Barbell Shrugged - Physiology Friday: [Recovery] How to Build a Resilient Physiology w/ Anders Varner Doug Larson, and Dan Garner Barbell Shrugged

Episode Date: March 28, 2025

In today’s episode of Barbell Shrugged you will learn: How to define resilience Understanding psychology vs physiological resilience What are the biomarkers of resilience Cortisol wakening response and how it relates to stress response Is balance possible between stress and recovery How much stress can you body handle before physiology begins to break down How resilience builds confidence in getting through hard times How purpose can be the driver of resilience Where resilience will show up in your labs How to differentiate between recovery and resilience To learn more, please go to https://rapidhealthperformance.com 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 Shrug Physiology Friday. Our main homie Dan Garner is back in the house and we're talking about building a resilient physiology. How do you train harder without your body breaking down? How do you manage external stressors? All the things so that you can build a resilient physiology. And as always friends, make sure you get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab lifestyle and performance analysis. And you can access all of that over at rapid health report.com friends. Let's get into the show. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Dan Garner. On today's Barbell Shrugged, we're going to be talking about resilience

and breaking these things down. One, we want to know kind of like what the highest level understanding of resilience is, how it plays into your physiology, and then really like the inside-out side of resilience, outside-in stress, but really just how do we build a robust physiology that allows your body to withstand stress without becoming so beat down. Um, and then structuring kind of like a lifestyle performance optimization plans around that so that you can, um, train harder, get more out of it, recover faster. And, um, I'd really like to start kind of at the top of this thing of how do we, I feel like resilience is one of these, uh, fun subjects where like, it's kind of like the word optimization to begin with, where it's like, that sounds like best in the world for a word.

And if you type like recovery into, it's like recovery thesaurus and they're like, use the word resilience. And you're like, oh yeah, totally. That's the one I'm going to use. Like, what is the best health? They're like, just say optimization. Like, what the hell is resilience? And like, why do we need it as a physical being and like in our lives and how it relates to gym training, sleep, stress? What is resilience? Resilience. I mean, technically in Webster's dictionary, it's defined as your ability to return back to a state of homeostasis after a stressor. And more specifically, the speed at which you come back to a homeostasis after a stressor. And the example that they actually provided was

nylon. So stretchy pants, you're able to stretch nylon and then it returns to its original state uh very very quickly so the most resilient being on the planet is yoga pants they are extremely resilient you ever seen some of them girls fit in those yoga pants yeah you go that is exactly what resilience is Those pants are hanging on for dear life. When I think about resilience, I tend to like naturally gravitate to psychological resilience. Like something really bad happens to you lose your job, but like you,

you keep your shit together and you just like get right. You don't like fall into depression. Like you just get right back out there, right back out there, excuse me, and go find a new job or, or find some way to solve your problem without like feeling bad, or like getting down on yourself and that type of thing. But you're more so on this show talking about physiological resilience, not so much psychological resilience, although we'll

probably talk about that as well. Like what is physiological resilience, really? Oh, man. So it depends kind of like how you look at it. Because like, when I say physiological resilience, and you say physiological resilience, it there is almost like a pre assumed explanation that that excludes psychology, but we know psychology impacts physiology and physiology impacts psychology. So I've always coached like this, even way back in my courses in the Ultimate Nutrition Mentorship and Training Mentorship. I have the outside-in model and the inside-out model. And I find when you assess things, especially in biology, and you assess them from the inside-out

and the outside-in, you can really get a full and complete perspective on a lot of things that people kind of miss because they put things into individual silos, something as enormous as resilience, your hormones, your immune system, as well as your inflammatory markers. There's a lot of unique markers within that world. Hemoglobin, A1C, a great marker for chronic blood sugar, your acute and chronic inflammatory markers like C-reactive protein and ESR, which is your erythrocyte sedimentation rate, immune markers being your white blood cells and your neutrophil to lymphocyte ratio. A big thing I just posted about rather recently was your cortisol to DHEA ratio, and how that impacts many markers of things that could absolutely be

represented as physiological resilience. Sex hormone binding globulin sneaks its way in there too. Like there's a lot of ways in which you can calculate resilience. And that's something that we actually do here at Rapid. We've got our own unique algorithm that utilizes many biomarkers from the inside out to predict one's ability to be resilient. And it's funny, like when you dive into these biomarkers, they are connected to many of the same things, injury risk, risk of illness, stress fractures, overtraining. Basically, when you look into the world of fatigue and overtraining you'll find a lot of the markers that are also associated with resilience as well and you know from an inside out perspective your ability to recover is proportional to your ability to be resilient

somebody who is way more somebody who has a a higher recovery capacity also is somebody who has a higher resiliency capacity because anything that's thrown at your way, again, even just going back to Webster's and the nylon, your ability to return to homeostasis at a faster rate is a representation of resiliency. In our world of high performance anything, high performance business, high performance business, high performance athletics, high performance, physique transformation, that's recovery capacity, exposing yourself to a

huge stressor and being able to recover to recover from it and adapt from it extremely quickly and being overall more resilient in all of these different buckets? When I kind of how those two play together, and maybe this is just with our population, I feel like my mindset on resilience and like the ability to push through hard things is likely much stronger than my physiology would allow it to be sometimes. Like, if I need to call it, you know, like in the middle of a pandemic, when you have two kids at home all day long, and it's like, well, now my work time is 4am. And I have to now wake up at 330 and be ready to rock at 4am because I have from four to nine to get everything done that I need to get done.

I will literally just destroy my body to make that happen. Like the mental side of, or call it psychological side of that, I feel like I can push through really anything on the mindset side of things. How do I know that my body, or how do I keep my body in a place where my mindset is just able to push through so much of the uphill battle? How am I going to know that my body has really said,

hey, dude, it's time to stop right now. We're 18 months into this, and you're going to meet a guy named Dan Garner. He's going to read to your labs and you are going to be very depressed when you find out that you got a D minus on your labs because of just grinding. Well, dude, and that's funny. You use depression almost as a joke there, but the cortisol to DHA ratio is a risk marker for depression. And there's also something known as your cortisol awakening response, which is three salivary measures of cortisol within the first 60 minutes upon waking.

That's actually considered one of the most validated and most scientifically accurate ways in which you can measure cortisol. Because as you do cortisol measures throughout the day, say, mid morning, noon, dinnertime, evening, it's so variable, based on what you were exposed to that day, and even the perceptions of what you were exposed to that day, that those readings can be all over the place. However, you can really control that morning cortisol. That's why it's a lot more reliable and valid because you're taking it upon waking 30 minutes after waking, and then 60 minutes after waking. That first hour of the day is your cortisol awakening response.

And there's a ton of literature on this. You ideally want a minimum of a 50% increase in cortisol at during that first hour. If your cortisol stays the same, or even worse, decreases, it's actually associated with a reduction in stress tolerance for that day, and a reduction of energy and productivity for that day. So when we talk resilience a lot, and you use that phrase, like that brings me right to one of the most validated markers, which is the cortisol awakening response, how it's connected to energy and productivity that day, and how it's connected in and I'm quoting the paper connected to stress tolerance. Well, that's that's resilience. In my mind, stress tolerance is absolutely resilience. Dr. Andy Galpin here.

As a listener of the show, you've probably heard us talking about the RTA program, which we're all incredibly proud of. It's a culmination of everything Dan Garner and I have learned over more than two decades of working with some of the world's most elite performers, award-winning athletes, billionaires, musicians, executives, and frankly, anyone who just wanted to be at their absolute

best. RTA is not a normal coaching program. It's not just macros and a workout plan. It's not physique transformation and pre and post pictures. RTA is something completely different. RTA is incredibly comprehensive and designed to uncover your unique molecular signature, find your performance anchors, and solve them permanently. You'll be working with not one person, but rather a full team of elite professionals, each with their own special expertise to maximize precision, accuracy, and effectiveness of your analysis and optimization plan. RTA isn't about treating symptoms or quick fixes. It's about unlocking your full potential and looking, feeling, and performing at your absolute best, physically and mentally, when the stakes are the highest. In my mind, stress tolerance is absolutely resilience.

That cortisol weighting response is connected to all of those things in healthy people, by the way, not in unhealthy people. So it is an excellent way in which you can begin the process. And then the other things are kind of quantifying a lot of the other stuff I talked about your HBA1C, the other hormone markers, the CRP, the ESR, These are all things that kind of quantify in a big way. A, your stress tolerance, but B, your recovery capacity. So to kind of bring it back, fatigue makes cowards of us all. You are wildly less resilient when you are tired. What creates energy, health and physical fitness? It doesn't matter how, you know,

it doesn't matter what your mindset is for the day. If you don't have energy, you're absolutely not going to be resilient to any incoming stressor. That's true for being a dad. That's true for being a husband. That's true for being a husband. That's true for training. You're absolutely not going to be resilient to the training. It's true for cold immersion. If you're exhausted, you're thinking, I'm not going to get in that cold

tub. I just don't want to do it today. Shrug 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 rapidealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. Sometimes when I feel great and I think about doing that, I immediately just go, no.

Yeah. No way. Imagine if you're, like, tired. You're like, didn't you want to get off? Yeah, no way imagine if you're like tired you're like didn't you want to get off yeah no way yeah me wanting to take a cold shower right after i woke up versus at like 4 p.m it's like night and day i woke up i'm always tired i'm way more of a night person than a morning person like i wake up and i'm like dude i want to get a cold shower right now but like later on in the day no problem it's a totally different situation that's why I'm so focused on recovery

because the more recovered you are, the more energy you have. And just like a UFC fighter, a good example, a UFC fighter is just some of the most resilient people in the world. But if they're exhausted in the middle of the round, they will give up their neck for a rear naked choke so that fight can be over

because they are completely burnt out. Some of the most resilient, mentally tough people in the world. If you're exhausted, that resilience is gone. So just like a UFC fighter can use their resilience in the presence of fatigue. I see millions of people every single day give up on their dreams due to fatigue. And it's classified as resilience, just like a fighter can give up a fight due to fatigue. People give up their dreams due to fatigue. And that's physical fitness, that's energy, that's health combining itself to be

this thing called resilience. But you are giving yourself a way better chance at life when you have the foundation that allows you to be resilient instead of relying on something we call grit because grit can bury you. And that will bury you because in the absence of resilience, you're just going to run into something like overtraining, exhaustion, burnout. I actually, if you want to know like a very tactical thing that changed in my life after you did my lab work, I have not set an alarm since the day I got my labs back. And I used to be like the guy that was like, I have to be up at five. If I'm not awake at five, I've completely wasted my day. It was like, I had to be the person that, uh, like intentionally struggled so that I immediately just, and the easiest way to intentionally struggle is to just under sleep. And you're like waking up too early. And now all

of a sudden it's like, now, now I'm being like this, this warrior by showing up at 5.00 AM and getting to work, uh, which I also enjoyed at the time, but now realizing like, don't set the alarm, let my kids wake me up whenever they get up. That's not when I get up. It's not like it's perfect by any means, but when I,

when I saw the, the melatonin curves, the cortisol curves and how jacked up they were, it immediately was like, this is a very, very short term play when I need to be in this game for a long time and, and be able to have, have the energy when you when you actually build these, these programs out and,

and kind of like understanding the push and pull of performance and recovery and like what we're really trying to do. And it could be us talking about business. Um, it could be an MMA fighter talking about training camp. Um, there really is the balance and that you're trying to get the, the, the graph to slowly move up into the right, that you're able to do more work and to be able to recover, uh, by, and you're always going to be like increasing the skill level or the efficiency, the amount of volume that you're able to put in so that you are really still pushing the kind of the limits on like how much you can do, but building

the resilience side of how much you're able to recover from on a daily basis. What are some of the factors that you kind of look at in that balance? Because that really is, you know, like a year plus or so after kind of going through everything with you, like, has been something that I've really tried to think about a lot of like, it's not like a work life balance, but it's like, how hard can I push and still be able to recover and feel like I can push the same the next day. And that many times for me just as in business of how much, how, how efficient can I be at work? How, how hard can I push in, in my roles here and things like that. And then realizing like I could wake up at 5am, that's not the not the smart move. So how does somebody kind of like recognize

where that balance is at and how well their body actually is recovering? Because they can't go and run cortisol curves on themselves every single day. Yeah. Finding balance is key, but it kind of triggers me in a way because a lot of people associate balance with taking your foot off the gas. And that's just not who I am. It's not what I like to promote. Like you'll hear a lot of people, I need more balance. I just need more balance. Usually their version of balance just means training less, working less, eating more crap, playing more video games. I'd like everyone to know as a preface, what I was saying is I'm willing to give up being a good parent so I can work more.

Now that's balance. That's what I meant. I still sleep the same. I'm just doing parenting less. I'm just a guy who knows for sure that his wife doesn't listen to the show. God, but they don't listen to us in real life.

That's what they want. More of us't listen to us in real life that's what they want more more more of us to listen to yeah no kidding um but yeah so like in a real sense a lot of people associate balance with kind of taking your foot off the gas so you're telling me like how do people achieve balance um towards larger things it's a supply and demand chain because i you could go back to my content all the way back in 2014. I have said that health is the ultimate plateau buster for years. I have had this philosophy that if you insult the immune system, then you're insulting your adaptive reserve. You're insulting the total stress tolerance and resiliency that the system has as a whole. I have always, always, always thought that. But when you are looking at achieving greater goals, then you just need a greater supply and demand chain. So I actually have a concept I call

extreme balance. So to many people, balance just means taking your foot off the gas. Train less, have more fun, eat more crap, whatever it is. That's people's version of balance. Also work less. I knew that's not anything I wanted to accomplish. And I think with that mindset, you really don't accomplish much of anything. So I had a concept that I created called extreme balance. What does my weekly schedule need to look like? So I can be great at business. So I can be a great husband. So I can be a great dad. So I can stay

lean. So I can get stronger. What is that week need to look like? Let me figure that out. And then that's what's going to allow me to achieve extreme balance. And you know what? Like this is something that your lifestyle and schedule will actually decide for you. There are people who are obsessing over periodization tactics, optimal volume, intensity and frequency. They're obsessing about very, very minute things. But if you look at your lifestyle and schedule, all of those things are going to be answered. Your periodization strategy will be obvious at that point. What type of volume, intensity, and frequency approach you should utilize to remain consistent will be obvious.

You build your training around your lifestyle. You don't build your lifestyle around your training. And when you do that, all of those high level things are answered. You're able to remain consistent. You are resilient to the programming because you met it where you were ready to be met. You allowed science to adapt to you. You didn't have to adapt to science. This is all about that overall approach to resiliency

in combination with being fucking realistic. That's a huge component of actually being resilient and building the fitness required to achieve more and more and more things is to build your fitness around your life and not your life around your fitness. And then you'll eventually reach this state that I call extreme balance to where you have the routines and habits and structures and autopilot patterns that allow you to achieve high level things across the board. Like a guy like Joe Rogan, for example, world-class comedian, black belt with Eddiedie bravo um legendary ufc commentator has the most successful podcast of all time like these things that like that is the function of somebody who has achieved

extreme balance in their life and is absolutely killing it that's something you do slowly and progressively but it's possible and i'm absolutely tired of people using balance as a cop out because that's the opposite of resilience. If you want to accomplish more in life, set up the structures, fuel, micronutrients, training, sleep, stress management in order to allow you to have the recovery capacity to go after your dreams. Yeah, dude, I love the extreme balance idea. One, I've never heard it put that way. But two, I feel like that's exactly what I've been trying to just be hyper aware of over the last year. And that like, there's also an efficiency to it. And that like the harder the harder you push in specific areas, your body has

to just become like you talk about Rogan having like, basically being the best in the world, like three different things, maybe not the best jujitsu grappler or whatever it is, but he's a black belt. He's got the best podcast. He's one of the best comedians. He's one of the best commentators in UFC. There's four things that you're the best at. And to think that you just like go to that level, but he's constantly been getting better and better and better. And probably at many times been burnt out and realizing like gone too far. We need to dial it back.

It's not necessarily like doing less to achieve less. It's dialing it in and figuring out where that balance is, um, and the lifestyle around it. Um, I've talked many times about like, uh, how this has been probably the healthiest year of my life as far as like that balance or whatever. But the other, I, there have been moments in the year where I have felt like I, this is another terrible term, but kind of like, like broke my physiology in a way, where it was like the sleep was terrible.

It was like a sick kid or something. So you're up all night. The food then turns totally awful. And then your training, it's like you have no energy. You just barely like walk around the neighborhood to get some steps in to just like move. And then all of a sudden you like gain five pounds out of nowhere. You're like, how did this happen? And you just look at the life that you've created over the last like five to seven days and

you go, oh, it's because your body hates you. And then you go back to sleeping well. And then you go back to like just dialing training down a little bit or maybe lifting a little bit more, like taking some of the stressors off, but your body just gets more efficient as you go through those bad periods. So you can do a lot more with the time that you have. But I've definitely had moments throughout the year where I feel like I just like, I feel like I can actually like feel my body go, dude, too far, too far. That's why you feel like shit right now. Stop doing this.

Go, go sleep more. Yeah. And that question around, around balance is, is what is your time domain? Are you trying to get balanced within a single day, within a week, within a month, within a quarter, within a year? Like if you're trying to get balanced on a, like a daily schedule where you're working, you know, say, say five hours and you're parenting for another five hours and you're working on health and fitness and a side product for another five hours, like your life's going to progress at a certain rate. But if you're

thinking about it more on like a quarterly basis for like this, for these 13 weeks, like I'm going to, I'm going to smash business. I'm going to do business 10 hours a day and I'm going to do family for two or three hours a day. And then next quarter when that project's done or whatever it is, you go on a vacation, you spend some more time with your family. You can have balance after that quarter or whatever time domain you want. It doesn't have to be a daily basis. You really should think about what kind of time domain you want to be focusing on, whether it's weekly, monthly, or quarterly, I think are the easiest blocks to think about. Because daily, no one has balance over the course of the day. You're naturally going to be working more than you're

training or working more than you're parenting in most cases on most weekdays. You really need to think about what are your long-term goals? And then how long do you want to focus on one particular area? And then when should you switch? Yeah, absolutely, man. And that's a key part of hormesis too. Like we haven't talked much about hormesis on this podcast, but long story short, some stressor in a controlled amount is actually good for you. But too much of that stressor is when it can become toxic. So like, for example, training, some training can create a lot of great adaptations. But if you do a ton of training, and you're an out of shape person, that can actually lead to overtraining and a lot of bad outcomes. Something that could have been

good in a controlled dose ends up being bad. Cold immersion, you do some cold immersion, it can be pretty good. You jump in a frozen lake here in Canada in the winter for an hour, you have hypothermia and death probably. Fasting in the right context. You can get some recover from. When you recover and adapt to it, that adaptation is specific to the context of the stressor, which allows you to that stressor. So many people associate a hypertrophy stimulus with adaptation to get bigger and stronger. That's many people's example of hormesis and or stimulus adaptation. However, what do we do to a muscle to create the stress that's required for adaptation? We stress a muscle and it adapts. How do you think the mind gets stronger? You stress the mind and it adapts. I think that's something that's like,

I don't have any research for that. But I just it's a truth that I just have in my life that tough times make tough people. And you need to expose yourself to stressors. Sometimes it's imposed upon you. Or like Doug saying, you can expose yourself to certain seasons of life. Maybe you're in the season of health, wealth, family, or personal, right? These are all different seasons of life. And depending upon what type of stressor you want to create, that stressor can create physiological resilience in their controlled amount, or it can create psychological resilience in the controlled amount. And the way in which you make sure that it's controlled is to build up, you build your

schedule in a way that allows for the recovery capacity and the supply and demand chain for the physiological, whether that's micro and macronutrients and rest, or psychological, whether that's breathing, meditation, and having a hobby you love. These are all ways in which you can progressively build resilience in all domains of life. And I just want people to understand that we stress a muscle to adapt and become resilient. But those hard times is a stressor for your mind to adapt and become resilient. I also feel like there's a piece of the resilience thing. Like when I think back about literally knowing zero about business and starting a gym, I'm like, kind of like every night facing the fact that like,

I might have to sleep here tonight. Some people, Doug, actually did sleep in the gym. But like, when you get home at midnight from your first business after running classes and personally training people, and then you sit down and it's literally 12 o'clock and you go, cool. Now I got to figure out how to build a website and you have no money, you have nothing. And you have, you have literally just like a hope, but you have to go do this thing for like nine months You have nothing. And you have literally just like a hope. But you have to go do this thing for like nine months, 12 months. And the only thing that's getting you out of it is like,

there's two options. You can either like go do the work or you can go back and like move in with your mom. Those are literally like the two options. Like go be broke or go figure it out like i'm gonna go understand how to go be resilient and overcome a lot of adversity and truly i think that that's where like uh on the psychological side like that's how you build confidence in yourself i don't think it's like a like a lot of people see it as like a very bad thing many times to like have to go through and struggle and like beat the crap out of their body and like do all this.

If there's like a real long of my actual life was, were also like the biggest times of being able to adapt to whatever my new, new life was going to be. Like when I left home at 14, when I fucking opened the gym, like all of those, all of those things, had I quit all of a sudden, now you're like, you're like practicing the ability to quit, which has got to be the worst skill that you could ever have and you don't want to like go pave the path to being like to being one of the people that like can't get it done because it was too hard that's like the skill set i never want to understand

so like they're in in doug's timeline it's like you have to be able to go through the storm. If your timeline is a year, you can survive that. If you're trying to be a pro athlete, you might not want to do that. You might have to like take care of your body a little bit more. But I think that there's a lot of people, especially the people that come into our program and the people that I talk to consistently, they've been doing the hard thing for so long that they don't know how to get out of it. And I think that that's that also becomes the skill set to have like, they've been grinding so hard on their business or grinding so hard to become a pro athlete or, or grinding so hard to achieve the thing. And then they achieve it and they realize, realize holy crap look at the beating my body took in order for me to get to this level and that that then becomes the balance talk like okay i've pushed so hard in one direction how do i like rein this in a little bit and then actually be able to move forward by like paying more attention to my body, paying more attention to the long game.

I think that that skillset really like you have to go practice it in the same way that they practice becoming very successful. You practice building your business. You practice just dealing with the crap of not knowing where to go and what to do when you're, when you're starting out. But I think that that balance side of things comes after you have kind of like achieved or gotten gotten through that thing because being able to trust yourself whether when times get hard is a real i think it's a really important skill that

people just should should understand it's going to take a toll on your body it's going to be very hard to get through those things yeah i think a big part of it too is you also have to believe that it's possible to accomplish whatever you're trying to accomplish or to get out of your situation or whether it whatever it is like if you're sean o'malley who who dan coaches like he believes he can be a ufc champion and so going through fucking viciously hard fights and hard training sessions and just killing himself in the gym, when it makes sense to kill himself in the gym,

those moments are worth it. And he's resilient to those very tough situations because he believes it's possible to accomplish this big goal that he has. If you don't believe it's possible, like people that try to exercise and then they stop, it's not necessarily always because the workouts were too hard. it's because they didn't believe they don't believe it's going

to matter i'm going to do all this work and it's not going to change anyway and so if they get discouraged not because necessarily it's hard to do so many push-ups and go for runs and whatever they're doing to try to um get more fit it's because they believe they're going to do it all and you know what i'm still going to be fat and i'm still going to be whatever like they they have a belief about about how how well it's going to work which is part of the rationale for having a coach because the coach knows you know it's quote unquote easy to lose some weight and get in better shape because we're we're used to doing it like when i work out i believe i can get stronger if i choose to i believe if i want if i choose to lose five or 10 pounds or whatever it is, or gain five

or 10 pounds of muscle, I just kind of assume it's, it's obvious that I'm going to be able to do it. And so there's no discouragement whatsoever because I believe it's possible. And beyond that, it's not, I mean, it's the same thing as saying, I believe it's possible. It's like, I know it's possible. It's guaranteed to happen basically, if I choose, if I just choose to do it. But for a lot of people with respect to health and fitness or many other categories, starting a business and being able to make money and quit your job and all that, it's easier for me to want

to start a business because I believe it's going to work. But if somebody's never ran a business before and they're thinking about quitting their job and they know they don't know what they're doing, then yeah, they're not going to be very resilient the first time they fall in hard times after they quit their job, because they're like, I knew, I knew this wasn't going to work. I'm out of here. And back to, back to having a regular job. So there's gotta be some level at which you're working on your beliefs and, or you're, you're working with someone who has, uh, not just has the belief, but they, they have the competence

and capabilities that, that just has the belief, but they have the competence and capabilities that underlie the belief. If you have all the skills you need to be able to lift weights and eat the right foods and the right proportions to gain muscle mass, and you just know it's possible, then you can bring someone else along for the ride. And that's what that coaching relationship is. That's why you have a coach. There's someone there that tells you, no, no, no, this will be easy. You just do this and that and the other thing, and it'll happen. No problem. And that belief can kind of, can kind of be projected onto you. And it can kind of carry you forward if you don't have it yourself. Yeah. When, when I was on, especially, you know, maybe a lot of these things just come down to like uh do you feel

like part of the that belief side of things i think is like the ability to get to weather the storm it's like i know if i can just keep going every single day i'll be able to get through this thing um but also you know energy is a real thing when you wake up every single day in the middle of a pandemic at 4 30 in the morning to go lift weights to feel like you are alive and then you have to go outside and like the blistering well it's north carolina so it's on dan cold but like actual cold and like walk to like just get blood flowing in your body like that starts to really suck and like the energy thing is is has to be like the first thing physiologically that starts to just kind of like break like is is there a is there a path or like a way um i know in my supplement uh like um protocol that you sent me there were some things that just like when they

hit i was like dude no one told me about rhodiola before hold on a second this thing just like this little adaptogen thing is pretty radical like i feel alive all of a sudden um are there things that people can start to look at and and maybe if they have their own blood work or they know they're deficient in certain areas or they just that they can just start to kind of like um because what i was doing before was chugging 60 ounces of coffee and that is a uh that's that's not the route you want to go because the next step is 80 when you uh when you start to um when you're when you're normal is 60 ounces a day, that's a lot. You can only go up from there. Yeah. As far as like what things people can look at, I basically just echo Doug's statement. And I think first to look at your purpose, people don't get burnt out. They lose their purpose.

I really think that there's a lot of truth to that. I think that if you believe your cause is just, then almost nothing can stop you. Like some of the greatest historical figures of our time had a just cause that they absolutely believed in. It was their purpose and life's mission to change the world in some way. And absolutely nothing. They were resilient, they were invincible. And now they are immortal, because we remember them for the cause that they stood up for. I don't think people get burnt out. I think they lose their purpose. In the beginning,

your purpose is to really get lean and healthy. But then you kind of fall back in your old habits, not because you want to, but because you kind of stopped caring. You've lost your purpose. You're still capable of accomplishing your goals, but you've lost your purpose. So I think when you asked me, what could people look at? I think the first thing is to review their own purpose. Go back and figure out why that was triggering for you, why that was motivating for you, why that was inspiring to you, and why the person today doesn't still want to accomplish those things. I think that you're going to have a really hard conversation with

yourself and realize you do still want to accomplish those things. And that's going to get your ass off the chair and get you going again. So that'd be number one. The second thing I would want people to look at is actually their environment. So I think that despite your own efforts towards being resilient, we are incredibly susceptible to the opinions and feelings of others. And many times, it's your people that are supposed to be close to you, like your friends and family. If they have negative opinions about what you're doing, or your current goals, or if they that's a good indicator of whether you got a friend or not, as if you tell them their goals, and they laugh. That's a real good indicator on if they that's a good indicator of whether you got a friend or not as if you tell them their goals and they laugh that's a real good indicator on if that person's actually on your team or not

um it'll happen shockingly often and they don't mean it in like some in some very evil way but it absolutely crushes people um the friends and family of the people who are closest to you they're a pit. Like you have to look, you have to look at where you can trim fat in your life. Negative people talking to them is like walking through mud. It's, it's exhausting. It takes forever and you never feel good after doing it. It's the negative people are people that just absolutely have to go. So that's one component of your environment that, that you could absolutely remove. And you didn't add anything to your resilience, you removed an energy sucker. And that's what actually improved your resilience. So looking at your purpose,

looking at the people around you, and then even adding, you know, a more biomarker perspective to this, because I say look at your environment um heavy metals and environmental pollutants will absolutely freaking railroad you man like uh styrene directly associated to uh elevated fasting plasma glucose and insulin resistance if you want to screw up your energy have blood sugar fluctuations that's a real easy way to do it uh styrene because it can it's about you can look at it in a validated way through your urine. Um, MTBE, that's a gas solvent. You can look at that in your urine as well.

Um, that can, uh, inhibit thyroid function in a big way. Um, mercury, mercury is a heavy metal directly lowers testosterone. Mercury can also impact thyroid health. Um, mercury is actually, I've seen a paper just recently where mercury was already seen as something that can increase your risk of Alzheimer's. But in a very recent paper, it was seen as a cause of Alzheimer's, a cause. So that's something incredibly huge that, you know, everything is a continuum, you don't get exposed to mercury, and then you get Alzheimer's right away. But I think that it's probably safe to make the assumption that there's not a real

hormetic effect for mercury that anybody wants. It's a you're not you don't want anything impacting your brain at any level, let alone the level of Alzheimer's. Mercury has also been demonstrated to impact the serotonergic system. So serotonin, that's a neurotransmitter we use for feelings of anti-anxiety and happiness. It's a reason why antidepressants are very reliant upon SSRIs, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors. Exposure to mercury impacts the serotonergic system, which can absolutely impact your mindset. So some people may have more anxiety, they may not feel as positive, they can have lower testosterone, they can have impacted thyroid function, they can have impacted brain health. And that was all from one thing, one thing from mercury. And there's a bunch

more. But like, I think I don't think I have to convince the audience that mercury exposure isn't good for you. But it's common. You guys, how many times in just in rapid have you seen uh exposure to mercury in a lab analysis way more than i yeah way more than i thought too would be out there very common and environmental pollutants are out there like herbicides insecticide insecticides fungicides pesticides um and the heavy metals these things are in cookware they're in piping they are in the air sometimes you just breathe them Maybe you work in a machine shop or an auto shop, or maybe you used to, but then you've never done a detox protocol, and they're still there. Like, there's, there's so many people are exposed to this stuff. And then there's evidence based papers in humans about the negative outcomes that has in your health now that's impacting health at the global level which means it's impacting resilience at the global level your resilience is proportional to your purpose it's also proportional to your health so the outside in and inside out approach

to this is absolutely key to anybody who wants to take a true holistic approach to resilience. Yeah. The Mercury thing is really crazy to see how many people have it. Yeah, man. And one of my best friends just wrapped up and got his post-test done. And I'm sure it's not like a one-to-one relationship of like, all the Mercury's gone, and the fact that he just has like, the most confidence I've ever seen in his own health and like the trajectory of just like how he feels about his health is a complete 180. Yeah. Like when he.

It's so huge. Like that's before and after. Mercury present. Lots of symptoms. After. Mercury gone. Feeling like a million dollars. Like that's just data we have in-house and i've done that a ton of times in my career because it's out there you guys and you'll never know you have it unless you check no that's uh that's it's like

a the the number of downrange things too just from having that toxicity level is and it's high in some people it's like terrifyingly high um but that of all the things like um probably for the last five years my buddy and i have been talking about his health specifically um and then we have like calls set up specifically just to talk about like the last five years and then uh we talk about it not at all anymore because it just like feels like it's got a little control yeah like it's all just fixed it all just went away and there's like real confidence it's uh just being having actual conversations about that stuff specifically with him is like it is super cool because he had no confidence in it eight months ago nine months ago so um dan garter oh go ahead last question regarding like physical

resilience do you think uh or do you count rather um say i do three sets of 10 and i'm sore for five days versus i do three sets of 10 and i barely get sore at all. Like you're, you're quote unquote more resilient when you, when you just don't get sore at all, as opposed to recovering quickly. How do you differentiate between resilience and recovery kind of on the, on the physical front? I think that you've adapted to that specific stressor. So then there's not going to be the same level of muscle soreness. That's always going to happen with novelty of sets and rep scheme. It's going to happen with novelty of weekly splits going to be the same level of muscle soreness. That's always going to happen with novelty of sets and reps scheme. It's going to happen with novelty of weekly splits going to happen with novelty of just a new exercise being exposed to them as well. So I absolutely think that less soreness doesn't mean more results or less results. But I do think it's it represents the

idea that you are absolutely more resilient to that movement pattern in that set and ret scheme. I absolutely believe that, but that does not mean that it's a marker of performance or adaptation. It's purely a representation of not being, being more resilient to the effects of delayed onset muscle soreness in that movement pattern. So you wouldn't count that as like an increasing global resilience. You think it's hyper specific to the mover pattern or to the exercise itself? Right. So I'm saying that it is an increase in resilience. Oh no, not in global resilience.

Sorry. So I'm saying that it's an increase in resilience to that specific movement pattern. Yeah. That's what I'm saying. Where can the people find you, Dan Garner? At Dan Garner Nutrition on Instagram is the main spot and some courses where I talk about some of the stuff can be found at coachgarner.com. Fantastic. Doug Larson. On Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. I am Anders Varner at Anders Varner and we are Barbell Shrugged at barbell underscore shrugged and make sure you get over to arete lab.com that is the signature program inside rapid health optimization where you can go and experience all the lab lifestyle performance testing analysis and coaching to help you optimize your health and performance and you can access all of that over at arete lab.com friends we'll see you guys next week