Inside The Bizarre World & Strange Science of Exercise Recovery: What Works, What Doesn't & Why Many Studies Are Flawed.

On this episode of the Ben Greenfield.

Fitness Podcast, I really did want to believe it. We sort of got really excited, but I really had a hard time believing the results. And let me explain to you why.

The long story short is that for most people, real food does just as good as a lot of this food that we're led to believe a lot of elite athletes are consuming, when in fact, they're just kind of paid to be a poster boy.

The most important skill that any athlete can develop is an ability to read their own body.

If not used properly, it may actually impair recovery, health, performance, nutrition, longevity, ancestral living, biohacking, and much more. My name is Ben Greenfield. Welcome to the show. Well, if you're confused about all those crazy recovery biohacks and performance biohacks out there and what's snake oil and what's not, you're gonna like today's episode with the author of a brand new book called To Go. All right, so if you've been listening to this show for a while, you know, I talk about all sorts of crazy recovery modalities, everything from acupuncture to PEMF to hyperbaric oxygen and beyond. And so my head swiveled when I saw that this gal named Christy Ashwanden. I don't even know. Am I pronouncing your name right? Christie.

It's Christy Ashwanden.

Well, I got Christy, right?

Christy Ashwandan. Yeah, not bad. I've heard worse.

So anyways, you guys, Christy wrote this book, and the book is called Good to Go. I don't know who sent it to me or how I got my hands on it, but it wound up on my bookshelf, and it was sitting there for a while, and I finally got around to cracking open the pages and reading it, and it's actually pretty entertaining. She goes through, like, drinking Gatorade versus beer after training, Tom Brady's infrared pajamas, pneumatic compression boots, cup. You know, all the stuff that you see a lot of pro athletes and celebrities doing and biohackers, you know, like cryo chambers and float tanks and infrared saunas. She just kind of did, like, this immersive, journalistic exploration of whether or not these things actually work for goals like recovery or for performance. And what's cool is Christy is not just, like, you know, sitting in a basement tapping away in a typewriter. She's an athlete, too. Like, she's raced in Europe and North America on the Team Rossignol Nordic Ski Racing Squad and lives in Colorado, which is a highly active area. She does trail running, bicycling, skiing. And so she gets out there and does stuff. So she was probably the perfect person to write this book, try out all this stuff on herself, and then report back on what works and what doesn't. So we're going to get into a little bit of an enlightening discussion today, I think for any of you who are skeptical about some of these things, and rightly so. So all the show notes for everything we talk about, including a link to Christy's new book called Good to Go, you can find@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Good to go. That's BenGreenfieldFitness.com GoodToGo. Christy, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for inviting me on. Pleasure to be here.

Yeah, I actually was pretty intrigued in the I think it was the first chapter in the book because you talked about a beer study and kind of a surprising result of a beer study. It sounds like that's what kind of got you interested a little bit in writing the rest of the book. So let's start there. What was this whole beer study that got you interested in recovery and biohacking and all this stuff?

Yeah, sure. The decision to begin the book with this beer study was very deliberate. And the reason for this is I really wanted people to understand this sort of bigger problem or this bigger issue, and that is that science is really hard. Look, I'm a science journalist by vocation. That's my day job as writing about science. I've been writing a lot about COVID right now. But answering even simple questions with science is a really sort of painstaking process. We don't get instant answers. And I think we have a tendency to, you know, put too much faith in single studies. And so the beer study started with this very simple question that I have. I mean, I live in Colorado, so I am a beer drinker. We have a pretty big craft beer industry here. I will admit that I'm a bit of a beer snob.

I actually know this because I own a supplements company called Kion, and it's based out of Boulder. Whenever I visit. Well, I should say this. When I visit Boulder, there's microbreweries and beer everywhere. But I also live in Spokane, Washington, which is, I have described it in the past as like a poor man's Boulder because it's extremely outdoorsy community with tons of breweries, you know, a little bit more backwoods and redneck than Boulder. But anyways, I get it. There's. There's lots of beer down there.

Yeah. So, you know, a lot of my running buddies and, you know, I do a lot of things, I like to mountain bike. It's usually mountain biking and running. Trail running, though, that we like to finish up a workout with a nice cold beer. And yeah, I got to thinking, is this really such a great idea? Is it possible that I'm wrecking my recovery with this? Even though I know that having that post workout beer can be really enjoyable. And sometimes it's enjoyable not just because of the beer itself, but this whole ritual of it's something that you're drinking to sort of say, hey, we're relaxing now, the hard stuff's over. This is time to sort of let loose and relax. But I was really curious about the science here. And so I went to the scientific literature, which is where I usually start when I'm going to write about something. And I found that there wasn't a lot of good research on this. Most of the research that had been done on alcohol and exercise had actually been done. This is kind of funny to me, but a lot of it was done looking at exercise performance, like while drinking or post drinking, which was definitely not the scenario I was looking for. Right. I'm looking for, like, whether it's bad.

To go to the. Pretty much something relegated to the realm of the golf course in most cases.

Yeah, exactly. But then it turns out. So there was some research on this, but it turns out, for reasons I'm not sure of, it seems that most of this research was done on rugby players who I have to sort of hats off to them, these guys can drink. I mean, these studies were like six or seven or eight beers after a bout of exercise, which is absolutely not what I'm curious about. I mean, I don't need a study to tell me that getting drunk after a hard workout is probably not good for me. Probably not good for me, whether I've been working out or not. Right. And it certainly wasn't the scenario I was interested in. And so I thought, well, you know, I actually started off before I was a journalist, I was a scientist. And I thought, I'm still sort of a researcher, sort of an experimentalist at heart. And so I thought, you know, why don't we do a study? I had. It just so happened that a buddy of mine, a running buddy who was at the time the cross country coach at our local college, also ran the exercise lab and was a home brewer. So, like, what could be more perfect, right? Like, it took me about two seconds to convince him, yeah, that we should do this study. And so we. We started off with this seemingly extremely simple question, which was, does drinking beer after a hard run impair recovery? That seems pretty straightforward, shouldn't be that hard to answer. But it turns out that it was incredibly hard to do this. The first problem that we ran into, the first issue was, okay, well, what do we mean by recovery? Because if you're going to study something scientifically, it's not enough to just ask the question. You need to have some sort of measure and some way that you're going to tally your results. And so, you know, we had to think about this a little bit. What do we mean by recovery? How are we going to measure it, and how is that meaningful to us? And for me, it really meant, you know, I'm sort of a recreational athlete now. I was elite and pretty serious back in my day, but I'm more of a master blaster and doing this stuff for fun. But I want to know if I'm having that beer after a race or after a hard run, am I going to feel wrecked the next day? Is it. Is it going to feel like the next run isn't going to feel very possible? Am I going to feel extra sore? All of these things? Will I not sleep well? But we ended up having to figure out ways to quantify this. And at the time, in retrospect, I think I wish we would have gone and taken a little bit more time to think this through. But what we ended up doing was using just some very standard markers that are used in these kinds of exercise tests. And one of the most commonly used tests to measure things in these sorts of studies is something called the run to exhaustion. This can also be done on a bike, but it seems to be more often done running. And this is something where they, just before starting all of the studies, they'll put all of the participants through this whole battery of tests to figure out their VO2 max and all of that. And so you're put at this high rate of your max heart rate, basically to see how long you can go. And so you're going. And I think for this, it was something like 80 or 85% of your max. And so people would go. And that was our measure of recovery. Now, we also looked at some other things. We asked people to report during this run to exhaustion how they were feeling, how their sort of qualitative feelings of effort. We also looked at a few metabolic measures because one hypothesis that we had is that alcohol might affect how you're utilizing fuel. So whether you're using carbohydrates or fat preferentially, and we didn't end up finding much difference there. We also thought that there was a possibility that we could find a gender difference in the way that things were metabolized.

And to clarify that this run time to exhaustion, you were still studying the alcohol consumption after, or was this alcohol consumption before?

Yeah. I'll give you a little rundown on the methodology. So basically what we did is we had people come into the lab, they were put on a treadmill and ran at like 75% maybe of the max, I can't remember. But basically for, I think it was about 45 minutes, about a 45 minute run on the treadmill. And basically this run was designed to deplete glycogen because one of the hypotheses that we wanted to test is that there seemed to be some hints in the literature. It wasn't definitive, but there seemed to be some hints that alcohol might impair glycogen reuptake. So it might impair your body's ability to replenish those glycogen stores and that would be something that would impair your recovery. So we wanted to specifically look at that. So we didn't do. It's pretty invasive to do actual glycogen testing of the muscles. So we didn't do that, but we did this run to a.

Hurts like hell. Those, those muscle punch biopsies. I've, I've. I was part of a study where we had to do before and after a three hour treadmill run at. It was a ketosis study at UConn called the Faster Study. And yeah, I, I just remember running for three hours on the treadmill post muscle biopsy. I felt like somebody was just digging knives into my thighs with every step. So, yeah, not, not a fun way to measure the, the glycogen amount in muscle. So what, what'd you say you guys did instead?

Okay, so we did the run to exhaustion. We did these, you know, we took the rpe, the what is it? Rating of perceived exertion.

Yeah.

Which is, you know, basically asking you, how do you feel on a scale to 1 to 10? There are different scales that you can use. And then we looked at, you know, we had people wear these masks so we could tell what kind of metabolism they were using, if it was carbs or fat and all of that. So those were our measures. And so people came in for the first run and ran for about 45 minutes. I believe it was at this pretty hard run, but not so hard that you're completely crushed afterwards, but just hard enough that you need to feel like you're going to recover for the next one. And then right after the run, what we did is we fed everyone a pasta dinner along with a beer which we had titrated to get. So basically the level of alcohol that we were going for was just slightly below the legal limit for driving in Colorado. And so this wasn't enough to be knocked down drunk or anything like that. You wanted to be just below where it was still legal for you to drive. But it was enough beer for me. 130 pound woman. It was one beer. This was Fat Tire Amber Ale. So we weren't drinking Bud Lights. It was one hearty beer, may have been one and a half, but it wasn't a lot. And it was over a little bit of a time course anyway. But we did this and then the next morning everyone came back and did the run to exhaustion. So you get on the treadmill and you have to go at this pretty hard pace until you can go no longer. And then we repeated the whole experiment. And here was sort of the trick was that everyone did this two day series under two different conditions. We had the Fat Tire beer and then we had, we were calling it the placebo beer. It was a non alcoholic beer whose really only redeeming quality was that in the little cups it looked a lot like Fat Tire. And so, you know, we did that.

It's disappointingly tasteless in my experience with non alcohol.

Yeah, yeah, it is. But you know, there are other things in beer too. And there is also, you know, beer is actually a very. Has a lot of water in it too.

Yeah, water, electrolytes, carbohydrates, things in addition to the ethanol that will have an impact.

Yeah. So we were definitely trying to sort of preferentially look at the alcohol. Anyway, so we did the study and we got the results back. There were 10 people in the study, five women, five men. And I'll just add that I was one of the, the participants and I'm really glad that I was because I learned some things and I'll get into that in a second. But the results came back and what we found was that women performed better on that run to exhaustion the morning after they'd had the post run beer. Whereas men, their performance was, you know, that beer was detrimental to their performance by about the same percentage. It was about 20% difference was what we found. And so that sounds really exciting. And I can just tell you that as a woman who's married to a man. This was like, awesome. Because it's like, okay, sorry, sweetie, you're the designated driver. I'm the drinker. You know, this is all for our performance.

Exactly. But studies have shown.

Right. So I just, you know, I was totally primed to want to believe this. I mean, I really. I really did want to believe it. And we sort of got really excited, but I really had a hard time believing the results. And let me explain to you why. First of all, there were 10 people, and we had a really large variety of results between us. So we had one guy, Marty, who's an ultra runner, who ended up getting the placebo beer the first time, and he ran, like, some ridiculous amount. It was like over an hour on this run to exhaustion, which you're not supposed to do. But he's just a really fit ultra runner. He was in his prime right then. And so we did the second go round very close to the first one. And so chances are he was pretty wrecked on the second one. And that difference kind of skews the averages. Right? And then we had some people who were pretty similar on both of them. But what you end up having is that this variety can kind of skew those averages. And, you know, these statistical analyses are supposed to sort of account for that sum, but they can't completely eliminate this.

Especially with an N with a sample size that's that low. And you see this a lot. You know, I. For example, one of the journals that I subscribe to is the Journal of Strength Conditioning Research, and it's got a lot of interesting studies in there. But compared to a lot of these larger medical journals, the n is often 10 to 80 folks. And so you don't get a very strong strength of the statistical analysis in a scenario like that. And a lot of people aren't aware that when you're looking at eight to 10 people who come from a wide variety of backgrounds in a study like the one you're describing, the takeaway always needs to be taken away with a pretty big grain of salt.

Absolutely, absolutely. And this is a fundamental problem in performance research, and it's something people who are interested in this should look up. My work at FiveThirtyEight. I've written a ton about P values and statistics, and I've written several stories about problems in sports science in particular. And that's probably beyond the scope of this interview today. But I'll just say that you have to really think about something called sampling error, and that is when you have a really small study like this, you have to wonder, like, are these people really representative of the population you want to be studying? And more importantly, when it comes to all of us, is this, you know, indicative of being in this case? I can tell you I was in the study, so I know my results. And I did do a little bit better the morning after beer than I did the morning when I had the placebo beer. But I also found the run to exhaustion really weird and strange. It did not feel to me at all like a good measure of recovery. At some point, you're sort of on this treadmill, running at a pace that's kind of uncomfortable, but not all out, and it becomes sort of this mental game of like, okay, how uncomfortable do I want to be? How much incentive do I have to keep going? We had a few interesting things that happened. So in the. We had a meeting with everyone before the study to just explain what was going to happen, run everyone through the protocol. We also, in that first meeting, served everyone some beer and brought a cop in with a breathalyzer because we wanted to be sure that we could sort of titrate the alcohol to the right level. So that was kind of fun. But in that meeting, one of the people asked, how long will this run to exhaustion? Give us a ballpark. How long do you expect that this will last? Is this going to be something that's five minutes or five hours? And the lead researcher said, oh, most people last about 20 minutes. Well, guess what? Pretty much everyone. And I talked to everyone afterwards about this. I sort of interrogated them after the study was done, and all of us felt like, okay, we had to make it 20 minutes. That was sort of the benchmark. And after that, then you could sort of decide. And it was very telling to me that there were two people who missed that meeting. And so they got privately briefed, and they didn't get that little bit of information, and neither of them went 20 minutes. And, you know, by all of those sort of accounts, there's. There's not a good reason to think that, you know, they were less talented or, you know, weren't going to be able to go as far. I mean, it really, at some point, all of us felt like this. This test was a sort of an artificial measure of how dedicated we were to this study.

Right. Plus, there's always the variable. And this occurs very often in studies where when you've done the protocol a second time and you're more accustomed to the protocol, you are going to see an improvement in performance. I mean, I guarantee that if you give me a time to exhaustion treadmill test the first time, it's actually going to be a little bit more difficult because you just know what to expect the second time around, which means anything that you consume there could be a pretty big impact on whether it's that thing that's actually improving your performance versus the fact that you're just familiarized with the test.

Oh, absolutely. And this is a known phenomenon, it's something that people try to account for. But here, ideally you have a really large sample and we did randomize who got the beer first versus second. But when you only have 10 people, even if you randomize that, you're not going to eliminate that problem. And when you looked at it, it was definitely clear that we were seeing some issues like that. We also, because of lab space constraints and things like this, we did all of these runs sort of back to back. So by the time you were on the second run to exhaustion, there was a pretty good chance you were feeling kind of fatig intrigued. Anyway, I certainly felt that. And I had the placebo beer. When we went back and saw, I could see that it was the placebo beer the second time. Now the other thing is that most of us were quite able to determine whether we had had the real beer or not. And it was really funny. One of the guys in the study actually was able to guess the exact brand of the non alcoholic beer because he had actually done his own experiment a few years back. He was trying to qualify for Boston. And so he gave up beer and he started drinking this non alcoholic beer. And it turned out that that didn't. So he went back to drinking. And then I think he qualified for Boston later anyway. But that's a little bit of an aside, but there are all these issues that could really have a huge impact on what results you have, what you get. And so I think it really, you know, this experience of being a participant in the study, but also having been in on the study to begin with, I mean, this wasn't something we weren't setting this up like this wasn't, you know, made by big beer to try and create this result or something. I mean, we genuinely wanted to get the correct result. We were doing our best and yet we ended up getting results that I felt were not entirely reliable. And it wasn't that they weren't interesting, but they were just sort of a first step. And so, you know, we could have published this and made headlines and gotten some attention. And it did, I will say it did. It was presented some of the people involved were grad students, and one of them, or actually an undergrad, I believe, presented the study at a meeting. So it is out in the literature. We didn't, you know, hide it in a closet or anything or the file drawer. But it's just a small study and it's just one little piece of evidence. And, you know, if you ask me, does beer after a workout impair recovery? This is just one little snippet of evidence. And you have to take the bigger pile of evidence that we have. And when you look at that, I mean, basically what you see is that, you know, in moderation, beer probably doesn't make a big difference either way. And I think one thing I like to keep in mind is that if something has a big effect on something, you probably don't need a big study to find out. Like, if beer really wrecked my recovery, I would have probably already like, noticed that on my own. Right. And so if it has an effect, which it still may, it's probably pretty subtle, though. And particularly, again, we're talking about moderate alcohol intake care. We're not talking about, you know, going and getting completely sloshed like those rugby players. And by the way, they did find that that was not good.

Yeah, that's something important too, is you'll see headlines such as the ones that came out out after that rugby player study that says, you know, thethe evidence is in alcohol intake post exercise impairs recovery. People see those headlines often don't read the actual article in which they indicate, as you alluded to, that those subjects drank a lot of alcohol, like seven drinks, when in fact, the small amounts of water and carbohydrate and electrolytes in one beer after exercise may arguably even allow for better recovery. So there's that dose effect part. And then the other part is even just, I think you mentioned this in the book, just the type. Type of test used, like, for example, and I know this from, you know, I have a background. I don't know if you knew this in exercise physiology and biomechanics and spent, you know, about a decade in just labs, you know, doing tests on athletes and, you know, a time trial, you know, saying, okay, you're gonna. You're gonna do a 10k time trial on the treadmill. We know that that has better reliability and validity and sensitivity compared to a run to exhaustion. And so even just. Just the method via which the fitness is assessed is pretty important too. But unfortunately, especially looking at. I know we're kind of talking a little bit more about performance in that context than recovery. But you have to actually look at what's being used in the study, the dose, et cetera. And so many people just don't pay attention to those factors.

Absolutely. And I have to just say, you really, when you're looking at these studies, you really have to ask, what are they measuring? What's the difference that they found? And is this something that's relevant? To me, this run to exhaustion is probably not that relevant for the question I had or that most of us had, because most of us aren't going out and doing a run, I mean, unless you're being chased by a bear or something. And that probably is not going to last 20 minutes, let's be honest. But that's not really a good way of measuring an answer to the question that I'm asking. And so one thing that happens again and again is it's very easy to set up studies where you take a bunch of measures and you sort of measure a bunch of things until you find some difference, and then you can attribute that, whatever it is that you're looking at, so in this case, beer, to that difference and, you know, make a big deal out of it. But it may or may not be something that's important, and you have to sort of ask too, is this measure something that's reliable? There are a lot of physiological measures that we can take that have a lot of natural variability, meaning that if you took that, you know, on two different days, they might be different, not because all these other things were so different, but just because naturally, I mean, blood pressure, heart rate is a good one. Right. You know, your heart rate can go up and down in different circumstances. You really have to replicate the exact same circumstances to get that. So you really have to be very careful about asking what it is they were doing and whether it's relevant. So in this beer study, we also looked at ratings of perceived exertion, which I think is actually a much better measure here because it's asking you, how do you feel? And that's actually what I wanted to know is, am I going to feel crappy if I drank some beer the night before? And with that measure, we didn't find a difference. So if you're using that measure to answer the question, the answer is no, Beer doesn't impair recovery.

Right, Right. Yeah. And sports drinks, of course, are far more commonly studied than alcohol. And there's some issues with a lot of these sports drink studies. I mean, I interviewed Tim Noakes way back in the day about all the issues with a lot of these Gatorade studies and some of the concerns that he had about that. But you looked into sports drinks a bit. And I remember one part in the book, I think you described a study where they compared a group that was given a sports drink and then the other group got water. And I forget, do you remember the findings of that study or what was going on with that study was just kind of funky. It was like, well, of course it's going to indicate that the sports drink is better than water. But what was happening in that one?

Yeah, I mean, you'll see these studies where they have, they have athletes who are fasted, so they haven't eaten, they haven't had any calories since the day before. And then you bring them into the lab and you're giving them some sports drink versus water. Well, of course, you know, it may or may not be the sports drink. It probably has nothing to do with the hydration. It's, you know, they're getting these calories, they've been fasted. So, you know, this goes back to like, what is the question you're asking and is this protocol a good way of answering it? And you know, Gatorade has created an entire research empire around this idea that hydration is a super essential part of performance. And, you know, they've set the research agenda which is premised on this idea. And you know, when you go and look into the physiological literature here, we just don't actually have a lot of good evidence that hydration is nearly as fundamental or crucial as they say. Now, don't get me wrong, I am absolutely not saying that hydration isn't important and that, you know, athletes shouldn't drink and all of this, but this idea that there's this sort of absolute optimum level of hydration that you need to attain and that's going to have this huge impact on your performance. A load of crap. Our bodies are extremely, extremely, you know, capable of functioning under different conditions. And if you think about it, I mean, you know, our ancestors, I don't like to like, look at evolutionary examples to sort of say cavemen can explain everything. But, you know, even my grandparents who are farmers, you know, they didn't bring huge water bottles with them out in the fields all the time. Like, our bodies are capable of dealing with a little bit of dehydration.

Oh, absolutely. But if you take a sub subject, as you just alluded to, who wakes up after an overnight fast, goes into a lab in an overnight fasted state and does let's say it's not a runtime to exhaustion test. Let's say it's a test like the one I did where it's a set distance, in this case three hours on a treadmill. And then you find out that lo and behold, a sports drink appears to help in that scenario. Well, I mean, it's an unrealistic scenario for many folks to wake up at an overnight fasted state and go run for three hours. Yet the headline will simply say, news flash, this just in Sports drinks dramatically improve running performance. The same is said of the post exercise anabolic feeding window. Right. A lot of those studies, I think you talk about this in your book. I do a lot of those studies. You'll take someone who again has fasted overnight, does a glycogen depleting weight training workout to absolute exhaustion. And then when you compare that to someone who didn't hit that post exercise anabolic feeding window window of depending on the study, anywhere from 20 minutes to two hours, you know that that person does see an impact in terms of better muscle hypertrophy or better recovery. But it's again, pretty few and far between that you are actually going to be waking up completely fasted and training to complete exhaustion for a couple hours in the gym. And sure, that's a scenario in which maybe optimizing some type of carbohydrate and protein blend post workout could give you benefit. But in the absence of that scenario, if you're still burping up whatever energy bar or breakfast that you had before you went to the gym, you don't have to drop the bar and go dig the protein shake out of your duffel bag like a lot of people are doing based on their flawed perception of the research.

Yeah, absolutely. And Gatorade has. And it's not just them. I mean, there are other sports drink companies as well, but they've really created this situation now. I mean, I looked when I was researching the book, I tried to find an example of someone dying of dehydration during a sporting event. There is. I have yet to find one. People die of heat exhaustion, heat stroke, which are not the same thing, by the way. And in fact, there's some pretty good research showing that dehydration may be associated with those, but they don't seem to be the most important factor. And it's not the same thing. That's an important thing. But now we have people who are literally dying in marathons because they're drinking too much, because they've been told that they have to drink on some sort of schedule. I mean, drinking is actually quite easy. Drink to thirst. That's how our bodies have evolved. We're quite good at dealing with that. You know, thirst is your body's way of telling you that it needs some hydration. And so, so much I think of what I found while researching this book is that, you know, the most important skill that any athlete can develop is an ability to read their own body and to be able to, you know, read those signs. And this sounds really simple and a lot of people say, oh, but that's, you know, just drink when you're thirsty. But you know, we've gotten to a point where so many people now don't even know what thirst is like because they've been drinking you a liter an hour, whatever it is that the hydration folks want you to do. And so it takes paying attention, and not just paying attention, but paying attention to the correct things. And I think that can be trickier than a lot of people realize.

I think There was almost 20 different reported and probably more underreported or non reported hyperhydration and hyponatremia related deaths during these incidents. You know, Gatorade, to their credit, they changed their stance, I think in like, I think it was like 2007, 2015, where they officially came out and said, you don't have to drink X number of ounces of water slash Gatorade per hour. I think they used to say like at least 40 ounces of fluid an hour during, during endurance exercise. They instead said, which is dangerous. Yeah, they instead said, as you alluded to, you know, after the work of folks like, you know, Tim Noakes, to call him out on this, that you just need to drink to thirst. Unfortunately, a lot of people died in the years before they actually came right out and said that. While, you know, as, you know, the, the winners of a lot of these marathons, triathlons, et cetera, would finish the race 3 to 5% dehydrated. Like the, the faster folks are actually dehydrated and they're not dropping dead right and left as you just noted.

That's right, yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, the, the other thing that, that I want to get into, it kind of goes beyond, you know, some of the, some of the things regarding, like eating and, and drinking. And you cover some other things in the book as well. For example, cold therapy, cryotherapy, cold thermogenesis. A lot of people are interested in this topic and I know you have some thoughts on that or at Least you went out and did some research on that. So what did you find out about cold therapy and cold thermogenesis?

This was probably one of the more surprising things I learned during my research. I sort of came up icing and doing ice baths and cold baths and all that. When I was a bike racer or during stage races, we used to, you know, fill our hotel bathtubs with ice and sit in there. It was super painful, which is kind of how we knew it was working. Right. There's that whole thing where placebos are more powerful and potent if they feel uncomfortable or unpleasant. But anyway. But I really thought that icing worked. I thought that it helped. Do you, have you also been an icer? I'm curious.

I have, yep. I, I have like a cold tub outside of my office. I've got an above ground pool that I keep kind of cold. I don't do a lot of direct topical ice, even though I used to use back when I worked at a physical therapy clinic, I would jump into their game ready after some long runs, which is kind of like pneumatic compression combined with cold. And so yeah, I've certainly utilized it.

Yeah. And I mean it can feel really good like on a really hot day. I think it can be useful for helping to reduce your core body temperature and cool down and all of that. And there is something. Icing cold definitely can have a numbing effect effect. So when you're in pain that can be helpful. But it turns out that cold and icing is not helpful for recovery. And in fact it seems to, in fact, if anything it may slow down and hinder recovery. It's not something that's going to prevent you from recovering, but it's going to just slow it down. And I think the best way to explain this is just kind of through a little thought experiment. And that is like what is the purpose of icing? You know, why do you do it? And I'm curious what your thoughts are on this. I mean, what have you been told or sort of, you know, what do you perceive as sort of the theory behind, behind icing?

It's kind of a tricky question.

Yeah.

You look at inflammation and the release of a lot of these pro inflammatory biomarkers in response to exercise can induce a satellite cell response that is followed by mitochondrial biogenesis and an increase in muscle hypertrophy and a host of factors that dictate that particularly for the fitness response to properly occur to exercise, exercise that if inflammation is completely blunted, that's not going to occur to as Great an extent, as it would if you just allowed a lot of those immune factors and cytokines and other elements responsible for inducing that repair response to simply occur naturally. And from what I understand, the argument is that cold exposure, cryotherapy, intensive icing post workout shuts down the inflammatory response to the extent to. To where you're allowing MTOR to be. In this case, it would be inhibited and shutting down the anabolic response if you ice post workout. That's kind of the general argument.

Yeah. And I mean, that's way more detailed answer than I was expecting. Although I shouldn't be surprised because I know you're trained in this stuff, but I mean, we could even be more basic than that. Right. Like when you make your muscles cold like that. If I put my legs into the ice bath, I'm basically reducing circulation there. My body's going to shunt all the blood to my core. And so all these things that you want to happen just with circulation, just getting blood in and out of there to get rid of metabolic byproducts, to get new stuff in all of this, you're slowing that down. And so whatever you're doing, you're not really speeding anything up. And once you get out of the cold, your body's going to start recirculating again and all that stuff's going to happen. So best case, you're just sort of slowing down this process that's going to happen. And as you just described, inflammation, we so often are sort of told that this is a bad thing that we want to get rid of or we need to address inflammation. And there are conditions and situations in which that's correct. And there are also different types of inflammation. And that's another discussion. But I think in this case, the reasons that most athletes are going into the ice bath and doing this icing is they think that it's going to speed their recovery. And the evidence that we have just shows that that doesn't seem to be the case. You know, you want those inflammatory agents to get in there and repair that damage. I mean, that's part of your body's healing process. And that healing process is what makes you fitter, faster, stronger.

I think there are some subtle nuances, you know, like we were talking about the subtle nuances and, you know, in terms of whether it's a, you know, it's a facet study versus a fed study, or whether it's a time to exhaustion versus a set distance, et cetera, et cetera. And for example, every single study that shows a blunting of a hypertrophic response when someone does something like an intense cold bout. And it does have to actually be pretty intense. I mean, we're talking like, I think it's like a 5 to 8 degree Fahrenheit drop in the actual muscle tissue. It's significant. It requires a pretty intense. We're not talking about like a cold shower at the gym. We're talking about literally jumping in an ice bath or maybe like a couple rounds of a cryotherapy chamber to actually get the core or the muscle belly cold enough to an extent to where it's significantly blunting inflammation, which a lot of people aren't doing anyways. But when you look, at least from what I've seen at a lot of the studies that are utilizing whole body cryotherapy or cold thermogenesis, the blunting always occurs in every single study when it's acute, when you finish your workout, you know, in this case strength training, and get straight into an ice bath without allowing implant inflammation to build in the same way that we know whatever high dose of antioxidants, vitamin C and vitamin E, can blunt the inflammatory response very similarly. But yet there are other studies that show that when you do cryotherapy about one to two hours after a strength session, you actually see the direct opposite. You see an improvement in recovery, an improvement in power, an improvement in hypertrophy, indicating there's kind of like a timing window, meaning that if you allow inflammation to build for one to two hours and then blunt it later, later on, decrease core temperature, get like the norepinephrine response and all the positive benefits that you get from something like cold therapy, you could kind of have your cake and eat it too when it comes to strength training. And so again, I think it's important to dig into and look at the studies and it appears that that timing and also that the dose and the temperature is important. Meaning that if you finish a strength training session and you got to go to work and you take a quick cold shower, so you're not pitting out the entire day at work, that's not going to blunt any, anything at all. But if you're jumping in a super cold ice bath for 10 minutes right after your strength training workout, yeah, I mean it is going to blunt that inflammatory response. Whereas if you were to maybe take that ice bath at 5pm and you've worked out at say 9am, arguably it's actually going to improve some of your recovery parameters and might give you some of the other like the building mitochondria and uncoupling protein and white adipose to brown fat conversion and all the other kind of side benefits of cold. So I think timing is important and then the modality is also important. Like I know they've looked at strength versus endurance. And for example, cold is well known to increase your mitochondrial biogenesis. Like you activate PGC1 Alpha, that makes more mitochondria in the muscle. And that's kind of like the holy grail for endurance athletes. You want increased mitochondrial biogenesis in response to like jogging, jogging or running or swimming or cycling or anything that's going to require a greater deal of mitochondria as opposed to like a strength or power athlete for whom that's less important. Well, when, you know, when you, when you look at the studies done in, in especially like elite runners and elite endurance athletes, all of them who did even that acute whole body cryotherapy after, after they, after they'd done endurance exercise, they all saw a massive increase in mitochondrial biogenesis. And because they weren't training for hypertrophy and for power and for strength, it didn't negate any performance parameters and actually improve things like post exercise muscle recovery and mitochondrial biogenesis. So you could say like, well, if you're an endurance athlete and you go out on a three hour run. Yeah, get in the ice bath afterwards because you're actually going to increase mitochondrial biogenesis. But if you're training for strength or, or hypertrophy, don't do that. Wait. And so I think a big part of it too is what you're training for. Like the modality of training. And these are just things that again, like media will just say, cause I've seen this before, it's like, oh, cold is old news. It's gonna destroy your gains, bro. When there's a lot more to it than that.

Yeah, I mean I'd love to see some of those studies. I know at the time I did write this book, it's been out for, it came out February of 2019. And of course I was finished writing months and nine months before that. But at that time I wasn't seeing studies that were showing this. I mean it's interesting. Cryotherapy, these cryo chambers have become really popular, but it's interesting. Yeah, they feel really cold, but you actually don't get as cold in those as you would an ice bath. And this is just basic physics, right? Like water is a much better conductor of cold than air is. And so although it might feel really cold and be a rush. And I do think this sort of gets into another thing that I think is really, really important. There's a reason. There's a whole chapter in my book about placebos and the placebo effect. And I kind of come down on saying that the placebo effect can be useful. It is something that you can sort of harness for good. But I think I tried cryotherapy. I did all this research that was basically telling me that it wasn't worth much at all. But I went ahead and tried it anyway, and I'm glad that I did, because what I found is that there are other things that it does that people might find useful. I got out of that cryotherapy chamber feeling like a total rush, right? There's definitely an adrenaline rush that you get. And I understand why the guy at the place that I went to, the local NFL team, would like to come in and do this before games sometimes. And I can see why they would do that. You really feel ready to go and sort of ready to kick some ass. So there are other things that people can get out of some of these modalities. And I think sometimes we focus on certain things when the benefit may be something else and it may be something that's more squishy. It might be something that's harder to measure scientifically, which doesn't mean that it's not useful in some way. And I think one of the big takeaways for me was that anything, when it comes to recovery, anything that helps you feel better faster is useful. And like, at a very basic level, like, you can measure all these really fancy physiological things, but a lot of those don't actually matter that much. But your subjective feeling of well being is actually really important. And that's something that you need to be tuning into anyway. But at the end of the day, that's actually much more important and relevant than some of these other things that you can measure in the studies. And so, you know, when I. When people ask me if something works, I have to ask, well, what do you mean by working? And if you're doing this thing that's making you feel better? And so many things that are geared towards recovery are really about helping people relax, which I think it says something really important about life today and where we're at, that people have to work at relaxing. But, you know, obviously it's true. And so many of these things are really about helping people to relax and giving them some sort of ritual or some sort of reason to actually do that relaxation that they need to recover. And then there's one other thing that I want to mention, and so I talk about this in the book. There was this case of an airport, I believe it was Houston, where people were complaining that it was taking way too long to get their bags at baggage claim. And so they did a bunch of things to try and speed things up, and they reduced the time by a little bit, but people were still complaining. And so what they ended up doing was they rerouted people so they had to walk further from the gate to the baggage claim. But they did this in a way so that you basically arrive and your bags are there, and the complaints totally stopped. And so. Yeah, but I think the takeaway here is that we really hate waiting. And so many of these things are just things for us to do to feel proactive, to feel some sort of sense of agency while we're just waiting for our bodies to, you know, naturally recover on their own. And so I think this idea that we need to optimize everything and we need to really be pushing all the time and doing everything is sort of the antithesis of this. Like, sometimes the best thing you can do is just kick back and relax and wait and, like, know that that's okay. Like, forcing it is not always the right call.

Right. Essentially, those 20 minutes that you spent closing your eyes with your $2,000 pair of, you know, grade aided compression boots, you know, 80% of what you felt from that could have just been the fact that you took some time to relax after your. After your workout.

Absolutely. I mean, I love compression boots because they feel good and they, you know, you're lying there, you're sitting up with your legs up for 20 minutes, 30 minutes, relaxing. Like, it's not some magic thing that it's doing, you know, physiologically, except that you're relaxing, I think. And that's. But that's okay. Like, I think that that that's legit. And I think we've really gotten to this point where, you know, we feel like these scientific explanations that are based on, you know, these very highly measured things are more legitimate than these. These qualitative measures. But I think that so often that that really sets us up to fall for snake oil, because you have all of this marketing around things that are just, you know, they can go and measure all this stuff until they find something, and they can really play that up. And it goes back to the beer study. Like, you know, is the run to exhaustion really the thing that about. And so often it's not.

Yeah. And part of it too does come down to the training modality when you're looking at elite athletes or, you know, for example, we were just talking about pneumatic compression and it has been shown to actually do things, you know, like, for example, you know, reduce skeletal muscle oxidative stress or proteolysis markers during recovery. But you know, many of the studies that have shown that to be the case are in elite male weightlifters, right, who are just destroying themselves, you know, on squat day. That doesn't mean that if, you know, whatever, you're going for a 30 minute lunchtime jog, that you gotta prioritize everything and drop your entire lunch hour to go slip into your pneumatic compression recovery boots because you're not training at the level that is reported in a lot of these studies. But it goes the other way too. I mean, like, you know, some of the studies I've seen on cold, for example, that we were just talking about, they're showing no effect on cold or of cold on recovery in people who are doing like a 30 minute bike ride three times a week, not an Ironman triathlon, creating mass oxidative stress from training three to four hours a day. So I think part of it does depend on the modality of training too. I would argue that for the folks who are really out there crushing it hard, like elite athletes, et cetera, those people probably do benefit a little bit more from using some of these overpriced modalities that really aren't going to do as much. Good, good.

I'm not convinced. I mean, I hate to be a total naysayer, but I mean, go back to the thought experiment with the cold. What are you doing? You're like, you are, you are slowing inflammation for however long you're in that cold bath. I just, I'm not convinced that that's the best use of your time and the best use of your efforts.

Yeah, well, I do have, I should send it to you. I have it somewhere. I have like a two hour presentation I recently, recently gave where I dig into the research and there's a ton of subtle nuances in terms of timing, in terms of temperature, in terms of how difficult the training session actually was. It's difficult to paint with a broad brush. But I think the important takeaway point is if something is reported to be an anti inflammatory or antioxidant that's going to help you be healthier, that does not mean that it's going to assist with your recovery. And in some cases, if not used properly, time primed properly or dosed properly, it may actually impair recovery.

Yeah, and I mean, I think this gets to a broader point, which is that we're really, we have so much marketing that we're being bombarded with that tells us that there is this absolutely optimal state that you can attain if only you buy our products and do all of these things when really our bodies are very, very adaptable, we are able to handle. I mean, this goes back to the hydration thing. Our kidneys are designed, they are adapted to being able to function under a lot of different circumstances with different levels of hydration. When you've been losing fluids, they hold on to water. When you're over hydrated, you pee more. So we're adaptable. And this idea that we need to optimize every little thing, I think it's really a distraction and it's a marketing ploy to sell products. I think the best thing that people can do is focus on the basics, which it turns out can be really hard to master for a lot of people. And so this isn't just saying don't worry about anything, but pay attention to the correct things. Let your rivals worry about all this complicated stuff. That best case scenario, might give you a tiny sliver of a percentage of an edge, whereas the important fundamental basics will give you much greater advantage.

That kind of reminds me of something else I think you wrote about in the book where you compare what would arguably be a very common, expensive recovery tactic, you know, like designer sports bars and fancy sports powders and things like that, with just food. Do you remember the anecdote?

Yeah. There was a clever study where they brought people in and they basically they matched the food. So it was a study, it was, I don't want to compare it to our beer study, but it was something similar where they brought people in and they had them do a hard workout and then they had them take these recovery products and then they measured their recovery. And I can't recall now what they were using for their recovery measures. It was different. I don't believe it was a run to exhaustion, but anyway. But what they found it may have been glycogen reuptake. This is in the book and it's referenced there. So you can go back.

Yeah, I think it was like insulin blood glucose levels and glycogen reuptake with it was like food compared to sports.

Bars, specifically at metabolism. Yeah. And what they did is they matched the meal, you know, the post workout meals that people got for calories and carbs and fats. And things like that. But One group got McDonald's and that was because there was a McDonald's across from the lab. You know, they could have chosen a different fast food chain, but it was McDonald's versus the other group got, you know, these designer sports bars and all of this. And they found no difference. And I think that the takeaway here is not that, yeah, everyone go eat all your food at McDonald's. It's great. But I think that we sort of, we put too much emphasis on the specifics of nutrition. Nutrition is absolutely important, but every single meal does not have to be perfect. I think that we've gotten to this point too where we demonize food. There's good food and there's bad food. But to your body, particularly if you are a high performance athlete who's training a lot, you're burning through a lot of, of calories. Your body just needs those nutrients. And so as long as you're getting those nutrients, it doesn't matter so much where they're coming from. And if you're eating a lot of calories, you're probably getting enough vitamins and all of this, you know, you want to be eating a variety in your diet and all of that in moderation, all these sort of simple things. So I'm not saying that junk food is good for you, but I'm also saying that like, a little junk food isn't going to hurt you. You. And we've sort of paid too much attention to nutrition. I want to be careful about the way that I say this because it's not that nutrition isn't important, but it's just that the minutia is really probably less important than we give it credit for. Again, this goes back to marketing. We have all these vested interests who have a stake in convincing us that our nutrition is not what it could be. So therefore, we need their products in order to have a healthy diet or to maintain make up for nutritional deficiencies. I mean, if you are an endurance athlete who's training a lot, you're eating a ton of calories, the chances of you being vitamin deficient are almost nil. Particularly if you're eating something like breakfast cereals or all enriched with vitamins and things like this. I mean, this is not the problem that we need to be solving here.

Yeah, and you know, the way I look at it is basically if I, I am traveling, if I finished a really tough workout, and I actually do know that I need glycogen repletion and mineral and vitamin repletion and I have the convenience of a packaged sports bar or a powder or something like that to allow me to do that. Especially if I'm for example, traveling and just outside my normal access to food. Then I'll choose something like that for convenience's sake. But anytime I, I have the option to eat real food. Preferably not McDonald's, but just something real, recognizable, organic, close to your real meal. If I can finish, let's say an 11am workout and I have an entire pantry stocked with the fanciest designer sports powders and supplements in the optimized macronutrient ratios. And then I'll have mixed greens, a can of sardines, a handful of macadamia nuts, nuts and some olive oil. I'll choose the latter every single time. And yeah, it might not look as cool and might not be as slick in terms of the packaging, but really if you actually look at the macros and even the research that you just alluded to, my example wasn't perfect because, you know, my salad isn't necessarily a glycogen replenishing salad, the one I just described, but you get the same amount of glycogen replenishment. I mean, I even remember one study that I saw that showed that compare if an athlete or an exercise enthusiast finishes a workout and simply eats ad libitum according to appetite, within like eight hours, their glycogen levels are restored just as much as the person who just dropped everything to go suck down their perfectly proportioned maltodextrin and fructose infused carbohydrate and whey protein shake.

Right? But there is a difference because the person who just went and ate the normal meal or whatever didn't go through all the stress was, wasn't experiencing this, oh my God, I need to go get this thing and it has to be now. And I mean, I think that putting too much reliance on this stuff can actually be. It's not just that it's not helping, but I think when we start to stress out and we start to pay attention to the wrong things, it really distracts us and it takes our attention and our energy away from things that could really be much more meaningful. And so, so much of it is finding out. I'm not at all opposed to bars and shakes and things like that, but these should be things that you're using because they're conducting convenient or they work for you or whatever, but not because they're the thing that you have to do. You can be a very high performance athlete and never take any of those things, it's fine. Like regular food is fine. And the reason to do those things is because there's some other reason. Like they're more accessible. You don't have access at that time when you're hungry to some other meal. But we shouldn't think of them as essential, right?

Exactly. And you know, I think to play devil's advocate, there are some people that take the, that too far. Like when I used to race Ironman triathlon, a lot of the paleo people, you know, that the, you know, that eat as close to nature as possible. Folks, you know, would see me, you know, eating like the, this little, you know, like, like a carbohydrate containing energy bar for, you know, for my race, right. For like five hours during an Ironman triathlon, having a few of those slipped into my jersey pocket and they'll be like, why aren't you doing sweet potatoes and bananas? It's like, are you like the water weight? They get mushy dynamics that like, there are times when the convenience of a packaged food actually assists with performance from a direct biomechanical standpoint. It's like if you put me in a wind tunnel with three power bars in the back of my cycling jersey versus like eight bananas and four sweet potatoes, I guarantee I'm gonna be more aerodynamic with the quote, fake, unquote packaged food. So, you know, there's a, there's a time and a place where, especially, you know, for elite performers, that stuff does come in handy. And then the, the only, only other thing I should mention is I'm, I'm not like a total. If it fits your macros guy, right? Like, I'm not, I'm not saying that. Well, you know, you just go out and eat whatever is that's going to replenish your glycogen stores, right? You still have to consider things like, you know, rancid seed oils and pressured and oxidized vegetable oils, you know, other issues that might have long term health implications. But you know, I think the long story short is that for most people, real food does just as good as a lot of these fancy, sexy, packed packaged food that we're led to believe a lot of elite athletes are consuming, when in fact they're just kind of paid to be a poster boy or poster girl for.

Well, I was going to say there's so much marketing and all of these companies with the supplements and the bars and all these things. I mean, the reason that your favorite athletes are using these products is because they're getting Paid to do it. And these companies have invested a huge amount in the sports, and it makes it very confusing.

Yeah, I personally know several athletes. Athletes who rep companies and don't eat barely any of that company's products because they don't like them, but they're getting paid to smile and hold them up. So, yeah, you have to be aware of that stuff. Now, you covered so much in the book. I mean, you covered like we talked about cold water, immersion sports drinks, alcohol. But then you also looked into things like massage. And I think you. You looked into those compression boots, I believe. Did you have a section on acupuncture in there?

I didn't look specifically at acupuncture, but I'll tell you, I love massage. I just got a massage. My husband is great massage therapist. He and I trade massage about once a week. And I think it's great. Do I think that there's good scientific evidence that it's doing a lot in terms of, like, you know, there's all these explanations that are given. You know, it's flushing out lactic acid. I mean, I'll just give you a tip. Anything that's making claims about lactic acid is probably a load of.

Lactic acid is pretty good.

Lactic acid. Yeah. I'm sure you've covered this before, so I won't rehash that. But there's all this stuff. But, you know, if I tell you this thing is, is flushing your lactic acid, that sounds really scientific and bonafide. Right. But if I tell you massage is a way for you to take an hour to just totally relax and, you know, not that massage is always relaxing. Sometimes it hurts. Right. But it's a way for you to totally, like, exist and your body and feel completely present in your body and check in on your body. It's how you see, oh, my right calf is a little bit more sore than I knew that it was. And I'm going to work on that or I'm going to baby it a little or whatever it is that it needs. But it's a really powerful way, I think, of sort of working on this thing that I mentioned earlier, which is just paying attention to your body and checking in with it. And so I think massage is great. It also helps you relax, it helps you feel good. And that's enough, like, I think that we should really be careful about how we measure whether something's working and when it comes to recovery. If something is helping you relax, it's helping you feel good. That's bonafide. Enough. You should do it, then that's fine. You don't need a more scientific reason. And I wasn't finding any good, really scientifically verified reasons that massage is helpful. But I can tell you that every athlete I know swears by it. I personally swear by it. And so I don't need a study showing me that it does something to my blood markers because it's doing this other thing that's really important, and we can measure those things. I think that there's just this tendency for us to sort of put more faith into these things that we can measure with a number. And I think that, again, this just sets us up for being sold snake oil, because sometimes it's not the number that matters, it's that thing that you have to correct, quantify with more of a qualitative measure. And that's okay.

Yep. Yeah. And I mean, as you know, in the book, there's, you know, these theories that massaging might change immune cell markers or might increase protein synthesis via the mechanical signal that the massage gives. But very little of that has been studied, even fascia. You know, research is in its infancy. So I have a feeling we'll probably find out more about massage. But, yeah, it's shocking how many people get massages and how little it's actually research. And I'm a massage fanatic. I get a massage every week. But you're right, there's not a lot that shows that's actually doing things like flushing the lactic acid out of the tissue or causing some kind of a magical response. I wanted to ask you, based on having written this book and also the fact that you're an exercise enthusiast yourself, what has stuck with you? Are there a few things that you do for your own performance or recovery that an outsider looking in might observe to be some kind of a, you know, might classify as a modality? Like, is there anything that you do that aside from massage, which you already named, actually did stick with you. After writing the book, I have a.

Whole chapter on sleep, which is the most potent recovery tool known to science. I mean, really, it is number one through 20. Nothing else comes close. And I've always been pretty good on sleep. Working from home helps because I have a little more time over my time. But one thing that I have done since researching the book is really prioritize it in a way where it's just non negotiable. You know, in before times, I had stopped taking early morning flights because I knew that they were disruptive to my sleep. I'm not A morning person. And you know, if I have to get up at 4:30 in the morning to go catch a flight, I'm just. My sleep is disrupted for multiple days and that's no good. And so just totally prioritizing sleep has been one. I. I also have really prioritized having some period, some time in my day that's just set aside for relaxation. And this is a time when I have absolutely no expectation of being productive. I think we have this cult of productivity in our culture right now that's really toxic, not just to recovery, but to our whole psychology and our whole being. And so really just taking some time to have downtime where you're just relaxing. Relaxing can be spending time with friends. It can just be lying on the couch reading a book. My husband's a winemaker. I like to have a glass of wine at the end of the day oftentimes, but just something where you're just taking time to relax and kind of checking in on your body too and feeling how you're feeling, if that makes sense.

No, I have that. That's after lunch for me for about 30 minutes. I duck away. You're probably going to laugh, but I have a hyperbaric chamber and it's like my sensory deprivation. I climb in there, I'm dead to the world and I put on a sleep mask and just either meditate or breathe or snooze for about a half hour. And it's just, it's incredible. It gives me two days and it's almost like the world can't touch me for these 30 minutes. And it's. It's amazing.

I mean, I think that's great. And for people who, you know, don't have the means to have that kind of chamber, you can take a nap. Like it really. It can be something simple like that.

Yeah. Well, this book is really fantastic. I think it's very thought provoking, especially for a lot of my listeners who I often find are interested in the very. Every last biohack and recovery modality that comes out. But sometimes maybe without enough skepticism or at least without raising the eyebrow or maybe digging into the studies to see if the folks who were studied to say whether or not this stuff actually works are similar to the people who are purchasing it or whether they're exercising in a similar way or whether it was being used in the way that is used on a consumer level. There's just so many considerations and I would hope that folks might grab this book and get a little bit more educated on how the science is working behind the scenes and just approach things with a healthy degree of skepticism.

Yeah, I mean, my ambition for the book was that I really wanted readers to walk away with an understanding of how science works. This is really. It looks like a fitness book, but it's really a science book. It's about the process of science, how we know things, how we determine what to believe, things like that. But I really wanted readers to walk away with the skills and understanding to be able to look at these research studies and say, is this any good? Should I believe it? What are sort of the pros and cons here? What are the strengths and weaknesses? So if people read my book and come away with that, I'll be extremely happy.

Yeah. Well, I dig it. It's called Good to Go. And if you guys are listening in, I'll link to everything that we discussed. Research, studies, and complimentary articles. Christy's website, which is a blog, Last Word on Nothing is the name of her blog. And we'll link to all that if you go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com GoodToGo it's BenGreenfieldfield Fitness.com GoodToGo. The book is Good to Go. What the athlete in all of us Can Learn from the Strange science of recovery. Christy, thanks for coming on the show.

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

All right, folks. Well, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Krishy Ashwanen signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com have an amazing week. Well, thanks for listening to today's show. You can grab all the show notes, the resources, pretty much everything, everything that I mentioned over@BenGreenfieldFitness.com along with plenty of other goodies from me, including the highly helpful Ben Recommends page, which is a list of pretty much everything that I've ever recommended for hormones, sleep digestion, fat loss, performance, and plenty more. Please also know that all the links, all the promo codes that I mentioned during this and every episode help to make this podcast happen and to generate income that enables me to keep bringing you this content every single week. So when you listen in, be sure to use the links in the show notes. Use the promo codes that I generate because that helps to float this thing and keep it coming to you each and every week.