yeah.

That's awesome. Take that breath and create that intra-abdominal pressure and do the Valsalva. Yeah. And then you breathe at the top. And some guys, like you said, the bros and the meatheads, they get it. They get it they get it other people are just staring at me like what's this guy talking about so yeah that's exactly it we have to do that every two to two and a half to three seconds so

what that's doing is it's maintaining positive chest pressure and then obviously we're getting that exchange because when you're under g, it feels like an elephant sitting on your chest, right? So if you exhale too much, you'll collapse your chest. And if you inhale too much, you'll create too much pressure. And then when you try to breathe, you'll dump it all. You'll basically just dump all that gas. Is that like, kind of like the blood pressure dropping, even, even if you're like in a gym and you feel that like your blood pressure dropping, even if you're in a gym and you feel that your blood pressure just drops on you, you'll just pass out even though you're standing on the ground. Yes. Yeah.

And that's how it can feel if you aren't executing this correctly. The third component is just simply a relaxed upper body. So people tend to get really tense through the shoulders and then kind of like squeeze their neck out. You get that nice little neck winging just because it's pretty stressful. So we try to teach a relaxed upper body, you know, chest out, shoulders back, nice and relaxed. Let your shoulders kind of melt into the seat is what I like to say. And then we go through that whole process. So we have to apply

that simultaneously. So the lower body squeeze is pushing the blood back up to the heart to get it to the brain. That cyclic breathing is maintaining that positive chest pressure, also keeping the variability between our blood pressure and then relaxing the upper body not to take away from anything of the other two components. So going back to Doug's original question about fitness, we teach performance threats as well when we're teaching our physiology classes, and we try to focus in on diet and exercise, right? Exercise is medicine, is what I like to say. And the fact of the matter is that some of these guys are pretty fit, and some of them are not. Really the most important thing that you can do for making sure that you don't G-lock is one, stay hydrated and execute your AGSM. If you do those

two things, you're going to be fine. I know guys that are rail thin that fly jets. I know guys that are nice and stocky. I know guys that are tall. I know guys that are short. If you can do it, if you can execute that technique and you can maintain your hydration and have some nutrition, like you're usually going to be okay. But exercise goes a long way to improve the sustainability and to improve the ability to go out there and do this for many repetitions. So what we always teach is obviously the standard, hey, you need cardiovascular and you need strength training, right? So the cardiovascular component is going to be moving blood. So the more efficiently we can move blood with our heart, the better. And then that strength component is really going to be allowing us to execute that nice lower body strain to get that blood back where it needs to go. So if you're fairly thin, you're probably going to have to work harder.

But if you got some nice meat down there and the glutes and the thighs, it's going to be really easy to just get a good squeeze. But also... The impact always matters. I mean, you can't deny the literature, right? Yeah. I mean, you can't deny the literature, right? So when you're thinking about doing the AGSM, we're not just sitting in the cockpit with no additional gear on, right? So when you see a fighter pilot, they're all just like loaded out in all this garb, right? So I would be doing a disservice if I didn't talk about the aircraft flight equipment as well.

And those guys are outstanding. They maintain all the gear that the pilots wear. So when we're talking about fighter pilots, they're going to wear what's called the G-suit in the lower half. So it's a full coverage G-suit that starts basically just below the bottom rib and then it covers all the way down to their ankles. And that thing inflates all the way through.

All right. So when the aircraft senses about two G's, that thing automatically inflates. Now, what that does is it creates a whole bunch of pressure in the legs for you to squeeze against and assist getting that blood back up. So we like to say that the G suit covers about three to four G's of protection. And then we also have our helmet and mask, right? So they're wearing a helmet and a mask. And that mask is going to provide what's called positive pressure breathing so the flow of o2 coming into their mask will actually increase to assist in that breathing mechanism so those are the two big things there's also some different pressure garments that they can wear on their vest that's more that's more the f-22 f-35 type bros that are flying that aircraft.

And that has a lot to do with just flying at higher altitudes and that possible risk for decompression. But when it comes to pulling Gs, the G suit and that mask are really going to be big helpers in making sure that you can execute that AGSM. Yeah. And on top of all of the kind of like physiological demands that you just walked through, there also has to be like a very high level of critical thinking at high speeds. I'd love for you to dig into kind of like what the what the training or how you guys start to not just teach the, you know, surviving the G-Force side of things, but then adding critical thinking into that, which is going to be kind of like the more

real world scenario that these pilots are going to be in. Yeah, absolutely. So that's kind of that situational awareness piece that I mentioned at the beginning, right? The evolution of aviation is an interesting one, right? As planes get better, pilots kind of stay the same, right? I mentioned this the other day when we had a couple of calls. The jet or the aircraft that you're flying is built for the mission. It does the mission really well. It's loaded up with weapons and it can go execute that mission. The human is going to be the limiting factor.

So how do we integrate that human into the system and make sure that they can perform at a high level? So like the evolution of aviation basically says like hypoxia, well, as planes went higher, they realized people were passing out hypoxia. They figured that out. They created pressurized cockpits. They started putting masks on pilots to give them supplemental oxygen. So cool. Solve that problem. Not necessarily solved, but have a pretty good handle on it, right? Yeah.

Then planes started going higher and they started going faster. G-forces, right? We started experiencing jets. So they started figuring out what gear they needed to put on the pilots. They started developing that AGSM that I talked about. Kind of mastered that a little bit. Well, as we have evolved into a fifth generation aircraft our f-22s our f-35s and then some of the other aircraft as well like our kc-46

that's coming online our tankers uh the b-21 that's coming online those are all kind of like sixth gen technologies is what they would call them so it the f-35 specifically is built to be a multi-role aircraft it's supposed to do everything it's supposed to be a fighter it's supposed to be able to attack ground targets it's supposed to be command and control center and who's operating that aircraft yeah one pilot obviously communicating with several wingmen and utilizing their resources but you have to employ a ton of bandwidth from your brain in order to figure out how to not only just continue to fly that aircraft but also employ all the weapons communicate and manage your tasks accordingly so that's kind of the new challenge for the aviation community is

situational awareness and cognitive resources and how we're utilizing or how we're employing that pilot to make sure that they're making good decisions, right? So we educate them. We talk all about the situational awareness aspect. We try to teach, I mean, something as simple as scanning techniques, how to communicate properly through good, what we call CRM, right? So CRM is going to be that cockpit resource management. And we try to tackle those with some basic, I mean, sometimes we'll put some stuff on the phone, like a Stroop test, and we'll just kind of go through some of those

challenging games and see how they handle those complex tasks. We also are using devices like Synaptic where we're light test and we're measuring complex tasks there. We can put some of that stuff into simulators as well and see how they're, they're handling that cognitive load in a simulator. So when it comes to missions, you know, pilots mission plan, they prepare, they fly their simulation, uh, and the simulator, and then they go employ the actual jet in the mission. Um, so there's a lot

of things that we're doing to tackle that piece in the Air Force and in the Navy right now, because that is kind of the growing concern is that we're putting a ton of tasks on these individuals. And we're expecting them to perform the same, which is really, really difficult to do in really any community, right? Let alone flying, like you said, Mach 3, which is maybe a few Machs faster than I might actually fly. Yeah. I want to go Mach 3. I don't know if I want to or not. It just sounds like a razor. Tom Cruise, he ejected at Mach 10. And how he didn't completely vaporize, we don't know. Hollywood.

Montanus-like bust. That's right. What kind of volume are these guys experiencing on a mission or any training evolution? If you're flying for two hours like every single time you turn more or less at any speed are you having to do these maneuvers versus like 2gs versus 3gs versus 4gs or or whatever whatever you get to versus um you know you only have to do it when you're doing like kind of the most extreme maneuvers and that type of thing you're out for two hours and you have to do this the whole time these these max like lower body voluntary

contractions over and over and over again. And it's it's physically exhausting because you're doing it so much. Or like what is the what is like a normal hour or two in a jet look like? Yeah, that's a great question. So, no, you're not under, you know, seven, eight, nine G's the entire time you're flying. Right. It's only when you're in a turn. Right.

And you're creating, right? It's only when you're in a turn, right? And you're creating that acceleration over gravity. So a typical training sortie for most fighter pilots is anywhere between like one and two hours, depending on what the actual mission entails. So sometimes that's take off, go to the airspace, fight, come back and land. Sometimes that's come back, land, fuel up, so pit, and then go back out and fight. So it'd be like a fight, pit, fight. Sometimes you're tanking.

So you go out there into the airspace, you tank, and then you come back into the airspace and continue your mission. Was tanking mean in this context? So tanking is just getting fuel so you pull up underneath another aircraft and a little probe comes down and it plugs in and it refuels you on the go so basically just uh giving you a little gas for a little extra airspace so when you're thinking about jets deploying they fly across the ocean right it's not like we load them up. I mean, the Navy loads them up on a ship sometimes and drives them across, right? But the Air Force

doesn't have ships. So when you're talking about when we have jets deploy, we have to tank all the way across for those seven, eight, nine hour sorties. A sortie is just a flight. So in context, if I'm ever using any jargon that you guys don't understand just please pick that one up stop me yeah yeah so anyways going back to your question Doug a typical training sority is an out and back so you take off you go to the airspace you come back and land that'll be about one to two hours depending on gas and fuel states in that time frame it really just depends on what you're actually doing but let's just pretend we're doing a bfm flight which is basic fighter maneuvers which would be your dog fighting that you guys are talking about so when you're going out you're either going to be in offensive

or defensive posture and you're probably going to do anywhere between five to seven sets of dogfights. All right. So that's really all the gas that you can, you can hold in a jet for the most part. And in any of those sets, you can expect between five to nine G's. When it comes to the AGSM and when it comes to how focused you have to be on making sure that you're employing those strategies that I was talking about earlier, four to five Gs, not really that stressful on the body. The G suit can kind of take care of you. The mask can kind of take care of you. So most of these guys, the guys that actually have experience, they can talk under five or six Gs and they can communicate still. When we're starting to push it up into the seven plus range,

it's really tough on your body. And that's when you really have to focus in. And we always say to never get behind the G, right? So that is one of the main factors that lead to g-lock is when an individual pulls the jet too fast and they don't anticipate the g and they don't prepare themselves with that agsm right so you should always be doing that agsm prior to going into that maneuver because if you don't and all of a sudden you find yourself under seven eight nine g's you're not going to be able to get into that good agsm so what i would say is five to seven sets anywhere between like five and fifteen seconds per pull i think the longest i've ever been in like during a circle fight where essentially i'm under about the peak pull was right around nine. And then you're kind of sitting at seven for another like 15 seconds or so.

So it's anywhere between five and 15 seconds at seven to nine G's, five or seven times during a standard training sortie. Now, one of the things that we're really facing today is what we call long duration sorties. So these individuals, due to the inherent environment or the threat environment that we are in, you can go on and read about it online. We've got this huge thing called the Pacific Ocean in between us and what we would consider our primary threat in the world today. So we're talking about flying across that ocean and then executing an engagement phase on the back end of that. So you're looking at six, seven, eight hours of flying where you're just literally kind of dragging. It's called dragging behind the tanker, right? So the tanker is dragging you across the ocean. You're just in a line, getting gas, getting gas, just trying to stay awake, trying to survive.

And then you have to go and do the dogfight, right? So we're really working on strategies. That's where that nutrition and hydration really come into play. Yeah. We're working on strategies to make sure that we can keep pilots engaged and capable when they get there to be able to then go into that workout phase or that, that, uh, execution phase. Yeah. Those are some of the biggest challenges. Yeah. What is like the, uh, kind of like the flight readiness and pre-flight routine. I imagine this is very similar to like a real training session where you want to be warmed up properly, making sure all the breathing patterns are dialed in muscles are turned on. Like it's, uh, there's,

there's gotta be something that everyone is doing to prepare themselves for the intensity of the flight. Yeah, absolutely. So everybody has kind of their own individual routine, but we always give recommendations based on what you should be doing. So the one thing that the Air Force has done, well, the Air Force has done a lot of things well, but in the last couple of years, they've created this program called Optimizing the Human Weapon System, OHWS. And what that does is it effectively employs athletic trainers, massage therapists, and strength coaches right in the unit. So they're embedded in the unit. So they're embedded in the unit. The athletic trainers will physically sit in the squadron. The massage therapist will usually be somewhere around there too. And then we'll have a

gym specifically built out for the pilots with a strength and conditioning professional. So when it comes to flying a specific sorority, the day before or the days leading up to the flight, you're going to have tons of mission planning. So the individual will go in and mission plan, prepare all of the primary, secondary, tertiary functions that they're going to be doing during that mission. And then the day of, they're going to go into a brief. And everybody kind of handles their day a little bit differently. We try not to, for individuals that are on the workout train, we try to tell them, Hey, if you're going to be going into a high G sortie during that day, maybe don't do your heavy squats that morning, right? Uh, maybe go after the flight or just do like a light, easy workout that morning. Just get your blood flowing. So we always try to recommend get a well-rounded breakfast in. So hit all your macronutrients. If you're going to have

coffee, have it in a natural form, coffee or tea. Try not to suck down energy drinks. And then try to have a regular bowel movement as well prior to flying. Now, this can be challenging sometimes because you're talking about a brief that's five in the morning and then they're taken off at seven in the morning. So getting that strategy is sometimes difficult, but really that's where it starts. The foundation is nutrition because especially when it comes to hydration, making sure that they're well hydrated with hydration and the agsm what we found is that your ability to do your agsm

can be reduced by about 40 just by being dehydrated right so we know that hydration has a huge role in not only our muscular um not only how we perform muscular, but also our brain as well. So just even a 2% or 3% dehydrated state can be very, very detrimental. So we try to make sure we start with the basics of nutrition and hydration to prepare them for that day. And then with the OHWS that I was mentioning, a lot of times what we'll have is those athletic trainers prior to them going to the operations desk and getting their step brief is what it's called. So you get your weather and your tactics for the day before you actually walk out to the flight line to get in the jet. We send them to the athletic trainer. They'll do some warmups.

So basically from the top all the way to the bottom, really focusing on that good spine movement. So we go in from the top to the bottom, neck all the way down to the lumbar, going through the shoulders. I always tell them anything, any muscle that attaches to the spine, you should warm up in some degree. And then sometimes they'll get a little massage gun just to get some blood flow to those tissues prior to going to the jet because not only are we talking about the g-forces and the blood going to the lower part of

the body we're talking about the mechanical load that the spine has to take right and not only that but when we're talking about pulling g's if you're in a defensive posture you're looking back like this so you have a ton of axial loading through that spine. And what you get is just neck and back and neck and back and neck and back over and over and over again. And really that's why this OHWS program became so prominent or such a need for it the last couple of years, because they finally realized, Hey, these pilots are hurt and they're getting out of the Air Force at rates that we can't meet our need for pilots. I mean, you hear about it all the time in the news.

The Air Force has pilot shortages because these guys are just putting their body through the most extreme environments. And then they see the cozy Southwest job where he just kind of jumps in the cockpit, pushes the buttons, goes flying. Yeah, I mean, it is, but it makes a little bit of money and it's not nearly as stressful on your body. One of my best friends, the Blue Angel,

he's potentially headed that direction. I'm like, dude, you were just out there performing in front of thousands of people doing the coolest stuff ever. Now you're going to put me in the back with 500 other people and think that that's fun. It's like, you're going to be ready to quit in three weeks for sure. There's no way that's cool. Yeah.

A lot of those guys do miss it. But what you do see is a lot of guys will transition into like the guard of the reserves, take a part-time role. They'll go fly for the airlines, you know, 80, 90% of the time, and then you get to get in the jet once a month and go fly and do super cool stuff. So keep the chops. Yeah. Yeah. But back to the question, right? So preparing for that day, it does take that, that preparation. Again, that's going to be individual, individual drive as well. Like how prepared you are for that day is's going to be individual drive as well.

Like how prepared you are for that day is really going to be the person. Some people, they're super focused on that. They got their nutrition locked in. Some people, they're kind of a little bit more lackadaisical about it. It doesn't mean they're going to be any better or worse when we're talking about preparation for the actual flight, but they might land and be like, man, I feel absolutely awful. And it's like, yeah, because you didn't take care of yourself before you went to fly. Right. So I, so just a little, I guess, taking a step back, I should have mentioned this at the beginning. I'm a backseat flyer,

right? I'm a non-rated air crew member, which means I can jump in the backseat and fly with these guys. And when I was stationed at Shaw, I was flying in the F-16s all the time. And there was a very noticeable difference. Guys that I flew with, when we'd get done, depending on what we actually did during that flight, some of them would just be absolutely zonked. And some of them would be like, just ready to rock and ready to do the next thing. And you can see that in the mentality, you can see that for individuals that tend to be in the gym, three, four or five times a week, guys that really take care of themselves, they have more success getting out of the jet

than guys that don't. So really, that that's what this, the OHWS program is focused on making sure that even if you're one of the guys who doesn't necessarily take care of yourself, the resources are there to force you to like walk past that athletic trainer every day and be like, yeah, I should, I should probably go in there. I should probably go in there to get in there, to get your body worked on, to get some of those musculoskeletal issues taken care of. So that way we can just have healthier pilots doing a better job. And then not only that, we can retain them on the back end. Yeah.

Most people are in good shape, though. Like if you're dealing with elite performers, like there can't be that many of them that are like out of shape, I wouldn't think. Or am I just like totally off the mark here? Yeah, that's I wouldn't i just like totally off the mark here yeah that's i wouldn't say you're totally off the mark but it is right it's not hollywood we're not all like you don't walk in it's not a six foot guy 185 pounds strapping individual or gal as well, right? We've got plenty of gals rocking it and doing the job as well. You see people of all sizes in the aviation community. You've got the kind of prototypical, you know, big broad shoulders strapping young lads.

And then you have kind of rail thin tall guys. You kind of have some stockier short guys you get every measure of male and female body type essentially uh and some of them individuals especially who played sports growing up they tend to stay a little bit more in shape they stay a little bit more focused and then you have other individuals who uh you know they might go for a run every once in a while. They might go to the gym with their buddies, but they might be just kind of a very in a variable state of fitness is what I would call it. So it's really up to them what they choose to do. There's no requirements on how they stay prepared.

Correct. Correct. The only thing they're required to meet is the Air Force standard, which is a PT test one to two times a year, and all that is is push-ups, sit-ups, and a mile-and-a-half run. That's a little bit to ask for someone driving a multimillion-dollar rocket, basically. That's a fast plane for someone to just go, yeah, you passed.

Yeah. That is absolutely where we're at but what we're doing is we're trying to you know as a fitness professional myself as a as a physiologist we're trying to teach these guys and gals that like hey by the way if you keep your body in better shape it's going to treat you better when you are performing so if you think that you're walking around not not flying a jet, feeling like crap, how do you think you're going to feel when you fly a jet? Yeah. Right. So the more prepared we can get them physically and mentally, just in their everyday life, the more prepared they are going to be to go fly the jet or do the thing in whatever aircraft they're flying and do the mission well, and then come back and also continue living their lives and doing their daily

activities. Yeah. And your specific role, are you doing kind of research and, you know, figuring out kind of physiologically I'd love to almost know what it looks like when someone is preparing like running cortisol blood tests before and after flights and seeing like what that intensity and physical load does to somebody hormonally. And then like, how are you able to get them back

to homeostasis in the fastest, safest way so that they're able to kind of get immediately into a, uh, into recovering post-flight. Um, are you, are you doing, uh, that's just an example. I'm sure you have millions of other things that you would like to research, but, um, are you doing any specific, um, research and kind of on the, on the biomarker side of things? As far as the biomarker side of things, I'm still fairly new to this specific role that I'm in. Yeah. So everything that I've done up to this point

has been passive monitoring, whether that's counseling, whether that's, I've done some work with the Whoop and the Aura. We all kind of have the Garmin watch. But when it comes to passive monitoring, we all know that they're not perfect and some are a little bit better than others. So there's only so much information that you can get from those devices. But you can usually

establish an individual baseline for how we're treating each individual pilot. Now, at the weapons school, there's a lot of cool stuff going on. I'm going to be diving in trying to figure out what I can get involved in, but there's also some test and evaluation squadrons that are here and at Edwards. Edwards also has the test pilot school, the TPS. There have been, so I don't, I don't want to speak on behalf of what they're doing. I just know from like to speak on behalf of what they're doing. I just know from like the 3,000 foot view what they have done. I know they've done some stuff with the continuous glucose monitoring during flight.

We've got a lot of integrated systems that are coming through like our Air Force Research Laboratory that can measure O2 and CO2 in the mask to do real-time physiological changes they've got these integrated vests that are on the pilot they've got a whole bunch of systems that are monitoring actively while they're they're flying now the hardest part with putting these things in the jet when it's when we're talking about in-flight monitoring is that there's requirements for like the ejection seat there's requirements for the aircraft there's the aircraft has to be or the the device has to be cleared through the special programs office because when you're talking about an aircraft that has top secret information and material none of that stuff can be monitoring unless it's cleared by the program's office. So I don't want to speak on behalf of those.

There's a lot of cool stuff going on in the next six months to a year where we can start monitoring some of those things for the pilots to identify hey where are these guys breaking down and where can we build them up and i don't want to do that reactively i want to do that proactively i want to identify how these pilots work, where their shortfalls are, how do we supplement that, how do we make them better before they get into the jet, because the environment's always evolving, the threats are always evolving, so we need to make sure that we are building the best pilots in the world prior to walking back on how we didn't get them where they needed to be so that they were ready for that environment. I love it, man. Where can people learn more? Yeah, so I think I put, I sent the link over for my professional profile is LinkedIn.

I think you can just look me up, Zachary underscore Carson, and you'll see me in my uniform and all my glory. If you're watching this video, you'll see my face just plastered right there. My personal profile, if you want to see what I'm up to in my daily life and my family, Instagram is Zachary underscore Carson. But on LinkedIn, for sure, if you shoot me a message and you want to learn a little bit more, this is all very 3,000 foot view. If you want to dive in with more specific questions about physiology, about some of the things that we're trying to get after at the weapons school, I'd be happy to answer those questions on LinkedIn. But before I do depart, I do want to say that everything that I have talked about

today are my own opinions, right? They're not the opinions of the head of the Air Force. I also don't want to speak on behalf of anybody. I'm a physiologist. I'm not a pilot. So if there's anything that I said today that sounds a little bit off, it might not be 100%. And then in respect to the Navy, please don't jump on me with anything that I said in regards to Top Gun. Um, I was in the Navy once I'm a squid. Uh, so I still have that near interior to my heart. What is the craziest creature you've seen at the bottom of the ocean when you were a diver?

So I wasn't a diver. I was a rescue swimmer. Uh, still way deep surface. We're surface level swimmers. Um, but we saw sharks a lot when we were flying along um tiger sharks mostly around the the coastal waters of the pacific yeah we don't jump in the water when we see those we tend to circle back i remember talking to one of them when we were training him down there that said he came like face to face with a hammerhead he was like that thing is a prehistoric creature you do not whether it comes after you or not you just look at it and

you go we are not supposed to be friends that is not a thing you want to be messing with when you're all the way down at the bottom so i'm a i'm a freshwater kid i'm from michigan i grew up on lake michigan i tell people all the time i'm like i like, I don't go in the ocean. It tastes terrible. It's bad for your skin. There's things that can kill you in it. The freshwater, it's great. Freshwater is great. It feels good to get into. It's refreshing. If you're in the wrong place, you might meet a sturgeon that's prehistoric, but they're not going to kill you for sure. I like the ocean. I like the ocean. I like them both. Ocean's got waves, especially in San Diego.

It's the best. Beautiful sun, cold water. Life is good. Douglas Larson. Douglas E. Larson. That's it on Instagram. Douglas E. Larson. Zach, appreciate you coming on the show, man. I find all this very interesting and exciting. Enjoyed having you on.

Outstanding. Thank you. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are Barbell Shrugged, Barbell underscore shrugged. And make sure you get over to rsalab.com. That is where you can learn about all of the performance lab testing analysis and coaching that we do inside

Rapid Health Optimization. And you can access all of that over at rsalab.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.