Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation for Fitness | Huberman Lab Guest Series

[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 marks the sixth and final of the sixth episode series on fitness exercise and performance and today's discussion is all about nutrition and supplementation to maximize your fitness exercise and performance goals Dr Andy Galpin I'm super excited to discuss today's topic which is nutrition and supplementation for performance and recovery and I'm particularly excited about this conversation because I've

been interested in supplementation and nutrition for performance really since my teens but also because in recent years we've witnessed a massive transformation in the general public in terms of their view of supplementation and nutrition first of all more people are thinking about nutrition what is good nutrition what is not a very barbed wire topic as you know but there are some truths in there that we'll discuss but also supplementation you know whereas 105 years ago I think most people um would either be really into supplements that was a small percentage of people but the majority

of people uh were either told or were thinking oh you know vitamins you you mostly excrete them they're just expensive urine nowadays it seems that many people including many of my colleagues and Physicians all the way down to sports performance experts are taking and making recommendations about certain supplements and so the way that I like to think about supplements is that they aren't necessarily just supplements which makes it sound like they are augmenting what should already be there but you're not quite getting enough of but indeed a lot of these things we call supplements are

very potent compounds that can transform our ability to perform in the short term to recover from exercise and that can really shape brain chemistry hormone patterns acutely and when taking long term term so I'm very excited about today's topic and to be able to try and sort through this let's call it a cloud hopefully not a storm but this cloud of supplements that are out there because indeed many of them are excellent and can provide us a lot some of them are terrible and then some just don't do anything and therefore are terrible because uh

either they have side effects or because they're very expensive and they don't do anything and then of course within the realm of nutrition there's an equal amount of of confusion but that's why I'm talking to you because you're going to put Clarity and structure and definition on these incredibly important topics you you absolutely nailed it there one of the major reasons supplements can work is because you can consume nutrients in extremely high concentrations such that you would not get in nature through food having said that you really do want to focus on the basics sleep

nutrition hydration and I'm going to get into very specific detail later with some of those things that said there are plenty of situations in circumstances when supplementation can do exactly what you said also though because you are taking them in such high concentrations they can also be unproductive they can be destructive or they can be counterproductive so in case if you're taking a couple of supplements over here it may actually be counteracting the benefits of some of the other supplements over there so in the ideal situation we would be able to work like snipers here

so we would be able to run full biological testing so extensive blood work and saliva and urine and stool and have an in-depth analysis of your gut microbiome and your stress patterns and your time of day and your cortisol curve and like all the things that we do in our high performance folks with that then we can get extremely high Precision supplementation and and quite honestly our philosophy is we only give individuals exactly what they need so even some of the standard uh generally safe and effective supplements we don't really necessarily use them if there's

no specific need we've talked about the consequences of this with things like antioxidants but even simple stuff like stimulants and other tools that are effective for Recovery we don't use them unless we have a reason that said that's not the reality for a lot of people they're not going to be able to do something like that or somebody who can help them in that so there are a handful of supplements that I would consider to be in my my 8020 rule which is sort of like the 20% of supplements that are going to give you

80% of the benefit for the lowest cost and so what I can actually do is just sort of start there even though this like burns my skin and my soul a little bit I absolutely hate this I am the context guy I'm the it depends it's high Precision guy but let's be real um there are a number of supplements that are fairly effective and fairly cheap for a wide range of outcomes uh so this is for general public this is for people who want to do the three buckets right you want to look a certain

way so supplements that could enhance muscle growth and fat loss uh non hormonal based supplements of course supplements that can improve energ or physical performance again from everything from you know squatting more to feeling better in your yoga class to having more energy throughout the day to our third major bucket that we've been talking about throughout this entire series which are longevity so we can cover those first if you'd like to start there yes absolutely let's start there often times when we think of supplements we immediately jump to High Sport performance type of things or

vigorous workouts or or muscle building though that doesn't necessarily have to be the case uh take for example creatine and I've spoken about this at length and with gu Darren kandow who's done a tremendous amount of research I was just up at his lab recently in Canada and he has covered extensively in fact I I think I put up a post perhaps I could draw this up um where he laid out all the Myriad of benefits of creatine this is taken in the you know typically 3 to five grams per day of dose of creatin

monohydrate which has the most research behind it um seems to be extremely low side effects in almost anyone and the benefits include in course things like uh muscle performance and strength and things like that and if you go back to our discussion and our episode on metabolism and and endurance uh we talked about the phosphocreatine system so you can figure out kind of what this is going to do in terms of effect that said there's excellent information and data coming out and on on the benefits of bone mineral density in creatine U there's a ton

of work looking at a host of cognitive factors um from memory executive function uh to effects potentially on even things like depression mood to alzheimer's Parkinson's uh all forms of of neurogenerative disease u in fact it's it's pretty obvious the brain loves creatine as a fuel and so not only we sort of discussed in the episode as being the fuel for skeletal muscle contraction but the brain needs to do that as well the asites around the brain need to be able to provide energy Etc so it's very clear that metabolism in the brain is reduced

with things like TBI and potentially concussions so um now to be extremely clear creatine does not prevent any of those diseases it does not treat any of them and the data are mixed but it more and more are coming uh some show a little bit of benefit some show you know maybe none but I'm not aware of any research in those areas that show it has any downside for the most part side effects are extremely minimal if not null and then potentially some benefit depending on the specific study so we could put up a if

you'd like a couple of links directly to those meta analyses and folks can go through those things one by one so um I only say that to again maybe expand our understanding or thinking about what these types of supplements can do it's not just about growing muscle or um you know high performance it's everything to again there's an association with recovery uh so is fantastic for recovery from muscle for muscle damage uh helps and can potentially Aid in fat loss and a whole host of things so you can actually also even look at websites like

examin I have you know no affiliation with them whatsoever but if you want to just type in something like monohydrate you can see a whole list and you're going to see thousands of studies of the potential benefits of creatine so that is is always number one on my list I'm relieved to hear that creatine sits at the top of your supplementation list because uh well first of all I started taking it when I was in college at that time I was taking it in this kind of loading mode where you take it in um you

know anywhere from uh 15 to 25 gram per day often causing some gastric distress often combining with fruit juice to try and shuttle it into the muscles and then a so-called maintenance phase of reducing to 10 or 15 grams per day um nowadays I just take about five grams or so although later I know you're going to tell me why I should probably be taking more than five grams per day given my body weight so I know we'll get into some of those specifics a little bit later but in addition to experiencing Direct effects on

uh muscle size and strength which I did I don't know how it contributed to my cognitive function or if it does now because there's really no way to tease that out with with standard um uh at home tests like a scale uh but it is very clear to me based on the literature uh that you described and some of which we've covered on other episodes of the podcast that the phosphocreatine system is vitally important for forbrain function right the forbrain of course being the the uh portion of brain U broadly speaking the portion of brain

just behind your forehead that is uh responsible for planning action setting rules in context so um even as simple as if you're going downfield in a game of soccer or basketball and you're on offense and then uh you make an attempt on goal or basket and then it switches and you go back now you're on defense that being on defense is very different than being on offense and that goal excuse me that that rule switching is a prefrontal cortical function as is every context dependent way of thinking or or acting and so anything that can

favor function of the forbrain I think is good for uh humans in general it suppresses anxiety allows us to interpret what's going on for us and so I'm very um relieved and gratified to hear that creatine sits at the top of the list also as I'm sure you'll point out again later creatine is for the most part a relatively affordable supplement for most people so here we're not talking about something that's really esoteric or that you have to you know fly to um some remote location to get an infusion of right um but although I

apologize to all you CU I know the price has skyrocketed recently really yeah why is that uh I think it's a well nobody knows but it's quote unquote a supply and and uh demand issue if you will so uh those prices have gone up there's also of course been shipping problems in the world and things so uh every time I I talk about creatin right now people just flame me for like oh my God it's so expensive now I'm like I know I'm sorry but honestly it's only so expensive because you're used to it being

so cheap so when you when you counter the fact that we like right yeah like relative to the other stuff you're probably taking relative to any other number of purchases um for the it still lands very high on my Roi List my you know my 8020 because of that it's um it can be taken any time of the day it doesn't have to be in magical combination you talked about coing esting with carbohydrates that can enhance uh how quickly you can get into the system in fact it's it's going to work on the exact same

me mechanisms we'll probably or potentially talk about hydration um but these things are shuttled so anytime you bring in carbohydrate that's going to be shipped into tissue as quickly as it can uh creatin goes along for the ride and then it brings water for the ride that's how you enhance hydration that's why it's important to have carbohydrates when you're trying to hydrate um so you're just going to take it in there and that's also why you get quote unquote cell swelling um which is a good thing like you're it's just enhancing hydration we actually use

it a ton in our post weigh-in protocols so individuals that have to cut water weight is a great thing to throw back in there it's going to help you rehydrate it's also why when you take 30 grams of it it can pull a bunch of fluid in the intestines and and there you go with your little bit of GI distress so um yeah there's a lot of fun things you can talk about there um I just had to flag that because every time I've been talking about it recently and I say it's Jeep people are

killing me for it so I apologize I don't know how to make it any cheaper but it's still fairly fairly affordable yeah I would say relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of supplements out there and when thinking about the return on investment is U it's quite good yeah like actually sorry sorry to cut you but I was just also thinking um there's been a number of studies on uh sleep deprivation as well with that can help so obviously sleep deprivation will generally reduce cognitive function and creatine can amarate some of that drop so if you

think about it in that context I had a crummy night of sleep well and if that enables you to perform a little bit better in your job then you would make up the dollar or so whatever you paid for that day's supply of creatine so um it is something kind of on that note it's not going to work as an acute response so it's not something you're like I feel terrible let me throw some creatine Down the Hatch I'll feel better that that's not going to work it's going to take several weeks to have a

noticeable effect it needs to be stored in tissue uh it needs to be built up before you can actually do much of anything so it is unlike some of the other things like stimulants or caffeine that have an acute you know response right now uh and so if you're going to take it you probably need to consume it consistently if you can't do that then really there's no point in doing it uh and the loading phase you mentioned distance were here is something you can do again if you need to enhance the storage of it

really quickly so say for example we've done this in some military cases where it's like you get back to base and you you've only got a week and you got to go back out we may actually have to uh do a little bit of a loading phase then but if that's not the case um the loading phase is unnecessary it's not really harmful other than maybe G stress and maybe waste but you're going to have three or four weeks it's going to reach full saturation plenty of time to to be there in that if you're

in that three to seven grams per day range I'm glad you mentioned the slow accumulating positive effects of creatine as compared to so-called acute effects because the way that I think of Health promoting and performance enhancing protocols like viewing morning sunlight or um endurance exercise for that matter or creatine or sleep for instance is that while they can have effects in the immediate term you might feel a little bit or in the case of a good night's sleep a lot better it's really the cumulative effect of raising your Baseline level of functioning you know there's

uh another way to think about it is um these supplements or behaviors um and quality nutrition when done consistently over time time and that doesn't mean 100% of the time but you know probably 80% of the time sure lead to a sort of uh buoyancy in your system that allows you to be more resilient under conditions uh where conditions aren't perfect right and if conditions are made perfect or close to perfect and you already have that buoyancy that's when you really start to see the ultra high performance effects um that are so much fun but

they have to be established through consistent supplementation consistent nutritional intakes so today I know we're going to distinguish between uh normally they're called chronic and acute effects but that makes it sound like chronic illness the moment people hear chronic well they might think of other things but but in the context of Health they typically think of you know chronic illness and we're not talking about that what we're talking about is slow modulatory effects in the body a lot of things in the body take time to build up but once they've built up they uh they

clearly can benefit us um and then other things as you mentioned you know a stimulant for instance has a very acute effect that is going to occur with you know Peak within 30 minutes and wear off within you know 4 hours or so can also have some chronic effects but typically it's a short-lived effect so we just want to frame up the the language that we'll be using and I'm really excited to dive into this topic and I think creatine is a beautiful example of a supplement that has positive chronic mental and physical benefits down

the road I can come back and talk a little bit more about creatine and we can cover some other information regarding best practices for getting the most out of it as well as we'll certainly dive into some of the common side effects or at least a thought of side effects while we're here though I also could throw in a few other of these high impact lowcost generally safe um things that are my 802 rule if you will so the way I actually kind of think about it is you want one from each of three categories

uh and these categories are fuel stimulant and fatigue blockers so creatine is actually in the fuel it's not not a stimulant as we talked about The Chronic effect there so we've already knocked that one off another one from the fatigue blocker is going to be anything like beta alanine or sodium bicarbonate and then from the stimulate use of course we have anything like a beetroot juice to a caffeine or uh something of the equivalent so we can come back again and talk about all those in more detail a little bit later 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 RS at Cal State Fullerton it is however part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast our first sponsor is momentus momentus makes supplements of the absolute highest quality the hubman Lab podcast is proud to be partnering with momentus for several important reasons

first of all as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality second of all their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations if you're going to develop a supplementation protocol you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations with single ingredient formulations you can devise the most logical and effective and costeffective supplementation regimen for your goals in addition momenta supplement ship internationally and this is of course important because we realize that many of the hubman Lab podcast listeners reside outside the United States if you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned

on the hubman Lab podcast in particular supplements for Hormone Health for Sleep optimization for focus as well as a number of other things including exercise recovery you can go to live momentus spelled o us so that's liv.com huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by levels levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and activities affect your health by giving you real-time feedback on your blood glucose using a continuous glucose monitor many people are aware that their blood sugar that is their blood glucose level is critical for everything from Fat Loss

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eat what best to eat when best to exercise how best to exercise and how to modulate my entire schedule from work to exercise and even my sleep so if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself go to levels. link huberman that's levels. link huberman today's episode is also brought To Us by element element is an electrolyte drink that contains the exact ratios of the electrolyte sodium magnesium and potassium to optimize cellular functioning for mental and physical physical performance most people realize that hydration is key we need to ingest

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it some people might roll their eyes or wonder why are we even talking about that now but that I have to believe is among the more fundamental if not foundational aspects of nutrition and supplementation for performance and that's hydration right I mean I think we hear hydration it's like okay we have to drink 68 glasses of water every day our urine should be relatively clear if it's too dark yellow we're not doing a good job of hydrating enough yeah how much of that is true um is alkaline water worthwhile for changing the alkalinity of my

body I learned when I was in college and graduate school that the alkalinity of the different tissues in your body is very well controlled in order to keep you alive and that you don't want it to shift too much or you can enter pretty horrible states of seizure vomiting and even death so tell me about hydration and woven into that if you would educate me on electrolytes and hydration because I think most often when people ingest electrolytes sure they could be ingesting salt tablets probably getting some electrolytes by the way electrolytes sodium magnesium potassium through

their food I think most people think about drinking electrolytes so water and electrolytes I think is a vitally important topic to kick this off with sure we can jump right into your alkaline water um while there's perhaps much to say about this uh we can maybe revisit this in another seven part series all on its own uh I would just say it this way there's probably a few things you should do before worrying about the alkalinity of your water and I'll I'll just leave it at that meaning the alkaline of the water is sort of

irrelevant not that you won't go that far it's just it's probably remember we sort of started off talking about 8020 M um well this would be in my like 991 in terms terms of like if we're really at the level of worrying about the pH of their your drinking fluid uh we have optimized so many other things uh that then we can talk about it but until we have nailed months and years of work on other things this is just not going to make much of an impact great then perhaps you could tell us about

what volume of water we should be drinking when we should be drinking that water relative to training and just generally and um yeah and anything else related to water and electrolytes that can improve mental Performance Physical performance and offset any you know ill effects I like the fact that you mentioned physical and mental performance because it's clear in both cases we hear that we need to drink more water and I can give you some numbers and I will in a second what we also need to recognize is there's this is hormesis we talked about hormesis

a few episodes ago and this is the case right whether we talked about food or hydration or I think I gave you the example of cyanide naturally occurring in your food hot water is same way so if you are under hydrated or dehydrated then there is a clear negative effect on your body and as I increase the level or improve the level of hydration things get better whether this are physical performance or whether this is mental performance in fact we know that a body weight reduction of as low as 2% via dehydration so imagine you're

doing a about of exercise and you're sweating and you lose 2% of your body weight that alone is enough to reduce accuracy in performance so the classic study we talk about here was in basketball players so shooting accuracy so free throw shooting I think is specifically what they looked at um significant reduction in performance with as little as 2% dehydration that that level you also see a significant increase in perception of difficulty of exercise and so only right at 2% again when I say 2% I mean percent body weight lost right that's what that means

you start getting the 3 four 5% dehydration you start having a significant reduction in blood volume and that's incredibly important for endurance um your blood becomes viscous it gets hard to pump through um and you're going to start having all kinds of issues so being dehydrated is again not only going to reduce performance but because of the mental aspect which we just walked through and neuromuscular issue you're going to lose accuracy you're going to lose total endurance performance and you're going to lose speed and power so we have the Triad there no matter what you're

interested in it's going to be harmed by being dehydrated that also is happening then if you're starting your program dehydrated so um if you're already 1% or so DEH hydrated maybe you're like a little under hydrated and you lose a little bit of sweat you've already hit that 2% and so we're starting to see reductions um in performance there the same happens on the other side of that hormetic curve so if you are optimally hydrated in some large window but you start going past that we can start running into equal problems remember there is a

there is a need for an optimal concentration of sodium and potassium and chloride between your cell inside your cell and outside your cell these are electrolytes this is what we call osmolality and osmol ity is is really think of it like concentration and osmosis if you remember those terms so if we are trying to create a muscle contraction that requires an electrical gradient and so sodium and potassium specifically in magnesium calcium are positively charged and chloride is negatively charged and we need to have a certain amount inside the cell and outside the cell so that

the positives and the negatives are balanced appropriately um so that when we move one we change the voltage and we have in the case of a muscle contraction okay I just skimmed through a whole lot of of physiology there to say if you then go mess with fluid only and you say if I were to give you a bis of you know 3 l of pure water right now you're going to dilute your blood and so there's not going to be as many chemical uh there won't be as many electrical signals in there because you've

taken the same amount of sodium potassium Etc and put it in a larger volume of pure water so that gradient is now changed that becomes a significant problem for contraction um I mean quite literally it can kill you this is what we call hyponatremia so nmia spelled na hypo being low hyponatremia if you actually go to the Periodic Chart na is what we Ed for sodium so hyper because the word is nrii actually so that what that literally means is low sodium and you didn't get that from sweating out all your sodium you actually get

hyponatremia from drinking in too much water so it's not that the total amount of sodium gets low it's the fact that the concentration gets low from excessive fluid intake so in the Extremes in fact if you look at the the literature you'll see um anywhere between like 2 to 15% of people who finish endurance races are are into hyponatremia now that varies wildly if you're doing Iron Man and Kona versus like you know the marathon in Denver in in October right it's it's going to be totally different depending on weather conditions but these are all

important um so while like death happens that is sort of extreme if you back up just a little bit you start seeing the same types of performance sacrements in fact the symptoms can be identical brain fog confusion performance uh irritation a GI distress and you think man these are symptoms of dehydration so then you drink more water and you're just exacerbating the problem and I can actually um give you one little example of this we had an executive actually female CEO uh I'll say she's probably when her was in her early 40s and so she

came to us and she thought man for sure she has some sort of gut problem going on because we hear a lot about kind of like gut health and how it affects everything and so she's just like I have brain fog and I've done all these things and I got blood work done and everything's fine like nothing's going on I think I must have some sort of gut thinger going on whatever and it's okay and we just started going through her stuff and uh she was I think about 170 lbs plus or minus and she

was consuming like 250 to 60 ounces of water a day that's a lot of water that's a ton of water and we were like holy what are you doing this for and she just like I that's sort of like my thing it was but she didn't realize it was more of like a nervous tick than it was anything else right she just like sip sip sip sip sip water I'm like man how often do you go pee she's like yeah like every you know 30 minutes or something I'm like fantastic sleep problems focus and so

she's smashing caffeine she was at like 8 cups of coffee a day which is also going to add to to excretion of sodium totally right so it's like okay we don't really need to come in and run a sleep study on you we're just going to lower your water and she was like what we dropped her down to like 180 so basically an ounce per pound of body weight which is still high cuz she did train 180 ounces correct yeah she does work out so she needed to replenish some stuff and we'll cover these numbers

in a second instantaneously I mean like two days in she's like oh my God I haven't slept six or eight hours in years and then after that it was like basically tears coming back to us right my focus my brain fog is gone CU she's in a very high pressure job um it's like everything's coming back like now she was down to three or so cups of coffee a day blah blah blah like the whole thing digestion improved all of it she was s like her only problem after all the analyses was she was just

drinking way way too much water and adding more salt to her would not have solved the problem because she would have just had simply way too much fluid n system she was having all kinds of ADH problems and aldosterone like the whole thing and that that rolls into cortisol the whole like system gets goes into chaos so um it is important that you pay attention to hydration um even though as you sort of mentioned people tend to just kind of like roll their eyes around it because if you're in the middle it's fine but if

you're anywhere past not even the extreme extremes but just that first standard deviation away um you're going to have problems and you might be thinking adrenal fatigue you might be thinking your Testo like you're going to think all these things and you simply just haven't actually dialed in your hydration yeah um I think people sometimes roll their eyes at the discussion of hydration because it just doesn't sound very sexy it's not like doesn't sound like a neurotransmitter or a hormone it sound like testosterone or estrogen or DHEA or um dopamine but it actually is all

of those things it sits at a level beneath all of those but not beneath on a hierarchy beneath in in terms of a foundation it's actually the without proper electrolyte balance and hydration none of the cells of the body can function and then I think people also hear that oh you know we are 70% water and somehow like that statistic Alone um or that fact alone doesn't seem to uh stimulate any kind of action will take away it's like great you know uh like gravity also you know keeps us you know from jumping as high

as we like you know what do I do and so I think um it's it's important that people understand that every cellular process in the body critically relies on having enough sodium magnesium pottassium around and the the way that it's concentrated in fluid water is really the way that you allow every cell in your body to function as well as it possibly could and respond to all the sorts of kind of quote unquote High Performance Tools that we're talking about the other thing I've observed many times over is that if people are ingesting too much

water and also drinking a lot of caffeine and their electrolytes are low they get shaky and they actually can have anxiety like symptoms when people come into my lab to do studies on anxiety and fear we ask a few questions and um those questions include how much water they've had that day also a sort of bizarre fact um but one that I think is worth mentioning is that when the bladder is full it stimulates a sort of anxiety if you ever had to urinate very badly and you're in the car or you can't urinate and

then you get the door like that's talk about anxiety um and that's because there's a direct neural pathway from the bladder that registers the mechanos sensors how much stretch there is on the bladder that sends a signal to the brain stem alertness areas broadly speaking Locus culus and others um that wake us up these are the when we're awake it makes us more awake and when we're asleep this is what wakes us up to urinate in the middle of the night yeah that's actually why you can use uh night urination as a a pretty good

diagnostic of sleep disorders so if because of vasopressin right exactly what you're talking about uh if you're having sleep disorder issues and you're staying awake and uh vas op pressant gets taken off right an APN goes straight to the kidneys your kidneys are supposed to be dormant basically at night you're not supposed to be filtering a lot of and producing a lot of urine at night um if that's happening and and say you you have any number of apne kicking on or anything going on vasal press keeps going keeps sending signal kidneys start filtering so

if you're waking up and peeing multiple times a night that's called nocta that is a very very very good sign that either one of two things happen you one you have some sort of sleep disorder or two you're drinking outrageous amounts of water and so that's actually a bit of a backwards cycle in now right because you're drinking way too much water you're waking up and peeing all night that's actually ruining your sleep and so we have seen this a number of times with our sleep company as we go in and it's just like you

don't need any of this crap you just need to be properly hydrated alternatively if your hydration is sound and you're still waking up more than one time a night to pee on average then you almost well I shouldn't say like that but there's a potential that you have some sort of sleep disort or sleep condition going in so the rule of thumb on that is so we're here once or night once a night or so of urination is fine um if it is routinely or consistently more than two uh you need to make some adjustments

start with hydration it's the simplest way right getting a full sleep study done just figure out hydration we we've had this happen a number of times where people want to get more health conscious and they just get they hear things like this and they're like I got to get on my water and then they just start train wrecking their sleep and they're waking it up so if you're w up multiple times and you're urinating and it is a large amount of urine for you and it is clear that's probably not sleep apne induc nocta that's

probably excessive hydration if you're waking up a bunch of times and it's fairly small amounts of urine then it's probably not the fluid issue it's probably the fact that the basal pressent is kicking your kidneys into gear so that's not a perfect criteria but it's just like a quick little tool you can sort of use um that's actually one of the reasons why we measure almost always uh your body weight at night as well as in the morning so that that's like the combat sport in the UFC fighters boxers we call that your float so

how much you floated overnight I like to know that number because I want to know as well your first morning void so when you wake up then you went to bed at 200 lb you woke up the next morning at 195 it's like oh you floated five pounds did you pee last night yeah yeah three times interesting another case you woke up you went to bed at 200 lb you wake up at should have a certain amount of fluid that you're just respirating out as you're breathing throughout your nose throughout night ideally uh guaranteed you're

going to wake up what was your urine like oh yeah a little bit pretty dark like shocker you're dehydrated so you can kind of look at numbers like that a general float is something like a pound to two pounds for the 170 plus pound person as you scale up that number can go up a little bit you can kind of use these to triage a little bit about what's going on um with this kind of combination everything is everything right so it's like it's not just about one system so you're going to pay attention you

can also look well I don't know if you want to jump into it we can but there's a whole bunch of ways I I can teach you to diagnose hydration and then maybe we can start there and then we can talk about hydration numbers yes I'd love to talk about diagnostics for hydration overhydration dehydration to start off would you be willing to give us some numbers how much water should we be drinking the classic rule here and you're making me do what I hate right I want to give all the caveats first but I'll go

straight to your number half an ounce per pound of body body weight is a rough rule so if you weigh again 200 lb that would mean you drink 100 ounces of water a day most water bottles are like 12 to 20 ounces something like that so you know you end up drinking six of those or so a day kind of like plus or minus which is not that unreasonable um this does depend on a number of factors which I could go over but that is a a rough starting place the only other thing to add

to that is that does not account for exercise induced water loss Ora or anything like that so that's assuming just like basil daily needs if you are exercising or sweating at all for any reasons or work related so um folks that work outside or in the Heat or a human environment this these numbers all change and you can slide this scale up but you generally want to drink about 125% of the fluids you've lost during that physical activity back and how much do you lose per hour of exercise it that number range is between 1

to 5 lbs depending on the person it can even be higher with some of our athletes like I can think of a number of NFL players right now it's not uncommon for those guys to do eight or nine pounds even not even like crazy circumstances if it's August and we're in Jacksonville it's not wild for us those guys to go 9 10 pounds but what about the typical person who goes to a air conditioned gym or goes out for a run on a day that is somewhere between let's say 55 degrees fenit and 85 degrees

F you're probably looking at like a pound got it it's not extremely high if you are are totally soaked might be like a pound and a half to two lbs if you're like come back and like your pits are a little sweaty and there's a little bit of water kind of on your neckline or it's probably like a more like a pound or so so in that case you might drink back a pound and a half of water okay so just to review these numbers to make sure that I'm on the correct page here a

half an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight is a a sort of a foundation for hydration and then you want to replace 125% of the fluid lost during exercise and exercise varies where exercises done varies whether or not people are wearing uniforms or helmets is going to impact how much fluid they lose Etc in a very hot environment that the amount of fluid lost can be anywhere from you know 1 to five maybe even 10 pounds easy per hour of hard hard exertion for most exercise done in conditions of 55 de fhe to

7 to excuse me 85 de fhe done with some degree of effort one might lose a pound or or 2 pounds of water super easy way to find out all you have to do is weigh yourself naked go do your workout come back in dry off weigh yourself naked that'll tell you exactly what you lost so if you win in you were 160 PBS you come back out you weigh you're 158 you lost two pounds drink Back 2 half pounds of water you're good so that is uh honestly it's like fairly gold standard for identifying

you can actually buy a whole bunch of technology for this and they are using the exact same equation which is your body weight when you were there now if you do that though you do need to account for any fluid you drank during the workout sure because that then offsets it simple but I think important question we're talking about a half an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight does that include things like coffee tea soda pre-workout drinks mid-workout drinks uh mate Macho whatever the you know there's a yerba mate there's a there a

million things out there um or just water any fluid for the most part is going to count and is it true that fluids that contain caffeine generally cause us to secrete sodium yeah okay so do you recommend including electrolyte powder or a small pinch of sodium or any number of other supplement type electrolytes that can replace that sodium magnesium and potassium a couple things we have to pay attention to to accurately answer that question what you also sort of asked about you may have not realized is does caffeine actually enhance dehydration uh which is not

really what you asked but it's it probably a lot of people thought that as well so caffeine can but coffee doesn't necessarily do that because remember you're coing esting that with fluid and so we used to say that all the time how coffee dehydrates you it doesn't it might make your urine yellow it certainly gives off an a odor in your urine but in general coffee will not do that because your if you were to now be taking caffeine pills alone now there there is a bit of a diuretic effect there and so you're going

to ur it how much maybe not enough for you to be really concerned with especially when you balance that against the ergogenic effects and benefits of caffeine it's not something we are concerned about second part of your question do you need to then offset the loss of sodium I'm not super concerned about the amount of sodium lost to caffeine I am more concerned about simply the amount of sodium being correct because of the bigger circumstances like how much is actually in your system and how much you lost in the training session so it's not the

caffeine that I care about that much relative to you know if you lost three grams of sodium because of the training and you added another few milligrams because of the caffeine I don't really care or or didn't I'm glad you brought up the difference between a substance like caffeine and the vehicle it's contained in like coffee this is all really important and it also raises a question about individual differences in sweating ability and I call it sweating ability because uh I have a good friend I've known for ages really um actually work with him in

my laboratory uh as well and he's one of these people that the moment he starts any physical activity it's like a flood warning right he just soaks through clothing it's just the sweating adaptation is is exceedingly robust in him other people less so so is it true that sweating in our ability to dump heat through it by loss of water is something that um we tend to vary on and that also that we can build up that capacity I know a number of people are probably thinking ew gross why would I want to sweat more

but there's actually a huge advantage to be able to dump body heat during exertion because body heat in some ways sets the cap for performance in lot many many ways including mental performance our ability to stay alert often is enhanced by it being cold and of course we all want to warm up properly but um in terms of loss of fluid through sweating is there a way to easily bin ourselves into kind of a a low sweater medium sweater um heavy sweater that sounds like an article of clothing but in any case you know what

I'm you know man another a lot to say here we should wish we had a whole series on this um listen if we have to go 17 hours we can do it just everybody hydrate well I think we've shown the listeners uh that is a real threat that's a very real threat podcasting to failure you don't have to do every set in the gym to failure but here we are attempting a podcast failure in it in all seriousness um what what is the role of sweating ability and is this something that any of us should

care about or train for or pay attention to or is this just kind of getting into the Arcane number one you can train your ability to sweat this is important for heat acclamation and why that matters when you sweat that actually is not what regulates your temperature what you want to have happen is the fluid to hit your skin and that to be evaporated that's the actual mechanism so in fact um if you stop sweating and like you can guarantee within a short amount of time you're going to be done moving oh very interesting I

hope people heard that and really are are highlighting that in their mind that sweating is a process of bringing fluid from your body onto the surface of your skin and then the heat dumping aspect of sweating is the evaporation of that off off your body which brings to mind all sorts of ideas about how to dress during exercise Etc but what you said is that if you are not sweating enough you are limiting your output capacity so it's not just about having fluid to sweat y it's also about being able to sweat and being uh

Dressed appropriately to allow that sweat to move uh to evaporate off your body yep and heat acclamation training is as simple as it sounds so just practice it more so uh if you're going into a process where you either need to be in a hot environment or you need to improve your sweat rate you just need to practice sweating and your body will get best to that practice the sauna practice a Jacuzzi just get in those things and you will uh improve your ability to do that now there is a huge genetic component um I

have one individual actually a UFC fighter I've been working with and I don't mind mentioning his name he'll give me full permission Scott Holzman uh many many years um he's actually um fighting right now actually today he'll be going he is like he he is like you described like buckets and buckets and buckets of fluids come off this guy when he's tying his shoes like he just goes right like and know we've we've improved that I actually sweat too much we worked on that a lot early in his career and we we got some improvements

down to get him to hold on to to fluids better that being said I've worked with other individuals in his weight category and it's the opposite right so we can have them literally do the exact same training session together and Scott will dump six pounds and and other folks at his size will dump two two and a half so there's a genetic component that is just there and you don't need to worry about it there um so can you identify if you are a heavy salt sweater or not well you have a whole bunch of

routes for this number one is you can use the old free um cost free test of just looking at your clothing and if you're seeing that white residue all over it so youve You' all have the friend who probably wears that same B baseball hat that they've had for eight years if it is covered in the white junk all over the place um that's a sign of a higher salt sweater if the opposite happens and it's like you can pull their clothing back and there's just nothing there and they maybe a little bit of a

lower salt sweater um you can also use any number of hydration tests I know that there is some coming out in the market very very soon that can give you theoretically real time um measurements just like a CGM would be although I haven't seen any data on if those are accurate or not I haven't used one yet but there are number that are out super cheap you know 10 15 20 bucks all the way up to a couple hundred dollars you can buy these patches put them on you and get a reasonably close estimate um

and again if those things are five or 10 or 20% off I don't know have to see independent data come out first but even if they are you're not worried about the specific milligrams right whether you sweat out you know 1,250 milligrams in a workout or if it's 1340 it doesn't really matter you're trying to look for big big numbers right are you losing 500 milligrams using three and a half grams where you're at so those things will get you in a ballpark to do exactly what you decide am I high medium or low um

and there's a lot of them that that I've used in the past so that that's another way to go about it um then what you want to do is probably match your electrolyte intake to something close to what you sweat that's the ideal scenario um you can get a lot of information about hydration from blood um you can look at like acute markers of dehydration like hemoglobin hematocrit uh if your like if your hemoglobin is like 15 plus it's funny we've talked about this in a few episodes before but I see that and I'm like

man that dude's super fit that's like a 15 uh for hemogo would be pretty high 14 or so would be pretty good for a female that's also the exact same thing as a sign of acute dehydration um so hematocrit same thing if you're north of 50% you're probably dehydrated so you can get a lot there are also though a lot of biomarkers that can tell you more about chronic dehydration so you can run through those things as well so a good blood chemistry test can tell you a lot and you can actually get some insights

in your sodium and potassium albumin is another fantastic way to to measure longer term hydration status another one of these amazing globulins that we've sort of talked a lot about so you can do all those things you can also simply measure the body weight pre-imposed and use a sweat patch or not and use the the Freer version of your clothing test and get a rough idea of where you're getting it from so those are good places to start um I want to go back though and make sure I wasn't over terrifying the audience too much

on a s piece if you're performing a type of training or exercise or sport in which you're not losing more than 2% of your body weight you don't need to be overly concerned about hydrating in the sport and so we can actually get into to um some equations for how much water to drink during training right now but if you if you're again losing less than that it's not critical you can have some fluids like makes you feel better but you're not going to be experiencing tremendous amounts of performance sacraments if you're you know again

out playing a baseball game and it's 50 degrees out you're fine um you can drink some water but that's not going to be compromising performance or recovery so we can actually then if you'd like I can go through the three-step system for optimizing hydration but um those are I I want to make sure I planted that flag so people aren't just terrified that they got to be guzzling down water if they're you know going to their physical therapist for some stretching that's probably not super important I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our

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them but in general it's not uh reflective of healthy psychology if they name things after themselves correct sometimes yes neuro anatomists used to do that but in any case Dr Andy Galpin did not name the Galpin equation after himself I named it after him and the Galpin equation for how much fluid to ingest during exercise is you want to take your body weight in pounds and divide that by 30 and you want to consume that number which would be in ounces about every 15 to 20 minutes so in the example of you being 200 pound

you would take 200 divided 30 which is let's just call that number seven to be close which means you would consume about 7 ounces of water every 15 or 20 minutes or so okay now as a little bit of a point while I also did not name it I also didn't do the research it's important to point out that other scientist figured these things out I just read their papers and made that derivation of their equation to make it a little bit easier for those folks who do not work on the metric system okay a

couple of things first of all I'm not 200 lb but it doesn't matter how much I weigh because the point is that the listener correct should take their body weight in pounds divided by 30 and just that number of ounces in fluid every 15 minutes and then for those out there outside the US that are accustomed to thinking in milliliters and liters not ounces and kilograms not pounds what is the Galpin equation in the metric system this would be 2 milliliters per kilogram which again if you were uh let's say 200 lb that's going to

be something roughly like we'll call it 90 kilos and so if you did 2 Millers per kilo you'd be something like 180 milliliters of fluid again every 15 or 20 minutes great and how should people ingest that fluid and of course I would imagine it's through their mouth um I would hope I hope there are other orices that that it might suffice but let's not go there they're drinking that water consistently or is it every 15 minutes they Slug it back does it matter okay yeah that's very good a handful of things in general when

you talk hydration the slower and steady you can go the better in fact the reason this this 2 Millers per kilogram uh number came out is because a number of Trials were run when they looked at that every 15 minutes just one bolus of it you know um in different derivations and it is pretty clear that the slower Pace one could do it the better so whether you're doing it every 10 minutes or 15 or 20 minutes the reason we actually give that Gap is because you have to be also offset a little bit of

Gus stress in fact like kind of the the four golden rules of recovery if you will um we use sort of three Rs you need to rebuild rehydrate and replenish what that really means is you need to have a continuous glucose stream you need to have a continuous amino acid stream you need to hydrate and you need to do all one two and three without disturbing your gut too much and so in this particular case um it was sort of found that we can hit that level in general and be just fine for most people

so I mean a little bit of context the example we gave there in both cases it's something like 6 to 7 ounces for 15 or 20 minutes if you think about that there's 16 ounces in a pound and most water bottles like if you go buy a water bottle at a store here it's they generally come in like 16 ounce bottles is so six or seven ounces is really like a third of a water bottle maybe every 15 or 20 or so minutes so it's not some egregious amount of water that you have to slime

down now that is influenced heavily by how hydrated you started the session with so how hydrated you came in external factors like heat humidity temperature things like that but that gives you a rough idea um that again and these are numbers that you would need to consume to optimize performance at the end of that then is when you would look to see how much I lost like we talked about earlier and then add back that 125% taking into account how much fluid you ingested so if you're 200 lb and you drank a total of say

a pound of water during the training and you started off at 200 and you finished at 198 you actually lost three pounds not two PBS because you lost three you drank one during it so your final net number is two so now you don't you really need to drink back 125% of that remaining 2 lbs 2 and a half PB something like that um these numbers especially that 125 are they're just rough guidelines some actually papers suggest it's all the way up to 150% um so it's just like an idea don't measure out whether you

need 5.5 ounces or 6.2 ounces like it just sort of gives you an idea of of where to start all right a few sips every 15 or 20 minutes is close enough I've actually started using uh the Galpin equation to determine how much fluid I need for mental work given the now robust data that are out there on the relationship between hydration and mental work it's um been very effective for me and again there are peer-reviewed studies that that support the idea that hydration is important for uh proper mental Clarity and energy and focus and

that even being slightly dehydrated can disrupt that but if one is drinking so much water that they're frequently going to the restroom and can't comfortably uh focus on the work they're doing that's also an issue so so um that's very helpful what are the three most critical features of hydration and then I'd like to move on to um some of the more particulars about supplementation and nutrition three parts start hydrated maintain hydration throughout part three is hydrate post to fix it okay we gave you the half ounce per pound of body weight equation so you

start the training hydrated we gave you the you know 2 milliliters per kilogram SL body weight divided by 30 to stay hydrated and we gave you the 125% um but I can actually just give you sort of I'm giving you another list here I'm sorry but it is my five-step cheater guide for optimizing hydration for performance all right step number one drink a lot of water first thing in the morning this gets everything kickstarted get you going it also saves you from having to drink a bunch of water at night which is then going to

compromise your sleep what's a lot depending on how big you are the general thing I'll tell people is like one of the very first things you you do throughout your day you wake up go to the bathroom as you're consuming your sunlight consume water this is maybe chugging a full glass it's honestly what I do it's not the best route but I'll just get that going 16 o 16 ounces or so is great it's fine if you're larger um you know I'm I'm 165 to 70 lb depending on what's going on maybe a little higher

sometimes if you're 225 lbs maybe that number is 30 o right so you just sort of scale up and down and the only reason I say a lot is it just depends on on what you're doing and I also should clarify I don't really literally mean chug just like Zips because the faster you drink water the faster it's going to expand blood volume the faster it expands blood volume the faster you get rid of it um I don't think a lot of people will know that yeah this is maybe this is clarifying this is also

we sort of talked about earlier if you drink too much water you'll dilute the system well if you have a diluted system your body's first reaction is to rid of water to bring total blood volume down right remember if you were to go to a doctor and they looked at your total blood volume and they're like man you're at 5 and a half liters you're going to be like holy crap you're going to be put on a diuretic because you don't want to have a heart attack and have blood pressure I I wonder if people

are drinking a 16 oun glass of water or other fluid all at once before going to sleep and that's why they're waking up in the middle of the night totally given what you just said probably a better um protocol would be to sip on a glass of water in the final hour or 2 hours before sleep you generally the number we say is 3 hours in the 3 hours preceding sleep you want to basically fluid intake to sipping as needed I think that's I'm going to start that tonight yeah because I wake up generally once

per night to use the bathroom and I do drink some fluids before I go to sleep mostly because I'm pretty thirsty at that time yeah um but I'm going to start sipping that water in the uh three hours heading into sleep yeah so you can actually pay attention to is um to go back this is actually I love doing this stuff but if you're waking up at night and you have a very dry mouth m not for me all right because it can be one of two things you might actually be dehydrated and so then

the mistake people make is they like man my mouth is so dry I keep getting up to drink water at night that makes you then pee too much what that also indicates is probably your mouth breathing so a lot of ways to fix people waking up and urinating too much at night is to tape your mouth and or use a a dilator over your nose and then what happens is you don't feel like you have a dry mouth so you don't get up to consume any extra water throughout the night so that actually reduces your

your fluid intake so you don't have the problem of actually now having too much fluid to do it and so it's another reasons why mouth taping can really really help um I if you are having those issues U and or snoring those are not benign that's a really like you really should get some work on those um something you're you're not sleeping very well is the way I'll say it it's doesn't doesn't necessarily mean something life-threatening but it's not a good thing so um you're going to run kind of your triaging things back and forth

so if you're like I'm waking up to pee a lot by my m isn't thirsty okay great then you may actually have just a water consumption issue if it is my mouth is dry but I'm actually waking up and I'm having these large urinations then you're not actually dehydrated you're just breathing through your mouth if you're waking up and your mouth is dry and there's not a lot of pee there then you actually might actually legitimately be under hydrated so a little bit of a game you can play there well that's super informative I think

that um the point alone that gulping a bunch of water all at once is going to cause you to need to excrete that water soon after um is a really important point also for people that are going to I don't know give a talk or um you don't want to have to get up to use the restum you have to sit through a long meeting um clearly I'm violating all these rules up until right now I've been you know not I I sort of Follow The Seagull approach to uh to consuming fluids just in um

enormous volumes I'm going to start sipping um fluids instead um what are some of the other rules of hydration so you're going to wake up you're going to start your day and start hydrated so you know you're you're consuming a larger percentage of your water earlier in the day then you get all the performance enhancing effects of water and you don't have to worry about it compromising your sleep so that's step number one also now you're going to start your session closer to hydration all right great number two eat mostly real Whole Foods why interesting

what you may or not have thought about is a huge determinant of your hydration status is your food choices uh if you look at different foods uh for example most fruit um watermelon watermelon is like 95 plus% water right fantastic Source also by the way since we're here it is not extremely high in carbohydrate it's not extremely high in sugar it is by percentage but since it is almost exclusively water you're eating uh it is not something that is extremely dangerous in terms of sugar um I there alone probably all the things we've talked about

in the six six episodes uh that comment right there will probably blow the internet to pieces and I'll probably get hate mail for life for it but from people throwing water throwing watermelons yeah oh my gosh well I don't think the point is that sugar is necessarily bad I think the point is that for most people they're ingesting too much sugar most people yeah um and it it's interesting often times the people who are justifying the ingestion of sugar are exactly the kind of people that should not ingest so much sugar so there's a little

bit of a user the point here is if you're eating whole real food this is like now we're kind of splitting hairs about those things so so morning hydration cons real yeah now important Point here if you compare it to other Foods um like actually meat is is a very high percentage of fluid depending on how well or long you've cooked it you will reduce remember you said earlier over 70% water right so if you're eating meat you're getting actually a big chunk of water as you cook it of course you lose some of that

but meat can be like I wouldn't call it a hydrating food item but it is not as low as something like a biscuit which can be actually like 10% water that's why it's like dry and dense which doesn't mean it's bad for you but there if you're eating highly processed foods almost by association that means they've been dehydrated or Pally right so you're just getting less total fluid intake in addition they have also been highly salted in general right so now we're in this position where we're under hydrated and highly salted bad spot if you

now switch over to mostly again just mostly whole real foodish whatever that means to you then your hydration is going to Skyrocket you're going to have a lot so you're eating a ton of food in fact it should be a large percentage of the fluid intake you have actually should be coming from your food and you shouldn't have to be smashing water bottles after water bottle all day in that case though you do need to add salt back so we do see this a lot with people who try to make a transition from maybe a

suboptimal Nutritional Lifestyle and they they give up a little bit of the processed food and they come over and they start having problems because they're not actually consuming enough salt so add that back easy way to do that you can use electrolytes and we could talk about those numbers if you want if you just salt your food that you're making you know to taste that's going to get most people in a in a pretty good spot so start hydrated consume hydrating Foods step number two step number three you want to preh hydrate if you know

you're going to do a workout session and it's going to be hot and long or one of those things um you want to look for that half a pound uh per body weight of ounces so that's the number we're looking for to start our hydration session we do that we're pretty much taken care of and then like I said adjust depending on lifestyle humidity and and other factors like that um you can use what is called the what system W I think Bob Ki who's done a ton of research in this area if you want

to read more look up his research um it is simply weight urine and thirst so in other words check your body weight look at your urine color and engage your thirst and actually you can use those three things and those uh can significantly predict actual hydration status independent of actually measuring osmol or or anything like that so those three metrics alone are a prettyy good indicator of where you're at so you're going to have that normal amount of water plus or minus if you miss that number for whatever reason you get distracted the number we

typically tell people is like something like 400 to 500 milliliters of water uh in the hour preceding the training all right so that's like 13 to 20 ounces so like you know you're going to go out at 3:00 it's 2:00 and you realize oh man I have not dranking much water today um you don't need to go smash tons and tons and tons just look for something like that you know call it a bottle of water if you will um if that's not enough if you're in a really tough spot you can do more like

uh five to eight ounces 15 or 20 minutes before exercise you want to be really careful about drinking a bunch of water like in the seconds before exercise because you're just going to feel a whole bunch of water bouncing up and down in your stomach and nobody likes that so 1 to 300 milliliters 15 or so 20 minutes before that assumes you're in this like 185 pound range is again if you're talking people of much larger size you may need to increase those values accordingly if you do all that then you use the Galpin equation

for your intra workout hydration and you're in a pretty good spot um what you want to consume in that is what I call Sweat what I mean by that is you don't actually want to necessarily consume water only during a workout you want to consume something that is isoosmotic to your blood so something that is the same concentration that you lost in your sweat so if you've done a sweat test you would then drink a fluid that is of the same osmolality um the short version of that some in the neighborhood of 200 to 400

milligram of sodium most electrolytes uh products are going to be something like that now I know element is is 1,000 milligrams it's a lot higher but most products now that you're going to find are 250 to 400 milligrams and they're typically in the like two to maybe up to 3 to one sodium to potassium range right coconut water is actually cool it's it's like basically the opposite like a cup of coconut water I think has something like 200 milligrams of sodium but like 600 milligrams of pottassium so um like total spoiler alert but well we

use coconut water a lot of hydration just add a little pinch of salt because that'll bring the sodium way back up yeah one note about sodium um obviously people who have prehypertension or hypertension want to be careful with their sodium intake um anytime I've suggested that people might consider ingesting more sodium you know sort of it's like it's like putting a Target on your on your back and yet the data are pretty good showing that if people are not getting enough sodium their mental Clarity their focus their uh mental stamina their physical stamina really suffers

and then people argue well most of us are getting too much salt that often is true for people that are eating a lot of processed foods and not training and not training but for many uh people who are already sort of healthc conscious who are training they're largely consuming or I should say they're consuming largely nonprocessed or minimally processed C foods and especially for folks who are not ingesting many carbohydrates and are consuming caffeine totally you know a lot of people don't know that carbohydrates hold water um and that makes it sound bad it's not

necessarily that you know you're going to get subcutaneous swelling of your body it's Rec it's it's bringing water into your system and it holds water so when you drop carbohydrate starches in particular you urinate a lot more and when you drink caffeine you also urinate a lot more as as you pointed out earlier so you start combining a few things like slightly lower carbohydrate or low carbohydrate eating really quote unquote clean you're not getting a lot of salt in your food and drinking caffeine and then exercising and then pretty soon those numbers that come along

with um you know a gram of sodium in your electrolyte drink are not all that outrageous and what you find is people feel much much better when they're getting enough sodium and of course I should um say that there's no reason why someone has to ingest a a supplement like element or something there are plenty of other ways to bring sodium into your system you use a pinch of pink salt or Himalayan salt or sea salt or even just table salt in water or just making sure that you're salting your food enough and I think

that there too salt appetite and salt taste is a pretty good guide if you taste something and it feel it tastes really salty to you that's an indication that either it's really salty or your salt stores are kind of tapped off you're okay whereas if you're craving salt and you and you're thinking gosh I really want to put salt on this already salty thing not necessarily but often times that means that you are salt deficient so salt appetite is a pretty hardwired set of neural circuits and hormones and I think uh we would all be

wise to learn to tap into the our kind of intuition about salt intake but of course also to measure your blood pressure Etc yeah of course if you think you have some sort of contraindication there that work with a medical specialist without without question um those situations you laid out though were very real a lot of people are living like that and so it's important for those folks to understand if you are going through symptoms fatigue um lack of focus cognitive function performance isn't there then hey like you may be UND salted and again actually

a good amount of blood chemistry work can unravel that a lot and it can sort of tell you if you're running out of whack there are number of folks who are extremely sensitive to sodium in terms of health risk and that that is a real thing again work with your um individual folks on that I don't work with anyone for disease treatment or management at all I've said that probably for times I'll say it six more times um I only take people who are healthy and try to make them perform at their best possible level

so it's actually funny to mention that because I was going to give people my recommendation for sodium intake in general throughout the day and then I decided I'm not going to say that because all it's going to do is make all the rest of the people who aren't coming to come after me for the watermelon comment come after me for that so I'll by the end of today's episode the goal is that there everyone's coming after you but also that everyone has learned something of value you've already um given us uh tremendous uh insights and

actionable information information on Creatine and hydration and along those lines i' I'd love for you to tell us about some of the things that we can do with supplementation in order to enhance training by taking certain things before we train and I also have the question of how long before training should we start thinking about supplying nutrients and supplements for the training session I'm not sure I actually finished my five or maybe I wasn't clear enough about the last one so I just want to tie that that bow and then we'll go next one yeah

no it was probably my fault so that uh in addition to the Galpin equation in terms of amount I Amic recommended a you know roughly 3 to one sodium to potassium recommendation and I gave you some rough numbers for things to like that I actually in all honesty use probably six to 10 different electrolyte companies depending on the situation some of them are really good in the case again like element that's nice about that is there's no carbohydrate however the downside is there's no carbohydrate so some sometimes I want carbohydrates in the training because as

you mentioned there's significant evidence going back actually several decades on the benefit of carbohydrate during exercise so if you're in a situation uh where you're trying to again maximize actual exercise performance you especially if it is either long duration so more than two hours or extremely high intensity and this has to be well north of 100% of your V2 Max in that situation as we talked about in the endurance episode you can actually start having a decrement in performance because of a drop of muscle glycogen uh G glycogen can start coming down if that's the

case augmenting with the carbohydrates during the training that is going to enhance performance it's going to do what we call spare the liver and it's going to keep my second rule of my four which is maintain glucose ingestion it's going to keep that going in general what you're going to find is the number is like a 5 to 9% glucose concentration in your fluid which turns out to be like exactly the number that most sports drinks have as well as I think that's pretty much exactly what coconut water is the downside of sports drinks since

we're here is they actually tend to be undersalted and so that they don't provide enough of them if you look at the numbers they're going to say something like 60 to 100 gram of carbohydrate per hour is the Target and now if you're using the sort of gallin equation and you're splitting that up into 15 uh minute intervals it's something again like 20 or so grams of carbs per 15 to 20 minutes if you're doing again an hourong plus training valow so admittedly 100 grams uh is a bit much for some folks depending on your

size so I would recommend starting in that uh 60 gram or so range again per hour total is what you want to get to and only in the situation in which muscle glycogen depletion is becoming a limiting factor to Performance so the other benefit of that is as you mentioned that actually drives water into the cell and so you're going to be in that nice sweet lot of you're actually keeping glucose going which is going to enhance performance and you're helping hydration at the same time so the other little part that's important to pay attention

to here is the type of carbohydrate matters um so you can use actually a whole combination of things called resistant starches which I will use for a long bouts of exercise but in the middle of the workout you're going to want to focus on glucose and fructose mostly glucose typically at least a two or 3 to1 ratio of glucose to fructose and the reason is those actually get into tissue through separate Transporters and so what happens is once the glucose Transporters get full you can't bring anything else in however since fructose comes in a separate

route you can maximize total carbohydrate intake by using two different unique forms there there's a lot of ways you can do this um but this is where the momentus fuel product is is like specifically has that exactly in it so it's fantastic um you can use food no problem you can use a combination of things like honey and and different easily uh absorbable and usable and things you can actually like maybe put in a drink um to get away with so there's lots of routes for it but you want to look in that that sort

of combination uh of 5 to 9% roughly glucose for there so you do need to train your gut so do not do anything and there's a generally A good rule do not do anything in your competition that you've never done in practice so try these food items try these amounts the carbohydrate numbers try the sodium numbers try the total amount of water start low you can always increase what you don't want to do is have to run out during the middle of your spin class and Sprint to the bathroom and hope nobody's in your way

uh which uh in the lab we've seen we'll just say accidents like that occur more than once so um just be careful of your stomach I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor insid tracker inside 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 specific number numers 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 I realized I jumped the gun a little bit asking you about supplementation for before during and after a workout um because what I neglected to ask about was training in the fasted State this is something that we talked about in an earlier episode but I think it's worth highlighting now um Sometimes the best way to

supplement if you will a workout or pre-workout is ingesting nothing I I'm one of these people I actually prefer to do my weight training somewhere between 7 and 8: a.m. each morning sometimes a little earlier sometimes a little bit later I drink fluid water and I do ingest caffeine prior to those uh training days um on days when I don't train I do as I often recommend uh people do delay my caffeine intake 90 to 120 minutes after waking but in any event it's water and caffeine yate or coffee or some sort of stimulant for

weight training workouts and generally not for cardiovascular training workouts although sometimes yes so I'm training fasted that said I'm ingesting carbohydrate the night before to make sure that my I have glycogen stores that are topped off and uh so it's fasted but with that caveat what are your thoughts on training fasted and what I just described is fasted overnight but some people are training in the afternoon and they may opt to not eat anything in the you know two to four hours prior to training or maybe even longer I personally find that caffeine hits my

system a lot better when I'm fasted better meaning it just seems to have more of a potent effect there are some reasons for that um and of course we dissuade people from ingesting Caff too late in the day cuz you'll disrupt sleep so I'm not saying fast for 3 hours then drink caffeine but who knows maybe that's in your protocol the simple version of this question is what are your thoughts on training fasted and if people are going to train fasted how should they modulate their fluid intake if at all what happens with exercise in

the endurance and Metabolism episode we walk through in the fact that no matter what you're using for fuel carbohydrates or fat or even um other potential sources the end product of all of those is ATP CO2 and water right so you're trying to make ATP that is the fuel for exercise now ATP is a Denine triphosphate so one two three phosphates on top of an adenosine well what you may have not put together is if you hydrolyze ATP and you break off one of those phosphates you now have ADP if you do it again you

have a a Denine monophosphite if you do it one more time now you just have adenosine and if you have then therefore run through a lot of exercise burned a lot of energy you have increase the amount of adenosine that's floating around now if you have a high concentration of adenosine what's that going to make you want to do that's going to bind to certain receptors and we know when those receptors get bound to you fall asleep Bingo caffeine will competitively bind to those receptors therefore that's why caffeine stops you from feeling like you want

to go to sleep right so we have a very clear relationship between exercise fuel in fact if you look at the literature there's a pretty clear relationship between the more caloric expenditure in different sports and the higher amount of hours needed for sleep so there is a nice tie between how hard you're exercising how much energy you're burning how much you need to sleep stimulant which brings us all the way back to your question of fueling so do I need a fuel prior to my exercise bout if you're going to be limited in your exercise

bout by Fuel then fueling is necessary one way or the other if it is a type of training that is not then it's not going to matter and so the examples we gave uh if you're doing if you're going to go do a 30- second bout of maximal exertion and you're going to do it one time you don't need to worry about fueling at all or eating within your workout CU it's only 30 seconds yeah you get 30 seconds you don't need to worry about hydration post exercise you don't need to worry about recovery total

energy expenditure was nothing uh if you're going to go um you know you're going to go practice you're going to go to the driving range and practice your golf swing you don't need to worry about it the total amount of energy expenditure is just not high in fact in that case you might want to keep it somewhat low because you want to keep blood glucose fairly even and you don't want to bring it in the system you certainly wouldn't want to use stimulants right because you may get over exerted inside in all of these things

we probably should have started off our conversation with this in terms of macronutrients the total amount throughout the day is more important generally than the timing of them which is why you can do things like have a bunch of carbohydrate at night not eat the next morning and lift and be just fine it doesn't matter that you didn't have them in a few hours before your muscle glycogen is topped off your liver is glycogen is topped off you're absolutely fine you have plenty of fuel even if you to wait a few more hours in fact

even if you were to do conditioning you're probably fine I have plenty of athletes that prefer to do many of their training sessions faster the morning for personal reasons not because it enhances performance but if it doesn't enhance or uh harm it then and it's a personal preference thing fine if you're going to go do a session though where you're going to be really concerned with muscle glycogen depletion and again you can go back that episode to learn of different types uh when those thresholds hits and what you worry about it then feeling would be

important you would either need to have something before the session or consume it during the session so one of the other things we' like to say here is recovery starts during the previous workout right so if you're working out right now and you optimize nutrition right now even if you don't necessarily need it for the current workout if you can get ahead on recovery then you're going to be fine the next day and the differentiation here between carbohydrate and protein is important so the total amount of protein you ingest throughout the day is probably a

bigger determinant for things like muscle growth than the timing so the post exorcize anabolic window it doesn't necessarily matter carbohydrate is different the timing of that does matter it needs to be around and available so you can maximize both hydration and muscle glycogen resynthesis which is restoring the muscle glycogen you burn during exercise um I also work with athletes that train multiple times a day so in those particular cases recovery window is half what you normally have so if you're in a situation where you have two or three days before you work out again you

don't need to worry about getting carbohydrate in before during or after Because by the time you go to train again you will have restored your muscle glycogen levels easily however if you're training every day or twice in a day then the timing of carbohydrate really starts to matter and in that case I see no reason to not ingest those nutrients either before during or after you don't need need to necessarily do it but you can the general rule of thumb I give is something like this um if you're doing something where you're trying to really

work hard whether this is hypertrophy training or a lot of endurance energy expenditure is going to be high potential muscle damage is high and or energy utilization is high what you want to look for is a number something in the area of like half a gram of carbohydrate per pound of body weight so you weigh 200 pound you want to make sure that either premid or post or total you bring in 100 grams of carbohydrate it's just a very rough number to start protein is about half of that so it's about a quarter of your

body weight right so those numbers would be if you're 200 pounds make sure you have 100 grams of carbs and 50 grams of protein and again it doesn't necessarily have to be before or during or after and you'll be in a good spot all you need to do then is Alter well what I do I should say is Alter the amount of carbohydrate based on energy expenditure so a lower energy an easier workout instead of having 100 grams of carbs I might tack that down to 75 or even 50 and be one to one carb

protein ratio if it was even harder more sun hotter outside more fluid loss I might go from 100 grams of carbs up to 150 or 200 and get closer to like a 3 to1 or 4 to1 carbohydrate to protein ratio so those are the numbers that I generally go by well as I take a sip of My Double Espresso Americano here I'd love for you to tell us about stimulants sure there's no shortage of these in most of our lives and of course you can cover the health benefits of it later you maybe you have

an episode yes we have an episode on caffeine and it does have certain health benefits although one has to use caffeine correctly in order to drive those yeah so there's caffeine is the easy one to start with and we won't blor the point here uh the evidence is strong it has an erogenic effect uh you can take it at whatever dosage is reasonable for you and of course there is uh a bit of a learning curve there such that obviously the more you take it the more you need to take even though there's actually some

recent evidence showing even folks who are uh acclimated to it will still see an ergogenic benefit even though if they don't feel a big boost of it so typically that takes 30 to 45 minutes or so but it's highly dependent upon the person so some people can smell coffee and immediately feel better and that's probably working actually through a different mechanism um of anticipation but you can take it there the half life of it is you know 4 to 6 hours or something like that it can totally depends on the person so don't let ruin

your sleep but if you take it prior to Performance it has a a noticeable effect on particularly endurance maximum strength maybe less well quite clearly less so um in fact the data are mixed there on whether it actually does anything for Peak strength although I think most people would uh re would suggest that you know you're going to take it prior to trying to truly lift as as high as trying to you know lift a one repetition Max or similar but most of the the documented effects are on the the endurance-based SE activities yes so

my read of the literature uh in terms of performance-enhancing effects of caffeine are that one to three milligrams I want to make sure that people hear the units correctly before people Blitz themselves out with that caffeine one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight about 30 minutes prior to exercise has a definite performance- enhancing effect it also has a definite mental performance-enhancing effect especially when people who are regular caffeine users have abstained from caffeine for anywhere from 2 to 15 days and and that's an extremely rare circumstance but even if they have not it

appears that 1 to 3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight of caffeine taken about again it's not super precise as far as I uh can see uh about 30 minutes before the event starts um can really enhance reaction time and power output and uh as well as as you mentioned endurance when I was researching the caffeine episode one interesting caveat that um I discovered was that if people are not caffeine adapted they are not regular users of caffeine the sudden introduction of caffeine can really degrade performance mostly because people don't know how to operate at

that high level of autonomic arousal have you ever observed that yeah 100% in fact there's actually data going up as high as 10 milligrams per kilogram of body weight wow which is in fact once you cross the five m milligram per kilogram threshold you will start seeing performance decrements so there's absolutely such a thing of ruining your performance with too much caffeine so most people listening to this if you're thinking wow they said caffeine I'm all in and then you just stopped listening and now you you know go for your quad espresso shot before every

time you go to workout you probably passing that threshold if you think about those numbers 1 to 3 milligram per kilogram body weight if you weigh 100 kilog that's 220 lb that'd be something like 2 to 500 milligrams of caffeine which is like a pretty high amount um but you know a coffee is going to get you close and espresso is going to get you somewhat in that ballpark depending on source and stuff um so you don't really need to go and blister your brain with caffeine in fact if you do it's quite common and

in fact likely that you'll actually make performance worse right yeah the amount of caffeine in different coffees and sodas Etc of course varies one thing that ought to know is that the smallest of commercially available um coffees at the most popular commercial vendors um generally contain anywhere from 250 to 350 milligrams of caffeine what that means is that the so-called medium and the large contain as much as 500 milligrams or one gram of caffeine so for you morning um large coffee at a commercial vendor um uh drinkers if you're wondering why you get an A

headache if you're 30 minutes late on that caffeine or um if you can't access that caffeine at all or even if you're drinking C coffee excuse me from another source you're finding like oh it's really not doing it for me it's because the amount of caffeine in the now commercially sold uh coffees is exceedingly high it's about two or three times higher than the standard lookup tables that you'll see on the internet so I'm not saying that to demonize caffeine we can pretty quickly adapt to form of tolerance to caffeine um some people never really

can get over the Jitters other people um are just fine with even a th000 milligrams of caffeine but only because they've been drinking a lot of caffeine consistently anyway it's also wildly inconsistent from location to location uh The Brew type the functionality so yeah that that stuff can be very hard to figure out what what's happening there's only one way really to uh objectively measure caffeine and that's use caffeine tablets and they work pretty well actually uh someone I know um who's prominent in the podcast space uses 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine in tablet

form combined with tea so they've now conditioned themselves to think that herbal tea actually has this caffeinating effect but um tablet form caffeine while I'm not recommending it to to uh outright it is going to give you the best sense of how much caffeine you can tolerate and how much is performance enhancing or is performance degrading there's actually another line of supplementation we can go down here which is not technically a stimulant but it's something I use to help performance when you don't want caffeine and so this think specifically if you're one of those folks

who have to exercise at night and you want a little bit of boost for your training but you don't want to have caffeine because it messes up your sleep and this is when you can turn to the whole like citrine Arginine nitric oxide sort of route and uh we'll skip the explanation there but effectively what happens is nitric oxide is this wonderful compound that causes vasil dilation and of course that's going to Aid then in transporting nutrients in and out of the cell um so it has an erogenic effect the you have a number of

ways you can go about this um some of them have more pros and cons than others and and there are more and more data coming out specifically on citrine more recently if you look though in my opinion the most consistent evidence for the most consistent effect is in the supplement of beetroot or beetroot juice or extract or something like that so you can find those supplements and they tend to uh again they're pretty effective at enhancing performance specifically anything moderate to longer duration endurance performance and they are not a stimulant so they won't ruin your

sleep that much now one um note of caution uh for those of you that are interested in citrine or or beetroot because they are in the Arginine pathway if you're somebody who has um a predisposition to cold sorce um oral cold sorce that is or other forms of cold sores that um because activation of the Arginine pathway can exacerbate some of the neural related aspects of of cold sores and that's because the viruses that cause those cold sores actually live on neurons then you want to be very cautious with citrine especially high dose citrine I

can really amplify that the cold sore response what about non-stimulant yet um focus enhancing supplements things like Alpha GPC um for example I routinely use 300 to 600 milligrams of alpha GPC prior to hard physical training typically weight training but occasionally I'll take 300 milligrams of alpha GPC prior to a mental work bout um less often these days because I kind of reserve it for physical training uh and I don't tend to use it every day maybe once every you know third or fourth workout combined with caffeine so that combination is pretty uh pretty potent

I find and so technically because it's a coleric Agonist it's not a stimulant in the traditional sense but it has a um focusing and an alertness promoting aspect to it what are your thoughts on those sorts of compounds there's not much human perform exercise performance data on those there are certainly cognitive functioning tests on those so you're not going to find a lot of information no though there isn't none we actually will use many of these substances you could globally call them neut tropic which is you know any substance that specifically will enhance brain function

is a rough way to think about it will use them prior to more challenging bouts of training um this is something that we'll pull out say on sparring day only um or the most important training session or a session when you're trying to work on Pitch command or when you're trying to enhance uh work on your shot and as a basketball player or you're really trying to improve a certain swing as a golfer or something like that but we do not use them every day we do not use them with every person so yeah we

will use those um they are not stimulants but they can be performance enhancing and another kind of way to think about this is if you're in the case of caloric restriction so whether you're trying to lose weight or we're actually trying to control weight for you know weight purposes in terms of a sports where you have to be in a certain weight class or something like that what we may not be able to give you food in fact we may not be able to give you stimulants because of the sleep thing or because we're already

like maxed on on stimulant um now we can go this route and so at least like mentally you're a little bit there and you're more likely to be alert and focused and you can train harder despite the fact we didn't actually change fuel now that's a little bit of a short game in terms of that's not your permanent solution you eventually need to bring calories up or you know whatever other train you're training or whatever you're going to do but it can work in a nice short pinch I'm very interested to learn from you about

fatigue reducers and I'm hoping that Roda Rosa will come up in the conversation yeah great let's just start right there then there's actually a lot of research on this despite most people not having heard of it uh I think I mentioned in a previous episode I've used it a lot over many many years um you have to be a little bit careful of it there's well first of all no we we should have said this at the onset there no supplement is a Panacea right nothing's going to work for everything in rodea is no no

different it can have a number of effects if you look across the literature you're going to find generally somewhere between a small benefit to little benefit um but not often is it detrimental with a few exceptions I know of a handful of papers that would be two specifically where it may actually reduce muscular endurance okay fine if you think about what's happening is one of the benefits that has been seen so far with riola is it is helpful at managing cortisol but cortisol suppression is not a necessarily a good thing we talked about how if

you do an acute B of stress cortisol will go go way up and that is a sign of of acute stress however a sign of longterm excessive stress is cortisol suppression and so this is a thing to be really careful of is if you're feeling down or lethargic or tired and you think your adrenals are messed up and then you start taking cortisol modulators you could be making the problem worse because now your cortisol is actually suppressed and now you're taking these things to blunt it or keep it low and and you're you continue to

feel lethargic and and lack of desire and libbido and focus and and sort of all these things so cortisol is not a bad thing um we want this to be going up and down uh in the amounts that we want so if we're we're thinking about like for example waking up um you would want generally something like a 50% reduction in the first hour in terms of cortisol concentrations however if you're extremely suppressed already um going down is is only going to be a problem so riola is is has a a good evidence-base to support

it for that um you'll see actually a number of of studies that have looked at it in a whole host of areas um for benefits so something good to do um the difficult part with riola to be quite honest is getting it from a high quality brand and Source it's difficult to get as a single source which is a very very important thing to do with supplements is try to get them sourced alone riola typically comes in combination with any other herbals or other stuff you adrenal support and etc etc um also then getting them

then third party certified which for most folks is not necessary but for any athletes that need to go through drug testing systems you should not take any supplement at all that does not have some sort of third party certification so those are the challenges that being said if you've ever ran into into somebody who's taken riola and they're like it didn't do anything for me it that's possible that's you know nothing works for everyone it also could be just very poor quality sourcing um so if you look at uh the there have been a number

of papers on um its perception of fatigue and You' sort of mentioned that you felt pretty immediate effects I've taken it a few times yeah I'm fairly sensitive to supplements but I've started taking uh Rola before workouts and found that I could push much harder much longer through the workout normally I would or typically before taking it um that is in sessions where I did not take it I would be able to work out very hard for 20 minutes or so the next 10 minutes I could get some work output and then the remaining uh

period of time it was kind of a tapering off now granted these are very intense training sessions these are not the endurance training sessions these are the weight training sessions that one one time per week per body part type sessions uh what I've noticed is I can complete the entire 60 minutes with with minimal fatigue now I mean obviously I hit fatigues within sets and of course you know I you remain human despite taking it but um I found to be very useful and I've been using it whenever I use Alpha GPC prior prior to

workouts yeah and I've been impressed by by it overall I do want to highlight something that you said because I think it's so so vitally important which is that using single ingredient formulations for most things is critical to figuring out what works for you what doesn't what dosages you need being able to take things uh two on one off um two days on one day off for instance being able to um increase dosage in the morning and then com maybe reduce the dosage and combin with something else in the afternoon single ingredient formulations are pretty

much the only way to do that there's perhaps only one supplement that I take at all and that's athletic greens as they've been a regular podcast sponsor for a long time that is a cocktail of many many things and those are all adaptogens as well as some probiotics and vitamins and things like that so I'm not opposed to Blends where the Blends include a lot of nutrients that are synergistic but for all pill capsule uh based supplements where I'm looking for a very targeted effect and it's not just about sub uh foundational nutrition I really

believe strongly that single ingredient formulations are the way that you can build a rational approach to supplementation and also make adjustments if something isn't making you feel better and also make adjustments if something's really working for you so for instance some people might take Alpha GPC 300 milligrams and not feel anything go up to 600 milligrams not feel anything maybe just feel kind of eh they don't like it other people like myself took 300 milligrams of alpha GPC the first time I was like wow this really puts me in the zone but I want to

be really careful how often I use it I did mention I go to 600 milligram occasionally but that really puts me on the outer threshold of kind of overall levels of focus and amped up such that if I drink too much caffeine it can tilt me over the edge so I encourage people to become scientists of themselves and the only way to do that is to try and limit the number of variables and the final point is that I think that single ingredient formulations are by far the best in terms of changing things over time

you know this could be um uh women during their menstrual cycle might find that during certain phases of the cycle they're more sensitive to certain things than not others um and for men and women it may be that you know certain times of year even and uh certain supplements might go better closer to sleep some earlier in the day and on and on and on there's just no real way in my opinion to have a supplementation protocol that involves lots and lots of Blends one or two Blends okay but lots of Blends I think that's

um I actually think that's potentially dangerous territory yeah I mean just take Roda as good example I know a new meta analyses came out just in the last few months looking at it and they found in general you see again a slight to moderate Improvement in everything from uh Power output to fatigue resistant antioxidant effects um to endurance performance so it's like okay great maybe there's a little bit here now let's say you went to do it and the only way you could access riola is in combination with that and um some Lion's man and

you know some other of these adapted dens and was like well wait a minute I just wanted to take this to get a better workout but now it also came with this stimulant or this cortisol suppressor or cortisol activator well now all of a sudden you can't take it at night or you can't take it in the morning because you're already you already had coffee your your options are just way limited so I think the biggest part of all that is you if something doesn't feel good you have absolutely no idea you don't know if

it was Rola you don't know if it was the BSW that's in there you don't know if it was any of the other things that were smashed in there or it could be something as simple as the um the the citric acid they use like some other combination of thing and now here you are thinking that some supplement that actually works for you doesn't and you throw that out of your repertoire uh for the rest of your life which is you know not the biggest crime but it's not needed and you're not really going to

know so yeah I fully stamped you can look back at my course lectures for the last decade and you will see like stamped number one on the supplement sections is make sure you're taking single ingredient supplements at all costs the last part about that too is you're more likely to ensure the amount that is on the label is correct so if you're taking riola and it says you know it's 100 milligrams in there and if that's the only thing that's in there you're you're more likely than not to actually get something close now they're never

perfect but it will be close if it's in a combination of 20 other things you actually don't have any idea if that's in there um in fact there have been many papers on um melatonin and vitamin d and a number of other supplements in which when you actually just pull them off the shelf these are these are standard studies where they will go on buy say like 20 to 25 different supplements in the case of melatonin and we'll actually measure the amount of melatonin actually in them and and despite the fact that the label says

5 milligrams they can be up to a 500 to a thousandfold actual concentration in that supplement and then you wonder why some people react great to melatonin some people that absolutely destroys you and this is also why like we'll we'll actually we'll see this constantly well people will have like 5 100 times the upper limit of melatonin the morning after when the halflife is supposed to be more like 90 minutes it should be totally gone but we're seeing extremely high I'm not even talking like double I'm talking 10 20 30X the upper limit range for

melatonin the next morning and then it's like well what are you taking he's like I got this melatonin at X store or X website and you're like holy cow um so I'm I'm not opposed to melatonin theoretically um but you have to be careful with that one in particular so any supplement has that to be true so you want to buy them from as many places as you can that are high quality and if they are third party tested even if you're not a performance athlete I want to stress this even if you're not a

performance athlete third-party certified and test of supplements are you're less likely to just just get wildly high concentrations or low concentrations of active ingredients and so relative to other ones who you might get for cheaper but you could be totally wrecking Yourself by getting you know 50 Mill grams of melatonin every night and not realizing it so then of course the next morning you drown yourself in caffeine and then you can see what death cycle you're in now yeah um people can look for third party certification on the packaging and um some websites will allow

you to zoom in on the bottle beforehand it's largely listed on on certain um vendor websites a brief point about supplement cost and blends and I promise this will be a brief Point different ingredients meaning different types of supplements have widely varying costs in order to you know create to to get them to manufacture them so often times what you'll find is that blends will um include the least amount of the most expensive uh ingredient right um not always the case there are some there certain exceptions to this and I mentioned some Blends that I

like a few minutes ago that are for foundational nutrition adaptogens and probiotics athletic greens of course just being one of several examples out there but when it comes to say a sleep Blend or a pre-workout blend there are some decent products out there but a lot of them tend to put in more of the least expensive ingredients and less of the ones that you're actively seeking and so those tend to be uh caffeine tends to be kind of a buffer against the other things meaning if you pre-workout putting caffeine in there isn't necessarily a bad

thing but if it has five other things in there often times what manufacturers will cheat on is the actual amount of the things that are costing um so again single ingredient formulations for 80% of your supplements I think is really um the way to go and the other thing I know is going to come up as we're talking about all these supplements is this issue of dependency I often get this question and when I solicit for questions uh on social media in anticipation of this episode number of people said okay so if you take a

sleep formulation do I need to take it every night if I don't take it will I have an incredibly hard time sleeping if I take a pre-workout every time I train will uh will I need it um it's a great question um some people will take supplement holidays as they may be called um for a couple of days each week back to back some people take them straight through I myself take a a sleep cocktail we've described this it's magnesium theanine and things this is not one ingredient these are multiple ingredients in fact precisely because

some people who have sleep walking and Vivid dream issues can't take theine before bed in any case I've had times when I either forgot my supplements that's rare or I just didn't have what I needed or just simply took a break for a night and it was not a problem um but in terms of pre-workout I do think that people become dependent on being in that really ramped up state but I don't think we view all this as like true dependency kind of like addiction totally right I mean I Define addiction as a progressive narrowing

of the things that bring you pleasure so you know I I suppose people could get addicted to pre-workout but it seems a little unlikely more likely there would be a dependency such that if you didn't have your pre-work out you might feel like oh you're not motivated to train so what are your thoughts on um taking little holidays from supplements and varying the frequency of supplement intake in particular as it relates to stimulants and fatigue reducers the end goal anytime I coach somebody is to get them into a physiological state in which they require no

or close to no supplementation that's the target we should really be in a position to where our lifestyle our sunlight exposure exposure our Stress Management our physical activity our sleep and our hydration and our whole food nutrition provide us almost everything we need now look again there are some foundational items that we can give people um we put together a little bundle actually for this that of basic things that you can go look at but that's the goal right so the target is to be let your physiology run the guy your physiology is way smarter

than we are even if I take a bunch of biomarkers from you your physiology still knows better than those few markers can tell me so that's always where we're ending up I actually personally don't like people being in a position that they have to take a supplement for anything so I don't like it if you have to take a supplement to have a good night of sleep I don't like it if you have to have a supplement to train we will use any of these stimulants very very carefully uh with any of the athletes we

work with and certainly for the non-athletes because at least the athletes we have an end date we have a fight scheduled we have a season we have a game you're going to pitch whatever when you don't have that it's sort of like you're in this endless cycle of oh you're just going to do that all day every day we don't really need to be in that spot so what I the way that I describe My Philosophy is I will use those short-term tactics to symptom manage if I have to so if somebody comes to me

and they're like you're feeling awful and we've got to get through the hump okay great maybe we'll give you something for Sleep immediately to get you sleeping that allows us to then come back and work on the causal problem right so this is what is why are you having a hard time sleeping anyways if you have to take a a nine cocktail supplement to sleep then all we're doing is is blinding the reason why are you in that position to begin with right so we see this all the time whether it is sleep problems whether

it is cortisol or testosterone the question is why is that low now we may give you something again to manage it immediately but the task uh the mystery I'm going to try to unveil is why why is it there to begin with this could be something like this is natural for you and your lack of energy is something else or could be actually it is not a natural level for you but something is suppressing it any number of uh you've got some infection going on there's some allergic reaction to something in your environment there's a

you know mold um Mercury like that one comes up a lot you'll see Mercury and folks and that's causing a lot of problems um or any number of heavy metals or toxins any host of thing psychological distress bad daily habit you don't ever see the sun like you don't ever sweat you don't ever drink we've talked about so many things so I'm always is going to hunt for that and I hate using this phrase it's highly maligned for a good reason but root cause all right so we're trying to find that is like are we

making sure that we're not causing this problem and I'm not going to want to give you a supplement to cover up something if we're not even trying to solve the problem of what's being there that being said am I that concerned about people taking a multivitamin just all throughout no not really am I concerned about people taking creatine no like go ahead um those ones are generally pretty fine to to just take but anything else I want a reason I really don't like giving people anything in a super physiological concentration or a superfood concentration right

so again an amount you wouldn't find in a normal food dosage unless we have really a specific reason some of these things are more problematic others are less problematic so when I to answer the question of dependency you have a combination of actual physiological dependency caffeine like that actually creates a physi iCal dependency versus a uh emotional or psychological dependency or just a I like drinking this like that's my habit that's my routine there's a fancy scientific phrase for that but it doesn't matter so yeah we want to get off that and like again my

personal philosophy is I don't want you dependent upon anything I want to create extremely resilient people and I want to create physiological resilience we actually have a fancy little algorithm we use to to measure that in people and so we can actually calculate that number and the goal of us is to push that number higher so that we don't have to have anything um so many situations pop up in your real life that you're not going to have your supplement or you're not going to have your routine or you're not going to have your journal

or whatever but also for the long term I don't want to create a situation in which this is a short-term success that you have to now do that the rest of your life no let's just get out of the way let's fix the problem if if there is something symptom management that's real while we're actually searching for better foundational habits um the last thing I want to say about this is if you're only covering symptom you're really missing signal right which is if you're constantly tired throughout the day and all you're doing is giving yourself

a number of Alpha gpcs and caffein Etc even though there's good literature are you really just using that to allow your poor sleep hygiene to happen if you took those away I bet you you would actually start addressing your sleep if that's the Cause right or I your your stress or your poor hydration like you would go hunting for the problem and so like you want to walk a fine here of going like hey look is an athletic greens supplement that big a deal no probably not but wait a minute am I actually now covering

up the pain point that is maybe needed it's a signal to actually get my ass in gear to go make one of these changes um whatever it needs to be so I know I got like a little bit meta on you and a little bit philosophical but that's honestly how I approach it yeah I think it's really important a friend of mine who's a physician has a great saying um which is better living Through Chemistry still requires Better Living um boy that's that's golden that's so good you know and it pertains also to things like

anti-depressants and ADHD drugs and things of that sort most all of those things were developed as tools to allow people to move from a maladaptive State maladaptive is hard to Define but think about in any domain of life you can either be back on your heels flat footed or forward Center of mass um and there are times when people are so compromised neurochemically that they need to use pharmacology in order to get into a flat-footed position yeah you know they're really back on their heels flat footed or forward Center Mass but the idea was always

that those things were developed as things to allow people to engage in the sorts of behaviors that can produce the same sorts of neurochemical shifts and if people are thinking well what sorts of behaviors can induce these neurochemical shifts I'll just zoom out myself for a moment here and say I am a big proponent I believe you are as well F May in doing behavioral tools first when possible really establishing good habits the dos and don'ts which we've talked a lot about in this series and in this episode then excellent nutrition which involves dos and

don'ts volume food Choice timing all the factors and then also supplementation and also there sometimes a case for prescription drugs certainly and often brain machine interface or body machine interface measuring stuff using devices but the the foundation of behavior and good nutrition are really truly foundational and it's hard in anything to skip steps but supplements and prescription drugs are one place where people often skip steps and then they they don't actually learn how to cultivate the best uh behavioral practices including the don'ts as you mentioned and then just one more point along these lines you

know you talked about taking anything for energy is really uh disruptive to the system and it is because especially caffeine while it has its uses and even health benefits it's really borrowing it it's against the adenosine system with interest and so because caffeine acts as an adenosine antagonist effectively while caffeine is present in those receptors you don't feel as sleepy you have more energy you're reaction time goes down memories enhance Focus performance of all kinds yes but then when that caffeine is dislodged from the receptor then the adenosine can act even more potently at those

receptors so it's sort of like being able to borrow against the normal variations in wakefulness and sleep and this is why we encourage people if they're not training first thing in the morning to push their caffeine and take out about 90 to 120 minutes after waking so they can clear some of that adenosine in the morning which tends to happen even uh uh after we wake up um people can listen to episodes on Master your sleep or perfect sleep or the caffeine episode to understand more about that but the the final thing I just want

to say here and then it it um prompts a question is you know in thinking about supplement protocols um I think a lot of people assume that once they start taking something they're going to have to take it all the time and one idea perhaps is that people have some uh Alpha GPC around that they could take and granted it'd be great if people could try things without having to buy a whole product I think companies hopefully are listening to this and we um give people a sample to see if something works for them and

then give them an opportunity to try it to have things around but not necessarily assume you're going to take it every time right some things you take every day foundational nutrition um uh supplements for instance but then also to take a look at how well you're eating or not eating right at times when I'm eating much better I consuming you know low sugar fermented foods which are great for the gut microbiome I consume less probiotics if ever I've been really compromised for whatever reason then I will take pill form probiotics but I don't take those

all the time um because I get them from food and from certain G you know greens drinks like athletic greens and so forth so I think that nutrition and supplementation are are tethered in this way in my mind and I don't think that um most people think of supplementation as something that where you can induce a lot of variability in when and how you take them but as far as I'm concerned as long as there single ingredient formulations you can be um you can use supplements once a week if you want you could use them

seven days a week you could use them um twice a day four times a day every day or you could use them not at all agreed yeah some of them uh will have an effect randomly like that others will not and we talked about creatin being one of them it's if you're going to take it once or so a week then there's I mean basically no benefit that's a very good point creatine um beta alanine is another fantastic example of something you need to take consistently if you want some sort of benefit um it needs

to be built up in muscle we need to use that to create uh carnosine which is what's actually going to help us with our fatigue management that's why we call it like an acid buffer um so in our previous metabolism episode we talked about that being a major cause of fatigue um the wonderful part the one of the reasons why beta alanine works so effectively is it blocks that buildup so that is an example of another one that you would want to take uh other things like fish oil you could certainly skip a day here

and there it wouldn't be that big a deal I also do support your comment of you can take absolutely none of these things and and be just fine um in terms of and we'll come back maybe to bet Allan in a second in terms of some other fun stuff my colleague Greg giki ran a really cool number of studies looking at how exercise actually alteras that got microbiome this is actually an area that we I probably have 300 stool samples sitting in my freezer in my lab oh goodness another reason to pause before entering your

lab yeah another reason to not apply to come be one of my graduate students unless you want to deal with that um we actually have a number we've applied for a couple of Grants to look more into this um specifically with females uh so hopefully we can get that funded but nonetheless um you can actually see some like pretty traumatic and I say that word on purpose changes in the gut microbiome this one in particular study I was thinking of that Greg did is he looked at the the changes pre-post and ultramarathon and even within

a single bot of exercise um I can't remember some of the markers but I know one of the markers uh was specifically increased by like 14,000 per. uh after a single bot of exercise now this is an ultramarathon this is like like totally absurd amount of exercise relative to what normal people would do would be but that number I remember like it was like 14,2 29% or like something some random number like that of something meaningful yeah something meaningful I can't remember which marker uh that was that had changed um I know strepto caucus was

in there strepto caucus went up like maybe something more like 30 or 40 or 50% so the point is we haven't even had the proper time and we don't to even launch into the gut microbiome um supplementation there needs to be ultra specific um you wouldn't be best served to just jump in and take random things there um that's it's a whole area of emerging science we know very very very little about it but there is a number of actionable things one could do um there so probably something to not mess with uh would certainly

work with a qualified physician if you think you have something going on clinical or you know some actual problem there don't work with someone who's not a specialist a medical doctor there but um just randomly assigning a bunch of probiotics or prebiotics without intention is is maybe um the next Forefront of human performance research but we'll have to maybe come back in a few years and dive into that in detail or perhaps you can bring somebody on as an expert in that to discuss that yeah gut microbiome is fascinating I think of sleep as the

most powerful performance enhancing activity uh of course you still have to do the activity yeah I consider it foundational like it basically raises the tide on mental health physical health performance of all kinds um it there's recent data that during sleep your body goes through all its various forms of metabolism possible Y which is amazing so it's measured from breath in human subjects breath metabolites in human subjects so obviously uh if one is thinking about supplementation and wondering okay what's what's the best supplement to enhance performance you gave some um great rationale for why creatine

would be an excellent choice provided you're eating well and um hydrating well uh and then to my mind the next thing on the list would be anything that allows you to improve the quality and maybe even the duration of your sleep although if you wake up and you feel rested throughout the day and only need a short nap in the afternoon not everyone needs one but then generally that means you're feeling okay people sometimes get flipped onto this idea that they have insomnia insomnia is excessive daytime sleepiness where you're falling asleep during the day that's

insomnia could also be narcolepsy but that's insomnia but supplementation to improve the quality or duration of sleep or both seems to me like the most direct route even though actually technically it's an indirect route to to uh performance enhancement and then thinking about things that increase alertness and stimulant and F and fatigue reducers do you think that's a good logic yeah we go to absurd lengths to dial sleep in as much as we can I mean the honest answer is like truly absurd this is a conflict of interest my my company I'm a part of

this absolute rest is the name of that company we actually go out to your house and run a full clinical grade sleep study in you your bedroom on you and run that over multiple nights so instead of having to go to a Sleep Clinic and have it done in this weird hospital room or sort of setting with these people looking at you through a mirror it's like totally creepy um that is important because that's the only way to truly determine how you are sleeping now that said the technology of wearable trackers is getting better in

fact I would actually predict those things will reach a level of accur equivalent to the PSG in the next couple of years and probably we'll get FDA approval to be able to diagnose officially Sleep Disorders that's my total my my prediction from some inside information I don't know that to be true but it is getting a lot better right now those wearables are not accurate enough to meet that threshold so that we do is we bring up basically all the equipment um to do that so we'll come in and do that now once we understand

exactly how you're sleeping the next question is to answer why are you sleeping that way and so this is a full four-fold system um number one is we're going to look at biology which means you're going to take saliva and blood and we're looking at everything from uh neurotransmitters concentrations to um vitamins B6 B12 Etc that are important for Sleep performance so we're going to see is that is it a physiological problem is there something happen there is cortisol DHEA ratio that we've previously talked about or uh is something like that off if it's not

physiology then we're going on the next one which is environmental we run a full environmental scan of your bedroom during those nights of sleep that we're there and that's really important because we can look at everything from dander and pollen and allergens that are in the air um a quick tip here is wash your sheets at least once a week one of the common most common places that people um get allergens in the air is actually from accumulation on your sheets so if you clean those more often uh you'll be in a better spot and

next one the next one there also is like keep your I'm sorry this hurts my heart I don't even VI I in in truthfulness I violate this but keep your pets out of your bedroom and certainly keep them off your bed our our Ghost Face Killer is my dog and no is my other one they don't go on my bed but they're right next to my bed so we violate that one but full environmental scan uh includes all those things of course there's uh we measure light and temperature and humidity and everything else that's going

on in the room um volatile Organics that are coming out of the mattress from Mal theide lead out of out of the wall like all these things that could potentially disrupt your sleep and we want to make sure that none of those things are kicking on uh we see this constantly people will have things like trying to be cool and they want to be cold at night because that's important and so they'll turn an air conditioner on or a fan but the air conditioner kicking on and off and night actually can shoot you out of

various sleep stages so you want to be really careful how this going the last metric on that is actually CO2 and so what you remember from our metabolism discussion is when you exhale you're breathing out CO2 well if your room is closed and the ventilation isn't great the amount of CO2 in your room starts to build up and we actually very specifically know the threshold uh based on information collected from the International Space Station actually we know the Threshold at which CO2 crosses and starts disrupting sleep so we want to make sure that you're not

sitting in this CO2 bath in front of your face and then breathing it back in and disrupting your sleep so environment is the second one the third one is actually now psychology so um one of the members on our team is a Harvard MD and Psychiatry and put together an entire sleep scan survey so we run through all that to see if there's anxiety depression anything like that psychologically going on and then the F fourth one there is if you have some sort of actual sleep pathology and so this again will include some eye tracking

stuff that we can use so we take all those data they go back to our team uh we work in combination with with Steve locky uh from Harvard who's done a ton of stuff he actually set up a lot of the Circadian rhythm stuff in the National Space Station as well uh himself Jeffrey Drummer and mdphd Etc and all these folks in a room go over your data identify what's going on in build action plans off of that occasionally those action plans will include supplementation but only if necessary we're really going to try to come

back and work through a system um to improve the Sleep however is needed so I realize that is not U totally accessible for a lot of people but like if you really need to go to the end of the Earth to figure out sleep um that service is available absolute rest sounds like an amazing tool given that most people won't be able to use it um or access it although we will provide a link in case people are interested in it and do want to try it you mentioned a few things that I think everyone

should uh assay their sleeping environment for and um determine whether or not they are hindering their sleep uh without realizing it for instance the uh air conditioning going on and off or this could be heater going on and off or um central heat heating or cooling unit um this could be uh keeping the room dark uh this could be uh cleaning your sheets certainly that doesn't require um uh that one sign up for absolute rest so cleaning one sheets routinely keeping pets out of the bedroom as you admitted you don't entirely um different opinions about

that but if you're having sleep issues the dander from animals may may be part of those issues and then one that I'll just add which I think is pretty interesting is there's some beautiful data out of Michael turman's Lab at Columbia Medical School in New York um on negative ionization and this sounds pretty uh wacky new AG I'm sure some you are like negative ionization but listen the termin lab is a serious laboratory focus on circadian biology for many decades now negative ion concentrations are higher near Coastal locations so if you've ever gone to the

sea or gone on vacation and you sleep better near a body of water that's actually a real thing and there are negative ionization machines but there are also some things that one can do in order to increase the negative ion concentration in their sleeping environment that are nearly zero cost if not zero cost you can look those up online and we probably will do an entire episode about this in the future but I think what you describe for absolute rest really highlights a more General set of themes that I think are really important which is

your sleep environment is an environment it's got a lot going on in it and it's worth running through the checklist uh that you described and asking you know where where things you know maybe not optimized but where am I really getting in my own way in terms of sleep all of this again being related to the fact that getting excellent sleep consistently is a will completely transform everything that you do and not getting excellent sleep consistently which is a challenge for so so many people uh will also transform everything that you do and think and

feel but in the negative Direction yeah I can also offer a few tips uh on sleep based on things we find most consistently for those that can't go through uh the whole protocol um one quick little actually app called time shifter is really cool for anyone that's dealing with consistent travel and jet lag so you can go and enter your location your time where you're going the location and then it'll actually back calculate and it'll give you full light uh stimulant food hydration and stuff protocol and you just follow along with that and we've used

that for many years actually especially when traveling to like Abu Dhabi for vice and Mongolia and and Brazil for the Olympics and sort of all over the place so um that's I think that app is still available I hope so um it's it's great um a nice tool um a couple of things we found major if you're dealing with acid reflex so if you're someone who who has problems like that you can just Elevate the head of your bed by like 6 in so if you you know put a little piece of wood or something

underneath it um you can also buy very inexpensive pillows um that can Elevate that now that's not solving the problem but at least can help you sleep whether it's just that night or if it's a consistent problem you can do there um if you're snoring like I said that's not really benign you should probably take a look at that your first step there is mouth tape um if that doesn't work you can go through what's called myofunctional therapy um which I don't know if you've covered that before but it's basically tongue exercises uh and that

can be quite effective specifically for people who have problems with REM sleep so malfunctional therapy um it's just a it's kind of like you do like depending on the protocol uh some tongue exercises kind of in the morning afternoon or night and that takes a while to be honest uh you're probably going to need at least six weeks before you start seeing anything but that actually is is pretty well demonstrated to help with sleep so you can probably Google you could find a link for for exact protocols I don't want to describe all them but

yeah you're going to strengthen your tongue so that it stops falling in the back of your neck and waking you up at night so that's a really free easyfree protocol to use um if you're struggling with it could be insomnia but it could be just things like when you get into bed you're super tired you can't fall asleep or things like that kind of a basic rule of thumb we use is only two things happen in your bed and if you can make sure those are the only two things you do in your bed the

problems of falling sleeper insomnia tend to go down those two things are you have sex and you sleep and nothing else goes down in your bed and so you can make that environment very special and that can help uh quite effectively improve your ability to fall asleep and then not wake up early so keeping that environment specific to what it's for uh can be effective the only other thing I would think of is and I I hate to say this because it's not super practical but it's just quite clear at this point sleeping with a

partner in your bed it's just not very good for sleep so good luck with that one I know um you can do a couple of things if it helps uh you can get two smaller beds and put them right next to each other um if you can actually have separate sheets that alone can be helpful um so if you get you mean if you're on a king-sized bed or something um and again I know some people they're just like there's no chance but if you want to know the the cost for your like the your

relationship just lose your use your loved one ideally please don't please don't don't oh my goodness so um the only last thing I want to mention here is something that's popped up just a few times recently but you're going to see more of um which is called orthosomnia U so that is a term that is people are growing concerned over uh which is wearables and sleep trackers causing sleep issues so people be basically become too obsessed with optimizing maximizing scores and that alone well actually it's actually you so you learn when to wake up and

so so you have actually U an anticipatory response when many hours prior to waking up so if you actually learn to have a little bit of a what's that little molecule of like excitement and reward oh dopamine that's the one if you start getting that because you wake up and you get super excited to check your score um or your phone it's the same thing if you check your phone or Twitter or whatever inmediately in morning that'll actually start carving back your wakeup time because you start launching it so it can ruin sleep becoming too

obsessed so what I'll say is if you're going to use a sleep tracker and you just like don't care you want to check it and you have fun with it great but if like you are really really really interested in it and you pay a lot of attention to it don't check your sleep score for at least the first 60 minutes after waking up and then you that should help you that's a great tool I think that um and piece of advice I think generally because I think a lot of people are waking up in

the middle of the night checking their phone two or three times per night I'm kind of wondering why they're doing that and I'm guessing it's this anticipatory wakeup circuit yeah you absolutely should use either your night mode or do not disturb or airplane mode or something overnight or leave it out of the room yeah I mean if you have to wake up and like some people have um like a a family member who's maybe not in great health and so they have to keep their phone around in case they call or things like that so

I get it you're like I can't leave it out leave it in there leave it in do not disturb and enter in their phone number or whoever's phone number so only they can get through but keep it black and white so if you do have to look at your phone at night you see black and white and you do not have notifications so make sure that there's no notification for no email and a no DM like get all that stuff off your screen and so you look at the did anybody call did anybody text of

importance um what time is it no emergency going on black and white okay right back to sleep so that can help a little bit one of the supplements that I found is extremely useful for being able to fall back asleep if I've woken up in the middle of the night and for some reason can't um and is also very effective for enhancing sleep when one is ingesting fewer carbohydrates m an issue that a lot of people run into um or for people that are fasting for many hours before sleep you know people are trying to

not eat anything within you know two to four hours but is inositol 900 milligrams of myoinositol i i find again this is anic data to be clear if I wake up in the middle of the night and I've taken 900 milligrams of vosl before initially falling asleep that I fall back asleep much more easily so that's why I've added 900 milligrams of inositol to my called Sleep stack I've also tried just taking it alone and it works well alone but works better of course with the mag 3 and8 um apogen and cleaning sleep stack the

um the also in terms of tools for Sleep the the app revery that was developed by my colleague Dr David Spiegel who's a medical doctor at Stanford Psychiatry Stanford School of Medicine Psychiatry um there is a free trial there's a nominal cost if you use it um month to month but the data are really strong that people that use that I think it's 8 to 11 minute sleep hypnosis once a week and it doesn't have to be in the middle of the night when you wake up really helps improve people's um ability to fall asleep

quickly stay asleep fall back asleep if they wake up in the middle of the night in some cases curing insomnia in other cases really just helping people with their General sleep issues and I mention this because uh obviously it's a technology it's not a supplement but I know that some people are supplement averse also if you look at by at the cost comparison between taking the Sleep stack totally um and the revery app it's Pennies on the dollar really um so again I'm a proponent of both for myself but I realize that people have varying

budgets and again I should say as always behavioral tools first and I I think of the Ry app as as a more or less a behavioral tool yeah it's uh it's really just a tool any of these breath work protocols hypnosis protocols they're just a tool for you to in touch back in with your own physiology rather than a a substance that's coming in so I I fully support those we have used a number of those um in in protocols there's some other tricks that we can pull in those areas um I probably shouldn't say

this but the reality of it is depending on what's keeping you up um sometimes we recommend just getting up and getting it done uh like if it's a really like if it's a a project or a thing or whatever um like sometimes rather than laying there all night not sleeping you can get up get it done and then if you stay awake fine at least the anxiety is gone or sometimes you can actually go back to sleep cuz you're like especially if the task only literally would take like 10 or 15 minutes um it may

ruin your sleep but you're you're going to have ruined sleep anyways so you can try that tool um you don't want to pull that card very often and you have to have be very careful with what you consider to be something worthy of doing that um but that is like between me and you and nobody else here that's a tool I have used personally more than a few times where just like I get an idea and I don't lose it or like the solution for something you've been noodling on for a long time Pops in

your head and just like and you're not wanting to forget it just get up and get it done and get on with your day in several previous episodes you emphasized how exercise induces various adaptations depending on the type specificity volume intensity Etc of the exercise and that during exercise the degree of adaptation that one triggers is often associated with things that normally we don't associate with exercise related health things like huge increases in blood pressure during exercise huge increases in inflammatory markers muscle damage and these all things all sound terrible but as you beautifully explained

all of that triggers adaptations that then bring those markers below the Baseline with which they were previous to the exercise so that's the adaptation and the recovery within the realm of supplementation and nutrition I'm aware of a number of things some herbal some lipid based other compounds that are used for various things but that are known to have a potent anti-inflammatory effect things like omega-3 fatty acids ashwagandha for its effect on cortisol although that's a bit indirect to the inflammatory pathway um curcumin uh and things of that sort given that we want inflammation in order

to trigger the adaptation response to exercise and given that we want to reduce inflammation in the recovery period can we put together a logical framework as to when is best to take anything anti-inflammatory whether it's supplement base or prescription or over the counter drug and when to strictly avoid taking any anti-inflammatory supplement or um behavioral tool you mentioned ice can reduce inflammation that's why you don't want to do it too close to exercise anyway I think think you get the gist of the question what about specific supplements related to inflammation and anti-inflammatory responses what are

the best ones when should we take them when should we avoid taking them the way that I think about it is understanding what we call the fitness fatigue model so what I mean by that is whenever you do some sort of insult the whole idea is for you to come back and get an adaptation now recovery is not adaptation right recover is recovery adaptation is what happens after you're recovered right so there's a very important distinction there Fitness fatigue model says basically you've done something and you've got an adaptation and you've enhanced Fitness and by

Fitness in this case I mean it as a non-specific term so you got stronger you've uh improved your endurance like whatever thing you're trying to train for at the same time though your fatigue elevated so what happens is if Fitness increases at the same or similar rate as fatigue your performance actually isn't any better and so you may think oh my program isn't working I need to then train harder or need to take more anti-inflammatory or whatever the things are when in reality all you really need to do is reduce fatigue and if you do

that your performance will increase and all the training adaptations will be actualized so the way that we do that is a couple of things first and foremost is actually a taper so the the first step I think of if someone is training very very hard and you're not seeing any results and we want to think about supplementation before I get there I want to think about taper and D Lo if you're actually training hard and sleep and everything else is taken care of so just without going too far into taper some general General parameters there

um you want to think about about a 50% reduction in training volume over the course of about a week for every eight weeks of training super super rough right so if you've been training hard for three months for something you might want to taper for two weeks something like that right it's sort of a rough estimate that taper you actually don't need to reduce intensity because intensity is not the driver fatigue it tends to be volume so as long as your volume is reduced by 50% you can maintain intensity you can maintain in fact I

generally would recommend maintaining frequency so if you're used to working out four days a week keep it four days a week you can go down a little bit in frequency but if you go down too much in frequency you actually tend to feel super lethargic so I wouldn't do that if you do those things correctly you can typically see somewhere between like a 3 to 8% Improvement of performance um within a matter of days so so it's important to do that um we actually ran a study on cross country Runners years ago testing on a

metabolic cart um muscle biopsies blow a whole bunch of things and we did it pre and post three weeks of taper and we actually this is cool because we did this in competitive season so this were Collegiate cross country Runners and we got them to come to our lab three weeks before their conference Championship ran them all through a bunch of testing biopsied them they went through their three-week taper and then we biopsied them again and then they went and ran um their conference championships and stuff well what happened was they end up hitting about

a 50% reduction because what they did is they took out what we call the junk volume so they kept their race tempos high intensity stuff in there um they kept the recovery stuff and that Medium Pace they just basically reduced now they were terrified as any endurance Runner or endurance athlete or participant would understand um when you take volume away they tend to get very nervous and so they didn't like that um but as a result of that what we saw is their V2 Max despite the fact that they covered half the mileage their V2

Max did not go down in 3 weeks of reduced taper your Fitness is in is extremely stable and in fact once we actually looked at their data the enzymes in their muscle were responsible for oxidative metabolism were maintained and so you don't have to worry about losing uh Again Fitness or we're talking about overall performance or even um oxygen capacity mitochondrial function Etc that was all preserved obviously we saw performance go up what was actually really interesting is we saw I think it was around a 10% increase in type 2 which are fast twitch muscle

fiber size so we saw a 10% increase in fast switch fiber size at the end of 3 weeks of tapering now what you may think is like wow I guess tapering is anabolic but that's probably not what happened what realistically probably happened was their volume of training was actually causing their fibers to be reduced in size and then once we remove that fatigue they just recovered back to normal so that's a good example of what I'm talking about once you remove the fatigue you can actually see enhancements and performance not because you're necessarily getting better

but because you're removing the simul light light suppressing you so that being said the way that you want to think about recovery like this is although recovery especially like injury recovery like seems chaotic biology is very organized and there's a very specific three-step process that you're going to go through for recovery and then there are different supplements that can can help you in each of those three areas so area one is basically inflammation so this is when the cyto storm comes rolling out uh it starts signaling the injuries there in this case even if it's

muscle damage um and activates immune system to kick on and that whole repair process happens there um what you're trying to do effectively in fact this is why you probably ever wondered like why is inflammation a thing um what you're trying to do is bring in fluid enhance the size and increase blood flow in so you can get nutrients for repair and immune cells and everything like that in the system and get the waste out so short-term inflammation even in the case of muscle soreness is the example we we talked about in the previous episode

but any inflammation it is part of the necessary process that's why you would not want to take an anti-inflammatory in that state and so why you also would not want to do things like an ice spat um so in that immediate inflammatory response time window this is you know seconds to hours after training you would want to stay away from things like that that um a good option here are things like Omega-3s um good evidence some somewhere in the neighborhood of like 2 to 5 GRS total typically like a 1:1 um EPA to DHA ratio

is fine similarly this is another example of when good doesn't mean more is better um because for example there is EV actually evidence showing up to 15 grams will harm the immune response and so you don't just want to be like man I'm super sore I'm training harder I'm just going to go to 10 grams a day or more and more more you're actually causing yourself more of a problem um so antioxidants anti-inflammatories are fine again Omega-3s in that dosage um are a decent thing um you can also do something like 500 milligrams of curcumin

three times a day that's going to be enough uh to keep you in a decent spot um there are some other things that you could look up um maybe some potential benefit for ginger um and bellia and some things like that for inflammation but under unless we're in like very specific circumstances where we have like an injury we're probably not going to those you know areas I just wanted to highlight one thing that came up in a previous episode some not all people but some including myself are very sensitive to kirkum Y it has a

very potent effect in reducing DHT dehydrotestosterone and leads to all sorts of uh clamping of testosterone Associated positive things so um I have experienced that myself I've had people write to me and say I don't understand I started taking the supplement um Kirin is supposed to be a great anti-inflammatory it flatlined my libido it took away my drive um and kind of wondering what's going on there those people are very likely to be very DHT sensitive circumin while it's a potent anti-inflammatory can also potently reduce DHD but some people tolerate it quite well and are

hearing this and probably think that's ridiculous well it's U certainly substantiated by the biochemical Pathways that kiriman Taps into in the known roles of DHT on libido aggression power output Etc and mood so just be wary that um a there's no way to predict this one simply has to figure it out empirically meaning you have to try and see if you like it or don't um the good news is is those um negative effects on DHD seem to reverse pretty quickly after um ceasing to take uh circumin so just a mention of something that came

up in a previous episode but in case people didn't hear that on that segment um just wanted to highlight those those facts further evid do I I strongly discourage strongly discourage taking anything in the anti-inflammatory antioxidant realm unless you actually have a reason to do so um if you're waking up and you're like maybe I'm inflamed that's probably not a good approach let's have a reason to do so step two is actually what we call proliferation and that's kind of like the cleanup crew that's when you're going to be going in there and cleaning out

dead cells and debris and misfolded proteins and things like that at this stage a fantastic evidence based supplement uh is glutamine glutamine 20 gram a day we typically honestly split it up into two dosage 10 grams morning 10 grams night it's a conditional amuno acid which means you can make it uh your body can make enough of it at times and other times you may want to support it uh generally those conditional times are things like burn victims um high stress situations or injury things like that so um there isn't also like a ton of

downside to glutamine because it can go through uh transamination which means your body can take it and say like we don't need anything here for our Muscle Recovery let's make it into something else and use it um for whatever else is needing so it's kind of another one of these like lowrisk uh products it's hon why you see it in a lot of recovery products um if you're ever wondering like what the heck is that in there I don't need amino acids and you're thinking it's like for protein synthesis it's really not it's because of

this it is uh beneficial to this proliferation process I've been taking glutamine for years um I tend to take it in higher dosages several times throughout the day if I'm ever feeling particularly run down y I know they're decent data not great but decent data on the role of glutamine for leaky gut totally for offs saying leaky gut that's getting a little bit into the realm of uh like not super well substantiated but in the in the peer-reviewed literature but some a lot of anec data and um and certainly some peer-reviewed work but not a

ton and then there is also um grown interest in the idea that glutamine because it can trigger activation of the neurons in the gut that signal to the dopamine pathway in the brain that it can be used to offset sugar Cravings this is kind of an interesting new uh and emerging theme which makes sense given the biology of the neurons in the gut that respond to uh specific amino acids including glutamine essential fatty acids and sugar and because they respond to any uh and all three of those um any one or combination of those I

should say um to trigger this dopamine response some people have taken to uh a teaspoon or so of glut of glutamine in some water or other drink couple times throughout the day as a way to reduce their sugar Cravings because what's essentially doing is it's tricking the pathway into into activation of those neurons through an alternate uh ligan receptor interaction right also another interesting point there are very I'm trying to think right now at the top of my head I can't think of a time and I've used glutamine a lot I can't think of a

time where I've ever heard anybody come back with any side effect reports I think if you take enough of it you can get some gastric distress but of course you take enough of any powdered substance uh mix in water you're going to get a a gastric distress response and I what I've noticed about gastric distress with things like uh creatine glutamine and even protein powders for that matter I use a high quality uh whey protein powder routinely um is that if you build up to it over the course of a few days then can get

away with using much higher dosages without any issue yeah yeah um beta alanine is the same thing by the way we sort of talked about that earlier if uh you've ever tried that and you're like oh my gosh like I feel like I've just rolled around in grass and my skin is itching everywhere it's that ants under the skin sensation yeah all that stuff um you can just take a little bit of a lower dosage and be fine for the most part and then you will build up a tolerance to that pretty quickly so you

can up that dosage along the way so what we will often times do there is start at a dosage that's pretty minimal like 2 grams um and then every week or so you can go up another gram until you get to whatever final point you want to be five six grams day you know whatever um so that's another way you can sort of mitigate that problem so the third step in this recovery process um after inflammation proliferation we're now into Remodeling and this is when you're actually you know quote unquote growing back bigger and stronger

um this is where the majority of the repair is actually taking plays and at this point we're basically playing a micronutrient and macronutrient game right by that I mean talked about basic macronutrients um one thing to pay attention to often times if people are hurt whether they had an injury or they've had uh just they're super sore and they are concerned about eating excess calories they tend to want to eat less food during this process because they're like I'm not working out so much so I'm going to eat less calories one of the things that

you have to pay attention to is injury can increase basal metabolic rate by up to 10% wow so what you want to do in general is just take your calories up about 10% at least that's what I recommend um if that is an extended period of time then yes you may put on a slight amount of body fat or something but if that also means you come back some percentage faster then it's worth the exchange um so we recommend that in terms of your carbohydrate or fat split I'm not super worried about it my general

recommendation is just don't make any major changes relative to what you were doing right keep yourself uh pretty much in in the same spot in terms of protein this is the big one you want to make sure you were absolutely at 1 G per pound of body weight because we need those amino acids to come in and start helping um with recovery one gram uh of protein per pound of body weight or more or one gram or more yeah there's going to be very little downside to to having more um remember protein and carbohydrates both

stimulate insulin and remember insulin is anabolic and so we're trying to drive this process of recovery um that's why you want both so you wouldn't want to skimp on carbohydrates in this phase nor would you want to skimp on protein because you need the activation the drive into the tissue as well as the structure going back to one of our earlier conversations and at this point in the week I honestly can't remember at all what episode we covered this in but I gave an analogy about um use making a campfire and using fat and carbohydrates

is the wood and the log and the protein wory the metal structure so you need that Supply if you're trying to B if you've cleared out in the previous step um damaged proteins and you need to make new ones to recover that process you have to have the raw Supply and material so you wouldn't want to avoid either one of those things um there's actually some indirect inflamation management that comes from fatty acids which you actually sort of alluded to earlier um I don't think you need to necessarily go crazy you don't need to change

your fat intake that much just don't drop it you know depending on where you're at so if you're a little bit of a higher carb lower fat person great great if you're moderate great if you're the indirect if you're higher fat lower carb person awesome just don't make an extreme change and don't and try to not be on the extremes of either one of those ratios but the only specific number to pay attention to again is that protein number and if you go a little bit high or even a lot high it's totally fine just

don't go low so that's the the macronutrient portion of remodeling in terms of micronutrients to be honest you just get your bases covered uh this is when a basic multivitamin uh is effective what you're really trying to look at here are vitamin A and zinc they actually have independent mechanisms that are helpful here but those are typically covered in most multivitamins so we generally just give people a multivitamin U magnesium is actually has some some benefits here something like 6 milligrams per kilogram of body weight is the dosage you're looking for there um magnesium citrate

is probably has the most evidence uh in terms of this respect but it doesn't mean I actually have no reason to think you couldn't use glycinate or if you're using another form for Sleep um that probably fine I don't know that for sure but I I can't think of a reason why the other forms of magnesium would all of a sudden not work so you could probably choose whichever form you like um OB citrate has probably the most research in this aspect the only other things you would probably consider here uh three things um calcium

might be on your list particularly if you're trying to if you're concerned with some sort of bone injury that we've sort of got gone past like recovery and we're actually like into injury um so you'll see that in recovery products occasionally and that's why uh and then the last two ones of course are vitamin D and that's pretty well researched uh and then the last one is actually uh something that can help you if you're at this stage and you still are dealing with a lot of soreness or not and that is tart cherry juice

that's actually effective for both THS muscle injury muscle soreness and actually has another benefit of potentially aiding with sleep so not a bad one to turn to as well 's a number of companies that make these things um yeah and then there's actually more ongoing research that I know of on those areas but uh promising literature will'll say not often but every once in a while on this podcast I will solicit social media for questions from the audience where I should say the audience to be and then ask some of those questions on the fly

during the podcast I did this with Dr Lex Friedman I'm going to do it with you your goal is to answer each of these questions certainly not all of them thousands of them within the last couple of hours to answer each of these questions in three or four sentences I certainly won't be counting the number of sentences that you speak so just know that if you want to go over a little bit that's fine but feel free to refer to your Instagram site at a future time where you might go more in depth or to

refer to a study or um if you like you can also say pass if you don't think that you can answer the question um assistant ly enough for this format and here the goal is not to put you on the spot um the goal is simply to allow the audience to ask some questions directly and I I confess I'm looking at these for the first time uh so I'll try and be quick with my with my reading um some of these we may have touched on in previous episodes or in this episode even in which

case you can just kind of cue us to the reminder this is not directly related to supplementation but it is related to nutrition and I don't think we touched on this directly can we do intermittent fasting AKA time restricted feeding with keto and still gain muscle mass TBD I am am quite clear such study does not exist so I don't know I think I've alluded to to before that we did run an intermittent fasting 168 hypertrophy study there was no keto arm uh the results of that study by the time this comes out will probably

be ready though I'm not sure so I can't comment I not have the data but regarding whether or not if you did that with keto or not I can't comment scientifically do you ever prescribe the use of Gaba supplements well I can't prescribe anything to to make sure we're clear but you're Professor you can profess I can profess uh we generally don't spend too much time on Gaba rarely is it okay to weight train fasted than not break the fast and eat for three or four hours after training so in other words y train fasted

I do this but then also not eat immediately following training and wait another three to four hours after training once we have our results from our intermittent fasting study back we will we will have a better answer here my general recommendation as it stands now though is as long as your total protein intake is sufficient um you should be in a decent Spot Great a lot of questions about fasting and training just to to note that um can you train high performance fasted and how long before um you need to refuel the body yeah you

can certainly do that I know of actually many athletes uh some athletes that will do that though the vast majority will not uh as it gets higher and higher in intensity and or duration it gets more challenging but it really does come down to what you did the day before as well so if you ate sufficient calories the day before uh didn't train and your glycogen stores are topped off you have a fighting chance now the duration part of that equation is really kind of dependent upon you um so are you really talking 30 45

minutes 60 Minutes you're probably fine whether you're out past that in several hours you may not be and then the only other comment I would make is there is keep in mind whenever you think about fasting and any other let's say against the textbook you know quote unquote St style you really really need to be careful and thinking the difference between can I do it and is it optimal so I have absolutely no reason to think fasting like that would improve improve performance I only work for the most part with people who are trying to

perform at the highest level possible so I can't think of a scenario in which I would go too fasting to try to enhance performance so whether or not you can maintain some level of performance probably um will it provide any benefit I struggle to find scenarios in which that would actually make you perform better how do different forms of carbohydrates impact performance and then right below it another question about carbohydrates which is does carbohydrate cycling work so these are two uh questions from people that I think don't know one another but a lot of carbo

questions about carbohydrates and performance which we've touched on anything else that you want to add to that conversation I don't think I really maybe you might want to think about carb loading uh SL carb cycling so carbohydrate loading does help uh however a misconception there is it's just you know a big bowl of pasta the night before that can help top off storages but really optimal carbohydrate loading prior to a long duration endurance performance is probably best over the course of three or four days so you want to gradually increase carbohydrate intake for multiple days

rather than just have one big bowl of pasta Branch chain amino acids and essential amino acid supplementation yay nay or as I would say meh uh meh usually if your total protein intake is fine then you don't really have a need for them um if you're for whatever any number of valid reasons total protein is not then going to an essential amino acid would be my first step rather than a BCA um now admittedly we actually do use essential amino acids somewhat regularly because it's it's also sort of like a there's no real harm other

than if you're price conscious and you're sort of like I'm wasting money that's fine the people I work with generally again that's not a few dollars for to maximize recoveries is not that big so we will sometimes use that uh premit or post training in in some circumstances uh total protein would be high quality way something like that um if you can't use whey for whatever reason there are plenty of high quality vegan proteins you could use if you want to top all that off though and add some essential amino acids it wouldn't hurt anything

and may potentially help slightly so you choose um based on that algorithm ah I was hoping somebody would ask this we touched on it a little bit it's a a little bit of a loaded question the way they phrased it so um at risk of leading the witness does the mythical anabolic window really exist and I'm just laughing because the way they pose the question they're already telling us what their stance is um making it more effective as to create hypertrophy uh to eat within a certain time frame after working out I'm going to assume

that this person genuinely wants to know whether or not the anabolic window really exists or not um because they refer to it as mythical I'm going to assume that they're um suspicious but what's the deal is the anabolic window a real thing the post exercise anabolic window is extremely real so what this is uh you can see more detail in a number of videos on my YouTube page I believe it is the idea that you need to must uh consume some sort of nutrients specifically usually protein uh in some time domain 30 or 60 Minutes

post exercise in order to maximize growth so is that window real yes are you hyper sensitized to nutrients in that time frame yes is it very important that you rehydrate uh replenish muscle glycogen and rebuild tissue quickly after exercise to maximize recovery absolutely it's not real though in the sense that you that you have to have it within 30 minutes um in the case of protein as we talked about a second ago your total protein intake throughout the day is more important um timing though for things like carbohydrate especially if you're training multiple times a

day it is very real so it is a very real thing it's just you may or may not actually care about it it may not be important for your context garlic seems like an appropriate question what if any functional roles does garlic have in performance Garlic's actually really cool there's a number of things you can dive into that are outside of my three to four sentences considering them at like two and a half probably already um you're not going to find strong human data on garlic extract however there is a little bit uh suggesting it

can actually enhance hands recovery from injury or potentially tissue damage so you got to kind of be careful though because in order to understand what's happening you have to differentiate between innate and adaptive recovery processes and when we say things like immunity realiz defense that's not one thing that's just like a very colloquial term for a number of things again it's a verb like it's a noun right the immune system but it immunity is a bunch of processes or processes if you're about to correct my speech I'll correct your right back um not yours Andy

but the listeners process tomato tomato it's a verb immunity is a verb this is my problem with immune boosters same issue right you're like whoa what are you boosting specifically because in fact if you're boosting the wrong part of immunity during the wrong phase of recovery with garlic you may be actually hurting uh the the process because you were theoretically could be trying to downregulate that ption that you can upregulate a next portion that's the faster way to say it if you will so um we actually you may see more data come out that says

the garlic extracts now overrated I don't know I actually don't even know yet we just don't have enough human data on it but yeah there's some stuff there if you want to look hard enough I'm gonna ask this question for myself because I'm curious to know the answer selfish tart cherry extract uh pretty effective actually uh for two things uh potentially ating and sleep getting to sleep as well as muscle soreness that's the bulk of the research is in muscle soreness and um seems to be a moderate effect there I think for people that might

be interested in dosages of things like tart cherry extract garlic Etc um obviously Dr Andy galpin's Instagram and Twitter are great places to ask questions like that and to find qu answers to questions like that as well as examine.com is a terrific website um they actually recently overhauled their entire website so they have this human effect Matrix that shows the um the effects and the the strength of different effects in human studies of many many different compounds um relating to everything to you know Hormone Health in men and women sports performance cognitive performance it doesn't

cover everything but it certainly covers a lot with links to studies there's a lot that's available at completely zero cost by joining examine.com um you can access some addition features and this is by the way not a paid endorsement from examine.com I'm simply a longtime user of examine.com myself um and so I just want cue people to it and again many of the resources there are available completely free of cost It's a Wonderful site um so for dosages of garlic tart cherry extract and things of that sort whether or not you're getting it from food

or you're getting it from extract uh powders rather um all of that information is is pretty nicely laid out there so unless you have something to add to that I was just going to um cue people to that resource no I've been using that since the first day that website was launched I I was made aware that it was coming I've been fortunate to know those guys for a while so yeah I've used it I've used it in all my classes I use it I don't even know probably weekly at this point uh another NE

nice feature that's actually on there is they have a a series of like they'll do some topical reviews basically so they'll write a big paper out on muscle damage or blood pressure or testosterone en or um hormone uh you menstrual cycle and and yeah PCOS I think they do one on and all kinds of stuff so you can search by topic uh like you know energy or recovery or whatever or you can search by you know black human seed extractor like whatever number of things you want to do and they'll also tell you if there's

any interactions to pay attention to so it's really really nice so be careful if you're taking a and b or whatever so yeah it's wonderful wonderful yeah they've done a marvelous job so thank you examine.com keep keep up the amazing work well we've come close to the end of this episode and that means that we are close to the end of this series where you have so graciously joined us for six full episodes of The hubman Lab podcast to educate us on all things Fitness episode one you reviewed and educated us on assessing our level

of Fitness in fact I learned so many ways of assessing Fitness that I had not thought about and also assessing my recovery capacity for instance one thing that I'm definitely going to implement from that episode is a routine broad jump test and uh an inhome high jump jump and touch test if people don't know what I'm referring to that's all contained in that episode it's timestamped these are very straightforward zeroc cost ways to assess one's level of Fitness um there are few others that require a bare minimum of Technology like taking your pulse rate in

very specific ways at specific time also some timing of Mile runs and some other things related to strength and hypertrophy and on and on really it's a it's a buffet of options that we can select from and I already know the four or five that I started implementing this week I've recognized how I'm pretty good in a couple of areas I'm doing maybe maybe better than pretty well in one area but that I'm doing abysmally poorly in a few areas that um I just wasn't aware of and so I've already started um taking on ways

to uh adjust that over time and I I'll keep people posted so that first episode was absolutely incredible and just provides so much actionable knowledge and the rationale behind it the second episode you educated us about strength speed and hypertrophy training and there too an immense amount of incredible knowledge we got way down into the details you explained sets reps the rationale for sets reps rest Cadence number of workouts per week I'm definitely going to take away my need to do some speed Based training and some power-based training normally I think in terms of strength

or hypertrophy and I'm relieved to learn that a lot of the speed and power-based training it it's low intensity enough that it can be done fairly often and incorporated into my program which already touches on strength and hypertrophy and indeed some endurance work as well so amazing tips that you provided there I'm certainly going to implement the 3 to five program that you describ um 3 to five exercises done for 3 to five repetitions 3 to 5 minutes between sets uh you're doing this three to five times per week and so on and so forth

all the details again timestamped um in the strength and high pervy uh episode show note so just incredible we even use that to set up PR with you this week that's right I did PR this week thanks thanks to your input and following that program and um I'm really grateful for that it it does feel good to break through a barrier um and I intend to break through more barriers but not just with strengthen hypertrophy because episode 3 you taught us all about endurance the four different forms of endurance how to train for each of

those different forms the value of doing even very brief 20 second Sprints or bouts of jumping jacks throughout the day which to some people might just sound like a you know like a little hack or gimick but no these are actually tapping into fuel systems and modes of neuromuscular interactions that great greatly Aid other forms of endurance like long duration endurance I would love to return to my um High School mile time I won't reveal what that is because this is not really about me but I plan to start doing um if not mile repeats

then doing some mile mile runs and testing there once a week you laid out a beautiful program for how to do that and then in the next episode you wowed us again with a description of the science and the tools and this right down to the details but all laid out very cleanly and clearly as to how to design an optimal fitness program what are the things that really represent an optimal program what questions does one have to answer before designing a program what are some of the barriers in the way this concept of Defenders

as things that prevent you from reaching your goals and one of the key things I have it right here in front of me um that I took away from that episode is was this quadrant um approach of really thinking about and figuring out how much one intends to devote to work career calling let's make that one bin um relationships another bin Fitness in the other bin and Recovery in the other bin and um here we'll tip our hat to our our good friend Kenny Kane um for um mentioning that overall um scheme for doing things

it's been immensely useful and I've actually charted it out and thought about and drawn out which Different Things fall into each of these categories you might think it's obvious okay relationships but that includes a lot of different things and there's crossover between these bins um in terms of how you can combine enhancing relationships with Fitness work recovery and so on so that episode is just again a treasure Trove of knowledge and then in the next episode you you educated us on recovery in all its forms in the very short term in within the workout immediately

after the workout and from workout to workout ways to really accelerate recovery assess recovery and as you pointed out for people like me who always assume that we don't recover very well and that some sort of character trait or nervous system thing or genetic to really think about how my training is impacting my level of recovery and in doing so is revealed to me that I have far more capacity than I thought I had and already this week I've managed to train more often doing more work and I feel better than ever um and that's

also despite the fact that we've we spent a fair amount of time in these chairs across from one another it's a kind way to say it well it's it's been it's been a pleasure and then in today's episode you explained nutrition and supplementation as it relates to Performance and of course that touches into recovery but also optimal mental States for training how to approach one's training and how to extract the most from training through quality nutrition right so what to eat and when which carbohydrates protein amounts Windows of opportunity um Windows you absolutely don't want

to miss and then some that are a bit more flexible and then we went deep into the weeds of magnesium garlic tart cherry extract Alpha GPC we touched on neurotransmitter related systems hormone related systems we went deep into a discussion about sleep because of course sleep is the foundation for recovery and performance of all kinds emotional mental and physical recovery and performance and in taking us through this enormous Arc of a journey through Fitness I think it's fair to say that you've given us your knowledge contained in your head I was telling someone uh just

the other day that one of the things that I always lamented in science is that I would encounter these incredible professors and scientists and in other domains of life too and you just wish there was some way to download their brain because they had so much knowledge inside them and um I'm looking for a USB or USBC uh port on you and I don't see one yet but what you've effectively done for us across these six episodes is to download the actionable knowledge and you know it's wonderful the information you've provided is clear it's super

interesting it's highly highly actionable and in many cases it's counterintuitive and surprising but once one understands the logic behind it as you've provided for us also then it all makes sense in a way that's extremely satisfying and extremely motivating so it's certainly motivating me to change the way that I train in a number of ways and I promise that I'll report back to our audience and to you as to what my results are but really as we both agree this is not about me this is not about you this is really about the people listening

and so for those of you listening I uh hope you can appreciate what an Incredible Gift it is to have somebody of Dr Annie galpin's experience and um drive and uh scholarly background who also works with athletes in Everyday People just to splay out all this knowledge for us systematically over six episodes Dr Andy Galpin thank you ever so much I appreciate that far too kind of uh words to me there if you've been following along through this entire Journey as you called it you know I like first principles thinking and I like lists so

I'm going to get you with one more list and I got five things on this final list get your pen and pad out please uh number one I want to really emphasize science itself is a verb which means it's ongoing and changing I I did my best over the course of these many many many hours to um provide my inter a of the science uh to provide my practical knowledge and things that I use uh but that's fallible uh science changes there are many many things in my career that I was very sure the that

the evidence was clear on and then it changed so as you move forward do not think of any of the recommendations I gave you whether they were about supplement dosages and timing uh rep ranges or breathing tactics anything in between just use them as guidelines so number one science is a verb number two I really want to thank the audience this has been an extremely long haul as some of you have somehow I'm sure which I'm not sure how but some of you have probably made it through this entire journey and listen to all six

episodes and you should probably get some sort of free hubman lab shirt or something or a plaque or I don't know how about a Galpin plaque ah gin plaque how about a internet high five um and even if you just dropped in for a few of the episodes uh you know I I appreciate you taking the time there's a lot of things you could be doing with your time and uh to make to spend those resources on my words is uh touching number three uh I want to actually thank you of course Andrew and the

whole team and the crew up here for three things number one um I think it's incredibly important that you have gone out of your way to give other people credit for their work you go out of your way on your large platforms of social media to tag people to give scientists credit for their work and most people do not do that uh and that's something you don't have to do and I think that is a culture you know I know why you do you come from science that's just what you do you give people credit

for their work but you go out of your way to do that and so I want to thank you for that the next one is many people who have outlets and platforms will try to fill those with people who are going to grow their platforms doesn't mean these people are wrong or bad but I think what's extremely special about what you've created here is again you have gone out of your way to bring on the direct source of information um I can't even imagine how many of your podcasts guests have never been on a podcast

before or been on a very short number of them and you've made an extremely large platform doing nothing but talking about super deep dork science directly from the scientists themselves U and to create a community like that it's um I'm so happy that science is is made it here and you've shown the world um people aren't stupid people want detail and people want science and you've given it to them um and the last one of course let's see if I can get through this is uh thank you for what you've done for me in my

career I I understand there could have been any number of people in this chair to put me on your your platform once was um incredibly gracious but to do it for 600 hours or whatever we did in this series is uh um I can't thank you enough for that opportunity so I hope I lived up to it and I had a tremendous time and and thank you for being such a gracious host well you more than exceeded uh expectations you are absolutely the person to be in this chair talking about these topics with me and

for the world and once again I just want to say thank you as a colleague as a public educator as an exercise scientist and as a friend if you're learning from and or enjoying this podcast please subscribe to our YouTube channel 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 hubman Lab podcast all in Fairly concise format and all completely zero cost you

can sign up for the neural network newsletter by going to hubman 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]