Founder's Story - Peak Performance: Dr. Andy Galpin's Quest to Optimize Human Potential | S2: E27

Episode Date: May 7, 2024

Today's episode is brought to you by BiOptimizers, whom I LOVE their MAGNESIUM BREAKTHROUGH product that has helped me sleep better, stay focused, and feel all around healthier. Check out their products at http://bioptimizers.com/danrobbins use promo code FOUNDERS for 10% off any order. Andy Galpin is a tenured full Professor at California State University, Fullerton. He is the Co-Director of the Center for Sport Performance and Founder/Director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory. He is a Human Performance scientist with a PhD in Human Bioenergetics and over 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations. Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes (including All-Star, All-Pro, MVP, Cy Young, Olympic Gold medalists, Major winners, World titlist/ contenders, etc.) across the UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, Boxing, Olympics, and Military/Special Forces, and more. He is also a Co-founder of Vitality Blueprint, Absolute Rest, BioMolecular Athlete, and RAPID Health & Performance.Our Sponsors:* Check out PrizePicks and use my code FOUNDERS for a great deal: www.prizepicks.com* Check out Rosetta Stone and use my code TODAY for a great deal: www.rosettastone.comAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Welcome to Founders Story, the podcast where trailblazing entrepreneurs share their extraordinary journeys, uncover the passion, grit, and vision that drive the world of business. Hey, everyone, welcome back to Founders Story. Human performance is something that I am focusing on in 2024. It's something I need to prioritize because I really haven't been. That's why we wanted to bring in the world expert in human performance health optimization. It's none other than Professor Andy Galpin. But Andy, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to be here, man. I appreciate it. You have a PhD in human bioenergetics and over 100 peer-reviewed publications, and you're really

the leading authority in the field. Before we dive into all of the things that we need to know, what inspired you to get into this? Well, I guess I'll say I don't know any different. I grew up as a country kid, and I played every sport imaginable, And my parents always said, you can do whatever you want. We'll support you however you want, but you're not going to do what we did for a living. So, you know, my mom had a bunch of kids and was just trying to make the house survive. And then my dad was in road construction and then they divorced when I was pretty early. And so they were always just doing whatever they could to make the next month's payments. And so they just wanted me and my siblings to live an easier life than's payments. And so they just wanted me and

my siblings to live an easier life than they did. And so to me, I'm like, okay, I'm going to keep playing sports. And I was fortunate enough to play college football. And while I was there, I was just sort of like, academically, I just want to learn more about sport performance. I didn't want to be a sports coach and it's not what I wanted to do. And I didn't know what it was. Really honestly, back in that time, there was no academic fields for human performance. And so I sort of just kicked around what I could until I figured out how to make a career out of this thing. And I've been fortunate enough to do that. And I feel blessed every day because of it. Wow. Kinesiology was like one of the most interesting courses I ever took in college. It's really inspired me to want to learn more.

So let's dive into all of the things that we need to know and first i wanted to go through sleep i struggle with sleep maybe i sleep five hours a night if that and i've really felt an impact but how do you feel around the impacts that sleep are having with people and are there any solves that you can give us oh sure to go for a very long time here. I want to actually start before we get into any of this. So actually, and just making sure everyone understands, when I say and when you say the word human performance, I gave you some sports references earlier, but that's not what I'm talking about. And that's important for me to clarify right now because I don't want people walking away from this conversation thinking this only helps if I play sports or for my kids who are playing sports.

That's not the case. When I say that phrase, human performance, I mean exactly that. I want you to perform in however way you want to perform. If you want to use that to be better at shooting a basketball, great. If you want to use that to be a better leader or parent or make better decisions, have more energy and focus throughout the day, it doesn't matter to me. Fundamentally, everything I'm about to tell you in the rest of our conversation is under the umbrella that I assume you all want to look physically a certain way. That means different things for different people. You want to feel a certain way,

different things for different people. And you want to perform in a certain way, different for different people. So really want to make sure everyone understood that's what I mean when I say perform. So getting to your question of sleep, I think you would have a hard time. In fact, I mean when I say perform. So getting to your question of sleep, I think you would have a hard time. In fact, I do this all the time. If you go to really any scientific

conference in any field and you ask them, you know, what is the most important thing for overall health? Sleep is almost always the top answer. And if you asked everyone in the room to put their hands up and say, hey, how many of you think is sleep is important for your short and long-term health? Every hand will go up. And so it is probably the most universally widely acknowledged short and long-term performance and health activity we can participate in. But yet most people do almost nothing about it. You said yourself, you're super into kinesiology. I'm sure you work out. You probably pay attention to your food and then you don't do anything with your sleep.

And that is actually true at the highest level of performance. That's one of the reasons why our company Absolute Rest, which is our very advanced sleep technology and coaching service, has done so well. And we have such a long waiting list behind it is because no one is doing anything about this field. And if people have done something, it's usually one of a couple of areas. They've either gone in and gotten maybe a clinical sleep study done in a hospital, and that's really cumbersome. It's not going to represent how you actually sleep very well. And a lot of people honestly have not gotten much help from those things. Or they've bought maybe a wearable, and that's great. You're taking steps. There's pros. I don't want to sound like I'm dismissing either one of those. There's pros to most of them. But frankly, most people haven't done much with those information. And so we wanted to really come in and say, hey, wait a minute. We know this is

impactful. Somewhere between 20 to 40% of athletes actually have clinically diagnosed sleep disorders. And about 80% of them go undiagnosed. Same thing is actually true in general population, by the way. Somewhere around 80, it used to be about 90%, but it's down to about 80% of them go undiagnosed. Same thing is actually true in general population, by the way. Somewhere around 80, it used to be about 90%, but it's down to about 80% of actual clinical sleep disorders go undiagnosed. That's not even counting for people who have subclinical, but clearly dysfunctional sleep. And so we have a tremendous amount of sleep issues going on, it impacts and affects basically every part of your physiology, from your mental health to your long-term cardiovascular or cancer risk to your digestion, your energy, your ability to grow muscle mass, your immune system. You can't pick a part of your body that is not massively impacted by sleep. We know it's dysfunctional in many people, if not suboptimal or even to a level of clinical significance, and that no one's doing anything about it.

And the reason this is really happening is because we need to understand, and this is where we're getting to some of the solutions. Why we've been so effective is because we can give very high precision solutions to people. And my favorite example of this is, you know, we had actually a client, one of our first, who had something like 30 to 40 awakening events per night. So it's waking up a bunch a night. And we were able to reduce that by over 90% in the very first night. So one night in, and those, you know, he's down to waking up a couple of times per night. And eventually he's basically zero now for years. And all we had to do with him was have him buy like a $14, it looks like a reverse fanny pack, basically. So imagine a fanny pack that sits in the front of

just below your belly button, and you kind of flip that backwards. And the reason we did that with him is because he was having almost all of his sleep disruptions when he was laying on his back. And so that little reverse fanny pack made him stop laying on his back. He could either lay on his side or stomach or other side. And the very first night he was like what in the heck woke up the next morning was like what just happened and almost this has been years many many years and he's just and now he's at the point he doesn't have to wear the fanny pack anymore it's just gone because he now has just learned to sleep in certain positions so it's a really good example of us being able to come in and say we're not just going to look and see if you have insomnia or something else.

We're going to analyze exactly how you're sleeping in the most high fidelity, high accuracy in the entire world. And then from there, we know how you're sleeping. We're going to actually find out why you're sleeping that way. And because in his case, we knew why he was sleeping that way. We were able to very quickly, very cheaply solve the problem. Yeah, I could tell you I have obstructive sleep apnea and there's days where I wouldn't sleep. I'd say for about six months, I never wore my CPAP machine. My memory was like wiped out, my short-term memory. I couldn't remember anything. It was very scary. So I can appreciate all the things you're doing here.

I'd love to dive into grip strength and leg strength. You talk about how these can tell us around the long-term health outcomes of people just from these two things alone. Can you dive into that? Sure. Your physical health, you want to think about it in two different ways. Number one, how long you're going to live in terms of years. Number two, your functionality within that. Some people call that your wellness span or your health span, right? So it's how well you're going to live. Well, if you want to start

crossing off the things that are preventable, we start thinking about cardiovascular disease. You start thinking about late onset dementia and Parkinson's. And more and more, we understand these things. We're starting to realize those things are incredibly preventable. And you heard that right. I can't do much about early onset Alzheimer's. That's tough, right? But dementia is massively preventable. The data are a little bit, you know, depends on what you look at, but some of them suggest over 80% of it is preventable through lifestyle interventions. And so with that understanding, we start going backwards and saying, oh, okay, well then what do I have to do? And if you start to understand, well, what are the things that are actually going to give me the highest likelihood or predict how long I'm going to live outside of, oh my gosh, you got unpreventable cancer or you got in a car accident. well you can take blood markers and look at blood pressure and look at those what we call clinical risk factors these more traditional ones that stuff's super important absolutely check with

your doctor and let your medical team give you help on your cholesterol levels and things like that however if you compare that to measures of functionality the ability to predict who's going to live longer is dwarfed compared to those clinical risk factors. By functionality, I specifically mean a handful of things. You mentioned grip strength. That's a fantastic one. Leg strength is another one. Your VO2 max, so the maximum ability to bring in and utilize oxygen. In terms of prediction power of survival capacity, say something like hypertension or high blood pressure, it might increase your hazard ratio. So your risk of dying earlier by 15 or 20 or 30%. Having a really low VO2 max, 300%, 400%, 500%, depending on the exact paper and study that you're referencing here. The numbers are a little bit different, but they almost always

show the same point. We actually published a paper just last year, and we found that your leg strength predicted 5% of cognitive function as you age. So your ability to think and remember things and your IQ, if you want to put it that way, 5% of it was determined by your leg strength. Another study that I was not involved in found that actually low grip strength, and this actually paper was published using the UK, what's called the Biobank. So it's about a half a million people in here. So it's not a study of six people or 10 people or something like that. You're talking an extremely large database, 500,000 people.

And what they found was about 30% of dementia was directly attributed to low grip strength. And then one more idea here, just to highlight and show you how well-rounded this research is. There is one paper that's been published recently, and it's only been one paper. So don't get too excited here. We need to see if it's replicated or not. That's just how research works, right? But I thought it was really interesting because what they actually looked at for the first time is the difference in strength between your strong, your dominant hand and your weak hand. So we call this asymmetry, right? Now, some people like mechanics who use one hand a lot and the other one's not, you're going to have some asymmetry

and that's okay. Where I grew up, like you're going to shovel one direction for the most part, you're going to have an asymmetry. But at the population level, what they found was those that had a greater than 10% difference between their dominant hand and their non-dominant hand also had strong correlations to losses of brain health. It's not mental health. It's not depression. This is physical brain health. Okay. And they saw this actually in a handful of biological and molecular markers as well. And what they're cuing into there is people will sometimes think, oh my gosh, well,

sure, grip strength is only important because people who are healthier also tend to be stronger. We will return to our show shortly, but first let's talk about today's sponsor, Magnesium Breakthrough by BioOptimizers. Did you know four out of 5 Americans don't get enough magnesium? Crucial for over 300 biochemical reactions in your body. Here are signs of magnesium deficiency. Irritability, anxiety, insomnia, muscle cramps, high blood pressure, and even constipation. I know I suffer from a few of these. But many supplements don't work well because they use low quality magnesium. That's why Magnesium Breakthrough by BioOptimizers is

recommended. Offering seven forms of absorbable magnesium, BioOptimizers stands by their products with a 365-day money-back guarantee. That's insane. So make sure you visit biooptimizers.com, B-I-O-O-P-T-I-M-I-Z-E-R-S.com backslash Dan Robbins. That's biooptimizers.com backslash D-A-N-R-O-B-B-I-N-S for a special offer. And make sure you use the code FOUNDERS, F-O-U-N-D-E-R-S, FOUNDERS, and you get your 10% off. So check out biooptimizers.com to learn more.

And back to the show. So what they're kind of doing is diminishing the importance of it. That's true. We're also seeing that there. This is classic what's called correlation versus causation, right? So there is just a random correlation. People are generally healthier, going to be probably generally stronger. True. However, we have so much information that this relationship is direct and causal, whether we're talking leg strength or grip strength. And this paper I just discussed on asymmetry is a great example of that. And because we know that it's not only the act

of being tested and say in your maximal grip strength, but the training as well. Why? Well, in order for your muscles to fire, to squeeze, to contract, you have to have a signal that comes from your brain and brain stem or spinal cord, your central nervous system. And so when you're asking these, what are called motor units to engage, well, you have a handful of them that are slow twitch, smaller, you know, they're good. They're fatigue resistant. They're good for endurance, but they're not good for strength and power. Well, those get activated at all times. So as I'm moving my hands in the air right now, as I'm talking, I'm using my slow twitch neurons. The only way I turn those fast twitch ones on

is if I do something that requires high force production so by doing some sort of training whether i'm actually lifting weights or i'm just being active in my garden or whatever else i'm doing it doesn't matter if it's exercise or it's lifestyle if you're lifting things up because you have an active job nonetheless if i'm asking my body to require more force production, then I will turn those neurons on. That means they stay alive. If a nerve or a set of neurons are not activated for years, or in this case decades, they will die. And that's why direct relationships do exist between muscle strength and brain health,

because it's all coming from a similar neurological pathway, who if not activated for decades, will eventually die and go away. I guess the term never skip leg day should now be never skip grip strength and leg day. But that's amazing that these are things that are preventable because I think we feel like it's out of control. It's out of our control. And it's great that technology and everything that you've been doing is now allowing us to learn. So I'm curious when it comes to technology. We recently had a guest on, they have an AI powered humanless doctor's office. And I found

that very interesting around how we will be able to access so much more of our health now that technology can do a lot of it versus having to always go to the doctor. But what excites you when it comes to human performance, health, and technology? Oh my gosh. There's a lot of stuff in this area. I appreciate you bringing this up. I'll go back a little bit. I believe it was 2015, the President Obama's administration started a national initiative called the Precision Medicine Initiative. And they branched that out into exercise. They branched it into nutrition.

And the basic point is we no longer or we now realize that it's no longer the best option possible to give everyone in our country the same nutrition recommendations, the same exercise. It doesn't make sense, right? We come from too many varied backgrounds and genetic profiles and things like that. So how do we start moving the needle forward where we give people more precision and more direct information and let them know about their health activities? Well, it's been a decade and there's been a lot of progress. AI is one example of that. What we spend most of our time on, and I actually personally think is by far the most actionable place to start right now, is what's called blood chemistry. So this is actually taking your blood like you would do in a medical office, but not from the perspective of diagnosing your diabetes or your heart disease.

For high performance, this is an entirely different approach to the thing. It's different tests. It's different interpretation. But we use that in every one of our high performers. We work with literally the best athletes in the world right now. We have the highest paid athletes in multiple of the biggest sports in the world, the most elite athletes, the most elite musicians. But we also have coached hundreds of non-athletes, regular parents, moms, young entrepreneurs, retired individuals. With all of them,

we take the same approach in terms of, hey, if we can get a really good understanding of what's happening in your blood, then we can get tremendous insights into exactly what to do with you from an exercise perspective, nutrition, supplementation, if needed, it's not always, lifestyle, recovery, sleep, breath work, meditation, what time you work, what time you exercise, all that stuff can be placed together in plans based on your unique physiology. And while we need a lot more information and data, for sure, there is a ton that is actionable absolutely right now. And that is different than 10 years ago.

It's different than even five years ago. We just completed a project actually in combination with a number of companies that I was actually just down in Houston in Johnson Space Center last week, because we did this with a large group at NASA called the Human Digital Twin Project. So we were able to take a bunch of companies, bring them together, and we were able to take all of our advanced metrics. So we take blood, urine, stool, saliva, sweat, and hair. We run brain scanning. We run physical performance testing.

We look at advanced motion capture to see how you're moving through the world. We do psychological evaluations. And all of these data were able to come together into a single platform. And we were effectively able to make a digital replica of a human. And we did this in men and women, and we were able to make digital copies of your entire, not just physical size, right? So how we looked at every muscle in their entire body through an MRI, not for cancer detection or screening, but we want to see the exact size and space. We want to see through the scar tissue or edema anywhere in your body. We take all those data and put them together and make a digital twin of you. And then we can run simulations to see which protocol of exercise will give you the best results, which combination of nutrition and supplementation,

which micronutrients you need, so on and so forth. So that simulation part needs more work, but the front piece is totally done. These companies are available right now for anybody, and we've used them for years to get tremendous insights into people. So from a technology perspective, I mentioned at the beginning, our Absolute Rest, our sleep company, no one is even remotely close to us in terms of our technology. We can run full FDA approved clinical sleep studies on people from their own bedroom with no wires, nothing else attached. We can do this every single night for your entire life if you'd like. We're running full environmental analysis and scan on you. So we're scanning your room at all time for dander or mold or CO2 or pollen, so on and so forth.

We actually, you mentioned OSA, we have an ability to screen your face with just your camera on your phone and identify if you have any anatomical structures that are going to lead to OSA in your nose or tongue or face or anything like that. So we can go as far into this technology field as you possibly want. And I wanted to sort of finish my answer here by saying, sometimes when I get into this stuff, you can see I get really excited. And it almost freaks some people out and almost makes them think, oh, that's so complicated. I can never do that. But hopefully, the sentiment you're getting here is the fact that it's literally the opposite. This is why I'm so excited because, candidly, we've been doing this stuff for a very long time with our NFL quarterbacks and world champions and stuff. But why I'm so excited is because this stuff is now available to most consumers, like my companies for sure, but all the other companies, doesn't matter if you pick mine or not. It's all at the level where instead

of these things being six figures a year, it's a hundred bucks. It's $600. It's stuff that is reasonably affordable for a lot of people. And if you think about that from your sleep perspective, hey, a lot of people can't afford $500. But if you think about how much money you're losing by not sleeping all year, sometimes 500 is not even an option. So I get it. That's how I grew up. It's not even on the table. But if it is even close, these things are now super, super affordable for a lot of people. No, that's great news. And that's amazing to hear that as technology advances, it's going to get more accessible, easier. I didn't, I didn't even know the things that you were just saying. I didn't even know it was possible. I need to do it myself. Like when you I think when you realize

that you're not sleeping or you're realized you you've been impacted by these things for so long. That's when you're like, wow, I wish I knew 10 years ago, five years ago, if it was accessible, I should have done that. I'm curious about fat loss. Because I don't know if it's true or not. But I feel like as I get older, it's harder and harder for me to lose fat. I feel like I'm maybe gaining muscle or maintaining muscle, but I have the hardest time losing fat, like no matter what I do. I don't know if it's my diet or what's happening or if it's age. How do you feel about fat loss? Well, that can be true, right? It is much easier, certainly when you're a teenager. Basal metabolic rate, energy output, non-exercise-based energy expenditure is really, really high.

Depending on the age, when people get somewhere in the neighborhood of like 18 to 25, depending on your physiology, that does dramatically slow down. So if you're contrasting it to when you were a kid or in your young 20s, then most definitely. But even past, we'll call it 30, mid 30s on, it will increase a little bit, but it shouldn't go that much. The same thing honestly can be said for muscle mass and your VO2 max or your endurance. These things do decline with age, but a large, and there's excellent research on this to support what I'm about to say, but a large percentage of there's excellent research on this to support what I'm about to say, but a large percentage of that decline is preventable if you train appropriately based on your physiology. It's the same thing for your nutrition. What happens a lot of times is people are comparing it to themselves when they were just in this really anabolic

muscle growth, burn fat stage, and that's probably not a fair, you know, comparison. That said, what does tend to happen around kind of like 35 to 50 years old for, you know, some people a little bit different for men than women, but plus or minus the same thing is they start to have this slow creep that they're just not recognizing. So here's what I mean. You just start kind of being a little bit less active. You feel like you're the same, but you're actually not. You're getting, your sleep is getting a little bit worse. There's actually excellent evidence on sleep itself. So even there's been great studies that have been done where they put people at the exact same

caloric intake, right? So they're controlling their calories. Some groups sleep eight and a half hours, the other groups sleep five and a half hours. And that group that sleeps less, even when calories are totally equated, they will lose significantly more muscle mass and gain significantly more fat mass. So it's things like that. You maybe slept better five years ago and you don't realize your sleep has declined by 10%. Maybe it feels the same, but it has gone down 10 well if that means a 10 increase in in fat accumulation there you go it's those small increases over six months six years and all of a sudden it's like man how did i gain these 12 pounds like what happened well it wasn't this big dramatic um a great example this is a lot of people will blame testosterone especially men right and that that's a real thing

for sure. But it's also, well, wait a minute here. Are you sure it's just testosterone? If it is going down, why? Like something is causing it. Physiology doesn't do things randomly. There's always a reason for it. The issue is you just haven't gone to the reason yet. You're just typically trying to cover up symptoms rather than going after core resolution.

So it could be a slow trickle of a micronutrient imbalance. Maybe you're just a little bit low in chromium or zinc has gone down. And it's not a level where you're just like waking up the next day. We call these hidden stressors, by the way, because they're putting a stress on your system and it's almost hidden. Sleep is a visible one. Like, you know, typically if you're not sleeping well, but things like micro nutrient profiles in your nutrition, they maybe were fine when you were super resilient as a 25 year old, your body had backup systems and was able to counteract it. Your anabolic state is so high.

It can kind of overload the system. Well, now when that starts to sort of settle in, those small details start to matter. And all of a sudden that little bit of reduced chromium or that little bit of extra heavy metal storage that you got going on or whatever else is happening starts to accumulate in small amounts. This is now amplified over many, many years or a couple of decades. And that small amount leads to big outcomes. I was just blaming testosterone a few days ago. So as you're talking, I'm starting to think back to all the things I used to do and my change in habits and everything. And I'm like, you know

what? I need to get these tests done. So if I want to get these. Yeah, I'm not a medical doctor, so I've never prescribed or recommended a single medication and certainly not a hormone to anybody. I'm not against it at all. That's just not what I do. I'm not an MD. So we try to resolve those issues as much as we can, if there is a cause. And if not what I do. I'm not an MD. So we try to resolve those issues as much as we can if there is a cause. And if not, hey, great, go see your MD. No, I really need to get these tests done. So if I want to get this done, if other people need to get it done, how can they do so? Sure. If you'd like to check out our sleep company, that's called Absolute Rest. It's

just absoluterest.com. Our advanced, full, super comprehensive. If you want to go absolutely nuts and you want everything taken care of for you, your exercise and nutrition and lifestyle and sleep and all the testing, that is to be candid with you. It's not at a very affordable price because it is comprehensive, so I don't want to mislead listeners here. But that can be seen at rapidhealthreport.com. And then finally, if you just want to pare it down, you're like, just give me the blood work. I can only afford this much or I'm only interested in that part.

And that can be seen at vitalityblueprint.com. If I lost you on all that, just go to my website, andygalpin.com. Well, Dr. Andy Galpin, I mean, what you're doing is incredible. Here at Founder Story, we are all about impact. And I hope one day you impact billions of people. And I think you will.

I think it seems like what you're doing is so far advanced. And it's really different and unique, but it makes total sense. It's not like I need a degree or a science or PhD to understand the things that you're saying, which I think is great for me because I feel like sometimes people say things about health and it gets us scared and we don't want to go look into it. But now I'm actually very excited to get blood work. I need to get sleep. I need so many things that you said, and I want to get it done tomorrow because I want to be at optimal health. Do you think at one point, knowing all of this stuff, technology in the future, could we live to 150, 200 plus years old?

200, I don't know about. I think 150, 120 is very reasonable in a short frame. We have some issues to resolve, but a lot of these preventable issues are actually not that complicated scientifically, especially with where we're at technology-wise. So I don't think those things are outside the question. I actually probably feel like if you're alive now, you're going to have to reset what you planned for your financial planning for retirement, For sure. Amazing. Dr. Andy Galvin, thank you so much again

for joining us today on Founders Story. And thank you for all that you do. I appreciate it. Thank you so much for your time and great questions. Thank you for tuning in to Founders Story. Keep exploring, keep dreaming, and join us next time for more inspiring entrepreneurial journeys.