Barbell Shrugged - Sleep’s Role in Cellular and Metabolic Health w/ Dr. Chris Perry, Anders Varner, Doug Larson, and Coach Travis Mash #753

Episode Date: June 26, 2024

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

Shrug family, this week on Barbell Shrug, Dr. Christopher Perry is coming back in and we're going to be talking about sleep, metabolic health, cellular health, how all of those things play together. And I know not everybody listening to this podcast has the pleasure of listening to me talk about the Edmonton Oilers in my daily personal life to anybody and everybody that is willing to listen, but I even get to weave in some performance stuff and how the NHL Stanley Cup will be finished. I know this is coming out on a Wednesday. By the time this airs,

the Stanley Cup will have been already figured out. I'm like 48 hours away from the Oilers calling us and asking for Dr. Perry to be a part of their sleep program. I hope they already have somebody. Yeah, go Oilers. As always, friends, you can get over to rapidhealthreport.com. That is where Dr. Andy Galpin is unlocking the three-step process that we use

so that you can maximize your true physiological potential. You can access that free video, Unlocking Your True Physiological Potential, over at rapidhealthreport.com. Friends, let's get into the show. Welcome to Marble Strong. I'm Anders Varner, Doug Larson, Coach Travis Mash, Chris Perry. Welcome back. Dr. Christopher Perry, coming off a huge weekend, hanging out with Coach Travis Mash out here in Bermuda Run, North Carolina. Nobody even knows that place exists, but there's this beautiful little place called Rise Indoor Sports, and all of us got to do high fives, little bro hugs.

Dr. Perry talking about sleep, which we're going to be digging into here in a little bit, but I'm going to kick it to both you guys because I was only there for about enough time for the high fives and bro hugs. I want to hear a couple. Perry, I'm kicking it to you first. What was some of the big takeaways of the day? Travis, I got to tell you, that place was nuts.

Like when we're driving in Rise Indoor Sports, Kelly, because Kelly was with me and she was in the passenger seat. She's like, Chris, what's going on? I was like, this is a big place. Soccer? The basketball tournament that was going on inside was insanity. I have never. Dude, I watched some kids hiking that ball.

Dude, I went to the. They straight throwing it down. I went probably like five or six years ago to the AAU National Championships in Vegas, like the Adidas thing. And it was like half the size of what a saturday at rise indoor sports looked like it was madness it was insane yes everything there or just a weight training yeah no i work with everything you know i'm more of the sports you know science director where right but like testing for basketball we're building this combine where no

matter what sport you you know do whether it's basketball football basketball baseball i'll be able to tell you athletically i can't tell you if you're good at basketball or not but i'll be able to tell you athletically where you are throughout the nation depending on your age groups and then like if a 15 year old comes to me says i want to play in the nba someday i'll say well man you're like 20th percentile so you're a long ways out you know i mean or or hey yeah you're you're 90 95th percentile so yeah you have a good shot but i'll be able to tell you where you're at um and like what you need to work on more importantly not just like fresh somebody's dreams but here's what you need to work on anyway so yeah i work with all of them, and we have a lot of good coaches.

So it's – I don't know. I can't believe someone had the guts to put that place in Bermuda Run, North Carolina, but shout out to Neil and Jason for doing that. I'm super thankful. You have all the standards for just speed, power, strength, coordination, et cetera, and you just throw it into a big algorithm and spit out a number so you can compare people across yeah that's exactly right it's what i'm working on i did all that yeah i mean it's not really hard anymore if you have ai so it's like in the back of the day like i started this thing like a year ago and then all of a

sudden i'm like oh wait time out and so then I went to AI and so but I had you know you want to go to the higher version because yeah I want it to be referenced I don't want to be like somebody's guesstimates so it's like concrete evidence so but yeah it's going to be super sweet hopefully within the next two weeks I'll roll it out and then be able to that'll be like the thing that brings rise into sports together as one heartbeat is what i'm hoping i love it um dr perry let's talk about sleep you ready to rock let's let's do it let's dive in and so first thanks to coach mash like that was an incredible experience being a part of the summit like just seeing so many awesome speakers together that

hell i learned a whole bunch you know learn a bunch from coach joe khan and william bradley who is awesome who needs to get his voice out there because he knows a ton about speed development that was that was oh yeah best kept secret and all of physical conditions in my opinion but but let me be clear and like there was a lot of good speakers dr sukomil myself dan garner bradley kirk skin but i have to admit you were by far the best speaker there and i think if everyone was honest everybody would agree with me you are unbelievable my friend wow stamp of approval right there yes i've only gotten one of those when Matt saw me lift weights.

He goes, you move well. It's like, that's rad. I mean, when you did that swimming. I was going to say, you know, you beat that guy in Jamaica. Matt thinks I'm jumping in the ocean and smashing all the Jamaicans in a race. The only race you could do. You're definitely the guy. You can't beat him on beat him because of being pretty good

at a lot of things my man anders kills us off pretty good at a lot of things yeah i'll take it my man general i mean that's a compliment yeah oh yeah broadly just broadly mediocre well i suck at swimming i can just say that yeah yeah i would have drowned slightly above average at no there is not there is not um chris berry sleep loss circadian misalignment which we need to dig into definitions of all of these because sleep loss i believe by itself is a big enough bucket. And then how it affects mitochondrial and metabolic health. Those are all the buzzwords we could put into one big sentence. But I actually want to dig in really with the first two there on sleep loss, because

that's such a big bucket and why people could be getting less sleep, starting with the obvious of just not going to bed and turning their phone off. Right. But really, there's, I would imagine, significantly more complexity to it from when you're going to bed, how you're going to bed. I'd love to kind of dig into right off the top, just as you see sleep loss in that big bucket, where do you see kind of the low hanging fruit and how people can really just start to get more hours on the clock while they're sleeping. Certainly. And I appreciate you guys having me back to talk about this, because when you talk about sleep, and we were discussing this before you started the show, there's so much more to consider rather than just, how do I get seven to nine hours of sleep per

night? Because for so long, we all thought when you look at the scientific literature, hands down, everyone preached about it on social media, you need seven to nine high quality hours of sleep per night to be at your best. But now we know that there's so much more to that equation when it comes to circadian rhythms, because you could get seven to nine hours a night. But if it's all over the place, as far as the variability of what time you go to bed and what time you wake up, you're still going to have negative health risk effects occur. And so, and that's where we get into the circadian misalignment. Your circadian rhythm is a very vital and just as an important key player on the field when it comes to making sure that you are getting adequate rest. And the part of the reason

why this is so important is there's a new framework for sleep that has come out. And there's a lot of sleep doctors talking about this, Dr. Matthew Walker being one of them. It's called the QQRT framework. In English, there's the four macronutrients of sleep that I've started using, and that I start communicating with our rapid clients, with my students and on social media. And it's as easy as this. It starts out with quantity, quality, regularity, and timing. Those are the four best places to start when it comes to saying, hey, let's improve our sleep.

Let's get back on track. And as we know, when it comes to our overall health, sleep is that number one foundational thing that if you're not prioritizing that, it is negatively going to influence everything else down the line significantly. And so if I were to put these in order, and we can, of course, dive deeper into any of them, which ones are most important? Regularity is king. And this is what I talked about at the Forged Athlete Summit, all right?

Regularity is king more than duration, because if you are not regular with your sleep and this is defined as what time you wake up in the morning because it is actually the wake time, not what time you go to bed that dictates where your circadian rhythm is going to go. All right. Are you going to advance your clock or are you going to delay your clock? Are you going to push yourself into artificial jet lag, otherwise known as social jet lag? Or are you going to keep on top of this seven days a week instead of getting to the weekend, sleeping in, and then completely jostling your sleep?

Number two is then quality. All right, quality comes after regularity. Once you get your regularity down, then you can focus on getting seven to nine hours of sleep per night and making sure it's of high quality. Shark Family, I want to take a quick break. If you are enjoying today's conversation, I want to invite you to come over to rapidhealthreport.com. When you get to rapidhealthreport.com, you will see an area for you to opt in, in which you can see Dan Garner read through my lab work. Now, you know that we've been working at Rapid Health Optimization

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

you to see step one of this process by going over to rapidhealthreport.com. You can see Dan reading my labs, the nutrition and supplementation that he has recommended that has radically shifted the way that I sleep, the energy that I have during the day, my total testosterone level, and just my ability to trust and have confidence in my health going forward. I really, really hope that you're able to go over to rapidhealthreport.com, watch the video of my labs, and see what is possible. And if it is something that you are interested in, please schedule a call with me on that page. Once again, it's rapidhealthreport.com, and let's get back to the show. From there, you can go into the quality aspect. All right, how do I improve my sleep efficiency?

All right, am I getting enough deep stage non-REM sleep? Am I getting enough REM sleep? Because we know each of those is so important for various aspects of recovery. And then the last time, and this is the one that's most confusing for people, is timing. And I hear a lot, oh, well, isn't timing the same thing as regularity? No, this is your chronotype. This is, are you a morning person? Are you a morning eveningness person, which most individuals in the United States are, or are you an evening person? And you can have outliers on both sides, but this is why when it comes to shift work and

individuals who work night shift are oftentimes at a big disadvantage because you are going against your normal biological rhythm. And so, and you can probably astute this to tactical populations too. So that's where we do our research with at EKU. We work with police officers, firefighters, and military. When you think about the common occupations of those individuals, when are they usually occurring? They're usually occurring overnight. All right. I like to call them the MVPs of our society because they are literally working at times where everyone else is asleep, keeping everybody safe. But that unfortunately goes against your health. And so this is why, for example, if you have a night shift person who

has a normal night chronotype where they're used to going to bed late and waking up a little bit later in the morning, Travis, I think we talked about you were kind of one of these people. All right. If I were to take Coach Mash and I were to make him a early morning person, Travis probably ain't going to like that all too much. All right. If I had to make Coach Mash get up at 3 a.m. to A, do his lifts or B, do his main occupation, he'd probably be dragging ass most of the day. He probably would not- It just wouldn't be good either. The quality would be terrible. Exactly. It's going completely against his natural circadian rhythm. So now we're getting to a point where when coaches are working with clients or when you in general are trying to

figure out what is a good sleep pattern for you, you really have to take into account what is your natural, actual chronotype. Because if you give someone, oh, based off of your work schedule, you got to be up at 8 a.m. All right, we need to get you waking up at 6 a.m. and going to bed every night at 9. But that could be completely against your genetic chronotype. And you'd be battling an uphill battle forever before you even get anywhere close to trying to improve things. Have you guys ever had a night job? Work the night shift? No. I mean,

it is literally like somebody is just like, it's like walking around where somebody's just got a gun to your head. And they're like, I might shoot. You might die. You really might die. And they never, they never fully pulled the trigger,

but you walk around feeling like your life is about to crumble every step of the way all day long. I used to work from 7 p.m. to 7 a.m. six days a week on Navy ships. And it is absolutely awful. And I was doing that in like the years of life where like you can do anything and get away with it. And I couldn't even imagine what being like 41 and having kids at home where you're like trying to get them on the bus and do all the things

at like 21 i was dying working working man you know it is at 1 a.m i'm so awake at 1 a.m i can like i can write the best work i mean like i can like i'm creative my brain weight is just like so like colorful at 1am i come alive but like it just doesn't work that way anymore similar to like all the psychopathic like uh writers of in the past like yeah that's why i love ernest anyway fear loathing in las vegas like oh like that guy because it's up yeah my nobody else around yeah i'm 100 like you but yeah to your to the point you're about to make there it's like my my sleep schedule is totally dictated by my family situation like we all we all have little kids like like they wake up automatically at 6 30 in the morning

and they got to be at school at 8 or 8 30 or whatever and it's like you just you don't have a choice you just have to play ball or or you know my wife why are you always going to go somewhere else talking yeah i'm losing a decade of my life i have to schedule chris i'd love to dig into like if if i uh i'm very much a a person, but I don't think I was for most of kind of like the, the earlier stages of life. That's, um, purely kind of like driven by lifestyle almost, uh, that I'm not up till call it like 11 or midnight, just being smoked by the end of the day. Um, but we all have the same sunshine that's hitting us at the same hours of the day. Like when the, when the sun comes up, we're all supposed to be kind of aligned with this, uh, in, in our

circadian rhythms. But why does that affect people differently if, if it is so important in how we kind of regulate sleep? Right. And so just to, just to back up for a second, to be clear, when it comes to a Zetgeber, and this is something I talked about at the summit as well, is anything that stimulates a clock. And so intrinsically, so whether it's light, the time that you exercise or eating food, all of these actions are going to influence your circadian rhythm in some way, whether, and it's dependent upon what time of day you do it. So you're exactly right. We know that light is the most potent of these Zetgevers. And so getting light for, let's say I have a normal morning, evening person. Let's say I have a normal person wakes up at 6 a.m., goes to bed at 9, 10 o'clock. Okay, perfect. Right in the middle. Getting light first

thing in the morning is the best thing for that person to do because it's the first signal to the body that says, hey, it's daytime. It's at the start of the rhythm. Let's get up. Let's go. It starts the initiation of that light enters your eyes through the retinas and activates a protein called melanopsin. That melanopsin is within what is called the suprachiasmatic nucleus. In English, that is your major body clock. That is what regulates all the clocks within all of your cells. Just think of it as HQ. Once the light hits that, it's go time. It's time to go. Now, just as important is getting darkness at the end of the day. But you can actually improve this by actually getting low-level light. And so you'll actually hear guys like you, Ruben, will talk about this,

where just as important as getting in morning light, you should also get evening light because the low angle of a sunset gives the opposite signal that will then tell your body that it's the opposite. Now it's time to start downregulating. And then from that point on, you get darkness. And I love what Dr. Matthew Walker says about this is the United States and all cultures don't have a light problem when it comes to looking at your phones and all this. We have a darkness problem. We are not getting enough darkness that is being sensed by your intrinsic rhythms to actually send the message to downregulate and start getting ready for bed.

Temperature has a lot to do with this too, but it is light that is really, really important for that. So now let's say I had someone who, as you just said, is someone who has a completely different rhythm. Yeah, you can bet that that's going to cause some issues, right? Because they're at a completely different point within their circadian rhythm compared to the individual who is normal within their own parameters. And so it's a very, very interesting question that I would need to dive deeper because just thinking logically, you would think that it would have a negative impact. I would have to dive deeper into the literature to get more clear on that question. You just kind of sparked a question, and I don't know if it's ever been studied, but are there kind of like macro cycles that we go through

throughout a lifetime of sleep? Like obviously we have like the kind of like baby stages where you're just sleeping all the time to grow your brain and then you wake up, you eat, you poop, and then you go back to bed. 1000%. And then you're like an adolescent where like, if I remember my adolescence at like 7 a.m my dad was like if you don't get out of bed we're gonna have problems all i wanted to do was sleep until like noon every day but now i'm really am like a like a 10 to 6 kind of guy like i don't really need much later than that um i wake up at 6 6 30 pretty pretty easily without an alarm clock um then i start to look at older people. And I don't know

if that's because of lifestyle stacking on, but it looks like they don't sleep that much. It doesn't look great. So great question. So when you study sleep across the lifespan, you see exactly as you just described. When you are in infancy, your circadian is very early, right? And you're sleeping most of the day. There's a lot of development going on. As you age into adolescence, it becomes later and later and later. So this is why if I think anecdotally back to when I was, I don't know, 15, 16, I was able to stay up to 3 in the morning, no big deal,

and then sleep in until 11 and be completely cool. So adolescence, you'll see their circadian rhythm, it delays a little bit, it gets much later. And then as you get into your 20s and 30s and 40s, then it starts to level back out to the middle again, and you start to regress. And so once this is why you see grandma and grandpa, they are almost getting back to the point to when you were in infancy to where they become much earlier, much more morning individuals. The problem with that, however, is older adults have a great more degree of fragmentation and sleep efficiency issues compared to their younger counterparts. And so and that's where we have to hyper focus on what is our lifestyle like? What are we doing in order to help these individuals get the most rest

possible? Because you will see these individuals will have a significant loss in their non-REM deep stage sleep. And so, and it becomes very, very, that's why older adults will nap during the middle of the day more than your average individual, because they're gaining this amount of pressure that is starting to occur because their body, and even Galpin talks about this, where your brain is very smart. It'll keep track of the amount of deprivation of a particular stage that it needs and will eventually force you to get that amount of rest. This is why in sleep restriction research, you will see that if you restrict a particular time frame where you are starting to get less and less

REM sleep, for example, your body will keep note of that and will get to the point where when you get knocked out and you go to sleep, all of a sudden, let's say you deprive someone of sleep for a week and they had a significant reduction in REM sleep. And then let's say you brought them back and got them close to a regular sleep schedule again. I guarantee they're going to have the craziest dreams ever that week because their brain was like, oh, crap, we didn't get as much REM sleep during that time. Boom. All right. And all of a sudden, you get a lot of REM sleep out of nowhere and you start remembering your dreams much more effectively because your body went all in on being able to recover that way. And so and this is we'll use sleep restriction oftentimes to help people

be able to get back on proper schedules. You just have to be careful with how you use it. It's one of the best things you can use for insomniacs. And there's a lot of research to look at in helping people with insomnia by utilizing restriction, because it helps the sleep stages consolidate a little bit and improve sleep efficiency. You just have to be careful with how you do it. Because if you're anyone who's trying to live their life off of five hours a day and thinking that that's okay, and I get that a lot from students and athletes. You're actually not okay. You're just very, very well adapted, but at a about 10 to 15% decrement of what your total cognitive capacity could actually be. And so it's really good inferences to make from that. You know, jumping back to something from earlier, when you're

talking about regularity and timing, you're saying that waking up consistently at the same time is really one of the most important metrics to keep track of here yes you know i don't stay out very late very often again referencing my kind of my family situation like my sleep rhythm is very consistent because i'm just always home with the kids so i put them i put them to sleep i have 30 minutes to clean the kitchen then i go to bed and then i wake up you know before they get up so i can get prepared for them to be up and that's that's my life for the most part most part. However, like, like on Saturday night, I went out and watched the UFC. And so I did come home in the middle of night, just one time. Should I, in that case, still wake up at the same time, still wake up at 615 or whatever,

or should I sleep? Should I get more sleep? Should I wake up early and then take a nap later? Or just wake up early and then, and then and just go to bed a little earlier, but still wake up at the same time and try to recover it over the next many nights? Or what's the lay of the land for strategies there? Great question. And so first, you have to back up and take a look at yourself as far as, OK, what kind

of person are you? Are you someone who is exercising frequently? Are you someone who is utilizing those tools correctly? How much out of your rhythm are you going to push yourself? If it's only going to push yourself out of a rhythm for half an hour to an hour and you sleep in maybe an extra half an hour, hour that next morning after the UFC fight, okay, cool. Probably not going to be the worst thing in the world. It's more significant when you're constantly going back and forth every morning an hour or so that causes a little bit more of an issue. But if it's only that one time, it's probably going to be OK, because we know that exercise is going to be one of the most significant tools you can use to help mitigate the negative risks or negative effects that come from pushing your body clock out of alignment.

Now that you make a great point, though, what's more important to do? Should I just stay up late? No, that I'm not going to get the best night of sleep and still wake up at 615. Actually, that might be the best thing you can do because that's the less impact you're going to have on your circadian rhythm and it'll increase your sleep pressure. So that way you might be a little bit tired the next day, but you're going to hit that pillow 10 times over to where the next night, if you go to bed on time, that's a better way to catch up on sleep debt. And honestly, that's the only way.

And so I actually, I talked about this at the summit as well. And I tell my students this and they hate it when I say it. You cannot sleep in to catch up on sleep. Don't work that way because you constantly push yourself out of your circadian alignment when you do that you catch up on sleep by doing the opposite by waking up at the same time and going to bed early the next night and so and oftentimes that's what i'll tell people to do when they're traveling if they know that that's going to happen they'll go to bed earlier the next night and try to wake up at the same time and so and that honestly works a lot better

in keeping you aligned and just anecdotally speaking and athletes that I've worked with in the past, when they practice that, they always feel a lot better than the, than doing the opposite side, doing the contract. I would say for sure. When you travel,

when you're going to go through time zones, that's what we do. We always like eat it that first day. So you slap yourself in the face, man up. So then you go to bed at the proper time and then you get right back on schedule. You just got to eat that first day. Everyone does, you know, because if you go to bed, you just, you're just going to pay later. You got to pay the piper sooner or later. So get it over with. Now, something that Doug said, can I just take a nap in the middle of the day? Yeah, but I would actually say do NSDR instead because doing non-sleep deep rest techniques like yoga nidra will A, keep you from falling asleep for longer than you want to

and can help mitigate some of the negative effects that come from sleep deprivation. And so I utilize this tool myself. I utilize it with everyone and it works much much better because the problem with naps is if you sleep too long and then say longer than usually it can be as long as 30 minutes sometimes and you wake up after that you are interrupting a deeper stage of sleep you're going to feel worse you're going to feel tired you're going to feel lethargic

you're going to feel groggy it's the same issue that i have when people press the snooze button never press the snooze button you always want to make sure you wake up as naturally as possible because when you roll back over and say, oh, I can get another extra hour of sleep, that's always a bad news bearer's situation because then you always wake up and then you're like, why do I feel worse at 6 a.m. than what I did at 4.30 a.m.? And it's because you're most likely up to the deeper stage of sleep yes all right so the non-sleep so what is a good nap though 10 minutes 15 minutes like what's the safe sometimes don't nap so when you do nsdr for example you can get benefits from doing 10 minutes you know you can go as high as 20 minutes and that's completely fine and so i would just say if you are going to

take a nap and you don't feel like turning on a YouTube video to walk you through yoga, just set the alarm for 20 to 25 minutes, just in case. And then that's usually just fine. And so sometimes I'll do this in school, like in between classes. Um, I, I prefer yoga Nidra instead. Um, but it's a major difference maker after a bout of stress or something you can even do after a workout to prepare you for the rest of the day. And it can really help you mitigate a lot of the stress that comes from doing so many things at once. I'm not overly familiar with, with yoga. That's like, it's kind of like progressive muscle relaxation. Is that correct? Yeah. Think of it as combining, it combines you shutting your eyes and getting the restore restorativeness that you would get from taking a nap. But you also get

cognitive benefit and restoration from it as well because it's a grounding technique. All right. And so a very common cognitive behavioral therapy technique where you are literally just bringing focus to other areas of the body. Most common yoga nidra practices will utilize the cue of shining a flashlight on various aspects of your body. And you just feel the sensations that you feel. So if you're lying down and the video is walking you through, it says, bring attention to the bottom of your hamstrings, feel your toes, feel your knees, feel your eyes. And when it does that, what is it doing? It's bringing you away from all the thoughts that you've got going on in your mind currently. And it can help with a little bit of

mental restoration. And it's super effective to do at the start of the day, at the end of the day before going to sleep, when you're sleep deprived, or even between meetings. We've got so many people who have constant meetings throughout the day. And when you go, let's say you have like six back to back. And I know a lot of people that do this. You guys might even have been known to do this. You will literally drive yourself exhausted from constant, constant exposure to going from one thing to the next. If you just pause for 10

minutes in between a couple of Zoom meetings, you will find yourself feeling a lot more clear than had you not done this. And let me know if you've ever experienced this. Have you ever gone through so many meetings at once or did so many activities without just pausing in between? You start slurring your speech or you start having trouble thinking of things or just like oh crap i need to eat or do something all right so much so that taking the break seems hard because you're just like essentially just dopamine out of your mind and you're like i can't break i just need more more i'll go to instagram just to get stay, just to stay high. Drink more coffee. And you don't necessarily need to do yoga nidra. You can just go for a walk.

Just take away stimulation for a short amount of time. And that can be super beneficial. Go for Dan's nature walks or something for as little as five to ten minutes. Yeah, that's all you need. You just got to limit the amount of exposure you get so your brain can chill. Because remember, your brain has ultradian rhythms. Every 90 minutes or so, your brain is like, oh, let's chill for a second so I can consolidate before you give it continuous exposure again.

And that's why yoga nidra helps with that as well. Totally. I wish I would have listened to my first anatomy physiology teacher about studying, about how important, like, you know how you think I just need to keep cramming, cramming versus like cramming and go to bed and let your body process it. You know, like, it's like so much better. You remember so much, like you cram all night. You don't remember anything. Like, so like that doesn't work. So you just got to commit, like,

that doesn't work. You know, like go to bed and like, you'll remember stuff totally um yo let's dig into kind of the the back half of what you wrote uh to us on on this i'd love to understand like on the cellular health side of things um how does poor sleep really affect um affect that in that i would imagine if you ask most people like, what is a bad night of sleep? They're like, oh, I just feel like crap. And then I go to sleep later that night without ever really understanding the like physiological deficits that it's actually putting your body into. Yep. Great, great point to bring up. And so, and this was, you know, kind of the highlight now is,

why is circadian misalignment bad, right? Why is poor sleep bad? It's like, all right, well, both of these things negatively influence your mitochondrial health. And when you hear that buzzword and you actually dig deep into this, you will find that it is due to mitochondrial dysfunction that so many increases in prevalence of chronic diseases are starting to occur when it comes to cardiovascular disease. But you can even find some things with cancer. But the biggest one is metabolic health and how your body is able to utilize glucose and fatty acids for energy. And so if you've got a mitochondria that is not efficient, that can't do its job right, that's going to result in increased oxidative stress. It's going to increase in free radicals. It's going to increase the need of you needing

antioxidants to offset a lot of the issues because it's going to cause higher levels of inflammation, which causes damage to tissues. And this is what you can actually relate to many things happening underneath the hood that causes these things such as increased autonomic nervous system activity, constant fight or flight, inability to relax, issues with the gut health brain access. And while we're starting to see issues with your gut health, all these things are tied together. And so, you know, one of the biggest things I was able to pull for you guys when it comes to a, like a fact that you can look at is even being deprived as much as four hours a night, you can see significantly impaired glucose tolerance. You can see significant reduction in the acute insulin response. So how well your body can release insulin to get rid of glucose and regulate it properly.

We also see that sleep restriction causes issues with your beta cells. And so it allows the pancreas to stop being as sensitive to the signal of high glucose. And so this is why it's such a big deal on, you know, Dan talks a lot about glycemic variability when he works with our clients, right? And so when you look at a lot of the optimization health profiles that come out with people, the timing of your nutrients is important, but your sleep is even more important because your sleep is directly tied to how well your body is going to regulate glucose. And if you're not sleeping with good efficiency or timing, both of these things are going to negatively influence your blood glucose.

There is actually a, without getting too sciencey, there are particular molecular clocks within the mitochondria that will signal for proper insulin sensitivity and the proper utilization of glucose. When you push your biological rhythm forward and backward and forward and backward, you are messing with these clocks. And what we see when you sleep deprive someone or misalign someone's circadian rhythm, it negatively influences the expression of these genes and these clock genes that's going to negatively influence your insulin sensitivity and how well your body responds to glucose. And so just simply by waking up at different times all throughout the week, you will

see worse glycemic variability. You will see individuals not handle glucose as well. You will see. So how does that, uh, how does that surface as a symptom? These are going to be individuals who have crazy energy spikes and crashes all day long. These are going to be people who have brain fog. These are going to be people who might actually have a hard time keeping themselves emotionally stable, right? Because when you have someone that has poor glucose regulation, and let's say they have a giant sugary meal that spikes their glucose really, really high, where else is it going to go? All right, it's going to crash really, really hard a little bit later on, that's going to cause an autonomic nervous system event, make them a little bit

more fight or flight. This is what you'll usually see in individuals with some mood swings. It's like, all right, well, sometimes it's just learning how to control the food that we're eating at certain times of day. And this is why I love what Dan says about this. So when it comes to, you know, keeping your glucose levels, you know, secure and regulated, you want to work out physically hypercalorically. So put the majority of your carbohydrates and these high glucose molecules around your workouts. That's when your body is most likely to utilize them and then live life hypo calorically. All right. So being more on top of higher protein, you know, you can still have carbohydrates, but prioritize your fiber, prioritize your fat. That way you can keep your

glucose levels better regulated. And this is actually a good opportunity. So everyone has been seeing, you know, the glucose revolution, you know, the glucose goddess. Have you seen her on social media? She's cool. I'm not going to downplay her at all, but she does kind of demonize things a little bit. And I'm not, I don't like people that have these, you know, crazy absolutes when it comes to science. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. There's both sides of every story here. We're in the gray. We can accept that there's research studies on both sides. And what we do need to tell people is when it comes to looking at your continuous glucose monitors, don't freak out at every little thing. It's like your glucose is supposed to go up and

down. That's a normal, healthy glucose rhythm. If your body is able to handle glucose properly, you'll see it go up and down just fine. It's like even with your food choices, protein will cause your glucose to go up. So will fat. So trying to get dogmatic about which macronutrients are going to do this is a little crazy. But what's better to take a look at is, okay, how much does it cause your glucose to go up? If you eat a particular food, and there are some individual variations with this that we see. So for example, based off of your genetic makeup, I can eat bread just fine. And I usually don't see a big spike.

I'm usually pretty okay with it, especially if I have a little bit of fiber. But you might find someone else that looks at white bread and will see a giant glucose spike. And so there's a level of individual variation here, which is why also we need to be careful with where we're getting our information on the web. All this to say that sleep deprivation and misaligning your clock can negatively influence how your circadian rhythm is going to work at that level of the muscle tissue

and will negatively influence how your circadian rhythm is going to work at that level of the muscle tissue and will negatively influence insulin sensitivity. And there is one thing besides just getting regular sleep and better sleep to help with this. Once again, it's exercise because we do see that when you exercise, it will actually help mitigate the negative influence that it will have on those particular circadian processes. And so once again, exercise is medicine. It is the best thing you can do. When I went back to school, like I didn't sleep regular, you know, you know, you got to do what you got to do. You got to study when you got to study, especially when you're coaching a team and running a business. And so like, man, like, no kidding. I mean, the, the, the whole look of my body changed because my body just wasn't handling anything really well.

So I'm sure glucose sensitivity was up and down and all over the place. I went from having no grays to all gray in three years. And like the body fat I held was the most I'd ever held in my life. And I wasn't eating it. I probably was eating less. I mean, well, of course, I wasn't eating it. This probably was eating less thinking about, I mean, well, of course I wasn't working out as hard,

but totally no. And then the main point I'm trying to make is like the emotional, like I'm not a very emotional person in general. And like, man, like start crying when a song come on, like, who am I? What am I?

I'm so sorry. Like, I need to go get in a bar fight right now and handle this. This is crazy. Totally. Just going regular sleep and just eating normal and working out and back to normal. Thank God. Yeah.

Yeah. Have you, I spoke probably three or four years ago now at a retreat and retreat and they gave everybody uh cgms at the beginning of it and by like day two it was just like a bunch of junkies they couldn't wait to see what the how high the numbers went they were like beeping in the middle like the beeping when it gets too high is is like the perfect little like uh pavlov's dog approach to like freaking out about something that like does not need to be freaked out about at all. It's like, I ate an apple. And everyone's sitting down at the next talk and things like, dee, dee, dee, dee, dee. You settle down. If you stress out more, it'll negatively influence how your glucose responds. And so I love this study that was done by Aaliyah Crum, where she was actually able

to show that your habits and how you feel in that current time when you eat a food will affect how your body metabolizes it. And so it was really cool. The same group of people, she first gave them what she denoted as a health shake. You know, pretty cool. No big deal. And of course, when you hear someone say, oh denoted as a health shake, you know, pretty cool, no big deal. And of course, when you hear someone say, oh, here's a health shake, chill about it, like, oh, cool, low calorie, it's not going to screw with my goals. I'm on point with this. And when you look at how her metabolism reacted to that, pretty chill, you know,

the digestion was good, glucose regulation, great. She did it again with the same group of people a little bit later on. And this time she was like, hey, it's a McDonald's shake. And so, you know, for lack of a better word, you know, I'm not, I need to go back and read the study 100%. And of course, what does everybody do? They flip out, you know, they stress out a little bit, you know, going into it and you see the body will respond in that way. Can you guess what happened? It was the same shake both times. And it was both a fatty ass shake as far as being sugary and probably absolutely delicious. And so all to show you that when you're just in control of your emotions, when you are in control of your stress, like that will, that will influence how your body responds. And so, and this is why learning

how to regulate is so important when it comes to just daily habits in general. This this this interview here comes at like a super interesting time. I would love how to to to know what your recommendations are for the greatest hockey player maybe to ever face to step on this planet named Connor McDavid. But they're going into the Stanley Cup playoffs. They're in Edmonton. The other team is in essentially Fort Lauderdale, Florida. That's like a six hour direct flight without having to touch down to refuel. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't. They change four time zones as well as having to play two hockey games in three days from the time that they land to getting back on the plane and doing

the whole thing over again, how would you go about, um, kind of like optimizing that situation? It could be for either team. I just, uh, love watching those guys play hockey, but, um, it's, I've been thinking about the challenge of what the coaching staff or the training staff would need to be doing in order to get everybody. Because sleep to me, you know, I feel like we go through these like stages of life where it's like training is all that mattered. Like I was going to recover no matter what when you've got all the great testosterone and you've got like a three quarter form brain. Like you're going to you're going to get the work done in training no matter what. And those those like pivotal like muscle building years. brain. Like you're going to, you're going to get the work done in training, no matter what in those, those like pivotal, like muscle building years. And then as you like sleep right now, it's like,

I focus on it, not to a stressful point, but it's very important that I, I know when I don't get good sleep and that shows up and like the, the not brain fog, but like the mental clarity, the ability to perform, like the way that I'm speaking, the cadence, like I can tell when those things just aren't flowing the way they're supposed to. And then I get to the gym and it's like, just missing like that, that almost like the neurological side of lifting, not just like the strength piece, but like the movement just doesn't seem clean. And then the idea that now you've got professional athletes going to play for the Stanley cup and they've got a six hour flight. They've got four plus time zones to, to deal with plus the stress of getting their body prepared and taking care for it. Nutrition on the road, almost every single

thing that you've stated, they've got a deficit in over the next two weeks to go win a Stanley Cup, which they've been thinking about since they were all two years old. How do you go and attack some, how do you go start to solve a problem like that? If this was a perfect world, I would make them change the policy to where they plan the event six days later so that by the time that team gets there, they have time to acclimate because that is so difficult to do that. And even if you do the most perfect thing within a 24 hour time period, it's still not as optimal because it takes at least 24 hours just to shift your clock in the right direction of an hour. So you really have to

man get in the weeds with this. And so first help me out with geography. Edmonton is to the West, I'm assuming, right? Edmonton is, it's essentially California. And then how much time do they have from when the time that they land before the Stanley Cup? So it starts on Saturday this week. So I'm assuming, you know, game one's the easy one because you can get in on Thursday, you can sleep, you can do all the things. I think that that's where the biggest benefit of actually being the road team up front is because you can get in on Thursday and then you've got a full day to recover. You can get back in the gym the next day. You can reset some sort of like normal sleeping patterns. Right. But now you've got game Saturday.

You've got a game Monday. Back on the plane, they've got two days. Well, it's a full travel day. Then you've got a recovery day and then game, day off, game, and then repeat that. So this is fresh on my mind because I just did this for one of our clients. And so you have to. I actually, we have so many clients that travel

for work and, and like, I know you solve these problems on a daily basis because I think there was one client we had who had a home office in New York, London, and South Africa. And I was like, how do you do all three in a month? How do you sleep at night? Insanity. Um, but yeah, you have to start days before like you. And for example like when i just worked with greg thompson he's one of our guys right and he went to ireland for a golfing tournament we had to start him three or four days prior to start advancing his clock in a way to where his sleep schedule would be almost on point to where when he wakes up at his destination, it is morning there because then that has a better chance of you being able to synchronize the body clock with that time zone. So for example, what we

did with Greg is three days before I had him first find his temperature minimum, right? And so your temperature minimum is approximately an hour to 90 minutes prior to when you wake up naturally. And the way that you help advance or delay someone's body clock is if you want to advance someone's body clock, that means make it earlier, make it easier for them to fall asleep earlier, then you want them to either exercise, eat, or get light exposure in the six hours after your temperature minimum. If you want to delay their body clock, you do the opposite. You go six hours before their temperature minimum and do one of those three things. And so if I'm working with, let's say I had Greg, I want to make his

circadian rhythm just a little bit more advanced and a little bit more advanced to where he is getting up a little bit earlier and a little bit earlier and a little bit earlier for those three days. So that way, when he gets on his flight and he's getting ready to then get on his flight for Ireland, all right, that way, so let's say he gets on the flight at seven's getting ready to then get on his flight for Ireland. All right. That way. So let's say he gets on the flight at seven and then he stays up a little bit. And then once he starts to feel tired by that point, then he waits about 11 or 12 and then he goes to sleep. That way when he wakes up, it'll be just as they're touching down morning time in Ireland. And so from that point, then once you wake up there, then you do those three things.

You exercise, you eat, and you get light exposure because then those are the three things that are the strongest and sending the signal that says, hey, body, let's advance our body clock so that you can fall asleep earlier so that by the time 8 p.m. or so rolls around where he is now in that time zone, he has a much better shot at falling asleep. Now, there's a good chance that some people will experience some form of nausea and symptoms that come from just change in general from the time zones. And that's where you see a lot of stewardess and you know, pilots will utilize certain supplements like picogenol that can help mitigate some of these issues that come with that and help a little bit. But just trying to get to bed that night and downregulate as much as possible is going

to be the best thing you can do. So for the guys who are about to go off to the Stanley Cup, they got to do that. Hopefully, they've got some sort of expert who understands circadian rhythms that has them starting now that will then prep them. So by the time they're coming from Edmonton to wherever the Stanley Cup is in Florida, they're waking up at the time of touchdown and then utilizing that entire day. They shouldn't do anything crazy exercise-wise, but should get some movement in with light exposure

and start eating something to help sync their clock as fast as possible. Yeah, the other piece of it that I didn't even add to the equation is the fact that they will all be playing. The game starts at 7, 8 o''clock so you're kind of like a second shift worker where you want to have your body as as tuned up as possible at 7 30 at night or you're not going to be going to bed until coming off of that you know it's going to be 1 a.m before you even have a chance um but it's a, that's a, that's a real, when I was looking at the numbers on how, on how far that flight is and even flying private with the team, with the best of resources,

best food that you could probably put on the plane. Like that's an equation to solve right there. That's a big one. I'm sure they have their own galpin type person to look at all that and help them with that. But yeah, that's hard. That's why circadian rhythms, they're important, man. Yeah. Yo, one final question for a wrap here.

If you are sleep deprived, just like for a day or, or two days, like not, not chronically, but I stay up late on Saturday night. I want to train on Sunday. Are there any types of exercise that are,

you can still get a high quality response or stimulus where it's just power training or just cardio or just strength training or low volume, muscle, muscular endurance training or whatever it is, or when you're sleep deprived, you can still be effective. That's a great question. I would first say, well, first it depends on where you are in your training cycle, right? What did you do the day before? What'd you do the day before that? Are you at a point where you are recovered enough to do anything substantial?

Like if you just did a leg day the day before and you're sleep deprived, not only did you compromise your recovery, you're not going to be able to put your best foot forward on that Sunday. And that's when I would most likely say that's an active recovery day, man. That's going to be a day for you to just try and recover as much as possible. Now, if you did something light yesterday or yesterday was a rest day and you do that, you might not be at your best overall, but you still might be able to have a decent workout

at a moderate intensity. Just for the sake of knowing that sleep deprivation might negatively influence a little bit of the efficiency with how you utilize glucose, you might not be as restored with glucose into muscle glycogen as you possibly could have. It might affect your performance a little bit. It would depend on the person.

You could have someone who is just absolutely stellar and advanced, has a high training age, and can still pull off something amazing. But for them, most likely it wouldn't be at their absolute best due to the negative impact that sleep deprivation has. I would say definitely not in general. Yeah. I wouldn't deadlift if I've RM or anything like that. I mean, I was just saying no power training because of the, it's so neuromuscular, you know,

like Brian Mann would say once you're fatigued like that to do some like light bodybuilding to maybe get that acute hormonal response that might help with as far as with recovery. But definitely I wouldn't do anything that requires lots of technique just because it won't be there it's not even a good time to learn something new either because your brain if your brain is not working good then yeah it's not a good coach but i'll just teach them technique i mean you can do what you want but it won't work but yeah i'm just thinking about situations where if you have a short amount of time you got you got an event coming up in three weeks you want to get as much in as possible

before the event and then you you stay up late out of your control you got you got a kid that keeps waking up during the night keeps waking you up and you just had a shitty night's sleep you did you're being responsible you're not partying and drinking but like you still want to get something done you don't want to take the day off you still want to get something in like what's what's the most ideal thing i'd imagine you I'd imagine it isn't there. You could even do a WOD or a circuit. As long as you're not doing a 1RM, you're probably going to be okay. And that's also going to be in your benefit, right?

Because exercise is going to help mitigate some of the negative influences on glucose regulation that come with sleep deprivation and misalignment. And so do something. But I wouldn't make it a peak day or a competition day now that it requires lots of speed or anything like really high rate of force development you know yeah just like moderate intensity if you're if you're tia to may then you could probably do anything but but but other than if you're yeah joe just get something in. So level of experience too, right? Yeah. I don't know. Coach Perry, Dr. Perry, Mr. Perry, Chris Perry, all the places.

Dr. Perry. He's earned that mess. Where can people find you, sir? You can find me on Instagram at DrCPerry001 and anything that has to do with Rapid. There you go. Go Travis Bash. You can read my articles on JimMoyer.com in the blog section, or if you're local to Bermuda Run, which probably not.

But if you are, Rise Indoor Sports, check me out also still mashally.com too for all of our programming and e-books. Where did all those people come from? Are they all around the country? Yeah, man. That was like a big-time basketball. Yeah, it looked like. Yeah.

Man, there were some people straight donkey it was just great jumping of all the things athletically has improved the most of anything people do stuff like michael jordan jump from the free throw but you got ninth graders doing that laughing doing 360s from it yeah they're freaks man it's totally crazy wait wait like another generation like one more generation out of all the breeding going on here's here's uh here's my my half-baked idea on uh on so much of the sports is title nine happened and now all of a sudden the freak females showed up that like freak males and the freak and the freak got their freak on and created these little children that freak is the freaks a loot monsters and sports like i i thought about

this the other day because i was watching the women's college world series and i was just like every girl out there is an absolute animal like they they should be division one baseball players they run perfect they throw like not saying anything bad about my sister but the level of athleticism between d1 when cali varner was playing softball and d1 today very different very very you know we should do a show on how quickly females athletically have caught up to males in the last decade. Unbelievable. Unbelievable.

Crazy. Crazy. Yeah. Doug Larson, 160 pound girls. Now I'm sorry. Yeah. You bet.

I'm on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson, Mr. Perry, Dr. Perry. Good to have you, buddy.

Always happy to be here. I'm Anders Varner at Anders Varner. And we are Barbell Shrugged to Barbell underscore Shrugged. And make sure you get over to RapidHealthReport.com. That is where Dan Garner and Dr. Andy Galpin are doing a free lab, lifestyle, and performance analysis. And you can access that free report at RapidHealthReport.com. Friends, we'll see you guys next week.