Barbell Shrugged - [Nervous System] Methods for Understanding and Improving Physiological Stress w/ Dr. Chris Perry, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Travis Mash #739

Episode Date: March 20, 2024

Dr. Christopher A. Perry, an Assistant Professor at Eastern Kentucky University, began his fitness journey at Penn State University, where he developed a robust background in Strength & Conditioning leading to 17 years in the industry to date. His academic path, leading through a PhD at Arizona State University, deepened his expertise in Exercise Science & Sports, Sleep & Circadian Rhythms, and Nutrition. Chris's current research focuses on sleep, movement analysis, and CO2 tolerance, particularly in tactical populations and collegiate athletes. His work aims to enhance performance, wellness, and longevity health outcomes, demonstrating his commitment to advancing the field of exercise and sports science. Beyond his academic pursuits, Chris is an executive performance coach, weight loss consultant, fitness entrepreneurship mentor, podcast host, and enjoys engaging in coffee culture and movie discussions. Dr. Chris Perry on Instagram Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram  

Shrugged family this week on barbell shrug dr. Chris Perry is back in the house do you guys remember back maybe about a month and a half ago Chris came in here and dropped some serious knowledge on sleep which was very very cool but we're having him back today to talk about the nervous system so for for any of you people that may be stressed out some tactics to get over that and then even people when this comes down to like so many people that are just very very good we'll call them the high-performing humans that do not get bogged down in stress it's like the emotions we just shove the stress down and act like we don't feel it or we act like we don't see it and mainly you're

not testing for it or trying to analyze where those stressors are and a lot of times it's just stuck in your physiology. The more we push it down, the more we ignore it, the less we're dealing with it. And then all of a sudden we come back with labs or kind of like health issues. And we don't really understand why these like mystery symptoms appear. And a lot of times it's just, it's a total cumulative load, the allostatic load of stress on our bodies. So if you have a high stress job if you have a relationships that are not doing great in your life if you're trying to build something very very cool which demands a lot of your time and attention and you're getting pulled in different directions and then all of a sudden you go and tack on four five six days of super high

intensity weight training and your body's not recovering we go why is all this happening why is my sleep not great a lot of times it just comes down to the fact that your body's not recovering. We go, why is all this happening? Why is my sleep not great? A lot of times it just comes down to the fact that your body, your physiology is holding onto that stress. And in today's episode of Barbell Shrug, Dr. Perry is going to dig into one, how you can understand what's going on. If you're wearing an oar ring, looking at your HRV, if you don't have any of those, using some CO2 tolerance tests. And then if you have some blood work, understanding cortisol curves and how all that stuff plays into managing total stressors

and your autonomic nervous system. As always friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access that free report over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.

I'm Andrew Garner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Bash, Dr. Chris Perry. Welcome back to the show, sir. I appreciate you having me again. It was a blast the first time, so I didn't know it was going to be this quick. So I'm glad you had me again it was a blast the first time so i didn't know it was going to be this quick so i'm glad you have you co on barbell shrugged one time and then travis mash is ready to fly you out to north carolina to speak at his upcoming seminar this is amazing dude we need kickbacks on this doug we need i feel like we're getting we're getting cut out i mean yeah yeah today on barbell shrugged we're going to be talking about the autonomic nervous system and how it relates to I mean, yeah, you too. they probably just get like really confused. And then if you break that down, there's the, the fight or flight and the rest and digest, which may hit home a little bit more. But I would love to keep it, keep it very high level because it's a big subject and we're going to dig into

specifics. But if we could like just talk about the, the nervous system and how it works, what it's maybe not responsible for, cause that's a lot. but just give us like a big overview on what that yeah right um on on uh on how how our nervous system kind of plays into health and performance sure it's important to remember just like everything in the body there there's a balance of everything that has to work together you are never just sympathetic at one time you're never parasympathetic truly at one time. It is dynamic, the same way that your energy systems work with metabolism. You are both aerobic and anaerobic at the same time to some degree. It's just the intensity

of activity that dictates how much more or one of the other is at that certain time. Same thing with your nervous system, and there needs to be balance. So when it comes to the nervous system, we have the overarching ANS, all right, your autonomic nervous system, everything that your body is doing on its own without you having to think about it. And we can divide that into three different branches. You have your enteric system, you have your sympathetic, and you have your parasympathetic. Sympathetic, as you just said, it's your fight or flight, all right?

That is everything that is getting you ready for activity, whether it's going for a run, exercise, your fight or flight, avoiding danger. It has an androenergic receptor response where it's releasing catecholamines to upregulate your heart rate, get you ready to contract muscles so that you can either fight what's in front of you or get the hell out of there as fast as you can, all right, to keep it as just easy to understand as possible. Whereas on the other side of things, your parasympathetic system is more vegetative. It's more rest, recovery, digestion, in order for our body to truly recover from anything, whether it's

from mental related activities or from physical activities as well. You have to be able to tap into the system to fully recover and even assimilate nutrients. This is why when we work with people at Rapid and we take a look at what's going on in their gut health, people are like, I have a great amount of GI distress, but I don't feel like I ever stress out. It's like, well, that's another thing. When you work with these high-performance people who have learned to adapt to stress a lot over time, they're unaware of the physiological stress that's actually being going on underneath the hood that's causing a lot of the issues. Because when your HPA access is upregulated because you're stimulating yourself so much throughout the day, either from countless Zoom meetings and caffeine and hard workouts on top of that, you have no idea that that's

actually causing issues across the board. Don't put me in that box. Don't put me in that box. With so many of us on. Smashing over there, smashing like ghost monster drinks. It's like a crazy cocktail C4 mixed into some of that. But this is the issue though, right? I just got off of a call with one of our guys and I was talking with him. It was like, the reason he's like, I don't ever feel stressed.

I'm like, most high performers don't. And it's usually an ass backwards way of thinking when it comes to the central nervous system. They're just like, but I feel completely chill. That doesn't mean that you are. All right. If you take a look at your respiratory rate, if you take a look at your heart rate variability, all of these are going to be the signs that show us, oh, wow, I might actually need to pay more attention to this.

And this could be the reason why I'm overweight. This could be the reason why I have no energy throughout the day. And so, and the best way I love to illustrate this as far as we get into now, how autonomic imbalance is such a big problem. So if we were to illustrate this in English, chronic fight or flight, you never want to be in fight or flight for such a long period of time. The best way that I illustrate this when I teach class is think about individuals who are going to go hike up a mountain and go cross-country skiing at higher elevation. Well, we know that elite athletes are more better adapted to that. And a normal resting heart rate for a elite athlete is probably below 50 somewhere. Well, the higher elevation that you

have to go, the harder your heart has to work. So let's say that that resting heart rate from 50, the higher elevation to go then becomes 90, right? Well, the sympathetic nervous system has to counteract that and help them recover in a way so that the recovery heart rate comes back down to meet that. Well, as you continue to go higher and higher and higher in elevation, eventually you get to the point where your resting heart rate is then level to your recovery heart rate, but then you can't recover anymore. And so now you're at the point where you're in such severe hypoxia, not getting enough oxygen that you eventually die. And so this is an extreme way to look at it, but it's essentially what's happening with people when they're at rest. They are breathing so much at rest. They are having such a high heart rate variability. It's putting a tremendous amount of cardiovascular stress on

their body that they don't need to be putting themselves through. That's prematurely raising the risk of cardiovascular disease and everything else we look at when it comes to all-cause mortality. Yeah. I have a question for you. And I feel like this has been a kind of like a lingering question since I transitioned from extreme meathead to a more mature meathead. And have there ever been studies or just any data on, say Travis Mash at one point in time squatted 1,000 pounds? Hypothetically. Yeah, we'll pretend.

Will he get a better result by doing that in the stage of life when maybe before squatting that he was like grunting, possibly headbutting a barbell, or walking up to that after breathwork, meditation, zenned out, one with the barbell, sitting down, standing up, no bloody nose or eyeballs, and re-racking it like the stoic squatter that he is. That was like a rap song right there, by the way. That was awesome. So I'd say this is in two camps, right? First, my question to Travis would be, well, how consistently have you been lifting that heavy? If you've been consistently lifting that heavy for quite some time, you've been on a Power 5 program, Westside Barbell, and you've been training that way for a while, I'm not sure stress regardless would have too

much of an impact on that. It would more depend upon, did you get enough rest the night before? Because we do know that sleep deprivation and all of these things will negatively impact muscle efficiency and hence your ability to perform the way that you need to and activating the motor units that you're used to doing. But if you are more relaxed into the system, just think logically about this for a second. If you're more relaxed going into your workout, you can still warm up well. But if you're overstimulated, I mean, how have you felt when you were overstimulated in physical activity? We teach this in sports. Yes. We teach this in sports psychology. If you are overly aroused,

that has a significant negative impact on your performance versus where you are at an optimal level of arousal, which is right in the middle. You want that sweet spot. Too much, you're more likely to, A, that's going to reduce muscle efficiency because we know low HRV and stress reduces muscle efficiency. And B, if you're overly stressed out, you're more likely to make a mistake. You're more likely

to push through when you shouldn't. Form and technique breakdown might occur. You might end up hurting yourself. And so that's the thing we have to consider as well. Versus if you are too zen, well, then you might not have enough oomph to actually be able to activate higher threshold motor units to produce that force that you need to, to put that thousand pounds above 90 degrees. So those are the two schools of thought you have to have going into that situation. You got to have control of that arousal. Yes.

Control your arousal. Right. Right. You may have already said this to some extent, but when you have a client who doesn't feel like they're stressed out, but you suspect they have some type of autonomic imbalance, how would they know if they're not, quote unquote, feeling stressed? They would have to look at that biofeedback or be honest with themselves.

Am I breathing too much at rest? Because how much have you ever asked that to a person? We talk about this with Galpin all the time. We like to see that your respiratory rate is 12 breaths or less at rest. If you're sitting down and you're breathing 16 to 18 times per 60 second bow, how are you not stressed out at that time? And so, and when you just, you use the art of coaching with this, when you're working with these people, well, let me ask you some questions.

Like how many times a day are you stressing out about your kids? Are you stressing out about your job? How many zoom meetings are you having? All right. What are your energy levels? Do you feel like you're out about your kids? Are you stressing out about your job? How many Zoom meetings are you having? All right. What are your energy levels? Do you feel like you're dragging throughout your day? If your answers are yes, across the board, you are stressed out. You're just not perceiving that as stress because that has become your normal lifestyle. What does feel even mean? Have you ever thought about that? Like I had a really good, like a

sports medicine doctor asked me, I would, I would say like, I don't feel X. And he's like, what does feel actually mean? Give me a measurement. It's just some arbitrary word that we use, which really means nothing until you can define it. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing

health. Now, what does that actually mean? It means in three parts, we're going to be doing a ton of deep dive into your labs. That means the inside out approach. So we're not going to be guessing your macros. We're not going to be guessing the total calories that you need. We're actually going to be doing all the work to uncover everything that you have going on inside you. Nutrition, supplementation, sleep. And then we're going to go through and analyze your lifestyle. Dr. Andy Galpin'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 it's my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com

and let's get back to the show. Exactly. And so, and that's why we have the clinical criteria that we go over. If your resting heart rate is, you know, I like to see below 60. You know, I know Galpin's in that same area as well, where he likes to see lower. If we see 70, 80, 90, I mean, anything above 90 beats per minute, that's a clinical indicator of autonomic imbalance. And then when you want actual measurement tools to see if someone is under, you know, significant autonomic imbalance, look further than that. Let's take a look at their heart rate recovery. When someone is recovering from high-intensity exercise, you should see that heart rate be able to come down by at least 12 beats or more within that first 60 seconds.

If it doesn't, clear indication that they're having a hard time recovering properly after physical activity. The next thing that you look for is actually during that high intensity activity again. Can they achieve 85% of their heart rate max or more during that intensity? If not, that is also a limiting factor that their autonomic nervous system is on overdrive and the body will not let them go any higher than that for that reason. And then of course, abnormal heart rate variabilities as well. If we see below 45, which we see a lot of this in the individuals that we work with, that is also a significant factor to take a look at as well. So heart rate, heart rate variability, breath rate, all these things are easily measured by most normal trackers, auras and whoops and what have you. Do you think it's wise to at least

once or twice a year to get on an assault bike just go 100 full speed for as long as you can tolerate get off and just see what your heart rate can get to i think your time if you can hit a if you're losing fit well i don't know if it's specifically fitness but a type of fitness where you're not able to get to a maximal heart rate that you used to be able to get to are you decreasing over time 100 yes sir But isn't it going to decrease no matter what with age? Like your max heart rate is going to decrease. It can, yes. But then look at the individuals who stay in shape consistently over time.

You see individuals that have high VO2 maxes. I forget the exact name of the study that they did, but they took individuals who were above the age of 50 or more and they implemented that Norwegian protocol. That's the standard protocol we utilize for high-intensity interval training. That's the four on, four off. So four minutes as high, higher than you can go, 90% over your heart rate max or more, and then backing off as hard as you can. They saw in the architectural changes of those individuals' cardiovascular systems, took individuals at age of 50 back to the realm of when they were in their 30s in relation to their heart health. And when it came to their actual heart rates, they were able to push them much harder than individuals who were sedentary at half their

age, which was absolutely fascinating with the impact that cardiovascular training over time can have on an individual's cardiovascular architecture and health as well. If you go to any undergraduate exercise physiology course, they're going to tell you like kind of like the very loose standard. I have no idea what kind of research is behind. This is like 220 minus your age, which is there's going to be a lot of variability in there. Like what does the actual research say on heart rate?

The Carnovan method is what we use, which is more efficient. And so that's where we implement the usage of your resting heart rate and heart rate recovery in that equation to get a more accurate representation of what your heart rate max is rather than just 220 minus your age. In most people, sure, 220 minus your age works because most people are not elite athletes or not individuals who stay active like they should throughout the lifespan. But for those older for those older individuals for example that we just talked about i guarantee if we were to do that carnovan method with them we get a much different result than what we see it's way different for me like i can get

mine way above what you know the 220 minus my age yeah exactly that would be like 170 not even i can get it well above that exactly so i know i'm hearing yeah so i was gonna say i remember in graduate school when i was doing my thesis as a part of the the testing we were doing we had we had to walk uphill on a treadmill at progressively faster and faster and faster paces carrying i think it was a fourth of our body weight in a backpack so 200 pounds so it's like 50 pounds in a backpack um going uphill at faster and faster and faster rates until we till you basically just give up. And I think if I remember correctly, Andy at that time got his heart rate up to 206.

Oh, my gosh. For like walking with a heavy pack is a very high heart rate. But yeah, he was obviously older than 14 years old at that time. Do you have any idea like what the kind what the highest records on heart rates are? He's the most out of shape person we got. I know, right? He was only doing heavy singles. He was competing in weightlifting at the time.

One lift, I got to rest five minutes, guys. That's a great question. That's not an answer I'm not sure I'm able to give, but I'm sure the better in shape you are, the higher you are able to get it as well, as far as achieving that high intensity.

It's really hard to push your heart rate past like 95%. It is. It is incredibly hard. It's not, it's like, yeah, it's the, it's like,

it's like in the one to two minute range for me that I need to be pushing like really high intensity. There has to be a gradual buildup. The 30-second all-out effort, I feel like, doesn't really get to where you need to be. It's not sustained enough to be able to build that quickly. That just makes you want to throw up. That's honestly why I think those CrossFit wads, wads why i think you're usually really good at doing that because

you're sitting there doing an all-out you know barbell thrusters and then you're jumping over to your your your ball throws and then you're hitting the assault bike you know cranking it out for 30 to 60 seconds and you can't feel your legs that's probably the only time i've seen my heart where it needs to go my two when i did grid league it's like i got my heart rate into some no man's land i remember my whole body i feel i felt like i felt like i died it was like rigamortis on the other side of things that i would imagine in 2024 there just aren't that many people rolling around without cell phones that live a natured life that you would look at and you're over parasympathetic. But what would be the numbers

on that where you're like, just, man, you need more stress in your life? I got to be honest, I don't see many of those people. Yeah, we don't work with any of them. But are there numbers that go along with just the idea of like, it's way too much recovery and not enough stress? So Anders, that's a great question, because so much of the data that I've read is on the opposite side of the spectrum. I would almost think if, and I think the last time I did read a paper on this, when comparing and contrasting what denotes too far sympathetic versus too parasympathetic, I think when you start seeing

those heart rate variabilities above 150, that those are usually the individuals that are like, all right, you're way too chill. Maybe you're the type of individual who's really dragging through life, not because of stress, just from a lack of activation. Those would be the individuals that you would then, you know, counter with, all right,

you need to start doing high intensity work to actually start to shock the system. Does this human exist? Like, is that like a Buddhist monk? He's like, you know, I actually feel like, uh, and kind of the, the, the secondary question to that is I was curious about that because at some point, the lack of stress in your body or in your life starts to become stressful.

Like your body just stops in a way like functioning properly because it's not being challenged. There's no adaptation to anything. And you're just kind of like sleeping till 10 and then just meandering through the day. There's no working out. You're just going on like a casual hike every day. You just surf at 2 p.m. every day. I feel like a small faction of SoCal probably has over parasympathetic tendencies. But yeah, it would be interesting to know what those numbers

are because if we're, if we're in like the, the 12 ish breaths per minute rate, what is it like? It's just not a 2024 problem really. Right. And honestly, no, exactly. I don't believe that is a current public health concern of everyone putting their focus on. But I will say as well with that, there's a balance to everything, right? Does having that super high or super low HRV really reflect how you are either? We got to look at the other data along the spectrum. It's like, what if you're an individual that has that? And Galpin has said this to us, to all coaches before.

What if you have that individual who just, genetically speaking, they have a low heart rate variability, but their resting heart rate is fantastic. Their VO2 is fantastic. They do the breath work. They do everything else. They have no signs of metabolic disease. Well, then is there truly an issue with that heart rate variability? Because we do know that having that heart rate variability below a certain point, usually below 20 is what puts you at higher risk of myocardial infarction. But what if you're doing everything else that goes against that? And so that's when you come down to, all right,

let's test the symptoms with the person, all right? Looking at their heart rate variability on average, when someone drinks that night before with a couple of drinks of alcohol, how does it affect their heart rate variability then? And then what are the symptoms from that? If they bounce back from that just fine the next morning, they're like, oh yeah, no big deal. I'm a little tired, but it didn't really kill my performance in any way.

And it didn't stress out my heart rate anyway. Resting heart rate is still chill. All right, then maybe that's not the biggest deal. But for most people that we work with, if it does come down that five to 10 points and they're absolutely miserable and it drives up their stress, they can't work out, they're having issues with performance and everything else down the line with stress and anxiety, then maybe that's more of a big deal. So we have to take in more data than simply just looking at heart rate variability, which I think is the one limiting factor we have with that right now.

Yeah. But what are some strategies to overcome? Let's say like, you know, that your resting heart rate is 75, 80. Let's say that your breath rate is 14 plus. What are some strategies to overcome this or to improve? Great. So first thing we need to look at for- Ask it for a friend. What are all the factors contributing to it in the first place? When we look at a lot of the things that we fight here in public health and what

we're looking at as coaches, is the individual obese? Are they overweight? Because that is a primary concern as well. If your body composition is not optimal, that is associated with having that lower heart rate variability. And we know for sure interventions have shown weight loss also positively impacts heart rate variability. Heart rate variability will go back

up after weight loss occurs, especially if we're improving our body composition. Then we need to look at things like insulin resistance or diabetes, because those are also associated. And so if you're the type of individual who is really, really stressed out, cortisol levels are super high, then we need to take a look at things of what's causing stress. Do we need to implement some sort of stress management to help with those things that are potentially causing those numbers to be driven up? Same thing with blood pressure, right? We need to look at all of these other factors first and see how we can fix those that will then positively impact our heart rate variability. Sleep apnea is another big thing, and that's something that we see with so many people. If your sleep is not optimal, that

significantly impacts heart rate variability, 1,000%. And from the last time we all talked together on Barbell Shrugged and we talked about how to improve that, that's usually step one. Because we know how many issues there are there. And then I have some other thoughts on lifestyle habits as well. But we'll pause there for a second just to allow the audience to chill before we get into that. I actually want to kind of transition into the CO2 tolerance side of things because that's another thing that we test and it's very, very telling. I think a lot of people have some sort of wearable where they can sit there and talk to you about their HRV. And they've probably justified whatever score they're seeing on a day-to-day basis.

But when we go and test the CO2 tolerance, that's not something people do every morning or possibly ever in their life. Can we start with kind of the significance of that assessment? And then how does kind of like higher stress levels play into that? Sure. And so this is all very much related. And so that CO2 tolerance is telling you just that. How well is your body adapted to being able to handle the buildup of that CO2 tolerance over time? And so this is exactly why we have things such as gear training from the shift guys and Brian McKenzie. If we have individuals who, in sedentary positions, are breathing heavier than they should be, almost guarantee that those individuals probably have very poor CO2 tolerance. If I was to do most CO2 tolerance tests

that I do with individuals with low HRV, usually perform poorly, all right? Most of the time, all right? If I've got someone with an HRV below 45, more than likely they are your standard individual who breathes more than 12 to 14 breaths per minute. Those are probably the individuals that have higher levels of stress.

Makes sense, right? If they're breathing more at rest than they should, they're offloading more CO2 faster than they should. That's augmenting the pH of their blood, which is causing respiratory alkalosis, which then in terms, when you are offloading too much CO2, you're also telling the body that we don't have enough oxygen. So the Bohr effect gets kicked in, right? Galpin's talked about this as well, right? Your hemoglobin hang on to your oxygen. As a result, what's that going to tell your body to do? Breathe more because we don't have more oxygen.

So it causes you to breathe even faster, puts even more stress on the system. So we have to train. The CO2 tolerance test is not so much a test to say, oh, okay, what's our stress levels currently? It does show us that. But how are our breathing habits as well? If we can utilize things like breath work, not only to get you to be more tolerant of that buildup of CO2, we can also teach you how to breathe right for particular activities, which can then allow you to control and slow things down.

The more that you're dead at, the more that you can actually adapt to those proper breathing protocols, which is why I'm also starting- What is the CO2 tolerance test? The CO2 tolerance test, you're sitting naturally right here. You take in three relaxed breaths. You can do it with the cadence

of anywhere from three to four seconds in, three to four seconds out. At the end of those three breaths, you take in one really, really large breath. As soon as you're done taking in that big breath on the final one, you start the timer and you time the amount of time it takes for you to exhale completely until you get to urge to breathe again. Anything that's above 45 seconds, we usually denote as, okay, that's pretty solid.

All right. We can definitely get some work out of that if we take a look at other health markers and see that we still have improvements to make, such as, you know, VO2 max, or if we still have a poor respiratory, uh, respiratory rate per minute, if it's between 30 and 45, then we're like, all right, average, definitely have some work to be done here. Anything below 30, that's when like, okay, high concern. All right. Definitely need to, you know, you're definitely the individual who's definitely breathing too much at rest, probably has sleep related issues as well. Probably has a lot of stress and anxiety related issues as well. Perfect. In, in understanding kind of the, those gears, how do we improve that score? Because there's a

lot of like workouts, maybe not like workouts in the way that people are thinking, but breath holds while you're doing training. What are like some kind of more tactical ways that people can go about improving that if they are to go do that test? Sure. So first there is the gear training. And so the gear training is fascinating, right? Because the gear training teaches you, all right, how do I need to breathe for the specific activity that I'm currently doing?

So if your goal is improving aerobic endurance, right, and improving your ability to perform on longer steady state activities, you want to make sure that you're all nasal breathing, right? Because if you're mouth breathing at lower intensities when you don't need to be, that's when you're offloading more CO2 than you should, right? You're putting yourself more into an anaerobic state for a low intensity exercise when you shouldn't be, and you're going to fatigue much quicker than if you just controlled yourself doing basic nasal breathing. Strategy one. Or you do what we usually do with a lot of our individuals where we're trying to improve not only their CO2 tolerance, but how they regulate their breath rate of then

doing nasal breathing only through higher intensity exercise, higher intensity exercise. And so that's teaching them that when I drive my breath rate up really, really hard for higher intensity, now I know how to control it to come back down again, which is exactly the premise of gear one, gear two. Gear one, you're going nice and easy recovery. Gear two, you're exercising as hard as you can, nasal only, but no design cadence. And then as soon as the bout is over, you're teaching yourself how to relax after that and getting back down to gear one, Again, nasal only, but no design cadence. And then as soon as the bout is over, you're teaching yourself how to relax after that and getting back down to gear one as long as it takes you.

And over time, should be able to adapt to allow yourself to get down to gear one quicker, which means that you've definitely improved on your CO2 tolerance. Part number two, improve your VO2 max. If you improve your VO2 max and the amount of oxygen you can utilize at any time, that's also going to help performance and reduce your need to continue to breathe faster to get more of that oxygen in a couple years ago and just remember this we're out in memphis and

me you andy and dan were we're training my buddy's gym and we're doing some stuff with andy where we're riding on the bike and then we were we were getting off the bike and then taking med balls bear hugging them and then holding our breath as we walked and you would walk as far as you can before you had to take a breath and you drop the med ball we're doing intervals like that to what extent does like breath hold type training like that influence co2 tolerance so hypoxic work and that's what we've just started to get into more and more with our own clients and athletes right and so emily hightower is big on giving individuals with CO2 tolerance related issues, hypoxic walking for that reason, that will also improve CO2 tolerance. And

the hypoxic walking is very, very simple. You're just putting yourself through bouts of hypoxia as you're walking at lower intensity intervals, which is a lot easier to adapt yourself to over time, going bouts of maybe maybe 10 15 seconds of holding your breath taking a break and then do it again over the course of 30 to 45 minutes theoretically speaking over time that's doing the same type of principle right you're getting yourself used to accommodating yourself being at that higher levels of co2 tolerance and over time your body will accommodate to that and adapt to that same principle that you just described with the higher intensities of activity so that's where like the xpt larry hamilton underwater training comes in where they're they're um you know carrying

dumbbells underwater as far as they can until they have to get up because like you can't breathe you're underwater so you're kind of just by default having to hold your breath it's a cool way to do it yeah this is how those deep guys get good it looks good on instagram yeah it's exactly how you adapt to being able to hold your breath for a long time that's uh that was that was one of the most interesting training sessions of my life i've done it a couple times up there uh and your body is immediately ready to freak out. You can take all the athleticism and all the strength and experience of being in the weight room for a really long time, and then all of a sudden they hand you a 30-pound dumbbell

and sink you to the bottom, and you go, oh, no, what do I do? This is terrifying. And the only thing to do is to sit there and chill out. I had a blast doing that. It was a really, really fun time. I learned a lot. Talk to me about kind of on the cortisol side of things. I'd love to really dig into one specifically that hormone and how people maybe like look at their blood work and and obviously that is the stress hormone but um how are they able to kind of uh get in and

start to look inter inside out and and things that they can do on that side so when when you take a look at the blood work cortisol is usually high at the same time as reproductive hormones are low right you know whenever whenever we look at our blood analyses of our own individuals, the most common factors we see is an individual will have high cortisol, but they'll also have low DHEA and they'll have low testosterone, all right? Those are the most common culprits we see in so many of the individuals that we work with who have low energy levels, who have low libido, who have all of these symptoms of that stress. There are, of course, straight up things that we can do, such as utilizing supplements and

everything else, but it's the holistic practices that are going to be the most beneficial. And the first thing I'll say, besides the obvious exercise, weight loss, and everything else, take account of the things that you are doing throughout the day that are stimulating you because there are so many things that we do that we're unaware of that's actually driving up that stress and so and the biggest one that i'm going to show and the audience can't see me do this is holding up my phone all right and so and we know that every time you pick up your phone for a notification, they've done this research shows a little bit of secretion of androgen, androgenergic hormones,

all right, or catecholamines released into the bloodstream. All right. And so this is why I'm big on this when it comes to working with my students, because just having your phone in the vicinity, even if you're not paying attention to it, if you're, you know, let's say you're focused on a tab on your computer and you're trying to work or trying to write a podcast script or write a strength training program, just by having your phone in your vicinity, your brain is constituting 15 to 20% of its energy towards just thinking about it subconsciously. Every time you get a notification, they see a rise in catecholamines. So you are literally stressing yourself out every time you're getting a notification on your phone. All right. In addition to that, when you, the reason why we

tell people to start breaking up their meetings throughout the day with breath work is because when you go from meeting to zoom meeting, to in-person meeting, to business call that does the same thing. All right. It's that constant stimulation over and over and over and over again. Then what are you doing? Oh, well, you're going for a walk and you're doing high intensity exercise thinking that that's going to help you, but it's just compounding on each other. More and more sources of stress constantly. Sometimes even listening to music on your walks will do the same thing. It's still stimulating you. So you have to take an audit of yourself of how many sources of stimuli do you truly have that's putting all of this onto the system that you need to pull back in order for

the things like low intensity exercise, meditation, and eating better to actually help you in the long run in helping your autonomic nervous system get back to balance. Because you can do all these great things, but if your nervous system is still highly stressed out and you're still in chronic chronic fight or flight that's still going to drive up cortisol all right consistently and so you have to just be really really aware of that i've just at at my work you know i'm the head of sports science at rise and like uh indoor sports and i've had to like discuss with you know the upper you know upper management about certain days of the week where i'm doing deep thought you know deep work uh i can't be at the beck and call because it will totally get me out of that you know mindset i need to like create

something new so if i'm like trying to create a new program or i'm trying to create or write a book and the minute i i answer a text message it's just like my brain is gone it's like i can't focus and so but they've agreed so we had to come to terms on i'll answer their stuff before and then i'll answer it after but in the middle like don't get mad if i don't answer or i'll never be able to do these things or they're asking so i feel like setting up some good boundaries you know with your work it could be a really good thing to to help with this because if you're just constantly getting you know text a call you know an email i mean my god there it's all around us. People are like, well, I messaged you on Instagram and I messaged you on the messenger, Facebook messenger and text. I'm like, you can't do anything of any value like that.

1,000%. And Travis, I'm glad you brought that up because this is a problem with my specific populations that I work with, especially now the younger children and even college age students. What is the biggest problem that they complain about? And this is stuff that I've heard our own clients say as well. I can't focus. And I'm like, well, why can't you focus? And they're like, tell me about your day. And they start their day with doing just that, utilizing their phones. And so you end up going down this path where, because they talk about this, when you start your day, as soon as you wake up by rolling over and picking up your phone and you scroll instantly, not only are you setting your

new baseline level of dopamine even higher than that, so even to feel motivated, you need to get more sources of dopamine. Think about that from now a stress perspective that we're talking about with heart rate variability. Now you're doing even more and more and more things to try and get to that point to where you feel good, but you're doing all these things that are also stressing you out and making you more ADHD-like. So then what happens when you go to work? What happens when you go to school? Well, now you're less focused. You're going to continue to seek those sources of dopamine, which are also stimulating you at the same time. And as a result, driving your stress higher and

higher and higher and making it unlikely for you to focus. Because we also know when you are more fight or flight, it is much harder for you to have access to your executive function control centers. So then you're less likely to think logically, you're less likely to have volitional control or feel motivated to make good choices towards physical activity, towards staying motivated, towards being breath work and doing the things you know are going to be healthy for you. So now, cognitively speaking, you are less likely to make those better choices. You're going to be more stressed out. And it all culminates in this big driving force to higher cortisol, lower HRV, lots of stress on the system, carry that through the rest of the day. Now, it's going to affect your sleep,

creates this chronic cycle, and it starts all over again, day after day after day. I would love to know your thoughts as a professor. Because we, when I was in school, we never brought computers to the class. There was no iPad. There was no, I guess there were phones, but they weren't as capable of doing all the magic that they do to our brains and emotions and everything now. And like that, that, that like hamster wheel that every everybody's on. Have you noticed, do you have like breaks that you're putting into class? I remember Galpin telling me one day that he has like a phone break where it's like, everybody go check social media.

Like go, it's like, go take your hit of crack in the middle of the class. It's programmed in. And then we'll all come back, put your phones away. Let's pay attention again. Because I had a hard time paying attention when there wasn't a computer, much less a computer now that the teacher can't see.

And you're just sitting there typing away. And I would never have paid attention. It would have been impossible. That is the most brilliant strategy that I'm stealing from Galpin right now, because it's outstanding in the most negative way possible of when I roll into my classroom, how many of my students are getting into their phones, utilizing computers to do something they shouldn't be. I caught some students of mine watching the NASCAR race during a group activity the other day. I'm like, what the hell are you doing? Turn this off. I found another one on Amazon. I'm like, this is not okay to be doing that class. Now,

I take a different approach. I am not your standard lecturer because I don't think that's an effective way to teach. I am a flipped classroom teacher where in my programs for each and every lecture, every five minutes we're stopping and we're either reflecting or having some sort of engagement activity. I actually learned this when during COVID, when I worked for Bryan University and we had synchronous online teaching and we were forced to come up with these strategies that kept people online engaged at all times. So my lectures were never just talk straight for 90 minutes. They were talk for five minutes, stop, talk for another five minutes, stop, talk for five minutes, group activity. And so, and it keeps that attention the similar way that a phone would, but that actually, but they still do it. They will still be on their phones. They will still

be checking them even while they're having a conversation with me and answering a question. And I'm like, dude, WTF? Get off your phone. You're looking straight in my eyes right now. What are you doing? And so I think that that might actually be, A, I just need to be more stringent and have boundaries and just be a little bit more dominant in the classroom.

But I think that's also a great strategy from Galpin as far as let's have a designated time that you know you're going to be on your phone because I'm taking them away from you when you enter. Because it's taking away from their abilities to focus and it shows in their grades when they're lethargic, they don't care, they're not getting the grades that they need to and then coming to me later saying, how can I do this? How can I make this up? Put your phone away and pay attention in class and maybe you'll get i wouldn't have done well in your class i may have been for a grade one day senior year only yo how do you handle phone use in your own life you just like schedule a few times to check social media throughout the day have you ever seen somebody that just has notifications turned on like my mom that's just notifications it's like 37 people just played

wordle with you and i'm like mom what kind of crack are you smoking here stop this has got to go like the weather changes and it's like ding ding ding oh my god i'm like mom this is awful what do you have? It's brutal. I feel like it should be common knowledge to just turn off basically all notifications. I feel like I have none because I've turned off social media and email.

But then you realize it's like, it's still text messages. There's still like the calendar notifications. It's like, even when you dump everything, you still have many of them coming at you and it's hard it's hard to escape the only thing i leave on is texts which is you get plenty of those that's all i need yeah slack because i just anything that happens with the business i'm like i need to know now i need to know now so something that i've been telling people to do

is that first hour of the day is crucial. Make that hour where you have no phone because then that's when you're most susceptible to being able to technically program yourself as it were on how you're going to tackle that day. That's the time where you do all the human stuff. You get your light exposure, you get your mind work in, you connect with loved ones and you exercise. Do that first thing. So that way, that's the first thing that gets in your head. Then something that I've started teaching people is the domino habits. And so the domino habits is effective because you should only have four alarms that go off throughout the day, not including sleep and waking up. And it should be whatever can strive your focus away from

whatever could be taking your focus away and getting you back on track. And so this came from a paper that I read that looked at why human beings are so obsessed with New Year's resolutions and why they can't just apply that during the day itself. And so you can take that habit, as it were, or that philosophy and say, what if you were to give yourself four quarters a day like you do in football and make each of those quarters similar to a New Year's Day? Have that alarm go off that reminds you, oh, crap, I've been off my game. Let's change direction and change your state. And so you can utilize that alarm to have a domino habit. And choose what works best for you. Is it mindset? Maybe you need to do

five minutes of breath work four times a day to shift your focus. This is stuff like Tom Bilyeu and these big guys do to help keep themselves on point throughout their day. And it's a great thing to use. I personally use walking because walking is one of the best things you can do to downrate your amygdala, which is the emotional center of your brain. If you're someone who's really stressed out, high anxious type of person, and you have a hard time being able to be receptive to different ways of thinking sometimes throughout the day, then go for a walk. You'll be more receptive to thinking more clearly, and you'll actually give your body a shot to being receptive to that breath work and getting

yourself out of whatever state you're in so you can go and conquer the rest of your day. And so I've been setting it up that way. And you just set it up three or four times a day, and it can be really, really helpful in individuals who tend to struggle with those types of issues throughout the day. So domino habits. I found a really ineffective way is to hop on Twitter right away. Just see what's going on in the world. Maybe get some like World War III in your life. Maybe a nuclear war.

Like just some like really high level politics. Like great way to get that cortisol spiked in the morning. And all you're doing is just chasing it for the rest of the day. Don't follow any of that advice. No, not at all. Chris, so what would you, with the phone, when do you check your phone? How often? So I actually, and you know, iPhones, you can do this.

I have it set to where at a certain hours, it'll screen and block off all notifications. And you can actually go in and set certain rules. So only certain people can text you. So for example, I have mine built into where I called it focus mode. So it'll have no Slack notifications, no WhatsApp notifications, no emails, no nothing. The only person that can get through is my fiance and my mom and dad. That's it. Those are the only three people who can get through that wall. You can set that on your iPhone. So when I get to school at the university, I have to put my phone in a drawer in my podcast studio that's in the second room of my office. So it's out of sight, out of mind. And then I only allow myself to check it right before I go into class after I've finished prepping for a couple hours or I had a rapid

meeting or whatever it is that I had to do. And then I wouldn't grab it again. I don't take it with me into class because I know that if I, it'll distract me. If I look down and I see Kelly text me or something in the middle of my presentation, it's going to distract me. So I leave it inside locked up in my room. Then when I come back after class, then I'll check it again. So I kind of make it coincide with those domino habit alarms throughout the day. So that way I know then, hey, I'm answering these notifications on my schedule, not them taking away from me. Because as soon as that happens, I do go down that path where I'm like, oh crap, well, I need to keep checking this. And then all of a sudden I've lost the whole day. And then you'll look at the time because you can

look at the metrics on how much time you spend on it. That's enough to scare the hell out of you to where you're like, I spent how much time on Twitter or Instagram or whatever today no kidding i need to get my life back so how many so like four times a day kind of like the four i try to make it no more than three or four times a day and my days were always 10 times more productive when i approach it that way absolutely totally agree i like and less stressed. Yeah, absolutely. And probably higher HIV. Right? I probably saw this on the show more than once now, but I put Instagram on my old phone.

When I got a new phone, I didn't transfer it over to my new phone. That way I could go intentionally check it whenever I felt like, whenever I feel like it, which I figured would be like once or twice a day, I would just go to my old phone and pick it up and it didn't turn out like that at all now it's like fuck i forgot i have instagram i have to go like check my messages after a week which is like it like it like took it too far now i'm like damn should i like put this on my phone like

one or two days a week so i can like actually write some posts and uh upload you know stories and whatnot because like it's it's now to the point where i've actually like exited the instagram game too much and i need to like rein it back in so if you've really gone too far and you have a second phone you're getting a new phone try that and you'll you'll get a clean break for a little while and then you can cycle back into it yeah have a healthy relationship the longer i go the more i just want to go back in time. It's like reading a real book, not not having being able to drive somewhere without needing it. That's the strangest thing in my house, because all of us would have much different lives if we didn't have it. But like the day it's like crushes in other areas. It's like, well, I think one of the things I learned, Doug, when you guys were doing those masterminds is like bundling things.

And so that's what I've gone back to. So like I bundle, like if I'm going to do articles, I'll try to write a bunch in a day or two. Or if I'm going to do Instagram, do it for the next three or four days. I mean, that was of all the things I learned and all the masterminds I've ever been to, that was by far the thing that helped me the most with productivity and with mindset and stress levels.

Bundle it and then be done. Yeah. Chris Perry, where can the people find you? And then talk about the seminar. What are you going to be talking about? Are you 100% locked in or you got too many things going on? I'm locked in. I will be there.

I'll put you on the spot right here. See? I will be there. I told Travis I'll be there. You got to figure out how to close, man. Just put him right on the spot, right on the show. Yes. I'm so happy about him being there.

I will be at Travis's event. That's awesome. And I'll be coming right after my presentation at ACSM.. I will be at Travis's event. That's awesome. And I'll be coming right after my presentation at ACSM. So it'll be really, really cool. And I'll be able to talk about that. But people can find me at Instagram hashtag DrCPerry001. And then I'm also the host of our Kicking at the E-Way podcast, an evolved athlete podcast as well.

So you can find me all over Instagram. Twitter is the same exact handle there. But you can also find me on Rapid Co coaching and just making a difference in people's lives every day. There he is. Coach Travis Bash. I just want to say really quick, like I called Andy's rise to fame on the day I met him at Chris Moore's wake. When I met Andy, I told my wife, oh my God, the minute the world knows this guy is going to be explosive. I'm saying the same thing about this guy, Chris, is like he's the next. I think he is the next big thing in science.

So, you know, just now I have it on record. So when he gets super famous, I will have said it. Anyway, you go to Masterly dot com to get our e-books and all that. Or you can read all of my articles on, um, Jim aware.com. Fantastic. Doug Larson. How do I follow that? I think Chris is pretty cool too. Yeah. You remember when master, when he first met me out in San Diego and he was like that Anders guy sure is

going to be slightly above average. I'm calling it today. The most mediocre man on the planet, for sure. The world will soon know. The guy who's pretty good at a lot of things. I'd like to keep him around for a while. He may potentially provide some value of average levels one day.

You were made for CrossFit. Kind of good at a lot of things. Perfect. Yeah. Which makes him awesome at that. that's right yeah he whipped my body across there you go uh right on chris dude love having you at rapid coaching our clients and i appreciate you coming on the show you crushed as always so i appreciate you being here i'm on instagram douglas e larson and i am anders varner at anders varner we We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. And make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com.

That's where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are walking through a lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can go access that report over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we will see you guys next week.