Mark Bell's Power Project - STOP Brain DEGENERATION with These TOOLS - Louisa Nicola || MBPP Ep. 868

Episode Date: January 12, 2023

In this Podcast Episode, Louisa Nicola, Mark Bell, Nsima Inyang, and Andrew Zaragoza talk about how amazing exercise is for your brain. Follow Louisa on IG: https://www.instagram.com/louisanicola_ Subscribe to Louisa's Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-neuro-experience-with-louisa-nicola/id1274468842 New Power Project Website: https://powerproject.live Join The Power Project Discord: https://discord.gg/yYzthQX5qN Subscribe to the new Power Project Clips Channel: https://youtube.com/channel/UC5Df31rlDXm0EJAcKsq1SUw Special perks for our listeners below! ➢https://hostagetape.com/powerproject Free shipping and free bedside tin! ➢https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!! ➢Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1 Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM ➢https://www.vivobarefoot.com/us/powerproject to save 15% off Vivo Barefoot shoes! ➢https://markbellslingshot.com/ Code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off site wide including Within You supplements! ➢https://mindbullet.com/ Code POWERPROJECT for 20% off! ➢https://bubsnaturals.com Use code POWERPROJECT for 20% of your next order! ➢https://vuoriclothing.com/powerproject to automatically save 20% off your first order at Vuori! ➢https://www.eightsleep.com/powerproject to automatically save $150 off the Pod Pro at 8 Sleep! ➢https://marekhealth.com Use code POWERPROJECT10 for 10% off ALL LABS at Marek Health! Also check out the Power Project Panel: https://marekhealth.com/powerproject Use code POWERPROJECT for $101 off! ➢Piedmontese Beef: https://www.piedmontese.com/ Use Code POWER at checkout for 25% off your order plus FREE 2-Day Shipping on orders of $150 Follow Mark Bell's Power Project Podcast ➢ https://www.PowerProject.live ➢ https://lnk.to/PowerProjectPodcast ➢ Insta: https://www.instagram.com/markbellspowerproject ➢ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/markbellspowerproject FOLLOW Mark Bell ➢ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marksmellybell ➢https://www.tiktok.com/@marksmellybell ➢ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MarkBellSuperTraining ➢ Twitter: https://twitter.com/marksmellybell Follow Nsima Inyang ➢ https://www.breakthebar.com/learn-more ➢YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/NsimaInyang ➢Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nsimainyang/?hl=en ➢TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@nsimayinyang?lang=en  Follow Andrew Zaragoza on all platforms ➢ https://direct.me/iamandrewz #PowerProject #Podcast #MarkBell #FitnessPodcast #markbellspowerproject

She wants to be professional. I'm a professional. Okay, hopefully we can. Whenever you guys are ready. Yeah, it ain't going to happen. Whenever you're ready, Mark. So what part of the brain is involved with organization? Because we got some problems here.

That's the actual frontal part of the brain. I probably took a couple of hits to the frontal then. I was going to say, do we not have that? What happened to us? It's the newest member of the brain family, actually. Like a new discovery? Well, not a new discovery, but it's the largest. And not just largest as in structurally. It holds the most amount of neurons. A neuron is a brain cell. So it sits right here behind your forehead. That's the area that is involved in organization thinking processing

speed what maybe would be something that would jumble that area up like uh well just as a natural aging process i'm not very organized i'm not i'm not trying just to make fun of andrew i'm making fun of myself too like i well yeah my room is messy my closet my sock drawer like i'll i've got a lot of shit i need to like clean up you got four bottles of mind bullet yeah yeah i'm not oh yeah i don't know what's going on no but just due to the natural brain aging process one of the first things to go is focus which lives in the the frontal lobe so many things you know start to go uneasy actually when we turn 30, which is scary.

It's all downhill after the age of 30. Our brain actually begins to atrophy at the age of 30. So we get a decline in all of these executive functions such as organization, which we'll talk to Andrew about. Yeah, he's in a lot of trouble. Do we know who those studies have been on when you say like past the age of 30? Like are we talking about normal folk? Are we talking about people that really take care of themselves? No, we're talking about everybody.

Everybody. Yeah. So that's just due to the – yeah. But guess what? You can actually slow the progression of these brain aging processes through different interventions, which I'm sure we're going to speak about. Curious about the atrophy that you mentioned after 30 years, people mentioned that with muscle all the time. Have you,

you, have you heard the book like exercised? It's by Daniel E Lieberman. Yes. Yeah. So in that book, he talked about how like there was a professor who was like 80 something years old, but he was still extremely mentally sharp.

And he aided that to the fact that he just kept teaching over the years. And one thing we noticed is like, if people just like keep working out or keep lifting, they keep doing something. Probably those things, atrophy of muscle, atrophy of the brain, I'm assuming it's just going to slow down drastically if not happen at all. Yeah. Actually, Dr. Lieberman was on my podcast. Yes. And this was in the earlier days. But it's so interesting you said that because there was a neurosurgeon in California. I don't know which hospital he was working at, but he was still performing surgery at the age of 94. And he's like, you know what, guys, I'm going to retire.

And he was fantastic. I'm going to retire because I want to travel. So his cognitive function was amazing. He took care of his brain himself and he went and traveled and he ended up passing away at the age of 104. Wow. So yeah, so there is something to be said of that. What happens is when somebody retires, maybe at the age of 65, let's just say 65, a lot of their executive functions start to go down because they stop

engaging in different activities they stop you know communicating with people they stop becoming social and your brain wants variety and it loves variety and it actually you know there is it's the same as your muscles it's it's if you if you don't use it you lose it that's the same with your muscles if you don't exercise your biceps or your quads, you're just going to atrophy. It's the same as your brain. And every area of the brain has a different function and different responsibility. So if you stop blood flow to that area, if you just stop using it, then it has no use. It's like, well, I don't have any use here anymore. What are some ways to exercise the brain? Oh, there's just so many ways. I don't know. What's like a top five?

Okay. So, well, for example, exercise. When we talk about exercise, we've got aerobic physical activity. We've got resistance training. And then we've got something that I call neuroathletics, which is this neurocognitive involvement. Neuroathletics. I like that. Yeah. It's basically how can we get an athletic brain. And it involves doing things such as reaction training, memory drills, strobe goggles where we block out different areas of the eye and get you performing tasks. But it turns out that training your brain is just like training your body. So you get so many benefits from doing cardiovascular fitness work, aerobic work and resistance training. So that's how you want to train. If you want to train your brain, have a healthy performing brain, you need to stick to three domains. It's sleep, it's exercise and it's nutrition. They're the three pillars of a high performing brain. What about for those of us that kind of like,

maybe want to like, I guess, get more out of like doing a singular thing. I know it's not too great to mix too many things together because then maybe you lose focus and maybe you kind of make yourself more, maybe you put yourself at more risk for like an attention deficit. But let's say you go for a run or you go on a walk. What are some ways to maybe enhance the brain during these walks? Would getting rid of headphones or listening to certain kinds of music, would that enhance or would that be more of a negative? Like what are we trying to do maybe when we go on these walks, like look around a little bit more? Yeah, you can definitely look around a little bit more. But one thing that I like to do, and this comes into consideration

when we're talking about Alzheimer's disease patients and mild cognitive impairment patients. And this is one area that I focus on, word fluency. And there's three letters that we generally train when we're training these – I call them athletes. I call everybody an athlete. But when we're training these patients, and it's sticking to the letters F, S, and A. So if you're on your walk and you want something that is cognitive demanding, you know, that requires your brain, just start thinking of words that begin with the letter F, S, and A. And you'd be surprised how hard that is. Every one of those was foul for me. Fuck, shit, and ass.

I was like, god damn, I messed that up. You should see some of my athletes, actual young NBA athletes, when I'm getting them to do drills, and they're like, Louisa, I've got this. I'm like, okay, if a red light comes up, that is F. If a green light comes up, that's S.

And if a blue light comes up, that's A. And they're like, Louisa, this is like easy. And as soon as they have to go, they can't think of anything. And you can't repeat the word. So you have to think of a new word every time you see it. So why those letters, FSA, why? It's just the letters that were formulated when we do studies on Alzheimer's disease patients. So those letters, and I come up with other ones too. I'm like letter K, and that seems to be a bit more easier for some reason. Interesting. Now, let me ask you this too.

When it does come to, let's say you're walking and you're thinking of different letters, what else can people do as far as maybe their eyesight's concerned? The reason why I'm asking this is because you've talked a lot about that with us before. But when I was younger, I had eye problems when I was like five, six. I wore glasses and I started playing sports. And then what happened was each year that I went back to my eye doctor, he's like, oh, your eyes are getting better.

Your eyes are getting better. And by 10 years old, I didn't need them anymore. And the same guy was like, it's probably because you're out on a field, you're getting sun, you were seeing a ball come back and forth and your eyes continue to improve. So I'm wondering, you know, a lot of kids, a lot of people, let's say they don't play sports. I haven't played athletics. They stay indoors a lot. What are some simple things one can do to, I guess,

increase the health or the, their, their, yeah, the health of their eyes? Yeah, no, that's a good question because we at NeuroAthletics, when we get an athlete in, we'll do a brain scan. And on this brain scan, we assess different areas of dysfunction in the brain, but we also do a full visual acuity test. So we're testing the speed at which you see a stimulus and how it goes back to the brain. So we know that our eye is connected to the brain via this nerve called the optic nerve. And we actually test that and we can test the speed. And then we formulate a program, whether it's a visual acuity program around how can we get that speed going. And you can start off really basic. And this is for anybody. And this is, I think, what everybody

should be doing. Get a tennis ball or just a little handball and start throwing it to the wall overhand grip stand a meter away from the wall and start throwing it to the wall and you'll see you can challenge yourself and this can be it's free or how much does a tennis ball cost 90 cents yeah you can start implementing these strategies at home and you can get harder and harder. So for example, let's just say you've aced the right hand throw, overhand grip. So you're taking into consideration reaction time, visual acuity, spatial awareness, and hand-eye coordination. So let's just say you do that.

Then you start doing right hand, catch with the left hand, throw with the right hand, catch with the left hand, et cetera. Then what you want to do, maybe stand on one leg. Yeah. While doing the same thing. While doing the same thing. And then if you want to get really crazy, you want to wear an eye patch. I have so many athletes just out there buying these eye patches and they just got an eye

patch on and they're just throwing the ball to the wall and you're strengthening the different pathways of the opposite eye. Yeah. Great way to train without any negative influence. Like you're not trying to lift a heavy weight or anything. Yeah. He's kind of what punching it, right? He's punching it.

That's incredible. Keep watching. This gets crazier. So this is Roy Gold. He was a former student of Ido Portal. Now he does movement stuff in Israel. But I've seen him do a lot of this stuff over the years. See that?

Yeah. Yeah. And he also does things with the feet. So actually, I'm curious. Oh, go ahead. I just want to say that when I started looking at this, okay, started looking at the science behind what grows the brain. And if we're growing the muscles in our body, can we grow the brain?

There was a study done and that was actually printed in the journal Nature. So high stringent journal. They took a group of individuals, healthy individuals, and they subjected them to juggling with two balls. So these people knew how to juggle. And over a six month period, guess what they found from juggling daily for 10 minutes? They grew the gray matter of their brain. Now, is that just because it's a new skill or it's the nature of this skill? Both. Like I said, novelty, variety, it's thinking, it's hand-eye coordination. So you're using these cognitive domains that are not usually practiced. Like I just got back from Australia. I was visiting my parents and I got to tell you, as you get older, my dad's 70, my mom's 67, they just stop doing other things.

This is why gardening is good as you get older. Variety. Now, kind of on the same note, I'm curious about this because, for example, when you become very good at something you tend to maybe think less so what happens is like when it comes to starting running you're thinking of all these little cues and then as it becomes something that you can you don't think when you run because your body knows what to do same thing with jujitsu as you get better you don't need to think about all the moves you do because they're automatic so does some does a skill that you've built over time and you become very good at because you mentioned building the skill of juggling, it's a new skill. It builds gray matter or what does it do?

Yeah, so gray matter. So we can do a bit of a neuroanatomy course and then I can answer your question. Okay, so you've got – here is the human brain. And the brain is – it's not like this. This is a hard brain. It's like three pounds of jello. Nice. So actually a real brain, you can stick your fingers

in there. Not that you probably would want to. But the interesting thing about this is it is the most vascular rich organ in the entire body. So you've got two arteries that shoot out from your heart, the carotid arteries and then the vertebral arteries. And then you've got branching of these arteries that go into your brain and infiltrate the brain. And if you were to – somebody demonstrated this. If you were to pull apart all of the blood vessels in the brain, it actually spans to 400 miles.

That's how much vasculature, so made up of capillaries, blood vessels, veins that are sitting in the brain, which is what I believe. I believe now that brain health is about vascular health. So we've got the gray matter of the brain, which holds and houses these cell bodies. So we've got neurons and they are nerve cells. And then coming off those neurons is an axon. And the axon has a coating around it it's called the myelin sheath and that's what creates the white matter so we've got gray matter and then white matter and the white matter if you look inside it it's the projections they're like highways to different cells to all the different other cells in the in the brain so when i say growing the gray matter we're talking about

structural changes that can occur from exercise and from novelty events. So that's where I wonder if you've been doing a certain exercise for a long time, you've gotten really good at stuff in the gym or running or jujitsu. Do these things still have the same benefit to your brain than when you started them or do you need to try to seek new things? them or do you need to try to seek new things? You need to keep trying to seek new things because what happens, the information travels down that pathway, okay? Down that axon and it says, oh, I've been here before. Yeah. And it keeps doing it and then it becomes like a habit. We know that the, you know, that 10,000 hour rule. So it ends up becoming a habit and you also build confidence and it's just, you're prepared. So in order to stress it, you need to do something else. Just like again, you don't want to keep lifting a 20 kilo barbell.

You want to get heavier and heavier as you adapt. Yeah, I think if you're to hit like a speed bag or something like that, after a while, you don't even have to look at it. And jujitsu, same thing. You don't even have to look at your opponent jujitsu same thing you don't even have to look at your opponent a lot of you guys will look away on i don't know if you're just like if it's a thought process but a lot of you look away right it's kind of i don't i don't know just a flow that you get into maybe yeah i was talking to her about this earlier sometimes it's like feel or close your eyes maybe i can close my eyes and still do the same shit so it's like yeah it becomes automatic so that's why but i'd imagine with

jiu-jitsu though because you are going against different opponents i mean not everyone's going to do the exact same thing you might know that if i'm going to go for something you know how to react to it but i might still be a little bit different than the last guy right everything's always a little different every role is different every run right every run is going to be like a you're going to take different steps in different areas no matter – even if you try to go on the same run. Same run, different shoes, same run, different weather, same run. Like maybe you went a slightly different route. There's always going to be some differences.

What I'm imagining is that I believe the left side of the brain kind of works the right side of the brain and so forth, right? Controls the right side of the brain kind of works the right side of the brain and so forth, right? Controls the right side of the body. Right. Yeah. And it's also my belief that it's our job to exercise that every day. And if you aren't exercising that every day, if you're not getting the body to kind of cross over back and forth, that's what I imagine juggling because it's crossing the midline of your body has a big significance in that. because it's crossing the midline of your body, has a big significance in that.

And, yeah, the contralateral movement of throwing a punch, throwing a ball, doing this movement practice called functional patterns, where you're doing some of these movements where you go from the right to the left. We had David Weck on the podcast who talks about when you walk, you're supposed to go head over foot, and there's a natural internal and external rotation of the upper body and lower body back and forth and back and forth. And you're kind of wringing out the body's fascia every day if you can learn how to take proper steps. However, a lot of people are in pain. It's hard

for them to take proper steps. And I don't think they get to wring out that fascia and they don't get to send those signals up and down the body into the brain. I am aware there's some research showing that when you walk at like specific speeds, it can really help with memory. I think it's like 3.7 miles an hour, but sometimes some of these things are done just because they're done at a specific speed. That's the test result that they got. But I'm imagining that anything that you can do that is movement directed and the more complex it is, probably the better, but it doesn't have to be as complex as you think because it could be as simple as walking. Yeah. And walking, I'm so happy that you brought that up because walking is one of the best things that you can do for your brain in

terms of brain health. And there was actually a study that was done on mild cognitive impairment patients walking 30 minutes a day and they reduced their cognitive impairment by I think it was around 26%. So just walking is great. I love walking. I think it's incredible. You get that forward ambulationulation you get to be outside you're getting the natural sunlight but not just that you're in get you're lifting your heart rate up and what do we know now about heart rate that means that we're getting more blood which goes to the brain more blood means more oxygen your brain needs oxygen to survive that every tissue does but also needs nutrients and needs it through blood flow and this is why exercising is one of the best prescriptions for Alzheimer's disease and also strokes.

You know, strokes, when you think about it, what's a stroke? It's an occlusion of a blood vessel. We can have a stroke in our lung. It's just called a pulmonary embolism. We can have a stroke in our heart. It's just called something different, you know? So we've got a cerebral embolism in our head or we need to be getting this blood flow and we need to be doing, you know, whatever we can to strengthen the chambers. In exercise

physiology, we call it cardiac remodeling. So if you're just getting that great base, which starts off with walking and then lift it back up, you know, maybe start jogging a little bit, get into zone two, you're training the chambers of your heart. And when you train the chambers of your heart, you're getting a, your arteries have muscles, you know, you're training the walls of the artery to be able to pump out more blood and more oxygen with every heartbeat. Dr. Gabrielle Lyon points out that she believes a lot of disease starts in the muscle. Would you agree with that? I mean, she's amazing.

I love Gab, and I don't know if that's entirely true. However, I am now really studying the effects of skeletal muscle and its effects on the brain. So probably. What's up Power Project family? It's time to stop dressing like you're a fucking preschooler and step your game up by checking out Viore clothing. Now I'm not one to talk. I wear a fucking pink hat that has a dog on it. But at the end of the day, at least my shirt and shorts are popping. So head to Viore because they have great stuff for your top and your bottom. Andrew, how can they get it? Yes, you guys got to head over to Viore.com slash Power Project.

That's V-U-O-R-I.com slash Power Project. And you guys will automatically receive 20% off your order. Links to them down in the description as well as the podcast show notes. Let's get back to the podcast. And diabetes, heart disease, Alzheimer's, dementia, they seem to all be pretty interconnected. And there seems to be a pretty strong relation to, I guess, I guess you could say all the organs, but a major connection between the brain and the heart and the heart and the brain. Oh, 100%. And we can take a bit of a look now and go down memory lane and talk about how the

first studies that were done that looked at exercise, like how did we know that exercise was good for the brain? We didn't really know this until around 1999 and that's when the first studies were done. But we did know it. We knew. Like as a species, we knew it. We knew. Yeah, we knew.

Because like, I mean, past cultures have talked about movement forever, right? Movement. But did we know that that movement was correlated with the brain? I think so. I think people have, I think, religions and I think people have talked about kind of the purity of keeping the body strong. And I mean, I think, you know, if you go back to like your grandma, your great grandma, like there's probably somebody preaching and teaching the benefits of movement. And maybe we didn't call them exercise because maybe we just moved

differently previously and maybe didn't have to worry about it as much. But I don't think just because we didn't have studies that it means that we maybe didn't know the information at all. But there could have been a lack of proof as you're pointing out. Lack of proof. And we probably would have correlated exercise back then to, it makes me feel better. I'm thinking better. We didn't even, we didn't probably look at MRI scans, but around 1999, a group of researchers took rodents and it was an RCT. So they control them. They got an experimental group and a control group. And what they did with the experimental group was they got these mice doing aerobic physical activity, daily aerobic wheel training. Because that's really all what these, they couldn't

really lift weights, these little mice back then. They can't bench press. That's what Max Lugavere told us. Mice can't bench. Just make it a weighted wheel. I'm telling you. We got to make it a weighted wheel. That's actually really smart. I said this to Max Lugavere. I'm like, why don't they make a weighted wheel? Just make it like a pound and a half.

They have weighted jump ropes. They could be able to do a fucking weighted wheel. You're scientists. Come on now. That's probably tapping into the aerobic system anyway. Or just teach them how to bench press. They could probably do burpees pretty easily could it be that hard?

they could probably do a burpee but what they found was daily aerobic physical activity grew new neurons in the hippocampus of the brain that's amazing I can grow new neurons, that's called neurogenesis here's the caveat

it was in the hippocampus and the hippocampus is the area in the brain. And we can pull this apart and have a look at it, but that's where a lot of our memory consolidation occurs and memory formation. So new neurons can be created in that area, but it actually can't be created anywhere else in the brain. So I don't want to confuse people and people think that I'm growing new neurons. It's very hard to do. So that was 1999. Then they fast forward to 2017. And they also did, what they did was they took another group of mice, subjected them to aerobic physical activity. Then they found that they could starve off Alzheimer's disease by 20 years. And that's mainly because they saw an uprise in growth factors such as BDNF. So the 2000s were all about BDNF and I got really

sick of it because, okay, brain derived neurotropic factor, it's a growth factor for the brain and it helps with the proliferation of these new neurons to grow and it helps with other things. And everyone was talking about, and then there was all these supplement companies saying, we're going to inject BDNF in our coffees now. And it's like, okay, that was great. So that was 2017. And then 2019, there was a systematic review that was done. Okay, so Howard Atala, I think they were a group of researchers in Germany, they pulled together all of the studies that were done on physical activity

or exercise and brain health. And what they found was that resistance training has far more benefits than aerobic physical activity when it comes to the brain. And that was so exciting for me. I was like, oh, thank God. Now we have evidence. RCTs, which is the gold standard in academic research, to show the effects of resistance training on the brain.

It turns out that when we are doing weight training or resistance training, our skeletal muscle releases myokines. Myokines are muscle-based proteins. So they get secreted from the muscle belly and they go into the bloodstream and they have an effect. They can go up across the blood-brain barrier and have an effect on different areas of the brain, especially the frontal lobe, which is involved in executive function. You know how many myokines we have? That has been proved.

611. Oh, wow. Only? That's a big number. 611 little hormones, myokines that are released from your muscle. That's a lot. Okay. We rarely talk, you know, 2000s, we're only talking about one your muscle. That's a lot. Okay. We rarely talk, you know, 2000s, we're only talking about one, which was BDNF.

Yeah. Now we're talking about irisin. We're talking about interleukin-6, myostatin. We're talking about cathepsin B. These things that are only produced when you are doing resistance training. I think we used to believe that the muscles are kind of dumb, right? We used to think the muscles were dumb. I mean, people say the brain is dumb.

It's like plastic. It just molds into whatever you tell it to. But our entire body is an intelligent system. So if we are not getting these myokines anywhere else, take irisin, for example. So irisin, it's one of the newest and sexiest myokines on the market. It was named after the Greek god Iris, who was a messenger to the god. And that's what it does. It's a messenger molecule. So it'll go to different areas of the brain. So it's secreted from the muscle, go to different areas of the brain and be a messenger and say,

taps on the walls and saying, hey, guys, you need to produce more BDNF. Hey, guys, you need to produce more lactate. We need to grow in these areas. So it's beautiful. If you can't get these from other areas, then maybe that's why you're getting cognitive decline. There's so many awesome things to get into with talking to you, but this kind of makes me wonder about some of the stuff we've

been working on here. We've all been obsessed with doing like myofascial release type stuff. And so you can imagine if an area of your body is locked up and it can't produce some of this stuff that you're talking about because we're trying to work the muscles, but the body's in pain and it's almost like that area is siphoned off or kinked or whatever it might be. Maybe the body doesn't really work that way. But it kind of sounds like if an area has pain and you're trying to like work through it as a lot of people do, people like to be on that grind and they like to kind of work through it, that maybe we're not sometimes, we're underslept, and we don't have the nutrition, it kind of makes me think of the maddening that some people feel when they're like, I just can't lose weight. I can't get in better shape. And it seems like the people that are in fitness, it seems like they just get in better shape and they get stronger and they progress. But God damn it, I'm stuck here. And I think a lot of that has to do with, there's so many other factors other than just the food that you eat and

other than just the movement. Although those are kind of the hierarchy things that are at the top. But as we'll get into more with some of the athletes that you've worked with, you might have to figure out ways of clearing all this shit out all the time if you are going to train to try to have a stronger and healthier brain, right? Yeah. So I use this analogy. I was an elite triathlete. That's how I really got into all of this, marrying neurology with high performance because I was an athlete. And so I've been through it. And if you know much about triathlons, and I know you run a lot, we had to become the best in three sports. And so we were training 40 hours a week. A lot of overtraining. we used to see these people and I'd be training for like 10 years, right? We'd see these people come in with the brand new bike into our training squad.

And they hadn't even like, and they thought that because they had this bike, it was like this $30,000 Cervelo. And they thought, oh, they used to describe it to me. They're like, you know, I'm just going to zip through the air. I'm like, but you haven't even built up an aerobic base. And this is what people are doing now. They're looking for the perfect supplement, the perfect exercise, but they're not sleeping well.

They've got no aerobic foundation. They've got no flexibility. And they're starting from the top tier of that pyramid, but they're not starting down here. And that really frustrates me. I always say, Peter Atiyah says this too. He's like, do not even consider taking a supplement until you can bench press or squat your body weight.

I don't think it was bench press. I think it was squat your own body weight. But it's true. Get yourself up and down from a chair a couple of times. Why are you doing that? And there's actually been wonderful studies. You can have hypertrophy. This is in older, sedentary individuals.

Just from doing a wall sit, you can gain muscle from that. Wall sits are rough. Those are hard. It's a tough exercise. Actually, I got my parents to do it. We're starting really fresh with my parents. That's great. I should get my mom doing that.

And all they're doing is just going down and coming back up. And then we'll go a bit deeper. And then once they've got the movement patterns down packed, then we'll move up. deeper and then once they've got the movement patterns down packed, then we'll move up. And I think what you guys are doing is great because you always stress the correct movement and the correct way to do things. And we were talking, you know, offline about how sometimes, you know, there's men and maybe women too, just going in and doing this bench press. And for some reason, they just keep wanting to do the heaviest weights when they shouldn't be doing that. And maybe it's ego, but I think, I think a lot of women as well, I'm a female, so I can talk to this. You go into the gym and I see

them lifting these tiny weights. I'm like, why? And if you talk to them, some of them are scared, but it's because they haven't gotten the foundation. They've never learned how to squat. Just learn how to squat. Learn how to do a dumbbell press. Don't go and just look at something on Instagram and just think that you can mimic it because it's just not going to do you anything. The cool thing about powerlifting is we've seen girls handle like 80-pound dumbbells on like inclined bench press. And I've seen girls do like 100 hundred pound dumbbells or seen girls walk with a 60 pound dumbbells, like in lunges and stuff like that. And so, yeah, don't let it limit you. Obviously you don't want to hurt yourself, put yourself in a compromised position. It's

something you work up to over time. But just cause you maybe think that you're fragile, doesn't mean that you actually are. And you might be able to challenge yourself a little bit bit more and why not just try a little bit less reps next time you go to do some lunges try a set of five for each leg instead of a set of 20 for each leg you might be able to handle a little bit more weight yeah well it turns out with these myokines they don't just get released when you just pick up a weight you actually have to be working at 70 to 75 percent of your one repetition max to get these benefits why 70 to 75 and not higher uh that's just the what the studies that were done and that's pretty you know that's that's okay that's you're getting the you're getting quite a load with 70 percent oh absolutely

stop here for just a second because with triathlon have you found that that is like that 75 to 80% range is probably the sweet spot and pocket of 90 to 95% of your training? Maybe you realize that now, but didn't know that when you were training. I didn't know. And you know what the most annoying thing is? My coach wouldn't let me do any strength training. I'm not tiny. So by the way, when I was a triathlete, this was like, that was 40 pounds ago. Let's be really honest. I was tiny. Probably wasn't even healthy. But to be great at triathlon, in my opinion, you have to be a wonderful runner.

And that's what let me down. I was first out of the water. So I was a great swimmer, always have been. I was great on the bike. I was powerful. But as soon as I got onto the leg part, onto the running, I just came to the back of the pack. So I ended up finishing 13th. But my coach used to always say, you need to be skinnier.

You need to be – and we know now that that's not necessarily true. So he wouldn't let me go near the weights in fear that I would get too bulky. It's like now I'm like, oh, my God, I'm not going anywhere near a weight. So I never lifted weights. I just got all my strength from – we did bands and I was just swimming so much. I actually, I was, I was big. You had a friend. You know, the funny thing is yesterday we were talking with this guy, Obi Vincent, and

he, he transitioned from doing bodybuilding to CrossFit. And one thing he's noticed with CrossFitters is like the really good CrossFitters, the highest level they still have some sort of resistance training that helps them specifically build muscle and they end up doing well but the ones at the lower levels they only do the big olympic lifts and the running and they end up being fragile we notice that with running too a lot of runners don't end up doing much resistance training and they end up being frail end up with a lot of injuries same thing with jujitsu a lot of athletes don't do much resistance training and they end up being frail, end up with a lot of injuries. Same thing with jujitsu. A lot of athletes don't do much resistance training and they end up being

frail with many injuries, but at the highest level, they do. So it's interesting how the idea of bodybuilding and not bodybuilding and the crazy aspect of it, but resistance training and adding muscle can be beneficial for all forms of sport, not just to get bulky, but to be resilient. Yeah. But you know how hard it is for a woman to gain muscle. Like, I can't just go out now and lift some weights in your amazing gym, by the way, and just expect that I'm going to have a pound of muscle. It takes a lot of work from a nutritional perspective, but also from a sleep perspective. So back to

what you were saying, you can't, if you've got a great, uh, if you've got a great nutrition plan, let's just say you're eating fantastically for your body type and for who you are, but you're not exercising or sleeping well, it doesn't, it's who cares. Or if you're not exercising or if you are exercising but you're not sleeping well no one cares stop posting it's going to be hard to really make progress too if you're just sleep deprived in general what is some of the literature kind of show on that like in terms of i guess let's just take like academics something that no one cares about but uh what is the literature kind of show when people are like sleep deprived

and they're trying to take tests and they're trying to get through school and stuff like that? Oh, look, sleep deprivation is now known as a carcinogen. Oh, really? It's really, really, really bad. And I always say that even being awake, when you think about the brain, it's like being awake is like low-level brain damage because your brain repairs during sleep. So does your body. When it comes to sleep deprivation, there was a study that we need to talk about.

And I talk about it so often in every podcast. They took a group of healthy men, healthy individuals. They had no mild cognitive impairment, nothing. And they deprived them of sleep. And this sleep deprivation in this study was six hours. You think about that. Like I work with a lot of portfolio managers on Wall Street and they're like, Louise, I'm only sleeping four hours. So they're severely deprived of sleep. So six hours of sleep deprivation for one week, that's all. And guess what they found? They found a 3% change in their genome.

What does that mean? We'll get a bit further into it. We have around 25,000 genes or 20,000 genes in the human genome. Now, when these subjects were sleep deprived, they saw a dysregulation in 711 genes. So 711 out of 20,000 genes is around 3% change. And what they found was half of the genes that were upregulated and other half were downregulated. The ones that were downregulated were the immunity genes. So the genes responsible for immune function, they were downregulated. So they were switched off essentially. The ones that were upregulated were the genes responsible for growth of tumor cells. Damn.

So chronically depriving yourself of sleep is not just interfering with cognitive functions. We know that road accidents are happening due to sleep deprivation, due to reaction time, and not even seeing a car when it's coming. So that's one thing. That's how I got into my ever first car accident. I was like sleep deprived coming back from work. I closed my eyes for a few seconds. The next thing I hit a car. I was like 19 at the time. Yeah. Yeah. But see, that's what's happening. And inhibition control, like we can't control that and your brain goes into damage control mode yeah and remember your brain is not here to survive evolutionarily past the age of 40 so we you know it said you know it used to say okay we're done with reproduction

40 years old we're done we don't need to survive after that so just the fact that we are wanting to we don't need to survive after that. So just the fact that we are wanting to survive past 40 and not only that thrive, it takes a lot of fuel, brain fuel, I call it. And if you're sleep depriving yourself, you're just, you're just behind the mark in every, every way. So you're not just getting behind on these cognitive functions. You're also disrupting your genome. That's, that's scary. Yeah. You know know the cool thing that we were talking about before uh before we got on is like you work with a lot of pro athletes and you set up hotel rooms for them and you set up an eight sleep in there along with other things and it's kind of sick because we've been using that for a while now but it's awesome that you got also pro athletes won't

name the names but you got some pro athletes and a lot of people that are utilizing that to help their performance. So why specifically did you pick that? And what else do you do to help pro athletes sleep better? What like maybe habits do you have them try to implement into their day? What do you try to do? Well, we already know at that level of elite athleticism that they're not going to be doing anything more to better their tactics in a sport. If you're an NBA player, you know the skills and the tactics of the sport. So you can't really go further there.

They're already as fit as they can be. So they're not really going to go further there. So they're not going to get anything. They're not going to go backwards. Yeah, they might get a different coach here and there. It shows them how to shoot a free throw or a three-pointer, but it's going to be relatively the same. Relatively the same. The only things that are really going to change is how well you treat your brain yeah and which is why i come in and i always say i'm working from the

neck up and sleep how especially during the playoffs that's when most of them are employing my services um the playoffs are just horrific because some of them are going you know on three flights a week different different states. Sometimes they're getting on a 5 p.m. flight. They're getting to their destination at 11. By the time they get home, get into bed, it just wreaks havoc on their performance, in my opinion. So they have to work extra hard. So sleeping well is imperative. So I'll go in and I'll set up their room. I'll make sure they're pitch black room, blackout curtains. Some of them have the boots that we were talking about. Yeah, Normatec boots.

The Normatec boots where they're recovering that way just to bring down their nervous system just to relax them. Getting them to sleep on an eight sleep. Temperature controlled mattress, which I believe pairs biometric metrics. Yeah, it tracks your heart rate. Yeah. And so we'll have them go down in their temperature as throughout the night because in order to fall asleep and stay asleep we know our core body temperature needs to drop to at least two degrees and these guys are big men you know they're big

fellas they're producing a lot of heat just due to their size i used to wake up in puddles literally to wait before like that like even on my cool days i sleep very hot i used to wake up in puddles. Before like that, like even on my cool days, I sleep very hot. I used to wake up like it looked like I pissed the bed, but it was just because I sweat so much. It wasn't great for my girl either, but it's crazy how big of a difference that makes. Yeah. And you know, the great thing about this mattress is it splits in half. So if you do sleep with a hot sleeper, you guys can sleep at different temperatures. But this was just, you know, one of the things that we were doing, Then setting the temperature, the thermostat down to a certain temperature, having an eye mask, earplugs if they need it, and then supplementation. Everybody is

different, but around most of them, I would say general average consensus, we're getting a lot of them to have GABA. GABA is gamma-aminobutyric acid. It's our chief inhibitory neurotransmitter. Gets them to relax, especially during playoffs. They're all wired. I'm wired. I take GABA every night. So wait, you have them supplement GABA? Yeah. Is there a specific supplement, like brand, or it's just called GABA? Yeah. So I am an advisor to Momentus. So all of my athletes now are taking Momentus. I think it's just called gaba yeah so um i i am an advisor to momentous so all of my athletes now are taking momentous i think it's got the the highest purity that i know so far so getting

them to take gaba magnesium l3 and eight which pairs well because they're also taking magnesium through the day but three and eight we know can have the potential to cross the blood-brain barrier and get into the central nervous system so that's great um everything else i really caution against melatonin why can you explain it this is good because it's a hormone yep well i mean i'm not going out there and just taking estrogen you know i'm not just going out and getting enough you know in australia you have to be under the age of 60 you have to be prescribed melatonin. Good for you guys. Yeah. So what happens? Because a lot of- It's interesting though, vitamin D is recommended a lot, right?

And it's a hormone, right? It is. But this is a bit different. I think that it has major correlations in the growth of kids as well. So there's a lot of mothers out there just giving their kids melatonin. It's a naturally secreting hormone that gets secreted in response to darkness. And if you overstimulate the pineal gland to keep producing, it'll not produce it naturally. There's just things that we can do by going out and getting sunlight every single day.

A lot of that stuff is so interesting because we take stuff to like rev ourselves up, you know, and then like to take something to like rev ourselves up you know and then like to take something to like calm back down kind of depending on what it is i guess we kind of view as bad but you know to me like if you're drinking a cup of coffee in the morning and you're taking a pre-workout to get yourself fired up to work out and you need to take some melatonin here and there i don't see really the major harm what What if it's like, I've heard some people recommend like taking it earlier. Do you think that that would be of any? In the day? Yeah. Like not taking it like midday, but like taking it, you know, because I think the fear is that you're

kind of thrown off your whole cycle. But what if you were to take it at like five or 6 PM and you go to bed at like nine or something like that? I don't know. Well, everybody's different. The way that we, you know, metabolize different vitamins is different. But here's the thing. The biggest issue with melatonin is a lot of the labels now say, okay, this is five milligrams, when in actual fact, it's 100 times the amount. So they're lying on the labels, first and foremost. So you may be taking 500 milligrams. You don't know what you're taking. That's the first thing. that's why supplement control is something that we need to be speaking about you know making sure that your supplements are going through third-party testing yeah two or three times being like double certified or

triple certified if you can um but you know taking it you know at 5 p.m depending on what dosage you have and everything it might just start to get you sleepy but i the only time i will take it is when i'm traveling to and from australia just to get back on the time zone so i've been i got to australia five i got to america five days ago from australia landed in la and i supplemented with just 2.5 milligrams as it says on the bottle for three nights and that got me back on track yeah what about thc or wine no absolutely terrible both yes so alcohol what about both together that's what i try and tell my athletes like they're like yo louisa they're like how do you do it they're like i'm just you know i'm doing it to relax i'm like hey stop that's the hardest thing i have getting my athletes to stop the

marijuana alcohol they're like no no i don't i don't do that during game season but they'll have you know marijuana and with alcohol it turns out that it actually blocks the rem sleep and it blocks deep sleep especially like if i have a glass of wine my REM sleep just plummets to the ground. And that's because ethanol, which is the active ingredient in alcohol, is a sedative. What's a sedative? When you go into surgery, they pump you with propofol, which is a sedative and it knocks you out. Obviously that's to a much higher degree. But so if this is a sedative as well, then what is it doing? so it's knocking you out so you may be thinking well i'll have some alcohol and i'll just knock myself out

you're no you're sedating yourself and you're not getting into sleep and it turns out that no amount of alcohol which people on instagram hate me for this no amount of alcohol is safe for the brain there's so many studies that show that you can get atrophy of the brain from drinking moderate amounts of alcohol. Hey, you said it. I'm happy you said it. Moderate amounts is seven drinks for women and 14 drinks for men. That's moderate? A week.

Oh, shit. Okay, I'm like, oh my god. But seven drinks, you can have that all in one go. I've seen some girls, like, you know, can just do seven shots. i'm like i that's not me like i'm i'm terrible with alcohol i'm i'm a real cheap date actually i'm a lightweight lightweight i'll have a glass of wine and i don't really drink i'll if i do i'll have a glass of wine but even that just sends me you know so i don't know how some

women are putting down five drinks or seven drinks so you can have those seven drinks one a night yeah and so many women are and you can have he's laughing at you yeah uh yeah there's a lot of people that drink often okay are you one of them okay that's an inside joke i don't an inside joke. I don't know. But tell whoever it is that's drinking that they're wreaking havoc on their sleep patterns. And we also know that just one night of sleep deprivation can build up amyloid. What's amyloid? It's one of the hallmarks of Alzheimer's disease.

It's a protein. Once it clumps together, it's necessary. It's in our brain. But if we don't clear it out during the night, which happens during deep sleep through the glymphatic system, then we're just going to get a buildup of amyloid and that's not good. I have a question on the THC side of things because we had Joel Jamison on the podcast recently and he's worked with athletes for a long time. And I was surprised because he mentioned that different athletes deal with THC differently.

Like it can be beneficial for some, but it can be not beneficial for some too. So you mentioned that THC is just something that, do you believe across the board, it's going to negatively impact sleep? And that's just, do you think that that's just the case there? Not just that. So I'm not too big on THC or CBD, although I know that in the plant, we know if you cut it apart, you get the CBD and you get the THC. Now, the THC is the psychoactive component. The CBD is not, which is why many people are having CBD, maybe to calm themselves down. THC, what I do know is that over time, that's when it starts to play a role. So maybe the immediate

effect is maybe you don't sleep well. Maybe you're just sedating yourself and thinking that you're sleeping well, but there are major implications of marijuana use over the 10 years, 20 year period. So when you say that, what kind of issues do you tend to see over that period of time? And do you mean like chronic use, like everyday need or is this like it's still in every now and then over 10 20 years it's still going to be a negative uh well even every now and then they probably have different effects but i'm talking more a one a day okay i don't even know what you call it what is it it's just like taking a hit every single day every day getting high getting high every day it'd be fun more susceptible to disorders such as ADHD, but also even in severe cases like schizophrenia.

Yep. And don't quote me on that, but that's what I do believe is happening. I've personally seen some of that happen to people. Or hallucinations. They just start seeing things. But also anxious, anxiety, things that we just don't want. Yeah. also you know anxious anxiety things that we just don't want yeah what about it also enhancing your life though and then maybe therefore you know adding some color and flavor to your life

to where everything's a little bit more manageable you mean from taking that i mean i know that with mushrooms you know lsd maybe we're talking about colorful i'm not sure what thc does i mean i've never had it myself. I just know that I try and tell my athletes not to take it. I just mean like utilizing drugs to, they enhance an experience, whether it's alcohol or marijuana or, I mean, that's why people take them, right? They go out and they want to talk and they want to communicate more and they want to like, quote unquote, have fun. out and they want to talk and they want to communicate more and they want to like, quote unquote, have fun. They feel like they have more fun if they drink, which can be problematic in and of itself.

But I'm just kind of thinking like trying to manage and mitigate stress all around often. I would say for myself, like, boom, knocking down a shot or two here and there, I would think would be a good idea, just like it would be a good idea to eat some ice cream here and there. Yeah. And it's not the one-time effect that is having the problem. And most of the time what we're seeing is when we are drinking, we are lowering our inhibitions. We've got this little thing in our brain which is called the go-no-go system. And we often lose that as we get older, but we practice it when we're kids because we'll touch a hot plate and then we'll realize don't touch it. So we've got this go, no-go system

that teaches us to don't punch this guy or don't tell this guy that you like him or don't try and pick up this girl because we're not going to do that because we think about all the bad things that can happen. But when we lower our inhibitions, we're like, I'm going to go talk to him. I'm going to go and, because our inhibitions are lowered, we don't have that go, no-go system in place so we can go up and do that. So generally, this is why people are drinking because it lowers their inhibitions. Some of us are drinking too much where it lowers our inhibitions too much. And you don't remember. And you don't remember. And in Australia, this became a big problem.

Like 10 years ago, there was this thing called King Hit. You guys probably haven't heard of it, but it was where guys were getting so violent that they'd do one punch to the head and it would kill somebody. And it was called King Hit. So Australia, thank God I got my going out days done when I was younger before this was involved. This was a game?

No, it was men. Okay, when go, no go. You know not to hit someone in the face or not to punch somebody. You just know that. Even if you are extremely angry, you know I'm not going to punch him in the face. But when you're drunk and this go, nogo system isn't there anymore, you have a tendency to want to hit someone if you are angry. And that's what was happening. So these guys were just getting drunk off shots and they'd go out and they would king hit, which means just one

hit to the head and the guy would go down and smash their skull and they would die. And so Australia got put on a full ban of shots. You can't get, I mean, I don't know what it's like now. I haven't lived in Australia since 2016. Yeah. So I don't, I don't know. Australian listeners chime in, let us know. Yeah. But, um, yeah, you, you couldn't get shots. You'd have to get a shot in a, in a drink. So just a normal standard drink and you wouldn't be able to get more within, I think it was like a one-hour time frame. So that's how crazy Australians got with this whole madness, not controlling their alcohol. Power Project Family, how's it going? Now,

we talk about sleep all the time on the podcast because it's one of the biggest things that helps you with your health and fitness, your recovery, your muscle gain, your fat loss, everything. That's why we've partnered with Eight Sleep for such a long time now because the technology behind the mattress allows you to track your heart rate, the amount of times it takes you to fall asleep, your tosses and turns, your heart rate variability. It changes its temperature through the night based off how you sleep, but not only yourself, but maybe your partner on the other side of the bed.

It is an amazing mattress. Andrew, how can they learn more? Yes, head over to eightsleep.com slash powerproject. That's eight spelled out, E-I-G. Head over to eight sleep.com slash power project. That's eight spelled out E I G H T sleep.com slash power project. Along with more information, you guys will actually save $150 off of your entire order automatically links to them down in the description, as well as the podcast show notes. I feel like a, uh, like a stoner's already like typing and saying that, like, I just, i do smoke weed to go to sleep because if i don't i won't sleep so won't sedated sleep be better than no sleep but why will they not sleep

generally we've got two complaints when somebody goes and sees someone about their sleep it is i can't fall asleep i have trouble falling asleep or i have trouble staying asleep if you're having trouble falling asleep that's generally because your mind is so active and which is why we supplement with GABA. So if it's our chief inhibitory neurotransmitter, it's going to inhibit those synapses of the brain cells. So you can calm yourself down. Or if it's I'm waking up through the night, one of the biggest reasons for wake ups and insomnia is sympathetic nervous system activity. It's stress. So the stress is rising your cortisol levels. Cortisol gets us up in the morning.

Along with the millions of people who have sleep apnea and wake up frequently. Sleep apnea, which is less oxygen to the brain, which is also a risk factor for these cardiovascular diseases and cerebral diseases as well. So that and then over the age of 70, depending on your PSA score, a lot of men are getting up at around 2 a.m., 4 a.m. to go to the toilet as well. Women too.

I'm not equating PSA scores to women. So just it's so many – there's so many different things to come into place. But for someone who is like, I can only sleep if i take a joint it's like we're gonna have to do some damage control find out the core reason yeah question about your athletes sleep um because we've been we tape our mouth shut tonight we've been doing that for years just to make sure we breathe through our nose at night so you're running with one too yeah yeah sometimes so so i'm curious, so I'm curious, like, do you, cause like, you know, a lot of bigger bodybuilders end up getting sleep apnea because of all the muscle they build and they end up snoring,

sleep apnea, et cetera. How do you help athletes maybe breathe through their nose at night? Is that something that you put importance on or not really? Not really. Because even if you're snoring, it doesn't mean you've got sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is the choking. Yeah. When you just, and then you're snoring, it doesn't mean you've got sleep apnea. Sleep apnea is the choking. Yeah, of course.

And then you're choking. Yeah. And generally you can pick up on that if you sleep with a partner because your partner can stay up all night and watch you sleep like a crazy person and say, yeah, he's got apnea. Yeah. I don't really work on that because I haven't had an issue. I have done mouth taping though just to see how that works and that seems to generally be safe.

just to see how that works. And that seems to generally be safe. I just saw, who posted recently a study that was done on mouth breathers and it changes their entire facial structure. Oh, yeah. Yeah, that's a giant rabbit hole, yeah. Yeah, I think there was a study done on a woman, a beautiful woman, who was sleeping and breathing through her mouth. And then they taped it up and this was for years and they started, she started sleeping,

started breathing through her nose again. And her model like features started coming out and she started getting like cheekbones and her jaw started aligning. And that's really interesting. I'm not a mouth breather myself. I'm a nose breather.her good you can tell by your facial structure except maybe when I'm working out who knows James Nestor talks about that a lot and Patch McEwen has done a lot on that that's where we started learning about that years ago so it's made a big difference for us maybe I should take my mouth on a

plane my mouth breather on a plane because I'm so anxious it makes a huge difference I've noticed even just with a nap I've used it on a plane because I'm so anxious. It makes a huge difference. I've noticed even just with a nap, I've used it on a plane before, and yeah, you kind of look like a crazy person, but that's all right. Yeah, but look, I think the premise

of what we're speaking about is the brain, which is how it is who we are. I think we are a result of how well our brain is functioning. Everything you think, do, feel, act, every action that you produce is produced in the brain. People used to go to the gym because they'd be like, I want to get fitter and healthier. And that's well and truly true. But we should be going to the gym, in my opinion, for brain health, especially if we are aging. Aren't there like more like cells in gut uh than there are in the brain like

isn't they say the brain is uh what uh the second brain but i've always said the gut is the second brain yeah i say the gut is the second brain but i actually believe that it's the first brain because i think it will override everything i think that if you are hungry enough you will kill another person which you know that that's hungry enough, you will kill another person, which you know that that's not right, but you would kill another person for your family to live onward. So I don't know, what are some of your thoughts kind of surrounding some of that? But is that a response to the gut or the brain being in survival mode? Yeah. Don't know too much in terms of that. I do know that the gut um is the lining of it some areas are one cell

thick meaning that you know so many things can be penetrating it so we need to be taking care of our gut microbiome through obviously diverse plants etc but i'm under the assumption that we need to be looking after our brain first yeah the cool thing about what you're mentioning here is we were talking about this on a podcast months ago where if you're only doing strength training and that's like the main thing that you do there's minimal you don't really train your reflexes as far as certain things like versus somebody juggling a soccer ball or somebody doing martial arts or or doing anything where it comes to having to navigate a ball you're not really training your reflexes. But the really cool thing is like the juggling aspect that you've brought in. If an athlete is purely doing strength training and the only thing that they're focused

on is moving a load, that they can get that benefit just from grabbing a ball and doing some drills. You know, that's pretty awesome. But then also you do have to do i'm never going to say don't ever do aerobic physical activity even if it's in zone two training because we know that we know when it comes to longevity you know the studies that were done on centenarians showed that they have more mitochondria in their cell you know so mitochondrial biogenesis which is the creation of new mitochondria occurs occurs during that zone two training effort. How much per week do you think? Because there are some people that are listening that are like, but I'm a lifter. And there's some people that are still anti-cardio.

So if you were to prescribe a minimum amount per week and a goal to try to just get this in, what would that be? Three hours. Three hours of zone 2 cardio a week. Made up of 45-minute increments or even one-hour increments. Why those increments? Because in order to get the training effects of that mitochondrial biogenesis that I just described, you have to be training at around zone 2, which is around 60% to 65% of your maximum heart rate. We do blood lactate tests to just check that you're

completely in zone two. You can't get that until you're at around that 45 minute mark. So I do it for an hour. And for people who are like, but I don't have a heart rate monitor, I don't have this, just go on the treadmill, put the incline to maybe eight, work at maybe a 3.6 speed, and it's to the point where you're not exhausted, but you can have a conversation, but the conversation is hard. That's fast and high. Oh, because that's what I do. Maybe that is too high.

That's flying. 3.6, really? Oh, yeah. That would be hard. 3.6 at eight for 45 minutes? Yeah. Okay, then bring it down. That would fucking hard. 3.6 at 8 for 45 minutes? Yeah. Okay, then bring it down. That would fucking suck.

Bring it down to 3.2 at 7. Incline of 7. Look, but you've got to push it. But then you get used to that, so then maybe you have to keep going up. Everyone has to measure it and just measure it as in like, I can't talk to the person next to me that easily. Plus, you are a triathlete, so I get that. You should be able to talk, though, when you're in zone 2. Yeah, you should be able to talk. Yeahlete. You should be able to talk though when you're in zone two. Yeah, you should be able to talk.

Yeah, you shouldn't not be able to talk. But right now we're in zone one. Yeah. We're in zone one right now. I can talk to you and I don't have to. So maybe just lifting it up, but not to the point where you're so out of breath. Yeah, and it definitely needs to be more than just a walk for most people. It depends on how fit they are.

Right. But for most people, they need more than just a walk unless they were obese, I think. Yeah, absolutely. Most people would need – because it's 180 approximately minus your age. I know there's other ways of getting it more scientific, right? Yeah. You can do a VO2 max test. But then here's the thing what about the people who are not working on their vo2 max we need to be working on that too because this you

know the centenarians also show that they had a higher utilization of oxygen through vo2 max testing so if we know that that is also important so for my parents for example i've prescribed them 15 minutes of hard out effort a week yeah and they're trying to get it down to like okay so if we do three minutes here and three minutes next wednesday i'm like just 15 minutes in a week that's all you really need in that zone like in that high high pace zone to get the maintenance of vo2 max so that's important as we're getting older as well. What are they doing in those 15 minutes? Oh, I'm getting them to walk up hills. Nice.

Yeah. And I'm really big on this because in 2019, my dad had a right parietal lobe infarct, a stroke of the right side of his brain and the parietal lobe. And it was, you know, I'm just seeing what's happening to him. And the biggest thing you can do for anybody who's had a stroke, even if it's left you with paralysis in different areas, is exercise. I believe out of the three pillars that I study and speak on and consult on, exercise, sleep, and nutrition, I have to say hands down that if I had to pick one, exercise takes the gold medal. Yeah. Hill is great because it's given you resistance. It's resistance training.

But not just that. They now see a personal trainer. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, they complain every day. They're like, oh, Jared had us doing this today. I don't think that's right. I'm like. That's great.

Is there anything you do as far as your athletes in terms of utilizing cold or hot or any type of like sauna, cold? Do you do anything there as your athletes in terms of utilizing cold or hot or any type of like sauna cold like what do you do anything there do you utilize anything there love cold therapy what kind cold plunge cold plunging yeah okay versus cry because like i don't do cryotherapy but i've heard people talk about it and i'm curious do you know the differences yeah you're not going to get the same effects from it. Also, one of the biggest things that we need to speak about is adherence. Adherence to anything, whether it's a diet, exercise regime, that's probably the biggest risk factor to anybody getting to where they want.

It's not going and doing it once. So cryotherapy is a lot of money, right? Kobe Bryant had one in his house. Why can't we? Yeah, exactly. And Tony Robbins also has one. So if you're, you know, some of my athletes want to get one,

I'm like, no, just get a cold plunge. And the cold plunge seems to work a lot better, especially so when you're, there's differences. You have got, when we, you know, submerse ourself in cold water, we release something called cold shock proteins. Likely if we go into the sauna,

we're releasing heat shock proteins. And these cold shock proteins. Likely if we go into the sauna, we're releasing heat shock proteins. And these cold shock proteins are amazing. They can immediately raise the amount of norepinephrine that is secreted. And that's that, you know, that's that hormone or neurotransmitter, depending on where it's coming from, is involved in vigilance, focus. That's why it's so good to do these first thing in the morning. So I love that. And it also has an effect when it comes to TBI in the brain through this pathway called the RBM3 pathway.

Sorry, what's TBI? Traumatic brain injury. Okay. Yeah. So it's really great for athletes who are getting hits to the head, traumas to the head, which is just so deleterious. I don't know why people are doing these sports. So it can help with that.

So I love the cold for both the mood-boosting benefits but also the brain-boosting benefits. However, I think there's a myth around the window of when to get into these cold baths. So you can mitigate the effects of a hypertrophy session if you get into the cold bath you know 10 minutes after training so let me ask you this because like there's so many people that we've heard say this um and we even tell people be a little bit careful but uh let's say you do lift

right how long later would you suggest somebody get and maybe the next morning is that something that you would have them just like keep it away from your lifting session? I would generally say a three-hour window. Three-hour window. Yeah. That's cool. That's okay. Yeah.

You know, when I was a triathlete, no one was getting into cold plunges, but we were straight after swimming. We'd have in our – Why? For some reason we'd get – but you've got to remember Australia. So I was training in an indoor pool. So we'd train and it'd be so hot because we'd be training so he'd just push us into this cold bath and the where we would be training they'd have a cold bath and then we'd go from there into the spa back into the car and he used to just throw

ice on us it was I trained with all men as well and 100% of my athletes now are men why I know where are the ladies at I don know. Maybe they're scared of me. I don't know. But yeah, it's funny. All of my lads are lads. Because I work with NBA, NFL, cricket. I wanted to work with Serena. She was my gold athlete.

And then she went and retired. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got Osaka? Maybe you can get her naomi osaka i want to get her yeah she actually i think she needs me there if she's listening you brought up the traumatic brain and uh traumatic brain injury and we were talking a little bit before about how you choose not to work with nfl players or boxers now do you also add ufc fighters into the bunch like anyone that's getting a hit to the head I

don't want to work with why oh my god they might need you the most that's what I'm curious like you know if they do need me and they want to go through a rehab plan please sign me up but not if you're going to come and see me and then go straight into the ring I like I've got back in Australia I've got a boxer who I took from amateur to pro and she's young, but she's getting there and I just hate what they, you know, I watch her and I'm like, you're getting hit in the head. It's, it's scary because any type of force, you look at this, right? Between this and the skull is fluid and the fluid is not viscous. It's not protective in any way. So when you get hit, your brain's doing this. And it's jello.

It's soft. It's going to mush all over the place. You're disrupting the fibers. And most oftenly, you're getting white matter disease. You're disrupting the fibers that I was speaking about that project to different areas. And as a neurophysiologist, we are really looking at things such as nerve fibers. So we're being trained in EMG, nerve conduction studies, EEGs to look at what is happening to the brain. And oh my gosh, if you put a healthy individual

on a brain scan, an EEG, and then get a TBI or post-concussive patient. It's two different things. So I choose not to work with them. In fact, there's a disease called Parkinson's pugilistica, which is Parkinson's disease caused by boxing. Can you believe that there is even a neurodegenerative disease that is caused by boxing? I mean, there's also chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which is caused by repeated hits to the head from NFL. So it's just, I think it's just, it's just scary. And now with the NFL

protocols, what we just saw with DeMar Hamlin, like I know that that wasn't a concussion, that was a completely different story, but like this, you can be doing other things. But then there's a culture of the sport because what we're seeing now, especially with NFL, is we're seeing there's the medical side, which is what is good for the brain, but then there's a culture side. And I believe that the culture side is overriding the medical side because the culture side is like, but Louisa, we've got billions of dollars to make.

We can't let him leave. So he's got to stay in whether his brain is damaged or not. Yeah. Yeah, and not only that, you have people that watch it that are diehards that are upset when it's not as hardcore as it used to be. But before we get any further, I wanted to ask about, because for the cold plunge, when I did cryotherapy, it was claimed to be i forgot

whatever temperature some crazy below like you know 60 degrees or something insane below zero um it felt very surface level um it what i mean is like if you walk outside in you know 60 degree weather you'll feel it but if you jump into 60 degree water it's holy shit i feel that yeah i feel like it gets way deeper yeah but do you have a certain temperature that you like to get your athletes in well can you do the conversions to fahrenheit because i'm generally looking at three to ten degrees yeah celsius yeah uh let's see what's your cold plunge you're in a what's the temperature at yeah is it 40 it goes down to 39 so 10 degrees is 50 or 10 degrees celsius to fahrenheit it's 50 degrees okay and then three degrees let's do that three you already went for the highest one of course

you're funny he loves to keep his cold at 55 degrees yeah 55 so i guess we're going to do 50 fuck uh 37 yeah so you know we're looking at 37 around there but here's the thing don't just focus on this is the same as when you sleep don't just focus on the temperature of the room or the temperature of the water it's the temperature of you so i'll even do um thermometers i'll put it i'm like don't you lie to me. You're shaking. I don't care. I'll do a thermometer to prove it, to prove what your core body temperature is because that's what it is. It's not about, let's just jump in the water and we're going to get these effects. You have to jump in the water. Your core body temperature needs to drop it a certain degrees in order to get the browning of adipose tissue, A, in order to release these cold shock proteins

that go into the bloodstream, B, in order to activate this RBM A, in order to release these cold shock proteins that go into the bloodstream, B, in order to activate this RBM pathway, in order to release the norepinephrine. It's not about the water temperature. It's about your temperature. Yeah. Get out of the cold plunge and stand in front of a fan directly. Yeah. That might get you sick.

Make it a party. So what degree temperature drop in body temperature do you shoot for i only really i look generally my consensus is i get my boys in there for three minutes at three degrees okay yeah now curious because mark's actually mentioned this before if you cold plunge for a while, like I've gotten cold adapted. I still feel amazing after I get out of it. Like I still get those, I feel I can kill the day.

Everything's good, but I don't shiver nearly as much as I used to. So I wonder, if you become cold adapted, do you need to give yourself time away to lose that adaptation so you get as much from the cold as you used to or do you just spend more time in the cold plunge either spend more time or just make it colder just make it cool

yeah that's great you've got your adapt that's what we're built for yeah adaptability so if you are adapting to the cold or the hot by the way when you get into the sauna you can have you know in some cases when you do the opposite thing where you release these heat shock proteins they can have other effects and a lot of the effects are on the opposite thing where you release these heat shock proteins, they can have other effects. And a lot of the effects are on the cardiovascular system. So you can, in some aspects, you can mimic cardiovascular workouts, what you do for the heart, from getting into the sauna. And you can heat adapt as well. So you'd have to get in there, maybe get it hotter, maybe stay in there longer.

What do we see with diet? We've scraped up upon it a little bit, but what about something like a ketogenic diet and its effects on Alzheimer's, dementia, damage of the brain? We see any extra benefit with something like that or is it kind of more just a calorie control thing? So such a controversial field for some reason, like nutrition, people just start attacking you on Instagram. I'm not sure why. Careful what you say here. Now, the most widely studied diet for brain health in terms of Alzheimer's disease and mild cognitive impairment is the MIND diet.

So that is the Mediterranean. It's like the Mediterranean diet. So it involves all the food groups. Mainly the bulk of it is green leafy vegetables, all different types of vegetables, fish, olive oil, and a little bit of red meat. And what they found was if you just adjusted for nutrition when it comes to Alzheimer's disease, you can lower your risk by 53% just from adjusting one area, which is nutrition. Now, I don't subscribe to any diet. I eat everything. I eat red meat. I love it. I don't

think that there is a problem to it. The only time that that becomes a problem is when your saturated fat is tipping over to the point of where your LDL is higher than 70. So if you get an LDL higher than 70, then you're quote unquote in that atherosclerotic state. And we know that that's bad because what does that end up doing? It ends up forming these plaques against the arteries of the wall, which stops the blood flow narrowing. And so we don't want that. So I was talking about this with Max Lugavere and he's like, but Louisa, it's good for you.

And I'm like, just the dose makes the poison. So you can have, in my opinion, saturated fat is only a problem if you're exceeding the recommended daily intake, which don't ask me what that is because it's different for everybody. So we really need to be monitoring that. We know that green leafy vegetables are fantastic for the brain. Nuts, olive oil is great. Fish, oh my gosh, fish is wonderful.

If you, you know, people think of fish as, you know, EPA, DHA, omega-3 fatty acids, and they're absolutely amazing. I always say that if you should have any two supplements, you should be having creatine and omega-3 fatty acids, in my opinion, your athletics gold standard. But if you put a telescope and shine it on a salmon, you know, you look at it, it's not just EPA, DHA, you've also got B vitamins in there. B vitamins, B12, B6. These are amazing for the brain and for mild cognitive impairment patients.

So just stay away from the bad things really. What would you say the bad things are? Sugar. Okay. Yeah. Excessive amounts or just – Processed foods. Okay.

Just things that we know of to be bad. There are certain individuals who are like it's only plant-based only plant-based and i'm like okay but whatever you need you do you um i i generally stay away from the things like i said the worst things you can do for your brain is eat high saturated fats is i even there's a huge argument with seed oils oh seed oils are bad have you heard Paul Saladino we've talked to everybody about

seed oils before and what's your take on it they're in processed food and I don't really eat processed food so I don't have anything to worry about no but if you go and eat a packet of chips or whatever you just once it's not going to kill you and there's seed oils in there so like i said the dose makes the poison yeah but if you want a high-performing brain then you generally stay away from these refined sugars

highly processed foods eating whole grains whole vegetables do you eat meat i eat tons of meat yeah you know i think uh one of the hard things about the seed oil thing, I call it restaurant oil, so it's a little easier for people to understand. It's like, I don't even know if I eat seed oil. Well, it's like canola oil and it's in packaged food, but you get it in heavy dosages, probably in the heaviest dosage at a restaurant because they don't even know how to prepare or cook your meat without dumping a bunch of oil on it. know how to prepare or cook your meat without dumping a bunch of oil on it. And a lot of times here in the United States, the oil that they use, it's allowed to still be called olive oil,

but it's like 50-50. So it has both in there. But I don't really know or care a ton about that. I think just trying to manage your body weight, I think is like an easier thing to do. And, and, uh, in terms of sugar and all the different things, I think, yeah, you should be mindful of like what it is you're consuming. Like try to go for quality, uh, as much as, as much as possible, but you also want your, uh, your life and your day to be feeling at least feeling like rich and feeling like you're, uh, doing some of the things that you want to do rather than just always forcing yourself to maybe do some of the things you don't want to do yeah and also i think we focus a lot on what not to put in our mouths and we

don't focus on what to put in our mouths such as omega-3 no there's risk factors for all-cause mortality and i think they've come up with around 20 risk factors, smoking, et cetera. We know smoking is bad. It leads to death eventually. One of the risk factors now is a low omega-3 index. So if you are not consuming omega-3 fatty acids, specifically EPA, DHA, and you go and get a blood test, it's called omega-3 index, and your score, I think if it's below 8, I want to say,

don't quote me on that, but if it's below 6 or 8, you are on the same path of accelerated all-cause mortality as a smoker. That's how imperative EPA and DHA is. It helps with cell membrane fluidity it helps with lower lowering inflammation in the brain and central nervous system it's just your brain is made of water and fat the fat is DHA you've got to be feeding the brain and so many people like does that you know I'm feeding the brain cholesterol the cholesterol the molecule can't pass through the blood-brain barrier.

I don't know what people are talking about when they talk about that. So we've got to be feeding the brain what it's made of. Yeah. Do you think there's a difference between getting that from supplementation versus getting that from actual fish food? Well, nowadays, the fish that we're eating I don't believe is the best. I watched this documentary called Seaspiracy. You've got to watch it. It was really scary and what it's doing to our oceans.

Yeah, it's on Netflix. I watched it. What it's doing to our oceans is crazy. Our fish are swimming around in a big poisonous barrel of soup, basically. They're giving us, and they're injecting it, actually, what they said on this documentary, they're injecting salmon with astaxanthin, which gives it the pink flavor.

So you'll go to, you'll think, wow, look how fresh this fish looks. But it's been, it's just colored. So this is why we need to adopt EPA, DHA. This is seaspiracy here, yeah. Or try to get wild caught, but then we don't really know what the regulations on all that is. I mean, wild caught, wild caught. So I spent time in Greece. That's where my family is from in September.

And I went there and we stayed on this little island called Gastelorizo. And the fishermen were literally going out that day and bringing the fish back. So that was beautiful. That was EPA, DHA rich. How about if you like, because I usually, I never cook salmon. I always get just sushi-grade fish

because I like sashimi. So is there a difference? Your face. I know. I can't believe I just did that. So do you understand? I hope you have that shit on camera. So I have literal fights.

Like relationships have been ended because I don't eat sushi. i'm i'm i'm coming out of the closet with this i do not eat sushi and i wish i did that's a thing i wish i did wish you were fancier right yeah i just wish i i wish i liked it because it's you can go to these different places in new york it's like five hundred dollars just to get it's ridiculous but it's oh my god okay as well poke you see and i don't eat it and i just i wish i did because i get judged people judge me they're like you don't eat sushi they're like just try it and so i don't eat things that are weird like i don't eat custard i don't eat

cream weird textures for some reason so i don't think you're getting more benefits from eating it raw but you may be i'm not sure i was just wondering because of the quality of the fish like you can only get to eat a certain type of fish raw you know what i mean like you can't eat eat normal costco sushi you can't eat that raw well the best form of dha in its phospholipid form is um in fish eggs so caviar another thing i want to like caviar i see them on like little pancakes they're so good that's gonna to be my i'm just going to force myself have you ever tried it yes that's how i got to this such as i that's how i got to this position of not liking it you know when you try something like it you have to have it with creme fraiche that's the key did you have it with creme what is creme fraiche that's the cream that you have it with that's on the little tiny pancake there we go i don't eat

cream because of the texture. It will make me, it makes me sick. Avocado? You don't fuck with avocado? I fuck with avocado, yeah. Okay. But here's the weird thing. I don't eat the inside of tomatoes, but I'll eat the outside, like the hard pieces of tomatoes.

Again, very hard to date me. Very hard person. I get that. I have the same thing. Once the tomato is inside of a hamburger and it's all soggy, like I don't know. But I'll take that first initial like crispy bite. But that's my goal this year to like caviar.

So then no yogurt either? I eat yogurt, yeah. Okay. Good. All right. Got it. Can you have, sorry, because will the omega-3s have the DHEA or DHA in it, or do you have to have that as another supplement as well?

Yeah, so omega-3s are made up of three parts, EPA, DHA, and ALA. EPA, DHA comes from fish, often fatty fish such as mackerel, salmon, and sardines. ALA is in its plant form, and this is where you get the vegans coming in. You can get it from microalgae or you can get it from flax seeds and chia seeds. It's just that you have to have a lot of it to meet the demands of it because it has to then translate into the DHA EPA. So I mean, if you're not allergic to it, maybe just try the EPA DHA. And you can get different forms from different companies in terms of more DHA than EPA. If we cut out and cut back on processed foods and we eat relatively healthy natural foods, that will change our profile of our omega-6 to omega-3 ratio, right?

Yeah. So maybe you don't have to worry about it too much. And if you get grass-fed beef and things like that, we think that will augment enough or not enough. But here's the point with the omega-6 and omega-3 ratio. If you're too high in omega-6, you can't even process the omega-3s. So people could be saying, well, I had a bad diet today full of omega-6, you can't even process the omega-3s. So people could be saying, well, I had a bad diet today full of omega-6, so I'm just going to take all of this omega-3. But it

actually, you can't, you know, it's not bioavailable if you've got too much omega-6. So you have to really be careful with the amount of food, like you said, that you're putting, and you don't want to throw off that ratio. And it's so easy to throw it off. But getting rid of processed food will help that ratio a ton. Oh yeah, immensely. So just sticking to a whole food. So you can bypass all of it potentially without having to take fish oil supplements. Well, no, you can bypass the omega-6, but the omega-3 fatty acids you have to supplement

with because we want to get that omega-3 index up. Can we get them from eggs? And can we get them from beef, grass-fed beef? You can get omega-3 fatty acids from a wide variety of foods, like eggs, beef, et cetera. Choline is abundant in eggs, but not to the same amount. And the dosage that you're looking at is four grams a day to get these effects. So I usually take two grams in the morning and two grams at night. So that's 2000 milligrams of each. So that's a big load to get from, um, you know, foods other than fatty fish. Yeah. Curious. Does, um, you said the brand was momentous. Do they have omega threes? I'm just curious, like in terms of other brands that you may know that are regulated as far as the amount of omega-3s in them? Yeah.

And so they're regulated. They've got – and I know that Thorne has really great omega-3. Thorne, T-H-O-R-N-E? Yeah. That brand? Yeah. Okay. And they've got a supplement.

They've got a specific one that is high in DHA. Oh, cool. So it's like advanced DHA. So it's like advanced DHA. So you can be getting more DHA, which generally would be given to someone who's had a concussion or somebody who has gotten Alzheimer's disease or MCI, mild cognitive impairment, which is a pre-dementia managers, you work with professional athletes, you work with a lot of high performers all the time. You yourself probably do things each day to allow you to make sure you're performing at your highest level. So what are some things that you do each day? Maybe we've talked about it all here, but I'm just curious what a day looks like for you when you're working and when you're trying to perform at your highest level? So on any given day, I'm preparing for sleep the moment that I wake up. So you're generally preparing for sleep when you wake up. So I'm doing, and this is, I've been traveling, so I haven't been doing all of this, but when I'm in New York and in my apartment, I'm getting up at 7am each morning, unless something wakes me up. I get up 7am, I'm getting my natural sunlight. I go for a walk first thing in the morning, Whether I'm walking to the gym, I have to walk to the gym. I'm riding Manhattan or I'm just walking, whether it's around the block, wherever I am, I'm getting that walking in. I don't eat till around

midday. And that's not a, I mean, it works better for my focus and attention. I get all of my work really like all of my emailing hard work done before around 2 p.m. So it helps with that. But I'm just generally not hungry until around that time. So sleeping well, obviously getting my sunlight to prepare for sleep. I'm doing damage control. I'm trying to not infiltrate my brain with whatever's going to be toxic for it. So that's not just sleeping well, with whatever's going to be toxic for it. So that's not just sleeping well, eating well, and exercising because I do train every day. I'm also now trying to minimize the people that I surround myself with

in terms of negativity. I think what I don't speak about a lot because it's not scientific enough is happiness and its rate on all-cause mortality and its rate on neurodegenerative diseases. So what I found last year was I did mix a lot with, I had my girlfriends, three specifically, unfortunately, who are no longer in my life because there was just so much. I have a hard enough time as it is, just being alive. We all do. We live in 2023 now. It's hard enough. And so I was taking in

all of this negativity because when I have a friend, I become, you know, whatever problem they have. And there were just some of them, their problems were just so overbearing. They weren't even problems. I have this one friend, poor thing, if she's listening to this. And, you know, she's in a bad relationship. And every conversation was about this relationship. And it was interfering with me because we've all given her the advice. And so that was stressing me.

What is that doing? That's raising my inflammation. And not just that. It's getting in the way of my mood and how I function. So every day we wake up and we've got a – if we are looking online. By the way, this is my bottle that you were drinking. Oh, I stole it. The entire time I'm looking on online. By the way, this is my bottle that you were drinking. Oh, I stole it. The entire time

I'm looking at it, I'm looking at you drinking it and I'm like, how dare he? Because I am desperately wanted water right now. You must have put yours somewhere else. No, see, it's not. I brought all mine in. I put it here. You came back from wherever and you didn't get yours and I've been looking at it.

So what happened is you put this here. You're like, here, have didn't get yours and I've been looking at it. So what happened is you put this here. You're like, here, have this. Because when I first walked in, I thought that was my mic. Controversy. Yeah. I thought that was my mic. So I sat there and Andrew said, no, you're over here. You've been dying of thirst the whole time. Yeah, I've been, I'm like,

did my lip balm taste nice at least? You look pretty dry right now. I'm joking. You i'm joking you don't you don't know um so okay so if we wake up every day and we look at this bottle and it's full of water this is so good oh come on i'm so sorry don't explode the podcast the fact that i can think well now because um my you know you need adequate hydration for your brain to be functioning well but let's um let's just go back to this analogy. Let's say you wake up every day and this is your brain, okay? And it's full of water.

That is your brain fuel. Your brain consumes 25% of your body's energy expenditure. Every time you think a thought or you produce an action, just imagine as if you're taking a sip of water. That is a sip of brain energy that has been taken away from you. When I talk to my friends, sometimes the ones that are bad, or even when I'm emailing, or if you're doing anything like mentally exhaustive, you're taking away this brain energy. So therefore, throughout the day, you've got this much left. And I was just burning myself out and giving my brain energy to other people.

To a bunch of bullshit you don't really care about. I don't care about. It doesn't move the needle for you. I just can't understand. The amount of worries that people go through for nothing. I'm like, break up with him for three years. Oh, shit. And I'm like, that's it.

We're done. And we're done now until she comes back and she's single. So that's what I mean. So that's another thing I'm now starting to, and this is also for business. A lot of people, and you've got the same effect in business and just in everyday life. So that's the non-scientific part of how I'm protecting my brain.

Yeah. No, but even though that's non-scientific, and here's some hydration. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. You can have that one. That's yours. We should start labeling them.

That's right. We probably should. Not organized enough. Even though that's non-scientific, that's something that we talk about a lot. I guard the friendships and relationships that I keep around because if you don't have the right people around, it can fuck up the way you think about everything. And it's going to mess with your energy. So you need to be careful with that, truly. Well, so much of what we were talking about earlier today

was also like recovery, you know, trying to recover from stuff. And I think maybe we take it for granted. We don't really think that we have to recover from everything. But you have to recover from everything, everything that you do. Not just like trying to get a stronger squat or not just a run. It's conversations with friends.

It's any worries or concerns that you have. So your sleep has to be put together and you have to try to figure out how am I going to recover from these things. If you can cut certain things out of your life that you really kind of recognize, you like do i really care that much about this like do i really have that uh much of an opinion on this to what do i think this is this useful to my life and to my friend's life uh to where this is going to like move us forward or should i maybe just sever ties with this because it's just not really it's not helping me and it's not really helping them. Yeah. You know what I mean?

You cut your ties sometimes. So as you get older, we go through this thing called the brain aging process and there are many theories that are set forth for the brain as to why we age. One of the theory, the first theory that comes to mind, and this is all relevant to what you said, is as we age, we have a white matter integrity, like lower white matter integrity. So we lose our white matter as we get older, which means that we can't process information as well. Okay, so information processing speed is declined just due to the natural brain aging process. The second one is we have a lower efficacy of dopamine release in the frontal lobe. So we have a dysregulation of dopamine receptors in the frontal lobe. Dopamine, we know, is that motivation molecule. I say that dopamine is like the little tugboats that gear our mood.

So if the tugboats is the dopamine and our mood is the ship, the tugboats are the ones that are going to steer our mood. And the only way that they get going is if we do something like we go to the gym and we feel good and we achieve a goal. That's how the little tugboats keep going. So I was finding that people, the little tugboats keep going. So I was finding that people, I already have, I'm past the age of 30, not too far past. And with the help of a plastic surgeon, I'll hopefully, you know, reverse my age like when I'm 40. But you're exercising, you're going to be fine.

But so I already have, I'm already at the detriment of all of these, you know, theories that are happening to my brain. Then I bring upon these bad and negative people, whether it's online, okay? Negative comments on Instagram, on YouTube. Okay. If I delve into them, I am not going to be motivated. Okay. It's going to suck the energy out of me.

I'm not going to be motivated to go to the gym. Therefore, I don't push as well at the gym okay i don't get the secretion of these hormones the myokines i don't get to go to the gym so i don't work on my heart muscle i don't get to work on my brain and that affects my dopamine because you haven't hit your goal then you hate yourself it's like i have to do it again and then the bitch calls again and it's like fuck my life sorry i shouldn't be saying that no hey sometimes it's just how it is yeah so i've become ruthless now um yeah with with that how much time do uh some of the people that you work with how much time are they devoting to recovering from these uh maybe various activities that they do?

Oh, God. Recovery is huge. From a physiological perspective, they're always recovering. Whether they're on a plane, they've got a TENS machine. Some of my athletes, which they hook up and their muscles are getting stimulated. So you think those are – because some people look at TENS machines and are like, that's a fad. Some people do.

So you think those are really beneficial? I started using the, it was a complex. It stimulates your muscles for sure. There's no question, yeah. We were given one. This is 2019. It was a long time ago when I was training and we were given a TENS machine. It was a complex. I still have it at home.

I used to put on my muscles and we were made to use them every day, especially when we were flying to get the blood flow. and we were made to use them every day, especially when we were flying to get the blood flow. So I will not find one athlete that isn't recovering. They've got their own. I'm privileged to work with high-level athletes who have high incomes. They have their own personal masseuse.

A lot of them are getting not dry needling. They're working on myofascial release. They've always got a ball that they're like grinding their shoulder blades against. They're doing a lot of that to recover, but none of that will work if they're not sleeping. So the best thing they're doing is sleeping, hydrating a lot. Like we forget how important hydration is. Like I said, the brain is made of both water and fat, but not just that. Our brain, the electrical signals that occur in our brain through neuron to neuron is via a sodium potassium pump. They are electrolytes. So when you sweat at night or when you're used to, or even in the gym,

you're not just sweating out water, you're sweating out selenium, potassium, zinc, all of these different things. So you need to replace that through both water. You can even get a bit of sea salt in the morning and put it in your water or get some element or whatever it is that you want to do, shake it up and have that. So they're doing that. But in terms of – so here's another thing that people don't think of. They see these athletes on the court and they're like,

maybe they've got so many – but some of them are going going through like we have some of them going through divorces so they have to recover from that and play as well and that's the hidden thing that you don't see or recovering from a bad media article that was put out like it's just kevin love has had a lot of that you know if they've done something angry on the court, the media is on at ESPN, then they have to relate to that. So they have to really caution their brain to be able to withstand all of this pressure that the public don't see. They just think that athletes are just these robots that are walking around just with amazing bodies and they have all the time in the world, but they've got to do so many other things.

They've got to do press conferences. They've got to talk to their teammates. They've got to talk to the coach, their agents. There's a lot of things that happens. Yeah, they're in high-stress situations and then they're asked to perform at a really, really high level. I think we've seen this many, many times in sports, but maybe it hasn't even been highlighted because maybe somebody is not surrounded in controversy. Like

the information doesn't always come out, but you see this guy, uh, performing amazingly like a quarterback in the NFL or, uh, an NBA player and like, man, this guy is incredible. He's amazing for like three years, five years, and then just completely falls off, just falls apart and is never the same guy again. And obviously there could be physical reasons for that. Maybe injuries, maybe the sports changed a little bit or something, but almost always it's like off the field stuff. I remember talking with a strength coach one time and he said, my biggest job is to communicate with my athletes and to talk to them and be like a therapist for them rather than their strength coach. He's like, we have a hard time keeping them out of the strip clubs. We have a hard time getting them to like go to bed at regular hour. We have a hard time just really nailing down how important nutrition really is. And then what would happen is over a period of time, they might get like a veteran player who is adhering to this advice of sleeping and getting better. And then it kind of pushes everybody else around in the organization as well. But kind of without that, it's like just a wild west it really is like take um ellen's

you know the the one who committed suicide uh recently yeah twitch is that his name and that was so sad but everyone was saying but yesterday he was on tiktok being fun and happy it's the same thing you don't know what somebody is going through. And at this level, unfortunately, and I realized this late in my career, I had to sit in on a front end of major league baseball. So I got to go and speak at the actual conference when they were doing all the conferences in Florida. And one guy got up and he goes, let's just call it plain and simple. He goes, these men are data points. I was like, what? So the moment you think that it's all family orientated and we love you and you're a great athlete, the moment that you slip up on the field, that is it.

Because on the back, you know, the analysts aren't looking at, oh, there is Jason, we'll call him. He's so great. He's so pretty. Look at his hair. He's trustworthy. No, he's a data point. And he did this. He missed this. He went here when he shouldn't and he didn't follow protocol. He's out. We've got somebody cheaper and better to come in. So they have to know.

So they're managing money. They're managing a board of directors. They're managing a wife, kids. There's a lot going on. And then they're also getting older and then they're subjected to different injuries in the NBA. It's like ACL and Achilles. They've got to do so much just to perform on that pitch. The moment that they don't, they know that they're going down.

And now I have the Australian, I have an Australian cricketer who's a captain. And he was, you know, he was you know he's like he's got to manage so many other people as well as himself yeah hey paparazzi family shut your mouth no not not really but kind of you should keep your mouth shut when you're asleep now on the podcast we've been talking about the importance of nasal breathing for years and we've been talking about using mouth tape during your sleep for years as it's going to help your sleep quality because you're going to be breathing through your nose. We had James Nestor, author of Why We Sleep. Actually, that was Matthew Walker, but James Nestor, author of Breathe. We had Patch McEwen.

We've had so many people talk about the importance of taping your mouth and breathing through your nose when you sleep for your sleep quality, which helps your recovery, which helps every aspect of your health and fitness. So hostage tape, if you want to get some of this to help you sleep better and it also stays on your face, if you're a bearded man, which is one of the big problems with Mount Tape, head to hostage tape.com slash power project. And there you can actually get the power project annual deal, which will give you a year supply of hostage tape, 55 cents a day for tape pretty much. And you'll be able to save $150 along with getting two tins, a year supply of tape,

and a blindfold. That is going to be something that you want to get your hands on. Links in the description along with the podcast show notes. Shut your f***ing mouth. When you put it in that lens, it makes you kind of also, again,

think differently about the NFL and football itself. Because yeah, these athletes are already expendable tools. But also, well, we know what's happening to all this CTU with all these athletes. We know what this is causing. They're even more expendable. Oh, this guy's out after two, three years?

Let's just get another one. Another one's going to come back in. You know what I mean? It's just- And I don't think anything's going to change even after what happened with the Buffalo Bills player. I don't think there's going to be- There won't be a change.

There won't be a change. And like, if he died, would there be a change? I don't think there's going to be a change. There won't be a change. And like if he died, would there be a change? I don't even know if that would be enough still. No. I love football. I love watching it. I've been a huge fan. I played it.

But something needs to change. Like they need to make major – like they have made changes, which is cool. But they need to make major change. And I know that they could say, oh, well, it doesn't really have much to do with a head injury. It could have to do with other things that the NFL forced some of the players to do. So it's kind of controversial, but they need to do something. But that's just the same as, OK, if you take the Major League Soccer, for example, you take young kids who are headbutting the ball. It depends on the velocity, right? So for NFL, the reason why

it's so bad is they've got these helmets, which are around nine kilos, I think, or nine pounds, maybe, I don't know what it is, but they've got that traveling at a velocity plus their body weight just cramming into each other. So it's the velocity and the speed, which is what makes the severity of the concussion occur. But with headbutbutting a ball, we've found that even in kids, your brain isn't fully developed. Your skull, it's not fully developed until the age of 25. So you've got a lot of things happening as a kid when they need all of that nourishment. There's so many different things that kids need and they're going to go and smash their head against the ball. That's low level and even that is bad. So, I mean, just stick to, you know, go and play tennis.

This is actually I was about to ask you that because I played soccer from like the age of six football major six to 21 years old. Right. And I'm curious with a lot of parents wanting to get their kids involved in sport. If the parents are looking out for the health of the child and all sports can be dangerous in different ways. What would you suggest? Tennis. Dancing. Basketball? Basketball, yeah.

Look, there's no, you know, you don't see anything. Grappling? Jiu-jitsu? When I have kids, they're going to be tennis players. Or, you know, I love soccer. Soccer is my favorite sport to watch. Yeah. Same.

Yeah. And look at, you know, ronaldo versus messi what we've seen um and that comes down to the intelligence of an athlete as well i think messi is just he is you can't you know it's nothing he's just magic he is the luckiest man alive i love watching him he's beautiful you've seen what he can do and what he can produce but also look at his life which we were talking about offline. Like an athlete isn't made to, you know, the best in the world, you know, Messi, he's going to be hands down the greatest football player, soccer player to ever lived.

He's now remarked the same as Maradona. You look at Messi's life. Has he done anything? Has he been picked up for hitting anybody? Has he been caught cheating on his wife? Is he doing anything like with drugs? He's kept his profile so pristine. And athleticism to that level, these athletes know it's not just about the game.

I'm also infecting millions of little kids worldwide, especially if you're LeBron. Imagine these little kids and these little girls looking up to Serena. I can be her one day. Serena was from Compton, I believe, her family. These little kids that are just waiting for them. And imagine if this little kid was looking at Serena and just says she goes out and she does something so terrible.

You've got the weight of other people on you. So these elite athletes do need a lot of help um i mark was asking me do you go into psychology i try not to because it's not my field but sometimes it does you know some of the boys are like can you just talk to my wife i'm like what no can you just call my wife i'm not calling your wife yeah there's probably a lot there when it comes that kind of stuff is really interesting because um i think that people really it's so many of the things like so many of the struggles that we have are uh they're not real yeah you could probably like

some of these guys could probably go home and tell their wife or significant other, Hey, I need to make some big changes because I want to, I want to really push harder. You know, I've been in the league for three years. I want to push harder than ever. And I want to make, you know what I mean? Like they probably could have that conversation.

We're just going to make more money is what's going to happen. You know, it's going to be the result of it. What's what I'm interested in is what's the education that these players are getting around brain health? Do they know that they're going into what they're going into when they hit their heads? Do they know what is happening in the brains? Do they know what CTE is?

Like actually fundamentally because what I think is separating people from being who they want is just education. You get a choice. You can know the education. You get a choice. You can know the education then get a choice. So once you have the education, it's your choice of what to do with it. And so if you want to continue in the NFL, okay. But are they giving them an outlet to understand, hey, if you get hit, this is what's happening to you. Not to mention, I think somewhere NFL has to take responsibility. Currently the healthcare system, when it comes to Alzheimer's disease, Alzheimer's disease is costing the healthcare system $305 billion in direct costs.

Which is weird because they can't do anything about it. There's no... Well, yeah. You can't. No, actually. So currently there's 30 genes, around 30 genes involved in Alzheimer's disease. Out of all of the patients who have been, out of all the people who have Alzheimer's disease, guess how many is diagnosed from a genetic form? 3%. 3%. Up to 3% of diagnosis from genetics alone. That means that around 95%, 97% of all Alzheimer's disease patients

are driven through lifestyle factors. Now, hear me strong on this. I believe by right now 50 million people worldwide have Alzheimer's disease. That number is said to triple by the year 2050. It's costing the healthcare system $305 billion. It is the fastest progressing epidemic in developed nations, and it will be the collapse of our healthcare system. Specifically, well, I mean, I'm curious.

Alzheimer's, yeah, but we also see the rate of obesity going up like that too. So do you think it's a cumulative of these different things happening? Well, like I said to you, 95% of current Alzheimer's disease patients are the non-genetic form. Yeah. So for example, one of the high-risk genes is ApoE4. You can get two copies of it. So if you have one copy, it increases your risk four times. If you have two copies, it increases your risk 12 times. Now, here's the interesting thing. Out of all the people who have got two copies of E4 and E4, only 50% get

Alzheimer's disease. There are parts of Africa where they've got E4 and E4 and they never develop the condition. They never get Alzheimer's disease. Why? Because of lifestyle interventions such as eating, eating well, exercising. Just moving to America increases your risk of Alzheimer's disease by I think 6%. Do you know if there's any aspect of community that plays a role in that? Oh, 100%. We know that when you have mild cognitive impairment or these pre-dementia states you become

more recluse so you stop talking to people and you lose that community and you need that you almost become really just by yourself and you become lonely in your head you start to think that people are not around and it's just me. And that's what then leads to brain atrophy and worsening of the condition, which is scary. So we need community involvement. And how is this related to NFL? Because if concussions are causing these neurodegenerative states, which they're not, it's just one risk factor for chronic traumatic encephalopathy, then we're having a burden on the healthcare system, like I said. So we need to be taking this into account.

It's really interesting because like the burden on the healthcare system, it's something that fascinates me and fascinated me with the pandemic as well. People were going to the hospital, but there was no treatment. And there's no treatment. Like the only treatment, the treatment for everything is the same. The RX for everything is the same. Go on a walk, lift some weights, lose 20 pounds. It has nothing to do with going to the hospital.

It depends on what you're talking about. But there's not drugs for it. Is there really anything super effective at the moment? The most effective drug is exercise, but no, there are FDA approved drugs. One, which is aducanumab, is getting a lot of controversy. I think they've actually recalled it with Medicare, but there are another two drugs that are used for Alzheimer's disease patients, but it's not like you're reversing it or it's just helping you. So there's two things that happen when you've got this disease. There's the buildup of amyloid. An amyloid is a protein. And like I said, it gets cleared out during deep

sleep, but this happens outside of the cell. So it stops the communication between the cells. So it's happening outside. Then you've also got something else, which is tau, which causes the neurofibrillary tangles. Tau exists within the actual cell itself. So you've got these myofibrils and they are like highways. I would say they're just these highways and the tau wraps around them and the tau is structure for these myofibrils. What happens is over time is they end up collapsing on each other. It's like this scaffolding just collapsing and it tears down the myofibrils. So you've got two things that are happening here. You've got the tau tangles and then you've got the amyloid beta plaques.

And both what we've seen can be mitigated through sleep and exercise yeah so you know back to the myokines because i really love it and hopefully i want to i want to find another myokine maybe call it the louisa so that would be good but one of them and you guys have known i had to write you know some notes just because there's over 600, but I want to bring up some. One myokine, IGF-1. What do we know IGF-1 to be? Insulin growth like factor one. We know that it's helping with growth. It's like helping with growth hormone.

And we know that. But there's also IGF-1 in the brain, which is responsible for growth and repair of tissue, of the brain tissue. This goes down in TBI. of tissue, of the brain tissue. This goes down in TBI. So IGF-1, in the late stages of TBI, it is diminished. So we know that exercising increases the release of IGF-1.

We've spoken about irisin. But then there's another one called IL-6. Have you heard of interleukin-6? Heard of it. Application, no. It's a cytokine, but it's more like a signaling molecule. And I like to refer to it as it's very bipolar. So it can signal different things in terms of immunity. So it can be a cytokine, but it's also a good thing when secreted from the muscle belly. Okay. So if that is secreted, then it has an anti-inflammatory, instead of being a pro-inflammatory cytokine, it is an anti-inflammatory cytokine. So it's

why I say it's bipolar is because it can be anti-inflammatory or be pro-inflammatory. So we can get a bunch of IL-6 that's secreted from our muscle belly, but in that state. And then we've got another one, which I had to write some notes on because I wanted to be careful. I'm going to bring this up because I think it's really interesting. It's called myostatin. Okay. Oh yeah. Can we get rid of it?

How do you know what myostatin is? Everyone always talks about the cows and the myostatin deficiencies. And we've been like trying to figure out ways to minimize it and probably not even reason the right term to help build muscle in ourselves well myostatin is a myokine and it is released when you're not exercising yeah so um it's inversely so it's inversely correlated with irisins remember how i spoke about irisin being the so when you exercise you get iris, and irisin ends up blocking the myostatin. But when you don't exercise, you get a buildup of myostatin. And that then has an effect on insulin sensitivity.

So it decreases it. So it's a – Yeah, yeah. Because I'm just thinking – no, I'm just – because Mark has mentioned like it might not be somebody has – who's obese might not be – it's just the fact that they don't have too much fat it's just they're under muscled and if they've been developing a lot more myostatin the road to recovery or the road to getting back in shape they're just pushed even further back than somebody starting at zero because they have all this myostatin now absolutely okay and the um the

rct done on myostatin was the study this that researchers created a group of myostatin knockout mice. So knockout mice, so that's when they're genetically altered to switch off myostatin. Okay. That's why they're called knockout mice. So what they found was that over a three-month period, so they switched off, okay, myostatin. What they found over a three-month period was that the mice gained 26% more muscle tissue over three months of just knocking out that myostatin. So more exercise blunts myostatin through the release of irisin. As soon as you don't exercise, you get that myostatin back up.

That's why myokines are amazing but then there's also the bad ones can we exercise and somehow take more of that irisin you said and like just double up everything by killing more myostatin well the premise is the harder you lift the more like the more strenuous it is the more iris and you'll produce yeah but you can't just produce it just by doing this right now that's why it's important for people to know about progressive overload you've got to keep pushing your body 70 women stop being afraid of creatine stop stop being afraid of creatine and stop being afraid of weights about the uh the 70 percent like um sweet spot can you trick your muscles into just being fatigued

and then you know like like uh pre-fatiguing on a leg press and then going to squat even though like for that squat it might be 80 of what you can in that moment it's not 80 of your overall like one rep max well this is what happened it's when your muscle is under tension. When it's under tension like this, then that's when it releases. So you could put your body through. You could even do high reps, I would imagine, at a lighter weight and just keep doing it. So honestly, it's like how much time do you have? What do you think if we just kind of minimize carbohydrates to some extent? Maybe not get rid of them, but just minimize them a lot.

A lot of what exercise does, especially weight training, is just chew up some glucose. Yeah. So do you think that that would be, do you think that like are the people that have dementia and Alzheimer's and some of these diseases, how often are they overweight? How overweight are they? And is it just a thing of overweight? Or are they insulin resistant? They're insulin resistant.

And some of the studies were first done with resistance training and leg muscles. And they showed that if you had to pick one muscle group, it would be to work on the leg muscles because in terms of vector size, they're big and they are able to be a glucose disposal system because they're so big. So that's why they said that having more leg strength and leg muscle mass, predominantly the front, the quads, helps with muscle mass, which then helps with brain health and insulin sensitivity. Because we know diabetes is one of the risk factors of getting these strokes, atherosclerosis, and these neurodegenerative diseases. So yeah, definitely insulin sensitivity. But what you're also doing when you're training these leg muscles is we've

got veins. Now legs, we know that. Veins, they don't have muscles like the arteries do. So they are this one directional pump. So the blood is in there, but you need to, when you exercise your quads, you're squeezing the veins through. So what's that doing? That's then going up. The blood is going up through the veins into the vena cava, then into different areas. It's going into your lungs, which is helping with oxygenation. So that's why it's so good to be moving your body. Upper body strength is great too, because you've got veins everywhere. But lower body strength as we age, we know that falls are a very big predictor of head injuries. We know that falls can lead to a higher rate of all-cause mortality.

I don't know. It's not the biggest rate of all-cause mortality, but we know that over the age of 80, if you fracture your hip or if you have a hip replacement, we know that the recovery is hard. So that's why leg strength is really crucial for elderly individuals, just to merely prevent falls. Yeah.

You don't want to be falling at that age. Kind of build up them legs. Squats. Any other questions there, Andrew? You got to be harder to kill. Let's see what I have. Oh, yeah. Something I've always been interested in is nootropics.

I don't know. Do you ever dive into that stuff over there? Not really. I did this morning have L-tyrosine. First time or something? No, no. I just was like, because I didn't sleep well last night and I had some L-tyrosine. So when it comes to nootropics, look, the best forms of nootropics is sunlight, water, sleep, exercise. Yeah. But you can go a bit deeper into it depending on um i was cycling modafinil actually nice yeah and that was um that was fun heard good things about it yeah and i

wouldn't i would caution everybody it's a prescription drug for narcolepsy for anybody who wants to know you can't just go and pick it up uh and look it didn't have it wasn't like an amphetamine it didn't you know it didn't make me jittery it was just like i was in the flow now kind of curious about this because this is the last question i have but when it comes to learning nowadays there's so many different ways that people can learn you can watch youtube videos you can listen to audiobooks you can read do you know there's a like from what you know about the brain, is there a difference in being able to, because a lot of people don't read things anymore, right? And because there are so many ways to learn, but is there a difference in terms of your ability to remember, upkeep, depending on the way you choose

to learn something? Yeah, well, generally learning takes place, there's two parts of it, takes place when you're actually learning something. And then the deep penetration generally learning takes place, there's two parts of it. It takes place when you're actually learning something, and then the deep penetration of learning takes place during sleep. But in fact, they've done studies on when you're training and getting the blood flow to the brain, you can actually retain more information and learn faster when you are exercising. Nice. So if you're walking and listening to an audio book?

Walking and listening. I always get the best ideas for some reason when I'm power walking. That's why I do it every morning. I'm like, and then I also think about things that I need to do, but you're getting more blood flow to the brain whilst you're trying to learn. But there's also, you've got to be passionate about what you're learning. You've got to really love what you're learning so you can retain and be motivated to really embed it. Cool. Do you kind of prescribe the athletes to work with a mindset coach as well? Like do you have like a team or?

Yeah. Yeah. So when you work with us, I've got eight people on board at NeuroAthletics. Everybody has a different responsibility, but you get general check-ins from my staff. And that involves one of them is a mindset coach and she works with me too. That's awesome. I'm like, I want to eat the chocolate. Tell me not to.

But I think mindset is a very big one and they do sports psychology techniques such as a lot of my players are like, Louisa, when I go on the court, I think about different things and it just interferes. So they come up with anchoring techniques. And if you have a bad negative thought, you have to produce a stimulus. Maybe you click or you hit your leg and then you anchor your thought into something positive. And it gets you back in the game. You know, other things such as we have a sports specific development coach, which goes through

and sets goals for the athletes saying set points, like for the first half of the match, we need 12 set points. What are they? And how are you going to achieve them instead of just going in blindsided? That's where I think most athletes fail in the amateur stage. They don't set themselves goals and we call them set points. They just go in and they're like, I just want to score. I just want to shoot. It's like, okay, but what are you going to do? Like, what are you going to do? It makes, there's more to an athlete than just shooting. Like visualizing and thinking those things through? You've got to visualize it.

You've got to think about how many passes do you want to take? Where do you want to be? How many blocks do you want to have? Yeah. Because that ends up increasing points as well. So what are we going to do? Set yourself a goal and a target to do this. That's what an intelligent athlete does.

They don't just wing it i mean you look at lebron and there are certain plays where you see him take consistent threes on every single court it's kind of crazy you know like he goes to a spot bam spot bam spot bam that's makes sense yeah there you go um what are some things that you do uh that you've noticed that make you happy because you mentioned about cutting out things that are were kind of more clear to you whether you're like this makes me kind of unhappy is there some specific things that you could share with us yeah sleeping before 10 p.m. makes me happy the following day um that makes me happy uh really sticking like not putting in certain foods into my body because at the time it's like this is going to feel good,

but it actually just makes me generally unhappy. I raise my heart rate every single day and maybe twice a day, so that makes me happy. I think being in America, the happiest thing is talking to my mum every day. That's what makes me happy. So I now go out of my way. I. That's what makes me happy. So I now go out of my way. I'm deliberate with what makes me happy. I have to be. Unfortunately, if I just let it be up to fate, I probably would just be miserable and sitting on the couch. So I deliberately do

things when I hate, I don't want to go to the gym. I force myself there. Andrew, take us out of here, buddy. Sure thing. Make sure you guys stick around so you guys don't smell. You guys don't miss Smelly's tip on the way out or you can smell it if you want. That's kind of what we do anyways. But let us know what you guys think about this conversation. Drop those comments down below.

Hit that like button and subscribe if you guys are not subscribed already. For everything podcast related, head over to powerproject.live. Follow the podcast at mbpowerproject on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter. instagram tiktok and twitter's at i am andrew z in sema where you guys comment about this conversation because there's a lot of things i think may have triggered some of you like the hate on american football discords down below chiming down below and see my ending on instagram youtube and see my yin yang on tiktok and twitter what's up and alcohol and alcohol yeah fuck i the answer, by the way. I do love it.

Yeah. And even THC. People love their weed. All right, Lisa, where can people find you? My Instagram is Louisa Nicola. I'm there on Twitter

and neuroathletics.com.au. And where can they mail you some water? Yeah. I know. I can't wait to watch the video and see exactly what happens. Literally.

I think, were you filming before he came here? No. So we've got no evidence. No, there's going to be evidence. You definitely know that that was my water. There's going to be evidence of you're probably looking at the bottle. Just over here, just drinking it. Yeah, I'll have to check the tape.

That's the only way. All right. Well, Smelly's tip is that unhappiness comes from within you, and so does happiness. It's not our environment. It's not the outside world. It's what's in your motherfucking brain. Strength is never a weakness. Weakness is never strength.

Catch you guys later.