Barbell Shrugged - Neuro Athletics: The Intersection of Neuroscience and Performance w/ Louisa Nicola, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson #704

Episode Date: July 19, 2023

Louisa leverages her experience as a neurophysiologist and professional triathlete to not only teach but inspire your audience to perform like an athlete. By using science-driven data from EEG scans, labs tests and cognitive assessments, Louisa has a first class ticket inside the brain of elite NBA, MLB and NFL stars as well as Wall Street’s biggest Hedge funds and portfolio managers. 9 years ago, Louisa was training to go to the Olympics (representing Australia in the triathlon), when she was hit by a car and suffered seemingly insurmountable injuries. Desperate to accelerate her recovery, Louisa integrated brain training into her physiology regime and was able to make a near-miraculous recovery to not only go to the Auckland World Championship series, but place 13th in the triathlon.  Louisa has since helped so many elite performers become the top 1% in their field by leveraging neuroscience, exercise physiology, and biomedical services. Louisa has successfully given her signature talk “Perform like an athlete” to the head of sales at IBM, Salesforce and Google, etc. Louisa graduated from the University of Sydney medical school with a master of medicine in neurophysiology and is currently completing her doctorate under the guidance of Dr Tommy Wood at UW, studying the effects of resistance exercise on the brain. She is on the scientific advisory board of Tonal, Klora and Momentous. Louisa Nicola on Instagram Work with Louisa Nicola Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrugged, we are hanging out with Louisa Nicola. We're going to be talking about neuroathletics, which is the intersection of neuroscience and performance. If you guys have never heard of Louisa, she works with very high-performing human beings, helping them eke out the last 1% of brain power that allows them to excel at their sports and their jobs, combining and leveraging neuroscience, exercise, phys, and biomedical services so that she can take them to the top of their game. As always, you can head over to rapidhealthreport.com. health optimization receives once they get all their labs and lifestyle tracking and questionnaires, performance metrics done, and you can get a little sneak peek at what you would receive being a part of rapid health optimization. You can head over to rapidhealthreport.com.

You can check that out over there. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Marble Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Louisa, Nicola. Hey, it is so awesome having you on here. We're going to talk all about brain health and performance today. What's really cool is we've gotten a little bit of some behind the scenes working with you inside Rapid Health Optimization. Having you on the show, it's beautiful now. At the highest level though, how do we, when you think about brain health and performance, is there actually a separation between health and performance or are those two so closely related that they all kind of merge into one world here?

Yeah, really great question. So I love to, it's all one. We can separate the two and just say, well, what does it mean to perform at your peak? But I truly believe that everybody's peak is different. But if you really want to perform at your peak, you do have to be in a health optimized state. You do have to be healthy, right? Yeah. When did you start to get into brain health as your specialty? So, oh gosh, that dates back to many years. So I did an undergraduate degree in exercise physiology, and I was also a triathlete. I love putting that out there because I work with

elite sport. And I love to tell people that I was also training at an elite level. I was racing for Australia in three sports triathlete. I love to put that in there. So that's when I became obsessed with health, performance, physiology. And then I went on and studied medicine and went into, I would say brain health, but I went into clinical neurophysiology and that's where I was looking at a lot of brains. Okay. So neurophysiology, you generally go and see one of these people when you have maybe nerve damage, you'll get an EMG, for example, or a nerve conduction study. I was doing a lot of brain scans. So we use EEGs. And so I was testing thousands of brains and poor performing brains. Okay. Mainly these people who

have either had epilepsy or they have been suspected to have early onset Alzheimer's disease. And I became obsessed with this tool, this EEG, electroencephalography, that's what it's called. And I became obsessed with it because it tests the functionality of the brain. And I was thinking back then, I'm like, well, why can't we be testing healthy subjects just to see how well their brain is performing? So that's pretty much how I got into the what I'm doing now, which is neuroathletics. It's literally the intersection of neurology and performance. Yeah. How every time I see somebody doing not neurological testing, I always look at them like, what are they looking for? Like when you're doing like lights and catching balls and asking questions and trying to jog people's memory, what are like some of the just big buckets that make up neurological health? Because I always want to

know like, what happens if I catch the ball? Does that mean like the right side of my brain is working right? Like I never know how the tests link to what's actually going on with brain health. Yeah. Okay. So this is a broad topic, but for everybody just to understand, I'm going to break it down into two fundamental processes. We've got these structural components of the brain. Okay. so your brain has four lobes and then you've got this cerebellum which is also the mini brain it sits behind the brain stem and i i call that the structural aspects of the brain and we can talk about that because the structural aspects as we get older generally at around 30 30 years old our brain begins to atrophy so we do get

changes in the gray matter of our brain. So it's structure, but then we've got the functionality of the brain. And that's how the brain is functioning because every single lobe of the brain is responsible for something different. You've got the temporal lobes here, your auditory processing, you've got the occipital lobe at the back, which is auditory processing. Yes, temporal lobe. And then you've got the occipital lobe at the back, which is, sorry, auditory processing. Yes, temporal lobe. And then you've got visual processing. Then you've got the frontal lobe, which is your cognition. And then obviously cerebellum, which is more so responsible for coordination and movement.

So that's the functioning of the brain. And we can test for both. And I love that. And now you mentioned, you know, if I'm catching a ball or if I'm reacting or if I'm looking at lights, you're generally testing the functionality of the brain. How well can you process visual stimulus from coming in? You know, how well can you hear something? How well can you balance on one leg? This is all the functioning of the brain. Now, then it comes down to how fast can you do it and can we

speed up that process? So can we speed up your reaction time or your visual acuity? It turns out that we can. So what you're seeing maybe on Instagram is people just generally working with hand-eye coordination, reaction time, information processing speed. I love that. I use that in my practice. But I use that more as a testing modality and a training modality. But there's so many different things that we can touch on there. So is that really the biggest selling point then for athletes is you promise an improvement in reaction time and then they go, oh, yeah, that makes sense for me.

Like I would be a better athlete if I can improve reaction time is that typically what uh gets people to make the leap and do this type of testing well it's interesting because we generally work with ball players and i mean you would baseball if you look at baseball okay oh just all the balls gotcha well but mainly small ball sports because actually in baseball, especially like major league baseball, you'll see that they have the highest, these players have the highest recording visual acuity. And it makes sense, right? Because they need to be able to see a ball traveling at whatever speed that those balls are traveling

at from a very far distance. And that's what makes them who they are. So we can speed that up. So for example, with an EEG, which is what we use at NeuroAthletics, when we scan a brain, we're actually scanning the optic nerve and we're looking.

And so obviously the optic nerve is one of the 12 cranial nerves that connects your eye to your brain. And we're generally seeing how fast are you transmitting information along that nerve? And so, yeah, if I say to a ball player, we can get that, you know, 0.2 seconds faster, that could mean the difference between $100 million and maybe $20 million. So they're generally like, okay, Louise, I'll sign up for you. Tennis, for example,

we've got some of the best tennis players, we're doing the same thing, but we're also working on reaction time because they may be scanning the entire court. They also need to be reacting. They've got hand-eye coordination. They're athletes i think dal and federer are like two of the best athletes that we have yeah yeah um is there like a correlation between uh the memory side the reaction time like how does the whole not the system of the brain but when it comes to training these things i would imagine the more reps you have, the better memory you have for doing these, which improves the reaction time. And anything, I assume that, and I may be wrong in this assumption, but they're not really like siloed. Like here is reaction time.

These are improving memories. How do they play together? Do they play together? Do they play together? When you're doing these testings, how does, how do each of those pieces really, you know, combine together to make a healthier, like neurological function? Yeah. Well, first of all, there's a really big myth out there. You know, people saying we only use 10% of our brain. We use a hundred. the brain 100% of the time. If you were using 10%, you'd probably be in the hospital right now. Something would really be wrong. So we use 100% of our brain 100% of the time. And yes, it's like a neural network. It's like this. Imagine a bustling city like New York City. There's over

87 billion neurons and each neuron has around 30,000 connections. So they're all connecting with one another. So it's not as if like, okay, I'm just going to turn on memory and then that's it. No, memory encompasses many different things. And likewise, when you see a ball coming to you, right, you have to perceive what that ball is. So you generally have to use the front part of your brain, the frontal lobe, okay, because you have to tell your brain, which is the frontal lobe I like to say to everybody, it's the CEO of the brain.

You've got the prefrontal cortex, which houses our cognitive functions. So it has to say, say okay this is a ball and then it transmits information back into the occipital cortex the occipital cortex then transmits information up into the back up into the frontal lobe so you have to in the primary motor cortex to then you know say throw the ball or catch the ball so there's so many different areas of your brain working simultaneously at the same time. So it's not about that. It's about how can we get perfect movement or perfect judgment with perfect reaction time, with perfect processing speed, with perfect execution.

That's what we want. Shark family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization on programs for optimizing health.

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

has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and 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 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. Perfect processing speed with perfect execution execution that's what we want yeah i love that because how are you talking about oh sorry well when you talk about uh ball sports baseball has

to be like the craziest thing for you to test this on right like somebody's seeing 103 mile an hour fastball there is no reaction time the ball is already behind you so you get this like insanely i watched the whole documentary on just fastballs because I'm kind of crazy about things like this. Like it's, it's wild to me. So how, um, when, when, when you take somebody that's throwing that hard and you have milliseconds between it leaving their arm and being past you already, um, is that, is that kind of like the highest level of hand-eye coordination, reaction time, all combined into one event? Yeah. And there is so... People put down baseball players saying all they have to do is just swing a bat. My God, the amount of mental

energy it requires to swing that bat at the right time and hit it as hard as they do. Oh my God, it is a workout in itself. So yeah, that's what we're generally testing. We're generally testing how far away can we get you to see the ball? You know, we hear 20-20 vision, right? A lot of people want to get 20 over 10. The highest recording visual acuity in baseball

was 20 over eight. And so that's what we're trying to get our players. So because if they can see a 20 over 8, therefore they have more ability, milliseconds we're talking, to move their body and the bat at the precise time. And then there's a lot of physics involved too because it's a placement of the bat as well when it comes to the ball. So yeah, it comes to the ball so it's yeah it's it's phenomenal say you're say you're a baseball player you've been in the league for you know 10 years you're

starting to get on the older side maybe in the late 30s kind of the end of your career and you're you're just not as fast and athletic as you used to be just you're just getting older how do you know if it's purely like a a more physical musculoskeletal thing you're just not as explosive as fast as you used to be versus specifically it's like a neurocognculoskeletal thing. You're just not as explosive as fast as you used to be versus specifically, it's like a neurocognitive issue where it's a reaction time issue where it's a brain issue as opposed to a muscle issue. How would you differentiate and know to come to you versus go to a strength coach or whoever else you could go to? Yeah, that's so great that you said that, Doug, because that answers,

you're generally asking this question, which I get asked often, how do we know if it's pathological or if it's just natural brain aging process? And that's why we do so much more than just doing a cognitive test. So we're doing blood tests. We're doing the VO2 max test. Sometimes we'll go in and get them to see a physician and get an MRI if suspected of anything else do a complete comprehensive patient history we look at medications we then do supplementation and nutrition so we take into consideration the entire human because what if they've been hit by a ball in the head were they concussed do we then need to go through a post-concussion protocol so you you have to look at every single field because like i said to you these guys are not 25 either you've got seasoned

athletes 40 years old okay if i tell you already the brain begins to atrophy at the age of 30 there's so many things that you need to take into consideration at that standpoint so we're doing everything just to make sure that it's not a just a neurocognitive issue then for example it could be just generally a sleep issue you know it's things happen as we get older there's a lot of them maybe they've got three kids a wife they're on and off planes they're just they're tired and this compounds over time and so we have maybe it's a sleep issue maybe it's a nutrition issue yeah yeah um you mentioned concussions i would love to know um the recovery on concussions um what are you what are you looking for in like testing um are there are there any broad protocols

that you could talk about uh for people that have suffered them? Yeah. So we stopped working with the NFL because I just couldn't bear to witness any more of their brain scans that showed that they should not be going on the field. 100% concussions. Everyone. Everyone. And it was hurting me to tell these players, no, you shouldn't go on the field. And then fighting back to me. And I'm like, no, you shouldn't go on the field and then fighting back to me.

And I'm like, well, I can't do my work. You know, you want a brain rehabilitation, but you're going to go out and get hit again. That's not going to help me. So I just decided to not work with the NFL anymore. And generally because most of these players are getting hit. And I say they're walking themselves into these neurodegenerative states. So just recently, before we got on the call, I posted a really nice study on the effects of creatine on depression. And it got me thinking about this other study that was done on college footballers, where they got them to supplement with 20 grams of creatine per day, which is a high amount. However, they were testing the benefits of creatine per day, which is a high amount. However, they were testing the benefits of creatine.

So when you are concussed, no matter at what velocity, but look, concussion really does come down to physics as well. Just because you get hit in the head doesn't mean you're concussed. It depends on the velocity at which you got hit, the impact at which you got hit, and that varies. But let's just say you got hit and you've got to go out for 10 days, okay, and you're going through the concussion protocol. Creatine is amazing. This study showed the effects of, I was going to say pre-gaming, but like, you know, dosing up on creatine before even getting hit. And it's been shown to be extremely

neuroprotective because when you get hit, you then mess with all the metabolites, A, in your head. And you're also messing with cell energy metabolism, which is generally what creatine is. It's helping with the cell energy metabolism with ATP. So these patients who were going with these boys who were going in to a game, basically safeguarding themselves with creatine, which was really good. The second thing that, basically safeguarding themselves with creatine, which was really good.

The second thing that they were safeguarding themselves with was EPA, DHA. That's another thing that I think is really warranted to speak about if anybody's going out and playing football. High doses of EPA and DHA, I think they were supplementing with around five grams to basically safeguard themselves from getting concussed. So that's pregame. But what about postgame?

Like, what are we looking at? Okay, we're looking at many things. A, sleep gets immensely disrupted when you have a concussion. So being able to get sleep back on track, I believe, is probably one of the most foundational things and fundamental things you should be doing if you're trying to heal from any type of brain trauma. Second to that,

there's been the most important phase of a concussion is in the 24 to 72 hours after getting hit. There's many things you can do. Obviously sleep is one. There's been experiments with ice, seeing how these players can cool themselves down because your brain heats up when you've been concussing. If they can dunk their head in a bucket of ice to see if they can cool it down. The third thing is high-fat diet. one of the most famous studies that was done on the 72 hour framework and nutrition was done with

post-concussive insults and having a high fat diet in the form of ketones straight after a concussion yeah that's interesting yeah actually i actually just saw you um on um what's the what's the acronym for that company that makes the ketones ketoneetone IQ or whatever? HVMN, yeah. Yeah, I was actually on their website a second ago and saw that you were on there because we're about to interview that guy as well. Are you – Michael. You're very ketone friendly then? Yeah, look.

Interviewing guy named Latt. Latt, yeah. He's wonderful. Ketones are great i think for me i was taking it more so for the focus endurance because i felt as though i was getting sustainable energy throughout the day which i need but it was also doing something that i desperately need which it was curbing my appetite so i'm like this is great if you can curb my appetite that's just that's a win for me yeah yeah it just cuts down your cravings like you get a lot of cravings

and it helps them just not show up for you yeah it just curbed my appetite it felt as though i didn't really need to go and you know i get sugar craving i didn't need to go and get sugar cravings but no it it also serves a massive benefit if you're fasting as well so yeah for sure um you know a second ago um it made me think about concussions related to hormones. I've heard in the past that if you have a history of concussions, then that can depress sex hormones, testosterone specifically. A, is that true? And what's the mechanism behind that if it is true? I'm guessing it would be true. It's not my area of expertise, this hormone route. I try and stay away from it.

But look, post-concussion, if you're not, this is the reason why I'm not working in NFL. If you are not healing properly, it can actually have so many more effects than just hormonal. It can also be implicated in, like I said, early onset Alzheimerzheimer's disease messing with the the key biomarkers which is tau proteins so that's another thing okay um i um with with all the sorry with all the recommendations you just gave with that would those things also

contribute to the um to attenuating the progression of the decrease in brain volume or whatever you were suggesting starts at age 30? Okay. So there's many theories around the brain aging process. One is that we just lose neurons as we get older, just due to the natural brain aging process. One is that we have a lower efficacy of dopamine receptors. So the amount of dopamine that gets released, it tends to just fall off as we get older. If some of the things I just said can help prevent that, yes. So generally speaking, the top three things, in my opinion, that can help slow the progression of the brain aging process is sleep, proper nutrition, and exercise. And we can go into how the mechanism of all three of those,

if you like, and we can start with exercise because I know you've got a barbell, so what is that squat rack behind you, a barbell set behind you. So we can start there if you like. Let's do it. Okay. So resistance training, aerobic physical activity, and neuroathletics. Okay. These are the three components that we'll speak about.

Let's first talk about aerobic training because many people know it, and it's the first studies that were done on brain health. So aerobic physical activity, generally speaking around, I would say 45 minutes of running, for example, at 65% of your maximum heart rate is doing enormous benefits of the brain. So remember how I said, we've got our temporal lobes just here behind our ear? Deep within those is a structure called the hippocampus. It's a seahorse-shaped structure. We've got two because we've got two lobes. Within that seahorse-shaped structure, we have all of these little neurons, okay? And they're beautiful, but they atrophy as we get older. And that is the first thing to go in neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer's disease, dementia, and just as we age. And this

area is responsible for memory formation, learning, memory consolidation, et cetera. When we do aerobic physical activity, what we are doing, they studied this on rats, what they are doing is they produce a massive amount, humans do too, of a protein called BDNF, brain-derived neurotropic factor. So it's a growth factor for the brain. And what they found in these mice models were once they got them to wheel run, and they'll actually get them to tread water as well they produced massive amounts of this particular molecule and that was amazing because what it

does is it goes into the hippocampus and it helps with the proliferation of new neurons so those neurons inside there as they're dying off you can grow new ones just through aerobic physical activity so you're preserving the memory functions of the brain, first and foremost, not just that you're growing the volume of the hippocampus. So you're not just growing the little things inside, you're growing the volume. So that's really interesting. Just on that, if we're speaking evolutionarily, I had a thought and hear me out on this. This is not a scientific thought, but this is just what I believe. These are my favorite ones.

Okay. Why would we need this? Why would we grow new neurons in the memory centers of our brain? Because we actually can't grow neurons anywhere else. Adult neurogenesis doesn't exist. So why did mother nature produce this effect? I believe it's because prehistorically, remember, you'd go out and you'd have to go and hunt for your food. You'd also have to be aware of the tigers. I think that prehistorically, Mother Nature did this because you would have to remember where the tiger was. So you'd see the tiger and you'd immediately start running. When you start running, you're helping with the memory of the tiger was

there. Don't go back there, but also the food was there. Get that food. So that's my take on why I think that that occurs. But for everyone listening, I just want you to think about fertilizer because that's what excess that's what bdnf is there's there's massive pharma companies now that are trying to replicate bdnf as an injection because if you get bdnf and just put it on a brain cell it can actually grow those neurons so wouldn't that be amazing if we could get it pharmacologically, but we can't. Okay. So you need to be doing it through aerobic activity. Fast forward, after we found that out in science, we now went on to study and we scientists went on to study the effects of resistance training on the brain. This is what I'm currently studying right now. And oh my God, there's so many more benefits.

First of all, when we're doing any type of resistance training, okay, let's just imagine a bicep curl. We are contracting our muscles. During that contraction phase, more molecules are spitting out through the muscle cells. These molecules are called myokines, so muscle-based proteins, and there's around 1,000 of them. So they get released, and when they get released, they cross the blood-brain barrier. They can go into the blood, travel up to the brain. Some of them can cross the blood-brain barrier

and have an effect on different areas of the brain. It can have an effect on the structural parts of the brain and they can have an effect on the functionality of the brain. So for example, you've got irisin. And irisin, it was named after a Greek god, Iris. And Iris was a messenger to the gods. And that's what this is. Myokines are messenger molecules. So they go in and basically they help with BDNF. So irisin gets released and it says to BDNF, hey, I'm here, BDNF, you need to be produced even more. So it helps BDNF. It goes into the frontal lobe of the brain and helps executive functions such as mood, processing speed, attention, focus, vigilance.

It helps with that. And not just that, we now know through these two methods, resistance training and aerobic, we now can pretty much say that 80% of brain gray matter is modifiable by exercise. 80%. Wow. Yeah. And then we've got neuroathletics. It's neurocognitive training, but this is what we focus on and excel in. And this is taking in consideration hand-eye coordination, reaction time, speed, all of the things that we were speaking about before. And this is a lost art, if you will, because every area of the brain is accounted for. And it has a motto, use me or lose me. The areas of the brain that you don't use, it will atrophy, just like your muscles. And as we get older, we stop doing certain things

like we stop playing with a tennis ball. We stop gripping things. We stop climbing trees. We stop doing these fun things that we used to do when we were kids. And so that's what neuroathletics is. It's basically taking into consideration all of your neurocognition

and how can we build that up and train it. So if you're already an athlete and you're already participating in any reaction-based sport on a regular basis, you already play baseball and you're doing it every day and you're batting practice and whatever else, you're at jujitsu, you're reacting to your opponent, you have many considerations about how to react and you got to be able to do it quickly, et cetera, et cetera. How is the training that you would give to somebody the same and or different than someone who's already doing something many hours a day that require very quick reaction time? Such as what?

Well, if you're a baseball player and you're hitting you're taking batting practice you are all day long or not all day long for a period of time each day um experiencing something where you have to react quickly and you would think that you are training your reaction time just in the real world by just as a function of your normal practice um what what kind of things do you guys do that could improve reaction time beyond simply just practicing the task itself? Yeah, I love that question because most coaches used to say to me, Louisa, everything you do, when I speak to the coaches, everything you do has to be mimicking a real life situation. And then they used to say, well, how does, you know, how does my baseball player, if he's just, you know, throwing a ball to the wall,

how is that mimicking real life situations? You have to imagine you have a base, just like you're, you know, when you, when you say zone two training, you're building the base, but then the, the VO two max sessions are building the peak of the pyramid, you need a base for hitting that ball. Now reaction time, just one hit, you know, that linear process, that's not all that your brain is thinking about. You're just going down one highway. We want you to build the base.

I want you to go down 50 or 60 different highways and you can make the bat and the catch your one highway that you're going to that's going to be your peak but the base we need like 20 set points and you need to become so focused on each of those set points to build a huge base that's how i describe it does that does that make sense because reaction time isn't just one thing you know it's a stimulus so we need to be working on many different stimuli okay um just so the audience has a better idea of of uh what that looks like what are some examples of the type of

training you would do with a baseball player to improve uh their you know their on base percentage or whatever they're trying to get better at they're trying to have a better batting average by being more accurate with their with their reaction time and hitting the ball and getting on base what types of things would you do with a baseball player that would improve their at-bat? Well, let's talk about how we would test vision. So we've got 20 different testing parameters for vision. Okay. And once we test those, we'll get a baseline measurement of where they're at, and then we'll start training them. So we start using, we're using strobe goggles right now. So let's just say we look at their vision and we find out that the upper white, just cut your eye into fours, the upper

right quadrant is not as strong as the rest of the eye, but we need it to be there. So what we'll do is we, with our strobe goggles, we can split them into halves or we can split them into quads. So we can black out that quadrant, the one that's not working well already. And we can get him hitting the ball and just seeing his eye, you know, complete visual acuity just with every other part of his eye. Or we can reverse it. We can get the left eye open. We can get him to see fully visually with that eye and then black out all other three quadrants of his right eye and just leave the upper right quadrant for him to see. Therefore, we're strengthening that quadrant of his eyesight. So once we do that, we're getting with the strobe goggles on.

For example, we'll get him to hit the ball over and over and over again until he's accurately hitting it with less eyesight. Yeah. Yeah, that's a fantastic example. Yeah, that's just like one of the 50 different things that we do. But from a baseline, you know, just from a real like easy perspective, which you guys got to witness this, anyone can work on this. Just get a tennis ball and start throwing the ball to the wall. I always say overhand grip to start with.

Throw the ball to the wall. See if you can make it to a minute. Make it two minutes and then lift one leg up off the ground and start hitting the ball because we know that the left side of the brain controls the right side of the body right side of the brain controls the left side of the body so you can simultaneously use both sides contralaterally by lifting one leg up and just throwing the ball to the wall a really easy way to train visual acuity is I go to CVS and I get these eye patches that are used for if you've got an eye infection or something. They're really fun. They're like $4, really inexpensive. Just put it on. You've immediately blacked out 50% of your vision

and then just start throwing the ball to the wall you'll see like oh my god you can start strengthening your your entire visual system just by doing that yeah i have many questions about the visual system my daughter has glasses and it was like i immediately started seeing things but we'll stick to the brain um When with a lot of the kind of like emerging conversation being about degenerative issues, Alzheimer's, dementia, things like that. Where are some like precautionary things or protocols that people can start to put into place to push that out as long as possible. Yeah. I love talking about this.

Can I just touch on one thing before I touch on this? Scouts are actually going out. This is related to your daughter. So visual acuity, because you need it for these sports. Scouts are now going out and they're looking at kids and figuring out will they be able to make Major League Baseball when they get older. And the first thing they look at is eyesight. So if your kid already has glasses and he's like 10 years old,

you're generally not going to see him unless he's going to go through and get surgery, which a lot of them do, by the way. A lot of them have had corrective surgery even though they've got no issues they're generally not going to be the best ball players as they get older all right yeah i'm going to keep her in dance for a little bit longer she's not she's not she's not there yet i don't think she's going to be in the big leagues but we'll give it a shot no i actually, specifically to that, I've thought many times about like any meathead would try to do. How do I make the eye stronger without putting glasses on it and just saying, oh, this is where we're at. And now we're going to handicap the situation by putting glasses on you and saying that this is just where we stop. It really did get to a point where we like needed to do it. So I, three years later, I was like, I should

probably stop being a bad dad and let my kid be able to see. Um, but I also have heard many times that professional baseball players that do have, or golfers that do have 2020 vision will go and get the surgery to become 2010 so that they can have just that tiny little bit of an advantage um to being able to see the ball better yeah and there's also been nba players with nystagmus that go in and get um different corrective surgery as well but that's that's a bit insane um i mean they're only playing for like tens of millions of dollars. I would do it. I'm in. It's like a steroid for your eyes. Yeah, I would do it too. But no, this topic of Alzheimer's disease does need to be touched on.

So I mentioned that I studied the effects of resistance training on the brain, and this is to help starve off neurodegenerative diseases. But currently worldwide, we have an epidemic, in my opinion. There's 50 million people who currently have Alzheimer's disease. That number is said to triple by the year 2050. Unfortunately, two thirds of that population are women, for many reasons, hormonal and lifespan. So we don't have to touch on that. But if you look at the pathology of this,

why do we have 50 million people with Alzheimer's disease? And why is the number going to triple? And why is it going to be the collapse of our economic system? Why? Because there's around 30 genes involved in Alzheimer's disease, right? Only about three of those genes are chemotropes. So if you've got these three genes, you most likely will get dementia. I'm talking about the frontotemporal dementia,

the Bruce Willis, et cetera. But this Alzheimer's disease, these genes are risk genes. And out of that 50 million population, around 3% to 5% have the genes responsible for Alzheimer's disease. So the 95% are getting there through lifestyle factors. So we are pretty much at the mercy of this disease. We are basically saying, hey, if the disease exists, let's go and do it. And it scares me

because we don't have to. We can starve off Alzheimer's disease. We don't have to get it. Even if you've got the genes, even if you've got ApoE4, one or two of the genes still doesn't mean you're going to get Alzheimer's disease because there are so many people in Africa and Nigeria who have two copies of ApoE4 and they never get Alzheimer's disease. So we know that it's not a foregone conclusion that you're going to get it. So why are we getting it? Stress. Stress is a huge factor.

Whatever's good for the heart is good for the brain. So you've also got to look at lipids. You've got to look at your cholesterol, obviously ApoB, LDL particle. We need to have a look at lipids you got to look at your your cholesterol obviously apob ldl particle we need to have a look at those exercise are you exercising one of the best things you can do for your brain are you sleeping sleep is a drug for the brain it's the most underrated high performance tool that we have then studies now are coming out from harvard showing that that social relationships, romantic relationships help with long-term brain health, which I believe it's because of it's lowering inflammation and stress, et cetera.

But there's just, I could now point off 15 different modifiable risk factors for starving off Alzheimer's disease, but it probably wouldn't mean anything to anybody unless i talk about things that everyone knows which is work on your sleep and i know you guys are doing you know fantastic work you know testing people's sleep you guys have got like one of the best systems for testing sleep and you would know that sleep isn't just a process you don't just go to bed and just stay there for eight hours it's a you have to train for it eliminate bright light yeah have

blackout curtains don't eat an hour and a half before you go to sleep like get rid of your kids you can throw them out yeah three to five years you're just not you're just gonna be setting yourself up for sleep deprivation yeah um but these are the things that we're we're not doing and it's i just can't believe it i can't believe we have this epidemic are the things that we're, we're not doing. And it's, I just can't believe it. I can't believe we have this epidemic in the world. That's, it doesn't have to be. Yeah. We, we interviewed Dr. Tommy Wood and I would love to know if you incorporate some of these things into your practice from like language, music. I think there was a list and of course, the basic ones from sleep,

nutrition, exercise, specifically resistance training. But do you incorporate or have any additional kind of like research on the music, language side of things? Obviously, I think that one of the other ones was you talked about just being in relationships as you age. But do you implement? You've already said that you have some of them, but the music and language side of things was really interesting to me because I wouldn't expect that to have such an impact on brain health. Well, here, I'm filling a little bit of a gap there before we go down that question. Like one of the big parts about that was as long as it's new and novel and difficult that was really the big thing learning languages is new novel and difficult like learning instrument is new novel and difficult like it has to be challenging in order to have that protective

effect and those are just one example or two examples of many different ways you could challenge yourself so yeah what do you guys do on that on that side of things yeah so we do full cranial nerve testing so your cranial nerve testing. So your cranial nerves are just like the nerves that come out of your stomach. They come out of different areas of the brain. And there's 12 of them. And we test all of them. And one of them is language.

We test language, but we test smell. So we do a different smell test because we can pick up. Because smell is also associated with memory. And you could smell cinnamon, for example. And if you can't remember, it's like, I've smelled that before, but I can't remember what it is. Then that's going to take into consideration language, memory, and smell, olfaction. But then we're also testing sound because we now know that hearing deficits, impairment is a huge predict it's closely linked to alzheimer's disease as well so we're testing sound we're testing absolutely every

cranial nerve language processing um which you guys saw um with one of our with one of the clients we were testing his ability to process language and also say it. So there's different areas, brokers area, which is responsible for different areas of language. So we want to be able to see that he can actually say different words. So we are testing that as well. Yeah, it's an amazing field.

Yeah, I love it. The last question I want to ask, um, and this is one of the things that we get into, uh, with an insane number of our clients is brain fog. Um, how is it, is there some like just simple protocols that people can, uh, start to implement or ways of thinking about this? Because when you're working with high level people, they're pushing in every aspect of every piece of their life. And brain fog seems to come up with an unbelievable number of our clients. Is there anything that they can do kind of when, when for these super type A people that are just pushing in every aspect of, of business and family life. Yeah. And it's funny because brain fog isn't a clinical diagnosis. So people generally describe it as, you know, I wake up and I just got lack of clarity. And generally I say, well, how was

your sleep the night before? Because when we go into deep sleep, we, you know, we activate the glymphatic system, which is like a sewerage system. It's like a washing machine, which clears out all the metabolites. If you don't get into that deep sleep state, you wake up with brain fog. That could be one reason. It could also be the timing of sleep. It could also be dehydration. It could also be a deficit, a deficiency, I say in b vitamins so making sure that you're having a look at um all of your b vitamins and making sure that they're intact could be something else like

neural inflammation and that's another path that you need to look at but if you wake up immediately you've got brain fog uh and you can't do it you've got to go straight to work, I would generally say just drink as much water as you can, like hydrate efficiently and breathe efficiently. I love it. Yeah. Where can people find you? I hang out on Instagram a lot, Louise and Nicola underscore,

or you can go on to, I have a podcast as well, The Neuro Experience. Doug Larson. Right on. Louisa, thank you for coming on to, I have a podcast as well, The Neuro Experience. Fantastic. Doug Larson. Right on. Louisa, thank you for coming on the show. The older I get, the more concerned I am about not just my body health, but my brain health. So I continue to be more interested in this topic. So very cool to have you on. Appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you so much.

I'm Andrew Varner. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Did I have my Instagram? I mean, people got to find a place to find you. That's it. Douglas E. Larson on Instagram. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner, and we are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore shrugged. Make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com.

That is where you can find Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galvin doing a lab lifestyle and performance analysis. Everybody inside Rapid Health Optimization will be getting us over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.