Barbell Shrugged - Real Chalk  — Better Body Performance w/ Dr. Mike T. Nelson  — 24

Episode Date: May 22, 2018

Dr. Mike T. Nelson has spent 18 years of his life learning how the human body works, specifically focusing on how to properly condition it to burn fat and become stronger, more flexible, and healthier. He’s has a PhD in Exercise Physiology, a BA in Natural Science, and an MS in Biomechanics. He’s an adjunct professor and a member of the American College of Sports Medicine. Dr. Nelson has been called in to share his techniques with top government agencies. The techniques he’s developed, and the results he gets for his clients have been featured in international magazines, in scientific publications, and on websites across the globe. In this episode, Dr. Mike T. Nelson covers everything from the way our mind can influence our physiology, to recovering optimally. He also gets into the details comparing a ketogenic diet to a high carb diet, and give guidelines on how to determine which specific diet you or your athlete should follow.   Dr. Nelson also covers various strategies on flipping from a high fat diet to a high carb diet, and the benefits of having fast or slow access to ATP. When it comes to training, Dr. Nelson talks about how he develops programs to fit each athlete he works with, and how to find optimal training to recovery ratios.   Enjoy! - Ryan and Yaya ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Show notes: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/rc_nelson ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- Please support our partners! Thrive Market is a proud supporter of us here at Barbell Shrugged.  We very much appreciate all they do with us and we’d love for you to support them in return!  Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of FREE Organic Groceries + Free Shipping and a 30 day trial, click the link below: thrivemarket.com/realchalk   How it works:  Users will get $20 off their first 3 orders of $49 or more + free shipping.  No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week anyway, so why not give Thrive Market a try! ► Subscribe to Shrugged Collective's Channel Here http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedSubscribe 📲 🎧 Listen to the audio version on the Apple Podcast App or Stitcher for Android Here- http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedApple http://bit.ly/BarbellShruggedStitcher Shrugged Collective is a network of fitness, health and performance shows that help people achieve their physical and mental health goals.  Usually in the gym, but outside as well. In 2012 they posted their first Barbell Shrugged podcast and have been putting out weekly free videos and podcasts ever since. Along the way we've created successful online coaching programs including The Shrugged Strength Challenge, The Muscle Gain Challenge, FLIGHT, Barbell Shredded, and Barbell Bikini. We're also dedicated to helping affiliate gym owners grow their businesses and better serve their members by providing owners tools and resources like the Barbell Business Podcast. Find Shrugged Collective and their flagship show Barbell Shrugged here: SUBSCRIBE ON ITUNES ► http://bit.ly/ShruggedCollectiveiTunes WEBSITE ► https://www.ShruggedCollective.com INSTAGRAM ► https://instagram.com/shruggedcollective FACEBOOK ► https://facebook.com/barbellshruggedp... TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Welcome to Real Chalk, a Shrug Collective production. Mike Bledsoe here, stoked to be launching this network so that we can introduce you to amazing content providers like Ryan Fisher. We'll be posting new shows every weekday, so be on the lookout. As a thank you for listening, Thrive Market has a special offer for you. You get $60 of free organic groceries, plus free shipping and a 30-day trial. Go to thrivemarket.com slash real chalk. This is how it works. Users will get $20 off their first three orders of $49 or more plus free shipping.

No code is necessary because the discount will be applied at checkout. Many of you will be going to the store this week, so just hit up Thrive Market today. Go to thrivemarket.com slash realchalk to get set up. Enjoy the show. And howdy kids, how we doing? This is Yaya here from the Real Chalk Podcast. You guys are tuned in to the Shrug Collective and we got a brand new episode coming at you guys are tuned in to the shrug collective and we got a brand new episode coming at you guys once more this is one of the episodes that we recorded while at paleo effects

in austin and we had a super awesome opportunity to sit down with a super awesome guest i want to try and put super awesome in a sentence one more time somewhere uh but yeah we sat down with Dr. Mike T. Nelson. He has been a fan and a part of the Barbersh or let's be honest the one that's going to matter the most to you right now he is the inventor of the metabolic flexibility or the flexible dieting so counting your macros if it fits your macros all that stuff you have dr mike t nelson to thank for that on top of that this guy has a phd in exercise physiology from the university of minnesota a ba in natural science a ms in biomechanics he's a adjunct professor in home performance he's a professional nsca member and so on and so on this guy's the real deal guys and we had such a blast sitting with him and i could have gone on forever as you guys can already tell this episode

is a little bit longer I think we went just over 90 minutes and like I said I could have gone for two more days I was lucky enough to spend some more time with Mike over the weekend and pick his brain and I've already texted him a bunch of times since this episode was recorded to ask more and more questions. But we tried to cover as much as we possibly could in this podcast that maybe hasn't been covered as much on other shows. You guys know we got our own style. We try and do our own thing for most of it. One of the things that we jump into at the beginning

is kind of the high-carb versus for high performance athletes diets and what works, what doesn't work. Mike has worked with so many athletes throughout the years. He's really seen it all. So he breaks it down for us how come there are some athletes out there who can perform so well on a high fat diet and others who need the carbs. Other than that, we talk about outside factors that can influence your body composition. So not just the food, but also the stress, maybe overtraining, all that stuff, HRV, insulin sensitivity, sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system, and just all around how to be smarter with your training and your nutrition. I really hope you guys enjoyed this one.

I'm getting all excited. I'm flustered over here. So yeah, I hope you guys enjoyed this one as much as we did recording it. On top of that, guys, don't forget, it's still May. We still have the special going on at Chalk Online. So if you guys just head over to CrossFitChalk.com, sign up for the Chalk Online programming, which is being used by hundreds and hundreds of people around the gym

and actually we have full affiliates signed up to the program now as well. You guys are going to get the regular CrossFit Chalk programming seven days a week. On top of that, for six days, you guys are getting the sweat program, which is more of a conditioning style, body weight, less complicated movements type of workout. And all of that you're going to get for $20 a month. And if you enter in May, you guys are not only going to get a free ski erg,

but you're going to get a full home gym package. So for more information, either head over to ryan's instagram at ryanfish.com head over to our website at crossfit chalk i'm yaya at yaya's view and i'm going to let you guys dive in have fun all right got my coffee where's my coffee all right so i've just set a certain distance from you for that or am am I good? I think we're okay. Actually, if you could sit on his lap, that would be ideal. Yeah, we joke around a lot. Be prepared for that. No worries.

Yeah. All right, kids. We're here at Paleo FX sitting on the couch. Not quite Fish's couch. Yeah, no, we're still on a couch. Still on a couch. Went to TJ Maxx just for this. Got the couch right across from the Barber Shrugged booth.

And there's absolutely no way that we're not going to not return it. Yeah. So thank you, Target, for having such a great return policy. We have Dr. Mike with us right now. Who's actually sitting on Fish's lap because his couch is so small. Which you'll know will be a lie if you watch YouTube. So, yeah, I'm excited. We're on the couch.

And we are going to be talking about mental effects towards our fitness goals. Yep. So what better to talk to or who better to talk to than a doctor on the subject? Because if he's a doctor, you have to listen. A real doctor. A real doctor. That's a real doctor. Okay, cool.

So let's just start with your background and who we're talking to and we'll start getting into some stuff that people just don't know anything about. Yeah, who the hell are you, man? Yeah, I'm Dr. Mike T. Nelson. I did a Bachelor of Arts in Natural Science, did a Master's in Mechanical Engineering, Biomechanics, and then did a PhD in Kinesiology, exercise physiology. I'm the owner of Extreme Human Performance and also the creator of the Flex Diet Certification. Oh, okay. And I work with mostly clients online right now.

So when you hear the term flexible dieting, that's you? Kind of. I took and mashed up flexible dieting with metabolic flexibility. Okay. So that's how you got the term flex diet. And also you think of like fitness, flexing, that kind of stuff. Okay. But then I teach for Rocky Mountain University online.

I'm an adjunct there. And then you'll see the video, a faculty member at the Keurig Institute. They do a lot of functional neurology. So we're going to talk more about brain stuff, things like that. Absolutely. And then I primarily help them with their creation of an exercise and human performance program with Dr. Kenneth Jay and Dr. Freddy Scarsia and Dr. Kerrig and some of the other people there. Awesome. That sounds pretty cool. I mean, that's pretty obvious that you've like dedicated your life towards fitness and just like improving the metabolic condition.

What, like if we go way way back right where did this i don't want to say obsession but this path obsession's fine okay we'll do obsession then what does obsession start it probably started if i think back even pretty young so i had a open heart surgery when i was four and a half oh wow so I had heart failure when I was like four just uh hole in the top chamber so massless line of the heart and just interest in physiology probably from there like in high school I love physiology in college I'm like oh this is great I'm gonna do a bachelor of arts I'll learn more about physiology I took exercise physiology as well and yeah that class was literally the actual human physiology class was my favorite. Yeah. And it was so interesting because I never for a while didn't even understand the concept of exercise physiology. I'm like, why don't we

just have physiology? And I remember one of the first anatomy professors I had, Dr. Chisaldo was at St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. Awesome guy. Learned a ton from him. He's like, well, we have exercise physiology because physiology at rest is just kind of boring. Super boring. I'm like, oh. He's like, if we want to figure out how the system really works, you need to apply a bunch of stress to it and then see what it actually does. And that always kind of stuck with me of like, oh. It's crazy, too, because you already know it's going to be boring.

And then the professor that they give you is usually a super boring professor as well. It can be of like, oh. It's crazy, too, because you already know it's going to be boring. And then the professor that they give you is usually a super boring professor as well. It can be. Oh, definitely. My professor at University of Utah, he had like one of those thick pieces of white saliva stuck to the sides of his mouth. You know what I'm talking about? The mouth cheese. So when he would talk, it would just be

like gooping. Yeah, mouth cheese, dude. So you literally couldn't even listen to it. That's all you could see. You're just like, oh, my God, I think he's going to blow a goop bubble at me. But, yeah, it definitely can be very boring. But when it comes to exercise, I feel like it could be a lot more exciting because if you're in that class, yeah, you probably want to get bigger. You want to understand why you're getting bigger or why you're getting faster or stronger or whatever.

Yeah, and I think a lot of it for myself was just, you know, like most guys, you get into it because you want to look better and lift more. And in high school we had the old presidential fitness test, if anyone remembers that. I remember that. And if you didn't get presidential, you got the national award. It was so horrible. Like I was like the most non-physical person ever.

I remember doing that test, and we had to do the pull-up test. So you go up there and you hang from the bar, and he's like, okay, you can start the test now. And I'm like, I already started. He's like, you're not moving. I'm like, I can't move. He's like, no, you're supposed to do at least one pull-up. I'm like, I can't, you know, I got squashed by the bar, just an empty bar trying to do bench press in 10th grade. And I think a lot of it was just trying to learn to get better myself and what things I need to do and applying it and then also learning more on the academic side, too. Cool. The one thing we always talk about on this show is we do a lot of nutrition stuff and uh the one thing that we always kind of start with and

then follow up with is always that it always comes down to who you are as a person and everybody is different and everything you know someone might do fasting someone might do keto and it just depends on who you are what works best for you but one thing we never talk about is why why is every person different and what makes it different that me i I'm doing a high carb diet, fish is doing a low carb diet, you're doing keto, and all three of those things are just working perfectly for us. Yeah, I think about it as, and it's a really good topic because it's like, how do you individualize something? And I think in the industry we go like from one end to like the other end, right?

It's like, oh, everyone, like I remember in the industry we go, like, from one end to, like, the other end, right? It's like, oh, everyone. Like, I remember in CrossFit, like, for when ketogenic became popular because I got all these emails from people. They're like, dude. It's getting more popular now, I feel like. It's, like, becoming popular again. Like, the cycles, I think, are, like, being shortened. And people would email me, and they're like, hey, bro, I need your help.

I did a ketogenic diet. I'm doing CrossFit. I'm training one or two times a day. I want to make it to regionals and i'm dying i felt amazing for five weeks i feel like dog shit now and i can't figure out why you know and but then they'll held up like you know some freak that can able to do that yeah right so you've got the other end you've got people that are very, very high carb. So I look at it as what are the overarching principles? Right. Because we're all human. We all kind of look alike. Metabolism.

The basic principles are always going to be true from you to the next person to the next person. So once we understand that, OK, what's the process we go through to individualize it? And then knowing the principles will give you a really good idea of where to start. So if you come in and go, hey, I'm doing more CrossFit stuff, in my brain I'm like, ooh, ketogenic diet is probably the last thing I'm going to have you do. Why? Because your sport is extremely glycolytic. You're burning through a piss ton of carbohydrates. I'm not going to give you a nutrition plan that basically has no carbohydrates.

Like you eat, like, sniff half a bagel and boom, you're done with your carbs for a day. It's like in dodgeball when the guy is like masturbating with the pizza and shoving it down his pants. And the guy comes in, he's like, what were you doing? He's like, nothing. Absolutely nothing. But yeah, that's exactly what it is. Yeah. So I think having a little bit of a tiered approach

or a way that you're going to walk people through and be like, okay, for the assessment of your goals and what you're doing, your background, what you like to do, we're going to have you start here. That doesn't mean I'm going to be 100% or any coach to be 100% right, but it's going to be better here than over here. But then after that, not being so rigid where you're trying to pound the square peg into the round hole like I may think you need 300 grams

a day and you're like my performance is okay and I just feel like I'm becoming a fat bastard right in my head I could say wow you need more carbs or I could go well based on your current result maybe we'll scale those back a little bit or you get the inverse you have some people that have 300 grams of carbs and like I think my performance could be better cool let's bump it up and see what happens so now let's individualize from those starting points and have some markers to figure out if we're going in the right direction and then what is going on with the person who, so like for me, for instance, I competed at CrossFit for a high level for like 10 years. Yeah. And I went to regionals seven times, and I was like a games alternate a few times.

And I like never eat carbs. Really? Yeah, like I never really have. I don't even really crave them. I just crave. So when he said low carb, like he's meaning like low, low carb? I literally will only, like, and back in the day day i didn't even eat like any carbs like ever wow and i was gonna ask you the same question my sister actually is an olympic athlete and she

she went to rio uh plays field hockey which also is like highly conditioning yeah sure yeah yeah so many calories like during a game and same thing no carbs she eats maybe like salads and veggies and that's absolutely it. Whoa. And actually, if she eats carbs, which every now and then, you know, she like craves maybe like a bowl of pasta or something like that, immediately after, she gets so sleepy she can like barely stay awake. Oh, yeah. I'm the same too.

And as soon as I try to eat carbohydrates, I do definitely feel like my body fat percent goes up a little bit. And just being in the fitness industry, it's always my goal to be as lean as possible. I'm always trying to keep the carbs low just for that. And I do feel like my performance is really good. After a workout, I definitely crave

sugar, I think like anybody else. And recently in the last probably two or three years, I'll have a bunch of carbs post workoutworkout, but that'll be it. Okay. How many is a bunch, just out of curiosity? Probably like 100 grams. Okay.

Maybe. Yeah. So with someone like you, like in my brain, I'm going, okay. Just to aid, like, for muscle building. Yeah. With people like that or even, like, you said it was your sister, right? Yeah. Yeah.

I always wonder, I'm like, have they experimented with the flip of their condition? And is it better once they get through that transition? How long is the transition? Well, that's the tricky part that no one can really tell us right now, whether you're going to like say into keto or out of keto or low carb or high carb. I'll look to see where is the most efficient state to put in carbohydrates and see how they feel. So with someone like you, it would be maybe even during training or right after, right?

Because you've got all the counter-regulatory hormones. You've got muscle activation, which will pull glucose right out of the bloodstream. You've got translocation of GLUT4. You've got possibly insulin effects. You've got cortisol to some degree. You've got epinephrine, norepinephrine. If there's any time that your body is better able to, quote, unquote, handle carbohydrates, it's during training and after training.

So I will push carbs, like, super high in those people during those windows and see how they do, and then I'll expand out a little bit from there. And then you may find that hey you're good with like 100 grams post and you're perfectly fine you may find that you do even better at other times or she may find that her recovery maybe is better or maybe the type of carbohydrate or she may be so low carb for so long that the muscle can actually be more insulin resistant paradoxically to carbohydrates. Okay. Why?

Because it's trying to spare glucose for the brain. So if you make the muscle more insulin insensitive, which in a healthy person is a non-pathological condition, it's not a type 2 diabetic, your muscle is saying, hey, I don't want to take as much of the glucose because there's so little around, I need to move it to the brain. Wow. So you, I have seen those cases where someone who's been doing very low carb for such a long period of time that having them come back and use carbohydrates, especially with timing, you can see some different issues. And then also, you know, working with their physician to say, okay, what's your fasting glucose? What's your HbA1c?

There's another marker of glucose called glycomark. So glycomark is a blood test you can run to see if that first phase of insulin response is all goofed up. Right? So you've got two phases of insulin response. The first one is primarily controlled by the nervous system. It's very, very short. And you've got two phases of insulin response. The first one is primarily controlled by the nervous system. It's very, very short. And you've got the more sustained release. Some people, like my wife, we had tested her HbA1c,

which is the three-month kind of average of blood glucose, was pretty good. Her fasting blood glucose was also pretty good, was 85. Her glycomark was completely wonky. So what we think happens is she gets these massive spikes that go up and then drop really fast. So she has a lot of carbohydrates. She also feels very not so good, sleepy. I feel very tired. I don't really feel that good.

But if you only looked at fasting and you only looked at a three-month average, you'd say, no, no, no, you're fine. So we then went a step further and put a continuous glucose monitor on her to see what's actually going on. So it goes out and it takes a measurement every five minutes for two weeks. You compare that to your nutrition log, and you can look to see if you're getting these massive excursions that go high and then may go super low on the opposite end, but the average may be okay. Kind of like a pendulum. Like as soon as it goes super high, it has to go super low on the other side.

A lot of times, yeah. And when it's going super low, they feel like crap. Right. So, you know, you can get that in depth just to kind of see what's actually going on. At the end of the day, you may find that, hey, you know, even though it looks like your sport should require more carbohydrates, maybe you're okay without them i don't know i always wonder about that because at an elite level like there's a study done with uh marathon runners they gave them i think it was nicotinamide acid to block fatty acid use so they're not using fat at all and these are very

high level marathon runners they're running entirely now on carbohydrates. Their performance did not decrement at all. Which technically shouldn't work because the carbohydrates should burn up super fast in the beginning stages of the run, correct? Yes and no because they were allowing them to take in exogenous carbohydrates during. Okay. Yeah, they just wanted to see in an elite-level runner how much of that is carbohydrate-based runner how much of that is carbohydrate based and how much of that is fat based. So as you get higher levels of performance, you find that pretty much everyone will drift to being more carbohydrate use because of the rate of which you can create energy.

Carbohydrates allow you to create energy faster than fat. Fat has a benefit of you can store a lot of it and provide a crap ton of energy, but the rate at which you can produce ATP from it is much slower. Okay, gotcha. If I'm at home and I'm just kind of starting out my diet journey or whatever you want to call it, because all three of us sitting here, we've tried many trends,

like high- low carb kind of stuff you mentioned there are some markers where if i walked into your office you could start me out on a trend you mentioned exercise of those is one like how often how intense do you exercise what are some other ones of those markers just to start me out on my journey yeah so the very first question and people come up and they go hey what do you think about x diet like ketogenic diet like well what are hey, what do you think about X diet? I'm like, ketogenic diet. I'm like, well, what are your goals?

What are you trying to accomplish, right? So exactly what you said, I'll look to see what exercise you're doing, what level of intensity, how long. If I think people are lying about intensity, I put heart rate monitors on them to try to get a real accurate picture. It's not that they're intentionally trying to lie. They're just missing some awareness. Other things that I look at now that I didn't look at a couple years ago are stress. So I put heart rate variability on them, resting heart rate, sleep.

So if you use like an aura ring or you can use like a Fitbit or something like that just to get a non-invasive marker that's not self-report. So what time do they go to bed and even what time do they get up? Just the number and how many hours they're sleeping. Okay. Because we know that if you impair even one night of sleep like severely, carbohydrate tolerance is shit. And you do that for like four or five days.

University of Illinois did this. You can take people who are healthy and make them borderline type 2 diabetics in less than a week. Wow. So if I have someone who I know is pushing training really hard and they're probably sleep deprived until I can get those turned

around, I may opt to not really push carbohydrates super hard with them. That's us this weekend for sure. I might be diabetic after sleeping only three hours. That's why I'm like I might eat tacos last night. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So even just lifestyle things without getting into blood work, you know,

for most people listening that they can do, I find that those are like really big ones. And the last one too is what are they willing to do, right? Because I have some people who are scared to death of fat. I've got other what are they willing to do? Right. Cause I have some people who are scared to death of fat. I've got other people who are scared to death of carbohydrates. I, I look at another sweet potato. Oh my God, I'm going to get fat. You know, whether we can argue all day, if we think those things are real or not to them, it's, it's very real. You know, I've had in the past hour long consults with a moderately successful CrossFit person.

My whole goal at the end of the conversation was I wanted to get them to eat one more freaking sweet potato because they were so low on carbohydrates, their performance had dropped, that I'm like, this is probably the low-hanging fruit. This is the most easy thing to test first. But they're like, I know my performance is crap, but I'm going to get fat. And I'm like well one of you tested that and two you told me that performance was your goal not body comp so what is your goal is your goal body comp no it's performance i'm like but you're sounding like

you're telling me your goal is body comp yeah i don't care what your goal is either one's cool do whatever you want man that's awesome but you can't say i want this and then do that i didn't understand the difference between those two things until I actually started CrossFit. Oh, sure. I was working out really hard all my life. I played football, high school, college, semi-pro all the way through. And I've talked to nutritionists and coaches, and they've all said those things. And it's just kind of one of those things where you can hear it 100 million times.

Oh, yeah. But you just kind of one of those things where you can hear it 100 million times. Oh, yeah. But you just kind of, yeah, exactly. In through one ear, out through the other. And then all of a sudden one thing hits and you just experience it and you're like, oh, my God, I fucking get it. And that moment for me was CrossFit where when I started CrossFit, I just wasn't eating enough. Yeah. And I felt like, well, the reason why I started CrossFit at the time was because I got done with football and I wanted to work out and just kind of go into the gym and doing 5x5 bench press just wasn't cutting it. Yeah.

Because I was so used to the competition factor of working out. So then CrossFit stepped in. I was like, this is fucking perfect. Like, I'm going to get shredded, get big, all that stuff. But I was still eating the same way I was eating when I was doing five by five bench press and i burned out so super fast just tired all the time sluggish terrible workouts just foggy right and that's when i noticed that it's like all right i gotta eat just to fuel my workouts and then everything else just has to be secondary yeah yeah but i think you also made the decision that correct me if i'm wrong but performance was a little bit higher than body count.

Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, and people can do both, but they have to realize that, okay, I'm trying to do both. And at some point when I work with people, it's like, okay, where's your threshold? For someone, it may be, dude, if I get above 7% body fat, I'm a fat bastard. For other people, it's like, I'm trying to get below 30%. Everyone has their own threshold of where they want to be and then okay what is your performance what are your performance measures okay and if you want to do both what compromises where you want to be between those because you can do both but you're gonna have to compromise a little bit a little bit

yeah and there are like absolute freaks that can do both. No question. Yeah, it's weird. They're not normal. I, like, never eat carbs. Yeah. My big question here, and I, like, really, really want to know the answer to this. I feel like I know it a little bit, but I think you might be able to break it down better. So let's say I'm the person who truly believes that either A, fat is going to make me fat, or B, carbs are going to make me fat. Let's say I take your advice, and I'm like, all right, Dr. Mike says I'm going to do this and it's going to get me to my goal.

But I truly, truly believe that it's going to make me fat. Is my consciousness of me actually believing that? Does that actually lead to me becoming fat? Like is there such a stress level that you're blocking off different receptors and such or it's actually becoming true or will i just find out like physiologically on my own i would say yes raise cortisol enough high enough to actually fuck yourself up right if you're actually stressed about eating the extra sweet potato yeah so i would say yes and no, right? So on one hand, right, the hardcore calories in, calories out people would say

it doesn't matter, right? If you follow calories in, calories out, it's going to work out. Physics is going to win, right? Okay. And yes, do I 100% agree with that? Absolutely. The hard part is that people, and they'll point to metabolic chamber studies. We lock people in this metabolic chamber. We control all their movement.

We control all their food. High, high, high control. Yes, calories in, calories out, always works. The hard part is that humans live in an open environment and a free living. And you add to the fact that a lot of humans do things subconsciously that they probably don't even know that they're doing. And that, to me, is like the world's biggest monkey wrench. Because do the physics work? Absolutely. Can you 100% all the time rely on exactly what the client is telling you?

No. Sadly, no. And it's not that the client is bad or that they're trying to live you but what i've noticed is that their sub belief is that um i eat more carbs i'm going to become fat and i tell them to eat one more banana i know that that's not enough to add up to even a pound of fat it's just the physics are not even remotely close now do i think they may subconsciously alter other behaviors to move themselves to a poor self-fulfilling prophecy so they eat the banana and they work out more i i think they might right yeah and what you see is in studies

as you start lowering the calories right, people will spontaneously move less, but they won't really report it because it's almost like an unconscious thing, right? Because their body is adapting to less calories coming in, I'm going to start slowing things down, right, which is where you get into, oh, my metabolism shut down, all these other things. So what I like to do is I say, okay, I want to get as much hard data as I can within reason. So if I think you're moving less, I'm going to put a watch or an aura ring on you and see how many steps per day do you take. If you went from 12,000 steps to 4,000 steps,

and you're telling me I got fat because I ate a banana at the same time, I'm like, no, it's probably more your movement, right? And I can show them the data and say, now let's do the reverse. Let's go back up to 10,000 steps per day or 8,000 or whatever. And do we kind of even out at that point? And I think that's where kind of the art of coaching and that sort of thing comes in. So I always want to know what do I think their core belief is. And a lot of times I do kind of want to challenge it a little bit,

but not so far that I feel like I'm going to start losing their trust also. You know, and if you add like, you know, especially female athletes, if you add fluid retention, you add different electrolytes, you're training in the hot environment or not, sleep, stress, all those things like you mentioned, fluid level can actually change quite a bit. It's like you flying on an airplane. Yeah, we were talking about that yesterday. All yesterday I felt like super puffy and just bloated and big, and I was just like, what the hell is going on?

Yeah, I mean, with like some more competitors, I remember one competitor, I told her, I said, okay. She's like, I'm not losing weight, blah, blah, blah. And she's getting ready for a show. And she's already very lean. And I said, okay, for tonight, I want you to go home and I want you to have 30 grams of carbohydrates of white rice at dinner because that's what she liked.

Oh, my God, I can't eat an extra 30 grams of carbohydrates. I'm like, I absolutely guarantee you 30 grams are not going to make you fatter. And I bet that you'll probably show up leaner tomorrow morning. She's like, well, you're full of shit. There's no way. I'm like, just do it once, and let's just see what happens, okay? So does it once. She loses like two pounds.

Overnight. Probably because it was enough of a carbohydrate bump to possibly drop her cortisol to get her body to release some fluid because we dropped her stress level a little bit. Gotcha. Again, hypothetical. Who knows exactly why. Yeah. But that's happened a lot of times.

I really think that stress level thing is, like, something to really focus on. I agree 100%. Like, me personally, if I – because I am so not used to eating carbs for years and years and years, I'll eat a sweet potato and instantly just, like, feel sick to my stomach because I feel like I, like, I'm a dog and I just pissed on the bed. You know what I mean? I just feel like it was such a terrible idea, and I, like, mentally make myself feel bad about it.

So I give myself the sad dog face. Yeah. And I feel like that could definitely, like, mentally create some cortisol levels that are not okay. But also swing completely the other way. I mean, we always talk about this. When I started at Chalk, I kind of came off like a super strict training regimen, and also my outside gym life was almost nonexistent.

Yeah. I was in the gym all day, every day, outside of the gym. I was sleeping during my recovery and eating freaking chicken and broccoli, that's completely it and then i came to chalk my life kind of shifted a little bit i defocused from training and focused more on like living my life and becoming happier outside of the gym also and i was working out way less i mean before that i was working out close to four and a half five hours a day And then I was doing just class. I would show up 6 a.m., do an hour workout, and then be done for the rest of the day. Maybe like play basketball or something like that, but nothing inside the gym anymore.

And I was getting leaner and leaner and better looking, and I was just so happy when I saw myself in the mirror. As time progressed with working out three hours less a day, and the same thing, the only thing i can trace it back to is just the stress levels yeah and especially if you start getting into and i've had you know i think every coach trainer has clients that for whatever reason you just don't get a result from i mean i'd be really worried if someone says i get a result to the 100 of people 100 of the time yeah everybody is time, I doubt that.

And I find that the clients I have the hardest time with are ones that are usually a little bit older, have a little bit more injuries, and are just very, very stressed, whether the stress comes from training, whether it comes from their outside life, things of that nature. It's very hard to see a change in them. And I think a lot of times we're like oh calories in calories out that overly focusing on that i think sometimes can be a detriment and to your effect i've seen i don't know how many people where you just over train them and i've had people like not even trained sometimes for two weeks they do their hrv and wait till their hrv comes up and they're back

to normal and i said don't don't consciously change anything, right? I know they probably will, but I said, just don't change anything. Go for walks. Do light movement. Do not go to the gym. And if they can do it, which is very rare because it's very, very hard to do that, almost every time they're like, dude, I look better. I'm a lot leaner.

And they go back to the gym and test their weight, and they're, like, up quite a bit. Stronger than everything. Yeah, 100%. and they go back to the gym and test their weight, and they're, like, up quite a bit. Stronger than everything. Yeah. Right. 100%. Right, because if you're so overtrained or so sympathetic, you just haven't recovered. Your body is not in the state to perform, and you add, you know, cortisol and probably water weight, and who knows all the other factors. You haven't even probably figured out yet.

It just tends to compound it, and then a lot of times their immune system takes a hit, and they get sick. Right, right. So for someone who's maybe not even a competitor, but someone who just works out really, really hard, I would say most people who are listening to this probably have like 30% competitors listening to this and 70% of people who are just interested in fitness stuff. Sure, yeah, we'll go with that.

Let's just say I work out at Gold's and I work out super hard. How many weeks until I should take like a week off or three days off or four days off and how many days do you think you should take off yeah that's a really good question um in my experience i what i'll do with clients when i initially get them is i'll just run old school linear volume periodization which they're like i paid you a shit ton of money for this this is so basic and boring i'm like but it works it's gold standard yes because i may literally have them do one set you're like you want me to go to the gym on week one and do one set of each extra each exercise i'm like yes why because if i start super low and I build you back up, wherever you drop off is where you drop off, right?

But if I said, ah, look at your past, I think you can start at three sets or X amount of volume, and I'm wrong, crap, now I've got to go all the way back down, taper you, deload you, go back up again. So I'm like, just give me a couple weeks. I promise you within three to four to five weeks you will not want to go to the gym you will not want to do any more work and I literally just add one set each week so they may start at one or two sets and then the next week one more sets

and now they're at three sets four sets five sets I track their resting heart rate and HRV and then their kind of willingness to train like are, are you excited to go to the gym? And then usually within four to six sets of, like, four to five days a week, they're just like, no, I can't do anymore. I'm done. Yeah. And then I'll be like, all right, so let's take a taper. And usually their taper, just super simple. I cut their volume in about half to maybe even 60% because a lot of times

they still want to go to the gym. I just run in one week. I usually do week blocks. Are we about six weeks in right now? Oh, yeah, yeah. You said four to six stats, but you didn't say how long. Yeah, I usually find that it's about four to seven weeks. Okay.

So if I had to put a number on it, I'd say four to five weeks, somewhere around there. Now, some of that may be... And that's just a deload you're talking about, not actually taking off? A deload, yep. Okay. Yep, so I'll literally just whack their volume at about 50%. With competitors, it works pretty good. So I've worked with a guy who was a powerlifter

who was looking to qualify for Raw Nationals, which he did. And for those people who's a little bit more experienced, it tends to be more prolonged. So he would run about six weeks. And then when we're off season, his tapers would be about a week just because of his lifestyle that was easier. But then when we got up to a meet, we would run a little bit longer. And then his taper ended up being about 10 days and we just used hrv so i said his first time he's like okay in the past he's like i've always done a seven day taper he's like that just works i said well let's do this let's give you two weeks

this time and let's watch your hrv and when your hrv drops we're going to start your taper and then we're going to wait for it to recover and then just come down again. And if we have two weeks, that's more than enough time to be able to see that. And if it looks like you're early, we'll just add one or two more days of prep or just some stimulation work or whatever. If we're wrong on that time frame, if we think it's seven days and you're still not recovered at the end of the seven days, you're kind of effed at that point, right? You can't, you've got to do the meet or do the competition on that day. In his case,

you know, it was right about in the middle. And when you say that he's recovered or not recovered, I know you've mentioned HRV and I want to get to that later in the show. What are some other factors that you take into consideration saying that he's recovered? Yeah, so a lot of it is if you really push people, you get like sleep disturbances that don't feel good.

If you look at the research, like willingness to train is like a huge one. So I always track, you just put in your log, you know, 1 through 10, how willing did you want to train? Performance-wise, how was the session? If your performance is all of a sudden tanking and you don't feel like you want to train, you probably need to taper or deload or your recovery is just utter crap and you need to rethink your life.

Your entire life. Rethink your life. Just look in the mirror for 45 minutes. Yeah, and your values. That's your homework tonight. Yeah. So I find it varies. Total time, four to seven

ish weeks uh time off i usually run in weeks just because a lot of people like the calendar they like monday squad day wednesday's deadlift they like that kind of consistency so sometimes i just default to that because of kind of the mental side of what they like and enjoy but again if they're more elite competitors and they're really pushing volume, I'll probably run stuff out a little bit longer just to see how that plays out. And during the four to five weeks that we said where they're actually working, did you say it was three days on, two days, one day off, two days on, one day off? It depends.

Like I have everyone on a – I mean I've had some people on a two-day template. I've had some people who are like, dude – Two days a week? Yeah. They're like, dude, my life is hell Monday through Friday. I've got kids. I drive an hour each way. They're like, I physically can't fit any time in the gym.

So they train for an hour and a half Saturday and Sunday. Is that ideal or quote-unquote optimal? Probably not. But is it better than anything else they could probably do at that time unless they just rearrange their whole life? Yeah. Most people I have, like four days is pretty average for weight training. They may do some light cardio on the opposite days too.

I tend to do them on different days. That's a perfect segue into my next question. I know a lot of CrossFitters do the active recovery day. Yeah. And I think it's a wide spectrum of recovery days going on. There's the active recovery day where I just do like a raw water yoga session in the morning. And then there's other active recovery days where people are in the gym for two and a half hours and going from bike to road to ski. And all out.

Yeah, exactly. So do you implement active recovery days and if yes what are like the parameters that you have your athletes within yeah like the simplest template i ever use which again is a little bit more for intermediate athletes is monday wednesday friday maybe saturday some type of lifting anaerobic five by five is a bunch of different routines you can use split out the work as much as possible. I'm a big fan of splitting out the work over the course of all those days. Tuesday, Thursday, maybe an optional Sunday.

Just get up in the morning if you can and do some type of fasted cardio, moderate to low intensity. So you can use the Phil Moffitton's equation. So 180 minus your age. So if I'm 43, my max I'm still looking at is around 137, 140. And I will actually put heart rate monitors on people, especially if they tell me they do CrossFit. First thing I'll do is like, put a heart rate monitor on, do your recovery day, send me your data. And I show it to them and go, 10 beats off your max. Do you think this is recovery work?

And they're like, well, you should see my lifting days. I'm like, cool, that's your next object. Go out and put this on during your lifting day. And usually there's not enough contrast between them. That's probably the simplest thing I do. And then I will also usually, in more advanced people, change their carbohydrate levels. So lifting days will be usually much higher on carbohydrates,

usually pre, sometimes mid, and post, definitely pre and post. And then recovery work, if possible, I have them do it fasted or semi-fasted. So if they can't get it done in the morning, which is fine, they said I can only do it at 3 in the afternoon. Cool, just have a normal meal at noon, and then probably not much before you go to your run at 2 or 3, or cycle, or agameter, or whatever. And then we'll have a little bit more carbs, you know, kind of after.

What are some benefits you've seen with the fasted active recovery? I think in, I'm trying to match their bioenergetics to the exercise, which the model I use then is it's called the more of a U-stress model. So E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S, that you're matching the energy intakes to what you're burning. So if you're going to go out and do this crazy WOD, you're going to burn through a piss ton of carbohydrates. I want you to have a piss ton of carbohydrates probably on board or going to be replaced relatively soon. If your goal is recovery work and you're trying to increase the body's aerobic base, I'm trying to increase the body's ability to use fat,

we know that if I bump up insulin before, that intensity is going to push you a little bit more towards carbohydrate use. So I want you to stay more on the fat burning side, which gets bastardized. But I'm trying to selectively use more fat to run that aerobic engine. And when you're fasted, correct me if I'm wrong, you increase hormone levels, correct? Don't you get a little bit of extra growth hormone output? You do, but I don't think that makes any difference.

There's one study that looked at that in terms of lactate. So if you do a really heavy lactate session, it is true that you do get more growth hormone. Do those acute anabolic hormones matter? I think you could almost make a slight argument for growth hormone. I think growth hormone is more of a fuel selector than it is a thing by itself. Meaning that if you're fasted, you are absolutely correct that growth hormone will go up,

but I think that's because growth hormone is also pushing your body to use more fat. Okay. So I think the cause and effect sometimes gets reversed. If we look at studies from Dr. West, who is out of Stu Phillips' lab, they did studies looking at acute testosterone release. They've done three of those studies now looking at hypertrophy, and the first one they did was a brilliant study. So all the stuff from, like, Bill Kramer and everyone else that says,

hey, if you go to the gym and you do super heavy squats and we go measure your testosterone, your testosterone goes up. And that's absolutely true. The follow-up question is, does that actually matter? Does that acute bump in testosterone make any damn difference at all? So what Dr. West did is they said, okay, you come into the lab Monday, we're going to have you do squats, and then we're only going to exercise your right bicep on that day, right? That's the high hormone condition, right? Squats bump bump testosterone you're exercising your

right bicep under high levels of testosterone take a couple days off come back into the lab now do the reverse exercise your left bicep first and then go squat wow that's cool why left bicep is now exercised under a low hormone condition, but the work and every volume, everything else is identical between the two groups. And what they showed was no difference between either one of the groups. They've repeated that study with a little bit different version. Ronsted, who's out of Denmark, did show some difference on exercise order in terms of acute hormone release. Stu Phillips then took their data and analyzed it a different way and said, no, if you analyze it this way, there's no effect really.

So at least with testosterone, we've got pretty good data to show that those acute levels from exercise don't appear to matter at all. Now, again, we're talking about a very acute level that's elevated and then drops down we're not talking about people using high amounts of exogenous hormones that are completely out of the range and being elevated chronically for days to weeks to months yeah um so what do you think was the ideal training schedule for someone who's been like working out for five six ten years Maybe they're pretty advanced, and they still think they need to work out five, six days a week. What do you have to say about that?

What do you think is the best scenario? Yeah. Because I work out five days a week. I take off the same days every time. I always take off Thursday and Sunday. Okay. But I've really, really been wanting to try a three-day-a-week workout just to see if I could look the same and work out less.

Yeah. And maybe just do a little bit higher volume on those days. But I think it would feel amazing. Yeah, I would bet. So what I've seen is that if your goal then was to only maintain what you have, I would bet you could probably drop down to one day a week or maybe two days. Wow. And still maintain. Yeah, totally.

Even your leanness and your muscle size? Everything? In my experience, I would say yes. Wow. Now, if you told me you want to get bigger and stronger on one day a week, that's going to be really hard. I know a couple of guys who have

done it just because of their schedule. But what I've noticed is to maintain a physiologic quality doesn't take that much work. Right. So if you have someone who trains really hard in their cardiovascular stuff, maybe one, two days a week, they do cardiovascular stuff. They can kind of keep their aerobic side pretty good. Now, if they drop to zero, holy shit, it's going away pretty fast. I can feel that for sure. Yeah.

Now, muscle is different because muscle is such a slow process that size-wise, you probably won't lose for quite a while. Now, strength, you probably would because you're not practicing that skill. So what I tell people is if you run this experiment, do it one or two days, and then when you go back to test, let's say, your squat strength, your first test day may be pretty shitty. But do it at least one or two more times because you may have lost the skill of squatting a heavy weight.

And that will come back within probably one or two exposures, and you're probably still okay. A mistake I see people make is, you know, I'm just going to do one or two days a week. I do that for a couple months. Holy shit, I went back and tested my max squat, and it was off by like 10 pounds. Yeah. I'm like, well, dude, one, that could vary by... That's actually awesome. I would take that. Your testing day, right? Yeah. Or 20 pounds or whatever. And it's like, but if you haven't practiced that for three months, you

probably may not have lost that contractile tissue. You may have just lost a little bit of that skill of not practicing that per se. But I think maintaining and trying to gain are, like, completely different. Because I'll take periods of time where even, like, down here, I was in Sal Padre kiteboarding for 14 days, and I only went to the gym twice. I've heard that's an amazing place to kiteboard, by the way it's so nice I've heard it's so fun but I'm out you know riding 12 out of the 14 days you know beating the shit out of myself doing that and I would get up and I'd run usually most mornings do some meditation that kind of stuff

so it wasn't like I was not doing anything now I know if you said let's go test your max deadlift right now it's probably not going to be that good but I've done it enough to know that if I go back home get in a nice routine, I kind of sleep more eat a little bit better, all those things within probably two weeks it's not going to be that far off. Totally. You know like I tested it when I was in Costa Rica and

it was only off by like 20-30 pounds you know it wasn't that bad and that could be just a variation on the day that I tested it too. Yeah. You know so it's yeah I think. And that could be just a variation on the day that I tested it, too. You know, so it's, yeah, I think there's a pretty big discrepancy between there. So to answer your question of what would be ideal, it depends on their goals and what they want to do. I will do as much specific practice as I can get away with

to improve that skill as long as they can recover. So if you said, hey, I want to start deadlifting more, and I'll do whatever you tell me, and my aerobic base is pretty good so I can recover from work, I've got experience deadlifting, I've had people deadlift four or five days a week. Now I'll rotate them through. Like you may do a Jefferson, you may do a shovel deadlift,

you may do conventional, and then maybe a block pull. So I'm not going to have you do the exact same movement all the time because that just destroys people mechanically. But if you kind of vary it around, you can usually get away with a fair amount of volume with it. Like Westside Barbell style? Yeah, I mean Westside Barbell, right? I mean those dudes are, drugs aside,

I mean those are massive dudes moving massive weight. Yeah, when they have like those two days a week sessions where it's super heavy one day and then the next time is like a tempo where it's like speed work and it's like 50% effort. Yeah, and they rotate through. And they change the movements every single time which I think is super interesting. Like, Louis Simmons says he didn't squat for

10 years and he PR'd his back squat. Yeah, that on one hand, like, my brain's like, wow, that's amazing and doesn't seem to be true, but they're obviously doing something that works. And then on the other side, Jeremy Leneke, who's done a lot of work, he's had really good results in his lab by having people deadlift 90 plus percent at a pretty high frequency. All the time.

A fair amount for short periods of time right not for years and the bulgarian olympic lifters yeah bulgarian olympic lifters same thing right because said principles so specific adaptation to pose demand would say that the fastest way to get better at that is to do direct practice and so i i tend to agree with that but i've noticed some people just get the shit beat out of them. And look at the Bulgarian system, right? So they were notorious, again, drugs aside, notorious for just chewing through lifters. And in their system, it didn't matter.

If you can't hack it, dude, we've got 1,000 other people that would give their left nut to be right where you are. See you later. Bob, get over here. But they're all getting tossed in the recycling bin. Oh, yeah. They look like Mr. Potato Head fell apart. Oh, yeah. I mean, for longevity, horrible idea.

Yeah. We were talking about longevity a lot this whole weekend and, like, in the last, like, week or two. And we actually were at a gym recently here in Austin, and they talk about having classes called durability classes. Yeah. And I thought that was, like, the most interesting thing. I was like, that's really cool to be able to give people things that are actually, like.

Was it on it? It was on it. Yeah, yeah. I love those guys. It was just cool that they were doing stuff that was, like, you know, in that direction, like durability and longevity and stuff like that. I think that's really cool. Yeah, I think.

I don't think you understand that, though, until you're like 30 plus. No. I mean, you understand it younger, but I don't really think that you know that you need it until you start getting a little older. No. I've had this discussion with I don't know how many coaches and stuff now. I'm like, you see a young person

come in in their early 20s, right? And you're like, oh my gosh, I can see the path that you're going down. Oh yeah, for sure. And I can see that you're successful now, but I guarantee within three to five years, you're not going to be happy, right? But to try to talk them out of that path, I think it's almost impossible at this point. It is.

So what I do with people, I don't know if it's right or wrong, is can I get them to just skirt a little bit to the right, and can I literally get them to screw up but not as bad? Can I get them to screw up enough that they learn the lesson but they didn't debilitate themselves? Because I can't really get them to not mess themselves up no matter what I do. It's the whole analogy when you have a kid, they have to touch the stove pot. Oh, yeah. Just burn themselves a little bit and get it.

All right, that's hot. Let's not do that again. Yeah, it's like how, and I literally think about this, how can I get them to do a controlled mistake where it's bad enough that they'll learn but not, in a perfect world, not injure them? Not that I'm trying to injure anyone. No, absolutely. It's the same people who come to you and go, hey, dude, but not in a perfect world not injure them. Not that I'm trying to injure anyone. It's the same people who come to you and go,

hey, dude, I want you just to beat the shit out of me. I'm not going to listen to a damn thing you say. I don't care how many degrees. I don't care how many CrossFit people you've gotten to regionals and in the games. I'm not going to listen to you unless you just pound the crap out of me. And normally I don't work with those people. But in the past I have, and so I thought, okay okay what can i do to them that will just metabolically wreck them without injuring them right and you come up with and everyone else has done this too hey let's go push the car let's

do reverse sled drags let's go pound on a tire let's do high concentric stuff that feels i mean like reverse sled drags on your quads are just miserable. Yeah. But you usually don't get injured with that. It's not a high-skill movement. Anyone can put in the right mechanics. There's not much eccentric. You're not having a lot of load.

The risk of injury is very low. But, man, it feels hard. And then once they kind of buy into that, you kind of try to give them a little less stupid stuff. But sometimes you've got to go that route just to get their buy-in. Yeah, you totally do, yeah. I have some people in our gym right now that just will not stop working out just all day, every day type of thing. Or they'll work out for like two hours and you see them in the gym again,

they're working out for two hours again. And you say that to them, you're like, oh, no, I only worked out for like 30 minutes, minutes or whatever and it's like okay yeah and i'm good friends with dr pat davidson he's got a program called mass one and mass two and it's just absolutely heinous and pat's like a freaking genius but the program is so horrible it's like all you know like bench press incline press uh what is it squat deadlift and pull-ups i think all like 20 second work 40 second rest and you cycle through five for like multiple sets just utterly heinous does it work yeah absolutely but in his model and his model is that i'm gonna make the

work so hard and so heinous that you will have to change the rest of your life or you will never complete it. So it's kind of targeted to those people who are like super goal-driven. I can do this. You're not going to tell me not to do it. I could make an argument that for some people that may be the only approach that works for them. That's not where I start, but I think for some people that definitely works for them. I think CrossFit

is like that to an extent. CrossFit very much is on that. Right? Where once you walk into a gym, I experienced the same thing coming from football. I know what we're doing was just weightlifting in the gym, and there wasn't really any coaching. It was just, here's a barbell, there's a lot of weight on it, pick it up, put it over your head type of thing. And then you get into

CrossFit, and you realize, damn, I can't keep up unless I'm sleeping, I'm eating, I'm doing my recovery. Otherwise, I'm either going to get injured or I'm just never going to get good at this. Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah. 100% the same thing. All right, let's shift a little bit.

Yeah. And let's go from body to mind. Let's go just upstairs a little bit. Sure. So I know that there are a lot of implications that food and diet and just your recovery has also on your mind. What are some experiences you've had with that with your clients? Yeah, the biggest thing I found, and you can get into, like, what is central versus peripheral fatigue, right?

So a lot of times people are like, oh, your CNS is burnt. I'm like, on one hand, I've experienced that, and I know what that feels like. On the other hand, I'm like,'m like what the hell are they talking about you know and you look at the research there's some cool studies one of them was an old study from the 90s uh from andrew fry where he took people and said okay i think you're gonna do olympic weightlifting you're gonna do 90 plus percent of your one rep max on monday and Tuesday and then Wednesday and Thursday. I think he did it for seven days in a row just to see what happens, right? So muscular-wise, right, concentric load, not that much damage going on,

but a very high kind of neural effect. What he saw was, like, willingness to train, things like that, were the first thing to show up. Performance would definitely drop, too. And he said by the end of the seven days, he's like, no first thing to show up. Performance would definitely drop too. And he said by the end of the seven days, he's like, no one wanted to go to the gym anymore. This sucks. This is horrible. I don't want to do this.

So there is some component to that. Second, you can look at some of the old studies where they did just like leg extensions. So, okay, do leg extensions till max. All right. Well, now if we think that there's a difference between central versus peripheral, what can we do to see if we can get this muscle to work more? Oh, we'll take a high amount of electric stim and hook it up to the quad and see if we can zap the shit out of it and see if it'll do anything else.

Oh, lo and behold, it will. So if you override the central mechanism and directly stimulate the muscle in a human you will get more work out of it wow okay um so that kind of is some data to show that well maybe there is something to these central effects like tim noakes would say it's a central governor theory by the way you know what's interesting is that um if you've ever been shocked by those things, they hurt like bloody hell. Yeah.

The ones that actually work. So what they did in a further study is because the receptors, the pain receptors are primarily in the skin. Okay. And when you run the current through the skin, you're hitting all those receptors and it hurts. It hurts really bad. Yeah.

So what they did is brilliant. They took a round induction loop. So they take a loop, run current through it, and you create a magnetic field that you can induce current via what's called the right-hand rule into a wire. So putting a wire in a large magnetic field will induce a current the direction of your thumb in the wire. So they put this massive induction loop over the

main nerve to get the nerve to run energy down and they bypass all the pain receptors oh no way because the theory was and i agree that creating so much pain may actually have changed the output because it was so painful right um but yeah so anyway getting back to the question, I think there is something to central issues versus peripheral type issues. Okay. And was your question more related to mental stuff and recovery? Right. I think the biggest thing is people just need to be able to downregulate. So can you get to be more parasympathetic? If you look at the autonomic nervous system, you've got your parasympathetic side,

which is primarily your vagal nerve, and putting pressure on the gas pedal of your car. I push on the pedal harder, and the car slows down. On the sympathetic side, I can step harder on the gas pedal, and the car is going to accelerate. A lot of people, especially I've noticed some CrossFit athletes, are really good on the sympathetic side. Man, you tell me we're going to go do my favorite my favorite wad today i'm gonna have like four cups of coffee

this is gonna be the greatest thing ever and then like four hours later they're running around still like you know they can't they can't down regulate like at all and what i found anecdotally is that their recovery capacity is just not very good but you look at um a buddy of mine trains a lot of nhl guys and he would say his biggest predictor for who's going to stay in the league the longest time he's like is who can down regulate he's like we'll have guys come in that are just sympathetic monsters they can go out they can hammer and hit guys and they could their performance is amazing he's like for about one to two years and then they burn up and no one ever hears from him again he's like the guys who can go out and perform at a high

level they can come back and just down regulate and they'll sit and just be fine the tom brady's they can play in 12 seasons without yeah exactly right you can even see this even more in like quarterbacks and stuff right you've got um certain quarterbacks in the nfl who physical performance wise should be light years ahead of everyone else but you'll see them get stressed or pressured and you'll see them make poor decisions right so i think some of that is a skill acquisition thing but i think some of it is how their brain is processing under a high level of stress and then also if they processing under a high level of stress. And then also if they realize that they're having that stress, can they get themselves to calm down a little bit, even being in a very stressful environment?

Right. So the military does this really well. Like you look at like Navy SEALs and how they train. They do so much intense training that they literally almost get flipped. So they'll go into a very stressful situation, and they'll be actually quite calm. But a lot of them, when you see them are done, going to the grocery store. Just because they've adapted to the outside stressors so much, so it just doesn't bother them anymore? Yeah, because they've done so much training that it becomes almost a controlled environment that's like their baseline yeah yeah which is what you want

right because you don't want someone to have a massive stress response in the wrong environment but i can imagine if you're so used to that man can you imagine just going to the grocery store and just kind of doing day-to-day tasks i think would be harder almost to adapt to because it's so different. Yeah. You know, so the system is super plastic where you can go so far the other direction and granted that takes a lot of time, a lot of training, very specific circumstances that you can adapt to that. But it takes some time. So I think being able to down regulate to once you're done with training can you sit in the corner and just do some belly breathing for a while can you write out your training journal

just get your heart rate even back down to semi normal and not run around like a crazed idiot for four hours afterwards that's fun to do once in a while yeah but that was gonna be my next question you said there's a certain aspect of that that's just skill acquisition and before we get into maybe supplements and all that stuff, what are some of those skills that you can teach yourself and learn to maybe get better at downregulating? Yeah, so one of the ones I like to use a lot is, I talked to Bledsoe about this too, is RPR.

It's Reflexive Performance Reset. You can do specific work on yourself, or you can have someone else help you with it. And it gives you better access to control breathing and breathing is probably the biggest i would say window to the autonomic nervous system so if i sat here and i told you just start breathing super fast i guarantee your heart rate will go up right because heart rate is coupled to breathing rate why because the heart has to deliver oxygen and all those things the The reverse is true. If you start breathing just very slow and relaxed, your heart rate starts coming down, right?

And everyone kind of knows this, but that gives you a way of controlling your autonomics, controlling parasympathetic to sympathetic. And it's your muscles and everything, too. You know, if you're, like, super tense because you're stressed out about something, you might be actually, like, tense. Like, your muscles may be flexed to a certain point, and once you start breathing correctly and you take deep breaths in and out,

you feel yourself, like your entire body just physically actually relaxing. Oh, yeah, because your body is wired for survival, right? So if you get super – so imagine you're like Paleo Man, right? So there's a Paleo effect. Wandering through the Paleo desert or whatever you are, and you see the saber-toothed tiger. You're like, wah! You're going to run as fast as possible, right?

So you want as much muscular gross motor output as possible. You want as much blood flow to the muscle as humanly possible. Are your muscles probably going to be a lot more tense? Absolutely, because it's going to tighten the tendons. It's going to give you more reflex and all that kind of stuff. The hard part is that a lot of humans now are under high levels of stress with, like, no movement. So you think about the person working at their desk job, their boss yelling at them all day, and they're sitting at their keyboard scared out of their mind.

They have completely uncoupled stress with movement. And I think that's why something like CrossFit is also potentially so beneficial because your stress and movement are more coupled. You just can't really take it to the nth degree and stay in that state all the time. So I think of matching the stressor to the state, and then what state do you want to be in? If you're doing a max one rep lift by all means be as sympathetic as possible is that going to help you in an advanced lifter absolutely

right gross motor skills go way up right just look at power lifters guys hitting them on the chest nose torque you know loads of caffeine and in lifters, that all helps their lift, right? That enhances gross motor skill. However, you don't really see many Olympic lifters doing that. Olympic lifters still moving a lot of load, less load comparatively, more fine motor skills. Is that almost the same skill that the Navy SEAL has then? That they're able to go out on stage and be ready for peak performance but at the same time be so calm and relaxed that they know what to do as far as their motor skills go

I think it's both I think they're really good at transitioning so cognitively being relaxed you need to be relaxed making sure you can think clearly and then if you have to act by all means all out do whatever it is you need to do okay now I'm back down to being relaxed I have to act, by all means, all out, do whatever it is you need to do. Okay, now I'm back down to being relaxed. I have to do this type of drill. I think of like the old videos of like the old Russian weightlifters, right? Huge dude wanders out on the stage. The dude looks like he's going to fall asleep. The second he touches the bar, you're like, holy shit, watch this.

Clean and jerk world record. Wanders off stage like he's going to go take a nap. Yeah, back to hibernation. Right, back to hibernation he goes. In the tundra somewhere or whatever. Yeah. In the tundra. Yeah.

But massive amount of parasympathetic until the absolute moment he needs to be as sympathetic as possible and then back to being parasympathetic again. Yeah. You see this in elite athletes a lot of times too. Watch NFL is great. as sympathetic as possible and then back to being parasympathetic again. Yeah. Right? You see this in elite athletes a lot of times too. Right? Watch, like NFL is great. Watch players in between plays.

Watch like wide receivers and stuff. You'll see them kind of wander back to the line, but the second they're ready to go, they're gone. Right. And the second the play is over, guys, you know, making fun of someone else or whatever, right? They're completely on or then back to being off. My roommate in college was the perfect example. He complete just freak athlete and out of Florida,

fastest kid I've ever seen in my whole entire life. We played in junior college together, and then at the end of two years, he had offers to go anywhere he wanted to. Grades weren't there, so he didn't end up that's the only reason i believe in why you haven't heard of him otherwise this kid would be an nfl 100 and he was exactly the same way he we would practice and then we would get a water break and we would all jog over to the water cooler and he would literally right where he was just lay down and i'm not joking taking that for like two minutes yeah and then once practice

resumed he just popped up and started running again there was actually one instance um during spring where we were all just on the field and we're just kind of like playing catch and playing around and he was literally just laying in the end zone dozing off and the coaches just bought the new like laser uh time oh yeah for like the 40 yard dash thing and they were setting it up and they were like lv come over here come come test this thing out and he's like oh dude i really don't want to like i'm relaxing i'm just laying in the sun type of thing yeah and they're like just you have to go fast just test it out so he walks over he takes off his sweatpants takes off his hoodie just in

compression shorts does like two stretches jumps around a little bit runs a four six and we're like oh my god dude get the fuck out of here. And the rest of the day, like, whenever there wasn't practice, he would just lay on the couch and just, like, move in turtle speed. And we always said that that was his key to success. Like, he would move so slowly for 98% of the day that, like, the 2% where he had to fire, he was just the fastest kid alive. And I think that comes back to, like, being able to regulate up and down super fast.

Yeah, and it's very similar if you work with special forces people or even just police, right? You think the average cop is probably sitting in a cop car. There's something that ever went completely sideways, rare, but it happens. Are you really going to get out of your car and go, hold on, got to stretch my hamstrings yeah got to make sure my hip flexors are good it's like no you you have to go you know and a lot of times your life depends upon what happens at that point too but so being able to

train that too even you know power lifting or even crossfit right so crossfit you got you know so you're competing three times in a day. Sometimes more. Yeah, sometimes more. You don't see it as much now as what I used to see it, but if you went back like five years, I would watch the games, and I would go, that dude's not going to make it. That girl's not going to make it. And what you would see is they could not downregulate between sets. You'd see them walk around. You'd see them stay amped up, and they would do really good.

And then by the end of the competition, they were like nowhere to be found um i don't see that as much now per se that's a really good point actually now that i think about it now that people i think across are getting more professional too i think that's a big big aspect of it that their life revolves more around it so the education factor comes in more so they realize things like that are super important that you're able to get the rest you need in between the hour, hour and a half of the two events. You need to, like, conserve as much energy as you possibly can before you need to go full speed again.

Yeah, and the old joke I used to make, although people still know who Rich Froning is, but not as much as a couple years ago when he was competing, is, like, the joke I would make is, like, you would watch him compete, and every time I'm like the dude's gonna lose he's gonna lose it doesn't look like he's trying that hard he's like at 70 I'm like oh my god and he destroys everyone and then after that he's usually just and that was Matt Frazier last year too. I mean, he won so many events.

I think they went into the last day and he technically didn't even have to compete as far as points scored. Like, he only won. And he had events where I remember the – I forgot what exactly the event was, but it was a regionals event where at the very end they had all the ground over shoulder things with the sandbags. And then at the very end they had to, like, grab it and carry it over the finish line. At regionals.

Yeah, at regionals. And every single finish you saw, like, oh, here's another record, here's another record. You always saw these guys just, like, with the bag, and they literally, like, fell over the finish line and dropped, and they were just laying there. And then finally it was East Central, whatever Fraser is. And it was like, all right, Fraser beat the record again, and they showed a video. And this dude literally just jogs over the finish line, drops the bag, and, like, whatever Frazier is. And it was like, all right, Frazier beat the record again, and they showed a video, and this dude literally just jogs over the finish line, drops the bag, and, like, walks off the floor without, like, even breathing heavy.

And I was like, wow, dude, this is fucking insane. But just think on a psychological level, too, how demoralizing that would be to watch that as another competitor. I mean, to be, like, the dude who, like, like did really hard and maybe you get second and you're destroyed and you see some guy Come in who just destroys your time and it looks like No big deal man walk in the park We have this guy, you know Josh bridges, yeah I know he is but yeah him and I'd be in the same heat all the time. And he would do something where I'm literally like, I'm fucking cruising.

And I look over and I'm like, oh, this motherfucker's done? And I'd have to go back and watch the video online so I could see what he did. I'd be like, what did he do? It doesn't make any sense to me. That actually leads me just a little off path, but I wanted to ask this question. I have days where I'm working out and i go in and i warm up and i start the workout and i feel absolutely fantastic throughout the whole entire workout i'm very clear in my mind i feel very connected to the workout um i know what i'm doing the entire

way through i feel like i have my breathing under control and by the time the workout ends i knew i performed very well but i'm okay Maybe I'm laying on the ground. Maybe I need to breathe a little bit, but after two minutes, I'm up and I can go again. Then there's other days where there wasn't any significant difference in my outside life. So it wasn't like I went drinking the night before. It wasn't necessarily I'm super stressed out. It wasn't necessarily I didn't get any sleep. But there are days where I start working out,

and it just feels like I cannot get going. I'm breathing the entire time. My lung is going to come out of my throat. My heart rate is out of control. I feel like I'm zoning out in the middle of the workout. I'm not there physically. And then afterwards, I go home, and I'm done for the rest of the day. Where does that come from? physically and then afterwards i go home and i'm done for the rest of the day what are where does

that come from if i knew that i'd yeah be doing on a living on the island in fiji i think there's a lot more variability to one day and the next day than we currently understand right i'm sure you guys have experienced this right so the scenario you scenario you just talked about, I'm sure you probably had that. Where you go to the gym and you're thinking in your head, you're like, yeah, I feel good. All my metrics are good. My nutrition's been on point. I slept good.

Man, this is going to be the greatest training session ever. And you get there and you're like, this sucks. Why does this suck? It happens all the time. And in the past, I used to kind of force myself through it, and now I'm just like, I'll get to a point, and I'm just like, it's not, for whatever reason, it's not there, it's not there. And then I'll just leave.

Wow. You know, but it's hard, too, because if somebody is new, maybe I want them to train through that. Maybe I want them to get the habit of doing things that are hard, too, because if somebody is new, maybe I want them to train through that. Maybe I want them to get the habit of doing things that are hard. But the risk you run is I think you increase your risk of injury, and I think you decrease your performance because you're literally training someone to be worse. Now, if you tell me you're trying to build the mental habit and things of that nature for someone who doesn't have the habit of exercise.

Just a resilience factor of it. Yeah okay maybe i can buy that but if you're a higher level competitor and it's easy for you to go to the gym it's hard for you not to go to the gym i would argue that you're probably making your performance worse on those days and just if it's not there it's not there um i would probably leave at that point and it's crazy to think that that takes so much experience you know i mean it's two two kinds of people i feel like that can do that one is the person that just started working out right they get to the gym and they're like oh i hate this i'm going home yeah and then it's the other person who's been working out for 15 20 years where they get 20 25 minutes into their workout and immediately they're like this just isn't it this is just not

my day i'm gonna go home one of my favorite references or one of my favorite like stories i've ever heard was um and this is back a guy that is training in arizona with opex and uh i know opex does a lot of testing so like while their athletes are working out they take blood samples they have them like hooked up to the oxygen machine they run moxie too yeah exactly so it's not just i feel like shit it's actually like your metrics are off and you shouldn't be working out today and then they my buddy that i was talking to he was doing like roll repeats yep and basically it was he had to keep it within three seconds of his first time yep not faster not slower yep just keep it there and he messed up

once went like five seconds slower and they were like all right let's try this again took a little blood sample did it again went five seconds slower again so they were like all right time time you're done time to go home and he's like what do you mean like i just i just got here like this is my training day right yeah so they're like no your metrics are off you're not feeling great and then this is my favorite coaching advice ever he said to him he goes here's what you need to do go home eat a cup of rice jerk off go to sleep and then come back tomorrow and i promise you you're gonna feel fucking fantastic and like sometimes that's what it takes you know to just be able to quit mid-training and just call it a day yeah i i like

to have like some type of performance metric that you know you're not meeting yeah and in a perfect world then i'd be like okay you have a decision so today if you're following a eustress model, so stress that you can fairly easily recover from your matching, your nutrition to your exercise modality and performance is your number one thing, then yes, you probably need to go home. to set days say for CrossFit to qualify or in the games or whatever you have to decide now am I going to make this a distress day meaning that I'm going to run the risk of injury a little bit higher I may have to take the next two or three days off but I'm going to do it as a simulation practice because what if this happens on the day I do have to compete. Absolutely. That's a fair point. Yeah, it's a great point. But I think you have to decide that at that point and live with that decision. Yeah. Right. And I think if you have never done any distressed training, that may be the perfect day to do it and be like, all right, I got to figure this shit out and I got to perform now. I'm not that worried about the cost. Obviously, I don't want to injure myself because if this happens on the day I have to compete, I need to know what it's like in practice. Or like you said, if it's a eustress, then I would say, yeah, take the day off. You've got plenty of time.

Your competition's, say, nine months out. You've done two distress sessions already in the past three cycles. You probably don't need any more distress training. You've done that before. You knew that if you had to do it right now you'd probably be okay but you don't need that simulation practice i love that that's awesome you know what the reality of that probably is though right yeah you're gonna have a shitty workout yep you're gonna be mad that you had a shitty workout you're gonna come back later and work out again well first of all you're gonna leave the gym you're gonna not eat right you're not gonna eat carbs or anything because well i didn't work out again. Well, first of all, you're going to leave the gym. You're going to not eat, right? You're not going to eat carbs or anything because, well,

I didn't work out hard enough. So I'm not going to eat. So you're going to go back. You're going to work out harder. You're going to try to work out harder. And then you're supposed to have a rest day the next day, but you didn't really work out the day before. Yeah, exactly.

That's what happens. Oh, yeah. And it's a whole mental game at that point, right? It's, you know, go home, do the exact same thing you did, but to your point exactly, athletes are like, bro, I didn't earn my carbs. Or I didn't even work out yesterday because I couldn't go hard. Right. Yeah, and that's a tough one as a coach, as a gym owner for myself. That's really rough. Even for myself as an athlete, I feel those days and I'm like, I know that tomorrow needs to be a rest day because today was

a shit day. But just mentally, I know that tomorrow needs to be a rest day because today was just a shit day. But just mentally, you know what I mean? It's a hard compromise for sure. Yeah, absolutely. All right, let's get back on track. Sorry about that little side note, but I think that was important. You mentioned RPR. Yeah.

Let's talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, so it's originally from Doug Heal's work. He's out of South Africa, which was B-activated training. And that's the initial training that I did with it and then he got a license to license it as RPR so reflexive performance reset which is taught by like primarily Cal Dietz, JL Holdsworth, Chris Corfis and it's taking Doug's system and applying it to coaches and trainers so Doug's kind of teaching more of the medical model to chiropractors, physicians, that type of thing. And then RPR is taught more to coaches and personal trainers.

Okay. And it's a way of doing very simple strength tests to figure out what muscles are not working the way that they should be and then to do a set of interventions just by pushing on tissue, right, different points that you work on the athlete can work on themselves to get those muscles to then be activated again okay what i like about it is it's um so i've taught it a couple times in texas actually and once it on it and the thing that amazed me about it was there's a lot of other like really cool systems out there and i love a lot of the other systems but man i don't even feel remotely qualified to do them on people much less

teach them and to have people come in and one day and leave and do something that's pretty effective i think is a very good system and the other part i would ask people so we'd run them through they'd be paired up it's okay just for practice you're going to work on each other, right? Because this is just practice. And then we'll have you do the strength test on each other. You'll do the little point, and then you'll see, did the strength test improve? And at the end of running them through all these drills over the course of a day for level one, each time I'd be like, all right, I have everyone in the group. How many got better? Like 80% of the people would raise their hand. All right, how many got worse? I had one person once out of two full days that got worse

that I was able to change in 30 seconds. And you would have some people that wouldn't change. But there wasn't much of a downside. So I think some systems can be really powerful. But if you do them wrong, the downside is very huge. You're really gonna mess somebody up um or with this the odds of them messing up as long as you're not being a complete dumbass yeah are pretty low and the fact that these were most people's like first reps and a

lot of you know 80 90 percent of them were coaches they've never really worked on another person they've never done anything like this that most of them were very effective after just eight hours it to me is like mind-blowing um and that's what i really like is that it's effective and it's something that you can then teach um also and your athletes can do it on themselves so you're handing a lot of that responsibility back to them so once you get pretty good okay here's the little points you work on yourself. We'll either come in and do it as a group or if it's one-off coaching, be like, hey, all right, your session starts at 9, come in at 845.

We want you to go through these points yourself. We'll start at 9. I talk to you and go, hey, anything not feeling good? You're like, yeah, my right psoas doesn't feel so good. All right, maybe I'll help you do a little more work there. Boom, you good to go? Yep, cool, my right psoas doesn't feel so good. All right, maybe I'll help you do a little more work there. Boom, you good to go? Yep, cool, let's go. So that's what I really like about it, that it's very fast but efficient.

And it's not so complicated that the person and the athlete themselves can't figure out how to do it. Gotcha. And if I'm a coach or an athlete, where do I go to learn this? Yeah, just go to reflexiveperformancereset.com. They have all the different seminars and stuff like that. Okay. And that helps with the downregulating that we're talking about as well? Yeah. So where I found it's really helpful is that a lot of the work they do is on breathing. So you can breathe like deeper and slower and will that downregulate your parasympathetic? Absolutely. We know that from heart rate variability studies

and just anyone can run that test themselves at home. The next thing is, what if I could change your breathing mechanics so that it is better and easier for you to take more of a quote-unquote correct breath? Cool. Could you use more of your diaphragm? Can you get more expansion in your ribs?

Can you get a bigger easier and deeper breath and with a lot of the rpr stuff we do work like on the top of the pectoralis uh middle of the sternum below the ribs kind of some visceral stuff or some points in there and some of the stuff on the head for glute max and what you're doing is you're making the system better and more able to breathe more efficient. Wow, that's really cool. It's amazing how much we've talked about breathing recently. Yeah.

I mean, even like Cal's got a – Cal Dietz, University of Minnesota, who I learned it from initially, he's got a lot of just amazing case studies where he took one, I think it was – she was an Olympian of some form, and she had been doing kind of this standard, you know, moderate intensity bike work as just something they would use to monitor her progress and so they had her heart rate they had her work output and everything and cal went and did some of the rpr work on her i want to say her heart rate during the same amount of work was like 10 or 11 beats less wow the next day after they did it wow just one session one session wow that's an o an Olympic athlete who probably already has a low heart rate. Yeah, and she was pretty low.

And, like, I don't remember what her workload was, but it was, like, 140, 155. And they had standardized all the work-rest ratios and everything. And she did the exact same output. You know, so they said, let's fix, let's clamp the output and let's see where your heart rate, and it actually would drop. That's really cool. I mean, I've had people, resting heart rate sometimes goes down two three five eight points overnight you know just because their

breathing is that much more efficient yeah um so you think about competitors right you think about someone to say crossfit probably pretty good aerobic engine probably doing really good the the handful of people i've tested it on the mechanics there's usually a lot of times the weak link and the thing that they're missing. So they've done really, really good with their existing mechanics, but to kind of get to that next level, they kind of need to change some of their breathing mechanics to get there. Watch Rich Froning.

In between sets, he's like... You can see his chest grow and then breathe out, and he's doing that in the middle. That's what makes him look like he's at 70%. If you can see someone breathing, it usually makes them look. And breathing so slowly too. And methodically. Yeah, methodically.

Exactly. If you were to sit there and count him to 100 thrusters, you could see him breathe at the exact same time every single time. Yep. Right. And there'd probably be a cadence, like a 1, 2, 3 count. You can watch his first 10 and you can watch his last 10, and they're going to be exactly the same.

And I've had several people break that down and count different things, and he's, like, exactly on point every single time with the exact same breath. Yeah. And what I've seen in the videos of his breathing mechanics, they're really good. Yeah. And I don't know if he got lucky and he does it on purpose or what, but everything I've seen of his mechanics are very good.

And they say that he does work out an insane amount, like everybody says, but a lot of those sessions, we had another guy on who was saying that he kind of correlates those to free throws on the basketball court. They're not necessarily super hard sessions, but he might be working on something like breathing and just technique and stuff like that. And moving better. And I would say he runs, from what I've seen, the ultimate eustress model. He might be working on something like breathing and just like technique and stuff like that. And moving better. Yeah.

And I would say he runs, from what I've seen, the ultimate eustress model. Right? He pushes volume, but from what I've seen, and you guys correct me if I'm wrong, you don't see him in practice do a lot of super hard distress sessions. Absolutely. That's what I'm saying. We call them the free throw stress. Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Yeah, yeah. He does exactly what you say. He does it every now and then just to prove to himself, like, I can still do it if I have to. But other than that, he never goes through that stress. Yeah. And it's so crazy to me how much, like we first said, we talk about breathing so much lately in all the podcasts. And I think it's become such a big topic too and just the difference that it makes in and outside the gym yes to be in control of your breath and like be connected to it it's just absolutely incredible

i mean you feel you feel more connected to your workouts i feel like you know what's going on instead of just being a zombie and just kind of floating through your workout you're more methodical you're moving better i've been trying to i heard i forgot where i heard this but i've been trying to implement this technique where crossfit a big thing is always transition times right so like the open just ended and people are always talking about like okay well i'm going to be 20 seconds of this movement 30 seconds of this movement 15 seconds of this movement in between my transitions i'm going to try and not go over 15 seconds. Now, something I found really cool, a different approach to that is instead of just going off of time, they go off of the breathing pattern. So I'm going to take, I'm going to breathe three times or four times and then go back to the next exercise.

What I think is really cool about that is one, it kind of makes you aware of your breath. And then two, you automatically slow your breath down because you want those four breaths to last as long as you possibly can before you have to go back to work. Yeah, no, I love that kind of stuff. So it's a biofeedback kind of model. Caldeet says one similar that he calls a biometric method where you'll do like a squat. You'll put a heart rate strap on.

You'll have your heart rate display. Who cares what your max is during the squat? It doesn't matter. Let's say you're doing an old school bill star five by five right so you do five reps you know you end at 155 but now your next set doesn't start until your resting heart rate gets to 100 or 90 or 70 and then now you go again and then you see how long it takes you to complete that work right because? Because it's training. You're not necessarily, you don't have to do a density in a specific time. It's open-ended. And then over time, you could even do the same amount of work and just compress that density.

But you're doing it by getting the positive adaptation of, one, the skill set, like you were saying, of how do I get my heart rate down. And then, two, a little bit of a conditioning effect. But you're not sacrificing the quality of the work that's being done. And then the second part of that is I'll even push the heart rate lower if I want purely skilled development. So look at the classic way Olympic weightlifters train, super high level of skill, very long rest periods. Some would argue that that's because of the recovery of the fast and slow ATP,

CP, and all that stuff. Yeah, I think that's part of it. But I think part of it is because it's so skill development that you have to get really down to these low levels again, I think, especially when learning to be able to execute those skills again. Yeah, and it's such high output as well. Yes, exactly, 100%. Yeah.

To get back to the we're almost out of time, but just to those skill techniques to kind of work on your down regulation, besides RPR, what are some other things that you've done? Yeah, so there's a whole bunch of them. Like I find, and it's crazy, I got this from Dr. Ben House, a functional med Costa Rica, literally have clients program one hour of something by themselves that they enjoy. And it's crazy how I've had clients do that and it's been beneficial. Maybe not so much because it's the hour they got to work on themselves, but the fact

that they gave themselves permission to do it. Yeah. And it's scheduled. It's scheduled. So I'll email them like, hey, I want you to do something that's only for yourself, by yourself. yeah and it's scheduled and scheduled so i'll email them like hey i want you to do something that's only for yourself by yourself no it's not watching tv like read a book go for a walk i don't care go hang out in a float tank get a massage whatever something that's more relaxing tell me what you're gonna do and tell me the time and then tell me how it went and they're like this is crazy i'm doing this for fat loss. But I know their life is very stressful. They usually don't allow themselves to give themselves permission to do that,

to put themselves as a priority, even for an hour a week. And once they're able to do that, I had a client just last week who was like, yeah, I went and I read for an hour by myself. I just had some light music on. She was like, it was great. I'm going to do it again next week. She was like all excited. week who's like yeah i went and i read uh for an hour by myself i just had some light music on she's like it was great i'm gonna do it again next week she's like all excited you know and it wasn't that she didn't necessarily have the time it wasn't it wasn't a high enough priority um so stuff like that um even going outside you know looking at going for a walk in the woods right you look at

the japanese research on forest bathing. That's extremely beneficial. Maybe looking at because of the fractal patterns of the trees or whatever. Forest bathing? Forest bathing, which I was on Barbell Shrugged. I joked, I'm like, so is that like running into the woods, a bunch of hippies like hitting themselves with twigs and sticks and stuff? Yeah, 100%. That's what I thought it was at first.

I thought some dude just made up the term, and I looked it up, and I was like, holy shit, there's actually some pretty good research on it. It was interesting. When I was in Costa Rica at Ben House's place, I was down there for two weeks. It was amazing. And one client there, I would see her off whenever she would get nervous. She would go off to the side and just stare out at the jungle. And I found, like, oh, my God, I'm doing, like, the same thing, right?

It's like if you look at the ocean. I was in Sao Padre recently. So I would do, like, a Zen-style meditation in the morning where I would just stare at the water. I was just talking to Fish about this today, the blue mind theory. I don't know if you've heard of that. But that's basically exactly what you're saying, that when we're around large bodies of water that our brain basically gets overwhelmed because we can't comprehend comprehend the power and the mass of the water oh sure so it just calms you down and just takes away anxiety because all of a sudden you seem smaller oh interesting right so um that's

exactly the same thing i feel the same way like we live in newport beach so the ocean is right there yeah you can't be stressed out staring out at the ocean. It's just impossible. It's very hard. Yeah. Yeah. So I love doing that. Obviously, there's all different forms of meditation, which is super helpful. A little bit harder sometimes to get clients to apply it, like long walks, just being relaxed, taking your dog for a walk.

I mean, there's research on petting your dog. Which can be a form of meditation almost. Oh, yeah, moving meditation. Right. There's different ways you can do that. on which can be which can be a form of meditation almost oh yeah moving meditation right um there's different ways you can do that we did some of that in costa rica which was very cool um just literally go for a walk and don't have any headset in don't have any noise and just breathe and pay attention yeah just chill the fuck out for once yeah i mean i'm like a huge fan of float tanks right yeah we've been talking about that too, yeah. We wanted to do an episode on that, but we have to go do it first.

Oh, dude, like go to Zero Gravity here in Austin. Oh, they have it here. Oh, it's amazing. Might just do that. The tank's super nice. I think it was Kevin Johnson that designed them. I could be wrong on that. Okay.

But I've been there a couple times. Nothing to disclose. But, yeah, great place. Super nice. But, yeah, just I did one in Venice for two hours. Two hours. Wow. That was a little weird.

That's a long time. The guy who owns it is, like, one of the original guys who developed a lot of the flow tanks and did one for Joe Rogan and maintains his tanks and all this stuff. And so I'm all excited to go to his place, and it's right on Venice. And the tanks are, like, super nice, super amazing, like two hours. It was very cheap. But at the end, it's so funny. It's, like, brilliant in one area, and then at the end, all you hear is this,

Get up! He yells at you at the end when your session is up. That's, like, the same thing when you're just leaving vacation. You've been on vacation for like a week, 10 days, and then on the way back, your flight gets delayed and your car breaks down. And then everything is just fucking dead. It was all for nothing. Yeah. But very cool experience.

If people have the chance to do that, I'd recommend it. That's awesome. Yeah. We've got to do that for sure. Yeah. Yeah. I would highly recommend it. I mean, the first time I did it, I was we got to do that for sure yeah yeah i would highly recommend it i mean the first time i did it i was like scared to death and i'm like well why am i so what what am i afraid of i'm

not gonna drown in here i can open the door and get out and then i realized i'm like oh i'd be in here for an hour or 90 minutes like with my own thoughts and nothing else. Yeah, exactly. I'm like, oh, that's scary. Yeah, we'll have to give that a try. Definitely. We'll try that. Maybe even while we're here. Do you have anything else to add, Brian? I don't right now.

Is there anywhere that people can find you and a lot of the stuff that you're doing and the research that you're doing? Yeah, yeah. They can just go to MikeTNelson.com. So M-I-K-E-T-N-E-L-S-O-N.com. And I'll have at the top a little opt-in for the newsletter. That's probably where 90% of my information goes out is through the newsletter. And then got a bunch of articles, calendar, a bunch of other stuff on there. And, yeah, it's probably the best place.

Cool, MikeTNelson.com. Awesome. Fish, what do you got going on? You guys know me, the programming mastermind. Got the worldwide mobile app. Got about 1,000 people on there right now that follow the online workouts, helping gym owners every day. I hope you guys want to give it a go one time.

I will personally send you a promo code for a free month if you like. Just email me, Ryan, at crossfitchalk.com. And then all of our design work that you guys see and you love so much is from your boy, Yaya, over here. Yep. All the stuff you're going to see from this weekend too, all the videos, photos, podcasts, all that stuff, all coming from me. So if you guys see anything in that area, yaya at crossfitchalk.com. Find me at Yaya's View on Instagram. Got at Ryan Fish on Instagram or at CrossFitchalk.com. Find me at Yaya's View on Instagram, got at Ryan Fish on Instagram

or at CrossFit Chalk. Shoot your questions our way. I had a lot of fun. Mike, thank you so much. My brain definitely... Yeah, thank you very much for having me on the show. I really appreciate it, guys. This was a good time. Fun stuff. I love talking about stuff that I love. I know. My brain definitely grew again, so that's good.

Alright, cool. Thank you, Mike. Cool, thanks. And that will wrap it up. I hope you guys' brains aren't bleeding too bad from being fucking blown away right now. I know that was a lot of information. So if you guys want to go back and listen to it two more times, three more times, four more times, it's not going to go anywhere. It's going to stay here. But while you do that, make sure you guys please, please to the shrug collective leave us a review tell everybody that real chalk

is your favorite show in the collective so we have some bragging rights next time we go out with all these guys thanks for tuning in guys as always i just wanted to remind you guys about the giveaway that we have going on at chalk right now with the chalk online programming if you guys sign up for the chalk online program before june 1st you guys are automatically going to be entered into a raffle not only to win your very own brand new skier but be outfitted with an entire home gym for more information on that head over to either at ryan fish on instagram or just at crossfit chalk on instagram or to sign up go to crossfitchalk.com find the online button sign up for 20 bucks 20 bucks before june 1st you guys are gonna be answering to this raffle and you're gonna get so jacked just in time

for summer breaking necks snapping checks all that whatever stuff yeah you guys feel me all righty have a great day stay jacked y'all