118 DR Andy Galpin Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation For Fitness Huberman Lab Guest Series

Transcribed by readthatpodcast.
com
Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation for Fitness | Huberman Lab Guest
Series
In this episode 6 of a 6-part series on fitness, exercise and performance with Andy
Galpin, PhD, professor of kinesiology at California State University, Fullerton, he
explains optimal nutrition, hydration and supplementation to achieve your fitness goals.
We cover macronutrient guidelines, when to eat relative to training and training fasted
versus fed. Dr. Galpin describes proper hydration for before and during exercise, how
dehydration and/or low electrolyte concentrations impede physical and mental
performance. He discusses what supplements work best for fitness and performance,
how to decide which to take, if any, and when to take them. He also shares high-impact,
lower-cost supplements and nutrition recommendations to benefit performance,
recovery, and sleep. This episode also includes an audience Q&A. Overall, it is an in-
depth but clear discussion of nutrition strategies and supplements that can help anyone
improve their level of fitness physical and mental performance.
#HubermanLab #Nutrition #Science
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Dr. Andy Galpin

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Website: https://www.andygalpin.com
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Transcribed by readthatpodcast.com
Articles
Meta-Analysis Examining the Importance of Creatine Ingestion Strategies on Lean
Tissue Mass and Strength in Older Adults: https://bit.ly/3Ev36pU
Timestamps
00:00:00 Nutrition & Supplementation
00:05:16 Creatine Supplementation, Muscle & Cognitive Function, Loading Phase
00:20:31 Dehydration, Overhydration, Night Urination
00:35:37 Tool: Hydration, Caffeine & Electrolytes
00:41:22 Tool: Sweating, Salt & Performance
00:49:49 Galpin Equation for Hydration & Exercise, Focus
00:55:28 Tool: 5 Steps to Optimize Hydration, Sipping Water, W.U.T. Status, Salt
01:10:58 Electrolytes, Carbohydrates & Exercise
01:16:47 Training Fasted versus Fed, Caffeine, Carbohydrate Timing
01:25:13 Caffeine & Endurance
01:31:20 Citrulline, Beet Root Juice & Performance; Alpha-GPC & Focus, Nootropics
01:35:43 Rhodiola, Cortisol & Fatigue
01:39:55 Tool: Supplement Formulations
01:47:31 Supplements, Dependency & Root Cause; Foundational Behaviors
01:57:44 Acute vs. Chronic Effects, Supplements & Gut Microbiome
02:02:33 Tool: Sleep Environment, Absolute Rest
02:11:03 Tools: Sleep & Disturbances, Inositol
02:20:03 Tool: “Fitness Fatigue” Model, Taper, Anti-Inflammatory Supplements
02:26:33 Exercise Recovery: Curcumin, Omega 3s, Glutamine, Nutrition, Vitamins
02:39:27 Intermittent Fasting, Training & Keto Diets; GABA
02:43:39 Carbohydrate Loading; Amino Acid Supplements; “Anabolic Window”
02:47:23 Garlic; Tart Cherry Extract; Examine.com
02:51:50 Fitness Testing, Training Programs; Exercise Recovery
Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac - https://www.blabacphoto.com

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Welcome to the Huberman lab guest Series where I and an expert guest, discuss
science and science-based tools for everyday life, I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a
professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today’s
episode marks the sixth and final of the six episode series on fitness exercise and
performance, and Todays discussion is all about nutrition and supplementation to
maximize your fitness exercise and performance goals. Dr Andy Galpin, I'm super
excited to discuss Todays topic, which is nutrition and supplementation for performance
and recovery, and I'm particularly excited about this conversation, because I've been
interested in supplementation and nutrition for performance really, since my teens, but
also because in recent years we've witnessed a massive transformation in the general
public in terms of their view of supplementation and nutrition, first of all, more people are
thinking about nutrition. What is good nutrition? What is not a very barbed wire topic, as
you know, but there are some truths in there that we'll discuss, but also supplementation.
You know, whereas 10 - 15 years ago I think most people would either be really into
supplements. That was a small percentage of people, but the majority of people were
either told or were thinking. Oh, you know vitamins you mostly excrete them they're just
expensive urine. Nowadays, it seems that many people, including many of my
colleagues and physicians, all the way down to sports performance experts, are taking
and making recommendations about certain supplements. And so the way that I like to
think about supplements is that they aren't necessarily just supplements which makes it
sound like they are augmenting. What should already be there but you're, not quite
getting enough of, but indeed a lot of these things. We call supplements are very potent
compounds that can transform our ability to perform in the short term to recover from
exercise and that can really shape brain chemistry, hormone patterns acutely and when
taken long term. So I'm very excited about Todays topic and to be able to try and sort
through this. Let’s call it a cloud, hopefully not a storm, but this cloud of supplements that
are out there, because indeed many of them are excellent and can provide us a lot.
Some of them are terrible and then some just don't do anything and therefore are terrible
because either they have side effects or because they're very expensive, and they don't
do anything. And then, of course, within the realm of nutrition. There’s an equal amount
of confusion. But That’s why I'm talking to you because you're going to put clarity and
structure and definition on these incredibly important topics, you, you absolutely nailed it
there. One of the major reasons supplements can work is because you can consume
nutrients in extremely high concentrations such that you would not get in nature through
food. Having said that, you really do want to focus on the basic sleep, nutrition hydration,
and I'm going to get into very specific detail later with some of those things. That said,
there are plenty of situations and circumstances when supplementation can do exactly
what you said. Also, though, because you are taking them in such high concentrations,
they can also be unproductive, they can be destructive or they can be counterproductive.
So in case, if you're taking a couple of supplements over here, it may actually be
counteracting the benefits of some of the other supplements over there. So, in the ideal
situation we would be able to work like snipers here, so we would be able to run full
biological testing, so extensive blood work and saliva and urine and stool, and have an
in-depth analysis of your gut microbiome and your stress patterns. And your time of day
and your cortisol curve and like all the things that we do in our high performance folks
with that, then we can get extremely high precision supplementation and quite honestly,
our philosophy is: we only give individuals exactly what they need. So even some of the
standard uh generally safe and effective supplements, we don't really necessarily use
them if there’s no specific need. We’ve talked about the consequences of this with things
like antioxidants, but even simple stuff like stimulants and other tools that are effective
for recovery. We don't use them unless we have a reason. That said, That’s not the
reality for a lot of people, they're not going to be able to do something like that or
somebody who can help them in that. So there are a handful of supplements that I would
consider to be in my 80 20 rule, which is sort of like the 20 of supplements that are going
to give you 80 of the benefit for the lowest cost. And so what I can actually do is just sort
of start there, even though this like burns, my skin and my soul a little bit. I absolutely
hate this. I am the context guy, I'm the “It depends It’s high precision guy”, but Let’s be
real, there are a number of supplements that are fairly effective and fairly cheap for a
wide range of outcomes, so this is for the general public. This is for people who want to
do the three buckets right. You want to look a certain way so supplements that could
enhance muscle growth and fat loss. Non-Hormonal based supplements, of course,
supplements that can improve energy or physical performance again from everything
from you know, squatting more to feeling better in your yoga class to having more
energy throughout the day to our third major bucket that we've been talking about
throughout this entire series, Which are longevity, so we can cover those first, if you'd
like to start there, yes, absolutely.
00:05:16 Creatine Supplementation, Muscle & Cognitive Function, Loading Phase
Let’s start there oftentimes, when we think of supplements, we immediately jump to High
Sport, performance, type of things or vigorous, workouts or muscle building, though that
doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Take, for example, creatine, and I've spoken
about this at lengthens with Darren kandow who's done a tremendous amount of
research. I was just up at his lab recently in Canada and he has covered extensively. In
fact, I think I put up a post. Perhaps I could draw this up um, where he laid out all the
Myriad of benefits of creatine. This is taken in the you know, typically, three to five grams
per day of dose of creatine monohydrate, which has the most research behind it, seems
to be extremely low side effects in almost anyone and the benefits, including of course,
things like muscle, performance and strength, and things like that and if you go back to
our discussion and our episode on metabolism and endurance, we talked about the
phosphoryl creatine system. So you can figure out kind of what this is going to do in
terms of effect. That said, There’s excellent information and data coming out and all on
the benefits of bone, mineral density and creatine. There’s a ton of work. Looking at a
host of cognitive factors, from memory executive function to effects potentially on even
things like depression mood to alzheimer's, Parkinson's, uh, all forms of
neurodegenerative disease, in fact It’s It’s pretty obvious. The brain loves creatine as a
fuel, and so not only. We sort of discussed in the episode as being the fuel for skeletal
muscle contraction, but the brain needs to do that as well. The astrocytes are on the
brain need to be able to provide energy, Etc. So It’s very clear that metabolism in the
brain is reduced with things like TBI and potentially concussions, so um now to be
extremely clear. Creatine does not prevent any of those diseases, it does not treat any of
them and the data are mixed, but It’s more and more are coming. Some show a little bit
of benefits, I'm showing you know, maybe none, but I'm not aware of any research in
those areas that show it has any downside. For the most part, side effects are extremely
minimal, if not null and then potentially some benefit and depending on the specific
study. So we could put up a if you'd, like a couple of links directly to those meta-analyzes
and folks can go through those things one by one, so um. I only say that to again maybe
expand our understanding or thinking about what these types of supplements can do. It’s
not just about growing muscle, or you know, high performance. It’s everything to again
There’s an association with recovery. So Creatine is fantastic for recovery for muscle for
muscle damage it helps and can potentially Aid in fat loss and a whole host of things. So
you can actually also even look at websites like examine.com. I have you know, no
affiliation with them whatsoever, but if you want to just type in something like creatine
monohydrate, you can see a whole list and you're going to see thousands of studies of
the potential benefits of creatine. So that is always number one. On my list, I'm relieved
to hear that creatine sits at the top of your supplementation list because well, first of all, I
started taking it when I was in college. At that time I was taking it in this kind of loading
mode where you take it in um. You know anywhere from uh 15 to 25 grams per day,
often causing some gastric distress, often combining with fruit juice, to try and shuttle it
into the muscles sure and then so-called maintenance phase of reducing to 10 or 15
grams per day now days. I just take about five grams or so, although later I know, you're
going to tell me why I should probably be taking more than five grams per day, given my
body weight. So I know we'll get into some of those specifics a little bit later. But in
addition to experiencing Direct effects on muscle, size and strength, which I did, I don't
know how it contributed to my cognitive function or if it does now, because There’s really
no way to tease that out with standard at home tests like a scale. But it is very clear to
me, based on the literature that you described and some of which we've covered on
other episodes of the podcast, that the phospho-creatine system is vitally important for
forebrain function, right the forebrain, of course, being the portion of brain. Broadly
speaking, the portion of brain just behind your forehead, that is responsible for planning,
action, setting, rules and context. So, even as simple as if you're going downfield in a
game of soccer or basketball and you're on offense and then uh, you make an attempt
on goal or basket, and then it switches - and you go back now, you're on defense, that
being on defense, is very Different than being on offense and that goal excuse me that
that rule switching is a prefrontal cortical function, as is every context dependent way of
thinking or acting, and so anything that can favor function of the forebrain, I think, is
good for uh humans in general. It suppresses anxiety, allows us to interpret what's going
on for us, and so I'm very um relieved and gratified to hear that creatine sits at the top of
the list. Also, as I'm sure you'll point out again later. Creatine is, for the most part, a
relatively affordable supplement for most people (Creatine), so here we're not talking
about something That’s really esoteric or that you have to you know, fly to some remote
location to get an infusion of right um. But although I apologize to all you, because I
know the price has skyrocketed recently really yeah, why is that? I think It’s just well.
Nobody knows, but It’s a quote unquote “supply and demand issue”. If you will so those
prices have gone up. There’s also, of course, been shipping problems in the world and
things so uh every time I talk about creatine right now, people just flame me for, like, oh,
my God, It’s so expensive. Now I'm like, I know, I'm sorry but honestly, It’s only so
expensive because you're used to being so cheap. So when you, when you counter the
fact that you're like right, yeah like relative to the other stuff, you're, probably taking
relative to any other number of purchases um for the it still lands very high in my Roi
List, my you know my 80 20. Because of that, It’s um, it can be taken any time of the day
it doesn't have to be in magical combination. You talked about co-ingesting with
carbohydrates that can enhance uh how quickly you can get into the system. In fact, It’s
It’s going to work on the exact same mechanisms will probably potentially talk about
hydration, but these things are shuttled so anytime you bring in carbohydrate, That’s
going to be shipped into tissue as quickly as it can. Creatine then goes along super ride
and then it brings water into the right. That’s how you enhance hydration. That’s why It’s
important to have carbohydrates when you're trying to hydrate so you're just going to
take it in there, and That’s also why you get quote-unquote cell swelling, which is a good
thing like you're, It’s just enhancing hydration. We actually use it a ton in our post weigh
in protocols with individuals that have to cut water weight. Creatine is a great thing to
throw back in there. It’s going to help you rehydrate. It’s also why, when you take 30
grams of it, it can pull a bunch of fluid in the intestines and there you go with your little bit
of GI distress, so um yeah There’s a lot of fun things you can talk about there (Creatine).I
just had to flag that because every time I've been talking about it recently - and I say It’s
- cheap people are killing me for it. So I apologize, I don't know how to make it any
cheaper, but It’s still fairly affordable yeah, I would say relatively inexpensive compared
to a lot of supplements out there and when thinking about the return on investment is It’s
quite good yeah. So, like actually sorry, I started to cut you out, but I was also thinking.
There’s been a number of studies on sleep deprivation as well with creatine that can
help so obviously sleep deprivation will generally reduce cognitive function and creatine
can ameliorate some of that drop. So if you think about it in that context, I had a crummy
night of sleep well and if that enables you to perform a little bit better in your job, then
you would make up the dollar or so, whatever you paid for that day's supply of creatine.
So it is something kind of on that note: It’s not going to work as an acute response, so
It’s not something you're like I feel terrible. Let me throw some creatine down the Hatch
I'll feel better. That’s not going to work! It’s going to take several weeks to have a
noticeable effect. It needs to be stored in tissue. It needs to be built up before you can
actually do much of anything. So it is, unlike some of the other things like stimulants or
caffeine, that have an acute. You know response right now and so, if you're going to take
it, you probably need to consume it consistently. If you can't do that, then really There’s
no point in doing it, and the loading phase you mentioned distance were here is
something you can do again. If you need to enhance the storage of it really quickly so
say, for example, we've done this in some military cases where It’s like you get back to
base and you've only got a week and you got to go back out. We may actually have to
do a little bit of a loading phase then, but if That’s not the case, the loading phase is
unnecessary. It’s not really harmful other than maybe GI stress and maybe waste, but if
you're going to have three or four weeks, It’s going to reach full saturation, if you're in
that three to seven grams per day range. I'm glad you mentioned the slow accumulating
positive effects of creatine as compared to so-called acute effects, because the way that
I think of health, promoting and performance enhancing protocols like viewing morning
sunlight or endurance exercise for that matter or creatine or sleep, for instance, is that
while they can have effects in the immediate term, you might feel a little bit or in the case
of a good night's sleep a lot better: It’s really the accumulative effect of raising your
baseline level of functioning. You know There’s another way to think about. It is um
these supplements or behaviors and quality nutrition when done consistently over time,
and that doesn't mean 100 of the time. But you know, because probably 80 of the time
sure lead to a sort of uh buoyancy in your system that allows you to be more resilient
under conditions where conditions aren't perfect right and if conditions are made perfect
or close to perfect. And you already have that buoyancy, That’s when you really start to
see the ultra-high performance effects, um that are so much fun, but they have to be
established through consistent, supplementation, consistent nutritional intake. So today I
know we're going to distinguish between uh, normally they're called chronic and acute
effects, but that makes it sound like chronic illness. The moment people hear chronic
well, they might think of other things, but in the context of health, they typically think of
you know chronic illness and we're not talking about that. What we're talking about is
slow, modulatory effects in the body. A lot of things in the body take time to build up, but
once they've built up they clearly can benefit us and then other things, as you
mentioned, you know, a stimulant, for instance, has a very acute effect that It’s going to
occur with. You know peak within 30 minutes and wear off within you know four hours or
so can also have some chronic effects, but typically It’s a short-lived effect. So we just
want to frame up the language that we'll be using, and I'm really excited to dive into this
topic, and I think creatine is a beautiful example of a supplement that has positive
chronic mental and physical benefits down the road (Creatine). I can come back and talk
a little bit more about creatine, and we can cover some other information regarding best
practices for getting the most out of it, as well as we'll certainly dive into some of the
common side effects, or at least a thought of Side effects while we're here, though, I also
could throw in a few other of these high impact, low-cost generally safe things that are
my 80 20 rule. If you will so the way I actually kind of think about it, is you want one from
each of three categories and these categories are fuel stimulants and fatigue blockers,
so creatine is actually in the fuel. It’s not a stimulant, as we talked about The Chronic
effect there, so we've already knocked that one off another one from the fatigue. Blocker
is going to be anything like beta, alanine or sodium bicarbonate and then from the
stimulant yeast. Of course, we have anything like a beetroot juice to a caffeine or
something of the equivalent. Creatine
00:20:31 Dehydration, Overhydration, Night Urination
I want to ask you about something that as soon as I say it, some people might roll their
eyes or wonder. Why are we even talking about that now, but that I have to believe is
among the more fundamental, if not foundational, aspects of nutrition and
supplementation for performance and That’s hydration right I mean I think we hear
hydration, It’s like okay, we have to drink six to Eight glasses of water every day our
urine should be relatively clear if It’s too dark, yellow we're not doing a good job of
hydrating enough. How much of that is true? Um is alkaline water worthwhile for
changing the alkalinity of my body. I learned when I was in college and graduate school
that the alkalinity of the different tissues in your body is very well controlled in order to
keep you alive and that you don't want it to shift too much or you can enter pretty horrible
states of seizure. Vomiting and even death so tell me about hydration and woven into
that. If you would educate me on electrolytes and hydration, because I think most often
when people ingest electrolytes sure they could be ingesting, salt tablets they're
probably getting some electrolytes by the way, electrolyte sodium magnesium potassium
through their food. I think most people think about drinking electrolytes, so water and
electrolytes, I think, is a vitally important topic to kick this off with sure we can jump right
into your alkaline water. While There’s perhaps much to say about this, we can maybe
revisit this in another. Seven part series all on its own uh. I would just say it this way,
There’s probably a few things you should do before worrying about the alkalinity of your
water and I'll. Just leave it at that, meaning the alkalinity of the water is sort of irrelevant.
Not that you won't go, that far is just It’s probably remember. We started started off
talking about 80 20.. Well, this would be in my like 99 one in terms of like, if we're really
at the level of worrying about the pH of your drinking fluid, we have optimized so many
other things that then we can talk about it, but until we have nailed months and Years of
work on other things, this is just not going to make much of an impact great. Then
perhaps you could tell us about what volume of water we should be drinking when we
should be drinking that water relative to training and just generally and um yeah and
anything else, relate to water and electrolytes that can improve mental Performance,
Physical performance and offset any. You know ill effects. I like the fact that you
mentioned physical and mental performance, because It’s clear in both cases, we hear
that we need to drink more water, and I can give you some numbers and I will in a
second. What we also need to recognize is There’s. This is hormesis. We talked about
hormesis a few episodes ago, and this is the case right whether we talked about food or
hydration, or I think I gave you the example of cyanide naturally occurring in your food.
Hot water is the same way. So if you are under hydrated or dehydrated, then there is a
clear negative effect on your body and as I increase the level or improve the level of
hydration things get better, whether this are physical performance or whether this is
mental performance. In fact, we know that a body weight reduction of as low as two
percent via dehydration, so imagine you're, doing a bout of exercise and you're sweating
and you lose two percent of your body weight. That alone is enough to reduce accuracy
and performance. So the classic study we talk about here was in basketball players, so
shooting accuracy so free throw shooting, I think, is specifically what they looked at
significant reduction in performance with as little as two percent dehydration that that
level, you also see a significant increase in perception Of difficulty of exercise, and so
only right at two percent - and again when I say two percent, I mean percent body weight
lost right. That’s what that means. You start getting the three four five percent
dehydration. You start having a significant reduction in blood volume and That’s
incredibly important for endurance. Um, your blood becomes viscous. It gets hard to
pump through um and you're, going to start having all kinds of issues so being
dehydrated is again not only going to reduce performance but because of the mental
aspect which we just walked through and neuromuscular issue you're going to lose
accuracy you're going To lose total endurance, performance and you're going to lose
speed and power, so we have the Triad there, no matter what you're interested in It’s
going to be harmed by being dehydrated. That also is happening, then, if you're starting
your program dehydrated. So if you're already one percent or so dehydrated, maybe
you're like a little under hydrated and you lose a little bit of sweat, you've already hit that
two percent and so we're starting to see reductions um in performance there. The same
happens on the other side of that hormetic curve. So if you are optimally hydrated in
some large window, but you start going past that we can start running into equal
problems, remember There’s a there is a need for an optimal concentration of sodium
and potassium and chloride between your cell inside your cell and outside your Cell,
these are electrolytes. This is what we call osmolality and osmolarity is really going to
think of it like concentration and osmosis. If you remember those terms, so if we are
trying to create a muscle contraction that requires an electrical gradient and so sodium
and potassium, specifically in magnesium, calcium are positively charged and chloride is
negatively charged and we need to have a certain amount inside the cell and Outside
the cell, so that the positives and the negatives are balanced appropriately, so that when
we move one, we change the voltage and we have in the case of a muscle, contraction.
Okay, I just came through a whole lot of physiology there to say. If you then go mess
with fluid only, and you say if I were to give you a bolus of you - know three liters of pure
water right now, you're going to dilute your blood, and so There’s not going to be as
many chemical uh. There won't be. As many electrical signals in there because you've
taken the same amount of sodium, potassium, Etc and put it in a larger volume of pure
water, so that gradient has now changed. That becomes a significant problem for
contraction. I mean, quite literally, it can kill you. This is what we call hyponatremia, so
notremia spelled n a hypo being low hyponatremia. If you actually go to the Periodic
Chart, n a is what we use for sodium so hypernetes, because the word is natremia
actually so that what that literally means is low sodium and you didn't get that from
sweating out all your sodium. You actually get hyponatremia from drinking in too much
water, so It’s not that the total amount of sodium gets low. It’s the fact that the
concentration gets low from excessive fluid intake, so in the Extremes, in fact, if you look
at the literature you'll see anywhere between like two to fifteen percent of people who
finish endurance, races are into hyponatremia now that varies wildly if you're Doing Iron
Man and Kona versus, like you, know the marathon in Denver in in October right It’s
going to be totally different depending on weather conditions, but these are all important.
So, while like death happens, that is sort of extreme. If you back up just a little bit, you
start seeing the same types of performance sacraments. In fact, the symptoms can be
identical: brain fog, confusion, performance, uh, irritation, a GI, distress and you think
man. These are symptoms of dehydration. So then, you drink more water and you're,
just exacerbating the problem, and I can actually um give you one little example of this.
We had an executive, actually female, CEO uh I'll, say she's, probably when I was in her
early 40s, and so she came to us and she thought man for sure. She has some sort of
gut problem going on because we hear a lot about kind of like gut health and how it
affects everything and so she's. Just like I have brain fog and I've done all these things
and I got blood work done and everything's fine, like nothing's going on. I think I must
have some sort of gut thinger going on or whatever and It’s okay and we just started
going through her stuff and uh. She was, I think, about 170 pounds plus or minus, and
she was consuming like 250 to 60 ounces of water a day, That’s a ton of water and we
were like holy [, __ ]. What are you doing this for? And she says, like That’s sort of like
my thing, it was, but she didn't realize it was more of like a nervous tick than it was
anything else right. She just like sips of sip sip, sip water, I'm like man. How often do you
go pee and she's like yeah like every you know, 30 minutes or something I'm like
fantastic sleep problems focused and so she's smashing caffeine. She was at like eight
cups of coffee a day which is also going to add to excretion of sodium totally right. So It’s
like okay. We don't really need to come in and run a sleep study on you we're just going
to lower your water and she was like what yeah we dropped her down to like 180, so
basically, an ounce per pound of body weight which is still high because she Did train
180 ounces, correct yeah? She does work out, so she needed to replenish some stuff
and we'll cover these numbers in a second instantaneously. I mean like two days in
she's like oh, my God. I haven't slept six to eight hours in years and then, after that, it
was like basically tears. Coming back to us right, my focus, my brain fog is gone
because she's in a very high pressure job um, It’s like everything's coming back like
now. She was down to three or so cups off a day like the whole thing digestion improved
all of it. She was sick like to her only problem. After all, the analyzes was. She was just
drinking way way too much water and adding more salt to her. Would not have solved
the problem because she would have just had simply way too much fluid in her system.
She was having all kinds of ADH problems and aldosterone like the whole thing and then
that that rolls into cortisol the whole like system gets, goes into chaos. So it is important
that you pay attention hydration, even though, as you sort of mentioned, people tend to
just kind of like roll their eyes around it, because, if you're in the middle, It’s fine. But if
you're anywhere past, not even the extreme extremes, but just that. First standard
deviation away, you're going to have problems and you might be thinking adrenal
fatigue. You might be thinking you're testing, like you're, going to think all these things
and you simply just haven't actually dialed in your hydration yeah uh. I think people
sometimes roll their eyes at the discussion of hydration because it just doesn't sound
very sexy. It’s not like doesn't sound like a neurotransmitter or a hormone. It doesn't
sound like testosterone or estrogen or DHEA or dopamine, but it actually is all of those
things. It sits at a level beneath all of those, but not beneath on a hierarchy beneath in in
terms of a foundation, It’s actually the without proper electrolyte balance and hydration.
None of the cells of the body can function, and then I think people also hear that. Oh,
you know we are 70 water and somehow like it, that statistic Alone, um or that fact alone
doesn't seem to uh, stimulate any kind of action will take away right. It’s like great, you
know, uh, like gravity also, you know keeps us, you know from jumping his eyes. We,
like you know what do I do, and so I think, um. It’s important that people understand that
every cellular process in the body critically relies on having enough sodium magnesium
potassium around and the the way that It’s concentrated in fluid water is really the way
that you allow every cell in their body to function as well as It possibly could and respond
to all the sorts of kind of quote, unquote High Performance Tools that we're talking about
the other thing I've observed many times over is that if people are ingesting too much
water and also drinking a lot of caffeine and their electrolytes are Low they get shaky
and they actually can have anxiety like symptoms. So when people come into my lab to
do studies on anxiety and fear, we ask a few questions and those questions include how
much water they've had that day. Also, a sort of bizarre fact, but one that I think is worth
mentioning, is that when the bladder is full, it stimulates a sort of anxiety if you ever had
to urinate very badly and you're in the car or you can't urinate. And then you get to the
door like That’s talk about anxiety, um and That’s because There’s a direct neural
pathway from the bladder that registers the mechanosensors. How much stretch there is
on the bladder that sends a signal to the brain, stem alertness areas. Broadly speaking,
Locus ceruleus and others that wake us up, these are the when we're awake. It makes
us more awake and when we're asleep, this is what wakes us up to urinate in the middle
of the night yeah. That’s actually why you can use uh night urination as a pretty good
diagnostic of sleep disorders. So, if, because of vasopressin right, almost exactly what
you're talking about, if you're having sleep disorder, issues and you're staying awake
and a vasopressin gets taken off right, an APN goes straight to the kidneys. Your
kidneys are supposed to be dormant, basically at night you're not supposed to be
filtering a lot and producing a lot of urine at night. If That’s happening and say you, you
have any number of apneas kicking on or anything going on. Vasopressin keeps going
keep sending signal, kidneys, start filtering. So if you're waking up and peeing multiple
times a night, That’s called nocturia. That is a very, very good sign that either one of two
things happen. You one. You have some sort of sleep disorder or two you're drinking
outrageous amounts of water, and so That’s actually a bit of a backward cycle now right,
because you're drinking way too much water, you're waking up and peeing all night.
That’s actually ruining your sleep, and so we have seen this a number of times with our
sleep company as we go in and It’s just like. You don't need any of this crap. You just
need to be properly hydrated. Alternatively, if your hydration is sound and you're still
waking up more than one time a night to pee on average, then you almost well. I
shouldn't say like that, but There’s a potential that you actually have some sort of sleep
system or sleep condition going in. So the rule of thumb on that is so we're here once or
night, once a night or so of urination is fine if it is routinely or consistently more than two.
You need to make some adjustments start with hydration. It’s the simplest way right.
Getting a full sleep study done just figure out. Hydration we've had this happen a number
of times where people want to get more health conscious and they just get. They hear
things like this and they're like I got ta get on my water and then they just start train
wrecking their sleep and then waking it up. So if you're waking up multiple times and
you're urinating - and it is a large amount of urine for you - and it is clear - That’s
probably not sleep - apne induced noctria - That’s probably excessive hydration. If you're
waking up a bunch of times and It’s fairly small amounts of urine, then It’s probably not
the fluid issue. It’s probably the fact that the vasopressin is kicking your kidneys into
gear. So That’s not a perfect criteria, but It’s just like a quick little tool. You can sort of
use, That’s actually one of the reasons why we measure almost always your body
weight at night as well as in the morning, so that That’s like the combat sport in the UFC
fighters boxers. We call that your float so how much you floated overnight. I like to know
that number, because I want to know as well your first morning void. So when you wake
up, then you went to bed at 200 pounds. You woke up the next morning at 195.. It’s like,
oh, you floated five pounds. Did you pee last night, yeah yeah three times interesting?
Another case you woke up. You went to bed at 200 pounds you wake up at 199.5, okay,
you're dehydrated, because you should have a a certain amount of fluid that you're. Just
Whispering out as you're breathing throughout your nose throughout night, ideally uh
guaranteed you're going to wake up. What was your urine like? Oh yeah, a little bit pretty
dark like shocker you're dehydrated, so you can kind of look at numbers like that. A
general float is something like a pound to two pounds for the 170 plus pound person, as
you scale up. That number then go up a little bit, but you can kind of use these to triage
a little bit about what's going on um with this kind of combination, everything is
everything right. So It’s like It’s not just about one system, so you're going to pay
attention. You can also look uh. Well, I don't. If you don't jump into it, we can but There’s
a whole bunch of ways. I can teach you to diagnose
00:35:37 Tool: Hydration, Caffeine & Electrolytes
Hydration and maybe we can start there and then we can talk about hydration numbers.
Yes, I'd love to talk about diagnostics, for hydration over hydration dehydration. To start
off, would you be willing to give us some numbers? How much water should we be
drinking the classic rule? Here and you're making me do what I hate right. I want to give
all the caveats first, but I'll go straight to your number. Half an ounce per pound of body
weight is a rough rule. So if you weigh again 200 pounds, that would mean you drink 100
ounces of water a day. Most water bottles are like 12 to 20 ounces. Something like that.
So you know you end up drinking six of those or so a day, kind of like plus or minus,
which is not that unreasonable. This does depend on a number of factors which I could
go over, but that is a rough starting place. The only other thing to add to that is that does
not account for exercise induced water loss or sauna, or anything like that. So That’s
assuming just like basal daily needs if you are exercising or sweating at all for any
reasons or work related, so folks that work outside are in the Heat or a human
environment. These numbers all change, and you can slide this scale up, but you
generally want to drink about 125 percent of the fluids you've lost during that physical
activity back. And how much do you lose per hour of exercise? That number ranges
between one to five pounds, depending on the person it can even be higher. With some
of our athletes like, I can think of a number of NFL players right now. It’s not uncommon
for those guys to do eight or nine pounds, even not even like crazy circumstances. If It’s
August and we're in Jacksonville, It’s not wild for us. Those guys go nine ten pounds. But
what about the typical person who goes to a air-conditioned gym or goes out for a run on
a day that is somewhere between, Let’s say 55 degrees, Fahrenheit and 85 degrees,
Fahrenheit you're, probably looking at like a pound, It’s not extremely high! If you are
totally soaked might be like a pound and a half to two pounds. If you're like come back
and like your pits, are a little sweaty and There’s a little bit of water kind of on your
neckline, It’s probably like a more like a pound, or so so in that case, you might drink
back a pound and a half of Water, okay, so just to review these numbers to make sure
that I'm on the correct page here, a half, an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight is a
sort of a foundation for hydration. And then you want to replace a hundred and twenty
five percent of the fluid lost during exercise and exercise varies. Where exercise is done
varies whether or not people are wearing uniforms or helmets is going to impact, how
much fluid they lose, Etc. In a very hot environment that the amount of fluid lost can be
anywhere from, you know one to five, maybe even ten pounds easy per hour of hard
hard exertion for most exercise done in conditions of 55 degrees Fahrenheit to 72.
Excuse me, 85 degrees, Fahrenheit done with some degree of effort, one might lose a
pound or or two pounds of water super easy way to find out. All you have to do is weigh
yourself naked, go. Do your workout come back in dry off, weigh yourself naked that'll.
Tell you exactly what you lost. So if you went in you were 160 pounds, you come back
out. You wait! You'Re 158, you lost two pounds: drink back two and a half pounds of
water you're. Good, so that is uh is that, honestly, It’s like fairly gold standard for
identifying. You can actually buy a whole bunch of technology for this and they are using
the exact same equation, which is your body weight when you were there now? If you do
that, though, you do need to account for any fluid you drink during the workout sure,
because that then offsets it simple, but I think important question we're talking about a
half an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight. Does that include things like coffee, tea,
soda pre-workout drinks, mid-workout drinks, uh, mate, matcha, whatever the you know,
There’s a yerba mate (Yerba Mate Tea). There’s a there are a million things out there,
um or just water. Any fluid for the most part is going to count, and is it true that fluids that
contain caffeine generally cause us to secrete sodium yeah? Okay, so do you
recommend, including electrolyte powder or a small pinch of sodium or any number of

other supplement type electrolytes? That can replace that sodium magnesium and
potassium a couple of things we have to pay attention to accurately answer that
question. Well, you also sort of asked about you may have not even realize is: does
caffeine actually enhance dehydration, which is not really what you asked, but It’s
probably a lot of people thought that as well, so caffeine can. But coffee doesn't
necessarily do that because remember you're co-ingesting, that with fluid and so uh, we
used to say that all the time how coffee dehydrates you it doesn't, it might make your
urine yellow. That certainly gives off a odor in your urine, but in general coffee will not do
that because you're just if you were to now be taking caffeine pills alone now there is a
bit of a diuretic effect there and so you're going to year and how much? Maybe not
enough for you to be really concerned with, especially when you balance that against the
ergogenic effects and benefits of caffeine, It’s not something we are concerned about.
Second part of your question: do you need to then offset the loss of sodium? I'M not
super concerned about the amount of sodium lost to caffeine. I am more concerned
about simply the amount of sodium being correct because of the bigger circumstances
like how much is actually in your system and how much you lost in the training session.
So It’s not. The caffeine that I care about that much relative to you know if you lost three
grams of sodium because of the training and you added another few milligrams,
because the caffeine, I don't really care or didn't, I'm glad you brought up the difference
between a substance like
00:41:22 Tool: Sweating, Salt & Performance
Caffeine and the vehicle It’s contained in like coffee. This is all really important, and it
also raises a question about individual differences in sweating ability, and I call it
sweating ability, because I have a good friend, I've known for ages, really um actually
work with him. In my laboratory as well and he's one of these people that the moment he
starts any physical activity, It’s like a flood warning right. He just soaks through clothing.
It’s just the sweating adaptation is, is exceedingly robust in him, other people less. So is
it true that sweating in our ability to dump heat through it by loss of water, is something
that um we tend to vary on and that also that we can build up that capacity. I know a
number of people are probably thinking ew gross. Why would I want to sweat more, but
There’s actually a huge advantage to be able to dump body heat during exertion,
because body heat in some ways sets the cap for performance a lot. Many many ways,
including mental performance, is stay alert, often is enhanced by being cold and, of
course, we all want to warm up properly but um in terms of loss of fluid through
sweating. Is there a way to easily bin ourselves into kind of a low sweater? Medium
sweater, heavy sweater, that sounds like an article of clothing, but in any case you know
what I'm you know, man another a lot to say here. We should wish we had a whole
series on this. Listen. If we have to go 17 hours, we can do it. Just everybody hydrate.
Well, I think we've shown the listeners uh. That is a real threat. That’s a very real threat,
podcasting to failure. You don't have to do every set in the gym to failure, but here we
are attempting a podcast failure in it in all seriousness. What is the role of sweating
ability, and is this something that any of us should care about or train for or pay attention
to, or is this just kind of getting into the Arcane number one? You can train your ability to
sweat? This is important for heat acclimation and why that matters, when you sweat, that
actually is not what regulates your temperature uh you? What you want to have happen
is the fluid to hit your skin and that to be evaporated. That’s the actual mechanism. So,
in fact, if you stop sweating and like you can guarantee within a short amount of time,
you're going to be done moving, oh very interesting. I hope people heard that and really
are, are highlighting that in their mind, that sweating is a process of bringing fluid from
your body onto the surface of your skin and then the heat dumping aspect of sweating is
the evaporation of that off off your body, which Brings to mind all sorts of ideas about
how to dress during exercise Etc. But what you said is that if you are not sweating
enough, you are limiting your output capacity. So It’s not just about having enough fluid
to switch wet yeah. It’s also about being able to sweat and being uh dressed
appropriately to allow that sweat to move to evaporate off your body. Yep and heat
acclimation training is as simple as it sounds, so just practice it more. So, if you're going
into a process where you either need to be in a hot environment or you need to improve
your sweat rate, you just need to practice sweating and your body will get compared to
that. I practice the sauna practice a Jacuzzi just get in those things, and you will improve
your ability to do that. Now. There is a huge genetic component. I have one individual,
actually a UFC fighter. I'Ve been working with and I don't mind mentioning his name.
He'Ll. Give me full permission: Scott Holtzman many many years, um he's actually
fighting right now. Actually, today he'll be going. He is like he, he is like you described
like buckets and buckets and buckets of fluids come off this guy. When he's tying his
shoes, like he just goes right like and we've we've improved that I actually sweat too
much. We worked on that a lot early in his career and we got some improvements down
to get him to hold on to the fluids better. That being said, I've worked at the other
individuals in his weight category and It’s the opposite right. So we can have them
literally. Do the exact same training session together and Scott will, dump six pounds
and other folks at his size will dump two two and a half, so there’s a genetic component
that is just there and you don't need to worry about it there um. So can you identify if you
are a heavy salt sweater or not? Well, you have a whole bunch of routes for this number
one is. You can use the old free cost free test of just looking at your clothing and, if
you're, seeing that white residue all over it so you've, you've all have the friend who
probably wears that same baseball hat that they've had for eight years. If it is covered in
the white junk all over the place, That’s a sign of a higher salt sweater. If the opposite
happens, and It’s like you can pull their clothing back and There’s just nothing there.
They are maybe a little bit of a lower salt sweater. You can also use any number of
hydration tests. I know that there is some coming out in the market very very soon that
can give you theoretically real time measurements. It’s like a CGM would be, although I
haven't seen any data on. If those are accurate or not, I haven't used one yet, but there
are a number that are out super cheap. You know 10, 15, 20 bucks all the way up to a
couple hundred dollars. You can buy these patches, put them on you and get a
reasonably close estimate and again if those things are 5 or 10 or 20 off, I don't know, I
have to see independent data come out first, but even if they are you're not worried
about the Specific milligrams right, whether you sweat out, you know 1250 milligrams in
a workout or if It’s 1340, it doesn't really matter. You’re. Trying to look for big, big
numbers right. Are you losing 500 milligrams using three and a half grams while you're
at so those things will get you in a ballpark to do exactly what you decide? Am I high
medium or low and There’s a lot of them that I've used in the past so that That’s another
way to go about it, then what you want to do is probably match your electrolyte intake to
something close to what you sweat. That’s the ideal scenario: you can get a lot of
information about hydration from blood. You can look at like acute markers of
dehydration, like hemoglobin hematocrit, if you're like, if your hemoglobin is like 15 plus
It’s funny. We’ve talked about this in a few episodes before, but I see that and I'm like
man that dude's super fit. That’s like a 15 uh for him would be pretty high 14 or so would
be pretty good for a female. That’s also the exact same thing as a sign of acute
dehydration, um so hematocrite same thing: if you're north of 50 you're - probably
dehydrated, so you can get a lot. There are also, though, a lot of biomarkers that can tell
you more about chronic dehydration, so you can run through those things as well. So
good blood chemistry test can tell you a lot and you can actually get some insights in
your sodium and potassium albumin is another fantastic way to measure longer term uh
hydration status. Now one of these amazing globulins that we've sort of talked a lot
about. So you can do all those things you can also simply measure the body weight, pre
and post and use a sweat patch or not and use the the Freer version of your clothing test
and get a rough idea of where you're getting it from. So those are good places to start. I
want to go back, though, and make sure I wasn't over terrifying, the audience too much
on a server piece if you're performing a type of training or exercise or sport in which
you're not losing more than two percent of your body weight, you don't need to Be overly
concerned about hydrating in the sport, and so we can actually get into some equations
for how much water to drink during training right now. But if you, if you're again, losing
less than that, It’s not critical, you can have some fluids. It like makes. You feel better,
but you're not going to be experiencing tremendous amounts of performance
sacraments. If you're, you know again out playing a baseball game and is 50 degrees
out you're, fine um, you can drink some water, but That’s not going to be compromising
performance or recovery. So we can actually, then, if you'd like, I can go through the
three-step system for optimizing hydration, but those are, I want to make sure I planted
that flag, so people aren't just terrified that they got to be guzzling down water. If they're,
you know going to their physical therapist for some stretching That’s probably not super
important
00:49:49 Galpin Equation for Hydration & Exercise, Focus
I would love for you to tell us what I refer to as the Galpin equation. Understanding, of
course, that you did not name it. The Galpin equation. Listen folks, scientists can have
things named after them, but in general It’s not reflective of healthy psychology if they
name things after themselves. Correct, sometimes, yes, neuroanatomists used to do
that. But in any case Dr Andy Galpin did not name the Galpin equation after himself. I
named it after him and the Galpin equation for how much fluid to ingest during exercise
is you want to take your body weight in pounds and divide that by 30, and you want to
consume that number, which would be in ounces about every 15 to 20 Minutes so in the
example of you being 200 pounds, you would take 200 divided by 30, which is, Let’s just
call that number seven to be close, which means you would consume about: seven
ounces of water, every 15 or 20 minutes or so. Okay. Now, as a little bit of a point, while
I also did not name it, I also didn't do the research, It’s important to point out that other
scientists figured these things out. I just read their papers and made that derivation of
their equation to make it a little bit easier for us folks who do not work on the metric
system. Okay, a couple of things. First of all, I'm not 200 pounds, but it doesn't matter
how much I weigh, because the point is that the listener correct should take their body
weight in pounds divided by 30 in just that number of ounces in fluid every 15 minutes,
and then for those out There outside the US that are accustomed to thinking in milliliters
and liters, not ounces and kilograms, not pounds. What is the Galpin equation in the
metric system? This would be two milliliters per kilogram, which again, if you were Let’s
say, 200 pounds, That’s going to be something roughly like we'll call it 90 kilos. And so, if
you did, two milliliters per kilo you'd be something like 180 milliliters of fluid again every
15 or 20 minutes great. And how should people ingest that fluid and, of course I would
imagine It’s through their mouth um? I would hope. I hope there are other orifices that it
might suffice, but Let’s not go there, they're drinking that water consistently or is it every
15 minutes they Slug it back. Does it matter? Okay, yeah, That’s very good, a handful of
things in general, when you talk hydration the slower and steady, you can go the better.
In fact, the reason these this two milliliters per kilogram number came out is because a
number of Trials were run when they looked at that every 15 minutes, just one bolus of
it. You know um in different derivations and It’s pretty clear that the slower Pace one
could do it the better so whether you're doing it every 10 minutes or 15 or 20 minutes.
The reason we actually give that Gap is because you have to be also offset a little bit of
GI distress, in fact, like kind of the the four golden rules of recovery, if you will um we
use sort of three R's, you need to rebuild rehydrate and Replenish, what that really
means is you need to have a continuous glucose stream? You need to have a
continuous amino acid stream. You need to hydrate, and you need to do all one two and
three without disturbing your gut too much, and so in this particular case. It was sort of
found that we can hit that level in general and be just fine for most people, so I mean a
little bit of context. The example we gave there in both cases It’s something like six to
seven ounces for 15 or 20 minutes. If you think about that, There’s 16 ounces in a pound
and most water bottles like if you go, buy a water bottle in a store here. It’s they
generally come in, like 16 ounce bottles ish. So six or seven ounces is really like a third
of a water bottle, Maybe every 15 or 20 or so minutes. So It’s not some egregious
amount of water that you have to slam down now. That is influenced heavily by how
hydrated you started the session with so how high are you came in external factors like
heat humidity, temperature things like that, but that gives you a rough idea that again -
and these are numbers that you would need to consume - to optimize Performance at
the end of that, then, is when you would look to see how much I lost like we talked about
earlier and then add back that 125 percent, taking into account how much fluid you
ingested. So if you're 200 pounds and you drink a total of, say a pound of water during
the training and you started off at 200 and you finished at 198., you actually lost three
pounds, not two pounds, because you lost three, you drank one during it. So your final
net number is two. So now you don't, you really need to drink back 125 of that remaining
two pounds: two and a half pounds. Something like that. These numbers, especially that
125 are they're just rough guidelines. Some actually papers suggest It’s all the way up to
150 percent. So It’s just like an idea. Don'T measure out whether you need 5.5 ounces
or 6.2 ounces, like it just sort of gives you an idea of where to start all right, a few sips
every 15 or 20 minutes is close enough. I'Ve actually started using uh the Galpin
equation to determine how much fluid I need for mental work. Given the now robust data
that are out there on the relationship between hydration and mental work, It’s um been
very effective for me and again, there are peer-reviewed studies that that support the
idea that hydration is important for proper mental Clarity and energy and focus, and that
Even being slightly dehydrated can disrupt that, but if one is drinking so much water that
they're frequently going to the restroom and can't comfortably uh focus on the
00:55:28 Tool: 5 Steps to Optimize Hydration, Sipping Water, W.U.T. Status, Salt
Work they're doing That’s also an issue so um, That’s very helpful. What are the three
most critical features of hydration and then I'd like to move on to um some of the more
particulars about supplementation and nutrition. Three parts start hydrated maintain
hydration throughout part. Three is hydrate post to fix it. Okay, we gave you the half
ounce per pound of body weight equation, so you start the training hydrated. We gave
you the you know two milliliters per kilogram, slash body weight divided by 30. to stay
hydrated. Let me give you the 125, but I can actually just give you sort of I'm giving you
another list here. I'M sorry, but it is my five-step cheater guide for optimizing hydration
for performance, all right step, number one drink a lot of water first thing in the morning.
This gets everything kickstarted get you going. It also saves you from having to drink a
bunch of water at night, which is then going to compromise your sleep. What’s a lot,
depending on how big you are the general thing I'll tell people is like one of the very first
things you should do throughout your day. You wake up, go to the bathroom as you're
consuming your sunlight consume water. This is maybe chugging a full glass. That’s
honestly, what I do It’s, not the best route, but I'll just get 16 ounces, 16 ounces, or so is
great. It’s fine! If you're larger um, you know I'm 165 to 70 pounds depending on. What’s
going on maybe a little higher, sometimes if you're 225 pounds, maybe that number is 30
ounces? Okay, so you just sort of scale up and down, and the only reason I say a lot is it
just depends on what you're doing, and I also should clarify. I don't really literally mean
chug just like sips, because the faster you drink water, the faster It’s going to expand
blood volume, the faster it stands, blood volume, the faster you get rid of it um. I don't
think a lot of people will know that yeah. This is maybe this is clarifying. This is also we
sort of talked about earlier. If you drink too much water you'll dilute the system. Well, if
you have a diluted system, your body's first reaction is to rid of water to bring total blood
volume down right. Remember if you were to go to a doctor and they look at your total
blood volume. They’re, like man, you're five and a half liters you're going to, be like holy
crap you're, going to be put on a diuretic because you don't want to have a heart attack
blood pressure. I wonder if people are drinking a 16 ounce, glass of water or other fluid
all at once before going to sleep and That’s why they're waking up in the middle of the
night totally given what you just said, probably a better um protocol would be to sip On a
glass of water in the final hour two hours before sleep generally, the number we say is
three hours in the three hours proceeding sleep. You want to basically limit fluid intake to
sipping as needed. I think That’s I'm going to start that tonight because I wake up
generally once per night to use the bathroom and I do drink some fluids before I go to
sleep mostly because I'm pretty thirsty at that time. Yeah um, but I'm going to start
sipping that water in the uh three hours heading into sleep yeah, so you can actually pay
attention to his um to go back. This is actually I love doing this stuff, but if you're waking
up at night - and you have a very dry mouth - not for me all right, because it can be one
of two things - you might actually be dehydrated, and so then what the mistake people
make is Like man, my mouth is so dry. I keep getting up to drink water at night. That
makes you then pee too much. What that also indicates is probably your mouth
breathing. So a lot of ways to fix people waking up and urinating too much at night is to
tape your mouth and or use a dilator over your nose (nasal strips). And then what
happens? Is you don't feel like you have a dry mouth, so you don't get up to consume
any extra water throughout the night so that actually reduces your fluid intake. So you
don't have the problem of actually now having too much fluid to do it, and so It’s another
reasons why mouth taping can really really help, and if you are having those issues and
or snoring those are not benign. That’s a really like you really should get some work on
those um. Something you're not sleeping very well is the way I'll say it. It doesn't, doesn't
necessarily mean something life-threatening, but It’s not a good thing. So you're going to
run kind of your triaging things back and forth. So if you're like I'm, waking up to pee a
lot, but my mouth isn't thirsty: okay, great, then you may actually have just a water
consumption issue. If it is, my mouth is dry, but I'm actually waking up and I'm having
these large urinations, then you're not actually dehydrated you're, just breathing through
your mouth. If you're waking up and your mouth is dry and There’s not a lot of pee there,
then you actually might actually legitimately be under hydrated. So a little bit of a game
you can play there. Well, That’s super informative. I think that um, the point alone that
gulping a bunch of water all at once is going to cause you to need to excrete that water
soon after um is a really important point. Also for people that are going to, I don't know,
give a talk or um. You don't want to have to get up to use the restroom. You have to sit
through a long meeting, yeah um. Clearly, I'm violating all these rules up until right. Now
I've been, you know, not I sort of followed the seagull approach to uh to consuming
fluids, just in um enormous volumes, I'm going to start sipping um fluids instead um.
What are some of the other rules of hydration, so you're going to wake up, you're, going
to start your day and start hydrated, so you know you're consuming a larger percentage
of your water earlier in the day, then you get all the performance, enhancing effects of
water And you don't have to worry about it, compromising your sleep, so That’s step
number one. Also now you're going to start your session closer to hydration all right.
Great number, two eat mostly real Whole Foods. Why interesting? What you may, or not
have thought about is a huge determinant of your hydration status. Is your food choices?
If you look at different foods, for example, most fruit, watermelon watermelon is like 95
plus percent water, fantastic Source, also by the way since we're here, it is not extremely
high in carbohydrate, It’s not extremely high in sugar, it is by percentage, but since it is
almost Exclusively water you're eating - it is not something that is extremely dangerous
in terms of sugar. I there alone, probably all the things we've talked about in the six six
episodes. Uh that comment right. There will probably blow the internet to pieces and I'll
probably get hate mail for life for it, but from people water, throwing watermelons yeah
yeah, oh my gosh. Well, I don't think the point is that sugar is necessarily bad. I think the
point is that for most people, they're ingesting too much sugar, most people, yeah um,
and It’s interesting oftentimes the people who are justifying the ingestion of sugar are
exactly the kind of people that should not ingest so much sugar. So, There’s a little bit of
a well a user bias. The point here is, if you're eating whole real food. This is like now
we're kind of splitting hairs about those things so so morning, hydration yeah now
important Point here. If you compare it to other Foods, um like actually meat is, is a very
high percentage of fluid, depending on how well or long you've cooked it. You just
remember, you said earlier over 70 water right so if you're eating meat you're getting
actually a big chunk of water, as you cook it, of course you lose some of that, but meat
can be like. I wouldn't call it a hydrating food item, but it is not as low as something like a
biscuit which can be actually like, 10 water. That’s why It’s like dry and dense, which
doesn't mean It’s bad for you, but there if you're eating highly processed foods, almost
by association, that means they've been dehydrated or portionably right, so you're, just
getting less total fluid intake. In addition, they have also been highly salted in general
right, so now we're in this position, where we're under hydrated and highly salted bad
spot. If you now switch over to mostly again, just mostly whole real food-ish, whatever
that means to you, then your hydration is going to Skyrocket, you're, going to have a lot
so you're eating a ton of food. In fact, it should be a large percentage of the fluid intake.
You have actually should be coming from your food. You shouldn't have to be smashing
water bottles after a water bottle all day. In that case, though, you do need to add salt
back. So we do see this a lot with people who try to make a transition from maybe a sub-
optimal Nutritional Lifestyle and they give up a little bit of other processed food and they
come over and they start having problems because they're not actually consuming
enough salt. So add that back easy way to do that you can use electrolytes and we
could talk about those numbers if you want, if you just salt your food that you're making
you know to taste, That’s going to get most people in a pretty good spot. So start
hydrated consume hydrating Foods. Step number two step number three. You want to
pre-hydrate if you know you're going to do a workout session and It’s going to be hot and
long or one of those things you want to look for that: half a pound, a per body weight of
ounces. So That’s the number we're looking for to start our hydration session. We do
that we're pretty much taken care of and then, like, I said, adjust depending on lifestyle
humidity and other factors like that. You can use what is called the what system w-u-t. I
think Bob kennethick has done a ton of research in this area. If you want to read more
look up his research, it is simply weight, urine and thirst, so, in other words, check your
body weight. Look at your urine color and engage your thirst, and actually you can use
through those three things and those can significantly predict actual hydration status,
independent of actually measuring osmolality, or anything like that. So those three
metrics alone are pretty good indicator of, where you're at so you're going to have that
normal amount of water plus or minus. If you miss that number, for whatever reason you
get distracted, the number we typically tell people is like something like 400 to 500
milliliters of water in the hour proceeding the training all right. So That’s like 13 to 20
ounces. So, like you know, you're going to go work out at three o'clock. It’s two o'clock
and you realize oh man, I have not drinking much water today, you don't need to go
smash, tons and tons and tons. Just look for something like that. You know call it a bottle
of water if you will, if That’s not enough, if you're in a really tough spot, you can do more
like uh, five to eight ounces, 15 or 20 minutes before exercise. You want to be really
careful about drinking a bunch of water like in the seconds before exercise because
you're just going to feel a whole bunch of water bouncing up and down in your stomach,
and nobody likes that so one to three hundred milliliters, 15 or so 20 minutes before that
assumes you're in this, like 185 pound range ish again, if you're talking people of much
larger size, you may need to increase those values accordingly, if you do all that, then
you use the Galpin equation for your intra workout, hydration and you're. In a pretty good
spot, what you want to consume in that is what I call Sweat. What I mean by that is, you
don't actually want to necessarily consume water. Only during a workout you want to
consume something that is ISO osmotic to your blood, so something that is the same
concentration that you lost in your sweat. So if you've done a sweat test, you would then
drink a fluid that is of the same osmolality. The short version of that something in the
neighborhood of 200 to 400 milligrams of sodium most electrolytes products are going to
be something like that. Now I know element is, is a thousand milligrams and It’s a lot
higher, but most products now that you're going to find are 250 to 400 milligrams and
they're. Typically, in the like two to maybe up to three to one sodium to potassium range,
right, coconut water is actually cool. It’s like basically the opposite. Like a cup of coconut
water, I think has something like 200 milligrams of sodium, but like 600 milligrams of
potassium, so um like total spoiler alert, but will we use coconut water? A lot of hydration
just add a little pinch of salt, because that'll bring the sodium way back up. Yeah one
note about sodium um. Obviously, people who have pre-hypertension or hypertension
want to be careful with their sodium intake. Um anytime. I'Ve suggested that people
might consider ingesting more sodium. You know It’s sort of uh. It’s like It’s like putting a
Target on your on your back, and yet the data are pretty good, showing that if people are
not getting enough sodium their mental Clarity, their focus, their mental stamina, their
physical stamina really suffers, and then people argue well. Most of us are getting too
much salt. That often is true for people that are eating a lot of processed foods and not
training and not training, but for many uh people who are already sort of health
conscious who are training, they're, largely consuming, or, I should say, they're
consuming largely non-processed or minimally processed Foods, and especially for folks
who are not ingesting many carbohydrates and are consuming caffeine totally. You know
a lot of people, don't know that carbohydrates hold water, and that makes it sound bad.
It’s not necessarily that you know you're going to get subcutaneous swelling of your
body. Now It’s recovery, It’s It’s bringing water into your system and it holds water. So
when you drop carbohydrate starches in particular, you urinate a lot more and when you
drink caffeine, you also urinate a lot more, as, as you pointed out earlier, so you start
combining a few things like slightly lower carbohydrate or low carbohydrate. Eating really
quote: unquote clean you're, not getting a lot of salt in your food and drinking caffeine
and then exercising and then pretty soon those numbers that come along with um. You
know a gram of sodium in your electrolyte drink are not all that outrageous and what you
find is people feel much much better when they're getting enough sodium and of course I
should um say that. There’s no reason why someone has to ingest a supplement like
element or something. There are plenty of other ways to bring sodium into your system.
You use a pinch of pink salt or Himalayan salt or sea salt, or even just table salt in water,
or just making sure that you're salting your food enough, and I think that there too, salt
appetite and salt taste is a pretty good guide. If you taste something - and it tastes really
salty to you - That’s an indication that either It’s really salty or your salt stores are kind of
tapped off you're, okay, whereas if you're craving salt and you and you're thinking gosh, I
really want to put salt on this. Already salty thing, not necessarily but oftentimes, that
means that you are salt efficient, so salt appetite is a pretty hardwired set of neural
circuits and hormones, and I think we would all be wise to learn to tap into the our kind of
intuition about salt intake, but Of course, also to measure your blood pressure, Etc,
yeah, of course, if you think you have some sort of contraindication there that work with
the medical specialist without without question um. Those situations you laid out, though,
are very real. A lot of people are living like that, and so It’s important for those folks to
understand. If you are going through symptoms, fatigue, lack of focus, cognitive function,
performance, isn't there then hey like you may be under salted and again actually a good
amount of blood chemistry. Work can unravel that a lot and it can sort of tell you if you're
going out of whack. There are a number of folks who are extremely sensitive to sodium
in terms of health risk and that that is a real thing again work with your um individual
folks. On that I don't work with anyone for disease treatment or management at all. I'Ve
said that probably four times I'll say it six more times um. I only take people who are
healthy and try to make them perform at their best possible level. So It’s actually funny.
You mentioned that because I was going to give people my recommendation for sodium
intake in general throughout the day, and then I decided I'm not going to say that,
because all It’s going to do is make all the rest of the people who aren't coming to come.
After me, for the watermelon comment come after me for that, so by the end of Todays
episode, the goal is that there everyone's coming after you, but also everyone, has
learned something of value you've already given
01:10:58 Electrolytes, Carbohydrates & Exercise
Us a tremendous insights and actionable information on Creatine and hydration and

along those lines, I'd love for you to tell us about some of the things that we can do with
supplementation in order to enhance training by taking certain things before we train,
and I also have The question of how long before training should we start thinking about
supplying nutrients and supplements for the training session? I'M not sure I've actually
finished my fiber, maybe I wasn't clear enough about the last one, so I just want to tie
that that bow and then we'll go to the next one yeah. No, it was probably my fault so that
uh, in addition to the Galloping equation in terms of amount uh, I'm recording, I
recommended at you, know roughly three to one sodium to potassium recommendation,
and I gave you some rough numbers for things like that. I actually, in all honesty, use
probably six to ten different electrolyte companies depending on the situation. Some of
them are really good in the case again, like element, That’s nice about that is There’s no
carbohydrate. However, the downside is There’s no carbohydrate. So sometimes I want
carbohydrates in the training because, as you mentioned, There’s significant evidence
going back actually several decades on the benefit of carbohydrate during exercise. So,
if you're in a situation uh where you're trying to again maximize actual exercise
performance, you, especially if it is either long duration, so more than two hours or
extremely high intensity, and this has to be well north of 100 of your VO2 max in that
situation. As we talked about in the endurance episode, you can actually start having a
decrement performance because of a drop of muscle, glycogen uh Global glycogen can
start coming down. If That’s the case, augmenting with carbohydrates, during the
training that is going to enhance performance, It’s going to do what we call spare the
liver and It’s going to keep my second rule of my four, which is maintain a glucose
ingestion. It’s going to keep that going in general. What you're going to find is the
number is like a five to nine percent glucose concentration in your fluid, which turns out
to be like exactly the number that most sports drinks have as well. As I think, That’s
pretty much exactly what a coconut water is, the downside of sports drinks since we're
here is they actually tend to be undersalted and so that they don't provide enough of
them. If you look at the numbers, they're going to say something like 60 to 100 grams of
carbohydrate per hour, is the Target and now, if you're, using the sort of Galloping
equation and you're splitting that up into 15 minute intervals, It’s something again like 20
or so Grams of carbs per 15 to 20 minutes, if you're doing again an hour, long plus
training, though so admittedly, 100 grams uh is a bit much for some folks depending on
your size. So I would recommend, starting in that uh, 60 gram or so range again per
hour. Total is what you want to get to, and only in the situation in which muscle glycogen
depletion is becoming a limiting factor to Performance. So the other benefit of that is, as
you mentioned, that actually drives water into the cell and so you're going to be in that
nice sweet spot of you're, actually keeping glucose going, which is going to enhance
performance and you're helping hydration at the same time. So the other little part That’s
important to pay attention to here is the type of carbohydrate matters. So you can use
actually a whole combination of things called resistant starches, which I will use for a
long bouts of exercise, but in the middle of the workout you're going to want to focus on
glucose and fructose, mostly glucose. Typically at least a two or three to one ratio of
glucose to fructose and the reason is those actually get into tissue through separate
Transporters, and so what happens is once the glucose Transporters get full. You can't
bring anything else in, however, since fructose comes in a separate route, you can
maximize total carbohydrate intake by using two different, unique forms. There’s a lot of
ways. You can do this, but this is where the momentous fuel product is. Is that
specifically, has that exactly in it? So It’s fantastic! You can use food, no problem. You
can use the combination of things like honey and different, easily absorbable and usable
and things that you can actually like, maybe put in a drink to get away with. So There’s
lots of routes for it, but you want to look in that that sort of combination of five to nine
percent - roughly glucose for there, so you do need to train your gut. So do not do
anything and There’s a generally A good rule. Do not do anything in your competition
that you've never done in practice. So try these food items try these amounts. The
carbohydrate numbers. Try the sodium numbers. Try the total amount of water start low.
You can always increase. What you don't want to do is have to run out during the middle
of your spin class and Sprint to the bathroom and hope nobody's in your way which, in
the lab we've seen we'll just say accidents like that occur more than once so just be
careful of your stomach.
01:16:47 Training Fasted versus Fed, Caffeine, Carbohydrate Timing
I realize I jumped the gun a little bit asking about supplementation for before, during and
after a workout um, because what I neglected to ask about was training in the fasted
State. This is something that we talked about in an earlier episode, but I think It’s worth
highlighting now um, Sometimes the best way to supplement, if you will a workout or
pre-workout, is ingesting nothing, I'm one of these people. I actually prefer to do my
weight training somewhere between seven and eight a.m. Each morning, sometimes a
little earlier, sometimes a little bit later, I drink fluid water and I do ingest caffeine prior to
those training days on days. When I don't train, I do, as I often recommend, uh people
do delay my caffeine intake 90 to 120 minutes after waking, but in any event It’s water
and caffeine, yerba, mate or coffee, or some sort of stimulant for weight, training,
workouts and generally not for cardiovascular Training workouts, although sometimes
yes, so I'm training fasted. That said, I'm ingesting carbohydrate the night before to
make sure that my I have glycogen stores that are topped off and uh. So It’s fasted. But
with that caveat, what are your thoughts on training fasted and what I just described is
fasted overnight, but some people are training in the afternoon and they may opt to not
eat anything in the you know two to four hours prior to training or maybe even Longer I
personally find that caffeine hits my system a lot better when I'm fasted better meaning it
just seems to have more of a potent effect. There are some reasons for that um and, of
course, we dissuade people from ingesting caffeine, too late in the day, because it'll
disrupt sleep, so I'm not saying fast for three hours then drink caffeine. But who knows?
Maybe That’s in your protocol. The simple version of this question is: what are your
thoughts on training fasted, and if people are going to train fasted, how should they
modulate their fluid intake? If, at all, what happens with exercise in the endurance and
Metabolism episode, we walk through and the fact that, no matter what you're, using for
fuel, carbohydrates or fat or even other potential sources, the end product of all of those
is ATP CO2 and water right. So you're trying to make ATP, that is the fuel for exercise
now ATP is adenosine triphosphate, so one two three phosphates on top of an
adenosine. Well, what you may have not put together is, if you hydrolyze ATP, and you
break off one of those phosphates. You now have ADP. If you do it again, you have amp
addressing monophosphide. If you do it one more time now you just have adenosine and
if you have then therefore run through a lot of exercise burned a lot of energy, you have
increased the amount of adenosine That’s floating around now, if you have a high
concentration of adenosine. What'S that going to make, you want to do That’s going to
bind to certain receptors and we know when those receptors get bound to you fall
asleep. Bingo caffeine will competitively bind to those receptors. Therefore, That’s why
caffeine stops you from feeling like you want to go to sleep right, so we have a very clear
relationship between exercise fuel. In fact, if you look at the literature, There’s a pretty
clear relationship between the more caloric expenditure in different sports and the higher
amount of hours needed for sleep. So There’s a nice tie between how hard you're
exercising how much energy you're burning. How much you need to sleep stimulants,
which brings us all the way back to your question of fueling? So do I need a fuel prior to
my exercise about if you're going to be limited in your exercise, bout buy fuel, then
fueling is necessary. One way or the other if it is a type of training that is not, then It’s not
going to matter and so the examples we gave if you're doing, if you're going to go, do a
30-second bout of maximal, exertion and you're going to do it. One time you don't need
to worry about fueling at all we're eating within your workout, because It’s only 30
seconds yeah you got 30 seconds. You don't need to worry about hydration, post
exercise. You don't need to worry about recovery. Total energy expenditure was nothing
if you're going to go um. You know you're going to go practice, you're going to go to the
driving range and practice your golf swing. You don't need to worry about it. The total
amount of energy expenditure is just not high. In fact, in that case, you might want to
keep it somewhat low, because you want to keep blood glucose fairly, even and you
don't want to bring into the system. You certainly wouldn't want to use stimulants right
because you may get over exerted inside in all of these things, we probably should have
started off our conversation with this in terms of macronutrients. The total amount
throughout the day is more important generally than the timing of them, which is why you
can do things like have a bunch of carbohydrate at night, not eat the next morning and
lift and be just fine. It doesn't matter that you didn't have them in a few hours before your
muscle. Glycogen is topped off your liver is glycogen is topped off you're. Absolutely
fine! You have plenty of fuel, even if you're to wait a few more hours. In fact, even if you
were to do conditioning you're, probably fine, I I have plenty of athletes that prefer to do
many of their training sessions faster in the morning for personal reasons, not because it
enhances performance, but if it doesn't enhance or harm it, then, and It’s a personal
preference thing: fine! If you're going to go, do a session, though, where you're going to
be really concerned with muscle, glycogen depletion and again you can go back that
episode to learn of different types when those thresholds hits and what you worry about.
Then a feeling would be important. You would either need to have something before the
session or consume it during the session. So one of the other things we'd like to say
here is recovery, starts during the previous workout right. So if you're working out right
now - and you optimize nutrition right now, even if you don't necessarily need it for the
current workout, if you can get ahead on recovery, then you're going to be fine the next
day and the differentiation here between carbohydrate and protein is Important, so the
total amount of protein you ingest throughout the day is probably a bigger determinant
for things like muscle growth than the timing, so the post exercise anabolic window, it
doesn't necessarily matter. Carbohydrate - is different. The timing of that does matter. It
needs to be around and available. You can maximize both hydration and muscle,
glycogen resynthesis, which is restoring the muscle glycogen you burn during exercise. I
also work with athletes that train multiple times a day. So in those particular cases a
recovery window is half what you normally have. So if you're, in a situation where you
have two or three days before you work out again, you don't need to worry about getting
carbohydrate in before, during or after Because by the time you go to train again, you
will have restored your muscle glycogen levels easily. However, if you're training every
day or twice in a day, then the timing of carbohydrate really starts to matter. In that case,
I see no reason to not ingest those nutrients either before, during or after you don't need
to necessarily do it, but you can. The general rule of thumb I give is something like this: if
you're doing something where you're trying to really work hard, whether this is
hypertrophy training or a lot of endurance, energy expenditure is going to be high
potential muscle, damage is high and or energy utilization is High, what you want to look
for is a number something in the area of like half a gram of carbohydrate per pound of
body weight. So you weigh 200 pounds. You want to make sure that either pre-mid or
post or total you bring in 100 grams of carbohydrate. It’s just a very rough number to
start protein is about half of that. So It’s about a quarter of your body weight right, so
those numbers would be if you're 200 pounds make sure you have 100 grams of carbs
and 50 grams of protein and again it doesn't necessarily have to be before or during or
after and you'll be in A good spot, all you need to do, then, is Alter. What I do, I should
say, is Alter the amount of carbohydrate based on energy expenditure, so a lower
energy and easier workout. Instead of having 100 grams of carbs, I might tack that down
to 75 or even 50, and be it a one to one carb protein ratio if it was even harder, more
sun, hotter outside more fluid loss, I might go from 100 grams of carbs up to 150 or 200,
and get closer to like a three to
01:25:13 Caffeine & Endurance
One or four to one carbohydrate to protein ratio, so those are the numbers that I
generally go by well, as I take a sip of My Double Espresso Americano here, I'd love for
you to tell us about stimulants sure. There’s no shortage of these. In most of our lives -
and of course you can cover the health benefits of it later you, maybe you have an
episode. Yes, we have an episode on caffeine and it does have certain health benefits,
although one has to use caffeine correctly in order to drive those yeah. So There’s
caffeine is the easy one to start with and we won't belabor the point here. Uh, the
evidence is strong. It has a negrogenic effect. You can take it at whatever dosage is
reasonable for you and, of course, there is a bit of a learning curve there such that,
obviously the more you take it. The more you need to take, even though There’s actually
some recent evidence showing even folks who are acclimated to it, will still see an
ergogenic benefit, even though, if they don't feel a big boost of this. So typically that
takes 30 to 45 minutes or so. But It’s highly dependent upon the person, so some people
can smell coffee and immediately feel better and That’s probably working actually
through a different mechanism of anticipation, but you can take it there. The half-life of it
is, you know, four to six hours or something like that. It totally depends on the person, so
don't let it ruin your sleep, but if you take it prior to Performance, it has a noticeable
effect on particularly endurance. Maximum strength may be less well, quite clearly less.
So, in fact, the data are mixed there on whether it actually does anything for Peak
strength, although I think most people would uh Rec would suggest that you know you're
going to take it prior to trying to truly lift as high as trying to you know, lift A one repetition
Max or similar, but most of the the documented effects are on the the endurance based
activities. Yes, so my read of the literature uh in terms of performance, enhancing effects
of caffeine are that one to three milligrams. I want to make sure that people hear the
units correctly before people Blitz themselves out with that caffeine, one to three
milligrams per kilogram of body weight about 30 minutes prior to exercise has a definite
performance enhancing effect. It also has a definite mental performance, enhancing
effect, especially when people who are regular caffeine users have abstained from
caffeine for anywhere from 2 to 15 days and and That’s an extremely rare circumstance,
but even if they have not, it appears that one to three milligrams per Kilogram of body
weight of caffeine taken about again, It’s not super precise. As far as I can see now
about 30 minutes before the event starts, um can really enhance reaction time and
power output and as well as as you mentioned, endurance when I was researching the
caffeine episode. One interesting caveat that um I discovered was that if people are not
caffeine adapted, they are not regular users of caffeine. The sudden introduction of
caffeine can really degrade performance, mostly because people don't know how to
operate at that high level of autonomic arousal. Have you ever observed that yeah 100,
in fact, There’s actually data going up as high as 10 milligrams per kilogram of body
weight wow, which is in fact, once you cross the five milligram per kilogram threshold,
you will start seeing performance decrements. So, There’s absolutely such a thing of
ruining your performance with too much caffeine, so most people listening to this. If
you're thinking wow, they said caffeine, I'm all in and then you just stop listening and
now you you know, go for your quad espresso shot before your every time you go to
work out. You probably are passing that threshold. If you think about those numbers,
one to three milligrams per kilogram body weight, if you weigh 100 kilograms, That’s 220
pounds that'd be something like two to five hundred milligrams of caffeine, which is like a
pretty high amount. But you know a coffee is going to get you close and espresso is
going to get you somewhat in that ballpark, depending on source and stuff um. So you
don't really need to go and blister your brain with caffeine. In fact, if you do is It’s quite
common and in fact likely that you'll actually make performance worse, right, yeah the
amount of caffeine in different coffees and sodas, Etc. Of course varies. One thing that
people ought to know is that the smallest of commercially available um coffees at the
most popular commercial vendor, so um generally contain anywhere from 250 to 350
milligrams of caffeine. What that means is that the so-called medium and the large
contain as much as 500 milligrams or one gram of caffeine, so for you morning, large
coffee at a commercial vendor drinkers. If you're wondering why you get a headache if
you're 30 minutes late on that caffeine or um, if you can't access that caffeine at all or
even if you're drinking coffee excuse me from another source you're finding like. Oh, It’s
really not doing it! For me, It’s because the amount of caffeine in the now commercially
sold uh coffees is exceedingly high. It’s about two or three times higher than the
standard lookup tables that you'll see on the internet. So I'm not saying that to demonize
caffeine. We can pretty quickly adapt to and form a tolerance to caffeine. Some people
never really can get over the Jitters. Other people um are just fine with even a thousand
milligrams of caffeine, but only because they've been drinking a lot of caffeine
consistently anyway. It’s also wildly inconsistent from location to location, uh, The Brew
type, the functionality so yeah that stuff can be very hard to figure out what's happening,
There’s only one way really to uh objectively measure caffeine and That’s use caffeine
tablets and they work pretty well actually uh. Someone I know who's prominent in the
podcast space uses 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine in tablet form combined with tea.
So they've now conditioned themselves to think that herbal tea actually has this
caffeinating effect, but um tablet form caffeine, while I'm not recommending it to to
outright. It is going to give you the best sense of how
01:31:20 Citrulline, Beet Root Juice & Performance; Alpha-GPC & Focus, Nootropics
Much caffeine, you can tolerate and how much is performance enhancing or is
performance, degrading, There’s actually another line of supplementation. We can go
down here, which is not technically a stimulant, but It’s something I use to help
performance when you don't want caffeine, and so this thing specifically, if you're one of
those folks who have to exercise at night - and you want a little bit of boost For your
training, but you don't want to have caffeine because it messes up your sleep, and this is
when you can turn to the whole, like citrulline, Arginine, nitric oxide, sort of route and
we'll skip the explanation there, but effectively what happens is. nitric oxide Is this
wonderful compound that causes vasodilation and, of course, That’s going to Aid, then in
transporting nutrients in and out of the cell, so it has an ergogenic effect. The you have a
number of ways you can go about this. Some of them have more pros and cons than
others, and, and there are more and more data coming out, specifically on citrulline more
recently, if you look, though, in my opinion, the most consistent evidence for the most
consistent effect is in the supplement of beetroot or beetroot Juice or extract - or
something like that, so you can find those supplements and they tend to again they're,
pretty effective and enhancing, performs specifically anything moderate to longer
duration, endurance performance and they are not a stimulant, so they won't ruin your
sleep. That much you know. One note of caution for those of you that are interested in
citrulline or beetroot because they are in the Arginine pathway, if you're somebody who
has a predisposition to cold sores, um oral cold sores that is or other forms of cold sores.
That um, because activation of the Arginine pathway, can exacerbate some of the neural
related aspects of cold sores, and That’s because the viruses that cause those cold
sores actually live on neurons. Then you want to be very cautious with citrulline,
especially high dose citrulline. I can really amplify that the cold sore response, what
about non-stimulant, yet um Focus enhancing supplements things like Alpha GPC, for
example, I routinely use 300 to 600 milligrams of Alpha GPC prior to hard physical
training, typically weight training, but occasionally I'll take 300 milligrams of Alpha GPC
prior to a mental work bout less often these days, because I kind of reserve it for
physical training and I don't tend to use it every day, maybe once every you know, third
or fourth workout, combined with caffeine. So that combination is pretty uh, pretty potent.
I find and so technically because It’s a cholinergic Agonist, It’s not a stimulant in the
traditional sense, but it has a focusing and an alertness, promoting aspect to it. What are
your thoughts on those sorts of compounds? There’s not much human perform exercise
performance data on those. There are certainly cognitive functioning tests on those, so
you're not going to find a lot of information. No though there isn't none, we actually will
use many of these substances. You could globally call them nootropics, which is you
know, any substance that specifically only has brain function is a rough way to think
about it, we'll use them prior to more challenging bouts of training. This is something that
we'll pull out say on sparring day, only or the most important training session or a
session when you're trying to work on Pitch command or when you're trying to enhance
work on your shot and as a basketball, player or you're really trying to Improve a certain
swing as a golfer or something like that, but we do not use them every day. We do not
use them with every person, so yeah we will use those, they are not stimulants, but they
can be performance enhancing and another kind of way to think about. This is, if you're
in the case of caloric restriction, so whether you're trying to lose weight or we're actually
trying to control weight, for you know, weight purposes in terms of a sports where you
have to be in a certain weight class or something like that. Well, we may not be able to
give you food. In fact, we may not be able to give you stimulants because of the sleep
thing or because we're already like maxed on a sibilance. Now we can go this route and
so at least like mentally you're, a little bit there and you're more likely to be alert and
focused, and you can train harder despite the fact that we didn't actually change fuel.
Now That’s a little bit of a short game in terms of That’s, not your permanent solution.
You eventually need to bring calories up, or you know whatever other trains, you're
training or
01:35:43 Rhodiola, Cortisol & Fatigue
Whatever we're going to do, but it can work in a nice short pinch, I'm very interested to
learn from you about fatigue, reducers and I'm hoping that Rhodiola Rosea will come up
in the conversation yeah great. Let’s just start right there then There’s actually a lot of
research on this, despite most people, not having heard of it. I think I mentioned in a
previous episode. I’ve used it a lot over many many years. You have to be a little bit
careful of it. There’s well, first of all, no we only we should have said this at the onset. No
supplement is the Panacea right. Nothing'S going to work for everything in Rhodiola is
no no different. It can have a number of effects. If you look across the literature you're
going to find generally somewhere between a small benefit to little benefit it, but not
often is it detrimental with a few exceptions, I know of a handful of papers. That would be
two specifically where it may actually reduce muscular endurance. Okay, fine, if you
think about what's happening, is one of the benefits that has been seen so far with
Rhodiola is It is helpful at managing cortisol, but cortisol suppression is not a necessarily
a good thing. We talked about how, if you do an acute out of stress, cortisol will go way
up, and that is a sign of acute stress. However, a sign of long-term excessive stress is
cortisol suppression, and so this is a thing to be really careful of is if you're feeling down
or lethargic or tired, and you think your adrenals are messed up and then you start
taking cortisol modulators. You could be making the problem worse because now your
cortisol is actually suppressed and now you're, taking these things to blunt it or keep it
low. And then you continue to feel lethargic and lack of desire and libido and focus and
sort of all these things. So cortisol is not a bad thing. We want this to be going up and
down uh any amounts that we want. So, if we're thinking about like, for example, waking
up um, you would want generally something like a 50 reduction in the first hour in terms
of cortisol concentrations. However, if you're extremely suppressed, already um going
down is, is only going to be a problem, so Rhodiola is is, has a a good evidence base to
support it for that um you'll see actually a number of studies that have looked at it in a
whole host Of areas for benefits, so something good to do. Um, the difficult part with
Rhodiola, to be quite honest, is getting it from a high quality brand and Source It’s
difficult to get as a single source, which is a very, very important thing to do with
supplements to try to get them sourced alone. Rhodiola that typically comes in
combination with any other herbals or other stuff, adrenal support, etc, etc, and also then
getting them. Then third party certified, which for most folks, is not necessary, but for any
athletes that need to go through drug testing systems. You should not take any
supplement at all. That does not have some sort of third-party certification, so those are
the challenges that being said, if you've ever ran into somebody who's taking Rhodiola
and they're like I didn't do anything for me, it It’s possible. That’s! You know nothing
works for everyone. It also could be just very poor quality sourcing. So if you look at uh
the there have been a number of papers on um, its perception of fatigue and you've sort
of mentioned that you felt pretty immediate effects of taking it. A few times yeah, I'm
fairly sensitive of supplements, but I've started taking uh Rhodiola before workouts and
found that I could push much harder much longer through the workout. Normally I would,
or typically before, taking it um. That is in sessions where I did not take it. I would be
able to work out very hard for 20 minutes or so the next 10 minutes. I could get some
work output and then the remaining uh period of time. It was kind of a tapering off now
granted. These are very intense training sessions. These are not the endurance training
sessions. These are the weight training sessions that one time per week per body part
type sessions uh. What I've noticed is I can complete the entire 60 minutes with minimal
fatigue. Now I mean obviously I hit fatigues within sets and, of course you know I get you
remain human despite taking it but um. I found to be very useful and I've been using it
whenever I use Alpha GPC prior to workouts, yeah and I’ve been impressed by it overall.
01:39:55 Tool: Supplement Formulations
I do want to highlight something that you said, because I think It’s so so vitally important,
which is that using single ingredient formulations for most things is critical to figuring out
what works for you. What doesn't what dosages you need? Being able to take things uh
two on one off um two days on one day off, for instance, being able to increase dosage
in the morning and then maybe reduce the dosage and combine with something else in
the afternoon. Single ingredient formulations are pretty much the only way to do that.
There’s perhaps only one supplement that I take at all and That’s athletic greens is there
have been a regular podcast sponsor for a long time. That is a cocktail of many many
things and those are all adaptogens as well as some probiotics and vitamins, and things
like that. So I'm not opposed to Blends where the Blends include a lot of nutrients that
are synergistic but for all pill. Capsule based supplements, where I'm looking for a very
targeted effect, and It’s not just about foundational nutrition. I really believe strongly that
single ingredient formulations are the way that you can build a rational approach to
supplementation and also make adjustments if something isn't making. You feel better
and also make adjustments if something's really working for you. So, for instance, some
people might take Alpha GPC 300 milligrams and not feel anything go up to 600
milligrams, not feel anything, maybe just feel kind of they don't like it. Other people, like
myself, took 300 milligrams of alpha GPC the first time I was like wow. This really puts
me in the zone, but I want to be really careful. How often I use it I did mention. I go up to
600 milligrams occasionally, but that really puts me on the outer threshold of kind of
overall levels of focus and amped up such that. If I drink too much caffeine, it can tilt me
over the edge. So I encourage people to become scientists of themselves, and the only
way to do that is to try and limit the number of variables, and the final point is that I think
that single ingredient formulations are by far the best in terms of changing things over
time. You know this could be um. Uh women during their menstrual cycle might find that
during certain phases of the cycle, they're more sensitive to certain things than not
others and for men and women, it may be that you know certain times of year, even and
uh. Certain supplements might go better closer to sleep some earlier in the day and on
and on and on There’s just no real way, in my opinion, to have a supplementation
protocol that involves lots and lots of Blends one or two Blends, okay, but lots of Blends.
I think That’s um, I actually think That’s the potentially dangerous territory yeah I mean
just take Rhodiola as a good example. I know a new meta-analysis came out just in the
last few months, looking at it and they found in general. You see again a slight to
moderate Improvement and everything from Power output to fatigue, resistant,
antioxidant effects to endurance performance. So It’s like okay, great, maybe There’s a
little bit here now. Let’s say you went to do it and the only way you could access rhodiola
is in combination with that and some lion's mane - and you know some other of these
adaptogens and was like well wait a minute. I just wanted to take this to get a better
workout, but now it also came with the stimulant or this cortisol suppressor or cortisol
activator. Well now also, you can't take it at night or you can't take it in the morning
because you're already you already had coffee. Your options are just way limited, so I
think the biggest part of all that is you. If something doesn't feel good, you have
absolutely no idea, you don't know if it was a rollio, you don't know if it was the
boswellian it is in there. You don't know if it was any of the other things that were
smashed in there or it could be something as simple as the um, the the citric acid they
use. Like some other combination of thing - and now here you are thinking that some
supplement that actually works for you doesn't and you throw that out of your repertoire
for the rest of your life, which is you know, not the biggest crime, but It’s not needed and
you're, Not really going to know so yeah, I fully stamped. You can look back at my
course lectures for the last decade and you will see like stamped number one on the
supplement. The sections is make sure you're taking single ingredient supplements at all
costs. The last part about that too, is you're more likely to ensure the amount that is on
the label is correct. So if you're taking Rhodiola- and it says you know It’s 100 milligrams
in there and if That’s only thing - That’s in there you're more likely than not to actually get
something close now, they're, never perfect, but it will be close if It’s in a combination of
20. Other things you actually don't have any idea, if That’s in there, in fact, there have
been many papers on melatonin and vitamin D and a number of other supplements in
which, when you actually just pull them off the shelf, these are these are standard
studies where they Would go and buy us in like 20 to 25 different supplements in the
case of melatonin and we'll actually measure the amount of melatonin actually in them.
And despite the fact that the label says five milligrams, they can be up to a 500 to a
thousand fold. Actual concentration in that supplement, and then you wonder why some
people react great to melatonin and some people that absolutely destroys you, and this
is also why, like we'll, actually we'll see this constantly well, people will have like 500
times the upper limit of melatonin the morning. After when the half-life is supposed to be
more like 90 minutes, it should be totally gone, but we're seeing extremely high. I'M not
even talking like double I'm talking. 10 20 30X. The upper limit range for melatonin the
next morning, and then It’s like well. What are you taking he's like? Oh, I got this
melatonin at X, store or X website and you're like holy cow um, so I'm not opposed to
melatonin theoretically um, but you have to be careful with that one in particular. So any
supplement has that to be true, so you want to buy them from as many places as you
can, that are high quality and if they are third party tested, even if you're, not a
performance athlete. I want to stress this. Even if you're, not a performance athlete third
party, certified and tested supplements, are you're less likely to just get wildly high
concentrations or low concentrations of active ingredients and so relative to other ones
who you might get for cheaper. But you could be totally wrecking Yourself by getting you
know: 50 milligrams of melatonin every night and not realizing it. So then, of course, the
next morning you drown yourself in caffeine and then you can see what death cycle
you're in now, yeah and people could look for third party certification on the packaging
and um. Some websites will allow you to zoom in on the bottle beforehand. It’s largely
listed on on certain vendor websites, a brief point about supplement, cost and blends,
and I promise this will be a brief point. Different ingredients, meaning different types of
supplements, have widely varying costs in order to you know, create to get them to
manufacture them. So often does what you'll find is that blends will um include the least
amount of the most expensive uh ingredient right um, not always the case. There are
some. There are certain exceptions to this, and I mentioned some Blends that I like a
few minutes ago that are for foundational nutrition, adaptogens and probiotics athletic
greens. Of course, just being one of several examples out there. But when it comes to
say a sleep Blend or a pre-workout blend, there are some decent products out there, but
a lot of them tend to put in more of the least expensive ingredients and less of the ones
that you're actively seeking. And so those tend to be caffeine tends to be a kind of a
buffer against the other things, meaning if you pre-workout that putting caffeine in there
isn't necessarily a bad thing, but if it has five other things in there oftentimes, what
manufacturers will cheat on is The actual amount of the things that are costly so again
single ingredient
01:47:31 Supplements, Dependency & Root Cause; Foundational Behaviors
Formulations for eighty percent of your supplements, I think, is really the way to go, and
the other thing I know is going to come up as we're talking about all these supplements
is this issue of dependency? I often get this question and when I solicit for questions uh
on social media, in anticipation of this episode, number of people said okay. So if you
take a sleep formulation, do I need to take it every night? If I don't take it will. I have an
incredibly hard time sleeping if I take a pre-workout every time I train will uh will I need
it? It’s a great question. Some people will take supplement holidays, as they may be
called for a couple of days each week back to back some people take them straight
through. I, myself take a sleep cocktail. We’ve described this, It’s Magnesium Threonate,
L-Theanine and things. This is not one ingredient. These are multiple ingredients, in fact,
precisely because some people who have sleep walking and Vivid dream issues can't
take theanine before bed. In any case, I've had times when I either forgot my
supplements, That’s rare, or I just didn't, have what I needed or just simply took a break
for a night, and it was not a problem, but in terms of pre-workout, I do think that people
become dependent On being in that really ramped up state, but I don't think we view all
this as like true dependency kind of like addiction. Totally right, I mean I Define addiction
as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure. So you know I, I
suppose people could get addicted to pre-workout, but it seems a little unlikely more
likely. There would be a dependency such that if you didn't have your pre-workout, you
might feel like oh you're, not motivated to train. So what are your thoughts on um, taking
little holidays from supplements and varying the frequency of supplement, and in
particular, as it relates to stimulants and fatigue reducers the end goal anytime? I coach
somebody is to get them into a physiological state in which they require no or close to no
supplementation, That’s the target. We should really be in a position to where our
lifestyle, our sunlight exposure, our Stress Management, our physical activity, our sleep
and our hydration and our whole food nutrition provide us almost everything we need
now look again. There are some foundational items that we can give people we've put
together a little bundle actually for this, that the basic things that you can go look at, but
That’s the goal right. So the target is to be let your physiology run. The guy your
physiology is way smarter than we are. Even if I take a bunch of biomarkers from you,
your physiology still knows better than those few markers can tell me. So That’s always
where we're ending up. I actually personally, don't like people being in a position that
they have to take a supplement for anything. So I don't like it if you have to take a
supplement to have a good night of sleep. I don't like it. If you have to have a
supplement to train, we will use any of these stimulants very, very carefully with any of
the athletes we work with, and certainly for the non-athletes, because at least the
athletes we have an end date. We have a fight schedule. We have a season, we have a
game you're going to pitch whatever, when you don't have that It’s sort of like you're in
this endless cycle of oh you're, just going to do that all day every day, um we don't really
need to be in that spot. So what I the way that I describe My Philosophy is, I will use
those short-term tactics to symptom manage if I have to so. If somebody comes to me
and like you're feeling awful and we've got to get through the hump. Okay, great, maybe
we'll give you something for Sleep immediately to get you sleeping that allows us to then
come back and work on the causal problem right. So this is what is: why are you having
a hard time sleeping anyways? If you have to take a nine cocktail supplement to sleep,
then all we're doing is blinding the reason. Why are you in that position to begin with
right? So we see this all the time whether it is sleep problems, whether It’s cortisol or
testosterone. The question is well: why is that low? Now we may give you something
again to manage it immediately, but the task, the mystery I'm going to try to unveil is why
is it there? To begin with? This could be something like this is natural for you, and your
lack of energy is something else or it could be. Actually it is not a natural level for you,
but something is suppressing it. Any number of you've got some infection going on
There’s some allergic reaction to something in your environment. There’s a you know:
mold Mercury, like that one comes up a lot, you'll see Mercury and folks and That’s
causing a lot of problems, um or any number of heavy metals or toxins any host of
things, psychological distress, bad daily habit. You don't ever see the sun, like you, don't
ever sweat, you don't ever drink. We was talking about so many things, so I'm always
going to hunt for that and I hate using this phrase. It’s highly maligned for a good reason,
but root cause all right. So we're trying to find that It’s like. Are we making sure that we're
not causing this problem, and I'm not going to want to give you a supplement to cover up
something if we're not even trying to solve the problem of what's being there? That being
said, am I that concerned about people taking a multivitamin just all throughout? No, not
really am I concerned about people taking creatine, no like go ahead. Those ones are
generally pretty fine to just take, but anything else. I want a reason. I really don't like
giving people anything in a super physiological concentration or a superfood
concentration right so again, an amount you wouldn't find in a normal food dosage
unless we have really a specific reason. Some of these things are more problematic.
Others are less problematic. So when an ant to answer the question of dependency, you
have a combination of actual physiological dependency caffeine, like that, actually
creates a physiological dependency versus a emotional or psychological dependency, or
just a I like drinking this. Like That’s my habit, That’s my routine! There’s a fancy!
Scientific phrase for that, but it doesn't matter so yeah. We want to get off that and, like
again, my personal philosophy is, I don't want you dependent upon anything. I want to
create extremely resilient people and I want to create physiological resilience. We
actually have a fancy. Little algorithm, we use to measure that in people, and so we can
actually calculate that number and the goal of us is to push that number higher so that
we don't have to have anything so many situations pop up in your real life that you're not
going To have your supplements or you're not going to have your routine or you're not
going to have your journal or whatever, but also for the long term. I don't want to create a
situation in which this is a short-term success that you have to now. Do that the rest of
your life? No, Let’s just get out of the way, Let’s fix the problem. If there is something
symptom management, That’s real, while we're actually searching for a better
foundational habits um. The last thing I want to say about this is, if you're only covering
symptom, you're, really missing signal right, which is, if you're, constantly tired
throughout the day and all you're doing, is giving yourself a number of Alpha gpc and
caffeines, Etc. Even though There’s good literature, okay, are you really just using that to
allow your poor sleep hygiene to happen? If I took those away, I bet you, you would
actually start addressing your sleep. If That’s the Cause right, all right, you're stress or
your poor hydration like you, would go hunting for the problem, and so like you want to
walk a fine line here of going like Hey look. Is an athletic greens supplement that big a
deal? No? Probably not but wait a minute. Am I actually now covering up the pain point
that is maybe needed. It’s a signal to actually get my ass in gear to go. Make one of
these changes um whatever it needs to be so I know I got like a little bit meta on you a
little bit philosophical, but That’s honestly how I approach it yeah. I think It’s really
important a friend of mine who's, a physician has a great saying um, which is Better
Living Through Chemistry, still requires Better Living. Oh um, That’s golden! That’s so
good! You know - and it pertains also to things like antidepressants and ADHD drugs
and things of that sort. Most all of those things were developed as tools to allow people
to move from a maladaptive State. Okay, maladaptive It’s hard to Define but think about
in any domain of life. You can either be back on your heels flat-footed or forward Center
of mass, and there are times when people are so compromised, neurochemically that
they need to use pharmacology in order to get into a flat-footed position. Yeah, you know
they're really back on their heels flat, footed or forward Center or mass. But the idea was
always that those things were developed as things to allow people to engage in the sorts
of behaviors that can produce the same sorts of neurochemical shifts. And if people are
thinking well, what sorts of behaviors can induce these neurochemical shifts I'll just zoom
out myself for a moment here and say I am a big proponent. I believe you are as well, if I
may, in doing behavioral tools first, whenever possible, really establishing good habits.
The do's and don'ts, which we've talked a lot about in this series and in this episode then
excellent nutrition, which involves do's and don'ts volume, food Choice. Timing, all the
factors and then also supplementation and also they're, sometimes a case for
prescription drugs, certainly and often brain machine interface or body machine interface
measuring stuff using devices, but that the foundation of behaviors and good nutrition
are really truly foundational. And It’s hard in anything. To skip steps but supplements
and prescription drugs are one place where people often skip steps and then they they
don't actually learn how to cultivate the best behavioral practices, including the don'ts, as
you mentioned, and then just one more point along these lines. You know you talked
about taking anything for energy is really uh disruptive to the system, and it is because
especially caffeine, while it has its uses and even health benefits. It’s really borrowing it
It’s against the adenosine system with interest and so because caffeine acts as an
adenosine antagonist effectively. While caffeine is present in those receptors, you don't
feel as sleepy. You have more energy. Your reaction time goes down. Memories
enhance Focus performance of all kinds. Yes, but then, when that caffeine is dislodged
from the receptor, then the adenosine can act even more potently at those receptors. So
It’s sort of like being able to borrow against the normal variations in wakefulness and
sleep, and this is why we encourage people if they're, not training first thing in the
morning to push their caffeine intake out about 90 to 120 minutes after waking. So they
can clear some of that adenosine in the morning which tends to happen even after we
wake up. Um people can listen to episodes on
01:57:44 Acute vs. Chronic Effects, Supplements & Gut Microbiome
Master, your sleep or perfect sleep for the caffeine episode to understand more about
that, but the the final thing I just want to say here and then it prompts a question. Is you
know in thinking about supplement protocols? I think a lot of people assume that once
they start taking something they're going to have to take it all the time - and one idea
perhaps is that people have some Alpha GPC around that they could take and granted
it'd be great. If people could try things without having to buy a whole product, I think
companies hopefully are listening to this and we'll give people a sample to see if
something works for them and then give them an opportunity to try it to have things
around, but not necessarily Assume you're going to take it every time right. Some things
you take every day, foundational nutrition supplements, for instance, but then also to
take a look at how well you're eating or not eating right at times when I'm eating much
better, I consuming you know low sugar fermented foods, which are great for the gut
microbiome. I consume less probiotics if ever I've been really compromised for whatever
reason, then I will take pill form probiotics, but I don't take those all the time because I
get them from food and from certain you know, Green strings like athletic greens and so
forth. So I think that nutrition and supplement are tethered in this way in my mind, and I
don't think that most people think of supplementation as something that where you can
induce a lot of variability in when and how you take them. But as far as I'm concerned.
As long as they're single ingredient formulations, you can be um, you can use
supplements once a week. If you want, you can use them seven days a week. You could
use them twice a day four times a day every day or you could use them not at all agreed
yeah. Some of them will have an effect randomly like that. Others will not, and we talked
about creating being one of them. It’s if you're going to take it once or so a week, then
There’s I mean basically no benefit. That’s a very good point. Creatine, beta alanine is
another fantastic example of something you need to take consistently. If you want some
sort of benefit, it needs to be built up. In muscle, we need to use that to create uh
carnosine, which is what's actually going to help us with our fatigue management. That’s
why we call it like an acid buffer, so in our previous metabolism episode we talked about
that being a major cause of fatigue. The wonderful part, the one of the reasons why beta
alanine works so effectively. Is it blocks that buildup. So that is an example of another
one that you would want to take other things like fish oil. You could certainly skip a day
here and there it wouldn't be that big a deal. I also do support your comment. If you can
take absolutely none of these things and and be just fine um in terms of and we'll come
back, maybe to Beta alanine in a second in terms of some other fun stuff. My colleague
Greg osiki ran a really cool number of studies. Looking at how exercise actually Alters
the microbiome, this is actually an area that we, I probably have 300 stool samples
sitting in my freezer in my lab, oh goodness, another reason to pause before entering
your lab yeah. Another reason to not apply to come be one of my graduate students
unless you want to deal with that, we actually have a number we've applied for a couple
of Grants to look more into this, specifically with females, so hopefully we can get that
funded, but nonetheless You can actually see some a pretty traumatic, and I say that
word on purpose changes in the gut microbiome There’s one in particular study I was
thinking of that Greg did. Is he looked at the the changes pre-post and ultra marathon
and even within a single bot of exercise? I can't remember some of the markers, but I
know one of the markers was specifically increased by like 14 000 percent uh after a
single bout of exercise. Now this is an ultra marathon. This is like, like totally absurd
amount of exercise relative to what normal people would do would be, but that number I
remember like it was like fourteen thousand two hundred twenty nine percent or like
something some random number like that of something meaningful yeah something
meaningful. I can't remember which marker uh, that was that had changed um I know
streptococcus was in there. Streptococcus went up like maybe something more like 30
or 40 or 50. So the point is, we haven't even had the proper time and we don't to even
launch into the microbiome supplementation. There needs to be ultra specific. You
wouldn't be best served to just jump in and take random things there um. That’s It’s a
whole area of emerging science. We know very very, very little about it, but there is a
number of actionable things. One could do there, so probably something to not mess
with uh would certainly work with a qualified physician. If you think you have something
going on clinical or you know some actual problem, there don't work with someone
who's, not a specialist, a medical doctor there, but just randomly assigning a bunch of
probiotics or prebiotics without intention is Maybe the next Forefront of human
performance research. But we'll have to maybe come back in a few years and dive into
that in detail, or perhaps you can bring
02:02:33 Tool: Sleep Environment, Absolute Rest
Somebody out as an expert in that to discuss that yeah gut microbiome is fascinating. I
think of sleep as the most powerful performance enhancing activity uh. Of course you
still have to do the activity yeah. I consider it foundational like it basically raises the tide
on mental health, physical health, performance of all kinds, um. There’s recent data that,
during sleep, your body goes through all its various forms of metabolism possible yep,
which is amazing. This was measured from breath in human subjects. Breath
metabolites in human subjects, so obviously uh. If one is thinking about supplementation
and wondering okay, what's the best supplement to enhance performance, you gave
some great rationale for why creatine would be an excellent choice provided to your
eating well and hydrating. Well and then, to my mind, the next thing on the list would be
anything that allows you to improve the quality and maybe even the duration of your
sleep. Although, if you wake up - and you feel rested throughout the day and only need a
short nap in the afternoon, not everyone needs one, but then generally that means
you're feeling. Okay, people sometimes get flipped onto this idea that they have
insomnia. Insomnia is excessive daytime sleepiness, where you're falling asleep during
the day. That’s insomnia, it could also be narcolepsy, but That’s insomnia, but
supplementation to improve the quality or duration of sleep or both seems to me like the
most direct route. Even though, actually technically It’s an indirect route to to
Performance enhancement and then thinking about things that increase alertness and
stimulants and fatigue reducers, do you think That’s a good logic? Yeah we go to absurd
lengths to dial sleep in as much as we can. I mean the honest answer is like truly
absurd. This is a conflict of interest that my company, I'm a part of this absolute rest, is
anyone that company we actually go out to your house and run a full clinical grade.
Sleep study in you, your bedroom on you and run that over multiple nights. So, instead
of having to go to a Sleep Clinic and have it done in this weird hospital room or sort of
setting with these people, looking at you through a mirror, It’s like totally creepy um. That
is important, because That’s the only way to truly determine how you are sleeping now.
That said, the technology of wearable trackers is getting better. In fact, I would actually
predict those things will reach a level of accuracy equivalent to the PSG in the next
couple of years and probably will get FDA approval to be able to diagnose officially
Sleep Disorders um, That’s my total, my prediction from some inside information. I don't
know that to be true, but it is getting a lot better right now. Those wearables are not
accurate enough to meet that threshold, so the we do is we bring up basically all the
equipment to do that so we'll come in and do that now. Once we understand exactly how
you're sleeping the next question is to answer, why are you sleeping that way, and so
this is a full four-fold system. Number one is we're going to look at biology, which means
you're going to take saliva and blood and we're looking at everything from
neurotransmitters concentrations to vitamins, B6, B12, Etc. That are important for Sleep
performance, so we're going to see is that is it a physiological problem? Is there
something happening? There is cortisol DHEA ratio that we've previously talked about,
or is something like that off? If It’s not physiology, then we're going on the next one,
which is environmental. We run a full environmental scan of your bedroom during those
nights of sleep that were there and That’s really important, because we can look at
everything from dander and pollen and allergens that are in the air. A quick tip here is
wash your sheets at least once a week, one of the common most common places that
people get allergens in the air is actually from accumulation on your sheets. So if you
clean those more often you'll be in a better spot and next one, the next one there also is
like keep your I'm sorry. This hurts my heart. I don't even I in in truthfulness. I violate this
but keep your pets out of your bedroom and certainly keep them off your bed. Our Ghost
Face Killer is my dog and milky is my other one. They don't go on my bed but they're
right next to my bed, so we violate that one. But full environmental scan includes all
those things. Of course, There’s we measure light and temperature and humidity and
everything else That’s going on in the room. Um, volatile Organics that are coming out of
the mattress formaldehyde lead out of the wall like all these things that could potentially
disrupt your sleep, and we want to make sure that none of those things are kicking on
uh. We see this constantly. People will have things like trying to be cool and they want to
be cold at night, because That’s important and so they'll turn an air conditioner on or a
fan. But the air conditioner kicking on and off at night, actually can shoot you out of
various sleep stations, so you want to be really careful about It’s going. The last metric
on that is actually CO2, and so what you remember from our metabolism, discussion is
when you exhale you're, breathing out CO2. Well, if your room is closed and the
ventilation isn't great, the amount of CO2 in your room starts to build up and we actually
very specifically know the threshold based on information collected from the International
Space Station. Actually, we know the Threshold at which CO2 crosses and starts
disrupting sleep, so we want to make sure that you're not sitting in this CO2 bath in front
of your face and then breathing it back in and disrupting your sleep. So environment is
the second one. The third one is actually now psychology, so um. One of the members
on our team is a Harvard MD in Psychiatry and put together an entire sleep scan survey.
So we run through all that to see if There’s anxiety, depression, anything like that
psychologically going on and then the first fourth one there is, if you have some sort of
actual sleep pathology, and so this again will include some eye tracking stuff that we can
use. So we take all those data they go back to our team uh. We work in combination with
with Steve Locke from Harvard who's done, a ton of stuff. He actually set up a lot of the
Circadian rhythm stuff in the National Space Station as well uh himself. Jeffrey Drummer
and MD PhD, Etc, and all these folks in a room go over your data identify what's going
on, then build action plans off of that. Occasionally, those action plans will include
supplementation, but only, if necessary, we're really going to try to come back and work
through a system to improve. The Sleep, however, is needed, so I realize that is not
totally accessible for a lot of people but like if you really need to go to the end of the
Earth to figure out sleep. That service is available. Absolute rest sounds like an amazing
tool, given that most people won't be able to use it um or access it. Although we will
provide a link in case people are interested in it and do want to try it. You mentioned a
few things that I think everyone should uh assay their sleeping environment for and um
determine whether or not they are hindering their sleep without realizing, for instance,
the air conditioning going on and off, or this could be heater going on and off or um
Central heating or cooling unit um: this could be keeping the room dark uh. This could be
cleaning your sheets, certainly that doesn't require um uh that one sign up for absolute
rest, so cleaning one sheets routinely keeping pets out of the bedroom. As you admitted,
you don't entirely um different opinions about that. But if you're having sleep issues, the
dander from animals may be part of those issues and then one that I'll just add, which I
think is pretty interesting, is There’s some beautiful data out of Michael turman's, Lab at
Columbia, Medical School in New York on negative ionization And this sounds pretty uh
wacky kind of new AGP. I'M sure some people like do a negative ionization, but listen.
The Turman lab is a serious laboratory focus on circadian biology. For many decades
now negative ion concentrations are higher near Coastal locations. So if you've ever
gone to the sea or gone on vacation - and you sleep better near a body of water - That’s
actually a real thing and there are negative ionization machines. But there are also some
things that one can do in order to increase the negative ion concentration in their
sleeping environment that are nearly zero cost, if not zero cost. You can look those up
online and we probably will do an entire episode about this in the future, but I think what
you described for absolute rest really highlights a more General set of themes that I think
are really important, which is your sleep. Environment is an environment, It’s got a lot
going on in it and It’s worth running through the checklist that you described and asking
you know where, where things you know, maybe not optimized, but where am I really
getting in my own way in terms of sleep? All of this again being related to the fact that
getting excellent sleep consistently is a completely transform everything that you do and
not getting excellent sleep consistently, which is a challenge for so so many people will
02:11:03 Tools: Sleep & Disturbances, Inositol
Also, transform everything that you do and think and feel, but in the negative Direction
yeah. I can also offer a few tips on sleep based on things we find most consistently for
those that can't go through uh. The whole protocol um one quick little actually app called
time. Shifter is really cool for anyone. That’s dealing with consistent travel and jet lag, so
you can go and enter your location. Your time, where you're going with the location and
then it'll actually back calculate and it'll, give you full light. Uh stimulant food, hydration
and stuff protocol, and you just follow along with that, and we've used that for many
years actually, especially when traveling, to like Abu Dhabi. For vice and Mongolia and
and Brazil for the Olympics and sort of all over the place, so That’s I think that app is still
available. I hope so um, It’s great um, a nice tool, um a couple of things. We found major
if you're dealing with acid reflux, so if you're, someone who has problems like that, you
can just Elevate the head of your bed by like six inches. So if you, you know, put little
piece of wood or something underneath it, you can also buy very inexpensive pillows
that can Elevate that now, That’s not solving the problem, but at least can help you
sleep, whether It’s just that night or if It’s a consistent problem. You can do there um if
you're snoring, like I said It’s not really benign. You should probably take a look at that.
Your first step. There is mouth tape. If that doesn't work, you can go through what's
called myofunctional therapy, um, which I don't know if you've covered that before, but
It’s basically tongue exercises and that can be quite effective specifically for people who
have problems with REM, sleep, so myofunctional therapy um, It’s just a It’s kind of like
you do like, depending on the protocol uh some tongue exercises kind of the morning
afternoon or night, and that takes a while, to be honest, you're, probably going to need at
least six weeks before you start seeing anything. But that actually is is pretty well
demonstrated to help us sleep, so you can probably Google we could find a link for for
exact protocols. I don't want to describe all them, but yeah you're, going to strengthen
your tongue so that it stops falling in the back of your neck and waking you up at night.
So That’s a really free, easy free protocol to use um if you're struggling with no. It could
be insomnia, but it could be just things like when you get into bed. You'Re super tired
and you can't fall asleep or things like that kind of a basic rule of thumb we use is only
two things happen in your bed and if you can make sure those are the only two things
you do in your bed, the problems of Falling asleep or insomnia tend to go down those
two things are: you have sex and you sleep and nothing else goes down in your bed,
and so you can make that environment very special and that can help uh quite
effectively improve your ability to fall asleep and Then not wake up early, so keeping that
environment specific to what It’s for uh can be effective. The only other thing I would
think of is - and I hate to say this - because It’s not super practical, but It’s just quite clear
at this point, sleeping with a partner in your bed. It’s just not very good for sleep. So
good luck with that one. I know um, you can do a couple of things if it helps uh, you can
get two smaller beds and put them right next to each other. If you can actually have
separate sheets, that alone can be helpful um. So if you get, I mean, if you're on a king-
sized bed or something and again, I know some people they're just like There’s no
chance, but if you want to know the cost for your, like the oh, my goodness so um. The
only last thing I want to mention here is something That’s popped up just a few times
recently, but you're going to see more of uh, which is called orthosomnia uh. So that is a
term that is, people are growing concerned over uh, which is wearables and sleep
trackers, causing sleep issues, so people be basically become too obsessed with
optimizing, maximizing scores, and that alone will actually It’s actually you. So you learn
when to wake up, and so you have actually uh an anticipatory response when many
hours prior to waking up. So if you actually learn to have a little bit of a what's a little
molecule of like excitement and reward, oh dopamine, That’s the one! If you start getting
that because you wake up and you get super excited to check your score or your phone,
It’s the same thing if you check your phone or Twitter or whatever immediately morning,
that'll actually start carving back your wake up time, because you start launching It so it
can ruin sleep becoming too obsessed. So what I'll say is if you're going to use a sleep
tracker and you just like don't care, you want to check it and you have fun with it great.
But if, like you are really really interested in it, and you pay a lot of attention to it, don't
check your sleep score for at least the first 60 minutes after waking up and then you'll
that should help you That’s a great tool. I think that um end piece of advice I think
generally, because I think a lot of people are waking up in the middle of the night
checking their phone two or three times per night. I'M kind of wondering why they're
doing that and I'm guessing It’s this anticipatory wake-up circuit yeah. You absolutely
should use either your night mode or do not disturb or airplane mode or something
overnight or leave it out of the room. Yeah I mean if you have to wake up and like some
people have um like a family member who's, maybe not in great health, and so they
have to get their phone around in case they call, or things like that, so I get it you're like.
I can't leave it out, leave it in there, leave it in do not disturb and enter in their phone
number or whoever's phone number, so only they can get through, but keep it black and
white. So if you do have to look at your phone at night, you see black and white and you
do not have notifications so make sure that There’s no notification for no email and a no
DM like get all that stuff off your screen. And so you look at the did. Anybody call did
anybody text of importance um? What time is it no emergency going on black and white
okay right back to sleep, so that can help a little bit? One of the supplements that I found
is extremely useful for being able to fall back asleep if I've woken up in the middle of the
night and for some reason, can't um and is also very effective for enhancing sleep when
one is ingesting fewer carbohydrates, an issue That a lot of people run into or for people
that are fasting for many hours before sleep. You know people are trying to not eat
anything within, you know two to four hours, but is inositol 900 milligrams of my
myoinositol. I find again. This is anecdotal to be clear that if I wake up in the middle of
the night and I've taken 900 milligrams of Inositol, initially falling asleep, that I fall back
asleep much more easily. So That’s why I've added 900 milligrams of Inositol to my so-
called sleep stack. I'Ve also tried just taking it alone and it works well alone, but it works
better. Of course, with the mag 3 and 8 apogenic themine, sleep stack the um that also
in terms of tools for Sleep, the the app reverie that was developed by my colleague, Dr
David Spiegel who's, a medical doctor at Stanford, Psychiatry, Stanford School of
Medicine Psychiatry. There is a free trial, There’s a nominal cost if you use it um month
to month, but the data are really strong that people that use that I think It’s 8 to 11
minute sleep hypnosis once a week and it doesn't have to be in the middle Of the night,
when you wake up, really helps improve people's ability to fall asleep quickly, stay
asleep fall back asleep if they wake up in the middle of the night, in some cases, curing
insomnia, in other cases, really just helping people with their General sleep issues, and I
mentioned this because, obviously It’s the technology, It’s not a supplement, but I know
that some people are supplement diverse. Also, if you look at by at the cost comparison
between taking the Sleep stack totally um and the reverie app It’s Pennies on the dollar
really um. So again, I'm a proponent of both for myself, but I realize that people have
varying budgets and again I should say, as always, behavioral tools first and I think of
the reverie app as more or less a behavioral tool. Yeah, It’s uh. It’s really just a tool. Any
of these breath work protocols, hypnosis protocols, they're just a tool for you to touch
back in with your own physiology, rather than a a substance. That’s coming in. So I fully
support those. We have used a number of those um in in protocols There’s some other
tricks that we can pull in those areas. Um, I probably shouldn't, say this, but the real of it
is depending on. What'S keeping you up, sometimes we recommend just getting up and
getting it done like if It’s a really like, if It’s a a project or a thing or whatever like
sometimes it rather than laying there all night, not sleeping you can get up, get it done
and Then if you stay awake fine at least the anxiety is gone or sometimes you can
actually go back to sleep because you're like especially if the task only literally would
take like 10 or 15 minutes um. It may ruin your sleep but you're you're going to have
room sleep anyways, so you can try that tool um. You don't want to pull that card very
often, and you have to have be very careful with what you consider to be something
Worthy of doing that. But that is like between me and you and nobody else here, That’s
a tool. I have used personally more than a few times where It’s just like I get an idea. I
don't lose it or like the solution for something you've been noodling on for a long time,
Pops in your head and just like and you're, not
02:20:03 Tool: “Fitness Fatigue” Model, Taper, Anti-Inflammatory Supplements
Wanting to forget it just get up, get it done and get on with your day in several previous
episodes, you emphasized how exercise induces various adaptations, depending on the
type specificity volume, intensity, Etc of the exercise, and that during exercise the
degree of adaptation that one triggers Is often associated with things that normally we
don't associate with exercise related health things like huge increases in blood pressure
during exercise, huge increases in inflammatory markers muscle, damage right. These
all things all sound terrible but, as you beautifully explained, all of that triggers
adaptations that then bring those markers below the Baseline with which they were
previous to the exercise. So That’s the adaptation in the recovery within the Romo
supplementation of nutrition. I'M aware of a number of things, some herbal, some lipid-
based other compounds that are used for various things, but that are known to have a
potent anti-inflammatory effect. Things like Omega 3 fatty acids, ashwagandha for its
effect on cortisol, although That’s a bit indirect to the inflammatory pathway. Um
curcumin and things of that sort, given that we want inflammation in order to trigger the
adaptation response to exercise, and given that we want to reduce inflammation in the
recovery period, can we put together a logical framework as to when is best to take
anything anti-inflammatory? Whether It’s supplement base or prescription or over-the-
counter drug, and when to strictly avoid taking any anti-inflammatory supplement or um
a behavioral tool you mentioned ice, can reduce inflammation. That’s why you don't want
to do it too close to exercise anyway, I think you get the gist of the question. What about
specific supplements related to inflammation and anti-inflammatory responses? What
are the best ones? When should we take them? When should we avoid taking them?
The way that I think about it is understanding what we call the fitness fatigue model. So
what I mean by that is, whenever you do some sort of insult. The whole idea is for you to
come back and get an adaptation now. Recovery is not adaptation right, recovers.
Recovery adaptation is what happens after you're recovered right. So It’s a very
important distinction. There, Fitness fatigue model says basically you've done something
and you've got an adaptation and you've enhanced Fitness and by Fitness. In this case I
mean it as a non-specific term, so you got stronger. You'Ve improved your endurance,
like whatever thing you're trying to train for at the same time, though, you're fatigue
elevated. So what happens is if Fitness increases at the same or similar rate as fatigue?
Your performance actually isn't any better, and so you may think, oh my program isn't
working. I need to then train harder or I need to take more anti-inflammatory or whatever
the things are when reality, all you really need to do is reduce fatigue, and if you do that,
your performance will increase and all the training adaptations will be actualized. So the
way that we do, that is a couple of things first and foremost, is actually a taper. So the
the first step, I think of if someone is training very, very hard and you're not seeing any
results, and we want to think about supplementation before I get there. I want to think
about taper and deload if you're actually training hard and sleep and everything else is
taken care of so just without going too far into taper some general General parameters.
There. You want to think about about a 50 reduction in training volume over the course
of About a Week for every eight weeks of training. Super super rough right. So if you've
been training hard for three months for something you might want to taper for two
weeks, something like that right, It’s sort of a rough estimate that taper you actually don't
need to reduce intensity. Because intensity is not the driver of fatigue, it tends to be
volume. So, as long as your volume is reduced by 50, you can maintain intensity. You
can maintain. In fact, I generally would recommend maintaining frequency. So if you're
used to working out four days a week, keep it four days a week, you can go down a little
bit in frequency, but if you go down too much in frequency, you actually tend to feel
super lethargic. So I wouldn't do that. If you do those things correctly, you can typically
see somewhere between, like a three to eight percent Improvement of performance um
within a matter of days. So It’s important to do that. Um. We actually ran a study on
cross-country Runners years ago, testing on a metabolic heart muscle, biopsies blood, a
whole bunch of things, and we did it pre and post three weeks of taper and we actually,
this is cool because we did this in competitive season. So these were Collegiate cross-
country Runners and we got them to come to our lab three weeks before their
conference Championship ran them all through a bunch of testing biopsied them. They
went through their three-week taper and then we biopsied them again and then they
went and ran. Um, their conference championships and stuff. Well, what happened?
Was they end up hitting about a 50 reduction, because what they did is they took out
what we call the junk volume, so they kept their race, tempos high intensity stuff in there
they kept the recovery stuff and then that Medium Pace they just basically reduced. Now
they were terrified as any endurance, Runner or Dare It’s athlete or participant would
understand. When you take volume away, they tend to get very nervous, and so they
didn't like like that, but as a result of that, what we saw is their VO2 max. Despite the fact
that they covered half the mileage, their VO2 max did not go down in three weeks of
reduced taper. Your Fitness is is extremely stable and, in fact, once we actually looked
at their data, the enzymes in their muscle will be responsible for oxidative metabolism.
Were maintained, and so you don't have to worry about losing uh Again Fitness, whether
we're talking about overall performance or even oxygen capacity, mitochondrial,
function, Etc. That was all preserved. Obviously we saw performance go up. What was
actually really interesting is we saw, I think it was around a 10 percent increase in type 2,
which are fast twitch muscle fiber size, so we saw a 10 percent increase in fast food fiber
size at the end of three weeks of tapering. Now, what you may think is like wow, I guess
tapering is anabolic, but That’s probably not what happened. What, realistically probably
happened, was their volume of training was actually causing their fibers to be reduced in
size and then once we removed that fatigue they just recovered back to normal. So
That’s a good example of what I'm talking about once you remove the fatigue. You can
actually see enhancements in performance, not because
02:26:33 Exercise Recovery: Curcumin, Omega 3s, Glutamine, Nutrition, Vitamins
You'Re necessarily getting better but because you're removing the simulated
suppressing you. So that being said, the way that you want to think about recovery like
this is, although recovery, especially like injury recovery, like seems chaotic biology, is
very organized and There’s a very specific three-step process that you're going to go
through for recovery, and then there are different Supplements that can help you in each
of those three areas so area one is basically inflammation. So this is when the cytokine
storm comes rolling out. It starts signaling the injuries there in this case, even if It’s
muscle, damage and activates the immune system to kick on and that whole repair
process happens there um what you're trying to do effectively. In fact, this is why you
probably ever wonder like why is inflammation a thing and what you're trying to do is
bring in fluid, enhance the size and increase blood flow in so you can get nutrients for
repair and immune cells, and everything like that in the System and get the waste out so
short-term inflammation, even in the case of muscle soreness, is the example we we
talked about in the previous episode, but any inflammation. It is part of the necessary
process. That’s why you would not want to take an anti-inflammatory in that state and so
why you also would not want to do things like an ice bath. So in that immediate,
inflammatory response time window this is you know seconds to hours after training.
You would want to stay away from things like that. Um. A good option here are things
like Omega 3s good evidence, something somewhere in the neighborhood of like two to
five grams, total, typically like a one-to-one EPA to DHA ratio, is fine. Similarly, this is
another example of when good doesn't mean more is better because, for example, there
is actually evidence showing up to 15 grams will harm the immune response, and so you
don't just want to be like man, I'm super sore, I'm training harder, I'm just going To go to
10 grams a year more and more you're, actually causing yourself more of a problem, so
antioxidants, anti-inflammatories are fine again Omega 3s in that dosage are a decent
thing. You can also do something like 500 milligrams of Curcumin three times a day.
That’s going to be enough to keep you in a decent spot. There are some other things
that you could look up. Maybe some potential benefit for ginger and baswellia, and some
things like that for inflammation, but under unless we're in like very specific
circumstances, where we have like an injury, we're probably not going to those you know
areas. I just wanted to highlight one thing that came up in a previous episode: some, not
all people, but some, including myself, are very sensitive to curcumin yep. It has a very
potent effect in reducing DHT dihydro testosterone and leads to all sorts of clamping of
testosterone-associated positive things so um. I have experienced that myself. I'Ve had
people write to me and say I don't understand. I started taking a supplement. Curcumin is
supposed to be a great anti-inflammatory. It flatlined my libido. It took away my drive and
kind of wondering what's going on there, those people are very likely to be very DHT
sensitive curcumin, while It’s a potent anti-inflammatory can also potently reduce DHT,
but some people tolerate it quite well and are hearing this and probably think That’s
Ridiculous, well, It’s certainly substantiated by the biochemical Pathways that curcumin
Taps into in the known roles of DHT, on libido aggression, power, output, Etc and mood
so just be wary that um a There’s no way to predict this. One simply has to figure it out,
empirically meaning you have to try and see. If you like it or don't, the good news is, is
those negative effects on DHT can to reverse pretty quickly after ceasing to take
curcumin? So just a mention of something that came up in a previous episode, but in
case people didn't hear that on that segment, um just wanted to highlight those those
facts. Further evidence do I. I strongly discourage strongly discourage taking anything in
the anti-inflammatory antioxidant realm unless you actually have a reason to do so. If
you're waking up and you're like - maybe I'm inflamed, That’s, probably not a good
approach right. Let’s have a reason to do so step two is actually what we call
proliferation and That’s kind of like the cleanup crew. That’s when you're going to be
going in there and cleaning out dead cells and debris and misfolded proteins, and things
like that at this stage, a fantastic, evidence-based supplement is glutamine L-Glutamine,
20 grams a day. We typically honestly split it up into two dosage 10 grams morning. 10
grams, a night: It’s a conditional amino acid, which means you can make it your body
can make enough of it at times and other times you may want to support it generally.
Those conditional times are things like burn victims, high stress situations or injury.
Things like that, so there isn't also like a ton of downside to glutamine because it can go
through transamination, which means your body can take it and say, like we don't need
anything here for our Muscle Recovery, Let’s make it into something else and use it um
For whatever else is needing so It’s kind of another one of these like low risk uh products
is also why you see it in a lot of recovery products. If you're ever wondering like what the
heck is that in there, I don't need amino acids and you're thinking It’s like for protein
synthesis. It’s really not It’s! Because of this. It is uh beneficial to this proliferation
process. I'Ve been taking L-Glutamine for years um. I tend to take it in higher dosages
several times throughout the day. If I remember feeling particularly run down, I know
there are decent data, not great, but decent data on the role of glutamine for leaky gut
totally we're off saying leaky gut. That’s getting a little bit into the realm of uh like not
super well substantiated, but in the in the peer-reviewed literature, but some a lot of
anecdata and um, and certainly some peer-reviewed work, but not a ton. And then there
is also growing interest in the idea that glutamine, because it can trigger activation of the
neurons in the gut that signal to the dopamine pathway in the brain that it can be used to
offset sugar Cravings. This is kind of an interesting new uh, an emerging theme which
makes sense, given the biology of the neurons in the gut that respond to specific amino
acids, including glutamine, essential fatty acids and sugar, and because they respond to
any uh and all three of those. Anyone or combination of those I should say to trigger this
dopamine response. Some people have taken to a teaspoon or so of L-Glutamine in
some water or other drink a couple times throughout the day as a way to reduce their
sugar Cravings, because what It’s essentially doing is It’s tricking. The pathway into into
activation of those neurons through an alternate ligand receptor interaction right also
another interesting point. There are very I'm trying to think right now off the top of my
head. I can't think of a time and I've used glutamine a lot. I can't think of a time where
I've ever heard anybody come back with any side effect reports. I think if you take
enough of it, you can get some gastric distress. But of course you take enough of any
powdered substance mixed in water you're, going to get a gastric distress response and
what I've noticed about gastric distress with things like creatine, glutamine and even
protein powders. For that matter, I use a high quality whey. Protein powder routinely is
that if you build up to it over the course of a few days, then you can get away with using
much higher dosages without any issue. Yeah yeah um, beta alanine, is the same thing
by the way we sort of talked about that earlier. If uh you've ever tried that and you're like.
Oh, my gosh, like I feel like I've just rolled around in grass and my skin is itching
everywhere. What'S that ants under the skin sensation, yeah all that stuff yeah, you can
just take a little bit of a lower dosage and be fine, but for the most part and then you will
build up a tolerance to that pretty quickly. So you can up that dosage. Along the way, so
what we will oftentimes do there start at a dosage, That’s pretty minimal, like 2 grams
and then every week or so you can go up another gram until you get to whatever final
point: you want to be five six grams a day. You know whatever so That’s another way
you can sort of mitigate that problem, so the third step in this recovery process after
inflammation proliferation, we're now into Remodeling - and this is when you're actually
you know - quote - unquote - growing, back bigger and stronger um. This is where the
majority of the repair is actually taking place and, at this point, we're basically playing a
micronutrient and macronutrient game right. By that I mean, we've talked about basic
macronutrients, one thing: to pay attention to oftentimes. If people are hurt, whether they
had an injury or they've had uh just they're super sore and they are concerned about
eating excess calories, they tend to want to eat less food during this process because
they're, like I'm, not working out so much so I'm going to Eat less calories. Well, one of
the things that you have to pay attention to is injury can increase basal metabolic rate by
up to 10 percent wow. So what you want to do in general is just take your calories up
about 10, at least That’s what I recommend um. If that is an extended period of time,
then yes, you may put on a slight amount of body fat or something, but if that also
means you come back some percentage faster, then It’s worth the exchange. So we
recommend that, in terms of your carbohydrate or fat split, I'm not super worried about it.
My general recommendation is just don't make any major changes relative to what you
were doing right, keep yourself pretty much in the same spot in terms of protein. This is
the big one. You want to make sure you're absolutely at one gram per pound of body
weight, because we need those amino acids to come in and start helping with recovery.
One gram of protein per pound of body weight or more or one gram or more yeah - I
mean There’s going to, be very little downside to having more um. Remember, protein
and carbohydrates, both stimulate insulin and remember, insulin, is anabolic and so
we're trying to drive this process of recovery. That’s why you want both, so you wouldn't
want to skimp on carbohydrates in this phase. Nor would you want to skimp on protein
because you need the activation, the drive into the tissue, as well as the structure going
back to one of our earlier conversations and at this point in the week, I honestly can't
remember at all what episode we covered this In but I gave an analogy about use,
making a campfire and using fat and carbohydrates is the wood and the log and the
protein were the the metal structure. So you need that Supply if you're trying to bank if
you've cleared out in the previous step, damaged proteins, and you need to make new
ones to recover that process, you have to have the raw Supply and material, so you
wouldn't want to avoid either one of Those things There’s actually some indirect
inflammation management that comes from fatty acids, which you actually sort of alluded
to earlier. I don't think you need to necessarily go crazy. You don't need to change your
fat intake that much just don't drop it. You know I depending on where you're at so, if
you're a little bit of a higher carb lower fat person great if you're moderate great, if you're
the indirect, if you're higher fat, lower carb person awesome just don't make an extreme
change and don't and try to Not be on the extremes of either one of those ratios, but the
only specific number to pay attention to again is that protein number and if you go a little
bit high or even a lot high, It’s totally fine, just don't go low. So That’s the the
macronutrient portion of remodeling in terms of micronutrients. To be honest, you just
get your bases covered. This is when a basic multivitamin is effective. What you're,
really trying to look at here are vitamin A and zinc. They actually have independent
mechanisms that are helpful here, but those are typically covered in most multivitamins,
so we generally just give people a multivitamin. Magnesium is actually has some some
benefits here. Something like six milligrams per kilogram of body weight. Is the dosage
you're looking for there. Magnesium citrate is probably has the most evidence in terms of
this respect, but it doesn't mean I actually have no reason to think you couldn't use
glycinate or, if you're, using another form for sleep. That’s probably fine. I don't know that
for sure, but I can't think of a reason why the other forms of magnesium would all of a
sudden, not work, so you could probably choose whichever form you like um, albeit
citrate, has probably the most research in this aspect. The only other things you would
probably consider here, three things calcium, might be on your list, particularly if you're
trying to, if you're concerned, with some sort of bone, injury and we've sort of gone past
like recovering we're actually like into injury. So you'll see that in recovery products
occasionally and That’s why and then the last two ones of course, are vitamin D and
That’s pretty well researched and then the last one is actually uh something that can
help you. If you're at this stage - and you still are dealing with a lot of soreness or not -
and that is tart cherry juice and That’s actually effective for both Dom's muscle, injury
muscle, soreness and actually has another benefit of potentially aiding with sleep. So I'm
not a bad one to turn to as well There’s a number of companies that make these things
um yeah and then There’s actually more
02:39:27 Intermittent Fasting, Training & Keto Diets; GABA
Ongoing research that I know of on those areas, but a promising literature, we'll say not
often, but every once in a while on this podcast, I will solicit social media for questions
from the audience where I should say the audience to be, and then ask some of Those
questions on the fly during the podcast - I did this with Dr Lex Friedman, I'm going to do
it with you. Your goal is to answer each of these questions, certainly not all of them,
thousands of them within the last couple of hours. To answer each of these questions in
three or four sentences, I certainly won't be counting the number of sentences that you
speak so just know that if you want to go over a little bit, That’s fine but feel free to refer
to your Instagram site at a Future time where you might go more in depth or to refer to a
study or um, if you like, you can also say pass if you don't think that you can answer the
question um succinctly enough for this format, and here the goal is not. To put you on
the spot, the goal is simply to allow the audience to ask some questions directly, and I I
confess I'm looking at these for the first time so I'll try and be quick with my with my
reading um. Some of these we may have touched on in previous episodes or in this
episode, even in which case you can just kind of cue us to the reminder. This is not
directly related to supplementation, but it is related to nutrition and I don't think we
touched on this directly: can we do intermittent fasting, AKA time restricted, feeding with
keto and still gain muscle, mass TBD? The I am quite clear. Such study does not exist.
So I don't know I think I've alluded to before that we did run an intermittent fasting 16-8
hypertrophy study. There was no keto arm the results of that study by the time this
comes out. We’ll probably be ready, though I'm not sure. So. I can't comment on. I
haven't looked at the data, but regarding whether or not if you did that with keto or not, I
can't comment scientifically. Do you ever prescribe the use of Gaba supplements? Well,
I can't prescribe anything to make sure we're clear but you're a professor you can
profess. I can profess uh. We generally don't spend too much time on Gaba. Rarely is it
okay to weight, train fasted than not break the fast and eat for three or four hours after
training, so in other words, train fasted. I do this, but then also not eat immediately
following training and wait another three to four hours after training. Once we have our
results remind fasting study back, we will. We will have a better answer here. My
General recommendation as it stands now, though, is as long as your total protein intake
is sufficient. You should be in a decent spot great, a lot of questions about fasting and
training, just to yeah to know that um can you train high performance fasted and how
long before um you need to refuel the body yeah. You can certainly do that. I know of
actually many athletes, some athletes. That will do that, though. The vast majority will
not, as it gets higher and higher in intensity and or duration, it gets more challenging, but
it really does come down to what you did the day before as well. So if you ate sufficient
calories a day before didn't train and your glycogen stores are topped off, you have a
fighting chance now. The duration part of that equation is really kind of dependent upon
you um. So are you really talking? 30 45 minutes 16 minutes. You’re, probably fine,
whether you're out past that in several hours you may not be, and then the only other
comment I would make is there is keep in mind whenever you think about fasting and
any other, Let’s say against the textbook. You know quote: unquote style. You really
really need to be careful in thinking the difference between. Can I do it and is it optimal,
so I have absolutely no reason to think fasting like that would improve performance. I
only work for the most part with people who are trying to perform at the highest level
possible, so I can't think of a scenario which I would go too fasting to try to enhance
performance. So whether or not you can maintain some level of performance, probably
will it provide any benefit? I struggle to find
02:43:39 Carbohydrate Loading; Amino Acid Supplements; “Anabolic Window”
Scenarios in which that would actually make you perform better how do different forms
of carbohydrates impact performance and then right below it. Another question about
carbohydrates, which is: does carbohydrate cycling work, so these are two uh questions
from people that I think don't know one another, but a lot of questions about
carbohydrates and performance, which we've touched on anything else that you want to
add to that conversation. I don't think I really. Maybe you might want to think about carb
loading uh, Slash, carb, cycling, so carbohydrate loading does help. However, a
misconception there is, It’s just you know a big bowl of pasta the night before that can
help top off storages, but really optimal. Carbohydrate loading prior to a long duration,
endurance performance is probably best over the course of three or four days, so you
want to gradually increase carbohydrate intake for multiple days rather than just have
one big bowl of pasta, Branch chain amino acids and essential amino acid
supplementation. Yay, nay or, as I would say, meh uh meh. Usually if your total protein
intake is fine, then you don't really have a need for them. Um, if you're, for whatever any
number of valid reasons total protein is not then going to an essential amino acid, would
be my first step rather than a BCAA. Now, admittedly, we actually do use essential
amino acids somewhat regularly, because It’s also sort of like a There’s. No real harm
other than if you're price, conscious and you're sort of like I'm wasting money. That’s
fine! The people I work with generally again. That’s not a few dollars for to maximize
recoveries is not that very so we will sometimes use that pre-meter post training in some
circumstances, uh total protein would be my a high quality way, something like that um,
if you can't use whey for whatever reason there are Plenty of high quality, vegan proteins
you could use if you want to top all that off, though, and add some essential amino acids,
it wouldn't hurt anything and may potentially help slightly so you choose based on that
algorithm. Ah, I was hoping somebody would ask this. I'Ve touched on it a little bit, It’s a
little bit of a loaded question. The way they phrased it so um at risk of leading the
witness. Does the mythical anabolic window really exist and I'm just laughing because
the way they posed the question they're already telling us what their stance is, um,
making it more effective as to create hypertrophy to eat within a certain time frame after
working out, I'm going to assume That this person genuinely wants to know whether or
not the anabolic window really exists or not um, because they refer to it as mythical I'm
going to assume that they're um suspicious. But what's the deal as the anabolic window
a real thing, the post-exercise anabolic window is extremely real. So what this is uh?
You can see more detail in a number of videos on my YouTube page. I believe it is the
idea that you need to must consume some sort of nutrients, specifically usually protein in
the some time domain, 30 or 60 Minutes a post exercise in order to maximize growth. So
is that window real? Yes, are you hyper sensitized to nutrients in that time frame? Yes, is
it very important that you rehydrate replenish muscle, glycogen and rebuild tissue quickly
after exercise to maximize recovery? Absolutely is not real, though, in the sense that you
that you have to have it within 30 minutes in the case of protein, as we talked about a
second ago, your total protein intake throughout the day is more important timing,
though, for things like carbohydrate, especially if You'Re training multiple times a day. It
is very real, so it is a very real thing: It’s just you may or may not actually care\
02:47:23 Garlic; Tart Cherry Extract; Examine.com
About it, it may not be important for your context. Garlic seems like an appropriate
question. What, if any functional roles, does garlic have in performance, Garlic's, actually
really cool? There’s a number of things you can dive into that are outside of my three to
four sentences. Considering I'm at like two and a half, probably already um you're not
going to find strong human data on garlic extract. However, there is a little bit suggesting
it can actually enhance recovery from injury or potentially tissue damage. So you've got
to kind of be careful, though, because in order to understand what's happening, you
have to differentiate between innate an Adaptive recovery processes and when we say
things like immunity, realize friends, That’s not one thing. That’s just like a very colloquial
term for a number of things. Again, It’s a verb like It’s a noun right, the immune system,
but it immunity is a bunch of processes or processes. If you're about to correct my
speech, I'll correct yours right back um, not yours, Andy yeah, listeners processes,
tomato tomato, It’s a verb, immunity is a verb. This is my problem with immune boosters
same issue, right you're, like whoa. What are you boosting specifically because, in fact, if
you're boosting the wrong part of unity during the wrong phase of recovery with garlic,
you may be actually hurting in the process, because you're theoretically could be trying
to down regulate that portion. So you can upregulate a next portion, That’s the faster
way to say it. If you will so um, we actually, you may see more data come out that says
the garlic extracts overrated. I don't know I actually don't even know yet we just don't
have enough human data on it, but yeah There’s some stuff there. If you want to look
hard enough, I'm going to ask this question for myself because I'm curious to know the
answer. Selfish tart cherry extract pretty effective, actually for two things: uh potentially
aiding in sleep getting to sleep as well as muscle soreness. That’s the bulk of the
research is in muscle soreness and seems to be a moderate effect there. I think for
people that might be interested in dosages of things like tart cherry extract, garlic, Etc.
Um. Obviously Dr Andy, galpin's, Instagram and Twitter are great places to ask
questions like that and to find questions. Answers to questions like that, as well as
examine.com as a terrific website um, they actually recently overhauled their entire
website, so they have this human effect Matrix. That shows the um the effects and the
the strength of different effects in human studies of many many different compounds.
Um relating to everything to you know, Hormone Health in men and women, sports
performance, cognitive performance - it doesn't cover everything, but it certainly covers a
lot with links to studies. There’s a lot That’s available at completely zero cost by joining
examine.com. You can access some additional features, and this is by the way, not a
paid endorsement from examine.com, I'm simply a long time user of examine.com,
myself um, and so I just want a cue people to it and again many of the resources there
are available completely free Of costs, It’s a Wonderful site so for dosages of garlic, tart
cherry extract and things of that sort, whether or not you're getting it from food or you're,
getting it from extra powders, rather um. All of that information is is pretty nicely laid out
there. So unless you have something to add to that, I was just going to cue people to
that resource. No I've been using that since the first day that website was launched. I I
was made aware that it was coming. I'Ve been fortunate to know those guys for a while,
so yeah I've used it. I'Ve used it in all my classes. I use it. I don't even know probably
weekly at this point. Another nice feature That’s actually on there is they have a series of
like they'll. Do some topical reviews? Basically so they'll write a big paper out on muscle
damage or blood pressure or testosterone, testosterone, enhancement or um hormone
uh. You know menstrual cycle and and yeah PCOS. I think they do one on and all kinds
of stuff, so you can search by topic. Uh, like you know, energy or recovery or whatever
or even search by you, know black cumin seed extractor, like whatever number of things
you want to do, and they'll also tell you if There’s any interactions to pay attention to. So
It’s really really nice so be carefully. If you're taking a and b or whatever so yeah, It’s
wonderful, wonderful, yeah,
02:51:50 Fitness Testing, Training Programs; Exercise Recovery
They'Ve done a marvelous job, so thank you. Examine.Com keep keep up the amazing
work. Well, we've come close to the end of this episode, and that means that we're close
to the end of this series, where you have so graciously joined us for six full episodes of
The Huberman Lab podcast to educate us on all things. Fitness episode, one you
reviewed and educated us on assessing our level of Fitness. In fact, I learned so many
ways of assessing Fitness that I had not thought about, and also assessing my recovery
capacity. For instance, one thing that I'm definitely going to implement from that episode
is a routine broad jump test and uh an in-home high jump, jump and touch test. If people
don't know what I'm referring to That’s all contained in that episode, It’s Time stamped.
These are very straightforward: zero cost ways to assess one's level of Fitness. There
are a few others that require a bare minimum of Technology like taking your pulse rate in
very specific ways. At specific times. Also, some timing of mile runs and some other
things relate to strength and hypertrophy and on and on really It’s a It’s a buffet of
options that we can select from, and I already know the four or five that I've started
implementing this week. I'Ve recognized how I'm pretty good in a couple of areas, I'm
doing - maybe maybe better than pretty well in one area, but that I'm doing a abysmally
poorly in a few areas that um I just wasn't aware of, and so I've already started, um
taking on ways To uh adjust that over time and I'll keep people posted so that first
episode was absolutely incredible and just provides so much actionable knowledge and
the rationale behind it. The second episode you educated us about strength, speed and
hypertrophy training, and there too an immense amount of incredible knowledge. We got
way down into the details. You explained sets reps the rationale for sets reps rest
cadence number of workouts per week. I'M definitely going to take away my need to do
some speed, Based training and some power Based training. Normally, I think, in terms
of strength or hypertrophy, and I'm relieved to learn that a lot of the speed and power
Based training is low intensity enough that it can be done fairly often and incorporated
into my program, which already touches on strength and hypertrophy. And indeed, some
endurance work as well, so amazing tips that you provided there. I'M certainly going to
implement the three to five program that you describe three to five exercises done for
three to five repetitions: three to five minutes between sets. Uh you're doing this three to
five times per week and so on and so forth. All the details again time stamped um in the
strength and hypertrophy uh episode show note so just incredible. We even use that to
set up PR with you this week. That’s right! I did PR this week thanks thanks to your input
and following that program and um, I'm really grateful for that. It does feel good to break
through a barrier um, and I intend to break through more barriers, but not just with
strength and hypertrophy, because episode three, you taught us all about endurance,
the four different forms of endurance: how to train for each of those different forms. The
value of doing even very brief, 22nd Sprints or bouts of jumping jacks throughout the day
which to some people, might just sound like a you know like a little hack or a gimmick,
but no these are actually tapping into fuel systems and modes of neuromuscular
interactions. That greatly Aid other forms of endurance like long duration endurance, I
would love to return to my um High School mile time. I won't reveal what that is, because
this is not really about me, but I plan to start doing um. If not mile repeats than doing
some mile runs and testing there. Once a week, you laid out a beautiful program for how
to do that and then in the next episode. You wowed us again with a description of the
science and the tools and this right down to the details, but all laid out very cleanly and
clearly as to how to design an optimal fitness program. What are the things that really
represent an optimal program? What questions does one have to answer before
designing a program? What are some of the barriers in the way, this concept of
Defenders as things that prevent you from reaching your goals and one of the key
things? I have it right here in front of me that I took away from that episode is: was this
quadrant approach of really thinking about and figuring out how much one intends to
devote to work career, calling Let’s make that one bin relationships? Another been
Fitness in the other bin and Recovery in the other bin and um here, we'll tip our hat to
our good friend, Kenny Kane um for um, mentioning that overall um scheme for doing
things. It’s been immensely useful and I've actually charted it out and thought about and
drawn out which Different Things fall into each of these categories. You might think It’s
obvious okay relationships, but that includes a lot of different things and There’s
crossover between these bins um. In terms of how you can combine enhancing
relationships with Fitness work, recovery and so on, so that episode is just again a
treasure Trove of knowledge and then in the next episode you, you educated us on
recovery in all its forms in the very short term, in Within the workout, immediately after
the workout and from workout to workout ways to really accelerate recovery, assess
recovery and, as you pointed out for people like me, who always assume that we don't
recover very well and that some sort of character, trait or nervous system thing or
Genetic to really think about how my training is impacting my level of recovery, and in
doing so is revealed to me that I have far more capacity than I thought I had and already
this week I've managed to train more often doing more work and I feel Better than ever
um, and That’s also despite the fact that we've spent a fair amount of time in these
chairs across from one another, It’s a kind way to say it. Well, It’s It’s been, It’s been a
pleasure and then, in Todays episode you explained nutrition and supplementation as it
relates to Performance and, of course, that touches into recovery, but also optimal
mental States for training, how to approach one's training and how to extract the most
from Training through quality nutrition right so what to eat and when which
carbohydrates protein amounts Windows of opportunity Windows, you absolutely don't
want to miss and then some that are a bit more flexible. And then we went deep into the
weeds of magnesium garlic. Tart cherry extract Alpha GPC, we touched on neural
transmitter, related systems, hormone-related systems. We went deep into a discussion

about sleep because, of course, sleep is the foundation for recovery and performance of
all kinds, emotional, mental and physical recovery and performance, and in taking us
through this enormous Arc of a journey through Fitness. I think It’s fair to say that you've,
given us your knowledge contained in your head, I was telling someone just the other
day that one of the things that I always lamented in science is that I would encounter
these incredible professors and scientists and in other domains Of life too, and you just
wish there was some way to download their brain because they had so much knowledge
inside them and um. I'M looking for a USB or USBC port on you and I don't see one yet.
But what you've effectively done for us across these six episodes is to download the
actionable knowledge, and you know It’s wonderful. The information you've provided is
clear. It’s super interesting, It’s highly highly actionable and in many cases It’s
counterintuitive and surprising, but once one understands the logic behind it as you've
provided for us also, then it all makes sense in a way That’s extremely satisfying and
extremely motivating. So It’s certainly motivating me to change the way that I train in a
number of ways, and I promise that I'll report back to our audience and to you as to what
my results are, but really as we both agree. This is not about me. This is not about you,
this is really about the people listening and so for those of you listening. I hope you can
appreciate what an Incredible Gift it is to have somebody of Dr Andy galpin's experience
and um drive and uh scholarly background who also works with athletes and everyday
people just to splay out all this knowledge for us systematically over six episodes. Dr
Andy Galpin, thank you ever so much. I appreciate that far too kind of uh words to me
there. If you've been following along through this entire Journey, as you called it, you
know I like first principles. Thinking and I like lists so I'm going to get you with one more
list and I got five things on this final list. Get your pen and Pat out, please number one. I
want to really emphasize science itself is a verb, which means It’s ongoing and
changing. I I did my best over the course of these many many many hours to provide my
interpretation of the science to provide my practical knowledge and things that I use, but
That’s fallible. Science changes. There are many many things in my career that I was
very sure. The uh that the evidence was clear on and then it changed so as you move
forward, do not think of any of the recommendations. I gave you whether they were
about supplement, dosages and timing, rep ranges or breathing tactics, anything in
between just use them as guidelines. So number one science is a verb number two. I
really want to thank the audience. This has been an extremely long haul, as some of you
have somehow I'm sure which I'm not sure how. But some of you have probably made it
through this entire journey and listened to all six episodes, and you should probably get
some sort of free Huberman lab shirt or something or a plaque, or I don't know how
about a galp in plaque. Ah, I got from black how about a internet high five and even if
you just dropped in for a few of the episodes uh, you know. I appreciate you taking the
time There’s a lot of things you could be doing with your time and to make to spend
those resources on my words is touching number three uh. I want to actually thank you,
of course, Andrew and the whole team and the crew up here for three things number
one um. I think It’s incredibly important that you have gone out of your way to give other
people credit for their work. You go out of your way on your large platforms and social
media to tag people to give scientists credit for their work, and most people do not do
that and That’s something you don't have to do, and I think that is a culture you know. I
know why you do it. You come from science, That’s just what you do. You give people
credit for their work, but you go out of your way to do that, and so I want to thank you for
that. The next one is many: people who have outlets and platforms will try to fill those
with people who are going to grow their platforms. It doesn't mean these people are
wrong or bad, but I think, what's extremely special about what you've created here is
again. You have gone out of your way to bring on the direct source of information. I can't
even imagine how many of your podcasts guests have never been on a podcast before
or have been on a very short number of them, and you've made an extremely large
platform. Doing nothing but talking about super deep dork science directly from the
scientists themselves and to create a community like that. It’s um, I'm so happy that
science is is made it here and you've shown the world um people aren't stupid. People
want detail, and people want science and you've, given it them um, the last one, of
course, Let’s see if I get through this is uh. Thank you for what you've done for me in my
career. I understand there could have been any number of people in this chair to put me
on your platform once was um incredibly gracious, but to do it for 600 hours or whatever
we did in this series is uh um. I can't thank you enough for that opportunity. So I hope I
lived up to it and I had a tremendous time and then thank you for being such a gracious
host. Well, you more than exceeded uh expectations. You are absolutely the person to
be in this chair talking about these topics with me and for the world and like once again, I
just want to say thank you

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118 DR Andy Galpin Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation For Fitness Huberman Lab Guest Series

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#HubermanLab #Nutrition #Science

Huberman Lab Social & Website

Dr. Andy Galpin

Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac - https://www.blabacphoto.com

00:05:16 Creatine Supplementation, Muscle & Cognitive Function, Loading Phase

00:20:31 Dehydration, Overhydration, Night Urination

00:35:37 Tool: Hydration, Caffeine & Electrolytes

recommend, including electrolyte powder or a small pinch of sodium or any number of

00:41:22 Tool: Sweating, Salt & Performance

00:49:49 Galpin Equation for Hydration & Exercise, Focus

01:10:58 Electrolytes, Carbohydrates & Exercise

Us a tremendous insights and actionable information on Creatine and hydration and

01:16:47 Training Fasted versus Fed, Caffeine, Carbohydrate Timing

01:25:13 Caffeine & Endurance

01:35:43 Rhodiola, Cortisol & Fatigue

01:39:55 Tool: Supplement Formulations

01:47:31 Supplements, Dependency & Root Cause; Foundational Behaviors

01:57:44 Acute vs. Chronic Effects, Supplements & Gut Microbiome

02:02:33 Tool: Sleep Environment, Absolute Rest

02:11:03 Tools: Sleep & Disturbances, Inositol

02:20:03 Tool: “Fitness Fatigue” Model, Taper, Anti-Inflammatory Supplements

02:26:33 Exercise Recovery: Curcumin, Omega 3s, Glutamine, Nutrition, Vitamins

02:39:27 Intermittent Fasting, Training & Keto Diets; GABA

02:43:39 Carbohydrate Loading; Amino Acid Supplements; “Anabolic Window”

02:47:23 Garlic; Tart Cherry Extract; Examine.com

02:51:50 Fitness Testing, Training Programs; Exercise Recovery

transmitter, related systems, hormone-related systems. We went deep into a discussion

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