Dynamic Dialogue with Danny Matranga - 288: How to *ACTUALLY* Recover in 2023 (Sleep and Recovery Summit)

Episode Date: May 16, 2023

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Hey, folks, welcome into a special episode of the Dynamic Dialogue podcast. I'm your host, Danny Matranga. And in this episode, you are going to hear me discuss recovery modalities that are popular right now on social media that are trending from sauna to cold water immersion to red light therapy to CBD, percussion guns, a little bit of everything in a talk I gave for the Sleep and Recovery Summit in 2023. You will definitely enjoy this if you want to increase your workout recovery and hear me give a more formal talk. There is a video. You can see the actual presentation as well as 50 other presentations from some of my peers and contemporaries at the Sleep and Recovery Summit. I'll go ahead and link that in the show notes of this episode. Sit back and enjoy the

discussion. This episode of the podcast is brought to you in proud part thanks to our partners, Seed. Seed makes the best symbiotic on the market. A symbiotic is a prebiotic and a probiotic. It's not just a supplement or a pill loaded with random bacterial strains that may or may not be clinically proven to work in humans. And it's not just fiber. Seed is a symbiotic capsule that contains a unique pomegranate husk prebiotic fiber that feeds the clinically proven to work in human microorganisms inside the capsule. It's pretty amazing. Actually, it's this unique emerald green capsule. It's pretty amazing, actually. It's this unique emerald green capsule that looks like a rare gemstone. I love taking my seed every morning

because it just looks so damn cool. But the other thing that's amazing about seed is it's delivered on a basis that allows for all of the microorganisms to be alive, meaning they're active fluorescent units. So when you look at them, you see, oh my gosh, these microorganisms, these probiotics are actually still alive by the time I ingest them. So I can get the most benefit possible from my probiotic supplement. And again, seed uses the most clinically proven to work strains, clinically proven to work in humans. For example, seed has 3.3 billion AFUs of dermatological health-promoting probiotics. That means 3.3 billion microorganisms who have been shown in the research to clinically enhance the health of your dermatological microbiome, your skin, not just your gut. 5.25 billion for

cardiovascular health. 8.05 billion for micronutrient synthesis and nutrient absorption, and of course, 37 billion AFUs from specimens shown to improve digestive health, gut immunity, and gut barrier integrity. Seed is amazing, and in addition to being so evidence-based, it's also vegan, gluten-free, dairy-free, soy-free, nut-free, shellfish-free, sesame-free, glyphosate-free, corn-free, and does not use binders, preservatives, and is compliant with Prop 66. So that is one hell of a product that you can get shipped directly to you. They even have a brand new PDS-08 formula. This is their new pediatric symbiotic formula that is specific for children and teens with no observed side effects of GI distress. It's engineered to survive digestion, even in your kiddo's stomach,

and it contains five grams of prebiotic fiber per serving. So an awesome thing you can work in there for your kids. When you go to seed.com, listeners today are going to save 15% off their subscription by checking out with the code Danny15. This is the only probiotic supplement I would consider taking. And if you're interested in improving the health of your gut, skin, and overall wellbeing, I'd look into seed as well. Hey guys, Danny Matrenga here. Very excited to be presenting at the 2023 Sleep and Recovery Summit. The topic of my presentation today is going to be navigating many of the popular recovery tools and recovery protocols that you'll see on social media, that you'll see marketed in gyms, at sporting goods stores. Many of these products are available even for sale at Best Buy. I'm

thinking of some of the technological recovery products we'll discuss from red light therapy to percussion devices. CBD, which we'll discuss, is available in almost every health food store or just store in general. We'll be talking about sauna, cold water immersion, essentially all of the latest and greatest and quite frankly, most discussed from a pop culture and social media standpoint with regards to kind of how these tools can help with recovery and the culture of fitness recovery. What's really worth your time? What's not worth your time? Many of you are coaches. what's not worth your time. Many of you are coaches, so it will be valuable to, I think, hear me discuss how I use these in my own coaching practice and in my own routine.

Everything we're going to discuss today are things that I have either tried for extended periods of time or I've seen used in my studio. We've got some citations. We're going to be looking at the literature as well as generally just speaking about, well, if these tools do work in the literature, how can we practically use them to enhance recovery as well as what to be on the lookout for as this kind of field of fitness recovery, post-workout recovery, just recovery culture continues to grow. One thing I've noticed is that the idea and importance of self-care, self-care, I should say, has really kind of grown the recovery paradigm outside of sleep and just eating effectively for your goals to include a lot more active and passive modalities that people want to try and navigating that can be difficult. So let's go ahead and get into this. 2023 is probably as a year, the most technologically advanced year for a number of reasons in the recovery space.

One, we just have more equipment from wearables to percussion guns, to pneumatic devices, to many of the different therapies we'll be discussing from infrared to standard sauna. Pretty much everything we're talking about today has never been more accessible. And with technology and artificial intelligence, data integrative capabilities, we're seeing wearables that tell us a lot and we are managing a lot of data. And I think that this can be a rabbit hole that unfortunately many people get lost in. So I have narrowed it down to what I think works really well for enhancing markers of workout recovery, not esoteric ideas of recovery. Well, I believe to be meaningful

markers of workout recovery. Are you less sore? Are you less inflamed? Can you get to your training faster? Can you get back to training more quickly with less pain. And I'll talk about what I think really can help you do that today. So what I think works really well, sauna, cold water immersion, sleep, adequate nourishment, hydration, and certain supplements. I'll talk about three that I like specifically for managing workout to workout soreness. So sauna is my favorite. You'll see here I am in my own sauna. I have a sauna. I've been a sauna user for about a decade and I gave sauna a recovery score of 10 out of 10 with regards to what we're going to get on a minute per minute basis when we compare this to other recovery modalities for readiness for the following session, a reduction of soreness.

And I think we need to include things like tolerability and accessibility in here. And while this is probably a little bit lower on the accessibility side, tolerability and efficacy are just so high. I give this a 10 out of 10 in terms of active modalities that can increase recovery. One of the cool things about sauna usage as well is when you expose the body to very high heats, you have a natural response at the level of the blood vessel to see the smooth muscle within it that lines it, this endothelium expands. So we get this passive expansion of the blood vessel. This actually is a great tool for vascular health, for expanding the ability for blood

redistribution to occur more quickly and at a more rapid rate. So you can get blood to working tissues in an active session better. I think that this is a really cool performance enhancing capability. When we talk about what sauna can do, and I know many of you are interested in performance, not just recovery, but for recovery specifically, that ability to move blood around, to transport nutrients, to take better, essentially expand the vessels and allow for better nutrient partitioning, better nutrient transportation. That's fabulous. We've got here one study that in 2007 illustrated a 32% increase in time to peak exhaustion,

which essentially is just saying you're going to have about 32% more juice. This is likely due to increased blood plasma and red blood cell volume. This is also associated with sauna use. We know sauna increases heat shock proteins, which are proteins in the body that can actually scavenge for oxidative stress and misfolded proteins, which can be very present in damaged skeletal tissue. So knowing that we get better blood flow, we have better plasma volume, better red blood cell count, it would be sensible to assume, in my opinion, that we can better get stuff to the tissue that most needs help recovering. That's two of the three big reasons I really believe sauna decreases soreness. The third is that when you go into the sauna, you experience a low dose bout of what is essentially aerobic activity. You do a very light, reasonable amount of aerobic activity that I think can promote recovery.

We already know zone one and zone two recovery work or aerobic work can actually enhance our recovery from an anaerobic exercise bout. Low intensity cardio does not interfere with our ability to recover. And in fact, it can enhance this. So I think sauna is fabulous because we see a three pronged, essentially a modulatory thing happening in the body. We are changing our body and three unique ways, all of which promote recovery. More blood volume and better blood redistribution, better nutrient transport. Boom, huge boost in heat shock proteins,

which can help with localized tissue repair and induces an acute positive aerobic effect. So the sauna is a really good recovery tool. You can see here that I'm using a traditional sauna. This is a Finnish style sauna. That's going to get to about 180 to 200 degrees. I keep it at 185. Infrared saunas, there is not as much literature on infrared saunas. There's a good amount of literature on infrared saunas. So much that I'd say you can kind of pick and choose which one works for you. The amount of research being done on infrared saunas only increasing. So I think we've got something there as well.

We're going to talk about red light a little bit later in the presentation, which I think you guys will enjoy learning about. I enjoyed learning about it for the presentation. But yeah, so those are the two main types of saunas. A lot of times I'm asked, can I do a steam room? Typically with the humidity being that high, the temperature can't get to exactly where you'd like it to be. So if you'd like to use this recovery modality, the sauna modality, I think your best bet is to go to a sauna, to purchase a sauna, or to find a gym that has a sauna included in its membership and incorporate it a couple times a week. And if you do it after your training sessions, anecdotally, I can tell you it will really help with soreness. It is unbelievable how much this tool helps with muscle soreness from my own experience. And the literature, quite frankly, says the same. So let's talk about the, uh, manosphere popular cousin of sauna,

which is of course, cold water immersion, cold water immersion, or ice baths. You can see me here enjoying an ice bath. This is my, my preferred method to do cold water immersion. Um, this has become very popular in self-improvement culture, in hustle culture, in stoic kind of, let's call it reborn stoic culture, very popular with the manosphere. Celebrities like Andrew Huberman and Joe Rogan have really hyped up cold water immersion for what it can do for mental toughness, for what it can do for cognition. And having used this tool many times and for many years, both as an athlete coming up and growing up and as an adult working to kind of better manage my cognition, mental health, resilience, and of course my training, I have some opinions about cold water

immersion. The evidence is clear that this thing works for reducing inflammation. And I think that's the first thing we need to discuss here. And that is that cold water immersion can be too effective for certain populations. And the one that comes to mind immediately are those who really need to prioritize muscle growth or hypertrophy. We see such a powerful anti-inflammatory effect from this modality specifically that it might not be optimal to do after a hypertrophy workout. And if you need to really be, let's say, on the most granular cutting edge of muscle growth for something like bodybuilding, for example, this might not be a tool that you use to recover from your workouts in any capacity. It just might be something that you toss out. But let's say being as physically

muscular as possible is not your number one thing. You just want to have a nice balance of recovery and you're open to how this tool can help you. I think it's fabulous. I think it can really, really be helpful. We're going to talk about global cold water immersion and localized my experience with both. I think the first thing you got to know when we talk about cold water immersion is we're not talking about cryotherapy, the big, very expensive on a per session basis box where liquid nitrogen is used to lower the temperature to, you know, South oftentimes of several, like several magnitudes below freezing. I've seen like negative a hundred degrees, crazy temperatures, you know, uh, that's cryo. And then a cold shower is not cold water immersion. Cold water immersion is basically dunking up to the neck, 35 to 55 degrees or so water.

I don't think you need to do this in a completely frozen like metal trough. I'm using an ice barrel here. There's a lot of different ways you can do this. It doesn't have to be like freezing cold. You don't have to do it for as long as possible. In fact, I think that short sessions can actually be a lot of people struggle with doing sessions that are, let's say longer than about a minute. I've gone in cold water immersion with at least 10 different people in the last year. And I have yet to meet one who couldn't make it a minute. Only a few can get to two, and that's not an intentional rhyme. But a lot of people on the internet are like, oh, I do this for 10 minutes every day. I don't think you need to do that to get the recovery benefit from this. There's plenty of evidence out there on cold water immersion for

muscle recovery, both anecdotal and the markers we're talking about specifically are like markers of pain and inflammation. And if you look at people who play sports where impact on collision are big, but be it basketball, combat sports, football, you know, basketball is more of a contact sport, you know, UFC and football are collision sports, but there's a lot of body to body contact, a lot of banging, a lot of bruising, you know, a lot of, you know, force being put onto your tissue. And a lot of times you need to recover quickly from something like this so that you can get back to practicing and you're not so much worried about optimizing for muscle growth.

I think it's important to know here that you're probably not going to lose muscle from using these tools, but it's not optimal in a world where you want to gain muscle to use them all the time. So we know cold water immersion can lower perception of pain. This could come from some of the psychological cascades that occur with things like dopamine and adrenaline. We know it can reduce stress, anxiety, increase mobility and physical activity. Okay. We know that too much cold water immersion can also blunt performance and recovery. So if you overshoot here, you need to know that too much of a good thing can be a bad thing. And so I like to keep my cold water immersion pretty short. I like to do a pre-workout for 30 seconds as a boost.

I like to contrast this with hot 15 minutes in the hot one minute in the cold. I like to do it pre-workout for 30 seconds as a boost. I like to contrast this with hot 15 minutes in the hot one minute in the cold. I love this for no more than eight to 10 minutes a week on the days that I do not train. So if I have really bad DOMS, I think cold water immersion can be fabulous. I don't do this when I'm sick anymore. I did this once like an idiot and got when I was like on the brink of getting sick, jumped in here, literally 30 minutes later, it was like, fuck that thing got me. Cause this is a hormetic thing, guys. Both sauna and cold water immersion are forms of stress that are considered to be hormetic, meaning they are actually going to challenge your body and you have to overcome them.

Um, that that's the theory of something that's hormetic. It's a physical stressor, exercise, cold, sauna, all of these things. And if you're like a total basket of stress, this can be a pretty intense stressor. However, I want to share my own experience using this in conjunction with a hypertrophy block, not trying to refute any of the evidence here, simply sharing an anecdote. Over the last three months, I really focused a lot on developing my back. I also did a lot of what I would describe as frequent one to two minute cold water immersion bouts. And in these one to two minute cold water immersion bouts, I developed what I thought was like a

greater ability to train closer to failure, greater ability to do hard things. I really leaned into the, um, you know, mental benefits that people often talk about. And I noticed that my back really grew in that three month period. I actually didn't lose any muscle. I was able to go through a specialization block and see results doing these one to two minute ice baths three to four times a week. So I think that there is definitely a way to fit these in on the short term, get the benefit and the recovery and not lose any gains. Now, I will say I've had a tremendous number of injuries over the years from my athletic career where I used localized cold water immersion, whether it be for ruptured tendons in my ankles playing basketball, whether it be for contusions post-practice after

getting smacked playing more collision-based sports. But let's talk about one of my favorite stories about how well cold water immersion can work for reducing pain and reducing inflammation. water immersion can work for reducing pain and reducing inflammation. And this is actually about a non-contact sport. This is about my golf game and my 2022 trip to Bandon Dunes. So I call this slide toe no, because as you can see here, I have broken and have some pretty intense bruising here on my pinky toe. This I picked up from the plane ride from San Francisco to Bend, Oregon to play at Bandon Dunes golf course. Bandon Dunes is an absolutely gorgeous course. But the thing with Bandon Dunes is you have to walk. There are no carts. And I didn't want to be the only guy on the bachelor party who bailed. So I was going to play 72 holes of golf across three days. And that is a

lot of walking about 12 to 14 miles a day when you're walking banded with a bag. Thankfully, I had a push cart, but no shoes. You'll see in a second, couldn't put shoes on this thing and it hurt so damn bad. So I wondered to myself, how the heck am I going to get through this? How the heck am I going to be able to do all of this walking and all of this golfing when I can barely put any weight on this toe? And I used localized cold water immersion, aka dunking my toe in a bucket of ice before and after each round of golf for four to six minutes. And that got this thing from this the day before not even being able to walk through a full weekend of golf and band and dunes. There you go. You can see here hitting the driver over 300 yards, tons of, there's actually a scissoring

like effect there with the feet. So like barefoot, barefoot, barefoot had to be barefoot. Cause I couldn't get anything on the actual, um, foot itself due to all of the, just the pain from the way the golf shoes were laced. So barefoot works, but my ability to bend the toe and manage the toe and work with the toe was really, really enhanced big time by having the ability to use a tool that is so effective at reducing swelling and inflammation. And ice does this because it constricts the blood vessel. It works almost in a complete opposition to the way sauna works. And that sauna expands that smooth

tissue that lines the vessel, and it creates blood flow that redistributes to the extremities. And cold has a tendency to constrict those vessels and redistribute blood flow to the core. That's why people like to do them back and forth. Now, just to wrap up on cold water immersion, I think it's fabulous for local tissue recovery. If you know the tissue that you've either damaged and that or is inflamed that you need to have an acute anti-inflammatory response, this can be really good. Very powerful for recovery and inflammation reduction. So probably not optimal post-workout.

Phenomenal after long days of hard work and labor or something that you did that you know is going to wreck you and make you sore. Really amazing for alertness and focus. I think that's something that people are really going to enjoy with these tools moving forward. So that I'm giving a 7 out of 10 recovery score. I'd bump it up to an 8.5 if you consider its ability to help you recover your attention and focus. Okay. Next one is sleep. So obviously guys, this is the sleep and performance recovery summit. So a lot of people are going to be talking about sleep and I am not going to be one of them who's talking about it in great detail, but this is far and away, I think, the best thing you can do to enhance your ability to recover from a hard, challenging, debilitating

physical workout. I don't think there's anything that is going to better help you manage training fatigue, training stress, and take your training to the next level like sleep. If you take one thing from this presentation today, let it be that sleep got a quite literal 11 out of 10 rating. 11 out of 10 rating. If you're a regular listener or somebody who gets value out of this podcast, somebody who's learning from me on your health and fitness journey, whether you're a trainer, a high-level athlete, or you're just getting started, other people need this kind of advice. And the best way for you to help me grow the podcast is to take a little bit of time, literally one to two minutes max, to leave a rating and review on the app that you listen to your podcasts on. The majority of you probably

listen on an iPhone and you probably listen on Apple podcasts, but many of you listen on Spotify. Both platforms allow you to leave a quick, easy review. And if you could leave me a five-star review plus a short one to two sentence blurb about what you like, not only will it help more people reach the podcast, it will help me to continue to refine what it is I bring you each and every week. Thanks so much for doing this. It means the world to me. It helps me achieve my dream of helping more people live a healthier life. Enjoy the episode.

And this is not hyperbole. This is just how important I believe sleep really is for recovery. So if you do not have this modality on lock, please proceed back to square one. Start with this. Hey, guess what else is really important for recovery? Eating enough food, guys. Again, I know there are a number of speakers on this event roster that are going to be discussing nutrition in tremendous detail. I will leave that to them. These are just fabulous tools, obvious tools. Wouldn't you say guys getting enough sleep and getting enough of the right food, you would be shocked at how many people do not do that and proceed to the other modalities we're going to be discussing today. So I wanted to kind of weave these in almost as jokes, but also as an opportunity to discuss the importance of looking at things through a hierarchy. And that is that, yes, these cool tools like CBD and red light therapy and cold

water immersion are going to be exciting and potentially maybe helping us recover in certain contexts, but nothing is going to be more valuable than sleep and nutrition, except for maybe hydration, which is also something that most people are surprisingly bad with. And guys, hydrating properly, adequately, and early in your day is integral to your health, wellbeing, ability to perform, and ability to recover. Poor hydration is linked with poor sports performance training and poor sports performance recovery. Isn't that fascinating? If you do not have adequate fluid supply to an organism that is 70% water and it's contractile tissue, which is like 75% water,

it won't perform well. Yet, I cannot tell you how many people I know that train very hard, that train very diligently, that watch their diet, that do a good job getting sleep, take all the right supplements, and somehow do not manage to drink enough water. So that is also something you need to do. General recommendation from me to my coaching clients and in our physical therapy practice, very, very simply put guys, half your body weight in ounces of water every single day is probably going to be just fine. Some of you want to drink a gallon a day, go right ahead. Just make sure that if you're drinking a ton of water, you're doing what you need to do to replace valuable electrolytes. And if you want to add things to your water, like supplements, such as protein, creatine, L-carnitine, magnesium,

essential amino acids, electrolyte supplements, more power to you, folks, more power to you. Supplements are another thing that you can take to help with recovery. There are three that I think can be very, very valuable for helping specifically with recovering from hard workouts where your muscles are going to be tired. The first of which is creatine, which has been shown to increase a number of different markers for performance, whether it be strength, whether it be muscularity, whether it be IGF-1, insulin sensitivity, things that can be helpful for body composition. But creatine works by pulling water into muscle tissue. And that is a really valuable way to help

your muscle tissue recover because creatine can also come into the tissue through the glute floor pathway with all that beautiful blood sugar. And it can just naturally help you recover better, non-hormonal, safer, both genders. We love that. L-carnitine is another one that can help with muscle soreness, something that is typically found in meat. So I would say that if you're a plant-based athlete or you're somebody who eats a more plant-centric diet, maybe you don't eat a lot of red meat, creatine and carnitine are a fabulous supplement. Magnesium is also excellent for sports performance, for muscle contractility, for calmness. A lot of different reasons to use supplemental magnesium, a lot of different types of supplemental magnesium for you to choose from.

supplemental magnesium, a lot of different types of supplemental magnesium for you to choose from. But from a muscle soreness and inflammation standpoint, I think that magnesium is really good. Interesting thing about magnesium in sports performance or recovery, people really love Epsom salt baths. And one of the things that's in Epsom salt is magnesium. So as far as supplements go, I gave them an eight out of 10 score. Remember folks, hydration, we gave a 10 out of 10 score. Eating the right amount of food, we gave a 10 out of 10 score. And sleep, we gave the elusive and impossible 11 out of 10 score. So those are really your big four guys, sleep, eating, hydration, and supplementing like an athlete. That's when you've checked those bases, we can talk about all of the other tools that we've talked about today. Here's some of the

exciting stuff that might work, starting with CBD. So CBD has been around for a while. It's been marketed for pretty much everything under the sun. The legalization and kind of general cultural shift towards cannabis acceptance nationwide has made the kind of diet form CBD, which is like literally, it's non-psychoactive. Well, some of it contains psychoactive stuff, but most of the CBD products you see seen most places are obviously free of THC.

The ones that have THC or contain THC should only be sold in certain locations. But CBD is not going to get you high like THC. There's other cannabinoids like CBD, such as CBG and CBN. And you see CBD pumped a lot by various influencers all across the internet as being fabulous for recovery and helping them with their training. But the truth is, guys, the evidence is pretty limited and scant there. Some of this has to do with the institutions that be and some of the laws in the United States making it difficult to study cannabis in any capacity, even if it's a part of the plant like CBD, for example, that does not have an actual psychoactive component. One thing that we do see

to be fairly true of CBD is that it does seem to have anti-anxiolytic properties. It can help with anxiety and improve sleep, which could absolutely help with performance. So if those are things that are holding you back from performing well, then remember, we talked a lot about this, folks. We talked about the importance of sleep, hydration, supplementation, and nutrition before any of these tools. Well, if your sleep is off because you're anxious and this is a tool that helps you manage that, that's a way that it could indirectly help recovery. But I can't say with any degree of certainty, it's going to be as helpful as some of the other tools we mentioned. And appropriate sleep is widely, I want to share this really

quick guys from a study I pulled. Appropriate sleep is widely accepted as an integral component of the recovery process in athletes. Professional athletes have previously reported suboptimal sleep quantity and quality. Disturbances in sleep can be a consequences of several mechanism, including pregame supplementation. Think about this guy. So you're talking about pro athletes who maybe use caffeine before a game that starts at 7.15 if it's in the NBA, and MLB can start as late as 7.10. NFL can start as late as, gosh, a 5.45 sometimes. So if you're on the East Coast, that's an 8.45 start time, 10.30 start time. Not necessarily. You very rarely see 7.15

East Coast tip-offs in the NBA or baseball, but it can happen. You could be an East Coast team who's having their first game against a West Coast baseball team at 7 a.m., 7 p.m. It'll feel like it's 10. You have caffeine before the game. That's still in your system. Okay. Plus all of the time zone shifting can make sleep really, really hard. And if you look at some of the actual league to league data, you'll find that a lot of the athletes in the actual NBA, MLB and NFL, when polled internally use CBD, use cannabis, use marijuana, the plant recreationally because it contains some of these compounds. People self-report all the time that it could be beneficial. I'm not bashing on it. Let's read this final piece here. Any potential positive effects of CBD on sleep are primarily limited to diseased populations

such as sufferers of Parkinson's, PTSD, and it goes on to talk about randomized clinical control trials showing greater effectiveness in diseased populations. So if you're somebody who has something that's pre-existing, maybe have some anxiety, maybe some sleep trouble, that's where CBD could help and indirectly probably bringing you to a better place there. I don't think the anti-inflammatory properties of the plant itself are powerful enough in the dosages you'd get them in conventional products to reduce inflammation enough for them to directly promote recovery. So I'd say it's more likely an indirect thing, but I do not want to be accused of being an anti-cannabis kind of Puritan bro.

In fact, I am quite familiar with the plant being from Northern California, born and raised. I'm familiar with the plant, how it grows. I've used it myself. I do use it myself recreationally. I do think it can help with recovery. And one thing that I think is worth talking about is that I think that cannabis as a recreational opportunity to change your estate is probably a better opportunity if it's legal and you're open to it than alcohol, which is the most popular drug for quote unquote, changing your state, because that is very much going to harm your recovery in many cases with just two drinks. I know many people will argue that alcohol does not necessarily have a negative effect on body composition, but depending on how it affects your sleep specifically, it can very directly impact your recovery. Okay. So let's talk about red light therapy. This is one that is

newer to me and all of the light therapy falls into photobiomodulation. And so red light saunas or infrared saunas are also using some of this technology. Now, red light therapy is interesting to me for athletes who are looking to recover from acute trauma more than it is from general muscle soreness. So, we're going to use that inflammation proxy as a marker of recovery and see where we can get here. So, in studying red light therapy, I've come to learn that it is commonly used as an opportunity to improve a modality rather that can increase the proliferation of follicles, hair growth, and it can really help with encouraging more youthful skin. There's evidence that shows this is a pretty effective treatment for dermatological health. But what was interesting to me, and I have used red light

therapy to attempt to increase hair growth where I've had stress-induced alopecia. I've had some luck with it. One thing I found with the treatments is it seems like the number, it's just difficult to get it on my head where those spots are without being in awkward positions. But when I just turn it on, when I'm like getting out of the shower, for example, to hit my body with red lights, so I can get some of the skin enhancing effects. I do think it does promote good and better looking skin. Anecdotally, that does appear to show in the research. So I like to see that. What I haven't played with myself too much, but is interesting to me, and this makes sense when you kind of cross-reference, hey, skin and hair,

keratinous, collagenous, and that their protein matrix contains a lot of keratin, a lot of collagen. Well, you know what else contains a lot of collagen? These connective tissues in our body. And there are studies that show red light therapy can improve arthritic condition symptoms. So arthritis, increased collagen production, we kind of can infer that with the skin health thing and improve arthritic symptomology overall. So joint health, arthritis, collagen production. There's also evidence that I found that was interesting showing that there are specifically positive changes observed in the rate at which tendinous issues recovered when using red light therapy. So you see faster recovery from tendon issues. So another kind of soft tissue in the body. So this is not enough evidence for me to write here

to say like, hey, go for it. This should be in every training room in America. But it's interesting to me that if this can improve joint health and help with collagen and keratin and you know, the recovery of these kind of, you know, whether it be a skin incision, whether it be scarring, which we have research for, whether it be recovering hair that's lost or tendons that are potentially damaged or joints that are potentially inflamed. Those aren't necessarily the markers of recovery we're talking about as athletes when we're saying like, God, that workout kicked my ass. I want to recover. But there are things that could come up that might be something you'd like to recover for. And I think that's what these tools or this tool specifically is really good at. I have not

noticed that it was particularly great and improving the rate at which my muscles recovered, but I will say, I think that it is a really interesting tool for a bunch of other things. And if you do have damage to skin or you have damage to soft tissue, maybe play with this, or if you have joint pain, maybe play with this. Okay, folks, SMFR or foam rolling myofascial release, as it's often called. There are a lot of new foam rolling modalities hitting the market from temperature integrated foam rollers to percussion vibration integrated foam rollers. And while I'm not anti-foam roller, percussion, vibration, integrated foam rollers. And while I'm not anti-foam roller, I do think it's important to acknowledge that there are limitations to what self myofascial release, foam rolling, tissue tampering, whatever you want to call it, can do to help you recover.

There are some data sets that show this helps with recovery. I found a study that showed 20 minutes post-workout can really reduce feelings of pain and enhance readiness. But 20 minutes for a passive intervention, based on what we've talked about today, I'd probably rather do sauna. I mean, I guess you could do this in the sauna. Or I'd probably rather even do static stretching. This is a tool that I think can help with mobilization.

I think it can help with tissue prep. We use it in my studio and with clients and patients all the time like this. But I oftentimes see people head for this thing when their workout's over. And I don't think it's a bad idea. In fact, you might even notice as a general theme with this presentation, I'm not bashing on anything. I'm kind of exploring things with you. I don't want to discourage you from trying anything. We'll talk about that in a second. I want to be as open-minded as I can, but I think that foam rolling often gets compared to stretching. I might rather do static stretching or stretching of the tissue that's been trained after a workout if I wanted to get the optimal recovery response compared to say something like foam rolling. Another form of this or very popular thing right now, the last thing we'll be discussing today are massage guns,

tissue tempering devices, percussion therapy guns. These things are cool. They look amazing. They feel really good. Again, I probably like them more pre-training as a tissue prep thing to get some movement and some fluid exchange in these tissues. Do I think that it's powerful enough to really help you meaningfully redistribute fluids after a session? I don't. I think you can use these before to increase mobility and have like that localized analgesic effect. Of course, that could qualify as post-workout. I think you could spend a lot of time with this after a session, take it in the sauna, pair it with something else, and it might enhance that mildly. But I brought this up because

actually, I think a lot of the companies that make these, they make secondary products that are pneumatic pumps or ice pumps or heat pumps. Those I think might be better at actually promoting recovery session to session so that you can perform your best. Simply sitting there with this isn't going to do too much. That's why I gave these two modalities, SMFR and massage guns, a six out of 10. Okay. So let's talk about what doesn't work guys. More training. Talk about what doesn't work, guys. More training. As we wrap this up here, I would love to encourage you all to understand that not training or training too much and not being able to take a break from training is really something

that limits a lot of athletes. Make sure that you're taking time every time that you sit down to construct a new training block, to construct a new program, a new routine that you ask, is there an opportunity for me to recover from this? And if you feel like you're getting sore, not recovering well, a lot of people do this weird thing where they're like, I'm going to throw more training at this. I'm going to do an active recovery day. And that becomes like cardio and arms and abs. And it's just another lift. And it's just another high intensity session. And I think what you can do if you want to move on those days that you're not training hard, you can do zone two cardio. You can do the sauna. You can go outside. You

can do a little cold water immersion. You can play with red light therapy. You can incorporate static stretching, percussion, massage, SMFR. None of those things are going to hurt, but more training does not work. That's why I got a zero out of 10. If you want to train more, train harder when you're training, make the sessions a little longer, but don't add actual sessions on to help with that. Okay. And then the final slide today, folks, the rest is up to you. There's a little bit of an entendre in there where I guess a little bit of a hidden meaning. The rest and the recovery is up to you. Okay. So when it comes to recovery routines and ritual, a lot of this is going to be driven by placebo or nocebo. So if you believe something helps in your recovery routine and we didn't talk about it today, that doesn't mean it

doesn't work. If there's something that we didn't talk about today, some really interesting stuff that could help with recovery, like perhaps tart cherry juice, a lot of unique evidence around tart cherry juice. I know that sounds random, but there's a lot of evidence-based stuff we did not talk about today. So continue exploring, continue being scrutinous. And also guys, if you think something will not work for you,, if you think something will not work for you, or if you think it's going to make your recovery worse, it probably will. That will be the nocebo effect. So if we talked about something that you love, maybe you're a big CBD fan, don't think it's just going to stop working because I said it's not the greatest

thing for recovery. It's only six and a half out of 10. Don't let me dissuade you for doing what's working for you. My job is to give you access to the knowledge and hopefully inspire you to find a few things that are going to work really well for you. One thing I used to do early in my career as a coach and as a fitness coach, nutrition coach is I would bash things that I thought were maybe silly or that maybe I just didn't understand. And now I'll actually try them and look at the literature and see what's going on. And I would just encourage you to don't knock what you haven't tried, but maintain skepticism around what's productized in our industry, especially if you see an absence of scientific

evidence and communication. There's a lot of new modalities and there's a lot of really old modalities. And just because something's new and scientific doesn't mean it's 100% going to work. And just because something's old and battle-tested doesn't mean it's perfect. This is up to you to try. Please, if you're a coach, don't take this stuff to your clients unless you've tried it or experienced it yourself. But yeah, that's it, folks. That's what I have for you today. I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to be here and to present on these topics. You know, I, as sleep, training, performance are all things that benefit our bodies so

much physically. You know, exercise, we know how wonderful it is for a sauna. Same thing. We know how wonderful it is benefit our body so much physically. Exercise, we know how wonderful it is for a sauna, same thing. We know how wonderful it is for our body sleep, the right kind of nutrition, but these things are also really good for our brain health and our mental health. And as fitness enthusiasts and coaches, I know many of you are both or one or the other, we spend so much time focused on our physical wellbeing and a lot of the tools that we talked about today and the recovery tools, um, that you look for can also help you maintain the health of your brain and of your mental, not the same thing. Um, so I want

you guys to take that just as seriously as you take creating opportunity for your body and tissue to repair. Uh, thanks so much. I hope you enjoy the rest of the summit. I'm going to learn from some of these amazing presenters myself, and I'm really grateful to have had the opportunity to connect with you and speak to you here about this stuff. If you have any questions, follow me on Instagram at Danny Matranga. I love to engage with my audience there. You can find me on Twitter as well. You can send me an email at danny at coach dannymatranga.com if you had any questions about anything we talked about today. But enjoy the Sleep and Recovery Summit, folks.

This is good stuff. And I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to have any of your time. So please enjoy the rest of the event. All right, folks, I hope you enjoyed that little special episode that I did right there. This is a snippet, of course, from my 2023 Sleep and Recovery Summit talk. We discussed a variety of different things that could help your training and recovery, and I hope you enjoy it. So if you did, please be sure to go check out the full event, enjoy it. So if you did, please be sure to go check out the full event, check out the recordings,

great CEU opportunities. You can get this full talk and the video that you won't find here over there. I'll link that in the show notes of the episode. I think you'll love it. And if you haven't yet leave the show a five-star rating and review on iTunes or Spotify, it really helps us grow and it helps me connect with more people. Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you on the next one.