Performance Coach Andy Galpin — Rebooting Tim’s Sleep, Nutrition, Supplements, and Training for 2024

there are data on NBA players and their tweeting activity so how much they tweet postgame as a defunct to measure of like who's asleep and who's not and that can predict almost 2% of shooting accuracy the next day I'm just imagining all all of the quants we're going to go out and start betting on games now based on analyzing tweet volume and timing no uh Sherry actually I think clever I don't know her at all but obviously know I think she worked for ESPN for like 3 years M and she did this thing where she

would predict NFL games like who would win or lose based strictly on circadian rhythms mhm and I think she was like 70 to 80% accurate for three years spam W that's [Music] wild Dr galp and 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 but anytime you can do something for yourself and only yourself it's a win you have a history of competition been a competitive athlete you have an

extensive history of injuries which have forced you to become creative well you could have not been creative but you had 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 themselves

for [ __ ] sake there are a million different things I could be doing yeah and it's helpful even if it's imperfect to sometimes rank order things I'll give you an example so I've known pav tulan for a long time perhaps best known as popularizing the kettle bell in the United States by and large and his position would be strength first right like focus on strength first that is the mother quality MH 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 I will acknowledge my bias yeah at this point I played college football I got into the sport of weightlifting Olympic weightlifting is 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 I don't really have as

much love for physique and bodybuilding stuff like is 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 to being able to skate on ice like I I like it 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 right 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 fair representation of the science versus just my personal preference right right 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 mhm 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 you know you had Eric on cres 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 to be in a certain place your knee and your toes and all that stuff so you guys can to refer back to that mhm 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 paavo's 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 and that 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 Jiu-Jitsu whatever it is I'm going joint by joint and I'm asking a handful of things almost four specific things 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 it when you don't want drive a car without brakes totally you have to understand that position right so you can put whatever phrase on I call it strength others call it stability but they just is just control so is that joint under control is it stable number two and this is even prior to that first one 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 shoulders in the wrong spot they have no idea not only where they're supposed to be but they don't even have the awareness of where they actually are yeah so just letting you know hey did you realize that you your left foot is painted forward and your right foot is pointed 90° 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 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 is pointing basically to like it was my right foot to like 10:00 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

I was internally rotating your 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 that's interesting almost always the case it' be the opposite no kidding okay you'd flare out so that you can actually get more in of motion your knee forward yeah so I was doing the yeah drop the hip and throw the straight right kind of totally position yeah so not to interrupt but even for someone who thinks they know where their body is in space

you 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 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 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 like just give me a ballpark what's that ballpark I don't know it's not there's no hardcut 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 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 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 MH now I'm concerned is my right knee doing something normal to my foot is my right seat 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 life if I say the same pattern on the right knee and the left knee and that's a different problem and a different solution than if that pattern is is exclusive to my right knee M 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 M now you 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 in the low back and the neck and fingers Etc 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 doesn't have to be 600 lb 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 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 check box number one which is do you move well MH after that 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 ask that joint to move fast does it change

its behaviors or patterns okay so you do speed before load or I guess it's I mean you could say I guess it's adding load in its own way but we'll just say additional external load yeah which could be gravity mhm that one I'm fine switching out if you want to go load first before speed absolutely fine it's really kind of 1 a one B yeah 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 mhm

you don't want to load a system repetitively if you 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 right on a leg so even a slow 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 5 miles

or 2 miles or one mile doesn't really matter okay if it can't do it well when you have your body weight right in a unilateral stance then we have a problem and just for definition unilateral meaning here what for people 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 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 y right 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 m 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 it yeah but 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 mhm 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 is how

you're defining fatigue MH so this is not that candidly 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 M rather than an actual you're going to run this many miles or you're going to run this this much time or you're going to complete this much work it is how much can you do until we see a significant break in posture in technique until you're on the air assault bike and you're all of a sudden hunching over now your chest is

on the paddles in the front we stopped at that point because what are we doing we're potentially reinforcing a bad pattern we're re enforcing an idea of when you get tired just go ahead and break posture we don't want those things right that never is going to be a win in our book occasionally you're probably not talking under 10% of the time I'll let it fly okay great we're not 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 and oh I like it not

even 2.0 it's not even 2.0 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 out some of the basic specs and Mysteries maybe and then we can go from there 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 you and the whole rest of the world me in 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 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 cardiovascular Le 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 adaptation the big difference is that

as we were talking about a bit before we started recording I've had effectively n months of deconditioning right and I've had this persistent sometimes crippling constellation of low back issues which thankfully are seemingly on the menend although I do have some questions for you about it so I'll 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 draining retraining 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 it was the broad question is if you were coaching me sort of how would you have a conversation about training maybe program couple of wrinkles so 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 in one different diagnoses of the lowb back compression sensitivity which I do think is a thing some stenosis at L4 L5 on the right side etc etc however I've been told by a number of folks like inflammation is not the issue however when I address inflammation Sy by and large vanish right I was on like mooic Cam and all sorts of anti-inflammatories for a period of time ended up doing an extended fast a few let's just call it two months ago so weekl long water fast and in combination with a few other things

complete remission of symptoms for weeks that raised a lot of interesting questions when I am training for 2 months unlikely I'm going to take a week to fast water fast and 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 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 I have more muscle mass on the right side but I'm having a lot more chatter meaning kind of stuttering on the slope that the curves aren't as smooth my priority is skiing

right so if that means it's to my benefit for relative strength in 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 I can't explain to you how big of a smile I have on my face this is what we live for M 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 yeah here's how all

of our coaching goes this is exactly what I do for anyone that comes through any of our programs in 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 you know everything from my cuticles to my you know my chest hair and do the the 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 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 inum yeah where are those places you want to start let's start with you 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 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 blood work would be the most important thing that one can do here if done appropriately but even cheaper easer than that respiratory rate will tell you a 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 MH at all times you're playing this oxygen into CO2 game oxygen is primarily responsible for regulating cellular metabolism energy MH CO2 is meant to regulate PH M 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 and I could I could walk through the entire chemistry here if you want it's it's fairly simple

actually but that will then be registered psychologically as hey be more alert be more focused be more anxious all those things right 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 okay that is then registered as energy 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 and so on one end of the spectrum and it is way more complicated than this but just to get to another point I'm trying to make here on one side of that Spectrum you've got sympathetic Drive MH this is fight ORF 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 right

we should be a little I want to be hyperfocused 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 yeah totally that's the point right it's a tool and the toolkit yeah yeah parasympathetic is the other side that's rest digest that is lethargic that is depressed 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 par sympathetic and lethargic

right 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 of that spectrum and this is why things like CO2 tolerance which we've studied in my lab are connected to State and trade anxiety they are connected to a lot of different things and so this is Brian McKenzie you know Brian M he's done this for probably a decade we really spent a lot of time on co2 for a long time it'll tell you a ton of what's going on that then drives respiration because

the primary thing remember CO2 is is regulating pH right and so when your body senses CO2 concentrations are getting a little bit higher it's going to tell you ventilate breathe right that's the science way of saying breathe now if we were to have you hold your breath to say take a breath and then hold it eventually you start feeling that air hunger right that like Panic to breathe right that desire to breathe and eventually if you hold hold it panic panic panic okay great unless we're an altitude or something weird that sensation is not being

driven by running out of oxygen it's driven by increasing Co increasing CO2 right CO2 concentrations this is why you have to have carbon monoxide sensors yeah also why you 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 for those which is what we're about to get to right so 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 MH so I'm breathing more than I need to be breathing if you and I were to sit here and hyperventilate right which done plenty of times that's putting you in a state of hypocapnea so capnia is the science word for CO2 hypo meaning low so you've lowered your CO2 below normal m this is causes what's called respiratory alkalosis right you've removed CO2 you've removed acid you become

more alkalic right so acid on one side base or alosis 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 uh 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 altered what's happening through alumin you've altered bicarbonate you've altered all of these things okay now if you were doing that in the short

term that gets too low we have all kinds of issues with blackout you do that in water like we're going to have huge problems yeah be careful yeah people die all the time doing this not good you want the urge to breathe if you are getting to the point where you need to breathe yeah yeah for sure it's a good idea okay great if I'm under breathing then we get hypercapnic right and so what's supposed to happen is you increase CO2 concentrations you get a little bit of hypercapnic this sends signals it says Hey hemor

flexors 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 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 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 an optimal physiology yeah right right yeah those reference ranges change

a lot too right man I could I could 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 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 right going from where's your risk factor disease I don't care about that's like go see petera I can't help you there yeah again we take hundreds of

biomarkers and I don't think I've ever measured a we B in my life yeah never will so it's not your game it's not my game I don't do medicine we do high performance right so you want to go from good to great I got you you risk of 20year disease I don't know just exercise 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 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 rests our sleep company we have a very very high quality one that not to pitch on this but the reality is you you should pitch it if it's good just give a second option for like the second place well the reality of it

is by the time this comes out ours will probably be available it's a couple hundred dollars MH it's not a Tracker it it is a clinical sleep lab set up on your in your house with wireless our Technologies you've probably seen people with the poly stenography sleep stuff like all over the place ours is entirely Wireless you have to do any of those things so for a couple 100 bucks you can put that on and that's absolute rest absolute rest that company yeah we were able to to run 150 Herz which means we're measuring 150

times per second most wearables are going to measure once every 5 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 FDA approved device so we can I actually said a second ago we don't do anything medical that was a bit of a lie what is it approved for diagnosing Sleep Disorders okay so the indication is we can clinically diagnose Sleep Disorders in your own home and your own bedroom for few 200 bucks MH at

this point so that can be done with that we have tremendous insights because we're getting every single breath we're not missing any breath and and HRV heart rate variability is 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 whatever 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 would get close actually you it would probably overestimate it if you just literally use the stopwatch and just measured how often 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 at touch so that might give you a little bit of a false sense but you could try it that way that would get you close do the the Rings and watches Etc do a comparable job to a chest strap

of some type are okay so now this is actually interesting question it depends on what you're measuring the beauty and benefit of have 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 because we're 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 that's we do that too that that's put on there not at that insanely low price point but M at other

Mar like our full immersion part that that's going to get measured as well we don't miss anything for the most part so do they no the honest reality is no yeah got it okay so you could use both I mean just for people listening I mean there are folks out there we could probably spend a lot of time just on like inspiratory like respiratory muscles oh for sure and so on but but you you were saying just to lead back after I interrupted things that people can potentially do yeah right outside of the full Monte

my 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 there's actually a recent study that came out that was quite interesting on College freshman 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 breath 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 timing duration things like that and so if you're using a sleep tracker of some sort and that's not changing but you still feel like you're experiencing stress or some of these other Downstream things you will not it in respiratory rate you will see that move generally before it is more sensitive it's it's like if if you've ever used resting heart rate as a metric for you know 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 it's much 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 responds typically but you would have HRV heart rate like resting heart rate would be another rough way to do that respiratory rate is going 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 if 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 and 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 mhm you will see reference r ranges that say 12 to 20 is normal I could pound that one as much as you want n it's all right I mean we could replace normal with common

maybe but yeah right I want to see it 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 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 a sense that when you exceed a certain sum total of allostatic load respiratory rate goes up presumably that's that's 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 the sum components I suspect it's both end but I'm curious if by addressing the respiratory rate directly for instance through meditation breathing practices does that help to reduce the SU total of that allostatic load or do you have to go back to the puzzle pieces okay is it just an indicator no no so here's where it's fun yeah 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 can give 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 can be independent of the original causality mhm which means let's say you had a really traumatic event couldn't be not traumatic say you won a big game you got excited you got a great you had some it doesn't matter positive or negative yeah some sort of big event in the state of that you went into sympathetic drive that then elevated respiratory rate mhm if

that pattern is sustained that continues to hold place even when you remove that initial stressor okay right so childhood trauma sure like period of of extensive work completing a dissertation having a child any of these things again it's not negative it could be good or bad that pattern can absolutely stay independent of the stressor being removed sounds a lot like pain signaling I or anyway Everything is Everything my man like 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 res rate 17 breasts 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 M I'm going to look at blood that's going to tell me lot what's going on I can differentiate whether that stress is acute or or chronic based on various markers I'm going to ask you we're going to have conversations right when did you start noticing 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 M and 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 in this particular your respiratory used to be 12 and now it's up here now it's 16 when's the breaking point right 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 or whether this is some pattern from 10 days ago to 10 years to it doesn't really matter right you can generally get a good sense of somebody's respiratory rate is high if they tend to feel very very good good during light or low intensity exercise you know why why because their metabolic rate now starts to match their respiratory rate if you're

breathing at 16 breaths per minute that's about four seconds right ratio if you go how many you take 15 breaths in a 60c window right it's about every four seconds 2 second inhale 2 second exhale right we on the math 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 often times can't stand going a day without exercise they got to do some movement they have to do some they got to get a sweat in Som day

a lot of the times those people's respiration rate is high they can't go a day without it because they feel tremendous when they're doing a lowlevel activity because now they're finally at a heart rate that's matching the respiratory 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 not work out or I can't have a I get too much anxiety get too much and then you look and you're like 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 right 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 there's great work here from Emily hi Tower she has a course called skill of stress it is fantastic she's actually Brian MacKenzie's partner phenomenal Emily's a great resource she's on our team as well now 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 you need to

be able to regulate it 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 right 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 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 down regulation piece what are your favorite levers to pull on the and I'm sure it's customized but just broad Strokes with your high performing athletes and so on for regulation post that's right yeah the easiest

by far is give me two to 7 Minutes of just quiet dark mhm right 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 MH 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 4 second inhale 8sec exhale so you're an extended exhale which is down regulatory typically

fine if you're super into that stuff if not just quiet and calm chill the [ __ ] out and breathe chill out dude just like bring it down there's actually some initial data on that can accelerate adaptations to exercise MH is post exercise down regulation it's it's not a 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 extracise in terms of sympathetic Drive really high and then I want to match it with the downside and so it's equal opposite reaction if you got to a s 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 so they 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 arous when you can second one is retraining breath work if you want to do something like that 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 3 second inhale 3 second exhale and so we're going to do whatever exercise you want I don't care go as hard as you want I don't care but we

are capping your inhalation and exhalation right so that would be 3 seconds in 3 seconds out would be sort of in that let's just call 10 to 11 target range right 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 can be a little bit longer mhm we're certainly going to be really clear 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 is something from our physiology side that that we're really paying attention to okay so hopping back to Tim 4.0 oh yeah we got a little far off we no we didn't get off track these are all interrelated but if if I'm going to headed to altitude in let's just call it 7 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 talking here 10,000 yeah let's call 10,000 yeah okay mhm and typically have elevated heart rate for lots of straightforward reasons sleep is compromised dry blah blah blah priority number one would be sort of reducing risk of injury right for me and then cuz I'm not a professional skewer but even if I were I suppose that would be number one but given what I've mentioned and I'll say I just a few more things because in case they're helpful I

realize this is a little bit of it's not as comprehensive as as I would like but what I've observed pattern wise minimizing likelihood of the back becoming a major problem which it was last season right I'd have to stop midslope and like pick up one leg to try to like relieve pain it was bad there were days when I just couldn't even couldn't even ski because I hadn't slept the night before because I've been tossing and turning with back pain right 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 compression s a chair or extended doesn't really bother me if it's sort of straight up and down for lack of a better way to describe it it compression sensitivity so heel drop test [ __ ] hate it right very sensitive other things that may or may not be helpful certainly if I if

I'm working and this is la lay person speaking just keep that in mind folks but sort of the antagonistic muscles if I'm doing core work of any type Pilates Etc that tends to significantly alleviate the lower back issues Stuart McGill style kind of the the f B exactly especially the side planks seem to alleviate a lot of the what I would tend to describe it's just like overall like ql spin 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 yeah really

help yeah 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 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 be very very interested in that because also like the polygraphy stuff it's like your first night's going to be dog [ __ ] right with

all that stuff hooked to you and then like it's easy to corrupt the data how much do you want me to [ __ ] on polography cuz I I can no no no let's save that yeah it is an absolute disaster yeah and borderline useless yeah yes let's let's save it we'll give people that but 10 days I'm at altitude how would you in lie of since we won't have time to do all of this testing first I am going to pay much more attention to the respiratory rate I suspect mine is elevated my 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 we got to have data that we can use right now I'm sure all of our special you know preferred markers and all that but I bet we could get a really strong sense of what's Happening based on what you have you know like on your phone you certainly do some sort of tracking at this point of your sleep I have not used say or ring

Etc in a while just because I the the main takeaway were like yeah don't drink before bed maybe don't drink at all right I mean I there were a few things that I took away from it and I was like okay this is the problem there's a significant difference between you don't have a clinical sleep disorder and you're sleeping great are you familiar with 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 okay if you want to understand your risk of disease

30 40 50 years okay yeah don't sleep four hours a night that that's great if you want to look at what happens with disease markers between 7 hours to sleep at night and 8 hours okay there's not a convincing argument there 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 performance are strong yeah 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 M sleep banking is such that before going into exposure of either restrict sleep mhm high intensity or hydration training or both what happens when you Bank sleep ahead of time get more than more than normal periods of sleep and so a a lot of these data are looking at things like going into fight Camp okay 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 and 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 so what you're about to go do yep so we're 10 days away we know that this is happening and we know your injury risk is going to quadruple y during this phase so that's roughly what is going to happen now a bad night of sleep is irrelevant right two three 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 times your sleep isn't great when you're in altitude for obvious reasons yeah for the first week or two right M 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 M we

need to get to 10 hours of sleep we need to get ahead of that curve right we know what's 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's going to have those physiological issues so we need to bank that that sleep banking can get 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 3 Days M all the way up to two plus hours a night of additional sleep for 5 to seven weeks data on Rugby players high level endurance cyclist division one basketball players division one swimmers potentially missing another one but enough here four five six studies from different Laboratories looking at different metrics you're going to see improvements in in particular one this is actually classic Sherry Moss study you're talking about two hours of additional sleep per night and people already sleeping well so the caveat with all this is we're not looking at sleep deprivation

which is you know you went 24 hours straight without sleep right or what we call Extreme sleep restriction so you s for 4 hours or 3 hours you're talking about people already sleeping reasonable amounts of time and now you're adding this 45 minutes to up to 2 hours a night now in doing that you're seeing in Sherry's initial study 9% Improvement in free throw shooting accuracy this is in division one basketball players yeah 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 a 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 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 yeah like that happens but a 9% Improvement in Elite athletes of a skill let's say it was 50% High let's say it

was 75% high like you're still talking to 3 four 5% Improvement M which is is really really impressive right there are data on NBA players and they're tweeting activity so how much they tweet postgame as a defun measure of like who's asleep and who's not and that can predict almost 2% of shooting accuracy the next day I'm just imagining all all of the quants were going to go out and start betting on games now based on analyzing tweet volume and timing no uh Sherry actually I think clever I don't know her at all but obviously

know I think she worked for ESPN for like 3 years mhm and she did this thing where she would predict NFL games like who would win or lose based strictly on circadian rhythms M and I think she was like 70 to 80% accurate for three years spam wow that's wild stepen lley who's actually works absolute 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 I'll hold you to it all right what you want to pay attention to his sleep is sleep duration of course and 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 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 M 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 yeah but I'm not sure of how to extend it so that's let's just make that part A Part B is very specific which is I'd be curious to know your 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 as opposed to just like suffering for an 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 mhm but I was going to bed earlier much earlier right I was going to bed in this case like 9 9:30 10:00 waking up a lot earlier but waking up Wide Awake yeah no fatigue no dragging 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 mhm that includes me right now because I'm back on the sauce we dissect that it's been a [ __ ] nutty

last 10 days I'll 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 but now I have to do it when I'm in real life whereas before I had you know four weeks off the grid and it was easier I see yeah so for people who are unsure of how they would Bank sleep because they're doubtful that they could extend their sleep some options MH and then thoughts on CA or getting off of

caffeine yeah this is why an appropriate measure of Sleep Quality matters mhm to figure out just what you're working with is that what I mean yeah yeah I you have to right so that is depending on what wearable or tracker you're using that is defined differently by everybody mhm I would caution you against two major things here one worrying about as sleep score yeah do not pay attention to that right that is in part almost all those are calibrated against polygraphy 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 moving Target yeah and polysomnography for people who don't know I mean this is what we were referring to earlier like sleep lab bunch of stuff stuck on your scalp it's the 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 lb those are based on 30second epoxes right so what happens every 30 seconds and then somebody goes to their manual grades and decides this was a

cut off line this was not a cut off line and so you're being still subjectively scored mhm even on like you went in the lab you went the Sleep Clinic you did the whole thing so what should you pay attention to different ways to go about that like I do have an order ring I could wear one prior I mean I could put one on 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

polygraphy so when they say they're 99% accurate or 80% accurate it's it's against PSG MH which I don't think is telling you the story the second part about that is problematic is if I asked you and we had this entire conversation about training you said hey I want to train for my ski thing how would I would I train the same way for this ski this two months of skiing physically train as I would if that was now a marathon if that was just I want to feel better my joints hurt if that was I

want to gain some more muscle and the obvious answer is clearly no yeah and I asked we had the same conversation about nutrition but yet when we think about sleep it's just yeah yeah sleep more right if you want to get better nutrition in your particular case you would hire probably somebody who's done performance nutrition for skiing MH you would hire a high performance person for your physical training and this type of skiing and something like that when it comes to sleep it's like go to a sleep lab and get a doctor that's all we

have here 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 night mhm doesn't 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 many how much time you spend in each one of those sleep stages based on a Tracker is highly problematic yeah 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 and so we need 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 yeah excellent data if somebody sleeps for8 hours a night versus 5 hours a night and you tell them the opposite you will see a physiological response so that's corresponds what you told them rather than what actually happened so in other words if I told you man we did this whole sleep St

on you last night Tim you slept for two hours you're like really your reaction time your memory your focus your attention that next day will reflect poor sleep if you slept for two hours and that the actual study here was five hours and I told you eight I said hey man your ordering is super wrong actually our technolog is better and and you sleep phenomenal like right that's not true but like I made it up right you would actually respond that way MH there's a thing that's growing in the field called orthosomnia right right which

is actually sleep tracker induced insomnia MH those scores matter to you 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 right so when you know that a certain thing happens in this particular case check 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 meaning 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 right things like that so all that stuff you need to be really really careful with understanding in like how am I using any of these Technologies if I overall am so Sleep Quality we'll kind of leave it yeah 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 so if you are in the same timing and have have a higher quality you have de facto increase duration sure even if your duration didn't actually increase so the number one and two things I'd say there is okay number one let's make sure your timing your activity today in the right time of your physical day that's going to make you feel like you slept more your

performance will go up and so without actually increasing a minute of sleep you performed like you it's like a pseudo sleep making it's like pseudo sleep extension getting a higher quality of sleep and all those things is 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 I'm okay going with it as long as it's not

reducing sleep pressure harming your sleep latency yeah 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 yeah it doesn't work very well for me yeah okay so in your particular case I would say just take what we have mhm get as as much sleep as absolutely possible and then build in what are nonsleep equivalents so what can we do throughout the day to encourage extreme down regulation 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 all kinds of things we can do that are going to again 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 one are the

things I have to get done check in for my flight pack things like that and then the rest of the time like I'm really making sleep my so I'm starting my down regulation practice now at 3:00 p.m. or something or whatever you do so that by the time 8:00 hits like you're just very Zend out I would say these days not just reducing eliminating caffeine yeah and then ensuring I am not exceeding a certain duration of sitting which is [ __ ] for this week I'm recording podcasts but that's that's okay those two things if

I attend to those two things everything else is a rounding error yeah yeah those are the two putting aside the low back stuff for now we come back to it but it's it's such a gnarl Tangled mess of different theories and diagnoses but the caffeine is I suppose a little simpler not always easy but 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 I'll have some but like a half CF espresso is like

perfect your physiology will tell you that answer and what I mean by that is I have plenty of people that do fine on caffeine and their sleep is fantastic and others it really is detrimental if you were to look just across the the landscape with 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. or things like I'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 course 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 one of thing you can pay attention to is your physical output M now there are not any data 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 M but there is clearly some Association here I mean just based on basic physiology when we understand how caffeine works and how sleep works and that 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 mhm right this is the energy currency of all biology it's the only way we can use cellular energy now that stands for adenosine triphosphate so it's an adenosine modle with tri three phosphates 1 two three the way that energy is created from ATP is

you take one of those phosphates at the end and you break that off m in our biology that is exergonic meaning it gives off net energy and we can use that but that leaves is a molecule called anorganic phosphate so one of those PS is floating around and then now instead of having a triphosphate you have a die phosphate so there's two of them if you were to do that one more time this becomes challenging but that Denine diphosphate goes to Denine mono phosphate 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 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 mean dening can't which means you don't feel the pressure for sleep this is why it causes so many sleep issues therefore it makes some intuitive sense to say 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 are people that engage in the most physical activity even when they consume decent amounts 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 you we've probably talked about this but how fast you metabolize caffeine and or don't

and stuff like that 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 mhm 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 deal with high performing

folks so whether this 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 mhm caffeine is an incredibly powerful erogenic tons of research on it affecting and enhancing human performance in a lot of ways and so we use it mhm a lot for athletes you're 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

we're at but now we've lost sleep there's no right answer here at what point 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 PG golfers mhm and so here's a good example you're going to be on a course for 4 to 6 hours in a 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 so golf is played in well in the PJ tour four days so you play Thursday and Friday and then the half the top half 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 right so half the golfers and you need to switch right and so sometimes it's an advantage to play Early depending on the weather sometimes so they just try to make it even say all right Thursday you have 6 a.m. tea time then Fridays to you know noon or one or whatever the case is okay well that is really hard because if you are 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. T time this is a 4: a.m tea time yeah which means you're up at 1:30 yeah 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 a turn on here to get going because my neuromuscular skill is significantly compromised so it's going to 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 point and this is just a coaching

decision how much do you want to perform better right now versus sacrifice tomorrow mhm and what are you doing the same could be said for any sport and this is really hard for like our our football players all right 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 and now oh baseball players is the worst because they're playing typically at 7 7:05 7:10 p.m. if they're pitching whatever they're going to be done

at 10:00 at the earliest and now you've got to come back off that train and try to get his sleep before 4 a.m. mhm which is really really and now we're changing time zone so there's no one answer for that I guess is my point how do you use it judiciously and carefully so in terms of getting off of it 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 friend of mine was explaining sleep deprivation with young kids and if

you asked him how you contend with that his answer was effectively like don't be weak he like you just you contend with it right there is no magic trick which might be the answer for getting off caffeine it's like yeah you're going to 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 if I grab a device whatever device I happen to have I use that prior to getting to altitude I land at altitude yeah yeah I can try to

do some sleep banking mhm up to that point which would include non-sleep augmentation in the form of nonsleep deep breath Yoga Nidra meditation whatever it might be any other thoughts in terms of what happens after I hit the ground y another thing that would be a very easy win would be making sure hydration mhm 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 yeah you lose that in the cold mhm I know

you've done a bit of hunting yeah yeah so this is where like it comes in for me all the time this is one of my 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 yeah to drink water right and then you start seeing feeling signs and symptoms of exhaustion and altitude and all those things 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 ketchup blood is doesn't help 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 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 win any guidelines around that when to hydrate how to hydrate easy example hear half your body weight in ounces per day is a very rough number so if you weigh 200 lb to 100 ounces a day MH get you sort of close ballpark within that you want to make sure that you're not reducing sleep and so one of the biggest wins we've had in and from a coaching perspective is actually reducing water intake yeah I'd love for you

to say more about that a friend of mine just a few days ago said he's like yeah you're familiar with the 321 Rule and I was like I have no idea what you're talking about and he said no food 3 hours before sleep no Water 2 hours before sleep and then no devices 1 hour before sleep I was like oh that's clever okay I mean it's not a bad like curis to use but how do you think about yeah reducing liquid intake I mean as a global answer yeah but I like I probably wouldn't use

that approach personally much you do want to taper down fluids at night I'm I'm laughing because we we've had a number of people and and they come in and they 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 yeah and it's like okay well why is that happening well it can actually happen because of low quality sleep and so there's actually there are a number of things that happen that are common and people think are benign that are not

right and one of them is that so it is somewhat normal to wake up once throughout the night to have to be 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 and and that can actually contribute to nocta over Iration but just the easy solution there is pay attention to a couple things number one how much water are you actually drinking at night in 2 hours

3 hours before then two pay attention when you wake up to pee pay attention to it MH is it a really large volume is it really clear right or is it a smaller or medium amount and or is it 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 pe the next morning mhm 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 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 and and I went pee and it was like I was there for a while and then I woke up the next morning and I did it again and I had these you know half a pound or a pound and a half of of urine then you have a pretty good idea 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 ago right and it's just a heuristic it's not a hard and fast drill but like the 321 it's like 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 yeah and so if you're consuming diuretics and then compensating by drinking tons of water or in my case I'm just a compulsive water Drinker if I sit at a lunch with someone like I'll drink one or two bottles of water like I drink a lot of [ __ ] water and I'm not saying you're making amazing faces well to get that on the video there's so much opportunity with you yeah yeah so let's get into the

juicy bits but so I would love to know 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 M you can differentiate between acute and chronic dehydration and blood really quickly Alum is the big ticker there 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 m mate hemoglobin sodium you got a good indication of dehydration

if they go the opposite direction we're worried about hypohydration hyperhydration hyperhydration m if you tick in albumin on top of that then you're getting indication this has been around for a very long time so we can calculate osmolality we can do it independent of urine analysis and things like that okay now why this stuff matters think about it all those metrics hematocrite 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 how many milligrams per deciliter of blood if you were hydrated your total blood volume goes down so much such that those numbers even if they're the actual same absolute value get reduced okay now albumin is an acute phase reactant which means it responds acutely to inflammation okay so it'll change 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 oh you Labs look fine but you're like I don't feel fine there'll be a lot of

things happening here but albumin is one of the like easiest examples examples here is an acute phase reactant is also sensitive to hydr I'll let me back up real fast we're like Inception right now I'm like four points into four points behind to setting up those so we can come up here 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 alumin bunch of other things okay so it's

a main protein it's made in your liver and it's got like a 20 or so day turnover rate so every 20 or so days you'll recycle that of human so that in response to dehydration 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 M and slightly dehydrated pretty common right yeah okay albumin got tugged up and tugged down which means where's 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 xray M knee's not broken your knee must be fine mhm not at all so now if I can look at albumen and say hey wait a minute okay 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 okay this is an inflammation issue that's our marker and so I can really pay attention to that and say Tim you're hyper hydrating 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 mhm headaches brain fog do you how many people in our program who's brain foged we've solved in day one because they're just drinking way too much water yeah I believe it headaches gone away all kinds of issues almost the exact same symptoms are associated with dehydration is hyperhydration MH 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 were you were hyperhydrated this becomes a huge problem because it can induce what's called hyponatremia oh yeah dangerous you can die yeah people di heard stories of radio jockey having water drinking competitions people die on eternity parties yeah dangerous tons of stuff it marathons too I mean people over hyper hydrating marathons Iron Man's like things like that that happens hypon nmia nmia is sodium it's the science word for sodium so it's hypo so that gets too low it's

not actually an issue of sodium getting too low it's 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 MH this is muscle fatigue this is lack of performance like I'm just not feeling as strong as powerful as Twitchy as they used to be all the way up to in severe cases death this cardiac tissue stops so I would be interested to look at more your metrics and just paying

attention to all right how many times are you really being 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 I think this is a behavioral modification thing and not a knowledge thing for me totally I would bet like right here on the spot with without looking at my labs I'd be like I I could bet half my net worth that I am hyper hydrating like I know I'm hyper hydrating I'm just looking at my behavior over the

last couple of weeks and so it's really a question of like how do I modify behavior in this case cuz 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 I mean rarely alcohol but if it's alcohol you know it's it's sort of like whatever is in front of me I will drink because I like the motor movement 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 this for sure cuz it's inhibiting like vasopress Tic hormone yeah yeah exactly is the real problem so you're going to downregulate that and then that's good when you drink alcohol you should be given the physiological symptoms to pee more clear right so here's what I would say I would say actually two last things in that one as a behavioral coaching tool then we would have some sort of mechanism for you

there' be something in your day that triggers water stopping this could be okay when you shower at night you just don't drink water afterwards right when we have decide what the trigger is what is the trigger what flips the switch what other Behavior right so at that point if you need a sip water you can but we're no longer having water in a visual or immediately achievable position so no more water bottles no more C back off you mean well you can leave it on for fun physiologically I would come back and say I wonder

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 the your physiology yeah it's a great question it's a great question so back to the labs it's just it's wild hell and this does this isn't a surprise but it's just a 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 hitch 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 althetic 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 holidays yeah that happened to me too when everybody's on their autor response yeah and you're like okay interesting home alone you know like ah and one of my coping mechanisms is this is like 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 6:00 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 right 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 mhm many reasons why one of them though is any hyperhydration that has occurred oh you bleed it out you bleed it out M okay all right so 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 may maybe $100 that 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 $100 that your hydration habit is better when you have better down regulation practices 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 just says like no more water bottles after 6 p.m. or whatever that's great but have we really solve the core issue MH 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 Etc cortisol is playing here and so these people tend to feel really good when you give them salt M 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 even the number 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 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 right this is why want your HRV it's like it's like a worry stone me drinking water and I've spent so much of my life worrying about hydration because I have like hyperhydrosis I I always was good at cutting weight for wrestling I

mean I would cut like 20 30 lbs 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 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 40 hours and just like and do the sauna but don't guzzle

a gallon water afterwards like going to bed a little bit sort of like when I did tennis training a long time ago and I was whiffing the ball like 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 if you want to hit a home run knock yourself out he's like the one place you cannot hit it is into the net maybe this is a case where it's like all right you can do anything except

for drink a ton of water at night like and if you go to bed a little dehydrated for 2 days like you're quote unquote dehydrated totally may not be dehydrated you will feel signs and symptoms of dehydration though you'll feel Cott in mouth I'm sure yeah you'll feel different things have you ever had your sweat tested no that's a super easy start 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 this is something that can be done for a

few dollars at this point so there are a number of different meth methods that people can purchase these things I think as low as probably like 15 bucks all the way up to a couple hundred people just want to learn about this what would they Google 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 NX and this is now I think you buy that patch for $150 or something like that and you could get different

things but you can actually in that get real time feedback I'm not associated with that interesting so it's like a CGM it's like a glucose monitor for your sweat 100% now there's some issues you don't get full electrolyte break now but you'll tell you'll know how much total fluid you're losing as well as sodium content 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 mhm

which is to say it is not just about water we've talked about hypon neutrum we need to know that we're putting in a hypotonic solution 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 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 MH 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 your running constant checks of total blood volume you'll actually expand more than you think 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 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 2 10 plenty hot so 195 210 get in there and I will immediately start dumping water onto the stones so I'm also jacking yeah so I'm also jacking up the immunity I would say generally the way that I'll run it in because I do this almost every day right four to seven times a week I'll do let's just call it 20 to 30 minutes MH and

that will be threshold for most people right they'll be like I need to cool off then I'll do coal plunge for 3 to 5 minutes then I'll go back in for a shorter Session 5 minutes warm back up yeah 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 3 minutes of cold and that's typical night okay so in that first session overall as well how much weight are you losing you know I would say over the two heat sessions 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 like weight cutting like we couldn't shower after cutting for wrestling like you would absorb multiple pounds of water back just by showering but I don't know if that's true in this in this much more mild form probably not but I mean I'm dumping Sweat There is a huge pool of sweat under me how long does it take you from initiation the second you walk in your sauna till you start sweating I would say if

I'm throwing water on the Rocks two minutes okay two to three minutes two minutes is the number we always pay attention to that if taking longer than that we start to have concerns of dehydration so when we handle this with our UFC fighters and stuff like we're two minutes is a good pay attention to my guess is you are sweating out far more than that amount it would be not uncommon for someone you're plus or minus 160 70 PBS 170 170 something yeah low 7 yeah I would imagine in a 30 minute Sonic session 3

minute 3 PBS would be reasonable if you're a hypers sweater maybe more yeah I think it's basically the equivalent of a like a soda stream full of water would be would be my guess yeah yeah now this number differs significantly from people to people I can just give you two direct examples Tatiana Suarez UFC fighter I've worked with for many years she is a very good sweater so she competes at 115 pounds M it is not particularly hard for her to sweat out four to five pounds MH at that low of a body weight not

really hard now there's a lot of work that goes into yeah operation before that but that's not particularly hard Brian Ortega another UFC fighter who competes at 145 PBS and is a male it is we we tally have to work to get four or five pounds out right so there is a 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 over twice a week that was over oh yeah yeah that was 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 yeah a few other things but a lot of water to use your language I'm a very good I'm top tier sweater top

elite elite sweater Elite sweater MH so okay that that's great that's an easy way to figure out your sweat rate mhm so just naked go in the sauna come back out completely dry off I would recommend in fact if we're going to do this test to not use the don't put any water M want to keep it dry so we don't have any on there and then just measure do for 30 minutes come out measure yourself how much do ton that's going to tell us about your sweat rate in Good Sense we don't have a

sensor so we don't 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 to do the sauna you're gonna have way lower Sweat Right and if you were to tot drinking three gallons this is water loading right this is in in weight management Sports

we did that way 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 are different we sweat differently but is something coming back to that there is probably something in your physiology to which is explaining why that is happening so I was born premature had a ton of issues as a prei was in the nicku lots of thermo regulation issues since day Zero so tons of thermo regulation issues yeah and 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 whatever four degrees in terms of uh normal body body temperature my subjective experience is much like when people have say a really high fever they feel cold MH 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 Thermo regulatory issues from the gecko 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 Judo compete like training in Judo in Tokyo in the summer with a gon 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 there's a lot of sweat going on yeah so the point is you

kind of come back to that whole story of unpacking like what is actually happening internally why are you doing it so your cocktail for hydration would probably be abnormal normal needs to be dialed in so we can say okay great because if you drink too much 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 MH but here's the kicker you're urinating because that blood volume got that shortterm this is exact especially 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 has hasn't had time to cross into tissue where you're actually properly dehydrated right because you got three main areas you have intracellular you have in the vessels 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 right I 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 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 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 so then the final piece would be what is exactly 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 knowing what the hell you are excreting that's going to tell you electrolytes you have to have that in combination again ideally with what your standard metrics

are throughout your system and then making sure that in addition do we need to add glucose to the situation that's going to transport things into the 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 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 got now it doesn't mean it's your

only thing that can be in there m if we're only concerned about just hydration or if we have other things we're trying to do once so it's typically less common to only be caring about water mhm 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 if I had to wait it I'd say it's like 70% hydration 30% help with recovery I like I like to S after weight training yeah okay so in that particular case if you're trying to maximize recovery then like glucose is going to be super super effective yeah 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 yeah 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 we have a combo between glucose and fructose Diversified Transporters right like you have two freeways one of them is full two different types of fairies or yeah ex now in terms of getting into the actual cell itself there's two basic ways that you can get glut for Transporters these are the Transporters on muscle cells that allow glucose to go inside the cell um there's

insulin dependent and insulin independent and so muscle contraction itself M insulant 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 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 5 to nine MH is typically The Sweet Spot 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 yeah drink you're probably fine I'm going to weigh myself before and after sauna tonight yeah no water on the rocks and just to get an idea of what that actual number is cuz I'm super curious yeah I'll also be doing a Sonic 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 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 easy what is the easiest way to to keep track of that probably what you're about to say just fill one container yeah and multiply it out Bingo just fill up a gallon how far do you get

down yeah 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 Etc sleep timing TBD I'm going to work on that although frankly the 15 car pile up 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 entry 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 from a nutrition perspective yeah so this is why full analysis is better CU now we can naate you exactly not only macronutrients right calories protein carbohydrate that's great what we tend to say is like people care globally about three things regarding their body they want to look a

certain way they want to feel a certain way and they want to perform a certain way in this particular season I care most about two and three I'm in going to be in four layers anyway I don't give a [ __ ] you already laid the foundation the physique doesn't matter and your f is fine as it is right so it's not like it detriment in your performance right so you care about feeling and performing a certain way MH awesome that's going to give us some heads towards macronutrients micronutrients though M are the true game

behind how you feel and perform MH that's the key here macronutrients are fine energy intake 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 okay 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 would took us to get to the training yeah I mean if I'm giving you my like lazy lazy day of skiing and I know this is going to make people shutter but one of the reasons why I think you've had such an tremendous career is you're so honest about these things you don't you don't protect ego of like you know what's best but this is what you're doing like 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 uh and then the pixie sticks come out no I often wake up and this last season I had a tough time with my low back I was having a 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 cuz my lower back is all jacked wake up huge cup of coffee and then 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 so I'm waking up having a huge cup of coffee and then I'm having oatmeal mixing in some almond butter M 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 back country then I'm I have a backpack so I'll carry water C pack yeah but I might have some ukan bars some kind of right 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 3/4 day or full day then we'll stop for lunch and I'll I'll probably have some type of Stew like meat beans Etc and 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 right then I'm sitting down and I can kind of choose whatever I want to have

at that point you have a combination of fats and starches and yeah the whole yeah but 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 like keto super low carb I feel like [ __ ] like I really feel terrible right normal life not having that kind of output fine but for that type of activity no it it doesn't really work so well there's a difference between not being sick yeah not dying and performing at your best yeah yeah

very different so that's not every day but that would be a busy day shitty night's sleep woke up [ __ ] just want to get out on the slopes last year/ this year do you have a plan for supplementation what I have done over the last say n months which has and this is going to sound like a Shameless plug cuz 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 Nei 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 I can just throw those in my ski jacket too so that will probably take the place of eggs yeah 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 wanted to

carry too much weight like additional water weight if I was going to retain a lot more water oh yep so I use that intermittently I would often use that around cross training so if I was like kind of going to the gym yeah athletic ingredients again it's going sound like a plug but I've been using that stuff since 200 whatever 9 10 so yeah and not a whole lot beyond that I'd say 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 an entire laundry list of stuff before sleep including some prescription stuff which I've tried to really titr trate off of yeah but at the time helpful you know Trazodone and 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 if you were to ask me like what does your macro breakdown look like i' be like I have no [ __ ]

idea honestly if I'm being like truthful about it look the reality of it is supplements are called supplements for a reason yeah and we we absolutely approach them the same vein yeah right we're going to spend as much time as we can on whole food after coming back from training almost always taking supplemental protein of some of some type okay I just want a little bit of a context of foundation of what I was working with here 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 whe Protein Isolate or something before like immediately before heading out so I've had the oatmeal plus the almond butter and then I would throw that in that happened quite a bit I would say when you think about recovery mhm three classic RS come to place repair replenish and rehydrate yep that's what we're going after right so repair is protein replenish is carbohydrate and obviously rehydrate is is a combination of fluids plus electrolytes and glucose 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 means do we have enough total calories maybe do we have enough protein unlikely unlikely fact we're starting off the day with no protein sour is not a good or very little yeah Maui is fantastic eat it almost every day at this point my entire like I eat

almost exclusively Wild game that's yeah that's what I do but yeah yeah since being a part of Maui as well like yeah 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 up like this is incredible yeah such a high positive response yeah all right conflicts of interest noted you got the know so that is great you can start there it's awesome I don't really particularly care where the sources I 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 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 g of protein at once and that's obviously by the way I opened up that question that's clearly not the case yep however there is serious scientific evidence to suggest you can only maximize

muscle protein synthesis up to 25 to 30 grams mhm okay great that's beenin around so the question is for you despite the fact that all the evidence in science will say that mhm 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 a tough question right my urine ends up a little more expensive I don't care who cares right when you go to apply things into science into life what 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 this is why like I think it's best to think about science as a verb not a noun MH is an action it is not a thing right what is a science of recovery that's not how it works right 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

is maximized at 25 or 30 grams I work with NFL players right so v a defensive tackle 300 many plus pounds on top of 300 right we really think his muscle protein synthesis is locked up and just maximized at 30 G the same as you I correct who are just about less than half his size like actually way less than half so there's actually paper that just come out really interesting suggests even up to 100 grams of protein it continues to increase 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 like a larger Bolis meaning more grams of protein at a single yeah this is what you're talking about is called anabolic resistance so you become more resistant to anabolic stimuli training or protein as you age but this is totally preventable M extremely preventable by just having bigger bises so my point with all that is you can't stop that train yeah yes some of that protein will be oxidized who cares 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 had conversations about you just recover slower you sore longer etc etc we need to make sure we are never limited in our recovery by protein mhm that needs to be higher and so we need you at a minimum of I don't know 200 g of protein a day oh wow okay yeah 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 let's just say

copy paste now you're in my place doing the exact same training yeah what might your breakfast look like I'm fine with everything you had there yeah but now I just want 50 gr of protein what form I know you said you're agnostic but for you fine eggs yeah like no problem eating eggs to get to 200 gram I mean if we're like yanking out the Yol yeah you can well I'm just thinking about the what this actually Nets out to I mean how many eggs that mean that's be 5 six I'll put it this way

I wouldn't go exclusively from eggs that 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 y this this last season so if you have let's say three eggs maybe half a cup of egg whites M something like that maybe two eggs half a cup of egg whites okay great we're now 40 or so and 20 minutes later or something I don't know were you having that shake on the way I was having right before I stepped out let's

just stop right there Then 40 G 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 great just do the double shake yeah right two two scoops right so you're 40 to 50 depending on what protein Source you're using whoever you're getting it from pretty high quality pretty fast absorbing yeah 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 Mau N Sticks throughout the day those are what 10

gam each 10 gam each yeah so you got 20 right there mm it's easy to put down like four or five of those more candidly let's just say you're at one mhm 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 yeah 50 like depending on how much you're eating there you don't want to eat your feel terrible MH but that's fine we're already well over 100 mhm 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 snacks like you another 30 or 40 which brings you back to dinner with another 30 or 40 mhm 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 175 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 yeah I'll get in a fat along the way I think that I've trained myself historically to reduce carbohydrate in intake for a lot of different reasons and so I consume to little carbohydrate yeah when I get into training mode for something like skiing I said I'm tool agnostic it's the same thing with food M like carbohydrates and fats have different properties and that gives us a lot of opportunity one is not better than the other yeah in any situation so it is in this context clearly additional carbohydrate is highly

beneficial M you can go more fat that's great too just to get more Cal yeah it's also easier more condensed you can get it in Faster you're getting in a decent amount for breakfast so you're you're good there I would make sure we have some sort of starch as well for lunch yep bread with that soup need to be fancy yeah who ever complained about dipping bread in in soup yeah that's amazing or whatever any number of me well well or high quality carbohydrate sources that's great 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 for sure super there's tons of links there in fact we actually had this happen Labs came back individual sex hormone binding globulin High free testosterone's low all the signs and symptoms of wanting to go on testosterone mhm that's not a conversation I have that's go to

your doctor right you want to go on hormones awesome you must get asked about it a lot oh my gosh like you see how sensitive I am when I go in public I'm like I'm not like I don't do medications well there's a known in oh 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 to free testosterone goes down yeah right so you can do that if you want however in this

individual we took a look at total carbohydrate in 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 I train most days I feel fine at 125 150 no issues almost no carbohydrate at night M very low 20 or less grams of carbohydr night all we had to do was put another 40 or so gram of carbohydrate at night mhm everything corrected itself and sleep took off so super super simple solution like that so sex

for B and glob and came down 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 well this it's a classic Cas 40 gram so what we're talking about there is like it's not that much I mean it's like what 200 like I'm flubbing the math here but it's 4.5 calories per gram forish right so it's not that much no like you're talking about well this is say banana gram 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 like you've already hit 25 to 40 yeah sort of grams pretty easily so we're not talking like we had this guy pig out on pasta yeah very small changes here miracle workers right just like they really have to so point is I'm making sure that we have an appropriate amount of carbohydrate MH in your last feeding would be appropriate we've gotten ourselves a nice infusion throughout the

day this will help with your rehydration since we're probably having fairly limited water intake cuz 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 dry environments I did a mu deer hunt in the Tetons this year 10,000 is 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 yeah so dry and like 10,000 which for me who Liv I live in Southern California so I'm at you know zero like literally 10,000 is no joke man and those Mountain Boys holy cow they are mountain tough at a great time so point is you get super dehydrated super fast and don't really so those carbohydrates and all that are going to help maintain mhm replenish the muscle glycogen that you burn throughout your entire body yeah we don't care if we're having an excess of calories because if we lose a

little bit of body composition I don't care at all won't cuz you're burning so many calories yeah it's astonishing how much so I'm I'm going to be there with a close friend and we can consume absolutely mindboggling amounts of food oh and it does oh yeah and it just does not matter you're going to work it off you mentioned some resistance arches earlier if you can take them out there that's great too that's going to feel better than just a mauu new stick when you're sure for sure yeah I mean the ukam 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 making sure that you adequately salting your food MH because we know that that's going to go down we know you're a heavy sweater yep 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 that's just going to you're going to lose a gram yeah plus many grams of salt so making sure that comes back in in the form of supplementation if

you like to use electrolyte pack or something like that or if you just want to strictly go salting your food you know heavily to taste there you probably need some supplemental electrolytes would be my guess at this point making sure it's there that's nutritionally 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 like you're not going to feel a difference in vitamin A or C in like a day yeah 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 an athletic greens yeah I generally used color as a proxy so I try hard it is one of the challenges in a lot of these mountain towns of course it is is like they're importing everything and fresh fruits and vegetables oh man yeah well we won't say yeah but yes yeah good use frozen if you have to right so Frozen fruits and vegetables it's not the same but it's still really really high quality

and then supplementation we could say you know I could be brief here if you'd like mhm 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 swe also with with skiing like I'm going to swep my ass off yeah I'll be working 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 would use it or don't okay so

having it like on certain days or not is probably make it daily or not yeah because it takes a chronic effect yeah for it to really start to matter unless you're going really high dosage mhm so I wouldn't be super concerned about the water retention aspect of it because might even be a plus yeah I was going to say we're having a problem with that anyways right any recommendation if you try and doesn't work you don't like it and what are we talking about like five grams a day or what we 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 yeah like why candidly for guys a size it's fine I'm probably going higher I'm also never measuring greetin to be totally honest like I'm just taking big Scoops and throwing it in there yeah 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 even like mood brain health is no joke yeah but that's been 10 to 20 grams a

day 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 at this somewhat it's n of one it's just self-reporting but for me it's pretty noticeable you don't have to do N1 there's data yeah there's tons of it out there that yeah nothing's perfect but there's actually another review article just this week came out also on [ __ ] and brain health mhm so whether you're looking at dementia Alzheimer's arcs and stuff like that it's

there's no perfect answer there but you can see the data anything else You' 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 yeah common one you're going to be out in the sun all day so well half of my face will be out in the sun all day there'll be significant Sun blockage I hope so yeah yeah I I did supplement with d last year

yeah and fish oil I also supplemented with fish oil yeah 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 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 yeah again relatively yeah they have very little cross reaction MH unlike minerals yeah unlike even high dos of vitamins M 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 meaning just unintended side unintended yeah 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 mhm can be concerned there but it's a very rare thing so most of the time like you're fine I feel comfortable saying like 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 mhm 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 ashro Ganda Rola y things like that start to kick in what do you find Rola most helpful for so I actually do use ashwaganda in the same way that say Peter Tia might use phosl serin just to blunt oh sure a bit of cortisol release at night for instance um okay inhale uh so maybe I'm off base but I

mean talk to me about ashanda and Rola okay so we actually just published a review paper on rhodiola MH I think it's open access she be able to go read it for free way more data on ashwaganda been around for a long time the issue we've always dealt with with both of those are most all of our athletes have to have third party certified M things and even they have to have NSF or informed choice so those are hard to get to yeah if you're not concerned about that then disregard that but you really do

need 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 got to be complete disaster whatever number you're thinking it's higher yeah yeah totally it's it's now in America with big Brands like you're fine but you you leave America and things get squirrly yeah pretty quickly on supplements okay and plenty of squirel here too but both those papers are open access so if anybody wants to dive in we'll start ashwag there's much more data on ashwaganda good effective but it is

very difficult to make sure you're getting concentrations at what is labeled on the bottle MH 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 behold totally 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 it yeah against things like that it's really hard right you're growing herbals and you're just hoping that

that doses is potent as the previous one so what do you think from an effect standpoint for what can a credible argument be made I know less science but with ashwaganda like why would someone take it yeah that is plausibly defensible and what should you take in that case like are there certain brands that are yeah more reliable for dosing for any particular reason with ashwaganda I think the only thirdparty pure ashwaganda company that I know is clean the k kle e a an I'm pretty sure you'll see it in combinations and a bunch of

other stuff but that's I think the only one that sells it as design for health and design for sport might make one as well I'm not 100% sure mhm on that one okay decent data on exactly what you mentioned taking it as a the colloquial term we'll say here is any adaptogen adaptogen yeah yeah 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 cortisols well that's Addison's disease right super low down 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 etc and 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 there a curve okay great

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 dial curve M right that's the idea ashwaganda and riola and specifically ashwag 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 nerves is kind of resetting that entire access 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 and so the sort of smaller level science and then also large amount of anecdote is it can be helpful and beneficial with test OST mhm I would say in my experience it's reasonable mhm it is a very reasonable thing to think about I wish that more companies would make pure ashwaganda that is NSF certified that'd be great I could 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 riola

really yeah it is also cortisol modulator M 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 and that it seems to be pretty beneficial it's not perfect not every study showed benefit but there's enough to we 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 it does really effective work

on that that was pitching it so hard we got Jeff from momentus to make it so they have their stuff so we use them oh they have Roda yeah I didn't know that yeah that's good we got him to make it because I was like you guys just 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 a rodol from but a lot of benefits there for acclimating to altitude cuz I know you've gone from flatlander to altitude a

couple of times anything that you have found particularly helpful for accelerating acclamation to altitude yeah cuz you hear all sorts of stuff right some people take like beetroot extract some people take riola yeah anecdotally right of I'm curious if if you have thoughts here riola would be on my short list yeah I would listen to you either way if you said it didn't work at all or if you said it did like I I would listen either way but it would be a lowrisk potential small reward why not any AD Arginine or precursor beot you

mentioned basil dilation is going to give you every opportunity possible to give spleen of contraction to get more red blood cells into your blood to let you climatize to it couple weeks at [Music] EPO I yeah right yeah that's that's would be my first stop it's a joke guys joke joke well yeah anyway I mean it'll work it'll work it it'll work yeah now you can consider at this point in the same realm you can consider any Global alkaline age and so one of the issues that you're going to see happen with altitude is predictable

increases in respiratory rate predictable increases in carbohydrate metabolism right predictable increases in respiratory quoti respiratory ratio things like that this is just part of what happens like lactate is a big player this is insanely beneficial for you and 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 there lactate is incredibly powerful that through actually bicarbonate at buffering acid so this may sound counterintuitive but you heard that right lactate very specifically will reduce

metabolic acidosis ma 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 of the brain and the Heart in numerous situations including altitude MH used actually right now a couple of handful of Trials being used as an acute huge response to traumatic brain injury no [ __ ] yeah how's that administered you can do it any number of ways IV supplement

yeah gel they're lactate gels any of those things done George Brooks at Cal Berkeley the like the lactate King him and Bruce gladen at Auburn but George's is done a number of those trials in TBI you may or not realize but there's an entire lactate shuttling that happens from muscle into other muscle y to the kidney Cory cycle all that stuff there's also an asite lactate shuttle so asites are like the cells in your centr nervous system M they need energy too yeah so we know that the brain the heart and astrocytes prefer almost exclusively

aerobic or anerobic metabolism which means they love glucose right when you enter into areas of problem whether you're talking about long-term um brain health reductions or even short-term concussions and injury es schemas 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 this is why these things are so interesting it's still a lot to Lear here yeah 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 a 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 sty geometry so it doesn't give you a ton yeah one molecule of [ __ ] one ATP others ketones are it's far higher but it's super fast and effective so lactate would be one I would go to I haven't ever sought it out presumably you can just find that as an oral supplement you're taking capsules of this stuff you

can again the gel would probably be gel yeah better place where you apply the gel is it like any any of your tissue just rub it on anywhere yeah yeah on your legs yeah 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 M solution right

it's same exact idea yeah where you're to put yourself in a little more alkaline situation my guess is that would help you feel a little bit better in that since you asked sort of direct application sodium bicarbonate can come in a lot of forms and fashion it's baking soda yep like literally mhm just be careful though yeah I could tell you many stories in the lab of doing research with baking soda or sodium bicarbonate and yeah there there's such thing is too much of a good thing 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 too creatine and caffeine have this weird relationship increased likelihood of disaster pants not to get too technical but yeah yeah 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 what they make so you can just rub a blond sodium bicarbonate if you want to go around it there so anyone that has any GI issues with that the lotion will

go as well far far far more research on oral applications mhm than lotions but nonetheless on the sodium bicarbon 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 MH to kind of go down those rins the issue with all that is I don't know if you're going to have like a one to five day effect and so really getting into and this is everything from CoQ10 and things like that so the

going back up to like Arginine and beer juice that's going to have an instantaneous effect Sony bicarbon it will instantaneous L change things the other stuff takes a little like a m or a PQ or something like that it's going to take probably to do stuff so by that time hopefully it climatize well there are levels and there are levels right so if I'm operating at 10K but then I'm doing some skiing at 16 or skiing at 16 pass out 14 oh you could do it but but if I'm going up a few thousand feet

for for Backcountry stuff for hell skiing yeah you'll notice that extra thousand ft oh yeah for sure yeah I would probably let physiology just do wants to do mhm 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 yeah and we're going to walk ourselves into these first two or three weeks anyways if you were there for like for example we have Brian Ortega is fighting and I I think I can say this yeah by the time this comes out it'll

be it'll be open is fighting in Mexico City for his next fight that's 7500 feet in elevation Ryan lives Torrance so he lives below elevation we are doing things specifically now starting like two day to prepare for that but that's because we have to get there for one event one night right you'll have two months to time yeah 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 in 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 down right so this is alcohol this is any number of suboptimal visible stressers hidden stressers that's going to hold you back but once you've removed those things MH 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 yeah but then don't have too much control of the wheel super important it's human nature to think about how we can accelerate things accelerate accelerate 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 breaks on yes that's exactly right you'll make a lot of progress Andy 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 Andy galpin.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 I appreciate that opportunity the absolute rest of course is our sleep company 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 five 25 and 55 minute physiology videos mhm

and if you've been paying attention when I say 25 minutes it's is and when I say 55 minutes it's is yeah I get bur on that one I'm always going to do that and that is like always going to be free out there but we had I had such a demand for it I was like mean I just need to make a full proper education company MH so we released our very first course in Thanksgiving and I think we had people from over 90 countries get into it I was like all right it'll do well

but holy cow mhm 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 a an algorithm if you will step by-step process on fatigue how to stop it from happening corrected like what to do like all this stuff so that'll be coming at biomolecular athlete.com I think it's forward strength but if you get to buy Lu athlete it's going to get you close enough the other one we're launching

in Jan January is called Vitality blueprint MH and that is 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 mhm 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 are done for you and then as a result of that you get spit out very High Precision

supplementation nutrition and and exercise protocols M 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 at rapid rapid health and performance is like if you want to come in and get full immersion coaching like I sort of started with at the beginning yeah yeah where can people find that I think that is rapid Health report.com but we'll link to it in the show notes as well yeah I think it's all is

or will potentially be on my side I realize again I'm like 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 all the social media is 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 te performance that's pretty much if you don't want it like do not if that's not what you want don't go to Andy galpin.com

but if that is a then certainly what we mentioned Andy galpin.com on social Dr Andy Galpin and we'll link to everything in the show notes so if people miss anything on Andy galpin.com people go to tim. Blog podcast we'll link to everything we discussed in this conversation which is going to be a lot great for the record I made that website myself on Squarespace like seven or eight years ago so not a lot of Standards right all right well I might be able to help you with an upgrade so TBD on that is there anything

else Andy that you'd like to mention or closing comments you'd like to add before we l on 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 podcast and until next time train smart keep it green lights don't get injured and best 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 entry right I'm not worried about like hitting the most complex Double Black Diamond blah blah blah like 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 knock on wood I've had

very few knee issues I've had issues with a lot of other stuff like shoulder surgeries elbow surgeries you know all sorts of issues but angles 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 Medevac out with a very impressive Tomahawk accident after hitting a ice Ridge at highspeed hellis King so I got metac out for a bunch of I mean like the knee was my leg was twisted around like a GI Joe figure is bad and

I felt a pop in the hip and the knee cuz one ski ejected the other one didn't so as I tomahawked like the tip got caught and rotated my leg around and landed and I was like [ __ ] I'm going to wait for the tail guide to check this out 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 like a mild tear I think it was miniscus 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 ice lateral leg training cuz part of what precipitated this I've had back issues for for decades it's just I have a transitional segment 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 yeah okay what really precipitated the acute phase was back squats and

I'm sure yeah I could dissect biomechanically why I think I [ __ ] 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 mhm a little tension after that with like terminal knee extension let's just say terminal extension like when I'm walking if I try to keep my heel down I'm like huh 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 yeah right how might you think about getting back into skiing but doing it in a responsible way what type of training to augment with just the time on the slopes okay great so I will actually directly answer your question finally oh my God yeah we'll go straight to 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 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 nauseum 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 M you got to get better at fighting you got to get better hit in golf balls you got to get better hit in tennis balls Etc

so tell me what that looks like in I'll War verse engineer the training backwards great okay 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 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 for my lesser self like week one is going to be acclimating let's just call it then begin beginning week two probably minimum 3 days a week of training with a coach yeah and then depending on recovery and other factors an additional 2 to 3 days of skiing most likely then after 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'm I have not decided on what adjunct training y to 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 lowkey let's

just call it down regulating yoga classes a week mhm also for just hip stuff and then some type of core training there a couple of great uh platies instructors find that very very helpful for seemingly mitigating some of the lower back issues and and that's about it as far as it stands right now so let me see if I can spit that back to you mhm first week just getting on the slopes moving yep moving around yeah and just and acclimating to altitude yep 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 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 mhm depending on conditions yeah depending on right so it's like if if we're training for powder we don't have the chance might train on Moguls for host of reasons and yada y y what you just outlined is fight Camp M it's exactly what it is yeah you move week one you do these

things and then you get into a specific plan for five to eight weeks of like different things on each of the days we have different emphasis right so we're boxing one day we're wrestling another day Etc you're doing it's the same thing it's the same thing because we might do one day it's a real carving emphasis we might do another day that is you know powder emphasis another day that's more conditioning with the touring great so here's what I do a couple structured things number one 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 away you you'd be willing to let it go be willing to sacrifice if it helps sort of looking at say Lance Armstrong post cancer when his like relative strength went through the roof yeah I'm willing to compromise that for the sport if that understood yeah don't want to go let it go away for no reason no no no no if it's matters right now I don't know a ton about skiing so I 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 M high impact on joints my assumption is that's shorter duration yeah the runs are going to be shorter duration like 12 minutes like two minutes like I would say with the coach two to five minutes before stopping to review technique and then some back up the mountain and then multiple runs of that a day yeah yeah how many runs rough I would say minimum 10 to 15 total runs the other days are more when you're

doing like the touring stuff 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 yeah 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 a steady state great and this would be in the sort of go heavy go long go hard this would be like the go long

yeah yeah okay great how many days a week total seven six five I will likely increase the volume each week my recovery will just be compromised in the beginning as I'm acclimating to altitude Etc so I would say my goal would be by week three that I'm at minimum 4 days a week oh okay 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 about your upper body is when

you're moving on skis like that and again I know minimal about it you're having polls and you will get some upper body like you are using your upper body there's actually classic data going back to the very beginning or talk here um at for the most part looking at Cross Country skiers this is like our study was in that biopsy data that had been done in the deltoid so shoulder muscle you can get like a 95% reduction in muscle glycogen content mhm 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 like you you can torch your shoulders oh for sure and also triceps you can smoke your triceps and the reason I'm saying that yeah is going back to your back and knee mhm because if we are now either compromis strength Endurance on our shoulders and now we're getting up or downhill or control 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 100% right it's

not going to be to the CrossCountry skiing is like Nordic skiing is insane it is just like torture personified the cardiovascular capacity is so outrageous absurd absurd so I'm not doing that I'm not doing that I mean there are like cardor 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 yeah but to your point yes I'm using the upper body and one of the question marks that has existed in 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 yeah sorry everybody it's getting very personalized you're not sorry all yeah I'm not sorry sorry sorry I'm not sorry uh 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 the toll and the tax I can take

especially if you have mobility issues or or any type of orthopedic issues okay so big picture wise what I would do is set up your week MH 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 in both of those categories on all our 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 yeah it is impact it is also probably more focused because there's like Crash and Burn yeah 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 y okay that's a red we're going to stack that red when it comes to your training now 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 dat or this could be one of the other ski sessions that is a very low technical recovery movement something like that this is something of there and then we can come back and Sack probably like an orange yellow whatever you want to call it kind of in the mid 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 gnarlier stuff yep 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 red lining yeah you don't want to like yellow then maybe something else maybe it's some drilling right like drilling like single leg practice stuff like that yep it is high technical feedback stuff exactly High technical feedback stuff and then the maybe the Orange is the moderate touring something like that 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 and when you say red on red that's in a single day single day yep because 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 like 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 of fashion right that's what I mean say if it's a single session that's fine yeah single session red is fine it's going to carry over to the next day 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 batch recovery into that the next day then we got to pay that toll back okay now this is again technical work yeah so I'm saying this is much for myself I am am saying for myself but like the slow restorative yoga was fantastic for down regulation that's where the day ends yep 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 like maybe enough because we just want restoration fine like if you're like no I leave there and I feel more energetic I feel Unwound than oh I basically feel like I'm almost asleep cuz it's also really dark studio so perfect so we would lay out the entire week on the skills there and this would progress over time over right so the Reds get a little bit harder the green Stay Green this is a major mistake people drift green drift everybody drifts yeah right you end

up just having a bunch of medium stuff which is great you got to accumulate volume there the way that I want you to reframe this is when you're thinking of red we're thinking about maximal capacity MH can I perform under these maximum 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 it is practice y the general rule of thumb is probably something like 20% of the time can be read and almost everything else

needs to be practiced or recovery mhm much more than that depends on your unique physiology but you know 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 slower to recover than a lot of my friends who are competitive athletes who I trained with same workload kind of same diet same habits and I'm just I'm slower to recover yeah that's it's another metric we actually like we always bucket

so I want to S with your Total Recovery capacity and then it goes back earlier it's that non-specific stressor get those out of your life and watch your recovery capacity just take off MH so we want to work on that 100% but nonetheless this is the end part the recovery capacity is give me my other stuff and I'll get that up higher as soon as 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 out kicking our capacity to recover like this is

where the problems start to exist we want to out kick them a little bit got 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 lock up 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 tight tight that's effectively what's happening right no real actual change there but is a global regulator

it's a governor saying lock up right 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 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 I'm generally when I am my better self meditating twice a day 20 minutes basic TM stuff trans meditation and breath

work on top of that I'm not doing much independent breath work 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 it's I'm not even sure what the sort of general term would be it's a mouthpiece with it's a respiratory trainer you know it's respiratory training and I do find those extremely helpful on a number of levels funny you mention the O2 trainer that research came from my lab oh yeah yeah oh [ __ ] okay there we go so that's

boss rutins sper yeah I had him on the podcast that's when I started using it in preparation for high altitude hunt yeah and found it tremendously helpful yeah yeah since it came from your lab it's just 60 seconds sure just a brief overview we touched a lot on respiratory rate now the reason respiratory rate can be either dysfunctional or even just suboptimal which are are different is because of a number of things I talked to you about it could be pattern record recognition mhm could be psychophysiological right what I never even got to was could

be biochemical that would be CO2 that would be pH levels right you're trying to restore there the third one is it can simply be mechanical yeah so this is intercostal muscles so these are the little muscles that are in between your ribs as well as your diaphragm MH when you 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 is not less oxygen at altitude there's a same amount of oxygen at 10,000 ft

as it 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're may be aware 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

air flow in and so you actually have to actively pull it 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 like any other muscle they fatigue so when you lose that ability you lose the ability to bring in air like during acute exercise so that becomes a problem another free way to do it is this is when nasal breathing M 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 n some 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 like for a reason but if you have significant problems breathing at moderate to medium intensities O2 trainer great or nasal breathing or any other tools but it's effectively getting out respiration train yeah and that came in because you're asking if I do separate breath work

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 diag yeah so let's leave that alone but I would say right now no I'm not doing separate breath work okay let's take a look at CO2 tolerance let's take a look at mechanics how you're moving how you're breathing potentially I don't know if you guys cover this in your combo with Eric or not but you know where are your ribs at

are you have excessive rib flaring it's something that I've been working on a lot in the last let's call it 6 to 12 months yeah just having my awareness brought to it but generally yes quite a bit of flare yeah yeah 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 you know pattern psychophysiologically something like that but that would be the places to start 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 the meditation the same thing it's m 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 this is not necessarily just this Panacea of everyone go do down regulation breath work M particularly if if your HRV is extremely high so you're very parasympathetic and and this has actually happened again this is rare more common is what we've been describing but has happened

you we have had folks that have very high HR v s so if you're using a device like an aura that's getting you this you know once every 5 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 may be totally normal especially if you're super fit anytime we're running through physiology we're never taking action

on one metric 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 M and you give them a bunch of down regulation work yeah right going to be a problem going to be a real you're pushing the slider in the wrong direction you're pushing the slider in the wrong direction for sure more typical is up regulation we need to bring you back down yeah

I just feel like it's important to say that because some people go out there and just have everyone down regulate and you're like who yeah yeah time out here you may or may not need breath work at all is a baseline tool yeah for sure so I want something in there to after those sessions hit and we've got that big fear to go okay let's let's bring it back down that could be very very low volume strength work mhm if we feel like we have a little bit of an issue with underregulation this is where

I was going to go next so I'm curious to hear yeah more about this so I want to make sure that you're strong in strong positions so everything you outlined is going to be steady state endurance or a somewhat limited range of motion mhm you've also outlined I'm 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 [ __ ] 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 high edge angle yeah makes sense yeah yeah so that's actually High Velocity Ecentric control all right we want to make sure that we come back in and reestablish 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 looked 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 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 and breathing patterns that are the lowest common yeah recipe right hedging against that that's when we come back and we do our pelvic floor stuff we do whatever stuff that you're doing that says hey no 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 hopefully a lot but even 1% is better than zero any percent carryover we can get from there okay at this point we probably don't need to spend a lot of time on maximum speed and power that's not a rate limiting factor we would have done this in the offseason or some other issue right day late in a dollar short totally but we need to make sure your hips in particular

and 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 them you're going to get a lot of muscular endurance on the slopes M 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 like I don't need that but we want to touch more than you probably want to do maybe this isn't the right way to reference it like what percentage of one rep max ret talking for those doubles and triples 85 okay all right it's up there you're going yeah you're more than you want to do for sure but we don't need you 95 yeah I don't need you at a two rep max yeah 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 but six six okay all right got it got it that's right just to sort of make it concrete for my something you knuckle dragging yeah all right you're doing a double something you could Max six for yep the double could be with weight that you would use for yeah where you would tap out at 6 to8 six yeah something like that I'm not super concerned about the exact numbers here yeah what I'm concerned about is is

it at a level where you sufficiently have to be paying attention yeah you have to be ready to go right we're not sending a work text in the middle of like a set right right I'm not listening to a dense podcast while I'm doing this totally I also don't want it at such a intensity or volume that it's now escalating recovery in a negative fashion 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 right it it there's a little bit of an ASM toote 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 so the amount of volume you could do let's say skiing at 50% of your max heart rate pretty much the same is what you could do at 60% M there will be very little changes but if you go from 80% to 90% yeah there'll be

dramatic increases in time it takes to recover Y and you already we know just based on what youve told me earlier probably struggle higher on the higher end of that spectrum and so getting into the real high terms of recovery recovery so your maximum recoverable volume is 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 yeah my fatigue my soreness from Power heavy strength stuff is really really high yeah from those things because I'm particularly good at that stuff Rel for my own self you're much more sophisticated with this stuff but when in my own primitive way when I've been my absolute strongest I'm generally taking like s to n days between yeah the same workout and super long rest intervals yeah of course it's not necessarily that you potentially respond better to that training is the fact that the hole gets dug so deep if you do more than

that your Maxim recover volume is just super low yeah low so we want to pay attention to that 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 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 had a history specifically with trap bar deadlift I'm not sure why for decades I was totally fine trer deadlift y you're going to love this and then I

did a going from zero tennis to spending I don't know 7 to 10 days with a pro in Florida doing like eight hours a day of tennis technically made tons of progress of course and then I came back and I was doing a trap art deadlift and my right SI was like clunk yep and ever since I've actually had it's I've gone through periods of it improving getting worse who knows if it's exactly the SI but have had issues with both trap bar and say back squatting type movements where I worry about the low back

and and the hip so I'm wondering if throw it off yeah pick a different exercise right got it we're almost always tool agnostic mhm right it is what's the thing we're trying to get to and we we'll pick a bunch of tools based on that right right so I could do some split stance or split St tend to be better for you single leg or split stance entirely or both single leg I would say just seems to be safer I don't run into the same back issues do a single leg leg press yep for all

I care who cares right it's different now we got to do something for the back later but fine yeah totally we can make that work we can do hip thrusting mhm lots of ways we can go about single leg leg press is how I've been edging back into the leg training which is overall going very well with that one strange like piano wire not snap but like twing that I felt a couple of weeks ago so this is just recent two or three weeks ago oh okay okay we could do sled drags mhm 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 you'd probably be fine MH 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 yeah like split stance even potentially elevated one foot overhead pressing rear shoulders things like that let's get your back out

of the equation but I don't want it gone that's the real big key you said a second ago termal extension of your right leg when it's trailing okay great so let's put it in termal extension I want your right leg behind I want your right heel on the ground I want you terally locking out your knee and then we're going to do overhead movement MH and so what we're doing is 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 what to say you never get the time off you are always practicing that movement when distracted MH right that's going to tell us do you own that position do you really have that is that going to me 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 oh yes they're not but then we go right back to treating it system by System yeah if we want to improve movement that

means that foot heel connection needs to be worked on in all yeah of our practices we just don't let it go that's just the new ingrained system so I would do that I would say the same thing for rotational work it's really weird people get to rotation all of a sudden just forget the strength train and they get to rotation they're like I'll just do sets of 10 or like what why yeah like well why is that the only answer you want to be strong this way and this way right yeah 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 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 going great yeah you can use a a very easy rule of thumb 3 to five method is now every time I say this the entire internet comes after me yes I didn't invent it yeah yeah like no like it's been around for a very long time 3 to five which this

means is 3 to five days per week MH pick three to five exercises do three to five sets three to five reps per set three to five minutes rest okay so what that means that could be on the high end 5 days a week 5 to five of five exercises that is a that's a long workout if you start adding up the rest intervals right if you start adding up the rest intervals and even if you cheat the rest and rolles yeah and you do that at the appropriate load 5 by5 is anyone who's truly

strength trained yeah that is a beast it's another word I was wanting to say but I'll I'll pass on saying it like starts with an m and an F involved in it it's it's it's a load right it can be as little as three days a week three exercises three sets of three mhm that's probably what I would hedge more to you yeah so that I'm not digging any deeper with my already limited recovery ability so if I were to give you like just 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 5 days a week as as the way you call it I probably want roughly Wednesday I want almost as a pure recovery day MH 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 we need to get activated so any hygiene we have from you know whoever's you know coaching you 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 it get hot like any of those things you like to do for Recovery Wednesdays as an example is that day mhm that's it catch up on work maybe for a few 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 massage soft tissue all that stuff is Wednesday and that's Wednesday y 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 World of Warcraft while I'm getting a Manny Petty or Petty probably I need my hands yeah there there you go that's Fant fantastic all right that is that day we may or may not incorporate a low intensity walk M this is potentially getting out in you know 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 right

so in place of Zoom calls in place of that type of thing I'll do low intensity walking if not we would say walk outside for some chunks two walks two 10e walks a day Morning Noon something like that any other adjunct therapies and and tools and Technologies we're using is going to be that day mhm so that's amazing let's just say I'm just going to make an example you're just going to run the whole thing let's just say Monday is that really hard red day mhm you go on that really hard session on the scope

we're going to come back after that final session and we might go straight to the gym and get really warmed up and we're going to do 3x3 mhm 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 lower rep ranges as well as the lower body interesting you won't see too many guys who

are really really excellent at bench press who like only do singles or doubles they tend to do probably closer to three to four to fives lower body is like generally opposite so doing like a an overhead press double by the time you get it up and get the first rep up yeah it doesn't work as well 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 very little spinal loading angle it so let's just do incline yeah same thing

right Hammer Jammer press like 45° if you've got a land mine like some other we need to just be at an angle here it doesn't have to be perfectly overhead M something like that okay so I'm probably doing that I want some sort of lower body similar vein this could be threes I love if you have a heavy sled you can push for like three steps each leg M that would be great if you've got some sort of you know potentially front squat gobl squat zerker squat something like that that is not aggravating of any

of your things yeah when we're saying 3x3 2 at 80% this is still week one mhm so I don't care if this is 60% y it doesn't matter like we're just going through the motions any favorite split stance or ice lateral like movements just in my particular case the sled is interesting I've responded well to sleds in the past yeah so I'll I'll look for that it maybe my equipment options might be limited what would be an alternative step UPS a super basic step up right just like holding on to dumbbells or cattle bells or

something yeah just be really careful a lot of people will like to progress 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 yeah for sure now at the same time if we go at a low say 12in box or something we're really not getting much movement here other than a basic knee extension mhm 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 or high box or low box I have only done lower box even at low box assuming that I'm kind of and this is getting into the weeds but when I sort of do like the vertigan like pick the knee up and really get that support leg glute contraction my low back responds very well to that 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 the left foot over there

where is your body at relative to your left foot and where's your knee at the way I've been doing these step UPS is actually a sort of like cross-lateral step oh sure and then a Cy squat yeah exactly yeah okay yeah I've been doing that but I'm open to whatever would you would suggest it has the lowest injury potential yeah so you're doing that and feeling a great glute contraction because you're yeah 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 or you stepping up with a hamstring or glute related activity I'm not sure to be honest if your foot is way on front of you mhm so you can imagine as you go to step up you're rocking forward yeah and then coming up right or if it's behind you right none of these things are right or wrong 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 close Ste typically right as a general rule so what are we trying to get response to potentially your quads are weak yep now when you're getting feeling great response from single leg pressing depends on how your setup is I can tell you how I'm setting up for the single leg leg press I'm actually placing the foot very high on the platform what kind of a platform is this here on a leg press we've got this rectangle in front of

us I am putting the foot quite High On That platform so that 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 so what you're getting is contraction over stretch mhm which is great yeah this is why full range motion stuff is such a good idea right it needs to be strong over those long positions right Charlie wi all day right like long strong and then work hard

okay so we want to be in that position I'm I'm not going to suggest that the standard Step Up position is any better if you're having success with how complicated things like low back are if you're having success with that modified Cur seed step up then I would stay like probably right there okay which is great the only thing we might want to do is potentially load it more y I don't know how you're doing now honestly most of the as far as step UPS go I've been doing it unloaded like this is body weight

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 like if we started loading curtsy I would start very low yeah like right now let's not go the wrong direction yeah all right let's take our wins where to blackjack table we won one hand let's and step-ups you were saying sort of below or 12 Ines or below like you're not really getting a

and C if you're trying to like win a world record and you're trying to do like a foot step up you got your own set of problems like how do you think about elevation it's because of hip flexion if it's at a very low position then it is 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 really high flexion so your thigh gets really close to your rib cage

y now we have to work the glute 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 high range of motion which is what we're after y people tend to avoid range of motion when they have things like back injuries but that's often times 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 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 hip thrust have you done those before I have done hip thrust I mean we talking about like barbell across the waist type stuff y I have glute Bridge hip thrust 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 hip extension I'm usually okay if it can cause my spinal Erectors to fire oh yeah yeah and that sometimes gets me

into a spasmed situation where it's problematic yep 100% so you're getting extension from lumbar spine instead of 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 roll outs where I'm really getting the hamstring then I'm fine yep but higher weight if I'm really making the effort to go full range my spinal Erectors can really get overactivated and stay overactivated yeah so you just want to stay out of those situations yeah I'm glad you're letting us do this by

the way because typically on podcast they kind of just like what's the yeah what's the cookie cutter like you can this is this is and I know this is really self-indulging everybody so I I appreciate you bearing with but you know what I would have said cuz 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 cookie cut or once size fits all you're going to have to

Zig and zag like we're doing right now so this is I appreciate you being game to do it also cuz 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 what's the right word hypertonic if my spinal directors just like turn on and they refuse to turn off that can last two days or more or three days

and it [ __ ] up my sleep so badly and everything else and everything digestion all of it mood work to do anything okay 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 at this point this is like green only yeah yeah yellow orange is out like that's what we're doing the only other thing I'd say is okay let's let's change the positions entirely 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 yep take the back entirely out of the equation retrain glutes contract hamston contract when we don't give the spinal Erectors an 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 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 him to the party

this guy again 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 mhm 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 quads hamstrings and glutes are truly conditioned we isolating mhm and until we get out of pain I would do leg extension on a leg extension machine y leg

curl on a leg in your situation where you're at and limited resources probably not a fulltime PT like yeah remember folks like this is this situation here and then we're going to slowly in our warm up and cool Downs do sequence movement patterns that go glute hamstring low back mhm right and just to start like hey remember this is the pattern we want to be in okay now we're not going to put 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 warm-up that you do every day prior to skiing that is the same sequencing y right could be a thousand different little things we do but we're going to do a couple of drills and I'm literally talking 4 minutes of work right we're just remembering proper glute sequencing and this is a combination to last around this last point out because we haven't got to Tuesday yet I still have more questions about Monday but yeah okay oh folks I'm having

a ton of fun so I hope they are too yeah 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 mhm because we can't then rebuild the lower sequence without and then just let the ribs do it that natural thing and so we don't want to be in a situation where we're like locked down where we can't like breathe and everything is 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 MH is you're not going to see significant changes in your posture low back pain in three days by doing a four-minute warm-up a year later yeah this this can have substantial impact what might that warmup look like one of the things I'd probably start you with is a basic diaphragm warmup mhm okay so this could be as simple as let's lay on your 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 yep 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 maybe probably nasal only okay awesome now we're going to do a glute Bridge we're get in that same position and we're going to make make sure as high as you can go 6 in 2 in an inch off the ground

I don't care only as high as you can go and we're probably going to tuck our chin mhm this is almost automatically going to keep your position out of extension in your low back right 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 Y and Watch What Happens reset yourself mhm come back up and watch you've gained 8 in in your hip extension guaranteed because not you've actually stretched anything but you've turned signals off right now you're in

a position to where anytime you get any perception through your low back it just goes lock the governor is just like Bingo turn it off shut off the yeah you have to turn it off right throw the switch so you throw the switch and 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 stay green totally Stay Green we're going to do some breath work there and by

breath work again yeah breath through your nose three yeah three of them four five whatever you want doesn't matter okay then come back down reset come back up one more time you'll be up four more inches 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 our we have torsal rotation and we also have that termal hip extension and now can you still breathe M what happened to your ribs I guarant as soon as you do that you look down you'll have arched M ribs have gone up this is not a locked in hard contraction this is a chill position it has to be 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 to do the next

one take a break in between like those details aren't what matter here right 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 symol sequence we are 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 a curve from there I would probably then take that exact same thing and go into a split stance MH

so imagine you could do this walking lunges I would probably do this 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 Superior ELC spine that Asis that front point of your hip you're going to pay attention to that if you want to pick 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 yep and just breathe do a step all the way down

if you want to play here that's fine right 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 like if your right knee is forward in this lunge position mhm and you want to take your left arm and reach it over top of your head you want to 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 check box that says this is my warmup mhm intention is everything here as soon as you lose intention just stop CU we're trying to make sure we have a specific action not just like coach that 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 little like bony protrusion on the front of the hip folks like if you see someone wearing low jeans and you see like ridges in the

front yeah it's the arrow that points yeah right exactly okay so that is the intention then right 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 yeah and it's breathing not even necessarily like the other classic things that are associated with a physical warm-up like actual temperature increases being metabolically efficient in the muscle having more strength and power production that's coming too but we've slid that in MH we've also slid in breath work yeah cuz you're actually now altering O2 and

CO2 on purpose and you've done that on top of correcting movement patterns mhm and now you're reestablishing that so I would argue would Lov to do this Barefoot sure if possible right so your toes are all the way up are engaging I want in this particular case that heel connection to be strong I don't want you driving only through your heel you're going to be driving and using your whole foot make sure we're not forgetting our toes and our feet yeah super important for skiing very important right your foot awareness and control is super super

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 M so it's like the size of a chew if you will if you can put it on a surface of slides and put that on your back foot and let that slide back and forth so you lose some stability 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 mhm

right so we're talking your adductors are now moving you're talking knocking your hip extenders knee flexors they're all working on both sides and we're getting am I controlling my breath M am I controlling my ribs so I would probably add a few of those in again one give me one set yeah six to 12 per leg I I don't really care there's no magic thing we're trying to get here we're 3 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 they have any specific things and this is why I don't have insight but if you had any hey yeah my my right adductor is weaker than my left or it's overused or mic cilus something like that then we would add in specificity here so let's get your left glut me on so we'll do some standing clam shells we'll do some lateral walks we whatever the cases 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 all the way up and down so this could be throw in some stmill right so throw in hand leg opposite here mhm we could do that hand like opposite meaning like bird dog something like that yeah so you're on quadraped 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 youh 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 yep and so you're getting a very strong right glute contraction that's Crossing that fasal line to your left shoulder MH and now that entire thing is in the sequence at the same time your core is working on rotation while remember what happened to your cage yeah exactly 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 M would be probably what 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 St stuff this is rudimentary hops so something like stiff-legged and you're going to do 20 Hops and land intentionally on your heel oo that's going to be hard for me with the heel drop stuff yeah 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 but if you're going to be landing and absorbing load on the skis yeah for sure 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 mhm tangible quick example let's just say you're having an issue with trap bar deadlifts mhm 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 lb for you probably have a pretty decent drop bar deadlift I assume MH okay great so when the pain started hurting at 300 lb okay great let's go to 200 M let's do three sets of six go home mhm come back the next day no no no issue okay great next session slowly working our way up until where's that line okay seems like I can train at 280 and I have no pain okay great 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 okay great now let's slowly go up to 280 you're going to desensitize that system by doing it I'm doing the same thing with your landing and compression right I had to get to that somehow I don't want to exacerbate your pain yeah but I want to do 10 lands I want to do some something it can be maybe on a little bit of a softer ground we could do some other

way around but we want to slowly desensitize the tissue and that landing and loading is is okay MH so that's how I would build Monday Monday this is like Groundhog Day all right so Monday my most important remaining question is related to let's just say in this case the three exercises yeah and 3 to 5 minutes in between I've benefited in the past from 3 to 5 minutes or more 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 5 minutes in between maybe I could just sequence it so that I do exercise a I take like 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 in your particular case 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 MH fact 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 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 a super setum 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 warmup and you do one catch your breath for a second you slowly walk over set up do the next one m i don't care that it's 3 minutes or 2 minutes right or less what we want to make sure we're doing is not getting a ton of fatigue I don't want 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 yeah pause calm down I actually want you to leave these sessions feeling like I didn't do anything yeah okay right like great but if you can do that in super set fashion no problem these should not be 30 minutes yeah remember you skied hard oh yeah well that's part of the reason I'm asking it's like I'm going to be I'll probably be pretty fatigued walking in yeah so if that's great like we're going to get a high quality warm-up in we're going to do a

couple of exercises at a reasonable quality but we're also not going to 90 95% yeah we're getting a good strong contraction probably finish it potentially with one exercise to a pump this would be let's take one area that needs that is under size that is under strength that is dysfunctional and we'll do one set so many options yeah and we could we' probably rotate it uhuh maybe it's just it's glutes M maybe we put a band on and we just do a set of 30 mhm glute pumps yeah it's it we're out of there right

got it maybe something for your shoulder yeah you've had this thing going on maybe it's a hand leg opposite mhm 30 rep I just just did this yesterday it's kind of shoulders using like rear rear Del stuff and totally feels great felt great yeah yeah so something like that maybe bent row on a machine like 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 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 if I'm not hungry like I'm just I develop the habit of not eating very much and I can see that in my lean body mass right now in terms of just totals right I'm like hm as an underused or overfat both i' well the overfat is I've just

been a piglet over the holidays and I've been doing less strength training in a being in a protective mode for the back stuff yeah so it's a competent and I think just not consuming enough protein and other things so we talked about Monday I guess if there are any sort of Crux pieces that you'd like to discuss for the rest of the week and then which you already kind of laid out top level right Y 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 a jewelry scale and like I practically speaking I'm probably not going to do that but much like tracking hydration by having a container with a set volume and you just multiply it out that's straightforward right yeah how you might approach nutrition with a similar regarding training we kind of said we're probably just a very quick recap Monday is that red day Wednesday is that green day which that means Saturday which is kind of like the reason I'm doing this is Monday Wednesday Saturday right

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 and that's Saturday it is practice it is yep we missed this we missed this we missed this here's the drills I'm going to do it is not high fatigue it's also not

nothing yeah it's not Green Day you got all Sunday Sunday's off or whatever it doesn't matter what days a 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 M awesome that 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

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 withit 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 m give you a little bit more variety make sure we're doing something pulling something pressing something ER roding make sure we're doing something in what we would technically call frontal and sagittal plane so maybe this is a lateral lunge okay

maybe so not only we now switching out the exercise we're going laterally this way something like that same thing with our upper body maybe it's a horizontal pull row instead of a vertical pull okay I would set that up on Saturday M your technical work 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 right if not go have your fun do what you do enjoy the weekend okay 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 yeah 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 then I'm good mhm hard hard hard ski is probably what I'd say mhm so we're lifting on that Monday we're going to lift again in this case I know this got a little confusing but I'll probably lift on Thursday yeah right this is

split it up a little bit Thursday it's a yellow orange ski hard ski not a lot we're going to LIF m going to be kind of hard so we 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 and now two bonuses from Andy one doubling a client's testosterone by just changing what path he took for his

morning walk and two curing a lifelong sleep disorder in five minutes for $22 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 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 this remarkable results with extraordinarily simple and sometimes even cheap and uh really one change um approaches and so I 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 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 share you some stories but really really really I don't want fall prey to any

thoughts sometimes that really this one particular thing I'm going to share is the cause of all human suffering it's 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 interpretation and really Human Performance and so Dan was working with the 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 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 is not what we do and that's not what this individual wanted to do so the question was can we do this without those options and so Dan had kind of run him through many of the 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 bi markers 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 then didn't rather and but we knew something was there and so long story short what ended up happening was it was actually responding 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 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 start 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 etc etc and that eventually was 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 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 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 things 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 can kind of combine a multiple stories here but when we do our sleep analysis we're not 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 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 that 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 um where people would struggle in this example with sleeping on their back and what we're able to do for a very cheap price was to go on to Amazon and buy what effectively looks like a fanny pack in Reverse so you can imagine a standard not

the the shoulder chest fanny packs but the more traditional ones that just go around your waist like a belt 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 their 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 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 5 minutes for think the backpack cost like 22 bucks on Amazon or something like that