Dr. Andy Galpin: Maximize Recovery to Achieve Fitness & Performance Goals | Huberman Lab

[Music] welcome to the hubman lab guest Series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Opthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine today's episode is the fifth in a six episode series on fitness exercise and performance and today's episode is all about recovery that is how to maximize your recovery to achieve your fitness and exercise and performance goals and how to avoid overtraining Dr Andy Galpin great to be back today we're discussing recovery and I'm very excited to have this discussion

because as we know despite the fact that different types of exercise can be used to trigger different types of adaptation such as increased long distance endurance Anor robic capacity strength hypertrophy Etc the workouts themselves are not actually when the progress occurs when the adaptation occurs occurs and this to me is extremely interesting because it parallels what we see with so-call neuroplasticity which is the nervous systems ability to change in response to experience we sit down to learn something we experience something and that is the trigger for rewiring of the nervous system but the actual rewiring

occurs away from the experience or the learning so to in Fitness and in exercise recovery is where the Real Results actually emerge where we get better so I'd love for you to explain what recovery really is and the different types of recovery certainly different ways to enhance recovery and I'd also love for you to explain whether or not there are ways that people can become better at recovering because if indeed recovery is when progress emerges when we get better well then anything that supports our recovery and gets us better at recovering ought to increase our

rate and our degree of progress absolutely you nailed it in the description what people really want is some sort of change whether we're talking athletes or general population this change is uh some sort of improvement in muscle function reduction in body fat higher functioning metabolism whatever the case is and the only way that happens is we talk about the equation of stress causes adaptation but as you alluded to the piece in the middle is only if you can recover from it and so the game we're playing here is we all agree we want more adaptation

that means we need to bring more stress into the system but we then have to ensure that our recovery outpaces the stress input or else we no adaptation will occur in fact what happens is you will actually be in a negative spot and start going backwards and so what I would love to do is is talk about how we've handled this um and I've had a decent amount of experience here I was fortunate enough to do my master's degree in the laboratory of a gentleman named Andy fry who's an NCA lifetime time Achievement Award winner

and he studied in large part recovery overtraining overuse overload in a lot of areas in addition I've been fortunate enough to work with individuals from high functioning CEOs and Executives who have little time for Recovery High job stress to to athletes uh in the think of the example of pitchers in Major League Baseball who have to recover in a matter of 4 days so that they can pitch again at maximum velocity so I would love to outline some of the tools and tactics strategies that we use for all these individuals um give you some foundational

stuff and I would love to maybe actually cover some things that most people have never heard of um some stuff you may not have access to some technologies that we use some biomarkers um and then even a whole bunch of things that are keeping with the theme of your show here cost free or extremely low cost so all those strategies um what i' would also like to do is cover nutrition and supplementation and fueling and hydration and things but that's probably going to have to be saved for an additional conversation that we'll do in the

next episode yes so we will absolutely hold a conversation about nutrition and supplementation where you can educate us about all the top C toour stuff all the way down to the the uh fine details I do have a question about recovery and it's one that I think most people are familiar with themselves which is soreness we think of it as muscle soreness but I was trained early on in my scientific career to always question the seemingly obvious so couple of questions about soreness first of all what does soreness really reflect is it really muscle soreness

it feels like it's in the muscles uh but what other organ systems and tissues and cell types does it involve and then I'm particularly interested in this concept or this experience that many of us including myself had which is delayed onset muscle soreness why would it be that when we are less in shape or when we perform a movement that is extremely novel to us the soreness seems to arrive after a reasonable delay of maybe even a day you know we're F the next day with 48 hours later we are exceedingly sore and as we

get more fit or more familiar with the movement the soreness seems to arrive earlier so I realized I just asked you about three questions or more first of all what is muscle soreness at a Cellar level which cells which organ systems and so forth what does it mean if we are sore is something I know we'll get into a little bit later and then why the delayed onset muscle soreness it's actually one question so it's totally fine you answered all you asked all three because I'm going to actually answer number three which will answer number

two which will actually answer number one I'd love to tell you that I set it up uh that way intentionally but uh I'm just happy to hear that where I was unable to be concise you are able to be concise thank you yeah we are still learning a lot about this area it's actually really difficult to perform these studies anytime you ask a question about something like pain or soreness you're immediately talking about perception and there is obviously a physical component to that but there's also perception and so teasing those things out is extraordinarily challenging

that said there has been a lot of work in this area in fact probably you may have a show already out on pain or maybe one's coming down the road we did an episode on pain uh while ago but it's definitely time to revisit that literature I also have some amazing colleagues at Stanford who work on pain both from the uh cellular and molecular side but also from the psychological side about how our um understanding of pain and what we believe about pain shapes the experience of pain and Pain Relief amazing that's that stuff is

incredibly important and I'm I'm glad we flagged that and maybe we'll just call that good for now they can come back later for another one of your shows so that being said why does it happen uh 28 to 48 hours after you exercise well that actually should give you some Clues into what's happening so the traditional dogma of delayed onset muscle soreness is what this is called is that it is a result of quote unquote micro tears in the muscle and so you can sort of think I challenged the muscle there was some small tears

in there and I'm feeling the result of that well in fact that certainly does happen and it can happen that is not what's explaining your muscle soreness and in fact you can be quite sore from exercise and have no measurable amount of muscle damage and so much like anything else when we're in this idea of pain it's not a onetoone explanation there are multiple factors that are probably causing your perception of pain muscle damage can be one of them it is not the only one and it is probably in my opinion though this is yet

to be shown definitively probably not even the leading cause of it and so what's actually happening well the reason it's taking you 24 to 48 hours is is you can actually uh find various papers uh literature reviews dating back in a number of years now over a decade that show these wonderful curves of an inflammatory uh and immune response and and we don't need to necessarily go through the entire physiology right now but effectively what's happening is those things have a little bit of a time delay and so some of those steps happen immediately like

right when the exercise is there and then some of them are delayed six to 24 to 48 hours um if you know a little bit about this uh physiology it's you have a combination of neutrophils and macras and a bunch of things happening and this has a Time sequence so what happens is by the time we get to this 28 to 48 hour window now the muscle soreness kicks in which wait a minute if I if this was a result of my muscles being torn and that happened immediately wouldn't that pain start immediately well the

answer is it would and so that that is your first clue that that's not responsible for it when we look at that immune response and we see that that is actually Peak 24 to 48 hours later and then that's the same time the pain kicked in that's cluing you with the problem so we have this immune response happening in inflammation then all of a sudden we start getting fluid accumulation and now there are what are called nose receptors and you're probably very obviously you're very familiar with these and these are pain receptors what's actually interesting

is we don't necessarily know a lot of information about how many pain receptors are in muscle they're not really in the belly in fact this is why I can perform my muscle biopsies and they don't really hurt you mean in the belly of the muscle correct yeah we do have pressure sensors though and so if you change the volume of the tissue you will respond to that very very quickly so by enhancing swelling in the actual muscle that is immediately putting pressure on those pressure receptors if you will that's the signal so what's probably happening

here and I just I just hate to give you another bone but a lot of delayed on some muscle sorus is probably just a neural feedback loop rather than it is actual MUSC damage yeah makes a lot of sense there's a lot of interactions between the um types of neurons that control touch sensation and pain sensation and itch sensation in fact a lot of people um kind of collapse itch and pain together Pingo you know that's something it's painful and it itches is is a familiar thing for people mosquito bites and such um and of

course there's the uh classic gate theory of pain which uh people will be familiar with and then I'll explain why I'm explaining this um which is if you you something hurts you know you Bonk your knee or you stub your toe we tend to grab that body part and try and rub it totally and that rubbing is not a coincidental thing it activates a set of uh touch sensors that are that respond to kind of broad dull touch um and that actively inhibits through the release of an inhibitory neurotransmitter the fibers that control the pain

signal so anytime we we rub a you know like a charlie horse our leg or we or we stub our toe and we you know we winse and then we grab the toe and we kind of like squeezing in a little bit that's actually deactivating or partially inactivating the the pain mechanism so the idea that uh a swelling response would then trigger a neural response that then then would recruit the pain receptor response here I'm using broad broad brush um Strokes here to explain this um makes very good sense to me um now and only

now that you've explained how this process works I can actually even add more to that so if you remember how muscles work so we have to have some sort of signal from the nervous system that has to actually go in and tell the muscle to contract well remember there a few episodes ago we covered the physiology here of what's called a motor unit okay well what I didn't explain to are called muscle spindles and we have talked about proprioception in uh an episode of before as well but we never tied this picture together so let

me walk you through that really quickly and it's going to tie this Loop in into a nice bow so what happens is um this motor unit is is coming in from what's called an alpha motor unit and that's going to be innovating your muscle fibers and that's going to tell the muscle fibers to contract those are typically spread out throughout the uh all sides of the muscle in interior exterior all over on the outside though there is another type of muscle called a muscle spindle now these are non contractile so they don't have that acon

and myosin and they don't produce Force they are responsive they are proprioceptive so what that means is they sense stretch and this is why for example if you were to um stretch a hamstring stretch any muscle group it doesn't really matter or muscle its innate response is to fire back to close that distance and this is what keeps you from say if you're leaning to the right um You can imagine that the example we give is if if you're standing on one foot and you start swaying to the right all right let's say you're standing

on your right foot and this make this easier for folks and you start swaying to the right like you're going to fall on your right ear will hit the ground the inside of your right calf muscle will start being stretched the outside will start being compressed right so the stretch on the inside of the right calf muscle will sense that stretch and it will respond by Contracting that pulls you back to the middle and stops you from falling that's proprioception and muscle spindles send stretch and tell you to contract the way that they work is

is through gamma motor neurons and so these are sensory things so what's happening is unlike when you tell your muscle to contract it goes Alpha to the muscle contract these muscle spindles work such that it is oh I've been stretched send signal back to some Central Point typically in the spinal cord and we don't actually want to go all the way up to the brain we've got a time delay this is why these are subconscious autonomic right versus somatic so that gamma is going to go back to the central location and then come back through

the Alpha motor neurons until it to contract so you have this wonderful mechanism of sensing stretch going back well one Theory that's been put forward regarding muscle damage is that the pressure is actually being applied to those nerve endings of the muscle spindles and that's actually responsible for the pain signal that's going back and coming up to your brain and you're registering that as pain rather than it is actually in the the contractile units so the muscle fibers that that's a very intriguing idea uh because it would suggest that stretching muscles in order to alleviate

soreness might be the exact incorrect thing to do yeah now I'm not saying that for sure for certain I'm just building off the mechanistic logic that we've laid out here yeah really that you've laid out here there's a more effective principle based on exactly that which is this is generally why low-level movement is effective at reducing acute soreness because that's lowle contraction of the muscles antich and get tissue out and and get fluid out wow you're literally pumping it out of the the cell yes and in our previous episode where we were talking about programming

or using the wi but let's be fair here where you were educating us including me um and the audience about different structures for programming exercise for specific adaptations Etc the month week year SC scales Etc we had a brief um discussion about the fact that if one trains legs very hard with resistance training you know some heavy squatting or deadlifting it or and there's some soreness that often times doing some quote unquote lighter cardio or um some uh low impact work the next day or or any number of different things that involve um not high-intensity

uh contractions of the muscles but that do require contractions of the muscles that it can alleviate soreness more quickly than if one were to Simply lie around and you know watch Netflix or something yeah that's exactly right the um to go back just a little bit as well the if that's really the case um the question is like where is this inflammatory signal coming from and while there's much to be learned there uh there is a little bit of information right now that suggests it's potentially coming from free radicals released from the mondra again that

may or may not hold up as more research comes I'm not sure but but if you remember back to our uh conversation on endurance so we talked about the electron transport chain and aerobic metabolism and regardless of whether or not you're getting energy from glycolysis or carbohydrates remember they have to be finished through aerobic metabolism so even if you're lifting weights and you're using carbs for your fuel you have got to finish that metabolism by running it into the mitochondria and Performing oxidated metabolism as a result of that that electron transport chain runs so theoretically

if free radicals which is um which are hyperreactive oxygen species basically they're oxygen molecules that are missing an electron so that they react to a lot of things they're the opposite of antioxidants by the way this is you know oxidant molecules with extra protons so they can balance the charge if those leak out that in of itself is going to be a massive inflammatory signal and that's probably what signals the cause of these neutrophils and macroasia and kicks off this entire Cascade again I believe we need more research there I need to look into it

maybe it's more definitive than I that I know um but that's probably what's happening potentially what's happening rather that causes that Cascade in Signal also um what you have is this combination of well if that's the case why am I not getting tremendous amount of muscle damage when I do more aerobic based exercise well because you don't have the mechanical tension pulling on the fibers that's actually causing damage to the cell wall that allows these free radicals to escape the mitochondria and the cell cell wall so that's the best we can postulate at this moment

as to why those things are happening and then why again low-level exercise tends to enhance uh even things like percussion um so using either instruments that put a low level of vibration into your leg or like pneumatic boots so you massage all these things are generally probably helping because they're moving that stuff out Adema most specifically so pressure comes off of those nerve endings in the muscle spindles and allows you to stop receiving that signal of pain despite the fact that you didn't actually regenerate tissue at all yet fascinating and I think that beautifully frames

where we're headed next which is to talk about all the different modes of recovery and how to accelerate them and perhaps even how to combine different forms of recovery in order to become better at recovering and in doing so make faster progress with Fitness before we begin I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford it is also separate from Dr Andy galpin's teaching and research roles at Cal State Fullerton it is however part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science

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recovery is when the specific adaptations to exercise actually occur I'd love for you to share with us what happens or needs to happen during recovery in order for us to get better at anything endurance strength Etc but also how specific types of exercise stimuli and specific types of adaptations that we trigger so running a bit further lifting a bit more weight slowing the Cadence of a given movement Etc how those specific types of triggers for adaptation relate to the specific or maybe similar types of recovery that are required for us to make progress us in

one of our previous episodes we were talking about how the Harvard fatigue lab really identified this idea of homeostasis or at least sort of championed it for it and that's important because in all levels physiology wants to return to homeostasis so what happens in terms of adaptation is you've challenged it to a level that it realizes if it does not make a change it will not be able to get back to the same level of homeostasis that's fundamentally what's happening that is recovery that process of taking an insult being temporarily reduced in functionality causing a

change so that now we come back and get what we often call in sport performance super compensation all that really is doing though is bringing you to a new level of homeostasis effectively it is understanding if that same insult comes again I need to be able to make sure that that doesn't cause the same level of disruption and so we raise the bar whether this is is enhancing our ability to take the same level of mechanical tension on the muscle and not result in micro damage whether this is being able to take the same reduction

in energy and not have that compromise sleep or anything it's really fundamentally changing so we can have a new level of homeostasis because it's presuming it's predicting that that same insult is going to come again down the road I want to clarify for people that when Dr galin says insult while he may actually insult me um insult is the nerd speake terminology for some sort of damage inflicted to a tissue or system so um he's speaking about the insult to the muscle or insult to the neuromuscular connection created by adding more weight to the bar

um running a further distance um uh running a bit fast or or pedaling faster that creates a micro insult or an insult and now because everyone is familiar with um psychological and verbal insults you'll never forget that biological concept it's important we tag another thing here which is called hormesis it's one of my favorite phenomenon and it effectively means this that there is a dosage or toxicity response to almost everything and if you think about this in the context of say drugs what this means is if I gave you 10 milligrams of something that it

would be okay but if I gave you 20 it'd be a problem and eventually if I go up and give you enough this thing turns toxic this is a case of everything from cyanide uh where it can actually be in small dosages in nature in fact it's in many of the fruits that you eat but it's at a dosage that it doesn't matter if that dosage gets higher though that actually can cause problems and if it is high enough it can actually kill you instantaneously the back end of that though is because you introduce this

micro insult as you framed it for me perfectly your body will then adapt to it and that's really what's happening with exercise adaptation is is it is a hormetic stressor and why that's important is if you look at the immediate responses to exercise you see an extremely large increase in inflammation you see oxidative stress you see a whole Cascade of autophagy like all these problems quote unquote happening it's that what's actually quite funny here is um as a part of my PhD the academic portion I had to go through the medical side of the school

and so I was my physiology class was in med school so I'm the only non-medical doctor in that class right I'm a PhD some I leave my lab I walk across campus and I take physiology class with these folks and I I died the whole time internally because every time we would cover a new area it was basically the the exact same value or number in a medical setting is like oh my gosh they're going to die and in performance setting is like this person's in fantastic shape it's I never still amuses me to this

day obviously because it's just simple things like total blood volume right and you cover like okay if you have a patient come in their blood volume is six liters you know immediately get them on a diuretic of some sort because they're going to have a heart attack as blood pressure gets up right now I'm immediately thinking damn six liters that that person is super fit because that is actually a positive adaptation to training it's one of the most important if not the most important adaptation to endurance training is enhance total blood volume so you you'll

store more blood in your body when you're more fit than you are less fit so I mean I could go on all all these things sodium concentrations potassium concentrations are like you look at these things on paper and you don't know if that person's about to die cuz they're 65 years old and out of shape or if that person is going to break a world record the marathon this brings up a very important tangent which is uh for instance if you go and take a blood test and you are somebody who exercises very intensely uh

with resistance training your blood creatinine levels can be way out of range and if your physician doesn't know that you're doing certain forms of exercise might say wow there's a lot of muscle tissue damage occurring in your body um as you mentioned before your total blood volume is is dangerously High when in fact you are far healthier and indeed much fitter than the person who numbers would be in range that said obviously there are um limits to these to these statements whereby you would want to be cautious and take action to amarate a very elevated

um blood creatinine level or something of that sort but the point you're you're uh bringing up is is also one about the field of medicine which is that many not all but many Physicians don't take into consideration uh the outside activities that people are doing and so it becomes a kind of a plug- Inplay type um type way of looking at blood charts we've done many thousand athletes blood chemistry and uh we we don't use first of all we never look at disease stuff that's not what we do we take people that are healthy and

try to optimize performance and blood chemistry is one of the best tools if you really understand what you're doing there you can uh get some incredibly powerful information out of blood chemistry that actually relates to what we're going to talk to today uh in terms of measuring uh everything from acute to Chronic dehydration to sleep deprivation can be identified in in blood chemistry to optimization improvements in nutrition supplementation there's just a lot you can get there um even people interested in that field I would i' Point them to a gentleman named Dan Garner who's just

an absolute Juggernaut and wizard in blood chemistry for high performance but you can get a ton of information from that if you understand the difference between exactly what you talked about looking for signals of increased risk of cardiovascular events 25 years down the road versus is this the optimal value for high performance in an athlete which is what our our database and all of our software and stuff does is is only looking for those things so I'm going to talk about some of the biomarkers to look for a little bit later um salivary stuff some

blood stuff um but we'll maybe save that part of the conversation for down the road tell me about different time scales of recovery sure this is actually where I was trying to answer your question for and then I got myself way off track but the reason I brought up the hormetic thing is if you understand that some things in the acute say 24 to 48 hour period look terrible it's actually fine right so this is the stimuli that's causing adaptation so the reason I brought up the medical U exchange there is because uh you if

you looked at inflammatory markers and then you mentioned some of them you would see that they are highest acute within seconds to minutes to hours after exercise however that's exactly the stimuli needed to bring them down chronically okay and so chronically meaning maybe in that moment they are elevated and then maybe they're coming down 24 hours later and 48 Hours however if you were to compare your resting level say that Monday before you worked out so your resting level that Monday the week following the week following that what you would probably see is your Baseline

inflammation goes down and so we got to be really careful are we talking immediately post exercise man these markers look terrible maybe my recovery score is awful Etc that's not necessarily a bad thing because what we're like looking to do is to not only change what's happening today but we're trying to cause adaptation that may take us weeks or months to actually access I love that you're highlighting this principle because one of the more obvious ones to me now that you've said this is heart rate absolutely my heart rate goes very very high during exercise

and I do that fairly consistently or even semic consistently my resting heart rate will actually be quite a bit lower that's a fantastic example really what you're getting at here is this concept where I think it's important to differentiate between adaptation and optimization now we hear that word and I use it and most scientists hate it but it's a good communication tool of optimization if you're optimizing for the current moment you're almost surely compromising delayed adaptation right if if I were to say do the thing right now that makes you feel the absolute best in

the world and you're like great you took a nap and you ate a dut like awesome you feel amazing but you know it's causing long-term issues the same can be said on the back end if you're never choosing things that make you better right now you're never actually going to see any adaptation so what we're really doing with this recovery conversation is playing this game of balancing immediate gratification with delayed gratification and how do we identify how much to do now versus not how do I use a value or a marker whether this is how

tired I feel today how sore I am today versus a score on an app or a a tracking metric whether this is a blood marker anything and understand if that's what I need to cause the adaptation I want a week a month three months from now and in the case of some of our other athletes it's even up to four years right we're trying to cause adaptations that will get us where we want to get in the Olympics or World Championships or World Cup or wherever we're going to be so that's the framework we have

to think about recovery we we maybe falsely think about it is I need to maximize my recovery today and you could do something like take an anti-inflammatory whether this is a supplementation or a drug or maybe this is ice oh cool that's great that will enhance your recovery in this moment that'll make you feel better today probably tomorrow but what we know is that blocks the signal for adaptation so you're not going to get the same results you know four six eight weeks from now so when we talk about recovery we have to understand what

tool am I using and why and in order to do that we have to understand what am I training for and what am I trying to maximize um if I am in the middle of a season with an athlete and we are competing tomorrow I am going to headed towards acute recovery right because I have to actuate that performance right now if I am starting the off season I'm not hedging towards recovery I'm actually hedging towards adaptation so we're not going to deploy any of these especially things like uh there's evidence that a combination of

vitamin C and vitamin E will blunt hypertrophic adaptations because they're anti-inflammatory they antioxidants right um other other Studies have shown maybe they don't have uh inhibitory effect they may or may not point is conceptually you want to be careful of what you're trying to optimize for and you have to have that forethought and that alone is going to dictate your decision making with whether or not again you get in the eyes uh you do everything now we will cover some tools like massage that are pretty fine to use you don't have to worry about those

blocking long-term adaptation but others you're going to want to be very careful about so this principle that you've laid out for us which is that there's a set of events that occur during exercise that trigger the adaptation and that sets in motion a number of adaptations that occur during recovery that then get us the exact opposite response to what the trigger was so I'll go back to the heart rate example um heart rate is close to maximal or maximal you do that enough times within a short you know a week or so or two weeks

and your resting heart rate goes down as I recall a few episodes ago you said that your maximum heart rate doesn't really change that much is that correct yes okay but your resting heart rate can go down quite a bit yep is that a general theme mean meaning do we have a more or less set upper limit or ceiling for things like inflammatory markers for heart rate maybe even things like stress and what we do when we deliberately trigger stress or a dramatic increase in heart rate or dramatic increase in inflammatory markers is that we

are lowering the floor but that the ceiling Remains the Same it's very dependent upon the marker so in the case of maximum heart rate it will not change with the exception of one thing which is age age brings it down training will not change it up in most circumstances if you look at something like an inflammatory response I suppose theoretically there is a ceiling though I'm not aware of it um I can tell you right now looking at blood markers of things like creatin kise so remember the conversation about metabolism and that we use phosphocreatine

as one of our primary fuel sources for explosive exercise well if we're using phosphocreatine U this creatin kinas now remember kinas are enzymes that that function to break things down for the most part so creatin kinas is the enzyme you Ed to break down creatine when you do that a lot then that creatin kise gets out of muscle and seeps into the blood um myoglobin is actually another fantastic marker by the way myoglobin is if you think about hemoglobin being in blood is the molecule that carries oxgen around when it's in the muscle tissue then

it's my globin my meaning muscle and it's the same globulin thing so there's a bunch of markers you can look at muscle breakdown and one of the things that you can see is a creatin k level that's elevated after say um one bot of exercise and and you might it might be up you know five or six fold um I've actually seen this number in offensive lineman in the NFL be something like 500 plus fold so even within just one category to the next that that number can get extraordinarily high and if you know this

is actually one is important Point here if if you're paying attention to any mechanistic research or use you're using that to inform your decision-making you have to be extraordinarily careful of magnitude and what I mean by that is if if I were to to be running a a western blot looking at a signaling protein um in a muscle does did this activation of this protein turn on mitochondrial biogenesis and I saw that whatever intervention we gave it whether it was an nutrition thing or a drug or an exercise and I saw that that signaling protein

increased by 20% I would basically assume that to be totally physiologically irrelevant because in order for that to be important it totally depends on the marker you're looking at but you some markers I might need to see four five six hundredfold increase before I know that that will actually be enough to be what we call physiologically relevant others if they're up one or two% that is relevant and so you really want to be careful when you're either reading papers or looking at Social Media stuff if people are just talking about this marker increase this much

it may not matter it may be totally irrelevant physiologically and so you have to that that's also if you're wondering like how the hell are the all these people well that's how they can trick you a little bit and intentionally or not it could be just they're trying to their best but they don't really understand that area enough and so um that's an important point to pay attention to so to answer your question again fully it would be hard to determine if there is truly a maximum level um some things don't want to move like

blood pH it doesn't really want to move the range that you're going to move from is you know like 6.8 to 7.4 and if you get up to like 7.9 like you're probably in big big big trouble other things again can go up 500 5,000 fold and so the markers will really determine that answer well at some point in the future I'd love to continue this discussion around the topic of stress specifically yeah um and maybe we will get into that a little bit later today when we um get into the use of deliberate cold

exposure because that certainly um has effects related directly to temperature on tissue but it certainly has mental effects in terms of raising one's level of perceived pain it's fun also good or some people love it and some people love it for the feeling they get during it um deliberate cold exposure some people only like it for the feeling that they get after it not unlike exercise totally I I love to train I love exercise but I know many people who uh um they Lo exercise but they love the feeling afterward so this will be a

theme that we will come back to thank you for indulging my interest in that semi- tangent I think it's a relevant tangent if there is such a thing if you can now return us to the different time scales yeah and modes of recovery because I think where we are headed is how to get better at recovering yep let's talk about the tools let's talk about what to measure and identify for all four of these distinct levels so level one is what we call overload and just very quickly what that means is I did a workout

today the sign and symptom of overload is you're fatigued per acute performance is down so I worked out hard right now if I were to go try to do a maximum effort I would be reduced in my ability the recovery period for acute overload is minutes to days right that's generally what we call acute overload and that's what we're looking for right so we system should theoretically see that hormetic stressor come back in response come back bigger better more efficient Etc if you were to continue training in that state like most of us do and

say I did a workout today I had a little bit of a Cute Overload going to work out again tomorrow a little more acute overload going to work out the next day a little more acute overload even if you took a day in between it's that doesn't matter right you just continue these acute bouts of insult then you're going to be pushing into the absolute golden Target which is what we call functional overreaching so you have overreached what you can currently do and and it results in a functional outcome and what we mean functionally here

is performance is enhanced and again performance being whatever you deem it to be you're stronger know you've enhanced muscle size your mitochondria has improved you've whatever the thing is it's not just a physical performance thing right amazing recovery time for functional overreaching is typically a few days to maybe even a week or so and so typically what we see happen is prior to a competition individuals will do what we call a taper which is a reduced training volume for some short period of time and the the reason they do that is to again actualize is

the phrase we use here the adaptations and so you worked hard for six weeks and you know theoretically the workout you did three four five six weeks ago once you allow the system to recover will be actualized which means your performance will be enhanced here so functional overreaching is the golden Target okay if you were to be at the point of functional overreaching and you continue to train so it intensified whether this is through intensity this is through volume or really as you said earlier you had something holding back your recovery it doesn't really matter

right it's it's sort of two sides of the same coin then you would move into what we call nonfunctional overreaching so you've overreached again but now it is nonfunctional as in you did not see a positive benefit once recovery allowed this typically means you have weeks it takes weeks to come back from and you basically just get back to Baseline and this is where a lot of folks are who end up in this vicious cycle and so you're like man I'm not getting the results I want I'm going to train harder I'm not getting results

I want I'm going to train harder and harder but because you've recovery isn't improved you just end up in the same spot so then you train more and you end up in the same spot and you end up then just either blowing up or quitting and you're not getting where you want if you were to continue past that point you may actually be into what we actually call overtraining and that typically is uh considered to be overtrained if it takes months to recover from so most people think they're overtrained are really not you're just probably

non-functionally overreached and again the classic distinction is if you took three or four days off and you felt better you weren't probably quote unquote overtrained you were probably just in this area of non-functional reaching you need a little bit of a back off if you and this has been the case I've had the app with gymnasts uh and a cheerleader and some other things where they take a month off and we're barely seeing them start to come back to their Baseline numbers in any number of areas mood desire to train testosterone cortisol ratios bow markers

in a number of areas physical performance vertical jump height like all these things they just start to get back to Baseline so over true overt training is actually quite rare nonfunctional overreaching is much more common and uh it is a a shorter time frame scale so when we talk about recovery those are the four pieces that we're really thinking about and so if you are concerned about oh I'm super sore how do I get less sore how do I either not be a sore next time I do that same workout or I'm super sore now

how do I recover those are playing in that first category of overload and we can certainly talk about how to figure that out but the quick answer is you got to go back to our previous episodes and just pay attention to the volume intensity recommend commendations if you're getting significantly uh more damage or fatigue in a workout you probably have increased your volume too too quickly or something else is dragging your stress bucket down but generally this is a problem of training um you either didn't warm up sufficiently your fueling strategy is off which we'll

talk about in The Next Episode or You' violated one of our principles of increasing intensity and volume sort of too quickly um if it's past that and you're getting to a stage where you're just like I'm feeling beat up all the time my energy is going down I'm just not feeling like I'm recovered now we're in this overreaching stage so the the story I kind of tell here always is uh a few years ago I was working and uh my wife Natasha was in the garage training and I'm doing something and like she comes stumbling

and she has this look on her eyes and they're like giant her eyeballs are giant she's just like wobbling she's like I effed up and I was like what do you mean you like effed up and she's just like I read the program wrong and she's like like what' you do like she was supposed to be doing 10 sets of three every minute on the minute and she did three sets of 10 every minute on the minute and she was absolutely wrecked she couldn't move for a few hours afterwards and then for days she's just

like you have to handle the kids like I can't get out of bed I can't move so that was like a classic example of all right like we don't need to fix recovery here you're just a dummy and you did the training way too hard too long like this is not we don't have a problem here so if it's a situation like that it's generally you just the program was way off if it's constantly happening where you're just like man like for whatever reason every once in a while I'm getting really sore or having a

really bad performance in these workouts then we need to go to our other stress bucket take a look at our alistic load or allostasis and get figured out what's happening there um so those are the the easy ways to flag acute overload problems I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor athletic greens athletic greens is a vitamin mineral probiotic and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs I've been taking athletic greens daily since 2012 so I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast the reason I

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D3 K2 again if you'd like to try athletic greens go to athletic greens.com huberman to claim the special offer I'm happy that you pointed out the distinction between functional overreaching overtraining and being overtrained I think one common mistake that people make in thinking about biology generally is that they think in terms of nouns and adjectives and not verbs amazing I love that so much you know biology is a collection of processes or processes depending on who you are and where you live and who you trained with being overtrained is a state that in many ways

is an adjective you're overtrained I'm overtrained it's like saying uh you know I'm an American I'm a you know Czechoslovakian whatever it happens to be right and in many ways people do start to associate with an identity at least a transient identity and they start making all sorts of decisions it sounds like about what sorts of verbs they will and will not engage in whereas I think if we look at things as processes and we assign verbs to them then we can say okay I'm functionally overreaching or I'm truly over trainining which is a matter

of degrees correct right or under trining for that matter I'm not I'm reaching but I'm not functionally reaching it's just it's just performance and you know just as with the nervous system won't change unless you give it a reason to this is the reason why if you can perform something perfectly or speak a language perfectly there's there's no rewiring of the nervous system this myth that we've all been told that every experience rewires your nervous system it's different now than it was two seconds ago that's that's a ridiculous illogical statement we know that's not true

if your nervous system can perform something it has no reason to change and it won't muscles the same way this is why you have to progressively overload you have to learn something new or challenge your muscle to do something new it's same thing so in the example that you gave uh with your wife doing this workout that turned out to be far more strenuous she had functionally overreached in some sense she might have been overtraining or heading in the direction of overtraining but the mistake would be to assume that she was overtrained right as a

kind of it's almost becomes a bit of a a state or a character assignment um as opposed to a verb and in any case there's no perfect way to describe this we're talking about nouns and adjectives and and we're also um uh talking about verbs but I think the verbs are really anchored down in processes and things that we do actions that we can take and so um if I may I'd like to just highlight this this idea of Shifting one's thinking towards verb actions rather than labels on the state that we happen to be

in or the person that we happen to be right sometimes it even does become kind of characterological in the way that people describe it and uh so I have to believe that there is something called overtraining that overtraining is real in other words but that we don't ever really know if we're overtrained you nailed it there's there's no you know it's not like a red flag you know shoots up out of your shoulder it's like I'm overtrained you know it's um so in doing so I hope that we can start thinking about some of the

verbs the actions that we can take in order to ensure that we stimulate Progressive overload one way or another and at the same time that we don't fall into these bins of character assignment where suddenly we decide that we need to do X like take a month off or something like that because I I'm beginning to realize um from our discussion that that's exactly the wrong way to go those are fantastic points I I want to make sure it is clear that there is no clinical diagnosis for overtraining there are no standards there's no test

or or a blood panel you can pull that would actually identify you in that state so your your distinction Here Andrew of these are verbs rather than nouns is is so wonderful because that is exactly the case uh the only way we could really come retroactively diagnose one with overtraining is if again we had you did weeks of recovery and you only got back to Baseline so we can't do it in the moment I can't take a single test um there's no subjective marker or anything that says you are overtrained it is simply you are

probably overtraining and we need to reverse that quickly or in the case of the step before you are probably fun non-functionally overreaching and if you continue to do this you will probably enter into a stage uh where this is your overtraining and we need to come back so that's an important thing to let people know is there's no one thing we can actually point to that says you are here you are not a noun this is a verb so what are some tools that we can use to enhance our recovery yep let's start off with

that a Cute Overload phase so in other words I just did a workout and I'm feeling awful or I just did one two days ago and I'm super sore how do I get rid of that right now well there's a couple of things you can do immediately after your workout and then others that are maybe more actionable a day later or two days later and we'll just cover handful of them we'll do some nutrition and hydration and supplementation in the next episode I'm going to cover everything else not in that category right now so a

couple of things number one uh you actually start Kickstart that recovery process at the end of your current training session and I guess I should say it this way I strongly suggest you start this recovery process immediately after the workout you mentioned earlier about this idea of you got to get a really high peak of stress to cause adaptation but I actually didn't explain that correctly because what has to happen is you need that extremely high peak but then you have to be met with an extremely sharp recovery back down and so you know you've

talked about this before in some of your neuroplasticity stuff and in terms of what has to happen that caus the insult and then you immediately need to be able to recover to make sure that that causes changes in the brain same thing happens here so we need a really sharp and high inflammatory response and then if you do not meet it with an immediate recovery period the signal won't be there to maximize your results so what's that mean you can actually do a couple of things number one is listening to slow paced music there's evidence

that suggest fast-paced music May uh slow down your recovery and slow pace would actually enhance it so if you just change from you know your maximum get you up and get going music during the workout to a slower lower Cadence that will help you Kickstart the idea of a similar note you can also use what we call down regulation breathing you could do them in conjunction or one or the other whichever is up to you so my personal favorite method here is is somewhere between 3 to 10 minutes of finishing your training session laying down

i' like to be in that position you could certainly do it in the Lotus position but I think laying on your back is generally more effective personal preference there no signs uh I like the eyes being covered getting into this dark quiet sort of area and then just breathing through your nose in a structured Cadence there's a lot of different things you can try an easy example is just box breathing so and you can imagine box having four squares so what you're going to do is inhale for somewhere between like 3 to 8 seconds and

then whatever number you choose you keep that same tempo and so let's say you chose to do a 5-second inhale that's going to take you up vertically and then horizontally for your box is a 5-second hold and then a 5-second exhale and then a 5-sec hold and you just need to repeat that for the time domain I typically honestly don't use a timer you'll actually notice a lot of people will like fall asleep or get really close to falling asleep in this period you could do a triangle version of that where you do an inhale

hold exhale and then go right back into your inhale or there's a bunch of different tricks you can try here you need to play around and see what actually works best for you 10 minutes is probably better but if you can just at least give me three that'll work if you're really really resistant you can actually do that just in the shower and so if you're going to finish your workout get in the shower again just close your eyes in the shower give me three minutes of focused relaxation breathing and that will accelerate the recovery

process I love it and I particularly love it because my laboratory works on stress and respiration AK breathing and the interactions between the two and I'll just mention a result that was just accepted for publication so should be out by time this episode SS uh thank you uh this is the beautiful work of uh not me directly although it took place in my lab but as we know it's the students of posto really do the heavy lifting of um Dr maliss U balbon uh in my lab it's a phenomenal researcher that showed that a short

period of 5 minutes of box breathing of exactly the type that you described or uh cyclic sign so two inhales followed by an extended exhale to lungs empty ideally the inhales are done through the nose the exhales are done uh through the mouth although it could all be done through the nose um or the mouth for that matter but probably nose nose for inhale inhale mouth for exhale or um uh in inhales through the nose and and xhl through the nose cyclic sing as we refer to it done for 5 minutes both of those produce

very significant uh decreases in resting heart rate the over time will increase things like heart rate variability and so on and so forth um so provided that there are extended exhales it seems like the calming response and the reduction in overall stress occurs the only thing that really sends things in the other direction would be something like cyclic hyperventilation I'm sure you've observed that um and interestingly uh when we had people just do 5 minutes of u meditation which during which of course they are breathing but they're just allowing their breathing to progress however it

happens to be in that moment um or moments across the five minutes uh there were reductions in the same sorts of markers of stress that I described but not as significant as breathing so I love the Box breathing tool post-workout um and there's some other Alternatives there too that I just mentioned but I think people greatly underestimate the potency of breathing for shifting one's nervous system function away from stress or if one wants toward more alertness and stress I actually have a couple questions for you on that sure I think the audience would appreciate this

um how long were those boxes was it just user selected great question so we use the carbon dioxide tolerance test amazing in order for people to determine how long the different sides of the Box should be and you cover carbon dioxide tolerance test in previous episode and we can provide a link to that clip um in the show note captions but as you point out it involves a long extended exhale to lungs empty um and of course people could sit with lungs empty but uh they have to accurately Faithfully as we say report how long

it took them to empty their lungs we use that as a as a gauge typically if it takes if people go to lungs empty in 20 seconds or less I believe I have to go back to the paper and look but I believe that the um duration for each of the sides of the box boxes as it were was somewhere between um two and 3 seconds if they had a uh CO2 discard time of anywhere from uh 20 seconds up to about 40 45 seconds we used a the sides of the Box were I believe

um between four and six seconds and then for people longer than a who could discard their erir over a period of a minute um or more we used a uh box duration that is inhale hold exhale hold duration of somewhere between I believe it was um seven or maybe it was eight and um as long as 11 or 12 seconds you get your kind of free diver types who can really do this um who are really well trained for this sort of thing the don't quote me exactly on those numbers but that that was approximate

those line up exactly with what what we've done so I I believe it's it's going to be close within seconds of non-important Distinction is it's going to be close you know so that's great and that was uh it took them what six weeks before they uh so this study was done over the period of a month and then when they were swapped into a new pattern of breathing um condition or meditation condition and this was all done in in the natural world as we say um they were wearing woot bands that we were getting heart

rate heart rate variability sleep data subjective data about mood Etc so there were a lot of measures but this was um more than 100 subjects out in the wild of life um and we tried as best we could to track life stress events and exercise and things like that that was harder to control outside the laboratory really all those results speak to exactly what you're describing here which is that deliberate respiration that involves controlled holds and exhales really has a dramatic and very immediate impact on reducing our levels of stress that that's wonderful I'm not

surprised at all uh with your findings and what's really interesting about that is you mentioned how the exhalation portion is primarily responsible for the down regulation and that's actually goes back to our previous endurance conversation which is that in general at rest at non- altitude increases in CO2 are the primary driver for ventilation and so what that generally means is inhales are associated with an uptick and sympathetic State and exhales are associated with a uptick of parasympathetic State uh this is generally why folks will do things like exhale and finish that exhale right before they

perform a very high Precision neurological task so if you're going to say aim at a Target and shoot you're going to Exhale fully and then almost always execute that movement at the end of the exhale because that's when you're in your highest parasympathetic State and lowest drive for ventilation I have to say I'm not surprised at all that you guys found that there's actually other data that point to individuals particularly after endurance training that can get backed down to Baseline heart rate is going to be correlated with who gets the most actual results of the

training said that if you take a bunch of individuals and put them through an endurance training program and if you measure how quickly they can get back down to Baseline after each workout in general those folks that are better at that are going to see greater improvements in performance at the end of your say four six or eight week training block and so there's a little bit of causation and correlation there that we have to untie but I think it's enough to say hey if you invest these three and in your case your your study

was 5 minutes it's only going to enhance recovery you have a likelihood of increasing the results from your training and now we also have additional benefits like being able to transition more appropriately into our next task going to work going to see family whatever the thing is and it's it's a nice close to I asked you to be in a high sympathetic State body and I asked you to perform and to be under stress I gave you recovery and now we're ready to transition in our next thing so that we don't take that exercise energy

if you will into our next task which may or may not want me in a sympathetic Drive state so if somebody is sore following a workout either locally sore in a muscle group or group of muscles maybe in their legs or chest or torso or maybe their whole body is sore as it sometimes is the case what are some tools that they can Implement in order to to accelerate the I want to call it moving out of that soreness but it's really uh as we know the alleviation of the soreness through a bunch of different

processes what are the most effective tools to push back on that soreness and dissipate it yeah absolutely first of all it's not lactate that's is a really important thing that we still hear people talk about is you know you're sore 24 hours later you got to do this thing to get the lactate out of there as we talked about in the metabolism uh conversation and episode that that is not the cause of fatigue and it's certainly not the cause of soreness so not an actionable tip there but just a pet peeve of mine when I

hear people say that that I get irritated so we can maybe in that conversation um strategies tools here's what you can do you can actually wear compression gear that will help a little bit there's a decent amount of evidence suggesting if you just were to you know put some tighter fitting clothes on Leisure wear or compression gear if you have it that that can actually prevent a little bit of soreness from occurring so if you're in the case of poor Natasha and you realize you just done way way way too much or you went and

hung out with your bow hunting friend and you trained way too hard and you realize oh my goodness I'm going to be very sore here you can immediately put on compression gear and wear that really for as long as possible what are some examples of compression gear I've seen people on the plane with those high high socks um I mean anything that you wear compression gear for what you do for exercise so whether these are just uh you know compression panss and leggings the tight fitting leggings uh whether this is a long sleeve shirt that's

like a rashgard you would wear in you know Jiu-Jitsu or surfing or something like that as long as it's tight fitting it doesn't have to be much more than that you can wear I suppose you could get the socks would be great but um we generally just tell our athletes um they would put on long sleeve compression shirts that they would wear for their training and then long compression leggings and that'd be fine can people apply these compression um Garb after training and still get some of the positive effects yeah I have not seen any

evidence to suggest that that would block adaptation that may be the case I I am not aware of those studies if that happens but um I certainly know that the information suggests it canh hands a little bit of Muscle Recovery but ideally one knows if they are about to do a workout that could trigger a lot of soreness and then wears compression gear of some sort to offset that and if so does it have to be local to the muscle groups that you're working on the reason I asked about the sock is my understanding the

socks that the compression socks people wear on the plane is that it's going to shift the patterns of blood flow not just in the lower legs but all over the body yeah you're probably going to want to focus it on the actual exercising tissue though actually that's a really good question I don't know the answer of whether or not you did an upper body workout only or lower body compression gear if that would actually help that's a great question that may have been done I don't know but I don't know the answer to that in

general we just tell people like we wear the whole thing as much as you can um I actually am not concerned that you're wearing it during your workout it is something you could put on afterwards or even wear just a little bit of compression the other day um we've actually did a really fun study uh I collaborated with um Bill Kramer who's uh you know Sports scientist of the Year award is the bill Kramer award if that gives you an indication out of uh University of Connecticut as well as with Lee Brown so two Lifetime

Achievement Award winners and we we put people on a a plane in stores Connecticut and flew them to Cal State Fullerton so a cross Country flight and some of them got to wear compression gear during the flight and others did not and then they landed in California did a training bout put them back on the plane went back to stores and I think they did another training about when they got back there there was a lot of data that came out of that paper but one of the things that was clear is the compression group

was effective um at handling some of the blood related coagulation and other issues associated with uh long flights and particularly athletic performance so that's actually a sneaky little Insider trick that I'll use a lot with people particularly with athletes that are traveling is just wear that compression gear on the plane so you you talked about that and that sort of rung that study to mind that it's another effective strategy so compression gear in general as well as particularly on a plane um basically the tighter you can get it the better without obviously making your hands

purple and being uncomfortable and things like that so it doesn't have to be overly tight uh anything will work and probably help so I'm also doing that personally anytime I'm taking a flight like that as much as I can just feel a little better when I get there so what are some other methods that we can use to alleviate acute soreness well if we continue down this same theme which is saying okay we use some sort of pressure manipulation to enhance recovery if compression is one strategy you can also use things like um compression boots

or garments and these are pneumatic devices that will you know pump uh air outside you and compress back and forth there's any number of devices that will do this um you can also use the physical hand so this would be massage and body work um they're all really working as best we can tell on the same mechanisms uh which are effectively moving fluid in and out of the tissue as well as potentially enhancing blood flow uh increasing capillarization and which is going to only get nutrients in and waste products out so you can kind of

pick and choose based upon your budget uh preferences availability timing things like that so those are all effective strategy outside of that really is the next largest category which is now thermal and uh and so far in this discussion we've mentioned cold water immersion and I talked about in the hypert section how you would not want to do that immediately post exercise which would be getting into cold water or an ice bath if you're trying to grow muscle mass having said that there is good evidence showing that cold water immersion specifically is effective at reducing

muscle soreness so so it is a fair consideration and it's a classic example of how there are no free passes in physiology nothing is always good or always bad it's always about what are you willing to give up and versus what you're willing to get and in the case of like cold water immersion you may be thinking yeah I might blunt some of the hypertrophic adaptations but if you're in that phase of training where you're actually trying to push more towards optimization in that moment rather than long-term adaptation then a an ice maath might be

a great choice in addition if you fall into a scenario like Natasha did and you realize like I'm just so unbelievably sore this might cost me three or four or five or six days of training it might be worth it for you to accelerate that recovery process by a couple of days so that you don't miss so much training so it's it's just a it's an algorithm it's an equation what am I looking for again if I'm in season or trying to compete or if I have just done way way way too much exercise and

I'm really in significant pain you would probably be willing to give up some small percentage of eventual muscle growth after a single session to get out of pain so um of the cold strategies cold water immersion is clearly the best approach rather than cold air or some other tactics so a cold shower is probably not enough here you really do uh want to be either in moderately cold this is maybe 40 to 50 degree water uh for probably north of 15 minutes or you can be in sub40 for as little as maybe 5 minutes to

get some of the effect and there's been a number of studies um so I'm sort of summarizing a bunch of that kind of into one rather than going through them Point by point the numbers you just threw out U which I'm assuming are um uh Fahrenheit um seem seem really cold to me right uncomfortably cold absolutely so I always recommend that people ease into it as a protocol overall that they not immediately go to 35 degree uh cold water if they've never done it before uh that said once people are comfortable being uncomfortable because I

always answer the question how cold should it be exactly would you agree that it should be very very cold so much so that you really really want to get out but that you're able to stay in safely whatever that value happens to be you absolutely need to be safe having said that we have actually in our xpt Retreats put dozens if not hundreds of people at this point uh immediately into the sub35 degree water their first time ever and done you know 3 minutes multiple rounds uh in a session so they can handle it but

you don't need to go that crazy if you don't want you kind of have to play a game right do you want to be really really cold for a short amount of time or do you want to be like kind of cold for a longer amount of time I really the only mistake you can make is doing something like you know 65 degree water which for most people is not very comfortable and doing you know five or 10 minutes it's just not going to be effective it's probably not going to be effective so if you're

like man 35 is is absolutely crazy and you want to do 55 degree water and there's literature in that area but it's going to say you need to probably be there you know somewhere almost surely north of 10 minutes and some of it will actually show you need to be in there like well north of 20 to 30 minutes so for my money I would rather go really really cold and get it down in five minutes but um personal preference on this one you can also make it a little bit easier on yourself there is

not nearly as much evidence but there is some on contrast stuff so uh this is when you go cold hot and sort of back and forth there are no really good rules in terms of how much should you go how many rounds how long and cold how long and hot again there have been a couple of studies but and obviously those studies use numbers but that doesn't mean those have been tested to see what what are optimal which is a very big difference so um you can really just kind of play that by feel hot

is good for Recovery you just have to be careful because you are going to put more blood flow in the area and so you you may walk out of there with some additional acute swelling which is then going to put greater pressure on there so you have to kind of play with that I personally really like hot uh for Recovery I will feel maybe not great in that moment but the next day I tend to feel really really good in addition if I wake up the next morning and I'm really really hurting and and I'm

super stiff a hot bath will will help that um quite a bit so you can play with some of those protocols again you don't have to do ice there's absolutely no requirement to do so it is just an option if you're interested yeah the studies of Dr Susanna soberg um sure yeah are not directly aimed at alleviating soreness or recovery they're more about increasing thermal capacity by a storage of uh Brown adapost tissue not the blubbery fat but the stuff around the clavicles and around the heart that help you generate body heat at rest and

metabolism and so on and the numbers there that um she's come up with again have not been tested against all the possible derivations just like with breathing we did five minute sessions but who knows maybe a minute would have been equally effective we just there are constraints on these sorts of studies but the values that she's come up with which seem to be good thresholds for making sure that an adaptation response is triggered by heat and cold is it ends up being 57 minutes per week total of uncomfortable but safe heat in that case sauna

and that can be all in one session or breaking it up into a couple of sessions on the same day or or different days and then 11 minutes per week of cold either in one single session or multiple sessions again one could do more um one could break that up over you know multiple days or do it all in one day or do it all in one you know an hour in the sauna and then 11 minutes in the cold or vice versa although that seems a little bit extreme especially for the uninitiated but those

are the numbers that have been studied but as you point out there are not a lot of really thorough studies examining different cold protocols according to temperature by time requirements so there is a bit of subjective feel required to establish a routine and I would actually say this is another time to re-emphasize something we talked about at the beginning of our convers which is that pain itself is not a defined outcome it's heavily influenced by your perception and so if you don't feel like they work for you they won't work if you feel like they

work fantastic they do so it's a challenging field to get really objective data on so there's always going to be a little bit of subjective nature to some of these things I can tell you anecdotally we've used hot and cold contrasts for a long time with athletes um some love it some don't care for it and everything in between so it's one of those things where I never mandated of course I can't mandate anything for anyone I work with but I'm never you know like hey are you interested great you're struggling in this area you

want to try this you did and you liked it great you're struggling in this area and you tried it you didn't love it okay fine I'm not we we'll find other routes as we we'll get into there's a lot of ways to enhance recovery um this is only one and it hasn't even really come down to stopping the problem in the first place we're not we're just treating symptoms which is first line of defense but you really need to go back and figure out why it's happening to begin with as a solution these are just

different again acute symptom management tactics one final point about uh deliberate cold exposure I think worth mentioning is one of the reasons the shower is effective but not nearly as effective as cold water immersion or immersion in ice up to the neck is simply because of the reason you stated before which is that most showers are not going to get that cold you're not going to get down you know into the sub 40s um also cold showers haven't really been studied that much they have but not nearly as much as immersion and people always ask

why I just think about the challenges of studying cold water uh exposure in the shower where you can't really control for how much of the body is covered whether or not the head stays under different Siz bodies Etc whereas when people come into a laboratory they can get into a cold water tank we know where the neck is know where the chin is and we can make sure that people's arms and um legs are underneath but with cold shower sure you can make everyone face away or toward the shower but it's really tricky and um

for all the variations that that were described that said would you agree that if one wants to use deliberate cold exposure that cold shower is better than nothing and cold immersion in circulating cold water or ice bath is better than um than cold shower yeah what I would actually say if you're looking for recovery for muscle soreness I would say cold shower is probably doing very little U because you're not going to be able to get enough cold water onto any muscle besides basically your head um so maybe you could try a cold bath uh

and so you at least get some surface area coverage but yeah if you want to use cold shower for all the other awesome reasons cold shower that's totally great but if you're trying to use that to recover your low back and glutes from being sore from training in a good way it's probably not going to do much the the immersion would be there you actually also hit sneaky other point which is if you can't get your water super cold just make the water move so if you have Jets and stuff you can turn on and

anyone who's tried this and you're like okay I can do a 40 Dee bath awesome uh try 60 when the water's moving right because you break up the thermal layer normally you have a little thin layer of water that you're heating up you break that up it's a whole new world yeah absolutely so being very still in the cold water is actually the weaker way to go correct that you can make your face stoic but make your body circulate some water around you as long as we're on this maybe just one more point about heat

uh I've certainly used sauna wet sauna dry sauna steam sa saunas excuse me jacuzzi can work pretty well y um uh males if you are looking to conceive in the 60 days following uh following sauna or um hot tub do realize that it that both those approaches do severely limit the number of motile sperm um substantially so for people that are not trying to conceive don't think that this works reliably enough that you could use as a form of contraception yeah but but for people that are trying to conceive it really is detrimental to to

sperm Health right and so for that reason some people bring an ice pack and put it on the groin or near the groin uh when they go in but um which is harder to do in a hot tub than a sauna so here we're getting into the fine points um or crude points if you will pun intended but um but the idea is that we we wouldn't want anyone to approach these techniques and compromise their other life goals was not allowed anywhere near these things when uh we were at that stage of life I I'll

just say Natasha put an x on me hanging out with lared so going going in no for those reasons she's like you're not going in you're not going none of the stuff and I just had to wait right he um heat and sperm have a have a relationship but it's not one that's positive for the sperm I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor insid tracker insid tracker is a personalized nutrition platform that analyzes data from your blood and DNA to help you better understand your body and help you reach your health

goals I've long been a believer in getting regular blood work done for the simple reason that many of the factors that impact your immediate and long-term health and well-being can only be analyzed from a quality blood test one issue with a lot of blood tests and DNA tests out there however is that you get information back about various levels of lipids and hormones and metabolic factors Etc but you don't know what to do with that information inside tracker makes knowing what to do with all that information exceedingly easy they have a personalized platform that lets

you see what your spefic numbers are of course but then also what sorts of Behavioral dos and don'ts what sorts of nutritional changes what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you if you'd like to try insid tracker you can visit insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off any of insid tracker's plans again that's insid tracker.com huberman to get 20% off are there ways to combine uh the various types of um stimula that you described for inducing recovery you talked about breathing based tools um which

while they could adjust and indeed do adjust oxygen and carbon dioxide ratios and Etc I'm guessing the major effect of those on recovery is going to be neural it's going to be deliberate calming of the nervous system more sympathetic based uh you mentioned yeah most definitely and then you talked about some movement based and touchbased approaches um which will uh movement cly certainly will circulate blood but also will generate contractions of the muscles yep right which maybe if indeed again it's still speculation if indeed some of the soreness is due to excessive stretch or swelling

at the stretch ends of the of the muscles that would make sense so movement and touch and then thermal are there ways to to combine these um that are more effective or maybe even synergistic yeah I suppose you could throw on uh some compression garment put on a Pneumatic compression device and sit in the sauna while you down regulate your breath like that that would be fine quite honestly though you probably don't need to maximize all of them we were joking uh you could probably go for a light swim while regulating your breathing in cold

water uh you get the compression from the cold water and and you'd be in a good spot so you can certainly do that the reality of it is I generally look for some physical approach and then some uh holistic approach of the breath work basically so I want breath and then something else if you knock those two things out you're in a good spot so that could be breath while you're in thermal stress so just controlling and doing the UN regulation stuff you have to also remember ice is a stressor and I'll actually show you

some data here in a second about how that actually can enhance um systemic recovery although it won't happen in the in the acute minutes in fact it's going to take at least 30 to 60 minutes and then you'll eventually see a rebound effect but acutely it's going to make you actually more sympathetic which is going the other direction heat can do the opposite opposite or it can actually drive you up so it's a little bit dependent upon how you respond what time of day um and how you're using so in general I guess uh combining

them is if you need it um depending on what you have what's available so perhaps you don't have a sauna but you can take a hot bath great maybe you have some percussion device some tool and you can use that but you don't have u a sauna amazing don't have ice bath these things so I think rather than thinking about an optimal combination of them I would say just use a couple of the tactics based on what you have and what is easily available um in your situation I'd love for you to teach us about

some of the methods for longer form recovery as it relates to overreaching and overtraining sure you want to think about this in a couple of phases phase one is to try to prevent it from happening in the first place uh in terms of training load you're going to just go back to our previous episodes where we talk give you specific instructions for how much to increase your volume and intensity per week Etc the other thing you can do then is do some monitoring and I'll I'll go over some different tools some cost-free ones as well

as some some higher techologically demanding ones uh to monitor to see if it's actually happening and then the third approach here is what if this is already occurred I figured out I'm so how do I get back out of that hole so I would like to just sort of tackle these one by one in order and and talk about what's happening what tools you can use and why they're going to work all right so anytime we're talking about fatigue management here most people are aware of these terms because if you have any sort of Technology

uh you're probably getting some sort of Readiness score or recovery score or strain depending on which app or watch or Tech you have you have a little bit of vacular change if you're in the sport performance world you might be looking at things again like load or GPS tracking and monitoring and really all of it is is doing the same thing it's trying to either one predict a problem is going to happen in the future and then placing restrictions upon you so that you don't run into that situation the other thing is possibly doing is

identifying a drop in physiology or performance and then saying we need to get you out of this hole that's really what's happening and so when we think of the first one just imagine uh a scenario like a mileage limitation uh pitch count in baseball and what has happened there is is you know individuals in those fields have looked and said hey what we notice is people who throw say more than a 100 pitches in a game tend to start losing Effectiveness and increased injury rate therefore we're predicting the next time you go to play if

you cross that threshold we start having an increased risk of negative consequences so therefore we're going to cap your in this case pitching volume at that 100 pitches per game or whatever the case same thing with running etc etc so you could just simply do that and there's actually really cool data coming out now on sport performance stuff looking at things like Imus and GPS trackers and trying to identify even position by position specific uh recommendations for how much distance you should cover in a practice in a training session um so that you can say

hey these positions don't cross this threshold these positions don't cross this threshold in basketball and tennis and and all kinds of things like that that's not probably extremely applicable to many of the listeners right now but it is still conveying the idea that that if we understand where we break then we can stop ourselves from getting there in the first place the functional example uh here is just thinking about basic things like where do I start my training program and then how do I progress it and we've already covered those numbers in either case though

you want to have three markers that you're paying attention to if you're concerned you're getting into an overreaching phase or potentially going to lead to overtraining or you want to get out it's three unique things number one we're going to look for some sort of performance metric right so this could be um your times are going down your your squat numbers your your power is going down any of these things so it's got to be an actual performance number two some sort of physiology and so I want to see something happening with resting heart rate

some biomarker is moving uh heart rate variability some other measure that is not influenced by you and the beauty of using biological markers are if we contrast that to like performance and I said okay here's our performance test every day you come in you're going to do a vertical jump and if one day you come in all a sudden your vertical jump is super low I might think oh man maybe we're starting to overreach you also could be feeling lazy that day and just not have jumped very high on purpose because you didn't want to

work out the beauty of biomarkers are you don't get to manipulate them like that they don't care there's a downside to it which is maybe they're just indirect markers right and so I'm not telling you biological markers are better than performance markers what I'm saying is you want to look at both all right in fact you want to look at our third category as well which is some sort of symptomology and so am I am I having a symptom of overreaching am I seeing a performance decrement and then am I seeing a biological marker as

well if you see all three of these popping up you have reason to believe you've reached some overreaching now what you have not identified yet is if that is functional overreaching non-functional overreaching or true overt trining and remember you shouldn't be feeling great after every training session you're trying to cause adaptation and until you back off maybe even weeks or months later to actualize the adaptation and get that super compensation and performance increase you're going to have to invest a little bit so you're going to go in the hole um any sport performance coach is

going to look at numbers throughout the year and say yeah yeah when we first start training and preparation for this the season we are going to see a drop in performance that day that week that's part of the plan though right that's the stress you're trying to accumulate so you want to see all three of those markers you just want to pay attention to a couple of things how long are they down for a day three days 7even Days 15 days Etc if you're seeing a performance drop in a day and I am far away

from from performance uh so the day that I want to peek for I'm not going to do anything different if I see two days in a row drop performance I'm not worried if I see more than probably in my opinion five days in a row of decrement then I might start paying attention if you're in season though or close to competition or whatever that thing means to you and you see more than a couple of days in a row of dropping then you might actually want to take some some steps to mitigate that so it

really is important you understand again what are we trying to do are we trying to cause adaptation are we trying trying to cause adaptation and I I have a very specific example of all this we can run through uh here in a second and then of course a bunch of tools to to pull you out of those phases but that's that's fundamentally what we're trying to do here uh I would encourage you again don't be too reactive and responsive to any one measure I'm going to cover a whole bunch of them in a second but

you can get lost in in different things because they all have pros and cons and so I know it's simple to just look at one score on your watch and make your decisions because of that or check your app but you really want to be careful of doing that you're going to probably lead yourself in the wrong direction more often than you're going to help yourself I'm curious as to why when we overreach too much or too often or we are overtraining that performance is diminished because on the face of it it's kind of obvious

you're overreaching you're overtraining so performance has diminished but that's completely circular you hear about things like adrenal fatigue and adrenal burnout well it turns out adrenal burnout doesn't even really exist absolutely not there is such a thing as adrenal insufficiency syndrome but course you know these phrases like burnout adrenal burnout overtraining um they're thrown around you know as much as words like gaslighting and obsessive compulsive you know are without any real clinical definition um or there are clinical definitions but people aren't obeying them when they use the language I do want to acknowledge however what

is absolutely true which is that over reaching too much too often overtraining these can degrade performance but mechanistically speaking what's going on because I think if once we understand what's going on mechanistically then I think um we can all look at tools whether or not it's breathing movement compression thermal psychological um motivational Etc and have a much clearer sense as to what's going to work best and what likely won't work I love this question so much because as I mentioned at the beginning I I was fortunate to spend my uh some of my graduate work

in Andy fries Lab at the University of Memphis and we we did a lot in this area and so we in fact this is how I learned how to do assays and run Western blots and measure signaling proteins and things like this so this stuff is near and dear to my heart we also did a bunch of really wild studies and he had done some before I got there so I'm going to combine kind of Andy his entire career uh and just highlight some of the big pictures of what he found there um he was

very interested in exercise particularly strength training and trying to figure out this entire question right which is like why is this actually happening when I work out too much when I lift too much that all of a sudden I can't sleep what's happening like why is my energy down why is my mood my motivation reduced if I squat too much so we did a whole series of studies across his career and again I'll just sort of highlight some of the the some of the themes that ran through them so the first one that jumps out

to mind is early in his career he did this really awesome protocol um where he had people squat 100% of their back squat Max every day for two weeks so you come into the gym and and I think this first one was on a machine and you did a one rep max and then you came back in every single day for two weeks so these are what we would generally call kind of like that short to moderate range overreaching and by definition some of them ended up actually being true over training because it would take

the individuals sometimes two to up to eight weeks to return back to their one rep max at the end of these protocols um so some of them were non-functional overreaching or some combination of that well along with that he took uh a lot of blood samples as well as muscle biopsies to try to look at what's happening endocrinologically um neurologically muscle physiology wise to pay attention What's happen so a couple of things that jump out there um one of his initial studies actually I think the very first one he did did um when they ran

that first uh squat everyday protocol what they found was camine levels changed quite significantly um and depending on kind of what you wanted to pay attention to there whether it was epinephrine or nor epinephrine um or even uh some other markers they basically increased by somewhere between two to three fold and so a little bit of understanding of sleep physiology if adrenaline is extremely high epinephrine you're going to have a hard time sleeping so that alone was was first indication this is like wait a minute something's actually happening here that's just beyond muscle soreness there's

some sort of systemic fatigue happening and as you rightfully pointed out is not the adrenal glands becoming fatigued that's sort of a bit of tongue and cheek and pedantics it is cortisol disregulation and general stress syndrome um but it's really can be noted in in blood in terms of epinephrine and norepinephrine another study he had done of a similar realm was over the the course of seven and a half days people came in and did 15 training sessions so it was really cool these are these really short BS of just ridiculous training and they said

okay like something's happening with with epinephrine and norepinephrine something HP something's happening with testosterone what's it look like inside the cell so now muscle biopsies came on board and they started looking at things like map kinases which are these signaling proteins that are tend to be associated with an anabolic response they upregulate muscle protein synthesis and they do many other things but that's like a big factor of them um they looked at various androgens and gluc cortic cord receptors and they wanted to see like well maybe receptor density or Andor sensitivity is changing and in

fact surprise surprise that's exactly what they found so they found both Androgen and gluc cortico receptor concentrations were reduced and so you can start to see a picture forming which is like hm very similar to the insulin type 2 diabetes story where you've you've really put yourself in a very high stress situation so presumably epinephrine Etc testosterone releases are extremely high in response to that to try to reach back to some level of homeostasis you start downregulating the receptors for them and so it's like the signal can only get so high if you're going to

keep that gas on we're going to pull back the throttle and the receptor so that the total signal stays the same if that makes a little bit of sense well that becomes obviously problematic um so then like a final follow-up study here that that is it's important to not is they did another protocol which was really really cool and they said the first ones weren't enough so how about this we're going to come in every day for two weeks and we're going to do 10 sets of a one rep max every day so they were

coming in and they would do 10 one rep Maxes every day for two weeks and what what's really cool about that study if they didn't complete any of the repetitions they had to repeat it until they had 10 successful one rep Maxes on that given day um absolutely brutal brutal protocol I wasn't there at the time um they had finished that right before I got on campus but I was actually able to be around when they were doing some of the final analyses there of the tissue um what they want to look at in this

particular study was beta adrenergic receptors which are those receptors where that are going to be epine and such are going to be binding for so again similar story here um perhaps are we losing overall sensitivity because of this extreme sympathetic stimulation now actually thinking back what would have been pretty cool is if they had another group that did it and then did some down regulation breathing post to see if that can urate some of the problems but of course this was 20 plus years ago or something like that so um couple of things that happened

is the one rep Maxes dropped by I think around like8 kilos by the end of the two weeks uh if I remember right like the group average was something in the neighborhood of 151 kilos so these were pretty well- trained individuals and it went from rather I think actually it was about 160 kilos and they dropped to like 150 2 kilos something close to that what was more significant though was their power dropped by 35% which is really really interesting because if if you pay attention to declines in physical performance over time and I mean

that like through aging what you'll see is people can hold on to muscle mass pretty well um it will go down by about you know 1% or so after the age of 40 however strength will go down at like 2 to 4% and then Power by 8 to 10% and if you look at actually World Records across strength Sports by age you'll see that they will decline by age but not that much however if you look at Speed Sports by age they fall off the planet so it's very challenging to preserve fast Through Time whether

this is fatigue or because of uh age that's really important because that'll then tell you hey a little bit of a in the coal mine is not necessarily your strength but your speed and so a lot of different techniques that we use to measure performance remember that's our Triad right symptomology physiology and performance um you're generally better looking at speed based performance tests rather than strength-based performance tests to get an earlier indication of potential uh overreaching or overtraining so anyways back to the the individual study there um in that same group again we we had

the same problem where it took some of them 2 to eight weeks to come back so what they had to do is I can't remember the exact time frame I probably should have thought through this but they they had to come back something like every week or every couple of days even after the study finished until they got back to their Baseline one rep max and some of them it took them up to eight weeks before they finally got back so they probably were in a classic overtraining State at that point which is was done

in as little as two weeks and this is also another point that people always ask like how uh like how long does it take is this something that has to happen over the course of months or or like if I were to go do two days or this intense training camp for two or three weeks could I actually cause over training and the answer is if it is actually truly enough volume and enough intensity you probably can do some significant damage in as little as two weeks probably doesn't happen that often most likely you you're

probably going to be reaching a state of nonfunctional overreaching but you may actually be able to put yourself in a position where it might take three or four weeks or more to get back to Baseline after a truly intense and again think about this protocol it's like totally unrealistic for the most part 10 sets of one of a one rep max squat every day for two straight weeks um some folks if you're extremely highly trained weightlifter you might do something like that when you're very close to say World Championships but outside of that really specific

scenario it's a totally absurd training protocol but that was the point right we were trying to ensure uh ensure that overtraining was met or close it's similar to when we've done we've actually done I think three studies in the center for sport performance on Dom's muscle soreness and in all those cases you do just like ridiculous leg extension protocols because you're just trying to ensure you cause super soreness if you don't then you have nothing to study so um absurd training Pro protocols but but that's the point so nonetheless um as a result sure enough

the beta adrenergic receptors uh were regulated by something like 37% um what's probably even more significant though was the sensitivity in those receptors was reduced by like two and a half fold and so it's like okay wait a minute we're becoming desensitized to this timei and we're also actually now starting to reduce our total concentration similar which is actually an interesting was a very sneaky smart thing to do is they looked at nocturnal urinary epinephrine and guess what that was also up by like 50% 1515 5 Z 5 zero yeah and so now you're seeing

this tie-in where it's like I'm seeing response at the tissue level I'm seeing a response probably although they didn't actually look at a pituitary anything like that I'm seeing adrenal and other endocrinological problems and then I'm also seeing this increase in concentration of vrine when I'm supposed to be sleeping and surprise surprise I'm having a hard time sleeping um symptomology well that's uh a very interesting finding about nocturnal epinephrine epinephrine of course is adrenaline it's released from the adrenals no surprise there but also from this brain area called Locus culus in the brain and the

Brain tends to be called epinephrine in the body adrenaline just to complicate everyone's um understanding but that nclat did not come from us so don't blame us the point is that rapid eye movement sleep so called REM sleep is more abundant in the second half of the night we know that the dreams associated with rapid eye movement sleep are more emotionally Laden and that those dreams and those emotional states are actually important for discarding the emotional load of previous days experiences it's a sort of a uh natural trauma therapy if you will because in the

normal healthy State those dreams are associated with an inability to release epinephrine at night so for me what you just described first of all it's the first time I've ever heard of it um uh but it ties together something really uh quite clear from the Sleep Neuroscience literature which is that when people are stressed they tend to get less rapid eye movement sleep that rapid eye movement sleep normally is associated with low levels of epinephrine so whether or not it's causal or not isn't clear um but sort of doesn't matter for sake of this discussion

but what I'm wondering and I suppose one could test for but maybe observed is whether or not people who are over in overtraining too much overreaching too much because of this elevated nocturnal epinephrine diminished REM sleep whether not their emotional state is also um disrupted because one thing we know for sure is if you want to disrupt somebody's emotional state you deprive them of sleep and rapid eye movement sleep in particular the one caveat to that is for those of you out there that have heard that rapid eye movement sleep deprivation deliberate rapid eye movement

sleep deprivation is a treatment for depression that is true but it's coupled with a next night enhanced rapid eye movement sleep so one of the major takeaways from all of this uh that I'm realizing is that no surprise daytime activities impact nighttime endocrine function impact quality of sleep impact daytime activities yeah actually there's there's so many fun things I want to do here now um this is actually why measuring eye movement is a very fantastic tool for understanding total stress load and you can actually differentiate different types of stress so caffeine use versus alcohol use

versus sleep deprivation by actually measuring eye movements that's actually what we do in our absolute rest sleep company is in addition to getting a a full PSD sleep study done in your bedroom you're going to get an eye tracking assessment which we're going to be able to figure out why you're getting there so um nonetheless yeah if you actually look at the classic signs and symptoms of overtraining or overtraining syndrome it's going to be everything from performance decrements like we talked about um resting heart rate is going to increase uh you're going to see things

like HRV drop by generally 20 or so percent that would be a very large disruption in HRV um decreased body weight and then all the stuff Andrew y just talked about so motivation adherence appetite mood um all of this stuff are are classically known associations with with overtraining and that's for the exact reasons you're talking about sleep disturbances and disruptions um wanting to train motivation all of this stuff uh goes part and parcel with non-functional overreaching and or overtraining um you can actually tie this back in a little bit more to some other biomarkers and

this is this is great because this is the stuff we look for this is the the physiology stuff we look for um you've probably talked about shbg before um which is the sex hormone binding globulin so it's this protein that that'll float in your body that's going to bind up sex hormones in particular testosterone so what happens with um overt training is you can actually take this serly like week by week and you will actually see this number rise and so if you see this like say you're using a a a service like inside tracker

and you're getting your your blood measured every so often and you see this numers start ticking up this is actually associated with that because what's actually happening is it's binding up all your free testosterone and that's just leading back to the circle we're talking about and you can actually see the same thing happen with calorie restriction U just not eating enough calories but in this particular case because it actually happens in both scenarios you know it's not an issue simply of being underc calori it's clearly an issue of the training load being too high so

just to give another little tool there's uh I can get the link for it but there's a a website that um was created by uh which Journal oh slipping but I'll get it to you you can link it up where you can actually go in and plug in a number of values from blood chemistry so if you got your blood work done and you can plug in your pre number and your post number so say you got it done and then maybe 10 weeks later you got it done again and you're wondering and you notice

hey my free testosterone's down or my shbg is up is it actually a meaningful number and you it will actually tell you whether or not the change prepos is physiologically Meaningful or not or just within the error margin of the measure um and you can actually change like like right there on the website you can change your confidence interval so it's really really cool if if you know if you just have your own blood and you want to know like hey I had any level this year and now it's you know here over there it's

just a totally free resource um created gone through peer review all that stuff um and I'll give the link to that so that's a pretty cool um measure in addition to that like probably one of the more powerful and easy metrics uh biologically is to take your cortisol and dhaa ratio so this is known to be associated with a lot of things um you want to be really careful you don't want this number to be too high or too low something like 0.09 is about cortisol to DHEA DHEA to cortisol ratio yeah DHEA to cortisol

I'd love to tell you I said it backwards on purpose just to make sure everyone understood but I got it backwards yeah I mean this ratio has been associated with so many things um you have to do you do have to be careful with Association right not being causation but everything from risk of infections some metabolic health and and like other disease States as well as more what we're talking about which is hey am I am I am I getting sort of cortisol this regulation which is what a lot of folks would call you know

again adrenal fatigue and know that's not really what's happening but if adrenaline and epinephrine are off and testosterone cortisol is going to be along the right and so you can also look at things like testosterone to cortisol ratios um so there's a lot of things you can glean here to give you some insights into where you're going if that um if that ratio is too high that's going to be associated with metabolic syndrome and a bunch of other stuff if it's too low that's going to be associated with a lot of cognitive problems like um

aggression and mood and and a bunch of things like that so again you want to keep it right around that 0.09 ratio and and most of the time actually in some blood chemistry stuff you'll get a you'll get a report of that or you can calculate it pretty quickly I'm sure we'll get into this in the episode that comes next on uh nutrition and supplementation totally what about compounds that lower cortisol such as ashwagandha um I can see now based on the L you're spelling out that during phases of a lot of intense overreaching or

frequent overreaching given that those compounds can indeed lower cortisol rodol rolia rosacea Rola Rola Rosa um fun word to say um two words but the first one more fun to say Rola Roda Rola Rosa riola Rosa folks and ashwag gandha um I've been uh trying riola recently um and mainly as a buffer to uh output um it does seem to have some good data attached to it related to lowering uh one's perceived threshold of how hard they're working so in other words you can work harder um and not feel as if you're working really hard

which allows you to do more work that's sort of the subjective description of how it works but you told me that it um Can blunt cortisol and and ashonda we know blunts cortisol both of these things of course can do other things but are these um compounds that you sometimes will incorporate into uh a training regimen uh I I've been using rodea for probably six or more years like pretty consistently not personally but uh using it with the individual we work with you do need to be a little bit careful uh I wouldn't say that

it blunts cortisol it is probably more appropriately described as a cortisol modulator uh which means sort of if it gets too high or too low it'll it'll help kind of keep it within normative range um there's also there it is important to note there have been a handful of studies two of I know specifically showed that riola use can enhance strength gains however it may reduce muscular endurance so um we need more human data on this stuff and it may turn out that's not a concern it may also turn out to be a concern so

nothing is nothing is perfect and free there's no supplement that is a Panacea and um I have used again rodol in a lot of situations because the other thing you kind of have to pay attention to the cortisol is is you have it's supposed to be modulated throughout the day it's not supposed to be at this normal value in fact if you look at normative values um it's typically uh described in um uh micrograms per deciliter and depending on literally what company you used to draw your blood if you're getting it through the blood uh

depending on what which method they use to analyze it the normative values are like frankly embarrassingly all over the place um they're mostly going to be like 5 to 25 as a quote unquote normative value but that's outrageous we also know those numbers vary massively by age by sex um and throughout the day and so if you only are taking a single point let's assume you're doing a fasted blood draw which is what most folks do it's really only going to tell you a lot about what's happening in that moment we need to know well

like maybe let's say my cortisol was if I'm a say 38-year-old woman and my 7 A.M cortisol was you know 15 milligram per decer that's pretty good but if it's 15 milligrams per deciliter at 3 p.m. oh boy I'm I'm probably having some issues right so there's a change throughout the day and you need to be able to plot that curve so you can actually well pretty standard practice that we do is we look at cortisol throughout the day we're going to take multiple markers because I don't want to just see your Baseline cortisol I

want to see this curve throughout the day that's going to tell me a ton about U again is your sleep being caused by this regulation um is it your training is it something else so I would like take a single Baseline blood marker of cortisol with a lot of grain of salt we we typically measure it at least three times throughout the day so something like 6:00 to 9:00 a.m. 12: to 3 and then something like closer to the evening oftentimes we do much more we'll do like seven points or something like that throughout the

day depending on the situation so you want to be careful of that um just since we're here you can also get cortisol in uh through saliva and now there's sort of pros and cons to that because the the pro of doing it in your blood is it's it it's much more stable um saliva is extremely responsive to whatever happened these seconds before you took that test the upside of it though is you can do a bunch of real world life experiments so for example we will do this sometimes if we want to see how an

individual is responding to a given stressor let's take it right let's take the take it in the you know spit into a tube we're going to take it and then we're going to go do this workout or this cold exposure whatever we're going to do take it at thean we know that it's responsive to what just happened but that's the point um so you can actually there's sort of pros and cons so you'll use the appropriate measure for the appropriate uh question you're trying to answer yeah a couple of points and Reflections about cortisol my

first uh laboratory Duty as an undergraduate was in a was actually in a biopsychology lab at the time they didn't have the field of Neuroscience as it's now called it was called biopsychology or psychobiology I didn't know that no there was used to be neurochemistry neurobiology they had all collapsed into what we now called Neuroscience which was only some years ago but my job was to collect cortisol samples which means I I was collecting um spit which means I was collecting saliva and the an advantage of saliva based cortisol it's free cortisol it's the active

form as you mentioned it's reflective of what happened in the seconds or minutes um just prior a couple of things about the regular cortisol pattern across the day because I realized that while it wonderful for everybody to get their cortisol measured in detail multiple times and blood and and saliva and so on some people just won't do that uh for whatever reason or can't do that yeah and the basic Contour of a healthy pattern of cortisol secretion is uh to have highest levels of cortisol in the morning um is actually part of the mechanism that's

associated with waking you up viewing bright light ideally from sunlight but other forms of bright light early in the day actually can lead to a 50% % increase in that qu cortisol Spike which is a good thing people here elevated cortisol oh no this sets in motion a Cascade of things related to enhanced mood and alertness immune system function Etc what I think it can be useful for people to understand is that many things will Spike cortisol throughout the day stress cold water exercise but the idea is that it comes down to baseline or near

Baseline um rather quickly one of the worst situations as you pointed out is when the highest level of cortisol is consistently shifted to the afternoon period in fact that's a um pretty reliable signature of certain forms of depression this is worked by U my colleague David Spiegel at um Stanford Psychiatry and the the great Bob spolski Robert spolski of uh why zebras don't get ulcers y behave Etc and fame lots of lots of popular books there um I think that if people are trying to regulate their cortisol and they're just under and they just understand

that basic Contour that the Baseline should be uh you know rise pretty quickly after one rise in the morning so it's easy to remember rise rise um rise out of bed and Rise cortisol with light um bright light with exercise um with caffeine these things will all increase cortisol and then across the day it's normal for cortisol to spike but then to use some of the down regulation methods that you described in particular the breathing methods and exercise itself as the case may be but then to really pay attention to how much psychological and physical

stress is occurring in the six hours or so or eight hours prior to sleep um does that seem like a a good sort of broad Contour of how to have a healthy pattern of cortisol released because you actually want the cortisol to reduce inflammation and initiate or participate in the recovery process you will not see any progress from exercise training without a large spike in cortisol it is critically important when we think of phrases like cortisol inflammation stress this is not bad right physiology is not personified right there the things don't like hate you in

the body right it is all is not good and bad they just are um the more you try to suppress cortisol the more you suppress adaptation what you want is exactly what you mentioned large spikes meant with large quick recovery and you want to do that throughout the day and get that hor medic stressor this is so to going back to your ashwagandha and Rola issue um it I think it would be very shortsighted for people that do that as this is a prophylactic okay because you if you blunt cortisol you're going to cause immunosuppression

especially early in the day totally taking on to before going to train is is counterproductive yeah we do not just this is not a baseline part of our foundational package right if you go look at the um athlete foundations or the athlete resilience protocols that put together you're not going to see these things in there for that specific reason um any form of cortisol regulation needs to be done strategically if you are excessively high and we're bringing you back down to normative values at the right time then great if you're normal though then taking you

down lower than that is actually problematic that's the same thing is actually true since we're here for oxidative stress forign inflammation antioxidant use um we mentioned I think earlier about taking vitamin C and vitamin E post exercise will actually blunt adaptations or at least has the potential to do so same thing right if you're modulating this response just because and you have not done so because of actually biological testing that indicated you needed to do such then you actually may be making things worse and so um we we see constantly with people who take a

number of supplements and substances for sleep and then they wake up the next morning groggy and your your cortisol suppressed okay great so then they take something for stimulation and then the rest of the day they're trying to reduce and then you're this nasty cycle instead of just getting out of the way and letting cortisol do what it's supposed to do U and then making sure again you're teaching it so this is actually a coachable response you can coach your own body to go down in the later part of the day and go up in

the earlier part of the day you want to make sure that you are driving that train with intent and so again to reiterate if you don't need that you shouldn't do it right if you don't need to lower cortisol you shouldn't walk around doing it you're just going to suppress the state even far and this is what's need this is needed for anabolic responses so you're not going to grow muscle if cortisol is not spiked it's it's going to compromise it rather so you want to be intentional with these practices uh especially in the form

of of supplementation be very very intentional I've heard it said that carbohydrates in particular starchy carbohydrates definely can inhibit cortisol definitely and uh this could be through the uh tryptophan amino acid related pathway that ratchets up to uh serotonin release probably some other things too I mean the idea that carbohydrates just stimulate serotonin is is a little bit uh overly simp cellular mechanisms amk going up and immediately turning on there yeah right so um you know I think we've all experienced this uh you know we're stressed we're stressed we uh doesn't necessarily even have to

be highly processed you know uh fat assoc you know fatty carbohydrates um you know like potato chips and and potato chips and dip or these kinds of things it can also be a bowl of rice a bowl of oatmeal a bowl of pasta um which here I'm not trying to demonize um carbohydrates I I do ingest carbohydrates um minimally or non-processed carbohydrates um most of the time but not all the time and they have a a fairly potent uh effect on on lowering stress and perceived stress and even quality of sleep which is not to

say that somebody has to load up on them like crazy unless their glycogen is really depleted talked a lot about this in the endurance episode I know we'll touch on it more in the nutrition supplementation episode but um in thinking about the relationship between carbohydrates and cortisol and what we've just been talking about terms of cortisol as being vitally important for the adaptation Trigger or triggering adaptation it's probably a better way to put it but that it can blunt cortisol taken post training or um maybe in the evening before sleep what are some of the

basic ways that one can think about and maybe use carbohydrates in specific ways in order to let's say control cortisol rather than uh quash cortisol uh you actually have alluded to a number of times already so we often times will give people a lot of carbohydrates at night for some of these reasons you're going to feel fantastic a lot of people that helps you sleep um both get to sleep and stay asleep Sleep Quality you talked about specifically remember think about it this way cortisol at its core is an energy signaling molecule it says we

are in the need for energy great um epinephrine the same you you'll start seeing for example cortisol will liberate uh free fatty acids put them in the bloodstream getting you prepared to do something the problem is if it's continually elevated throughout the day with no down regulation we start running into issues right so again this is the differentiation between oh my cortisol is slightly elevated all day versus I had a really big big spike after training I had a really big spike after breath protocol Etc and then it went back down so that being said

if you then ingest carbohydrates you are telling it is quick to see the sign all we have nutrients we have energy again specifically carbohydrates therefore cortisol can sort of go back down we don't need to be liberating free fatty acids and preparing uh the need for fuel so you can help yourself go to sleep for many as you pointed out many mechanisms actually of why carbohydrates will help you sleep at night for some not all people but some that would be one of the relationships it has with cortisol great I look forward to hearing more

about how the various macronutrients and micronutrients and so-called adaptogens this very mysterious group of compounds you know the word adapt gets thrown around so much nowadays um but as long as we're talking about adaptation I think uh that'll be fair play for the uh discussion in the next episode about nutrition and supplementation in my laboratory when we study stress we use a number of different markers subjective reports of how stressed people feel uh heart rate mning heart rate heart rate variability cortisol free cortisol and on and on what are some of the other markers of

stress as it relates to exercise adaptations and Recovery because once again I think we're seeing a lot of parallels between the study of psychological stress and the study of physical stress as it relates to exercise adaptation remember in terms of physiology stress is stress this is why we have this cool term of alistic load or allostasis so it's that it really doesn't matter which system you test for it will reflect overall stress uh you you mentioned several of them we've got done talking about some biomarkers HRV and heart rate are another great example because what

you're trying to do is this when we were talking about the muscle soreness thing what we were really getting at was a marker of how do I fix the overuse in that particular muscle now we've really transitioned into Global markers of overuse and why these are problematic or important to pay attention to rather is again these are the indicators that you didn't just work a muscle out too hard but you have actually done something where you've compromised all of your physiology to a level where you've influenced a circulating catacol amine or something that's going to

influence multiple markers now like your sleep and your mood and your behavior so that's why these things are problematic that said you could look at resting heart rate not a bad thing to do however that does have multiple downsides uh one thing we do know is your resting heart rate will Elevate with excessive stress load this actually doesn't matter if it is physical stress or psychological stress or a combination so you will see that number drift up over time here's the downside though it's not tremendously sensitive to smaller stressors uh in other words if you

were to do something like alcohol is a very good example you will see your resting heart rate Elevate with alcohol use um excessive tobacco use and psychological stress however if you do something smaller like a hard training sessions resting heart rate is not sensitive enough to pick that up it will actually probably stay the same so for those reasons we don't actually use resting heart rate that much we will take it but it's not our primary indicator that being said HRV is a better use so just really quickly for those that are not familiar uh

your heart rate uh let's say for example you your resting heart rate is 60 beats per minute that means every second it's beating it doesn't actually happen on a consistent Rhythm such that it would beat on second one beat on second two beat on second three Etc the rate is more variable so it might go beat beat beat beat beat be there's a variation in the heart rate and at the end of that 60 seconds in this example you would have still completed 60 beats they just aren't on the exact same pattern well one thing

that's actually quite interesting is the amount of variation in your heart rate is actually associated with your overall sympathetic or parasympathetic State such that a large variation so an arhythmic pattern is generally more representative of being more rested and recovered and being more parasympathetic and you'll notice during times of extremely high stress uh you will be very rhythmic beat beat beat beat beat and so this is a little bit of a of a confusing idea but a high HRV is there indicated of a lot of variation meaning you're pretty recovered a low HRV meaning there's

not a lot of variation means you're probably pretty stressed and wire so it's it's uh related to heart rate but in my opinion it is a significantly better marker of that now one thing you want to pay attention to if you do this a couple of things there are some accuracy issues with many of the devices basically everybody at this point probably has some device uh that's telling them their HRV what you do not want to do is simply compare your number to somebody else for a lot of reasons not all of these Technologies are

actually even measuring the same thing um again some of them are actually combining with other metrics and calling it your overall Readiness or your recovery and so now we've what we've actually done is made a couple of assumptions and then stacked them on a whole host of other assumptions and then gave you a number and you don't know what that sort of black box score actually even represents so I would caution one against taking too much uh information from that if you are actually measuring HRV even within that there's a lots of ways to calculate

it that are not important here so don't necessarily worry about the score compare it to yourself but not to others what you will see is if you use similar devices and techniques it's hard to find data here but in general people that are uh overweight um might have a little bit of a of a lower score as in a worse score um we need more information on that to be clear so in large part the best way to use something like HRV is to measure it under the exact same circumstances every day so whether you're

going to use um just a device uh on your watch or your phone or your bed or anything else or you're going to buy a special HRV on it's fine just take that measure at the same time um mostly this means first thing in the morning so you wake up you go to the bathroom you come back down take your measure or something like that you don't uh wait sometimes you took it before food then after or look at your phone like all these other things that can influence stress so so take it it usually

takes somewhere between seconds and minutes to record so you want to pay attention to that now one of the things you'll notice is there is a natural change in your HRV that just happens and so what you kind of really want to pay attention to is I guess answering the question of well how much of a change in HRV has to happen before I should care and it's hard to answer right so let's just say your HRV was 100 I just made that number up what if you wake up tomorrow it's 99 what's that mean

well I don't know if you wake up tomorrow when it's 20 that's probably a bad thing well where's that line it's hard one thing I would recommend doing is taking your HRV for at least a month before you start using that value to make any changes and you recommend taking it first thing in the morning yep always at roughly the same time basically under the same circumstances it doesn't have to be technically in the morning but because your day will change on most days what you get into um that's the most stable thing in your

life so I would take it then and I would collect it for at least a day at least a month rather maybe even six weeks and then give yourself basically a running average so what we quite honestly do is uh we will actually track it for forever and then what we always look at is what does it look like today relative to the last week on average and then what does that look like to our historical average and we always compare those things um and you also want to make sure you compare like to like

so in other words I generally I'm not going to worry about today's HRV score relative to tomorrow's what I want to look at is today's relative to this exact same day last week um not for athletes but for non-athletes this is very important so imagine don't worry about the difference between hrb score and Monday compared to Tuesday pay attention to Monday compared to last Monday and the Monday before that that's because you typically have the same sort of weekly schedule and what you don't want to do is is say look at Monday's HRV score which

is a reflection of what happen Sunday and compare that to Tuesdays which is actually a reflection of what happened Monday you probably didn't do the same stressors on Sunday as Monday so you're not actually comparing the same thing but if you have a General weekly schedule you're likely to compare this Monday's or to the last Mondays because they're both comparing what happened on the previous days see did that sort of Distinction make sense absolutely I do the same thing with body weight by the way if you're trying to track body mass gain or fat loss

or something compare like the like you can look at the daily changes but you need to pay attention to what that normal distribution is so if you kind of do that you know Monday to Monday thing that'll give you a rough area of saying okay my normal weekly variation is say five so my average is 100 but I will fluctuate between 95 to 105 that's my standard deviation is sort of a science dorks would call that um if you start very uh changing more than 5% outside of your normal standard deviation then I'm going to

start paying attention a little bit and I'm going to actually run a little bit of an algorithm on this one and so here is my thinking process when I get HRV really any metric but HRV is is the example we're using First Step did I collect good data and what that I mean again did I measure it the same way I measured every single day or did I get up and look at my phone first and I realized oh crap I forgot to take my HRV and then I went back and got there so say

I had a 15% derivation from my normal number and then I realized oh yeah that's right I was up super late last night doing whatever okay great I'm going to consider that bad data you didn't good if it's bad data then I'm not doing anything ignore it's bad data and you throw it out you don't use it if you decide for the most part let's assume it was good data okay great then I'm going on to my next question which is is is it acute in other words is it just today right or is it

chronic in words this is a is this pattern been happening for more than five days or at least three out of the last four or something like that three minimum is what I like honestly I generally look at five or more days that's a very big distinction if it is something that just happened today then the next question I'm going to ask myself is and I in that adaptation phase am I trying to be in a phase where I'm trying to cause insult to the body that it needs to respond with if that is the

case I'm just going to ignore it right in fact it's almost sometimes a good sign hey we are stressing the body and it is stressed what we're doing is working amazing in fact if you don't see that it's sort of like maybe we're not doing enough to push the pace all right so great if the answer is no we're in a peaking phase then we're actually going to use what I call acute State shifters so this is a whole host of little tricks that I have that can change HRV or any recovery metric Within seconds

again these are not chronic fixes this is just I'm having a bad day today I feel like crap can I make myself feel better right now and so I kind of call these parlor tricks a lot of the times and there's a thousand of them we are certainly not going to go over them but I'll give you some examples um you can pull out first of all physical movement we'll do it you you'd be stunned how just doing some yoga moving around doing some jumping jacks starting your workout I mean you probably experienced this it's

sort of cliche in our world at this point but um if you ever do any serious lifting over a serious amount of time there will be days when which you walk into the gym and you feel awful and somehow that day you said a lifetime PR yeah that's a strange strange phenomenon yeah I uh I I've experienced that more than a few times um it's rare the inverse is rare however you feel great you have a horrible workout it happens yeah um and it can happen for any number of different reasons but yeah I think

the the former when when isn't feeling very good and then somehow it's a terrific workout does set a kind of a seed of Doubt as to how good our subjective assessments really are and which I guess is why we were talking about um objective assessments yep like HRV and remember if it's a single day here uh you can even do hard training uh people sort of have this idea like well if you get up and your recovery score is down do a lighter day that's probably like I'm probably never making that choice to be honest

not in this situation remember this is one bad day and we are in a phase of even trying to improve performance right now like we're probably still training hard you will again often see I felt terrible then I trained super hard and it totally changed my day around this all can happen so exercise is my first love here um absolutely breathing um any sort of up regulation breathing so we talked a lot about down regulation breathing just do the opposite right and so this is when hyperventilation strategies can work uh instead of accentuating the exhale

you accentuate the inhale or you restrict the exhale this is working in the exact opposite situation you can also play little this is where things like music motivational quotes um if you're the type that follows people on Instagram that motivates you or can work with these things um coaching tactics these can be things like um finding out or talking about that person's why um you sort of shared something that a mantra you use um when you're training hard to keep you go better I'm not going to ask you to share that now but some people

have this sometimes right or you may have this conversation with your athlete we call this finding out your why right so finding out like why are you really here what are we doing here and a lot of times you'll hear things like it's because I grew up poor and I don't ever want to be poor again okay great well this is for my children or like any number of things and you can pull that out on these days you need to be really careful this is why I call these parlor tricks because when you play

that card too often it starts to lose effect right and you can only dig to a hole so often before it's sort of like a um the same thing is with music right if you every time you go to the weight room it's blasting death metal at level 10 well eventually it's not it's no longer motivating right it's no longer helpful so um you want to deploy these things strategically yeah the the phrase that comes to mind is signal to noise you know the nervous system especially the dopamine system and the adrenaline system which are

part of this larger system called the catacol amine system so that's dopamine epinephrine norepinephrine the the get up and go focus on external goals um movement Associated it's and on and on that that system responds best to high signal relative to noise so if you're as you pointed out um listening to music every time drinking a ton of caffeine energy drinks pre-workout New Tropics and then you know stacking all those things uh sometimes refer this as dopamine stacking informally referred to as dopamine stacking you're doing all those things then you first of all then you're

wondering why later that afternoon or the next day you're feeling like you're you're under a cloud well it's obvious your your cacing system crashed but it's also that um you don't necessarily become dependent on it it's just that you start to wonder whether or not you have the internal mechanisms and motivation to train without those things and so one tends to use them more and more and then they have a diminishing effect over time um the rule that I've been um sort of applying has been I never do two workouts in a row where I'm

stacking in um stimulants loud music and any kind of uh sort of high potency inspiration however every set in the gym or when I run I really try and be diligent about form and attention to what I'm doing the one exception would be the long duration endurance work part of the reason I do that work is to let my mind go into states of drifting uh not trying to think in complete sentences or even close to it just let my my brain kind of idle at at a low hum uh and for that reason generally

listen to something that's more of a story or don't listen to anything at all and just let my thoughts kind of spool through anyway I don't want to take us too far off track but I think this um idea of signal to noise will resonate with the engineers out there but since most people are likely not Engineers it is the way that the nervous system works um evidenced by the fact that whatever area of your body right now is in contact with a chair or um any other surface that's been in contact with for more

more than a few seconds you forget that it's in contact with it because there's low signal to noise at that point a similar note you actually mentioned stimulants basically there whether you're talking caffeine or any other stimulant any other cortisol modulators or adaptogens any of these things fall in the category if you're not using them consistently and you're having a rough day and all of a sudden you throw down 200 milligrams of caffeine uh it's going to change real fast the equ strong performance enhancing effect yeah absolutely and for these reasons right um so we

mentioned a couple of them breath work um food more calories just eating some food uh sometimes we'll give people like what we call Comfort Foods so this is just like hey you're uh you know you're from Georgia and we know you love grits so we're having grits for breakfast oh my great like just something to change your mood acute State shifters um to alter it the other couple of Tricks here are light so if we know that maybe say multiple people are struggling that day maybe we'll put on the lights extra bright we'll bring in

some extra things and just get it more light in the area not that do even count actually going outside and seeing the Sun but perhaps we'll do that um and then other little tricks that I've learned over the years is one particular thing I love is literally drawing a line a physical line in the ground and you look at that line and you say like I'm going to train today and I'm going to accomplish this effort uh I'm not going to walk past this line and into that training space until I'm ready to give that

effort and that may take a minute or 10 or whatever but it it's the physical barrier is very important to saying like I'm not just going to get through it I'm going to actually perform the way I want to perform or I'm not going to do it and I'm not going to cross this line until I'm ready to make that happen all right I really like that tool it also brings to mind the importance of at least thinking about how your relationship with your phone during training um Can perhaps help but also impede workout motivation

and performance in an earlier episode you mentioned that if people are using their phone to play music during their workout that they establish the complete playlist prior to initiating the workout and then not deviate from that playlist as opposed to changing it in the middle because there's just too much of a uh of an Impulse to also check social media check email check text messages I mean the way I think about the phone actually is it's a bunch of little um brain areas it's got a memory system for you it's got lookup tables for lookup

tables it's got websites to look things up on the Internet it's got photos I mean it is so rich with sensory data and it's so closely linked to our own brain architecture the algorithms are designed for those to be that way that I always think about it as bringing in a second person with me but that person is a my twin that um has severe attention issues and for those that already have attention issues just think about this as a twin that would then compound You by tapping on your shoulders talking to you all the

time interrupting you uh somebody that you like a lot but that frankly is um is a little bit irritating in that they're they're interrupting your ability to really show up and also your ability to show up for them so I started to think about the phone as um an entire individual and that it represents me and and certainly not the better version of me exactly you actually mentioned something else that we use uh occasionally which what we call Brain Games or puzzles whether this is a crossword puzzle or something where you actually lose your thought

of self for a second and your brain gets engaged in a task that you weren't regretting or even thinking about these can be stupid little games uh it could be little challenges especially if you're in like a group or a team setting right like we're going to play one round of vge ball or we're going to play one round of of Thumb Wars so you do encourage this yeah I see so you would play like a thing instead of warming up like all right get in and everyone get going we're going to you know get

your foam roller your D whatever things just like all right everyone line up and we're going to play thumb roll to see who wins right just like whatever right and all a sudden you've snapped into a new mental shift um or literally playing brain games playing Tetris on your phone like any of these things um can work in this acute setting C can I ask you a question it's not directly related to recovery uh per se but I think it's worth mentioning um or asking about rather which is the use of mirrors or no mirrors

while training um you know the experience of seeing oneself and observing one's form in the mirror I suppose has some utility you can get some sense of progress that you might trigger um here I'm almost specifically referring to uh resistance training I suppose it could be cardio if you're running on a treadmill or pushing a sled or something but um you can see form um you can get a sense of um what your face looks like when you Grimace uh but in all seriousness um you are without question a person not you Andy but um

one is in a interceptive mode when looking at themselves in the mirror so exception perception of things beyond the confines of our skin even if it's a picture of us interoception perception of everything from the skin inward um and so if we're looking at ourselves we're diverting some allocation of our attention let's say there's a hundred these are arbitrary units and you can think put 50% of your attention on the feeling in your body or the muscles you're training um and 50% on how it appears in the mirror or it could be 100% on the

mirror 100% internally which you best accomplish probably by closing your eyes so obviously there are constraints here certain movements you wouldn't want to close your eyes Etc in general what are your thoughts on mirrors or no mirrors for resistance training specifically it depends on the metric that you find most important and what I mean by this is if you're training for say muscle hypertrophy there's emerging evidence that suggests uh actually looking at yourself in the mirror and even flexing in between sets um can actually be advantageous or it can augment muscle gains oh my there's

uh support for all the the the uh mirror flexers absolutely not not making fun of you I just uh it is is sort of interesting to be on the observing side of of that but Hey listen results are what people are after yeah having said that if you're trying to enhance um movement learning then it may be detrimental so if you're doing an exercise that is explosive and fast it's probably not the best thing to be looking into a mirror um if you were to walk into any Olympic weightlifting Arena and you had any thoughts

of using a mirror you would probably run out of the gym very very quickly you can't see yourself in time to make an adjustment with the movement that's happening that fast and also we'll do exactly what you mentioned which is it will remove your ability to understand and feel the movement and so this is a big component to using technology for exercise at all is you have to make sure that the end point is you understanding you and your physiology more not less when you Outsource learning to technology in this case even if the technology

is the mirror you remove your ability to gain and truly understand that learning process so you need to be very very careful whether you're using a mirror or whether you're using any number of apps where you can record say a movement and then watch it afterwards and it will give you a breakdown if your hand was in the right spot or foot was in the right spot spot these are all great but you need to then take the next step which is to say I need to be able to feel that position all right so

in the case of performance if you can imagine trying to learn a new technique say running technique and you have to be able to watch yourself in the mirror to understand your stride in the right position if you don't take the next step of saying okay now I don't have to look in the mirror and I can feel when I'm getting out of rhythm or whatever the cas is then you'll never be able to actually then use that in your race and so it's very very important that people again pay attention to what is the

dependent variable that you're actually interested in doing if you're trying to get better at something the tech is okay as a starting place it just cannot be the finishing place thank you for those Reflections I'm curious as to what happens or what one should do if their HRV is reduced for maybe three or four or more days in a row absolutely the next question that I'm going to ask is and am I in that adaptation phase if so I'm going to still ignore it just like I did if it was a single bad day but

I'm going to start watching it very carefully I may actually now introduce some other tests so I may use a performance test uh we may look at something else maybe ask questions maybe have some communication either with myself or somebody else so I'm going to start paying more attention but I'm still really not going to take much action until that crosses more than seven days of consistent problems um if it does do that or we're in a peing phase then I'm going to go to another set of solutions that are truly going to pull me

out of the hole rather than just be uh those acute State shifters these are more what I call chronic state shifters now some of these are actually very similar to the ones we've used before uh for example thermal stress so I can promise you if your recovery score is in the tanks and you walk outside and you jump in your 35 degree water and you get back out what's going to happen is your HRV score immediately afterwards I'm I'm talking Within seconds is going to be significantly compromised right in other words think about that remember

a low HRV means High sympathetic I promise you cold water will put you in a high sympathetic Drive however and we've tested this pretty extensively um looking at HRV zero 15 30 60 90 all the way up to 180 minutes post and on average you will see your HRV score continue to rise after that and so well you have this immediate sympathetic response you will immediately then respond you know about 30 minutes on most people depends on the person though and that score will be improved for several hours afterwards so um heat can kind of

have a similar effect um that actually again is a it's sort of an acute fix but over time as we've described earlier that can also have a little bit of a chronic effect um we can also then get into areas like sleep and so now we're going to start playing and exploring why uh are you sleeping poor as well or was your sleep score fine but your HRV was low that's a little bit of a different answer if your sleep is getting compromised then we're going to start going into and making sure we're improving our

sleep um in terms of like brain stuff instead of maybe playing a game or having music or some of those other tricks those aren't going to really have a chronic effect but you can do things like work on social connection that's actually been shown to improve recovery over time you can do things like journaling or meditation and those have an acute effect as well as a chronic effect so again if you go Journal right now you probably feel better but also we know that over time that will gradually improve things so um adaptogens and things

like that also can have a chronic effect so can things like electrolytes or food or hydration if those things were were off so we're going to go to a whole number of areas but those are the primary ones outstanding of all that of course it may be simply a time to go back and reassess our training program that's truly the case so uh that's where we're at if so we're probably going to either completely remove training um or drop it to like 50% or so uh until we start rebounding back to Baseline and that's generally

the numbers we use for many people who are not training for a competitive Sport and maybe aren't pushing themselves really hard you know maybe uh they're they consider themselves somebody who exercises in order to maintain Health um and Aesthetics and um longevity Etc uh and they never really finish any workout completely exhausted they're sleeping okay their appetite's okay can we assume that they are recovering well um or maybe they're not creating enough of a adaptation response like there's no Progressive overreaching and so there's really no stimulus for Recovery what I'm saying here is on the

the face of it I think is obvious right if you don't train hard there's nothing to recover from what I'm really saying is is the ability to recover itself something that we need to train in other words can we get better at recovering and the uh analogy here would be something like focus in order to uh perform work of any kind but certainly mental work and physical work we need to be able to focus the ability to focus is the reflection of a bunch of neural circuits and chemicals and hormones Etc but we know roughly

what those are and we know that if you are poor at focusing for every small bit of time that you can focus a little bit longer even if it's a matter of seconds those circuits themselves get better at focusing and so on and so forth so in other words is the recovery system however Broad neurotransmitter hormones neural muscular immune-based Etc can that system or set of systems become better can we get better at recovering can we meaning can it become faster and uh more effective um can we think of the recovery system is kind of

a blade that gets sharper by engaging recovery because if so then there's strong reason for people who are not pushing really hard to push at least a little bit harder than is comfortable for them every once in a while to make sure that system doesn't start to slide back remember physiology is listening to everything you do and it is always responding so the analogy that I will meet your analogy with that I use here is the bowling alley so you've probably been bowling before and you've used the bumper Lanes right the bumper Lanes I've gone

bowling before and I've spent time in the gutter and I've spent time on the pins okay um it's been a while we used to have a bowling alley in the town where I went to and um it was fun we used to slide around on the Sho and like all the kids would hang out there and I feel like do they still have bowling alleys I don't even know it feels like something that may have gone the the way of the the mid 2000s I don't care if no one bills anymore you're not going to

ruin my good analogy okay well well my intent wasn't to ruin your analogy um okay tell us about bowling all the bowlers are going to come after me with with um bowling balls or something you're going to get blasted with all the stats on elevations don't hurt me sorry cool so if would one were to go bowling and they didn't want to put their ball in the gutter yeah you could put these little bumpers in those Lanes all right and these little foam pads that go in the gutter that if your ball is going towards

the gutter it hits those and bounces off and goes back in the lane right okay so in this entire conversation and this is actually true of a lot of the way people approach their fitness and health people are very concerned often times with optimizing meaning I want to make sure I don't go in the gutter I don't want to hit the walls so therefore I'm going to try to improve the accuracy in which I throw the ball so I want to make sure that I'm throwing it down the center of the lane more often and

I want to get my my standard deviation Tighter and Tighter so that I don't get anywhere close to hitting the wall however what they're not realizing is if you do that the body will start shrinking the size of the lane because what it basically says is huh we haven't had a ball touch Us in years we don't need to be this wide let's get smaller and smaller and smaller so it's not that you actually are having a reduced ability to recover but you start becoming incredibly sensitive to that so your two strategies for enhancing recovery

are to practice getting closer of throwing that ball down the middle lane or to widen to widen the alley and that's exactly what you're referring to and you absolutely should do that and so what happens is you don't have to be so precise with what you're doing because your ability to handle so many things things is widen so if you're off now by four or five in to the right no problem because you've just tripled the size of your alley that's exactly what you want to do so paying attention to two things number one is

getting better at accuracy maybe staying really tight with your progressions um using nutrition and sleep to optimize your recovery and push your resilience is what we call this in fact there's actually a biological way to measure resilience we we do that in all of our folks um this is scientifically validated stuff and didn't just make it up you can actually measure resilience and there's more and more coming out on this but that's exactly what that term me so how well can you handle and bang things off the stress so when you see a reduction in

say 10% of your HRV today for you that may make you feel terrible for me I might not feel anything because I'm well adapted to large fluctuations and therefore I'm okay the less and less you do that the more and more responsive you will be to those slight deviations so that is exactly the Target and that's kind of what I allude to when I say you got to understand what are we optimizing for we optimizing for making sure I don't feel any different today are we optimizing to make sure when I do feel different I

still am able to perform um so this is why you want to do things like maybe use some caffeine today and feel great but if I have to use it every day all I'm doing is shrinking my sensitivity there so now if I have to go a day without it I can't train at all right caffeine is the easy example because people understand how that whole system works but this is really true of everything else so yeah you need to practice this and the way to do that is to give yourself more stress to continue

to bring in the stress from nutrition from training from breath work um you mentioned earlier about Focus the exact same thing right it's not just about getting better right now it's about training a system and you can clearly train that right um we will often say breath work is a practice that's exactly what we're talking about right so you're practicing getting better at these things you're practicing returning your focus you're practicing recovering and quite literally physiologically you can upregulate whether we're talking enzymes whether we're talking about Regulators these will be upregulated so then the the

next time that insult comes in it's not as big as it's not as damaging so yeah absolutely you can and you should strive for that throughout all the episodes where we've been talking about exercise at the core of that is this word adaptations and I love that you mentioned that breath work can also create adaptations the way I'm visualizing all of this now is that resistance training with weights machines body weight otherwise cardiovascular training running jogging sprinting jumping and so on thermal training exposure to heat exposure to cold in a dedicated way and deliberate respiration

AKA breathing or breath work as a practice all of those can be viewed as ways to trigger adaptations and in the context of recovery the specific adaptations you're trying to engage are opposite to stress in fact with the exception of perhaps deliberate cold exposure maybe deliberate heat exposure because if the sauna is really hot you can get the dorphin release which is kind of uncomfortable but but still in both those cases the rebound from that in other words when you get out you shower you go to bed the next morning you do have this kind

of blist out feeling we know why that is that is the rebound to that uncomfortable situation so it seems it doesn't really matter whether or not you're using resistance you're doing cardiovascular training you're using thermal approaches or you're using respiration based approaches all of these are really ways of both triggering adaptations and if applied properly to actually help you recover from the stress and create the the literal result that you're that you're trying to achieve for some people that might have been obvious but I think for many people including myself this set of conversations that

we've been having over the series these episodes It's really the first time that I've ever thought about exercise in these ways in any event it's just a reflection but it's one that at least for me um is tremendously useful because it has a lot of um Oran organizational logic to it uh which at least appeals to to my brain because the more that things have a logic the more for me that they become simplified and the more that the vast array of tools uh becomes uh becomes visible to me as you said earlier what is

it let me make sure I get this right it's um concepts are few methods are many pretty close Okay how would you how remind us how you state it methods are many concepts are few ah okay either way the directionality probably matter it doesn't matter no let's keep it right the the methods are many uh Concepts there a few um galpin's law I in science you're not allowed to name things after yourself um but you can name uh things after other people so uh it's a galpin's law because I'm definitely the one who created that

idea so absolutely that was extreme and tremendous sarcasm just so we're Ultra clear regardless uh here we go G galpin's Law there you go one thing that's in my head right now is we've thrown out a lot of options for folks and maybe what we can do is try to simplify a little bit so what I can kind of walk you through is how we uh measure recovery if you will and how often and some tools and what I would recommend people do is not use everything I said you want to pick one or two

things per category that are most important to you that are at your cost uh that are at your availability that are interesting and important relevant to you and do that uh the reason I kind of wanted to cover a a large number of things was was to give folks options but again I want to emphasize the point is to not measure all of them in fact you don't need to we um I've ran this before with professional athletes where we've taken blood urine every single day we've done performance measures uh vertical jumps on a force

plate a whole bunch of things every day for years on end and what I can tell you is there is tremendous redundancy in physiology right Everything is Everything so you don't need to do them and don't feel like you're missing out if you aren't doing them one or two metrics is probably fine I generally recommend one subjective measure this could be as simple as what's your mood how do you feel today great and one objective measure HRV resting heart rate anything else right so if you even literally just did that you'd probably have pretty good

insight as to what you're doing so maybe in fact I I'll go more detail here um maybe I'll give you a couple of examples of things to measure every day some things that you should measure maybe quarterly monthly and then maybe even semiannually and then you can maybe just pick a couple from each of these categories and have yourself a pretty good monitoring system for what to do and I'll include some that are um a little bit of Technology based and then others that are totally cost free and require nothing okay to start off I

would recommend taking something like HRV every day or or most days um if you don't have a device like that you could also use honestly the CO2 tolerance test and we've talked about that a number of times and we probably have plenty of resources to go find that uh but that doesn't require anything it typically takes about a minute or so and you can do that under the same circumstances in which HRV in other words do it the same time every day have the same standardization stuff and that is actually been in our coaching experience

um while admittedly there is no peer- reviewed research on this yet um just in our experience this tends to track extremely closely with HRV and other metrics of recovery in fact we actually did do a uh a pilot trial in my lab and it uh it tracked decently well with both state and trade anxiety so uh it's a nice metric um not perfect but you you could take that so if you wanted you could do both um but again remember you're trying to capture systemic stress and so you're really just showing you're measuring one thing

two ways so you don't necessarily have to have them both I will do both just because like I'm super interested in small differences but globally they're going to tell you basically the same thing so those are two things we we use again basically daily year round or or close to it um if you want to go past that a little bit um you can look at you can use an actual a a pretty old commonly used survey called a daa d l d I forget the exact acronym but it is a fairly lengthy questionnaire and

it accounts for things like how do you feel today how do you sleep um any stressors going on in your life how you've been eating and it's this it's like fairly comprehensive lengthy survey um that came out I mean geez it's probably been around for 30 years or something it's it's nothing new and been used extensively uh I you would not want to do that every day if you wanted to take some subjective measures every day we typically stick with like I said mood um motivation something like that um you you could perform this do

detesto something more like monthly or at the end of each training phase you know every couple of months and probably worth looking at it's not going to tell you if you're in a bad spot today or tomorrow but you would pick that up with the HRV or suit to tolerance test it would though tell you information especially if you're working with another individual about major life changes and if anything it just facilitates that conversation right I noticed you reported X happening um let's let's talk about that and can I help Etc so another kind of

sneaky helpful one is is is simply body fi like I said um non-functional overreaching and overtraining are associated with a number of things like energy um appetite suppression changes in in in body weight or body composition so you can measure that um monthly or even really quarterly uh depending on what kind of athlete or individual you're working at or if you're trying to especially if you're not trying to lose weight or if you're trying to be at maintenance and that'll give you some insights as well so moving past that now actually we're going to move

into the realm of things that we call Hidden stressors so those those are all visible stressors um so hidden stressors the most common ones we've sort of mentioned U and I would probably do this um well you're going have to do these ones through serum so this is blood work cortisol like we talked about in testosterone and then of course testosterone to cortisol ratio and then the other ones I mentioned um you can do those quarterly it's not bad there are some blood markers that there's really no sense to do them that soon and there

are other markers I mean in our system our individuals are getting pretty extensive blood work saliva work urine and stool and there so there's plenty of those things you just do not need to measure you know every 10 weeks or so uh in this case you know cortisol as you know sort of changes rapidly um testosterone can change pretty quickly um but if you're really trying to notice a large Trend you know certainly quarterly or so is is an appropriate time frame um doing it every four or five weeks is probably unnecessary so you can

save yourself some money and do that um other stuff you can look at actually more like semiannually in um plasma like glutamine and glutamine to glutamate ratio and you can maybe save the why you want to look at those for another conversation but those are important um we always look at something from the oxidative stress thing so this could be something like tnf alpha or inter Lucan 6 something like that again we're looking at that in serum and we're looking at that you know like semiannually and then another sneaky actually one um that I love

to look at is uh the nutrifil the lymphocytolysis uh that number starts to get really high certainly like more than 9 to1 you got a pretty good Insight that something gnarly is going on with your immune system so um we will actually take action much lower than that number but that's like a nice cut off you'll see is like that's a very very high number so um those are some things you can use uh most folks have the ability hopefully to get some basic blood work done get a basic what's called a CBC and CMP

um if you have a great physician and you can get insurance to cover that and you just go on and ask for a CBC and CMP they'll what that means you can Google that and they'll order it you'll get all the information typically that I just described or close enough and you'll get some insights and then again you can just use uh that free service I mentioned earlier to check to see whether or not the changes are um just a matter of testing quality or actually physiologically relevant what you just described is an amazingly powerful

array of tools I'm hoping that you can also mention a few tools that are either lower cost truly low cost or zero cost that while they may not have the accuracy or um give the complete picture that some of the biomarkers and other tools that you mentioned do that they can still provide reasonably reliable metrics that people can use in order to assess their level of recovery absolutely the CO2 tolerance test would be the first one um and you can just take that metric anytime you'd like the other ones we've talked about so far are

things like your mood uh we haven't me mentioned libido but that's another assessment that people also tend to have a pretty good grip on and they know what feels normal so when things go out of whack it tends to be a pretty good signal that people will recognize yeah and one note about that um so something that came up in an episode on uh on hormones both for male and female Health um that at some point will Air um which is that you know there's no objective measure for people in terms of libido across the

board meaning people people vary tremendously um age life circumstances um uh and on and on and so um this is one of those subjective measures that I think people need to uh have some sense of what their quote unquote Baseline really is and I'm guessing that the time to assess that might best be uh when initiating or Midway through a relatively low intensity training phase um maybe during the time of year in which all the other factors um that can influence libido are not um at their maximum so if you think about you know light

and dopamine and the relationship between those and the testosterone estrogen systems we know that libido uh testosterone estrogen men and women um tends to peak in the summer months so if that's your Baseline that you're comparing to I don't know that that's as reliable as um piing something like the the fall or the spring um and so anyway this again is very subjective but would just encourage people to uh recognize that there's no standard numbers for this no lookup table there's no equivalent of the libido BMI LMI um no dis respect to the acronym that

probably is LMI um so I think that it's just something to keep in mind as people um do comparisons or subjective comparisons is don't pick a comparison to an extreme try and pick a comparison to a average as you know it to be that actually sort of reminding me one issue that we have seen a lot lately is people if they're having libido issues or just even slightly noticing uh drop they just assume that then therefore means their testosterone is crashing and those things are certainly connected but that is not necessarily the case and where

that becomes a problem is then people then go uh on things like trt Etc with no true oversight and then all kinds of other problems so make sure that if you're going to take that step that you actually get testosterone measured and you're working with the quality ified person to guide you through that process don't just assume because you're having low energy or your libido is a little bit down it could be simply training related it could be sleep related could be any number of things um so that's just like a little bit of a

word of caution there two quick points along the lines of what you just said one interesting thing that I learned when researching our episode on testosterone and estrogen optimization this was an episode that we've done some time ago but is still available in our hberman lab.com all formats Etc is that many many people actually increase their libido and even their levels of testosterone and estrogen as they progress from their 20s into their 40s if they take excellent care of themselves including the correct exercise adaptations correct body fat to lean um lean muscle uh ratios but

of course it can go the other way too A lot of people can be training to achieve such low body fat stores that libido can suffer so it it you know the age depend uh age related declines in libido um are not necessarily um written into the script of life in fact there are some data points from a really interesting paper I talk about in that um episode of uh individuals this was a study focused on males in their 80s and 90s who maintained total and free testosterone as high as uh individuals in their 20s

but then when you look at the lifestyle factors of those people in their 80s and 90s they were doing a lot to create that that scenario the second point is one related to what you just said um which is very true which is people generally tend to assume that a drop in libido is related to a drop in testosterone um and then assume that they need to increase their testosterone and in some cases that is true absolutely but it's also often the case that people who take estrogen or aromatase blockers that is enzyme um Inhibitors

that prevent the conversion of testosterone to estrogen experience severe deficits in libido because of estrogen being too low so estrogen blockers are as much an issue here as um low testosterone then the final point is also one that um many people now men and women are um I think need to be aware of which is that dihydrotestosterone DHT is among the more powerful androgens for um Power output physical power output but also for libido and DHT is strongly inhibited by certain things like turmeric so a lot of people who are taking high doses of turmeric

uh can experience drops in libido so there and um who are taking um uh various compounds to prevent hair loss y things like finasteride so there's a whole catalog of things that can reduce libido that are not directly in the testosterone pathway it can be DHD related or estrogen related and this I think points to the importance of yes take a subjective measure of your libido pay attention essentially be aware don't you know don't obsess but be be aware and try and figure out what factors um are involved for you but don't immediately assume that

it what's needed is more testosterone and often times um the opposite is the case yeah you yeah try to put on a lot of muscle with no estrogen good luck right and and indeed a lot of um athletes in particular uh you know competitive bodybuilders that have that you know Saran Wrap thin skin if you get to know some of those people and you talk to them they they can um look like the sort of comic book archetype of what um someone might might want to be I mean that's not what this discussion or these

episodes have been about but often times they can have um serious liido issues I mentioned earlier and I will emphasize it once more you need to be very cautious when you're taking antioxidants anti-inflammatories cortisol reducers for all those reasons right I didn't really sort of get in examples but you just nailed another fantastic reason of it um we do not give those things prophylactically I I I strongly discourage people from just walking around taking supplementation of antio oxidant um especially powerful ones for no reason if you have done some testing um and you have a

good reason to do so I'm fine or if you're in a very specific say training phase or something like that cool um but if you're just walking around doing that you are often times not always but you're often times causing problems that then you then try to solve by taking more of those anti-inflammatories I feel terrible low energy low libido blah blah blah blah blah I'm too inflamed Etc so yeah antioxidants in the form of food are fantastic almost no issue there is a good evidence actually there so don't worry about man I shouldn't eat

High antioxidant-rich Foods you're going to be fine what we're talking about here is Pharmaceuticals and supplementation where you can take orders of magnitude higher dosages very quickly than you could in the presence of food so that distinction is also very important antioxidant-rich foods are generally fine and that's cons consumed in totally absurd concentrations supplementations powders creams drugs Etc is where you can get into problem so yeah you want to be very careful of doing that unless you have a reason we don't do that unless uh we we see a reason to do so in someone's

markers yeah and herbal compounds despite the fact that their herbal can be quite potent modulators of of hormones um ashwagandha being uh an example uh two herbal compounds that we've talked a lot about on our podcast before and repeatedly uh including in that test off asteron optimization uh episode uh Tonga ali um and fogia grus um Tonga Ali is now taken by a large number of men and women um Tonga Ali and fedoa typically men I'm not sure that there are any good studies about the effects of fedia in women those are herbal compounds that

can have potent effects in increasing testosterone and glutin ising hormone uh do they work yeah they work to varying degrees in in most everybody not certainly not in everybody um but they do work but they they work because they're potent they have effects so the idea that herbal compounds are not powerful um is wrong and it's important to remember that that can cut both ways hence my mention of this uh observation related to turmeric which is not to say that some people can't take turmeric and feel perfectly fine maintain or even increase their liido that

sure that can happen it's just that for people that are very DHT sensitive this tends to be an issue so so unfortunately for many of these compounds the only way to find out is really to try them or to just completely avoid them and decide you don't want to try them is fine too but there really aren't ways to predict who will respond who won't and who will be hyperresponders and um in that case it's a bit of a it's a little bit of a wild west I'm also sort of remembering what the point of

this conversation was supposed to be and maybe I'll I'll return back to that which were some cost free or low cost metrics um that was a very fun tangent but nonetheless uh another couple of ones you can do are uh grip strength testing so if you can buy a you know fairly cheap handgrip dynamometer uh on any number of places these are typically able to be purchased for 20 to $40 or something like that range um you can actually just test that every day I've done that uh in a number of athletes for a decent

amount of time uh admittedly I don't do it anymore that's not because I disagree with it but because we just we're getting the information already and it was just too redundant but if that's the only option it is a great one to do I mentioned Also earlier how I actually like speed tests over strength tests as an earlier indication of overreaching and so because of that I like a vertical jump test um if you have access to a force plate that's great and then you can get uh more in-depth characteristics of the force velocity curve

and acceleration and things like that um used a lot in high performance situations if not simply looking at you know your performance and so you can kind of go back to one of our earlier episodes when I described coloring my fingertips with highlighters earlier in my life you could do the same thing and go out in your garage and every day jump up and touch uh that marker and see where you're at um so a system like that could be done you can also use tools like uh Force transducer and do a standard movement against

say a vertical jump or a high Pole or something like that and measure the velocity and just compare that dayto day of a standard load right so you do it every single time with the same load um same similar thing could be done with like a a medicine ball throw um so you have the same ball you throw the same thing and just sort of where you're at today you want to do a little bit of warmup but not excessive here you want to kind of get an idea of where your Baseline is and you

don't want to influence it by the veracity uh of the warm up every single day because that alone can change it same thing with stretching uh acute static stretching directly influences power production so you don't want to go out there and one day do a 20- minute stretch before and then then the other day you didn't stretch at all because that alone will will cause uh deviations in your performance so try to keep everything you can think of standardized and that'll give you a little bit better data remembering all of these values the biom markers

the performance stuff they have normal variations you just want to figure out first and foremost what those normal variations are for you so you have your normal number you have your standard deviation when you start getting outside of that standard deviation you start paying attention and so that's kind of like what we we typically call that the gray Zone and so if is in the gry zone we're fine we're not adjusting but if it's outside of that whatever that is for you recognizing that the gry zone is smaller for some folks and larger for others

but what is normal for you and your situation and then you can make your decisions outside of that when you see numbers that are consistently or more than 3 to 5 days and in a row or close four the last 5 days four the last six something like that then you may have some cause for Action well that was an incredible description of the various tools and modes for recovery and I realized I jumped the gun a bit during our discussion about food and supplements but I like to think that it serves as a nice

uh precursor to the next episode which is going to be all about nutrition and supplementation if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel that's a terrific zeroc cost way to support us in addition please subscribe to the podcast on Spotify and apple and on both Spotify and apple you can leave us up to a five-star review if you have questions for us or comments or suggestions about topics you'd like us to cover or guests you'd like me to include on the hubman Lab podcast please put those in the

comment section on YouTube we do read all the comments please also check out the sponsors mentioned at the beginning and during today's episode that's the best way to support this podcast I'd also like to inform you about the hubman Lab podcast free newsletter it's called the neural network newsletter and each month the neural network newsletter is sent out and it contains summaries of podcast episodes specific protocols discussed on the hman Lab podcast all in Fairly concise format and all completely zero cost you can sign up for the neural network newsletter by going to huberman lab.com

go to the menu and click on newsletter you provide us your email we do not share it with anybody and as I mentioned before it's completely zero cost by going to hubman lab.com you can also go into the menu Tab and go to newsletter and see some example newsletters from months past thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercise and performance with Dr Andy Galpin and as always thank you for your interest in science [Music]