#716: Performance Coach Andy Galpin — Rebooting Tim’s Sleep, Nutrition, Supplements, and Training for 2024

Brought to you by Momentous https://livemomentous.com/tim high-quality supplements, Nordic Naturals https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/ Ultimate Omega fish oil, and AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim all-in-one nutritional supplement. Andy Galpin (@DrAndyGalpin https://twitter.com/drandygalpin) is a tenured, full professor at California State University, Fullerton, where he is also co-director of the Center for Sport Performance and founder/director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory. He is a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations. This year, Andy is teaming up with Huberman Lab https://www.hubermanlab.com/ to launch a podcast of his own, called Perform with Dr. Andy Galpin https://performpodcast.com/. Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes (including All-Stars, All-Pros, and MVPs; Cy Young and Major winners; Olympic Gold medalists; and World titlists and contenders) across the UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, Olympics, boxing, military/special forces, and more. He is also a co-founder of BioMolecular Athlete http://www.biomolecularathlete.com, Vitality Blueprint http://www.vitalityblueprint.com, Absolute Rest http://www.absoluterest.com, and RAPID Health & Performance http://www.rapidhealthreport.com. Please enjoy! Resources from this episode: https://tim.blog/2024/01/17/andy-galpin/ * This episode is brought to you by AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim! I get asked all the time, “If you could use only one supplement, what would it be?” My answer is usually AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim, my all-in-one nutritional insurance. I recommended it in The 4-Hour Body in 2010 and did not get paid to do so. I do my best with nutrient-dense meals, of course, but AG1 https://drinkag1.com/tim further covers my bases with vitamins, minerals, and whole-food-sourced micronutrients that support gut health and the immune system. Right now, you’ll get a 1-year supply of Vitamin D free with your first subscription purchase—a vital nutrient for a strong immune system and strong bones. Visit DrinkAG1.com/Tim https://drinkag1.com/tim to claim this special offer today and receive your 1-year supply of Vitamin D (and 5 free AG1 travel packs) with your first subscription purchase! That’s up to a one-year supply of Vitamin D as added value when you try their delicious and comprehensive daily, foundational nutrition supplement that supports whole-body health. * This episode is also brought to you by Momentous http://livemomentous.com/Tim high-quality supplements! Momentous offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, and I’ve been testing their products for months now. I’ve been using their magnesium threonate https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, apigenin https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, and L-theanine https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products daily, all of which have helped me improve the onset, quality, and duration of my sleep. I’ve also been using Momentous creatine https://www.livemomentous.com/pages/tim-ferriss#section-tims-favorite-products, and while it certainly helps physical performance, including poundage or wattage in sports, I use it primarily for mental performance (short-term memory, etc.). Their products are third-party tested (Informed-Sport and/or NSF certified), so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. If you want to try Momentous for yourself, you can use code Tim for 20% off your one-time purchase at LiveMomentous.com/Tim http://livemomentous.com/Tim. And not to worry, my non-US friends, Momentous ships internationally and has you covered. * This episode is also brought to you by Nordic Naturals https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/, the #1-selling fish-oil brand in the US! More than 80% of Americans don’t get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body can’t produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor-recommended Ultimate Omega fish-oil formula for heart health, brain function, immune support, and more. Ultimate Omega is made exclusively from 100% wild-caught sardines and anchovies. It’s incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. All Nordic Naturals’ fish-oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form—the form naturally found in fish, and the form your body most easily absorbs. Go to Nordic.com and discover why Nordic Naturals is the #1-selling omega-3 brand in the U. S. Use promo code TIM for 20% off your order of Ultimate Omega. https://www.nordic.com/products/ultimate-omega/ * [00:00] Start [08:46] Doubling testosterone by changing the path of a morning walk. [12:03] Curing a lifelong sleep disorder in five minutes for under $100. [14:09] Training priority. [26:26] Building Tim 4.0. [31:37] Insights provided by tracking respiratory rate. [38:23] Tracking device options and accuracy. [44:49] Physiology recognizes patterns. [46:33] Physiology is personal. [50:32] Two to seven minutes of quiet darkness. [57:04] Sleep banking/extension. [1:02:54] Options for optimizing sleep quality. [1:12:19] Caffeine and sleep. [1:19:40] Hydration. [1:25:13] Hyperhydrated? Dehydrated? Albumin knows. [1:29:26] Cultivating better hydration habits. [1:35:50] Sweat testing. [1:37:28] Consequences of top-tier sweating in the sauna. [1:45:23] Maximizing electrolyte efficacy. [1:49:56] Nutrition for optimal feeling and performance on the slopes. [1:53:35] Supplementation. [1:56:10] The three Rs of recovery: repair, replenish, and rehydrate. [1:59:20] Getting enough protein. [2:02:23] Getting enough carbs. [2:07:37] Salt and electrolytes. [2:08:11] Fruits and veggies. [2:09:06] Creatine. [2:10:35] Vitamin D and omega-3. [2:11:55] Ashwagandha and rhodiola. [2:17:10] Accelerating acclimation to altitude. [2:22:57] Letting physiology do what it wants to do. [2:24:52] Andy’s current projects and parting thoughts. [2:29:14] Minimizing risk for injury while training on the slopes. [2:45:32] Meditation, breathwork, and Bas Rutten’s O2 Trainer. [2:51:15] Low-volume strength work and high-velocity eccentric control. [2:54:42] Fatigue and recovery. [2:56:29] Global torso. [2:57:53] Leg training. [2:59:14] A holistic approach to movement. [2:59:58] The three-to-five method. [3:01:07] What a week of full training might look like. * For show notes and past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast https://tim.blog/podcast/?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=podcast-description. For deals from sponsors of The Tim Ferriss Show https://tim.blog/podcast, please visit tim.blog/podcast-sponsors https://tim.blog/podcast-sponsors Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (5-Bullet Friday) at tim.blog/friday https://go.tim.blog/5-bullet-friday-1/. For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts https://tim.blog/transcripts. Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books https://tim.blog/books. Follow Tim: Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss https://twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferriss https://instagram.com/timferriss/ YouTube: youtube.com/timferriss https://www.youtube.com/timferriss Facebook: facebook.com/timferriss https://www.facebook.com/TimFerriss/ LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/timferriss http://linkedin.com/in/timferriss Past guests on The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast include Jerry Seinfeld https://tim.blog/2020/12/08/jerry-seinfeld/, Hugh Jackman https://tim.blog/2020/06/26/hugh-jackman/, Dr. Jane Goodall https://tim.blog/2020/04/16/jane-goodall/, LeBron James https://tim.blog/2018/11/27/lebron-james-mike-mancias/, Kevin Hart https://tim.blog/2020/05/20/kevin-hart/, Doris Kearns Goodwin https://tim.blog/2018/09/07/doris-kearns-goodwin-leadership/, Jamie Foxx https://tim.blog/2015/12/06/jamie-foxx/, Matthew McConaughey https://tim.blog/2020/10/19/matthew-mcconaughey/, Esther Perel https://tim.blog/2017/05/21/esther-perel/, Elizabeth Gilbert https://tim.blog/2020/05/08/elizabeth-gilbert/, Terry Crews https://tim.blog/2017/12/20/terry-crews-how-to-have-do-and-be-all-you-want/, Sia https://tim.blog/2020/08/12/sia/, Yuval Noah Harari https://tim.blog/2020/10/27/yuval-noah-harari/, Malcolm Gladwell https://tim.blog/2016/06/21/malcolm-gladwell/, Madeleine Albright https://tim.blog/2020/05/27/secretary-madeleine-albright/, Cheryl Strayed https://tim.blog/2017/03/30/cheryl-strayed/, Jim Collins https://tim.blog/2019/02/18/jim-collins/, Mary Karr, https://tim.blog/2020/11/11/mary-karr/ Maria Popova https://tim.blog/2014/10/21/brain-pickings/, Sam Harris https://tim.blog/2020/05/15/sam-harris-2/, Michael Phelps https://tim.blog/2021/01/21/michael-phelps-grant-hackett/, Bob Iger https://tim.blog/2020/01/16/bob-iger/, Edward Norton https://tim.blog/2019/10/31/edward-norton-motherless-brooklyn/, Arnold Schwarzenegger https://tim.blog/2015/02/02/arnold-schwarzenegger/, Neil Strauss https://tim.blog/2014/06/24/neil-strauss/, Ken Burns https://tim.blog/2019/09/12/ken-burns/, Maria Sharapova https://tim.blog/2017/08/26/maria-sharapova/, Marc Andreessen https://tim.blog/2016/05/29/marc-andreessen/, Neil Gaiman https://tim.blog/2019/03/28/neil-gaiman/, Neil de Grasse Tyson https://tim.blog/2019/10/03/neil-degrasse-tyson/, Jocko Willink https://tim.blog/2016/09/21/jocko-willink-on-discipline-leadership-and-overcoming-doubt/, Daniel Ek https://tim.blog/2020/12/03/daniel-ek/, Kelly Slater https://tim.blog/2020/09/08/kelly-slater/, Dr. Peter Attia https://tim.blog/2019/11/27/peter-attia-fasting-metformin-longevity/, Seth Godin https://tim.blog/2016/02/10/seth-godin/, Howard Marks https://tim.blog/2018/09/25/howard-marks/, Dr. Brené Brown https://tim.blog/2020/02/06/brene-brown-striving-self-acceptance-saving-marriages/, Eric Schmidt https://tim.blog/2019/04/09/eric-schmidt/, Michael Lewis https://tim.blog/2020/05/01/michael-lewis/, Joe Gebbia https://tim.blog/2018/03/08/joe-gebbia-co-founder-of-airbnb/, Michael Pollan https://tim.blog/2018/05/06/michael-pollan-how-to-change-your-mind/, Dr. Jordan Peterson https://tim.blog/2021/03/01/jordan-peterson/, Vince Vaughn https://tim.blog/2017/05/31/vince-vaughn/, Brian Koppelman https://tim.blog/2020/04/23/brian-koppelman/, Ramit Sethi https://tim.blog/2019/05/07/ramit-sethi/, Dax Shepard https://tim.blog/2020/11/18/dax-shepard/, Tony Robbins https://tim.blog/2014/10/15/money-master-the-game/, Jim Dethmer https://tim.blog/2020/05/18/jim-dethmer/, Dan Harris https://tim.blog/2020/11/19/dan-harris/, Ray Dalio https://tim.blog/2017/09/13/ray-dalio/, Naval Ravikant https://tim.blog/2015/08/18/the-evolutionary-angel-naval-ravikant/, Vitalik Buterin https://tim.blog/2021/03/08/vitalik-buterin-naval-ravikant/, Elizabeth Lesser https://tim.blog/2021/03/16/elizabeth-lesser/, Amanda Palmer https://tim.blog/2019/04/18/amanda-palmer-2/, Katie Haun https://tim.blog/2021/02/18/katie-haun/, Sir Richard Branson https://tim.blog/2017/10/09/richard-branson/, Chuck Palahniuk https://tim.blog/2020/09/02/chuck-palahniuk/, Arianna Huffington https://tim.blog/2017/10/18/arianna-huffington/, Reid Hoffman https://tim.blog/2015/08/31/the-oracle-of-silicon-valley-reid-hoffman-plus-michael-mccullough/, Bill Burr https://tim.blog/2017/09/17/bill-burr/, Whitney Cummings https://tim.blog/2015/06/26/whitney-cummings/, Rick Rubin https://tim.blog/2015/05/15/rick-rubin/, Dr. Vivek Murthy https://tim.blog/2020/03/26/vivek-murthy/, Darren Aronofsky https://tim.blog/2017/09/09/darren-aronofsky/, Margaret Atwood https://tim.blog/2022/02/22/margaret-atwood/, Mark Zuckerberg https://tim.blog/2022/03/24/mark-zuckerberg/, Peter Thiel https://tim.blog/2014/09/09/peter-thiel/, Dr. Gabor Maté https://tim.blog/2018/02/20/gabor-mate/, Anne Lamott https://tim.blog/2021/07/09/anne-lamott/, Sarah Silverman https://tim.blog/2022/01/12/sarah-silverman/, Dr. Andrew Huberman https://tim.blog/2021/07/06/andrew-huberman/, and many more. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Momentus. Momentus offers high-quality supplements and products across a broad spectrum of categories, including sports performance, sleep, cognitive health, hormone support, and more. I've been testing their products for months now, and I have a few that I use constantly. One of the things I love about Momentous is that they offer many single ingredient and third-party tested formulations. I'll come back to the latter part of that a little bit later. Personally, I've been using Momentous Mag3, Nitrates, L-theanine, and Apigenin, all of which have helped me to improve the onset quality and duration of my sleep. Now, the Momentous Sleep Pack conveniently delivers single servings of all three of these ingredients.

• 0:42Tim Ferriss?

  I've also been using Momentous Creatine, which doesn't just help for physical performance, but also for cognitive performance. In fact, I've been taking it daily, typically before podcast recording, as there are various studies and reviews and meta-analyses pointing to improvements in short-term memory and performance under stress. So those are some of the products that I've been using very consistently, and to give you an idea, I'm packing right now for an international trip. I tend to be very minimalist, and I'm taking these with me nonetheless. Now, back to the bigger picture. Olympians, Tour de France winners, Tour de France winners, the US military, and more than 175 college and professional sports teams rely on Momentous and their products. Momentus also partners with some of the best minds in human performance to bring world-class

• 1:27Tim Ferriss?

  products to market, including a few you will recognize from this podcast, like Dr. Andrew Huberman and Dr. Kelly Starrett. They also work with Dr. Stacy Sims to assist Momentous in developing products specifically for women. Their products contain high-quality ingredients that are third-party tested, which in this case means informed sport and/or NSF certified, so you can trust that what is on the label is in the bottle and nothing else. And trust me, as someone who knows the sports nutrition and supplement world very well, that is a differentiator that you want in anything that you consume in this entire sector. So, good news. For my non-US listeners, more good news, not to worry. Momentous ships internationally, so you have the same access that I do. So check it out.

• 2:09Tim Ferriss?

  Visit livemomentous.com/tim and use code TIM at checkout for 20% off. That's live momentus, L-I-V-E-M-O-M-E-N-T-O-U-S dot com slash TIM and code TIM for 20% off.

• 2:27Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the number one selling fish oil brand in the US. More than 80% of Americans, that's probably a lot of you listening, including me, because I do measure my omega-3s, do not get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body cannot produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for cell structure and function. Nordic Naturals solves that problem with their doctor recommended, and in fact, this brand was recommended to me by one of my doctors, Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula. So the Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula for heart health, brain function, immune support, and more. It's incredibly pure and fresh with no fishy aftertaste. So I have been taking Ultimate Omega for the last two months or so,

• 3:12Tim Ferriss?

  and this fishy aftertaste issue has been a problem for me. And it's actually with other brands induced some nausea after a few days. And Ultimate Omega has been as clean as a whistle. I've had no issues whatsoever. And if you are vegetarian or prefer to alternate, I ended up alternating two products. And that is number one, the Ultimate Omega Fish Oil Formula, and also the Algae Omega, which is plant-based EPA and DHA. That's also from Nordic Naturals. So I end up getting both of those products, and it has improved my recovery from workouts. It's improved my sleep. It has improved my mood. And I know that because I pulled out a lot of other variables. In any case, back to the read.

• 3:57Tim Ferriss?

  All Nordic Naturals fish oil products are offered in the triglyceride molecular form, the form naturally found in fish, and the form your body most easily absorbs. Their Ultimate Omega Fish Oil is offered in soft gels, liquid, and zero sugar gummies. Nordic Naturals fish oils are Friend of the Sea certified and sustainably made in a zero-waste facility powered by biofuel. They're also non-GMO and third-party tested, surpassing the strictest international standards for purity and freshness. Want proof? You can visit their website, where they provide certificates of analysis for every one of their products. So go to Nordic.com, N-O-R-D-I-C, Nordic.com.

• 4:35Tim Ferriss?

  Discover why Nordic Naturals is the number one selling omega-3 brand in the US. And while you're there, use promo code TIM, T I M, for 20% off of your order. That's N O R D I C dot com and code TIM for 20% off of the fish oil with no fishy aftertaste. All upside, no downside. Try it out.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease.

• 5:03Speaker 02

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking.

• 5:07Speaker 03

  Can I ask you a personal question?

• 5:09Tim Ferriss?

  Now would seem an appropriate time.

• 5:13Speaker 03

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 5:25Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, boys and girls, ladies and germs. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job to interview and deconstruct world-class performers from all different disciplines. In this case, exercise science, and it is very self-interested. I wanted to talk to this guest, Andy Galpin, about a reboot in the new year. What should I do to train for very specific things? What should I do to improve sleep, et cetera, and so on, and so on, and so forth? So Andy Galpin, who is Andy? Andy Galpin is a tenured full professor at California State University Fullerton, where he is also co-director of the Center for Sport Performance and founder-director of the Biochemistry and Molecular Exercise Physiology Laboratory. He is a human performance scientist with a PhD in human bioenergetics

• 6:10Tim Ferriss?

  and more than 100 peer-reviewed publications and presentations. It turns out he has done research, his team has done research on many things that have been on this show. I didn't realize some of it in advance. Dr. Galpin has worked with elite athletes, including All-Stars, All Pros, and MVPs, Cy Young and major winners, Olympic gold medalists and world titleists and contenders across many, many different sports that includes MMA. So for instance, UFC, MLB, NBA, PGA, NFL, all the acronyms, Olympics, boxing, military, special forces, and much more. He is also a co-founder of Biomolecular Athlete. Vitality Blueprint, Absolute Rest and Rapid Health and Performance. You can find all things Andy Galpin at andygalpin.com and you can find him on Twitter and Instagram

• 6:55Tim Ferriss?

  at DrAndyGalpin, spelled G-A-L-P-I-N. Just a few additional notes on this episode. I asked Andy if he would be willing to provide a number of bonuses, a number of resources that we could put in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast and he very generously agreed. Those include some synopses, overviews of the various training protocols that were mentioned in this episode specifically related to the prep for my skiing, but that applies to a lot more than just skiing, could apply to any number of different endurance sports or maintaining strength over a period of training in just about anything. That's my interpretation, not his. He also agreed to include a number of different resources

• 7:39Tim Ferriss?

  related to micronutrient testing and a number of different supplements that he feels pull their weight from a scientific credibility perspective with respect to endurance training. And in my particular case, training at altitude, including skiing. We cover a hell of a lot in this episode. We cover sleep banking, we talk about basketball tweets and how they tie into sports betting, believe it or not, testing sweat, talk about using respiratory rate, so overnight respiratory rate, which you can figure out pretty easily, as a proxy, an indicator of many other things. And last but not least, I asked Andy if he would be willing to provide a few snippets, anecdotes and explanations for a number of bullets that I didn't get to cover. And he recorded those separately and I added those

• 8:23Tim Ferriss?

  to this episode for you to enjoy. And here are those bullets. Number one, doubling a client's testosterone by just changing what path he took for his morning walk. Number two, curing a lifelong sleep disorder in five minutes for $22. And now, please enjoy a very wide-ranging and very practical conversation with Dr. Andy Galpin.

• 8:46Speaker 04

  The honest reality is, as I've mentioned several times now, our approach is to have as comprehensive a testing as possible so that we can get the most precise and specific solutions that we can. But the reality is, the vast majority of people will respond best through a multifactorial approach. Addressing all of the big rocks at once is almost always going to be required for people to get their best results. That said, having done this now, really hundreds of times, there have been some fun cases in which people had this remarkable results with extraordinarily simple and sometimes even cheap and really one change approaches. And so I do want to really reiterate that those are the exceptions to the rule.

• 9:30Speaker 04

  And I think that's important to state here because that stuff can be intoxicating. It can really drive confusion. It's like, oh, my gosh, maybe all of my problems are really just this one thing. And that can happen. Of course, I'm about to share you some stories, but really, really, really, I don't want you to fall prey to any thoughts sometimes that really this one particular thing I'm going to share is the cause of all human sufferances. Clearly not the case. So the very first one is from a colleague of mine, Dan Garner. Dan is a world-renowned specialist in blood lab interpretations and really human performance. And so Dan was working with a client in the Dallas, Texas area. The client had done many of the right things and had a lot of success, but was particularly interested in elevating his testosterone.

• 10:14Speaker 04

  And so despite the fact that things were going well, that number wasn't moving as high as that individual wanted. And remind you, this is medication, TRTs, hormones, things like that are off of the table. We're not medical doctors. It's not what we do. And that's not what this individual wanted. So the question was, can we do this without those options? And so Dan had kind of run him through many of the normal steps. And we're still struggling to figure it out. And so we kind of went to the next level with some of the biomarkers we looked at. And Dan was able to identify there was actually an allergic response happening to something in his environment. And you can actually differentiate if it's coming from environmental factors or other factors based on a handful of different blood markers. And so Something was going on there and we didn't know what it was, Dan, didn't rather, but we knew something was there.

• 10:58Speaker 04

  And so, long story short, what ended up happening was, it was actually response to some of the trees that were in this man's neighborhood. And he was basically allergic to those and didn't know it, because it wasn't creating a sufficient enough of a response for him to figure it out. And it turns out that those trees were basically on one side of his neighborhood and not the other one. And so, the individuals basically started his day going outside and going for a walk, and would walk right through these trees. And it's just kind of exacerbating that response. And there's a known pathway there that'll lead to many things, including compromising sleep quality, et cetera, et cetera, and that eventually was compromising his testosterone. And so, really, the ultimate change that was made was still continue to take those daily walks, but instead of walking out of the house and going right, and walking around the block

• 11:40Speaker 04

  that way, that he went out of his house, turned left, and walked the block in a different area that was no longer exposing him to those trees. So, you did that, waited six or eight weeks, or something like, I can't remember the exact time domain, and then testosterone was checked again, and it was almost doubled by that point. So, again, fun little story there, atypical, but absolutely possible and thing that we've seen a number of times over the years. Another really fun story I like is from the sleep. Now, this is actually in a professional athlete that we've worked with, and has happened more than one time. This exact thing has happened more than one time. And so, really, I'm kind of combining multiple stories here, but when we do our sleep analysis, we're not just looking at your sleep staging and architecture.

• 12:24Speaker 04

  We're actually able to identify what physical positions you are in. So, on your right side, left side, back, et cetera. And one thing that stands out routinely is how sleep quality drastically differs in people depending on their position. So, some people really struggle on their right side or the left side or their backside. And it's very common for us to see people will have large percentages of their sleep problems in a single place. And so, again, seen this multiple times, where people would struggle, in this example, with sleeping on their back. And what we're able to do for a very cheap price is to go onto Amazon and buy what effectively looks like a fanny pack in reverse. So you can imagine a standard, not the over the shoulder chest fanny pack, but the more traditional ones that just go around your waist like a

• 13:06Speaker 04

  belt. And instead of having the pouch in front, you flip it around and put it on your low back. And that stops you from sleeping on your low back and forces the individual to sleep on their right side or left side. It's uncomfortable and it is weird for a few days or weeks, but really it's pretty quick for the people to adjust to that. Now, in this story I'm referring to, we were able to see over 90% reduction in sleep waking events in the very first night by simply putting that backpack on. And that was not a fluke that has been sustained for weeks and months after that. Now, the individual, because it's been so long, again, many individuals here, actually, they can really either sleep without the pack entirely, or it certainly no longer affects their sleep at all. They really don't notice it. And those reductions in sleep waking events have persisted for

• 13:50Speaker 04

  months and months and months, if not years at this point. So we would kind of collectively say, we have basically fixed that person's sleep disorder that had been going on for years, if not decades, and certainly decades, actually. And about five minutes for, I think, the backpack costs like 22 bucks on Amazon or something like that.

• 14:10Tim Ferriss?

  Dr. Galpin, Andy, nice to see you.

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Nice to see you.

• 14:12Tim Ferriss?

  And I'm so happy to have this opportunity to do a podcast, which is really a self-interested, self-directed session with you in the guise of a podcast.

• 14:22Speaker 04

  Anytime you can do something for yourself and only yourself, that's a win.

• 14:26Tim Ferriss?

  You have a history of competition, been a competitive athlete. You have an extensive history of injuries, which have forced you to become creative. Well, you could have not been creative, but you had the capacity to think creatively about your own training and training. And then you also have deeply technical foundations.

• 14:47Tim Ferriss?

  And that combination of competitive experience, creativity, and then technical capability, I think produces a lot of what you've been able to do, which is why I'm part, I'm excited to have you here today. For a lot of folks who are listening to this, who have listened to many other podcasts, perhaps read many books, they think to themselves, for fuck's sake, there are a million different things I could be doing. And it's helpful, even if it's imperfect, to sometimes rank order things. I'll give you an example. So I've known Pavel Tsatsoulin for a long time, perhaps best known as popularizing the kettlebell in the United States by and large. And his position would be strength first, right? Like focus on strength first. That is the mother quality.

• 15:29Tim Ferriss?

  And then also important, as we age, for a host of reasons that I'm sure we can get into. And then you can add in other things sort of below that, let's just say, top of the pyramid or bottom of the pyramid, depending on how you look at it. How do you think about the cultivation of attributes, training, and how to prioritize those things?

• 15:50Speaker 04

  I will acknowledge my bias.

• 15:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  I played college football. I got into the sport of weightlifting, Olympic weightlifting, as you may know it, but technically called weightlifting. I enjoy that side of the spectrum much more than I enjoy anything else, right? So I'm a sport kind of guy. I don't really have as much love for physique, bodybuilding, stuff like, it's always impressive, but it hasn't gripped me because I'm always more interested in sport. So I value being able to hit a golf ball 350 yards, being able to dunk a basketball, being able to skate on ice. I like it when people can do a whole bunch of things in a well-rounded area. So that's my just personal preference. At the same time, I acknowledge when other folks have a preference towards endurance or in that case physique. That's important to understand because the way that I answer this question is built fundamentally

• 16:36Speaker 04

  upon my own bias, as we'll probably talk about through the entire conversation. We all have that filter. And so we're all aiming it at a lens and it's just personal preference. And I will do my best as the conversation evolves to when I feel like that's a fair representation of the science versus just my personal preference. And that's not always the same thing, though sometimes it is. So technically, personally, to me, you outlined my injury history. I know you have just a touch yourself.

• 17:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yes.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  Just a touch.

• 17:02Tim Ferriss?

  Quite a collection.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  I actually prefer the very first quality is you need to move well. What's that mean? Well, there's different definitions depending on what you're asking your body to do, but there are some colloquial standards. You know, you had Eric Cressy on recently. Shirley, obviously, is the foundation of the field in large part, so you guys covered a lot of that there. But really, you have to move well. Your joints, for the most part, have a fairly standard operating mechanism. So your shoulder is supposed to go through that certain range of motion. Your neck is supposed to be in a certain place, your knee and your toes and all that stuff. So you guys can refer back to that, that conversation. But you have to move well. Secondarily, on top of that, after moving well, you have to be able to ask yourself, well, if I'm not moving well, why not? And someone like Pavel is going to come back and say, well, in large part, it's because of a lack of strength.

• 17:46Speaker 04

  If you're strong enough, you move well. I actually agree with him on many, many, many things, and that's one of them. That said, though, I think there's a little bit more nuance there that I like to approach. And so whenever I'm watching movement, whatever that is to you, whether you're surfing, or you like jogging, or you're doing jiu-jitsu, whatever it is, I'm going joint by joint, and I'm asking a handful of things, almost four specific things per joint. Number one, does it have appropriate stability? You can call this stability, you can call this strength, it is the same thing, right? Your ability to control the joint to make sure it moves when you want it to move, and when it doesn't move, when you don't. Those things have to both be there. It's not okay to just move it when you want and then not control when you don't want.

• 18:27Tim Ferriss?

  Drive a car without brakes.

• 18:28Speaker 04

  Totally. You have to understand that position, right? So you can put whatever phrase on it. I call it strength. Others call it stability, but it's just control, right? So is that joint under control? Is it stable? Number two, and this is even prior to that first one, are you even aware? You'd be stunned how many movement dysfunctions and mobility restrictions and things that I've seen on people, and none of those are the case. They just don't even know that their foot's pointed to the right, or that their shoulder's in the wrong spot. They have no idea, not only where they're supposed to be, but they don't even have the awareness of where they actually are. So just letting you know, hey, did you realize that your left foot is pointing forward and your right foot is pointing 90 degrees?

• 19:04Tim Ferriss?

  Which, just as a side note, can be very surprising because I like to think, and I do think I have a reasonably high degree of spatial kinesthetic awareness. But I remember having some issue with my right big toe and I was doing a split squat type of exercise and this woman who was supervising at the time said, are you aware that your toe is pointing basically to like, he was my right foot, 10 o'clock on a dial if you're facing 12? And I was like, what are you talking about? And she took a photograph.

• 19:36Speaker 04

  Oh, like you were internally?

• 19:37Tim Ferriss?

  Internally rotating, heel way out because I didn't have the mobility in the big toe. And so I was dodging that by kicking my heel way out to the outside.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  That's, that's interesting. Almost always the case would be the opposite.

• 19:50Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding?

• 19:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, you'd flare out so that you can actually get more engine motion, your knee forward.

• 19:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so I was doing the drop the hip and throw the straight right kind of position.

• 19:57Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 19:58Tim Ferriss?

  So not to interrupt, but even for someone who thinks they know where their body is in space, you would be surprised.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  And we don't need to go off course here too much, but the reality of it is you don't need to be perfect.

• 20:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Speaker 04

  Some level of asymmetry is absolutely fine. And in large cases with almost all of our professional athletes, you actually probably want some asymmetries, right? This allows you to create torque and to move in specific ways where if you're a major league baseball pitcher, you need to be able to throw 100 miles an hour. We have to have some asymmetries. A golfer, all of our folks on the PGA tour and stuff like, you need those things. So when I say that, I just mean roughly symmetrical. Just give me a ballpark. What's a ballpark? I don't know. There's no hard cut line there, but you'll probably know when you see really bad, I guess is the point. And so number one was again, are you stable? Number two was, are you even aware of where you're at? Number three is, do you have some sort of rough balance

• 20:50Speaker 04

  between front, back, left, right, on the left side of your body to the right side of your body, to the front side of your body, the back side of your body? What's that mean? Let's just say we're going with, with our knee, right? Let's just say it's my right knee, right? There you go. Let's do easy as an example. If I'm doing some sort of hinging activity and my right knee is doing something different than my left knee, now I'm concerned. Is my right knee doing something normal to my foot? Is my right seat doing something normal to my right hip? And so I'm looking not just at the movement pattern, but how is it relative to my left? If I say the same pattern on the right knee and the left knee, then that's a different problem and a different solution than if that pattern is exclusive to my right knee. And so that's what I care about. So if there's some level of movement in your knee,

• 21:33Speaker 04

  maybe that's normal if it's in both knees. If it's aggressive in one side versus the other, you almost always have some sort of compensation happening. Now you've got to run a long algorithm there to figure out kind of what's happening, but that's what I'm after. And then the final step is can you go through a full range of motion? Now that range of motion is different for every joint. The shoulder does different things and the lower back and the neck and fingers, et cetera. But you should be able to access a full range of motion. We want to be able to produce strength and have control in those end ranges of motion without significantly compromising any other joint. And that's really as complicated as it needs to be. And so yeah, can your knee fully flex? Great. Can it do it with any load whatsoever? Doesn't have to be 600 pounds, just a reasonable load. And then can it do it without significant compromise, significantly compromising your ankle

• 22:18Speaker 04

  or hip or neck or something else? So really it's those four things. If you have all that checked off, then really your joints can access any movement that you want under reasonable control. So as long as you have that, that is checkbox number one, which is, do you move well?

• 22:33Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 22:34Speaker 04

  After that, now we're going to play a game of, okay, great. If you do it on bilaterally, let's just keep using the lower body. So your knees are fantastic when I give you support, so assisted. So your hands are on a table or I'm holding your hands when you're squatting or something like that. So if I take load off the scenario, do you check all four boxes? Yes, you do. But I'm, we're going to the next one now. What happens when it's body weight only? You still move well? Great. Now we're going to the next one. What happens when we add speed? Now you ask that joint to move fast. Does it change its behaviors or patterns?

• 23:05Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so you do speed before load. I mean, you could say, I guess it's adding load in its own way.

• 23:09Speaker 04

  We'll just say additional external load.

• 23:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:11Speaker 04

  Which could be gravity, depending on how you should answer. That one, I'm fine switching out. If you want to go load first before speed, absolutely fine. It's really kind of one A, one B.

• 23:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 04

  In that particular way. But you need to understand what's happening. The point is, you want to do all that before you get to the last one, which is now fatigue. You don't want to load a system repetitively. If it can't handle, let's just say it's the knee. And we're going to go for a jog. We know that even a moderate jog, when you're in a single leg stance, is going to put four, five, six times body weight on that load on a leg. So even a slow jog puts a lot of load on your right knee, in this particular case, when it's on that single foot stance. So it's a pretty high amount. And now you're going to repeat that over five miles, or two miles, or one mile. It doesn't really matter. If it can't do it well when you have your body weight in a unilateral stance, then we have a problem.

• 24:03Tim Ferriss?

  And just for definition, unilateral, meaning here, what?

• 24:08Speaker 04

  One at a time. So what I kind of skipped over was, in that initial assessment, we're going to go through bilateral stuff first, and then we're going to go through unilateral the second way, which is the way to say, all right, if you put your hands on a table, can you do a squat and your knees and ankles move correctly? And now what if I take your hands off the table? Now it's body weight. And now what if I add load? Okay, great. Now what if I add speed? Now we're going to repeat that whole thing, basically, by saying, okay, now let's do it one leg at a time.

• 24:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 24:35Speaker 04

  That would be unilateral, right? So maybe you move well bilaterally, but all of a sudden, when we get in that unilateral again, one foot at a time, now things collapse with speed, or they collapse with load, or they collapse with something else. If I have failure points there, then what the heck do you think is going to happen when I put that thing under stress and fatigue? You know the result, right? Now, again, under fatigue, you're going to have some tactical breakdowns. That's a part of it. But we're looking for red flags. We're looking for egregious. We're looking for, am I really putting myself in a situation where you're just asking? For injury, it is anytime you're talking injury prevention risk and you can go a million different directions to this, it's never about can you stop injuries from happening? That is not a real thing. It's all about can you just reduce the likelihood and reduce

• 25:19Speaker 04

  the risk as much as possible. So to circle back to your initial question, like where does that pyramid of me land? That's initially how I'm thinking about it. If you're moving well, and you can do this unilaterally, you can do this under load, you can do it fast, and you can do it over fatigue, then you can really do whatever you want. The only thing you have to pay attention to is how you're defining fatigue. So this is not very practical. This is ideal. But one of the things we use a lot in training is determining fatigue by technical breakdown, rather than an actual, you're going to run this many miles, or you're going to run this much time, or you're going to complete this much work. It is how much can you do until we see significant break in posture and technique?

• 26:01Speaker 04

  Until you're on the aerosol bike and you're all of a sudden hunching over now, your chest is on the paddles in the front. We've stopped at that point because what are we doing? We're potentially reinforcing a bad pattern. We're reinforcing an idea of when you get tired, just go ahead and break posture. We don't want those things, right? That never is going to be a win in our book. Occasionally, you're probably not talking under 10% of the time, I'll let it fly. That can't be the pattern.

• 26:26Tim Ferriss?

  Let's take this to the personal on my side. We're going to talk about Tim 4.0.

• 26:31Speaker 04

  Oh, I like it. Not even 2.0. It's not even 2.0. It's like the shoulder.

• 26:35Tim Ferriss?

  2.0 was a while ago. 4.0, which will hopefully involve fewer MRIs, fewer emergency room visits, and I'll lay out some of the basic specs and mysteries, maybe, and then we can go from there. So the first, I think, will be time bound in a way that will resonate with a lot of people listening. And that is, we're recording this in late December, and in early January, I'm going to be looking to reengage with all sorts of training.

• 27:03Speaker 04

  You and the whole rest of the world.

• 27:04Tim Ferriss?

  Me and the entire world. And in this particular case, I do have two months blocked out for skiing and ski training. And I've got lessons already booked with a technical coach. So I have the technical side, let's just say it, organized. I will be at altitude. I'll be doing ski touring in addition to downhill, which I find very meditative. I also find very challenging cardiovascularily. And

• 27:30Tim Ferriss?

  So far, so good. That is the same as last year, and I made a ton of progress technically last year, physically as well, lots of great adaptations. The big difference is that, as we were talking about a bit before we started recording, I've had effectively nine months of deconditioning, and I've had this persistent, sometimes crippling constellation of low back issues, which thankfully are seemingly on the mend, although I do have some questions for you about it. I'll give you sort of a laundry list of things that are going on. But before I get to that, I wanted to say that for a lot of folks, they're going to go through cycles, if they're not consistently competitive athletes, of de-training, retraining, and at least for me, as someone who used to be very competitive in various

• 28:15Tim Ferriss?

  sports, there's a higher risk of believing that I'm 15, or 20, or 25 again, attempting to do things I used to do and getting myself into trouble. So this was the broad question is, if you were coaching me, sort of how would you have a conversation about training, maybe program? Couple of wrinkles. So the first is that I know my low back, as an example, and probably a lot of the posterior chain is weak, because I've avoided anything that would potentially lead to inflammation. And I've had a million and one different diagnoses of this low back, compression sensitivity, which I do think is the thing, some stenosis at L4, L5, on the right side, et cetera, et cetera. However, I've been told by a

• 28:56Tim Ferriss?

  number of folks, like inflammation is not the issue. However, when I address inflammation, symptoms by and large vanish. I was on like meloxicam and all sorts of anti-inflammatories for a period of time, ended up doing an extended fast a few, let's just call it two months ago, so a week-long water fast, and in combination with a few other things, complete remission of symptoms for weeks. And that raised a lot of interesting questions. When I am training for two months, unlikely I'm going to take a week to fast water fast. It could, but it would present some challenges. So I'm trying to figure out how to approach things, recognizing in my older years, which I did not perhaps recognize in my younger years, that there's a high potential for injury here.

• 29:39Tim Ferriss?

  Approach it the wrong way. A few other notes. Last season, when I was skiing, I noticed that I got more chatter on my right leg. So if I took like a carving turn to the left, I would get more chatter on the right leg. And I was like, oh, that's very interesting. And my left leg, I have noticeably larger, say, calf on the left leg. But I did a DEXA scan recently and overall I have more muscle mass on the right side. I was like, okay, that's interesting. So I was like, so it seems like I have more muscle mass on the right side, but I'm having a lot more chatter. Meaning stuttering on the slope, that the curves aren't as smooth. My priority is skiing. So if that means it's to my benefit for relative strength and skiing to lose some upper body mass, that's fine with me. I don't care. Where would you start in this particular case?

• 30:24Speaker 04

  If you're just listening, I can't explain to you how big of a smile I have on my face.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  During that whole thing. This is what we live for. All right. This is exactly what I like to do. Now you can take a couple of approaches here. Small to big or big to small. I think you know where I'm gonna go.

• 30:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Speaker 04

  Here's how all of our coaching goes. This is exactly what I do for anyone that comes through any of our programs and our coaching programs. I want everything. I want to collect everything on you and that's going to allow me to stop messing around.

• 30:53Tim Ferriss?

  I would love to do a full battery and gather everything from my cuticles to my, you know, my chest hair and do the 100% analysis. And the reality is you're here for a day, you're taking off and then I head to the undisclosed high altitude location in, let's just call it 10 days. So chances are I won't have an opportunity to do all of that. So I'd be curious to know, given that constraint, I realize I should do it, but given the constraint, what you might recommend in the interim?

• 31:26Speaker 04

  Yep. Where are those places you want to start?

• 31:29Tim Ferriss?

  Let's start with.

• 31:31Speaker 04

  Maybe you want me to just cover a couple of really specific short ones that.

• 31:35Tim Ferriss?

  Let's do that.

• 31:35Speaker 04

  Folks could try. Okay. And a very easy one that almost everybody has access. No, that's not everybody. Many people have access to. If you have any sort of reasonable tracker of any kind, respiratory rate is a phenomenal insight into everything that's happening in your body. I would make the argument that blood work would be the most important thing that one can do here. If done appropriately, even cheaper and easier than that respiratory rate will tell you a ton of stuff. So. What we're talking about is how many times you breathe per minute and specifically overnight. So if you can measure your respiratory rate overnight, you'll have a great insight of what's happening. A lot of stuff can be explained. Here's roughly why. When you take a breath in, you're bringing in oxygen. When you exhale, that releases CO2.

• 32:20Speaker 04

  At all times, you're playing this oxygen to CO2 game. Oxygen is primarily responsible for regulating cellular metabolism, energy. CO2 is meant to regulate pH. It does a lot of different things, but that's the primary mechanism. CO2 then has a bidirectional relationship between psychology and physiology. Meaning a psychological stressor got really excited, got really happy, got upset, can cause alterations in the physical body, right? Specifically through CO2, exercise, movement, any physical stressor increases CO2 concentrations. But that will then be registered psychologically as, hey, be more alert, be more focused, be more anxious. All those things. And so when you see an increase in CO2 concentrations that are developed from any tissue, let's just say muscle,

• 33:05Speaker 04

  that increases CO2 concentrations in the blood. That is then registered as energy is going out physically. So let's be prepared psychologically, again, more focused, all those things. And so your body is constantly measuring CO2 and paying attention to what's happening. And this is good, right? This is one of the main mechanisms in which our body switches us up and down to the autonomic nervous system. And so on one end of the spectrum, you've got sympathetic drive. This is fight or flight. This is freeze, this is awake, alert, anxious, all those things. It's important to understand that's not good or bad. That is just a thing that happens, right? So as you and I are sitting in this conversation, we should be a little anxious. Well, I want to be hyper focused. My eyes need to be narrowed on you. I shouldn't be having a panoramic view. Adrenaline should be up. I guarantee our cortisol levels are a little bit, that's, that's the point, right?

• 33:48Tim Ferriss?

  It's a tool, a toolkit, yeah.

• 33:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Parasympathetic is the other side. That's rest, digest, that is lethargic, that is depressed, that is all those things, right? So right now, we want to be alert like this. And when we're done tonight and go to sleep, we want to be very parasympathetic and. Lethargic. Amazing. Well, CO2 concentrations are driving, it's not the only thing, but it's one of the main things driving where we're out of that spectrum. And this is why things like CO2 tolerance, which we've studied in my lab, are connected to state and trade anxiety. They are connected to a lot of different things. And so this is Brian McKenzie. Brian? He's done this for probably a decade. We've really spent a lot of time on CO2 for a long time. It'll tell you a ton of what's going on. That then drives respiration. Because the primary thing, remember, CO2 is regulating pH. And so when

• 34:33Speaker 04

  your body senses CO2 concentrations are getting a little bit higher, it's going to tell you, ventilate, breathe. Now, if we were to have you hold your breath, and just say, take a breath in and hold it, eventually you would start feeling that air hunger, right? That like panic to breathe, that desire to breathe, and eventually if you hold it, panic, panic, panic. Unless we're at altitude or something weird, that sensation is not being driven by running out of oxygen. It's driven by increasing CO2.

• 34:57Tim Ferriss?

  Increasing CO2.

• 34:57Speaker 04

  Right? CO2 concentrations, this is why you have to have carbon monoxide sensors.

• 35:01Tim Ferriss?

  Also why you need to be careful about shallow water blackouts if you're doing a bunch of crazy breathing exercises.

• 35:07Speaker 04

  This is why you don't want to hyperventilate before those. You're supposed to be saying, all right, CO2 concentrations are elevated in my system, therefore I'm becoming acidic, so therefore I need to start ventilating more. So then I breathe more, I dump out more CO2 that lowers my CO2 concentrations in my body and I'm back to normal. Hyperventilation is specifically exhalation, so additional breathing, where it no longer meets metabolic demand. So I'm breathing more than I need to be breathing. If you and I were to sit here and hyperventilate, right, which I've done plenty of times, that's putting you in a state of hypocapnia. So capnia is the science word for CO2, hypo meaning low. So you've lowered your CO2 below normal. This causes what's called respiratory alkalosis, right? You've removed CO2. You've removed acid, you've become more alkalotic, right? So acid

• 35:52Speaker 04

  on one side, alkalosis on the other side. Great. And in response to that, one of the major things that can happen is your kidneys will then start altering bicarbonate, which is the way you regulate pH as well, causing potentially, at least even temporarily, metabolic acidosis. Because the entire system is supposed to be balanced. So now you've already altered pH in a number of different areas. You've altered what's happening through albumin, you've altered bicarbonate, you've altered all of these things. If you were doing that in the short term, that gets too low, we have all kinds of issues with blackout, you do that in water, like we're gonna have huge problems, right? People

• 36:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, be careful.

• 36:27Speaker 04

  Plenty of people die.

• 36:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, people die all the time doing this.

• 36:29Speaker 04

  Yep. Not good.

• 36:31Tim Ferriss?

  You want the urge to breathe if you're getting to the point where you need to breathe.

• 36:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. It's a good idea. If I'm under breathing, then we get hypercapnic, right? And so what's supposed to happen is you increase CO2 concentrations, you get a little bit of hypercapnic, this sends signals, this is, hey, chemoreflexors jump off and they say breathe more. So you breathe more and you dump your CO2. That's awesome. So that rate of respiration, or how often you're breathing, is supposed to be driven by a number of things, but in this particular case, let's call it CO2. If your respiratory rate gets high, we are now putting ourselves in hyperventilation. It's not clinical hyperventilation. And this is a story that will unfold so many times, there's a, just because you don't hit clinical markers for disease, does not mean you're in optimal physiology.

• 37:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, those reference ranges change a lot, too, right?

• 37:20Speaker 04

  Man, I could, I could, I could spend hours on, this is effectively what we do, right?

• 37:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 04

  With all of our stuff, we don't use reference ranges for anything.

• 37:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:29Speaker 04

  We have our own high performance standards. I'm not an MD. I don't do anything medical or disease related. Everything from our perspective is from the perspective of enhancing human performance. So going from good to great, going from where's your risk factor, disease I don't care about, that's like, go see Peter Attia. Like, I can't help you there.

• 37:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Speaker 04

  Again, we take hundreds of biomarkers and I don't think I've ever measured APOUB in my life.

• 37:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 37:53Speaker 04

  Never will.

• 37:53Tim Ferriss?

  This is not your game.

• 37:54Speaker 04

  It's not my game. I don't do medicine. We do high performance. So you want to go from good to great? I got you. Risk of 20 year disease, I don't know, just exercise. Don't come to me. Point is, I'm watching that respiratory rate. If that thing starts to exceed 15 breaths per minute or so overnight, I have a pretty good indication that you're over breathing. Now, is this, again, clinical hyperventilation? Probably not. I don't know. Not for me to even call. But I can certainly tell you're over breathing because at that point, for most people, you're breathing more than your metabolic need.

• 38:23Tim Ferriss?

  Do you have a preferred tracking device for that?

• 38:26Speaker 04

  A little bit of inside house. Here we use our own. So my company, Absolute Rest, our sleep company, we have a very, very high quality one that not to pitch on this, but the reality is most-

• 38:37Tim Ferriss?

  You should pitch it if it's good. Just give a second option for like the second place.

• 38:41Speaker 04

  Well, the reality of it is ours is by the time this comes out, ours will probably be available. It's a couple of hundred dollars. It's not a tracker. It is a clinical sleep lab set up on your, in your house with wireless. Our technologies, you've probably seen people with the polysomnography sleep stuff like all over the place. Ours is entirely wireless. You don't have to do any of those things. So for a couple hundred bucks, you can put that on. And we actually are able to-

• 39:03Tim Ferriss?

  That's Absolute Rest.

• 39:04Speaker 04

  Absolute Rest, that company, yeah. We are able to run 150 hertz, which means we're measuring 150 times per second. Most wearables are going to measure once every five minutes, something like that.

• 39:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 04

  So like our fidelity is just a touch higher.

• 39:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 39:19Speaker 04

  Which means we are catching a whole bunch of things. This is, by the way, an FDA approved device. So we can actually said a second ago, we don't do any medical. That was a bit of a lie.

• 39:28Tim Ferriss?

  What is it approved for?

• 39:30Speaker 04

  Diagnosing sleep disorders.

• 39:31Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So the indication is?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  We can clinically diagnose sleep disorders in your own home in your own bedroom for a few hundred bucks at this point. So that can be done. With that, we have tremendous insights because we're getting every single breath. We're not missing any breath and HRV, heart rate variability is also the highest standard possible. And we're getting overnight of that. So you can pick other trackers. Those are all going to be in the same price range. So there's really no difference. Anything you have is probably fine. Almost everyone has something, watches, rings, bands.

• 40:04Tim Ferriss?

  Whatever.

• 40:05Speaker 04

  Of different scenarios. You can get any of those. I'm trying in my head to, is there like a zero cost option? Or respiratory rate? I mean, you could certainly measure it. You get close. Actually, you'd probably overestimate it if you just literally use the stopwatch. And just measured how often you're breathing during the day. I got a calm resting state. My guess is you'd be a little bit aroused. So you'd probably be over breathing a touch. So that might give you a little bit of a false sense, but you could try it that way. That would get you close.

• 40:36Tim Ferriss?

  Just a quick thanks to one of our sponsors and we'll be right back to the show. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot, what I would take if I could only take one supplement? And the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin

• 41:17Tim Ferriss?

  D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com/tim. That's drink A-G-one, the number one. Drinkag1.com/tim. Last time, drinkag1.com/tim. Check it out.

• 41:40Tim Ferriss?

  Do the rings and watches, et cetera, do a comparable job to a chest strap of some type?

• 41:50Speaker 04

  It depends on what you're measuring. The beauty and benefit of how something directly on your chest is not only do I get to measure respiratory rate directly, but I get to measure respiratory depth, which is an entirely underutilized tool.

• 42:02Tim Ferriss?

  And by depth, you mean sort of chest expansion?

• 42:05Speaker 04

  That's correct. Yeah. And that's going to tell us a lot about what's going on. That's, we do that too. And that's put on there. Not at that insanely low price point, but at our other, our full immersion part, that that's going to get measured as well. We don't miss anything for the most part. Yeah. So do they, no, no, it's reality. It is no.

• 42:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, got it. Okay. So you could use both. I mean, just for people listening. Yeah. I mean, there are folks out there who could probably spend a lot of time just on like respiratory muscles.

• 42:33Speaker 04

  Oh, for sure.

• 42:34Tim Ferriss?

  And so on. But you were saying, just to lead back after I interrupted, things that people can potentially do.

• 42:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right? Outside of the full monty.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  My hope was. You have something where you can get a rough sense of respiratory rate because this factor alone and just numbers wise, throw it out there. Again, I always look at 15. There is actually excellent research on 16. There's actually a recent study that came out that was quite interesting on college freshmen, I believe. And they looked at respiratory rate and they found that for every increase in one breath per minute. So you went from 14 breath per minute to 15 to 16. There's a 25% increase in likelihood of experiencing moderate to high stress. And that was independent of a number of sleep markers, sleep latencies, sleep quality, sleep timing, duration, things like that. And so if you're using a sleep tracker of some sort, and that's not changing, but you're still feel like you're experiencing

• 43:26Speaker 04

  stress or some of these other downstream things, you will note it in respiratory rate. You will see that move generally before it is more sensitive. It's like if you've ever used resting heart rate as a metric for if you're kind of overdoing things or where to go. It's okay, but that is a lagging indicator. HRV is more of a immediate indicator. So HRV would be superior. The fidelity and change of HRV is much higher. Blood is even higher than that. It's faster. It's going to tell you what's happening before HRV response typically. But you would have HRV, like resting heart rate would be another rough way to do that. Respiratory rate was going to be even faster. Respiratory rate happens really, really, really quickly. You're going to have a change overnight for the most part. If you get a cold, if you have a few drinks tonight, if things like that, you will see a change in respiration

• 44:10Speaker 04

  almost immediately. If you cross that 15 to 16 and you continue to go up, you see dramatic increases in risks of all kinds of disease states. In fact, the line again on the research, and I'm kind of summarizing the entire field, really, it starts to break around 15. You will see reference ranges that say 12 to 20 is normal. I could pound that one as much as you want.

• 44:34Tim Ferriss?

  Nah, that's all right. I mean, we could replace normal with common, maybe, but.

• 44:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:37Tim Ferriss?

  Right?

• 44:39Speaker 04

  I want to see it 10 or 11.

• 44:41Tim Ferriss?

  Ten or eleven.

• 44:41Speaker 04

  That's the number to be. Now, there is genetic components to it and some other things, but if anytime I see above thirteen, I'm probably taking action.

• 44:49Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask a question. I want to, and the action is where I'm going next. And before we get there, I'm curious if the arrow of causality here is bidirectional or unidirectional in the sense that when you exceed a certain sum total of alostatic load, respiratory rate goes up, presumably. That's what I'm gathering, right? Can you reduce your overall alostatic load by targeting the respiratory rate directly? Or do you need to address the some components? I suspect it's both and, but I'm curious if by addressing the respiratory rate directly, for instance, through meditation breathing practices, does that help to reduce the sum total of that alostatic load? Or do you have to go back to the puzzle pieces?

• 45:29Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 45:30Tim Ferriss?

  Is it just an indicator?

• 45:30Speaker 04

  No, no. So here's where it's fun. Excellent research on this for a long time, twenty plus years of data on this. Physiology recognizes patterns. The same thing happens with sleep. I could give a ton of examples here. Happens with anything else, but if your respiratory rate is elevated, that could be an acute or chronic response, and it can be independent of the original causality. Which means, let's say you had a really traumatic event. Couldn't be not traumatic. Say you won a big game. You got excited. It doesn't matter, positive or negative, some sort of big event. In the state of that, you went into sympathetic drive. That then elevated respiratory rate. If that pattern is sustained, that continues to hold place even when you

• 46:11Speaker 04

  remove that initial stressor. So, childhood trauma, sure. A period of extensive work, completing a dissertation, having a child, any of these things, again, it's not negative. It could be good or bad. That pattern can absolutely stay, independent of the stressor being removed.

• 46:29Tim Ferriss?

  Sounds a lot like pain signaling, or, anyway.

• 46:33Speaker 04

  Everything is everything, my man. Like, this is why I love physiology. It's gonna tell you the story, right? And so we can run a little bit of a triage here. I look at your stuff and I see your respiratory rate seventeen resps per minute. I say, "All right, I'm gonna look back to the rest of your physiology. Do I see any other indicators of acute stress? I'm gonna look at blood. That's gonna tell me a lot what's going on. I can differentiate whether that stress is acute or chronic, based on various markers. I'm gonna ask you, we're gonna have conversations. When did you start noticing any signs and symptoms? Oh, back pain kicked up. Okay, did anything happen around then? What's going on, right? We're gonna figure this stuff out. It's very important, when you measure physiology, you always need to understand symptomology. Like, you're working with humans. You're not working with blood markers. And this is always the case.

• 47:14Speaker 04

  And so, if you have historical data, and this is one of the benefits of tracking over time, we can look back and say, "Okay, there's an uptick here. Your respiratory rate used to be 12, and now it's up here. Now it's 16. When's the breaking point?" If you don't have any of those things, fine. It doesn't particularly matter, because we have two clear action steps we can take in either of those cases. Whether we have an acute, specific thing we're doing right now, that's causing it, or whether this is some pattern from 10 days ago to 10 years to... It doesn't really matter, right? Number one, you know what? Here's a free version. You can generally get a good sense if somebody's respiratory rate is high, if they tend to feel very, very good during light or low-intensity exercise. You know why? Why? Because their metabolic rate now starts to match their respiratory rate.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  So if you're breathing at 16 breaths per minute, that's about 4-second, right? Ratio. You take 15 breaths in a 60-second window, right? It's about every 4 seconds, 2-second inhale, 2-second exhale, right? Run the math there. So if you are now going for a light jog, doing zone 2, zone 1, like low-level activity, maybe just walking, these people are not always, but oftentimes can't stand going a day without exercise. They gotta do some movement, they gotta get a sweat in someday. A lot of the times, those people's respiration rate's high. They can't go a day without it, because they feel tremendous when they're doing a low-level activity, because now they're finally at a heart rate... That's matching their respiratory... That's matching respiratory rate. And so what happens? CO2 concentrations are normalized, and you feel normal. When you don't do that, you go back into... This is, again, this is never perfect.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  There's no panacea here, there's no magic recipe with physiology, ever. So I don't oversell it, but it's very common in our Rapid Health and Performance Program to have people like this, who are just like, "I can't not work out, right? I get too much anxiety, get too much..." And then you look, and you're like, "Oh, I don't need to see your labs. I can predict your respiratory rate." I can predict your HRV. I can predict these other things and they feel great there. And so what is the solution in any of these cases? Number one, we have to reduce arousal, which means you no longer get headphones when we exercise. You no longer get headphones when you're walking. You're not going to put in a podcast when you're going out to take the dog for a walk. We have to reduce input and you have to, and this is, there's great work here from Emily Hightower. She has a course called Skill of Stress.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  It is fantastic. She's actually Brian McKenzie's partner. Phenomenal. Emily is a great resource. She's on our team as well now, at least in part. But she will talk about, hey, we need to read and regulate, which means you need to read your physiological state. You need to be aware that you're over breathing. You should be able to read that state and then you need to be able to regulate it. So what we're doing is reducing input. And so whatever it is, any physical activity, not as a hard and fast rule, but for the most part, we need you to be bringing senses out and paying attention to what's happening to your respiratory rate in this particular case. So reducing arousal, step number one. This could be, hey, no more work at night. This could be like a lot of the very classic stuff. You're doing too many things that bring up arousal at night or throughout the day.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  We could insert some specific down regulation in the middle of the day. Any number of ways we can go about this, but we want to have some point, particularly after the place where we have the highest sympathetic drive throughout the day. Your most focused and intense work session, your most physical session. And we're going to match that on the back end with an intentional down regulation piece.

• 50:32Tim Ferriss?

  What are your favorite levers to pull? And I'm sure it's customized, but just broad strokes with your high performing athletes and so on.

• 50:39Speaker 04

  For down regulation post?

• 50:40Tim Ferriss?

  That's right.

• 50:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. The easiest by far is give me two to seven minutes of just quiet dark. So we typically ask them to do some breath work post-exercise, which is as simple as.

• 50:56Speaker 04

  Turn the lights off, lay on your back, put a towel over your eyes, turn the music off, and just breathe for five minutes. If you want to follow a specific cadence and do something like box breathing, fine. If you want to do like a double exhale, which means say a four second inhale, eight second exhale, so you're an extended exhale, which is down regulatory typically, fine. If you're super into that stuff, if not, just quiet and calm.

• 51:23Tim Ferriss?

  Chill the fuck out and breathe.

• 51:24Speaker 04

  Chill out, dude. Just like bring it down. There's actually some initial data on that can accelerate adaptations to exercise, is post-exercise down regulation. It's not an extremely strong area of science, it's just a few papers, but nonetheless, it's enough for us to say, okay, what we want to do is take that high sympathetic drive, and then we want to basically expand your boundaries. So right now, your boundaries of up and down are narrow, and we want to bring it way up with exercise in terms of sympathetic drive really high, and then I want to match it with the downside. And so it's equal and opposite reaction. If you got to a seven out of 10 sympathetically, I want you to seven out of 10 parasympathetically. That's going to increase your ability to go up and down. Not always the case. Some people have the

• 52:09Speaker 04

  opposite problem. This is far more complicated, but broad strokes wise, it's more common for us to ask that than it is the opposite. By doing that, you are contributing to retraining breath rate. And so that is the second step. So first step was reduce arousal when you can. Second one is retraining breath work. If you want to do something like that, just do very light level exercise, but instead of doing just the movement, we're intentionally keeping a breath cadence. And so we're regulating, we're saying you need to learn to breathe at three second inhale, three second exhale. And so we're going to do whatever exercise you want. I don't care. Go as hard as you want. I don't care. But we are capping your inhalation and exhalation.

• 52:51Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So that would be three seconds in, three seconds out, it would be sort of in that, let's just call it 10 to 11 target range, right?

• 52:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 52:57Tim Ferriss?

  Breath per minute.

• 52:57Speaker 04

  There you go. That's the idea. And you can kind of do that. So you take a combination of approaches there to figure out what's really happening. And that solution can be very quick, can be a little bit longer. We're certainly, and to be really clear, not boiling down any or all mental health things into, just fix your breath rate, you'll be fine. I guess it's not even close to that simple, but it is something from our physiology side that we're really paying attention to.

• 53:22Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so hopping back to Tim 4.0.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, we got a little far off.

• 53:27Tim Ferriss?

  We didn't get off track. I mean, these are all interrelated, but if I'm going to be headed to altitude in, let's just call it seven to 10 days, I've already made a couple of what I would consider risk reducing decisions such as giving myself a week before intensive training to acclimate a bit to altitude because it always will affect my sleep for the first handful of days.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  What kind of rough ballpark me altitude are you talking here? 10,000?

• 53:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let's call it 10,000.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay.

• 53:54Tim Ferriss?

  So I typically have elevated heart rate for lots of straightforward reasons. Sleep is compromised, dry, blah, blah, blah. Part number one would be sort of reducing the risk of injury, right, for me. And then, because I'm not a professional skier, but even if I were, I suppose that would be number one. But given what I've mentioned, and I'll say, I just have a few more things in case they're helpful. I realize this is a little bit of, it's not as comprehensive as I would like, but what I've observed pattern wise, there are kind of two things at once. One is like minimizing likelihood of the back becoming a major problem, which it was last season. I'd have to stop mid slope and like pick up one leg to try to like relieve pain. It was bad.

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 54:33Tim Ferriss?

  And there were days when I just couldn't even ski because I hadn't slept the night before because I'd been tossing and turning with back pain, right? So a few things that have helped, some of which are easier to implement than others. So the first thing I've noticed, very clear over the last nine months, more time spent sitting, the more back issues. And when I did some testing with Eric Cressy, just basic stuff, right? But if I'm sort of in a flexed position and I do compression, say on a chair or extended, doesn't really bother me. If it's sort of straight up and down, for lack of a better way to describe it, compression sensitivity. So heel drop test, fucking hate it. Very sensitive.

• 55:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:11Tim Ferriss?

  And other things that may or may not be helpful. Certainly if I'm working, and this is a layperson speaking, so keep that in mind, folks, but sort of the antagonistic muscles. If I'm doing core work of any type, Pilates, et cetera, that tends to significantly alleviate the lower back issues. Stuart McGill style, kind of.

• 55:35Speaker 04

  The big four.

• 55:36Tim Ferriss?

  The fundamentals, big four, exactly. Especially the side planks seem to alleviate a lot of the, what I would tend to describe as just like overall like Q L spinal erector tightness. On the inflammation side, interestingly, I can gobble anti-inflammatories like Tic Tacs. It does not seem to help much. Ice and ketones really help. Ketones only in a fasted state, but ketones and ice tremendously helpful with some durability. I mean, ice, that effect lasts for longer than I would have guessed. So anyway, those are a few things, but I'm going to be at altitude in 10 days. At some point, certainly, I definitely will talk about this after we stop recording, but would love to test the absolute rest at some point.

• 56:21Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, we could get that done in a night.

• 56:22Tim Ferriss?

  Very, very interested in that. Because also like the polysomnography stuff, it's like your first night's going to be dog shit, right? With all that stuff hooked to you. And then like, it's easy to corrupt the data.

• 56:32Speaker 04

  How much do you want me to shit on polysomnography? Cause I can.

• 56:35Tim Ferriss?

  No, no, no, let's save that.

• 56:36Speaker 04

  It is, it is an absolute disaster and borderline useless.

• 56:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, let's save it. We'll give people that, but 10 days I'm at altitude. How would you, in lieu of, since we won't have time to do all of this testing first, I am going to pay much more attention to the respiratory rate. I suspect mine is elevated. My resting heart rate also chronically, I mean, or I shouldn't say chronically, but for as long as I've ever paid attention to it, higher than desirable.

• 57:04Speaker 04

  Well, you're a data guy.

• 57:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 57:06Speaker 04

  We got to have data that we can use right now.

• 57:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, I have certainly, I'm sure I have a fair amount of stuff.

• 57:12Speaker 04

  All of our special, you know, preferred markers and all that, but I bet we could get a really strong sense of what's happening based on what you have on your phone. You certainly do some sort of tracking at this point of your sleep.

• 57:22Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I haven't used say OraRing etc. in a while, just because the main takeaways were like, yeah, don't drink before bed, maybe don't drink at all. So, right, I mean, I, there were a few things that I took away from it and I was like, okay.

• 57:33Speaker 04

  This is the problem, right? There's a significant difference between you don't have a clinical sleep disorder and you're sleeping great. Are you familiar at all, any of the research on sleep extension?

• 57:42Tim Ferriss?

  Sleep extension?

• 57:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 57:44Tim Ferriss?

  I don't think so.

• 57:44Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, like, it's so insane. If you want to understand your risk of disease, 30, 40, 50 years, okay, yeah, don't sleep four hours a night. That's great. If you want to look at what happens with disease markers between seven hours of sleep a night and eight hours, okay, there's not a convincing argument there, right? So the take home message there is don't have horrific sleep. But that is not nearly the same as optimizing your performance. The data on what goes from good to great sleep on optimizing performance are strong. There is a ton of research on specifically high performing athletes in a number of areas. There's at least four studies I'm aware of in the areas of what we'll call sleep banking or sleep extension. Sleep banking is such that before going into exposure of either restricted sleep, high

• 58:27Speaker 04

  intensity or high duration training, or both, what happens when you bank sleep ahead of time? Get more than More than Normal Right. And so a lot of these data are looking at things like going into fight camp, okay? Going into training camps. We know that we have a combination of increased training. And so by that fact alone, our injury risk has gone up. Injuries in training camps are higher. You're coming in somewhat deconditioned, just playing a part of it. You're doing a high intensity, a high volume at the same time. Now, we also know on the side, sleep goes down significantly during those phases of intensified training, which you're about to go do, right? Yep. So we're 10 days away. We know that this is happening and we know your injury risk is going to quadruple Yep.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  During this phase. So that's roughly what is going to happen. Now, a bad night of sleep is irrelevant. That's not going to increase your injury risk that much. However, if you look at, and the research again is not insanely strong here, but there is an association with risk and sleep. And so the number one thing I'm thinking is, okay, you already mentioned, and you said this a couple of times, your sleep isn't great when you're in altitude for obvious reasons. Yeah, for the first week or two. Right. We need to bank ahead of time. It's like, starting tonight, we need to maximize sleep, as much sleep as humanly possible. The number here is 10 hours. We need to get to 10 hours of sleep. We need to get ahead of that curve, right? We know what's going to happen and we know that for altitude, we have first night effect. You never sleep particularly well the first night in a new place, you know, all those things. And we know altitude is going to have those physiological issues.

• 59:57Speaker 04

  So we need to bank that. That sleep banking can get ahead. Sleep extension is taking good and going to great sleep. There's a handful of studies, again, probably five, ranging from 45 minutes of extra sleep per night for three days, all the way up to two plus hours a night of additional sleep for five to seven weeks. Data on rugby players, high level endurance cyclists, division one basketball players, division one swimmers, potentially missing another one. But enough here, four, five, six studies from different laboratories, looking at different metrics. You're going to see improvements in particularly one, this is actually a classic Sherry Ma study. You're talking about two hours of additional sleep per night and people already sleeping well.

• 1:00:37Speaker 04

  The caveat with all this is, we're not looking at sleep deprivation, which is, you know, you went 24 hours straight without sleep. Or what we call extreme sleep restriction. So you slept for four hours or three hours. You're talking about people already sleeping reasonable amounts of time, and now you're adding this 45 minutes to up to two hours a night. Now, in doing that, you're seeing in Sherry's initial study, 9% improvement in free throw shooting accuracy. This is in division one basketball players. Same thing with three point shooting accuracy, improvements in reaction time. Now, these are actually not done in a single time. So what they're looking at is kind of like, I think they shot free throws kind of in practice every day. They track that number over the course of the season, kind of thing.

• 1:01:18Speaker 04

  So not like just one particularly good day of shooting or bad. With any of this stuff, and all science has limitations. These are not perfect studies. In this particular case, they didn't have a control group. You'd also assume people get better in season, like that happens. But a 9% improvement in elite athletes of a skill, let's say it was 50% high.

• 1:01:43Speaker 04

  Let's say it was 75% high. Like, you're still talking a 3, 4, 5% improvement, which is really, really impressive, right? There are data on NBA players and their tweeting activities. So how much they tweet post-game as a defunct measure of like who's asleep and who's not. And that can predict almost 2% of shooting accuracy the next day.

• 1:02:02Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just imagining all the quants we're gonna go out and start betting on games now based on analyzing tweet volume and timing.

• 1:02:11Speaker 04

  No, Sherry, actually, I think.

• 1:02:13Tim Ferriss?

  It's actually clever.

• 1:02:14Speaker 04

  I don't know her at all, but I've seen her stuff. I think she worked for ESPN for like three years and she did this thing where she would predict NFL games, like who would win or lose based strictly on circadian rhythms. And I think she was like 70 to 80% accurate for three years span.

• 1:02:27Tim Ferriss?

  That's wild.

• 1:02:28Speaker 04

  Stephen Lockley, who's actually worked at the rest of this, he's done a ton of this work. So there's things to pay, we're so off track here, but this is too fun. I'm coming back to a point to your ski thing here in a second, I promise. I don't promise. I loosely promise.

• 1:02:41Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I'll hold you to it.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  All right. So what you want to pay attention to is sleep, is sleep duration, of course. All that stuff is great. Sleep quality, this is where polysynography becomes really problematic. Like defining sleep quality is really challenging.

• 1:02:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:53Speaker 04

  It's not the same thing.

• 1:02:54Tim Ferriss?

  So let me ask you a question related to sleep and maybe we'll, we'll dive even further into this, but a few things. With sleep banking, I would imagine there are people out there, and this would include me, who would say, I kind of wake up when I wake up and I might feel tired, but I'm not sure how I would be physiologically capable of extending my actual sleep. I could extend my time in bed, but I'm not sure of how to extend it. So that's, let's just make that part A. Part B is very specific, which is, I'd be curious to know your thoughts on caffeine and best ways to reduce or get off caffeine. Because what I noticed recently, I did 30 days with no caffeine, zero. It's the first time I've probably done that since I was 16.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:03:37Tim Ferriss?

  And I mean, zero caffeine, no tea, no nothing for 30 days. All of my sleep issues went away, like resolved magically, right?

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:03:46Tim Ferriss?

  And what was fascinating to me is that prior to that, I would often try to fix my sleep issues by attempting to sleep more.

• 1:03:55Tim Ferriss?

  More time in bed. I was, I mean, hopefully, this is smart enough. If I were tossing and turning, I'd just get up, right? As opposed to just like suffering for an hour or two in bed. What I noticed when I got off the caffeine is that I, in many cases, was quote unquote, sleeping less. But I was going to bed earlier, much earlier, right? I was going to bed, in this case, like nine, nine thirty, ten o'clock. Waking up a lot earlier, but waking up wide awake.

• 1:04:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:04:23Tim Ferriss?

  No fatigue, no dragging ass, no, I need a cup of coffee. So the two questions are, for people who are listening and are doubtful they would be able to extend their sleep. What are some options? That includes me right now, because I'm back on the sauce. And we could dissect that. It's been a fucking nutty last 10 days. I'll spare you the drama, but a lot of things have happened in life that were unexpected. So my soothing mechanism has been drinking caffeine. I'm willing to get off of it, but now I have to do it when I'm in real life. Whereas before I had, you know, four weeks off the grid and it was

• 1:04:54Speaker 04

  Of course. Oh, I see. Yeah.

• 1:04:55Tim Ferriss?

  So for people who are unsure of how they would bank sleep because they're doubtful that they could extend their sleep, some options? And then thoughts on caffeine or getting off of caffeine?

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Yep. This is why an appropriate measure of sleep quality matters.

• 1:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  To figure out just what you're working with. Is that what you mean?

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Speaker 04

  You have to, right? So that is, depending on what wearable or tracker you're using, that is defined differently by everybody. I would caution you against two major things here. One, worrying about a sleep score. Do not pay attention to that, right? That is, in part, almost all those are calibrated against polysomnography. And that is somewhat arbitrary, right? Even in 2007, they actually changed, I think it's like the American Sleep Society or something.

• 1:05:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Speaker 04

  Changed their definition of what deep sleep is. So.

• 1:05:45Tim Ferriss?

  Moving target.

• 1:05:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:05:47Tim Ferriss?

  And polysomnography, for people who don't know, I mean, this is what we were referring to earlier, like Sleep Lab, bunch of stuff, stuff on your scalp.

• 1:05:52Speaker 04

  Quote unquote, gold standard. But what people don't know about that is, number one, those things changed. And then two, all, even in a sleep lab. And those are based on 30 second epochs, right? So what happens every 30 seconds? And then somebody goes in there, manually grades and decides this was a cutoff line. This was not a cutoff line. And so you're being still subjectively scored. Even on like you went in the lab, you went into the sleep clinic, you did the whole thing. It's a little bit nasty. So

• 1:06:15Tim Ferriss?

  So what should you pay attention to?

• 1:06:17Speaker 04

  Different ways to go about that.

• 1:06:19Tim Ferriss?

  I do have an Oura ring. I could wear one prior. I mean, I could put one on tonight or tomorrow.

• 1:06:22Speaker 04

  We use Oura for the record with almost everybody for many reasons. Have used it historically. So this is nothing against them whatsoever, but even Oura is matched against polysomography. So when they say they're 99% accurate or 80% accurate, it's against PSG, which I don't think is telling you the story. The second part about that is problematic is think about it this way. If I asked you, and we had this entire conversation about training and you said, hey, I want to train for my ski thing. Would I train the same way for these two months of skiing, physically train as I would if that was now a marathon? If that was just, I want to feel better in my joints or if that was, I want to gain some muscle. And the obvious answer is clearly no.

• 1:06:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:58Speaker 04

  We had the same conversation about nutrition, but yet when we think about sleep, it's just, yeah, yeah, sleep more.

• 1:07:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:07:04Speaker 04

  If you want to get better sleep, if you want to get better nutrition, in your particular case, you would hire probably somebody who's done performance nutrition for skiing. You would hire a high performance person for your physical training and sleep or in a this type of skiing and something like that. But when it comes to sleep, it's like, go to a sleep lab and get a doctor. But that's all we have here, right? And so we don't think about sleep as a high performance tool. When I'm saying that to say, why do you think your sleep stages should be the same every night? Doesn't make any sense. Would I expect your muscles to perform the same way? No. Would I expect your nutrition to be the same? Absolutely not. So not only do you be really cautious with the sleep score, but even worrying about how much time you spend in each one of those sleep stages based on a tracker is highly problematic.

• 1:07:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Speaker 04

  It shouldn't be the same. When you go ski for six hours a day, I promise you, your sleep architecture is going to be different than it is tonight.

• 1:07:55Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, totally. And if I was cramming for studying Chinese, it would be something else.

• 1:08:00Speaker 04

  No question, right? And so we need to go a better way about thinking of overall sleep quality. This is where things like, okay, what's your H R V look like? What is your respiratory rate? How do you feel? Did you have a hard time sleeping at night? Did you wake up a bunch? How do you feel right now when you wake up? Those are free ways to assess your sleep. There's actually strong data on two things here. One, I promise I'm coming back to the point. I warned you before we started.

• 1:08:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, no, you did. This is why I'm I'm alert. I'm sympathetically activated to keep track.

• 1:08:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Excellent data. If somebody sleeps for eight hours a night versus five hours a night, and you tell them the opposite, you will see a physiological response. So that corresponds to what you told them rather than what actually happened. So in other words, if I told you, man, we did this whole sleep study on you last night, Tim, you slept for two hours. You're like, really? Your reaction time, your memory, your focus, your attention that next day will reflect poor sleep. If you slept for two hours and the actual study here was five hours, and I told you eight, I said, hey, man, your ordering is super wrong. Actually, our technology is better and you sleep phenomenal. That's not true, but like I made it up, right? You would actually respond that way. There's a thing that's growing in the field called orthosomnia. Right?

• 1:09:10Speaker 04

  Which is actually sleep tracker induced insomnia. And so those scores matter to you. They matter more than you think. There's also an anticipatory response that can happen, such that this is why you don't check your phone first thing in the morning. So when you know that a certain thing happens, in this particular case, checking your sleep score first thing in the morning, you will then back calculate and start adjusting your sleep to wake up in that aroused state, which then compromises your sleep quality because you know that thing is happening in a certain amount of time.

• 1:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning you're anticipating waking up, looking at your sleep score.

• 1:09:43Speaker 04

  Getting a positive or negative feedback, and now it's disrupting. This is why we're typically waking up all of a sudden earlier. Don't know why, things like that. So all that stuff, you need to be really, really careful with understanding, how am I using any of these technologies? If I overall am. So sleep quality, we'll kind of leave it to that for now.

• 1:10:04Tim Ferriss?

  Sleep banking, how to?

• 1:10:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. Back to our original point here now. When you are thinking about sleeping more, we're paying attention to those other ones first. Duration is the one you keep saying, sleep banking. But really, I've tried to make the argument sleep quality matters and then timing. So if you are in the same timing and have a higher quality, you have de facto increased duration.

• 1:10:24Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 1:10:25Speaker 04

  Even if your duration didn't actually increase. So the number one and two things I'd say there is, number one, let's make sure you're timing your activity today in the right time of your physical day. That's going to make you feel like you've slept more. Your performance will go up. And so without actually increasing a minute of sleep, you performed like you've, it's like a pseudo sleep banking. It's like pseudo sleep extension, getting a higher quality of sleep and all those things is the same thing. So that's step number one and two, independent of a single extra minute of sleep. If you still need that, then this is where things like napping can come in. Now be careful with napping. I personally don't like it at all. In these particular cases, I'm okay going with it as long as it's not reducing sleep pressure. Like is it harming your sleep latency?

• 1:11:09Speaker 04

  Are you waking up more, having a harder time going to sleep at night and you're losing total duration? A lot of people can get away with a lot of napping and it doesn't harm it.

• 1:11:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it doesn't work very well for me.

• 1:11:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay. So in your particular case, I would say just take what we have, get as much sleep as absolutely possible and then build in what are non-sleep equivalents. So what can we do throughout the day to encourage extreme down regulation? And really banking that, it's not the same as banking sleep, but is it having the same potential? Well, we've taken a couple of steps of logic away, but it's close, right? So this is pick breath work, pick low intensity exercise, pick non-sleep, deep rest stuff, right? Peak yoga nidra, like all kinds of things we can do that are going to simulate some aspect of sleep. And that's what we're going to go after. And then really doubling, tripling, quadrupling down on all of your personal known best sleep practices.

• 1:12:00Speaker 04

  And just really making sure that is our top priority for the day. What are the things I have to get done? Check in for my flight, pack, things like that. And then the rest of the time, like I'm really making sleep my, so I'm starting my down regulation practice now at three o'clock PM or something, or whatever you do. So that by the time eight o'clock hits, like you're just very zen out.

• 1:12:20Tim Ferriss?

  So for me, I would say these days, not just reducing, eliminating caffeine.

• 1:12:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:26Tim Ferriss?

  And then ensuring I am not exceeding a certain duration of sitting, which is fucked for this week, some recording podcasts, but that's okay. Those two things, if I attend to those two things, everything else is rounding error.

• 1:12:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:38Tim Ferriss?

  So those are the two, putting aside the low back stuff for now. We'll come back to it, but it's such a gnarled, tangled mess of. Different theories and diagnoses, but the caffeine is, I suppose, a little simpler, not always easy, but what is, what is your position here?

• 1:12:54Speaker 04

  Great. I personally don't love caffeine much, not as a scientist, not as a coach, as a human.

• 1:13:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 04

  Like, I don't like it that much. I'll have some, but like a half-caf espresso is like perfect. This tiny backlog down there. Your physiology will tell you that answer. And what I mean by that is, I have plenty of people that do fine on caffeine, and their sleep is fantastic. And others, it really is detrimental. If you were to look across in the landscape of the research, what you're globally going to see is caffeine is problematic for sleep. It just doesn't. And I'm not even talking about like, hey, you don't have caffeine past 2 o'clock PM or things like that. I'm talking about literally any caffeine ingestion whatsoever, just seems to take sleep the wrong direction.

• 1:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and I think I mis-evaluated this for a long time, because I can consume stupid amounts of caffeine and fall asleep, but the sleep architecture is disaster, right? It's like a spider webs that is created by the spider on methamphetamine, where you're like, oh, that doesn't look right.

• 1:13:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:51Tim Ferriss?

  That's my sleep.

• 1:13:52Speaker 04

  Okay, so, one thing you can pay attention to is your physical output. There are not any data that I'm aware of that suggests that sleep duration is linearly tied to energy expenditure, such that if you burn more calories, you don't sleep more. But there's clearly some association here. I mean, just based on basic physiology, when we understand how caffeine works and how sleep works, and that there's clearly an association. Let me give you a very simple example. Most people are aware at this point of a molecule called ATP. Right? This is the energy currency of all biology. It's the only way we can use cellular energy. Now, that stands for adenosine triphosphate. So it's an adenosine molecule with tri, three phosphates, 1, 2, 3. The way that energy is created from ATP is you take one of those

• 1:14:35Speaker 04

  phosphates at the end and you break that off. In our biology, that is exergonic, meaning it gives off net energy, and we can use that. What that leaves is a molecule called ergonic phosphate, so one of those Ps is floating around. And then now, instead of having a triphosphate, you have a di-phosphate. So there's two of them. If you were to do that one more time, and this becomes challenging, but that adenosine di-phosphate goes to an adenosine mono-phosphate, you do that one more time, and now you just have adenosine. Those phosphates are now recycled and gone back. That adenosine molecule is what drives most of sleep pressure. And the way caffeine works... Is that will competitively bind to the same receptors. So they're binding up to that receptor, which means adenosine can't, which means you don't feel the pressure for sleep, right? Great, this is why it causes so many sleep issues.

• 1:15:20Speaker 04

  Therefore, it makes some intuitive sense to say, if I burn a bunch more ATP, this should then, if I have a bunch of caffeine in the system, allow me to generate more overall pressure because I'm creating more total adenosine in the system. Better ability to bind. Now, that's not a rate limiting step to it. That's why there's not a linear relationship there, but you're going to have some stuff there. What I say that to mean is, are people that engage in the most physical activity, even when they consume decent amounts of caffeine, tend to, on average, still be okay with their sleep architecture? And so, one of the ways to do that, of course, genetics and how fast, and we've probably talked about this, but how fast you metabolize caffeine and don't and stuff like that, that all matters.

• 1:16:04Speaker 04

  But the reality of it is, if you are in that situation, having a high energy expenditure, and the other one I'll say is having a high cognitive expenditure. So making sure both those demands are really high are going to get you in a position where if you have to be on the sauce, as you say, that you're giving yourself the best chance to sleep the highest amount. So when you asked me that second question of, how do we think about caffeine? We typically deal with high performing folks. So whether this are athletes or non-athletes, they're all in this game for high performance, which means caffeine comes along for the ride almost all the time. Caffeine is an incredibly powerful ergogenic aid. Tons of research on it affecting and enhancing human performance in a lot of ways, right? And so, we use it a lot for athletes. You're going to perform better, that's great. But you have to play the game of sleep.

• 1:16:49Speaker 04

  So when you cross over of, yeah, you had better numbers in the gym, or on the court, or on the course, or wherever at, but now we've lost sleep, there's no right answer here. At what point do we say, okay, I'd rather you be a little bit fatigued and not train as hard, but then sleep tonight? And I can't answer that. One of the easiest examples is with our PGA golfers. And so here's a good example. You're gonna be on a course for four to six hours in the PGA Tour. Energy is a big deal. So we gotta keep these folks, especially when it's hot and we're playing in Augusta and we're playing in like all these really difficult places. So we gotta keep people hydrated and performing. At the same time, golfers don't typically love caffeine because any amount of loss of neuromuscular control is 1% loss there is catastrophic. You gotta be there.

• 1:17:34Speaker 04

  So in golf, what happens is, so golf is played in, well, in the PGA Tour, four days. So you play Thursday and Friday. The top half of the group gets to play the weekend and the bottom half goes home. So you're cut, if you will. But to make things even, because circadian rhythms matter so much, you play one of those first two days in the morning and you play the other day in the afternoon. So half the golfers, and then you need to switch, right? And so sometimes it's an advantage to play early, depending on the weather, sometimes. So they just try to make it even. Say, alright, Thursday you have 6 a.m. tee time, then Friday's, you know, noon or 1:00 or whatever the case is. Okay. Well, that is really hard because if you're a West Coast player, say in Phoenix, and you're gonna go play a tournament in Georgia, like Augusta, and you get a 7 a.m. tee time. This is a 4 a.m. tee time. Yeah.

• 1:18:16Speaker 04

  Which means you're up at 1:30 and practice, warm up, all those things. And so you may wanna go to caffeine to say, hey, I need a little bit of a turn on here to get going because my neuromuscular skill is significantly compromised, right? So it's gonna be really hard to get going. The downside of that, though, is now what have we done to sleep? Because if we're in the wrong situation, if we have early tee time Thursday, late tee time Friday, we're fine. But if you're doing well and you have the opposite, then you have a late start Thursday, and then you have a super early start Friday. So you have like short number of hours between when you finish and then play the next day. The caffeine on the first day is then if that compromises sleep at all, then you're really doubling down on how hard that next day is going to be.

• 1:18:59Speaker 04

  And so you have to really be careful about how much caffeine you use because at some point, and this is just a coaching decision, right? How much do you wanna perform better right now versus sacrifice tomorrow? And what are you doing? The same could be said for any sport, and this is really hard for our football players. So when are we practicing in the NFL? If we're playing a night game, do we use a bunch of caffeine before that Sunday night? Night football game or that Monday night football game, baseball players is the worst because they're playing typically at seven, seven oh five, seven, 10 P M. If they're pitching, whatever, they're going to be done at 10 at the earliest. And now you've got to come back off that train and try to get to sleep before four A M. And now we're changing time zone. So there's no one answer for that, I guess, is my point. So how do you use it judiciously and carefully?

• 1:19:41Tim Ferriss?

  So in terms of getting off of it, I mean, it seems to be, and maybe I'm simplifying here, but I recall being in Korea not too long ago and I didn't use any caffeine when I was adjusting to Korea, which was challenging, but a friend of mine was explaining sleep deprivation with young kids. And if you asked him how you contend with that, his answer was effectively like, don't be weak. He was like, you just contend with it, right? There is no magic trick, which might be the answer for getting off caffeine. It's like, yeah, you're going to have to just like bite the bullet and have a week probably of some degree of withdrawal symptoms, which I might just have to contend with. Okay, so let's just say if I grab a device, whatever device I happen to have, I use that prior to getting to altitude, I landed altitude.

• 1:20:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:23Tim Ferriss?

  I can try to do some sleep banking up to that point, which would include non-sleep augmentation in the form of non-sleep deep rest, yoga nidra, meditation, whatever it might be. Any other thoughts in terms of what happens after I hit the ground?

• 1:20:40Speaker 04

  So another thing that would be a very easy win would be making sure hydration is really on point. When people get in cold, they tend to forget because when you go to and do something when it's hot, you have the visual tactical feel of your sweat. You lose that in the cold. I know you've done a bit of hunting.

• 1:20:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:57Speaker 04

  Yeah. So this is where like it comes in for me all the time. This is one of my primary areas of passion. And you get out and you spend days and you're working all day, running up and down mountains. And it's really cold outside. You just forget.

• 1:21:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:08Speaker 04

  You drink water, right? And then you start seeing, feeling signs and symptoms of exhaustion and altitude and all those things. And you realize, all right, there's nothing I can do about the altitude, but I can. Correct hydration and that's going to be really, really important. Having viscous blood is not going to help anything of your performance.

• 1:21:25Tim Ferriss?

  Catch up blood doesn't help?

• 1:21:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, catch up's not a good thing to be pumping through your veins. So hydration would be another easy win. You also are probably aware of what happens with hydration, just being on a plane, assuming you're on a plane to go out there. But the altitude will get it. You already said dryness, it's going to be dry up there. This is part and parcel. So that would be the next big one I would go after is maintaining great hydration now. And then certainly optimizing it, or at least maintaining it. Once you get there, another super easy win.

• 1:21:50Tim Ferriss?

  Any guidelines around that? When to hydrate? How to hydrate?

• 1:21:55Speaker 04

  Easy example here, half your body weight in ounces per day is a very rough number. So if you weigh 200 pounds to 100 ounces a day, gets you sort of close ballpark. Within that, you want to make sure that you're not reducing sleep. Some of the biggest wins we've had in, from a coaching perspective, is actually reducing water intake.

• 1:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'd love for you to say more about that. A friend of mine just a few days ago said, he's like, yeah, are you familiar with the three, two, one rule? And I was like, I have no idea what you're talking about. And he said, no food three hours before sleep, no water two hours before sleep. And then no devices one hour before sleep. I was like, oh, that's clever. Okay. I mean, it's not a bad heuristic to use, but how do you think about reducing liquid intake?

• 1:22:32Speaker 04

  As a global answer, yeah, but I'd like, I probably wouldn't use that approach personally much. You do want to taper down fluids at night. I'm laughing because we've had a number of people and they come in and they, they are sure they have a sleep disorder or something or else. And we look and we're like, all right, you're peeing three times a night. And it's like, okay, well, why is that happening? Well, it can actually happen because of low quality sleep. There are a number of things that happen that people, that are common and people think are benign that are not. And then one of them is that. So it is somewhat normal to wake up once throughout the night to have to pee. Okay, great. More than that, something is probably happening. Either it's one of a couple of main areas. You're drinking way too much water, pure water too late at night.

• 1:23:14Speaker 04

  Or two, you do legitimately have some sleep quality issues and that can actually contribute to nocturia overnight urination. But just the easy solution there is pay attention to a couple of things. Number one, how much water are you actually drinking at night? In the two hours, three hours before. And then two, pay attention, when you wake up to pee, pay attention to it. Is it a really large volume? Is it really clear? Or is it a smaller or medium amount? And/or is it of a more tinted color? And then pay attention to how much, we actually weigh and measure all this stuff, but you can just use these rough rules. How much you pee the next morning? Same thing. So if you're getting up and you pee once throughout the night and it's a medium amount and then you pee the next morning and it's very small and it's very yellow, then you can say this is probably not overhydration.

• 1:23:58Speaker 04

  This is probably being induced by low sleep quality. If it's the opposite, it's like, yeah, I woke up, I went pee and it was like, I was there for a while. And then I woke up the next morning and I did it again and I had these, you know, half a pound or a pound and a half of urine. Then you have a pretty good idea. It's like you're simply drinking way too much water at night. You can, in that case, try to add things like salt, but the better idea is just not drink so much water.

• 1:24:19Tim Ferriss?

  Any guidelines on that? Any suggestions specifically? I mean, in the sense that people need to remember something to act upon it. So I'd be curious to know why the three, I mean, look, I just heard about this two days ago, right? And it's just a heuristic. It's not a hard and fast drill, but like the three, two, one, it's like, oh, it's easy to remember. I mentioned it once, I was able to remember it. I happen to pee quite a lot at night. But guess what? When I was off of caffeine, didn't pee at night. And so if you're consuming diuretics and then compensating by drinking tons of water, or in my case, I'm just a compulsive water drinker. If I sit at a lunch with someone, like I'll drink one or two bottles of water. Like I drink a lot of fucking water. And I'm not saying you're making amazing faces. We'll get that on the video.

• 1:25:01Speaker 04

  There's so much opportunity with you.

• 1:25:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. So let's get into the juicy bits.

• 1:25:05Speaker 04

  Okay. So I would love to know, I didn't intend, I'm not intending to always go back to sleep here. I don't even think we intended to get here at all really today, but we're here again. You can differentiate between acute and chronic dehydration in blood really quickly.

• 1:25:17Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. What do you look for?

• 1:25:18Speaker 04

  Albumin is the big ticker there. And so acute dehydration markers, take a look at hemoglobin, hematocrit and sodium. Okay. That's going to give you an indicator. If you stack albumin on top of that, if those three things start to tend to high hematocrit, hemoglobin, sodium, you got a good indication of dehydration. If they go the opposite direction, we're worried about hyperhydration.

• 1:25:38Tim Ferriss?

  Hyperhydration.

• 1:25:39Speaker 04

  Right? If you tick in albumin on top of that. Then you're getting an indication that this has been around for a very long time. So we can calculate osmolality, we can do it independent of a urinalysis and things like that. Now, why this stuff matters, think about it. All of those metrics, hematocrit is the percentage of your blood that is red blood cells. So it is a percentage. It's not an actual unit. Sodium and hemoglobin come in such low concentrations, we tend to give them relative to total blood volume, which means it's how many milligrams per deciliter of blood. If you were dehydrated, your total blood volume goes down so much such that those numbers, even if they're the actual same absolute value, get reduced. Now, albumin is an acute phase reactant, which means it responds acutely to inflammation. Okay, so it'll change.

• 1:26:24Speaker 04

  And so here you go, here's some fun. This is gonna frustrate everybody.

• 1:26:28Speaker 04

  Okay, if you've ever had blood work done and someone's been like, "Wow, your labs look fine," but you're like, "I don't feel fine." Could be a lot of things happening here, but albumin is one of the easiest examples here. Is an acute phase reactant, but albumin is responsible for 50 to 60% of the osmotic pressure in your vessel. So it's the protein that carries around any number of things, 10 to 15 or so percent of your cortisol is being carried on albumin, a bunch of other things. So it's a main protein. It's made in your liver and it's got like a 20 or so day turnover rate. So every 20 or so days, you'll recycle that albumin. That in response to dehydration will change. It will change in response to inflammation, too. So here's what happens.

• 1:27:08Speaker 04

  Imagine a situation, a scenario when somebody is slightly inflamed and slightly dehydrated. Pretty common, right? Yeah. Albumin got tugged up and tugged down, which means where is albumin gonna be on your blood? Dead in the middle. You will have a normal albumin. Right, your snapshot's gonna look just fine. This is an x-ray. Knee's not broken, your knee must be fine. Not at all. So now, if I can look at albumin and say, "Hey, wait a minute. Albumin, as well as other markers, are trending high. Now I got an idea what's happening." If they're not... Now I can look at albumin and go, oh, okay, this is an inflammation issue. That's our marker. And so I can really pay attention to that and say, Tim, you're hyperhydrating. You're drinking way too much water. Do you know what the signs and symptoms of hyperhydration are? Well, waking up and peeing three times a night is one headaches,

• 1:27:53Speaker 04

  brain fog. Do you have many people in our program whose brain fog we've solved in day one? Because they're just drinking way too much water.

• 1:27:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I believe it.

• 1:28:00Speaker 04

  Headaches gone away, all kinds of issues, right? Almost the exact same symptoms are associated with dehydration as hyperhydration. You don't need to do a single lab if you want to be a dork like us and get all that stuff figured out. But if you are peeing consistently throughout the day like that, and if it carries over into night at the rate that you're talking about, almost surely you were hyperhydrating. This becomes a huge problem because it can induce what's called hypoanatremia.

• 1:28:23Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah, dangerous.

• 1:28:24Speaker 04

  You can die.

• 1:28:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Speaker 04

  People died.

• 1:28:26Tim Ferriss?

  People heard stories of radio jockeys having water drinking competitions, people die.

• 1:28:31Speaker 04

  Fraternity parties.

• 1:28:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, dangerous.

• 1:28:33Speaker 04

  Tons of stuff.

• 1:28:33Tim Ferriss?

  Marathons too. I mean, people were hyperhydrating.

• 1:28:36Speaker 04

  Marathons, Ironmans, like things like that happens. It can cause hypoanatremia. Anatremia is sodium. It's the science word for sodium, right? So it's hypo, so that gets too low. It's not actually an issue of sodium getting too low. It's an issue of excessive water intake. And so the the lateral gradient between your muscles and your blood becomes neutral. So the gradient gets lost. And so muscle, and in this particular case, the heart muscle fails to contract. This is muscle fatigue. This is lack of performance. I'm just not feeling as strong, as powerful, as twitchy as I used to be, all the way up to in severe cases, death, right? Because the cardiac tissue stops. So I would be interested to look at at more your metrics and just paying attention to, all right, how many times are you really peeing at night? And if you are, I would stop that immediately.

• 1:29:21Speaker 04

  And you will typically see very big changes in sleep, but overall function by not excessively hydrating.

• 1:29:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, this is a behavioral modification thing and not a knowledge thing for me. I would bet like right here on the spot without looking at my labs, I'd be like, I could bet half my net worth that I am hyperhydrating. Like, I know I'm hyperhydrating. I'm just looking at my behavior over the last couple of weeks. And it's it's really a question of like, how do I modify behavior in this case? Because like if I sit down at a lunch or a business meeting, my inclination is just to keep drinking whatever is sort of in front of me. Yeah, that could be coffee, could be water, rarely alcohol. But if it's alcohol, you know, it's sort of like whatever's in front of me, I will drink because I like the motor movement. I have no idea. It's gratifying in some way. And then if I layer diuretics on top of the liquid intake, then we have a hell of a lot going on.

• 1:30:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, alcohol does the same thing at night, right?

• 1:30:09Tim Ferriss?

  Alcohol is for sure because it's inhibiting like vasopressin, right? I think that's what's going on.

• 1:30:14Speaker 04

  It's a diuretic hormone.

• 1:30:15Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:30:15Speaker 04

  ADH is the real problem, right? So you're going to down regulate that. And then that's good, right? When you drink alcohol, you should be giving the physiologist symptoms to pee more and clear quickly, right? So here's what I'd say. I would say actually two last things on that. One, like as a behavioral coaching tool, then we would have some sort of mechanism for you. There'd be something in your day that triggers water stopping. This could be, okay, when you shower at night, we just don't drink water afterwards.

• 1:30:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:30:41Speaker 04

  When we have.

• 1:30:42Tim Ferriss?

  Decide what the trigger is.

• 1:30:43Speaker 04

  What is the trigger?

• 1:30:43Tim Ferriss?

  What flips the switch? What other behavior?

• 1:30:45Speaker 04

  Right. So at that point, if you need to sip water, you can. But we're no longer having water in a visual or immediately achievable position. So no more water bottles, no more.

• 1:30:56Tim Ferriss?

  Take my Camelback off, you man.

• 1:31:00Speaker 04

  Well, you could leave it on for fun. Yeah, that would be physiologically, I would come back and say, of course, it's behavior, right? But is there something actually happening that's causing sensation of thirst? And I want to look at that side of your physiology.

• 1:31:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it's a great question. It's a great question.

• 1:31:15Speaker 04

  So back to labs.

• 1:31:16Tim Ferriss?

  It's just, it's wild hell. This isn't a surprise, but it's just a consistent reminder when these conversations get unpacked. It's like, I can't remember who it was, maybe Emerson. I'll give him credit, why not? When you try to tease out any one thing, you find it hitched to the rest of the universe in the sense that if I look at these behaviors, right, I also look at the very high, let's just call it allostatic load of the last week, a bunch of unanticipated events such as life have caused a tremendous amount of workload, very unexpectedly, right before the holidays.

• 1:31:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, that happened to me too.

• 1:31:46Tim Ferriss?

  When everybody's on their auto response.

• 1:31:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:48Tim Ferriss?

  And you're like, okay, interesting. Home Alone, you know, like, ah, and one of my coping mechanisms is, we don't have to spend a lot of time unpacking this, but is hot, cold sauna. Typically, I would do that earlier in the day. I would do that, let's say, 5, 6 p.m. But because of the nature of the schedule this past week, I've been doing it late at night. So what does that lead me to do? Leads me to hydrate around that. And then boom, here we are.

• 1:32:16Speaker 04

  Okay, so funny enough, you say that. You may or may not have heard, but some people actually. Sleep better when they do a sauna.

• 1:32:23Tim Ferriss?

  I do, if I do it earlier.

• 1:32:26Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:32:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:27Speaker 04

  A lot of people have success with sauna at night, right?

• 1:32:29Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:32:29Speaker 04

  Many reasons why. One of them, though, is any hyperhydration that has occurred.

• 1:32:34Tim Ferriss?

  When you bleed it out.

• 1:32:34Speaker 04

  You bleed it out.

• 1:32:35Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, okay.

• 1:32:37Speaker 04

  So it's not the worst thing ever.

• 1:32:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:40Speaker 04

  To be there. The only other thing I'd come back to is I would be willing to bet, probably not half my net worth, but some smaller margin, maybe a hundred dollars.

• 1:32:49Tim Ferriss?

  You're smarter. I'm just a terrible gambler.

• 1:32:51Speaker 04

  I love gambling.

• 1:32:54Tim Ferriss?

  We might come back to that.

• 1:32:55Speaker 04

  I love it. There are two things in this world I love more than anything, and that's trash talking and gambling.

• 1:33:01Tim Ferriss?

  Often go together. Okay, so you'd bet a hundred dollars.

• 1:33:03Speaker 04

  That your hydration habit is better when you have better down regulation practices.

• 1:33:13Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. I wouldn't bet against that.

• 1:33:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so now it's coming back to the same point, which is, okay, great. We can give you a mechanism that says, like, no more water bottles after 6:00 PM or whatever. That's great. But have we really solved the core issue?

• 1:33:27Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:33:27Speaker 04

  It's the same thing of going back to saying, okay, great. We took a look at that sodium-metastine ratio. We identified that that got really high or that got really low, really, and that caused signs and symptoms of fatigue, etc., cortisol's playing here. And so these people tend to feel really good when you give them salt. But did we solve the problem? No. We didn't. Because as soon as, you know, like, yeah, you took your element packs and you did all these great things. I felt way better. Amazing. Was your sodium truly low? Or was it being pulled down?

• 1:33:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. As a ratio, was it just being?

• 1:34:02Speaker 04

  Though even the absolute number, even the absolute number being pulled down as a response, right? So we've now had alterations in kidney function that changed how much sodium that we're holding on to. We haven't solved the issue.

• 1:34:13Tim Ferriss?

  This is also a case for me where drinking water is basically a socially acceptable, minimally disruptive compulsive habit that is a coping response for me.

• 1:34:25Speaker 04

  This is why I went to your HRV.

• 1:34:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It's like, it's like a worry stone. Me drinking water and. I think this is also a case, I'm just thinking out loud here because it's helpful for me, where I've spent so much of my life worrying about hydration because I have like hyperhidrosis. I always was good at cutting weight for wrestling. I mean, I would cut like 20, 30 pounds. I mean, absurd amounts that I would never recommend, terrible for you. However, I could do it because I sweat so easily.

• 1:34:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:34:53Tim Ferriss?

  That also meant that when I sweat a lot, my endurance, my power output would just go into the garbage. So for my entire life, my preoccupation has been hydrating.

• 1:35:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:05Tim Ferriss?

  And this is a case where it's like, okay, maybe that has served you at points. But in this case, why don't we try the opposite for 48 hours? And just like, and do this on it, but don't guzzle a gallon of water afterwards. Going to bed a little bit, sort of like when I did tennis training a long time ago. And I was whiffing the ball like into the net over and over again. And this pro said, look, for the next like 10 minutes of practice, you're allowed to hit the ball anywhere except into the net. He's like, if you, if you want to hit a home run.

• 1:35:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:34Tim Ferriss?

  Knock yourself out. He's like, the one place you cannot hit it is into the net.

• 1:35:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:35:38Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe this is a case where it's like, all right, Tim, the only thing, you can do anything except for drink a ton of water at night. Like, and if you go to bed a little dehydrated for two days, like you're quote unquote dehydrated.

• 1:35:49Speaker 04

  Totally.

• 1:35:49Tim Ferriss?

  May not be dehydrated.

• 1:35:50Speaker 04

  You will feel signs and symptoms of dehydration though. You will feel cotton mouth, I'm sure.

• 1:35:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:54Speaker 04

  You'll feel different things. Have you ever had your sweat tested?

• 1:35:57Tim Ferriss?

  No.

• 1:35:58Speaker 04

  That's a super easy start. Like, why don't we test how much you're actually sweating? And then what's the content of that sweat? And that's going to tell us the opposite side. And this is something that can be done for a few dollars at this point. So there are a number of different methods that people can purchase these things. I think as low as probably like 15 bucks all the way up to a couple of hundred dollars.

• 1:36:17Tim Ferriss?

  What would people, if people just wanted to learn about this, what would they Google?

• 1:36:20Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's a number of companies, like Gatorade makes a sweat patch. It's $12, I think, something like that. You can go all the way up to something like a Nix, N I X. And this is now, I think you buy that patch for $150 or something like that. And you can get different things, but you can actually in that get real time feedback. I'm not associated with them at all.

• 1:36:42Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting. So it's like a CGM, it's like a continuous glucose monitor for your sweat.

• 1:36:45Speaker 04

  A hundred percent. Now there's some issues, you don't get full electrolyte breakdown, but you'll, you'll know how much total fluid you're losing as well as sodium content. And we will actually use that because one of the real tricks. To maintaining optimal hydration status, whether you're talking about throughout the day or during exercise performance, is you have to make sure you're putting back in what you're sweating, which is to say, it is not just about water. We've talked about hyponutremia. We need to know that we're putting in a hypotonic solution. So the way of saying like the total pressure with all the different solutes and solvents in the cocktail needs to be the same as your blood. Glucose, sodium, chloride, potassium, all this stuff needs to be balanced. Doesn't have to be, but you're gonna get better results. If you drink excessively

• 1:37:30Speaker 04

  diluted fluids, let's just say pure water, then what's gonna happen is it'll go immediately into your gut, that'll get immediately into blood. It's very quick to get that across that barrier. And then your total blood volume will expand. You're running constant checks of total blood volume. You'll actually expand more than you think. And so you'll actually send signals that says, excrete the fluid. And so this is why if you're really, really dehydrated, say after the sauna, say you did a crazy session, when you do sauna, how much time do you do? Like 20 minutes, 30 minutes?

• 1:37:58Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not doing super long. I tend to, and this is where it gets a little tricky, because it's like, all right, what's the humidity in the sauna, right? So generally what I'll do, I'll get to, let's just call it 195 in the sauna, maybe between 195 and 210.

• 1:38:11Speaker 04

  Plenty hot.

• 1:38:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, plenty hot. So 195, 210, get in there and I will immediately start dumping water onto the stones. So I'm also jacking.

• 1:38:22Speaker 04

  Oh, I see. Yep.

• 1:38:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So I'm also jacking up the humidity. I would say generally, the way that I'll run it, because I do this almost every day. It's, who knows, four to seven times a week. I'll do, let's just call it 20 to 30 minutes. And that will be threshold for most people, right? They'll be like, I need to cool off. Then I'll do cold plunge.

• 1:38:40Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:38:40Tim Ferriss?

  For three to five minutes.

• 1:38:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:38:42Tim Ferriss?

  Then I'll go back in for a shorter session. And

• 1:38:45Speaker 04

  Five minutes warm back up.

• 1:38:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, like 10 minutes. And then also cold plunge on the opposite side, at which point I won't need as much. So I'll probably do three minutes of cold. That's a typical night.

• 1:38:55Speaker 04

  Okay. So in that first session, overall as well, how much weight are you losing? Do you know?

• 1:39:01Tim Ferriss?

  I'll say it is, if I were to guess, this is a straight guess, I mean, I think it's a few pounds. I mean, I would say over the two heat sessions, two pounds or at least a few pounds. I don't know how much I am reabsorbing in the cold plunge. For anyone who has never experienced extreme like weight cutting. We couldn't shower after cutting for wrestling. You would absorb multiple pounds of water back just by showering. But I don't know if that's true in this much more mild form, probably not. But I mean, I'm dumping sweat. There is a huge pool of sweat under me.

• 1:39:32Speaker 04

  How long does it take you from initiation, the second you walk in your sauna till you start sweating?

• 1:39:36Tim Ferriss?

  I would say if I'm throwing water on the rocks, two minutes, two to three minutes.

• 1:39:41Speaker 04

  Two minutes is the number. We always pay attention to that. If it's taking longer than that, we start to have concerns of dehydration. So when we handle this with our UFC fighters and stuff like two minutes is a good, pay attention. My guess is you are sweating out far more than that amount. It would be not uncommon for someone, you're plus or minus 160, 70 pounds.

• 1:40:03Tim Ferriss?

  170, 170 something, yeah. Low seventies.

• 1:40:06Speaker 04

  I would imagine in a 30 minute sauna session, three minutes, three pounds would be reasonable. If you're a hyper sweater, maybe more.

• 1:40:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I think it's basically the equivalent of a, like a soda stream full of water would be, would be my guess.

• 1:40:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now, this number differs significantly from people to people. I can just give you two direct examples. Tatiana Suarez, UFC fighter I've worked with for many years. She's a very good sweater. So she competes at 115 pounds. It is not particularly hard for her to sweat out four to five pounds at that low of a body weight. Not really hard. Now, there's a lot of work that goes into preparation before that, but it's not particularly hard. Brian Ortega, another UFC fighter who competes at 145 pounds and is a male. We tend to have to work to get four or five pounds out, right? So there is a spectrum.

• 1:40:52Tim Ferriss?

  To give you a crazy reference point, my senior year in high school, when I was competing, seriously, I cut from, this is, never do this, people, never, ever do this. But I got to a lean body weight. I was very lean then. It's kind of sad to think how much more muscle mass I had then, believe it or not, at like whatever age it was, 16, 17. But I was 178, super lean, and I cut to 152 twice a week. That was over.

• 1:41:16Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:41:17Tim Ferriss?

  I was doing that over 24 hours.

• 1:41:18Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:41:18Tim Ferriss?

  And that's water. That was water. Yeah.

• 1:41:21Speaker 04

  And a few other things, but yeah, for the most, that's a lot of water.

• 1:41:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, a few other things, but a lot of water. I sweat, to use your language, I'm a very good, I'm top tier sweater.

• 1:41:30Speaker 04

  Top, elite.

• 1:41:31Tim Ferriss?

  Elite sweater.

• 1:41:32Speaker 04

  Elite sweater. So, okay, that's great. We would come back and the reason I'm asking that is, is we would have a good, it's an easy way to figure out your sweat rate. So just way naked, go in the sauna, come back out completely dry off. I would recommend, in fact, if we're gonna do this test, don't put any water. I wanna keep it dry, so that we don't have anything on there. And then just measure, do it for 30 minutes, measure yourself, how much did you sweat? Right? Now, that's gonna tell us about your sweat rate in good sense. We don't have a sensor, so we don't have actually what's coming out of your sweat, which would be nice, because we're paying attention to, again, sweat content and sweat amount. But that's gonna be a good insight. Now, that changes on your day as well. So if you were to do a day where we podcast for five hours and you drink one glass of water and then you go into the sauna,

• 1:42:13Speaker 04

  you're gonna have way lower sweat rate than if you were to drink in three gallons. This is water load, right? This is in, in weight management sports, we did it that way. So, we wanna pay attention to all those things. You said you've been a sweater like that your entire life. Okay, great. Natural. People are different, we sweat differently. But is something coming back to that? There is probably something in your physiology to which is explaining why that is happening.

• 1:42:36Tim Ferriss?

  I've always had, so I was born premature, had a ton of issues as a preemie, was in the NICU, lots of thermal regulation issues since day zero. So tons of thermal regulation issues.

• 1:42:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:42:48Tim Ferriss?

  Body temperature tends to run low, so my, and I can give you my take on this, but like, I would say I tend to run in like the 97.1 to 97.4 degrees in terms of normal body temperature. My subjective experience is, much like when people have, say, a really high fever, they feel cold. I feel hot a lot of the time. Like, the ambient air temperature seems warmer to me than it does to, I think, most folks. But thermoregulatory issues from the get-go. So I've been hospitalized for heat stroke a couple of times. Whether that was a proper diagnosis or not, but basically like in hot conditions where other people are challenged, very challenged.

• 1:43:29Tim Ferriss?

  Like training in judo in Tokyo in the summer with a gi on, like indoors with poor ventilation, collapsed, taken to the hospital. I've had that kinda stuff happen a few times.

• 1:43:38Speaker 04

  I see. That may or may not have anything to do with heat regulation there. It could be a sensation, so you don't get the signals.

• 1:43:45Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, could be for sure.

• 1:43:46Speaker 04

  And or because of hyper sweating?

• 1:43:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, that was, yeah, there's a lot of sweat going on.

• 1:43:51Speaker 04

  Yeah. So the point is, you kind of come back to that whole story of unpacking, like, what is actually happening internally? Why are you doing it? So your cocktail for hydration would probably be abnormal, but what is something we could, needs to be dialed in so we can say, okay, great. Because if you drink too much water that's diluted for you. Remember, not for me, not for anybody else, for your physiology, if it's too diluted, then you have that excess of urination. But here's the kicker. You're urinating because that blood volume got that short term. So this is what happens when you drink water really quickly. You get a short term expansion of total blood volume, which causes you to then urinate it back, and you're not actually cellularly hydrated yet. So that stuff hasn't had time to cross into tissue where you're actually properly dehydrated, right? Because you've got three main areas.

• 1:44:33Speaker 04

  You have intracellular in the vessels themselves, and then you have interstitial. So it's the space between. You're drinking it in your stomach, it's going into your vessels. That's trying to get it across into tissue. If that goes too quickly through there, it doesn't have time to get into. So here's the kicker, you're chugging water, you're peeing clear constantly, and you're still cellularly dehydrated.

• 1:44:50Tim Ferriss?

  Dehydrated, yeah. What I've experientially found to be the case is that if I do really hard sauna sessions, I can be wiped out the next day. I can feel really fatigued. To avoid that, I can't hydrate in the sauna, I can't hydrate right after the sauna. I can't even hydrate within like 20 minutes of going into the sauna. It has to be like an hour to an hour and a half before the sauna with electrolytes. In which case, I'm able to, I have greater resilience and feel less fatigue the next day.

• 1:45:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:19Tim Ferriss?

  At least that's been, I haven't split tested everything, but that's been my experience.

• 1:45:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. So then the final piece would be, what is exactly in that electrolyte cocktail? And getting that dialed in so that we are putting back in the same thing that you're losing, so we're not excessively bringing in.

• 1:45:33Tim Ferriss?

  Which I guess comes back to the sweat test, right?

• 1:45:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:45:35Tim Ferriss?

  Knowing what the hell you are excreting.

• 1:45:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, you have to have that, that's going to tell you electrolytes. You have to have that in combination, again, ideally with what your standard metrics are throughout your system, and then making sure that, in addition, do we need to add glucose to the situation? Right? That's going to transport things into cells really effectively. Sodium comes along for the ride, water comes along for the ride with it. Does it not need to be in there?

• 1:45:56Tim Ferriss?

  You're the perfect person to ask, and I haven't had a chance to ask someone. Is it glucose? Is it the insulinemic response to glucose? Do other things work better than glucose? Artificial sweetener versus dextrose versus fructose versus fill in the blank? In terms of hydration?

• 1:46:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, glucose.

• 1:46:16Tim Ferriss?

  Glucose, just straight glucose.

• 1:46:17Speaker 04

  That's your answer.

• 1:46:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, now it doesn't mean it's your only thing that can be in there. It depends on what if we're only concerned about just hydration? Or if we have other things we're trying to do at once? So it's typically less common to only be caring about water. So in the case of you may need to be trying to increase or restore muscle glycogen. Are you trying to recover faster? Is there any tissue consideration there? That is a slightly different answer. Are we trying to maintain acute performance? So are we taking this in the middle of a session? That we're trying to keep going and perform better? Are we doing it to try to recover faster the next day? Or are we only concerned about just pure hydration at a steady resting state?

• 1:46:55Tim Ferriss?

  In this case, it would be if I had to weight it, I'd say it's like 70% hydration, 30% help with recovery. I like to sauna after weight training.

• 1:47:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay. So in that particular case, if you're trying to maximize recovery, then like glucose is going to be super, super effective. Fructose comes in the equation when we're trying to maximize carbohydrate intake and acute performance especially because glucose and fructose get through the gut barrier and they have different transporters. So when the glucose gets full, we can use fructose and get it through separately. So our ability to bring in without GI distress is much higher if we have a combo between glucose and fructose.

• 1:47:28Tim Ferriss?

  So you just have diversified transporters.

• 1:47:31Speaker 04

  Bingo. You have two freeways, one of them is full.

• 1:47:33Tim Ferriss?

  Two different types of ferries or yeah.

• 1:47:34Speaker 04

  There they go, right? Now, in terms of getting into the actual cell itself, there's two basic ways that you can get gluten four transporters. These are the transporters on muscle cells that allow glucose to go inside the cell. There's insulin dependent and insulin independent. And so muscle contraction itself is insulin independent. And then you would directly have insulin dependent, which is in this case, bring in glucose, insulin will then drive it in there. But if you're doing exercise, you're going to get that other contraction as well. And so you have both mechanisms to bring it in play. So in that particular case, glucose at a roughly 5% concentration or so, somewhere between five to nine is typically the sweet spot. It doesn't have to be part of your equation, but it is going to help the process. So post weight cut, if you were to drink electrolytes only, you would be limiting

• 1:48:19Speaker 04

  how quickly you can rehydrate. That's in extreme situations. If you're the average person hanging out, just like did a sauna session? You don't need to put a whole bunch of glucose into your drink. You're probably fine.

• 1:48:30Tim Ferriss?

  All right. So I'm going to weigh myself before and after sauna tonight.

• 1:48:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:48:33Tim Ferriss?

  No, no water on the rocks. And just to get an idea of what that actual number is, because I'm I'm super curious. I'll also be doing a sauna tonight with a guy who used to be a BJJ competitor. So I think he'll be equally interested to see what the hell happens with him.

• 1:48:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Do you track how much water you drink throughout the day total? Do you know what that number is?

• 1:48:48Tim Ferriss?

  I haven't. I have done it at points far in the past. I haven't done it recently, which would be pretty easy because I could.

• 1:48:54Speaker 04

  Super easy.

• 1:48:54Tim Ferriss?

  Well, what is the easiest way to keep track of that?

• 1:48:56Speaker 04

  Probably what you're about to say. Just fill one container.

• 1:48:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, multiply it out.

• 1:49:00Speaker 04

  Bingo. Just fill up a gallon. How far do you get down?

• 1:49:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:04Speaker 04

  Or if it's multiple, then you get it there.

• 1:49:05Tim Ferriss?

  So I'll do that tonight. 10 days from now, let's just say I make an attempt, which I will, to bank some sleep or sleep adjacent activities, meditation, et cetera. Sleep timing, TBD, I'm going to work on that, although frankly, the 15 car pileup may make that somewhat challenging, but I'll work on it. We do the best we can with what we have. I land at altitude. I will then be confronted with training decisions. And my concerns are mostly around avoiding injury.

• 1:49:40Speaker 02

  Tim and Andy got into the weeds of Tim's fitness training and it got very detailed. So we moved it to the end. It is super, super interesting from a training perspective. So stick around to the end of the interview and you can hear the rest of that section.

• 1:49:56Tim Ferriss?

  And then from a nutrition perspective.

• 1:49:59Speaker 04

  Yeah. This is why full analysis is better because now we can nail you exactly not only macronutrients, right? Calories, protein, carbohydrate. That's great. What we tend to say is like, people care globally about three things regarding their body. They want to look a certain way. They want to feel a certain way. They want to perform a certain way.

• 1:50:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. In this particular season, I care most about two and three.

• 1:50:20Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 1:50:20Tim Ferriss?

  I'm going to be in four layers anyway. I don't give a shit.

• 1:50:22Speaker 04

  You already laid the foundation. The physique part doesn't matter. And your physique is fine as it is. Right. So it's not like a detriment in your performance. Right? So you care about. Feeling and performing a certain way. Awesome. That's going to give us some heads towards macronutrients. Micronutrients, though, are the true game behind how you feel and perform. That's the key here. Macronutrients are fine energy intake. This regulates how you look. Micronutrients are how you feel and perform. And so we want to be very clear on exactly what you're eating if we can. Let's say we don't have any access to that. And so we just have to give you rough suggestions based on nothing. I want to know what you're consuming prior to. I want to know what you're consuming during, while you're on the slopes and what you're consuming afterwards. So give me a rough idea there and then I'll come back with a far shorter answer than it took us to get to the training.

• 1:51:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I mean, if I'm giving you my lazy day of skiing, and I know this is gonna make people shudder, but I'll

• 1:51:13Speaker 04

  One of the reasons why I think you've had such a tremendous career is you're so honest about these things. You don't protect your ego of like, you know what's best, but this is what you're doing. You're waking up and eating cake in the morning. I get it.

• 1:51:24Tim Ferriss?

  So first, I just do a couple of lines of cake mix.

• 1:51:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:28Tim Ferriss?

  And then the pixie sticks come out. No, I, I would say often wake up. And this last season, I had a tough time with my low back. So I was, I was having a really, most nights, very compromised sleep. Like I was tossing and turning, waking up a lot, like turning from side to side, pillow between the knees, because my lower back is all jacked. Wake up, huge cup of coffee. And then, these are usually pretty early mornings, right? So, and I'm, and I'm getting up with about 30 minutes to be out the door. So I wake up.

• 1:51:57Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:51:57Tim Ferriss?

  So I'm waking up, having a huge cup of coffee, and then I'm having oatmeal, mixing in some almond butter, and kind of swirling that around, downing that, maybe if they're available, one or two eggs, and then I'm out the door. And for on the slopes, generally, we can make pit stops for water. So I'm generally not carrying water unless I'm doing backcountry and then I have a backpack, so I'll carry water.

• 1:52:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:21Tim Ferriss?

  But I might have some Yukon bars, some kind of, and a handful of those, which I have found helpful. Just kind of like nibble on. And then typically, I'm doing a half day. But if we're going to do a three quarter day or full day, then we'll stop for lunch and I'll, I'll probably have some type of stew, meat, beans, et cetera. And maybe some, maybe some additional coffee. If I've really been pushing it hard, I might have some hot chocolate and then right back out. And then at night, I would say it's more of a real meal per se. Then I'm sitting down and I can kind of choose whatever I want to have at that point.

• 1:52:57Speaker 04

  You have a combination of fats and starches and the whole.

• 1:53:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, but I have certainly have flexibility. What I have found, and this is not going to be a shocker for anyone. Who's done a lot of intense skiing, if I try to follow like keto, super low carb, I feel like shit. Like I generally feel terrible, right? Normal life, not having that kind of output, fine, but for that type of activity, no, it doesn't really work.

• 1:53:21Speaker 04

  Friends, there's a difference between not being sick, not dying and performing at your best.

• 1:53:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, very different. So that's I'd say not every day, but that would be a busy day, shitty night's sleep, woke up. Fuck, just want to get out on the slopes.

• 1:53:35Speaker 04

  Okay, one last really quick, last year slash this year, do you have a plan for supplementation?

• 1:53:42Tim Ferriss?

  Let's see. So last year, I would say, no, I would add in what I have done over the last, say, nine months, which has. And this is going to sound like a shameless plug, some involved with these guys, but probably what I would do this ski season is I would have a never ending supply of Maui Nui. Venison sticks, like the unsweetened, like no additional sugar. And that has proven for me to be just about the easiest way to get nutrient dense, 30 grams of protein in the morning. So, and I can just throw those in my ski jacket too. So that will probably take the place of eggs, also just for convenience. In terms of supplementation, I would say last year, kept it pretty simple. I would say I was taking magnesium, some electrolytes.

• 1:54:24Tim Ferriss?

  Generally magnesium in the morning and then I went back and forth on creatine. I know that there are so many different benefits to creatine. I was cognizant of not wanting to carry too much weight, like additional water weight if I was going to retain a lot more water. So use that intermittently. I would often use that around cross training. So if I was like kind of going to the gym. Athletic Greens, again, this can sound like a plug, but I've been using that stuff since 2000, whatever, nine, 10. So, and not a whole lot beyond that. I'd say where last season I was taking the most was related to sleep because I was so desperate to get a good night's sleep. I was taking just like entire laundry list of stuff before sleep, including some prescription stuff, which I've tried to really titrate off of.

• 1:55:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:55:10Tim Ferriss?

  But at the time, helpful, you know, trazodone, things like that, which you should not take without doctor supervision. So I would say not a really comprehensive supplemental plan at this point. I would also, though, not want to leave behind the nutrition piece because right now, if you were to ask me like, what does your macro breakdown look like? I'd be like, I have no fucking idea. Honestly, if I'm being truthful about it.

• 1:55:31Speaker 04

  Look, the reality of it is, supplements are called supplements for a reason.

• 1:55:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:35Speaker 04

  And we absolutely approach them the same vein. We're going to spend as much time as we can on whole food.

• 1:55:39Tim Ferriss?

  After coming back from training, almost always taking supplemental protein of some type.

• 1:55:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, okay, great.

• 1:55:44Tim Ferriss?

  Just.

• 1:55:45Speaker 04

  Okay, I just want a little bit of context, a foundation of what I was working with here.

• 1:55:48Tim Ferriss?

  And actually, I'll modify one thing I said, which was last season, I would often, and again, this is like, what I did, I'm not saying it's the best, but I would often have like Athletic Greens plus some type of like whey protein isolate or something before, like immediately before heading out.

• 1:56:03Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:03Tim Ferriss?

  So I've had the oatmeal plus the almond butter, and then I would throw that in.

• 1:56:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:07Tim Ferriss?

  And that happened quite a bit, I would say.

• 1:56:10Speaker 04

  When you think about recovery, three classic Rs coming into place, repair, replenish, and rehydrate. That's what we're going after, right? So repair is protein, replenish is carbohydrate, and obviously rehydrate is a combination of fluids plus electrolytes and glucose. So as you're running through that, I'm running through that entire thing. Okay. Now, can we alter what we're doing to maximize performance on the slopes? Yeah, but that's not really what you're asking. You don't want to feel terrible on the slopes, but you're also really hedging because we know your recovery capacity is already compromised. So I'm going to push towards that. What's that mean? Do we have enough total calories? Maybe. Do we have enough protein? Unlikely.

• 1:56:47Tim Ferriss?

  Unlikely, yes.

• 1:56:48Speaker 04

  It's a fact we're starting off the day with no. Protein source is not a good.

• 1:56:51Tim Ferriss?

  Or very little, yeah.

• 1:56:52Speaker 04

  Maui Nui is fantastic. Like I eat it almost every day at this point. My entire, like I eat almost exclusively Wild Game.

• 1:56:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:56:59Speaker 04

  That's what I do. But yeah, since being a part of Maui Nui as well, like that's what I'm after. I've yet to have anybody that we've sent it to come back and be like, what the hell is this stuff? This is like, this is incredible.

• 1:57:10Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:10Speaker 04

  It's such a high positive response.

• 1:57:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:12Speaker 04

  All right. Conflicts of interest noted. You guys, you got the note. So that is great. Um, you can start there. It's awesome. I don't really particularly care where the sources. I, I would make sure that we're getting some source immediately in the morning of protein. That would be my first stop. Now, the other thing is I would probably take your caloric intake higher in the morning than it currently is because we know it's unpredictable throughout the rest of the day.

• 1:57:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:34Speaker 04

  And we know that's, you don't have to have a lot of calories in the morning. So now people often say things like you can only absorb 25 or 30 grams of protein at once. And that's obviously, by the way, I opened up that question. That's clearly not the case.

• 1:57:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:57:49Speaker 04

  However, there is serious scientific evidence to suggest you can only maximize muscle protein synthesis up to 25 to 30 grams. That's been around. So the question is for you, despite the fact that all the evidence in science will say that, are you ever concerned that if you ate a little bit more protein, that you would somehow not use it?

• 1:58:13Tim Ferriss?

  No, I spend zero time worrying about that.

• 1:58:15Speaker 04

  Great. Okay. So I know this is a tough question, right? So this never made sense to me.

• 1:58:23Tim Ferriss?

  If my urine ends up a little more expensive, I don't care.

• 1:58:25Speaker 04

  Who cares, right? Look, when you go to apply things into the science and life, what we were trying to do all day, the science of sleep and nutrition and supplementation, you have to take some leaps of faith. That, that is actually the scientific process, right? This is why, like, I think it's best to think about science as a verb, not a noun. It's an action. It is not a thing, right? What is the science of recovery? That's not how it works. It's like, this is an action. So I'm taking a real life action on you, which means I'm going to take steps past science such that it never made sense to me that muscle protein synthesis is maximized at 25 or 30 grams. I work with NFL players, right? So Vita V, a defensive tackle, 300 and many plus pounds on top of 300, right? We really think his muscle protein synthesis is locked up and just maximized at 30 grams.

• 1:59:08Tim Ferriss?

  The same as your eye.

• 1:59:09Speaker 04

  Correct. Who are just about less than half his size. Like actually way less than half. So there's actually a paper that just come out really interesting. Suggest even up to 100 grams of protein, it continues to increase.

• 1:59:20Tim Ferriss?

  You know, I might be making this up, but I don't think I am. I want to say that the older you get, there's some literature to suggest that it was better to have like a larger bolus, meaning more grams of protein at a single.

• 1:59:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, this is what you're talking about. It's called anabolic resistance. So you become more resistant to anabolic stimuli, training or protein. As you age, but this is totally preventable, extremely preventable by just having bigger boluses. So my point with all that is you can't stop that train. Yes, some of that protein will be oxidized. Who cares? Doesn't matter. You can't have too much protein in your particular case. Why I'm going back to that in your case and your scenario is because now we've continually had conversations about you just recover slower. You were sore longer, et cetera, et cetera. We need to make sure we are never limited in our recovery by protein. That needs to be higher. And so we need you at a minimum of, I don't know, 200 grams of protein a day.

• 2:00:13Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, wow. Okay. I'm gonna need to change some things.

• 2:00:15Speaker 04

  I'll survive at 150. I'll take 150, but like, I want you to go over.

• 2:00:19Tim Ferriss?

  So let's, let's just say, copy paste. Now you're in my place doing the exact same training.

• 2:00:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:24Tim Ferriss?

  What might your breakfast look like?

• 2:00:26Speaker 04

  I'm fine with everything you had there.

• 2:00:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:00:28Speaker 04

  But now I just want 50 grams of protein.

• 2:00:30Tim Ferriss?

  What form? I know you said you're agnostic, but for you.

• 2:00:32Speaker 04

  Fine. Eggs. No problem eating eggs.

• 2:00:35Tim Ferriss?

  To get to 200 grams, I mean, if we're like yanking out the yolk.

• 2:00:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, you could do that.

• 2:00:39Tim Ferriss?

  As a factor. Well, I'm just thinking about the, what this actually nets out to. I mean, how many eggs would that mean? That's be.

• 2:00:46Speaker 04

  Well.

• 2:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  Five, six?

• 2:00:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're not gonna get, like, I'll put it this way. I wouldn't go exclusively from eggs. That would be the point. If you want to have a protein shake as well, you already said you basically did that, right?

• 2:00:57Tim Ferriss?

  That's what I did. Yep. This last season.

• 2:00:58Speaker 04

  So if you have, let's say, three eggs, maybe half a cup of egg whites. Something like that. Maybe two eggs, half a cup of egg whites. We're not 40 or so. And 20 minutes later or something, but I don't know, were you having that shake on the way?

• 2:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  Right before I stepped out.

• 2:01:13Speaker 04

  Okay, great. Let's just stop right there then. Forty grams. Great. I said fifty. We're splitting hairs, right? You're close enough there. If you want it, and it's a day where you woke up late, great, just do the double shake.

• 2:01:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:01:23Speaker 04

  Two scoops, right? So you're forty, fifty, depending on what protein source you're using, whoever you're getting it from. Pretty high quality, pretty fast absorbing.

• 2:01:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:30Speaker 04

  You're great. Now, when we're at lunch, that's fine. We're just gonna make sure that if we've had a couple of Maui news sticks throughout the day, those are, what, ten grams each?

• 2:01:38Tim Ferriss?

  Ten grams each, yeah.

• 2:01:39Speaker 04

  So you got twenty right there?

• 2:01:41Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 2:01:41Speaker 04

  It's easy to put down like four or five of those, more candidly.

• 2:01:44Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:45Speaker 04

  Let's just say you're at one. Ten more grams. All right, we're up to fifty, sixty, maybe another one. At lunch, any reasonable serving of meat in your stew is gonna get you another thirty to forty, fifty, depending on how much you're eating there. You don't want to eat till you're feel terrible.

• 2:01:59Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:00Speaker 04

  But that's fine. We're already well over a hundred. Okay, awesome. If you can get another shake in, a protein shake, double shake, when you're on the slopes, that's great. Some of their snacks, like you've got another thirty or forty, which brings you back to dinner with another thirty or forty. I wouldn't track them. I wouldn't weigh them. I wouldn't do any of those things. Some days you're at one fifty, fine. Some days you're one seventy-five.

• 2:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  Do what I don't, which I don't really do, which is like, when in doubt, just eat a little bit more. It's fine.

• 2:02:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, eat a little bit more, right? From there, I would be primarily concerned with making sure your carbohydrate intake is sufficient. You're probably gonna get enough fat along the way, so you have some.

• 2:02:33Tim Ferriss?

  I'll get enough fat along the way. I think that I've trained myself historically to reduce carbohydrate intake for a lot of different reasons.

• 2:02:41Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:02:41Tim Ferriss?

  So I consume too little carbohydrate when I get into training mode for something like skiing.

• 2:02:48Speaker 04

  Look, I said I'm too agnostic. It's the same thing with food. Carbohydrates and fats have different properties, and that gives us a lot of opportunity. One is not better than the other in any situation. So it is, in this context, clearly additional carbohydrate is highly beneficial. You can go more fat, that's great too, just to get more calories. It's also easier, more condensed, you can get it in faster. You're getting in a decent amount for breakfast, so you're good there. I would make sure we have some sort of starch as well for lunch.

• 2:03:16Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:03:16Speaker 04

  Bread with that soup.

• 2:03:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, doesn't need to be fancy. Yeah.

• 2:03:21Speaker 04

  Whoever complained about dipping bread and

• 2:03:23Tim Ferriss?

  And soup.

• 2:03:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's amazing. Or whatever. Any number of Mewel well are high quality carbohydrate sources. Fruit would be fantastic at that feeding as well. So now we get all the other additional benefits that come along with fruit. This context and then backing up at night. One of the other things that's really clear, while you don't want to have a large meal right before bed, carbohydrates at night are highly beneficial for sleep quality.

• 2:03:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:03:51Speaker 04

  There's tons of links there. In fact, we actually had this happen fairly recently. So labs came back individual sex hormone binding globulin is high. Free testosterone is low. All the signs and symptoms of wanting to go on testosterone. That's not a conversation I have. Let's go to your doctor, right? You want to go on hormones. Awesome. Sleep is terrible.

• 2:04:10Tim Ferriss?

  You must get asked about it a lot.

• 2:04:11Speaker 04

  Oh, my gosh, like you saw how sensitive I am. When I go in public, I'm like, I'm not like, I don't do medications and insulin was low. Super low. There's a known inverse association between insulin and sex hormone binding globulin. So when insulin gets too low, sex hormone binding globulin goes up because that what happens free testosterone goes down. So you can do that if you want. However, in this individual, we took a look at total carbohydrate intake and it was something like 125 grams a day, which I actually feel great personally. I would imagine you probably feel fine at that level too, even with like training. I train most days. I feel fine at 125, 150, no issues.

• 2:04:47Speaker 04

  Almost no carbohydrate at night. Very low, 20 less grams carbohydrate at night. All we had to do was put another 40 or so gram of carbohydrate at night. Everything corrected itself and sleep took off. So super, super simple solution like that.

• 2:05:02Tim Ferriss?

  So sex hormone binding globulin came down.

• 2:05:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:05:04Tim Ferriss?

  Because the insulin was going up.

• 2:05:05Speaker 04

  Totally. And testosterone then took off. And then what happened to sleep? And what happened to recoverability?

• 2:05:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, sleep doesn't hurt testosterone either.

• 2:05:13Speaker 04

  Oh, my God, right? Well, this is the classic case of.

• 2:05:15Tim Ferriss?

  He said 40 grams. So what we're talking about there is like, it's not that much.

• 2:05:21Speaker 04

  No.

• 2:05:21Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it's like, what, 200? I'm flubbing the math here, but it's 4.5. Calories per gram, four-ish, right? So it's not that much.

• 2:05:29Speaker 04

  No, like you're talking about, well, this is a banana. Twenty-five grams.

• 2:05:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:33Speaker 04

  Bingo, right? A hundred calories.

• 2:05:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:35Speaker 04

  An apple, like these, these things are, a piece of fruit is typically fifteen to twenty, twenty-five grams. A small side of sweet potatoes, a cup of rice, like you've already hit twenty-five to forty sort of grams pretty easily. So we're not talking like we had this guy pig out on pasta, which we, but like it's very small changes here. Miracle workers, right? It's like they really have to, so point is, I'm making sure that we have an appropriate amount of carbohydrate in your last feeding would be appropriate. We've gotten ourselves a nice infusion throughout the day. This will help with your rehydration since we're probably having fairly limited water intake because you're on the slopes, right?

• 2:06:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah. And it's dry and it's so easy for people to forget. You mentioned this earlier, but it's like high altitude, cold. It's like you go to Antarctica, it's a desert, right? It's easy for people to forget.

• 2:06:21Speaker 04

  Trust me.

• 2:06:21Tim Ferriss?

  It's a dry environments.

• 2:06:23Speaker 04

  I didn't mule deer hunt in the Tetons this year. Ten thousand-ish, I think our base camp was like seventy-five hundred. And we were to ride horses for a couple of hours in the morning to get up to our hunting spot. Holy cow, cold, so dry and ten thousand, which for me, I live in Southern California, so I'm at, you know, zero. Like literally.

• 2:06:44Tim Ferriss?

  Ten thousand's no joke.

• 2:06:45Speaker 04

  No, it, and those mountain boys, holy cow, they are mountain tough. I had a great time. So point is you get super dehydrated super fast and don't really, so those carbohydrates and all that are gonna help maintain replenish the muscle glycogen that you've burned throughout your entire body. We don't care if we're having an excess of calories because if we lose a little bit of body composition, which you won't. Yeah. Cause you're burning so many calories.

• 2:07:10Tim Ferriss?

  It's astonishing how much, so I'm, I'm gonna be there with a close friend and we can consume absolutely mind-boggling amounts of food.

• 2:07:20Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:07:20Tim Ferriss?

  And it does, oh yeah, and it just does not matter. You're gonna work it off.

• 2:07:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And I like you mentioned some resistance starches earlier. If you can take them out there, that's great, too. That's probably going to feel better than just a Maui Newli stick when you're six hours in.

• 2:07:32Tim Ferriss?

  For sure. Yeah, I mean, I need to restock. But yeah, the Ucam bars that I used last season were super helpful.

• 2:07:37Speaker 04

  Yeah, I would just make sure on top of all that, kind of rounding out these points, making sure that you're adequately salting your food. Because we know that that's going to go down. We know you're a heavy sweater. I don't know what your sweat rate is for your salt intake, but if you're sweating out three or four pounds a day, that's just gonna, you're gonna lose a gram plus many grams of salt. So making sure that comes back in in the form of supplementation. If you like to use electrolyte packs or something like that. Or if you just want to strictly go salting your food, you know, heavily to taste there. You probably need some supplemental electrolytes would be my guess at this point. Making sure it's there. That's nutritionally going to put you in a really, really good spot. Just be really careful. Making sure we're still getting colors in your food. Because micronutrients typically don't have a huge response. Like you're not gonna feel a difference in vitamin A or C in like a day.

• 2:08:21Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:21Speaker 04

  But it will over the course of two months start to kind of add up.

• 2:08:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:08:25Speaker 04

  So making sure we're not just eating all brown and then having an outlet of greens.

• 2:08:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I've generally used color as a proxy. So I try hard. It is one of the challenges in a lot of these mountain towns.

• 2:08:35Speaker 04

  Of course it is.

• 2:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  Is like they're importing everything.

• 2:08:38Speaker 04

  Fresh fruits and vegetables.

• 2:08:39Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, man. But yes.

• 2:08:40Speaker 04

  But use frozen. If you have to, right? So frozen fruits and vegetables, it's not the same, but it's still really, really high quality. And then supplementation, we could say, I could be brief here if you'd like. But absolutely making sure magnesium is there. Magnesium is released in sweat at very low quantities, but it's still enough when you sweat the amount that you're potentially going to be sweating.

• 2:08:59Tim Ferriss?

  Also with skiing, like I'm going to sweat my ass off.

• 2:09:01Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:09:02Tim Ferriss?

  I'll be working.

• 2:09:03Speaker 04

  Yep. So you want to make sure that that stuff is high. Creatine is great. If you're going to use it, I wouldn't use it the way you did.

• 2:09:11Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:09:11Speaker 04

  I'll use it or don't.

• 2:09:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:09:12Speaker 04

  So having it like on certain days or not is.

• 2:09:14Tim Ferriss?

  Just make it make it daily or not.

• 2:09:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, because it takes a chronic effect.

• 2:09:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:18Speaker 04

  For it to really start to matter unless you're going a really high dosage. So I wouldn't be super concerned about the water retention aspect of it.

• 2:09:23Tim Ferriss?

  Might even be a plus.

• 2:09:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, I was gonna say, we're having a problem with that anyways, right? So I would go there. That said, any recommendation, if you try and doesn't work, you don't like it, just don't.

• 2:09:33Tim Ferriss?

  And what are we talking about? It's like five grams a day or what are we?

• 2:09:35Speaker 04

  That's the number. That's the standard. That's what everyone throws out. But I would say the same thing of like,

• 2:09:39Tim Ferriss?

  Like the protein?

• 2:09:39Speaker 04

  Yeah. Like why? Candidly, for guys our size, it's fine. I'm probably going higher. I'm also never measuring creatine, to be totally honest. Like, I'm just taking big scoops and throwing it in there, like seeing what happens. There's actually really interesting data on the more recent stuff, the more interesting stuff on creatine is around bone health, brain health, and overall even like mood.

• 2:10:01Tim Ferriss?

  Brain health is no joke.

• 2:10:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, but that's been 10 to 20 grams a day, things like that. So.

• 2:10:06Tim Ferriss?

  I have experimented with that chronically and just looking at verbal, I mean, it's

• 2:10:10Speaker 04

  Recall, yeah.

• 2:10:11Tim Ferriss?

  And also just like verbal acuity and stuff in podcasts. I mean, I've looked at this somewhat. It's N1 and it's just self-reporting. But for me, it's pretty noticeable.

• 2:10:20Speaker 04

  You don't have to do N1. There's data. There's tons of it out there. That's, nothing's perfect, but there's actually another review article just this week came out also on creatine and brain health. So whether you're looking at dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, stuff like that, there's no perfect answer there, but you can see the data.

• 2:10:35Tim Ferriss?

  Anything else you'd add to the list?

• 2:10:37Speaker 04

  The rest of it would be dependent upon your labs and your physiology, what we knew there. You could throw in, you're never going to be hurt for the most part, adding vitamin D. It's a very common one. You're gonna be out in the sun all day, so.

• 2:10:49Tim Ferriss?

  Well, half of my face will be out in the sun all day.

• 2:10:52Speaker 04

  There'll be significant sun blockage, I hope.

• 2:10:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I did supplement with D last year.

• 2:11:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. And fish oil?

• 2:11:01Tim Ferriss?

  Fish oil, I also supplemented with fish oil. Could be placebo, who knows? There's probably literature out there on this, but I found it to seemingly help with sleep quite a bit.

• 2:11:10Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Like, those would be the standard, kind of, without knowing anything about you. You throw in that cocktail, you're talking about things that are fairly cheap. Again, relatively.

• 2:11:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:11:19Speaker 04

  They have very little cross reaction, unlike minerals, unlike even high doses of vitamins. You're playing a game there that you may want to be a bit careful of. But things like vitamin D and things like omega threes.

• 2:11:30Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning just unintended side effects, yeah.

• 2:11:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, you don't want to know what problem you're solving really, and so you're just sort of throwing stuff in there. That can technically happen with anything, even vitamin D and heavy metals can be concerned there, but it's a very rare thing. So most of the time, like you're fine. I feel comfortable saying like, most people can jump on that train for all those and be totally fine. Outside of that, it would be precision and intent. What are we trying to move? What are we trying to do? If you wanted to go kind of next level of, hey, less science, but some science, potentially beneficial. Then you would get in the realm of herbals, and this is when ashwagandha, rhodiola, things like that start to kick in.

• 2:12:07Tim Ferriss?

  What do you find rhodiola most helpful for? So I actually do use ashwagandha in the same way that say Peter Tia might use phosphatidylserine just to blunt.

• 2:12:16Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 2:12:16Tim Ferriss?

  A bit of cortisol release at night, for instance. Okay, inhale. So maybe, maybe I'm off base, but I mean, talk to me about ashwagandha and rhodiola.

• 2:12:26Speaker 04

  Okay, so we actually just published a review paper on rhodiola. I think it's open access. Should be able to go read it for free. Way more data on ashwagandha. Been around for a long time. The issue we've always dealt with with both of those are all of our athletes have to have third party certified. Things and even they have to have NSF or informed choice. So those are hard to get to. If you're not concerned about that, then disregard that. But you really do need.

• 2:12:50Tim Ferriss?

  This is to avoid doping issues, right?

• 2:12:52Speaker 04

  Correct.

• 2:12:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:52Speaker 04

  We actually have another paper we published on the frequency of adulterated supplements.

• 2:12:57Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God. It's gotta be complete disaster.

• 2:13:00Speaker 04

  Whatever number you're thinking, it's higher.

• 2:13:01Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah, totally.

• 2:13:02Speaker 04

  I guess it's, it's now in America with big brands, like you're fine, but you leave America and things get squirrely.

• 2:13:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:13:09Speaker 04

  Pretty quickly on supplements. Plenty of squirreliness here too, but I hope those papers are open access. So if anybody wants to dive in, we'll start ashwagandha. There's much more data on ashwagandha. Good effective, but it is very difficult to make sure you're getting concentrations at what is labeled on the bottle. And that's actually from a labeling issue as well as a harvesting issue. So the people that are kind of behind the scenes that make these things will tell you not every plant has the same.

• 2:13:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, lo and behold, nature doesn't standardize.

• 2:13:38Speaker 04

  No, yeah. People will say things like it's not FDA regulated. That's not true. There's tons of regulations on supplements. It's just. They can't sanitize against things like that. It's really hard, right? You're growing herbals and you're just hoping that that dosage is as potent as the previous one.

• 2:13:54Tim Ferriss?

  What do you think from an effect standpoint for what can a credible argument be made? I know less science, but with ashwagandha, like why would someone take it? That is plausibly defensible and what should you take in that case? Like are there certain brands that are more reliable for dosing for any particular reason?

• 2:14:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, with ashwagandha, I think the only third party pure ashwagandha company that I know is clean. The K K L E A N, I'm pretty sure. Um, you'll see it in combinations and a bunch of other stuff, but that's, I think the only one that sells it as designed for health and designed for sport. Might make money as well. Can I, I'm not a hundred percent sure on that one. Decent data on exactly what you mentioned, taking it as a, the colloquial term we'll say here is any adaptogen.

• 2:14:42Tim Ferriss?

  Adaptogen.

• 2:14:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, what it means is it's, we're skipping, is it's a cortisol modulator? What that means is cortisol is not supposed to be low. It's not a good thing, right? That is lethargy. That is, that is a classic sign of excessive training as well. You can go back to sodium potassium ratio. That'll tell you exactly what's happening with cortisol as well. That's Addison's disease, right? Super low down there. You don't want it to be high either. Now, the general thing that is optimal with cortisol is you have giant spikes throughout the day and then giant recovery. This is exercise. This is focused work, etc. And then we have this normal curve throughout the day such that we have high cortisol in the mornings. So our awake and alert, and then we have low cortisol at night so that we can actually fall asleep. And then there's a curve. So adaptogens are supposed to be modulating that curve, not such that it's going high or low,

• 2:15:26Speaker 04

  but such that it's getting back to an appropriate diurnal curve. That's the idea. Ashwagandha and rhodiola, and specifically ashwagandha, there's reasonable evidence that it helps with that. And so a lot of folks, probably the most typical utilization of ashwagandha is helping get to sleep, helping calm down. There's, it is kind of resetting that entire axis. Because of that, whenever you manipulate cortisol, you have a very good chance of manipulating testosterone. Cause that relationship is antagonistic for the most part. And so the smaller level science and then also large amount of anecdote is it can be helpful and beneficial with testosterone. I would say in my experience, it's reasonable. It is a very reasonable thing to think about with that.

• 2:16:08Speaker 04

  I wish that more companies would make Pure Ashwagandha that is NSF certified. That'd be great. I could, I could use it more directly. Now, Rhodiola is another one we have had. Now, this is not science. This is just my practice, coaching experience. I've had a lot of benefit of elevating testosterone with Rhodiola.

• 2:16:25Tim Ferriss?

  Really?

• 2:16:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. It is also cortisol modulator. There has a lot of other effects. The paper we published had nothing to do with hormones. It had everything to do with performance. And so there is enough data now on muscular endurance and physical performance that it seems to be pretty beneficial. It's not perfect. Not every study showed benefit, but there's enough to where that I've been using it for, I don't know, probably a decade or more personally, as well as in a coaching practice. And, and I feel like it, it does really effective work on that. So we actually got, um, then I was pitching it so hard. We got Jeff from Momentus to make it. So they have their stuff. So we use that.

• 2:16:58Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, they have Rhodiola?

• 2:16:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:16:59Tim Ferriss?

  I didn't know that.

• 2:17:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:17:01Tim Ferriss?

  That's good to know.

• 2:17:01Speaker 04

  We got them to make it because I was like, you guys, there's just like so much work here. So we use them because it is certified, it's third party tested as well. So that's pretty much where we got our Rhodiola from, but a lot of benefits there.

• 2:17:10Tim Ferriss?

  Are there for acclimating to altitude? Cause I know you've gone from Flatlander to altitude a couple of times. Anything that you have found particularly helpful for accelerating acclimation to altitude? Cause you hear all sorts of stuff, right? Some people take like beetroot extract. Some people take Rhodiola anecdotally.

• 2:17:28Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 2:17:28Tim Ferriss?

  I'm curious if you have thoughts here.

• 2:17:30Speaker 04

  Rhodiola would be on my shortlist. I would listen to you either way. If you said it didn't work at all, or if you said it did.

• 2:17:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:37Speaker 04

  Like I would listen either way, but it would be a low risk, potential small reward. Why not? Any arginine or precursor, beetroot, you mentioned, basal dilation is going to give you every opportunity possible to give splenic contraction, to get more red blood cells into your blood, to let you acclimatize to it. Other stuff you can pay attention to. So one of the major.

• 2:17:59Tim Ferriss?

  Couple of weeks of EPO.

• 2:18:04Speaker 04

  I mean,

• 2:18:04Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right.

• 2:18:05Speaker 04

  That's, that's, that would be my first stop.

• 2:18:09Tim Ferriss?

  It's a joke, guys. A joke.

• 2:18:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:18:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, anyway. It'll work.

• 2:18:13Speaker 04

  Three, three, four.

• 2:18:14Tim Ferriss?

  It'll, it'll work. Yeah.

• 2:18:16Speaker 04

  Now, you can consider at this point in the same realm, you can consider any global alkaline agent. And so one of the issues that you're gonna see happen with altitude is predictable increases in respiratory rate, predictable increases in carbohydrate metabolism, right? Predictable increases in respiratory quotient, respiratory ratio, things like that. This is just part of what happens. Like lactate is a big player, right? This is insanely beneficial for you. So you may consider, I don't know if this will actually work. I don't even know the literature to be candid here on this one. But a lactate supplement could be potentially beneficial there. Lactate is incredibly powerful at, actually bicarbonate, at buffering acid. So this may sound counterintuitive, but you heard that right. Lactate, very specifically, will reduce metabolic acidosis.

• 2:19:00Speaker 04

  And lactate doesn't do what people think it does. It is certainly not the cause of muscle fatigue and definitely not the cause, absolutely definitely not the cause of muscle soreness. It is highly beneficial. It is directly used in the brain as a preferred fuel source, the brain and the heart in numerous situations, including altitude. Used actually, right now, a couple of, handful of trials being used as an acute response to traumatic brain injury.

• 2:19:21Tim Ferriss?

  No shit?

• 2:19:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:19:22Tim Ferriss?

  How's that administered?

• 2:19:24Speaker 04

  You can do it any number of ways. IV supplement.

• 2:19:26Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:27Speaker 04

  Gel, lactate gels, any of those things done. George Brooks at Cal Berkeley, the Lactate King, him and Bruce Gladman at Auburn. But George has done a number of those trials in TBI. It's similar to, look, you may or may not realize, but there's an entire lactate shuttling that happens from muscle into other muscle, to the kidney, core cycle, all that stuff. There's also an astrocyte lactate shuttle. So astrocytes are like the cells in your central nervous system. They need energy too. So we know that the brain, the heart, and astrocytes prefer almost exclusively anaerobic metabolism, which means they love glucose, right? When you enter into areas of problem, whether you're talking about long-term brain health reductions or even short-term concussions and injury, ischemias, heart attacks, things like that. One of the major issues is we lose metabolic fuel.

• 2:20:12Speaker 04

  We have problems, right? Enter ketones.

• 2:20:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:20:15Speaker 04

  Enter lactate. This is why these things are so interesting. It's still a lot to learn here. Some of the trials are like, oh, great, but then they don't work for ketones and they do for lactate and stuff like that. But there's clearly something happening. And this is also why, to come back to a point, creatine is so powerful for brain health. It's the same thing. It's the most direct and fast fuel source. It's one to one stoichiometry, so it doesn't give you a ton. One molecule of creatine, one ATP. Others ketones are far higher, but it's super fast and effective. So lactate would be one I would go to.

• 2:20:44Tim Ferriss?

  And is that, I haven't ever sought it out. Presumably you can just find that as an oral supplement? You're taking capsules of this stuff?

• 2:20:51Speaker 04

  You can. Again, the gel would probably be.

• 2:20:53Tim Ferriss?

  Gel?

• 2:20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, better place, but.

• 2:20:55Tim Ferriss?

  Where would you apply the gel? Is it like?

• 2:20:57Speaker 04

  Any of your tissue. Just rub it on.

• 2:20:58Tim Ferriss?

  Anywhere?

• 2:20:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, on your legs.

• 2:21:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:21:00Speaker 04

  All that stuff. Probably where I'd actually start, because that's, I could go look at the research and I might be like, oh my God, that was really stupid. Don't do that. I don't know. Like, that was sort of me working through thoughts on there. But a similar idea that is much more founded would be any sodium bicarbonate solution, right? It's same exact idea, where you're gonna put yourself in a little more alkaline situation. My guess is that would help you feel a little bit better. And that was, since you asked sort of direct application, sodium bicarbonate can come in a lot of forms and fashion. It's baking soda, like literally. Just be careful, though.

• 2:21:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:21:34Speaker 04

  I could tell you many stories in the lab of doing research with baking soda or sodium bicarbonate.

• 2:21:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, there's such a thing. It's too much of a good thing.

• 2:21:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, fluid in your intestines matters, so.

• 2:21:45Tim Ferriss?

  Also be careful with creatine and double espressos, just pro tip, if you're about to head out skiing. Too much of those, too.

• 2:21:52Speaker 04

  Creatine and caffeine have this weird relationship.

• 2:21:55Tim Ferriss?

  Increased likelihood of disaster pants, not to get too technical.

• 2:21:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's super technical. Theoretically, we'll see the date on that. So you can do that. The other way is gels.

• 2:22:04Tim Ferriss?

  Gels, yeah.

• 2:22:05Speaker 04

  Right, so this is PR lotion. This is what they make, so you can just rub a little on sodium bicarbonate, if you want to go around it there. So anyone that has any GI issues with it, the lotion will go as well. Far, far, far more research on oral applications than lotions, but nonetheless.

• 2:22:18Tim Ferriss?

  On the sodium bicarbonate?

• 2:22:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure. And there's lots of research on that. So those would be potential ways. Outside of that, we would have to really start getting into things that are actually specific to mitochondria and to kind of go down those ranks. The issue with all that is, I don't know if you're gonna have like a one to five day effect. And so really getting into, and this is everything from CoQ10s and things like that, so the going back up to like arginine and B-reduce, that's gonna have an instantaneous effect. Sodium bicarbonate will instantaneously change things. The other stuff takes a little, like a mito or a PQQ or something like that. It's gonna take probably weeks.

• 2:22:52Tim Ferriss?

  It's gonna take a while.

• 2:22:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, to do stuff. So by that time. You probably hopefully have acclimatized.

• 2:22:57Tim Ferriss?

  Well, there are levels and there are levels, right? So if I'm operating at 10K, but then I'm doing some.

• 2:23:02Speaker 04

  You skiing at 16 or?

• 2:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I was skiing at 16.

• 2:23:05Speaker 04

  That'd be high, 14, yeah, yeah. Oh, you could do it.

• 2:23:08Tim Ferriss?

  But if I'm going up a few thousand feet for for backcountry stuff or hell of skiing.

• 2:23:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, you'll notice that extra thousand feet.

• 2:23:14Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:23:14Speaker 04

  For sure. Kind of my point I was getting there at the end was I would probably let physiology just do what it wants to do. That would be my normal thing. Take your baseline stuff there and then let it go because you're going to be there for eight weeks. And we're going to walk ourselves into these first two or three weeks anyways. If you were there for, like, for example, we have, Ryan Ortega is fighting in Mexico City for his next fight. That's 7,500 feet in elevation. Ryan lives Torrance. He lives below elevation. We are doing things specifically now, starting like today to prepare for that. But that's because we have to get there for one, one event, one night. You'll have two months to live there.

• 2:23:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:49Speaker 04

  I would let your body do what it wants to do. Kind of the last thing I'll really say here is I think that's an important note. Your physiology and your brain are still way smarter than anything we have. Any AI program, any machine learning stuff we've got, your own physiology has a far better sense of what you're doing. So whenever possible, don't hold it back. We call these performance anchors. So anything you're doing that's an anchor, it's dragging you down. So this is alcohol. This is any number of suboptimal visible stressors, hidden stressors. That's going to hold you back. But once you've removed those things, just get out of the way.

• 2:24:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, your body will figure it out.

• 2:24:25Speaker 04

  Your body really knows where it wants to go for the most part. Don't sabotage it, but then don't have too much control of the wheel either.

• 2:24:31Tim Ferriss?

  Super important. I mean, maybe another way to put this, I guess, would be like, it's human nature to think about how we can accelerate things. Accelerate, accelerate. But in this case, I mean, we have millions of years of of evolution at hand. And if you can just remove, make sure that you don't have any emergency brakes on.

• 2:24:49Speaker 04

  Yes, that's exactly right.

• 2:24:51Tim Ferriss?

  You'll make a lot of progress. And we've talked about a lot today. People can find you on Twitter, Instagram, at Dr. Andy Galpin. And they can find all things Andy Galpin at andygalpin.com. You have a number of different initiatives, projects, companies that are in motion. Absolute Rest, we've already mentioned. Any others that you would like to mention or point people to?

• 2:25:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, Absolute Rest, of course, is our sleep company. My education company is called Biomolecular Athlete. And that is actually something that we just released Thanksgiving. So this is just new to the world. I have always and will continue to put out as much free content on YouTube as I can. So what I do is I have this like series of five, 25 and 55 minute physiology videos. And if you've been paying attention, and when I say 25 minutes, it's ish. And when I say 55 minutes, it's ish. Yeah, I get burned on that one. I'm always going to do that. And that is always going to be free out there. But we had, I had such a demand for it. I was like, I mean, I just need to make a full, proper education company. So we released our very first course, Thanksgiving.

• 2:26:00Speaker 04

  And I think we had people from over 90 countries get into it. Like I, I was like, all right, that'll do well. But holy cow, I was so stunned. So that is out there. We're going to come out with our second and third course this year. One of them will be on performance blood work. And then another will be on managing, it's like an algorithm, if you will, step by step process on fatigue. How to stop it from happening correctly, like what to do, like all this stuff. So that'll be coming at biomolecularathlete.com. I think it's forward strength, but if you get to biomolecular athlete, it's going to get you close enough. The other one we're launching in January is called Vitality Blueprint. And that is, is high level performance blood work. And so this is not medical stuff.

• 2:26:43Speaker 04

  This is if you want to really understand how to not only analyze blood, but then go through some of the stuff I, we talked about of how do you interpret it? Once you get it, what's it mean? All that is done for you. It's completely interpreted. All the patterns and calculations that go into high performance are done for you. And then as a result of that, you get spit out very high precision supplementation, nutrition and, and exercise protocols on the back of that. So it's not just like, hey, here are your labs, you go figure it out. So that is coming out. That's Vitality Blueprint. And then our coaching program is at Rapid, Rapid Health and Performance is like. If you want to come in and get full immersion coaching like I sort of started with at the beginning.

• 2:27:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:27:23Speaker 04

  That's at that program. So.

• 2:27:24Tim Ferriss?

  Where can people find that?

• 2:27:26Speaker 04

  I think that is rapidhealthreport.com.

• 2:27:29Tim Ferriss?

  We'll link to it in the show notes as well.

• 2:27:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think it's all is or will potentially be on my website. I realize again, I'm like business and savvy forte is not my thing. So probably shouldn't have all these brands and companies going, but they're all out there. So education, blood work, rest, sleep, and coaching are there. And then all the social media is for me is it's all science communication. That's pretty much all I do. So if you want to know more about the science of even performance, that's pretty much, if you don't want it, like get out of there.

• 2:27:58Tim Ferriss?

  Do not, if that's not what you want, don't go to andygalpin.com. But if it is of interest, then certainly what we mentioned, andygalpin.com on social, Dr. Andy Galpin, and we'll link to everything in the show notes. So if people miss anything on andygalpin.com, people go to tim.blog/podcast. We'll link to everything we discussed in this conversation, which is going to be a lot.

• 2:28:20Speaker 04

  For the record, I made that website myself on Squarespace like seven or eight years ago. So not a lot of standards.

• 2:28:28Tim Ferriss?

  All right. All right. Well, I might be able to help you with an upgrade. So TBD on that. Is there anything else, Andy, that you'd like to mention or closing comments you'd like to add before we land the plane?

• 2:28:41Speaker 04

  I think I've had plenty of comments at this point.

• 2:28:46Tim Ferriss?

  All right, perfect. And as mentioned, everybody, we'll have links to everything in the show notes as per usual at tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, train smart, keep it green lights, don't get injured, and best of luck in the new year. Thanks for tuning in.

• 2:29:15Tim Ferriss?

  I land at altitude. I will then be confronted with training decisions. And my concerns are mostly around avoiding injury, right? I'm not worried about like hitting the most complex double black diamond, blah, blah, blah, two weeks out. I don't have a competition. I'm doing this for fun, also to get into shape, which is fine. Touring, I find pretty kind of self-regulating in a way, although you have avalanche risk, but let's put that aside. How would you think about training? This is going to be a lazy question, but the lower body. And the reason I ask is two seasons ago, I've been very lucky, knock on wood. I've had very few knee issues. I've had issues with a lot of other stuff, shoulder surgeries, elbow surgeries, you

• 2:29:57Tim Ferriss?

  know, all sorts of issues, but ankles like broken every which way from Sunday, from all sorts of terrible combat sports decisions. Knees have been pretty good, except for two years ago, I had to get medevaced out with a very impressive tomahawk accident after hitting a ice ridge at high speed, hell, skiing. So got medevaced out for a bunch of, I mean, like the knee was, my leg was twisted around like a G I Joe, figure is bad. And I felt a pop in the hip and the knee because one ski ejected, the other one didn't. So as I tomahawked, like the tip got caught and rotated my leg around and landed. And I was like, fuck, I'm going to wait for the tail guy to check this out. And the knee felt a little loose, ended up ultimately getting ER, MRI, the whole nine,

• 2:30:41Tim Ferriss?

  and had a couple of minor injuries. But they were like, your knee is surprisingly okay. You might have like a mild tear. I think it was meniscus. They're like, but nothing really of note. And I was like, huh, okay. But there have been points, for instance, as my back has started to feel better, I've slowly moved into conservative, mostly ice lateral like training, because part of what precipitated this, I've had back issues for decades. It's just I have a transitional segment, my brother has the same thing, lots of kind of chronic back tightness.

• 2:31:09Speaker 04

  You have a tail.

• 2:31:10Tim Ferriss?

  I have a tail. Exactly. That's what I'm going to say now. But what really, yeah, okay. What really precipitated the acute phase was back squats. And I'm sure I could dissect biomechanically why I think I fucked that up. But I've been very moderately moving into like split squat type stuff and feeling really good, feeling very good about it. But a few weeks ago, felt like a little like. Ping, like a little weirdness in the right knee, a little tension after that with like terminal knee extension. Or let's just say terminal extension, like when I'm walking, if I try to keep my heel down, I'm like, weird. At the very end, it's a little tight on the back of the knee. So priority number one for me is injury prevention. How might you think about getting back into skiing, but doing it in a responsible way?

• 2:31:55Tim Ferriss?

  What type of training to augment with just the time on the slopes?

• 2:31:58Speaker 04

  Okay, I will actually directly answer your question finally.

• 2:32:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh my God.

• 2:32:00Speaker 04

  Yeah. We'll go straight to it.

• 2:32:02Tim Ferriss?

  Christmas comes early.

• 2:32:03Speaker 04

  Hey. Let's talk about sleep.

• 2:32:06Tim Ferriss?

  Let's talk.

• 2:32:08Speaker 04

  When you're going into a novel situation like that, your hydration, your sleep, we've already talked, those are going to be huge. And then overall, stress of all that stuff. Like that is by far the best place to start. We've done a nauseam there. We're going to go on to what you're talking about here. I need to know, what is your, you got two months, what's the rough skiing plan? Because what we want to do first, and this is the same thing when we get in season for any of our athletes or in fight camp, sport is first. You gotta get better at fighting. You gotta get better at hitting golf balls. You gotta get better at hitting tennis balls, et cetera. So tell me what that looks like and I'll reverse engineer the training backwards.

• 2:32:41Tim Ferriss?

  So what that looks like is first week, I'm actually not scheduling any formal training sessions with a coach because I want to have some time simply to remember what I did last season.

• 2:32:52Speaker 04

  No point of even getting tips on technique when you're inconsistent.

• 2:32:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let me get in a bit of mileage. Also, let me acclimate to altitudes that I'm not tempted to push with a coach who is also a very high level skier because I'm competitive and there's just, if I'm protecting myself from my lesser self, like week one is going to be acclimating, let's just call it. Then beginning week two, probably minimum three days a week of training with a coach. And then depending on recovery and other factors, an additional two to three days of skiing. Most likely then after, let's call it week three, I will add in ski touring, where I'm doing side or back country using skins where I'm basically shuffling my way up.

• 2:33:39Tim Ferriss?

  A mountain and then skiing down in more backcountry powder conditions. I would say also around that time, because I do well with these types of conditions, I would like to. I'm not attached to it, but I think it would be very interesting to do some adult race training. And just working with gates and getting very good at carving. And there are other, obviously, aspects to that. At this point, and this is where I have not decided on what adjunct training.

• 2:34:09Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:34:10Tim Ferriss?

  To supplement. What I found helpful in the past, at least last season, was, let's just call it one or two. It's not quite yoga nidra, but pretty low key, let's just call it down-regulating yoga classes a week. Also for just hip stuff. And then some type of core training. There are a couple of great Pilates instructors find that very, very helpful. For seemingly mitigating some of the lower back issues. And that's about it as far as it stands right now.

• 2:34:40Speaker 04

  So let me see if I can spit that back to you.

• 2:34:42Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 2:34:43Speaker 04

  First week, just getting on the slopes, moving.

• 2:34:46Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:34:46Speaker 04

  Moving around.

• 2:34:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and just an acclimating to altitude.

• 2:34:49Speaker 04

  Getting there. Okay.

• 2:34:50Tim Ferriss?

  Dryness, all that.

• 2:34:51Speaker 04

  Weeks two to three, we start actually getting moving. We're doing a variety of different types of skiing and styles of skiing in different areas. Week three to eight is training. Where we're going to have a somewhat of a specific plan about different styles of training on different days.

• 2:35:06Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, depending on conditions, yeah.

• 2:35:08Speaker 04

  Depending on.

• 2:35:08Tim Ferriss?

  Right, so it's like if we're training for powder, we don't have the chance, might train on moguls for a host of reasons and yada, yada, yada.

• 2:35:15Speaker 04

  What you just outlined is fight camp. It's exactly what it is. You move week one, you do these things, and then you get into a specific plan for five to eight weeks of different things. On each of the days, we have different emphasis, right? So we're boxing one day, we're wrestling another day, et cetera, you're doing.

• 2:35:30Tim Ferriss?

  It's the same thing.

• 2:35:30Speaker 04

  It's the same thing.

• 2:35:31Tim Ferriss?

  It's the same thing, right? Because we might do one day, it's a real carving emphasis. We might do another day that is, you know, powder emphasis. Another day is more conditioning with the touring.

• 2:35:39Speaker 04

  Great. So here's what I do. A couple of structured things. Number one, you actually made a comment earlier that I banked that I want to come back to. And you sort of said, you don't care about your upper body losing weight.

• 2:35:48Tim Ferriss?

  I'd be willing to sacrifice if it helps sort of looking at, say, Lance Armstrong, post-cancer, when his like relative strength went through the roof. I'm willing to compromise that for the sport.

• 2:35:59Speaker 04

  Understood. Yeah. Don't want to go away for no reason.

• 2:36:01Tim Ferriss?

  But if, but if, but if it's, if it's beneficial.

• 2:36:04Speaker 04

  Power to weight ratio matters. Right. Now, I don't know a ton about skiing, so I didn't catch all that terminology exactly. But from my understanding, you're going to be doing some stuff that is high speed, high change of direction, high impact on joints. My assumption is that's shorter duration.

• 2:36:19Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the runs are going to be shorter duration.

• 2:36:20Speaker 04

  Ballpark me. Time. 12 minutes, like two minutes?

• 2:36:23Tim Ferriss?

  I would say with the coach, let's just say it's two to five minutes before stopping to review technique.

• 2:36:30Speaker 04

  And then some back up the mountain and then multiple runs of that a day?

• 2:36:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:34Speaker 04

  How many runs roughly?

• 2:36:35Tim Ferriss?

  I would say, I mean, we're going to be doing on the order of at least, I would think, minimum 10 to 15 total runs.

• 2:36:44Speaker 04

  Okay. Yep. The other days are more when you're doing like the touring stuff?

• 2:36:48Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. That's going to be, you might spend an hour or two going up and then you get 10 turns in deeper powder. I mean, ideally, you get more than 10 turns, but the ratio of, let's just call it uphill to downhill, is heavily tilted to uphill, where you're doing a lot of conditioning.

• 2:37:08Speaker 04

  And very fatiguing, more like steady state, though, more like many hours of you're going up.

• 2:37:14Tim Ferriss?

  This would be the steady state.

• 2:37:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. Great. And?

• 2:37:17Tim Ferriss?

  This would be in the sort of go heavy, go long, go hard. This would be like the go long.

• 2:37:22Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. How many days a week total? Seven, six, five?

• 2:37:26Tim Ferriss?

  I would say I will likely increase the volume each week because my recovery will just be compromised in the beginning as I'm acclimating to altitude, et cetera. So I would say my goal would be by a week. Three that I'm at minimum four days a week. It would not be seven days a week. I will have at least one full day of recovery because I've just found that I need that.

• 2:37:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, you have to have so. Okay, great. The reason I ask about your upper body is when you're moving on skis like that, and again, I know minimally about it, you're having pulls and

• 2:37:57Tim Ferriss?

  You will get some upper body, like you are using your upper body.

• 2:38:00Speaker 04

  There's actually classic data out of Scandinavia for the most part, looking at cross-country skiers. This is like our study was in that. But if you actually the biopsy data that have been done on the deltoid, so shoulder muscle, you can get like a 95% reduction in muscle glycogen content. If you were to look at something like glycogen depletion

• 2:38:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:18Speaker 04

  in the quads, if you get to like 50, 60%, we call that depleted. So like you, you can torch your shoulders.

• 2:38:26Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, for sure. And also triceps, you can just smoke your triceps.

• 2:38:29Speaker 04

  And the reason I'm saying that is going back to your back and knee, because if we are now either compromised strength or endurance in our shoulders, and now we're getting up or downhill or control via other mechanisms, we're probably putting undue stress in those positions.

• 2:38:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, let me add something to that, because what you just brought up raised this, and that is, you're 100% right. It's not going to be to the cross-country skiing is like Norweg skiing is insane. It is just like torture personified. I mean,

• 2:38:59Speaker 04

  The cardiovascular capacity is so outrageous.

• 2:39:01Tim Ferriss?

  Absurd, absurd. So I'm not doing that. I mean, there are cardio respiratory demands placed on me in touring, but I'm, I won't get into all the details, but it's far less than cross-country. But to your point, yes, I'm using the upper body. And one of the question marks that has existed in my mind since last season is how much to work on various types of rotation. Because where I've found my back can get quite grumpy is when you're skiing at, say, steeper inclines.

• 2:39:33Tim Ferriss?

  Sorry, everybody. It's getting very personalized.

• 2:39:36Speaker 04

  You're not sorry at all.

• 2:39:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I'm not sorry. Sorry. Sorry, I'm not sorry. Your skis might be facing across the slope, but you often want your body, your chest to be facing down the slope. So there's a lot of rotation. There's like disassociation of the torso almost. And that is something I think that a lot of skiers underestimate in terms of the toll and the tax that can take, especially if you have mobility issues or any type of orthopedic issues.

• 2:40:02Speaker 04

  Okay, so big picture wise, what I would do is set up your week. And we need to make sure that we're doing this in a way where we understand our higher impact days and our higher fatigue days.

• 2:40:11Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:40:12Speaker 04

  And what you want to avoid is doing something in both of those categories on all our most days. And so I personally generally like to stack red on red. What I mean by that is if you're gonna have a really challenging session, say it's the touring when you guys really get going and you're cutting, you're sharp, you're moving. This is torsion on the back, right? It is impact. It is also probably more focused because there's like crash and burn, faster speeds, all that stuff. Okay. This is high physiological demand. This is high energy demand and this is high neurological demand. Also high stress.

• 2:40:42Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:40:43Speaker 04

  Okay, that's a red, right? We're gonna stack that red. When it comes to your training now, I'm thinking this is a good day to go hard. Counterintuitive, but I want to go hard on hard, right? I want red on red because the next day, we're gonna come back and probably do green. Whatever that means. That could be your Pilates, could be your total off day, or this could be one of the other ski sessions that is a very low technical recovery movement, something like that. This is something of there. And then we can come back and stack probably like an orange, yellow, whatever you want to call it, kind of in the mid. This is where you're accumulating volume, right? So this is, we're building up. This is maybe the longer state.

• 2:41:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so the red might be the steeper gnarlier stuff.

• 2:41:23Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:41:23Tim Ferriss?

  With some higher speed carving. And then green is actually maybe a touring day. I mean, it's gonna be like slow and steady, but not redlining.

• 2:41:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, you don't even want to like yellow line.

• 2:41:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, okay, then maybe something else. Maybe it's some drilling, like drilling, like single leg practice, stuff like that.

• 2:41:40Speaker 04

  It is high technical feedback stuff.

• 2:41:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly. High technical feedback stuff. And then the, maybe the orange is the moderate touring, something like that.

• 2:41:47Speaker 04

  It is exactly what you want to do, right? So we're gonna take all that and the first thing I'd want to say is let's lay out specifically when we're doing, if we can, the skiing components over the course of a week. And then we're gonna build in some sort of intentional. Down regulation work to supplement that stuff, right? So when we go red on red, then we are paying that back.

• 2:42:05Tim Ferriss?

  And when you say red on red, that's in a single day?

• 2:42:07Speaker 04

  Single day.

• 2:42:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:42:08Speaker 04

  Cause they assume you're gonna do a training session and a skiing session in a day or something, right?

• 2:42:13Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it.

• 2:42:13Speaker 04

  So you're gonna do your hard, hard red skiing session and then we're gonna come back and either do some Pilates to unwind. We're gonna do maybe a lift that day. We're gonna do something else depending on where we're at, right? We're typically doing some multiple physical exposures in one day at some form or fashion. And that's what I mean by say, if it's a single session, that's fine. Single session red is fine. It's gonna carry over to the next day, right? So there's residual fatigue there. There are some other changes that we wanna pay attention to. So either way, we're gonna finish that day with strong down regulation, right? Really gonna batch recovery into that. The next day, then we gotta pay that toll back. Okay? And this is again, technical work.

• 2:42:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yes, and I'm saying this as much for myself, who I am saying for myself. But like the slow restorative yoga was fantastic for down regulation. So that's where the day ends.

• 2:42:59Speaker 04

  Yep, love that stuff. I would actually like to also see, make sure that that session is maybe not full 90 minutes. If it's long or even maybe 60 minutes is maybe enough, because we just want restoration.

• 2:43:09Tim Ferriss?

  Keep it short.

• 2:43:10Speaker 04

  Fine, if you're like, no, I leave there and I feel more energetic or I feel unwound.

• 2:43:15Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, I basically feel like I'm all asleep, because it's also a really dark studio.

• 2:43:18Speaker 04

  Perfect.

• 2:43:18Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 2:43:19Speaker 04

  Amazing on that. So we would lay out the entire week on the skills there and this would progress over time. So the reds get a little bit harder. The greens stay green. This is a major mistake.

• 2:43:29Tim Ferriss?

  Drift, green drift.

• 2:43:31Speaker 04

  Everybody drifts, right? You end up just having a bunch of medium stuff, which is great. You gotta accumulate volume there. But the way that I want you to reframe this is when you're thinking of red, we're thinking about maximal capacity. Can I perform under these maximal conditions, right? You are holding on, you are getting after it. When we get into the other session, we're not working on conditioning at this point. We are working on technical capacity. It is practice. The general rule of thumb is probably something like 20% of the time can be red. And almost everything else needs to be practice or recovery. Much more than that depends on your unique physiology, but with all you got going on, new to the altitude. Injury history, I'm going to hedge way more conservatively.

• 2:44:13Tim Ferriss?

  I would also say my recovery capacity, broadly speaking, pretty low. I mean, I would just say I'm a slower, I'm slower to recover than a lot of my friends who are competitive athletes.

• 2:44:22Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:44:22Tim Ferriss?

  Who I trained with, same workload, kind of same diet, same habits, and I'm just, I'm slower to recover.

• 2:44:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's another metric we actually, we always bucket. So I want to settle your total recovery capacity. And then it goes back to earlier, it's that non-specific stressors. Get those out of your life and watch your recovery capacity just take off. So we will want to work on that 100%. Nonetheless, this is the end part, right? The recovery capacity is, give me my other stuff and I'll get that up higher. But since we don't have time for that, let's just make sure the input, the stressors going in from what we can control, are not outkicking our capacity to recover. This is where the problems start to exist. We want to outkick them a little bit. Got stress system. Physiology doesn't change without stress, but we can't exponentially increase our injury or overuse risk, right? You will see the back lockup 100% during this time, right? Not because of injury there, but because global stress got high. Central nervous system said, I don't like what's going on here. I'm going to stop him.

• 2:45:14Speaker 04

  I'm throttling him back. Pain, pain, pain, pain, pain, tight, tight, tight. That's effectively what's happening. No real actual change there, but it is a global regulator. It's a governor saying lock up, right? That's what's happening. So we're going to stretch that week out that way. I want a full layout of the seven days. We want to put in all those other practices around that. We're going to build a schedule. And then from there, we're going to work our training backwards around that. So when we look at that, we need unwinding. Sounds like you're getting that from yoga and Pilates.

• 2:45:40Tim Ferriss?

  Meditation also. I'm generally, when I am my better self, meditating twice a day, 20 minutes, basic TM stuff.

• 2:45:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. And breath work on top of that, or that is just the intentional breath manipulation?

• 2:45:53Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not doing much independent breath work. I mean, what I do find helpful, and I can make time for this, is using something like, there's a device called the O2 Trainer. It's, I'm not even sure what the sort of general term would be.

• 2:46:06Speaker 04

  It's a respiratory trainer, you know why?

• 2:46:07Tim Ferriss?

  It's respiratory training. And I do find those extremely helpful on a number of levels.

• 2:46:12Speaker 04

  Funny you mentioned the O2 Trainer. That research came from my lab.

• 2:46:15Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah?

• 2:46:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:46:16Tim Ferriss?

  Oh shit. Okay. There we go.

• 2:46:17Speaker 04

  So that's Boss Rutens.

• 2:46:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's Boss Rutens. Yeah, I had him on the podcast. That's when I started using it in preparation for high altitude hunt.

• 2:46:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:46:26Tim Ferriss?

  And found it tremendously helpful.

• 2:46:28Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:46:28Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, since it came from your lab, just 60 seconds.

• 2:46:32Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:46:33Tim Ferriss?

  Just a brief overview of what we're talking about.

• 2:46:35Speaker 04

  We touched a lot on respiratory rate. The reason respiratory rate can be either dysfunctional or even just suboptimal, which are different, is because of a number of things. I talked to you about it. It could be pattern recognition. It could be psychophysiological. What I never even got to was it could be biochemical. That would be CO2. That would be pH levels, right? You're trying to restore there. The third one is it can simply be mechanical, right? And so this is intercostal muscles. So these are the little muscles that are in between your ribs, as well as your diaphragm. And when you contract those that open up the cavity of the lungs, which allows to change pressure. What that matters is the real issue at altitude, and people say this all the time, but there is not less oxygen at altitude. There's the same amount of oxygen at 10,000 feet as there is at sea

• 2:47:19Speaker 04

  level. But the partial pressure in the air is different. It's much lower. And so when you open your mouth, the gradient, the difference between the pressure in your lungs and the outside environment is less. It's almost the same. So air doesn't go anywhere. And so what you need to do is be able to create a huge amount of increase in volume. As you may be aware of the relationship between pressure and volume, you open that up and then allow air to come in. So what the O2 Trainer does is it restricts airflow in. And so you actually have to actively pull. It's like strength training your intercostals and your diaphragm. So you can do that to give yourself more ability. Why that also matters through fatigue is those muscles are like any other muscle. They fatigue. So when you lose that ability, you lose the ability to bring in air, like during acute

• 2:48:01Speaker 04

  exercise. And so that becomes a problem. Another free way to do it is this is when nasal breathing can work. So nasal breathing alone as in closing your mouth is a fantastic way to force intercostals and diaphragm to really get on board, because you're restricting total air. You're effectively doing altitude without doing it. Not something you want to necessarily do. You shouldn't be doing. Like nasal only breathing when you're at maximum heart rate, doesn't really make any sense to do that. You have a mouth like for a reason. But if you have significant problems breathing at moderate to medium intensities, O2 trainer, great. Or nasal breathing or any other tools, but it's effectively getting at respiration train.

• 2:48:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. And that came in because you're asking if I do separate breath work and I would say outside of, I often wonder how much of, we don't need to diverge here, but how much of the benefit of meditation is from just measured, slow breathing versus good posture versus other things. Yes. Let's leave that alone, but I would say right now, no, I'm not doing separate breath work.

• 2:48:58Speaker 04

  Okay. May or may not need it. Again, let's take a look at CO2 tolerance. Let's take a look at mechanics, how you're moving, how you're breathing potentially. I don't know if you guys covered this in your convo with Eric or not, but you know, where are your ribs at? Or you have excessive rib flaring?

• 2:49:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's something that I've been working on a lot in the last, let's call it six to 12 months. Just having my awareness brought to, but generally yes, quite a bit of flare.

• 2:49:19Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's pretty easy. That'll kick off the diaphragm pretty quickly, right? Inhibits it and so it becomes a problem. So we would look biomechanically. We would look at it chemically and then we would look at pattern, psychophysiologically, something like there. But that would be the places to start to figure out, okay, you may or may not need breath work. That doesn't necessarily need to happen. It also again, can be detrimental. Meditation, the same thing. It's almost like as an aggregate, it's generally very, very, very positive to extremely positive. But there's also subsets of folks where breath work is maybe not a great option, right? It's not necessarily just this panacea of everyone go do down regulation breath work. Particularly if your HRV is extremely high, so you're very parasympathetic. And this has actually happened, again, this is rare.

• 2:50:03Speaker 04

  More common is what we've been describing, but has happened. We have had folks that have very high HRVs. So if you're using a device like an Aura. That's getting you this, you know, once every five minute mark. You're talking about people's overnight HRV averages of 150 milliseconds, 170 milliseconds. Really, really high, which may or may not be a problem at all. Could be totally normal for you. Easy, no problem. At the same time, they have a respiratory rate of nine breaths per minute. Okay, again, maybe totally normal, especially if you're super fit. Anytime we're running through physiology, we're never taking action on one metric. There's way too many things that could be explaining what's going on there. But if you couple that with lethargy, can't get out of bed, performance numbers are down, no motivation, drive, things like that.

• 2:50:47Speaker 04

  If you think that person is burnt out and you give them a bunch of down regulation work. Yeah.

• 2:50:53Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:50:53Speaker 04

  It's gonna be a problem. It's gonna be a real, real problem.

• 2:50:55Tim Ferriss?

  You're pushing the slider in the wrong direction.

• 2:50:56Speaker 04

  You're pushing the slider in the wrong direction for sure. So then again, that's more typical is upregulation. We need to bring you back down. But just, I just feel like it's important to say that because some people go out there and just have everyone down regulate and you're like, well, timeout here. You may or may not need breath work at all.

• 2:51:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's like a baseline.

• 2:51:13Speaker 04

  Tool, right?

• 2:51:14Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 2:51:14Speaker 04

  So I want something in there to, after those sessions hit and we've got that big fear to go, okay, let's, let's bring you back down. That could be very, very low volume strength work. If we feel like we have a little bit of an issue with underregulation.

• 2:51:29Tim Ferriss?

  This is where I was gonna go next. So I'm curious to hear more about this.

• 2:51:33Speaker 04

  So I want to make sure that you're strong in strong positions. So everything you outlined is going to be steady state endurance or a somewhat limited range of motion.

• 2:51:43Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 2:51:44Speaker 04

  You've also outlined, and again, I'm just, I'm making assumptions here, but when you're doing a lot of those fast turns, it's a greater range of motion through your knees and hips, uh, cause you're cutting at a faster angle.

• 2:51:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and you're doing stuff that scares the shit out of me that is helpful for skiing, like kind of, this is not the right term, but like buckling the knees laterally to get higher edge angle.

• 2:52:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, makes sense. So you clean, yep, start of the tire. I get it. All right, great. So that's actually high velocity eccentric control. We want to make sure that we come back in and reestablish a proper pattern over those same ranges of motion and fast. We'll walk through like exact examples here in one second, but we're walking from the top down. I want to know what your week looked like. What's the skiing? Now that we understood that, now we're back filling in all of our needs. Okay. So we needed the down regulations so that we don't just get the entire system to lock up on us. We needed now to look at our physical attributes. Okay. Can we come back and reestablish proper movement patterns? What I'm meaning by that is you are going to, when you're on those slopes, you're going to default to your movement and breathing patterns. That are the lowest common recipe, right? Hedging against that, and that's when we come back and we do our pelvic floor stuff.

• 2:52:48Speaker 04

  We do whatever stuff that you're doing that says, hey, now this is the way that we want to sequence. So you're just continually reminding it that how much transfer that has over to your skis, I don't care. Hopefully a lot, but even 1% is better than zero. Any percent carryover we can get from there. At this point, we probably don't need to spend a lot of time on maximal speed and power. That's not our rate limiting factor. We would have done this in the off season or some other issue, right?

• 2:53:11Tim Ferriss?

  Day late and a dollar short.

• 2:53:13Speaker 04

  Totally. But we need to make sure your hips in particular and feet are functioning appropriately as well as your shoulders. And that's like, those are the areas I'm going to go after and making sure we have proper stability. And then we have strength in them. You're going to get a lot of muscular endurance on the slopes. I'm not super concerned about that. I want low volume, high quality strength. I don't really need maximal strength at this point, but I kind of want to touch the envelope a little bit here. I want to get up to, Tim, give me a heavy, heavy double. Give me a heavy triple. No smelling salts. Don't like, you know, like, I don't need that, but we want to touch more than you probably want to do.

• 2:53:47Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So maybe this isn't the right way to reference it. Like what percentage of one rep max are we talking for those doubles and triples?

• 2:53:54Speaker 04

  85.

• 2:53:55Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. All right. It's up there.

• 2:53:57Speaker 04

  No, you're, you're, you're going.

• 2:53:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:53:59Speaker 04

  You're more than you want to do.

• 2:54:00Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:00Speaker 04

  For sure.

• 2:54:01Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 2:54:01Speaker 04

  But we don't need you 95.

• 2:54:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:04Speaker 04

  I don't need you at a two rep max.

• 2:54:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:54:05Speaker 04

  Right. I want you feeling again heavier than you want to feel.

• 2:54:08Tim Ferriss?

  So you're doing a two with what you might be able to do for four? I don't know if my mouth is panning out here.

• 2:54:13Speaker 04

  Six.

• 2:54:14Tim Ferriss?

  Six. Okay. All right. Got it. Got it. That's right. Just to sort of make it concrete for my

• 2:54:18Speaker 04

  Something where you've got to be paying attention.

• 2:54:20Tim Ferriss?

  Long Island, knuckle dragging.

• 2:54:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:54:21Tim Ferriss?

  So the double could be with a weight where you would tap out at six to eight.

• 2:54:25Speaker 04

  Six. Yeah. Something like that. Um, I don't, actually, I'm not super concerned about the exact numbers here. What I'm concerned about is, is it at a level where you sufficiently have to be paying attention? You have to be ready to go, right? We're not sending a work text and in the middle of like a set, right?

• 2:54:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right. I'm not listening to a dense podcast while I'm doing this.

• 2:54:41Speaker 04

  Totally. I also don't want it at such an intensity or volume that it's now escalating recovery in a negative fashion.

• 2:54:49Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. Right. You're, you're not digging the hole deeper.

• 2:54:52Speaker 04

  Yes, that's right. Don't want to dig the hole any deeper. Fatigue is really interesting, whether you're looking at endurance or strength, however you want to do it. This is basic physiology stuff. It doesn't go linearly. There's a little bit of an asymptote here and there's a little bit of an exponential growth such that going from a 10% increase in intensity. So 50 to 60% is almost identical in terms of recoverable volume. So the amount of volume you could do, let's say skiing at 50% of your max heart rate is pretty much the same as what you could do at 60%. There'll be very little changes, but if you go from 80% to 90%, there'll be dramatic increases in time it takes to recover. And you already, we know just based on what you've told me earlier, probably struggle on the higher end of that spectrum, right? And so getting into the real high intensity stuff.

• 2:55:34Tim Ferriss?

  Recovery.

• 2:55:34Speaker 04

  Recovery.

• 2:55:34Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:35Speaker 04

  So your maximal recoverable volume is MRV is kind of how we talk about a lot is low.

• 2:55:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:55:40Speaker 04

  For higher intensity stuff. Now I'd be interested to see what your muscle physiology looks like. Would you generally consider yourself more fast twitch or slow twitch? Just off the cuff.

• 2:55:47Tim Ferriss?

  I'd say more fast twitch.

• 2:55:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's always the answer, right? That's me. My fatigue, my soreness from power, heavy strength stuff is really, really high.

• 2:55:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:55:56Speaker 04

  From those things because I'm particularly good at that stuff relative for my own self.

• 2:55:59Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, when I've, and look, you're much more sophisticated with this stuff, but when in my own primitive way, when I've been my absolute strongest. I'm generally taking like seven to nine days between

• 2:56:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:11Tim Ferriss?

  the same workout.

• 2:56:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:56:12Tim Ferriss?

  And super long rest intervals.

• 2:56:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, of course. Right. Because if not, it's not necessarily that you potentially respond better to that training. It's the fact that the hole gets dug so deep if you do more than that. Your maximal recovery volumes is super low.

• 2:56:24Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, low.

• 2:56:24Speaker 04

  Right? So we can get out of it. Okay, so we want to pay attention to that. That's basically where I'm looking at, right? So we're going to do some stuff for global torso. Think of this as trap bar deadlift. Right? So we want to make sure that shoulder position is appropriate, hip position, and we're putting strength in the posterior side. And we're just remembering strength.

• 2:56:42Tim Ferriss?

  If I've had a history specifically with trap bar deadlift, I'm not sure why, for decades, I was totally fine with trap bar deadlift. You're gonna love this. And then I did a going from zero tennis to spending, I don't know, seven to 10 days with a pro in Florida, doing like eight hours a day of tennis.

• 2:56:59Speaker 04

  Smart.

• 2:56:59Tim Ferriss?

  Technically, made tons of progress.

• 2:57:01Speaker 04

  Of course.

• 2:57:02Tim Ferriss?

  And then I came back and I was doing a trap bar deadlift and my right SI was like clunk. And ever since I've actually had, I've gone through periods of it improving, getting worse. Who knows if it's exactly the SI? But I've had issues with both trap bar and say back squatting type movements.

• 2:57:20Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:57:21Tim Ferriss?

  Where I worry about the low back and the hip. So I'm wondering if

• 2:57:24Speaker 04

  Throw it off.

• 2:57:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:25Speaker 04

  Pick a different exercise, right? We're almost always tool agnostic, right? It is what's the thing we're trying to get to? And we'll pick a bunch of tools based on that, right?

• 2:57:34Tim Ferriss?

  So I could do some split stance or, you know, I lateral thing.

• 2:57:37Speaker 04

  Split stance tend to be better for you?

• 2:57:39Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:39Speaker 04

  Single leg or split stance entirely or both?

• 2:57:41Tim Ferriss?

  Single leg. I would say it just seems to be safer. I don't run into the same back issues.

• 2:57:45Speaker 04

  Okay, do a single leg leg press.

• 2:57:48Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 2:57:49Speaker 04

  For all I care, right? Like, who cares, right? It's different. Now we've got to do something for the back later, but fine.

• 2:57:54Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:54Speaker 04

  Right? We can make that work. We can do hip thrusting.

• 2:57:56Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 2:57:57Speaker 04

  Lots of ways we can go about this.

• 2:57:58Tim Ferriss?

  Single leg leg press is how I've been edging back into the leg training, which is overall going very well with that one strange like piano wire, not snap, but like twing that I felt a couple of weeks ago.

• 2:58:09Speaker 04

  So this is just recent?

• 2:58:10Tim Ferriss?

  That was two or three weeks ago.

• 2:58:12Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, okay. Yeah, great. We could do sled drags, right? We could push and pull things that are really heavy for a few steps. All of these things are going to be fine. So my guess is if you were to do something like that, you'd probably be fine. That particular position, it is being stuck in a position under load that really give you problems. So I would look and see when we get out to the place, what equipment do we have? And then we'll work around that. That's the approach. Could be like split stance, even potentially elevated one foot overhead pressing for your shoulders, things like that. Let's get your back out of the equation, but I don't want it gone. So that's the real big key. You said a second ago, terminal extension of your right leg when it's trailing. Okay, great. So let's put it in terminal extension. I want your right leg behind. I want your right heel on the ground. I want you terminally locking out your knee.

• 2:58:56Speaker 04

  And then we're going to do overhead movement. And so what we're doing is in that case, we're not training the leg per se. We got that and other stuff. But we're connecting it to the rest of the movement group. Which is to say, you never get the time off. You are always practicing that movement when distracted. That's going to tell us, do you own that position? Do you really have that? Is that going to men transfer on the slopes? And that's what we're after. Learning movement, and this is a general problem with physiology. I think we've done a huge disservice teaching systems as if they are separate. Everyone makes and says, oh, yes, they're not. But then we go right back to treating it, system by system. If we want to improve movement, that means that foot heel connection needs to be worked on in all of our practices, right? We just don't let it go. That's just the new ingrained system. So I would do that.

• 2:59:40Speaker 04

  I would say the same thing for our rotational work. It's really weird. People get to rotation and they all of a sudden just forget to strength train, right? And they get to rotation, they're like, I'll just do sets of 10. And like, what? Why?

• 2:59:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:50Speaker 04

  Like, well, why is that the only answer? You want to be strong this way and this way, right? Great. So we're going to have the same movement patterns that we're going to get there.

• 2:59:58Tim Ferriss?

  When you're doing, let's just say, two rep sets, three rep sets.

• 3:00:02Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:00:03Tim Ferriss?

  Doesn't have to be right now, but I'd love to know what we're talking about in terms of total volume, number of sets.

• 3:00:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's exactly what I'm going. You can use a very easy rule of thumb, three to five method. Now, every time I say this, the entire internet comes after me. Yes, I didn't invent it. No, like, it's been around for a very long time. Three to five, which this means is three to five days per week. Pick three to five exercises, do three to five sets, three to five reps per set, three to five minutes rest. So what that means, that could be on the high end, five days a week, five sets of five. Of five exercises.

• 3:00:36Tim Ferriss?

  That's a long workout.

• 3:00:37Speaker 04

  That's a.

• 3:00:38Tim Ferriss?

  If you start adding up the rest intervals, right?

• 3:00:40Speaker 04

  If you start adding up the rest intervals, and even if you cheat the rest intervals, and you do that at the appropriate load, five by fives, anyone who's truly strength trained, that is a beast. It's another word I was wanting to save, but I'll pass on saying it. Like, starts with an M and an F involved in it. It's a load, right? It can be as little as three days a week, three exercises, three sets of three. That's probably what I would hedge more to you.

• 3:01:03Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so that I'm not digging any deeper with my already limited.

• 3:01:06Speaker 04

  Hundred percent.

• 3:01:07Tim Ferriss?

  Recovery ability.

• 3:01:07Speaker 04

  So if I were to give you like this one example, but actual full training program for you. I'm missing a bunch of information here, but just as a sample here, I would probably say, if you're skiing initially, five days a week, as we call it, I probably want roughly Wednesday, I want almost as a pure recovery day. We are going to potentially do some sort of movement. So your PT or your actual movement coach, respiratory muscle, hip adductors, whatever that little thing is, we need to get activated. So any hygiene we have from whoever's coaching there, we want to get done. We're doing our hot, cold sauna thing. You want to do that outside? Great. You want to go do your breath work outside to get hot? Like, any of those

• 3:01:49Speaker 04

  things you'd like to do for recovery, Wednesdays, as an example, is that day. That's it. Catch up on work, maybe for a few hours. We're going to keep that thing. We're resetting, we're checking hydration, we're sleep extension, we're napping, we're getting PT, massage, soft tissue, all that stuff is Wednesday. And that's Wednesday. This is also the day where you do something that is obnoxiously selfish. You want to play three hours of video games. Great. Like, what is the thing you love to do that you don't like let yourself do?

• 3:02:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, will the Warcraft while I'm getting a mani-pedi? Uh huh. Petty, probably. Need my hands.

• 3:02:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, there you go. That's fantastic. Alright. That is that day. We may or may not incorporate a low intensity walk. This is potentially getting out and you know, you're going to have a lot of nature exposure. So we're fine there.

• 3:02:34Tim Ferriss?

  I will likely also do a lot of walking in place of sitting. So in place of zoom calls, in place of that type of thing, I'll do a low intensity walking.

• 3:02:43Speaker 04

  Yeah. If not, we would say walk outside for some chunks, two walks, two 10 minute walks a day morning or something like that. Any other adjunct therapies and tools and technologies we're using is going to be that day. Right? So that's amazing. Let's just say, I'm just going to make an example. You're just going to run the whole thing. Let's just say Monday is that really hard red day. You go on that really hard session on the scope. We're going to come back after that final session. We might go straight to the gym, get really warmed up and we're going to do three by three. Okay. We're going to probably do that, like rear stands, other foot elevated.

• 3:03:12Tim Ferriss?

  Front foot elevated.

• 3:03:13Speaker 04

  Front foot elevated, overhead press, something like that. Now, in this particular case, I'm probably not doing three sets of three. I might ask you to go to like fives. The upper body doesn't tend to respond to lower rep ranges as well as the lower body.

• 3:03:24Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting.

• 3:03:25Speaker 04

  Um, you won't see too many guys who are really, really excellent at bench press, who only do singles or doubles. They tend to do probably closer to three to four to fives. Lower body is like generally opposite. So doing like a, an overhead press double, by the time you get it up and get the first rep up, doesn't work as well.

• 3:03:41Tim Ferriss?

  It also might behoove me to use slightly lighter loads for anything overhead, which I've avoided completely for probably half a year because of the compression sensitivity.

• 3:03:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:03:51Tim Ferriss?

  So I have, I've done very little, very little spinal loading.

• 3:03:54Speaker 04

  Angle it. So let's just do incline.

• 3:03:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:03:56Speaker 04

  Same thing, right?

• 3:03:57Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 3:03:57Speaker 04

  Like jammer press, like 45 degree. If you've got a land mine, like some other way.

• 3:04:01Tim Ferriss?

  Perfect.

• 3:04:01Speaker 04

  We need to just be at an angle here. It doesn't have to be perfectly overhead, something like that. Okay? So I'm probably doing that. I want some sort of lower body, similar vein. This could be threes. I love if you have a heavy sled, you can push for like three steps each leg. That would be great. If you've got some sort of potentially front squat, goblet squat, zirker squat, something like that, that is not aggravating of any of your things. When we're saying three by three, two at 80%, this is still week one. So I don't care if this is 60%. It doesn't matter. Like we're just going through the motions here.

• 3:04:34Tim Ferriss?

  Any favorite? Split stance or isolateral leg movements, just in my particular case. The sled is interesting. I've responded well to sleds in the past, so I'll look for that. It may be my equipment options might be limited. What would be an alternative?

• 3:04:50Speaker 04

  Step ups.

• 3:04:51Tim Ferriss?

  Great.

• 3:04:52Speaker 04

  A super basic step up, right?

• 3:04:53Tim Ferriss?

  Like holding on to dumbbells or kettlebells or something?

• 3:04:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, just be really careful. A lot of people will like to progress this by going to a higher step. Which is great, but we have to be really careful of how much hip flexion and how much load we put on hip flexion for you. Now, at the same time, if we go at a low, say 12 inch box or something, we're really not getting much movement here other than a basic knee extension. We want to think and kind of play through this.

• 3:05:17Tim Ferriss?

  And my low back responds very well to the type of glute activation that I experienced through step ups.

• 3:05:23Speaker 04

  High angle or low angle? High box or low box?

• 3:05:26Tim Ferriss?

  I have only done lower box, even at low box, assuming that I'm, and this is getting into the weeds, but when I sort of do like the Verstegen, like pick the knee up and really get that support leg glute contraction, my low back responds very well to them.

• 3:05:41Speaker 04

  Okay, let me ask you one quick question. This is super technical here. When you're on that box, let's just say you're doing a step up with your left foot. Okay, to make it easy, you have the left foot over there. Where is your body at relative to your left foot? And where's your knee at?

• 3:05:57Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm, well, the way I've been doing these step ups is actually a sort of cross lateral step.

• 3:06:04Speaker 04

  Oh, sure.

• 3:06:05Tim Ferriss?

  And then.

• 3:06:05Speaker 04

  Like a curtsy squat?

• 3:06:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 3:06:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, step up. Okay.

• 3:06:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, so I've been doing that, but I'm open to whatever you would suggest that has the lowest injury potential.

• 3:06:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, so you're doing that and feeling a great glute contraction because you're crossing. Okay, that's great. The only reason I ask that is because depending on where your foot position is, this can dramatically change hamstring glute activation, right? And so are you stepping up with a knee related activity? Are you stepping up with a hamstring or glute related activity?

• 3:06:29Tim Ferriss?

  I'm not sure, to be honest.

• 3:06:31Speaker 04

  So if your foot is way in front of you, so you can imagine you're kind of, as you go to step up, you're rocking forward and then coming up, right? Or if it's behind you.

• 3:06:39Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 3:06:40Speaker 04

  Right? Or same with you, it's behind you. None of these things are right or wrong, right? Should your knees go past your toes? Well, what are we trying to do here? The more our knee goes past our toes, the more it's going to be knee related, the more it stays behind and the more it's going to be posterior typically, right? As a general rule. So what are we trying to get response to? Potentially, you're in quads or weak.

• 3:06:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 3:06:59Speaker 04

  Now, when you're getting, feeling great response from single leg pressing, depends on how your setup is, you might be in a situation where you feel better when your quads, quads got...

• 3:07:08Tim Ferriss?

  I can tell you how I'm setting up for the single leg leg press. I'm actually placing foot very high on the platform.

• 3:07:14Speaker 04

  What kind of a platform is this here?

• 3:07:15Tim Ferriss?

  Well, let's just say on a leg press, we've got this rectangle in front of us.

• 3:07:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:07:20Tim Ferriss?

  I am putting the foot quite high on that platform so that it would be, I guess, maybe the equivalent of rocking forward in this step up.

• 3:07:27Speaker 04

  This is a very high hip flexion.

• 3:07:29Tim Ferriss?

  Very high hip flexion.

• 3:07:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:07:30Tim Ferriss?

  And because the more I feel it in the glute, the better the low back feels.

• 3:07:35Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. So what you're getting is contraction over stretch, which is great, right? So contracting over, this is why full range of motion stuff is such a good idea, right? It needs to be strong over those long positions, right? Charlie Weingroff all day, right? Like, long, strong, and then work hard, okay? So, we want to be in that position. I'm not going to suggest that the standard step up position is any better. If you're having success with how complicated things like low back are, if you're having success with that modified curtsy step up, then I would stay like probably right there.

• 3:08:03Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 3:08:03Speaker 04

  Which is great. The only thing we might want to do is potentially load it more? I don't know how you're doing now.

• 3:08:09Tim Ferriss?

  As far as step ups go, I've been doing it unloaded. Like, this is body weight, body weight only. And then I've moved into loading with the leg press because there are just fewer variables.

• 3:08:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:08:18Tim Ferriss?

  At play. And I'm like, alright, let me see how I progress with this.

• 3:08:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. I would do the same thing, by the way, the record. Like if we started loading curtsy, I would start very low. Like right now, let's not go the wrong direction.

• 3:08:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:08:28Speaker 04

  All right, let's take our wins. We're at the black tech table, we won one hand.

• 3:08:32Tim Ferriss?

  And step ups, you were saying sort of below or 12 inches or below, like you're not really getting A, B, and C. If you're trying to like win a world record and you're trying to do like a four foot step up, you got your own set of problems. Like, how do you think about elevation?

• 3:08:44Speaker 04

  It's because of hip flexion. It's the same thing. You already answered the question. I was coming at it this way, right? Which is if it's at a very low position, then you're basically getting most drive from your knee extension initially to get you moving. This is generally what's gonna happen. But if you put it at a really high position, you're automatically putting your hip in a really high flexion. So your thigh gets really close to your rib cage. Now we have to work the glute. And it doesn't mean you're not working your knee as well. Could be very knee, heavy driven, still doesn't matter. But you've now forced your glute to work over a high range of motion, which is what we're after.

• 3:09:13Tim Ferriss?

  Yep.

• 3:09:13Speaker 04

  People tend to avoid range of motion when they have things like back injuries. That's oftentimes the wrong direction. Like you want to make sure without exacerbating pain, of course. But it probably wants to be opened up a little bit and the hip needs to be. So I would keep it there. I also may ditch that and go to straight hip extension. This is, this is go to a hip thrust. Have you done those before?

• 3:09:33Tim Ferriss?

  I have done hip thrusts. I mean, we're talking about like barbell across the waist type of stuff.

• 3:09:37Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:09:38Tim Ferriss?

  I have.

• 3:09:39Speaker 04

  Glute ridge hip thrust.

• 3:09:40Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for whatever reason, especially if it's single leg. If I keep the elevation pretty low, in other words, if I'm not getting to like max terminal.

• 3:09:49Speaker 04

  Hip extension.

• 3:09:50Tim Ferriss?

  Hip extension, I'm usually okay. It can cause my spinal erectors to fire.

• 3:09:55Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:09:56Tim Ferriss?

  And that sometimes gets me into a spasmed situation where it's problematic.

• 3:10:00Speaker 04

  Yep, 100%. So you're getting extension from lumbar spine instead of.

• 3:10:05Tim Ferriss?

  But for instance, if I keep my hips somewhat low, let's just say I'm using a Swiss ball or something like that. And I'm doing like heel rollouts where I'm really getting the hamstring.

• 3:10:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:10:14Tim Ferriss?

  Then I'm fine.

• 3:10:15Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:10:15Tim Ferriss?

  But higher weight, if I'm really making the effort to go full range, my spinal erectors can really get over activated and stay over activated.

• 3:10:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you just wanna stay out of those situations.

• 3:10:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:10:26Speaker 04

  This is why like it would be impossible. I'm glad you're letting us do this, by the way, because typically on podcasts, it kind of is like, what's the?

• 3:10:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What's the cookie cutter?

• 3:10:32Speaker 04

  Ah, like you can't.

• 3:10:33Tim Ferriss?

  No, this is, this is, and I know this is really self indulgent, everybody. So I appreciate you bearing with. But you know, what I would have said, because I record the intros after these conversations, but like you get to the universal through the personal in the sense that if you've had any degree of injuries, if you've just lived life aggressively, it's never going to be a cookie cutter, one size fits all. You're going to have to zig and zag like we're doing right now. So this is, I appreciate you being game to do it also because you're going to have to zig and zag with this stuff. So yeah, with the hip bridging, if I keep my hips kind of low and I'm, let's say targeting the hamstrings, then it works. But otherwise, what I've realized with this low back stuff is if it gets super hypertonic, like if my spinal actors just like turn on and they refuse to turn off, that can last two days.

• 3:11:19Speaker 04

  Or more.

• 3:11:19Tim Ferriss?

  And or three days.

• 3:11:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:11:20Tim Ferriss?

  And it fucks up my sleep so badly.

• 3:11:22Speaker 04

  And everything else.

• 3:11:23Tim Ferriss?

  And everything.

• 3:11:24Speaker 04

  Digestion, all of it, mood, work, can't, don't want to do anything.

• 3:11:27Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:27Speaker 04

  Okay. So I would just, given the fact you've had some success with what you're currently doing, and those other ones are marginally helpful, then just ditch them.

• 3:11:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:35Speaker 04

  At this point, this is like green only.

• 3:11:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:38Speaker 04

  Yellow, orange is out. Like that's what we're doing. The only other thing I'd say is let's change the positions entirely, which is, okay, how about, you said you had success in areas where you make the hamstrings work really hard. So let's do a hamstring curl on a machine. Take the back entirely out of the equation.

• 3:11:54Tim Ferriss?

  Take it out.

• 3:11:54Speaker 04

  Retrain glutes contract, hamstrings contract, when we don't give the spinal erectors and even an option to come. Because it sounds like once they come into the party, when you're front squatting, when you're back squatting, when you're doing hip thrusts or glute bridges, they haven't learned to play their position yet?

• 3:12:09Tim Ferriss?

  No, it's like that, that one friend everybody has who shows up at the party, drinks too much, starts yelling and screaming. You're just like, oh, God.

• 3:12:16Speaker 04

  Just don't invite him to the party.

• 3:12:17Tim Ferriss?

  This guy again. Yeah.

• 3:12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. You don't get to come to the party for a while.

• 3:12:20Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:12:20Speaker 04

  Like you're just gone, right? We can do some other stuff there. What you're going to eventually want to build to is integration, which is, okay, now we need to learn to go glute hamstring low back firing sequence, right? Glute hamstring low back. But right now for a while, to make sure that your quads, hamstrings and glutes are truly conditioned or isolating.

• 3:12:39Speaker 04

  And until we get out of pain, that's where I would do leg extension on leg extension machine, leg curl in your situation where you're at and limited resources, probably not a full-time PT. Like remember folks, like this is this situation here. And then we're going to slowly in our warmups and cooldowns, do sequence movement patterns that go glute hamstring low back. And just to start like, hey, remember, this is the pattern we want to be in. Okay, now we're not going to expose you to load and fatigue. We're going to do that in our isolation work, but then we'll come back and in our cooldowns, we're going to go through that. I would also then build you out a specific warmup that you do every day prior to skiing. That is the same sequencing. It could be a thousand different little things we do, but we're going to do a couple of drills. And I'm literally

• 3:13:22Speaker 04

  talking four minutes of work, right? Where we're just remembering proper glute sequencing. And this is a combination to round this last point out because we haven't got to Tuesday yet.

• 3:13:33Tim Ferriss?

  I still have more questions about Monday, but yeah.

• 3:13:37Speaker 04

  Well, folks, I'm having a ton of fun. So I hope they are too. In getting to that is we need to make sure a part of that equation is your chest and your thoracic spine and your rib cage, because we can't then rebuild the lower sequence without and then just let the ribs do it, that natural thing. And so we don't want to be in a situation where we're like locked out, where we can't like breathe, everything's so tight, where we're just like, no, this needs to be a moved functional position. You actually would be sort of surprised how much that will carry over if you give it time. You're not going to see significant changes in your posture, your low back pain in three days by doing a four minute warmup. But a year later, this can have substantial impact.

• 3:14:14Tim Ferriss?

  What would some of the, what might that warmup look like?

• 3:14:17Speaker 04

  Yeah. Okay. So one of the things I'd probably start you with is a basic diaphragm warmup. Okay. So this could be as simple as let's lay on your back. Let's go in a heels to your butt position. So knees are up on there, your feet are flat on the floor and your heels are right up against your butt. Okay. Now you're going to take your hands and put them around your stomach. So just below your rib cage. And we're just going to use your breath to expand your hands. So pushing it out there, right? Okay, great. Three or four breaths, probably nasal only. Okay, awesome. Now we're going to do a glute bridge. Okay, we're in that same position and we're going to make sure. As high as you can go, six inches, two inches, an inch off the ground, I don't care. Only as high as you can go. And we're probably going to tuck our chin, right? This is almost automatically going to keep your position out of the extension in your low back.

• 3:15:01Speaker 04

  So we're going to tuck your chin just a little bit there. And we're going to breathe, three breaths, four breaths.

• 3:15:07Tim Ferriss?

  While you're bridged.

• 3:15:08Speaker 04

  While we're bridged, right? And watch what happens, reset yourself, come back up and watch you've gained eight inches in your hip extension, guaranteed. Because not you've actually stretched anything, but you've turned signals off. Right now, I'm totally projecting here, but I'm pretty confident. Right now, you're in a position to where anytime you get any perception through your low back, it just goes lock.

• 3:15:29Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, the governor's just like.

• 3:15:31Speaker 04

  Bingo. Turn it off.

• 3:15:32Tim Ferriss?

  Shut off the, yeah.

• 3:15:34Speaker 04

  You have to turn it off.

• 3:15:34Tim Ferriss?

  Throw the, throw the switch.

• 3:15:35Speaker 04

  So you throw the switch and all of a sudden, boom, you get hip extension. And now it's not coming from your lumbar spine, right? And we're doing this still in a tucked position and we're going two inches lower than you want to go. So gold, as high as you want to go.

• 3:15:45Tim Ferriss?

  Stay, stay, stay green.

• 3:15:46Speaker 04

  Totally, stay green. And we're going to do some breath work there. And by breath work again.

• 3:15:49Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, breathe through your nose.

• 3:15:50Speaker 04

  Three.

• 3:15:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:51Speaker 04

  Three of them, four, five, whatever you want, doesn't matter. Then come back down, reset, come back up one more time, you'll be up four more inches. Like if you're doing this at home, you're going to be like, oh my God. It works perfectly. I might have you go into one leg position. So you're going to hold that position on one leg, say, kick your right leg out, keep your knees identical to each other and kick the right leg out. And now we have ipsilateral control, right? So now we have torso rotation and we also have that terminal hip extension. And now can you still breathe? What happened to your ribs? Bingo, right? You're going to see, I guarantee you, as soon as you do that, you look down, you'll have arched, right? Ribs have gone up. This is not a locked in hard contraction. This is a chill position, right? It has to be, all right, I'm relaxed here. I'm breathing. There's going to be a little bit of shaking because you're in a single leg position, but not much.

• 3:16:35Speaker 04

  Three, four, five, eight breaths, switch to do the next one. Take a break in between, like those details aren't what matter here. You're just trying to slowly let the system know, these are okay positions. You can relax, we're safe here. So I would probably go into that. Then I'd come back down, that's a simple sequence. We are 45 seconds in at this point. And I guarantee you, stand up and your posture will be better, right? You'll be out of that little bit of a curve. From there, I would probably then take that. Exact same thing and go into a split stance. So imagine you could do this walking lunges. I would probably do this with a slight rotation, but I still want your hands around your stomach. So we're still watching the distance between your rib and anterior spiroiliac spine, that ASIS, that front point of your hip. You're going to pay attention to that. If you want to put your thumb and your pinky,

• 3:17:18Speaker 04

  put your thumb below your rib, put your pinky on your ASIS while you're doing these lunges and make sure that distance isn't changing. And just breathe. Do a step all the way down. If you want to play here, that's fine. Let's go a little bit, rock your knee over your ankle, rock backwards a little bit. Give me a little bit of a rotation. If you want to do a little bit of an arch, if your, your right knee is forward in this lunge position and you want to take your left arm and reach it over top of your head, you want to rotate it, you want to twist it, any of those things are fine. But the key is here, we're not doing these because we have a checkbox that says this is my warm up. Intention is everything here. As soon as you lose intention, just stop. Cause we're trying to make sure we have a specific action, not just like, coach, that I have to warm up.

• 3:17:57Tim Ferriss?

  And specific action in this case is making sure you're not flaring, making sure that that torso position.

• 3:18:04Speaker 04

  That's correct.

• 3:18:05Tim Ferriss?

  In terms of like distance from rib cage to the ASIS. Yep. Like bony protrusion on the front of the hip. Folks, like if you see someone wearing low jeans and you see the like ridges in the front.

• 3:18:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's the arrow that points.

• 3:18:18Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. Right, exactly. Okay, so that, that is the intention then. It's not just like, oh, I'm doing my eight steps. It's like, no, you're doing your eight steps, but the purpose is to maintain.

• 3:18:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:18:29Tim Ferriss?

  Wild breathing.

• 3:18:30Speaker 04

  Not even necessarily like the other classic things that are associated with a physical warm up, like actual temperature increases, being metabolically efficient in the muscle, having more strength and power production, that's coming too. But we've slid that in. We've also slid in breath work because you're actually now altering O2 and CO2 on purpose and you've done that on top of correcting movement patterns. And now you're reestablishing that. So I would argue, I'd love to do this barefoot.

• 3:18:54Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 3:18:54Speaker 04

  If possible, right? So your toes are all the way up are engaging. I want, in this particular case, that heel connection to be strong. I don't want you driving only through your heel. You're going to be driving and using your whole foot, but let's make sure we're not forgetting our toes and our feet.

• 3:19:08Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, super important for skiing.

• 3:19:10Speaker 04

  Very important, right?

• 3:19:11Tim Ferriss?

  Your foot awareness and control is super, super important.

• 3:19:14Speaker 04

  Everything, right? If you want to do a little more ski specific here, you could do actually, or a little more fun, you could take a little slide pad. So it's like the size of a shoe, if you will. If you can put it on a surface that slides and put that on your back foot and let that slide back and forth. So you lose some stability, that back leg, which is then just going to further exacerbate neurological control. And it's going to remind you at all times, do you know where everything is moving? Right? So when we're talking, your adductors are now moving, you're talking your hip extensors and knee flexors, they're all working on both sides. And we're getting, am I controlling my breath? Am I controlling my ribs? So I would probably add a few of those in. Again, one, give me one stat, six to 12 per leg. I don't really care. There's no magic thing

• 3:19:58Speaker 04

  we're trying to get here. We're three minutes in at maximum here. You've now gotten the entire lower body, the hips have been moved and isolated or activated. We would do something like that. If you have any specific things, and this is why I don't have insight, but if you had any, hey, yeah, my, my right adductor is weaker than my left, or it's overused, or our stylos is something like that, then we would add in specificity here. Let's get your left glute med on. So we'll do some standing clamshells. We'll do some lateral walks. What over the cases that we need to get going there? And we're in a pretty good position. Last thing we would do is then go to your upper body and make sure that we're having a connection between our upper body to our toe, all the way up and down. So this could be throwing some sumagil. So throw in hand, leg opposite here. We could do that.

• 3:20:38Tim Ferriss?

  Hand leg opposite, meaning like bird dog, something like that?

• 3:20:41Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you're on quadruped, right? So your hands are on the ground, you're on your knees, and you would say lift your left hand all the way in front of you. So it would be over your head, but you're on your knees. And then at the same time, your right leg is extending back. And so you're getting a very strong right glute contraction that's crossing that fascial line to your left shoulder. And now that entire thing is in the sequence. At the same time, your core is working on rotation while remember. What happened to your rib cage?

• 3:21:06Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, and we'll link to all this in the show notes, guys. So you'll be able to find these things.

• 3:21:11Speaker 04

  Something simple like that would be, probably would do the very, very last thing I would do then would be some sort of extremely low level, what some folks call aerobic plyometrics. This is altus, this is Dan and Sue's stuff, this is rudimentary hops. So something like stiff legged, and you're gonna do 20 hops and land intentionally on your heel.

• 3:21:30Tim Ferriss?

  Ooh, that's gonna be hard for me with the heel drop stuff.

• 3:21:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, right, like again, you don't want to do it to a level of pain. You could do a little bit of your toe, you could do something, but if you're going to be landing and absorbing load on the skis.

• 3:21:41Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 3:21:42Speaker 04

  We have to get some sort of activation of tissue tolerancy. Remember, if we really have a sensitivity issue in your low back with pain, we have to desensitize it somehow. The way that we do that is we walk right up to that line of sensitivity, go back two steps, and we do a little bit of volume there. And then ideally try to push that line back up. Tangible, quick example, let's just say you're having an issue with trap bar deadlifts. Okay, great, and let's just say we did a thing where I said, okay, put it on the bar, and we're just gonna work up to a load until it starts to hurt. Let's say that that is 300 pounds for you, probably have a pretty decent trap bar deadlift, I assume. Okay, great, so when the pain started hurting at 300 pounds, let's go to 200. Let's do three sets of six. Go on, come back the next day, no, no, no issue.

• 3:22:25Speaker 04

  Next session, slowly working our way up to where's that line? Okay, seems like I can train at 280, and I have no pain. Let's now get to five sets of six. Let's get to five sets of six and then some accessory exercises, some other stuff. No pain, no pain, no pain. Now let's slowly go up to 280, and then we're gonna slowly, you're gonna desensitize that system by doing it. I'm doing the same thing with your landing and compression. I had to get to that somehow. I don't want to exacerbate your pain, but I want to do 10 lands. I want to do something. It could be maybe on a little bit of a softer ground, we could do some other wave around, but we want to slowly desensitize the tissue, that landing and loading is okay. So that's how I would build it Monday.

• 3:23:04Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, so a few follow-ups on Monday. My most important Remaining question is related to, let's just say in this case, the three exercises. And three to five minutes in between. I've benefited in the past from three to five minutes or more in between exercises. But in the interest of time, one might be inclined, myself included, to say, well, rather than doing, say, exercise A and doing the three sets of that exercise with five minutes in between, maybe I could just sequence it so that I do exercise A, I take like a minute rest, exercise B, take a minute rest, C, take a minute rest, and then go back to A. Is that something that is acceptable slash advisable?

• 3:23:46Tim Ferriss?

  Or do you really want more of a break for your central nervous system or otherwise?

• 3:23:50Speaker 04

  In your particular case in this situation, what you laid out, that supersetting is totally fine.

• 3:23:54Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, great.

• 3:23:55Speaker 04

  No issue there. We're not trying to maximize your strength.

• 3:23:58Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:23:59Speaker 04

  If we were trying to do that for any number of reasons, where we really are trying to peak it, what you're really trying to do in this case, I don't even care if you get stronger. If we lose some strength over the course of this, it's okay.

• 3:24:08Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 3:24:08Speaker 04

  What we're trying to do is continue to have health throughout the system. So it needs to be strong enough to hold positions while you're on the slopes.

• 3:24:14Tim Ferriss?

  Right. So we're trying to avoid a slope of degradation over the course of Fight Camp.

• 3:24:18Speaker 04

  So if you wanted to do that, no problem. You want to superset them, is what we'd call that.

• 3:24:22Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:23Speaker 04

  What we'd probably have you do is set the whole circuit up before. It's part of your kind of warm up. And you do one, catch your breath for a second, you slowly walk over, set up, do the next one. I don't care that it's three minutes or two minutes or less. What we want to make sure we're doing is not getting a ton of fatigue. I don't want you, if your breath rate is 150 breaths per minute, if you're, your heart rate, rather, if you're sweating a lot, if you're really getting it, then, oh, like,

• 3:24:47Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, pause.

• 3:24:47Speaker 04

  Calm down. I actually want you to leave these sessions feeling like, I didn't do anything. But if you can do that in a superset fashion, no problem. The D Shing should not be 30 minutes.

• 3:24:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 3:24:56Speaker 04

  Really, this is, remember, you skied hard.

• 3:24:58Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Well, that's part of the reason I'm asking. It's like, I'll probably be pretty fatigued walking in.

• 3:25:02Speaker 04

  So that's great. Like, we're going to get a high quality warm up, and we're going to do a couple of exercises at a reasonable quality, but we're also not going to 90, 95%. We're getting a good, strong contraction, probably finish it potentially with one exercise to a pump. And this would be, let's take one area that needs, that is undersized, that is under strength, that is dysfunctional, and we'll do one set.

• 3:25:24Tim Ferriss?

  So many options.

• 3:25:27Speaker 04

  We'd probably rotate it. Is to be honest. So like, maybe, maybe it's just it's glutes. Maybe we put a band on and we just do a set of thirty glute pumps. That's it. We're out of there, right?

• 3:25:39Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 3:25:39Speaker 04

  Maybe something for your shoulder. Yeah, you've had this thing going on. Maybe something like that going on. I mean, maybe it's hand leg opposite thirty reps each.

• 3:25:47Tim Ferriss?

  I just just did this yesterday for to kind of shoulders using rear delt stuff.

• 3:25:51Speaker 04

  Totally feels great, right?

• 3:25:52Tim Ferriss?

  Felt great. Yeah.

• 3:25:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. So something like that. Maybe bent row on a machine. Like, what are any number of things we can do? And you do one or so sets of twenty. You get a nice big pump. You feel jacked. It's great.

• 3:26:04Speaker 04

  And then you're out of there. That's probably what I would do. One to two of those, one set, maybe two, and then we're done.

• 3:26:09Tim Ferriss?

  What else would you like to add? And then another critical question, which is one where I do think I tend to lose the plot. I don't think I eat enough, actually. And I've done so much fasting. I'm like, eh, I'm not hungry. I have developed the habit of not eating very much. And I can see that in my lean body mass right now in terms of just totals. I'm like, hmm.

• 3:26:31Speaker 04

  As in under muscled or over fat?

• 3:26:33Tim Ferriss?

  Both.

• 3:26:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:26:34Tim Ferriss?

  The over fat is I've just been a piglet over the holidays and I've been doing less strength training in being in a protective mode for the back stuff. And I think just not consuming enough protein and other things. So we've talked about Monday. I guess if there are any sort of crux pieces that you'd like to discuss for the rest of the week, which you already kind of laid out, top level. And then I would love to get your thoughts on tracking nutrition, because part of what I've seen is like, all right, I'm not going to like weigh out my chicken breasts on

• 3:27:02Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 3:27:03Tim Ferriss?

  jewelry scale. And like, practically speaking, I'm probably not going to do that. Maybe I should. But much like tracking hydration by having a container with a set volume and you just multiply it out.

• 3:27:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 3:27:15Tim Ferriss?

  That's straightforward. How you might approach nutrition?

• 3:27:19Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 3:27:19Tim Ferriss?

  With a similar.

• 3:27:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. Great. This is fun. Regarding training, we kind of said, we're probably, just a very quick recap. Monday is that red day. Wednesday is that green day. Which that means Saturday, which is kind of like the reason I'm doing this is Monday, Wednesday, Saturday, is generally going to be, if we can, a single session. And this is technical work. So this is let's review Monday through Friday. And Tim, what do we need to work on? You know, this is you and your coach going back and say, we really want to work on this. We need more reps at this. In other words, what do you need more volume in? And that's Saturday. It is practice. It is, we missed this, we missed this, we missed this. Here's this drills I'm going to do. It is not high fatigue. It's also not nothing. It's not green day. You got all Sunday. Sunday's, huh, right, whatever. It doesn't matter what days a week you are, but this is the point. So it is a little bit of work, but it is really getting that last bit of volume. We just need more practice. Practice takes reps. Awesome.

• 3:28:05Speaker 04

  That then leaves us with Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. That lift, you could do another lift on Saturday afterwards. Do real technical stuff and do the same thing. I would do the exact same thing I did on Monday, but switch the exercises. So it's a little bit different. So let's say we decided to do step ups on Monday. Switch that out for rear foot elevations with squat. If those are great. Switch that out for some other lower body extension exercise, whatever. Same exact concept though. Same thing. Switch out your upper body movement. Switch out your rotation movement. Give you a little bit more variety. Make sure we're doing something pulling, something pressing, something eroding. And make sure we're doing something in what we would technically call frontal and sagittal plane. So maybe this is a lateral lunge. So now only we now switching out the exercise. We're going laterally this way, something like that.

• 3:28:50Speaker 04

  Same thing with our upper body. Maybe it's a horizontal pull row instead of a vertical pull. I would set that up on Saturday. Your technical work, really quick lift, and then you're out of there. Done for the day. You want to add in your recovery stuff from Wednesday? Great. If not, go have your fun. Do what you do. Enjoy your weekend. Tuesday and then probably Thursday are going to be generally yellow medium days. On the slopes, may or may not lift, but you're going to do a lot of volume on those days. This is probably your longer duration stuff. Going to feel fine on Thursday because you came off of Wednesday. Friday, if we want to come back and do one red, not a double red, but one, then I'm good. Hard, hard, hard ski is probably what I'd say. So we're lifting on that Monday. We're going to lift again. In this case, I know this is kind of confusing, but I'll probably lift on Thursday. Right?

• 3:29:35Speaker 04

  Just to split it up a little bit. Thursday is a yellow, orange ski, hard ski, not a lot. We're going to lift, going to be kind of hard. So we're stacking hard on hard. And then Friday might be one really hard ski. But now we're good because Saturday is pretty much green and then we're definitely green on Sunday. That's how I would stack the whole week up and I'll keep the exact same theme lifting wise.

• 3:29:55Tim Ferriss?

  Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just one more thing before you take off, and that is Five Bullet Friday. Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little fun before the weekend? Between 1.5 and 2 million people subscribe to my free newsletter, my super short newsletter called Five Bullet Friday. Easy to sign up, easy to cancel. It is basically a half-page that I send out every Friday to share the coolest things I've found or discovered, or have started exploring over that week. It's kind of like my diary of cool things. It often includes articles I'm reading, books I'm reading, albums perhaps, gadgets, gizmos, all sorts of tech tricks and so on that get sent to me by my friends, including a lot of podcast guests. And these strange esoteric

• 3:30:40Tim Ferriss?

  things end up in my field, and then I test them, and then I share them with you. So, if that sounds fun, again, it's very short, a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend, something to think about. If you'd like to try it out, just go to tim.blog/friday, type that into your browser, tim.blog/friday, drop in your email, and you'll get the very next one. Thanks for listening. This episode is brought to you by Nordic Naturals, the number one selling fish oil brand in the US. More than 80% of Americans, that's probably a lot of you listening, including me, because I do measure my omega-3s, do not get enough omega-3 fats from their diet. That is a problem because the body cannot produce omega-3s, an important nutrient for

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• 3:32:52Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:33:31Speaker 01

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• 3:33:39Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:35:51Tim Ferriss?

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