Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [Cortisol] The Science and Function of the Stress Hormone w/ Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash and Dan Garner Barbell Shrugged

Episode Date: October 25, 2024

In this Episode of Barbell Shrugged: Understanding the stress response system What is the function of cortisol Why you struggle adapting to stress The myth of adrenal fatigue The difference between chronic and acute stress on your physiology Connect with our guests: Anders Varner on Instagram Doug Larson on Instagram Coach Travis Mash on Instagram Dan Garner on Instagram

Truck family, this week on Barbell Shrugged Physiology Friday, we're talking about cortisol. All you crazy kids out there that are super stressed about all the work and family and things that you need to do, said all that in one sentence because that's how cortisol feels in your life, in your body, where everything is stressed out. And most of you probably have gone and gotten your blood work done, looked at the cortisol levels and gone, what in the world? Why am I so stressed out? How do I fix this?

And that is what we're gonna be wrapping with Dan Garner today on understanding cortisol, its role in your body, both positive and negative, and some action steps on what you can do about it. As always, friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. If you would like to hang out inside Rapid Health Optimization with me,

we'll go and schedule a call so we can all talk about health history, lifestyle, performance goals, build a program specific to you and the things that you would like to achieve. And you can do that by heading over to rapidealthreport.com. As soon as you park,

if you're listening to this in the car, don't do it while you're driving. That's dangerous. But once you settle down and you get to work or you get to the gym, schedule a call. And you can do that over at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Dan Garner.

Friends, today on Barbell Shrugged, we're talking about cortisol. Hey, Travis Mash, I didn't talk about this in the pre-show because I'm so stoked. Back-to-back national champion. Back-to-back. All these coaches in any sport show up and go back-to-back national champions. In their first two years of the program? First two years. I don't know.

I feel like you could go like a decade straight. Yeah, we're talking about a dynasty now. I don't know if I can do that. You'd be great, dude. Yeah. At what point talking about a dynasty now. So, like, yeah, I don't know if I can do that. You'd be Tom Brady, dude. Yeah. At what point are you a dynasty? You know what happens when you get one more championship than Tom Brady? What?

Gazelle. Oh. Don't tell Drew that. Yeah, yeah. So, yeah. Wait, so obviously you got Ryan out there smashing, but who else is out there setting records that leads you to a team national champion? Our entire team.

I've never had this in my career. Our entire team set a PR of some kind in that meet. We only had one bomb out, but the reason, no problem, is Liz Becker. She's our team captain, but she was cutting down quite a bit to go for Team USA. And so, like, she asked me about it. I said, yeah. You know, any time an athlete's going to go for something big like that, I'm like, you know, let's go for it.

And so it just didn't work out. You know, she cut the weight, and, you know, she was ready, but, you know, just the weight was too much for her. But other than that, the entire team PR'd. So they all killed it. We had Matt, my guy who's been with me since he was 10. So he's been with me 12 years. He killed it.

He set PR performance. We had another gold medal from Blaine Brooks. He gold medaled. Mallory gold medaled. It was awesome, though. You got some big boys I see on Instagram lifting weights these days, man. um, Mallory gold medal. Like it was, it was awesome though. You got some big boys I see on Instagram lifting weights these days, man. Yeah. But what you do attracting people outside of mountains of North Carolina, but they can just eat barbells.

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

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

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

Here we go. He lit it up. He lit it up. I feel like if I didn't know you, I would have been like, wait, what did he just do right there? I saw him, I was like, holy shit. Like, that's straight out of Travis's playbook. You're always talking about drinking your own blood.

I was like, he just did it on stage. And turn it up. Like, he's normally so quiet. Ryan is like, he doesn't say a lot of words, and he just lost his damn mind. But he deserved six for six. He's fully embraced Travis Mash. Took him a decade.

Dan Gardner, cortisol. Let's talk a little bit about the physiology. What is the role of cortisol in our body as like a stress response? Why do we have it? Well, it's there for a lot of reasons. And I think that it would do people a service if we talked about the physiology of stress before actually getting into the role of cortisol, because you can't really talk about cortisol without talking about stress. When it comes to the actual stress response, this could be a massive conversation, but I'll try and put it real quick here. If we see, for example, a bear, or if we

see somebody cut their wrist and drink it in front of us, we are going to have a massive stress response. And that actually shows high cortisol right now. It kicks off with epinephrine, actually. The spinal cord is going to send a signal to something known as the adrenal medulla, which is the inner portion of the adrenal gland. And the adrenal medulla will then secrete epinephrine. And that's what's going to kick off our fight or flight response. So we're going to have dilated pupils so that we can see further and clearer. We're going to increase respiration to oxygenate our body.

We are going to get energy substrates into the bloodstream, such as glucose, to fuel movement. We are going to move blood away from the gastrointestinal system into the skeletal muscle tissue so we can choose to fight or flight. There are many things that are happening all at once, all with one idea in mind, survival. So that stress response kicks itself off and we do whatever we have to do. And that spinal to adrenal medulla concept is known as your first phase stress response, which then leaves room for second phase. And that's when cortisol actually kicks in.

So there's something in your brain called the hippocampus, and it knows when epinephrine has been secreted. So it says, wait, hold on, epinephrine has been secreted. Okay, let me kick off my second phase stress response. So that hippocampus, it'll send something known as cortisol releasing hormone to the pituitary gland. The pituitary gland will then secrete adrenocorticotrophic hormone to the adrenal cortex. So epinephrine comes from the adrenal medulla, whereas cortisol is going to come from the adrenal cortex. And then the adrenal cortex is that's what's going to secrete cortisol. And that's the stress hormone that a lot of people typically talk about. But a lot of people don't know that it's actually in place to make the first phase

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

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

a bad hormone. Bad hormones don't exist in physiology. Biology is not stupid. The only time hormones can be bad is if they're chronically high or chronically low. Well, chronically high cortisol is what a lot of what breaks people down and hurts people in the long term with respect to glucose control, inflammation, fitness monitoring, but Travis is an absolute master in. So that's kind of like the quick breakdown on the physiologic response. And then we can get into those outcomes as well. If you guys want to bring in some specific context here. What, when you are, cause your entire PhD is basically on managing stress athlete monitoring, which is managing stress. Um, when, what are you seeing with the athletes and like how you're

tracking all this on like a day to day of just-day of just what questions you're asking them? What are you actually monitoring to be able to track this stuff? And trends that you see over time, just youth athletes at this stage with having social media and crazy lives, really. I would say definitely the social media is causing a lot of issues. You got the – now they're actually – these things I'm about – it sounds like I'm just talking about something random, but now it's classified scientifically. Such things as fear of missing out.

It's like an actual designation of what's happening. Or social media bullying, social media fatigue, social media stalking, online social comparison. And then there's the effects of the blue light. So people can't sleep to recover, which causes them never to get out of that sympathetic nervous system response. They're always, cortisol is being released way too much. And like you said, acutely, it's great. Chronically, it's terrible. And, but luckily the way that we can measure, you know, how badly it's affecting people is, you know,

fatigue is just defined is, is a decrease in one's ability to produce force. So like every single day, what we do is we measure the first lift of the day at 85%. You know, 85% is like what we've, somewhere between 80 and 85% is somewhere around where the nervous system starts to perceive this as heavy weight. Because like at 70%, it might not pick up. It might go, you know, you might have the same velocity as ever on 70, 75, but then when you start to get 80, 85, if you're experiencing like, you know, basically a ton of fatigue, you'll start to get a very much, you know, like example, a girl did Liz, same girl on Monday of last week, she was squatting and 85%, she was at 0.33, which normally she's at 0.40.

Maybe for some people that doesn't sound like much. That's more than 10% off. And so that tells me, okay, you're going to do a little bodybuilding and go home because you are so out of whack. So, you know, like all the studies that we go by, like, you know, Roman or Prilipin, all these great names, Vrkosansky, like they got to research athletes who did not have any of this stress. And so when we look at Prilipin's chart, what seems perfect, you know, what they perceived as perfect, you know, like prescriptions is not at all for us anymore because stress is stress. When you prescribe an athlete to do X amount of volume, add X amount of intensity and load, then what you're saying is that this is stress I am introducing to my athletes. And then you're expecting a response and then they were covering it stronger. But now,

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

So like it's how the brain interacts with the muscles. So by looking at a depth jump, we're looking at those, you know, those neural components in the joints, like the muscle spindles, anyway, the stretch reflex, putting it simple, we're looking at that. And so if that's affected, then it's definitely, you know, something with stress. And then the third component is we have them do a subjective questionnaire every day. So the cool thing about the questionnaire,

even though it's a little bit, you know, subjective, subjective obviously nature is it tells me when I see something objective, like on the velocity or on the depth jump, I can then go look at their subjective questionnaire and see the reason. Like I can look at like some of the questions we asked them, how much sleep did you get the night before? You know, what was the quality of your nutrition? And the more advanced the athlete is, the more exact the questions are.

So like Ryan wouldn't get, you know, what was the quality on a scale from one to five. I would say, what are your macros yesterday? Exactly. And so anyway, so to summarize, the objective, the depth jump and the velocity tells us that there's a problem. The subjective questionnaire tells us what those problems are yeah i'm super interested because uh competitive people aren't just like competitive sometimes they're competitive all the time and to like the highest degree and if you're

ryan like one of the best weightlifters in the country. I can imagine like me when Instagram like came out in the middle of my competitive CrossFit career. And it was one of the, I became so angry watching people train or like hitting lifts that I hadn't hit yet, or immediately getting off my training program and doing workouts that they had posted because I wanted to beat them at all times, like every single day until you realize that like, you can't beat everybody on the internet. There's just too many people. How do you keep your like people's brains screwed on the right way? So they're not just constantly comparing themselves to, to their competition. Well, I'm really encouraging. Like, Ryan rarely gets on social media, and he never gets on social media and, like, strolls through

and sees what people are doing. Like, he barely posts. And when he posts, he just puts something up of his own, and then that's it, which is great for him as an athlete. You know, obviously it's not so good for him, you know, building his following, but luckily he cares more about winning the Olympics and less about his following, and it's definitely playing out. The people who worry the most, I've noticed,

end up doing the least as far as like it gets to them. You see the people who are constantly online, and you can look and like their performance is definitely affected more than guys like Ryan know ryan who's rarely on so um it does seem to be the sweet spot to like use social media as a megaphone you're just you're blasting your thing out to the world and then you're not in the comments reading everything that everyone's saying like you just post and ghost and you're out of there you kind of get the benefit without the downside of whatever even if it's one in a hundred negative

comments that one negative comment can linger in your brain when you're in the shower and every other part of your day. Yo, Dan, I want to turn this back over to you for a minute. We use the Dutch test to look at our cortisol curves, where essentially your cortisol in the morning kind of rises right after waking and kind of falls the rest of the day. Why does cortisol have this this pattern? And if it's if you don't have that pattern, what does that mean for the rest of your physiology and how you feel and how and how much energy you have, how you sleep, etc? Sure. So yeah, cortisol plays a really important role in one sleep wake cycle. So it's a like I said, there's no bad hormone hormones are only bad if they're chronically high or low. but in a normal homeostatic range, that's something that is always going to provide

benefits. Like if you just think of evolutionary biology, why would our body over millions of years give us a hormone with the sole purpose of being bad for us? Like it literally makes no sense at all. Biology is a lot smarter than that. And people try to demonize cortisol. They demonize insulin. They demonize these things. And it's such a representation of their lack of understanding of human metabolism when they try to isolate and demonize something because cortisol in a healthy physiologic range is actually anti-inflammatory. Many people are familiar with its sister hormone, cortisone, that athletes will inject into their joints to finish a fourth quarter or whatever it's going to be. Cortisol also has anti-inflammatory effects. Cortisol is a hormone of energy, which is why it plays such a big role in our sleep-wake

cycle. Cortisol is immunostimulatory, like we discussed in our podcast on the immune system not so far back. It stimulates the certain branch of the immune system to help fight infections. Cortisol is what actually mobilizes fatty acids from triglycerides within fat cells so they can be transported to the mitochondria and burned as energy. Cortisol also breaks down glycogen into the form of glucose. We can use that as a form of energy as well. I mean, you're talking about energy substrate availability, immune system function,

inflammation control, energy throughout the day. How and why somebody could call this bad is just absolutely silly. And what you'll see from a cortisol test, whether you use the Dutch profile, which is a combination of saliva and urine, or whether you use the adrenal cortex from Genova, which is purely saliva, or if you've got the time and blood availability to do a blood draw multiple times throughout the day, you'll see cortisol levels, a healthy cortisol rhythm would start the day at your highest point. And then as the day progresses forward, it's going to decrease. And again, the stress response has lots to do with evolutionary biology. So you'll see me bring this up quite a bit. But cortisol is highest upon waking because once

cortisol passes through a certain threshold, that's what actually wakes us up for the day. And it is the hormone of energy. So it's highest upon waking because we didn't always have light bulbs. So we needed to do all of our hunting, all of our gathering and complete our to-do list, whatever that was before sundown. So our cortisol as evolution progressed was highest upon waking so we could attack our day and then progressively decreases as the day goes on so that an anti-relationship of melatonin can take place. It is lowest throughout the day, and then it will progressively increase. And that's what will put you down. When cortisol passes a certain threshold, you're going to wake up. When melatonin passes a certain threshold, you're going to go down. And why I look at that is basically to see what's going on with an athlete, because what their cortisol values are says a lot about, and I love how Travis is looking at objective and subjective stuff because I do the same thing, just kind of in a different way. I look at the

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

or distress, I should say. And that subjectivity married with the objectivity tells me so much about how stress is individually impacting this athlete's context that I'm looking at in this moment. That's such a great point. That is why having an individual approach to any program that you're doing is so important because you're right. Ryan looks at the crowd at the Arnold Classic and gets the same butterflies and anxiety everyone else does, perceives it as like, you know, it's actually like superpowers. You know, another person could be just as good as Ryan, perceives as, oh, shit, I'm nervous.

I'm going to mess up in front of this crowd. And so, like, perception is everything. And how one deals with it is so important. So you can't just assume, well, you know, if I put Ryan and Matt in the exact same everything, they have the same classes, the same everything, I can't assume that one is going to, you know, that he's going to be affected the exact same because one perceives it as good, one perceives it as bad.

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

But then when we look at their labs, we see that they're fine. So it's like, hang on a second. Now there's this new element because stress is objective and subjective in the athlete that we're working with. But not only do they have to understand the perception, but now I have to understand the perception of the physiologic load that I'm placing upon that athlete. Because what I've noticed that a lot of coaches as the years go on, especially in the last decade, as research continues to come out and stress, is that people kind of forgot how resilient we are. We are more adaptable and more resilient

than a lot of people give us credit for. And it's so funny to me because the same people who will say, okay, well, the stress response hasn't evolved since Saber Two Tigers, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I'd say, okay, well, hold on a second. So let's use that example. Do you know how stressful it was to live back in that day and how resilient we were? Do you know how hard it was to hunt and gather? What kind of training, quote unquote, volume intensity it took to hunt and gather and that we still recovered from? Do you know how hard and stressful it was to live in the elements without air conditioning? You must have been.

You must have been. Yeah. Dude, it's insane, right? Like, and so people are saying our stress response hasn't evolved yet. We're stressed out. Hang on a second, man. We are some of the most adaptable and resilient freaking creatures on the planet. So make sure that you have an objective and subjective analysis and that you're not just

placing wild analogies from the paleolithic era on everybody that comes your way. It doesn't make sense. When you, when, when you, you brought up the word anxiety, is anxiety, uh, a perception issue or is it a failed adaptation issue? Like you're talking about kind of like that second level of cortisol that comes through your body, which is kind of like your body adapting to whatever stressor it is to prepare you for the next attack or the next fight or whatever it is. Is anxiety a perceived problem or is there a failed adaptation in your physiology, which isn't allowing that second stage because you're just maybe operating it in too much stress? What what how how is anxiety related to the physiology in that process? Well, you know, you have arousal and like, um, that is more of the measurable unit that you can say, you can say,

I, you know, they, they were given this much arousal, meaning like he lifted in front of 10,000 people. Anxiety becomes, yeah, the perception of that arousal.

So for a high performer, like, like, uh, Ryan, he did not get anxiety because anxiety is associated with feelings of negativity, like, oh, shit, I'm nervous. Most times, it is a very subjective thing that your brain is dealing with to say, hey,

I'm nervous. But arousal is what you can measure. Big crowd, no crowd. It's what you can measure, you know, big crowd, no crowd, you know, and like, it's what you can control. Like I want my guys on a day-to-day basis to have a low arousal minus Friday where yes, we pick it up and we're going to go to an eight, you know, but like, otherwise I like to stay around a six or seven throughout the week. Otherwise, which is why we ask that question at the end of the training,

we ask, you know, on a rate you know scale one to ten ten being the hardest I killed you like where are you because I have a certain scale I'm trying to keep them you know I'm trying to keep them somewhere around four or five hundred on the norm and then go six or seven hundred on Fridays we can let it loose so arousal is what we're looking at. Anxiety is something that everyone is different. It's how they perceive arousal. Yeah. Dan, growing up, I remember one of the first perceptions I had of cortisol was like reading

bodybuilding magazines and whatnot. It was like you wake up and you want to eat food right away because cortisol is in there and it's catabolic. And so you're losing muscle mass. And if you don't eat right away, you're going to, you're going to shrink and be skinny. That was like my perception of cortisol, like in high school, uh, maybe even early college. Like, so to what extent is that true? And to what extent is that kind of silly? Uh, to the extent that it is acute or chronic, that, that, that's, that's the truth of it. So

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

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

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

you're going to have decreases in bone formation. You know, it's going to inhibit collagen production, which, you know, that's not good at all for the soft tissue, the joints, the tendons, the ligaments. So, you know, the key is you're going to keep, we're going to keep coming back to is going to be acute or is it chronic? And so if it's chronic, look at their lifestyle. Not necessarily do I want to monitor, you know, stress during the workout because that's exactly where I want it to be.

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

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

with oxygen transfer and deliverability. So was that the stressor or was it the body's a beautiful, beautiful ability to adapt to the stressor. So sometimes the stressor, the adaptation to the stressor is what's going to make you great at a single thing at the expense of maladaptations elsewhere. And that's kind of like the ultimate pursuit of anything is going to require maladaptations in other areas of your life. And that's kind of what's known as allostasis. And kind of the real foundation of the philosophy at which I coach, there's something known as allostatic load. And I don't

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

best athletes in the world, there's not going to be homeostasis, but there will be allostasis. And our job is to maximize allostasis to drive maximum adaptation for that person's single pursuit of greatness. And that is a management of stressors toward a direction and not a management of stressors to try and get you to some false land of homeostasis that you simply won't achieve if you're trying to be the best in the world at anything. No. Master, are you tracking, like, I feel like HRV had a huge three years, a couple years back, and you don't hear much about it anymore? I know it still exists, obviously, but are you tracking things like that? Some of them, yeah, but it's going to tell me, you know, like if you have velocity, you know, they're going to tell me about the same thing. Because like Ryan, you know, he has the, what's the one?

Whoop. He has the whoop. So we have his HRV, but it lines up pretty well with like, you know, if he's really not recovering, he's in a sympathetic nervous system state too much, the velocity tells me. Like right now he's beat to, like system state too much it the velocity tells me yeah like right now he's beat to like right now it's super high i mean it's the heart rate variability is not very good right now yeah so and because i'm doing it on purpose so yeah i mean one of the i

feel like hrv kind of just like disappeared off the um the big conversation. Well, yeah, but I mean, it still has its place. And for the average adult, I think it's great because when you're at heart rate variability, when it's not very variable, it's a problem. It's a big red flag that you're about to, you could die early. So it's important, but with velocity, it pretty much tells me the same thing just because I look at,

I look at, I assess them every single day when the very first movement, if it sucks, I know that they're not recovering, which is all heart rate variability is telling me. Yeah. Um, Dan,

going back to, uh, kind of like the, how cortisol is supposed to play out through the day. Like when you wake up, it's supposed to be at its best. When you did all of my testing and the results came back, I was basically opposite. Like I was in the shitter in the morning,

which is why I drank so much coffee. And then right as I was about to go to bed, my brain would be like, dude, let's get creative. Let's do cool stuff right now. Me too. Like why is that? Yeah. Lay in bed and your brain's like, man, we could write standup comedy routines. We could write blog posts. You want to talk about strength training? We can do that too. All the things come to me right as soon as I hit the bed. Luckily I have Dan Garner doing my nutrition and supplementation. So I don't have that as much anymore. Um, why does that happen? Like what, what, how do I switch? How did you switch that around on me? Garner doing my nutrition and supplementation. So I don't have that as much anymore. Why does

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

A lot of people don't know that gut bugs are nocturnal. There's excellent scientific papers on this. So things like gut bacteria, gut parasites, fungal infections, a lot of these things are at their highest level of activity in the evening. And the reason because of this is because that's when immunity is at its absolute lowest. So when you are getting ready to go to sleep, or when you are asleep, the immune system is at its absolute lowest. So when you are getting ready to go to sleep, or when you are asleep, the immune system is at its absolute lowest. So you can think about bacteria, like wanting to be active when all the security guards have gone home. Immunity is at its lowest. So bacteria now has its own opportunity to survive and thrive, replicate and create more of the colonies that it's that it currently has. And that will in turn create a transient stress response. So I'll see a little

bit, usually not an absolute elevation, but I will see a relative elevation in stress response right in that evening marker. And then that is confirmed, not always confirmed, can be certainly confirmed if I also see a slightly elevated marker upon waking. So with Anders, his adrenal function was so low upon waking that it wasn't carrying over into the next morning. But that relative increase right before bed kind of let me know, you know, like that Anders should probably be doing a stool test here because this is a huge marker for gastrointestinal distress due to infectious activity at nighttime. And that is doubly true if somebody's melatonin is less than 18. Like that's something you actually won't find in

literature. But after having done over 1000 labs, I can tell you if somebody's melatonin is less than 18, they have gut dysfunction. That's something I've absolutely identified as a KPI. And one of the reasons a lot of people don't know, there's actually 400 times more melatonin in our gut than there is within the pineal gland in the brain. So whenever there is a lot of gut dysfunction, or I'll say two things, whenever there's a lot of gut dysfunction, there's a transient decrease in melatonin. But also whenever somebody has sleep problems, one of my first thoughts now is actually what's going on with the gut. I don't think like, hey, what more sedatives could I give them at nighttime? Because two things happen.

For the sleep cascade to kick off properly, serotonin puts you down, melatonin keeps you down. 90% of our serotonin is made in the gut. And we have 400 times more melatonin in the gut than we do in the pineal gland and the brain. So when the two most important components of sleep length and sleep quality are housed within the gut in massive quantities, and we know that an infectious state can increase cortisol prior to bedtime, we start creating an excellent consensus as to what we should do with this

individual. Not to mention cortisol is, as we've mentioned, a stress hormone. Stress hormones run antagonistic with anything inhibitory. So it's going to suppress melatonin. It's going to suppress serotonin. It's going to suppress GABA. Cortisol is always going to suppress anything inhibitory in neurology because stress is always seen as survival. So from an evolutionary biology perspective, if there's a saber tooth tiger in front of us, it's probably a bad time to go to sleep. So there's a natural antagonistic relationship. Holy shit. We are as a stressor in front of us. We got to suppress these inhibitory actions. So then my job is not to go, okay, Andrew's got pre-bed cortisol cortisol release what can i give him to suppress cortisol

that's amateur that the question is why is cortisol high to begin with why don't we answer that question because stress and this is one of the most important things i'll say in this podcast stress is a reactant it's not something that just happens people yeah it is a reactant so every single time you blame the adrenal glands for all of your problems, instead of doing that, why don't you ask them what they're reacting to? Because that's the root cause of the problem. And that should be the beginning of your diagnostic process. And that's what we did with Anders. So in like an oversimplified, my body is recognizing, hey, you've got some stuff going on in your gut. The immune system is suppressing because it's at night and it's going to go down, which means the bad bugs are about to attack.

So my body is releasing cortisol to handle the stress. It's going into like a fight or flight response to gut bugs. It doesn't have to be the saber tooth tiger on the external. It's actually preparing to fight what's going on inside me. Nobody in the world is going to tell you that, by the way. Nobody talks about that. They're always talking about email and social media. How about your gut bugs? You got bacterial infections in there. Go handle those. See how that changes things around. Physiology is physiology, so stress is stress. These different types of stress are going to respond the same in physiology. So stress is stress. Like these different types of stress are going to respond the same in physiology. And that's kind of, you know, another good thing about

objective markers. So like if I'm an Olympic lifter with mash, or if I'm an amateur lifter with mash, velocity is velocity and a stress load is stress load. And in my world, you know, for example, GGT, GGT is a marker of oxidative stress, whether you're the number one athlete in the MLB or if you're a stay-at-home mom wanting to get, you know, leaner. It is a marker of stress. So like whenever I kind of see those things happen in physiology, you have to identify where that's coming from. And once you do, that's the next plateau buster that you just found towards

reaching your goals. It's changed like immediately. It was, it was, uh, it was like a inside one month was the, how fast I started to recognize the cortisol, like the, the mornings got so much better. The nights got much better. Um, and that was a function of gut health. Yeah. Cause that, that's the thing too, man, because like somebody who sleeps poorly is naturally going to have way more coffee in the morning. And then when you eliminate the root cause of the problem and maximize sleep length and sleep quality, you have a natural increase in cortisol so that your dependency upon stimulants decreases dramatically. Like what, what was the before and after of your coffee intake again? Uh, I am down like 40 ounces a day.

Yeah. So hold on a second. It's like five cups. Yeah. So hold on. You have to also know that I got it done. I did all of my testing when I had a four-month-old. So sleep was like a disaster to begin with. It was like super chronic stress going on for months at that time because it really was like the dumps. You're not thinking well. You're not performing well. You're just trying to survive the first four to six months of being in the cave of having a newborn. But once the results came back and once you were explaining to me each of the biomarkers and where things were at, I was like, this is so obviously exactly what's going on with me right now. Like, I just didn't know how the physiology would read. So exactly how I was feeling. It was that was like, insane to me. And then once we got on it, it was like, I got all the supplements, nutrition, everything in like month five and a half month six, maybe like once. And it was like,

the light at the end of the tunnel started to get bigger. And then all of a sudden, month six maybe, like once. And it was like the light at the end of the tunnel started to get bigger. And then all of a sudden it was like back to normal. Just like it totally – it just happened. It was wild. And for the record, Ryan is now with these guys too. Yeah. Yeah, he's with Dan and Andy. I'm sending another one now.

So really, if you're a top athlete, I mean, Ryan's going to have an unfair advantage over anyone who's listening. I hope they're not listening so they don't go. But it's a big advantage. When everything, the only thing that really matters for me as a strength coach is the amount of stress I introduce to to ryan and now and what ryan does to reduce stress in his life well and your coach like your job is to optimize that stress that's like if they're constantly fighting a bunch of crap that you have no control over

a gut bug i wouldn't know anything about that yeah you can't actually even program well for them because you're just trying to manage the thing that they're managing like you're you're playing telephone with stuff that's in your physiology and you don't even know, know what's happening. Right. So until you pull that stuff up, you can't write the right program. You can't prescribe the right macros or the right food, um, micronutrients, whatever it is.

Like you're just kind of guessing until you figure out why he's dumping 30% of his performance because he can't sleep well at night. And that was one of the – obviously, having a newborn is different than trying to go to London. But that stress, if you're not sleeping, if you're not able to recover, you're just guessing. Right. And imagine that for you, Anders, too. Because how well do you think your immune system was functioning during those months? Like, and even in the months after, so that gut bug only

would have gotten progressively worse and then continued to have gone, just gone ignored, for lack of a better phrase, because that gut bug would have continued to get worse. It would have continued to got ignored. And then that's kind of when excuses come out, right? Like, oh, this is just the dad bug. This is how it is. I'm getting older, you know? But it was really just something that could have been identified and solved. The question I asked earlier about anxiety, is this just like a failed adaptation to stress? Or is it some sort of like brain thing that you're just like perception of how bad you're so you're like meta feelings about some scenario but that's a that really goes into it because it's like had I not I remember at that stage going fuck I wish I could get out of this like

how am I gonna get out of this like brutal cycle I am I'm in right now and it's not like I'm I'm that different than every other dad that has gone through this or exactly where my wife has been for the last three and a half years. Like she's, she's going through it. We all kind of go through it in that stage. But I remember specifically when my coffee intake like bumped up and I went, this is a lot now. Like if, if I'm having to question myself, cause I like,

I thought I was a good coffee drinker to begin with. And then all of a sudden it was like, it just bumped up 30%. And I'm going, God, this is not headed in the right direction. Like, how am I going to get out of this? But like every morning it was like, you go to the coffee machine, am I going to put four scoops in or am I going to get out of this? But like every morning it was like, you go to the coffee machine. Am I going to put four scoops in or am I going to put seven? Maybe if I just like have more coffee beans, but less water, how's that going to work?

Like even better. But I had to get out of the hole somehow. And the only way to do it was drugs. Yeah. I mean, there was no way out until we go and do all the stuff and actually find out what's going on right you know his ryan's mom is now with them too like that's how good so that shows you the value is that the mom liked it so much she's doing it

i'm like yeah so good i was worried about them being mad that i asked him to spend the money now she's doing i'm like perfect yeah i did i did her labs last week she did uh we did blood and urine so just the the uh the initial consult but we found um yeah dha we did we found many actionable items that answered a ton of questions she had about her physiology so she is off jessica she's off to a flying start right now yeah she's so happy too because she loves andy like she's a big like when she when i first started being friends i know when i first started being friends with him she loved him already that was before anybody knew him and now like she's super excited to be with him yeah yeah yeah now he's the industry celebrity he is the industry i know that when i met him at chris's wake nobody knew him and that was like

how many years ago did chris pass away like uh six years ago now i think that's 2016 in those six years that dude has absolutely blown up. A nuclear bomb went off because no one knew him. I don't even know if he had social media. And so now he's like, boom, Joe Rogan, boom. Give it three weeks, bud. Give it three weeks. Big one's coming.

Oh, there's something bigger coming? Not Rogan. You can't redo Rogan. But yeah, it's going to be great. Dan Garner, where can the people find you? Rogan. You can't redo Rogan. It's going to be great. Dan Garner, where can the people find you? At Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram. There it is.

Coach Travis Mash. Mashley.com Instagram Mashley Performance. Doug Larson. On Instagram Douglas E. Larson. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. We are Barbell Shrugged at Barbell underscore Shrugged. Make sure you get over get over to diesel dad mentorship.com where all the busy dads are getting strong lean and athletic and make sure you get over to the performance nutrition section in Walmart and if you do not see my face in the store at the pharmacy guess what you need to go

to Walmart next door because we are in 2200 stores three products on the shelf shred burn zone shred pump zone friends see you guys next week