Dr. Andy Galpin: On Recovery Modalities, Performance Anchors and Hidden Stressors | TUH #211

If you're biohacking hopping, which is like every month you're doing something new, your physiology has no possible way of understanding what's going on. And so it's never going to get settled. So fewer interventions, less frequently, and I almost guarantee you you'll get better results.

Especially when you get to health expos like this and you start googling around about supplementation, about diet, and all about recovery. Can we just touch on cold plunging?

When we get into this cold plunge idea, what we have to walk away from are things like, oh, this is what I do to help my fat loss. That's when we started getting the realm of, you don't understand the mechanism, you don't what's really going on. Sauna getting hot is a great way to simulate exercise. But be really clear here. Saunas are not an exchange for exercise red light therapy. This is an area that I have changed my mind on, like very much so. I could make a case for any modality you possibly have. The question is, is that the most important thing you should be doing? Are you using it properly? And you as a consumer or coach, are you providing realistic expectations? What I'm hope I'm highlighting is there's pros and cons to all of it. It all comes down to why you're using it. Is it working for you? If you feel good, you feel good, you're doing a positive health habit that has a slight potential to reduce soreness. This is a net win all over.

In the world of recovery. What are some must haves?

The only ones that I say are absolutely, you know, quote unquote, necessary.

Ultimate humans. Hey, guys, welcome back to the Ultimate Human Podcast. I'm your host, human biologist Gary Brecke, where we go down the road of everything, anti aging, biohacking, longevity, and everything in between. And today we're coming to you live from the Health Expo in London, uk. Yeah. Awesome.

Yes.

Okay, thank you all for coming. Guys, I'm so excited to be sitting down with Dr. Andy Galvin. He is an absolute encyclopedia of knowledge. I was talking to him backstage. He did a 21 hours of podcasting with Dr. Andrew Huberman. So this is gonna be 21 hours and then at the end there'll be a short Q and A. So sometime around Tuesday, we'll get to everybody's questions.

So fired up.

I'm joking and I'm actually not joking about the 21 hour podcast with Andrew Huberman. So Dr. Galpin is an expert in all things human performance. You know, exercise performance, nutrition. He's worked with some of the top athletes in the world, Olympic athletes, the Major League Baseball, you know, the National Hockey League, I mean, you name it. He's an absolute wealth of knowledge. So what we've done is we've consolidated a lot of the most frequently asked questions. I've got a lot of questions myself as a human biologist. So we've taken questions from our audience and we're going to feed them to Dr. Galpin today. So this should be an amazing, amazing journey. So welcome to the ultimate human podcast.

About time, man.

Yeah, very, very excited for this. You know, there's there, I think, you know, especially when you get to health expos like this and you know, you get on Google, you start googling around about supplementation, about diet, about lifestyle, about sleep, and all about recovery. And then once you get on the recovery bandwagon, there's everything from compression gear to ice bathing to saunas to red light therapy to hyperbarics. I mean, you name it, you can go down that road. And interestingly, he opened some of his talks by showing the 400 things that he does every day as a joke to say you can really get paralysis of analysis. And so I'd really like to open up the discussion not talking about performance per se, but talking about recovery. Because the world of recovery, I think, is where the biohacking world has really come into play. I think we've got our nutrition pretty dialed in. I mean, there's been decades of research on nutrition, but the whole biohacking world is relatively new. And so in the world of recovery, what are some must haves?

Yeah, I think that the best way to think about recovery or really any modality, whether you walk away from this weekend for those of you here, or you're listening at home in a podcast, if you leave here and go home with a list of 14 different things to do and 12 new products, you've messed the whole thing up. That's never going to get you recovery. In fact, I'll show you some data later today that's going to be pretty convincing. The fact that it's probably going to make things a lot worse. You should approach this podcast, you should approach social media or any book you read as trying to identify what is the specific piece of information that I can use to solve a specific problem. And if you can't answer that, then the reality of it is you probably fold and walk away from that modality. We were talking backstage. I can point any product out in this entire exhibition and probably show you either direct human evidence on it or maybe even indirect or plausibility. I can make a case for anything you've ever seen here. And this happens, this is a reality. When people come to me in our coaching practice, they've done the thing, they got all this stuff and the number one question we get is how do I blend it all? How do I put it together right? Not all of us are 28 year old biohackers with no family. I have some limitations in my schedule. I have to go to work, I have kids, I have all these things. In terms of recovery, the direct answer is you want to find what we call performance anchors. So a performance anchor is the single biggest thing that is limiting your recovery. This could range. Maybe it is excessive training, maybe it is poor nutrition, maybe it's what we call visible stressors. Things you know, see and feel are stupid and wrong. You're drinking alcohol excessively, like you're doing all this stuff all you already know about. But what you're really searching for are what are called hidden stressors. So these are things that are adding or exceeding your overall allostatic load, which is a fancy science way of saying like total stress bucket. But you don't necessarily know, see or feel them. And so when you're choosing your recovery modality, it is specific and precise to that exact anchor. And I can give you some examples to make this a little bit more tangible. But I could walk you through a really good reason to use cold plunges. And I could walk you through and maybe we'll do this a little bit later, a bunch of reasons why you would never want to use cold plunges. We take them away from people constantly. You can't pick a supplement on the shelf here that I haven't used positively and one I haven't taken away from people. The reality of it is again, what problem am I solving? What specific information or data do I have that I need to solve that problem? Should solve that problem and then try one thing at a time. I'm happy to go into individual details for any of these modalities if you want, but conceptually that's how you should approach the process. If you're adding four to five to six different things, if you're biohacking, hopping, which is like every month you're doing something new, your physiology has no possible way of understanding what's going on. And so it's never going to get settled. It's never getting into a place of saying, okay, we can understand this homeostatic stress, we can now figure out how to adapt and overcome. So fewer interventions, less frequently, and I almost guarantee you you'll get better results.

That's a great answer. We have to touch on cold plunging because I call that my drug of choice. Please don't take it away from me in front of this whole audience. And I've got four of them back there. But I call it my drug of choice because nothing makes me feel better for longer. And when I miss it in the mornings, I feel it. When I do it in the mornings, it translates through my entire day. And my cold bunch routine is in the morning, fresh out of bed. I always do it prior to exercise and I never do it after exercise, especially after weight training. Can we just touch on cold plunging sauna, red light therapy?

Yeah, let's just go in that order.

Yeah, Cold. And again, please don't take cold plunging away from me.

Yeah, it's one of the worst recovery practices you could ever do. It's the most amount of information. No, I'm just kidding. Okay, great. So when we think about conceptually what's happening, we're going to be in. What do you typically, temperature wise, do?

52 degrees, 3 minutes minimum, 6 minutes maximum.

So you're doing a pretty warm one that generally when we started doing cold plunges probably 15 years ago, like really routinely and we started implementing it, we're going to spend most of our time sub 34 degrees. So like you're in floating ice chunks. You don't have to do that. Do whatever you want. But we've experimented with longer duration. 10 to 15 minutes, 20 minutes in the 50 to 60 degree range. We've done really cool stuff. What's happening the second? Has many of you here been in the cold plunge this weekend? All right, dope. By the way, if you get in.

That cold plunge, you're entered to win one of those cold plunges. Just so you know. So I'm giving them away while we're here. We're not taking those back to the U.S. i gave one away yesterday. I'm giving two away today. So go back there and you're brave enough. And we have. I keep wanting to say onesies for women. Onesies are for babies, right?

But no, my wife wears the onesie all the time. It's horrific.

We have one piece for women.

Do not support that, Hoffy. Do not. I know what you're going to say. Guaranteed.

Yes. Church it up a little bit. This is a public broadcast.

Yeah. Okay. So when you get in that thing, you're going to feel it immediately. You're going to See ventilation go up, you're going to see a whole host of sympathetic responses. In fact, if you look at things like heart rate variability, hrv, you walk into that cold plunge, if you walk out, your HRV is going to massively drop. This is great, right? Meaning you're going to move into sympathetic drive. If you look at that though, 30, 60, 90, up to usually 180 minutes plus, you will see a continual rise in your HRB and you'll often see it double or triple in some hyper responders. So what you're seeing there is a compensatory response.

Right?

This is again another hormetic stressor, which is to say you get a huge adrenaline shot. If you want to think about it that way. Now, cold plunging actually doesn't make your cortisol rise nearly as much as people think. It's not that big of a deal. The biggest impact you're going to see there is adrenaline. When we get into this cold plunge idea, what we have to walk away from are things like, oh, this is what I do to help my fat loss. That's when we start getting in the realm of you don't understand the mechanism, you don't understand what's really going on. Oh, cortisol, again, you're not really understanding. It is a very clear thing you can use to wake up. You use it in the mornings, you feel great, feel more 100% I'm in. Where we're going to take it away are things like you mentioned post exercise. If we're trying to go muscle mass, fine. We use it all the time post exercise in our athletes. Rarely are we in phases when we're trying to maximize muscle growth in competitive athletes, we're often using it post game where we actually have to turn around and play in a couple of days. We have to go back, we've got a game in five days, we've got a game the next day and we're in a phase of that year where we're maximizing recovery and if we lose some muscle, we don't even necessarily care. What I'm hope I'm highlighting is there's pros and cons to all of it. It all comes down to why you're using it, what you think the adaptation is going to be and are you matched up with that? Right. So is the response you're looking for actually going to happen and then are you using it appropriately? So some inappropriate responses that we see, some reasons we tend to take it away from people is when we're doing stuff like that, and then we're seeing issues with sleep onset, or we're seeing issues other ways because they actually had way too much of a sympathetic drive. They maybe had a post cold parasympathetic response, but that was exaggerated. It doesn't happen in everyone. It's 15 or 20% of the people. So the most likely you're using in the morning, you're 10 or 12 hours away from sleep. You should be just fine. I'm throwing that out there saying, think about that, pay attention. You start cold, plunging, and then all of a sudden, randomly, your sleep goes to trash. Maybe you're not a good candidate for it. Maybe it's too cold. Maybe you should do it warmer. Longer duration. You could tinker with it. But that is. And I'm really lingering on cold here just as a way to explain to you how any of these modalities. We can do Sononics, we can do red light. Is it working for you? Mm.

Really?

Pay attention. Categorically, I like it individually. I may hate it, I may love it. Or somewhere in between.

One of my favorite biohacks outside of Breathwork by far is mineral salts. Baja Gold sea salt. It's got all of the trace minerals that the body needs.

You know, most of us are not.

Just protein deficient, meaning amino acid deficient, or fatty acid deficient. We are mineral deficient. So a quarter teaspoon of this in water first thing in the morning will make sure that you get all of the essential minerals that you need. It tastes amazing. In fact, I made a steak today. I actually made a grass fed steak with grass fed butter. And I put just mushrooms and a little bit of rosemary. And I sprinkled Baja Gold sea salt all over the top.

Try it.

It'll be your new favorite for cooking too. It's the cheapest and one of my favorite biohacks. I don't know, a $15 or $20 bag of this will probably last you five years. And this is literally the world's best biohacking secret.

Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And you know, sauna, I think there's. There's so much data. We have so much data. Centuries of data literally on, on, on dry sauna. I think the science is clear relative to its impact on all cause mortality and a reduction or extension of all cause mortality, mainly because of its ability to detoxify the body. And for those of you that are regularly doing sauna sessions, you know that you're improving the lymphatic flow. We actually do use our skin as a secondary route of waste elimination. I feel amazing when I've done it. I actually accidentally got heavy metal poisoning from a water machine that I, I bought from a doctor that had told me that this was a structuring machine. It ended up being a welder from, from China and my, my house manager and I actually ended up getting heavy metal poisoning from this. I actually wrote a whole guide on detoxing from heavy metals. But a large part of that detoxification process was sauna. And as I measured my reduction in metals and did the same thing for mold and mycotoxins, not necessarily focused on performance, but focused on longevity detoxification. So sauna as a tool for longevity and detoxification different from one that we would use as a performance tool. But in the performance world, I've read some data on hyperthermic exposure post exercise and that sauna after exercise beneficial for muscle growth, for hyperplasia, for hypertrophy, muscle hypertrophy. So can you touch on that both as a performance tool and also as a fit in your longevity journey? Where it lies in that journey.

Yeah. So when you get to things like detoxification, okay, like we could think about that that way. For me, when we're ever going to use sauna is more of things like the following. You're going to get hot, you're going to sweat, you're going to increase blood flow, you're going to work on dilation. This is probably the bigger effect on longevity. This is what it's going to help. You'll see things like you mentioned the data on cardiovascular health, long term mortality. This is probably the massive reason why we're doing it. Number one, you've got that. Now why is that specifically happening? Getting hot is a great way to simulate exercise. But be really clear here, saunas are not an exchange for exercise. One of the ways we see this being misused is people get super excited and they're like, sauna, sauna, sauna, sauna, sauna, awesome. I'm with you. But they kick that past exercise. Oh, I didn't work out today because I got my sauna in. Whoa, whoa, whoa, like, wrong order of operations here. So if you want to make sure you're thinking about the two. Now when I will use sauna a lot is things like, oh, I'm traveling and the gym was terrible, or didn't have a gym or I was going to have to commute 45 minutes to go to the gym. I will just get a sauna in or you're too sore or you're too tired or maybe you're too hungover on hydrogen water or whatever.

Hey, watch it.

It's things like that. So if the question is I not going to or can't work out today, a sauna is better than nothing, significantly better. And a lot of the research that you're talking about isn't people who actually don't even exercise. So it shows you itself, in and of itself is a positive health benefit. But we have to make sure we have that caveat because that's one of the big things as we've popularized heat, sauna, jacuzzi, thinking it's an exchange or alternative or it's even on equal footing. And you're gonna have a really hard time convincing me with any molecular data or any randomized control trials or any of our epidemiology that saunas outpace exercise and physical movement. You feel me on that one?

Yeah.

All right, great. Now, other things to think about with it that you're potentially getting. We use it as a pretty effective recovery tool. This is mostly anaclesic, so people don't feel as sore, they feel more likely to go exercise or a little bit looser. Data on that is not nearly as strong. But in this particular case, if you feel good, you feel good. I really don't care. You're doing a positive health habit that has a slight potential to reduce soreness. This is a net win all over. You specifically asked about post exercise sauna. There is, there have been a couple of papers out on looking at sauna post exercise for muscle growth as well as endurance adaptations. Right now that field is actually growing. If I had to guess, you'll probably see more and more positive studies to that. That makes a whole bunch of molecular sense. It is a very similar mode. It is the same very similar cellular signaling activating pathway from exercise. And now you've put a whole stimulus into your muscle, your tissue, your immune system, cytokine responses, and you've actually continued to increase blood flow to those areas. You're going to clear away waste faster and you're going to get positive nutrients back in. So I don't know if that will actually come through as the actual legitimate mechanism. But at this point, the outcomes, performance like exercise endurance are positive and there are plausible mechanisms. So that's one of those things where I say sorry, because those two things are there and you also have the known positive effects long term, pretty good idea.

Okay, great. I, I thank you for that too because I love the Sauna session, you know, and I think post exercises is the placement for. For people that are not replacing exercise, but want to include sauna in their daily routine. You were saying, post exercises.

Yeah.

And what's also important there, it doesn't actually have to be sauna, per se. Hot water can do the same thing. So if this is hot water immersion.

Some cases even better. Actually, I read a study where water is 29 times more thermogenic than air. So it removes heat from the body at 29 times the rate of water.

Well, you also actually have the compression force of the water. The compression force of the water works like a Normatec boot. There's one downstairs. You guys seen those? Awesome. The water itself will physically do this independent of the thermal regulation and transferability. You see the actual pressure changes, which are phenomenal.

And great.

This is going. But a lot of really good reasons to get in. So those of you that don't have a sauna, if you have a hot bath or a plunge or a jacuzzi, something like that, it's as good and potentially even better as a post exercise.

Okay, so onto red light therapy. Oh, yeah. And I'm talking full body photobiomodulation, not face masks and panels. I mean, really submersive full body photobiomodulation, whole body red light therapy inside of a red light therapy bed. Where would that fall in importance? What is your interpretation?

So this is actually something where it's really fun to be on stage with you right now because you and I could not be seeing this feel differently.

Okay.

In this, my podcast. Did I just get kicked out?

Yeah.

That was you, wasn't it? I told you, they're running the show over there. Yeah, no, I don't care. We'll roll on. So here's what I mean by that. If you would have asked me that question, Gary, five years ago, I would have said you're absolutely full of shit. Yeah, Right. And now it's like, okay, you're not full of shit, but you're okay. All right. Okay. Actually data here.

Right.

And so you have people like Gary who are going to push the pace on if there's a little bit of evidence, if there's some plausibility there. We're going to try it, we're going to use it, we're going to go after it. And I'm way more conservative. I'm on the. Like, I need to see some human data that shows it actually works before I'm going to recommend it to any of my clients, athletes. I take it with it. Personally, I mess with stuff all the time, but I'm not going to go put this out in social communication. I'm saying that to say this is an area that I have changed my mind on, like very much so. Now, whether or not you need to have full body, head to toe versus half body, we don't have any data that suggests that is specifically different than a small portion. But I think it's reasonable to think if you have a 4 meter square input of red light that's going to be different than a 4 centimeter that's in your body. Again, we don't have specific data on that, but a little bit of logic says we know how it's working. At least close. More of it on my skin, more contact, probably going to have more pronounced systemic effect, localized effect, you put it right on your knee, quite different in there. It's an area that is growing. The question with red light stuff is always better than what Is it effective? And the studies are showing like yes, but is it better than? That's what we don't have direct answers to. Red light therapy is one of those secondary or tertiary recovery modalities we use. If you can check boxes that are higher up on the order, then we'll let you tinker with red light. But if our sleep is out of order, you guys know this stuff. I don't even have to say it. Then I'm like, you're coming to me and you have 40 questions about red light therapy. I'm going to do the stare you in the face blankly until you get really uncomfortable and eventually back your way out and be like, oh yeah, I should probably go to sleep. So that's my way of thinking about it. Like I opened up the conversation with I could make a case for any modality you possibly have here. The question is, is that the most important thing you should be doing? Are you using it properly? And you as a consumer or coach, are you providing realistic expectations?

Right.

That aspect of all health practices is critically important. Realistic expectations of what it's going to do and the magnitude of effect it's going to have. And if you're honest about that, then fuck, I'm all good at it. Rock and roll. Like Gary sends me a bet, I'm using it. I'm not going to lie.

You put one on that shirt. Yeah. You subliminally trying to get me to send you a red light. So you, you.

I'm watching off stage if you don't.

You often talk about these, the three eyes framework. You Know, investigate, interpret and intervene. And this is how you structure your, your work. Can you just share a real life story where this approach has made a big, like a breakthrough difference for an athlete.

Okay.

Or even for someone who's not a super athlete. Yeah. But where it's made a breakthrough difference for someone, a real life story.

So the three eyes is just a framework of thinking that. Thank you for saying it that way. It is saying, okay, how do I investigate, how do I measure, what do I measure and how do I get it done? The second one is interpret. What do I make of that information? Is it good, bad, great, terrible, horrible, where should I be? And then the third is intervene. What do I do about it?

Right.

And so one of the things we see in the biohacker space is a huge problem with one of those three areas. So we cut off number one and jump to number three. We do number one and two, but then we have no idea what impact it had, why, or what we should be paying attention to. So we could. I could give you loads of examples. Is there a particular area that we want. You want me to do? Sleep, Food, exercise?

Like, let's do sleep. Yeah. Nobody's sleeping here.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, if Gary Berka is going to force me to talk about my world's most comprehensive sleep company, absolute rest.

Www.absolute sleep. Com.

Rest.com. world's most advanced sleep coaching and testing program in the world. Yeah, I mean, I guess I'll do that if you want me to.

Yes, I do. I want you to.

Okay.

I mean, we know that sleep is our human superpower.

So conceptually we're on the same page. I've already given you philosophically how we approach things. If we're going to be working on sleep, we have to understand, number one, how are we defining good sleep? And we could do this a lot of different ways. I'll talk about it at length in a couple of hours on stage. But you tell me what you care about. Are you concerned about your architecture? Are you concerned about your time duration? Are you concerned about just how you feel the next day? I don't feel good. I'm just losing my. I'm not as sharp as I used to be, or I'm just dragging or I'm not recovering. I'm super sore. Great. Now we're going to go on the path of saying what is the most accurate way to measure that, that specific thing you care about REM sleep so much. Fine. Are we using gold standard scientific methodology to measure that? If not, then we're not going to play the game of REM sleep because we're not even measuring it appropriately. We're not going to dick around and mess around with stuff like that if we don't even start at the beginning of saying this is the appropriate way to measure that variable. The second thing is, how do I interpret it? I'll do this again later, but I promise you, I don't know, 30% of this room is like, can you get me more REM sleep? And I would say, great, what's your REM sleep? And you would all give me these random numbers and I would go, great, what should it be? And you're going to go higher.

And.

I'm going to say, why? And you're going to go, because the score is yellow on the scorer and my friend's number is bigger. Great. So interpretation is everything. What should it be for you? Are you male? Female? Are you 35 years old? Are you 65 years old? Do you travel internationally? Are we dealing with time changes? What physical environment are you in? Because I promise you right now your REM sleep will change based upon your cognitive load. And it should. We shouldn't have the same scores. I could play this game for hrv. I could play this game for any variable you want. So until we make a decision to act, we have to actually understand qualification. What should it be based on what data? Based on my ethnic background, based on my goals, based on my activities and everything else. The third eye. Okay, now what do I do about it? Now we can play a whole bunch of games and this is when we can start tinkering with maybe cold plunge gets us more. Maybe some more antioxidant rich foods. We could do a whole bunch of stuff. And we've done all of these and I've increased REM sleep and I can't tell you how many hundreds of people. And we've used probably over 500 different modalities to get that there. So it's not the modality because people will just jump to like, my score sucks. I go to number three and we're just guessing. And I hope it works, but we don't have specific rationale between that metric. That's why I care about it. And that's the intervention that we're going to try. So I don't know if that answers the three. I could. That. Was that helpful? That makes sense.

Yeah, makes sense. You know, I had a. I had a very, very interesting conversation a few months ago with a former professional athlete. His name was Billy Davis. He won two super Bowls. He took the Ravens to the Super Bowl. And it gives you any time frame of when he played professional ball. He also took the Cowboys to the Super Bowl. He was. Oh, okay.

I was gonna say, I don't recognize his name.

Been a little while. And he. He was one of the greatest receivers in the league at the time. And I had this, like, pondering question in my mind. You know, you see these super athletes, you know, like a Michael Phelps or Lance Armstrong or, you know, LeBron James, Michael Jordan. And I'm always fascinated by their athletic prowess and their performance, but I'm more fascinated by their duration of staying at the top of their game. And I always wanted an answer to this question, like, not just what makes the difference between a good athlete and a great athlete, but what keeps a great athlete at the absolute top of their game for such a long period of time? And this was the answer that he gave me. And I found it really fascinating because, you know, you go from relative obscurity to all of a sudden you're a celebrity. You go from probably not having a lot of means to being very wealthy, very well known. So you're getting pulled in every direction. You know, we've seen a lot of athletes fall to the, you know, the pleasures of the flesh, right, and ruin their careers. And I just. I asked him, I was like, what kept you at the top of your game? I mean, you were being. You. You'd already, you know, exhausted your contract. You know, you. You already had set the records. I mean, what. What was getting you up every morning? How. How are you saying no to all the temptations? And he said there was a. A moment. It was the coolest explanation I'd ever heard. He said, gary, there was a moment when the plate would get called and I would break off the line and I would be sprinting down the sideline in this field at hundred percent of my effort. I didn't have one ounce more to give. And he said, there are 70,000 people in a stadium, but I could actually hear one voice. I actually would tune into one voice on the sideline. I could hear one person going, go, Billy. And I could hear that voice crystal clear. And I was looking down the field, and I could actually tell that the trumpet player was too close to the sideline. I was actually going to collide with him when I caught the ball. He said, as I'm sprinting, I could feel the ball snap. I could feel actually the throw up in the air, and he goes. I could feel the defender coming across the field full Speed. And he goes, that guy wasn't coming to give me a kiss. And he said, and right before I would put my hands up and the ball would touch my hands, he said it was a feeling like I never, ever, ever felt before. And he said, I chased that moment, that three seconds, like a RA rat to cheese. And he said, I don't know how to describe it. It's better than any drug I ever had. I was so hyper aware, my senses were so alert. And then that ball would touch my hands, I would get hit and it would be over. And he'd, I just want to do it again. And he said, that's what got me up every morning. That's what pushed me in the weight room. That's what made me say no to women, no to clubs, no to drugs, no to, no to. And all of these temptations that I had out there that it didn't. That weren't available to me before. And I just thought that that was fascinating, that it was that moment that he. That he chased. And it was the only time I've ever talked to someone of that caliber that actually gave me a real explanation for what keeps them at the top of that game. So can you talk a little bit about that? That mental resilience, you know, discipline versus, you know, motivation? Because on the one end of the spectrum, you got David Goggins who's like, sure, fricking do it. If your legs break, good, you know, it makes you a man.

Probably not super great for just put.

Duct tape on your feet if they fracture, you know, and then, you know, but that's not. That's not realistic for most of us.

Yeah.

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Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast.

So I've been fortunate. I mean, as you have to work with professional athletes in every major sport at the highest level, the MVPs, the Cy Young winners, the gold medalists, all of it. And some of them are around for four or five years and we've had some that have been in leagues for 15 plus years.

Yeah.

So we have seen this quite a bit. And I'm gonna, I'm gonna give you two sides of a blade here. The reality of it is the folks we have dealt with who have done those really long, lengthy careers, had these billion dollars in revenue, you know, contracts, total. The good side of the equation is they have such unbelievable drive to. It's not always win. We hear this like, oh, it's Michael Jordan, like super competitive. Sometimes they're not super competitive, but they're obsessed about something. It's like, I just can't beat that thing. Like, you talked about it as that feeling. I want that feeling again. Others are. My friends made fun of me when I was 12 because I put on a report, I want to break the major League baseball strikeout record. And 20 years later, they can't let go of it. Like, they're so locked into being like, I have to get this. I have to get, like, I have to sort of get this. The hard part about that is, and what also puts almost that same person in the same category is they have what we call post Olympics depression. We've had people spend five or six or seven years doing nothing else in their life but training for baseball. No hobbies, no family, nothing else. They don't go to conferences, they don't go on vacations. They run right to it. And then they win. The S. Young. And you know what happens the moment they're announced as Cy Young winner? Nothing. They feel nothing. I've won a national championship and I hated everyone I played with and I walked out the field and went, huh. I'll have more satisfaction walking off this stage than I did winning a national championship. Football.

Thank you. The ultimate human podcast. You're welcome.

Gary's brekka satisfying every 42 year old man in the world.

That clip is going to go viral. Guys, guys, my team. Can you cut that? Throw it on TikTok.

I coached an athlete who won, was the first American to win Olympic gold in her sport. She beat a 14 or 15 time world champion. Huge upset, right? And then they walk out of these things and they have this depression because they have no identity outside of that. And so the athletes that stay around all those years, sometimes they're still winning, sometimes they're losing a bunch. And you're just, you as a fan are like, God, can you just like, you know, you Want them to retire, you want them to walk away, but they can't because they have no other identity. That's what got them there though. That is what. That's why I said it's the double edged sword here because it was that obsession with that moment, that obsession with winning, that obsession with proving somebody wrong, that obsession with something. But they also can't walk away. And so they battle through everything to continue to play because they don't know what the hell else to do when they retire.

Right.

And so we have to be really cautious of this. And this is actually something we work on. All of our athletes work with sports psychologists and we encourage them to work with therapists or psychotherapists as well, even if they're fine. As we start getting in that middle to back half, we have to start developing these things or they're going to walk away. But not all, but like they're going to walk away potentially in trouble. So we actually have some of our really young, like megastar sub 23 year olds or starting this process. Like, you have to have at least one hobby. You have to do something else, something.

Outside of your sport.

It's gotta be, yeah, I don't care if it's. Some of our guys are into hunting, some of them are riding horseback, they're painting. I don't, like, I don't care. But we're gonna develop at least one other thing that we can go to now. We did that with one of our guys and he's like, I'll play golf. We're like, all right. So he never played golf before. We brought a coach in for him, taught him how to swing or whatever. Like three days later, shoulder problems, Shoulder problems. We couldn't figure it out. Like, what happened? Like, oh, yeah, I played golf. Whatever. We're like, like, you should be fine swinging. Then we looked and we're like, you had 185 swings. Like he, he bought a simulator, put it in his garage and swung for like an hour and a half at full go. And we're like, okay, that's the athletes. Like, you gotta be really specific with what you tell them, like, really careful. So my answer to it is really that the longevity piece is sometimes just pure grit. Because the fear of having to deal with life outside of that is so gripping and so real. Whether it's income, I don't know how else I'm gonna make income. Right. Professional sports, like you're done in your early 30s. It's like not. You guys are all just like figuring out what you kind of want to be in life at 40 and they're, they're, they're done such a huge transition.

Yeah.

So I could go on and on, but like that, from the psychological mental perspective, the ones I've been around, that's really the big concern that they have to deal with. And it gets them there, but it also can set them up for troubles the next 25 to 50 years of their life. And that's when you see those really sad stories of the athletes that have gone bankrupt and all the other. They just have no other skill.

So I want to talk about some of the big majors yesterday. There was a lot of questions after my group talk in here, especially coming from, from women centered around intermittent fasting. Oh yeah. And their feeding windows. And lots of questions around fasted versus fed cardio, fasted versus fed weight training. You know, which is better for fat loss, which is better for muscle, you know, hypertrophy. And I think there's still that prevailing fear in a lot of women that if I weight train, I'm going to get bulky. Sure. You know, that's. So let's start with, with morning exercise because most of us are exercising in the morning. Fasted versus fed exercise. Fasted versus fed cardio. Where do you fall in that?

Yeah, there's a lot of literature on this. In fact, probably two or three months ago, we published a study where we looked at intermittent fasting, a 16, 8 protocol, which you all probably know of. Right. And we did it in men and women. Well, what's different about it is they were strength training four days a week and they were strength training in our laboratory and it was really, really hard. They did a repetition to fail test every single day. And if they exceeded like 10 repetitions that day, they went up in weight the next day. And we increased their calories every single week based on their body weight. So this is a hyper caloric. This was not a fat loss. This was if you tried to increase.

Calories prior to exercise.

No. Oh, one group trained, fed 13 hour eating window. The other group trained, completely fasted and waited over an hour to start their feeding window.

So train fasted, metabolic window.

Which is gone.

Yeah, gone.

Like total nonsense. Right. Well, there's some caveats. There's one actually important thing there. Point is we set them up for the most extreme conditions like unbelievably hard training. Very, very previously well trained people, hypercaloric. And you're going to not only train fasted, you're going to stay fasted for.

A minimum of an Hour post exercise.

Post exercise, everybody got stronger. Everybody gained muscle mass. Men, the women, all of them. But the fed group got stronger than the other group did. That said the fasting group, better body composition results. This is how physiology works, friends. There's not a single modality. We could pick any of the ones we just said. Any other question you potentially have where I could say universally, it's a panacea, it is always better. It's almost always a case of trade offs. Right, so what is your goal now? The fasting group got more sleepy as the study went on. They did less work. The volume of exercise was lower. They couldn't hang for as much volume. This was only eight weeks. My suspicion, and I'm completely speculating, is if this would have been a 12 or 16 week or maybe six months, I think the fasting group would have had more problems because they were getting tired during the day. It was difficult to handle. All because, remember, we're hypercaloric and they're just having a hard time getting all those calories in, in that condensed window. So they made it for eight weeks, but they were headed in the wrong direction. So my answer directly is, can you train really hard? Fasted 100%. Can you make progress? Absolutely. Can you train after fed? Yes. None of them are like a. This does work. This does not work. It's pros and cons. And at this point, the research indicates it has almost nothing to do with male versus female. It has everything to do with you as a human versus you as a human. Maybe you are terrible at training fasted and maybe you are significantly better when you train fasted. That is the reality of how this is going to play out. So if I did the same example for endurance or cardio, you would hear the same thing. The one caveat here is there have been recent publications suggesting if you are in a really, really high volume endurance athlete, you're running, you're cycling 60 kilos a week, or kilometers a week, 80 kilometers a week, like you're really up. That does actually look like feeding before training is more advantageous than not. So if you're in one of those categories, and for any of our athletes, we never intentionally tell people to fast. If they're already fasting, already like it, their stomach doesn't work in the morning, they get nauseous. If it makes them feel better, then we'll, of course we'll let them keep going. But we very, very rarely be like, all right, you have to start fasting for your training.

There's just no Advantage if you refer to body composition. So in the fasted group, they had better body composition. So if fat and most of us are not training for a, you know, gold medal, we're training to look good, feel good, have more energy, you know, live longer, take care of our bodies, detoxify. So for the vast majority of us in broad categories, if I'm summarizing what you're saying, you know, the fasted training group had better body composition, both got stronger, the fed group got stronger. Yeah.

So you want to think about it this way. You can get a little bit strong and gain less fat in a hypocaloric state. How many of you would take that? I guess there's a lot of hands are going to go up, right?

Yeah.

Great. Awesome. Now remember, that was just one study. You can only interpret so much. It doesn't prove anything. So maybe more studies will come out, agree with us, disagree with us, who knows? If you look at the collective body of literature, fasting doesn't seem to have a huge impact on body fat. If it does, it generally looks like it potentially benefits it, but the impact is pretty minimal. So the way that I think the most appropriate way to think about this is the impact of the fasts, say, is less than the impact of your adherence, than the quality of your workout, than your happiness, your enjoyment. So if you don't mind fasting and your primary goal is body composition, then I'd probably see tri fasted training. But if you're like, oh my God, I hate it, it's awful, it's the worst thing ever. And you don't train hard, you hate it, you have sucky workouts, then I would say definitely don't do it. And if you don't carry the weight for sure, try it. There is no to be. Again, to be really clear, outside of really, really high volume endurance, there doesn't seem to be huge downsides to it. Does that calculus make sense? Yeah, you got lots of options here. Right. So what we want to walk away from our idea is that this is absolutely better or absolutely fake or garbage. It doesn't work. Like, none of those are true. There are use cases that are pretty common, not even just athletes, normal people, in which they're either completely acceptable options or one might even be slightly more advantageous than others. So I personally will do both. I'll go through weeks at a time where I go fasted training, I'll go through other weeks at a time when I do fed training, I tinker with them all. We will generally by default for our clients and our athletes generally not going to act. Make them go, start fasting if they don't. But again, we're not walking away from it unless we have specific reason in them that it's compromising performance.

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Now let's get back to the ultimate human podcast. Yeah, I want to talk about some real life experience we've had coming through our clinic system. We've had about a quarter of a million patients come through our clinic system in the last 10 years. I'm going to pick on the women here for a minute because there's a lot of questions about this, you know, in the previous discussion and you know, it's, it's not uncommon for women to come in with the scenario and say, Gary, I don't, I don't get it. I wake up in the morning, I'm fasted, I have a cup of black coffee. I go to Orange Theory. You guys know what Orange Theory is? It's like one of those exercise sort of like a boot camp. I go to Orange Theory, I go hammer down for 55 minutes. I've been doing that five days a week for three months and I haven't lost a single pound.

Yeah.

And they go, I don't get it. I'm not even eating. And, and, and so nothing is more frustrating than that, than trying to exercise that discipline. When we, when we took a deeper dive into the vast majority of, of those cases, they had very narrow feeding windows. Is usually husband and wife or, you know, spouses start this journey together. Husband's doing great, he feels amazing. Sleeping like a bear for sure, wolfing down pizza in his feeding window. You know, she's having a Ritz cracker and black coffee and she's blown up like a tick. And, and now they want to get divorced. So I become a marriage counselor and I'm like he still loves you. He's just a candidate for intermittent fasting and you're not. So can you talk about. And then I will tell you some of the worst endocrine disasters that we've seen are young menstruating women that eat in a very narrow feeding window.

Yeah. So there's a thing called reds R E D s Red S. Yep. And it's an effectively what happens when you live in this low energy availability state and res is effectively a female specific issue. If you live in a really low energy availability state for a long time, you're going to see. You said hormonal, but you can pick any metric you possibly care about and it will tank. Res is actually a very legitimate, really difficult.

It's awful.

It's awful. And it is incredibly pervasive, especially for female athletes or what I'll just call female exercisers. Like, your avatar is perfect.

Yeah.

Not an athlete, but you're just, you're exercising five or six times a week and you're really doing cardio and you're like really pushing it. Strength training twice a week. So that is a very, very real thing. And it's so hard because they desperately need to lose that weight. They want to lose that weight and they're just burning themselves to do it and they get in that spot. So the approach we have philosophically, I mean, this can happen to men too. But I would say our experience and our coaching program would mimic yours.

Okay.

It is more we have. Personally, I don't know if the data actually support this, but we have seen this be more of an issue in women.

I mean, I'm talking the vast, vast majority and very narrow feeding.

We'll see this sleep will start to tank. Sleep will just really crash and go down. We see excessive rumination. I don't really think of myself as an anxious person. I never had this. But I'm just like completely compulsive and assessive and I don't know what's going on. Like we have all this and then that spiral. Right. You sleep worse, you binge, you fly off the handle. Then you punish. You go even further in the wrong direction and then you try to out exercise it. You try to out under eat it again and you're just in this. I mean, does this sound familiar at all? Not to you personally, but maybe a friend of yours.

Yeah. Asking for a friend.

Yeah. So again, mimic that same exact thing. What you want to do is there's a couple of things you can try. Maybe I'll start there there's been some research on things like diet refeeds. This is something that you want to think about. And this refeed can happen every something like 4 to 10 weeks. And a refeed is generally like a 10 to 15% elevation in calories. It is not a cheat Sunday. I eat whatever the hell I want one day a week. We have some people that are fine with that, but we generally. I don't like to think about food as cheating. It sets again, particularly people with or in the area of eating disorders. Most professionals in that space are gonna like cringe at the idea of a cheat day. It's just a really bad relationship with food. So we don't do that. A diet refeed, a diet rebound is also not a doubling of calories. At the same token, when we're cutting calories, we're not cutting 50% either. Right. We're generally in the window of like 10 to 15% increases and decreases in range that will help significantly stabilize your physiology. And we tend to see really common rebounds of hormonal profiles. Sleep perceptions, mood control is a huge one. But this one. So one thing I would try on that is maybe seven to 21 days of a mild refeed, generally that looks like more carbohydrates. We're generally going to give those back because it tends to be the one. This group tends to hyper restrict in the face of large volumes of high intensity exercise. That also has a direct impact on sleep. And so that tends to be the one we can give back. And they're okay if you want to go. If their protein is low and you want to go the protein route, fine. If their fats are too low, because some women do that too, like super low fat, fine. So pay attention to your client, your person. Right. And deploy the strategy that makes the most sense. Yeah, it's a significant issue. So the advice I would give that individual is do the refeed. The framework here, friends, is this. And you probably say something like this all the time. People want to lose fat to get healthier. And we will always say get healthier first. Fat loss is far easier when you're healthy. When you're not, it is really difficult. If you want to think about that as hormone imbalances, if you want to think about that as that's not always just the case, it's not all your hormones. But if that helps you understand conceptually what's happening, get the body stable, get it happy. Weight loss will be far easier when you do that. So you can actually come back and either reduce the exercise. One of the things we see happen specifically with high intensity exercise. It's okay, some people can't handle five days a week of it. It's really common, super time efficient, I get it. But five days a week in the face of really low caloric intake can hammer people. And you will see this with recovery metrics. Whether it's our biochemical metrics we're taking, whether it's something like an HRV or asleep or perception or whatever, you'll just see that stuff just tank. So strategy one I gave you was maybe altering caloric intake. Strategy two might be, let's back off the orange theory. Three times a week. They're not going to go to two, they're at five. Maybe can we negotiate to four? And then what do we put in exchange? It could be nothing, it could be a walk, it could be something else. Right. To get anxiety out of the way, get respiratory rate down, whatever we can do. But that is a really common thing we'll do. So you have multiple levers is what I'm trying to help you understand. If somebody's refusing to change calories, great, see if they'll tone down the high intensity. They won't pull up on that. Maybe tell them, okay, fine, we're going up in calories. But those are the two biggest levers. You're not going to out supplement your way through this one. Like you're just not going to. You, you have to give the body some sort of allostatic reprieve or you're not going to get anywhere.

I think we be remiss if we didn't actually touch on supplementation, if any. What are some must haves? There's a lot of, I don't want to say that it's new research, but it's newly publicized research, especially surrounding creatine. Yeah, you know, I'm a huge fan of creatine, especially in, in older females. Not just for muscle benefits, for cognitive benefits. So I wonder if you might just touch on creatine as a big one and then any other must have supplementation for, you know, athletes or people that are just on that health journey. Because nothing's worse than paralysis of analysis that you get getting out on Google right now or going out on social media and trying to figure out what should I be supplementing with. I mean, I'm a huge fan obviously of genetic testing and supplementing for deficiency. But when we talk about performance, muscle fat loss, you know, impact on sleep.

Yeah. So we're all probably on the same page. Supplements Are one of our tertiary or lower level activities. You got to do all the big stuff for. Can I skip past that part, though? We all know that's to be true. Whole food. Whole food. Whole food. Whole food. Okay, we're done, right? Absolutely true. And we for sure spend most of our time on whole food. But we will get to supplements. The only ones that I say are absolutely necessary are ideally based on direct biomarkers or performance goals. Generally we approach it that way. Blood chemistry, blood tests. That has by far the most rigorous science behind it. It has the most direct implications. We will do our specific supplementation based on your unique molecular signature. After that, we can have some categorical universal ones. Creatine, of course, is getting loads of love, which makes my heart just warm to all ends. I have a conflict of interest. I have a financial tie to Momentous, but do whatever you want there, right? So I always want to disclose things like that. So that being said, I don't get any money if you buy creatine.

How about monohydrate versus hcl?

Yeah. So monohydrate is the play for sure. And one thing you want to pay attention to with creatine, and this is different. Nicole, how long have we been talking about creatine? Like for a billion decades, right? The thing about it was we used to be able to buy it from anywhere. And I sold this for. I said this thing like for decades. Just buy it all by. It's all creatine, monohydrate. Because it all came from the same manufacturer. It's now different. So there's a specific type of creatine called Crea Pure. Many, many companies use it again, I do momentous, but do whatever you want. Now the difference between Crea Pure. Excuse me, is they don't use formaldehyde and other things you don't want in there in the processing way. If you guys actually knew how creatine is made, you'd be stunned. Creapure is not made with formaldehyde. It's not made with other things you don't want. It's also the only one that has verified concentrations of accuracy. So pick a provider that has that generally pick one that has transparency in their testing. We actually published a study a couple years ago. Depending on what country you pull from, you'll see that supplements even like creatine have anywhere between like a 10 to 40% adulteration rate. So either they're over or under dosed that contain ingredients that are not supposed to be there, or they don't contain the Actual active ingredient that is now happening with creatine. We're seeing it a ton, specifically with things like creatine gummies, not actually having creatine in them. I don't know if you sell creatine. So that's happening.

Creatine gummies, sorry, perfect. What about dosing, you know, milligrams, you know, do we need the, the loading dose?

How important is the loading dose? Loading is absolutely fine. There's really no downside. The benefit of creatine monohydrate from a sporting background. For years we knew it enhanced muscle strength and performance and things, but the vast majority of the research on creatine monohydrate now are tinkering with things like bone health, neurological disorders, brain injuries. Now, it's not all coming out as perfectly great, but we've had research now in kids, in pregnancies, in vulnerable populations, in young, in old, across multiple laboratories, at lots of different dosaging at timing. Take it in the morning, take it post exercise. And if you look at that research in totality, timing is irrelevant. Take it whatever time of day you want. It doesn't seem to have that many downsides. It's the closest thing we've ever seen to a panacea in the supplement world. It really is. It seems to benefit a lot. It has a small antioxidant profile. It just has so many benefits potentially to it with little downsides. So from the dosing perspective, five grams a day was always the number, right? We never followed 5 grams a day, right. It's like, okay, if you're 70 kilos, 5 grams, but some of our people are 200 plus kilos, right? Like legitimately we're like, all right, we're not going to give that guy 5. It's like saying 30 grams of protein, it's like, okay, yeah, yeah, it's like a snack in his tooth. Like there's just no chance. So we've over many, many years used 10, 15 plus the research now, like Darren Kandao has done some really interesting stuff giving postmenopausal women 20 plus grams a day for over two years, looking at bone mineral changes. Not a lot changed there. Some little stuff, but no reported downsides, no issues. And there's been a lot of things like that. So if your 74 year old grandma could take 20 G's a day, yeah, I think you're fine. Last thing I'll add to that is it's gotten a lot of publicity, but there was actually a cool study that was looked at creatine for cognitive function post sleep deprivation. And so this is people who hang like, you had a bad night of sleep. You had only a few hours taking 15 to 20 grams in that session. Showed a mild improvement in cognitive function that day. I don't know if that is actually as cool as it sounds, to be honest with you. I'm a kind of guy. Like, as you've seen, I want two or three or four studies before I get too excited. But there's no downside. There's no harm to doing it. So if you want to be in part of your protocol, if you have a bad night of sleep or travel and you want to throw in 20 grams a day, it's not going to do anything. Besides, maybe some of you might get a little bit of GI distress. But it's another one of those potential slight win almost no downside. So if that's your jam, fire away. If you hate that idea, fine too. You're going to be just fine. There's plenty of other ways to get there.

Okay. Amazing. I wind down all of my ultimate human podcasts by asking all of my guests the same question, and there's no right or wrong answer to this question. But what does it mean to you to be an ultimate human?

We will use the phrase performance. You use ultimate human. I'm going to say the same thing. And that is simply the ability to get what you want and not have what you don't want. It's autonomy.

Right?

You want to be able to look a certain way, you want to be able to feel a certain way. You want to be able to perform a certain way. And we all define that differently. I have some, actually, some of our mutual friends, like the most famous people in the world, and they actively want to be, I'm talking males. They want to be as skinny and lean as possible. They don't want to be like lean and toned. They literally want to be as skinny as possible. Fine. And we have plenty of friends who are literally the opposite, Right? Like my man over here. Just be as Jack as possible, Right?

He's actually a very nice guy. Fine. Don't let the tattoos fool you.

I don't care how you define good luck. I don't care how you define feel. I want to feel more energy. I want to feel stronger. I want to feel more in control of my emotions. I want to be a better leader. Fine. You tell me the rules of the game and we'll go after that. And so my ultimate human would simply be. You want what you want, hopefully for good reasons. Not past trauma or like, whatever, like, legitimate reasons that are serving you in a good fashion. And if you're getting that and you're not having things you don't want, you're not in pain, you're not doing things to please other people, you're not doing stuff you don't want, taking things you don't want, you're uncomfortable with. To me, that's the only ultimate human experience.

Amazing, guys. Big round of applause for Dr. Andy Galvin. Thank you so much, man.