The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett - The Muscle Growth Doctor: "The Anti-Ageing Cure No One Is Talking About!", "Exercising At Night Is A Terrible Idea!", "Your Grip Strength Predicts Chronic Diseases!" - Andy Galpin

Episode Date: February 26, 2024

How can grip strength predict if you will get a chronic disease? And why is sleeping with a shut door ruining your sleep? Dr Andy Galpin, PhD, is Professor of Kinesiology (the study of movement) at California State University, Fullerton. He is the Co-Director of the Center for Sport Performance and Founder/Director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory. Dr Andy is an Elite Performer Coach & Consultant for NBA All-Stars, World Title athletes, and Olympic medalists. He is also the host of the ‘Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin’ podcast. In this conversation Dr. Andy and Steven discuss topics such as, how grip strength can predict chronic diseases, why you should never exercise at night, the foolproof way to lose weight, and why you need to know your VO2 levels. (00:00) Intro (02:11) Enhancing People's Physical & Cognitive Performance (04:16) Why You Care About Human Performance? (10:39) What's Your Academic Background (11:38) What's the Range of People That Come to You & What Do They Want Fixing? (14:23) What Stops Us from Reaching Our Optimal Performance? (20:53) How Vitamin Deficiencies Affect Our Body (24:37) Why We Don't Get Accurate Results from Blood Tests (28:22) You Need to Understand Why Your Body Markers Are Down (32:25) Why People Struggle to Sleep (37:23) How to Improve Your Sleep (42:59) Is 8h the Optimal Sleep Time? (48:34) The Misconceptions of Sleep Debt (50:51) The Power of Doing Tasks at Your Usual Circadian Times (55:24) Environmental Factors That Affect Our Sleep (01:04:17) Create the Optimal Environment for Restorative Sleep (01:06:56) Sleep Debt (01:10:12) How to Stop Travels Disrupting Your Sleep (01:12:28) How Important Is Your Heart Rate Variability (HRV)? (01:13:55) The Impact of Keto Diet and Carbs on Your HRV? (01:16:38) The Effects of Introducing Carbs Back into Your Diet (01:18:42) How to Have a Healthy HRV? (01:23:37) Good Morning Routines for Improved HRV (01:28:14) Does Red Light Have an Effect on Our Bodies? (01:30:36) The Importance of Choosing the Right Training (01:31:30) Gain Muscle Mass and Stay Lean (01:35:19) When to Eat When Exercising (01:37:18) Best Training for Best & Lasting Performance (01:39:22) The Death Dangers of Falling at 60+ Years Old (01:42:31) What Is VO2 Max? (01:45:03) What VO2 Max Says About Your Health (01:49:33) People Don't Believe Their Health Problems Can Be Fixed (01:52:24) The Exercise and Steps to Improve VO2 Max (01:54:43) To Build Muscle You Need to Add Variations to Your Exercise Routine (01:59:03) Creatine Benefits for Your Body (02:04:09) Fat Loss (02:11:30) Depriving Yourself from Food Isn't Beneficial in Weight Loss (02:12:34) Why Should You Do Strength Before Endurance? (02:12:58) How Technology Will Shape Our Health (02:18:40) The Impact of Minimizing Stressors in Our Lives (02:24:43) Last Guest Question Follow Dr Andy Twitter - https://bit.ly/3IasClR Instagram - https://bit.ly/3wuEigJ Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/3kxINCANKsb Follow me: https://beacons.ai/diaryofaceo Sponsors: WHOOP: https://join.whoop.com/en-uk/CEO Uber: https://p.uber.com/creditsterms ZOE: http://joinzoe.com with an exclusive code 

Quick one. Just wanted to say a big thank you to three people very quickly. First people I want to say thank you to is all of you that listen to the show. Never in my wildest dreams is all I can say. Never in my wildest dreams did I think I'd start a podcast in my kitchen and that it would expand all over the world as it has done. And we've now opened our first studio in America, thanks to my very helpful team led by Jack on the production side of things. So thank you to Jack and the team for building out the new American studio. And thirdly to to Amazon Music, who when they heard that we were expanding to the United States, and I'd be recording a lot more over in the States, they put a massive billboard in Times Square for the show. So thank you so much, Amazon Music. Thank you to our team. And

thank you to all of you that listened to this show. Let's continue. I've never seen a single paper that shows you can't lose weight, you can't get stronger. All of it can be done. But you're paying attention to things that just do not matter. Dr. Andy Galpin, one of the most highly respected exercise physiologists in the field today. He is the director of the Center for Sports Performance, and he's a coach to many professional athletes. I'm going to talk about how I lose weight and how do I improve my performance, move, sleep, but if you want to live as well as possible for a long time,

it comes down to a couple of things. Number one, you can't if you want to live as well as possible for a long time, it comes down to a couple of things. Number one, you can't not pay attention to grip strength. And in fact, we can actually predict Alzheimer's and dementia risk via grip strength testing. And then leg strength and DL2 max, those things will outpredict how long you're going to live more than almost any metric. And I'm saying leg strength because one of the most significant issues that we face during aging, it's our falls. If you look at the risk of dying after a hip break in those that are over 60 years old, there is a 70% chance of death over the next 15 years. Wow. What is VO2 max?

Your maximum ability to bring in and utilize oxygen. There was actually a study with 750,000 people and found smoking and diabetes had a 40% increase risk of dying. And VO2 max is 300%. Oh, fuck. What do I need to be doing? It comes down to a couple of things. If you can do this stuff consistently, you're going to be just fine. First of all...

But why do you care? Most people will go through challenges at some point in their life. This is going to give you the ability to not be in those situations anymore. Sorry, I need to collect myself a little bit here. There's just a lot of part of my story that the world doesn't know. Quick one, quick favor to ask from you. There is one simple way that you can support our show, and that is by hitting that follow button on this app that you're listening to the show on right now. This year in 2024, we're trying really, really hard to level up everything we're doing. And the only free thing I'll ever ask from you is to hit that

follow button on this app. It helps the show more than I could probably articulate. And it allows us, enables us to keep doing what we're doing here. I appreciate it, Dealey. On to the show. Dr. Andy Galpin, someone's just clicked on this podcast right now. And if you were to speak freely about the things that you care about the most, what exactly is it that they would walk away from this conversation with in terms of value that would positively impact their life? I've done hundreds of podcasts and I have never had that question. And I certainly never had it coming right out the gate. So I love it. The way I would capture it would be, I want to enhance human performance. And when I say that, I want to make sure that you're not hearing sport performance. That means sport to you, fine. That's great. But I really break that

down into three categories. People want to look a certain way. Whatever that means to you, I don't care. People want to feel a certain way. And people want to perform a certain way. You set the ground rules. You want to look this way. When you say perform, when you think perform, that means X to you. When you say you want to feel, that means Y to you. Great. Let's establish all that. And then my goal is simply to help you achieve all of those goals. So you want to be bigger and stronger and have more energy throughout the day. Great. You want to think more clearly. You want to be a better leader, athlete, spouse, parent. That's great. You want to be out of pain.

You want to have a certain functionality and a certain, all those things are on the table. So when I say perform, I mean cognitively, physically, in whatever area of department that matters for you. All those are on the table. We analyze all that. We break it down and we say, okay, this is the targets we're going after. And then my mission is just to help anyone I'm working with, but really broadly the world, get better at that.

I don't think I've ever seen any paper that has shown any genetic combination that shows you can't grow muscle. I've never seen a single paper that shows you can't lose weight. Never seen a single indication of any physiological marker that says you can't get stronger. I've never seen a single indication of any physiological marker that says you can't get stronger. Whatever you're interested in,

nothing should stop you from making some progress in some area of your physical health. And if you do that, you got a chance. Why do you care? Why do you care about human performance and exercise and cognitive performance? Where did that come from? What was the first domino that fell in your life?

Sorry, I need to collect myself a little bit here I've been on a lot of podcasts and there's just I've been in the media a lot and there's just a lot a part of my story that the world doesn't know the shortest answer to that question was I grew up with sports being everywhere and I played sports growing up everyone I knew played sports growing up

and I personally was an adequate athlete, which means I was good, but not exceptional, but I wasn't terrible either. I was told as a teenager and by the people around me, my parents and my grandparents, that, you know, you deserve nothing. Not in the negative way, but in terms of like, no one owes you anything in this world. If you want to get better at sports, you better train, you better work harder. And in the most positive, loving way possible, right? I was very fortunate. My parents were incredibly positive and supportive and there's no negativity there. And so it was just as simple as a matter of fact of, hey, you say you want to win, then why aren't you working harder than everybody else? Just the way that my parents

raised us and the way that my grandparents and my siblings, there was just a sense of like, my sorry I'm trying to give a more genuine answer but there's only so most people will go through challenges at some point in their life and I'm no different most people will go through challenges at some point in their life, and I'm no different. I was just very fortunate to where my parents were in a position that,

my dad was a construction worker, my grandparents were construction workers, we grew up in the country, my mom did whatever she could to, you know, keep our house and things like that. And they raised us in a very positive way. They always said, you're going to go to college. I don't care what you do, what you spend your career on, whatever, but you're just not doing what we did just because they wanted us to have an easier and better life. Um,

so for me, human performance was that, hey, here's your chance. Like, here's your chance to get out and do something. This is going to give you the ability to not be in those situations anymore. And I get to do that by being around sports all the time, which is pretty great. So why I care. What is the emotion, Andy?

Sorry, I've never been in the real public before. There's a lot of things that people will go through in life that are out of their control. To me, this represents stuff that will be within your control. And so I give you the chance to make changes that you can control, your strength and your health. At least you got that. You tell me where the parameters are here because

i want to make sure that you're comfortable but from that i understand that in your childhood there were things that you you couldn't control and in what i heard there was that this was something that you could give you that control I don't want to overplay my own situation. I had a tremendous childhood. I've had a tremendous life. I guess especially never being around alcohol or violence and things like that. Like I had a lot of great breaks

and still had loving parents, support, positivity. There were a number of years, you know, as a child that were really difficult and just being like, man, my parents never did anything. Like again, never violence, never alcohol, never negative, never hate, just okay, fine. That was really horrible, really bad break. What are we going to do? We're going to work harder. Financially difficult. That was really horrible. Really bad break. What are we going to do?

We're going to work harder. Financially difficult. Yeah, for sure. And other ways. But the thing I appreciate is like, many of the things, the biggest one is just like, it doesn't matter.

We're moving forward. Like, not in terms of like ignoring it, we're letting it one is just like, it doesn't matter. We're moving forward. Like, not in terms of like ignoring it, letting it go, but like, okay, great. Bad deal here. Got real bad luck. But we're pressing on. We are going to overcome this stuff. When we start talking about exercise and health and performance and all these things, what's been your academic and life experience that has built the foundation of everything that you know?

Can you give me a little bit of a walkthrough? Yeah, so I have an undergraduate degree in what's called exercise science. Kinesiology, it's the same thing. I got a master's in human movement sciences. And then my PhD is in what's called human bioenergetics. And what happened professionally once you graduated from there? So as soon as I finished my PhD, I started my lab at Cal State Fullerton. So I work and I'm now one of the directors of what's called the Center for Sport Performance there. So within that, we've got multiple laboratories, biomechanics, strength conditioning, motor control, motor learning, etc.

And they all study, the mission of that center actually is to study and disseminate research that enhances human performance. What is the range of people that you work with that come to you and say, Dr. Andy Galpin, I need help with this? Oh, oh my gosh. that come to you and say, Dr. Andy Galpin, I need help with this? Oh, oh my gosh. So we've traditionally spent most of my career working with our pro athletes. I've been fortunate to work with Olympic gold and silver medalists, world champions, the highest contract in major league baseball and golf, all pros at every position in the NFL, et cetera, et cetera. But by far, in terms of numbers-wise, we've worked with more executive clients than professional athletes. So our coaching program,

Rapid Health and Performance, is like, what if we took what we've been doing for a decade in only these elite athletes and put a system together for non-athletes? And that's exactly what we've done with that company. And it's gone exceptionally well. People that tend to come in for that kind of fall into a couple of buckets. A lot of times it's kind of like your adult athletes, if you will. So I want to run a marathon. I want to do something like that. But the overwhelming majority of people are just going, hey, I want to just feel better. I want to look better and I want to perform better. And I want to minimize my likelihood of missing. What I mean by that is you can try a diet, you can try a thing and like see what happens for six weeks. And that's very effective. But some people have more money than they have time. And some people have been through the ringer. I've

been trying for a year, two years, five years. I haven't slept in a decade. What's it going to take? I don't want to miss anything. And so we do extremely comprehensive testing. It takes a very long time to finish all of our testing. We can get a volumetric measurement of each muscle on your body. So I can look at the size of each endo one. We can look at your VO2 max.

We can look at cognitive performance. We're running very in-depth sleep assessments. We're looking at environmental factors in your house. Like we're running everything possible that we go through with our high-level athletes. And by doing that, we're able to see and find what we call performance anchors. So these are things that are putting the most constraint on your physiology. And so the analogy I'll say is, imagine you want to drive a car faster. People's initial inclination is to hit the gas pedal. That's great. My inclination is to look at your left foot, which is, I want to make sure your foot is on a brake somewhere. So before I hit the gas pedal, let's make sure our left foot's off the brake. And in this case, that is a constraint.

What are you doing to hold back your own biology? And so we can be able to find those things, and then because of that, we can give them extremely specific solutions. And our program tends to be so effective because we can go through all this analysis that allows us to then give them very simple and hyper-specific plans. When you talk about that left foot on the

brake analogy, which I thought was a really nice sort of crystallizing analogy, what are the most common things that we have our left foot on the brake with in terms of, are there fundamental things that you see most often that are kind of getting in the way of us reaching our optimal performance? Yeah. You want to think about these in a couple of buckets. We call these stressors. Yeah. So the way that your body works at all times,

in fact, I think this is one of the traits that separates human physiology from any other animal. We have a better ability to adapt and respond to our environment. That's the single thing

your body is trying to do at all times, right? Pushing and pulling, it's always reading and sensing, trying to get to a certain place. Stressor comes in and it adjusts. Okay, great. That's a good thing. We categorize those stressors into two major areas, what we call visible stressors and then hidden stressors. Visible

stressors are things you're doing that you are visible and aware of. So you went and worked out. You felt that. Great. That's a stressor. You drank alcohol. You felt that. You didn't sleep tonight. You feel these things, right? You can see them. You smoke cigarettes. You have all these things, your diet, your nutrition. So all those are analyzed from a perspective of their, what are the most common ones? Well, the obvious ones you've probably covered countless times, right? Don't drink alcohol in excess and don't drink, try to have quality water and sunlight. And honestly, like the, the, you know, 15 year old health, like could probably tell you like, what are the five pillars of health? And like that would, you would line those things up pretty well.

Now where things get more interesting and our stuff is the hidden stressors. So these are things that are putting equal or greater stress on your system, but you can't see or feel them. So this could be things like a vitamin or mineral insufficiency. No one wakes up and goes, oh man, like my vitamin D is low today. You don't see that. You don't feel that, right? Where you know like, man, I ate all you could eat pizza last night. Like I know why I feel this way because of that thing I did last night. If there is a pathogen, if there is something suppressing your immune system, if endocrine system is not happy with something going on, oxidative stress, something like that could be happening. A lot of times these can be

falling into sleep as well. We've seen a number of times where people have a self-perceived, I sleep okay, I sleep pretty decent. And then we can actually run real true in-depth analysis and we can see huge, in fact, we've had multiple times where we've like very likely saved somebody's life because their self-perceived sleep was pretty good. And we were able to actually see like you're steps away from a heart attack. And in fact, we put them basically in a hospital within a few weeks. And we're told many times, like, you basically saved this guy's life. That's happened countless times. So there are things that are going on that are beyond your perception that we can see, whether it's through some of our molecular biomarkers, whether it's, again, our brain analysis, like a lot of the stuff that we can see. Other ones that are common are things like muscle strength, muscle performance. People don't realize how telling those can be over your overall physiological health, but you don't necessarily see them. A really easy example is most people are somewhat aware that grip strength is an incredibly important predictor of, in fact,

there's a really cool paper. It's titled something like, Grip Strength is an Indispensable Marker of Aging. Something like that, right? It was basically saying like, you can't not pay attention to grip strength. And we've actually published a paper last year. Tommy Wood from the University of Washington Neuroscientists led this project. And we've got a couple of them going.

But one of the things we found there is, is we can actually predict Alzheimer's and dementia risk via grip strength testing. And strongly, we actually have a project right now that we validated in the UK Biobank, which is 500,000 people or so. We validated it in the American equivalent, which is called NHANES. We can actually predict muscle quality from four blood markers. And we can also predict the risk of dementia as well from those four basic biomarkers. And we can also predict the risk of dementia as well from those four basic biomarkers. And those are also directly tied to grip strength. And so looking at things

like that is saying, okay, you have some potential signs of either short-term or long-term physiological stress that's happening and you don't necessarily feel it yet because you're 35 or 45 and you don't feel super weak, but we're seeing these early signs. One other example of that, and I'll caution to say that there's only been one paper on this. year and it showed that the asymmetry in your grip strength, so the difference in strength between your right and left hand, is actually an early predictor of neurological decline. And the reason is, think about this, in order for your muscles to contract, they have to be sent a signal from your central nervous system, your brain and brainstem. And if you're having significant asymmetries from one side to the other, and by this they meant over 10%. So if you have a grip strength of 40 kilos on the right hand, 10% of that would be four kilos.

So if your left hand is 30 kilos, that's way more than 10% difference. That may be an early sign of early denervation of that left side. And so neurologically, I'm potentially losing ground there. So just things like that are things we're able to detect. This is, hey, we're seeing things that are putting stress on your system, whether you realize that or not. And so they can be these molecular biomarkers,

but they can also be other things that people just either don't have the technology or they don't know how to, or they're not aware that that can give you tremendous insights into the overall stress as scientifically we call this allostatic load or allostasis but that's the marker we're after ultimately and in the case of grip strength i find that so fascinating because i was reading about that in your work um a while ago that it could also be the case that i've just trained one side so totally okay so it's if you've trained one side yeah then

you're yeah like then if you've only gone after one side you've done either a sport or you have a lifestyle or an occupation that is really one side dependent it could be as simple as but for the typical person we tend to yeah be fairly even and asymmetrical uh so it's very symmetrical with our grip strength yeah remember these are population averages. Sure. Right. This is one study. The individual person always means less to the individual person than it does to the population. When we were talking about some of these invisible stresses, my partner came back to the house two days ago and said,

babe, I've just found out from the doctor because she did a bunch of tests. And she hadn't been feeling so great. But one of the things we found out was that she was very deficient in vitamin D. And it made me wonder how many people are walking around, and you must have seen this in some of the lab work you've done, with a deficiency in things like vitamin D. And what is then the symptom of that deficiency? So vitamin D is one of the more common deficiencies you will see. You will not see or feel that. This is another example of potentially hidden stressor, right? What could you be experiencing? Vitamin D is associated with low bone mineral density, low muscle size, low muscle strength, cognitive cognitive function immune function mental health

so you could be experiencing any number of things and vitamin d being low could be contributing to that it's very likely to be the sole explainer of any individual thing but it could be playing a large impact vitamin d is also one of the higher safety profiles. And so typically what I tell people is I don't like when people go after supplements, specifically vitamins and minerals. You can get away with vitamins a little bit more, minerals to be really careful of. But vitamin D, honestly, you can go pretty wild with it. And the chances of you being deficient or even just subclinically low is what we'll call that, chances are pretty high. And the chances of you running into issues with the vitamin D are also very low. So it's one of those ones that masks like, pretty good chance to be effective, pretty low risk. I'm okay with

people really pushing vitamin D. Obviously, the better answer is the sunlight. But if you want to take a supplement and you don't have money or availability to get blood testing done and you're not sure, going after a little bit of vitamin D, there are worse things you could do. We'll put it that way. So I'm okay with that one.

Are there other deficiencies that you're more concerned about in terms of vitamins? Yeah, well, you should be concerned about vitamin D being low because it is so effective in so many areas. That's generally how vitamins and minerals work. It's also very, very, very common. Maybe I sort of inadvertently blew past that so much because there are things that we are

going after much more that people are unaware of. When you see vitamin D on a blood panel, and if it is low, you can take vitamin D. That said, you do want to be really careful if you get blood work done of trying to just move those numbers up and down. And I'm going to say this for a couple of reasons. Vitamin D is one of those ones that's okay. If it's low, take vitamin D directly, move it up. No problems there. That said, when you go to interpret blood work, you have to realize most of those values, when you're being told that number's high or that number's low, I won't say they're irrelevant, but they're misleading at the least. And that to say, you've got some blood work done, right?

And it gives you a whole bunch of things back. Let's say you did a basic thing like what we'll call a CBC and CMP. So a complete blood count and then a cardiometabolic panel. Those are like the most common things you'll get. And you'll see all kinds of stuff in there. White blood cell counts and vitamins and hormones and things like that. Okay, great. And then as you look over at the paper on the right side, it's going to tell you a reference range. And that reference range is going to tell you whether you're high or low, right? And so on that test you did, right? It probably said, you know, your vitamin D level is 20 and it should be between 30 and 100 or something like that. Great. Well, it's that 30 to 100 part where things get squirrely. Because did they take into account ethnicity? Okay, those numbers differ based on your ethnic

background, right? What is normal, as we said earlier, is also not the same as what is common. Okay. And it's definitely not the same as optimal. Now remember, and I'll try not to say this too many times, I don't deal with disease. I deal with like, I'm not in disease state, but I want to get better and optimized. And why I'm drawing that distinction is because on a blood test, you're looking for, do you clinically flag for an actual metabolic disease or otherwise? Okay. Most of those things are set against that. And so their reference ranges are built off of databases like the UK biobank, like Anne Haines here, who are generally not healthy people. And the people that are in those data, in fact, we actually ran this and published this last year,

that in the NHANES database, in America at least, the people that had the muscle mass had no association between their muscle mass and their exercise history. Which means these people did not gain muscle by exercising. Now, some people exercise in these databases, but you're talking very, very small numbers. In addition, when they build reference ranges, so they're building it off of populations that

are not the healthiest, and as you're aware, our world is not getting healthier. So those numbers are moving. Now, when they build a reference range, they use, typically, most companies, by the way, every company that you get a blood draw from has a different range. So they're not

all the same. They're not nefarious. It's just like they have different databases to pick from. Many companies will give you a reference range based on their own database. So all you're seeing is what's normal for the people that bought their lab.

Not population. And they use a 95% curve, which is to say 95% of people Okay, so all you're seeing is like what's normal for the people that bought their lab, not population, okay? And they use a 95% curve, which is to say 95% of people land within this bell curve. And so if you are within that, you're normal. Two and a half percent at the top, two and a half percent low. So what that could mean is you could be in like the 94th percentile and be told you're in the reference range. Easy example is something like blood glucose, okay? Now, a normal blood glucose is going to be in the mid-50s, or mid-80s rather, 80, 85, something like that, okay? Technically, you're not going to flag on most

people's databases until you get past like 110, 120, 130 plus you're actually in diabetes. And so you can come and flag for like 108, and technically, medically, you're actually in diabetes. And so you can come and flag for like 108. And technically, medically, you're not diabetic yet. You're not pre-diabetic yet. But there is no world on this earth where somebody has a fasting blood glucose of 108 and they are healthy. Or they are optimally healthy, we'll say, right? In fact, we have strong evidence. You get past 95, you're starting to increase your risk of oxidative stress, retinopathy, tons of issues happen with a consistent fasting blood glucose over 95. And so a great example of that would be, you would be within the reference range there. You'd be told you're normal, and then I would look at it and be like, that's absolutely suboptimal. Is it clinically, officially diabetic? No. But I'm telling you right now to perform at your absolute

best, that's not the range you want to be in. I'm going to make it worse for you. So the reference ranges are one particular concern. The second one is, and the reason I brought this up with vitamin D. Vitamin D is okay. It's low. You push it up. No problem. Most of your markers, you don't want to do that with though. Because physiology responding to physiology which means something moves something up and then it moves something else down in the way it's the push pull thing so if you don't know what you're pushing up you might be pulling something else down you're pulling something else down it might be pushing something else up you don't know what you're doing there so you don't want to treat those markers as like a and b and c are low i should make them all go up. You need to understand

why they're doing that. Low testosterone is an easy example. Low testosterone is oftentimes a symptom of something going on. You need to go backwards and figure out why is your testosterone low to begin with, right? Because if you can do that, then you get out of the way, testosterone will go up. We've done this countless times with people, right? We've doubled testosterone more times than I could even count without using hormones at all. Again, I'm not against hormone therapy at all, but you don't always necessarily need it if you can understand, well, why is your testosterone suppressed as it is, if it truly is? Sometimes it's not. There are normal ranges for different people. But if we can see something going on where you've got immunosuppressant or something else happening,

that's, again, subclinical. So you're not sick all the time. You're not in a hospital bed, but it's like, oh, okay, we can see A, B, and C happening. Those are known to be associated with compromised testosterone. Clear those things up and then back out of the way and watch testosterone just take off. Easy example, this one is my colleague Dan Garner. He did this one famously. He had an athlete or a client who actually had a number of markers that are in a blood test, a basal fill specifically, that are associated with allergic reactions. They're not an allergy test, okay? But he noticed that this particular individual was doing everything right, but that number was off the chart. Found that actually what was happening is there was a tree in this gentleman's neighborhood that was causing him a little bit of

a response. So he had to make sure he stayed away from that tree. His basal fill number went back to normal and his testosterone rocketed. Really? Yeah, absolutely. It gets more complicated. Okay. So take something like, uh, albumin. Uh, albumin's a protein. It's the, uh, it's actually the protein in egg whites, which is great. It does a lot of things. It's a carrier protein though. So it carries, um, red blood cells that carries cortisol throughout your body. It's also, it's called an acute phase reactant. I mean, it will respond to acute changes in your body. It's also what's called an acute phase reactant. I mean, it will respond to acute changes in your body. Albumin is a really good way to measure hydration. Most people have

no idea about that, right? It's because when you get dehydrated a little bit, albumin is measured based on concentration. So how much is there relative to how much blood? So if you take the total amount of blood down, then the concentration of albumin looks like it goes up. Right? You see what I'm saying? So when you're dehydrated, albumin levels will go up.

However, when you're inflamed, it goes the opposite direction. And so if you look on a blood test, if you're a little bit dehydrated and a little bit inflamed, what's albumin going to look like? Level. Dead in the middle.

Yeah. This is exactly what happens when people do things like, I feel suboptimal, I'm terrible, or just not at my best, but my labs look okay. Nothing's off the markers that much. I'm not clinically deficient or excess in something. So everything can be within the reference ranges, but given the reference range problem, given the association problem, and giving other things that we realize happen as that multifaceted approach, we can absolutely see what's explaining why you're feeling what you're feeling dead in your blood panels without anything ever being off your reference range. In that particular case, if your albumin was up or or down and then you went in and did something specifically to change albumin you've actually now messed with the entire system when it had

nothing to do with albumin it was just the fact that you needed to drink some more water and lower overall inflammation so i say that to caution folks of saying like be really careful about especially if you're going to go to minerals and then absolutely with medications please let a qualified physician or somebody that understands blood work at this level really make sure that they're helping you um one more time vitamin d is a good example of something that's okay you push that one up no problem there for the most part there are times when it is but the rest of them folks like be a bit careful there so what are the if i if i stay away from the temptation of the industry that says like drugs and minerals and supplements are the answer to everything and i come back down to these sort of fundamentals

yeah of health and performance sleep is one of the fundamentals right oh it's probably arguably the core yeah so thinking about sleep then so many of us are suffering with sleep my sleep for whatever reason is really really good in terms of duration i don't know about quality we can you're making a face on me i don't know about quality but the duration's great and i speak to so many people i think increasing numbers that are struggling with sleep for whatever reason if someone comes to your labs that you know and you realize that there's an struggling with sleep for whatever reason. If someone comes to your labs and you realize that there's an issue with sleep, A, how do you realize there's an issue? And what are the first steps you take to help correct that so that they can get that foundation

in place? So I want to know exactly how you're sleeping. So I know exactly why you're sleeping that way. So then we know exactly what to do about it. And this is why, frankly, our success rates are so high. Okay, what do we want to do? I want to run the most in-depth analysis of your sleep absolutely possible. So I have a company called Absolute Rest. And so what we do is we actually build full functional sleep labs in people's houses. And this is all wireless. So we can run full clinical grade FDA approved sleep studies in your house. You don't have to go to a hospital. You don't have to go to anywhere else, right? We're going to run that. We're going to run

this all wirelessly and we're going to run, we're looking at not only depth of sleep. The gold standard in science is called polysomnography, right? So it's like the wires attached to your brain, all that stuff. I actually don't think polysomnography is the best way. There's a better way to do it called cardiopulmonary coupling, where we can actually look at your autonomic nervous system and how that's actually responding. So I prefer that method. We'll do both. We actually run full PSG and cardiopulmonary coupling as well. But we're looking at that. So we can look at, do you have brexism? Like, are your jaw clenching at night? Are your leg moving?

We're doing that also while we're looking at position. So we're having this on your right side, on your left side, on your back, where you at. We can actually do a whole bunch of other fancy stuff with ocular metrics, with eye tracking, with facial scanning, and all kinds of other stuff. But we want to most specifically look at how you're sleeping. We're looking at then why. And so in terms of why you're sleeping, that's in a bunch of different buckets. One of the buckets is environmental. And so we actually run full-time environmental scanning of your sleep environment. And we actually have a little device. I take it with me like everywhere I go. So while we have our athletes always checking the environment when they're in hotels

and places like that, we can always run environmental scans to make sure that it's an optimal thing. So we're looking for temperature, humidity, but carbon dioxide, dander, pollen, allergens, molds, things like. If we can check off environment, then we're looking at behaviors. You've probably heard a lot about sleep hygiene and, you know, don't watch exciting TV thrillers before night. Don't get on your laptop and work and answer emails and then fall asleep. Try to fall asleep five minutes later. That's all behavioral stuff, right? And I'm happy to talk about as many of those as possible. But that's the like stuff people have kind of shared with the world a lot, right?

And then those are very true and very real. Outside of behavioral, then we're looking at physiological. So what are your actual melatonin concentrations? How much serotonin are you making? Dopamine, what is it in your blood biochemistry precursors? What is actually happening? So we're taking salivary markers and blood markers to see what is going on in your physiology that is potentially causing or as a result,

iron concentrations, B vitamins, like a ton of stuff that are needed for proper sleep physiology. We're measuring all of that. We also are measuring psychology. So we have a very in-depth way to evaluate psychology of sleep. So previous trauma and PTSD and associations, there's, funny enough, there is a ton of actual sleep disorders caused by people's psychological state of their sleep. Meaning we have had a lot of success fixing sleep problems because people just have such a

negative association with their sleep because they've slept so poorly for so many years that they actually start getting anxiety when it starts getting late at night because they just know they're not going to sleep well. And so now actually the problem is gone, but they have such a problem. They get into, this is a common one of like, I get so tired. I get so tired. I can't, I fall asleep on a couch and then I get in bed. I lay there for hours. Or the, uh, the classic one we get here is I fall asleep immediately, but then two to three hours in the night I wake up and then I'm shot awake. Okay, great. Like those are all like pretty clear solution or causes a lot of the time. So they have very clear solutions, um, that are not, not very often supplements. What'd you do in those

cases? Cause I, a lot of people that have messaged me speak to exactly what you've described there. Yeah. So we would go back and actually figure out, again, is this behavioral? So are you doing the, no offense, the idiot-proof stuff? Like, are you drinking? Are you doing all those things?

So a lot of times it is simple as that. A lot of the times you don't need to spend a dollar on any assessment. It is really, truly do the stuff people have told you a hundred times to stop doing. I mean, on the psychological point. Yeah. If it's just an anxiety reaction. Well, I started there for a reason because that can be causing it.

Okay. So it is an actual sleep problem you're having because of your behaviors. Right. Okay. Now, let's say it's not all those things. Remember earlier when I said your body's superpower is adapting and responding, right? That's exactly what's happening. If you get into bed and you learn a pattern of continuing to lay there and stay awake or wake up in a certain hours, that pattern will be recognized and that pattern will be repeated. You have to break that

pattern. So how do you do it? This is not very common, but I'll give you like an extreme example. Okay. There's a thing called sleep restriction training. Okay. It's very effective, but it is brutal. We don't go to it often one more time, but we have gone to it. I have used it. It can be successful. This is the same for people who wake up after a few hours or struggle to fall asleep. So what you do is let's say, um, you want to get up at, we'll make the math easy here, five o'clock in the morning. Okay, great. And you typically get in bed at 10 and you lay there and you're kind of up all night

and you have all these sleep issues, right? And then you wake up at five, you're exhausted. So then you have to have caffeine all day and then you're up from your caffeine. So then you have to have melatonin, right? I can't tell you how many times we've looked at people's next morning melatonin concentrations and seen them 20, 30, or 40 times higher than the upper limit on the reference range value. So then what happens when you're walking around with extreme amounts of melatonin the next day? Like you're sedated. Great. So how do you break this cycle? Well, one of the ones that you stop those

habits, like not that much caffeine that late, and then you stop the melatonin. Okay. I don't like melatonin like at all very much for almost anything, but we're going to set the clock and you're going to wake up at five o'clock in the morning. I don't care what happens. You're waking up at five in the morning, period. And we're not even going to get into bed until 1159. So you're going to have five hours of sleep at most. And you know what happens night one? You lay there and you don't fall asleep because you're in that pattern, right? And you're also staring the clock knowing, I have to get up at five. And you're laying there worrying and thinking about how you're not sleeping and it is brutal. And you're going to have a couple of hours of sleep and you're going to

wake up at five. And you're going to get up at five every single day, period. No sleeping in on weekends, okay? You're also going to not get into bed. No matter how tired you are, you're not getting into bed until 11.59. And you do that for a week. What will happen very quickly is your body will start to realize a new pattern of, yo, the second she lets us lay down, you better fall asleep. And you better not mess around during those five hours because we're not getting any naps, we're not getting anything else, right?

You will start to fall asleep quickly and you will jump right into deep sleep and you'll go through a pretty compressed but a proper sleep architecture. Every week then, you add back 10 to 15 minutes. So next week you go to bed at 11.45. And you know what happens next week when you get into bed at 11.45? You lay around falling, trying to fall asleep? No chance, right? Because now you've got a week with pretty gnarly sleep restriction, you fall asleep immediately. 10 or 15 minutes a week after that. And so what you end

up doing is you backfill until you get back up to your eight or eight and a half hours. But the pattern you're learning the entire time is when I go to sleep, I fall asleep and I do not wake up until that next time. So you stop the overnight wakings, you stop the struggling to fall asleep. It takes a couple of months clearly, and it is brutal, but is very very effective how effective from your research we've never had a problem with somebody and not working really putting it that way now again we don't use it very often you don't need to yeah you can do a subtler version of those things um so i want to acknowledge that as an extreme sort of thing i don't recommend doing it especially if you have legitimate health concerns like you want want to have an MD or walk through something like that on you.

You can do it on a more condensed scale though. Generally, if you're laying there struggling to fall asleep, almost every sleep scientist is going to tell you, get out of bed. Because you don't want to set that pattern of like, every night I toss and turn for an hour and a half. That's a problem, right? And so you want to break out of that pattern one way or the other to not to set up that routine. And the same thing would be, this is why it's important to not do things first thing in the morning that are deleterious to sleep. waking up and immediately turning the TV on or immediately looking at social media because your body will anticipate that response. It will then start a cascade prior to that that kicks you up and starts waking you up earlier and earlier every morning because it knows that stimulation is coming at 6 a.m. And so instead of you waking up at 6 a.m. with your alarm and then checking your phone, your body starts to wake you up at 54545, 5.30, 5.15, because it

just knows that thing is coming at six. And so making sure that your morning is not jump-started in that direction, that it really does wake up appropriately, is really important to those that wake up super early and they just can't get back to sleep. There's obviously a well-known, probably might be a myth, I don't know, that says we should sleep for eight hours a night? Well, anytime you throw out numbers like that, again, you're talking on average for most people most of the time. We certainly have some people that are high performing at seven, maybe seven and a half. We certainly have plenty that need nine, 15, need more. There's actually excellent research on, it's called sleep extension research. When you look at, so this is, I love this because this is a great example of going from like,

are you talking about risk of long-term health? Are you talking about maximizing performance? Okay. Now the research is clear going from like seven and a half hours to nine hours is probably not needed to minimize your risk of brain health over there. Okay, like seven hours is probably fine. However, if you're trying to maximize your performance, it's a different answer. The sleep extension research will show you that the most classic one, Sherry Ma's work out of Stanford many years ago now, but she took the Stanford basketball team and she had them sleep an additional two hours a night in season, right? They asked them to sleep for 10 hours a night. The end result was, I think like 1.8 hours of additional sleep per night for five to eight weeks in season. Okay.

Now there's no control group. There's, there's lots of potential criticisms. I'll acknowledge all that, but it doesn't matter because what we're getting at here, you'll see the bigger point. And so she did this in high-level athletes in season, right? These also were not chronically sleep-deprived, so they didn't go through like three hours of sleep. They were sleeping seven hours or whatever and said go from seven to, or eight hours,

go from eight to 10 on average. Those numbers differed for every person, but that's what she did. And what she saw was a 9% improvement in free throw percentage. Enormous, right? Wow. About a 9% improvement in three-point shooting percentage,

improvements in reaction time, reduced sleepiness, improved mood, and a handful of other markers improved in season in Division I basketball players. Now, probably would have gotten better in season anyways, right? Like that tends to happen. Again, no control group. So I don't want to oversell it. But I think it's pretty powerful saying, hey, going from okay sleep to maximizing your sleep, pretty big improvements in all these tests. And some of the tests, like the reaction time test, they did daily for the whole season. So

it wasn't just like, well, the one time they did a test, they happened to get better that day. Same thing, that free throw and three-point shooting percentage stuff was done like in a weekly practice. And so they measured it, you know, weekly over the season and pretty marked improvements. That's been repeated in tennis, swimming, cycling. It's been done in as little as 45 minutes of extra sleep per night for three days. And we're seeing improvements of reductions in cortisol by 20% has been shown in rugby players, reductions in body fat, improvements in VO2 max. All this stuff has been shown when you go from this even seven to seven and a half hour range to eight, eight plus.

There's actually evidence of 30 additional minutes per night reduces the likelihood of getting a cold by four times. So good to great, it's not the same thing. Now, I run many companies in a lab. I have two small children. I know some of you out there are going like, oh my God, if I could only sleep for 10 hours, trust me, my wife will murder me just hearing that.

But my point is not that. My point is to say, look, what if that work at Stanford was exaggerated? Okay, so instead of improving three-point percentage by 9%, it was actually 5% or 4%. I don't know, but who cares, right? Pretty powerful. And look at all the other studies. They're all generally, in science, when you see multiple studies from different labs, different scientists, different groups, different populations, and they're all generally pointing towards the same thing, the numbers aren't exact and the mechanisms, yeah, yeah, yeah.

But that is when you start to get real confidence. And with sleep extension, that's where I believe the collective research is. It's like, there's a lot of studies from a lot of different scientists and a lot of different athletes measuring different things. And you see this three to 10% improvement in most measures when you go from anywhere between 45 to an additional 2 hours per night for as little as 3 days to up to 5 to 7 weeks. So from a normal person perspective, if you can sleep even 30 more minutes, it's probably going to matter.

If you're a person who needs a nap and does well with napping, that can be your additional 30 minutes or 45 minutes or 90 minutes or whatever. So different people will get this differently. I personally hate napping like as, as a personal human. But we'll use it a lot and a lot of actually in our, like our executives and CEOs, we do a ton of, of intentional napping that's super super effective so whatever it is for you I personally do better if I just go to bed earlier I can't sleep in that will never happen

but I can definitely go to sleep earlier I can't nap so whatever works for you and your situation and your physiology but it's generally a good idea I can't make the argument that you live longer by going from eight hours of sleep to 8.30. Not at all. But I can make a strong argument that it will make you perform better. What about sleep debt? You know, because there's a lot of

misconceptions that if I sleep for four hours today, I just make it up tomorrow by sleeping another four hours. And I think I've lived under that illusion for a certain, several years of my life. It's an excuse I tell myself, I'll just make it up on the weekend. Here's the misconceptions about sleep debt. One of the guys that works for us at Absolute Rest, Stephen Lockley from Harvard, he will always laugh about this. He'll say, yeah, man, you can't time travel. As in like, you can't go backwards and make the debt up. So if you only slept for four hours, you'll never get those additional four hours back. but that's not what we're saying with sleep debt okay you can't do that but you can absolutely go from consistent diminished sleep to getting back

out of that sleep debt so when you think about sleep debt that way you absolutely can do it you phrased it well though a second ago which is to say it is a huge mistake to think I'll have inconsistent sleep, short sleep, and then just sleep more. And over the course of seven days, as long as the total amount of hours add up to the same, I'm fine. And that is a terrible strategy. And I don't think a single sleep scientist in the world would disagree with me there. Trust me, we interact with as many of these people as you can. So one of the things you mentioned earlier, you said your total sleep duration is good. Okay, great. That's only one component of sleep. You also mentioned sleep quality. That's another really important component. I would argue the overwhelming majority of people

have never had an accurate assessment of sleep quality, but that's another thing, right? What people also don't realize is sleep consistency. And in fact, a lot of data will suggest that sleep consistency is more important than total sleep time. Meaning you need to be going to bed and waking up at roughly the same time. Plus or minus 30 minutes is the goal. I'm a human too. I will stay up, you know, later and, you know, occasionally do things like that. So we'll give our people typically 45 minutes, a grace period. But as like your default state, you should be trying to go to bed and waking up plus or minus 20 to 30 minutes,

most of your nights. If you can do that, you will see many of the benefits of longer duration by simply getting more consistent. The other major component of sleep here is sleep timing. So performing at the same time of day, the same type of tasks, is as important as sleep duration and sleep quality. Meaning we take advantage of this with athletes all the time. You can predict winning percentage of NFL games, NBA games, NHL games, and Major League Baseball games, the big four in America, over a 30-year span can be predicted by simply looking at who performed not in their time zone, but who performed in the time

that was their normal circadian time. What I mean by that is, let's say you had a West Coast team. Whether they traveled to the East Coast or not doesn't matter, but if they played on the East Coast at the same time of day that they normally play on the West Coast, it doesn't matter that they got on a plane for three hours.

They performed at the same time of day that they normally did. They have a competitive advantage somewhere between two to 4%, depending on the study, maybe a little higher over the team that is playing at home in their same building. If they're playing at a different time than they normally play. So I'll give you like one example. We worked with the university of Washington football team this year on their sleep. And so if they play a normal West coast game at one o'clock, a normal West Coast football time, 1 p.m.,

and then we had to go to the East Coast, which we didn't have to too often, but next year we're going to start having to go there, right? And we got there and we played a game in Ohio, but we played it at 4 o'clock Ohio time, which is still 1 o'clock our time, then we don't have any concerns with jet lag or travel. But in fact, in that case, the Ohio team,

who typically plays at a different time is having to compete way earlier or way later than they're actually at a circadian disadvantage because we're playing at the same local circadian time. So it's not the time change that gets people. We do the same

thing, by the way, with our executive and professional clients, especially in negotiations. If you're doing a team meeting and you have to think, well, that's great. But if you're going to actually have to battle somebody, like negotiation, or make a really hard decision, I want you making that decision on your local schedule,

and I want your opponent off schedule. Don't tell anybody I said that. But you have an advantage. So you get the East coast person to have to have a, uh, a 4 PM or 5 PM West coast meeting. That's eight or nine o'clock their time. Their, their cognitive performance is going to be lower than yours or the inverse. So we make sure we give our people advantages. I was thinking about the gym because the time that I go to the gym fluctuates wildly. Sometimes I go in the morning and I'm going to be honest because it's

what I have to do. Sometimes I go at midnight. Terrible idea. I know you're going to say that. Yeah. We actually have, we encountered this a number of times where we see sleep issues, we see energy issues, we see struggling to lose body fat issues, things like that. And they come in and they think they want this like secret recipe of supplements and you know, blood markers and they want all this stuff. And'm like we do it i'm like yo you gotta stop training at night and we start looking at things like their respiratory rate their hrv other markers of sleep quality and it can be as simple as the fact that you are doing too much high intensity stuff in the evening that has a carry over that carry over can be a couple of hours for some people it could be six hours for other people

and so if you are doing a training session at 10 p.m., you better expect not to sleep very well. That's going to happen. Now, some people are a little bit more resilient to that and others, it's really, really, really damaging. And so we have to pull people off of exercise a lot at that time or at minimum go, hey, yo, for you, if you're going to train at night,

it needs to be restorative training. Short duration, get a little sweat going. Don't get your heart rate up too high. Don't do anything too neurologically fatiguing. And then get out of there. We got to do our harder work in the morning. I'm just making, it's not always the case, but it's more often than not that we have to peel people back. That said, again, I work with professional athletes. We play major league baseball games at seven o'clock. We're not done until 10 or 11. Whether it's like, hey, they literally can't control it. That's their job. Or, you know, schedule-wise, whatever. You can work around it. The world is not perfect. But in an ideal scenario,

you really want to pay attention to that because that can seriously affect. What are the topics on sleep that most people just aren't talking about? Because you're right, there's the edit-proof stuff we all know about. But from your research, you must have discovered another set of issues that just don't get the same level of spotlight and attention. Yeah. I mean, I could go on about this stuff for a long time. We've mentioned the environmental piece of it, really important.

We actually have a literature review in review right now that should be published fairly soon entirely on environmental factors. I never thought about it before. When you started talking about sort of pathogens in the environment, I thought, Jesus Christ,

I didn't know that was an issue. Oh, yeah, yeah. CO2, I didn't think that was an issue when I was asleep. Oh, absolutely. So think about it this way. When you take a breath in, you breathe in oxygen. When you take an exhale and you breathe out, you're breathing out CO2. So the difference is O2 and CO2 is the carbon molecule. Now,

your tissue is breaking down carbon for all of metabolism. In fact, the way that you produce all of your energy doesn't matter if you're using carbohydrates or fat. Remember, fat is just a big long chain of carbon. That's what fat molecules are. Carbohydrates are a carbon that has a water on it. It is a carbon that has been hydrated. So the chemical equation for like glucose, blood sugar, is C6H12O6, which means six carbons and six H2O. That's all carbohydrates are, right? They're big chains of carbon. So whether you're using carbohydrates or fat, it doesn't matter. The end product of metabolism is going to be three things. Water, ATP, which is the central energy currency, and carbon dioxide. Great. So it doesn't matter what you're using for fuel. It doesn't matter what you're using the fuel for. Exercise, digestion, building your immune system, thinking. It doesn't matter.

Remember, your brain is a massive suck of energy, right? It uses the majority of your ATP throughout the day is to power your brain. So great. It doesn't matter what it's coming from or what's being used. More metabolism for any reason from any source results in more carbon dioxide buildup. You take the carbon dioxide out of your organs and tissue and you put it in your blood. Your body is paying attention to carbon dioxide deeply, right? That's one of the primary ways in which you regulate your pH. Your body will regulate pH over almost anything else that it has. Blood sugar, pH, blood pressure, things like that are like the tight things that it doesn't want to mess with. pH is arguably the number one thing. And the reason is if you get too alkaline or too

acidic, enzymes don't work. So everything shuts down. So you want to keep, your pH will stay very, very, very tight. You could do basically whatever you want. You could eat and drink, you could do anything you want, and it's going to keep pH like, really tight. It's hard, hard, hard to change. So it's watching that CO2. You take a breath in of O2, you're pretty much using that to run and regulate cellular metabolism. You're managing O2 by altering respiration. And so if you were to hold your breath right now, and you were to 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds would go on right now, you could actually do this at home. I would encourage you to hit pause and do this if you can,

not while driving. If you don't breathe, what's going to happen is you're going to not breathe in oxygen. Okay, fine. But really, you're going to start building up CO2. Because the way that you do is you build it up in the blood, you get it to the pulmonary system, and then you exhale and you get rid of it. So your breathing, your respiration rate is entirely determined by how much CO2 you want in your system. That's what regulates respiration. Such to say, that air hunger you're feeling when you're holding your breath, it's not that you're running out of oxygen. You have anaerobic metabolism. You can produce boatloads of energy without oxygen. You have enough oxygenobic metabolism. You can produce boatloads of energy without oxygen. You have enough oxygen in your system currently to go extensive amounts of time. You're not

running out of oxygen. What you're feeling is a buildup of CO2. It's the CO2 that drives your respiration. So when you then breathe out, you've exhaled, and then you're probably going to go and breathe pretty hard for a few times because what you're saying is there was too much CO2 buildup. I need to dump it so I can lower that level. Okay. Now, physiologically, we call that hypocapnia. Capnia is carbon dioxide, and hypo is low. If you breathe a bunch, hyperventilate, you're getting CO2 concentrations very, very, very low. I'm going to back that up. If you hold your breath and hypoventilate, you let CO2 concentrations go up. CO2 concentrations have a bidirectional relationship

between psychology and physiology. Okay? So if CO2 rises, not only do you feel a physical sensation in your chest, you feel a physical panic, but you'll feel a psychological change. Right? It is telling you,

you need to move into what's called sympathetic drive. This is your fight, flight, or freeze, right? And this is great. If you think about this from a normal exercise perspective, we'll get to it in a more interesting one here in a second. If I start moving and start expending energy, I start building up CO2, I want my brain to know, hey, this is potentially a fight or flight situation. Doesn't matter if it's that extreme, right? It's just a gradient. Be more focused, be more alert, be more aroused, be more intent. Your vision literally narrows, right? Be more focused. I'm on task. Like right now, I guarantee you our respiratory rates are higher than they need to be. Our HRV is a little bit lower, right? HRV is heart rate variability.

That's a measure of, of where I'm at in the sympathetic parasympathetic drive, right? I'm more focused. Our vision is very narrow right now. I got four feet to look at, right? And I'm attuned. I'm paying attention. Like all of our senses are really heightened right now. When we're done, we're probably going to go the exact opposite direction, right? Our vision is going to open back up. I'm not going to be paying things and et cetera. I'm going to go into parasympathetic. Parasympathetic is rest, digest. It is chill. It is Zen. It is depressed. It's lethargic. It's all these things, right? So parasympathetic, sympathetic is not good or bad. You as a normal human want high

resilience on both sides. When you go to bed tonight, I want you to feel lethargic. I want you to feel no motivation. I want you to feel zen. Great. I want digestion and things like that. Right now, I don't want you to feel super zen. Like I want you to be a little bit like, same way, right? A little bit alert, speaking a little faster than you'd like to be, but really focused, driven, and motivated. That's great. I don't want you feeling that though before going to sleep. I don't want you feeling lethargic when it's time to wake up. I don't want you feeling lethargic when we got to go to the gym. So it's about just making sure we're on when we want to be on and not when we want to be on. So your CO2 is going to tell you that. So a physical stressor, like the exercise, elevates CO2, tells the brain sympathetic drive. A psychological stressor does the exact same thing.

So we could be not doing anything. We're experiencing that right now. We're not moving at all for the most part, but I guarantee you our cortisol levels are higher. Our glucose is being dumped into the blood, elevated. I guarantee you our strength right now is higher, our speed, our power, our muscular endurance is higher right now than in the exact same situation if we were watching TV, okay? It's like we are primed and ready. Our nervous system is actually literally primed.

You just let out neurotransmitters into the system already that are there, ready to activate, so it's faster, okay? So that's awesome. That's telling us to go the direction we want to be in. Now, if CO2 goes the opposite direction, we have the opposite feeling, okay? So we get super zen, super gym. So what you want to be doing is breathing at a rate to where your supply meets your demand. If my supply is up a little bit and I have a little more demand,

then I'm going to breathe a little bit more. Normal respiration rate at night should be something like 11, 10 breaths per minute, okay? If you're looking at your overnight sleep tracker and you're seeing you're breathing 16, 17, 18 breaths per minute, a couple of things are probably happening. Number one, you may have some form of sleep apnea. You can't get enough oxygen, so you're ventilating more than you need to be. Number two, you could be in sympathetic drive more than you need to be. Okay? Now, that can happen for a number of different reasons, but you're over-breathing. You shouldn't be breathing that much because your demand of energy is very, very low, and so you're dumping CO2. By doing that, your CO2 concentrations get too low. This puts you in a little bit of a state we call respiratory alkalosis.

Your kidneys will oftentimes, not always, often though, respond by trying to put you into metabolic acidosis. And so there's a lot of research showing that people that are diagnosed with metabolic acidosis, it's actually misdiagnosed. In reality, it's respiratory alkalosis. It's the over-breathing that caused the problem. The metabolic acidosis, you'll start changing how much bicarbonate you recycle, electrolytes. We see hydration issues with this constantly. So if you're an over-breather,

you're going to have all kinds of hydration problems. All that's going on over there. Okay, so getting back now that we have a little bit of foundation to what's really happening with CO2 in your room. If you are what we call CO2 sensitive and you're intolerant to CO2, so a little bit of CO2 starts building up and your body already kicks you into a position where it thinks you're way too high. It then will tell you to start breathing. You'll start over breathing. That whole cascade I just explained then kicks in. So what happens to your HRV? Gets worse. What happens to your ability to fall asleep? Gets worse. Oh, I wake up and then I can't get

back to sleep. You look at your respiratory rate, you check your CO2 tolerance, you're going to know exactly why, right? Now now I'm about to finish the circle. If it's not those things and you simply are sitting there, let's imagine you and your partner are in your room. Um, do you guys have any other living things in your room that sleep with you? My dog. Your dog. Yeah. What size of dog? Not big, not, not big. Okay. Now, um, without getting too personal here, what does your room look like when you guys are asleep? How big is the room roughly? It's about the same size of the space we're in now.

Okay, fantastic. And is your door shut? Is it closed? Always closed. Always closed. Yeah. Perfect. You couldn't be seeing me out better here.

So, you're at night laying there breathing in, and you're breathing out, and you're breathing out and you're breathing out CO2 and your lovely little bulldog is breathing out CO2 and your partner's breathing out CO2. So what's happening to the CO2 concentration in that room as that door is closed? It's rising. Right. Going up. Generally not an issue, not a huge deal. But what if you is maybe a little bit CO2 sensitive? The amount of CO2 in your room is rising. You're rebreathing that CO2 right back in. CO2 is then getting too high. That's going to cause your entire system, like we said earlier,

when CO2 levels increase, this kicks off sympathetic drive, puts you into fight or flight. Now all of a sudden, HRV goes down a little bit. Resting heart rate goes up a little bit. Arousal goes up a little bit. Resting heart rate goes up a little bit. Arousal goes up a little bit. Your body temperature changes. You're not getting into the same sleep stages and we're having either a struggle falling asleep, staying asleep, et cetera. In addition to that,

there's a handful of studies now. We need way more research here. There's a handful of studies that have taken people at what's called 900 parts per million. So that's the CO2 concentration. That's the level, right? Below 900 parts per million,

we have no issue. And so normally, like I'll check my house. If our doors are closed and stuff all day, I, myself, two shepherd mix, you know, rescues, wife, two kids. Ours will easily get up to 1,500, 1,800 parts per million. Now the research on this stuff has done experiments where they take people up to like 3 000 okay so can i make a strong claim that if you're at 1100 parts per million it's really going to screw up your sleep well i i don't think so but now we're playing a game of like the studies have gone to the extreme and what they will see is a huge reduction of sleep quality both subjective and objective so i actually measured on like a PSG system or similar as well as subjects saying like, I did not sleep well last night. Next day cognitive function,

memory, reaction time, sleepiness, wakefulness, next day executive function, decision making at work. All this stuff is significantly, and when I say significant here, I want to make sure I'm saying not only like research statistically significant, but of a magnitude that matters to your life, right? So it's both clinically relevant and statistically significant. So we're seeing real reductions in sleep quality. In fact, there's a thing called something with like a building sickness where people like they have headaches and they have, they feel like brain fog and all that stuff because they're in large like apartment buildings and the quality of the air gets so low. And by

that, I specifically referring to CO2, that they feel these issues. And once they get CO2 out of the room, then this building sickness thing goes away. So if you're in that situation and that starts to rise and it does get up to 22,000 or 2,500, which is not that crazy, you're absolutely going to see reductions in sleep quality. Sleep onset, again, which is a time, it's called latency. The time it takes you to fall asleep. Waking events, disturbances, and then next day sleepiness, wakefulness, and cognitive function will be compromised certainly up to 3,000 to 3,500 parts per million. What happens at 2,000? I don't know.

Like, again, we need more research. Like, where is the exact line that starts to matter? I do know you get up that high, it starts to matter. And that number is not crazy, especially for people who close their door. Yeah, I was just thinking that. Right? People who live in apartment buildings

or hotels where they can't control. People that live in environments where they can't control, people that live in environments where they can't open up their windows because it's too hot or too cold or rainy or the air quality is really poor or whatever the case is. So if that happens, a couple of steps you can take. One, you're not going to do because I don't do it either, which is don't have your dog in the room. I have two dogs and they sleep right on the end of my bed. Like not on my bed, but on the floor below it. So that's not a question.

But making sure you have a lot of ventilation in your room. If you can and you want to use a fan in your room, that's fine. Don't make it too loud. If you want to download, there's all kinds of apps you can download on your phone that allow you to measure the decimals of noise. Keep it under 35. the decimals of noise. Keep it under 35, 35 decimals. Same thing, by the way,

if you're using like a white noise machine. White noises will actually compromise sleep quality. They'll make it worse if they're too loud. The other thing to do is if you can get away with having your doors and windows open during times of the day where you can at least let that clear out a little bit, and then if you can shut them, even if you can open it up for half an hour or something like that, all those steps will

help manage CO2. That's just CO2. We haven't even gotten into the other stuff in your environment. So is there any other big ticket sleep items that are unobvious? Because CO2 for me, that's a revelation for me. Yeah. Sticking with the environmental theme, there are some things you can do for travel okay that are not super well understood one of them is we've talked a lot about patterning if you can pattern your sleep environment at home with your sleep environment on the road you're going to have much more success many people are aware of the first night phenomenon which is the first night you get into a new place you tend to struggle with. So the first night in a hotel or a place doesn't matter how comfortable it is.

Because the body's on edge. Bingo. Right. So how do you take that away? Well, make the body think it's at home. So how can you do that? The sound, the smell, the temperature, all of this is, all these sensors are going in your brain. If you artificially design your sleeping environment in your house, any way that can be transported with you, then you can cut that problem down in large part. So if there's a particular scent, I don't mean like have a plug

in there, but some like lavender is very common. Lavender is highly associated with sleep quality. So a lot of people will do like a little bit of a lavender spray on the bottom of their bed, on the corner of their room, or just something very, very subtle that you're not paying attention to. There are companies that make little lavender sprays, right? And so then you have that lavender scent at your house, again, something that you would barely even be conscious of when you walk in. Then you take that scent on the road with you. When you get in your hotel room, you can spray it around a little bit and now your body will go, oh, okay, we're at home. Not going to fix it entirely, but these things can start stacking little behaviors like that.

Trying to stay in the same rhythm. Do the same thing the 90 minutes before sleep that you did at home when you're on the road. So don't all of a sudden, you know, like switch out and shower at a different time or eat at a different time. Like try to be as consistent with your sleep routine as possible will be the bigger ticket. But then little things like, you know, having the same setup. If you have a noise machine, take that thing with you and try to bring that environment as much as you can. But the smell is a very big one because it's very high reward, very low risk, and, you know, pretty easy to take a couple of ounces of a spray or something with you on the road. Is sleep equal to recovery? Because I'm

thinking, okay, now I'm really well slept. Sometimes I wake up, like last night in fact, and I'd had eight and a half hours sleep. I'd flown in from London, landed here in LA. My recovery on my whoop band here was 10, 12%. It was really, really low. And I was shocked. Even though my HRV was quite high, it was quite confusing. I spend a lot of time thinking about my HRV. I'm pretty obsessed with it. And I spend a little bit less time thinking about my recovery, but my HRV, me and my friends almost are like competitive with it. We all have a little league table. Me and my girlfriend, it's one of the first things we talk about in the morning, every morning. Do these things really, really matter?

HRV is a very, very strong metric. It is effectively telling you the overall balance of your autonomic nervous system. And that is very strong. There's a lot, there's, I don't know, 50 plus years of research on HRV. It's not new. It's not like, it's very well established. It's highly associated with actually long-term cardiovascular risk, strokes, hypertension, blood glucose, hypercholesterolemia, like lots of things that are associated with HRV. Mental health, anxiety, depression, tons of stuff. We also know

interventions that are generally associated to be positive for you. Exercise, stress regulation, breath work, meditation, all generally improve HRV. And things that are associated as poor for your health, like lack of exercise, low quality nutrition, alcohol use, are also things that are going to reduce. In December, about December the 20th or 30th, around that time, that 10-day window, my HRV was fantastic. And then I went keto for about four, four or five weeks for the entire time I was keto, my HRV was in the bin. And then I came out of keto and my HRV was still in the bin. And to be honest, it's only in the last three days. And we're in February now, we're like mid February when my HRV has started to recover. And I was

like, what the hell happened? Was it the keto that I did? Was it, I don't know. Again, a lot to say on that. Depends on how far you want me to go down this road. I'm not surprised. I would love to see your blood work. I can probably tell you exactly what's happening from that. That will explain a lot of what's going on.

The reason I'm saying that is we have seen many, many times situations which people are fatigued, HRV goes down, sleep, like we see all these issues, right? And you'll see kind of an interesting combination here. And I've used this example a lot because it's come up so many times where testosterone starts to go a little bit low. And you start looking at another thing called sex hormone binding globulin. It's one of the hormones that's a sex hormone binding globulin. It's one of the hormones, it's a sex hormone binding globulin. Globulin is like a collection of proteins, right? So it's a protein that holds on to sex hormones like testosterone. So when that gets really, really high, the amount of free testosterone goes down. That's what free testosterone is. How much is not being globbed up?

And so you see this combination of like sex hormone binding globulin gets really high, testosterone gets super low. And then you start poking around and you look at insulin and insulin's low. And you're like, oh, okay, great. And we know that there's a known association. There's an inverse relationship between sex hormone binding globulin and insulin. Okay. Now, it could be a million things. You don't know. Anytime, like this is one of the reasons why I love blood chemistry so much, because it allows you to be in a little bit of a detective. Now you're always working off the human. You're always working off symptoms.

You don't treat or coach blood markers. It's a bad way to go about it, right? But you're looking for clues. Okay. So you're looking around, you're poking around there and like, trust me, you can check the record. I've given this example plenty of times. So I'm not, I'm not just saying this for you. It's just going to work. You're teaming me up, man. You're just lighting me up here. So in this particular case, you think, okay, why is insulin low? Again, it could be many, many, many things. So you start asking additional questions. But what we've seen a lot is you start poking around and looking at what carbohydrate intake is like. And if carbohydrate intake is insufficient and lower than what that person needs,

now that number is different for every person, situation, all context. But if it's lower than what you need in that particular instance, then your insulin can start getting too low. As a result of that, sex hormone binding globulin goes up. As a result of that, testosterone starts going down. As a result of that, you start feeling the feelings of low testosterone. So the solution in that particular case, we give people carbohydrates. Do you know what it feels like when they have some carbohydrates back? Insulin starts going up, testosterone starts going up, they start feeling incredible. In addition, they start sleeping better, right? So we know there's an association between carbohydrate intake and serotonin concentrations. This is the molecule that helps you fall asleep at night.

There's also meta-analyses that'll show a pretty tight correlation between carbohydrate intake and sleep onset and sleep quality. That is not at all to say you can't be ketone and sleep great. That is not at all to say you can't be in ketosis and have high testosterone. Absolutely possible. I'm not against it. We just see that one often enough to where this is a good example of it just didn't work for you in that situation. It doesn't mean it doesn't work for anybody else or any other situation. Plenty of times to go after it. We actually just put one of our clients in our coaching program on a ketogenic diet for like a very specific brain health reason, actually, brain cancer. But nonetheless, the other times it's sort of like, okay, great. It's not working for you right now. Why is it?

How are you feeling? Not feeling there. How is your HRV? How is your sleep? How's your respiratory rate? How's your performance? How's your training? Like, I want to know all these things. How's your nutrition? In these particular cases, it's like, all right, sometimes as subtle as an additional 50 grams of carbohydrate at night. Wham. Feel amazing. Sleep goes up. Testosterone goes way up. Body composition doesn't change at all, right? You're not going to gain any additional fat as long as you reduce the calories elsewhere, right? And you feel great. So we use the carbohydrates at night a lot, not like right before bed, but you know, in your normal thing, high quality carbohydrates, as long as the total amount of carbohydrates throughout the day are accounted for all that.

So you're just switching. You're saying, okay, great. We're going to pull a little bit from morning or lunch, put a little bit more of that in the afternoon and changing the order here if needed. And in that particular case, that's why I would love to have seen your blood work there. I don't know that that was happening, but that brought me up because we've seen that one so many times now where we're like, all right, just step back and watch it. Without knowing some, having this sort of blood markers from me or having any tests done on me or anyone that's listening now, hour where we're like all right just step back and watch it without knowing some having this sort of blood markers from me or having any tests done on me or anyone that's listening now what are the like the first things you would look at if i'm trying to whoop my friend's ass at hrv in our little hrv league table what are the like fundamentals of hrv are you sure you want me

to tell you let me just tell you afterwards yeah no because i can cut this out and no one needs to hear it so i can just so i can know because this is a big thing it's like a big thing in my family now there's a family lead table and then there's like my best friend's lead table then me and my girlfriend so i'm trying to and i'm losing right now because this bloody keto thing that i did it really honestly my honest answer i hate to do this but it does come back to what is your biggest anchor so we're going to figure out because this is going to be different for everybody if Let's assume you've eliminated all the, what we call, idiot practices. All that stuff is gone. Okay, now we start getting to kind of level two, like level B level things, all right?

I would want to see what that respiratory rate looks like. I would want to see what's the sleep data actually look like. That's your starting place, no question. You want to think about it this way. Okay, maybe I'll back up. It'll be easier. When I go solve this problem, I'm using what's called first principles. Okay, so I'm going to very, very fundamental things saying what's causing stress, and then what's causing stress

relief. Two sides of that equation. And I want to see what's going on. Where's the problem? Too much in or not handling enough of what we currently have? Neat thoughts is one of the two areas. So coming in, is there any changes we can make in your total stress that is a non-specific stressor? Right, so things that are not helping you achieve an adaptation that are not business, can we solve those things, right? Relationship-wise, like, great.

Something in your environment, like is there some other non-specific? Are there any hidden stressors? If I can remove these hidden stressors, all of a sudden the stress bucket just got lowered. Allison, you're automatically having an HRV. And so I'm going hunting, right? I'll take you through the full battery kit and caboodle, and I will find like what are the non-specific stressors that are in there, and we're dialing those things up, okay? Let's assume you either can't do all that stuff or you've done all that. Now, how do we modify how we handle the stress? The stress resilience is the piece. Okay, great. What are we doing for stress management? How much time are you spending decompressing?

I mean, physically and physiologically. Okay. One of the things I love is we are in a state right now, for better or for worse, I'll just assume better, where we have way more arousal in our daily lives than we've probably had in human history in the past. Okay, great. So how do we address that? We need intentional times when we're removing input. A mistake that some folks will make is, okay, I'm working, and then sometimes I listen to music or a podcast and that's great. That's part of your day. And then what do you do after work? Okay. I go to the gym. Okay. Awesome. Love you there. What do you listen to? Oh, I listen to more podcasts. Okay, great. So arousal, arousal, arousal. All right. Then what are you doing when

you're done? Like, oh, okay, great. I watch TV. Okay, great. Like kind of TV? And you see the calculus I'm going through. What are we doing at the time of our day? What do you do if you get done with work early for an hour? What do you do on the weekends, right? I'm not judging, but I'm trying to run the calculus of going like, where is our time where we don't have input coming in? And so sometimes I'm not, I listen to music and stuff when I train occasionally. Not against it. I've said this stuff before and people have been like, oh man, Andy's like, you should never listen to podcasts. I'm like, no, no, no, no. No, please listen to podcasts.

Definitely. And like and subscribe. Absolutely. Can we five star rate? Yeah. Please? Come on now. I got kids to feed.

Dogs to take care of. Just when is the time when we don't have sensory input coming in? So one of the things we'll do often is saying, okay, great, can we do one to three 10-minute walks with no input? Nothing in your ears. If you want to make it a 45-minute walk, great.

If you want to do one, i don't really care what it is but we need some time where you can i like three a day because i want to start your day like that decompress get focused you're going to notice i'm sure your brain works similar to mine we're like if you go 20 seconds it's like all of a sudden and you're getting back and you're going to fire off 50 emails and texts and like you're on, right? Which is great, but you need that time. I like doing it at lunch. Same thing.

You've been on, on, on, on, on, on, on. Give yourself 10 minutes. If you want to do actual breath work, if you want to do actual just closed eyes, if you want to do meditation, if you, I prefer to just like walk outside personally, whatever it is, but you need some time where we just stop the world. It's like torture for me. It's horrible, right? It's awful for me. You know, you know how much I have to like force myself to do those, that part.

My girlfriend's a breathwork practitioner. So she finds it so easy. Oh, of course. She'll wake up in the morning and she'll do like an hour and a half yoga and breathwork in front of me. Never. Yeah. And she doesn't, she doesn't, she hasn't even gone and got her phone off charging. She'll then walk into the kitchen and drink her water, make her little tea with the herbs thing in it. And she'll drift back and she'll go and she sits on the balcony and just sits in the sun.

Me. Whatever the opposite of that is, is me. Yeah, I know. I wake up like the second my eyes are open. I'm the opposite of that is, is me. Yeah, I know. I wake up, like the second my eyes are open, I'm like, I'm like, 100% I'm raging to like get after something

or I actually tend to wake up with a huge creative explosion. So I don't necessarily like have anxiety of like stuff I have to do, but I have excitement of like, oh, I got an idea. Like this is really cool.

Like I want to, like I want to get raging, right? But I don't. I'm like, I play with my kids and stuff like that, right? So can you give me five minutes, right? What can you give me in the morning of just down? Can we do the same thing at some point during the day? And trust me, that midday one is like awful for me, right?

Because the whole time I sit there just going, all I'm doing is wasting time right now. But it is a worthwhile investment because even that amount of time like to re-center um i don't close my eyes i don't do breath like i don't i don't even try it's just like okay great i'm gonna literally walk outside like i'm gonna take one lap around my house like i'm doing something to like bring it back down and then i love it for guys like you and i at night because there has to be some sort of physiological signal that we're done i have to have a thing if not i'm like boom kids dinner playing with them get them to bed and then i'm like everything i can do to not walk back in my office like everything i can do the wife just has

to be like now so if i can finish that was, we're going to do dinner and then we're going to go play outside. We're going to take the dog for a walk. We're going to go to nature walk or something. I have to have something that tells me you're done. The last thing I'll say on this is there's actually really interesting research that will find a disassociation between HRV and respiratory rate and sleep quality. And the reason I'm saying that is they are all entwined, but they are also different. There was actually a study that came out last year and found for every breath rate per minute, so one breath per minute rate increase, and this was in college freshmen, there was a 25% increase in likelihood of experiencing

moderate to high stress. But it wasn't found in HRV. And it wasn't found in any sleep objective or subjective markers. What that's telling you is, again, those are associated, but they're independent variables to pay attention to. And so just because you're like, oh, I sleep enough. And just because, and the last one I'll get to is, we actually use scientifically validated questionnaires to look at mental health in every person we work with.

It's not our expertise, but we have somebody on our team that does that. But really, we're looking for red flags if we need to refer out, right? But we do that because there's just no way you can optimize the human experience with just total disregard for mental health, right? But what happens often is we see people who are fine or just not like major issues in mental health, but they can still have an extremely stressed physiology. And so understanding stress, when I say stress, I do the same thing. I associate that with like, oh, I'm not stressed.

I'm not stressed. But then when we look at your HRV and we look at all these other markers, we're looking at a bunch of blood markers and other molecular markers, we're seeing like a bunch of blood markers and other molecular markers. We're seeing like, well, you have a very stressed physiology. Now, for whatever reason, you're handling it fine psychologically or it's not making an impact, whether it is or not, or I don't know, that's not my area. But we can see it physiologically.

And so coming into your equation, it goes, okay, we have levers to pull here. You asked a few minutes ago, is sleep and recovery the same thing? They're not. They're associated, but this is a good example. You could be sleeping fine, but if you're not physiologically recovering enough, that can be a separate issue. There's a Venn diagram here. There's an overlap, but they're not necessarily just the same thing.

And a lot of people, you'll see the same pattern with CO2 tolerance, respiratory rate, sleep, and HRV. They'll be highly associated. But in some people, you might have to disentangle one from the other one or another one and really pull something apart. So that's what we would do for you is to go in with this HRV game is to say, okay, great. Where is the place that we have to go and usually you'll see something poking out there that says okay here's our opportunity um to go after something and improve and work on and this is where we're going to get the most bang for the buck for you does red light play a role because for christmas she got me two massive red light um i don't even know what they are they're just like panels yeah

there's a lot of data on red light therapy. This is actually a good example of something that I missed the boat on. Like I've changed my tune on this one big time. I didn't think that there was anything here. And I was wrong about that one. There's a lot of research. What is red light therapy doing?

In my head, I was like, maybe it's mimicking the sun or something. I don't know. Okay. So there's a couple of wavelengths. There's one around like 640-ish nanometers and another about 850 nanometers, plus or minus here. And what we're looking at here is red light therapy in those wavelengths have an ability to cross and get into tissue. So they can get past

your skin layer. And they activate a whole series of cascades of things that are beneficial for skin health. We've seen injury. We've actually seen changes in endocrine system, hormone balances for them. There's that, again, it's pretty impressive what it's actually doing because it can get in and stimulate. It absolutely can mimic.

There's actually data on, it potentially improves vision when actually like in the eye. Work with your eye doctors on that one, please, your ophthalmologists and stuff. But you can actually see that. You'll see this a lot for overall global recovery. Again, for muscle soreness and muscle damage,

it can actually benefit those as well. I have them. There's a bunch coming out, but they can actually get hyper-specific and like focus on a certain area of your body that is damaged and tissue. We've used them a lot with athletes coming back from surgery specifically. So one of our quarterbacks this year had a pretty gnarly lower body injury at the very beginning of the season. And we were able to get him back in pretty good shape pretty fast. And we used many

different things, but red light was certainly one of them. I haven't found many people yet where I'm like, you definitely have to go get red light. It's one of those things where I'm like, oh, you got it. Oh, cool. Like I would do it. Or like, hey, you have a $60 million contract this year on the line. Well, we're doing everything like, like bring it all on. That's kind of where I stand with it. So it's another area that I am paying attention to more and more, see what more things come out. But really the ability for those wavelengths to penetrate skin,

to actually get into tissue is what's causing active change inside your actual physiology. I'm someone that works out every day. I've got to be honest, not all the workouts are great workouts. Some of them are pretty terrible workouts because... This, by the way, is the next place I was going with your HRV question. Okay. Another thing where we could potentially see some improvements to your HRV

is breaking down how you're training. What types of training you're doing and what time of day you're doing them. Typically, lower intensity, longer duration stuff oftentimes increases HRV over time. Higher intensity stuff can put people in the hole. And what I mean by that is people that have very high demanding jobs, and then they couple that with really high intensity, high sympathetic drive training. Well, now we're wondering,

you're like, you're high sympathetic drive all day. And then the only break from it you have from that, you went higher sympathetic drive. And now we wonder why your total drive is pretty high sympathetic. Well, you know, when I think about training, you always talk about these trade-offs that you're making. One of the questions I have is, can I achieve it all at once?

And being more specific, I want to gain muscle mass and I want to stay super lean at the same time. And there's a school of thought that says you've got to like load up and then you've got to cut, but I don't want to do that. I just want to gain muscle mass, but stay lean. Is that possible? Yes. Okay, great. Yeah. A couple of things to think about here. It depends on your baseline fitness and how lean you are to start. Okay. Now you're pretty lean as it is already. And I assume you're reasonably fit. I mean, clearly you work out and stuff like, okay, great. It's going to be a little harder for you.

Right. If you're really, really unfit and you're really overweight, it's much easier to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time, right? So it's going to be challenging for you, especially you've got a number of three years of training. That's still kind of like early in your training age, right? That's a pretty young training age. We've got some newbie games that we'll still be able to take advantage of, especially you don't have like a specific plan and tension with your training. You just kind of just, you know, working out. All right, great. We would be able to have pretty good success with that. Physiologically, it's possible. It's never going to be a hundred percent though. There's no way I can put, especially without exogenous testosterone, there's just no way I

can put 15 pounds of muscle on you and zero fat. Like that's just not going to happen. Could we put on seven or eight pounds of muscle and one pound of fat? Oh yeah, we could do that. Like that would not be a crazy thing. You would see that pretty consistently in the research and certainly thousands of coaches in practice are like, oh yeah, like I've seen that countless times. And so it's kind of like, what are the reasonable expectations there?

So what I would do is for you is recommend saying, you don't have to go like 40 pounds and like, you know, but how much do you really want to be at? What's that number, right? We would figure that out. Maybe run analysis on you and see where you're actually at. All right, great. And then we set reasonable expectations. So you want to end up being, you know, you want to put on five kilos total. Okay. Tremendous. You really accept, you know, five kilos, four and a half kilos of muscle and maybe one of fat. Oh, okay, we get reasonable expectations. And then what you would want to do there is train consistently.

You would want to be in a close to caloric, slight surplus as possible. We have to add calories to gain mass, right? But how we're going to do that is 10% surplus, something like that. So if your normal maintenance with all your exercise is 3,000 calories, I don't need you to go to 6,000 calories. That's a recipe to put on some muscle, but a lot of fat too. Now, we don't know the exact number here. There's a lot of studies going on. Actually, friends of mine, Eric Helms in New Zealand has done a handful of studies like this recently trying to figure out what is that number? 5%, 10%, 20%. Where is the number in terms of caloric excess that you want to be on to put the most amount of lean muscle mass and the least

amount of fat on? Because it's not going to be zero, right? 10 or so percent, which for you would be 10% of 3,000 would be 300 extra calories. Maybe 15%. Maybe we're going to 500 extra calories. We're not going to 5,000 calories. We're not making these crazy jumps in your situation there. We'd make sure protein is really, really high, at least two grams per kilogram, right? Something like that, maybe even higher, making sure we have enough extra on there, but we're hedging on, if we're going to miss the mark, I'd rather be missed by 15% too high than 2% too low. There's just no advantage of being down there. And then we'll regulate caloric intake in terms of your calories and fat. We would play with those ratios.

If you want to do a little more fat, a little less carbs, we could do that. If you want to do the upset, we can play with that stuff. But those would be the standards we'd set. Does it matter what time I eat in terms of exercise? Because I've always heard that you should eat sort of immediately after you do a workout. Doesn't matter. In terms of protein timing, if you're just looking at muscle growth, none of the other human factors, which there are many, then timing of protein is pretty irrelevant. You're fine. Timing of carbohydrates does start to matter though, specifically for recovery. Now that typically happens in athletes

that train multiple times a day. That said, with both of them, you have options. Again, look at the research on intermittent fasting. You don't see, especially if you look at the classic kind of like 16-8, which is you have a condensed eating window of just six hours a day and the other 18 you're fasting. That is not any more advantageous for fat loss than non-fasting. There doesn't seem to be any difference at all when you account for calories and protein. So if you want to eat six meals a day, great. You want to eat one meal a day? Won't matter for fat loss. So that still though tells us timing of protein, it's just not super important for someone like you for muscle mass gains. The only practical challenge is this. If we need you at

that two grams of protein per kilo, or maybe higher, can you get enough food in during your timing of eating? Sometimes, yeah. You know, in our study, we had plenty of participants that had no issue eating all their food and calories in a caloric surplus in a six hour window. They had no problem. Others really struggled. And so now we're not talking science or physiology. We're talking practical application. You in your own personal life, my stomach is so full or timing of work or whatever. But if that's not the case, then I'd be like, great, we're going to have no problem. So I wouldn't be super concerned with the timing of either of your, or any of your macronutrients outside of personal preference, real world situations, things like that.

If I'm just a normal guy, which I very much am, and I'm maybe a busy business person, or I just have a job as a manager or something. And I'm thinking about the types of training that are going to help me perform at my best cognitively in my work, but then just be healthy over time in my life. What is the like blend of training types and styles and durations

that are optimal for me to just be a great average Joe? You need a handful of physiological skills to age super well okay so if you want to live and live as well as possible for a long time and it comes down to a couple of things you need to move well what's that mean different definitions but you need to move in a way that is not getting hurt causing pain pain. Great. That comes down to movement skill. There's some flexibility in there. There's some mobility. And there's also just like, do you know how to stand up? Do you know how to walk? Right? So we need to move well. So something where you're addressing, I don't need you to be the most talented sprinter in the world,

but we just can't have glaring holes. Can have huge problems in mobility, flexibility, posture, ranges of motion, because we have to stay out of pain. So number one, biggest key to successful aging when it comes to exercise is not missing training. We can't miss training for big chunks in time, months and years because we're hurt. We have to stay active. Ah, okay.

See what I'm saying? Yeah, so mobility means that we can be consistent. If it does. Yeah. Right? So there's no like strong tie there of like, active okay see what i'm saying yeah so mobility means that we can be consistent if it does yeah right so um there's no like strong tie there of like hey the more range of motion your hamstring the less injuries you'll have i'm just talking if you have some really bad issue where all of a sudden you're 40 years old and you're in so much back pain you can't walk okay you're that's going to be a problem so don't get hurt. That's step number one.

Number two is now speed and power. And I'm saying that because if you look at one of the most significant issues that we face during aging, it's our falls risk. You can't fall. If you look at the data, I don't know what it is off the top of my head, but if you look at the risk of dying after a hip break in those that are over 60 years old, it's something alarming, like a 50% chance of death over the next 15 years. It's absurd. And you could, whatever the number is, it doesn't matter. When you look up the real ones, you're going to be like, wow, it's just as bad as I exemplified there. So you can't afford to do that. Why do you fall when you're over 60? Well, sometimes a dog just walks out in front of you and, okay, great. But the things that you can control, you can't lose your balance.

Don't, like you need to train balance. Okay, great. Secondly, if you lose your balance, you need to have the foot speed and the hand speed to move your appendages out in front of you to stop that fall from happening, right? This is a foot speed. This is a hand speed to move your appendages out in front of you to stop that fall from happening. This is a foot speed. This is a hand speed. Mostly, since your legs are the way that you interface with the world most of the time, we always start with our lower body. We can't have bad knees, can't have bad ankles, and we can't lose foot speed and power. Let's assume that freak accident happened. You had a slip and you had the ability to get your foot out in front of you and you're falling, right? So you're tripping, you're falling forward,

and then you flung your right foot out in front of you and you planted it to stop yourself from falling. So you didn't smash your hip. You then need to have the eccentric strength to stop yourself from collapsing on that foot. So you had the foot speed to get it out there, but did you have the strength to actually stop yourself from falling? Physical strength is one of the strongest predictors of mortality of any metric in the entire world. The only one that is sort of close to it is your VO2 max. Those things will outpredict how long you're going to live more than almost any metric. If you look at them stacked up directly against traditional clinical risk factors, blood pressure, cardiovascular disease markers, coronary artery disease, smoking, diabetes,

things like that, those are all bad. But leg strength and VO2 max typically will predict survival rate more so than those other markers. There's actually a couple of studies that come to mind. One of them out of Jonathan Myers lab, the famous one, 750,000 people in the studies, like big studies. And over the course of it, I think 174,000 people died. These are retrospective studies and stuff like that. But what you're looking at is like who stayed alive and who didn't. Not like a surrogate marker,

not some sort of like direct marker, right? And you will definitely see what's called a hazard ratio, which is to say, okay, 1.0 is neutral. Below one is reduced risk of dying. Above one is increased risk. And you'll look at things, you'll see smoking and diabetes

put you at an HR of like 1.3, 1.4. So 30% increase hazard ratio, 40% increase. That's not good. And then you start to see the things like VO2 max, and you start seeing like 4X increases, 5X increases. They just outpace smoking and diabetes by massive amounts. It's not like smoking is 30% and VO2 max is 40%. It's like smoking is 30% and VO2 max is 300%. What is VO2 max for anybody that doesn't know?

Your maximum ability to bring in and utilize oxygen. Cardiovascular fitness, if you want to think about it like that. When you compare leg strength in those same studies, depending on the studies, it's comparable,

if not higher of a predictor than the VO2 max. Can't I just think about that when I get older? Because a lot of people, you know, I'm 30 years old. Great question. You can, you're welcome to, but here's what happens. We know that VO2 max will drop something like 1% per year after the age of around 40 to 45-ish, right? Now you can attenuate a lot of that. Sorry, it will drop automatically?

Yeah, with aging. Okay. For sure. Regardless of what I... I mean, obviously my work will go against it. Yes. But if left alone, it kind of drops itself. Not even if left alone. We actually drops itself not even if left alone um we actually did a study years ago in stockholm sweden where we took we ran vo2 max tests on

cross-country skiers and these people were world champions in the 1940s and 50s and they were still competing in 2010 so they're on year 50, 60 of continuous training and competing. It's really, really cool to get these people in there a little bit. Again, you're studs in the 1950s and they haven't stopped competing. And we compared them to age-matched individuals back here in the States. Now, all these people were over 80. Some of them were up to 92 years old. And we ran their VO2 max test. And there's a bunch of fun stuff we did there. But when you look at the VO2 max, our group average was something like 35, 38 milliliters per kilogram per minute. Those people, we didn't have their data from the 1940s. But if you're going to win a world championship in cross country skiing,

you're probably going to be in the 80s or 90s for your VO2max. So they were way up there in the 80s or 90s, presumably when they were in their 20s and 30s. We're down to the mid-30s, you know, 50 years later. But people their age that don't train, typically on average, VO2max is about 20. So it is way higher with training. The slope in terms of the decrease can really be blunted, but it will still go down. You'll never see an 80 year old

who can outrun a 30 year old if they're equivalently like trained and talented, right? So it goes down. The same thing will happen with muscle strength and muscle size. How is this linked to mortality though? What is it about my VO2 max that ends up, you know, putting me in a grave? Yeah. So here's what happens. When men cross below 18 milliliters per kilogram per minute, for women, it's about 15 to 16. It's what we call the line of independence. And what that means is basic tasks of everyday living represent so much oxygen utilization that you can't do anything. As an example, if your VO2 max is 15, things like getting dressed in the morning are about 12. Okay. Getting up from the toilet, 12 or 13. Walking, 14, 15. You imagine doing a workout

where you're at literally at your maximum heart rate just walking up your stairs you shut down right and so what happens is it's multifaceted number one cardiovascular your heart is just no longer fit right the amount of blood pressure and amount of stress your heart is under all day just surviving is enormous so what do you think happens your hrv what do you think happens you just sleep what do you think happens to your HRV? What do you think happens to your sleep? What do you think happens to your global? It's a very stressed physiology. It gets worse than that though. You tend to stop doing things. So you socially isolate. You stop being around people. You stop having purpose and drive because you can't do anything. Mental health can decline because you don't feel like you're worth anything. So self-worth goes really low because you can't do anything by yourself. You can't even make your own breakfast. You can't. And so you start to just read. And so this thing

just catapult. So it is a, it is a, again, multifaceted problem. You can talk about just the ability to, you can't bring in and utilize oxygen. You can't feel your brain. You start to deteriorate, but then you can go all the way to the under the spectrum that I just said of like social isolation, because you can't walk, you can't be in the world, you can't get out in the sunlight. Like you can't, physical activity starts to plummet once legs shrink. Legs shrink then specifically will tell you how long you'll be physically active. Once your legs get weak, you stop being physically active because everything gets really, really darn hard. So you're like, I'm not even going to go for a walk. Why? Because I'm going to be exhausted because my legs are going to be shaking because my legs are so

weak. So you tend to stop. You tend to sit. You tend to not want to move. And then all those other problems exist. And now what we call this is atrophy leads to atrophy. So atrophy is a loss of muscle. But now because we're weaker, we want to do less things, which makes it worse and worse. And we just spiral down. So not ever getting into that cycle is critically important. So why can't you wait until you're old? First of all, trainability is still really high. We've done training studies on people 80 years old. You can grow muscle and strength at 80. No question. In fact, almost as well as you can when you're in your 20s. But if you're starting at a VO2 max of 35 when you're 40 years old, how long until you cross below 20?

Well, 1% per year, you can run the math there pretty quickly. You're going to cross that line of independence by 60, 65. And now I guess you can start working out. But, right, Really, really challenging. Alternatively, you drive it as high as possible now, so when you see that decline over time,

your buffer is much higher. Last point I'll make, I'm sure you've got 100 questions there. If you run that gamble, and you get to 50, and you have any little thing go wrong, you've got to have a hip replacement. You've got to have something going on, and now you're bedridden for six weeks. Boom. You just fall off the cliff. You get really busy at work. You got to take care of your mom. All these things that happen in real life and you can't work out as much. Great. So the way that we say this, like one of the golfers I

work with, John Rahm, we were talking about this a couple weeks ago is why I bring it up. And he was like, yo, look, one of the strategies is we always control the things we can control. So there are parts of the golf game that you can't control, the weather and what your opponents are doing.

And so he always makes sure he gets really good at the things he can physically control. I would say the exact same thing right here. If you have the time right now and there's never a good time, but you can control it, you can work out, you have the ability, then you want to put that as high as possible because when things then come out of your control and you get hurt or work or all the gyms in the world shut down, like, you know, all these things that can happen, then you've got some buffer. But if you've got no buffer, you're running a pretty high risk and you're running a

risk of losing your health, which means you're not gonna be able to do anything. Reminds me of a conversation I had at Christmas with a dear relative of mine who, to scene set of Christmas, we've got three little kids below the age of six running around, which are my brother's kids. We've got all the generations there. And then we've got the oldest generation and a member of that generation isn't able to move for many of the reasons you've described anymore there's not an injury there but just going up the stairs even will make them out of breath and we sat down as a as a family at christmas trying to figure out whether this was reversible or not oh yeah and we all concluded you know again being optimist and loving this person very much that in fact, it was a part of a downward spiral.

And this individual had kind of accepted that it was their fate. They said like they'd blamed on something that was unchangeable. And I was there on YouTube trying to find videos to prove that, you know, if you start, I'll get you an exercise bike. And if you start moving, it can, it can change. There's extensive evidence to show you're right okay good tons um again you can look at our any of our work or any other groups of scientists that have done training studies in untrained 70 year olds uh men women 80 year olds plus there's actually the reason i'm saying 80s because of a study that came out last i think it was last year the the year before, on that.

Strength training in 80 plus year olds that are not currently active. Huge improvements in strength, muscle growth. Like, I can't remember the exact one, but I think it was like over 15% increase in muscle size. Like, numbers that matter. So, yeah, you could pick your study. You would have dozens to pick from that would show work. Now, can you get that person to do it? That's the hard part.

That's the ultimate hard part. But a lot of it starting, starts with it, even believing it's possible, which most people don't believe it's possible. They think once you get to 60, it's kind of an inevitability and there's nothing I can do to change it. Yeah, absolutely fundamentally not true.

In fact, if you look at the papers that have been done on the rate of decrease, I don't remember the exact numbers right now, but it's stunning what percentage of physiological decrements are stopped entirely. Like specifically with VO2 max, your VO2 max will remain highly stable. The kind of number we always play with is 50 at 50, which is at 50 years old, I want your VO2 max to be at least 50. If you train consistently, you'll see tons of people who, I remember I said earlier, tends to start dropping around 45 to 50. You'll see people who do not drop into their 60s from their 20s if they consistently train. And that is a very real phenomenon. So you have a

huge control over it. The earlier you start, the better. But if you've already missed that window, it's no problem whatsoever. Your ability to change like really never stops in response to exercise. Plasticity in tissue is extraordinarily high and it responds very well to training. And there's just no reason to think you can't make huge progress at any age. What kind of training for VO2 max? I understand leg strength. I can kind of figure out what I need to do there, but to improve my VO2 max, what do I need to be doing? Yeah. Think of a couple of things. You need to challenge your heart to pump consistently over time. What that means is if you want to think about that as lower

intensity, more continuous work, that's great. The mode, running, swimming, cycling, pushing a sled, doing a circuit, joining a group activity class, those things don't matter that much in terms of they all work. Great, so something that makes your heart rate elevated for, let's call it 20 minutes minimum. Somewhere between 20 and 60 minutes. So if all you can do is 20, let's start at 20.

No problem. What zone should you be in? I don't care. What heart rate? I don't care. Elevated. Great. I'll take that as a win. That's all I need. Then we need to do something that requires your heart rate to get closer to max. What heart rate? It doesn't matter. Go up high. I would bank on those two things. Something that is a lower intensity, longer duration, things. Something that is a lower intensity, longer duration, and then something that is a higher intensity, shorter duration. If you want to do something like 30 seconds as hard as you can and 30 seconds of rest

for four to six rounds, great. No problem there, right? If you want to do something that's a little bit different, if you want to not even worry about that, and again, go to a group activity class, go to a spin class, go to a kettlebell circuit class. Great, you want to go to cardio kickboxing. All that's going to, fine, great. That alone will check the specific protocol, how many reps exactly. When you ask a question like, how do I improve my VO2 max? Specificity always matters towards the end, but at the highest level, it's like, yo, just get your heart rate up. There's a principle in science we call SED, S-A-I-D, specific adaptation to imposed demand. That is to say, if your physiology is challenged, it will adapt. That's all it has to be. If you want your heart to improve, just challenge it. That's as complicated as we have to be.

You do that consistently, ideally, you overload it a little bit over time, it will adapt, your VO2 max will improve. And does that also count for muscles? Because I've been really keen to ask you, I go to the gym every day and I think I'm not growing my muscles very well because I'm basically doing the same thing. I'm like, I know that I should be doing something differently here. We can do better than that. What are the fundamental things I need to be thinking about? I'm going to go to the gym tomorrow morning now, but what do I need to be thinking about? What you've kind of described is playing a game of variation against specificity. Okay. Like anything, pros and cons here, it's not much better.

If you were to go hyper specific, you did the exact same workout every single time, you would drive a lot of adaptation because you're seeing exactly what you're going after. At the same time though, you've increased our chance of overuse, injury, problems, because we're putting all of our load and stress in the same movement patterns, the same joints, et cetera. If you go the other direction, which is like, I literally just make up my workouts every single time, right? Chance of overuse of a specific movement pattern goes down,

but progress also goes down because there's not enough stimulus in the same pattern. So we need consistency. We need to drive a groove and get better at something, but we don't want to be there. So how do we play the game a little bit? Well, we want to have what's called variation. We want to have for you some sort of progressive overload. How do we achieve that? We can go up in load or weight. Okay. We can go up in reps per set. We can go up in sets. We can go up in number of exercises. We can go up on what's called frequency. So how many days per week? We can do a combination. We could reduce your rest intervals,

how much time you're resting between reps, any combinations, right? But we have to have some strategy. We can't do it all. And what we want to think about is 10%, which is no more than a 10% increase week to week. Okay. That'll be enough where we can progressively overload you, but also not really make our injury is too high. So we would want a fairly consistent plan for maybe six to eight weeks or so that we can watch and monitor and go, great. What I would recommend you doing is having, say, 50 workouts, all planned out. And you're going to get to the end of 50 whenever you get to the end of 50.

We're not doing like you work out legs Monday, you do upper body Wednesday. No, no, here's your workout. And this is the order you're going to do them in. And here's the 50 you're going to complete. And we're going to write a new program when you're down to 50 but if you can get extra workout one done today and tomorrow you can get workout number two done great and then it's three days before you get to number three fine number four so instead of thinking about this on like a seven day micro cycles what we called it no no we just have this much work to get done

ideally we want to get this 50 done in the next 100 days. Okay, great, whatever. You're going to go three, four days in a row because you're like, hey, actually, I got a trip going on. I'm not going to train those two days. So I'm going to train four days in a row. Well, it's not ideal, but it's better than skipping three days. Okay, great. Then you're going to come back and go, hey, I'm actually home for 10 days. I got a stretch. I'm going to go three days a day off. Oh, okay, great. But that's what we would do as a system somewhere like that. Well, you know what the end goal is,

but that allows us to then construct those 50 days with intentional overload. As you know, Whoop are a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company. And last month, I had the chance to sit down with Kristen Holmes. She's the VP of performance at Whoop.

And I learned so much from our conversation about circadian rhythms and things like sleep. Studies show that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that you accrue, that your decision-making ability will drop by up to 10%. And when you're chronically underslept, you'll only be a fraction of the person, the fraction of the boss, partner, friend, manager that you can be. That's why I'm obsessed with Whoop, which not just tracks but coaches you on how to get better at sleep so you can bring your best to everything that you choose to do. If you're not convinced, you can try Whoop for 30 days completely risk-free with zero commitment just by going to join.whoop.com slash CEO. That's join.whoop.com slash CEO. And let me know how you get on. If you don't like it,

there's no commitment. Join.whoop.com slash CEO. I had a big debate this Christmas with my girlfriend about creatine. So we're in Cape Town in South Africa and I went and bought creatine and I put it on the table and I was like, I'm going to start taking creatine, right? That's so me, not really knowing what it is or what it's for. That's right. And she picked it up and then looked at the label and gave it back to me. And she said, creatine's not for women. And she felt, and I think a lot of people feel this, this is why I wanted to ask you it, is she thinks that she thought creatine was for bodybuilders. And I Googled it and Googled it and showed her the Google thing. And she was, oh, amazing. And she started taking creatine yeah but I imagine there's a lot of people out there that think

creatine is for people that want to just get stacked great question um sometimes you get deep in your own world you forget you know what the people are really thinking out of that that world so there's a website and a company called examine.com I have no affiliation with them but it is an unbiased place you can go to and you can ask that question for any supplement. You can ask about creatine or you can ask about arginine or Tongkat Ali or whatever you want. You can also ask it by the adaptation. So what are the best supplements for fat loss, for brain function, for cardiovascular health? And it'll give you answers based on there. So it's a really phenomenal site. So when you ask, does it work? Well, work for what and work how much? That's the two questions, right? Work for what? So in the case of creatine, it improves, say, muscle strength. Probably why she had that muscle size. Okay, what's the weight of the evidence? Lots of studies, hundreds and hundreds of studies, men, women, young, old, children, all kinds of stuff, right? Astronauts, space flight, bed rest, tons and tons of research. Okay, check that box. What's the magnitude of effect? You're probably looking at

somewhere between a 3% to 12%. Okay, that's a pretty good magnitude of effect for something that has an insanely good risk profile. Meaning like you can't cause imbalances with it. It's not a hormone. It's not a mineral. So it's not causing oxidative stress anywhere. It's like really, really robust in there. And so when you look at it, you go, okay, great. Pretty easy choice here. I'm not, it's not like the hormone stuff, like I said, where you're turning on something. It's a fuel source. So in fact, remember earlier when I said metabolism, you're either using carbohydrates or fat as a fuel. Actually, creatine is the third one. It's a faster one. So the stoichiometry is one-to-one. So you can break down one molecule of phosphocreatine, gives you one molecule of ATP.

It's the fastest one, but it gives you the lowest energetic output. So it's a fuel. And because of this, there is extensive research on performance-based things. This is where it started. In fact, I remember as a kid when the entire Balco and steroid thing hit baseball in the early 2000s, creatine was like on that list. And that's where this entire association came because Mark McGuire and Barry Bonds were using all of, of course, allegedly, whatever performance enhancing drugs they were not using. And they were also using things like creatine. And so that just kind of got lumped in as like, oh, it's a steroid. It's like a, because it came from that world. And most of the evidence and most of the research was on that. Fortunately, the last 20 years, honestly, people have sort of

left that with creatine because we know the answer there. More interesting stuff is coming in things like bone health. Now, my friend Darren Kando just finished a really great study, two-year study on post-menopausal women at 20 grams a day. Typical dosage for creatine is five grams. So your typical bodybuilder at the gym is using five grams a day. He put this in post-menopausal women, 4X the dose, and did it for two years. No adverse effects, no kidney issues, no problems. Improved some of the bone markers. I think in the actual, like the femur area. I don't remember exactly. It didn't improve others. It's not a miracle. It's not a panacea, but it was like, hey, it didn't do anything bad. Potential to help bone marrow density in a

population that really needs it from just a simple fuel. It's kind of, rather than thinking about it like a mineral or vitamin or hormone,, think of it more like protein powder. It's a nutrient that you get that fuels it. In addition, there's been at least two trials that I can think of off the top of my head that have shown that it may enhance things like mood. There's a ton of research on traumatic brain injury, long-term physical brain health. Because it is such a fast fuel source,

it's actually a preferred fuel source in your brain. Your astrocytes, which are kind of like the central nervous system cells, thrive on creatine. So they absolutely love it. So it is neurological as well. So it'll help the neurological system, nervous system, as well as brain. And tons and tons of stuff going on. It is an antioxidant.

It has some mild antioxidant properties and a bunch of other stuff. So while I understand a lot of people still hear and think of it as the muscle thing, that's because that's where it came from and the dominant research. But really, I would encourage people to look at more in the last 20 years, what people that are doing creatinine research, the topics they're actually studying, and it's not muscle growth and young, healthy guys. There's two most replayed moments. These most replayed moments are basically from the podcasts and interviews you've already done.

The thing that people replayed the most. And I was looking at what those moments were because I find it quite interesting. And I thought I'd just let you know what they are. The first one was um people over eating burning fat in anaerobic exercise as a method of fat loss and this is really what i want to talk about is i've definitely grown up my whole life thinking that the way that you burn fat is by running i mean this is what most people think right they think you want to burn fat

around here the belly fat the best way to do is go for a run. And a lot of people have very little luck with that and end up beating themselves up. So to close off on this conversation, I'd like to hear your take on that. You need to think about fat loss in a broader approach than most people give it to. Which is to say, when you say fat loss, let's get specific. What we're meaning is we're losing fat and ideally we're preserving muscle. That's what we typically want. Okay. We're also talking about losing fat so that it stays off as long as possible. Those are baked into that phrase, but oftentimes forgotten. So the advice I'm going to give you is with those two assumptions in mind. You're trying to keep as much lean mass as you can,

and you're trying to make this a successful journey and not something you have to repeat again time and time. Like a yo-yo. Totally, right? Yo-yo dieting. In fact, one of the more, probably the highest, most cited paper I've ever published was on yo-yo dieting. Like a review article on that. So you can go read that. People love that paper. I was just a co-author. Jackson wrote that paper. So credit

goes to Jackson for that. But making sure you're paying attention to those parameters in mind. How do I lose weight? You can look across meta-analyses and review articles and you will see the number one predictor of long-term successful weight loss, and by weight loss, I mean fat loss, is always adherence. It's adherence to your workout program and it's adherence to your nutrition program. So step number one, before we worry about any change in diet, we sort of start arguing about which method of exercise is, before we worry about any change in diet, we sort of start arguing about which method of exercise is best before we start really going way down the line to things like genetic testing.

Like you're really wasting your time here. And a lot of that stuff, especially if you're not paying attention to what's going to make you adhere the longest amount of time. In fact, if you just stopped right there, that's enough for most people. Can you put yourself in a position where you're able to feel abundant with your nutrition approach? And notice I'm trying not to say diet here. It should be a nutritional approach. You have a balance between living life and flexibility, but then also figuring out what

triggers you. And maybe you don't have a trigger. Maybe you can be more flexible. Maybe you need more stringent, like all the things that go into it you got to figure out a system so you're not people will not be on a diet very long collectively right on average diets don't work quote unquote for those exact reasons right you got to get to a caloric deficit somehow but you got to do that in a way where you still are happy and sustainable totally right and you still feel energy and you're you're there and that it's working for you, right? And that's different for every physiology. Okay, great. And you got to be the exercise system, the same thing, right? If you hate running, there's no reason. You don't have to run a step to lose a ton of weight. If you

love running, you shouldn't run. If you hate lifting weight, fine. I can work with any parameter you give me if all we're concerned about is preserving lean muscle mass and losing fat over the long term. That's really what we have to consider the most. Okay, now within that, does that mean every training and nutrition program is the same? No, no, no, not at all. There are fundamental differences. Here's the problem to think about. If I said, hey, you're going to do the same training program the rest of your life, you'd probably be like, well. But if I told you that with nutrition, people are like, well, yeah, of course. There's magic diets that do, like, no. Keto, great. Meta-training, great. High carb, great, great, great. You can do them all. They can all work

for you. Some people, taking out gluten helps. Some people, great, great great great great you can do them all they can all work for you some people taking on gluten helps some people great great great sure all of it is possible right we come from very different backgrounds if you look at any of the research for example like a really interesting point on genetic testing if you're not taking account genetic background on that, genetic testing for things like nutrition, precision nutrition, is entirely worthless. Because we see classic markers that are associated with, say, more effective carbohydrate utilization or fat utilization or body composition. and they might predict a decent percentage of variance in European Caucasians. You apply those exact same things to West African or East African, and those variants go to zero. People forget that part when they start talking genetic testing. They have not been validated across all ethnic backgrounds. The ones that have, have shown they range from like 40% variance to zero.

So, like, really, like, you're way, way, way ahead of the cart here, paying attention to things that just do not matter. We got to get you on a system that works. Okay, great. For some people that might be more nutritionally based. All right. You can lose and preserve muscle mass really well by just going decently high on protein and then regulating your calories. The example I gave you earlier, you want to go more carbs, less fat. Great. You want to the opposite? Like we can play those levers. No problem. All right. What's your problem though? Oh, I struggle with cravings. Okay, great. Oh, I struggle with hunger pangs. Okay, great. I struggle with, okay, well then we're going to make those decisions based on more of this, more of that, based on like, where's your

pain point? What's your problem? I struggle with the, okay, great. I have to, now we're personalizing, now we're individualizing it based on things that are going to matter orders of magnitude more than other things that I've just talked about, right? That stuff will trump it. Exercise, the same thing. Maybe you hate exercise. Okay, great. Maybe we can get you to walk a few times a day and we'll get most of our fat loss through our nutrition. Maybe the opposite. You love training, but man, you just struggle to eat whatever or not eat something. All right, great. Maybe we'll play the game more with, you know, willpower. We'll push the pace on our exercise. High intensity, fine. Low intensity, fine. Weights, great. Cardios, great. Surfing, great. Don't zone six, I don't care. All of it can be done.

Some of the foundational things that tend to be consistent for those two things on most people is you need to make sure protein is adequate, hard to maintain muscle mass with lower protein, especially if we're going hypocaloric. So keep protein high. You want to do something revolving strength training at least once a week for the same exact reasons. Something that makes you burn a lot of calories, long duration, high intensity, either way. That's all you really have to do. If you can do that stuff consistently, over time, you're going to get there. You're going to be just fine. Where we see problems are people that put themselves in a position of scarcity. What do you mean by scarcity for anyone that doesn't know? Depriving themselves of something.

You feel like you never get to do the thing you want to do. And this is a psychological thing, right? Totally. Which causes the yo-yo effect. Which causes the problem of consistency and adherence over time. So making sure you do that. I personally have some go-to standards I like to do. I'll happily share that with you. I tend to like to have a decent balance between

kind of our anaerobic strength training, high heart rate stuff, and our more steady state longer duration stuff. So if someone's going to be able to work out three times per week, I'm probably doing one thing where we're going long duration, call it a hike, call it a swim, call it a run, whatever we can do. And then the other two days, I'm probably doing a combination of lifting and then probably finishing with some high heart rate thing, right? So we'll do like a little bit of strength and hypertrophy, muscle growth work, and then we'll do a circuit or an

aerosol bike or some sprints or like, what can we get you into? It's like really, really hard. If I can get you in an environment where you're working out with some other human, I love that. Is there any reason why you do the strength first and then? Absolutely. That's a great question. If you do strength training before endurance work, your strength training will not compromise your endurance. In fact, sometimes it exacerbates it. If you do your endurance first, you're going to be more fatigued and you're going to lose strength and still have worse performance in your strength training. What's the most important thing we haven't spoken about?

If there was one more thing you could add of all the things you know that would allow Jennifer, who's a 34 year old single mother or Dave, who's a black cab driver in London, the average person. I think it is exciting what's coming in the world of human health. And I think it's helpful for people to know that stuff because a lot of the challenges we're facing are going to get worse we have things that are going to be possible pretty soon at kind of the stuff I'm talking about this idea of precision exercise precision nutrition it's not really available to many people too too expensive, et cetera. We're going to cross those barriers pretty soon. We are working on a project right now called the Human Digital Twin.

So this is a combination of a couple of my companies, so the sleep company, Absent Rest, our blood work company, Vitality, Blueprint, Springbok, there's another company called AxioForce that actually has four sensors in your shoe. And we can see early changes potentially in gait, so how you're walking, which could potentially, and research is needed here, but potentially be early signs of Parkinson's development, neurological disorder. So we'll see this in gait before we'll see this in symptoms. Companies that are involved in this entire thing,

we can take all those data, we're actually doing this right now, put them together and make what's called a digital twin. This allows us to make your physiology. And so from our perspective of vitality, we've got all your blood work and molecular biomarkers from absolute rest. We've got your sleep, we've got your movement patterns. We can actually work with another company to watch you physically move and do that stuff. We can take your physiology and upload it. Then from there, we can run endless simulations of combinations of nutrition and training and supplementation, medicine, movement, daytime patterns, sunlight, water, all those things, and figure out really quickly how you're going to respond the best for whatever outcome we want. It's not ready at all right now, but we're actually, again, running it right now. We'll have our first cohort done probably in the next week or so. Yeah, really, really soon. I don't know how well the model is going to be the first time through it. I don't know if our group's going to be the best at it. It doesn't matter. But this is clearly going to be something

the world is capable of. As we get better at being human sensors and we can bring those data in, we're going to be able to deploy things like this and say, hey, yo, this is most likely to work for you. The digital twin is already being used for the heart. It's in place. We have the digital twin of the kidneys is as well. The

lungs are coming soon. The heart is coming pretty soon. There's lots of groups. I'm not involved in any of those projects, but that's, it's coming on board. So the ability to not have to guess anymore and most importantly, try, I tried this for six weeks. It didn't work. I tried this for nine. That's going to go away really fast. Great. You still have to go do all the work the technology won't work out for you right well we have some stuff that'll do that too um what's the cost though like when you were saying all of that i go do you know what i mean we spent the entire length of human history with one, maybe arguably two singular goals. One of them at the core was stress reduction. That was what we're after, right? You create communities so you're safer. You create homes so you're environmental and you create agriculture so we're food. And we all wanted to reduce the stress thing, right? We didn't call that,

but that's what it was. And then we got to the year 2000 or so we realized oh fuck maybe that was the wrong target i saw on your bookshelf at home there's a book called the comfort crisis oh yeah and that just flashed in front of me as you were saying that yeah shut up michael it's a great book um when we have astronauts come back from the International Space Station, getting people to live on Mars, it's a bit of a rocket problem, but it's a bigger physiology problem. And this HDT project, part of the people we're working with is Cody Burkhardt,

who runs Human Works at NASA. Figuring out that line of going, hey, you don't want to release stress if you do like what happens when we send people up to space because there's no gravity your physiology tanks really quickly right they come back oftentimes astronauts come back and they like they can't physically walk for a few days right because in that case aspect, now other aspects of stress are way up. We've lost some of the core tenants that it means to be human. And we are not ready for that. We are not ready at all to be able to be told, oh yeah, run this scan. And here's the exact culmination of life you need to run. Not even counting the ethics behind all that. The ethics of genetic testing alone are really, really

interesting, to say the least. The ethics of doing something like that, we have not thought through this stuff. Collectively, we. There is more in our world and our human experience than just straight answers, right? This is one of the beauties of this ride we get to take.

I don't know if we have good answers. I think we've clearly shown we're not very good at asking those questions before. Never. Because the incentives in the short term is so tempting. We're seeing this with AI at the moment. It's just so tempting. And then we get the results back in 20 years

and by then it's just too late. I mean, look at the current health position that we're in, right? We went after that entire idea of minimizing as many stressors as we possibly could. And uh-oh, it worked. Yeah. Oops. Now we have to go back and do this weird thing where we re-engineer stress back into our

lives. You have to be very careful and judicious when you pull things out of a natural state. I'm being very choosy with my words there. If you're not directing stress, you're letting something else direct that. That stress is still coming one way or the other, which means adaptation is coming. So you can be intentional and point that ship in one direction, or you can cover your eyes

and think it's not happening at all and realize you're getting pointed somewhere else. It's better to at least have the acknowledgement. This is why the word consciousness is in the title of my book. This is part of the process, right? You can be aware of it or you cannot. From there, you can choose whatever you want. That's entirely up to you and all that. I just want people to realize you're making a choice one way or the other.

So when you involve technology into the picture, AI is another really, really challenging thing in a lot of ways. But I'll reiterate, we've seen this already play out and we know the answer is this gets worse in terms of we're not going to make very good choices right away. How does that manifest itself in the end? I don't know. Nobody knows. But to date, we're not particularly good at making that decision. So there's lots of

consequences there. I think that we have there. One of the last things I'll say on this is if you break down, okay, the way that we structured is there's four pieces, okay? In order for you to have more success at your performance and health, you number one, have to have assessment. Once you have all this data, you have to go to step number two, which is then you have to qualify. Good, bad, great, worst ever, best in world history, okay? We're struggling on that. We don't know what healthy looks like. I know what clinically deficient rickets looks like.

I know what obesity and type 2 diabetes, and we know disease. We don't know what good versus great means. There are no databases I can pull from. There is no metric I can look at and say, what is a great vertical jump number? What does somebody need to be able to jump in their 40s to be healthy? We don't know these things, and I don't know it by ethnicity. And I mentioned that before. That's a critical component because it is clearly different, right? There are some markers

in basic blood chemistry that are not different in Southeast Asians or that are different in Southeast Asians versus Northern Europeans. We don't have that fully fleshed out. And if we do, it's for disease markers. We don't have that. So I don't even know what I'm judging. Okay. Now, assessment, great. Where are we going to get these databases of super healthy people as the world continues to get less healthy? I'm losing my population to pull from really, really quickly. Okay. Then the next piece is, okay, great. You've told me that this marker should be here. Pick your marker, whatever you want. How do I get it there? And that's really where we're struggling. So the second problem is what I call Polaris. Like we have no North Star. We don't know where this

thing should go. The third one is, okay, how do I get there? What is the intervention? What is the thing? That's where I actually think people in my field are going to not only maintain, but increase their value, such as like personal coaches, physical therapists, athletic trainers, people that are going to, nurses, because you might have an AI that can come in and run something and say, great, your numbers are here and our metrics say you should be here and then you should go do X. I want somebody there with me. I want a human taking me through X. That's going to feel better because we don't know, there's almost no data on, okay, great, well, what is the optimal training for that marker? What is the optimal nutrition?

That is really, really limited. So we have to rely on expert. We have to rely on people that go, I know the evidence base, but then also my experience. I'm thinking about this this way. If you were an NFL quarterback and you tore your ACL and we ran all that stuff on you,

you would still come back and go, oh, great, there's a coach over there who's actually run people through ACL recoveries on 15 starting NFL quarterbacks? Like, what's it going to cost? You're hiring that person, right? Because like you've done it before. Fantastic.

Like the budget doesn't matter at that point because the person's actually done it and they will be there. Fantastic. I really feel like our field is going to increase in the value because of that. They're going to want to say, okay, awesome. The numbers came out on this.

The AI told me this, this, there. You've done it before, yeah? Done a lot? Great. I trust you the most. I want you by my side. I want that companionship. As we lose more and more connection to other people,

it's my biased opinion in my field that this is a great place where people want someone there. Online coaching is great. That's fine and all that. But you're seeing actually already a premium coming on like, I want to hire an in-person trainer. Can you get me that person? Where the boom was the opposite for a while, and now it's already swinging back where people would rather have somebody there in person for all those reasons. So that is, I think, an incredibly interesting challenge. But that's the way to think about it. That top one's going to get better.

Lots of problems. But what are we comparing against? And then what do we do about it? That's going to be the real trick. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to be the real trick. We have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're going to leave it for. Ah, who on your team or in your life can you not function without who rarely ever gets the credit

they truly deserve? Oh man. I can't see any scenario how that answer doesn't go straight to my wife natasha i don't want to be you know cliche on you in that one but it's not cliche in my case it is um like she is fundamental to so many things about my life um the success i've had in the last any number of years is um in large part like because of her and I mean tactically but I also mean like unfortunately I'm not particularly fond of talking to people when it comes to like something crummy happens or whatever I'm just like okay like I'm honestly pretty good about separating those things out. And I don't really like to talk to people about this stuff.

But when I do, that's pretty much going to be her for the most part. And she's also very good about sometimes because it's, you know, when things that affect me affect her, it's the same thing. So sometimes it's like, oh, she needs me to talk to her. Like, I don't want to talk to her. I don't care. But it's like, okay, I have to get in. But she's good about being like,

this is what you need. And this way, you know. So yeah, I mean, there's no scenario in which she's not the answer to that question. Thank you so much. You know, this is probably the longest conversation I've ever had,

but for good reason. Because I could have carried on talking to you for a very, very long time. I find it absolutely fascinating. And I've never really met anybody like you in the sense that you're so innately passionate, mission-driven, and so rigorous in the way that you present information and you provide really, really important nuance to everything you're saying as you're delivering it. And I think it's really, really remarkable. It's really, really, really remarkable. And I don't say that lightly, but I've spoken about this subject matter before, you know, I've had people on this,

this podcast to speak about this, but I've never, ever learned so much. Oh man. You know, and I really, really mean that. But I've also never felt so empowered, which I think is an important point to add because sometimes you can learn something, but it can feel disempowering. But to make me feel like I'm intellectually better off

in terms of like my intellectual wealth around these subject matters, but also feel really, really empowered is a real superpower, you know? And I just wish we could bottle you up in a jar, use AI to keep you alive forever because I think you're a real force for good in the world. So thank you so much for giving me your time today. It's a real honor. Oh, man. I don't know how to accept compliments like that. So thank you so much is all I can say.

It's an honor. Thank you so much, Dr. Andy Galpin. Let's talk about Zoe, who you may know know because they're a sponsor of this podcast and i'm an investor in the company you guys know health is my number one priority zoe's growth story has been absolutely incredible so far they're doing science at a scale that i've never seen before because of their members and recent breakthroughs in research they can now continue to offer the most scientifically advanced gut health test on the market. Previously, the test allowed them to analyze 30 bacteria types in your gut, but now, thanks to new science, they've identified 100 bacteria types. This is a huge step forward and there's nothing else that's available, even close to it, on the market at all. So to find out

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