The Tim Ferriss Show - #716: Performance Coach Andy Galpin — Rebooting Tim’s Sleep, Nutrition, Supplements, and Training for 2024

Starting point is 00:00:00 This episode is brought to you by Momentous. Momentous offers high quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Momentous

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Starting point is 00:03:12 so. And this fishy aftertaste issue has been a problem for me. And it's actually with other brands induced some nausea after a few days. And Ultimate Omega has been as clean as a whistle. I've had no issues whatsoever. And if you are vegetarian or prefer to alternate, I ended up alternating two products. And that is number one, the Ultimate Omega fish oil formula, and also the Algae Omega, which is plant-based EPA and DHA. That's also from Nordic Naturals. So I ended up getting both of those products, and it has improved my recovery from workouts. It's improved my sleep. It has improved my mood. And I know that because I pulled out a lot of other variables. In any case, back to the read. All Nordic Naturals fish oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form,

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Starting point is 00:05:12 What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines. In this case, exercise science, and it is very self-interested. I wanted to talk to this guest, Andy Galpin, about a reboot in the new year. What should I do to train for very specific things? What should I do to improve sleep, et cetera, and so on and so on and so forth. So Andy Galpin, who is Andy? Andy Galpin is a tenured full professor at California

Starting point is 00:05:56 State University Fullerton, where he is also co-director of the Center for Sport Performance and founder director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory. He is a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations. It turns out he has done research, his team has done research on many things that have been on this show. I didn't realize some of it in advance. Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes, including all-stars, all-pros and MVPs, Cy Young and major winners, Olympic gold medalists, and world titleists and contenders across many, many different sports that includes MMA. So for instance, UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, all the acronyms, Olympics, boxing, military special forces, and much more. He is also a co-founder of Biomolecular Athlete,

Starting point is 00:06:45 Vitality Blueprint, Absolute Rest, and Rapid Health and Performance. You can find all things Andy Galpin at andygalpin.com, and you can find him on Twitter and Instagram at Dr. Andy Galpin, spelled G-A-L-P-I-N. Just a few additional notes on this episode. I asked Andy if he would be willing to provide a number of bonuses, a number of resources that we could put in the show notes at tim.blogs.com and he very generously agreed. Those include some synopses, overviews of the various training protocols that were mentioned in this episode, specifically related to the prep for my skiing, but that applies to a lot more than just skiing. It could apply to any number of different endurance sports or maintaining

Starting point is 00:07:29 strength over a period of training, just about anything. That's my interpretation, not his. He also agreed to include a number of different resources related to micronutrient testing and a number of different supplements that he feels pull their weight from a scientific credibility perspective with respect to endurance training. And in my particular case, training at altitude, including skiing. We cover a hell of a lot in this episode. We cover sleep banking. We talk about basketball tweets and how they tie into sports betting, believe it or not, testing sweat. Talk about using respiratory rate, so overnight respiratory rate, which you can figure out pretty easily, as a proxy, an indicator of many other things. And last but

Starting point is 00:08:11 not least, I asked Andy if he would be willing to provide a few snippets, anecdotes, and explanations for a number of bullets that I didn't get to cover. And he recorded those separately, and I added those to this episode for you to enjoy. And here are those bullets. Number one, doubling a client's testosterone by just changing what path he took for his morning walk. Number two, curing a lifelong sleep disorder in five minutes for $22. And now, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and very practical conversation with Dr. Andy Galpin. The honest reality is, as I've mentioned several times now, our approach is to have as comprehensive as testing as possible so that we can get the most precise and specific solutions that we can. But the reality is the vast majority of people will respond best through a multifactorial approach. Addressing all of the big rocks at once

Starting point is 00:09:05 is almost always going to be required for people to get their best results. That said, having done this now really hundreds of times, there have been some fun cases in which people had these remarkable results with extraordinarily simple and sometimes even cheap and really one-change approaches. And so I do want to really reiterate that those are the exceptions to the rule. And I think that's important to state here because that stuff can be

Starting point is 00:09:33 intoxicating. It can really drive confusion. It's like, oh my gosh, maybe all of my problems are really just this one thing. And that can happen. Of course, I'm about to show you some stories, but really, really, really, I don't want you to fall prey to any thoughts sometimes that really this one particular thing I'm going to share is the cause of all human sufferance. It's clearly not the case. So the very first one is from a colleague of mine, Dan Garner. Dan is a world renowned specialist in blood lab interpretations and really human performance. And so Dan was working with a client in the Dallas, Texas area. The client had done many of the right things and had a lot of success, but was particularly interested in elevating his testosterone.

Starting point is 00:10:14 And so despite the fact that things were going well, that number wasn't moving as high as that individual wanted. And remind you, this is medication, TRTs, hormones, things like that are off of the table. We're not medical doctors. It's not what we do. And that's not what this individual wanted. So the quest was, can we do this without those options?

Starting point is 00:10:32 And so Dan had kind of run him through many of the normal steps. And we're still struggling to figure it out. And so we kind of went to the next level with some of the biomarkers we looked at. And Dan was able to identify there was actually an allergic response happening to something in his environment. And you can actually differentiate if it's coming from environmental factors or other factors based on a handful of different blood markers. And so something was going on there, and we didn't know what it was, Dan didn't, rather, but we knew something was there. And so long story short, what ended up happening was it was actually a response

Starting point is 00:11:02 to some of the trees that were in this man's neighborhood. And he was basically allergic to those and didn't know it because it wasn't creating a sufficient enough of a response for him to figure it out. And it turns out that those trees were basically on one side of his neighborhood and not the other one. And so the individuals basically started his day going outside and going for a walk and would walk right through these trees. And it's just kind of exacerbating that response. And there's a known pathway there that'll lead to many things, including compromising sleep quality, et cetera, et cetera, that eventually was compromising his testosterone. And so really the ultimate change that was made was still continue to take those daily walks, but instead of walking out of the house and going right and walking around the block that way,

Starting point is 00:11:41 that he went out of his house, turned left and walked the block in a different area that was no longer exposing him to those trees. So you did that, waited six or eight weeks or something like, I can't remember the exact time domain. And then testosterone was checked again and it was almost doubled by that point. So again, fun little story there, atypical, but absolutely possible and thing that we've seen a number of times over the years. Another really fun story I like is from the sleep. Now this is actually in a professional athlete that we've worked with and has happened more than one time. This exact thing has happened more than one time and so really I'm taking kind of combine multiple stories here but when we do our sleep analysis we're not

Starting point is 00:12:22 just looking at your sleep staging and architecture we actually able to identify what physical positions you are in. So on your right side, left side, back, etc. And one thing that stands out routinely is how sleep quality drastically differs in people depending on their position. So some people really struggle on their right side or their left side or their back side. And it's very common for us to see people will have large percentages of their sleep problems in a single place. And so, again, seen this multiple times where people would struggle, in this example, with sleeping on their back. And what we're able to do for a very cheap price is to go onto Amazon and buy what effectively looks like a fanny pack in reverse. So you can imagine a standard, not the over-the-shoulder chest fanny pack, but the more traditional ones that just go around your waist like a belt.

Starting point is 00:13:07 And instead of having the pouch in front, you flip it around and put it on your low back. And that stops you from sleeping on your low back and forces the individual to sleep on the right side or left side. It's uncomfortable and it is weird for a few days or weeks, but really it's pretty quick for the people to adjust to that. Now, in this story I'm referring to, we were able to see over 90% reduction in sleep-waking events in the very first night by simply putting that backpack on. And that was not a fluke. That has been sustained for weeks and months after that. Now the individual, because it's been so long, again, many individuals here actually, they can really either sleep without the pack entirely, or it certainly no longer affects their sleep at all. They really don't notice it. And those reductions in sleep waking events have persisted for months and months and months, if not years at this point.

Starting point is 00:13:52 And so we would kind of collectively say we have basically fixed that person's sleep disorder that had been going on for years, if not decades, and certainly decades, actually, in about five minutes for I think the backpack costs like 22 bucks on Amazon or something like that. Dr. Galpin, Andy, nice to see you. Nice to see you. And I'm so happy to have this opportunity to do a podcast, which is really a self-interested, self-directed session with you in the guise of a podcast. Anytime you can do something for yourself and only yourself, that's a win. You have a history of competition. You've been a competitive athlete.

Starting point is 00:14:30 You have an extensive history of injuries, which have forced you to become creative. Well, you could have not been creative, but you have the capacity to think creatively about your own training and training. And then you also have deeply technical foundations. And that combination of competitive experience, creativity, and then technical capability, I think produces a lot of what you've been able to do, which is why, in part, I'm excited to have you here today. For a lot of folks who are listening to this, who have listened to many other podcasts, perhaps read many books, they think to this, who have listened to many other podcasts,

Starting point is 00:15:05 perhaps read many books, they think to themselves, for fuck's sake, there are a million different things I could be doing. And it's helpful, even if it's imperfect, to sometimes rank order things. I'll give you an example. So I've known Pavel Tatsulin for a long time, perhaps best known as popularizing the kettlebell in the United States, and large and his position would be strength first right like focus on strength first that is the mother quality and then also important as we age for a host of reasons that i'm sure we can get into and then you can add in other things sort of below that let's just say top of the pyramid or bottom of the pyramid depending on how you look at it how do you think about the cultivation of attributes, training, and how to prioritize those things?

Starting point is 00:15:50 I will acknowledge my bias. Yeah. I played college football. I got into the sport of weightlifting. Olympic weightlifting, as you may know it, but technically called weightlifting. I enjoy that side of the spectrum much more than I enjoy anything else, right? So I'm a sport kind of guy.

Starting point is 00:16:04 I don't really have as much love for physique, bodybuilding, stuff like this. It's always impressive, but it hasn't gripped me because I'm always more interested in sport. So I value being able to hit a golf ball 350 yards, being able to dunk a basketball, being able to skate on ice. I like when people can do a whole bunch of things in a well-rounded area. So that's my just personal preference. At the same time, I acknowledge when other folks have a preference towards endurance or in that case, physique. That's important to understand because the way that I answer this question is built fundamentally upon my own bias, as we'll probably talk about through the entire conversation. We all have that filter. And so we're all aiming it at a lens and it's just personal preference. And I will do my best as the conversation evolves to when I feel like that's a

Starting point is 00:16:49 fair representation of the science versus just my personal preference. And that's not always the same thing though. Sometimes it is. So technically, personally, to me, you outlined my injury history. I know you have just a touch yourself. Oh yes. Just a touch. Quite a collection. I actually prefer the very first quality is you need to move well. What's that mean? Well, there's different definitions depending on what you're asking your body to do, but there are some colloquial standards. You know, you had Eric Cressy on recently. Shirley obviously is just the foundation of the field in large part, so you guys covered a lot of that there. But really, you have to move well. Your joints, for the most part, have a fairly standard operating mechanism. So your shoulder is supposed to go through that certain range of motion. Your neck is supposed

Starting point is 00:17:27 to be in a certain place, your knee and your toes and all that stuff. So you guys can refer back to that, that conversation, but you have to move well. Secondarily, on top of that, after moving well, you have to be able to ask yourself, well, if I'm not moving well, why not? And someone like Pavel is going to come back and say, well, in large part, it's because of a lack of strength. If you're strong enough, you move well. I actually agree with him on many, many, many things. And that's one of them. That said, though, I think there's a little bit more nuance there that I like to approach. And so whenever I'm watching movement, whatever that is to you, whether you're surfing or you like jogging or you're doing jujitsu, whatever it is, I'm going joint by joint and I'm asking a handful of things, almost four specific things

Starting point is 00:18:08 per joint. Number one, does it have appropriate stability? You can call this stability. You can call this strength. It is the same thing, right? Your ability to control the joint, to make sure it moves when you want it to move. And when it doesn't move, when you don't, those things have to both be there. It's not okay to just move it when you want and then not control when you don't. Those things have to both be there. It's not okay to just move it when you want and then not control when you don't want. Driving a car without brakes. Totally. You have to understand that position, right? So you can put whatever phrase on it. I call it strength. Others call it stability, but it's just control, right? So is that joint under control? Is it stable? Number two, and this is even prior to that first one,

Starting point is 00:18:41 are you even aware? You'd be stunned how many movement dysfunctions and mobility restrictions and things that I've seen on people, and none of those are the case. They just don't even know that their foot's pointed to the right or that their shoulder's in the wrong spot. They have no idea, not only where they're supposed to be,

Starting point is 00:18:56 but they don't even have the awareness of where they actually are. So just letting you know, hey, did you realize that your left foot is pointed forward and your right foot is pointed 90 degrees? Which, just as a side note, can be very surprising because I like to think, and I do think I have a reasonably high degree of spatial kinesthetic awareness, but I remember having some issue

Starting point is 00:19:15 with my right big toe and I was doing a split squat type of exercise. And this woman who was supervising at the time said, are you aware that your toe is pointing basically to like, it was my right foot, 10 o'clock on a dial if you're facing 12. And I was like, what are you talking about? And she took a photograph. Oh, like you were internally. Internally rotating heel way out because I didn't have the mobility in the big toe. And so I was dodging that by kicking my heel way out to the outside. That's interesting. Almost always the case would be the opposite.

Starting point is 00:19:50 No kidding. Yeah, you'd flare out so that you can actually get more range of motion, your knee forward. Yeah, so I was doing the drop the hip and throw the straight right kind of position. Yeah. So not to interrupt, but even for someone who thinks they know where their body is in space, you would be surprised. And we don't need to go off course here too much, but the reality of it is you don't need to be perfect.

Starting point is 00:20:06 Yeah. Some level of asymmetry is absolutely fine. And in large cases with almost all of our professional athletes, you actually probably want some asymmetries, right? This allows you to create torque and to move in specific ways where if you're a major league baseball pitcher, you need to be able to throw 100 miles an hour. We have to have some asymmetries. A golfer, all of our folks on the PGA Tour and stuff like, you need those things. So when I say that, I just mean roughly symmetrical. Just give me a ballpark.

Starting point is 00:20:34 What's that ballpark? I don't know. There's no hard cut line there, but you'll probably know when you see really bad, I guess is the point. And so number one was, again, are you stable? Number two was, are you even aware of where you're at? Number three is, do you have some sort of rough balance between front, back, left, right, on the left side of your body to the right side of your body, to the front side of your body, the back side of your body? What's that mean? Let's just say we're going with our knee, right? Let's just say it's my right knee, right? There you go. Let's use that as an example. If I'm doing some sort of hinging activity and my right knee is doing something different than my left knee, now I'm concerned. Is my right knee doing something normal to my foot? Is my right

Starting point is 00:21:14 doing something normal to my right hip? And so I'm looking not just at the movement pattern, but how is it relative to my left? If I say the same pattern on the right knee and the left knee, then that's a different problem and a different solution than if that pattern is exclusive to my right knee. And so that's what I care about. So if there's some level of movement in your knee, maybe that's normal if it's in both knees. If it's aggressive in one side versus the other, you almost always have some sort of compensation happening. Now you've got to run a long algorithm there to figure out kind of what's happening, but that's what I'm after. And then the final step is, can you go through a full range of motion? Now that range of motion is different for every joint. The shoulder does different things than

Starting point is 00:21:51 the low back and the neck and fingers, et cetera, but you should be able to access full range of motion. We want to be able to produce strength and have control in those end ranges of motion without significantly compromising any other joint. And that's really as complicated as it needs to be. And so yeah, can your knee fully flex? Great. Can it do it with any load whatsoever? It doesn't have to be 600 pounds, just a reasonable load. And then can it do it without significantly compromising your ankle or hip or neck or something else? So really it's those four things. If you have all that checked off, then really your joints can access any movement that you want under reasonable control. So as long as you have that, that is checkbox number one, which is do you move well after that?

Starting point is 00:22:35 Now we're going to play a game of, okay, great. If you do it on bilaterally, let's just keep using the lower body. So your knees are fantastic when I give you support. So assisted. So your hands are on a table or I'm holding your hands when you're squatting or something like that. So if I take load off the scenario, do you check all four boxes? Yes, you do. Phenomenal. We're going to the next one now. What happens when it's body weight only? You still move well? Great. Now we're going to the next one. What happens when we add speed? Now you asked that joint to move fast. Does it change its behaviors or patterns? Okay. So you do speed before load. I mean, you could say, I guess it's adding load in its own way. We'll just say additional external load, which could be gravity depending on how you

Starting point is 00:23:13 think. So that one, I'm fine switching out. If you want to go load first before speed, absolutely fine. It's really kind of 1A, 1B in that particular way. But you need to understand what's happening. The point is you want to do all that before you get to the last one, which is now fatigue. You don't want to load a system repetitively. If it can't handle, let's just say it's the knee and we're going to go for a jog. We know that even a moderate jog when you're in a single leg stance is going to put four, five, six times body weight on that load on a leg. So even a slow jog puts a lot of load on your right knee in this particular case times body weight on that load on a leg. So even a slow

Starting point is 00:23:45 jog puts a lot of load on your right knee in this particular case when it's on that single foot stance. So it's a pretty high amount. And now you're going to repeat that over five miles or two miles or one mile. It doesn't really matter. If it can't do it well, when you have your body weight in a unilateral stance, then we have a problem. And just for definition, unilateral meaning here, what? One at a time. So what I kind of skipped over was in that initial assessment, we're going to go through bilateral stuff first, and then we're going to go through unilateral the second way, which is the way to say, all right, if you put your hands on a table,

Starting point is 00:24:19 can you do a squat and your knees and ankles move correctly? And now what if I take your hands off the table? Now it's body weight. And now what if I add load? Okay, great. Now what if I add speed? Now we're going to repeat that whole thing basically by saying, okay, now let's do it one leg at a time. That would be unilateral, right? So maybe you move well bilaterally, but all of a sudden when we get that unilateral again, one foot at a time, now things collapse with speed or they collapse with load or they collapse with something else if i have failure points there then what the heck do you think is going to happen when i put that thing under stress and fatigue you know the result right now again under fatigue you're going to have some tactical breakdowns that's just that's a part of

Starting point is 00:24:59 it but we're looking for red flags we're looking for egregious we're looking for red flags. We're looking for egregious. We're looking for, am I really putting myself in a situation where you're just asking for injury? It is anytime you're talking injury prevention risk, and you can go a million different directions of this. It's never about, can you stop injuries from happening? That is not a real thing. It's all about, can you just reduce the likelihood and reduce the risk as much as possible? So to circle back to your initial question, like where does that pyramid of me land? That's initially how I'm thinking about it. If you're moving well, and you can do this unilaterally, you can do this under load, you can do it fast, and you can do it over fatigue, then you can really do whatever you want. The only thing you have to pay attention to

Starting point is 00:25:40 is how you're defining fatigue. So this is not very practical. This is ideal. But one of the things we use a lot in training is determining fatigue by technical breakdown rather than an actual, you're going to run this many miles, or you're going to run this much time, or you're going to complete this much work. It is how much can you do until we see significant break in posture and technique, until you're on the aerosol bike and you're all of a sudden hunching over. Now your chest is on the paddles in the front. We've stopped at that point because what are we doing? We're potentially reinforcing a bad pattern. We're reinforcing an idea of when you get tired, just go ahead and break posture. We don't want those things, right? That never is

Starting point is 00:26:18 going to be a win in our book. Occasionally, you're probably not talking under 10% of the time. I'll let it fly fly that can't be the pattern let's take this to the personal on my side we're going to talk about tim 4.0 oh i like it not even 2.0 it's not even 2.0 it's like the shoulder 2.0 was a while ago 4.0 which will hopefully involve fewer mris fewer emergency room visits and I'll lay out some of the basic specs and mysteries maybe, and then we can go from there. So the first I think will be time-bound in a way that will resonate with a lot of people listening. And that is we're recording this in late December. And in early January, I'm going to be looking to re-engage with all sorts of training.

Starting point is 00:27:03 You and the whole rest of the world. Me and the entire world. And in this particular case, I do have two months blocked out for skiing and ski training. And I've got lessons already booked with a technical coach. So I have the technical side, let's just say it, organized.

Starting point is 00:27:20 I will be at altitude. I'll be doing ski touring in addition to downhill, which I find very meditative. I also find very challenging cardiovascularly. And so far, so good. That is the same as last year. And I made a ton of progress technically last year, physically as well. Lots of great adaptations. The big difference is that as we were talking about a bit before we started recording, I've

Starting point is 00:27:43 had effectively nine months of deconditioning. And I've had this persistent, sometimes crippling constellation of low back issues, which thankfully are seemingly on the mend. Although I do have some questions for you about it. I'll give you sort of a laundry list of things that are going on. But before I get to that, I wanted to say that for a lot of folks, they're going to go through cycles if they're not consistently competitive athletes of detraining, retraining. And at least for me, as someone who used to be very competitive in various sports, there's a higher risk of believing that I'm 15 or 20 or 25 again, attempting to do things I used to do and getting myself into trouble. So I suppose the broad question is, if you were coaching me, how would you have a conversation about training,

Starting point is 00:28:30 maybe program? A couple of wrinkles. So the first is that I know my low back, as an example, and probably a lot of the posterior chain is weak because I've avoided anything that would potentially lead to inflammation. And I've had a million and one different diagnoses of the slow back, compression, sensitivity, which I do think is the thing, some stenosis at L4, L5 on the right side, et cetera, et cetera. However, I've been told by a number of folks like inflammation is not the issue. However, when I address inflammation, symptoms by and large vanish. I was on like meloxicam and all sorts of anti-inflammatories for a period of time. Ended up doing an extended fast a few,

Starting point is 00:29:11 let's just call it two months ago. So a week-long water fast and in combination with a few other things, complete remission of symptoms for weeks. And that raised a lot of interesting questions. When I am training for two months, unlikely I'm going to take a week to fast, water fast. I could, but it would present some challenges. So I'm trying to figure out how to approach things, recognizing in my older years, which I did not perhaps recognize in my younger years, that there's a high potential for injury here if I approach it the wrong way. A few other notes. Last season, when I was skiing, I noticed that I got more chatter on my right leg. So if I took like a carving turn to the left, I would get more chatter

Starting point is 00:29:50 on the right leg. And I was like, oh, that's very interesting. And my left leg, I have noticeably larger, say calf on the left leg, but I did a DEXA scan recently. And overall I have more muscle mass on the right side. I was like, okay, that's interesting. So I was like, so it seems like I have more muscle mass on the right side, but I'm having a lot more chatter, meaning stuttering on the slope, that the curves aren't as smooth. My priority is skiing. So if that means it's to my benefit for relative strength and skiing to lose some upper body mass, that's fine with me. I don't care. Where would you start in this particular case? If you're just listening, I can't explain to you how big of a smile I have on my face during that whole thing.

Starting point is 00:30:31 This is what we live for, right? This is exactly what I like to do. Now you can take a couple of approaches here. Small to big or big to small. I think you know where I'm going to go. Here's how all of our coaching goes. This is exactly what I do for anyone that comes through any of our programs, any of our coaching programs. I want everything. I want to collect everything on you and that's going to allow me to stop messing around. I would love to do a full battery and gather everything from my cuticles to my, you know, my chest hair and do the 100% analysis. And the reality is you're here for a day, you're taking off, and then I head to the undisclosed high altitude location

Starting point is 00:31:11 in, let's just call it 10 days. So chances are I won't have an opportunity to do all of that. So I'd be curious to know, given that constraint, I realize I should do it, but given the constraint, what you might recommend in the interim? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:31:27 Where are those places you want to start? Let's start with... Maybe you want me to just cover a couple of really specific short ones that... Let's do that. Folks could try. Okay. And a very easy one that almost everybody has access... No, that's not everybody.

Starting point is 00:31:41 Many people have access to. If you have any sort of reasonable tracker of any kind, respiratory rate is a phenomenal insight into everything that's happening in your body. I would make the argument that blood work would be the most important thing that one can do here, if done appropriately. Even cheaper and easier than that, respiratory rate will tell you a ton of stuff. So what we're talking about is how many times you breathe per minute and specifically overnight. So if you can measure your respiratory rate overnight, you'll have a great insight of what's happening. A lot of stuff can be explained. Here's roughly why. When you take a breath in, you're bringing in oxygen. When you exhale, that releases CO2. At all times, you're playing this oxygen to CO2 game.

Starting point is 00:32:23 Oxygen is primarily responsible for regulating cellular metabolism, energy. CO2 is meant to regulate pH. It does a lot of different things, but that's the primary mechanism. CO2 then has a bidirectional relationship between psychology and physiology, meaning a psychological stressor, got really excited, got really happy, got upset, can cause alterations in the physical body, right? Specifically through CO2, exercise, movement, any physical stressor increases CO2 concentrations, but that will then be registered psychologically as, hey, be more

Starting point is 00:32:56 alert, be more focused, be more anxious, all those things. And so when you see an increase in CO2 concentrations that are developed from any tissue, let's just say muscle, that increases CO2 concentrations in the blood. That is then registered as energy is going out physically. So let's be prepared psychologically, again, more focused, all those things. And so your body is constantly measuring CO2 and paying attention to what's happening. And this is good, right? This is one of the main mechanisms in which our body switches us up and down to the autonomic nervous system.

Starting point is 00:33:24 And so on one end of the spectrum, you've got sympathetic drive. This is fight or flight. This is freeze. This is awake, alert, anxious, all those things. It's important to understand that's not good or bad. That is just a thing that happens, right? So as you and I are sitting in this conversation, we should be a little anxious. Well, I want to be hyper-focused. My eyes need to be narrowed on you. I shouldn't be having a panoramic view. Adrenaline should be up. I guarantee our cortisol levels are a little bit. That's the point, right? It's a tool in the toolkit. Yeah. Parasympathetic is the other side. That's rest, digest. That is lethargic. That is depressed.

Starting point is 00:33:54 That is all those things, right? So right now we want to be alert like this. And when we're done tonight and go to sleep, we want to be very parasympathetic and lethargic. Amazing. Well, CO2 concentrations are driving. It's not the only thing, but it's one of the main things driving where we're at that spectrum. And this is why things like CO2 tolerance, which we've studied in my lab, are connected to state and trait anxiety. They are connected to a lot of different things. And so this is Brian McKenzie. Brian, he's done this for probably a decade. We've really spent a lot of time on CO2 for a long time. It'll tell you a ton of what's going on.

Starting point is 00:34:26 That then drives respiration. Because the primary thing, remember, CO2 is regulating pH. And so when your body senses CO2 concentrations are getting a little bit higher, it's going to tell you, ventilate, breathe. Now, if we were to have you hold your breath, just say, take a breath in and hold it, eventually you would start feeling that air hunger, right? That like panic to breathe, that desire to breathe. And eventually if you hold it, panic, panic, panic.

Starting point is 00:34:50 Unless we're at altitude or something weird, that sensation is not being driven by running out of oxygen. It's driven by increasing CO2. Increasing CO2. Right? CO2 concentrations. This is why you have to have carbon monoxide sensors. Also, I need to be careful about shallow water blackouts if you're doing a bunch of crazy breathing exercises. This is why you don't want to hyperventilate

Starting point is 00:35:08 before those. You're supposed to be saying, all right, CO2 concentrations are elevated in my system. Therefore, I'm becoming acidic. So therefore, I need to start ventilating more. So that I breathe more, I dump out more CO2 that lowers my CO2 concentrations in my body, and I'm back to normal. Hyperventilation is specifically exhalation, so additional breathing where it no longer meets metabolic demand. So I'm breathing more than I need to be breathing. If you and I were to sit here and hyperventilate, which I've done plenty of times, that's putting you in a state of hypocapnia. So capnia is the science word for CO2, hypo meaning low. So you've lowered your CO2 below normal. This causes what's called

Starting point is 00:35:45 respiratory alkalosis, right? You've removed CO2. You've removed acid. You become more alkalotic, right? So acid on one side, alkalosis on the other side. Great. Now in response to that, one of the major things that can happen is your kidneys will then start altering bicarbonate, which is the way you regulate pH as well, causing potentially, at least even temporarily, metabolic acidosis because the entire system is supposed to be balanced. So now you've already altered pH in a number of different areas. You've altered what's happening through albumin. You've altered bicarbonate. You've altered all of these things. If you were doing that in the short term, that gets too low. We have all kinds of issues with blackout.

Starting point is 00:36:23 You do that in water, right? We're going to have huge problems, right? People, people die. Yeah, people die all the time doing this. Not good. You want the urge to breathe if you're getting to the point where you need to breathe. Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure, it's a good idea. If I'm under breathing, then we get hypercapnic, right?

Starting point is 00:36:40 And so what's supposed to happen is you increase CO2 concentrations, you get a little bit of hypercapnic. This sends signals. This says, hey, chemoreflexors jump off and they say, breathe more. And so what's supposed to happen is you increase CO2 concentrations, you get a little bit of hypercapnic. This sends signals. This says, hey, chemoreflexors jump off and they say breathe more. So you breathe more and you dump your CO2. That's awesome. So that rate of respiration or how often you're breathing is supposed to be driven by a number of things.

Starting point is 00:36:57 But in this particular case, let's call it CO2. If your respiratory rate gets high, we are now putting ourselves in hyperventilation. It's not clinical hyperventilation. It's not clinical hyperventilation. And this is a story that will unfold so many times. Just because you don't hit clinical markers for disease does not mean you're in optimal physiology. Yeah, right. Yeah, those reference ranges change a lot too, right? Man, I could spend hours on... this is effectively what we do right yeah with all of our stuff we don't use reference ranges for anything yeah we have our own high performance

Starting point is 00:37:31 standards i'm not an md i don't do anything medical or disease related everything from our perspective is from the perspective of enhancing human performance so going from good to great going from where's your risk factor disease i don't care about that's like go see peter to you like i can't help you there yeah again we take hundreds of biomarkers and i don't think i've ever measured apoeb in my life yeah never will this is not your game it's not my game i don't do medicine we do high performance so you want to go from good to great i got you risk of 20-year disease i don't know just exercise don't come Don't come to me. Point is, I'm watching that respiratory rate. If that thing starts to exceed 15 breaths per minute or so overnight, I have a pretty good indication that you're over-breathing. Now, is this, again, clinical hyperventilation?

Starting point is 00:38:15 Probably not. I don't know. Not for me to even call. But I can certainly tell you're over-breathing because at that point, for most people, you're breathing more than your metabolic need. Do you have a preferred tracking device for that a little bit of inside house here we use our own okay so my company absolute rest our sleep company we have a very very high quality one that not to pitch on this but the reality is you should pitch it if it's good just give a second option for like the second place well the reality of it is ours is by by the time this comes out, ours will probably be available. It's a couple of hundred dollars. It's not a tracker.

Starting point is 00:38:47 It is a clinical sleep lab set up on your, in your house with wireless. Our technology is, you've probably seen people with the polysomnography sleep stuff

Starting point is 00:38:56 like all over the place. Ours is entirely wireless. You don't have to do any of those things. So for a couple hundred bucks, you can put that on and we actually are able to. That's absolute rest.

Starting point is 00:39:04 Absolute rest, that company, yeah. We able to to run 150 hertz which means we're measuring 150 times per second most wearables are going to measure once every five minutes something like that yeah so like our fidelity is just a touch higher yeah which means we are catching a whole bunch of things this is by the way an way, an FDA-approved device. So we can, I actually said a second ago, we don't do any medical. That was a bit of a lie. What is it approved for?

Starting point is 00:39:30 Diagnosing sleep disorders. Okay, so the indication is? We can clinically diagnose sleep disorders in your own home in your own bedroom for a few hundred bucks at this point. So that can be done. With that, we have tremendous insights because we're getting every single breath.

Starting point is 00:39:44 We're not missing any breath and hrv ra variability is also the highest standard possible and we're getting overnight of that so you can pick other trackers those are all going to be in the same price range so there's really no difference anything you have is probably fine almost everyone has something watches rings bands, of different scenarios. You can get any of those. I'm trying in my head, is there like a zero cost option or respiratory rate? I mean, you could certainly measure it. You'd get close, actually. You'd probably overestimate it if you just literally use the stopwatch and just measured how often

Starting point is 00:40:22 you're breathing during the day, like at a calm resting state, my guess is you'd be a little bit aroused. So you'd probably be over breathing a touch. So that might give you a little bit of a false1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year

Starting point is 00:41:16 supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. drinkag1.com slash Tim. Last time, drinkag1.com slash Tim. Check it out. Do the rings and watches, et cetera, do a comparable job to a chest strap of some type? It depends on what you're measuring.

Starting point is 00:41:51 The beauty and benefit of having something directly on your chest is not only do I get to measure respiratory rate directly, but I get to measure respiratory depth, which is an entirely underutilized tool. And by depth, you mean sort of chest expansion? That's correct. Yeah. And that's going to tell us a lot about what's going on. We do that too. That's put on there. Not at that insanely low price point, but at our other mark, our full immersion part,

Starting point is 00:42:17 that that's going to get measured as well. We don't miss anything for the most part. Yeah. So do they? No. The honest reality is no. Yeah. Got it. Okay. So you could use both. I mean, just for people part. Yeah, so do they? No. The honest reality is no. Yeah, got it.

Starting point is 00:42:25 Okay. So you could use both. I mean, just for people listening. Yeah. I mean, there are folks out there who would probably spend a lot of time just on like respiratory muscles.

Starting point is 00:42:33 Oh, for sure. And so on. But you were saying, just to lead back after I interrupted, things that people can potentially do. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:42:41 Right, outside of the full Monty. My hope was you have something where you can get a rough sense of respiratory rate because this factor alone and just numbers wise, throw it out there. Again, I always look at 15. There is actually excellent research on 16.

Starting point is 00:42:55 There's actually a recent study that came out that was quite interesting on college freshmen, I believe. And they looked at respiratory rate and they found that for every increase in one breath per minute, so you went from 14 breaths per minute to 15 to 16, there's a 25% increase in likelihood of experiencing moderate to high stress. And that was independent of a number of sleep markers, sleep latency, sleep quality, sleep

Starting point is 00:43:18 timing, duration, things like that. And so if you're using a sleep tracker of some sort, and that's not changing, but you're still feel like you're experiencing stress or some of these other downstream things, you will note it in respiratory rate. You will see that move generally before it is more sensitive. It's like if you've ever used resting heart rate as a metric for if you're kind of overdoing things or where to go, it's okay, but that is a lagging indicator. HRV is more of a immediate indicator. So HRV would be superior. The fidelity and change of HRV is much higher. Blood is even higher than that. It's faster. It's going to tell you what's happening before HRV response typically, but you would have HRV,

Starting point is 00:43:55 like resting heart rate would be another rough way to do that. Respiratory rate would seem to be even faster. Respiratory rate happens really, really, really quickly. You're going to have a change overnight for the most part. If you get a cold, if you have a few drinks tonight, things like that, you will see a change in respiration almost immediately. If you cross that 15 to 16 and you continue to go up, you see dramatic increases in risks of all kinds of disease states. In fact, the line again on the research, and I'm kind of summarizing the entire field really it starts to break around 15 you will see reference ranges that say 12 to 20 is normal i could pound that one as much as you want that's all right i mean we could replace normal with

Starting point is 00:44:36 common maybe but yeah right i want to see 10 or 11 10 or 11 that's the number to be now there is genetic components to it and some other things, but anytime I see above 13, I'm probably taking action. So let me ask a question. I want to, and the action is where I'm going next. And before we get there, I'm curious if the arrow of causality here is bidirectional or unidirectional in the sense that when you exceed a certain sum total of allostatic load, respiratory rate goes up,

Starting point is 00:45:06 presumably. That's what I'm gathering, right? Can you reduce your overall allostatic load by targeting the respiratory rate directly, or do you need to address some components? I suspect it's both ends, but I'm curious if by addressing the respiratory rate directly, for instance, through meditation breathing practices, does that help to reduce the sum total of that allostatic load? Or do you have to go back to the puzzle pieces? Okay. Is it just an indicator?

Starting point is 00:45:31 No, no. So here's where it's fun. Excellent research on this for a long time, 20 plus years of data on this. Physiology recognizes patterns. The same thing happens with sleep. I could give a ton of examples here. Happens with anything else.

Starting point is 00:45:43 But if your respiratory rate is elevated, that could be a ton of examples here. Happens with anything else. But if your respiratory rate is elevated, that could be an acute or chronic response, and it could be independent of the original causality, which means, let's say you had a really traumatic event. Could even be not traumatic. Say you won a big game. You got excited. It doesn't matter, positive or negative, some sort of big event. In the state of that, you went into sympathetic drive. That then elevated respiratory rate. If that pattern is sustained, that continues to hold place even when you remove that initial stressor. So childhood trauma, sure. A period of extensive work, completing a dissertation, having a child, any of these things. Again, it's not negative. It could be good or bad.

Starting point is 00:46:25 That pattern can absolutely stay independent of the stress for being removed. Sounds a lot like pain signaling. Or anyway. Everything is everything, my man. This is why I love physiology. It's going to tell you the story, right? And so we can run a little bit of a triage here. I look at your stuff and I see your respiratory rate 17 breaths per minute. I say, all right, I'm going to look back through the rest of your physiology. Do I see any other indicators of acute stress? I'm going to look at blood. That's going to tell me a lot what's going on. I can differentiate whether that stress is acute or chronic based on various markers. I'm going to ask you, we're going to have conversations. When did you start noticing

Starting point is 00:46:58 any signs and symptoms? Oh, back pain kicked up. Okay. Did anything happen around them? What's going on? Right. We're going to figure this stuff out. It's very important when you measure physiology, you always need to understand symptomology. Like you're working with humans. You're not working with blood markers. Then this is always the case. And so if you have historical data, and this is one of the benefits of tracking over time, we can look back and say, okay, there's an uptick here. Your respiratory used to be 12 and now it's up here. Now it's 16. When's the breaking point? If you don't have any of those things, fine. It doesn't particularly matter because we have two clear action steps we can take in either of those cases, whether we have an acute specific thing we're doing right now that's causing it,

Starting point is 00:47:37 or whether this is some pattern from 10 days ago to 10 years to, it doesn't really matter, right? Number one, you know what? Here's a free version. You can generally get a good sense of somebody's respiratory rate is high if they tend to feel very, very good during light or low intensity exercise. You know why? Why? Because their metabolic rate now starts to match their respiratory rate. So if you're breathing at 16 breaths per minute, that's about four seconds, right?

Starting point is 00:48:03 Ratio. You take 15 breaths in a 60 second window, right? It's about every four seconds, two second that's about four seconds, right? Ratio. You take 15 breaths in a 60 second window, right? It's about every four seconds, two second inhale, two second exhale, right? You're on the map there. So if you are now going for a light jog, doing zone two, zone one, like low level activity, maybe just walking, these people are not always, but oftentimes can't stand going a day without exercise. They got to do some movement. They got to get a sweat in some day. A lot of the times those people's respiration rates high. They can't going a day without exercise. They got to do some movement. They got to get a sweat in some day. A lot of the times those people's respiration rate's high. They can't go a day without it because they feel tremendous when they're doing a low-level activity because now they're finally at a heart rate.

Starting point is 00:48:33 That's matching their respiratory rate. That's matching respiratory rate. And so what happens? CO2 concentrations are normalized and you feel normal. When you don't do that, you go back into, this is, again, this is never perfect. There's no panacea here. There's no magic recipe with physiology ever. So I don't oversell it, but it's very common in our rapid health and performance program to have people like this who are just like, I can't

Starting point is 00:48:54 not work out, right? I get too much anxiety, get too much. And then you look and you're like, oh, I don't need to see your labs. I can predict your respiratory rate. I can predict your HRV. I can predict these other things and they feel great there. And so what is the solution? In any of these cases, number one, we have to reduce arousal, which means you no longer get headphones when we exercise. You no longer get headphones when you're walking. You're not going to put in a podcast when you're going out to take the dog for a walk. We have to reduce input. And you have to, and this is, there's great work here from Emily Hightower. She has a course called Skill of Stress.

Starting point is 00:49:28 It is fantastic. She's actually Brian McKenzie's partner. Phenomenal. Emily is a great resource. She's on our team as well now, at least in part, but she will talk about, hey, we need to read and regulate, which means you need to read your physiological state. You need to be aware that you're over breathing. You should be able to read that state and then you need to be able to regulate it.

Starting point is 00:49:47 So what we're doing is reducing input. And so whatever it is, any physical activity, not as a hard and fast rule, but for the most part, we need you to be bringing senses out and paying attention to what's happening to your respiratory rate in this particular case. So reducing arousal step number one, this could be, hey, no more work at night. This could be like a lot of the very classic stuff. You're doing too many things that bring up arousal at night or throughout the day. We could insert some specific down regulation in the middle of the day. Any number of ways we can go about this, but we want to have some point, particularly after the place where we have the highest sympathetic drive throughout the day,

Starting point is 00:50:23 your most focused and intense work session, your most physical session. And we're going to match that on the back end with an intentional downregulation piece. What are your favorite levers to pull? And I'm sure it's customized, but just broad strokes with your high-performing athletes and so on. For downregulation post? That's right. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:50:41 The easiest by far is give me two to seven minutes of just quiet dark so we typically ask them to do some breath work post exercise which is as simple as turn the lights off lay on your back put a towel over your eyes turn the music off and just breathe for five minutes if you want to follow a specific cadence and do something like box breathing, fine. If you want to do like a double exhale, which means say a four second inhale, eight second exhale. So you're going to extend it, which is down regulatory typically. Fine. If you're super into that stuff, if not, just quiet and calm. Chill the fuck out and breathe. Chill out, dude.

Starting point is 00:51:25 Just bring it down. There's actually some initial data on that can accelerate adaptations to exercise as opposed to exercise down regulation. It's not an extremely strong area of science. It's just a few papers. But nonetheless, it's enough for us to say, okay, what we want to do is take that high sympathetic drive, and then we want to basically expand your boundaries. So right now, your boundaries of up and down are narrow, and we want to bring it way up with exercise in terms of sympathetic

Starting point is 00:51:53 drive really high. And then I want to match it with the downside. And so it's equal and opposite reaction. If you got to a 7 out of 10 sympathetically, I want you to 7 out of 10 parasympathetically. That's going to increase your ability to go up and down. Not always the case. Some people have the opposite problem. This is far more complicated, but broad strokes wise, it's more common for us to ask that than it is the opposite. By doing that, you are contributing to retraining breath rate. And so that is the second step. So first step was reduce arousal when you can. Second one is retraining breath work. If you want to do something like that,

Starting point is 00:52:30 just do very light level exercise. But instead of doing just the movement, we're intentionally keeping a breath cadence. And so we're regulating. We're saying you need to learn to breathe at three second inhale, three second exhale. And so we're going to do whatever exercise you want. I't care it goes hard as you want i don't care but we are capping your inhalation and exhalation right so that would be three seconds in three

Starting point is 00:52:53 seconds out would be sort of in that let's just call it 10 to 11 target range right yeah breath per minute there you go that's the idea and you can kind of do that so you take a combination of approaches there to figure out what's really happening. And that solution can be very quick. It can be a little bit longer. We're certainly, and to be really clear, not boiling down any or all mental health things into just fix your breath rate. You'll be fine. I guess it's not even close to that simple, but it is something from our physiology side that we're really paying attention to. Okay. So hopping back to Tim 4.0. Oh yeah. We got a little far off. We didn't get off track. I mean, these are all interrelated, but if I'm going to be headed

Starting point is 00:53:31 to altitude in, let's just call it seven to 10 days, I've already made a couple of what I would consider risk reducing decisions, such as giving myself a week before intensive training to acclimate a bit to altitude because it always will affect my sleep for the first handful of days. What kind of rough ballpark may altitude you're talking here? 10,000? Yeah, let's call it 10,000. Yeah, okay.

Starting point is 00:53:54 So I typically have elevated heart rate for lots of straightforward reasons. Sleep is compromised, dry, blah, blah, blah. Heart number one would be sort of reducing risk of injury right for me and then because i'm not a professional skier but even if i were i suppose that would be number one but given what i've mentioned and i'll say i just take a few more things in case they're helpful i realize this is a little bit of it's not as comprehensive as i would like but what i've observed pattern wise they're kind of two things at once. One is minimizing likelihood of the back becoming a major problem, which it was last season. I'd have to stop mid-slope and pick up

Starting point is 00:54:29 one leg to try to relieve pain. It was bad. And there were days when I just couldn't even ski because I hadn't slept the night before because I'd been tossing and turning with back pain. So a few things that have helped, some of which are easier to implement than others. So the first thing I've noticed, very clear over the last nine months, more time spent sitting, the more back issues. And when I did some testing with Eric Cressy, just basic stuff, right? But if I'm sort of in a flexed position and I do a compression, say on a chair or extended, doesn't really bother me.

Starting point is 00:55:03 If it's sort of straight up and down, for lack of a better way to describe it compression sensitivity so heel drop test fucking hate it oh very sensitive yeah and other things that may or may not be helpful certainly if i'm working and this is a lay person speaking keep that in mind folks but sort of the antagonistic muscles if i'm doing core work of any type, Pilates, et cetera, that tends to significantly alleviate the lower back issues. Stuart McGill style kind of the fundamentals, big four exactly, especially the side planks seem to alleviate a lot of the,

Starting point is 00:55:42 what I would tend to describe as just like overall, like QL, spinal erector tightness. On the inflammation side, interestingly, I can gobble anti-inflammatories like Tic Tacs. It does not seem to help much. Ice and ketones really help. Ketones only in a fasted state, but ketones and ice, tremendously helpful with some durability. I mean, the ice, that effect lasts for longer than I would have guessed. So anyway, those are a few things, but I'm going to be at altitude in 10 days. At some point, certainly, I definitely will talk about this after we stop recording, but would love to test the absolute rest at some point. I'd be very, very interested in that. Because also the polysomnography stuff,

Starting point is 00:56:26 it's like your first night's going to be dog shit with all that stuff hooked to you. And then it's easy to corrupt the data. How much do you want me to shit on polysomnography? Because I can. No, no, no. Let's save that for- It is an absolute disaster and borderline useless. Yeah. So let's save it. We'll give people that. But 10 days I'm at altitude, how would you, in lieu of, since we won't have time to do all of this testing first, I am going to pay

Starting point is 00:56:52 much more attention to the respiratory rate. I suspect mine is elevated. My resting heart rate also, chronically, I mean, or I shouldn't say chronically, but for as long as I've ever paid attention to it, higher than desirable. Well, you're a data guy. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:06 We got to have data that we can use right now. Yeah, I mean, I have certainly, I'm sure I have a fair amount of stuff. All of our special preferred markers and all that, but I bet we could get a really strong sense of what's happening based on what you have on your phone. You certainly do some sort of tracking at this point of your sleep. I haven't used, say, Oura Ring, et cetera, in a while, just because the main takeaways were like, yeah, don't drink before bed. Maybe don't drink at all.

Starting point is 00:57:30 Right? I mean, there were a few things that I took away from it and I was like, okay. This is the problem, right? There's a significant difference between you don't have a clinical sleep disorder and you're sleeping great. Are you familiar at all, any of the research on sleep extension? Sleep extension? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:57:44 I don't think so. Oh my God. Like, it's so insane. at all any of the research on sleep extension sleep extension yeah i don't think so oh my god like it's so insane if you want to understand your risk of disease 30 40 50 years okay yeah don't sleep four hours a night that's great if you want to look at what happens with disease markers between seven hours to sleep a night in eight hours okay there's not a convincing argument there right so the take-home message there is don't have horrific sleep but that is not nearly the same as optimizing your performance the data on what goes from good to great sleep on optimizing It's not a convincing argument there, right? So the take-home message there is don't have horrific sleep, but that is not nearly the same as optimizing your performance.

Starting point is 00:58:06 The data on what goes from good to great sleep on optimizing performance are strong. There is a ton of research on specifically high-performing athletes in a number of areas. There's at least four studies I'm aware of in the areas of what we'll call sleep banking or sleep extension. Sleep banking is such that before going into exposure of either restricted sleep, high intensity or high duration training, or both, what happens when you bank sleep ahead of time? Get more than normal periods of sleep.

Starting point is 00:58:36 And so a lot of these data are looking at things like going into fight camp, going into training camps. We know that we have a combination of increased training. And so by that fact alone, our injury risk has gone up. Injuries in training camps are higher. You're coming in somewhat deconditioned, just playing a part of it. You're doing a high intensity, a high volume at the same time. Now, we also know on the side, sleep goes down significantly during those phases of intensified training, which you're about to go do, right? So we're 10 days away. We know that this is happening

Starting point is 00:59:09 and we know your injury risk is going to quadruple during this phase. So that's roughly what is going to happen. Now, a bad night of sleep is irrelevant. That's not going to increase your injury risk that much. However, if you look at, and the research again is not insanely strong here, but there is an association with risk and sleep. And so the number one thing I'm thinking is, okay, you already mentioned, and you said this a couple of times, your sleep isn't great when you're in altitude for obvious reasons. Yeah, for the first week or two. Right. We need to bank ahead of time. Like starting tonight, we need to maximize sleep, as much sleep as humanly possible. The number here is 10 hours. We need to get to 10 hours of sleep. We need to get ahead of that curve, right? We know what's

Starting point is 00:59:48 going to happen. And we know that for altitude, we have first night effect. You never sleep particularly well the first night in a new place, you know, all those things. And we know altitude is going to have those physiological issues. So we need to bank that. That's sleep banking can get ahead. Sleep extension is taking good and going to great sleep. There's a handful of studies, again, probably five, ranging from 45 minutes of extra sleep per night for three days, all the way up to two plus hours a night of additional sleep for five to seven weeks. Data on rugby players, high-level endurance cyclists, Division I basketball players, Division I swimmers, potentially missing another one. But enough here. Four or five, six studies from different laboratories looking at different metrics.

Starting point is 01:00:28 You're going to see improvements in particular one. This is actually a classic Sherry Ma study. You're talking about two hours of additional sleep per night and people already sleeping well. The caveat with all this is we're not looking at sleep deprivation, which is you went 24 hours straight without sleep, or what we call extreme sleep restriction. So you slept for four hours or three hours. You're talking about people already sleeping reasonable amounts of time, and now you're adding this 45 minutes to up to two hours a night. Now, in doing that, you're seeing in Sherry's initial study, 9% improvement in free

Starting point is 01:00:59 throw shooting accuracy. This is in Division I basketball players. Same thing with three-point shooting accuracy, improvements in reaction time. Now, these are actually not done in a single time. So what they're looking at is kind of like, I think they shot free throws kind of in practice every day. They track that number over the course of the season kind of thing. So not like just one particular good day of shooting or bad. With any of of this stuff and all science has limitations these are not perfect studies in this particular case they didn't have a control group you'd also assume people get better in season like that happens but a nine percent improvement in elite athletes of a skill let's say it was 50 high let's say it was 75% high. Let's say it was 75% high. Like you're still talking

Starting point is 01:01:45 a 3, 4, 5% improvement, which is really, really impressive, right? There are data on NBA players and their tweeting activities. So how much they tweet post game as a defunct measure of like who's asleep and who's not.

Starting point is 01:01:58 And that can predict almost 2% of shooting accuracy the next day. I'm just imagining all the quants are going to go out and start betting on games now based on analyzing

Starting point is 01:02:09 tweet volume and timing. Sherry, actually, I think... I don't know her at all, but I've seen her stuff. I think she worked for ESPN for like three years and she did this thing where she would predict NFL games, like who would win or lose based strictly on circadian rhythms. And I think she was like 70 to 80%

Starting point is 01:02:26 accurate for three years span. Wow, that's wild. Stephen Lockley, who actually works the rest of this, he's done a ton of this work. So there's things to pay, we're so off track here, but this is too fun. I'm coming back to a point to your ski thing here in a second, I promise. I don't promise. I loosely promise. Oh, I'll hold you to it.

Starting point is 01:02:42 Alright. So what you want to pay attention to is sleep, is sleep duration, of course course all that stuff is great sleep quality this is where polysomnography becomes really problematic like defining sleep quality is really challenging yeah it's not the same thing so let me ask you a question related to sleep and maybe we'll we'll dive even further into this but a few things with sleep banking i would imagine there are people out there, and this would include me, who would say, I kind of wake up when I wake up and I might feel tired, but I'm not sure how I would be physiologically capable of extending my actual sleep. I could extend my time in bed, but I'm not sure of how to extend it. So let's just make that part A. Part B is very specific, which is is i'd be curious to know your

Starting point is 01:03:25 thoughts on caffeine and best ways to reduce or get off caffeine because what i noticed recently i did 30 days with no caffeine zero it's the first time i've probably done that since i was 16 oh and i mean zero caffeine no tea no nothing for 30 days all of my sleep issues went away like resolved magically, right? Of course. And what was fascinating to me is that prior to that, I would often try to fix my sleep issues by attempting to sleep more, more time in bed. I was, I mean, hopefully this is smart enough. If I were tossing and turning, I'd just get up, right? As opposed to just like suffering for an

Starting point is 01:04:04 hour or two in bed. What I noticed when I got off the caffeine is that I, in many cases, was quote unquote sleeping less, but I was going to bed earlier, much earlier, right? I was going to bed in this case, like nine, nine 30, 10 o'clock, waking up a lot earlier, but waking up wide awake. No fatigue, no dragging ass. ass no i need a cup of coffee so the two questions are for people who are listening and are doubtful they would be able to extend their sleep what are some options that includes me right now because i'm back on the sauce and we could dissect that it's been a nutty last 10 days i'll spare you the the drama but a lot of things have happened in life that were unexpected. So my soothing mechanism has been drinking caffeine. I'm willing to get off of it,

Starting point is 01:04:49 but now I have to do it when I'm in real life. Whereas before I had four weeks off the grid and it was easier. So for people who are unsure of how they would bank sleep because they're doubtful that they could extend their sleep, some options and then thoughts on caffeine or getting off of caffeine. Yeah. This is why an appropriate measure of sleep quality matters. To figure out just what you're working with. Is that what you mean? Yeah. You have to, right? So that is, depending on what wearable or tracker you're using, that is defined differently by everybody. I would caution you against two major things here. One, worrying about a sleep score do not pay attention

Starting point is 01:05:26 to that right that is in part almost all those are calibrated against polysomnography and that is somewhat arbitrary right even in 2007 they actually changed i think it's like the american sleep society or something yeah change their definition of what deep sleep is so moving target yeah and polysomnography for people who don't i mean this is what we were referring to earlier like sleep lab bunch of stuff stuck on your scalp quote-unquote gold standard but what people don't know about that is number one those things change and then two all even in a sleep lab um those are based on 30 second epoxes right so what happens every 30 seconds and then somebody goes in there manually grades and decides

Starting point is 01:06:05 this was a cut off line this was not a cut off line and so you're being still subjectively scored. Even on like you went in the lab you went into the sleep clinic you did the whole thing

Starting point is 01:06:14 it's a little bit nasty. So what should you pay attention to? Different ways to go about that. I do have an aura ring I could wear one prior I mean I could put one on

Starting point is 01:06:21 tonight or tomorrow. We use aura for the record with almost everybody for many reasons, have used it historically. So this is nothing against them whatsoever. But even Aura is matched against polysomography. So when they say they're 99% accurate or 80% accurate, it's against PSG, which I don't think is telling you the story. The second part about that is problematic is, think about it this way. If I asked you and we had this entire conversation about

Starting point is 01:06:43 training and you said, hey, I want to train for my ski thing. Would I train the same way for this two months of skiing, physically train, as I would if. If you want to get better sleep, if you want to get better nutrition, in your particular case, you would hire probably somebody who's done performance nutrition for skiing. You would hire a high-performance person for your physical training and sleep or in this type of skiing and something like that. But when it comes to sleep, it's like, go to a sleep lab and get a doctor. But that's all we have here, right? And so we don't think about sleep as a high-performance tool. And I'm saying that to say, why do you think your sleep stages should be the same every

Starting point is 01:07:32 night? Does it make any sense? Would I expect your muscles to perform the same way? No. Would I expect your nutrition to be the same? Absolutely not. So not only should you be really cautious with the sleep score, but even worrying about how much time you spend in each one of those sleep stages based on a tracker

Starting point is 01:07:46 is highly problematic. It shouldn't be the same. When you go ski for six hours a day, I promise you your sleep architecture is going to be different than it is tonight. Oh, totally. And if I was cramming for studying Chinese, it would be something else.

Starting point is 01:08:00 No question, right? And so we need to go a better way about thinking of overall sleep quality. This is where things like, okay, what's your HIV look like? What is your respiratory rate? How do you feel? Did you have a hard time sleeping at night? Did you wake up a bunch? How do you feel right now when you wake up? Those are free ways to assess your sleep. There's actually strong data on two things here. One, I promise I'm coming back to the point. I warned you before we started. Oh, no, you did. This is why I'm alert. I'm sympathetically activated to keep track.

Starting point is 01:08:28 Yeah. Excellent data. If somebody sleeps for eight hours a night versus five hours a night, and you tell them the opposite, you will see a physiological response. So it's a correspondence what you told them rather than what actually happened. So in other words, if I told you, man, when we did this whole sleep study on you last night, Tim, you slept for two hours. You're like, really? Your reaction time, your time your memory your focus your attention that next day will reflect poor sleep if you slept for two hours and the actual study here was five hours and i told you eight i said hey man your aura ring's super wrong actually our technology is better and you sleep phenomenal that's not true true, but like I made it up, right? You would actually respond that way. There's the thing that's growing in the field called orthosomnia, right? Which is actually sleep tracker induced insomnia. And so those scores matter to you.

Starting point is 01:09:17 They matter more than you think. There's also an anticipatory response that can happen such that this is why you don't check your phone first thing in the morning. So when you know that a certain thing happens in this particular case, checking your sleep score first thing in the morning, you will then back calculate and start adjusting your sleep to wake up in that aroused state, which then compromises your sleep quality because you know that thing is happening in a certain amount of time. I mean, you're anticipating waking up, looking at your sleep score, getting a positive or negative feedback, and now it's disrupting. This is why we're typically waking up all of a sudden earlier. Don't know why.

Starting point is 01:09:50 Things like that. So all that stuff, you need to be really, really careful with understanding how am I using any of these technologies if I overall am. So sleep quality, we'll kind of leave it to that for now. Sleep banking, how to, and caffeine. Back to our original point here now. When you are thinking about sleeping more, we're paying attention to those other ones first. Duration is the one you keep saying, sleep banking. But really, I've tried to make the argument sleep quality matters and then timing.

Starting point is 01:10:17 So if you are in the same timing and have a higher quality, you have de facto increased duration. Sure. Even if your duration didn't actually increase. So the number one and two things I'd say there is, number one, let's make sure you're timing your activity today in the right time of your physical day. That's going to make you feel like you've slept more. Your performance will go up. And so without actually increasing a minute of sleep, you performed like you've, it's like a pseudo sleep making.

Starting point is 01:10:42 It's like pseudo sleep extension. Getting a higher quality of sleep and all those things is the same thing. So that's step number one and two, independent of a single extra minute of sleep. If you still need that, then this is where things like napping can come in. Now, be careful with napping. I personally don't like it at all. In these particular cases, I'm okay going with it as long as it's not reducing sleep pressure. Is it harming your sleep latency? Are you waking up more, having a harder time going to sleep at night, and you're losing total duration? A lot of people can get away with a lot of napping, and it doesn't harm it. Yeah, it doesn't work very well for me.

Starting point is 01:11:17 Yeah, okay. So in your particular case, I would say just take what we have, get as much sleep as absolutely possible, and then build in what are non-sleep equivalents. So what can we do throughout the day to encourage extreme downregulation? And really banking that. It's not the same as banking sleep, but is it having the same potential? Well, we've taken a couple of steps of logic away, but it's close, right? So this is pick breath work, pick low-intensity exercise, pick non-sleep deep rest stuff, right?

Starting point is 01:11:46 Pick yoga nidra, like all kinds of things we can do that are going to simulate some aspect of sleep. And that's what we're going to go after. And then really doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on all of your personal known best sleep practices. And just really making sure that is our top priority for the day. What are the things I have to get done? Check in for my flight, pack, things like that.

Starting point is 01:12:08 And then the rest of the time, like I'm really making sleep. So I'm starting my down regulation practice now at 3 o'clock PM or something or whatever you do. So by the time 8 o'clock hits, like you're just very zenned out. So for me, I would say these days, not just reducing, eliminating caffeine and then ensuring I am not exceeding a certain duration of sitting, which is fucked for this week. Some recording podcasts, but that's okay. Those two things, if I attend to those two things, everything else is a rounding error. So those are the two.

Starting point is 01:12:40 Putting aside the low back stuff for now, we can come back back to it but it's such a gnarled tangled mess of different theories and diagnoses but the caffeine is i suppose a little simpler not always easy but what is what is your position here and great i personally don't love caffeine much not as a scientist not as a coach as a human yeah like i don't like it that much um i'll have some but like a half calf espresso is like perfect just tiny background down there your physiology will tell you that answer and what i mean by that is i have plenty of people i do fine on caffeine and their sleep is fantastic and others it really is detrimental if you were to look

Starting point is 01:13:17 across in the landscape of the research what you're globally going to see is caffeine is problematic for sleep it just doesn't i'm not even talking about like hey you don't have caffeine past 2 o'clock p.m. I'm talking about literally any caffeine ingestion whatsoever just seems to take sleep the wrong direction. Yeah, and I think I mis-evaluated this for a long time because I can consume stupid amounts of caffeine and fall asleep. But the sleep architecture is disaster right it's like a one of those spider webs that is created by the spider on methamphetamine where you're like oh that doesn't look right yeah that's my sleep okay so one thing you can pay attention to is your physical output there are not any data

Starting point is 01:13:58 that i'm aware of that suggests that sleep duration is linearly tied to energy expenditure such that if you burn more calories you don't sleep more but there's clearly some association here i mean just based on basic physiology when we understand how caffeine works and how sleep works and there's clearly an association let me give you a very simple example most people are aware at this point of a molecule called atp right this is the energy currency of biology. It's the only way we can use cellular energy. Now that stands for adenosine triphosphate. So it's an adenosine molecule with tri-three phosphates, one, two, three. The way that energy is created from ATP is you take one of those

Starting point is 01:14:35 phosphates at the end and you break that off. In our biology, that is exergonic, meaning it gives off net energy and we can use that. What that leaves is a molecule called inergonic phosphate. So one of those Ps is floating around. And then now, instead of having a triphosphate, you have a diphosphate. So there's two of them. If you were to do that one more time, and this becomes challenging, but that adenosine diphosphate goes to adenosine monophosphate. You do that one more time, and now you just have adenosine. Those phosphates are now recycled and gone back. That adenosine molecule is what drives

Starting point is 01:15:06 most of sleep pressure and the way caffeine works is that will competitively bind to the same receptors so they're binding up to that receptor which means adenosine can't which means you don't feel the pressure for sleep right great this is why it causes so many sleep issues therefore it makes some intuitive sense to say if if I burn a bunch more ATP, this should then, if I have a bunch of caffeine in the system, allow me to generate more overall pressure because I'm creating more total adenosine in the system. Better ability to bind. Now, that's not the rate limiting step to it. That's why there's not a linear relationship there, but you're going to have some stuff there. What I say that to mean is our people that engage in the most physical activity, even when they consume decent amounts

Starting point is 01:15:48 of caffeine, tend to, on average, still be okay with their sleep architecture. And so one of the ways to do that, of course, genetics and how fast, and we've probably talked about this, but how fast you metabolize caffeine and don't and stuff like that, that all matters. But the reality of it is if you are in that situation, having a high energy expenditure and the other one I'll say is having a high cognitive expenditure. So making sure both those demands are really high are going to get you in a position where if you have to be on the sauce, as you say, that you're giving yourself the best chance to sleep the highest amount. So when you asked me that second question of how do we think about caffeine, we typically

Starting point is 01:16:27 deal with high-performing folks. So whether this is our athletes or non-athletes, they're all in this game for high performance, which means caffeine comes along for the ride almost all the time. Caffeine is an incredibly powerful ergogenic aid. Tons of research on it affecting and enhancing human performance in a lot of ways, right? And so we use it a lot for athletes. You going to perform better that's great but you have to play the game of sleep so when you cross over of yeah you had better numbers in the gym or on the court or on the course or wherever at but now we've lost sleep there's no right answer here at what point

Starting point is 01:17:00 do we say okay i'd rather you be a little bit fatigued and not train as hard, but then sleep tonight? And I can't answer that. One of the easiest examples is with our PGA golfers. And so here's a good example. You're going to be on a course for four to six hours in the PGA tour. Energy is a big deal. So we got to keep these folks, especially when it's hot and we're playing in Augusta and we're playing in like all these really difficult places. So we got to keep people hydrated and performing. At the same time, golfers don't typically love caffeine because any amount of loss of neuromuscular control is 1% loss there is catastrophic. You got to be there.

Starting point is 01:17:34 So in golf, what happens is, so golf is played in, well, in the PGA Tour, four days. So you play Thursday and Friday. The top half of the group gets to play the weekend and the bottom half goes home. So you're cut if you will. But to make things even because circadian rhythms matter so much, you play one of those first two days in the morning and you play the other day in the afternoon. So half the golfers and then you need to switch, right? And so sometimes it's an advantage to play early depending on the weather sometimes. And so they just try to make it

Starting point is 01:18:00 even say, all right, Thursday you have six AMT time, then Fridays, you know, noon or one or whatever the case is. Well, that is really hard because if you're a West Coast player, say in Phoenix, and you're going to go play a tournament in Georgia, like Augusta, and you get a 7 a.m. tea time, this is a 4 a.m. tea time, which means you're up at 1.30 and practice warm up, all those things. And so you may want to go to caffeine to say, hey, I need a little bit of a turn on here to get going because my neuromuscular skill is significantly compromised, right? So it's gonna

Starting point is 01:18:29 be really hard to get going. The downside of that though is now what have we done to sleep? Because if we're in the wrong situation, if we have early tea time Thursday, late tea time Friday, we're fine. But if you're doing well and you have the opposite, then you have a late start Thursday and then you have a super early start Friday. So you have like short number of hours between when you finish and then play the next day. The caffeine on the first day is then if that compromises sleep at all, then you're really doubling down on how hard that next day is going to be. And so you have to really be careful about how much caffeine you use because at some

Starting point is 01:19:03 point, and this is just a coaching decision, right? How much do you want to perform better right now versus sacrifice tomorrow? And what are you doing? The same could be said for any sport. And this is really hard for our football players. So when are we practicing in the NFL? If we're playing a night game, do we use a bunch of caffeine before that Sunday night football game or that Monday night football game? Baseball players is the worst because they're playing typically at 7, 7.05, 7.10 PM. If they're pitching, whatever, they're going to be done at 10 at the earliest. And now you've got to come back off that train and try to get to sleep before 4 AM. And now we're changing time. So there's no one answer for that, I guess is my point. So how do you use it judiciously and carefully? So in terms of getting off of it, I mean,

Starting point is 01:19:42 it seems to be, and maybe I'm simplifying here, but I recall being in Korea not too long ago and I didn't use any caffeine when I was adjusting to Korea, which was challenging. But a friend of mine was explaining sleep deprivation to his young kids. And if you asked him how you contend with that, his answer was effectively like, don't be weak. He's like, you just contend with it, right? There's no magic trick, which might be the answer for getting off caffeine. It's yeah you're gonna have to just like bite the bullet and have a week probably of some degree of withdrawal symptoms which i might just have to contend with okay so let's just say if i grab a device whatever device i happen to have i use that prior to getting to altitude. I landed altitude. I can try to do some sleep banking up to that point,

Starting point is 01:20:27 which would include non-sleep augmentation in the form of non-sleep deep rest, yoga nidra, meditation, whatever it might be. Any other thoughts in terms of what happens after I hit the ground? So the other thing that would be a very easy win would be making sure hydration is really on point. When people get in cold, they tend to forget because when you go to and do something when it's hot, you have the visual tactical feel of your sweat. You lose that in the cold. I know you've done primary areas of passion. And you get out and you spend days and you're working all day running up and down mountains and it's really cold outside. You just forget to drink water. And then you start seeing, feeling signs and symptoms of exhaustion and altitude and all those things.

Starting point is 01:21:14 And you realize, all right, there's nothing I can do about the altitude, but I can correct hydration. And that's going to be really, really important. Having viscous blood is not going to help anything of your performance. Ketchup blood doesn't help? Yeah. Ketchup's not a good thing to be pumping through your veins. So hydration would be another easy win. You also are probably aware of what happens with hydration just being on a plane, assuming you're on a plane to go out there, but the altitude will get it. You already said dryness.

Starting point is 01:21:39 It's going to be dry up there. This is part and parcel. So that would be the next big one I would go after is maintaining great hydration now and then certainly optimizing it or at least maintaining it once you get there. Another super easy way. Any guidelines around that? When to hydrate? How to hydrate? Easy example here, half your body weight in ounces per day is a very rough number. So if you weigh 200 pounds to 100 ounces a day, it gets you sort of close to the ballpark. Within that, you want to make sure that you're not reducing sleep. Some of the biggest wins we've had from a coaching perspective is actually reducing water intake. Yeah, I'd love for you to say more about that.

Starting point is 01:22:14 A friend of mine just a few days ago said, he's like, yeah, are you familiar with the 3-2-1 rule? And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And he said, no food three hours before sleep, no water two hours before sleep, and then no devices one hour before sleep. I was like, oh, that's clever. Okay. I mean, it's not a bad heuristic to use,

Starting point is 01:22:29 but how do you think about reducing liquid intake? As a global answer, yeah. But I probably wouldn't use that approach personally much. You do want to taper down fluids at night. I'm laughing because we've had a number of people and they come in and they are sure they have a sleep disorder or something or else. And we look and we're like, all right, you're peeing three times a night. And it's like, okay, well, why is that happening? Well, it can actually happen

Starting point is 01:22:53 because of low quality sleep. There are a number of things that happen that people that are common and people think are benign that are not. And one of them is that. So it is somewhat normal to wake up once throughout the night to have to pee. Okay, great. More than that, something is probably happening. Either it's one of a couple of main areas. You're drinking way too much water, pure water, too late at night. Or two, you do legitimately have some sleep quality issues.

Starting point is 01:23:17 And that can actually contribute to nocturia, overnight urination. But just the easy solution there is pay attention to a couple of things. Number one, how much water are you actually drinking at night in the two hours, three hours before? And then two, pay attention when you wake up to pee, pay attention to it. Is it a really large volume? Is it really clear? Or is it a smaller or medium amount?

Starting point is 01:23:38 And or is it of a more tinted color? And then pay attention to how much we actually weigh and measure all this stuff. But you can just use these rough rules. How much you pee the next morning. Same thing. So if you're getting up and you pee once throughout the night, and it's a medium amount, and then you pee the next morning and it's very small, and it's very yellow, then you can say, this is probably not overhydration. This is probably being induced by low sleep quality. If it's the opposite, it's like, yeah, I woke up, I went pee, and it was like, I was there for a while. And then I woke up the next morning, I did it again. And I had these, you know, half a pound or a pound and a half of urine.

Starting point is 01:24:10 Then you have a pretty good idea. It's like, you're simply drinking way too much water at night. You can, in that case, try to add things like salt, but the better idea is just not drink so much water. Any guidelines on that? Any suggestions specifically? I mean, in the sense that people need to remember something to act upon it. So I'd be curious to know why the three, I mean, look, I just heard about this two days

Starting point is 01:24:28 ago, right? And it's just a heuristic. It's not a hard and fast rule, but like the three, two, one, it's like, oh, it's easy to remember, right? You mentioned it once I was able to remember it. I happen to pee quite a lot at night, but guess what? When I was off of caffeine, didn't pee at night. And so if you're consuming diuretics and then compensating by drinking tons of water, or

Starting point is 01:24:48 in my case, I'm just a compulsive water drinker. If I sit at a lunch with someone, I'll drink one or two bottles of water. I drink a lot of fucking water. And I'm not saying you're making amazing faces. We'll have to get that on the video. There's so much opportunity with you. Yeah, yeah. So let's get into the juicy bits okay

Starting point is 01:25:05 so i would love to know i didn't intend i'm not intending to always come back to sleep here i don't even think we intended to get here at all really today but we're here again you can differentiate between acute and chronic dehydration and blood really quickly okay what do you look albumin is the big ticker there and so acute dehydration markers take a look at hemoglobin hematocrit, and sodium. Okay, that's going to give you an indicator. If you stack albumin on top of that, if those three things start to tend high, hematocrit, hemoglobin, sodium, you got a good indication of dehydration.

Starting point is 01:25:34 If they go the opposite direction, we're worried about hyperhydration. Hyperhydration. Right? If you take in albumin on top of that, then you're getting an indication that this has been around for a very long time. So we can calculate osmolality. We can do it independent of a urine analysis and things like that. Now, why this stuff matters?

Starting point is 01:25:50 Think about it. All those metrics, hematocrit is the percentage of your blood that is red blood cells. So it is a percentage. It's not an actual unit. Sodium and hemoglobin come in such low concentrations, we tend to give them relative to total blood volume, which means it's how many milligrams per deciliter of blood. If you are dehydrated, your total blood volume goes down so much such that those numbers, even if they're the actual same absolute value, get reduced. Now, albumin is an acute phase reactant, which means it responds

Starting point is 01:26:20 acutely to inflammation. Okay, so it'll change. And so here you go. Here's some fun. This is going to frustrate everybody. Okay, if you've ever had blood work done and someone's been like, well, your labs look fine, but you're like, I don't feel fine. Could be a lot of things happening here. But albumin is one of the easiest examples here. It's an acute phase reactant, but albumin is responsible for 50 to 60% of the osmotic pressure in your vessel. So it's the protein that carries around any number of things, 10% to 15% or so of your cortisol is being carried on albumin, a bunch of other things. So it's a main protein. It's made in your liver, and it's got like a 20 or so day turnover rate.

Starting point is 01:26:58 So every 20 or so days, you'll recycle that albumin. That, in response to dehydration, will change. It will change in response to inflammationration will change. It will change in response to inflammation too. So here's what happens. Imagine a situation, a scenario when somebody is slightly inflamed and slightly dehydrated. Pretty common, right? Yeah. Albumin got tugged up and tugged down, which means where is albumin going to be on your blood? Dead in the middle. You will have a normal albumin. Right. Your snapshot's going to look just fine. This is an x-ray. Knee's not broken.

Starting point is 01:27:27 Your knee must be fine. Not at all. So now if I can look at albumin and say, hey, wait a minute, albumin, as well as other markers, are trending high. Now I got an idea what's happening. If they're not, now I can look at albumin and go, oh, okay, this is an inflammation issue. That's our marker.

Starting point is 01:27:43 And so I can really pay attention to that and say, Tim, you're hyperhydrating. You're drinking way too much water. Do you know what the signs and symptoms of hyperhydration are? Well, waking up and peeing three times a night is one. Headaches, brain fog. Do you know how many people in our program whose brain fog we've solved in day one because they're just drinking way too much water? Yeah, I believe it.

Starting point is 01:28:00 Headaches, gone away, all kinds of issues, right? Almost the exact same symptoms are associated with dehydration as hyperhydration. You don't need to do a single lab if you want to be a dork like us and get all that stuff figured out. But if you are peeing consistently throughout the day like that, and if it carries over into night at the rate that you're talking about, almost surely you're hyperhydrating. This becomes a huge problem because it can induce what's called hyponatremia. Oh yeah, dangerous. You can die. Yeah. People die consistently. People have heard stories of radio jockeys having water drinking competitions. People die. Fraternity parties. Yeah, dangerous. Tons of stuff. Marathons too. I mean, people over hyperhydrating. Marathons, Ironmans, things like that happens. It can cause

Starting point is 01:28:40 hyponatremia. Natremia is sodium. It's a science word for sodium, right? So it's hypo, so that gets too low. It's not actually an issue of sodium getting too low. It's an issue of excessive water intake. And so the electrical gradient between your muscles and your blood becomes neutral. So the gradient gets lost. And so muscle, and in this particular case, the heart muscle fails to contract. This is muscle fatigue. This is lack of performance. i'm just not feeling as

Starting point is 01:29:05 strong as powerful as twitchy as they used to be all the way up to in severe cases death right because cardiac tissue stops so i would be interested to look at at more your metrics and just paying attention to all right how many times are you really peeing at night and if you are i would stop that immediately and you will typically see very big changes in sleep, but overall function by not excessively hydrating. Yeah. This is a behavioral modification thing and not a knowledge thing for me. I would bet like right here on the spot without looking at my labs, I'd be like, I could bet half my net worth that I am hyperhydrating. Like I know I'm hyperhydrating. I'm just looking at my behavior over the last couple of weeks. And so it's really a question

Starting point is 01:29:44 of like, how do I modify behavior in this case? Because it's like, if I sit down at a lunch or a business meeting, my inclination is just to keep drinking whatever is sort of in front of me. That could be coffee, could be water, rarely alcohol. But if it's alcohol, you know, it's sort of like whatever's in front of me, I will drink because I like the motor movement.

Starting point is 01:30:00 I have no idea. It's gratifying in some way. And then if I layer diuretics on top of the liquid intake, then we have a hell of a lot going on. Yeah. Alcohol does the same thing at night, right? Alcohol does for sure.

Starting point is 01:30:10 Cause it's inhibiting like vasopressin, right? I think that's what's going on. Anti-diuretic hormone. Yeah. ADHD is the real problem, right? So you're going to downregulate that.

Starting point is 01:30:18 And then that's good, right? When you drink alcohol, you should be given the physiologist symptoms to pee more. Yeah. Clear. Yeah. Correctly.

Starting point is 01:30:24 Right. So here's what I'd say. I would say actually two last things on that. One, like as a behavioral coaching tool, then we would have some sort of mechanism for you. There'd be something in your day that triggers water stopping. This could be, okay, when you shower at night, we just don't drink water afterwards. When we have- Decide what the trigger is. What is the trigger? What flips the switch? What other behavior?

Starting point is 01:30:45 Right. So at that point, if you need a sip of water, you can, but we're no longer having water in a visual or immediately achievable position. So no more water bottles,

Starting point is 01:30:55 no more water- Take my camelback off, you mean? No, you can leave it on for fun. Yeah, that would be, physiologically, I would come back and say, of course it's behavior, right? But is there something actually happening that's causing sensation of thirst? And I want to look at that side of your physiology.

Starting point is 01:31:13 Yeah. It's a great question. It's a great question. So back to the labs. It's just, it's wild hell. This isn't a surprise, but it's just a consistent reminder when these conversations get unpacked. It's like, I can't remember who it was, maybe Emerson. I'll give him credit, why not? When you try to tease out any one thing, you find it hitched to the rest of the universe in the sense that if I look at these behaviors, right? I also look at the very high, let's just call it allostatic load of the last week. A bunch of unanticipated events such as life have caused a tremendous amount of workload very unexpectedly right before the

Starting point is 01:31:45 holidays when everybody's on their auto response yeah and you're like okay interesting home alone you know like ah and one of my coping mechanisms is we don't have to spend a lot of time unpacking this but is hot cold sauna typically i would do that earlier in the day i would do that let's say 5 6 p.m but because of the nature of the schedule this past week i've been doing it late at night so what does that lead me to do leads me to hydrate around that and then boom here we are okay so funny enough you say that you may or may not have heard but some people actually sleep better when they do a sauna i do if i do it earlier okay yeah a lot of people have success with sauna at night right many reasons why one of them though is any hyperhydration

Starting point is 01:32:33 that has occurred when you bleed it out you bleed it out okay all right it's not the worst thing ever yeah to be there the only other thing i'd come back to is I would be willing to bet probably not half my net worth, but some smaller margin, maybe a hundred dollars. You're smarter. I'm just a terrible gambler. I love gambling. We might come back to that. I love it. There are two things in this world I love more than anything, and that's trash talking and gambling. Often go together okay so you'd bet a hundred dollars that your hydration habit is better when you have better down regulation practices absolutely i wouldn't bet against that yeah and so now it's coming back to the same point which is okay great we can give you a mechanism that says like no more water bottles after 6 p.m. or whatever, that's great.

Starting point is 01:33:26 But have we really solved the core issue? It's the same thing of going back to saying, okay, great. We took a look at that sodium potassium ratio. We identified that that got really high or that got really low, really, and that caused signs and symptoms of fatigue, et cetera, cortisol is playing here. And so these people tend to feel really good when you give them salt but did we solve the problem no we didn't because as soon as you know like you yeah you took your element packs and you did all these great things i felt way better amazing was your sodium truly low or was it being pulled down yeah right as a ratio was it just being so even the absolute number

Starting point is 01:34:03 even the absolute number being pulled down as a response. So we've now had alterations in kidney function that changed how much sodium that we're holding on to. We haven't solved the issue. This is also a case for me where drinking water is basically a socially acceptable, minimally disruptive, compulsive habit that is a coping response for me.

Starting point is 01:34:25 This is why I went to your HRV. Right. It's like a worry stone, me drinking water. And I think this is also a case, I'm just thinking out loud here because it's helpful for me, where I've spent so much of my life worrying about hydration because I have hyperhidrosis. I always was good at cutting weight for wrestling. I mean, I would cut like 20, 30 pounds. I mean, absurd amounts that I would never recommend. Terrible for you. However, I could do it because I sweat so easily. That also meant that when I sweat a lot, my endurance, my power output would just go into the garbage. So for my entire life, my preoccupation has been hydrating.

Starting point is 01:35:05 Yeah. And this is a case where it's like, okay, maybe that has served you at points. But in this case, why don't we try the opposite for 48 hours? And do the sauna, but don't guzzle a gallon of water afterwards. Going to bed a little bit, sort of like when I did tennis training a long time ago, and I was whiffing the ball into the net over and over again. And this pro said, look, for the next like 10 minutes of practice, you're allowed to hit the ball anywhere except into the net. He's like, if you, if you want to hit a hole in it, knock yourself out. He's like, the one place you cannot hit it is into the net.

Starting point is 01:35:38 Maybe this is a case where it's like, all right, Tim, the only thing you can do anything except for drink a ton of water at night. night like and if you go to bed a little dehydrated for two days like you're quote-unquote dehydrated totally may not be dehydrated you will feel signs and symptoms of dehydration though you feel caught in mouth i'm sure yeah you feel different things have you ever had your sweat tested no that's a super easy start like why don't we test how much you're actually sweating and then what's the content of that sweat and that's going to tell us the opposite side and this is something that can be done for a few dollars at this point

Starting point is 01:36:09 so there are a number of different methods that people can purchase these things i think as low as probably like 15 bucks all the way up to a couple of hundred dollars what would people if people just want to learn about this what would they google yeah there's a number of companies like gatorade makes a sweat patch. It's $12, I think, something like that. You can go all the way up to something like a NYX, N-I-X. And this is now, I think you buy that patch for $150 or something like that. And you can get different things.

Starting point is 01:36:40 But you can actually, in that, get real-time feedback. I'm not associated with them at all. Oh, interesting. So it's like a CGM. It's like a continuous glucose monitor for your sweat. 100%. Now there's some issues. You don't get full electrolyte breakdown, but you'll know how much total fluid you're losing as well as sodium content.

Starting point is 01:36:53 And we will actually use that because one of the real tricks to maintaining optimal hydration status, whether you're talking about throughout the day or during exercise performance, is you have to make sure you're putting back in what you're sweating, which is to say, it is not just about water. We've talked about hyponatremia.

Starting point is 01:37:10 We need to know that we're putting in a hypotonic solution. So, the way of saying like the total pressure with all the different solutes and solvents in the cocktail needs to be the same as your blood. Glucose, sodium, chloride, potassium, all this stuff needs to be balanced. It doesn't have to be, but you're going to get better results. If you drink excessively dilute fluids, let's just say pure water, then what's going to happen is it'll go immediately into your gut. That'll get immediately into blood. It's very quick to get that across that barrier. And then your total blood volume will expand. You're running constant checks of total blood volume. You'll actually expand more than you think.

Starting point is 01:37:47 And so you'll actually send signals that says excrete the fluid. And so this is why if you're really, really dehydrated, say after the sauna, say you did a crazy session, when you do sauna, how much time do you do? Like 20 minutes, 30 minutes? I'm not doing super long. I tend to, and this is where it gets a little tricky because it's like, all right, what's the humidity in the sauna, right? So generally what I'll do, I'll get to, let's just call it 195 in the sauna, maybe between 195 and 210.

Starting point is 01:38:12 Plenty hot. Yeah, plenty hot. So 195, 210, get in there and I will immediately start dumping water onto the stones. So I'm also jacking up the humidity. I would say generally the way that I'll run it, because I do this almost every day, it's who knows, four to seven times a week. I'll do, let's just call it 20 to 30 minutes. And that will be threshold for most people, right? They'll be like, I need to cool off. Then I'll do cold plunge for three to five minutes. Then I'll go back in for a shorter session. Five minutes warm

Starting point is 01:38:46 back up. Like 10 minutes. And then also cold plunge on the opposite side, at which point I won't need as much. So I'll probably do three minutes of cold. That's a typical night. Okay. So in that first session overall as well, how much weight are you losing? Do you know? I'll say it is, if I were to guess, this is a straight guess. I mean, I think it's a few pounds. I mean, I would say over the two heat sessions, two pounds, or at least a few pounds. I don't know how much I am reabsorbing in the cold plunge for anyone who has never experienced extreme weight cutting. We couldn't shower after cutting for wrestling. You'd absorb multiple pounds of water back just by showering. But I don't know if that's true in this much more mild form, probably not. But I mean, I'm dumping sweat.

Starting point is 01:39:30 There is a huge pool of sweat under me. How long does it take you from initiation, the second you walk in your sauna, until you start sweating? I would say if I'm throwing water on the rocks, two minutes, two to three minutes. Two minutes is the number. We always pay attention to that. If it's taking longer than that, we start to have concerns of dehydration. So when we handle this with our UFC fighters and stuff, like two minutes is a good thing to pay attention to. My guess is you are sweating out far more than that amount.

Starting point is 01:39:57 It would be not uncommon for someone, you're plus or minus 160, 70 pounds. 170, 170 something. Yeah, low 70s. I would imagine in a 30-minute sauna session, three minutes, 70 pounds. 170, 170 something. Yeah. Low 70s. I would imagine in a 30 minute sauna session, three minute, three pounds would be reasonable. If you're a hyper sweater, maybe more.

Starting point is 01:40:12 Yeah. I think it's basically the equivalent of a, like a soda stream full of water would be my guess. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Now this number differs significantly from people to people. I can just give you two direct examples.

Starting point is 01:40:26 Tatiana Suarez, UFC fighter I've worked with for many years. She's a very good sweater. So she competes at 115 pounds. It is not particularly hard for her to sweat out four to five pounds at that low of a body weight. Not really hard. Now, there's a lot of work that goes into preparation for that, but it's not particularly hard.

Starting point is 01:40:43 Brian Ortega, another UFC fighter who competes at 145 pounds and is a male, we tend to have to work to get four or five pounds out, right? So there is this spectrum. To give you a crazy reference point, my senior year in high school when I was competing seriously, I cut from, this is, never do this people, never ever do this, but I got to a lean body weight. I was very lean then. It's kind of sad to think how much more muscle mass I had then, believe it or not, at like whatever age it was, 16, 17. But I was 178, super lean, and I cut to 152 twice a week. That was over. I was doing that over 24 hours. That was water. That was water. Yeah. And a few other things. But yeah, for the most, that's a lot of water.

Starting point is 01:41:24 Yeah, a few other things, but a the most that's a lot of water yeah a few other things but a lot of water i sweat to use your language i'm a very good i'm top tier sweater top elite elite sweater elite sweater so okay that's great we would come back and the reason i'm asking that is is we would have a good it's an easy way to figure out your sweat rate so just weigh naked go in the sauna come back out completely dry off i would recommend in fact if we're going to do this test don't put any water on it keep it dry yeah so that we don't have anything on there and then just measure do for 30 minutes measure yourself how much did you do tonight right now that's going to tell us about your sweat rate in good sense we don't have a sensor so we don't

Starting point is 01:41:56 have actually what's coming out of your sweat which would be nice because we're paying attention to again sweat content and sweat amount but that's going to be a good insight. Now, that changes on your day as well. So if you were to do a day where we podcast for five hours and you drink one glass of water and then you go into the sauna, you're going to have way lower sweat rate than if you were to drink in three gallons. This is water load, right? This is in weight management sports. We did it that way.

Starting point is 01:42:20 So we want to pay attention to all those things. You said you've been a sweater like that your entire life. Okay, great. Natural. People people are different we sweat differently but is something coming back to that there has probably something in your physiology to which is explaining why that is happening i've always had so i was born premature had a ton of issues as a preemie was in the NICU lots of therm regulation issues since day zero so tons of thermal regulation issues yeah body temperature tends to run low so my and I can give you my take on this but like I would say I tend to run in like the 97.1 to 97 point whatever four degrees in terms of normal body temperature my subjective experience is much like when people have, say, a really high fever, they

Starting point is 01:43:08 feel cold. I feel hot a lot of the time. Like the ambient air temperature seems warmer to me than it does to, I think, most folks. But thermoregulatory issues from the get-go. So I've been hospitalized for heat stroke a couple of times, whether that was a proper diagnosis or not. But basically, like in hot conditions where other people are challenged, very challenged, like training in judo in Tokyo in the summer with a gi on like indoors with poor ventilation, collapsed, taken to the hospital. I've had that kind of stuff happen a few times. I see. That may or may not have anything to do with heat regulation there. It could be a sensation. So you don't get the signals. Yeah, could be for sure. And or because of hyper sweating. Yeah. I mean, that was, yeah, there's a lot of sweat going on. Yeah. So the point is you kind of come back to that whole

Starting point is 01:43:53 story of unpacking like what is actually happening internally? Why are you doing it? So your cocktail for hydration would probably be abnormal, but what is something we could needs to be dialed in so we can say, okay, great. Because if you drink too much water that's diluted for you, remember, not for me, not for anybody else, for your physiology, if it's too diluted, then you have that excess of urination. But here's the kicker. You're urinating because that blood volume got that short-term, so this is what happens when you drink water really quickly. You get a short-term expansion of total blood volume, which causes you to then urinate it back, and you're not actually cellularly hydrated yet. So that stuff hasn't had time to cross into tissue where you're actually properly dehydrated, right? Because you've got three main

Starting point is 01:44:33 areas. You have intracellular in the vessels themselves, and then you have interstitial. So it's the space between. You're drinking it in your stomach. It's going into your vessels. That's trying to get it across into tissue. If that goes too quickly through there, it doesn't have time to get into. So here's the kicker. You're chugging water, you're peeing clear constantly, and you're still cellularly dehydrated. Dehydrated, yeah. What I've experientially found to be the case is that if I do really hard sauna sessions, I can be wiped out the next day. I can feel really fatigued. To avoid that, I can't hydrate in the sauna. I can't hydrate right after the sauna i can't even

Starting point is 01:45:05 hydrate within like 20 minutes of going into the sauna it has to be like an hour to an hour and a half before the sauna with electrolytes in which case i'm able to i have greater resilience and feel less fatigue the next day yeah at least that's been i haven't split tested everything but that's been my experience yeah so then the final piece would be what is exactly in that electrolyte cocktail and getting that dialed in so that we are putting back in the same thing that you're losing so we're not excessively bringing in which i guess comes back to the sweat test right yeah knowing what the hell you are excreting yeah you have to have that that's going to tell you electrolytes you have to have that in combination again ideally with what your standard metrics are throughout your

Starting point is 01:45:44 system and then making sure that in addition do we need to add glucose to the situation right that's going to transport things into cells really effectively sodium comes along for the ride water comes along for the ride with it does it not need to be in there you're the perfect person to ask and I haven't had a chance to ask someone is it glucose is it the insulinemic response to glucose do other things work better than glucose? Artificial sweetener versus dextrose versus fructose versus fill in the blank in terms of hydration. Yeah, glucose. Glucose, just straight glucose. That's your answer. Yeah. Now, it doesn't

Starting point is 01:46:18 mean it's your only thing that can be in there. It depends on what, if we're only concerned about just hydration or if we have other things we're trying to do at once. So it's typically less common to only be caring about water. So in the case of you may need to be trying to increase to restore muscle glycogen, are you trying to recover faster? Is there any tissue consideration there? That is a slightly different answer. Are we trying to maintain acute performance? So are we taking this in the middle of a session that we're trying to keep going and perform better? Are we doing it to try to recover faster the next day? Or are we only concerned about just pure hydration at a steady resting state? In this case, it would be if I had to weight it,

Starting point is 01:46:57 I'd say it's like 70% hydration, 30% help with recovery. I like to saw an after weight training. Yeah. Okay. So in that particular case, if you're trying to maximize recovery, then glucose is going to be super, super effective. Fructose comes in the equation when we're trying to maximize carbohydrate intake in acute performance, especially because glucose and fructose get through the gut barrier and they have different transporters. So when the glucose gets full, we can use fructose and get it through separately. So our ability to bring in without GI distress is much higher if we have a combo between glucose and fructose. So you just have diversified transporters. Bingo. You have two freeways. One of them's full.

Starting point is 01:47:33 Two different types of ferries are, yeah. Yeah, they got, right? Now, in terms of getting into the actual cell itself, there's two basic ways that you can get GLUT4 transporters. These are the transporters on muscle cells that allow glucose to go inside the cell. There's insulin-dependent and insulin-independent. And so muscle contraction itself is insulin-independent. And then you directly have insulin-dependent, which is, in this case, bring in glucose. Insulin will then drive it in there. But if you're doing exercise, you're going to get that other contraction as well. And so you have both mechanisms to bring it in play. So in that particular case, glucose at a roughly 5% concentration or so, somewhere between five to nine, is typically the sweet spot. It

Starting point is 01:48:11 doesn't have to be part of your equation, but it is going to help the process. So post weight cut, if you were to drink electrolytes only, you would be limiting how quickly you can rehydrate. That's in extreme situations. If you're the average person hanging out, just like did a sauna session, you don't need to put a whole bunch of glucose into your drink. You're probably fine. All right. So I'm going to weigh myself before and after sauna tonight. No water on the rocks. And just to get an idea of what that actual number is, because I'm super curious. I'll also be doing a sauna tonight with a guy who used to be a BJJ competitor. So I think he'll be equally interested just to see what the hell happens with him. Do you track how much water you drink

Starting point is 01:48:46 throughout the day total? Do you know what that number is? I haven't. I have done it at points far in the past. I haven't done it recently, which would be pretty easy because I could. Super easy. What is the easiest way to keep track of that?

Starting point is 01:48:56 Probably what you're about to say. Just fill one container. Yeah. Multiply it out. Bingo. Just fill up a gallon. How far do you get down? Yeah.

Starting point is 01:49:04 Or if it's multiple, then you get it there. So I'll do that tonight. 10 days from now, let's just say I make an attempt, which I will, to bank some sleep or sleep adjacent activities, meditation, et cetera. Sleep timing, TBD, I'm going to work on that. Although frankly, the 15 car pileup may make that somewhat challenging, but I'll work on it. We do the best we can with what we have. I land at altitude. I will then be confronted with training decisions. And my concerns are mostly around avoiding injury. Tim and Andy got into the weeds of Tim's fitness training, and it got very detailed, so we moved it to the end. It is super, super interesting from a training perspective, so stick around to the end of the interview, and you can hear the rest of that section. And then from a nutrition perspective. why full analysis is better because now we can nail you exactly not only macronutrients, right?

Starting point is 01:50:05 Calories, protein, carbohydrate. That's great. What we tend to say is like people care globally about three things regarding their body.

Starting point is 01:50:13 They want to look a certain way. They want to feel a certain way. They want to perform a certain way. Yeah. In this particular season, I care most about two and three. I'm going to be in four layers anyway. I don't give a shit.

Starting point is 01:50:22 You already laid the foundation. The physique part doesn't matter. And your physique's fine as it is, right? So it's not like it's determining your performance, right? Yeah. So you care about feeling and performing a certain way.

Starting point is 01:50:31 Awesome. That's going to give us some heads towards macronutrients. Micronutrients, though, are the true game behind how you feel and perform. That's the key here. Macronutrients are fine energy intake.

Starting point is 01:50:41 This regulates how you look. Micronutrients are how you feel and perform. And so we want to be very clear on exactly what you're eating if we can. Let's say we don't have any access to that. And so we just have to give you rough suggestions based on nothing. I want to know what you're consuming prior to. I want to know what you're consuming during, while you're on the slopes and what you're consuming afterwards. So give me a rough idea there and then I'll come back with a far shorter answer than it took us to get to the training. Yeah. I mean, if I'm giving you my lazy day of skiing and I know this is going to

Starting point is 01:51:12 make people shudder, but I'll- One of the reasons why I think you've had such a tremendous career is you're so honest about these things. You don't protect your ego of like, you know what's best, but this is what you're doing. You're waking up and eating cake in the morning. I get it. So first I just do a couple of lines of cake mix. Yeah. And then the pixie sticks come out. No, I would say often wake up.

Starting point is 01:51:33 And this last season I had a tough time with my low back. So I was having really most nights very compromised sleep. Like I was tossing and turning, waking up a lot, like turning from side to side, pillow between the knees because my lower back is all jacked. Wake up, huge cup of coffee. And then,

Starting point is 01:51:51 these are usually pretty early mornings, right? So, and I'm getting up with about 30 minutes to be out the door. So I wake up. Okay.

Starting point is 01:51:57 So I'm waking up, having a huge cup of coffee and then I'm having oatmeal, mixing in some almond butter and kind of swirling that around downing that maybe if they're available one or two eggs then I'm out the door and for on the slopes generally we can make pit stops for water so I'm generally not carrying water unless I'm doing backcountry and then I have a backpack so I'll carry water yeah but I might have some you can

Starting point is 01:52:22 bars some kind of and a handful of those which i have found helpful just kind of like nibble on and then typically i'm doing a half day but if we're going to do a three-quarter day or full day then we'll stop for lunch and i'll probably have some type of stew meat beans etc and maybe some maybe some additional coffee if i've really been pushing it hard i might have some hot chocolate and then right back out. And then at night, I would say it's more of a real meal per se. Then I'm sitting down

Starting point is 01:52:53 and I can kind of choose whatever I want to have at that point. You have a combination of fats and starches and the whole. Yeah, but I have certainly have flexibility. What I have found, and this is not going to be a shocker for anyone who's done a lot of intense skiing, if I try to follow keto, super low carb, I feel like shit. I generally feel terrible. Normal life, not having that kind of output, fine. But for that type of activity, no, it doesn't really work so well. Friends, there's a difference between not being sick, not dying, and performing at your best. Yeah, yeah, very different.

Starting point is 01:53:27 So that's, I'd say, not every day, but that would be a busy day, shitty night's sleep, woke up, fuck, just want to get out on the slopes. Okay. One last, really quick, last year slash this year, do you have a plan for supplementation? Let's see. So last year I would say, no, I would add in what I have done over the last, say nine months, which has, and this is going to sound like a shameless plug because I'm involved with these guys, but probably what I would do this ski season is I would have a never ending supply of Maui Nui venison sticks, like the unsweetened, like no additional sugar. And that has proven for me to be just about the easiest way to get nutrient dense, 30 grams of protein in the morning. And I can just throw

Starting point is 01:54:10 those in my ski jacket too. So that will probably take the place of eggs also just for convenience. In terms of supplementation, I would say last year kept it pretty simple. I would say I was taking magnesium, some electrolytes, generally magnesium in the morning. And then I went back and forth on creatine. I know that there are so many different benefits to creatine. I was cognizant of not wanting to carry too much weight, like additional water weight if I was going to retain a lot more water. So use that intermittently. I would often use that around cross-training. So if I was like kind of going to the gym. Athletic greens, again, this can sound like a plug, but I've been using that stuff since 2000, whatever, nine, 10. So, uh, and, uh, not a whole lot beyond that. I'd say

Starting point is 01:54:55 where last season I was taking the most was related to sleep because I was so desperate to get a good night's sleep. I was taking just like entire laundry list of stuff before sleep, including some prescription stuff, which I've tried to really titrate off of. But at the time, helpful. You know, trazodone, things like that, which you should not take without doctor supervision. So I would say not a really comprehensive supplemental plan at this point. I would also, though, not want to leave behind the nutrition piece. Because right now, if you were to ask me like What is your macro breakdown look like I'm having a fucking idea

Starting point is 01:55:29 Yeah, honestly if I'm being truthful about it look the reality of it is supplements are called supplements for a reason Yeah, and we absolutely approached them the same vein We're gonna spend as much time as we can on whole food after coming back from training almost always taking supplemental protein of some type Yeah, just okay. I just want a little bit of a context, a foundation of what I was working with here. And actually, I'll modify one thing I said, which was last season. I would often, and again, this is like what I did. I'm not saying it's the best, but I would often have like athletic greens plus some type of like whey protein isolate or something before, like immediately before heading out.

Starting point is 01:56:03 Yeah. So I've had the oatmeal plus the almond butter, and then I would throw that in. And that happened quite a bit, I would say. When you think about recovery, three classic R's come into place. Repair, replenish, and rehydrate. That's what we're going after, right? So repair is protein, replenish is carbohydrate, and obviously rehydrate is a combination of fluids plus electrolytes and

Starting point is 01:56:25 glucose. So as you're running to that, I'm running to that entire thing. Okay. Now, can we alter what we're doing to maximize performance on the slopes? Yeah, but that's not really what you're asking. You don't want to feel terrible on the slopes, but you're also really hedging because we know your recovery capacity is already compromised. So I'm going to push towards that. What's that mean? Do we have enough total calories? Maybe. Do we have enough protein? Unlikely. Unlikely, yeah. The fact we're starting off the day with no protein source is not a good start. Or very little, yeah. Maui Nui is fantastic. I eat it almost every day at this point. I eat almost exclusively wild game. That's what I do. But yeah, since being a part of Maui Nui as well, that's what I'm after. I've yet to have anybody that we've sent it to come back and be like, what the hell is this stuff?

Starting point is 01:57:08 This is incredible. It's such a high positive response. All right. Conflicts of interest noted. You guys, you got the note. So that is great. You can start there. It's awesome. I don't really particularly care where the sources... I would make sure that we're getting some source immediately in the morning of protein. That would be my first stop. Now, the other thing is I would probably take your caloric intake higher in the morning than it currently is because we know it's unpredictable throughout the rest of the day. And we know that's, you don't have to have a lot of calories in the morning. So now people often say things like you can only absorb 25 or 30 grams of protein at once. And that's obviously, by the way, I of protein at once and that's obviously by the way

Starting point is 01:57:45 i opened up that question that's clearly not the case yeah however there is serious scientific evidence to suggest you can only maximize muscle protein synthesis up to 25 to 30 grams that's been around so the question is for you despite the fact that all the evidence in science will say that, are you ever concerned that if you ate a little bit more protein, that you would somehow not use it? No, I spend zero time worrying about that. Great. Okay. I know this is a tough question, right? So, this never made sense to me.

Starting point is 01:58:23 If my urine ends up a little more expensive i don't care who cares right look when you go to apply things into the science and life we've been trying to do all day the science of sleep and nutrition and supplementation you have to take some leaps of faith that that is actually the scientific process right this is why like i think it's best to think about science as a verb not a noun is an action it is not a thing right what is the science of recovery that's not how it works it's like this is an action so It is not a thing, right? What is the science of recovery? That's not how it works. It's like, this is an action. So I'm taking a real life action on you, which means I'm going to take steps past science such that it never made sense to me that muscle protein synthesis

Starting point is 01:58:54 is maximized at 25 or 30 grams. I work with NFL players, right? So Vita Vea, defensive tackle, 300 and many plus pounds on top of 300, right? We really think his muscle protein synthesis is locked up and just maximized at 30 grams. The same as you or I. Correct. Who are just about less than half his size. Yeah, yeah. Like actually way less than half. So there's actually paper that just come out,

Starting point is 01:59:16 really interesting, suggests even up to 100 grams of protein, it continues to increase. You know, I might be making this up, but I don't think I am. I want to say that the older you get, there's some literature to suggest that it was better to have a larger bolus, extremely preventable by just having bigger boluses. So my point with all that is you can't stop that train. Yes, some of that protein will be oxidized. Who cares? It doesn't matter. You can't have too much protein in your particular case. Why I'm going back to that in your case, in your scenario, is because now we've continually

Starting point is 01:59:59 had conversations about you just recover slower, you were sore longer, et cetera, et cetera. We need to make sure we are never limited in our recovery by protein. That needs to be higher. And so we need you at a minimum of, I don't know, 200 grams of protein a day. Oh, wow. Okay. I'm going to need to change some things. I'll survive at 150. I'll take 150. But like, I want you to go over. So let's just say, copy paste, now you're in my place doing the exact same training. Yeah. What might your breakfast look like?

Starting point is 02:00:26 I'm fine with everything you had there. Yeah. But now I just want 50 grams of protein. What form? I know you said you're agnostic, but for you. Fine. Eggs. No problem eating eggs.

Starting point is 02:00:35 To get to 200 grams, I mean, if we're like yanking out the yolk. Yeah, you could do that. That's a factor. Well, I'm just thinking about what this actually nets out to. I mean, how many eggs would that mean? That'd be five, six? Yeah, you're not going to get, like, I'll just thinking about what this actually nets out to. I mean, how many eggs would that mean? Let's be five, six. Yeah, you're not going to get, like, I'll put it this way. I wouldn't go exclusively from eggs.

Starting point is 02:00:51 That would be the point. If you want to have a protein shake as well, you already said you basically did that, right? That's what I did, yep, this last season. So if you have, let's say, three eggs, maybe half a cup of egg whites, something like that, maybe two eggs, half a cup of egg whites. We're not 40 or so. And 20 minutes later or something, but I don't know, were you having that shake on the way? I was having it right before I stepped out. Okay, great. Let's just stop right there then. 40 grams. Great. I said 50. We're splitting hairs, right? You're close enough there. If you want it and it's a day where you woke up late,

Starting point is 02:01:21 great. Just do the double shake. Yeah, right. Two scoops, right? So you're 40 to 50, depending on what protein source you're using, whoever you're getting it from. It's pretty high quality, pretty fast absorbing. You're great. Now, when we're at lunch, that's fine. We're just going to make sure that if we've had a couple of Maui new sticks throughout the day, those are what? 10 grams each? 10 grams each, yeah. So you got 20 right there. It's easy to put down like four or five of those more candidly. Yeah. Let's just say you're at one, 10 more grams. All right. We's easy to put down like four or five of those more candidly. Yeah. Let's just say you're at one,

Starting point is 02:01:47 10 more grams. All right. We're up to 50, 60, maybe another one at lunch. Any reasonable serving of meat in your stew is going to get you another 30 to 40, 50, depending on how much you're eating there.

Starting point is 02:01:57 You don't want to eat to your feel terrible, but that's fine. We're already well over a hundred. Okay. Awesome. If you can get another shake in a protein shake, double shake when you're on the slopes, that's great. Some of their snacks over 100. Okay, awesome. If you can get another shake in, a protein shake, double shake, when you're on the slopes, that's great.

Starting point is 02:02:09 Some other snacks, like you get another 30 or 40, which brings you back to dinner with another 30 or 40. I wouldn't track them. I wouldn't weigh them. I wouldn't do any of those things. Some days you're at 150, fine. Some days you're at 175. Just do what I don't, which I don't really do,

Starting point is 02:02:21 which is like, when in doubt, just eat a little bit more. It's fine. Yeah, eat a little bit more, right? From there, I would be primarily concerned with making sure your carbohydrate intake is sufficient. You're probably going to get enough fat along the way. So you have some- Yeah, I'll get enough fat along the way. I think that I've trained myself historically to reduce carbohydrate intake for a lot of

Starting point is 02:02:39 different reasons. Sure. So I consume too little carbohydrate when I get into training mode for something like skiing. Look, I said I'm tool agnostic. It's the same thing with food. Carbohydrates and fats have different properties. And that gives us a lot of opportunity. One is not better than the other in any situation. So it is in this context, clearly additional carbohydrate is highly beneficial. You can go more fat. That's great too too just to get more calories it's also easier more condensed you can get it in faster you're getting in a decent amount for breakfast so you're good there i would make sure we have some sort of

Starting point is 02:03:14 starch as well for lunch yeah bread with that yeah soup yeah doesn't need to be fancy right yeah whoever complained about dipping bread and soup yeah that's amazing or whatever any number of meal well well or high quality carbohydrate sources fruit would be fantastic at that feeding as well so now we get all the other additional benefits that come along with fruit in this context and then backing up at night one of the other things that's really clear while you don't want to have a large meal right before bed, carbohydrates at night are highly beneficial for sleep quality. Yeah, for sure. There's tons of links there. In fact, we actually had this happen fairly recently.

Starting point is 02:03:55 So labs came back, individual sex hormone binding globulins high, free testosterone is low, all the signs and symptoms of wanting to go on testosterone. That's not a conversation I have. Let's go to your doctor, right? You want to go on hormones. Awesome. Sleep is terrible. You must get asked about it a lot.

Starting point is 02:04:12 Oh my gosh. Like you tell how sensitive I am. When I go in public, I'm like, I'm not like, I don't do medications. And insulin was low, super low. There's a known inverse association between insulin and sex hormone binding globulin. So when insulin gets too low, sex hormone binding globulin goes up because that what happens free testosterone goes down so you can do that if you want however in this individual we took a look at total carbohydrate intake and it was something like 125 grams a day which i actually feel great personally i would imagine you probably feel fine at that level too even with like training

Starting point is 02:04:41 i train most days i feel fine at 125, 150. No issues. Almost no carbohydrate at night. Very low. 20 less grams carbohydrate at night. All we had to do was put another

Starting point is 02:04:54 40 or so gram of carbohydrate at night. Everything corrected itself and sleep took off. So super, super simple solution like that. So sex hormone and glabinin came down.

Starting point is 02:05:04 Yeah. Because the insulin was going up. Totally. And testosterone then took off. And then what happened to sleep? And what happened to recoverability? Yeah, sleep doesn't hurt testosterone either. Oh my God, right?

Starting point is 02:05:14 Well, it's a classic case of like, what do you think? 40 grams. So what we're talking about there is like, it's not that much. No. I mean, it's like, what, 200? I'm flubbing the math here, but it's 4.5 calories per gram, 4-ish, right? So it's not that much. No. I mean, it's like, what, 200? I'm flubbing the math here, but it's 4.5 calories per gram, 4-ish, right? So it's not that much. No.

Starting point is 02:05:29 Like you're talking about, well, let's just say a banana, 25 grams. Yeah. Bingo, right? 100 calories. Yeah. An apple. Like these things are, a piece of fruit is typically 15 to 20, 25 grams. A small side of sweet potatoes, a cup of rice.

Starting point is 02:05:45 You've already hit 25 to 40 grams pretty easily. So we're not talking like we had this guy pig out on pasta, which would be fine. But very small changes here, miracle workers, right? Just like they really have to. So the point is making sure that we have an appropriate amount of carbohydrate in your last feeding would be appropriate. We've gotten ourselves a nice infusion throughout the day.

Starting point is 02:06:06 This will help with your rehydration since we're probably having fairly limited water intake because you're on the slopes, right? Yeah, yeah. And it's dry and it's so easy for people to forget. You mentioned this earlier, but it's like high altitude, cold. It's like you go to Antarctica, it's a desert, right? It's easy for people to forget. Trust me.

Starting point is 02:06:21 It's a dry environment. I did a mule deer hunt in the Tetons this year. 10,000-ish feet. I think our base camp was like 7,500. And we would ride horses for a couple hours in the morning to get up to our hunting spot. Holy cow. Cold, so dry, and 10,000. Which for me, I live in Southern California, so I'm at zero.

Starting point is 02:06:44 Literally. 10,000 is no joke. No, and those mountain boys, holy cow, they are mountain tough. Had a great time. So point is, you get super dehydrated super fast and don't really ice it. So those carbohydrates and all that are going to help maintain, replenish the muscle glycogen that you've burned throughout your entire body. We don't care if we're having an excess of calories,

Starting point is 02:07:09 because if we lose a little bit of body composition, you won't because you're burning so many calories. Yeah. It's astonishing how much, because I'm going to be there with a close friend and we can consume absolutely mind-boggling amounts of food. Oh yeah. And it does. Ravenous. Oh yeah. And it just does not matter. You're going to work it off. Yeah. Yeah. And I like, you mentioned some resistant starches earlier. If you can take them out there, that's great too. That's probably going to feel better than just a Maui Nui stick when you're six hours in. For sure. Yeah. I mean, I need to restock, but yeah, the UCAM bars that I used last season were super helpful. Yeah. I would just make sure on top of all that kind of rounding out these points,

Starting point is 02:07:41 making sure that you are adequately salting your food because we know that that's going to go down. We know you're a heavy sweater. I don't know what your sweat rate is for your salt intake, but if you're sweating out three or four pounds a day, you're going to lose a gram plus many grams of salt. So making sure that comes back in, in the form of supplementation, if you'd like to use electrolyte packs or something like that, or if you just want to strictly go salting your food heavily to taste there, you'll probably need some supplemental electrolytes would be my guess at this point, making sure it's there. That's nutritionally

Starting point is 02:08:09 going to put you in a really, really good spot. Just be really careful making sure we're still getting colors in your food because micronutrients typically don't have a huge response. You're not going to feel a difference in vitamin A or C in like a day, but it will over the course of two months start to kind of add up. Yeah. So making sure we're not just eating all brown and then having a lot of greens. Yeah. I've generally used color as a proxy, so I try hard. It is one of the challenges in a lot of these mountain towns.

Starting point is 02:08:35 Of course it is. It is. Like, they're importing everything. Fresh fruits and vegetables. Oh, man. But yes. But use frozen. If you have to, right?

Starting point is 02:08:42 So frozen fruits and vegetables, it's not the same, but it's still really, really high quality. And then supplementation, we could say, I could be brief here if you'd like, but absolutely making sure magnesium is there. Magnesium is released in sweat at very low quantities, but it's still enough when you sweat the amount that you're potentially going to be sweating. Also with skiing, like I'm going to sweat my ass off. Yeah. I'll be working.

Starting point is 02:09:03 Yep. So you want to make sure that that stuff is high creatine is great if you're going to use it i wouldn't use it the way you did okay i'll use it or don't okay so having it like on certain days or not is just make it make it daily or not yeah because it takes a chronic effect yeah for it to really start to matter unless you're going a really high dosage so i wouldn't be super concerned about the water retention aspect of it because it wouldn't be a plus yeah i was say, we're having a problem with that anyways, right? So I would go there. That said, any recommendation, if you try it and it doesn't work, you don't like it, just don't. And what are we talking about? It's like five grams a day or what are we-

Starting point is 02:09:35 That's the number. That's the standard. That's what everyone throws out. But I would say the same thing of like- Like the protein? Yeah. Like why? Candidly for guys our size, it's fine. I'm probably going higher. I'm also never measuring creatine to be totally honest. Like I'm just taking big scoops and throwing it in there, like seeing what happens. There's actually really interesting data on the more recent stuff. The more interesting stuff on creatine is around bone health, brain health, and overall

Starting point is 02:09:59 even like mood. More research has been done on that. Brain health is no joke. Yeah. But that's been 10 to 20 grams a day. Things that so yeah i have experimented with that chronically and just looking at verbal i mean it's recall yeah and also just like verbal acuity and stuff in podcasts i mean i've looked at this somewhat it's end of one and it's just self-reporting but for me it's pretty noticeable you don't have to do anyone there's data there's tons of it out there that's nothing's

Starting point is 02:10:24 perfect but there's actually another review article just this week came out also on creatine and brain health. So whether you're looking at dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, stuff like that, there's no perfect answer there, but you can see the data. Anything else you would add to the list? The rest of it would be dependent upon your labs and your physiology, what we knew there. You could throw in, you're never going to be hurt for the most part, adding vitamin D. It's a very common one. You're going to be out in the sun all day, so.

Starting point is 02:10:49 Well, half of my face will be out in the sun all day. Half air. There'll be significant sun blockage, I hope. So. Yeah. Yeah, I did supplement with D last year. Yeah. And fish oil?

Starting point is 02:11:01 Fish oil, I also supplemented with fish oil. Could be placebo, who knows there's probably literature out there on this but i found it to seemingly help with sleep quite a bit oh yeah like those would be the standard kind of without knowing anything about you you throw in that cocktail you're talking about things that are fairly cheap again relatively yeah they have very little cross-reaction unlike, unlike even high doses of vitamins. You're playing a game there that you may want to be a bit careful of, but things like vitamin D and things like omega-3s.

Starting point is 02:11:31 Meaning just unintended side effects. Yeah. Yeah. You don't want to know what problem you're solving really. And so you're just sort of throwing stuff in there that can technically happen with anything. Even vitamin D and heavy metals can be concerned there, but it's a very rare thing.

Starting point is 02:11:43 So most of the time, like you're fine. I feel comfortable saying most people can jump on that train for all those and be totally fine. Outside of that, it would be precision and intent. What are we trying to move? What are we trying to do? If you wanted to go kind of next level of, hey, less science, but some science, potentially beneficial, then you would get in the realm of herbals. And this is when ashwagandha, rhodiola, things like that start to kick in. What do you find rhodiola most helpful for?

Starting point is 02:12:10 So I actually do use ashwagandha in the same way that say Peter Tia might use phosphatidylserine just to blunt a bit of cortisol release at night, for instance. Okay. Inhale. So maybe I'm off base, but I mean, talk to me about ashwagandha and rhodiola. Okay. So we actually just published a review paper on rhodiola. I think it's open access. You should be able to go read it for free. Way more data on ashwagandha. Been around for a long time. The issue we've always dealt with, with both of those are all of our athletes have to have third-party certified things. And even they have to have NSF or informed choice. So those are hard to get to. If you're not concerned about that, then disregard that.

Starting point is 02:12:48 But you really do need to- This is to avoid doping issues, right? Correct. Yeah. We actually have another paper we published on the frequency of adulterated supplements. Oh God, it's gotta be a complete disaster. Whatever number you're thinking, it's higher.

Starting point is 02:13:01 Yeah, yeah, totally. I guess it's, now in America with big brands, like you're fine but you leave america and things get squirrely yeah pretty quickly on supplements plenty of squirrelliness here too but both those papers are open access so if anybody wants to dive in we'll start ashwagandha there's much more data on ashwagandha good effective but it is very difficult to make sure you're getting concentrations at what is labeled on the bottle and that's actually from a labeling issue as well as a harvesting issue. So the people that are kind of behind the scenes that make these things will tell you not every plant has the same. Yeah. Lo and behold.

Starting point is 02:13:36 Totally, right? Nature doesn't standardize. No. Yeah. People say things like it's not FDA regulated. That's not true. There's tons of regulations on supplements. It's just they can't standardize against things like it's not FDA regulated. That's not true. There's tons of regulations on supplements. It's just they can't standardize it against things like that. It's really hard, right? You're growing herbals and you're just hoping that that dose is as potent as the previous one. What do you think, from an effect standpoint, for what can a credible argument be made? I know less science, but with ashwagandha like why would someone take it that is plausibly

Starting point is 02:14:05 defensible and what should you take in that case like are there certain brands that are more reliable for dosing for any particular reason yeah with ashwagandha i think the only third-party pure ashwagandha company that i know is clean the k k-l-e-a-n i'm pretty sure um you'll see it in combinations and a bunch of other stuff but that's I think the only one that sells it as a design for health and design for sport might make one as well can exact I'm not 100 sure on that one decent data on exactly what you mentioned taking it as a the colloquial term we'll say here is any adaptogen adaptogen yeah it what it means is it's we're skipping

Starting point is 02:14:45 is it's a cortisol modulator what that means is cortisol is not supposed to be low it's not a good thing right that is lethargy that is that is a classic sign of excessive training as well you can go back to sodium potassium ratio that'll tell you exactly what's happening with cortisol as well that's addison's disease right super low there. You don't want it to be high either. Now, the general thing that is optimal with cortisol is you have giant spikes throughout the day, and then giant recovery. This is exercise. This is focused work, et cetera. And then we have this normal curve throughout the day such that we have high cortisol in the morning, so we're awake and alert. And then we have low cortisol at night so that we can actually fall asleep. And then

Starting point is 02:15:21 there's a curve. So adaptogens are supposed to be modulating that curve, not such that it's going high or low, but such that it's getting back to an appropriate diurnal curve. That's the idea. Ashwagandha and rhodiola, and specifically ashwagandha, there's reasonable evidence that it helps with that. And so a lot of folks, probably the most typical utilization of ashwagandha is helping get to sleep, helping calm down. There's, it's kind of resetting that entire axis. Because of that, whenever you manipulate cortisol, you have a very good chance of manipulating testosterone because that relationship is antagonistic for the most part.

Starting point is 02:15:55 And so the smaller level science and then also large amount of anecdotally is it can be helpful and beneficial with testosterone. I would say in my experience, it's reasonable. It is a very reasonable thing to think about with that. I wish that more companies would make pure ashwagandha that is NSF certified. That'd be great. I could use it more directly. Now, rhodiola is another one we have had. Now, this is not science. This is just my practice coaching experience. I've had a lot of benefit of elevating testosterone with rhodiola. Really?

Starting point is 02:16:25 Yeah. It is also a cortisol modulator. There has a lot of other effects. The paper we published had nothing to do with hormones. It had everything to do with performance. And so, there is enough data now on muscular endurance and physical performance that it seems to be pretty beneficial. It's not perfect. Not every study showed benefit, but there's enough to where that I've been using it for i don't know probably a decade or more personally as well as in a coaching practice and and uh i feel like it does really effective work on that so we actually got um then i was pitching it so hard we got jeff from momentous to make it so they have their stuff so we use that are they already yeah i didn't know that yeah that's good we got them

Starting point is 02:17:01 to make it because i was like you guys are just like so much work here. So we use them because it is certified. It's third-party tested as well. So that's pretty much where we get our rhodiola from, but a lot of benefits there. Are there, for acclimating to altitude, because I know you've gone from Flatlander to altitude a couple of times, anything that you have found particularly helpful for accelerating acclimation to altitude? Because you hear all sorts of stuff, right? Some people take beetroot extract.

Starting point is 02:17:26 Some people take rhodiola, anecdotally. Of course. I'm curious if you have thoughts here. Rhodiola would be on my short list. I would listen to you either way if you said it didn't work at all, or if you said it did. I would listen either way,

Starting point is 02:17:38 but it would be a low-risk, potential small reward. Why not? Any arginine or precursor, B-root, you mentioned. Nasal dilation is going to give you every opportunity possible to give splenic contraction, to get more red blood cells into your blood, to let you acclimatize to it. Other stuff you can pay attention to. So one of the major- A couple weeks at EPO.

Starting point is 02:18:03 I mean- Yeah, right. That mean, yeah, right. That would be my first stop. It's a joke, guys. It's a joke. Yeah.

Starting point is 02:18:11 Yeah. Anyway, I mean, it'll work. It'll work. It'll work, yeah. Now,

Starting point is 02:18:17 you can consider at this point in the same realm, you can consider any global alkaline agent. And so, one of the issues that you're going to see happen with altitude is predictable increases in respiratory rate,

Starting point is 02:18:30 predictable increases in carbohydrate metabolism, right? Predictable increases in respiratory quotient, respiratory ratio, things like this. This is part of what happens. Like lactate is a big player, right? This is insanely beneficial for you. So you may consider, I don't know if this will actually work. I don't even know the literature to be candid here on this one, but a lactate supplement could be potentially beneficial

Starting point is 02:18:48 there. Lactate is incredibly powerful at actually bicarbonate, at buffering acid. So this may sound counterintuitive, but you heard that right. Lactate very specifically will reduce metabolic acidosis. Lactate doesn't do what people think it does. It is certainly not the cause of muscle fatigue and definitely not the cause, absolutely definitely not the cause of muscle soreness. It is highly beneficial. It is directly used in the brain as a preferred fuel source to the brain and the heart in numerous situations, including altitude.

Starting point is 02:19:15 Used actually, right now, a couple of handful of trials being used as an acute response to traumatic brain injury. No shit. Yeah. How's that administered? You can do it any number of ways. IV, supplement,

Starting point is 02:19:27 gel, lactate gels, any of those things done. George Brooks at Cal Berkeley, the lactate king, him and Bruce Gladden at Auburn. But George has done a number of those trials in TBI. It's similar to,

Starting point is 02:19:38 look, you may or may not realize, but there's an entire lactate shuttling that happens from muscle into other muscle, to the kidney, core recycle, all that stuff. There's also an astrocyte lactate shuttle. So, astrocytes are like the cells in your central nervous system. They need energy too. So, we know that the brain,

Starting point is 02:19:53 the heart, and astrocytes prefer almost exclusively anaerobic metabolism, which means they love glucose, right? When you enter into areas of problem, whether you're talking about long-term brain health reductions or even short-term concussions and injury, ischemia, heart attacks, things like that, one of the major issues is we lose metabolic fuel. We have problems, right? Enter ketones. Yeah, exactly. Enter lactate.

Starting point is 02:20:16 This is why these things are so interesting. It's still a lot to learn here. Some of the trials are like, oh, great, but then they don't work for ketones and they do for lactate and stuff like that. But there's clearly something happening. And this is also why, to come back to the point, creatine is so powerful for brain health. It's the same thing. It's the most direct and fast fuel source. It's one-to-one stoichiometry, so it doesn't give you a ton, one molecule of creatine, one ATP. Others, ketones are far higher, but it's super fast and effective. So lactate would be

Starting point is 02:20:42 one I would go to. And and is that i haven't ever sought it out presumably you can just find that as an oral supplement you're taking castles of this stuff uh you can again the gel would probably be gel yeah better place but where would you apply the gel is it like any of your tissue just rub it on anywhere yeah yeah on your legs yeah all that stuff probably where i would actually start because that's i could go look at the research and i might be like oh my god that was really stupid don't do that i don't know like that was sort of me working through thoughts on there but a similar idea that is much more founded would be any sodium bicarbonate solution right it's same exact idea where you're going to put yourself a little more alkaline situation my guess is that would help you feel a little bit better

Starting point is 02:21:23 and that was since you asked sort of direct application sodium bicarbonate can come in a lot of forms and fashion it's baking soda like literally just be careful though yeah i could tell you many stories in the lab of doing research with baking soda or sodium bicarbonate yeah there's such thing it's too much of a good thing yeah fluid in your intestines matters. Also be careful with creatine and double espressos. Just pro tip, if you're about to head out skiing. Too much of those two.

Starting point is 02:21:54 Creatine and caffeine have this weird relationship. Increased likelihood of disaster pants. Not to get too technical. Yeah, it's super technical. Theoretically, we'll see the data on that. So you can do that. The other way is gels. Gels, yeah. Right, so this is PR lotion. This is is what they make so you can just rub a blonde sodium bicarbonate

Starting point is 02:22:09 if you want to go around it there so anyone that has any gi issues with it that lotion will go as well far far far more research on oral applications than lotions but none of the sodium bicarbonate yeah for sure and there's lots of research on that so those would be potential ways outside of that we would have to really start getting into things that are actually specific to mitochondria to kind of go down those reins. The issue with all that is I don't know if you're going to have like a

Starting point is 02:22:33 one to five day effect. And so really getting into, and this is everything from CoQ10s and things like that. So going back up to like arginine and beetroot juice, that's going to have an instantaneous effect. Sodium bicarbonate will instantaneously change things. The other stuff takes a little, like a mito or a PQQ or something like that.

Starting point is 02:22:52 It's going to take probably weeks. It's going to take a while. Yeah, to do stuff. So by that time, you probably hopefully have it climatized. Well, there are levels and there are levels, right? So if I'm operating at 10K, but then I'm doing some- You're skiing at 16 or- Well, if I'm skiing at 16, I'll at 16 or well that'd be high 14 yeah yeah oh you could do it but if i'm going up a few thousand feet for for backcountry stuff for

Starting point is 02:23:11 heli skiing yeah you'll notice that extra thousand feet oh yeah for sure kind of my point i was getting there at the end was i would probably let physiology just do what it wants to do that would be my normal thing take your baseline stuff there and then let it go because you're going to be there for eight weeks and we're going to walk ourselves into these first two weeks anyways. If you were there for, like, for example,

Starting point is 02:23:30 we have Brian Ortega is fighting in Mexico City for his next fight. That's 7,500 feet in elevation. Brian lives, Torrance, he lives below elevation. We are doing things

Starting point is 02:23:39 specifically now starting like today to prepare for that. But that's because we have to get there for one event, one night. You'll have two months to live there. I have some time, yeah.

Starting point is 02:23:49 I would let your body do what it wants to do. Kind of the last thing I'll really say here is, I think that's an important note. Your physiology and your brain are still way smarter than anything we have. Any AI program, any machine learning stuff we've got, your own physiology has a far better sense of what you're doing. So whenever possible, don't hold it back. We call these performance anchors. So anything you're doing that's an anchor. It's dragging you

Starting point is 02:24:13 down. So this is alcohol. This is any number of suboptimal visible stressors, hidden stressors. That's going to hold you back. But once you've removed those things, just get out of the way. Yeah, your body will figure it out. Your body really knows where it wants to go for the most part don't sabotage it but then don't have too much control the wheel super important i mean maybe another way to put this i guess would be like it's human nature to think about how it can accelerate things

Starting point is 02:24:38 accelerate accelerate but in this case i mean we have millions of years of evolution at hand. And if you can just remove, make sure that you don't have any emergency brakes on. Yes, that's exactly right. You'll make a lot of progress. And we've talked about a lot today. People can find you on Twitter, Instagram at Dr. Andy Galpin. And they can find all things Andy Galpin at andygalpin.com. You have a number of different initiatives, projects, companies that are in motion. Absolute Rest, we've already mentioned. Any others that you would like to mention or point people to? Yeah, Absolute Rest, of course, is our sleep company.

Starting point is 02:25:17 My education company is called Biomolecular Athlete. And that is actually something that we just released Thanksgiving. So this is just new to the world i have always and will continue to put out as much free content on youtube as i can so what i do is i have this like series of 5 25 and 55 minute physiology videos and if you've been paying attention and when i say 25 minutes it's ish and when i say 55, it's ish. And when I say 55 minutes, it's ish. Yeah. I get around that one. I'm always going to do that. And that is always going to be free out there. But I had such demand for it. I was like, I just need to make a full proper education company.

Starting point is 02:25:57 So we released our very first course Thanksgiving. And I think we had people from over 90 countries get into it. I was like, all right, that'll do well. But holy cow, I was so stunned. So that is out there. We're going to come out with our second and third course this year. One of them will be on performance blood work. And then another will be on managing. It's like an algorithm, if you will, step-by-step process on fatigue.

Starting point is 02:26:21 How to stop it from happening, correct it, like what to do, like all this stuff. So that'll be coming at BiomolecularAthlete.com. I think it's forward strength, but if you get to Biomolecular Athlete, it's going to get you close enough. The other one we're launching in January is called Vitality Blueprint. And that is high level performance blood work. And so this is not medical stuff. This is if you want to really understand how to not only analyze blood, but then go through some of the stuff we talked about of how do you interpret it? Once you get it, what's it mean? All that is done for you. It's completely interpreted. All the patterns and calculations that go into high performance

Starting point is 02:26:59 are done for you. And then as a result of that, you get spit out very high precision supplementation, nutrition, and exercise protocols on the back of that. So spit out very high precision supplementation nutrition and exercise protocols on the back of that so it's not just like hey here are your labs you go figure it out so that is coming out that's vitality blueprint and then our coaching program is that rapid rapid health and performance is like if you want to come in and get full immersion coaching like i sort of started with the beginning yeah that's at that program. Where can people find that? I think that is rapidealthreport.com. We'll link to it in the show notes as well.

Starting point is 02:27:31 Yeah, I think it's all is or will potentially be on my website. I realize, again, business and savvy forte is not my thing, so probably shouldn't have all these brands and companies going, but they're all out there. So education, blood work, rest, sleep, and coaching are there. And then all the social medias for me is, it's all science communication. That's pretty much all I do. So if you want to know more about the science and performance, that's pretty much, if you don't want it, like get out of there.

Starting point is 02:28:06 Do not, if that's not what you want, don't go to andyalpin.com. But if that is of interest, then certainly what we mentioned, andygalpin.com. On social, Dr. Andy Galpin. And we'll link to everything in the show notes. So if people miss anything on andygalpin.com, people go to tim.blogs.com. We'll link to everything we discussed in this conversation, which is going to be a lot.

Starting point is 02:28:21 For the record, I made that website myself on Squarespace like seven or eight years ago. So not a lot of standards. All right. All right. Well, I might be able to help you with an upgrade. So TBD on that.

Starting point is 02:28:33 Is there anything else, Andy, that you'd like to mention or closing comments you'd like to add before we land the plane? I think I've had plenty of comments at this point. All right. Perfect. and as mentioned everybody we'll have links to everything in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog slash podcast and until next time train smart keep it green lights

Starting point is 02:28:58 don't get injured and best of luck in the new year. Thanks for tuning in. And now Tim and Andy discuss Tim's training regimen. I land at altitude. I will then be confronted with training decisions. And my concerns are mostly around avoiding injury, right? I'm not worried about hitting the most complex double black diamond, blah, blah, blah, two weeks out. I don't have a competition. I'm doing this for fun, also to get into shape, which is fine. Touring, I find pretty kind of self-regulating in a way, although you have avalanche risk, but let's put that aside. How would you think about training? This is going to be a lazy question, but the lower body. And the reason I ask is two seasons ago, I've been very lucky,

Starting point is 02:29:50 knock on wood, I've had very few knee issues. I've had issues with a lot of other stuff, shoulder surgeries, elbow surgeries, all sorts of issues, but ankles like broken every which way from Sunday from all sorts of terrible combat sports decisions. Knees have been pretty good, except for two years ago, I had to get medevaced out with a very impressive tomahawk accident after hitting an ice ridge at high speed, hell of a skiing. So I got medevaced out for a bunch of reasons. I mean, my leg was twisted around like a G.I. Joe figure is bad. And I felt a pop in the hip and the knee because one ski ejected, the other one didn't. So as I tomahawked, the tip got caught and rotated my leg around and landed. And I was like, fuck, I'm going to wait for the tail guide to check this out.

Starting point is 02:30:33 And the knee felt a little loose, ended up ultimately getting ER, MRI, the whole nine and had a couple of minor injuries. But they were like, your knee is surprisingly okay. You might have a mild tear. I think it was meniscus. They were like, but nothing really of note. And I was like, huh, okay. But there have been points, for instance, as my back has started to feel better, I've slowly moved into conservative, mostly isolateral leg training. Because part of what precipitated this, I've had back issues for decades. It's just, I have a transitional segment where my brother has the same thing, lots of kind of chronic back tightness. You have a tail. I have a tail. Exactly. That's what I'm going to say now. But what really-

Starting point is 02:31:14 I have one too, so I know. Yeah, okay. What really precipitated the acute phase was back squats. And I'm sure I could dissect biomechanically why I think I fucked that up, but I've been very moderately moving into like split squat type stuff and feeling really good, feeling very good about it. But a few weeks ago felt like a little like ping, like a little weirdness in the right knee, a little tension after that with like terminal knee extension, or let's just say terminal extension. Like when I'm walking, if I try to keep my heel down, I'm like, weird. At the very end, it's a little tight on the back of the knee. So priority number one for me is injury prevention. How might you think about getting back into skiing, but doing it in a responsible way?

Starting point is 02:31:55 What type of training to augment with just the time on the slopes? Okay. I will actually directly answer your question finally. Oh my God. Yeah. We'll go straight to it. Christmas comes early. Hey, let's talk about sleep. Let's talk. When you're going into a novel situation like that, your hydration, your sleep, we've already

Starting point is 02:32:12 talked, those are going to be huge. And then overall stress of all that stuff, like that is by far the best place to start. We've done a nauseam there. We're going to go on to what you're talking about here. I need to know what is your, you got two months, what's the rough skiing plan? Because what we want to do first, and this is the same thing when we get in season for any of our athletes or in fight camp, sport is first. You got to get better at fighting. You got to get better hitting golf balls. You got to get better hitting tennis balls, et cetera. So tell me what that looks like and I'll reverse

Starting point is 02:32:39 engineer the training backwards. So what that looks like is first week, I'm actually not scheduling any formal training sessions with a coach because I want to have some time simply to remember what I did last season. No point of even getting tips on technique when you're inconsistent. Yeah. Let me get in a bit of mileage. Also, let me acclimate to altitudes that I'm not tempted to push with a coach who is also a very high level skier because I'm competitive and there's just, if I'm protecting myself from my lesser self, like week one is going to be acclimating, let's just call it. Then beginning week two, probably minimum three days a week of training with a coach. And then depending on recovery and other factors an additional two to three days of skiing most likely then after

Starting point is 02:33:28 let's call it week three i will add in ski touring where i'm doing side or back country using skins where i'm basically shuffling my way up a mountain and then skiing down in more backcountry powder conditions. I would say also around that time, because I do well with these types of conditions, I would like to, I'm not attached to it, but I think it would be very interesting to do some adult race training and just working with gates and getting very good at carving. And there are other, obviously, aspects to that. At this point, and this is where I have not decided on what adjunct training to supplement, what I found helpful in the past, at least last season, was let's just call it one or two, it's not quite yoga nidra, but pretty low-key, let's just call it down-regulating yoga classes a week, also for just hip stuff. And then

Starting point is 02:34:26 some type of core training, there are a couple of great Pilates instructors find that very, very helpful for seemingly mitigating some of the lower back issues. And that's about it as far as it stands right now. So let me see if I can spit that back to you first week just getting on the slopes moving yep moving around yeah and just and acclimating to altitude getting there okay dryness all that weeks two to three we start actually getting moving we're doing a variety of different types of skiing and styles of skiing in different areas week three to eight is training where we're going to have a somewhat of a specific plan about different styles of training on different days depending on conditions yeah depending right so it's like if if we're training for powder we don't have the chance we might train on moguls for a host of

Starting point is 02:35:13 reasons and yada yada yada what you just outlined is fight camp it's exactly what it is you move week one you do these things and then you get into a specific plan for five to eight weeks of different things on each of the days we we have different emphasis, right? So we're boxing one day, we're wrestling another day, et cetera. You're doing- It's the same thing. It's the same thing, right? Because we might do one day, it's a real carving emphasis. We might do another day that is powder emphasis. Another day that's more conditioning with the touring. Great. So here's what I do. A couple of structured things. Number one,

Starting point is 02:35:42 you actually made a comment earlier that I banked that I want to come back to. And you sort of said you don't care about your upper body losing weight. I'd be willing to sacrifice if it helps sort of looking at, say, Lance Armstrong post-cancer when his relative strength went through the roof. I'm willing to compromise that for the sport. Understood. Yeah. Don't want to go away for no reason. But if it's if it's if it's beneficial power to weight ratio matters right now i don't know a ton about skiing so i didn't catch all that terminology exactly but from my understanding you're going to be doing some stuff that is high speed high change of direction high impact on joints my assumption is that's shorter duration yeah the runs are going to be shorter duration ballpark me time 12 minutes like two minutes i would say with the coach let's just say it's two to five minutes before stopping to review technique and then some back up the

Starting point is 02:36:31 mountain and then multiple runs of that a day yeah how many runs i would say i mean we're going to be doing on the order of at least i would think minimum 10 to 15 total runs okay yep the other days are more when you're doing like the touring stuff oh yeah that's going to be you might spend an hour or two going up and then you get 10 turns in deeper powder i mean ideally you get more than 10 turns but the ratio of let's just call it uphill to downhill, is heavily tilted to uphill, where you're doing a lot of conditioning. And very fatiguing. More like steady state, though. More like many hours of you're going up. This would be the steady state. Yeah, great. This would be in the sort of go heavy, go long, go hard. This would be like the go long. Yeah. Yeah. How many days a week total? Seven,

Starting point is 02:37:33 six, five? I would say I will likely increase the volume each week because my recovery will just be compromised in the beginning as I'm acclimating to altitude, et cetera. So I would say my goal would be by week three that I'm at minimum four days a week it would not be seven days a week i will have at least one full day of recovery because i've just found that i need that yeah you have to absolutely okay great the reason i ask why your upper body is when you're moving on skis like that and again i know minimally about it you're having pulls and you will get some upper body like you are using your upper body there's actually classic data at a scan for the most part looking at cross-country skiers this is like our study was in that but if you actually the biopsy data that have been done on the deltoid so shoulder muscle you can get like a 95 reduction in muscle glycogen content

Starting point is 02:38:14 if you were to look at something like glycogen depletion yeah in the quads if you get to like 50 60 we call that depleted so. So you can torch your shoulders. Oh, for sure. And also triceps. You can smoke your triceps. And the reason I'm saying that is going back to your back and knee. Because if we are now either compromised strength

Starting point is 02:38:35 or endurance in our shoulders, and now we're getting up or downhill or controlled via other mechanisms, we're probably putting undue stress in those positions. Yeah, let me add something to that because what you just brought up raised this. And that is, you're probably putting undue stress in those positions. Yeah. Let me add something to that because what you just brought up raised this and that is, you're a hundred percent right. It's not going to be to the cross-country skiing is like, Nordic skiing is insane. It is just like torture personified. I mean,

Starting point is 02:38:58 the cardiovascular capacity is so outrageous. Absurd, absurd. So I'm not doing that. that i mean there are cardiorespiratory demands placed on me in touring but i'm i won't get into all the details but it's far less than cross country but to your point yes i'm using the upper body and one of the question marks that has existed in my mind since last season is how much to work on various types of rotation. Because where I found my back can get quite grumpy is when you're skiing at, say, steeper inclines. Sorry, but it's getting very personalized. You're not sorry at all. Yeah, I'm not sorry.

Starting point is 02:39:38 Sorry, I'm not sorry. Your skis might be facing across the slope, but you often want your body, your chest to be facing down the slope. So there's a lot of rotation. There's like disassociation of the torso almost. And that is something I think that a lot of skiers underestimate in terms of the toll and the tax that can take, especially if you have mobility issues or any type of orthopedic issues. Okay. So big picture wise, what I would do is set up your week and we need to make sure that we're doing this in a way where we understand our higher impact days and our higher fatigue days. Yep. And what you want to avoid is doing something

Starting point is 02:40:14 in both of those categories on all or most days. And so I personally generally like to stack red on red. What I mean by that is if you're going to have a really challenging session say it's the touring when you guys really get going and you're cutting you're sharp you're moving this is torsion on the back right it is impact it is also probably more focused because there's like crash and burn faster speeds all that stuff okay this is high physiological demand this is high energy demand and this is high neurological demand also high stress yeah okay that's a red right we're gonna stack that red when it comes to your training now i'm thinking this is a neurological demand. Also high stress. Yeah. Okay, that's a red, right? We're going to stack that red. When it comes to your training now,

Starting point is 02:40:46 I'm thinking this is a good day to go hard. Counterintuitive, but I want to go hard on hard, right? I want red on red. Because the next day we're going to come back and probably do green, whatever that means. That could be your Pilates, could be your total off day, or this could be one of the other ski sessions

Starting point is 02:41:02 that is a very low technical recovery movement, like that this is something of there and then we can come back and stack probably like an orange yellow whatever you want to call it kind of in the mid um this is where you're accumulating volume right so this is we're building up this is maybe the longer state yeah so the red might be the steeper gnarlierlier stuff with some higher speed carving. And then green is actually maybe a touring day. I mean, it's going to be like slow and steady, but not redlining. Yeah. You don't even want to like yellow line. Okay. Then maybe something else. Maybe it's some drilling, like drilling, like single leg practice, stuff like that. It is high technical feedback stuff.

Starting point is 02:41:41 Yeah, exactly. High technical feedback stuff. And then maybe the orange is the moderate touring, something like that. It is exactly what you want to do, right? So we're going to take all that. And the first thing I want to say is let's lay out specifically when we're doing, if we can, the skiing components over the course of a week. And then we're going to build in some sort of intentional down regulation work to supplement that stuff, right? So when we go red on red, then we are paying that back. when you say red on red that's in a single day single day yep

Starting point is 02:42:08 because they assume you're going to do a training session and a skiing session in a day or something right okay got it so you're going to do your hard hard red skiing session and then we're going to come back and either do some pilates to unwind we're going to do maybe a lift that day we're going to do something else depending on where we're at, right? We're typically doing some multiple physical exposures in one day at some form or fashion, right? That's what I mean when I say, if it's a single session, that's fine. Single session red is fine. It's going to carry over to the next day, right? So there's residual fatigue there. There's some other changes we want to pay attention to. So either way, we're going to finish that day with strong down regulation, right? Really going to

Starting point is 02:42:44 batch recovery into that. The next day, then we're going to finish that day with strong down regulation, right? Really going to batch recovery into that. The next day, then we get to pay that toll back. Okay. And this is again, technical work. Yeah. So I'm saying this as much for myself. I am saying for myself, but like the slow restorative yoga was fantastic for down regulation. So that's where the day ends.

Starting point is 02:42:59 Yep. Love that stuff. I would actually like to also see, make sure that that session is maybe not full 90 minutes, if it's long, or even maybe 60 minutes is maybe enough, because we just want restoration. Keep it short. Fine. If you're like, no, I leave there and I feel more energetic,

Starting point is 02:43:14 or I feel unwound. Oh, I basically feel like I'm able to sleep, because it's also a really dark studio. Perfect. Amazing on that. So we would lay out the entire week on the skills there, and this would progress over time. So the reds get a little bit harder. The greens stay green. This is a major mistake.

Starting point is 02:43:29 Yeah, drift. Green drift. Everybody drifts, right? You end up just having a bunch of medium stuff, which is great. You got to accumulate volume there. But the way that I want you to reframe this is when you're thinking of red, we're thinking about maximal capacity. Can I perform under these maximal conditions, right? You are holding on, you are getting after it. When we get into the other session, we're not working on conditioning at this point. We are working on technical capacity.

Starting point is 02:43:55 It is practice. The general rule of thumb is probably something like 20% of the time can be read, and almost everything else needs to be practice or recovery. Much more than that depends on your unique physiology, but with all you got going on new to the altitude injury history, I'm going to hedge way more conservatively. I would also say my recovery capacity, just broadly speaking, pretty low. I mean, I would just say I'm a slower, I'm slower to recover than a lot of my friends who are competitive athletes who I trained with. Same

Starting point is 02:44:24 workload, kind of same diet, same habits, and I'm just, I'm slower to recover. Yeah, that's another metric we actually, we always bucket. So I want to see what your total recovery capacity, and then it goes back to earlier, it's that non-specific stressors. Get those out of your life and watch your recovery capacity just take off. So we will want to work on that 100%. Nonetheless, this is the end part, right? The recovery capacity is, give me my other stuff and I'll get that up higher. But since we don't have time for that, let's just make sure the input, the stressors going in from what we can control are not outkicking our capacity to recover.

Starting point is 02:44:54 This is where the problems start to exist. We want to outkick them a little bit. Got a stress system. Physiology doesn't change without stress, but we can't exponentially increase our injury or overuse risk, right? You will see the back lockup 100% during this time, right? Not because of injury there, but because global stress got high. Central nervous system said, I don't like what's going on here. I'm going to stop him. I'm throttling him back. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, tight,

Starting point is 02:45:16 tight, tight. That's effectively what's happening. No real actual change there, but it is a global regulator. It's a governor saying, lock up. That's what's happening. So we're going to stretch that week out that way. I want a full layout of the seven days. We want to put in all those other practices around that. We're going to build a schedule. And then from there, we're going to work our training backwards around that. So when we look at that, we need unwinding. Sounds like you're getting that from yoga and Pilates. Meditation also. I'm generally, when I am my better self, meditating twice a day, 20 minutes, basic TM stuff, transpirational meditation. And breathwork on top of that,

Starting point is 02:45:49 or that is just the intentional breathwork? I'm not doing much independent breathwork. I mean, what I do find helpful, and I can make time for this, is using something like, there's a device called the O2 trainer. I'm not even sure what the sort of general term would be. It's a respiratory trainer. You know why? It's respiratory training. And I do find those extremely helpful on a number of levels. Funny you mentioned the O2 trainer.

Starting point is 02:46:14 That research came from my lab. Oh yeah? Yeah. Oh shit. Okay. There we go. So that's Boss Rutens. Yeah, that's Boss Rutens.

Starting point is 02:46:19 I had him on the podcast. That's when I started using it in preparation for high altitude hunt and found it tremendously helpful. Okay. Since it came from your lab, just 60 seconds. Sure. Just a brief overview of what we're talking about. We touched a lot on respiratory rate.

Starting point is 02:46:37 The reason respiratory rate can be either dysfunctional or even just suboptimal, which are different, is because of a number of things. I talked to you about it could be pattern recognition. It could be psychophysiological. What I never even got to was it could be biochemical. That would be CO2. That would be pH levels. You're trying to restore there. The third one is it can simply be mechanical. And so this is intercostal muscles. So these are the little muscles that are in between your ribs as well as your diaphragm. And when you contract contract those that open up the cavity of the lungs, which allows to change pressure. One that matters is the real issue at altitude, and people say this all the time, but there's not less oxygen at altitude.

Starting point is 02:47:16 There's the same amount of oxygen at 10,000 feet as there is at sea level, but the partial pressure in the air is different. It's much lower. And so when you open your mouth, the gradient, the difference between the pressure in your lungs and the outside environment is less. It's almost the same. So air doesn't go anywhere. And so what you need to do is be able to create a huge amount of increase in volume as you may be aware of the relationship between pressure and volume. You open that up and then allow air to come in. So what the O2 trainer does is it restricts airflow in. And so you actually have to actively pull. It's like strength training your intercostals and your diaphragm. So you can do that to give yourself more ability. Why that also matters through fatigue is those muscles are

Starting point is 02:47:56 like any other muscle. They fatigue. So when you lose that ability, you lose the ability to bring in air during acute exercise. And so that becomes a problem another free way to do it is this is when nasal breathing can work so nasal breathing alone as in closing your mouth is a fantastic way to force intercostals and diaphragm to really get on board because you're restricting total air you're effectively doing altitude without doing it none of them you want to necessarily do you shouldn't be doing like nasal only breathing when you're at maximum heart rate doesn't really make any sense to do that. You have a mouth for a reason. But if you have significant problems breathing at moderate to medium intensities, O2 trainer,

Starting point is 02:48:35 great, or nasal breathing or any other tools, but it's effectively getting at respiration train. Yeah, and that came in because you're asking if I do separate breathwork, and I would say outside of... I often wonder how much of, we don't need to diverge here, but how much of the benefit of meditation is from just measured slow breathing versus good posture versus other things. It's a big man diagram there. Yeah, so let's leave that alone. But I would say right now, no, I'm not doing separate breath work.

Starting point is 02:48:58 Okay, may or may not need it. Again, let's take a look at suit to tolerance. Let's take a look at mechanics, how you're moving, how you're breathing. Pot're breathing potentially i don't know if you guys cover this in your combo with eric or not but you know where your ribs that or you have excessive rib flaring it's something that i've been working on a lot in the last let's call it six to twelve months just having my awareness brought to it generally yes quite a bit of flare yeah yeah yeah it's pretty easy that'll kick off the diaphragm pretty quickly right inhibits it and so it becomes a problem so we would look biomechanically we would look at it chemically and then we would look at pattern psychophysiologically something like that but that would be the places to start

Starting point is 02:49:34 to figure out okay you may or may not need breath work that doesn't necessarily need to happen it also again can be detrimental meditation the same thing it's almost like as an aggregate it's generally very very very positive to extremely positive when there's also subsets of folks where can be detrimental. Meditation, the same thing. It's almost like as an aggregate, it's generally very, very, very positive to extremely positive. But there's also subsets of folks where breath work is maybe not a great option, right? It's not necessarily just this panacea of everyone go do down regulation breath work, particularly if your HRV is extremely high. So you're very parasympathetic. And this has actually happened. Again, this is rare. More common is what we've been describing. But has happened, we have had folks that have very high HRVs.

Starting point is 02:50:09 So if you're using a device like an Aura that's getting into this, you know, once every five minute mark, you're talking about people's overnight HRV averages of 150 milliseconds, 170 milliseconds, really, really high, which may or may not be a problem at all. Could be totally normal for you. Easy, no problem. At the same time, they have a respiratory rate of nine breaths per minute. Okay, again, maybe totally normal, especially if you're super fit. Anytime we're running through physiology, we're never taking action on one metric.

Starting point is 02:50:37 There's way too many things that could be explained what's going on there. But if you couple that with lethargy, can't get out of bed, performance numbers are down, no motivation drive, things like that. If you think that person is burnt out and you give them a bunch of down regulation work, yeah, going to be a problem. Going to be a real, real problem. You're pushing the slider in the wrong direction. You're pushing the slider in the wrong direction, for sure. So then again, that's more typical is upregulation, we need to bring you back down. But I just feel like it's important to say that because some people go out there

Starting point is 02:51:06 and just have everyone downregulate and you're like, well, time out here. You may or may not need breathwork at all. It is a baseline tool, right? For sure. So I want something in there to, after those sessions hit and we've got that big fear to go,

Starting point is 02:51:20 okay, let's bring it back down. That could be very, very low volume strength work. If we feel like we have a little bit of an issue with under-regulation. This is where I was going to go next. So I'm curious to hear more about this. So I want to make sure that you're strong in strong positions.

Starting point is 02:51:37 So everything you outlined is going to be steady state endurance or a somewhat limited range of motion. You've also outlined and again i'm just making assumptions here but when you're doing a lot of those fast turns it's a greater range of motion through your knees and hips because you're cutting at a faster angle yeah and you're doing stuff that scares the shit out of me that is helpful for skiing like kind of this is not the right term but like buckling the knees laterally to get higher edge angle yeah it makes sense

Starting point is 02:52:04 and lean yep start of the tire i get it all right great so that's actually high velocity eccentric control we want to make sure that we come back in and re-establish a proper pattern over those same ranges of motion and fast we'll walk through like exact examples here in one second but we're walking from the top down i want to know what your week looks like what's the skiing now that we understood that now we're back filling in all of our needs. Okay, so we needed the down regulation so that we don't just get the entire system

Starting point is 02:52:29 to lock up on us. We needed now to look at our physical attributes. Okay, can we come back and reestablish proper movement patterns? What I'm meaning by that is you are going to, when you're on those slopes, you're going to default to your movement

Starting point is 02:52:40 and breathing patterns that are the lowest common recipe, right? Hedging against that, and that's when we come back and we do our pelvic floor stuff. We do whatever stuff that you're doing that says, hey, now this is the way that we want to sequence. So you're just continually reminding it that how much transfer that has over to your skis, I don't care.

Starting point is 02:52:58 Hopefully a lot, but even 1% is better than zero. Any percent carryover we can get from there. At this point, we probably don't need to spend a lot of time on maximal speed and power. That's not a rate limiting factor. We would have done this in the off season or some other issue, right? Day late and a dollar short. Totally. But we need to make sure your hips in particular and feet are functioning appropriately as well as your shoulders. And that's like, those are the areas I'm going to go after and making sure we have proper stability and then we have strength in

Starting point is 02:53:25 them. You're going to get a lot of muscular endurance on the slopes. I'm not super concerned about that. I want low volume, high quality strength. I don't really need maximal strength at this point, but I kind of want to touch the envelope a little bit here. I want to get up to, Tim, give me a heavy, heavy double. Give me a heavy triple. No smelling salts. Don't like, you know, like I don't need that, but we want to touch. More than you probably want to do. Okay. So maybe this isn't the right way to reference it, but like what percentage of one rep max

Starting point is 02:53:52 are we talking for those doubles and triples? 85. Okay. All right. It's up there. No, you're going. Yeah. You're more than you want to do.

Starting point is 02:54:00 Yeah. For sure. Okay. But we don't need you 95. Yeah. I don't need you at a two rep max yeah right i want you feeling again heavier than you want to feel so you're doing a two with what you might be able to do for four i don't know if my mouth is panning out here six six okay all right got it got it

Starting point is 02:54:15 that's right just to sort of make it concrete for my something where you got attention knuckle dragging yeah so the double could be with a weight where you would tap out at six to eight. Six, yeah, something like that. Actually, I'm not super concerned about the exact numbers here. What I'm concerned about is, is it at a level where you sufficiently have to be paying attention? You have to be ready to go, right? We're not sending a work text in the middle of like a set, right? Right.

Starting point is 02:54:39 I'm not listening to a dense podcast while I'm doing this. Totally. I also don't want it at such an intensity or volume that it's now escalating recovery in a negative fashion. I got it right. You're not digging the hole deeper. Yes, that's right. Don't want to dig the hole any deeper. Fatigue is really interesting, whether you're looking at endurance or strength, however you want to do it. This is basic physiology stuff. It doesn't go linearly. There's a little bit of an asymptote here and there's a little bit of an exponential growth such that going from a 10% increase in intensity, so 50 to 60% is almost identical in terms of recoverable volume.

Starting point is 02:55:13 So the amount of volume you could do, let's say skiing at 50% of your max heart rate is pretty much the same as what you could do at 60%. There'll be very little changes, but if you go from 80% to 90%, there'll be dramatic increases in time it takes to recover. And you already, we know, just based on what you told me earlier, probably struggle on the higher end of that spectrum, right? And so getting into the real high intensity stuff. In terms of recovery. Recovery.

Starting point is 02:55:34 Yeah. So your maximum recoverable volume, because MRV is kind of how we talk about a lot, is low for higher intensity stuff. Now, I'd be interested to see what your muscle physiology looks like. Would you generally consider yourself more fast twitch or slow twitch? Just off the cuff. I'd say more fast twitch. Yeah, that's always the answer, right?

Starting point is 02:55:50 That's me. My fatigue, my soreness from power, heavy strength stuff is really, really high from those things because I'm particularly good at that stuff for my own self. And look, you're much more sophisticated with this stuff. But in my own primitive way, when I've been my absolute strongest, I'm generally taking like seven to nine days between the same workout and super long rest intervals. Yeah, of course. Right.

Starting point is 02:56:15 Because if not, it's not necessarily that you potentially respond better to that training. It's the fact that the hole gets dug so deep if you do more than that. Your maximum recovery volumes is super low. Yeah, low. Right. So we can get out of it. Okay. So we want to pay attention to that. Your maximum recovery volumes is super low. Yeah, low. Right? So we can get out of it. Okay. So we want to pay attention to that.

Starting point is 02:56:27 That's basically where I'm looking at, right? So we're going to do some stuff for global torso. Think of this as trap bar deadlift, right? So we want to make sure that shoulder position is appropriate, hip position, and we're putting strength in the posterior side, and we're just remembering strength. If I've had a history specifically with trap bar deadlift, I'm not sure why. For decades, I was totally fine with trap bar deadlift. You're going to love this.

Starting point is 02:56:49 And then I did a going from zero tennis to spending, I don't know, seven to 10 days with a pro in Florida doing like eight hours a day of tennis. Smart. Technically made tons of progress. Of course. And then I came back and I was doing a trap bar deadlift and my right SI was like clunk. And ever since I've actually had, I've gone through periods of it improving, getting worse. Who knows if it's exactly the SI.

Starting point is 02:57:13 But I've had issues with both trap bar and say back squatting type movements. Yep. Where I worry about the low back and the hip. So I'm wondering if. Throw it off. Yeah. Pick a different exercise, right? Got it.

Starting point is 02:57:27 We're almost always tool agnostic, right? It is what's the thing we're trying to get to, and we'll pick a bunch of tools based on that, right? So I could do some split stance or, you know, isolateral stance. Split stance tend to be better for you? Yeah. Single leg or split stance entirely or both? Single leg, I would say, just seems to be safer.

Starting point is 02:57:44 I don't run into the same back issues. Okay a single leg leg press yep for all i care right like who cares right it's different now we got to do something for the back later but fine yeah right we can make that work we can do hip thrusting lots of ways we can go about single leg leg press is how i've been edging back into the like training which has overall gone very well with that one strange piano wire, not snap, but like twing, that I felt a couple of weeks ago. So this is just recent?

Starting point is 02:58:10 That was two or three weeks ago. Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, great. We could do sled drags, right? We could push and pull things that are really heavy for a few steps. All of these things are going to be fine. So my guess is if you were to do something like that,

Starting point is 02:58:24 you'd probably be fine. That particular position, it is being stuck in a position under load that really give you problems. So I would look and see when we get out to the place, what equipment do we have? And then we'll work around that. That's the approach. Could be like split stance, even potentially elevated one foot overhead pressing for your shoulders, things like that. Let's get your back out of the equation, but I don't want it gone. So that's the real big key. You said a second ago, terminal extension of your right leg when it's trailing. Okay, great. So let's put it in terminal extension. I want your right leg behind. I want your right heel on the ground. I want you terminally locking out your knee, and then we're going to do overhead movement. And so what we're doing is,

Starting point is 02:58:59 in that case, we're not training the leg per se. We got that and other stuff, but we're connecting it to the rest of the movement group, which is to say you never get the time off you are always practicing that movement when distracted that's going to tell us do you own that position do you really have that is that going to mean transfer onto the slopes that's what we're after learning movement and this is a general problem with physiology i think we've done a huge disservice teaching systems as if they are separate everyone makes and says says, oh yes, they're not, but then we go right back to treating it system by system. If we want to improve movement, that means that foot heel connection needs to be worked on in all of our practices, right? We just

Starting point is 02:59:35 don't let it go. That's just the new ingrained system. So I would do that. I would say the same thing for our rotational work. It's really weird. People get to rotation and they all of a sudden just forget to strength train, right? And they get to rotation and they all of a sudden just forget the strength train. Right. And they get to rotation. They're like, I'll just do sets of 10 or like, what? Why? Yeah.

Starting point is 02:59:50 Like, well, why is that the only answer? You want to be strong this way and this way, right? Great. So we're going to have the same movement patterns that we're going to get there. When you're doing, let's just say two rep sets, three rep sets. Yeah. It doesn't have to be right now, but I'd love to know what we're talking about in terms of total volume, number of sets, et cetera.

Starting point is 03:00:08 Yeah, that's exactly where it's going. You can use a very easy rule of thumb, three to five method. Now, every time I say this, the entire internet comes after me. Yes, I didn't invent it. No, it's been around for a very long time. Three to five, which just means just three to five days per week. Pick three to five exercises. Do three to five sets. Three to five reps per set. Three to five minutes rest. So what that means, that could be on the high end, five days a week, five sets of five, of five exercises.

Starting point is 03:00:36 That's a long workout. That's a... If you start adding up the rest intervals, right? If you start adding up the rest intervals, and even if you cheat the rest intervals, and you do that at the appropriate load, five by fives, anyone who's truly strength trained, that is a beast. It's another word I was wanting to say, but I'll pass on saying it. Starts with an M and an F involved in it. It's a load, right? It can be as little as three days a week, three exercises, three sets of three. That's probably what I would hedge more to you.

Starting point is 03:01:03 Yeah, so that I'm not digging any deeper with my already limited recovery ability. So if I were to give you like this one example of an actual full training program for you, I'm missing a bunch of information here, but just as a sample here, I would probably say if you're skiing initially five days a week, as we call it, I probably want roughly Wednesday. I want almost as a pure recovery day. We are going to potentially do some sort of movement. So your PT or your actual movement coach, respiratory muscle, hip, adductors, whatever that little thing is,

Starting point is 03:01:37 we need to get activated. So any hygiene we have from whoever's coaching there, we want to get done. We're doing our hot, cold sauna thing. You want to do that outside? Great. You want to go do your breath work outside just to get hot. Any of those things you'd like to do for recovery. Wednesdays, as an example, is that day. That's it. Catch up on work, maybe for a few hours. We're going to keep that thing. We're resetting. We're checking hydration. We're sleep extension. We're napping. We're getting PT,

Starting point is 03:02:04 massage, soft tissue. All that stuff is Wednesday. And that's extension. We're napping. We're getting PT, massage, soft tissue. All that stuff is Wednesday. And that's Wednesday. This is also the day where you do something that is obnoxiously selfish. You want to play three hours of video games. Great. Like, what is the thing you love to do that you don't like let yourself do? Yeah.

Starting point is 03:02:18 World of Warcraft while I'm getting a mani-pedi. Yeah. Or a pedi, probably. I need my hands. Yeah. There you go. That's fantastic. All right. That is that day. We may or may not incorporate a low intensity walk. This is potentially getting

Starting point is 03:02:31 out and you're going to have a lot of nature exposure, so we're fine there. I will likely also do a lot of walking in place of sitting. So in place of Zoom calls, in place of that type of thing, I'll do a low intensity walking. Yeah. If not, we would say walk outside for some chunks, two walks, two 10 minute walks a day, morning or something like that. Any other adjunct therapies and tools and technologies we're using is going to be that day, right? So that's amazing. Let's just say, I'm just going to make an example here.

Starting point is 03:02:56 I'm just going to run the whole thing. Let's just say Monday is that really hard red day. You go on that really hard session on the scope. We're going to come back after that final session. We might go straight to the gym, get really warmed warmed up and we're going to do three by three okay we're going to probably do that like rear stands other foot elevated front foot elevated front foot elevated overhead press something like that now in this particular case i'm probably not doing three sets of three i might ask you to go to like fives the upper body doesn't tend to respond to

Starting point is 03:03:22 lower rep ranges as well as the lower body interesting um you won't see too many guys who are really really excellent at bench press who only do singles or doubles they tend to do probably closer to three to four to fives lower bodies like generally opposite so doing like a an overhead press double by the time you get it up and get the first rep up doesn't work it also might behoove me to use slightly lighter loads for anything overhead, which I've avoided completely for probably half a year because of the compression sensitivity. So I've done very little spinal loading. Angle it. So let's just do incline. Same thing, right?

Starting point is 03:03:57 Okay. Like jammer press, like 45 degree if you've got a landmine, like some other way. Perfect. We need to just be at an angle here. It doesn't have to be perfectly overhead, something like that, okay? So I'm probably doing that. I want some sort of lower body, similar vein. This could be threes.

Starting point is 03:04:12 I love if you have a heavy sled that you can push for like three steps each leg. That would be great. If you've got some sort of potentially front squat, goblet squat, zirker squat, something like that that is not aggravating of any of your things. When we're saying 3x3, 2 at 80%, this is still week 1. So I don't care if this is 60%. It doesn't matter. We're just going through the

Starting point is 03:04:33 motions here. Any favorite split stance or ice lateral leg movements? Just in my particular case. The sled is interesting. I've responded well to sleds in the past. So I'll look for that. It may be my equipment options might be limited. What would be an alternative? Step-ups. Great. A super basic step-up, right? Just like holding on to dumbbells or kettlebells or something? Yeah, just be really careful. A lot of people will like to progress

Starting point is 03:04:58 this by going to a higher step, which is great, but we have to be really careful of how much hip flexion and how much load we put on hip flexion for you. Now, at the same time, but we have to be really careful of how much hip flexion and how much load we put on hip flexion for you. Now, at the same time, if we go at a low, say 12 inch box or something, we're really not getting much movement here other than a basic knee extension. We want to think and kind of play through this. And my low back responds very well to the type of glute activation that I experienced through step ups. High angle or low angle? High box or low box? I have only done lower box, even at low box, assuming that I'm, and this is getting into the weeds,

Starting point is 03:05:32 but when I sort of do like the Verstegen, like pick the knee up and really get that support leg glute contraction, my low back responds very well to that. Okay, let me ask you one quick question. This is super technical here. When you're on that box is super technical here when you're on that box let's just say you're doing a step up with your left foot okay to make it easy you have a left foot over there where is your body at relative to your left foot and where's your knee

Starting point is 03:05:56 at hmm well the way i've been doing these step ups is actually a sort of cross lateral step oh sure and then like a curtsy squat yeah exactly yeah okay yeah so i've been doing that but i'm open to whatever you would suggest that has the lowest injury potential yeah so you're doing that and feeling a great glute contraction because you're crossing okay that's great the only reason i ask that is because depending on where your foot position is this can dramatically change hamstring glute activation right and so are you stepping up with a knee related activity are you stepping up with a hamstring or glute related activity i'm not sure yeah to be honest so if your foot is way in front of you so you can imagine you're

Starting point is 03:06:34 kind of as you go to step up you're rocking forward and then coming up right or if it's behind you right right or same thing is behind you none of these things are right or wrong right should your knees go past your toes well what are we trying to do here? The more our knee goes past our toes, the more it's going to be knee related. The more it stays behind and the more it's going to be, oh, seared, typically, right, as a general rule. So what are we trying to get response to? Potentially, you're in quads, are we? Yep. Now, when you're getting, feeling great response from single leg pressing, depends on how your setup is, you might be in a situation where you feel better when your quads got... I can tell you how I'm setting up. For the single leg leg press, I'm actually placing foot very high on the platform. What kind of platform is this here? Well, let's just say on a leg press, we've got this rectangle in front of us. I am putting the

Starting point is 03:07:21 foot quite high on that platform so that it would be, I guess, maybe the equivalent of rocking forward in this step up. This is a very high hip flexion. Very high hip flexion. And because the more I feel it in the glute, the better the low back feels. Yeah. Okay. So what you're getting is contraction over stretch, which is great, right? So contracting over, this is why full range of motion stuff is such a good idea, right? It needs to be strong over those long positions, right? Charlie Weingraff all day, right? Like long, strong, and then work hard. Okay. So we want to be in that position. I'm not going to suggest that the standard step up position is any better. If you're having success

Starting point is 03:07:56 with how complicated things like low back are, if you're having success with that modified curtsy step up, then I would stay like probably right there, which is great. The only thing we might want to do is potentially load it more. I don't know how you're doing now. As far as step ups go, I've been doing it unloaded. This is bodyweight only. And then I've moved into loading with the leg press because there are just fewer variables at play. And I'm like, all right, let me see how I progress with this. Yeah. I would do the same thing, by the way, the record. If we started loading curtsy, I would start very low. Like right now,

Starting point is 03:08:26 let's not go the wrong direction. Yeah. Let's take our wins. We're at the blackjack table. We won one hand. Let's step up. You were saying

Starting point is 03:08:33 sort of below or 12 inches or below, like you're not really getting A, B, and C if you're trying to like win a world record and you're trying to do like a four foot step up.

Starting point is 03:08:41 You got your own set of problems. Like how do you think about elevation? Well, it's because of hip flexion. It's the same thing. You already answered the question. I was coming at it this way, right? Which is if it's at a very low position,

Starting point is 03:08:50 then you're basically getting most drive from your knee extension initially to get you moving. This is generally what's going to happen. But if you put it at a really high position, you're automatically putting your hip in a really high flexion. So your thigh gets really close to your rib cage. Now we have to work the glute.

Starting point is 03:09:03 And it doesn't mean you're not working your knee as well. Could be very knee heavy driven, still doesn't matter. But you've now forced your glute to work over a higher range of motion, which is what we're after. People tend to avoid range of motion when they have things like back injuries. That's oftentimes the wrong direction. Like you want to make sure without exacerbating pain, of course, but it probably wants to be opened up a little bit

Starting point is 03:09:25 and the hip needs to be. So I would keep it there. I also may ditch that and go to straight hip extension. Let's just go to the hip thrusts. Have you done those before? I have done hip thrusts. I mean, we're talking about like barbell across the waist type stuff.

Starting point is 03:09:38 I have. Glute bridge hip thrusts. Yeah, for whatever reason, especially if it's single leg, if I keep the elevation pretty low, in other words, if I'm not getting to like max terminal hip extension, I'm usually okay. It can cause my spinal erectors to fire. And that sometimes gets me into a spasmed situation where it's problematic. Yep. A hundred percent. So you're getting extension from lumbar spine instead of from the hose.

Starting point is 03:10:05 But for instance, if I keep my hips somewhat low, let's just say I'm using a Swiss ball or something like that, and I'm doing like heel rollouts where I'm really getting the hamstring, then I'm fine. But higher weight, if I'm really making the effort to go full range,

Starting point is 03:10:19 my spinal erectors can really get overactivated and stay overactivated. Yeah, so you just want to stay out of those situations. Yeah. This is why like it would be impossible. I'm glad you're letting us do this, by the way, because typically on podcasts, it kind of is like, what's the. Yeah.

Starting point is 03:10:32 What's the cookie cutter? Ah, like you can. No, this is really. And I know this is really self-indulgent, everybody. So I appreciate you bearing with. But you know what I would have said, because I record the intros after these conversations, but like you get to the universal through the personal in the sense that if you've had any degree of injuries, if you've just lived life aggressively, it's never going to be a cookie cutter, one size fits all. You're going to have to

Starting point is 03:10:55 zig and zag like we're doing right now. So this is, I appreciate you being game to do it also, because you're going to have to zig and zag with this stuff. So yeah, with the hip bridging, if I keep my hips kind of low and I'm, let's say targeting the hamstrings that it works, but otherwise what I've realized with this low back stuff is if it gets super hypertonic, like if my spinal arc is just like turn on and they refuse to turn off, that can last two days. Or more. Or three days. And it fucks up my sleep so badly. And everything else.

Starting point is 03:11:23 And everything. Yeah. Digestion, all of it. Mood, work, can't, don't want to do anything. three days and it fucks up my sleep so badly and everything else and everything yeah digestion all of it mood work can't want to do anything yeah okay so i would just given the fact you've had some success with what you're currently doing and those other ones are marginally helpful then just ditch them yeah at this point this is like green only yeah yellow orange is out like that's what we're doing the only other thing i'd say is let's change the positions entirely, which is, okay, how about you said you had success in areas where you make the hamstrings work really hard. So let's do a hamstring curl on a machine. Take the back entirely out of the equation. Retrain glutes to contract, hamstrings to contract when we don't give the spinal erectors

Starting point is 03:11:59 even an option to come. Because it sounds like once they come into the party, when you're front squatting, when you're back squatting, when you're doing hip thrusts or glute bridges, they haven't learned to play their position yet. No, it's like that one friend everybody has who shows up at the party, drinks too much, starts yelling and screaming. You're just like, oh God. Just don't invite them to the party. This guy again. Yeah. Yeah. You don't get to come to the party for a while. Like you're just gone, right? We can do some other stuff there. What you're going to eventually want to build to is integration which is okay now we need to learn to go glute hamstring low back firing sequence right glute hamstring low back but right now for a while to make sure that your

Starting point is 03:12:34 quads hamstrings and glutes are truly conditioned or isolating and until we get out of pain that's where instead i don't even care i would do leg extension on leg extension machine, leg curl in your situation where you're at and limited resources, probably not full-time PT. Like remember folks, like this is this situation here. And then we're going to slowly in our warm ups and cool downs, do sequence movement patterns that go glute, hamstring, low back. And just to start like, Hey, remember, this is the pattern we want to be in. Okay, now we're not going to expose you to load and fatigue. We're going to do that in our isolation work, but then we're going to come back and in our cool downs, we're going to go through that. I would also then build you out a specific warmup that you do every day prior to skiing.

Starting point is 03:13:17 That is the same sequencing. It could be a thousand different little things we do, but we're going to do a couple of drills. And I'm literally talking four minutes of work, right? We're just remembering proper glute sequencing. And this is a combination to round this last point out because we haven't got to Tuesday yet. I still have more questions about Monday, but yeah. Well, folks, I'm having a ton of fun, so I hope they are too. In getting to that is we need to make sure a part of that equation is your chest and your thoracic spine and your rib cage, because we can't then rebuild the lower sequence without, and then just let the ribs do it, that natural thing.

Starting point is 03:13:53 And so we don't want to be in a situation where we're like locked out, where we can't like breathe, everything's so tight, where we're just like, no, this needs to be a moved functional position. You actually would be sort of surprised how much that will carry over if you give it time. You're not going to see significant changes in your posture, low back pain in three days by doing a four minute warmup. But a year later, this can have substantial impact. What might that warmup look like? Yeah. Okay. So one of the things I'd probably start you with is a basic diaphragm warmup. So this could be as simple as let's lay on your

Starting point is 03:14:25 back. Let's go in a heels to your butt position. So knees are up in the air, your feet are flat on the floor and your heels are right up against your butt. Okay. Now you're going to take your hands and put them around your stomach. So just below your rib cage. And we're just going to use your breath to expand your hands. So pushing it out there, right? Okay, great. Three or four breaths, probably nasal only. Okay. Awesome. Now we're going to do a glute bridge. Okay, we're in that same position and we're going to make sure as high as you can go, six inches, two inches, an inch off the ground.

Starting point is 03:14:53 I don't care. Only as high as you can go. And we're probably going to tuck our chin, right? This is almost automatically going to keep your position out of extension in your low back. So we're going to tuck your chin just a little bit there and we're going to breathe three breaths, four breaths. While you're bridged. While we're bridged, right? And watch what happens. Reset yourself, come back up and watch

Starting point is 03:15:12 you've gained eight inches in your hip extension. Guaranteed. Because not you've actually stretched anything, but you've turned signals off. Right now, I'm totally projecting here, but I'm pretty confident. Right now you're in a position to where any time you get any perception through your low back, it just goes lock. Yeah. The governor's just like- Bingo. Turn it off.

Starting point is 03:15:32 Shut off the, yeah. You have to turn it off, right? Throw the switch. So you throw the switch. All of a sudden, boom, you get hip extension. And now it's not coming from your lumbar spine, right? And we're doing this still in a tucked position and we're going two inches lower than you want to go.

Starting point is 03:15:44 To go all the ties you want to go, come back down two inches. Stay green. Totally. Stay green. And we're going to do some breath tucked position and we're going two inches lower than you want to go. So go all the way you want to go. Stay green. Totally. Stay green. We're going to do some breath work there. And by breath work again. Yeah. Breathe through your nose.

Starting point is 03:15:50 Three. Yeah. Three of them. Four, five, whatever you want. Doesn't matter. Then come back down, reset. Come back up one more time. You'll be up four more inches.

Starting point is 03:15:57 Like if you're doing this at home, you're going to be like, oh my God. It works perfectly. I might have you go into one leg position. So you're going to hold that position on one leg. Say, kick your right leg out, keep your knees identical to each other and kick the right leg out. And now we have ipsilateral control, right? So now we have torsional rotation and we also have that terminal hip extension. And now can you still breathe? What happened to your ribs? Bingo, right? You're going to see, I guarantee you, as soon as you do that, you look down, you'll have arched, right? Ribs have gone up. This is not a locked in hard contraction. This is a chill position, right? It has to be,

Starting point is 03:16:29 all right, I'm relaxed here. I'm breathing. There's going to be a little bit of shaking because you're in a single leg position, but not much. Three, four, five, eight breaths, switch, do the next one. Take a break in between. Those details aren't what matter here. You're just trying to slowly let the system know, these are okay positions. You can relax. We're safe here. So I would probably go into that. Then I'd come back down. That's this simple sequence. We are 45 seconds in at this point. And I guarantee you stand up and your posture will be better, right? You'll be out of that little bit of a curve. From there, I would probably then take that exact same thing and go into a split stance. So imagine you could do this walking lunges. I would probably do this

Starting point is 03:17:05 with a slight rotation, but I still want your hands around your stomach. So we're still watching the distance between your rib and anterior spiroid aliac spine, that ASIS, that front point of your hip. You're going to pay attention to that. If you want to put your thumb and your pinky, put your thumb below your rib, put your pinky on your ASIS while you're doing these lunges and make sure that distance isn't changing. And just breathe. Do a step all the way down. If you want to play here, that's fine. Let's go a little bit, rock your knee over your ankle, rock backwards a little bit. Give me a little bit of a rotation. If you want to do a little bit of an arch, if your right knee is forward in this lunge position and you want to take your left arm and reach it over top of your head, you want to

Starting point is 03:17:42 rotate it, you want to twist it, any of those things are fine, but the key is here, we're not doing these because we have a checkbox that says, this is my warmup. Intention is everything here. As soon as you lose intention, just stop. Because we're trying to make sure we have a specific action, not just like coach said, I have to warm up. And specific action in this case is making sure you're not flaring, making sure that that torso position. That's correct. In terms of like distance from rib cage to the ASIS. Yep. Like bony protrusion on the front of the hip, folks.

Starting point is 03:18:12 Like if you see someone wearing low jeans and you see those like ridges in the front. Yeah, it's the arrow that points. Yeah, right, exactly. Okay, so that is the intention then. It's not just like, oh, I'm doing my eight steps. It's like, no, you're doing your eight steps, but the purpose is to maintain wild breathing. Not even necessarily like the other classic things that are associated with a physical warmup, like actual temperature increases, being metabolically efficient in the muscle, having more strength and power production.

Starting point is 03:18:40 That's coming too, but we've slid that in. We've also slid in breath work because you're actually now altering O2 and CO2 on purpose and you've done that on top of correcting movement patterns and now you're reestablishing that

Starting point is 03:18:51 so I would argue I'd love to do this barefoot if possible so your toes all the way up are engaging I want in this

Starting point is 03:18:58 particular case that heel connection to be strong I don't want you driving only through your heel you're going to be driving using your

Starting point is 03:19:04 whole foot but let's make sure we're not forgetting our toes and our feet. Yeah. Super important for skiing. Very important, right? It's important. Your foot awareness and control is super, super important. Everything, right? If you want to do a little more ski specific here, you could do actually, or a little more fun, you could take a little slide pad. So it's like the size of a shoe, if you will. If you can put it on a surface that slides and put that on your back foot and let that

Starting point is 03:19:28 slide back and forth. So you lose some stability in that back leg, which is then just going to further exacerbate neurological control. And it's going to remind you at all times, do you know where everything is moving? Right? So when we're talking, your adductors are now moving. You're talking your hip extensors and knee flexors. They're all working on both sides. And we're getting, am I controlling my breath? Am I controlling my ribs? So I would probably add a few of those in. Again, give me

Starting point is 03:19:53 one set, six to 12 per leg. I don't really care. There's no magic thing we're trying to get here. We're three minutes in at maximum here. You've now gotten the entire lower body. The hips have been moved and isolated or activated. We would do something like that. If you have any specific things, and this is why I don't have insight, but if you had any, hey, yeah, my right adductor is weaker than my left, or it's overused, or our ciliates is something like that, then we would add in specificity here. Let's get your left glute med on. So we'll do some standing clamshells. We'll do some lateral walks. Whatever the case is that we need to get going there. And we're in a pretty good position. Last thing we would do is then go to your upper body and make sure that we're having a connection between our upper body to our toe

Starting point is 03:20:31 all the way up and down. So this could be throwing some sumagil. So throw on hand-leg opposite here. We could do that. Hand-leg opposite, meaning like bird dog, something like that? Yeah. So you're on quadruped, right? So your hands are on the ground, you're on your knees, and you would say, lift your left hand all the way out in front of you so it would be over your head but you're on your knees. And then at the same time your right leg is extending back. And so you're getting a very strong right glute contraction that's crossing that fascial line to your left shoulder and now that entire thing is in sequence. At the same time your core is working on rotation

Starting point is 03:21:04 while remember what happened to your ribcage. Yeah, and we'll link to all this in the show notes, guys. So you'll be able to find these things. Something simple like that would be probably what I'd do. The very, very last thing I would do then would be some sort of extremely low level, what some folks call aerobic plyometrics. This is Altus, this is Dan and Sue stuff.

Starting point is 03:21:22 This is rudimentary hops. So something like stiff legged and you're going to do 20 hops and land intentionally on your heel. Ooh, that's going to be hard for me with the heel drop stuff. Yeah, right? Like, again, you don't want to do it to a level of pain. You could do a little bit of your toe. You could do something.

Starting point is 03:21:37 But if you're going to be landing and absorbing load on the skis, we have to get some sort of activation of tissue tolerance here. Remember, if we really have a sensitivity issue in your low back with pain, we have to desensitize it somehow. The way that we do that is we walk right up to that line of sensitivity, go back two steps, and we do a little bit of volume there. And then ideally try to push that line back up. Tangible quick example. Let's just say you're having an issue with trap bar deadlifts. Okay, great. And let's just say we did a thing where I said, okay, put it on the bar and we're just going to work up to a load until it starts to hurt. Let's say that that is 300 pounds for you.

Starting point is 03:22:14 Probably have a pretty decent trap bar deadlift, I assume. Okay, great. So when the pain started hurting at 300 pounds, let's go to 200. Let's do three sets of six. Go home. Come back the next day. No, no, no issue. Next session, slowly working our way up to where's that line? Okay. Seems like I can train at 280 and I have no pain. Let's now get to five sets of six. Let's get to five sets of six and then some accessory exercises, some other stuff. No pain, no pain, no pain. Now let's slowly go up to 280. And then we're going to slowly, you're going to desensitize that system by doing it. I'm doing the same thing with your landing and compression.

Starting point is 03:22:47 I had to get to that somehow. I don't want to exacerbate your pain, but I want to do 10 lands. I want to do something. It can be maybe on a little bit of a softer ground. We could do some other way around it, but we want to slowly desensitize the tissue and that landing and loading is okay.

Starting point is 03:23:02 So that's how I would build Monday. Okay. So a few follow-ups on Monday. My most important remaining question is related to, let's just say in this case, the three exercises and three to five minutes in between. I've benefited in the past from three to five minutes or more

Starting point is 03:23:19 in between exercises. But in the interest of time, one might be inclined, myself included, to say, well, rather than doing, say, exercise A and doing the three sets of that exercise with five minutes in between, maybe I could just sequence it so that I do exercise A, I take a minute rest. Exercise B, take a minute rest. C, take a minute rest, and then go back to A. Is that something that is acceptable slash advisable, or do you really want more of a break for your central nervous system or otherwise?

Starting point is 03:23:50 In your particular case in this situation, what you laid out, that super setting is totally fine. Okay, great. No issue there. We're not trying to maximize your strength. Yeah. If we were trying to do that for any number of reasons where we really are trying to peak it, what you're really trying to do in this case, I don't even care if you get stronger. If we lose some strength over the course of this, it's okay. What we're trying to do is continue to have health throughout the system. So it needs to be strong enough to hold positions while you're on the slopes.

Starting point is 03:24:14 Right. So we're trying to avoid a slope of degradation over the course of fight camp. So if you wanted to do that, no problem. You want to superset them is what we'd call that. Yeah. What we'd probably have you do is set the whole circuit up before. It's part of your kind of warm-up. And you do one, catch your breath for a second, you slowly walk over, set up, do the next one. I don't care that it's three minutes or two minutes

Starting point is 03:24:34 or less. What we want to make sure we're doing is not getting a ton of fatigue. I don't want you, if your breath rate is 150 breaths per minute, or your heart rate rather, if you're sweating a lot, if you're really getting it, then, oh, like, calm down. I actually want you to leave these sessions feeling like, I didn't do anything. But if you can do that in a superset fashion, no problem. Dishing should not be 30 minutes. Really, this is a, remember, you skied hard.

Starting point is 03:24:58 Oh yeah, well, that's part of the reason I'm asking. It's like, I'll probably be pretty fatigued walking in. So that's great. Like, we're going to get a high quality warmup and we're going to do a couple of exercises at a reasonable quality, but we're also not going to 90, 95%. We're getting a good, strong contraction, probably finish it potentially with one exercise to a pump. And this would be, let's take one area that needs, that is undersized, that is under strength, that is dysfunctional. And we'll do one set. So many options. We'd probably rotate it, is to be honest. So like maybe it's just, it's glutes. Maybe we put a band

Starting point is 03:25:34 on and we just do a set of 30 glute pumps. That's it. We're out of there, right? Got it. Maybe something for your shoulder. Yeah, you've had this thing going on. Maybe something like that going on. I mean, maybe it's hand-leg opposite, 30 reps each. I just did this yesterday for shoulders using rear delt stuff. Totally. It feels great, right? It felt great, yeah.

Starting point is 03:25:53 Yeah. So something like that. Maybe a bent row on a machine. What are any number of things we can do? And you do one or so sets of 20. You get a nice big pump. You feel jacked. It's great.

Starting point is 03:26:04 And then you're out of there. That's probably what I would do. One to two of those, one set, maybe two, and then we're done. What else would you like to add? And then another critical question, which is one where I do think I tend to lose the plot. I don't think I eat enough actually. And I've done so much fasting. I'm like, eh, if I'm not hungry. I have developed the habit of not eating very much. And I can see that in my lean body mass right now in terms of just totals. I'm like, hmm.

Starting point is 03:26:31 As in under-muscled or over-fat? Both. The over-fat is I've just been a piglet over the holidays. And I've been doing less strength training in being in a protective mode for the back stuff. And I think just not consuming enough protein and other things. So we've talked about Monday. I guess if there are any sort of crux pieces that you'd like to discuss

Starting point is 03:26:51 for the rest of the week, which you already kind of laid out top level. And then I would love to get your thoughts on tracking nutrition. Because part of what I've seen is like, all right, I'm not going to like weigh out my chicken breasts on the jewelry scale. And practically speaking, I'm probably not going to do that. Maybe I should. But much like tracking hydration by having a container with a set volume and you just multiply it out, that's straightforward. How you might approach nutrition with a similar... Yeah. Great. This is fun. Regarding training, we kind of said, we're probably just a very quick recap. Monday's that red day, Wednesday's that green day, which that means Saturday, which is kind of like the reason I'm doing this is Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, is generally going to be, if we can, single session. And this is technical work. So this is, let's review Monday through Friday. And Tim, what do we need to work on? You know, this is you and your coach going back and say, we really want to work on this. We need more reps at this. In other words, what do you need more volume in?

Starting point is 03:27:46 And that's Saturday. It is practice. It is, we miss this, we miss this, we miss this. Here's this drills I'm going to do. It is not high fatigue. It's also not nothing. It's not green day. You got all Sunday.

Starting point is 03:27:56 Sunday's off or whatever. It doesn't matter what day of the week you are, but this is the point. So it is a little bit of work, but it is really getting that last bit of volume. We just need more practice. Practice takes reps. Awesome. That then leaves us with Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday. That lift, you could do another lift on Saturday afterwards. Do real technical stuff and do the same thing. I would do the exact same thing I did on Monday, but switch the exercises.

Starting point is 03:28:15 So it's a little bit different. So let's say we decided to do step-ups on Monday. Switch that out for rear foot elevated split squat, if those are great. Switch that out for some other lower body extension exercise, whatever. Same exact concept though. Same thing, switch out your upper body movement, switch out your rotation movement. Give you a little bit more variety. Make sure we're doing something pulling, something pressing, something eroding. Make sure we're doing something in what we would technically call frontal and sagittal plane. So maybe this is a lateral lunge. So not only are we now switching out exercise, we're going laterally this way, something like that. Same thing with our upper body.

Starting point is 03:28:51 Maybe it's a horizontal pull row instead of a vertical pull. I would set that up on Saturday. Your technical work, a really quick lift, and then you're out of there, done for the day. You want to add in your recovery stuff from Wednesday? Great. If not, go have your fun. Do what you do during the weekend. Tuesday and then probably Thursday are going to be generally yellow medium days. On the slopes, may or may not lift, but you're going to do a lot of volume on those days. This is probably your longer duration stuff. Going to feel fine on Thursday because you came off Wednesday. Friday, if we want to come back and do one red, not a double red, but one,

Starting point is 03:29:25 then I'm good. Hard, hard, hard ski is probably what I'd say. So we're lifting on that Monday. We're going to lift again. In this case, I know this is kind of confusing, but I'll probably lift on Thursday, right? Just to split it up a little bit. Thursday is a yellow, orange ski, hard ski, not a lot. We're going to lift. It's going to be kind of hard. So we're stacking hard on hard. And then Friday might be one really hard ski, but now we're good because Saturday is pretty much green and then we're definitely green on Sunday. That's how I would stack that whole week up and I would keep the exact same theme lifting-wise. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a

Starting point is 03:30:02 short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums, perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the

Starting point is 03:30:51 weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog slash Friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog slash Friday, drop in your email and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. diet. That is a problem because the body cannot produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor-recommended, and in fact, this brand was recommended to me by one of my doctors, Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula. So the Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula for heart health, brain function, immune support, and more. It's incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. So I have been taking Ultimate Omega for the last two months or so. And this fishy aftertaste issue has been a

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #716: Performance Coach Andy Galpin — Rebooting Tim’s Sleep, Nutrition, Supplements, and Training for 2024

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