The Ultimate Morning Challenge with Gary Brecka - Day 2 #live

Sam. Hey, guys. Welcome back to day two of the ultimate morning routine challenge. I'm so pumped to be here with you guys. Is everyone feeling good after day one? Did you prioritize yourself in the morning when you woke up? Remember, put yourself first early in the day so you can give the rest of your day away. That's so important that self care in the morning, that time that belongs only to you. Especially my female audience. Did you do your sunlight tracker, guys? Did you get sunlight in your eyes today? Did you let some sunlight hit your skin or at least get a window open and get your eyes out into natural sunlight? I mean, this is all about accountability and starting to build the habits and that you can take with you anywhere in the world that are portable in any time zone, in any country, in any place, and really set the tone for you to actually have a routine that your body can tie into. Because remember, our circadian clock is one of the most disrupted biorhythms in the world. And I'm going to show you some research today on what happens to our bodies when we disrupt our circadian rhythm. You know, I spoke at Mar a Lago two nights ago, some of you might have seen it on my Instagram and I, and we just talked about the stage state of our, our country right now and why the wealthiest nation in the world, the highest spender on health care, has the highest rates of so many chronic diseases, spending four and a half trillion dollars a year on health care, leading the world in morbid obesity, type 2 diabetes, multiple chronic disease in a single biome, infant mortality, maternal mortality. These, these are not things that are happening to us. They are things that are happening within us. And how we prevent them is we get closer to Mother Nature. You know, we, we, we've lost touch with each other, the human touch that is so important. You know, I always talk about the, the Blue zone research. And if, if you've seen any of the Blue Zone documentaries or you've read Dr. Valter Longo's research, the longevity diet, or some of the research he's doing at usc, you know that it's not a dogmatic diet that extends our life, right? When you look at dieting all over the world, when you look at these blue zones, you don't see continuity between diets. In other words, it wasn't keto, paleo, pescatarian, vegan, vegetarian, carnivore. It wasn't raw food, it wasn't any of these dogmatic diets. The only continuity between diets, because when you look at These different areas of the world. Sardinia, for example, one of the longest life expectancies in the world, one of the highest carbohydrate consumptions. You go to the Mediterranean and you see very high fat in the diet, fatty fish, lots of oils, olive oils. And then you go to Singapore, you see the highest meat consumption per capita and one of the longest life expectancies in the world. And then of course the French are kind of screwing up the whole equation because they're smoking cigarettes, drinking wine and eating cheese. But the point being, and they're living a long time in certain areas of France. But the point being that there wasn't a continuity between the diets. The only theme that ran through every single one of these diets were that they were all whole foods, right? None of them had a processed foods as a part of their diet, none of them had seed oils as a part of their diet. But the two things that were contiguous between all of the blue zones and there were no exceptions to these two rules. One was a sense of community and purpose in life. And so they actually felt that they had a sense of community, a sense of purpose, even if they were elderly and their only role was to go out to the garden and get vegetables for meals that day for their family. There was no such thing as assisted care living facilities in these locations. Assisted care living meant mom and dad moved back in with the kids until they passed away. They didn't institutionalize and isolate them. We knew in the mortality space when I was studying mortality for a living that if you wanted to cut the life expectancy of any human being in half at any age, you put them in isolation. And so the, the, the sense of purpose and sense of community is so important. That's why I'm trying to build a community at the ultimate human. That's why I have a VIP community. That's why I do these challenges. Because I want you to know there's so many like minded people that are on this journey with you and you'll find that when you get into the comments section on these videos, you'll the kindest human beings on, on the earth. And what I love to see and I saw yesterday there were thousands of comments. Thank you so much by the way, for all of your kind words. There were so many comments in there and what I noticed was that the community is beginning to support each other and answer each other's questions. I saw people going back and forth about NAD and NMN and breakfast foods and recommendations for kids and multivitamins, all kinds of things. And so this is what we're trying to do. We're trying to create a movement, a community that shares information with each other so we can make America healthy again. But the second thing besides community and sense of purpose was mobility. Mobility until later in life. We know now that it's not arguable that muscle is our metabolic currency. Muscle is directly linked to longevity. Thigh circumference, grip strength, are all indications of how many more years you have left on earth. Frailty is the greatest risk to mortality. In older ages, it's actually not even the disease processes. It's not cancer and diabetes and heart disease. It's frailty not being able to keep yourself stable while you're grip, strengthening the rail of a set of steps, going up and down a set of steps, not having the grip strength to actually suspend your own body weight and hold your own body weight. And we, we become so weak in our aggressive pursuit of comfort that a lot of people won't even take the most basic of advice because it makes them slightly uncomfortable. It's okay to be cold. It's okay to be hot. We gotta stop telling grandma not to go outside. It's too hot, not to go outside. It's too cold, to just lay down, to just relax, to eat at the very first pang of hunger. This is destroying our natural defense mechanisms. The human body responds very well to certain stresses. There's a type of stress called hormesis, a hormetic stress that when you apply it to the body, the body strengthens in result, right? Rest, relaxation, lack of mobility, these destroy our natural defense mechanisms. And I'll probably cut the audience in half with this next statement. But the worst thing that ever happened to humanity during the pandemic was not even the pandemic itself. It's how we answered the pandemic. What we did was we put human beings in isolation, masking social distancing, residential quarantining. What this did was it took us out of contact with other human beings and it collapsed our natural defense mechanism. Remember, if you don't load a bone, it doesn't strengthen. If you don't tear a muscle, it doesn't grow. And if you don't challenge the immune system, it weakens. And so you're seeing the effects of the global weakening of the immune system. And all of these new pandemics that they say are circling back around that are going to come and get us are only after the weak and the immunocompromised. They are not after those of us that regularly Stress our system and strengthen it through this process of hormesis. One of those stressors, believe it or not, is sunlight. That's why I'm such a big believer in cold water exposure, basic mobility, deep sleep, sunlight exercise. And we're going to talk about the benefits of exercise. We're going to actually talk about which type of exercise and what time of the day is most beneficial, according to the research. So here's what most people don't realize. The way that you breathe actually controls your nervous system, your energy, your mental clarity, and even your immune function. So today I'm going to show you how to. An intentional breath work can reduce stress by lifting your nervous system from fight or flight into recovery. In other words, switching you from what's called a sympathetic state to a parasympathetic state. Boost your immune system, increase oxygen efficiency, improve your focus, your mental clarity, and it's going to change the way that oxygen is delivered to the brain, which is called oxygen tension. I wish I could sell it. It's free. I'm going to teach it to you today. You can't bottle it. And most of what serves our cellular biology are the things that are free. Grounding, sunlight, breath, work, exercise. They're not expensive and they're portable and we can do them everywhere. God gave us everything that we need to thrive. I have millions of dollars of fancy equipment in my condo. You don't need any of it to reach a state of optimal health. This is just curiosity vendor that I've been on. And so I'd rather spend money on red light beds than than Ferraris. But you don't need this expensive equipment in order to reach a state of being completely optimal. So we're not just talking about theory today. We're going to go through the actual guided breathwork session together. I'm going to talk about the science behind it. And for IVIP's, today's session is going to be next level. Dr. Paul Saladino, formerly known as the Carnivore MD is going to join us. He's going to break down breath work and nutrition together for performance and longevity. So if you're on, if you're ready to unlock the full potential of your breath, you know, let's get started. And I feel a compulsion to go to the whiteboard. Can I go to the whiteboard for a second? All right, I'm going to show you guys a clock here of your circadian rhythm. Can they see this? Okay. Your body operates on a 24 hour biological clock. It's called your Circadian rhythm. It's the system that wakes you up, it makes you feel alert. It's the system that puts you to sleep, it makes you tired. It regulates how things efficiently our body functions. Remember, we all know that sleep is important, but few of us know why sleep is important. Right. When we talk about the different stages of sleep, why is sleep so important? And why is quality sleep so important? Well, there are two particular phases of sleep, REM sleep and deep sleep, that I want to highlight today because these are what going to set the trajectory for our next day. So when we go to sleep, everyone knows when you had a good night's sleep, you feel rested, you feel awake, you feel refreshed. But why is that the case? Well, there are things that happen during deep sleep and REM sleep that don't happen any other time during the day. When we get into the deep phases of sleep, a system in our body called the glymphatic system activates. So everyone knows about the lymphatic system. You get a sore throat, your lymph glands swell in your throat or under your armpits, sometimes in your inguinary, inguinal area. The lymph system is what eliminates waste from our body. It's a static system. So in other words, it's not like a vein or an artery which has the pressure of the heart. It doesn't have, it doesn't have a muscular system to contract it like your esophagus or like your intestinal tract does. It's a static system. So trash gets dumped into this system. Right? And then in order to eliminate it from our body, we need muscular contraction. If you've ever heard of a deep vein thrombosis, this is lack of contracting the calf muscles and not actually circulating the blood, causing it to pool and, and throw a clot. Well, the lymphatic system is circulated by muscular contraction. This is why movement, things like qigong, basic, you know, yoga, breathwork, walking, these are some of the most underrated exercises in the world that can make a dramatic difference in how your body eliminates waste. And when I say eliminate waste, I don't mean stool or urine. I mean cellular waste. The process of cellular biology is a really dirty process. Even the cleanest of automotive engines have an exhaust. And if you back that exhaust up, it will eventually blow the engine. The same thing happens in human beings. What happens is we don't eliminate the waste from our system and it backs up and it blows our engine. This is why metabolic syndrome is happening earlier and earlier. And earlier. Now we see prepubescent teens with metabolic syndrome. It used to be a syndrome that affected the elderly over 65 and above, and now it's creeped its way all the way down into our children. And so we're going to talk about movement in a minute. But that's why movement is so important in the body. But there's no muscular contraction in the brain. So the brain doesn't have a lymphatic system, it has a glymphatic system. This is a system to eliminate waste from the brain. And again, I'm not talking about stool or urine, I'm talking about cellular waste. Inflammatory factors, cytokines, histamines, prostaglandin, E2s, all of these, all of these inflammatory factors that build up in our brain, slow the transmission of our neurons, which is slowing the transmission of our thought, clog our neuronal pathways, what's called the neurosynaptic junction. And so if we could eliminate that waste, this is when we wake up clear and refreshed. And when do we eliminate that waste? We eliminate it during deep sleep. This is the only time in the circadian cycle of the 24 hour day where your brain is eliminating waste. Now the REM cycle is where the body actually begins to assemble. The brain begins to assemble the thoughts and the things that you learned that day with your subconscious. These two start to talk. So when we're trying to learn new tasks, when we're trying to retain information, when we're trying to absorb complicated interactions that we've had throughout the day, these get assembled during REM sleep. How many of you guys wake up at night with like a great business idea or, you know, you solve the problem in your life and you roll over and you actually write down a great idea on a notepad. Some of you do that before you go back to sleep. A lot of you probably have a notepad next to your nightstand or on your nightstand. So you can actually get thoughts out of your mind at night. Well, why do you wake up with these thoughts that seem to be solving the most complex problems in your life? Because REM sleep is when the brain is beginning to assemble learning. So learning happens during REM and retention and waste elimination happens during, during deep sleep. This all starts before midnight. And this is why I'm going to encourage you, if you are not a shift worker, to actually try to go to bed before midnight. Every hour of sleep that we get before midnight has a dramatic impact on these phases of sleep. The reason for this, and I'M not going to go through the whole cycle. I'm going to start before we go to bed and talk about. Hopefully you can see this. It's a very easy chart to see. The melatonin secretion begins around 8pm so now what happens? Because of our modern lifestyle, because we regulate our air temperature, because we regulate our lighting, all this bright lighting, I can, I can make it the surface of the sun at 1 o' clock in the morning in my house if I want to. So can you. But this is fighting our circadian biology. So around 8pm, melatonin secretion starts in the brain. It actually starts to rise in our brain. Melatonin is the calming sleep hormone. It has a lot of other functions I can go into in a minute. But melatonin secretion actually starts a few hours before midnight. This is why, if you want to support your cellular biology, you can dim your lights at night. So use floor level lamps, use lower level lighting, don't use overhead lighting. Our body perceives that as waking light from the sun. So simple things you can do is sort of set your home up so that you're actually feeding your cellular biology. So two hours after the sunset, around 8pm at night, you can start to dim the lights in your house. A lot of you have light controls. If you don't turn the overhead lights on and start to use table and floor lamps that have a lower level of lighting, it comes into your eyes from a different angle and it has less kilowatts, it has actually less milliwatts of irradiance. So you're not fighting the melatonin cycle. Remember, melatonin is responsive to light, just like cortisol is responsive to light. Cortisol is our waking hormone. It takes very little light passing through our eyelids, even when our eyes are closed, to start to stimulate the cortisol Sparse. So about 8 o' clock tonight, then we go through midnight and about 2 o' clock in the mornings is when the deep phases of sleep should begin to occur. This is according to our cellular biology. So you want to be asleep minimum three hours before you start the deepest phase of your sleep. The reason for that is I want to activate, right? I want to activate that glymphatic system and I want my brain to start eliminating waste. What happens after you eliminate waste from the glymphatic system is your body temperature starts to actually drop. Your body will regulate your temperature and your core body temperature will actually begin to drop, which moves you into the next phase of sleep. This is why I'm a big supporter of things like eight sleep mattresses because they will actually cool you through this cycle of sleep. It will sense what phase of sleep you're in and it will actually apply cool water to actually help your body temperature lower and hold you in these states of sleep longer. You don't want to get an eight sleep mattress. Just drop the temperature in your bedroom. Colder than you think. My wife and I go back and forth on the thermostat all the time because she's thin and doesn't like it cold. And I'm thicker and I like it, I like it cold, but colder than you think. Between 65 and 69 degrees Fahrenheit is optimal. That's where most of the research says when your head, sometimes your feet are out in that temperature. It actually helps your body regulate and hold these deeper stages of sleep. So you don't need fancy equipment, you just need a thermostat. Make your room cooler than you actually think it should be. Around 6:00 in the morning, we have a sharp rise in blood pressure. So why do you think you have a sharp rise in blood pressure? Because this is when your cortisol secretion is going to start following that. Around 7:30 in the morning, your melatonin secretion actually stops and this whoops. Let me put those back. This is why it's so important to try to follow the circadian cycle of the sun if we can. So about 7:30 in the morning, melatonin secretion has stopped and now it's time for us to go out and get, and get sunlight. This is going to be first light for most of you guys, depending on where you live in the country. Then we get into reaction times and other things. But this is the circadian cycle of sleep. And so I want to also talk about. Let me pull up my discard that. Okay. So we know that the circadian cycle is what we're trying to tie ourselves into. So now we've woken up in the morning. Yesterday we talked about splashing water on our face, brushing with a soft toothbrush, finding a hydroxy appetite toothpaste rather than a fluoride toothpaste, doing tongue scraping. I think you can get a copper tongue scraper on Amazon for about six bucks. And then also adding oil pulling, which is just organic cold pressed coconut oil, a half tablespoon of that in the mouth and swishing it around to actually saturate our gums with oil. Now we're going to move to the next phase. What I do is I That's when I expose my body to cold right out of the bed. I actually need. Need a. I do the cold exposure. We talked yesterday about what cold exposure does to us. You can either use a cold plunge, you can use a cold shower, or you can actually freeze Tupperware in your. In your refrigerator, in your freezer. And you can take those Tupperware blocks, put them in your bathtub. They will last three, three days. You only need 58 degrees Fahrenheit to be a cold plunge. Colder is not better. Longer is not better. I keep my cold plunges between 48 and 52 degrees. It's just a man contest to try to go down into the 30s. It's painful and it's unnecessary. Also, prolonging cold exposure is not necessary. Remember, we're not trying to become cold adaptive. We're trying to cold shock the body. So you've woken up, you've cleaned your oral cavity, you've flossed, you've tongue brushed, you've oil pulled, you brush with a soft toothbrush, you used hydroxyapatite toothpaste. You're starting to wake up, you expose your body to cold, and then from there, this is when we're going to move into the balance of our morning routine, which for me starts with sunlight exposure and breath work. And I'm going to talk about both of those. Now. We have a really special guest that is joining us, Mrs. Sage Workinger Brecker, my wife, because I'm really trying to serve the female audience, and I want her to talk a little bit about her journey, what she does in the morning. And then we're going to get into the science of. We're going to get into the science of sunlight, and we're going to get into the science of grounding and the science of breath work. Because when I tell you these three things, you will never, ever, ever miss a day of doing breath work the rest of your life. It is free, it is portable, and it can regulate your cellular biology. So are we switching? There is my beautiful wife. So this is Sage working her breakout. She's, you know, it's been a beautiful journey with her. Ten years ago, she and I took over a bankrupt vitamin shop in a strip mall in Naples, Florida, because we wanted to make a change in the world, and we wanted to start a functional medicine clinic. Neither of us are or were licensed to practice medicine, so we had to go find a doctor. And we just knew that there was more to medicine than what we saw was out there. And by the grace of God, that went very well for us. We recently exited that to focus all of our attention on the ultimate human folks like you guys. So I want my wife to talk about what's made the biggest shift in her, in her life with these morning routines.

Oh, it's definitely the Good morning babe getting.

I don't know if you see my Good Morning Babe series. Good morning babe. But I do always bring her a gift and coffee. Yeah.

Yes.

So I wake her up with sunlight and lots of energy, but she gets gifts and coffee.

It's a lot of energy in the morning. I'm not a morning person. So for those of you who may be more relate to not being a morning person, I guess that's why I'm here to kind of share how I. I'm a little bit slower at waking up in the morning. And so you may just kind of.

Yeah, I would love for you just to talk about your, your morning routine because, you know, we also, you know, monitor her. We're regularly checking her hormones, we're regularly checking inflammatory levels in her body, you know, kidney function, liver function. And I know so many women are around Sage's age and funny things start to happen in your body that you don't really understand.

So fun.

And so developing a really good morning routine, if I'm not putting words in your mouth, has really has really helped her manage some of these symptoms.

It has. It's good to know you're going to get up in the morning and you've got a routine. I do want to note this, this routine that I do now would. Is very different than what I probably would have done when I was getting a kid ready for school and, you know, getting everybody out the door and that when we were going into our clinic, into an office. So. But I think that there's, there's a lot of people that can still get a good routine even if they have all the chaos in the morning. I am lucky enough to not have all the chaos anymore, but. So you can make it short and sweet, you can stretch it out, whatever works for you to get the day started. But I always do. I'm not. Again, I'm not like a crack of dawn kind of wake up in the morning person, but I do like to wake up, get my sunlight in, do some of my breath work techniques. He's, you know, he usually drags me out on the balcony and we do it together. But I just.

Every day.

Yes, every day. But I just don't do it at like crack of dawn. He waits a little bit of time for me to do it. Then I always start with one big water in the morning. And I love, love, love the new H2 tabs. So my favorites, the raspberry. If I'm just going to do it in plain water with a little bit. If I put it, if I combine it with my second water, I do a second water of the day. If I'm going to do the perfect aminos, which I like the lemon, lime flavor and mixed berry. Then I'll put in the H2 tabs, unflavored one and put that in there. But always start with perfect aminos. Some sort of electrolyte or sea Salt and the H2 tabs. And I put a couple of tabs in there because it just helps with the inflammation. It helps get my, the, you know, gets the cranks out in the morning. I'm not a big fan of eating a big breakfast in the morning so I'll usually do a protein bar. I do like the perfect aminos, the ultimate human bars. The brownie is my favorite. And so I'll do that before I take all my vitamins and my supplements and I take methylated vitamins only. I double up on vitamin C, D3, K2. A big one that I just added into my routine was creatine. I thought that creatine was for bodybuilders and I was taught that it was for like big dudes in the gym. And I think now I'm starting to learn through a lot of. There's a doctor that I follow, Dr. Mary Claire, and she's been teaching, you know, a lot about the importance of creatine in women my age and 40.

I agree with that.

I don't fully understand it.

I think creatine is the most under supplemented nutrient in, in women over 40. So if you're over 40 years old, you absolutely should be taking 5 milligrams of creatine a day. Creatine comes in two main forms. It comes in an HCL form and a monohydrate form. Some women will bloat a little bit with monohydrate. If you do take creatine in the HCL form. So creatine monohydrate is where I would start. If you find that it causes a little bit of bloating, then switch to creatine HCl, the hydrochloride, you won't have the bloating. But this isn't just for muscle gain. You know, Sage is and I'll let her talk about it. But we, we, we really switched her Morning routine, from heavy and cardiovascular exercise to kev heavy and weight training. And you put on, what, four pounds of muscle.

Pounds of muscle. At 46, I'm in better shape than I was in my 20s and 30s, which I'm, like, shocked by. But it was just that I made these simple changes. I. You know, protein. I'm like, good Lord, I've never thought so much about protein in my life.

Yeah, for cognitive function is so good. Especially. Especially women.

So. But adding simple forms of protein, easier ways to get it in than thinking, oh, God, I got to eat chicken or steak again. So that's been a big, you know, factor.

Cold plunging.

Well, also, just on the weight training piece, I think I spent so much of my life always trying to do cardio. You know, there's the skinny factor. Like, you're always supposed to be skinny, and I know I'm thin, but it was always like, get on the treadmill, get on a bike, get on, you know, do cardio. And I was slacking on the weight training piece. I've changed my mindset with that, and I now do more car. I do more weight training than I do carry cardio. I mean, I still get my steps in, I still work out. But my. The game changer for me was working out with Alexia Clark. She's fabulous. If you don't know who she is, she's actually coming on tomorrow, right?

Yeah, she's on our challenge tomorrow. Yeah, she's coming on for free tomorrow, guys.

She's literally the best human ever. I adore her. She. We. Our workouts went. I love you too. I love you too. Our. But our workouts went from, like, 30 minutes to an hour because we just yap a lot of the 30 extra minutes. But she has a great app, and she can tell you more about that. But she's fabulous, and she really helped me change the way that my body works. Like, now I've got muscles in places I never knew that I could have muscles, and I'm, like, super stoked about it. So getting more protein, adding the creatine, doing more strength training, that's been a big thing for me. You want me to talk about cold plunging?

Well, they sent a couple of questions in for you. Most commonly asked questions for Sage. Okay. What brand of vitamins does Sage take?

So I take a. There's a methylated multivitamin called Thorn B complex number 12. I found that that one works the best for me. It doesn't have all the different vitamins in it. It's not, like, a huge Powerful multivitamin. So what I do is I take that form the Thorn B complex and then I add additional things to it. So I separate out my vitamin C, D3, K2, my iron. I like separated out vitamins. A lot of these vitamins come from thorn and pure encapsulations. And Symbiotica is another one that I do. So I'm kind of a, you know, do a couple of different brands. I and find that that sort of works best for me. I love I. In the mornings I do my coffee. I add a lot of stuff to my coffee too. So I do my collagen powder and my coffee. I do. I love cinnamon, ginger and turmeric powder. That's like my little coffee mix. I have them all over the house for everybody to use. But I basically combined organic cinnamon, ginger and turmeric powder together and then refunneled it back into a container and I add that with like butter or MCT oil, acid kicking stuff so it's not so acidic. I do a lot of stuff in my coffee that's like a powerful coffee in the morning. But I love it.

I love all the. And we do it after sunlight just so. So we know the order.

Yeah.

There's a question. Is there any truth that creatine can give issues with your kidneys? No. If you have normally, normally functioning kidneys, there's on. On a blood test there's something called creatinine, which is not creatine. You'll see on a normal kidney exam something called egfr. That's your glomerular filtration rate. And what that tells is how quickly is blood moving through your kidneys. Remember, 15 times every single day. The entire volume of blood in your body goes through your kidneys. So that's your filtration rate. And then you usually see two other metrics. Bun, which stands for blood urea nitrogen, and another one that is creatinine. That's not creatine. When your creatinine is high, it generally indicates muscle damage. But this is very common if you're exercising. So you know guys that go into the gym and do a heavy squat workout. If they go straight to the doctor and have blood work done, you'd look like you're in kidney failure. You're not. You just have high amounts of creatinine in the blood from muscle breakdown. So no, there's no truth that creatine in normally functioning kidneys can give you issues with your kidneys. Of course, if you have kidney failure issues or you actually have kidney pathology going on, then it could affect your kidney filtration rates. The other question was, is 5 milligrams of creatine also recommended for pregnant women? So because there's no clinical studies on pregnant women, I don't want to answer that directly, but indirectly, what I would say is, first of all, check with your doctor before you start any supplement if you are pregnant. But the, the relationship between a mother and fetus is a parasitic relationship. Meaning, and don't take that the wrong way, huge fan of having babies. You know, I had three and I have three. Three from previous marriage. We have one together. So I love, I love my family. But that, that baby, that fetus is a parasite and you're in women, that fetus will be prioritized before the mother's nutrition. So if that fetus needs calcium, it will leach it from the mother's bones. If it needs amino acids, it will strip it from the mother's lean muscle tissue. If it needs calcium, magnesium, phosphorus, it will pull it from. From the mother. So super important, pregnant women to take a really high quality methylated prenatal vitamin and also to hide no folic acid. Yeah, make you crazy. And to hydrate and mineralize the body. I also want to mention that, you know, Sage suffers from ruminating thoughts at night. So I know there's a lot of you out there, men and women that have that condition. When you lay down to go to sleep at night, as your environment quiets, your mind wakes up. And she was really able to solve that with methyl folate.

Oh, it's a game changer, guys. I. I tried to figure out how, when to take it because it's. I always tell people it's not a sleeping pill, but it is something you can take at night. And it helps me quiet. I say it quiets the squirrels so it stops the racing thoughts. So I have MTHFR from both parents and so I am super highly deficient in methyl folate. So I take. There's a little bit of folate in my multivitamin in the morning, the Thornby complex, there's a little bit of. I think it's like 600% or something. And then I take another milligram at night before I go to bed and that helps quiet my mind down. And then inevitably, because I did have a baby, I wake up at every morning between 3 and 4 and have to go to the bathroom. So I shuffle my way to the bathroom and then I take another milligram of 5 methylfolate. Now that is not for everybody. I highly recommend getting tested to see if you have the MTHFR mutation at all and if you have it from one parent or two because it makes a difference. If you only got it from one side then you don't need that much folate. But, but it also depends on weight, it depends on your mood. It's.

And methylfolate is very safe to experiment with. Very safe.

You'll know within a day or two where you're balanced. I mean you'll know here. How often do I get my blood work done to check all the levels of hormones?

Every six months.

Yeah, every six months. I highly recommend it because especially if you're in your 40s and you're moving into your 50s or older, things are changing. So just all the time I'm, I'm hitting that phase. I'm starting to learn about perimenopause. I don't know what the heck is going on in my body so I may even step it up a little bit and do more often just to make sure I'm on track. Right now I'm not taking any hormones because I haven't felt the need to just yet. But I think it's important the. You know at least every six months at a minimum.

Yeah. So and I'll just mention because this is about morning routines, not about female hormones but just for, for the women that are listening that might be around that age where you're. You're concerned about hormone fluctuations. The best test to get is called a Dutch test. You can talk to your OB GYN about that. It's a 24 hour urine test. Remember all blood work. When you take blood work men to it is just a snapshot in time. So it only tells you what your levels are at that time. The greatest mistake that's made in all of female and male hormone therapy is treating the levels of hormones. We should never be treating levels of hormones. We should be treating the ratios of hormones. Even women in menopause have a cycle. It's just that the amplitude is less. You have, you have a large amplitude cycle. Follicular ovulation, luteal when you are menstruating as you get into peri premenopause and then go through menopause that that amplitude drops during that time. It's still important to have the ratio of hormones stay at the right level. Also on the Dutch test it will actually look at your compt gene mutation Catechol O methyl transferase gene mutation. The reason why this gene is important is because that Gene codes for the enzyme that eliminates estrogen sends estrogen down the E2 pathway. And lots of women around this time in their life, they begin to actually carry water we their midsection. And, and it doesn't mean that you're fat, it means that you're retaining water. And nothing's more frustrating for a female that is going to the gym, eating right and getting exercise and sleeping properly to have to be bloated sort of universally all over the body, sort of cheeks, flanks, arms, under the breasts and then around the the midsection, or to have what we call the estrogen band, which is the bubble right below the stomach that moves laterally around to your flanks. Um, next month or the following month, I'm going to do a whole challenge on hormones and blood work. So pay attention for that one because we'll go deep down the rabbit hole of what you should be looking at. Is there info about sunlight in your eyes? I'm assuming that you just look at it with your eyes closed. You can actually turn towards the sun with your eyes closed. What I do, what I did this morning, when I did breath work this morning, was I looked in the direction of the sun, but not at the sun. This is called horizon gazing. Horizon gazing actually can move your body into a parasympathetic state, as can cold water exposure. Remember, when you actually get into cold water, you get the peripheral vasoconstriction, you get brown fat activation, you get cold shock protein activation, you get a spike in dopamine. But if you put your face in cold water, you activate something called the mammalian dive reflex. Welcome to look this up. The mammalian dive reflex exists in all mammals, not even. Not just aquatic mammals. You think about a whale or a dolphin that is diving in the ocean. As the water gets deeper and the pressure increases, it also changes temperature rapidly. So as that water cools and passes over their face, it slows their heart rate by moving them into a parasympathetic state, a rest or digest state. This sounds counterintuitive, guys, but if you're having a difficult time cold plunging, dunking your head, or when you get in the shower, running it on your face first actually will calm you down. It will put you into a parasympathetic state by activating this mammalian dive reflex.

Sometimes I'm so shocked at the things like he's like, Google sometimes. And I, oh, you didn't know about.

The mammalian dive reflex?

I literally told you before, but I actually paid attention this time. That was.

I was trying to tell you that in bed the other night.

I don't want to hear it in bed.

I bring a Kindle to bed with research on it, and when I find a really interesting topic, I'd wake her up because I feel like I got to get it off my chest. I don't have you guys on a live zoom. So I wake up my wife, and clearly you're not listening.

No, I listen a lot. Just.

This was just a few weeks ago, but okay.

But I learned something new today. So that was.

I would love to know more about grounding and how much time is actually needed on a daily basis. Three to six minutes is all. All that's needed for grounding. Here's something really interesting. If you live in a commercial building, commercially built building, not. Not a home, but a commercial condominium building, believe it or not, these. These construction. This type of construction is actually very conducive. So very often because of the steel and the concrete and the pillars that go down into the earth, you can actually take your shoes off and even be grounded in your unit. You want to check that this is the case, but you can also. Commercial electrical installations are naturally EMF protected, not because they're trying to protect the emf. They're trying to protect wires from fires. So when they run electrical wires in conduit, which is like a metal pipe, the EMF doesn't leave the wire like it does when they run it in something called Romex or inside of rubber. So if you're in a commercial condo. I was actually really surprised how low the EMF in our unit here tested. We. We've done a lot of EMF mitigation, but just as a. As another fact. How does Sage balance blood sugar and hormones in the morning? I do want to make a quick comment and I want you to answer. We did notice that when she started weight training, her blood sugar was dramatically better. She never had issues with blood sugar per se, but her insulin sensitivity improved when she started weight training. Women, you should really please listen to this. I'm going to show you a clinical study before we're done. Not all women are good for intermittent fasting. Some of the worst endocrine disasters that we've seen in the hundreds of thousands of. Of patients that were treated in our clinic system were young menstruating women with very narrow feeding windows. Sometimes women that have really good blood sugar control will spend too much time being hypoglycemic. And this throws your hormones off and it throws your thyroid off. Remember your. Your pituitary, the master puppeteer in your body is always trying to save your life. So if you don't have enough caloric intake, it will begin to throttle back your metabolism. And nothing is worse than restricting your calories and starting to retain water and having other consequences like a slower metabolism.

That's why I do the protein bar thing in the morning because again, I'm not a huge breakfast person, so. But then if I do eat breakfast, you know, it's always eggs, avocado, no carbs. I don't do toast or, you know, cinnamon rolls or any of the good stuff, but I stick to bacon and eggs and avocado.

Yeah, I actually, in our guide, guys, I added a section on how you can get 30 grams of protein. This is free. It's in your guide. So you can actually go right into here and talk about and find ways that you can get 30 grams of protein. There's some vegan, vegetarian options in there.

The only other thing I want to talk about was my cold plunging.

Yes. Oh, yeah. Talk about that.

Yeah. So I have a love hate relationship with it. I know there's a lot of women, especially if you're thin, that, like, I have trouble. I'm cold right now. My fingertips are always chilling and so I have a hard time getting warm in places. So I'm always bundled up. But I had a back surgery almost eight years ago.

L5S1 fusion.

Yes. And I have struggled for years in trying to manage the pain of that. And I have found that as much as I didn't want to give him credit for it, that cold plunging, he was right about cold plunging. It is the one thing that helps my back. So if I'm on my feet all day and I'm achy and I don't feel well, I always do it in the morning. It's just part of how I wake up. I do a sauna. I like to get a little bit warm before I get in. And then I do a quick cold plunge. I do four minutes. I listen to a positive affirmations video, the same video every day. So I know that when my four minutes is up, it's at 50 degrees. There's no chance you're getting me in anything colder than that. But I love it. I hate it for the first 30 seconds and then I really come to peace with it. And when I get out, I feel so much better. And then sometimes at the end of the day, if I've been on my feet and we've been running around like crazy, I'll do it again just a shorter Period of time, maybe like two minutes. It's such a game changer for the aches in my back, my shoulder, my neck sometimes. So I force myself to get up to my neck. If I only have access to a cold shower, I just sort of go like one limb at a time and I just sort of kick them all in and then I finally get all the way through. So if you only have a cold shower that you can do and it's hard to get all the way in like that. All right, that's, that's my super sciencey.

Okay, that was advice.

You're welcome.

Good. We got to tone up the, the biohacking language a little bit. But thank you, Sage for coming on with us. Even though she's not listening to me and in bed at night. We'll work on that later. If there's any therapists in the group, send us your number. She should be paying attention to me. When I find research every day, it.

Is so much attention.

So guys, we're gonna have a few more minutes. I want to delve into the science because I want to finish the, I want to finish the morning routine. I'm also want to encourage you guys to join our VIP community. I promise you, we pour so much value into this community. It's $97 a month. You can quit at any time. But I am desperately trying to build an army of like minded people in this community that can go out and really change the world. So thank you, babe. You're welcome back to the whiteboard. So I wanna, there's a couple of things that I wanted to run through because I went and I, I looked up the, the science of circadian rhythm. I also, there's a couple of scientific articles that I, I want to show you guys because in the morning, remember we talked about what, what are the best things to put in your water? We're going to hydrate and mineralize first thing in the morning. So you're going to take this. Remember we just said how do we just take everything and have it serve us, right? You're going to drink in the morning anyway, or at least I hope that you're having some, some fluid in the morning. So how do we, how do we have this, this water serve us? You know, first of all, this should be filtered water. I hope that you have permanently gotten tap water out of your, your life for good. I want to talk about delaying the onset of, of caffeine. 60 to 90 minutes. I can go into the entire science behind it, but just very quickly. And there is a compound called adenosine, which binds to receptors in your brain. The higher the dentistine, the sleepier you become. Caffeine competes for that same receptor site. So it's actually better for you to allow these adenosine receptors to get more saturated than the first 60 to 90 minutes of the day and have your coffee 60 to 90 minutes after you wake up. So if you were able to wake up and do your, you know, your oral routine, do your cold plunge, get a little bit of sunlight in the morning, you can extend, accelerate these things and then have your, your coffee, you're actually going to avoid your morning crash. So what do we put in our, our water in the morning? Minerals. You know, my favorite mineral is something called Baja Gold sea salt. The reason why I like this is probably the cheapest biohack that I know of. A 15 bag of that will literally last you five years. You can use Celtic salt. You can use, um, you can also use powders. But my preference is to actually use real mineral salts because most human beings are mineral deficient. Remember, our bones are not actually made of calcium. It's calcium and phosphorus, which combine to make something called hydroxyapatite. This is what our bones are made out of. In order for calcium and phosphorus to bind and make hydroxyapatite to make strong bones to avoid osteopenia and osteoporosis, you need 12 minerals. You need boron, manganese, molybdenum, silica, selenium, you need zinc. You need all kinds of minerals. There's 12 of them that, that are required for this, not to mention all kinds of other physiologic processes. So if you can get them naturally, maybe a Celtic salt. My, my preference is Baja gold. I also put into here something called perfect aminos. You do not have to use these. But I put this into my cough, I mean, into my water in the morning. Why? Because amino acids are not proteins, guys. Amino acids are the building blocks of proteins. So we don't just build muscle from amino acids. Our natural killer cells are made from amino acids. Collagen, elastin, fibrin is built from amino acids. You cannot improve the tone and texture of your skin without the right amino acids. My preference is I don't use collagen or. Because collagen, first of all, is an incomplete protein. So you can't build muscle with collagen. Also, we cannot target direct proteins. Right? That's a fallacy. We don't eat our nails to grow our nails. We don't eat our hair to Grow our hair. I don't know why we think we can eat collagen to grow collagen. Collagen like every other protein, whether it's steak or chicken or eggs or collagen or protein powder. Whey protein becomes the exact same thing in the human body. It becomes amino acids when we, when then our, our liver takes those amino acids, sends them into the bloodstream and we build all of the structures in the human body. One of the reasons why fasting is so good for you is because the body needs amino acids. So if you don't eat, where does it get them from? It goes out and breaks apart what we call senescent cells. It actually goes out and gobbles up worthless cells in your bloodstream, turns them into amino acids so you can build proteins and other other structures in the body. And then I put something called H2 tabs or hydrogen. I think hydrogen water is the most underrated biohack on the surface of mother Earth. As you know, I've been a big proponent of hydrogen water. I got lots of flack for promoting hydrogen water bottles because they're 250 to $299. Hydrogen tablets will cost you. I part per million hydrogen into your water. One of the benefits of hydrogen you can. I'm going to link this study but this is one of my favorite studies on hydrogen water. And the reason why I like this study is because this is a randomized, peer reviewed, published clinical trial. It had a placebo control group and the majority of research that we see, everybody likes to do research on young healthy men and women or athletes. There's very little research targeted on people that are biometrically deficient. So this one was the effects of six months of hydrogen which water on, on phenotypic biomarkers which is methylation of aging in older adults. These were 70 years and over. Okay, so they did this trial for six months. What they found, this is astounding, right? I mean for, for less than a dollar a day is that. And they, I mean this was such a well designed study. They measured oxidative stress, they measured the function in the mitochondria, they measured multiple different markers of inflammation. They measured sarcopenia which is the age related muscle wasting. They measured levels of certain neurochemicals in the prefrontal cortex of the brain and they even measured their sit stand ratio, all of which improved. So if you actually look at and I'm going to link this study. So methylation, DNA methylation increased in the hydrogen rich water group over the baseline they the hold on superior to control hydrogen rich water was superior to the control water to increase brain choline brain choline and NAA levels in the frontal gray matter. That's a fancy way of saying the activity in our prefrontal cortex they had I'm gonna quit. I'm just gonna quit highlighting these I'll just read so it they significantly improved chair sit stand performance after hydrogen rich water intervention compared to the control group. So what happened was these people's degree of methylation improved how well they were processing nutrients, their telomeres, one of the hallmarks of aging lengthened their inflammatory markers, dropped their their cognitive function especially in the prefrontal cortex improved their sit stand ratio improved all by adding hydrogen rich water to to their morning routine. So if you are going to drink anything in the morning make sure it is we hydrate and mineralize the body with amino acids which by the way will not break a fast. We also I also am a big fan of morning versus afternoon exercise. This is a clinical study that was a randomized trial that looked at whether or not exercising in the mornings or in the evenings was better. Hands down, morning exercise was better even though you are stronger and more coordinated in the afternoon. That's best to do competitive athletic activities, but in terms of regular timing of your morning routine it is better to exercise in the morning. I want to get through this quickly so I'm not going to go through all the points of this study but I will link it in the show notes below so you can look at these. I also wanted to highlight the beneficial effects of higher protein breakfast in the morning if you are an intermittent faster and I'm a big fan of intermittent fasting. The evidence is clear on intermittent fasting that if you can shifting your eating window to the morning and your fasting window to the evening has significantly better improvements on athletic performance, sleep cognitive function, senescent cell elimination, meaning these the what we call zombie cells. It improves cellular apoptosis which is the way that our cells regenerate and die. So there are significant improvements on having our feeding window in the morning versus having our feeding window in the in the afternoon. Sorry, our feeding window in the evening and certainly eating close to bedtime. We know especially for those of you guys that participated my in my sleep challenge, we know that eating within two hours of bedtime and nearly universally interrupted everybody's sleep routine. Alcohol was the only one that was 100% sleep disruptive, meaning nobody that checked alcohol had an improvement or even a baseline of sleep. It actually went Down. But the second was consistent bedtimes and the third was eating within two hours of bedtime. So guys, we're almost up on our hour. Tomorrow I'm going to go over the circadian clock control endocrine factors. I think it's really important to time our meals and our sleep around our endocrine system. So part of the reason why I want you guys to have a healthy morning routine. Whether you exercise in a fasted state state and if you exercise fasted, you have to take perfect aminos. You have to take a full spectrum amino acid supplement before you exercise. You can eat immediately after that exercise and move your evening feeding window to an earlier time frame. Major impact on your cellular biology. So I want to. How much time do we have left? We got five minutes. Okay, two things I want to do is I want to run through the breathwork technique with you before we, before this clock expires. And I really want to encourage you guys to join the VIP group today. Like I said, it's 97 bucks a month. You join the VIP, I'm going to spend another two hours with you. I've got all kinds of guests in there, but this is the group I'm going to pour myself into. We're going to create an army of like minded people. And every month I've got surprises for you guys. This month it was H2Tabs. I'm sending you a $30 box of H2Tabs. You can just try those for free. Hydrogen water will change the trajectory of your life. So are we ready to talk about breath work and for the last five minutes go through this breathwork technique? Let's do it. All right, I'm on so quickly and tomorrow we're going to get more into depth and I'll go a lot more in depth on the, on the VIP call today. But I want to make sure I get this out to the, to the free group. I can't overstate the benefits of breathwork. I think because it's free and it's so available, people really discount its capacity to improve our lives, to reset our circadian rhythm. There was a statistic that I read, I did not get it from a peer reviewed medical journal. I got a lot of flack online for repeating sounds to me to be true. And it was that after the age of 30, roughly 90% of people will never sprint again for the rest of their life. Whether that's true or not, what it highlights is the fact that we are not using. Let me take this this way. The best Off. That's all that's coming off, guys. Promise you the. You know what we stop using are our auxiliary muscles of respiration. The. The intercostals. Right. We don't just breathe with our diaphragm, we breathe also with our intercostals. When your brain takes over your breath and you take a gasp of air in, you're using your intercostals or your auxiliary muscles of respiration. What's important about this is it stops you from breathing with the apex of your lungs, which is only a third of your lung volume. And it forces you to breathe with the lobes of your lungs where two thirds of your lung volume is. So if you're not out sprinting a couple of times a week, we can mimic this activity with breath work. And here's what I do when I'm outside. I call this bio stacking, if you can. Feet touching the surface of the earth, skin exposed to sunlight, looking roughly in the direction of the sun. If that's not possible, it's okay. And we do. I want to do three rounds of five breaths with you, and I want to explain what's going on with the breath work. Remember, carbon dioxide is the main vasodilator in the human body. It is not nitric oxide, which most people think. In fact, if you are taking a nitric oxide supplement, please stop. Nitric oxide is a caustic gas that competes in the mitochondria for oxygen at a site called cytochrome C oxidase. So I don't want to raise your nitric oxide level. Possible. I actually want to lower it when you get vascular during exercise. That is because of the CO2 heading back to the lung or heading back to the heart to go to the lung. And so if I want to vasodilate, technically vaso, relax my system. I want to raise the CO2 level and then flood it with oxygen. So here's how it works. When we do breath work, it's intentionally designed to do both things. Not just get more air into our lungs, but it's designed to actually relax and vasodilate our system. So I want you to start with three rounds of five breaths. And these breaths have to be obnoxious. I mean, obnoxious like you were held underwater for two minutes and you broke the surface of the water and you literally never thought you were going to get another breath. That's how I want you to breathe each time. You can breathe through your nose or through your mouth. My preference is the nose. But if you're if you have clogged nasal passages or you're congested or you have a deviated septum, it's perfectly fine to breathe through your mouth. Don't overthink this, guys. Just get the air in, okay, so it looks like this and then out through a straw. We're going to do five of these. Foreign. You should already feel more relaxed when we breathe like this. On the final exhale, I want you to start with three rounds of five breaths, work your way to three rounds of five or 10, three rounds of 15, three rounds of 20, and get all the way to three rounds of 30 breaths. When I started, I could only hold my breath for about 30, 30, or 40 seconds. Now I can hold my breath for almost four minutes between rounds. On your final exhale, I want you to just close your eyes and I want you to exhale, and I want you to fight the urge to breathe. So fight the urge to breathe allows the carbon dioxide to build up. It starts to vaso relax and vasodilate the body. And then once you feel the overwhelming urge to breathe, you take another deep breath in. And you hold that, you let it out, gather your breath, and you start again. Okay, I'm going to come back and do another demo of this tomorrow. I can't believe this hour went so fast. We're wrapping up and cutting over to the VIP guys. Today is the joint, the day to join the VIP. It's 97amonth. Quit whenever you want, but come on this journey with us. Be a part of this VIP community. It will change every aspect of your life. Maybe you'll be the person that we select to fix whatever condition is ailing you or a loved one right now so we can have a qualified professional do it in real time, very authentic and very visceral and very vulnerable so that everyone can benefit from this education. So that's a wrap on day two of the ultimate morning routine challenge. First off, I just want to take a moment to thank each and every one of you. You showed up, you leaned in, you took control of something so fundamental, which is just your morning. Remember to check out the PDF. It's free. And review it. We're in phase two now. It's amazing information for you. It makes. It's a great place for you to start. If you have a burning question you want to ask me, I encourage you to join the VIP session because we're going to do live Q and A with me this afternoon and some really amazing qualified health professionals. Until next time, that's just science. And I will see you guys tomorrow. Tomorrow. So in just a few minutes, we're going to be sitting down with Dr. Paul Saladino. We're going to talk about breathwork, nutrition, human performance at the highest level. Remember, all VIPs who joined are getting a free box of the H2 tabs. So I'm going to send you all a free box of these tabs. These tablets, supercharged hydration and oxygen efficiency at the cellular level. I know a lot of you already bought these. It doesn't matter. Just put those on the shelf. I'm still sending you a free box. If you're not a VIP yet, this is your last chance to upgrade. Before we kick off, hit the link below and join us inside the VIP group.