Dr. Andy Galpin: Optimal Nutrition & Supplementation for Fitness | Huberman Lab Guest Series

Welcome to the Huberman Lab guest series where I and an expert guest discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today's episode marks the sixth and final of the six episode series on fitness, exercise and performance. And today's discussion is all about nutrition and supplementation to maximize your fitness, exercise and performance goals. Dr. Andy Galpin I'm super excited to discuss today's topic which is nutrition and supplementation for performance and recovery. And I'm particularly excited about this conversation because I've been interested in supplementation and nutrition for performance really since my teens. But also because in recent years we've witnessed a massive transformation in the general public in terms of their view of supplementation and nutrition. First of all, more people are thinking about nutrition. What is good nutrition? What is not a very barbed wire topic as you know, but there are some truths in there that we'll discuss. But also supplementation. Whereas 10, 15 years ago, I think most people would either be really into supplements, that was a small percentage of people, but the majority of people were either told or were thinking, oh, you know, vitamins, you mostly excrete them, they're just expensive urine. Nowadays it seems that many people, including many of my colleagues and physicians, all the way down to sports performance experts, are taking and making recommendations about certain supplements. And so the way that I like to think about supplements is that they aren't necessarily just supplements, which makes it sound like they are augmenting what should already be there, but you're not quite getting enough of. But indeed, a lot of these things we call supplements are very potent compounds that can transform our ability to perform in the short term, to recover from exercise, and that can really shape brain chemistry, hormone patterns, acutely and when taken long term. I'm very excited about today's topic and to be able to try and sort through this, let's call it a cloud, hopefully not a storm, but this cloud of supplements that are out there because indeed many of them are excellent and can provide us a lot. Some of them are terrible and then some just don't do anything and therefore are terrible because either they have side effects or because they're very expensive and they don't do anything. And then of course, within the realm of nutrition, there's an equal amount of confusion. But that's why I'm talking to you, because you're going to put clarity and structure and definition on these incredibly important topics.

You absolutely nailed it there. One of the major reasons supplements can work is because you can consume nutrients in extremely high concentrations such that you would not get in nature through food. Having said that, you really do want to focus on the basics, sleep, nutrition, hydration. And I'm going to get into very specific detail later with some of those things. That said, there are plenty of situations and circumstances when supplementation can do exactly what you said. Also though, because you are taking them in such high concentrations, they can also be unproductive, they can be destructive or they can be counterproductive. So in case, if you're taking a couple of supplements over here, it may actually be counteracting the benefits of some of the other supplements over there. So in the ideal situation, we would be able to work like snipers here. So we would be able to run full biological testing, so extensive blood work and saliva and urine and stool and have an in depth analysis of your gut microbiome and your stress patterns and your time of day and your cortisol curve. And like all the things that we do in our high performance folks with that then we can get extremely high precision supplementation. And quite honestly, our philosophy is we only give individuals exactly what they need. So even some of the standard, generally safe and effective supplements, we don't really necessarily use them if there's no specific need. And we've talked about the consequences of this with things like antioxidants. But even simple stuff like stimulants and other tools that are effective for recovery, we don't use them unless we have a reason. That said, that's not the reality for a lot of people. They're not going to be able to do something like that or work with somebody who can help them in that. So there are a handful of supplements that I would consider to be in my 8020 rule, which is sort of like the 20% of supplements that are going to give you 80, 80% of the benefit for the lowest cost. And so what I can actually do is just sort of start there. Even though this burns my skin and my soul a little bit, I absolutely hate this. I am the context guy. I'm the it depends, it's high precision guy. But let's be real. There are a number of supplements that are fairly effective and fairly cheap for a wide range of outcomes. So this is for general public, this is for people who want to do the three buckets, right? You want to look a certain way. So supplements that could enhance muscle growth and fat loss. Non hormonal based supplements, of course, Supplements that can improve energy or physical performance. Again, from everything from, you know, squatting more to feeling better in your yoga class, to having more energy throughout the day, to our third major bucket that we've been talking about throughout this entire series, which are longevity. So we can cover those first if you'd like to start there.

Yes, absolutely, let's start there.

Oftentimes when we think of supplements, we immediately jump to high sport performance type of things or vigorous workouts or muscle building, though that doesn't necessarily have to be the case. Take for example, creatine. And I've spoken about this at length and with Darren Kandow, who's done a tremendous amount of research. I was just up at his lab recently in Canada and he has covered extensively. In fact, I think I put up a post, perhaps I could draw this up, where he laid out all the myriad of benefits of creatine. This is taken in the, you know, typically 3 to 5 grams per day of dose of creatine monohydrate, which has the most research behind it, seems to be extremely low side effects in almost anyone. And the benefits, including course things like muscle performance and strength and things like that. And if you go back to our discussion in our episode on metabolism and endurance, we talked about the phosphocreatine system. So you can figure out kind of what this is going to do in terms of effects. That said, there's excellent information and data coming out on the benefits of bone mineral density in creatine. There's a ton of work looking at a host of cognitive factors from memory, executive function to effects potentially on even things like depression, mood to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, all forms of neurodegenerative disease. In fact, it's, it's pretty obvious the brain loves creatine as a fuel. And so not only we sort of discussed in the episode as being the fuel for skeletal muscle contraction, but the brain needs to do that as well. The astrocytes around the brain need to be able to provide energy, etc. So it's very clear that metabolism in the brain is reduced with things like TBI and potentially concussions. So now to be extremely clear, creatine does not prevent any of those diseases, it does not treat any of them. And the data are mixed, but it's. More and more are coming. Some show a little bit of benefit, some show, you know, maybe none, but I'm not aware of any research in those areas that show it has any downside. For the most part, side effects are extremely minimal, if not null. And then potentially some benefit and depending on the specific study. So we could put up a, if you'd like, a couple of links directly to those meta analyses and folks can go through those things one by one. So I only say that to again, maybe expand our understanding or thinking about what these types of supplements can do. It's not just about growing muscle or, you know, high performance. It's everything to again, there's an association with recovery. So creatine is fantastic for recovery from muscle, for muscle damage, helps and can potentially aid in fat loss and a whole host of things. So you can actually also even look at websites like examine.com I have, you know, no affiliation with them whatsoever. But if you want to just type in something like creatine monohydrate, you can see a whole list and you're going to see thousands of studies of the potential benefits of creatine. So that is, is always number one on my list.

I'm relieved to hear that creatine sits at the top of your supplementation list because. Well, first of all, I started taking it when I was in college. At that time I was taking it in this kind of loading mode where you take it in anywhere from 15 to 25 grams per day, often causing some gastric distress, often combining it with fruit juice to try and shuttle it into the muscles and then so called maintenance phase of reducing to 10 or 15 grams per day. Nowadays I just take about 5 grams or so. Although later I know you're gonna tell me why I should probably be taking more than 5 grams per day given my body weight. So I know we'll get into some of those specifics a little bit later. But in addition to experiencing direct effects on muscle size and strength, which I did, I don't know how it contributed to my cognitive function or if it does now, because there's really no way to tease that out with standard at home tests like a scale. But it is very clear to me, based on the literature that you described and some of which we've covered on other episodes of the podcast, that the phosphocreatine system is, is vitally important for forebrain function. Right? The forebrain, of course, being the, the portion of brain, broadly speaking, the portion of brain just behind your forehead that is responsible for planning action, setting rules and context. So even as simple as if you're going downfield in a game of soccer or basketball and you're on offense and then you make an attempt on goal or basket and then it switches and you go back now you're on defense. That being on defense is very different than being on offense. And that goal, excuse me, that, that rule switching is a prefrontal cortical function, as is every context dependent way of thinking or acting. And so anything that can favor function of the forebrain, I think is good for humans in general. It suppresses anxiety, allows us to interpret what's going on for us. And so I'm very relieved and gratified to hear that creatine sits at the top of the list. Also, as I'm sure you'll point out again later, creatine is for the most part a relatively affordable supplement for most people. So here we're not talking about something that's really esoteric or that you have to, you know, fly to some remote location to get an infusion of.

Right. But that, although I apologize to all you because I know the price has skyrocketed recently.

Really?

Yeah.

Why is that?

I think it's a. Well, nobody knows, but it's quote unquote, a supply and demand issue, if you will. So those prices have gone up. There's also, of course, been shipping problems in the world and things. So every time I talk about creatine right now, people just flame me for like, oh my God, it's so expensive now. I'm like, I know, I'm sorry. But honestly, it's only so expensive because you're used to being so cheap. So when you, when you counter the fact that you're like, right, yeah, like relative to the other stuff you're probably taking, relative to any other number of purchases for the. It still lands very high on my ROI list. My, you know, my 80, 20 because of that. It's, it can be taken any time of the day. It doesn't have to be in magical combination. You talked about co ingesting with carbohydrates that can enhance how quickly you can get into the system. In fact, it's going to work on the exact same mechanisms. We'll probably potentially talk about hydration, but these things are shuttled. So anytime you bring in carbohydrate that's going to be shipped into tissue as quickly as it can. Creatine then goes along for the ride and then it brings water. That's how you enhance hydration. That's why it's important to have carbohydrates when you're trying to hydrate. So you're just gonna take it in there. And that's also why you get quote unquote cell swelling, which is a Good thing it's just enhancing hydration. We actually use it a ton in our post weigh in protocols. So in individuals that have to cut water weight, creatine's a great thing to throw back in there. It's gonna help you rehydrate. It's also why when you take 30 grams of it, it can pull a bunch of fluid in the intestines and there you go with your little bit of GI distress. So, yeah, there's a lot of fun things you can talk about there. I just had to flag that because every time I've been talking about it recently and I say it's g people killing me for it. So I apologize. I don't know how to make it any cheaper, but it's still fairly, fairly affordable.

Yeah, I would say relatively inexpensive compared to a lot of supplements out there. And when thinking about the return on investment is. It's quite good.

Yeah. So like actually, sorry, sorry to cut you off, but I was just also thinking there's been a number of studies on sleep deprivation as well with creatine that can help. So obviously sleep deprivation will generally reduce cognitive function and creatine can ameliorate some of that drop. So if you think about it in that context, I had a crummy night of sleep. Well, and if that enables you to perform a little bit better in your job, then you would make up the dollar or so whatever you paid for that day's supply of creatine. So it is something kind of. On that note, it's not going to work as an acute response. So it's not something you're like, I feel terrible. Let me throw some creatine down the hatch, I'll feel better. That's not gonna work. It's going to take several weeks to have a noticeable effect. It needs to be stored in tissue. It needs to be built up before you can actually do much of anything. So it is unlike some of the other things like stimulants or caffeine that have an acute response right now. And so if you're going to take it, you probably need to consume it consistently. If you can't do that, then really there's no point in doing it. And the loading phase you mentioned distance war. Here is something you can do again if you need to enhance the storage of it really quickly. So say, for example, we've done this in some military cases where it's like, you get back to base and you've only got a week and then you gotta go back out. We may actually have to do a little bit of a loading phase then. But if that's not the case, the loading phase is unnecessary. It's not really harmful other than maybe GI stress and maybe waste. But you're gonna have three or four weeks, it's gonna reach full saturation. Plenty of time to be there in that if you're in that 3 to 7 grams per day range.

I'm glad you mentioned the slow accumulating positive effects of creatine as compared to so called acute effects, because the way that I think of health promoting and performance enhancing protocols like viewing morning sunlight or endurance exercise for that matter, or creatine or sleep for instance, is that while they can have effects in the immediate term, you might feel a little bit, or in the case of a good night's sleep, a lot better. It's really the cumulative effect of raising your baseline level of functioning. You know, there's another way to think about it is these supplements or behaviors and quality nutrition when done consistently over time, and that doesn't mean 100% of the time, but you know, probably 80% of the time, sure lead to a sort of buoyancy in your system that allows you to be more resilient under conditions where conditions aren't perfect.

Right.

And if conditions are made perfect or close to perfect and you already have that buoyancy, that's when you really start to see the ultra high performance effects that are so much fun. But they have to be established through consistent supplementation, consistent nutritional intake. So today I know we're going to distinguish between normally they're called chronic and acute effects. But that makes it sound like chronic illness. The moment people hear chronic, well, they might think of other things, but in the context of health, they typically think of chronic illness. And we're not talking about that. What we're talking about is, is slow modulatory effects in the body. A lot of things in the body take time to build up, but once they've built up, they clearly can benefit us. And then other things, as you mentioned, a stimulant for instance, has a very acute effect that is going to occur with peak within 30 minutes and wear off within four hours or so. Can also have some chronic effects, but typically it's a short lived effect. So we just want to frame up the language that we'll be using and I'm really excited to dive into this topic. And I think creatine is a beautiful example of a supplement that has positive chronic mental and physical benefits.

Down the road, I can come back and talk a little bit more about creatine and we can cover some other information regarding best practices for getting the most out of it as well as we'll certainly dive into some of the common side effects or at least a thought of side effects while we're here. Though, I also could throw in a few other of these high impact, low cost, generally safe things that are my 8020 rule, if you will. So the way I actually kind of think about it is you want one from each of three categories and these categories are fuel, stimulant and fatigue blockers. So creatine is actually in the fuel, it's not a stimulant as we talked about the chronic effect there. So we've already knocked that one off. Another one from the fatigue blocker is going to be anything like beta alanine or sodium bicarbonate. And then from the stimulant use, of course we have anything like a beetroot juice to a caffeine or something of the equivalent. So we can come back again and talk about all those in more detail a little bit later.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is also separate from Dr. Andy Galpin's teaching and research roles at Cal State Fullerton. It is, however, part of our desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools that are to the general public. In keeping with that theme, we'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Momentous. Momentous makes supplements of the absolute highest quality. The Huberman Lab Podcast is proud to be partnering with Momentous for several important reasons. First of all, as I mentioned, their supplements are of extremely high quality. Second of all, their supplements are generally in single ingredient formulations. If you're going to develop a supplementation protocol, you're going to want to focus mainly on using single ingredient formulations, which single ingredient formulations? You can devise the most logical and effective and cost effective supplementation regimen for your goals. In addition, Momentous supplements ship internationally. And this is of course important because we realize that many of the Huberman Lab podcast listeners reside outside the United States. If you'd like to try the various supplements mentioned on the Huberman Lab podcast, in particular supplements for hormone health, for sleep optimization for Focus, as well as a number of other things including exercise recovery. And you can go to livemomentous spelled o u s. So that's livemomentous.com huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Levels. Levels is a program that lets you see how different foods and activities affect your health by giving you real time feedback on your blood glucose using a continuous glucose monitor. Many people are aware that their blood sugar, that is their blood glucose level, is critical for everything from fat loss to muscle gain to healthy cognition and indeed aging of the brain and body. Most people do not know, however, how different foods and different activities, including exercise or different temperature environments, impact their blood glucose levels. And yet blood glucose is exquisitely sensitive to all of those things. I first started using Levels about a year ago as a way to understand how different foods, exercise, and timing of food relative to exercise and quality of sleep at night impact my blood glucose levels. And I've learned a tremendous amount from using levels. It's taught me when best to eat, what best to eat, when best to exercise, how best to exercise, and how to modulate my entire schedule from work to exercise, and even my sleep. So if you're interested in learning more about levels and trying a continuous glucose monitor yourself, go to Levels Link Huberman that's Levels Link Huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by Element. Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that contains the exact ratios of the electrolyte sodium, magnesium and potassium to optimize cellular functioning for mental and physical performance. Most people realize that hydration is key. We need to ingest enough fluids in order to feel our best and perform our best. But what most people do not realize is that the proper functioning of our cells and nerve cells, neurons in particular, requires that sodium, magnesium and potassium be present in the correct ratios. Now of course, people with pre hypertension and hypertension need to be careful about their sodium intake. But what a lot of people don't realize is that if you drink caffeine, if you exercise, and in particular if you're following a very clean diet, that is not a lot of processed foods, which of course is a good thing. Chances are you're not getting enough sodium, potassium and magnesium to optimize mental and physical performance. Element contains a science backed ratio of 1000 milligrams. That's 1 gram of sodium, 200 milligrams of potassium and 60 milligrams of magnesium and and no sugar. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drink element. That's lmnt.com huberman to get a free Element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's DrinkElement lmnt.com Huberman to claim a free sample pack. To start off, I want to ask you about something that as soon as I say it, some people might roll their eyes or wonder, why are we even talking about that now? But that I have to believe is among the more fundamental, if not foundational aspects of nutrition and supplementation for performance. And that's hydration, right? I mean, I think we hear hydration, it's like, okay, we have to drink six to eight glasses of water every day. Our urine should be relatively clear. If it's too dark yellow, we're not doing a good job of hydrating enough. How much of that is true? Is alkaline water worthwhile for changing the alkalinity of my body? I learned when I was in college and graduate school that the alkalinity of the different tissues in your body is very well controlled in order to keep you alive and that you don't want it to shift too much or you can enter pretty horrible states of seizure, vomiting and even death. So tell me about hydration and woven into that, if you would educate me on electrolytes and hydration. Because I think most often when people ingest electrolytes, sure, they could be ingesting salt tablets, they're probably getting some electrolytes, by the way, electrolytes, sodium, magnesium, potassium, through their food. I think most people think about drinking electrolytes. So water and electrolytes, I think is a vitally important topic to kick this off with.

Sure. We can jump right into your alkaline water. While there's perhaps much to say about this, we can maybe revisit this in another 7 part series all on its own. I would just say it this way. There's probably a few things you should do before worrying about the alkalinity of your water. And I'll just leave it at that.

Meaning the alkalinity of the water is sort of irrelevant.

Not that you won't go that far. It's just, it's probably. Remember we sort of started off talking about 80, 20. Well, this would be in my like 99.1 in terms of like, if we're really at the level of worrying about the PH of your drinking fluid, we have optimized so many other things that then we can talk about it. But until we have nailed months and years of work on other things, this is just not going to make much of an impact. Great.

Then perhaps you could tell us about what volume of water we should be drinking, when we should be drinking that water, relative to training and just generally and anything else related to water and electrolytes that can improve mental performance, physical performance, and offset any ill effects.

I like the fact that you mentioned physical and mental performance because it's clear in both cases we hear that we need to drink more water. And I can give you some numbers, and I will in a second. What we also need to recognize is this is hormesis. We talked about hormesis a few episodes ago and this is the case, right? Whether we talked about food or hydration or I think I gave you the example of cyanide naturally occurring in your food. Hot water is the same way. So if you are under hydrated or dehydrated, then there is a clear negative effect on your body. And as I increase the level or improve the level of hydration, things get better, whether this is your physical performance or whether this is mental performance. In fact, we know that a body weight reduction of as low as 2% via dehydration. So imagine you're doing a bout of exercise and you're sweating and you lose 2% of your body weight. That alone is enough to reduce accuracy and performance. So the classic study we talk about here was in basketball players, so shooting accuracy, so free throw shooting, I think is specifically what they looked at. Significant reduction in performance with as little as 2% dehydration. That that level, you also see a significant increase in perception of difficulty of exercise. And so only right at 2%. And again, when I say 2%, I mean percent body weight lost, right? That's what that means. You start getting the 3, 4, 5% dehydration, you start having a significant reduction in blood volume, and that's incredibly important for endurance. Your blood becomes viscous, it gets hard to pump through, and you're going to start having all kinds of issues. So being dehydrated is again not only going to reduce performance, but because of the mental aspect, which we just walked through and neuromuscular issue, you're going to lose accuracy, you're going to lose total endurance performance, and you're going to lose speed and power. So we have the triad there. No matter what you're interested in, it's going be harmed by being dehydrated. That also is happening. Then if you're starting your program dehydrated. So if you're already 1% or so dehydrated, maybe you're like a little under hydrated and you lose a little bit of sweat, you've already hit that 2%. And so we're starting to see reductions in performance there. The same happens on the other side of that hormetic curve. So if you are optimally hydrated in some large window. But you start to going past that, we can start running into equal problems. Remember, there is a need for an optimal concentration of sodium and potassium and chloride between your cell, inside your cell and outside of your cell. These are electrolytes. This is what we call osmolality. And osmolarity is really what it is. Think of it like concentration and osmosis, if you remember those terms. So if we are trying to create a muscle contraction that requires an electrical gradient. And so sodium and potassium, specifically in magnesium, calcium, are positively charged and chloride is negatively charged. And we need to have a certain amount inside the cell and outside the cell so that the positives and the negatives are balanced appropriately so that when we move one, we change the voltage and we have. In the case of a muscle contraction, okay, I just skimmed through a whole lot of physiology there to say if you then go mess with fluid only. And you say, if I were to give you a bolus of, you know, three liters of pure water right now, you're going to dilute your blood. And so there's not going to be as many chemical, There won't be as many electrical signals in there because you've taken the same amount of sodium, potassium, et cetera, and put it in a larger volume of pure water. So that gradient is now changed. That becomes a significant problem for contraction. I mean, quite literally, it can kill you. This is what we call hyponatremia. So no tremia spelled na, hypo being low hyponatremia. If you actually go to the periodic chart, na is what we use for sodium. So hyponatre, it's because the word is natremia, actually. So what that literally means is low sodium. And you didn't get that from sweating out all your sodium. You actually get hyponatremia from drinking in too much water. So it's not that the total amount of sodium gets low, it's the fact that the concentration gets low from excessive fluid intake. So in the extremes, in fact, if you look at the literature, you'll see anywhere between, like, 2 to 15% of people who finish endurance races are into hyponutrium. Now, that varies wildly. If you're doing Ironman and Kona versus, like, you know, the marathon in Denver in. In October, right. It's going to be totally different depending on weather conditions, but these are all important. So while, like, death happens, that is sort of extreme. If you back up just a little bit, you start seeing the same types of Performance sacraments. In fact, the symptoms can be identical. Brain fog, confusion, performance irritation, a GI distress. And you think, man, these are symptoms of dehydration. So then you drink more water and you're just exacerbating the problem. And I can actually give you one little example of this. We had an executive, actually a female CEO. I'll say. She's probably when her was in her early 40s. And so she came to us and she thought, man, for sure she has some sort of gut problem going on. Because we hear a lot about kind of like gut health and how it affects everything. And so she's just like, I have brain fog and I've done all these things and I got blood work done and everything's fine. Like, nothing's going on. I think I must have some sort of gut thing or going on or whatever, and it's okay. And we just started going through her stuff, and she was, I think, about 170 pounds, plus or minus, and she was consuming like 250 to 60 ounces of water a day. That's a ton of water. And we were like, holy, what are you doing this for? And she says, like, that's sort of like my thing. It was. But she didn't realize it was more of, like, a nervous tic than it was anything else, right? She just like, sip, sip, sip, sip, sip of water. I'm like, man, how often do you go pee? And she's like, yeah, like every, you know, 30 minutes or something. I'm like, fantastic. Sleep problems, Focus. And so she's smashing caffeine. She was at like eight cups of.

Coffee a day, which is also going to add to excretion of sodium.

Totally, right? So it's like, okay, we don't really need to come in and run a sleep study on you. We're just gonna lower your water. And she was like, what? We dropped her down to like 180. So basically an ounce per pound of body weight, which is still high because.

She did train 180 ounces, correct?

Yeah, she does work out. So she needed to replenish some stuff. And we'll cover these numbers in a second instantaneously. I mean, like two days in, she's like, oh, my God, I haven't slept six straight hours in years. And then after that, it was like, basically tears coming back to us, right? My focus, my brain fog is gone because she's in a very high pressure job. It's like, everything's coming back. Like, now she was down to three or so cups of Coffee a day, blah, blah, blah, like the whole thing. Digestion improved, all of it. She was sick. Like, her only problem after all the analyses was she was just drinking way, way too much water. And adding more salt to her would not have solved the problem because she would have just had simply way too much fluid in her system. She was having all kinds of ADH problems and aldosterone, like the whole thing. And then that, that rolls into cortisol, the whole like system gets, goes into chaos. So it is important that you pay attention. Hydration, even though, as you sort of mentioned, people tend to just kind of like roll their eyes around it because if you're in the middle, it's fine. But if you're anywhere past not even the extreme extremes, but just that first standard deviation away, you're going to have problems. And you might be thinking adrenal fatigue, you might be thinking your chest out. Like you're going to think all these things and you simply just haven't actually dialed in your hydration.

Yeah, I think people sometimes roll their eyes at the discussion of hydration because it just doesn't sound very sexy. It's not like, doesn't sound like a neurotransmitter or a hormone. It doesn't sound like testosterone or estrogen or DHEA or dopamine, but it actually is all of those things. It sits at a level beneath all of those, but not beneath, on a hierarchy beneath in terms of a foundation. It's actually without proper electrolyte balance and hydration, none of the cells of the body can function. And then I think people also hear that, oh, you know, we are 70% water. And somehow like that statistic alone or that fact alone doesn't seem to stimulate any kind of actionable takeaway.

Right.

It's like, great, you know, like gravity also, you know, keeps us from jumping as high as we like, you know, but what do I do? And so I think it's important that people understand that every cellular process in the body critically relies on having enough sodium, magnesium, potassium around. And the way that it's concentrated in fluid water is really the way that you allow every cell in their body to function as well as it possibly could and respond to all the sorts of kind of quote unquote, high performance tools that we're talking about. The other thing I've observed many times over is that if people are ingesting too much water and also drinking a lot of caffeine and their electrolytes are low, they get shaky and they actually can have anxiety like Symptoms. When people come into my lab to do studies on anxiety and fear, we ask a few questions. And those questions include how much water they've had that day. Also, a sort of bizarre fact, but one that I think is worth mentioning, is that when the bladder is full, it stimulates a sort of anxiety. If you ever had to urinate very badly and you're in the car or you can't urinate and then you get to the door, like, that's talk about anxiety. And that's because there's a direct neural pathway from the bladder that registers the mechanosensors, how much stretch there is on the bladder that sends a signal to the brainstem alertness areas, broadly speaking, locus coeruleus and others that wake us up. These are the. When we're awake, it makes us more awake. And when we're asleep, this is what wakes us up to urinate in the middle of the night.

Yeah, that's actually why you can use night urination as a pretty good diagnostic of sleep disorders. So if. Because of vasopressin. Right. Almost exactly what you're talking about. If you're having sleep disorder issues and you're staying awake and vasopressin gets taken off, right. An APN goes straight to the kidneys. Your kidneys are supposed to be dormant, basically at night, you're not supposed to be filtering a lot of and producing a lot of urine at night. If that's happening and say you have any number of apneas kicking on or anything going on, vasopressin keeps going, keeps sending a signal, kidneys start filtering. So if you're waking up and peeing multiple times a night, that's called noctoria. That is a very, very good sign that either one of two things happen. You, one, you have some sort of sleep disorder, or two, you're drinking outrageous amounts of water. And so that's actually a bit of a backwards cycle now, right, because you're drinking way too much water, you're waking up and peeing all night. That's actually ruining your sleep. And so we have seen this a number of times with our sleep company as we go in. And it's just like, you don't need any of this crap. You just need to be properly hydrated. Alternatively, if your hydration is sound and you're still waking up more than one time a night to pee on average, then you almost. Well, I shouldn't say like that, but there's a potential that you actually have some sort of sleep disorder or sleep condition going in. So the rule of thumb on that is, so we're here once or night. Once a night or so of urination is fine. If it is routinely or consistently more than two, you need to make some adjustments. Start with hydration. It's the simplest way, right? Getting a full sleep study done. Just figure out hydration. We've had this happen a number of times where people want to get more health conscious and they just get. They hear things like this, and they're like, I got to get in my water. And then they just start train wrecking their sleep and they're waking it up. So if you're waking up multiple times and you're urinating and it is a large amount of urine for you, and it is clear that's probably not sleep apnea induced nocturia. That's probably excessive hydration. If you're waking up a bunch of times and it's fairly small amounts of urine, then it's probably not the fluid issue. It's probably the fact that the vasopressin is kicking your kidneys into gear. So that's not a perfect criteria, but it's just like a quick little tool you can sort of use. That's actually one of the reasons why we measure almost always your body weight at night as well as in the morning. So that's like the combat sport in the ufc. Fighters, boxers, we call that your float so much. You floated overnight. I like to know that number because I want to know as well, your first morning void. So when you wake up, you went to bed at £200. You woke up the next morning at 195. Oh, you floated £5. Did you pee last night? Yeah, yeah, three times. Interesting. Another case. You woke up, you went to bed at 200 pounds. You wake up at 199.5. Okay. You're dehydrated because you should have a certain amount of fluid that you're just respirating out as you're breathing throughout your nose throughout night, ideally, guaranteed, you're gonna wake up. What was your urine like? Oh, yeah, a little bit pretty dark, like, shocker. You're dehydrated. So you can kind of look at numbers like that. A general float is something like a pound to two pounds for the 170 plus pound person. As you scale up, that number can go up a little bit, but you can kind of use these to triage a little bit about what's going on with this kind of combination. Everything is everything, right? So it's like it's not just about one system. So you're gonna pay attention. You can also. Look, I don't know if you want to jump into it. We can, but there's a whole bunch of ways I can teach you to diagnose hydration. And then maybe we can start there and then we could talk about hydration numbers.

Yes, I'd love to talk about diagnostics for hydration over hydration, dehydration to start off. Would you be willing to give us some numbers? How much water should we be drinking?

The classic rule here. And you're making me do what I hate. Right. I want to give all the caveats first, but I'll go straight to your number. Half an ounce per pound of body weight is a rough rule. So if you weigh again 200 pounds, that would mean you drink a hundred ounces of water a day. Most water bottles are like 12 to 20 ounces, something like that. So you know, you end up drinking six of those or so a day. Kind of like plus or minus, which is not that unreasonable. This does depend on a number of factors which I could go over, but that is a rough starting place. The only other thing to add to that is that does not account for exercise induced water loss or sauna or anything like that. So that's assuming just like basal daily needs. If you are exercising or sweating at all for any reasons or work related. So folks that work outside or in the heat or a humid environment, this, these numbers all change and you can slide this scale up, but you generally want to drink about 125% of the fluids you've lost during that physical activity back.

And how much do you lose per hour of exercise?

That number ranges between 1 to 5 pounds depending on the person. It can even be higher with some of our athletes. Like I can think of a number of NFL players right now. It's not uncommon for those guys to do eight or nine pounds even. Not even like crazy circumstances. If it's August and we're in Jacksonville, it's not wild for us, those guys to go nine, ten pounds.

But what about the typical person who goes to a air conditioned gym or goes out for a run on a day that is somewhere between let's say 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 85 degrees Fahrenheit.

You're probably looking at like a pound.

Got it.

It's not extremely high. If you are totally soaked, might be like a pound and a half to two pounds. If you're like come back and like your pits are a little sweaty and there's a little bit of water kind of on your neckline, or it's probably like a more like a pound or so. So in that case, you might drink back a pound and a half of water.

Okay, so just to review these numbers to make sure that I'm on the correct page here, a half an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight is a sort of a foundation for hydration. And then you want to replace 125% of the fluid lost during exercise. And exercise varies. Where exercise is done varies. Whether or not people are wearing uniforms or helmets is going to impact how much fluid they lose, et cetera. In a very hot environment, the amount of fluid lost can be anywhere from 1 to 5, maybe even 10 pounds per hour of hard exertion. For most exercise done in conditions of 55 degrees Fahrenheit, 85 degrees Fahrenheit, done with some degree of effort, one might lose a pound or two pounds of water.

Super easy way to find out. All you have to do is weigh yourself naked, go do your workout, come back in, dry off, weigh yourself naked. That'll tell you exactly what you lost. So if you went in, you were 160 pounds, you come back out, you weigh you 158, you lost two pounds, drink back two and a half pounds of water, you're good. So that is honestly, it's like fairly gold standard for identifying. You can actually buy a whole bunch of technology for this. And they are using the exact same equation, which is your body weight when you were there. Now if you do that though, you do need to account for any fluid you drink during the workout because that then offsets it.

Simple, but I think important question. We're talking about a half an ounce of fluid per pound of body weight. Does that include things like coffee, tea, soda, pre workout drinks, mid workout drinks, mate, matcha, whatever? The, you know, there's a yerba mate, there's a, there are a million things out there, or just water.

Any fluid for the most part is going to count.

And is it true that fluids that contain caffeine generally cause us to secrete sodium?

Yeah.

Okay, so do you recommend including electrolyte powder or a small pinch of sodium or any number of other supplement type electrolytes that can replace that. Sodium, magnesium, and potassium.

A couple of things we have to pay attention to accurately answer that question. What you also sort of asked about, you may have not even realized is does caffeine actually enhance dehydration? Which is not really what you asked, but it's probably a lot of people thought that as well. So caffeine can, but coffee doesn't necessarily do that because, remember, you're congesting that with fluid. And so we used to say that all the time. Coffee dehydrates you. It doesn't. It might make your urine yellow. It certainly gives off an odor in your urine. But in general, coffee will not do that because you're just. If you were to now be taking caffeine pills alone, now, there, there is a bit of a diuretic effect there. And so you're going to urinate. How much? Maybe not enough for you to be really concerned with, especially when you balance that against the ergogenic effects and benefits of caffeine. It's not something we are concerned about. Second part of your question, do you need to then offset the loss of sodium? I'm not super concerned about the amount of sodium lost to caffeine. I am more concerned about simply the amount of sodium being correct because of the bigger circumstances, like how much is actually in your system and how much you lost in the training session. So it's not the caffeine that I care about that much relative to, you know, if you lost 3 grams of sodium because of the training and you added another few milligrams because of the caffeine, I don't really care or didn't.

I'm glad you brought up the difference between a substance like caffeine and the vehicle it's contained in, like coffee. This is all really important. And it also raises a question about individual differences in sweating ability. And I call it sweating ability because I have a good friend I've known for ages, really actually work with him in my laboratory as well. And he's one of these people that the moment he starts any physical activity, it's like a flood warning, right? He just soaks through clothing. It's just the sweating adaptation is. Is exceedingly robust in him. Other people less so. So is it true that sweating in our ability to dump heat through it by loss of water is something that we tend to vary on and that also that we can build up that capacity? I know a number of people are probably thinking, ew, gross. Why would I want to sweat more? But there's actually a huge advantage to be able to dump body heat during exertion because body heat in some ways sets the cap for performance in many, many ways, including mental performance. Our ability to stay alert often is enhanced by being cold. And of course, we all want to warm up properly. But in terms of loss of fluid through sweating, is there a Way to easily bin ourselves into kind of a low sweater, medium sweater, heavy sweater. That sounds like an article of clothing. But in any case, you know what I'm.

You know, man, another a lot to say here. I wish we had a whole series on this.

Listen, if we have to go 17 hours, we can do it. Just everybody hydrate.

Well, I think we've shown the listeners that is a real threat. That's a very real threat.

Podcasting to failure. You don't have to do every set in the gym to failure, but here we are attempting a podcast to failure. In all seriousness, what is the role of sweating ability? And is this something that any of us should care about or train for or pay attention to? Or is this just kind of getting into the arcane?

Number one, you can train your ability to sweat. This is important for heat acclimation and why that matters. When you sweat, that actually is not what regulates your temperature. What you want to have happen is the fluid to hit your skin and that to be evaporated. That's the actual mechanism. So in fact, if you stop sweating, you can guarantee within a short amount of time you're going to be done moving.

Oh, very interesting. I hope people heard that and really are highlighting that in their mind that sweating is a process of bringing fluid from your body onto the surface of your skin. And then the heat dumping aspect of sweating is the evaporation of that off your body. Which brings to mind all sorts of ideas about how to dress during exercise, et cetera. But what you said is that if you are not sweating enough, you are limiting your output capacity. So it's not just about having enough fluid to sweat. It's also about being able to sweat and being dressed appropriately to allow that sweat to move to evaporate off your body.

Yep. And heat acclimation training is as simple as it sounds, so just practice it more. So if you're going into a process where you either need to be in a hot environment or you need to improve your sweat rate, you just need to practice sweating and your body will get best of that. Practice the sauna, practice a jacuzzi, just get in those things and you will improve your ability to do that. Now, there is a huge genetic component. I have one individual, actually, a UFC fighter I've been working with, and I don't mind mentioning his name. He'll give me full permission. Scott Holtzman, many, many years. He's actually fighting right now. Actually today he'll be going. He is like. He is like you described, like buckets and Buckets and buckets of fluids come off this guy when he's tying his shoes. Like, he just goes right, like. And we've improved that. He actually sweat too much. We worked on that a lot early in his career and we got some improvements down to get him to hold on to fluids better. That being said, I've worked with other individuals in his weight category and it's the opposite. Right. So we can have them literally do the exact same training session together. And Scott will dump six pounds and other folks at his size will dump two, two and a half. So there's a genetic component that is just there and you don't need to worry about it there. So can you identify if you are a heavy salt sweater or not? Well, you have a whole bunch of routes for this. Number one is you can use the old free cost free test of just looking at your clothing and if you're seeing that white residue all over it. So you've, you've all have the friend who probably wears that same bass baseball hat that they've had for eight years. If it is covered in the white junk all over the place, that's a sign of a higher salt sweater. If the opposite happens and it's like you can pull their clothing back and there's just nothing there. They are maybe a little bit of a lower salt sweater. You can also use any number of hydration tests. I know that there is some coming out in the market very, very soon that can give you theoretically real time measurements, just like a CGM would be. Although I haven't seen any data on if those are accurate or not. I haven't used one yet. But there are a number that are out super cheap, you know, 10, 15, 20 bucks, all the way up to a couple hundred dollars where you can buy these patches, put them on you, and get a reasonably close estimate. And again, if those things are 5 or 10 or 20% off, I don't know. Have to see independent data come out first. But, but even if they are, you're not worried about the specific milligrams, right? Whether you sweat out 12, 50 milligrams in a workout or if it's 1340, it doesn't really matter. You're trying to look for big, big numbers, right? Are you losing 500 milligrams? Are you using three and a half grams where you're at? So those things will get you in a ballpark to do exactly what you just said. Am I high, medium or low? And there's a lot of them that I've used in the past. So that's another way to go about it. Then what you want to do is probably match your electrolyte intake to something close to what you sweat. That's the ideal scenario. You can get a lot of information about hydration from blood. You can look at acute markers of dehydration like hemoglobin, hematocrit. If you're like, if your hemoglobin is like 15 plus. It's funny, we've talked about this in a few episodes before, but I see that and I'm like, man, that dude's super fit. That's like a 15 for hemoglobin would be pretty high. 14 or so would be pretty good for a female. That's also the exact same thing as a sign of acute dehydration. So hematocrite, same thing. If you're north of 50%, you're probably dehydrated, so you can get a lot. There are also though, a lot of biomarkers that can tell you more about chronic dehydration, so you can run through those things as well. So a good blood chemistry test can tell you a lot and you can actually get some insights in your sodium and potassium. Albumin is another fantastic way to measure longer term hydration status. Another one of these amazing globulins that we've sort of talked a lot about. So you can do all those things. You can also simply measure the body weight pre and post and use a sweat patch or not, and use the freer version of your clothing test and get a rough idea of where you're getting it from. So those are good places to start. I want to go back though, and make sure I wasn't over terrifying the audience too much on a sort of piece. If you're performing a type of training or exercise or sport in which you're not losing more than 2% of your body weight, you don't need to be overly concerned about hydrating in the sport. And so we can actually get into some equations for how much water to drink during training right now. But if you, if you're again losing less than that, it's not critical. You can have some fluids, it like makes you feel better. But you're not gonna be experiencing tremendous amounts of performance sacrements. If you're, you know, again, out playing a, a baseball game and it's 50 degrees out, you're fine. Um, you can drink some water, but that's not gonna be compromising performance or recovery. So we can actually then if you'd Like I can go through the three step system for optimizing hydration, but those are. I want to make sure I planted that flag so people aren't just terrified that they got to be guzzling down water. If they're, you know, going to their physical therapist for some stretching, that's probably not super important.

I'd like to take a brief break and acknowledge our sponsor, Athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is a vitamin, mineral, probiotic and adaptogen drink designed to help you meet all of your foundational nutritional needs. I've been taking Athletic greens daily since 2012, so I'm delighted that they're a sponsor of this podcast. The reason I started taking Athletic Greens and the reason I still take Athletic Greens once or twice a day is that it helps me meet all of my foundational nutritional needs. That is, it covers my vitamins, my minerals, and the probiotics are especially important to me. Athletic Greens also contains adaptogens, which are critical for recovering from stress, from exercise, from work, or just general life. If you'd like to try Athletic Greens, you can go to athleticgreens.com huberman to claim a special offer. They'll give you five free travel packs and they'll give you a year supply of vitamin D3K2. Again, if you'd like to try Athletic greens, go to athleticgreens.com huberman to claim the special offer. I would love for you to tell us what I refer to as the Galpin Equation. Understanding, of course, that you did not name it the Galpin equation. Listen folks, scientists can have things named after them, but in general, it's not reflective of healthy psychology if they name things after themselves, correct? Sometimes, yes. Neuroanatomists used to do that. But in any case, Dr. Andy Galpin did not name the Galpin Equation after himself. I named it after him. And the Galpin equation for how much fluid to ingest during exercise is you.

Want to take your body weight in pounds and divide that by 30 and you want to consume that number, which would be in ounces about every 15 to 20 minutes. So in the example of you being £200, you would take 200 divided by 30, which is, let's just call that number seven to be close, which means you would consume about seven ounces of water every 15 or 20 minutes or so. Okay, now as a little bit of a point, while I also did not name it, I also didn't do the research. It's important to point out that other scientists figured these things out. I just read their papers and made that derivation of their equation to make it a little bit easier for us folks who do not work on the metric system.

Okay, a couple of things. First of all, I'm not £200, but it doesn't matter how much I weigh, because the point is that the listener.

Correct.

Should take their body weight in pounds divided by 30, ingest that number of ounces in fluid every 15 minutes. And then for those out there outside the US that are accustomed to thinking in milliliters and liters, not ounces and kilograms, not pounds, what is the Galpin equation? In the metric system, this would be.

2 milliliters per kilogram, which, again, if you were, let's say, 200 pounds, that's gonna be something roughly like, we'll call it 90 kilos. And so if you did 2 milliliters per kilo, you'd be something like 180 milliliters of fluid again every 15 or 20 minutes.

Great. And how should people ingest that fluid? And of course, I would imagine it's through their mouth. I would hope. I hope there are other orifices that it might suffice. But let's go there. They're drinking that water consistently, or is it every 15 minutes? They slug it back? Does it matter?

Okay, yeah, that's very good. A handful of things. In general, when you talk hydration, the slower and steady you can go, the better. In fact, the reason these. This 2 ML per kg number came out is because a number of trials were run. When they looked at that every 15 minutes, just one bolus of it, you know, um, in different derivations. And it is pretty clear that the slower pace one could do it, the better. So whether you're doing it every 10 minutes or 15 or 20 minutes, the reason we actually give that gap is because you have to be also offset a little bit of GI distress. In fact, like, kind of the. The four golden rules of recovery, if you will, we use sort of three Rs. You need to rebuild, rehydrate, and replenish. What that really means is you need to have a continuous glucose stream. You need to have a continuous amino acid stream. You need to hydrate, and you need to do all 1, 2, and 3 without disturbing your gut too much. And so in this particular case, it was sort of found that we can hit that level in general and be just fine for most people. So, I mean, a little bit of context, the example we gave there, in both cases, it's something like 6 to 7 ounces for 15 or 20 minutes. If you think about that there's 16 ounces in a pound. And most water bottles, like if you go buy a water bottle at a store here, it's, they generally come in like 16 ounce bottles. Ish. So 6 or 7 ounces is really like a third of a water bottle maybe every 15 or 20 or so minutes. So it's not some egregious amount of water that you have to slam down. Now that is influenced heavily by how hydrated you started the session with. So how hydrated you came in, external factors like heat, humidity, temperature, things like that. But that gives you a rough idea that again, and these are numbers that you would need to consume to optimize performance. At the end of that then is when you would look to see how much I lost, like we talked about earlier, and then add back that 125% taking into account how much fluid you ingested. So if you're £200 and you drank a total of say a pound of water during the training and you started off at 200 and you finished at 198, you actually lost three pounds, not two pounds because you lost three, you drank one during it. So your final net number is two. So now you don't. You really need to drink back 125% of that remaining two pounds, two and a half pounds, something like that. These numbers, especially that 125 are they're just rough guidelines. Some actually papers suggest it's all the way up to 150%. So it's just like an idea. Don't measure out whether you need 5.5 ounces or 6.2 ounces. It just sort of gives you an idea of where to start. All right. A few sips every 15 or 20 minutes is close enough.

I've actually started using the Galpin equation to determine how much fluid I need for mental work. Given the now robust data that are out there on the relationship between hydration and mental work, it's been very effective for me. And again, there are peer reviewed studies that support the idea that hydration is important for proper mental clarity and energy and focus and that even being slightly dehydrated can disrupt that. But if one is drinking so much water that they're frequently going to the restroom and can't comfortably focus on the work they're doing, that's also an issue. So yeah, that's very helpful. What are the three most critical features of hydration? And then I'd like to move on to some of the more particulars about supplementation and nutrition.

Three parts Start hydrated, maintain hydration throughout. Part three is hydrate post to fix it. Okay, we gave you the half ounce per pound of body weight equation. So you start the training hydrated. We gave you the, you know, 2 milliliters per kilogram slash body weight divided by 30 to stay hydrated and we gave you the 125%. But I can actually just give you sort of. I'm giving you another list here. I'm sorry, but it is my five step cheater guide for optimizing hydration for performance. All right, step number one, drink a lot of water first thing in the morning. This gets everything kickstarted, gets you going. It also saves you from having to drink a bunch of water at night, which is then going to compromise your sleep.

What's a lot?

Depending on how big you are. The general thing I'll tell people is like one of the very first things you should do throughout your day. You wake up, go to the bathroom. As you're consuming your sunlight, consume water. This is maybe chugging a full glass. It's honestly what I do. It's not the best route, but I'll just get that.

Sixteen ounces.

Sixteen ounces or so is great. It's fine if you're larger. You know, I'm 165 to 70 pounds depending on what's going on. Maybe a little higher. Sometimes if you're 225 pounds, maybe that number is 30 ounces. So you just sort of scale up and down. And the only reason I say a lot is it just depends on what you're doing. And I also should clarify, I don't really literally mean chug, just like sips because the faster you drink water, the faster it's going to expand blood volume. The faster it extends blood volume, the faster you get rid of it.

I don't think a lot of people will know that.

Yeah, this is, maybe this is clarifying. This is also we sort of talked about earlier. If you drink too much water, you'll dilute the system. Well, if you have a diluted system, your body's first reaction is to rid of water to bring total blood volume down, right? Remember if you were to go to a doctor and they looked at your total blood volume, they're like, man, you're five and a half liters. You're going to be like, holy crap. You're going to be put on a diuretic because you don't want to have a heart attack and blood pressure.

I wonder if people are drinking a 16 ounce glass of water or other fluid all at once before going to sleep. And that's why they're waking up in the middle of the night.

Totally.

Given what you just said, probably a better protocol would be to sip on a glass of water in the final hour, two hours before sleep.

Generally the number we say is three hours. In the three hours preceding sleep, you want to basically limit fluid intake to sipping as needed.

I think that's. I'm going to start that tonight because I wake up generally once per night to use the bathroom and I do drink some fluids before I go to sleep. Mostly because I'm pretty thirsty at that time. Yeah. But I'm gonna start sipping that water in the three hours heading into sleep.

Yeah. So you can actually pay attention to. Is to go back. This is actually. I love doing this stuff. But if you're waking up at night and you have a very dry mouth.

Not for me.

All right. Because it can be one of two things. You might actually be dehydrated. And so then the mistake people make is like, man, my mouth is so dry. I keep getting up to drink water at night. That makes you then pee too much. What that also indicates is probably your mouth breathing. So a lot of ways to fix people waking up and urinating too much at night is to tape your mouth and. Or use a dilator over your nose. And then what happens is you don't feel like you have a dry mouth. So you don't get up to consume any extra water throughout the night. So that actually reduces your fluid intake. So you don't have the problem of actually now having too much fluid to do it. And so it's another reasons why mouth taping can really, really help. If you are having those issues and, or snoring. Those are not benign. That's a really like, you really should get some work on those. Something you're not sleeping very well is the way I'll say it. It doesn't. Doesn't necessarily mean something life threatening. But it's not a good thing. So you're going to run kind of your triaging things back and forth. So if you're like, I'm waking up to pee a lot by my mouth isn't thirsty. Okay, great. Then you may actually have just a water consumption issue. If it is my mouth is dry, but I'm actually waking up and having these large urinations, Then you're not actually dehydrated. You're just breathing through your mouth. If you're waking up and your mouth is dry and there's Not a lot of pee there. Then you actually might actually legitimately be under hydrated. So a little bit of a game you can play there.

Well, that's super informative. I think that the point alone that gulping a bunch of water all at once is going to cause you to need to excrete that water soon after is a really important point. Also for people that are going to, I don't know, give a talk or you don't want to have to get up to use the restroom, you have to sit through a long meeting. Clearly I'm violating all these rules. Up until right now, I've been, you know, not. I sort of follow the seagull approach to, to consuming fluids just in enormous volumes. I'm going to start sipping fluids instead. What are some of the other rules of hydration?

So you're going to wake up, you're going to start your day and start hydrated. So you're consuming a larger percentage of your water earlier in the day. Then you get all the performance enhancing effects of water and you don't have to worry about it compromising your sleep. So that's step number one. Also now you're going to start your session closer to hydration. All right, great. Number two, eat mostly real whole foods. Why? Interesting. What you may or not have thought about is a huge determinant of your hydration status is your food choices. If you look at different foods, for example, most fruit, watermelon. Watermelon is like 95 plus percent water. Fantastic source. Also, by the way, since we're here, it is not extremely high in carbohydrates, not extremely high in sugar. It is by percentage. But it's. Since it is almost exclusively water you're eating, it is not something that is extremely dangerous in terms of sugar. I there alone probably of all the things we've talked about in the six, six episodes, that comment right there will probably blow the Internet to pieces and I'll probably get hate mail for life for it.

But from people. Sugar, water, throwing watermelons. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh my gosh.

Well, I don't think the point is that sugar is necessarily bad. I think the point is that for most people they're ingesting too much sugar. Most people, yeah. And it's interesting, oftentimes the people who are justifying the ingestion of sugar are exactly the kind of people that should not ingest so much sugar. So there's a little bit of a, well, user bias.

The point here is if you're eating whole real food, this Is like now we're kind of splitting hairs about those things. So.

So morning hydration consumption.

Eat whole real food. Yeah. Now, important point here. If you compare it to other foods, like actually meat is a very high percentage of fluid, depending on how well or long you've cooked it. You will just remember you said earlier we're 70% water, right. So if you're eating meat, you're getting actually a big chunk of water as you cook it. Of course you lose some of that. But meat can be like, I wouldn't call it a hydrating food item, but it is not as low as something like a biscuit, which can be actually like 10% water. That's why it's like dry and dense, which doesn't mean it's bad for you. But there, if you're eating highly processed foods almost by association, that means they've been dehydrated or partially. Right. So you're just getting less total fluid intake. In addition, they have also been highly salted in general. Right. So now we're in this position where we're under hydrated and highly salted bad spot. If you now switch over to mostly, again just mostly whole real food, ish, whatever that means to you, then your hydration is going to skyrocket. You're gonna have a lot. So you're eating a ton of food. In fact, it should be a large percentage of the fluid intake you have actually should be coming from your food and you shouldn't have to be smashing water bottles after water bottle all day. In that case though, you do need to add salt back. So we do see this a lot with people who try to make a transition from maybe a suboptimal nutritional lifestyle and they give up a little bit of the processed food and they come over and they start having problems because they're not actually consuming enough salt. So add that back. Easy way to do that. You can use electrolytes and we could talk about those numbers if you want. If you just salt your food that you're making, you know, to taste, that's going to get most people in a, in a pretty good spot. So start hydrated, consume hydrating foods. Step number two. Step number three, you want to pre hydrate. If you know you're going to do a workout session and it's going to be hot and long or one of those things, you want to look for that half a pound per body weight of ounces. So that's the number we're looking for to start our hydration session. We do that, we're pretty much taken care of and then like I said, adjust. Depending on lifestyle, humidity and other factors like that, you can use what is called the what system. Wut. I think Bob Kenneth has done a ton of research in this area. If you want to read more, look up his research. It is simply weight, urine and thirst. So in other words, check your body weight, look at your urine color and gauge your thirst. And actually you can use those three things and those can significantly predict actual hydration status independent of actually measuring osmol or anything like that. So those three metrics alone are pretty good indicator of where you're at. So you're going to have that normal amount of water, plus or minus. If you miss that number for whatever reason, you get distracted. The number we typically tell people is like something like 400 to 500 milliliters of water in the hour preceding the training. All right, so that's like 13 to 20 ounces. So like, you know you're gonna go work out at 3 o', clock, it's 2 o' clock and you realize, oh man, I have not drank much water today. You don't need to go smash tons and tons and tons. Just look for something like that. You know, call it a bottle of water, if you will. If that's not enough, if you're in a really tough spot, you can do more like 5-8 oz. 15 or 20 minutes before exercise, you want to be really careful about drinking a bunch of water, like in the seconds before exercise, because you're just going to feel a whole bunch of water bouncing.