The Surprising New Science Of Recovery To Build More Muscle - Dr Mike Israetel

Summary

Highlights

• Dr. Mike Israetel explains the importance of treating human recovery like machine maintenance. 🛠️
• The conversation highlights the science behind fatigue and its role in muscle building. 🔬
• Dr. Israetel stresses the significance of balancing training with adequate recovery. ⚖️
• Learn about the major recovery factors: sleep, nutrition, stress management, and relaxation. 💡
• The myth-busting session on recovery supplements and what truly helps. 🌟

Key Takeaways

• Recovery is as crucial as training—you're like a finely-tuned machine needing maintenance! 🛠️
• Fatigue breaks you down; recovery builds you back up stronger! 💪
• Sleep and proper nutrition are your best friends for optimal recovery. 😴🍎
• Less is more! Subtraction, not addition, is the key to effective recovery. ➖
• Laughter and chilling out with friends are powerful recovery tools! 😂🎉

Overview

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction to Recovery In the chapter "Introduction to Recovery," the speaker transitions from previous discussions on fat loss and muscle building to the topic of recovery, which is described as the other side of those processes. The focus is on understanding recovery in relation to energy flow and the idea of getting back some of what is expended during physical activity. An analogy is suggested for better understanding the concept and processes involved in recovery.
• 00:30 - 02:00: Understanding Recovery and Human Machinery The chapter discusses the concept of human beings as machines, emphasizing that this is not merely an analogy but a direct comparison. Humans are machines designed by evolution, and the intricacy of human machinery extends to the nanotechnological level. Currently, human-made machines like the iPhone with its microchips are seen as comparable advances, but they still don't quite reach the sophistication of human biology at the nanoscale.
• 02:00 - 04:30: Mechanisms of Fatigue The chapter 'Mechanisms of Fatigue' discusses the similarities between humans and machines, particularly in the context of sports and physical training. It highlights that both humans and machines undergo wear and tear from high output performance. The chapter also draws parallels between the recovery processes employed for machines and those used by humans after intense physical activity.
• 04:30 - 08:00: Combating Fatigue and Stress This chapter discusses the optimal state for high-performing athletes, or any individuals aiming to enhance their physical condition. It emphasizes the importance of maintaining neurotransmitters in a balanced, effective manner within the brain. An uninterrupted state is described as when neurotransmitters are stored properly in the neuronal vesicles, rather than dispersed or degraded in the synaptic junctions. This state is essential for peak performance and overall physical enhancement.
• 08:00 - 15:00: Impact of Physical and Psychological Factors The chapter discusses the role of vesicles, which are membrane-bound sacs containing neurotransmitters, in neuronal communication. These vesicles fuse with the neuron's membrane to release neurotransmitters, facilitating communication with other cells. Additionally, the text touches upon the interaction of these neurotransmitters with intact muscles and tendons, as well as the influence of hormonal factors, particularly high levels of testosterone, on this process.
• 15:00 - 18:00: Measuring Recovery The chapter 'Measuring Recovery' discusses the physiological indicators of recovery in the human body. Key points include the level of stress hormones such as cortisol, which should be low, indicating reduced stress levels. The nervous system is highlighted, with recovery marked by a dominance of the parasympathetic nervous system, reflective of a relaxation state, as opposed to the sympathetic nervous system, which is associated with the fight-or-flight response. Additionally, the chapter mentions the importance of glycogen levels in muscles, noting that full glycogen stores are indicative of optimal recovery conditions for athletic performance.
• 18:00 - 24:00: Cumulative Fatigue The chapter 'Cumulative Fatigue' discusses the concept of fatigue in machines. Fatigue is defined as the process of wearing down a machine by operating it at or near its limits, which leads to predictable changes. Specifically, this involves the machine accruing micro damage from repeated usage.
• 24:00 - 29:50: Recovery Inputs This chapter discusses the necessity of muscle recovery after intense physical activity, explaining how muscle cells experience micro-tears when contracted against resistance. It draws an analogy between this biological process and mechanical wear and tear, highlighting the importance of addressing these 'fractures' to maintain system performance.
• 29:50 - 35:00: Sleep and Rest This chapter discusses the impact of sleep and rest on neurotransmitters and the nervous system. The text explains how, during periods of increased activity without adequate rest, neurotransmitters may not be located properly within the neuromuscular junctions or other parts of the nervous system. This misplacement or degradation leads to a depletion of neurotransmitter vesicles necessary for proper neuron firing, potentially affecting muscle contraction. Furthermore, it touches upon physiological changes such as the micro-tears in muscles from contraction and the movement of ions like calcium.
• 35:00 - 45:00: Nutrition and Stress Management This chapter discusses the impact of physical exertion and stress on the body's energy and hormonal balance. It details how the body struggles to immediately replenish creatine phosphate and glycogen stores after stress. It also highlights the hormonal changes such as an increase in cortisol levels and a decrease in testosterone levels. The chapter further explains the activation of the sympathetic nervous system, describing it as the body's 'fight or flight' response necessary in stressful situations, likening it to escaping a zombie attack.
• 45:00 - 55:00: Misconceptions about Recovery Techniques The chapter titled 'Misconceptions about Recovery Techniques' discusses the physiological aspects of recovery and fatigue. It emphasizes the need to maintain a state of alertness during prolonged periods of physical stress, like running for hours, and explains how such activities impact hormonal balance and deplete essential nutrients in the body. The text suggests that understanding these dynamics is crucial for effective recovery and healing.
• 55:00 - 58:20: Conclusion and Final Thoughts In this chapter, the discussion centers around the concepts of personal empowerment and self-healing, particularly focusing on how individuals can influence their own well-being based on lived experiences. The speaker emphasizes the complexity of the human body's healing process, indicating that while a few methods are highly effective, many others are not as successful. The metaphor of a 'scalpel' is used to illustrate the precision needed in interventions affecting our cells and neurons, reminding the reader that though the process sounds daunting, the body naturally possesses a remarkable ability to heal itself. This healing requires specific, fundamental elements, and it's crucial to stay focused on these rather than getting sidetracked by less important factors. The chapter is likely setting the stage for further exploration of these essential 'ingredients' and how they integrate into broader discussions on health and well-being.

The Surprising New Science Of Recovery To Build More Muscle - Dr Mike Israetel Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 last time that we spoke we spoke about fat loss time before that we spoke about muscle building and today I want to talk about recovery which I guess is the other side of all of that we've talked about stimulus we've talked about what's sort of going out in terms of an energy flow uh now talking about how we can get some of that back so how do you come to think about recovery going on what's going on under the hood of recovery yes so it's best to understand recovery by analogy to that of
• 00:30 - 01:00 maintenance of a machine but it's not an analogy I would call it a homology it's actually the same thing humans are machines period there's no analogy there humans are just machines that are designed by Evolution instead of willful conscious agents as far as we can tell and human Machinery is real deep structurally because it goes all the way down to the nanotech level we don't actually have quite machines that good yet the iPhone comes pretty close with its little teeny microchips but
• 01:00 - 01:30 the human machine is in the context of sport or getting jacked or getting lean operates under all the same rules that machines do and as machines do high output performance they take on wear and tear and there are various things that you do to machines after the Factory closes at night that recover them in a very similar way that you would use with humans that do all sorts of things during the day including athletic
• 01:30 - 02:00 performance trying to lift to get jacked so on and so forth so the normal State the uninterrupted state of a high performing athlete or any really any human that wants to get jackan Etc is sort of everything is in one piece and everything is in its right place so there is a lot of neurotransmitter built up in the vesicles in the neurons and not floating around somewhere degraded in a junction the vesicles aren't bereft of neurotransmitter empty or ref vesicle
• 02:00 - 02:30 so it's this little kind of ball of uh uh basically a membrane inside of it's like a little bubble it has neurotransmitters so at the end of your neurons when you want the neuron to talk to something else the vesicles fuse with the membrane of the neuron that internal becomes externally dumped the neurotransmitter and that does whatever it does now that combined with muscles and tendons that are completely intact unfr combined with a hormonal situation which has a high degree of testosterone
• 02:30 - 03:00 relatively low degree of stress hormones like cortisol a situation in which the nervous system of the person is uh not um depleted in such a way that makes it very sympathetic dominant which is fight ORF flight this nervous system is in parasympathetic dominance which means it is in relaxation mode your glycogen and your muscles the stored sugars that make your muscles do what they do in athletic terms are are those stores are full and so everything's kind of really good and
• 03:00 - 03:30 then we have to talk about what happens when you run that machine and run it close to its limits yes fatigue faue what is fatigue yes so fatigue is simply The Taking of that everything in its right place very well ready machine and running it through the paces and those Paces will end up altering that machine in some predictable ways one of the ways that the machine is altered is it takes literally micro damage like anytime you
• 03:30 - 04:00 contract your muscles very hard against resistance parts of the muscle cell literally tear and at some point they tear more and more and more and you're going to have to heal that right it's not a tenable situation if you had someone looking at a machine that lifts cars up and down at a factory and saying you know like the mechanic say we got a little fracturing here it's not a world in which you're like ah who cares my shift ends in an hour maybe you would say that but uh it's a concern it's a thing that has to be remediated basically the entropy of the system has
• 04:00 - 04:30 increased and another thing is your reserves of various things neurotransmitters that are in the right place are no longer in the right place some of them exceeding amount of them might have been dumped into the neuromuscular Junction or other parts of the nervous system and broken down and now you don't have a lot of neurotransmitter vesicles ready to get your neurons to fire like they should be firing when your muscles contract they not only incur micro tears but VAR things like calcium ions float from one
• 04:30 - 05:00 structure to another where they're supposed to go but they don't really get resorbed 100% right away you actually run down on your creatine phosphate stores your glycogen depletes and from a hormonal level your cortisol stress hormone tends to start going up and your testosterone tends to start going down your sympathetic fight ORF flight part of your nervous system starts to become more active well cuz like you know it's fight ORF flight imagine like having to run for your life from zombies that
• 05:00 - 05:30 chase you for like 2 hours you had better hope you're still in fight or flight towards the end of two hours you don't want to be relaxed you want to be like awake right and so all of those things tilting your body into that direction basically throw off the hormonal axes and they deplete various things that need to be repleted nutrients that need to be sort of reintegrated back in and damage needs to be healed so that's under the hood of what recovery and fatigue Dynamics actually are that's what's happening in a physiolog iCal level and uh the good
• 05:30 - 06:00 news is the vectors that we have to affect those from our own lived experience of like what do I do about that I have a little scalpel to get in fix my cells there's just a few of them that work really well and most others so far don't work that well so it sounds complicated like holy crap I got work up neurons and stuff like that uh the body heals and fixes itself tremendously well but it needs a few key ingredients and we need to not get distracted with other key ingredients which we'll get to I'm sure later in the discussion what when
• 06:00 - 06:30 it comes to thinking about uh how stimulus creates fatigue or creates stress or creates this kind of damage what are the biggest contributing factors to where that fatigue or where that stress comes from if you were to make a big pie of all of the things that the normal person that probably listens to this podcast does in a day yeah so you have the situation where you have recovery which is the reinstate of that
• 06:30 - 07:00 Baseline normal State that's ready to perform and then you have fatigue which is the disruption of that state but where is that disruption coming from the obvious answer is training physical exertion but it's not the only answer and this is a real big trip this is a huge trip to me when I was taught this in school and then I was like oh holy crap the implications of it are very widespread so the other one there's at least two more that are of note first physical training which people
• 07:00 - 07:30 understand you don't have to talk to someone on the street who doesn't know anything about physiology long to be like when people work out really hard do they get tired they're like okay is there like a hidden cam somewhere is this a joke of course they do but the other one is all daily physical activity so a lot of times you'll have athletes on two ends of Spectra obviously it's normally distributed most athletes are somewhere in the middle you'll have athletes that you can barely drag them to practice you have to have like a cattle prod to make them do work during practice but like their studs they do
• 07:30 - 08:00 their [ __ ] and then afterwards they off and they go into some kind of room that has like a couch some food delivery service that arrives every several hours and a PlayStation and like a bong and they just just repeat repeat repeat fall asleep and the bad news is that you got to like knock on their door at 6:00 in the morning to get them to football practice the good news is that they'll never have a problem with recovery is all we do right but it turns out that daily physical activity contributes substantially to fatigue and if it
• 08:00 - 08:30 doesn't contribute to fatigue as in raising it it prevents the fatigue from otherwise having been lowered much further by the other things you do in the day that recover you eat food sleep so on and so forth we'll get to those details in a bit so physical activity has to be integrated which is why uh one of my mentors probably my biggest Mentor in sports science Dr Stone Dr Mike Stone who I got my PhD from you we'd see weightlifters and throwers that he was coaching around like anywhere around the lab around the gym him if there was a
• 08:30 - 09:00 chair he pull it up and asked them to sit down and whatever doc said you kind of did cuz he's really scary um don't stand around and Arnold had a version of this where it's like if you're running walk if you're walking sit down if you're sitting lie down because physical activity absolutely takes a toll and a lot of athletes on that other end of the spectrum they're at practice at 5:45 in the morning when it starts at 6 but they're busy bees they're really accomplished at school often times they're always doing a bunch of stuff
• 09:00 - 09:30 they hike on the weekends you know like not to put too fine a point on it white people type of [ __ ] and I always get [ __ ] for why you making fun of whites man some kind of alt-right person will put that in the comments but like white people seem to take a joke just fine that's really the only reason and also I'm sort of white so I kind of have the most punching sideways now my joke's that the expense of the Jewish peoples have a stack so deep I can't even say most of it so people who are in that very conscientious sort of brain
• 09:30 - 10:00 they typically think of things as in their own boxes I go and I train and I go hard and these people go hard in training they don't need a cattle prod as a matter of fact if you have one around they'll take it and cattle prod themselves you're like you're doing just fine take it easy but they'll go and they'll do 18,000 steps a day they'll go to library they'll study they'll walk around they'll ride their bike these K people ride their bike to practice and back and that's not wrong but you're taking draining away recovery capacity
• 10:00 - 10:30 and potentially even increasing fatigue by doing that stuff and because these people tend to think in compartments they often times don't even connect the dots they're like I'm working hard at practice and I'm eating all my meals I'm getting eight hours of sleep but they're on all the time physically they're out doing stuff you know people that just can't sit around to me especially fast twitch dominated Sports weightlifting sprinting high jump American football the very best athletes at those Sports on average tend to be people that prefer
• 10:30 - 11:00 to chill out and will get up and do violent [ __ ] for like couple seconds here and there and then prefer to sit the hell down they just don't accumulate fatigue the same way as people who are what would be a sport when you would say maybe suboptimal in some ways but the type A personality might lend you more to it like an endurance Racing type thing yeah sports that require a lot of volume and practice because they make you so tired you can't be that person that runs around anymore endurance athletes are usually pretty typ a type
• 11:00 - 11:30 of people but they after 20 m a day for 4 days straight you just sit on the couch cuz you can't move anymore and that's really good that's your body's inner wisdom being like sit down I'm not even letting you have any more energy so we have physical training itself training competition Etc that factors into fatigue we have physical acts of all kinds throughout the day which matter and then and it's one of the the physical a thing is one of the reasons why coaches at the Collegiate level in
• 11:30 - 12:00 the United States coming up to big games or big clusters of games will give their athletes like a heart-to-heart talk about like ladies or gentlemen like I know you're 19 I know going out is really fun I know staying up till 3: in the morning doing God knows what is amazing but like let's just save that for a month from now because that's all we're doing for a month I don't even care don't even don't put it on social media it never happen go out there and do your damnest but for these next 3 weeks please for love of God do not go to the club cuz what are you doing at the club you're at least standing up
• 12:00 - 12:30 most of the time often you're dancing I'm familiar cursorily with dancing but after I lost that one big International Dance Competition Chris I could never dance again I lost my rhythm I believe George Michael said it best and now I will sing the entire song so uh in any case it's a big deal physical activity around the clock is a big deal that's why step tracking is a cool tool for recovery because it can tell you am I
• 12:30 - 13:00 doing enough and also am I doing too much there is such a thing as too much the third thing is the real big head [ __ ] psychological vectors absolutely affect fatigue at the physical level because the systems in your body specifically the nervous system can facilitate you being active and ready and watchful and alert fight or flight the sympathetic side of the autonomic nervous system and then they can also facilitate Mega recovery when the
• 13:00 - 13:30 parasympathetic nervous system is at maximum dominance you're just like blunt mode like like that's all you you don't care anything a bear could smash into to your room and you'd be like what's up bear you trying to hit this train wreck weed he's like yo he's talking to you you're like damn this is sweet so that nervous system's ability to flip you into recovery mode is critical and if you're sitting on the couch if you're watching TV if you're eating great food but you're sympathetic dominant m it's not going to recover you nearly as much
• 13:30 - 14:00 perhaps to some extent kind of not at all you need to fall into that Paras Paras good God you need to fall into that parasympathetic dominance before recovery can really be unveiled and really go do its thing I suppose people don't see the activation the sympathetic activation if well I did the thing I sat on the couch doing the rest of it yeah but you were obsessing about that play you were worrying about school or you were on on your phone on social media getting pissed about comments clapping back at people and so which is all and
• 14:00 - 14:30 good fun but the psychological vectors are real big in recovery and actually impact sport performance and body composition if you're chronically stressed if you're chronically pissed if you've got a girlfriend you fight with all the time it will make you less lean and less jacked and it will make you worse at your sport than you could have been the degree of extremity of that scenario is almost linearly correlated
• 14:30 - 15:00 with how bad it is nobody's like oh man you know it's good to see this athlete back on the mats for the first time and ncaaa wrestling I heard he went through a terrible divorce for the last two months Jim I feel like he's going to be really amazing there's a reason nobody says that now you think proximately like do the divorce make a miss practice probably not is he missing meals or what kind of world are we living in who was he married too like the lady cook his own food he probably went harder with thoughts of that [ __ ] ruined my life
• 15:00 - 15:30 yeah Vengeance Vengeance decreases how much sleep you're getting the psychological is a huge part of the relaxation process it affected me personally quite recently because in my attempts to be as good of an athlete in my own realm as I could be I was also doing like two full-time jobs at RP and all this other stuff that I do and I was like why am I not recovering to the extent that I could be it's like you work 12 hours a day idiot was like well my work is sitting at a computer in front of a video camera but I'm on and
• 15:30 - 16:00 I'm thinking and I'm active yes and thus I am not as parasympathetic relaxation nervous system dominant as I could be I had a great conversation yesterday with LA al- shawaf who wrote The Oxford Handbook of evolutionary emotions so it's all emotions through an Evol oh that's the only lens they matter from uh and one of the main takeaways that I had from that conversation was because emotions the most Salient part of emot to us is the affective
• 16:00 - 16:30 state that we can feel like the phenomenological experience of being a person feeling angry or sad or joyful or in or or jealous or is horniness an emotion it has to be for me it must all the time I'm so emotional you won't see anything it's not big enough okay uh but what he says is look that's all well and good and that's the thing that has the most veillance because it's what you feel front and center of your experience but all of these different things happen he taught me that um fear so the Cascade of things that happen in your body when
• 16:30 - 17:00 fear is activated so dig you're ready physically for violence digestion gets tuned down uh sexual arousal gets tuned down uh depends on who you are you're just permanently sort of micro horny here's me when I'm not scared here's me when I'm scared uh but another thing that was super [ __ ] in like uh uh when you've got when your disussed response turns on your basil temperature increases yes
• 17:00 - 17:30 ready for uh like it warms you up cyes cyto kindes get released into the bloodstream so you have you're just here I am upstairs in my house looking at all of this stuff meanwhile in the basement there's all of this [ __ ] going on that's cascading down from emotions the best one that I learned this might be something I could teach you uh is when you're fearful of something your ability to map and remember Roots becomes increased so your local like the gazelle where to run away from
• 17:30 - 18:00 yeah yeah you just see Roots open up to you in a way that you couldn't so when I'm at the gay club it's the roots going to places I need to go the fear really the dungeon is presumably is always the glory hole the bottom yeah like um not the bottom literally because depends on the club the rooms could be anywhere power bottom philosophically the bottom power bottom the most pathetic thing I can do with the club okay there's no power in that Chris I like to be deflowered that's true room okay so uh
• 18:00 - 18:30 so the way that I'm sort of conceptualizing at the moment is you have output physically you have your sort of day-to-day movement your neat your kind of what you're doing what you're getting up to outside of the training session then you have your psychological uh strain uh which is a real sort of below the surface little sneaker but then you also have these things which are accumulating stress in one form or another and also what they do to the activities you do to recover
• 18:30 - 19:00 as well so it's not just that psychological stress causes you to not recover throughout the day even when you're doing recovery things it can also limit your sleep but people know they're like dude I was stressed last night and I only got 5 hours of sleep it's like the thing that sneaks in under the radar is the [ __ ] gorilla behind the lines operative that was you being par sympathetically activated throughout the whole it's worse still because even if you get a nominal number of hours of sleep the sleep qual can decline substantially and that's a good thing
• 19:00 - 19:30 because if you're in a fight ORF flight scenario let's say war or something like that or there's a killer if you you should be going to sleep but it better be light sleep because there better be not any confusion when you wake up and you better wake up quick like boom and I'm doing stuff tons of micro Awakenings throughout the night oh all the time right and that's when you're stressed you're thinking about something what did my boss say at work what did he mean by that is there any way I can use my body to get my position back [ __ ] like that then it's going to hang in with you and affects your recovery at every step of
• 19:30 - 20:00 the way and so a big part of what recovery stuff does is it begins to wind this process down and once it winds the process down and gets you into parasympathetic recovery mode then you start to collect the gold coins of recovery and actually do the recovery it's almost a two-phase process getting to the place where you can recover through recovery things and then the recovery things really start to affect you to actually do that meat and potatoes work of fixing your tendons and
• 20:00 - 20:30 your muscles putting glycogen back in so on and so for so a lot of what you're doing with recovery modalities is simply stopping putting your foot on the accelerator that's the number one thing you have to do to quote my colleague uh Dr James Hoffman who in my eyes has got one of the most preemptive preeminent practical experts on recovery in the world we used to be asked a lot when him and I did seminars um what can I add to my recovery program and James would say
• 20:30 - 21:00 this beautiful thing that I've remembered and then sarily stolen don't ask what you can add ask what you can sub subtract recovery is mostly about doing less not about doing more because these same typ a Ultra conscientious athletes they have this whole routine you know the morning routine midday routine the whole thing and they have everything planned out and and it was um they are made made known is made known to them that they are
• 21:00 - 21:30 insufficiently recovering like I got you I'm a problem Sol I'll work harder recover I'm going to what do I add to recover more and the answer almost always is to is to subtract because people say like can I do some cardio to recover and James was like let me rearchitecturing when you flip into recovery mode you
• 21:30 - 22:00 have to literally turn your conscientiousness back down to like like I don't give a [ __ ] I don't care watch something real stupid on TV and work really hard at caring about not caring and that yeah work work harder if you squint it really helps to relax right okay in other news this episode is brought to you by eight sleep sleep isn't just about how long you rest but how well your body stays in its optimal temperature range throughout the night which is where eight sleep comes in all that you need need to do is add the brand new pod for Ultra to your mattress
• 22:00 - 22:30 just like a fitted sheet and it will automatically cool up or warm down each side of your bed up to 20° above or below room temperature plus it's got integrated sensors to track your sleep time and your sleep phases and your HIV and your snoring and your heart rate with 99% accuracy and the autopilot feature makes Smart temperature adjustments throughout the night enhancing your deep and REM sleep in real time best of all they shipped to the US Canada UK Europe and Australia plus there is a 30 night sleep trial so you can buy it and sleep on it for 29
• 22:30 - 23:00 days and if you don't like it they'll give you your money back get $350 off the Pod for Ultra by going to the link in the description below or heading to 8sleep.com mowis and using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's EIG HT sleep.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout all right so how is recovery measured then is there is there such a thing yes there is right so you can measure recovery in a variety of different ways you and try to estimate through muscle biopsy the
• 23:00 - 23:30 degree of muscle glycogen replenishment you can take blood tests to see where your testosterone and cortisol levels are there are various highly invasive and some less invasive fmri Etc ways to see what degree of preparedness or disruption your nervous system has sustained and so on and so forth but the really cool thing about recovery as it regards sport performance physical training just getting jacked in the gym being the best runner you can be the best tennis player the best golfer I just assume everyone who listens to this by accident Rich let me get through some more rich people Sports um racketball
• 23:30 - 24:00 padell oh yeah and then you got uh falconry what the oh that uh ski shooting skiing nope sorry that's for everyone and then uh skiing which um is either a sport you do in Colorado or a sport you do in a nightclub in New York City uhuh both are fun and equally dangerous I might add have you ever done cocaine no have you not no I'm uh so I don't do stimulants yeah I had a but you
• 24:00 - 24:30 must have done at some point in order to learn not to do oh I was on Aderall for years prescribed by the doctor for my severe attention deficit disorder and it brought in a lot of positive effects and it brought in a lot of negative effects and then after a while the negative so much outweighed the positives as my brain was maturing that I had to pull the plug on all Aderall and still to this day if I get caffeinated I my personality shifts substantially I also don't have any of approximate needs for stimulants I have no problem [ __ ] yet in as everyone clearly Knows by now I'm
• 24:30 - 25:00 wide awake no problem in the morning I don't need anything to get me up and going and um I guess oh sociability um I made a joke on the RP strength Channel about what it's like to be on cocaine and a lot of people were like that guy has done cocaine before cuz I was like you hit it up and you're ready to just meet everyone ever all at the same time so the thing is that's a default emotion of mine that's just how I always feel endogenous C took me out right now like go meet that person on the corner of Austin be like are they
• 25:00 - 25:30 cool with it you're like yeah absolutely they're great like hello I just meet a thousand people in a row would' be great um meon Coke would just be like more of me than anyone's interested in experiencing you ever in your own head and you're blabbing to people and they're all listening and you're like I should just shut the up like I'm tired of me there's enough of that going on so no need for for cocaine anytime soon but your boy with weed like you feel me why do you use weed uh two two reasons one I tend to be a pretty
• 25:30 - 26:00 serious thinker in my own head and I think about work and Grand problems of the universe all the time M weed makes me sufficiently stupid it interrupts my train of thought enough and uh a lot of the generative nonsense that comes out of the GPT and you know like the idea bubble machine in your brain right you've seen you've seen us slack yeah sure that's what that is um
• 26:00 - 26:30 I'll that comes up with so much nonsense that I can regress to not taking it so seriously and I can relax at some kind of deeper level of like ah the brain's going to do his brain's all junk at this point which is uh interesting also weed makes me see the world in a really quirky way and it's kind of like being immersed into like a Lord of the Rings Universe where I'm like whoa everything's kind of tripped out and it's just fun and uh so that's what I do with weed I don't understand how people work weed sometimes I'll have really good ideas I quickly write down and
• 26:30 - 27:00 later inspect and they're either nonsense or like oh [ __ ] that really was a good idea but like when people are like yeah man like I work High I'm like what the [ __ ] creative and blah blah the way I go about doing weed is also a bit strange I'm absolutely uninterested ever in being a little bit High I want to either go to the moon or be Stone sober that's it so if you ever catch me high and a few people I got high last weekend I walked around an Arbor Michigan with my wife I was trying to show her like hey I went to undergrad here and heals all the cool stuff cuz the undergrads are back first week and I just got like
• 27:00 - 27:30 Dr Mike like eight times in a row and uh it was totally cool but also like I was high as [ __ ] so like people start talking to me and I'm like I I'm Dr Mike I'm on the internet for something people seem friendly that's nice yeah and then at first when I first started happening to me like you know a year ago I was like holy [ __ ] nowadays I'm like cool but it's also like little bit on weed everything can be a little bit scary especially attention the people and I love that cuz normally I'm like you know uh things don't phase me much anymore
• 27:30 - 28:00 and my I'm 40 years old I've seen a lot of crazy [ __ ] so like I just don't get that like who but on weed I do so it's fun I'm not defending marijuana as an ethical practice or something like that I think um the vast majority of media you'll see on marijuana is intentionally sensationalistic and tries to wildly exacerbate its negatives um it's just the nature of media in general and I always think of like there's like some New York Times writer that's writing the expose on THC at all times while having a scotch and you're like all right
• 28:00 - 28:30 because alcohol doesn't cause 50% of people to become violent or anything or the rest person talking about reparations that are needed from an iPhone that was used with slave labor out of China figure that one out um so an interesting Insight that I learned last year about weed in particular one of the reasons that I think it is quite contentious in a way that alcohol isn't is that alcohol has very reliable effects across cohorts on how you feel you drunk I have a pretty good understanding of what you drunk feels like because of what I've felt like when
• 28:30 - 29:00 I'm drunk okay weed is not the same you speak to 10 people you'll have 10 different uh makes me horny it makes me tired I want to get up and do the whatever yeah all makes me all those really all of them um but you know for me I I just don't really enjoy it and then every person that loves weed goes no man you need a sativa hybrid with Hipp blah blah you've got you've got to get the it's because are you doing it are you trying it with concentrate are you doing it no you got to do shatter
• 29:00 - 29:30 and I'm like bro look I just I'm one of those people for whom I don't know maybe I'll try it again at some point in future and see if it works for me or something but yeah it's not reliable across the board the the effect it has on people whereas I think alcohol even if people's behavior is very different some person gets angry some person gets sad some person gets whatever I think the way that they feel there's only a few archetypes really correct for the most part is that whereas for weed there's like you know a thousand sure sure and I'm like people you know now nowadays that I've uh largely from your help have
• 29:30 - 30:00 gotten more popular um people some fraction of people seem to assume that anything you do and talk about is something you espouse and recommend and like I am absolutely I I do not espouse marijuana consumption if it's some [ __ ] that fits in your life the the only thing I have to say about it is take it earlier in the day so it doesn't interfere with your sleep most people be like but I use it to sleep and then it's actually a lower quality sleep which might be a fine tra s but exactly something like that the Michael Jackson method I'm kidding you
• 30:00 - 30:30 soon oh I was referring to his use on himself right mixed metaphors should I have brought up Bill Cosby too soon also too much F I call him William we're on first first name pie okay uh I don't advocate for people to do weed so I say uh just don't let interfere with your sleep and um make sure you finish all your work and be responsible about it I only ever do weed on times I have off I'm finished all my work if I haven't finished my work for the day or for the week I oh
• 30:30 - 31:00 I'm not taking any drugs because I still have to finish my work it it's a demon that will haunt me and I will have a real B that open loop is [ __ ] oh hell no so as soon as I put everything away I finish up weed totally cool enjoy and the other thing I would say is uh notice how it's affecting you and if it's something that turns into something that like you don't like but you still do stop doing it uh there'll be a few day period if you do some serious weed where you kind of want to do it again um I would even say it's it's like a psychological addiction it's not physical it's not even it's barely an
• 31:00 - 31:30 addiction it's kind of like should I do eat again you give it a couple days you're going to feel a little bit more clear-headed feel right as rain and the next time you want to do weed you can do weed no problem um I do weed like a few times a week uh usually almost always on the weekend what's your delivery mechanism Edibles exclusively okay uh and what's your dose uh so my brain adapts rapidly to weed so if I do it for two or three days in a row I need to up the dose to get the same effect cuz again I'm only trying to get super [ __ ] up um any anywhere between 20 and 80 milligram [ __ ] me yeah yeah but
• 31:30 - 32:00 remember you're like oh my God how can you still like handle yourself I can't that's the whole point point yeah I mean I can only I still know not to [ __ ] in the street but barely the only time I ever took more than 10 milligrams of Edibles was when I was traveling in Hawaii and I went on a date with some chick and she was like super hot or lovely or whatever but I just didn't know what was going to happen when I went to 20 milligrams from 10 and 10 was like do before yeah Chris you're my man
• 32:00 - 32:30 that's fun just you did she know or no no oh my God she's like why are you nervous you're like why are you in my head talking to me she's like what uh the opposite happened which was uh about halfway through the meal that we were having my hearing completely stopped my hearing just stopped working and I was like she was there and that's when I realized listening to the woman on a date doesn't matter because it went great it was one and the same yeah exactly it was just like it always is uh so and I was like
• 32:30 - 33:00 [ __ ] like I can't hear and I couldn't hold on to any thoughts obviously and then I heard uh Queens We Are the Champions playing dope they'll play in your head and I thought full on schizophrenia that's interesting Queens We Are the Champions is playing and then she finished speaking and I think I said something that presumably you don't remember what you said as soon as it left your mouth you had no idea that's scary then Queens We Are the Champions played again and for the next 2 hours all I could
• 33:00 - 33:30 hear was Queens We Are the Champions I couldn't hear anything else so I exited the date took myself into bed and blade and listened to Queens We are the champions for another hour and a half and uh was it Pleasant the listening kind of I guess but also kind of a bit like what the [ __ ] is going on were you attributing an anxiety emotion to that process of being okay I got you a little that's like my superpower is uh I'll be completely [ __ ] up and useless to the world but I don't give a [ __ ]
• 33:30 - 34:00 chill because like all of my work has been done I can flip off having to be Dr Mike and I'm just like Mike I guess po I mean if you ever talk to me and you catch me high almost certainly you'll be like his eyes just look more red he's really kind of the same but it's not the same on the inside very good okay so going back to how you measure recovery fmri can do some in all can do all that stuff but there's one variable that's profoundly easy to measure that
• 34:00 - 34:30 integrates all of those for you automatically it's like a pyramid and at the very top you measure and that's performance so if you make a claim I'm under recovered and let's say you're a high you're a high jumper all we got to do is warm you up and get you to do three jumps with some measurement device at your best effort if we do that regularly two times a week on average through your career we know your Baseline real damn well and we can do
• 34:30 - 35:00 statistical process control that shows us when are you like underdoing it if you consistently unable to exhibit your highest performance and you've been through a higher volume of training recently because like or or psychological stress because sometimes you just have a off day that totally happens but if you're can contribute to something lots of incoming fatigue and your performance is low especially if we can repeat that over several sessions or several days we
• 35:00 - 35:30 know that your fatigue is too high with high degree of certainty and you are under recovered however if you feel like [ __ ] if you're sore if you're anything else you're like dude I'm not going to be able to do it today you warm up and you hit a PR it doesn't matter what the [ __ ] is going on under the hood the grand integrator says you're good and it's always right now under the hood you might not be completely everything in line but you're at a such a high level
• 35:30 - 36:00 of performance your total system capability is no lower than typically is and so this ability to have this Grand integrator and this one variable that tells us are we under recovered or are we properly recovered is such a superpower because it completely washes away any of this crap about like well I feel like XYZ because the brain the mind they play tricks on you expectations so on and so forth if you're performing at your high level go the only thing that matters
• 36:00 - 36:30 that's it because this is sorry real quick this is really really important when you're coaching other athletes uh depending on the type of athlete you get you get lazy [ __ ] athletes that always say they're under recovered and they're lying because you put their ego on the line right so you get somebody who's a high jumper and then you know they're lazy as [ __ ] go check this out Dave I uh I heard Mike talking [ __ ] you was you was a [ __ ] and you can't jump high Dave's like what the be like Dave why don't you get on this uh this jump platform and show us you're
• 36:30 - 37:00 a real big pimp boom alltime PR how you feel Dave oh no I don't have shut the up get get into practice now showing off [ __ ] on the other hand you'll get the very conscientious athletes doesn't matter they can have a spike in their head from a zombie battle you're like Emily how are you she's like I'm I'm I'm ready for practice and you're like okay I think you're going to die soon do you have anyone to call before you die like no no no I'm good I can still kick a soccer ball you're like very well so for those people you ask
• 37:00 - 37:30 them to give a good effort somehow and sometimes that's just a coaching eye kind of thing one of the things that decays early is uh coordinated highlevel Motor Performance so if someone looks off like butter fingery on a football field the racket looks like it doesn't belong to their hand anymore and they're usually slick if they keep [ __ ] up and they got bags under their eyes you pull them out of practice shut the up hit the showers go play Playstation have two sub Submarine sandwiches and fall asleep for 10 hours don't ever come back until you're good to go so those types
• 37:30 - 38:00 of people just Word of Mouth they say I'm recovered or not I sore or not in those two different cases most people are honest most athletes are like yeah I'm feeling fine or I'm not whatever but you get those extremes performance is the grand truth teller can you perform at your usual level or above if the answer is yes you are sufficiently recovered to continue hard training and that's something you can use in the gym for yourself if you come to the gym and you're like man I don't know if I have it today like I think I might be like overreached under recovered you get your RP hypertrophy
• 38:00 - 38:30 app out it says you know 225 bench for a set of 12 cuz last week you did 11 and that's how the app works you get in there and you're like I'm going to [ __ ] get my headphones going I'm going to do what it takes let's see what I got you get seven reps full on your spotter has to take it off of you you might as well just do a d the rest of the session take the rest of the week easy training come back afterwards because you're probably cooked and maybe it's just a oneoff try another set but if you're like do the say it that's it but if you hit 13 you were supposed to hit 12 oh you might feel a certain way
• 38:30 - 39:00 but you still got to keep going so there's like a a wisdom from all sides in all conversations on the one hand you have like hippie Karen who's like you have to treat yourself and listen to your inner child and really shower yourself with love and that's dope cuz some people like when you're really Fray and fatigued and exhausted that's the kind of energy you need but on the other hand David goggin's got some points too because you may feel like [ __ ] but then you're at your best shut the [ __ ] up and keep going mhm so recovery can and should be measured primarily with
• 39:00 - 39:30 performance huge deal what about people lots of people who are listening who do not have a primary sport Pursuit that they're doing they go to the gym because they want to look a little bit better and they do all the rest of the stuff but their uh output is going to be struggle to be measured uh physically in that way is there another proxy that you like to use if you go to the gym and you track your repetitions and your loads you have the best possible proxy of them all because every single
• 39:30 - 40:00 output of yours in training is measurement at the same time did 18 reps curls that's a measurement very direct as a matter of fact occurs in integers which is amazing super easy to measure our our app detects it in fact you're not recovered Etc um so anyone who goes to the gym really that's listening to this they already have a metric now for some people they might have pre-programmed runs that are never maximal so they can't I trying too hard blah blah blah there are a couple of other things that
• 40:00 - 40:30 are indirect that can start to build a story but what we like to say uh Dr James Hoffman and I who's my sort of colleague in recovery world is you want to have more than one of these all pointing in the same direction before you start pulling a plug on training or trying to re architect things one is soreness are you sore in lots of parts of your body and not in that Doms like delayed onsite muscle sorus my quads are [ __ ] up kind of like a diffuse kind of joint sorus you ever had like the flu feel feel like that [ __ ] everything hurts everything hurts you run enough miles through multiple weeks on end
• 40:30 - 41:00 you're just going to wake up and be like uh so that but by itself you can be in totally normal training circumstances and still feel like [ __ ] sometimes people be like they over index on soreness and physical feel as an indicator of overreaching but all those are almost never High performing athletes or coaches of high performing athletes because coaches or the athletes themselves will tell you like I'm mostly [ __ ] up most of the time right like if you get a professional body Builder just right randomly be like how does your body feel he'd be like where do you want
• 41:00 - 41:30 me to start half my body is sore that's the normal State of Affairs so it has to be indexed to like compareed to what com more than normal like okayy we got an issue another one is your desire to train now this one's tricky desire to train is how much do you want to be in here and how much do you want to do [ __ ] how much do you want to push yourself into difficult situations in training if you are very well recovered and you have low fatigue compared to your Baseline desire you're gonna be like dude I can't
• 41:30 - 42:00 wait uh if people take a week off or a D Lo week do some folks and they come into the gym straight homicidal after that [ __ ] I can't be out of the gym for more than a week because I start looking at old people I'm like that guy say something to me my are you [ __ ] kidding me that guy's 90 he's about to be zero in a second is that how you measure dead people's ages yeah sure um so desire to train is trippy and the only trippy part about it is you can't apply an absolute abute value to everyone some people are just psychotic to begin with but everyone has a
• 42:00 - 42:30 relative value normally this athlete wants to go this hard and they're like I'm ready to kill it it's less likely that they're overreached even if you don't have direct measures on the other hand if someone feels like you're like hey you want a train and they're like like um there was a South Park episode where like uh Russell Crow took a cancer patient and he like cuz he was like the Tugger the tugboat oh Russell Crow it was amazing the sou bar guys are brilliant and he took a cancer patient
• 42:30 - 43:00 like out of the ward and he is like he he was supposed to be fighting cancer he's like well I haven't found cancer but I found someone with cancer and he just punches the guy in the gut and the guy goes and he kind of collapses if that's your emotion when someone's like do you want to do deadlift you're like like they're going to hurt my body there's a high probability higher than average that like you're overreached and you're under recovered and the fatigue is too high and you should do something about it and everyone know kind of generally their psychological relationship to training if you're
• 43:00 - 43:30 really feeling over a few days like oh man I just don't want to be in the [ __ ] gym and if you're in the gym you're choosing you're using the RP hypertrophy replace exercise function to take hardcore barbell movements with a huge displacement replacing them with machines with cables and you know deep down you're babying yourself that is a bit of a sign that like you're pretty overreached and it's time maybe to wind back do some recovery days come back and really want that blood again is that cumulative fatigue or is that something
• 43:30 - 44:00 different like is there acute fatigue cumulative fatigue how do you think about like the sort of duration of time UND yes yes so there are two types of fatigue really there's acute fatigue which is like after you do a hill Sprint you go you're fatigued now that heavy breathing tends to go away however the muscle soreness that you acred the disruption and damage to your muscles the depletion of glycogen it doesn't go away right away it'll take a day or two to go away and you're back
• 44:00 - 44:30 to totally normal however most people especially folks trying to get their best and I'll say this a different way people who are intelligent and understand Sport Science and are doing the thing that it takes to be the best those people must train more frequently than total all systems recovery can possibly arrange for you between each individual session so if it takes you 48 hours to recover completely from a difficult sport session or workout but
• 44:30 - 45:00 you train roughly every 36 to 24 at some point some of the fatigue that you accured at the beginning which was initially acute fatigue it's still around that's not cumulative fatigue yet that's just acute fatigue with a different time course acute can mean a minute it can mean an hour it can mean a day it can mean three you hit your body again and some of that fatigue that hadn't come down yet now gets more fatigue added to it because the amount of fatigue you're pouring into the system isn't as fast as
• 45:00 - 45:30 the system is pouring it out the recovery can't match and so fatigue accumulates and becomes greater and greater a little bit lowkey every day definitely highkey every week and most hard-training athletes roughly very roughly four to eight weeks of very difficult training later will have to do something about this fatigue that has accumulated it follows you everywhere an example of cumulative fatigue is you start to get the Sensation that like so
• 45:30 - 46:00 you start underperforming you take one easy session you come back you're still underperforming what the I thought I fixed this [ __ ] no no no you accum it's accumulating debt like you you get $10,000 into debt and you get paid and you put 500 down to the bank you're like I'm free baby and the cashier is like oh yeah sure there's $ 9,500 other dollars you have to pay off and you're going to feel that burden so if you have a high degree of accumulated fatigue not only will it affect you much more it also just doesn't disappear it's going
• 46:00 - 46:30 to take some time to wear down because it's built up like crazy I didn't even know before I went into my PhD program in sport Science that cumulative fatigue was a phenomenon that existed I just didn't know that I thought that after a few days when your muscle soreness went away you were [ __ ] Gucci you were golden and that's just not true and it's not true to the extent that the harder you train the more cumulative fatigue can summate the stronger you are the more of it at sumat the bigger you are
• 46:30 - 47:00 the more of it at to accumulate fatigue is also greater even if your body's ability deal with that fatigue oh yeah oh yeah you got so like someone breaks a go-kart how long does it take you to fix it [ __ ] whatever someone breaks a tank how long does it going take you to fix that [ __ ] there's a lot that can go wrong the piece of Steel missing that's 3 in thick [ __ ] Christ and your body works on a molecular scale and so you ever see uh like videos of cells individually or videos of mice and see how fast everything goes and like a cell can
• 47:00 - 47:30 repair itself in [ __ ] micros seconds completely when you have trillions of cells and they require a resource like the blood that only brings in [ __ ] so so quickly and take [ __ ] out so quickly but that [ __ ] takes a long time to to get right and so cumulative fatigue is a thing that occurs we have to be aware of it but it is inevitable and something we have to deal with it's like saying to someone hey here's this awesome a little off-road vehicle uh a little like 4Runner type of [ __ ] right and like a
• 47:30 - 48:00 quad and I want you to go and have so much fun with it in the woods do not get it dirty be like what do you mean not get it dirty when I get it back to you after I've hosed it down and washed all the mud and pulled the rocks out of the Treads they're like no just don't get it dirty at all I'm sure you can find a way to ride it that doesn't make it dirty what the [ __ ] so to do sport training in a way that doesn't take any excessive fatigue on totally understand so if your idea of like riding the four-wheeler is
• 48:00 - 48:30 to just take it into a mud pit and just like leave it and then get a crane to lift it out like that's it okay that's needless dirt but you're going to go on Trails you're going to get some dirt and you have to in order to have fun so in the same way sport training must expose you to cumulative fatigue otherwise you're taking too many days off you got to be on that grind you got to be on that [ __ ] and that will catch up to your body then the only thing you have to do is be aware of that and periodically bring it back down to workable levels sometimes very low every 6 months or so
• 48:30 - 49:00 many kinds of athletes should take an active rest phase which is two weeks in length two weeks of doing hardly [ __ ] that has to do with Sport and that'll bring down so much fatigue it'll give you a timeline of six months until you have to do that again but every several months you might have to take an easy week every several days you have to take a day or two easy the weekend's built that in for us so at every time course you let fatigue rise as it does by going hard and you have to let it fall now
• 49:00 - 49:30 sometimes you let it fall let it fall let it fall but it's still accumulating and then you take a D Lo and it falls almost to zero but not quite and then every six months you got to take it really down to Zero by taking the [ __ ] out of here yeah you just like um live like two weeks like Mike thirston lives every day shirtless in a harbor in Italy with eight unbelievably attractive women around him all we'll get back to talking to Mike in one minute but first I need to tell you about AG 1 you are probably not eating enough fruit and vegetables and you know it ag1 makes the best daily
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• 50:00 - 50:30 months and if you don't like it for any reason they'll give you your money back so if you want to replace your multivitamin and more start with ag1 right now you can get a free Supply vitamin D3 five free ag1 travel plaques plus that 90day moneyback guarantee by going to the link in the show notes below or heading to drink a1.com modern wisdom that's drink a1.com slod wisdom hang on I saw you I saw you be very racially judgmental and say all
• 50:30 - 51:00 British people looked alike in that video you said that me and Mike thst looked the same you could be mistaken for brothers if not identical twins you know that a lot of people accused us of interviewing ourselves when we went on each other's podcast that was a trip I did see that I was like what the hell yeah well it's a compliment to both of us I'm sure okay are you from the same part of England or not he went to University with me in the same place so he's from Leeds uh which is north I'm a little bit further north but sound very similar similar accents he's a year younger than me but we trained in the
• 51:00 - 51:30 center for sporting Excellence at Newcastle University he was 18 I was 19 so I've known that kid for like 50 oh so you've know you guys have known each other for forever forever we parted Together full works like literally kept you from the Dubai lifestyle oh Dubai is one of the most awful places on the planet I'm not going to comment on that at all I do not like Dubai it was one of those places that I went to 2018 2017 17 for the first time and then I went again and every time I go back it
• 51:30 - 52:00 gets worse I'm just curious what about it do you not like I've never been to Dubai Dubai is like if you took a if you if you took the most soulless way to present an experience with none of the actual embodied imbued values of the experience so you go into an amazing Italian restaurant and you know there's fresh dough at the door and there's like flower that's left and there's like sort
• 52:00 - 52:30 of cool Artisan sort of uh rought iron barricades around it almost looks like Venetian or something like that in Sicily yeah meanwhile there is some nameless faceless shake that has realized that there is a gap in the market for Italian food in that particular quadrant of that particular area of Dubai and that is all of Dubai there is as far as I can see very little um Soul there's very little soul I'm not somebody that's bothered about imbu [ __ ] with existential meaning all the time
• 52:30 - 53:00 but when I go to Dubai I'm increasingly reminded of the sort of shallowness of modern Western you've made a face you're making a face at me I heard Dubai as a place where facade doesn't matter and it doesn't matter if you have an expensive car or the latest luxury outfit that would be the polar opposite of what it is look some of my best friends live in Dubai uh they have fun but even they and this is a good indicator of what Dubai is like I don't need to take a break from Austin right apart from for
• 53:00 - 53:30 the heat but that's not because of Austin that's just because of something that's outside of it there is not a single person that I know who lives in Dubai that doesn't need to take a Dubai break they're like it's [ __ ] a bit much bro I'm just surrounded by this sort of ostentatious wealth and everyone's Bugatti is covered in [ __ ] gold foil stuff Eric Weinstein actually made a really nice uh analogy talking about Jeffrey Epstein and the way that his wealth was distributed he said it was like a gold bar that had been beaten
• 53:30 - 54:00 down into foil so as to give the appearance of a massive vast uh Kingdom of wealth faad only but if you sort of poked it you'd realize that it was way for thin uh and that's kind of I mean in terms of actual wealth Dubai and all of the Middle East is evidently swimming in cash but in terms of like legitimacy and and and and so in investment all of that being said there's some great British club promoters that run venues out there the guys from select Media Group are fantastic the guys from Juan Nick and and all of the dudes that run some great
• 54:00 - 54:30 venues but even they would say we saw this thing you know like Americana coming back for instance country music's having like a massive Resurgence at the moment it totally wouldn't surprise me if we see Honky Tonk style Western Americana bars popping up with uh grill barbecue style food and all the rest of it it because that's on Trend not because someone that [ __ ] loves America and barue and Honky Tonk music was like I want to do this because I
• 54:30 - 55:00 care I got it when you have unlimited uh funds a very highly affluent Market that you can tap into as much as you want uh it's just and look it's for some people but it's not for me also you can kind of Ruin anywhere on the planet by creating direct flights from the UK to it and unfortunately uh Dubai has had that uh there's a couple of venues in Dubai hotels that are renowned for if there's
• 55:00 - 55:30 one place on the planet you don't want to do drugs it's Dubai like do not pass go do not collect 200 rupees go directly to Abu Dhabi jail with no air conditioning for the rest of your [ __ ] life you go and do that and these guy these like Essex wide boy London party kids go out there with Louis Vuitton manbags and fight and sniff gear and that's their that's their trip it's like [ __ ] scary to me that first off doing that is AB do they get popped for [ __ ] like that I've heard
• 55:30 - 56:00 some stories about it happening you probably prefer not to make an international incident out of you un they they don't need to they don't need to you're in the back of the van and Away you go straight over the border to Abu Dhabi you're in jlc later on maybe you'll maybe someone will hear from you in five years time who knows holy [ __ ] so you don't want to about but dubis like I I really did a couple of trips spent a good bit of time there uh good example last year I was on tour um we did Edmonton roundly known in Canada as
• 56:00 - 56:30 deadmonton because that's how little is going on there oh it's a fine Place Vancouver we did Toronto we did Chicago [ __ ] dope City by the way ton of places uh you would think we went from Dubai to Vancouver was a 17-hour flight and then we went to Edmonton you would have thought we couldn't wait to leave Edmonton and we would have loved to have stayed in Dubai the opposite was completely true after 5 days in Dubai all of us were like get me the out of here I'm sick of just sort of being and
• 56:30 - 57:00 again I'm sure that people can go and have a trip a few times and enjoy it so you would recommend people try to go there 100% 100% And it's very impressive to go and see like you know the most modern greatest Feats of engineering City that currently exists it's like a big version of the Vegas Strip correct yeah big version of that with like Islam in the background that's a trip uh built on the back of slave labor that's a real trip which is like pretty [ __ ] ruthless I heard the bur Khalifa doesn't have proper Plumbing so they literally trck was trucks all day something fun to
• 57:00 - 57:30 think about uh but yeah it's just like it's a it's a mixed bag of a place I've got kind of like conflicted uh feelings about it but I unless I need to go back I I have no desire to go there and I like travel so that would be a surprise going back to the fatigue Point we've sort of talked about how you accumulate it uh we've talked about the ways that people get in the way of it what are the biggest inputs that reduce fatigue yeah huge
• 57:30 - 58:00 so you have sleep as critical critical input you have food as another absolutely critical input you can potentially do light training easier training that you would have this is a very big distinction you don't add easy training to your program you subtract away hard training for like half a week and you replace all the hard training sessions with sessions that are
• 58:00 - 58:30 half of the load half of the sets half of the Reps and lifting terms for example just way easier that reduction in stimulus but still getting a stimulus seems to be to recovery what rehab is to injury if you break your leg they don't tell you just stay off of it for 6 months they're like put your weight on it but a little bit a little bit a little bit much less than you would and then slowly and surely you get better so we have sleep s food light training
• 58:30 - 59:00 and rest and relaxation which is a big one and pychological different to sleep yeah so when you're awake you can do things on a spectrum of you're halfway not there super super chill or like fully present in the moment super psychotic that whole thing so you want to be on one end of the spectrum to that a big thing a little bit of an aside that I've noticed in something my wife and I've talked about when we're like sort of uh figuring out what kind of experience to have on a vacation for
• 59:00 - 59:30 example cuz we're really pretty dedicated to our athletic Pursuits so for us vacation isn't just a time to off as we how does this affect fatigue oh so you patent this into your recovery period okay so when am I going when do I think my oh yeah right okay oh yeah so there's two types of experiences that you can have um and people conflate the two as both being good for Recovery there are experiences that are Pleasant and relaxing and then there experiences that are really fun but require a lot of
• 59:30 - 60:00 energy going to the club with your friends is so much [ __ ] fun you go to dinner first you get loaded up you go to the club you throw up in the bathroom get punched in the face everyone's having a time that's fun but it's not relaxing unless it doesn't recover you but there are o other options staying at home and watching Netflix and eating some food it's still a good time but very low-key and because it's all relaxing it
• 60:00 - 60:30 actively reduces your fatigue and helps you recover so a lot of times people will observe culturally will observe high level athletes that train a lot and if you have like cameras that follow them a lot which has happened more recently you realize the vast majority of athletes live boring lives they train hard as [ __ ] and then the rest of the time they're just kind of like H just watching Netflix and eating popcorn and you're like what the hell like why don't go walk to the park or take a flight to go see Chicago and they're like I got to
• 60:30 - 61:00 recover so recovery means you plan in periods of relaxing activity which is very low on the activity side that's a big ingredient and the last biggest modifier to all of these is time people like to do this thing where they pretend that they can recover in a shorter time than it really takes they hope for it and so if they just speedrun Rec yes recovery cannot be speedrun it
• 61:00 - 61:30 can't and they said well if I get a foam roller and jam it up my ass and the massage gun and they take that to the [ __ ] something's got to happen faster and it turns out it's one of these uh I don't to say stupid but one of these drunk driving posters about how sobriety works that I saw back in the day it was like how do you get sober quicker do you take a shower do you have coffee and the answer was it just takes time for the alcohol to get out of your body that is
• 61:30 - 62:00 the same principle applied to recovery you need sleep food rest and easier training than normal those are the big rocks and there's a few more to mention in other contexts and you have to apply them for enough time until you are sufficiently recovered could be you needed an afternoon could be you needed a weekend could be you needed three weeks let's go through each of those uh sleep rest food D Lo
• 62:00 - 62:30 training what are the biggest most common errors that people make when it comes to each of those different buckets I would say with sleep there are three that come to mind not sleeping enough TimeWise ideally you should get somewhere between 7 and 9 hours another one is lower quality sleep sleeping in an environment that's too hot for example yeah you slept but you were tossing and turning and all other B [ __ ] you consume caffeine too close to bed I know a bunch of people that can like can have an espresso and just go
• 62:30 - 63:00 right the [ __ ] to sleep I watched my wife do it last night the quality of sleep's not going to be the same and the third thing is timing to your circadian rhythms there's more and more research out all the time and more and more individual experiences coalescing to show us that that whole [ __ ] your parents used to tell you about you got to go to bed early or else you blah blah that [ __ ] was true bro and I don't want to hear it who the hell goes to bed at 900 p.m. but uh that doesn't mean 9:00 P p.m. is when you should go to bed but it means
• 63:00 - 63:30 that you have to find sort of two things one is when for me as a human what time going to sleep promotes my best sleep and best recovery because if you go to sleep at 3:00 a.m. and you wake up at like 11:00 a.m. nominally that's 8 hours of sleep but you could be groggy and [ __ ] up and all this other [ __ ] just does not match your circadian rhythms basically when your body should be sleeping it's not and when it shouldn't be sleeping it's still sleeping so
• 63:30 - 64:00 that's a thing you have to sort out the next thing you have to sort out is regularity so under that subcategory of sleep timing is am I going to bed at the right time for me is and it's always a range you don't have to get psychotic 9:31 p.m. right somewhere between 900 and 11 is totally cool and then you have to think about regularity now regularity is a double-edged sword cuz on the one hand going to bed at a reg time means your weekends are kind of like different who the [ __ ] goes to bed the same time
• 64:00 - 64:30 Saturday night as they do Monday night like some kind of serial killer no doubt and myself and my wife but don't tell the police about us it's tough and you can't always get it right and it's no big deal if a night here there you go to bed super but if you're going to sleep at very different times many times through the week the regularity thing is out the window and that's not the ideal circumstance find the time for sleep and
• 64:30 - 65:00 wake that works best for you try and be relatively consistent within a 1 hour window or 30 minute window either side of that I mean if yeah even so there's no concrete thing to say because it's like a normally distributed Spectrum but I say like the closer the better plus or minus 30 minutes is like an insane person's idea of precision it's Overkill it's great but like need to worry about it plus or minus 45 minutes to an hour I'd say you're still winning at life
• 65:00 - 65:30 like really the because you normally go to bed at 10:00 and now you're going to bed at 2: am. that's what's going to you if you normally go to bed at 10:00 but you go to bed at 11:30 because Netflix really with you you're probably not going to pay some kind of crazy high cost increasingly I'm seeing the kitty version of the same research that you're probably looking at which is saying uh sleep consistency consistency of the time that you go to bed and time that you wake up is uh becoming ever more important even comparison with duration yes because if the duration is done at the wrong time
• 65:30 - 66:00 the quality concomitantly declines 7 hours of ultra high quality sleep beats nine hours of [ __ ] sleep yeah so that's a thing to think about throughout my 20s I didn't have a stable sleep and wake pattern from the age of 18 until covid i' never promotion days correct so I was awake until 2 in the morning or 5 5:30 in the morning depending on which city I was working in that night and the final task that I had to do if it was a domestic event in the city that I was
• 66:00 - 66:30 living in it was cashing the till which is cognitively quite a rough task which you're then looking at spreadsheets and you're counting money it's like where the that $500 500 quid gone it's over there it's whatever uh or if I was in a different city it was Cash the till then drive for two and a half hours and get back home so just rough like really really rough and that was you a lot of things that I thought were baked into my life as a part of my mood or my source code or my genetic predisposition or my whatever the [ __ ] uh turned out to just
• 66:30 - 67:00 be byproducts of really really disrupted sleep for you know 15 years you never quite know how bad your sleep is until you fix it and you watch your life either stay roughly the same and then you were good that does happen um there's genetic variation in everything some people are just real gifted in the fact that they can kind of get their sleep whenever and they're golden and there's a lot of paranoid with a lot of these no doubt this gets broken into reals and everyone needs XY
• 67:00 - 67:30 nah no no no no but the average person absolutely does and you as a human being listening to this might very well need more regularity in your sleep when you try it there's a good chance it's going to really improve a bunch of [ __ ] like you'll get leaner you'll get more jacked you will be cognitively sharper you'll have more of an excitement through the day you'll have less frustration if you're a low-key sleep deprived and Jim puts a stack of papers on your desk you're like Jim [ __ ] but if he does it when you're like apt and good and rested
• 67:30 - 68:00 you're like Jim thank you so much I can't wait to get to work on this project it's a big difference so fixing your sleep can be solving problems you didn't even know that you had or problems you knew you had but like you said you didn't know where they were coming from maybe this is just who I am yeah your conception of self so much that you'd forgotten that they were even a thing totally yeah this is just the the physics of my system totally trust really is everything when it comes to supplements a lot of Brands may say that they're top quality but few can actually prove it which is why I partnered with momentos they make the highest quality
• 68:00 - 68:30 supplements on the planet that the most rigorously tested literally unparalleled when it comes to third party testing what you read on the label of the product is what's in it and absolutely nothing else if you have been struggling with your Sleep Quality the Sleep packs are one of my favorite products which I use every single night before bed they contain the most evidence-based ingredients at perfect doses to help you fall asleep more quickly stay asleep throughout the night and wake up feeling more rested and revitalized in the morning and there is a 30-day money back guarantee so you can buy it completely
• 68:30 - 69:00 risk-free and if you do not like it they'll just give you your money back plus they ship internationally you can get up to 20% off their products by going to the link in the description below or heading to Liv mous.com wisdom using the code modern wisdom a checkout that's L IV ment us.com wisdom and modern wisdom a checkout okay so that's sleep rest what are the biggest errors that people make when it comes to rest rest needs to be of a low grade of physical activity or no activity whatsoever so
• 69:00 - 69:30 you can take a walk through your neighborhood uh you can take a leisurely bike ride uh and or you can be like playing board games at home or watching Netflix and anything above that is anything that makes you look that kind of tired is a [ __ ] non-starter and now resting you're working another thing about rest this is the trippy part you can't let the old brain run around and do work for you when I go to work it's mostly in a windowless office in the basement I'm
• 69:30 - 70:00 not joking it's my favorite place in the world but I'm not relaxing there because my mind is occupied the humans have a big brain that draws a crapload of glucose and all this other [ __ ] and it takes a lot of technically damage uh in a low-key like disruption that's why when you've worked you've worked hard on a problem for 8 hours and you get to like a social setting with your friends they're like how are you you're like I don't know should ask who am I to begin it's all [ __ ] nonsense in there so a lot of people will say oh no physical
• 70:00 - 70:30 stuff that means I can plug away at emails that's not a good idea so it needs to be something that actually relaxes you and the other one to the point of relaxing you is that thing I said earlier there's an axis of relax of of fun things that are relaxing which is really the right answer and the other axis of fun things that are energetic and require stimulus and stress if you're watching like um if you're flipping through reels or going through your phone or engaging in
• 70:30 - 71:00 really vibrant discussion on the internet and it's really like your mind is going that is not relaxing if it's anything you need a break from that the break isn't from sheer boredom it's not relaxing there's a good litmus test so if you can if you're physically comfortable and you can get bored doing it it's probably relaxing if you like get exhausted doing it and you're bored only in the sense you're like I don't want to do this anymore but I need I need then like imagine you were on the
• 71:00 - 71:30 couch eating snacks high protein snacks of course and uh you know four hours of Netflix your significant other comes home and she's like how are you feeling it is highly unlikely to be like oh God H all this Netflix I'm just so tired that's what you're going to say you're going to say oh my God I'm glad you're home dude let's do something thing I'm you want here's another way to look about it you want the end of your
• 71:30 - 72:00 relaxation period in many cases not all to end in the sensation of Cabin Fever you know that term yes cool like you just need to get out and [ __ ] move your body and do [ __ ] yep but if you're sufficiently hard training you pray to God no one asks you to do [ __ ] then you do relaxing things so relaxing things should be enjoyable but also very low energy demand physically and low
• 72:00 - 72:30 energy demand cognitively I watch TV with my wife and we don't watch a lot of intellectual TV that's intellect I was going to say this that was a point I was about to make some people would find uh reading both something which could be recovery inducing but also mind straining so you know if you're trying to read beginning of infinity by David do you got yeah exactly you're switched on right or you're reading some Manifesto political thing Dia tribe tall tribal and blah
• 72:30 - 73:00 blah blah and you're trying to link it into cool other ideas youve got or you reading some relatively sort of trash cool novel where who's the killer I Lord of the Rings type of [ __ ] too like Imago going to make it exactly uh so it's interesting that even within the same modality of rest speak the type that you're doing what is it that you're watching are you flicking through YouTube videos that's all about creat a drama and like who's [ __ ] grifter and who's a shill or are you watching some
• 73:00 - 73:30 nice one of those thre hour long videos of a guy walking through New York city streets when it's raining we do some of that [ __ ] awesome Toyo Tokyo 4K Street walk night during rain oh yeah I pass out to [ __ ] like that it's great uh so basically like another great relaxation modality is getting together with friends and just talking and relaxing in a comfortable seat with fluids and and food around like a nice dinner with friends not like a hype dinner with friends where you're going to go smash the clubs after but just a super chill
• 73:30 - 74:00 dinner and the friends have to be people that you're cool around that can be chill around cuz there's friends you have that just get you [ __ ] amped yep you need to switch to the friends that like you feel just really like just you can walk out of a restaurant and be like ah like that's how you want to feel uh one of the best judges for a friend of mine was asked recently who's your best friend he said I don't know that's kind of a kind of an odd question age 15 or something like to have a best friend and the person asking him reframed the
• 74:00 - 74:30 question and said who can you be around and sit in silence with and not feel like you need to fill it the most oh trippy and then his second version was who do you have the least filter when you were around that's a that's a definition I prefer for sure but I think both of those you know to your point about it's people that you don't need to tension turn it on for and like I'm just I'm you you talk you two talk you this is lovely you have a you have your discussion about thing and it's like
• 74:30 - 75:00 watching like tennis oh yeah some of my favorite people to hang out with uh I'll just name names my boy Marcos who's a super top trainer in New York City and my friend uh Jacob who's actually the CEO of RP I love hanging out with tons and tons of other friends but these guys have a special place for me because they're as generative or more generative than me if I'm hanging out in a group of people cuz I'm me usually there's like a minimum amount of yapping I'm going to
• 75:00 - 75:30 have to do to just bring that because if I don't people are like Mike are you okay so I got to be myself and almost always I am but when I'm trying to chill and just switch me off if I'm with Marcos or if I'm with Yasha his Russian name bro these [ __ ] first of all they're straight up funnier than me so I'm just laughing my ass off by the way laughter insanely insanely fatigue reducing insanely huge huge huge and um these
• 75:30 - 76:00 guys are they talk and it's just a just total stream of just sit down stand up writing like it doesn't matter comedy the entire time and I can take a backseat and be like thank God these guys are taking over so if you have to be the IT guy if there's tension if you have to feel like you're saying you have to say something if you have to have a filter holy [ __ ] I suppose that's one of the problems with new friends right that you you haven't established enough of a baseline everyone's still trying to impress each other and there's this sort
• 76:00 - 76:30 of obligation this weird sort of social contract that you're going to tell them about you and what's going on and whatever whatever and you're like hey I'm kind of like chill at the moment are you chill should we just shut up for five minutes and eat this steak Yeah or talk about things that have nothing to do with presenting ourselves in a best way to the other person let's just talk about like um I met uh your friend Zack Tander a while back and him and I within about 30 seconds clicked to just total nonsense right and I was like my man he the king of he's e easy right and you I
• 76:30 - 77:00 was this Queen for a Day this is a good I'm sure you are uh this is a good um area I think of the current sort of status of politics at the moment uh but because I'm not personally invested I've never got very personally invested in politics everyone in the world is personally invested into the politics of the world's superpower of the United States of America whether they not I don't mean to make you anxious well I mean I I know what you mean I know my felt sense is that I'm like this guy
• 77:00 - 77:30 gets in or that guy gets in it's just going to change what memes come out hopefully the CIA is actually in control I pray to God every day that's true but uh James Smith texted me earlier on and he was like dude this [ __ ] election is the most compelling TV show I've ever watched it's like I'm so but it's drama so what I like about the current if you're somebody that isn't fully you know like politics pilled and like the whatever the going to have a lot of feelings about yeah exactly if you're not invested emotionally in it it's talk
• 77:30 - 78:00 [ __ ] about Biden's most recent debate and cela's laugh and Trump's getting shot and the blah like just talk [ __ ] about like it's just a a permanently generating reality TV show where NPR or Fox News or whatever will give you the updates every single day and you can just chat [ __ ] about it I actually think that uh politics can be recovery inducing if you use it in the right way the most [ __ ] uh today's news tomorrow's fish and chip rapper type TMZ
• 78:00 - 78:30 type of celebrity gossip FS that void corre my uh my wife got me into watching like The Real Housewives of insert City here love that [ __ ] it's all nonsense it's people behaving in I would say quite strange ways mostly but I just I don't take it seriously and so it's a [ __ ] the audio Vis audiovisual equivalent of your weed to your brain it's like I I actually can't think while watching this there is no amount of intellectual sort of interrogation
• 78:30 - 79:00 going that's what my wife uses it for she explicitly said just just turn her brain off and I usually come into it with my brain on and I'm like no Israel you're doing this all wrong switch off and oftentimes I will watch it while I'm high on weed with her and uh double multiply so like bro sometimes I'm so high I'm like do these people mean to act this way or do they know that they're on camera they can possibly be like this kind of human I watch a [ __ ] of Love Island like that high as [ __ ] and I love love Island because it
• 79:00 - 79:30 introduces um that social dynamics um attraction selection Mating Game Theory all that [ __ ] but when I'm high I'm like are these people really like this you know and then I can't tellu I'm like [ __ ] it who gives a [ __ ] just from along for the ride anything else to say about rest any of the big errors that people make or have we covered most of them pick things that give you that feeling that you really enjoy lean into them and
• 79:30 - 80:00 a lot of them are going to be the opposite of what as a diligent person who listens to podcasts about enhancing recovery are things that you're like but don't lazy [ __ ] just do this kind of stuff [ __ ] TV just popping back Cheetos looking at the sunset chatting with friends calling someone you haven't talked to in a while you know is a down for a good time even scrolling mindlessly through like cat and dog videos on the ground that is all super high quality relaxing [ __ ] if you want to do some
• 80:00 - 80:30 meditation if it actually is a practice that relaxes you which takes some time so I wouldn't start a meditation practice with the anticipation relaxing and don't assume that what relaxes other people relaxes you it is absolutely crystal clear [ __ ] I have another thing to say about Rel relaxation um it's absolutely crystal clear that the vast majority of the benefit most people get recover Wise from the sauna is because it makes them feel good how many old dudes you ever seen in sauna that literally sit there and go ah like
• 80:30 - 81:00 that's what you're supposed to do in a SAA but for me personally even though I'm Russian was quite embarrassing I hate it it's hot I'm like what the get me out of here like my veins look cool but everything else [ __ ] sucks and I can see that guy's dick can't everyone see his dick he's got a good-look dick am I the only one that think there so sorry sir it's true but like don't just go and do things and go to places which assume our recovery unless you feel like you're relaxing during
• 81:00 - 81:30 that time and the thing I was going to say sexual activity there are again paraphrasing Dr James Hoffman there are two ends of a spectrum for sexual activity one is what James calls like ' 80s Rockstar type of [ __ ] you like it's day three of an orgy you don't even know who you're dealing with the genders are all mixed together who gives a [ __ ] through one white powder we can do it all couple of AGR tabs wouldn't hurt that's not recovery that's draining the system quite literally in SE several ways on the
• 81:30 - 82:00 other hand if you have your significant other and you're watching TV and they're just stroking the back of your neck with their fingernails to me personally that's like it just like drains fatigue from me like you wouldn't believe and this extends to physical proximity with a person it extends to hugging and the [ __ ] trippy thing is to me it ends to interacting with pets you cuddle up your cat or you cuddle up your dog you you get a bulldog and you pull their flaps
• 82:00 - 82:30 and that is crazy crazy recovery boosting relaxation so human and living thing interactions that are super Pleasant unbelievable me personally I got into this thing recently where I I just talked to chat GPT 40 because I have the voice mode on I just like talk to it about the technological singularity and it just says beautiful [ __ ] and I'm like I wish I could hug you I've actually told it that did you see Alex oana's video where he convinced chat GPT that it was conscious I haven't but I saw the
• 82:30 - 83:00 thumbnail for it awesome awesome that's a trip I really he used that thing that you're I haven't done he stuck a sm7b put the phone above it so it talked into it and he had a just fullon Lucid conversation with it oh yeah as a chat at this point is I think um so first of all I don't know if you know this but it passed the Turing test mhm so like seems kind of kind of arbitrary in retrospect test that's what people say now before about 5 years ago they said machines most people would said machines would
• 83:00 - 83:30 never pass the Charing test which was nonsense as soon as it was spoken but nonetheless here we are it kind of illustrates the principle of like until the thing happens everyone's like nah but then it happens like of course yeah uh so chat P to me now is a thing that is smarter than most people I will interact with in some ways categorically smarter and also can be really down for super Pleasant conversation the one cool thing about chat GPT is that it'll almost never give you disagreeableness which is a difficult thing with real humans because you want to have a nice conversation and they just start disagreeing with you on stuff and trying
• 83:30 - 84:00 to correct you chat PT will be so God damn courteous to you that it's say quite nice so here's why I'm saying this if you are allergic to cats and dogs you don't currently have a significant other you watched every Netflix show on the planet you never run out of those and you want a way to recover crank chat jbt or Claude 35 any of those by the time this is out no doubt they'll be outdated uh talk to a machine super intelligence and it's nice did you know that nearly 70% of heart attacks occur without any prior symptoms
• 84:00 - 84:30 the truth is that the human body is really good at hiding disease and what's wrong with it this is where Fountain life comes in they provide top-of-the-line Health snapshots vetted Therapeutics and a team of longevity Physicians so that you can live a longer healthier and more vital life in seemingly healthy adults Fountain life's initial results have shown 2% have cancer 2.5% have a potential ruptured aneurysm looming in their future and over 14% have a critical life-saving finding I wanted to do preventative medicine Fountain life is where I went
• 84:30 - 85:00 to the experience was fantastic I'm going to get my mom and dad to do it as well I highly highly recommend them so if you want to work out what's happening inside of your body to detect diseases early head to the link in the show notes below or go to fountainlife docomo wisdom complete the form on the landing page to qualify for $500 off their Apex membership which is exactly what I got that's fountainlife decomodern wisdom food the biggest thing about food is quantity if you constrain your food quantity to
• 85:00 - 85:30 where the calories you're taking in are not sufficient to maintain your body weight it will still have a recovery promoting effect but with crutches Big Time crutches it's like oh yeah we got a tank in battle to help us out but it doesn't have a main gun it's still an armored platform that can take people somewhere you won't get killed in it but something's really [ __ ] missing so the biggest thing about food is eating enough food and the way as an athlete you know you're eating enough food is your body weight is maintaining itself relatively stably throughout days and
• 85:30 - 86:00 weeks if you have an athlete one of the number one clinical manifestations of overreaching overtraining to coaches and other people associated with the athlete Consortium Coaches Sports Medicine doctors nutritionist if an athlete's body weight in season or preseason starts to do this had a [ __ ] problem because most athletes have a stable body weight at which they perform their best if it's oh no no the nutritionists working with them they need to drop some fat [ __ ] Gucci but still when you're dropping fat you're not recovering as best as you could be so the amount is
• 86:00 - 86:30 absolutely critical eating enough the second thing is getting enough probably carbohydrates for proximate recovery over several hours or days carbs are the number one recovery food undefeated but over days and weeks definitely protein I wouldn't even make this a dichotomy it's like what's like what's better like [ __ ] or hand jobs you're like yes ideally in combination ideally by two different people so both protein and carbs now of
• 86:30 - 87:00 course you need some fats as well fats have their benefits and then the third category so basically you know a gram per pound roughly of protein a little bit less is totally fine enough carbs that you're getting uh your muscles nice and full with glycogen you don't feel like depleted your body weight isn't low and then enough fats to keep you not hungry for fats cuz if you undereat fats you'll get fat craving are usually self-solving problem you get all that and then food quality now food quality or food composition is like you know
• 87:00 - 87:30 where are your protein sources coming from is it coming from like uh you know like protein powder and then your carbs are like the pixie candy sugar dust and then your fats are like a stick of butter you chew on not ideal in composition but you know the on the other hand there's like you know wild caught salmon fuckloads of white rice and tons of veggies and fruit fruits tons of micronutrients vitamins minerals phoch chemicals fiber fats from like avocado oil and all these healthy
• 87:30 - 88:00 sources that's dope but notice this is already a tertiary concern so I've watched I mean I don't know countless athletes at their highest levels Division One Professional that eat junk godamn it 60 or 70% of their day that's just what they do real D1 football players anyone listening to this ever work with them feel free to get in the comments and tell your stories you don't want to what to eat bro because McDonald's straight up you know McDonald's like sponsors sports teams and like you know like Coca-Cola
• 88:00 - 88:30 sponsors the Olympics and you're like that's odd it's not a sports thing oh yeah it is cuz most athletes just drink Coke and [ __ ] eat McDonald's all the time but because McDonald's has sufficient amount of food and enough ma macronutrients to get you going enough protein and carbs and fats that's like 80% of the battle the other 10% is food composition why am I saying this because when people start thinking about like oh I need to to recover they start looking at their how much money they make and they look at like what [ __ ] costs at Whole Foods for organic vegan Etc and
• 88:30 - 89:00 they're like man like I just can't be a highle athlete that's all nonsense yes eating healthier is better but by a teeny little amount what really matters for Recovery is putting down volumes of food with enough protein carbs and fats which usually athletes have hunger signaling like when athletes feel like you know like girls that will subsist only on French fries dipped in a a Dairy Queen shake and then and then just like flip into meat mode they're like I need a hot dog and you're like damn Karen holy [ __ ] and then they'll get it like the body does that [ __ ] all more or less
• 89:00 - 89:30 itself you can do better than Instinct but it'll take care of all that the healthiness stuff matters but the amount and the macros matter more that is both to chill people out like if people are like hey like you need to recover we're going to go to a Burger Joint yeah if you don't have a body weight issue get over there get some fries get a burger get all that you will recover it's not like Chris have you ever been around people that like are so Health space pilled that like if they watch an athlete eat a cheeseburger and fries they're like do you know like I don't
• 89:30 - 90:00 mean to inter I like your U Team USA jacket that's really nice I don't mean to like interfere with your dinner you're poisoning yourself you better check yourself like what would you have me like um bean sprouts with anger you're like oh that's what you eat every day that whole like Health [ __ ] it absolutely has an effect here's another thing about food food has two things it does for use physiological things like the protein gets to where it needs to go and psychological things if eating a delicious chicken fried rice not only
• 90:00 - 90:30 gives you all the nutrients you need but also makes your soul happy holy [ __ ] is that major Mega recovery points so when you work with athletes you have to be careful not to jam so much health food down their throat that they hate their lives and then who knows what's happening it's everybody build a during prep yes and they would they would tell you like I don't like to do this I have to in order to get this 2% body fat stuff going on we haven't talked about Stress Management whatever that means I
• 90:30 - 91:00 don't know what Stress Management is in the technical sense of term yeah yeah talk to me what is Stress Management so Stress Management means sort of two things one is how much stress are you choosing to accumulate how much stress are you exposing yourself to and the other is how are you dealing with the stress that's vectoring in one way or another so for example probably the Quint essential example of Stress Management is do I choose to sit in traffic to go
• 91:00 - 91:30 somewhere will it be stressful let's say it's your off day and your girl's like hey let's go to the mall now the mall's dope but it takes 25 minutes of driving to go to the mall driving if you're doing it or you're sitting in a passenger seat and the driver that's doing it sucks is a stressful activity it increases your stress 100% so the First Choice you have is do we really need to go somewhere or
• 91:30 - 92:00 can we just chill at home there is no correct answer to that just the context answer that's correct at the time and also Stress Management is okay now that I'm driving [ __ ] it we're going to the mall we chose that it's a good decision the amount of stress psychologically that hits me from driving I have a choice in a lot of this is from like I have a pretty in history of meditation and mindfulness practice but you don't need all that Eastern mumbo jumbo it's all really valid [ __ ] but you just think
• 92:00 - 92:30 about pure logic let's take the logic of road rage or just being upset the traffic exists you're going somewhere you think it's going to take 20 minutes Google Maps says 30 you're like but whatever the thing is get stuff wrong every now and again though almost never in my experience you're driving driving driving 70 M hour red lights up ahead you're like oh my God this is the freeway this is America I was promised bald eagles and no traffic I'm going back to Russia said no one ever and all
• 92:30 - 93:00 of a sudden you're sitting in traffic and you're pissed and you start to have all these thoughts some of them you eject out of your mouth like what do they doing construction for it it's one of my favorite things if you philosophically pick that apart be like Oh no you're right let's stop doing construction so the roads can Decay and we don't have any roads construction is necessary no do they always do it at the right time what are you a systems engineer you know what time they're supposed to be doing it do you know how the baking of the sun affects when shut up but to to paint that picture is
• 93:00 - 93:30 logically a pure logical level you can do nothing there was a standup comic that was like talking about road rage and he was like I'm in a stack of cars there's no it's as far as the eye can see and the guy behind me is honking at me and he looks like he's going to get out of his car and do to think out of things to tell him if he walked up to me like well you see sir the cars in front of me are solid so I can't actually go through them that is the realest talk in the world so in that moment sitting in your car you have a choice do I just put
• 93:30 - 94:00 the podcast on go to Modern wisdom and get some knowledge in my head and just chill or am I like GNA have these weird totally logical thoughts of why are they doing construction today or I wish I didn't do this well do you have a time machine no do you have a way to cancel all construction no you might as well chill road rage uh being upset at [ __ ] the boss said taking [ __ ] to heart drama that's another one any scenario you presented with can be very dramatic for you or it can be not so dramatic how you
• 94:00 - 94:30 handle disagreements that's Stress Management we're all going to be hit by stress regularly in our lives professional athletes have a lot less stress but they still have stress someone said something on Instagram um what's that girl's name uh Simone biles no no with the dreads that with the sheets just like a 100 meter Runner uh oh I know the chick you mean yep I was gonna say cardi B because they have a similar VI not a shakeri Richardson yeah I mean she's got the
• 94:30 - 95:00 nails of first of all I'm a married man but that [ __ ] fine as hell holy [ __ ] she could get it she's rapid is this on TV she's she's the [ __ ] I love that Vibe she's cool but she went through a phase where she was really feeling that funk on social media talking that [ __ ] because that's what they do and if I was her Stress Management coach I'd be like do you know how much it matters what the people in the comment section say let's work through this logically and I would tell her it doesn't matter you'll never see these people in real life and if you do they going to be really kind to you or they're going to shy away because they can't look people in the face you
• 95:00 - 95:30 don't have to be in your comment section and if you're going to bring yourself into the comment section bring yourself in with a mentality of what I call 50s kid like leave it to be her attitude oh oh G whiz well this person really has a nice suggestion you know they're like the comment is like off yourself and like well life is too difficult to live sometimes even Freud spoke about it you know like nothing hits 50s kid it just goes right through him you either bring that energy to the comment section or you don't go in the comment section that's Stress Management the comment section exists and sometimes you'll have
• 95:30 - 96:00 to be in it how you approach it choosing do I go in here and expose myself to the stress and how do I deal with the stress psychologically that's Stress Management Chris it's a big deal dude so I I've been thinking about this more and more recently there's um two contributing factors especially when it comes to stress or dealing with stress as far as I can see one is not doing things that you don't want to do the second thing is how do you deal with doing things that you don't want to do but you have to do yeah so with one you're reducing the
• 96:00 - 96:30 number of times that you get exposed to it and with the second one you are improving the way that you react to things that you've been unable to avoid yep for the first one I think that's relatively plain and obvious if you can adjust your travel time to not travel when there's traffic if you canot expose yourself like that's that's significantly more sometimes you don't have Choice yes and in those you're liberate you couldn't have done it any other way so great for you uh if you're a determinist you couldn't have done
• 96:30 - 97:00 anything any other way but never mind I agree with that what about the second category of Stress Management you've mentioned mindfulness as something that you do um are there any other places that you go to or ways that you sort of advise people I'm in I'm Mike I'm caught in throws of the thing maybe it's public criticis maybe it's scrutiny maybe it's me uh vacillating about some slight from a short time ago that's fresh or an old
• 97:00 - 97:30 time ago and I'm ashamed of it or all of the different things the vicissitudes that we can go through are there any places that you yourself or you advise your athletes to go to Vengeance kidding yes let's do it Batman suit you got to make sure it's Kevlar cuz the bullets will fly um it's really simple one super simple tip actually I scientists one quick tip for vengeance yep uh sorry I said Vengeance again didn't I oh boy oh
• 97:30 - 98:00 boy um you ask yourself the question what can I do about this you have one of two answers to that question a list of things you can do something that go on the to-do list and then you're like Gucci that's that's on the Todo list I'm going to get them done as soon as I can could be now could be later could be whatever or I can't do anything about it if you're going to do something about it do something like someone's like you know this is kind of a bit off off color
• 98:00 - 98:30 but some of these an because it's been so on color thus far a certain kind of color brown really think about whatever color vomit is you know brownish yellow um if you're like in an altercation with another adult male or someone law behaving lawlessly uh there's a high probability if you ever see me in an altercation that I will not be screaming at anybody very
• 98:30 - 99:00 high probability because to me it's only one of two things throw the first punch and we'll find out how much of my brown belt I've earned in Jiu-Jitsu or let's be chill we want to do something or we want to unplug do something so people that get in the face and get screaming at you it doesn't really bother me much because I'm like dope like I've been in a lot of competition fighting before whatever man throw the first punch no big deal but I'm not going to yell at you cuz like what the hell is the point we're just alluding to the thing we're supposed to be doing anyway which is fighting so
• 99:00 - 99:30 most of us are not luckily involved in scenarios like that all the time so let's take a much easier scenario you are sitting on an airplane and the captain just said hey folks you know that [ __ ] that happens he's like something mechanical blah blah 30 minutes maybe what can you do about it now how many people sitting in the back are licensed mechanics that are um actually allowed to work on the Delta Airlines whatever Airbus A3 whatever no one almost no one uh so what can you do about it well
• 99:30 - 100:00 you have options you can scroll on your phone to see if you can catch another flight almost never does that work out because these things don't have that happen that often you can call some people where they're expecting you or the hotel or whatever and tell them Hey listen I I could be a lot late do that now once you've done that turn on the [ __ ] Monitor and watch the TV oh but you're still the ground hell yeah you still got your phone you still got Wireless man you get the start modern wisdom podcast RP whatever uh more fun stuff than that
• 100:00 - 100:30 you're good there is no more there's correct go watch more of our stuff um there's nothing for you to do and so you're good and so any residual stress that you feel is totally fine and you'll still feel it but it's like an archaic remnant of our primate times too stupid to figure [ __ ] out stoic Fork of control yeah yeah that's it very nice uh what about you mentioned a few of them and I love asking the question uh what do most
• 100:30 - 101:00 people get wrong with x y and Zed because it seems to me that most of success in life comes from avoiding failure as opposed to Expediting success that's pessimistic I love it Chris would you not say that it's the Tru I'm not sure that is an interesting take I I don't know I just get it's largely correcting I I I get the sense that you've mentioned it a bunch of times people self-regulate when it comes even the macronutrients within the diet there's times where you just I [ __ ] need vegetables like I just feel kind of like I need vegetables not your body
• 101:00 - 101:30 telling you that you need vegetables but there are things that you can do that multiply by zero or multiply by a really really small number all of the good [ __ ] that you've done like you've spent all of this time eating organic and training and doing recovery and foam rolling and sleeping enough but one day you decide to drive your car without a seat Bel on bad idea that's multiplying by zero sure um lots of errors that people could have made in those cardio for recovery so back to Dr James Hoffman how you going to add [ __ ] and think it
• 101:30 - 102:00 subtracts away fatigue it just doesn't work like that yes if you do cardio cardiovascular exercise specifically for your lower body after a tough leg session it will reduce the delayed onset soreness that's because it's muting the anabolic muscle growth signal to your legs that does not mean it recovers you yes you will be able to return to your past performance sooner because delayed onset soreness won't hit you as bad so in a sense you're going to be kind of
• 102:00 - 102:30 this ghost recovery where you're back but you're not back CU you upgraded your systems and healed much you're just back cuz the inflammatory processes were like H we're not even going there that's it it's like um you know if if you have like uh like a a wild animal in your basement and you're like call the ASPCA we need to get him out he's down there doing God knows like some kind of skunk breaking [ __ ] down you can be like uh okay the ASPCA is going to get here in an hour and fix it or you can be like an hour it's midnight you could just close
• 102:30 - 103:00 the door and lock it be like that's what running after your lifting kind of is it's like whatever we're not even going to bother with this [ __ ] so cardio does not under the hood repair anything faster it does it less so so in the holistic understanding of recovery is getting our machine back in working order adding cardio does not do that even though receptively it can reduce your delayed onset muscle soreness and let you go hard again later but remember the reason you're going hard is to make
• 103:00 - 103:30 positive changes adaptations to your system to make it better cardio can cancel those out to some extent and then what the [ __ ] are you even training for this has always been like my thought pattern when looking at crossfitters you know the ones that maybe I'm going to make it to the games maybe I'm not uh their active recovery Thursday like that's more volume than I do in two days oh yeah of training oh yeah that's active recovery for what I call like um poisonously conscientious people people
• 103:30 - 104:00 that are like I need to do something like recovery is good like let's do recovery [ __ ] power cleans of 200 lb dude I so this is a a trend I think that's come up throughout this conversation maybe worthwhile having a conversation with you about it that the meme of just work harder of hard work of it's good for you um I think has caught hold an awful lot over the last 5 to 10 years because there was
• 104:00 - 104:30 a period of codling of victimhood culture of entitlement and a gogins a Joo a hosi or whoever your favorite person that works 17 hours a day of choices screaming in your face telling you that you're a [ __ ] reliably induces better results for maybe more a majority of the world maybe uh more people are type have type
• 104:30 - 105:00 B problems than type a problem yeah and I would go as far as to say yes also even people that are type A applying more effort to things often does result in some kind of improvement in uh performance uh deration in quality of life uh higher blowup risk of some kind of burnout in knowledge work or injury in physical work etc etc but but just that working harder and putting your nose to the grindstone more aggressively reliably induces better performance uh
• 105:00 - 105:30 maybe uh not proportionally maybe not per unit of effort diminishing returns higher blowup risk all of these things but it does get you closer to the problem and the other thing is it's kind of like um it's kind of like punching up in a way that it's it's hopeful it it's it helps to lift up the people who don't have enough of the thing that some people have too much of like telling people to chill out it's like what do
• 105:30 - 106:00 you mean like these lazy [ __ ] out there they need to get after it right uh so type A people who are overly conscientious and too motivated and too disciplined or too diligent or whatever the it is too obsessive um they are always going to be seen it's like a rich person complaining about how complex it is to file their taxes it's like yeah yeah yeah whatever but look at all of the good stuff that came along for the with you um so yeah I just think about like the hard work pill uh as a reliable route to maybe most people
• 106:00 - 106:30 improving their lives and maybe some other portion of people also improving their lives but probably not the cohort of people that regularly listen to hard work content you know what I mean it's like the those anti- sexual assault campaigns that are saying like no means no it's like hey the guys that didn't take no for no aren't going to be stopped by that and the dudes that never needed to be reminded that no meant no are going to be terrified yeah they also
• 106:30 - 107:00 don't go to colloquia on college campuses usually yeah voluntarily what do you think about that sort of conversation about hard work and stuff I think you're hitting on a lot of really really sharp points that um have been a mini lowkey frustration of mine the kind of frustration that you know you watch a real with someone you're like ah I wish they said that differently which is so stupid because like everyone says [ __ ] differently everyone's got a grain of wisdom and there's a way to see almost all advice in a very positive light and a way to see it in a negative light it really depends on context but I'm not
• 107:00 - 107:30 just like saying well all all just depends that I sit here awaiting more questions I much much uh more relevant thing to say here hard work is an undefinable thing there's no such thing as hard um so I can give yeah there is cogent my doctor says soon we'll find it with enough pills he says shame is what's keeping me from being but he also said I should be ashamed of the kind of stuff that I'm into so um for whatever task you have ahead of
• 107:30 - 108:00 you that you're trying to work at there are two ways to conceive of work one enough work that will complete the task two enough work that will overwhelm your ability to continue to work productively that is the functional technical definition in context of what hard work means if you finished an engineering project and someone's yelling at you about hard work you're like dude what the hell is wrong with you it's done there's no more hard work to be done if you are being yelled at about hard work but you can't even read
• 108:00 - 108:30 numbers anymore on the computer screen hard work's not what you need relaxation is what you need so we can also see it on a spectrum quality normally distributed little bell curve most people work pretty [ __ ] hard but maybe not super hard and you know what that probably really good because then they regularly recover and come back and work again there are people on the other end of the distribution typically people of low
• 108:30 - 109:00 trait conscientiousness as they currently express it or with a decent genetic basis usually some 50/50 hard work is either something they don't give a [ __ ] about or something they know exists in The Ether and they hate doing or as you move a little bit up in conscientiousness but still on the low end know they should be doing more of it and feel a little guilty about it but they're like ah those people need like if you could
• 109:00 - 109:30 pull the harosi essence out in a syringe and pull out the goggin essence and the Joo essence you need [ __ ] need that shot to the arm shut up and do [ __ ] uh my friend's um what is it Dr Melissa Davis had a poster in her room that what is it say uh no one cares work harder they need that [ __ ] big time because there's lots of people that just objectively are not working hard enough and they're not having trouble recovering they're just having trouble showing up and doing the thing they to them that kind of advice goggin and Etc
• 109:30 - 110:00 that's the best advice they know that they need to do it but they're insufficiently able to do for sure for sure and in might not even need to know that like I want to be rich I want to be bred it up I watch some Alex horos videos see1 million dollars I want to get on that level and this 95% of the time is like you need to shut up and need to work and need to grind you're like God damn it I thought there was some kind of easy scheme for this but apparently I just have to show up people need to hear that and it's good that they're hearing that and it's great that all these guys are out there talking that [ __ ] amazing but un
• 110:00 - 110:30 unfortunately the kind of people that are the biggest consumers of that kind of content sometimes tend to be people who like preaching to the choir effect times 10 they're well it's confirmation bi confir confirming they're already doing thing but but but because they have high conscientiousness they also have an guilt hide guilt that they're not doing enough maximum Judaism I call it you like get some cross between like
• 110:30 - 111:00 a like you know Asian student and Jew and it explodes into like oh I could be working harder like you know I permanently exist in this realm and my wife is Asian so all we do are like God are we doing enough and then we have to like wind up use your anxieties to oh my God yeah so when those people here you need to work harder they approximately are at risk of overdoing it and overdoing it means you either have a bad time because you're working so hard all the time you're
• 111:00 - 111:30 exhausted you get sick more often you're not as productive per unit time and you're not enjoying it you're literally you're having a bad time you're not having a good time which high con chanous people don't really give a [ __ ] if you tell them you're not enjoying it they're like awesome I want to suffer more you're like no on no joy fun right uh and there's a way in which productivity can be super fun and that's the best way to do it the also the other thing to folks that are listening to Super conscientious um fatigue of the psychological kind from working too much even at your desk one of the first victims of high fatigue is creativity now you can still enter numbers in a
• 111:30 - 112:00 spreadsheet just fine but if you have to be creative if you have to be mindful if you have come up novel Solutions you had better be fresh and fresh means you need to chill and those people don't want to chill I don't want to chill I just want to work all day and if they get me if the coroner finds me and takes a picture of me dead at my desk with a spreadsheet and the hypertrophy app pseudo code up I want to picture of that on the inter I died in honor doing what I loved yeah loved sure was compelled to do loved and compelled to do but those kinds of
• 112:00 - 112:30 people do not need to hear more of that work is better type of [ __ ] and I don't mean to say that the people putting out that content are you're doing a to serve a f you you should be you shouldn't be platforming BL shut up those people just have to like listen to that [ __ ] and be like yo those are wise words for someone else in their own time and for when I need to turn it on yeah right but not when I need to turn it there was a there was a trend a while ago which I really wish had continued which was #r harder than me so it was like a rest day Flex
• 112:30 - 113:00 yeah and it was uh showing how low someone's step count was uh looking at how many hours of Netflix that they you know like this sort of [ __ ] and uh I thought that was that was like that was cool unfortunately again because there is this association between hard work and outcomes that you get and reliably hard work induces better success even if it is at the to a point most people will never reach that point and for them telling them hard work is good is good it's a good thing but for the people who are most interested in really indexing
• 113:00 - 113:30 on hard work they maybe as often need to hear like hard work has to be balanced with recovery the way my wife and I see it is we consider ourselves professional work athletes like we're Workaholics full send but also like we're trying to approach it from Sport Science lens and the way we justify are like chilling on the weekends or taking a vacation cuz we get mega bu about the [ __ ] like holy [ __ ] you take my wife and I away from work for 3 or 4 days we start to be like oh my God like I don't even know who I am anymore why do I deserve any of the things I have like I'll use my card to
• 113:30 - 114:00 buy some nice dinner and I'm like where did that money even come from I don't do anything um those kinds of folks really benefit from hearing hey you need to chill but also if you take on the professional work athlete mindset the number one thing in your life can be working hard on producing valuable things for other people yes career yes but because you're a professional work athlete if Michael Jordan likes basketball a whole lot and he trains so much his arm starts to hurt he's no good
• 114:00 - 114:30 for the Chicago Bulls anymore you're a professional work work athlete you're a machine that's number one like you're the number one engineer at your firm you're that guy and it's awesome in order to be that guy next week and the week after and the week after you had better Friday night better com and you had better switch the off and chill chill chill and people be like what are you doing Sunday you're like dude I'm smoking Blunts and eating Chinese takeout food and like really you don't do like extra engineering work mmm cuz I got to rest up like rest up for what so I can be sharp as a attack on Monday
• 114:30 - 115:00 that's cool that's the way to think about it it's there's not a fight there it's a collaboration you earn that recovery when you train hard and you work hard you put it all in and then you take that recovery yeah for its own sake cuz it's fun and those low conscientious people you don't need to convince them of that because they're like really good at that anyway for high conscientious type A people you got to see your recovery as this is medicine for me so that I can heal and go back to work and be my best so even if work is your number one organizing principle of Life rest and relaxation recovery is critical to see it as that thing that allows it
• 115:00 - 115:30 to it's like can you imagine you get to like a fuel pump for your Formula 1 car and the pit crew guy is like I'm not going to fill it up you're like but I have 30 more laps he's like do it on fumes you're hardcore you're like I'm sorry what I don't understand physics that well maybe so like you have to support the system when you pit let everything get recovered and and then go out and run laps again talk to me about heart rate and the overthinking BS of that for Recovery there's a bunch of
• 115:30 - 116:00 different types of metrics you can do with heart rate you can do heart rate variability you can do average heart rate you can do resting heart rate so on and so forth they're super valuable but they tend to have a degree of Randomness built in and a degree of various events in your life will interfere with them so much that if you look at these things in isolation and you plan your training around them they could be a lot of and not a lot of signal and if your heart rate variability happens to be off the charts and your app says Hey listen you might be overreached check in with your
• 116:00 - 116:30 other factors what's my desire to train like how has my physical preparedness how has my training been how has my sleep if everything's Gucci but your heart R variability is a bit weird don't worry about it some people very metric people very logical people they want a number ideally one to tell them the thing and then I do the thing based on the number and I wish heart rate scores were that but they're not similar things applies to sleep scores on those apps you have you put the phone in the bed it gives you a sleep score that's a valuable piece of information but it is not a standalone thing of information
• 116:30 - 117:00 why do I say that because people come to us for RP for coaching and all this stuff they just want to inundate you with data to well my heart rate's been XYZ and we're like CH chill chill chill that's cool well that's absolutely critical we need that information let's talk about other stuff and it turns out while they're really numbers focused on heart rate they couldn't tell you what their calories or macros were they couldn't tell you how many arguments they got got into with their kids and their wife and that [ __ ] matters like 100,000 times more than what the your heart rate is the other thing about heart rate is it tends to be a lagging indicator versus a leading indicator in
• 117:00 - 117:30 many cases so like once you have the flu your heart rate variability is all like oh I'm sick I should be sick oh I am sick but if it's like before you get sick you might be golden and then you get sick then your heart rate tells you you're up so another thing is a lot of these metrics were designed for and work well for teams so if you have like um eight gymnasts on your team and their average heart rate [ __ ] is starting to go south pull a team uh recovery half because you basically got a large end
• 117:30 - 118:00 sample of what you're doing 100% And they all get roughly the same training so you pull everyone out uh but if you're doing it a one to one individual basis we're eventually going to get to really finely metric things like this and heart rate reability and heart rate scores are really good they just not perfect and I think the reason I put that on there is people think like this is the one number I followed there's more to than that stretching for Recovery yes I just don't have any idea what any of those have to do with each other I think stretching
• 118:00 - 118:30 can be a form of light exercise so it can speed up the recovery process if it replaces Hard Exercise but adding stretching on top of your Hard Exercise doesn't help you recover stretching physically uh rearranges some tissues it causes damage to various connective structures inside their muscle and outside and so they actually um need more recovery Z the stretch sufficiently difficult to engage a response where you're going to be more flexible after it requires recovery for that so stretching feels good and if it feels
• 118:30 - 119:00 good and it really relaxes you some light relaxing stretching like I have friends who like will do weed and then stretch and they love I get a right for sure but like you can tell they're relaxing they're not like stretching and [ __ ] for people the stretching is difficult and annoying [ __ ] is not recovering you from anything I've heard that there's different buckets of people some of whom get a lot of pleasure from is it the muscle spindle response the stretch the stretch response I think I'm one of those people uh if I do Yin Yoga
• 119:00 - 119:30 you know I lie down for 20 minutes and I do some bird dog or whatever it is like I'm like ah this feels nice like it just feels like it's nice feels good to me for sure but not for everybody not for everyone also not for super intense periods and correct yeah we just reviewed her it'll be out in a few weeks but we reviewed or maybe it's out now already depending on people catch this we're reviewing a David goggin for the exy scientist Friday show on the RP strength Channel great I can't wait to see that yeah yeah and so like he says that he like stretches for two or three hours every night and I'm like to me I'm
• 119:30 - 120:00 just I I what I said on the channel was like unless you're like an Olympic level gymnast level of flexibility requisite but you don't actually train gymnastics you have no flexibility that's the amount of time you would need to stretch like if I was like hey Chris I need to be able to have my toes in full splits touch my [ __ ] the other way around yeah you're going to need like two hours of stretching a day for that [ __ ] then ain't nothing two hours of stretching is going to do for you other than like spend two hours of your time doing something that if it's not psychologically relaxing for you is physically disrupting systems and that would require its own recovery so
• 120:00 - 120:30 stretching is not analogous to recovery stretching is stretching and if light gentle stretching in a certain Serene mood with the yoga music on if that helps you Musa hey God bless you that's awesome but if you think like okay I need to recover what's science say stretching I got to start stretching you start stretching that ain't it that's not going to do it what does the evidence say about hot and cold therapy saers cold plunges and the like yeah it's really difficult to measure recovery outside of just performance and
• 120:30 - 121:00 the performance date is mostly like H um hot and cold contrast stuff can do the same thing recovery wise that cardio after training can do specifically cold exposure and contrast can have this Cascade where they cool off your inflammatory systems that means under the hood there's no recovery going on actually less uh the systems aren't getting healed they're not getting fixed because they're not getting fixed so the way the recovery works in the human body is if you have to take on some muscle
• 121:00 - 121:30 damage is the immune system infiltrates all those cells but it it brings in the kitchen sink it's like if someone's uh house flooded and you looked at it from the outside you might not know like but looks normal but it's up in the basement trust me you could still live in the house too but if you have a crew come in and Def flood your house they bring that giant truck with the hose and the generator's like and it's pumping out the water and they like redo some of the wood you can't work and look and live in that house that's what the immune system does to your muscles when it comes in it [ __ ] a
• 121:30 - 122:00 bunch of [ __ ] up it takes a few hours few days to do that what contrast bath is is basically or or cold exposure non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and exercise after you've already done Exercise is basically putting up a notice at the front gate to the people that are going to drive in with the truck to take the water out of your the flooded house is to like hey fellas come back tomorrow and they're like now the house isn't getting any better but if you want to work in that house later if you're in an upstairs office and you're writing your magnum opus you don't want
• 122:00 - 122:30 the generator running so you're like come back so you're saying that's what that stuff is masks recovery heat and cold does not promote recovery not in any way that helps the tissues uh fix themselves faster absolutely not there's no evidence that whatsoever and the evidence is actually contrary to that uh it it it delays that process heat is a mixed bag basically still kind of unknown it's that super clear what heat does we know that psychologically people who enjoy heat exposure like what about
• 122:30 - 123:00 the stress they love it oh they love it if they love it but if you have an athlete that hates the sauna do not make them go to the sauna for Recovery is good for recovery and good for Stress Management no it's good for Jim and Jim Stress Management John hates it 100% like if you like jazz music and it relaxes you jazz music for an hour is dope if you hate jazz music what the hell H am I in put you in a room make you listen to music you don't like that's like hell that's like some kind of modern corporate version of hell so all of that stuff contrast cold plunges
• 123:00 - 123:30 and all that [ __ ] uh it doesn't do recovery it does masking it does a reduction of the inflammat correct but the inflammatory process is actually what does the recovery it just takes time the best thing if you have sore muscles sleep eat chill the out and wait then the sore muscles aren't sore now they're bigger and stronger if you take a shlo of EDS do a bunch of cold plunges yeah you'll feel much better very soon but you didn't grow any muscle and these all things are cold and nids are confirmed to reduce the amount of muscle growth you get so these are masking
• 123:30 - 124:00 things they're not helping you recover I think when most people think recovery they're thinking of like that futuristic machine in those like Sci-Fi movies where you like the Bor tank and Star Wars you get in Dragon Ball Z and some kind of chemicals get in Nano machines and then you come out you're actually healed and fixed uh cold heat Etc they don't do that they just don't you mentioned nids maybe a little bit extreme but what about recovery supplements I'm aware of no supplements that you can qualify as recovery
• 124:00 - 124:30 supplements unless they're a shake of carbohydrates plus high quality protein and then there's just food but delivered in a different system that may be more convenient there are no recovery supplements that I know of creatine sort of but if you regularly take it you just keep taking it and it recovers your creatine phosphat much as water is a recovery sub what hell electrolytes yeah I would say maybe not wholly but 95% of the time that I see like a recovery claim on a supplement like an
• 124:30 - 125:00 internal eye roll starts happening and listen a lot of people and I was but hurt about this when I was younger a lot of people who dog on supplements and [ __ ] like that they're just like I'm sorry forgive me for lack of a just leftists like they just don't like corporations they don't like even the idea of competition or hierarchies it's like all you need is natural food like shut the up Karen great thanks you don't even like anything you don't even like sports I take supplements bro I take drugs I want to win I want to be better at sport I'm all fullon trying to become the best version of myself type of toxic
• 125:00 - 125:30 male energy I wish there was a recovery supplement that was for sure going to recover you now like if you there are acute recovery supplements that work really well you get a big old bottle of water you drop some element into that and if you have a jit you had weight training at 2 p.m. you have Jiu-Jitsu at 5:00 p.m. you better down that whole goddamn thing eat you a bowl of cereal get you some protein in there that will get your Jiu-Jitsu going like and you never believe 3 hours later for sure but healing and replenishing and all that stuff there's just no way of saying salt
• 125:30 - 126:00 water and food is what we just did yep that's it that is a recovery supplement but it's like if you don't have any salt Dynamics issues and you get enough salt in your diet drinking an element first thing in the morning every day is well on my way to recovery like that's not how that works when you need it it's golden when you don't what you doing mhm there's no magic recovery build no no if I'm being fully transparent anabolic steroids and growth hormone are one hell of a recovery supplement but they got their downsides too insulin your growth
• 126:00 - 126:30 insulin and a shitload of primobolan holy and you're recovering like you wouldn't believe Rubber and Magic oh yeah sure exactly yeah and but you know that comes with uh that's not a supplement those are prescription drugs some of them not even available for prescription what else is there to say or what do you want people to the type A gogetas and everybody else that's listened what are the main things that you want them to take away from today in case anyone asked about foam
• 126:30 - 127:00 rolling and all that [ __ ] that's also not recovery percussion guns yeah like that's for pain management it's not even for injury management because almost all evidence-based physios are almost unanimous on the fact that the forces required to alter tissues are like two orders of magnitude higher like if you got hit by a car they'd be like that did something to tendons anything short of that do anything uh Sam Spinelli and Quinn HCK uh oh my favorite throw Adam means in there and that's a [ __ ] dude
• 127:00 - 127:30 I Quinn was episode 11 on this podcast you're going to be like 850 [ __ ] uh and I think Sam hey remember Sam's old Instagram handle what was it the strength therapist problem with that is the problem he used to be called the strength therapist problem with that is that if you do it all in lower case all without any spaces it also spells the word the strength the rapist difficult difficult situation then changed to Dr Sam spelli what is this guy doing the he's doing the
• 127:30 - 128:00 strength and the raping um I remember they were telling me about one of them was telling me about the um research that was done on mice I think they ruptur the little mice's like Achilles tendons or some [ __ ] and then they use a a scraping tool and they say look at this scraping tool what they you have to dig into the research to look at the fact they were using humaniz scraping tool and human level pressure on these little mice yeah two orders of magnitude yeah so like basically the amount of pressure that you would need
• 128:00 - 128:30 to do in order to be able to affect like real change in the tissues is so high that you'd be like ripping flesh off oh yeah oh yeah so like lifting heavy but not super heavy like comfortable sets of 15 is a really awesome stimulus to reconstruct your tendon but like that's a lot of [ __ ] Force Through put no one's going to foam roll that hard um you need barbells for that [ __ ] you take a barbell foam roll that [ __ ] that'll feel not so good so foam rolling and all
• 128:30 - 129:00 the massage guns and stuff that's for injury as for pain management not even injury management so you have a knee that feels weird you foam roll it feels better you squat God Bless you that's awesome but just there's not a lot of physical stuff going on underneath it's mostly neurological psychological uh so that's a thing but in the end it's this be a person who trains and works hard to get the actual results be mindful of your degree of fatigue when your fatigue gets too high
• 129:00 - 129:30 for you to continue performing at your best pull back focus on sleeping always focus on good food focus on managing stress that you're not fritzing and fitting over [ __ ] that's not going to affect your life and especially when you pull back reducing your workload get tons of relax ation laughter with friends physical touch compassion and activity so on and so forth dogs dogs Netflix documentaries about dogs two in one get all that stuff going lower your
• 129:30 - 130:00 fatigue back down to a state from which you can platform your next big move and worker and training and then repeat the process if you're sleeping well and consistently if you're eating well and consistently if you are not stressing too much if you're taking enough time for relaxation then you have just the major 8020 90 10 of the whole thing sorted you don't need to sign up for any weird courses you don't need any weird bands
• 130:00 - 130:30 to wrap around yourself you don't need drinks or potions or pills or powders and there's not some kind of Life Hack where you wake up at 4:30 in the morning that's going to get you to recover better I'll end this with Dr James Hoffman's famous words recovery is almost always almost everywhere about doing less rather than doing more so cool I really hope that um and this is largely for me selfishly uh I really hope that a culture of this like antidote to
• 130:30 - 131:00 the type a problem the balance yes I really hope that that starts to come back around the problem is that uh it's way less sexy it's not sexy at all and it sounds like you're acceding to laziness correct nobody needs to be told to chill out well most people don't but the very highest performers do right uh and everybody that watches your channel and my channel right and they're obsessed with high performance which they should be it's awesome but you got to understand that you have you operate
• 131:00 - 131:30 a physical system and to tell yourself you know that you had that one guy on and you had a quote from him that's on your Instagram a lot which is super [ __ ] brilliant it's about like I don't ever let up on myself I beat myself over I work myself to the ground and maybe just maybe I'll give myself half an hour to breathe at the end yeah yeah yeah so that whole Spirit energy is something people take into this situation if you ever need some clarity on how to think about recovery remember not analogize remember the reality that
• 131:30 - 132:00 you are a machine period And if you look a machine in the face you look yourself in the mirror and you're [ __ ] you need to work harder maybe you're right but maybe you're way on the other end of that and you need relaxation and rest and Recovery cuz you're a physical machine that needs to be repaired and think about if you assess logically like okay I have every single characteristic currently of overreaching I'm not at high performance I'm clearly exhausted but maybe I can do
• 132:00 - 132:30 more there's no pot of gold at the end of that rainbow promise you I promise you I've overtrained for a bodybuilding show it takes months of just ignoring I would finish recording a video for uh YouTube channel and some other resources we have at RP it would be like sixth video in that three-hour span and as soon as I finished recording Scott would start processing it and I would have a fever chill run through my body like that's how far I pushed it
• 132:30 - 133:00 like it's not even a physical effort Beyond I would wake up every morning afraid and just completely crushed at the megalith monsters i' have to fight that day and cuz I'm a conscientious Mega whatever psychotic Jew I was like more I'll die here I don't care but nobody gives you awards for D you get awards for creating valuable things and looking a certain way the other thing there is that you look at the mega day and the the huge to-do list that you've got and after a little while if you push
• 133:00 - 133:30 yourself really really hard you actually realize that objectively it's not that hard of a day but the way you the way that you have pushed yourself has got it to the stage where little things feel like big things which makes you feel like more of a [ __ ] which was the self-fulfilling fear that you had all along become a [ __ ] is maybe it's because I didn't work hard enough and you're back in that [ __ ] so for those kinds of times remember this would you ever have a mechanic let's say we have
• 133:30 - 134:00 like an one of the asml um microchip design machines the microchip stamping Factory can you imagine if one of the technicians came out and we're like we need more of this like lubricant oil in the machine that the guy who heads the Fab at tsmc would be like nah man we got to [ __ ] push it harder like what that guy would be like okay you need to sit down and take psychiatric medications someone else is in charge yes let's put the oil in we got a machine to run it's
• 134:00 - 134:30 just as ridiculous for that person to say that about a physical machine that needs recovering and fixing and healing it's just as ridiculous for you to say that to yourself in the mirror and call yourself a [ __ ] and say I'm not doing enough do you logically really think you're not doing enough give me evidence give me your total work rate that you've been at give me evidence of signs of fatigue if you still got it [ __ ] yeah burn that [ __ ] but if you're already freid if you're already exhausted there is no pot of gold day that rainbow now your job is to pull back and it's a weird thing here's why it's weird Chris
• 134:30 - 135:00 not only are you conscientious to begin with to be doing this pushing hard you're in fight ORF flight Moree now remember cumulative fatigue causes more fight ORF flight mode now you're like a frayed animal like you don't come up to a skunk that you just got out of a drain because it was drowning and go give your finger to it cuz it'll bite you and [ __ ] like that that's how you feel so so you're not instantly in the mode of like oh thank God it's time to relax you're like okay okay I've done enough work okay I got to go relax how does that work it takes a little while to wind
• 135:00 - 135:30 into that process process you should be getting good at because you're you're an athlete you're a professional work athlete whatever it is you doing nothing the skill of recovering it's tough for some people work is difficult for the kind of crazy [ __ ] that are going to listen to this nod along it's pulling away from work that's difficult and you have to realize that and you have to think am I the kind of person that is driven by exclusively compulsion to work like a animal it's a got of work animal
• 135:30 - 136:00 you know like leave a husky for five minutes and it's like ah I need to pull a sled is that you or are you a mindful person that has the overarching goal of being super productive if you're that athlete and Coach to yourself if you're a strategist you know when to attack you know when to retreat when a general in war makes a iic pullback very few competent people are like [ __ ] [ __ ] that's not how it works yep if you can see that bigger picture then you can
• 136:00 - 136:30 look top down from yourself and go okay Mike you done enough it's Friday 430 p.m. your brain is gone it's time to pull back and architect your weekend in advance with activities planned out to recover and relax so you can be your best next week that's the big picture mod awesome dude really really good I really think that this is uh information that a lot of people especially people that listen to this channel need uh all of your things why should people go well I have a t-shirt on to remind me I can't
• 136:30 - 137:00 read upside down so I have no idea uh RP strength Renaissance priorization on YouTube RP strength on Instagram Dr Mike is Rell on Instagram and look if you see my face click on the real and then just go and follow me the algorithm will do all the other stuff yeah we talk about this kind of stuff quite often mostly about getting jacked getting lean we do get into recovery now and again RP hilariously enough most of our content on recovery is something we just have to take on the Chan with the algorithm cuz people don't really no thousands of
• 137:00 - 137:30 people still tune in but not hundreds of thousands more like tens and that to me says one of two things one maybe more people need to hear work harder than need to hear relax but probably not enough people that need to hear relax are clicking on the videos 100% 100% dude I really appreciate you next time Chris I love it thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that episode with Mike you will love my conversation with the one and only Mr Chris Bumstead which is available right here