Barbell Shrugged - The Truth About CBD, Heart Rate Variability, and Getting STRONG w/ Dr. Michael T. Nelson, Anders Varner, and Doug Larson — Barbell Shrugged #412

Episode Date: August 7, 2019

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.   He’s been called in to share his techniques with top government agencies. The techniques he’s developed, and the results Mike gets for his clients have been featured in international magazines, in scientific publications, and on websites across the globe.   Minute Breakdown:   1-10 The truth behind CBD 11-20 Dosing CBD, costs, and delivery 21-30 Metabolic Flexibility 31-40 Is CBD actually beneficial 41-50 Does CBD neutralize the affects of THC 51-60 Importance of heart rate and HRV 61-70 HRV standardization and what is missing in measuring HRV 71- 80 Increasing aerobic capacity for HRV   Connect with Dr. Michael T. Nelson   Anders Varner on Instagram   Doug Larson on Instagram -------------------------------------------- Please Support Our Sponsors   Savage Barbell Apparel - Save 25% on your first order using the code “SHRUGGED”   Organifi - Save 20% using code: “Shrugged” at organifi.com/shrugged   WHOOP - Save $30 on 12 or 18 month membership plan using code “SHRUGGED” at checkout ----------------------------------------- One Ton Challenge    Registration is LIVE now   Find your 1rm in the snatch, clean, jerk, squat, dead, bench.    Add them up to find your One Ton Total.    The goal is 2,000 pounds for men and 1,200 for women.    “What is the One Ton Challenge”   “How Strong is Strong Enough”   “How do I Start the One Ton Challenge” ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Show notes at: http://www.shruggedcollective.com/bbs-miketnelson -----------------------------------------------------------------------   ► Subscribe to Barbell Shrugged's Channel Here ► 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/barbellshruggedpodcast TWITTER ► http://twitter.com/barbellshrugged

Shrugged family, everybody that was a part of the One Ton Challenge, thank you so much. Last week, this event didn't even exist. We were just hoping people would show up. And about five minutes before the very first lift took off, C.T. Fletcher and I looked up into the stands and there was about 3,000 people inside the Fit Age Lounge just ready to watch animals go lift some weights. I wrote an Instagram post the other day about how awesome it was that I trained my whole life through 12 years to go compete at the CrossFit Games. And it wasn't until I completely lost sight of that goal that I stepped foot on the CrossFit Games floor for the very first time.

And I was standing next to CT Fletcher. And I was able to speak to thousands of people, all because of this amazing idea of the One Ton Challenge. And I'm just so grateful for all the people that were a part of the event, all the people that are on the program, and all the people that are going to be on the program as we just got through the first eight weeks. And we are accepting new athletes onto the program now. The results of the first eight weeks and we are accepting new athletes onto the program now. The results of the first eight weeks were unbelievable. We had roughly 100% of the people PR'd. Anywhere between 40 and

we had 100 pound back squat PR, which is just insane. So head over to one ton challenge.com forward slash join, get registered now. The program's ridiculous. Everybody that started in the first group is now moving into a snatch, an eight week snatch cycle. The eight week squat cycle is what launches. And just, I'm just going to say it right now. I promise you're going to put on an additional 20, 40, 60, 80, potentially 100 pounds on your back squat. So get over to OneTonChallenge.com forward slash join right now. I promise you're going to get so strong. We have so many testimonials. It's just incredible.

Dr. Mike is on the show today. This guy just has so much information. It's ridiculous. He's one of the smartest people in our game. Reads every single study for fun, and I don't know how he does it, but he just does. Also want to thank our sponsors. First and foremost, Savage Barbell. They were the official apparel sponsor.

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the whole thing. Jared Stevens also is just a total monster. He was just up against Wes Kitts, which is almost unfair. But I love Whoop. I got my brand new 3.0 band, which has all kinds of cool functions on it. I've been loving it. They actually got a new band on it, which is super cool.

It's way more comfortable. It fits a little bit tighter, just a little bit more snug. It has like a more athletic feel to it. So training with it's been awesome because it doesn't, it just has a different, like it grabs your wrist a little bit better Um, so training with it's been awesome cause it doesn't just has a different, um, like it grabs your wrist a little bit better than the, the one that, uh, the older ones. Um, also it has some, some additionally cool functions of live heart rate.

So you can see just where your heart rate's at. HRV is still the same. Um, lots of cool new functions though. So get over to whoop.com. You're going to save $30 on a 12 or 18 month subscription using the coupon code shrugged. That's whoop.com and use the coupon code shrugged to save $30 on a 12 or 18 month subscription. And then of course, how could we forget the sunrise to sunset shrugged stack over at Organifi.com forward slash shrugged. Save 20% on the greens, the reds, the golds, making sure, yo, I live on these things.

I love getting all my micros and one beautiful, delicious shot from the greens in the morning, reds and the golds afternoon when I go to sleep. Organifi.com forward slash shrug. Use the coupon code shrugged to save 20%. Let's get into the show. You got some weird stuff going on in your training now.

You're doing Denny's. I watched. Yeah, that's fun. Hold on. What is the name of the – it's on Netflix. They've got – it's called like – there's like a rogue created like a series called like Strongland or something. Stone Land.

Yeah. What is it? Oh, man, it's great. It's the very first one. The first episode is about Sandow. Yeah. What is that? Oh, man, it's great. It's the very first one. The first episode is about Sandow. Yeah. And, like, what strong people used to be. Welcome to Barbell Shrugged.

I'm Anders Varner. Doug Larson's in the house. Dr. Michael T. Nelson. Dude, the first time we hung out, I had to just jump into the intro because we're talking about so much cool stuff that we're going to make this an official show now. The first time we hung out at Paleo FX, dude, I knew who you were back then, but man, you crushed me. You destroyed me.

You had 15 shows that weekend, and I was just, you were like number three, and I was like, oh, so fresh on the mic. This young, not young, but like this new guy that was like ready to attack the podcasting world. And then Michael T. Nelson's over there just standing like a statue. Like two and a half hours? I could go five more. I didn't even have to whiz during that time. Oh, no.

I had to take two breaks because I was just getting pummeled by vitamins and minerals. It just kept going and going. Dude, welcome back to the show. This is so radical that you came up. We're hanging out at the Fit A tent right there. That's Sarah. We're at the Granite Games in beautiful St. Cloud, Minnesota. Sarah Sigmundsdottir is standing over us, drinking a Fit A.

Not bad looking for a Fit chick. Yeah, man, it's Sunday afternoon. What's going on in the world of Mike T. Nelson these days? It's been good. Doing a lot of traveling around. Speaking a lot? A fair amount of speaking. Yeah, I was down at Paleo FX.

How was that this year? It was good. It's always a good time hanging out in Austin. It got weird this year, right? Weirder than normal? Weirder than normal? How so? Just everybody had blue blockers on.

Or the blue shades, whatever they are. Yeah. Is that normal? I don't know. It looked like more this year. There's definitely more. More of the biohacking crowd this year? More biohacking than normal.

Yeah, I would say there's more biohacking than normal. Keto's still big, and CBD was everywhere. That was my takeaway. Oh, hold the phone. You actually also put up a really good post the other day. We were going to talk about it. We're still going to talk a lot about HPV. HRV.

But, dude, what's the deal with CBD? You've done a little research on this. It was interesting. So I started researching about three-ish years ago, and I was looking for stuff. I do a lot of kiteboarding. And I was thinking, I'm like, okay, so training, there's some stuff you can do. But, like, supplement-wise, nutrition-wise, if I get, you know, 20 feet up in the air and screw up and get dropped out of the sky in my head,

is there some stuff I should consider doing both before and after? So I started looking at the research, and different mixed cannabinoids, CBD, kept coming up. And at the time, I was like, ah, it can't be anything to this, whatever. And I kept looking at it more, and I'm like, huh, there's actually some pretty good data on that. Fast forward a couple of years, and right about six months ago, all of a sudden CBD is like everywhere. Part of that may be because of the hemp farm bill. So when that passed, it's illegal now to sell CBD. I mean, it was kind of legal before, but the hemp, if it's less than 0.3% THC, it's regulated under the department of agriculture instead of not

marijuana or cannabis per se and that makes it legal to process it in other states where marijuana is not legal you could always send the finished product to most states for the most part but it just seems like everyone and their brother now is manufacturing cbd. The FDA, for whatever reason, actually stopped kind of going after the different claims on CBD. So prior to that, I won't name their name, but certain big producers of it who have been around for quite a while, they would actually get letters from the FDA stating that, hey, you had the word CBD on a customer review that was posted on your site. You need to take that down.

Wow. on a customer review that was posted on your site, you need to take that down. And then now all of a sudden they've kind of, for whatever reason, been pretty lax on it. I think people saw that, and so now everyone's kind of jumping into the market. I was really freaked out when I got to the East Coast, and I was thinking, like, tobacco. There's no way marijuana. There's still, like, blue laws in place where I live now,

which I was very unaware of the first couple Sundays when everything was closed. Nothing. You can't go anywhere. I had to buy a car and like the whole. I was like, wait, nothing is open on Sunday? How? Especially moving from San Diego where they don't have any of that stuff. Oh, yeah.

And I went to the farmer's market and there was like five stands all selling CBD. I was like, whoa. Yeah. What's next, North Carolina? You progressive state you are. La Ventana, Baja, Mexico. So small town in Baja kiteboarding in January. And they're like, hey, we got this cool farmer's market that comes out on Sundays.

All the locals kind of you know sell different things there and I'm like I'll go check it out there was a guy selling CBD at the local farmers market in La Ventana Mexico wow I was like what so it's like everywhere new thing really beneficial like what can people expect I feel like I take it and I know I take it because I put it in my mouth, and then I don't know. I don't know what I'm supposed to feel. Yeah, so in terms of feeling, CBD is the non-psychoactive component of the cannabis plant. It's the boring weed.

Yeah, well, that's what it used to be called, right? So the people that produced Charlotte's Web, so that specific strain, used to be called the hippie's disappointment because they would smoke it and they're like, I don't know, nothing happened. It was really high in CBD but really low in THC. So back then, that was just this worthless weed that's not really worth anything. We don't need it. And then as more research came out, especially for original cases of epilepsy,

they found, whoa, this seems to be beneficial for that. Now if you look at what the claims are, it's got all sorts of crazy claims. My opinion, the only thing that the research is showing may be useful, possibly sleep, although I'd say that's debatable. I mean, in the experiments I've done, I don't notice a massive difference. But if you're a very anxious type person, you have a hard time down-regulating and relaxing, it may be beneficial for that. In terms of general recovery, that's kind of up in the air on that. I think the most beneficial is possibly reducing the risk of head trauma,

or if you've already suffered some head trauma. The reasons for that are there's a very cool rat study where they took the rats and they whacked them on the head and they gave them a TBI. So TBI, traumatic brain injury, right? Obviously it's not going to be replicated in humans. And what they found if they gave them CBD mixed cannabinoids, those rats, the blood brain barrier stayed intact much better. So one of the problems is if you get whacked on the head really hard, like two big things happen like immediately. One is that the blood brain barrier can potentially open up. So all that other stuff that is normally keeping out floods into the brain and causes massive amounts of inflammation. The other part is you have a huge energy crisis. The glucose

metabolism just gets really screwed up and you have a massive energy deficit in the brain. So using like ketones or ketogenic diet might be beneficial for that. CBD may be beneficial for reduction of some of that neuroinflammation. And based on a rat study, possibly reducing how much that blood brain barrier opens upon impact. But on like a daily use, or should I just be taking CBD in preparation for one day getting knocked out? Potentially. I mean, I'll use a higher dose before I go. You'll get knocked out someday.

Yeah. Before I go kiteboarding or things that I know may be a little bit higher risk. In terms of general health, maybe. I mean, there's not a ton of data on that because most of the data is looking at pathologies yeah um there is some data on tbi looking even at thc they did a screen of 446 patients many years ago when thc was illegal and they found that if you had a talk screen that showed positive for thc that your chance of survival was much higher than if you didn't. So even THC may have some positive effects on that.

Wait, so back that up. So what was the thing that having more THC was giving you a benefit for? So they did it where marijuana cannabis was illegal. So the only way they could do it is what they call the retrospective study. So they took all these 446 cases of TBIBI and they looked because when they came to the hospital, they also had a tox screen. And they said, okay, we'll separate them between positive for THC or not positive for THC. So we have our two subgroups and then we'll look to see, they all had a TBI, traumatic brain injury. What was the outcome of these two groups? So the group where the tox screen was positive for THC, they were beneficial effects in terms of long-term mortality after a TBI.

But in that case, they're saying the THC was the thing that did it or their CBD because they smoked weed and there was both in there? We don't know. That's the hard part, right? And we don't even know the amounts. We don't know anything else. Right. And actually, that was a question I was about to say a second ago.

With a lot of rat studies, oftentimes it's like, okay, well, there was some positive thing, but they actually gave the rat about 1,000 times more than you would ever take as a human being. Do you know what the dosing was, like milligrams per kilo body weight type of thing? I'd have to look up on the one study, but dosing in general for CBD is most of the research in humans is starting at like 100 milligrams, actually, maybe 150. Some studies have used 300 milligrams. I've never taken that much. I've always taken like 20.

20 or 30. It's a pretty high dose. One tincture is like five, right? It depends. It depends. Anywhere from five. Those Charlotte Webb ones we had had were like 30 and one of them was 60. yeah the highest you can get I've seen is the advanced by Charlotte's web so one milliliter was 60 milligrams of CBD right that's the highest I've seen um but again a lot of the dosing data we're familiar with right now is kind of set by the manufacturers.

And I think a lot of that has to do with cost. So if you're trying to even take, say, 60 milligrams of CBD a day, that's pretty darn expensive. So in terms of human studies, there's not a ton. And then it gets into very complicated really fast. So you're looking at CBD. Well, how was it delivered, right? If you're in States where it's legal, this could be, you know, vaporized, this could be smoked. This could be other forms of ingestion. And even then sublingual versus just swallowing it. So other alternative forms of delivery are generally not looked favorably upon by the FDA. So if you were

to put on your label saying, okay, hold it in your mouth for 30 to 60 seconds, that gets into a gray area because you're trying to get absorption through the mouth, not just after you ingest it. And by the FDA, that's considered more of a drug. Even like transdermal preparation, same thing. Right? So in humans, there's not a really good transdermal study that I've seen on CBD. There's a couple animal studies that showed positive effects. But if you think about it, if you're a manufacturer and you're like, all right, let's run this study, let's see. If it does show that there's an effect, the FDA could come in and say,

oh, wow, that's having an effect like a drug because you're using an alternate delivery method, and that's generally not happy for them in terms of if you're a manufacturer selling a supplement. Yeah, they probably can't put on there, you should smoke this. Sublingual, even if that goes too far, then that seems very simple. Right. And they still have a problem with that? So far, yes.

So if you look at what is actually written, the answer would be yes. If you look at what's actually enforced, who knows? That's a whole different other topic, unfortunately. And what's being enforced and what's actually getting in there, how, I guess, testing quality of the CBD that you're actually getting, how would you even go about knowing what you're buying and a reputable source? I mean, we've worked with Charlotte's Web through Driven Nutrition.

Jason Roll's an awesome dude. Me too. Super trust that guy. Yeah. Like, he's an awesome, he does his research. Oh, yeah. But how, if I'm going to the farmer's market and there's 10 different brands of CBD,

how do I know what the hell I'm supposed to buy? Yeah, so a couple things I look for. I'm a big fan of Charlotte's Web. I've been out there, spent two days with all those guys, toured their facility and everything through Jason. They're super awesome. They've been doing it for a long period of time. They have all traceability on everything.

So the things I tend people to look for is do they only sell CBD? If that's the only thing they sell and they just started about a year ago, that makes me kind of nervous. That doesn't mean they're bad. It just means that if they get shut down, there's nothing else really for them to lose per se. Also, call and ask them, do they have traceability? So they say, okay, this is standardized to 18 milligrams of CBD.

How do you know it's standardized to that amount? What do you do to verify that that's actually what it is? Yeah. They should also have traceability. So I know like on Charlotte's Web, on some of them, I don't know if they still have it, you could take the QR code off the top, type in the lot number on your phone, and it'll give you the sheet of all the testing that they've done on that

lot number itself. So you want to make sure that they've actually tested both the materials as they come in and the actual finished product itself the other part is cost i mean right now it's expensive yeah it's really i mean if you were to start all the way at the beginning and get the actual hemp that has a high amount of cbd and do the correct manufacturing and extract it and do all the other stuff that goes with it, it gets expensive pretty fast. Well, just that little bottle is like $140. Yeah.

And you go through that probably 15 days if you're consistently taking it. Oh, yeah, definitely. Yeah. So someone's trying to sell it at like even half that price, and then you can look to see, okay, are they selling it direct to a consumer or are they selling it through a shop or an MLM or somewhere else? Yeah. So the more people they go through, all those people have a percentage that they're going to make off of it,

which means then it's your COPS or the cost of products sold has to be even less than that in order for those people to stay in business. And kind of what you're saying, the research really only backs up if there's TBI, that there's potentially some really good benefits to it. Yeah, there's a couple other things where there's, you know, some, I'd say some data per se. Yeah. But, again, what are you looking at? What dosage?

How long are you looking at it for? But generally, I feel like we're in this, like, we're riding a very, like, bull market on this, like, CBD has the answer to everything yes and this like endocannabinoid system no one knows about it so we're going to say it solves everything and if we just take the cbd we should have no anxiety we stopped worrying about everything and now we're going to sleep perfect and guess what your workouts are going to be better too but that's just all talk for the most part i would say he's so good for the most part so i

also look at is there an endogenous system where all these other potential effects could happen and that's what's interesting about cbd so if you look at the endogenous cannabinoid system you basically have a cb1 and cb2 receptor and what we find is they are almost everywhere in the body. So the endogenous cannabinoid system does actually control a lot of different physiologic systems. So that means that for some of these claims, there is at least a physiologic underpinning that it may be potentially beneficial. So if we look at something like creatine, it's probably only so many things creatine can do even though it's very beneficial yeah just because of the role that creatine serves in the body in terms of atp regenerating you know all that kind of stuff um in the cannabinoid system because it's so widespread throughout the body there is a potential that it can have multi-faceted effects and what receptor it

interacts on you know what concentration uh the different pharmacokinetics of it. It gets to be kind of messy pretty fast. And there's some limited data showing that people probably metabolize it different. So if you look at oral absorption of just CBD, even just taking it in your mouth, so primarily absorption through the mouth, having it with food or without food makes a difference. Even though the food is probably not modifying the absorption of it per se, it's probably interacting somehow with the pharmacokinetics of it. And the times on it to what's called a peak concentration are very wide.

A couple hours, two, three, maybe four hours. So it's very wide. And my guess in the future, we'll maybe look at genetics or other factors to say, two, three, maybe four hours. So it's very wide. And my guess in the future, we'll maybe look at genetics or other factors to say, just like caffeine. We know there's some fast metabolizers of caffeine, there's slow metabolizers of caffeine, and there's a bunch of people in between. So it makes sense that these compounds, people are probably going to metabolize them at different rates and speeds and have different effects too. Wait, have you seen any big downsides to taking CBD? We talked about a few upsides, but is there any like really solid reasons not to take it?

There's not too many. So there's a couple of things that are theoretical. There's a mouse study looking at possible negative effects on mitochondria in the brain specifically, but that was just kind of pulling out a bunch of cells from a mouse and looking at them in a dish there's also some other mouse data showing that if you get whacked on the head cbd is actually beneficial and affects the mitochondria in a positive way so don't know much on that in terms of like for people lifting who are lifters could it possibly

screw up recovery we know that taking a super high dose of vitamin C and E, so one study recently published looked at only one gram of vitamin C with 400 IUs of vitamin E, and they showed less adaptation in hypertrophy in a group. So we know that some antioxidants can actually mess up some of the gains in hypertrophy. We don't have any data on CBD to see if it's interacting in a similar method. In theory, it might be, but we don't have any data on that so far. But again, other compounds don't have that effect at all. So we just don't know enough in that area. I would say that and probably costs.

Those are probably the three big downsides right now. In terms of acute, what's called an LD50, so lethal dose to kill 50% of a population, it's ungodly high. So you're not going to have any real negative acute effects that we know of. So ODing is basically not going to happen. Right.

So we haven't seen any negative effects there. Maybe some negative effects on inflammation if you're using it directly after training. Again, those studies haven't really been done yet at least that i've seen anywhere so if researchers are listening i'd love to see that study be pretty easy to run i mean easy as far as studies go yeah that's specifically what i was going to ask about can you it's i guess the idea that people can take this and now all of a sudden like inflammation, it's just, it's this magic pill for it. But where does that come from? If there's being no research being done on it?

Well, that's the hard part right now. Cause most companies probably don't even understand the research, the handful ones that I've interacted with and probably not the most beneficial way. Cause I guess all sorts of crazy emails from people that are like, Oh, we'll give you a whole case of it. You can test it out. I'm like, dude, I don't even know where this stuff came from.

The amount of effort it's going to take me to try to verify your crazy product and everything else, it's just not worth my time right now. I feel like I'm going to be so negative on this show. I'm going to come across as just because I – Negative Nancy. Yeah, well, here's the thing I've been struggling with with CBD. If I take it, if I don't take it for like two or three days, and then I go and take it like before breakfast on an empty stomach,

I'm going to the bathroom. My body completely rejects it as if I took too many fish oil pills. Like it's going right through me, and there is zero digestion. I can literally feel my stomach just be like nope and i'm in the bathroom you have a hard time digesting fats i don't think so oh i'm usually pretty fat i'm very flexible metabolically oh good good job that's your turn that's what we talked about last time yeah um yeah i it's a very interesting thing because my try to, like, people send it to me, and then I try it, and I'm just like, I'm sure something's there, but I don't get it.

And it kind of seems to me like with the amount of actual benefit that you're saying there is, wherever that is on the spectrum. And people should just have the THC. Add a little bit of fun to it. If you're just going to have an average result, you might as well enjoy your night more. Oh, yeah. Depends on what you want to do.

Because, well, you might get a little more anxious, though. Possibly. Anxiety might be a little bit higher with the THC piece. That could be a dosage issue. A dosage issue? Yeah. Well, and then the other thing that I think about, maybe you can offer a little bit higher with the THC piece. That could be a dosage issue. A dosage issue? Yeah. Well, and then the other thing that I think about, maybe you can offer a little insight into this,

is just sometimes being fat soluble or whatever, like how individually for each person are they going to have a different result? Like it's not this magic cure-all thing. Like if I give it to my wife, she might be like, wow, I feel so calm, so relaxed. But for me, I just run to the bathroom. Is that very easy to happen? Yeah, I've seen very high variability. So in NM1, you're always subject to placebo and other effects like that. So like with sleep, I haven't found any really good data in healthy humans

that it helps with sleep. There's some data with different pathologies, REM disorder, things of that nature that it may be beneficial. But I've heard people that tend to be, I would rate as more anxious, it really seems to help them sleep pretty good. And that's been verified looking at HRV, using an Oura ring, different things like that. Could that be placebo? Could be. But at the end of the day if there's not much of a downside and they sleep better and they feel better hey man keep doing

after it right i mean we don't know if there are massive downsides to it doesn't appear to be um so it's you know right now i'd say we're definitely in the end of one testing what i tell people is to start yeah start around 20 milligram 20 milligram dose, just see how that goes, and figure out what are your markers you're going to use to test. Are you using heart rate variability? Are you looking at sleep? Are you looking at how you wake up in the morning? Are you looking at recovery?

If you're doing recovery, well, what do you define recovery as? If you do a hard workout on Monday, in my opinion, can you come back and do that again Friday instead of Saturday? If you can move that same work in, that by definition, without even any fancy lab equipment, your recovery must have gotten better, especially to repeat that at the same performance or higher. And that's something people can do on their own too. I feel like CBD now has really made its way all the way into the mainstream. Oh, definitely.

Any random person would be like, oh, yeah, I've heard about that now, even if they don't know what it is and the details and research and all that but you know five years ago it was still relatively fringe like you go to paleo effects like some people knew about it for sure but is there anything like that right now where like in five years it'll be like cbd is right now but like still kind of the majority of the population hasn't really heard about it yet but it seems promising if i were to hedge any of my bets, I would actually bet on other types of cannabinoids that we haven't really looked at yet. Because there's hundreds, right?

There's about 100 and I think 13 that have been identified. Well over 100. The only one that's psychoactive is THC. CBD, all the other ones, don't appear to be psychoactive. One or two are on the fence depending upon dosage. But the other ones, if you can extract them out of the hemp plant now, under the Department of

Agriculture, if you're a supplement company listening, there's ways you can extract out these different cannabinoids by looking at pressure and temperature and how you do your decarboxylation. And right now, those would be considered legal as a supplement. one like possibly cbn

may be useful for sleep more so than cbd yeah um so i think looking at those other cannabinoids i think that's going to be a huge area of interest and like all things the manufacturers and availability of it will be well ahead of the research. Yeah, but like I mentioned before It does have the potential of interacting with other Beneficial parts in the body and we have the technology to extract these compounds right now There's a couple companies that are starting to do it that will probably be out later this year There's like one or two that are out right now But being able to do that in Mass and that scale is coming pretty fast.

So if I had to hedge and bet money, that's kind of the area I would be looking at. Is this similar to, say, 50 years ago, the supplement industry really comes on the rise? You start taking individual nutrients. You mentioned vitamin C, vitamin E. You start taking individual phytochemicals or whatever they are, and then we come full swing and we go, well, you don't need to take like high doses of each of these individual things. You just need to eat real whole food. And then it'll kind of take care of all these problems if you're eating real whole food.

Like not to be crass, but like is it just better just to smoke real weed? And then you just get all these things instead of like trying to isolate one single compound at a time when there's hundreds of them available? Yeah, so what I tell people right now is, I'm still more biased to mixed cannabinoids standardized for CBD. That means the other cannabinoids, they may not standardize for them, but if they're getting them from a reliable source, they should still be there.

Do we know exactly how much of those you need? Not really sure, but based on your premise, to me that's more of a whole spectrum type food and not as much as an isolated individual item. It seems like every time we get overly reductionist, it tends to come bite us back in the ass a lot of times. Again, not always, right? I mean like creatine has been very successful,

fish oil has been very successful. Fish oil has been very successful. It just kind of depends. And the last comment, too, you had mentioned about if people are trying to get CBD from, like, a vaporizer or smoked, you will get the same amount of THC as CBD based on the plant material you start with. Because some people said, well, if I change the temperature, the vaporization temperature, can I set it so I get a higher amount of CBD and lower amount of THC? And you can't because their boiling points are almost the same amount. I got you.

Now, if you want high amount of terpenes and these other compounds that are in there, you can set it to a very low temperature, and you won't get that much THC, and you'll get these other terpenes and these other compounds in and above cannabinoids that are in there that may have some other beneficial effects too. Wait, so if you say, if you have the ability to set the temperature on a vape pen that has THC in it, if you set it lower, you get less THC, and you set it higher,

you get more, is that what you just said? Yes. Yeah, so THC, if I remember right, someone will email me and correct me, I'm sure. But I want to say the boiling point is like 170 degrees C or 160. Yeah. So it's almost the same as CBD. Terpenes, like one of them is around 130, 120. So they tend to be as a class of compounds much lower. Yeah. And the terpenes are the things that give it kind of the flavor and the smell.

Oh, it smells like lemon. It smells like dirty socks. Smells like gas, whatever. That's actually the terpene compounds that give it that smell and kind of that flavor. The downside, again, is if you're working with an oil, then it's a little bit more messy, right? Because the oils, they have to make sure that all those compounds are actually pulled out, they show up in the oil, and they're actually in the finished product. if you're doing it directly with the plant material itself then all you have to verify is look at the testing that they did on the plant make sure those compounds are actually present regarding vaping me and andrews we joke about this all the time like now now if we're in california and we're like does anyone got a vape pen on them like every person pulls a vape pen out of their pocket.

Like everyone just has pens everywhere you go. Yeah. We could do it right here too at the FitAid booth. Look. Look. So have you seen any research on vaping specifically as far as like just not even THC, but just the general category of vaping? Like it's obviously, in my my mind i think it's intuitive

rather that it's probably better for you than actually smoking something you know like actual combustion fire and the whole whole deal where you're getting real smoke in your lungs that's pretty much established as bad for you but vaping is it what percentage of smoking is it or is it just totally different category and it's not the same thing at all. Yeah, it's a different category. If you look at cannabis as a whole, even doing what I call the old school method of having a joint or just basically flaming it directly,

the little bit of data that I've seen... When I was a kid. Back in 2017. When we had a flower. Yeah. The data on it doesn't, at least in terms of cancer rates, doesn't appear to be super high. Now, again, that's suspect because of all the other cofactors and stuff that go into that. So like a recent study out of the University of Colorado showed that a lot of people who use cannabis also happen to exercise a lot, which was kind of not what they thought going into the study.

But if you've been to these states and hung out with those people, it kind of makes a little bit of sense. So you may have a lot of other healthy behaviors that are associated with that, especially if you're comparing it to cigarette smoking. In terms of vaping, might be a little bit better. But again, I go back to what are you actually uh vaping as a source material so if i'm going to do it i use something called a grasshopper from boulder colorado i don't make any money from them but it's a vape and you can put the actual plant material in there and you can vape that

directly all right so that way i know and i've controlled what is actually going in there and what is what temperature it is and what happens if i I'm buying an oil from someone, the oil may be perfectly fine, but now I have to go back and trust the company that they didn't put other things in there. So, for example, like in the more tobacco world, people like blowing these huge clouds of smoke. So they'll add other compounds in there so that that actually will happen. Oh, nice. Epic Bar just came through and dropped like a pound. I'm going to eat some of this right now.

Jerky. Jerky. All right, you keep talking. We'll just eat. Yeah, yeah. So, again, I think it depends on what are the materials you're looking at, what is the temperature, you know, how often is it, do people use other things.

So it gets a little bit messy. My gut feeling is if you're doing nicotine and other compounds, we're probably going to find, eh, probably not all that much beneficial. Now, if you're using cannabis and other compounds that may have antioxidant activity on top of that, maybe it's not as bad. So, again, that's just my guess for now. It's a Good question. The CBD and the THC, I've heard that if, say, potentially you go and eat a

brownie and you just are off the deep end of way too much THC, that if you then take a tincture or whatever of CBD, that it will neutralize the THC effects and you will be stabilized and normal very quickly. Is that true? There's a couple older studies that seem to hint that that may be true. There was a more recent study that showed, at least in terms of cognitive

and tests that they ran in the study, that it made no difference. Yeah. So, again again it may be specific to what we're actually testing for um i have seen that happen in person where someone i know was pretty freaked out she's like oh but if i close my eyes i'm gonna go to sleep and never wake up again trust me and she was like really freaked out so i gave her a bunch of cbd and it seemed to calm her down sometimes i wish the flight attendants on my flights would have some cbd when please help me a little they'll never know i'll just tell

them i'm high yeah yeah and if people want a good party trick, if you get bored at parties, ask them if you ever have an edible marijuana story. And anyone who's ever done it at least has like one to three stories that are pretty entertaining. Yeah, like when it first became legal in California, we were like, I don't even know what this dosage thing is. Let's just try it all. Let's find the edge. We've gone too far.

Day one. Oh, yeah yeah and people forget that it's one of the better parts about legal cannabis the fact that you actually know know what you're getting now oh totally yeah you can actually have it standardized right and the other part people forget too is that if you're using an edible the first thing the liver does is change it into a different drug which is 11 hydroxy and that basically acts as a completely different drug in your body. And the pharmacokinetics of it, like the peak can be 60 to 90 minutes is average, but there's some data showing it may not show up until peak, until at least two hours or longer in.

And then if you deal with something like a brownie where if they didn't mix it correctly, especially in the fat they usually disassociate it in, you can have these concentrations in pockets where it's way higher than that and then way lower depending upon how it's manufactured, and especially if it's just Bob in his kitchen putting a bunch of stuff together. Yeah. What you can't see is me nodding my head. On your way to work, I'm just like, yes.

Yes, I know about that. Dude, let's get into some HRV. You mentioned a little bit earlier. Just starting at the top, what is HRV and why? I feel like right now we're talking about these two things that we've gone off the deep end maybe on their importance. One being CBD. Maybe it's not all it's cracked up to be, but HRV, I got the whoop band on right now. I'm tracking my HRV as we speak.

That's right. That's what everybody says I need to be doing. It has to be the thing, how we're making our training programs and recovering. And our HRV isn't perfect, but what actually is HRV? And how are we supposed to start to unravel all the pieces that go into it? Yeah, so heart rate variability is, if we look at the average heart rate, we can get some pretty good data, right? So old school was, you know, stand up in the morning, take your resting heart rate.

If it's elevated, you know, it's a sign maybe you're overreaching or overtrained, things of that nature. So heart rate variability now is not taking the average but doing a variability analysis. So we're looking at how much does one heart rate one beat change just a little bit in these tiny amounts from one beat to the next beat to the next beat to the next beat so we're looking at these fine scale changes in that heart rate so if you're sitting here at rest and we hook you up to some fancy equipment we'll see that your heart rate could be 65, 66, 66.7, 64.1. It's not 65, 65, 65, 65.

One of the old Chinese phrases was, yeah, it sounds like that too. That was my one second. Yeah, go ahead. Sorry. There was an old Chinese phrase that said if your heart beats like a metronome, you have a couple days left to live. So historically, they've known about this for quite a while. HRV was originally used for the cosmonaut space program.

They needed a way to measure how well are they going to do in space. And this is back in the 60s. So trying to send data back and forth was really, really hard. You could only send these very, very small bytes of data at one point. So they looked and said, okay, well, if we do heart rate variability and we send back what's called the RR intervals, the distance from that R wave to the next R wave, basically the beats from one beat to the next,

we can process that data back on Earth. We just send the data itself. And that will tell them the status of the cosmonauts. Are they stressed? Are they not stressed? What's going on with them? So in terms of availability, that was kind of the biggest area that it was used. You fast forward many decades, and now we have wristwatches that will do it.

I have an Oura Ring that will do it, apps on your phone that will do it. So it's becoming much more accessible to do right now. The good part is HRV is very accurate at telling you the status of your autonomic nervous system. Your autonomic nervous system has two branches. One's called the parasympathetic, which is like the brake on your car. I push harder on the brake, the car is going to slow down. So rest and digest. The other one is the sympathetic side. If I step on the gas pedal harder, my car is going to go faster. So HRV tells us the status of the autonomic nervous system. Where are you on that balance between are you more parasympathetic or are you more sympathetic?

And at the end of the day, if you have accurate HRV and you've got the measurement in place, all that stuff is good. The pro and the con of HRV is that all it will ever tell you is the status of your autonomic nervous system. Now, that controls a lot of stuff in your body in terms of a hierarchy of stuff I want to know. I would definitely put that at the top of the list. But it's not going to tell you absolutely everything. And I think it's... So the way that was explained, it's like you had the gas pedal,

and then you had the brake, and then you said there's a bunch of other stuff it doesn't handle, but that kind of sounds like, especially if you don't know anything about the nervous system and all that, the gas pedal and the brake sounds like everything. Right.

You're either speeding up or you're slowing down. Well, what else is there? Yeah, so in terms of autonomic function, that's the main things that it it will regulate and then if we look at different systems we'll have different effects right so if all of a sudden a bear shows up here we're going to become super sympathetic and everything that happens from that point is to either fight flight or potentially hopefully not freeze, or hide behind Anders. So we're going to have an increased amount of blood flow to the muscles. We're going to have a shunting of blood flow away from digestion,

even changes in the visual system, the auditory system. So it does govern a lot of different things. But in terms of, let's say say recovery from a super heavy training session you did it's not gonna tell us a lot about muscle damage it's not gonna tell us a lot about other factors that could play into recovery yeah it's just gonna give you a good marker of kind of your overall stress on your nervous system yeah I was having a conversation about this recently and this person was saying that it's more it's a better measure of aerobic recovery, so to speak, rather than anaerobic recovery.

Is that those big categories? Yeah. So now if you go down into more of the bioenergetics realm, if you look at the studies that have been done to try to predict performance from HRV, it is much better at predicting aerobic performance than anaerobic performance. And so a lot of the crazy emails I've gotten from people over the last five to seven years are like, ah, I started doing my HRV. I was listening to you. I got a red. My HRV was screwed. I went to the gym and I said a PR. Ah, HRV is worthless. I'm like, whoa, hold on. You should do that every day then. Yeah.

So in terms of prediction of performance, HRV is actually not very good at prediction of anaerobic strength, speed, power, things of this nature. There's a new study that just came out last week that showed that again. But if we think about it, exactly what Anders was saying, you can get away doing that. If people are listening to go, okay, how often have you set a PR on a

horrible nutrition and very little sleep? It happens. Does that happen day in and day out though? If your nutrition is horrible, you're sleeping five hours a night, at some point you're just not going to be sending prs in the gym yeah right so in terms of performance i tell people again we get uh performance and

fatigue like mixed up all the time right you talk to like very elite power lifters they'll go to a meet they'll dehydrate themselves like crazy in order to make weight they'll sleep three hours the night before they'll step on the platform and sometimes they'll hit all-time prs what they don't tell you is they go home they're normally sick for a week and they do nothing for about a week right because the amount of fatigue they had was super high and that has to be repaid at that point yeah so i don't be like if i'm driving around in my little jetta and i redline it i definitely can get the car to go faster. But can I expect to redline the car every single day and have it live a long period of time? I'm going to put 250,000 miles on it doing that. Probably not, right? So acutely, you definitely can go to the gym. You

can have a horrible HRV and you may do pretty good for that session, but you're not going to come back and do it the next day, the next day, the next day. So it's more telling you where is your level of fatigue, kind of parasympathetic to sympathetic again. And what you do in terms of performance is pretty variable. So if you're a strength athlete or CrossFit athlete, weightlifter, powerlifter, or whatever it is, if you see that your HRV is really, really low, just for one day, you don't wake up and go, oh, my day's fucked. You can go train or whatever it is, but see that your hrv is really really low just for one day you don't wake up and go up my day's fucked like yeah you can go train or whatever it is but like if it's if it's

repeatedly if it's consistently rather low day in and day out for a period of time you know a couple days a week or longer then then okay well something needs to change at that point because it's going to catch up to you yeah i like using both the acute one and like about a seven-day average. So I tell clients, okay, if my HRV acutely is good, my seven-day average is kind of declining, I'm probably going to train as normal, but I'm going to keep an eye on it. Because if that average keeps going down, at some point I'm going to have to repay that amount of fatigue. And that's the art of coaching. So I have other clients where it'll drop a little bit, and I'm like to have to repay that amount of fatigue. And that's the art of coaching. So I have other clients where it'll drop a little bit, and I'm like, all right, today just substitute an easy aerobic on the bike.

Move your lifting until tomorrow. Why? Because I want to prioritize the amount of work I'm trying to get in over the next eight weeks. And I want that work to be as high quality as possible. And usually I know historically that if I just do that one day, their HRV will pop up the next day and we're good to go again. Now, if I forced them and said, okay, go to the gym,

I really want you to test your PRs, they'd probably be okay. Yeah. But now I've got to play with that potential two or three days after that where they're going to be much lower than normal. And does that screw with all the work I'm trying to get in over this next six, eight, 16 weeks. And that's the hard part. You have to kind of weigh in your head, right? And some athletes have said, okay, if you feel really good

and you think you can hit a PR and you're, you know, four, eight weeks away from competition and your HRV is crap, I don't know, do it. If that's your main goal and that, I don't know, do it. If that's your main goal and that's what you're living for, great. We'll figure out the back end. We've got plenty of time. It's not going to mess with your competition. You're far enough out.

Or if it's off-season, awesome. Because that mental win a lot of times is worth more to them than just three days of taking it easy. One thing I'm really interested in is how sleep plays its role in this thing because I've been tracking this, like, I don't know, five months now, six months. And one, the correlation of where we live under this theme of you have to have eight hours of sleep. Well, I got five hours and 20 minutes of sleep last night, and my HRV is 143, which is like through the roof. Nice.

On the score. And my resting heart rate's to 46. Nice. Which is an average of 44. So where does sleep play a role in this? Is it the same as going to set a PR, like you can get away with bad sleep a couple nights in a row?

A lot of the numbers just don't seem to add up when you drill down from these like grandiose themes of eight hours, eight and a half hours is the minimum for recovery. Well, it looks like I'm very recovered right now. Yeah, so when I first started looking at HRV, it was part of my PhD research. And then after that, they had an app like I used the iFleet app initially. It was a validated app came on the market about six years ago so i started doing it on myself i had all my clients

started doing daily monitoring of it and i had the old xeo device at the time if people remember that uh headband could look at eeg look at accelerometer you had to sleep with this little sexy thing around your head at night and i'm looking at sleep and i'm looking at hrv the same thing i was like oh wait a minute i didn't get much sleep last night i got five hours my hrv is really good today yeah and then i would see the converse i would sleep in for like 12 hours on saturday especially doing my phd my hrv would be dog shit i'm like oh this hrv is crap i should never sleep huh i should never sleep never sleep yeah and then i started looking at it closer and I'm like, oh, this HRV is crap. I should never sleep. Huh? I should never sleep. Never sleep. Yeah. And then I started looking at it closer and I'm like going,

oh, wait a minute. I find that HRV is more related to the sleep debt than it is acute loss of sleep. And if you think about what's going on from a physiologic stressor, is it more of a stressor to have one or two nights of poor sleep or to be chronically sleep deprived? Yeah. Chronic sleep deprivation is definitely going to be a bigger stressor. Yeah.

And what I found was that I'm looking at my sleep debt rate. Yeah. It's really bad. Oh, yeah. It says I need nine hours of sleep, eight hours and 53 minutes because I got five hours and 20 minutes of sleep. Well, this is exactly what we're talking about.

Five hours and 20 minutes of sleep in a hotel. I'm playing a road game for the last four nights in a row. My HRV is through the roof. It's a weird correlation. Yep. So I'll come back to why it may be potentially higher, too. Yeah. So acute sleep can affect it, but not as much as a chronic sleep debt.

And the other part to watch, too, is that if people have always been in a chronic sleep debt, their HRV may not change a lot because it's just being continually depressed. So if you take those people and you put them on vacation for a week, so when people go on vacation, I tell clients, I'm like, all right, go on vacation. Yeah, try to eat sensibly, whatever, you whatever. But go to bed as early as you can. Sometimes they do it, sometimes they don't. I said, I admit, I'm just sleeping as long as you can. And the ones that do, they're like, oh, my God, bro, I was sleeping like 10, 12 hours a night for like a week.

All their measurements of HRV got better, like probably better than they've ever been. So what that tells me is they were chronically sleep-deprived before. All their numbers were being pushed down. And because they're only comparing to themselves, you can't really see where that is. So when it comes to sleep, does your body adapt to the ability to live in a sleep debt?

It doesn't. And still perform? It doesn't seem to. Now, there's a caveat to that where you can probably buffer some acute sleep loss um and how much of that you can buffer is debatable but in pretty much all the studies where they've put people on severe sleep debt so like five hours a night for a week all their markers definitely go down the interesting part is that people will report that, oh, bro, I do fine, right? I sleep six hours a night. I'm fine. One, if you remove stimulants from them, not so good.

Two, you talk to the researchers who run these tests and what's called, they have them do like a motor task and they put them in a dark room they have to do this repeated boring motor task is like half of them just fall asleep within like five ten minutes because their perception as you get more and more sleep deprived your perception gets worse and worse at detecting how sleep deprived you are so if anyone's had this experience where you're like no i'm good you're gonna do a long boring drive for like an hour home you get like, no, I'm good, you're going to do a long, boring drive for like an hour home. You get like 30 minutes into the drive, you're like, oh, my God. Oh, this is dangerous. This is really bad.

I think I need to pull over. But leaving, you're like, oh, I'm fine. I'm going to make it. This is going to be great. So sleep definitely has a factor. Out of all the athletes I've worked with, anyone who has never taken a long period of time to replace sleep should probably do that. I've seen other athletes get away with what I'd consider very stupid training, crazy nutrition stuff.

I haven't seen anyone get away being chronically sleep deprived and not do better once they got more sleep. The amount of people walking around with what's called a DEC2 SNP in their genetic code, it's like less than like 0.1%. Those people appear to get five, six hours a night and are doing okay. Yeah. But that's a very small fraction of the population. My buddy John has that. Really? Very legitimately has that.

I wish I had it. He only sleeps a couple hours a night, three hours. I've known this guy for 10 or 12 years. A couple hours a night, I've never seen've known this guy for 10 or 12 years. A couple hours a night, I've never seen him look tired ever. Yeah, it's crazy. Like, when you ask researchers, they're like, hey, man, what the hell is going on with that? And they're like, we have no idea.

And he's just like, I don't know why people need so much sleep. I don't get it. He really doesn't understand. What does he do? How do you fill the time? Oh, I'd find a way. Yeah. He does plenty. Yeah. Plays a lot of video games.

Works a lot. He gets a lot done. Yeah, you only have to sleep three hours a night. When we think about writing a training program or strength work, maximal work, kind of the intensity side of things, how does HRV play into what

would be writing a very good strength program? If I'm hanging out in the 140s and that's pretty consistent for me, I should be able to train at a higher intensity, more maximal load work. But is that real? Or am I just in the 140s just because that's where I hang out? Yeah, so baseline HRV, there's a lot of variability on it, meaning variability from one person to the next person.

Yeah. It's probably similar to VO2 max has a very high genetic component to it. That's from the heritage study. There's a couple other trials that support that, meaning that some people are just born with genetics that their VO2 max is just a lot higher independent of them training. I think HRV, there's pretty big variation in that also. Things that people can do, lower resting heart rate will definitely help it.

So Doug's question, if you look at chronic aerobic training, will increase your baseline of HRV. So back to programming, if I have, so a guy I worked with recently who's trying to qualify for the regionals for CrossFit. Came in, he's got, you know, very fit dudes, you know, deadlifting close to 500 pounds. But his resting heart rate was like the mid-50s. Like he was hitting 60s once in a while. So by general population standards, that's good.

Comparison to the people he wants to compete against, he's very, very hot. And his HRV was actually quite low. And I said, okay, so performance-wise, where do you think you're lacking? He's like, yeah, any Metcon over like 10 to 15 minutes, especially if I have to do it again later that day. He's like, I just get destroyed. So his aerobic base is lower than what it needs to be so we did a whole block of many months of kind of long slow distance type training he still did some strength

work but we're trying to get a lower resting heart rate trying to increase his heart rate variability to give him a little bit more capacity to then play with and then allow him to under a competition situation be able to recover faster to go in and do it again and again yeah and i think that's a component that many times is overlooked because they'll look and go well all his max lifts are good i mean yeah you could be a little bit stronger but you could say that about everybody yeah um but the ability to repeat that high level of performance i think hrv is a good rough indicator for that in addition to resting heart rate you can do a 2k on a rower concept 2 has some very good equations it'll tell you roughly where your vo2 max is you can do a 12 minute cooper run test so go run 12 minutes as far as you can get

and then look at that distance and that'll translate into what your vo2 max is also so from the initial assessment that's a lot of the stuff that i'll use looking at heart rate variability if i get into specifics uh then i'll look at how well does their baseline recover so i had a guy who was a natural pro bodybuilder and he just kept getting injured had all these weird things going on and his training style was much more kind of powerlifting like but some guys who do that sport they get away with it and it works just fine uh he was just getting beat up all the time yeah so i said okay let's take three weeks let's just run and get a good hrv baseline let's just kind of know where you're at and then i'm gonna have you go to the gym and do uh three rep max of trap bar deadlift bench press and squat so i purposely

kind of just beat the crap out of him on that day and then looked at his hrv the next two days so then don't train for two days his hrv was good and then boom just tanked he didn't recover until well after two days from just that event i said okay you recovered you're back to baseline now let's go to the gym and let's just do a lot of volume let's do compound lifts we'll even take the same lifts i think i had him do and just do 8 to 12 rep range he did like 30 000 pounds of volume in one session hrV was like almost the same for the next two days. So to him, that wasn't that much of an insult to his body. So we changed all of his training.

So Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he would go in and work up to a heavy, you know, five rep max, and then he would do all just accessory volume work after that. Tuesday, Thursday was more just what I call kind of standard dude bra training. One day was arms, one day was shoulders. Yeah. And he was pushing around, you know, 30,000 to 40,000 pounds of volume five to six days a week. And we could run that for almost six to eight weeks, and his HRV would be almost neutral. Wow.

Now, that amount of volume with most people I've worked with otherwise just completely buries him. But the second he starts going down into lower rep ranges would just completely tank him. Yeah. So I like doing the kind of strength versus hypertrophy stuff. And to see how long it takes your nervous system to recover gives you an idea for programming. Yeah. So if he was a competitive power lifter, okay, now we've got to be probably really specific. Because if it's going to take him 48 hours to recover, maybe we've got to run an aerobic block to try to bump up

his ability to recover. Maybe we're just going to have him work up to 90-plus percent and limit how many exposures they're going to have. There's different ways you can play around with it. But knowing that information is good, instead of just trying to pound the square peg in the round hole and be like oh you know you just got to do more squat bench and deadlift yeah yeah i get it that's if you're doing powerlifting that's what you're tested on

but if you have a hard time recovering from that you're gonna just be beat up a lot of times and not make as much progress if you're able to find like a baseline for somebody and then kind of just look at their HRV and the numbers that come back, can you write some sort of like undulating periodization type model just based off HRV? I have, yeah. And then I will look at it and see how it matches up with their goals and what progress they make yeah um so a very simple template that i use a lot is monday wednesday friday some type of lifting you know maybe more hypertrophy focus maybe more strength focus depending on what your goal is tuesday thursday saturday initially i'll start out with just some long slow endurance type stuff that

may be just a 20 minuteminute capacity on the rower. So you get on the rower, sit up for 20 minutes, see how far you can go in 20 minutes. Yeah. Right? It's intense. It kind of sucks, but it's not like doing a 500-meter on the rower. Right? It's definitely more on the aerobic end of the spectrum. Yeah.

And that allows their HRV to recover a little bit, builds up their aerobic base a little bit over time. If it's done the next day, it's not going to have any type of interference effect with the main thing that they're training for. People generally recover a little bit faster. So if I'm going to start someone on a rough template, that's usually the one that I'll go to and just kind of expand it from there. With online clients, I have a whole week of testing.

I just pound the living crap out of them on. I do everything from three lifts, three to five rep max, to some looking at movement quality, to, you know, a ton of stuff on the rower, wind gates, 36, or 30 seconds, 60 second, 180, 2K, 20 meter, I'm sorry, 20 minute. So just kind of spread a lot of work out over the course of the week. The nice part is I can then perfectly map where they're at. Are you really good on the anaerobic side and lacking aerobic? Are you really good on aerobic but lacking power?

Do you suck at the lactate area? Take that and then look at, okay, what are your goals? Like what are you actually trying to achieve? If you're doing CrossFit stuff, yeah, you're probably going to need a lot of very high lactate, you know, tolerance work at some point. We may not necessarily start with that because in my experience, that'll just beat people up really fast. Yeah.

But knowing we have to get there, I can then take a different modality like the rower and get a pretty good idea of where they're at. Take a Metcon that they do as kind of more of a standard one and see if they improve on that over time. Do you know much about DC potential? Yeah, Mega Wave. Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about over time. Do you know much about DC potential? Yeah, MegaWave. Yeah, tell me about that. I don't know much about it.

So MegaWave is a system that is trying to only do non-invasive measures to get a prediction of what's going on with recovery. And they'll do three measures generally. The very fancy unit will do more. They'll look at CNS by looking at something called a DC potential. So they stick this little electrode on your head and on the base of your thumb and they run a current between the two and that'll look at and give them an idea of your CNS, right? Central nervous system. I have the mobile one. I've had it since it came out.

There's only two published things on the cns that i can find on that for dc potential uh one of them was a phd dissertation uh chris morris i think i could be wrong on that um there's some earlier data that it's based on in my experience it appears to be pretty accurate just anecdotally um because i've done stuff then to see okay if i do a lot of heavy 1rm stuff and just beat down my nervous system does my you know cns potential drop appears to they use hrv they use a bunch of different metrics they won't tell me exactly which ones they use but it's probably non-linear linear frequency a bunch of different ones and then they look at the height of the R wave,

and that gives them some idea of more bioenergetics. And again, I've used it. I think it's useful. In terms of supporting data, there's not a ton of it that I've seen, which I would like there to be more. Yeah, I don't really use it a whole lot right now, because what I found is once i had a pretty good baseline i know what stuff's going to be taxing to my cns and what stuff isn't because those same patterns would show up again so to learn that initially i think it was um useful the other metrics my hrv for whatever reason on their mobile device would rarely change

i don't know why that is. I never got a good answer. Other people, it appears to match up pretty good. Have you had a multiple number of devices measuring HRV simultaneously? Like you're wearing your WHOOP and you got your Oura Ring or whatever else it is and your Fitbit and whatever else measures HRV, and are they all kind of the same? Yeah, what's that variance?

Are they all over the map? They're all different. They're all over the map. Really? Yeah. Oh, that bothers me so much. Which one's the best? They're all different. In my opinion, you have to then look at what is.

So I just do this to all companies. Okay, show me your published research. How do we know this thing is valid? And iFleet does have published research showing that theirs is valid. Whose? iFleet. Okay. Which is an app.

Aura has good data on their HRV, which is published in the journal Sleep. Other companies, not as much. I would love to see some published data on the Whoop. So if they're listening, please send it to me because I would love to see it. The downside about having a wrist-worn device for HRV is it's much harder to get it to be accurate because you're looking at this impulse of light going through to hit the blood flow. And by each one of those pulses, you can determine HRV then. The catch with HRV is you have to be accurate within about two to seven milliseconds of where that R-wave peak shows up as you're looking at these fine scale differences from one to the next. Now I've heard that there's some companies in Silicon Valley that have with

technology have gotten over that and are able to do wrist wornworn HRV, again, I would like to see that validated. The other one is the iFleet one will run off of a polar or just an electrical heart rate strap. Then you have to look at to see what method of the algorithm do they actually use. Right now, time domain-based analysis, if they report in milliseconds, probably the most accurate. Frequency-based stuff, I'm not entirely sold that that's super accurate. I think we have a paper called Everything Hertz, H-E-R-T-Z,

from James Heathers on that. The Aura one is pretty accurate because of the location. It's on the vessel in the finger. You get a lot less noise, so they can map the entire pulse wave. They sample 250 times a second. They can get all the intricacies that they need off of that. And then the hard part then, you look at, okay, well, what position should I take it in?

Omega Wave is always done laying down. And if you have a really high, or I'm sorry, really low resting heart rate, you get what's called parasympathetic saturation. You get this super high amount of parasympathetic tone at rest because that's keeping your heart rate down. If I press on that brake really hard, the car is going to slow down really fast. And what can happen is you will get an accurate HRV from that, but all your other

stressors in terms of sleep and training and nutrition, they won't show up in that measurement. So I tell people, it's like if you draw something in the sand on a beach and a huge wave comes by, it just washes it away. It was still there, but you can't see it because there's too much of something else going on. So then usually you have to look at positional changes, like seated or standing. So if I have an endurance athlete, if their resting heart rate is 44 and under,

I'll have them do their HRV standing in the morning. Most people, if you do it seated, that's enough just to get that little bit of a bump in sympathetic tone because your heart is not working as much. It's working more now against gravity, but when you sit up, that known stressor of just that orthostatic position is normal, right? Because it's the same position all the time. So over time, that doesn't really matter. But it'll bump your HRV down a little bit, and it'll bump your resting heart rate up a little bit.

And that shows more accuracy in terms of looking at background stressors, which is more why people are trying to use it. They want to know, okay, am I really that stressed today or am i not yeah um because i had one one client i'm looking at her measures and all of a sudden like her hrv goes up by like 10 points and stays up for like the whole week this is like five weeks into her training and she's been training with me for about like three months i'm like scratching my head going so man what do you what are you doing like Like did you change nutrition? Did you get a new job?

She's like, no, no. We go through everything. Nothing's changed. And I'm like, okay. So walk me through. How do you do this measurement in the morning? She's like, oh, well, I switched to laying down now. I said, well, why did you switch to laying down?

Well, the numbers were a lot better. I was winning. Yeah. I'm like, well, your numbers are better, but we can't compare laying down to seated because you can't compare the same positions. Yeah. You just finished, like, a 30-day rowing HRV experiment on yourself. Yeah, I've been doing that for a while.

Well, you had it, like, drawn up on, like, a massive chalkboard. It looked like there was something. Oh, yeah, we did it with ketones. Ketone esters. Yeah, yeah, yeah yeah can you walk me through whatever what what were you doing yeah i followed a little bit of on facebook but yeah so for the kerrig institute we have a human performance program and we ought to divide it into four modules so they do most of the work online it's a master's level education i did with myself

dr kenneth j dr freddy's garcia dr Kerrig had some input on it. And so for each module has a specific goal. So one was on strength and conditioning, one was on cardiovascular, I did the one on nutrition, and they just finished up the one on neurology. So for the nutrition one, you'll come in on each module and you'll do three days of live training. So Kenneth Jay did the cardiovascular one, walked us all through just tons and tons of rowing. So I was interested is if we change nutrition does that acutely change exercise performance? So we had one day where we took all the members through people in the class and they just did it

fasted. So walk in, do a 2k, what's your time? These are people who have been rowing for a while so it's not like this is a brand-new experience to them. The next day we said, okay, we're going to give you a ketone solution. So we used the one from HVMN, which is a ketone ester. So ketone ester tastes like airplane fuel, but you can get very high levels of ketones in about 20 minutes. You can get up to 1.5 to 3 millimolars of ketones within 20 minutes. The downside is that one little container is about $33, so it's very expensive.

And then we had them do just a day on carbohydrates. And what was interesting is I wanted to see is there any difference between the days. So we looked at heart rate, we looked rpe we looked at performance and what we found was yeah it's it was much more mixed than what I wanted it to be to be honest like some people did pretty good on the ketone day did a little bit better on the carb day and did worse on fasted some people were pretty much even all the way across the board in general the ketone group reported RPE was a little bit less, but if we look at some of their power indicators, they were down a little bit. Now that may or may not result in a difference in their time. If you go anecdotally and you just talk to them and like, what did you

feel? On the ketone ester, like they didn't feel like it was as ester like they didn't feel like it was as hard but they didn't feel like they could speed up as much at the end they felt like it was easy to hold just the same pace but when they tried to just really give it all the last 30 seconds yeah they didn't feel it as much carbohydrates they reported that felt a little bit harder, but the indication showed higher power at the beginning and at the end a little bit more. Again, these are all, you know, we haven't run stats or anything on it. It's just looking at the data, kind of, you know, what do you see? So it was interesting because if you go to the literature and go,

okay, if we give someone a ketone, we can have this other fuel that may be cognitively beneficial for the brain, may change some of how we actually perceive fatigue. But the downside is it can change an enzyme called PDH, pyruvate dehydrogenase, which is that gatekeeper to glycolysis. So how well can you run that carbohydrate machinery of the body? And we do know from chronic ketogenic diets that speed and power will drop maybe 5%, maybe 10% off of the top. That's just because you're losing that kind of high-end glycolytic portion of it.

Now, we don't really know if you give someone an ester who wasn't chronically doing a ketogenic diet, does that have that same effect? Not really sure on that. What we've looked at says it might still impair it a little bit. But, yeah, it was, like, super interesting to try to figure out because the study that was published on the ketone ester, one of them was by Cox et al. a couple years ago, they gave people high amounts of carbohydrates and the ketone ester,

and a pretty elite-level athlete showed, I think, a 2% to 4% increase in performance, which is pretty and a pretty elite-level athlete showed, I think, a 2% to 4% increase in performance, which is pretty high for an elite-level athlete. But, yeah, it'll be interesting, especially as they come down in price, become more available. We didn't test the category of having both of them together. We just didn't have enough time to do that.

We're kind of getting kicked out of here at the fit eight booth brandon caves is wrapping up we've got we've got uh yeah they're tearing our booth down still falling down all over but dude one thing i just want to know what are you learning these days like what where's your brain going we've gone over the hrv the cbd like what's what's really piquing your interest on performance nutrition yeah so the two areas I'm really looking at now, one of them I have been looking at for a while is physiologic flexibility. So we talked about metabolic flexibility, how well you use carbs, how well you use fats. If we look at what are the regulators of homeostatic principles in the body,

so example is temperature. We know that the body wants to operate at a very known temperature. We also know we can handle pretty good extremes of temperature so if we have you do sauna and we have you do some cold does that we have so much to enhance your health right the other one is ph right we know that blood ph doesn't change that much why because there's a ton of systems that are put in place because if it changes a little bit it screws with all those enzymes and you're in a world of systems that are put in place. Because if it changes a little bit, it screws with all those enzymes, and you're in a world of hurt.

But can we play around with those mechanisms? Can I do something acutely to make your blood more basic? Maybe baking soda, intramuscular beta-alanine, things of that nature. Could I have you do a lot of lactate work? Lactate produce work, high lactate, high hydrogen ions, that burning sensation. So that's enough to challenge that pH again. So I've been thinking a lot about what are all those regulators? What are systems you can do to try to challenge that?

And at the end of the day, does that make you a more resilient and robust human just from a health standpoint and possibly performance? Yeah. And then the other thing I've looked a lot into is just kind of hands-on work related to trauma. So what happens to people if they have a big injury, right? We know all the musculoskeletal things that happen, but what about your nervous system? Like it appears to get rewired very fast. Yeah. So I'm doing another class on that with Tom Myers in July for a couple days in Maine.

Is there a lot of stuff in the TBI kind of world that is interesting to you? Yeah. So I work out of Jeremy Shamo's office. He's a functional neurologist in the Twin Cities. I just do online exercise programming. And he'll have a lot of people come for like a week intensive from all over the US and even all over the world so he'll do a bunch of different things with them and then once they leave I might work with them online doing exercise programming looking at daily heart rate variability making sure

they're doing their exercises in terms of exercise after a TBI intervention there's just not a lot of data yeah i mean you would think that there would be we know a lot of mechanisms aerobic training can help bdnf right so the brain fertilizer can have all these positives but we also know exercise is a pretty potent stimulus and a stressor you have to make sure to start very low especially someone who suffered an injury who's trying to recover can we kind of grade that a little bit i think about the early research with cardiovascular stuff right people would have a cardiovascular event no one did cardiac rehab for any of the patients they just said ah we fixed to go home you're fine and then

they realize oh my god if we start training these people they their outcomes are like way better yeah i think we're just kind of in the very early stages of that trying to determine you know because every tbi is a little bit different too tbi's popped up because like in the nfl thing or the the nfl like controversy and long-term brain injuries and then mma guys i mean good lord that's frightening stuff and then i've heard you know supplementing testosterone to kind of build back that coordination strength. Yeah, a lot of them go hypogonadal, right? You get knocked in the head, your testosterone just drops.

And it's interesting that there isn't that much research being done or not many people looking at it. No, and I think part of that is because every TBI is a little bit different, right? Because we think TBI, we go, oh, you just got whacked in the head. Well, depending on where you get hit, how hard you get hit, what part of the brain actually suffers the damage. So they'll go in by looking at vestibular movements, eye movements, all these specific movements that they know what part of the brain kind of controls that.

And they're like, oh, this part of the brain. This is the thing that probably got injured because we're seeing this drop off in this functional performance. Can we have you do something else that can train that area of the brain to increase that neuroplasticity to try to get you back to that baseline function again?

Love it. We just mentioned saunas and you mentioned BDNF. Yeah. Isn't BDNF one of the things that is released with long-term or consistent sauna usage? Yes. Yeah, there's some pretty good data showing that saunas can help with that. Saunas can also reduce potential atrophy, heat shock proteins. So my thought of how these things all kind of combine together is exactly where you're going,

is if we know that, say, post say post tbi if someone is stable enough we know exercise probably going to be beneficial we know doing some specific drills with them probably going to be beneficial now can we look at other physiologic systems that we know have to function and maybe kind of slightly push them in that direction maybe they go in a sauna for five minutes at a very low temperature, right? Look at their symptoms, see how they feel. Is that a system that sort of is overlapping with the other system we're trying to get to? And I think a lot of physiology has been developed kind of in silos, right? We think of all these separate things, and especially just the way academics are done.

I've always been fascinated by the systems approach of how do all these things overlap? Yeah. And what is the thing we can look at as a way of discerning where to start? So if you go back and go, if your body is wired to survive, it's going to do everything possible in order to survive. All right, cool. Well, maybe that gives us some information on where to start. Right, you have to regulate temperature or you're dead. Have to regulate pH or you're dead.

Right, so can we start intervening with some of those other things and get a lot of this overlap at a very high level? Right, so you look at the book, like Spark, they did aerobic training with kids and saw that their performance in school got a lot better. Yeah. And at the time, now we're going to go, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

But back then, they're like, what? Classic study was where they gave them two math periods, did a standardized math score. The other one, they gave them math and then an hour of just recess. The hour of recess did better than twice the amount of math skills that they did. Why? Because their brain functions better, everything else works better. Yeah. Right? But that is a harder sell. It's just like training, right?

Oh, you did kettlebell swings, your deadlift went up. That's kind of weird, right? There's a positive transfer and there's also the set principle. So specific adaptation to impose demand. We know that deadlifting will probably make your deadlift go up. But other things can make your deadlift go up too. So it's trying to figure out what other systems can we interact with

to maybe get at the thing that we want. Especially when you can't interact directly with that thing. If you have a TBI, there's some things you can't do because your stress level just gets way too high and you become symptomatic. So you're stuck looking for a little detour pass back to it.

We could do this for a long time. Yeah, this is fun. We'll get booted out of here. Hunt the sheriff's running around. Across the game's athlete. Unbelievable. Look at that guy. You believe they let him in.

Where can people find you? Get on your mailing list. Read everything you're putting out. Yeah, so the best way is just the website. The website is just MikeTNelson.com. If they go to the very top of there, that would be a way they can opt in. Most of the content I have now is through the newsletter.

Yeah. So getting on the newsletter is definitely going to be the best way to do that. You can just go at the top of the website, MikeTNelson.com, and hop on. Killer. Doug Larson. Right on. Find me on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson. Oh, my God.

Oh, no. Jim Wietersdorf is in the house. I'm so glad we got this on. Do you want to hop on the mic real quick? Killer Doug Larson right on fire on Instagram at Douglas E. Larson I'm so glad we got this on you want to hop on the mic real quick Yeah, get into the one-ton challenge calm squat clean jerks Hey, come hang out. Hi. What up? It's me. What up? I can't believe it. I know I said I wasn't coming, but I couldn't not. Right? It looked like it was a good one. It was fantastic.

We sat right here and just talked all weekend. Was it productive? It wasn't as colorful without you. That was the only answer I wanted. Right. Doug, it's great to see you. Good to see you. Where are you going?

I'm going to go to my friend's house and make some fish tacos. Oh, it's beautiful. That's it. Do you want to go to the after party with me? What's that mean? It means, I think. Is it here or in the city? It's definitely here.

St. Cloud's got a huge party scene. The bar's open until like 930. I was like, I don't think he's been here before. Are you guys literally closing out the interview? Yep. Oh, my gosh. Well, you have to get back on then. We're all done.

He already gave credits. Doug Larson already went. That's right. Already went. Where can people find you? Hey, guys, at Jen Widerstrom. If you don't know how to spell it, then don't worry about it. I'll see you at the games.

Widerstrong.com. That's a good one. Get on the car cycling challenge. Oh, yeah. Just doing all the plugs for you. You owe me money now. No problem. High fives. Okay, bye. So good seeing you. Get into the one ton challenge.com

squat. Deadlift, bench press, snatch clean jerk. Getting you to 2,000 pounds, 1,200. We're shutting down the Granite Games right now. Everyone's closing all the booze and we're still here talking. We'll see you guys next week. That's a wrap, friends. I'm telling you, Dr. Mike T. Nelson, so smart.

One-Ton Challenge launch happening right now. Look, I'll just say it. You might put 100 pounds on your back squat. We had that happen. It is real. In eight weeks, you could put 100 pounds on your back squat. More than likely, though, you're going to put about 40 pounds. That's about the average.

It's actually about the low end of the average. But OneTonChallenge.com forward slash join. Get registered for the One Ton Challenge 12-month strength program. Start with the squat. Move into the snatch. Clean jerk bench. Dead. All of them.

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