Barbell Shrugged - How to Naturally Increase Testosterone by 300% w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Dan Garner, and Dr. Andy Galpin

Episode Date: October 30, 2024

This week on Barbell Shrugged we are throwing it back to the first show where we met Dan Garner. We take the deep dive into strategies for naturally boosting testosterone levels. Key topics discussed include the importance of creating a comprehensive health profile with blood work, stool, urine, and saliva, which together offer a full picture of an individual's hormonal and metabolic state. By identifying micronutrient deficiencies and other physiological markers, these health professionals aim to address factors that directly impact testosterone production and overall vitality. The hosts discuss how maintaining a healthy body composition is crucial, as excess body fat can convert testosterone into estrogen, which impacts hormone balance. Additionally, managing stress levels and lowering cortisol—known to inhibit testosterone production—is emphasized. The episode also delves into how specific dietary adjustments and targeted supplements can help, along with psychological factors like confidence, which can positively influence testosterone levels. Work with RAPID Health Optimization Links: Dan Garner on Instagram Dr. Andy Galpin on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, we're throwing it way back to when Dan Garner first came on Barbell Shrug at the end of November, 2022. We're wrapping up 2023, and this is his first year being a full-time host. A fun story about this podcast. This is the first time in like 500, 600 episodes that I have recorded in which I immediately,

as soon as getting off the podcast, signed up to go work with Dan. It was like, I had never heard somebody speak in the manner about physiology and blood work and chemistry and actually getting results like he did on this show. And Doug and I both immediately signed up and then we got our blood work done. And then once we got the video that you can see my lab reports, I'm reading my labs over at rapidhealthreport.com. But as soon as we got that video, I immediately called Doug and I went, dude, have you ever seen anything like that? And he immediately said, I have not. And then three months later, we were hanging out in Texas and we both looked at each other almost simultaneously and went, I feel amazing right now.

Because we've been doing this protocol for about four months when everything kind of really starts kicking in and you've got tons of energy, tons of sleep. My coffee addiction had dropped like a ton. We just both felt incredible. And we both at the same time said, wow, this is incredible. But this is the show that started it all. This is the show that started Rapid Health Optimization.

This is the show that got us all combined, working together and starting to build something truly special. So we always like going back and listening to this one. I hope you guys enjoy it. Anybody that is a new listener, we appreciate you guys coming in this year and really being a part of the show and the success of this program. And we're just really proud of the work we're going to do and supporting you, getting you guys healthy and beyond. So I appreciate all the support this year. Schedule a call and you can do

that over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Strug. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson. Coach Travis Fash, Dr. Andy Galpin and Dan Garner. Today on Barbell Strug, we're going to be talking about nutrition, lab work, and we're just going to kick this thing right off. I'd love to hear a little bit of the background and then really get into testosterone. That's something that is, I got about three hours of sleep last night. So I imagine if I went into your lab today to talk about it, you'd just look at me and be like, dude, you're sick and three quarters female. What's going on? But you and Galpin have been working on some athletes together and I'd love to just get a little bit of the background. Introduce yourself

to the audience and how you got into really digging so deep into lab work and its effects on hormone balance. Sure. So yeah, everybody, my name is Dan Garner. I'm coming from Canada today. This is an international Barbell Shrugged. I've been into fitness and being a meathead for a long time. I'm one of the original meatheads who would have the plastic concrete weights in their garage and would just hammer away at that thing. uh absolutely freezing in the winter absolutely boiling in the summer there's no there's no insulation here so you can imagine what training uh like that was like but it was worth it i had meathead dreams and that's what kind of brought me to focusing so much on research and stuff not because I was getting such great results and loving it, but

because I had absolutely no genetics for getting jacked. So I was falling in love with reading absolutely every single article about nutrition, about training. And since that point, I've completely dedicated my life. I do mean it when I say that I'm obsessed with this stuff. I don't know if anybody can read as much as I've read in the world of lab-based nutrition and applying high performance protocols to athletes. I've worked with professional athletes, dozens of them in nine different professional sports. I've trained and coached three Super Bowl champions, multiple Hall of Famers, two UFC title winners, and hopefully two more coming this September. Working with Galpin, we've got some exciting stuff coming up.

I've worked with an Olympic gold medalist, two bronze medalists, a silver medalist. on the block working with tons of very, very high level people traveling the world, educating different gyms and associations on nutrition, training, all that kind of stuff. So I've been in the game for a long time and I absolutely love talking shop. So thanks for having me on here today. Yeah, I sent Galpin a text message saying, who's the best endocrinologist you know? Because we're taking this really deep dive into uh testosterone it's something that's super interesting to us and we've got a bunch of projects that we're working on on our side and he immediately well not immediately and immediately is like a week out scalping um so immediately on his schedule he texted back your name and started

rattling off we're taking hair samples. We're taking urinalysis. We're doing blood work, stool samples. What I'd love to dig into before we even kind of get into everything that you guys are finding out on the hormone side of thing and testosterone side of things, but like, what can we learn from blood work? Because I feel like there's – I've gone to doctors before, and there's like your standard doctor, and then there's your super high-performance doctor, and the amount of blood work that comes out of your standard doctor takes like four vials.

And then I go to my high-performance doctor, and I feel like they walk out with four gallons of blood and they're testing 50 different things. And I have no idea why the difference, like what, what leads you down kind of a path to getting into hair follicles, getting into urinalysis, getting into blood work, stool samples, how does all this stuff kind of play together? And what are you looking for in each one? I'm looking for absolutely everything. I mean, and that's why I order everything. So it's not just a blood analysis, because if you get a blood analysis, you're getting a snapshot of one's physiology. But urine, stool, hair, you're getting the full movie of one's physiology. And when you're

able to look at the entire movie of somebody's physiology, what I'm essentially doing is trying to identify a root cause or what I refer to as a performance anchor. Everybody's got one. And it's the ultimate plateau buster. When a lot of people are looking for the next advanced periodization scheme, regulating intensity, frequency, volume, specificity, variation. They're doing a lot of complicated linguistics and tactics within the gym. And granted, these things are all absolutely vital to get world-class results. But what I found when it comes to breaking through plateaus and bringing someone's physiology to a truly optimized level, it's identifying what root causes are currently holding them back. So what do I mean by that? Well, let's just go with an easy example. Let's say somebody has

acid reflux, okay? If somebody has acid reflux, what does the average person do? They're going to go to their pharmacy, they're going to get some Tums typically, because it's an antacid, and they will suppress that acid secretion. Boom, done. That's what a lot of coaches do unintentionally. Even medical practitioners will do unintentionally and people do unintentionally. And I'm saying unintentionally because they don't really know they're operating on a symptom-based level rather than a root cause based level. The symptom was acid secretion. But one thing I would never want the listeners to forget is that the symptom is never the problem. The symptom is only ever the result

of the problem. So my brain just works differently. I don't say, hey, there's acid shooting up my esophagus. How do I suppress that? Instead, I ask, why is acid shooting up my esophagus? Let's answer that question. Acid reflux. I answer, why do we have acid shooting up our esophagus? That's not a normal function of physiology. Let's answer that question first so we can identify the root cause, solve it at a root causal level, and then that person can move forward in the absence of medication Because if we just take Tums for example and suppress that acid We now have no idea what the root cause was we have no idea what ripple effect

That's creating within the organ systems of the body and we have no idea What kind of impact that can have towards a number of factors. When you're talking about just in this example, it's gut health, digestion, absorption, hormone balance, all the things your microbiome are connected to. There's so many different things here. So when you're asking me, what am I looking for in labs? I'm trying to identify any kind of root cause that I can. And when I find that root cause, that's always,

always, always one's performance anchor. And essentially, what I'm looking at is, and then this is, this is going to be a big answer, but I'm looking at someone's total stress load. If somebody has a stress load, that's always going to impact their ability to recover from exercise. When I work with athletes, like I've worked with, like I've said, the best athletes in the world, they're not short of mental toughness. The problem is your weekly training frequency is not designed based on how bad you want it. Your weekly training frequency is designed based on your adaptive capability. If you can't adapt from your current training load, it's really not advantageous for you to keep training more just because you want it. You're going to be digging a deeper and deeper

debt of fatigue. So when I'm looking at total body stressors, stress can come from anywhere and hurts somebody's adaptive reserve, whether it's going to be a bacterial infection, yeast infection, parasitic infection, hormone imbalance, you name it. These are all something else now that the immune system has to focus on instead of just focusing on adapting from training. So when I remove somebody's root cause, I'm removing that performance anchor, allowing them to adapt for more stimulus. You've said that word performance anchor three times for that phrase. Can you describe that in a little bit more detail? I can put the two words together and kind of understand that, but can you dig deeper into just what exactly that means to you and what you're looking for is that is that a hang-up in someone's training or is that

the launch point to getting them to where they're going uh hey before you answer that um the audio is not doing its best service here i don't know dan like i don't know if your audio is coming from your mic actually it's kind of choppy kind of chunking out there it is speak speak right in your mic and then speak away from your mic and see if it is it like radically different or like tap your mic okay is it better now way better yeah let me just make a note what time how are we about 10 minutes into this thing so i can tell colton when to edit this? Sounds about right. That's my fault. My mic was in my headset, not in this.

Yeah, that sounds so much better. Cool. Sorry, guys. Yeah, you're good. All good. We can just roll from my question and Colton will be able to edit it to exactly where we need you to go if you want to just hop into it while I make this note.

What is it, performance anchor? Yeah, so it was really about the term performance anchor. And is that, in your eyes, the thing that is holding people back? Or is that the baseline that they should be at to the launch point forward to optimizing things. So is it the anchor of where you need to be to start? Or is it the anchor holding you down from getting you to where you need to be? It's an anchor holding you down from getting you to where you need to be. Because if somebody has a dysfunction in their body, then their adaptive

capability from training is absolutely going to be hampered. It's definitely going to be decreased. So you can think about it like a pie. You can think about somebody's recovery reserve like a pie. But if somebody has, say, a bacterial infection or a parasitic infection or a yeast infection or any of these types of issues, a micronutrient deficiency, any of these, you can think about 20%, like a slice of that pie being gone. And because the immune system has to focus on multiple things at once. So when somebody thinks this is what this is one big thing that I do, I really take athletes potential to a level that they thought that they weren't capable of before, through

increasing their health, rather than just focusing on performance markers, because the body is going to adapt to the degree of the health of the organism. So when I remove that piece of pie that's going towards mitigating stressors that are hidden within the body, then you're going to have more pie left over for your adaptive capability, if that makes sense. Totally makes sense. I'm curious, like, you know, couldn't you make an argument to say that, that like hormonal changes and even changes in the immune system could very well be coming from a part of their lifestyle versus like necessarily what they're putting in their body. So like,

if they're arguing with their spouse at home, the same changes could possibly, you know, there's clear evidence to say the same changes could happen. And so would it always be nutritional or could you say, Hey, like we need to make these changes in your lifestyle? No, it's, it's definitely lifestyle based as well, because if I were to stay here and stand here and say it was just nutrition, then I would be talking also saying your sleep doesn't matter. And we all know that that ain't true, right? So there are other factors. When I'm talking about stress impacting your recovery reserve, we're really looking at five different avenues. We're looking at environmental stressors,

psychological stressors, emotional stressors, physical stressors, and then the last one, which I call a hidden stressor, which is what I'm looking for on a lab to see if anything's impacting your adaptive capability. What would be the difference in a psychological and emotional? Psychological, I forgot to do my taxes. Shit. Emotional, family trauma. 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. 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 just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over

to rapidealthreport.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. So Dan, you work with a lot of like super high level athletes and presumably they were high level before you met with them in many cases. And you would think if someone's a high level athlete,

they're a world-class competitor, they're already pretty dang healthy, and they already focus on their nutrition to at least some extent, you would think. What do you find with these high level people is common where they're – what's like the weak link in the chain kind of on average? Before you answer that, I wish you all at home could see how much Stan was smiling as soon as. He was like, no, they don't, they don't focus on.

They don't. They're really good. Your face is lit up at the same time. Yeah. So the reality is that you would be quite amazed at how much genetics play a role in becoming a professional athlete. I work with an NHL player who will not be named, but he never did any strength and conditioning until he got to the NHL. He never trained once.

He did no strength and conditioning until he got in the NHL and got a multimillion-dollar contract. This is off of natural ability alone. And so this is something, I mean, Andy Boatman, he deadlifted 500 pounds the first time he entered a gym. There are people out there that are just simply freaks. But when it comes to your ability to maximize your potential, a lot of people think that eating clean means you're eating for high performance. And that's not necessarily true. It just simply means you're trying to eat nutrient dense foods. And that is not always going to impact your performance in the way you think it is. So when high level athletes come to me, first of all, there are certain things that are quite

asymptomatic, like you can have a bacterial or a parasitic infection and you'll get bloating and think it's normal. It's common, but it's not normal. That's not normal physiological function. You can get loose stools and diarrhea. It's common, but it ain't normal. So there's a lot of things people chalk off as normal that aren't normal. Then we identify them, we eliminate them, and they're like, wow, I feel so much better. I mean, a lot of people actually are quite unsure as to how good the human body is designed to feel. They've allowed a lot of stressors, poor dietary habits, poor sleeping patterns. A lot of these things change the barometer for what they think is normal, but that changes the barometer for the goals they set on themselves, the potential they think they have. There's a lot of things. And when we remove this stuff,

they have a completely different perspective. So when high-level athletes come to me, I find something every single time. And let's just change the conversation though. Let's say they are perfect. So let's say they came to me and just like doug said that everything was perfect um they're already healthy everything is good but as performance continues to push itself further to set a world record now is a lot harder than it was to set in 1950 and in absolutely anything the the human physiology is being pushed more than ever. So then let's, yeah, so let's just look at, say, we're on barbell shrugged. So let's just look at protein synthesis, okay? When you have protein, if we want to ignite protein synthesis, and we'll go

through a big analogy here with a chef in a kitchen. If our nucleus is within our cell, I'm going to take everybody back to functional cellular biology. Our nucleus is inside of our cell. If we want to tell that nucleus to initiate protein synthesis, that's what's known as cell signaling. We're going to signal that cell to initiate protein synthesis. That chef, the chef is our nucleus. It knows all of the recipes. It's the head chef. It knows every single recipe, but it doesn't do any of the cooking at all. So what the head chef does is it receives the cell signal to initiate protein synthesis. But since it doesn't do any of the cooking itself, it is going to go through cell transcription and tell the ribosomes in order to start making those proteins. Ribosomes are cell translation. So putting the order in for

a new dinner is signaling. The chef taking in that order and knowing the recipe is cell transcription. And then the chef telling the line cooks, which is the ribosomes, to make those proteins, that is translation. Ultimately, those ribosomes are going to make proteins, whether it's a hormone, enzyme, sodium pump transporter, or actin and myosin for a bigger bicep. That process is all the same. Here's what a lot of people forget. Best explanation ever, by the way.

Yeah, stop. Can you go back to my undergrad and just redo that so I don't wait the next 20 years of my life? Here's what a lot of people forget in respect to labs, though. If you want your nucleus to do that job properly, it's going to need B12, folate, zinc, selenium, and copper. So if we're going to even ingest a bunch of testosterone, we still need these micronutrients present within the nucleus in order to initiate cell transcription and ultimately translation. And then if we have those micronutrients, it is then going to go to the ribosomes to create more proteins. Those ribosomes are going to create proteins. The body can actually make

its own amino acids. It's a process called transamination. It can make its own non-essential amino acids, the essential we still need from our diet, but the non-essential we can make for ourself. There are over 200 enzymes involved in transamination. All of them require vitamin B6, every single one. So whether, and this is any form of protein synthesis, by the way, if you want to make insulin, fibrinogen, albumin, actin myosin, they're all going to require more B6. So we need all of those nutrients available at the nucleus. Then we need B6 for the transamination process to occur. So this is where my contention with IIFYM in a true sense, that's where at least my argument begins to where if we take in calories and macronutrients, sure, that is an enormous part of the equation. Nobody's arguing

that. But to ignore micronutrients at the cellular level is to ignore the cellular processes you're trying to actually activate with your macronutrient and caloric allotment. So we need to keep this rocking and rolling. And let's say, let's even take it, the analogy can go as long as you freaking want it to, because the nucleus is going to require ATP for that to happen. There's no free lunches in physiology, none. And nucleus is going to require ATP for that to happen. Everybody loves pasta. So let's have some pasta. Let's convert that glucose outside of the cell into pyruvate so it can enter the cell.

We just lost a bunch of magnesium. And if we're going to convert that pyruvate into acetyl-CoA, so it can enter the Krebs cycle, that's going to require B1, B2, B3, B5, and lipoate. Now, glycolysis got us 2 ATP. The Krebs cycle is not going to get us a whole lot, except for an awesome thing called an electron, which is then going to go to the electron transport chain, get us 34 ATP. But in that electron transport train, we're going to need iron, copper, and oxygen. So we need those micronutrients to even give the ATP to the nucleus to do its job. But we also just brought oxygen into the equation. So now we need to depend on the micronutrient health of the red blood cells for that oxygen delivery.

This continues on and on and on and on and on. Everything is connected to everything. When we're looking for performance anchors, we are looking in all areas of the body because they matter. If you want to set a world record in 2021, you have to care. If you want to push your body to its limits, your calories, macros, and micros all need to be in alignment. And the specificity needs to be in alignment for your sport, for you to get absolutely everything out of your body. I told you guys. Yeah. So Galvin, what's the guy that we interviewed? Doug, you'll remember as well out of San uh that we interviewed um i'm doug you'll remember as well out of san francisco that we interviewed about gut health and and programming jimmy bagley yeah um i don't know where i believe this was like two years ago we we interviewed him and he was working on a study um on gut health and and how it related to a person's ability to, like, their volume in their trainings, exercise.

Basically, like, by looking at someone's gut health, you'd be able to immediately write a training program specific to the way that their digestion, their – how does gut health play into this and getting food really from the digestion process into the cells and getting this process moving let me answer really let me answer really quickly and then dan can answer um so one i know jimmy and we have a handful of more studies coming out on this um the correlation but i'll just set dan up here if you're only going to look at the gut you're going to have real real real big problems right like if you stop at just the gut there's no chance you could simply look at someone's gut microbiome analysis and program especially not nutrition there's no chance so and this was two years ago

so i'm imagining where you guys have gone in two years is way beyond that's just the last conversation we had with him and dan can explain why that's a problem if he wants. But you should never do that. I don't know why. Sure. So, I mean, the gut health is wildly important, right? But, you know, you're going to come across people who are passionate about organs rather than passionate about performance.

So, if I go to a seminar on brain function, I'm going to be shown amazing data that shows that everything begins in the brain. But then I could go to a seminar on liver health, and I'm going to be shown amazing data that everything begins with the liver. And you can go to a seminar on the microbiome, and you're going to be shown amazing information on the micro, very compelling, awesome information. But when your primary goal is performance, you learn quickly through not getting your clients results, that everything is connected to everything. And when you try to put all squares into some shapes that look like circles, you're going to get maybe 50% of your clients results and the other 50% not.

So I think that the gut is an amazing thing to, to get to a high level of health. Um, one of the biggest reasons is simply because it's going to feed everything else, right? If you want, if you want to make thyroid hormone to improve fat loss, we are going to need tyrosine, iodine, and zinc in order to get those T4s and T3s created. If you want to create testosterone, we are going to need vitamin B5, saturated fat, and cholesterols for it to get converted into pregnenolone and ultimately into testosterone. These things come from our diet, and it's not what you eat. It's what you eat and actually absorb.

Because if you have a problem with your hydrochloric acid secretion, if you have a gallbladder or pancreatic duct issue, or if you have a problem with the microbiome, these things will impact digestion and assimilation. So the gut health is key because it's going to feed your your tissues organs and organ systems but to design a program based off of that would be short-sighted because root causes can absolutely exist elsewhere in the physiology yeah and and i'm sure you guys like i said before i'm sure uh jimmy's done a ton of work since then it's just two years ago he he brought this up to us and I was like, whoa, we are really going in a wild direction right now. In a more practical approach, like you're working with professional athletes and I'm sure some of them live in a gym and they're training in a specific place and then they go to Vegas for the fight and everything is so controlled. But you take an NHL team and they're on the road for seven days. They're home for five. They're back on the road. Assuming they have to go out and eat. Everybody listening to

this knows that if you go out to eat and you've been really healthy for three weeks and then you go eat a meal at some restaurant, no matter how healthy you think, you are very close to needing to run to the bathroom because you just consumed a bunch of oils and a bunch of weird stuff. Like, how do you structure that? So that's not normal. That's very not normal. You know, it's not normal when it happens to you. It happens every time. Like it's, it's clockwork, right? How do you take somebody that is completely optimized? And i i it had to have been galpin that kind of presented this idea of like we fully optimize somebody and then we have

to like create problems so that then the body can adapt to that stuff and still work optimally like what is it what does that process look because i feel like you don't want to have some nhl player going to the local restaurant and the next day wakes up and he's just got gas and wakes up with the shits. That's terrible. Yeah, for sure. But I mean, it is going to happen. There are some things that are just simply unavoidable. And for me to be a robot for my clients would be for me to be a bad coach. There's a science to coaching, which is me breaking down the electron transport chain. But then there's the art of coaching of making it apply to their actual lifestyle. So what I'll typically do is give athletes

recommended restaurants and meals that they can consume. But for NHL players specifically in the past, I've actually contacted restaurants and they'll actually make the Doug Larson specific meal or they'll make the Anders Varner meal. You can actually contact, because yeah, the restaurants want those types of celebrities in their facility. And when it's something as simple as, hey, make a steak without all the oils, you jackasses,

then it's pretty simple for them to do. And then they still have a celebrity who is guaranteed to now go there because they've got a menu for them that they can order. So it's essentially a situation where you make the meal plan fit the client rather than try and make the client fit the meal plan. Yeah. You mentioned earlier parasites. And I'll just give a little shout out.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon came in and we did a bunch of blood work and stuff with her. And that was one of the things that she was like really focused on. And like parasites living in our gut. And at some point, I kind of looked at her and I was like, you're just smarter than me. And I'm going to nod my head because I'm like the host of this podcast.

And I'm going to think we're talking about the same thing, but I don't get it. Where do I get parasites? How do I know I have them? What does that even mean? Like that sounds terrifying. Like I've got this like thing living in me that's sucking all of my gains. Like I don't want that. Yeah. So I actually, I almost

laughed at the beginning of your question because I thought you were giving a shout out to parasites. Oh no, we don't want those. We don't want them. I'll give them a shout out. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, we love her. Yeah. No, parasites. So that's something where it's a huge area of investigation in current science right now. And to try and identify where they come from can be a nightmare. Like when you're coaching, you want to look at what's actionable and what's actionable is to get rid of it. Lots of times when it comes to what's going on in physiology, it can come. I would say, I would tell you that undercooked meat and bad water are probably your top two contributors

for any type of bacterial or parasitic issue but when it comes to worms that's usually international travel so there's different things and uh it's trying to i mean you can see i'm even struggling to find an answer here because you'll actually find that in the literature. It can come from water, it can come from raw meat, it can come from any kind of cooking procedure, it can come from a lot of different things or even just poor hygiene. So trying to eliminate them from your life is very difficult to do. I think that instead we should simply just, you know, people have no problem getting their car looked at once a year for a tune-up, yet nobody does a tune-up on the vehicle that they have to live in for the rest of their life once a year. People don't do lab work. And I think that just like you would look at your car to see if there's any issue with it, you should look at your body to see if there's any issue with it. Because like I said, a parasite can be relatively asymptomatic because a lot of people think things are normal. But yeah, a weird cool example for this question would be like a blastocystis hominis. That is a

parasite that's been demonstrated to have inflammation within our connective tissue and joint structures. So somebody can actually have an inflamed elbow or inflamed hip or knee. And they'll be looking at, yes, they will be looking at all things biomechanics. Yet, this type of parasite can migrate and create inflammation within connective tissue. Mesh, you want your hip back now, don't you? Yeah. I was'm reading the book Endure. Have you read that book? Endure, it's all, it's really about like aerobic conditioning. You know, the theories. There's a central governing theory, you know, of course, you know,

there's the traditional VO2 max, lactate threshold. And when I'm gathering, it seems to be like a conglomerate of all of them, but mainly probably controlled by the brain. So like, you know, with science being where it is, and it looks like, you know, with, with science being where it is and it looks like, you know, like it's still kind of up in the air, you know, from what I've read, you know, like, what do we know? Like, where do you focus on, you know, what is the 100% this is correct. And like, I'm going to focus here to make sure I give, you know, a hundred percent, you know, to my, to my clients, you know,

which is where I'm at. Like, I'm really studying fatigue, you know, with our weightlifters and trying to, you know, a hundred percent, you know, to my, to my clients, you know, which is where I'm at. Like, I'm really studying fatigue, you know, with our weightlifters and trying to, you know, everyone is trying to give your weightlifters a net, just making sure I don't push them too far, but not enough. But like, it just seems like a lot of things are like uncertain. So where do you focus? Right. So where do I focus in respect to performance can be a really big question. So I'll kind of use an analogy here. A lot of people want to make a lot more money so they have more money in the bank, right? But one of the best ways to have more money in the bank is not to make more money, but to cut your expenses. So what I would do is look at lab analysis and cut my expenses. I'm looking for root causes to eliminate

so that bank account is looking a lot better. Bank account representing adaptive reserve so that athlete can perform more training each week and actually maximally adapt from it. So I'm not necessarily focusing on performance. I'm focusing on identifying dysfunction within physiology. And as a byproduct i get great performance yeah totally makes sense so if you have an athlete that comes in and they have lots of joint pain there's like my elbow hurts like my training is not that crazy they don't feel like like at what point do you go okay probably a parasite and like like you know what i mean like how do you make the leap to parasite from just my elbow hurts? Well, they got to kind of pass the dumb ass test first, right?

What's your training frequency? What's your technique? You know, do you have a previous injury history? And then also just basic inflammation and oxidative stress. Like a lot of these things are going to knock away, say 80 to 90% of the issues. If somebody comes in with sore joints. But if you rule out, okay, this person does understand biomechanics. They were taught to bench press properly. Their volume, frequency, and intensity isn't anything crazy. They don't have previous injury history.

And I know from their homocysteine or CRP, their 8-hydroxy-2-deoxyguanosine, all these inflammatory markers are looking great. So let's do a stool test because you might have more issues that or this issue may have been something for you for so long because it's been hidden in that area and you've already checked all the other boxes. What comes from hair follicle testing? I'm sorry, I don't have any. So this is now I need to know what I'm missing out on. Me neither, bro. There you go.

Me neither. There it is. I know where your interest comes from now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, with hair follicle testing, you're gonna get an insight on all metals. So beneficial and non-beneficial. You'll get an insight towards toxic metal,

exposure and excretion, but you also get insight as to things like zinc and chromium, such as that as well. So hair is essentially a natural storage depot for the body to excrete metals. So it just gives you insight as to what's going on with metal excretion in the body. It's great to inform decisions for protocol design, but not necessarily make decisions on protocol design. I'll use it to, in combination with several other markers, to decide what's going on with the current metal status of the body. Yeah. And there's one easy example there is if you thought for some reason, or you had mercury at a high level or something, You simply cannot get that in any

other way besides the hair. You're going to get faulty readings across the board. So zinc, he mentioned that as another good one. So typically with those metals and minerals, you need them to be around for a long time for them to matter is one way to think about it. So you're not going to get accurate numbers from blood or stool or anything else. So it's not something you, one would always need necessarily. But that that's where you're going to get true. Heavy metal numbers. That was my question. Where do you start? Like, you know, like, say you get a high level athlete, you just go all in and do hair,

do the whole gamut. Let me, let me, let me get my crimson coming your way, by the way. Yeah. And then Dan can answer this. So here's what I have been saying for a number of years. How many of you guys have ever gotten like a blood panel and you, you look at it and you're like, you look at that reference range numbers and you're like, all right.

Like, yeah. What have you done with that blood panel? Nothing. Nothing. This is like 97% 99% of people who've ever gotten one panel, right? They're like, I do blood panel. Actually, to answer your question even deeper, I look at it and I go, oh, that was like a day. I give it zero credibility. If I did it like 30 days in a row and had rolling averages or something like that, but I literally go do it

because somebody tells me every year I'm supposed to go get a physical cough and take blood. And I'm like, cool. Yeah. This is my point. So it means dick all right. Like nobody, it doesn't matter. You feel like you can interpret it yourself and nobody ever makes hardly any change at best. You would look at it and say, Oh, maybe my vitamin D is low. And then maybe you take some vitamin D. Right. Yeah. So here's my contention before Danny wants to answer is I don't even recommend doing that. If you're not going to truly try to understand what's going on and make changes, I wouldn't do any of it because you're just going to spend your money and you're not going to change anything. Nothing's going to happen. If you're going to try to

interpret it, you're going to get a, you know, a very low level coach who can just look at the numbers and all they're really going to do is look over at the reference value and be like, everything looks good. Then you're going to have huge problems because, as Dan can, I'm sure, explain, you can see several numbers on there that look perfect, but they actually, you know, two or three markers that look perfect can give you very specific clues about massive problems that you have. So you really have to have somebody that can understand,

let's look at your LDL levels, Let's look at your lymphocytes. I actually see this ratio is tell us something about what's going on in a host of areas. There's so many examples we get into here, but this is why I'm going to generally recommend Travis, your question was, where do we start? So my question is don't start at all, unless you're going to go all the way, because you're going to get a waste of time. You're going to get likely false negatives or false positives. You're going to go in the wrong direction. You're going to start taking iron supplementation when you actually don't need it because you probably over-creating iron as it is same thing with cortisol, other, other reasons, right? So you, you oftentimes can go in the wrong direction. So my recommendation to start is just spend your energy and time on the very basics. If you're going to go to no labs at all, you really have to try to optimize sleep. You have to go for sleep hygiene. You have to go for hydration. You have to go for all these things because these do honestly tackle 90% of the problems. You will, you will fix a huge majority of people. If you do

the very basics, if you can't get those done, or you've done all those and you're still having problems, or you're just the type of person who's trying to chase a metal or trying to chase a huge dream. And you're like, I don't even care. I just want to make sure I'm optimized for right now. And this is the type of person Dan and I work with, right? Like these are, I don't have six months to figure out if I can improve my sleep at that. Like, I just want to know now. So my recommendation to start is that either go a route, depending on your scenario, or go straight to the end, which is like, let's just get all the answers and figure it out from there. So if you were to lay out the metrics of like, these are the basics, this is 90%.

We've got sleep eight hours, how much water? Half gallon to a gallon a day. Like, what does that checklist look like on sleep, hydration, and relatively, I guess, macros for the day? Myself? Either of you. Just as like, if somebody isn't going to go get

all four of these things tested or five of these things tested and they're not interested in the blood work, what is, what is like the big checklist of where they can start? So I think any checklist begins with context, of course. Right. And I know, I know everybody says it depends, but it kind of does depend, right? I got to be that guy who says context matters. So your checklist is going to be shorter if your goals are shorter. Your checklist is going to be larger if your goals are larger. But if you're somebody who is interested in doing what you can in the absence of labs, you would be looking at things that I think a lot of people could predict,

I would say. I mean, you would be looking at, say, sleep and then the National Sleep Foundation for adults, they suggest seven to nine hours of uninterrupted sleep per night, which I think is a great goal for anybody to hit. Your water intake, I think a good place to start would be half an ounce of water per day per pound of body weight. So if you're 200 pounds, 100 ounces of water per day is a good intake. Now use the Galpin equation for your workout hydration. That's an equation that's becoming world famous very fast. I think your hydration would be key. I mean, for those people, for your average person, I don't even think calories and macronutrients are going

to be that big. So long as you have whole minimally processed foods and a source of protein with every single meal and snack. I mean, everybody is debating about whether we should go carbs or fats, but so long as proteins at a gram per pound of body weight per day, and you're not in a hypercaloric state, you're going to be a pretty healthy person at a base level. So it'd be hitting that whole minimally processed foods, very good source of protein with each meal and snack of the day, hydration, sleep. And I think the last thing I would check off that's quite difficult, but needs to be checked off would be stress management. So if you can knock all of those down, then you're a healthy person healthy person context after that determines how we're

going to refine that checklist and if you want labs and what labs we're going to go with let me ask you guys you two experts who work with with top of the echelon athletes how important do you believe that like you know it's tip-top what i've noticed is that what separates the people who are actually winning is simply the person who can when they when it's time to compete who can be calm and like so it comes down to their you know their brain like in the you know like how can you can you stay calm when you compete how important is sports psychology is it like have you seen it work have you seen it help people like um you just like, to me, it's a clear indicator. Ryan, when he competes, he just is an animal every single time. He's probably not the best athlete I've coached, but he's the best winner.

What are your thoughts? Can it change? Yeah, I've got two answers for that. I've got a psychology answer, and I've got a biochemistry answer. This is great. We'll go sports psychology first. Entering that flow state, I think that's absolutely key. Entering a state of flow is simply, you know, you're looking at stimulation of one's mind.

If somebody is not stimulated enough for competition, they're a little too relaxed and a little too apathetic about the drive that's required to win. But if somebody is too stimulated for competition, you know, yeah, absolutely. In the octagon, you're going to be tight and very springy instead of fluid. Yeah. If you're, if you're playing hockey, you're not going to be patient with the puck. You're going to, if that's, that's not going to work either with the puck. That's not going to work either. But that state of flow is going to be right in the middle. And I think achieving a state of flow is very ritualistic. When you look at some of the best athletes that have ever existed, I absolutely love MMA. So you'll see Anderson Silva open his arms and he bounces off the cage. George St. Pierre, he's going to sprint to one side and sprint back to the other side. John Jones, he's going to crawl into the octagon.

These are very ritualistic things that transfer you from your everyday self to your high-performance self. And when you have a ritual that's, say, body weight only, if it's a home game or an away game, you're able to perform that ritual and enter that state of flow that turns you into your high performance self. And I think that that's, that's really key is to create some form of, um, it could be your movement. So your kinesthetic, but also an auditory signal as well. They're really keeping headphones on and performing a certain ritual in order to

enter that state of float. So the crowd's not impacting you and music's not impacting you. Nothing's impacting you. So I think creating a ritual is absolutely key for achieving a state of flow and the right stimulation required for optimal performance. But when we look at this biochemically, this is where nutrition comes back into play. When you're looking to say, for example, create the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine is required for focus, motivation, drive, and attention span. Things that are real key to perform at our best. Well, we're going to begin with L-tyrosine. L-tyrosine is going to be broken down into phenylhydroxyalanine, and then we're going to need B6 in order to make dopamine.

So if somebody doesn't have enough B6, it doesn't really matter what is going on upstairs because biochemically, you cannot make dopamine. It is a rate-limiting step. So you will reduce your dopamine synthesis due to a reduction in micronutrients. But the chain, that metabolic pathway continues because after dopamine, if you want to make epinephrine or norepinephrine, you're going to require vitamin C and copper. So if we want epinephrine and norepinephrine, or a lot of people know them as adrenaline and noradrenaline, and you're going to need vitamin C and copper and dopamine, epinephrine and norepinephrine is the hormonal and neurotransmitter cascade we need for optimal brain performance.

Yet there are rate limiting steps dependent upon macronutrients. So our pre-game or pre-fight ritual is what's going to get us psychologically into that state. But unless we have the micronutrients and macronutrients to back up that state, brain performance, just like I said, there's no free lunches in physiology. Everybody, every nutrition coach is, let's hydrate the muscle cell. Let's get glycogen in the muscle cell. Let's use electrolytes in the muscle cell. What about your brain? You take two fighters and put them in the octagon they're both of equal physical ability

but one has better brain performance than the other he's gonna win every single time and yet we can impact that nutritionally and we can test that in the lab so let's freaking do that to take you to the next level oh this is brilliant because i swear yeah go ahead sorry but i would just say like you know by being at the world championships so many times, being at Pan American championships, it never is the physical. It never is the muscle that keeps somebody from winning. Because I know plenty of people who should have won

who never probably will because they lack something going on in the brain. And, like, you know, and, like, some people who have really tried to, like, they've worked with sports psychologists, but the two people I'm thinking about have never looked at it from, you know, and like some people who have really tried to, like they've worked with sports psychologists, but they, but the two people I'm thinking about have never looked at it from, you know, chemical, you know, I guess level. So that there has to be that because it just like,

it looks impossible for them no matter what they do to ever like, number one, be calm or ever, or to, to enter a flow state. There's two people I can think of. They just have never entered that flow state ever. I'm like, I wonder. Well, that's in comparison to somebody like Ryan too that just goes out and smashes on daily. Like he's just ready to go eat people's lunch every day. Yeah.

I saw that boy on the other hand. You know, like this guy at the Arnold Classic when he weighs in, I told him at the last second, hey, we should do – oh, no, sorry, at the Arnold Classic. It was at the Senior Nationals. The last – one week out, I'm like, we should probably do it. I think you can make the world team. He's only 19 years old, and, you know, he's a junior athlete. I said, I think you can beat these guys.

And so I was like, do you want to try it? He's like, I'll try it. So he was way overweight. So he came to weigh-ins and he looked like a skeleton. He could not form his words correctly. He couldn't communicate. That's how bad it was. And he finally made weight. He took it forever, took it to the last second to make it. And then he comes in and destroys everybody because that guy's brain, it's like, I promise you, it's not his nutrition you it's not his nutrition it's not

his nutrition is shit you know but his brain but what if this guy did what we're talking you know number one like andy said he'll have to you know he'll have to say i will do it you know if he would do it i feel like you you see extraordinary things for someone like that who can get into a flow state, what appears to be at will. Yeah. Yeah. I'm curious as if your basics aren't on point, how it changes what your blood work looks like. So say you're in a caloric surplus for a long time, you're eating too many carbs and too much fat, not enough protein.

And you put on 20, 30 pounds of body weight. Like, can you look at someone's labs and just clearly see, oh, this person's obviously overweight, even if you hadn't seen them in person, didn't know anything about them. And then when they lose the weight, are there changes back that are kind of recoverable, we'll say?

Yes. So that's actually how I prefer to coach, believe it or not. I'll actually look at someone's lab before I look at their questionnaire because I don't want the questionnaire to impact my biases. So I want to look at the's lab before I look at their questionnaire because I don't want the questionnaire to impact my biases. So I want to look at the lab without even knowing the person because labs always sing

a song to me. If I'm looking at your numbers, I'm looking at your physiology and breaking everything down. I don't want to look at your symptoms yet because I don't want your symptoms to dictate where my brain goes when I'm looking at your labs because that can happen. So when I'm looking at labs to answer your question, absolutely, I can tell if you're overweight, blood sugar mismanagement, if there's even smaller things like within reference ranges to bring it back to what Andy was saying, there are some things,

even though they fall within the normal on reference ranges. They aren't a normal at all, especially not for a world-class athlete. So I'm able to identify and break down a ton of things without ever meeting the person or looking at their questionnaire. And it's my preferred route. I look at the questionnaire after. Did you give us an example of that? Sorry, because I know you can't. Will you give us an example of like saying multiple things in the reference range that look great, but actually give you a clue? For sure, man. So I could, this is actually what pisses me off a lot of times. Actually, this is something I could talk about for hours. I think probably like really relevant for the audience, I would say albumin, glucose and vitamin D are probably three really good examples. Beginning with albumin, albumin, a lot of people don't even

know what it is, but it's in every single standard blood test. And elevated, even trending high elevations are directly correlated to dehydration. So if somebody could have a normal albumin, but if it's trending high, it's absolutely representative of a dehydrated state within physiology. But albumins, and this is where reference ranges, you have to actually have a grip on the literature rather than trust the reference range. Because reference ranges, a lot of them are built on just tons of normative data of people visiting their doctor. But these people are visiting the doctor, so they're not exactly always the healthiest people. And they're also on medication, which can impact reference ranges in and of itself. So when we're building reference ranges based off of these mass amounts of people

who aren't necessarily healthy and could also potentially be on medication, you need to then have a strong grip on the literature to be able to trust the reference range, especially within the context of who you're looking at. A good example, let's just keep with albumin. If you're comparing the Mayo Clinic to LabCorp, the Mayo Clinic's reference range for albumin is 3.5 to 5, whereas LabCorp's reference range for albumin is 4 to 5. Yet, there was a study, it was from the Journal of Insurance Medicine, and they followed 1.7 million people for 12 years. Excellent data identified that mortality rates went up 189% once you are below four within albumin. So if you went and utilized the Mayo Clinic reference range, and you're at 3.5, good to go, man, go home. You're going to

be 189% more likely to die, but just go home. That's absolutely unacceptable, in my opinion. So trending high can represent dehydration, but having a grip on the literature lets you know if you're going to die or not, because you could be considered normal. Fairly important. Yeah, exactly. A couple other examples, vitamin D. Vitamin D is a good one because whenever something like vitamin D is something the teach my golden retriever to do that. Like if something come back low, I supplement with it. But then you're going to have that's biology is never that easy. I'm sorry. It's just absolutely not that easy. When you look at vitamin D, magnesium is required for vitamin D synthesis. Magnesium is also required to convert. It's

another thing people don't know. 25 hydroxyroxyvitamin D is what people are testing, yet it's 125 that is the actual active form of vitamin D. So when you're testing 25-hydroxy, you don't know if you're testing vitamin D3 or vitamin D2. You don't even know. And then you're also not even testing the active form of vitamin D, which is 125. Magnesium is required to synthesize vitamin D and convert vitamin D. Magnesium is also involved in vitamin D binding globulin, which a lot of people don't even know exists. Yeah. Do you have messed up vitamin D or do you have no magnesium? It's also... Go ahead. Vitamin D and magnesium are like the perfect segue to kind of a question that I know what the high-level answer is going to be. But I'd love for you to kind of dig into the idea of like people taking their lab results saying, oh, I'm low in vitamin D.

They go and take vitamin D supplements, and then they go and take the magnesium off the shelf, it's going to lead them also to these everyday vitamins and mineral pills that I know they're just putting it in there, hoping for the best, hoping that the chemistry works and then I'll be healthy tomorrow. And it's not the long-term solution. It's not specifically to their needs, but what are some of the pitfalls of taking an everyday multivitamin and why that shouldn't be the answer and how someone can look at their blood work and actually make a better decision? Yeah. So like even you just saying the low vitamin D and taking vitamin D, there's an actual, and there's excellent papers on this and not like crazy people papers. The NHANES has published that lead has an inverse relationship with vitamin D. A lot of people don't know vitamin D actually increases your absorption of minerals.

So it's been hypothesized that the body will actually, as a protective mechanism, lower vitamin D in the body in the presence of heavy metal toxicity. So if someone has low vitamin D and then they say, oh'm gonna have more vitamin d you could actually have a lot of lead in your body and now you're just increasing absorption of heavy metals for further toxicity so do you have low vitamin d or is your body literally trying to protect itself from further toxicity and you're dumping in and check this like someone will say well vitamin d didn't move up with 5000 iu so let's bump it up to 10,000 IU. Does that sound logical?

Not at all. Why would we ever do that? Why is that accepted? It's so far beyond the RDA. And you don't ask, why is vitamin D low? Like, Andy, in California, where there's so much sunlight, how many people with low vitamin D have you seen? Everyone.

Yeah, exactly. Every single one. So we need to start asking better questions instead of giving people enormous doses of vitamin D because it's correlated with so many other things. Can you dig into that? Because that actually is like wildly, wildly living in TV. This is also a massive fucking problem is you can actually look back uh some of the guys that brought through a lot of the vitamin d stuff years ago so now we're talking uh five plus years of research now and this has been fairly clear in the literature um that the measurement methods of vitamin d probably are very questionable right and now actually and dan just posted this a couple

days ago on his Instagram. I saw it. If you look at what's actually coming in vitamin D supplements. So if you think you're taking 5,000 IUs, it could be 10 to a hundred fold off up or down, right? So you could be taking 500,000 IUs per pill. You could be taking five. And then it's a very common, if you look across the vitamin D supplements, you're just getting a fucking insanely wide range of actual dosage. And that doesn't even take into context what Dan was just talking about of why is your vitamin D low? Is it that you're not in the sun? Well, okay, maybe, but there's all kinds of problems here. And this is exactly why I was saying earlier, just don't do blood work and start taking pills. You really, really have to look at the system because you're going to get false findings. And this is literally what I was talking about earlier. Or you're going to go in a worse direction.

And Dan's made one example here, and I could give you, and he could give you a hundred more examples of if you just take micronutrients in supplemental form, you're introducing the possibility of a whole bunch of problems. Some of them are like pretty fail safe and not that big a deal, but others aren't. And if you don't really know what you're doing,

when it comes to micronutrients from food, you're probably just fine, right? You're not going to be into toxicity levels by eating too many oranges or things like that. Well, now when you're taking pharmacologicals, which we call supplements that, right? You're getting them now at dosages that are orders of magnitude higher than you would ever get them in whole foods. And so you're introducing whole cascades of potential issues. Many of them are probably fairly benign, but some aren't. And even benign problems are not going to cut it for people trying to break world records or at least their own

internal physiology, right? They're trying to maximize their personal physiology. Well, then you need a little bit more precision. And with all the stuff we're talking about, there still is a little bit of unknown, right? The gut microbiome is far from perfect. There's a tremendous amount of garbage in that space. And even something like vitamin D, we just assume you can measure vitamin D. And Dan just talked about how that's not necessarily the best assumption. I'll look at reference ranges for albumin, which Dan talked, it is literally on every blood work panel anyone has ever done. Same thing with triglycerides, all these other stuff. They're not perfect. So you really, really, really have to look at things in context with the rest of the things, right? So if we did a blood, blood work and we saw someone's vitamin D was low, and then we looked

at their hair analysis and saw, ah, bam, we're picking up heavy metals in the hair. Now we start making the appropriate action. If we just stopped at the blood work, maybe you needed some vitamin D. Maybe we could just say, Hey, get out in the sun more. Don't take the vitamin D or, or maybe vitamin D was the worst possible scenario. So just walking around being like, okay, magnesium is good. Vitamin D is good. Okay. Creatine is good. Vitamin C is good. All right. B6 is Dan talked about B6 and B12. Okay, cool. I'm just going to take this B complex. I'm just going to throw it all in the system. Yeah. Yeah. I actually, I'm super curious. Yeah. I think I'm,

I'm super curious too. Cause you like we've, we've magnesium's one of my like, uh, favorite things. I guess you could say when it comes to this, like trouble sleeping, take magnesium, crazy ass dreams. You're basically just getting high for a couple of nights and you notice changes, but long-term what's actually going on? Like, yeah, night one through three, I had these super vivid dreams. Deep sleep shows up on my watch. I must be doing everything right. But how do I know I'm actually getting the right dose of anything besides just like feeling some effects because I got this new drug inside me? You want to make it even worse? Just take melatonin too. Don't even get us started on melatonin.

Hold on. Help me if I'm relatively right on this, because I notice a lot of things by having a three-year-old when we give it melatonin, she sleeps for three hours. Next thing you know, she's wide awake, and we've got the worst night in the world ahead of us because it doesn't stay in the system long, and now I feel like a terrible parent that I just drugged my kid and Andy

shaking his head. Like I should be in child. You've got to be real careful of no time. Dan can explain why if he wants or I can, but that's, that's a, I'm never doing that again just because of Andy's head shake right there. That was the disapproval of Andy Galpin. Yeah. Ooh, that parent that was the disappointed dad quick route to crashing somebody's testosterone load him up on melatonin see what happens yeah we could get yeah yeah but yeah to to just kind of recap the question like how

how does somebody know once they start taking it and then they start feeling the effects that it's actually the right thing for them versus just having it in their system there and and it being this short-term effect versus a long-term long-term solution to where they're okay don't forget your question you can tell them right now uh one of our more recent melatonin stories i was already thinking that that. You guys are going to like this one. Sorry to derail your question twice, Anders, but this is gold here. So we had a guy recently who is a hundred times over the upper end range limit for melatonin. A hundred times. And let's remember, melatonin is a hormone. It's not just a supplement. Melatonin is a hormone. It is a just a supplement. Melatonin is a hormone. It is a hormone structure within the body. And we just recently had a guy whose intake or his measures came back 100 times over the upper reference range limit. So like that toxicity

data I posted on vitamin D, where some people were literally taking 1.6 million IU of vitamin. Yeah. In the millions. And they thought they were taking 1000. Why can't that happen with melatonin? It absolutely can happen with melatonin. But then to answer, answer your question. You know what it feels like, Anders, when you walk around with eight grams of melatonin

in your blood all day, he's walking around sedated all day, just sedated. And then you wonder why you feel, oh, I'm so sleepy. I need more melatonin. I'm so sleepy. I don't get good sleep. I'm not getting quality sleep. My hours are fine. I'm not getting quality.

No, you're fucking sedated all day. And then you think your caffeine tolerance is high. Yeah, it's like taking all the Sudafed. You're like, wow, I feel like I'm on meth right now. It's the opposite. I took a nutrition class while i'm doing this thing and like there's some pretty big dangers of taking like the too much of these micronutrients there was like one where um a gymnast coach like uh was telling her you know telling her uh athlete to take i forget it was like it was one of the Bs.

And like the girl became almost paralyzed from taking too much. Like I have to go reference it. And then, and I'll send it to you guys. But like, what are some of the dangers of just taking, you know, too much of these micronutrients? Well, I mean, it all travels back to kind of how I opened the podcast, right? The question is, why are you taking it? It's why. So like when Anders is saying, how do I know if I'm taking enough vitamin or how am I know if I'm taking

enough magnesium? The question still is, why are you taking magnesium? Because are you actually repleting a magnesium need or is there a depletion happening from elsewhere within the physiology? So I think taking any micronutrient from a supplement company that's not third-party tested, there's already a danger in that all by itself because you're placing trust in a company that's done nothing to earn it, nothing at all. And this stuff can absolutely create a toxic effect in your body. But then in a lot of cases, people are well-intentioned, but they just don't know they're operating on a symptom-based level, which is something I just, I can't ever recommend. So the question of why always needs to be at the forefront. And I think whenever you're talking about bigger doses of anything, or especially

utilizing a hormone, or even asking. Sleep is supposed to be a normal physiological function. It is not supposed to be a chore to fall asleep. So something's wrong with the physiology. You're not in a deficit of a supplement. It's something where you should ideally be looking at what's going on internally, because you're exhausted. You should be able to sleep at the end of the day. Well, sleep, we've, we've gone an hour and 20 minutes giving the cliffhanger on testosterone. Can we, can we start that one? Cause I know sleep is just a massive piece of that obesity, strength training, muscle mass, all of those things. And Galpin just alluded to it on um the the melatonin side of things and and overall production um if we were to just start

at the top and and work our way into um the testosterone conversation um can can you kind of kick that off of just what you're looking at when you look at labs and normal ranges because you're for many reasons it's now all the way down to 200 can can be considered normal up to 900 um yeah how do you start to just assess uh testosterone levels and and begin that conversation with athletes yeah sure so i mean that's a good point, even right away. Like when you look at a reference range, that's enormous. It's a good indication that you should look at the literature to try and narrow that reference range down yourself to see what information is actually available on this kind of stuff. Because I can tell you, a male

with 200 testosterone is going to feel a little different than a male with 900 testosterone. Yeah, both are considered completely normal. And yet, let's also look at it. Let's say we're across a 10-year span and you went from 900, 800, 700, 600, 500, 400. Why is that happening? Yeah. You're still considered normal. No one's going to ask the question why you've decreased your testosterone by 50% over the last five years.

It's because I'm getting older. No, it's not. There is absolutely another answer in there. I actually worked with an NFL Hall of Famer and he was 71 years old. His testosterone came back at 1,100 and he's natural. 1,100. Get it, bro. Yeah, 1,100. He was 71. And it's 100% natural. So it's absolutely it's not this age thing. You can there's always some sort of a root cause going on in there. So when you're looking at labs, you're looking at testosterone synthesis, you have to look at a lot of things like if you're if you're going to go back to the steroid metabolization chart all the way back in your endocrinology class, you're going to be looking at saturated fat and LDLs being combined with

vitamin B5. We're going to combine these things to make a cool thing called acetyl-CoA and ultimately allows us to make pregnenolone. Pregnenolone can be converted into DHEA, but ultimately to testosterone. Two rate-limiting minerals are zinc and magnesium. So even a lot of people will supplement with DHEA, but if we don't have zinc and magnesium, we're not going to get that optimal conversion over to testosterone. So we need those saturated fats. We need some LDLs. We need B5. We need our zinc and our magnesium for all of those metabolic pathways

to be properly taking place. But then we also should ask why is testosterone even low? Well, cadmium and arsenic have both been demonstrated to depress testosterone. So do you have low testosterone? Or do you just have an abundance of metals building up within the body? Cadmium and arsenic have been directly shown to impact testosterone up within the body. Cadmium and arsenic have been directly shown to impact testosterone production within the body. So we have beneficial micronutrients contributing to testosterone synthesis. We have heavy metal toxicity that can suppress testosterone synthesis. And then you also have to look at other things too, simply like energy state of the body. Hypocalorism, we can expect some reductions

in testosterone. I remember seeing data that even five days of sleep deprivation reduces testosterone by 15%. So we would have to take sleep into the consideration as well. And then previously, I talked at looking at root causes. And this is why when I when I freaking find a root cause, I'm like, yes, because it's our blueprint to the championship. Because when we are impacting stressors, our environmental, psychological, emotional, physical, or the hidden stressor that I'm identifying in the lab, stressors create cortisol. Cortisol runs antagonistic with testosterone. So when we eliminate stressors from our physiology, we are reducing glucocorticoids that run antagonistic with

testosterone, allowing testosterone to better optimize itself. So there's a lot of different pathways we can go, whether it's toxicity, micronutrient availability, or any of the five stressors in order to impact testosterone. And when you get all of those unifying, like Andy talked about before, I think it was before we recorded, I've tripled people's testosterone in a matter of months. It's, it's something that's absolutely possible. And it's things, things can turn around fast. Like usually people who, who don't have a fast turnaround are people who aren't confident, like that they've had a, like, we can't even get into it right now. But the idea of adrenal fatigue is beyond silly nonsense.

I've destroyed that elsewhere, and I'll happily destroy it again. But that would take about an hour or so. But you can have very fast turnarounds. Like where I was going with this is people have had sepsis. Sepsis, there can be extreme cortisol issues with sepsis, but people who survive it, sepsis, by the way, is death pet stuff. So people who are unfamiliar, if you survive it and you get out of the hospital, there's direct data on this, that cortisol secretion goes from absolutely zero back to totally normal in two weeks. So some people will say like, oh, your adrenals is going to take six to 12 months of healing and you'll have to take these herbs and you're going to have to do Tai Chi. And then

we'll do yoga at the same time and we'll call it tea yoga. And it's just, there's a lot of silly things that end up happening, but those, your body is the, is a regeneration machine, basically except the kidneys. But a lot of things regenerate incredibly quickly. But just a good example, adrenals from a deathbed illness can be completely regenerated in a couple of weeks. So when people say testosterone takes like many, many, many years and years and years in order to bounce back, it absolutely doesn't. If you know what you're doing, if you found the root cause, because the root cause, a lot of times the root cause writes my program for me because when I find that root cause, now I've got a blueprint to work forward from. Yeah.

To tie that all together for you, like a really super tangible example of this. If you found any number of, Dan, you can give an example if you want, but any number of things going on in the gut, right? And again, we need to acknowledge that you can't take any just a hundred dollar poop sample thing and figure out what's trying to figure out what's going on. There's a lot of nonsense in the field of gut diagnostics, and there's a tremendous amount to learn, a tremendous amount. So we're going to come back and refine this stuff as we go. Having said that there's enough literature in this area where you can see some major red flags that stand out. Okay.

Some of them in particular, um, can help you identify things like this. So Dan just went through this whole cascade of what it means to have testosterone and why it's not optimized. Okay. Well, if you have say a vitamin B deficiency, say B6, and we've actually seen this one specifically a number of times, you don't know if it's a combination or if it's caused by lack of consumption of B vitamins. So the wrong food choices, even if you're eating your macros and calories and you're eating whole real foods, et cetera, if you're not getting enough of the B vitamins in your diet, or if it's an issue of not absorbing them. And the reason the gut is important is because certain things that we can find

in the gut at like crazy cuckoo levels can directly be involved in, in reduction of B vitamin absorption. And so this is why these lab diagnostics are so important because we can say, Hey, your gut looks okay, but let's look at your food. Oh, okay. You're not eating foods that are high in B items. This is what's causing those problems. And then follow Dan's last explanation for why that all of a sudden led to your testosterone below. And this is why he's saying like, we can see these pretty miraculous improvements in a couple of months in testosterone, because if we go in and find, Hey, this is all because you had this one little yeast overgrowth or this small

opportunistic bacterial overgrowth once we calm that down all of a sudden you can triple quadruple like huge x your b-absorpting going on in your stomach and then as a result testosterone cortisol fixes itself out so we never use trt we don't of people are against it, but for what we do, most of our athletes can't take us not legal. Well, none of them really can. Well, some. But that's how you can get these huge increases in whatever, pick your dependent variable by simply finding root cause. And the root cause is often the gut and the not always.

But that's why we mean all this stuff matters. You simply can't just do a blood draw and say, oh, your testosterone is low, get on TRT. Maybe, but there's a better answer here for most people. I feel like any time you start to just take something exogenous like that and not looking at sleep and the big rocks first, you really are just – I don't know what the long-term effects are of that, but it's going to be a never-ending process where you just have to keep upping dosage and never

actually looking in the mirror and going, well, you need to sleep better. We need to eat better. We need to eliminate body fat better. How does body fat actually play into it? Because the people that are listening to this show, the people that we're working with, we're not taking them from normal levels to superhuman feats of strength going to get into an octagon. It's somebody that needs to lose 40 pounds and can't get out of bed in the morning without feeling like crap. That's the levels that I feel like a very natural path of eating better, body fat, sleep, the levels that I feel like a very natural path of getting,

eating better body fat sleep and, and moving the big rocks just to get to a body fat that allows it. But everything that we read right now, it really points to obesity and, and having that extra 40 pounds of body fat in, in your, in your belly specifically being just one of the leading indicators of things are just out of whack. Sure. I mean, in respect to testosterone

for being overweight, there's so many other pathways you can go there as well. Like when your enzyme aromatase exists in adipose tissue. So you're going to be converting more testosterone into estrogen simply by being overweight. If you're overweight too, you may be at risk for sleep apnea. You impact sleep quality, you're going to have lower testosterone from that route as well. We also know that exercise stimulates testosterone levels. But if you're overweight, you're probably more sedentary,

so less exercise is going to impact less testosterone. There's a lot of routes that you can take there being overweight as well, where it's going to result in blood sugar issues, which is going to result in more oxidative stress, which lowers testosterone. So sleep apnea, I would love to dig into that. Because I when I think about sleep apnea, in my kind of like rationale of what's going on. And the fact that you're kind of like choking in the middle of your sleep on a consistent basis, isn't like a great thing. Um, but when it starts to get into like the, the hormonal side of it and testosterone production, is that really just in, in, in, in the highest level, like you never actually get into a deep

breathing pattern to go parasympathetic at any state over a 24-hour period. So how the hell are you going to de-stress your body when the eight-hour chunk in your night, you're basically in the MMA cage with Doug over there, and he's choking you out all night long? He's squeezing it, letting it off. Yeah. Squeezing it, letting it off. Nope. Tap, tap, tap. You can live again. You can live again. But I'd love to dig into how breathing and the sleep apnea thing, because it's a really interesting thing that I don't think many people think about. Yeah. I mean, sleep apnea, I believe I've seen research,

and correct me if I'm wrong, it's when the neck exceeds 42 centimeters that you're at a dramatically increased risk for sleep apnea. And when you have sleep apnea, you're going to have poor sleep quality. So instead of, you know, just directing it to apnea, you can look at data on poor sleep quality. We've seen a lot of things. We've seen increases in ghrelin, which increases your cravings throughout the day. We've also seen reductions in leptin, which directly reduces satiety. So now you're looking at somebody who has more cravings and less satiety, even from the same caloric intake. We saw actually a great study out of the University of Chicago looking at the, it was macronutrient expenditure based on their BMR and how that impacted a deficit. And what was seen, and you guys are probably have seen this,

it was an enormous study that came out from the University of Chicago, how people, they were given, there's two groups. There's a group of eight and a half hours sleep per night and a group of five and a half hours sleep per night. And the group that slept five and a half hours of sleep per night lost 50% more muscle in a deficit and also lost 50% less fat. It was due to their respiratory exchange ratio. They were preferentially burning both muscle and fat in their deficit. Whereas the group that slept eight and a half hours per night, it was something like an 80-20, I believe, where they were losing 80% body fat and only 20% lean mass because neither group was resistance trained. But one was 50-50,

the other was 80-20 with only a difference of three hours in sleep per night. That's absolutely huge. And the real kicker is that metabolism didn't actually slow down in that study. So the group that only slept five and a half hours per night, their metabolic rate actually didn't decrease. So they just ended up losing more muscle because of the respiratory exchange ratio. Oh, cool. I'm actually like uh i'm like i'm like walking through that in my brain i wasn't ready for you to end right there well i actually i actually kind of paused because travis looked like he was looking it up let the internet catch up to you talking go ahead if you Google University of Chicago, eight and a half,

did you? Eight and a half versus five and a half. Yeah, you'll find it. So I'm actually, the part about metabolic rate not being affected, but muscle mass decreasing is really interesting on that. Can you dig into that a little bit? I think that it's just a bad situation. Sounds terrible, right? You're burning the same amount of calories per day from your BMR, but now more of them are coming from lean tissue. Because yeah, the respiratory exchange ratio created a differentiation in where your fuel sources was coming from. So that was a huge landmark study. So that in addition with the ghrelin and leptin differences from sleep apnea, the reduction in testosterone that you'd see,

and then even getting into aspects of neurotransmitter availability from being in a poor sleep. It doesn't matter how much B6 and tyrosine you have. Your dopamine production is going to be poor as hell if you're not sleeping at all throughout the night. So hormonally and neurotransmitter wise, you're just going to be a mess. It's never going to work in your favor. I'd love for kind of you and Andy to dig into this. When you have fighters specifically going into such a caloric deficit to make weight, how does that affect testosterone over

preparing and getting fighters ready? And this relates to the average person on just losing weight in general. You guys are taking it to the extreme, but how are you guys able to kind of maintain testosterone levels if you are, while you've got people having such rapid changes and fluctuations in their weight to make the cut and then to get them prepared for the fight in the next, you know, day or two. Sure. So you want me to tackle that one first, Andy? Sure. Okay, cool. So I actually don't see reductions in testosterone. I really don't. The research that I've seen is largely, you're going to see a lot of testosterone reductions after a 6% body fat or lower. And this is measured on something like a DEXA scan, I believe it was the data. So this is where if

you're 6% on DEXA, you're absolutely shred city. That's shredded. So that includes organ fat. That's like all of it. Yeah, that's absolutely everything. So yeah,. That includes organ fat. That's like all of it. Like, yeah, that's absolutely everything. So yeah, it's, it's pretty much transparent. Yeah. It's pretty much 3% body fat because it would include the 3% of essential fat. So it's essentially 3% subcutaneous fat. So this, you'd have to get to extremely low levels to even see reductions in testosterone. But one thing that fighters kind of naturally do intuitively, but I do intentionally, is I actually want a fighter to enter training camp at about 80%.

Because it gives us an opportunity to peak performance. When they enter at 100%, they're not going to maintain 100% for 10 weeks. It's not going to happen. That's when you see overtraining symptoms start to kick in. You're going to see someone's going to happen. That's when you see overtraining symptoms start to kick in. You're going to see someone's going to get flu symptoms or catch a cold. There's so many fighters who fall ill prior to fighting, and that's because they went way too hard way too soon. So I'll have an athlete actually enter camp at about 80%, and then we're actually getting healthier and in more shape as the camp goes on. So their testosterone is actually increasing rather than decreasing during this time. And then we don't actually get absolutely shred dice city.

And I think the only reduction you would possibly see is an expected acute reduction during the weight cut process. But that acute variation, honestly, I've never even measured it because I think it would be obviously reduced and would play into the athlete's psychology. I don't want to go into the cage with low testosterone. So I'm not even going to fucking measure it. It's not even going to be a thing.

But Sean O'Malley, he's a guy I'm working with right now, absolutely shredded, always has high testosterone, always. And that's with a pretty heavy weight cut to going all the way down to 135. So it's just something where if you don't start, if you don't start crazy hard, and then obviously you have your calories, macros, micros properly in check, and you have an actual phasic progression to your weight cut strategy. Low testosterone is not something you should ever struggle with. Yeah. So two, two ways I'm going to answer that for you. Um, but you have two things to think about. You have the training camp and then you have the final week. So the final week is easy

because everything is shitty that week. You have water cut, you've got calories, the fight is coming, press travel stressors, right? But if you actually pay attention, some people will try to scare you on the internet and they'll say things like one night of low sleep will reduce testosterone by 220. That that's all horseshit. It's completely out of context. It's not wrong, but it's way out of context. So I say that to say that the loss of testosterone, the week of the fight is probably true, but it has no meaningful physiological effect. We see no reductions in cognitive function, really no reduction in motor skill or control with a single night of poor sleep. That's just simply not going to happen. What you're going to see,

need to see is days or weeks of reduced sleep quality for it to actually start to really matter. So if you have one night, like you had a poor night of sleep last night, Anders, if you fought today, you would be just fine. like you'd be sleepy throughout the day if you're like working on your computer but if you were competing today it wouldn't matter at all most athletes have that right most athletes don't sleep before the night especially before a fight that the weight cut nights and all this stuff right so we'll tease that part out because you will certainly see it drop in testosterone the week of the fight but it it doesn't matter. So the better answer though is the camp question. So you'd be surprised to know, but the way that you handle it is this. Number one,

you shouldn't have that much of a drop in body weight through the course of fight camp. If you come into fight camp way over your marks, so you're 20% over your body or your competing weight, then we're going to have testosterone problems because we're going to have to be losing three, four or five pounds, you know, a week. If you lose things appropriately and we have metrics numbers for all this stuff, then you will not see a drop in testosterone throughout even though you're losing 1% per week, something like that. So number one, starting off camp in a reasonable level of fitness and a reasonable body weight,

it eliminates that problem almost entirely. Number two, the vast majority of fighters I've been around have no periodization plan whatsoever for their fight camp. And you're talking about fight camps are typically eight to 12 weeks. So they simply train hard and they try to train harder every week. And then when they get really tired, they'll take a day or two off. Um, we don't do it that way. We approach it almost exactly like you would a power lifter or weight lifter. And we have planned D loads both within the week, outside of the week, throughout the entire camp. And when you do that, I'm telling you like they walk into fights fight week super fresh they're not just crawling into fight camp they feel incredible for what you're saying yeah and

the vast majority just simply don't do that so yeah daniel that like you see constantly they get a cold the week before the fight yeah what would they get super shitty after lands um you see all kinds of energy just crashes and they're like, um, caloric deficit. Well, not, not really actually caloric deficits.

The same has been for the last six weeks. You're feeling trashed because you're getting close to competition. Um, we, we know what happens when you sort of back off epinephrine in the presence of extreme stress over a long time. Once the adrenaline goes away because the immune system's been compromised for so long, all of a sudden, boom, like it just takes a break basically.

And then you get sick and you have all these problems, energy crashes, your inner, uh, your, your mood, all this stuff, just boom. That's an idiotic plan. So if you even have a semblance of understanding, how long do we have here? When are we going to deal out? How is what the deal is going to look like? How are we going to build the camp so it's phasic, so it progresses over time? We're not just going as hard as we can every week and nonsensical stuff. You do that, testosterone is going to be just fine. Andy, can I ask you, do you guys look at monotony and strain, acute to chronic, work loads, effect sizes? Do you look at that in your programming at all? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes, I do. It's incredibly difficult because we can't put metrics on training.

It's tough because you don't know how many times someone's punched someone in the face. It's really difficult. You can use heart rate. GPS, of course, is out of question. You can't count reps in volume low. That doesn't count. You can use heart rate, but that's a really crappy indicator as well. Because if you did intervals for 40 minutes, 30 on, 30 off, or whatever you're going to do, that ain't the same as sparring for 30 minutes, even if your heart rate was the same. What about RPE? RPE is fine, but certain things feel harder.

So if you're a striker, when you go to wrestling practice it feels harder than a wrestler going to wrestling practice and the opposite right um depending on the partner you're with that day did you have other media stuff like so like honestly it's the vast majority of time too like unless you're going to every single workout the the coaches are going to have to do this for you right and like it ends up being we've tried this stuff. Right. So when you, well, then my next question is like, when you say you progress it, like you do, like we would powerlifting, like, how do you do it?

Yeah. So you have an idea of you're watching body weight all the time. Right. So, you know, what's happening food wise going into it. You have, we have a subjective markers that they're taking every day, just how do you feel, these types of things. Once you've gone through one camp, so I will go and before, when I first start working with a fighter, I will go and watch every one of their practices with all their different coaches.

And then I internally calibrate, right? So when you were working with Coach Dan today in boxing, how hard is it? Oh, Dan, oh, this is So when you're working with coach Dan today in boxing, how hard is it? Oh, Dan, Dan. Oh, this is a seven out of 10 with coach Dan. Well, I know that's a four out of 10 because coach Dan's not really, it doesn't go crazy, but I know a five out of 10 from Anders is like, okay, that's a really nine out of 10. Got it.

So then I calibrate back that way. I watch video, show me your sparring today, things like that. Right. And so I get a sense of how they're doing. So we use, I have the algorithm I use is a combination of all those. And we can do that and say, okay, great. And then you plan. You let them know ahead of time.

And it tends to work out pretty well. And that's what we call predicting pregnancy. It's like I can generally be like, all right, you're going to be pregnant in about three weeks. No, I see what you're saying. So when you say like, they say Coach Dan was a five, but you know it's because they enjoy

like punching. Well, enjoy or like Coach Dan thinks it was five out of 10 because he's old and he's unrealistic. And that was like a seven out of 10. Like that's a super easy practice today. We only did 12 rounds of sparring like oh okay like all right cool because back in 1988 when i wrestled in brusca

we would do 15 so we only had 12 today so it's not that you're like so okay all right got it like so you have to calibrate between what they're saying so my next question because we all know that coaches are like they don't want to be told what to do what do you do just give here's my suggestions on how to periodize their training yeah i tell them what to do there's no suggestions so you're in total control of the whole thing 100 oh because you would have to be just to do what you're saying you'd have to be because those coaches if they're in control they're going to tell you to fuck off you know right and so then i would say i'm not doing i'm not wasting my time doing this for you ah yeah what's the point i'm gonna make your suggestion is they're not gonna listen to a list of points so either we're all on

the same page or we're not there has to be somebody that is like the you know the maestro otherwise i leave that up to the athlete when we're super clear like is this the role you want me to play if not like fine i don't care like i'm not leaving or quitting the team i'm just i'm not gonna waste my time going through this whole damn process. Because no one's going to do it. If no one's going to follow it. Do you want me to do this or not? Yes, you do.

Cool. Well, then great. I'll do it. And then there's just no questions. And typically the athlete will regulate that too, right? So if I tell, if you're the fighter, Travis, and you're going to coach Dan, and I told you and Dan, like, hey, today's a green day. Stay in green.

And Dan's like, oh, let's go. Let's go. Like, Travis, you're in charge. Speak up. You're the fucking fighter. You're the CEO. If you don't speak up, like we've told Dan 28 times, he's not going to listen. If you don't fire him or tell him what to do,

I'm not doing this anymore. I see exactly how you... There's just no room for error here. It's communication. Was it unclear the directions? No. Okay, then did you, was it unclear the directions? No. Okay. Then did you directly go against what the fighter wants? Did you do that as a coach? You directly went against what they said. Either you don't believe us or you don't care what they say.

And so it's like, there's just no more options. So then my next thing would be like, if you can put values, you know, green, red, whatever your values are. I feel like then even like, I bet you're doing monotony and strain whether you think you are or not like you are wise enough to know i can't go hard every single day there's got to be highs lows which is nothing but monotony and strain and so like i feel like if you're in control it's it's measurable even though it'd have to be like somewhat subjective based on your observations

but that's what everybody needs that's why that would prevent so many people from bombing at the very end you know so yeah yeah you you have to have some something like that and then there's always the plan and there's always what happens you have to adjust and all that but you have to have at least a a north star like there has to be something you're trying to get to um and then if not you get up the problem we've actually theta, uh, on this just yesterday got published. Um, you end up being the classic, what they used to call the American problem, which is you end up having a bunch of these medium days, right? The hard days don't get hard enough because you're pre-fatigued. So you feel shitty about them. So then you don't do enough the next day. So the light days aren't

light enough. And you end up having this waving small undulation line of basically medium trainings with very small blips, which is not what you need to optimize physiological adaptation, right? You need huge insults that are not chronic, very short, very large insults, then recovery, very large insults recovery. That's how you induce adaptation, not just like constant stress overload. Like that, that's when you run into problems, right? So we see this all the time with cortisol, right? So people think cortisol is negative. And it's obviously very, very, very beneficial and positive and required. So a smashing huge increase in cortisol is actually a very good thing. But a slight increase in cortisol consistently over time is where we have problems. The same thing with inflammation, oxidative stress,

that can go over and over on these things, epinephrine. So we need to control that. If you do that, then you get better adaptations and you don't feel run down. You have a quick question about blood work again. When you have someone in a fight camp, one of the big problems with blood work, I feel like, is it's kind of like a balance sheet. It's just a snapshot. It's a moment in time. It's not really telling

the whole story. Like you were talking about earlier, if your testosterone goes from 900, 800, 700, 600, like you can't just see that if you do blood work, you know, very infrequently. Do you ever think there's going to be a point where we kind of have like a, kind of like a continuous glucose monitored, um, works where we have that for the entire spectrum of metabolites that you could possibly have where you have, you have like a rolling graph on your phone of your testosterone every minute of the day, which is constantly tracking. You have like a, you have like a real digital dashboard of exactly what's going on with your physiology. Do you guys feel like that's, that's possible in future um i i definitely think it's possible

i think biotechnology is a huge uh avenue for a lot of people to make a lot of money but us to gain a lot of data but i think it's a sports psychology nightmare to see the peaks and valleys of certain things so although it may be valuable for the informed coach i think for the athlete to be in the know about that would mess up their mind i like a motto i have in coaching is hard on me easy on them i want to provide a protocol that they can execute consistently that will not mess with their psychology at all don't let them see it yeah exactly so for the informed coach that's thing. You got to be informed and confident because if you think there's going to be peaks and valleys, that's the natural ebb and flow of

training. And if you're a non-confident coach, then you're going to want to change the protocol every time something drops or, and that's, that is, there is a negative feedback loop and add an adaptive process. And that, that happens with everything. So I think, I think it's possible. And I think it would be great for i think it's possible and i think it would be great for research and informed coaches but i think it would be bad for poorly informed coaches and athletes psychology yeah i know the answer to that doug so the answer is yes actually um but it won't be coming from things like a cgm so it won't be stuck in your arm it'll be coming from and so i i can't say anything now but i know these things actually are on the way i love being your friend why the hell don't i know about it yet i can't tell you about any of this stuff you don't love it you don't live in california man

yeah you just you just don't tell the Canadian who cares. I warned you. You signed up with me. I warned you that there are things in play here. So I know that this is, it's not at the level that we can do with all of our other stuff yet, but this is not, this is not sci-fi for sure. And I know many of these are already possible. It's just being able to put it in the system is the thing right now which is

we know the answer to that it's just a matter of building i think a problem a lot of coaches have is like you know there are times for like a person to feel bad like they're i mean i purposely program them they should feel like shit the key the key is like are they are is their rpe equal to my intent that's the big question. You know, if they're always feeling good, you've messed up. Like, nothing is going to happen. For fun's sake, too, Doug, we can actually do this entire thing with sleep as well. So we can get, oh, yeah, like you won't have to do anything.

There'll be no ring attached and nothing else. You can just go to sleep and wake up and we'll have a full sleep study performed on you with more detail than you 100x more than you'd ever give them a dumb water ring so that's that's ready to go too as well so bro these technologies are real they're here come back and do a whole show on that yeah we're this is not probably sooner than you think um you've mentioned confidence a couple times and and the first time it came up was when we first started bringing up, uh, testosterone, how does confidence and just the, um, you know, there's a, a lot of, uh, maybe not a lot, but there, there is research. I think Gad said, Doug and I found the, um, a study that he put out on just like driving

a crappy car versus a really nice car or walking in and having like the social status attached and then in testing testosterone levels, I would imagine there's some sort of metrics and how you're coaching athletes and preparing for events that really makes a difference when they show up on game day. Yeah, for sure. I think confidence is absolutely key, right? And I'm just going to speak from experience because I like to stay in my own lane. I'm the nutritional and biochemistry guy. There's people out there that know way more about sports psychology than me. So I'm just going to speak from practical coaching experience here. I think the difference

between cockiness and confidence is preparation. When you have properly prepared for an event, you have earned the right to be confident. And there's anxiety out there. And anxiety is not always a bad thing. If it's endogenous anxiety, then that's biochemical. And that is something that can be altered with prescriptions or nutrition or whatever it's going to be. But exogenous anxiety, usually we deserve it. If I have anxiety before a fight,

well, why do I have anxiety? Well, I didn't actually have a periodized fight camp plan. I didn't actually follow my diet the entire fight camp. I didn't take any D loads. I didn't buy any of the supplements. I only trained when I felt like it. I deserve that anxiety. I don't deserve confidence when I step into the octagon and that's happened. However, with proper preparation, I did my workouts. I did my mobility sessions. I made sure I got a great sleep every night. I followed my diet exactly. I've earned the right to be confident somebody who's cocky they've just that's a false confidence without preparation we know what happens to cocky people when they meet confident people what about like you know you got um the irish mma guy i mean he's always cocky and he's normally pretty darn good i mean i would say he's confident.

I would say that that's a true confidence, actually. I think there's a fine line between your view of confidence and cocky. I agree. I think I agree. I think he's confident. And the stuff that he does is rehearsed. I think that those lines, that's a part of the confidence. That's a part of showmanship i think he actually i agree with you prepared that shit talk because he's prepared to be confident so

i think it goes into that same most people would disagree with you but i i didn't agree like you know i've never met a person who was a world champion at anything when that when you spoke with them they would not, in your, probably in most people's mind, come off as cocky. Like, you know, when you met me when I was a world champion, if you'd asked me, am I going to win? I would say, of course, you know, but like, you know, most people say that's cocky. What do you want me to say?

I'm going to lose? I'm not, you know, so, I mean, yeah, when you're prepared, you have that, you've earned that right. What are you supposed to say? Other than damn right, I'm about to win. I'm ready. I'm better than this guy. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. I feel like we could do another hour. We're going to have both you guys back on. I feel like we're oddly two hours in and still just getting started, which means we nailed it. Yeah. Can you tell people where they can find you, how they learn more, um, and everything you have going on? Um, yeah. So basically just my

main hub really is at Dan Garner nutrition on Instagram. That's, that's the main spot to find me. I post content, um, here and there, like Andy was talking about with the vitamin D research and stuff like that. So I'll do posts here and there. If you see like an evidence-based meathead, you're in the right spot. I'll throw some studies at you, but I'm probably going to throw a couple of poses at you in between studies. That's all credibility. Yeah, Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram. Yeah, that's the best place and easiest place to find me.

Andy Galpin. Yes. Do you want to tell the people where to find you? Oh, yeah. Wow. He's paying attention, guys. What do you want? That's how all your students answer questions in hour two of the lecture, too, I bet.

Like, Anders, huh? I haven't been paying attention at all. Got me. Yeah, Instagram and Twitter, Dr. Andy Galpin, D-R-A-N-D-Y Galpin are the fastest way. Beautiful. Coach Travis Smash. Go follow Andy Galpin.

Don't follow me. Yeah. That is the man. If you want to, message me before on Instagram instagram anybody listening to the show already falls all four of us anyways yeah yeah doug larson i'm on instagram doug larson dan andy this was one of my favorite shows we've done in a long time dude i'm absolutely i could totally parent what andrews were saying we easily could just keep going like i have more questions and i and i want to hear more so we'll do round two let's um Let's do round two whenever you guys want.

And maybe, I got so many notes. Maybe let's coordinate like a whole bunch of specific questions or maybe take some from the audience too, based on this one. And then that way we can make sure we get to some direct ones. And Dan can coach them all. Oh,

now that I know Dan, I'll be way more prepared for next time. Yeah. I actually, I want the whole audience and both of you guys to know when I send Andy Galpin a text and I say, who is the best in the world that you know in this specific thing? I absolutely think about that show more than I think about every other show that we do,

and we're putting out a ton of content um I appreciate you guys and by far I'm on my game more in these shows and appreciate you guys just bringing that out of me and and all of us all at the same time so uh Galpin I know that this show means a lot to you from being a part of it for so long I appreciate you putting us in touch with Dan I feel like these are these are the days that I'm like, man, we are in this microphone. So I appreciate you guys. Dan Garner, where can the people find you? I can be found at Dan Garner nutrition on Instagram. Don't send me your lab work with your testosterone levels on. I got a bunch of this on those after a recent podcast. I can imagine with Mark Bell, they just sent you all a picture of it.

Can you just do the same thing? I just get DMs of lab, screenshots of labs. I'm like, guys, I can't just do this on Instagram DM. It's way more complicated than this. But give me a follow at DanGarnerNutrition on Instagram. Check out my courses at CoachGarner.com. Get your blood work at InsideTracker.com slash Garner Nutrition on Instagram. I love that. Check out my courses at coachgarner.com. Get your blood work at insidetracker.com slash Garner. And that's it.

You never know what the downstream effects of doing something incredible are going to be. Like doing a live lab reading and then your DMs get loaded with everyone's labs. Yeah. That's incredible. Yeah. Fantastic.

Turns out you should probably be a client of mine in that process. That's so good. Doug Larson. Yeah. And by the way, you can go listen to that. It's like a, you did like four hours or something like that with Mark over,

over a two part episode on power cast. So yeah, five hours of Dan Garner spitting knowledge to Mark Bell. So go check that out. I'm on Instagram, Douglas E. Larson. There you go. And I'm Anders Varner, at Anders Varner. And we are Barbell Shrugged,

Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you go over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where you're going to find a free case study about our boy TJ. Cut his cholesterol in half. Got super ripped in the process. And Men's Health and Apple News

ran an awesome case study for us, which is really nice. You can access that free case study over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.