The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 211. Dr. Andy Galpin: On Recovery Modalities, Performance Anchors and Hidden Stressors

Starting point is 00:00:00 If you're biohacking hopping, which is like every month you're doing something new, your physiology has no possible way of understanding what's going on, and so it's never going to get settled. So fewer interventions, less frequently, and I almost guarantee you, you'll get better results. Especially when you get to health expos like this, and you start googling around about supplementation, about diet, and all about recovery. Can we just touch on cold plunging? When we get into this cold plunge idea, what we have to walk away from,

Starting point is 00:00:26 are things like, oh, this is what I do to help my fat loss. That's when we start getting in the realm of you don't understand the mechanism, you don't understand what's really going on. SANA. Getting hot is a great way to simulate exercise. But be really clear here, saunas are not an exchange for exercise. Red light therapy. This is an area that I have changed my mind on, like very much so. I could make a case for any modality you possibly have.

Starting point is 00:00:47 The question is, is that the most important thing you should be doing? Are you using it properly? And you as a consumer or a coach, are you providing realistic expectations? What I hope I'm highlighting is there is pros and cons to all of it. It all comes down to why you're using it. Is it working for you? If you feel good, you feel good. You're doing a positive health habit. It has a slight potential to reduce soreness. This is a net win all over. In the world of recovery, what are some must haves? The only ones that I say are absolutely, you know, quote unquote necessary.

Starting point is 00:01:28 Hey guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist, Gary Brecker, where we go down the road of everything, anti-aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today, we're coming to you live from the Health Expo in London, UK. Woo! Yeah! Awesome!

Starting point is 00:01:56 Yeah! Yes. Okay, thank you all for coming. Guys, I'm so excited to be sitting down with Dr. Andy Galpin. He is an absolute encyclopedia of knowledge. I was talking to him backstage. He did a 21 hours of podcasting with Dr. Andrew Huberman. So this is going to be 21 hours. And then at the end, there'll be a short Q&A.

Starting point is 00:02:25 So sometime around Tuesday, we'll get to everybody's questions. So fired up. You think he's joking. I'm actually not joking about the 21-hour podcast with Andrew Humberman. So Dr. Galpin is an expert in all things human performance. You know, exercise, performance, nutrition. He's worked with some of the top athletes in the world, Olympic athletes, the Major League Baseball, you know, the National Hockey League.

Starting point is 00:02:52 I mean, you name it. He's an absolute wealth of knowledge. So what we've done is we've consolidated a lot of the most frequently asked questions. I've got a lot of questions myself as a human biologist, so we've taken questions from our audience, and we're going to feed them to Dr. Galpin today. So this should be an amazing, amazing journey. So welcome to the Ultimate Human Podcast, my brother. About time, man.

Starting point is 00:03:10 Yeah, very, very excited for this. You know, I think, you know, especially when you get to health expos like this, and, you know, you get on Google, you start Googling around about supplementation, about diet, about lifestyle, about sleep, and all about recovery. And then once you get on the recovery bandwagon, there's everything from compression gear to ice bathing, to saunas, you know, to red light therapy, to hyperbarics. I mean, you name it, you can go down that road. And interestingly, you know, he opens some of his talks by showing the 400 things that he does every day as a joke to say you can really get paralysis of analysis. And so I'd really like to open up the discussion, not talking about performance per se, but talking about.

Starting point is 00:03:56 about recovery. Because the world of recovery, I think, is where the biohacking world has really come into play. I think we've got our nutrition pretty dialed in. I mean, there's been decades of research on nutrition, but the whole biohacking world is relatively new. And so in the world of recovery, what are some must-haves? Yeah, I think that the best way to think about recovery or really any modality, whether you walk away from this weekend, for those you hear, or you're listening at home in a podcast. If you leave here and go home with the list of 14 different things to do and 12 new products, you've messed the whole thing up. That's never going to get you recovery. In fact, I'll show you some data later today. That's going to be pretty convincing

Starting point is 00:04:39 the fact that it's probably going to make things a lot worse. You should approach this podcast, you should approach social media or any book you read as trying to identify what is the specific piece of information that I can use to solve a specific problem. And if you can't answer, that, then the reality it is you probably fold and walk away from that modality. We were talking backstage. I can point any product out in this entire exhibition and probably show you either direct human evidence on it or maybe even indirect or plausibility. I can make a case for anything you've ever seen here. And this happens. This is a reality when people come to me in our coaching practice, they've done the thing. They got all this stuff. And the number one question we get is

Starting point is 00:05:22 how do I blend it all? How do I put it together, right? Not all of us are 28-year-old biohackers with no family, right? I have some limitations in my schedule. I have to go to work. I have kids. I have other things. So in terms of recovery, the direct answer is you want to find what we call performance anchors. So a performance anchor is the single biggest thing that is limiting your recovery. This could range. Maybe it is excessive training. Maybe it is poor nutrition. Maybe it's what we call visible stressors. Things you know see and feel are stupid and wrong. You're drinking alcohol excessively. Like you're doing all this stuff all you already know about. But what you're really searching for are what are called hidden stressors. So these are things that are

Starting point is 00:06:03 adding or exceeding your overall allostatic load, which is a fancy science way of saying like total stress bucket. But you don't necessarily know see or feel them. And so when you're choosing your recovery modality, it is specific and precise to that exact anchor. And I can give you some examples to make this a little bit more tangible. But I could walk you through a really good reason to use cold plunges. And I could walk you through, and maybe we'll do this a little bit later, a bunch of reasons why you would never want to use cold plunges. We take them away from people constantly. You can't pick a supplement on the shelf here that I haven't used positively, and one, I haven't taken away from people. And so the reality of it is, again,

Starting point is 00:06:43 what problem in my solving? What specific information or data do I have that I need to solve that problem? Should solve that problem. And then try one thing at a time. So I'm happy to go into individual details for any of these modalities if you want. But conceptually, that's how you should approach the process. If you're adding four to five to six different things, if you're biohacking hopping, which is like every month you're doing something new, your physiology has no possible way of understanding what's going on. And so it's never going to get settled. It's never getting into a place of saying, okay, we can understand this homeostatic stress. We can now figure out how to adapt and overcome. So fewer interventions, less frequently, and I almost

Starting point is 00:07:24 guarantee you, you'll get better results. That's a great answer. You know, we have to touch on coal plunging because I call that my drug of choice. Please don't take it away from me in front of this whole audience. And I've got four of them back there. But, you know, I call it my drug of choice because nothing makes me feel better for longer. And, you know, when I miss it in the mornings, I feel it. When I do it in the mornings, it translates through my entire day. And my cold bunch routine is, you know, in the morning, fresh out of bed. I always do it prior to exercise.

Starting point is 00:07:55 And I'd never do it after exercise, especially after weight training. Can we just touch on cold plunging sauna red light therapy? Yeah, let's do, we'll just go in that order. Yeah. Cold. And again, please don't take cold plunging away from it. Yeah, it's one of the worst. The first recovery practices you could ever do.

Starting point is 00:08:15 The most amount of it from missing, no, just kidding. Okay, great. So when we think about conceptually what's happening, we're going to be in, what do you typically temperature-wise do? 52 degrees, three minutes minimum, six minutes maximum. So you're doing a pretty warm one. Generally, when we started doing cold plunges probably 15 years ago, like really routinely and we started implementing it,

Starting point is 00:08:34 we're going to spend most of our time sub-34 degrees. Right? So like you're in floating ice chunks. You don't have to do that. do whatever you want but we've experimented with longer duration 10 to 15 minutes 20 minutes in the 50 to 60 degree range we've done really cool stuff what's happening the second has many of you here been in the cold plunge this weekend all right don't by the way if you get in that cold plunge you're entered to win one of those cold plunges just so you know so i'm giving them away while we're here we're not taking those back to the u.s i gave one away yesterday i'm giving two away today so if you go back there and you're braven up and we have i keep wanting to say onesies for women onesies are for babies right? No. My wife wears the ones all the time. It's horrific. Yeah, we have one pieces for women. Do not support that, Huffy. Do not. I know what you're going to say. Guaranteed. Yeah. Church it up a little bit.

Starting point is 00:09:21 This is a public product, guess. Yeah. Okay. So when you get in that thing, you're going to feel it immediately. You're going to see ventilation go up. You're going to see a whole host of sympathetic responses. In fact, if you look at things like heart rate variability, HRV, you walk into that coal plunge. If you walk out, your HRV is going to massively drop. This is great, right? Meaning you're going to move into a sympathetic drive. If you look at that, though, 30, 60, 90, up to usually 180 minutes plus, you will see a continual rise in your HRB. And you'll often see it double or triple in some hyper responders. So what you're seeing there is a compensatory response, right? This is, again, another hormetic stressor, which is to say you get a huge adrenaline shot, if you want to think about it that way.

Starting point is 00:10:07 Now, cold plunging actually doesn't make your cortisol rise nearly as much as people think. It's not that big of a deal. The biggest impact you're going to see there is adrenaline. When we get into this cold plunge idea, what we have to walk away from are things like, oh, this is what I do to help my fat loss. That's when we started getting in the realm of you don't understand the mechanism, you don't understand what's really going on. Oh, cortisol, again, you're not really understanding.

Starting point is 00:10:30 It is a very clear thing you can use to wake up. You use it in mornings. You feel great. 100% I'm in Where we're going to take it away are things like You mentioned post-exercise If we're trying to go muscle mass Fine

Starting point is 00:10:44 We use it all the time post-exercise in our athletes Rarely are we in phases When we're trying to maximize muscle growth In competitive athletes We're often using it post-game Where we actually have to turn around and play in a couple of days We have to go back We've got a game in five days

Starting point is 00:11:02 We've got a game the next day And we're in a phase of that year where we're maximizing recovery, and if we lose the muscle, we don't even necessarily care. What I'm hope I'm highlighting is, there's pros and cons to all of it. It all comes down to why you're using it,

Starting point is 00:11:15 what you think the adaptation is going to be, and are you matched up with that, right? So is the response you're looking for actually going to happen, and then are you using it appropriately. So some inappropriate responses that we see, some reasons we tend to take it away from people, is when we're doing stuff like that,

Starting point is 00:11:32 and then we're seeing issues with sleep onset. or we're seeing issues otherwise because they actually had way too much of a sympathetic drive. They maybe had a post-cold parasympathetic response, but that was exaggerated. It doesn't happen in everyone. It's 15 or 20% of the people. So the most likely you're using it in the morning, you're 10 or 12 hours away from sleep. You should be just fine. I'm throwing that out there as saying, think about that.

Starting point is 00:11:57 Pay attention. You start cold plunging and then all of a sudden randomly your sleep goes to trash. maybe you're not a good candidate for it maybe it's too cold maybe you should do it warmer longer duration you can tinker with it but that is and i'm really lingering on cold here just as a way to explain to you how any of these modalities we can do sonar necks we can do red light is it working for you really pay attention categorically i like it individually i may hate it i may love it or somewhere in between. One of my favorite biohacks outside of breathwork, by far is mineral salts, Baja Gold, sea salt. It's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs. You know, most of us are not

Starting point is 00:12:40 just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient or fatty acid deficient. We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this in water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today. I actually made a grass fed steak with grass fed butter and I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary and I sprinkled Baja gold sea salt all over the top. Try it. It'll be your new favorite for cooking too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks, I don't know, a 15 or $20 bag of this will probably last you five years. It's literally the world's best biohacking secret. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Starting point is 00:13:16 And you know, sauna, I think there's, there's so much data. We have so much data centuries of data literally on dry sauna. I think the, I think the science is clear relative to its impact on all-cause mortality and a reduction or extension of all-cause mortality, mainly because of its ability to detoxify the body. And for those of you that are regularly doing sonocessions, you know that you're improving the lymphatic flow. We actually do use our skin as a secondary route of waste elimination. I feel amazing when I've done it. I actually accidentally got heavy metal poisoning from a water machine that I bought from a doctor that had told me that this was a structuring machine, it ended up being a welder from China. And my house manager and I actually

Starting point is 00:14:01 ended up getting heavy metal poisoning from this. I actually wrote a whole guide on detoxing from heavy metals, but a large part of that detoxification process was sauna. And as I measured my reduction in metals and did the same thing from old and mycotoxins, not necessarily focused on performance, but focused on longevity, detoxification. So sauna as a tool for longevity and detoxification, different from one that we would use as a performance tool. But in the performance world, I've read some data on hyperthermic exposure post-exercise. And that sauna after exercise, is that beneficial for muscle growth, for hyperplasia, for hypertrophy? So can you touch on that both as a performance tool and also as a fit in your longevity journey?

Starting point is 00:14:53 where it lies in that journey. Yeah, so when you get to things like detoxification, okay, like we can think about that that way. For me, when we're ever going to use sona, it's more of things like the following. You're going to get hot, you're going to sweat, you're going to increase blood flow, you're going to work on dilation.

Starting point is 00:15:10 This is probably the bigger effect on longevity. This is what it's going to help. You'll see things like you mentioned the data on cardiovascular health, long-term mortality. This is probably the massive reason why we're doing it. So number one, you've got that. Now, why is that specifically happening? Getting hot is a great way to simulate exercise.

Starting point is 00:15:29 But be really clear here. Sanas are not an exchange for exercise. So one of the ways we see this being misused is people get super excited and they're like sauna, sauna, sauna, sauna, sauna, sauna. Awesome, I'm with you. But they kicked that past exercise. Oh, I didn't work out today

Starting point is 00:15:50 because I got my sauna in. Whoa, whoa, whoa. Like wrong order. of operations here. So if you want to make sure you're thinking about the two, now when I will use sauna a lot is things like, oh, I'm traveling, and the gym was terrible, or didn't have a gym, or I was going to have to commute 45 minutes to go to the gym. I will just get a sauna in. Or you're too sore, or you're too tired, or maybe you're too hung over on hydrogen water, or whatever. Hey, watch it. It's things like that, right? So if the question is, I'm not going to or can't work out

Starting point is 00:16:21 today, a sauna is better than nothing, significantly better. And a lot of the research that you're talking about isn't people who actually don't even exercise. So it shows you itself, in and of itself, is a positive health benefit. But we have to make sure we have that caveat because that's one of the big things as we've popularized heat, sauna, jacuzzi, thinking is an exchange or alternative, or it's even an equal footing. And you're going to have a really hard time convincing me with any molecular data or any randomized control trials or any of our epidemiology that saunas outpace exercise in physical movement. You feel me on that one?

Starting point is 00:16:56 Yeah. All right, great. Now, other things to think about with it that you're potentially getting, we use it as a pretty effective recovery tool. This is mostly anachlizic so people don't feel the sore. They feel more likely to go exercise or a little bit looser. Data on that is not nearly as strong. But in this particular case, if you feel good, you feel good.

Starting point is 00:17:17 I really don't care. You're doing a positive health habit that has a slight, potential to reduce soreness. This is a net win all over. You specifically asked about post-exercise sauna. There is. There have been a couple of papers out on looking at sauna post-exercise for muscle growth, as well as endurance adaptations.

Starting point is 00:17:36 And right now, that field is actually growing. If I had to guess, you'll probably see more and more positive studies to that. That makes a whole bunch of molecular sense. right? It is a very similar mode. It is a very similar cellular to signaling activity pathway from exercise. And now you've put a whole stimulus into your muscle, your tissue, your immune system, cytokine responses, and you've actually continued to increase blood flow to those areas. You're going to clear away waste faster and you're going to get positive nutrients back in. So I don't know if that will actually come through as the actual legitimate mechanism. But at this point, the outcomes, performance, like exercise, endurance. are positive and there are plausible mechanisms. So that's one of those things where I say, sorry, because of those two things are there and you also have the known positive effects long term,

Starting point is 00:18:27 pretty good idea. Okay, great. I thank you for that too because I love the sauna session. You know, and I think post exercises is the placement for people that are not replacing exercise but want to include sauna in their daily routine. You're saying post exercises. Yeah, and what's also important out there,

Starting point is 00:18:44 it doesn't actually have to be sauna per se. Hot water can do the same thing. So if this is hot water immersion. In some cases, even better, actually. I've read a study where it's water is 29 times more thermogenic than air, so it removes heat from the body at 29 times the rate of water. Well, you also actually have the compression force of the water. So the compression force of the water works like a Norma Tech boot.

Starting point is 00:19:03 Right, so there's one downstairs. You've got seen those awesome. The water itself will physically do this. So independent of the thermal regulation and transferability, you see the actual pressure changes, which are phenomenal and great. This is, I can go on. Okay. A lot of really good reasons to get in.

Starting point is 00:19:18 So those of you, they don't have a sauna, if you have a hot bath or a plunge or a jacuzzi, something like that, it's as good, it potentially even better as a post-exercise. Okay, so on the red light therapy. Oh, yeah. And I'm talking full-body photobiomodulation, not face masks and panels. I mean, really submersive, full-body photobiomodulation, whole-body red-light therapy inside of a red-light therapy bed. where would that fall in importance, what is your interpretation? So this is actually something where it's really fun to be on stage with you right now because you and I could not be seeing this feel differently.

Starting point is 00:19:56 Okay. In this sense. Did I just get kicked out? That was you. I told him off stage. They're running the show over there. Yeah. No, I don't care.

Starting point is 00:20:08 We're rolling on. So here's what I mean by that. If you would have asked me that question, Gary, five years ago, I would have said, you're absolutely full of shit. Yeah. Right? And now it's like, okay, you're not full of shit, but you're... Okay, okay, I actually have some sort of data here, right?

Starting point is 00:20:23 And so you have people like Gary who are going to push the pace on if there's a little bit of evidence, if there's some plausibility there, we're going to try it. We're going to use it. We're going to go after it. And I'm way more conservative. I'm on the, like, I need to see some human data that shows it actually works before I'm going to recommend it to any of my clients or athletes. I take it with it personally. I mess with stuff all the time.

Starting point is 00:20:42 But I'm not going to go put this out in social communication where I'm saying that to say, this is an area that I have changed my mind on, like very much so. Now, whether or not you need to have full body, head to toe, versus half body, we don't have any data to suggest that is specifically different than a small portion. But I think it's reasonable to think if you have, you know, a four meter square input of red light, that's going to be different than a four centimeter that's in your body. So, like, there's, again, we don't have specific data on that, but a little bit of logic. says, we know how it's working, at least close, more of it on my skin, more contact,

Starting point is 00:21:19 like probably going to have more pronounced systemic effect, right? So localized effect, like you put it right on your knee, quite different than there. So it's an area that is growing. The question with red light stuff is always better than what. So is it effective? And the studies are showing like yes, but is it better than that's where we don't have direct answers to, right? So, red light therapy is one of those, like, secondary or tertiary recovery modalities we use. If you can check boxes that are higher up on the order, then we'll let you tinker with red light, right? But if our sleep is out of order or all that, you guys know the stuff, I don't have to say it, right? Then I'm like, you're coming to me and you have 40 questions

Starting point is 00:22:01 about red light therapy. I'm going to do the, uh, scare you in the face blankly. Until you get really uncomfortable and eventually back your way out and be like, oh yeah, I should, I should probably go to sleep. Yeah. So that's my way of thinking about it. Like I opened up the conversation with, I could make a case for any modality you possibly have here. The question is, is that the most important thing you should be doing?

Starting point is 00:22:26 Are you using it properly? And you as a consumer or a coach, are you providing realistic expectations? Right. That aspect of all health practices is critically important. Realistic expectations of what it's going to do, and the magnitude of effect is going to have. And if you're honest about that,

Starting point is 00:22:44 then fuck, I'm all good at it. Rock and roll. Like, Gary sends me a bet. I'm using it. I'm not going to lie, right? Was that suggestion? Yeah. You subliminally trying to get me to send you a red light bed?

Starting point is 00:22:55 So you... I'm walking offstage if you don't. You often talk about the three-eyes framework. Yeah. Investigate, interpret, and intervene. And this is how you structure your work. Can you just share a real-life story where this approach has made a bait,

Starting point is 00:23:10 like a breakthrough difference for an athlete or even for someone who's not a super athlete but where it's made a breakthrough difference for someone a real life story. So the three eyes is just a framework of thinking that thank you for saying it that way. It is saying, okay, how do I investigate? How do I measure? What do I measure and how do I get it done?

Starting point is 00:23:29 The second one is interpret. What do I make of that information? Is it good, bad, great, terrible, horrible, where should I be? And then the third is intervene. What do I do about it, right? And so one of the things we see in the biohacker space is a huge problem with one of those three areas. So we cut off number one and jump to number three.

Starting point is 00:23:47 We do number one and two, but then we have no idea what impact to had, why, or what should be paying attention to. So I could give you loads of examples. Is there a particular area that we want me to do sleep, food, exercise? Let's do sleep, yeah. Nobody's sleeping here. Yeah, okay. Well, if Gary Breka is going to force me to talk about my world's most comprehensive. Grants of Sleep Company, Absolute Rest.

Starting point is 00:24:13 W.W.W. Absolutely.com. World's most advanced sleep coaching and testing program in the world. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll do that if you want me to. Yes, I do. I want you. I mean, we know that sleepers are human, too, power. So, conceptually, we're on the same page. I've already given you philosophically how we approach things.

Starting point is 00:24:29 If we're going to be working on sleep, we have to understand, number one, how are we defining good sleep? And we could do this a lot of different ways. I'll talk about it at length in a couple of hours on stage. But you tell me what you care about. Are you concerned about your architecture? Are you concerned about your time duration? Are you concerned about just how you feel the next day? I don't feel good. I'm just losing my, I'm not as sharp as I used to be, or I'm just dragging, or I'm not recovering. I'm super sore. Great. Now, we're going to go on the path of saying,

Starting point is 00:24:58 what is the most accurate way to measure that? That specific thing, right? You care about REM sleep so much. Fine. Are we using gold standard scientific methodology to measure that? If not, then we're not going to play the game of REM sleep. We're not even measuring it appropriately. We're not going to dick around and mess around with stuff like that if we don't even start at the beginning of saying this is the appropriate way to measure that variable. And the second thing is, how do I interpret it? So I'll do this again later, but I promise you, I don't know, 30% of this room is like, can you get me more REM sleep? and I would say, great, what's your REM sleep?

Starting point is 00:25:36 And you would all give me these random numbers and I would go, great, what should it be? And you're going to go, higher. And I'm going to say, why? And you're going to go, because the score is yellow on the scoreer and my friend's number's bigger. Great. So interpretation is everything.

Starting point is 00:25:57 What should it be for you? Are you male, female? Are you 35 years old? Do you 65 years old? Do you travel internationally? are we dealing with time changes? What physical environment are you doing? Because I promise you right now, your REM sleep will change based upon your cognitive load. And it should. We shouldn't have the same scores. I could play this game for HRV. I could play this game for any variable you want. So until we make a decision to act, we have to actually understand qualification. What should it be? Based on what data, based on my ethnic background, based on my goals, based on my

Starting point is 00:26:32 activities and everything else. The third eye, the investigate, okay, now what do I do about it? Now we can play a whole bunch of games. And this is when we can start tinkering with, maybe coal plunge gets us more, maybe some more antioxidant, rich foods. We could do a whole bunch of stuff and we've done all of these. And I've increased REM sleep and I can't tell you how many hundreds of people. And we've used probably over 500 different modalities to get that there. So it's not the modality because people will just jump. to like my score sucks, I go to number three. And we're just guessing, and I hope it works.

Starting point is 00:27:08 But we don't have specific rationale between that metric. That's why I care about it, and that's the intervention that we're going to try. So I don't know if that answers the three. Was that helpful? That makes sense? Yeah, it makes sense. You know, I had a very, very interesting conversation a few months ago with a former professional athlete.

Starting point is 00:27:26 His name was Billy Davis. He won two Super Bowls. He took the Ravens to the Super Bowl, and it gives you any time frame of when he played professional ball. He also took the Cowboys to the Super Bowl. He was in the time. Oh, okay, I was because I don't recognize his name. Been a little while.

Starting point is 00:27:38 And he was one of the greatest receivers in the league at the time. And I had this like pondering question in my mind. You know, you see these super athletes, you know, like Michael Phelps or Lance Armstrong or, you know, LeBron James, Michael Jordan. And I'm always fascinated by their athletic prowess and their performance, but I'm more fascinated by their duration of staying at the top of their game. And I always wanted an answer to this question, not just what makes the difference between a good athlete and a great athlete,

Starting point is 00:28:12 but what keeps a great athlete at the absolute top of their game for such a long period of time? And this was the answer that he gave me, and I found it really fascinating because, you know, you go from relative obscurity to all of a sudden you're a celebrity. You go from probably not having a lot of means to being very wealthy, very well known. So you're getting pulled in every direction. You know, we've seen a lot of athletes fall to the, you know, the pleasures of the flesh, right, and during their careers. And I just,

Starting point is 00:28:41 I asked him, I was like, what kept you at the top of your game? I mean, you were being, you already, you know, exhausted your contract. You know, you already had set the records. I mean, what was getting you up every morning? How are you saying no to all the temptations? And he said, there was a moment. It was the coolest explanation I'd ever heard. He said, Gary, there was a moment when the play would get called and I would break off the line. And I would be sprinting down the sideline on this field at 100% of my effort.

Starting point is 00:29:13 I didn't have one ounce more to give. And he said, there are 70,000 people in a stadium, but I could actually hear one voice. I actually would tune into one voice on the sideline. I could hear one person going, go, Billy. And I could hear that voice crystal clear. And I was looking down the field and I could actually tell that the trumpet player

Starting point is 00:29:30 was too close to the sideline. actually going to collide with him when I caught the ball. And he said, as I'm sprinting, I could feel the ball snap. I could feel actually the throw up in the air. And he goes, I could feel the defender coming across the field full speed. And he goes, that guy wasn't coming to give me a kiss. And he said, and right before I would put my hands up and the ball would touch my hands, he said, it was a feeling like I'd never, ever, ever felt before. And he said, I'd chased that moment at three seconds like a rat to cheese. And he said, I don't know how to describe it.

Starting point is 00:30:06 It's better than any drug I ever had. I was so hyper aware. My senses were so alert. And then that ball would touch my hands. I would get hit and it would be over. And he'd know how I just want to do it again. And he said, that's what got me up every morning. That's what pushed me in the wait room.

Starting point is 00:30:20 That's what made me say no to women, no to clubs, no to drugs, no to, no to, and all of these temptations that I had out there that weren't available to me before. And I just thought that that was fascinating. that it was that moment that he, that he chased. And it was the only time I've ever talked to someone of that caliber that actually gave me a real explanation for what keeps them at the top of that game. So can you talk a little bit about that mental resilience, you know, discipline versus, you know, motivation.

Starting point is 00:30:51 Because on the one end of the spectrum, you got David Goggins, like, just freaking do it if your legs break, good. You know, it makes you a man, probably not super great for one. Just put duct tape on your feet if they fracture. You know, and then, you know, but that's not realistic for most of us. Yeah. Over the last 20 years in human biology, one compound I've trusted again and again is NAD Plus. It's critical for energy, focus, and cellular repair.

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Starting point is 00:31:45 You'll receive 15% off, and your cells will thank you. Now, let's get back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. So I've been fortunate, I mean, as you have, to work with professional athletes in every major sport at the highest level. The MVP's, the Cy Young winners, the gold medalists, all of it. And some of them are around for four or five years, and we've had some that have been in leagues for 15 plus years. Yeah. So we have seen this quite a bit.

Starting point is 00:32:09 And I'm going to give you two sides of a blade here. The reality of it is the folks we have dealt with who have done those really long, lengthy careers, had these billion dollars in revenue, you know, contracts total. The good side of the equation is they have such unbelievable drive to, it's not always win. We hear this like, oh, it's Michael Jordan like super competitive.

Starting point is 00:32:33 Sometimes they're not super competitive. But they're obsessed about something. It's like, I just can't beat that thing. Like, you talked about it as that feeling. I want that feeling again. Others are, my friends made fun of me when I was 12 because I put on a report, I want to break the Major League Baseball strikeout record.

Starting point is 00:32:51 And 20 years later, they can't let go of it. Like, they're so locked into being like, I have to get this. I have to get, like, I have to sort of get this. is. The hard part about that is, and what also puts almost that same person in the same category is they have what we call post-Olympics depression. We've had people spend five or six or seven years doing nothing else in their life but training for baseball. No hobbies, no family, nothing else. They don't go to conferences. They don't go on vacations. They run right to it. And then they win

Starting point is 00:33:22 the Say Young. And do you know what happens the moment they're announced as Syong winner? Nothing. They feel nothing. I won a national championship. And I hated everyone I played with, and I walked out the field and went, huh. I'll have more satisfaction walking off this stage, and I did winning a national championship. Football. Thank you.

Starting point is 00:33:46 The ultimate human podcast. You're welcome. Gary Breka, satisfying every 42-year-old man in the world. That clip is going to go viral, guys. My team, can you cut that, throw it on TikTok. I coached an athlete who won was the first American to win Olympic gold in her sport.

Starting point is 00:34:07 She beat a 14 or 15 time world champion. Huge upset, right? And then they walk out of these things and they have this depression because they have no identity outside of that. And so the athletes that stay around all those years, sometimes they're still winning, sometimes they're losing a bunch,

Starting point is 00:34:23 and you as a fan are like, can you just like, you know, you want them to retire, You want them to walk away, but they can't because they have no other identity. That's what got them there, though. That's why I said it's the double-edged sword here because it was that obsession with that moment, that obsession with winning, that obsession of proving somebody wrong, that obsession with something, but they also can't walk away. And so they battle through everything to continue to play because they don't know what the hell else to do when they retire.

Starting point is 00:34:51 Right. And so we have to be really cautious of this, and this is actually something we work on. And all of our athletes work with sports psychologists. I mean, encourage them to work with therapists or psychotherapists as well. Even if they're fine, as we start getting in that middle-to-back half, we have to start developing these things, or they're going to walk away. But, no, like, they're going to walk away potentially in trouble. So we actually have some of our really young, like, megastar sub-23-year-olds who are starting this process.

Starting point is 00:35:21 Like, you have to have at least one hobby. You have to do something else beside this one. Something outside of your sport. It's got to be. I don't care if it's, some of our guys are into hunting, some of them are riding horseback, they're painting, I don't, like, I don't care. But we're going to develop at least one other thing that we can go to. Now, we did that with one of our guys, and he's like, I'll play golf.

Starting point is 00:35:40 We're like, all right. So he never played golf before. We brought a coach in for him, taught him out of swing or whatever. Like, three days later, shoulder problems, shoulder problems. We couldn't figure it out. Like, what happened? Like, oh, yeah, I played golf or whatever. We're like, you should be fine, swinging.

Starting point is 00:35:54 And we looked, we're like, you had 185 swings. He bought a simulator, put it in his garage, and swung for like an hour and a half at full go. And we're like, okay, that's athletes. Like, you've got to be really specific with what you tell them, like really careful. So my answer to it is really that. The longevity piece is sometimes just pure grit.

Starting point is 00:36:16 Because the fear of having to deal with life outside of that is so gripping and so real, whether it's income. I don't know how else I'm going to make income, right? professional sports like you're done in your early thirties it's like you guys are all just like figuring out what you kind of want to be in life at 40 and they're they're they're done such a huge transition yeah um so i could go on but like that from the psychological mental perspective the ones i've been around uh that's that's really the big concern that they have to deal with and it gets them there

Starting point is 00:36:44 but it also can set them up for troubles the next 25 to 50 years of their life and that's when you see those really sad stories of the athletes that have gone bankrupt and all the other. They just have no other skill. So I want to talk about some of the big majors. You know, yesterday there was a lot of questions after my group talking here, especially coming from women, centered around intermittent fasting. Oh, yeah. And their feeding windows. And lots of questions around fasted versus fed cardio, fasted versus fed weight training, you know, which is better for fat loss, which is better

Starting point is 00:37:21 for muscle, you know, hypertrophy. And I think there's still that prevailing fear and a lot of women that if I weight train, I'm going to get bulky. Sure. You know, that's, so let's start with morning exercise, because most of us are exercising in the morning, fasted versus fed exercise, fasted versus fed cardio. Where do you fall in that? Yeah, there's a lot of literature on this.

Starting point is 00:37:47 In fact, probably two or three months ago, we published a study where we looked at intermittent fasting, a 16-8 protocol, which you all probably know of, right? And we did it in men and women. But what's different about it is they were strength training four days a week. And they were strength training in our laboratory, and it was really, really hard. They did a repetition to fail test every single day. And if they exceeded like 10 repetitions that day, they went up and wait the next day. And we increased their calories every single week based on their body weight.

Starting point is 00:38:15 So this is a hypercaloric. This was not a fat loss. This was if you're trying to increase calories prior to exercise. No. Oh. One group trained fed. Okay. 13-hour eating window.

Starting point is 00:38:26 The other group trained completely fasted and waited over an hour to start their feeding window. So train fasted. The infamous metabolic window is gone. Yeah, gone. Like total nonsense, right? Well, there's some caveats. It's not, there's one actually important thing there. Point is, like, we set them up for the most extreme conditions.

Starting point is 00:38:44 Like unbelievably hard training, very, very previously well-trained people, hyperchloric, and you're going to not only train fasted, you're going to stay fasted. fasted for a minimum of an hour. Post exercise. Post exercise. Everybody got stronger. Everybody gained muscle mass. Men, the women, all of them.

Starting point is 00:39:03 But the Fed group got stronger than the other group did. That said, the fasting group, better body composition results. This is how physiology works, friends. There's not a single modality we could pick, any of the ones we just said. any other questions you potentially have, where I could say universally, it's a panacea, it is always better. It's almost always a case of trade-offs, right? So what is your goal? Now, the fasting group got more sleepy as the study went on. They did less work. The volume of exercise was lower. They couldn't hang for as much volume. This was only eight weeks. My suspicion,

Starting point is 00:39:43 and I'm completely speculating, is if this would have been at 12 or 16 week or maybe six months, I think the fasting group would have had more problems because they were getting tired during the day. It was difficult to handle all. Because remember, we're hyperchloric. And they're just having a hard time getting all those calories in in that condensed window. So they made it for eight weeks,

Starting point is 00:40:06 but they were headed in the wrong direction. So my answer directly is, can you train really hard fasted? 100%. Can you make progress? Absolutely. Can you train after you're fed? yes, none of them are like a this does work, this does not work. It's pros and cons. And at this

Starting point is 00:40:26 point, the research indicates it has almost nothing to do with male versus female. It has everything to do with you as a human versus you as a human. Maybe you are terrible at training fast it and maybe you are significantly better when you train fast it. That is the reality of how this is going to play out. So if I did the same example for endurance or cardio, you would hear the same thing. The one caveat here is, there is, there have been recent publication suggesting if you are in a really, really high volume endurance athlete, you're running, you're cycling 60 kilos a week or kilometers a week, 80 kilometers a week, like you're really up. That does actually look like feeding before training is more advantageous than not. So if you're in one of those categories

Starting point is 00:41:11 and for any of our athletes, we never intentionally tell people to fast. If they're already already like it, their stomach doesn't work in the morning, they get nauseous. If it makes them feel better, then we'll, of course, we'll let them keep going. But we very, very rarely be like, all right, you have to start fasting for your training. There's just no advantage. But you referred to body composition. So in the fast group, they had better body composition. So if...

Starting point is 00:41:33 And most of us are not training for, you know, gold metal. We're training to look good, feel good, have more energy, you know, live longer, take care of our bodies, detoxify. So for the vast majority of us, in broad categories, if I'm summarizing what you're saying, you know, the fasted training group had better rotty composition, both got stronger, the Fed group got stronger. Yeah. So you want to think about it this way, you can get a little bit strong and gain less fat in a hyperchloric state. How many of you would take that?

Starting point is 00:42:04 I guess there's a lot of hands are going to go up, right? Yeah. Great. Awesome. Now remember, that was just one study. you can only interpret so much it doesn't prove anything so maybe more studies will come out agree with us disagree with us who knows if you look at the collective body of literature fasting doesn't seem to have a huge impact on body fat if it does it generally looks like it

Starting point is 00:42:29 potentially benefits it but the impact is pretty minimal so the way that i think the most appropriate way to think about this is the impact of the fast at say is less than the impact of your adherence, the less than the quality of your workout, than your happiness, your enjoyment. So if you don't mind fasting and your primary goal is body composition, then I probably say try fastid training.

Starting point is 00:42:54 But if you're like, oh my God, I hate it, it's awful, it's the worst thing ever, and you don't train hard, you hate it, you have sucky workouts, then I would say definitely don't do it. And if you don't carry the way, for sure, try it. There's no, to be, again, be really clear.

Starting point is 00:43:07 Outside of really, really high volume endurance, there doesn't seem to be huge downsides to it. Does that calculus make sense? Yeah. You got lots of options here, right? So what we want to walk away from our idea is that this is absolutely better or absolutely fake or garbage. It doesn't work.

Starting point is 00:43:24 Like, none of those are true. There are use cases that are pretty common, not even just athletes, normal people in which they're either completely acceptable options or one might even be slightly more advantageous than others. So I personally will do both. I'll go through weeks at a time where I go fast at training. I'll go through other weeks of the time when I do Fed training. I tinker with them all.

Starting point is 00:43:46 We will generally, by default, for our clients and our athletes, generally not going to make them go start fasting if they don't. But again, we're not walking away from it unless we have a specific reason in them that it's compromising performance. If you know me, you know I'm a huge believer in the benefits of hydrogen water. H2 tab delivers cost-effective portable tablets that generate ultra-clean molecular hydrogen at 12 parts per million, one of the highest concentrations on the market, with over 1,300 published studies showing benefits of oxidative stress,

Starting point is 00:44:20 energy, recovery, brain function, and so much more taking charge of your health has never been easier or more cost-effective. Just drop a tablet in water, let it dissolve, and drink it back. It's less than a dollar a day. Science-backed and part of my daily routine. I never travel without this and it is my favorite biohack. Visit drinkh2 tab.com. That's drinkh2 tab.com and upgrade your hydration today. Now let's get back to the Ultimate Human podcast. Yeah. I want to talk about some real life experience we've had coming through our clinic system. We've had about a quarter of a million patients come through our clinic system in the last 10 years. I'm going to pick on the women here for a minute because there was a lot of questions about this, you know, in the previous discussion.

Starting point is 00:45:07 And, you know, it's not uncommon for women to come in with this scenario and say, Gary, I don't, I don't get it. I wake up in the morning. I'm fasted. I have a cup of black coffee. I go to Orange Theory. Do you guys know what Orange Theory is? It's like one of those exercise, sort of like a food camp. I go to Orange Theory. I go hammer down for 55 minutes. I've been doing that five days a week for three months, and I haven't lost a single pound. Yeah. And they go, I don't get it. I'm not even eating. And so nothing is more frustrating than that. I'm trying to exercise that discipline.

Starting point is 00:45:41 When we took a deeper dive into the vast majority of those cases, they had very narrow feeding windows. It's usually husband and wife or spouses start this journey together. Husband's doing great. He feels amazing, sleeping like a bear. For sure. Wolfing down pizza in his feeding window. You know, she's having a ritz cracker and black coffee.

Starting point is 00:46:02 and she's blown up like a tick and now they want to get divorced. So I become a marriage counselor and I'm like, he still loves you. He's just a candidate for intermittent fasting in, you're not. So can you talk about... And then I will tell you

Starting point is 00:46:16 some of the worst endocrine disasters that we've seen are young, menstruating women that eat in a very narrow feeding window. Yeah, so there's a thing called Reds, R-E-D-S. And it's effectively what happens when you live in this low-energy availability state and Res is effectively a female-specific issue.

Starting point is 00:46:34 If you live in a really low energy availability state for a long time, you're going to see, you said hormonal, but you can pick any metric you possibly care about, and it will tank. Res is actually a very legitimate, really difficult concern. It's awful, and it is incredibly pervasive, especially for female athletes, or what I'll just call female exercisers.

Starting point is 00:46:57 Like, your avatar was perfect. Not an athlete, but you're just, exercising five or six times a week and you're really doing cardio and you're like really pushing it strength training twice a week so that is a very very real thing and it's so hard because they desperately need to lose that weight they want to lose that weight and they're just burning themselves to do it and they get in that spot so the approach we have philosophically and this can happen to men too but I would say our experience in our coaching program would mimic yours okay it is more we have personally I don't know if the data actually support this but we have seen this be more of an issue and yeah

Starting point is 00:47:30 I mean, I'm talking the vast, vast majority. Yeah. And very narrow phantom. We'll see this, sleep will start to tank. Sleep will just really crash and go down. We see excessive rumination. I don't really think of myself as an anxious person. I never had this, but I'm just like completely compulsive and excessive.

Starting point is 00:47:47 I don't know what's going on. Like we have all this. And then that spiral, right? You sleep worse. You binge, you fly off the handle, then you punish, you go even further in the wrong direction. And then, like, you try to out exercise it. You tried out, unread it again, and you're just in this, I mean, does this sound, like, familiar at all? Not to you personally, but, like, maybe a friend of yours.

Starting point is 00:48:06 Yeah. Asking for a friend. Yeah. So, again, that same exact thing. What you want to do is, there's a couple of things you can try. Maybe I'll start there. There's been some research on things like diet refeeds. And so this is something that you want to think about, and this refeed can happen every something like four to ten weeks.

Starting point is 00:48:26 And a refeed is generally like a 10 to 15 percent elevation. and calories. It is not a cheat Sunday. I eat whatever the hell I want one day a week. Like I don't, we have some people that are fine with that, but we generally, I don't like to think about food as cheating. It sets, again, particularly people with or in the area of eating disorders, most professionals in that space are going to, like, cringe at the idea of a cheat day.

Starting point is 00:48:51 It's just a really bad relationship with food. So we don't do that. A diet refeed, a diet rebound is also not a doubling of calories. At the same token, when we're cutting calories, we're not cutting 50% either, right? We're generally in the window of like 10 to 15% increases and decreases in range. That will help significantly stabilize your physiology, and we tend to see really common rebounds of hormonal profiles, sleep, perceptions, mood control is a huge one with this one. So one thing I would try on that is maybe seven to 21 days of a mild refeed.

Starting point is 00:49:25 Generally, that looks like more carbohydrates. We're generally going to give those back because it tends to be the one this group tends to hyper-restrict in the face of large volumes of high-intensity exercise. That also has a direct impact on sleep. And so that tends to be the one

Starting point is 00:49:41 we can give back and they're okay. If you want to go, if their protein is low and you want to go the protein around, fine. If their fats are too low because some women do that too, like super low fat, fine. So pay attention to your client, your person, right, and deploy the strategy that makes the most sense.

Starting point is 00:49:55 But yeah, it's a significant issue. So the advice I would give that individual is do the refeed. The framework here, friends, is this. And you'd probably say something like this all the time. People want to lose fat to get healthier. And we will always say, get healthier first. Fat loss is far easier when you're healthy. When you're not, it is really difficult.

Starting point is 00:50:20 If you want to think about that as hormone imbalances, If you want to think about that, that's not always just the case, it's not all your hormones. But if that helps you understand conceptually what's happening, get the body stable, get it happy, weight loss will be far easier when you do that. So you can actually come back and either reduce the exercise. One of the things that we see happen specifically with high intensity exercise, it's okay. Some people can't handle five days a week of it. Right.

Starting point is 00:50:52 It's really common, super time efficient, I get it, but five days a week in the face of really low caloric intake can hammer people. And you will see this with recovery metrics, whether it's our biochemical metrics we're taking, whether it's something like an HRV or asleep or perception or whatever, you'll just see that stuff just tank. So strategy one I gave you was maybe altering caloric intake. Strategy two might be, let's back off the Orange Theory three times a week. They're not going to go to two. They're at five. Yeah. Maybe can we negotiate to four?

Starting point is 00:51:27 And then what do we put in exchange? It could be nothing. It could be a walk. It could be something else, right? To get anxiety out of the way, get respiratory rate down, whatever we can do. But that is a really common thing we'll do. So you have multiple levers is what I'm trying to help you understand. If somebody's refusing to change calories, great, see if they'll tone down the high intensity.

Starting point is 00:51:44 They won't pull up on that. Maybe tell them, okay, fine, we're going up in calories. But those are the two biggest levers. You're not going to out supplement your way through this one. Like, you're just not going to. You have to give the body some sort of allostatic reprie or you're not going to get any way. I think we be remiss if we didn't actually touch on supplementation. If any, what are some must-haves?

Starting point is 00:52:05 There's a lot of, I don't want to say that it's new research, but it's newly publicized research, especially surrounding creatine. You know, I'm a huge fan of creatine, especially in older females, not just for muscle benefits, for cognitive benefits. So I wonder if you might just touch on creatine as a big one. And then any other must have supplementation for, you know, athletes or people that are just on that health journey because nothing's worth than paralysis of analysis that you get,

Starting point is 00:52:34 getting out on Google right now or going out on social media and trying to figure out what should I be supplementing with them. I mean, I'm a huge fan, obviously, of genetic testing and supplementing for deficiency. But when we talk about performance, muscle, fat loss, you know, impact on sleep. Yeah. So we're all probably on the same page. Supplements are one of our tertiary or lower level activities.

Starting point is 00:52:57 You've got to do all the big stuff for it. Can I skip past that part, though? We all know that's to be true. Whole food, whole food, whole food, whole food. Okay, we're done. Great. Absolutely true. And we for sure spend most of our time on whole food.

Starting point is 00:53:08 But we will get to supplements. The only ones that I say are absolutely, you know, quote unquote, necessary are ideally based on direct biomarkers or perform. skulls. So generally we approach it that way, blood chemistry, blood tests. That has by far the most rigorous science behind it. It has the most direct implications. So we will do our specific supplementation based on your unique molecular signature. After that, we can't have some like categorical universal ones. Creatine, of course, is getting loads of love, which makes my heart just warm to all end. I have a conflict of interest. I have a financial tie to Momentus.

Starting point is 00:53:47 but do whatever you want there, right? So always want to disclose things like that. So that being said, I don't get any money if you buy creatine. How about monohydrate versus HCL? Yeah, so monohydrate is the play for sure. And one thing you want to pay attention to with creatine, and this is different. Nicole, how long have we been talking about creeteen, like for a billion decades, right? The thing about it was we used to be able to buy it from anywhere.

Starting point is 00:54:11 And I sold this for, I said this thing like for decades. So just buy it all ways. It's all creatine monohydrate because it all came from the same manufacturing. is now different. So there's a specific type of creatine called Crea Pure. Many, many companies use it. Again, I do momentous, but do whatever you want. Now, the difference between cure, Crea purr, excuse me, is they don't use formaldehyde and other

Starting point is 00:54:34 things you don't want in there, in the processing way. If you guys actually knew how creatine is made, you'd be stunned. So Crea Pure is not made with formaldehyde. It's not made with other things you don't want. it's also the only one that has verified concentrations of accuracy. So pick a provider that has that. Generally, pick one that has transparency in their testing. You'll know, we actually published a study a couple years ago.

Starting point is 00:54:59 Depending on what country you pull from, you'll see that supplements, even like creatine, have anywhere between like a 10 to 40% adulteration rate. So either they're over or underdosed, they contain ingredients that are not supposed to be there or they don't contain the actual active ingredient. That is now happening with creatine. We're seeing it a ton, specifically with things like creatine gummies,

Starting point is 00:55:19 not actually have any creatine in them. I don't know if you sell creatine. So that's happening now. There's creatine gummies. Sorry, perfect. What about dosing? You know, milligrams. Do we need the loading dose?

Starting point is 00:55:35 How important is the loading dose? So loading is absolutely fine. There's really no downside. The benefit of creatine monohydrate, from a sporting background, for years, we knew it enhanced muscle strength and performance and things. But the vast majority of the research on creatium monohydrate now are tinkering with things like bone health, neurological disorders, brain injuries. Now, it's not all coming out as like perfectly great, but we've had research now in kids,

Starting point is 00:56:01 in pregnancies, in vulnerable populations, in young, and old, across multiple laboratories at lots of different dosaging, at timing, take in the morning, take a post-exercise. And if you look at that research in totality, time. Timing is irrelevant. Take it whatever time a day you want. It doesn't seem to have that many downsides. It's the closest thing we've ever seen to a panacea in the supplement world. It really is. It seems to benefit a lot. It has a small anti-accident profile. It just has so many benefits potentially to it with little downsides. So from the dosing perspective, five grams a day was always the number, right? We never followed five grams today. It's like, okay, if you're 70 kilos, five grams.

Starting point is 00:56:45 But some of our people are 200 plus kilos, right? Like legitimately, we're like, all right, we're not going to give that guy five. It's like saying, yeah, 30 grams of protein. It's like, yeah, okay, yeah. It's like a snack in his tooth. Like, there's just no chance. So we've over many, many years used 10, 15 plus. The research now, like Darren Kandao has done some really interesting stuff,

Starting point is 00:57:04 giving post-menopausal women 20 plus grams a day for over two years, looking at bone mineral changes. not a lot changed there some little stuff but no reported downsides no issues and there's been a lot of things like that so if your 74 year old grandma could take 20 Gs a day yeah I think you're fine last thing I'll add to that is

Starting point is 00:57:28 it's gotten a lot of publicity but there was actually a cool study that was looked at creatine for cognitive function post sleep deprivation and so this is people who hang like you had a bad night of sleep you had, you know, only a few hours, taking 15 to 20 grams in that session showed a mild improvement in cognitive function that day. I don't know if that is actually as cool as it sounds, to be honest with you. I'm a kind of guy, like, as you've seen, I want two or three or

Starting point is 00:57:55 four studies before I get too excited. But there's no downside. Right. Like, there's no harm to doing it. So if you want to be in part of your protocol, if you have a bad night of sleep or travel, and you want to throw in 20 grams a day, it's not going to do anything besides maybe some of you might get a little bit like GI distress. But it's another one of those like potential slight win almost no downside. So if that's your jam, fire away. If you hate that idea,

Starting point is 00:58:21 fine too. Like you're going to be just fine. There's plenty of other ways to get there. Okay. Amazing. I wind down all of my ultimate human podcast by asking all of my guests the same question. And there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human? We will use the phrase

Starting point is 00:58:39 performance, you use ultimate human, I'm going to say the same thing. And that is simply the ability to get what you want and not have what you don't want. It's autonomy, right? You want to be able to look a certain way. You want to be able to feel a certain way. You want to be able to perform a certain way. And we all define that differently. We, I have some, actually some of our mutual friends, like the most famous people in the world and they actively want to be, I'm talking males. They want to be as skinny and lean as possible. They don't want to be like lean and toned. They literally want to be as skinny as possible. Fine.

Starting point is 00:59:12 And we have plenty of friends who are literally the opposite, right? Like my man over here. Just be as jack as possible, right? He's actually a very nice guy. Fine. Don't let the tattoos fool you. I don't care how you define good look. I don't care how you define feel.

Starting point is 00:59:28 I want to feel more energy. I want to feel stronger. I want to feel more in control of my emotions. I want to be a better leader. Fine. You tell me the rules of the game, and we'll go after that. And so my ultimate human would simply be, you want what you want, hopefully for good reasons,

Starting point is 00:59:45 not past trauma or like whatever, like legitimate reasons that are serving you in a good fashion. And if you're getting that and you're not having things you don't want, you're not in pain. You're not doing things to please other people. You're not doing stuff you don't want, taking things you don't want, you're not comfortable with. To me, that's the only ultimate human experience. Amazing. Guys, big round of applause for Dr. Andy Galvin. Thank you so much, man.

Starting point is 01:00:09 I don't know.

The Ultimate Human with Gary Brecka - 211. Dr. Andy Galpin: On Recovery Modalities, Performance Anchors and Hidden Stressors

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