Barbell Shrugged - [Cortisol] The Science of Stress w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Dan Garner and Coach Travis Mash #694

Episode Date: May 10, 2023

Welcome to another episode of Barbell Shrugged! In this episode, we will be diving into the topic of cortisol and the stress response system. First, we will discuss the stress response system and how it works. Our bodies have a built-in response to stress, known as the fight or flight response. This response is controlled by the sympathetic nervous system and triggers the release of hormones like cortisol, adrenaline, and noradrenaline. Next, we will talk about the function of cortisol. Cortisol is a hormone that is released in response to stress and has several important functions in the body. It helps to regulate blood sugar levels, suppress the immune system, and aid in the metabolism of fat, protein, and carbohydrates. We will also discuss why many people struggle to adapt to stress. Chronic stress can lead to an overactive stress response system, which can cause the body to release too much cortisol. This can lead to negative effects on the body, including weight gain, decreased immune function, and an increased risk of chronic disease. We will then debunk the myth of adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue is a controversial diagnosis that claims that chronic stress can cause the adrenal glands to become fatigued and unable to produce cortisol. However, there is little scientific evidence to support this claim, and many experts believe that the symptoms attributed to adrenal fatigue are actually caused by other factors. Finally, we will discuss the difference between chronic and acute stress on your physiology. Acute stress is a short-term response to a specific event, while chronic stress is a long-term response to ongoing stressors. While acute stress can be beneficial, chronic stress can have negative effects on the body and can lead to chronic disease. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Barbell Shrugged! We hope you found this discussion on cortisol and the stress response system informative and helpful. Don't forget to subscribe to our podcast for more informative episodes like this one. To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthreport.com Connect with our guests: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, we are talking about cortisol, the science of stress. That's right. How? Stress is everywhere, right? You hear about it all the time. And it's such a big bucket category that nobody actually ever wants to dig

into the full science of it and understanding where cortisol, why cortisol exists, what's good about it, what's bad about it, when do we have too much stress. And the number of people that are coming into Rapid Health Optiposition right now, there's like a very serious thread that combines a lot of them together. And a lot of it is just pushing the gas pedal, having the stress response nonstop in every

aspect of their life because they're such high achieving human beings. They want to push the limits on their training, push the limits on their conditioning, push the limits at work, push the limits on travel and everything that they have going on, which is fantastic because they're trying to live life and play at the highest level. But what they always, what they fail to realize is the importance of the recovery aspect of it. And how do we balance all those stressors so that we're not getting completely burnt out? And inside this episode, we're going to be talking about that. Why do we have a stress response? Why it's important? What happens if it starts to get out of whack?

And I can tell you guys from my labs that I did a couple of a couple year and a half back or so, my cortisol was all whacked out from having a new baby in the house. It's two years ago now, actually, when I did all this stuff, but having a new baby in the house, the lack of sleep, growing businesses, training, family, just endless endless stuff you feel like you're just always just hammering the gas pedal and it was very very cool when I started working with Dan back in the day I say back in the day two years ago but two years ago to actually start to understand how to balance all these things and I'm not saying that you have to live your life at balance that's

it's really impossible but how do we how do we get the most out of intentional stress in a positive direction? How do we maximize recovery? And then how do we optimize those two ends of the spectrum so that we're getting the actual optimization piece that we're looking for? As always, friends, you can head over to rapidhealthreport.com.

That is where Dan Gardner and Dr. Andy Galpin are giving a performance, lifestyle, and lab analysis to see a little bit of the deep dive that everybody gets when they come into Rapid Health Optimization. And you can learn more about that at RapidHealthReport.com, as well as sign up for a call with me so we can talk about all things inside, out, outside in health optimization. Friends friends let's get into the show welcome to barbell shrugged i'm andrews varner doug larson coach travis mash dan garner friends today on barbell shrugged we're talking about cortisol hey travis mash i didn't talk about this in the pre-show because i'm so stoked back-to-back national champion back-to-back and we won these coaches in any sport show up and go back-to-back national champions.

In their first two years of the program? First two years. I don't know. I feel like you could go like a decade straight. Yeah, we're talking about a dynasty now. So, like, yeah, I don't know if I can do that. You'd be great, dude. Yeah.

At what point are you a dynasty? You know what happens when you get one more championship than Tom Brady? What? Giselle. Oh. Don't tell Drew that. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Wait, so obviously you got Ryan out there smashing, but who else is out there setting records that leads you to a team national champion? Our entire team. I've never had this in my career. Our entire team set a PR of some kind in that meet. You know, we only had one bomb out, but the reason, no problem, it was, you know, Liz Becker.

She's our team captain, but she was cutting down quite a bit to go for Team USA. And so, like, she asked me about it. I said, yeah, you know, anytime an athlete's going to go for something big like that, I'm like, you know, let's go for it. And so it just didn't work out. You know, she cut the weight, and, you know, she was ready, but, you know, just the weight was too much for her.

But other than that, the entire team PR'd. So, you know, they all killed it. You know, we had Matt. You know, my guy who's been with me since he was 10. So he's been with me 12 years. He killed it. He set PR performance. We had another gold medal from Blaine Brooks.

He go meddled Mallory gold medal. Like it was, it was awesome though. You got some big boys I see on Instagram lifting weights these days, man. Yeah. But what you do attracting people outside of mountains of North Carolina, but they can just eat barbells.

Ryan really lit the world on fire, I think. You know, put him on that big stage, and I'm sure there was some cortisol going on there. There is. Doug and I were laughing so hard when you guys were at the Arnold, because this is what happens if you meet Travis Mash when you're like 12. Yeah. You go out and set a national record. What was the lift that he – the clean and jerk?

400? He did 400 pounds. He was the second ever in America. He clean and jerks 400 pounds. And instead of being happy and, like, jumping and giving hugs, what does he do? He slams the barbell, runs to the front of his stage, slits his wrist, and drinks his own blood.

Yeah. This is – he didn't actually do it. If you want your kids to be around Travis Mads from the age of 12 on, there's a chance that might happen. Hey, they're not mad. His mom's going to watch him in the Olympics, so she's happy. That's right. That's all that matters.

Here we go. He lit it up. He lit it up. I feel like if I didn't know you, I would have been like, wait, what did he just do right there? I him i was like holy like that's straight out of travis's playbook you're always talking about drinking your own blood else he's just on stage and turn it up like he's normally so quiet he's like right he's like he just he doesn't say a lot of words and he he just lost his damn mind. But he deserved six for six. He's fully embraced Travis Mash. Took him a decade.

Dan Gardner, cortisol. Let's talk a little bit about the physiology. What is the role of cortisol in our body as like a stress response? Why do we have it? Well, it's there for a lot of reasons. And I think that it would do people a service if we talked about the physiology of stress before actually getting into the role of cortisol, because you can't really talk about cortisol without talking about stress.

When it comes to the actual stress response, this could be a massive conversation, but I'll try and put it real quick here. If we see, for example, a bear, or if we see somebody cut their wrist and drink it in front of us, we are going to have a massive stress response. And that actually shows high cortisol right now. It kicks off with epinephrine, actually. The spinal cord is going to send a signal to something known as the adrenal medulla, which is the inner portion of the adrenal gland. And the adrenal medulla will then secrete epinephrine. And that's what's going to kick off our fight or flight response. So we're going to have dilated pupils so that we can see further and clearer. We're going to increase respiration to oxygenate our body. We are going

to get energy substrates into the bloodstream, such as glucose to fuel movement. We are going to get energy substrates into the bloodstream, such as glucose, to fuel movement. We are going to move blood away from the gastrointestinal system into the skeletal muscle tissue so we can choose to fight or flight. There are many things that are happening all at once, all with one idea in mind, survival. So that stress response kicks itself off and we do whatever we have to do. And that spinal to adrenal medulla concept is known as your first phase stress response, which then leaves room for second phase. And that's when cortisol actually kicks in. So there's something in your brain called the hippocampus and it knows when epinephrine has been secreted. So it says, wait, hold on. Epinephrine has been secreted. Okay, let me kick off my second phase stress response.

So that hippocampus, it'll send something known as cortisol releasing hormone to the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland will then secrete adrenocorticotrophic hormone to the adrenal cortex. So epinephrine comes from the adrenal medulla, whereas cortisol is going to come from the adrenal cortex. And then the adrenal cortex is, whereas cortisol is going to come from the adrenal cortex. And then the adrenal cortex is that's what's going to secrete cortisol. And that's the stress hormone that a lot of people typically talk about. But a lot of people don't know that it's actually in place to make the first phase stress response

work better because cortisol increases the cell's receptor sensitivity to the effects of epinephrine. So cortisol's actually primary job is to resensitize the next time we have to fight or flight. That's why that I'd say we can't talk about cortisol without talking about stress as a whole. Because its primary purpose is to actually resensitize our body's ability to maximally fight or flight for the next time that happens. So if our back in the day, if our tribe was invaded and then we won the territory war, and then that first phase stress response allowed us to win the war. And then we're in that second phase response where we're not totally dialed down yet. We're still a bit stressed out and that's cortisol actually coming in to resensitize

certain receptors so that if that tribe comes back, we can have the same level of fight or flight and do that ass kicking all over again. Now, where this physiology turns into a problem is back in the day, that was great because stressors were truly stressors. It was someone invading our tribe or it was a bear. It was these serious, serious things. But now we have blind dates, we have traffic, we have frustration with the internet because it opened a page in two seconds rather than 0.5 seconds. We have so many things that cause us to be stressed. And cortisol, as Travis will be able to tell you, because he knows much more about stress than I do, but there's no such thing as a bad hormone. Bad hormones don't exist in

physiology. Biology is not stupid. The only time hormones can be bad is if they're chronically high or chronically low. Well, chronically high cortisol is what a lot of what breaks people down and hurts people in the long term with respect to glucose control, inflammation, fitness monitoring, but Travis is an absolute master in. So that's kind of like the quick breakdown on the physiologic response. And then we can get into those outcomes as well if you guys want to bring in some specific context here. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com,

you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside-out approach.

So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin is going to build out a lifestyle protocol based on the severity of your concerns. And then we're going to also build out all the programs that go into that based on the most severe things first. This truly is a world-class program, and we invite you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and

supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com. And let's get back to the show.

Masha, when you are – your entire phd is basically on managing stress athlete monitoring which is managing stress right um when what are you seeing with the athletes and like how you're tracking all this on like a day-to-day of just um like what questions you're asking them what are you what are you actually monitoring to be able to track this stuff and um like trends that you see over time, just youth athletes at this stage with having social media and crazy lives, really. I would say definitely the social media is causing a lot of issues. Now, these things, it sounds like I'm just know, something random, but now it's classified scientifically. Such things as, like, fear of missing out.

That's like an actual, you know, designation of, like, what's happening. Or social media bullying, social media fatigue, social media stalking, online social comparison. And then there's the effects of the blue light, you know, so people can't sleep to recover, which causes more – you know, causes them never to get out of that sympathetic nervous system response. You know, they're always, you know, cortisol is being released way too much. And like you said, you know, acutely, it's great. Chronically, it's terrible.

And but luckily, the way that we can measure, you know, how badly it's affecting people is, you know, fatigue is just uh defined is is a decrease in one's ability to produce force so like every single day what we do is we measure the first lift of the day at 85 you know 85 is like what we've somewhere between 80 and 85 is somewhere around where the nervous system starts to perceive this as heavyweight because like at 70 percent it might not pick up it might go you know you you might have the same velocity as ever on 70 75 but then you start to get 80 85 if you're experiencing like you know you know basically a ton of fatigue you'll start to get a very much you know like example a

girl did um liz same girl on on monday of last week she was squatting and 85 she was at 0.33 which normally she's at 0.40 maybe for some people that doesn't sound like much that's more than 10 off and so that tells me okay you're going to do a little bodybuilding and go home because you are so out of whack. So, you know, like all the studies that we go by, like, you know, Roman or Prilipin, all these great names, Vrkosansky, like they got to research athletes who did not have any of this stress. And so when we look at Prilogic's chart, what seems perfect, what they perceive as perfect prescriptions is not at all for us anymore because stress is stress.

When you prescribe an athlete to do X amount of volume at X amount of intensity and load, then what you're saying is this is stress I am introducing to my athletes. And then you're expecting a response, and then they're recovering. It's stronger. But now, man, it's all messed up, you know,

because they still have the typical stressors of school, relationships, exams. The key is measurement. For all of you out there listening, if you're a strength coach or a coach, is measure it, you know, monitor every day. Like I said, we use velocity. We use also a depth jump. We don't use a vertical jump because the depth jump looks more at the neuromuscular system. And I'm sure as we'll find out, you know, later in this podcast is that the social, I mean, the chronic stress affects the neuromuscular system more so than it does just the muscular.

So like it's how the brain interacts with the muscles. So by looking at a depth jump, we're looking at those, you know, those neural components in the joints, like the muscle spindles. Anyway, the stretch reflex, putting it simple, we're looking at that. So if that's affected, then it's definitely, you know, something with stress. And then the third component is we have them do a subjective questionnaire every day. So the cool thing about the questionnaire, even though it's a little bit, you know, subjective, subjective, obviously, nature is it tells me when I see something objective, like on

the velocity or on the depth jump, I can then go look at their subjective questionnaire and see the reason. Like I can look at like some of the questions we asked them. How much sleep did you get the night before? You know, what was the quality of your nutrition? And the more advanced the athlete is, the more exact the questions are. So like Ryan wouldn't get, you know, what was the quality on a scale from one to five? I would say, what are your macros yesterday?

Exactly. And so anyway, to summarize, the objective, the depth jump, and the velocity tells us that there's a problem. The subjective questionnaire tells us what those problems are. Yeah, I'm super interested because competitive people aren't just competitive sometimes. They're competitive all the time and to like the highest degree. And if you're Ryan, like one of the best weightlifters in the country,

I can imagine like me when Instagram like came out in the middle of my competitive CrossFit career and it was one of the, I became so angry watching people train or like hitting lifts that I hadn't hit yet, or immediately getting off my training program and doing workouts that they had posted because I wanted to beat them at all times, like every single day until you realize that like, you can't beat everybody on the internet. There's just too many people. How do you keep people's brains screwed on the right way so they're not just constantly comparing themselves to their competition? Well, I really encourage them.

Ryan rarely gets on social media, and he never gets on social media and strolls through and sees what people are doing. He barely posts. And when he posts, he just, he puts something up of his own and then that's it. And so, which is great for him as an athlete. You know, obviously it's not so good for him, you know, building his following, but luckily he cares more about winning the Olympics and less about his following.

And it's definitely playing out. The people who worry the most i've noticed end up doing the least as far as like they it gets to them you see the people who are constantly online you can look and like their performance is definitely affected more than guys like you know ryan who's rarely on so um it does seem to be the sweet spot to like use social media as a megaphone you're just you're blasting your thing out to the world. And then you're not in the comments reading everything that everyone's saying. Like you just post and ghost and you're out of there.

You kind of get the benefit without the downside of whatever, even if it's one in a hundred negative comments, that one negative comment can linger in your brain when you're in the shower and every other part of your day. Yo, Dan, I want to turn this back over to you for a minute. We use the Dutch test to look at our cortisol curves, where essentially your cortisol in the morning kind of rises right after waking and kind of falls the rest of the day.

Why does cortisol have this pattern? And if you don't have that pattern, what does that mean for the rest of your physiology and how you feel and how much energy you have, how you sleep, et cetera. Sure. So yeah, cortisol plays a really important role in one sleep wake cycle. So it's a, like I said, there's no bad hormone. Hormones are only bad if they're chronically high or low, but in a normal homeostatic range, that's something that is always going to provide benefits. Like if you just think of evolutionary biology, why would our body over millions of years, give us a hormone with the sole purpose of being bad for us? It literally makes no sense at all. Biology is a lot smarter than that. And people try to

demonize cortisol. They demonize insulin. They demonize these things. And it's such representation of their lack of understanding of human metabolism when they try to isolate and demonize something because cortisol in a healthy physiologic range is actually anti inflammatory. Many people are familiar with its sister hormone cortisone that athletes will inject into their joints to finish a fourth quarter, whatever it's going to be. Cortisol also has anti-inflammatory effects. Cortisol is a hormone of energy, which is why it plays such a big role in our sleep-wake cycle. Cortisol is immunostimulatory, like we discussed in our podcast on the immune system not so

far back. It stimulates the certain branch of the immune system to help fight infections. Cortisol is what actually mobilizes fatty acids from triglycerides within fat cells so they can be transported to the mitochondria and burned as energy. Cortisol also breaks down glycogen into the form of glucose. We can use that as a form of energy as well. I mean, you're talking about energy substrate availability, immune system function, inflammation control, energy throughout the day. How and why somebody could call this bad is just absolutely silly. And what you'll see from a cortisol test, whether you use the Dutch profile, which is a combination of saliva and

urine, or whether you use the adrenal cortex from Genova, which is purely saliva, or if you've got the time and blood availability to do a blood draw multiple times throughout the day, you'll see cortisol levels, a healthy cortisol rhythm would start the day at your highest point. And then as the day progresses forward, it's going to decrease. And again, the stress response has lots to do with evolutionary biology. So you'll see me bring this up quite a bit. But cortisol is highest upon waking because once cortisol passes through a certain threshold, that's what actually wakes us up for the day. And it is the hormone of energy. So it's highest upon waking because we didn't always have light bulbs. So we needed to do all of our hunting, all of our gathering and complete our to-do list, whatever that was before sundown. So our cortisol

as evolution progressed was highest upon waking so we could attack our day and then progressively decreases as the day goes on so that an anti-relationship of melatonin can take place. It is lowest throughout the day and then it will progressively increase and that's what will put you down. When cortisol passes a certain threshold, you're going to wake up. When melatonin passes a certain threshold, you're going to wake up. When melatonin passes a certain threshold, you're going to go down. And why I look at that is basically to see what's going on with an athlete. Because what their cortisol values are says a lot about, and I love how Travis is looking at objective and subjective stuff, because I do the same thing, just kind of in a different

way. I look at the objectivity within their lab markers. So I'm looking at hormones and cytokines to see what's going on with overreaching, overtraining, and the athlete's overall recoverability. But then I'll also look at subjective markers, man, because the beautiful thing about stress is its perception. My wife and I could both go on a roller coaster. I'm going to love it. She's going to hate it. We were subjected to the same stressor, but the perception of the stressor completely alters our endocrinology because her stress response would be massive and mine would actually

be considered what's known in research as a eustressor. So it's a stressor that actually, it's a eustressor, it makes us feel good. It's a difference between eustress and It makes us feel good. It's a difference between eustress and de-stress or distress, I should say. And that subjectivity married with the objectivity tells me so much about how stress is individually impacting this athlete's context that I'm looking at in this moment. Which is, that's such a great point. That is why having an individual approach to any program that you're doing is so important because you're right.

Like Ryan looks at the crowd at the Arnold Classic and gets the same butterflies and anxiety everyone else does, perceives it as like, you know, it's actually like superpowers. You know, another person could be just as good as ryan perceives as oh shit i'm nervous i'm gonna mess up in front of this crowd and so like your perception is everything how one deals with it is is so important because so you can't just assume well you know you know if i put ryan and matt in the exact same everything they have the same classes the same everything i can't assume that one is gonna you know that he's gonna be affected the exact same everything. They have the same classes, the same everything. I can't assume that one is going to, you know, that he's going to be affected the exact same because one perceives it as good,

one perceives it as bad. The bad, you know, creates chronic stress. And so now we're in trouble. Yeah, for sure. And that's, yeah, yeah. So that's actually, I want to actually add on Travis's point that our perception matters too. So what we perceive as physiologically stressful may not be physiological stressful for Ryan because he's a beast. So we actually have to remove our own bias on top of it as well. Because stress is something that's super individual because we are prescribing a certain training volume intensity that we may perceive as overly stressful or perhaps an overreaching phase. But then when we look at

their labs, we see that they're fine. So it's like, hang on a second. Now there's this new element because stress is objective and subjective in the athlete that we're working with. But not only do they have to understand the perception, but now I have to understand the perception of the physiologic load that I'm placing upon that athlete. Because what I've noticed that a lot of coaches as the years go on, especially in the last decade, as research continues to come out and stress, is that people kind of forgot how resilient we are. We are more adaptable and more resilient than a lot of people give us credit for. And it's so funny to me because the same people who will say, okay, well, the stress response hasn't evolved since Sabre 2 Tigers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'd say, okay, well,

hold on a second. So let's use that example. Do you know how stressful it was to live back in that day and how resilient we were? Do you know how hard it was to live back in that day and how resilient we were? Do you know how hard it was to hunt and gather? What kind of training, quote unquote, volume intensity it took to hunt and gather and that we still recovered from? Do you know how hard and stressful it was to live in the elements without air conditioning? You must have been. You must have been.

Yeah. Dude, it's insane, right? without air conditioning. You must've been, you must've been. Yeah, dude. It's, it's insane, right? Like, and so people are saying our stress response hasn't evolved yet. We're stressed out.

Hang on a second, man. We are some of the most adaptable and resilient fricking creatures on the planet. So make sure that you have an objective and subjective analysis and that you're not just placing wild analogies from the paleolithic era on everybody that comes your way it doesn't make sense when when mash you you brought the word anxiety is anxiety uh a perception issue or is it a failed adaptation issue like um you're talking

about kind of like that second level of um cortisol that that comes through your body, which is kind of like your body adapting to whatever stressor it is to prepare you for the next attack or the next fight or whatever it is. Is anxiety a perceived problem, or is there a failed adaptation in your physiology, which isn't allowing that second stage because you're just maybe operating at in too much stress um what what how how is anxiety related to the physiology um in that process well you know you have arousal and like that is more of the measurable unit that you can say you can say i you know they they were

given this much arousal meaning like he lifted in front of 10 000 people anxiety becomes yeah the perception of that arousal so for a high performer like like uh ryan he did not get anxiety because anxiety is associated with like feelings of you know negativity like you know oh i'm nervous you know you know it's some most times it's like it is a very like subjective thing that your brain is dealing with to say hey i'm nervous you know it's just but arousal is what you can measure you know big crowd no crowd you know and like it's what you can control like i want my guys on a day-to-day basis to a low arousal minus Friday where, yes, we pick it up and we're going to go to an eight, you know, but like,

otherwise I like to stay around a six or seven throughout the week. Otherwise, which is why we ask that question at the end of training, we ask, you know, on a rate, you know, scale of one to 10, 10 being the hardest, I killed you. Like, where are you? Because I have a certain scale i'm trying to keep them you know i'm trying to keep them somewhere around four or five hundred on the norm and then we can go six or seven hundred on fridays we can let it loose so arousal is what we're looking at anxiety is something that everyone is different it's how they it's how they perceive

arousal yeah um dan growing up i remember one of the first perceptions i had of cortisol was like like reading bodybuilding magazines whatnot was like you wake up and you want to eat food right away because cortisol is in there and it's it's catabolic and so you're losing muscle mass and if you don't eat right away you're gonna you're gonna shrink and be skinny that was like my perception of cortisol like in high school, maybe even early college. Like to what extent is that true? And to what extent is that kind of silly? To the extent that it is acute or chronic, that's the truth of it. So if you have chronically high cortisol, it is catabolic.

So if somebody is chronically high cortisol due to a variety of issues, whether it's a true disease ailment or chronic anxiety or overtraining, continuing to train way too much beyond your maximum recoverable volume. These are all things that can drive cortisol up beyond certain thresholds where you begin to break yourself back down. That chronic would have an impact. That chronically elevated cortisol would have an impact on a bodybuilder's ability to get big and jacked. But acute rises in cortisol are actually an important component of the

training stimulus to drive the inflammation required for the cytokines to tell the body, hey, we need more mTOR so that we can signal some muscle strength, we can signal some muscle growth, we can get this whole process kicked off. That doesn't happen without an acute stress response. That acute stress response is what we're in the gym for. So when people are trying to constantly suppress cortisol, you're suppressing the degree of the stimulus. So I in no way, shape or form, I'm a fan of suppressing cortisol during training or needing or forcing anybody to overly focus on cortisol throughout the day if it's not high to begin with. So that's something that you would quantify through labs. But beyond that, it's not going to play some acute role. The people who think that they don't eat immediately upon waking are going to lose

muscle. That's short sighted. The people who think that they don't, they have to have an insane peri-workout process if they train for 30 minutes or else they'll lose muscle while they're active. That's short-sighted. None of this stuff really matters unless it's chronically high or chronically low. Which then it gets even life-threatening if it's chronic. So we measure it because we're all looking at strictly performance, and I'm trying not to break them down, and I'm trying not to injure them. There's a huge correlation between chronically high cortisol levels and injury.

Because if cortisol is being produced a lot, you're going to have decreases in bone formation. It's going to inhibit collagen production, which, you know, that's not good at all for the soft tissue, the joints, the tendons, the ligaments. So, you know, the key is you're going to keep, we're going to keep coming back to is going to be acute or is it chronic? And so if it's chronic, look at their lifestyle. Not necessarily do I want to monitor, you know,

stress during the workout because that's exactly do I want to monitor, you know, stress during the workout because that's exactly where I want it to be. But it's like looking at their lifestyle outside of the gym is really a big key. For sure. And sometimes it's adaptations versus maladaptations. Like sometimes an adaptation, actually almost all the time, an adaptation in one area of the body is going to be a maladaptation in another area of the body. So for example, if you sit down at your desk all day, every day, because you're an online coach, you know, a lot of us have that you will get tight hips, that is an adaptation for sitting, but a maladaptation for sprinting. So like the certain stressors and your body is the ultimate adaptation machine that is going to respond in

response to stress. But from a physiologic perspective, you kind of have to look at that from a stress response perspective too, even when looking at objective markers, because sometimes what we think is stress is actually efficiency. So for example, if I look at blood work and I see elevated red blood cells, I see elevated hematocrit, I see elevated hemoglobin, I think, hang on, he's got high red blood cells. There's quite a bit of iron in the blood and his hematocrit is quite concentrated. Like what's going on here? We have to fix this immediately. But then you come to find out he's been training at altitude for a while. And his body is actually just becoming efficient with oxygen transfer and deliverability. So was

that the stressor or was it the body's beautiful, beautiful ability to adapt to the stressor. So sometimes the stressor, the adaptation to the stressor is what's going to make you great at a single thing at the expense of maladaptations elsewhere. And that's kind of like the ultimate pursuit of anything is going to require maladaptations in other areas of your life. And that's kind of what's known as allostasis. And kind of the real foundation of the philosophy at which I coach, there's something known as allostatic load. And I don't talk about it a lot because it's a medical term. I usually just use the phrase like total stress load to make it

easier and more digestible. But allostatic load is a beautiful term because it represents the total stress load from all factors in your life. So social media, environmental, your training, psychological, emotional, your diet, environmental pollution. Allostatic load is the representation of the total stress load of your life on your physiology. And there's something known as allostasis, which is your body's adaptation and maladaptation response to survive in the best way that it can and adapt in the best way that it can to the allostatic load. So that's something I consider constantly. And I know Travis has to consider constantly when you're working with some of the

best athletes in the world, there's not going to be homeostasis, but there will be allostasis. And our job is to maximize allostasis to drive maximum adaptation for that person's single pursuit of greatness. And that is a management of stressors toward a direction and not a management of stressors to try and get you to some false land of homeostasis that you simply won't achieve. If you're trying to be the best in the world at anything. No. Um,

mass, are you tracking? Like, I feel like HRV had a huge three years, uh, a couple of years back and you don't hear much about it anymore. I know it still exists obviously, but are you tracking things like that? Some of them. Yeah. But it's going to tell me, you know, like if you have velocity, you know,

they're going to tell me about the same thing. Cause like Ryan, you know, he has the what's the one? Whoop. He has the whoop. So we have his HRV, but it lines up pretty well with like, you know, if he's really not recovering, he's in a sympathetic nervous system state too much, the velocity tells me. Like right now he's beat to, like right now it's super high.

I mean, the heart rate variability is not very good right now. Yeah. So, and because I'm doing it on purpose. So yeah, I mean, one of the, I feel like HRV kind of just like disappeared off the,

um, the big conversation. Well, yeah, but not, I mean, it's still got, it still has its place.

And for the average, you know, adult, I think it's great because, you know, when you're at, when you're already variability, but it's not very variable I think it's great because when your heart rate variability, when it's not very variable,

it's a problem. It's a big red flag that you're about to die early. So it's important, but with velocity, it pretty much tells me the same thing just because I look at the system every single day when they're very first in movement

and if it sucks, I know that they're not recovering, which is all heart rate variability is telling me. Yeah. Dan, going back to kind of like the, how cortisol is supposed to play out through the day. Like when you wake up, it's supposed to be at its best. When you did all of my testing and the results results came back i was basically opposite like i was in the shitter in the morning which is why i drank so much coffee and then right as i was about to go to bed my brain would be like dude let's get creative let's do cool stuff right now me too like why is that yeah lay in bed and your brain's like man we could write stand-up comedy routines

we could write blog posts. You want to talk about strength training? We can do that too. All the things come to me right as soon as I hit the bed. Yeah. Luckily I have Dan Garner doing my nutrition and supplementation. So I don't have that as much anymore. Um, why does that happen?

Like what, what, how do I switch? How did you switch that around on me so that I actually wake up and don't feel like I'm just like crawling to the coffee machine. And then when I lay in bed at night, it's like, hey, I think I can go to sleep. Yeah. So in your physiologic context, and that's kind of what stress is all about, is taking a step back, looking at the big picture of objectivity and subjectivity and creating the greatest consensus of Anders Varner's physiology and what we're going to do to adapt to the stressors that are currently happening within him. And a big hint, if you have evening elevations in cortisol is actually

gut dysfunction. A lot of people don't know that gut bugs are nocturnal. There's excellent scientific papers on this. So things like gut bacteria, gut parasites, fungal infections, a lot of these things are at their highest level of activity in the evening. And the reason because of this is because that's when immunity is at its absolute lowest. So when you are getting ready to go to sleep or when you are asleep, the immune system is at its absolute lowest. So you can think about bacteria like wanting to be active when all the security guards have gone home.

Immunity is at its lowest, so bacteria now has its own opportunity to survive and thrive, replicate, and create more of the colonies that it currently has. And that will, in turn, create a transient stress response. So I'll see a little bit, usually not an absolute elevation, but I will see a relative elevation in stress response right in that evening marker. And then that is confirmed, not always confirmed, can be certainly confirmed if I also see a slightly elevated marker upon waking. So with Anders, his adrenal function was so low upon waking that it wasn't carrying over into the next morning. But that relative increase

right before bed kind of let me know, you know, like that Anders should probably be doing a stool test here, because this is a huge marker for gastrointestinal distress due to infectious activity at nighttime. And that is doubly true if somebody's melatonin is less than 18. Like that's something you actually won't find in literature. But after having done over 1000 labs, I can tell you if somebody's melatonin is less than 18, they have gut dysfunction. That's something I've absolutely identified as a KPI. And one of the reasons a lot of people don't know there's actually 400 times more melatonin in our gut than there is within the pineal gland in the brain. So whenever there is a lot of gut dysfunction, or I'll say two things, whenever there's a lot of gut dysfunction, there's a transient decrease in melatonin.

But also whenever somebody has sleep problems, one of my first thoughts now is actually what's going on with the gut. I don't think like, hey, what more sedatives could I give them at nighttime? Because two things happen, you know, for the sleep cascade to kick off properly, serotonin puts you down, melatonin keeps you down. 90% of our serotonin is made in the gut and we have 400 times more melatonin in the gut than we do in the pineal gland and the brain.

So when the two most important components of sleep length and sleep quality are housed within the gut in massive quantities and we know that an infectious state can increase cortisol prior to bedtime. We start, you know, creating an excellent consensus as to what we should do with this individual. Not to mention cortisol is, as we've mentioned, a stress hormone. Stress hormones run antagonistic with anything inhibitory. So it's going to suppress melatonin. It's going to suppress serotonin. It's going to suppress GABA. Cortisol is always going to suppress

anything inhibitory in neurology because stress is always seen as survival. So from an evolutionary biology perspective, if there's a saber tooth tiger in front of us, it's probably a bad time to go to sleep. So there's a natural antagonistic relationship. Holy shit. We're as a stressor in front of us. We got to suppress these inhibitory actions. So then my job is not to go, okay, Andrew's got pre-bed cortisol release. What can I give him to suppress cortisol? That's amateur. The question is, why is cortisol high to begin with? Why don't we answer that question? Because stress, and this is one of the most important things I'll say in this podcast,

stress is a reactant. It's not something that just happens, people. It is a reactant. So every single time you blame the adrenal glands for all of your problems, instead of doing that, why don't you ask them what they're reacting to? Because that's the root cause of the problem. And that should be the beginning of your diagnostic process. And that's what we did with Anders.

Dr. Andrew Sears So, in like an oversimplified, my body is recognizing, hey, you've got some stuff going on in your gut. The immune system is suppressing because it's at night and it's going to go down, which means the bad bugs are about to attack. So my body is releasing cortisol to handle the stress. It's going into like a fight or flight response to gut bugs. It doesn't have to be the saber tooth tiger on the external. It's actually preparing to fight what's going on inside me. Nobody in the world is going to tell you that, by the way.

Nobody talks about that. They're always talking about email and social media. How about your gut bugs? You got bacterial infections in there. Go handle those. See talks about that. They're always talking about email and social media. How about your gut bugs? You got bacterial infections in there. Go handle those. See how that changes things around. Stress, physiology is physiology. So stress is stress.

Like these different types of stress are going to respond the same in physiology. And that's kind of, you know, another good thing about objective markers. So like if I'm an Olympic lifter with M, or if I'm an amateur lifter with mash, velocity is velocity and a stress load is stress load. And in my world, you know, for example, GGT, GGT is a marker of oxidative stress, whether you're the number one athlete in the MLB, or if you're a stay at home mom wanting to get,

you know, leaner, that is a marker of stress. So whenever I kind of see those things happen in physiology, you have to identify where that's coming from. And once you do, that's the next plateau buster that you just found towards reaching your goals. It's changed like immediately. It was like inside one month was how fast I started to recognize the cortisol. Like the mornings got so much better. The nights got much better. And that was a function of gut health. Yeah. That's the thing too, man.

Because like somebody who sleeps poorly is naturally going to have way more coffee in the morning. And then when you eliminate the root cause of the problem and maximize sleep length and sleep quality, you have a natural increase in cortisol so that your dependency upon stimulants decreases dramatically. Like what, what was the before and after of your coffee intake again? Uh, I am down like 40 ounces a day yeah so are you being serious yeah well hold on a second it's like five cups yeah so hold on you have to also know that uh i got it done i did all of my testing when i had a four month old so sleep was like a disaster to begin with. It was like super chronic stress going on for months at a time, just like in that window of life. It's like, I was actually really

excited to do the testing at that time because it really was like the dumps, like you're not thinking well, you're not performing well. You're just trying to survive the first four to six months of like being in the in the cave of having a newborn um but once the results came back and once you were like explaining to me each of the biomarkers and and where things were at i was like this is so obviously exactly what's going on with me right now like i just didn't know how the physiology would read so exactly how i was feeling it was that was like insane to me. And then once we got on it,

it was like, I got all the supplements, nutrition, everything in like month five and a half month, six, maybe like once. And it was like, I,

the light at the end of the tunnel started to get bigger. And then all of a sudden it was like back to normal. Just like it, it, it totally, it just happened. It was wild. And for the record, Ryan is now with these guys too. Yeah.

Yeah, he's with Dan and Andy. I'm sending another one now. So really, if you're a top athlete, I mean, Ryan's going to have an unfair advantage over anyone who's listening. I hope they're not listening so they don't go. But it's a big advantage. When everything – only thing that really matters for me as a strength coach is the amount of stress I introduce to Ryan

and what Ryan does to reduce stress in his life. Well, and your coach, like your job is to optimize that stress. That's it. So like if they're constantly fighting a bunch of crap that you have no control over a gut bug i wouldn't know anything about that yeah you can't actually even program well for them because you're just trying to manage the thing that they're managing like you're you're playing telephone with stuff that's in your physiology you don't even know know what's happening right so until you pull that stuff up

you can't write the right program. You can't prescribe the right macros or the right food, micronutrients, whatever it is. You're just kind of guessing until you figure out why he's dumping 30% of his performance because he can't sleep well at night. And that was one of the – obviously having a newborn is different than trying to go to London. But that's, you know, that, that stress just, if you're not sleeping, if you're not, if you're not able to recover, you're just guessing. Right. And imagine that for you, Anders,

too, because it, how well do you think your immune system was functioning during those months? Like, and even in the months after, So that gut bug only would have gotten progressively worse and then continued to have gone, just gone ignored for lack of a better phrase, because that gut bug would have continued to get worse. It would have continued to got ignored. And then that's kind of when excuses come out, right? Like, oh, this is just the dad bug. This is how it is. I'm getting older. But it was really just something that could have been identified and solved. The question I asked earlier about anxiety, is this just like a failed adaptation to stress?

Or is it some sort of brain thing that you're just like perception of how bad you're, so you're like meta feelings about some scenario. But that really goes into. But that's a, that really goes into it because it's like, had I not, I remember at that stage going, fuck, I wish I could get out of this. Like, how am I going to get out of this? Like brutal cycle I am I'm in right now. And it's not like I'm, I'm that different than every other dad that has gone through this or exactly where my wife has been for the last three and a half years. Like she's going through it. We all kind of go through it in that stage.

But I remember specifically when my coffee intake like bumped up and I went, this is a lot now. Like if I'm having to question myself, because I like I thought I was a good coffee drinker to begin with. And then all of a sudden it was like it just bumped up 30 and i'm going god this is not headed in the right direction like how am i going to get out of this but like every morning it was like you go to the coffee machine am i going to put four scoops in or am i going to put seven maybe if i just like have more coffee beans but less water how's that gonna work like even better

but I had to get out of the hole somehow and the only way to do it was drugs yeah I mean like there was no way out right until we go and do all the stuff and I can find out what's going on right you know his Ryan's mom is now with them too. Like that's how good – so that shows you the value is that the mom liked it so much she's doing it. I'm like – Yeah. So good. I was worried about them being mad that I asked them to spend the money. Now she's doing it.

I'm like, perfect. Yeah, I did her labs last week. Did she do the whole thing? She did. We did blood and urine. So just the initial consult, but we found, yeah, DHA. We found many actionable items that answered a ton of questions she had about her physiology. So she is off, Jessica, she's off to a flying start right now. Yeah. She's so happy too, because she loves Andy. Like she's a big, like when she,

when I first started being friends, I know know when i first started being friends with him she loved him already that was before anybody knew him and now like she's super excited to be with him so yeah yeah yeah now he's the industry celebrity he is the industry i know that when i met him at chris's wake nobody knew him and that was like how many years ago did chris pass away like uh six years ago now i think that's 2016 in those six years that dude has absolutely blown up a nuclear bomb went off because like he wasn't no one knew him like i don't even know if he had a social media and so yeah now he's like joe rogan boom like give it three weeks bud give it three weeks big one's coming oh there's something bigger coming not rogan you can't you can't redo rogan yeah but yeah it's gonna be great well um dan

garner where can the people find you at At Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram. There it is. Coach Travis Mash. Mashley.com, Instagram, Mashley Performance. Doug Larson. On Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged.

Make sure you get over to DieselDadMentorship.com where all the busy dads are getting strong, lean, and athletic. And make sure you get over to the performance nutrition section in Walmart. And if you do not see my face in the store at the pharmacy, guess what? You need to go to Walmart next door because we are in 2,200 stores, three products on the shelf. Shred, burn, zone. Shred, pump, zone. Friends, see you guys next week.