Pursuit of Wellness - Why Most Women Are Training Wrong: Fix Hormones, Build Strength, and Recover Smarter w/ Dr. Andy Galpin | Part 1

Episode Date: January 13, 2025

Ep. 165: How do you define peak performance? Today Dr. Andy Galpin, world renowned human performance scientist, joins us to explore what it means to optimize your body and mind - whether you’re an elite athlete or just starting your health journey. We discuss how to remove performance anchors, the surprising overlap between athlete and non-athlete needs, and why systems and sustainability matter more than perfection. This episode is so packed with insights that we split it into two parts. This episode is so packed with insights that we split it into two parts—don’t miss part one now and stay tuned for part two this Thursday! Leave Me a Message - click here! For Mari’s Instagram click here! For Pursuit of Wellness Podcast’s Instagram click here! For Mari’s Newsletter click here! Sponsored By: Experience the benefits of red light therapy for skin rejuvenation, fine lines, and acne scars. BonCharge’s Red Light Face Mask is lightweight, portable, and fits seamlessly into your routine. Go to boncharge.com and use code PURSUIT to save 15%. Control Body Odor ANYWHERE with @lumedeodorant. Safe for anywhere on your body, it’s clinically proven to block odor for 72 hours. Get 15% off with promo code POW at Lumepodcast.com/POW! #lumepod #sponsored Upgrade your sleep with Blissy’s silk pillowcases, dermatologist-tested to reduce fine lines and keep your skin and hair hydrated. Shop at blissy.com/powpod and use code POWPOD for 30% off plus a 60-night risk-free trial. Make grocery shopping simple with personalized, healthy meal and grocery recommendations delivered to your door. Get 40% off your first box and a free item in every box for life at hungryroot.com/pow with code POW. Topics Discussed 00:00 - Introduction  00:00 - lorem ipsum

Do you want to be more focused throughout the day? Do you want to have more energy? Do you want to make better decisions, be a better leader, feel less pain? Like what is the thing? That's all physical performance to me. It's all mental performance. And so what I love doing the most out of all this

is having an answer for somebody who's searching because they want to perform better and then being able to be like, oh, you just have to do this. This is the Pursuit of Wellness podcast and I'm your host, Mari Llewellyn. What is up guys? Welcome back to the Pursuit of Wellness. Today I am joined with Dr. Andy Galpin, a world renowned human performance scientist.

This episode is so packed with insights that we split it into two parts. We talked for so long and there's so much good information in here. You're going to want to listen to part one and two. In part one, we cover Dr. Galpin's fascinating journey with growing up on a farm to working with elite athletes. And we dive into topics like stress, sustainable systems, fat loss strategies, and the importance of daily movement. Part two will drop this Thursday, so stay tuned. Dr. Andy Galfin, welcome to the show.

Ah, it's a pleasure to be here. I'm gonna have to read your credentials here because there's so many. You are a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics. You work with elite athletes, you're a professor. The list goes on. I'd love to just start by hearing how you got

to where you are now. Like where did the interest start? You know, I grew up in the country with just everybody around me who were on horses and logging and farming and things like that. And my parents were really loving and supportive. No one where I'm from was was highly educated. I could not have told you as a kid what a PhD was. I had no idea. That's crazy. I had no, I didn't have any lawyer parents or anything like that, not to,

but we just don't any different. And so my parents were super supportive of my siblings and I and they didn't care what we did professionally. But all they said is you're not gonna do what we did. And then they just wanted a better life for us. And so the only thing back in the 1980s and 90s then was, for country people, it was like, well, you're gonna go to college.

Like, we don't know what this, it doesn't matter. It's a different thing than it is now. So they just pushed us to go to college. And again, they could be artists or whatever we wanted to be, but just like, you're not going to be a manual labor person, like your entire life. So, but just that you're not going to be a manual labor person, like your entire life. So, okay, that was great. So then as a country kid, I played sports.

I wanted to be better at all those things. And I was trying to figure out how do I have a life that is not as hard as my parents? But I knew I wasn't gonna be a professional athlete. I knew actually pretty quickly, I didn't wanna be like a sport coach. I didn't wanna coach football. And then actually after I got into college

and got through that stuff, I spent a little bit of time as a professional strength and conditioning coach of very high level athletes, major league baseball players, NFL players. Realized quickly, I didn't want to do that full time either. And so basically I spent the rest of my career trying to figure out where,

like how do I make a career out of sports, but not doing those things? I love science, I was a decent athlete but not a tremendous one. And so what that meant was I was good enough to where if I did things better, it mattered. It would be the difference between me playing and not playing.

But I also wasn't so bad where like, hey, it doesn't matter what you do, you're not gonna get out there kind of thing. And so all I knew at that point in my life was the only thing I can control is working harder than everyone else, doing things better than everyone else, being more focused, so on and so forth. And if I can carry that through a college degree somehow

and then try to figure out how I can do this as a profession, that was really as far as I was focused. So collectively, that's how I really got into this field and then just was able to carve a 20 year path into making where I am now. What interests you the most about performance and optimizing? I think it's actually how well rounded that phrase can be. So I wanna be really clear.

I try to like reiterate this as much as possible. I will talk a lot about the athletes and things that we do. But performance to me really means what do you want out of your body? Right? What do you want to do? Performance can be defined as hitting a ball better

and scoring more points. Sure, no problem. But do you want to be more focused throughout the day? Do you want to have more energy? Do you want to make better decisions, be a better leader, feel less pain? Like what is the thing? That's all physical performance to me,

it's all mental performance. And so what I love doing the most out of all this is having an answer for somebody who's searching because they wanna perform better and then being able to be like, oh, you just have to do this. And then they go, their life is better. And it's like this amazing feeling to know

you have these answers sometimes and then you can give that gift to somebody and then they get something more that they want and their life is more enriched and they're better with their family and things like that. And so that ultimately is the thing that gives me the most joy is being like, oh hey, I have this little solution over here.

Now you wanna use it to whatever you're doing, I don't even care. But that to me is what I love the most about performance. Like I love sports. So it's great when that gets manifested and I get to watch people I coach on TV win championships and stuff. But we have as much reward out of our non-athlete clients and folks that come to us too for the same thing.

It's just like, wow, I was just suffering for all these years. Now this is gone. That's pretty awesome too. So do you have people who come to you who are not just peak performance athletes, you have regular people? Oh 100%.

Possibly overweight? We have, honestly, so we have a coaching program and we have many servicing companies, but in our coaching program, we'll often have a pretty big dichotomy. Like over here on one side is, we do have plenty of professional athletes in there. We have probably, I don't know, four or five of the highest contracts in the country,

in the big sports here. We have all pro, we have the biggest of the biggest athletes. But by number, we don't have hundreds of athletes in those programs, because it's a little bit different. But for our non-athletes, which is more people, you generally have the split, and we have some people at the top. They're pretty dialed, and they just want to get But for our non-athletes, which is more people, you generally have the split, and we have some people at the top.

We're pretty dialed, and they just want to get more focused. They're either trying to compete, they like to run races, or do kayak, or do some activities, kind of the weekend warrior folks. Or they're not that, but they're trying to get every last little bit of brain function, or back health, or longevity, or whatever. So we have those people who are dialed, and they're trying to go from last little bit of brain function or back health or longevity or whatever, right? So we have those people who are dialed

and they're trying to go from like a nine to a 10. And then we have people at the opposite that are saying like, I'm just starting this health journey. I'm finally ready, I've got to lose the weight, I've got to stop the drinking, whatever the thing is. And then they're like, I'm gonna commit to this. But if I'm gonna do that, I wanna start with everything perfect. That's unique to my physiology, right? So it's kinda like, I'm gonna commit to this, but if I'm gonna do that, I wanna start with everything perfect.

That's unique to my physiology, right? So it's kinda like, I'm not gonna start this journey and then be wondering, am I eating the right foods? Am I doing the right workouts for my body? I don't want that. So all the questions gone, so I start there. So we have a big split between people that'll generally fall into both those buckets.

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you're going to pull from that routine? Okay, it's in the routine. It's in the routine. It's in the routine. It's in the routine. It's in the routine. that you also recommend to regular people. Like for people listening who want to know the tips and tricks you give to the elite athletes, like what are some of the things you're gonna pull from that routine? Okay, it's impossible for me to answer because it's gonna be, we could be here for hours.

Okay. Here's how I'll set it up. Joe Rogan style three hours. Yeah, oh yeah. We've done that plenty of times. Okay, if I started listing off to you things, I want you to tell me, is this something I'm gonna give to an athlete?

Okay. Or a general population person? Okay. Okay, mental focus. Oh, I feel like that's both. Okay. Yeah. VO2 max.

Athlete. It's also arguably the number one predictor of longevity. Okay, so both. Okay, bone mineral density. Both? Oh, like you can see how I can run this train, right? Yeah. There's not a metric I can pick

where you're gonna be like, oh, that's an athlete thing with some very small exceptions. Okay. You wanna hit a baseball better. Okay, okay, fine. Yeah. And you want, but outside of that, like you pick your health metric,

you pick your longevity metric, you pick whatever thing you care about the most, you're gonna have a 99% Venn diagram overlap between these two people. So what are the things that we give the athletes? What are the things that we give the non-athletes? It's almost identical. It's not the athlete thing that matters.

What matters is it specific to your physiology and your demands and your goals. And that is the same answer I would say, by the way, when you say women versus men. Hey, we don't coach women versus men. What we coach is you. Individual, your physiology demands and goals are unique to you.

I don't care what body you put that in, I don't care what sport you put that in or not, we're going to coach you as a unique human being and whatever that means. Of course there are generalities we can kind of cover that functionally split them, but it's the same as old versus young, right? Or movement person, not movement beginner.

So there's a thousand different categories that split people up, but the reality of it is, it's just you based on your unique physiology. So could we go down the supplement route to answer your question? Sure. Could we go down recovery? Yeah, sleep, right, water.

We could go any of these routes that you want. And what we're going to generally say is our goal with any of our athletes is to get their physiology into a position where they have the least amount of what we call performance anchors. So these are things that are holding your physiology back, that are draining your system. They're non-specific stressors.

So what we want to do is create, the way that you create physiological adaptation, that's the fancy way to say change, right? You wanna grow muscle, you wanna lose fat, you wanna have more, less back pain, or you wanna higher libido, okay fine, you're trying to do some change, awesome. Well that is a response to stress.

Adaptation happens because of stress, and so the way that you create change some change. Awesome. Well, that is a response to stress. Adaptation happens because of stress. So the way that you create change is you put a whole bunch of stress onto a system. The reality of this is your body can only handle so much total stress. The science word is allostatic load. When that stress load gets too high, then any more additional stress no longer creates adaptation, it creates maladaptation, right? Backwards and you get overrun or run down

or whatever the case is. So, the way that you enhance that stress load is not to actually necessarily just dump more stress on the system, is to make sure you don't have any non-specific stressors. So what that means is if you pre-fold your stress bucket 80% from shit you didn't want coming in, you don't have much room to put in the stuff that you do.

So this means like I work out a little bit and I get super sore or I get exhausted. I'm like, interesting. I have a couple of meetings a day and then my brain shuts down. Interesting. Those are stressors, but I can tell you're preloaded. There's lots of different things in there, right?

So if we can remove those nonspecific stressors, our ability to put in the ones we want to create that adaptation, so it's the same goal no matter what it is. These nonspecific stressors can be things like poor sleep. It can be a micronutrient insufficiency. It could be a suboptimal, not even like a clinical deficiency

in something in your blood. It could be a thousand different things. We're running environmental scans on every one of our people that go through, so there's a lot of ways that we can find things. It could be mental health, it could be stress management. It could come from any of these routes, but we're looking at all of it,

and we're gonna see where is it coming in the most from you, remove that, and now we generally just get the back away. We want people in an environment where they're not following 600 supplements and a 90 minute routine just to go to bed every day. And these are unrealistic long-term solutions, but you have to kind of figure out what is putting the most strain in the system initially,

get that out of the way, and then generally let physiology do what it wants. I was the 90 minute supplement every two hours person for a very long time. And flexibility has been like a new thing for me because I do love like a very regimented routine but I've had to sort of ease up on that. Do you think and this is a bit of a deep question but do you think for someone listening who wants to be in the best shape of their life, lose fat, gain muscle, do you think for someone listening who wants to be in the best shape of their life, lose fat, gain muscle, do you think suffering

is a part of that, or do you think there's a way to go about it that is enjoyable? Okay, so it's clearly both, right? The way that you wanna think about this is, you wanna suffer in the way that your muscle's able to handle, and you wanna do this in a way that is gonna establish the most long-term consistency. The goals you just outlined are different than other client goals we hear.

But let's just take the ones you said. Okay, I want to have fat loss. I want to be in the best shape of my life. Do you want to be in the best shape of your life for a week? The assumption is you want that to stay around for a while, right? Yes. Great. So we're automatically thinking we have to put ourselves in a system that is somewhat sustainable. Yep. Okay.

So that is a different approach maybe than other approaches where compare this to say our professional fighters who really want to be in the best shape of their life. And they only really have to be there for a week. Okay. Right, because they're going to compete and they're going to fight for a world championship and things like that.

We're going to get them in good shape, but they're actually literally trying to peak. The Olympics, we just had this, like our athletes were peaking. You get it, right? So when all those questions are going in my head, I'm literally thinking, okay, you're probably talking like long-term stay that way for a long time.

So it's a different approach. So to your question, what we want to do is figure out, can we get those things done in a way that is sustainable and where your suffering is a way that you can handle it? So could this be hunger or suffering? Okay, fine. Some people are fine with that. Some people that is a huge trigger.

Yeah. No problem. Can it be other types of suffering? Fine, can the suffering be, we're gonna be walking more often so you don't get as much work done. Ah, God, we have to stop working. Is that it?

That may be a different type of suffering we ask of you. Could be any number of things. It could be we have to actually carve out 45 minutes before sleep because we have to get more effective sleep as a huge component to effective fat loss. People like completely miss that or disregard the important role of sleep in successful fat loss.

So we will do, like it could be a number of ways to different sufferers. So ultimately there's gonna have to be some, but we can be as intelligent as possible and to not put you on a short-sighted goal. We wanna go off the long game there. And so what we'll always say with that question is, a lot of people will think,

I have to lose weight to kind of get healthy. That's true. Sometimes though we need to get you healthy first to then let you have more successful weight loss. So we have to pick our suffering and be intelligent with what we ask of people. What we don't want to do is set people up into positions that are extremely unrealistic.

I'm particularly sensitive to this one because I have young kids, right? You take somebody who's got kids and a job and other things going on, you're going to lose that battle. If you put them in like really ridiculous food prep modes or things like, all right, that was just a bad coaching decision.

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offer. For a limited time, get 40% off your first box plus a free item in every box for life. Go to hungryroot.com slash pow and use code pow. That is hungryroot.com slash pow. Code pow to get 40% off your first box and a free item of choice for life. Hungryroot.com slash pow, code pow, P-O-W. So back in 2017, I lost 90 pounds in a year window, but it was literally all I thought about for that year. So back in 2017, I lost 90 pounds in a year window, but it was literally all I thought about for that year. Like I didn't have, I don't have kids.

I wasn't even in school. I had dropped out at that point. My life was also a mess. So I didn't really have a choice. Like it was a very like isolated situation. And I think when people ask me questions and they, I just have to mention that because it was a very unique time of my life where I could really zone in on that.

I did work at, I worked at Orange Theory Fitness at the front desk. And I'd bring my little meal prep every day. It was pretty funny, but yeah, like I could really zone in on it. And for people with kids and school and whatever else, it's a lot. What would you say is the biggest barrier to entry for people who

want to lose a lot of weight or have a fitness journey? What is stopping them along the way? Dr. Justin Marchegiani It's always about systems. Dr. Emma Cunningham Mm-hmm. Dr. Justin Marchegiani So I was kind of saying a second ago, like put yourself in a better system. I'll give you a direct example. We will split people up into what I call cooks or bakers. All right. So you know the difference between cooking and baking is? I feel like baking's very exact and measured

and cooking's a bit more creative and flexible. Right, so initially if you were to come to me and say I got 90 pounds to lose, the very first thing I'm trying to figure out is, okay, what kind of a system is gonna work best for you based on your situation if you identify you as a cook. And I can ask this question. Okay, Mari, like I'm gonna give you this meal plan.

You're gonna weigh and measure everything you eat for the next six months. Yeah. Okay. That's what I did. Or we can have a call once every two weeks. We can talk about kind of some concepts and then you'll be out to pasture.

Which of those would you have picked back in that day? Option A for sure. Great, so we would have said, all right, you're a baker. You want precision, you want detail, you want systems. Even if the system isn't perfect, it doesn't matter because you actually would probably have some relief, less anxiety because you have a plan, you have a system, you're just gonna follow it.

Could there be other options? Sure, sure, sure, I don't really care. I just want to know what to do and I want to win. Amazing. Other people that does the exact opposite, right? People that are what I would call a cook, that's gonna give them insane anxiety. Because they're like, oh my God, I have no flexibility,

I have no freedom, I feel claustrophobic and trapped and oh, this is gonna be terrible. If I were to give you the concepts approach back then, you would have been more of like, ah, but like what to do, like how, and you would have probably given you a worse approach because you don't know exactly what to do. So when I say like systems,

that's the type of stuff I'm trying to figure out, right? Am I, I'm immediately gonna say, am I gonna create chaos in your life because I'm not giving you enough detail? Then I need to give you specific detail and I don't wanna give you any wiggle room. Other people then we're gonna go the opposite direction. So when it comes to successful long-term fat loss

in this example, that's the first thing we're trying to figure out. If you are, it doesn't matter if you have the kids or don't have the kids or whatever stage life you run, companies you're traveling, how can I put you in a position to succeed for your personality based on this? I would strongly encourage people at the beginning of their journey to spend at least,

I'd like to say 30 days, but give me like 14 days, a week if I have to, being that baker. You need to know, you need some calibration. What is six ounces of meat really look like? What is a cup of rice? What is the serving of olive oil or whatever foods you're eating or not eating? It doesn't matter. Because that alone is like, oh, I didn't realize it.

When I've done this activity in my classes, you will find a couple of things. People are always stunned how little protein they're eating and how much fat that they're eating. Like always like, oh my gosh, like I thought I was eating 200 grams of protein a day and I'm eating 110. And I didn't realize I'm eating 250 grams of fat a day.

Like they just have no calibration to that stuff. So I don't necessarily need you to follow that the whole time but we need to have a little bit of awakening and awareness so that you can go, okay. So when I ask you to eyeball stuff, we're at least in the stratosphere of realistic. If you don't have some calibration, then it's impossible. Imagine that you're driving

and I took away your odometer and your speedometer. It was like, oh yeah, okay, great down there, but just don't overspeed. Go from here all the way to Houston and never speed. Like you have no idea what you're doing because you're always relying on that output, right? So you have to have some calibration if you're gonna run the cook approach,

which is kind of like concepts and things like that, you gotta get some calibration. When I need to get dialed in personally, when our athletes have to get dialed in because we have a specific weight to make or time, we always revert back to baking. So when I have to hit a goal, we get detailed. But once we've done that, then we go back into cooking mode.

So when athlete comes into the off season, we tend to give them their stuff in like concepts. Make it a little bit easier for them. Yeah, take some time off. Like I just want you to do A, B and C, right? Make sure you kind of hit your protein numbers, get this much vegetable in per day and get close, okay? But then when it's like we're getting closer

and tighter and tighter, we gotta get dialed in, we get really specific and then when the season starts, we actually kind of go back to concepts because we got a lot going on to manage, right? So you can play back and forth between both of these things, but definitely my big advice for somebody just starting it, get a little bit calibrated, don't worry about the specifics of the diet.

Don't worry about the specifics of the exercise routine. Be consistent, establish a baseline. Whatever it is that you're eating, okay, we'll improve the system, we'll improve the numbers later. But you've got to get a consistent pattern down, get some understanding of what we're doing. So the system is number one,

and I just gave you number two, which is you have to create stability. You don't have to eat the same thing every day, but we have to have some sort of thing. There's actually excellent research showing this. When you match people for calories per calories and per other macronutrients, the ones that eat them more consistently

at the more consistent times will have more effective weight management than those that are eating it inconsistently throughout the day. It has nothing to do with timing or anything like that. Eat one meal a day, eat six meals a day, I don't care. That doesn't really particularly matter. Physiologically, if it makes a better system for you, fine.

Doesn't matter. But you need to be somewhat consistent in your approach. Again, within reason for you. So if you do those two things, most people will have a huge amount of progress for the first six weeks, six months, or whatever that domain can be, without needing to get into any detail really past that.

That is always our first two battles. And once you get those down, they're typically in a really good spot. I think that's such a fantastic way of phrasing it, because I've, so when I started losing weight, I used my fitness pal, like religiously tracked every thing I was putting in my mouth. And I'm so glad I did that because I had zero understanding of nutrition before. So I didn't even really understand what a carb protein

or fat were until I was plugging everything in. And I was watching all the bodybuilding girls on YouTube. So I was like imitating their diets for a while. I was like, thought I was going all the bodybuilding girls on YouTube. So I was imitating their diets for a while and I thought I was gonna be a bikini competitor, but that's what taught me how to eyeball a plate. So I feel like I was baking for a year and now I've been cooking for the past five years or whatever. You know what's crazy about that? You'll hear that story.

If you did it a year, I'm telling you, do it for 30 days and you can go back into cook mode for a decade. Yeah, that's smart. It'll last a really, it may be potentially forever. Like my wife hasn't gone into baker mode in probably over a decade. Does she weight lift?

She, maybe like strength train, yeah, for sure. But she was, you know, back in the day, growing up kind of in the LA thing, like it was weigh and measure everything, like be this specific body weight. And so she spent years doing that. And now she, like, she will tell you, you could pull up anything in front of her

and she will know the macros of like any amount. Yeah. Because she was like way too far down that road. Yeah. In a, you know, bad position probably. But now because of that, the rest of her life, she has an incredibly good calibration of where she's at and even for other people. So her ability to portion for our kids and stuff, she knows exactly what they're getting.

Yeah, it's really beneficial. It's a little bit of work. It sucks. It's kind of a grind, I get it. But it's going to pay dividends the rest of your life. I also feel like people get caught up on scheduling. And I don't know what you do with your clients, but I feel like everyone has a very individual lifestyle and you kind of need to make it work for you. Like I was going first thing in the morning and I still do that. Like I have to work out first thing, otherwise it's not going to happen. What do you recommend to people who feel like they don't have time in the morning or they

work all day? Like I think people get caught up when they don't have time or it's not at the optimal time. What do you say to those people? Yeah, optimal time won't really exist for the overwhelming majority of people in terms of exercise. You can say the same thing with the number of meals you have per day, the time, right?

Should I do a 12 hour fasting window or four? Like those things don't matter. They matter very, very, very very little same thing with exercise training more. I don't care at all Like we've seen we've broken world records in strength sports. We've coached Olympians and weightlifting. We've done and like we've done them all We've done thousands of normal people and I'm when I say that those things don't matter much Like they really don't matter that much. Some of our professional athletes will train at seven in the morning. Some of them don't wake up before one.

Like we've won world titles in every sport, doing it lots of different ways. So it's not that it's irrelevant. It's just not that important relative to the more contextualized parts. So when do you feel best? When do you have time? What's more realistic?

What will you execute better? What will be more consistent? And those things just matter so much more than things like timing of the day. The only caveat I'll give you there would be there is some negative consequences to doing a bunch of really high intensity work really late at night.

Okay. If you can avoid that, that's generally better. And we've had to do that a number of times with clients, non-athletes typically. We deal with those with athletes, but that's part of the course, right? You're going to play a baseball game till 11 p.m. Yeah, I was going to ask you, what do you, for fighters who are going on at like 10 or 11 p.m.,

how do they prep for that? Like, are they not exhausted? No, no, because their life is scheduled around that. Really? Yeah, that's why we're never gonna have a fighter wake up at 7 a.m., 8 a.m. It makes, we only generally deal with like main event fighters so it's eight to nine, 9.30, 10 p.m.

We've also fought in many different time zones. Fight Island and Abu Dhabi and like Singapore and like we've been all over the place, right? And the Olympics were in Paris, like we're all over there, right? And so what you need to do is go reverse then engineer so that that competition time is when they're peaking physically throughout the day.

Got it. And so for the six to eight or 10 weeks before, their schedule is being changed so that that is when they are performing their best. Which means they're gonna train at eight, nine p.m. Every night. And then it's gonna be incredibly unalistic for us to expect them to be in bed by 11. Yeah.

It would be actually, even if it was possible, it would be a horrible coaching decision that you're certainly not peaking physically and cognitively two hours before your sleep time. And so those people might go to bed at two or three in the morning and then they're sleeping until 11 or noon the next day. So now we're still getting them in their physical peak typically like five to eight hours after waking is going to be when their competition time is.

So we are engineering their life around that because that's what they're there for. So that is one exception. The people that are not like that, but you still kind of, I work till six and then I get off work and then I go train at 7 p.m. And then I try to go to bed at nine and you do a lot of high intensity stuff. Doesn't always happen, but it's very likely

that will be detrimental to your sleep. And we'll see that in a number of areas pop up. This will a lot of times be the, I fall asleep super easy, then I wake up in the middle the middle of night can't go back to sleep. Because the cortisol is up from the workout? It's not the cortisol per se that will probably be up. It's a whole host of physiological cascades that are churning and burning. So if you want to call it cortisol like fine as one representation of general stress but it's like cortisol is often quite maligned when it doesn't need to be

It's super productive. But yeah in general like just called the global stress response is quite high temperature Recovery processes all these are in the wrong direction And so people will often fall asleep pretty quickly, okay, because they're tired and fatigued But then their system gets woken up within a couple of hours and they have a really hard time Going back to sleep we can see that in the respiratory rate and their heart rate in HRV, different metrics like that. That'll pop up and we're like, okay, we have to do either some sort

of very specific match down regulation. So if you are in this boat and you're like, this is no way you can work out in any other time of the day and you're not gonna do only like low intensity walks. Okay, fine. If you have to do the high intensity stuff at night, you need to leave that session or before you leave, do a very diligent down regulation.

You have to pay that thing back or you're gonna have trouble sleeping and it's gonna be a problem. So that down regulation piece can be a number, it's honestly specific to you, like what helps you down regulate. Simple examples, go to the corner of the gym or leave the gym, sit in your car, wherever that it's honestly specific to you. Like what helps you down regulate? Simple examples, go to the corner of the gym or leave the gym, sit in your car, wherever,

that it's kind of quiet. Or you can be dark with something over your eyes and just breathe through your nose for five minutes. We can do different like longer exhale stuff. That's fine, but the reality of it is like, you sometimes just need like five to seven minutes without music blasting without Lights on super bright and not and just bring it back down a lot of times that alone will be enough

I've heard you use the phrase exercise snacks. Is that correct? Oh, yeah, sure. Can you tell us about exercise snacks? What does that mean? Yeah, sure. So it's a basic idea of when you think about exercise, physical activity, a lot of times we bundle it all together. But the reality of it is you wanna kinda think about like physical activity as how much movement you have throughout the day. So if you're sitting at a desk all day, your general physical activity, this is a step count. Basic things like that.

So you wanna bucket physical activity as kind of a thing where all of us basically want that as high as we can, realistically. That's good, but it's not a surrogate for true structured planned exercise, okay? We want that. We want some of those things over there. You don't want to fall into the trap of saying like, I work out, I do these high intensity exercises

for 45 minutes a day, and do it five days a week. So I'm super healthy. And then you do no physical activity. Okay. There's lots of literature on that is not great either. So like, let's say you're having a crazy workout at 8 a.m. hit training, strength training, and then you sit at a desk all day and you don't move again.

That would be better than not doing the workout. Okay. But it would certainly be suboptimal. Yeah. We need some sort of physical movement throughout the day and we need structured exercise. That's our best component. Okay, now in between those two areas are exercise snacks.

So what this basically says is, imagine you are sitting there all day. We're all dressed up. Yeah, I wouldn't look so fancy over here, right? Like, your crew looks so great. Do we look fancy? Yeah. We're all dressed up. Yeah, I wouldn't look so fancy over here, right? Your crew looks so great. Do we look fancy? Yeah, you look great.

There's a lot of fashion around this place. My best outfit. Is it? No. If I dress myself, you guys would be laughing right now. Wait, who picked this out? I'm not allowed to, and nothing that goes in my house is chosen by me.

Your wife is picking it? What do you wear to work every day? To work every day? Like active wear? As in like get out of my bed and go upstairs to my computer? Yeah. Yeah, definitely going to be shorts and a very, very old t-shirt. Do you have a walking treadmill?

No. I'm surprised by that. I don't, like honestly I don't jam on it that much. Yeah. I'm a big fidgeter. So if I was working in this room, I would be like dancing up and not dancing, but I'd be moving, jumping, like shaking,

shuffling around a lot throughout the day. Yeah. In my office, I don't like to walk. I like to like pace back and forth. I have half of my wall is a big whiteboard. So I'm doing stuff on there. It's like my husband, he does this thing. Or I'm out like, I can't, I can't sit like that.

I can't like walk and if I'm like working, I'm there. And if I'm not, I'm gonna be moving around, so. I feel like that's an underrated thing. It's a big deal. My husband paces on the phone, he's always standing up, he never sits down, he's kind of like crazy entrepreneur vibes, but he's a jacked, he's a bodybuilder, he's constantly moving.

And I feel like he is the craziest step count because he's just constantly, like you wouldn't think that it's having constantly moving. And I feel like he is the craziest step count because he's just constantly Like you wouldn't think that it's having an impact, but I feel like it does. Oh, it's a massive impact In fact one would argue and there's a lot of literature to support that that is the bigger variable than anything else So if you look at things like total daily energy expenditure the amount of energy you spend like calories you burn throughout the day If you want to be in a caloric deficit, okay, you have kind of two global options, you either consume less or you move more, fine.

Now people tend to hear that and they think the movement part means I just said exercise. You can do that, but structured intentional physical exercise does not burn the caloric expenditure that people think, it's not even close. The average person's probably going to do a couple of hundred calories in their workout. burn the caloric expenditure that people think. It's not even close. The average person's probably going to do a couple of hundred calories in their workout.

They'll often think I burned a thousand or 1500, like really high numbers. That's really, really rare. It's generally a couple of hundred calories. Strength training, as much as I love it, burns very little calories. So that's not the thing that moves the needle there. There's another component to that that's called NEAT, non-exercise active thermogenesis, right?

So it's the calories you burn doing non-specific fidgeting. It's your foot right now moving around, right? It's the twitching, it's me jumping up and down, it's your husband pacing back and forth. It's those things. That is actually probably the bigger delta in terms of your caloric expenditure than any of the other variables.

There's a couple of other variables in that equation that I didn't mention like thermal effective food and things like that. But there's a strong argument to be made that that neat is the thing. That's also the thing that will go down when you have chronic caloric restriction. Okay. So if you're on low calories for a very long time, it's not that your like basal metabolic rate goes down that much. That's the kind of amount of energy that you're on low calories for a very long time, it's not that your basal metabolic rate goes down that much. That's the kind of amount of energy that you're burning throughout the day just to stay alive. It's the neat that starts coming down.

And if you watch bodybuilders specifically in the physique world, when they are getting low on calories, watch his fidgeting just go to zero. Right, because you don't want to use up energy. You'll just see them start leaning on stuff all the time and sitting and laying and hunching over. They have no idea that they're doing it, but their body is trying to bring caloric expenditure

down because caloric intake is down. And that's the thing that shuts them down a ton is that neat thing. So they'll just be like sitting there. They're on stage like about to pass out. Oh, for sure. Yeah, that's rough. Did you see Chris Bumstead? No, I saw that he won though, right?

Yeah, it's his last one. He retired, right? Yeah. I don't follow the physique world that much, but I saw that cause six in a row and then hold the plug, right? Do you ever coach those people? Because I feel like it's very aesthetic

and not so much like inner health. I don't coach them at all really that much. Like I just honestly don't find that field interesting at all. Really? Never, like, it's like kind of, but. It's like kind of anti-performance, I guess. I mean, it is, and it is like no disrespect,

but I grew up where like we were always going to promote substance over style. It was like, we never wore gloves and like aesthetics. I told you, I hate fashion. Like with all my passion, right? I was like, we never wore gloves and like aesthetics. I told you earlier, like I hate fashion. Like with all my passion, right? It's like, whatever. Yeah. But that said, it's really hard work.

Yeah. Like those folks, it's a ton of suffering. So my business partner that runs all of our coaching programs, Dan Garner, he does that stuff. So for those people that come in, bodybuilders, he competes in bodybuilding still and physique. He will do all that stuff. So for those people that come in, bodybuilders, he competes in bodybuilding still, in physique. He will do all that stuff in house. And me, I'm like, give me a figure skater.

I'd rather have a figure skater than a bodybuilder. Like, I just don't. Have you worked with a figure skater before? I haven't, but Dan has. That's really interesting. Yeah, he did a couple of Olympic medalists. What is their diet like? I don't know, I can imagine though. It's not gonna be that different.

Really? Yeah. I mean, you have to manage calories, right? Because you gotta be like, it's not that different from like our gymnasts and stuff like that. We've had to deal with anyone that's got to manage weight, but still perform. It's not that hard of a system. Because they're like flying through the air. Totally. But the thing that's going to get skaters is going to be things like training volume. Because they're skating so much. And they're training so much.

And so you have to keep, it's the same thing with like, honestly, it's very similar to conceptually, like most distance athletes. Because body mass is so big, it's such a big deal. And like whether you're a rower, swimmer, cyclist, like any extra body weight, that's FTP, right? For that endurance world. It's just gonna add mass that you gotta carry.

But at the same time, the fueling demands are so high. So you have to really be specific about when and how you're fueling and all that to make sure that you're as lean as you can, but then not sacrificing sleep or recovery. Do you ever have a questions? We have had like three. No.

Yeah. Oh my God, I'm so curious. These would be, I wouldn't say full-time professional ones, but folks that, like we had a lawyer, actually, she's from Texas. And we actually have like probably two or three that are competing right now. Wow.

At least in a program. Jumpers? I couldn't answer that question. I would guess jumpers, if you know. I grew up, my mom barrel raced for forever. Stop. I've been barrel racing. Yeah. Yeah, it's great Right. Yeah, I was gonna ask you because you said you grew up in the country and I was like I figured

I feel like anyone who grows up in the country ends up rodeoing somehow Yeah, I we we did a little bit of that stuff. I I did um I think the first one I did was I was probably like five or six. What did you do? The same thing that every six year old does, because you're not gonna get on Broncos. The sheep? Yeah. That's the way to go.

Mutton busting? Yeah, exactly. It's very character building, I feel like. Yeah, I remember I got so mad because I was pretty athletic as a kid, and I was like, oh, I'm gonna win. For sure, like I'd never been on one, but I was like for sure gonna win,

and I just fell off immediately, and I was so mad. No. Maybe it's like a balance thing. I mean, I don't know how much skill is involved. I had never done it before. Yeah. I had ridden horses, I could ride a horse. I'm like, I'm definitely gonna ride that.

It's gonna be super easy. All these kids are gonna suck and then I didn't win immediately the first time. So I was like, I hate this. Never again. Women who come to you who are afraid of strength training but want muscle. Like, what do you tell them? So it depends on where the afraid is coming from.

Yeah. All right, so the way we'll always break it down is look, feel, perform. Right, so everyone on the planet wants to look a certain way. You define what you like or don't like differently than me, fine, I don't care, you set the rules. Tell me what you, you don't want your shoulders to be big, fine, or you want them to be big, you want your weight, I don't care at all. You tell me what you want to look like, don't want, you set the rules. Tell me what you, you don't want your shoulders to be big, fine, or you want them to be big,

but you want your weight, like I don't care at all. You tell me what you wanna look like, don't wanna look like, fine. That's look. Feel, what do you wanna feel like? Right, so you wanna feel strong, you don't care about feeling strong. You wanna feel more energy, right?

You don't wanna feel the fatigue going up, like what is the feeling thing that you're gonna care about? And then perform, how do you wanna perform? Right, what is that area of performance to you? Again, we talked about examples earlier, so whatever it is. Once I have those, and then we work backwards, okay, great. So we're gonna recommend strike training. Awesome, why? Because it's gonna hit those goals.

And then I'm gonna show them, we'll actually take them directly through the research. Show them the papers that this type of training will get specifically to this goal or whatever, and it'll not achieve this outcome. So if it's an education piece, Show them the papers that this type of training will get specifically to this goal or whatever, and it'll not achieve this outcome. So if it's an education piece, it's actually then becomes quite simple. A lot of that, as you're well aware, is rooted in very, very old, we'll call it even mythology

at this point, right? We also have, I don't know how many, hundreds of clients, we can look back on them and say, well, it didn't happen to those first 600. Probably not gonna happen to you. You know, like we've done this so many times. It's hard for them to make an argument, like they're the special case who's gonna,

this is gonna happen. Bulk up, quote unquote. Right. And then because we have people on our team that do compete in physique, their job professionally is to make their physique look exactly how they want. They need this muscle to grow but not that much.

So we can literally be like, tell me which one you don't want to get big and we will make sure it doesn't get big. And which one you want to get big and we can do that. It's like not that hard of a thing to do. And so when they have that empowerment, they're like, oh, okay. Cause ultimately then it just comes down to trust.

Saying like, you promised you're gonna get me where I'm gonna get and we're not gonna pull the like, yes, you said that, but then we're gonna do it anyways cause we think it's better for you. We're not gonna do that. Like if you come in saying, you want your glutes to get bigger, great. We're gonna make sure your glutes get bigger,

but you don't want your thighs bigger. Okay. Like we can manage that. It's not always perfectly realistic, their expectations, but we can get pretty close. So it's an education piece at the beginning. And then it is saying, okay, just be good enough to give them what they want.

And generally we're pretty successful at that. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider-patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor or health team.