StarTalk Radio - Pain and Gain, with Lindsey Vonn

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

You’re at the top of your game and you get injured. Now what? Neil deGrasse Tyson and co-hosts Gary O’Reilly and Chuck Nice explore injury recovery and rehabilitation with Lindsey Vonn and exercise scientist Shona Halson. NOTE: StarTalk+ Patrons can watch or listen to this entire episode commercial-free. Photo Credit: Après Productions. Subscribe to SiriusXM Podcasts+ on Apple Podcasts to listen to new episodes ad-free and a whole week early.

Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now. This is StarTalk Sports Edition. I'm your host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist. And today's topic is recovery, sports recovery. And we're going to have two special guests to bring into this topic because two of the three of us in studio right now know nothing about this. So let me first introduce Chuck. Chuck, nice.

Hey, Neil, what's up? All right, dude. Yeah. So we've recovered from things but not knowing anything about it. We've got a third in the co-host here, Gary O'Reilly. Gary. Hey, Neil. Former professional soccer pro. You've done some recovering in your day, right?

Yes. Okay. Yes. Okay. And remind me, you also did some soccer commentary in the UK. Is that right? Yeah, and around the world. So I get to pollute people's airwaves, and they can't do anything about it but mute me.

Okay, that's the solution. Mute. Okay. Don't give the audience any ideas, Gary. So with recovery, you know, we see images, you feel them, you know when things go wrong. But how do you get it right? First, how do you prevent injuries from happening that you need to recover from? And even if you weren't injured, how do you just recover from having been the star athlete that you were?

Oh, when you said, how do you deal with recovery? I was like, well well the first step is admitting that you have a problem okay that different kind of recovery because that's the kind of recovery that i know about so what we did was we we found someone out there who may be the greatest of all time which is now a full-blown acronym GOAT. GOAT. The greatest of all time in the sport. And it's Lindsey Vonn, Olympic gold medalist, multiple-time world champion, and America's greatest alpine skier I think we ever had. Oh, yes.

And possibly one of the greatest ski racers of all time. And so we're featuring an interview that I conducted with her a little bit earlier. And so that was fun. We'll get to some clips from that. But we need some expertise in the house. And I'd like to think that Gary is an expert, but he's only an expert at having been injured. That's a different kind of expertise. Okay.

So who we're bringing on now is Professor Shona Halston. Professor Halston, welcome to StarTalk Sports Edition. Thank you, Neil. Thanks for having me on. Excellent. Oh, I detect a little bit of accent there. Let's see where you're from. I got you down as associate professor in the School of Behavioral and Health Sciences,

Australian Catholic University, ACU. Very nice. And a senior physiologist at the Australian Institute of Sport for 15 years. And your academic background, you have a PhD in exercise physiology. I love all of these topics because the human body and performance has been a side passion of mine. In another universe, that's what I'd be doing. So I'm a little bit jealous here. And you've published on the subject. And what I'm most intrigued is that you were the director

of the Australian Olympic Committee Recovery Center for three Olympic Games. So it sounds like you are the right person at the right time to have on this freaking show. Okay. Thanks, I hope so. No, no, there's no hope. There's no...

You do or you do not. You are or you are not. And as far as we're concerned, you are. So before I go to my first clip with Lindsay Vaughn, Shona, I want to know from you, when did people start thinking about recovery as a fundamental part of the entire athletic experience? Yeah, it's a great question. I think it was really the Russians and the East Germans that got really excited about it in the 80s. And so I think what we saw was that people, athletes were training more and more than ever before.

And there was this thought that, you know, it's all about the training. And then I guess, you know, in the 80s, we started to understand that maybe balancing that training with a bit of recovery is a good idea. From a science perspective, it was probably around the 2000s that we started to go, hang on, all these athletes are doing this crazy stuff. Does it actually work? Should they be doing it? When do they do it?

Can they do it better? So it's probably been the last 20 years that we've started to really focus on the scientific aspect of it. And it's been around for a while. I mean, you have the... Except, except, if memory serves, the Olympics used to be the gentleman's activity. Everybody in the Olympics had a day job that was not sports. Isn't that right? And so I don't think people thought...

I mean, I'm all with Shona on this. When people start being an athlete full-time, then you have other issues. Does that correspond with your read of the timeline, Shona? Yeah, for sure. I think that when athletes have their whole day being able to devote to training because they're not working anymore, your coaches think, fantastic, let's train them a bit more. And that can be good, but it also can be not so good.

So they obviously need to, as I said, balance that out with a bit of recovery. We all remember those scenes in Rocky IV where Rocky is fighting Drago, the Russian. And Rocky's out there, you know, in the cabin hauling logs. Thanks for that bit of... Just like that. That's the sequel, Rocky's speech impediment. They're going to get to that in the next episode. But they show Rocky doing sort of very natural things,

and then Drago is there with five scientists in lab coats around him. So, Shona, are you one of these scientists in lab coats surrounding the athletes before, during, and after they get off the track? Yeah, definitely. I've been one of the people that have done a fair bit of the research both in the lab, sort of measuring the athletes and testing them

and seeing what we're doing with their recovery, but also in the field as well. So, as you said earlier, working with the Olympic athletes and testing them sometimes and other times just letting them run free and observing their recovery and giving them advice and education. Chuck, you hear how she said that, let them run free and observing their recovery and giving them advice and education. Chuck, you hear how she said that, let them run free? It's like free-range athletes. They're so much happier when they're free-range.

Why do I sense I feel like a guinea pig? And they taste so much better. I'm a free-range experiment. Well, let's go to my first clip with Lindsey Vonn. And we learned from Lindsey that recovery is an important and invisible side of an athlete's life, invisible to all the fans and viewers and enthusiasts. But I wanted to know from her whether she had some particular regimen

whether she had some particular regimen from beginning to end that oversees all that she does to prepare and recover. So let's check it out. So we would have different programs based on was it a training day? Was it a race day? Because in any given week, we're usually racing a minimum of two days, training a minimum of two. So racing and training is not too dissimilar. The protein shake after training, replenishing all the nutrients, making sure I have my nap, making sure I don't have too many distractions.

Bike is critical after I train because if you don't bike after you train or do some sort of kind of lactic acid flushing activity, your legs become incredibly heavy and you never actually get a chance to recover because that lactate is just sitting within your muscle. And so that was my routine every single day. I think I got, as I got older, the sleep became more and more important. And then also as I had injuries, my recovery, as far as, you know, physical therapy, I had physical therapy every night. That became more intense. And also like the preparation to be able to prepare my body to compete was much, much longer and more intense. I just want to make sure I heard you accurately.

You're saying you will spend perhaps two days right up to the point where you're going to have to compete. So the two days pre-competition training, and you might have two days of events. And at the end of that, you say to yourself, oh, let me go spin on a bicycle. I'm not done with my body. No, it's like immediately. And also what we did actually was when we had two runs, if it was a slalom or giant slalom where there's two runs, we would actually get a bike and position it in a place where after the first run, oxygen and blood flow to the muscles. You know, again, like the lactic acid that we produce is very high. And also that's why you train, train a high volume so that you can have the endurance in your legs to continue to repeat the same high performance every day. So Shona, is this, is what she described standard or is this just her own cocktail recipe for, for kicking ass out there on the slopes?

It's really common for the really good athletes to have a program and a protocol and something they follow. Some of the best athletes that I've ever worked with have had that sort of regimen and they follow it really clearly. It might look a little different for different athletes, but what Lindsay suggested there that she's doing sounds really common from a recovery perspective for her specific sport. Can you speak to that, what she's talking about spinning on a bicycle and the difference between what she's talking about in recovery and what we see in an NFL game when a guy like has a muscle

strain or an injury and in between plays while the other team is out there, the other part of the team is out there, they're on the sidelines spinning it the same way. What's the difference there? Yeah, look, I think that it's kind of a similar approach. And what we think about when it comes to recovery, if we're focusing on lactate, which is a bit of an interesting one in itself, because we know that lactate doesn't cause soreness. We know it's involved in fatigue in some way. One of the contributors to fatigue. But isn't lactate like a fake milk that you buy? No.

Let me tell you something. It's in my refrigerator right now. I'm sorry. Sorry for my ignorance here. No, I'm the same way. I'm telling you, it's in my refrigerator. So what do we, so lactate, tell me what that is. Yeah, so essentially it's a byproduct of exercise.

So, you know, when we, you know, use glycolysis, which is, you know, the process to produce energy, we produce lactate. And one of the things is that if you do an active recovery, so you do a warm down, you're on a bike, or you're doing something low intensity, that helps speed up the clearance of that lactate. Oh, I get it.

So the pronunciation is lactate, not lactade. Okay, so I misheard that. That's good to know because once you said that, I was like, I'm no longer drinking this milk. You guys have crazy stuff over there. Sorry. The thing here is that the body will naturally flush that lactic acid out. Maybe not as fast.

So what's the deal? So what's the timeline here, Doctor? Yeah. So look, usually what we see is if you've got really high lactate levels, you probably clear that. We talk about clearing it in half a millimole a minute. So you're probably going to clear your lactate in 20 to 30 minutes anyway.

But if you're in a situation like Lindsay where she has to do repeated runs in a short period of time, you probably want to spend the time like she's doing to get rid of that by-product. But if you're someone who's not training again for the next day or even the afternoon, it'll clear, lactate will clear itself naturally. So I think there's an over

focus on lactate as, you know, we know it doesn't cause soreness, as I said, but it is something that does contribute to fatigue. So yes, you probably want to get rid of it if you've got a short timeframe that you're working within. Do they pee it out? I mean, to say, let me get rid of it by just cycling. You're still in a closed body because there's a layer of skin around you. It doesn't just pop out of some. So what does it mean to flush it out unless you're not otherwise going out to pee? And is that called lactating?

Different concept. Not something you do after exercise on the side of the... Go ahead and lactate. Not everyone does anyway. Okay, the act of flushing your lactic acid, first, is that lactating, to Chuck's point? Second, by what means does this happen? Yeah, well, we actually know now,

one of the super interesting things about lactate is it had this really bad name for a long time. Now we know you can actually use it as a fuel. So muscles can actually take it up and use it as a as a source of energy so it's not kind of the big bad guy that we always always thought it was but yeah you just metabolize it and yeah as i said you can use it as a fuel for exercise as well if we if i had to ask you the foundation if i said take one thing away that ruins everybody's post-training, post-event recovery, what would it be? Scotch. Scotch. Jack has totally nailed it. Scotch, social media, not sleeping. Social media too will totally ruin it. Yeah, okay. Yeah, not sleeping. Anything that stops you sleeping, Scotch, social media, media. Yeah, things that interfere with sleep actually, you know, to Chuck's point is actually correct.

Like we don't want to interfere with sleep. That's our best recovery strategy that we have. And then there's things I think that athletes might do like long active recoveries and things like that. They're probably, they don't harm, but they're probably not something that really helps either. So there's a lot of sort of things out there that athletes believe in. And, you know, we know belief is important. So, you know, if they're not harming them, you know, go for it. But I think the things that actually get in your way of recovery is probably things that are more important to avoid.

And before I get to the next clip, you got to clear this up for me. Why is it that some people like a warm bath and others want to be dumped in a pool of ice. It seems to me that if you put coal on your body, that would restrict the flow of new oxygen and other things. And so, plus, I don't want to jump in a bucket of ice. So why do I see both happening? And it's left me befuddled for years. Yeah, great question.

I think there's some of it's perception. Some people just hate cold water. Just naturally, it's like me befuddled for years. Yeah, great question. I think there's some of it's perception. Some people just hate cold water. Just naturally, it's like just not comfortable. Warm water is super comfortable. It's relaxing. You can, you know, no relaxation is involved in recovery. So like just chilling out is good. But the ice bath also takes away, it's got the cold temperature.

So it does reduce inflammation, which can reduce soreness um so it's like icing an injury it's like putting the whole body in oh okay so if Neil doesn't like ice yeah in a bath rather than in a cocktail why don't we do something very clever scientifically and have a cryotherapy chamber which does all of this thing super quick and I don't have to spend half an hour sat in this tub of ice. I mean, do they work? Do they actually work? It's interesting. We don't have as much science on the cryotherapy chamber

as we have on ice baths. We've got a lot more on ice baths. But the thing about the cryotherapy chamber is air is not good at conducting heat as water, which we know, so water is a great strategy to use. Water has hydrostatic pressure, which is also good for, you know, conducting heat as water, which we know. So water is a great strategy to use. Water has hydrostatic pressure, which is also good for, you know, blood flow and removal of those waste products. So, and the other thing, those cryotherapy chambers, while they're really obviously very cold, I've been in both ice bath and a cryotherapy chamber, and I've probably felt

colder in an ice bath because of the fact that it's water. And we know that there can be dangerous. Cryotherapy chambers can be dangerous. You can get skin, cold skin burns. If you pass out in one of those and you're not supervised, you're in a bit of trouble. I've actually been in one and I only lost two fingers. And just save your body from when we figure out how to thaw you out. One point I want to emphasize that Shona just

said is that if you imagine yourself running outside when it's like 33 degrees out in the air temperature, you can run out naked. You could do that and probably for five minutes or so and come back in. If I put you in a bucket of water with

ice at 33 degrees, you're near death after 15 minutes. So we can't overemphasize the point you're making here that water will suck heat out way faster than air does just in terms of what that is. Let me go to my last clip for this segment with Lindsey Vonn. We had a chat about, is it really true that you are what you eat and how would that apply

to a world champion and Olympic gold medalist? Let's check it out. So Lindsay, in modern times, the more we read about the effects of food on us, different kinds of food, different regimens, different eating habits, the more we learn that it's affecting your physiochemistry, your physiology, more than we ever previously imagined. So when you're injured and there's inflammation, of course, there are all manner of drugs that can reduce the inflammation. Were there any food regimens that in your world

served the role of what in a previous day might have been some pill you took or some other drugs you were injected with? I personally try not to take any sort of painkiller. The only thing I do take every day still is anti-inflammatory, but also Epsom salt baths. You know, obviously now there's a lot of science out there that says that meat causes inflammation. So I usually try to stick to fish and veggies and also wine. Like I always felt very inflamed after wine and also hydration. You know, water is, people really don't understand how important water is. And, you know, if you're not able to flush all of the toxins out of your body, they will remain there.

And a lot of people also don't drink good enough water to where it's actually being absorbed within the cell. But, Lindsay, the real problem is you're not drinking good enough wine. You see? Hey, maybe you're right. I've got it all backwards. You've got it all backwards. So, Doctor, apart from having Lindsay got it all backwards, as Neil says, is that kind of standard?

Is there a standard nutrition recovery for athletes, or do we get to a point where I have to have certain nutritions because of my event? And actually, you know what, there might be a genetic thing where I have to be careful or these things work better for me. Are we at that kind of level now? Yeah, I think from a nutrition perspective, we are to some extent. So athletes will definitely have, you know, the really good athletes will have their own program of what they eat and when

they eat it, especially around competition, especially when you're in a foreign environment and, you know, you don't know the food, you might bring your own food. Like there's lots of things like that where we're getting more individualised. And so the prescription of what an athlete takes is quite specific to them and their sport. So taking into account the demands of their sport. But when it comes to some of the more, you know, little interesting things that athletes might do that's unique to them, that's probably not really grounded in any science, you know, there's a lot of times we sort of think, well, look, if it's not doing any harm and it's something that they might be a

little superstitious about, which we know happens, then we say, just go for it. And from a genetic perspective, you know, there's some things that we're seeing now around, you know, celiac disease and some of those types of really specific issues that we're starting to understand more about. But in terms of just, you know, generally, is there genetically some foods that are better than others for us, you know, at this point for the elite athlete, we're not at that level yet. We do see athletes that attach to trends, like, so they'll watch a documentary on something that shows that, you know, not eating meat is good or not eating, you know, dairy is good. And then all of a sudden, without any basis to that from a testing perspective from themselves, they'll go, okay, all of a sudden now I'm vegan.

All of a sudden now I'm going keto. And then the dieticians have to work really hard to either tell them that they're not and test them and prove that they're not or sort of working in with, you know, with what they're saying and try to do the best they can in that situation. So you mentioned keto, you mean a low-carb diet like cavemen would have done. And cavemen live so long. You know, it's exactly the kind of life we want to emulate. Exactly. I want to be a grandfather by the time I'm 13 because I'm going to die in four years.

That's right. We're going to take a break. When we come back, more of my exclusive interview with Lindsay Vaughn. And guiding our analysis of her recovery regimens is Professor Shona Haltson. We'll see you in a moment. We're back. Star Talk Sports Edition. I got Chuck and Gary. Chuck.

Hey, hey, hey. Thanks for being there because, you know, I'm surfing blind here for half of what we do. So I'm glad, Gary, that you can anchor that. And Chuck, I don't know why we have you. No. We're in the same boat. Gary should just do this all by himself. He's the only one that actually was an athlete.

If I'm the seeing-eye dog in this scenario, then we're all in trouble. Really. So this episode, we're devoting to how athletes recover, especially athletes in the prime of their life. And we are featuring my exclusive interview with Lindsey Vonn, who is an alpine ski racer, possibly the greatest American alpine ski racer there ever was. And in the first segment, we looked at sort of training and race recovery, different regimens

someone might go through. And Professor Shona Halston is helping us out here. Let's jump right into my next clip with Lindsey Vonn, where we explored what does it mean to have pain while you are improving your performance. What does that mean? Is it really true, no pain, no gain? So let's find out.

So tell me about pain, because there's some people who might have meditative practices, you know, so how do you prepare yourself mentally for all of this beyond just the physical regimens that you go through? I just kind of suck it up and do it. Like I don't really, you know, a lot of people ask me, you suck it up and do it. This is, this is, well, we spoke with Edwin Moses, the great quarter, you know,

440, the guy from the Olympics, and he meditates, and he contemplates the cosmos, and you just suck it up. Yeah, I mean, basically, you know, you suck it up. There's no amount of meditation. There's no Eastern mysticism. You know, just you got to put it behind you and keep on trucking. That's my model.

You know, you can think about it. You can meditate about it or you could just suck it up and go do it. So that's the title of your next book. Okay. Just suck it up. It's going to be a bestseller, I'm sure. So I did not know that my mother raised Lindsay Vaughn. The only word she

left out was wussy. That's the way I heard it. Suck it up, you wussy, and do it. So, Shona, do you deal with the psychological state of athletes and their how they relate to the pain that they experience uh to a certain extent uh we do some work in mental fatigue and understanding you know how the how athletes get tired from it from a mental perspective when there's you know psychological issues i handball those across to my to my psychology mates but i must say that, you know, Lindsay's approach of sucking

it up, I really like. I think my psychology mates mightn't like it and they might say, come on, that's not the best approach. But I think when, you know, she's been doing something right, and if she says that she sucks it up and she just gets on with it, they're the kind of athletes I love working with. There's, you know, no nonsense, just get out there and do it. All right. So now let me ask you this. And as from a medical perspective, are there people who register pain at a higher intensity than other people? Because if there is such a thing, that means the people that are lower on the intensity scale would probably feel like suck it up and do it because it's actually easier for them to do that.

Wow. Good point. Yeah. What's up with that, Shona? Yeah, no, that's true. People do register pain at different levels. And that's why we always compare within the individual. So we always compare to what someone's normal, you know, baseline information is great. So comparing to, you know, if someone's always a two out of 10, but then one day, one day they might be a five, you know, we go, oh, that's okay. So comparing to, you know, if someone's always a two out of 10, but then one day, one day they might be a five, you know, we go, oh, that's okay. That's a, you know, that's a bit of a bit of a worry. Whereas if someone's always five and they jump up to six, we might be like, oh, six is, you know, six is whatever. But wait, but I think, isn't it more subtle than that? So for

example, Chuck, was it you who, we both put our hands in a bucket of ice to see how long we could keep it there? Ice water. Sorry, of ice water. And it hurt a great deal. It burned. It actually burned. And I knew I would win that between us only because I spent a lot of time experimenting with different temperatures. And he was going up against me.

Let's be honest. But my point, Shona, is, okay, I can put my hand in. I feel the pain. It's not like I don't feel the pain, but I'm accepting it rather than not accepting it. So can I really say that I have a lower pain threshold? Can't we both be experiencing it the same way, but I have more motivation to keep my hand in? Yeah, for sure. And there's actually evidence that athletes

have higher pain thresholds than non-athletes. Regular people, right. Yeah, they're just... Right, because honestly, I'm telling you right now, the pain threshold for a comedian is all psychological. It it's like are we talking about childhood scarring here because if we're talking about childhood scarring i'm a viking but we're talking about keeping our hand in a bucket of ice water because when i pulled my hand out shona my hand it wasn't like it just hurt. It was so stiffed that I had to move my fingers

with the other hand and then this guy is like I don't know what you're talking about. It's totally fine. And then finally it was just like, hey man can you please take your hand out of that bucket because I got a feeling you might do some

damage to yourself. See the thing is Chuck, I got a feeling you might do some damage. See, the thing is, Chuck, there's a motivation. And I'm sure Dr. Helson experiences this. I have a gold medal to win. I have a podium to be on. I need to be fit to play the next game. What's my motivation? A, if I, as you say, wuss out, I'm not achieving any of that.

And if I have to stick my foot, my hand, or whatever it is in a bucket of ice to make sure I'm there, I'm doing it. Because my motivation is strong enough for me to go through it. And what Neil's done, because he's experimented in certain areas, you get used to sticking your ankle in a bucket of ice. And you learn how to adapt. You learn how to work with those circumstances. But I also wrestled for many, many years, which is a particularly painful sport. So just to know what the pain is, maybe that's it, Shona. You just expose people to far more pain than they ever had in their life, just to recalibrate. Can that work? Yeah.

And you know you'll be okay, right? So that's one of the factors. And if you've used water, especially cold water before, you do adapt to it very quickly. The first time an athlete jumps in an ice bath, you think, oh, my gosh, they're going to have an anxiety attack or a heart attack or they just freak out. But second, third, fourth time you do it, all of a sudden it's like, oh, no, I know what this is. I can handle it.

So you do get a bit used to it. I hear childbirth is the same way. Childbirth. Yeah, really. I mean, if you introduce younger people to that kind of pain, you'll have social services on the doorstep. Okay. You have to be really careful how you go about this

all right but before i bring in my next clip uh let me just ask shona there's one thing to just have heavily performed at the top of your game and now you need to recover but it's a whole other universe if you perform at the top of your game and then you get injured now you're not simply recovering from having performed you're recovering from having been injured and i asked lindsey about this and my jaw was on the ground just hearing her recounted so just just because by the way you've seen ski uh videos of people getting airlifted off the mountain and doing the wipeouts coming down the slope. She was in at least some of those videos you've seen getting airlifted off the mountain. Let's check it out. So Lindsay, when they're airlifting you off the ski slope,

okay, by the way, this makes great television. Okay. There's Lindsay Vaughn. By the way, this makes great television. Okay. There's Lindsay Fawn. I can see everything. What are you thinking? What is your mental state? You obviously feel the pain that you just experienced, but are you asking, is my career over?

Will I come back? I'm going to be back on the slopes tomorrow morning. What do you do? Because as Yogi Berra said, you know, 90% of the game is half mental. At some point, your brain has to matter here, your mind. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. You know, when I'm being helicoptered off, I try to think about how much it hurts and is this career ending? Is this, you know, a small setback? What do I think it is? And I tried, I really try hard not to overthink things until I get the doctor's opinion, until I get the MRIs and the CT scans.

And then once I know what the injury is, then I say, okay, how long is it going to take? How long is it going to take for me to get back? Is it six months? Is it eight months? Is it 10 months? And then I say, okay, I can work myself back from there. Like I always need to have a goal. What's the end game?

And so as long as I know the end game, I'm goal-oriented. So once I know the end game, then I can get to work right away. So, again, there's a bit of psychology there, Sean. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I guess the fact that you ought to consider is to be an Alpine skier, got to be a special kind of person anyway, because that's a, you know, it's a unique, it's dangerous. It's, you know, yeah, it's, it's certainly not the sport that a lot of people would go, yeah, that's the thing that I want to do. That looks amazing. And so, you know, she's obviously been successful. She's got a certain mindset and having that goal outcome that, you know,

and to be able to think about that process of how she's going to get there, I think is a really useful strategy for her recovery. But she's not a magician and she's still human, right? injury is an injury so how do you in your sort of recovery universe how do you I remember the old days you would sort of immobilize and say don't move for six weeks and clearly we've evolved from that so where is the state of body damage recovery today yeah I guess there's sort of phases within the recovery and it's very different depending on, you know, if surgery is needed or, you know,

what type of rehabilitation is needed based on that surgery. But then what we do is as the athlete starts to get moving again and starts to be active and what we're finding is athletes are definitely more active earlier than what they used to be. That immobilisation period for, you know, a couple of months doesn't exist anymore. I mean, that's very general depending on the injury.

But then we start to get, when they start to train again, we start to, they start to move again, we start to tailor some of those therapies around that and a lot of it looks like, you know, massage and ice and compression and some of those more medical-oriented recovery strategies. So, yeah, it's a process and it's very dependent on the type of athlete, the damage they've done,

the type of sport they do, the team around them, doctors, physios, massage, everyone gets involved. And if it was a Lindsay Vonn we were working with, we would all be hands on deck, everyone communicating, talking to each other, getting a plan in place. But doctor, if you have a serious crash like that and you get airlifted off a slope and it's TV footage all around the world, you can rebuild the body, hopefully. But how if you don't get inside the head and realign that athlete's thinking? It's a problem.

So is that as an important process as recovery for the body as well as recovery from a crash like that mentally? Yeah, and I can imagine there's a certain, like a lot of athletes, if they've done an injury, have a fear of doing that injury again in the same way that they've done it. So I can only imagine that if you were airlifted off a ski slope, having done a particular injury

on a particular run, you can't tell me that's not going to be in your head the next time you do it. So I think that's the challenge for a lot of athletes is dealing with that fear of, I don't want to do that again. And I remember that and you focus on the negative and then you obviously run the risk of actually doing it again if you're not on your game. Yeah, because I think the answer of getting airlifted off a ski slope is, God wants me to swim now.

God wants me to swim now. Yeah, exactly. And that's it. How you do your injury matters. Like if you're a swimmer and you do your shoulder because you've done 50 billion laps in your life, that's different to falling off, you know, having a really bad crash and hurting your head or hurting your knee or whatever on a ski slope.

What happens? We've spoken to some of the top surgeons on this show, particularly Dr Kevin Stone, who's a knee specialist, and he said some athletes cheat the recovery time and they teach him about how you recover. How do you cheat as an athlete the recovery time? Because basically you have that surgery, it takes this long to recover. So how do they shave the time off? What are they doing? Yeah, and I think part of it is

that elite athletes are so unique. You know, you look at the scientific data and you say, yes, that's how long it takes. But then you go, well, we don't deal with the 0.0001% of the populations in a lot of scientific research. That's right. They're not in your data. That's right. They're not in the large-scale data sets. Four standard deviations away from the mean, these guys. They're so unique. And so sometimes we can't treat them like we treat every other individual in the statistics.

You know, you can't say this is the average this or this is the average that because they're way out of it, a lot of them. Just to quantify four standard deviations away would be like one in a few million is that right one in 10 million yeah something big yeah big yeah yeah one in big number yes yeah like someone like lindsey right you're a super athlete you're one of the ones that is at a high level repeats it not just once but over numerous times over numerous years they super elite. We don't have a lot of data on them. So you've just got to – maybe they're not cheating the system. Maybe they're just being them and they're just special.

We're going to take a quick break. And when we come back, we're going to the third segment of StarTalk Sports Edition, which we like to call Shoot the Shit. And in it, we'll have Professor Shona Halton just telling us like it is and possibly giving advice for people who are aspiring athletes who want to be at the top of their game when we return. We're back. StarTalk Sports Edition. We've got with us Professor Shona Halston,

who's dialing in from Australia. Thank you. You're 13 hours, 14 hours in some direction or another away from us. Thank you for being on the other side of the world and contributing to this show. We're talking about recovery, and this has been your entire life professionally. And I'm just curious, are there any outliers that you saw, like somebody who either should have been injured when something happened to them and they weren't, or some freak injury that you've never seen before? Tell me about some of the outliers in your life experience.

Yeah, I think the top athletes, always the really top, top, top super elites, you know, there's always something about them that's a bit of an outlier. I think some of the ones that I find most difficult to deal with are the athletes who are exceptional at what they do, but they don't follow any of the rules when it comes to recovery. So it's like they're kind of good despite of the fact that they sleep really ordinary and they don't, you know, they don't do any of the recovery practices. And so for them, it's kind of like, well, you're just good anyway. You're just genetically gifted or, you know, you've been doing your sport since you were a kid. And so you look and you go, you don't fit the mold. Like you're not doing any of the things that you're supposed to be doing and you're still really, really good. And so they're always, you know, it's easy when someone's

doing bad things, you can fix them and you can, you know, you can see their performance change and that's really rewarding to work with but then you get the ones and like you're just good anyway you don't need me you're doing everything wrong and uh and trying to work with those guys is always a bit of a challenge there's some sports for example like the NBA where you know you've got and I've worked with a couple of teams and you know some of those players are real challenges to work with, right? Because they're like super good. They don't do much recovery. They kind of, they don't sleep because they're playing, you know, across different sides of the country all the time. And, but they're genetically gifted. They've been playing ball since they could stand and they're just really good. And so sometimes, like I say, there's, you know, there's not that

much that you can do to help them. And then you also think, well, you're really good. Do I actually want to muck around with you? If you're seven foot three and you can play ball, you're a unicorn, right? So you're one of the ones that the scouts look for. You're just going to be good anyway. So sometimes there's a play, you know, scientists are like, well, just step back. And you just, you do you because you're obviously, you know, you're doing something right. We had a tennis player. What's Nick Kyrgios?

Nick Kyrgios. Nick Kyrgios. Love Nick Kyrgios. And his whole thing was, first of all, I wanted to play basketball. He didn't really say this. I'm paraphrasing because this is what really came off of him. I wanted to play basketball. I couldn't play basketball. I'm pretty good at tennis. I don't really have to work at it. And so, yeah, I'm going to play a match and go have a couple drinks, and maybe I'll get five hours sleep. I'm going to smoke a cigarette and then go play a match.

And lift up the scotch. You've got to have scotch, too. Yeah, exactly. Right. Yeah. Oh, dear. I mean, the thing about Nick, who, you know, I work at the Australian Open every year, the tennis,

and, you know, I don't work directly with Nick. But, you know, the thing about Nick is, you know, he work at the Australian Open every year, the tennis, and, you know, I don't work directly with Nick, but, you know, the thing about Nick is, you know, he's great for the sport. Young kids are coming and watching tennis that have never watched tennis before. Because of him. Because of him. Because of him.

Yeah, he's a dude. He's cool. But also he hasn't reached his potential. Like, you know, he should be, you know, you wonder if he actually tried hard and he did all the right things, whether, you know, he could be the next absolute superstar because his talent is extraordinary.

Right. He's really, really good, but he's not top 10, right? Isn't that right? And he should be. He's been ranked 13th in the world. That's as high as he's risen. And let me tell you something. So the question is, what do you want?

13th and basically I sleep till noon and then I have pancakes. All right. Or number eight and my entire life is devoted to nothing but tennis and I have no fun ever. So I don't know. It just depends how much you like pancakes. I know. Clearly. So where are we now, Professor? Because we've got compression garments, which basically, are we still at the DVT sock stage or have we gone up a couple of levels? What are DVT socks? Deep vein thrombosis. Got it.

You might see people on aircraft wear. Yes. So it's a good question because what we see is things that come from the medical world, like compression socks for DVT, like ice cryotherapy, it's transitioned into the athlete world because we think, oh, yeah, that works for a sick person or an injured person. Let's bring it into recovery on a day-to-day basis for athletes.

And compression is one of those things. Although now it's gotten, you know, they look great and they're, you know, they've got all fancy things. You know, their old compression socks look very different to the new, you know, fancy. It's compression socks as fashion, right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, as fancy tights with, you know,

glow-in-the-dark stuff on it. So, yeah, look, stuff like that, we're doing the research. We sort of understand that it probably does have a positive effect for athletes' recovery, but we do see a lot of those things come from the medical world. Okay. And how about copper? I mean, this is just, I'm just saying,

I see these commercials all the time and they're like, and it's infused with the healing power of copper and it's a compression gun. Is that just BS? Yeah, mostly. Yeah. And the thing is, I guess it's sometimes hard as a, you know, as a, as a scientist where we always play catch up. You know, the athletes in the Tour de France were drinking flat Coke at the end of stages for years. And then we did, we were like, that's bad. So then we go and do the study and we go,

oh no, that's good. It actually works. So, you know, there's things like that where athletes are ahead of the game for the majority of the time. And we have to come in and say, is that good or bad? And based on the mechanism and our knowledge, we go, yeah, that's probably bad or maybe it's not bad. And then you do the research and it comes out five years later. And so sometimes it proves what the athletes already knew. And they say, you didn't need to study that.

We knew that. We've been doing that, you know, what the athletes already knew. And they say, you didn't need to study that. We knew that. We've been doing that, you know, for the last four years. I'm going with the copper is bullshit side of that argument. So sticking with that, what wearables are out there that could possibly be advantageous to recovery? Yeah, most of the wearables now in terms of monitoring is sort of where it's at. So, you know, different styles of watches and, you know, some are good, some are bad, but for me, it's about what you do with that information. So, it's clothing infused with electronics to measure you. Okay, cool. Yeah, some of those, that's the new kind of new direction.

There's some, yeah, they're not perfect and there's not a huge amount of those out there, but that's sort of the direction that it's heading. Most of the wearables, though, that have something in it that, say, infuses something or gives you some sort of electrical stimulation is a bit crock. You know, there's nothing there to suggest that that would actually do anything.

But when we talk wearables, we talk mainly about technology like watches and heart rate monitors and GPS and those kinds of things where you're measuring something. And there's definitely some pros and cons to those. You can have too much information and cause athletes to get stressed and perfectionist and worried about things. But generally, some of those wearables are a good tool to start a conversation between you and the athlete and, I think one of the more beautiful storylines, whether or not

it happens in real life, is other people know that someone has limits that they'll never cross, but the person doesn't know it, and then they end up crossing the limits into a new place. And they said, how did you do that? I said, I didn't know. I wasn't supposed to be able to, right? So it's possible to, the knowledge, this is the too much information point, where the knowledge of information that someone else tells you is where you should stop. If you don't know it, you just keep going

and oh my gosh, you just set a world record. Yeah, and you either set a world record or you break your ACL. You know, there's – Wow. And hopefully it's to break the world record, right? So if we go back a step to a bit earlier on in our show here today, you said how sleep is vital. Well, I went to sleep, but what quality of sleep did I get?

How do I know? Can I monitor that right now and say I had X amount of this sleep, X amount of that sleep, and what are the sort of categories? Exactly. You've got measures to see if you had a good night's sleep? Yeah. There's definitely wearables that do that, that give you an estimation of how well you've slept,

tell you your duration as well as an estimation of your quality. Some do it better than others. Usually the more expensive ones with better algorithms do it better. Are they looking at your brain waves or what? What do they monitor? What are they getting out of your head? Yeah, look, if I was to measure an athlete in a sleep lab, yes, we'd have electrodes, we'd measure polysomnography,

brain activity, movement, the whole lot. When we'd measure polysomnography, brain activity, movement, the whole lot. When you're talking the wearables that you can buy at your shop, they use mostly accelerometry. So they just detect movement, certain amount of movement, you're awake, lower amount of movement, you're asleep. Some now measure heart rate, heart rate variability, temperature, you know, the more variables you add into that equation, usually the more accurate it is when it comes to sleep. And there's now devices that you can buy that do measure some aspect of brain activity, but very early days on those. So most of them work just off movement. Well, I have to ask, do other people in your household have electrodes that you put on their head for you to get data? No, no. And I'm also someone that doesn't,

I don't wear, I don't like the monitoring. I don't wear anything. I just, I just do what I do. I'm not one that likes too much. I know scientists saying I don't like too much information, but for myself, don't tell anybody. That's our secret. We won't tell anybody. Yeah. Athletes, you should. I just don't like it. We'll tell anybody. Athletes, you should. I just don't like it. In your experience and expertise, what is the one thing that we can all do if you're a gym rat or a weekend warrior to make sure that you recover properly and stave off injury?

What's the one thing that they do that we could also do? Yeah, look, sleep is 100% the thing. Sleep and nutrition, they're your foundations of good recovery. And so if I do see people, even the average weekend warrior who decides that they're going to buy a piece of high-tech kit to increase their recovery, but they're not sleeping and they're not eating well. And it's like, get your foundation right, get your basics right. And then you can add the fancy recovery strategies on top. So sleep would be the one. That is not, that's not what anybody wants to hear. Wants to hear, no. They want the shiny stuff. They want something shiny, man. You just reminded me of, there was a point where I had, I was much bigger than I am and I lost 31 pounds and I was standing at a comedy club bar and I was talking to a comedian who hadn't seen me he was like

geez man you look great god how did you do this man look how thin you are and then this lady said hey I just heard that guy say that you lost a bunch of weight and I was like yeah I lost 31 pounds she said how'd you do it I said well actually I started exercising at least four times a week and I changed my diet completely I cut out like sugar and I just ate like a lot of vegetables and lean protein and she went f that Who would have thought? I had an exercise. Exactly. People don't want to hear the hard stuff. Give me a pill. Everybody wants a secret.

They just want the one secret easy thing. Everyone wants to hack. Hack my day, hack my sleep, hack my life. By the way, that exists in basically every profession. I even tweeted about this once because I was tired of hearing it. People come, they eat a meal prepared by some master chef, and then they go to the chef and say, what's your secret for this?

As though, oh, just do this and you can do this too. No, no, the secret is I went to chef school for eight years. That's the secret. It doesn't work. I learned not to burn stuff. That is funny. What's your secret? I spent 40 grand at Culinary Institute of America.

Surprise. But anyhow, we actually got to call it quits there. But Shona, thank you for coming on and helping us bring nuanced insights and academic understanding to what Lindsay was sharing with us about her life as an athlete. So thank you. Is there anything we need to know about what's coming up for you? Look, coming up for us really in my academic world is, yes, we're just looking at lots more sleep research,

lots more good interventions, understanding athlete sleep. I'll be working down the tennis in a couple of weeks down in Melbourne, the Aussie Open. In Melbourne, okay, yeah, okay. About 40 degrees. Well, actually, Celsius. No. So it's really hot.

It's not cold. Yeah, it's summertime there now. Right now we're recording in January. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's hot. About a million percent humidity here at the moment, so. Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, mm-hmm. Okay, well, stay active and keep that going

because we need you because we see the products of what you do in the talents of the athletes that you touch. So thank you. Chuck, always good to have you. Always a pleasure. All right, Gary. Thank you, Neil.

You all be good. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astrophysicist, as always bidding you to keep looking up.