The Muscle Growth Doctor: "The Anti-Ageing Cure No One Is Talking About!", "Exercising At Night Is A Terrible Idea!", "Your Grip Strength Predicts Chronic Diseases!" - Andy Galpin

I've never seen a single paper that shows you can't lose weight, you can't get stronger. All of it can be done, but you were paying attention to things that just do not matter.

Doctor Andy Galpin One of the most highly respected exercise physiologists in the field today. He's the director of the Center for Sports Performance and he's a coach to many professional athletes. I'm going to talk about how I lose weight and how I improve my performance, move, sleep, but you want to live as well as possible for a long time. It comes down to a couple of things. Number one, you can't not pay attention to grips right.

And in fact, we can actually predict Alzheimer's and dementia risk via grip strength testing. And then leg strength and geotermax. Those things will outpredict how long you're going to live more than almost any metric. And I'm saying leg strength because one of the most significant issues that we face during aging, it's our falls. If you look at the risk of dying after a hip break in those over six years old, there is a 70% chance to death of an X-15 years.

What is video to max your maximum ability to bring in and utilize oxygen. There's actually a study with 750,000 people and found smoking and diabetes at a 40% increase risk of dying. And the auto max is 300%. Oh, fuck. What do I need to be doing? It comes down to a couple of things. If you can do the stuff consistently, it's going to be just fine. First of all, but why'd you care?

Most people will go through challenges at some point in their life. This is going to give you the ability to not be in those situations anymore. Sorry, I need to collect myself a little bit here. Just a lot of part of my story that the world doesn't know. Quick one. Quick favor to ask from you. There is one simple way that you can support our show. And that is by hitting that follow button on this app that you're listening to the show on right now.

This year in 2024, we're trying really, really hard to level up everything we're doing. And the only free thing I'll ever ask from you is to hit that follow button on this app. It helps the show more than I could probably articulate and it allows us enables us to keep doing what we're doing here. I appreciate it, Dealy. On to the show.

Dr Andy Galpin, someone's just clicked on this podcast right now. And if you were to speak freely about the things that you care about the most, what exactly is it that they would walk away from this conversation with in terms of value that would positively impact their life? I've done hundreds of podcasts and I have never had that question. And I certainly never had it coming out at the gate. So I love it.

The way I would capture it would be I want to enhance human performance. And when I say that, I want to make sure that you're not hearing sport performance. That means more to you. Fine. That's great. But I really break that down into three categories. People want to look a certain way. Whatever that means to you, I don't care. People want to feel a certain way. And people want to perform a certain way.

You set the ground rules. You want to look this way. When you say perform when you think form, that means X to you. When you say you want to feel, that means Y to you. Great. Let's establish all that. And then my goal is simply to help you achieve all of those goals. So you want to be bigger and stronger and have more energy throughout the day. Great. You want to think more clearly. You want to be a better leader, athlete, spouse, parent.

That's great. You want to be out of pain. You want to have a certain functionality and a certain all those things are on the table. So when I say perform, I mean cognitively physically in whatever area of department that matters for you. All those are on the table. We analyze all that. We break it down. And we say, okay, this is the targets we're going after. And then my mission is just to help anyone I'm working with, but really broadly the world.

Get better at that. I don't think I've ever seen any paper that has shown any genetic combination that shows you can't grow muscle. I've never seen a single paper that shows you can't lose weight. Never seen a single indication of any physiological marker that says you can't get stronger. Whatever you're interested in, nothing should stop you from making some progress in some area of your physical health. If you do that, you got a chance.

Why do you care? Why do you care about human performance and exercise and cognitive performance? Where did that come from? What was the like first domino that fell in your life? Sorry, I need to collect myself a little bit here. I've been on a lot of podcasts and there's this. I'm in the media lot and there's just a lot of part of my story that the world doesn't know.

The shortest answer to that question was I grew up with sports being everywhere. Right. And I played sports growing up. Everyone I knew is played sports growing up. I personally was an adequate athlete, which means I was good but not exceptional, but I wasn't terrible either. I was told as a teenager and by the people around me and my parents and my grandparents that you deserve nothing.

I was in a negative way, but in terms of like no one owes you anything in this world. If you want to get better sports, you better try it. You better work harder. In the most positive loving way possible. I was very fortunate my parents were incredibly positive and supportive and there's no negativity there. And so it was just as simple as a matter of fact of, hey, you say you want to win.

Then why aren't you working harder than everybody else? Just the way that my parents raised us and the way that my grandparents and my siblings. There was just a sense of like my. Sorry, I'm trying to give them more genuine answer, but there's only so. Most people will go through challenges at some point in their life and I'm no different.

I was just very fortunate to wear my parents more in a position that my dad was a construction worker, my grandparents were construction workers. We grew up in the country. My mom did whatever she could to, you know, keep our house and things like that. And they raised us in a very positive way. They always said you're going to go to college. I don't care what you do, what you spend your career on, whatever, but you're just not doing what we did.

Just because they wanted to step in easier and better life. So for me, human performance was that, hey, here's your chance. Like, here's your chance to get out and do something. This is going to give you the ability to not be in those situations anymore. And I get to do that by being around sports all the time, which is pretty great. So why I care. What is the emotion, Andy? So I've never been on the road real public before.

There's a lot of things that people will go through in life that are out of their control. To me, this represents stuff that will be within your control. And so I give you the chance to make changes that you can control your strength, your health, at least you got that.

You tell me where the parameters are here because I want to make sure that you're comfortable. But from that, I understand that in your childhood, there were things that you couldn't control. And in what I heard there was that this was something that you could give you that control. I don't want to overplay my own situation. I had a tremendous childhood, felt a tremendous life.

And especially never being around alcohol or violence and things like that. Like, I had a lot of great breaks. And still loving parents to support positivity. There were a number of years, you know, as a child that were really difficult. And just being like, man, my parents never did anything like, I never violence, never alcohol, never negative, never hate. Just okay, fine. That was really horrible, really bad break. What are we going to do? We're going to work harder.

Financially difficult. Yeah, for sure. And other ways. But the thing I appreciate is like many of the things, the biggest one is just like, it doesn't matter. We're moving forward. Like, not in terms of like ignoring it, letting it go, but like, okay, great. Bad deal here. Got real bad luck. But we're pressing on. We're going to overcome this stuff.

When we start talking about exercise and health and performance and all these things, what's been your academic and life experience that has built the foundation of everything that you know? Can you give me a little bit of a walkthrough? Yeah, so I have an undergraduate degree and what's called exercise science, kinesiology, it's the same thing. I got a master's in human movement sciences. And then my PhDs and what's called human bio energetics.

And what happened professionally once you graduated from there? So as soon as I finished my PhD, I started my lab at Cal State Fullerton. So I work and I'm now one of the directors of what's called the center for sport performance there. So within that, we've got multiple laboratories, biomechanics, strength conditioning, motor control, motor learning, et cetera. And they all study the mission of that center actually is to study and disseminate research that enhances human performance.

What is the range of people that you work with that come to you and say, Dr. Andy Galpin, I need help with this. Oh, oh my gosh. So we've traditionally spent most of my career working with our pro athletes. I've been fortunate to work with Olympic gold and silver medalist world champions, the highest contract and major league baseball and golf, all pros at every position in NFL, et cetera, et cetera.

But by foreign terms of numbers wise, we've worked with more executive clients and then professional athletes. So our coaching program, rapid health and performance is like, what if we took what we've been doing for a decade in only the easily athletes and put a system together for non athletes.

And that's exactly what we've done with that company and it's gone exceptionally well. People that tend to come in for that kind of fall into a couple of buckets. A lot of times it's kind of like your your adult athletes, if you will. So I want to run a marathon. I want to do something like that.

The overwhelming majority of people are just going, Hey, I want to just feel better. I want to look better and I want to perform better and I want to minimize my likelihood of missing what I mean by that is you can try a diet, you can try a thing and like see what happens for six weeks and that's very effective.

But some people have more money than they have time and some people have been through the ringer. I've been trying for a year, two years, five years, I haven't slept in a decade. What's going to take I don't want to miss anything. And so we do extremely comprehensive testing.

It takes a very long time to finish all of our testing. We can get a volumetric measurement of each muscle on your body. So I can look at the size of each individual one. We can look at your view to max. We can look at cognitive performance. We're running very in depth sleep assessments.

We're looking at environmental factors in your house. Like we're running everything possible that we go through with our high level athletes. And by doing that, we're able to see and find what we call performance anchors. So these are things that are putting the most constraint on your physiology. And so the analogy I'll say is imagine you want to drive a car faster. People's initial inclination is to hit the gas pedal.

That's great. My inclination is to look at your left foot, which is I want to make sure your foot is on a break somewhere. So before I went to the gas pedal, let's make sure our left foot's off the break. In this case, that is a constraint. What are you doing to hold back your own biology? And so we can able to find those things. And then because that we can give them extremely specific solutions. And our program tends to be so effective because we can go through all this analysis.

That allows us to then. Give them very simple and hyper specific plans. When you talk about that left foot on the break analogy, which I thought was a really nice sort of crystallizing analogy. What are the most common things that we have our left foot on the break with in terms of are there fundamental things that you see most often that are kind of getting in the way of us reaching our optimal performance?

Yeah, you want to think about these in a couple of buckets. We call these stressors. Yeah. So the way that your body works at all times. In fact, I think this is one of the traits that separates human physiology from any other animal. We have a better ability to adapt and respond to our environment. That's the single thing your body is trying to do at all times. Right.

Pushing and pulling. It's always reading and sensing trying to get to a certain place. Stresser comes in and it adjusts. Okay. Great. That's a good thing. We categorize those stressors into two major areas. What we call visible stressors and then hidden stressors. Visible stressors are things you're doing that you are visible and aware of. So you went and worked out. You felt that great. That's a stressor.

You drank alcohol. You felt that you didn't sleep tonight. You feel these things right. You can see them. You smoke cigarettes like you have all these things. Yeah, you're diet and nutrition. So all those are analyzed from a perspective of there. One of the most common ones. Well, the obvious ones you've probably covered countless times. Right. Don't drink alcohol and excess and don't drink.

Try to have quality water and sunlight and honestly like the 15 year old health that could probably tell you like what are the five pillars of health and like that would you would line those things up pretty well. Now where things get more interesting and our stuff is hidden stressors. So these are things that are putting equal or greater stress on your system. But you can't see or feel them.

So this could be things like a vitamin or mineral insufficiency. You know when wakes up and goes, oh man, like my vitamin D is low today. You don't see that. You don't feel that right where you know like man, I ate all you could eat pizza last night. Like I know why I feel this way because that thing I did last night.

If there is a pathogen, if there isn't something suppressing your immune system, if an endocrine system is not happy with something going on oxidative stress, something like that could be happening. A lot of times he's can be falling into sleep as well. We've seen a number of times where people have a self perceived.

I sleep okay, I sleep pretty decent and then we can actually run real true and depth analysis. We can see she actually found multiple times where we've very likely saved somebody's life. Because their self perceived sleep was pretty good. And here everybody actually see like you're steps away from a heart attack. And in fact, we put them basically in hospital within a few weeks and we're told many times like you basically save this guy's life. That's happened countless times.

So there are things that are going on that are beyond your perception that we can see whether it's through some of our molecular biomarkers, whether it's again our brain analysis like a lot of the stuff that we can see. Other ones that are common are things like muscle strength, muscle performance, people don't realize how telling those can be over your overall physiological health.

But you don't necessarily see them really easy example is most people are somewhat aware that grip strength. Is it incredibly important predictor of in fact there's a really cool paper. It's titled something like grip strength is an indispensable marker of aging. Something like that right was basically saying like you can't not pay attention to grip strength. And we've actually published a paper last year and Tommy Wood from the University of Washington neuroscientist led this project.

And we've got a couple of them going, but one of the things we found there is is we can actually predict. All simers and dementia risk the grip strength testing. And strong will be actually have a project right now that we validated in the UK biobank, which is 500,000 people or so we validated it in the American equivalent, which is called and Haynes.

We can actually predict muscle quality from four blood markers and we can also predict a risk of dementia as well from those four basic biomarkers and those are also directly tied to grip strength. And so looking at things like that is saying, okay, you have some potential signs of of either short term or long term physiological stress that's happening and you don't necessarily feel it yet because you're 35 or 45 and you don't feel super weak.

Or we're seeing these early signs one other example of that and I'll caution to say that there's only been one paper on this. So in science, that's a way of saying, we'll see like, okay, but just as one example, this paper came out last year and it showed that the asymmetry in your grip strength. So the difference in strength between your right and left hand is actually an early predictor of neurological decline.

And the reason is think about this in order for your muscles to contract, they have to be sent a signal from your central nervous system, your brain and brain stem. And if you're having significant asymmetries from one side to the other and by this they met over 10%. So if you have a grip strength of 40 kilos on the right hand, 10% of that would be four kilos. So if your left hand is 30 kilos, that's way more than 10% difference.

That may be an early sign of early derivation of that left side and so neurologically potentially losing ground there. So just things like that are things we're able to detect. This is hey, we're seeing things that are putting stress on your system, whether you realize that or not. So they can be these molecular biomarkers, but they can also be other things that people just either don't have a technology or they don't know how to or they're not aware.

That can give you tremendous insights into the overall stresses scientifically we call this allostatic load or allostasis, but that's the marker we're after ultimately. And in the case of grip strength, I find that so fascinating because I was reading about that in your work a while ago. That it could also be the case that I've just trained one side. Totally.

So if you've trained one side, then yeah, like then if you've only gone after one side, you've done either a sport or you have a lifestyle or an occupation that is really one side dependent, it could be as simple as that. But for the typical person, we tend to be fairly even an asymmetrical surgery symmetrical with our grip strength. Yeah, remember these are population averages. Sure. This is one study.

The individual person always means less to the individual person than it does to the population. When we were talking about some of these invisible stresses, my partner came back to the house two days ago and said, they have just found out from the doctor because she did a bunch of tests and she hadn't been feeling so great.

But one of the things we found out was that she was very deficient in vitamin D. And it made me wonder how many people are walking around and you must have seen this in some of the lab work you've done with a deficiency in things like vitamin D. And what is what is then the symptom of that deficiency? So vitamin D is one of the more common deficiencies you will see. You will not see or feel that.

Oh, this is another example of potentially hidden stress or right what could you be experiencing vitamin D is associated with low bone mineral density, low muscle size, almost a strength, cognitive function, immune function, mental health. So you could be experiencing any number of things and vitamin D being low could be contributing to that. It's very likely to be the sole explainer of any individual thing, but it could be playing a large impact.

Vitamin D is also one of the higher safety profiles. And so typically what I tell people is I don't like when people go after supplements, specifically vitamins and minerals. You can get away with vitamins a little bit more minerals, be really careful of. But vitamin D, honestly, you can go pretty wild with it and the chances of you being deficient or even just sub clinically low is what we call that. Chances are pretty high.

And the chances of you running into issues with the vitamin D are also very low. So it's one of those ones that mass like pretty good chance to be effective, pretty low risk. I'm okay with people really pushing vitamin D obviously supplements. The better answer is the sunlight. But if you want to take a supplement and you don't have the, don't have money for or availability to get blood testing done, then you're not sure.

Going after a little bit of vitamin D is there are worse things you could do. So I'm okay with that one. Are there other deficiencies that you're more concerned about in terms of vitamins? Yeah, well, you should be concerned about vitamin D being low because it is so effective in so many areas. It's generally how vitamins and minerals work. It's also very, very, very common.

And maybe I sort of inadvertently blew past that so much because there are things that we are going after much more that people are unaware of. When you see vitamin D on a blood panel, and if it is low, you can take vitamin D. That said, you do want to be really careful if you get blood work done of trying to just move those numbers up and down. And I'm going to say this for a couple of reasons. Vitamin D is one of those ones that's okay. If it's low, take vitamin D directly move it up.

No problems there. That said, when you go to interpret blood work, you have to realize most of those values when you're being told that numbers high or that numbers low. I won't say they're irrelevant, but they're misleading at the least. That's to say, you've got some blood work done, right? And it gives you a whole bunch of things back. Let's see you did a basic thing like what we'll call the CBC and CNP.

So a complete blood count and then a cardiometabolic panel. Those are the most common things you'll get. And you'll see all kinds of stuff in there. White blood cell counts and vitamins and hormones and things like that. Okay, great. And then, as you look over at the paper on the right side, it's going to tell you a reference range. That reference range is going to tell you whether you're high or low. And so on that test you did, right?

It probably said, you know, your vitamin D level is 20 and it should be between 30 and 100 or something like that. Great. Well, is that 30 to 100 part where things get squirrely? Because did they take into account ethnicity? Okay, those numbers differ based on your ethnic background. What is normal, as you said earlier, is also not the same as what is common. And it's definitely not the same as optimal. Now, remember, and I'll try not to say this too many times, I don't deal with disease.

I deal with like, I'm not in disease state, but I want to get better and optimize. And why I'm drawing that distinction is because on a blood test, you're looking for, do you clinically flag for an actual metabolic disease or otherwise? Okay, most of those things are set against that. And so their reference ranges are built off of databases like the UK Biobank, like, and Haynes here, who are generally not healthy people.

And the people that are in those data, in fact, we actually ran this and published this last year, that in the and Haynes database in America, at least, the people that had the muscle mass had no association between their muscle mass and their exercise history, which means these people did not gain muscle by exercising. Now, some people exercise in these database, we're talking very, very small numbers.

In addition, when they build reference ranges, so they're building an offer populations that are not the healthiest and as you're aware, our world is not getting healthier. So those numbers are moving. Okay. Now, when they build a reference range, they use typically most companies, by the way, every company that you get a blood draw front, has a different range.

So they're not all the same. Okay. So the, it's not like, they're not nefarious. It's just like, they've different databases to pick from. Many companies will give you reference range based on their own database. Okay. So all you're seeing is like, what's normal for the people that bought their lap? Not population. Okay. And they use a 95% curve, which is to say 95% of people land within this bell curve. And so if you were within that,

you're normal. 2.5% of the top, 2.5%. Low. So what that could mean is you could be in like the 94th percentile and be told you're in the reference range. Ease example is something like blood glucose. Okay. Now, a normal blood glucose is going to be in the mid 50th. There might be 80s rather 80, 85, something like that. Okay. Technically, you're not going to flag on most people's databases until you get past like 110, 120, 130 plus your action diabetes.

So you can come and flag for like 108. And technically, medically, you're not diabetic yet. You're not prediabetic yet. But there's no world on this earth where somebody has a fasting blood glucose of 108 and they're healthy. Or they are optimally healthy, we'll say. That is, in fact, we have strong evidence. You get past 95. You're starting to increase your risk of oxidative stress, retinopathy, tons of issues happen with a consistent load fasting blood glucose over 95.

And so a great example that would be you would be within the reference range there. You'd be told you're normal. And then I would look at it and be like, that's absolutely suboptimal. Is it clinically officially diabetic? No, but I'm telling you right now to have to perform at your absolute best. That's not the range you want to be in. I'm going to make it worse for you. So the reference ranges are one particular concern. The second one is, and the reason I brought this up with vitamin D.

Vitamin D is okay. It's low. You push it up. No problem. Most your markers. You don't want to do that with. Because physiology is responding to physiology, which means something moves something up, but then it moves something else down. In the way, it's the push pull thing. So if you don't know what you're pushing up, you might be pulling something else down. You're pulling something else down. It might be pushing something else up. You don't know what you're doing there.

So you don't want to treat those markers as like A and B and C or low. I should make them all go up. You need to understand why they're doing that. Low test Ostrone is an easy example. Low test Ostrone is oftentimes a symptom of something going on. You need to go back once you forgot why your testosterone load to begin with. Right. Because if you can do that, then you get out of the way testosterone will go up.

We've done this a countless times with people. Right. We've we've doubled testosterone more times than I could even count without using hormones at all. Again, I'm not against hormone therapy at all, but you don't always necessarily need it. If you can understand, well, why is your testosterone suppressed as it is if it truly is?

Sometimes it's not. There are normal ranges for different people. But if we can see something going on where you've got a immunosuppressed or depression or something else happening, that's again subclinical. You're not sick all the time. You're not like in a hospital bed. It's like, okay, we can see A, B and C happening. Those are known to be associated with, you know, compromised testosterone clear those things up and then back out of the way.

I watched testosterone just take off. Easy example. This one is my my colleague Dan Garner did this one famously. He had an athlete or a client who actually had a number of markers that are in a blood test of basal field specifically associated with allergic reaction.

It's not an allergy test, okay. But he noticed that this particular individual is doing everything right. But that number was off the chart found that actually was happening as there was a tree in this gentleman's neighborhood that it was causing him a little bit of a response. So we had to make sure he stayed away from that tree. His basal field number went back to normal and his testosterone rocketed. Really? Absolutely. It gets more complicated. Okay. So take something like Albumin.

Albumin is a protein. It's the sexually the protein and egg whites, which is great. It does a lot of things. It's a carrier protein though. So carries bread, but sells a carries cortisol throughout your body. It's also what's called an acute phase reactant. I mean, it will respond to acute changes in your body. Albumin is a really good way to measure hydration. Most people have no idea about that, right?

It's because when you get dehydrated a little bit, Albumin is measured based on concentration. So how much is there relative, how much blood? So if you take the tone on a blood down, then the concentration of Albumin looks like it goes up, right? You see him saying. So in when you dehydrate, Albumin levels will go up. However, when you're inflamed, it goes the opposite direction.

And so if you look on a blood test, if you're a little bit dehydrated and a little bit inflamed, what's Albumin going to look like? Level. Dead in the middle. This is exactly what happens when people do things like I feel suboptimal, I terrible or just not my best, but my labs look okay.

Now things off the markers that much, I'm not clinically deficient or excessive something. So everything can be within the reference ranges, but given the reference range problem, given the association problem and giving other things we realize happen as that multifaceted approach, we can absolutely see what's explaining why you're feeling what you're feeling dead in your blood panels without anything ever being off your reference range.

In that particular case, if your Albumin was up or down and then you went in and did something specifically to change your Albumin, you've actually not messed with the entire system when it had nothing to do with Albumin, it was just the fact that you needed to drink some more water and lower overall inflammation.

So I say that to caution folks of saying like be really careful about, especially if you're going to go to minerals and then absolutely with medications, please let a qualified physician or somebody that understands blood work at this level, really make sure that they're helping you. One more time vitamin D is a good example of something that's okay. If you push that one up, no problem there. For the most part, there are times that it is, but the rest of them folks like be a bit careful there.

So what if I stay away from the temptation of the industry that says like drugs and minerals and supplements or the answer to everything and I come back down to these sort of fundamentals of health and performance. Sleep is one of the fundamentals, right? It's probably arguably the core. Yeah. So thinking about sleep then so many of us are suffering with sleep. My sleep for whatever reason is really, really good in terms of duration. I don't know about quality. You're making a face of me.

I don't know about quality, but the duration's great. And I speak to so many people, I think it's increasing numbers that are struggling with sleep for whatever reason. If someone comes to your labs and you realize that there's an issue with sleep, how do you realize there's an issue? And what are the first steps you take to help correct that so that they can get that foundation in place? So I want to know exactly how you're sleeping. So I know exactly why you're sleeping that way.

So let me know exactly what to do about it. And that's why frankly our success rates are so high. Okay, what do we want to do? I want to run the most in-depth analysis of your sleep absolutely possible. So I have a company called Absolute Rest. And so what we do is we actually build full functional sleep labs in people's houses. And this is all wireless. So we can run full, full clinical grade FDA approved sleep studies in your house.

You don't have to go to a hospital. You don't have to go anywhere else. Right. We're going to run that. We're going to run this all wirelessly. And we're going to run. We're looking at not only depth of sleep. The goal standard of science is called polysumnography. Right. So it's like the wires attached to your brain all that stuff. Actually, I don't think polysumography is the best way. There's a better way to do it called cardiopulmonary coupling.

We can actually look at your autonomic nervous system and how that's actually responding. So I prefer that method. We'll do both. We actually run full PSGN, cardiopulmonary coupling as well. But we're looking at that. So we can look at are you do you have breakfast? Is it like are you your jaw clenching at night? We're looking at you are your leg moving. We're doing that also while we're looking at position.

So we're having this on your right side on your left side on your back. Where are you at? We can actually do a whole bunch of other fancy stuff with ocular metrics with eye tracking, with facial scanning and like all kinds of other stuff. But we want to most specifically look at how you're sleeping. We're looking at then why. And so in terms of why you're sleeping, that's in a bunch different buckets. One of the buckets is environmental.

And so we actually run full time environmental scanning of your sleep environment. We actually have a little device. I take it with me like everywhere I go. So we have our athletes always checking the environment when our hotels and places like that. We can always run environmental scans and make sure that it's an optimal thing. So we're looking for temperature, community, but carbon dioxide, dander, pollen, allergens, molds, things like that.

We can all measure in real time instantaneously on that thing. So we want to make sure nothing in the environment is causing the sleep. If we can check off environment, then we're looking at behaviors. You've probably heard a lot about sleep hygiene and you know, don't watch exciting TV thrillers before night. Don't get on your laptop and work and answer emails and then fall asleep. Try to fall asleep five minutes later.

That's all behavioral stuff, right? And I'm happy to talk about as many of those as possible. But that's the like stuff people have kind of shared the world a lot, right? But then those are very true and very real outside of behavioral. Then we're looking at physiological. So what are your actual melatonin concentrations? How much serotonin are you making? Dope of me. What is it in your blood biochemistry precursors? What is actually happening?

So we're taking a salivary markers and blood markers to see what is going on in your physiology. That is potentially causing or as a result, iron concentrations, B vitamins, like a ton of stuff that are needed for proper sleep physiology. We're measuring all of that. We also are measuring psychology. So we have a very in-depth way to evaluate psychology of sleep. So previous trauma and PTSD and associations, there's eight.

Funny enough, there is a ton of actual sleep disorders caused by people's psychosis. Psychological state of their sleep. Meaning we have had a lot of success fixing sleep problems because people just have such a negative association with their sleep because they've slept so poorly for so many years that they actually start getting anxiety when it starts getting late at night because they just know they're not going to sleep well.

And so now actually the problem is gone, but they have such a problem. They get into this is a common one of like I get so tired, I get so tired, I can't, I fall asleep when I couch and then I get in bed, I lay there for hours. Or the classic one we get here is I fall asleep immediately, but then two to three hours in the night I wake up and then I'm shot awake. Okay, great.

Like those are all like pretty clear solutions or causes a lot of the time, so they have very clear solutions that are not very often supplements. What you do in those cases, because a lot of people that have message me speak to exactly what you've described there. Yeah, so we would go back and actually figure out again is this behavioral, so are you doing the offense, the idiot proof stuff? Like are you drinking? Are you like doing all those things?

So a lot of times it is simple said a lot of the times you don't need to spend a dollar on any assessment. It is really truly do the stuff people have told you a hundred times to stop doing. I mean on the psychological point. Yeah, if it's just an anxiety reaction. Well, I started there for a reason because that can be causing it. So it is an actual sleep problem you're happening, you're having because of your behaviors. Okay, now let's say it's not all those things.

Remember early when I said your body's superpower is adapting and responding, right? That's exactly what's happening. If you get into bed and you learn a pattern of continuing to lay there and stay awake or wake up in a certain hours, that pattern will be recognized and that pattern will be repeated. You have to break that pattern. So how do you do it? This is not very common, but I'll give you like an extreme example. Okay, there's a thing called sleep restriction training.

Okay, it's very effective, but it is brutal. We don't go to it often one more time, but we have gone to it. I have used it. It can be successful. This is the same for people who wake up after a few hours or struggle to fall asleep. So what you do is let's say you want to get up and we'll make the math easy here. Five o'clock in the morning. Okay, great. And you typically get in bed at 10 and you lay there and you're kind of up all night and you have all these sea fishes.

And then you wake up at five, you're exhausted. So you have to have caffeine all day and then you're up from your caffeine. So then you have to have melatonin, right? I can't tell you how many times we've looked at people's next morning melatonin concentrations and seen them 20, 30 or 40 times higher than the upper limit on the reference range of value. So then what happens when you walk around with extreme amounts of melatonin the next day? Like you're sedated. Great.

So how do you break this cycle? Well, one of the ones that you stop those habits, like not that much caffeine that late and then you stop the melatonin. Okay, I don't like melatonin at all very much for almost anything. But we're going to set the clock and you're going to wake up at five o'clock in the morning. I don't care what happens. You're waking up at five in the morning, period. And we're not even going to get into bed until 1159.

So you're going to have five hours of sleep at most and you don't happen to night one, you lay there and you don't fall asleep. Because you're in that pattern, right? And you're also staring at the clock knowing I have to get up at five. And you're laying there worrying and thinking about how you're not sleeping in a disbrudal. And you're going to have a couple of hours of sleep and you're going to wake up at five. And you're going to get up at five every single day period.

No sleeping in a weekend. Okay. You're also going to not get into bed no matter how tired you are, you're not getting into bed until 1159. And you do that for a week. What will happen very quickly is your body will start to realize a new pattern of yo. The second she lets us lay down, you better fall asleep. And you better not mess around during those five hours because we're not getting any naps. We're not getting any else, right?

You will start to fall asleep quickly and you will jump right into deep sleep. And you'll go through a pretty compressed, but a proper sleep architecture. Every week then you add back 10 to 15 minutes. So next week you go to bed at 1145. And you don't happen next week when you get into bed at 1145. You lay around falling, trying to fall asleep. No chance, right? Because now you've got a week with pretty gnarly sleep restriction. You fall asleep immediately. 10 or 15 minutes a week after that.

And so what you end up doing is you backfill until you get back up to your eight or eight and a half hours. But the pattern you're learning the entire time is when I go to sleep, I fall asleep. And I do not wake up until that next time. So you stop the overnight waking, you stop the struggling to fall asleep. It takes a couple of months clearly and it is brutal, but it is very, very effective. How effective from your recess? We've never had a problem with somebody in not working. Really?

Now again, we don't use it very often. You don't need to. Yeah, you can do a subtler version of those things. So I want to acknowledge that as an extreme sort of thing. I don't recommend doing it, especially if you have legitimate health concerns. Like you want to have an MD walk through that, something like that on you. You can do it on a more condensed scale though.

If you generally, if you're laying there struggling to fall asleep, almost every sleep scientist is going to tell you get out of it. Because you don't want to set that pattern of like every night I toss and turn for an hour and a half. That's a problem, right? And so you want to break out of that pattern one way or the other to not to set up that routine. And the same thing would be this is why it's important to not do things first thing in the morning that are deleterious to sleep.

So rolling over waking up and immediately turning the TV on or immediately looking at social media. Because your body will anticipate that response. It will then start a cascade prior to that that kicks you up and starts waking you up earlier and earlier every morning. Because it knows that stimulation is coming at 6 a.m.

And so instead of you waking up at 6 a.m. with your alarm and then checking your phone, your body starts to wake you up at 545 535 515 because it just knows that thing is coming at 6. And so making sure that your morning is not jump started in that direction that it really does wake up. It really does wake up appropriately. It is really important to those that like wake up super early and that is can't get back to sleep.

There's obviously a well known probably a method or no. That says we should sleep for eight hours a night. Well, anytime you throw out numbers like that again, you're talking on average for most people most of the time. We certainly have some people that are high performing at seven, maybe seven and a half. We certainly have plenty that need 915. Need more. There's actually excellent research on it's called sleep extension research.

When you look at, so this is, I love this because this is a great example of going from like, are you talking about risk of long term health? Are you talking about maximizing performance? Okay. Now the research is clear going from like seven and a half hours to nine hours is probably not needed to minimize your risk of brain health over there. Like seven out probably fine. However, if you're trying to maximize your performance, it's a different answer.

The sleep extension research will show you that those classic one, Sherry Ma's work at a Stanford many years ago. Now, but she took the Stanford basketball team and she had them sleep an additional two hours a night in season. They asked them to sleep for 10 hours a night. The end result was I think like 1.8 hours of additional sleep per night for five to eight weeks in season. Okay. Now, there's no control group. There's lots of potential criticisms.

I'll acknowledge all that, but it doesn't matter because what we're getting at here, you'll see the bigger point. And so she did this in high level athletes in season. Right. These also were not chronically sleep deprived. So they didn't go through like three hours of sleep. And like they were sleeping seven hours or whatever and said go from seven to eight hours go from eight to 10 on average.

Those numbers differed for every person, but that's what she did. And what she saw was a 9% improvement in free throw percentage. It's enormous right. Wow. About a 9% improvement in 3 point shooting percentage improvements in reaction time reduced sleepiness improved mood at a handful of other markers improved in season in division one basketball players. Now, probably what have gotten better in season anyways, right? Like that tends to happen again, no control group.

So I don't oversell it, but I think it's pretty powerful saying, hey, going from OK sleep to maximizing your sleep. Pretty big improvements in all the tests and some of the tests like the reaction time test. They did daily for the whole season. So it wasn't just like well, the one time they did a test they happen to get better that day.

Same thing. That free throw and 3 point shooting percentage stuff was done like in a weekly practice. And so they measured it weekly over the season and pretty marked improvements. That's been repeated in tennis swimming cycling. It's been done in as little as 45 minutes of extra sleep per night for three days. And we're seeing improvements of reductions in cortisol by 20% has been shown in rugby players.

Reductions and body fat improvements in VO to max all this stuff has been shown when you go from this like even seven to seven half hour range to eight, eight plus. There's been there's actually evidence of 30 additional minutes per night reduces likely to getting a cold by four times.

So good to great. It's not the same thing. Now I run many companies in a lab. I have two small children like I know some of you out there going like, oh my god, if I could only sleep for 10 hours like trust me, my wife will murder me to see in that. But my point is not that my point is to say, look, what if what if that work at Stanford was exaggerated? Okay, so instead of improving 3 point percentage by 9% it was actually 5% or 4. I don't know, but who cares, right? Pretty powerful.

And look at all the other studies like they're all generally in science. When you see multiple studies from different labs, different scientists, different groups, different populations and they're all generally pointing towards the same thing. The numbers aren't exact and the mechanisms. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that is when you start to get real confidence and with sleep extension, that's where I believe the collective research is.

Like there's a lot of studies from a lot of different scientists and a lot of different athletes measuring different things and you see this 3 to 10% improvement in most measures when you go from anywhere between 45 to additional 2 hours per night for as little as 3 days to up to 5 to 7 weeks.

So from a normal person perspective, if you can sleep even 30 more minutes, it's probably going to matter. If you can, if you need it, if your person needs an app and does well with napping, that can be your additional 30 minutes or 45 minutes or 90 minutes or whatever.

So different people will get this differently. I personally hate napping like as a personal human, but we'll use it a lot and a lot of actually in our like our executives and CEOs, we do a ton of very concentrated, intentional napping. That's super, super effective. So whatever it is for you, I personally do better if I just go to bed earlier. I can't sleep in that will never happen.

But if I can definitely go to sleep earlier, I can't nap those things. So whatever works for you in your situation and your physiology, but it's generally a good idea. I can't make the argument that you live longer by going from 8 hours to sleep to 8 30. Not at all, but I can make a strong argument that it will make you perform better.

What about sleep debt? Because there's a lot of misconceptions that if I sleep for four hours today, I just make it up tomorrow by sleeping another four hours. And I think I've lived under that illusion for a certain several years of my life. Yeah, it's an excuse I tell myself, I'll just make it up on the weekend. Here's the misconceptions about sleep debt. One of the guys that works for us at Absorbed, Stephen Lockley from Harvard, he will always laugh about this.

You know, say, yeah, man, you can't time travel. It's like you can't go backwards and make the debt up. So if you only suffer four hours, you'll never get those additional four hours back. But that's not what we're saying was sleep debt. Okay, you can't do that. But you can absolutely go from consistent, diminished sleep to getting back out of that sleep debt.

So when you think about sleep debt that way, you absolutely can do it. You phrased it. Well, oh, a second ago, which is to say it is a huge mistake to think I'll have inconsistent sleep short sleep and then just sleep more. And over the course of seven days, as long as the total amount of hours add up the same, I'm fine. And that is is a terrible strategy.

I don't think a single sleep scientist in the world would disagree with me there. Trust me, we interact with as many of these people as you can. So one of the things you mentioned earlier, you said your total sleep duration is good. Okay, great. That's only one component of sleep. You also mentioned supe quality. That's another really important component. I would argue the overwhelming majority of people have never had an accurate assessment of sleep quality.

But that's another thing, right? Well, people also don't realize is sleep consistency. And in fact, a lot of data will suggest that sleep consistency is more important than total sleep time. Meaning you need to be going to bed and waking up at rough at the same time, plus or minus 30 minutes is the goal. I'm a human to I will stay up, you know, later, you know, occasionally do things like that.

So we'll give our people typically 45 minutes, a grace period, but as like your default state, you should be trying to go to bed and waking up plus or minus 20 to 30 minutes. Most of your nights. If you can do that, you will see many of the benefits of longer duration by simply getting more consistent. The other major component of sleep here is sleep timing. So the performing at the same time of day, the same type of tasks is as important as sleep duration and sleep quality.

Meaning we take advantage of this without the toilet time. You can predict winning percentage of NFL games NBA games NHL games and major league baseball games, the big four in America. Over a 30 year span can be predicted by simply looking at who performed not in their time zone, but who performed in the time that was their normal circadian time.

What I mean by that is let's say you had a West Coast team, whether they traveled to the East Coast or not doesn't matter, but if they played on the East Coast. At the same time of day that they normally play on the West Coast, it doesn't matter that they got on a plane for three hours. They perform at the same time of day that they normally did. They have a competitive advantage somewhere between two to four percent depending on the study, maybe a little higher.

Over the team that is playing at home in their same building if they're playing at a different time than they normally play. So I'll give you like one example we worked with the University of Washington football team this year on their sleep. And so if they play a normal West Coast game at one o'clock in normal West Coast football time, one PM, and then we had to go the East Coast, which we didn't have to too often, but next year we're going to start having to go there.

And we got there and we played a game in Ohio, but we played it at four o'clock or how time, which is still one o'clock our time. And we don't have any concerns with jet lag or travel, but in fact, in that case, the Ohio team typically plays at a different time is having to compete way earlier or way later. Then they're actually at a circadian disadvantage because we're playing at the same local circadian time. So it's not the time change that gets people.

We do the same thing, by the way, with our executive professional clients, when especially in the neck negotiations. If you're doing like a team meeting, you have to think, well, that's great. But if you're going to like actually have to battle somebody like negotiation or make really hard decision, I want you making that decision on your local schedule. And I want your opponent off schedule. Don't tell anybody to set that. But you have an advantage.

So you get these coast person to have to have a four PM or five PM West Coast meeting. That's eight or nine o'clock their time. They're they're cognitive performance is going to be lower than yours or the inverse. So we make sure we give our people advantages. I was thinking about the gym because the time that I go to the gym fluctuates wildly. Sometimes they go in the morning. I'm going to be honest because it's what I have to do. Sometimes I go at midnight. Terrible idea.

I know you're going to say that. Yeah. We actually have we encounter this a number of times where we see sleep issues. We see energy issues. We see struggling to lose body fat issues. Things like that. They come in and they think they want this like secret recipe of supplements and you know, blood markers and they want all this stuff. And I'm like, we do it. I'm like, yo, you got to stop training at night.

And we start looking at things like the respiratory rate, their HRV, other markers of sleep quality. And it can be as simple as the fact that you are doing too much high intensity stuff in the evening. That has to carry over that carry over can be a couple of hours. Some people could be six hours for other people. And so if you are doing a training session at 10 PM.

You better expect not to sleep very well. That's going to happen. Now some people are a little bit more resilient to that. And others, it's really, really, really damaging. And so we have to pull people off of exercise a lot at that time or minimum go, hey, yo, for you. If you're going to train at night, it needs to be restorative training.

Short duration, get a little sweat going, don't get your heart rate up too high. Don't do anything too neurologically fatiguing and then get out of there. We got to do our harder work in the morning. I'm just make this not always the case. But it's more often than not that we have to peel people back. That said, again, I work with professional athletes. We played majorly baseball games at seven o'clock. We're not done till 10 or 11.

Whether it's like, hey, they literally can't control it. That's their job or, you know, schedule wise, whatever you can work around it. The world is not perfect. But in an ideal scenario, you really want to pay attention to that because that can consider a fact. What are the topics on sleep that most people just aren't talking about because you're right. There's a the edit proof stuff. We all know about.

But from your research, you must have discovered another set of issues that just don't get the same level of spotlight and attention. Yeah. I mean, I could go on about this stuff for a long time. We've mentioned the environmental piece of it. We actually have a literature review in review right now that should be published fairly soon entirely on environmental factors.

I never thought about it before when you start talking about sort of pathogens in the environment. I thought Jesus Christ is that I don't know that was an issue. Oh, oh, yeah, yeah, CO2. I didn't think that was an issue when I was asleep. Oh, absolutely. So think about it this way. When you take a breath in, you breathe in oxygen. When you take an exhale, you breathe out. You're breathing out CO2. So the difference is O2 and CO2 is the carbon molecule.

Now, your tissue is breaking down carbon for all of the tables. In fact, the way that you produce all of your energy doesn't matter if you're using carbohydrates or fat. Remember, fat is just a big long chain of carbon. That's what fat molecules are. Carbohydrates are a carbon that has a water on it. It is a carbon that has been hydrated.

So the chemical equation for like glucose blood sugar is C6 H12 O6, which means six carbons and six H2O. That's all carbohydrates are right. The big change of carbon. So whether you're using carbohydrates or fat, it doesn't matter. The end product of metabolism is going to be three things. Water ATP, which is the central energy currency and carbon dioxide. Great. So it doesn't matter what you're using for fuel.

It doesn't matter what you're using the fuel for exercise digestion, building your immune system, thinking. It doesn't matter. Remember, your brain is a massive suck of energy, right? It uses the majority of your ATP throughout the days is to power your brain. So great. It doesn't matter what it's coming from or what it's being used. More metabolism for any reason, for many source, results in more carbon dioxide build up.

You take the carbon dioxide out of your organs and tissue and you put it into your blood. Your body is paying attention to carbon dioxide deeply. That's one of the primary ways in which you regulate your pH. Your body will regulate pH almost over almost anything else that it has. Blood sugar, pH, blood pressure, things like that, or the tight things that have done a lot of mess with pH is arguably the number one thing.

And the reason is if you get to alkaline or to acidic enzymes don't work. So everything shuts down. So you want to keep your pH will stay very, very, very tight. You could do basically whatever you want. You could eat and drink. You could do anything you want. And it's going to keep pH like really, really tight, right? It's hard, hard, hard to change. So it's watching that CO2. You pick a breath in of O2. You're pretty much using that to run and regulate cellular metabolism.

You're managing O2 by altering respiration. And so if you were to hold your breath right now, in you were to 10 seconds, 15 seconds, 20 seconds would go on right now. You could actually do this at home. I would encourage you to hit pause and do this if you can, not while driving. If you don't breathe, what's going to happen is you're going to not breathe in oxygen. Okay, fine. But really you're going to start building up CO2.

Because the way that you do is you build it up in the blood, you get it the pulmonary system, and then you exhale and you get rid of it. So you're breathing your respiration rate is entirely determined by how much O2 or O2 you want your system. That's what regulates respiration such to say that air hunger you're feeling when you holding your breath. It's not that you're running out of oxygen. You have anaerobic metabolism. You can produce boat loads of energy without oxygen.

You have enough oxygen in your system currently to go extensive amounts of time. You're not running out of oxygen. What you're feeling is a buildup of CO2. It's the CO2 that drives your respiration. So when you then breathe out, you've exhaled and then you're probably going to go, and breathe pretty hard for a few times because what you're saying is there was too much CO2 buildup. I need to dump it so I can lower that level.

Physiologically, we call that hypocapnia. Capnia is carbon dioxide and hypo is low. If you breathe a bunch, hyperventilate, you're getting CO2 concentrations very, very, very low. I'm going to make that if you hold your breath and hypoventilate, you let CO2 concentrations go up. CO2 concentrations have a bi-directional relationship between psychology and physiology. If CO2 rises, none of you feel a physical sensation in your chest. You feel a physical panic. But you feel a psychological change.

It is telling you you need to move into a sympathetic drive. This is your fight, flight, or freeze. This is great. If you think about this from a normal exercise perspective, we'll get to it more interesting one in a second. If I start moving and start expanding energy, I start building up CO2. I want my brain to know, hey, this is potentially a fight or flight situation. Doesn't matter if it's that extreme. It's just a gradient. Be more focused. Be more alert. Be more aroused.

Be more intense. Your vision literally narrows. Be more focused. I'm on task. Right now, I guarantee you our respiratory rates are higher than they need to be. Our HRV is a little bit lower. HRV is heart-aggressive. It's a measure of where I'm out of the sympathetic, parasympathetic drive. I'm more focused. Our vision is very narrow right now. I've got four feet to look at. I'm at 2 and I'm paying attention. All of our senses are really heightened right now.

When we're done, we're probably going to go the exact opposite direction. Our vision is going to open back up. I'm not going to be paying things and such. I'm going to go into parasympathetic. Parasympathetic is rest, digest. It is chill. It is zen. It is depressed. It's the the thargic. It's all these things, right? Parasympathetic sympathetic is not good or bad. You as a normal human want high resilience on both sides.

When you go to bed tonight, I want you to feel the thargic. I want you to feel no motivation. I want you to feel zen. Great. I want digestion and things like that. Right now, I don't want you to feel super zen. I want you to be a little bit like, do me a meaning. Same way, right? A little bit alert, speaking a little faster than you'd like to be, but really focused, driven and motivated. That's great. I don't want you feeling that though before going to sleep.

I don't want you feeling the thargic when it's time to wake up. I don't want you feeling the thargic when we got to go to the gym. It's about just making sure we're on when we want to be on and not. So your CO2 is going to tell you that. So a physical stressor like the exercise elevates CO2. Tell us the brain, sympathetic drive, a psychological stressor does the exact same thing. So we could be not doing anything. We're experiencing that right now.

We're not moving at all for the most part, but I guarantee you our cortisol levels are higher. Our glucose being dumped into the blood elevated. I guarantee you our strength right now is higher. Our our speed, our power, our musk endurance is higher right now than in the exact same situation. If we are watching TV, okay, it's like we are primed and ready to our nervous system is actually literally prime. You set out neural transmitters into the system already that are there ready to activate.

So it's faster. Okay. So that's awesome. That's telling us to go the direction we want to be in now. If CO2 goes the opposite direction, we have the opposite feeling. Okay. So we get super zen super chin. So what you want to be doing is breathing at a rate to where your supply meets your demand. If I'm my supply is up a little bit and I have a little more demand, then I'm going to breathe a little bit more. Normal respiration rate at night should be something like 11, 10 breaths per minute.

Okay. If you're looking at your overnight sleep tracker and you're seeing your breathing 16, 17, 18 breaths per minute, a couple of things are probably happening. Number one, you may have some form of sleep apnea. You can't get enough oxygen. So you're ventilating more than you need to be. Number two, you could be in sympathetic drive more than you need to be. Okay. Now that can be happened for a number of different reasons, but you're over breathing.

You shouldn't be breathing that much because your demand of energy is very, very low. And so you're dumping CO2. By doing that, your CO2 concentrations get too low. This puts you in a little bit of a state we call respiratory alkalosis. Your kidneys will oftentimes, not always, often though, respond by trying to put you into metabolic acidosis. And so there's a lot of research showing that people that are diagnosed with metabolic acidosis. It's actually misdiagnosed in reality.

It's respiratory alkalosis that caused the, it's the over breathing that caused the problem. The metabolic acidosis, you'll start changing how much by carbonate, you recycle, electrolytes. We see hydration issues with this constantly. So if you're an over breather, like you're going to have all kinds of hydration problems. All that's going on over there. Okay. So getting back now that we have a little bit of foundation to what's really happening with CO2 in your room.

If you are what we call CO2 sensitive and you're intolerant to CO2. So a little bit of CO2 starts building up and your body already kicks you into a position where it thinks your way too high. It then will tell you to start breathing. You'll start over breathing. That whole cascade I just explained and kicks in. So what happens to your HRB gets worse. What happens to your ability to fall asleep gets worse. Oh, I wake up and then I can't get back to sleep.

You look at your respiratory rate, you check your CO2 tolerance, you're going to know exactly why. Now I'm about to finish the circle. If it's not those things and you simply are sitting there, let's imagine you and your partner are in your room. You guys have any other living things in your room. Let's see. Put the. My dog. Your dog. Yeah. What size of dogs? Not big. Not big. I've fed off. Okay. Now without getting too personal here, what does your room look like when you guys are asleep?

How big is the room roughly? It's about the same size of the space we're in now. Great. Fantastic. And is your door shut? Is it closed? Always closed. Always closed. Yeah. Perfect. You couldn't be seeing me out better here. So you're at night laying there breathing in and you're breathing out and you're breathing out CO2 and your lovely little bulldog is breathing out CO2 and your partner is breathing out CO2. So what's happening to the CO2 conservation in that room as that door is closed?

It's rising. Right. Going up, generally not an issue, not a huge deal. But what have you is maybe a little bit CO2 sensitive the amount of CO2 in your room is rising. You're re breathing out CO2 right back. Can CO2 is then getting too high that's going to cause your entire system like we said earlier when CO2 levels increase this kicks off sympathetic drive puts you into fight or flight now also an HRV goes down a little bit resting heart rate goes up a little bit.

Arouse goes up a little bit your body temperature changes. You're not getting into the same sleep stages and we're having either a struggle falling asleep saying asleep, etc. In addition to that, there's a handful of studies now we need way more research here. There's a handful of studies that have taken people at what's called 900 parts per million that's the CO2 concentration. That's the level right below 900 parts per million we have no issue.

And so normally like I'll check my house if our doors are closed and stuff all day I myself to shepherd mix, you know, rescues wife two kids. R's will easily get up to 15 1800 parts per million. Now the research on this stuff has done experiments where they take people up to like 3000. Okay, so can I make a strong claim that if you're at 1100 parts per million, it's really going to screw up your sleep. Well, I don't think so.

But now we're playing a game of like the studies have gone to the extreme and what they will see is a huge reduction of sleep quality both subjective and objective. So I actually measured on like a PSG system or similar as well as subjects saying like I did not sleep all last night. Next day cognitive function memory reaction time, sleepiness, wakefulness, next day executive function decision making it work all this stuff is significantly.

And when I say significant here, I want to make sure I'm saying not only like research statistically significant, but of a magnitude that matters to your life. Right. So it's both clinically relevant and statistically significant. So we're seeing real reductions in sleep quality.

In fact, there's a thing called something with like a building sickness where people like they have headaches and they have they feel like brain fog and all that stuff because they're in large like apartment buildings and the quality of the air gets so low. And by that, I specifically referring to CO2 that they feel these issues. And once they get CO2 out of the room, then this building sickness thing goes away.

So if you're in that situation and that starts to rise and it does get up to 22,000 or 2500, which is not that crazy. You're absolutely going to see reductions in sleep quality sleep onset again, which is a time it's called latency. The time. Take you to follow sleep waking events, disturbances and then next day sleepiness, wakefulness and cognitive function will be compromised certainly up to 3,000 to 3,500 parts per million.

What happens at 2000? I don't know. Like again, we need more research. Like where is the exact line that starts to matter? I do know you get up that high. It starts to matter. And that number is not crazy, especially for people who close their door. Yeah, it's just thinking down. Right. People who live in apartment buildings or hotels where they can't control people that live in environments where they can't open up their windows because it's too hot or too cold or rainy.

Or the air quality is really poor or whatever the case is. So if that happens, a couple of steps you can take one, you're not going to do. Because I don't do it either, which is don't have your dog. In the room. I have two dogs and I sleep right on the end of my bed, like not on my bed, but on a floor below it. So that that sounded a question. But making sure you have a lot of ventilation in your room.

If you can and you want to use a fan in your room, that's fine. Don't make it too loud. If you want to download, there's all kinds of apps you can download on your phone that allow you to measure the decimals of noise. Keep it under 35. 35 decimals. Same thing, by the way, if you're using like a white noise machine, white noise will actually compromise sleep quality. I'll make it worse if they're too loud.

The thing to do is if you can get away with having your doors and windows open during times of the day, where you can at least let that clear out a little bit. And then if you can shut them, you know, even if you can open up for half an hour or something like that, all those steps will help manage CO2. That's a CO2. I mean, gotten to the other stuff in your environment. So is there any other big ticket sleep items that are unobvious? Because CO2 for me, that's a revelation for me.

Sicking with the environmental theme, there are some things you can do for travel that are not super well understood. One of them is we've talked a lot about patterning. If you can pattern your sleep environment at home with your sleep environment on the road, you're going to have much more success. Many people are aware of the first night phenomenon, which is the first night you get into a new place you tend to struggle.

So the first night in a hotel or other place doesn't matter how comfortable it is because the body's on edge. Hang up. Right. So how do you take that away? Well, make the body think it's at home. So how can you do that? The sound, the smell, the temperature. All of this is all these sensors are going in your brain.

If you artificially design your sleep environment in your house, any way that can be transported with you, then you can cut that problem down in large part. So if there's a particular scent, I don't mean like have a plug in there. But some like lavender is very common. Lavender is highly associated with sleep quality.

So a lot of people will do like a little bit of a lavender spray on the bottom of their bed on a corner of their room or just something very, very subtle that you're not paying attention to. There are companies that make little lavender sprays. Right. And so then you have that lavender scent at your house.

Again, something that you would barely even be conscious of when you walk in, then you take that scent on the road with you when you get in your hotel room, you can spray it around a little bit. And now your body will go, oh, okay, we're at home. Not going to fix it entirely, but these things can start stacking little behaviors like that, trying to stay in the same rhythm.

Do the same thing. The 90 minutes before sleep that you did at home when you're on the road. So don't all of a sudden, you know, like switch out and shower at a different time or eat at a different time. Like try to be as consistent with your sleep routine as possible. We'll be the bigger ticket, but then little things like, you know, having the same setup. If you have a noise machine, take that thing with you and try to bring that environment as much as you can.

But the smell is a very big one because it's very high reward, very low risk and pretty easy to take a couple of ounces of a spray or something with you on the road. Is sleep equal to recovery? Because I'm thinking, can I am really well slept? Sometimes I wake up like last night, in fact, and I'd had eight and a half hours sleep. I'd flown in from London, landed here in LA. My recovery on my whoop band here was 10, 12%. It was really, really low. And I was shocked.

Even though my HRV was quite high, it was quite confusing. I spend a lot of time thinking about my HRV. I'm pretty obsessed with it. And I spend a little bit less time thinking about my recovery, but my HRV, me and my friends are almost like competitive with it. We all have a little league table. Me and my girlfriend is one of the first things we talk about in the morning, every morning. Do these things really, really matter?

HRV is a very, very strong metric. It is effectively telling you the overall balance of your autonomic nervous system. And that is very strong. There's a lot, there's, I don't know, 50 plus years of research on HRV. It's not new. It's not, it's very well established. It's highly associated with actually long-term cardiovascular risk, strokes, hypertension, blood glucose, hyperclestralemia, like lots of things that are associated with HRV.

Mental health, anxiety, depression, tons of stuff. We also know interventions that are generally associated to be positive for you, exercise, stress, regulation, breath work, meditation, all generally improve HRV. And things that are associated as poor for your health, like lack of exercise, low quality nutrition, alcohol use, are also things that are going to reduce. In December, about December the 20th or 30th, around that time, that 10-day window, my HRV was fantastic.

And then I went keto for about four or five weeks. For the entire time I was keto, my HRV was in the bin. And then I came out of keto and my HRV was still in the bin. And to be honest, it's only in the last three days, and we're in February now, we're like mid-February, when my HRV has started to recover. And I was like, what the hell happened? Was it the keto that I did? Was it? I don't know.

Again, a lot to say on that. Difficult for you won't make it on this road. I'm not surprised. I would love to see your blood work. I could probably tell you exactly what's happening from that that will explain a lot of what's going on. The reason I'm saying that is, we have seen many, many times, situations which people are fatigued.

HRV goes down, we see all these issues. And you'll see kind of an interesting combination here. And I've used this example a lot because it's come up so many times where testosterone starts to go a little bit low. And you start looking at another thing called sex hormone binding globular. It's one of the hormones that's sex hormone binding globular. It's like a collection of proteins. So it's a protein that holds on to sex hormones like testosterone.

So when that gets really, really high, no matter free testosterone goes down, that's what free testosterone is. How much is not being globular? And so you see this combination of like sex hormone binding globular gets really high testosterone gets super low. And then you start poking around and you look at insulin, an insulin's low. And you're like, okay, great. And we know that there's a known association. There's an inverse relationship between sex hormone binding globular and insulin.

Okay. Now, it could be a million things. You don't know any time like this is one of the reasons why I love blood chemistry so much because it allows you to be in a little bit of an detective. Now you're always working off the human. You're always working off symptoms. You don't treat or coach blood markers. It's a bad way to go about it, right? But you're looking for clues. Okay. So you're looking around, you're poking around there. And like trust me, you can check the record.

I've given this example plenty of time. So I'm not I'm not the same as you. It's just going to work. You're team me up, man. Like you just lighten me up here. So in this particular case, you think, okay, why is insulin? Again, could be many, many, many things. So you started asking additional questions. But what we've seen a lot is you start poking around looking what carbohydrate intake is like. And if carbohydrate intake is insufficient and lower than what that person needs.

Now that number is different for every person situation, all contact. But if it's lower than what you need in that particular instance, then your insulin can start getting too low. As a result of that sex hormone binding, glogaline goes up as a result of that testosterone starts going down as a result of that you start feeling the feelings of low testosterone.

So the solution in that particular case. We give people carbohydrates. Do you know what it feels like when they have some carbohydrates back. Anzones starts going up testosterone starts going up. They start feeling incredible and addition. They start sleeping better. Right. So we know there's an association between carbohydrate intake and serotonin concentrations. This is the molecule that helps you fall asleep at night.

There's also metanolces that will show a pretty tight correlation between carbohydrate intake and sleep onset and sleep quality. That is not at all to say you can't be ketone and sleep great. That is not at all to say you can't be key in ketosis and have high testosterone. Absolutely possible. I'm not against it. We just see that one often enough to where this is a good example of it just didn't work for you in that situation.

Does it mean it doesn't work for anybody else or any situation. Plenty of times to go after it. We actually just put one of our clients in our coaching program on a ketogenic diet for like a very specific brain health reason actually it brain cancer. But nonetheless the other times it's sort of like okay great. This not working for you right now. Why is it how are you feeling that feeling there? How is your your HIV?

How is your sleep? How is your respiratory rate? How is your performance? How is your training? Like I want to know all these things. How is your nutrition in these particular cases? It's like all right sometimes the subtle is in additional 50 grams of carbohydrate at night. Wow. Feel amazing. Sleep goes up testosterone goes way up body composition doesn't change at all. You're not going to gain any additional fat as long as you reduce the calories elsewhere right.

And you feel great. So we use the carbohydrates at night a lot. Not like right before bed but you know in your normal thing high quality carbohydrates. As long as the total amount of carbohydrates throughout the day are kind of for all that. So you're just switching. You're saying okay great. We're going to pull a little bit from morning or lunch. Put a little bit more that in the afternoon and changing the order here.

If needed. In that particular case. That's why I would love to have seen your blood work there. I don't know that that was happening. But that brought me up because you've seen that one so many times now where we're like all right to step back and watch you without knowing some having this sort of blood markers from me or having any tests don't

me or anyone that's listening now. What are the like the first things you would look at if I'm trying to what my friends are so H.O.V. in our little H.O.V. League table. What are the like fundamentals of H.O.V. Are you sure you want me to tell you afterwards. Yeah. I can cut this out. I know no one needs to hear it. So I can just so I can know because this is a big thing. It's like a big thing in my family now. There's like family.

Table. So what is it my best friends lead table then me and my girlfriend. So I'm trying to and I'm losing right now because this bloody keto thing that I really honestly my answer. I hate to do this but it does come back to what is your biggest anchor. So we're going to figure out because this is going to be different for everybody.

If let's assume you've eliminated all the what we call it practices. All that stuff is gone. Okay now we start getting to kind of level two like level B level things. All right. I would want to see what that respiratory rate looks like. I want to want to see what's the sleep data actually look like. That's your starting place. No question. You want to think about it this way. Okay. Maybe I'll back up. That'll be easier. When I go solve this problem. I'm using what's called first principles.

Okay. So I'm going very, very fundamental things saying what's causing stress and then what's causing stress relief. Two sides that equation and I want to see what's going on. Where's the problem too much in or not handling enough of what we currently have. Need thoughts is one of the two years. So coming in. Is there any changes we can make in your total stress that is a non specific stressor. Right. So things that are not helping you achieve an adaptation that are not business.

Can we solve those things right relationship wise like. Something in environment like is there some other non specific. Are there any hidden stressors. If I can remove these hidden stressors. All the sudden the stress bucket just got lowered. Now listen, you're automatically having an HRV and so I'm going hunting right I'll take you through the full battery kit and caboodle and I will find like what are the non specific stressors that are in there.

And we're dialing those things up. Okay. Let's assume you either can't do all that stuff or or you've done all that. Now how do we modify how we handle the stress the stress resilience is the piece. Okay. Great. What are we doing for stress management. How much time are you spending decompressing. I mean physically and physiologically.

Okay. One of the things I love is we are in a state right now. For better or for worse. I'll just assume better where we have way more arousal in our daily lives and we've probably had in human history in the past. Okay. Great. So how do we how do we address that we need intentional times when we're removing in but a mistake that some folks will make is. Okay. I'm working and then sometimes I listen to music or a podcast and that's great.

That's part of your day and then what do you do after work. Okay. I go to the gym. Okay. Awesome. Love you there. What do you listen to? I listen to more podcasts. Okay. Great. So arousal or arousal. All right. Then what are you doing when you're done. Okay. Great.

I watch TV. Okay. Great. Like what kind of TV. Right. And you see that you see that the calculus I'm going through. What are we doing the time or day. What do you do if you get done with work early for an hour. What are you in the weekends? Right. I'm not judging but I'm trying to run the calculus of going like where is our time where we don't have been put coming in.

And so sometimes I'm not I listen to music and stuff when I train occasionally not against it. I've said this sub-perform people have been like, oh man, Andy's like you shouldn't ever listen to a podcast like no, no, no, no, no. They please listen to both costs. Definitely. I'm like and subscribe. If I absolutely. We five star rage. Yes. Come on now. I got kids to feed dogs to take care of.

Well, just when is the time when we don't have sensory input coming in. So one of the things we'll do often is saying, okay, great. Can we do one to three ten minute walks with no input. Nothing in your ears. If you want to make it a 45 minute walk, great. If you want to do one, I don't really care what it is. But we need some time where you can I like three a day because I want to start your day like that.

The compress get focused. You're going to notice I'm sure your brain works similar to mine. We're like, if you go 20 seconds is like all of a sudden. And you're getting back and you're going to fire off 50 emails and tax and like you're on, right, which is great. But you need that time. I like doing it lunch. Same thing. You've been on, on, on, on, on, on. Give yourself ten minutes.

If you want to do actual breath work. If you want to do actual just closed eyes. If you want to do meditation. If you I prefer to just like walk outside personally. Whatever it is, but you need some time or we just stop the world. It's like torture for me. It's horrible, right? It's awful for me. You know how much I have to like force myself to do those that part. My girlfriend's a breathwork practitioner. So she finds it so easy. Of course.

She'll wake up in the morning and she'll do like an hour and a half yoga and breathwork in front of me. Never. Yeah. And she doesn't she doesn't she hasn't even gone and got her phone off charging. She'll then walk into the kitchen and had drink her water, make her little tea with the herbs thing in it. And she'll drift back and she'll go and she sits on the balcony and just sits in the sun.

Me. Whatever the opposite of that is is me. Yeah, I know. I wake up like the second my eyes are open. I'm like. 100% I'm raging to like get after something or I actually tend to wake up with a huge creative explosion. So I don't have to say you're like having anxiety of like stuff I have to do, but I have excitement of like. Oh, I got idea like this is really cool. Like I want to try like I want to get raging right and. But I don't like I play with my kids and stuff like that, right?

So can you give me five minutes right? What can you give me the morning of just down? Can we do the same thing at some point during the day and trust me that midday one is like awful for me right because the whole time I sit there just going. All I'm doing is wasting time right now. But it is a it is a worthwhile investment because even that amount of time. Like to re center. I don't close my eyes. I don't do breath like I don't I don't even try. It's just like okay great.

I'm going to literally walk outside like I'm going to take one lap around my house like I'm doing something to like bring it back down. And then I love it for guys like you and I at night because there has to be some sort of physiological signal that we're done. I have to have a thing if not I'm like. Boom kids dinner, playing with them get them to bed and then I'm like. Everything I can do to not walk back in my office like everything I can do the wife to disaster be like now.

So if I can finish that was like fine we're going to dinner and then we're going to go play outside we're going to take the dog for a walk. We're going to go to nature walk or something I have to have something that tells me you're done. The last thing I'll say on this is there's actually really interesting research that will find a disassociation between HRV and respiratory rate and sleep quality.

And the reason I'm saying that is they are all entwined but they are also different there's actually a study that came out last year and found for every breath rate per minute. So one breath per minute rate increase. This was in college freshman. There was a 25% increase and likelihood of experiencing moderate to high stress. But it wasn't found in HRV and it wasn't found in any sleep objective or subjective markers.

What that's telling you is again those are associated but they're independent variables to pay attention to. And so just because you're like always sleep enough. And just because in the last one to get to is we actually use scientifically validated questionnaires to look at mental health and in every people every person we work with. It's not our expertise that we have somebody on team that does that but really we're looking for red flags if we need to refer out right.

But we do that because there's just no way you can optimize the human experience with total disregard for mental health right. But what happens often is we see people who are fine or just not like major issues and mental health but they can still have an extremely stressed physiology. And so understanding stress when I say stress I do the same thing I associate that with like oh I'm not stressed. I'm not stressed but then when we look at your HRV and we look at all these other markers.

We're looking at a bunch of blood markers another molecular markers we're seeing like well you have a very stressed physiology. Now for whatever reason you're handling it finds like logically or it's not making an impact whether it is or not or I don't know that's not my area. But we can see it physiologically and so coming into your equation it goes okay we have levers to pull here.

You asked a few minutes ago is sleep and recovery the same thing they're not they're associated but this is a good example you could be sleeping fine. But if you're not physiologically recovering enough that can be a separate issue there's a Venn diagram here there's an overlap. But they're not necessarily just the same thing and a lot of people. You'll see the same pattern with CO2 tolerance respiratory rate sleep and HRV they'll be highly associated.

But in some people you might have to disentantake one from the other one or another one and really pull something apart. So that's what we would do for you is to go in with this HRV game is to say okay great where's the place we have to go and usually you'll see something poking out there that says okay here's our opportunity to go after something and improve and work on. And this is where we're going to get the most bang for the buck for you.

This red light play role because for Christmas she got me too massive red light. I don't even know what they are they're just like panels. Yeah there's a lot of data on HR red light therapy this is actually a good example of something that that I missed a vote on. Like I've changed my tune on this one big time I didn't think that there was anything here. And I was wrong about that one there's a lot of research.

What is red light therapy doing I'm in my head I think maybe it's mimicking the sun or something I don't know. Okay so there's a couple of wavelengths there's one around like 640ish nanometers and another about 850 nanometers plus or minus here. And what we're looking at here is red light therapy in those wavelengths have an ability to cross and get into tissue so they can get past your skin layer.

And they activate a whole series of cascades of things that are that are beneficial for skin health. We've seen injury we've seen actually some changes in the interconsystem or my balances for them. Again it's pretty impressive what it's actually doing because it can get in and stimulate and absolutely can mimic there's actually data on it potentially improves vision. When actually like in the eye work with your your eye doctors on that one please here ophthalmologist and stuff.

But you can actually see that you'll see this a lot for overall global recovery again for muscle soreness and muscle damage. It can actually benefit those as well. I have them there's a bunch coming out but they actually get hyper specific and like focusing on a certain area of your body that that is damaged and tissue.

We've used them a lot a lot with athletes coming back from surgery specifically so one of our quarterbacks this year had a pretty nice gnarly lower body injury that's very beginning of the season and we were able to get him back in pretty good shape pretty fast and we use many different things but red light was certainly one of them. I haven't found many people yet where I'm like you definitely have to go get red light.

It's one of those things where I'm like oh you got it. Oh cool like I would do it or like hey you have a 60 million dollar contract this year in the line. We're doing everything like bring it on that that's kind of where I stand with it so it's another area that I am paying attention to more and more see what more things come out but really the ability for those those wavelengths to penetrate skin to actually get into tissue is what's causing. Active change inside your actual physiology.

I'm someone that works every day I got to be honest not all the workouts are great workouts some of them are pretty terrible workouts because this by the way is the next place I was going with your HIV question. Okay. Another thing where we could potentially see some improvements to HIV is breaking down higher training. What types of training you're doing and what time of day you're doing them. Typically lower intensity longer duration stuff often times increases HIV over time.

Higher intensity stuff can put people in the hole and what I mean by that is people that have very high demanding jobs and then they couple that with really high intensity high sympathetic drive training. Well now we're wondering you're like your high sympathetic drive all day and in the only break from it you have from that you went higher sympathetic drive and now we wonder why your total drive is pretty high sympathetic.

Well you know when I think about training you always talk about these tradeoffs that you're making one of the questions I have is can I achieve it all at once and being more specific. I want to gain muscle mass and I want to stay super lean at the same time and there's a school of thought that says you've got to like load up and then you've got a cut. But I don't want to do that. I just want to gain muscle mass but stay lean. Is that possible?

Yes. Good. Great. Yeah. Couple things to think about here. It depends on your baseline fitness and your how lean you are to start. Okay now you're pretty lean as it is already and assume you're reasonably fit. I mean clearly you work out and stuff like okay great. It's going to be a little harder for you.

Right if you're really really unfit and you're really overweight it's much easier to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time right so it's going to be challenging for you especially you've got a number of three years of training. That's still kind of like early in your training age right that's pretty young training age we got some newbie games that will still be able to take advantage of.

Especially you don't have like a specific plan and tension with your training is going to kind of just you know working out. All right great. We would be able to have pretty good success with that. Physiologically it's possible. It's never going to be a hundred percent though. There's no way I can put especially without exogenous testosterone. There's just no way I can put 15 pounds of muscle on you and zero fat. Like that's just not going to happen.

Could we put on seven or eight pounds of muscle and one pound of fat. I would do that. Like that would not be a crazy thing you would see that pretty consistently in the research and certainly thousands of coaches and practitioners are like oh yeah like I've seen that countless times. And so it's kind of like what are the reasonable expectations there.

So what I would do is for you is recommend saying you don't have to go like 40 pounds and like you know but how much you really want to be at what's that number right we would figure that out. Maybe you run analysis on you see where you actually at. All right great. And then we set reasonable expectations. So you want to end up being you know you want to put on five kilos total. Okay, tremendous. You really accept. You know five kilos of four and a half kilos of muscle and maybe one of fat.

Okay, we get reasonable like patients. And then what you would want to do there is train consistently. You would want to be in a close to caloric. So slight surplus is possible we have to add calories to gain mass right but how we're going to do that is. 10% surplus something like that so if you're normal maintenance with all your exercises 3000 calories. I don't need you to go to 6000 calories that's a recipe to put on some muscle but a lot of fat to now we don't know the exact number here.

There's a lot of studies going on actually friends of mine. Eric Helms and New Zealand has done a handful of studies like this recently trying to figure out what is that number 5% 10% 20% Where is the number in terms of caloric excess that you want to be on to put the most amount of lean muscle mass and the least amount of fat on. Because it's not going to be zero right 10 or so percent which for you would be 10% of 3000 be 300 extra calories maybe 15% maybe go to 500 calories.

We're not going to 5000 calories we're not making these crazy jumps in your situation there we'd make sure protein is really really high. At least two grams per kilogram right something like that maybe even higher making sure we have enough extra on there but we're hedging on. If we're going to miss the mark I'd rather miss by 15% too high then 2% too low there's just no advantage of being down there.

And then we'll regulate chloric intake in terms of your calories and fat we would play with those ratios. If you want to do a little more fat little less carbs we could do that we want to do the episode we can play with that stuff. Those would be the standards we'd set. Does it matter what time I eat in terms of exercise because I've always had that you should eat sort of immediately after you do a workout.

Does it matter in terms of protein timing if you're just looking at muscle growth none of the other human factors which there are many. Then timing of protein is pretty irrelevant you're fine timing of carbohydrates does start to matter though specifically for recovery. Now that typically happens in athletes that train multiple times today that said with both of them you have options again look at the research on intermittent fasting.

You don't see especially if you look at the classic kind of like 16-8 which is you you know you have a condensed eating window of just six hours a day and they're 18 you're fasting. That is not any more advantageous for fat loss than non fasting. It doesn't seem to be any difference at all when you account for calories and protein. So if you want to eat six meals a day great you want to eat one meal a day won't matter for fat loss.

So that still though tells us timing of protein it's just not super important for someone like you. For muscle mass gains the only practical challenges is if we need you at that two grams of protein per kilo maybe higher. Can you get enough food in during your timing of eating sometimes yeah you know in our study we have plenty of participants that have no issue eating all their food calories in a caloric surplus in a six hour window. No problem all there's really struggled.

And so now we're not talking science or physiology we're talking practical application you when your own personal life. I'm a someone who's full or timing of work or whatever but if that's not the case then I'd be like great we're going to have no problem. So I wouldn't be super concerned with the timing of either of your or any of your macronutrients outside of personal preference real world situations things like that.

If I'm just a normal guy which I very much am and I'm maybe a busy business person or I just have a you know job as a manager or something and I'm thinking about the types of training that are going to help me perform at my best cognitively in my work but then just be healthy over time in my life. What is the like blend of training types and styles and durations that are optimal for me to just be a great average Joe. You need a handful of physiological skills to age super well.

So if you want to live and live as well as possible for a long time and it comes down to a couple of things you need to move well. What's that mean different definitions but you need to move in a way that is not getting hurt causing pain great that comes on a movement skill there's some flexibility in there there's some mobility and there's also just like do you know how to stand up do you know how to walk right.

So you move well so something where you're addressing I don't need you to be the most talented sprinter in the world but we just can't have glaring holes can have huge problems and mobility flexibility posture ranges emotion because we have to stay at a pain so number one biggest key to successful aging when it comes to exercise is not missing training. We can't miss training for big chunks in time months and years because we're hurt we have to stay active.

Okay, so you know what I'm saying yes mobility means that we can be consistent if it does yeah right so there's no like strong tie there of like hey the more range of motion your hamstring the less injuries you'll have I'm just talking if you have some really bad issue where all of a sudden you're 40 years old and you're in so much back pain you can't walk okay you're that's going to be a problem so don't get hurt. Time to go on.

Number two is now speed and power and I'm saying that because if you look at one of the most significant issues that we face during aging it's our falls risk. You can't fall if you look at the data I don't know what is up top my head but if you look at the risk of dying after a hip break in those are over six years old it's something alarming like a 50% chance of death of the next 15 years.

Like it's absurd and you could whatever the number is it doesn't matter when you look at the real ones you can be like wow it's just as bad as as exemplified there so you can't afford to do that why do you fall when you're over 60 well sometimes the dog just walks out in front of you and okay great but the things that you can control you can't lose your balance.

Don't like you need to train balance okay great secondly if you lose your balance you need to have the foot speed and the hand speed to move your penance is out in front of you to stop that fall from happening right this is a foot speed this is a hand speed mostly since your legs are the way that you are in the world most of the time we always start with our lower body right we can't can have bad knees can have bad ankles and we can't lose foot speed and power.

Let's assume that freak accident happened you had a slip and you had the ability to get your foot out of front of you and you're falling right so you're tripping your falling forward and then you flung your right foot out in front of you and you planted it to stop yourself from falling so you didn't smash your hip you then need to have the eccentric strength to stop yourself from collapsing on that foot so you had the foot speed to get it out there but did you have

the strength to actually stop yourself from falling physical strength is one of the strongest predictors of mortality of any metric in the entire world the only one that is sort of close to it is your VO2 max those things will out predict how long you're going to live more than almost any metric if you look at them stacked up directly against clinical traditional clinical risk factors blood pressure

cardiovascular disease markers coronary artery disease smoking diabetes things like that those are all bad but leg strength and VO2 max typically will predict survival rate more so those other markers there's actually a couple of studies that come to mind one of them out of Jonathan Myers lab the famous one 750,000 people in the studies like big studies and all the course of it I

think 174,000 people died you know these are retrospective studies and stuff like that right but we're looking at is like who stayed alive and who didn't not like a surrogate marker not some sort of like direct marker and you will definitely see what's called a hazard ratio which is say okay 1.0 is neutral below one is reduced risk of dying above one is increased risk and you look at things you'll see smoking and diabetes put your HR of like 1.3 1.4 so 30% increase hazard ratio 40% increase

like that's not good and then you start to see the things like VO2 max and you start seeing like 4 x increases 5 x increases like they just outpace smoking and diabetes by massive amounts it's not like a smoking is 30% and VO2 max is 40% it's like smoking is 30% and VO2 max is 300% what is VO2 max for anybody that doesn't your maximum ability to bring in and utilize oxygen cardiovascular fitness if you want to think about it like that when you compare legs strength and those

same studies depending on the studies it's comparable if not higher of a predictor than the VO2 max can I just think about that when I get older because a lot of people you know I'm 30 years old great question you can you're welcome to but here's what happens we know that VO2 max will drop something like 1% per year after the age of around 40 to 45

yes right now you can you can a millionaire or attenuate a lot of that so it will drop automatically yeah with aging okay for sure regardless of what I mean obviously my work will go against it yes but if left alone it kind of drops itself not even if left alone we actually the study years ago in Stockholm Sweden where we took we ran VO2 max tests on cross country skiers and these people were world champions in the 1940s and 50s

and they were still competing in 2010 so they are on your 50 55 60 of continuous training and competing is really really cool to get these people in there like again you're your studs in the 1950s and you're they haven't stopped competing and we compared them to age matched individuals in in back here in the states now all these people were over 80 some of them were up to 92 years old

and we ran the VO2 max test and there's a bunch of fun stuff we did there but when you look at the VO2 max our group average was something like 35 38 milliliters per kilogram per minute those people we don't have their data from 1940s but if you're going to win a world championship in cross country skiing you're probably going to be in the 80s or 90s for VO2 max so they were way up there in the 80s or 90s presumably when they were in their 20s and 30s

we're down to the mid 30s 50 years later but people their age that don't train typically on average VO2 max is about 20 so it is way higher with training the slope in terms of the decrease can really be blunted but it will still go down you'll never see an 80 year old

who can outrun a 30 year old if they're equivalently like trained and talented right so goes down the same thing will happen with muscle strength and muscle size how is this linked to mortality though what is it about my VO2 max that ends up you know putting me in a grave

yeah so here's what happens when men cross below 18 milliliters per kilogram per minute for women it's about 15 to 16 it's what we call the line of independence and what that means is basic tasks of everyday living represents so much oxygen utilization that you can't do anything

as an example if your VO2 max is 15 things like getting dressed in the morning are about 12 okay getting up from the toilet 12 or 13 walking 14 15 you imagine doing a workout where you're at literally your maximum heart rate just walking up your stairs you shut down right and so what happens is it's multifaceted number one cardiovascular your heart is just no longer fit right the amount of blood pressure and the amount of stress your heart is under all day just surviving is enormous

so what do you think happens to your HRV what do you think happens you just sleep what do you think happens to your global is a very stress physiology it gets worse not though you tend to stop doing things so you socially isolate

you stop being around people you stop having purpose and drive because you can't do anything mental health can decline because you don't feel like you're worth anything so self-worth goes really low because you can't do it by yourself you can't even make your own breakfast you can't

and so you start to just read and so this thing just catapult so it is a it is a multi-faceted problem you can talk about just the ability to you can't bring any utilize oxygen you can't feel your brain you start to deteriorate but then you can go all the way to the unknown spectrum that I just said of like social isolation because you can't walk you can't be in the world you can't get out in the sunlight like you can't you physical activity starts to plummet once legs ring legs

and specifically will tell you how long you'll be physically active once your legs get weak you stop being physically active because everything gets really really down hard so you're like I'm not going to go for a walk why because I'm going to be exhausted because my legs are going to be shaking because my legs are so weak so you tend to stop you tend to sit and not want to move and then all those other problems exist and now what we call this is that to release to

atrophysal awesome muscle but now because we're weaker we want to do less things which means worse than worse than we just spiral down so not ever getting into that cycle is critically important so why can't you wait until you're old first of all train ability is still really high we've done training studies on people 80 years old you can grow muscle and strength at 80 no question in fact almost as well as you can when you're in your 20s

but if you're starting at a VO2 max of 35 when you're 40 years old how long until you cross below 20 well 1% per year you can run the math there pretty quickly you're going to cross that line of independence by 60 65 and I guess you can start working out but really really challenging

alternatively you drive it as high as possible now so when you see that decline over time your buffer is much higher last point I'll make I'm sure you got a hundred questions there if you run that gamble and you get to 50 and you have any little thing go wrong you got to have a hit replacement you got to have something going on and now your bed ridden for six weeks boom you just fall off the cliff you get really busy at work

you got to take care of your mom now he's all these things that happen real life and you can't work out as much great so the way that we say this like one of the golfers I work with John wrong we're talking about this a couple weeks ago as well I bring it up and he was like you look one of the strategies is we always control the things we can control so there are parts of the golf game that you can't control the weather and what your opponents are doing

and so he always makes sure he gets really good at the things he can physically control I would say the exact same thing right here if you have the time right now and there's never a good time but you can control it you can work out you have the ability then you want to put that as high as possible because when things then come out of your control and you get hurt or work or all the gyms in the world shut down like you know all these things that can happen

then then you've got some buffer but if you got no buffer you're running a pretty high risk and you're running a risk of losing your health which means you're not going to do anything.

Reminds me of a conversation I had at Christmas with a derelative of mine who to scene set of Christmas we've got three little kids below the age of six running around which my brothers kids we've got all the generations there and then we've got the oldest generation and a member of that generation isn't able to move for many of the reasons you've described anymore there's not an injury there but just going up the stairs even will make them out of

breath and we sat down as a family at Christmas trying to figure out whether this was reversible or not and we all concluded you know again being up to miss and trying and loving this person very much that in fact it was a part of a downward spiral and this individual had kind of accepted that it was their fate they said like they had blamed on something that was unchangeable and I was there on YouTube trying to find videos to prove that

you know if you start I'll get you an exercise bike and if you start moving it can it can change there's extensive evidence to show you right okay good tons again you can look at our any of our work or any other groups of scientists that have done training studies in untrained 70 year olds

men women 80 year olds plus there's actually the reason I'm saying 80s because of a study that came out last I think it was last year that year before on that strength training in 80 plus year olds that are not currently active huge improvements in strength muscle growth like your camera exact one but you I think it was like over 15% increase in muscle size like numbers it that matter so yeah you absolutely

you could pick your study you would have thousands to pick from that would show work now can you get that person to do it that's the hard part that's the ultimate starting starts with it even believing it is possible which most people don't believe it's possible they think once you get to 60 it's kind of an inevitability and there's nothing I can do change it yeah absolutely fundamentally not true in fact if you look at the

papers that have been done on the rate of decrease I don't remember exact numbers right now but it's stunning what percentage of physiological decrements are stopped entirely specifically the two max your view to max will remain highly stable the kind of number we always play with is 50 at 50

which is at 50 years old I want your view to max to be at least 50 if you train consistently you'll see tons of people who I remember I said earlier tends to start dropping around 45 to 50 you'll see people who do not drop into their 60s from their 20s if they consistently train and that is a very real phenomenon so you have a huge control over it the earlier you start the better but if you've already missed that window it's no problem whatsoever your ability to change

like really never stops in response to exercise plasticity in tissue is extraordinarily high and it responds very well to training and there's just no reason to think you can't make huge progress at any age what kind of training for the two max I understand leg strength I figure I can kind of figure out what I need to do there but to improve my video to max what do I need to be doing yeah think of a couple of things you need to challenge your heart

to pump consistently over time what that means is if you want to think about that as lower intensity more continuous work that's great the mode running swimming cycling pushing a sled doing a circuit joining a group activity class those things don't matter that much in terms of they all work great so something that continued make sure heart rate elevated for let's call it 20 minutes minimum so much between 20 and 60 minutes

so if all you can do is 20 let's start at 20 no problem what zone should you be in I don't care what heart rate I don't care elevated great I'll take that as a win that's all I need then we need to do something that requires your heart rate to get closer to max

what heart rate what's I don't it doesn't matter go up high I would bank on those two things something that is a lower intensity longer duration and then something that is a higher intensity shorter duration if you want to do something like 30 seconds as hard as you can

30 seconds of rest for four to six rounds great no problem there right if you want to do something that's a little bit different if you want to not even worry about that and again go to a group activity class go to a spin class go to a kettlebell circuit class

great you want to go to cardio kickboxing all that's going to fine great that alone will check the boxes offer a lot of people so when you think about this people get like as an extra scientist people get way too caught up in like the specific protocol how many reps exactly when you ask a question like how do I improve my view to max specificity always matters towards the end but at the highest level is like yo just get your heart rate up there's a there's a principle in science we call said

SAID specific adaptation to imposed demand that is to say if your physiology is challenged it will adapt that's all it has to be if you want your heart to improve just challenge it that's as complicated as we have to be you do that consistently ideally you overloaded a little bit over time

it will adapt to your ability Maxwell improve and does that also count for muscles because I 100% really keen to ask you I go to the gym every day and I think I'm not growing my muscles very well because I'm basically doing the same thing yeah I'm like I know that I should be doing something differently here we can do better than that what are the fundamental things I need to be thinking about I'm going to go to the gym tomorrow morning now but what do I need to think about

what you've kind of described is playing a game of variation against specificity okay like anything pros and cons here is not much better if you were to go hyper specific you did the exact same workout every single time you would drive a lot of adaptation because you're seeing exactly what you're going after at the same time though you've increased our chance of overuse injury problems because we're putting all of our load and stress in the same movement patterns the same joints

etc if you go the other direction which is like I literally just make up my workouts every single time right chance of overuse of a specific movement pattern goes down but progress also goes down because there's not enough stimulus in the same pattern

so we need consistency we need to drive a groove and get better at something but we don't want to be there so how do we play the game a little bit well we want to have what's called variation we want to have for you some sort of progressive overload how do we achieve that we can go up and load or wait okay we can go up in reps percent we can go up in sets we can go up in number of exercises we can go up on what's called frequency so how many days per week

we can do a combination we could reduce your rest intervals how much time you're resting between reps any combinations right but we have to have some strategy we can't do it all and what we want to think about is 10% which is no more than a 10% increase week to week okay that'll be enough where we can progressively overload you but also not really make our injury is too high so we would want a fairly consistent plan for maybe six to eight weeks or so

that we can watch and monitor I'm going to get great what I would recommend you doing is having say 50 workouts all planned out and you're going to get to the end of 50 whenever you get to the end of 50 we're not doing like you work out legs Monday you do upper body Wednesday no no here's your workout and this is the order you're going to do the man and here's the 50 you're going to complete and we're going to write a new program when you're not

50 but if you can get extra workout one done today and tomorrow you can get workout number two done great and then it's three days before you get to number three fine number four so instead of thinking about this on like a seven day micr cycles what we called it no we just have this much work to get done ideally we want to get this 50 done in the next 100 days okay great whatever you're going to go three four days in a row because you're like hey

actually got a trip going on I'm not going to train those two days so I'm going to train four days in a row that's not ideal but it's better than skipping three days okay great then you're going to come back and go hey I'm actually home for 10 days I got a stretch I'm going to go three days

or day off okay great but that's what we would do is a system somewhere like that well we you know what the end goal is but that allows us to then construct those 50 days with intentional overload as you know we're a sponsor of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company and last month I had the chance to sit down with Kristen Holmes she's a VP of performance at Wub and I learnt so much from our conversation about circadian rhythms and things like sleep

study show that for every 45 minutes of sleep debt that you accrue that your decision making ability will drop by up to 10% and when you're chronically under-sled you'll only be a fraction of the person the fraction of the boss partner friend manager that you can be

that's why I'm obsessed with Wub which not just tracks but coaches you on how to get better at sleep so you can bring your best to everything that you choose to do if you're not convinced you can try Wub for 30 days completely risk free with zero commitment just by going to join.wub.com

slash CEO that's join dot Wub dot com slash CEO and let me know how you get on if you don't like it there's no commitment join dot Wub dot com slash CEO had a big debate this Christmas with my girlfriend about creating so we're in Cape Town in South Africa and I went and bought

creating and I put up the table and I was like I'm going to start taking creating right that's so me not really known what it is what it's for that's right and she picked it up and then looked at the labeling gave it back to me and she said creating is not for women

and she she felt and I think a lot of people feel this this is why I wanted to ask you it is she thinks that she thought creating was for bodybuilders and I googled it and Google and showed her the Google thing and she was amazing and she started taking creating yeah but imagine there's a lot of people out there that think creatine is for people that want to just get stacked question sometimes you get deep in your world and you forget you know what people are really think out of that

that world so there's a website and company called examine dot com I have no affiliation with them but is it is an unbiased place so you can go to and you can ask that question for any supplement you can ask about creatine or you can ask about arginine or tongue out Ali or whatever you want you can also ask it by the adaptation so what are the best supplements for fat loss for brain function for cardiovascular health and it'll give you answers based on there so it's a

really phenomenal site so when you ask does it work well work for what and work how much that's the two questions right work for what so in the case of creatine it improves say muscle strength probably why she had that muscle size okay what's the way to the evidence lots of studies hundreds and hundreds of studies men women young old children all kinds of stuff right of astronauts space flight bed rest tons and tons of

research okay check that box what's the magnitude of effect you're probably looking at somewhere between a three to 12% okay that's a pretty good magnitude of effect for something that has an insanely good risk profile meaning like you can't cause imbalances with it it's not a hormone it's not a minerals it's not causing oxidative stress anywhere it's like really really robust in there and so when you look at it

you okay great pretty easy choice here I'm not it's not like the hormone stuff like so we're like you turning on something it's a fuel source so in fact remember earlier when I said metabolism your user using carbohydrates or fat as a fuel actually creatine is the third one it's a faster one so the stoichiometry is one to one so you can break down one molecule of fossil creating gives you one molecule of ATP it's the fastest one but it

gives you the lowest energetic output so it's a fuel and because of this there is extensive research on performance based things this is where it started on fact I remember as a kid when the entire palco and steroid thing hit baseball in the early 2000s

creatine was like on that list and that's where this entire association came because mark my choir and berry bonds were using all of course allegedly whatever performance enhancing drugs they were not using and they were also using things like creatine and so that just kind of got lumped in is like

oh it's a steroid it's like a because it came from that world and most of the evidence and most of the research was on that fortunately the last 20 years honestly people have sort of left that with creatine because we know the answer there more interesting stuff is coming in things like bone health now my friend Darren can do just finished a really great study two year study on post-minal puzzle women at 20 grams a day typical dosage for creatines five grams so your typical body builder at

the gym is using five grams a day he put this in post mental puzzle women 4x the dose and did it for two years no adverse effects no kidney issues no problems improved some of the bone markers I think in the actual like the femur area that remember exactly it didn't improve others it's not a

miracle it's not a panacea but it was like hey didn't do any bad potential to help bone real density in a in a niche population that really needs it from just a simple fuel it's kind of rather than thinking about it like a mineral or vitamin or hormone thinking more of like protein

powder like it's just it's a nutrient that you get that that fuels it in addition there's been at least two trials that I can think of at the top my head that have shown that it may enhance things like mood there's a ton of research on traumatic brain injury long term physical brain

health because it is such a fast fuel source it's actually a preferred fuel source in your brain the your astro size which are kind of like the central nervous system cells thrive on creating so they absolutely love it so it is a neurological as well so it'll help the

neurologic system as well as brain and tons and tons of stuff is an antioxidant and has some like mild antioxidant properties and a bunch of other stuff so while I understand a lot of people still here and think about it as like the muscle thing that's because

this was came from the dominant research but really I would encourage people to look at more the last 20 years what people that are doing creating research the topics that are actually studying and it's not muscle growth and young healthy guys.

There's two most replayed moments these most replayed moments are basically from the podcast and interviews you've already done the thing that people replayed the most and I was looking at what those moments were because I find it quite interesting and I thought I just let

you know what they are the first one was people over rating burning fat in anaerobic exercises a method of fat loss and this is really what I want to talk about is I've definitely grown up my whole life thinking that the way that you burn fat is by running.

I mean this is what most people think right they think you want to burn fat around here the belly fat the best way to do is go for a run and a lot of people have very little luck with that and then beating themselves up so to close off on this conversation I'd like to hear your take on that. You need to think about fat loss in a broader approach than most people give it to.

What's this is say when you say fat loss let's get specific what we're meaning is we're losing fat and ideally we're preserving muscle that's what that's what we typically want okay we're also talking about losing fat so that it stays off as long as possible those are baked in to that phrase but oftentimes forgot so the advice I'm going to give you is with those two assumptions in mind you're trying to keep as much lean muscles you can and you're trying to make this a successful journey and not

something you have to repeat again time and time totally right yo yo dieting in fact one of the more probably the highest most cited paper I've ever published was on yo yo dieting I can review article on that so you can go read that it's people love that paper.

I was just a co author Jackson wrote that paper so credit goes to Jackson for that but making sure you're paying attention to see those parameters in mind how do I lose weight you can look across meta analyses and review articles and you will see the number one predictor a long term successful weight loss and by can weight loss and weight loss and fat loss is always adherence. It's adherence to your workout program and it's adherence to your nutrition program.

So step number one before we worry about any change in diet we still start arguing about which method of exercise is best before we start really going way down the line to things like genetic testing like you're really wasting your time here and a lot of that stuff especially if you're not paying attention to what's going to make you adhere the longest amount of time. In fact if you just stop right there that's enough for most people.

Can you put yourself in a position where you're able to feel abundant with your nutrition approach and notice I'm trying not to say diet here right should be nutritional approach you have a balance between living life and flexibility but then also figuring out what triggers you and maybe you don't have a trigger maybe you can be flexible maybe eating more stringent like all the things that go into it you got to figure out a system so you're not people will not be on a diet very long collectively

on average diets don't work for those exact reasons right you got to get to a caloric deficit somehow but you got to do that in a way where you still are happy and sustainable totally right and you're still for energy and you're there and that is working for you right and that's different for every physiology.

Great and you got to me the exercise system is same thing right if you hate running there's no reason you don't have to run a step to lose a ton of weight if you love running you should run if you hate lifting weight fine I can work with any parameter you give me if all we're concerned about is preserving the muscle mass and losing fat over the long term that's really what we have to consider the most okay now within that does that mean every training and

nutrition program is the same no no not at all there are fundamental differences here's the problem to think about if I said hey you're going to do the same training program in us your life you'd probably be like whoa but if I told you

that with nutrition people are like well yeah of course like there's you know magic diets that like no keto great meta training great high card great great great you can do them all they can all work for you some people taking on gluten helps some people great great great sure all of it is possible

right we come from very different backgrounds if you look at any of the research for example like a really interesting point on genetic testing if you're not taking account genetic background on that genetic testing for things like nutrition precision nutrition is entirely worthless because we

see classic markers that are associated with say more effective carbohydrate utilization or fat utilization or or body composition and they might predict a decent percentage of variance in European Caucasians you apply those exact same things to West African or East African and those variants go to

zero people forget that part when they start talking genetic testing they have not been validated across all ethnic backgrounds the ones that have have shown they range from like 40% variance to zero so like really like you're way way way ahead of the cart here paying attention to things that

just do not matter we got to get you on a system that works okay great for some people that might be more nutritionally based all right you can lose and preserve muscle mass really well by just going decently high on protein and then regulating your calories example I gave you earlier you want

to go more carbs less fat great you want to the opposite like we can play those levers no problem all right what's your problem though I struggle with car cravings okay great all I struggle with hunger pangs okay great I struggle with okay well then we're going to make those decisions based on more

of this more that based on like where is your pain point wish your problem I struggle with the okay great I have to now we're personalizing now we're individualizing based on things that are going to matter orders of magnitude more than other things that I've just talked about

right that stuff will trump it exercise the same thing maybe you you hate exercise okay great maybe we can get you to walk a few times today and we'll get most of our fat loss through nutrition maybe the opposite you love training but who man you just struggle to eat whatever or not eat

something all right great maybe we'll play the game more with you know will power will push the pace on our exercise high intensity fine low intensity fine weights great cardio great surfing great like I don't know if you can like I don't zone six tone I don't care all of it can be done okay some of

the foundational things that tend to be consistent for those two things on most people is you need to make sure protein is adequate hard to maintain muscle mass with lower protein especially if we're going hypochloric so keep protein high you want to do something revolving strength training at least once for the same exact reasons something that makes you burn a lot of calories long duration high intensity either way that's all you really have to do if you

can do that stuff consistently over time you're going to get there you're going to be just fine where we see problems are people that put themselves in a position of scarcity would you mean by scarcity for anyone that doesn't mean it depriving themselves of the pride you feel like you're never

good to do the thing you want to do cycle this is a psychological thing right totally causes the yo yo effect which causes the problem of consistently in here it's over time right so making sure you do that I personally have some go to standards I like to do I'll happily share that with

you I tend to like to have a decent balance between kind of our anaerobic strength training high heart rate stuff and our more steady state longer duration so so if someone's going to be able to work out three times per week I'm probably doing one thing where we're going long duration call it a

hike call it a swim call it a run whatever we can do and then the other two days I'm probably doing a combination of lifting and then probably finishing with some high heart rate thing right so we'll do like a little bit of strength

and hypertrophy muscle growth work and then we'll do a circuit or an aerosol bike or some sprints or like what what can we get you into it's like really really hard if I can get you in an environment where you're working out with some other human I love that is there any reason why you do the

strength first and then absolutely that's a great question if you do strength training before endurance work your strength training will not compromise your endurance in fact sometimes it exacerbates it if you do your endurance first you're going to be more fatigued and you're going to

lose strength and so have worse performance in your strength training what's the most important thing we haven't spoken about you know if there was one more thing you could add of all the things you know that would allow Jennifer who's

a 34 year old single mother or Dave who's a black cab driver in London the average person I think it is exciting what's coming in the world of human health and I think it's helpful for people to know that stuff because a lot of challenges we're facing and it worse we have things that are going to be

possible pretty soon kind of stuff I'm talking about this idea of precision exercise precision nutrition it's not really available to many people to expensive etc we're going to cross those barriers pretty soon we are working on a project right now called the human digital twin so this is a

combination of you know a couple of my companies so the sleep company apps arrest our blood work company by Talady blueprint spring box there's another company called axial force that actually has four sensors in your shoe and we can see early changes potentially in gate so how you're

walking which could potentially and research is needed here but potentially be early signs of Parkinson's development or logical disorder so we'll see this in symptoms companies that are involved in this entire thing we can take all those data we're actually doing this right now put them together and make what's called the digital twin this allows us to make your physiology and so from our perspective it by you know by Talady we've got all your blood work

and molecular biomarkers from absolute rescue got your sleep we've got your movement patterns we can actually work another company to watch you physically move and do us we can take your physiology and upload it then from there we can run endless simulations of combinations of nutrition and training and supplementation medicine movement daytime patterns sunlight water all those things and figure out really quickly how you're going to respond the best for

whatever outcome we want it's not ready at all right now but we're actually again running it right now we'll have our first cohort done probably in the week or so we have really really soon I don't know how well the model is going to be the first time through it I don't know if our groups going to be the best at it it doesn't matter but this is clearly going to be something the world is capable of as we get better at being human sensors and we can bring those

data in we're going to be able to deploy things like this and say hey yo this is most likely to work for you the digital twin is already being used for the heart it's in place we have the digital twin of the kidneys is as well the lungs are coming soon the heart is coming pretty soon there's lots of

groups I'm not involved in those projects but that's it's coming on board so the ability to not have to guess anymore and most importantly try I tried this for six weeks it didn't work I tried this for night that's going to go away

really fast great you still have to go do all the work the technology won't work out for you well we have some stuff that I'll do that too what's the cost though like when you were saying all of that we spent the entire length of human history with one maybe arguably two singular goals one of

them at the core was stress reduction that was what we're after right you create communities so you're safer you create homes so you're environmental you create agriculture so our food and we all wanted to reduce the stress thing right didn't call that but that's what it was and then we got to the year 2000 or so we realized oh fuck maybe that was the wrong target I saw in your bookshelf at home there's a book called the comfort crisis oh yeah and that just

flashed in front of me as you were saying that yeah shut up Michael it's a great great question when we have astronauts come back from the international space station getting people to live on Mars it's a bit of a rocket problem but it's a bigger physiology problem and that this

H.D.T. project for one is part of the people we're working with is Cody Burkhardt who runs human works at NASA figuring out that line of going you don't want to release stress if you do like what happens when we send people up to space because there's no gravity your physiology tanks really

quickly right they come back oftentimes astronauts come back and like they can't physically walk for a few days because in that case that aspect now other aspects of stress are way up we've lost some of the core tenants that it means to be human and we are not ready for that we are not ready at all

to be able to be told oh yeah run this scan and here's exact combination of life you need to run not even counting the ethics behind on that like the ethics of genetic testing alone are really really interesting to say the least the ethics of doing something like that we have not thought

of this stuff right collectively we there is more in our world than our human experience than just straight answers right this is one of the beauties of this ride we get to take I don't know if we have good answers I think we've clearly shown we're not very good at asking those questions before never because the incentives in the short time is so tempting we're seeing this with AI at the moment it's just so tempting yeah and then we we figure we get

the results back in 20 years and by then it's just too late I mean look at the current health position that we're in right we went after that entire idea of minimizing as many stressors as we possibly could and all we worked yeah oops now we have to go back and do this weird thing we re re re

engineer stress back into our lives you have to be very careful and judicious when you pull things out of a natural state I'm being very choosy with my words there if you're not directing stress you're letting something else direct that that stress is still coming one way the other

which means adaptation is coming so you can be intentional and point that ship in one direction or you can cover your eyes and think it's not happening at all and realize you're getting pointed somewhere else it's better to least have the acknowledgement this is why the word

consciousness is in the title of of my book it's this is part of the process right you can be aware of it or you cannot from there you can choose whatever you want that's entirely up to you and all that I just want people to realize you're making a choice one way or the other so when

you're involved technology into the picture AI is is another really really challenging thing in a lot of ways at all reiterate we've seen this already play out and we know the answer is this gets worse in terms of we're not going to make very good choices right away how does

that manifest itself in the end I don't know nobody knows but to date we're not particularly good at making that decision so there's lots of consequences there I think that we have there the last one last thing I'll say on this is if you break down okay the way that we

structured is there's four pieces okay in order for you to have more success at your performance and health you number one have to have assessment once you have all this data you have to go to step number two qualify good bad great worst ever best in world history okay we're

struggling on that we don't know what healthy it looks like I know what clinically deficient records looks like I know what obesity and type 2 diabetes we know disease we don't know what good versus great means there are no databases I can pull from there is no metric

I can look at and say what what is a great what's a great vertical jump number what does somebody need to be able to jump in their 40s to be healthy like we don't know these things and I don't know it by ethnicity and I mentioned that before that's a critical component because

it's clearly different right there are some markers in basic blood chemistry that are not different in Southeast Asians are that are different in Southeast Asians versus Northern Europeans like we don't have that fully fleshed out and we if we do it's for disease

markers we don't have the good so I don't even know what I'm judging okay no assessment great where are we going to get these databases the super healthy people as the world continues to get less healthy I'm losing my population to pull from really really quickly okay

and the next piece is okay great you've told me that this marker should be here pick your marker whenever you want how do I get it there and that's really we're struggling so the second problem is what I call polaris like we have no nor star we don't know where this

thing should go the third one is okay and how do I get there what is the intervention what is the thing that's where I actually think people in my field are going to not only maintain but increase their value such as like personal coaches physical therapist

athletic trainers people that are going to nurses because you might have an AI that can come in and run something and say great your numbers are here and our metrics that you should be here and then you should go do X I want somebody there with me I want a human taking me

through X that's going to feel better because we don't know there's almost no data on okay great what is the optimal training for that marker what is the optimal nutrition or that is really really limited so we have to rely on expert we have to rely on people

that go I know the evidence base but then also my experience I'm think about this this way if you were an NFL quarterback and you tore your ACL and we ran all that stuff on you you would still come back and go oh great there's a coach over there who's

actually run people through ACL recoveries on 15 starting NFL quarterbacks like what's it going to cost you're hiring that person right because like you've done it before fantastic like the budget doesn't matter at that point because the person's actually

done it and they will be there fantastic I really feel like our field is going to increase in the value because of that they're going to want to say okay awesome the numbers came out on this AI told me this is there you've done it before yeah done a lot great I trust you the most I want you by my side I want that companionship as we lose more and more connection to other people this my bias depending on my field that like this is a great place where people want someone there online coaching is

great that's fine and all that but you're seeing actually already a premium coming on like you know I want to hire an in-person trainer can you give me that person we're like the boom was the opposite for a while and now it's already swinging back where people would rather have somebody there in person for all those reasons so that is I think an incredibly interesting challenge but that's that's the way to think about it that top one's going to get better lots of problems but what are we

comparing against and what do we do about it that's going to be the real trick we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves the question for the next guest not knowing who they're going to leave it for who on your team or in your life can you not function without who rarely ever gets the credit they truly deserve oh man I can't see any scenario how that answer doesn't go straight to my wife Natasha I don't want to be you know cliche on you and that one but it's not cliche in my

case it is like she is fundamental to so many things about my life the success I've had in the last any number of years is in large part like because you're her and I mean tactically but I also mean like unfortunately I'm not particularly fond of

talking to people when it comes to like someone crummy happens or whatever I'm just like okay like I'm honestly pretty good about separating those things out so I only like locked and talked to people about this stuff but when I do that's pretty much going to be her for the most part and

she's also very good about sometimes because it's you know when things that affect me affect her it's the same thing so sometimes it's like oh she needs me to talk to like I don't want to talk I don't care it's like okay I have to get in it but she's good about being like this is what you need and this you know so yeah I mean just there's no scenario in which she's not the answer that question.

Thank you so much you know this is probably the longest conversation I've ever had but for good reason because I could have carried on talking to you for a very very long time I find it absolutely fascinating and you're I've never really met anybody like you in the sense that you're so

so innately passionate mission driven and so rigorous in the way that you present information and you provide really really important nuance to everything you're saying as you're delivering it and I think it's really really remarkable it's really really really remarkable and I don't say that

lightly but I've spoken about this subject matter before you know I've had people on this this podcast to speak about this but I've never ever learnt so much you know I am really really mean that but I've also never felt so empowered which I think is an important point to add because sometimes

you can learn something but it can feel disempowering but to make me feel like I've I'm intellectually better off in terms of like my intellectual wealth around the subject matters but also feel really really empowered is a real superpower you know and I just wish we could bottle you up in a jar use AI to keep your life forever because I think you're a real force for good in the world so thank you so much for giving your time today it's a real honor.

Oh man I don't have acceptance like that so thank you so much so I can say. It's a honor thank you so much Dr. Andy Galpin. Let's talk about Zoe who you may know because the response of this podcast and I'm an investor in the company you guys know health is my number one priority.

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