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

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These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product does not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. I think this is how the two I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Hello boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferris. Welcome to another episode of the Tim Ferris Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world class performers from all different disciplines.

In this case, exercise science, and it is very self-interested. I wanted to talk to this guest, Andy Galpin, about a reboot in the new year. What should I do to train for very specific things? What should I do to improve sleep, etc. and so on, and so on? Andy Galpin is a tenured full professor at California State University Fullerton, where he is also a co-director of the Center for Sport Performance and Founder Director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory.

He is a human-performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics, and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations.

It turns out he has done research. His team has done research on many things that have been on this show. I didn't realize some of it in advance. Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes, including all stars, all pros and MPs, Sia Young and Major winners, Olympic gold medalists, and world titleists and contenders, across many, many different sports that include MMA.

For instance, UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, all the acronyms, Olympics, boxing, military, special forces, and much more. He is also a co-founder of Bio-Molecular Athlete by Taliy Blueprint, Absolute Rest and Rapid Health and Performance. You can find all things Andy Galpin at AndyGalpin.com, and you can find him on Twitter and Instagram at Dr. Andy Galpin, spelled G-A-L-P-I-N.

Just a few additional notes on this episode. I asked Andy if he would be willing to provide a number of bonuses, a number of resources that we could put in the show notes at Tim.logSlashPodcast, and he very generously agreed.

Those include some synopsis overviews of the various training protocols that were mentioned in this episode, specifically related to the prep for my skiing, but that applies to a lot more than just skiing, could apply to any number of different endurance sports or maintaining strength over a period of training and just about anything. That's my interpretation, not his.

He also agreed to include a number of different resources related to micronutrient testing, and a number of different supplements that he feels pull their weight from a scientific credibility perspective with respect to endurance training, and in my particular case, training at altitude, including skiing.

We cover a hell of a lot in this episode. We cover sleep banking. We talk about basketball tweets and how they tie into sports betting. Believe it or not, testing sweat. Talk about using respiratory rate, so overnight respiratory rate, which you can figure out pretty easily, as a proxy, an indicator of many other things.

Last but not least, I asked Andy if he would be willing to provide a few snippets, anecdotes and explanations for a number of bullets that I didn't get to cover. He recorded those separately, and I added those to this episode for you to enjoy. Here are those bullets.

Number one, doubling a client's testosterone by just changing what path he took for his morning walk. Number two, curing a lifelong sleep disorder in five minutes for $22. And now please enjoy a very wide ranging and very practical conversation with Dr. Andy Galpin. The honest reality is, as I've mentioned several times now, our approach is to have as comprehensive as testing as possible so that we can get the most precise and specific solutions that we can.

But the reality is, the vast majority of people will respond best through a multifactorial approach, addressing all of the big rocks at once is almost always going to be required for people to get their best results. That said, having done this now really hundreds of times, there have been some fun cases in which people have this remarkable results with extraordinarily simple and sometimes even cheap and really one change approaches.

And so I do want to really reiterate that those are the exceptions to the rule. And I think that's important to stay here because that stuff can be intoxicating. It can really drive confusion. It's like, oh my gosh, maybe all of my problems are really just this one thing. And that can happen.

Of course, I'm about to show you some stories, but really, really, I don't want to fall prey to any thoughts. Sometimes that really this one particular thing I'm going to share is the cause of all human sufferances, clearly not the case. The very first one is from a colleague of mine, Dan Garner, Dan is a world renowned specialist in blood lab interpretations and really him performance. And so Dan was working with the client and the Dallas Texas area.

The client had done many of the right things and had a lot of success, but was particularly interested in elevating his testosterone. And so despite the fact that things were going well, that number wasn't moving as high as that individual wanted and remind you, this is medication of T.R.T.s hormones. Things like that are off of the table. We're not medical doctors is not what we do. And that's not what this individual wanted. So the question was, can we do this without those options?

And so Dan had kind of run him through many of the normal stops and we're still struggling to figure it out. And so we kind of went to the next level with some of the biomarkers we looked at. And Dan was able to identify there was actually an allergic response happening to something in his environment. And you can actually differentiate if it's coming from environmental factors or other factors based on a handful of different blood markers.

And so something was going on there and we didn't know what it was. And didn't rather. And we knew something was there. And so long story short, what I ended up happening was it was actually response to some of the trees that were in this man's neighborhood. And he was basically allergic to those and didn't know it because it wasn't creating a sufficient enough of response from to figure it out.

And it turns out that those trees were basically on one side of his neighborhood and not the other one. And so the individual basically start his day going outside and going for a walk and would walk right through these trees. And it's just kind of exacerbating that response. And there's a known pathway there that will lead to many things including compromising sleep quality, et cetera, et cetera.

And that eventually was was compromising his testosterone. And so really the ultimate change that was made was still continue to take those daily walks. But instead of walking out of the house and going right and walking around the block that way that he went out of his house turned left and walked the block in a different area that was no longer exposing him to those trees.

So you did that weighted six or eight weeks or something like camera with the exact time to main and then testosterone was checked again and it was almost doubled by that point. So again, fun little story there at a typical but absolutely possible and thing that we've seen a number of times over the years.

Another really fun story I like is from the sleep now this is actually in a professional athlete that we've worked with and has happened more than one time this exact thing has happened more than one time. And so really I'm kind of kind of combinable multiple stories here. But when we do our sleep analysis, we're not just looking at your sleep staging and architecture. We actually able to identify what physical positions you are in.

So on your right side left side back etc and one thing that stands out routinely is how sleep quality drastically differs in people depending on their position. So some people really struggle on their right side or the left side of their back side and that it's very common for us to see people will have large percentages of their sleep problems in a single place.

And so again, seeing this multiple times and where people would struggle in this example was sleeping on their back and what we're able to do for a very cheap prices to go on to Amazon and buy what effectively looks like a fanny pack and reverse.

So you can imagine a standard not the over the shoulder chest fanny pack but the more traditional ones that just go around your waist like a belt and instead of having the pouch in front, you flip it around and put it on your low back and that stops you from sleeping on your low back. And forces the individual to sleep on the right side or left side. It's uncomfortable and it is weird for a few days or weeks but really it's pretty quick for the people that adjust to that.

Now in this story I'm referring to we were able to see over 90% reduction in sleep waking events in the very first night by simply putting that backpack on. And that was not a fluke that has been sustained for weeks and months after that. Now the individual exists been so long and get many individuals here actually they can really easily put out the pack entirely or it's not a big deal.

And then you can go to the other side of the world and then you can see that there's a lot of other people who are in the same position. So you can see that there's a lot of other people who are not in the same position and they can actually put out the pack entirely or it's certainly no longer affects our sleep but all they really don't notice it. And those reductions in the sleep waking events have persisted for months and months and months and months if not years at this point.

Dr. Galpinandi, nice to see you. Nice to see you. And I'm so happy to have this opportunity to do a podcast which is really a self interested self directed session with you in the guys of a podcast. Anytime you can do something for yourself and only yourself. That's a win. You have a history of competition in a competitive athlete. You have an extensive history of injuries which have forced you to become creative.

Well, you could have not been creative but you had the capacity to think creatively about your own training and training and then you also have deeply technical foundations and that combination of competitive experience, creativity and then technical capability. I think produces a lot of what you've been able to do which is why I'm part of excited to have you here today.

For a lot of folks who are listening to this who have listened to many other podcasts perhaps read many books they think themselves for fuck's sake there are a million different things I could be doing and it's helpful even if it's imperfect to sometimes rank order things I'll give you an example. So I've known povl Tutsu and for a long time perhaps best known as popularizing the kettlebell in the United States by and large and his position would be strength first.

Focus on strength first that is the mother quality and then also important as we age for a host of reasons that I'm sure we can get into and then you can add in other things sort of below that let's just say top of the pyramid or bottom of the pyramid depending on how you look at it. How do you think about the cultivation of attributes training and how to prioritize those things.

I will acknowledge my bias yeah I played college football I got into the sport of weightlifting Olympic weightlifting is you may know I'm technically called weightlifting I enjoy that side of the spectrum much more than I enjoy anything else right so I may sport kind of guy I don't really have as much love for physique.

Bodybuilding stuff like is it's always impressive but it hasn't gripped me because I'm always more interested in sports so I value being able to hit a golf ball 350 yards being able to

dunk a basketball being able to skate and ice I like when people can do a whole bunch of things in a well rounded area so that's my personal preference at the same time I acknowledge when other folks have a preference towards endurance or in that case physique that's important to understand because the way that I answer this question is built fundamentally upon my own bias as we'll probably talk about the entire conversation we all have that filter and so we're all aiming it out of lens and it's just personal preference and I will do my best as the conversation

of all stood when I feel like that's a fair representation of the science versus just my personal preference.

That's not always the same thing though sometimes it is so technically personally to me you outlined my injury history I know you have just to touch yourself oh yes just to touch quite a collection I actually prefer the very first quality is you need to move well what's that mean well there's different definition is depending on what you're asking your body to do but there are some colloquial standards you know you had Eric Cresci on recently

surely obviously is just the foundation of the field in large part so you guys covered a lot of that there but really you have to move well your joints for the most part have a fairly standard operating mechanism so your shoulders supposed to go through this certain range of motion your neck is supposed to be in a certain place your knee and your toes and all that stuff so you guys

going to refer back to that that conversation but you have to move well secondarily on top of that after moving well you have to be able to ask yourself well if I'm not moving well why not and someone like pop will come back and say well in large part is because of lack of strength if you're strong enough you move well I actually agree with him many many many things and that's one of them that said though I think there's a little more

nuanced there that I liked approach and so whenever I'm watching movement whatever that is to you whether you're surfing or you like jogging or you're doing to jitsu whatever you want to do is I'm going to join by joint and I'm asking a handful of things almost four specific things per joint number one doesn't have appropriate stability you can call this ability you can call this

strength it is the same thing right your ability to control the joint to make sure it moves when you want to move and when it doesn't move when you don't those things have to both be there it's not okay to just move it when you want and then not control you don't want drive car with that breaks total you have to understand that position right so you can put whatever phrase on I call a strength others call

stability but they just is just control right so is that joined under control is stable number two and this is even prior that first one are you even aware you'd be stunned how many movement dysfunctions and mobility restrictions and things that have seen on people and none of those are the case they just don't even know that their foot's pointed to the right or that their shoulders in the wrong spot they have no idea not only where they're supposed to be but they don't even have the

awareness where they actually are yeah so just letting you know hey did you realize that your left foot is playing forward your right foot is pointed 90 degrees which just a sign of can be very surprising because I like to think and I do think I have a reasonably high degree of spatial kinesthetic

awareness but I remember having some issue with my right big toe and I was doing a split squat type of exercise and this woman who was supervising at the time that are you where your toe is pointing basically to like it was my right foot like 10 o'clock on a

dial if you're facing 12 and I was like what are you talking about and she took a photograph like you're internally internally rotating that's you get it's because I didn't have the mobility in the big toe and so I was dodging that by kicking my heel way out to the outside that's that's interesting almost always the case would be the opposite no kidding out that flora also that you can actually get more in emotion your knees yes I was doing the drop the hip and throw the straight

right kind of position yeah so not to interrupt but even for someone who thinks they know where their body is in space you would be surprised and we don't need to go off course here too much but the reality is you don't need to be perfect yeah some of the asymmetry is absolutely fine and in large cases with almost all of our professional athletes you actually probably want some asymmetry right this allows you to create torque and to move in specific ways where if you're a majorly baseball

pitcher you need to be able to throw 100 miles an hour we have to have some asymmetry is a golfer all of our folks on the way you need those things so when I say that I just mean roughly symmetrical just give me a ballpark what's up ballpark I don't know there's no hard cut line there but you'll probably know when you see really bad I guess is the point and so number one was again are you stable number two was are you even aware of where you're at number three is

do you have some sort of rough balance between front back left right on the left side of your body to the right side of your body to the front side of your body the back side of your body once that mean let's just say we're going with with our knee right let's just say so my right knee right there you go was easy as an example if I'm doing some sort of hinging activity and my right knee is doing something different than my left knee now I'm concerned is my right

knee doing something normal to my foot is my right seed doing something normal to my right hip and so I'm looking not just at the movement pattern but how is it relative to my life if I say the same pattern on the right knee in the left knee and that's a different problem and they're different solution and if that pattern is exclusive to my right knee and so that's what I care about so if there's some level of movement in your knee maybe that's

normal if it's in both knees if it's aggressive in one side was the other you almost always have some sort of compensation happening now you've got to run a long algorithm here to figure out kind of what's happening but that's what I'm after and then the final step is can you go through full range of motion now that range of motion is different for every joint the shoulder does different things in the low back and the neck and fingers etc but you should be able to access full range of motion

we want to be able to produce strength and have control in those and ranges of motion without significantly compromising any other joint and that's really as complicated as it needs to be and so yeah can your knee fully flex great can it do it with any load whatsoever doesn't have to be 600

pounds is the reasonable load and then can it do it without significant compromise significantly compromise in your ankle or hip or neck or something else so really it's those four things if you have all that checked off then really your joints can access any movement that you want

under reasonable control so as long as you have that that is check box number one which is do you move well after that now we're going to play a game of okay great if you do it on by laterally let's just keep using the lower body so your knees are fantastic when I give you

support so assisted so your hands are on a table or I'm holding your hands when you're squatting or something like that so if I take load off the scenario do you check all four boxes yes you do phenomenal we're going to the next one now what happens when it's body weight only

you still move well great now we're going to the next one what happens when we add speed now you ask that going to move fast does it change his behaviors or patterns okay so you just speed before load I mean you could say I guess it's adding load in its own way

we'll just say additional external load yeah which could be gravity depending on how you should so that one I'm fine switching out if you want to go load first before speed absolutely fine it's it's really kind of 1a 1b yeah in that particular way but you need to understand what's

happening the point is you want to do all that before you get to the last one which is now fatigue you don't want to load a system repetitively if it can't handle let's just say it's the knee and we're going to go for a jog we know that even a moderate jog when you're in a single

leg stance is going to put four or five six times body weight on that load on a leg so even a slow jog puts a lot of load on your right knee in this particular case when it's on that single foot stance so it's a pretty high amount and now you're going to repeat that over five miles

or two miles or one mile doesn't really matter if it can't do it well when you have your body weight in a unilateral stance then we have a problem and just for definition unilateral meaning here what one at a time so what I kind of skipped over was in that initial assessment we're

going to go through bilateral stuff first and then we're going to go through unilateral the second one which is the way to say all right if you put your hands on a table can you do a squat and your knees and ankles move correctly and now what if I take your hands off the table now

it's body weight and now what if I add load okay great now what if I add speed now we're going to repeat that whole thing basically by saying okay now let's do it one leg at a time that it would be unilateral right so maybe you move well bilaterally but also when we get

that unilateral again one foot at a time now things collapse with speed or they collapse with load or they collapse is something else if I have failure points there then what the heck do you think is going to happen when I put that thing under stress and fatigue you know the

result right now again under fatigue you're going to have some tactical breakdowns that's just a that's a part of it but we're looking for red flags we're looking for egregious we're looking for am I really putting myself in a situation where you're just asking for injury

it is anytime you're talking injury prevention and asking you can go a million different direction to this it's never about can you stop injuries from happening that is not a real thing it's all about can you just reduce the likelihood and reduce the risk as much as possible

so to circle back to your initial question like where does that pyramid of me land that's initially how I'm thinking about it if you're moving well and you can do this unilateral you can do this under load you can do it fast and you can do it over fatigue and you can

really do whatever you want the only thing you have to pay attention to is how you're defining fatigue so this is not very practical this is ideal but one of the things we use a lot in training is determining fatigue by technical breakdown rather than an actual

you're going to run this many miles or you're going to run this much time or you're going to complete this much work it is how much can you do until we see significant break in posture and technique until you're on the aerosol bike and you're all the sudden

hunching over now your chest is on the paddles in the front we've stopped at that point because what are we doing we're potentially reinforcing a bad pattern we're re-enforcing an idea of when you get tired just go ahead and break posture we don't want those things right that never is going to be a win in our book occasionally you're probably not talking under 10% of the time I'll let it fly that can't be the pattern let's take this to the personal on my side we're going to talk about Tim 4.0

I like it not even two point oh it's not even two point I was like the shoulder two point oh is a while ago 4.0 which will hopefully involve fewer MRIs fewer emergency room visits and I'll lay out some of the basic specs and mysteries maybe and then we can go from there so the first I think will be time-bound in a way that will resonate with a lot of people listening and that is we're recording this in late December and in early January I'm going to be looking to

re-engage with all sorts of training you in the whole rest of the world me in the entire world and in this particular case I do have two months blocked out for skiing and ski training and I've got lessons already booked with a technical coach so I have the technical side let's just say it organized I will be at altitude I'll be doing ski touring in addition to downhill which I find very meditative I also find very challenging cardiovascularly and so far so

good that is the same as last year and I made a ton of progress technically physically as well lots of great adaptations the big difference is that as we were talking about a bit before we started recording I've had effectively nine months of deconditioning and I've had this persistent sometimes crippling constellation of low back issues which thankfully are seemingly on the mend although I do have some questions for you about it I'll give you sort of a

bit of a few things that are going on but before I get to that I wanted to say that for a lot of folks they're going to go through cycles if they're not consistently competitive athletes of detraining retraining at least for me as someone who used to be very competitive in various sports there's a higher risk of believing that I'm 15 or 20 or 25 again attempting to do things I used to do and getting myself into trouble so this was the broad question is if you

would you have a conversation about training maybe program couple of wrinkles so the first is that I know my low back as an example and probably a lot of the posterior chain is weak because I've avoided anything that would potentially be inflammation and I've had a million and one different

diagnoses of this low back compression sensitivity which I do think is a thing some stenosis of L4L5 on the right side etc etc however I've been told by a number of folks like inflammation is not the issue however when I address inflammation symptoms by and large vanish I was on like

maloxic am and all sorts of anti-inflammatories for a period of time end up doing an extended fast a few let's just call it two months ago so week long water fast and in combination of a few other things complete remission of symptoms for weeks and that raised a lot of interesting

questions when I am training for two months unlikely I'm going to take a week to fast water fast I could about it would present some challenges so trying to figure out how to approach things recognizing in my older years which I did not perhaps recognize my younger years that there's a

high potential for injury here if I approach it the wrong way a few other notes last season when I was skiing I noticed that I got more chatter on my right leg so if I took like a carving turn to the left I would get more chatter on the right leg and I was like that's very interesting and my

left leg I have noticeably larger say calf on the left leg but I did a dexascand recently and overall I have more muscle mass on the right side I was like okay that's interesting so I was like so it seems like I have more muscle mass on the right side but I'm having a lot

more chatter meaning stuttering on the slope that the curves aren't as smooth my priority is skiing so if that means it's to my benefit for relative strength and skiing to lose some upper body mass that's fine with me I don't care where would you start in this particular case if

you're just listening I can't explain to you how big of a smile I have on my face during that whole thing this is what we live for right this is exactly what I like to do now you can take a couple of approaches here small the big or big to small I think you know where I'm going to go yeah

here's how all of our coaching goes exactly what I do for anyone that comes to any of our programs in our coaching programs I want everything I want to collect everything on you and that's going to allow me to stop messing around I would love to do a full battery and gather

everything from my cuticles to my you know my chest hair and do the the 100% analysis and the reality is you're here for a day you're taking off and then I head to the undisclosed high altitude location in this is called 10 days so chances are I won't have an opportunity

to do all of that so be curious to know given that constraint I realize I should do it but given the constraint what you might recommend in the interim yeah we're those places you have to start let's start with maybe you want me just cover a couple of really specific short ones

that to do that folks could try okay and a very easy one that almost everybody has access now that's not everybody many people have access to if you have any sort of reasonable tracker of any kind respiratory rate is a phenomenal insight into everything that's happening in your

body I would make the argument that blood work would be the most important thing that one can do here if done appropriately even cheaper and easier than that respiratory rate will tell you a ton of stuff so what we're talking about is how many times you breathe for a minute

specifically overnight so if you can measure your respiratory rate overnight you'll have a great insight of what's happening a lot of stuff can be explained here's roughly why when you take a breath in you're bringing in oxygen when you exhale that releases CO2

at all times you're playing this oxygen into CO2 game oxygen is primarily responsible for regulating cellular metabolism energy CO2 is meant to regulate pH it does a lot of different things but that's the primary mechanism CO2 then has a bi-direction relationship

between psychology and physiology meaning a psychological stressor get really excited get really happy get upset can cause alterations in the physical body right specifically through CO2 exercise movement any physical stressor increases CO2 concentrations but that will then

be registered psychologically as hey be more alert be more focused be more anxious all those things and so when you see an increase in CO2 concentrations that are developed from any tissue a suicide muscle that increases CO2 concentrations in the blood that is then registered as

energies going out physically so let's be prepared psychologically again more focused all the things and so your body is constantly measuring CO2 and paying attention what's happening and this is good right this is one of the main mechanisms in which our body switches us

up and down to the autonomic nervous system and so on one end of the spectrum you've got sympathetic drive this is fight or flight this is freeze this is awake alert anxious all those things it's important understand that's not good or bad that is just a thing that happens right so as you and I are

sitting in this conversation we should be little anxious why want to be hyper focused my eyes need to be narrowed on you I shouldn't be having a panoramic view a gentleman should be up I guarantee our course all levels are a little bit as that's the point right it's a tool to get yeah

parasympathetic is the other side that's rest digest that is lethargic that is depressed that is all those things right so right now we want to be alert like this and when we're done tonight go to sleep we want to be very parasympathetic and lethargic amazing we'll see you two

two constructions are driving something only thing but it's one of the main things driving where we're out of that spectrum and this is why things like CO2 tolerance which we studied in my lab are connected to state and trade anxiety they are connected to a lot of different things and so this

is Brian McKenzie Brian he's done this for probably a decade we've really spent a lot of time on CO2 for a long time it'll tell you a ton of what's going on that then drives respiration because the primary thing remember CO2 is regulating pH and so when your body senses CO2

concentrations are getting a little bit higher it's going to tell you ventilate breathe now if we were to have you hold your breath and just say take a breath and hold it eventually you start feeling that air hunger and that like panic to breathe that desire to breathe and eventually if you

hold it panic panic panic unless what altitude or something weird that sensation is not being driven by running out of oxygen it's driven by increasing CO2 right CO2 concentrations is why you have to have carbon oxides sensors also why you need to be careful about shallow water blackouts

if you're doing a bunch of crazy breathing exercises is why you don't want to hyperventilate before those you're supposed to be saying all right CO2 concentrations are elevated in my system therefore I'm becoming acidic so therefore I need to start ventilating more so that I breathe more I don't

thought more CO2 that lowers my CO2 concentrations in my body and I'm back to normal hyperventilation is specifically exhalation so additional breathing where it no longer meets metabolic demand so I'm breathing more than I need to be breathing if you and I were to sit here and hyperventilate

right which done plenty of times that's putting you in a state of hypokapnea so capnea is the scientific for CO2 hypomeaning low so you have low word your CO2 below normal this causes what's called respiratory alkalosis right you've removed CO2 you've removed acid you become more

alkalotic right so acid on one side closest on the other side great now I'm response to that one of the major things that can happen is your kidneys will then start altering by carbonate which is the way you regulate pH as well causing potentially at least even temporarily metabolic

acidosis because the entire system is supposed to be balanced so now you've already altered pH in a number of different areas you've altered what's happening throughout human you've altered by carbonate you've altered all these things if you were doing that in the short term that gets too low we have all kinds of issues with blackout you do that in water right we're going to have a huge problem sorry people yeah people die yeah people die all the time

yeah not good you want the urge to breathe if you are getting to the point where you need to breathe yeah yeah for sure it's a good idea if I'm under breathing then we get hypercapnic right and so what's supposed to happen is you increase CO2 concentrations you get a little bit of hypercapnic this sends signals this is hey chemo-reflexers jump off and they say breathe more so you breathe more you dump your CO2 that's awesome so that rate of respiration or how often your

breathing is supposed to be driven by a number of things but in this particular case let's call it CO2 if your respiratory rate gets high we are now putting ourselves in hyperventilation it's not clinical hyperventilation and this is a story that will unfold so many times there's it just because you don't hit clinical markers for disease does not mean you're an optimal physiology yeah right yeah those reference range has changed a lot too right man I could

I could spend hours falling this is effectively what we do right yeah with all of our stuff we don't use reference ranges for anything yeah we have our own high performance standards I I'm not an MD I don't do anything medical

or disease related everything from our perspective is from the perspective of enhancing human performance so going from good to great going from moisture risk factor disease I don't care about that's like go see Peter Tia I can't help you there yeah again we take hundreds of biomarkers and I don't

think I've ever measured April we be in my life yeah never will it's not your game no my game I don't do medicine we do high performance you want to go from good to great I got you risk of 20 year disease I don't just exercise don't come to me point is I'm watching that respiratory rate if that thing starts to exceed 15 breaths per minute or so overnight I have a pretty good indication that you're over breathing now is this again clinical hyperventilation probably not I

don't know not for me to even call but I can certainly tell you're over reading because at that point for most people you're breathing more than your metabolic need you have a preferred tracking device for that a little bit of inside house here we use our own so my company absolute rest our sleep company we have a very very high quality one that not to pitch on this but the reality is you should you should pitch it if it's good just give a second option for like

the second place really it is ours is well by the time this comes out ours will probably be available it's a couple hundred dollars not a tracker it is a clinical sleep lab set up on your in your house with wireless and our technologies you've probably seen people with the polystem

biography sleep stuff like sure follow the place ours is entirely wireless you have to do that for a couple of bucks you put that on and we actually are absolutely rest absolute rest that company yeah we're able to run 150 hertz which means we're measuring 150 times per second most wearables are going to measure once every five minutes something like that so like our fidelity is just to touch higher which means we are catching a whole bunch of things this is by

the way an FDA approved device so we can actually set a second ago we don't do a bit of a lie was this company for diagnosing sleep disorders okay so the indication is we can clinically diagnose sleep disorders in your own home and your bedroom for you in a box at this point so that can be done with that we have tremendous insights because we're getting every single breath we're not missing any breath and HRV heart rate variability is also the highest standard possible

and we're getting overnight of that so you can pick other trackers those are all going to be in the same price range so there's really no difference anything you have is probably fine almost everyone has something watches rings bands whatever of different scenarios you can get any of those I'm trying in my head is there like a zero cost option or respiratory rate I mean you could certainly measure it you get close actually you'd probably overestimated if you just

little use a stopwatch and just measure how often you're breathing during the day I got a calm resting state my guess is you'd be a little bit of rouse so you'd probably be over breathing a touch so that might give you a little bit of a false sense but you could try it that way that would get you

close just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show this episode is brought to you by a G1 the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement and the true answer is

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out go to drink AG1 dot com slash Tim that's drink AG1 the number one drink AG1 dot com slash Tim last time drink AG1 dot com slash Tim check it out do the rings and watches et cetera do a comparable job to a chest strap of some type it depends on what you're measuring the beauty and benefit of

how something directly on your chest is not only do I get to measure respiratory rate directly but I get to measure respiratory depth which is an entirely underutilized tool by depth means of chest expansion that's correct yeah

and that's going to tell us a lot about what's going on that's we do that too that's put on there not at that in saying low price point but at other mar are full immersion part that that's going to get measured as well we we don't miss anything for the most part yeah so do they know

not Australia is no yeah got it okay so you could use both I mean just for people listening yeah I mean there are folks out there and we can probably spend a lot of time just done like respiratory muscles of for sure and so on but you're saying just to lead back after I interrupted things

that people can potentially do yeah right outside of the full Monty my hope was if something we can get a rough sense of respiratory rate because this factor alone and just numbers wise throw it out there again I always look at 15 there is actually excellent research on 16 there's

actually recent study that came out it was quite interesting on college freshman I believe and they looked at respiratory rate and they found that for every increase in one breath per minute so you went from 14 breath per minute to 15 to 16 there's a 25 percent increase in likelihood

of experiencing moderate to high stress and that was independent of a number of sleep markers sleep latency suit quality sleep timing duration things like that and so if you're using a sleep tracker of some sort and that's not changing but you're still feel like you're experiencing

stress or some of these other downstream things you will note it in respiratory rate you will see that move generally before it is more sensitive it's like if you've ever used resting heart rate as a metric for if you're kind of overdoing things or where to go it's okay but

that is a lagging indicator HRV is more of a immediate indicator so HRV would be superior the fidelity of change of HRV is much higher blood is even higher than that it's faster it's until you're tapping before HRV response typically but you would have HRV like resting heart rate would be

another rough way to do that respiratory rate would seem even faster but it's really really really really quickly you're going to have a change overnight for the most part if you get a cold if you have a few drinks tonight if things like that you will see a change in respiration almost

immediately if you cross that 15 to 16 and you continue to go up you see dramatic increases in risks of all kinds of disease states in fact the line again on the research and I'm kind of summarizing the entire world really it starts to break around 15 you will see reference ranges

that say 12 to 20 is normal I could pound that one as much as you want not sure I mean we could replace normal with common maybe but yeah right I want to see it 10 or 11 10 or 11 that's the number to be now there is genetic components to it

and some other things but used if anytime I see about 13 I'm probably taking action so let me ask question I want to and the action is where I'm going to be and before we get there I'm curious if the arrow of causality here is bidirectional or unidirectional in sense that when you exceed a certain

sum total of allostatic load respiratory rate goes up presumably that's what I'm gathering right can you reduce your overall allostatic load by targeting the respiratory rate directly or do you need to address the some components I suspect it's both and but I'm curious

if by addressing the respiratory rate directly for instance through meditation breathing practices does that help to reduce the some total of that allostatic load or do you have to go back to the pulse pieces okay is it just an indicator

no no so here's where it's fun excellent research on this for a long time 20 plus years of data on this physiology recognizes patterns the same thing happens with sleep I could give a ton of examples here happens with anything else but if your respiratory rate is elevated that could be

an acute or chronic response and it could be independent of the original causality which means let's say you had a really traumatic event could be not dramatic say you want a big game you got excited it doesn't matter positive or negative some sort of big event in the state of that you

went and to see with that drive that then elevated respiratory rate if that pattern is sustained that continues to hold place even when you remove that initial stressor so childhood trauma sure a period of extensive work completing

a dissertation having a child any of these things again it's not negative it could be good or bad that pattern can absolutely stay independent of the stress for being removed sounds a lot like pain signaling or anyway everything is everything my man like this is my physiology yeah it's going to

tell you the story right and so we can run a little bit of a triage share I look at your stuff and I see your rest for your rate 17 rest per minute and say all right I'm gonna look back to the rest of your physiology do I see any other indicators of acute stress I'm gonna look at blood that's

going to tell me lot was going on I can differentiate whether that stress is acute or chronic based on various markers I'm gonna ask you we're gonna have conversations when did you start noticing any signs and symptoms all back then kicked up okay did anything happen around them what's going on right we're going to figure this stuff out it's very important when you measure physiology you always need to understand symptomology like you're working with humans you're

not working with blood markers then this is always the case and so if you have historical data this is one of the benefits of tracking over time we can look back and say okay there's an uptake here your rest of your use be 12 and now it's up here now is 16 when's the breaking point if you don't have any of those things fine it doesn't particularly matter because we have two clear action steps we can take in either of those cases whether we have an acute specific

thing we're doing right now that's causing it or whether this is some pattern from 10 days ago to 10 years to it doesn't really matter right number one you know what here's a free version you can generally get a good sense of somebody's respiratory rate is high if they tend to feel very very good during light or low intensity exercise you know why what because their metabolic rate now starts to match the respiratory rate so if you're breathing at 16 breaths per minute that's

about four seconds right ratio you take 15 breaths in a 60 second window right it's about every four seconds two second inhale two second exhale right run them out there so if you are now going for a light jog doing zone two zone

one like low of activity maybe just walking these people are not always but oftentimes can't stand going a day without exercise they got to do some movement they got to get a sweat in someday a lot of the times those people's respiration rates high they can't go day without it because they feel

tremendous when they're doing a low level activity because now they're finally at a heart rate that's matching the rest that's matching respiratory rate and so what happens see two concentrations are normalized and you feel normal when you don't do that you go back into this is again this is never

perfect there's no panacea here there's no magic recipe with physiology ever so I don't over sell it but it's very common in our rapid health and performance program to have people like this who are just like I can't not work out right I get too much anxiety gets much and then you look and you're like I don't need to see your labs I can predict your respiratory rate I can predict your HRV I can predict these other things and they feel great there and so what is the solution

and any of these cases number one we have to reduce arousal which means you no longer get headphones when we exercise you no longer get headphones when you're walking you're not going to put in a podcast when you're going out to take the dog for a walk we have to reduce input and you have to and this is there's great work here from Emily high tower she has a course called skill of stress it is fantastic she's actually Brian Kenzie's partner phenomenal Emily is a

great resource she's on our team as well now instant part but she will talk about hey we need to read and regulate which means you need to read your physiological state you need to be aware that you're over breathing you should be able to read that state and then you need to be able to regulate it so what we're doing is reducing input and so whatever it is any physical activity not as a hard and faster rule but for the most part we need you to be bringing senses

out and paying attention to what's happening to your respiratory rate in this particular case so reducing arousal step number one this could be a no more work at night this could be like a lot of the very classic stuff you're doing too many things that bring up arousal at night or throughout the day we could insert some specific down regulation in the middle of the day any number of ways we can go about this but we want to have some point particularly after the place where

we have the highest sympathetic drive throughout the day your most focused and intense work session your most physical session and we're going to match that on the back end with an intentional down regulation piece what are your favorite levers to pull and I'm sure it's customized but just broad strokes with your high performing athletes and so on for the regulation post that's right yeah the easiest by far is give me two to seven minutes of just quiet

dark so we typically ask them to do some breath work post exercise which is simple as turn the lights off land your back put a towel over your eyes turn the music off and just breathe for five minutes if you want to follow a specific cadence and do something like box breathing fine if you want to do like a double exhale which means say a four second inhale eight second exhale so you're an extended exhale which is down regulatory typically fine if you're super into that

stuff if not just quiet and calm chill the fuck out breathe chill out do just like bring it down there's actually some initial data on that can accelerate adaptations to exercise is post exercise down regulation it's not an extremely strong area of science it's just a few papers but nonetheless it's enough for us to say okay what we want to do is take that high sympathetic drive and then we want to basically expand your boundaries so right now your boundaries of up and down

are narrow and we want to bring it way up with exercise in terms of sympathetic drive really high and then I want to match it with the downside and so is equal to opposite reaction if you got to a seven out of ten sympathetically I want you to seven out of ten or sympathetically that's going to increase your ability to go up and down not always the case somebody of the opposite problem this is far more complicated but broad strokes wise it's more common for us to ask

that than it is the opposite by doing that you are contributing to retraining breath rate and so that is the second step so first step was reduce arousal and you can second one is retraining breath work if you want to do something like

that just do very light level exercise but instead of doing just the movement we're intentionally keeping a breath cadence and so we're regulating we're saying you need to learn to breathe at three second inhale three second exhale and so we're going to do whatever exercise you want I don't care

goes hard as you want I don't care but we are capping your inhalation and exhalation right so be three seconds and three seconds out be so that was called ten to eleven target range yeah breath per minute there you go that's the idea and you can kind of do that so you take a combination of

approaches there to figure out what's really happening and that solution can be quick could be a little bit longer we're certainly and to be really clear not boiling down any or all mental health things into just picture breath rate

you'll be fine because it's not even close that simple but it is something from our physiology side that we're really paying attention to okay so hopping back to ten four point out oh yeah we got a little far off we know we didn't get off track man this is these are all interrelated but if I'm

going to head to the altitude in the scott seven to ten days I've already made a couple of what I would consider risk reducing decisions such as giving myself a week before intensive training to acclimate a bit to altitude because it always will affect my sleep for the first handful of days what

kind of rough ballpark my altitude you talking here ten thousand yeah let's call it ten thousand okay so I typically have elevated heart rate for lots of yeah straight forward reasons sleep is compromised dry blah blah blah part number one would be sort of reducing risk of injury right for me and

then because I'm not professional scared but even if I were I suppose I would be number one but given what I've mentioned and I'll say I just take a few more things in case they're helpful I realize this is a little bit of it's not as comprehensive as I would like but what I've observed pattern wise the kind of two things at once one is like minimizing likelihood of the back becoming a major problem which was last season I'd have to stop mid slope and like pick up one

leg to try to like relieve pain it was bad yeah and there were days when I just couldn't even ski because I hadn't slept the night before because I've been tossing a train with back pain right so a few things that have helped some of which are easier to implement than others so the first thing I've noticed very clear over the last nine months more time spent sitting the more back issues and when I did is some testing with Eric Cressy just basic stuff right but if

I'm sort of in a flexed position and I do a compression sanitary or extended doesn't really bother me if it's sort of straight up it down for lack of a better way to describe it compression sensitivity so a heel drop test fucking hate it very sensitive and other things that may or may not be helpful

certainly if I'm working and this is a layperson speaking to keep that my info experts sort of the antagonistic muscles if I'm doing core work of any type Pilates etc that tends to significantly alleviate the lower back issues Stuart McGill style kind of the fundamentals big for exactly

especially the side planks seem to alleviate a lot of the what I would tend to describe is just like overall like QL Spiner Ecclr tightness on the inflammation side interestingly I can gobble anti-inflammatories like tic tacs it does not seem to help much ice and ketones really help ketones

only in a fasted state but ketones and ice tremendously helpful with some durability I mean nice that effect lasts for longer than I would have guessed so anyway those are a few things but I'm going to be at altitude and 10 days at some point certainly I definitely will talk about this after

restart recording but would love to test the absolute rest at some I get that very very interested in that because the also like the polyseminography stuff it's like your first night's going to be dog shit right with all that stuff hooked you and then like it's easy to corrupt the

data how much do you want me to shit on polyseminography because I can no no no no it's a it is it is an absolute disaster and borderline useless yes let's save it we'll give people that but 10 days on my altitude how would you in lieu of since we won't have time to do all of this testing first

I am going to pay much more attention to the respiratory rate I suspect mine is elevated my resting heart rate also chronically I mean or let's she's a crime but for as long as I've ever paid attention to it higher than desirable well you're a data guy yeah we got to have data that we can use right

now yeah I mean I have certainly I'm sure we can't flare madness all of our special you know preferred markers and all that but I bet we could get a really strong sense what's happening based on what you have on your phone you certainly do some sort of tracking at this point of your sleep so I haven't used say or ring etc in a while just because I the main takeaways were like yeah don't drink before bed maybe don't drink at all so right I mean I there

were few things that I took away from it and I was like this is the problem right the significant difference between you don't have a clinical sleep disorder yeah and you're sleeping great are you familiar at all any of the research on sleep extension sleep extension yeah I don't think so oh my god like it's so insane if you want to understand your risk of disease 30 40 50 years okay yeah don't sleep four hours a night that's great if you want to look at what happens with

disease markers between seven hours sleep and eight hours okay that is not a convincing argument there right so the take on messages don't have horrific sleep but that is not nearly the same as optimizing your performance the data on what goes from good to great sleep on optimizing performance are strong there is a ton of research on specifically high performing athletes and a number of areas there's at least four studies I'm aware of in the areas of what we'll

call sleep banking or sleep extension sleep banking is such that before going into exposure of either restricted sleep high intensity or hydration training or both what happens when you bank sleep ahead of time get more than more than normal right and so a lot of these data are looking at things like going into fight camp okay going into training camps we know that we have a combination of increased training and so by that fact alone our renderer is because gone up and recent

training camp are higher you're coming in somewhat the conditioned just playing a part of it you're doing a high intensity a high volume at the same time now we also know on the side sleep goes down significantly during those phases of intensified training what you're about to go do right yeah so we're 10 days away we know that this is happening and we know your injury risk is going to quadruple yeah during this phase so that's roughly what it's going to happen now a bad

night of sleep is irrelevant that's not going to read increase your injury risk that much however if you look at and the research again is not insanely strong here but there is an association with risk and sleep and so the number one thing I'm thinking is okay you already mentioned you said a couple times your sleep isn't great when you're an altitude for obvious reasons yeah for the first week or two right we need to bank ahead of time like starting tonight we

need to maximize sleep as much sleep is humanly possible the number here is 10 hours you need to get to 10 hours of sleep we need to get ahead of that curve right we know what's going to happen and we know that for altitude we have first night effect you never sleep particularly well the first night in a new place you know all those things and we know how to do is going to have those physiological issues so we need to bank that that sleep banking can give you head sleep

extension is taking good and going to great sleep there's a handful of studies again probably five ranging from 45 minutes of extra sleep per night for three days all the way up to two plus hours a night of additional sleep for five to seven weeks data on rugby players high level endurance cyclists division one basketball players division one swimmers potentially missing other one but enough here four or five six studies from different laboratories looking at different metrics you're

going to see improvements in particular one is actually classic cherry ma's study you're talking about two hours of additional sleep per night and people already sleeping well the caveat with all this is we're not looking at sleep deprivation which is you know you went 24 hours straight without sleep or what you're going to fall extreme sleep restriction so you suffer four hours or three hours you're talking about people already sleeping reasonable amounts of time

and now you're adding this 45 minutes to up to two hours a night now in doing that you're seeing in cherries initial study 9% improvement in free throw shooting accuracy this is in division one basketball players same thing with three point shooting accuracy improvements in reaction time now these are actually not done in a single time so what they're looking at is kind of like I think they shot free throws kind of in practice every day they track that number over the

course of the season kind of thing so not like just one particular good day of shooting or bad with any of this stuff in all science has limitations these are not perfect studies in these particular case they don't have a control group

you'd also soon people get better in season like that happens but a 9% improvement in elite athletes of a skill let's say it was 50% high let's say it was 75% high like you're still talking a three four five percent improvement which is is really really impressive right there are data on NBA

players and their tweeting activity so how much they tweet post game as a defunct a measure of like who's the sleep and who's not and that can predict almost 2% of shooting accuracy the next day I'm just imagining all the quants were going to go out and start betting on games now based on analyzing

tweet volume and timing no sherry actually I think I don't know her at all but I've seen over so I think she worked for yes and for like three years and she did this thing where she would predict NFL games like who would win or lose

based strictly on circadian rhythms and I think she was like 70 to 80% accurate for three years that's wild Stephen Lockley who's actually works that's the rest of this he's done a ton of this work so there's things to pay were so off track here but this is too fun I'm coming back to a point to your

thing here second I promise I don't promise I lose sleep promise I'll do to it all right so what you want to pay attention to is sleep is sleep duration of course all that stuff is great sleep quality this is where polycynography becomes really problematic like defining sleep quality is really challenging yeah it's not the same thing so let me ask you question related to sleep and maybe we'll we'll dive in further into this but few things with sleep banking

I would imagine there are people out there and this would include me who would say I kind of wake up when I wake up and I might feel tired but I'm not sure how I would be physiologically capable of extending my actual sleep I could extend my time in bed but I'm not sure of how to extend it's that's let's just make that part a part B is very specific which is I'd be curious to know your thoughts on caffeine best ways to reduce or get off caffeine because what I noticed

recently I did 30 days with no caffeine zero this is first time I've probably done that since I was 16 oh and zero caffeine no tea no nothing for 30 days all of my sleep issues went away like resolved magically right of course and what was fascinating to me is that prior to that I would often try to fix my sleep issues by attempting to sleep more more time in bed I was I mean hopefully this is smart enough if I were tossing and turning I just get up right as

opposed to just suffering for an hour or two in bed what I noticed when I got off the caffeine is that I in many cases was quote-unquote sleeping less but I was going to bed earlier much earlier right I was going to bed in this case like 9 9 30 10 o'clock waking up a lot earlier but waking up wide awake yeah no fatigue no dragging ass no I need a cup of coffee so the two questions are for people who are listening and are doubtful they would be able to extend their

sleep what are some options that includes me right now because I'm back on the sauce and we we could dissect that it's been a fucking nutty last 10 days I'll spare you the drama but a lot of things have happened in life that were unexpected so my soothing mechanism has been drinking caffeine I'm willing to get off of it but now I have to do it when I'm in real life whereas before I had you know four weeks off the grid and it was of course I see yeah so for

people who are unsure of how they would bank sleep because they're doubtful that they could extend their sleep some options and then thoughts on caffeine or getting off of caffeine yeah this is why an appropriate measure of suit quality matters to figure out just what you're working with so I mean yeah yeah you have to right so that is depending on what wearable or tracker you're using that is defined differently by everybody I would caution you against two major

things here one worrying about a sleep score do not pay attention to that right that is in part almost all those are calibrated against polyseminography and that is somewhat arbitrary right even in 2007 they actually changed I think it's like the American sleep society or something yeah change their definition of what deep sleep is so moving target yeah and polyseminography for people who don't know I mean this is what we're referring to where they're like sleep lab

bunch of stuff stuck on your scalp quote unquote gold standard but what people don't know about that is number one those things change in the two all even in a sleep lab those are based on 30-second epochs right so what happens every

30 seconds and then somebody goes to their manually grades and decides this was a cutoff line this was not a cutoff line and so you're being still objectively scored even on like you went in the lab you went into sleep clinic you did the whole thing is a little bit nasty so so what should you pay

attention to different ways to go about that I do have an order I could wear one prior I mean I could put one on but so again we use or for the record with almost everybody for many reasons have used it historically so this is nothing against them whatsoever but even or is matched against polyseminography so when they say to 99% accurate or 80% accurate it's against PSG which I don't think is telling you the story the second part about that is problematic is think

about this one if I asked you and we had this entire conversation about training you said hey I want to train for my ski thing would I train the same way for this too much of skiing physically train as I would if that was now a marathon if that was just I want to feel better my joints or if that was I want to gain some more muscle and the obvious answers clearly no yeah we had the same conversation about nutrition but yet when we think about sleep it's just yeah

yes sleep more right if you want to get better sleep if you want to get better nutrition in your particular case you would hire probably somebody who's done performance nutrition for skiing you would hire a high performance person

for your physical training and sleep or in this type of skiing and some like that when it comes to sleep it's like go to sleep lab and get a doctor but that's all we have here right and so we don't think about sleep as a high performance tool when I'm saying that to save why do you think your sleep

stages should be the same every night doesn't make any sense what I expect your muscles to perform the same way no what I expect your nutrition be the same absolutely not so not only to you be really cautious with the sleep score but even worrying about how much time you spend in each one of those sleep stages based on a tracker is highly problematic yeah it shouldn't be the same when you go ski for six hours a day I promise you your sleep architecture is going to be

different than it is tonight oh totally and if I was cramming for studying Chinese it would be something else no question right and so we need to go a better way about thinking of overall sleep quality this is where things like okay what's your HIV look like what is your respiratory rate how do you feel did you have a hard time sleeping at 90 to wake up a bunch how do you feel right now when you wake up those are free ways to assess your sleep there's actually

strong data on two things here one I promise I'm coming back to the point I warned you before we started oh no you did this is why I'm alert I'm sympathetically activated to keep track yeah excellent data if somebody sleeps for eight hours a night versus five hours a night and you tell them the opposite you will see a physiological response so it's a corresponding but you told them rather than what actually happened so in other words if I told you man we did

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

thing that's growing in the field called orthosomnia right which is actually sleep tracker induced insomnia and so those scores matter to you they matter more than you think there's also an anticipatory response that can happen such

that this is why you don't check your phone first thing in the morning so when you know that a certain thing happens in this particular case checking your sleep score first thing in the morning you will then back calculate and start adjusting your sleep to wake up in that arouse state which then

compromises your sleep quality could you know that thing is happening in a certain amount of time mean you're anticipating waking up looking at your sleep score getting a positive or negative feedback and now it's disrupting

this is why we're typically waking up all of a sudden earlier don't know why things like that so all that stuff you need to be really really careful with understanding how am I using any of these technologies if I overall yeah so sleep quality will kind of leave it yeah to that for now sleep banking

how to yeah back to our original point here now when you are thinking about sleeping more we're paying attention to those other ones first duration is the when you keep saying sleep banking but really I've tried to make the arguments the quality matters and then timing so if you are in the same timing and high-barre quality you have to facto increased duration sure even if your duration didn't actually increase so the number one and two things I'd say

there is number one let's make sure you're timing your activity today in the right time of your physical day that's gonna make you feel like you slept more your performance will go up and so without actually increasing a minute of

sleep you performed like you it's like a pseudo sleep banking it's like pseudo sleep extension getting a higher quality of sleep and all the things is the same thing so that's step number one and two independent of a single extra minute of sleep if you still need that then this is where things like

napping can come in now be careful with napping I personally don't like it at all in these particular cases I'm okay going with it as long as it's not reducing sleep pressure like is it harming your sleep latency are you waking up more having a harder time going to sleep at night and you're losing total duration a lot of people can get away with a lot of napping and it doesn't work very well for me yeah okay so in your particular case I would say just take

what we have get as much sleep as absolutely possible and then build in what are non-sleep equivalents so what can we do throughout the day to encourage extreme down regulation and really banking that it's not the same as banking sleep but is it having the same potential well we've taken a couple of steps of logic away but it's close right so this is pick breathwork pick low intensity exercise pick non-sleep deep rest stuff right peak a you know in Nidra like all

kinds of things we can do that are going to simulate some aspect of sleep and that's what we're going to go after and then really doubling tripling quadrupling down on all of your personal known best sleep practices and just really making sure that is our top priority for the day one of the things I have to get done checking for my flight pack things like that and then the rest of the time like I'm really making sleep my so I'm starting my down regulation

practice now at three o'clock p.m. or something or whatever you do so that by the time eight o'clock kids like you're just in various end out so for me I would say these days not just reducing eliminating caffeine yeah and then ensuring I am not exceeding a certain duration of sitting which is fucked for this week some recording podcast but that's okay those two things if I attend to those two things everything else is rounding her yeah so those those are the two

putting aside the low back stuff for now we come back to it but it's such a narrow tangled mess of different theories and diagnoses but the caffeine is as opposed a little simpler not always easy but what is what is your position here and great I personally don't love caffeine much not as a scientist not as a coach as a human yeah I don't like it that much I'll have some but like a half calf espresso is like perfect just tiny backlamp down there your physiology will

tell you that answer and what I mean by that is I have plenty of people and I do find a caffeine and their sleep is fantastic and others it really is detrimental if you were to look across in the landscape of the research what you're globally going to see is caffeine is probably actually it just doesn't I'm not even talking about like hey you don't have caffeine past two o'clock p.m. or things like I'm not talking about literally any caffeine ingestion

whatsoever just seems to take the wrong direction yeah I think I miss a value it is for a long time because I can consume stupid amounts of caffeine and fall asleep but the sleep architectures disaster right it's like a one of the spider webs that is created by the spider on methamphetamine

yeah yeah that doesn't look right yeah that's my sleep okay so one of the things you can pay attention to is your physical output there are not any data that I'm aware of that suggests that sleep duration is linearly tied to energy expenditure such that if you burn more calories you don't sleep more

but there's clearly some association here I mean just based on basic physiology when we understand how caffeine works and how sleep works and that there's clearly an association let me give you a very simple example most people are aware at this point of a molecule called ATP right this is the

energy currency of all biology it's the only way we can use cellular energy now that stands for a dentists in try phosphate so it's an adenosine modicul with try three phosphates one two three the way that energy is created from ATP is you take one of those phosphates at the end and you break

that off in our biology that is exorganic meaning it gives off that energy and we can use that what that leaves is a molecule called anorotic phosphate so one of those peas is floating around and then now instead of having a try phosphate you have a die phosphate so there's two of them if you're to do that one more time and this becomes challenging but that adenosine die phosphate goes to adenosine mono phosphate you do that one more time and now you just have

adenosine those phosphates are now recycled and gone back that adenosine molecule is what drives most of sleep pressure and the way caffeine works is that will competitively bind to the same receptors so they're binding up to that receptor which means the dentists can't which means you don't feel the pressure for sleep right great this is why it causes so many sleep issues therefore it makes some intuitive sense to say if I burn a bunch more ATP this

should then if I have a bunch of caffeine in the system allow me to generate more overall pressure because I'm creating more total adenosine in the system better ability to bind now that's not the rate limit except to it that's why there's not a linear relationship there but you're gonna have some stuff there what I say that to mean is are people that engage in the most physical activity even when they consume decent amounts of caffeine tend to on average

still be okay with their sleep architecture and so one of the ways to do that of course genetics and how fast and you've probably talked about this but how fast you metabolize caffeine and don't stuff like that that all matters but the reality is if you are in that situation having a high energy

expenditure and the other one I'll say is having a high cognitive expenditure so making sure both those demands are really high are gonna get you in a position where if you have to be on the sauce and you say that you're giving

yourself the best chance to sleep the highest amount so when I when you asked me that second question of how do we think about caffeine we typically deal with high performing folks so whether this are athletes or non-athletes they're all in this game for high performance which means caffeine comes

long through ride almost all the time caffeine is an incredibly powerful hygienic a tons of research on it affecting enhancing human performance in a lot of ways right and so we use it a lot for athletes you're gonna perform better that's great but you have to play the game of sleep so when you cross over of yeah you had better numbers in the gym or on the core of her on the course or wherever at but now we've lost sleep there's no right answer here at

what point do we say okay I'd rather you be a little bit fatigued and not train as hard but then sleep tonight and I can't answer that one of the easiest examples is with our pj golfers and so here's a good example you're gonna be on a course for four to six hours in the pj tour energy is a big deal so we got to keep these folks especially when it's hot and we're playing in Augusta and we're playing in like all these really difficult places so we got to keep

people hydrated and performing at the same time golfers don't typically love caffeine because any amount of loss of neuromuscular control is 1% loss there is catastrophic you gotta be there so in golf what happens is so golf is played in well in the pj tour four days so you play Thursday and Friday the top half the group gets to play the weekend and the bottom half goes home so you're cut if you will but to make things even because circadian rhythms matter so much you

play one of those first two days in the morning and you play the other day in the afternoon so half the golfers and then you need switch right and so sometimes it's an advantage to play early to hang on the weather sometimes so they just try to make it even say all right Thursday of 6am tea time then Fridays you know noon or one or whatever the case escape well that is really hard because if you're a west coast player say in Phoenix and you're gonna go play a tournament in

Georgia like Augusta and you get a 7am tea time this is a 4am tea time yeah which means you're up at 130 and practice warm up all those things and so you may want to go to caffeine to say I need a little bit of a turn on here to get going because my neuromuscular skill is significantly compromised right so it's gonna be really hard to get going that downside of that though is now what have we done to sleep because if we're in the wrong situation if we have early tea

time Thursday late tea time Friday we're fine but if you're doing well and you have the opposite then you have a late start Thursday and then you have a super early start Friday so you have like short number of hours between when you finish and then play the next day the caffeine on the first day isn't if that compromises sleep at all then you're really doubling down on how hard that next case going to be and so you have to really be careful about how much

caffeine you use because at some point and this is just a coaching decision right how much do you want to perform better right now versus sacrifice tomorrow and and what are you doing the same could be said for any sport and this is really hard for our football players so when we're practicing in the NFL if we're playing a night game do we use a bunch of caffeine before that Sunday night football game or that Monday night football game baseball players is the worst

because they're playing typically at 7 7 0 5 7 10 PM if they're pitching whatever they're going to be done at 10 at the earliest and now you've got to come back off that train and try to get it asleep before 4 am in our changing time so so there's no one answer for that I guess is my point but how do you use it judiciously and carefully so in terms of getting off of it I mean it seems to be and maybe I'm simplifying here but I recall being in Korea not too long gone I

didn't use any caffeine when I was adjusting to Korea which was challenging but friend of mine was explaining sleep deprivation with young kids and if you asked them how you contend with that his answer was effectively like don't be weak he's like you just contend with it right there's no magic trick which might be the answer for getting off caffeine it's like yeah you're gonna have to just like bite the bullet and have a week probably of some degree of withdrawal symptoms

which I might just have to contend with okay so let's just say if I grab a device whatever device I happen to have I use that prior to getting to altitude I landed altitude yeah yeah I can try to do some sleep banking up to that point which would include non-sleep augmentation in the form of non-sleep depress the organe dure meditation whatever it might be any other thoughts in terms of what happens after I hit the ground so the other thing that would be a

very easy win would be making sure hydration is really on point when people get in cold they tend to forget because when you go to and do something when it's hot you have the visual tactical feel of your sweat you lose that in the cold I know you've done a bit of hunting yeah yeah so this is where like it comes in for me all the time this is one of my primary areas of passion and you get out and you spend days and you're working all day running up and down mountains and

it's really cold outside you just forget yeah you drink water right and then you start seeing feeling signs and symptoms of exhaustion and altitude and all those things and you realize all right there's nothing I can do about the

altitude but I can correct hydration and that's gonna be really really important having this is blood is not going to help anything of your blood is doesn't help yeah catch up not a good thing to be pumping through your fans so hydration would be another easy win you also are probably aware of what

happens with hydration just being on a plane assuming you're gonna plan to go out there but the altitude will get it you already said dryness it's gonna be dry up there this is part and parcel so that would be the next big one I would go after is maintaining great hydration now and then certainly optimizing it or at least maintaining it once you get there another super easy win any guidelines around that when to hydrate how to hydrate easy example here half your body weight

announces per day is a very rough number so if you weigh 200 pounds to 100 ounces a day get you sort of close ballpark within that you want to make sure that you're not reducing sleep some of the biggest wins we've had in from a coaching perspective is actually reducing water intake yeah look for you to say more about that a friend of mine just a few days ago said he's like yeah you're from the 3 to 1 rule and I was like I have no idea what you're talking

about and he said no food three hours before sleep no water two hours before sleep and then no devices one hour before sleep I was like yeah that's clever okay I mean it's not a bad to be sure stick to you is but how do you think about reducing liquid intake as a global answer yeah but I like I probably wouldn't use that I brought to personally much you do want a taper down fluids at night well I'm laughing because we've had a number of people and they come in they

they are sure they have a sleep disorder or something else than we look and we're like all right you're peeing three times yeah and it's like okay well why is that happening well it can actually happen because of low-quality sleep there are a number of things that happen that people that are common and people think are benign that are not and one of them is that so it is somewhat normal the wake up once about the night to have to be okay great more than that

something is probably happening either it's one of a couple of main areas you're drinking way too much water pure water too late at night or to you do legit may have some sleep quality issues and that can actually contribute to nocturia overnight urination but just the easy solution there is pay attention to a couple things number one how much water you actually drinking at night and then two hours three hours before then to pay attention when you wake up to

pee pay attention to it is it a really large volume is it really clear or is it a smaller or medium amount and or is it a more tinted color and then pay attention to how much we actually weigh and measure all this stuff but you can just use these ruff rules how much you pee the next morning same thing so if you're getting up and you pee once throughout the night and it's a medium amount and you pee the next morning and it's very small it's very yellow then

you can say this is probably not over hydration this is probably being induced by low-sleep quality if it's the opposite it's like yeah I woke up I went pee and it was like I was there for a while and then I woke up next morning I did it again and I had these you know half a pound or a pound and a half of urine then you have a pretty good idea of like you're simply drinking way too much water at night you can in that case try to add things like salt but the better

ideas just not drink so much water any guidelines on that any suggestions specifically I mean in the sense that people need to remember something to act upon it so I'd be curious to know why the three I mean look I just heard about this two days ago right and it's just a surestic it's not a certain fast drill but like the three to one it's like it's easy to remember I mentioned it once I was able to remember it I happen to pee quite a lot at night but guess

what when I was off of caffeine didn't pee at night and so if you're assuming diuretics and then compensating by drinking tons of water or in my case I'm just a compulsive water drinker if I sit at a lunch with someone like I'll drink one or two bottles of water I drink a lot of fucking water and I'm not saying you're making amazing faces well to get that on the video there's so much opportunity with you yeah yeah so let's get into the juicy bits okay so I would

love to know I didn't intend I'm not attending to always come back to sleep here I don't even think we intended to get here at all really today but we're here again you can differentiate between acute and chronic dehydration and blood really quickly okay what do you look for human is the big ticker there and so acute dehydration markers take a look at hemoglobin amaticryt and sodium okay that's gonna give you an indicator if you stack albumin on top of that if

those three things start to tend high amaticryt hemoglobin sodium you got a good indication of dehydration if they go the opposite direction we're worried about hyperhydration hyperhydration right if you take in albumin on top of that then you're gonna get an indication this is moron for a very long

time so we can calculate osmolarity we can do it independent of your analysis and things like that now why this stuff matters think about it all those metrics hematocryt is the percentage of your blood that is red blood cells so does a percentage it's not an actual unit sodium and hemoglobin come in such low concentrations we tend to give them relative to total blood volume which means is how many milligrams per deciliter of blood if you are dehydrated your total

blood volume goes down so much such that those numbers even if they're the actual same absolute value get reduced now albumin is an acute phase reactant which means it responds acutely to inflammation okay so it'll change and so here you go here's some fun this is gonna frustrate everybody okay if you've ever had blood work done and someone's been like oh your labs look fine but you're like I don't feel fine could be a lot of things happening here but albumin

is one of the like easiest examples here is an acute phase reactant but albumin is responsible for 50 to 60% of the osmotic pressure in your vessel so it's the protein that carries around any number of things 10 to 15 or so percent of your cortisol is being carried on albumin much other things so it's a main protein it's made in your liver and it's got like a 20 or so day turnover rate so every 20 or so days you'll recycle that albumin that in response to

dehydration will change it will change in response to inflammation too so here's what happens imagine a situation a scenario when somebody is slightly inflamed and slightly dehydrated pretty common right yeah albumin got tugged up and tugged down which means where is albumin gonna be on your blood dead in the middle you will have a normal albumin right your snapshot is gonna look just fine this is an x-ray knees not broken you need must be fine not at all so now if I

can look at albumin and say hey wait a minute albumin as well as other markers are trending high now I got an idea what's happening if they're not now I can look at albumin ago okay this is an inflammation issue that's our marker and so I can really pay attention to that and say Tim your hyper hydrating you're drinking way too much water do you know the signs and symptoms of hyper hydration are well waking up and peeing three times a night as one headaches

brain fog do you have any people in our program whose brain fog we've solved in day one because they're just drinking way too much water yeah believe it headaches gone away all kinds of issues right almost the exact same symptoms are associated with dehydration as hyper hydration you don't need to do a single lab if you want to be a door like us and get all that stuff figured out but if you are peeing consistently throughout the day like that and if it carries

over in a night at the rate that you're talking about almost surely you were hyper hydrating this becomes a huge problem because it can induce what's called hyponotremium oh yeah dangerous you can die yeah people died because stories of radio jockeys having water drinking competitions people die

for charity parties yeah dangerous tons of stuff I have a lot of thoughts too I mean people over high hyper hydrating marathons iron man's like things like that happens it can cause hyponotremium atrymia is sodium it's a science word for sodium right so typos so that gets too low it's not actually an issue of sodium getting too low it's an issue of excessive water intake and so the the liquid gradient between your muscles and your blood becomes neutral so the

gradient gets lost and so muscle and in this particular case the heart muscle fails to contract this is muscle fatigue this is lack of performance I'm just not feeling as strong as powerful as twitchy as they used to be all the way up to in severe cases death right because cord act issued stops so I would be interested to look at at more your metrics and just paying attention to all right how many times are you really being a night and if you are I would stop that

immediately and you will typically see very big changes in sleep but overall function by not excessively hydrating yeah this is a behavioral modification thing and not a knowledge thing for me I would bet like right here on the spot

without looking at my labs I'd be like I could bet half my net worth that I am hyper hydrating like I know I'm just looking at my behavior over the last couple of weeks and it's so it's really a question like how do I modify behavior in this case it's like if I sit down at a lunch or a business

meeting my inclination is just to keep drinking whatever is sort of in front of me yeah that could be coffee could be water rarely alcohol but if it's alcohol you know it's sort of like whatever is in front of me I will drink because I like the motor movement I have no idea it's gratifying in some way and then if I layer diuretics on top of the liquid intake then we have a hell of a lot going on yeah alcohol does the same thing at night right alcohol is for sure because

it's inhibiting like vasopressomy right I think that's what's going on it's like diuretic hormone yeah yeah it is the real problem right so you're gonna down regulate that and then it's good right when you drink alcohol you should be given the physiological symptoms to pee more yeah clearly right so

here's what I'd say I would say actually two last things in that one like as a behavioral coaching tool then we would have some sort of mechanism for you there'd be something in your day that triggers water stopping this could be okay when you shower at night we just don't drink water afterwards right when we have decide what the trigger is what is the trigger what flips the switch what other behavior right so at that point if you need to sip water you can but

we're no longer having water in a visual or immediately achievable position so no more water bottles no more take camera back off you mean now you leave it on for fun yeah that would be physiologically I would come back and say of course it's behavior right but is there something actually happening that's causing sensation of thirst and I want to look at that side of your physiology yeah it's a great question it's a great question so back to labs it's just it's

wild hell this isn't a surprise but it's just a consistent reminder when these conversations get unpacked it's like camera who it was maybe Emerson I'll give him Greta why not when you try to tease out any one thing you find a hitch to the rest of the universe in the sense that if I look at these behaviors right I also look at the very high let's just call it allostatic load of the last week a bunch of unanticipated events such as life have caused a tremendous amount of

workload very unexpectedly right before the holidays when I happen when everybody's on their auto response yeah and you're like okay interesting home alone you know like and one of my coping mechanisms is we don't spend a lot of time unpacking this but is hot cold sauna typically I would do

that earlier in the day I would do that let's say five six p.m. but because of the nature of the schedule this past week I've been doing it late at night so what does that lead me to do it's need a hydrate around that and then boom here

we are okay so funny enough you say that you may or may not have heard but some people actually sleep better when they do a sauna I do if I do it earlier okay yeah a lot of people have success with sauna at night right many reasons why one of them though is any hyperhidration that has occurred

they bleed it out you bleed it out okay so it's not the worst thing ever yeah to be there the only other thing I'd come back to is I would be willing to bet probably not half my net worth but some smaller margin may be a hundred dollars you're smarter I'm just terrible gambler I love gambling we might come back to that I love it there are two things in this world I love more than anything that's trash talking and gambling often go together okay so you bet a

hundred dollars that your hydration habit is better when you have better down regulation practices absolutely I wouldn't bet against that yeah and so now it's coming back to the same point which is okay great we can give you a mechanism that's just like no more water bottles after 6 p.m. or whatever that's great but have we really solved the core issue it's the same thing of going back to saying okay great we took a look at that sodium potassium ratio we

identified that that got really high or that got really low really and that caused signs symptoms of fatigue etc. cortisol is flying here and so these people tend to feel really good when you give them salt but did we solve the problem no we didn't because as soon as you know like you yeah you took your element packs and you did all these great things I felt way better amazing was your sodium truly low or was it being pulled down right as a ratio was it just

being though even the answer number even the answer number being pulled down as response right so we've now had alterations in kidney function that changed how much sodium that we're holding on to we haven't solved the issue this is also a

case for me where drinking water is basically a socially acceptable now you know you're not disruptive compulsive habit that is a coping response for me it's like it's like a worry stone me drinking water and I think this is also a case I'm just thinking out loud here because it's helpful for me

where I've spent so much of my life worrying about hydration because I have like hyperhydrousis I always was good at cutting weight for wrestling I mean I would cut like 20 30 pounds I mean absurd amounts that I would never recommend terrible for you however I could do it because I sweat so easily yeah that also meant that when I sweat a lot my endurance my power output would just go into the garbage so for my entire life my preoccupation has been hydrating yeah

and this is a case where it's like okay maybe that has served you at points but in this case why don't we try the opposite for 48 hours and just like and do this on a bit don't guzzle the gallon water afterwards going to bed a little bit sort of like when I did tennis training a long time ago and I was withing the ball like into the net over and over again in this process look for the next like 10 minutes practice you're allowed to hit the ball anywhere except

into the net he's like if you if you want to hit a hole right yeah knock yourself out he's like the one place you cannot hit it isn't in the net yeah maybe this is a case where it's like all right to me the only thing you can do anything except for drink a ton of water at night like and if you go to bed a little dehydrated for two days like you're you're quote unquote dehydrated totally may not be dehydrated you will feel signs and symptoms of dehydration though you

will focus on mouth I'm sure yeah you feel different things have you read your sweat tested no that's a super easy start like why don't we test how much you're actually sweating and then what's the content of that sweat and that's gonna tell us the opposite side that this is something that can be done for a few dollars at this point so they're a number of different methods that people can purchase these things I think is low is probably like 15 bucks all the way

up to a couple of hundred dollars what would people people just want to learn about this what would they Google yeah there's a number of companies a Gatorade makes a sweat patch it's twelve dollars I think something like that

you can go all the way up to something like a nix and I X and this is now I think you buy that patch for a hundred and fifty dollars or something like that you could get different things but you can actually in that get real-time feedback I'm not associated with them it's just like a CGM it's like a

ghost monitor for your sweat 100% now there's some issues you don't get full electrolyte break down but you'll you'll know how much total fluid you're losing as well as sodium content and we will actually use that because one of the real tricks to maintaining optimal hydration status whether you're talking about throughout the day or during exercise performance is you have to make sure you're putting back in what you're sweating which is to say it is not just

about water we've talked about I'm gonna dream you we need to know that we're putting in a hypotonic solution so the way you're saying like the total pressure with all the different solutes and solvents in the cocktail needs to be the same as your blood glucose sodium chloride potassium all this stuff needs to be balanced doesn't have to be but you're gonna get better results if you drink excessively dilute fluids let's just say pure water then what's

gonna happen is and it'll go immediately in your gut that'll get immediately into blood it's very quick to get that across that barrier and then your total blood volume will expand you're running constant checks of total blood volume you'll actually expand more than you think and so you'll actually send the signals that says excrete the fluid and so this is why if you're really really dehydrated say after the sauna say you did a crazy session when you do sauna how much time

do you do like 20 minutes 30 minutes I'm not doing super long I tend to and this is where it gets a little tricky because it's like I what's the humidity in the sauna right so generally what I'll do I'll get to let's just call it 195 in the sauna maybe between 195 and 210 and plus yeah plenty on so 195 to 10 get in there and I will immediately start dumping water onto the stones so I'm also jack yeah yeah so I'm also jacking up the humidity I would say generally

the way that I'll run it except do this almost every day it's who knows four to seven times a week I'll do let's just call it 20 to 30 minutes and that will be threshold for most people right I think I need to cool off then I'll do cold plunge for three to five minutes then I'll go back in for a shorter session and five minutes warm back up like 10 minutes and then also cold plunge on the opposite side at which point I won't need as much so probably do three minutes of cold

that's a typical night okay so in that first session overall as well how much where are you losing do you know I'll say it is if I were to guess this is straight guess I mean I think it's a few pounds I mean I would say over the two

heat sessions two pounds or at least a few pounds I don't know how much I am reabsorbing in the cold plunge for anyone who has never experienced extreme like weight cutting we couldn't shower after cutting for wrestling a cute absorb multiple pounds of water back just by showing but I don't know if

that's true in this much more mild form but I mean I'm dumping sweat there is a huge pool of sweat under me how long does it take you from initiation the second you walk in your sauna to start sweating I would say if I'm throwing water on the rocks two minutes two three minutes two minutes is the number we always pay attention to that I've taken longer than that we start to have concerns of dehydration so when we handle this with our UFC fighters and stuff

like two minutes is a good pay attention my guess is you are sweating out far more than that amount it would be not uncommon for someone your plus or minus 160 70 pounds and 70 70 something yeah low 70s I would imagine a 30-minute sauna session three minutes three pounds would be reasonable if you're a hyper sweater maybe more yeah I think it's basically the equivalent of a like a soda stream full of water would be would be my guess yeah yeah yeah now this

number differs significantly from people to people I can just give you two direct examples Tatiana Suarez the UFC fighter have worked with for many years cheese a very good sweater she competes at 115 pounds it is not particularly hard for her to sweat out four to five pounds at that low of a

body weight not really hard now there's a lot of work that goes into preparation for that but it's not particularly hard Brian Artega another UFC fighter who competes at 145 pounds and is a male we tend to have to work to get four or five pounds out right so there is a spectrum to give you a crazy

reference plan my senior year in high school when I was competing seriously I cut from this is never do this people never ever do this but I got to a lean body weight I was very lean then it's kind of sad to think how much more muscle mass I had been believed or not like from whatever age was 1617 but I was 178 super lean and I cut to 152 twice a week that was over oh yeah yeah I was doing that over 24 hours yes water yeah and a few other things but yeah for the

most that's a lot of water yeah a few other things but a lot of water I sweat to use your language I'm very good I'm top to your sweater tough elite elite sweater so okay that's great we would come back and the reason I'm asking that is we would have a good it's an easy way to figure out your sweat rate so just way naked go in the sauna come back out completely dry off I would recommend in fact if we're gonna do this test don't put any water on a keep it dry yeah

so we don't have anything on there and then this measure do for 30 minutes measure yourself how much do you want right now that's gonna tell us about your sweat rate in good sense we don't have a sensor so we don't have actually what's coming out of your sweat which would be nice because we're paying attention to again sweat content and sweat amount but that's gonna be a good insight now that changes on your day as well so if you were to do a day where we podcast for

five hours and you drink one glass of water and then you go into the sauna you're gonna have way lower sweat right and if you were to drink in three gallons this is water load right this isn't and weight management sports we did it that way so we want to pay attention to all those things you said you've been a sweater like that your entire life okay great natural people are different we sweat differently but is something coming back to that there has probably something in

your physiology to which is explaining why that is happening I've always had so I was born premature had a ton of issues as a premium was in the NICU lots of thermal regulation issues since days and a row so tons of thermal regulation issues yeah body temperature tends to run low so my and I can give you my take on this but like I would say I tend to run in like the 97.1 to 97 point whatever for degrees in terms of normal body temperature my subjective experience is much

like when people have say a really high fever they feel cold I feel hot a lot of the time like the ambient air temperature seems warmer to me than it does to I think most folks but thermal regulatory issues from the get go so I've been hospitalized for heat stroke a couple of times whether that was a proper diagnosis or not but basically like in hot conditions where other people are challenged very challenged like training in judo in Tokyo in the summer with

the guion like indoors with more ventilation collapsed taking to the hospital I've had that kind of stuff happen a few times I see that may or may not have anything to do with heat regulation there it could be a sensation so you don't get the signals yeah could be for sure and or because of hyper sweating yeah I mean that was yeah there's a lot of sweat going on yeah so the point is you kind of come back that whole story of unpacking like what is actually happening

internally why are you doing it so your cocktail for hydration would probably be abnormal but with someone we could needs to be dialed in so we can say okay great because if you drink too much water that's diluted for you remember not for me not for anybody else for your physiology was too diluted then you have that excess of urination but here's the kicker you're urinating because that blood volume got that short term this is what happens when you drink water really

quickly you get a short term expansion of total blood volume which causes you to then urinate back and you're not actually so you're not hydrated yet so that stuff hasn't had time to cross into tissue where you're actually properly dehydrated right because you get three main areas you have intracellular in the vessels themselves and then you have interstitial so space between you're drinking it in your stomach it's going into your vessels that's trying to get it across

into tissue if that goes too quickly through there it doesn't have time to get into so here's the kicker your trucking water your pain clear constantly and you're still similarly dehydrated yeah what I've experientially found to be the case is that if I do really hard sauna sessions I can be wiped out the next day right I can feel really fatigued to avoid that I can't hydrate in the sauna I can't hydrate right after the sauna I can't even hydrate within like

20 minutes of going into the sauna has to be like an hour to an hour and a half before the sauna with electrolytes in which case I'm able to I have great resilience and feel less fatigue the next day yeah at least that's been I've insupply tested everything but that's been my experience yeah so then the final piece would be what is exactly an electrolyte cocktail and getting that dialed in so that we are putting back in the same thing that you're losing so

we're not excessively bringing in which it comes back to the sweat test yeah knowing what the hell you are excreting yeah you have to have that that's gonna tell you electrolytes you have to have that in combination and ideally with what your standard metrics are throughout your system and then

making sure that in addition do we need to add glucose to the situation right that's gonna transport things into cells really effectively sodium comes along for the ride water comes along for the ride with it doesn't not need to be in there you're the perfect person to ask and I have a nice chance to ask someone is it glucose is it the insulinemic response to glucose do other things work better than glucose artificial sweetener versus dextrose versus fructose

versus fill in the blank in terms of hydration yeah glucose glucose just straight glucose that's your answer yeah yeah now doesn't mean it's your only thing that can be in there it depends on what if we're only concerned about just hydration or if we have other things we're trying to do once so it's

typically less common to only be caring about water so in the case of you may need to be trying to increase the restore muscle glycogen are you trying to recover faster is there any tissue consideration there that is a slightly different answer are we trying to maintain acute performance so we take in this in the middle of a session that we're trying to keep going and perform better are we doing it to try to recover faster the next day or we only concern about

just pure hydration at a steady resting in this case it would be if I'd await it I'd say it's like 70% hydration 30% help with recovery I like to sound after weight training yeah okay so in that particular case if you're trying to maximize recovery then glucose is going to be super super effective

fructose comes in the equation when we're trying to maximize carbohydrate intake in acute performance especially because glucose and fructose get through the gut barrier and they have different transporters so when the glucose gets full we can use fructose and get it through separately so our

ability to bring in without GI distress is much higher if we have a comma between glucose and fructose to just have to diversified transporters bingo you have two freeways one of those full two different types of fairies or yeah right now in terms getting into the actual cell itself there's two

basic ways that you can get for transporters these are the transporters on muscle cells that allow glucose to go inside the cell there's insulin dependent insulin independent and so muscle contraction itself is insulin independent and then you directly have insulin dependent which is in this

case bringing glucose insulin will then drive it in there but if you're doing exercise you're gonna get that other contraction as well and so you have both mechanisms to bring in play so in that particular case glucose at a roughly 5% concentration or so somewhere between 5 to 9 is typically the

sweet spot doesn't have to be part of your equation but it is going to help the process so post weight cut if you were to drink electrolytes only you would be limiting how quickly you can rehydrate that's an extreme situation if you're the average person hanging out it's like did a sauna session you don't need to put a whole bunch of glucose into your drink you're probably fine all right so I'm gonna wear myself before and after so tonight yeah no no water on the

rocks and just to get an idea of what that actual number is because I'm super curious I'll also be doing a song tonight with a guy used to be a BJJ competitor so I think he'll be equally interested just to see what happens with him yeah do you track how much water you drink throughout the day total do know what that number is I haven't I have done it at points far in the past I haven't done it recently which would be pretty easy because I could really what

is the easiest way to keep track of that probably what you're about to say just fill one container yeah multiply it out big oh just fill up a gallon how far do you get down yeah or if it's multiple then you get over there so I'll do that

tonight 10 days from now let's just say I make an attempt which I will to bank some sleep or sleep adjacent activities meditation etc sleep timing TBD I'm gonna work on that although frankly the 15 car pile-up may make that somewhat challenging but I'll work on it we do the best we can with what we

have I land at altitude I will then be confronted with training decisions and my concerns are mostly around avoiding entry Tim and Andy got into the weeds of Tim's fitness training and it got very detailed so we moved it to the end it is super super interesting from a

training perspective so stick around to the end of the interview and you can hear the rest of that section and then from a nutrition perspective yeah this is why full analysis is better because now we can nail it you exactly not only macro nutrients right calories protein carbohydrate that's great what we tend to say is like people care globally about three things regarding their body they want to look a certain way and I want a feel a certain way I want to

perform a certain way yeah in this particular season I care most about to course I'm in going to be in four layers anyway I don't give a shoot you already laid the foundation the physique part doesn't matter if it's fine as it is right so it's not like a detrimenting your performance right yeah so you care about feeling and performing a certain way awesome that's gonna give us some heads towards macro nutrients micro nutrients though are the true game behind

how you feel and perform that's the key here macro nutrients are fine energy intake this regulates how you look micro nutrients are how you feel and perform and so we want to be very clear on exactly what you're eating if we can let's say we don't have any access to that and so we just have to give you rough suggestions based on nothing I want to know what you're consuming prior to I want to know what you're consuming during while you're on the slopes and

then what you're consuming afterwards so give me a rough idea there and then I'll come back with a far shorter answer than we took us to get to the training yeah I mean if I'm giving you my lazy day of skiing and I know this is gonna make people a little shudder but one of the reasons why I think you've had such and tremendous career is you're so honest about these things you don't know you don't protect your ego like just like this is what you're doing like you're waking

up and eating cake in the morning I get it so first I just do a couple of lines of cake mix yeah then the pixie sticks come out now I I would say often wake up and this last season I had a tough time with my low back so I was having a really most nights very compromised sleep like I was tossing and turning waking up a lot like turning from side to side pillow between the knees because my low back is a little jack wake up huge cup of coffee and then these are usually pretty

early mornings right so and I'm getting up with about 30 minutes to be out the door so wake up okay so I'm waking up having a huge cup of coffee and then I'm having oatmeal mixing in some almond butter and I have swirling that around downing that maybe if they're available one or two eggs then I'm out the door and for on the slopes generally we can make pit stops for water some I'm generally not carrying water unless I'm doing backcountry and then

I'm then I'm the I have a backpack so I'll carry water back yeah but I might have some you can bars some kind of and handful of those which I have found helpful it's kind of like nibble on and then typically I'm doing a half day but if we're gonna do a three-quarter day or full day then we'll stop for lunch and I'll probably have some type of stew meat beans etc. and maybe some maybe some additional coffee if I've really been pushing it hard I might have some hot

chocolate and then right back out and then at night I would say it's more of a real meal per se then I'm sitting down and I can kind of choose whatever I want to have at that point you know that combination of fats and starches and yeah the holes yeah but I have certainly have flexibility what I have found and this is not gonna be a shocker for anyone who's done a lot of intense skiing if I try to follow like keto super low carb I feel like shit like I generally feel

center terrible right yeah normal life not having that kind of output fine but for that type of activity no it doesn't really work so there's a difference between not being sick yeah not dying and performing at your best yeah very different so that's I'd say not every day but that would be a busy day shitty night sleep woke up fuck just want to get out on the slopes yeah one last really quick last year slash this year do you have a plan for supplementation let's

see so last year I would say no I would add in what I have done over the last say nine months which has and this is gonna sound like a shameless plug some involved with these guys but probably what I would do this ski season is I would have a never-ending supply of Maui newy vines and sticks like the unsweetened yeah like no additional sugar and that has proven for me to be just about the easiest way to get nutrient dense 30 grams of protein in the morning so and

they I can just throw those in my ski jacket too so that will probably take the place of eggs also just for convenience in terms of supplementation I would say last year kept it pretty simple I would say I was taking magnesium some

electrolytes generally magnesium in the morning and then I went back and forth on creatine I know that there are so many different benefits to creatine I was cognizant of not wanting to carry too much weight like additional water weight if I was going to retain a lot more water so use that

intermittently I would often use that around cross training so I was like kind of going to the gym yeah athletic greens again this sounds like a plug but I've been using that stuff since 2000 whatever 9 10 so yeah and not a whole lot beyond that I'd say where last season I was taking the most was really to sleep because I was so desperate to get a good night sleep I was taking just like entire laundry list of stuff for sleep including some prescription stuff which

I've tried to really tie trade off of yeah but at the time helpful you know trasodone things like that which you should not take without Dr. supervision so I would say not a really comprehensive supplemental plan at this point I would also though not want to leave behind the nutrition

piece because right now if you if you were to ask me like what is your macro breakdown look like I'm about having a fucking idea yeah honestly if I'm being truthful about it look the reality it is supplements are called supplements for a reason yeah and we we absolutely approach them the same

vein we're gonna spend as much time as we can on whole food after coming back from training almost always taking supplemental protein of some type yeah okay just okay I just want a little bit of a context of foundation of what I was working with here and actually I'll modify one thing I said which

was last season I would often and again I'm not this is like what I did I'm not saying it's the best but I would often have like athletic greens plus some type of like weight protein isolate or something before like immediately before heading out yeah so I've had the oatmeal plus the almond butter and then I would throw that in yeah and that happened quite a bit I would say when you think about recovery three classic ours coming to place repair replenish

and rehydrate that's what we're going have to right so repair is protein replenishes carbohydrate and obviously we hydrate is is a combination of fluids plus electrolytes and glucose so as you're running that I'm running to that entire thing okay now can we alter what we're doing to maximize performance on the slopes yeah but that's not really what you're asking you don't want to feel terrible on the slopes but you're also really hedging because we know

your recovery capacity is already compromised so I'm gonna push towards that what's that means do we have enough total calories maybe do we have enough protein unlikely unlikely yeah the fact we're starting off the day with no protein source is not a good or very little yeah

Malino is fantastic like I eat it almost every day at this point my entire like I eat almost exclusively wild game that's yeah that's what I do but yes since being a part of Malinoe as well like that's what I'm after I've yet to have anybody that we've sent it to come back and be like what the hell is this up this is like this is incredible yeah it's such a high positive response yeah all right conflicts of interest noted you guys you got the note so that is great

you can start there it's awesome I don't really particularly care where the sources I would make sure that we're getting some source immediately in the morning approaching that would be my first stop now the other thing is I would probably take your caloric intake higher in the morning than it currently is because we know it's unpredictable throughout the rest of the day yeah and we know that's you don't have to have a lot of calories in the morning so now

people often say things like you can only absorb 25 or 30 grams of protein at once and that's obviously by the way I opened up that question that's clearly not the case yeah however there is serious scientific evidence to suggest you can only maximize muscle protein synthesis up to 25 to 30 grams that's been around so the question is for you despite the fact that all the evidence in science will say that are you ever concerned that if you ate a little bit more protein

that you would somehow not use it no I spend zero time worrying about that great okay I know this is good to tell questions right so this never made sense to me if my urine ends up a little more expensive I don't care you cares right look when you go to apply things into science and life but we were trying to do all that science of sleep and nutrition and supplementation you have to take some leaves of faith that that is actually the scientific process right this is why

like I think it's best to think about science as a verb not a noun is an action it is not a thing right what is the science over recovery that's not how it works just like this is an action so I'm taking a real life action on you which means I'm gonna take steps past science such that it never made sense to me that muscle protein synthesis is maximize at 25 or 30 grams I work with NFL players right so Vita Bay a defensive tackle 300 and many plus pounds on

top 300 right we really think his muscle protein synthesis is locked up and just maximize at 30 grams the same as you are correct or just about less than half his size yeah yeah like actually way less than half so there's actually paper that just come out really interesting suggest even up to a hundred grams of protein it continues to increase you know I might be making this up but I don't think I am I want to say that the older you get there's some literature

to suggest that it is better to have large like a larger bowl is meaning more grams protein at a single yeah this is what you're talking about is called antibiotic resistance so you become more resistant to animal stimuli training or protein as you age for this is totally preventable extremely preventable by just having bigger bulls so my point with all that is you can't stop that train yes some of that protein will be oxidized who cares doesn't matter you

can't have too much protein in your particular case why I'm going back to that in your case in your scenario is because we now we've continually had conversations about you just recover slower you were so longer etc etc we need to make sure we are never limited in our recovery by protein that needs to be higher and so we need you at a minimum of I don't know 200 grams protein today oh wow okay I'm gonna need to change some things I'll survive at 150 I'll

take 150 but like I want you to go over so let's just say copy paste now you're in my place doing the exact same training yeah what might your breakfast look like I'm fine with everything you had there yeah but now I just want 50 grams protein what form I know you said you're agnostic but for you fine eggs no problem eating eggs to get to 200 grams I mean if we're like yanking out the yoke yeah you can do that factor well I'm just thinking about the what this

actually nets out to I mean how many eggs would that mean let's be well five six yeah you're not gonna get me like I'll put this way I wouldn't go exclusively from eggs that would that would be the point if you want to have a protein shake as well you already said you basically did that right that's

what it did yep this last season so if you have let's say three eggs maybe half a cup of egg whites something like that maybe two eggs half a cup of egg whites we're not 40 or so and 20 minutes later or something but I don't know were you having that shake on the way I haven't right before I stepped out okay great let's just stop right there then four grams great I said 50 we're splitting hairs right yeah you're close enough there if you want it and it's a day where

you woke up late great just do the double shake yeah right two sous scoops right so you're 40 the depending on what protein source you're using whoever you're getting it from pretty high quality pretty fast absorbing yeah you're great now when we're at lunch that's fine we're just gonna make sure that if we've had a couple of mountain ducyx throughout the day those are what 10 grams each 10 grams each yeah so you got 20 right there it's easy to put down like four or

five of those more candidly yeah let's just say you're at one 10 more grams all right we're up to 50 60 maybe another one at lunch any reasonable serving of meat in your stew is gonna get you another 30 to 40 50 depending on how much you're eating there you don't want to eat you're feel terrible but that's fine we're already well over 100 okay awesome if you can get another shake in approaching shake double shake when you're on the slopes that's great someone

just nacks like you get another 30 40 which brings you back to dinner with another 30 or 40 I wouldn't track them I wouldn't weigh them I wouldn't do any those things some days you're 150 fines one days you're 175 just do what I

don't which I don't really do which is like when doubt just eat a little bit more it's fine yeah eat a little bit more right from there I would be primarily concerned with making sure your carbohydrate intake is sufficient you're probably gonna get enough fat along the way so you have to get enough

fat along the way I think that I train myself historically to reduce carbohydrate intake for a lot of different reasons sure so I consume to little carbohydrate when I get into training mode for something like skiing look I said I'm too well agnostic it's the same thing with food carbohydrates and fats have different properties and that gives us a lot of opportunity one is not better than the other in any situation so it is in this context you clearly

additional carbohydrate is highly beneficial you can go more fat that's great too just to get more calories it's also easier more condensed you can get it in faster you're getting in a decent amount for breakfast so you're good there I would make sure we have some sort of starch as well for lunch yeah bread with that yeah soup yeah who ever complained about dipping bread and soup yeah that's amazing or whatever any number of me well well or high

quality carbohydrate sources fruit would be fantastic at that feeding as well so now we get all the other additional benefits that come along with fruit in this context and then backing up at night one of the other things that's really clear while you don't want to have a large meal right before bed carbohydrates at night are highly beneficial for soup quality yeah for sure there's tons of links there in fact we actually had this happen fairly recently so labs came

back individual sex hormone binding globulans high free chest osteromes low all the signs and symptoms of wanting to go on testosterone that's not a conversation I have let's go to your doctor right you want to go on hormones awesome sleep is terrible you must get asked about it a lot oh my gosh like you saw sensitive I am I'm going public I'm like I'm not like I don't do medications in insulin was low super low there's a known inverse association

between insulin and sex hormone binding globulans so an insulin gets too low sex hormone binding globulans goes up because that what happens is a free testosterone goes down so you can do that if you want however in this individual we took a look at total carbide and it taken it was something like

125 grams a day which I actually feel great personally I would imagine you probably feel fine at that level too even with like training I train most days I feel fine at 125 150 no issues almost no carbide at night very low a 20 less grams carbide and all we had to do was put another 40 or so gram a

carbohydrate at night everything corrected itself and sleep took off so super super simple solution like that so sex hormone binding glubbing and came down yeah because the insulin was going up totally and testosterone then took off and then what happened to sleep and what happened

to recover ability yes sleep doesn't hurt testosterone either oh my god right well this is the classic case of 40 grams so what we're talking about there is like that's not that much no it's like what 200 I'm flooding the math here but it's 4.5 for calories per gram for ish right so it's not that

much no like you're talking about well this is say banana 25 grams yeah bingo right a hundred calories and apple like these these things are piece of fruit is typically 15 to 20 25 grams a small side of sweet potatoes a cup of rice like you've already hit 25 to 40 sort of grams pretty easily so we're not talking like we have this guy pick out on pasta which would fun but like it's very small changes here miracle workers right it's like there you'll have

so point is I'm making sure that we have an appropriate amount of carbohydrate in your last feeding would be appropriate we've gotten ourselves a nice infusion throughout the day this will help with your rehydration since we're probably having fairly limited water intake because you're on the slopes right yeah yeah and it's dry you know so easy for people to forget you mentioned this earlier but it's like high altitude yeah it's like you go to Antarctica it's a desert

right it's easy for people to forget trust me I was just a dry environment I didn't mule deer hunt in the teetons this year 10,000 ish fee I think of base campus like 7,500 and we were to ride horses for a couple hours in the

morning to get up to our hunting spot holy cow cold so dry and 10,000 which for me we live I live in Southern California so I'm at you know zero literally 10,000 snow joke now it and those mountain boys holy cow they are mountain tough and every time so point is you get super dehydrated super fast

yeah and don't really I said so those carbohydrates and all that are gonna help maintain replenish the muscle glycogen that you've burned throughout your entire body we don't care if we're having an excess of calories because if we lose a little bit of body composition you won't yeah because you're burning so many calories yeah it's astonishing how much some I'm gonna be there with a close friend and we can consume absolutely mind boggling amounts of food oh yeah

and it does oh yeah and it just doesn't matter you're gonna work it off yeah yeah and I like you mentioned some resistance starches earlier if you can take them out there that's great too that's probably gonna feel better than just a mowingly stick when you're sick for sure yeah I mean I need to restock but yeah the you can bars that I use last season were super helpful yeah I would just make sure on top of all that kind of rounding out these points making sure

that you're adequately salting your food because we know that that's gonna go down we know you're a heavy sweater I don't know what your sweat rate is for your salt intake but if you're sweating out three or four pounds a day that's just gonna you're gonna lose a gram plus many grams of salt so making sure that comes back in in the form of supplementation if you'd like to use electrolyte packs or something like that or if you just want to strictly go salting your

food you know heavily to taste there you probably need some supplemental electrolytes would be my guess at this one yeah making sure it's there that's nutritionally gonna put you in a really really good spot just be really careful making sure we're still getting colors in your food because micronutrients typically don't have a huge response like you're not gonna feel a difference in vitamin A or C and like a day yeah but it will over the course of two months start

to kind of add up yeah so making sure we're not just eating all brown and having it out of that greens yeah I've generally used color as a proxy so try hard it is one of the challenges in a lot of these mountain towns of course it is is like they're importing everything fresh vegetables oh man but yes but use frozen if you have to right so frozen to use in vegetables it's not the same but it's still really really high quality and then supplementation we could say

I could be brief here if you'd like but absolutely making sure magnesium is there magnesium is released in sweat at very low quantities but it's still enough when you sweat the amount that you're potentially going to be sweating also with with skin like I'm gonna sweat my ass off yeah that'll be working yep so you want to make sure that that stuff is high creating is great if you're going to use it I wouldn't use it the way you did okay I'll use it or don't okay so

having it like on certain days or not is just make it make it daily or not yeah because it takes a chronic effect yeah for it to really start to matter unless you're going a really high dosage so I wouldn't be super concerned about the water retention aspect of it because it wouldn't be a plus yeah let's say we're having a problem with that anyways right so I would go there that said any recommendation if you try it doesn't work you don't like it just don't and what are

we talking about like five grams a day or would be that's the number that's the standard that's what one throws out but I would say the same thing of like like the protein yeah yeah why can we for guys our size fine I'm probably going higher I'm also never measuring great team to be totally honest like I'm just taking big scoops and throwing it in there like seeing what happens there's actually really interesting data on the more recent stuff the more interesting stuff on

creotene is around bone health brain health and overall even like mood yeah brain health is no joke yeah but that's been 10 to 20 grams a day things like that so yeah I have experimented with that chronically and just looking at verbal I mean recall yeah and also it's like verbal acuity and stuff in

podcasts I mean I've looked at this someone is end of one and it's just self-reporting but for me it's pretty noticeable you don't have to do anyone there's data there's tons of it out there that's nothing's perfect but there's actually another review article just this week came out also on creotene

brain health so whether you're looking at dementia Alzheimer's marks and stuff like that there's no perfect answer there but yeah you can see the data anything else you add to the list the rest of it would be dependent upon your labs and your physiology yeah what we knew there you could throw in

you're never going to be hurt for the most part adding vitamin D it's a very common one you're gonna be on the Sun all day so well half my face will be out in the Sun all day very there'll be significant sun blockage I hope so yeah yeah I did supplement with deal last year yeah and fish oil fish oil I also supplemented with fish all could be placebo who knows there's probably literature out there on this but I found it to seem mainly help asleep quite a

bit oh yeah like those would be the standard kind of without knowing anything about you you throw in that cocktail you're talking about things that are fairly cheap again relatively yeah they have very little cross-reaction unlike minerals unlike even high doses vitamins you're playing a game there that you may want to be a bit careful of but things like vitamin D and things like omega-3 is just unintended side effects yeah yeah you don't know what problem

you're solving really and so you just sort of throw in stuff in there that contexting the happening even vitamin D and heavy metals can be concerned there but it's a very rare thing so most of the time like you're fine I feel comfortable saying like most people can jump on that train for all

those can be totally fine outside of that it would be precision and 10 what are we trying to move what are we trying to do if you want to go kind of next level of hey less science but some science potentially beneficial then you would get in the realm of herbals and this is when ashwagandha rodeola things like that start to kick in what do you find rodeola most helpful for so I actually do use ashwagandha in the same way that say Peter T. M. might use

phosphatidyl serene just to blunt oh sure a bit of cortisol release at night for instance okay inhale so maybe maybe I'm off base but I mean talk to me about ashwagandha and rodeola okay so we actually just published a review paper on rodeola think it's open access should be able to go read it for free way more data on ashwagandha been around for a long time the issue we've always dealt with with both of those are all of our athletes have to have third party

certified things and even they have to have NSF reform choice so those are hard to get to you know I'm concerned about that then disregard that but you really do this is to avoid doping issues correct yeah we actually have another paper we published on the frequency of adulterated supplements oh god it's gotta be complete disaster whatever number you're thinking it's higher yeah yeah it's it's not in America with big brands like you're fine but you leave America

and things get squirly yeah pretty quickly on supplements plenty squirliness here too but all those papers are open access so if I'm able to dive in we'll start off we're gonna have much more data on ashwagandha good effective but it is very difficult to make sure you're getting concentrations at was labeled on the bottle and that's actually from a labeling issue as well as a harvesting issue so the people that are kind of behind the scenes that make these

things will tell you not every plant has the same yeah long behold totally she doesn't standardize no yeah people say things like it's not FDA regularly that's not true there's tons of regulations on supplements it's just they can't sanitize it against things like that it's really hard right you're

growing herbals and you're just hoping that that doses is potent as the previous one what do you think from an effect standpoint for what can a credible argument be made I know less science but with ashwagandha like why would someone take it that is plausibly defensible and what should you take in that case I got the certain brands that are more reliable for dosing for any particular reason yeah with ashwagandha I think the only third-party pure ashwagandha

company that I know is clean the K K L E A N I'm pretty sure I'm you'll see it in combinations and a bunch of other stuff but that's I think the only one that sells it as designed for health and design for sport might make one as well

getting sick I'm not 100% sure on that one decent data on exactly what you mentioned taking it as a the local term will say here is any adaptogen adaptogen yeah it which it means is it's we're skipping is it to cortisol modulator what that means is cortisol is not supposed to be low it's not a good

thing right that is lethargy that is that is a classic sign of excessive training as well you can go back to sodium potassium ratio that'll tell you exactly what's happening with cortisol as well that's addisins to see it's right super low down there you don't want to be high either now the general

thing that is optimal with cortisol is you have giant spikes throughout the day and then giant recovery this is exercise this is focused work such and we have this normal curve throughout the day such that we have high cortisol in the morning so our wake and alert and we have low cortisol at night so that we could actually fall asleep and then it's a curve so adaptogens are supposed to be modulating that curve not such that it's going high or low but such that

it's getting back to an appropriate diurnal curve that's the idea ashwaganda and rodeola and specific ashwaganda there's reasonable evidence that it helps with that and so a lot of folks probably the most typical utilization of

ashwaganda is helping get to sleep helping calm down there's it is kind of resetting that entire access because of that whenever you manipulate cortisol you have a very good chance of manipulating testosterone because that relationship is antagonistic for the most part and so the smaller level

science and then also large amount of anecdotes it can be helpful and beneficial with testosterone I would say in my experience it's reasonable it is a very reasonable thing to think about with that I wish that more companies

would make pure ashwaganda that is NSF certified that'd be great I could use it more directly now rodeola is another one we have had now this is not science this is just my practice coaching experience I've had a lot of benefit of elevating testosterone with rodeola really yeah it is also cortisol

modulator there has a lot of other effects the paper we published had nothing to do with hormones that everything to do with performance and so there is enough data now on muscular endurance and physical performance that it seems to be

pretty beneficial it's not perfect not every study should benefit but there's enough to wear that I've been using it for probably a decade or more personally as well as in a coaching practice and I feel like it does really effective work on that so we actually got home then I was pitching it so hard

we got Jeff from a dentist to make it so they have their stuff so we use they rodeo yeah I do not yeah we got them to make it because I was like you guys just like so much work here so we use them because it is certified Mister party tested as well so that's pretty much where we got a rodeola from

but a lot of benefits there are there for acclimating to altitudes and no yeah you've gone from flatland or to altitude a couple of times anything that you have found particularly helpful for accelerating acclimation to altitude because you're all sorts of stuff right some people take like beetroot extract some people take rodeola anecdotally of course I'm curious if you have thoughts here rodeola would be a my shortlist I would listen to you either way if you

said it didn't work at all you said it did yeah like I would listen the way but it would be a low risk potential small reward why not any arginine or precursor beetroot you mentioned nasal dilation is gonna give you every opportunity possible to give split a contraction to get more roadblood cells into your blood to let you acclimatize to it other stuff you can pay attention to so one of the major couple weeks at EPO yeah right that's that's would be my first stop it's a joke guys yeah yeah

yeah yeah it'll work yeah now you can consider at this point in the same realm you can consider any global alkaline agent so one of the issues that you're gonna see happen with altitude is predictable increases in respiratory rate predictable increases in carbohydrate metabolism right predictable

increases in respiratory quotient respiratory ratio things like this is part of what happens like lactate is a big player right this is insanely beneficial for you so you may consider I don't know if this will actually work I don't even

know the literature to be candid here on this one I'm but I lactate supplement could be potentially beneficial there lactate is incredibly powerful it actually by carbonate that buffering acid so this may sound counterintuitive but you heard that right lactate very specifically will reduce metabolic

acidosis and lactate doesn't do what people think it does it is certainly not the cause of muscle fatigue and definitely not the cause absolutely definitely not the cause of muscle soreness it is highly beneficial it is directly used

in the brain as a preferred fuel source of the brain and the heart and numerous situations including altitude used actually right now a couple of handful of trials being used as an acute response to traumatic brain injury no sure yeah how's that administered you can do any number of ways I be

I'm going to get up on yeah gel and lactate gels and any of those things done George Brooks at Cal Berkeley the lactate King him and Bruce Gladden at Auburn but George is done a number of those trials in TBI it's similar to look you may or may not realize but there's an entire lactate shuttling that happens from muscle into other muscle to the kidney Corey cycle all that stuff there's also an astrocyte lactate shuttle so astrocytes are like the cells in your

center nervous system they need energy too so we know that the brain the heart and astrocytes prefer almost exclusively anaerobic metabolism which means they love glucose right when you enter into areas of problem what are you talking about long-term brain health reductions or even short-term

concussions and injury is schemia's heart attacks things like that one of the major issues is we lose metabolic fuel have problems right enter ketones yeah exactly enter lactate this is why these things are so interesting it's

still a lot to learn here some of the trials are like all great but then they don't work for ketones and they do for lactate and stuff like that but there's clearly something happening and this is also why to come back to point creating is so powerful for brain health this is the same thing is the

most direct and fast fuel source is one to one stoichiometry so it doesn't give you a ton one molecule of creating one ATP others ketones are it's far higher but it's super fast and effective so lactate would be one I would go to end and is that I haven't ever sought it out presumably you can just find that as an oral supplement you're taking castles of this stuff you can again the gel would probably be gel yeah better place but we're really applied to gel it's

it like any of your tissue just rub it on anywhere yeah yeah on your legs yeah all that stuff probably where I'd actually start because that's I could go look at the research and I might be like oh my god that was really stupid don't do

that I don't know like that was sort of me working through thoughts on there but a similar idea that is much more founded would be any sodium bicarbonate solution right it's same exact idea where you're gonna put yourself in a little more alkaline situation my guess is that would help you

feel a little bit better in that was since you asked sort of correct application sodium bicarbonate can come in a lot of forms in fashion it's baking soda like literally just be careful though yeah I could tell you many stories in the lab of doing research with baking soda or sodium bicarbonate

yeah there's such thing is too much of a good thing yeah fluid in your intestines matters so also be careful with creativity and double espresso is just pro tip if you're at the head out skiing too much of those two great team caffeine have this weird relationship increased likelihood of disaster

pants not to get too technical but yeah it's super technical theoretically we'll see the data on that so you can do that the other way is gels gels yeah right so this is PR lotion that's what they make so you just rubble on sodium bicarbonate I mean if you want to go around it there so anyone that has any GI issues with that lotion will go as well far far far far more research on our applications then lotions but none on the sodium bicarbonate yeah for sure and there's lots of

research on that so yeah that's going to be potential ways outside of that we would have to really start getting into things that are actually specific to mitochondria and to kind of go down those rains the issue with all that is I don't know if you're gonna have like a one-to-five-day effect and so really getting into and this is everything from coq tens and things like that so the going back up to like arginine and be reduced that's gonna have an instantaneous

effect so anybody carbonate will instantaneously change things the other stuff takes a little like a mightle or pq or something like that it's gonna take probably weeks while yeah yeah so by that time you probably hopefully acclimatize well there are levels and then there are levels right so from

operating at 10k but then I'm doing some you skiing at 16 or what yeah wow I'm skiing at 16 I'll start out 14 yeah yeah but if I'm going up a few thousand feet for for backcountry stuff or hell skiing yeah you'll notice that extra thousand feet oh yeah for sure kind of my point I was getting there at the end was I would probably let physiology just do it was to do that would be my normal thing take your baseline stuff there and then let it go because you're going to be there

for eight weeks and we're gonna walk ourselves into these first two or three weeks anyways if you were there for like for example we have Ryan or Tegga is fighting in Mexico City for his next fight that's 7500 feet in elevation Ryan lives torrents it really lives below elevation we are doing some things specifically now starting like two day to prepare for that but that's because we have to get there for one one event one night you'll have two months

that's there yeah I would let your body do what it wants to do kind of the last thing I'll really say here is I think that's an important note your physiology and your brain are still way smarter than anything we have any AI program any machine learning stuff we've got your own physiology has a far better sense of what you're doing so whenever possible don't hold it back we call these performance anchors so anything you're doing that's an anchor it's dragging

you down so this is alcohol this is any number of suboptimal visible stress stressors and stressors that's gonna hold you back but once you've removed those things just get out of the way yeah your body will figure it out your body really knows what it wants to go for the most part don't sabotage it but then don't have too much control the way like super important I mean maybe another way to put this I guess would be like it's human nature to think about how we can

accelerate things accelerate accelerate but in this case I mean we have millions of years of evolution at hand and if you can just remove make sure that you don't have any emergency breaks on yes that's exactly right you make a lot of progress and we've talked about a lot today people can find you on Twitter

Instagram at dr. Andy Galpin and they can find all things Andy Galpin at Andy Galpin.com you have a number of different initiatives projects companies that are in motion absolute rest we've already mentioned any others that you would like to mention or point people to yeah absolute rest of

course is our sleep company my education company is called biomolecular athlete and that is actually something we just released Thanksgiving so this is just new to the world I have always and will continue to put out as much free content on YouTube as I can so what I do is I have this like series of five 25 and 55 minute physiology videos and if you've been paying attention and when I say 25 minutes it's it's ish and when I say 55 minutes it's it's yeah I get

real on that one I'm always gonna do that and that is always gonna be free out there but we have I had such demand for it I was like I mean I just need to make a full proper education company so we released our very first course Thanksgiving and I think we had people from over 90 countries get into it like I was like all right that'll do well but holy cow it looks so stunned so that is out there we're gonna come out with our second and third course this year one of

them will be on performance blood work and then another will be on managing it's like an algorithm if you will step by step process on fatigue I had to stop it from happening corrected like what to do like all this stuff so that'll be coming that biomolecular athlete dot com I think it's forward strength but if you get to biomolecular athlete it's gonna get you close enough the other one we're launching in January is called vitality blueprint and that is is high

level performance blood work and so this is not medical stuff this is if you want to really understand how to not only analyze blood but then go through some of the stuff I we talked about of how do you interpret it once you get it what's it mean all that is done for you it's completely interpreted all the patterns and calculations that go into high performance are done for you and then as a result of that you just spit out very high precision supplementation

nutrition and exercise protocols on the back of that so it's not just like hey here your labs you go figure it out so that is coming out that's vitality blueprint and then our coaching program is that rapid rapid health and performance is like if you want to come in and get full immersion coaching like I sort of started with the beginning yeah that's at that program so where can people find that I think that is rapid health report dot com willing to

in the show notes as well yeah I think it's all is or will potentially be on my website I realize again I'm like business and savvy for Tay is not my thing so probably should have all these brands and companies going but they're all out there so education blood work rest sleep and coaching are there and then all all the social media is for me is it's all science medication that's pretty much all I do so if you want to know more about the science in performance that's

pretty much if you don't want it like get out of there do not if that's not don't go to Andy Galbin dot com but if it is of interest then that's certainly what we mentioned Andy Galbin dot com on social doctor Andy Galpin and we'll link to everything in the show notes so if people miss anything on

Andy Galpin dot com people go to Tim Dublog slash podcast holding to everything we discussed in this conversation which is going to be a lot for the record I made that website myself on square space like seven or eight years ago so not a lot of standards all right all right well might be able to help you with an upgrade so TBD on that is there anything else Andy that you'd like to mention or closing comments you'd like to add before we land the plane I think I've had

plenty of comments at this point all right perfect and as mentioned everybody we'll have links to everything in the show notes as per usual at Tim Dublog slash podcast and until next time train smart keep it green lights don't get injured and best of luck in the new year thanks for tuning in

and now Tim and Andy discuss Tim's training regimen I land at altitude I will then be confronted with training decisions and my concerns are mostly around avoiding injury right I'm not worried about like hitting the most complex double black diamond blah blah blah two weeks out I

don't have a competition I'm doing this for fun also to get into shape which is fine touring I find pretty kind of self-regulating in a way although you have avalanche risk but let's put that aside how would you think about training

this is going to be a lazy question but the lower body and the reason I ask is two seasons ago I've been very lucky knock on what I've had very few knee issues that issues a lot of other stuff shoulder surgeries elbow surgeries you know all sorts of issues but angles like broken every which way from

Sunday from all sorts of terrible combat sports decisions knees have been pretty good except for two years ago I had to get me to back down with a very impressive Tom a hawk accident after hitting a ice ridge at high speed helles game so got me to back down for a bunch of I mean like the new is my leg twisted around like a GI Joe figures bad and I felt a pop in the hip in the knee because one ski ejected the other one didn't so as I Tom a hawk like

tip got caught and rotated my leg around and landed and I was like fuck I'm gonna wait for the tail guy to check this out and the knee felt a little loose ended up ultimately getting ER MRI the whole nine and had a couple of minor injuries but they're like your knee is surprisingly okay you might have like a mile tear I think it was meniscus they're like but nothing really of note I was like okay but there have been points for instance as my back I started to feel

better I've slowly moved into conservative mostly ice lateral like training because part of what precipitated this I've had back issues for decades just I have a transitional segment my brother has the same thing lots of kind of chronic back tightness give a tail I have a tail exactly that's what I'm gonna say now but what really yeah okay what really precipitated the acute phase was back squats and I'm sure I could dissect biomechanically why I think I fucked

that up but I've been very moderately moving into like split squat type stuff and feeling really good feeling very good about it but a few weeks ago felt like a little like being like a little weirdness in the right knee a little tension after that with like terminal knee extension or let's just say

terminal extension like when I'm walking if I try to keep you healed down like weird at the very end it's a little tight on the back of the knee so priority number one for me is injury prevention how might you think about getting back into skiing but doing it in a responsible way what type of training to augment with just the time on the slopes okay I will actually directly answer your question finally oh yeah yeah we'll go straight to this comes early hey let's

talk about sleep let's talk when you're going into a novel situation like that your hydration your sleep we've already talked those are gonna be huge and then overall stress from all that stuff like that is by far the best place to start we've done a nauseam there we're gonna go on to dear where you're talking about here I need to know what is your you got two months what's the rough skiing plan because what we want to do first and this is the same thing when we

get in season for any of our athletes or in fight camp sport is first you got to get better fighting you got to get better golf balls you got to get better tennis balls etc so tell me what that looks like and I'll reverse engineering the training backwards so what that looks like is first week I'm

actually not scheduling any formal training sessions with a coach because I want to have some time simply to remember what I did last season no point of even getting tips on technique when you're inconsistent yeah let me get in a

bit of mileage also let me acclimate to altitudes that I'm not tempted to push with a coach who's also very high-level skier because I'm competitive and there's just from protecting myself from my lesser self like week one is going to be acclimating let's just call it then beginning week to probably

minimum three days a week of training with a coach and then depending on recovery and other factors and additional two to three days of skiing most likely then after let's call it week three I will add in ski touring where I'm doing side-or-back country using skins where I'm basically shuffling my way up a mountain and then skiing down in more back country powder conditions I would say also around that time because I do well with these types of conditions I

would like to I'm not attached to it but I think it would be very interesting to do some adult race training and just working with gates and getting very good at carving and there are other obviously aspects to that at this point and this is where I have not decided on what adjunct training to supplement what I found helpful in the past police last season was let's just call it one or two it's not quite yoga knee-drip but pretty low key let's just call it down

regulating yoga classes a week also for just hip stuff and then some type of core training there a couple of great plotties instructors find that very very helpful for seemingly mitigating some of the lower back issues and that's about it as far as it stands right now so let me see if I can spit that back to you first week just getting on the slopes moving yeah moving around yeah and just an acclimating to altitude getting there okay trying us all that weeks two to

three we start actually getting moving we're doing a variety of different types of skiing and styles of skiing in different areas week three to eight is training where we're gonna have a somewhat of a specific plan about different styles of training on different days and depending on conditions yeah depending on right so it's like if if we're training for powder we don't have the chance might train on moguls for a host of reasons and yeah yeah yeah yeah what you just

outlined is fight camp hmm exactly what it is you move week one you do these things and then you get into a specific plan for five to eight weeks of different things on each of the days we have different emphasis right so we're boxing one day we're resting another day etc you're doing it's the same

it's the same because we might do one day it's it's a real carving emphasis we might do another day that is you know powder emphasis another day it's more conditioning with the touring great so here's what I do a couple of structure things number one you actually made a comment earlier that I banked that I want to come back to and you sort of said you don't care about your upper body losing away you will decide if it helps sort of looking at say Lance Armstrong

post-censor one is like relative strength once you're the roof I'm willing to compromise that for the sport understood yeah don't want to go away from all reason but if but if it's if it's beneficial power to weight ratio matters right now I don't know a ton about skiing so I don't I didn't catch all that terminology exactly but from my understanding you're gonna be doing some stuff that is high speed high change of direction high impact on joints my assumption is

that shorter duration yeah the runs you're gonna be sure to duration ballpark me time 12 minutes like two minutes I would say with the coach let's just say it's two to five minutes before stopping to review technique and then some back up the mountain and then multiple runs that a day yeah yeah how many runs I would say I mean we're gonna be doing on the order of at least I would think minimum 10 to 15 total runs okay yep the other days are more when you're doing like

the touring stuff oh yeah that's gonna be you might spend an hour or two going up and then you get ten turns in deeper powder I mean ideally you get more than ten turns but the ratio of let's just call it uphill to downhill is heavily tilted to uphill where you're doing a lot of conditioning and very fatiguing more like steady state though more like many hours of you're going up this would be a steady state yeah great and this would be in the sort of go

heavy go along go hard this would be like the go long yeah yeah how many days a week total seven six five I would say I will likely increase the volume each week because my recovery will just be compromised in the beginning as I'm acclimating to altitude etc so I would say my goal would be by a week three that I'm at minimum four days week it would not be seven days a week I will have at least one full day of recovery because I've just found that I need that yeah

you have to have so okay great the reason I ask for your body is when you're moving on skees like that and again I know minimally about it you're having poles and you will get some upper body like you are using your body there's actually classic data that is good for the most part looking at cross-country skiers this is like our study was in that but if you actually buy up see data that I've done a deltoid social the muscle you can get like a 95% reduction in

muscle glycogen content if you were to look at and something like glycogen depletion yeah in the quads if you get to like 50 60 percent we call that depleted so like you you can torch your shoulders oh for sure and also triceps you can just smoke your triceps and the reason I'm saying that is going back to your back and knee because if we are now either compromised strength or endurance in our shoulders and now we're getting up or downhill or control via

other mechanisms we're probably putting on new stress in those positions yeah let me add something because what you just brought up raised this and that is you're a hundred percent right it's not gonna be to the cross-country skiing is like a normal skiing is insane it is just like torture personified I mean the cardiovascular capacity is so outrageous absurd absurd so I'm not doing that I mean there are cardiovascular demands placed on me in touring but I'm I won't

get into all the details but it's far less than cross-country but to your point yes I'm using the upper body and one of the question marks that has existed in my mind since last season is how much to work on various types of rotation because where I found my back can get quite grumpy is when you're skiing at say steeper inclines sorry but it's getting very personalized you're not you are yeah I'm not sorry sorry I'm not sorry your skis might be facing across the

slope but you often want your body your chest to be facing down the slope so there's a lot of rotation there's like disassociation of the torso almost and that is something I think that a lot of skiers underestimate in terms of the toll and the tax that can take especially if you have mobility issues or any type of orthopedic issues okay so big picture wise what I would do is set up your week and we need to make sure that we're doing this in a way where we

understand our higher impact days and our higher fatigue days yep and what you want to avoid is doing something in both of those categories on all our most days and so I personally generally like to stack red on red what I mean by that is if you're gonna have a really challenging session say it's the touring when you guys really get going and you're cutting your sharp you're moving this is torsion on the back right at his impact it is also probably more focused

because there's like crash and burn faster speeds all that stuff okay this is high physiological demand this is high energy demand and this is high neurological demand also high stress yeah okay that's a red right my stack that red when it comes to your training now I'm thinking this is a good day to go hard counter intuitive but I want to go hard on hard right I want red on red because the next day we're gonna come back and probably do green whatever that means that could

be your Pilates could be your total off date or this could be one of the other ski sessions that is a very low technical recovery movements something like that this is something of their and then we can come back and sack probably like an orange yellow whatever you want to call it kind of in the mid this is where you're accumulating volume right so this is we're building up this is maybe the longer state yeah so the red might be the steeper and earlier stuff

yep with some higher speed carving and then green is actually maybe a touring day I mean it's gonna be like slow and steady but not redlining yeah you don't want to like yellow line yeah okay then maybe something else maybe it's some drilling like drilling like single-like practice stuff like that it is high-technical feedback stuff yeah exactly high-technical feedback stuff and then the maybe the orange is the moderate touring something like that is exactly

what you want to do right so we're gonna take all that and the first thing I want to say is let's lay out specifically when we're doing if we can the skiing components over the course of a week and then we're gonna build in some sort of intentional down regulation work to supplement that stuff right so when we go red on red then we are paying that back and we say red on red that's in a single day single day yep because it's in you're gonna do a training session

asking session in a day or something right okay got it so you're gonna do your hard hard red skiing session and then we're gonna come back and you do some Pilates to unwind we're gonna do maybe lift that day we're gonna do something else depending on more at right we're typically doing some multiple physical exposures in one day at some form of fashion right that's one of me my state if it's a single session that's fine single session red is fine it's gonna carry

over to the next day right so there's residual fatigue there there's some other changes we want to pay attention to so either way we're gonna finish that day was strong down regulation right really gonna batch recovery into that the next day then we get to pay that toll back okay now this is again technical work yes I'm saying this is much for myself I am saying for myself but like the slow restorative yoga was fantastic for down regulations so that's where the day

ends yep love that stuff I would actually like to also see make sure that that session is maybe not full 90 minutes if it's long or even maybe 60 minutes is maybe and not because we just want restoration if it's fine like if you're like no I leave there and I feel more energetic I feel unwind oh I

basically feel like I'm gonna sleep because it's also really dark studio perfect perfect amazing on that so we would lay out the entire week on the skills there and this would progress over time so the reds get a little bit harder the green stay green this is a major mistake that drift green drift everybody drifts right you end up just having a bunch of medium stuff which is great you got a cumulative volume there but the way that I want you to reframe this is

when you're thinking of red we're thinking about maximal capacity can I perform under these maximal conditions right you are holding on you are getting after it when we get into the other session we're not working on conditioning at this point we were working on technical capacity it is practice

the general rule of thumb is probably something like 20% of the time can be read and almost everything else needs to be practice or recovery much more than that depends on your unique physiology but with all you got going on new to the altitude injury history I'm gonna hedge way more conservatively I would also say my recovery capacity is broadly speaking pretty low I mean I would just say I'm a slower I'm slower to recover than a lot of my friends who are

competitive athletes yeah who I trained with same workload kind of same diet same habits and I'm just I'm slower to recover yeah that's another metric we actually we always bucket so I want to say we're total recovery capacity and then it goes back earlier it's that non-specific stress get those out of your life and watch your recovery capacity just take off so we will want to work on that 100% nonetheless this is the in part right the recovery capacity is give me

my other stuff and I'll get that up higher but since we're not time for that let's just make sure the input the stressors going in from what we can control are not outkicking our capacity to recover this is where the problems start to exist we want to outkick them a little bit um gastro system physiology isn't changing the stress but we can't exponentially increase our injury or use risk right you will see the back lock up 100% during this time right now because

of injury there but because global stress got high center nervous system said I don't like what's going on here I'm gonna stop him I'm throttling him back pain pain pain pain pain tight tight tight that's effectively what's happening no real actual change there but it is a global regulator it's a governor saying lock up right as what's happening so we're gonna stretch that week out that way I want to fully out of the seven days we want to put in all those other practices

around that we're gonna build the schedule then from there we're gonna work our training backwards around that so when we look at that we need unwinding sounds like you're getting that from yoga and Pilates meditation also I'm generally when I am I better self meditating twice a day 20 minutes basic TM stuff yeah and breath work on top of that or that is just the

uh... I'm not doing much independent breath work I mean what I do find helpful and I can make time for this is using something like there's a device called the O2 trainer it's not even sure what the sort of general term would be it's a respiratory train you know what it's respiratory training and yeah I do find those extremely helpful on number of levels funny you mentioned the O2 trainer that research came from my lab oh yeah yeah okay yeah there we go so that's

boss route is yeah it's boss right now have it on the have it on the podcast that's when I start using it in preparation for high altitude hunt yeah and found it tremendously helpful yeah okay since it came from your lab just 60 seconds for just a brief okay we touch we touch a lot on respiratory rate the reason respiratory rate can be either dysfunctional or even to suboptimal which are different is because of a number of things I talked to you about it could be

pattern recognition could be psychophysiological right what I never got to was could be biochemical that would be CO2 that would be pH levels right you're trying to restore there the third one is it can simply be mechanical right and so this is inter-custom muscles so these are the little muscles that are in between your ribs as well as your diaphragm when you contract those that open up the cavity of the lungs which allows to change pressure what that matters is the real issue

at altitude and people say this all the time but there is not less oxygen at altitude there's the same amount of oxygen at 10,000 feet as a rizzo sea level but the partial pressure in the air is different it's much lower and so when you open your mouth the gradient the difference between the pressure in your lungs and the outside environment is less it's almost the same so air doesn't go anywhere and so what you need to do is be able to create a huge amount of

increase in volume as you're maybe aware the relationship between pressure and volume you open that up and then allow air to come in so what the O2 trainer does is it restricts air flow in and so you actually have to actively

pull it's like strength training your inner costals and your diaphragm so you can do that to give yourself more ability why that also matters through fatigue is those muscles are like any other muscle they fatigue so when you lose that ability you lose the ability to bring an air like during a cute

exercise so that becomes a problem another free way to do it is this is when nasal breathing can work so nasal breathing alone as enclosing your mouth is a fantastic way to force inner costals and diaphragm to really get on board because you're restricting total air you're effectively doing altitude

not doing it not something you want to necessarily do you shouldn't be doing like nasal only breathing when you're at maximum heart rate doesn't really make any sense to do that you have a mouth like for a reason but if you have significant

problems breathing that moderate to medium intensities O2 trainer great or nasal breathing or any other tools but it's effectively getting at respiration train yeah and that came in because you're asking if I do separate breath working I would say outside of I often wonder how much of we don't need

to divert here but how much of the benefit of meditation is from just measured slow breathing versus good posture versus the big night ground there yes let's leave that alone but I would say right now no not doing separate breath work okay me right now you again let's take a look at suit to tolerance let's take a look at mechanics how you're moving how you're breathing potentially I don't know if you guys recover this in your combo with Eric or not but you know where

your ribs that are you have excessive rib flaring it's something that I've been working on a lot in the last let's call it six to twelve months just having my awareness brought up generally yes quite a bit of flare yeah yeah yeah it's pretty easy that that'll kick off the diaphragm pretty quickly right and have it's in so becomes a problem so we would look about mechanically we would look at it chemically and then we would look at pattern cycle physiologically

something like that but that would be the places to start to figure out okay you may or may not need breath work that doesn't necessarily need to happen it also can can be detrimental meditation the same thing it's almost like as an

aggregate it's generally very very very positive to extremely positive when there's also subsets of folks where breath work is maybe not a great option right is not necessarily just this panacea of everyone go do down regulation breath work particularly if your HRV is extremely high so you're very

pretty sympathetic and this has actually happened again this is rare more common it's what we've been describing but has happened we have had folks that have very high HRV's so if you're using a device like an aura that's getting

this you know once every five minute mark you're talking about people's overnight HRV averages of 150 milliseconds 170 milliseconds really really which may or may not be a problem at all could be totally normal for you easy no problem at the same time they have a respiratory rate of nine breaths per

minute okay again maybe totally normal especially if you're super fit any time we're running through physiology we're never taking action on one metric there's way too many things that could be explain what's going on there but if you couple that with lethargy can't get out of bed performance numbers are down no motivation drive things like that if you think that person is burnt out and you give them a much down regulation work yeah right gonna be a problem

gonna be a real yeah you're pushing the slider in the wrong direction you're pushing the slide in the wrong direction for sure so then again that's more typical is up regulation we need to bring you back down but just I just feel like it's important to say that because some people go out there and just have everyone down regulate and you're like well time out here you may or may not need breath work at all and it's a tool right for sure so I want something in

there to after those sessions hit and we've got that big fear to go okay let's let's bring it back down that could be very very low volume strength work if we feel like we have a little bit of an issue with under regulation this is where I was gonna go next some curious to hear yeah more about this so I want to make sure that you're strong in strong positions so everything you outlined is going to be steady state endurance ever a somewhat limited range of motion

you've also outlined and I'm just making assumptions here but when you're doing a lot of those fast turns it's a greater range of motion through your knees and hips because you're cutting at a faster angle yeah and you're doing stuff that scares the shit out of me that is helpful for skiing like kind of this is not the right term but like buckling the knees laterally to get higher edge angle yeah makes sense yeah yeah start of the tire I get it all right great

so that's actually high velocity eccentric yeah control we want to make sure that we come back in and reestablish a proper pattern over those same range of the motion and fast walk through like exact examples here in a second but we're walking from the top down I want to know what you look like

what's the skiing now that we understood that now we're backfilling in all of our needs okay so we needed the down regulations that we don't just get the entire system to lock up on us we needed now to look at our physically attributes okay can we come back and reestablish proper movement patterns what I'm meaning by that is you are going to when you're on the slopes you're gonna default to your movement and breathing patterns that are the lowest common

recipe right hedging against that that's when we come back and we do our pelvic floor stuff we do whatever stuff that you're doing that says hey now this is the way that we want to sequence so you're just continually reminding it that how much transfer that has over to your skis I don't care hopefully a lot but even one percent is better than zero any percent carryover we can get from there at this point we probably don't need to spend a lot of time on maximal

speed and power that's not a right limiting factor we would have done this in the offseason or some other issue right delayed in a dollar short but we need to make sure your hips in particular and feet are functioning appropriately as well as your shoulders and that's like those are the areas I'm gonna go after and making sure we have proper stability and then we have strength in them you're gonna get a lot of muscular endurance on the slopes I'm not super

concerned about that I want low volume high quality strength I don't really need maximal strength at this point but I kind of want to touch the envelope a little bit here I want to get up to Tim give me a heavy heavy double give me heavy triple no smelling salts don't like like I don't need that but we want to touch more than you probably want to do okay so maybe this isn't the right way to reference it like what percentage of one rip max we talking for those

doubles and triples eighty five okay all right it's up there no you're you're going yeah you're more than you want to do yeah yeah for sure okay but we don't need you ninety five yeah I don't need you at a two-wrap max yeah right I want you feeling again heavier than you want to feel so you're doing it to with what you might be able to do for four I don't know if my mouth is panning out here six six okay all right got it got it that's right just to sort of make it

concrete for my something where you got a lot of attention knuckle dragging yeah so the double could be with a weight where you would have about at six to eight six yes something like that I don't actually I'm not super concerned about the exact numbers here what I'm concerned about is is it at a level where you sufficiently have to be paying attention you have to be ready to go right we're not sending a work tax in in the middle of like yeah right right I'm not listening

to a dense podcast while I'm doing this totally I also don't want it at such a intensity or volume that it's now escalating recovery in a negative fashion I got it right you're you're not digging the whole deeper yes that's right mm-hmm don't want to dig a hole any deeper fatigue is really interesting whether you're looking at endurance or strength however you want to do it this is basic physiology stuff it doesn't go linearly there's a little bit of an

asymptote here and there's a little bit of an exponential growth such that going from a 10% increase in intensity so 50 to 60% is almost identical in terms of recoverable volume so the amount of volume you could do let's say skiing at 50 percent of your max heart rate is pretty much the same as what you could do at 60% there'll be very little changes but if you go from 80% to 90% there'll be dramatic increases in time it takes to recover and you already we know just

based on what you've told me earlier probably struggle on the higher end of spectrum right and so getting into the real high terms of recovery recovery yeah so your maximum recoverable volume is mrv's kind of how we talk about a

lot is low for higher intensity stuff now I'd be interested to see what your muscle physiology looks like would you generally consider yourself more fast twitch or slow twitch just off the cuff that's a more fast yeah that's always the answer right that's me my fatigue my soreness from power heavy

strength stuff is really really high yeah from those things because I'm particularly good at that stuff really for my own self mean when I've and look you're much more sophisticated with this stuff but when in my own primitive way when I've been in my absolute strongest I'm generally take like seven to nine days between yeah the same workout yeah and super long rest intervals yeah of course right because if not it's not necessarily that you potentially

respond better to that training it's the fact that the whole gets dug so deep if you do more than that your maximum recover volumes is super low yeah low right so we can get out of it okay so we want to pay attention to that that's basically where I'm looking at right so we're gonna do some stuff for global torso take of this as trap our deadlift right so we want to make sure that shoulder position is appropriate hip position and we're putting strength in

the posterior side and we're just remembering strength if I've had a history specifically trap our deadlift I'm not sure why for decades I was totally fine I've trapped our deadlift you're gonna love this and then I did a going from zero tennis to spending seven to ten days with a pro and Florida doing like eight hours a day of tennis technically real smart tons of progress of course and then I came back and I was doing a trap bar deadlift and my right SI was

like clunk and ever since I've actually had I've gone through periods of it improving getting worse who knows if it's exactly the SI but I've had issues with both trap bar and say back squatting type movements yeah where I worry

about the low back and and the hip so I'm wondering if throw it off yeah pick a different exercise right we're we're we're almost always tool agnostic right it is what's the thing we're trying to get to and we'll pick a bunch of tools based on right so I could do some split stance or you know I just

fans split stands tend to be better for you single leg yeah or split stands entirely or both single leg I would say it just seems to be safe right don't run into the same back issues okay do a single leg leg press yeah for all I care right like who cares right yeah different now we got to do something for the back later but fine yeah we can make that work we can do hip thrusting mm-hmm lots of ways we can go and single leg leg press is how I've been edging

back into the like training which is overall going very well with that one strange like piano wire nut snap like swing that I felt a couple of weeks ago so this is this recent that was a two or three weeks ago oh okay okay yeah great we could do sled drags right we could push and pull things that are really heavy for a few steps all of these things are gonna be fine so my guess is if you were to do something like that you'd probably be fine that particular

position it is being stuck in a position under load that really give you problems so I would look and see when we get out to the place what equipment do we have and then we'll work around that that's the approach could be like split stands even potentially elevated one foot overhead pressing for your shoulders things like that let's get you back out of the equation but I don't want it gone so that's the real big you said a second ago thermal extension of

your right leg when it's trailing okay great so let's put it in thermal extension I want your right leg behind I want you right heel on the ground I want you terminally locking out your knee and then we're gonna do overhead movement and so what we're doing is in that case we're not training the leg

per se we got that understab or connecting it to the rest of the movement group which is to say you never get the time off you are always practicing that movement when distracted that's gonna tell us do you own that position do you really have that is not gonna men transfer on the slopes that's what we're after learning movement and this is a general problem with physiology I think we've done a huge to service teaching systems as if they are separate everyone makes and

says oh yes they're not but then we go right back to treating it system by system if we want to improve movement that means that foot heel connection needs to be worked on in all of our practices right we just don't let it go that's just the new ingrained system so I would do that I would say the same thing for our rotational work it's really weird people get the rotation and they all said and just forget the strength train right and they get the rotation

they're like I'll just do sets of ten or like what why yeah well why is that the only answer you want to be strong this way in this way right great so we're gonna have the same movement patterns that we're gonna get there when you're

doing let's just say two rep sets three rep sets yeah doesn't have to be right now but I'd love to know what we're talking about in terms of total volume number of sets you can use a very easy rule of thumb three to five method now every time I say this the entire internet comes after me yes I

didn't invent it no like it's been around for a very long time three to five which this means is three to five days per week pick three to five exercises do three to five sets three to five reps per set three to five minutes rest so what that means that could be on the high end five days a week five sets of five of five exercises that's a long work that's a if you start adding up the rest intervals right if you start adding up the rest of the rules and even if you

cheat the rest of the rules and you do that at the appropriate load five by five is anyone who's truly strength trained that is a beast it's another word I was wanting to save it all I'll pass on saying it like start to the M and F involving it it's a load right it can be as little as three days a week three exercises three sets of three that's probably what I would hedge more to you yes that I'm not digging any deeper with my already limited 100% recovery

ability so if I were to give you like this one example but actual full training program for you I'm missing a bunch of information here but just as a sample here I would probably say if you're skiing initially five days a week as a way of call it I probably want roughly Wednesday I want almost as a pure recovery day we are going to potentially do some sort of movement so your PT or your actual movement coach respiratory muscle hip addoctor whatever that

little thing is we need to get activated so any hygiene we have from whatever's coaching there we want to get done we're doing our hot cold sauna thing you want to do that outside great you want to go to your breath workout side is to get hot like any of those things you'd like to do for recovery Wednesdays as an example is that day that's it catch up on work maybe for a few hours we're gonna keep that thing we're resetting we're checking hydration we're sleep

extension we're napping we're getting PT massage soft tissue all that stuff is Wednesday and that's Wednesday this is also the day where you do something that is obnoxiously selfish you want to play three hours of video games great like what is the thing you love to do that you don't like let yourself do yeah world of work craft while I'm getting a mani petty yeah petty probably need my hands yeah there you go that's fantastic right that is that day we may or may

not incorporate a low intensity walk this is potentially getting out and yeah you're gonna have a lot of nature exposure so we're fine there I will likely also do a lot of walking in place of sitting so in place of zoom calls in

place of that type of thing I'll do low intensity walking yeah if not we'd say walk outside for some chunks two walks two ten at walks a day morning and some like that any other adjunct therapies and tools and technologies we're using is gonna be that day right so that's amazing let's just say I'm

just gonna make an example here just gonna run the whole thing let's just say Monday is that really hard red day you go on that really hard session on the scope we're gonna come back after that final session we might go straight to the gym you really warmed up we're gonna do three by three okay we're gonna probably do that like rear stands other foot elevated front foot elevated overhead press something like that now in this particular case I'm probably not

doing three sets of three I might ask you to go to like five's the upper body doesn't tend to respond to lower rep ranges as well as the lower body interesting you won't see too many guys who are really really excellent at bench press who only do singles or doubles they tended to probably closer to three to four to five lower bodies like generally opposite so doing like an an overhead press double by the time you get it up and get the first rep up yeah

it also might be who've made use slightly lighter loads for anything overhead which I've avoided completely for probably happier because of the compression sensitivity yeah so I have I've done very little very little spinal loading angle it so let's just do incline yeah same thing right okay like jammer press like 45 degree if you've got a landmine yeah some other great perfect we need to just be at an angle here it doesn't have to be perfectly overhead something

like that okay so I'm probably doing that I want some sort of lower body similar vein this could be three's I love if you have a heavy sled that you can push for like three steps each leg that would be great if you've got some sort of potentially front squat goblet squat zirker squat something like that that is not aggravating of any of your things when we're saying three by three to 80 percent this is still week one so I don't care if this is 60 percent it

doesn't matter like we're just going through the motions any favorite split stance or ice lateral leg movements just in in my particular case the sled is interesting I responded well to sleds in the past so I'll look for that it may be my equipment options might be yeah what would be an alternative stepups great a super basic step up right cycle not a dumbbells or kettlebells yeah just be really careful a lot of people will like to progress this by going to a higher

step which is great but we have to be really careful of how much hip flexion and how much load we put on hip flexion for you now at the same time if we go at a low say 12 inch box or something we're really not getting much movement here other than a basic knee extension we want to think and kind of play to this my low back response very well to the type of glue activation that I experienced through step ups high angle or low angle high box or low box I

have only done lower box even at low box assuming that I'm and this is getting into the weeds but when I sort of do like the verstag and like pick the knee up yeah yeah and really get that support leg glute contraction my low back response very well to them okay let me ask you one quick question this is a super technical here when you're on that box let's just say you're doing a step up with your left foot okay to make it easy yeah the left foot over there where

is your body at relatives your left foot and where's your knee at well the way I've been doing these step ups is actually a sort of cross lateral step oh sure and then yeah exactly yeah yeah okay yeah so I've been doing that but I'm open to whatever you would suggest that has the lowest injury potential yeah so you're doing that and feeling a great glute contraction because you're crossing okay that's great the only reason I asked that is because depending on where your

foot position is this can dramatically change hamstring glute activation right and so are you stepping up with a knee related activity are you stepping up with a hamstring or glute or the neck and I'm not sure yeah so if your foot is way on front of you so you can imagine you're kind of as you go to step up you're rocking forward and then coming up right or if it's behind you right or same with you is behind you none of these things are right or wrong right should your

knees go past your toes well what are we trying to do here the more our knee goes past our toes the more it's gonna be knee related the more it stays behind and the more it's gonna be most here typically right as a general rule so what are we trying to get response to potentially your enclosure we yep now when you're getting feeling great response from single leg pressing depends on how your setup is you might be in a situation where you feel better when your

quads quads got I can tell you how I'm setting up for the single leg leg press I'm actually placing foot very high on the platform well platform is this here well let's just say on on a leg press we've got this rectangle in front of us yeah I am putting the foot quite high on that platform so that it would be the I guess maybe the equivalent of rocking forward in this step up this is a very high hit flexion very high hit flexion yeah and because the more I feel it

in the glute the better the low back feels yeah okay so you're getting is contraction over stretch which is great yeah so contracting over this is why flow range emotion stuff is such a good idea right it needs to be strong over

those long positions right Charlie winegolf all day right like long strong and then work hard okay so we want to be in the position I'm I'm not gonna suggest that the standard step up positions any better if you're having success with how complicated things like low back are if you're having success

with that modified cursi step up and I would stay like probably right there okay which is great the only thing we want to do is potentially load it more I don't know how you're doing now as far as step ups go I've been doing it unloaded like this is by the bodyweight only and then I've moved into loading with the leg press because there's fewer variables yeah I play and I'm like all right let me see how I progress with this yeah I would do the same thing by the

way the record like if we started loading curtsy I would serve very low like right now let's not go the wrong direction yeah all right let's take our wins weren't the blackjack table we won one hand let's step up your saying sort of below or 12 inches or below like you're not really getting a B and C if you're trying to like win a world record and you're trying to do like a four-foot step up you got your own set of problems like how do you think about

elevation it's because of hip flexion it's the same thing you already answered the question I was coming out of this way right which is if it's at a very low position then you're basically getting most right from unique extension initially to get you moving this is generally it's gonna happen but if you put it at a really high position you're automatically put it your hip in a really high flexion so your thigh gets really close to your ribcage now we have to

work the glute and it doesn't mean you're not you working your knee as well could be very need heavy driven still doesn't matter but you've now forced your glute to work over a high range of motion which is what we're after yeah people tend to avoid range of motion when they have things like back

entries that's oftentimes the wrong direction like you want to make sure without exacerbating pain of course but it probably wants to be opened up a little bit and the hip needs to be so I would keep it there I also made ditch

that and go to straight hip extension this is this is go to the hip thrust have you done those before I have done hip thrust I mean we're talking about like barbell across the waist type stuff yep I have good with your yeah for whatever reason especially if it's single leg if I keep the elevation

pretty low in other words if I'm not getting to like max terminal hip extension hip extension I'm usually okay it can cause my spinal directors to fire no yeah yeah and that sometimes gets me into a spasmed situation where it's problematic yep 100% so you're getting extension from

lumbar spine instead of but for instance if I keep my hips somewhat low let's just say I'm using a Swiss ball or something like that and I'm doing like heel roll out so I'm really getting the hamstring yeah then I'll find yep but

higher weight if I'm really making the effort to go full range my spinal directors can really get over activated and stay over activated yeah so you just want to stay in those situations yeah this is why like it would be impossible I'm glad you're letting us do this by the way because typically on

podcasts they kind of just like what's the yeah what's the cookie cutter like you can no this is really and I know this is really self-indulgent everybody so I appreciate you bearing with but you know what I would have said because I

record the intros after these conversations but like you get to the universal through the personal in the sense that if you've had any degree of injuries if you've just lived life aggressively it's never gonna be a cookie cutter once I suppose it's all you're going to have to zig and zag like we're

doing right now so this is I appreciate you being game to do it also because you're gonna have to zig and zag with this stuff so yeah with the hip bridging if I keep my hips kind of low and I'm let's say targeting the hamstrings that it works but otherwise what I've realized with this low back stuff is if it gets super hypertonic like if my spinal arches just like turn on and they refuse to turn off that can last two days or more and or three days and it

fucks up my sleep so badly and everything and everything yeah digestion all of it we work I don't want to do anything yeah okay so I would just given the fact you've had some success with what you're currently doing and those other ones are marginally helpful then just ditch them yeah at this point is just like green only yeah yellow orange is out like that's the only other thing I'd say is let's change the positions entirely which is okay how about you said you had

success in areas where you make the hamstrings work really hard so let's do a hamstring curl on a machine take the back entirely out of the quaget retrain glutes contract hamstrings contract when we don't give the spinal record and even an option to come because it sounds like once they come into

the party when you're front squatting when you're back squatting when you're doing hip thrusts or glute bridges they haven't learned to play their position yet no it's like that one friend everybody has shows up at the party drinks too much starts yelling and screaming you're like oh god just don't buy on the party this guy again yeah yeah you don't get the party for well yeah like you're just gone right we can do some other stuff there what you're gonna

eventually want to build to is integration which is okay now we need to learn to go glute hamstring low back firing sequence right glute hamstring low back but right now for a while to make sure that your quads hamstrings and glutes are truly conditioned or isolating and until we get out of pain that's where instead I don't even care to I would do leg extension on leg extension machine leg curl in your situation where you're at and limited resources probably not

full-time PT like remember folks like this is this situation here and then we're gonna slowly in our warmups and cooldowns do sequence movement patterns that go glute hamstring low back and just to start like hey remember this is the pattern we want to be in okay now we're not gonna but expose you to load a fatigue we're gonna do that in our isolation work but then we're gonna come back in our cooldowns we're gonna go through that I would also then build you

out a specific warmup that you do every day prior to skiing that is the same sequencing yep right could be a thousand different little things we do but we're gonna do a couple of drills and I'm literally talking four minutes of work right we're just remembering proper glute sequencing and this is a combination to around this last point out because we haven't got to Tuesday yet I still work with my money but yeah well folks I'm having a ton of fun so I hope they

are too in getting to that is we need to make sure a part of that equation is your chest and your thoracic spine and your rib cage because we can't then rebuild the lower sequence without and then just let the ribs do it that natural thing and so we don't want to be in a situation where we're like lock out we can't like breathe everything so tight we're just like no this needs to be a moved functional position you actually would be sort of surprised how much

that will carry over if you give it time you're not gonna see significant changes in your posture low back pain in three days by doing a four minute warmup but in a year later yeah this is kind of have substantial what would some of the what might that warm up look like yeah okay so one of the things I'll probably start you with is a basic diaphragm warmup okay so this could be a simple as let's land your back let's go in a heels to your butt position so

knees are up on there your feet are flat on the floor and your heels are right up against your butt okay now you're gonna take your hands and put them around your stomach so just below your rib cage and we're just gonna use your breath to expand your hands so pushing it out there right okay great three or four breaths probably nasal only okay awesome now we're gonna do a glute bridge okay we're in that same position we're gonna make sure as high as you can go six inches two

inches an inch off the ground I don't care only as high as you can go we're probably gonna tuck our chin right this is almost automatically gonna keep your position out of extension and your low back so we're gonna tuck your chin just a little bit there and we're gonna breathe three breaths four breaths while you're bridged while we're bridged right and watch what happens reset yourself come back up and watch you gained eight inches in your hip extension guaranteed because

not you've actually stretched anything but you've turned signals off right now I'm totally projecting here but I'm pretty confident right now you're in a position to where anytime you get any perception through your low back it just goes lock yeah the the governor is just like bingo turn it off shut off the yeah you have to turn it off throw the throw the switch to throw the switch all of a sudden boom you can hip extension and now it's not coming from your

lumbar spine right and we're doing this still in a tucked position and we're going two inches lower than you want to go to goal the tie you want to go stay stay green totally stay green we're gonna do some breath work there and by breath work again yeah we three nose three yeah three of them four five whatever you want doesn't matter didn't come back down reset come back up one more time you'll be up four more inches like if you're doing this at home you're

gonna be like oh my god because it works perfectly I might have you go into one leg position so you're gonna hold that position on one leg say kick your right leg out keep your knees identical to each other and kick the right leg out and now we have it's a lateral control right so now are we have torsal rotation and we also have that thermal hip extension and now can you still breathe what happened to your ribs bingo right you're gonna see I guarantee you as soon as

you do that you look down you'll have arched right ribs have gone up this is not a locked in hard contraction this is a chill position right it has to be all right I'm relaxed here I'm breathing there's gonna be a little bit of shaking because you're in a single leg position but not much three four five eight breaths switch to the next one take a break in between like those details aren't what matter here you're just trying to slowly let the system know these

are okay positions you can relax we're safe here so I would probably go into that then I'd come back down that's this symbol sequence we are 45 seconds in at this point and I guarantee you stand up in your posture will be better right you'll be out of that little bit of a curve from there I would probably then take that exact same thing and go into a split stance so imagine you could do this walking lunges I would probably do this with a slight rotation but I still want your

hands around your stomach so we're still watching the distance between your rib and enter your spirit like spine that ASIS that front point of your hip you're gonna pay attention that if you want to pick your thumb and your pinky but your thumb below your rib but you're pinky on your ASIS way you're doing these lunges and make sure that distance isn't changing and just breathe do a step all the way down if you want to play here that's fine let's go a little

bit rock your knee over your ankle rock backwards a little bit give me a little bit of a rotation if you want to do a little bit of an arch if you're you're right knee is forward in this lunge position and you want to take your left arm and reach it over top of your head you want to rotate it you want to twist it any of those things are fine but the key is here we're not doing these because we have a checkbox that says this is my warm up intention is everything here as

soon as you lose intention to stop as we're trying to make sure we have a specific action not just like coach that I have to warm up and so I don't like action in this case is making sure you're not flaring making sure that that torso position that's correct in terms of like distance from rib cage to the ASIS like like bony protrusion on the front of the hip folks like if you see someone wearing low jeans and you see the like ridges in the front yeah it's the

arrow that points yeah exactly okay so that that is the intention then it's not just like I'm doing my eight steps it's like no you're doing your eight steps but the purpose is to maintain yeah and it's not even not even necessarily like the other classic things that are associated with the physical

warm up like actual temperature increases being metabolic may efficient in the muscle having more strength and power production that's coming to but we've slid that in we've also slid in breathwork because you're actually now altering O2 and CO2 on purpose and you've done that on top of correcting movement patterns and now you're reestablishing that so I would argue and love to do this barefoot true if possible right so your toes are all the way up are engaging I

want in this particular case that heel connection to be strong I don't want you driving only through your heel you're gonna be driving using your whole foot let's make sure we're not forgetting our toes and our feet yeah super important for skiing very important right it's important your foot awareness and control is super super important everything right if you want to do a little more ski specific here you could do actually or a little more fun you could

take a little slide pad so it's like the sides of a tube if you will if you put it on a surface of slides and put that on your back foot and let that slide back and forth so you lose some some stability that back leg which is then just gonna further exacerbate neurological control and it's gonna remind you at all times do you know where everything is moving right so we're talking your adductors are now moving you're talking your hip extensors and knee flexors

they're all working on both sides and we're getting am I controlling my breath am I controlling my ribs so I would probably add a few of those in again want give me one set six to twelve per leg I don't really care there's no magic thing we're trying to get here we're three minutes in that maximum here you've now gotten the entire lower body the hips have been moved and isolated we're activated do something like that if you have any specific things and this

is why I don't have insight but if you had any hey yeah my my right act doctors weaker than my left or it's overused or or silly I says something like that then we would add in specificity here let's get your left glute mead on so we'll do some standing clamshells we'll do some lateral walks whatever the cases that we need to get going there in we're in a pretty good position last thing we would do is then go to your upper body and make sure that we're having a

connection between our upper body to our toe all the way up and down so this could be throwing some stuma gill so throwing hand leg opposite here we could do that and like opposite meaning like bird dog something like that yeah so you're on quadruped right so your hands are on the ground you're on your knees and you would say lift your left hand all the way on front of you so it would be over your head but your my knees and then at the same time your right leg is

extending back and so you're getting a very strong right glute contraction that's crossing that fascia line to your left shoulder and now that entire thing is in the sequence at the same time your core is working on rotation while remember what happened to your ribcage yeah and we'll link to all this in the show that's guys so yeah you'll be able to find these things something simple like that would be probably what to do the very very last thing I would do

then would be some sort of extremely low level what some folks call a robeck plyometrics this is altus this is a danan and sue stuff this is rudimentary hops so something like stiff leg it and you're gonna do 20 hops and land intentionally on your heel who has come to be hard for me with the heel drops yeah right like again you don't want to do to level a pain you could do a little bit of your toe you could do something but if you're going to be landing an

absorbing load on the skis yeah for sure we have to get some sort of activation of tissue tolerance here remember if we really have a sensitivity issue in your low back with pain we have to desensitize it somehow the way that we do that is we walk right up to that line of sensitivity go back to steps and we do a little bit of volume there and then ideally try to push that line back up tangible quick example let's just say you're having an issue with trap

our deadlifts okay great unless it's say we did a thing where I said okay put it on the bar and we're just gonna work up to a load until it starts to hurt let's say that that is 300 pounds for you probably have a pretty decent trap our deadlift I assume okay great so when the pain started hurting at 300 pounds let's go to 200 let's do three sets of six go come back the next day no no no she next session slowly working our way up till where's that line

okay seems like I can turn it 280 and I have no pain let's now get to five sets of six let's get to five sets of six and then some accessory exercises one yourself no pain no pain no pain now let's slowly go up to 280 and then we're gonna slow you're gonna desensitize that system by doing it I'm doing the same thing with your landing and compression I had to get to that somehow I don't want exacerbate your pain but I want to do 10 lands I want to do something it could

be maybe a little bit of a softer ground we could do some other way around but we want to slowly desensitize the tissue that that landing and loading is okay so that's how I would build a Monday okay so few follow up some Monday my most important remaining question is related to let's just say in

this case the three exercises and three to five minutes in between I've benefited in the past from three to five minutes or more in between exercises but in the interest of time one might be inclined myself included to say well

rather than doing say exercise a and doing the three sets of that exercise with five minutes in between maybe I could just sequence it so that I do exercise a I take like a minute rest exercise b take a minute rest c take a minute rest and then go back to a is that something that is acceptable slash

advisable or do you really want more of a break for your central nervous system or otherwise in your particular case in this situation what you laid out that supersetting is totally fine okay great no issue there we're not trying to maximize your strength yeah if we were trying to do that for any number of reasons where we really are trying to peak it what you're really trying to do in this case I don't even care if you get stronger if we lose some strength over

the course of this it's okay or trying to do is continue to have health throughout the system so it needs to be strong enough the whole positions where you're on the slow right so we're trying to avoid a slope of degradation over the course of fighting so if you wanted to do that no problem you want a supersetting is what we call that yeah what we probably have you do is set the whole circuit up for it's part of you kind of warm up and you do one at your breath for a second you

slowly walk over set up do the next one I don't care that it's three minutes or two minutes or less what we want to make sure we're doing is not getting a ton of fatigue I don't want you if your breath rate is 150 breaths per minute if you're your heart rate rather if you're sweating a lot if you're really getting it then oh yeah pause calm down I actually want you to leave these sessions feeling like I didn't do anything but if you can do that a superset fashion no problem

the decision should not be 30 minutes yeah really this is a you've remember you skewed hard oh yeah well it's part of the reason I'm asking it's like I'll probably be pretty fatigue walking in so if that's great like we're gonna get a

high quality warm up and we're gonna do a couple of exercises at a reasonable quality but we're also not going to 90 95% we're gonna have good strong contraction probably finish it potentially with one exercise to a pump and this would be let's take one area that needs that is under size that is

under strength that is dysfunctional and we'll do one set so many options yeah probably rotate it is to be honest so like maybe maybe it's just it's glutes maybe we put a band-on and we just do a set of 30 glue pumps sit yeah rather

right got it maybe something for your shoulder yeah you've had this thing going on maybe something like that going on and maybe it's hand leg opposite 30 reps each I just adjusted this yesterday for kind of shoulders using real adult stuff totally feels great right feel great yeah so something like

that maybe a bent row on a machine like what would any number of things we can do and you do one or so sets of 20 get a nice big pompy feel jacked it's great yeah that's probably what I would do one two of those one set maybe two and then we're done what else would you like to add and then another critical question which is one where I do think I tend to lose the plot I don't think I eat enough actually and I've done so much fasting I'm like I'm not hungry I

have developed the habit of not eating very much and I can see that in my lean body mass right now in terms of just totals am I as an under muscle to overfat both yeah the overfat is I've just been a piglet over the holidays and I've been doing less strength training in being in a protective mode for the back stuff and I think just not consuming enough protein and other things so we've talked about money I guess if there are any sort of crux pieces that you'd like

discuss for the rest of the week which you already kind of laid out top level and then I would look to get your thoughts on tracking nutrition because part of what I've seen is like I'm not gonna like way out my chicken breasts on the jewelry scale and like I practically speaking I'm probably not gonna do that maybe I should but much like tracking hydration by having a container set volume and you just multiply it out that's straightforward how you might

approach nutrition yeah with a similar yeah great this is fun regarding training we kind of said we're probably just very quick recap Mondays that red day Wednesdays that green day which that means Saturday which is kind of like the reason I'm doing this is Monday Wednesday Saturday is generally going to be if we can single session and this is technical work so this is let's review Monday through Friday and Tim what do we need to work on you know this is

you and your coach going back and say we really want to work on this we need more reps at this in other words what do you need more volume in and Saturday it is practice it is we miss this we miss this we miss this here's this drill is not high fatigue is also not nothing it's not green day you got

all Sunday Sundays all right whatever doesn't matter what days week you are but this is a point so it is a little bit of work but it is really getting that last bit of volume we just need more practice practice takes reps awesome that then leaves us with Tuesday there's a party that lift you could do another lift on Saturday afterwards to real technical stuff into the same thing I would do the exact same thing I did on Monday but switch the exercises so it's a

little bit different so let's say we decided to do step-ups on Monday switch that out for rear foot elevators with squat if those are great switch that out for some other lower body extension exercise whatever same exact concept though same thing switch out your upper body movement switch out your rotation movement give you a little bit more variety make sure we're doing something pulling something pressing something eroding make sure we're doing something

in what we technically call frontal and sagittal plane so maybe this is a lateral bunch so not only we now switching out exercise we're going laterally this way something like that same thing with our upper body maybe it's the horizontal pull row instead of a vertical pull I would set that up on

Saturday your technical work really quick lift and then you're out of there done for the day you want to add in your recovery stuff from Wednesday great if not go have your fun do what you do you know you weekend Tuesday and then probably Thursday are going to be generally yellow medium days on the slopes may or may not lift but you're going to do a lot of volume on those days this is probably your longer duration stuff gonna feel fine on Thursday because you

came up Wednesday Friday if we want to come back and do one red not a double red but one then I'm good hard hard hard ski probably what I'd say so we're lifting on that Monday we're gonna lift again in this case I know this is gonna look confusing but I'll probably lift on Thursday right this is split up a little bit Thursday is a yellow orange ski hard ski not a lot we're gonna lift gonna be kind of hard so we're stacking hard on hard and then Friday might

be one really hard ski but now we're good because Saturday is pretty much green and then we're definitely going on Sunday that's how I would stack the whole week up and I'll keep the exact same name lifting wise hey guys this is

Tim again just one more thing before you take off and that is five bullet Friday would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend between one and a half and two million people subscribe to my free newsletter my super short newsletter

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