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 today's discussion is all about nutrition and supplementation to maximize your fitness exercise and performance goals dr. Andy alpen, I'm super excited to discuss today's topic which is nutrition and supplementation for performance and recovery. And I'm particularly excited about this conversation because I've been in
Arrested 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 will discuss. But also supplementation, you know, where, as 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 today's topic and to be able to try and sort through this, let's call it a cloud. Hopefully not a storm but this cloud
Of supplements that are out there because indeed many of them are excellent and can provide us a lot. Some of them are terrible, and then some just don't do anything. And therefore are terrible, because 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 absolutely.
Nailed it there. One of the major reasons supplements can work is because you can consume nutrients and 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 and may actually be counteracting the benefits of some of the other supplements over there. So in the ideal situation we would be able to work like snipers here. So we would be able to run full biological testing. So extensive blood, work and saliva and urine and stool and have an in-depth analysis of your gut microbiome and your stress patterns and your time of day and your cortisol curve,
And like all the things that we do in our high-performance. Folks with that, then we can get extremely high, Precision, supplementation. And, and quite honestly, our philosophy is we only give individuals exactly what they need. So even some of the standard generally safe and effective supplements. We don't really necessarily use them. If there is 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 work somebody who can help them in that. So there are a handful of supplements that I would consider to be in my 8020 rule which is sort of like the 20% of supplements that are going to give you 80% of the benefit for the lowest cost. And so what I can actually use to 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, it depends. It's high-precision guy but let's be real.
There are a number of supplements that are fairly effective in Fairly cheap for a wide range of outcomes. So this is for general public. This is for people who want to do the three buckets right? You want to look a certain way so supplements that could enhance muscle growth and fat loss non-hormonal. They supplements, of course supplements that can improve energy or physical performance, again, from everything from squatting, more to feeling better in your yoga class to having more energy throughout the day to our
Third, major bucket that we've been talking about throughout this entire series, which are longevity, so we can cover those first if you'd like to start
there. Yes, absolutely. Let's start there.
Oftentimes, when we think of supplements, we immediately jumped to hi sport performance type of things or vigorous workout sore muscle building. Though that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Take, for example, creatine and I've spoken about this at length, Darren Darren can do 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
Post. Perhaps, I could draw this up where he laid out all the Myriad of benefits of creatine. This is taken in the typically 3 to 5 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 course things like muscle performance and strength and things like that. And if you go back to our discussion in our episode on metabolism and endurance,
We talked about the phosphocreatine system so you can figure out kind of what this is going to do. In terms of effect that said there's excellent information and data coming out and 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. All
Of neurodegenerative disease. In fact, 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 write energy Etc. So, it's very clear that metabolism in the brain is reduced with things like TBI and potentially concussions. So now to be extremely clear, creatine, does not prevent any of those diseases. It does not treat any of them.
And the data are mixed but it more and more are coming, some show, a little bit of benefit, some shown, 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-analyses and folks can go through those things one by one. So I only say that to again, maybe expand our understanding and thinking about,
These types of supplements can do, it's not just about growing muscle, our high-performance, it's everything to again, there's an association with recovery. So, Christine is fantastic for recovery from muscle for muscle damage 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 no affiliation with them whatsoever. But if you want to just type in something like creatine monohydrate, you can see a whole list.
East and you're going to see thousands of studies of the potential benefits of creatine. So that is, is always number one on my list.
I'm relieved to hear that creatine sits at the top of your supplementation list because, 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, you know, anywhere from 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. Nowadays, I just take about 5 grams or so although later I know you're going to tell me why I should probably be taking more than 5 grams per day, given my body weight. 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 with standard.
At home tests like a scale but it is very clear to me based on the literature that you described in some of which we've covered on other episodes of the podcast that the phosphocreatine system is vitally important for for brain function. Right? Before brand of course, being the 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 down field in a game of
Soccer basketball and you're on offense and then 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 goals, 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 humans. In general, it suppresses anxiety allows us to interpret what's going on for us. And so I'm very
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 of relatively affordable supplement for most people. So here we're not talking about something that's really esoteric or that you have to you know fly to some remote location to get an infusion of right. But
that'll I apologized all you because I know the price has skyrocketed recently, really? Yeah. Why is that? I think it's a well, nobody knows but it's quote, unquote, a supply and and demand issue if you will.
Those prices have gone up. There's also, of course, been shipping problems in the world and things. So every time I talk about creating 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 we like, right? Yeah, like relative to the other stuff, you're probably taking relative to any other number of purchases for the still lands very high in my Roi List, my my 8020 because of that, it's
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 how quickly can get into system. In fact, it's going to work on the exact same. As in mechanisms will probably potentially talk about hydration but these things are shuttled. So anytime you're bringing carbohydrate that's going to be shipped into tissues quickly. As they can creating that goes along for the ride and then it brings water and fluoride, 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 all
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, way in protocols. So individuals have to cut water weight. Christine's, 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 yeah, there's a lot of fun things you can talk about there. I just had to flag that because every time I've been talking about it recently and I say it's cheap people killing me for it, so I apologize.
I don't know how to make any cheaper, but it's still fairly fairly
affordable. Yeah, I would say relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of supplements out there and when thinking about the return on investment is, it's quite good.
Yeah, so like actually sorry, sorry to cut you off, but I was just also thinking there's been a number of studies on sleep deprivation as well creating their can help. So obviously sleep deprivation will generally reduce cognitive function and creating 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 and you would make up the dollar or so, whatever you paid for that day's supply of creatine. So it is something a 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, we throw some creatine Down the Hatch. I'll feel better. That that's not going to work. It's going to take several weeks to have a noticeable effect. It needs to be stored in tissue 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 response right now.
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. We're 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 loading phase then, but if that's not the case, the loading phase is unnecessary.
It's not really harmful other than maybe Jack stress, and maybe waste, but you're going to have three or four weeks. It's going to reach full saturation, plenty of time to be there in that. If you're in that three to seven grams per day range,
I'm glad you mentioned the slow accumulating positive effects of creatine as compared to so called acute effects because the way that I think of Health promoting and performance-enhancing protocols, like, viewing morning, sunlight or endurance, exercise for that matter, or creatine or
Sleep for instance, is that while they can have effects in the immediate term, you might feel a little bit or in the case of a good night's sleep, a lot better. It's really the cumulative effect of raising your Baseline level of functioning. You know, there's another way to think about it is 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 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 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 normally they're called chronic and acute effects, but that makes it sound like chronic illness the moment people here, chronic? Well, they might think of others,
Things. But but in the context of Health, they typically think of, you know, chronic illness and we're not talking about that. What we're talking about is slow, modulatory effects in the body. A lot of things in the body, take time to build up, but once they've built up, they, they clearly can benefit us and then other things, as you mentioned, you know, a stimulant for instance. Yep. Has a very acute effect that is going to occur with, you know, Peak within 30 minutes and we're 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
The language that will be using and I'm really excited to dive into this topic. I think creatine is a beautiful example of a supplement that has positive chronic mental and physical benefits down the road. I can come back
and talk a little bit more about creatine and we can cover some other information regarding best practices for getting the most out of it as well as will certainly dive into some of the common side effects or at least a fought of side effects. While we're here though, I also could throw in a few other
Other of these high impact, low cost. Generally safe things that are my 8020 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 stimulant and fatigue blockers. So creatine is actually in the fuel. It's not a stimulant we talked about the chronic effects are so we've already knocked that one off. Another one from the fatigue blocker is going to be anything like beta alanine.
Sodium bicarbonate. And then from the stimulant use, of course, we have anything like a beetroot juice to a caffeine or something of the equivalent. So we can come back again and talk about all those in more detail a little bit later.
Before we begin. I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford, it is also separate for dr. Andy galvan's, teaching and research roles at Cal State, Fullerton. It is, however, a part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the General Public.
In keeping with that theme, we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is momentous, momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality. The huberman Lab podcast is proud to be partnering with Momentis for several important reasons. First of all, as I mentioned their supplements are of extremely high quality. Second of all, there's supplements are generally in single-ingredient formulations, if you're going to develop a supplementation protocol, you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations with single ingredient. Formulations you can devise
The most logical and effective and cost-effective supplementation regimen for your goals. In addition, momentous supplement, ship internationally, and this is, of course, important because we realize that many of the huberman Lab podcast, listeners reside, outside the United States. If you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned on the huberman, Lab podcast and particular supplements, for Hormone Health for Sleep optimization for Focus, as well as a number of other things. Including exercise recovery. You can go to live momentous spell do u.s. so that's live momentous.com hubermann. Today's episode is also
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Rise 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 is 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 or not doing a good job of hydrating enough. How much of that is true?
Is alkaline water. Worthwhile for changing the alkalinity of my body. I learned when I was in college and graduate school that the alkalinity of the different tissues in your body is very well controlled in order to keep you alive. And that you don't want it to shift too much or you can enter pretty horrible states of seizure vomiting and even death. So
tell me about hydration and woven into that, if you would,
Educate me on electrolytes and hydration because I think most often when people ingest electrolytes. Sure. They could be ingesting salt tablets probably getting some electrolytes, by the way, 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
And part series on its own. 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, 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 90 91 in terms of like, if we're really, at the level of worrying about the pH of their drinking fluid, we have optimized so many other things that then we can talk about it. But until we have
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 an anything else related to water and electrolytes. That can improve mental Performance, Physical performance and offset any, you no ill effects.
I like the fact that you mentioned physical and mental performance because it's clear in both cases, we hear that.
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? Well, we talked about food or hydration or I think I gave you the example cyanide naturally occurring in your food water is the same way. So if you are under hydrated or dehydrated, there is a clear negative effect on your body. And as I increase the level or improve the level of hydration things get better. What are those are? Physical performance weather?
This is mental performance. In fact, we know that a body weight reduction of as low as 2% via dehydration. So imagine you're doing about 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 talked about here was in basketball players. So shooting accuracy, so free throw shooting. I think it's specifically what they looked at significant reduction in performance with as little as 2 percent dehydration. That that level you also see a significant increase in perception of
The of exercise. And so only right at 2% and again when I say 2%, 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. Your blood becomes viscous, it's hard to pump through and you're going to start to 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 walk through, and
There are muscular 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 hydrating, the you lose a little bit of sweat, you've already hit that 2% and so we're starting to see reductions in performance there. The same happens on the other side of that, whore matter curve. So if you are
Optimally hydrated in some large window but you start going past that we can start running into equal problems. Remember there is a there is a need for an optimal concentration of sodium and potassium and chloride between yourself inside your cell and outside of yourself. These are electrolytes. This is what we call osmolality inaudible Clarity. Is this really what you 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 or 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 guy, just skim 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 three liters of pure water right now, you're going to dilute your blood and
There's not going to be as many chemical, there won't be as many electrical signals in there because you've taken the same amount of sodium, potassium etcetera, and put it in a larger volume of pure water. So that gradient is now changed. That becomes a significant problem for contraction. I mean, quite literally, it can kill you, this is what we call hyponatremia. So no treat me to be spelled n, a hypo being low hyponatremia. If you actually go to the Periodic Chart, n, a is what we use for sodium. So high point because the word isn't a dream.
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 is low from excessive fluid intake. So in the Extremes, in fact, if you look at the literature you'll see anywhere between like to to 15 percent of people who finish endurance, races are are in De hyponatremia now that varies wildly if you're doing Iron Man and Kona versus like, you know, the marathon
On and Denver and 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 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 give you one little example of this
We had an executive actually female CEO. I'd say she's probably wondering 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 gut health and how it affects everything. And so she's 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 good thing are going on, whatever and it's, okay. And we just started going through her stuff. And she was, I think about 170 pounds.
Plus or minus and she was consuming, like, 250 260 ounces of water a day.
That's a ton of water and we were like, holy shit. What are you doing this for excuses? Like I said, that's sort of like my thing. It was, but she didn't realize it was more of like a nervous tick than it was anything else, right? She just like, sip sip, sip, sip, sip water. I'm like, man, how often do you go pee? And she's like, yeah, like every, you know, 30 minutes or something. I'm like fantastic, sleep problems, focus. And so she's smashing caffeine, she was at like eight cups of coffee a day which
is also going to add two to excretion of
sodium, totally right?
So it's like, okay, we don't really need to come in and run a sleep study on you. We're just going to lower your water and she was like, what we dropped her down to like 180. So basically an ounce per pound of body weight which is still high cuz she did
train 180 ounces. Correct.
Yeah, she does work out. So she needed to replenish some stuff and we'll cover these numbers in a second.
Instantaneous. I mean like two days in she's like, oh my God. I haven't slept six straight hours and years. And then after that, it was like basically tears coming back to his right? My focus, my brain fog is gone because she's going to very high pressure job. It's like everything is coming back. Like now she was down to three or so cups of coffee a day bubble butt. Like the whole thing, digestion, improved. All of it. She was sit like to her only problem. After all the analyses was she was just drinking way way too much water and adding more salt to her.
Would not have solved the problem because she would have just had simply way too much fluid in her system. She was having all kinds of ADH problems and aldosterone, like the whole thing and that, that rolls into cortisol. The whole like system gets goes into chaos. So 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 your test out. Like you're going to think all these things and you simply just have an actually dialed in your hydration.
Yeah, 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 hormone. Is it sound like testosterone or estrogen or DHEA or dopamine? But it actually is all of those things. Yeah. It's it's 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 the oh you know we are 70% water and somehow like that statistic alone or that fact alone doesn't seem to stimulate any kind of action will take away rights like great, you know, 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,
It's important that people understand that every seller process in the body. Critically relies on having enough, sodium, magnesium, potassium around. And 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 of the sorts of kind of quote-unquote, high-performance tools. And there were 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
Your lights 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 asked 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've ever had to urinate very badly and you're in the car or you can't your name, then you get to the door. Like, that's talk about anxiety, and that's because there's a direct
Neural pathway from the bladder, that registers the McKenna Sensors. How much stretch there is on the bladder, that sends a signal to the brain stem alertness areas, broadly speaking, Locus, coeruleus, and others that wake us up. These are the when we're awake and 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 night urination as a pretty good diagnostic of sleep disorders so if you because of vasopressin, right, almost exactly what you're talking about. If
You're having sleep disorder issues and you're staying awake and based on precedent gets taken off, right. In a PN goes straight to the kidneys, your kidneys are supposed to be dormant. Basically a night, you're not supposed to be filtering, a lot of in 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 keeps sending signal kidneys, start filtering. So if you're waking up and being 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 to your drinking outrage.
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 waking up and being all night, that's actually ruining your sleep. And as we have seen this, a number of times with our sleep companies, 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 sounding, you're still waking up more than one time of night to pee on average, then you almost I shouldn't say like that. But there's a potential that you actually have some sort of sleep disorder, sleep condition going in. So the rule of thumb on that this or here,
Once or night once a night or so of your nation 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 the hear things like this. No, like I gotta get on my water and then they just start trying wrecking their sleep and 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
That's probably not sleep. Apnea induced nocturia, that's probably excess of 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 is 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 a like the combat sport in the UFC fighters.
Sirs we call that your float so much you floated over night. 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. Oh you floated five pounds. Did you pee last night? Yeah, three times interesting. Another case you woke up, you went to bed at 200 pounds. You wake up at 1 99.5. Okay. You're dehydrated because you should have a certain amount of fluid that you're distressed wearing out as you're breathing through your nose or not.
Ideally guaranteed, you're gonna 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 2 pounds for the 170 plus pound person as you scale up. That number can go up a little bit, you can kind of use these to triage a little bit about what's going on with this. Kind of combination is 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, I don't know if you can jump into it, we can but there's a whole bunch of ways.
As I can teach you to diagnose 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 won't go straight. Your number half, an ounce per pound of body. Weight is a rough rule. So if you weigh again, 200 pounds that would mean. Your drink 100 ounces of water a day. Most water bottles are like 12 to 20 ounces, something like that. So you know, your end up. Drinking six of those are so add a kind of like plus or minus which is not that unreasonable.
Double 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 basil daily needs if you are exercising or sweating at all for any reasons or work-related. So Folks at work outside or in the Heat or a humid environment. These numbers all changes, you can slide the scale up but you generally want
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 125 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 as those guys go 910 pounds.
But what about the typical person who
To a air-conditioned gem or goes out for a run on a day that is somewhere between let's say 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 85 degrees for our, 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 a comeback and like your pits are a little sweaty and there's a little bit of water, kind of on your neck liner. 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.
Half an ounce of fluid per pound of body. Weight is a sort of a foundation for hydration.
And then you want to replace 125 percent of the fluid loss 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 etcetera.
In a very hot environment that the amount of fluid lost can be anywhere from, you know, 125 maybe even 10 pounds, easy per hour of hard hard exertion for most exercise done in conditions of 55 degrees. Fahrenheit 272, scuse me 85 degrees Fahrenheit, done with some degree of effort. One, might lose a pound or two pounds of water. Super easy way to find out. All you have to do is weigh yourself naked.
Go do your work out. Come back in dry off or yourself naked. That will tell you exactly what you lost. So if you went in, you were wondering 260 pounds, you come back out, you wait you want to 58, you lost two pounds, drink back two and a half pounds of water your goods. So that is a 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 juror because that then
And 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, mate Macho, whatever. The you know, there's a yerba mate, there's a million things out there or
just water any fluid. For the most part is going to count.
And is it true that fluids that contain caffeine?
Generally caused 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 to accurately answer that question. Will you also sort of asked about you may have not realized, is just caffeine actually enhance dehydration.
Which is not really what you ask, but it's probably a lot of people thought that as well. So caffeine can but coffee doesn't necessarily do that because remember your Cohen just in that with fluid and so we used to say that all the time. I'll coffee dehydrates you. It doesn't have might make your urine, yellow and certainly gives off an odor in your urine, but in general coffee will not do that because you're just as 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 you 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, 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 3 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 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 actually work with them in my laboratory as well.
Well and he's one of these people that the moment he starts any physical activity. It's like a flood warning, right? A just soaks through clothing, it's just the sweating out updation is is exceedingly robust in him, other people less. So so is it true that sweating in our ability to dump heat, through it by loss of water or something that we tend to vary on. And that also that we can build up that capacity. I know a number of people are probably thinking it will 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 and like many, many
ways, including mental performance or ability is stay alert. Often is enhanced by being cold and of course, we all want to warm up properly, but in terms of loss of fluid through sweating, is there a way to easily been 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.
He's on this,
if we have to go 17 hours, we can do it. Just everybody hydrate. Well,
I think we've shown the listeners. That is a real threat. That's a very real threat
podcasting to failure. You don't have to every set in the gym to failure, but here we are attempting a podcast failure and 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 acclamation and why that matters when you sweat that actually is not what regulates your temperature. 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, like, you can guarantee within a short amount of time
You're going to be done
moving. Very interesting. I hope people heard that and really 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
I sweat. Yep, it's also about being able to sweat and being dressed appropriately to allow that sweat to move to evaporate off your
body. Yep. And he acclamation 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 back to that practice. This Asana practice a Jacuzzi. Just get in those things and you will improve your ability to do that. Now, there is a huge genetic component.
Have one individual actually a UFC fighter. I've been working with. I don't mind mentioning his name. He'll give me full permission. Scott Holtzman many, many years. He's actually fighting right now actually today, he'll be going. He is like he is like you described like buckets and buckets and buckets of fluids. Come off this guy. When he's tying his shoes and he just goes right. Like and know we've improved that actually sweat too much. We worked on that a lot early in his career and we, we got some improvements down to get him to hold onto it to fluids.
Better. That being said, I've worked with other individuals in his weight category and it's the opposite, right? So we can have them, literally do the exact same training session together, and Scott will dump 6 pounds and other folks at his size, will dump to two and a half. So there's a genetic component that is just there and you don't need to worry about it there. 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 all have the friend who probably wears that same bass, 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 test. I know that there is some coming out in the market. Very, very soon though can give you theoretically,
Real-time measurements like a CGM would be, although I haven't seen any data on if those are accurate or not, have a used one yet. But there are a number that are out. I was 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 have to see independent data come out first but even if they are you not worried about this specific mg right whether you sweat out 1,250.
G. It'll work out or if it's 1340, it doesn't really matter. You're trying to look for big. Big numbers, right? Are you losing 500 mg used in three and a half grams when you're out. So those things will get you in the ballpark to do. Exactly what you just said. Am I high medium or low? And there's a lot of them that I've used in the past so 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, a cute markers of dehydration, like hemoglobin hematocrit. If you're like, if your hemoglobin is like 15 plus, it's funny. Huh. We've talked about this in a few episodes before, but I see that I'm like, man, that dude super fit, that's it like a 15 for him would be pretty high 14 or so would be pretty good for a female. That's also the exact same thing as the sine of acute dehydration. So I'm adequate, same thing. If you're north of 50% you're probably dehydrated so you can get a lot. There are also the 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. I'll be home. In is another fantastic way to measure longer-term hydration status. Now, one of these amazing globulins that we 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 this wet patch or not. And use the Freer version of your clothing test, and get a rough idea of where you're getting it from. So those are good.
Aces 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're again, losing less than that, it's not critical. You can have some fluids. It's like makes you feel better.
But you're not going to be experiencing tremendous amounts of perform. The sacraments, if you're, you know, again out playing a baseball game and it's 50 degrees out, you're fine. I'm gonna drink some water, but that's not going to be pop advising 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 are just terrified that they got to be guzzling down water if they're you know, going to the physical therapist for some stretching that's probably not
super important. I'd like to see you
A brief break and acknowledge our sponsor athletic greens. Athletic greens is a vitamin mineral probiotic and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundation or nutritional needs. I've been taking athletic greens daily since 2012. So I'm delighted that they're our sponsor of this podcast. The reason I started taking athletic greens and the reason I still take athletic greens once or twice a day. Is that it helps me? Meet all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is it covers my vitamins, my minerals, and the probiotics are, especially important to me. Athletic greens all
Contains adaptogens, which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work or just general life. If you'd like, to try out, let it greens. You can go to athletic greens.com, / huberman, to claim a special offer, they'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year's supply of vitamin D3 K to again. If you'd like to try out, let it greens go to athletic greens.com huberman, to claim the special offer. 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.
And 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 you ask 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 announces 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 closed. Which means you would consume about 7 ounces of water, every 15 or 20 minutes or so, okay? Now as a little bit of a point while I also did not name it, I also didn't do the research. It's important to point out that other
Scientists figure 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? 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 ingest that number of ounces in fluid every 15 minutes. And then for those out there outside the US that are accustomed to thinking in ml and leaders not ounces and kill
Ur G, not pounds. What is the Galpin equation in the metric system?
This would be 2 milliliters per kilogram. Which again, if you were, let's say 200 pounds that's going to be something roughly. Like, will 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 that it's through their mouth, I would hope.
There are other orifices that 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. Handful of things in general, you talk hydration, the slower and steady, you can go the better. In fact, the reason these this to 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.
Different variations and it is pretty clear that the slower Pace one. Could do it the better. So whether you're doing it every ten minutes or fifteen, or twenty minutes of 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 four golden rules of recovery if you will. We use sort of 3 R's, you need to rebuild rehydrate and replenish. What that really means is, you need to have a continuous glucose stream, need to have a continuous amino acid stream. You need to hide.
Eight and you need to do all one. Two, and three without disturbing your got 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 their in both cases. It's something like 6 to 7 ounces for 15 or 20 minutes. If you think about that, there are 16 ounces in a pound and most water bottles. Like if you go buy a water bottle at a store here, it's the generally come in like 16 ounce bottles, if
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 sign them. 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 wondering at. So your final net number is 2. So now you don't you really need to drink back. 125 percent of that remaining two pounds, two and a half pounds. Something like that, these numbers especially that 125. Are there just rough guidelines? Some actually papers suggests it's all the way up to 150% so it's just like an idea. Don't measure out whether you need five point, five ounces or 6.2 ounces.
Oz like it just sort of gives you an idea of where to start a few sips. Every 15 or 20 minutes is close
enough. I've actually started using 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 been very effective for me. And again, there are peer-reviewed studies that support, the idea that hydration is important for proper mental Clarity, and
In 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 focus on the work they're doing. That's also an issue. So that's very helpful. What are the three most critical features of hydration and then I'd like to move on to some of the more particulars about supplementation and
nutrition. Three parts start hydrated. Maintain hydration throughout part 3 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 2 ml per kg / body weight divided by 32 stay hydrated. We give you the 125 percent, but I can actually just give you a sort of, I'm giving you another list here, I'm sorry, but it is my 5 step. Cheater guide for optimizing. Hydration for performance, art, step number one, drink a lot of water first thing in the morning.
This gets everything kick-starting is she going it also saves you from having a drink, a bunch of water at night which is then going to compromise your sleeve. 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. It's honestly what I do is not the best route but I'll just get 16 ounces 16 ounces or so is great. It's fine. If you're larger you know I'm a hundred and sixty five to seventy.
Pounds, depending on what's going on, maybe a little higher, sometimes, if your 225 pounds, maybe that number is 30 ounces, right? So you just sort of scale up and down and the only reason I say lot is it just depends on what you're doing and I also should. Clarify don't really literally mean chug just like Zips because the faster you drink water, the faster it's going to expand blood. Volume the faster. It extends, blood volume, the faster you get rid of it.
I don't think a lot of people know
that. Yeah, this is a maybe this is clarifying, this is also a we sort of talked about earlier.
If you drink too much water, you'll delete 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 there like man, you're five and a half liters, you're going to be like holy crap. You're gonna be put on a diuretic because you don't 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. Total, like, given, what? You just
Just said, probably a better protocol would be to sip on a glass of water in the final hour or two hours before sleep.
You generally, the number we say, is three hours in the three hours preceding 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 because I'm pretty thirsty at that time. Yeah. But I'm going to start sipping that water.
The three hours heading into sleep.
Yeah. You so you can actually pay attention to is 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,
mmm, okay, let
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 P too much. What that also indicates is probably your mouth breathing. So a lot of ways to fix.
People waking up in your dating too much, tonight is to tape your mouth and or use a dilator over your nose. And then what happens is you don't feel like you have a dry mouth so you can 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 help if you are having those issues and or snoring those are not benign that that's a really that you really should get some work on those.
Something you're not sleeping very well, is the way I'll say it's doesn't doesn't necessarily mean something life-threatening, but it's not a good thing. So you going to run kind of your triaging things back and forth. So if you 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 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 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 is a really important point. Also for people that are going to I Don't Give a talk or you don't want to have to get up to use the restroom. You have to
Sit through a long meeting. Yeah. Clearly. I'm violating all these rules up until right now. I've been, you know, not I, I sort of Follow The Seagull approach to consuming fluids, just Gloom Gloom in enormous volumes. I'm going to start sipping fluids instead, what are some of the other rules of
hydration? So you're gonna wake up your to start your day and start hydrated. So 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 a 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 to 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 carbohydrates, not straight, extremely high in sugar. It is why percentage. But it, since it is almost exclusively water you're eating, it is not something that is extremely dangerous in terms of sugar.
I their loan, probably of all the things we've talked about in the six, six episodes, 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
sugar and water throwing watermelons.
Yeah. Yeah. Oh my gosh, 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. And it's interesting often times the people who are justifying the ingestion of sugar. Exactly. The kind of people that should not ingest so much sugar. So there's a
Bit of a, well it used their
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
can you smell food? Yeah, now important Point here, if you compare it to other foods, like actually meet is is very high percentage of fluid depending on how well or long you've cooked it. You will remember you said earlier or 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 they're, if you're eating highly processed foods almost by association, that means they've been dehydrated or portion Ali, 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
Over to mostly, I can 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, and you shouldn't have to be smashing water bottles after a water bottle all day in that case. Do 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 nutrition lifestyle and they give up a little bit, other processed food and they come over and they start having problems.
Albums because they're not actually consuming enough salt. So add that back. Easy way to do that, you can use electrolytes when 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 upper body weight in ounces. So that's the number we're looking forward 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 UT I think, Bob kenefick has done a ton of research in this area. If you want to read more look up, his research, it is simply wait.
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, as much 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 mL of water, and the, our preceding the training, all right? So that's like 13 to 20 ounces. So like, you know, you're going to go work out at 3:00, it's 2:00 and you realize, oh man, I have not drink 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 of your
A really tough spot. You can do more like 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 on your stomach and nobody likes that. So 1 to 300 ml 15 or so 20 minutes before that assumes you're in this like 185 pound range is again. If you're talking people of much larger size, you may need to increase those values. Accordingly, if you do all that
then you use the gallop on occasion 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 aiso 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 1000 mg and it's a lot higher, but most products now that you're going to find are 250 to 400 mg and they're typically in the like to
To maybe up to three, two, one, sodium to potassium range, right? Coconut water is actually cool. It's like basically opposite like a cup of coconut water. I think has something like 200 mg of sodium, but like 600 milligrams of potassium, so, like, total spoiler alert, but we'll use coconut water. A lot of hydration, just add a little pinch of salt because I don't bring the sodium way back
up. Yeah, one note about. Sodium obviously people who have pre hypertension or hypertension. Want to be careful with their sodium intake.
Anytime I've suggested that people might consider ingesting more sodium, you know, it's sort of it's like it's like putting a Target on your, on your back. And yet the data are pretty good showing that if people are not getting enough sodium, their mental Clarity, their focus, their 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
Many people who are already sort of health-conscious who are training, their 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, 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 as recovery. It's bringing water into your
System and it holds water. So when you drop carbohydrates 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, you know, a gram of sodium in your electrolyte, drink are not all that outrageous. And what you find is people
I feel much much better when they're getting enough sodium, and of course, I should 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 to Salt appetite and salt taste is a pretty good guide if you taste something. And if it tastes really salty to you, that's an
Equation that either it's really salty or your salt stores are kind of tapped off your 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 deficient. 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 are 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 Contra indication there that work
With the medical specialists. Without without question those situations, you laid out the were very real. A lot of people are living like that. And so it's important for those folks to understand if you are going through symptoms fatigue, lack of focus cognitive function performance, isn't there then hey like you maybe undersalted. And again, actually a good amount of blood chemistry work can unravel that a lot, and it can sort of tell you if you're running out of whack, there are a number of folks who are
Extremely sensitive sodium, in terms of health risk and that is a real thing. Again, work with your 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. I only take people who are healthy and trying to make them perform at their best possible level. So it's actually funny, you mention that because I was going to give people my recommendation for sodium intake in general throughout the day and then I decided I'm not going to say that because all it's going to do is make all the rest of the people who aren't coming to come after me for the watermelon. Comment, come after me.
For that.
So also use Days episode. The goal is that they're everyone's coming after you. But also everyone is learned. Something of value already given us, 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 trained. 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 your next one. Yeah, no, it was probably my fault. So that in addition to the Galpin equation in terms of amount, I reckon I've ran a recommended at roughly three, two, one, sodium to potassium recommendation and I gave you some rough numbers. Things look that I actually in all honesty used probably six.
Stu 10, different electrolyte companies, depending on the situation, some of them are really good and 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 where you're trying to again maximize actual exercise performance, you especially if it is either long
Even some more than two hours or extremely high intensity. And this has to be well, north of 100 percent of your VO2 max. And 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 liver glycogen concur start coming down if that's the case augmenting with carbohydrates during the training and is going to enhance performance, it's got to do what we call, spare the liver, and it's going to keep my second rule of my for which is maintained a glue.
Ko's ingestion is 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 under salted and so that they don't provide enough of them. If you look at the numbers are going to say something like 60 to 100 grams of carbohydrate per hour is the target.
If you're using the sort of Galloping equation, 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 vo. So admittedly 100 grams is a bit much for some folk depending on your size. So I would recommend starting in that 60 gram or so range. Again per hour, total is what you want to get to and only in the situation which muscle glycogen depletion is.
Becoming a limiting factor to Performance. So the other benefit of that is as you mention that actually drives water into the cell and so you're going to be in that nice sweet spot of your 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
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 momentum
It has fuel product is that specifically has that exactly in it. So it's fantastic. You can use food, no problem. You can use a 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 their. 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 number is 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 is in your way which in the lab we've seen will just say accidents like that occur more than once. So just be careful of your
stomach. I'd like to take a brief break to acknowledge our sponsor inside tracker.
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What to do with all that information exceedingly, easy. They have a personalized platform that lets you see what your specific numbers are. Of course. But then also, what sorts of Behavioral do's and don'ts, what sorts of nutritional changes, what sorts of supplementation would allow you to bring those levels into the ranges that are optimal for you. If you'd like to try inside track or you can visit inside tracker, dot, coms huberman, to get 20% off any of inside trackers plans. Again, that's inside tracker. Dot coms huberman, to get 20% off, I realized that jumped the gun a little bit.
Asking about supplementation for before during and after a workout 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 sometimes the best way to supplement. If you will a workout or pre-workout is ingesting nothing, I'm one of these people actually prefer to do my weight training somewhere between 7:00 and 8:00 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, 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 have glycogen stores that are topped off and so it's fasted. But with that caveat, what are your thoughts on training fasted? And what I just described is fast it overnight, but some people are training in the afternoon and they may opt to not eat anything in the, you know, to 24 hours prior to training or maybe even longer. I personally find that caffeine hits my system a lot better when I'm fasted better mean.
He just seems to have more of a potent effect, there's some reasons for that 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 at it for 3 hours, then drink caffeine but who knows maybe that's in your protocol. The simple version of this question is what are your thoughts on training fasted? And if people are going to train fasted, how should they modulate their fluid intake? If at
all what happens with exercise in the endurance and Metabolism episode?
Road, we walk through in 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 1, 2, 3 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 a DP. If you do it again, you have a MP adenosine monophosphate. If you do it one more time. Now you just have adenosine and if you have then therefore, run through a lot of exercise burn, 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 a certain receptors and when 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 lationship between the more caloric expenditure in different sports and the higher amount of hours needed for sleep. So, there is a nice
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 by Fuel?
Then fueling is necessary one way or the other. If it is a type of training that is not then it's not going to matter. And so the examples we gave 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 feeling at
all. We're eating within your workout because only 30 seconds, 30 seconds,
you don't need to worry about hydration posts, exercise, you don't need to worry about recovery total. Energy expenditure was nothing. If you're going to go, you know, you going to go practice, 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 want to bring it in the system. You certainly wouldn't want to use stimulants
I could you make it over exert 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 then the timing of them which is why you can do things like have a bunch of carbohydrate at night. Not eat the next morning and lift and be just fine. It doesn't matter that you didn't have them in a few hours before. Your muscle glycogen is topped off. Your liver is glycogen is topped off. You're absolutely fine. You have plenty of fuel even if you to wait a few more hours. In fact, even if you were to do conditioning, you're probably fine. I have plenty of out the prefer to do many of their training sessions, faster than morning.
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 different types when those thresholds hits and what you're worried about, then the feeling would be important. You would either need to have something before the session or consume it during the session. So, one of the other things we like to say here is recovery starts during
During the previous workout, right? So if you're working out right now and you optimized nutrition right now, even if you don't necessarily need it for the current work out. 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. Then the timing. So, the post exercise anabolic window. It doesn't necessarily matter carbohydrate is different. The
That does matter, it needs to be around them 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, 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 and before during or after Because by the time you go to train again, you will have restored your muscles.
Kitchen levels easily. However, if you're training every day or twice in a day, then the timing of carbohydrate really starts to matter. And 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
hi 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, are you weigh 200 pounds? You want to make sure that either pre-made 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, in a lower energy and easier work out. Instead of having 100 grams of carbs, I might tack that down to 75 or even 50 and be at a one-to-one car approaching 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 a closer? Like, a 3 to 1 or 4 to 1 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 and 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. Nice. Yeah.
So there's caffeine is the easy one to start with? And we won't belabor the point. Here, the evidence is strong, it has an echogenic effect. You can take it at whatever dosage is reasonable for you. 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 a neurogenic benefit even know 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 at the half-life of it is, you know, four to six hours or something like that. I can 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 a particularly endurance, maximum strength, may be less double 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 wreck would suggest that, you know, you're going to take it prior to trying to truly lift as high as trying to lift a 1, or petition, Max or similar. But most of the, the documented effects are on. The the endurance based
activities. Yes. So my read of the literature. In terms of performance, enhancing effects of caffeine are that
1, 2, 3 mg. I want to make sure the people here the units correctly before you'll Blitz themselves out with that caffeine one, two, 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, two, three milligrams per kilogram of body. Weight of caffeine taken about and it's not super precise. As far as I can see how about 30 minutes before the event. Starts can really enhance reaction time and power output. And as well, as you mentioned endurance, when I was researching the caffeine episode one, interesting. Caveat that I discovered was that if people are not
Athene 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 as thing of ruining your
Dance with too much caffeine. So most people listening to this, if you're thinking wow they said caffeine, I'm all in and then you just stopped listening and now, you 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, 1 2, 3 milligrams per kilogram body weight. If you weigh 100 kilograms, that's 220 pounds, that'd be something like 22, 500 milligrams of caffeine, which is like a pretty high amount but you know a coffee is
Get you clothes and espressos going to get you somewhere in that ballpark, depending on sources of. So you don't really need to go and blister your brain with caffeine. And 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 so does etcetera. Of course. Varies one thing that people ought to know is that the smallest of commercially available coffees at the most popular commercial
Anderson.
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 mg or one gram of caffeine. So for you morning, large coffee at commercial, vendor drinkers. If you're wondering why you get a headache, if you're 30 minutes late on that caffeine, or if you can't access that caffeine at all or even if you're drinking,
Coffee scuse 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 coffees is exceedingly high. It's about two or three times higher than the standard. Look-up 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 are just fine with even 1,000 milligrams of caffeine, but only because they've been drinking.
Being a lot of caffeine
consistently anyway, it's also wildly inconsistent from location to location. The Brew type the functionality. So, yeah, that that stuff can be very hard to figure out what's happening.
There's only one way really to objectively measure caffeine and that's use caffeine tablets and they work pretty well actually. Someone I know who's prominent in the podcast base uses, 100 to 200 milligrams of caffeine in tablet, form, combined with T. So they've now condition
Selves, to think that herbal tea actually has this caffeinated effect, but tablet form caffeine while I'm not recommending it to outright, it is going to give you the best sense of how much caffeine you can tolerate and how much is performance enhancing or is performance
degrading. There's actually another line of supplementation we can go down here which is not technically a stimulant but it's something I use to help performance when you don't want caffeine and so this 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 that your cock site is this wonderful compound that causes vasodilation and of course that's going to Aid then and transporting nutrients in and out of the cell. So it has an organic affect the, you have a number of
You can go about this, some of them have more pros and cons and others 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, the pretty effective and enhancing performance specifically anything moderate to longer duration, endurance performance.
And they are not a stimulant, so they won't ruin your sleep. That much
one note of caution. For those of you, they're interested in citrulline, or beetroot, because they are in the Arginine pathway, if you're somebody who has a predisposition to cold sores oral cold sores, that is or other forms of cold sores. That 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
Of on neurons. Then you want to be very cautious with citrulline, especially high dose citrulline. I can really amplify that the Colts or response. What about non-stimulant yet? Focus, enhancing supplements. Things like Alpha GPC. For example, I routinely used 300, to 600 milligrams of alpha GPC, prior to hard, physical training, typically weight training. But occasionally, I'll take 300 mg 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, 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 in an alertness, promoting aspect.
To it. What are your thoughts on those sorts of
compounds? There is 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, there isn't none, we actually will use many of these substances, you can globally call them nootropics which is, you know, any substance that specifically enhance 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 will pull out, say I'm sparring day only or the most important training session or 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 weight purposes, in terms of a sports, we have to be in a certain weight class or something like that. What we may not be able to give you food. In fact, we may not be able to give you stimulants because of the sleep thing or because we're already like Max on. Has it been months? Now, we can go this route and so you least like mentally your little bit there and you're more likely to be alert and focused and you can train harder, despite the fact we didn't actually change fuel, that's a little bit of a short game.
Terms of that's not your permanent solution. You eventually need to bring calories up or whatever other trains your training or whatever 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.
Ears. You have to be a little bit careful of it. There's well first of all know we should have said this at the onset. No supplement is the Panacea right. Nothing's going to work for everything. Rodeo 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. But not often, is it detrimental with a few exceptions? I know of a handful of papers that would be to 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 necessarily a good thing. We talked about how if you do an acute bout a 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 suppress and now you're taking these things to blunt it or keep it low and in your you continue to feel lethargic and lack of desire, and libido and focus and sort of all these things of cortisol is not a bad thing. We want this to be going up and down in the amount that we want. So if we're thinking about like, for example, waking up,
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 going down, is only going to be a problem. So rhodiola is is has a good evidence base to support it for that. You'll see actually a number of studies that have looked at it in a whole host of areas for benefit. So something good to do the difficult part with rhodiola to be quite honest is getting it for my high quality brand and Source. It's difficult to get as a
Source, which is a very, very important thing to do with supplements and try to get them sourced alone. Rhodiola, typically comes in combination with any other herbals or other stuff, adrenal support, and such would cetera. Also, then getting them 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,
He was taken rhodiola and they're like it didn't do anything for me. That's possible. That's nothing works for everyone and also could be just very poor quality sourcing. So if you look at the there have been a number of papers on its perception of fatigue and you sort of mentioned that you felt pretty immediate effects of taking a few
times. Yeah, I'm fairly sensitive supplements but I've started taking rhodiola before workouts and
I found that I could push much harder much longer through the workout, normally I would typically before taking it, 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 period of time. It was kind of a tapering off. Now granted, these are very intense training sessions. These are not the endurance training sessions, these are the weight training sessions, that one one time per week per body,
Art type sessions. What I've noticed is, I can complete the entire 60 minutes with, with minimal fatigue. Now, I mean, obviously, I hit fatigues within sets and, of course, you know, I, you remain human despite taking it, but 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 by an overall. I do want to highlight something that you said, because I think it's so, so, vitally important, which is that using single ingredient formulations
Most things is critical to figuring out, what works for you, what doesn't, what dosages you need being able to take things to, on one off, two days on one day off, for instance, being able to increase dosage in the morning and then maybe reduce the dosage and combined 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 been a regular podcast sponsor for a long time? That is a cocktail of many many things.
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 some 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
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 mg, not feel anything. Maybe just feel kind of a, they don't like it. Other people like myself took, 300 mg 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 mg, I 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,
And I can tell 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 women during their menstrual cycle. Might find that during certain phases of the cycle. They're more sensitive to certain things and not others and for men and women it may be that, you know, certain times of year or even and
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 actually think that's potentially dangerous territory.
Yeah. I mean, just take rhodiola. As a good example, I know a new meta-analyses came out just in the last few months, looking at it and they found in general. You see again, a slight to
That 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 want to do it in. 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 this stimulant or this cortisol suppressor, or cortisol, activator. Well, now also you
Take it at night or you can't take in the morning because you're already 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 really old, you don't know if it is the bus while unit 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, the citric acid they used 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.
Ha for the rest of your life, which is not the biggest crime, but it's not needed in. 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 mg 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 will be closed 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 pull them off the shelf. These are their standard studies where they will go and buy said, like 20 to 25 different supplements in the
case of melatonin and will 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 1000 fold, actual concentration in that supplement. And then you wonder why some people react, great melatonin, some people are absolutely destroys you. And this is also why I like will actually will 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, I'm not even talking like double, I'm talking 10, 20, 30 x, the upper limit range from a low tone in the next morning and then it's like, well, what are you taking is like, oh, I got this melatonin at X store or X website. You're like holy cow. So I'm not opposed to melatonin theoretically, but you have to be careful with that one in particular. So any supplement has that to be true? So you want to buy them from?
As many places as you can that are high-quality. And if they are third-party tested, even if you're not a performance athlete, I want to stress this. Even if you're not a performance athlete, third-party certified and test, the supplements are, you're less likely to just just get wildly high concentrations or low concentrations of active ingredients and so relative to other ones who you might get for cheaper. But you could be totally wrecking Yourself by getting, you know, 50 milligrams of melatonin every night and not realizing it. So then, of course, the next morning, you drowned yourself in caffeine.
Yeah, and then you can see what death cycle you're in now.
Yeah, people could look for third-party certification on the packaging and some websites will allow you to zoom in on the bottle beforehand. If it's largely listed on uncertain, 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 the together to
Them so often what you'll find is that blends will include the least amount of the most expensive ingredient, right? Not always the case. There are some, there are certainly exceptions to this and I mentioned some Blends that I like a few minutes ago that are four foundational nutrition adaptogens, and probiotics, athletic greens, of course, just being one of several examples out there but when it comes to say asleep 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 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 formulations for 80% of your supplements.
I think is really the way to go and the other thing that 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 solicited for questions 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? Well, I have an incredibly hard time sleeping. If I take a pre-workout, every time I train will, will I need it? It's a great question. Some people will take supplement.
A days 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 asleep cocktail, we've described this, it's magnesium. Theanine and things this is not one ingredient, these are multiple ingredients. In fact, precisely because some people who have sleep walking and Vivid, dream issues can't take theanine before bed. In any case, I've had times when I either forgot my supplements that's rare, where 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 true dependency and I'm like addiction totally. Right. I mean, I Define addiction as a progressive narrowing of the things that bring you pleasure so you know, 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, might feel like you're not motivated to train. So what are your thoughts on taking little holidays from
Some supplements and varying, the frequency of supplement intake in particular as it relates to stimulants and fatigue
reducers. The end goal. Anytime I coach, somebody is to get them into a physiological state in which they require no or close to no supplementation. That's the target. We should really be in a position to where our lifestyle our sunlight exposure, our Stress Management, our physical activity are sleeping, our hydration and our whole food nutrition.
Does 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 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 guide, 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 in this endless cycle of, oh, you're just going to do that all day every day.
We don't really need to be in that spot. So what I, the way that I'll 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, is blinding. The reason why are you in that position to begin with, right? So we see this all the time whether it is sleep problems, whether it is cortisol or testosterone. The question is, why is that low? Now we may give you something again to manage it immediately. But the task the mystery, I'm going to try to unveil his why? Why is it there to begin with? This could be something like this is natural for you. And your lack of energy is something else or could be actually, it is not a natural level for you. But something is suppressing it any number.
Number of, you've got some infection going on. There's some aloe allergic reaction to something in your environment. There's a mold Mercury, like that. One comes up a lot, you'll see Mercury, and folks, and that's causing a lot of problems or any number of heavy metals or toxins and 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
Reason, but root cause. All right, so we're trying to find that as 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 know, like, go ahead. Those ones are generally pretty fine to just take but anything else I want to reason.
And 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 artist. 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 to pan up on anything. I want to create extremely resilient people and I want to create physiological resilience, we actually have a fancy little algorithm. We used 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.
To have your supplement through. 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. Now let's just get out of the way, let's fix the problem. If we, if there is something symptom management that's real while we're actually searching for better foundational habits on the last thing I want to say about this is if you're only covering symptom,
You 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, Chi PCS and caffeine's Etc. Even know there's good little sugar, are you really just using that to allow your poor sleep hygiene to happen? If you took those away, I bet you you would actually start addressing your sleep, if that's the Cause, right? All right, your stress, or Europe, or 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
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 may be needed. It's a signal to actually get my ass in gear to go. Make one of these changes, whatever it needs to be. So I know I've 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, which is Better Living Through Chemistry, still requires Better
Living.
Ting, but that's cool. 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 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, nor chemically that, they need to use pharmacology in order to get
get into a flat-footed position. You know, the really back on their heels flat footed or forward Center of 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 neuro chemical shifts, and the people are thinking, well, what sorts of behaviors can induce these neurochemical chefs. 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, we've talked a lot about in this series and then 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's 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 do. 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 disruptive to the system and it is because especially caffeine while it has its uses and even health benefits. It's really borrowing. 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 and hands. 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, people can listen to episodes on Master sleep or perfect.
Sleep or the caffeine episodes, understand more about that. But the final thing I just want to say here. And then it prompts the 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 to be great. If people could try things without having to buy a whole product, I think companies hopefully you're 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 everyday 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.
Biotics by, don't take those all the time because I get them from food and from certain group, you know, Green strings, like athletic greens and so forth. So I think that nutrition and supplementation are tethered in this way in my mind. And I don't think that. Most people think of supplementation is 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 our single ingredient formulations, you can be, 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 weak, then there's, I mean,
basically all benefit. That's a very good point, very low, creatine,
beta-alanine as 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 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 of the room of the reasons why beta-alanine work so effectively, is it blocks that build up? 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 of you can take. Absolutely none of these things and be just fine.
In terms of animal come back, maybe to Beta alanine in a second in terms of some other fun stuff, my colleague, Greg of sticky ran a really cool. Number of studies looking at how exercise actually Alters the gut microbiome. And this is actually an area that we have probably have 300 stool sample sitting in my freezer in my
lab goodness. Another reason to pause before entering your
lab yet another reason to not apply to come be one of my graduate school that's what you want to do with that. We actually have a number we've applied for a couple of Grants to
More into this specifically with females. So hopefully I can get that funded but nonetheless you can actually see stomach 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 proposed an ultra marathon.
And even within a single bout of exercise, I came with some of the markers but I know one of the markers was specifically increased by like fourteen thousand percent after he singled out 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 on some random number like that
of something meaningful.
Yeah. Something meaningful. I can't remember which marker.
That was that had changed, I know. Streptococcus was in there? Streptococcus went up like maybe something more like 30 or 40 or 50 percent. The point is we haven't even had the proper time and we don't to even launch into the gut microbiome supplementation. There needs to be ultra specific. You wouldn't be best served to just jump in and take random things there. 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.
They're so probably something to not mess with 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 medical doctor there but just randomly assigning a bunch of probiotics and 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 could bring somebody out as an expert in that.
Discuss that. Yeah, gut microbiome is fascinating. I think of sleep as the most powerful performance, enhancing activity. Of course, you still have to do the activity. Yeah, I consider it foundational. It basically raises the tide on mental health, physical health, performance of all kinds. There's recent data that during sleep. Your body goes through all its various forms of metabolism possible. Yep. It, which is amazing.
So it's measured from breath in human subjects that breath metabolites in human subjects. So obviously 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 you're 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 on to this idea that they have insomnia, insomnia is excessive daytime sleepiness where you're falling asleep during the day. That's insomnia could also be narcolepsy but that's insomnia, but supplementation to improve the quality or duration of sleep or both.
seems to me like the most direct route even though actually technically it's an indirect Route 22 performance enhancement and then thinking about
Things that increase alertness and stimulants and fit and fatigue reducers. 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 might 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. 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. So we'd be able to diagnose officially Sleep Disorders, 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 fourfold system. Number one is, we're going to look at biology, which means, going to take saliva and blood. And we're looking at everything from neurotransmitters concentrations to vitamins B6, B12, etcetera, that are.
Oughtn't for Sleep performance. So we're going to see, is that it is a physiological problem, is there something happen? 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 want 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 washed your sheets at least once a week. One of the common mode.
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, a next one, the next one. There also is like keep your, I'm sorry. This hurts my heart. I don't even and truthfulness, I violate this with, keep your pets out of your bedroom and certainly keep them off your bed. Argos Face Killer is my dog. And now he's my other one. They don't go on my bed but they were 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 is going on in the room. 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. 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 they are conditioner kick.
On and off a night actually can shoot you out of various sleep station. So you want to be really careful about us 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, it 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 one of the members on our team is a Harvard MD, in Psychiatry and put together an entire sleeps can survey. So we run through all that to see if there's things, I 80 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
You. So we take all those data, they go back to our team, we work in combination with Steve Lucky 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, himself, Jeffrey Drummer and MD, Ph.D cetera, and all these folks in the room, go over your data, identify what's going on in to 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 it out, sleep, that service is
available. Absolute rest. Sounds like an amazing tool given that most people won't be able to use it 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 a say, they're sleeping environment for and
Determine whether or not they are hindering their sleep. Without realizing it, for instance, the air conditioning going on and off, or this could be heater going on and off or Central Heating or cooling unit. This could be keeping the room dark. This could be cleaning your sheets. Certainly that doesn't require that one sign up for absolutely Resto. Cleaning, one-sheets routinely, keeping pets out of the bedroom as you admitted. You don't entirely 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 terminals Lab at Columbia Medical School in New York on negative ionization and the sounds pretty wacky kind of new age. EP, I'm sure something like a negative ionization. But listen to determine 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 of 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 it will completely transform everything that you do and not getting excellent. Sleep consistently, which is a challenge for so, so many people will also transform everything that you do and think and feel but in the
negative Direction. Yeah.
Also offer a few tips on sleep based on things. We find most consistently for those that can't go through the whole protocol 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 in enter your location your time, where you're going with the location and then it'll actually back calculate. It will give you a full light. Stimulant food, hydration is stuff protocol and you just follow along with that. And we've used that for many years actually.
And especially when traveling, I like Abu Dhabi, for advice 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. It's great. Nice to 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 know, put little piece of wood or something, underneath it, you can also buy very inexpensive pillows that
Debate. That now that's not solving the problem, but at least can help you sleep it. Whether it's just that night or if it's a consistent problem, you can do there if you're snoring. Like I said, that's not really benign. You should probably take a look at that. Your first up, there is mouth tape. If that doesn't work, you can go through what's called myofunctional therapy, 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, it's just
It's kind of like you do like depending on the protocol, some tongue exercises kind of in 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 pretty well, demonstrated to help with sleep. So you can probably Google. We could find a link for exact protocols. I don't want to describe all them, but yeah. You can 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 if you're struggling with.
With.
Not. It could be insomnia but it could be just things. Like when you get into bed, you're super tired, you can't fall asleep or things like that, kind of a basic rule of thumb. We use is only two things happen in your bed and if you can make sure those are, the only two things you do in your bed, the problems of falling 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 quite effectively improve, your ability to fall asleep.
Then not wake up early, so keeping that environment.
Specific to what it's for can be effective. The only other thing I could 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 you can do a couple of things, if it helps 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. So if you get, even if you're on a king
Nice bed or something and I know some people are just like there's no chance but if you want to know the cost for your like the effects
of and your relationship
is your is your loved one.
Ideally is, don't please don't oh my goodness. So
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 which is called orthosis Omnia. So that is a term that is people are growing concerned over 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 so you learn when to wake up and so you have actually 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 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 is the same thing. If you checked your phone or Twitter, whatever, and immediately morning that will 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 have fun with it, great. But if you like, you are really, really, really interested in it, and you pay a lot of attention to it. Don't check your sleep score for at least the first 60 minutes after waking up and then, you know, that should help you. That's a great
tool. I think they'll and piece of advice, I think generally, because I think a lot of people are waking up in the middle, 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 like a family member who's maybe not in great health as 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 it. Get leave it in there. Leave it in. Do not disturb and enter and their phone number or whoever so 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 knowing.
Now and a new DM like get all that stuff off your screen. And so you look at the anybody called anybody text of importance. 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 have woken up in the middle of the night and for some reason can't and is also very effective for enhancing sleep. When one is ingesting fewer carbohydrates. An issue that a lot of
People run into or four 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 myo-inositol. I find again, this is anecdotal to be clear if I wake up in the middle of the night and I've taken 900 milligrams of inositol before initially falling asleep, that I fall back asleep, much more easily. So that's why I've added 900 milligrams of inositol to my so-called sleep stack.
We also tried just taking it alone and it works well alone. But works better of course with the mag three and eight apigenin thinning sleep stack. The the also in terms of tools for Sleep, the the app or every that was developed by my colleague. Dr. David Spiegel. Who is 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 month-to-month, but the data are really strong that people that
Use that. I think it's 8 to 11 minutes, 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 mention this because obviously, it's a technology, it's not a supplement, but I know that some people are supplement to verse also. If you look at by at the cost, comparison between taking the Sleep. Sack totally.
And the reverie app, it's Pennies on the dollar, really? 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 it's really just a tool. Any of these breathwork, protocols, hypnosis protocols, there's just a tool for you to touch back in with your own physiology rather than
A substance that's coming in. So I fully support those. We have used a number of those in protocols. There's some other tricks that we can pull in those areas. I probably shouldn't say this but the reality 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 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 anxieties gone or sometimes you guys go back to sleep, cause you're like, especially the task only literally would take like 10 or 15 minutes. It may ruin your sleep, but you're going to have ruined sleep anyways. So you can try that tool, you don't want to pull that card very often and you have to have to be very careful to 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, it's more than a few times or it's just like
I get an idea, I don't lose it or like the solution for something you've been doing on for a long time, Pops in your head and just like in your not 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.
G8 with exercise related health, things like huge increases in blood pressure, during exercise, huge increases in inflammatory markers.
Muscle damage and these 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 yet updation in the recovery, within the realm of supplementation and nutrition. I'm aware of a number of things herbal. Some lipid-based other compounds that are used for various things, but that are known to have a potent anti-inflammatory.
But things like omega-3 fatty acids ashwagandha, for its effect on cortisol. Although that's a bit indirect to the inflammatory pathway 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, our prescription or over-the-counter drug and when to strictly avoid taking any anti-inflammatory supplement or not, 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 taken?
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 a Temptation, right? Recovers recovery adaptation is what happens after you're recovered. This was a very important section. They're finished fatigue. Model says, basically, you've done something and you've got an adaptation and you've enhanced
This and my Fitness in this case, I mean it as a nonspecific 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 fatigued elevated. So what happens is, if Fitness increases at the same or similar rate as fatigued, your performance actually isn't any better until you may think. Oh my program is working. I need to then train harder or I need to take more anti-inflammatory or whatever the things are when reality.
See, 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.
And to 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 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 use to work it out, 4 days a week, keep it for days, a week, you can go down a little bit and 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 in performance within a matter of days. So it's important to do that. We actually ran a study on
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 here's our Collegiate, cross-country Runners. And we got them to come to our lab three weeks before their conference Championship. Ran them all through bunch of testing biopsied them. They went through their three-week taper and we biopsy them again and then they went and ran 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 to high intensity stuff in there, they kept the recovery stuff. And then at medium pace, they just basically reduced. Now they were terrified as any endurance Runner or Dare. It's out later. Participant would understand. When you take volume away, they tend to get very nervous and so they didn't 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 and three weeks overdue.
Just taper your Fitness is in is extremely stable. And in fact, once we actually looked at their data, the enzymes in their muscle responsible for oxidative metabolism were maintained and so you don't have to worry about losing again Fitness. We're talking about overall performance or even oxygen capacity, mitochondrial function Etc. That was all preserved.
Obviously, we saw performance go up. It was actually really interesting as we saw, I think it was around a 10%, increase in type 2 which are fast twitch, muscle fiber size.
So we saw a 10% increase in fast-twitch fibers 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 remove that fatigue, they just recovered back to normal. So that's a good example of what I'm talking about. Once you remove the fatigue, you can actually see enhancements in performance, not because you're necessarily getting better but because you're removing the stimuli by suppressing you. So that being said, the way
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 as start signaling the injuries there. And this case, even if it's muscle damage and activates the immune system to
Calling in that whole repair process. Happens there? What you're trying to do effectively in fact, this is why you probably ever wonder like why is inflammation. A thing. What you're trying to do is bring in fluid, enhance the size and increase, blood flow ends, the you can get nutrients for repair and immune cells and romantic that in the system and get the waist out. So short term inflammation even in the case of muscle soreness is the example, 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. A good option here are things like Omega-3s, good evidence, Sumter somewhere in the neighborhood of like 225 grams, total typically, like a one-to-one EPA to DHA ratio is fine.
Murli. This is another example of when good. Does it mean more is better? Because for example, there is ever actually evidence showing up to 15 grams will harm the immune response and so you don't just want to be like, man, I'm super sore. I'm training harder, I'm just going to go to 10 grams a day or more and more. 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 mg 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 bus. Well, Leah 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 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.
In reducing DHT, dihydrotestosterone and leads to all sorts of clamping of testosterone, Associated positive things. So I have experienced that myself. I've had people write to me and say, I don't understand, I started taking a supplement, curcumin supposed to be a great anti-inflammatory, it Flatline 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.
And while it's a potent anti-inflammatory can also put only 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 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 those
Negative effects on DHT, seem to reverse pretty quickly after ceasing to take curcumin. So, just to mention of something that came up in a previous episode, but in case people didn't hear that on that segment, just want to highlight those. Those facts
further evidence, do 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, it's probably not a good approach.
Let's have a reason to do so. Step two was actually what we call proliferation, and that's kind of like the clean up 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 glutamine, 20 grams a day. We typically, honestly split it up into two dosage. 10, grams morning, 10 grams 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.
Only 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 a something else and use it for whatever else is needed. So it's kind of another one of these like low-risk products is also why
You see it? And a lot of recovery products if you're ever wondering, like, what the heck is that in there? I don't need em. You know, asses you're thinking it's like for protein synthesis. It's really not it's because of this. It is beneficial to this proliferation process.
I've been taking glutamine for years. I tend to take it in higher dosages several times throughout the day, if I'm ever feeling particularly rundown. Yep, I know. They're 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
Like not super well substantiated but earlier in the in the peer-reviewed literature but some a lot of anak data and and certainly some peer-reviewed work, but not a ton. And then there is also growing interest in the idea that glutamine and 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 and emerging theme which makes
It's 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 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 gluten of glutamine in some water or other drink a couple times throughout the day as a way to reduce their sugar Cravings. Because what's essentially doing is it's tricking the pathway into
Activation of those neurons through an alternate ligand, receptor interaction,
right? Also, another interesting point there are very, I'm trying, think right now, it's not 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, it makes them 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 of 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. Beta alanine is the same thing by the way. We sort of talked about that earlier if you've ever tried that and you're like oh my gosh, like I feel like I've just rolled around and grass and my skin is itching.
Everywhere that
Hands 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 often times do they are start at a dosage. That's pretty minimal, like 2 G and then every week or so you can go up another gram until you get to whatever final point you want to be 56 grams day, you know, whatever. So that's another way you can sort of mitigate that problem, the third step in this recovery process after him.
Animation proliferation. We're now into Remodeling and this is when you're actually, you know, quote, unquote growing back bigger and stronger. 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 often times, if people are hurt whether they had an injury or they've had just their super sore,
And they are concerned about eating excess calories. They tend to want to eat less food during this process because they're like, I'm not working out so much. So I'm going to eat less calories. One of the things that you have to pay attention to is injury can increase basal metabolic rate by up to 10%. So what you want to do in general is just take your calories up about 10% least, that's what I recommend. 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 were 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.
And of protein per pound of body weight or more or one gram or
more. Yeah. And there's going to be very little downside to having more. 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 it an elegy about use making a campfire and using
At 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 didn't know 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 your moderate great, if you're the indirect, if you're higher fat lower car 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 again is that protein number? And if you go a little bit high or even a lot hi it's totally fine. Just don't go low. So that's the the macronutrient portion of remodeling in terms of my
Nutrients. To be honest, you just get your bases covered. This is one. 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 their magnesium. Citrate is probably house.
The most evidence in terms of this respect but it doesn't mean. I actually have no reason to think you couldn't use a licen eight or if you're using another form for sleep, that 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 the sudden not work. So you can probably choose whichever form you. Like I'll be at citrate has probably the most research in this aspect. The only other things you would probably consider here
Three things. I'm calcium. Might be on your list. Particularly if you're trying to do, if your concern of some sort of bone injury and we've sort of gone past like recovering R 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, our vitamin D and that's pretty well researched. And then the last one is actually something that can help you if you're at this stage and you still are dealing with a lot of soreness or not. And that is tart cherry juice. That's actually effective for both.
Mom'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 and then there's actually more ongoing research that I know of in those areas. But promising literature will 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 if you like, you can also say pass, if you don't think that you can answer the question 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 confess. I'm looking at these for the first time. So, I'll try to be quick with my, with my reading. Some of these. We may have touched on in a previous episodes or in this episode even in which case you can just kind of Q 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 Quito, 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 is no key to arm the results of that study. By the time this comes out will probably be ready of though. I'm not sure so I can't comment on, I haven't looked at the data but regarding when I 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. Your professor. You can profess. I can profess. We generally don't spend too much time on Gabba rarely
is it okay to weight train fasted then 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 from intermittent fasting study back. 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, I'm turned out that. Can you train high-performance fasted and how long before you need to refuel the body?
Yeah you can certainly do that. I know of actually many athletes some athletes 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,
Doors are topped off, you have a fighting chance. Now, the duration part of that equation is really kind of dependent upon you. So are you really talking 30, 45 minutes, 60 Minutes? You're probably fine whether you're out past, that is several hours, you may not be. And then the only other comment I would make is there's keep in mind whenever you think about fasting and any other, let's say against the textbook, you know, quote unquote strout style. You really really need to be careful and thinking the difference between can I do it?
And is optimal so I have absolutely no reason to think fasting like that would improve performance. I only work for the most part of people who are trying to perform the highest level possible. So I can't think of a scenario which I would go to 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 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 by carbohydrates which is does carbohydrate cycling work. So these are two questions from people that I think don't know one another but a lot of carbon 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, / carb cycling. So carbohydrate loading does help. However, a misconception there is. It's just been, you know, a big bowl of pasta that
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 Mah. Usually, if your total protein intake is fine, then you don't really have a need for them. 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 your 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 the maximize recovery is not that very, so we will sometimes use that pre-made or post training and some circumstances of total protein. Would be my a high-quality way, something like that. If you can't use way 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, that was hoping somebody would ask this touched on it a little bit.
It's a little bit of a loaded question, the way they phrased it. So, at risk of leading, the witness does, the mythical anabolic window, really exist and I'm just laughing is the way they pose. The question, they're already telling us what their stance is making it more effective as to create hypertrophy to eat within a certain timeframe. 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 because they
refer to it as mythical. I'm going to assume that they're suspicious but what's the deal is the anabolic window? A real
thing, the post-exercise anabolic window is extremely real. So what this is, 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 some time domain, 30 or 60 Minutes post exercise in order to maximize growth. So
is that window real? Yes. Are you hyper sensitized to nutrients in that timeframe? Yes. Is it very important that you rehydrate replenish muscle glycogen and rebuild tissue quickly after exercise to maximize recovery? Absolutely it's not real though in the sense that you there 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 carbohydrates, especially if you're training multiple times a day.
It is very real so it is a very real thing. It's just you may or may not actually care about it. It may not be important for your
context garlic. Seems like an appropriate question. What? If any functional roles does garlic have in
performance Garlic's actually really cool. There's a number of things you can dive into that are outside of my three to four senses, considering them at like two and a half, probably already, you're not going to find strong human data on garlic extract. However, there is a little
A bit suggesting, it can actually enhance recovery from injury or potential tissue damage. So you got to kind of be careful though, because in order to understand what's happening, you have to differentiate between innate and adaptive recovery processes. And when we say things like Community 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
Also sees, if you're about to correct my speech. I'll correct years. Right? Back, not yours. Andy listeners. Crosses brought tomato tomahto. It's a verb immunity is a verb.
This is my problem with immune boosters. Same issue, right? You're like, whoa, 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.
Then the process because you were, theoretically, could be trying to down regulate that portions that you can up regulator next portion. That's the faster way to say it if you will. So 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.
A pretty effective actually for two things, potentially hating and sleep getting sleep as well as muscle soreness. That's the bulk of the research is in muscle soreness and seems to be a moderate vector.
I think for people that might be interested in dosages of things like tart, cherry extract garlic Etc, obviously, dr. Andy galvan's, Instagram and Twitter are great places to ask questions like that and to find question answers to questions like that, as well as examiner.com as a terrific website, they actually recently overhauled their entire website. So they have this human effect Matrix that shows the the effects and the strength of different effects in human studies of many, many different compounds.
Lb related everything to, you know, Hormone Health and 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 examined.com. You can access some additional features. And this is, by the way, not a paid endorsement from examine.com, I'm simply long time user of examined.com myself and so I just want
Q people to it. And again many of the resources there are available completely free of cost. It's a Wonderful sight. So for dosages of garlic, tart, cherry extract, and things of that sort whether or not you're getting from food or you're getting it from extract powders, rather. All of that information 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 know, I've been using that since the First Data website was launched, I was made aware that it was coming.
I've been fortunate to know those guys for a while so you have used it. I use it at all my classes, I use it. I don't even know. Probably weekly at this point. Another nice, 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
testosterone testosterone enhancement or hormone menstrual cycle.
And yeah, PCOS. I think they did wanton and all kinds of stuff. So you can search by topic.
Like, you know, energy or recovery or whatever, or you can search by black cumin seed, extract or like, whatever number of things you want to do. And I'll also tell you if there's any interactions to pay attention to. So it's really, really nice. So be careful if you're taking a and b or whatever. So yeah, it's wonderful wonderful.
Yeah, they've done a marvelous job, so thank you. Examine.com, keep up, keep up the amazing work. Well, we've come close to the end of this episode and that means that we are close to the end of this series where you have, so
Graciously joined us for six full episodes of The huberman, Lab podcast to educate us on all things Fitness episode 1, 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 an in-home. I jump jump in 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 is specific times. Also, some timing of Mile runs and some other things related to strength and hypertrophy and on, and on, really. It's a, it's a buffet.
Say of options that we can select from. And I already know the 45 that I started implementing this week. I've recognized how I'm pretty good in a couple of areas I'm doing maybe maybe better than pretty well in one area but that I'm doing a compass movie poorly in a few areas that I just wasn't aware of. And so I have a already started taking on ways to adjust that over time and I'll keep people posted. So that first episode was absolutely incredible.
The bomber just provides so much actionable knowledge and the rationale behind it. The second episode you educated us about strength speed and hypertrophy training and their to an immense amount of incredible knowledge we got way down into the details. You explain 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
Rafi and I'm relieved to learn that. A lot of the speed and power base training, its low intensity enough that it can be done fairly often and incorporated into my program which is 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 325 program that you describe three to five exercises done for three to five repetitions.
Three to five minutes between sets. You're doing this three to five times per week and so on and so forth. All the details, again time-stamped in the strength and hypertrophy episode show notes. 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 I'm really grateful for that. It does feel good to break through a barrier and I intend to break through more barriers, but not just with strength and hypertrophy because episode 3,
You taught us all about endurance, the four different forms of endurance, how to train for each of those different forms, the value of doing, even very brief 22nd. Sprint's are bouts of jumping jacks throughout the day, which to some people might just sound like a, you know, like a little hacker. Give me. 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 high school
Mi time, I won't reveal what that is because this is not really about me. But I plan to start doing if not mile repeats, then doing some mile mile runs and testing their 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 as 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 bin,
Fitness in the other been and Recovery in the other bin. And here, we'll tip our hats are good friend. Kenny Kane for mentioning that overall scheme for doing things have 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 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 were 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 in that some sort of character trait, what 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. And that's also despite the fact that we've spent a fair amount of time in these chairs across from one
another, the kind of way to say it.
Well it's been it's been a pleasure and then in today's episode you explained nutrition and supplementation as it relates to Performance. And of course that touches
Into recovery but also optimal mental States for training how to approach ones 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 of 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, containing 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 I'm looking for a USB or USB C 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.
Jen. 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 certainly motivating me to change the way that I trained 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 doctor, any gal, pins experience, and drive, and 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 words to me there. If you've been following along through this entire Journey, as you called it, you know, I like first principles thinking and I like lists. So I'm going to get you with one more list and I got five things on this final list. Get your pen and pad out please. Number one, I want to really emphasize
Science itself is a verb, which means it's ongoing and changing. 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 they all 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 listen 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 about a Galpin
black. I got some black, how about an internet high, five and even if you just dropped in for a few of the episodes, you know, I appreciate you taking the time.
Is 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. I want to actually thank you. Of course, Andrew. And the whole team, the crew up here for three things. Number one. 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. 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 bad, but I think it was 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. Guess have never been on a podcast before or have been in a very short number of them and you've made an extremely large platform doing nothing but talking about super
Dork science directly from the scientists themselves and to create a community like that. It's I'm so happy. The science is made it here and you shown the world. People aren't stupid. People want detail and people want science, and you've given us them.
The last one, of course, see if I get through this is, thank you for all you've done for me and my career. I understand there could have been any number of people in this chair, to put me on your platform, once was incredibly gracious. But you do it for $600, whatever we did in this series is 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.
You more than exceeded expectations. You are absolutely the person to be in this chair talking about, these topics with me and for the world. And once again, I just want to say thank you as a colleague as a public educator as an exercise scientist, and as a friend,
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Room and lab.com. You can also go into the menu tab and go to newsletter and see some example newsletters from months past. Thank you once again for joining me for today's discussion about fitness exercise and performance with dr. Andy Galpin. And as always, thank you for your interest in science.
