The TOP 5 FOODS To Lose Weight, Build Muscle & REVERSE AGING | Andy Galpin

It's my position that the entire existence as a human race, we have strived for two primary goals, and that's it. Reproduce, right? The second one is reduction of stress. We're now realizing though...

I think you gotta have a dream.

The School of Greatness.

Really? Yeah.

Please welcome Lewis Howes. Why do you feel like people in general are weak in the forms of like their body structure, their muscle structure, and their mindset? And obviously, I don't want to generalize this because there are a lot of mentally tough and strong humans, but it just feels like it's getting weaker and weaker with technology, with the access to comforts. Everything is so quick and easy. Why do you feel like this is happening? And what is the downside to a weaker society?

I think about this on a continuum of what we call resilience to sensitivity. and every action you're doing, you're moving towards one direction or the other. Now, depending on what insult you're looking at, some things you want to be highly sensitive to, some things you want to be very resilient. So not one of these is better than the other. It's a paradigm, easy example. It's probably good for you to be very sensitive to alcohol.

Yeah, yeah.

Right? Like, I don't want you to be so sensitive to where if you have a drink of alcohol, you have a mental breakdown for seven months. Like, that's not, that's way too sensitive. I want you so resilient to it that you could drink excessively and have no physical consequence, right? Because you're going to pay for that eventually. So that's something we probably want to be generally sensitive to. Generally resilient is probably something to like even carbon dioxide build up. So what you don't realize, and we could go into metabolism a little bit if you want, but every time you take a breath in, you're breathing in oxygen, O2. When you exhale, you're breathing out CO2. So the difference is you've added a carbon. Where does that carbon come from? Your fat and your carbohydrates are stored in your body, which are your two primary ways in which you derive cellular energy, are just big long chains of carbon. In fact, that's why we call it a carbohydrate. So when you breathe, you're breathing out fat. Or carbon, or carbohydrate. It's just a carbon. It doesn't matter. So whether you're getting your fuel from this carbon that's been hydrated, which is, that's all carbohydrates are, one molecule of carbon plus one molecule of water. Well, fat is typically in this what we call triglyceride form. So it has these three carbon backbones and it has tri, one, two, three, long chains of carbons. So either way, you're talking about a 40 carbon molecule or a six carbon molecule. It's being metabolized in the cell in either direction. One's going to go through the mitochondria initially. One's going to go in the cytoplasm and then through the mitochondria, but either way they're going to end in the mitochondria. They're gonna come out as carbon. That carbon is gonna be attached to oxygen.

Mitochondria is in the entire body or is it mostly in the brain? Mostly muscle.

Mostly the muscle.

Not in the brain.

It's gonna be a lot up there if you have more muscle than you have brain. Gotcha. So total volume wise, it's gonna be a lot.

Yeah.

So you're going to, however you're metabolizing energy from any of your system, it's gonna be accessing and kicking out carbon dioxide. When that level rises in your system, that's going to cross up in your brain. You have various receptors throughout your body that are going to tell you we've got a rise in carbon dioxide. The thing that drives your ventilation, the sensation to breathe, it's not actually running low on oxygen. It's running high in CO2. So this is why carbon monoxide kills you. Because carbon monoxide will competitively bind to oxygen. So oxygen levels get low. Okay. But you don't sense that your oxygen is low, so you don't have any.

Idea and then you just fall dead.

You pass out or you're gone? Oh, wow. Because there's no elevation in CO2. Interesting. So this is why we have to put smells and things like that in.

Various gases so that you can have some sense.

So you say, no, hey, this isn't good, I gotta get out. Or you have to have a carbon monoxide monitor in your house. Wow. Right? So point is CO2 has a direct physical psychological connection. This is a two-way street. It's what we call bi-directional. So an elevation or change in say state or trade anxiety. So they might like you get something happened right now and you freaked out, bad text, real actual thing. It doesn't matter. You will see an acute change in CO2 levels.

So if I think a thought, experience something that frightens me or gives me stress or anxiety, watch a scary movie, whatever it might be, your girlfriend reaches out to you about something and you feel stressed, what happens to the body when you feel that in a moment?

You're gonna get an immediate change in catecholamine status.

What is that?

So you're gonna see adrenaline, you're gonna see epinephrine, which is same word.

Yeah.

You're gonna see norepinephrine, cortisol, all these things, this stress response is gonna happen instantaneously. From that, you're gonna see a physiological response. So you're gonna see a change in heart rate, you're gonna see a change in ventilation, you'll see a change in dilation of your eyes, focus, you'll tend to see a change in vision because you're going to want to narrow in what's the danger, what's the threat. So you have a whole host of physiological responses that are coming from a psychological stress. And it goes both ways. So a physical stress can also then cause a state of psychological awareness. So you can give yourself psychological anxiety from a change in physiology, exercise. CO2 starts to rise, oh my gosh, you can't focus, you're not making good decisions, your vision changes, everything happens in this bi-directional.

Interesting.

So with CO2, and we've seen this in our lab, if someone is very tolerant and resistant, which is where we started this question at, to elevations in CO2.

Meaning that they can push themselves longer distances from training, they can have high heart rate.

It's simpler than that.

What is it?

Yeah, it's simply say that bad thing happened psychologically. You get this rise in CO2. If you're tolerant to that CO2, you can go, okay, I'm good here. Heart rate came up a little bit, not much.

You can assess the situation, you can be more neutral as opposed to up and down.

And that would be a psychological or cognitive thing, but there's also just physiological. Your heart rate won't go up as much. And you're, okay, we're good here. We're fine, right? You're not gonna make any emotional decisions, you're not gonna make any physical actions.

You'Re not gonna change your act, your.

Ventilation strategy, you're resilient to it, right? Someone who is sensitive to it has the smallest little thing come in and they're gone.

Right.

The wreck.

These are the people who are, oh, if I don't have my coffee in the morning, don't talk to me. This horribleness, right? We was like we call these people precious. You should be more resilient to daily stressors.

Yeah.

But you should be fairly sensitive to things like, I feel like I'm not drinking enough water today. I want a lot of sensitivity there because now you can quickly recognize change in behavior and pattern. But some stressors we want you to be resilient towards. I want you to be resilient towards running 20 miles.

Yeah.

Right?

26.2, but yeah, it's counting.

But I want you to be sensitive to going, Hey, My heart rate's a little bit higher last time that I ran this pace because now I don't need as much tech to give me feedback because that's one of the problems with the tech, especially training and physiology-based technologies. Is they're outsourcing your own endogenous awareness?

The heart rate monitor or something else?

Totally, right? And this is what our entire Unplugged book was about. It's not that training tech is bad. Obviously, I use it with every professional athlete I work with. but you don't want to outsource your physiology to a clumsy tech. It can be good for calibration, it can be good for establishing, I don't know what a heart rate of 150.

Is, I don't know. Right, right. It's an assessment tool. It's more of like, where am I at?

Totally.

Not a continuum tool necessarily. 100%. An assessment every now and then. Okay, let me recheck later. But using your brain or your body or own senses to assess on a.

Consistent basis is what I'm hearing is.

Probably more in alignment to a healthier long-term constructive life.

Absolutely, because then what happens when you're Michael Phelps and you're in the pool in the Olympics? You're like, I need my- well, your goggles broke. Oh, yeah. And he still broke world record. I don't know if you're familiar with this story, but what happened is goggles break in the middle of the race, right? And you can't see. Now, you know how important it is to be able to see when you're swimming, especially when you're trying to break a world record, 'cause you can't veer, right? You finish it and the story goes, his coach had actually made him practice without his goggles in case something happened. To prepare for it, yeah. So he learned how many strokes it takes, he learned how far he's traveling, and he could just count, and then he knew when to reach.

That's amazing, isn't it?

So if we kind of wrap that part up is, if you think about the entire optimization, if you want to call it that, for human physiology, you have to think, it's my position that the entire existence as a human race, we have strived for two primary goals. and that's it. Reproduce. The second one is reduction of stress. We're now realizing though it worked.

We have all these comforts, right?

We went too far, right? We developed culture for safety in numbers, right? We developed agriculture for safety of food. We developed indoors for safety of thermal stress. And we've strove for one central goal. Every technological advancement we've ever done is to mitigate Stress. Now what happens when you go into space and we have completely reduced all stress? Your physiology tanks in a matter of days. So getting to Mars is not going to be a rocket problem. It's going to be a physiology problem. Interesting. We can't replace enough stress with our current lifestyles. Your question initially, and I'm whatever, 10 minutes into finally answering your question, why are we at these problems? It's simply because we have not realized what stressors we want to place on ourself. and which ones were acceptable removing. We've just removed all as fast as we can. So if you want to take this from a lifestyle, if you want to take this from a happiness, if you want to take this from a movement or nutrition, any of these ones, it's gonna work. We have to have a better understanding of what are we trying to go after. So we have to come back and now artificially engage in weird stress, like exercise.

Because it feels like I think I can speak for most of the human race. And correct me if I'm wrong here. It feels like most of the human race wants to be happy, wants to be healthy, wants to have quality relationships and feel loved, wants to and wants to live a longer life. They want to be around longer. Maybe I'm off and tell me if I'm wrong, but I feel like most humanity wants those things.

I think you're probably pretty close.

Right.

And maybe they want to have status or something else or have a, you know, fulfillment in their work or something, but those are things they want to be happy, healthy, quality relationships and extend their life as long as they can in a healthy way. Is it better to do that, to live in complete comfort or what types of stresses do we need to be putting ourselves to also have all those things and extend our life as long as we can. Or if we're living in complete comfort, will we die earlier? Yeah, clearly.

There's no doubt, right? So you're gonna... And when it's too.

Much stress, like you're actually gonna die earlier because you're stressing yourself too much.

This is what we do. This is the entire point of everything I do with the professional athlete, right? We're trying to assess what we'll call hidden stressors, visible stressors. We're gonna match that with a recovery capacity. If you outkick your coverage, in other words, your hidden or visible stressors are higher than your recovery capacity, you're going to block adaptation. Now if I can move the lever on increasing recovery capacity or I can reduce a total stress load, fine. Well, the backside of that coin is the only way we get adaptation is through stress. So reduction of stress is not adaptation.

What's adaptation?

Any change.

Okay.

Any change.

The only way we grow is through stress.

Or shrink.

Interesting. Okay.

Either way, right? It's gonna have to be some stressor. It's inertia. If I throw a ball in space, it will continue at the same speed for forever because there's no external stress. We have external stress here. Physiology is optimized with stress.

Right.

Not without.

The body is optimized with stress.

It functions its best with stress because it needs to continually provide maintenance. Imagine if in this building you just fired every maintenance person. It's not going to work its best. You want to have some small changes there. Let's get the carpet out. Let's do this. Let's change out. You're gonna have to see improvements, right?

Take the trash out, everything, yeah.

Totally, yeah. That's like a figurative and a quite literal.

Example.

So another paradigm that's important to think about is what we'll call optimization versus adaptation.

Okay.

So just like I had my, and you're gonna see this a lot, by the way, like I love to have kind of numbers and, and systems. Every choice you're making in your day is moving you more towards optimization or adaptation. Now, what the key is, is understanding when we want to hedge for one versus the other. and I can give you some examples. If you had like, say you spent some time and you figured out what your optimal morning routine is.

Yeah.

Awesome. I want people to do that. That's fantastic. Huge believer in understanding what makes you feel incredible. However, that's pushing towards optimization, right? So you're going to not do work. You're going to lose time in your day. You're going to do all these things that are going to come at an expense. and you're going to feel great that day. The downside of that optimization is you're blocking adaptation, right? Because you're no longer getting better at dealing with a sub-optimal day. Fine. So when you say, okay, look, I've got a very important meeting, I've got a game today, I've got something to do. I want you to know exactly what it takes for you to feel fantastic, starting 24 hours or more out. Let's get on this thing, let's get in the sleep, let's get everything dialed. I'm going to feel great tomorrow. Yes. If you try to practice that every single day, you're going to become incredibly sensitive.

Which means-- if something's off.

Anything is off, you just tank.

Oh, interesting. So you have the optimal routine, but if your alarm clock goes off too soon, or you get a phone call, or something happens and you wake up-- Dog wakes you up in the middle of the night.

Now the whole day is off, is what you're saying. The whole thing is screwed.

Interesting. Because you became way too sensitive.

So I want you to-- you- became too reliant on it being perfect in a certain way. Mm-. And we've seen this a lot with breathwork stuff where people are just like, if I don't get my whole breath work in, like, I can't focus. If I don't have my nootropic and I don't have my full, like, that's not, if you can't function without coffee. That's not good. And caffeine is fantastic.

Yeah.

Like, that's a really bad position to be in because you're back to being precious now. Yeah. If anything happens, you're not resilient. I can't take you in the woods. We can't go hunting for five days because you're not gonna be able to function. Plug in your head.

No.

We need to be able to survive in difficult situations. Obviously our lives, what we consider to be a difficult situation now is far less than what it on average used to be. Certainly some people are dealing with really difficult things. But for the most part as a global average in this country, the bar has gone up. Life is pretty good.

Yeah, we're not in the woods all day.

So how do we figure this out? We need to think through from an athletic perspective It's very easy, right? In the off season, for example, we're not driving optimization. I'm not peaking you for tomorrow when I'm six months out from a game. I'm driving adaptation. Here's what that means. You're not going to feel great today. Things aren't going to be perfect. Our HRV numbers are going to be down. I'm not going to give you an optimal pre and post workout. And we're not going to dial these things in. We're going to put the body under higher stress. in the areas we want. We're gonna remove them in the areas we don't want, but general stress load's gonna go up. I may cut out a little bit.

Of your recovery capacity.

Make it uncomfortable for you. I want you to become more resilient. I want the physiological requirements for recovery to have to go, We don't have enough here. Upregulate. Build more mitochondria. Be more tolerant to the connective tissue.

Be more tolerant to the stress load. Whatever thing we're trying to push.

You're gonna feel more soreness today. You have to push through the soreness, whatever. All these things, right? Now we're gonna roll into season in this example and say, let's now push towards optimization. And I could give you some examples of this, but we've done work with things like taper. And you know what taper is, but I'll explain for non-sport folks.

Like tapering off?

Yeah. So you've trained the entire season, for example, and in the last couple of weeks you say back down practices.

Yeah, so we can get ready for the playoffs.

The whole idea is you've actually overloaded your system the entire season. And now when you back off that volume, intracellularly you recover. So now performance jumps up. And we've seen this actually, we've taken biopsies of folks pre and post like a three-week taper. And we've seen improvements of like 10 to 15% in fast-twitch muscle size. Wow. Through the taper.

Wow. And how long is the taper?

Like three weeks.

A couple weeks, yeah.

And we've seen this with as little as two. And this is not like a generally a 50 reduction in volume. So if you're running 30 miles a week and you go down to 15 for a week, you could quite literally see a giant increase in fast switch muscle fiber size by simply doing less.

Wow.

That only works, though, because you worked really hard.

Yes.

For that.

For like three months.

Yeah.

Yeah. So you just have to have a bit of a strategy. And for not like non-athletes The same thing happens for this longevity scheme, right? So what you're trying to run the equations on all the time are, okay, what have I become really sensitive to? What have I become really resilient against? And am I driving too much optimization? Because if you are, you're probably shortcutting your long term. This is what we call the short game versus the long game. So sometimes I want you to play the short game. I don't want you to spend too much time pushing for Another way to kind of think about this adaptation versus optimization is immediate versus delayed gratification. If you always choose immediate gratification, I don't need to explain to you why that's a problem. However, if you always choose delayed gratification, you're now asking a recipe for mental health issues.

Give me an example why.

You're not present. You have this big thing and congratulations like you made the big sale. Okay, yeah, but now we got a you're always kicking the, you're never having that piece of cake, you're never taking that day off, you're never present. And you've probably had a million people on the show before talk about the importance of presence, right? If you're worried about the past, you know what that is. If you're worried about the future, that's a different thing. So having some semblance of presence is critical. So you want to pay attention to, hey, you haven't been happy. I've had this happen with athletes. Winning Olympic gold medals. Yeah, and then depression right after.

Immediate depression, right? I can't tell you. Have you seen that movie, the Weight of Gold?

No.

It's a documentary called the Weight of Gold. Yep, I can get it. You should watch it, it's powerful. And it's about kind of like the depression cycle that these elite athletes have after the Olympics, specifically with the Olympics because-- It's very real. Because it's like you train for eight.

Or 16 years for one moment and then there's no more vision, there's no more goal once you retire, I guess. It's even more acute than that.

Yeah.

I have seen this before, like you walk off and you have these NBA world championships, UFC belts, and it's like, I'm not even happy right now.

Yeah.

Or like, it's not even like I'm so happy.

It's like, you're not even happy right then.

And that's because it's too much of like, okay, yeah, we had a great day, but like.

Or you're focused on the mistakes you made, or I could have done this, or I missed the shot of the goal or whatever.

Yeah.

That's workaholics.

Yeah.

You're gonna have all these problems. If you're too focused on acute happiness though.

Yeah, you're eating sugar all day long. You're not sleeping. You're just partying all day.

Four or five hours of work today is probably good.

Yeah.

Now you're in there. So, all these things are a calculation you're running. And I think you can challenge these with every aspect of your day, whether that's your work, it's your food, it's your relationships. All of these things, you need to think carefully and go, you, know what? Maybe I should, I'm gonna invest in more sleep right now, right? And I'm just gonna eat it with my job right now. We have what we call a snapshot or a quadrant. So you get 10 points.

Give me an example.

I give you 10 points. I'm gonna make you do this right now.

Okay.

You ready for this? You have four categories. Category one is relationships.

Okay. So this is like a four quadrant?

Bingo.

Okay. Relationships.

Category two is physical. Category three is recovery. And category four is we have relationships, physical, recovery and business. Of course, business, like business life, like job, all that stuff. So now each one of these categories is changing based on you. So what relationship means to you? Like that's not the same for me and What's business means. So whatever these things need to make sense for you, makes sense for you. And you get 10 points. Okay. So the question, and this is part of the business. One through 10. One through 10 total. So you gotta tell me how many points you wanna put in every category.

You only have 10 total points. In each category or all total. Total. Okay, so what's the points mean?

How much of your energy are you going to put into each one of these for the next, let's say, eight weeks? And I like to do these in short seasons, right? So it could be a month, but I like eight weeks better. So right now for the next eight weeks, Lose, how many points you can put in your relationships?, I feel like.

I put a lot of my relationships. I feel I put a lot in.

All these, but put put a you.

Tell ten so I give nine yourr.

Ten may be higher than my ten. But your ten is still your max capacity, for sure.

So I can I use ten points in all.

Total.

So you do 3334.

And now what's that number?

Oh, so 3331, right? It's like.

Bingo. Here's the problem. So put them down. Let's start with recovery.

I mean, it's hard.

So how much are you doing for physical and mental recovery every single day? Relative to, let's start with business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, this is how much of.

Your day is focused around business related things?

You're saying like there's 24 hours in a day.

How much of your energy, your overall, it's not like time per se, it's like how much does it take from your soul?

I feel like this is probably a four.

Four, great. So now we got six points left across the next three categories. How much is your physical training, your exercise, your breath work and your mental ability?

This is probably a 2, 1.5, can I do that or not? Okay, I'll do a two.

All right, so now you've got, how much are you putting into your relationships. This could be family, this could be even your people you work with and buildings.

This is probably a three and then a one, right? All right, cool.

Fine.

So here's what I'd say. There's nothing wrong. Your split is your split.

Yeah.

Here's what I'd say is, is that.

Split matching your current goals?

Well, I mean, and here's the thing.

Yeah.

Physical to recovery can never be higher than a two to one ratio. So you can't have a four in.

Physical training and a one recovery.

So this is perfect then.

This is perfect.

Two to one.

If you don't want to make much progress in your physical training, you're going to have to put 30.

Right.

Well, I'm thinking about the time. Like, I spend an hour, two hours a day of my time towards physical training, nutrition, I guess.

Yeah.

But, like, so that's up to you. Right. Right. What we're going to do then is we're going to take that and we're going to put that in front out here with the rest of your team. And you're going to put that on your cell phone. Right. And every Couple of whiles, we're gonna check in and say, Louis, did you, you haven't done, did you skip your mobility again today? Are we really getting to here? Are we getting half as much time in your physical training as we are in your business? And the answer is no, you're not holding consistently against what you said, and this was our agreement. You made this agreement to your boyfriend, your mom, whoever your coach is, right? So we're helping understand, and then we're gonna do this again. And you may say, Hey, look, right.

Now, we got this stuff moving business-wise.

Yeah, right. So put more energy here as opposed to, yeah. It's just acknowledging it, and it's hugely helpful for the high performers. We want your family to see this too. That's when you go, Hey, look, we're in the playoffs right now. I'm not gonna have time for you. Dad's going six in physical, four in recovery. Yeah, not the zero.

I have athletes that do this.

It's like they're 10 weeks out and they hug their family and okay, Dad is gonna see you in 10 weeks. They're not moving out, but like...

They're focused.

They know emotionally I'm gonna try to be here, but it's just not gonna be there. And if there's a question of like, can you go to Tommy's practice versus go see your, like you're going to, that choice is made.

Right.

And we're just gonna hold you consistent to that choice. And it's very helpful for understanding where we're gonna go. However, the final key here is once you've hit that mark, we have to reassess and we have to go, look, you can't just have a permanent six on business.

No.

Well, this is why I love looking at life in seasons, just from like sports. You know, as an athlete, it's like you can never have a season nonstop forever. There's always, an end to a season, and then there's the post season or the off season, whatever you want to call it. And then there's a pre season and then there's a season and then there's the playoffs. So it's like that end of the season, you got to give yourself a date when the end will be.

100%.

So you can reassess and say, is this working for me? Do I still want to be doing this? Do I want to try something new in my life and create a new.

Vision for the next season of your life, which I think is valuable. I couldn't agree more because if not, you end up getting this. And this, like, by the way, this is the most common split.

Yeah.

By like 80% of people are gonna put this on their first try. Exactly that. I could actually, I probably should have done like a magic trick before. I guess he's gonna go 4-3-2-1. It's everyone, right? If you run that the rest of your life, you're just going to continue to move at a very slow rate. You have to come and go, okay, you know what? Look, we did spend the next six months. We built this company. We got this project.

Yeah, 'cause it takes momentum to build something and launch something. It's gonna take more effort and time on one thing. But then you got to focus back on your body. The goal would be hopefully to have things kind of balanced after you launch things, right?

Or no? Not really. I don't think because if you end up having an equal balance of everything, you get very little done. I actually liked sprints. Totally. I haven't slept and we went nuts for two months, whatever the thing is. I'm going to go full recovery. We're going to go to business and maybe we're going to do it for two weeks. Fine.

Take a month off.

Not even, it could just be like, look, I'm going to work from 11 a.m. to 2. I'll work three hours a day, whatever the case is, and it's just not gonna get done. We're gonna lose that sale. We're gonna, like, money's gonna come down 20% fine. But I have to repay back this physical debt. I have to pay this emotional debt back.

I gotta spend time with my mom.

I haven't called my mom yet back. Like, I'm gonna hate myself if all these things you know are true. You just have to now invest and go. 'Cause, like, I know, like, I know.

You have to just, Do the 100.

Hour work week sometimes.

Uh huh, yeah. If you're launching something, if you want.

It to be successful.

You have to. You can't just show up two hours.

A day on a business that no one knows about. When we're preparing for world title fights or four years into an Olympic quad.

There are plenty of times when it is just like nothing else is going on. Yeah, you don't get to call your mom, no, it's just gettin' one minute a day. Born in the cabin, no mom, no dad. Here's the thing, here's one thing I wanna ask you about is sleep. One of the things that I've heard from a lot of the sleep scientists and doctors out there from Dr. Matthew Walker to Huberman to Shawn Stevenson who studied a lot about this as well, is that you can't pay off sleep debt is what I've heard. If you're two hours behind on sleep, what you should be getting, the brain just functions slower from what I've been told by scientists. And if you keep doing two hours less every day or you only get four hours or five hours of sleep, the body is not going to be able to recover, you're going to be slower thinking based on the studies that they've done. So what have you seen where people are lacking sleep, are able to still be focused and recover and can you pay off that debt if you miss a few hours every week? For years, can your body actually recover?

It's a bit of a pedantic argument. My general response is, I like the message of, no, I'll just like sleep when I'm like, I hate that idea.

No, sleeping I'm dead, yeah. No, no, no.

You're going to be dead. You're gonna die sooner. It's no good, right? So as a general thing, I think it's a good message to put like, hey, you need to invest in your physical health and sleep is a huge cornerstone to that. Having said that, I think people, and these are not Matthew Walker's words, by the way, is this what people have interpreted? Is Sim was saying, there is some confusion on what sleep debt is. is and is not. So if you missed two hours of sleep last night, that's not two hours. Well, you can't travel back in time. So yes, technically you'll never recover those two hours. Like literally not gonna happen. Totally get it. But don't think because you've not slept two hours tonight that you'll never recover some physical state ever possible again. That's not sleep debt. What he's saying is you can't sleep three hours a night during the week and then sleep 15 on the weekends and think that that's equal. Mm-. That's a bad idea. So I would absolutely agree the idea of sleep that like that is something you want to avoid. I would also agree that if you want to perform cognitively and physically at your highest level, sleep should be a major core. Mm-. I would probably argue the top. That's why I've spent so much time in that area. So I'm a huge proponent of that. I'm a big believer in it. Now having said that, I deal with athletes that are Take a major league baseball player. We're going to go into different time zones.

Right.

Every three or four days.

Yeah, it's tough.

We have to deal with this problem and so we have to come up with solutions for that and we do. You can recover.

Yeah.

Like there's no question. You can come back to baseline. It's a question of this. Think about your body tends to like spikes versus slow ramps. So what I mean by that is a huge insult physiologically matched with an equal amount of recovery tends to lead to positive adaptations. A tiny bit of stress, what do you mean an insult?

A huge insult, meaning like, okay, I'm going to the gym, I'm hitting it hard for a couple hours, I'm going.

To tear the muscles to a certain point. Yeah, there's actually not much muscle tearing.

There, but you get the idea. Be sore. Yeah, yeah, I'm going to be sore, I'm going to be in pain, right? And then I'm gonna go to fatigue, whatever it is. And so you're saying a big insult in the body, stress.

A totally important point that you don't care about, I promise I won't lose the message. Yes. You do not need to get sore.

For a quality workout.

At all. For a quality workout. For a productive exercise session, soreness is a terrible metric for activity. We can come back to that if you want, but I don't wanna lose what you're really trying to get at, because that was just a kind of example you're saying, so I understand. So we can flag that and come back if you want. But yes, in theory, whether this is a food insult, whether this is a sleep insult, whether this is a hormonal, is a thermal stress, this is why things like cold.

Cold, hot, yep.

They are big whole cow. We're gonna see a change in ventilation. We're gonna see an endocrine response, which is hormone release, right? We're gonna see all these physiological changes. this is what we're after.

We want that.

You match it with an equal amount of rigor recovery.

Sleep, rest, done, right?

You get in a cold bath, 30 degree water, you're gonna see immediate, boom, everything is gonna shoot up, you're gonna get out what you're gonna see. In fact, if you look at like HRV. So HRV is a measure of autonomic nervous system. So this is, think of this as like a global measure of your stress load. Okay? Now there's the parasympathetic side of the equation, which is kind of like chill, and then sympathetic, which is like fight or flight. So you want this high HRV score, because this is generally saying you are in a nicely parasympathetic mode when you're supposed to be. If you get in the ice, and we've done this with a lot of professional athletes, not like one setting, talking about like weeks and weeks of daily and metrics and months of metrics. Your HRV score when you get in the ice is going to plummet. You're going to flip into sympathetic nervous system as fat. And remember, low HRV is bad.

Okay.

You get out of the ice, within 30 minutes your HRV score will be higher than it was when you started. 60, 90, 180 up to 270 minutes post that, it'll still be higher than it was at the beginning. So a three-minute jump in cold water can provide a pretty lasting positive physiological response. That's exactly what I mean by short-term shock matched by get out, okay, breathe.

Relax for 20 minutes, yeah.

Totally. You're going to see a higher basal state, if you want to think about it, than what you did before. That's a really easy example of a quick.

Higher base state of what?

In this particular case, HRV, which is again like a rough global metric of what's your physiological state.

And you want that. You want it to be higher.

You're higher.

Performing better.

You're more under control.

Interesting. Is that good to do on a daily basis, these short shocks, whether it be extreme hot, extreme cold, extreme whatever, extreme sprinting really quick, something like that, on a daily or-- yeah, I think so.

But they don't have to be the same thing. So you don't have to ice every day. You don't have to do max heart rate intervals every day. But you could do something that requires tremendous concentration.

You can make a get like, yeah.

I'm gonna do 90 minutes of just completely involved work. I'm gonna do a meditation session. I'm gonna breath work. I'm gonna be totally engaged with my partner and just really have a 45 minute conversation where we're just locked in, like, physical touch. All of these things can represent these.

Short intense bursts, right?

So if you're an exerciser, like, It's like us, like that's gonna come a.

Lot of times in the form of working out, yeah.

Yeah, food related things, there's of course supplementation and other areas to get to it. What you don't want is just a wandering baseline where you're like slightly under slept, you're slightly overfed, like you have a little bit of stress but it's not like the kind of stress you want.

That's not good stress, it's like.

You're not totally focused and then like work builds up and then like you're kind of a jerk to your Kit that's that's a recipe for all things bad, right? Loss of productivity, loss of relationships all these things got worse and we didn't drive adaptation so we didn't get better interesting because of it so those the areas we want to stay away from you could you could I could give you physiological examples, but you're getting the point, right? And so that's where we want to be Mindful of with sleep and For example, chronic slight under sleep is going to lead to that area of, okay, now all of a sudden, I don't feel great and I feel like my energy is down and we just have these continual degradation of physiological state. So then we have to come in and spend way too much time running diagnosis and figure out, okay, it's one of four, bad sleep is one of four areas. It's psychology. It is physiology, it is environment, or it is your pathology.

What is pathology?

So you could have something going on, like if we ran, you could have, there's a particular issue where your legs twitched all night, right? You have things like that where your tongue is falling in the back of your neck and you can't breathe and your being shot awake. So some sort of negative actual state, you could have some sort of physical induced sleep apnea.

Right.

The four parts of bad sleep is psychology, which essentially like the way you're maybe you're thinking or ruminating all day.

You'Re worrying about something and you're not able to calm your thoughts. Yes, essentially.

This comes into a variety of areas.

Either I can't turn my brain off at night.

This used to be me for most of my life.

Totally.

Super easy fixes for that, by the way, for the most part. I wish I had that. I feel like I had that in the environment. We didn't have air conditioning when I was a kid growing up. Yeah, me too. So I was just sweating in the middle of the summer just like, I can't sleep. And then you're just ruminating on why he can't sleep. No sheets, no blankets, just like, My dad didn't let me have a fan on me because he's like, it's gonna make you sick.

Oh no way.

So I couldn't have a fan on. And he was like, this is gonna make you sick. So I just had to sit there.

For two hours every night hoping for sleep.

Well, you became very resilient to that. I know, right? I'm like, my gosh, man. I feel like the psychology, the environment is one thing. And you hear people talking about having a sleep sanctuary and really like the different things you can do with dark out, the snake plants to create more oxygen, the sheets, the temperature, everything for the optimized sleep is the ghee, right?

Yeah, so with environment, you want to pay attention to a handful of other things. Most people are hip to light.

Yeah, the light is sound.

Right.

There's other things that we can measure, like I was talking before the show. We have a box that we can just sit at the end of your desk.

I like that.

And it's going to run full environmental diagnostics. I want to try that. So this is going to measure everything from like your CO2 cloud, which is, again, going back to our beginning of our conversation, you're going to take a breath in and you're going to breathe out CO2. Well, when you're sleeping, that because you're not going, you're just barely moving. So that CO2 basically seeps out. Wow. Well, if that CO2 hovers around your face and you're re-inhaling CO2, what's happening?

It's not good.

It's going right back up again. It's shooting awake. Or even if you're not physically shooting awake, you're gonna be shot out of sleep stages, which is what we're trying to get into. And you can go back to I'm sure listen to your episodes with Walker and Andrew and they've talked about the various sleep stages. So if we can figure out, hey, you know what? Actually it's not You don't need to wear the blue blockers. Not that you don't, but you don't have all these things that people are thinking you've tried everything. All these supplementation, you've tried changing your diet, you've changing all these things, you're done and you're still not sleeping.

Well, maybe it's as simple as the.

Fact that the air ventilation in your room isn't moving the air off your face. So having some circulation. Totally. It has to be the right type.

Of circulation because if the air condition goes pushing it back. Now we've fallen, sorry if that was really loud. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's flowing now back into there.

Yeah, I actually like the, some sound, like not sound, but more like, Air flow, air flow. Like hearing the air flowing makes me sleep easier than silence. Like I get like worried when it's just silent, I don't know. You're very normal.

Most people are gonna say, put a big, this is why white noise machines. Like a little fan or something, yeah.

Just to hear it.

It also drowns out the bottom level of noise.

That's true, any of the little sounds that you might hear from outside, yeah, that's interesting.

Can't hear it, right? So we're gonna look at that, we're.

Gonna look at any... You said pathology, what was the third one? Psychology, environment, something else in pathology? Physiology. Physiology, this is like...

So this is where the body's twitching or you're sore, you're in pain? No, no, this is gonna be quite literally your melatonin levels throughout the night before, throughout the day, it's cortisol levels, it's DHEA levels, it's everything that goes the serotonin, dopamine, all these things that you can do supplementation wise or food wise are affecting the physiology. So what we're going to try to do is run through if you do the very standard sleep hygiene stuff and that's not working. Now we've got to go down one of these areas and figure out maybe there's simply a pollen or some environmental thing going on in the air that's blocking up your nose and all of a sudden you can't breathe through your nose, now you've gone to mouth breathing at night and you've probably talked about that a bunch of times.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's bad.

James Nester.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can look at the nitric oxide issues, so endothelial functions down. So, if you're a little bit older and you've lost nitric oxide function and/or you're not getting high nitric oxide concentrations out of your food, and now if you've got the double whammy, which tends to happen, poor food and age, boom. Now we have physiological problems. So, it may not be any of the environment or psychology, but you're kicking awake and then when you kick awake, you start thinking, and now you think it's a psychology problem, but really your physiology was just too close to high alert. And any little thing shot you off. And so you weren't resilient at all because you're right on that threshold.

Of.

Not being able to do things. And then you can try, you know, I'm sure Andrew's talked about HSDD stuff and just like nuts, right? Another trick I love for the brain thing, actually, We use this a lot with high performers and by that I mean not just athletes but high performers.

Executives and yeah.

The brain does not do well for these people that are high drive when you tell it to calm down. Now if you can't do that you need to develop that skill.

The ability to calm down.

For sure.

At any moment, yeah.

And meditation, breath work, all this stuff is really effective. However, it tends to do very well when you simply give it a very specific task. which sounds counterintuitive. So you shoot awake and you can't go back to sleep because you're thinking about whatever the thing is. Two ways to solve this. Number one, if it's like, I gotta do this tomorrow and this, this, this is a very easy solution is to just keep this right by your bed. Wake up and write, okay, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, and you'll be like, all right, good. Get it out, yeah. Or the other way is I try to solve my hardest problems in bed when I can't sleep. I specifically, not my emotionally difficult ones, but my hardest what I call wonders. Thought like, you know, I haven't really thought through this concept of optimization. How would this, and I'm just, I'm thinking really hard on something. How am I gonna write, like, you know, like, what do those data mean? Like, huh? Gone. Because you've just, you've fall asleep. You've state changed. You've given the brain a task, and then it goes, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's not what we're doing right now.

Really?

Interesting. And you just go out. So mindfulness is my number one. Try to just zen back out. If that doesn't work, though, focus on a task that's not emotionally charging for you.

Oh yeah.

But you really like, what's the thing that you're just like, man, sometimes, like sometimes I'll think about, I'm a sports fan, I played college football like you. Sometimes I think about like, God, can I name the entire 1995 Mariners roster? Like, I think I can. Who do I play second base? You just go through that stuff. So you give it something to do. It's the same thing with like a parenting or working with employees rather than just telling them what not to do. You're more effective generally telling it what to do and making it do something and giving it options. Hey, you can think about this, this or this. I'm not just gonna run and say, no, no, no, no, no, no. Cause that's really hard for you to just like stop thinking about this damn meeting.

Like that's really difficult.

Right, right.

It doesn't work.

You know what? Okay, you can have these three options. Think about this, this or this and.

You just go and at worst case.

You lay there in bed happy.

Yes, thinking about something.

Yeah. Worst case.

Something I've heard recently from different longevity experts is that building muscle mass is one of the key indicators to living a longer life. I don't know if that's accurate in your studies.

Yeah.

So having, you know, for a number of reasons, if you fall and, like, just to be able to get yourself off the ground so you don't die as one. one thing, having the strength, also just like being healthier and living longer and more flexible and stuff like that.

But there's physiology too. Remember, skeletal muscle is your biggest organ, which means it's your center house for most of your hormone response. It's going to control and regulate a lot of physiology. It's the place where insulin is going to have the most effect. Your cytokines, myokines, most of this is coming in or out of muscle. It's an amino acid reserve slightly, which you need amino acids to then build immune cells and brain cells, everything else requires an amino acid. So it's a storage depot. It has tremendous physiological benefit outside of jumping and looking good.

Is this the same for men and women? Yes. So should women be thinking about building muscle?

100%. If you look very clearly at the longevity data, you're going to see a handful of things jump out. If you look at studies, and this is Steven Blair's stuff from 1990, way back we've known that things like your VO2 max, and this is something that again has been written in every exercise physiology textbook for 35 years. It's nothing new, so it's not like a controversial hot new thing. It's very well established. VO2 max is a huge predictor of longevity, lifespan and health span. More recently, but even the last 20 years, muscle function, so muscle size and muscle quality. In fact, a really nice review paper came out just this week in Journal of Physiology. showing that skeletal muscle cells, so remember your muscle, any one of your muscles, is made up of millions of individual muscle cells. So think about a ponytail. So a ponytail is one, but it's just a composite of tons of hairs. Tons of hair. Skeletal muscle is long and thin and tubular. In fact, it's one of the biggest cells in all of biology by volume. So human skeletal muscle is massive. It's multinucleated, which is also very unique, which means all your.