In this solo‑host podcast episode, Dr. Christopher Ellis defines physiological resilience as the body’s ability to absorb stress and return to baseline. He argues that modern life makes us fragile and that most clinicians work in narrow silos, so a holistic, whole‑body view is needed. Ellis introduces a five‑constraint framework for resilience—sleep/recovery, energy & metabolism, movement capacity, stress & nervous system, and gut & immune resistance. For each constraint he outlines objective assessment tools: HRV (via Oura Ring) for sleep/recovery; continuous glucose monitors for metabolism; VO2 max (Concept2 2,000 m row) for movement; CO₂ tolerance/BOLT breath‑hold and cold‑exposure for stress; GI‑MAP stool testing and a simple baking‑soda stomach‑acid test for gut/immune health. He shares a patient anecdote linking fasting, stress, and injury to illustrate the framework. To help listeners identify their weakest constraint, Ellis offers the Dynamic Flex Index (DFI), a 15‑question online quiz that generates a physiologic flexibility score and primary focus. He then promotes his “Resilient Blueprint” and a 3‑month “Physiologic Flexibility” program that combines breathwork, temperature exposure, pH training, fasting, BFR cuffs, and the aforementioned assessments. The episode ends with a call to action to use the DFI, explore the Resilient Blueprint, and adopt antifragile habits.
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Do you wonder if you're the best version of yourself? This is a question we seek to answer in this podcast. We reveal information that helps you recover your health and become resilient. Modern life makes us fragile. Our diet, lifestyle, environment set us up for failure. We do not accept this. We seek optimization. We strive to become dynamic. Hey, what's going on, Dr. Chris? Here. And today I'm talking about resilience. Once again, I've been talking about resilience for years, but more specifically how to measure it. Because I think that if you go after your body's capacity or its resilience or becoming antifragile, you become, um, you can fix a lot of problems and you can even prevent a lot of problems through that. Too many of our healthcare providers are stuck in their silo. You got a heart guy, you got a lung guy, you got a hip guy, a knee guy. And that's all well and good. But if you have to, if you take a step back and look at the body as a whole, I think you can really solve a lot of problems. And I think it's kind of funny that the word holistic, which just means like to look at the whole body, has become like associated with like fringe healthcare or something like that. It's so strange to me. What's wrong with looking at the whole body? So before we talk about how to measure and assess resilience, kind of figure out what that is. What is resilience? In a nutshell, resilience is the— your body's ability to have a stress placed upon it and return back to baseline or recover. So in other words, if you travel over time zones and you lose a lot of sleep during travel, and maybe you eat outside of your diet, how long does it take you to bounce back? Do you have to give yourself a couple of days to get back to normal? Do you get sick? Or do you return home and you can get right back in the swing of things? Because as you become a little more fragile, those things become harder to manage. And that's where injury tends to occur too. For example, I just had a patient today who she works out a lot and plays a lot of sports. And she decided to start fasting, which is kind of— she kept her regular activity, which is stress, by the way. So, I don't mean just psychological stress, just the physical demands on the body. And, she suddenly kind of got injured. And, maybe it's the addition of the stress of fasting. Maybe. I'm not saying fasting causes injury at all, but maybe there's too much stress in the bucket or not enough recovery and maybe that set her up for an injury. So, how do we make sense of this sort of big nebulous topic of resilience? What We have to first set some parameters. So, I kind of developed a little system here of 5 categories or 5 constraints is what I would call them, constraints. That is sleep recovery, energy and metabolism, movement capacity, stress and nervous system, and gut and immune resistance. There are lots of ways to assess each of these 5 constraints. A lot of them will overlap. You'll see these things are kind of like a Venn diagram. But, in an ideal world, you go after all these things. You figure out where you're weak and then first you target that. As you improve that constraint, so for example, maybe gut and immune resilience, once you improve your gut, then you go over to the next constraint. So, let's start off with some things here for sleep and recovery, some assessment tools. Well, there's tons of sleep trackers on the market. You know, I use Oura Ring. I love Oura Ring. Gives you tons of great data. Actually, they're coming out with a new one that supposedly is going to be able to monitor blood pressure, which is pretty exciting. But, the one thing that I talk about all the time is HRV. HRV is heart rate variability. That is probably the best tool to measure your recovery. In other words, your immune system has 2 sort of sides, the yin and yang, the parasympathetic and sympathetic. So, the more time you are in a sympathetic state, the lower your HRV. And therefore less recovered. The higher HRV, the more you're in a parasympathetic state, and therefore the more recovered. Of all the tools I'm going to talk about, that to me is probably the most objective, the HRV. I put sleep and recovery together as one constraint because sleep is probably the number one lever you can pull in terms of recovery. There's other things too. There's active recovery and stuff, but if you're not sleeping well, you're just not going to recover, period. The next category is energy and metabolism. For this, I'm a big fan of a CGM, a continuous glucose monitor. Blood sugar regulation is so important for health. CGM is also very objective. Sure, there may be a little bit of inaccuracy with it, maybe plus or minus 5, but the point being you can see patterns over time and see how life and food affect your blood sugar because it's not just what you put in your mouth, it's also what you do because in a stressed state, your blood sugars will elevate. There's other ways too to track your metabolism and your energy that are more subjective, but that to me is probably the number one. The next category is movement capacity. This is really kind of the physical therapy realm of things. There's a lot of ways to assess movement capacity, but let's just take one, for example, your cardiovascular system, your cardiopulmonary system. A VO2 max test is a good objective test. There's a lot of ways to do that. So that's how much can you— how much can your cardiovascular system take? So the VO2 max Concept2 rower test is a good test. So you basically row as hard as you can on a Concept2 rower for 2,000 meters. You time yourself and you just go to their website and you punch in your time, your age, yada yada, and it'll tell you what your VO2 max score is. The next category is stress and nervous system. And, this one greatly overlaps with sleep and recovery. If you're highly stressed, you're going to have poor recovery. So, the one simple test that I like to do is a CO2 tolerance test because when you are stressed, you're going to tolerate CO2 in the bloodstream less effectively, something called a BOLT test. Really simple to do. You basically take a couple regular breaths and at the end of an exhale, a regular exhale, not a max exhale, You pinch your nose closed and you time in seconds how long you can hold your breath. Now, it's not a max breath hold test. It's a comfortable breath hold test. So if you finish the test and you're gasping for air, you've, you've held your breath for too long. So basically, you hold your nose closed, time it until something voluntary happens— like involuntary, sorry— like you swallow or you just have a sudden like air hunger, you need to breathe. And so ideally, you can get in the 20 to 25 second range or better. If you're getting 45 seconds or more, then you're probably an elite cardiovascular athlete. If you're down to around 15 seconds or less, there's a lot of room for improvement, and that's a sign that your body's under stress. We all know stress is bad, but I would say it's understated just how bad it is. And the greater your stress, the— just the worse off your body is in All categories. I've noticed this myself, just cold plunging. If I slept well and recovered and my body is under very little stress, I can tolerate colder temperatures for longer. I can almost assess my stress levels by just seeing how much I can take in a cold plunge. Alright. And so, for the last category, gut and immune resilience, there's a lot of ways we can look at this. So, we can see what your white blood cells are doing through blood work. We can test your gut with something like a GI MAP test, stool test. We can see what your digestion looks like. A simple test you can do for digestion is to see what your stomach acid is like because you actually need a fair amount of stomach acid to digest food. There's this old idea that too much acid in diet causes reflux, which maybe is part of it, but you can also get reflux from too little acid because basically your body, your stomach is not digesting food and it goes into your small intestine And, the bacteria there gobble it up and produce gases, which open up the LES, which is the valve, and cause regurgitation. So, you don't want to suppress your acid to zero. That's not a good idea. And, that's, by the way, how a lot of people become deficient in a lot of micronutrients. So, this is a quick little test. It's not the most reliable test in the world, but it gives you some idea. So, the baking soda test is you take a teaspoon of baking soda, you You put it in a small glass of water, you stir it, and then you swallow it and time how long it takes to burp. It should take you 2 minutes or less to burp. If it's like 4 or 5, 6 minutes, that's a pretty good indicator that you have low stomach acid and poor digestion. Because when you mix acid with sodium bicarbonate, it creates an eruption. So, it's kind of like that middle school science experiment with the volcano. Same thing. You should— you're supposed to belch after a minute or 2. So that's a general overview of a bunch of different assessments you can use to check out your bias, see how it's doing. And that's all a bit confusing, I know. So I created something called the DFI, the Dynamic Flex Index. It's just a 15-question test quiz. It will take you about 3 minutes to fill out. And it's a broad stroke. It's just to get an idea because it kind of asks questions for all 5 of these domains or constraints. And it gives you an idea which one is your low-hanging fruit, which is the one primary constraint that you can start going after first to start building up your buyer's resilience. I'll put this quiz in the show notes. Go ahead and take it within, you know, after, as soon as you submit the quiz, check your email, you'll get a score sheet. It'll tell you how your adaptable level is, your flexibility level. It's, I would call a physiologic flexibility level. It'll also tell you your primary focus and give you a couple little clues of things to start working on. And it'll also link to my website where I have resources for each of these categories. It's all free stuff. There's free eBooks and stuff that you can download to start addressing it. So check out the Dynamic Flex Index. And then if you want to take it a step further, I built a whole program around this idea of resilience or becoming more robust and antifragile. It's called the Resilient Blueprint. So when you go through these steps here, you'll see, You'll see links to the Resilient Blueprint if you want to go further with that program. It's all online. We do a lot of resiliency training through breathwork, cold exposure, heat exposure, pH training. So, things like fasting or using BFR cuffs, all these things that put demands on your pH system. And then, we work on CO2 tolerance as well and blusher. I forgot to mention blusher. So that's all part of this, uh, this is a 3-month program. It gives you the assessment tools you need. You start off with the DFI, then I usually recommend a bolt test, a VO2 max test, and HRV training. And then you can go through the program. So the program is written very general. You can just do the whole program or you can tailor it specific to your primary focus. So give that a shot, take a look at the Resilient Blueprint and go ahead and take that DFI test. A ship in harbor is safe, but that's not what ships are meant to do. What does this mean? It means exposing yourself to difficult situations so you become resilient. If you need help building resilience, check out our flagship program called Physiologic Flexibility. This is a 3-month do-it-yourself program that teaches you how to maximize your homeostatic regulators such as your pH, blood glucose, O2 and CO2 tolerance, and temperature. We give you specific action items through through the program with the goal of becoming antifragile. If you want to become the inspiration for your friends and family, this is the program for you.
